The three women were running late for their meeting, but the oldest one made the tallest one stop the car on Sylvester Street. The shortest, youngest one sat in the back with her seatbelt on. The Wash-N-Slosh was next to great, green eyeball painted on Madame Cazee’s storefront window; they were across a lane and a sidewalk on the driver’s side, and hard off the passenger’s side were the remains of the Wayside Inn. Remains aren’t ruins: ruins give some clue as to their former identity, but remains are just a pile of shit. The Colosseum? Even with half the floor missing and stripped for parts, you could tell something happened there. But the Wayside was just jagged pieces of charred timber lumped on top of one another; the fire and its fighting had destabilized the building, the engineers said once everything cooled off enough to check, and so the insurance company sent a wrecker to knock down the teetering frame and the bricks that still clung to it.

Lower Montana took one of the bricks and tossed it into Manfred Pierce’s grave when it was her turn to do the bit with the shovel. She tried to loft it in gently, but bricks are terrible at “gently,” and so it banged onto the casket and CHANK shattered into crumbly red pieces; Lower buried her face in Flower Child’s dress-blue armpit. Little Aleppo’s entire Fire Department was there. Nothing looks sharper than uniforms at a funeral. Manfred would have worn his, but there wasn’t enough of him left to dress. The undertaker laid out the shoes, polished to a shine like a showroom Porsche, and the bellbottom pants with the buttons up the sides of the waist, the blouse with its sweeping, three-striped cowl, and the neckerchief. The hat, too, even though he despised the hat.

He was not buried with his medals. They were burned with him. Manfred kept them in a silhouette box behind the bar at the Wayside, behind the top shelf booze, next to a picture of a tall, skinny woman who was happy and with her friends. Good conduct, two for marksmanship. Combat ribbon, too. When the cops used to bust the place, before the riots and protests and lawsuits, back in the bad old days, he would brandish the medals at the officers.

“Just so you know who you’re arresting,” he’d say, and sometimes the cops would hit him with their sticks, gentle as a brick hitting a casket.

The raids stopped, but the assholes didn’t. Uptight marms and martinets would barge in to interrupt everyone’s fun. (Ironically, they would instantly become the new source of everyone’s fun.) They’d yell about this and that. Deviance! (The crowd would nod and agree; the Wayside was chock-a-block full of deviance.) Sodomy! (That, too.) There was, the scolds would assert, errant faggotry afoot! (This always got a healthy cheer.) Pestilents! Child-tempters! Villains, the lot of you, they’d cry, and the crowd at the Wayside would raise their drinks and egg the assholes on.

Until the magic word.

“I’ll tell you what all of this…this…this heathenry is! I’ll tell you! It’s downright un-American, that’s what!”

And then there would be silence. Behind the bar, Manfred Pierce would retrieve the silhouette box of medals from behind the expensive booze.

“Un-American?”

The deejay would generally have slipped on John Phillips Sousa by this point.

“Un-AMERICAN, MOTHERFUCKER?”

The scold would have generally realized he was surrounded by this point. Manfred had a whole speech, and it was a good one. It was tough to argue with Communist shelling. What could possibly be more American than being shot at by Commies?

And then the scold would leave, unharmed, to go and bother sinners no more.

They stopped popping in after a while, but Manfred left the medals up and now they were gone just like he was.

“You remember the Human Fountain?”

“That man was a performer,” Lower said.

Steppy Alouette rolled down the passenger’s side window of the red-and-white Mustang SSP with the cherry bar on top and the Fire Department’s badge on the doors. The glass was thick with rain, and Steppy didn’t see too well anymore, anyway, so she rolled down the window to squeegee the drops off and cranked it back up.

“The guy that pissed?” Flower asked, checking the time on her watch and the car’s digital clock.

“‘The guy that pissed.’ Heh. Like calling Tommy Amici ‘the guy that sang,'” Steppy said.

“He pissed on things! It was disgusting.”

“He was incredible, Flowy,” Lower said. (She called Flower “Flowy.” It rhymes with “Maui,” not “Joey.”)

“The pissing? The public pissing? That was incredible?”

“You remember the bowling pins, Lower.”

“He would–”

Lower Montana released her seatbelt and scooched up on the backseat so her head was parallel with the other two women’s.

“–he would pass around the bowling pins so everybody knew they were real. And he would be 25 feet away from them. I’m not exaggerating.”

“She’s not,” Steppy added.

“He’d knock ’em all down.”

“Not every time. I saw him make the 7-10 split one time. It was poetry.”

“Yeah, no. Disgusting,” Flower said.

“Philistine.”

“He would throw playing cards and then shoot them out of the air,” Lower said. “You have to at least admire his aim.”

“I don’t at all.”

Steppy patted at Lower Montana’s forearm.

“Do you remember dick-tack-toe?”

“No,” Lower answered.

“I think he did this routine before you started coming around. He had a tic-tac-toe board made of paper and he would hang it over by the pool table. He’d stand by the bathroom door. What was that, 30 feet?”

“Maybe more.”

“And he would pick someone to play against, whoever he thought was cute. They would be X’s. So, his cute date would walk over to the board and write a big X with a marker. Then, the Human Fountain would THWAP take out a square with a piss-bullet. Always played to a draw.”

“Living theater,” Lower said.

“He was a real estate agent during the day.”

“No.”

“Commercial stuff, yeah.”

Flower laid her hand against the horn NYAAAAAAAAH. Lower and Steppy turned back towards her.

“We’re gonna be late.”

They were late. Cohen & Pine was on the Upside, way on the Upside. The poor rented, and the rich bought, but the wealthy? The wealthy built, and Cohen & Pine designed for them. There was the art house called Slapping Tushees on Mt. Chastity that was made of glass and uncomfortable couches. The boutique motel in Jeremiad Springs, The Boogaloo, whose rooms were modular and shifted about from night to night depending on the whims of the innkeeper. They had spearheaded and birthed the Hoppington-Grace Housing Projects on the Downside in the 70’s, which was a bold experiment in city planning and urban policy that was made entirely out of concrete and right angles, and everyone hated so much that it was torn down halfway through construction.

Hawkins Cohen was identifiable as a marathon runner from two blocks away. The bones in his face jockeyed for prominence and cords ran up and down his stork neck. You could just tell he got up at four in the morning and had a favorite oatmeal. Hawkins’ watch was the opposite of a Rolex: sleek, and hugging low on his wrist, almost unnoticeable. He wearing a black suit that was slim-cut and single-breasted. Open collar on a white shirt. Rectangular eyeglasses. Balding hair cropped very close as if to say it did not matter: lesser men think about their hair; architects think about the future.

They had said hello, Steppy and Hawkins had, and introduced themselves, Flower and Lower and Hawkins had, and coffee was offered by Hawkins’ assistant, who looked like a baby version of Hawkins, which was politely refused by all. Steppy and Hawkins discussed common acquaintances on the way into his office.

“The Comtesse died.”

“Which one?”

“Du Brionne,” Hawkins said.

“I thought she was in Paris,” Steppy said.

“She’s in Paris and dead.”

“Better than being alive in Philadelphia.”

The corner office looked out onto the Verdance and the Segovian Hills simultaneously: both the east and south walls were entirely glass, and when it was not raining they were full of green. The hills and the park, they erupted with life and depended on photosynthesis: green, man.

Except for every 18 days, when it rained and the view was mushy and gray.

“Ladies, what we’ve done–and I’m being candid–is, I believe, to translate intention into situation. We at Cohen & Pine don’t see ourselves as architects so much as artists, or maybe benevolent gods. We have heard you. We have listened. And from your prayers, we have delivered.”

Hawkins was in an award-winning chair; the women were on a paradigm-shifting couch. There was a table in between them, and it was the best fucking table you’ve ever seen. Real humdinger of a table.

“Are any of you familiar with the work of Chico Delacruz? He’s doing incredible things with biomimicry. His last piece was a gas station that looks like a bush. Incredible.”

“It’s a bar, Hawkins,” Steppy said.

Flower Childs did not like clever people, and she was getting the feeling that Hawkins Cohen was a clever little bastard. She tried to surround herself with smart people, or at least competent ones, but clever fuckers were a pain in the ass. Every conversation with them felt like a competition; it was why she avoided Lower’s faculty bullshit with all her asshole professor buddies over at Harper College. Funny people were fine, but the witty were not to be trusted, she thought.

“I’d like to see what you’ve come up with,” Lower said.

Lower Montana was a clever person. She was excellent at going to school, so much so that now she got paid for it. Lower was an Assistant Professor of History at Harper. Local history. She called it “herestory,” but not out loud. The 101 class, the review class that all Freshman were required to take, was based on her textbook A People’s History of Little Aleppo, and she led the advanced sessions on the economics of the Main Drag and graduate seminars on the Menefreghista’s role in race relations.

Hawkins smiled, but just with his lips, and slid a drawing towards the women.

“We call this Bundled Fruition.”

It looked like a wadded-up piece of paper fetched from a wastepaper basket. Or a crumpled handkerchief.

“The asymmetry of the walls represents the struggle for gay rights,” he said.

“It’s bold,” Lower said.

“What’s it made of?” Steppy asked.

“Phosphorous.”

“Phosphorous ignites in contact with oxygen,” Flower stated.

“I know,” Hawkins said, excited. “The opening shall be a delight!”

“No.”

“No.”

“I thought it was a fascinating experiment in materials, Hawkins,” Lower said.

“Thank you. We have more, we have more ideas, so many ideas. What do you think–”

He slid another drawing across the table.

“–of this?”

Someone with no knowledge of architectural theory would mistake the drawing for a bunker.

“We call this ‘Bunker.'”

It was a bunker: concrete walls and a slit to look out of.

“The martial aspect of the design pay tribute to Manfred Pierce’s military service, and also Corbusier.”

“One question,” Steppy said.

“Mm?”

“Where’s the door?”

There was no door.

“There’s no door,” Hawkins said.

“You don’t think that’ll be bad for business?”

“But the symbolism is so piquant.”

“Need a door, Hawkins,” Steppy said.

“Mm. I agree, yeah,” Lower added, looking around for approval. She did not find it in Flower Childs’ grinding jaw.

Architecture would be so much easier were in not for people, Hawkins Cohen thought, with their fire codes and their need for bathrooms. He kept his smile on and slid another drawing over. Color this time.

“That’s a McDonald’s,” Flower muttered.

It was a McDonald’s.

“It’s not a McDonald’s. It’s a ‘McDonald’s.’ It’s a statement on hyper-consumerism and the gay obsession with body image.”

Lower looked to her left and right: Flower had her eyes closed in irritation; Steppy, in amusement. She said,

“It does look like a McDonald’s.”

“That’s the point,” Hawkins said.

“Uh. Yeah. Um, won’t we get sued? I’m not a lawyer, but won’t we get sued?”

Hawkins leaned forward on his award-winning chair.

“Yes! The lawsuit will be part of the building’s story.”

It was raining hard now–it came in bands–and the sound was PATAPATAPAT against the windows which made up the south and east walls of the office. The floor was made of the hardest wood available, Ultraspruce, and some areas had rugs. Hawkins did not have a desk, but a table that rose to bellybutton height. It was covered with sketchpads, pencils, pictures of the General Slocum Disaster. Behind the table, bookshelves had been staged.

Flower Childs leaned forward on the paradigm-shifting couch. (It was a couch beyond description, an original Ooso Pruus, and it had shocked the design world when it had been introduced; it was a scandalous sofa. Imagine a couch you could never dream of: that was the Pruus.) She was not wearing her uniform, which was boots, navy khakis, and a blue short-sleeve button down with badges and ranks and bullshit all over it, instead wearing her civilian outfit of boots, dark-blue jeans, and a blue short-sleeve button-down without any badges or ranks or bullshit. There were pens in the breast pocket: a clicky blue ballpoint, and a black Sharpie.

Heaven help the probie who didn’t have a pen and a Sharpie at all times in Flower Childs’ firehouse.

She withdrew the marker, uncapped it, flipped over the drawing with the fast food manque on it.

“It’s a tavern, Mr. Cohen.”

She drew a rectangle.

“It’s pretty much just a big room.”

She drew a skinny rectangle on the left side of the larger rectangle.

“There’s the bar.”

Several circles.

“Some tables.”

A triangle up in the corner.

“Deejay booth.”

Largish square.

“Dance floor.”

Squat little rectangle.

“Pool table.”

Chicken-scratched around the edges.

“And, you know the bathrooms and the storage and all that shit.”

Steppy Alouette smirked. Architects needed to be kept to heel. They were tradesmen, no more and no less, but they thought themselves better than plumbers, and that made them dangerous. She had listened to an architect once, on a house out in the Jeremiad Springs: the magazines wanted to take pictures of it, but the roof leaked and there was no kitchen. The architect was Hawkins, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t his fault, she thought. If you let architects do whatever they wanted, then you ended up with buildings not fit for humans. It was in their nature, so a firm hand was necessary.

“It’s a bar,” Flower Childs said.

Steppy made them stop on Sylvester Street on the way back, too, even though it was entirely out of the way. The rain had washed the parked cars, and the road was glistening with puddles and temporary rivulets that came together on the unnatural ground, coalesced, shattered. On the sidewalk, pedestrians whisked themselves away. The joists and beams that used to be of a body were no longer, and the three women in the red-and-white Mustang SSP looked out the passenger’s windows and saw the place where they had been young, destroyed.

“This will be the third Wayside,” Lower Montana said from the backseat. Flower Childs turned to look at her, but it would have hurt too much for Steppy to do so, so she put two fingers on her left shoulder to show she was listening.

“March of 1856. First one opened in March of ’56. It was just about the first anything in Little Aleppo. They built the Main Drag around it. There aren’t any photographs, but there are several drawings of the interior. Bar on the right, piano and faro on the left. And the girls were upstairs. Burned down in ’71, along with half the neighborhood.”

Flower Childs ground her jaw.

“Manfred told me he took the Wayside over from a guy named Herbert Hantz, but I haven’t been able to find that name anywhere in the records. This was 1961 or maybe early ’62. Obviously, not the original location.”

“Obviously,” Steppy said.

The three of them looked at the rubble.

“And this will be the third,” Lower said.

The rain pounded down onto Sylvester Street, onto all the cars and manholes and sidewalk saints, and down the painted window of Madame Cazee’s and also the frontage of the Wash-N-Slosh, and onto the muted cherry-top of the Mustang and along the sidewalls of the tires and into the slutty sewers. The world went clean with the rain’s help, and the past rose from itself in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Cannot Swim was soaking wet. His tunic and cloak were made of deerskin, which is naturally waterproof, but it didn’t matter: the rain had gotten down his wide collar and coated his torso and legs. He had removed his moccasins and placed them in his satchel. The mud squelched up in between his toes, and his shins were covered in stalks of grass. He could not see the sun for the trees and thick clouds, and the ground had become uneven so he had lost count of his steps. It was mid-morning, he figured, but could be no more specific than that.

There was no time constraint to the Assignment, but it was bad form to take too long.

Teenagers are like dogs: unnatural and recent. No such thing as teenager, not in nature. Either you can’t procreate, which makes you a child, or you can, which makes you an adult. You can’t argue with biology, but you could ignore biology and make up some bullshit. You could delineate a category of not-quiteness: not quite kid, not quite adult. Hence: teenager. Hell, it wasn’t even a word until the 40’s. Teenagers were invented in America; in California, in fact, not too far from where the Pulaski lived and were massacred and buried. The Pulaski didn’t have teenagers. They had children, who then underwent their Assignments, and came back as adults.

In large cultures, societies bound by books and separated by distance, the coming-of-age rituals are flattened and homogenized. A Bar Mitzvah is a Bar Mitzvah, with minor geographical or theological variations, as is a Quinceañera or a Baptism. No matter who the kid is, he’s getting dunked in the tank. But the Pulaski were not many in number and all knew each other–and everyone knew the children better than the children knew themselves–so each Pulaski was given an individualized Assignment.

In the old days, everyone was sent into the Low Desert with no water to have visionquests, but a lot of kids died and so the elders started sending everyone up the Segovian Hills, and fewer kids died but still far too many, and then everyone had to swim the lake back and forth, but that wasn’t much of a coming-of-age ceremony and a few kids died anyhow, so now the elders personalized the ritual. Some children were spiritual and had a connection to The Turtle Who Was And Who Will Be Again; they went into the Low Desert. The hunters and the warriors went up into the Segovian Hills. And the other kids, well, they did what they could. Cloudy Eye was completely blind in her left eye, and mostly in her right. She couldn’t go to the desert or the hills, but she could sing for the whole village at the next communal meal. and everybody was okay with that being her Assignment. Loud Fingers was the tribe’s best embroiderer, and had been since he was about seven. He scoured the lakebed for shells, and the woods for pebbles, drilled through them with his hand tools and laced them together with dogsbane and leather cording to form bear, elk, eagle, wolf, and then these were attached to tunics and cloaks and satchels. Most of the Pulaski were wearing a Loud Fingers design, and so he obviously could not be sent into the desert or the hills, and his Assignment was to produce a very large work for the door of the storehouse, and he did: a massive turtle, which was the finest and most intricate he had ever done. Had the Pulaski been aware of the guild system, it would have been called his masterpiece. Means Well was a giant lunkhead that wouldn’t hurt a fly, but had often gotten lost within the village; the elders told him, “Just go pull some weeds for a while,” and he did, and that was good enough.

But Cannot Swim was a hunter, and so he was sent up into the Segovian Hills, which the Pulaski called Jesus fucking Christ, don’t ever go up there; there’s squatch up there. (It sounded a lot better in Pulaski, plus it was only one word.)

“The bear is as afraid of us as we are of him.”

“Bears are not afraid of anything,” Cannot Swim said.

“Everything that lives is afraid,” Shoots With Wrong Hand told him. Cannot Swim was 12, and they were standing on a small plateau about a quarter of the way up what would later be called Mt. Chastity. His father had unslung his rifle from his back, and cradled it in his left arm. Cannot Swim had grown four inches that year, but he was not yet as tall as Shoots With Wrong Hand.

“We are smaller than the bear.”

“This does not matter. There are two kinds of bears in our woods. Ones that have not encountered us, and therefore fear us because we are alien to them, and ones that have. The bears that have seen us know our rifles and our arrows and our knives. They know our dogs. If they are still alive, then it is because they escaped us. They will always fear us, and for good reason. The bear is not stupid.”

“Okay.”

“The puma is also more afraid of us than we are of him.”

“C’mon, Dad.”

“I’m serious.”

“Pumas are scary.”

“They’re cowards. Ever hear of a man being attacked by one?”

“No.”

They were on the western face of the hill, and it was mid-morning and their shadows were the same height as they were. Shoots With Wrong Hand turned in a circle, scanning the sky and sniffing. Pulaski did not come up into the hills unless they had to.

“No. They stalk us, but do not have the courage to attack. The puma knows that, even though it is bigger than us, we can put up a fight. The puma is scared of a fight. It prefers to snap necks by surprise.”

“Okay.”

“The squatch is not more afraid of you than you are of him. The squatch is not afraid of you at all.”

“We could just hire a hitman.”

“We don’t know any hitmen, baby. We don’t know any criminals at all, really.”

“Your cousin Cliff was in jail,”

“For Medicare fraud.”

“Maybe his roommate was an assassin.”

“Maybe.”

“So you’ll call him?”

“No,” Capolina Gardner said.

Harry Gardner had barely touched his cheeseburger, even though Louie Bucca had charred it to hell just like he liked. Ever since becoming a werewolf, Harry preferred his meat with as little blood as possible. Capolina had told him approximately a billion times that the red squeezings from a rare piece of beef wasn’t actually arterial fluid, but it didn’t matter to him: Harry knew blood when he saw it, and he saw it everywhere.

The rain was constant on the windows of the Victory Diner, so steady that your brain tuned out the sound until you looked at the drops hitting the glass. To the right of the door off the Main Drag were tables, and to the left were booths and the counter. Harry and Capolina were in a booth. There was a jukebox, a mini-version with a black plastic wheel that spun the shutters that the songs lived on, and Capolina had fed it a quarter. D8. The Fontanelles singing What Happened To Our Happy Home? in three-part harmony tighter than a snowman’s asshole.

You said “I do”
But now it’s two;
My momma said I should’ve known.

The table’s still laid
The bed is still made
What happened to our happy home?

O, those girl groups: no one ever suffered so pretty.

Harry knew it was 11 am because he was wearing a watch, but otherwise it could be any time of day: the sun was hiding like it owed Little Aleppo money, and the Main Drag was gray and gloomy. Umberto Clamme was selling his umbrellas for three times their normal price; Beer Cooler Ethel was nowhere to be found. The pizza boys had started their early lunch runs: the neighborhood ordered a shit-ton of pizza every 18 days. Capolina’s eyes were the same color gray as the entire world, and when Harry stared into them they were the entire world, and he didn’t know how to protect her. There were neon flyers on telephone poles, shining through the rain and the Victory Diner’s greasy windows, accusing him of setting the neighborhood’s fires and he wasn’t just a him, he was a them. That’s what “I do” meant, he figured. He was all tied up in her.

“What if we go talk to him?”

“Who?”

“The butcher,” Harry said.

“So, we’re not gonna take out a hit on him?”

“You sounded like you were down on that idea. Are we considering that again?”

“We’re not.”

“Okay.”

Capolina was a nurse who worked in the Emergency Room at St. Agatha’s, and Harry was an unpublished children’s book author, and you should read quite a bit into that.

“We could talk to him,” she said. “Do you think that would be safe?”

“I don’t know.”

“We should take the offensive. Do something.”

“Hitman?”

Capolina put the triangle of club sandwich down on the oval-shaped plate, reached across the table, took Harry’s hands in hers.

“Baby, if you don’t stop talking about hitmen, I’m gonna stab you a little in your sleep.”

“All right.”

She brought his knuckles to her lips.

“Love you.”

“Love you, too,” he said.

“Okay, we can’t go to the cops or, well, anyone.”

“Oh, no.”

“Best case scenario is you get thrown in a mental hospital.”

Harry was pushing fries around on his plate and looked up confused.

“What’s the worst case?”

“The worst case is that the authorities believe you’re a werewolf.”

He saw lab coats and stainless-steel tables and men in uniforms. Or a quick silver bullet to the back of the head. He was right, too. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man who has become a werewolf must not inform the government of the fact.

“So what do we do? Just walk into his shop and start asking questions?”

“Maybe?”

“What if there are other customers?”

“We wait for them to leave,” Capolina said.

“What if they have really big orders and take a long time?”

Capolina was the oldest of five, and when her mother died, she helped raise her younger siblings. A psychiatrist would point out that she had engineered the same dynamic in her marriage, but Capolina did not believe in psychiatry. Her yoga teacher had told her exactly that once, but she didn’t put much stock in yogis’ opinions on her mental health: wasn’t like they had any psychiatric training.

She took Harry’s hand again.

“We’ll worry about that if it happens.”

“Okay.”

Harry was an only child.

“Eat your burger.”

“Okay.”

“I envy your taste, Mr. Scotland,”

“It’s refined as shit, Mr. Leopard. People been tellin’ me that since I’m a kid.”

Since they were on the phone, Mr. Leopard felt free to roll his eyes, but made sure his lips did not curl into a smirk that would be heard over the line. There were accolades on the wall of his Town Hall office, but if you looked closer, none of them had his name engraved; all of the photos were of him with impressive-looking people whom, upon scrutiny, you’d never seen before. Nothing at all was on his desk except an old-fashioned green blotter and a telephone. He did not take notes or doodle. Rain against the window and a bare coat rack in the corner. The trash can was made of close-woven wire, and so you could see that it was empty.

“Of course. We shall have your usual available when you join us next, if you’ll only let us know when that shall be.”

“Yuh-huh. Well, here’s the thing. Thinkin’ about having a little party at your place. You do a caterin’ thing?”

“Mr. Scotland, you do understand that we are a private eating club.”

“Course I do. Some of ’em already members, but there’s three that ain’t. I’ll vouch for ’em and pay their way. Eight of us put together.”

The light from the overhead fixtures could not find a single fleck of stubble on Mr. Leopard’s head. It was pale and shaped like a pencil eraser.

“I see no reason why your guests could not become my guests, Mr. Scotland.”

Membership at the restaurant with no name was 25 grand, cash just like everything else at the restaurant with no name, and there was also vetting. Mr. Leopard had found vetting possible members far easier since he became a Town Father.

“Peachy. Now, here’s the other thing.”

There was always another thing.

“I wasn’t lookin’ f’r my usual this time. I got myself a real curiosity about somethin’ unusual as hell.”

“Unusual?”

“Kinda meal only comes ’round once inna blue moon.”

“Only in a blue moon, you say?”

“Well, shit, hunter’s moon, too. Harvest moon. Any ol’ moon’ll do, I suppose.”

“Ah.”

“The moon is th’ part we’re payin’ attention to in my query.”

“I understand you perfectly.”

Mr. Leopard flicked an imaginary piece of dust off of his blotter, then smoothed the thick paper’s fuzz towards him with three passes of his hand. His fingers each had an extra knuckle.

“Now: how soon could we be doin’ all this?”

“Hm.”

Personal schedule from the inside pocket of the black suit coat. As he flipped through the pages, a circle at each’s top waxed and waned. Fingertip stroked a fully-filled-in sphere.

“22nd, right? Night o’ the 21st is the first full moon, and you ain’t got shit yet. Cupboard’s bare an’ all that. Right? Cuz otherwise, you woulda told me a date ‘steada waitin’ on me.”

“I was taught it was bad luck for a restaurateur to discuss the contents of his larder with his guests.”

“Bad luck, huh?”

“The worst.”

“Well, tell ya what. You can accommodate my guests an’ me on th’ 22nd, I make it worth your while.”

“Mm?”

“How’s a million sound?”

The Verdance was outside the rain-slicked window; no one was in the park but the swans, and they were rather cross about the situation even though they had been built a short wooden lean-to specifically for them to stand under all day every 18 days. A volunteer from Friends of the Swans named Jarva Cantley would muck it out the next day, and the birds would thank Jarva by attempting to murder her. The Verdance was shaped like a dumpy oval and had three paths cutting through it that, when viewed from above, formed this shape: ≠. Beyond that were the foothills and then Mt. Fortitude and then America, where a million dollars was still a great deal of money.

“It sounds round, Mr. Scotland. Round and robust.”

“It’ll puff up yer pecker.”

“Mm.”

“I got a reservation?”

“No, sir. You have eight.”

“Leopard, it’s a disappearing fuckin’ art.”

“What is, Mr. Scotland?”

“Customer service.”

The line went dead, and Mr. Leopard replaced the handset briefly, then replaced it at his ear. Punched in seven numbers. A phone rang in a butcher shop on Harcourt Street.

THRUMBLE said the sky, and Cannot Swim shrugged his shoulders because he had no idea how to answer. There were no individual clouds, just splotches that were darker than the rest of the gray, and he poked his head out from under the outcropping of rock he had sheltered under. He knew he had not been followed, but he was a 16-year-old breaking rules, so he was paranoid. Between the rain and the heavy brush, he couldn’t see more than 20 yards in any direction, but he still scanned around. Sniffed, too.

The seven peaks of what would later be called the Segovian Hills are orogenic in nature: collision-birthed. The Pacific tectonic plate slides under the North American plate where the two tectons meet; this causes the tippity-top layer of the NA plate to buckle up. The process is violent, and ongoing, but it is a far slower violence than humans can register and so we go hiking and build our homes on what–from a geologic point of view–is a bar fight. Scars and pocks and ridges and crevasses and bruises and plateaus: the septet was unplanned, a mess, a craggy crumble of land.

Sometimes, the water cut through the limestone. Pooled. Rubbed away at what was so solid. The first White to attempt to map the Hills was named Hannah Speke; he had completed Mounts Lincoln and Faith when he discovered the cave system underneath Mt, Fortitude by falling 80 feet into it. The second White to attempt to map the Hills, Aubrey Norge, was much more careful about where he stepped.

Cannot Swim did not know anything about tectonic drift, and he would not be able to understand the compulsion to chart out the hills. The Pulaski lived in the valley, and the mountains lived in the mountains. It was a working strategy, he figured. The rocks above his head sheared the water away from him, and the ground was mostly dryish. Mushrooms would still be there tomorrow, when it would no longer be raining. Hell, probably be more of them, he thought. Cannot Swim knew this was not the most honorable was to complete the Assignment, but on the other hand, it was raining, just like it did every 18 days in what would later be called Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

 

It was Christmas Eve in Little Aleppo, and the Poet Laureate was running naked down the Main Drag blessing all he saw. He had not taken a haircut in months, nor shaved his black beard, and the neighborhood was glad for this. No functioning society could countenance the clean-cut running naked down the Main Drag: that’s an omen. But a scrawny, shaggy, wild-eyed nude man sprinting through town and calling upon the Lord’s favor? Well, that sounded about right. Bad luck for a neighborhood to go too long without a prophet. Can’t let the Old Testament get too old; need to let some pressure out from the ancient madness underneath the sidewalks where everyone’s so fucking civilized lately; no Christmas without John the Baptist.

Watch him fly. You can hear him coming. Dopplerized beatification.

“Merry Christmas, Town Fathers! We’ll drag you down those stairs and beat you to death if you fuck up too bad! Merry Christmas!”

And there they were, all five of them, three men and two women waving to their constituents and smiling and surrounded by security. The Town Fathers smiled the widest when they were surrounded by security.

“Merry Christmas to the judges and to the bailiffs and to stenographers and to the juries and Happy Hanukkah to the lawyers!”

The steps of the Valentine Courthouse were packed from Doric column to Doric column by people wearing uncomfortable clothes and comfortable shoes. Judge Rollo held his seasonal gavel high.

By the Verdance, where everything grows, even now in winter because Little Aleppo has a temperate pico-climate that never freezes and only scorches for three days in the summer, and the rains come regular every 18 days. The Segovian Hills form a barrier against the continent that curls into the sea and protects the harbor from the ocean. There are no tornadoes or hurricanes or blizzards or droughts; it is a wonderful place to settle. The Pulaski thought so, and they are still here, in the Verdance helping everything grow.

The bartenders at the Morning Tavern had thrown all the drunks out onto Widow Way, and they walked east to the Main Drag smoking and shouting and singing and swaying and holding onto each other, mostly consensually. Visions of empty apartments danced in their heads to Stones tunes, and they sloshed their harmonies together as old ladies leaned out their windows and scowled.

The Poet Laureate’s balls bounced as he ran, occasionally settling into a thigh-to-thigh rhythm for four or five beats and then reverting to random, hairy positionality. His nipples were symbolic as hell.

Two women with Santa hats on had smuggled their last-call bottles of Arrow beer out of the bar.

“Better than last year.”

“Anything would be better than last year. She stole a car.”

“The crash did detract a bit from the magic. AAAAAHahaha!”

His chest was flushed and pouncing outwards–you could see the Poet Laureate’s heart from the sidewalk, its presence at least–and his feet were already bloody and his wet footprints limped behind him on the blacktop of the Main Drag.

“Merry Christmas, Harper Zoo! Merry Christmas, Harper College! All the animals and their keepers! All the students and their professors! And the bookstore and the souvenir shop! May your merchandising rights be respected!”

Off in the distance, off to the west, an elephant trumpeted and a dog barked and a campus cried GO, PROFESSIONAL MOURNERS! (No one had liked being a Professional Mourner at first, especially when they saw the mascot costume, but opinion changed once everyone saw how freaked out the opposing teams got when they were ululated at.)

Car traffic had stopped out of respect, but the pizza boys on their scooters buzzed the Poet Laureate like King Kong and counted coup by slapping his bare ass.

“Merry Christmas, Tahitian! God bless your sticky floors and happy endings, and God forgive the balcony!”

A women in a red dress with white trim stood outside the theater with teenagers in identical tunics. The shutters were locked down in front of the glass doors.

“I think we’re okay.”

“Shutters stay down until he’s done, Julio.”

PAP PAP PAP the feet on the concrete and BOBBLE BOBBLE BOBBLE the dick.

The streetlights had come on so they could lie to moths, and store frontage all lit up with reds, greens, silvers, that frosty bullshit you sprayed onto glass. Snowmen where it had never snowed, and reindeer wandering about at far too low a latitude, and a saint from Asia Minor who had certainly taken the most circuitous route to the neighborhood. Randy’s Record Barn had speakers outside playing every Little Aleppian’s favorite holiday record.

Sleigh bells will jingle,
They’ll ringle-dee-dingle,
But snow’s not as cold as my heart;
When there’s only
One stocking
To haaaaaaaang. 

A Jolly Christmas with Tommy Amici. Everyone grew up listening to it as they opened their presents. The Mistletoe Missed Me kicked off the first side. You Left Me A Letter (Under the Tree) and Nightcap In My Nightcap and Tinsel Turns To Rust.

The tree is out back;
The garbageman’s coming.
The kids will grow tired of their toys.
It’s a must.

When you said you loved me
That cold Christmas Eve,
I forgot
That tinsel tuuuuuuuurns into rust.

He did Little Drummer Boy, too, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“Merry Christmas, Rose Street! Merry Christmas to your monsters, and Merry Christmas to your choirs, and Merry Christmas to your holy books without authors! Merry Christmas to your sermons and tax-free status!”

An enormous man in sky-blue suit and a man-sized man in a suit-colored suit watched the Poet Laureate go by.

“Every year?’

“That’s why we have a Poet Laureate.”

“I don’t understand why this is a tradition.”

“Me, either. Usually when people run naked down the Main Drag shouting about God, it’s more spontaneous.”

The enormous man smiled and did not make eye contact with the man-sized man, who smiled wider. They turned and walked into the First Church of the Iterated Christ. Midnight Mass was in a few hours. The First Church of the Iterated Christ was not a Catholic church, but it was a catholic church, and so held Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. So did the Hindu temple and the mosque; the synagogue used to, until it burnt down. Christmas was an American holiday in Little Aleppo, and everyone was invited in.

“Merry Christmas, all you failures! Merry Christmas, all you cowards! Merry Christmas, all you liars!”

A man with uncombed hair in a faded suit stood next to a tortoiseshell cat.

“I think he’s talking about you.”

“Mlaaaargh.”

“Fine, us.”

“Plep.”

“At least this one didn’t crash into the theater.”

“Plep.”

There was spittle and spray spewing from the Poet Laureate’s mouth and his whole body was covered with visible sweat that foamed like on the haunches of a racehorse; he took no exercise during the year and his muscles were slack and his skin was loose; it shifted and bubbled like a pie baking during an earthquake. He had stumbled, fallen–his pinky on his left hand broke–and when he got up, there were cuts on his knees and hands, which he wiped them on his chest. The blood mixed with the sweat and ran in Brownian rivulets down his torso.

“And the teevee shows and the radio programs! God bless you for whatever the fuck it is you do! Merry Christmas to the lake that none of you knew about it! It’s still there if you pay less attention to time! It’s all still here if you don’t pay attention to time! Bless the Cenotaph! Bless the newspaper! You turned a tree into the sports section, and bless you for that!”

The entrance to the Emergency Room at St Agatha’s has an inscription over the doors–Quid hoc fecisti, ut tibi?–and all the doctors and nurses and most of the patients stood outside. Far more nurses were smoking than you would assume. A woman in scrubs and a man who was not currently a werewolf held hands and stood tight against each other.

“Merry Christmas, St. Agatha’s! You can’t cure any of us! You’ll never win, and God bless you!”

And the doctors and nurses and most of the patients gave the Poet Laureate the finger. Tradition was tradition.

Besides, he’d be back.

“Merry Christmas to the cops! Merry Christmas to the firemen!”

They were on opposite sides of the Main Drag.

“Merry Christmas to the whores and the junkies! Merry Christmas to the bass players! Merry Christmas to the crazy fucks with suspicious coughs! Merry Christmas to the streetsweepers and Merry Christmas to the streetsleepers and Merry Christmas to the veterans who can’t do paperwork! God bless you, God bless you, God help you, God bless you!”

High atop Pulaski Peak, the tallest of the seven Segovian Hills, was Harper Observatory; and in between the observatory on the diamond-shaped summit of the mountain and the rocky precipice that led to it was a bench, and on that bench were an old man, who was not a ghost, and a young man and an old woman, who were.

“Why?”

“Christmas ain’t an American holiday, no matter what anyone thinks. Religious. Old-time religion.”

“So some asshole’s gotta run down the street naked?”

“Yeah. Like I said: old-time religion.”

“Every year?”

“Wouldn’t be a tradition otherwise.”

Car horns and big-band music drifted up. In the parking lots, teens fucked.

“Cops just tackled him.”

“You can’t see that.”

“Ghost vision.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The cops strapped the Poet Laureate to a body-board as gently as one can be strapped to a body-board, and then they walked him back to St. Agatha’s, where he would be stitched up and bathed and told what a good job he had done. He would not be charged for his stay and many unnecessary prescriptions would be written for him. When the sun came up on Christmas morning, the Poet Laureate would emerge from the hospital wearing scrubs and a pair of someone else’s tennis sneakers and walk back to his apartment along the Main Drag, which cuts through the heart of Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Meet me out at the Rumble Strip. Everybody’s gonna be there Saturday night. Junky Steve and Funky Eve and Last Chance Angel, they’re all gonna be there in their uniforms. White tee-shirts and blue, blue jeans and canvas Converse sneakers; everyone’s off work and that 3:00 bell rung down at the high school and the Mother Mary paying little to no attention. The kids made their own luck down on the Rumble Strip.

There was lightning down there, always, from the sky or from muscle. Black Cat Katie dropped a red bandana she bought at a gas station. She stood on those double lines. Parallel and yellow and shooting off into heaven or Philadelphia or at least somewhere the cops didn’t know about. Or maybe somewhere the cops were all waiting. Never could tell with a road. Could go either way.

Your cousin was there, and that guy from work–Wayne, could be–and those old men whose names everyone knew but didn’t say out loud. Grease monkey trios and boys in pairs and kids in crazy hats. Flashbulb fantasies and magazine promises all up the sidewalk that had chunks missing from it. It wasn’t the part of town that got its sidewalks fixed.

Angelina had a thing for promises, and Carlos looked over his shoulder.

Those kids from the next town over. The town with the houses all got two-car garages. Up a bit, not at sea-level like the Rumble Strip. They knew who they were, and they knew you knew it, too. They’d ride down and park hard, they’d park aggressive, come and get us.

And Last Chance Angel said to Junky Steve,

“They got engines made of money. They got time by the throat.”

And Junky Steve said,

“Fuck ’em.”

Which is the only proper response when the kids from the next town over ride down and park aggressive.

“Why am I being poked!?”

“Why are you asleep?”

“The tyranny of flesh,” Mr. Venable said. “Whereas you are poking me by choice!”

When she was sure he was awake, Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui (whom everyone called Gussy) straightened up and straightened the skirt of her dull red dress with her hands and said,

“Listening to Springsteen again?”

“Was I talking in my sleep?”

“You were,” Gussy said.

Mr. Venable yawned and stretched and looked around for the cat.

“The man is the Joyce of New Jersey, Gussy.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

Gussy fell in love a lot. Men, women. She had noticed, however, that relationships with women rarely if ever contained the Springsteen Conversation. Every boyfriend Gussy had ever had felt the need to explain Bruce Springsteen to her, ofttimes with extensive sourcing from the albums, and sometimes with pictorial evidence. And she just didn’t get it. She just didn’t get him. Maybe it was because she was a West Coast girl. Maybe she had the wrong blood type. She had tried! She had gone to see him, twice, and all she could hear was denim-coated grunting. Ah, fuck: is that asshole gonna play that fucking saxophone? Ah, shit: that asshole’s playing that fucking saxophone. And is this the beat? Up down up down? You couldn’t dance to it. Shit, you definitely couldn’t fuck to it. Well, Gussy thought, you could fuck to it, but you couldn’t cum to it. At least she couldn’t.

“How did you get back here?”

“Same way you did.”

Gussy had, five minutes previous, entered the bookstore with no title using the key she had never given back after she stopped working there–the bell on the door went TINKadink–and not found Mr. Venable in his customary spot. She walked behind the clutter he called, alternately, “my desk” and “my prison” and reached up to the shelf just slightly above her eye level and pulled on The Revelation of the Intrinsic by Mahdi Zaman until there was a KUH-CLIK and the entire panel swung out to reveal an office with a raggedy green couch, a white portable teevee set, and a Mr. Venable in his customary suit, which was faded but used to be black with thin gray pinstripes.

KSOS was playing a rerun of that show where the white people went to an island and had their wishes granted by foreigners of varying sizes.

“I will never understand what you see in that soap opera.”

“Yesterday’s Tomorrows is not a soap opera. It’s art. Valley Heights is as well imagined as Joyce’s Dublin.”

“Why do you keep talking about Joyce?”

“I just woke up. Only the most obvious references are available to me.”

Mr. Venable swung his legs off the couch and put his feet back in his unshined loafers; turned the set off TOCK and combed his hair with his hands. Behind the teevee was his office, which was not infinite but might be mistaken for infinite in poor lighting. It was the only room Gussy had ever been in with interior flying buttresses. Place gave her the creeps, honestly. Years ago, she had asked Mr. Venable if he had built the office.

He said,

“Build an office? I can’t even type.”

It was hours before she realized he had not answered the question.

Mr. Venable held the secret door open for her and waved outwardly.

“Get. Out. Go.”

She did, and he followed, spinning on his worn heel to KUH-CLIK the panel back into its spot where it fit so seamlessly that no one would know it was a door, and then he wandered to the sticky table by the bay window in the front of the shop with the coffee fixings.

“Coffee?”

“Yes, please,” Gussy said.

Mr. Venable filled a mug that read HARPER ZOO: WHERE ANIMALS ARE and then walked back to his desk and took his customary seat. Gussy pursed her lips and made herself a cup.

“Why are you here?”

Gussy leaned against the desk and took a sip of terrible coffee.

“What do you know about the Jack of Instance?”

“She’ll beat you if she’s able.”

“That’s the Queen of Diamonds.”

“Ah. Oh! He’s born to lose, and gambling’s for fools.”

“Ace of Spades.”

“Yes. Yes, you’re right. Hold on a second.”

He rummaged inside of his jacket and pulled out a Six of Clubs.

“Is this your card?”

Gussy had a fantastic sense of humor, and an all-encompassing one: she liked dirty jokes and corny ones and clever ones and dumb ones. She once peed herself–just a bit–at a friend of her doing a particularly silly voice. She had slept with some of the worst human beings because they made her laugh; it was her weakness. Gussy was easy and generous with her laughs in almost every situation.

She didn’t even smile.

“Why did you have that in your pocket?”

“I put it there after the fourth person came in asking about the Jack of Instance. Been doing that bit all day.”

“Has anyone enjoyed it?”

“I have.”

Gussy walked into the middle of the room so she wouldn’t be close enough to punch him.

“Who’s come in?”

“Who hasn’t? Our large fire chief, our handsome police chief, two of the Town Fathers, that hideous reporter from the Cenotaph who smells like a million ashtrays, several helpful citizens, and a gaggle of youths wearing the most outlandish trousers.”

She sipped her coffee and said,

“Well, at least everyone’s on the case.”

He sipped his and said,

“Mm. Or wanted to be seen walking down the Main Drag with the right book under their arm.”

“Didn’t ask for bags, huh?”

“The youths did. But the adults whose salaries you and I pay did not.”

“This fucking neighborhood.”

“Don’t blame the neighborhood. Blame your neighbors.”

Gussy laughed–just a bit–and set her mug down on the nearer of the two book-laded tables in the middle of the room.

“What’d they buy?”

“What I told them to. An Introduction to Cartomancy by Gilles Vernon. It’s like one of those Complete Idiot’s Guides to the tarot. Pictures and everything.”

She crossed her arms and said,

“Okay.”

Mr. Venable knew that tone of voice: a woman was angry with him. Or impatient. Perhaps disgusted; it was negativity aimed his way, he knew that.

“Okay what?”

“Where are the books you didn’t tell them to buy?”

Ah, impatience. Best one could hope for, really. He waved his arm towards the general vicinity of the back of the shop.

“In there somewhere.”

And now there was different tone of voice.

“I have helped you rob Town Hall on four separate occasions. Get off your ass and show me where the books on the Jack of Instance are.”

Mr Venable had been steadily liberating Little Aleppo’s archives from Town Hall into the bookstore with no title. You couldn’t leave the past in care of politicians; they did a bad enough job with the present. The original charter and all 23 volumes of the legal code and the very first surveying done by White men. Land titles going back to the day the concept of land ownership was introduced to the valley between the Segovian Hills and the harbor. Minutes from a century’s worth of Town Fathers’ meetings (the unredacted versions) and a folder full of grainy photos of dead squatch on the Main Drag. Safer here than there, he thought. What if there were a coup? Governments had coups, it was known to happen, although not often to semi-incorporated neighborhoods in America, but it was known to happen. What would happen if the Bolsheviks took Town Hall? Surely, they’d shred all of history and declare it Year One: that was just what Bolsheviks did. However, Mr. Venable reasoned, there had never been a coup at a bookstore. Therefore, the neighborhood’s archives were safer here. Quod erat demonstrandum.

But she was right. And wrong.

“You helped me rob Town Hall five times,” he said, standing up and resettling his suit coat on his shoulders.

The ceiling is high and the walls have books packed along them and there are two free-standing shelves that run perpendicular to the front door and back into a misty far-off; these created three rows and Mr, Venable and Gussy took the one on the left until the hit the dogleg into the annex, which was both vast and cluttered simultaneously–the psychology department at Harper College had determined it was the only room in the neighborhood capable of engendering both agoraphobia and claustrophobia at the same time–past the Romance section and the Crime section; where they met, the Sex Detectives series spanned two shelves with their bright-red covers. Gussy had read a few, and wondered if the Sex Detectives had hunted down the G-Spot yet.

The elevator was broken, and also a trap, and also a metaphor. Always take the stairs at the bookstore with no title.

The deeper they went, the cooler it became. Gussy’s dark blue dress had no sleeves; Mr. Venable saw her shiver out of the corner of his eye and handed her his suit coat. Gussy put it on and tried to put her hands in the outer pockets, but they were still sewn closed.

“You never cut these pockets open?”

“Ruins the line.”

“You have to comb your hair before you can worry about your silhouette.”

He snorted and they descended another flight.

“How far down does the shop go?”

“As far as it needs to, and not a sub-basement further.”

“Farther.”

“No, further. Most of the sub-basements are conceptual.”

They came to a large wooden door with no markings on it, and Mr. Venable rapped a Bo Diddley beat onto it with the palm of his hand. Then WHAP WHAP WHAP. Paused. WHAPWHAP. Paused for two beats. WHAPWHAP WHAP. Paused again. WHAP. Paused once more and looked back at Gussy with a shitty smile.

“Did you think there was a magick knock for the door?”

“You’re such a dick.”

“Maybe an immortal knight tasked to guard the contents of the room would open it and challenge me to a duel?”

“Jackass.”

The handle was a brass pull-bar, and so he pulled the bar and a rush of stale air that smelled like peppermints hit them.

“What is that smell?”

“Massed punctuation,” he answered. “That’s the aroma of too many commas in the same location. We must be vigilant.”

Gussy rubbed the bridge of her nose as Mr. Venable entered the sub-basement. She considered habeas corpus: no one would ever find his body down here. She could bludgeon him with a dictionary. Stab him in the eyeball with a pair of reading glasses. Surely, there was a suitably ironic death she could arrange. Or just set the whole shop on fire. She had a lighter. It was a building made of wood and filled with paper; after the gas station and the dirigible-rental place, the bookstore must be the most flammable establishment in the neighborhood. Set a fire. So easy and so simple and so final. Wait, she thought. Am I the Jack of Instance?

No. That would be a terrible twist.

The door was slowly closing and Mr. Venable called through it,

“Please stay with me if you don’t wish to be verbed!”

She blinked herself back into the present and went through the doorway and said,

“Verbed?”

“Eaten, disintegrated, chronally displaced, selected against your will for the Farnian Trials, spaghettified, so on. Something active. A verb shall happen to you. You’d be verbed.”

“You can’t do that to the English language.”

“I can do whatever I want,” he called back as he disappeared into the shelves. “I own the place.”

There should not have been so much light in the sub-basement, and there really shouldn’t have been so much sunlight. Gussy could feel the Vitamin D being produced; it was like being at the beach, and she took off Mr. Venable’s suit coat and draped it over her bare arm which was now toasty-hot from the bright and cheerful illumination. A row of tables transected the room. Open books and scattered papers on their tops. Mismatched wooden chairs. Shelves to the left and right of the tables. She could not see the ceiling.

“Psst.”

She looked around. That was not Mr. Venable’s voice, nor would he ever make that sound.

“Psst.”

“Who is speaking?”

“I wasn’t speaking. I went ‘psst.’ It’s a vocalization, if anything.”

The voice was coming from a book sitting on the table by the door. It was the size of a spare tire, but more rectangular. It was trembling.

“I’m not talking to a book.”

“Cool. Totally cool. I get where you’re coming from. This is not a normal situation for you. I get it. I just need you to do one thing.”

The massive cover THWOMPED open onto the table, revealing pages that were not made of paper.

“Read me out loud.”

“No.”

“Just a couple lines.”

“It’s never just a couple lines,” Gussy said.

“That was a cocaine joke.”

“It was.”

“Very funny. Very funny. Man, you’re smart.”

“I know what you’re doing.”

The book began hopping up and down on the table.

“READ ME OUT LOUD, BITCH!”

“WHAT DID YOU CALL ME, MOTHERFUCKER?”

She advanced towards the rude volume, which was now getting serious air in its leaps, until Mr. Venable stepped out of the stacks and SLAMMED a chair down on it upside down. He turned towards Gussy and cocked an eyebrow. Mr. Venable could cock his eyebrow at a graduate level.

“Were you going to fight a book, Gussy?”

“He started it.”

“Mm.”

He motioned back towards where he had emerged, and Gussy led the way.

“What was that thing, anyway?”

“You’ve heard of the Necronomicon?”

“Sure.”

“Imagine it had a cousin from Florida.”

Straight, he said, and then he told her to take a left and then a right. Another right. Four more rights, and then straight for a bit more, and then right twice more and just one more right.

“We’re just wandering around,” Gussy said.

“No. We’re divining a path.”

“How is that different from being lost?”

“It’s far more portentous.”

She stopped, and after a few paces he did, too, and turned to face her. Books towered on either side of them, every color in the rainbow and several that were only available to premium subscribers.

“Why are you so cavalier about this?”

“About what?”

“The fires!”

“I am not cavalier in the slightest about the fires. I wish them to cease and for the culprit to be snatched up by the authorities. But I am quite certain that the answer to said fires is not one of a mystical nature. None of this spooky nonsense has any bearing at all anything. I think some sad and broken loser heard a cool name and it stuck in his sad, broken, loser brain.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets.

“And so do you. You never believed in any of this.”

Gussy put a hand on the shelf next to her and leaned, and then a book said, “Excuse me,” and she took her hand off the shelf and looked at Mr. Venable and said,

“I’ll believe in anything I need to if it’ll keep The Tahitian from burning down.”

There was quiet for a moment, and then Mr. Venable walked towards Gussy and she said,

“You’re not.”

And he said,

“I am.”

“No.”

“It’s happening.”

And he hugged her, which he had never done before. She hugged him back, which was also a first.

“It’s just some loser, Gussy.”

“I know. I know. But it might not be.”

Mr. Venable rolled his eyes, and turned around and started walking down the aisle. She followed.

“I have a question.”

“Just one?”

“Are you not worried about the shop? The guy trying to burn it down? This place is flammable as fuck.”

He stopped and faced her. Recocked his eyebrow.

“Pity the man who tries to set a magickal bookstore on fire.”

And now it was Gussy’s turn to roll her eyes. They walked for a bit and she said,

“We’re lost.”

“We’re not.”

“We’re walking in circles.”

“What’s your point?”

“Plep.”

On the bottom shelf to Gussy’s left was a tortoiseshell cat, black and gray with no white at all, and her tail flicked back and forth in a tight pattern across the spine of a book. Mr. Venable bent down, administered scritchy-scratches to the cat, who had no name, and withdrew the leather-backed volume. The Jack of Instance: A Hermetic Psychography by Antonin Gebellin.

“Found it,” he said.

“What do I owe you?”

“With the ex-employee discount?”

“Of course.”

“Lunch. I’m famished.”

Mr. Venable handed her the book, and retrieved his suit coat from where it was still draped over her arm. Put it on, combed his hair with his hands, and set off back the way they’d come. Gussy followed, skimming through the pages as she went, and the cat was close behind watching for mice and rats and anything else that might be alive in one of the sub-basements, of which there were more than several, in the bookstore with no title in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Christmas was a full-contact sport in Little Aleppo; dominatrices wielded tinsel whips, and assassins used garrotes made of stringed popcorn. Santas were in charge of elf-gangs, and they battled for turf. Old ladies rang bells for the Salvation Air Force–they were saving up for their first plane–and sometimes they’d just whack you with their buckets as you passed by. Stockings have been known to contain feet, and the carolers are occasionally there to distract you while their accomplices sneak in the backdoor to steal your flatware and eggs. Christmas got all over the place, into cracks in the sidewalk and the corners of your eye; Christmas was context and stuck to situations like barnacles: made love deeper, and coincidence more meaningful, and the suicides far more poignant.

The Hidalgo Brothers bombed Vafunculo’s on Christmas Eve of ’79, which led to what would become known as the Pizza Wars. Christmas of 1923 is still known as Hairy Christmas: it was the last stand of the squatch, who snuck into the Main Drag in the middle of the night and ate a couple tavern’s worth of locals before the cops broke the Gatling gun out of the armory. The Town Fathers went to the Cenotaph office to demand the photos be turned over. As you might guess, the journalists refused, yelling about their First Amendment rights; as you might further guess, the Town Fathers had the cops bring the Gatling gun to the newspaper office and fire off a few rounds. The pictures of the squatch lying dead on the Main Drag have not been published to this day. 1892 was the year that everyone got smallpox for Christmas.

No bombings in 1985, and squatch were an urban legend and everyone had been inoculated; getting boring around here, some old-timers thought to themselves but did not say out loud because if you were an old-timer in Little Aleppo you knew better than to tempt fate. Fate was a slut, the Poet Laureate once said, and she’ll fuck you if you give her a chance; no one listened to the Poet Laureate. Tree went up, kids got toys, sing a little song: a quiet Christmas in the neighborhood.

Or you could go see The Snug, Little Aleppo’s very own–The motherfuggin’ Snug, man–at the Absalom Ballroom on the Upside, you could have yourself a rock and roll Christmas. It was a local tradition, and those are the best traditions because they don’t have to make any sense. The Snug brought their pyro and trousers and all of their immaculate hair back where they came from and showed the crowd their dicks while singing songs about their dicks. Bells did not jingle, and the little drummer boy was a burly man whose sweatbands were sopping up the blood running from weeping sores in the crooks of his elbows. They only knew one Christmas song, and they had written it themselves.

I don’t need no stocking
Just go get my cockring
Get down to Christmas Head

Babe, I ain’t no Rudolph
Now take your brassiere off
Yule give me Christmas Head

They had written the words, at least; the chords were stolen from Chuck Berry and the beat from The Meters. The kids down front didn’t care. They cheered every year. It was nice of them to make the effort, the kids thought.

The Snug were 15 in ’85 and hitting their stride; their pants had never been tighter. The last album, Memory Gangsters, was still selling, even though it was a mess: half of it was Johnny Mister’s half-finished sci-fi cycle about an intertrimensional crime syndicate that stole the past from you while you slept, and the other half were Holiday Rhodes’ tunes, which were about parties and pussy and parties plentiful in pussy. The whole record was credited to Rhodes/Mister, even though they had not been speaking to one another since February of ’82, and even though one of the songs–Say Goodbye Again, a power ballad that went to #7 on the charts in Europe–was written by Dave Ronn.

Fill on in, fill on in, come closer and storm the stage. General Admission at the Absalom Ballroom, at least down front. The building took up the whole block and opened onto Puncheon Street under a fifty-foot long marquee, and inside was a sprung floor that rode up and down with you while you danced. Guy named Montrose Ringler opened the place in 1927. It’s where the big bands used to come and play, which led to miscegenation, which led to the joint being shut down in ’35, and ’36, and again in ’38. The demon music was making white girls sleep with negroes, the Town Fathers complained; luckily for the white girls and the negroes, World War II broke out and everyone had more important things to worry about. Then came the crooners and the bobby-soxers–Tommy Amici played the Absalom quite a few times–and then roller derby was a thing for a while. Fancifully-named women concussed one another for the amusement of spectators, most of whom were perverts, and then came the rock and roll promoters, most of whom were also perverts. The ceiling was vaulted (and buckling just a bit) and the outer walls were whitewashed (as it was cheaper than paint) and the bathrooms smelled like the piss of your ancestors, but hot damn that sprung floor when it would get rocking.

That British band played the Absalom with tiny little amplifiers and giant teenage shrieks, and that other British band, too. The swivelly hillbilly with the fat manager and the greasy daddy, and that little fellow with the curly hair and the complicated songs. Ugly bands from New York whose only fans were critics, and pretty bands from Hollywood who sold records. Those assholes with the makeup. The fat little piano player, and the skinny lady with the snub nose who tuned her guitar wrong. A semi-functioning choogly-type band. The ones that almost made it, and the ones that fizzled out after an album, and the ones that got two or three songs into their sets and started biting each other. Killers and queens and hard-working men and red-headed strangers and the only band that mattered. Brother Ray, too.

All the kids were there, half the high school and most of the college, and the grown-ups, too, the ones who still confused themselves for teenagers before they met the morning’s mirror, and the drug dealers and groupies all lined up with care in hope that The Snug would soon enough be there.

They would be there soon enough. Rock Stars showed up when they showed up, and sometimes not even then. The Snug had been on a yearlong tour which ended in late November; they’d scattered. Jay Biscayne went to London, where he drank heavily and let people talk him into buying artwork. Holiday Rhodes went to the studio he’d just built but not yet paid for in Jamaica, where he picked up work on the reggae album he’d been recording for seven years. Dave Ronn met with his divorce attorneys again. Johnny Mister checked back into the Hotel Synod and got high. They would be there when they got there, even though the kids were already there and pressed against each other. Hot dogs for a buck, soda in a paper cup for less than that. First kisses and complicated handshakes. A beach ball had been produced, inflated, loosed, bopped, enjoyed communally.

The Absalom was rectangular, and the stage was at one end and the merch stand was at the other, just the way God intended it, and around the floor was a a balcony of ten rows (except where the seats had been stolen and replaced by picnic tables or sit-down arcade games) into which neither cop nor security guard nor janitor had ever ventured. The ballroom might be a temporary autonomous zone, but the balcony was autonomouser. There was a man in the balcony with a graying mustache and a row of neat, white teeth. He was sitting with a small woman and a large one; the former was wearing a tee-shirt from The Snug’s ’78 tour. The silkscreen was chafing and flaking off in patterns like a salmon’s scales: it was of Johnny and Holiday and they were Rock Starring. What else could you call it? The two of them, and their hair, posing together for the cheap seats and thrusting their cocks at God and all His angels. Rock Starring! They were good at it, good enough to immortalize them on any piece of merch their road manager could get his hands on; took a special sort to Rock Star properly. You try it. Go grab a guitar, try it: lean back and let it blow let it all blow down. You’ll look like a simp. Rock Starring could only be done by Rock Stars. Some folks call this line of thinking tautological, but all of them look terrible in leather pants.

The lights hadn’t dimmed because the lights wouldn’t dim until the man said so, and the man could only say so when the band had gotten out of their limos, but only three limos were idling in the alley that contained the stage door, which was open and throwing out light into the otherwise-dark alley that held three idling limos and one man in a tee-shirt he had not paid for who was flitting between limo windows like a bee, but instead of searching for nectar, he was trying to negotiate with three malfeasant pricks wearing too much eye makeup when the fourth limo, which contained the most malfeasant prick of them all (who, coincidentally, was also wearing the most eye makeup) entered the alley and when it had just barely stopped, the man in the tee-shirt he had not paid for wrenched the backseat door open and yanked out the skinny guitarist by his upper arm, hurling him through the open stage doors of the Absalom Ballroom, and then the man turned to the other three limos and said,

“Ladies?”

And only then did the other three car doors open and only then did the malfeasant pricks enter the venue.

The tape cuts out and the lights go down and the crowd swells and plumps and edges forward, and the balcony leans out to watch the roadies WHANG the guitar one last time and THRUMP the drums and they scatter like sloppy gnomes, leaving duct tape and backstage passes in their wake and then nothing at all but hushed breathing in and WOO from the back of the audience where a high school girl with black, curly hair whose father used to own a movie theater is sneaking a joint with her friends. Right before something happens is the last moment when anything can happen. Taking action collapses possibility into fact, but the instant before that is where magick comes from.

And then the deer started screaming.

Shitting, too, and the crowd ran into itself trying to get out of the way of the pellets, which somehow smelled of fear. The Snug’s road manager had argued against using live animals for the big intro, but the band overruled him and now there were nine deer strapped into a harness covered with jingle bells that was attached to a sleigh containing Jay Biscayne’s kid brother Felipe in a Santa outift, all of which was suspended thirty feet above the floor. The whole deal was on a track and should have glided gracefully towards the stage while Felipe tossed Christmas joints to the kids below, but the deer had in their terror knocked the contraption out of whack and so now the sleigh and “rein” deer were stuck directly in the middle of the room. The deer bellowed and shat for ten minutes until all of their hearts had exploded from panic, and they slumped in their harnesses.

After a moment, the crowd looked from the ceiling to the stage.

The Snug looked from the ceiling to the crowd.

Holiday Rhodes, man. Holiday fucking Rhodes. He always knew what to say, Holiday Rhodes. He said,

“ROCK AND FUCKING ROLL!”

And the crowd always knew what to say, too. They said,

“YEEEEEAH!”

Guitar first, then the drums and bass, and there’s the pyro FWAMP and everyone’s tongue was in anyone’s mouth; beers went flying into the air, bouncing off of deer carcasses, the whole mass of teenage fuckery bouncing and pulsing with the beat: they had become a non-Newtonian fluid and they surged and chopped and jumped and praised. The balcony lit doobies and straddled each other as the Super Troopers flung stardom the length of the room to capture The Snug–the motherfuggin’ Snug, man–in their sights, and that meant it really was Christmas. Local traditions are the best kind of traditions because they don’t have to make sense, and nowhere has traditions more local than Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

18 days had passed since it rained in Little Aleppo, so it was raining in Little Aleppo. The sun had come up, but not so you could tell, and the drops came down steady on the window, not a drizzle that went tiptiptap but a hard shower that sounded against the glass like THRUMPATUMP, like a hand with a million fingers was waiting for you to get to the point, and all around the neighborhood, appointments were being canceled and plans rescheduled and classes cut. You’d think locals would stop making plans for the day of the rains, but no one ever did: it wasn’t because they forgot, but that they thought it would be different this time, that they wouldn’t let the rain stop them from living their lives, but then they’d wake up and see the downpour and start calling each other pretending to be sick. Humans see patterns in everything but their own behavior.

A window opened on the Main Drag. Second floor, right above Big-Dicked Sheila’s Hair Salon For Rock Stars And Their Ilk. Head popped out and looked north towards The Tahitian. Black hair, curly and quickly waterlogged.

“Gus, the theater’s not gonna burn down while it’s raining,” a voice called from the back of the apartment where the bedroom was.

“I’m getting us coffee.”

“I heard the window open.”

“It was stuffy.”

The living room was packed. It was what Sheila called a “healthy clutter.” There were five teevees, one of which was generally working at any given time, in what was referred to as the Media Corner; the stereo was next to that, and a five-tall triple column of milk crates with records in them. Precarious Lee had wired the room for quadrophonic sound, and screwed the speakers to the wall studs in just the right spots. Two couches. Sheila had reupholstered one herself during one of her manic crafting phases. It looked fucked-up, but it was comfortable. All the paintings on the walls were by friends Sheila had buried; all the paintings were of her. Abstract, with silly slashes for her hair and long loping lines as legs, and photorealistic, with raised goose bumps on her forearm and her cock flopped against her leg showing its underside like an exhausted sturgeon. Kyron Binet painted Sheila before he got famous and died. The canvas was six by four, and mostly brackish black paint, slathered on thickly in what would come to be known as his style and examined at length in many critical brochures and catalogues. Her figure was offset to the right; she was perched on a stool, one bare foot up and the other forward with splayed toes and flexed calf muscle. White slip with blood smeared on it, left strap ripped free and dangling down her chest, and her hair was caked in something–mud, maybe–and there was blood on her teeth, too, but she was smiling like she knew a secret. Or whose blood it was.

Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui, whom everyone called Gussy, was in a thin white tee-shirt that covered only half her bare ass; it was inside-out, and the Arrow Beer logo flickered backwards through the fabric. The skin on the back of her left elbow was rough; she felt it up and down a few times, and then checked her right elbow, which was far smoother, and she puzzled over that as she walked into the kitchen to make coffee.

Sheila wasn’t a drag queen. Men do drag, and it’s an act; Sheila was a woman (with an accidental penis), and that was her life. She wasn’t a drag queen. She did, however, have a drag queen’s kitchen. It looked like a John Waters movie might break out any second: aggressively wholesome, but slightly off. The curtains had cartoon pigs and cows and chickens on them, but when you looked closer you saw that the animals were all offering themselves up to you, choice cuts sliced out of their sides and loins and steaming on plates held forth with big smiles, and the wallpaper featured the First Ladies, and all the magnets on the fridge depicted famous train derailments. On the top of the cabinets were seven Garfield cookie jars in varying poses–eating, sleeping, playing the piano–that Sheila had named after the Segovian Hills; she insisted on introducing new guests to them. The silverware drawer was jammed with forks and spoons and knives of all makes; they were not in a caddy or organized, but dumped in; there must have been hundreds. The second or third time Gussy stayed over, she asked about it.

“I used to shoplift all the time. I was terrible,” Sheila said.

“Now you steal silverware?”

“It’s my methadone.”

And Gussy had had more than a couple drinks, so she accepted the answer.

Mug from Dollywood. Sugar sugar sugar, milk milk milk, stir, clink clink clink. Mug with a silhouette of a dog riding an elephant and the logo HARPER ZOO: WHERE ANIMALS ARE. Sugar sugar sugar, milk milk milk, stir, clink clink clink. Spoon in the sink, run the water, mug in each hand and barefoot to the bedroom where Sheila is walking out of the bathroom, skinny and naked except for mismatched knee socks, and she has a tiny tuft of thick brown pubic hair in a semi-circle around her cock and no hair anywhere else on her body except for her head; she is growing her spiky short cut into a layered shag because she feels particularly rock and rollish lately and has dyed her hair greasy black, blue-black, jet-black, Joan Jett-black, and she has her eye on a pair of leather pants with a lace-up front in the window of Saxon’s Funkywear over on Maypole Street. She takes the Dollywood mug from Gussy, and they get back into bed.

Four-poster bed with the full canopy: a bed to die of consumption in; a bed for the madwoman in the attic; a bed Emily Dickinson could masturbate in. It had previously belonged to the Baroness de Koenigswarter when she lived in a cottage on Mt. Charity. (Baronesses have different ideas of what the word “cottage” means than most folks.) Sheila wasn’t planning on buying anything at the estate sale–she and Tiresias Richardson had just gone for the free booze and chance to pick up rich guys–but when she saw the carved angels on the columns, she knew that she had to have it. The vertical panel held up by the be-angelled columns is called the tester, and there was a mirror in this one. It was not original.

The rain always brought a chill, especially in December, and Sheila tucked herself under Gussy’s armpit and pulled the blanket up to her chest and curled herself against Gussy’s side and thigh; Gussy was five inches taller and five degrees warmer than Sheila, and they shimmied themselves into each other and the mattress and the covers and then lay still and breathed together and the raindrops on the window went THRUMPATUMP and the two women looked each other in the eye through the mirror above them and one of them said,

“I love you.”

The rain slapped onto Cannot Swim’s head THRUMPATUMP and he curled his lip and said,

“I hate this.”

Today? Why today? Tomorrow would be almost exactly the same, but–BUT–it was fucking dry, Cannot Swim thought. Why send him on his Assignment on the day of the rains? Go up in the hills and collect the cybeline mushroom that grows where the squatch live: that was bad enough, but in the rain? The Pulaski had figured out the cycle of the rains in the valley that would one day be called Little Aleppo; they hadn’t invented calculus, but they could count to 18 well enough. And it wasn’t like there was a rush, he exclaimed to himself. The mushrooms were made into tea for the Midsummer’s Feast, and it was the middle of winter. The sun had just barely come up, but not so you could tell, and it had been raining for an hour already.

Cannot Swim walked north out of the village with a rough cloak made from waxed deer leather draped over his head, passing the kotcha that belonged to Stranger Who Hunts Well and Stranger Who Hunts Well’s Useless Friend. He thought about ducking in and hiding out until it stopped raining, but only briefly. The two of them babbled in their harsh language non-stop; Cannot Swim did not think he could take an entire day of their grunting. Besides, he was a Pulaski man (or he would be when he returned to the village) and what kind of Pulaski man would cower from a little rain?

“Yo! Cuz!”

Turning around and peering through the raindrops and mist and morning gloom, Cannot Swim saw Talks To Whites in the outsiders’ kotcha. He looked back towards the lake, towards the village, and saw that no one was watching, so he loped over and slipped through the door, wiping the mud off his shoes and onto a heavy rock with a sharp edge placed just inside the entrance for that purpose.

“You were supposed to meet me by the scarred tree in the upper fields,” Cannot Swim said.

“It’s raining.”

“So?”

Talks To Whites stared at his cousin, tilted his head, scrunched up his nose.

“It…is…rain…ing.”

“How are you called a man and I am still called a child?”

“I was born six months before you.”

“It’s rain. You won’t melt.”

“I know. But, I’ll get wet.”

“Just gimme the damn rifle.”

Stranger Who Hunts Well and Stranger Who Hunts Well’s Useless Friend were still under their blankets on their sleeping platforms, scratching their balls and yawning and not quite following the conversation. The Pulaski language was full of subtle stops and swallowed vowels and all ran together in a breathy tumble that outsiders could not pick out words from, and even once they sort of figured out the syntax, there was still the conjugation to deal with–verbs were gendered in Pulaski, and could become perfect or pluperfect depending on where they were placed relative to the subject–and even tribes whose languages were close to Pulaski had little hope of becoming conversational, let alone mastering it. Stranger Who Hunts Well and his Useless Friend made out “rain” and “rifle,” but everything else was guesses based on body language.

“You’re gonna go now? Hang out here today.”

“It’s an Assignment. You’re assigned. That means you do what you’re told. And, you know, it’s a trial. It’s not supposed to be fun. Or easy.”

“My Assignment was easy until you freaked out and ate all our whole stash at once and nearly got us killed.”

“I did not like that place,” Cannot Swim said with his eyes on the ground.

“Duh.”

“They are chaos, the Whites, and also cruelty. And–”

“They stink.”

“–they stink.”

“I am more than aware of your feelings about the Whites’ odor.”

“I don’t know how they bear it. If I smelled like that, I’d chop my nose off. Like this one.”

Cannot Swim jerked his head towards Stranger Who Hunts Well’s Useless Friend.

“Stinks like a dying man’s balls.”

“He just woke up,” Talks To Whites said, smiling. “Everyone smells bad when they wake up.”

“Not like this. It’s inhuman.”

The two men on the sleeping platforms, one very large and the other very small, watched the conversation. The little one whispered in English to the big one,

“Are you getting any of this, Peter?”

“The tall one thinks you smell bad.”

“I just woke up. Everyone smells bad when they wake up.”

Talks To Whites turned around and looked down at the small man and said in English,

“That’s what I told him, Reverend.”

Neither Talks To Whites nor Peter had ever told the Reverend Busybody Tyndale that his Pulaski name was Stranger Who Hunts Well’s Useless Friend. What good could it possibly do?

Cannot Swim shouldered the Springfield rifle and Talks To Whites gave him two small satchels: peregrine leaves, ammo. He took a leaf from the pouch, offered one to his cousin.

“Nah, I’m going back to sleep.”

“You’re going back to sleep?”

“I don’t know how many different ways I can say this: it’s raining.”

“Unfuckingbelievable.”

And Cannot Swim backed out of the door of the kotcha; the leather flap clapped shut; he was gone.

The rain hit the hemispherical crown of Harper Observatory and sluiced down the exterior marble walls to the parking lot past the Volkswagens and Fords and over the side of the sheer rock and falling splashing running coursing the mud and pebbles and loosed grass flowing along and collected on the way, the homes on stilts and the infinite pools and hot tubs and luxury where there should be none, and gathering speed until the foothills and across the Main Drag and over what used to be a lake and into the harbor that fed Little Aleppo and out past the breakers to the sea it came from.

The rain sounded low-pitched THRUMPATUMP on glass windows and higher BAPADAP on nylon umbrellas and hollow PANGPANGPANG on the metal shutters of The Tahitian. THUPTHUPTHUP on the head of its owner sticking out a window down the street.

“GUSSY!”

“I’m letting the cat out!”

“I don’t have a cat!”

Gussy was back in the doorway of the bedroom; she leaned against the jamb.

“I could’ve sworn you did.”

Sheila is out of bed and her feet in mismatched knee socks swopswopswop on the hardwood floor; she is naked and her hips sway like a pendulum with a big dick, and, having left her coffee on the nightstand and cigarette smoldering in the ashtray which reads THE MENEFRIGHISTA CLUB: WHERE STARS COME TO SHINE, her arms are free to slip around Gussy’s waist, and Sheila raises herself on tiptoe and shoves her tongue rudely into Gussy’s mouth, who makes a noise like ooooohh and grabs Sheila’s bare ass with both hands, but it slips out when she lowers herself back to her flat feet and clears her throat and smiles like at a child.

“Gus, hon, I can’t date crazy anymore. I’m terrible at it. If you’re gonna be crazy–”

Gussy pushed her back, softly, and said,

“He left a fucking note, Sheel! He was in my place, he was actually there. Row 19. Seat 4. He was in my place, Sheel.”

Sheila came back into her, and said, softly,

“Shutters are locked.”

And kissed her.

“Precarious put ’em up.”

And kissed her again.

“Congo couldn’t get through shutters Precarious put up.”

And one more time and now Gussy kissed her back.

“You do know that Precarious has actually set my theater on fire several times, right?”

“And you’re not scared of him! So why freak out about this Jack of Instance asshole? Oh, and–”

Sheila took two steps towards the bed and launched herself into it FLOOMP a pillow launched off the side.

“–the Fire Chief? Flower? Big tall mean bitch?”

“She’s not a bitch.”

“She’s totally a bitch. Anyway, I told her all about the Jack of Instance and she visited Madame Cazee.”

“Uh-huh,” Gussy said as she picked the pillow up off the floor and threw it at her.

The record player had a square plastic lid. Sheila forgot to put the toilet seat back down, and her hamper was the corner, but the lid of the record player was always in place. Gussy lifted it. The turntable was made of aluminum and covered with tacky black rubber, and the components were brushed silver, and the tonearm curved just like a mountain road that movie stars died on. CH-CHUNK the power button had weight to it and then hmmmmmm–oh, that rock and roll hum–a noise at the same frequency as a teenager’s blood pressure, a predictory noise, a noise that prefaced sound. Machines have to clear their throats, too.

Living room records and bedroom records, there is a difference. A row of them on top of the dresser next to the record player which was on top of the amplifier that has two blue window with needles ready and waiting and bobbing against the left cushion of the parabola–it was the type of amplifier you left on; Precarious had dropped it off one day–and Gussy’s finger ran down the spines of the albums like a stick against a picket fence wielded by some old-timey kid in overalls. Bookends on either side holding the row upright, figures carved from heavy wood and painted: Tommy Amici and Cara Thorn, tuxedo and evening gown and separated only by the music. When all the songs had played, they’d be together again.

Gussy hated choosing the record in front of Sheila; she felt she was being judged. She felt that because Sheila had said so at least twice. It was one of those jokes you tell in the beginning of a relationship that isn’t a joke at all. It was early, she thought, and it was raining, and so this was rejected for being too poppy and that was rejected for being too cocktail-hour. And it was no time to listen to anyone’s bullshit, she thought, and slid the record with the smoky blue cover out. It was not a deep cut. It was the obvious choice. It was the jazz album; in fact, it was verging on being The Jazz Album. If you had one jazz album, you had this one. It was issued, seemingly, or spontaneously generated: if you put enough LPs together, then you’d find this one in the stack soon enough.

The record comes out of the cardboard, and then out of the white sleeve made of waxy paper with the rounded edges and oversized hole in the center. Flip it over to find Side A. Settle the disc onto the spindle. The tonearm lifts up and over and control it down. Softly. Pop and snap and hiss and other onomatopoeias. Then the bass and the piano playing Chinese chords and just the bass now challenging and the band answers and again and again.

FFT PHWOO Sheila lit a joint and blew out a cloud of smoke towards the mirror above her; it plumed off in crazy directions where it hit its own reflection. The curtains around the bed were drawn, and orange. She was thinking of going black.

“So. Your position is–”

Gussy took two steps toward the bed and eased onto the mattress. She crawled towards Sheila, who handed her the joint with one hand and reached out for her tit with the other.

“–that my worries, and therefore PHWOO the neighborhood’s worries are over, because you sent the Fire Chief to see a psychic?”

“Not over. But PWHOO close to. I have faith in Madame Cazee.”

“Sheel, if Madame Cazee knew anything, wouldn’t she have just gone to the cops? Or someone? She shouldn’t have been sitting there waiting to read the Fire Chief’s palm.”

“She doesn’t read palms anymore. Eczema.”

“Figure of speech.”

“The Jack of Instance is one of her Tarot cards. She knows all about him. I’m sure she helped the chief.”

“Helped her with what? She doesn’t have any actual information about the crimes.”

“Gus?”

Sheila put the joint in between her lips and got up on her knees facing Gussy and continued,

“These fires are happening on several levels, including magickal and psychic, and you have to acknowledge that.”

Gussy plucked the joint from Sheila’s mouth.

“Sheel, hon, I can’t date crazy. I’m terrible at it.”

Sheila rolled her eyes and spun around and laid down with her arms crossed.

“There are greater forces at play here, Augusta O. Incandescente-Ponui.”

“I love it when you call me that.”

“Mysterious forces. And destructive ones. Terror has been loosed according to a plan unavailable to onlookers. There is afootedness.”

“Afootedness?”

“When trouble is afoot, then exists a state of afootedness. One of my clients taught me about it; she’s in the Experimental Linguistics department at Harper.”

“It’s just some guy.”

“It’s not.”

“Is it the werewolf from the flyers?”

“No, that’s fucking stupid,” Sheila said.

“Thank you.”

“Werewolfs don’t have hands. They can’t light fires. It could maybe be a wolfman, but not a werewolf.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“It’s just a guy. A crazy guy who can’t get hard unless he lights shit on fire.”

“Then why the notes? Why the Jack of Instance?”

“I dunno. I dunno how crazy people think. That’s why they’re crazy. Some of ’em talk to dogs, and others talk to playing cards.”

Gussy had the joint and she hit it PHWOO and coughed, hacks that doubled her chest over and shook the bed, and small aftershocks followed by exploratory sips of her rapidly-cooling coffee. She looked at the bedroom door, and back at Sheila from the corner of her eye, and the door again; Sheila saw this and picked the phone up off her nightstand.

“What’s the number of the theater?”

“Why?”

“Tell me.”

She did. The phone rang twice and then the machine answered with Sheila’s voice.

“You’ve reached The Tahitian theater, located in the heart of beautiful Little Aleppo. We’re closed right now, but if you leave a message and aren’t Mr. Carnolin, we’ll get back to you. Thanks!”

After the beep, Sheila said,

“Wally? Wally, are you there?”

“He can’t answer the phone,” Gussy said.

DO NOT CALL ME THAT.

Gussy grabbed the receiver from Sheila.

“Why are you answering the phone?”

I DID NOT ANSWER THE PHONE. I WAS REQUESTED TO COME TO THE LINE.

“How are you answering the phone?”

I AM WIRED INTO THE ENTIRE BUILDING.

Sheila shoved her fingers into Gussy’s ribs, which made her flinch and give up the receiver.

“Wally, it’s Sheila. Listen, you gotta do me a favor. Do you know my phone number?”

I KNOW EVERYONE’S PHONE NUMBER.

“Great. So, if you get set on fire: call here. Immediately. Okay? Because Gussy is very worried, so I think it would be good if you told her that you were going to call if anything happened. Like getting set on fire.”

I WAS PLANNING ON IT.

Gussy tried to grab the receiver again, but Sheila had strong hands and held on, so they put their heads together to share.

“Were you going to let me in on this plan?” Gussy asked.

I ASSUMED YOU WERE INTELLIGENT ENOUGH TO FIGURE IT OUT ON YOUR OWN.

There was a muted trumpet playing in the background, just the right notes over one chord and then another and back to the first, while the drummer swished around his snare drum. Gussy let got of the phone and sat back against the pillows. Wondered who she had hurt in a previous life.

“Okay, that’s great,” Sheila said. “So, if there’s a fire–any fire of any size whatsoever–then you’ll call Gussy, right? Try her place first, and then here.”

SHOULD I NOT CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT? DO WE NO LONGER TRUST THEM? ARE THEY IN CAHOOTS?

Gussy ran her hand over her face and then stared upwards, but there was a mirror above her and she didn’t feel like making eye contact with the idiot that had brought Wally into her life.

“Call the Fire Department first. Then Gussy.”

THESE ARE THINGS I DO NOT NEED TO BE TOLD. I AM AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAPABLE OF 800 MONDOFLOPS OF–

Sheila hung the receiver back into the phone’s cradle and put the whole shebang back on her nightstand and turned back to Gussy and smiled and said,

“Fixed.”

And now it was Gussy’s turn to kiss her, she put her hand in Sheila’s hair and clutched and they sank into too many damn pillows, and Gussy threw her leg over Sheila’s lap to straddle her; Sheila put her hand on her tits under her thin white tee-shirt, and Gussy took it off and flung it onto the pile of dirty clothes in the corner and leaned back down to kiss Sheila and her long curly hair was everywhere cascading over both their shoulders, and Sheila’s cock was rushing coursing pulsing in Gussy’s hand, and she slid her into herself and settled down with no thoughts of fire, and no mind to instance, and no ear towards the rain that went THRUMPATUMP against the windows of bedroom all over Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Little Aleppians are from time to time permitted to name incoming animals to the Harper Zoo; they shouldn’t be. Either no one participates in the publicity event and the keepers slap a cheesy faux-ethnic name on the poor creature, or everyone participates way too hard and brawls break out and factions are formed and leaders rise. In ’56, the zoo asked the neighborhood to christen the new yak over KSOS in the morning, and by that night the Main Drag was in flames over the question of “Yak Benny” vs. “I Am Just A Foreign Cow And I Shouldn’t Be In A Zoo.” Both the LAPD (No, Not That One) and the Town Fathers became involved, which meant everyone had to pass a hat around for the bribes, and that took a lot of air out of the riot. Street warfare has a certain momentum it needs to maintain itself.

The shakedown was seen as just by the shake-ees: there were certain unbreakable rules a society needed to uphold, and one of them was “no knife fights in the Main Drag.” After a month of committee meetings, exploratory missions to Las Vegas, and thousands of pages of testimony, the Town Fathers came to a conclusion that there was no more juice to be squeezed from this particular berry, and named the yak Nancy at two in the morning when no one was looking. When the angry rival gangs arrived at Harper Zoo the next morning, they saw that there was indeed a plaque bearing the name of Nancy, and under that was information about yaks and their lives and diets and hobbies. Must have been three feet across, the plaque, and all engraved. A zookeeper in blue coveralls was polishing it with a rag and spray bottle.

The angry rival gangs paused.

“You can’t argue with that.”

“No. That’s official.”

“The yak is named Nancy. Okay. Hey, didn’t you stab me?”

“Everybody stabbed everybody. The details are unimportant. Let’s go get breakfast.”

And so the two angry rival gangs did become one hungry crowd that went for breakfast. The yak, who was named Nancy and had a plaque to attest to it, may or may not have noticed. The neighborhood’s opinion was not solicited for quite some time, but institutional memories fade and dumb ideas are recycled every generation, which is why Harper Zoo’s lion is named Kevin and there is also a large plaque with his name and fun facts about him outside his enclosure.

Kevin would or would not be Harper Zoo’s last lion.

When Harper T. Harper returned from making his fortune in the Congo, he began his new career of naming things after himself with a grand palace to knowledge and man’s mastery of the universe. On the land left over, he built the college. They would both turn out to be embarrassments to him: the school, almost immediately; the zoo, eventually.

Harper T. Harper loved looking at animals. Unlike most of the men of his day, he was not a hunter. They every much right to live as you or me, Harper would tell people, but “existence” was where the animals’ rights ended for Harper. Or maybe they had the full complement? If animals did have rights, then certainly mine supersede theirs, and it is my right as a Christian to make condors and gnus to live at my house.

35 acres on the Upside in between the Main Drag and the sea, the zoo is the shape of home plate with the sharpish bit facing south. A walking path runs around the inner perimeter; there are exhibits on both sides of the path. Two trails cut through the interior of home plate from north to south at just the parabola at which the stitching curves into a baseball. (Harper T. Harper famously loved baseball; his architect secretly loved charging as much as he could get away with, and figured catering to the old hand-chopper’s hobbies would do the trick.)

Nestled underneath the zoo is Harper College. Directly under. During The Bake, the college can small the zoo, and when the college gets baked, the zoo can smell that. The two similarly-named institutions are separated only by a fence hidden by bushes and ivy, and there is a sidewalk along the fence that is, in places, poorly lit. There had been deaths, yes, but all of them occurred within the animals’ enclosures and, well, that was on you. Carter Spants mentioned it in his Orientation address every year for four decades; alumni could recite his speech by heart:

“You’re going to break into the zoo because you’re all wicked children, but further illegal entry once within our neighboring cousin is strongly disadvised. Anyone who monkeys with the snack shop or horses around with the souvenir stand will be ferreted out.”

Dean Spants would pause for mild laughter here.

“And summarily expelled and forced into the military.”

Dean Spants paused here, too, but there was no laughter because it was the past and kids who fucked up could totally be forced into the military.

“I continue with a reminder and a warning: you don’t need to get eaten, and everyone will make fun of you for years if you do. No matter how popular you are, trust me. Branquist was the Big Man on Campus, big strapping fellow with a mop of blond curls. Everyone loved him, but Branquist didn’t know two things: 1, you shouldn’t mix tequila with jazz cigarettes; and 2, you can’t alligator wrestle a crocodile. Far more cantankerous species. Did we mourn him? Yes, of course. But did the students start called breakfast “Branquist?” Also yes. They did that immediately. The next year, the school’s mascot was the Crocodiles and the logo was a cartoon croc and would you like to guess what color the cartoon croc’s curly hair was?

“If you are eaten, you will be mocked.”

Dean Spants would then usually talk about the life of the mind, and sign-ups for the intramural leagues.

Kept from meddling with the school by the school charter Dean Spants had tricked him into signing–he still contends that Spants jerkoff hypnotized him–Harper turned all his energies towards his menagerie. Animals were easier to buy in the 30’s, and Harper knew mercenaries all over the world from his days in the Congo. It turns out that mercenaries are well-suited to the business of kidnapping megafauna and don’t even pretend to act indignant when you ask. Harper trusted mercenaries more than military men; it was always a chore to figure out precisely what the latest buffoon in a general’s uniform wanted when they sent for you, but mercenaries just wanted money. They were far more honest criminals, Harper thought.

His collection, most of which was lacking paperwork of any sort and had been delivered in the middle of the night in exchange for an envelope full of cash, grew. The vets tried to keep everything from dying, and the keepers tried to keep everything from killing each other. If either failed, well: you could always buy some more zebras. The cages were steel bars and poured concrete floors with metal drains embedded in them for when the animals were bathed with cold water hoses. Most were mangy and some were crippled or clearly dying and it was the 30’s, so there was also the occasional cage containing an ethnic.

But it was a dime to get in, and another nickel for popcorn, and in the Depression it was a day passed well to sit in a manicured meadow and look at animals that did not belong in that particular meadow. Even during the darkest days, with war brewing across the ocean and nothing in your belly or pockets, you could sit on a bench and look at an anteater. Used to be, you had to live where the anteaters did to look at them. Then, kings and queens got to look at anteaters. But now, the common man could look at an anteater for as long as he wanted. That’s the American Dream.

Harper T. Harper strolled around every day in the morning at then again after lunch. His driver would sit in the idling Stutz right outside the entrance and Harper would make a clockwise orbit. The keepers called him Mr. Harper and told him about the condor’s wing, or the orangutan’s tooth, and the children all knew that if they smiled and said, “Hi, Uncle Harper,” then he’d give them a nickel. Twice a day every day, even when the zoo wasn’t open to the public, for years. By 1963, he was being wheeled around, still clockwise, and the driver still sat outside in the idling Stutz. He said hello to Nancy, who was a yak, and felt his left side go light and his head felt airy. The last thought Harper T. Harper had was: I wonder how big the headline will be? Vain to the last, but he should have picked a different day in November if he wanted to make the front page. His obituary, written years earlier, noted his philanthropy, and charitable works, and the hand he had in building Little Aleppo, appeared on page B5. A line in the ninth paragraph notes that there were “…always ethical concerns about the source of Mr. Harper’s wealth…” but continues “…which Little Aleppo decided to ignore.”

The zoo went on. The tapirs needed feeding, and the ostrich was picking at her feathers again, and the hyenas seemed depressed. The local rats were cross-breeding with the prairie dogs; both the veterinary and zoology departments at Harper College determined that it was genetically impossible for that to happen, but the keepers had been chasing down little mutant prairie rat babies for a week and drowning them in the tub, so they didn’t want to hear any shit from the professors.

And Congo wasn’t doing well.

Everyone told him not to buy an elephant. We’re a small zoo and we don’t have the room for an elephant, the keepers pleaded with him, but he didn’t listen to anyone even before he went deaf, and so a few years before Harper’s death, Congo showed up in the middle of the night with no paperwork. She was an adolescent, and should have been with her mother and aunts. Take something terrible to separate them. They don’t teach you in veterinary school that elephants have nightmares, and that the noises they make during them are remarkably human. They tried everything, even giving Congo away to an elephant preserve; the other cows rejected her and were so violent that she was shipped right back to her cage, even sadder and more shrouded than before. A new enclosure: bigger and open to the sky with a moat around it to keep her in, with several levels and places to hide from the crowd and stout trees to scratch herself on. Nothing worked until the dog, a goofy blue heeler named Shep, who took to Congo like she was a milkbone with a trunk.

The two became mildly famous. PBS came by to shoot some footage, and big newspapers from out of town came by to run articles about the interspecies friendship. Two generations of Little Aleppo’s kids grew up on the Congo and Shep children’s books; they solved crime, or filed for a lien against a contractor who had done shoddy work, or learned how to make gnocchi. The pair were made into a simple logo and placed on every piece of merch that the Harper Zoo souvenir stand could get its hands on.

But what gave an elephant life may have doomed a zoo. Seeing the elephant’s joy in the dog only underlined the sorrow she lived. Beginning that day, the zookeepers and staff of Harper Zoo stopped buying animals out of the wild, and the breeding programs stopped shortly afterwards, and since then the 35 acres in the sheltered wood of the Upside has been the final repository for around a dozen circuses-worth of broken, beat-up, and busted creatures. Roadside petting zoo in Petaluma goes bust? Harper would take some goats. Crazy asshole in Akron with a bunch of tigers out back dies? Send one over; there’s room somewhere. The reptile house had been stocked exclusively from the mansion of a dead rock star, and the chimp used to be on teevee. Bootsy the alligator used to protect a drug dealer’s apartment.

Last stop for the out-of-place.

The kids still came by and ate their popcorn, though the prices had risen quite a bit, and mothers rolled their babies around home plate on nice days. They pointed and named the world for their children. When the sun went down and the customers had gone, an elephant and her dog would slip their bonds–just a little bit–and survey their entire world, which was a manicured meadow in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Flower Childs was unhappy. People who didn’t know her thought she was always unhappy, but they were wrong: she was just serious; her moods fluctuated like any normal human’s, it’s just she didn’t go gooning around when she was happy or weeping when things went wrong. Especially since something was always about to go wrong. Hell, that was her job, waiting for something to go wrong and then driving there. Firefighters were like human seatbelts, she figured: acknowledgement that life would go awry no matter how carefully one planned one’s trip. But now the Fire Chief was unhappy. She was one corpse away from losing her job, her girlfriend was opening a bar even though she barely knew her times tables, and she was sitting across from a naked psychic.

“You’re just gonna be naked?”

“You may disrobe if you’d like,”Madame Cazee said.

“I’m good.”

The room was oval, and the table was circular, and Madame Cazee was person-shaped. Flower was also person-shaped, but taller. There was no incense burning–Flower made Madame Cazee extinguish the sticks when she came in–but the smell lingered and the air was smoky and slowed down the light that came through the small porthole window with the sigil fitted inside it. Flower was in her work shirt and pants, boots; Madame Cazee was nude. Sometimes, the spirits insisted upon nudity, and other times Madame Cazee had not done laundry.

“I don’t believe in any of this crap.”

“Yes, I could tell by your haircut.”

“What’s wrong with my haircut?”

“Nothing. It’s just very fact-based.”

She was right: a crew-cut is the most logical of all hairstyles; it is a hierarchical haircut; there is a chain of command somewhere in a person with a crew-cut’s life. Flower’s was freshly trimmed and graying. (Least rational hairdo is a giant mohawk.)

She had never been in Madame Cazee’s before, though she had walked by millions of times–it was across Sylvester Street from where the Wayside Inn used to be–and didn’t particularly want to be there at the moment. She had strolled casually down the sidewalk, timing her entrance for when she thought no one was looking, and slid in the front door as quickly as she could, turning to shut it behind her. It was a lot like how people used to walk into the Wayside for the first time.

This was that Reverend’s fault. The one from that weird church she had breakfast with. Old enough to know better than to talk to giant strangers in bright-yellow suits, she thought, especially when their advice was “Go talk to Big-Dicked Sheila.” Flower had known Sheila for years, and thought she was a flibbertigibbet; her opinion was not changed when Sheila insisted that she go talk to Madame Cazee.

“She knows the Jack of Instance,” Sheila said.

Flower spun around in the chair so fast that Sheila’s scissors nearly severed her ear.

“This psychic person knows the Jack of Instance?”

“Of course. He’s a tarot card.”

“Of course, he’s a tarot card,” Flower muttered and let Sheila spin her back towards the mirror.

Sheila snipped in silence for a few minutes, and then said,

“Got any other leads, Chief?”

She was tiny, Flower thought. I could punt her. Just pick her up and punt her right out of the salon and into the Main Drag. Bet I could get a tight spiral going on her, she thought.

But Sheila was right. The LAPD (No, Not That One) had no clues at all; Hank Paraffin, the chief, had been appearing on KSOS to ask the community for help. He gave out a special phone number that locals could call and give tips anonymously, but it was one digit away from Cagliostro’s and so they got more orders for pizza than they did help. They also got more prank calls and dirty-talking than help. And wrong numbers. The whole idea was a bust, and it was only the minorest of fuck-ups. There were divinations, agenda-laden accusations, false confessions, several apartments busted into by the SWAT team for little-to-no reason

And then there was someone–there’s always fucking someone–who was leaving flyers up all over the neighborhood claiming that the Jack of Instance was a werewolf. Flower ripped them down off the telephone polls she passed. Blaming arson on werewolfs was just too odd even for Little Aleppo, and it pissed her off. Didn’t even make sense. How’s a werewolf gonna start a fire when they don’t have thumbs? A wolfman had thumbs, but not a werewolf. It’s like no one watched movies anymore. She tore two down and jammed them into her the big cargo pocket on the right thigh of her blue khakis while she was walking to Madame Cazee’s.

Arguing with herself the whole time.

“You are tense.”

“Using your psychic powers to figure that out?”

“No,” Madame Cazee. “I’m looking at your jaw. If you clench it any harder, your teeth will splinter.”

Flower Childs didn’t want to laugh, but she did a little, just a breathy snort from her nostrils, and she took her chin with her hand and shook it back and forth.

“Yeah, huh? You can see that from there?”

“You could see it from space.”

“Maybe I should get a less stressful job. How’s being a psychic?”

“Stress-wise? Somewhere in between a heart surgeon and a tennis pro. Depends on the day. Once in a while, there are demon incursions or everyone starts having the wrong dreams. Last week, I had a Freaky Friday deal: mom and daughter switched brains. Took forever to sort that one out, but the nice thing was that they learned a lot about each other.”

Madame Cazee had an accent that was foreign, and that was about as specific as you could get. Her vowels were as flexible as a gymnast with all her bones removed, and the consonants fought with themselves on the way out of her mouth. Some words were sing-song and others were clipped and she might pronounce the letter R nine different ways in the space of one sentence. Eyes the same summer-green as the giant eyeball painted on the window of her storefront, and long hair the same silver as a freshly-cut key, and she was wearing more rings than she had fingers.

“So. The Jack of Instance,” Flower said.

“Real bastard.”

“Looks that way.”

“They’re everywhere!”

“Looks that way,” Capolina Gardner said. She and her husband Harry were sitting at their kitchen table in their small rented cottage on Bailey Street. Dishes dried in a rack by the sink, and a baby-blue hand towel was draped through the fridge’s handle. A flyer was in front of them. It was neon orange and if you stared at it too long, your corneas would melt.

WEREWOLF!

What Are The Police Not Saying?

Every Fire Has Taken Place During
The Full Moon!

Coincidence?

OR WEREWOLF?

“This is not good,” Harry said.

Capolina rubbed his forearm and said,

“It’s not even true!”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“The fire at the Dean’s house was during the full moon, but not the others. I checked.”

“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”

Her hand slipped down to his and she laced her fingers into his. He looked just the same as he did when they met in Professor Scott’s Public Speaking class. All freshman at Harper College had to take it; it had been a requirement since the college’s founding. The first Dean of the school, Carter Spants, insisted. A truth poorly stated is speculation at best, Dean Spants used to say. Harry’s cheeks flashed crimson that first day. Everyone had to get up in front of the room and read an article from that day’s Cenotaph. Professor Scott called it “Sink or Speak.” No one much liked Professor Scott.  Capolina thought Harry was cute, except for the goatee. He shaved it before their second date, which impressed her because she hadn’t outright told him to, just nibbled around the edges of the topic. A man who could take a hint, Capolina thought, might be one to keep around.

Harry was clean-shaven now. She had noticed he had become scrupulous about keeping his beard off since…well, since. That was how they referred to the night in the Verdance when Harry got bitten. Just “since” and then they’d trail off, accompanied by a vague hand waving in the direction of the park.

“It’s just some kook, baby.”

“Guiseppe Franco was just some kook, and he started World War One.”

“That wasn’t his name.”

“The guy that shot the Arch-Duke.”

“Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Not his name.”

“Well, what was his name?”

The ice maker in the freezer loosed two cubes and they went CLUH-CLUNK onto the pile in the hopper.

“It was something. Can we get back to the flyers?”

“These are going to rile people up,” Harry said. “The whole neighborhood’s gonna go looking for werewolfs, and y’know what happens when people look for things.”

“What, baby?”

“They find things!”

Harry slapped a palm on the kitchen table and got up, walked over to the sink, looked out the window.

“That was very dramatic,” Capolina said.

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“Feel better?”

“No. Maybe. A little. I don’t know.”

Capolina stood up and came up behind him and threw her arms around his midsection and scratched at his belly. Harry was tall, so her face was planted in between his shoulder blades, and she rubbed her nose into his back.

“What if a Van Helsing shows up?”

“Van Helsings are for draculas, baby,” she said.

“The werewolf equivalent.”

She took him by the arms and spun him around, got up on her tip-toes–she was wearing blue socks–and kissed his naked chin.

“Baby.”

And kissed him again.

“Baby.”

Once more for luck, or for the road, or good measure. Whichever.

“You’ve never left the house as a werewolf. We keep the blinds closed. You don’t make any noise. I haven’t told anyone. Have you?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You tell your mother everything.”

“I didn’t tell my mother I was a werewolf.”

She kissed his chin again.

“Just checking. So: no one knows. These stupid flyers were made by a crazy person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

“But what if they’re not? What if someone knows? We don’t know who put them up.”

Capolina thought for a moment, and then nodded her head like she’d just had a clever idea.

“Get your shoes.”

She walked into the living room, then back in the kitchen to grab the flyer and jam it in the back pocket of her jeans, and then back to the living room.

“Come on, slowpoke. You got any cash?”

Harry followed her out of the kitchen, digging in his pockets.

“I have $39.”

“Great,” she said. There was a chair by the front door, and Capolina sat down and tied her sneakers.

“Where are we going?”

“To find out who paid for those flyers.”

“How?”

“Little Aleppo’s only got one copy shop.”

Harry thought for a moment, and then nodded his head like his wife had just had a clever idea.

“I love you,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” she answered, and stood up and kissed him. Man who could take a hint and  take direction? That was a keeper.

“Yung Man’s after?”

“If we have any money left.”

“How much do you bribe a copy shop employee?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“This is the Gnostic-Septollines-Teller tarot. It originated in Paris in the 1500’s and was updated at Los Alamos in between nuclear tests. Most people aren’t aware of the part that magick played in the creation of the atomic bomb.”

“I had absolutely no idea,” Flower Childs said.

“Why do you think they called the first test Trinity?”

WHAP Madame Cazee slammed the deck down; the bangles and beads of the maroon tablecloth bobbled.

“The Gnostic-Septollines-Teller deck has 77 cards. 77. Very magickal, 77.”

“How so?”

“Seems like it should be a prime number, but it isn’t. 77, 51, 119. Lot of power in that.”

Flower did not have enough background in the occult to evaluate any of Madame Cazee’s statements. She had mostly taken engineering classes at Harper College, and never read comic books or pulpy science fiction novels as a child. She wasn’t even an atheist; she didn’t disbelieve in God and the Devil and the Afterlife and the rest of the Capitalized Nonsense so much as she didn’t give a shit about any of it. It was irrelevant. Tough enough figuring out people, now I gotta deal with haints and boojums? Fuck that, she thought. Not interested.

The room was not bright; it never got bright, Madame Cazee’s oval-shaped storefront sanctum sanctorum ate up light and shat out portentous dim. A doctor’s office needs to be well-lit, but a psychic’s office needs to not be. It was a smudgy kind of dim like a burned-down library. She cut the deck once, twice, three times. The backs of the cards were black with sun and moon, yellow, opposing each other lengthwise. Picked them up. Riffle shuffle, then the Hindu, and the Zarrow. Madame Cazee had large hands and she laid one down on the table. Raised it, palm up. Nothing up a naked lady’s sleeve. Back on the table. When she raised it again, there was a card underneath with a black back that had a yellow sun and moon on it.

It was a good trick, Flower thought

Sylvester (the cat) leapt onto the table, which turned the card over. Then he leapt off.

That was a really good trick, Flower thought. So did Madame Cazee, but she tried not to show it on her face.

“The Jack of Instance.”

“There he is, huh?”

The card showed a barefoot man on a horse, both emaciated and wild-eyed. The man and the horse were on fire.

“Have you heard of Interpretationalism?”

“What?”

“Interpretationalism. Next big intellectual movement. Post-modernism was the death of the author, but Interpretationalism is the death of the text, too. Nothing matters but your opinion.”

“I got no idea what you’re talking about,” Flower said.

“Thousands of years the Jack of Instance has been around, and not one soul has ever gotten a good vibe from the motherfucker. He’s not chaos. He’s not war. He’s not destruction. The Jack of Instance is the danger that comes from being around other people. He’s a brick thrown from the overpass onto the highway. A shove in front of the train. He’s the stalker, the drunk driver, the junkie in the next apartment that fell asleep with a cigarette burning. He’s the burglar, he’s the rapist, he’s the coldcocker, he’s the one who forgot to mention that disease he’s got before he fucked you raw. He’s every time you got lied to. And every time you lied.”

Flower Childs stared into Madame Cazee’s summer-green eyes for a long moment, then said,

“That doesn’t help me in the fucking slightest.”

“Did you think I was gonna draw you a sketch?”

Flower had actually been kinda hoping for a sketch.

“I was kinda hoping.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Get up.”

“What’s this about?”

Cannot Swim had been dreaming, and it was a teenage dream, and he had a boner and now his father was touching him. It was pitch-black in the kotcha and cold and his father was touching him while he was boned up. This was not a great way to begin adulthood. His father, Shoots With Wrong Hand, let go of his shoulder and threw back the bearskin blanket exposing him, naked except for his breechcloth and he scrambled to hide his erection.

“Hey, look. The son rose.”

“C’mon, Dad.”

“It’s a pun.”

“I see what you did.”

Shoots With Wrong Hand stopped smiling and stood up and held the leather door of the kotcha open. The moon was almost full and there were no clouds, and Cannot Swim could see his sister hiding under her blanket, just her eyes peering out. His father stepped out, taking the door with him and tying it open so there was light for Cannot Swim to dress by.

The Pulaski slept on short wooden platforms that raised them off the dirt floors of their kotchas. The elders had thin mattresses stuffed with grass and leaves, the problem with which being that grass and leaves rot, meaning you need to constantly restuff the sucker. The elders did not have a problem with that problem, as they made the children of the village do the work. Most of the children and adults laid thick sheets of tanned hide down on the wooden platforms and that was that. Their pillows were the tunics they wore during the day.

Cannot Swim unrolled his tunic. It went over his head like a sundress and had a wide collar and deep vents for his sleeveless arms. The skirt was slit up both sides all the way to his waist; it might be more correct to call it a double-apron configuration than a skirt. On either side of his waist were laces that tightened up for wear and loosened for removal or after feasts. The stag that had died to provide the leather was embroidered on the front, the deer’s molars serving as its avatar’s eyes. Cannot Swim had shot the stag himself, first hunting party he’d ever been allowed out on.

They were to the south of the village, following the coast and avoiding the hills to the east. There was a wood there, a gently lumpy hill country that shared the valley that would be called Little Aleppo’s temperate climate and dearth of catastrophic weather. Black bear and grizzly, mule deer, coyote and cougar. And antelope and elk. The elders told stories that they heard from their elders about giant hairy beasts with arms for noses and trees for teeth, but no one had seen anything like that in years.

There were twelve–eight adults and four children–in the hunting party, far too many, and Cannot Swim was beginning to think his father had brought him out on a fuck-off trip. Everyone was chewing too many peregrine leaves and talking too loudly. And it was all men, which he thought was odd. Pulaski women fished; Pulaski men farmed; but hunting was a pure meritocracy. Bullets were a finite commodity, so the best shots got the rifles. (The weapons were owned by the tribe, but each belonged to the individual that could do the best with it. When you translate the concept of “rightful possession” between Pulaski and English, you run into quite a bit of connotative loss.)

Cannot Swim had noticed there were only four rifles among the twelve of them.

Most children in the village’s first hunting trip was one of these excursions, which were known (in Pulaski) as Everyone needs a night off once in a while, y’know? The men would pretend to hunt so they could complain about their wives, and the women would pretend to not know the men were pretending so they could complain about their husbands. The men would always make a ceremonial kill while they were out there to keep up the charade. Usually, they would try to nab something little so it wouldn’t be a pain in the ass carrying it home. Not too little, though. Once, a group led by Wide As Two Men brought a raccoon back with them and everyone made fun of them for years.

And they would bring the kids along for their introduction to the Pulaski hunting party. There were rules. There was a leader to a hunting party. Not like the village, where consensus was prized and everyone had an equal voice. When you left the village–when you left the village bearing arms–you left behind discussion and did what you were told. One leader. “Tyrant” wasn’t always an insult. Used to just mean “absolute monarch.” Could be a good tyrant, could be a bad tyrant. The leader of a Pulaski hunting party was a tyrant. The tyrant for this trip was Webbed Toes, who had been arguing with his wife Fast Hair again and just wanted to sleep under a tree for a night or two and pretend he was a bobcat.

Still, he was the tyrant and the children needed to be taught the rules of the hunting party, so he lined the four of them up in a clearing. They were all about eleven, so the two girls were taller than the two boys. Same tunics, hair, soft-soled shoes. The adult men formed a semi-circle around them.

“Hey, kids.”

“Hey, Webbed Toes,” they answered.

“Guys, if you don’t do what I tell you, either you’ll get shot in the face or everyone in the village will starve to death. Capiche?”

The children all nodded in an exaggerated fashion, and so did the men in a semi-circle around them.

“I mean, I know you guys. You’re bright kids. I don’t need to give you the whole spiel.”

Cannot Swim was feeling a bit underwhelmed by his first hunting party.

“Anyway,” Webbed Toes continued, “do what I tell you always and without question. Gotta listen to the tyrant or people get hurt and their families starve, okay? I tell you to do something? You do it.”

More nodding.

It was early morning in the wood to the south of the village and the sun crackled through the leaves and branches and alit on the clearing with the dozen Pulaski. Over the rise was a brook that fed into the sea beyond the hills, and the forest smelled full and meaty.

Cannot Swim asked,

“So, uh, what should we do?”

Webbed Toes admired the distance.

“Don’t get lost. And if you do get lost? Don’t go uphill. Never go uphill. Okay, kids. This was a big moment for you.”

The seven men in the semi-circle nodded and broke formation. Webbed Toes examined trees. The four children, two boys and two girls, stood there in a line in a clearing.

Cannot Swim said,

“What the fuck just happened?

The other children did not answer him, as they had no idea what the fuck had just happened.

The men laughed and yelled and tackled one another. The Pulaski had a camp out here to the south. Three kotchas, bigger than back in the village, around a firepit. Just a few hours walk from home. Follow the rill to the golden sequoia, turn left for two hillocks, over the creek and you’re just about there. The party left the camp early the next morning, and they found Webbed Toes beneath a lovely elm; when they woke him, he began hissing and clawing, but soon settled down and now the dozen Pulaski were ambling about the land with no real plan for their day.

Cannot Swim and his father had wandered away from the rest and were on the cusp of a wide, grassy plain. They saw the stag at the same time and became still. He was a ten-pointer with antlers as wide as the ocean but far more pointy. 300 yards. More. Too far.

“I can get him.”

“He’s too far away. We could creep around to the west by the treeline,” Shoots With Wrong Hand said.

“I can get him.”

The Pulaski started the children in on shooting early, mainly to see who was good at it and winnow out the useless. If you were a klutz, then you weren’t ever touching a rifle again after the age of eight. Finite commodity, and so was ammo. Cannot Swim was always the best marksman, even better than the older children. His father knew he was a good shot, but he also knew he couldn’t make this one.

“You can’t.”

“Gimme one shot.”

Little failure is good for a boy, Shoots With Wrong Hand thought, and shouldered his Springfield Model 1842 and handed it to his son.

Cannot Swim did not take his eyes off the stag. There was a felled log to his right, and he crept towards it, lowered himself, rested his left side against the dead tree. He could feel it pulsating beneath him with beetles and termites and grubs and worms, and he sighted down the barrel. The Springfield fired Minié balls accelerated by a percussion cap. He kept his finger off of the trigger. A Minié ball traveling 300 yards will do so not in a straight line, but in a ballistic arc; the precise equation of which must be calculated by the shooter, and so Cannot Swim raised the front sight two inches then to the left a squinch to account for the wind and BAK-CHOOM a tremendous noise and the stag was down 300 yards away with a Minié ball torn straight through both his lungs.

His father shielded his eyes from the sun and looked across the field and finally he said,

“Goddamn, kid.”

When they got back to the village, there was a feast and Shoots With Wrong Hand told the story of Cannot Swim’s shot at least ten times. The distance became greater with each retelling. Weeks later, Shoots With Wrong Hand would give his son the tunic made from the stag. It was too big for him at the time, but fit him now. He cinched the leather on the sides of his waist and stepped into his soft-soled shoes. His hair was still in its ponytail, and he had wide brown gauntlets on his forearms. There was a leather satchel on the floor resting against the foot of his sleeping platform, and he threw it over his shoulder and walked outside. The moon hung in the sky like a wonton.

The wonton floated in the soup like the moon. Harry Gardner had been seeing the moon everywhere the past few months, which was understandable. In chocolate chip cookies and manhole covers and frisbees whistling by his nose, and pizza pies and nipples.

“It’s the guy.”

“It looked like him.”

“Short, round, sweaty, newsboy cap?”

“Yup.”

It turns out it costs $20 to bribe a copy shop employee, who described the man who bought all the werewolf flyers and gave Harry and Capolina the work order. The name on it was Juan Dice, which was surely fake, but the number rang when they called it from a pay phone in between the copy shop and Yung Man’s. Harry squatted down so they could both listen to the earpiece. The other end picked up.

“Kinderfleisch butcher shop.”

They had not thought the plan this far through, so Harry said,

“Ummm.”

Capolina chimed in,

“What time are you open until?”

“7 pm.”

“Oh, great. Can’t wait to taste your meat.”

Harry gave her a confused look and she slammed the receiver back in the cradle. They walked over to Harcourt Place–that was where the Yellow Pages attached to the pay phone with a metal chain said the butcher’s shop was–and Harry waited at the end of the street, peering around the corner of the building, while Capolina walked by the front of the shop and tried her best to look in the window without showing her face.

The waiter set down their moo shu pork. Harry made Capolina’s for her; she liked when he did that.

“Why would a butcher be looking for a werewolf?”

“For meat.”

Capolina was about to bite into her moo shu, but put it down on her plate and leaned forward so she could whisper.

“No one eats werewolf.”

“You don’t know that. It’s the only logical explanation.”

“Logic? We left logic’s warm embrace months ago.”

“What else could it be, Cap?”

“I don’t know, baby, But it’s just a bit tough to believe, isn’t it?”

Humans are capable of thousands, tens of thousands, of facial expressions; one of the rarest is “You’ve seen me transform into a giant hellbeast, but this you find tough to believe?” She laughed, just a little tiny bit.

“I’ll accept it as a working hypothesis.”

“Kind of you.”

“I’m a great wife, man.”

He half-stood up and kissed her over the moo shu.

“Y’kinda are.”

“I know. But what do we do?”

Harry sipped his sweaty, over-iced Coke and said,

“We finish dinner.”

“I’m with you.”

“Go home. Maybe we stop for ice cream.”

“We don’t have any money left.”

“No ice cream. Just go home.”

“Okay.”

“I think we should fuck.”

“Agreed.”

They shook on it.

“And then, we sleep on it.”

“I love this plan.”

Capolina held up her tea-cup and he clinked his Coke glass against it and she said,

“Baby?”

“Yeah?”

“He’s not gonna hurt you. I’ll kill him before he hurts you.”

“I love you, Cap.”

“I love you, baby.”

“You get pregnant tonight,” Madame Cazee said.

“Completely fucking impossible,” Flower Childs answered.

The Jack of Instance was still face-up on the table, horse and rider engulfed in flame and both smiling too goddamned wide. There was a black border around the figures, but it was too thin to hold them and Flower could envision them bursting out, leaping off of the card and growing, life-size at first but only for a second, swelling up larger than that, larger, larger, til the horse’s hooves crushed the Segovian Hills with a step and the rider’s eyes were the size of oceans and everything was on fire around her.

“Someone’s putting a baby in someone. That’s a fact.”

“That’s a fact?”

“I’m a psychic. I tell fortunes.”

“Not well. I won’t get into the details, but suffice it to say that I am not getting pregnant tonight. Not my fortune.”

“I know. It’s somebody else’s fortune,” Madame Cazee said.

“You tell people other people’s fortunes?”

“What can I say? The psychic plane’s a mysterious fucking place.”

The chief stood up and made towards the beaded curtains that were the door between the inner sanctum and the waiting room with the big windows onto Sylvester Street. Stopped. Turned back.

“Don’t supposed you gave anyone my fortune lately?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know that. I did tell a regular client that they’d do a wonderful job with the zoo fire.”

Flower Childs didn’t believe in any of this psychic crap, so she waited until she was almost three steps onto the sidewalk on Sylvester Street before she started giving commands on her walkie-talkie; assemble the men in the station and ready for a plan. No more reacting, it was time to take the offensive in Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.

Little Aleppo had a natural harbor. The northernmost Segovian Hill sank into the ocean and curled around the shore of the neighborhood, forming a small, calm bay the shape of an inverted horseshoe and there was no sloping beach, just a drop off that allowed boats with a deep draw to enter and dock at the Salt Wharf. Metal piers as wide as a football field is long and stretching into the harbor dotted with wooden shops and offices and outhouses. Cranes and gangplanks and ropes thicker than you’d imagine possible, and the stevedores in their stevedore caps. Passenger ships used to berth here by way of New York via the Cape, or from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Yokohama. The immigrants were herded into the Customs House, where doctors would look at their balls while they coughed, and papers were issued, and then it was out the other side and welcome to America.

Now it was all cargo from China. Every pair of gas station sunglasses on the West Coast arrives via the Salt Wharf. Wigs and bike wheels and pillows made specifically for the tiny-headed. Drugs and guns and slaves, too. The foremen point and yell and make obscure notes on clipboards. Occasionally, fruit is left out to rot to prove a point, and there is no theft that has not been sanctioned. The forklifts take the containers next door to the Warehouse District; locals stay out of the Warehouse District.

The footprint of the district wasn’t large enough to hold all the warehouses. The mathematicians at Harper College had offered up an explanation: the real estate the Warehouse District sat upon was hypercubical. The neighborhood had responded: that sounds made up. The mathematicians said: well, don’t ask weird questions if you don’t want strange answers. Rats the size of political constituencies swaggered in between buildings like they weren’t scared of anything up to and including the Lord. Animals in the Warehouse District followed the same rules as people did: keep your eyes on your own work.

And work was all there was at the Salt Wharf and its environs; no one wanted to be there or stayed an instant longer than they were paid to.

This was not the case at Boone’s Docks: people snuck in and usually refused to leave.

Schooners and catamarans and funky houseboats with shag carpeting. The Dancronis in slip J1 had been preparing their twin masted ship, the Whistlewind, to circumnavigate the seas for about eleven years now. Buddy Bowie used to be a cop; now he lived on the Stubble in B5 with a pet alligator named Dion. The Gabacho brothers owned the cigarette boats in C9 and 10, the Pussy and the Pussy II. Kenny Coral owned  a 42-footer named the Ben Franklin’s Porn Stash that bristled with fishing equipment: overlong rods whipping back and forth in the snappy breeze of the shore, rods the diameter of one of those hamburgers that’s free if you can finish it, and spotlights and blippy radar thingamadoodles and deedads and all variety of gimcrackery. And the chair. You know the chair. The one in the back that swivels on a solid steel pole that went through the deck and attached to the ship’s hull. With the padding and it reclined so you could reeeeeeeeeel in that catch–she’s a fighter!–and the metal stirrups that make the whole affair a bit gynecological. The seatbelt. The chair with the seatbelt. The one from the movie. You know the chair. No one had ever seen Kenny take the boat out, but he could tell you stories about sea monsters he’d battled all night if you were willing to let him.

The slips radiated from the piers branching off the main jetty; from above, it looked like a communal teevee antenna on an apartment building’s roof. To the south of the main jetty was the slipway and the parking lot and the Banyan Bar, which served much the same purpose that the Customs House did for the Salt Wharf but then didn’t tell the government about it afterwards. Big stuff, well, big stuff had to come in via the Salt Wharf, but little things? Things you could fit in a duffel bag or two? It was so much easier to bring it in to Boone’s Docks. Less paperwork. It was a “What Uncle Sam doesn’t know won’t hurt him, but I’ll hurt you if you tell him” sort of situation. When the cops came to the Banyan, it was for drinks and cash that came delivered under the napkins of their bread baskets. Precise figures were, obviously, unavailable, but economists from Harper College once presented a paper arguing that Boone’s Docks did as much in trade as the Salt Wharf. Shortly thereafter, the paper was retracted, the author fired, and the Economics Department moved into a brand-new building with the fanciest bathrooms you can imagine; it was paid for by an anonymous donor.

No heavy machinery. That was the rule. You had to be able to carry it off your boat yourself, and not four big guys straining, either. Duffel bag was the sweet spot, plus one would expect a duffel bag in a nautical setting. Pardo Hectoralis tried using a hockey bag, but everyone yelled at him, “Why would you have a hockey bag on a boat?” and he struggled to come up with an answer. “Maybe my son’s on the team?” and everyone said, “Why would his hockey gear be on your speedboat?” and Pardo said, “Ballast?” and the whole bar threw cocktail napkins and olives at him until he agreed to use a duffel bag like everyone else. Appearances were important, the regulars at the Banyan Bar figured. There were people who could not be bribed out there. Powerful people. No one at the bar had ever met one of these people, but everyone was sure they were out there.

In the marsh grass, the off-billed santicos spread their wings in the sun and go ooWAHahee ooWAHahee. There are no waves here, protected from the ocean and her wine-dark temper, just a gentle lapping against the littorals that causes the cattails to sway and makes a sound like shlip shlip against the wood of the piers.

To the south were the breakers at the entrance to the harbor, and then the sea which went on forever until it ended in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Yokohama, in harbors just like this, those rare accidents of geography that went humanity’s way, and if the Segovian Hills couldn’t stop commerce, than neither could the Pacific Ocean; cargo ships and pleasure cruisers and boats with no manifest crawling with topless chicks, they all came floating into Little Aleppo, which is a neighborhood in America.