RAW YOUTH

Chapter One

2008-01-08T14:45:00.000-08:00

I was born dead, dead and dying as I fell from the sack of the womb dripping filth.

The doctor put me down and tried to kill me but my mother stopped him, reaching up from the stirrups and clawing at the doctor’s face as he held the anesthesia mask over my mouth. Whatever red madness possessed him was gone in a moment and his rage subsided. I was alive.

When I was three I was gripped by a terrible fever, pulled across the world and near to death’s door by an incipient grief of future tragedies. I lay at my mother’s side for four days while my eyes remained cold and hot, focused on phantoms that lay beyond my years. After I awoke from this delirium my mother would forever regard me as a stranger.

I was in the living room when the towers fell. I remember seeing the smoke and ashes, thinking to myself that nothing would ever be the same again. Somehow I knew in my heart that what was happening across the world was just a taste, just a foreshadowing of something big and dangerous, something that would rise up and destroy us all. I wanted to know, I wanted to understand what it was, I needed to know that it wasn’t just me, that it wasn’t my fault. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to satisfy myself on this point. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite comfortable with myself since.

My mother came up behind me and together we watched the footage on the television screen as it unfolded. The TV was on mute and the only sound we heard was the dog barking outside. She set her hand on my shoulder and for a moment we were apart, together.

Chapter Two

2008-01-08T14:44:00.004-08:00

As a child I remember running. It seemed as if the terrain was made of sticky taffy and every movement was caught on the trees or the streets or the grass. I couldn’t move without trapping myself, suffocating at the heart of the world.

I ran through the fields and valleys of an idyllic childhood, pages flipped across the lens of my memory. I can’t see the details because the edges are blurry and the light is soft and bleeds through the cracks, but I was young and alive.

There were abandoned industrial pipes set down in a lot near our home. I pushed through the long tubes like a worm, struggling and straining to reach the light. There was fear, naked crazy fear and a nascent claustrophobia. There were no words for these things in my mind but I had known dread long before I understood restraint.

The mountain vales were green and the waters that trickled across the rounded algae-green rocks were quiet and peaceful. It was a simple and unaffected childhood in many respects, marked only by my clean determination to learn and to understand, a determination that marked me beyond my years.

But aside from these scattered scenes of idyllic youth, the dominant note sounding through my childhood was panic, a sheer and vertiginous lust for stability and control that belied my age. Ever since the fever had taken me at such an early date I had been unable to dream. As I slept I drowned in sweat, soaking my sheets, starting bolt upright and sober as the clock struck three throughout an empty house. There was, from very early in my perceptions, an acknowledgment that something was wrong with me. Something was missing and I had no idea what it was.

So I reached further into solitude and parsed my own way through the mysteries of existence. The primal fears were unassailable, but I could at least try to come to grips with the daily agonies. The spectral images of my fever had been seared onto my brain, and I had to be ready in case they ever returned.

After graduating college I returned home and resumed tenancy under my mother’s roof. It was time for the wedding preparations to begin.

My wedding to Connie had been in the stages of perpetual planning for years, since before college. I entered into the theoretical compact with great trepidation and an inhuman dread. I had simply erred on the side of caution, unwilling to hurt Constance and, as a result, unable to make my feelings known at any juncture.

So we had left for college and placed the matter on the back burner. It made perfect sense to imagine that in the course of four years the engagement would be forgotten and nullified by the passage of time. How often do these things last? What are the statistics?

Of course I lacked the strength of convictions necessary to break the engagement myself. Constance dutifully sent letters on a weekly basis, letters I rarely read. Constance visited my school and made the acquaintance of my friends and peers – they all commented on how lucky I was to have found such a beautiful and intelligent companion.

I couldn’t tell them, of course, how much I truly loathed her - and how much I loathe her still, if the truth be told. My animosity had been precipitated by nothing specific she had ever done or not done, but simply by virtue of her copious virtuosity. She was very beautiful - intelligent and compassionate. She thought I was joking when I told her how much I wanted to kill her, to do anything necessary to take her out of my life and absolve myself of this persistent responsibility. She would laugh and giggle and hug me, pulling me closer to her in the bed.

So I took to walking the campus in the middle of the night, navigating by the light of the moon. Sometimes I carried an air rifle under my coat. There were a lot of rats in the neighborhood of the college and I enjoyed trying to kill them – but, in my defense I will also say that I was a horrible shot and they usually got away.

One night as I was stalking through the darkness on the periphery of the Life Sciences building I overheard a whispered conversation around the corner of a concrete abutment. There were two figures standing in the shadows across the stairway.

The first of the shadows was taller and seemed to be angry at the second shadow. They were arguing and were having a hard time keeping their voices down – words echoed swiftly through the crannies of the hollow concrete architecture.

“Jean’s got these,” were the first words I heard from the taller shadow.

“I don’t care what Jean has, Axel asked for these,” the second retorted.

“Jean’s got these,” the first shadow repeated. “And you don’t seem to understand that Jean doesn’t want any more of these. Jean is very unhappy with these.”

“Yeah, well, you tell Jean its not my fault, she needs to talk to Axel – or better yet, tell her to talk to Carter and see how she handles that.”

The first man stiffened visibly. I could see how angry he was even from the safe distance of my dark corner.

“Jean is not going to talk to Carter. Ever. You’d be good to think twice before you speak like that. You could get yourself killed.”

“Shut up,” the second shadow said. “You just shut the fuck up, no one's gonna get killed.”

“Wait a minute,” the first shadow stopped and put his hand on the second shadows arm to still him. “I think I heard something.”

“What? Where?”

I froze in my tracks and tried my level best to turn invisible. I had no idea what was happening but I knew that I wanted no part of it.

There was a moment of tension before I saw what happened next. A policeman stepped from the fog on the opposite end of the square and started yelling at the two shadows standing in front of the Life Sciences building. They turned their heads and in that moment I saw disgust, fear and anger on both of their obscured faces. The cop was already climbing the stairs towards the two men by the time they reached into their coats and pulled out two large handguns. They were firing their weapons at the officer before I had a chance to register what was happening – I saw the policeman fall as the two men fled into the night.

I fled too. I had no idea what had just happened and I had no intention of finding out. However, it was not to be. The night failed to swallow me as assiduously as I had wished. There were sirens and lights everywhere across the campus and I hadn't made it home before the police spotted me skulking through the underbrush.

“What are you doing, boy?” the policeman called out to me.

“Nothing, sir, just going home.”

“What the hell are you doing out here at this time of night?”

“Nothing, sir, as I said.”

The cop grunted. “Put your hands on the wall,” he said. I did so and he began to pat me down.

“What’s this?” he said after a moment. He reached into my coat and found my air rifle. “What the hell is this, boy?”

“Its an air rifle, sir.”

“Well, so it is . . .” the cop replied, surprised. He fingered the bolt and a handful of BB’s fell out of the gun and onto the ground below, landing with a dry metal crack. “I’m not even going to ask why the hell you had this on you at this time of night.”

The cop pulled my hands down from the wall and slapped handcuffs around my wrists. They were tight and sharp and I began to feel very claustrophobic. He opened the back door of his cruiser and pushed me inside. He threw my gun on the passenger seat and sat down behind the steering wheel.

There was someone in the back of the cruiser with me. I turned and saw a dark-haired boy, probably my age or a little younger, slumped over unconscious with a little bit of vomit on his shirt. He came awake with a jerk and opened his eyes wide to see me.

“Duuuuuude . . .” he began, slowly and cautiously. A stupid grin spread across his blotched face.

The policeman was quietly talking to his dispatcher on the radio. It occurred to me that I had seen my new companion somewhere before in my life.

“Duuuuuude,” he repeated, more forcefully now.

“Do I know you?” I finally asked. It was really beginning to bug me.

“Shut up,” the cop said from the front seat. I gave the officer a mildly forlorn look before we settled into our seats, him again blissfully unconscious and myself deliriously unperturbed. I had been through worse in my day, it was merely a matter of not letting the walls get to me.

And so it then occurred to me with the help of my inebriated companion that my generation lacks any sense of purpose or destiny. For the first time in forever the sense of history had been lost. History was in the past, a finite process that had somehow stopped completely in the last decade or so. Everything, or so the assumption went, was going to continue pretty much exactly as it has been for the rest of our natural lives with no real noticeable alterations in the fabric.

So when the towers fell there was a long fugue, a state of shock that gradually melted into brittle denial.

And I wonder just how much suffering the average person experiences in the course of their lifetime. Has my drunken friend ever had to experience the death of a sibling or a parent, madness or imprisonment, been the victim of a violent crime or a horrible life-threatening illness? I don’t know. Somehow as much as I would like to tell myself otherwise I can’t seem to decide whether or not that would impart any deeper meaning to the act of being piss-sloppy drunk.

I’ve been young and it feels like I’ve been old but at the moment I’m riding in the back of the police cruiser with my drunken friend and the surly cop I feel of a strangely indeterminate age, as if the future and the past had failed to crystallize in that one magic moment, leaving me adrift and alone on the shores of an eternal opaque now. I wished with a sudden and painful wistfulness that I had remembered to bring a blotter of acid with me.

When we reached the police station my friend and I were led through the most intimate corridors of the building until reaching the jail. Our pockets had been emptied and our photos taken and our names recorded and we were ready to be forgotten until the proper authorities could be notified as to the nature of our heinous crimes. I gave my name as Randall McMurphy, and my drunken friend slurred something incoherent from between his foaming lips. Undoubtedly he would have given them his actual name if he had had the wherewithal to form syllables.

But I was Randall McMurphy, at least in my mind, for the duration of the stay. I had developed the habit of hiding my real identification whenever I left my dorm or, later on, my apartment, on the principle of protecting my anonymity in the event of sudden and violent death.

My drunken companion stumbled the three feet to the hard bunk and passed out immediately. He was in rough shape and looked as if he was going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning. Periodically he moaned or mumbled something, which would be just barely audible out of the corner of my ear. He was tormented by something, conscious of blind assailants chasing him through his stupor.

To my surprise we shared the cell with the two shadowy figures with whom I had earlier made my hidden acquaintance. In the harsh medicinal glare of the halogen bulb they were immediately recognizable by the shapes of their bodies and the language of their posture, but they seemed strangely shrunken, as if the obfuscating fog of darkness had previously endowed them with a terrible authority that broad daylight - or a reasonable facsimile thereof - could never hope to match.

But they were punks. Punk kids - older than me, but kids nonetheless - with frayed leather jackets, and who looked in over their heads. They looked dreadfully, deeply afraid, morbidly distraught. Possibly high.

The cell was small and dry. There was a slight draft whistling down the hallway,
just enough of a breeze to chill the room. There were no shadows.

The bed where my inebriated companion had settled to sleep was little more than a metal plank jutting from a concrete wall. We weren’t trusted with bedrolls or pillows, apparently – which made sense, I suppose. Certainly the drunk kid barely noticed.

There’s a dream where I’m falling down a dark hole for an indefinite period of time. The air is hot and fetid and damp. I reach out to touch the walls but all I feel is something wet that gives but slightly to my touch – something like a lung or a chest cavity pulled inside-out.

I’m falling through the dark and I can smell something deep and old, something that was born before the stars were lit and something that makes my sleeping body recoil in horror.

Eventually I reach the ground. I don’t hit the ground with a great impact, somehow I merely touch the ground and begin to walk, to explore whatever strange underworld in which I’ve found myself. I’m in a cave and I can see the walls vaguely flickering like the vestigial memory of a flickering pre-digital nickelodeon. I continue walking for what seems like forever, with surging flotsam around my feet, my body borne along by strange faint breezes from further down the tunnels.

I’m lost and I can’t seem to see anything but the ground immediately in front of me. Its dark and the waters are rising and I am slowly aware of noises, loud and tremendous, filling the air and echoing through the living corridors of the maze.

Sometimes when I’m lying in the hazy netherworld between sleeping and awakening I imagine that I’m going to be wandering through hell for the rest of my life. I’m choking on shit and I try to move my arms to grasp at the walls but I’m asleep and I can’t move, I’m paralyzed and my limbs only respond in sharp imprecise jerks.

We were in the cell for the better part of an hour before the violence began.

Chapter Three

2008-01-08T14:44:00.003-08:00

When I was twelve I spent a month in a mental hospital. I try not to remember much about what actually happened during that month – lots of jigsaw puzzles and television. We were forced to participate in long nature walks through the surrounding wilderness. There was also therapy and there were tests but mostly, in between torture sessions, I remember being very, very bored.

I learned very quickly not to talk about those things I feared. People think you’re crazy when you start talking about red walls and purple nightmares – its best to avoid such discussions altogether.

It was an old building, I remember that, a very nice institution set on a sloping green estate in a quiet rural town many miles from the city. There was well-maintained but rarely-used playground equipment in the building's front yard. Only the windows betrayed the building’s deeper motives: dark and furtive, laced throughout with metal wire to prevent them from shattering when crazy people tried to break them with chairs - which they would try to do in order to escape the intense pain of "treatment".

When my mother sent me to the hospital I think she was relieved. It’s not hard to see why. Ever since I had been three she had been afraid of me, casting suspicious glances in my direction every so often as she became increasingly convinced that not only could I see more than she could, but that I saw things which would forever be invisible to her. I also saw things inside her of which she was ignorant.

The painful outbursts decreased in frequency as I grew older. Partly this was due to the growing realization that I had to normalize my behavior to survive unmolested in the mainstream, and partly this was due to the fact that I grew inured to the chaotic and daily betrayal of my five senses. The event that precipitated my first and final institutionalization was my last major episode before puberty, as well as the last major episode I had the weakness to share with the world outside my mind. Also, it should be noted that the medication I was given succeeded in preventing these outbursts as well, but not without extracting a cost.

(I can only imagine the relief my mother felt as I left for college. In the space of eighteen years she had traversed an emotional gamut the likes of which I could never hope to understand – from maternal affection to cold disdain to naked betrayal. For much of my youth she regarded me as a coiled snake held close to her bosom, and she would probably have had more consideration for the snake.

But eventually she softened. Trauma and anguish change a person. I would never say she warmed to me, but perhaps she grew accustomed to the idea that I was eventually going to leave. This allowed her the luxury of feebly attempting to recreate the sensations of her initial maternal affections. I appreciated the attempt, even if I knew it to be specious.)

The walls of the hospital were made of gray bricks, stacked one on top of the other and whitewashed over throughout the long subterranean hallways of facility. The dormitories were made to appear warm and welcoming, with friendly colors on the walls and picture books on the tables, but the hospital was still as uninviting an institution as could be imagined. I remember the gray-white walls and the blue metal doors that swung shut behind the orderlies and doctors with loud swooping thuds. It was harsh and loud because there was so little atmosphere, it seemed as if we were eight miles high and the air was thin and brittle, but we were really underground, deep beneath the surface of the earth.

To my disdain I would later discover that the hallways in my college dormitory were whitewashed gray-brick as well. Only, the atmosphere at school was as far removed from that of a hospital as could be conceived: the air was heavy and jellied, caked around the doors and windows. It was not a new building and the rot and mildew of previous tenants hung in the air like meat on a hook.

Of course it goes without saying that I despised my collegiate peers. Once you’ve been in the mental hospital and seen the clouds melting around your mother’s face you learn the lesson that life is a painful bitter and redundant struggle. You work hard and your soul becomes callused. You fight and you fight against the prevailing winds to gain a footing on what you have no choice but to call your own "achievement".

But you’re surrounded by privilege and affectation. Everywhere around you are reminders of just how callow and disproportionate the world your peers inhabit actually is. Had any of them been in the mental hospital? Did they understand what true, profound privation and suffering were? I doubted it.

There’s a world that I will never inhabit. The inhabitants of this world believe that art and literature are fashion accessories, and that having fine prints from the Met on your wall and Pablo Neruda on your shelf somehow absolves you of having to struggle. Well, art is powerful for exactly the reasons that these people will never understand.

It’s powerful because it can destroy as easily as it can create. It’s harder and harder to appreciate beauty the deeper you explore misery. That’s why its so important, so vitally intrinsically important that people have their conceptions of beauty and truth, so that we can somehow manage to keep living even when we’re seeing three thousand people die on the television in our living room in real time.

If you don’t understand this, if you’ve never suffered, how can you claim any appreciation of beauty? It’s callow and selfish and delusional to pretend at depths you cannot fathom.

So I spent a great deal of time in college sitting behind the dorms near the garbage dumpster and chain smoking. I would sit against the fence and read my books in the shadows of the streetlight and pull my jacket closer to my skin because it was getting chilly outside but I didn’t’ want to go inside because they would all be sitting around playing video games and listening to MTV. It seems petty, doesn’t it? But I don’t want to have to pretend I care, that would just be needlessly unpleasant for all concerned.

I’m already a loner with a reputation for sullen disrespect. My mother calls every few days and we actually have long meaningful conversations. Perhaps she misses me – if for no other reason than that I was the closest thing in her life to a constant? The closest thing in her life to an actual living breathing confidant, based on the fact that even if we didn’t like each other we still had a shared background of distrust and codependence?

She missed my father, I could tell. When she had been thinking about my father I would come home late in the day after high school classes and find her sitting in the kitchen in front of a cold cup of coffee and staring at a half-finished crossword puzzle or possibly a romance potboiler that she had placed before her and simply forgot. She had loved my father and she regarded me strangely as her only link to him, a mystifying mixture of keepsake and indictment. He was gone, she was still here, I was still here with her, why was this so?

In the habits and attitudes of those who come into money late in life, I have come to recognize a certain mortified stiffness of demeanor, a pallid rigidity that reflects an inherent uncertainty. My mother was never comfortable in her own skin after the day she became a millionaire. Her mind, the body which imprisoned that mind and the world around that body became perfect strangers, reflecting only distrust and anxiety. There is a constant fear that the sky will open and God will descend to Earth flanked by a chorus of angels in order to explain in very reassuring yet firm tones that the money was a mistake and he’s going to take it all back.

So the money became a burden. If the wealth had been intended to ease the suffering my father’s passing had left, it was a total failure. My mother would have been happy to be poor in his presence – now that she was rich in his absence she felt shame.

Of course, all of these things appeared in my thoughts in the duration of a mere instant as I sat uncomfortably in that dry and stuffy cell, with my inebriated friend for company and those two anonymous criminals with whom my fate had become temporarily and inexplicably tied. It had been a busy night for the campus police. There were drunken and disorderly frat brothers and sexually assaulted coeds running everywhere, it seemed, and the cops were just too busy to actually do anything about any of it.

As we had been booked there was a girl in the front of the station begging and crying and screaming for help, claiming she had been raped and that a group of boys at one of the fraternities had ganged up on her when she was drunk. She had been wearing the remains of a nice outfit, a short plaid skirt and a white blouse that she had sweat right through. She had been drinking and was still somewhat drunk but there was a fevered hint of sobriety at the edges of her voice, a hysterical glint in her words that betrayed a deep and portentous suffering. Of course, she was ignored.

So the ceiling is low and the lights are flickering. It’s late at night and its pretty hot outside because I’m sweating underneath my coat even through its supposedly air-conditioned inside the jail. I’m going to be sweating for hours tonight, even when I’m back in my apartment I’m going to feel my body sticking against the sheets. Nervous shivers rack my body. I am calm.

There’s a girl down the hall in my apartment building who I initially found attractive but who has since fallen in my estimation. She’s rich and comes from a background of privilege and license, and I find myself unable to mask my sarcasm when I’m around her. She seems functionally intelligent but lacks the kind of essential hunger that is necessary to succeed in this world, unless you have already achieved success by virtue of your birth.

Of course, this is the same problem I see all around me. Everyone seems recklessly intent on squandering their advantages and wallowing in their own concupiscence for mediocrity. It’s a depressing world to have to live in because no one seems at all worried about what they’re going to do with their lives.

These thoughts are still bubbling in my head when the action occurs.

I had been nodding myself to sleep in the quiet interim when I was woken by the struggle. The two men who shared our cell, the two shadowy figures who had killed the police officer as I watched in horror, who I had later seen to be punk kids little older than myself, were speaking in loud and agitated voices. They became increasingly angry as the minutes of captivity passed into hours, and finally the agitation erupted into desperation and violence.

The smaller one stands and runs to the opposite end of the cell, trying to stand out of the larger man's reach. The larger one leans down and pulls something small out of his sneaker, I can’t quite tell what because I’m trying very hard to seem like I’m totally ignoring what’s going on even though I can’t look away. It’s a small cell so my attempts at ignorance go unrewarded.

The small man is wailing like a cornered animal as the larger man strides confidently across the cell. There’s something in his hand and his eyes are fixed, like inanimate objects, rocks or stones set against the pasty backdrop of his face.

The small man is screaming louder and louder for help, for any kind of help but there are no answers. Everyone in the jail is looking at what’s going on in our cell but everyone is strangely quiet: all the petty crooks, all the drunks, all the hookers and all the brawlers. I get up and move across the cell to where my inebriated friend is laying, the only person in the cellblock oblivious to the drama, pursued by his imaginary demons.

On the opposite end of the cell, nearer where I had been sitting, the larger man has the smaller man backed into the corner and he’s holding him against the wall with the collar of his dark leather jacket balled in his fist. Suddenly there’s movement and then there’s blood everywhere, like he had reached into the smaller man’s chest and turned a faucet, because it’s on the man’s jacket and splattering on the floor.

The larger man turns away from the victim and tosses the knife away, into the hallway. His hands are covered in grimy, dark black-red blood and he’s got a strangely distracted look on his face. The smaller man slumps to the floor, his hands limp and his face ashen. His blood is everywhere it shouldn’t be and he can’t put any of it back where it’s supposed to be and he seems mildly amused by the irony as he starts to quietly cough and the blood drips down his chin.

Finally, after what seems like an eternity the police respond to the commotion and move into the cellblock en masse, opening the door to our cell and pushing the larger man to the floor and running to the smaller man but he’s already dead. Of course, my friend and I are overlooked and that’s for the best all things considered.

The smaller man dies before they can do anything and the larger man is mute, he seems tired and he doesn’t want to communicate anything, he just wants to go to sleep from the way he acts. He’s still got blood all over him and even some spurted on his face, shading his mouth and his eyes so that it looks like he put on war paint. He’s on the floor and he’s handcuffed and the police are yelling and shouting at him but he just looks like he’s about to fall asleep right there in the jail cell as he's being held to the ground.

And of course I never found out what any of that was about, not until much later.

Chapter Four

2008-01-08T14:44:00.001-08:00

My father was a killer for the CIA.

He was involved in the Deep Shit, the type of vitally important national security matters that necessitated his total and unequivocal silence. It has only been through the painstaking and laborious process of investigation that I have been able to piece together the fragments of his life.

The twentieth century was not kind to the African continent. The aftermath to hundreds of years of colonial repression was decades of war – both civil and external. My father was a mercenary in darkest Africa for the greater part of the 60’s and 70’s – fighting in the Congo and Angola and Zambia, killing on the side of those remaining white colonial governments who were being secretly supported by the United States through the CIA.

Throughout my childhood and early adolescence there’s the recurring presence of a One-Eyed Man, a tall and swarthy individual who would sometimes make himself visible to me when I was at the playground or playing soccer or shopping with mother. He would appear and I would look at him and he would acknowledge me, just long enough for the mutual recognition to register, and he would be gone.

I knew without having to ask, without having to say anything, that he had been sent by my father to watch over me, to keep an eye (one eye, at least) on me and ensure I was safe. I am certain that my father made many enemies during his tenure with the agency, enemies who would have liked nothing better than to strike out at my absent father through his vulnerable family – but he was always there to protect us, even when he wasn’t.

The One-Eyed Man stopped coming sometime after I hit junior high. Perhaps the people who had threatened my father were finally dead, or perhaps, as I secretly feared, the One-Eyed Man had finally been eliminated. All I knew was that the final link to my father’s secret life and career had been severed.

I never told my mother about the one-eyed man. She lived in a state of forced ignorance in regard to my father’s activities – I suspect she knew more than she admitted, and had perhaps been in some way complicit in my father's death - but her sanity depended on keeping these disparate parts of her life compartmentalized.

My newfound drunken companion and I were released from police custody around sunrise. Trevor, as I later learned his name to be, had slept through the entire altercation, waking only after the body and the murderer in question had both been carried away.

He was holding his head and squinting in the crisp winter morning. Apparently the events which had led to his arrest involved drinking contests and video games – more than that he refused to remember. For the immediate future he was concerned mainly with finding coffee and shelter.

The campus police station was situated on the far end of the school from where my apartment and Trevor’s fraternity house were both located. It was a Saturday morning and the school was quiet.

It turned out that I had indeed met Trevor before, although I would not have remembered this if he had not been the one to mention that we shared the same chemistry section during our freshman year. On a campus filled with tens of thousands of unfamiliar faces it was almost a miracle to find recognition in a stranger.

Trevor was wearing a simple white T-shirt. He had been sweating throughout the night and now he was very cold. There was a pancake restaurant off the main boulevard as you rose up through the campus buildings. We decided to stop in and have breakfast together.

We were certainly a sight. I hadn’t slept all night and there were spatters of blood from the murder all over my shirt and coat, droplets which had inexplicably flown across the cell to land on me. Trevor looked like he felt, horribly hung-over. His skin was coated in grease and his eyes were crimson.

The restaurant was empty. The waitress led us to a booth towards the front of the restaurant and filled our coffee cups. She was a student at the school, dully attractive in a soft and unfocused manner, although her breasts were recognizably pert through her starched uniform.

I ordered a plate of pancakes and a glass of orange juice. Trevor nibbled on an English muffin with some strawberry jam smeared clumsily across the face. After he downed two cups of coffee, he opened his eyes wider and engaged me in tentative conversation. He asked me why I had been in the jail. I told him the truth: that I had been walking around campus late at night and had had the misfortune to witness a shooting.

I explained roughly what had occurred last night from the time I spotted the two men arguing near the entrance of the Life Sciences building. I omitted mention of my air rifle.

The same officer who had collared Trevor had apprehended me. We met in the back of his cruiser, which Trevor did not remember. He didn’t remember much from around the time he was doing tequila shots with Arthur Magnusen from Delta Kai to the time he woke up cold and throbbing in the cell next to where a brutal murder had recently occurred (a murder which he also did not remember).

He mentioned in passing that the police had arrested him after pissing in a mailbox on Warring Street. He didn’t remember doing it but that’s why he had been booked.

All throughout our conversation he was drinking coffee at a furious rate. In hindsight it seems perfectly sane – drinking copious amounts of coffee enables his body to flush the system of toxins. I wasn’t dealing with an amateur, apparently Trevor knew his way around the world of extreme inebriation.

And as we chatted quietly and as Trevor continued the slow and awkward process of working through his hangover, I looked over his shoulder towards the opposite side of the restaurant and saw a familiar face staring back at me across the sterile café. It was the One-Eyed Man, ten years older and none the worse for wear, unmistakable.

The One-Eyed Man was staring directly at me with a look of inconsolable melancholy writ passionless on his face. Whatever had brought him here, ten years in the future from the last time I had seen him, set down directly into my life and my world again, from out of the dim recesses of my ancestral past, was obviously a grim chore.

Suddenly I wished that I had discussed the man with my mother. I wished I had been able to overcome my natural reluctance to communicate with her and explored this mystery further because I found myself inexplicably unable to deal with the sudden numbing possibilities which his presence reopened in my near future.

Trevor had stopped speaking. He had lifted his head and was looking right at me. I snapped back to our conversation but I didn’t have the slightest notion what we had been discussing.

When I looked again the One-Eyed Man had gone, paid his check and left the restaurant. But I knew I was going to see him again, and soon.

Chapter Five

2008-01-08T14:43:00.001-08:00

Trevor invited me to a party later that week at his frat house. I usually made a habit of avoiding parties but my inexplicable affection for Trevor overcame my better judgment in this instance.

The fraternities are arrayed in a row on a long street jutting south from the main campus. On any given weekend there are dozens of parties ongoing, dozens of ancient houses filled to the brim with drunken children. You could walk down the street on party nights and feel as if the entire campus was on fire, as if all the houses were actually part of one greater party and everyone was invited.

Of course, that was an illusory effect - and in reality, most parties are illusions. There’s an aching solitude at the heart of them, a cloying adolescent loneliness that won’t be alleviated merely by mass drunkenness or group sex. Perhaps I just don’t get it. I don’t know. I do know that parties usually don’t entertain me.

When I was fourteen there was a party at someone’s house . . . someone’s birthday party, I don’t remember exactly. I dressed nicely and had my present wrapped, I don’t remember what I got, it must have been something my mother picked out.

So as bad as college parties are it goes without saying that junior high school parties are worse. There’s not really a lot to do because you’re not old enough to be outside of the immediate purview of adults and you’re not young enough to think that’s OK. You want to be older but you’re stuck being what you are for however long you’re there. If I could go back in time with a fresh keg of beer and present it to my fourteen-year-old self he wouldn’t have the faintest clue what to do with it.

And of course its impossible to cast my mind back without stumbling across memories of Lauren.

There were years in my life devoted to abnegation, entire periods of my youth blacked out between the time of my father’s death and my departure from home. My childhood was given over to phantom deliriums, and my adolescence was almost entirely consumed by a negative burning lust aimed inwards and fueled by self-hatred.

Sometimes I crept out of the house and walked across the long and luxurious fairways of the nearby golf courses. I lay on the grass and looked skyward, slowing my metabolism down until I could feel the movement of the Earth in orbit beneath my fragile pulpy body. I dreamt inky purple seas of molten grief, and my father’s face spinning high above me, unable to see me or to hear me.

Lauren was beautiful, of course, and looking back across the years I can see now that she was irresistibly innocent as well – a virtue that would have appealed to me. Of course I was unable to do anything, to act on my impulses, because in all seriousness I was just a kid, and a pretty fucked up kid at that.

But I remember snippets of the year and I remember moments from that party in particular – a magical moment towards the end of the party. We were sitting on the couch waiting for our parents to come, sitting in a darkened living room somehow, inexplicably alone. I don’t remember thinking anything so much as wondering how this could possibly have been allowed to happen, it seemed so odd in a house full of people to be alone with Lauren in the living room . . .

And it was dark and we were sitting there together looking out the window and seeing the headlights pass by on the road and feeling the faint glow of reflected light on our pale youthful faces. It was dark in the house but there was white light from a lamppost outside and it played across our faces through the vertical bars of the venetian blinds.

I don’t remember what we said, and I don’t think we said anything important. But I remember that one single shining moment for what it was worth. Not much.

Trevor was nowhere to be found when I arrived at the party. The house was already filling with people, younger coeds and older members of the fraternity, in addition to sorority sisters and athletes and perhaps even a few townies somehow thrown in the mix. There was liquor everywhere, domestic beer in cheap plastic cups and ugly liquor in small shot glasses on coffee tables.

There were a few people I vaguely recognized. A younger girl came up to me and asked if I knew where the bathroom was. I told her that I didn’t and she thanked me and walked away. She was attractive in a preening slutty way, in much the same manner that most of the younger girls were.

The house itself was beautiful, an old gothic residence with high vaulted ceilings in the living room and elaborate winding staircases throughout. It was a perfect house in which to throw lavish parties, and a perfect house to entertain guests. I began to lose awareness of my surroundings and my eyes stretched off across the ceiling and into the spaces between spaces.

I turned my head and looked over towards the corner. There was a keg of beer set on a thick wooden table with a few younger coeds milling around. Looking closer I saw an older gentleman whom I hadn’t recognized when I first entered the room, but who I soon remembered. I strolled across the room and reached my hand out to him.

“Hello, my boy,” he said, taking my hand in a firm shake. “I’m so glad you could make it. Trevor told me you were coming and I’m very happy to see you here.”

“Thanks,” I said. He was holding a small plastic cup of beer in his hand. He reached over to the keg and poured another cup for me.

“Here you go,” he said. “I am happy to be of service to you.”

I took the beer and drank deeply. It was warm, room temperature, but it slid down my throat easily enough. It was good to see my friend, and he looked well. He was wearing a nice dark suit, with the tie pulled slightly loose from his collar, just casual enough to look at home anywhere he went. His complexion was a healthy light red, his black hair slicked back behind the tiny little horns poking out just above his forehead and to either side of his widow’s peak.

“Seriously, my boy, I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you for a good long while here.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder, comfortingly. “I’ve heard some pretty special things about you. You’re going to have a good year, you know that?”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes, really. Once you get out of here,” he gestured around the room with his free hand, “and get home, you’ve got some big decisions to make.”

“Connie.”

“Yes . . .” he paused. “She’s certainly a big decision. But there are some even
bigger decisions on your horizon.”

“Huh.”

“Yes, yes. It’s a damned good thing I found you when I did, because I have some very important advice to offer you. Come with me . . .”

He grabbed my arm above the elbow and escorted me out of the living room. We found ourselves in a smaller area, perhaps a family room, with a much cozier space. There were fewer people here as well. My friend sat down in a chair to the side of a plush sofa and I sat down on the sofa nearest to him.

“There’s one thing you’ve absolutely got to remember, I mean, above all else this is vitally important. Are you listening?”

“Yeah.”

“Everything is important. From this moment on in your life, everything that happens to you has a reason. Like a puzzle. You have to be smart enough to put everything together because everything is going to mean something.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“Of course you don’t understand. Not yet you don’t. You’re going to be in the middle of some crazy shit, my boy. You’re going to have your hands full.”

“Hmmm. So, I’m not going to marry Connie?”

“No, I never said that. But I think you’re going to want to take some time off after school, go find yourself. This is a big country and you’ve really only seen a tiny sliver of it.”

“Yeah, I was thinking of doing that. Road trip out to see New York maybe.”

“Yes, New York. Maybe you could see Ground Zero?”

“Yeah, I did think of that.”

“You’re not the only one. Anyway. In the coming days and months there’s going to be a lot happening around you and you have to be very careful to make the right decisions, to choose the right paths, or the consequences could be much more disastrous than you or even I could possibly foresee.

“You just have to remember one very important thing.” At this he leaned down from his chair and pressed his index finger into my chest. “Everything counts. Everything that happens to you from this day forward is important, it all means something, it all adds up. Pay attention and see if you can discern the shape and texture of the patterns that surround you, the patterns that dictate your existence. That’s the only way you’re going to get ahead.”

“I’m afraid,” I said meekly.

“Don’t be. I’ve seen this kind of thing before – a kid like you, fresh-faced, straight out of college. Takes some time off, finds himself. You’ve just got to figure our where you’re going, is all. Its not that intimidating, is it?”

“Not when you put it like that it isn’t.”

“See, that’s just my point. You’ve got to take it easy. You’ve got a lot of power now, a lot of potential. You can do anything in the entire world if you want and nothing can stop you. The only thing that can stop you is fear, and you can’t be afraid of anything, OK?”

“OK.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” He slapped me on the back in a jovial fashion. “Would you like another beer? A cigar perhaps?” He opened his coat to reveal his inside pocket, crammed with freshly-wrapped cigars. “Just got in from Cuba – fresh as a daisy.”

“No, no thank you, I don’t smoke.”

“Fine, fine. I can respect that. Anyway,” he said as he rose from his seat, “I really should be on my way. I’ve got a busy night ahead of me yet.”

“It was good talking to you,” I said dully, lifting my hand up to grasp his.

“Don’t let it get you down, kid, just go home and get on the road. Things will start happening, I guarantee you’ll end up on the right page in the end. I have it on a pretty high authority that you’re destined for greatness. Just be on the lookout for synchronicity – it’s the secret story of everything all around you. Figure out how that story ends and you’ll rule the world.”

“I will, I will. Thank you, thank you so much.”

“No problem. I still owe your dad . . . we go way back, you know that. He was a good man.”

“Yeah he was.”

“Cheer up, kid,” he said with a smile, “you’re on the right track.”

He grasped my hand and left, turned abruptly down the hall and disappearing into the party.

I sat in silence for a moment, ruminating on the conversation. My friend hadn’t said anything which I did not strongly suspect to already be true, but it was heartening nonetheless to hear it said by a voice besides my own.

The party grew louder and louder with every moment I sat thinking. There were more people streaming in from the outside and there were already more people than I thought possible packed into the house’s cavernous basements. The faint but insistent throbbing of music from deep in the building’s foundations was strangely, ominously comforting.

I looked up from my reverie and saw Trevor approaching from the main foyer. He had a broad grin and was carrying two more plastic cups of beer. Without a word he handed me one and took a long draught from the other.

“Dude,” he pronounced solemnly. “You made it. I was beginning to think you weren’t going to show.”

His face was flushed, I could tell he had already been drinking heavily for a while. Did he ever stop drinking, I wondered? He sat down next to me on the sofa while I spoke.

“I’ve actually been here a bit,” I answered. “I was talking to a friend before you came in.”

“Fuckin’ wild. I told you you’d see someone you knew.”

“Yeah, I’m glad I came.”

“Dude, you saved my ass the other night, you know that? I mean, seriously, dude. I was hardcore fucked up, seriously fucked up. I don’t even remember any of that. But I sure got some blood on my T-shirt to, uh, commemorate it by.”

I chuckled and took another sip from the beer.

“So, like, I’m glad you could make it, but you are just so not being where the party is going, dude . . . I am afraid I am going to have to insist you come on down with me and see what we can see. Seriously, dude.”

He rose on shaky feet and I followed. We turned the corner and found a long thin hallway leading to a dark stairwell at the end. There were kids lined up all across the hall, in various states of disrepair. Some were making out with others, some were fast asleep. I tried to be as careful as I possibly could, lifting my feet to ensure I didn’t step on anyone’s fingers or knock over any beers. The floor was already sticky with liquor.

The stairwell proved narrower than the hallway had been, curving down into the hill on which the ancient house stood. The music came up to me, thicker, meaner and bloodier in my ears. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the viscous darkness that enveloped us. We were surrounded by people all around us as we descended the stairwell, sweaty figures in the fumbling dark, leant against the crumbling masonry of the walls. There was smoke, tobacco and marijuana and more.

The stairs came to an abrupt end and we were suddenly in a large, dark enclosure at least thirty feet below the first floor of the house above. I had underestimated how deeply the foundations of the house had had to be cut into the hillside in order to build the house.

There were people everywhere, dancing sluggishly or lounging against the walls. The confidence and languor of these guests assured me that the basement was obviously the epicenter of the party. There was a small bar set jutting from the wall at the opposite end of the room, with half a dozen men whom I recognized as members of the fraternity taking turns pouring beers from a large metal keg and taking shots with the other revelers.

There was a DJ in the corner, two turntables and a mixer set atop a long piece of plywood perched on two piles of cinder blocks. He was in deep concentration as I entered the room, his headphones half ajar on his head and scrunched up against his shoulder. His fingers were slowly and methodically turning the record as it spun on the platter, speeding up or slowing down the incoming music to match the song that was already playing.

The crowd was lazy, however, and inattentive to the music. There were dozens, hundreds of bodies moving slowly across the dance floor, propelled by liquor past the point of exhaustion. Here was the dense hard core of the party, the people who had been here for hours and had no intention of going home, and the people for whom this permanent state of Bacchanal excess was home.

There was a thick iron chain hanging from the center of the ceiling, and there was a large iron-wrought cage hanging from this chain – like a birdcage, only bigger. Suspended about three feet off the floor, the cage contained a girl.

I don’t know if you could call the caged girl beautiful, because a latex mask covered her face. She was wearing some shiny fetish gear over her body. Her body language seemed dazed, slightly disinterested, perhaps bored. I think I would have been, in the same situation.

Trevor tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for me to join him at the bar. The bar itself was surrounded by what seemed to be thousands of swarming lowerclassmen screaming for beer. The bartenders gave a cup of beer from their keg to every third supplicant, in between downing cups of beer themselves.

The music was good but no one cared. I pressed into the crowd with Trevor, gaining ground on the bar as we slowly came through to the gate. Trevor swung the gate open and we emerged on the other side in the small area behind the bar. There were two chairs off the side, next to a television that was bolted to the wall. There were neon beer signs – flickering orange “COORS” and “BUDWEISER” talismans that gave you a headache to look at them.

Above the bar, on the ceiling behind where the cabinets were situated, there was a large poster of a naked lady, perhaps a Playboy model? I didn’t recognize her. It was an old poster.

Trevor leaned over and spoke in my ear, loudly through the noise: “Having a good time?”

I nodded my head dully. One of the seats was empty so I sat down, careful not to spill my beer.

As I situated myself, Trevor leaned under the bar and found a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He found a pair of shot glasses and slammed them onto the arm of my chair with an audible thunk. He filled both shot glasses, motioning me to take one.

We clanked our shots in mock toast and threw the liquor down our throats. It had been a while since I had drank whiskey and I was reminded, briefly, of just how foul it actually tasted. It ran down my throat as quickly as I could manage, and it landed in my stomach like a drop of molten lead. I was growing quite drunk despite myself.

Trevor turned away and shared a shot with his fraternity friends. My mind slowly tuned out the crowd beyond the barricades of the bar, focusing on the music and the light, soft and hard on my senses. The girl in the cage was still bored and looked drunk or stoned, and from the other side of the room I commiserated with her. I wondered, obliquely, how much she was being paid.

Then it occurred to me that I had seen the One-Eyed Man just a few days ago, after having missed him for almost a decade. It was an upsetting thought, and for a moment I fought feelings of paranoia rising out of my stomach and into my brain. It was a reptilian feeling, a pure conception of the primal ego that left my skin feeling vaguely like coiled scales. I felt the harsh fabrics of my shirt against my naked flesh and I was repulsed by my physicality.

But what was left? I was drunk and I had nothing to fear, at least for the time being. I found myself enjoying the party despite myself. As was to be expected, I had nothing to do and nothing to say to Trevor’s companions – anymore than I had anything to say to Trevor himself – but I enjoyed the party from my vantage point at the far rear of the basement, observing from a position of serene detachment. Life was good, at least for the time being.

After a few indeterminate minutes, Trevor turned back to me and we downed shots again. I was smiling, I could feel the grin across my face, and I could hear the blood pumping through my brain. It’s an odd sensation, drunkenness, and I am rarely prepared for the disassociation, of perceiving my surroundings in crystal clarity but being unable to speak or act in a rational manner.

For a moment, at least, I relaxed into the dull soft-focus of the party, enjoying the brief high and putting all unpleasant thoughts outside of myself. I would pick them up later, when the voices resumed and I was free to act on my friend’s advice. I had the rest of my life ahead of me, and the rest of my life started tomorrow.

Chapter Six

2008-01-08T14:42:00.001-08:00

The first few days after the bombings were days of panic and fear, days of attenuated perceptions stretched past the breaking point.

The broadcast news networks began running their coverage around the clock and the television feeds changed their design. Small running text feeds stretched across the bottom of the screens, buffeted by pictures and computer graphics moving like video games around your field of vision. As hard as it was to grasp the realities of a geopolitical universe grown suddenly much harsher, the hyper-kinetic paranoid television presentation brought these changes home to our living rooms. Here was the altered world, splayed and dissected and splattered across the TV.

There’s a point where you realize that the world you live in is no longer the world you grew up in. There’s a moment of hideous recognition, a sensation of horror that passes across the membrane of your consciousness like a bubble in oil. Everything feels wrong, jaded, corrupted.

When I turned my eyes from the television the running text strip at the bottom of the screen was burnt into my eyes. I was seeing the news as it happened with my eyes closed.

I dreamt of burning bodies and the smell of gunpowder for weeks after the towers fell. There was nothing I could do to cleanse my mind, nothing I could possibly wish for but silence, blessed silence, but as soon as I turned on the television the noise in my head was replaced by the noise on the news, voices and mouths speaking in clipped tones of urgency, saying nothing in particular in a very forceful manner.

And so I began, in the hazy days following the destruction, to gain a unique and comprehensive understanding of the strange world in which we now lived. Everything was compromised. Every layer of perception in our world had been dominated, purchased and pasteurized, coated with liquid latex and made to look new and agreeable and exciting. We saw mass murder unfold before our eyes and reacted as if we had just seen a television commercial. Where was this new product? How much did it cost?

Everything in our lives has been replaced by cheaply manufactured simulacra. I wondered when they had got to my mother. But then I realized it didn’t matter: she had been only too happy to be appropriated. She was positioning me for my replacement, working diligently to achieve this goal.

The Saturday after September 11th saw me the guest of Connie’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Gooding. Connie’s school schedule was such that she left for classes at the end of August, while my school year didn’t commence until September.

I enjoyed the company of the Goodings far more than I enjoyed the company of their daughter. They were honest and scrupulous, I felt, much more so than my own duplicitous mother. They were very comfortable with their lot in life, and both worked decent and respectable jobs. I felt at least partially safe in their home, removed from the constant struggle of the running captions that moved across the bottom of the television screens and which had sprouted across everyone’s forehead during the preceding week.

The Goodings’ house was impeccably and classically furnished. The furniture was strong and resilient, and when I returned home after dining with them I felt incredible shame at my mother’s gauche taste in modern furnishings. There wasn’t a piece in my mother’s house I didn’t feel that I could break apart at the slightest provocation, and I was deeply afraid of the impermanence represented by broken furniture.

I sat at the head of the Goodings’ cozy kitchen table, opposite of Mr. Gooding and flanked by Mrs. Gooding. They regarded me as their son-in-law in deed if not in word, making every accommodation to my eccentricities. Truth be told, they understood better than their daughter the difficult upbringing I had received, and felt almost grateful for the chance to help me.

In any event, theirs' was the first house I had entered in a week’s time that did not have the television playing. They were as impeccably presented as they had ever been, and they welcomed me with unfeigned warmth and generosity.

Mr. Gooding asked me how my week had been. I told him that I had been fortunate enough to be able to spend most of my week at home, reading and relaxing in preparation for returning to school. He inquired as to the date of my departure, I answered that I was planning on returning on the 20th.

They had been in close communication with Constance all week. Her classes had apparently been canceled on the day of the attacks and the school had remained closed for an additional day. Classes had resumed on Thursday but there was still campus-wide paranoia. It occurred to some that in the event of another proverbial shoe dropping a small liberal arts college in Oregon was hardly the most likely target, but logic and fear are rare bedfellows.

I asked Mr. Gooding what he had been doing at the time of the attacks. He had been doing paperwork in his office at the bank when he had received a call from his wife, who told him to turn on a television – any television. It was very early in the morning and few people had yet arrived at the bank, so he was alone as he marched into the small break room hidden at the rear of the bank and flipped on the small portable television that sat on the main table.

He was transfixed for a good ten minutes before he realized it was time to open the doors. By this time the morning shift were arriving and most of them had heard nothing yet. As they arrived he informed each of them that something terrible was happening in New York.

He opened the front doors anxiously and returned to the break room. By this time the first tower had fallen. He succumbed to temptation and carried the television into the lobby, installing the small receiver on a podium at the center of the room. He turned the volume loud and sat down in a chair near the loan office.

After a few early-birds, no customers came to the bank that morning. Everyone was hunched around the television together, unwilling to miss a moment of the history.

Mr. Gooding made the decision to close the bank when the first calls arrived for the parents. Schools had closed early and the children were being sent home, and most of the tellers needed to leave. It was really no decision at all – the take-out Chinese food restaurant situated across the way from the bank in the strip-mall had already closed, along with the insurance agency next door and the dry cleaners on the other side. The coffee shop across the highway was doing good business, though - there were dozens of trailer-trucks and cars packing the lot, having stopped in town after hearing the news on the radio.

Mr. Gooding saw each of the employees out the door and locked the building as he left. It was a surreal feeling, to close the bank before even the lunch hour had struck on a sunny Autumn Tuesday. He imagined millions of people across the country in similar positions, finding themselves impacted by distant events they could not easily comprehend. Aside from the out-of-town traffic at the coffee shop, the town had grown preternaturally quiet.

Mrs. Gooding was a doctor – an orthopod at a sports clinic downtown. She canceled all her appointments soon after seeing the first images on television. She called down the list and most admitted that they had had no intention of coming. Mrs. Gooding changed out of her white coat and was the last person to leave her office, the secretaries and other physicians having left earlier.

The Goodings’ voices were soft and assured, well suited to calm descriptions of tragedy. I remember feeling somehow reassured listening to them speak, assured in a way that I hadn’t felt listening to the same stories passing from my friends or my family’s lips. They were all the same, all the stories, anyway, it was simply in the act of telling that they were able to gain any semblance of significance.

Everyone’s story was essentially the same, and this was both boring and horrific. I longed to find someone with a different recollection of the day’s events, someone who hadn’t seen the towers fall, and still sees them standing today. That would be a story worth telling.

In any event I woke up the morning after the frat party with a pounding headache. I was back in my room although I didn’t remember in perfect detail how I had returned. I had never had a hangover like this before, and I was suddenly very glad I no longer had roommates to contend with.

I stayed in bed for most of the day, drinking water and coffee and trying to read but mostly just laying in bed with a pillow over my head. I remembered with a sudden viciousness why I disliked drinking.

I made myself get out of bed as the evening wore on and proceeded to find some
food. It was only then that I saw the note, scribbled hastily and left on my computer screen the night before –

Had a great time? Hope so, lover . . .
Kristy

My brow furrowed and I felt a searing pain through my head. Whatever I had drank the previous night had done a complete number on me, and the more I strained the less I remembered.

There was a Chinese take-out place down the street from my building. I pulled on my coat and left the apartment carefully, trying to walk as gently as I could. The sun was beginning to set but I wore my sunglasses anyway.

I had given up on studying the year before. Thankfully – or not, depending on your outlook - I had been gifted with the kind of memory that enabled me to make it through my courses on nothing more than willpower. I read all the assigned books but never gave the classes a second thought until I had to take the tests. Sure enough, I had been rewarded with A’s and B’s, an admirable scorecard by any definition. My time was left free for other pursuits.

Sometimes I wished that I could work harder, that I could enable myself to fail at something, anything. But it was all so damned easy, and I felt frustrated for caring.

As I walked down the street my friend’s words of the previous night came softly back into my aching head. I had felt aimless, adrift – unable to focus my life and my energies on any goal or suitable vocation. But his words had opened dark reservoirs of secret purpose at which I had only ever previously realized vague hints. Perhaps all of this was merely just a test, or a passing phase, and I would eventually perceive my current life as if it were a platform of phantoms and ghosts. Something was up there, waiting for me, watching.

If someone was watching my I had to be very careful. I cast a glance over my shoulder but the street was remarkably quiet. It was the weekend and there should have been some activity, I reasoned – but there was none. Simple preternatural silence was the only thing I heard.

The streets were composed with a mixture of ramshackle and modern architectures, a surreal jumble of old and new piled high one on top of the other. There was ivy everywhere, ivy and broad leafy trees bunched across the streets. There was something cozy and dark about the city, something that seemed to simultaneously repulse and welcome the stranger.

But now I became convinced that every corner, every cranny and nook in the crumbling civic masonry held a set of anxious eyes eager to find and dispatch me. There was nothing I could do but go about my business because I knew that to give so much as the slightest foreknowledge that I was aware of their presence would lead to my inevitable doom.

The feeling of being watched is one of the most unpleasant and helpless sensations in life. There is no earthly reason why you should be able to feel as if you’re being watched, and yet you know, with a certainty that belies proof, from the evidence of the downy hair on the back of your neck. You can almost hear the whispering voices as you turn the corner, the spies in their long duster coats and their faded porkpie hats, recording data and transmitting it back to their secret headquarters. It’s just like you’ve seen in all the movies, only worse and filled with loathing.

I sometimes wonder if the people watching me at night are even human anymore. There’s a part of me that hopes not.

I carried my Chinese food back to the apartment and locked the door behind me. My head was still pounding and my eyes felt shriveled. I still couldn’t remember a damn thing about what had happened last night after we started doing those shots behind the bar.

Connie was a good girl, better than I deserved. I hoped she wasn’t compromised by any of this.

Her parents had related their stories to me quietly, with the plain and humble authority with which they communicated everything in their lives. Here was a couple who had succeeded, who had found everything they wanted in life. Their daughter was a tribute to their conceptions of morality and decency, a good girl who reflected well on them both.

Except that she wasn’t really their daughter. Her mother was dead, her father was somewhere else. She had been abandoned by life and it was only her extreme good luck that she had found the Goodings – a childless couple who were willing to adopt an older daughter. I found out later – much later, and accidentally – that Mrs. Gooding had had a tragic miscarriage early in their marriage, and this misfortune had taken from her the ability to bear any children.

They had wanted a child, they had wanted children, the perfect keystone to the perfect suburban American life. Sometimes things don’t work out the way we plan. In any event, I’ve known Constance for longer than her parents have. I remember seeing her biological parents, when they were still alive and together.

That was a long time ago.

Chapter Seven

2008-01-08T14:40:00.002-08:00

I’ve got these pills I’m supposed to take but I don’t. They make me sleepy and give me headaches and I just don’t want to take them because I’m not sick.

I get the bottles every month in the mail from my doctor but they just stack up in the closet. My mother always asks me whether or not I’m taking them and I lie to her, say “yes, ma,” and leave it at that. She wants me to take my pills so I’ll be vulnerable to her, vulnerable to the machinations of her and her fellow ghouls. I don’t want that to happen, I can’t allow them to dull my perceptions, so I just smile and nod when the subject of my medication comes up.

But she’s no dummy, she knows I’m not taking them. She knows because they haven’t got me yet. When I take my pills it dulls everything, like there’s cottonwool around my head and I just can’t think straight. I know they’re out there but I can’t see them or hear them and that makes me paranoid as fuck. So before it gets too bad I stop taking them and soon I can hear their footsteps behind me as I walk through the neighborhood, and I find that oddly comforting because at least that way I can hear them coming.

I don’t think my dad heard them coming, which is why he’s dead. I don’t know exactly how he died but I imagine it happened in a similar fashion. They wanted him dead and they waited and waited and waited but he was too smart and too canny for them, until he finally let his guard down enough for them to slit his throat in the night and that was the last we ever heard of Pop.

In any event, the people who got to my dad are still out there and I know they’re still after me. If I had ever had the luxury to forget that, the One Eyed Man was back in my life to remind me of this fact.

So I began to formulate a plan.

My father was dead because of what he knew and what he had. There were hundreds of millions of dollars still out there, unclaimed, that belonged to him – belonged to me – and I had to figure out where it was before they did. Because if they did, I knew there wouldn’t be a place in the world I would be able to hide from them.

I felt sorry for Connie sometimes. There were times where I wanted to run away from her and never return, but I knew that at the end of the day I was important to her, deeply important in a way I couldn’t begin to understand. We had been friends from such an early age that it would simply be impossible to imagine life without her, for better or for worse. That probably goes a little way towards explaining why I’m such a goddamned chickenshit with her. I don’t want to marry her. I don’t really even know how we got engaged. But somehow it happened . . . and I can’t really explain that.

And I certainly can’t begin to explain it to her. I don’t want to hurt her because, ultimately, she’s going to be hurt enough by life before all is said and done. That’s just the facts.

Ultimately I suppose I was afraid. I didn’t want to let go of the life I was living, blissfully unaware of all these raging undercurrents beneath my feet, ignorant of the perfidy that sublimates us on a daily basis. I didn’t want to step out of the shell of college, where I felt relatively safe and secure, because I knew that I was going to be hurt, that the same people and the same forces that had wanted to hurt my dad were going to try and hurt me. I knew that the series of events which began with my father’s death and led eventually to those two planes falling into the World Trade Center could only end unhappily for me.

But I had a responsibility – to my father, to Connie, even to my mother as much as I hated to admit it. She was compromised, hidden away and demolished by their subterfuge and their hatred, but she was still my mother.

There were maps, maps and graphs and legends of all the places I needed to go and to see and to investigate, long charts of names and numbers relating back to the late 1800s. The same colonial forces that had thrown Africa into perfect disarray had also been working behind the scenes, slowly and confidently, in order to use this chaos to their greatest advantage.

My father was a mercenary in Angola – I’ve mentioned this. But I didn’t get into the part where my father was also smarter than his paymasters gave him credit for. He was a killer, yes, but he also kept his eyes open. It was no problem for him to see what the Company was really doing, to see that their covert activities were just masks for deeper machinations, masks atop of masks atop of masks. He was smart enough to see all the pieces as they fell into the tumblers, all the small clicks inside the lock that no one but a trained thief would be able to discern.

So that’s what ultimately killed him – the fact that he knew more than he should, and the fact that he had used this knowledge in ways he shouldn’t have. He was rich – very rich – and his wealth was a threat to the Powers because the fact that he had gotten his money in the way he did meant that he knew exactly how their little Ponzi scheme was supposed to happen. It made him the most dangerous man on the planet, and it also made him the most wanted.

And so he was killed. They cut his throat in the night and took his head clean off with a garrote, leaving it sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room from his cot. There was a picture of me and my mother in a frame next to his cot, a picture taken when I was no more than two years old. I was the last thing he saw before he died.

Graduation is a quiet affair. I spend a lot of time packing my boxes and preparing for the trip home. I’m putting my books away with extra care because they might be in storage for a long time. They’re going to sit in the attic of my mother’s house until everything is over.

I was glad that I had been able to find this apartment, off the beaten track and without the necessity of a roommate. Many of my former dormmates had been forced into unpleasant circumstances because of the housing shortage, and I was incredibly lucky to be where I was. I realized this, but I didn’t really consider myself lucky. I considered myself bored.

So here was my crummy room – a few bookcases filled with books, a computer, a bed and a miniature refrigerator. Magazines and comic books and newspapers strewn across the shelves. There’s a bag of stale pot in the toe of an old workboot, pot I bought a long time ago but never really wanted to smoke. I don’t like smoking alone and I don’t like being around people.

I expected to feel some nostalgia, some sympathy for my past and my lost youth. I
just felt tired, tired and bored, as if it had been time to leave a long time ago. I had overstayed my welcome.

There was a pile of Chinese food cartons piled in the wastebasket near the door. I dislike Chinese food but it was close enough that I didn’t care. I didn’t have a kitchen and I didn’t want to use the kitchenette that I shared with three other apartments on my floor. I’m just funny like that.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about my dad. In the last few days I had been reminded of so many important things that I had seemingly allowed myself to forget. I was still just a callow, raw youth, a child alone in a world of men.

My landlord was in on it. I knew because my apartment was right above his. Late at night when it was quiet outside I could hear him talking on a secret radio with the men who killed my father. The voices on the other end of this radio are raspy and harsh, just like the sound of brambles brushing the concrete. These are the voices I can hear on a clear day when the wind is low, and I stop just in time to turn and see the hint of my pursuers.

There’s a sweet scent in the night air, like ginger and chamomile, and I know it’s them.

I’m packing my bags and going home. I have a notebook filled with maps and numbers and names and plans for my trip. I think they are very anxious to see where I’m going and what I’m going to do. They would kill for my notebooks.

Chapter Eight

2008-01-08T14:40:00.001-08:00

I retrieved my car from the parking garage and filled it with stuff. The rented trailer was big enough to handle all the boxes of my crap. I reached home late that night after a nerve-racking drive.

My mother pretended to be happy to see me. She helped me unload the trailer in the morning and drove with me down to the U-Haul center.

I mentioned in casual conversation that I was going to be leaving on a trip in a few weeks. She seemed nonplused. It was obvious to me that her reaction had been precisely calibrated to make me think that her feelings were hurt when in fact she didn’t care. She didn’t care and she didn’t want me to know that but she was out of luck as far as that was concerned.

After college the old hometown is invariably gray and pallid. I’m not going to say I was in love with college one way or another, but it does enable you to get your head out of the dirt. I am grateful to the university for giving me four years away from my life to prepare for my journeys and labors.

And I had a nice piece of paper on my wall certifying that I was an expert in the field of history, with a minor in mathematics. It was an odd mixture but it worked. I was already fielding offers from graduate programs across the country, but I sincerely doubted graduate school was in my future. I think I would like to be a teacher, if I live that long.

The worst part about being home is having to put up with my mom’s “boyfriend.” She says they met at the supermarket but I’m pretty sure that he’s her handler. Have I mentioned that while I was gone they took the opportunity to wire every length of the house? I’m certain that nothing I say or do in my mother’s house goes unnoticed by the men who killed my father. Ironically, given the fact that I’m under constant surveillance I think I’m fairly secure here. If they wanted me dead they could have killed me the moment I set foot inside my mother’s door, but as it is they want to watch me. They’re probably unsure how much I know and I’m damn well not going to tip them off.

The first day I was back we had a big dinner, with my mother’s boyfriend and Connie. He was pretending to be amicable for the sake of the ruse, which I at least appreciated in Connie’s presence.

He says he went to Stanford and I don’t have any reason to disbelieve him. He’s probably been instructed to tell me as much truth as he can get away with, so as to allay my fears. He tries to build some conversation from the fact that Stanford and my school are perennial rivals. I gave him a tepid response and he smirked. I told him I’d never attended the “Big Game” and he was vaguely disappointed.

Constance was overjoyed to see me. She had returned from her school a few weeks before me and had been very impatient for my return. She was as beautiful as ever. My mother was very eager to press the subject of our impending nuptials. As we ate I watched her hands, watched her engagement ring bouncing gaily in the bright light of the dining room chandelier. My mother had given me the money to buy it and I had bought a very nice ring. I just didn’t feel it.

But it was on her finger nevertheless. We had postponed the wedding long enough, my mother insisted, and now it was time for us to get down to the nitty-gritty in terms of planning. When were we planning on getting married? Where were we planning on living? Connie could conceivably get a job anywhere but my decision was the vital one, because I had yet to decide whether or not I wanted to attend graduate school.

Or at least this is what my mother thought. My goal was to string her along as long as I could without actually upsetting her plans, under the notion that this would be the best way to ensure my plans went unmolested.

So I let slip in the most casual way that I was planning on taking a trip at the end of the month. Constance was disappointed that I hadn’t thought to ask her along but she assented readily enough when I told her this would be the last delay before our wedding. It was time to relent. I said we would spend the next few weeks before my trip planning the wedding and then while I was gone Connie and our parents could focus on the planning.

I suspect that women are generally disappointed when men fail to share their interest and enthusiasm in wedding planning. At the least, I will say that if I had been planning on actually marrying Connie we would have eloped, far from the prying eyes and ears of my mother and her “boyfriend.” If I was actually her husband I would have to spend the rest of my life keeping Connie safe and secure from the forces that wish to harm me. In the long run, it’s better she have as little to do with me as possible.

It was in my interests to keep my itinerary as vague as possible. I mentioned possibly visiting my grandparents in the southwest. Most importantly I gave them to infer that this was merely the last fling of my boyhood, one last great adventure before being shackled to the "ol’ ball and chain". These were phrases which I think appealed to them on this issue, gave them reassurance that everything was above-boards.

These are the reassurances I had to proffer in order to buy my freedom. I dislike lying but what is left of my life but subterfuge?

So I spend the next few weeks in a fugue. Before I know it I’m looking at invitations and banquet halls and registering at department stores. Strangely, I think Connie herself is only halfway concerned with the wedding preparations. Perhaps she is merely going through the motions, trying to convince herself that this is what normal people, people with real parents and affectionate fiancés, actually do. Again, I am stung by the reminder that she is very fragile. Undoubtedly in the end I will have hurt her, but it's best this way.

We make love and it is unsatisfying. She caresses and protects me but she is not stupid, she knows there is a reserve which hides those things that I do not share with her. I imagine she considers it her fault, and so sex becomes wilder and more primal, more desperate and pleading on her part. She believes that orgasm can bridge the gap.

There’s nothing I can do but wait these last days out. The summer is coming meekly across the mountains and I grow weary of pretense. Every night I check my notebooks where I have hidden them, in order to ensure it has not been stolen. It is safely hidden away where no one can find it.

At night I watch the blinking lights in the sky as the jets mark their passage through the night. I’m sitting in the backyard at our picnic table and drinking a beer. It’s very quiet and the night is just barely chilly.

I think I’m ready to leave.

Chapter Nine

2008-01-08T14:39:00.001-08:00

If women ever truly understood the nature of lust, they would lock their doors en masse and never pass their thresholds again. Lust is inescapable, it’s ubiquitous. It’s the cultural currency and we live in a masculine culture. Rape is the subliminal undertow that carries across every transaction in our lives.

I feel slightly bad leaving Connie in the proverbial lurch - as I know I am doing - but there’s nothing for it. She fell in love with me. I feel gratitude, slight affection, some friendship towards her . . . but no love. Certainly no lust. I envy those who feel love, I envy the feeling itself. Just to feel anything besides the constant white background noise of painful trembling fear would be a relief.

Perhaps that is love. I know that I envy Connie her assurance. I envy her and I also despise her. I despise her deeply and with every fiber of my being.

I rise with the sun and drive south. I have a few odds and ends in the car but mostly I’ve packed light, for reasons that will soon become obvious. I have a cassette in the tape deck that I recorded off the late-night campus radio, some DJ or another spinning fairly decent acid house with some Goa trance thrown in for good measure. It’s going to be a hot day, I can feel the sun just starting to tickle the skin on my neck through the window pane of the drivers’ side window.

There’s a recurring dream sensation from my childhood that I can’t seem to get out of my head. For some reason I’m grasping a balloon, holding onto it as it grows larger and larger. It grows until It overwhelms me and I feel it all across me body, pulsating like living tissue under my arms and hands. I can feel the muscles in my body recede with this until the feeling of weight and gravity grows distant and dim. My jaw moves like a marionette on strings. It’s a strange disconnect.

For some reason this recurring childhood hallucination has returned to me on this august morning. I’m grinding my teeth as the miles pass me by behind the windows of the car, I’m grinding my teeth to feel the mass of muscles and ligament come loose and unattached in my face. I feel liberated.

I set out on the freeway heading due south in the morning haze. I reach my first destination after about an hour of driving.

Although the town where I grew up is situated in a strange pocket of desert suspended between massive mountain ranges, the areas to the immediate north and south are composed of rugged hills. I get off the freeway next to a small town on the shores of a large lake. Everything is tight and winding, with roads hewn close to hillsides and strange houses built upon isolated hilltops.

I’ve driven through the area before, a few times, on leisure trips of one sort or another. There’s one place I know very well.

It’s a beautiful drive. The sun is just starting to settle in as I hit the thick green forest near the lake. Its an artificial lake, an eyesore reservoir built into a series of dammed canyons in order to provide water for farmers and municipalities further south in the state. Its easy to make out the shapes of the original canyons and gullies that marked this area originally, before the waters came.

There’s a side road somewhere on the east side of the lake, overlooking a tepid and forgotten tributary of the sprawling reservoir. There aren’t any houses overlooking the ravine. There aren’t any fishermen out on the stark rock outcroppings that stand for beaches. Over the side of the thin dirt road there’s an almost perpendicular fall down around one hundred feet of hard red clay with harsh rocks set against the waterline.

There was a guardrail along the side of the road, sometime a long time ago. There are a few wooden posts with rusted bolts still attached, but mostly the railing was demolished by time, by rust and drunken drivers. I park the car in the middle of the road and grab my duffel bag. Everything I need is here, my clothes and maps and notebooks.

I shift the car into neutral and turn the wheel towards the ravine. It’s a light car, a compact, and it pushes relatively easy. Before I know it the front wheels are over the cliff and the car is tumbling down the long face of the ravine.

It makes a God-damned noise when it hits the rocks at the water line. I half-expected the car to blow up, but I guess that only happens in movies. It just sat there, easing into the soft mud exposed by low tide and hissing softly in the morning air. Probably burst the radiator, undoubtedly popped the tires.

From the road, you’d have to be looking down to see the wreck juxtaposed against the rocks. No one comes along this way anyway. I imagine someone in a fishing boat will see it in a day or so, and then they’ll need a crane to pull it up and there’ll be an investigation. But by the time any of this happens I’ll be gone and they won’t know where I am, or if I’m even alive.

There are sinister forces at work in this world, forces that killed my father and engineered the tragedy at the World Trade Center. The evidence in my notebooks, the evidence that I have carefully compiled since my father’s tragic passing, makes me the most dangerous man in the world.

The only problem is that they’ll eventually figure out I’m not dead on account of the fact that my notebooks are missing. My notebooks and my maps, all that I have to prove the conspiracy, are safely tucked into my duffel bag. They’ll know this, and then they’ll come for me. Hopefully by then I’ll be ready.

Chapter Ten

2008-01-08T14:38:00.001-08:00

I dreamt about a bug my dad used to tell me about when I was a kid. When my dad was in the bush he saw something called a Buju Buju which he later says was one of the most unsettling experiences of his entire military career. He said the Buju Buju was about the size of a normal tick, except it was quite a bit nastier. Instead of merely biting you it would use its teeth to burrow into the flesh on your arm, and work its way into your body like a mole. There it would lay eggs that would hatch and grow into larvae that would eat their way out of your body and destroy you as they did so.

He saw a man with a Buju Buju infection once. They woke up in the bush and the man had the telltale divot on his arm that told him he had been infected. The man could feel the bug burrowing up his arm, slowly, and they could see a deep purple bruise up the side of his arm where the bug had made his path. They had to cut him open right there in the camp, wrapping a length of rope around his arm for a tourniquet and digging into his shoulder with a Bowie knife.

I’ve always had nightmares about the Buju Buju and I woke from one of those dreams that afternoon, shivering and shaking in the back of a flatbed pickup truck, nestled between a bale of hay and a cooler filled with beer and sandwiches. I had been picked up on the freeway by a farmer and his son heading towards Sacramento, and after hopping aboard the back of their truck I fell asleep for the remainder of the trip.

They stopped for lunch at a Denny’s in Woodland and I thanked them for the ride. The sun was high in the west, it was late in the afternoon. Perhaps the car had been discovered by now, perhaps not. I was far enough away that I felt relatively safe for the time being.

I set out from Denny’s with my thumb stretched towards the west. A late model minivan stopped and the back door slid open to let me in.

The driver was ten years older than me, maybe fifteen. He was remarkably well-preserved, however old he was. There was a young girl in the passenger seat of the car and a dog in the back.

“Come on in, buddy,” the man said. “Where you heading?”

“Berkeley,” I answered.

“Well, that’s perfect, we’re heading to San Jose. Throw your bag in the back and climb in with Rufus.”

Rufus lay sprawled across the back seat of the van, his outstretched reaching from window to window. He was a rottweiler, and a large one at that.

“Come on, Rufus,” the man exclaimed. “Make room.”

I wasn’t afraid of the dog but I was slightly intimidated. He cocked his eyebrows at me, as if to tell me that he didn’t have any desire to move on my account. But move he did, as the man continued to cajole him up from his sedentary position.

Finally I was able to settle myself on the edge of the bench. After a moment he ascertained that I was no danger, placed his head on my lap and returned to sleep.

The van pulled out of the breakdown lane and rejoined the freeway traffic.

“So,” the man began, “what’s a young fellow like yourself doing hitchhiking in this day and age?”

“Heh,” I replied, slightly nervous, “Don’t have much of a choice, really. My car broke down in Redding and I didn’t have the money for a bus ticket.”

“I can certainly understand that. I just wanted to ask because, well, most hitchhikers these days are kind of surly fellows, older . . . I haven’t picked up a hitchhiker in years, and certainly not with Princess in the car. But you looked like a regular stand-up kinda guy, and we got Rufus back there in case you try any kind of funny stuff.” He chuckled at this.

“Thank you Sir,” I said.

“So, you in college?”

“Actually, I just graduated last month.”

“Berkeley?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You didn’t look like a Berkeley man to me! If I’d have known that I wouldn’t have picked you up. I bleed Cardinal Red, myself.”

I smirked. “Well, you don’t have to worry about me. I was never very much of a partisan.”

“You weren’t, eh? I can see that.”

“I mostly just got frustrated by the traffic on the Big Game weekend.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet it was something else.”

We drove in silence for a few minutes. I was curious as to why the girl in the front seat was so quiet. She didn’t seem old enough to be very quiet for very long. Maybe she was shy. I put my hand on Rufus’ muzzle and scratched his chin. He seemed appreciative.

“Rufus likes you,” the man said. “Sometimes he doesn’t like people.”

“I’m glad he likes me,” I said. “I would hate to be on his bad list.”

He laughed again at that one. “Oh, his bark is definitely worse than his bite. That’s the thing with rottweilers that no one really knows . . . they have this reputation as big toughies but really they’re all just babies. I mean, you’ve never seen a gentler dog than Rufus, have you, Princess?”

“No, daddy, I haven’t,” the girl said with a very quiet voice.

“That’s right. And even among rottweilers Rufus there is the king of slugs, you know?”

“I can tell.”

“So, buddy,” the man said after another moment, “I’ve heard great things about you.”

“Um, what?”

“Don’t play dumb. There are a lot of people watching your career with great interest. I’m one of them . . . or, should I say, I represent their interests.”

Immediately I felt the cold sweat on my backbone and a ball of molten ingot in my belly. The car wasn’t slowing down. I was trapped. I remembered suddenly that my mother's boyfriend was a Stanford graduate as well.

“Don’t look so scared,” he said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He adjusted his rear view mirror in order to get a better look at me.

“But,” I said slowly, gulping for air, “but – but who are you?”

“A friend. Maybe a friend of a friend would be better to say. You know how these things work, I know someone who knows someone.”

“I see,” I said, trying to regain my cool.

“I knew your father.”

“You did?” I didn’t believe him.

“I fought with him in the Congo. We were both Thompson gunners working for the colonials. I remember he used to talk about this stash of diamonds he had supposedly stolen, a huge cache.”

This didn’t make any sense. My dad didn’t have a huge cache of diamonds. He certainly wouldn’t have talked about it if he did.

“I wonder where those rocks got to, all those years ago,” he said absent-mindedly, trying to act coy.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Oh, I think maybe you do,” he replied. I caught a glimpse of him in the rear view mirror he had trained on me. His teeth were glinting in the sunlight. He was grimacing.

“I don’t. I don’t know anything about my dad. I don’t think you do either.”

“Don’t be petulant. No one likes a brat.”

“No, I’m serious. I don’t think you knew my dad. You’ve told me as much about my dad as you’d pick up from a pop song.”

“Ah, perhaps, perhaps. You are very astute.”

He reached to the dash and turned the radio dial. The cabin was filled with static for a moment until he found the right channel.

“Frequency 109.9,” he said clearly into the air, “this is Operator 8 calling from Interstate 80 between Vacaville and Vallejo. Over.”

There was a voice on the other end of the radio, speaking back at him. “Yes, we read you, Operator 8. Please report. Over.”

“I have the Prodigal and am en-route to Berkeley as per his request. Subject is docile. Over.”

“Very good, 8. Proceed according to plan. Over and out.”

The radio went dead. The man – whose name I began to realize I had never been given – turned the radio off and began to smile.

“I’m so very glad I was able to be here, to see you and help you on your way. You’re going to do some very important things, my friend. Very important.”

I didn’t know what to say, how to reply. I looked to my side and there was a large white eighteen-wheeler passing us on the left. The driver was large and hairy, and was staring at us very intently.

“That’s Jerry,” the driver said, “he’s Operator 11. He’s here to insure nothing goes wrong. Whenever you see a white truck like that, unmarked, with no bumper stickers and a government license plate, you can assume it’s us, doing our best to keep our eyes on you, keep you out of trouble.”

He waved the truck past us, passing the thumbs-up sign to the driver. The truck sped up and was soon passed us.

“That went well. I’m glad you’re taking this in good spirits. Really, we just want to help you. We know where you’re going and we know why you’re going there, we just don’t know how. That’s what you’re going to show us.”

“I’m not going to show you anything.”

“Yes, yes, we kind of figured you’d say that. Hey, you want a magazine?”

“A magazine?”

“Yeah. Reach into the back and there should be a big cardboard box. Grab a handful, however many you want.”

I reached behind me and there was indeed a cardboard box filled with magazines. I grabbed one and pulled it out apprehensively.

It was a thick magazine, with slick brightly-printed covers. A large neon ink logo announced the name of this magazine to be "YOUNG MEAT". There was a girl on the cover, a young girl no older than nine or ten. She was licking a lollipop, feigning a seductive pose but failing badly, in the disgusting way of small children who pretend to be sexual creatures.

I flipped through the pages and there were children everywhere – preteen boys and girls playing with themselves, playing with older men and women. Some of them were tied up, some of them were being brutalized and raped, covered in purple bruises. Some of them were dressed like sailors and shepherds.

“Do you like it?” the man asked eagerly. “That’s my little Princess on the cover. She’s going to be a star, you know? She’s got that quality to her. It’s magical when she gets in front of the camera.”

I took a closer look at the picture on the front of the magazine.

“Flip to the middle spread, that’s where her pictures are . . .”

I did. There were pictures of her being tied up on a wooden table and sodomized, just the worst filth you could imagine. There was blood.

“This is sick,” I said.

“No, it’s business. We all got to pay the rent. You want it? You can have it, I’ve got boxes and boxes full.”

I placed the magazine back in the box. I felt ill, physically sick and dizzy. I didn’t have a clue where I was and I felt vaguely ashamed. I wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight, wherever I was.

“Don’t worry, we’ll set you down safe and sound in Berkeley, just like you said. Just relax and rest, and leave the driving to us.”

I didn’t say anything for the rest of the trip. Rufus slept with his head in my lap, blissfully unaware of anything that went on around him. I felt bad for the dog, in that life, but he seemed well fed and taken care of.

He took the off-ramp in Berkeley and stopped at a gas station to let me out. I grabbed my duffel bag and jumped out the door as fast as I could.

“Hey,” he said, calling out to me, “you be careful now. There’s some bad people out there, and they don’t all have your best interests at heart like we do.”

“Thanks,” I said weakly, still quite confused. I looked once again at the girl in the front passenger seat. Her face was blank, unresponsive, uninterested in me or in her father or anything. I wondered, for as long as I could stand, just what horrors she had seen in her short life to inspire such awestruck silence.

Chapter Eleven

2008-01-08T14:35:00.000-08:00

I never knew what to do in college. I used to walk around by myself and stare at the baleful moon, shooting rats and staring through the windows of the houses down the street.

You learn a lot about cities while they sleep, and Berkeley is no exception. For one thing, a college town doesn’t really sleep. The closest you get is the gray haze of the last hour before sunrise, when the only folks awake are night owls burning the candle at both ends. That’s the hour I love the most, when you can smell the potential in the air, like the crisp taste of cloves on your tongue.

I loved Berkeley, but I never felt at home there. Somehow, even though I felt a great affection for the city and its inhabitants, I never felt as if I were a part of the organism. There was always something keeping me away, setting me apart from the normal course of events. I often wondered why it seemed as if I was cursed to stand apart, to walk alone . . . but now I have come to understand that it was merely my destiny, if such a word is appropriate. I don’t know if I believe in destiny but I know now that I was set apart for special things. There is no such thing as coincidence: I see that now.

The town is built around the University like a cocoon protecting a soft pulpy mass of flesh. The campus is set into the base of the hillside, with the cyclotron and the defense laboratories resting on the roof of the town, overlooking the entire bay. Because of the research they do up on the hill there are spies everywhere, but most of the students and faculty are unaware of their presence.

I met a spy once. It was during those happy and carefree days when I had managed, against all odds, to forget the constant and unremitting danger I lived with. It was the pills I took, the pills my mother made me take that dulled my senses and were fattening me for the eventual kill.

When I stopped taking them I began to perceive the world as I once had, with all the colors and sounds and shapes that I had forgotten. I had allowed myself to be lulled into a false sense of security, and as unforgivable as that was I knew I had no one to blame for this turn of events but myself.

There’s something strange in the Berkeley air. I don’t know if I could find it at another school, in another school-town in another state or country. But as you rise up on the gradually sloping eastern hill on which the town as built you also pass up and through and into a different state of mind, as if you are passing through and up and apart from the constraints and conceits of mundane life. College has its own mundane, its own sense of normalcy, but it is far removed from gas stations and pharmacies.

You ride a bus up from the freeway. If you took the freeway through to its terminus you’d either end up in San Francisco or San Jose. If you needed to go to either place you could simply take BART, but BART only stopped at Shattuck, a block west of the campus.

The closer you edge to the campus, the more conventional civilization begins to fall by the wayside. Amazingly, there are no fast food restaurants inside the campus or, in fact, anywhere east of Shattuck. Of course, you can find a Taco Bell, a McDonalds and Burger King all within about a quarter mile radius of each other. I had McDonalds every Wednesday afternoon and it was a treat after the bland and starchy stink of dorm food.

On the last block of University Avenue before you enter the University you pass Comic Relief (although I hear they have since moved) and a decent record store whose name escapes me. But then you reach the streetcorner right before the big gate and there’s an administrative building right there, rather large and clunky and God have mercy on you if you have to go in there.

The entrance to the University is laid out in a large U-shaped courtyard before you reach the actual roads that line the campus. Of course, the roads themselves are closed to most traffic, with the exception of emergency vehicles and groundskeepers and the like. As you head up University drive there’s a beautiful grove of trees to your immediate right, a hidden track of darkened greenery left to quiet and contemplation on warm spring days when the campus fills with the noise of city activity.

After the copse you pass two life sciences buildings. If you keep going due east you’ll pass the huge library complex set at the top of a beautiful northward sloping glade. It’s a straight shot to the stadium and the amphitheater, both set into the hill at the rear of the campus proper, directly under the grade that leads to the cyclotron.

But I usually turn right after the life sciences building, climbing a small hillock between the massive Dwinelle complex and the tiny Durant Hall. That’s one of the most beautiful places on campus, a small glade with green grass and trees with huge spreading leaves perfect for passing an hour or two with a book, watching the people pass. In the fall and the spring, that’s when the girls pass by with their sundresses on. Girls don’t wear slips anymore.

Of course when you pass by Dwinelle you’re almost to Sather Gate and once you pass through those great grand wrought iron archways you’re in Sproul Plaza and you’re in the full press of history and fully in the midst of the assembled student body. There are always people, always people at all times of the day and in all situations.

This is where the riots were held, the famous protests and the chants and the marches. Of course, all that’s in the past now. There are always some token politicos on the scene – it goes without saying – but the overriding emotion on this campus, and I assume on campuses across the country, is apathy. People work hard to get into these universities. They work hard once they’re in the universities. If they don’t work hard, they party. They don’t want to throw away their personal achievements or their equally important personal luxuries on some vague sense of broad responsibilities. There are just too many things to do, and no one cares. I didn’t, and knowing what I know now I can't say that my priorities were entirely misguided.

I’ve been to the campus at Santa Cruz and it’s really amazing how they designed it to be the polar opposite of Berkeley. It was built in the years immediately after the unrest of the nineteen-sixties, so it was planned without any central location, no unifying plaza like Berkeley had with Sproul. All you have is a string of disparate campuses set miles apart in the midst of a primeval forest. It lacks something very vital to the college experience, I think.

Opposite the Sproul building in the plaza is the King Student Union building. The University bookstore sits in the Union’s basement along with a few related retailers, the college memorabilia store and a small convenience outlet that sold cheap candy. There are also a few assembly rooms in the union as well as the ballroom. A large staircase curves down from the ballroom mezzanine.

I’ve been to the top floor of the Union exactly once, on a campus tour during my junior year of high school. It was a good trip. I was still taking my pills during that part of my life and I suppose I was distracted by any number of things. That is maybe why I made the decision to come to Berkeley.

Anyway, after a brief meeting with an enrollment executive, we dispersed and were given a few minutes to ourselves in the union building. I found an exterior porch to the side of the main meeting room, a small rooftop alcove facing west over the city of Berkeley and towards the bay. On a perfectly clear afternoon you can see the fifteen odd miles from the top of Berkeley on through to the Golden Gate Bridge, and if you catch the afternoon just right you can see the sun setting through distant gaps in high tension cables drawn and pulled half a century ago. That’s when I knew I wanted to go to Berkeley. I tried to take a picture but – of course – I ran out of film at just the wrong moment, and when I turned around the sun had moved and the image was gone, save for a lingering shiver in memory.

But memory is like that. It creeps and crawls like a chimera, tricking and taunting you from behind a curtain. You think you remember something but you don’t, not really, not really in any meaningful way. Memory can be an illusion, a cruel deception. Of course, this seems overwrought, like something in an adolescent diary. But its hard to feel anything but grim resentment towards the workings of your own mind when you know you’ve been set upon, betrayed and trapped by circumstance. They’ve been lying to me since the day I was born, and sometimes I want so badly to just accept the lies and the illusions, to convince myself that I’m happy because the world says I should be, that I should take my pills because I need to be healthy.

But I don’t want to be “healthy”. If I’m healthy then the men who killed my father, who killed 3,000 people in New York and countless thousands more across the world, will be able to get away with it.

Once I took apart one of those pills they send me in the mail. I cut the membrane open with an exacto knife and there was a small creature living inside it, a small pink worm with minuscule antennae sticking out of its forehead. When I opened the capsule there was a brief whiff of something pungent, like valerian root mixed with sulfur. I surmised that this was the creature’s atmosphere, this was the air it needed to survive in the pill until it could prosper in my innards.

After I saw this I was repulsed. I emptied my stomach in my wastebasket and lay on the hard industrial carpeted floor of my dorm and sweat in the cold for a quarter of an hour. I didn’t eat for two days, rather I flushed my body with the harshest laxatives I could find. I drank castor oil by the bottle. I gave myself repeated enemas, one after another.

Finally, when I was satisfied that I had done everything I could to flush the creatures out of my system I began a regimen of white rice and distilled water, which I kept to for a full month. I dropped twenty superfluous pounds and felt better than I had in ages. The spiritual visions that had almost left me forever returned with a vengeance, and I began once more to understand things which I had imagined forgotten.

Sometimes I tried to see if there were any bugs left in my system. Once I saw small shapes burrowing in the flesh of my forearm, so I took a knife and tried to dig them out. I never found them, however. If they are still there I can’t find them. Maybe they die and rot.

Berkeley is a beautiful city, a wonderful place to live and to learn. But there’s also something unbearably disingenuous here as well, something rotten and sticky and covered in vomit right at the very core. Sometimes when I would walk around in the night I would see things, I would see people doing things I didn’t understand, that couldn’t make sense. But I saw them nonetheless, and I had no choice but to try and reconcile what I had seen with that I desperately wished to believe was true in this world.

There are garbage trucks that run in the night, making their way unobserved through the tight city streets of America’s great cities. The trucks stop at a corner in a major metropolis and men in black leather jumpsuits pour out of the back. These men wear helmets that obscure their faces. They carry high-caliber machine rifles slung over their shoulders.

They pour into the ghettos and barrios and liquidate the homeless and the abandoned on America’s streets. They take the bodies and put them into the back of the truck where the remains are never seen again. People just disappear off the streets. I’ve never seen it but I’ve heard tell.

After Sproul you come up against the southern border of the campus and Bancroft Avenue. Bancroft runs all the way down back to Shattuck, where the movie theaters and the Barnes & Noble are. But right down the way out of the union and by the tree-lined sidewalk you find yourself on Telegraph Avenue, the heart and soul of the campus. When I dream of Berkeley, this is where my sleeping heart brings me.