castirongoldfish

Vomit cascaded within the abalone bowl until settling in as ochre kaleidoscope skin, thick over the toilet water. Wedging himself, Joseph held, sweat pooling to the tip of his nose, and focused on the quickly retreating echo of the expansive bathroom. "C'monc'monc'mon" broken again by viscous spittle as he stared at surviving scraps of rejected egg. Eventually coughing gave way to silence.

It was a minute until he hauled himself, erect now, before the decrepit mirror, wiping away the past with fierce passings of his 59 cent comb. Squinting to bring his pale, blotchy reflection into focus, he saw clearly enough to determine that he looked like death, and tried his best to submerge his head in the undersized bar sink, producing what tomorrow morning would be an utterly mysterious faucet-sized lump on his forehead in the process.

Coming up for breath, allowing a moment of peace while the water dripped from his face and hair, dampening the shoulders of his well-wrinkled jacket (ha ha, wash and wear, some part of his brain snickered), he followed his gently reeling mind as it searched for the answer to life's most pressing question: "How the fuck did I end up here?" Unable to handle the full implications of the question without triggering another wave of nausea, aware that a weakness for Guinness and bar eggs, while surely a factor, couldn't completely explain his current state of disrepair, Joseph settled for trying to recall the events of the day.

Strange to realize that only this afternoon, stepping into blinding daylight from the subway station, he had first seen the very thin girl holding the very thin rose, plastic-wrapped, street-vendor purchased, thawed from some greenhouse freezer. She wore short, dark hair and long, dark coat. She seemed lost, standing still at the corner. But why would anyone buy a flower when they didn't know where they were going? He had shaken his head, brushing off the momentary impulse to approach her, see if she needed help. He was running late.

Later in the afternoon, practicing his 2:30 pm time-killing ritual, or what he optimistically thought of as "spam mining", Joseph scanned through his e-mail trash. He found many subject lines distressing. He feared that the dozen or so pleas to stop someone's pain - cheap - with images of small, colorful pills in shades of blue, purple, brilliant white, little letters stamped in the center, only hinted at the sheer scope of pain that must be spreading throughout the world, a constant presence, like the low hum of speakers, white noise. He could feel it - it made his teeth ache. And then, to heal other types of pain, the offers of sex in every form, or at least its representation. He would scroll to the bottom of these, looking for the baffling strings of nonsense words that seemed to hold a cryptic message: "admiral foistgoodman lone ahemairfare pervert doecrematory gopher relevantemanuel throwback haspcalliope arousal embracenotion great drizzlelimb abrogate breakwaterodorous philip ain'tnarcissism." What could it mean? Perhaps it was poetry, or the beginning of a story.

Admiral Foistgoodman - lone ahemairfare pervert, doecrematory gopher, relevantemanuel throwback - struggled to suppress haspcalliope arousal at the thought of embracenotion by the great drizzlelimb, all the while thinking, "abrogate breakwaterodorous Philip! ain'tnarcissism!" The Admiral sounded like a troubled man.

Ignoring creeping article deadlines, Joseph began a quick character sketch of old Ralph Foistgoodman. Late fifties, grey crew-cut, wandering eye... a slowly decaying man with a sagging tattoo, sagging wife, grown daughter. The rest of the day til nearly 6 was spent writing a quick and dirty short story to be submitted with equal hope to Playboy and the Atlantic. Whenever Joseph sold one of these stories, which was seldom, he vaguely pondered the implications of this type of plagiarism.

Slowly, digging his way through the past, Joseph managed to, bruised and wet, descend back into the present. A buzz, punctuated by clattering plates and steady scraping of violent cooking, rose up. He took one last deep breath, braced his eyes, and dove out the door.

The light was angrier than he expected, his head ripped open, leaving him to careen off a drunkard on his way toward, something. He expected he had a table here, somewhere between the neon lights and tinfoil glint of lobotomized dragons dancing above the counter. For a moment he was stuck in the ecstatic haze of the thrumming conversation and divine fluorescent light, but what little peace he had achieved was subsumed from by the rising bile brought on by Sellars, sitting by himself by the tall windows and backlit by cancerous neon light.

As he approached the seat, really there was no point any more trying to avoid these little serendipities, he looked at Sellars, sitting ramrod straight, not touching the back of the chair. Sellars tried, he really did, trying to get it right, but it was in the little things that he came out as what he was. Sighing, Joseph fell into the chair, rocking back precariously on two legs, until his form settled in an ambivalent incline. Looking over a haphazard pile of Chinese food and the pitiful tea candle flame, he wondered if Sellars had a first name. Probably not. Whatever the reason, it probably didn't matter.
"So. Were you here when I left?" Sellars looked at him, unblinking, with his hollow eyes, weighing the question with almost mocking severity. It had ceased bothering Joseph long ago, he did it with almost all the questions.

"I guess it really doesn't matter," sighed Joseph's shadowed companion, "but no, I got here as you were leaving to take care of a few things, I suppose. Good day at work I understand."

"Happens to the worst of us I suppose." Joseph smiled. Sellars did not. "Alright, it's the story. Isn't it?"

"Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?" Sellars didn't bother waiting for a response. "It's meant to hide in plain view. It's the point. What you've created is kabalistic, no good can come of this. These episodes are getting rather perilous."

"Episode, how very antiseptic. Hell, let's get this straight: you're worried about someone reading the articles in Playboy!"

The seething crowd let loose a lone girl, young, trying to look younger. Surprised by Joseph's sudden outburst, she quickly turned, and with an intoxicated stumble, her elbow passed through Sellars' throat. Save for a slight chill in her arm, she noticed nothing. Apparently neither did Sellars. Joseph, however, found himself dwelling on the pendulum swing of her retreating hips and sighed.

"She isn't doing it for you any more?" Sellars' question floated without mirth.

"She who? Rachael?" Joseph's head knotted and his stomach started grappling toward his tongue. Somewhere he had started eating the noodle and beef spew sitting in the plate before him. He had lost track of when. "No, not exactly. Haven't seen her in three months. Tends to be a barrier." He could feel the oil as he ate, and some perverse way, he began to enjoy the brinkmanship as he continued with the meal. "Hey, let's face it, I appreciate the mock attempts at charity, but neither of us give a shit. The only reason you're here is because I'm all you got left." Strained joviality had given over to words like gravel. "Cut the fucking horseshit."

Under the onslaught, Sellars had darkened, the outline of the chair and crowds behind him no longer visible. "Tell me at least you still have it."

With that Joseph lifted the right side of his coat with a deliberate laziness, just enough. From beneath, soft multicolored hues reflected off of his white shirt, dancing as if arriving late after a long ocean journey.

***

Stepping outside some hours later, Joseph let the door of the Cheerful Monkey Palace Six swing shut behind him with a surprisingly delicate jingle of Chinese bells. In the silence of the dark street Joseph felt for a moment born in reverse, leaving the world overfull of lights, smells, sounds, colorful and distracting visions, to sink into this warm after-rain dimness, drinking in the fog-thick air as if immersed in liquid. He had left Sellars behind at the table, confident that the man would eventually go wherever it was that he went, and also that the check would somehow be taken care of. Though he could never quite bring himself to ask Sellars how.

Just across the narrow street he could see the boardwalk, and beyond it the water, short choppy waves lit dull sliver in the haze of refracted harbor lights. The gentle slap of tide against the docks seemed deadened, hollow. Further beyond, water and sky met, unseen.

"Funny, I can remember when the water was a few blocks further out." Joseph snapped out of his own vague, slow-moving thoughts to realize this had come from an elderly gentleman in a tailored suit, who had been smoking silently next to the entryway, quite possibly forever. Thin and elegant curls of smoke rose though various shades of fluorescence from the Cheerful Monkey's animated sign just above, before becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding mist. The Monkey, grinning out into the night, tail moving back and forth, green, then yellow, then pink, seemed about to share a crude yet obscure joke.

"It wasn't that long ago. This city goes through so much effort to keep the water out, but the water always wins because it doesn't exert any effort at all. It just keeps finding the easiest path." A brief gesture with the cigarette took in the whole of the shoreline. "If you look closely right out there, at low tide, you can see the current changed by what's underneath. Foundations, sidewalks, rail tracks... Some people would even say that there are older cities beneath this one."

Joseph, head beginning to throb at a new and unpleasant rate, which he suspected matched the nearly visible oscillation of the fluorescent glow, gave his best attempt at politeness. "I'm sorry, but how long ago was this? I've lived in this city all my life, and I don't remember there ever being more blocks here."

"Oh, it was only a few years ago. Perhaps '44 or '45. Nobody remembers. Why would they? There was probably a place just like this on one of those blocks, and a newsstand like the one on the corner, and a tarot reader, and an alley where the prostitutes waited. Nothing unusual or different, just another set of city blocks."

The cigarette glow flared briefly, showing thin pursed lips, lined hands, reflecting off an old fashioned pair of steel-rimmed glasses. "Didn't you ever stop for coffee at the Tea Tree Cafe? On the corner of M and 15th? Or eat Armenian food at that place next door to it?" Joseph shook his head, confused. They were standing on K and 12th. M would have been...

The man had already gone on without waiting for an answer, as if talking to himself. "...built this part of the city where there was nothing but water. We built it out of concrete. But concrete is nothing but water and stone. And water returns to water. Stone returns to the earth. We can only hold things together for so long. You can feel it happening even now if you hold still."

"Feel what?" Joseph found himself lowering his voice, holding his breath.

"Entropy."

“Entropy?”

“Entropy.” By the second echoing of the word, the word tasted different, deep now, ancient in its timbre. Heavy, he looked out upon the waves, loosing the peripheral vision to encroaching blackness. Each ripple shoved itself upon the shore, sacrificing itself upon a short, shorn field of albino sand. In its wake he could see the sprouting bubbles, leaving micro-craters behind in potmarked imperfection. The wave struck again, smoothed out the grains, but in its descent left fertile ground for the quavering eruptions of air and pitiful avalanches of sand, chasing after the retreating water. And so it had gone, without architect or plan, until the sand finally succumbed or the waves gave up.

And so it would go.

A burst of flared in the darkness as Joseph absentmindedly lit a cigarette, he forgot which brand. It smoked lazily for a long slow minute until, realizing the rudeness, he offered the crumpled package to the old man. The old man’s moist eyes didn’t leave the horizon.

“So…what, it sunk?” Joseph savored the image of submerged city blocks, empty, quiet. No car horns, no pedestrian vitriol, no dueling cabbies. It didn’t seem such a bad fate.

“No. It’s not always that easy. It didn’t go anywhere. It takes time

Joseph woke to seagulls caterwauling around him. The shock brought his eyes open, his first mistake of the new day. The horizon was fat and pregnant with the sun, the viscous redness stuck like tar against where the sky and sea met. That first blastfurnace sight, snapped whatever remaining hope of sleep was left in him, and averting his eyes, he proceeded to gather his collection of crinks and cramps that were his muscles into some gait away from the beach. As left the beach to the sea pigeons and their catfights over crustacean carrion, he unearthed two realizations. He was some six, seven miles from home. And he had no idea where his car was.

Bereft of any money, he bore the first half of the journey in a quiet attempt to catch up to sleep through his paces. When that failed, he tried to let his mind wander over a monotony of cement squares that constructed, in the manner of the earth’s silliest jigsaw puzzle, the city. He failed, caught instead in the cracked, the missing, the patched, the stained, and the sprouting nature peeking through.

With unsettled mind he arrived at Mama Priyaveda’s, a basement diner still some three miles from home. Crowds were waking up, herded by cars and subways on their cattledrives to work, and it was safer to wait it out here than hazard that much humanity. Mama Priyaveda herself was working this morning, she always was, and the crowd was thin, as it always was. Mama P wasn’t that much older than himself, and, as far as he could tell from their occasional conversations, not a mother either, but he knew he could come here, even if it was a half mile out of his way and get shelter. It hadn’t been that long since his real work found him in her basement, and while he had been too late for the street kids he found there, Mama P hadn’t forgotten.

By now she could recognize the signs, and came quickly, leaving two cups of coffee (one to shoot, one to savor), a fiery omelet on a pita, and, of course, as in every diner on earth: hash browns. But most importantly she brought him space. Stolen newspapers from an abandoned stall were thrown open and finding the crosswords in each, he intertwined them on the blank placesetting. He carved letter after letter into each space, fully immersed in his zen word duel.

Following number seven, puzzle two, up, eight letter word for process method to turn oil into gasoline (“cracking”) and number twelve, puzzle three, right, four letter word, were it to smell so sweet (“rose”), Joseph was stuck on number 22, puzzle one, left, eleven letter word for chance kismet, when Mama P, looking over his shoulder as she gave him the fourth refill on each, gasped a little laugh.

“Serendipity! You know, usually there’s no bother trying to help you. You must be exhausted…what were you doing last night.” Mama P spoke quickly and playfully, but with Joseph she dropped the fake accent. She smiled, for more than the little trivial success as Joseph smiled solemnly at her and added in her donation to the word dance.

***

His car was where he left it, in all the glory a Chevy Nova could muster, right out side his apartment. He kicked it for it’s Benedict Arnold ways on two different tires, for good measure. He didn’t dare kick it anywhere else.

Fixated as he was to the thought of his own bed, though, to be fair, he doubted he would bother to use it, he almost missed the teenager watching him, crouched low behind a stump. As he looked over at him, the teenager, fearing that he’d been seen dived into the stump, eyes flashing feline yellow as he turned away.

Joseph sighed as he walked back to his car. Normally he wouldn’t bother, but this one was too close. It had been nice, this little crossroads within a block of home. He’d used it too. Twice, just to get away from himself. It was twice, wasn’t it? The plastic gasoline jug was heavy, the weight dancing in his hand has its contents threw themselves against the sides of the container, as if eager to get out. He took his time, walking over to where the stump, vibrant with life in browns and grays, had set its mass waist high against the tenement. It formed half an arch there, enclosed in a few audacious ferns, and through it lay, well, he’d rather not think about, looking at his burden.

Gasoline is a funny thing. Touch it, no matter what the temperature, and it’s cold. Look at it, it’s clear. Watch it evaporate, and it twists reality behind it. And, of course, spark it, and it rages. So innocuous, so dangerous, some poetic element of Joseph felt kinship to the gouts he poured over the entrance. He made sure to hit it all, every mushroom, every slug, every inch of moss and wood. Stepping back, he slowly drew the match across, three times until it lit and guttered dead before it touched. Minutes passed as he stood there looking at it. The second match was not as casual, though he didn’t remember lighting it, and the doorway blossomed into flame.

He could watch the immolation until it was done. He usually did, that’s how he picked up smoking. Today though, no, he shook his head slowly as he turned to walk up to his apartment and call the fire department, let them know what some damned fool had done outside his home.

Of course, if the interloper was experienced with the waywalking, this would be little more than an inconvenience. It would be easy enough to find another route in the Behind and not get trapped in the winding paths.

If he was experienced.

Upstairs he hung his white shirt up to air, curry and coffee intertwined obscenely on its collar. The computer was booted, its 486 engine roaring, as he prepared to go online. Thoughts of work crossed his mind, subdued by a cup of recycled coffee.

The cigarette pack was gone before the hour was, and Joseph let loose his full might on his mailbox with arachnine fury. He sorted through the several hundred emails since last night, picking out the junkmail for discount adult diapers and twisted S&M chat partners who promised true carnal love as soon as they got your name and/or money and proceeded to send their advertisements to each other. Financial planners received offers for holistic Viagra in response of a promise to “make your assets grow”, job recruiters given invites to pyramid schemes, and a stray PTA invite was countered by a invite to watch “barely” eighteen-year olds being cradle robbed in Oedipal orgies. That’ll teach them. Junk mailers were junk mailed for everything, but Joseph had a knack for finding the owner’s real work emails and hit them with gusto, spreading the offers to the corners of the world. Joseph made up dozens of emails at complete random, and sent off packets of junkmail. Never did they come back undeliverable. It was a cyclone of digital fury, and by lunch he was spent, sitting in his one chair, rolling around on stained glass hardwood in a collapsing orbit.

***

The boy was in the dark again. Gasping, shaking, reeking of gasoline, he stumbled down yet another short flight of stairs only to find steps going up again as soon as he reached the bottom. He moved through these narrow corridors with arms stretched out to either side, running his fingers along the damp and often slimy stone walls, searching for intersections.

He was not good at this. Yet, he kept telling himself. Not good at this yet. But getting better. Just relax and breathe. He was still learning, changing. He had called himself Lupus for a few years but grown tired of explaining that no, he didn’t mean the disease. Lately he tried to avoid calling himself anything.

In this absolute blackness he forgot whether his eyes were open or closed and almost raised a dirty hand to his face to check. Don’t. He could never tell if these pathways were in his mind or in real life, or even what the difference was. One thing was certain – he had never met another being here. And right now, alone as he felt, he wasn’t sure he would want to. He could feel his heart in his ears.

Without anyone to explain, he had formed his own fragile theories about how this world worked. It was like what happens in a dream, when you realize you’re dreaming. You have to be very careful not to let on that you know. You have to move slowly, relaxed, with a quiet mind if you want to keep dreaming. Or, it was like watching the sky, out in the dark fields with his father, ages ago. You can see some double star systems with just your eyes, but the trick is to look a little to one side of the point of light. Then, two stars will emerge, seem to pull away from one another. Your eyes will ache to look directly, but don’t do it – they’ll go back into hiding, blurred to a single point again.

With these superstitions in mind he kept moving, trying to remain relaxed, indifferent. But he could taste blood, and the images that flashed before him came with feral, incoherent emotions. Blinding glare of sun on snow. A hare, running, swerving side to side, eyes showing white. Big brown dog, lanky but fast, kicking up snow behind, mouth hanging open, breath steaming, panting hard. Yellow teeth. Impact. Blood. A wordless shout, a gunshot.

The boy froze. The sound was ringing in his ears, but he wasn’t sure he had really heard anything. He was shivering, and he thought he could smell snow. And under his left hand, the wall was gone. A branch in the path.

***

Joseph woke with a start to realize he had nearly fallen out of his chair. Time to get some real sleep. He not so much crawled as fell into bed with most of his clothes on and immediately had one of those dreams. He was really starting to hate those dreams.

***

In this variation, the Internet was a huge, dimly lit warehouse filled with row upon row of tall metal shelves. They faded into the shadows without visible end. Each shelf was filled with objects. Metal, glass, wood, plastic, fur. Shiny new. Cracking, rusting, covered with mold. Familiar, disturbing and strange. Joseph somehow knew his role here was as vehicle – that he must move objects from one shelf to another, sometimes carrying them across a mile of maze-like rows to their destinations. He felt an unspoken pressure of time, and was also aware of being observed.

Awake, he would not have been able to say how he knew where to move these objects, what should be paired with what, or which things should be separated. But within the dream there was a pattern, a flow, a balance. The mechanical pencil sharpener was brought near the spool of copper wire. The ornate feathered ladies’ hat was brought near the box of glow-in-the-dark condoms. The dime store watch was moved as far as possible from the “drinking bird” toy. He worked fast, but never fast enough. What would happen if he failed, and why was he alone here at this infinite task?

This dream, as always, he felt time running out. He could only transport one more object – futile, perhaps, but better to keep trying than to admit defeat, curl up on the cold warehouse floor and wait for… what? He pushed the thought away and reached out to pick up the last object. And stopped. A simple red rose, barely open, wrapped in green florist’s plastic. Wait… Something itched the back of his mind. He felt a presence behind him and spun around, terrified, tripping backward into the shelf now behind him. For an instant the idea of the domino effect he had just triggered panicked him. He could hear shelf after shelf falling with a deafening metal echo, objects scattering to the concrete. Then he was awake, sitting up in bed, gasping, wrestling with the damp sheets binding his body.

It wasn’t until twenty minutes later, after a blissful shower, followed by the first beer of the day, that Joseph clearly remembered how the dream had ended this time. A rose? He shuffled through the breakfast-stained crosswords of the morning and found the clue. Four letter word, were it to smell so sweet: “rose”. And that girl downtown yesterday, what felt like weeks ago. He searched back for why he had noticed her, among the sea of anonymous faces and endless variety, but found no answers. Thin, neither short nor tall, plain brown hair. Standard business dress from what he could recall, nothing striking. Not especially “his type”, though he couldn’t honestly say what that was anymore. What color were her eyes? He couldn’t remember but felt fairly sure they were some ordinary color. Brown, blue… And yet something had caught his attention, and not just the flower she was holding, though that had been odd.

Finishing the beer and shaking his head, he put the question aside for now to gnaw quietly at a corner of his mind. If he could just figure out what day it was, he’d be able to decide whether he needed to go to work.

***

Mama P. was wiping down the little counter of her now empty diner, humming aimless snatches of broadway show tunes as she worked. It had been a fairly good day for business, with a thin but steady stream of customers through breakfast and well into lunch. She should have some peace between 3 and 5 pm to get ready for the dinner crowds.

She must have been lost in thought, her mind busy with inventory and recipes as she cleaned, because when she noticed the elderly gentleman seated at the end stool she actually jumped, letting out a little oh! of surprise.

“I am ever so sorry, sir. I was so concentrating on my cleaning, I was not noticing when you arrived. What would be your pleasure? Coffee? Tea?” Her hands never stopped moving during this quickly spoken greeting, tossing her rag in the bin beneath the counter, bringing out a fresh place-setting, clean cup, saucer and spoon.

“Tea, if you would. Thank you. I don’t suppose you have any chai?” His words were deliberate, as if chosen one at a time, spoken with perfect diction and a complete lack of accent.

“Ah! Honored would I be to serve you my own homemade chai. It is a family recipe, and I make it fresh always, so it will take me but a few minutes to prepare.” Mama P. turned and hurried into the kitchen. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what was making her nervous.

When she came back to the counter with the steaming, fragrant pot of chai, the gentleman was sitting with head bowed, meticulously cleaning his glasses with a green silk handkerchief. At her return, he tucked the handkerchief back into an inner pocket of his jacket and settled the glasses back on the bridge of his nose. Mama poured the chai, blinking, thinking the spices had blurred her vision.

Mama P. always made a point of truly looking at her customers – she liked having regulars, and besides, you never knew when remembering a face would be important. But this man… she couldn’t quite see his eyes. Perhaps a trick of the light? She glanced up at the hanging lamps. His glasses seemed to have an unusual reflective property, but she had seen them in his hands – they had certainly looked like ordinary lenses.

The gentleman seemed to be enjoying his chai, and for the moment didn’t need anything else. Mama gratefully moved away, returning to her afternoon chores while keeping a quiet eye on her customer. Ten minutes or more passed in silence. Finishing his drink, the gentleman cleared his throat.

“I wonder if you could tell me – did you have a particular customer early this morning? A fairly young man, dark hair, tall? A bit thoughtful looking? He would have been wearing a grey jacket and a white shirt. He and his clothing would have perhaps been a little worse for wear?” What little Mama knew about Joseph set alarm bells off in her mind.

“I see many, many customers, sir. Quite a few of them are looking worse for the wear. I’m certainly not sure I know who you are asking about!”

The gentleman sighed. “Very well.” Rising, he left a bill on the counter without asking for a check. “Thank you for the chai. The addition of anise to the spice mixture is a fascinating choice.” He stopped to take in the whole of the little place with a slow look.

“I have to assume you do know the man I seek.” He cut her protest off with a small gesture. “Please, there’s no need for further discussion. I only ask a favor. If you do happen to see this man again, simply give him this.” He placed a small glass object, suddenly in his hand, on the counter.

Mama couldn’t suppress a gasp of awe. “It’s lovely!” It was a small crystal snow globe, simple in design, but more an object of art than an ordinary tourist trinket. The fine snowflakes sparkled gently, now falling back to the surface of a beach scene complete with sand, ocean and seagulls. The “ocean” was made of a viscous fluid of the clearest tropical blue, some sort of liquid that tended when separated to return gradually to itself. The effect of sand and ocean settling after being shaken was surprisingly wave-like.

Realizing she had been gazing fascinated for quite a few minutes, Mama P. looked up with a question on her lips. But the elderly gentleman was gone. He had finished the entire pot of chai, she noticed with satisfaction. And he’d left a fifty. Shaking her head in wonder, she couldn’t resist turning the snow globe once more. Then she put it safely beneath the counter. What could this mean?

***

Joseph meant to go to work. When he stepped out his door with the sun high and oppressively lording over the sky from its distance, it was with the intent of ending up within the cattlepens of labor. The cubicle farm had a Cheers-ic effect, at least there someone knew his name. At least, he thought they knew his name. Walking along the endless cement walkway, tapping each parking meter as he ambled, he tried to remember the last time that someone had actually called him by name.

He failed.

His travels brought him through many distantly familiar locales, and, with each of these steps, the echoes appeared.

On 4th and L, it was six sailors, on shore leave in their whites, drunk on acohol and geography. Hungry for the company of culture, namely the culture of women, Joseph left them with directions to the Convent of St. Therese, though in their oblivion, the band wandered off in a cloud of braggadocio and bravo.

On 6th and M there was a store, where, as a dozen times before, he pulled a random bill out of his pocket, deposited it on the counter, and, as a dozen times before, asked to be surprised. It was Manschwetiz. He was surprised.

On 7th and N, after buying three newspapers at random (the price of the newspaper does not the quality of the crossword make), he stopped flipping to the comics long enough to notice the cars. Watching, he saw, in automotive patterns, a Morse code R-O-S-E repeat four times, and not for the first time, long fingers of concern burrowed into him.

Before he even reached 9th and N, laden by his papers, he could feel the throb of plastic bucket drums and frying pan cymbals. The pair, hunched and riding each beat and blast, working in enviable tandem, smiled at no one but the music. Across the street, an elderly women challenged them occasionally with fiddle music from her frayed cassette player, and somewhere along the meridian, where the music met, where Joseph found himself walking, it made music. Not good music, but city music: raucous, violent, and wholly without order.

And on 11th and O, Rachel died.

Not today. But three months didn’t make the pain any cheaper. The agony any easier.

Twenty-one steps. Here, seven stories, up, she took twenty-one steps, and again he walked each one. There were no prints, there was no residue, but he could close his eyes, in fact, he did close his eyes on occasion, and he would follow each step in the precision of grave guardians.

At this moment, he was reminded that, comforted in the fact that the graves of heroes were as cold as the graves of the nameless.

He had to find comfort somewhere.

He’d met her in therapy. His therapy. She’d spoken often about how wrong it was, how perverse the relationship was. Usually when she was against the wall, feet in the air, moaning. He smiled at the thought, sweet memories mixing with the sweet, now half empty bottle of wine. Their sessions had taken on a perversion of the usual ritual, he became a safe place for her, solace of sorts.

She’d looked at him, that makeup she war out of desperation to hide her late twenties smeared by tears, a mass of color under tight, black curls that caught his fingers as he tried to romance in the fashion of the silver-age movies she loved so much. She looked at him, and he beheld hopelessness.

It was a long moment, there. Their eyes met, and nothing else, across the distance. He remembered the heat, oddly out of place, and remembered stepping toward her.

And he remembered counting twenty-one steps as he chased her.

Twenty-one steps until she reached the lip. That twenty-first step that brought her leaping, those silly heels hitting the brick embankment. Then seven stories, seven stories he watched, unable to tear himself away.

In one corner rainbow shards of a dozen glass bottles he had cast sprawled haphazardly. Once, when lying down, rather, when the imbibing laid him down, he had read her name in the jagged edges. That had stopped him from throwing the bottles in the corner for maybe a week.