Leagues of concrete stairs our injured friend couldn’t climb bore us to the green hilltop, where the ocean can still be seen in all its tranquil cartography between fluted pillars of marble. We sought the highest ground, and found a lonely grove of three trees in tall grass, twisted by years of swift, briny wind. I clutched the plastic bag in my pocket, scooping it from the depths and raising it to my eyes. I looked, I looked, and I dove into the gray.

In that same moment of deep pangs, when nostalgia tumbled into me for the sake of a lifetime of memories that were not my own, when the being that once inspired these atoms seemed yet to breathe and to breathe through me. . . I knew, that what I held was dust.

I took from the same pocket a scrap of paper on which I had scrawled a brief verse. I crafted the words not to trumpet of paradise, but to rejoice of mystery from within mystery. The syllables rang hollow, collocated against the warm summer breeze and its salty tone, against the eloquent backdrop of cliffs and sea. When my words trailed off to discover their quarry intangible, I was glad for the silence.

I opened the plastic bag, and—mind strange, heart ashamed that my blood still flows—let my fingers sink in the ash. We drew out a modest handful each, and scattered it through the air.

The gray dust clinging to our clothes, we walked down to the hillside hand in hand, to gaze into the bright, endless blue.

I shook the mesh-iron chair and watched the droplets clatter across the stone deck. I sat with my coffee and looked out over the wall, down into the woods where the stream rolls on, the same stream that flooded over the bridge after days of rain and we waded across with our jeans rolled up to our knees and bottles of liquor in hand. The same stream that rolls under the bridge and past the trees where that woman told me she had carved the name of her lover when she was fourteen.

Now I listen to the orchestrated moans of the band she brought me to, the melancholy flame of a grating violin held in the arms of a heartbroken drunkard like the child he might have had by his dearly beloved. She told me of the days when she lived alone, smoking marijuana and cigarettes and drinking heavily in the dumpy basement apartment in the back of the antique store, listening to this music, left behind by her parents and her friends. I stand on the carpeted floor running through contrived exercises with the red-handled axe, pulling it to my chest on the upturn of a squat, the axe that brought us together, that I used to split wood in the falling snow with a cigarette clutched between my lips, moist flannel clinging to my skin, the taste of beer on my palate. The song she gave me, so strong, gothic, and sad, like the musculature of a dying horse. And the banjo player that lived across the river from her house when she was a child, the twang of each note drifting across in the evenings, bringing a smile to her face that was blissful surface to the ineffable profound. How she wanted to thank the mysterious artist, the musician who played only for the air, for finding a pair of ears he would never know about, two young organs that would ingest the chosen tones but never taste the burly voice of the chooser.

Note the way memories move, the transference of her story into my subconscious: the story of her traveling companion, the hurtling locomotive, steaming along beside her through the night for a thousand weary miles before veering from the parallel and away into the dark, blaring its whistle in what could only be a gesture of fond farewell. It is the dream substance of another seeping into my own, taking on a new form, crawling into fresh nooks, growing.

Note the way they twine and untwine themselves, like the newborn snake, four inches long and thin as an earthworm, minute scales the purest, brightest green nature can conjure, wrapping itself amiably around my forefinger, playfully nibbling at the skin, before sliding off into the grass, into invisibility, into memory. Into those same tunnels of gray matter where the hungry raccoon is still alive, there on the moist earth, just before the rifle barked and spat two bullets into its gut, and the thing squealed and spat blood, convulsing into a ball of fur and fluid and needle-sharp claws.

And there was the little girl on the sterile white sheets. Her eyes were closed, welded shut with yellow discharge. Her face was motionless, moon-pale and contorted. But all the bitter sadness, all the vain anger and curses and prayers it would never again express flowed in great auras of feeling from the face of her mother, who leaned over the bed and looked into those pus-congested eyelids as she had done sleeplessly for days. There was the strange elation when she passed away: Atlas watching the sky lift off his shoulders, ready to hold itself up again.

I moved through the fog and climbed the hill one step at a time, looking down into the ground, focusing my eyes as if on something distant, so that the dew-gilded grass blades slicing the dirt from my boots were lost in the blur, and some cold mirror lurched into focus.

(From all of us at The Starsailor Newsletter, which is exactly one person: Happy Christmas—if that’s what you’re into. If not, I don’t know, man. Good luck with whatever you’re doing.)

•     •     •

Part I:
“The Part That Has Nothing To Do With You”

Once the melatonin wore off, I was stranded on the edges of 4 a.m. I sat up and looked around the room, which was dark and sunken. I gathered that I had collapsed on the floor and fallen asleep. My face was warm with racing blood. My eyes were bloodshot and loose and spiraling out of control. I had no idea where I was.

I remembered one thing, which was at the forefront of my mind. This was it: I’d had a bad day.

The bottle of melatonin was next to where I’d been sleeping. It was open. I’d taken three or four, I wagered, and had fallen into a screaming mad delirium for ten hours.

I took it with the intent to go away for a little while—to sleep until I no longer felt rotten from the inside-out. I had departed from this world and became insane with melatonin—though only temporarily. For there I was: awake and drowsy and stupid at an hour when no one should be awake. I felt worse than ever. Everything was falling apart again.

•      •      •

I opened my computer and began writing something terrifyingly long. I wanted to touch the heart of a girl who used to love me very deeply. I wanted her to know that I loved her, and that I wanted to be her friend, and that I wanted my two little baby cats back. I wrote, in maybe ten-thousand words or more, that I needed to see those cats. I didn’t tell her that I was losing my mind about it. I didn’t think she’d want to hear anything about that.

I called it, I Want To Know You Forever, or The Thing Became. It is divided into two parts, which are “The Part That Has Nothing To Do With You” and “The Part That Has Everything To Do With You”. The first part is about my cats. It has nothing to do with this girl. The second part is all about her. It says, “I love you, and I’m sorry I hurt you. Won’t you forgive me? I’m trying so hard.”

I have yet to finish it.

•      •      •

The contents of this Newsletter—Issue 010, something of a milestone, I would say—were originally going to be this letter I have described and nothing else. There would have been no explanation. But I don’t trust the world enough not to hurt me. Too many people out there would rip me to shreds. They would laugh at me in private.

So you’ll have to do with this, whatever this is. This is The Starsailor Newsletter. We’ve made it to number ten. If  you’re still here: thank you. I love you for sticking around. It’s important that I write this thing, if you didn’t know. If you don’t like it, you probably shouldn’t read it. (Thanks for that sentence, Tim.) But because you’re here, you’re wonderful. Thank you for being my friend. It’s been a hard year.

•      •      •

I have done something I don’t like to do, which is to tease a piece of writing without any promise of delivery. That letter, the long one: it’s intended for an audience of one—maybe three. (It is her decision if she wishes to read it aloud to my partially English-speaking cats. Though, their vocabulary is limited to “food” and “treats” and “hungry”.)

But I will share something with you that is tangentially related. Believe it or not, this is a difficult thing for me to do. See: I’m writing this novella. I was stuck on chapter IV for the longest time. I just couldn’t bear to write it. It was about that girl and how I met her. Every time I sat down to work on it, I teared up. It hurt to bleed all that out.

I sure do miss her sometimes. And I miss those little baby cats. But that goes without saying at this point, I guess. Ah.

So you can read it. I’ve since scrapped the whole chapter and have started from scratch. Chapter IV is now about suicide and Texas. It is about swimming and friendship. I have named it “Lone Starsailor.” I think that’s neat.

I wrote it in the present tense, which is heartbreaking to me. I wrote it for one person. It is written simply, but don’t be fooled: it was a root canal every time I tried to add to it.

I have to let it go. I cannot look at it anymore. You can have it. Take it from me.

So long.

•      •      •

Chapter IV:
“He Loved Until He Was Told Not To”

We are in love.

We have met each other and we are in love.

•     •     •

I offer to drive you home. I will take you anywhere if you ask me.

We drive down moonlit roads. We drive past places I have lived before. We listen to music and talk. We are alike in all the ways that matter.

You are sweet and wonderful and different. That’s the part I like the most—that you’re different. And you love me. You love me, you love me, you love me.

I park on Old Church Road. It’s dark and spooky and warm. We get out of of the car. We walk through meadows at twilight. We hold hands.

•     •     •

We are sharing a dream. In our dream there is an oak tree. We lie beneath it—lie in the shade of the oak tree. The moon casts its glow over us and we are hiding from it.

Your face is spotted with pale light. It is outlined by the white orb hanging over us. You look beautiful. You look lovely. I promise in my heart that I will love you forever.

You tell me about your year. You tell me how you tried to kill yourself, and how you’re happy it didn’t work. You tell me about the pills and the whisky. They made you drink charcoal to get the pills out of your system. You say you’re happy now. You say you’re happy with me. You say you’ve never met someone quite like me.

I pull you close to my chest. I connect my body to yours. I want you to take it all. I want you to have everything.

I kiss your forehead.

•     •     •

We are walking. The sky is enormous and black before us. It is filled with little pinholes that allow streams of light to shine through. We are staring at the biggest pinhole of all. We are staring at the moon.

It has gotten colder. Our blood has failed to warm us. You ask me if we should run. I laugh. I tell you we should run.

We are running. We are racing by fences and patches of open land. We pass darkened houses. Everyone is asleep but us. We’re alive and we’re awake. The world is ours.

I ask if we can walk for a while. Our lungs burn. My chest is fiery and hollow. It is lit up like a Christmas tree.

We are walking down the side of the the road. I hold your hand. I try to warm you up but fail. I’m too cold. I’m colder than you.

•     •     •

We pass by a fence that is different from the rest. It is guarded by a black horse. The horse is grazing and looking at us with big curious eyes. You reach over and pet him on the head. He makes a noise of contentment. We name him Thor.

Thor is breathing peacefully. He is happy to be among new friends. We stay with him for a long while.

Now it’s time to go. We tell Thor good-bye. We promise to visit him often.

This is the last time we will ever see him.

•     •     •

In my mind there are words, but I do not speak them:

“I love you, I love you, I love you.”

•     •     •

A year has passed. It is summer. Spring has vanished. It is never going to return.

fin

 •     •     •

That was all I could manage to write over the span of a month. It really gutted me to pick away at that thing. It feels good to leave it behind.

And you’re not listening, but I need to throw this out into the universe anyway: I love you very much, and I’m so, so sorry for the vicious monster I became. I hope you can forgive me. Please forgive me. I want to know you forever.

•     •     •

Part II:
“The Part Thats Has Everything To Do With You”

I left Austin, Texas on the 20th of December. With the exception of the night I have described—the night of melatonin and bad dreams—I cannot in recent memory recall a sadder day.

I had a phone conference with my psychiatrist while I was at the airport. He told me I sounded different. I told him he was right to think that about me. “I’ve been happy, yes, but I’m not so happy today,” I said.

“And why’s that? You sound fine,” he said.

“It’s because I’m leaving Austin.”

“It really is a fine city, I’ve heard.”

“Yes, it is.”

He gave me a six-month supply of the two medications that keep my brain on planet Earth. Otherwise I’d be all over the place. I’d be a crazy, ruined man.

He asked me how I was “functioning”—which is an important question for a psychiatrist to ask. I couldn’t take care of myself five months ago, after all. I wasn’t eating and I was sleeping for fourteen hours a day. I wasn’t functioning.

“Oh, I’m functioning, all right,” I said. “I have a job and everything. And I’m getting another one. And I know this girl, okay.”

“A girl, huh?” His must have sat straight up in his chair when he said that.

“Yeah, a girl.”

“Mm, I see!”

Dr. Hyman sure was happy to hear the word “girl”.

•     •     •

He told me I had six months to find a new psychiatrist—on account of my moving to Texas. I was sad to hear that. I wanted to stay with him forever. “You need to meet with someone in person,” he said. “You’re doing great—you just need to keep it up.”

“And,” he said, “I would like to be kept in the loop about how you’re doing and what you’re up to.” God bless him for that. He sounded like someone who loved and cared about me.

Thanks, Dr. Hyman.

 •     •     •

Before I went through the security checkpoint, when I would have to hang up my phone, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind writing me a brief note on his letterhead. See: Last August I was going to start a Master’s program. I was going to take a few classes to stay busy. But then I felt really rotten and wasn’t really existing anymore. I collapsed and lost the will to go on. I nearly killed myself, too.

So I didn’t take the classes. I dropped out of them. There was no way in hell my brain was going to tolerate anything more than was already dealing with, which was a lot. As it turns out, I dropped the classes too late—and was charged nearly $300 for doing this.

I explained all of this to Dr. Hyman. He would “hmm” and “oh!” as I said these things. I told him that the school would exonerate me of my debts if I could produce a letter saying I was a stark-raving lunatic for a little while.

“Certainly,” said Dr. Hyman. “I would be glad to. And just what should this note say?” I was getting closer and closer to the security checkpoint.

“I really can’t think of anything other than: ‘He lost his mind, but he’s OK now,’” I said.

The good doctor sucked in a lungful of oxygen. He exhaled. “I’ve got it,” he said in a grand voice. “Here it is: ‘Ryan [Starsailor] suffers from severe clinical depression, and was not functioning properly during the months he would have attended school. He began treatment in August of 2011, and was diagnosed as being Bipolar II. Please excuse him of any financial responsibility he would have accrued during this time.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “That’ll show them.”

“Sure will,” he said, making a popping noise with his mouth. “Sure will.”

•     •     •

As I have said, it’s true: I wasn’t functioning properly. I was a real mess. I was human soup.

I thought about this as I waited at Terminal 8. I was waiting for a plane to take me to Houston, and then Baltimore. It was delayed, so I had a lot of time to think. “‘Ryan [Starsailor] suffers from severe clinical depression,’” looped in my mind over and over.

“Severe clinical depression.”

It sounded so damning. How could anyone ever survive clinical depression—much less a severe case of it? Was I doomed?

And I remembered this commercial for an antidepressant I had seen the day before. In it, a cartoon woman is walking in a park. She is accompanied by a menacing black nether-nothing wearing a smirking cartoon face. He is a sort of black hole with teeth and eyes. When she attempts to step forward, he morphs into a hole. She falls in. He laughs. She struggles to climb out again. And then the drug is mentioned by name, and the black-hole-thing shrinks to the size of a small black balloon. He shrivels and looks sad. The woman is happy. She has a picnic with friends. But there the little black hole remains—waiting. He’s small but he still exists.

How accurate!

This thing still exists in me, and is brought out when I least expect it. It is kept at by an antidepressant and an anti-bipolar medication. It will never go away for good. It can only be pushed away for a little while.

I continued to think about this as I got up to walk down to Thundercloud Subs. I was feeling a little blue. I could sense my little black ballon growing into a hole. I was careful not to fall in.

And this is what happened, which kept my demons at bay: my favorite Thundercloud Subs employee was working. I frequent Austin-Bergstrom International Airport enough to know this guy on a friendly basis. I hoped to God he would remember what sandwich I wanted.

“Hey dude,” he said. I admire anyone who is over the age of thirty and is able to say ‘dude’ without it sounding stupid or forced.

“Oh hey, man,” I said.

“And what’ll it be? Veggie Delite?”

“Yes,” I said. I had been remembered.

“You got it, man. Hummus or cream cheese?” he said.

“What would you pick?” I said.

“Man, I would do hummus. But that’s just me—I’m a hummus guy.”

“Let’s do hummus,” I said.

To the horror of curious passersby, I ate the sandwich in something like forty seconds. The hummus was, without a doubt, the correct choice. I was happy again after that.

•     •     •

Yes, and so I flew home. I stopped in Houston and then to my final destination, which was the dreaded “B” word—Baltimore. I felt miserable just hearing it. “Baltimore.”

It was raining when we landed, of course. It is always raining in that godforsaken doom-metropolis—in that swamp of fools and fornicators.

Jason picked me up. He’s a wonderful human being for doing that. He brought me a honey crisp apple without even knowing they’re my favorite. “Thank you, brother,” I said.

“You’re very welcome,” he said. We drove off. We drove in the direction of Annapolis, which is the wrong direction.

“Um,” I said. “I don’t think you know where you’re going.”

“No,” said Jason, “I have no clue.”

•     •     •

Since that dreadful night, I have been staying in the Northern Virginia, which is a place where dreams go to die. I have outgrown this place. It is time to go. I’m only here for the two holidays that occur towards the end of December—and to retrieve my furniture and books and clothes and car and so on. I am here also to say good-bye. I don’t know when I’ll be back.

Here’s what I’ve been up to the past week: Nothing. I sleep until the late afternoon, on account of all the staying up late. Around four or five in the a.m., I’ll pop a melatonin and slip into a sort of peaceful coma.

Jason has a pillow-top for his mattress, don’t you know. It’s full of feathers. That’s part of the problem, too—part of the sleeping problem. I just don’t want to leave that bed in the morning. It’s too uncomfortable and weird and cold outside the cocoon I find myself in upon waking.

When I do get up, it’s because Lucy wakes me up. She’s a little tortoiseshell kitten. She’s brand new—only a few weeks old. I can fit her entire head in the palm of my hand with lots of palm to spare.

She wakes me up, and I’ll say, “Okay, okay, Lucy. For God’s sake.” And then we roll around on the carpet and play little kitten games. We’re becoming great friends.

Our friendship is almost out necessity, though. We’re roommates, and there’s damn near nothing to do but watch the rainclouds from this windows of Jason’s room. She’d be all alone if I didn’t stay in with her every day. So we play some more. We play all the time.

I’m falling in love with this cat. I need a cat presence in my life. It has been over five months since I have seen my own little boys.

I sure do miss those little boys. I bought them some Christmas presents. I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to give them those Christmas presents.

I’m getting sad again. I shouldn’t be thinking about this on Christmas Eve.

•     •     •

Yes, and it is Christmas Eve, all right. Or rather it was a half hour ago. As I have yet to go off to an unconscious state resembling sleep, I refuse to accept that it is Christmas. I will continue to pretend it is Christmas Eve.

It has been a fine one, as far as Christmas Eves go. I went to a candlelight service at my grandmother’s hippie church. It was weird stuff. I loved every minute of it. They have some really talented musicians there. We got to light candles at the end. The reverend told us to look around the room, and see the light shining. I did as I was told. It was a magnificent sight.

Later I found myself at the home of my dear brothers Jason and Eddie Long. They were watching television and ignoring my presence. I said some stupid things and no one cared.

They have since scampered off to bed in anticipation of the morning that awaits them. I told them they’d better close their eyes and go to sleep as soon as possible, or Santa Claus, the bastard, would skip over their house. They obeyed.

Good for them.

•     •     •

I am reclining in an easy chair in front of a crackling wood stove. I have just placed another log on the fire. It is cozy and wonderful in this room. Little baby Lucy is sound asleep on the couch to my left. Her little baby eyes are closed, and her little baby tail is wrapped around her little baby body. She is cute as a button. I think I will love her forever.

And I am ruminating on the days that lie ahead of me. I plan to spend the next week in solitude, maybe, in the doom-metropolis of Baltimore. It is the final days of my kingdom. Soon I will be Lord Baron of Baltimore no more. I will then be the Archduke of Austin. But not yet, not yet.

On the 31st I will travel to Brooklyn with Jason. We are seeing Deer Tick and Virgin Forest—and J. Roddy Walston and the Business and Dead Confederate. I’m not sure who the last two are. I guess I’ll find out on New Year’s Eve.

The show is called “Deer Tick & Friends”. Isn’t that nice?

And when the clock strikes midnight, we’ll be in the midst of rock and roll. We’ll be in the center of the universe. We’ll be in the greatest city in the world. I can’t think of a better place to be.

We’re probably going to end up sleeping in Central Park, or in a cafe or a gutter somewhere. It’s going to be a rip-roaring time, I’ve no doubt. I hope I end up with a bloody nose or a black eye or a few scars. I hope I end up with a missing limb.

I must be nuts.

•     •     •

When I return on the 1st—on the first day of 2012, no less—I will begin painting and packing up my pitiful apartment. I have not been there in over two months. I am not anxious to return to it, as I have said. But I must. And then I can finally leave it and the city it is in forever and ever.

Ms. Steph Malpass has said she can donate her time on the 2nd. We are going to paint and possibly order a pizza. And Ms. Perri Weldy is taking a bus from Philadelphia on the 3rd. We’re going to paint, too. We’re going to be paint like maniacs.

I have promised her we will watch Peter Pan. We might build a fort, too. Why not?

•     •     •

I have placed one more log on the fire. It will see me out to the end of this Newsletter.

But I think I shall retire. It is late, and though I am not at all tired, it would be a sound decision for me to close my eyes and see what happens. If need be, I may call upon the powers of melatonin. (I really ought to stop relying on that stuff, huh?)

Lucy is still curled up on the couch. I will pick her up and take her with me when I go upstairs. We will share the pillow-top mattress, and make fun of Jason in a language he does not understand, which is Cat. I plan to say, in various chirps and meows, that Jason is an idiot. Maybe Lucy will laugh, I don’t know.

Am I happy? I’m not sure. Tonight I am. That’s good enough for me.

Let’s go join Jason in dreamland, little Lucy.

Happy Christmas, friends.

—R. Starsailor

We set out over the river. Just as we thought ourselves free, bursts of water erupted from beneath the rafts. They were attacking from below.

They had taken on monstrous forms to stay our retreat. They were as the skeletons of sharks, yet longer, sinuous, with many tails and fins the color and strength of polished brass. Spines flashed as they breached and dove. Darkness and the murky river hid from us their true anatomy; they were no less, no more than the destruction they caused. They could have been many, or one swift as lightning.

This vision is burned into the back of my skull: as the fishers rowed  toward the opposite bank, and the boats were eaten from beneath, an explosion from the riverbank lit up the night for a split second. I saw the bulk of the thing as it rose from the depths and reared over the vessel just ahead of ours. Its head unfurled like a clockwork flower, revealing teeth or blades that grew radially from what seemed, in that instant of terror, to be both mouth and eye: purple crystal glinting, hungry darkness howling.

The light vanished and I was blinded. There were carnivorous sounds that froze my blood. The next burst of light only moments later revealed red clouds, splintered wood, and lengths of drifting rope in the current. I watched the tails of the thing crack the surface like whips as it turned to dive—it was a mechanical serpent, fueled by death, mouth and eye in one purple-black singularity.

Forever more, that is how I will remember our enemy: beasts that perceive and consume with the same organ.

          -Zoe

 ◊               ◊               ◊

The colony was ancient and unaware of its purpose.

Its geography was simple and beautiful. Carved out of thick forest, it rested on the western banks of the widest swath of a river that streamed south from highland springs just below a snowcapped chain of fog-shrouded mountains. The river split just downstream from the colony. One arm curved eastward to weave deeper into the forest and out toward the ocean, the other continued due south to sleep and fester in the swamps.

The river guarded the colony from the east, and all other sides were guarded by the wall. Twenty feet high and built of moss-spattered stone quarried in the shadow of rolling hills long ago, reinforced on the inside by spiked logs jutting at an angle just over the rim, it emerged from the river at the northern bank of the colony, proceeded west for over a mile, swung south for three, then turned east to disappear into the water downstream from whence it came.

The wall kept wilderness and civilization divided. On the inside were thatched-roof huts with chimneys that smoldered in wintertime and windows thrown open to summer warmth. There were rare groves of trees sprouting up from hillocks here and there, decorating the space between measured plots of farmland. But most of the space was tall tawny grass through which dirt roads twisted from one home to the next. All roads converged at the stone shrine on the central bank.

On the outside of the wall was endless forest. It was a place where the branches were so thick and tangled that no underbrush grew, where night and day were often confused, where navigation was impossible. It was a natural labyrinth orchestrated by chaos. A man could dissolve in those narrow corridors between trees, terrified and enraptured by the hungry sounds that echoed in the haze. There was one gateway into the forest: an ancient wooden door, thick and heavy, bound to its stone archway with rusty iron hinges. Hunting parties passed through the threshold, but never at night, and never to stray far.

To be sure, there was psychological darkness at work in the colony’s design. Nevertheless the inhabitants were meditative people. They practiced an art that was archaic, mystic, yet far from trivial. All of their culture, religion, politics, mythology, and philosophy revolved around this single art—this art revolved around a handful of coins, a hand of playing cards, and a wooden cube.

  ◊               ◊               ◊

Among the colonists was Aristokles, a frail man with tired grey eyes, hollow cheeks shaded with stubble, and wild brown hair. He was forty years old when sorrow struck his face, thirty or younger when laughter washed it clean. He was respected among the artists for his abstract imagination and his dignified, steel-spined gait. Rather than summoning his skills near his home, he chose to wander. He could be seen walking along the top of the wall, ambling in wide arcs through tall grass, wading into the river in the hot months, searching for a spot where he might engage in the art, cube held in the crook of one pale arm.

The cube was not the source of a shaman’s power. It was a channeling device. Every male colonist owned one, and treasured it above all other possessions. The cubes were one cubic foot in volume, carved seamless and smooth from the cylinder of a tree trunk. They were only frames; no walls, floors or ceilings, only a frame of empty space.

Aristokles’s cube was beautifully intricate. Though his hands did not craft it, they had mastered the feel of the object, and in turn its subtle magic. The wood was dark red in tone, and as stiff as marrowless bone. Air could whistle through it, clean and strong, filling its precise volume with invisible song. Each edge displayed a potent mythological text, engraved in runic symbols. He could tell each of the twelve stories by running his fingertips along the proper edge. In time he had discovered analogous connections among each trio of stories that met at one corner. He was fascinated by the tales, and would tell them whenever asked. To the listener they were only stories, but to Aristokles, with the patient machinations of a literary mind, they yielded worlds of insight. His dreams, furious with clarity, often parodied the cube’s mythology, and more than once reality had been invaded by the stories as well. He meditated on the recursive nature of the stories, but kept his faith secret.

Aristokles desired more time for his personal inquiries, but moments of solitary reflection were a rare luxury in the midst of a war.

The location of the front lines was unknown. But somewhere outside the colony, beyond the dense forest, beyond the sheltering arms of the river and the snowy peaks of the northern mountains, a war was being waged. The outcome would result in the extinction or survival of humanity. The colony had been founded to ensure victory. The shaman, the artists of the colony fought this war. They did not fight with steel or fire, with armies or force. Their stratagems were employed through the faintest movements of their fingertips, with the lightest tossing of their hands and swaying of their bodies, with their focus and brilliance, with sublime concentration on the voids of air within their cubes.

They became in tune with the power of Chance over all things, and they became intimate with vast metaphorical systems that lay just beneath sensory detection. They became able to influence cosmic events in the most remote location by making a minute movement over an exact space of time. The windows of time were short, the necessary movements precise, and human aim has never been accurate. If these difficulties did not exist, the art would not have been an art, and the war would have long since been won.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

The boats docked on the other side of the river, and we leapt to the shore with children in our arms. The fisherman followed, pushing what remained of the boats back out onto the river to distract the beasts. We thought we would watch those men die as they waded into the water, but the creatures would not come near the shore. The sinking ships drifted downstream, bursts of water-laced brass machinery following in their wake, tearing the wood to splinters as it was carried off into the night.

We tripped and scrambled our way over the stony beach and up the bank, then turned to face the opposite shore. All we could see were the fires in the forest and their orange gleam dancing like a mad spirit across the ripples in the river.

We fled to the forest and starved in terrified silence for days. It was early autumn and the nights were cold. Three days passed before we felt safe enough to light fires and to fish the river for food. But once our stomachs were full and our physical discomforts alleviated, reality struck and a heavy depression settled over us like a storm cloud.

Where would we go? What could we do? Most of our men had been swallowed or dismembered by the ferocious plague that still stalked the land. We knew from rumors that had met our ears months before the attack that the beasts held sway as far in every direction as any traveler had seen. We had remained unscathed until the horror of that night; now all of us knew and would never forget the carnal hunger, the cruel purposelessness of our enemy.

We had to assume they would come again. We had to build a wall.

          -Zoe

 ◊               ◊               ◊

The sky was confused on the day Aristokles was to gather with all shaman at the shrine. Brooding thunderheads were intertwined with mellow white clouds, and beyond was pure blue. Fast winds kept the array in visible motion and constant flux. He could smell the tension of captive rain; some force would not allow its cathartic release.

His dwelling lay at the north end of the colony, close to the river and beneath the shadow of the wall. His father had cut with his own hands a channel that led a ribbon of the river under a waterwheel built into the side of the hut. It gently spun day and night, churning the water and grating two millstones against one another. He lived there alone, sleeping, when he was able, wrapped in blankets on the straw mattress in the bed frame of the single room. He left his door open each day for the farmers who made flour. It was this service that allotted him his share of sustenance, and gave him ample leave to practice the art. Home had always meant the dusty scent of unmade bread.

That morning he walked out of his front door and made his way to the bank. Walking along the pebble beach was the quickest route from his home to the shrine. The chaotic sky reigned overhead, and being sensitive to such forces he found himself conflicted. But the cool flow of the river staid his anxieties, and he took to the common task that afflicted his mornings: remembering the dreams of the night before.

His dreams often featured the drone of the millstones, horror to some ears but a comfort to his own. But last night had been no routine vision of mountains being ground into powder. He could recall a blue mist rising from water, but all other images had vanished. He was left with a sense of awe he could not disentangle from the ache of nostalgic loss. The river whispered her eerie secrets: he possessed no cypher to her language.

The pebbles clacked under his leather sandals for a mile of time, and then he stopped short. Before him, crouched in the fetal position with toes in the water, was the craftsmen Kyriakos. He was carving images into a chunk of driftwood with a bone knife. Aristokles hailed him. Kyriakos was a scientist and mystic theorist, the designer of Aristokles’ waterwheel and one of the few and respected cube-makers. He had pioneered the process of chemically extracting salt from the silt of the river, and ever since had been allowed his share of the colony’s food to pursue whatever project that engaged his interest.

“What busies your hand on our strange morning?”

“Strange indeed, Aristokles,” said Kyriakos through his graying beard. “Spirits are at odds in the sky. I’m mapping out the supernatural struggle as my inward eye details.” Sarcasm, evasion, or a poetic expression of some glorious blueprint? Any and all were likely in the words of the shrewd craftsman.

“Did you hear of the meeting?”

“I know what’ll be said.” The old man was squinting at the driftwood, using the point of his knife to etch a minute series of lines between points. The picture so far was akin to a night sky, a network of white dots thrust into the brown wood. Aristokles was versed in astronomy, and could see, after crouching beside him, that Kyriakos was creating a false series of constellations on the true star-map—and during the day. Aristokles cracked the crooked smile of a conspiring intellectual.

“Allow me to hear your predictions.”

Kyriakos raised his eyes from the carving. His face had borne a permanent sorrow as long as Aristokles had known him. “We are closing in on the end. I can feel it in my palms.” There was a moment of silent reflection during which his eyes traced the changing contours of the river. Then, as if declaring the task impossible, he returned to his work with fervor.

Aristokles passed him by.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

The architecture of the shrine was meant to convey purity. In earlier times the place may have glowed. Now it held to its foundational concept in form but not in color. Set on four circular plates of marble stacked in succession of shrinking radii near the tallest edge of a raised bank were in turn four columns, unfluted, plain but for the miracle that they were each hewn of one boulder: no drums, singular cylinders. These columns held aloft a vaulted ceiling impressed with one continuous groove that formed a golden spiral.

The four capitals displayed elaborate stone masks facing, altogether, in the four cardinal directions. The eastern mask looked out across the river, its expression serene, philosophical, transcendent. The western looked across the colony, through the wall, into the forest, and it wore the brutal smile of exploratory conquest. The mask that faced south looked downriver with an air of foggy nostalgia, memory reaching farther than sight. The mask that faced north was of course a skull, its vacant sockets aimed upriver and beyond, reflected, perhaps, in the snow that feathered the mountain peaks on the horizon.

Aristokles climbed the four steps, passing beneath the northern skull, walking around its column, careful, placing each foot where it should fall. He was under the vault, and when he had walked the radius of the floor—twenty strides at a reverent gait—he came to the round table at the center. The table was not great in size, but all elements of the shrine seemed to lean toward this center, as if the spirits of the place were watching intently.

They should be. On this table was the strategic, topographical, moving map of the war.

Miniature hills and vast open fields once lush with growth but now barren, starved, festering in ash, were populated by thousands of glowing pinpoints and lines of two colors: purple and green. The map changed in real time as the armies marched across terrain upon which Aristokles had never lain eyes.

It was obvious that the power was in the hands of purple. Purple points outnumbered the green, and the purple lines that surrounded groups of points, representing, as the experts had told him, territory or at least temporary control, were beginning to encircle the green lines. Most of the green points were concentrated in a valley on which the purple were inexorably bearing down from the higher ground.

Kyriakos had been right. The shaman would gather and sit in a circle on the cool marble while Nikephoros made his speech. We are closing in on the enemy, the stout old artist would say, but victory is far from imminent. Let Chance and skill redistribute our abilities for the coming days, and then carry on.

Aristokles placed his hands on the rim of the table and set himself over it, a watchful god invisible to the combatants. The drama played out like two ant colonies at war on a plate of molasses. Aristokles was no tactician, and did not dare interpret the events of the greater armies. He decided to watch the minute actions of two scouting parties that were drawing close to one another. One purple speck of light, and three green. After a few minutes of stalking one another, circling and waiting, flirtatious evasions and seekings, the two forces met. The purple speck glowed brighter for an instant, and all three green points dissolved into haze before vanishing from the map.

Aristokles returned to the pebble beach to make use of his art until the gathering was over and the redistribution began.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

Legs folded, lungs expanding and contracting. Breathe in: one with the outside, part of the whole, all is with, selfless. Breathe out: severing of the self, separation from the outside, all is against, alone. Breathe in and breathe out until the invisible line between outside and inside is aware of itself. Transform observational peristalsis into intense, willed action. Eyes closed, daylight skipping off the waves of the river to splash in dull red heat across the eyelids. Eyes closed again, the second pair of eyelids this time, the film of dreams and distant recollections. Wide awake, the body is slowed. The heartbeat levels off to a steady tempo, calm quarter notes in a measure of unknown length, unknown signature, unbroken but for the occasional irregular pair of eighths. River sound in the ears, a rushing lull, a whispered roar.

When the mystery dissolves, when presence becomes dream-presence, when the mind is an open field without boundaries, when the strings of causality can be felt quivering at the fingertips—eyes open.

The cube on the stones. Cards with pictures and symbols arranged around it with deliberate geometry.

The space within the cube. Focus.

The squared volume of air wavers like heat off of sand. Adjust the mind, keep pace with the vibrations. Chance is at work in the motions of matter: in the river, in the shapes of the stones. Within this precise cubic volume of air there rushes billions of particles, pushed by the wind and swapped out for another set of billions each second. Within this precise volume there is no conscious design. Until now.

Now each of the billions of particles that passes through this space must first pass through the analogy of the self that observes, who alters their behavior by his very observation, and controls their behavior by altering the nature of his observation. Now the wind must pass not only through the smooth edges of wood and through this exact section of physical being, but also through the self-conceptualization of the acute spectator.

By carefully folding his observation into his willed selfhood, Aristokles has made his perception yet another muscle. He flexes that muscle, and the space within the cube bends, and the fate of the universe is changed ever so slightly.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

It wasn’t long before we discovered we were not the only refugees in the valley. Thousands of the displaced streamed down from the mountains and foothills to the north and through the forest to the west seeking shelter from the inhuman threat. They often worked their way along the river, and so would stumble upon our encampment. Few of those who found us carried on. Common sense taught that there was relative safety in numbers.

Yet beyond that simple truth was something intangible that dwelled about the place, haunting and serene. It remained unspoken, but we all knew it in our bones. We were being protected here.

Soon the projected enclosure of the wall had been expanded by several square miles. Every man, woman and child who arrived at our encampment was enlisted to work on the fortifications, to clear great swaths of forest, to build homes, to make farmland. We were no longer a mere handful of mourners hiding away in the woods. We were a community of dedicated individuals. One might have mistaken it for the blossoming beginnings of a city destined for greatness, had it not been for the sorrow in our movements, the revenge in our eyes.

Though the colony grew strong, each citizen felt the weight of the coming struggle as if it were already upon him. Soon the plague would have to be confronted. What had began as a series of predatory slaughters would transform into all-out war.

As the colony sublimated around them, the leaders among us sought not only the most strategic defense, but even then an obscure method of conquering the enemy. The beasts were becoming stronger out in the wilderness, while we were still recovering our senses, bracing ourselves for invasion, cataclysm, extinction.

It was the alliance between two great minds that brought about the revelation. Leon, soldier and strategist, held strenuous counsel with Anakletos, philosopher and craftsman. Together they reached this conclusion: The only way to combat an enemy with such incredible advantages was to influence probability itself.

          -Zoe

 ◊               ◊               ◊

The redistribution had begun. Three men sat on stools around a wooden table in the midst of a field, their cubes placed carefully to the side in the grass, eyeing hands of cards clutched firmly between thumb and fingers. Their names were Timokrates, Anaxagoras, and Phaedrus. Silver coins, dull-cornered hexagons embossed with curving symbols circumscribed in a forgotten language, clattered to the center of the table one upon the other. Phaedrus slapped his cards face-down and leaned back, arms folded, to watch the showdown. Timokrates placed his cards face-up on the table: two Quiet Stones, one Standing Tree, one Formless Air, one Boundless Field.

Anaxagoras revealed his hand with a flourish of the fingertips, each card clapping against the table in quick succession like a run of grace notes preceding melody. Three Bold Mountains and two Boundless Fields. Phaedrus whistled high to low, Timokrates groaned in disbelief, palms pressed white against his forehead, and Anaxagoras smiled as he collected his winnings, scraping the coins toward himself in one clean shovel-motion.

“Aristokles,” he said, “we missed you at the gathering. Take a seat.”

Aristokles sat, assuming the role of the fourth player. He reached into the folds of his cloak and produced the hand from the last game he had played. Anaxagoras began to deal out hands to himself and the other two players.

The game had been crafted ages ago as part of the system of shaman artistry. A handful of coins was possessed by each shaman, the quantity of which determined the potency of a shaman’s art. The cards were as old as the coins, each one embossed on stiff parchment with an elaborate hand-painted representation of a natural object. Trees, stones, bodies of water, meteorological forms, mountains, hills, fields, elements; all were accounted for in the Deck. The cards were in constant circulation, and no table-deck held all of them. They were said to be the mystic symbols of the types of power a shaman could wield with his spells, and were meant to be the subject of deep meditation, in parallel with the shaman’s cube, during sessions of artistry. The value of each card was indeterminate, and the winner was only proclaimed as such by an unspoken, collective interpretation of card-to-card relationships accepted by any given table of players. The purpose of the game was to distribute power (coins) and abilities (cards) in accordance with both the skill of the players and the chance of the draw.

Players left the game at the beginning of a hand, and kept their last five cards with them at all times. The last hand of Aristokles had been four Drifting Smokes and a Whispering Stream. He regretted to see the excellent hand shuffled back into the table-deck after the first round, but won a palpable sum with it before it was assimilated into the obscurity from which it had been assembled.

It was to be a lucrative redistribution for Aristokles. He doubled the number of coins in his possession before he left the table. Anaxagoras came away from the table with a slightly increased hoard, and by the twitching of his eyebrows as he stood up with his final hand, an inspiring set of abilities. Timokrates and Phaedrus lost much of their wealth, but retired with the same calm and friendly demeanor. It was, after all, the will of Chance that had robbed them of their power: surely Chance was on the side of the faithful, surely out of these subtle turns of events the human victory would be achieved.

Aristokles left the table with a hand that was, judging from the table’s determinations of value during this series of games, utterly worthless. Fanned out before his eyes were five different cards. One Quiet Stone, one Boundless Field, one Aimless Cloud, one Wandering Star, and one that Aristokles had never come across in all his years of card-slinging. It pictured a cartographic view of the colony itself, all in shades of gray but for the stark blue river carving its way southward, accurate to the last detail. . . except for the small bridge that extended from the central shrine to an island in the midst of the water that he knew did not exist.

The card was called Cunning River.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

Even before the wall was complete, the arms race had begun. We were stockpiling weapons and training the youth, racing against the monsters that lurked outside the colony. They were out of sight but never out of mind, and we could feel them like a heavy shadow creeping toward us from the periphery of vision, a motion that slides out of sight when the eye is brought into focus. The military men were playing chess with an invisible foe, fashioning an offensive stance out of a thousand pieces, unaware of the position of the enemy and even doubting its existence.

Once the idea of shaping Chance to our advantage had been spoken, it could not be forgotten. The wise-man Anakletos had long held certain theories regarding the nature of this universe. As the story goes, he had been silent for days, watching the river, when the philosophy struck him. The world, he claimed, is held together by a being’s awareness of it. To gaze upon the river was to alter, in miniscule gradients, the speed, the flow, the substance of its current. To observe was to reshape. And surely a creative mind, armed with clever and disciplined eyes, could change the way it perceived the river. Therefore, by ontological law, a man could bend the river to his will.

Toward the necessity of preserving our race, his philosophy was drafted into military service. Under the supervision of the commander Leon, Anakletos had begun to hone his new art and teach it to the next generation. Rigorous experimentation took place. Veteran soldiers would engage inexperienced recruits in mock battle; the former alone with their weapon, the latter armed in addition with a practitioner of the art seeking to manipulate the outcome. The results were beyond dispute.

Yet there were those who argued that there was another factor at work, the boundless variable known as faith. It was possible that the combatants’ awareness  of the practitioner was enough to strengthen the subject of focus, and to throw the opposing soldier off-balance. But however it came into being, was that not the desired effect?

The warrior-artist was born. It was not long before his craft met the less forgiving test of the battlefield.

          -Zoe

 ◊               ◊               ◊

The cube twitched.

Aristokles woke with a spasm, wiped beads of sweat from his brow, then stared into the sun until the sleep was burned from his eyes. She was past the zenith now and traveling lower. He was sitting on top of a rock with his legs crossed trying to remember his dream. He let his legs slide apart and his toes touch the earth. After a few gentle minutes of kneading his bare feet into the forest soil and looking through the sky, his gaze came to rest on the object between his feet. The cube. He focused, eyes straining. Had their been movement, or had it only been his imagination echoing another forgotten dream-image?

One instantaneous flash of color.

It lasted for the blink of an eye, and could have been the bright spot cloven into his sight by the sun. But no, the image had been too sharp, the colors too vivid. It had been the terrified face of a woman, blonde hair with eyes of blazing green, beautiful even in its contortion.

Aristokles recoiled, falling backwards off of the rock. He laid there, gazing upward into the blue for a long string of moments. Had he been granted the sight of a goddess? Had it been a vision into the past, or into the future? An image transmitted directly from the battlefield by the convoluted tides of coincidence? What had terrified, was terrifying, would terrify this woman?

After his thoughts had raged in every corner of possibility, he bade himself relax, and began steady breathing exercises. The vision had come to him with purpose, and had come to him because he had followed the will of Chance and brought himself out into the forest in search of a quiet stone. He sat up, groaning and running his fingers through his hair. He walked around the rock and found his cube, his last hand arranged around its sides. Near the left edge he had set the Quiet Stone, the first of his recent hand.

The second was the Boundless Field.

He picked up his cards and tucked them into his cloak, their dealt order still intact. He gripped his cube and jogged off deeper into the woods, heading for the nearest clearing.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

The wall was now almost complete. Its long arms extended deep into the river and far out over the land, cradling us in protective embrace. The last stones were laid and the sharpened tree trunks raised. The carpenters built the gate, and the smiths fashioned it with thick iron clasps and a massive bolt. A crowd gathered to watch as it swung shut for the first time, blocking out the terror of the outside world—locking us in.

The men were separated into two castes: soldiers and warrior-artsits. The castes were of equal numbers, and they were paired according to their styles of combat, their temperaments, even intellectual compatibility. One soldier to each warrior-artist. One man to deal and receive the blows, one man to twist fate in his soldier’s favor.

There was a time of great contentment with this system. But rifts in task soon become rifts in thinking, and all the wider for it. Leon and his soldiers grew disdainful of the warrior-artists. Why not bolster the fighting force with as many able-bodied men as we could muster? What’s more, the creed of the warrior-artists shifted further toward mysticism each time it was vocalized. The warrior-artists were scornful in their own right. Why deprive their purpose of a single man who could help turn the tides of Chance, when every mind set to the task brought them that much closer to controlling the fabric of causality?

The dispute was serious. But when the common enemy reared its formless head again for the first time in years, it was cast aside. One of the hunting parties had walked out the gates as twenty strong, and scrambled back in as three badly wounded, spouting tales of dark monstrosities devouring their companions.

The fighting force leapt into action. They were frightened, we could see it in their faces; but greater than fear was the hunger for the first militant confrontation with the enemy. They marched out of the gates in twos, led by the one hunter left with the strength to guide them.

And then, a miracle. Ragged, bloody, and filled with laughter, they returned. They had won. The beasts—so long rumored to be immortal, invulnerable, demonic—they had seen the beasts bleed and die.

The victory was only the first in a long and arduous campaign. So spoke the two great leaders, and they spoke no lie.

          -Zoe

 ◊               ◊               ◊

Two days had passed and Aristokles had brought about the visions of the woman four times, each in conjunction with a location delineated by the order of cards in his last hand.

The Boundless Field had led him to a wide clearing in the forest where wild grass swayed and insects hummed. After half an hour of intense concentration he had conjured the vision again. This time the woman lingered a moment longer within the empty walls of the wooden cube.

The search for a location symbolized by the Aimless Cloud had been far more rigorous. He had wandered through the forest for the remainder of the day, always with his eyes turned up toward the sky. No chance occurrences sparked an epiphany, no secrets were unveiled. He had reentered the colony with the evening hunting-party just before nightfall with a heavy heart, and retired to his dwelling. His sleep was plagued with intense dreams of wandering through vast expanses of uncharted territory, and as he walked he felt the blade-like pupils of crouching predators tracing his steps, set in golden circles gleaming from the shadows. He had started awake in the midst of night, and could not fall asleep again until he brought to bed with him the iron sledgehammer he kept for maintenance of the mill.

In the morning he had set out again, this time searching within the colony. He hiked along the dirt roads, passing farmers on horse-drawn carts and fellow shaman honing their skills in patches of matted-down field grass. When he sighted the hill from which a lone tree sprouted, he hurried off the path and up the gentle slope. He had reached into his pocket and gazed into the painting on the Aimless Cloud. This very hill, it seemed, had been sketched at the bottom of the picture, above which a great cloud was passing. He had sat down under the tree and waited.

The sky was clear but for one pure, white, lumbering beast. The vision came quickly this time, and he was able to sustain it for almost a minute. Her breathing was heavy as if in sexual passion, and her green eyes blinked in the face of some unknowable monstrosity. Was she being tortured, swallowed by the enemy?
She was seeking a listener. There was dark truth in her eyes, a yarn waiting to be told. He was determined to unravel it, and seek the center of the labyrinth.

That night he had leapt into the river at the north end of the colony and climbed the slippery birth-slope of the wall. He ambled along the top for nearly an hour before settling into the lotus position with the cube before him and the Wandering Star placed inside it. He looked up into the night sky: the stars like winter morning ice-crystals on black plate glass. One star, isolated from any constellation, winked and shifted, calling his attention. He poured his thoughts into it, imagining a huge, infinitely distant orb of fire, spinning fast enough to tear itself apart and fade into blackness. There and then the woman appeared to him for the fourth time, the vision burning through the surrounding night, so lucid he could almost hear her short breaths.

Aristokles saw a darkness framed in the green of her eyes, the silhouette of a malignant machine assembling itself out of a thousand fragments to reveal one striking purple disc reflected in the moisture of her quivering irises.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

That night Aristokles returned to his home. The machinery was droning on in the dark corner of the hut, muffled by the chuckling flow of the artificial stream. Ptolemais was waiting for him there. She had placed the sledgehammer on the rough dirt floor as if in fear or respect, and fallen asleep on the straw mattress. The woolen blanket hid her thin, curved frame up to the neck, but he could see she was wound tightly underneath, her extremities pulled inward to concentrate body heat. Her hair tumbled free across the blanket, thick and black, in tight waves. Her cheeks were hollow like those of a much older woman. Beneath her tight eyelids he could sense the oceanic blue of her eyes as they darted in circles.

He sat down on the side of the bed and ran his hands over his face and through his hair, gathering himself. He seemed to be squinting at himself from a great distance, trying to ascertain his own shape, to remember where he was. In the months before the fateful vision had befallen him, struck him like a subtle disease of the mind, he had courted Ptolemais in the fields of the colony, sipping wine and trading jokes and stories. A wave of guilt overtook him: lost in the depth of these past obsessive days he had all but forgotten her. Now he prepared himself, weighing phrases and apologies in his head, crafting a means of bringing her close to him again. But not too close. Not into the midst of these serpentine doubts. If he was to be, as the aura that enveloped him whispered, a sacrifice toward the discovery of higher knowledge, he would bear the fate alone.

Her eyelashes fluttered, and Ptolemais was eased out of an anxious dream by a calloused hand stroking her cheek. She opened her eyes and gazed up at him. She smiled, perhaps thinking herself, in a semi-conscious daze, wrapped in the familiarity of some moment long past that they had shared. But as the present seeped into her she remembered his long absence, and her lips tightened with concern.

“Where have you been?” she asked as she sat up in the bed. As the sheet fell from her shoulders Aristokles saw her smooth flesh, and felt, with some confusion, no desire for her.

“Stargazing,” he replied. He pulled her head to his chest and kissed it gently.

“I’ve been worried. You’ve been wandering again, as you used to. Everyone says you’ve become a man apart. Have you forgotten me?”

“No.” It was not a complete lie, he told himself. Surely he had kept her memory close on some level of consciousness. “I’ve been pursuing new methods. I have to follow my art where it takes me.” He was looking her in the eyes now. A cloud had passed across the moon, and the cool pallor had wormed its way through the windows and erected itself between them, firm and visible, thick as a wall.

“The shaman who pursue victory don’t need new techniques. They’re doing fine. Victory is near, they say. Why push into new territory?” She had wrenched away from him, frowning. Eyes downcast, her temper began to show. “They say you are already the best. You have the sight, and the gift, and the willpower. Don’t waste it. The art is a means, Aristokles. Don’t perfect it for the sake of your ego.”

“They’re dedicated to victory, Ptolemais. I’m dedicated to understanding what that victory signifies.” With a breathless motion of the lips he added, “They know nothing.”

“You’re so distant tonight. It’s been a long time. But it’s more than that.” She looked up at him. Desperation coursed through her question: “What is it this time? Are you forlorn or inspired?”

“They come hand in hand.”

With this he took her hand in his, and laid down beside her. They drifted away from the room, away from the bed they shared, and into dark individual spaces where they were each alone.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

After the first victory, the great campaign our leaders had spoke of crossed from conjecture into execution. The soldiers and warrior-artists were divided into regiments, and a disciplined hierarchy emerged. A different regiment marched out of the colony each day to scout out the position of the enemy, engaging them when necessary. They struck like packs of wolves, luring small groups of the creatures away from their herds and overwhelming them with a combination of force and artistry. Soon the groups were becoming self-sufficient, staying outside the colony on week-long patrols, returning only to bandage the wounded, bury the dead bodies that had not been devoured, and resupply.

There were whole months that went by when not a single regiment was seen within the colony. The occasional messenger would return from the front lines with news. The campaign was intensifying. Leon and Anakletos were developing their methods by careful experimentation in the field, coming to understand the new powers they wielded and  learning the weaknesses of the enemy. The resistance had evolved into a complex guerilla war, and by all accounts it was going as well as it could.

But old discontents began to arise. More and more soldiers were lost to the enemy, and Leon’s doubts about the artists grew. Anakletos insisted that his men were on the brink of revelation, that he needed the soldiers to buy him more time, and he needed more artists in his ranks. Soon, he said, they would be able to transform Chance into human design, to create a victorious outcome from the chaotic forces of the world. Soon the soldiers would no longer be necessary to his project.

Leon wanted to believe, but could not accept such an intangible course of action. His men were bearing the majority of casualties, and the artists refused to become soldiers to compensate for losses. Anakletos saw faith in their eyes, where Leon read cowardice and superstition.

It was during a tight spot in the campaign that Leon proclaimed all warrior-artists must either be drafted as soldiers or banished from the battlefield as cumbersome insubordinates. Many complied and enlisted. But Anakletos and his closest disciples would not concede what had become their religion and purpose. The artists had no tangible strength to resist the soldiers, and so those who remained in the fold had no choice but to go. Leon assured his old friend, with a final stiff handshake, that they could return to the colony and continue to practice their art in the service of the war.

Anakletos and his remaining men were unfazed. If their abilities were truly what they believed them to be, they could steer Chance toward victory without physical proximity to the soldiers. But new methods would have to be invented.

          -Zoe

 ◊               ◊               ◊

There were times when Aristokles was sighted as in a zoetrope, seen frame by frame through the narrow gaps between logs as he moved ghost-like within the damp triangular space between wood and stone, under the wall, below the angled trunks. He alone knew the secret to entering that secluded corridor: hidden by moving water at the north bank of the colony was an asymmetric void where one log was missing from the wall, forming an underwater entryway. The rite of passage was a struggle against the current and twenty breathless seconds.

The water ran down his face in streaks as he walked along the corridor, naked as an ancient statue. His cube and hand of cards had been left behind under his bed in the hut, stashed in silence while the first morning rays played across the sleeping face of Ptolemais. He needed more time alone, to contemplate the final card, the Cunning River.

The name suggested the river itself was consciously withholding secrets. The map on the card was ingrained in his mind: the image of a bridge extending from the shore near the shrine, leading across the water to an island that did not exist. Was the card so old that these objects had eroded away, swept off by the river or destroyed? Or was it a schematic meant for careful study and construction? Paranoia crept up his spine. The answer was close enough to taste—it tasted of old blood, buried tragedy. The other cards had led him to the vision of the woman with green eyes, each time more intense and lucid. She had a part to play in this yet. Aristokles could still feel her reaching up to him from a dark chasm, its stony lips closing together, inexorable and slow, to crush her truth and speak no more.

His muscles had gone tense without his approval. He slowed his pace and relaxed, and felt his heart rate diminishing. Aristokles reminded himself to think like those who had designed the card, to think like an artist. If the island and its bridge existed than there would be nothing extraordinary about the map on the card. The aberration was the only clue. He would have to find the bridge, or a bridge inward, seeking an island jutting from the midst of the stuff of life, a vacant space that the energy flow was forced by its own laws to circumvent and never touch. To contemplate this he would go to the shrine, the place where the bridge began.

Aristokles walked half the perimeter of the wall before doubling back. Now that his course was decided the way home seemed longer. He followed the narrow passage back down into the river, dove beneath the water, and swam up through the gap. He let the current carry him downstream, then swam into the man-made channel that led to the waterwheel. He grabbed one of the paddles as it came around, gripped it as it took him under, and held fast as it lifted him up above the hut. He jumped off and landed on the thatched roof, then tumbled down the slope and off the edge to land in a heap at his own front door.
He stood and brushed off the straw that had stuck to his wet skin. There was a broad smile on his face for the first time in days. He had not taken that way home since he was young.

Aristokles walked inside. Ptolemais had left him a breakfast of warm porridge before going on her way. He ate like an animal, crouching by the embers of the fire she had lit to cook the meal, drying himself. Then he slipped back into bed. He had only slept a handful of hours, and he would need full concentration for this final task. What’s more, he always thought more deeply once the sun had gone down.

The blankets were thick with Ptolemais’ sweet, fleshy scent. He dreamed of the woman with green eyes. She smelled just like his lover. She hummed a mournful folk song and danced a light dance as forest fires raged in the darkness behind her.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

Aristokles woke just as the sun sank below the forest. He dressed himself, stashed the cards in his cloak, and looped his arm through the cube. Then he was out the door, down the bank and onto the pebble beach, walking toward the shrine.

He looked out over the river. Thick fog was accumulating over the lapping water, shattering the moonlight into so many splintered points of vapor that it became one silver-blue haze. He had seen fog on the river before, but never like this. The heavy, earthbound clouds were swirling into shapes he could almost recognize, then dissipating before they could be given name or meaning. His mind was contorting its surroundings, as he had trained it—but those contortions were acquiring no definition.

There was another, invisible fog between himself and the shapes dancing across the river. Unfocused focus, intricate ambiguity, detailed opacity. No phrase could illustrate a film so fine, a lens synchronously convex and concave.

Halfway southward along the shore Aristokles encountered a familiar figure sitting cross-legged on the stones. It was Kyriakos. He had no tool in hand now, no astrological symbols scraped into driftwood. His vacant, open palms were placed on his knees, turned upward toward the shrouded sky. His eyes were wide open, absorbing the changing forms of fog into their glassy stillness.

Aristokles knelt down beside him. After a long quiet moment he posed his question.

“What do you see?”

Kyriakos did not stir. After what could have been an hour of drifting smoke and seamless silence, Aristokles stood and began to walk away. Then he came to a dead halt.

Kyriakos was whistling a tune. It was the song the green-eyed woman had hummed in his dream. The old man gradually broke off from the melody and descended chromatically in pitch until he could no longer intone the notes, and his lips vibrated with the sound of wind through an empty canyon. This too faded away as his single breath ran dry.

Kyriakos inhaled deep, and without breaking his gaze into the fog he said, “I see time.”

Aristokles passed him by.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

The warrior-artists returned to our colony, hearts heavy, spirits yet unbroken. It was the first time we had heard news of the war in half a year. Many believed that the army had been destroyed, that it could not survive so long in the field without returning to the colony. The artists explained the intricacies of the war to us, how Leon had established multiple base camps that the army periodically inhabited and then abandoned. The war machine had become a mobile city.

The news of the schism in the military was shocking, though predictable. The same tensions had been present as the regiments were first formed. Behind the artists’ shame lay a burning anger, but Anakletos was not about to let the transience of emotion come between himself and the goal of his faith. Once safe inside the wall, he assured his men that they would continue to refine their art in the service of the war, and that no grudges must be held with cataclysm still on the horizon. Then he plunged into seclusion.

Days passed as Anakletos brooded. Their power was undiminished, perhaps stronger than before, but they needed new methods to compensate for the loss of a true battlefield scenario.

Anakletos reached the conclusion that distance from the battlefield had robbed the warrior-artists of three things: their subject of focus, the influence of Chance on their individual power, and the influence of terrain on their individual methods of combat.

Anakletos chose to do what any man of faith does in the absence of the truth he proclaims. He created symbols for what had been lost.

For lack of a subject, Anakletos crafted an object. He let his hands run wild with the tools of a carpenter, following the flow of the wood, cutting away what was rotten and keeping what was dense. The result was the rough frame of a hollow wooden cube. With careful motions he smoothed its contours and gave it pure shape. It was perfect for his purposes. It had to be hollow, so that the emptiness, and not the object itself, might come under the sway of his scrutiny.

For lack of Chance’s influence on the artist’s power, Anakletos forged a great number of iron and copper coins, such as were used as currency in foreign lands. He had noted then that the coins seemed to be an analogy for natural energy, constantly changing hands as a representation of value, yet worthless without this motion. The warrior-artists needed to be surrounded by Chance, to be at its mercy, even where their power was concerned.

For lack of the battlefield itself, the various natural scenarios that determined how the artist would protect and empower his soldier, Anakletos created an innumerable deck of cards. Each one fell into a named category of geographic formation, yet each painted picture was unique. The cards would inspire in the subconscious those arenas of battle that were no longer physical realities, and thus strengthen their faith in the chaotic craftsmanship of nature.

The warrior-artists had crafted new tools. Now all they could do was practice the art and wait.

          -Zoe

 ◊               ◊               ◊

The fog swirled beneath the shrine’s vault, playing havoc with the shadows. The marble columns were spotted with water droplets that rolled downward and collected in pools on the floor. Aristokles climbed the moist steps and walked to the table, to the map. The pinpoints of light on the miniature battlefield produced an eerie glow, churned into luminescent foam by the fog. He leaned over the table and looked down on the war. The fog was thick enough that even his view of the map was distorted, and every group of points became one amorphous globule against the veiled landscape. Was there fog out in the field? he wondered. Were the soldiers groping for footing through this same obscurity? The purple mass had closed off all escape routes for the green, and was falling in on them as naturally as water moving downhill.

Aristokles tore his gaze from the table and walked to the eastern column of the shrine. He sat down on the steps, set the cube before him, and placed in the center of it the card named Cunning River. He then folded his legs underneath him, and after one upward glance at the sublime expression of the shrine’s eastern mask, he looked out over the river, deep into the fog, keeping the cube in his peripheral vision. He focused his thought on giving structure to the vapor.

In time, structure emerged. The fog above the water condensed, then curled away in tall curves that formed a series of arches over a pathway across the river. The path was weightless fog. Aristokles flexed his mind, and in a sudden, implosive rush of wind the path became solid. It was a wharf of rotting wood held aloft by poles set deep in the riverbed. The fog still held its parabolic shape above the bridge, forming a tunnel into the darkness. Aristokles sat still for a long time, afraid to move lest the vision dissipate. When he finally relaxed his mind, it held.

He stood and descended from the shrine. Trembling footsteps carried him to the high bank from which the bridge began. Aristokles paused before moving onto the wooden boards and squinted, searching for the exact point at which the wharf vanished into the darkness. Finding no division between wharf and night, he placed a foot on the boards and began to cross. Wood groaned beneath. He walked under the vault of fog, careful not to reach out into the vapor on either side of him; he felt as if he himself would evaporate if he touched the clouds with his fingertips, carried off into the crude dream from whence these shapes appeared. The river laughed from below, deep chuckles and high trickling—air passing through a heavy chest, brushing against rough patches of throat tissue.

The bridge led exactly where he remembered: straight to a door set into the weathered rock-face on the western side of the island. The door was tall and wide, two sloped edges meeting in a point at the top, the same flaking wood as the bridge. It was covered with splotches of moss, and from its boards two iron rings hung. He gripped one of the rings, rust flaking as he wrapped one finger around it at a time, fascinated by the intricacy of his muscles, amazed at his own dexterity.

He pulled open one half of the door and stepped into damp torchlight. The chamber had been carved out of the inside of the island. There was a guilty spirit to the place. To his left and right the walls were bare and craggy. Before him was the puzzle.

It was composed of nine stone tiles. Hundreds of bowl-shaped recesses had been hollowed into these tiles, an elaborate conduit of carved lines connecting them. Spheric stones lay in piles all over the floor. A feeling welled up in Aristokles: there was a river far greater than the one surrounding the island held back by this wall. The puzzle was the lock on a levy. The story was hidden, but the room’s logic was obvious. Of course the stones would lie just in this way, like scattered constellations fallen out of the sky, out of their own mythologies.

Constellations. . . Aristokles ran his hands along the wall, letting his fingers trace the lines, setting his balled fists into the dark, hollow spaces. He crouched down and lifted one of the stones in his hand. It was slimy and cold, and the weight was familiar. He thrust the stone into one of the spaces. There was a loud clack, and the stone held it place.

Now he was scrambling for more stones, rapidly arranging a shape on the wall. It was to be the form of one of Kyriakos’ contrived constellations. He couldn’t believe his memory of the driftwood carving was so vivid—he must have seen the shape before, somewhere else, a long time ago.

When he finished the picture the square tile on which he had arranged the shape broke from the wall and shattered as it struck the floor.

Hidden beneath it was a layer of granite, upon which text had been chiseled. It told of a nocturnal escape across a river from an inhuman enemy. As he read, tears began to stream down his face; suffocated in the steel grip of an emotion he could not recognize.

The text was punctuated with a delicate signature. He pronounced the name in a whisper. . .

“Zoe.”

The flash of green irises passed across his mind’s eye. “Zoe, beautiful terrified Zoe. . . was that your name?”

Aristokles stood, the torchlight playing over his face. It could have been a trick of the shadows, but wrinkles seemed to have been carved into his visage, as if he had aged years in a moment. He blinked, shook his head, blinked again, raised his right arm across his chest to clutch his left shoulder, lowered it again. He was aware of every hair sprouting out of his chin. He looked down and saw his feet, wrapped in sandals, and watched as his toes stretched away from one another, then settled in two neat rows again. So lucid, so much detail.

After another two hours of memory, confusion, and rapid movements of his hands, eight constellations from the driftwood carving had been recreated on the wall, every vertex accounted for by a smooth round stone. Eight tiles had been loosed from the wall and burst, one after the next, into porcelain-like shards on the cavern floor. His wide eyes had digested seven fragments of some mythic historical document, and they now moved, with inexorable slowness, over the eighth:

 ◊               ◊               ◊

For one cycle of seasons the artists practiced and perfected their art. With distance from the battlegrounds, their methods of incantation and meditative awareness came to revolve more and more around metaphysical vagaries and intangible modes of thought. They had abandoned all logic, and placed their faith in the cards, the coins, and the cubes. Their system became deeply subjective, and many feared they had lost touch altogether with their goal. Anakletos assured them that they were accelerating toward a singularity at which the war would no longer be the focus of the art—their control over reality would become so complete that the war would never have occurred. The trouble was there was no way to grasp such a result. How would they know when they had breached the wall of time, when causality was fully at their disposal? Could it be that this climax had already passed, and they now practiced on without knowledge as to their effect on the world, in stumbling, blind omnipotence?

The answers to these anxieties came trudging back into the colony, drenched and muddied from rain, bloody and wounded. They were a dozen men, and they were the last of the warriors. Leon and his surviving handful had returned to the colony, drained of all feeling in limbs and hearts.

Their stories unfolded as we warmed them with fire and sustenance. The enemy was too many, too strong, and too savage. No tactics could match their wolf-like brutality.

The war was lost. The final task was to wait for extinction.

The skilled craftsmen among us found a way to pass the time. Among Leon’s possessions was an extraordinary notebook that detailed the movements of both our warriors and the enemy throughout the conflict, complete with technical sketches of terrain. Within the shrine that marked the spot at which we first disembarked on this side of the river, the craftsmen constructed a fantastic machine with fragments harvested from enemy bodies. With living clockwork and mirrors, the monument would repetitively display the tactical movements of the war at the same speed they were executed, from beginning to end, unto eternity.

          -Zoe

 ◊               ◊               ◊

Aristokles knew the risk he had taken by leaving the island. He knew his art well enough to recognize the unique significance of a specific moment in time. If he should return at a different hour, in daylight or in twilight, or with different emotions or thoughts, the bridge was likely to not show itself, and to never show itself again. He had found the instant of passage, and it was (barring the possibility of a deranged, cyclic temporal system) the one and only instant of its kind.

But it couldn’t be helped. There was a task to be done.

When he found himself home once again, he reached under the bed and gripped the shaft of the sledgehammer, wrapping one finger around it at a time, cradling its gravity in his palms. Then he was following the path through the field, too afraid to walk the beach lest the mists show him anything more. He leapt up the stairs of the shrine and walked toward the monument. With one last look he saw the purple force streaming down on top of the green, purple sparks hunting, green sparks winking out one after the other.

Just as he swung the hammer down into the machine, a thought crossed his mind: How could the craftsmen have programmed their own extinction into its tactical history? But the thought, along with the miniature topography and battling points of light, was shattered upon impact.

Aristokles dropped his weapon and sank to his knees on the smooth marble floor. Within the great gash he had rent in the machine he saw steel gears twisting, fanged cogs turning, lights winking, mirrors flashing.

This was not the tractable reality he had been promised. This was the irreversible, merciless past, echoing on for an unknown span of ages.

 ◊               ◊               ◊

Tucked within folds of invisible fabric, real only in the void between two distinct  eventualities, the ninth and last tile of the puzzle lay unturned. The gateway had opened and closed, and just before the text yet hidden under the stone slab effectively ceased to be, it read as follows. . .

 ◊               ◊               ◊

 As we wait for the end, the warrior-artists have assumed one final, desperate task. If, in truth, they are, on some level however minute, able to alter the substance of Chance, to reshape the effects of causes, to control discreet events by controlling their own perceptions. . . then perhaps they can alter the flow of time. Perhaps they can reach backward and protect those who we once were, long before we were beyond salvation. Perhaps, if only within some dark pocket of untouchable space, they can produce another reality in which the war is only a myth.

          -Zoe

I saw Deer Tick three times in October 2011. It was the best month of my life. October was over, and I was left feeling pretty empty. I wanted to hear music again. I thought of bands that reminded me of Deer Tick. I thought of bands that make me good when I feel bad. I thought of Dawes.

And so I decided I wanted to see Dawes. Maybe they would be coming around to Austin. Every band, I figured, makes their way to Austin at some point or another. It’s the live music capital of the world. It’s the place to go.

As it happened, Dawes was planning on stopping by Austin. They were, I read, playing at the Moody Theater at Austin City Limits Live. I’m not really sure what that last part means. It’s just what I read. Is the Moody Theater in Austin City Limits Live? Is Austin City Limits Live . . . a building? I don’t know. All I know is that I wanted to be there, if God would allow me to.

God said, “Okay.” God said, “Just this once.”

There was a catch, and it was a weird one: you had to win tickets in order to see Dawes. I didn’t understand why that was. It seemed stupid.

Apparently it was some sort of celebration for a radio station I had never heard of called KGSR. KGSR wanted everyone to come out and celebrate their 21st year of existence—so long as one had a ticket. I figured there was no way I’d win, but I tried anyway. And by try I mean I registered on their website and didn’t understand how to enter the contest. I gave up. So much for Dawes, I thought.

•     •     •

Three weeks later I got an email informing me I had won a pair of tickets to KGSR’s 21st birthday celebration. It said, “Come on down and get your tickets!”

I said, “Sure, okay.” I had no idea how I had won. I hadn’t done anything at all—other than sign up to become a member on their website.

I went to that very website. It was full of stupid garbage. KGSR made it sound like it was the most exclusive event of the year. They made it sound as if Jesus Christ Himself would be there. They urged listeners to call in for a slim chance of winning tickets. I was confused. I hadn’t done that at all. In fact I had exerted almost no effort in order to win. Huh, I thought. Huh.

I invited Chantal. I told her Dawes was pretty good. I gave her North Hills and Nothing Is Wrong and told her to prepare to have a heart attack. She said they were okay. She said they weren’t as good as Delta Spirit or Deer Tick—two other bands I had forced her to worship.

That was a fair assessment, I said. I agreed with her only because Dawes lets their drummer sing every now and then, and when that happens it’s usually not a very good idea.

•     •     •

The night before the concert, I felt my phone vibrate in my pants. It was Chantal. She said her friend Carley was beside herself with jealousy over my winning a pair of tickets. She said she loved Dawes. I felt a little bad that Carley couldn’t come.

And then I remembered how lucky I had been. I felt pretty good about winning those tickets. I was maybe a little boastful about it. I told everyone about it “Dawes—” I said, “for free!” I was so very excited.

Thirty minutes later, Chantal told me Carley had won tickets.

“Sorry, man,” said Chantal. “They’re just giving those tickets away.” My chest sank. I didn’t feel like a special little boy any more.

“Tell Carley she can’t sit with us,” I said. “She might try to steal Taylor away.” I was of course referring to lead singer and principal songwriter, Taylor Goldsmith, whom I harbored a fierce crush on. I wanted him all to myself. I wanted him to sing “Time Spent in Los Angeles” into my ear and my ear alone. Carley could have his brother—the drummer. He could sing to her all he wanted, for all I cared.

I went to sleep that night feeling stupid.

•     •     •

The day of the concert was weird. It moved slowly.

But concert days are always weird. I get so excited that I don’t feel excited at all. I just want the day to be over with, and for live music to arrive. The fact that I have to eat and shower and walk and talk and breathe and blink annoys me.

I slept until the late afternoon to speed things up. I wanted to see Dawes so bad it nearly gave me a kidney stone.

And I knew they were headlining. I knew I would have to sit through three other bands before I got to see them. There was The Gourds, who, judging by their promotional band photo, looked like a bunch of old dudes with guitars. Then Givers, whom I had heard once or twice before. Matt Kearney would be the last person to separate me from Dawes, and I had no idea who in the hell that was. He looked like a real jerk. He wore a dumb hat.

I took a nap at some point. I fell asleep on the floor. I slept until it was time to go. I must have been awake for only ten hours that whole day.

The doors opened at seven p.m., but I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about seeing The Gourds, so I opted to make pasta instead.

I ate some pasta. It was just OK. I overcooked the noodles. The sauce was too cold.

After I’d finished what I’m sure can best be described as a sad meal, I hopped on my bicycle and sped down Duval in the direction of Chantal’s house. At the corner of San Jacinto and Dean Keaton, my phone went off.

“Ryan?” said Chantal.

“I’m on my way,” I said. I panted and took a sip of water. I had planned to make it to her house in less than ten minutes. I had less than five minutes to cut through campus and cross Guadalupe and do all of that crazy bullshit.

When the light turned green, I sped off like a real maniac. People were startled. I felt like a jerk. I wanted to see Dawes so badly.

•     •     •

I arrived at Chantal’s house in some obscene amount of time. I was covered in sweat—and coupled with the cool temperature, felt like I’d just snorted half a bag of blow. I was hot-cold. I was on fire and sick.

Chantal looked perplexed. She asked me if I was OK.

“Yes,” I said, huffing and puffing.

“Should I bring a sweater?” said Chantal.

“No,” I said. “God, no.”

We got on our bicycles. Chantal warned that she would kill me if the temperature dropped further. I had told her to calm the hell down. She frowned.

I opened the door and sped off towards downtown Austin. The sky was starless. The only thing we could make out was the big white moon. There was a ring of soft light around it.

Chantal was faster than me. She also knew where we were going, which was Willie Nelson Blvd. I had to laugh. Willie Nelson Blvd. was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard.

We stopped at stop signs, and waited at traffic lights. We let cars pass us. We biked like hell. I hoped in my heart that we’d waited long enough to miss The Gourds perform.

•     •     •

Willie Nelson Blvd. was a clusterfuck of rich people and laughing people and laughing rich people. It was crammed with cars and lights and pedestrians and pedicabs blasting Michael Jackson. “Hey, man,” I said to a pedicab driver behind me. I was counting on Austin friendliness. The driver didn’t disappoint. He was unfailingly nice.

“Hey, how are you?” said the driver.

“Great,” I said. “And you?”

“Doin’ good, man,” he said.

“So long.”

“Seeya.”

Before us there was a great building shaped like a cube. It was the color of a storm cloud. It had exposed walkways lined with glass plating and metal railings. It was lit up like a Christmas tree. It was the Moody Theater. “That’s it,” I said to Chantal. “There it is.”

People were eating and laughing and talking at its base. There was a restaurant and little shops making up the ground floor. Chantal and I crossed the street and locked our bicycles up. We crossed back over and tried to find a way in. It seemed impenetrable. We felt stupid.

Chantal spotted a set of stairs. They were partially hidden by a wall. We quickly made our ascent to the nearest group of people. They were entering through the lowest set of doors. We thought we could go in that way, too. We were told to keep scaling the building. “General admission is upstairs,” said a woman in a blue coat. She said, essentially, that we had to go way the hell up there in order to be admitted.

So we climbed and climbed. We made it to the top and got in the “will call” line. I gave my name to the man behind the table, and he quickly scanned an enormous list. “Ah,” he said. “Here you are.”

Chantal and I were given two orange bracelets. That meant we were third-class citizens. That meant we would be in the nosebleed section.

The lobby was swank as hell. It had leather couches and fancy bars and a terrific view of downtown Austin which wrapped around the entire building. I could make out lights and trees and buildings for miles in every direction. Chantal and I didn’t care about any of that, though. We just wanted to see Dawes.

Dawes was being kept at bay by a terrible force, which was The Gourds. I could hear them playing in the auditorium, which was just past the corner bar with the cute bartenders. It sounded like circus-jamboree music. It sounded like the kind of stuff that people in their fifties get their rocks off to. I didn’t want to go in, but I had no choice. So in we went.

•     •     •

 The auditorium was something like 95 degrees. It was hot with human bodies, of which there were many. There were a few people singing and dancing and clapping. Most everyone else sat stiff in their chairs, yawning and staring down below with neutral expressions on their dopey faces.

Yes, and they stared below, and not ahead, because the balcony hovered over the stage. It was at least thirty feet off the ground, and filled with rows and rows of empty seats. Below was a second balcony and finally the show floor, which had dozens of foldable seats arranged in neat rows before the stage.

And on the stage were The Gourds. There was a round gentleman playing a mandolin, and an old guy with a guitar, and another old guy with a bass—and a drummer and a keyboardist. They were rocking out the best they could, which was fair enough. Everyone seated in general admission that had gray or graying hair seemed to enjoy their rockabilly noise. Chantal and I looked at each other. We laughed. The Gourds were pretty bad.

They played what seemed like seven songs—but it could have been twelve. We’d come in mid-set, too, so surely the crowd had grown tired of their rock-influenced Christmas songs. Every time a song would end, the bassist would say the words “another” and “Christmas” and “song”, and there we were, listening to “another Christmas song.” The only one I remember was about how The Rolling Stones had never written a Christmas song.

And really, who gives a shit if they haven’t?

•     •     •

“We’ve got one more for you,” said someone, I don’t remember who. They ended up playing two more songs. The announcer from KGSR stood on the side of the stage with a set of white notecards in his hand. He tapped his foot to the music. He seemed anxious. He wanted The Gourds to stop playing just as much as we did.

Finally they left. They bowed. I clapped. I respected them, but wanted them to go away. I wanted Dawes to come out as soon as possible. Most of all I wanted to stop sweating so damn much. It was sweltering in that room. I felt claustrophobic and weird.

The man from KGSR stepped out on stage. With him was a woman in a black dress and white tights. Chantal turned to me: “God, white tights? Really?”

They talked about their radio station for ten minutes. They reminded us at least a half-dozen times that the show we were watching was absolutely free. “You paid zero dollars for this show, ladies and gentleman.” Yeah, okay.

And then they left, and everyone was happy again. A swarm of roadies descended upon the stage and picked it clean. They removed all of The Gourds’ equipment, and we thanked them silently for that. They began setting up for Givers, who were to perform next.

As it turned out, Givers required an unusual setup. There was a small drum set and a big drum set. There was a xylophone. I caught sight of a ukulele. Whatever they had planned, it was certainly going to be fucked up. It was going to be great.

•     •     •

Givers ended up being nuts. The guitarist yipped and hollered like a psychopath. He jumped up and down and shook his head and danced. There was a woman in the band, and she was great. She had a beautiful voice. And it was she, I found out, who needed to be stationed behind the small drum set and the xylophone. It was she who played the ukulele. I fell in love with her over the span of six or seven songs. At one point she head-banged and danced so fervently that her headband flew off and her long, long hair came down, draping her face with brown-golden locks that I wanted to run my hands through, as long as that wouldn’t be creepy to her. And then I fell in love with her some more.

Chantal pulled me in close. She put her mouth up to my ear so I could hear her. “I want to marry her,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, “me too.”

•     •     •

Matt Kearney was boring. He and another guitarist played some boring songs about love, or whatever. The only funny part was when Matt insulted one of the corporate sponsors. I thought that was funny as hell.

I think I fell asleep for the rest.

•     •     •

Chantal made eye-contact with her friend Carley, who was seated in the front row of the balcony with an architect named Peter. After some mouthing back and forth, and hand motions which told us we should move, we moved. We sat down next to Carley and Peter. I waved to Carley and shook Peter’s hand. He did his best to give me a firm handshake. He did the manly double-pump. I didn’t play that game. I just gave him a regular, medium-strength shake that lasted half a second. I could tell he wanted more, but that’s all I gave him.

I stood up. “Excuse me,” I said. I walked up twenty stairs and asked an usher where the restrooms were. He pointed toward a wall and mumbled some directions. I thanked him and went in the complete opposite direction he’d been pointing. I found the restroom in no time.

Inside there were dozens of men eager to rid themselves of all the beer they had drunk. I stood in line and waited to use a urinal. When it was my turn, I did whatever it is I had to do. I got rid of all the water in me.

On my way back to Chantal and Carley and Peter, I stopped by a large window and looked out at Austin. I reminded myself it was home. Then I reminded myself I sounded foolish telling myself that. I called myself a dope. I walked away.

I returned to my friends. All I’d missed was the between-show roadie set-up. Something big was about to happen. I could feel it down below. I was about to implode. And then something boring happened again.

•     •     •

The radio announcers came back on stage. They thanked the sponsors, and reminded us once again that the show was free, and that we should all bow down and worship Texas Music Water and Twin Liquors and The Salt Lick and so on.

A woman behind us turned to her friend: “Who the hell wears white tights?”

Dawes was announced. They came out on stage. Taylor Goldsmith was cute as a button. He was wearing little man clothes on his little man body. I wanted to hug him and tie his shoes for him. I wanted to make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I wanted to kiss him and put him on a school bus.

Then he picked up a white electric guitar and became my hero.

“Hey, how is everyone doing?” he said. “We’re Dawes.”

•     •     •

They opened with “Fire Away”—and then immediately drifted into “If I Wanted Someone”. I kept praying that they would play “Love Is All I Am” or “So Well”, but song after song went by, and still there was no sign of my favorite Dawes songs. I wasn’t sad, though. I just wanted to jump into Taylor’s arms.

Taylor’s voice began to give out during “When My Time Comes”. It shook and wavered. He sounded hoarse and breathless.

“I think my voice is telling me to quit,” he said. “But I wanna keep singing!”

So he sang. He sang his little heart out. It was beautiful.

•     •     •

They played both album closers—”A Little Bit of Everything” and then “Peace in the Valley”. There was a ten-minute breakdown during “Valley”, and every musician was given time to shine—except the bassist, who seemed like he didn’t really want to be anywhere at all. He was my brother in spirit because of that.

And then they left the stage. They put down their instruments and exited to the right. The announcers came back out, and we were once again assaulted by the blinding white tights. She said something dumb, and then the man with her said something dumb, too, and then they had both said something dumb.

“Dawes is going to play us one more song,” said the man-announcer, ruining the mystique of the encore.

They played “How Far We’ve Come,” which is their worst song. The drummer sang. I apologized to Chantal.

As soon as they left the stage the second time, everyone began to flood out the exits. No one wanted to hear announcer-man and white-tights-woman open their mouths again.

Chantal and I did our part. We ignored another shout-out to Texas Music Water—whatever the hell that was—and fled down what I assumed was a secret stairwell. It had been pointed out to us by a friendly and possibly shady usher.

Back on Willie Nelson Blvd., Chantal scolded me for the ten-degree drop in temperature.

We crossed the street. We unlocked our bicycles. We got on them and rode in the direction of home. The wind whipped around my body and easily pierced the henley I had on.

“I’m fucking cold,” I said. Chantal turned around and scrunched her face up.

“And it’s all your fault.”

“I was still falling in love when she said farewell.”

•     •     •

Prologue

The title for this week’s Newsletter is borrowed from a band called Dawes. They have a fine collection of songs with the same title: Nothing Is Wrong. I think it’s great—the name. It doesn’t hurt that the music is great, too.

The phrase “Nothing is wrong” is said three times during the song “So Well”. It is said nowhere else on the album. This song—it’s so wonderful. It has three distinct narrators: an old tailor, a boy, and a lonely musician. Each discusses the pain of the world, and how unbearable all of this. But there is a woman named Marie that unites them all in happiness. She’s sweet and gentle. All she has to do is smile. She reminds them, wordlessly, that “nothing is wrong”. Isn’t that lovely?

I know someone who makes me feel like nothing is wrong, too. I have my very own Marie.

•     •     •

Below the title, I have decided to omit any corporate sponsorship this Newsletter receives. Let’s take a break from that. Instead I have given you a line, which is also from “So Well”, which, remember, is on Nothing Is Wrong. (Had you forgotten?)

When I first heard that line, it hit me like a sledgehammer. I coughed. I was fortunate to not have any liquids in my mouth, or I would have sprayed them all over the place.

See, beyond the beautiful wording and sentiment, there is great pain hidden away. It is understood by those who have loved foolishly.

I have loved foolishly. I guess that’s why I liked it so much. Can you tell?

 •     •     •

Before we continue, let me just say that it’s important to like things that are good. Dawes is good. Dawes is a band from Los Angeles. They sing about how sad it is to be from Los Angeles. They sing broken hearts—and of the rotten things girls do, and the rotten things guys do, too. All of it is beautifully painful. It is a serrated knife wreathed in roses.

Of the three bands that I have trumpeted as being Worth Your Time, Dawes is probably the least accessible. Deer Tick and Delta Spirit are easier to get into, I think. My God, though—Dawes are a collection of talented musicians. Taylor Goldsmith, the lead singer—I want to hug that guy and tell him that, really, nothing is wrong. He’d probably start crying and tell me I’m mistaken. I would say, “I know. I just wanted to make you feel better.” Then I’d hug him again.

So give them a chance. Don’t listen to them when you’re tired, though. You’ll fall asleep.

If you’re sad, they’re a brown microfiber blanket and a box of incense. If a girl has recently ripped your heart out, they’re your best friend, and they care about you.

It’s important to like things that are good. Why aren’t Deer Tick, Delta Spirit and Dawes the biggest bands on earth? Sadly, it’s probably because they’re phenomenally talented.

How’s that for having an opinion?

•     •     •

Incidentally, the lead singers from each band formed their own band. When I found this out, I damn near exploded. They’re called Middle Brother. So far they’ve released one self-titled album. Good God. This album. Please obtain it legally. Pay for it. You have my highest recommendation.

There are ten songs on Middle Brother. At first the order goes Deer Tick/Delta Spirit/Dawes. Each song is distinctive of the person who wrote it. It’s actually quite brilliant.

Taylor Goldsmith, of Dawes—his songs are caustic as hell. That guy had a string of really bad girlfriends or something.

  •     •     •

Are you sick of me shoving music down your throat? I’m sorry. Like I said several issues back, when discussing The Future by Miranda July—God damn it, you’ve got to give these things a chance. Practically no one else is, in the grand scheme of things.

If you’ve been around for awhile, you’ve realized that most people like dumb bullshit. They don’t even really know what they like or, more importantly, why they like it. This is how one ends up liking dumb bullshit.

Is it dumb bullshit if it isn’t one of the three bands I’ve talked about enthusiastically? Does it make you wrong to dislike one or two or all three of them?

God, no. Not at all.

But: Have you ever listened to something that someone else liked, and though you didn’t particularly like it—it didn’t catch you or something—you still recognized that the musician(s) behind the work were talented, and that you could understand why other people like it? My hope is that the true artistry behind the songs and albums I share are recognizable, even if it isn’t your thing. (Incidentally, “true artistry” is a screamingly funny thing to say. I’m sorry.)

I’m not asking you to have a (music-induced) heart attack or anything. I just want you to listen to something. If you like what you’ve heard, donate ($) to keep these bands going. (Buy their albums). For God’s sake, go see The Future! These things matter! If we don’t do something about it—if we don’t buy Dawes albums or see films written and directed by Miranda July—we’re going to be hooked up to some singular hive-mind consciousness and told to like dumb bullshit. (Maybe this is already happening!)

Hey, man, I’m just the trumpet-blower.

•     •     •

“I was still falling in love when she said farewell.”

God damn.

The best sentences are written simply. I believe that. If you arrange a combination of words just right, a sentence can have the effectiveness of an M777 howitzer. It can blow you to bits.

And thank God for that.

•     •     •

This is Issue 009 of The Starsailor Newsletter. This is the future. (Hah!) We’re here, we’re alive, we’re awake. We’re doing things that other people aren’t. We’re sending out a mass email of gibberish and self-indulgent self-loathing to the best people on planet Earth.

Take my hand. I will take you to places you don’t want to go. And then we’ll both laugh like hell about it.

•     •     •

Chapter I:
“I Want To Be Lonely With You”

I am 1,500 miles away from anyone who would possibly want to spend Thanksgiving with me. I spent Thanksgiving alone.

I’m not sore about it or anything. As I told Matt Stites just the other day: “I knew what I was in for.” I was eating a clementine when I told him that. He asked me what I ate for Thanksgiving. “A clementine,” I said.

 •     •     •

I got plenty of phone calls, though. Some told me their Thanksgiving wasn’t all that great, while others told me it was downright awful. Most everyone else just said it was “okay” or “good enough”. I liked those people the best.

My sister called me just before midnight. She was furious that I hadn’t paid $300 to fly home for a holiday that lasts twenty-four hours. I explained to her that it would have been wasteful for me to avoid feeling lonely for the amount of money. And anyway, I said, it’s just one night. I’ll get over it, I said. Missing out on Thanksgiving was a side-effect of moving to Texas, which in itself was the best thing that had happened to me all year.

“Yeah,” she said, “but you still should have spent Thanksgiving with us.”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Really, it’s not big deal.”

She told me what Thanksgiving was like in Tennessee, where she had driven to visit our father. She said it was practically perfect, as far as Thanksgivings go. “Except for the fact that, you know, you weren’t there.” It wasn’t flattering to hear that. She was angry about it.

“Jeb came,” she said. Jeb is our brother. Whenever he shows up to anything it’s a complete catastrophe. It is hell on earth. See, he loves alcohol. He also loves rolling around and crying while it’s in his body. Though when Jeb is intoxicated, rolling around and crying is the most mundane thing that can possibly happen.

He brought his baby and his wife, both of whom I have never met. He had wine in his system, and so was a horse’s ass for the duration of his trip.

At some point I came up. My father told him about my plans to move to Austin. He said the same thing everyone says when I tell them I’m moving to Austin.

“Austin?” he said. “What the hell is in Austin?”

If I had been present, I would have asked him just what the hell is in Baltimore. “Sadness,” I would have said. “And a whole lot of the damn stuff.”

•     •     •

So while a dozen or so people I know and love were happily eating meals together on the East Coast, I was somewhere in Austin, Texas, sitting at my computer eating a citrus fruit and pounding away furiously at keys to save my soul. I ripped myself open and let it pour out. I wrote Issue 008 of this fine Newsletter. In it, if you’ll remember, I discussed my cats. I thought out loud about my old life, now dead.

I sent a message to that girl I know—the one who won’t see or talk to me, or remember my name or my face or anything. I wished her a happy Thanksgiving. I told her I missed my cats so much, and that I hoped she was well. I sat in a chair in the living room and felt completely rotten from the inside-out. I wanted to jump off a building. There was a pain in my chest. It hurt to breathe.

She never replied.

•     •     •

Chapter II:
“Baltimore Blues”

I have a plane ticket in my name. The plane I am to board will take off at 5:05 p.m. central standard time, and land in a different timezone at 10:25 p.m. This is all happening on the 20th of December. What a nightmare that’s going to be—to go home. For I will again be forced to ride the Light Rail home—if I can’t find someone who wishes to drive all the way up to Baltimore to pick up my dumb jerk self. (Steph Malpass—call me! I . . . may need your help that night. Save me from the Light Rail!)

And then it’s Back To Baltimore. I have to repaint my apartment and pack and clean. I have to get out of there forever. I will do my best to never visit Baltimore again. Steph, did you hear that? That means you absolutely must move to California. And then we can be neighbors.

I will, as they say, “make a weekend” out of repainting that apartment. I will invite my brothers Jason Long and Daniel Lama up to Baltimore. I will tempt them with promises of love and laughter—and beer and wine. Together we will rid my walls of blue and red—turn them white again.

And then I can finally rid myself of all this pain, this intense mental anguish that has embedded itself into my brain like a railroad spike. I don’t even want to look at that apartment again, much less that city. But maybe I can tolerate a weekend of it. Maybe the motivation to abscond from that wretched doom-swamp of tyranny and misery will make all the pain go away—at least for a little while.

•     •     •

Yes, and then it will be Christmastime, for God’s sake, and I will have no choice but to descend upon Northern Virginia. I will see my family, and they will asks me all sorts of questions about Austin, and of happiness and love and employment and so on. I will say, “You’ll see, you’ll see.” And I’ll love them, of course, because that is what I am programmed to do—as their son or grandson or brother or cousin or nephew or whatever. “I love you all,” I’ll say, “but please: less interrogation.”

May I say something? Christmas truly depresses me. Look: I am aware this is a common sentiment. Or you may even think, perhaps correctly, that you’re not surprised at all since everything depresses me. But I’m not even talking about crass commercialism or familial bickering. Christmas day—my God. I usually just drive around in the rain. It always has to rain on Christmas day in Virginia. I go to people’s houses and I say stupid things and I sometimes get presents from the parents of friends who love me. Maybe that last part isn’t so bad. Still—the rain. The rain really kills it.

And my mother, God love her, she won’t let me slip by without any presents. She wants something for me to open. I think that’s nice—but I also don’t really want anything ever again.

I’ll usually give her a list of a few books I want. I’ve done that again this year. My uncle is always saying, “You can never own too many books.” So I have said “Yes!” to this. I have asked for books and more books.

I have also asked for a new pair of Adidas Sambas, because lord knows my old ones are old as hell. I’ve been walking all over the world in these dumb things for damn near three years now. (My uncle, as far as I know, has never recited an adage involving shoes.)

•     •     •

My sister has already set up the Christmas tree. She sent me a picture of it. It had some sort of strange filter on—so the tree looks pristine and faded and nauseatingly romantic. It’s a little jarring, because the beauty of the picture disguises a great truth about Christmastime in my mother’s home: it is utterly mundane. No one ever happy on Christmas day, because no one wants to wake up at 5 a.m. and open gifts.

My sister, see—she still likes the presents to be placed under the tree after she’s gone to bed on Christmas eve. We’re not one of those families that starts piling things under the tree the day after Thanksgiving (which is when she put up the tree, don’t you know). No, she insists on the illusion of Santa Claus. She insists on being surprised. And like a seven-year-old, she still wishes to wake up before the sun has risen. The rest of us follow her demands because we’re terrified of the repercussions.

Yes, and I go to sleep around 4 a.m. on Christmas eve (or rather, Christmas day), much as I do every night. I get precisely an hour of sleep before I’m dragged upstairs to gingerly remove wrapping paper from books for the next hour. I take my damn time. I make a cup of tea. I schmooze. I’m a laid-back guy on Christmas day.

She is the opposite. She makes towering stacks and eyes them greedily. Her ravenous carnage is over within minutes. She then complains of my imminent departure to the great West to see my dear cousins—and my dear aunt and my dear uncle.

•     •     •

On driving West: Every Christmas I drive the fifty miles to the Village of Berries. My aunt and uncle’s home is asylum from the cruel nonsense of the world. I go there to drink tea and to have fine conversations with wonderful people. There is no insanity to speak of. Everyone is calm, and everyone loves me.

As is the custom, I will take my grandmother with me. We are great friends. She and I will discuss how upset we are that we have to go on living in such a world. She tells me every year that because she’s survived for so long and endured so much, she hopes to “graduate” from life with a Ph.D. “I deserve one, anyway,” she says. “I had to put up with World War II, for Heaven’s sake.”

“Yes,” I say. “And I’ll graduate with a degree in Czech film.”

•     •     •

This year we’re spending Christmas in Williamsburg, Virginia. I haven’t the slightest idea why. I anticipate a roaring good time, though. I have no reason to believe that time spent with my dear cousins won’t be the best use of my time.

We are staying in a hotel. I love staying in hotels. I plan to takes baths and wear comfortable socks. I will order room service, and jump on the bed. I will turn on the heat and transform our room into an oven. Hooray for Christmas! Hooray for me.

I think everyone is going to end up being so happy when all is said and done. And I will be happy, too—until I have to leave for Baltimore again.

Hooray for Baltimore.

•     •     •

Here is what I will not miss about Baltimore:

1. Death
2. Despair
3. Unbearable loneliness
4. Gray skies
5. Panhandlers
6. Post-apocalyptic neighborhoods filled with derelict factories
7. Shitty pothole-ridden streets
8. Living in a city that has no money
9. $2-an-hour parking (see previous)
10. Constant reminders of my former life
11. Weeks of rain
12. Feeling like a wet cardboard box every waking hour

Really, it’s the best decision I’ve made in years.

•     •     •

Chapter III:
“I’m Sad You’re Leaving, But I’m Happy I Still Get To Know You”

There was a gallery opening on 51st St. the other night. It was in an apartment. I thought that was neat.

See: I get invited to these things sometimes. It happens. Usually I’ll go. I decided to go this time, because Chantal’s paintings were going to be hanging on the wall. That seemed like a good reason to go.

As it happened, my dear brother Jason Long was in town. He was visiting Austin to determine if he wanted to make it his home, much as I have. I brought him along hoping he would be convinced. I told him there he would find art and great people and warmth and laughter and talking—and free beer. He didn’t care about the beer. He can’t even drink the damn stuff.

“Still,” I said, “it’s going to be a good time.”

The show started at seven, but we didn’t leave until close to eight. I told him it would be better if we showed up an hour late. “That way,” I said, “people will really think we’re something.” I was of course lying. I also had no idea what I was talking about.

•     •     •

I lead my friends to the opening. I knew where it was because I had been there the day before with Chantal.

The thing is: In addition to being a gallery space—as I have said—the place we were going was also the home of two perfectly wonderful human beings named Jade Abner and Donnie Carver. It was in an ugly late-1960s barracks-style building up on 51st and Guadalupe. The exterior disguised an otherwise charming place to live.

When we arrived, there were a few people milling around outside. They had Lone Star beers in their hands. My eyes lit up. “Lone Star,” I said to everyone. No one heard me. “They have Lone Star.”

The door to Jade and Donnie’s apartment was wide open. I walked inside with a confidence in me I did not know existed. The room was full of nicely-dressed young people. I reached into a large cooler filled with ice and scooped out a Lone Star. I cracked it open with great aplomb. It fizzed to life. I shuffled around from piece to piece. There were books on women and artists blocking the entrance to the kitchen. There was a computer set up with looping videos. There were envelopes pinned to a wall.

Chantal had two paintings hung on the wall across from the kitchen. I knew both well. They looked fantastic side-by-side. My heart sank into my chest a little. I was proud of her.

I saw Chantal from across the room. She was wearing her brown boots, which meant she was in “galley opening mode”. She was talking and laughing and cradling a Lone Star like it was her best friend. She probably felt pretty awkward.

I approached her at some point—once I was on my second beer. “Um,” I said. “Hey.”

“You look miserable,” said Chantal.

I protested: “No, no! I’m fine. I just don’t know too many people.” I was all alone, after all; I had abandoned the group I had come with.

When I did see friendly faces, I tugged at their shirts from behind. Krista Norman was the first recognizable human being I noticed. I tugged. “Hey!” I said. “Hey, girl.”

“Ryan!” she said. She smiled.

And then there was Karina Eckmeier, who was wandering around the room taking pictures. She waved to me. She neglected to give me hug—and she always hugs me. She was too busy for hugs. I was happy to see her. I ended up in some of her pictures. In most of them I look like the dumbest jerk you’ve ever seen.

I didn’t feel hollow inside at all, which is how I usually feel. I was loving and affectionate. I let everyone know just how happy I was to be there.

Jade Abner and I shook hands, and I think I gave Allie Underwood a hug. I was getting drunker and drunker as the night went on, so the details are hazy. I know for a fact that I hugged Donnie Carver. “Welcome,” he’d said. “Thanks so much for coming.”

“Oh, Donnie, it’s really no problem,” I said. I hugged him again. We hugged like brothers.

•     •     •

When the lights began to swirl, and the ceiling began to lower, and the voices became louder and louder still—I found myself sitting on an apple-red couch near the kitchen. I had a beer in my hand and my eyes were buzzing with human electricity. In front of me was a mass of smiling happy people, each of them fitted with a beer the same as mine. I felt the warmth of the room I was in. It felt foreign and welcome.

To my right were fifty or so envelopes addressed to various artists and curators. They had been prepared by Allie Underwood, the girl I maybe hugged. A woman with black hair and bangs approached me.

“Did you smell the envelopes?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I can’t really smell anything right now.”

“Oh, well, you should smell them, whenever you get the chance. They’re scented with perfume.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Yeah. I love your shoes.” She was referring to my red Adidas Sambas, which are often the envy of everyone in the room. I had worn them on purpose. I wanted to be a red-hot jerk.

“You know,” she said, “I’m old, okay?” She didn’t look old at all. In fact she looked no older than me. “But when I was in, like, eighth grade—let me tell you, Adidas Sambas were the thing. Anyone who knew anything about being cool wore those things.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re not old. For God’s sake, how old do you think I am?”

“Twenty?” she said. “Maybe twenty-one?”

“I’m twenty-three,” I said.

“Holland,” she said. “My name is Holland.” She extended her arm. “I’m twenty-six.”

•     •     •

Chantal joined me on the couch. She sat on the arm. She asked me how many Lone Stars were sloshing around in my stomach, and I told her it was somewhere around four or five. “Five,” she said. “You’ve had five.”

“Yeah, it’s probably five,” I said. I smiled. Chantal shook her head and took a sip of her fourth.

We had a long conversation about something or another. Chantal told me my eyes were unfocused and dull. I laughed and felt my cheeks. They were red and warm.

And Jason was somewhere around me, looking at the envelopes on the wall. He informed me at some point that he needed to run away and piss on a tree. I told him I didn’t know why he felt the need to tell me, but I wished him well all the same. I followed him outside. He darted off down the row of barracks and turned right. He disappeared. I shrugged and felt drunk and stupid.

•     •     •

I went back inside and said good-bye to everyone. I tugged at Krista Norman’s shirt. “So long,” I said. And I waved at Karina Eckmeier, and nodded at Jade Abner. I hugged Donnie Carver and told him I loved him. He thanked me for taking out the trash earlier. I told him I didn’t remember doing that.

And I tugged at Chantal’s sweater. I told her we were off to Cheer Up Charlie’s downtown. I told her I didn’t know why I was going there, but that I had been asked to go along, and so I would. She said, “Okay.” She said, “I’ll see you soon.”

I hugged her. I opened my mouth and a torrent of stupid sentences came pouring out. She told me to be careful. I promised I would. My eyes were still humming. I ambled out the door and through the rows and rows of barracks-style apartments. I sucked in a lungful of fresh air and let it slowly leave out my nostrils.

The backseat of the car made itself welcome to me. I sat down and rested my head against the window, watching the streetlights as we headed downtown. “God damn,” I thought. “God damn, god damn.”

I was in Austin, Texas—awake, and alive, and happy to be anywhere at all. Nothing was wrong.

—R.

Some days I feel pretty darn worthless. When I’m feeling worthless, I go to Torchy’s Tacos™.

That last part—that should be the official Torchy’s Tacos slogan. Instead their slogan is “Damn Good™.” It’s “damn”, of course, because Torchy’s whole thing is that they’re sinful. They love that. They love being sinful.

Their logo is a little devil-cherub with a pitchfork and horns and everything. He’s red. He’s got a wicked little baby face.

So maybe “When I’m feeling worthless, I go to Torchy’s Tacos” isn’t the best slogan. Still, I can’t think of single a time I’ve been to Torchy’s when I didn’t feel downright rotten. Their tacos make me feel happy again. That’s actually kind of depressing, but it’s also the truth.

It’s also a hell of a testimony, if you ask me.

•     •     •

The only store I ever go to is off Guadalupe St., here in beautiful Austin, Texas. It’s a pretty small place. They have food trailers/taco trucks, too, so maybe I shouldn’t complain about the size. Still, there’s never a place to sit in the damn place. If I had to guess, there are maybe six tables—and three or four of those seat two people at most. Those are always taken up by couples or guys talking about computers. It drives me nuts.

The interior is red. It’s fiery and nice. There are clippings from newspapers on the walls which explain, quite boldly, that Torchy’s Tacos is a well-loved establishment where a lot of people have eaten. They’ve won all kinds of awards. They deserve those awards, though. It’s okay if they boast.

•     •     •

Yes, and having eaten at Torchy’s Tacos a half-dozen times since I moved to Austin, I can tell you that they’ve got a fine thing going for them. As I do not eat meat, I can only comment on two things they have on their menu, which makes this is a piss-poor review. I don’t care. I love Torchy’s Tacos, and I’m going to review them anyway.

I usually get the fried avocado taco. I get two of them. At $3.25 a taco, Torchy’s isn’t the most affordable place in town. For God’s sake, what a mark-up! It comes with (vegetarian) refried beans, cheese, lettuce, pico de gallo and two fried avocados. The avocados are choice, if I may say so. (God, “choice”—did I really just say that?) I don’t know what they bread these things in, but they’re practically decadent. They’re brown, anyway, on account of their being fried. That’s OK with me. They give you this sort of spicy ranch dressing to dump all over the thing, and make sure you do that, because it’s almost necessary. Now, I’m not suggesting that the fried avocado taco doesn’t have legs of its own to stand on, but that sauce really hits the spot.

And for God’s sake, insist on a flour tortilla. They’ll ask you that at the register: “Corn or flour tortilla?” It’s usually some dude with a great haircut. Just say to him, “Brother, I’ll take flour,” and they’ll really take care of you.

Get two tacos. Pay the extra $3.25 to double the size of your meal. One taco will not be enough to satisfy even the smallest stomach. Though yeah, they really pack those things. But two—two makes it a full meal.

If you want your meal to be under $10, ask for a water cup. Don’t bother with fountain drinks. You shouldn’t be drinking all that sugar, anyway. Water is probably a better taco companion anyway. Can you imagine washing down a fried avocado taco with, say, a Dr. Pepper? Good God, no. That would make me feel pretty rotten about myself and my place in the world.

And hey, they also have burritos. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention these things. See, you can specify what you want on the burrito. That’s pretty standard. They give you a bunch of choices, and most of them are delicious as hell. They’re . . . scrumptious, even, which makes me nervous to say. (Why is my word choice so suspect—even to me?) But see, they don’t give you a non-meat option. I suppose you could say, “Just leave the meat out.” But what good is that going to do you? The guy behind the counter with the terrific haircut might scoff a little. (Maybe that’s not true—the employees tend to be friendly and laid-back. Even still.) Look: Even if you do eat meat, do yourself a favor and ask if you can replace meat with a bunch of fried avocados.

This idea came to me one day and I’ve never regretted it. When you do it, act like the idea just popped into your brain. Throw them a curve ball. Say something to the effect of, “Aha! May I replace meat with some fried avocados?” Don’t mention a specific number of fried avocados or they’ll probably think you’ve premeditated this (admittedly) genius move. The guy behind the counter, after stroking his gorgeous hair, will likely seem a little surprised. He’ll say, “Um, yeah! We can definitely do that, sure.”

“Great! Let’s do that, then.” (Say that.)

And then you just eat the damn thing.

•     •     •

When do normal people eat lunch? Noon? One? I don’t know. I eat lunch at three or four in the afternoon. See, I don’t operate during normal human being hours. I stay up late and wake up late. What I’m trying to say is eat when I do. That way you’ll avoid the usual crowd, which consists almost entirely of degenerate youths. Around lunchtime this place is crawling with undergraduate neanderthals and their girlfriends. Is that a mean thing to say? I don’t know. It’s the truth. These guys are real mouth-breathers, believe me.

Don’t eat when they eat. And if you do, for God’s sake, don’t look at them when they eat. You’ll lose your lunch, for sure.

That place gets pretty crowded. And as I mentioned, there’s no God damn place to sit. You’ll be forced to, I don’t know, sit outside or something. The thought of sitting outside Torchy’s Tacos literally makes my stomach turn. You’ll be forced to stare at a barbershop and a Whataburger and a busy road. Don’t do that to yourself.

•     •     •

Torchy’s Tacos is a pretty all right place. It’s great, even. Go eat there. Get two tacos. Get a water cup. If you’re feeling ballsy, get that custom-made fried avocado burrito. Or just eat whatever is on the rest of the menu, which my meat-eating friends tell me is wonderful. Get the “Trailer Park”. Everyone always orders that thing.

And if you see me sitting alone, sit down across the table from me. Lord knows I could use the company.

I didn’t think you’d be home. I had to ask anyway.

And here I am.

I told you, you’ve been in my dreams.

You’ve been in mine. This is our connection, our clairvoyance. We have to only use our powers for good.

Only good?

Yeah.

Maybe a little bad?

Maybe a little.

We’ll see.

Depending on the circumstances. Not every moral decision is black and white. There is a sizable grey area.

Plenty of grey area.

Yes.

I wanted to say: We’re talking about sex now, aren’t we? I held it back. Despite recent and numerous occasions of confidence and noble disregard for the whims and emotions of those around me I could not quite bring myself into a dominating relationship with my words, or with her life, or with her body. I could never do that. She’s tough, and tougher than last I saw her. But still so tender in my eyes. It’s not a chauvinist thing, it’s only how I see her, how I will always see her.

Eyes have always been the locus of my gravitation toward women. Or at least, they become the visual expression of everything I find attractive in a woman. And hers are too soft, when they look into me—when her gaze washes over me, and her gaze is like a spring shower in the night, or at least a waterfall at dusk, something liquid certainly, sometimes acid rain, I’ve seen that too—her eyes are too soft for me to not attribute that softness to an innate inner beauty that only I can see. If that beauty is in my eye and not hers as some would have it, so be it: her most secret beauty belongs only to me. I will store it in a box of stained oak, carved with elaborate boyhood mythologies in lines just as dark and deep as those carved in my memory, and each time I open that unholy treasure vault my chest will fill with the scent of warm flesh, sweat sprouting from her arching back, four-leaf clovers, dogs, forests, flowers, and every kind of smoke.

In the attic? No, never in the attic. The basement? For a few years. But when my courage flourishes again I’ll burry the box in the middle of a field, and as the horses watch from the hillside—bemused, unfamiliar with their own elusive beauty as they splash their nebulous silhouettes against the orange moonlight under a cloud in the shape of a dragon-head or a flying machine or a church on fire—I’ll cover the box in rich soil from the moist forest floor, and plant an apple tree deep in the mound of earth, so that when invisible creatures have turned my past into sweet-smelling carnage, a young man may prance barefoot along a farm road fifty years from now and taste the sugar of youth, and my spirit will dance in the juice that drips from his chin, and he will give himself—without a thought to consequence, reason, decency, horror—to a beautiful young woman who lives on the hillside just within walking distance, who loves to hop fences and lay in the grass and sing to the stars as they spin themselves into dizzy insanity. The lion pounces on the scorpion, the hunter pursues the lion, the serpent unhinges its jaw to swallow the hunter.

Chaos feeds chaos in the heavens above. The distant spheres of fusion that determine our fates will play at war until the universe is white-hot froth. When that day comes, when the fire burns us alive, you and I alone will recognize the taste.

Then that feeling wells up inside me, the one that has me stalking through the woods at night like an animal, shitting in a hole by the wayside, pissing into a river that rolls and hums, clutching an axe in two white-knuckled fists looking for something old to destroy. The swings come one after another—exhale as I bring the blade down into the wood, feel the vibrations running up my arm, inhale as I bring the shaft up over one shoulder, the tarnished steel catching the moonlight—the breathing exercises of physical meditation, while the mind ceases to stumble for a glorious moment just to take in the spectacle. Veins bulge, muscles tighten, eyes are clenched wide in their sockets. I can still smell the shit.

When the tree topples, a wave subtler and deeper than an orgasm rises, crashes, and falls deathly silent.

The impulse could be one of frustration, but more likely it is the search for a vehicle through which the profound may rumble its way into the pedantic. The insanity of repetition finds purpose in these labored strokes. Exertion for the sake of exertion. Is there some exchange here that escapes me? Energy into motion, motion into destruction, external destruction into internal peace that will only last until the irritation of mosquito bites starts catching up to me.

Take my blood, you scoundrels. I had no idea what to do with it.