Author: TJ McAvoy

Between the city and the hills the detective drove through the scorched earth, passing street signs with names blurred and battered, past vagrants starving, eyes aglow, past the walking dead and the actual dead, rotting atop the layers of the previously dead and decayed. The detective pulled the car left onto a street familiar to the young man and yet not familiar, as if he had traveled backward or forward in time many years and saw how the street had changed, the subtle ways time shapes the physical world. What do you want me to do, said the detective. He drove up through the twisting mountain road and the young man craned his neck to view the summit, imagining large winged creatures and cities made of tomb-lined streets where history is paved with the ground bones of the dead.

The peak of Gorgola Hill thrust upward into black clouds and orange sky and the young man said, I want you to tell me you’ve got this, that you’ll take it from here. And in the road before them a huge black bird with the mouth of a dog landed and scowled at them and the detective steered the car around it, the young man staring into its eyes as they passed.

I want you to say, She’s alive, kid. She’s always been alive. And then you’ll motion for her to come out from behind the door or wherever so that I can see her, I can sleep and dream peacefully again, I can eat and breathe and get on with my life.

There were fewer dead in the road the higher the car climbed and the detective pushed on harder, faster, weaving through the tricky curves as if down a slide, and the young man noticed fire up ahead, fire in the road and trees, fire eating the world in great red and orange waves, and the detective rode the vehicle headlong into the wall of flames with his hands gripping the wheel tightly, fire all around them, a world of light and incredible heat. The engine ran harder and louder until it burst with flames screaming into the car interior, fire swallowing everything, and the detective laughed, melting.

*

He was sweating and cold and alone in the dark and he closed his eyes again, breathing. For some reason the word RESTRAINT appeared in his mind, floating there white on black, almost as if he could reach up and touch the letters, rearrange them. There was a knock on his door and his mother saying, What time do you need to be at work. He swallowed and breathed deeply. I’m off today, he said.

His mother cracked the door open, looking in at him. Honey, she said. You’ve been off all week. I’m tired mom, he said, and turned over on his side.

*

It was a Sunday when he gassed up his rusted station wagon and drove though a wind shorn highway back up to Gorgola Hill. The trees dipped and shook and debris sprinted through the narrow dirt lane and the young man looked up to the sky low and gray, churning and rumbling like the angry belly of a god. He had the odd sensation he was entering something. He steered the car through the curves with raindrops disintegrating on his windshield and despite the obvious danger he never once considered heading back down the mountain. When he finally got to the clearing he parked the car and killed the engine, listening to the sounds of rain and wind and all the other attitudes of nature’s fury. He pulled out his cellular phone and dialed the detective but there was no answer.

When the rain seemed to have stopped he got out of the car and the force of the wind pushed him upright, reeling. Jesus, he said, and managed to pull up the hood of his windbreaker. He thrust his hands in his pockets and leaned into the wind with his head down, looking for tracks, looking for signs of a struggle, drops of blood, anything that may stand out or something he’d overlooked the last time. He looked up at the sky with his hood whipping in his ears and he realized for the first time how stupid this was.

Lightning like giant capillaries sparked and snapped about the shifting charcoal sky. It began to rain again. The young man remembered the dream he’d had the night before or the night before that in which he was standing in the exact same place as he was now, only in the dream it was night, the sky was total black, and he looked over to the ledge where he saw the backs of two people, both of them seated with their legs dangling over the precipice. He walked toward them now just as in the dream and he could clearly see the figure on the left was Norma Jean, her stringy black hair and wire thin frame, but the figure to her right was hidden behind the jutting rock, and as the young man walked closer to the ledge just behind the two seated figures a violent surge of wind rained down upon his back like a hammer and forced him to the ground.

He picked his head up from the dirt and saw that he was just inches from the ledge. He got to his feet carefully and looked to where the two forms had been and he knew there was no mistaking that the person Norma Jean had been seated next to was a woman with blonde hair.

*

To read this chapter in its entirety, buy the novel when it’s published.

The architect glanced about the wide catacombs of the skyscraper, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. Just don’t tie me up, he said. I can’t stand to have my limbs restrained. He peered into the shadows crosshatched by rows of steel beams wrapped in stacks of explosives.

The dark haired man led him to a pair of folding chairs beneath a faint swaying bulb. Nobody’s getting tied up, the dark haired man said. Have a seat. Can I get you some water or coffee? No, the architect said. No thank you. His voice echoed. The other men disappeared back through the door, leaving the architect alone with the dark haired man.

My name’s Christian, the dark haired man said. But no one knows that. No one’s ever even called me that.

So what do people call you, the architect said, and sat on one of the folding chairs. The room was very cold.

Well, some people call me Dutch, said the dark haired man, and sat across from the architect, scooting the chair close so that the knees of the men almost touched.

Why do they call you that? The architect peered into the darkness of that immense basement, the deep shadowed recesses, looking for glowing eyes or white knuckled hands holding glinting objects. His flashing and muted nightmare assassins. The room was quiet save for their voices and it smelled of ether and cordite, sawdust and alcohol and other exotic fragrances he could not place.

I’m not completely sure why people call me that, Dutch said, leaning back in his seat and looking up at the light bulb. I don’t know who started it or even when it started. Might have been during the war, I don’t know. Everything was during the war.

Would you rather I called you Christian, or Dutch? the architect said. Or, if you prefer, I could call you something else. Or nothing at all.

One of the men came back through the door and closed it softly. He walked over and whispered something into Dutch’s ear. The man left the room again.

Names are irrelevant, Dutch said. They have no power. Faces have power, actions have even more. But I’d like it if you called me Christian. I’d be honored if you were the first.

The architect nodded. Very well, he said. He cracked his knuckles and looked down to his hands. He was confused, nervous. Since when did architects become the target of kidnappings, he thought.

I’m a big fan of yours, Dutch said. I’ve been following your career since the Equilibrium in Chicago. You’re an unbelievably gifted artist.

Thank you, the architect said.

I love architecture in general, Dutch said. It’s by far my favorite of the arts. It’s the only truly functional form of art. By its very definition it is forced into expediency. This is its real value, what sets it apart. It’s the only true living, breathing art.

The architect didn’t say anything.

The Neocron in London. The Mire Hotel in Vegas. What many consider your master work, the Paradigm Towers in New York City. Their command, their governance over the city. I know the new millennium is young but your towers have helped to firmly re-entrench New York City as the secular capitol of the world.

The architect leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. He looked down to Christian’s hands, then back up to his face.

But this building is easily my favorite. I’ve been infatuated with it since the planning phase. You’re a follower of art in your own right, you know what it’s like. People follow an artist’s career as part of a small community. They dig and prod and try to immerse themselves in everything the artist has done through the years. Major projects, side projects. Even projects that never materialized. These followers or devotees want to be able to identify their artist’s signature, they want to feel connected, involved. Their awe and reverence becomes a part of their biological makeup. Soon they can even begin to see themselves rendered in the work. And of course each work speaks differently to every member of the community. One may identify with a work that the other followers may not necessarily see as vital to the collection. So on and so forth.

Dutch leaned back in his chair. He stared into the architect’s face and took a deep breath.

But on the contrary, he continued, this building more than any of the others represents for me a significant departure from self. Perhaps this is why I like it so much. When I look up at this structure from below or from a few blocks out I’m stricken with the idea that man may not have the size or power to confront nature, he may not even have the right to open dialogue with it. But it shows me that the human mind is at least capable of defending itself against the unpredictable wrath of the universe, it can withstand the inexorable crush of god’s will.

The architect remembered back to the first time someone tried to explain how his work made them feel. It was a young woman in drafting class back in college, an underclasswoman. She sat next to him and one afternoon he was immersed in his work and didn’t notice her staring over at what he was drafting. A lifeboat, she said, pulling him out of his creative trance. I’m sorry, he said to her. A lifeboat, she repeated. Looking at that drawing makes me feel like I’m on a lifeboat. The architect looked down at his drawing and then back to the woman’s face. She smiled. But I’m not sure if I’m saving someone or the one being saved, she said.

It’s all so very simple, Dutch said. It’s such a brilliant idea because of its simplicity. A skyscraper with a structural system based on the concept of giant springs, able to withstand large scale tectonic movement. Obviously vital to cities like Los Angeles or otherwise massive metropolitan areas on or near fault lines. And such a gorgeous structure, immersing and almost camouflaging itself into the city around it, atop it, if you will. A city known for its exhibition, and yet here’s this world-class skyscraper trying to hide itself. Built and maintained with far less energy than any other building of its size in the world, in history. It’s not only an achievement for Los Angeles and the environmental community at large, for businesspeople and realtors and the state of California, but an achievement for the world, for the architecture of a new millennium, for a human race geared toward reinvesting resources in the planet.

What exactly do you want, Christian? the architect said.

Dutch didn’t say anything. He stood and thrust his hands in his pockets and paced the area behind his chair.

I want what everyone wants, he said. Including you. The rich, the poor, the lost, the focused. I want what they want. I want more time.

You want more time for what?

Well, the what is irrelevant, sir. I think as a culture we all need to be more concerned with why. It’s the why that really matters. It’s always the why. Something happens in your life, more or less to you, you want to know why. You get mugged and maybe the first instinct you have is to run or fight or maybe tell the cops but when you’re alone for that first time afterward, secure, reflecting, you want to know why it had to happen to you. You want to know why your brother had to die of cancer, you want to know why your wife was hit by that taxi. When you read the newspaper, you’re given the particulars, the what, when, where, who and how. This is how journalists are trained, this is what they’re supposed to do. But rarely are you given the why of the story until after the details of the investigation are released, after the reporters pry and find it all out. The newspapers don’t tell you why the politician meandered from his wife of twenty years into the arms of a younger woman just as they don’t tell you why some nations will forever try and bomb each other into the earth’s mantle. It’s the responsibility of the reader to assemble the facts and construct the why. This is what they’re trying to do in the first place, this is why they’re reading, because they want to know why things are happening the way they happen. They want to try and make sense of the world, fit it all into a sensible narrative.

What does this have to do with me, the architect thought. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the bulb swinging lightly, the chain disappearing upward into darkness. He remembered a dream he’d had a few nights earlier, maybe it was a week or two weeks, a dream where he was staring at  a small hole in his living room wall. He’d never seen the hole before and he sat on his couch staring at it, trying to figure out when it got there, what could have possibly caused a hole so large and almost perfectly round halfway up the wall. He walked slowly to the wall and put his eye up to the hole and inside was a cylinder made of green and black glass. He tried to peer deep into it, see what was on the other side. But it was too dark, the cylinder was too long. He understood that the key to time travel was somewhere down that tube, the ability to leap through folds of light and space was just beyond his vision. He woke in the dark that night and stumbled into the living room. He slid his hands over the wall and was not surprised to find a small nick in the paint where the hole had been in his dream, as if the cylinder’s exit had been painted over and sealed.

To read this chapter in its entirety, buy a copy of the novelonce it’s published.

I woke up in the hospital with my legs wrapped in bandages and my wife sitting next to my bed, saying, Your father wanted you to have this. She reached over and placed my father’s old black fedora on my head, pressing it down comfortably and sobbing uncontrollably, telling me, Jesus, you look just like him. She stood up with her chest heaving and the sun leaking through the hospital room window and said with her eyes red and streaming, I’m leaving.

“Where?” I managed to say, the word coagulated in my throat. She told me through her sobs that she’d caused too much suffering here, she has to leave, and then she left the room guided by howls of despair echoing all the way down the hall and back, leaving me alone with her dying voice to distill my memories and cringe at the sharp cosmetic pains in my legs.

The doctor walked into the room smiling. Nice hat, he said. What’s happened to my father, I asked him. He ignored my question and looked down to a file open in his hands and said, I’ve got some good news and bad news. Don’t we all, I said.

“The good news,” he said, “is the fire mostly just burned up your pants. Your legs sustained superficial burns from the thighs down. Very little serious damage, and none of it permanent. And today you’re a local hero.” He reached over to my bedside table for a remote control and pointed it at the TV up on the wall, the television flashing video images from the fire, my house a volcano in the night, a machine of roaring light and smoke. The video looked like raw amateur footage from a mobile phone or some other compact device and the lens panned up to the sky awash in rolling white and gray smoke blackened at the edges, and then it swept over the lawn and my father lying unconscious in his boxer shorts looking as white as the ivory cross on his future grave. I followed the camera as it zoomed in to a figure stumbling from the front door of the eruption, and it’s me with my wife slung onto my back, a hobbling two-headed creature bathed in black and carrying the flames out with it, a fugitive from hell. The crowd surrounding the cameraperson scattered its awed noises as I dropped my wife on the lawn, blurred splotches edited into the video to cover her exposed breasts and genitalia. Then the camera zoomed out again as I collapsed onto the lawn with my legs on fire and either I’m laughing hysterically or it’s Harvey barking at the firestorm or it’s the roar of fire engines speeding onto the block, maybe it’s all three, and then the doctor turned the television off.

“It was quite a night,” he said, smiling. “And today every reporter in the country wants to have a stab at you, buddy.”

“This isn’t exactly good news, doctor.”

“Well, then, I’ve got some even less good news. Your father was treated here and released with no apparent injuries, and then he just disappeared, according to your wife. And she’s been taking it especially hard, I must say.”

“Disappeared?” I said. “He’s seventy years old.”

“And in great shape, for his age,” he said. “I examined him myself.”

“So where did my wife go?”

“I don’t know, but she’s really shaken up.”

I looked over to the bedside table and there was a piece of paper folded up with my name written on it. I picked it up and unfolded it and began reading.

Baby,

 

Your father’s gone. He left in the middle of the night. I talked to him once we both got home and he was suffering, he was feeling real bad. He told me he was disgusted with himself for betraying you, for taking me away from you. He said he was going to leave, that he had to go, he just didn’t know where to. He told me to give you his hat.

 

Baby, I’m so sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen. I love you, I never wanted to hurt you. I don’t know what else to say. Your father and I are just soul mates, I guess.

 

I can’t be here anymore. I feel like I’ve wrecked everything. I hope you can forgive me. Goodbye.

 

Your wife

 

p.s.: Harvey’s staying with Mrs. Wilkerson if you still want him.

The doctor had already left the room. I folded up the paper and put it back on the bedside table and looked up at the ceiling. After a while I took the hat off my head and held it in my hands. The room began to shrink and grow dark.

*

Darkness like fog all webbed and malleable, alive and breathing. My legs are healed and I’m searching for my father and can see his wavering figure alighted barely at the edge of total black, and he’s always turning away from me toward the shadows just before he dips headlong into them and disappears again. I lunge after him breathing heavily but encounter only darkness, only emptiness and moist cold, until he emerges halfway into the light spectrum again, forcing me to continue my pursuit. He’s there and then he’s gone, a sideward glance, grasping at nothingness, and then he’s there again in a different spot, half-man-half-shadow, his left arm spotted with age and vanishing from view. I breathe and run harder, measured footfalls in a mad zigzagging route, our minds and bodies submerged in an empty dreamscape.

*

The insurance people set me up in a hotel downtown and that first night I couldn’t sleep. Sometime after midnight I dressed and put on the fedora and went down to the empty lobby bar. The bartender was mopping and I ordered a bourbon and sat there looking at it, then I looked at my hands. I looked at the deep black grooves in the wood of the bar and then I took the hat from my head and looked at that and from the corner of my eye I saw someone walk up and sit on the stool next to me. I glanced over and nodded at the young man and then looked back down to my hat.

“Nice hat,” the young man said. Thanks, I said. The bartender came over and asked him what he wanted. The young man looked down to my drink. “I’ll have what he’s having.” He looked to be a little too young for drinking age but the bartender poured the drink without a word and walked back to his mop. Wanna see a magic trick? the young man said. I just looked at him.

“In the inside band of your hat, there’s a tag with the numbers six two dash five five two sewn into it.”

I looked at the young man, down to the hat, then back at the young man. He smiled calmly, reassuringly. He had pleasant brown eyes and I wanted to trust them immediately. There was nothing stark or stylish about his appearance other than he seemed completely devoid of style but he was very comfortable with it, confident about it. I felt like I’d met him before, I tried to remember all my family members who might be that age, my cousins and nephews, I tried to remember my wife’s nephews and step-nephews, sons and second-uncles, and then I tried to sift through all the memorized faces from out on the road, those miles and miles of hair and eyes and smiles and skin tones that no one could ever properly archive and store away, not anyone, anywhere. I reached for the hat and flipped it over in my hands and in the inside band there was a tag with the numbers 62-552 sewn into it. I looked over to the young man.

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Lying in the dark I watch the sleeping shadow of my boyfriend and decide to leave him. Just a pair of clothes and a little bag of essentials would be all I’d need. The thought of it makes me cry, not because I’d miss him or this crazy life we’ve created together, not because of the failure, of having to start all over again. I cry because I realize how very little of this world I can actually claim to own.

Instead of leaving I roll onto my side and face the window, watching the snow fall in a roiling midnight hush. I let the tears carry me down into a deep dreamless sleep where there is no snow and there’s a reason for everything. In the morning my boyfriend’s already gone to work and I get up and make coffee. It’s stopped snowing. I start a shower and get ready for work.

*

I had just started my shift when she came to my checkout stand looking so thin and pathetic in her faded rags that I wanted to reach out and cradle her face in my hands. She handed me twelve assorted tubes of oil paints, a medium roll of uncut canvas, three cheap brushes and a spindle of black thread. Twenty-two twelve, I told her. She handed me a few crumpled bills and I asked her, What type of painting are you working on? Oh, nothing really, she said, I’m just messing around. She looked down to the ground or at her feet or maybe past them to a place deep and warm and I handed her the change with a receipt and put her things into a plastic bag. Thanks, she said, and smiled, and I watched her walk out into the bitter cold with just a sweatshirt, the bag of materials nestled tightly like a treasure in the crook of her arm.

*

She came into the store a few days later looking rested and calm and I noticed how large and clear brown her eyes were, almost comically large, very bright and disproportionate to the rest of her face. How’s the project going, I asked her. It’s okay, she said, and handed me a set of brushes and two bottles of black acrylic paint. I told her that I loved art, I loved Monet and Renoir and Impressionism but that the French lacked above all else a working class perspective. I mentioned that my favorite painter of all time was the American Thomas Cole and then I said to her, Since it was the Germans and the Americans that dominated Expressionism, wasn’t that just the most apt metaphor for the twentieth century as a whole?

I took her money and handed her the change and both of us smiled and looked to the line of bodies waiting behind her. You wanna get some coffee some time? she asked me.

*

Do you paint? she said, sipping her coffee. No, I said. I’m afraid not. She gave me a strange look and so I told her, I’ve always been fascinated with art and painting but I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I haven’t got a creative muscle in my body. I mean, I love studying the methods and the schools, I love reading about troubled artists and their gross sensitivities, their frailty and idiosyncratic behavior. But as far as actually putting brush to canvas . . .

“How long has it been since you tried?” she asked me. She held her cup of coffee in both hands, the fingers pointed straight out. “Creativity isn’t just an ideal, you know. It may begin that way, but it still has to be realized. Being an artist, a person that creates every day, it takes a lot of resolve and stubbornness.”

“Maybe that’s why I stopped,” I said. “I’m sort of averse to working hard at anything.”

“Oh, come on.” She set her hands in her lap and sat back in the chair, studying me. “Sure, the creative process can be terribly difficult at times, but you shouldn’t just give up. It’s such a tremendously rewarding experience. And we’re all of us capable of creating at least one great work.”

“You might be right,” I told her. “But I’m afraid I’ll never know. I’ve tried and tried. I wanted it very badly since I was a teeny little thing. It just never happened. I’m convinced that the artist inside me is buried alive in a dark grave somewhere.”

“Rubbish,” she said, looking at her watch. “Oh, dammit, I’m gonna be late for work.” She stood and pushed her chair in and began walking away.

“Where do you work?” I asked her. “Or wait, I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m Norma Jean,” she said, reaching her hand out to me.

“I’m Angela,” I said, and took it. She rushed out of the café and into the dark cold like the icy dramatization of a dream, leaving her cup steaming its curious illusions into the air.

*

The room is bright with bodies spread sparsely in the silence. I stare at the wall straight ahead, study its colorlessness, try to seep into it. I feel nothing. The yoga instructor is seated at the front of the class and she says, Are you with me, Angela?

I feel like jerking back into the real world, a landscape of emotion and thought. I want to say, Yes, I’m with you. I try to focus on my breathing, involve myself in the session. But instead I just sit there staring at the wall, unable to make a sound, unable to feel. Maybe I should try the truth, tell her, No, I’m not with you, I’m not all right, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My eyes begin to well up with tears.

I’m sorry, I say, and stand to leave.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

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?”

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

I parked the Jeep in the driveway and killed the engine, listening to it tick and hiss. The digital clock on the dash read exactly midnight and every house on the block was hushed in shadow. What the hell am I doing back here, I thought. I’m not ready for this yet. I’m not prepared for the onslaught of emotion and the flood of words. I’d been driving for fifteen straight hours and my eyes were fried, my brain was drugged by the hypnotic meter of passing road signs and stitched highway lines and I looked up at the dark windows of my old house and thought about leaving again. I could just restart this Jeep and head back west, continue this boundless exploration, separate myself from feeling and consequence, from time and its perverse control. But I knew that I could rearrange time no more than I could continue to evade my wife and father and the rubble of my former life.

I got out of the Jeep into the mild night and stretched the road from my muscles, I listened to the symphonic creak and snap of joints, and suddenly I felt very tired and very old, like all the miles and all the towns and the stories had finally caught up with me, all the dark hours and the years and the promises, memories now just as lost as I was in front of that house I would never again call home.

I unlocked the front door and Harvey was right there pouncing on me, licking my face and hands, and it was only then that I realized I’d forgotten all about the dog, my one true friend on the planet and the only soul I could trust. I should have brought him out there on the road with me, through the peaks and valleys, the quiet wastelands and steady grumble of metropolitan America. Seeing him again and hearing him whimper with joy, feeling his body shudder with excitement reminded me that there is nothing more consistent in a man’s life nor more loyal to him than his dog. I scratched his ears and rubbed his belly and my eyes began to well with tears but I wasn’t certain it was from the sudden rush of love and sentiment for my dog or from all the smoke in the room and when I heard the leaping gust of flames coming from the rear of the house I jumped up and ran back there.

Fire was crawling up the walls and across the ceiling, fire in red and blue tongues with yellow eyes and orange legs, hissing and growling, fire like the light and heat of the world fresh out of god’s pocket, and I stood there watching rapt with the flames like dancing miracles in my eyes. Harvey was at my leg barking at the fire and I finally slipped from my trance, thinking about my wife. I’ve got to save my wife. I ran upstairs to my old bedroom and my father naked save for his boxer shorts was beating at the flames with a blanket, his body thin and pale and hairless like a white worm. My wife sat on the bed watching, screaming insults at my father as the draperies and the carpet and the room burned bright and loud with Harvey next to me barking still. My father continued to wave the blanket, fanning the flames, swelling them in a storm of sparks and then suddenly he fell down. I ran over to him and picked him up and slung him over my shoulder. Holy shit, my wife said, seeing me for the first time. Baby, where’d you come from? I told her to get out of bed before the house burned down and she just sat there staring at me dazed with the flames snapping about her in a whirl of hunger and lust.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

The hiker who found her tangled in the brush at the foot of Gorgola Hill told police that at first he thought the body was an exposed tree root. Her skin was just as pale as bone, he said, and she was all twisted up like.

And so resulting from the hiker’s quote in the local news media the dead woman came to be known as the Tree Girl, and her case, through the various channels of law enforcement and the bureaucratic fog of the D.A.’s office, invariably and unofficially became the case of the Tree Girl. All around Neophalia in the business offices and on the construction sites, at the fitness centers and in the kitchens people were talking about the Tree Girl, did you hear about the Tree Girl, who was she and where was she from.

But no one seemed to know. In a pocket of her shredded and bloodied jeans police found an identification card and a folded piece of paper upon which a short message was handwritten: I’m doing this because art is dead. Detectives quickly confirmed the woman’s identity as Norma Jean Brown, 25, the resident of a small studio apartment in Neophalia’s Garden district, and they cautiously treated the Tree Girl’s plunge to the base of the steep and rugged cliff as a suicide.

The police found the Tree Girl’s apartment dark and nearly empty save for a bare mattress lying on the floor in the center of the room and paints everywhere, paints of all types and colors, in cans and tubes and crusted dry and cracked upon plastic palettes. There were brushes and chemicals and handcrafted art materials and there were canvases and woods in varied states of completion. After a thorough search detectives could find no trace of friends or relatives of the Tree Girl, no working associates and no leads as to why this young woman would either jump from the summit of Gorgola Hill or become the focus of someone else’s violent designs.

After a week without anyone claiming the body, police appealed to the news media to help locate anyone who may have known the Tree Girl. They used the photo from her identification card and splashed it all over television and the Internet, in the newspapers and on billboards, the image of a frail girl with pale skin and large eyes, her smile forced and diffident perhaps in a vain attempt to help conceal her bad teeth. Plastered to the sides of local transportation vehicles and on the tiled walls of the subway tunnels the people of Neophalia were continuously reminded of the Tree Girl and her tragically anonymous life and death.

Then a young man came forward to police and told them he didn’t know the Tree Girl but he had seen her in a night club about a week before her body was found. She was inside the club, he said, painting some sort of picture on the wall. How can you be sure it was her, the police asked. I’m sure, the young man said, and described how he’d stood against the wall watching the Tree Girl paint that picture for hours while the room at her back strobed with light and sound and heat and movement, he stood frozen amid the fury of flesh until after the music stopped and the last of the dancers had gone, until the bouncer or the door man or the owner of the dance club came up to him and said, Dude, seriously, you gotta go. He told police that he walked out of the dance club with the sun just cracking the surface of the sky, feeling oddly connected to the young woman back in the dance club with her paints and brushes and harried concentration.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.

I was a tank mechanic in Nam, Surly said. “Such a massive instrument of destruction, but remarkably easy to operate.” He drank down his gin and motioned the bartender to pour him another. Soft music flitted about the edges of the shadowed room, an oddly liquid sound but consistent enough to make the few lingering souls in the bar with their slow orchestra of whispers seem like background noise. “Those old M46s, you should’ve seen em. The things they have today make our old babies archaic.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Ninety-mil cannon gun. I never got a chance to fire it in combat but I did in tactical. Just two shots would vaporize those three-story buildings we had dolled up to look like commy churches. If there are such things.” Surly’s gaze deepened and landed on the mirror behind the bar and then swam past it, beyond his own worn reflection to a place shorn of time. The bartender brought him his drink. “Anyway, that was a long time ago and I was a coward back then. My father was a congressman in Pennsylvania and I had him pull some strings to get me back home. Day before I left the bush one of our aerial teams miscalculated and napalmed my whole unit.” He uncuffed his right shirtsleeve and showed me his hand and forearm, the skin warped and melted and patched in odd visceral tones, as if the insides of his arm had burst through to breathe.

“That goes all the way up to the shoulder,” he said, and rolled his sleeve back down. “They grafted the skin from my back and thighs. Only two in my company lived through it and the other guy shot himself a year later. I got a discharge and a medal and came home to a parade, like I was some kind of hero or something. Wasn’t anything heroic came from that war, though.” He looked at me and I looked away but not before seeing in his eyes a flash of deep lasting shame and the force of its decay, but also strength, as if in the wayward course of his life and his incredible sufferings, both in and outside of war, he’d learned to accept that defeat was imminent but dignity was not.

“Forty-five years later, eighteen surgeries, law school, three marriages, a career in politics—I sit here and say with all honesty that I feel like my life’s finally been validated.”

I began to wonder if this was some sort of elaborately staged pep talk to help pedal me through the grief of losing my brother or if it was going to turn into some rambling soliloquy on suffering and the virtue therein, and so I asked myself if I could get away with leaving under the pretense of using the restroom and then never return, just abandon my frail little glass of bourbon and this old man with his scars and his bedtime stories and go upstairs to crisp hotel sheets and fragrant dreams and those meandering songs of night that follow you deep into your own bones.

“I have this memory,” he said, staring into the mirror again. Talking to himself or through himself. His former self. “I don’t know if it’s a memory of how things actually happened or if I’m recalling a dream from back then. But I remember lying in a clearing on my left side and there’s fire and smoke and screaming men all around me. The ground in front of my face is on fire, my body is on fire, even the sky is burning. Fire crawling and hissing and snapping like an alien jungle creature or some other ageless thing suffocating down there in the molten innards of our planet for millions of years and finally come to the surface for air. Fire roaring. I remember lying there melting and knowing I was dying a painful death of slow torment, suffering and agony beyond words or even the thoughts of words, and yet I was calm, relaxed, submissive. Then I suddenly had this feeling that I wasn’t in the bush at all, across the world from home. I wasn’t at war, I wasn’t fighting anything. I don’t know how I knew it or what had brought me there, but I was in the great city of Rome, burning on the ground in the middle of my street in the great fire of 64. This was nineteen hundred years earlier to the date, my friend.”

I finished my drink. “Quite a story,” I said.

“I looked it up years later after thinking about it for so long and found out the dates coincided. It’s almost like the fire had melted into the earth some type of time tunnel or something, I don’t know. Very strange, and I still can’t explain it. I know you don’t believe me, and of course I don’t have any evidence to support it. I don’t even know if the memory is from the waking world or the dream world. But it was real, I’m sure of it. I can still smell it, feel it bubbling on my skin.”

The bartender brought me another bourbon without my requesting it and then Surly said, Do you read literature?

Yes, I said. What are you reading now, he said.

“I’m reading Nietzsche. The transcripts of our enslavement. I’ve been going through his entire catalog again, looking for things I’d missed the first time around. The human mind matures in giant leaps over the course of ten years.”

Yes, indeed, Surly said, studying me. Have you ever heard of Desmond Paul?

Yeah, I said. I’ve never read any of his work, but I know he’s been in the news a lot lately. I’m not even sure what he writes.

Surly took a long pull from his glass and said, He died a few months ago. This is one of the reasons he’s been in the news. Controversy surrounding his death, rumors involving the works he’s left behind.

Was he murdered or something? I asked.

Possibly. No one knows for sure. The initial reports said he died of a heart attack. He was very young for a writer of his potency. Plus there are some people that think he’s not really dead.

I raised my eyebrow at him.

“There’s a lady sitting alone in a booth behind us,” he said. “Go ahead and take a look.”

I turned slowly and saw a woman sitting at a table, watching me. She looked to be about my age, thin with a very potent gaze. She nodded at me and I turned back around. Who is she, I said, and took a drink.

“She’s a journalist from D.C. A very good journalist, actually. So good that she was fired from her magazine for a story she wrote about Mr. Paul. What I want to give you, her and I have to give it to you together.”

“Man,” I said, exasperated. “I ain’t talkin to any reporters right now.”

“She’s not here to interview you. Don’t you understand what’s happening here? You’ve been chosen for something very important, very unique. There are only a handful of people in the world who’ve had this opportunity.”

Then the woman was standing behind us. Hello, gentlemen.

“I’d like to introduce you to Pamela Scott,” Surly said. I turned and shook her hand.

“Let’s all three of us go back to my booth,” she said, and Surly set a fifty on the bar and excused himself while I followed Pamela back to her table. I began to feel like I was treading water except I was meters beneath the surface, unable to breathe, unable to move in any direction, and there were these massive water creatures of immense power and intellect hovering or hunting in slow circles about me, studying me in the dark abyss. Pamela was telling me how she’d recently heard my music, how Surly had bought her one of my records.

“Pretty impressive, but jazz isn’t really my thing,” she said. “I’ve never understood it. I need music to move me, to drive my body into motion. Jazz is music you think to, not necessarily music you move to.”

If you’ve never made love to a jazz record then you’ve never really made love, I said, and Surly, carrying a small package wrapped in brown paper, sat next to Pamela, directly across the table from me.

“In this package,” he said, sliding it toward me, “you’ll find some studying materials along with a novel written by Desmond Paul. You’ll also find contact information for both Pamela and myself, which you’ll need, sooner than you think.”

Why are you giving this to me.

“Well,” he said, sighing deeply, “I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve traveled the world. Countless times. Trying to find peace, find solace. To seek validation. As I told you before, I’ve not always been pleased with my decisions or behavior. And I’ve certainly not been content in my nature. It’s only due to this gift,” his gaze dropping to the package, “that I have finally found that validation. And now I wish to pass it on to you.”

But why me?

Surly leaned forward so that his head burned brightly beneath the white glow of the hanging lamp. His skin was spotted and stained, faded and elasticized, almost translucent. He smiled and brought his burned and deformed hand up above the package and waved it softly in a gesture of indifference and said, “Because I love your music. It’s as simple as that.” Then he leaned back in his seat, smiling.

“Read the materials and then most everything will begin to make sense,” Pamela said. “Then read the novel. It won’t just change your life,” and then both she and Surly slid out of the booth and stood to leave. They shook my hand and wished me a pleasant evening, leaving me alone in that dim room with my eyes trained on the package, waiting for it to shudder and then burst with the black crawling madness borne of it. After a few minutes nothing happened and so I took the elevator up to my room and sat on the bed and just listened, listened to nothing, listened to the atomic rumble of dust like waves of souls gliding in and out of the open window, listened to the sounds of the city and the asphalt burning cold and lifeless in the howling chorus of night. Then I turned on the lamp and ripped open the package and found some papers folded in half atop a bruised black book with an odd radiance seeping from it, the words Jade Visions stamped in faded green foil upon the cover. I began to leaf through the papers and then decided just to read from the beginning, a printed copy of a news brief:

Famous writer found dead

(AP) CHICAGO, IL — Award-winning novelist and short story writer Desmond Paul was found dead in a Chicago hotel room early this morning, according to Chicago police.

A hotel service worker found the body at around 7 a.m. and notified hotel management. Though official autopsy results are pending, the cause of death is an apparent heart attack and no foul play is suspected.

Paul, 40, had been widely recognized in recent years as the leading voice of his generation in American letters. His most recent novel, The Death of Time, was nominated for the Pen-Faulkner and National Book awards after its publication almost a decade ago.

The rest of the papers were stapled together. They looked to be photocopied notes, scraps written by hand and typeset. There was a brief message on the first page:

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.