My Online magazine died a sudden and apathetic death so I left San Francisco for Los Angeles and was hired to write investigative pieces for a major weekly. My first assignment was to infiltrate the community of junkies and vagabonds in the gutters of downtown Los Angeles and root out the source of the plague. “Get in there and talk to the drifters, the diseased,” my editor told me. “I want this to be as oblique and sprawling as Los Angeles itself. Dig deep into the sewers, become a part of their world. I want to feel these people come alive, I want to know why their life seems to be a life so depreciated that even death rinses its hands of it.” He was very old and terse and hardened by a long career in news. “I see great things for you, young man,” he told me in his office. “No more wasting energy on this time travel nonsense. This piece you’re about to write, it’s the reason you became a journalist in the first place. Think about it. You’ll be doing a great service to the community, to the world.” He looked out to the newsroom and the flashing digital tickers strung up on the walls, the television monitors feeding in images from all over the globe. “I’ve been in the game a long time, son,” he said. “I’ve been through a lot of changes and I certainly don’t have much time left.” He leaned against his desk and fixed me with a firm glare. “I’ve always wanted to win a Pultizer.”
I swallowed hard and looked away from him. “That’s a pretty lofty expectation, sir,” I said.
“You can do it, son,” he said. “I’ve read your stuff, you’re a tremendous writer. You just need some guidance and support. Someone to get you away from this obsession with time travel.”
“And you just want me to get involved with the homeless of Los Angeles, the crack addicts, the lowlifes, the drunks. You want me to record what I see.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Let the story develop itself. This isn’t your first dance, you know what you’re doing. You’re a trained journalist. You’ve been out there writing for a few years now.”
I sighed. Yes sir, I said, and stood.
“It’s gonna be great,” he said, smiling, patting me on the back and leading me out of his office. “You call me at any time, let me know what you need. Just remember,” and he raised one arm and looked up to the fluorescent lights and said, “I see Pulitzer.” I wanted to ask him if he meant the prize for journalistic excellence or if he was actually seeing the ghost of Joseph Pulitzer floating there above us, shaking his head or smiling or pointing a finger, but instead I just said, Yes sir, and walked out into the sunshine.
*
“Hey honey,” I said. “You know where can I score a little rock around here?”
Get the hell out of here before I call the cops, the woman said, and I walked out of MacArthur Park feeling frustrated and distraught. I’d spent the past three days traveling about the city in my tattered and filthy clothes asking around, trying to get someone to embrace me, to point me in the right direction. I’d almost been arrested twice, once for urinating against the side of a building and once for drinking a brown-bagged bottle of Early Times at the bus stop. Nobody would cooperate, not the bus drivers or the gaunt ghost riders on the MTA, not the scalp and groin scratchers in the public libraries, not the Blacks in the ghettoes of Inglewood or the Mexicans crusted in dust and sweat out in Chavez Ravine. I thought I must be doing it all wrong, I was trying too hard, or maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. I was beginning to feel desperate and perhaps that was why I got my first lead, because desperation is equally as contagious as it is egregious, and so by dusk on that third day I was sitting against a brick wall in the alley shadows of Sunset next to a homeless man named Dutch watching the tourists and the Hollywood wannabees strut the glittering concrete fantastic.
“We’re in the thick of a massive social reversal,” he said.
I took a hefty sip from my bottle of Schnapps and offered it to him. He shook his head. “What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean there are roughly eighty-two thousand people sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles on any given night. Eighty-two thousand. Think about that, man. Did you know that twenty percent of those eighty-two thousand are holding Bachelor’s degrees?”
I looked over at him. He was heavily bearded, late thirties. His eyes were a stark aquamarine but their depth appeared to be concealed behind something, a clarity emerging randomly, infrequently, at inopportune times, leaving whoever was looking at him feeling as though they had just missed him, he was just out of their reach.
“And so the greatest minds of my generation, as Ginsberg would have said, are often relegated to dark alleys and rat-infested tenement basements, sitting in the crusts of their own shit, watching the meat of the world parade inconsequentially about their obsessions, namely materialism and the Image, and this is what propels the machine of American life. Not science or reasoned discussion or careful deliberation, not the classics. Our core system of value judgments has been reversed, it’s been tossed on top of its head.”
Just then another homeless man came stumbling around the corner and sat next to us. He was old and very drunk. Hey Dutchie, he said, trying to focus his eyes on me. It was getting dark in the alley. I cain’t fuckin sleep, he said.
“So what are you, a nihilist?” I asked Dutch.
“I am everything and nothing,” he said. “Did you hear about the architect?”
I shook my head. What architect, I said.
“Some famous architect died here in the city last night. One of the most famous in the world. Rigged up one of his buildings full of explosives and blew it to the stars, him still inside.”
I remembered hearing something like an explosion the night before. “I might have heard it,” I said, looking up at the dark pocket of sky above. The old drunk started snoring.
“That was him, the architect. Leaving this world. Boom.”
“Why’d he do it.”
“Who knows why anyone does anything,” he said, and stood up, his silhouette like a black tongue in the night.
“Where are you going?”
“Let old Charlie sleep it off. I’m gonna take a walk.”
“Hold on, I’ll join you,” I said, and stood. “What do you think about time travel?”
*
That night I learned a lot more about Dutch, about how he he’d just been tenured a professorship in NYU’s philosophy department when 9/11 happened. “If that’s not a call to arms,” he told me, “I don’t know what is.” He enlisted in the Marine Corps and was shipped to the most dangerous town in northern Iraq, but that’s where his memory began failing him. “I must have suffered some sort of head trauma,” he said. “Because I don’t remember anything after that.”
He said he ran out of money and ended up on the streets without knowledge of where he was from or any family he may have had. “I don’t even remember my own name. A buddy on the streets started calling me Dutch, and so that’s what I called myself.”
“Why didn’t you try teaching again?”
We sat huddled in the rain beneath an awning and watched a cocktail of dirty water swirl about the gutter.
“Man, I could never go back to the way things were,” he said, and then he was quiet again. He looked out to the water falling from the endless gray and there was something odd about Dutch, something I couldn’t quite grasp, as if he weren’t being fully honest with me and never had been, or as if he’d been living on the streets as a cover for something else, just as I was. I wondered if he thought the same things about me, I wondered if he already had me figured out.
*
Santa Monica Boulevard became the great vein of our discourse. We plodded southwest through the din and sun with traffic peeling past us, horns and stereo systems blaring, the smell of the surf tugging our complacent souls. Dutch was like some great orator concealed behind that ratted beard, his face stoic and wizened by the elements. He was like a seer or otherwise erudite traveler educated by a life on the streets of the world, or, as he claimed, a life he could no longer recall.
“Time is an illusion,” he told me. “It’s like Atlantis, or hell. These things don’t exist outside of the subjective willing them into being. So how could someone possibly travel through them?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I guess it could be possible on some subconscious plane, but that’s the only way, through something like dreams or the Freudian psychic apparatus.”
“So then what is this?” I asked, gesturing to the city around us. “How does this moment become the past, become a memory, if there’s no such thing as time? And couldn’t you say that just by living through this combination of atomic madness and cellular activity and thought, the emotion and temporal substance, couldn’t you say that by experiencing all these things that we are traveling through time, theoretically speaking?”
“No,” he said. “I couldn’t. I’m a philosopher, we don’t operate with such loose jargon. You could say that, though. You could say anything you wanted to say. And to answer your question, this air and our weaving through it, this atomic and cellular madness, or whatever you call it, it’s exactly what you said: experience. It’s our sensory data communicating with our bodies, and it results from knowledge both innate and learned. You have to remember: Time is a construct of man, an idea that conforms with our experiences in order to better understand them.”
“Time is universal to all creatures, all languages and modes of consciousness,” I said. “There will always be a past and present. It’s just that there are different names for them.”
“No, you’re wrong. Time is not a universal language. In order for that to be true, it would have to exist independently of the human mind.”
“It does, just as other minds exist independently of one another.”
“Prove it.”
“This is sophistry,” I said, and looked up at the sky. It was high and cloudless, an endless cyanic tribute to other worlds, other creatures ruminating these selfsame ideas.
“No,” he said. “It’s reasoned dialogue. Tell me, we’ve been walking through this city for almost two days now, slowly, or rather, at our own Socratic pace. I’ll remember this tomorrow just as you will. You’ll recall this exact moment, me speaking over the roar of traffic in this quadrangle, all the irregular cadences competing with one another, my body slightly facing yours with the palm trees jouncing in the breeze, and it will be just like any other memory you have. Every other experience of your life. Since your imagination is the principal guide through your projected memories, you can add or subtract anything you want. This is why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable, because we can bend and shape what we remember. We can invent or suppress things.” He stopped walking and faced me fully, staring me in the face.
“Make no mistake, man. What you’ve defined in your mind as memory, the past, the projections you’re manipulating, this is time, brother. This is the past, the present, and the future, the holy trinity of human invention. Memory is time.”
Then we started walking again.
*
Dutch didn’t fit the profile of a typical homeless person. His demeanor and his habits didn’t appear to be accustomed to a life on the streets. He didn’t beg for alms and he didn’t drink. He ate from the dumpsters just as I did, but only sparingly, swiftly, as if he were embarrassed. Whenever we encountered other vagrants on the streets cloistered in their dirty rags, all of them seemed to know Dutch, calling his name and raising their bottles or cans in salute. He’d always respond with a smile and subtle nod of the head, but nothing more. How long have you been in L.A., I asked him. “A couple months,” he said. “But I’m on my way out.” Where are you headed, I asked him. “Everywhere and nowhere,” he said.
*
We got to the beach at dusk and stood on the promenade watching the out-of-towners click their handsome postcard snapshots and the roller skaters slice through the withering crowds of families packing up to head home. The sun was winking out over the water, casting its pale red spell over the cloudless world and Dutch and I were allowed a wide berth on our march toward the pier.
“But if there was something like time and you somehow figured out a way to maneuver through it—”
“Give it a rest,” he said, and we walked to the edge of the surf where underneath the massive pier a man called out to us from far back in the shadows. I strained my eyes over to where the sand climbed up to the wooden planks and I could make out a few darkened figures lurking together. Dutch and I walked up to them with our feet melting in the sand and we were greeted with the whites of eyes and the sour smell of marijuana smoke. “Jesus, Dutch,” a man said, emerging from the darkness. “It’s you. We thought you two were the fucken cops for a second.” He patted Dutch on the back and handed him a joint. Dutch took it and started smoking and the two of them walked down to the water, laughing and talking quietly. Who are you, a woman’s voice asked me from the shadows. Nobody, I said, looking out to the water like blood or wine or the underside of an alien sea. Well, come over here, Nobody, and have a drink, the woman said. I stood listening to the foamy water lick the beach and then I walked up toward the blinking whites of eyes, the muffled laughter like a wrinkled invitation to a looming disaster both morbid and enchanting.
*
Dark night, stumbling about the shadows, stumbling about myself. The sounds of surf, the slow roll and hiss. I had been cold but was cold no longer. Roll and hiss, heave and retract. I sat heavily. A soft voice in my ear, warm breath, hot snaking tongue. Just relax, Nobody, she said. Just relax. Her hand at my belt, tugging softly. I lied back in the sand. Someone passed me a joint and I took a long slow drag, wafting upward with the smoke toward the planks and through the cracks, outside myself, slipping between everything. Slow roll and hiss. I took another drag and passed the joint to the woman but her head was in my lap, bobbing cold and wet. Someone take this fucken thing, I said, and closed my eyes. When I opened them it was still night and two or three figures kneeled over me, the whites of their eyes glowing. You got some wicked veins, Nobody, the woman said, and my body jerked at the slight prick in my arm. The woman giggled and then all of them began laughing, voices steadily rising like a breeze into storm, light’s subterfuge in the depths of night, and I’m reeling, falling backward into myself. Echoes of their laughter chasing me through the tunnels of time and building into a giant wall of sizzling ice, and I’m sinking, sinking, that mutated cackling of separate creatures combined into one, peeling at the edges of the world in a cascade of sound and darkness. I tried to open my eyes and I thought I saw the white face of a clock, its hands spinning forward, out of control, and I floated up to it, I could almost reach out to it and seize its mad progression with my dirt-creased fingers.
*
Aswim in an ocean of green glass, I stopped to breathe, just to breathe. The sun burned bright white directly overhead and I was alone out there treading the sea but I was not afraid. I ducked back into the water and continued swimming my rhythmic pace and the next time I looked up I was approaching a shore of white sand backgrounded by a line of dark foliage. I swam forward until I stepped out of that crystalline world as if out of a dream and everyone I ever knew was there on the beach to greet me. I paused shorebound with the sun warming my bare body and I looked up to all the faces watching me, three smiling, one crying, some faces full of guile or grief or longing, and I acknowledged them one and all and walked toward them and then past them to the forest where darkness and mystery and solitude awaited my Zarathustran meditations. I could feel the eyes of all the people on my back and a voice from the forest like a soft breeze tickled my skin, saying, Tree girl lives, tree girl lives. I crossed the threshold from light into dark just as life into death and all around me there was silence and shadow growing darker, deeper, without end. Soon I was cloaked entire and the voice repeated itself and I was frightened, I was alone. There is a bidding war underway for my soul, I thought. There are interested parties throughout the moral sphere, if there is such a thing, if morality is more than a human construct. Just then I saw a white flash like a lightning bolt slice into the blackness and for an instant the world was illuminated and all around there were snakes, writhing and sucking, snakes with red skin and white eyes in the trees and snakes hanging down from above and I began to panic, I started running. I had the deep empty feeling that nothing was ever going to make sense, not time nor my own ideas nor anything at all, ever, and somehow I understood this to be the purpose of life: calamity and confusion and total incomprehension. I kept running and running until my chest burned and thunder growled overhead and I ran until some weak semblance of light appeared straight ahead. I ran to it with tears in my eyes and rain beginning to fall in burning synaptic bursts on my head, my face. The light grew brighter and soon I could see exactly where I was running and that the snakes had disappeared. I slowed to a jog and then a walk, trying to regain strength, breathing heavily, and I was very thirsty. The forest gave way to a jungle with sunlight streaking in through the thick overhead growth, and the rain continued to fall, the drops cooler now, and I turned my head up to the water pouring into the jungle and I opened my mouth, drinking it down in giant mouthfuls, and then the rain fell harder, heavier, with thunder overhead like colliding worlds or other cosmic concussions. I looked for a place to take cover and saw a small cave hidden in the brush overgrown with moss and so I ducked into the darkness, listening for something inside, anything. There were no sounds save for a whisper of warm air escaping the blackness and so I crawled deeper inside, feeling my way through with my hands, leaving the jungle behind and trying to taste the salty air for any danger, and somewhere up ahead in the darkness I saw a small wavering light like a candle flame. As I crawled closer to the light I could make out a little room with a large basin blackened with blood and the body of a man hanging upside-down from chains above it, swaying softly. Get out of here, Nobody, a voice said from behind me. You don’t belong here. It was Dutch’s voice but when I turned around to face him there was no one there and then out of the darkness emerged a hairless head followed by its body pale and thin, and the face revealed itself smiling with eyes of pure depthless black and the mouth on the face said to me: Tree girl lives, and then I looked over to the dead man hanging in its bloody chains and the body was mine. My dead self came alive and looked up at me with eyes that weren’t mine but somehow Dutch’s, and the body folded upward at the waist to unchain its ankles and it fell into the tub with a splash of blood and visceral matter and when it lunged at me I fainted from fear. When I woke up I was back underneath the pier and Dutch was sitting next to me in the darkness, watching the moon’s reflection slice cold and white across the water. Dutch drank slowly from a can of beer and looked over to me and he looked different, he had shaved and was wearing a baseball cap and it was raining out on the beach. Who are you, he said to me. I tried to speak but my mouth was dry and I couldn’t control my breathing and then Dutch said, I don’t trust you, and he sank a needle into my arm and I dismounted that rigid plane to where I stood beneath an awning looking up to a brown sky as it flooded the golden plains stretched out before me. A cool breeze bellowed from far off and lightning licked the sky in ivory tongues. The sheer electric power of the moment startled me into a deep meditation where I was neither here nor there beneath the brown sky but nowhere in particular, a stranger in all worlds, oddly contented. I recalled a dream I’d had during my extended stay in Las Vegas about one year (five years? one hundred-five years?) ago, and the dream was precisely this moment in time, and I knew I would return from my intergalactic travels without harm, for I emerged that dream and the storm alive but intimate with death and restless, very restless. The sky began to churn and fold upon itself and soon the storm grew into an immense divine mass and the rain blew sideways into the shelter of my awning, into my face and mouth. It tasted of blood and hunger and I began to float upward, my feet simply lifted off the ground and carried me up into the swirling brown bedlam, the communication of electric light and monstrous chatter, upward to the sky’s three or four or infinite vortices, my body suspended by piano wire or frozen threads of blood. A woman’s voice calmed me and maybe the voice was in my head or perhaps it was in the sky, it was above the sky, it was the sky itself, and the voice said, calmly, Erase, erase. And that is what I tried to do, floating upward through the funnel.
*
I woke at dawn alone on the beach with the waves stumbling cold and drunk into my legs. I tried to sit up and couldn’t but looked out to the gray-blue line on the horizon, wondering where I was and feeling as though I’d traveled a great distance. There was nobody around me, there was no pier, no lookout station. I was feverish and shaky and I leaned over onto my side and vomited, retching up bile and mucous. I closed my eyes and Dutch’s voice said to me softly either from a dream or some crippled corner of my imagination: I destroy.
I lied there shaking until I passed out.
*
There was a needle in my arm when I opened my eyes and I was seated on the moonlit veranda of a very large house. I turned my head to the side and saw Dutch’s silhouette bathed in pale glow. Where are we, I said. A friend’s house on Mulholland, he said. He was clean shaven and his hair was combed, slicked straight back. A woman with blonde hair walked over to us from inside the house and sat on Dutch’s lap. What are we going to do with him, baby, she said, and I recognized her voice as the woman from beneath the pier. Feed him to somebody, I guess, he said, and laughed. I’m a journalist, I told them, looking up to the moon. We know, Dutch said, and he reached over to me, brushing my hair from my eyes with great tenderness. We know.
*
I woke up to a policeman pissing on me through the bars of a jail cell. I covered my face and rolled onto my side, saying, Please stop. The policeman finished and dripped the last of his piss onto the ground and zipped himself. I was soaking wet and very cold and someone asked me from far away, What is the purpose of life, or no, what is the most poisonous thing in the universe, and it was Dutch’s voice. A memory flashed back to me, either a memory from real life or a memory from a dream and I was sitting crouched in some dark room with music screaming from a speaker right by my face and I was preparing a syringe of heroin. The music stopped suddenly and I heard babies crying, at least three babies or maybe more crying and screaming and then I began to laugh, sticking the needle into my arm and dropping the plunger. The music began playing again, jarring me awake and another cop walked over to me and started pissing in my face, pissing in my eyes and mouth, both cops laughing, laughing. I told them I was a journalist for the Los Angeles Communiqué and that they should call my editor. I gave them the phone number and lied on the ground, shivering. There were no other prisoners in the cell. Sure you are, one of the cops said. Just make the call, I said, and fell asleep. When I woke up one of the policemen was handing me a telephone receiver through the bars.
“Who is this?” my editor said.
“It’s me,” I say.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“I’ve been out, gathering material.” One of the cops snorted and laughed.
“You sound terrible. Where are you?”
“Some jail.”
“Jail?”
“Come get me?” I coughed.
“Jesus, son,” he said. “I gave up on you. I gave up on the story.”
“No,” I said. “You can’t. I’ve been working this whole time.” A sudden wave of nausea gripped me and I leaned over and vomited. Blood and bile and other people’s piss. I wiped my mouth. “I need medical attention.”
“Jesus.”
“I’ve got some really good material to begin writing.”
“Begin writing? Son, you’ve been gone for two months.”
“Two months,” I said, and the receiver slipped from my hand. I picked it back up, groaning.
“Where are you?”
“In jail.”
“Which one?”
I asked the policemen where I was at. They looked at each other and one of them said, Tell him you’re at Cedars-Sinai. The other officer stood and left the room. The one who had spoken took his pistol from its holster and pointed it at me, glaring.
“I’m at Cedars-Sinai,” I said into the phone, watching the cop. He put the gun back in the holster.
“I’m on my way,” my editor said, and hung up. I tossed the receiver through the bars and rolled over onto my side. The concrete was wet and cold on my face. I tried to focus on breathing through the pain in my chest. The two policemen slammed open the cell door and picked me up. They took me outside into the sunlight and threw me in the back of a police cruiser. The next thing I remember was watching the cruiser peel away into the vaporous afternoon as a team of doctors lifted me from the ground up onto a gurney and rushed me inside, one of them saying, Jesus, this guy stinks.
*
My editor was there in the hospital, eyeing me.
“If I live to regret this,” he said.
“Where am I,” I said.
“Cedars,” he said.
I tried to sit up to better see him and a sharp pain shredded my guts.
“Just relax,” he said. Just relax, Nobody, I thought.
A doctor walked in and looked down at me. How do you feel, he asked.
I don’t, I said.
You’re very lucky, he said. Probably you shouldn’t be alive right now.
I didn’t say anything.
When was your last fix, he said.
I don’t know.
He injected something into a plastic tube connected to my wrist and I noticed that my hands and arms were blanketed with sores and rashes. There was a large window next to me, the sun soaking through it. I tried to think, tried to set my mind down gently upon some level plane of thought. I have to piss, I said. You’re catheterized, said the doctor. Just let go.
“When could you start writing,” my editor asked me. He stood across the room with his arms crossed. He looked very tired.
“I just need a pad and pen,” I said.
“I’ll be back.” He left the room. Four days later I was preparing to leave the hospital and he was sitting in the waiting room as I walked out.
“I’ve got some preliminary notes,” I said. He led me outside to a sedan and I got inside.
“This better be one hell of a story, son,” he said. He dropped me off at my apartment where I collected the two months worth of mail and showered and slept, dreaming of time travel, feeling convinced that coursing across these jagged days and nights would be a lot like that first euphoric rush of heroin in the blood, it would be like an upward climb through varied states of consciousness in one sudden leap, and yet it would also be like falling down a ladder with my limbs flailing at the rungs as they sped past. When I woke I sat down at my notebook computer and immediately began writing from memory, consulting my notes only periodically. I used Dutch as my protagonist, writing about his nomadic life and his heroic tales of woe just as he had told them to me. I was flooded by flashing memories of myself crouched in abandoned warehouses and behind park bushes, shooting up. Flashes of me high out of my mind on the MTA with children staring at me, flashes of me with my pants bunched about my ankles atop women drugged and unconscious, all the attitudes of laughter and wickedness and perversion. I wrote about Dutch and his amnesia without letting my own ambivalence cloud or decompose my journalist ethics. I didn’t like Dutch, I was afraid of him, and I certainly didn’t trust him. But I wrote down his story as best I could remember it, according to the way he had told it to me.
Some time after dark I stopped typing to use the toilet and I realized I’d written over four thousand words. I ate ravenously before dialing my editor’s office. I’ve got something, I said. Well then send it to me, he said. I e-mailed him a copy of the draft and showered and fell into a deep dreamless sleep. My phone woke me minutes later with my editor telling me, This is good, he said. This is really good. Okay, I said, exhausted.
“I want to clean this up and run it as soon as possible,” he said. “Were is this Dutch guy?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on,” he said. “Did you make this shit up?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not. And forget you for even asking that. All I’ve been through.”
“Okay,” he said, clearing his throat. “But we gotta find him. I don’t want to be the next New Republic, running these stories about made-up people. I won’t print a story I can’t confirm.”
“I understand,” I said.
“We gotta find him.”
“Sir,” I said. “I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t have the slightest idea where he is. He could be anywhere in the world.”
“You’ve got ten days to find him,” he said. “Then I can decide whether or not to run the piece. Come into the office, I’ll get you an expense account rigged up.”
“Sir,” I said. “I quit.”
He paused. “You quit.”
“I’m done, I’ve got to leave this town. I can’t be here anymore.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Keep the story,” I said. “It’s yours to do whatever you want with. And it’s all true, you’ve got my word.”
“I don’t believe this,” he said. “Your word.”
“Thanks for everything,” I said. “I’m sorry if I let you down.” I hung up.
Most of the stuff in my apartment was still in boxes. I took each box outside one at a time and tossed them into the dumpsters. Everything I’d collected through the years since college. Books and hats, framed photographs and mementos. Notes. When all the boxes were gone I went through my closet and threw away all my clothes. Then I sat down with a hammer and screwdriver and took apart all my furniture, piece by piece, filling the dumpsters with the remnants of my former life.
I took my valuables down to a pawn shop and exchanged them for cash. Storm clouds lingered and swelled over Santa Monica. I recalled a woman’s voice from a recent dream, telling me to Erase, erase. I found a bicycle shop just outside of town and bought the best bike I could afford, loading it into the back of my pickup. Nice bike, mister, a voice said from behind me. I turned around and a boy was watching me, squinting and smiling. Thanks, I said, and winked at him. Then I got into the pickup and started it and hit pavement eastward with the storm clouds looming in my rearview.
