Blaise Stories: Short Stories and Essays by Blaise Lucey

Finding My Writing (Improved!)

2012-01-28T22:32:00.001-08:00

It's all here. https://noiseattwilight.wordpress.com/.

Finding My Writing...

2011-11-09T14:50:00.000-08:00

Seeing as how this blog is slowly crumbling into disrepair, I thought I would point the hypothetical reader to other places where my writing can be found:

Essays & Etc.
http://www.open.salon.com/blog/blucey
Marketing:
http://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Constant-Commentary/bg-p/constantcommentary
Fantasy:
http://themaskoftheworld.weebly.com/

I'm also making a WordPress blog. I'm not sure, but I might just start using all of these channels for the same content. Although I'd like to keep this as a bastion for stories, no matter how bad.

The Compassion Revolution, Chapter 1

2011-03-28T15:44:00.000-07:00

Below is the first chapter of my (as of yet!) unpublished novel, "The Compassion Revolution." Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, this thing is just about to be shipped out to agents. It's told in "bro vernacular," which I believe has never been tried before.

The Compassion Revolution

1.1

Justin decides that we made a mistake as soon as we get into the cab. Rain taps the windows as the car starts and takes us away from the airport. "We don't know anything about this place," he says. He shakes his head as he looks out the window, where wet, green thickets are tangled on the sides of the highway. Farms stretch past the brush into a cement-gray horizon and I can see crooked barns curled underneath the sky.

"It's going to be awesome," I say, feeling more confident than I sound.

"This looks like it's in the middle of nowhere," Justin groans. He pulls out his iPod and looks down at it. His curly black hair bounces as the cab thumps over a pothole and he absently pats it like its a dog.

"I don't think the capital of Scotland is going to be in the middle of nowhere," I say. "Wikipedia said it was, like, a top tourist destination."

"Of what? The world? Britain? Scotland?" Justin rubs at his eye. "This was such a bad idea."

"Just think of everyone still at Benston, dicking around on that patch of grass we call a campus. Nothing can be worse than that." The farms and thickets dissolve into rotaries. Our cab slides into a whirlpool of other cabs. Other than the maze of highways, there's no sign of civilization.

Justin looks at me, his pale blue eyes flickering like candles. “Dude, Benston wasn't that bad. For me, at least.”

We share a half-glare, half-stare.

“Well, it's a little too late to change your mind about coming now,” I tell him.

He sighs and then looks back at his iPod, his thumb restlessly circling on it. I can tell that he's looking at pictures of Sierra. That's why he's whining. He thinks going here was a bad idea because she's not here.

It took me months to convince Justin to go abroad with me to Scotland for fall semester of our junior year. I had to lead him there with little crumbs – the castles, the drinking age, the fact that we only had to take three classes. The biggest problem was Sierra, who he had been dating since our sophomore year of high school. Since we got on the plane, he has alternated between telling me vibrant tales of how much he was looking forward to hooking up with other girls and then pining for Sierra for hours. This was apparently one of his pining sessions.

“This will be good for you,” I say. “And her, too. You guys can always get back together in January, man.”

He looks up at me again. “You think?”

I clench my fist. “Yes.”

I've had this talk with him at least a thousand times, and it's always the same stupid thing, where he looks for reassurance about a reassuring thing I had already said. It's like calming a jittery horse, I think. You've been going out with her for a long time, I would tell him, and you can really only go to a different country during college.

His cheek presses against the windowpane, making his cheekbone stand out like an ocean cliff. People always think Justin is sick or depressed or something, because his skin is kind of gray and that makes the circles under his eyes look like tar pits. He broke up with Sierra two days ago, so right now he looks like he has flu of the heart or something.

Too bad you can't blow love out of your nose, I think. I look at my hands, because Justin is sniffing and he might be crying, which I don't want to see. Part of me wants to tell him to stop being a bitch, but I feel responsible for the whole thing, anyway, because I pushed for him to come to Scotland in the first place.

“It's easy for you to want to get out of here for a semester,” he had told me during the winter, as we looked through the brochure for the University of Edinburgh. “You hate everyone.”

“No, man. They hate me,” I remember saying, looking at the pictures of castles and monuments and statues, plastered on the glossy paper almost scandalously, like fold-outs in a porn magazine of history and grandeur.

“Too bad you can't just put that on the application,” Justin said. “'Why do you want to come to Edinburgh?' Oh, well, because I spent the first two years of college making an ass out of myself when I was drunk and now I want to escape, because no one likes me.”

“It's not an escape,” I told him. “No, I want to fucking try to change, man, so I can come back and be different.”

And he had asked me how I wanted to be different, or something, and I had shrugged and said that I'd figure it out when I got here. Here I am, I think. I look back out the window, watching the dark shape of my brown hair shift back and forth across my eyebrows as the cab bounces out of the rotary. Here I am, now what? It's not like Benston sucked my freshman year, only my sophomore year. Only because I was trying to cram as much partying as possible into the few weekends I didn't get dragged back home to comfort my mom and Brendan. I shake my head.

It's not my fault that all the assholes at Benston couldn't understand that I was drunk when I did all of those things.

After letting out a long breath, I press my nose against the window to bring myself back to the present. I still don't see anything exciting, just more fields. Just as I start to get paranoid and think that the University of Edinburgh campus might be one of the soggy farms on the side of the highway, we cruise through a suburb full of glaring, white buildings. A stark, black tower juts out over their crooked rooftops into the low-hanging clouds like a witch's crooked tooth. The streets get wider and people with shopping bags point at things while doubledecker buses roll beside our cab like tanks. I can see a castle perched on a cliff, overlooking flowers that are blue and purple and yellow, glittering like jewels in the rain.

"Edinburgh Castle," I say, but I'm not sure, it just looks like something I saw from Google Images.

"Sweet," Justin says, still looking at his iPod.

"What the hell are you looking at?" I ask, feeling angrier than I should. "Do the pictures of her change if you look at them enough? Is it like a Sierra kaleidoscope or what?"

He looks at me, almost says something, and puts the iPod into his pocket. "That's exotic," he says, pointing at the glowing sign of a McDonald's, radiating underneath a nineteenth-century penthouse.

I'm already busy looking for girls on the sidewalks. "British accents," I whisper hopefully, even though I know the one thing Benston did teach me was that self-discovery or whatever doesn't have anything to do with hook-ups.

We pass over a bridge, drive down a street of restaurants and twirling umbrellas, the cab rumbling over rain-slick cobblestones. The cab driver points a hairy finger at a coffee shop. "J.K Rowling wrote there when she was poor," he says.

"Cool," I say.

"Nice," Justin says.

I see a pack of snow-skinned girls with careful eyeliner and skirts, prowling the sidewalk like

hyenas. "Dude!" I press my finger against the window. Justin doesn't say anything. When I turn back around, he's looking at his iPod again.

Our dorm is on the fourth floor of a building called Haddock Halls. There are automatic doors and elevators and the whole place smells like new rubber. We're supposed to register for our rooms or confirm that we're here or something, so we wait in a long line with people who talk in nervous, incomplete sentences.

I consider trying to be social, but it seems like a lot of work, like I have to plan ahead with a possible introduction, then a witty, yet concise response that's appropriate for any miscellaneous information. Fuck it, I decide. There will be time to make friends later. And Justin wouldn't be much help, because he still looks like he was just rescued from a burning building, like he has shell-shock from his relationship with Sierra. His eyes are glazed and unblinking.

After we get out keys, we march upstairs with our gigantic duffel bags, come to our door, and open it.

“This kicks ass!” Justin says.

Everything in our room seems new and delicate. There's one long desk, with enough room for two people, and a window is in front of it, looking out over the city. The beds are behind that set-up, so the gray sunlight pours into the room. There's another door across from the front door that opens out onto a balcony. We drop our stuff immediately and approach it, pawing at the handle, looking for EMERGENCY EXIT signs, like we're monkeys trying to figure out some new kind of technology. Can we go out here? Justin whispers to me. I respond by bravely yanking the door open.

The breeze washes into the room, sparkling with droplets of the drizzle. We dazedly wander out onto the balcony. Clouds roll like ghosts over the buildings and the traffic below. The balcony stretches to another room next door. To the right, there's a huge mountain wrapped in shivering fog. "Holy fuck," Justin says. "What's that?"

I shrug.

"That's Arthur's Seat," someone lisps from behind us. We turn around and see a kid about our age, his chin tucked into the stiff collar of a peacoat. His waxy, black hair is carved into a stiff, voluptuous flip that defies the rain. His face is wide and has a lot of pockmarks, like he waged a bitter war with acne back in high school. He blinks as we stare at him, then smiles and kicks at his foot. "It's an extinct volcano. You guys are American, too?"

He says his name is Steven. He's from Albuquerque, is actually going to Brown, but wanted some time to get away from it all. The way he echoes the last part seems like he means he's trying to get away from something other than Brown. He tells us that it's nice to meet us and slips back into his room.

"Wow, how gay is that kid?" Justin asks back in the room, as we unpack.

I nod, unfolding a sweatshirt, refolding it, deciding I might never wear it. "The peacoat and the flip and the lisp are a deadly combination."

"I just want to get away from it all," Justin says, and we laugh, but I'm thinking of Benston and Brendan and my mom and wonder if I'm trying to do the same thing, before shaking my head and laughing again.

1.2

After debating whether we want to go knocking on doors and meeting our neighbors, we decide against it. “We'll have plenty of time to meet them later,” I say to Justin. We walk out of the dorms to look for a store that sells alcohol, so we can celebrate our arrival in Edinburgh. The University campus is a two-dimensional cement landscape, winding like a maze between carefully groomed bushes, stubby trees, and other dorm buildings. Most of the other ones look like they haven't been painted or touched since World War II,with grim, dull brick covered in places by wandering vines and overgrown bushes.

When we stumble out onto a street, the hanging fog has started to recede into the flat sky. Bands of students clutter the sidewalks and move like jellyfish across the crosswalks. We follow one of the groups, but stay behind them. From across the street, we can see Haddock Halls and it looks as royal and mystical as a wizard's tower. Arthur's Seat looms above it, slowly emerging from the fog.

"I like that we can't see anything around us, and it's just kind of coming in slowly," Justin says.

"It's like we're seeing the city one thing at a time."

"Right, new things are easier to accept when you can't see them until it's too late," I say. "If you're a pussy."

"I don't see you running around, making new friends," he says. “Isn't that why you came here?

That's what you said, man.”

I shrug. "Yeah, well, when I was selling Edinburgh to you, I had to pull out all the stops. We'll definitely make new friends here.” If I remember how, I want to add. The thought shoots through my head like an arrow. “I also said that we could drink and hook up with hot girls. We don't have to do all of that now. Or in any particular order."

“Yeah, just remember that girls were the main problem at Benston for you. If you do want to change, man, maybe try and not hit on so many and keep the damage to the minimum.”

I grimace and don't say anything back. Why would he bring that up already? I think I hear a hint of triumph in his voice whenever he talks about my misguided, blackout adventures at Benston. Like he enjoys reminding me of how deuschy I can get when I'm wasted. Not anymore, I say to myself as the liquor store comes into view, peering out from beneath a scaffolding covered with a dusty green tarp.

We buy one bottle of vodka, decide that it's not enough, and buy two, then an eight-pack of beer.

Justin hoists it up and down in the air like a treasure chest. “An eight-pack of beer,” he says to me triumphantly. “See? We're already accepting new things.”

After getting back to the dorm and putting the vodka and the eight-pack on the long, empty desk in front of the window, we decide to get dinner. "Should we invite Steven?" I ask as we wait for the elevator.

"You mean Thteven?"

"Yeah."

"Uh... he's weird and he's awkward and a little creepy. We're not inviting Thteven to dinner," Justin says. The elevator dings, the doors open, and we step inside.

Down in the lobby, we run into Steven. Justin mutters under his breath.

Steven is giggling with two girls and a tall, blond guy, who he explains are our other hall neighbors. The girls are named Rosie and Kim, the guy is Anthony. Rosie's slumping shoulders are swollen with a boring pair of boobs and she has freckles and her red hair is cut to her shoulders in that weird, boyish haircut that girls think looks good. Kim is a cheerful Irish girl, Rosie's roommate, and she's short and has pretty, black hair. Her eyes are the color of soft soil and her boobs bounce as she talks. Anthony is a jolly and unassuming Scot who has a lean, athlete's build that people get from playing sports since they were like six and he has a big nose and friendly eyes. He shakes our hands and calls us his mates.

I get stuck with Rosie in the mix-and-match parade towards the cafeteria. She asks why I came to Scotland and I tell her it was because the drinking age is lower than it is in the States. She laugh and says it's weird that Justin, Steven, and me got put in freshmen dorms even though we're technically juniors and Anthony, Kim, and her are freshmen. Because you guys probably already know loads about how college works, she tells me.

I nod a little and then pull on Steven's shoulders, calling him Steve and asking him how he likes the new room. This is so I can talk loudly to Justin, who is in front of Steven and trying to flirt with Kim. I comment on something he says about the United States, she turns around to laugh, we form a triangle while Anthony talks to Steven and Rosie.

Why'd you guys come to the University of Edinburgh? Kim asks when we tell her that we're here for a semester. We look at each other and say that we wanted a change of pace. I don't mention that I was tired of being who I was at Benston College, a drunk guy from a vending machine of a million drunk guys, who hits on or hits people and wakes up and hates mirrors. I also don't mention the bullshit with my family. I have to start with a blank slate here, I tell myself.

The dinner is more of the same. People talk about themselves in vague exaggerations. Kim says she's glad to finally get out of her house, just because it gets cramped there and her parents have constantly watched her, so now she can finally be free. Rosie says she's just glad to get out of her neighborhood in London, because it's dodgy and she was sick of taking care of her brothers and sister when her parents were working.

"Isn't it just mental that we can just say everything that happened to us to get us all here in a few seconds?"

"Maybe if you've got a boring life," Justin says, playfully.

Kim lets out a weak laugh.

"It's just easy to summarize," I say, pausing to make sure I have her attention. "We're all at an age where we can look back on stuff and be like 'Yeah, that was important in my life.' You never know what's important to you until, like, time has passed and you can remember it and connect it." And we're just showing everyone the person we want to be, not who we are, I think. It's not like people tell the truth about themselves when they're writing their own biography.

Kim nods, smiles. "Yeah, yeah."

A point for me, I think. I wonder if, by saying she's glad that she's free, she meat that she's glad she can hook up with people. Isn't that what most people our age mean when they say they're finally free? I wonder.

Justin gets out of his seat to get more milk.

"Want to get drunk with us tonight?" I ask her.

"Definitely! Guys, let's all party in the pantry!" she suggests to the table. People shout in agreement.

I sip my milk and smile.

Justin and I drink the beers from our eight-pack of Tennent's before meeting up with everyone else. "This tastes like dirty pennies," he says as he logs onto Facebook. He sips the beer again

with pinched lips and puts the can back down. "God damn it."

"What?" I ask, watching a Youtube video of a skateboarder getting pushed off his skateboard by a security guard.

"Sierra hasn't messaged me back."

I drink some of my beer. "So?"

"Dude, like, don't you understand? This sucks for me. Everything just happened so fast. We broke up, what, two days ago, and now I'm in another country, across the ocean, and she's just starting college... fuck knows what she's doing. I just keep picturing your fucking freshman year."

Parties, hook-ups, repeat. “It wasn't much different from sophomore year,” I tell him.

“Kind of. I don't know, I think people tolerated you more your first year, though. Then you just started getting, like, too drunk or something.”

We both look away from each other. I came here to change all of that, I think, desperately clawing my way out of the sudden loneliness. I finish my beer. It clunks hollowly when I put it next to my laptop.

"What do you think this means, though? I just Sierra, like, oh, how is your college, do you like it, have you made friends, Tim and I just arrived in Scotland, blah blah..."

"When did you send it to her?"

He shrugs, sips his beer, keeps staring at the unchanging face of Facebook. "Like, an hour ago, a little before we went to dinner."

"An hour ago." My new beer hisses when I open it.

"Yeah, something like that." He notices my stare. "What?"

"Are you retarded? You sent the message an hour ago and you're upset that she hasn't replied yet?"

He looks down into the black hole of his beer can. "I dunno, it's just..."

I lean back in my chair, thinking about how familiar this feels. Justin has been looking to me for advice since we first met each other in 6^th grade. “I can tell you what it means, whether she never sends you a message or whether she does. It means you guys are broken up, which means that you're single. We're in Scotland, where girls have hot accents and like to get drunk. Cheers." We chug our beers, I open another one for Justin, so he doesn't lose momentum.

After we both finish our third beers and open our fourth ones, I look at him. "But I do have something to say before we go out there to party."

"What's that?"

"Dibs on Kim," I burp.

After we finish our fourth beers, we hear music coming down the hall from the common room, which Kim called the pantry. Drunken screeches of girls singing to a Miley Cyrus song pierce our door. I shudder. "Ready?"

We decide we need a shot, so we open one of the vodka bottles and I take two of my shot glasses out of my backpack. "Ready?" Justin asks after we take them.

We decide we need another, for good luck, so we drink more. The Miley Cyrus song is "Party in the U.S.A." We laugh about it. I get up to pee in our dorm's private bathroom, another marvel of the room. I sway in front of the mirror for a moment, tilting my head like a curious crow. You came here to become a better person, to experience new things, I whisper.

I feel like I'm staring myself down, until I feel like I'm staring at someone else, a stranger in the mirror, with a clown's stupid grin. “How the fuck do you even want to do that?” I mutter, like it's a challenge, like I'm waiting for the reflection to respond. Standing in a bathroom over a sink is something I used to do at Benston to remind myself that I existed. To stare right at my unchanging face, even as my drunk thoughts swim around like fish trying to go upstream.

Justin's right, I think. Something fucked up did start to happen my sophomore year, like I just slammed into each weekend with exponential speed. Faces from Benston swirl around me. Ex-friends that I yelled at or tried to fight, acquaintances who I lost because I tried to hit on their girlfriends or hit on them. By the end of sophomore year, almost everyone I met freshman year had jumped ship on me. It's been a long, drunken voyage, I think. But those people are gone now. Or at least locked in a freezer. This is a fresh start. A fresh start, but for how long?

I start to laugh, uncontrollably, watching my face shatter into crinkles and elastic lines. What the fuck am I doing? I wonder. There's no reason to make Scotland this dramatic. Just have a good time, I tell myself, nodding, gripping the crimson ledge of the bathroom counter until it starts to hurt. Maybe the change will come naturally.

When I come back into the room, I'm kind of surprised that Justin didn't ask what the hell I was doing in the bathroom, until I see that he's hunched over Facebook, so close to the screen that his nose is almost touching it, like he's getting ready to dive into the computer.

"Ready?" I ask.

He slams the laptop shut, jumps from the seat, and we run out into the hall with one vodka bottle each.

1.3

The party is gathered around the table. Kim's Apple computer is hooked up to tiny little speakers bursting with Britney Spears, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Lady Gaga, Usher, the Black Eyed Peas, Ke$ha, Jay-Z. Every single song sounds the same. I walk over to the laptop and scroll through the playlist. A Justin Bieber song comes on. "What a nightmare," I say, loud enough for Kim to hear.

She comes over like that's her cue, her hands on her hips. “What, do you not like him because he looks like you?” she asks me. She's wearing a casual tanktop and jeans, like getting drunk with a bunch of strangers is a pretty standard affair for her.

“He looks like me?” I ask her, stunned.

“Yeah. You both have that kind of golden-brown hair. It kind of looks like toast. Oh, and you like to swish it out of your eyes. You're like an older Justin Bieber with smaller teeth.”

I stare at her and shake my head slowly. I'm tempted to brush my hair out of my eyes, but now I'm afraid to enforce her image. “No, it's not a nightmare because I apparently look like Justin Bieber. It's a nightmare because it's bad music.” I finish a paper cup of vodka and juice.

“What!”

"This looks like you just bought everything that's ever been in the top hundred songs from

iTunes."

"Well, yeah!" she says, lighting up. "There's a reason that it's so popular, Tim. It's because it's good."

"It's not... good," I say, feeling drunk, still scrolling on iTunes, pointlessly. Anthony, Steven, Justin, and Rosie are playing a drinking game and shouting behind us. "It's just predictable. People like simple rhythms. Familiar rhythms." I shake my head. "Want to take a shot?"

"Sure!"

Around the table with everyone else. Taking shots from paper cups that are probably way bigger than a standard shot. Lil Wayne pants over a drum machine. Why does he always sound like he just ran a marathon? I wonder. Rosie is touching Justin's shoulder every few minutes. His eyes are shifty when he sips from his cup. Rosie is dressed in some pink shirt that pushes her boobs up so high that they almost reach her neck. Justin has a healthy pink glow to his cheeks that I haven't seen since we met at my house to get ready for the plane the night before, when he was telling me that he was looking forward to Scotland because he wanted to see what he was like when he was single.

What you're like? I asked him. It's not going to be some big revelation, man. And he had said that he thought he was too dependent on other people or something and I laughed at him.

We play a game that Anthony suggested called "Mushroom." You balance cards flat, over a cup of alcohol, each person puts one card on it, until they fan out, getting wider and wider.

Steven attempts to slide a card into the demented geometric shape it has become, but it topples because Anthony's phone rings and Steven startles. Anthony doesn't answer it, it keeps going, some sharp, underwater rendition of a Mozart song or something. While that plays, and

Anthony ignores the sound, people holler and hoot at Steven, pound the table, and Steven's smile is squeezed out, like a lemon being crushed in a fist. He tries to drink slowly, but Anthony and Justin and I roar at him to drink faster, jungle sounds traced over with the gentle tinkling of the Mozart ring tone.

Steven complains that he needs help, so I grab the cup from him. Everyone cheers as I drink the swampy mix of wine, vodka, and beer. Sounds, words blur together. The lights get brighter. Other kids pour into the pantry with more beer, Anthony shakes his own drink at them, smiling and clasping hands. I follow his lead, shaking hands and forgetting names. Anthony and I might pour more vodka into the paper cups and toast to something but when I drink from it, I can't taste anything.

When I turn around, a few English kids with popped collars, have surrounded Kim, clustering around her like bleeping Tetris blocks looking for an opening. I melt back into the group, more girls walk into the pantry wearing bright colors. Kim asks me where Steven went, I say that he probably went back to his room because he's a wimp and she says don't say that. Well, I meant shy, I say, which she laughs at for some reason, and then tells me that he's interesting. Does that mean I'm boring? I ask. We're backed into the corner of the pantry, a windowed wall which looks down onto the campus, where lights glitter like the dust of stars and groups of drunk students float in the empty, churning darkness, suspended in space.

Kim's eyes sparkle as they look up at me. I drink more. Justin and Rosie are still seated, facing each other, waving their hands like they're performing some exotic mating ritual. Man, I think, Justin has no idea what he's doing. And then I wonder how long he went out with Sierra, how many years I saw them growing up together in high school while I stood still like an island.

I can't kiss Kim here, I think, still joking about something. So I ask if she wants to see the balcony, because she's complaining that her room is on the other side, so she can only see the stupid campus from her balcony. I tell her that I'd say that my view isn't so great, but I'd be lying. She laughs and we leave the crowded pantry for the hallway, where the lights buzz alone, with a hint of desperation.

When Kim tells me she's cold, I put my arm around her. Edinburgh is a sea of watery lights in front of us and I feel like we're on the prow of a ship, leaning forward and sailing over the city.

Arthur's Seat is gloomy, a vague and unimaginable shape. 250 million years old, Kim says, that's what I read on Wikipedia. I hold her tighter, wonder how I'm going to kiss her. I drink from another cup, something that seems like it just appeared in my hand. Do you really need any more? Kim asks, batting my sternum playfully, and I smile and nod and drink.

We drift to the other end of the balcony, where the city is out of sight and Arthur's Seat rises into the paper-thin night. I feel like I've known you for a long time, Kim says, her voice sleepy with vodka. It's weird that we only met today.

Yeah, I say, not thinking about it, thinking instead about how familiar it all seems, almost like I'm an actor in an elementary school play, like I can barely contain the knowledge that I know the script and what happens next. I wonder if Kim feels the same way, but she's looking up at me like she's seeing me for the first time so I swipe her hair out of the way and kiss her.

She kisses back and pulls her head away, looking at me, gripping my arms like I'm going to disappear. I kiss her again, and again, but I can feel her wilting. I can't, she says quietly. Want to go to my room? I ask. I can't, she says again. Why not? I kiss her more, but she shakes her head. I'm not like that, she says. Like what? I ask, but she doesn't answer. Like what? I ask again, but then I'm sitting on my bed in the dark and she's gone and Justin is in his chair, facedown on his laptop keyboard, snoring, Facebook glows blue on the screen and I stare at it, mesmerized, until I fall onto my back in my bed and I spin there until I fall asleep.

Jon Stewart Goes Stern Father on Condoleezza Rice (Essay)

2010-10-14T10:28:00.000-07:00

On August 6, 2001, a presidential brief entitled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In The US was looked over by national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and she shrugged it away, describing it later as "historical information based on old reporting."

She also approved water-boarding and appeared to warmly encourage it, much like she encouraged a preventative attack (also known as an unprovoked war) on Iraq because she warned that she didn't want to have a "mushroom cloud" as the sign that Iraq had somehow instantaneously acquired WMDs.

Last night, Dr Rice interviewed on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show and I watched with the same kind of eager anticipation that I saw Dickey Armey's appearance, but was left with the deflated-balloon feeling of Stewart's miss-and-miss with torture legality enthusiast John Yoo.

To cut to the chase, the interview was slightly boring, like when Stewart gets a historian on the show who has specialized in something particularly obscure, like President Who-Gives-A-Crap's penchant for diamond necklaces and wooden barrels.

It was only slightly boring, because Rice did share some interesting facts about the race wars in the 1960s. Sure, I'll take it.

Unfortunately, it was clear from the start that Stewart would not be touching the issues on which he has remotely grilled Rice for eight years, and he really just came off like a stern father.

"Maybe we'll have that discussion some other time," he told her, like he had found a pack of cigarettes in her jacket. And she laughed and assured him that they would, but I wouldn't be surprised if she never came back.

What I really took away from this interview was that interviews are becoming pointless when politicians have the power to pick and choose whether they want to talk about something serious, or even talk at all.

Is this because so many people have already made up their minds that what a politician says without a script doesn't matter anymore?

The Daily Show has become one of the very few venues for honest, unfiltered debate, but this interview showed that there is a limit- if someone in power (or formerly) decides that they are fine talking about their personal struggles, but refuses to talk about anything else, the conversation is predestined to be stern father at best and slavering, wide-eyed kid at worst.

The Compassion Revolution...

2010-09-23T19:34:00.001-07:00

I am currently working on a novel called the Compassion Revolution. It's more than 150 pages single-spaced at the moment and I plan on finishing it by October.

After that, I plan to start writing/posting more short stories. Until I get famous enough to never have to do it again.

The Elevator (Story)

2010-05-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

"The Elevator" is now published at http://www.everydayfiction.com/the-elevator-by-blaise-lucey/.

It will be coming out in The Everyday Fiction Anthology 2010 next year...?

The Cruise Revised (Story)

2010-05-25T19:33:00.001-07:00

The boat set sail early in the morning, on a summer day. Mark boarded it first. His wife, Linda, followed. The children came last, jostling each other other in their excitement.

"Stop that," Mark said to them, embarrassed.

They either didn't hear or him or ignored him. Tom pushed Alice and Alice pushed Tom. Tom was about to push Alice again, giggling, but Mark caught his wrist. "God damnit," Mark said. "I said stop it." He shook Tom for a few seconds and then released him.

Tom bolted to his mother, crying into her dress. Linda put her hand on his head. "Mark, honestly." Alice trailed behind. Mark led the way to a lady with a clipboard. "The Waldens," he said. The humidity hung heavy, broken by bursts of an intermittent ocean breeze. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his temples.

Linda held the children's hands. They followed Mark to the room on the boat. Two beds shared a cramped wooden space. The window was closed and the heat had warped the floorboards.

"Why would they keep this closed in this weather?" Mark asked. He stormed to the window and wrenched it open.

"Try to relax," Linda said. Tom and Alice bounced over to one of the beds.

"I'm trying to relax," Mark said. "I can't relax if it's a hundred degrees in here."

"Go out on the deck," Linda suggested.

Mark untied his tie and threw it on the bed. The children paused to watch him.

"I don't know why you wore that thing," Linda said.

Mark said nothing. He shrugged his coat away and walked out of the room. Linda sighed.

"Can we jump on the beds?" Tom asked.

Linda didn't look at them, but she nodded.

A month ago, Mark and Linda had been been in a fight. A uniquely embarrassing fight, because there had been a witness. Mark had tumbled like a bowling ball into the kitchen, steaming. "The traffic was ungodly on the way back. You get one person that can't drive a frickin car and-"

He noticed their neighbor, Ned Cullian, and his daughter, Samantha, sitting in the dining room. Ned politely distracted Samantha by passing his finger through a flickering candle, murmuring quietly. Linda stood in the kitchen with a platter of sliced ham. It sullenly steamed towards the ceiling.

Mark grunted and walked next to her. "What are these people doing here?"

"What makes you think that it's okay to throw a tantrum about a commute?" Linda asked. "Since I don't have the midnight shift at the hospital, it just seemed like a nice change of pace to-"

"Oh, of course. All right. Do we have any beer?"

"Don't talk to me like that when we have company," Linda said.

Mark pushed aside two jars of jelly. "Is there beer in here? Or did you just buy too much jelly instead?"

Linda slammed the platter of ham onto the counter. It echoed. Ned Cullian peered into the kitchen. Mark and Linda looked at him.

"That's okay, we're going," Ned said.

The marriage counselor told them to take a break. Not from each other, but from their lives. "Stress often affects love," he said, resting his chin on steepled fingers. "Life goes by so fast with kids and work and bills."

He made a motion with his hands. "Slow it down. You're on the train of life right now, looking out the windows, and everything that's important is blurred. Try to take a cruise or something. Isolate yourself from all the trivial things. If you slow life down, you'll be able to appreciate it. Focus on each other."

"How much do we owe you?" Mark asked.

Out on the deck of the boat, foreheads blistered in the sun. Mark found a bar on the second deck after walking up a pair of shining, white stairs. His shirt dripped translucent with sweat. The barstools sparkled in the sun. He sat on one and wiped his face with his handkerchief. "Give me something cold," he said.

No one answered. He peered over the bar, towards a closed door. A stack of plastic cups stood beside a tap. He took one of the cups and started to fill it from the tap.

"Excuse me," someone said from behind him.

He turned around, still leaning over the bar.

A big man with a beard stared at him. "What are you doing?"

"There wasn't anyone here. I needed a drink," Mark said.

"You can't wait until the boat gets out of the harbor?"

Mark leaned back to the barstool and got to his feet. "I'm going to talk to the manager about your attitude," he said to the man.

"Good luck finding him," the man laughed.

Mark left the bar and went back down the stairs. People walked around, a few hundred people at least. He bumped into several of them, trying to find someone in uniform. Faces blurred in the sunlight. The boat hooted and sailed away from the harbor.

Alice had been born fourteen months after Tom. There had been no sibling rivalry. They had become best friends. Linda and Mark often marveled at this when they had guests over the house and it was necessary to compare and distinguish children.

"Two peas in a pod," Linda proclaimed.

"Partners in crime," Mark said gruffly, lovingly.

The guests marveled appropriately before advertising their own children. If they had no children, they wold talk about careers. The narrative of Alice and Tom's exploits sustained Linda and Mark for eight years. At this time, inevitably, their shining wonder grew dull from repetition. Mark worried about Tom's frequent crying.

"You spoil him," Mark said to Linda.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"God damnit," he said.

Every time Linda bought something for Tom, every time she comforted Tom in his trembling grief about school, about friends, Mark felt a hot sting of disapproval, of hatred for Linda's ineptitude at parenting. He signed Tom up for baseball, basketball, soccer.

"He doesn't like any of those things," Linda said.

"Because you teach him it's okay to play with Alice's dolls," Mark said.

The conflict kept life new. The heavy, suffocating smog of tension boiled in every room of the house. Tom cried more and Alice became nervous, bending under the weight of a permanent stress. Mark and Linda prided themselves, congratulated themselves, on their individual composure in front of the children, criticized the other's lack of it.

"You need to stop growling at the dinner table," Linda said one night, hovering over Mark while he washed the dishes.

"I wouldn't growl so much if you didn't try to jab at me with everything you said," Mark said.

"Like what? Like what?"

"Like everything."

And so on.

They ate dinner at a restaurant aboard the boat. People sat at every table, stood in lines outside the doorway, yelling over each other.

"What did you do all day?" Linda asked when they sat at their table.

"I looked for the manager of this thing," Mark said.

"Why?" Linda looked concerned.

"Because." Mark sipped from a glass of wine. "Because there's no respect from these people, that's why. It's a god damn circus in here."

Alice's lower lip trembled. Tom chewed on a piece of bread and looked at his plate.

"The children," Linda said.

"A god damn circus," Mark said, looking at the menu.

"Are you folks ready to order?" a waiter asked.

"Let me ask you something," Mark said, reading the waiter's name tag. "... Rob. Who runs this place?"

"The restaurant, sir?"

"No, the boat. This whole thing." Mark opened his arms.

"Oh. I'm not sure, sir. Sorry."

"I want chicken nuggets," Tom said.

"He'll have the chicken nuggets," Linda interpreted.

The first memorable fight took place on a playground. Tom had been a year old. Linda and Mark sat on a bench, Mark left and came back with a hotdog. Linda plucked Tom from the stroller, but kept an eye on Mark. He bit into the hot dog. A long, stringy drop of ketchup plopped onto the collar of his shirt.

"Whoops," he said.

"Oh my God," Linda said, seating Tom on the rubber flooring of the playground.

Mark looked at her, angling his head to take another bite of the hot dog. Linda's smile was tight. "Honey, you're spilling ketchup all over your shirt."

"All over?" Mark looked at the crimson on his shirt. "All over?"

Linda sighed a deep, sharp sigh. "We're going to be walking around town all day and you're going to look like... like that."

"Who cares?" Mark asked, finishing his hot dog. He licked at his fingers.

"Mark! What if we see someone we know?"

"Who cares?"

"Oh my God."

Mark stared at her for a long time, then looked at the ground. "Hey!"

Tom was gone. Linda and Mark jerked to their feet with the feverish movements of mounting worry.

"If you hadn't bought that hot dog."

"If you hadn't been busy laying into me."

"Where could he have gone?"

"He can't even walk!"

Kidnapped, molested, killed, broken, trampled, open drain, Mark and Linda thought.

"Care!" Tom squealed. "Care! Who!"

He had crawled underneath the bench and listened to them argue. Mark and Linda raced to be the savior. Mark got there first, scooped Tom into his arms and hugged him to his chest. "Did you hear that? His first words."

Linda crossed her arms.

After dinner, Mark walked on all three of the decks. He asked people who was in charge. No one knew. He hung his arms over the railing and watched the moon climb the horizon. It was full. Bright as the sun, but heatless. The night air brought a refreshing chill.

He walked back to his room. The children lay in bed, their faces melting into the pillows. Linda sat on the corner of it, reading a story to them.

"Let me," he said.

Linda smiled and handed the book to him. The children looked at him with uncertain faces. Linda watched him from behind.

"Where were you?" Mark showed the book to Tom.

"Here," Tom said, pointing.

Mark scanned the page. It was a story about knights and happily ever afters. "Linda, what is this crap?"

"What?" Linda had started to smile, but she stopped.

He clapped the book shut. "Kids, let me tell you a story instead. Would you like that?"

Tom and Alice watched him.

"Once upon a time, there was a man who could turn into an eagle. He could fly anywhere he wanted." Mark spread his arms like wings. Alice giggled. "He flew to the East, West, South, and..."

"North," Tom suggested.

Mark nodded. "The man married a woman who liked that he could fly places. But the man got older and older. It got harder to turn into an eagle, so he walked everywhere instead. One day, he realized that he couldn't turn into an eagle anymore, but he couldn't remember when that had happened. Maybe he had done something wrong."

"Mark..." Linda said quietly.

"He had two children that he loved very much," Mark said, thumbing Alice's nose. She giggled again. "And he hoped that he could teach them how to turn into eagles, someday, if he remembered. His wife wasn't sure."

He looked at Linda and looked back at the children. "The end."

Tom and Alice smiled. "Was that about you, Daddy?"

"Could be," he said. He kissed them on their foreheads.

Linda made a noise and walked out of the room.

They had been married two years before having children, lived in an apartment in the city, used trains to get to work. Each day ended with glasses of red wine, dim lighting, television of entangled bodies. Linda often organized dinners with other couples, any women from the hospital vaguely of the same age, the same stage.

They both enjoyed the idea of an active social life. The dinners could include up to four or five couples, some married, some almost married.

The women would comically announce eccentricities of husbands, husbands would justify these eccentricities with a comically masculine tone. Tiring of this, conversations would turn to finances, complaints about the costs of living in the city, peppered by jokes about the consequences of living in the city. The married couples carefully displayed how they were the exception to the decay of monotony, their lack of regrets or doubts, the superior ease and intimacy of their relationships.

At home, Linda and Mark reviewed each night.

"She looks a little tired."

"He's getting a little fat."

"They looked a little tense."

"Maybe it's just me, but..."

"Did you notice how...?"

They smiled at each other and kept their thoughts to themselves.

He found her at the bar on the second deck. He put his hand on her shoulder.

"Linda," he said.

She sipped from a straw. People hovered all around them, talking loudly.

"Linda," he said.

She turned around on the stool. Tears had smudged her eyeshadow. She kept sipping from her drink when she faced him, but only ice cubes remained. They clacked like teeth against the tug of the straw. Mark leaned past her with a five dollar bill in his hand. He waved it at the bar, but no one came.

"We can't do this," Linda said. "We need to tell them."

He looked at her.

"No," he said.

"Mark!"

"No."

She put her glass on the bar. "They're going to find out."

"Maybe."

She stood from the bar, swaying a little. "This isn't something we're going to be able to hide. You're not doing a good enough job of it."

"Me!"

"You!"

"Listen-"

"Don't touch me." She sat back down on the stool.

"Everything okay over-" The man with the beard stood behind the bar.

Mark looked at him.

"Did you find the manager?" the man asked, making a face.

Mark tried to ignore him. Linda turned back to the bar.

"Didn't think so," the man with the beard said. "Listen, don't bother this lady."

"She's my wife," Mark said.

The man shrugged. "Doesn't matter to me. Get lost."

"You see?" Mark said to Linda. "A god damn circus."

Linda stood up. The back of her head hit Mark's jaw. "What the hell?" he said.

The man with the beard laughed, Linda left the bar. Mark followed her.

"If you find him, tell the manager that I said hi," the man called.

A light breeze swept across the third deck. Somewhere, a limp flag clanged against a pole. Mark panted his way up the stairs. Linda perched on the railing, staring at the moon. The breeze washed over her. Her hair swam in the current.

"Linda," he said when he reached her. Her shoulders shook with unseen tears. The waves quietly broke below them.

He tried to put his hand on her shoulder, but her feet were balanced on the bar of the railing and he couldn't reach her. "Linda," he said. He grabbed at her hand, but she clung to the railing. He put his palm on her knuckles. "We're okay," he said. "Don't worry, we're okay."

"Did you lock the door?"

"What?"

"The door. For the room."

"Um-"

"The kids!" She hopped from the railing. "Jesus Christ."

He clenched his fists. "You ran out, I had to follow you."

"Where would I go?" she asked, spinning on the deck.

"But-"

"You just left them there," she said. "Jesus Christ."

"God damnit, I'm trying to talk to you!"

"You don't know how to talk to anyone." She brushed past him, walking towards the stairs.

"God damnit!" he said. He followed her down the stairs, back to the bar. The man with the beard leaned over a table, cleaning it with a rag. Linda walked down the stairs to the first deck. The man saw Mark and walked towards him. When Mark got to the stairs, the man stood in his way.

"What the hell?" Mark said.

"The lady doesn't want to be bothered," the man said.

"Get out of my way!" Mark said. He tried to go around the man, but the man blocked him. "What the hell?" Mark said again.

The man smiled through his beard.

"My kids!" Mark said. He turned away from the man and went towards the bar. People looked at him.

"Drunk," someone said.

"Where's the manager?" Mark said. He pushed his way between people to get to the bar.

"Hey," someone said.

"Drunk," someone said.

"Where's the manager!" No one was behind the bar. Mark turned around. The man with the beard had disappeared. He walked back to the stairs and jumped down to the first deck, back to the room. Inside the room, all the lights burned brightly.

Linda lay on her bed, crying with her face shielded by her curled elbows. Tom and Alice knelt beside her.

"Don't worry," Tom said.

"It's okay," Alice said.

The honeymoon was in the mountains. Mark and Linda lay in a tent for hours on end, overwhelmed by their love for each other. It rained most of the time. The tent shuddered from the water and the wind but, inside, they were warm and comfortable.

"It's our own world in here," Linda said, grappling Mark, resting her head on his chest.

"It's so nice," Mark said.

"I love you so much."

The rain cleared for a day. The sky stretched over them, a pale blue, frilly with the lace of storm clouds. They went on a hike, up to the peak of the mountain. At the top, they ate lunch on a bare rock, looking at the unraveled world at their feet.

"This is so amazing," Mark said.

"Do you think we're going to love each other forever?" Linda asked.

"Are you kidding? Of course!" Mark said. He kissed her on the top of her head, lifted his arm to point across the landscape below them. "Just pretend that we're up here because we love each other." He paused, thinking. "Our love brings us above everything else. We can fly like eagles together, wherever we want to be, and we can look down on the dark places and forests and cities down there but, up here, we're always going to be safe."

Linda sighing happily.

It started to rain again.

They ate breakfast by the swimming pool on the first deck. The pool was so full that people could barely swim. Waiters walked by Mark and Linda while they sat on folding chairs with newspapers.

"Look at this," Mark said, bending his newspaper towards Linda.

She lifted up her sunglasses. "Huh," she said.

He kept looking at her. The sunglasses went back over her eyes.

"You made a scene last night."

"You're the one who came after me," she said.

"I was trying to talk to you," he said, throwing his newspaper to the ground.

"Okay," she said. "Talk to me."

"Well," he said.

"More coffee, sir?" a waiter asked.

"Tell me, Zack, who's the manager of this boat here?"

"Exactly," Linda said. She folded her newspaper and sat back in the chair, exposing her neck to the sun.

"Well-"

"I'm not sure, sir. Sorry." The waiter walked away.

Mark sat in his chair, grinding his teeth. "Linda-"

"Dad, Dad, look!" Tom dove into the shallow end of the pool.

Mark got up and walked to the edge of the pool. Tom emerged in a spray of bubbles and ripples.

"Tom!" Mark said. "What are you thinking, how shallow is this? Four feet!"

"Sorry," Tom said. He swam away.

Mark sat back in his chair. He covered his face in his hands and started to cry, silently.

"Oh," Linda said. "Honey..."

"I can't do this," he said. "It's too much."

"The kids," Linda said.

"It's a god damn circus."

"The therapist..."

"A god damn circus."

"Doctors," Linda said.

Mark stood up. "The manager!" he said. "The captain! The owner! Where are they? Who is controlling this god damn circus?"

People stared at him.

"You're making a scene," Linda said.

Mark stared at the horizon. It was white with sun. "Nowhere to go, but it keeps moving," he said.

"What?" Linda asked.

"Did someone call for me?" the man with the beard said, walking down the stairs from the second deck.

Mark ran to the railing. He looked into the waves and tried to jump or fly or swim.

The Dig (Story)

2010-05-25T19:13:00.000-07:00

Susan lies awake, tossing in animal consciousness, thrashes and twists under the covers in the wet-humid room. Thoughts boil like a fever in her brain. Listens to David beside her, snoring grating snores. She listens closely to the mucus and saliva, stringy and viscous, hanging from each one of the raspy, echoing grunts. And she sweats.

Every night in the hotel room has been a stew of churning nightmares, a surreal existence where she is awake, but incoherent, except for a tiny corner of her mind where she looks down onto the thoughts in open-mouthed horror. It is like watching someone else's thoughts as they fester within her own brain. Opening and closing her eyes makes no difference. The hotel room is there and the ceiling is dark and terribly infinite, like an endless chasm.

Susan watches her thoughts from behind the glass of awareness. She has done something, will do something, terribly wrong, something born from desperation to bury the future, but she can't remember it. Since they have been in the city, every night has been worse than before. The first night, the dreams are all deep, dark caverns, empty of thought but the emptiness itself is a feeling, a blind sensation of remorse and shame and disgust.

The second night, she dreams that she wanders Altara alone, always with her head turned over her shoulder. The third night, her father is there, a beaten, bleeding corpse hanging like a puppet between buildings, illuminated, translucent with the Altaran moonlight. She walks towards him, runs towards him, but the distance remains the same and, eventually, she collapses.

The dread comes over her like a disease, infects her to the point where she feels like she is dissolving, and the sickness lasts in the morning for a few terrible moments, before she sighs in relief and touches her tongue, which is always bleeding from her teeth as they clamp down on it throughout the night, keeping it captive as it writhes, like a pink worm trying to escape from its subterranean burrow, to spill forth secrets like dirt.

Altara City isn't very crowded in the early afternoon. Altarans crouch in doorways, many of them looking at the other side of the street with a decidedly listless gaze. The sandstone buildings shine glossy in the cool sunshine. Tanned men ride rusted bicycles down the dull cobblestone streets, carts rattling behind them. They regard David and Susan suspiciously as they pass. The snowy glitter of the couple's unworked skin indicates that they are from very far away, a place where sunshine has been replaced by ceilings.

David feigns confidence in his unfamiliar surroundings and Susan allows him to lead her around by the hand. She is still too rattled by her latest nightmare to focus on the exotica of the city as it shimmers around them in the dry heat. David is impatient with her silence. He was reluctant to come to Altara because of Susan’s unspoken past involving the city but, now that they are here, he resents her sullenness, maturely takes it personally. He is always frustrated with saddened people because of his inability to comfort them. This is especially true with Susan and, consequently, he has always managed to discourage her from volunteering the sordid history of her childhood in this city.

To cheer her up and distract himself from her, he enthusiastically thrusts his fingers at statues and fountains, completely unaware of their meaning, secretly wondering if Susan has already seen them all. He busily recites facts he read from an Altaran brochure until he forgets Susan’s deeper traumas. When she fails to make any obligatory grunts or squeals or other instinctual noises of awes, he twists around to look at her.
Susan’s head is down, wobbling weakly, blond hair swaying like a curtain over her face. “Good God, Susan,” he says, pulling her into the shade of two dusty trees coiled between yellow-stone tenements. “We flew all the way out here. Let’s enjoy ourselves.”

She peers up at him, bleary-eyed. “You came to enjoy yourself. I lived here until I was twelve, David. You think I want to come back here, after what happened then?”

David shudders at the ominous tone to her question, quickly tries to brighten things with a legal dispute: “You said you wouldn’t mind if we came again,” he reminds her in a nasally exasperated voice. “I thought that meant you, well, wouldn’t mind.”

Susan braces herself with a breath, decides it’s not worth it. “These trees are pretty,” she says.

David nods and gently grips her hand again. “I know. They’re an exotic strain. Related to pine trees, I think.”

No, Susan thinks, that’s not what they’re related to at all, you never lived here, I did. Her existence in the city is a collage of emotion, but she can only see the colors, not the shapes. The ambiguity of the memories makes her worry that something sinister may be lurking beneath the colorful surface. She had been able to put everything aside when she left for the States, but things were slowly coming back to her. She thinks: like giant, meaty chunks in an otherwise tasteless stew, these sunken things are bobbing back to the surface.

This naturally reminds her that it’s time for lunch.

There is a stout, unattractive, purely decorative black fence wrapped around a corner of the Altaran Plaza. The corner is cluttered with stone chairs and shadowed by a canvas. This canvas shrugs up and down in a wavering and indecisive rhythm with the shy, unrelieving bursts of Altaran wind. David groans that the breeze feels like someone is dousing him with warm soup. Susan rolls her eyes, wishes he would ask how she feels, how she has been sleeping lately.

Harriet and her husband, Frank, sit underneath the soup-doused canvas. One of Frank’s gorilla arms hangs on the back of his chair, gesturing authoritatively at the glossy-eyed Harriet. He is in the middle of what he believes is a groundbreaking dissection of Altaran culture. Harriet, who is a native Altaran, tries to counter his arguments with her actual experience, but is quickly dismissed as narrow-minded.

Luckily, Frank sees David and Susan approaching from the other end of the plaza. “Great,” he says, shifting his formidable thighs on his seat. “Dave is finally here. I can’t wait to show him my dig. Would you mind getting Susan out of the way, though? She’s so goddamn melodramatic.”

Harriet is looking at herself in a pocket mirror. “Yes, Dear. I’m sure she’s fine.”

“Fine,” Frank laughs. “At the wedding, the woman stopped talking to me after I had a few drinks, like I had committed some great sin. David came simpering up to me later, tried telling me crap like, ‘Oh, her dad was an alcoholic,’ blah blah blah. Cry me a river.” He clears his throat as the couple comes closer, his arm shoots into the air with startling speed, swings back and forth like a cleaver.

They wave back. This is why we came all the way back here, Susan thinks, to indulge some misogynistic jackass. She hasn’t met Harriet but, upon seeing her practiced grasp on the pocket mirror, decides she is superficial and boring.

I wonder what Harriet is like in bed? David wonders, before sticking his tongue out, imagining Frank’s football bulk, long ago turned from muscle to pudding, rippling across her petite body.

“Hello there!” Harriet squeaks, clapping her mirror shut and dropping it into her purse. “Welcome to our humble city!” She stands from her seat and almost instantaneously hugs, and kisses, both David and Susan.
David grins. “Thanks. It’s great to see you guys again.”

“And you!” Harriet exclaims. She peers at Susan like one might eye a child as they crouch down to look at them. “You must be Susan!”

“I must be,” Susan says. She congratulates herself on her accurate assessment. An airhead, too, she thinks.
Frank notices the curtness of Susan’s answer. Here we go with the goddamn drama, he grumbles to himself.

"How was the flight?" he asks, half-crouching out of his chair to shake David’s hand, but investing no more effort than necessary.

"Long." David sits at the table. Harriet keeps Susan upright by gesturing frantically at her dress, Susan’s dress, and shouting delightedly

"I'll make it worth it, trust me," Frank says, stretching his back against his chair. "Altara City is one of the greatest cities in the world."

David nods politely as a waitress with a ski jump of a nose hands him a cup of coffee. He sips it as Frank rambles about the country, dropping acronyms, cities, Capital Events, like he has lived in the city since it was founded. This is exactly the reason David has never visited Frank here- it is the home and birthplace of Frank's cultural vanities. He has been living as an American abroad for eleven years now, so the innate American attributes of egotism and sentimental solipsism have been crowned by the delusion that he has transcended these qualities instead of translating them. David is suspicious of anyone who travels to a place and claims that the experience opened up new worlds for them.

He went to college with Frank, but Frank moved to Altara shortly after. However, since David had lost his job and Susan was an academic on sabbatical, this was a perfect time to indulge Frank’s request that they come to Altara to see “history in the making.”

"What do you want to do first?" Frank finally asks him. Harriet's babble still bubbles in the background. "Visit the Palace? Ride out into the country, maybe see the dig?" David opens his mouth, but Frank waves his hand. “It’s got to be the dig. You’ve never seen anything like it, I swear. Even Susan might enjoy it.”

Susan and Frank lock eyes for a moment, before David, blissfully immune to passive aggression due to a genetic deficiency in perception, says: "I think we want to see the city a bit before we go exploring other places."

"Oh, the city!" Harriet proclaims, slipping back down into her seat and fondling Frank’s hand. "What are you looking for? Entertainment? Shopping? Dining?"

They sound like talking billboards, Susan thinks. “You’re a native?” She asks Harriet, noticing the bronze sheen to the other woman’s skin, the oval, feline eyes. An exotic exterior to make up for a hollow interior, she thinks.

"We'd love to walk around the city, first," David says.

“Nonsense, the dig is….”

“I’m a native, through and through.”

“Born right during the Reformation then?”

“As native as anyone can be in Altara!” Frank laughs, slamming his palm on the table.

“What do you mean?” Susan asks sharply.

Harriet smiles. “Franky has this theory that no one is related to the actual Altaran Elites, the ones that planned out the city and did all the cultural stuff. He says they were all wiped out during the Reformation.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Susan crosses her arms, but feels a pinprick in the back of her head, like the slow unscrewing of a jar that has long been bolted shut. Like memories may spill out from her at any second.

“Honestly,” David says, panicking. “A walk around the city is exactly what-“

“You think that’s stupid?” Frank asks, swelling in his seat. “What do you know about Altara? Did you look at some IVDs from the Network while you were still in that sunless warehouse you call a country?”

“Now, Frank, I’ve told you that Susan grew up here,” David says. “She-“

“I know a lot more than you, that’s for sure,” Susan’s arms tighten together in a perfect bow of indignation. “My father was the Emissary here during the Occupation. He was killed during the Reformation. So was my brother, Richard. My mother and I had to flee, we barely made it out of here. I was twelve.”

Jesus Christ, that’s a fair card to slap onto the table, Frank thinks with a wince. He rolls his shoulders. “Well, I’m very sorry to hear that. I didn’t mean to offend any particularly emotional impression you had of Altara.”

Susan blinks and opens her mouth, but Harriet bursts: "I know what would be fun, let's split up- just the guys and just the girls- and then we can all meet back for dinner at Frank and my favorite seafood place. Sixish sound good?"

"Uh-" Susan tries. Incredulous: is a distraction the best defense in a confrontation? Suspicious: is Harriet far more intelligent than her pocket mirror prowess indicates? Is she intentionally defusing the situation?

"Sounds like a plan," Frank says, rising from his chair and shedding several bills from his wallet. "Dave, I've gotta show you that dig." Starts walking before David or Susan can suggest an alternate plan.

"Uh-" David says.

"Uh-" Susan says.

Harriet walks beside Susan, fluttering so passionately around the city that Susan is surprised she doesn’t end up flapping her arms straight up into the air. Harriet praises every building they pass. This statue is dedicated to Edward Glarian, the brave leader who freed the Altaran Workers from the Altaran Elite during the Occupation. This is the very street where the troops landed at first, to seize Altara and capture the country by force, the very street where, fifty years ago, the Occupation began.

They climb a street which curls up a hill and ends in a small garden. The garden huddles beneath the shadows cast by the cliff on which the Palace stands. Susan sits on one of the iron benches and stares beyond the cliff, up at the Palace. Its two spires stab the sky, glisten with wet, metallic sunshine. "Cool, huh?" Harriet asks. “That’s the kind of thing we’re not going to see more of, sadly. Because the Altaran Elites created those things.” She takes a breath. “With the blood and sweat of the Altaran Workers.”

Is she deaf? Susan wonders. Was her brain elsewhere when Susan and Frank argued about Altara City? Susan knew about the Elites and the Workers, but she disagreed that all the Elites were gone. It just didn’t make any sense. Still, the worry was there, gnawing at her memories of the city. The Americans had come and freed the Workers from the tyranny of the Elites, but then what?

“Frank sure has some interesting opinions about Altara,” Susan ventures.

“Oh, that,” Harriet says. Her hand twitches, as if to playfully bat the question out of the air.

“No, seriously. How can you let him think that you aren’t related to the people who built that?” She gestures at the Palace, glowering in the sun behind them.

Harriet shrugs, smiles nervously. “My people did build it, see, the Elites just designed it. We did the heavy lifting.” She chokes after trying to say something else. “The Reformation was a confusing time and we…. we don’t talk about it, or the Occupation, not here. Not now. Some things are better left buried.”

Something quivers in Harriet’s voice. Susan’s mind telescopes outwards, shooting out into the dark haze of her nightmares. The Altarans came to their manor at night, chanting and hoisting torches. Calling for the blood of her father, breaking through the door and finding the three of them huddled in the damp recess of the basement. Tearing her father from them, still chanting (chanting his name?). Must have been the Elites, hungry for vengeance, since her father led the efforts of the Occupation to free the Altaran Workers.

“Do you drink ka’kazaa?” Harriet asks, sitting beside Susan on the bench, underneath the solemn shadow of the Palace.

"Ka'kazaa?" Of course she knows what it is, but she decides to pretend. She can’t tell if Harriet is pretending, too, and simply forcing the fact that Susan used to live in Alatara all the way down. Maybe Harriet simply went deaf whenever Frank excreted his clueless presumptions about Altaran culture. How else could the marriage work? Susan wonders if secrets are really just a matter of repressing different parts of reality. Painting the more nauseating colors of memory black, she thinks.

“….a native Alteran drink,” Harriet is saying. “Slightly hallucinatory, of course, just like anything good." Her crimson lips press together. "I drink it whenever Frank is working at the dig."

"The dig?"

Harriet bats her eyes. "Goodness, honey, yes! Hasn't David told you anything about it? My Franky is the chief archaeologist. They found another Palace on the other end of the city. A lot older than that one." She points up at the Palace on the cliff. "Buried by one of the Storms during the Reformation, that’s what Frank says."
She mistakes Susan’s stunned silence for one of disinterest. “Let's go to my favorite ka'kaza bar, 'kay? It's the best time to go, right in the afternoon."
"Sure," Susan says.

Frank walks up the swaying bridge with one hand on the rope rail, another hand gesturing towards the crater below. “Right there, that’s where we found the first turret!” He shouts towards David. Below them, the sandstone turret juts out of the soil with a stiffness that David finds vaguely inappropriate. There is a graveyard silence at the dig now, since it’s the weekend and the site is off-limits to civilians. The Altaran Heritage Board mandates that Frank has to give the workers two days off every week. A predictable pain in the ass from a pompously named organization.

Frank shakes his head. He is positive that none of the residents of Altara are even related to the Altaran Elites, for which the Palace is a symbol, but the Altarans are desperate to steal history and dress up in it to make themselves unique. Frank finds it despicable. People are always desperate to scavenge some kind of self-discovery from history, he thinks disapprovingly, while simultaneously unaware of his own transformation from American to American Abroad. Either way, it’s exactly that selfish historical piracy that funds his dig in the first place, so he has to be grateful for it.

He stops in the middle of the bridge. It sways a little in the soupy breeze. David grips the sagging railings with both hands. “It’s okay,” Frank says, nodding his head. “Only one bridge has broken so far.” David’s mouth drops open and Frank releases a bellow. “Just kidding! Don’t worry, Dave. It’s perfectly safe. Hell, there aren’t even animals around here." He doesn’t bother to explain that this absence of animals should be unsettling, because it indicates something fairly lethal at work within the dig.

David clears his throat, squeezes the railings with his nervous hands. Poor David, Frank thinks. Always so uncertain about his life. A dreamer, not a doer. Limping his way from the remnants of one ambition to another, tripping into his marriage with Susan. Frank runs his tongue along his teeth. He decides it isn’t time to ask David to be his assistant, not yet, but he’s positive that David will say yes. Christ, he didn’t even know what David did. Everyone knew there was no future staying in the States, watching it rot from the inside.

“What do you think?” Frank spreads his arms out towards the dig, encompassing the half-mile within the sphere between his arms. This was his kingdom, his Palace more than any of these pseudo-Altarans.

“It’s, uh, pretty neat,” David says. He squints against the sunset as it glazes the dry crater with copper. He wrings the rope railing with his hands as he peers down below the bridge. The courtyard yawns open below them, but it’s still filled with rubble and dust. The other turret is just barely visible, yet to be unearthed. “Do you find any things in these Palaces?”

Frank laughs good-naturedly. “Oh, David. You really don’t know anything about Altara, do you? This is the first dig that the country has seen and I’m heading it. I was reading some of the historical texts, from the Altaran Library, and deduced that there were two Palaces. The one on the cliff, higher up, that’s actually the smaller, more recent one, where the Elites fled after the first one was covered by the Reformation Storm.”

“So, the-“

Frank waved his hand. “This Palace is the original one.” The better one, he wanted to say, to make sure David understood the importance of his discovery. “We’re bound to find thousands of never-before-seen Altaran artifacts here, David. We’re making history by discovering it, that’s what I always tell Harriet.” He nods, decides he likes this, repeats it to make sure David remembers it, so he can tell Susan. “We’re making history by discovering it.”

“What are you going to discover, exactly?” David tips his head back towards the sky, rolls his shoulders. The bridge creaks underneath him.

“That’s the question now, isn’t it?” Frank says. He claps David on the shoulders. “Let’s go find the women. I’m sure they’re done with their shopping now. Hopefully!” He wraps his hand around David’s neck and gives him a comradely shake. They walk back towards the city.

Harriet has achieved a spiritual level of self-indulgence, Susan realizes. It’s majestic, the way she dexterously reorients any conversation towards herself, transcends any signs of discomfort from the other person. Being with her is almost like being alone, with the radio on. Susan can sit in her chair, expressionless, Harriet will pause for a second, slowing down into something that is almost silence, and then actually regain momentum and go tearing off into some new street of conversation.

Harriet’s endless conversational detours are actually panic-induced twists, as she is someone who interprets every silence as awkward and, more importantly, fears that Susan will again press her for history about the Altarans. Harriet didn’t want to leave any breathing room for that kind of talk. She used conversation itself to distract her from the dull ache of the past which, to her, and most other Altarans, was cloudy at best, foreboding and eerie at worst. When conversation failed, that was when the ka’kazaa came in, a drink guaranteed to totally annihilate any lingering, unsettling sentiment about the history of the country.

Susan shifts in her chair. The ka’kazaa lounge is dim. A strange, pine-scented smoke smears its way past the overhead lights, eclipsing one as it slugs by, working its way towards the single, open window. Harriet has already finished half of her own ka’kazaa drink. Susan still eyes hers warily. It glows a radioactive green within its tall glass. The froth atop it actually bubbles, pops, and steams.

The sight is familiar enough, a flickering neon from her own Altaran past. If most of it was a blur to her, this, at least, was clear. Her father drank the stuff every day for the last few months they lived in Altara. Cursed at her mother, cursed at Susan, wept and raged at the same time. Susan had asked him why he kept drinking ka’kazaa, once, when they had sat on the balcony of their manor and he shivered in the afternoon heat, recovering from the night before. ‘Honey, I drink it because, when you are consumed by hopeless guilt, burning rage is better than empty despair.’

“Franky always just thinks I’m shopping when I come here. You’d think he would ask what the I bought, right?” This is one of the pauses where Harriet takes an extended breath, prepping her lungs for another enlightening expulsion of revelations, more insignificant paint to whitewash any brighter topics. “But he doesn’t. Nope, not at all. Can you believe it?” She sighs, grabs her glass from the crooked wooden table. “But that’s what I like about my Franky. He doesn’t ask questions.”

Doesn’t ask questions, Susan thinks. Maybe this was Harriet’s secret to tolerating Frank. He assumed this and he assumed that, to the point where his thoughts could be predicted as accurately as the weather. A truly honest relationship hinged on someone not knowing their own transparency.

Harriet goes quiet, looks at Susan’s glass of ka’kazaa suspiciously. “Are you going to drink that?” She is convinced that the true solution to making Susan happy and oblivious is to get her intoxicated. Harriet feels claustrophobic when she thinks of the fact that Susan lived in Altara as an American during the Reformation, because there were only a few American families in the city at that point, none of which were heroes. Harriet drinks ka’kazaa not to forget but to misremember.

“Uh-“

“It’s vacation, isn’t it? Come on, cheers, cheers!” She hands Susan the glass. Susan is appalled to find that it’s slimy to the touch, as if the glass itself is sweating ka’kazaa. Just touching it makes her feel lightheaded. Harriet watches Susan’s face and grins a sharky grin. “See? You can feel it already, right? Potent. A unique effect on anyone. Try it! Cheers to you and David finally coming to visit.”

Susan’s glass clinks against Harriet’s. They tip the glasses to their mouths. The ka’kazaa drips down into Susan’s mouth like mucus. The flavor is impossible- a fruity burst of flowers and summer breezes, like drinking liquid air.

“It does taste like that, doesn’t it?” Harriet, already growing muffled, dull, blurry. It’s difficult, suddenly, to decide what moment is present and what moment is past. Susan watches as Harriet turns into a puppet, with erratic limbs jerking and dancing on unseen strings. The scene and sounds are distant to her, like she is looking at a television from another room, trying to distinguish the actions on the screen.

But, Susan wonders, isn’t that what life feels like, if you really think about it? Like you’re just looking in from somewhere else in a state of paralytic bewilderment? As if you can/could always pull back and ask: How am I here? Why am I here? All the while, smiling at people while your thoughts turn on you like knives.

The ka’kazaa glass stands empty in front of her, glinting in the smoky lights. Secrets, Susan thinks.

“What about them?” Harriet asks, leaning closer.

This is the one secret, the one that follows her wherever she goes with echoing footsteps, only to recede into the eternal ocean of the past when she turns her head. Why does Frank think there are no more Altaran Elites? It’s so obvious that Harriet is native. What was the difference?

”It’s safe with me,” Harriet reassures her, coming closer still, her tongue licking her teeth. She holds her own empty glass of ka’kazaa. “This is the elixir of transcendence,” she proclaims. “Learn things about yourself.”

Learn things about yourself by looking at your past, scorning the monster in the memories, Susan thinks. She knows why Frank thought that the Altaran Elites were all dead. It was obvious, now. Somewhere, she knows what happened. The ka’kazaa eats away at the ceiling, the walls, the doors of Susan’s memories, leaves only the foundation, the dark pit on which everything has been built.

“Tell me,” Harriet says again. “Tell me.” Her face like a clown’s, eyes burning.

So Susan tells, told her, her as soon as she remembers the buried truth.

Frank shakes his glass of beer at David. “Alcohol,” he says. “That thing we drink while we wait for women to do what we want.” He burps. “Am I right?”

David shrugs, finishes his own glass. “When did you tell them to be here?”

The restaurant serves seafood. The fish are all from the moss-green waters of the Altaran Channel. The green sticks to their scales like fungus. David had to drink four beers just to eat his haddock. The sticky substance is tasteless, but the corduroy texture becomes the taste. The restaurant itself has a tank of fish on display, as if to unapologetically display the forest color of the water. There’s a little panel on the tank explaining why the Altaran Channel is colored the way it is, but David decides that he doesn’t want to know.

It’s almost nine. Frank still hasn’t reached for his phone to call Harriet and Harriet still hasn’t called him. David wonders if this is the kind of contest. Naturally, he compares his marriage with Frank and, naturally, decides his is far better, far deeper. Susan and he never engaged in phone call contests. He scratches his face, even though it doesn’t itch, and then he cringes. He pictures Harriet leading Susan around the city, chattering away, while Susan still wanders in her Altaran trance. He bites his lip. Why had she been so damn passive about the trip if it was going to bother her so much? How could she just let him whisk her away to a place that obviously haunted her? She had bad memories of the place. She didn’t have to martyr herself.

“No one really knows what happened to them,” Frank is saying. He probably said what time he expected Susan and Harriet, but David wasn’t paying attention. “The Elites, I mean,” he says, noticing David’s reenergized look. “The Storms covered this Palace we just found, right as the Reformation took place, but did they all die? Isn’t it strange, to think that all of our efforts and triumphs and failures will eventually be turned to sand?” Frank is eating mussels and seems to be taking a vicious pleasure in snapping the shells in two. “We all want to be remembered, it’s true. But when some comet wipes out humanity, who’s left to remember us? We always think about the future in terms of a future past. But there isn’t a future past if you look too far.” Frank snaps the final mussel, drops the two halves of the shell onto the pile.

“Then why are you digging at all?” David asks. He sips at another beer, not remembering that he ordered it.
“Everyone always asks me that,” Frank laughs. “I do what I do because digging for Altaran secrets is a pleasure. It’s a treasure hunt and the secrets are the treasure.”

“You’ll never know their secrets, though, not really,” David says. “You’re only assuming things from what you find.”

Frank laughs again, tips his beer at David, and drains it. “That, my friend, is why historians are very powerful people. No one records history, they create it from their presumptions.”

This idea startles David, because he thinks again of Susan. Her father had been an important figure in the Altaran Occupation, had died serving the States during the Altaran Reformation. It had only been twenty years, but David couldn’t even remember the reason that the States had gone into Altara in the first place. The reasons were more forgettable than the consequence. Facts, he thinks, are as fleeting as memories.

“How did this happen?” David asks, suddenly.

Frank cocks his head. “How did what happen?”

David strains to recall anything Susan told him about Altara, anything he had learned about Altara in his lifetime. It was like trying to peer into a murky pool of dull reflections and winking light. “The Occupation and the Reformation. How did it happen? Why did it happen?”

Frank looks uncomfortable for a moment, shifts in his seat. Puts his beer to his lips but brings it back to the table without sipping it. “The States came in here because Altara was supposed to be a place with a lot of resources, uh, and the Workers were all enslaved by the Elites.” He shrugs self-consciously. “A corporation sponsored the Occupation to free the… Altaran Workers, and got what it could in the process. It’s the old song and dance of innocent natives being….” Frank pauses, searching for words in the froth of his beer, which is volcanoing because of his jostling. He puts a thumb over the bottle, looks at David. “The company overestimated the, uh, output of the resources. People left in droves and a little, ragtag band of diplomats was left behind.”

“So that was the Occupation?”

“Oh, I know it’s an ugly word. Nothing happened, really. The diplomats sat in their manors in Altara. Some Altarans eventually felt like the diplomats were controlling them too much, so they rebelled. Saps like Susan’s father were killed, the rest of the Americans were forced out.”

David, miraculously, realizes that Frank is slighting Susan with this language, but he is too nervous to condemn him for it. He is more a man of confident gossip than productive confrontation. He tries to punish Frank for the remark by pushing him on the thing that seemed to make him the most uncomfortable: “But, I mean, what was this corporation? What made Altarans so angry?”

Frank clears his throat. “The corporation’s name was, well, it was named after the founder, a guy named John Altara.” He notices David’s disbelief, again shrugs self-consciously. “The inevitable occurred, David. These people and their past, it became private property. Altara Inc. seized it. Like I said, historians are the most powerful people.”

David and Frank finish their beers, in a silent, detached tribute to the natives made homeless and nameless by a force more powerful than truth.

After they eat at the restaurant and the women never join them, Frank stumbles back to his apartment, slightly drunk. He wrestles with his pocket lining for his key as he approaches his door, all the while lamenting David’s sensitivity to the Altarans. He shakes his head. David hadn’t always been such a damn pansy. Who did he think he was, poking away at old stones and hoping for gold? History wasn’t concerned with how something became history, Frank grumbles. He knows that if you think about history from too many perspectives it became metaphysical bullshit. You listen to everyone and you’re bound to lose the gems of the past in a steaming pile of speculative excrement. Choose a side and stick with it, that was Frank’s motto.

A raspy sound crackles trickles from the alley beyond the apartment door, the quick inhale-exhale of muffled tears. It takes Frank a minute to recognize the pitch and sobs most definitely belong to Harriet, who has long excelled at subtly indicating her distress. He approaches the dark alley cautiously, peering around it and squinting at the shadows. He can see her up against one of the walls, smoking a cigarette. Her shoulders rattle with each sob.

“Harriet? Honey? What are you doing here?” he asks.

“Susan,” Harriet breathes. Her voice is fractured. Each word slips out of her mouth like a piece of broken glass. “She, we, we had some ka’kazaa and she ran off into the city.”

“Ran off?” Frank tries not to raise his voice. Ka’kazaa leads to nothing good. He knows that Harriet attempts to have it in secret from time to time, but hadn’t known that she was comfortable enough with it to think that giving it to a friend would be a good idea. Especially not someone like Susan, who was damaged and psychotic enough without it.

“That’s not the worst part,” Harriet says. “She told me… oh, Frank! She told me something too horrible to say. It’s just awful.”

“What? What did she tell you?”

“A secret.” Harriet inhales another sob. “Something bad. So bad.”

She trembles against the wall. Frank walks to her side and puts his hand on her shoulder. Her skin is humid and rubbery. He tries to remain calm. It takes all of his strength to resist shaking her by the shoulders and yelling at her for deciding that ka’kazaa, above everything else, would be a good recreational activity to reintroduce Susan into the culture of Altara. In the back of his mind, he wonders if ka’kazaa is a cultural icon of Altara, or if it had become popular during the Occupation. He blows out a breath. If only Harriet knew how much ka’kazaa Susan’s father had drank.

“We’ll find her,” he breathes through his teeth. “We’ll find her.”

David stumbles up the stone steps leading to his floor, using the narrow walls as extra support. He is whistling a song to himself, drunk enough to try and live in the moment. He opens the door to his room and nods to himself when he sees Susan hasn't come back. Sits on the bed, kicks off his shoes, and massages a foot with his thumbs.

If he stops this motion, a black hole forms in his thoughts and wholly consumes him. Flashes of color and sound pass through his brain. His conversation with Frank made him feel even more uncomfortable with the trip to Altara. He wasn’t personally concerned with the past of the country, but he was concerned for Susan’s sake. He knew that much. He didn’t make the final revelatory leap that he was ultimately concerned because he didn’t want Susan to start telling him her secrets. His mind was already involuntarily putting pieces of the puzzle together, using the Reformation and Occupation, Susan and Frank, as the pieces, but he remedies this by fiercely shaking his head, sending the unwanted ruminations scattering like flies, only to have them come back to be swatted away again.

The stillness of the city creeps into the room from the open window, hovers like a weight around him. He looks at the empty bed, notices the crusted, salt outline of Susan's sleeping form. She had been sweating and thrashing since they had gotten here. So drained from thinking and feeling at night that she was little more than a shell during the day. A face with nothing behind it. Why hadn’t he asked her what was causing the nightmares? He wondered. He knew, though, because it was the same answer every time. Asking Susan about her past in Altara would lead to nothing good. He simply preferred ignorance to unpleasant truth. His suspicions of Frank’s Altara stories wriggled like snakes through his brain.

Knocks strike his door like thunder. David spins towards the sound as someone throws open the door.
"David," Frank says in a low voice. "Susan's gone." Harriet stands behind him in the hall, her shoulders bunched up and ashamed.

"Gone?" He chokes.

Frank nods. "She had a bit.... to drink. We don't where she is, but we'll find her."

David breathes easier, feels more relaxed. Another tragedy to move time forward, he thinks. Wasn’t this what attracted him to Susan in the first place? An intellectual woman, hamstrung by a tragic upbringing. He could protect her and respect her in one paternally compassionate swoop. But if the secrets burst out from the ground, he would be helpless. He couldn’t comfort her for the past. He knew it loomed, a shadow following her wherever she went, humbling her. He was comforted by its presence, but terrified that it might stagger forth into the present.

Out into the cold, dark streets of Altara. Dim flames spit within the lanterns hanging from the curved bridges arching over the street. The city is empty. The slithering wind has gone quiet, a noise David hadn’t noticed until it was gone. Without the persistent sound, Altara is lifeless. David bites his nails. It feels like the three of them are treading on hallowed ground, invading some moment better left behind.

The Altaran moon is a polished white and obscenely large. It crushes the nightly shadows with its merciless, pearl radiance. Clouds scurry across the face of the monstrous sphere, shattered into ragged shards by the sheer violence of the light. The night sky eddies, gravitates around it, like the moon is slowly pulling everything else towards it with the steadiness of a tide, bleaching every shadow.

The air pulsates against David’s face, breath with an almost brimstone warmth. Their footsteps clap on the moon-painted cobbles of the streets, echoing and then turning into echoes of echoes. It sounds like they are walking up the walls of the buildings around them, straight into the air. "How did this happen?" David asks.
Harriet’s eyes swim in tears. She tries, several times, to tell him Susan's secret, but each word is so ugly and terrible that she gives up and shakes her head. "She told me about her father."

David tries to contain the indifference of anticlimax. "Oh. You didn’t hear her this afternoon? She told Frank about it.”

“She sure did,” Frank says.

"She told me about what her father did.”

David feels the dreadful tug of nauseous knowledge. “What he did?”

“We’ll find her,” Frank says, quickly.

Harriet breaks down in the street, like some part of machinery has crumbled within her. She
crashes into a heap on the cobblestones, her palms buried in her eyes.

"It was a mistake to come here," David says to himself, unsure of his meaning. His eyes are unfocused in the gloomy streets. "It's better to let time bury the future of the past, isn't it?" Better yet, he thinks, to let silence bury the future of the past, so there can be a future beyond that past.

"What?" Frank asks, stepping towards him. He puts a meaty hand on David's shoulder. "Listen, Dave, you should have-"

David slaps the massive hand away and starts walking again, fully knowing the pointlessness of it all. He doesn't, didn't, know where Susan had gone. He wonders if he ever actually knew. All the years that they had known each other, loved each other, and there was still some unexplored corner, something that Harriet now knew and he didn’t. It offended him that she had held a secret so close to her heart, closer than she held him. Not that she held the secret.

Underneath the massive Altaran moon, Susan scampers down the jagged steps leading to the Palace. She feels a magnetic draw here, where things are buried. The wind is dead within the canyon, but skims its edges, causing small rocks and dust to clatter quietly down crevices and into corners. Her feet crunch on the hard sand as she plunges down the carved staircase, to the bottom of the dig.

It is safer here, she thinks. People can look down on her, but she can't see outside the hole. The ka'kazaa still rages in her, like a fever, but she can feel the familiar nightmares lapping at her consciousness. This time, they are as clear as glass, a window that she peers through to see the truth. The fog of her memories has dissipated, leaving only a cold stillness behind. She comes to a stop beneath the turret protruding from the sand. She stands in its moon-lit shadow and stares up at it. "I did nothing wrong," she confesses, externally. But her father had done something wrong. His secret had become hers. Finding it like a hidden, eternal sickness, an affliction that had been clinging to the back of her mind all along.

The turret stands before her, a monument to the ensuing silence. She can almost see the Palace when it was above ground. She remembers visiting it with her father as he spoke to the Altaran Elites, assuring them of the American withdrawal, making them smile and laugh with him. They all shook his hand bowed to him. They believed him.

She abruptly plunges towards the turret's small window, kicking up small clumps of sand. She just barely fits through it, wriggling with reptilian desperation. Falls for several seconds and crashes onto a cold, marble floor. Here, the darkness is absolute. The window is above her head, out of her reach. Finally, she feels safe from her secrets, in a dark place where there is no one to judge them. A paradise of oblivion in the unimaginable past. Without time, she is at peace.

She lurches through the blackness until her hands press against a rough, sandstone wall. Leans against it, finds a stairway with her foot. Starts down the steps. As she descends, she reflects that absolute darkness was possible, but absolute quiet wasn’t, not if you couldn’t mute your thoughts. You would always hear voices.
The stairs end. How deep does it all go? She wonders, then giggles.

Her father, proud against the dripping, crimson sunset, military jacket rippling. Holding her hand in his, nodding to himself in the stupor of ka’kazaa. “Make sure your memories are peaceful,” he said to her, “because your past is something that no one can take from you.” This, followed by a breath, then the trembling whisper: “Even if you wish, pray, that they could.”

The bombs had shaken the whole city, broken the earth until it swallowed the Palace and the Altaran Elites. The building was blasted until it was in pieces, gassed until every Elite was dead a hundred times over. Susan and her father had watched the dust from the rubble rise against the sunset, swarming over the horizon. “And that’s how you make sure that the past stays buried,” her father had said. And then the Altaran Workers, the ones who were left and knew the truth, stormed the manor and took him.

Now what? What now? What was now? Susan remembered that sunset for years before researching Altara. The Elites had been herded into the Palace, told that there would be negotiations about a peaceful Reformation. Still, she had refused to think of the connection to her father, John Altara. She staggers along a glassy floor, but her next foot finds only air. She peacefully drops into nothingness. No difference between up and down, left behind and right all along, in the cocoon of darkness.

“You made his wife drink ka’kazaa. You expect him to stick around and trust us now?” Frank asks, slamming his fist into the side of a stone building. They are on the outskirts of Altara, only a quarter mile from the Dig. The houses here are less regal, more huts than houses. People attempt to creep around the alleys, but the moon makes stealth impossible.

“I didn’t know who her father was!” Harriet says. Her voice drizzles with tears. She didn’t know who he was, but she had suspected.

“You don’t need to know that, ka’kazaa is a bad idea for anyone. How often have you been drinking that stuff?”

“Often enough to know that there’s a very low chance that would happen, Franky. That’s-“
“A very low chance, but not no chance! What is wrong with you?”

“What’s going on here?” A broad-shouldered man approaches them with the swagger of authority, both thumbs hooked on his belt. His baggy shirt glows with the emblem of the golden shield of the Altaran Guard.
“We’ve lost two of our friends,” Harriet says, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist.

The guard scratches at the mossy beard bursting from his cheeks and shrugs. “Where…” He peers closer at Frank. “Oh, the digger guy. Right?”

Frank nods, used to the inadequate nomenclature for his vastly underappreciated profession.
“You been over there tonight?” The guard jerks his head down the street, in the direction of the Palace.
Frank shakes his head. “I don’t do any night work there. It’s a weekend, besides. What we’re really looking for, though, is-“

“You should head over there,” the guard says, giving no sign that Frank had even opened his mouth. “There’s something strange going on over there. The whole guard, we got pulled out of the barracks.”

“Really? Some kind of vandalism?” Frank’s hands turn into fists. His biggest fear is that some miscreant would run into the site and destroy some invaluable relic.

The guard shrugs again. “Just lights. Lots of ‘em.”

“At the site?” Frank is dumbstruck.

“Coming from the Palace,” the guard says. “We went down there, but not much we can do except watch. Still getting paid overtime at least.”

“We’ve got to get down there, then.” Frank grabs Harriet’s hand by the wrist and yanks her alongside him. She walks alongside him, head bobbing.

“Franky,” she huffs, trying not to trip on her feet. “Why is this more important than finding your friend and his wife?”

He doesn’t answer. Down the streets, towards the dig. Lights are already shining in faded reds and blues, like beacons. Frank knows that the lights are actually the first activation signals of TISBs (Tactical Internal Structure Bombs), as used during the first steps of the Reformation, as organized by Susan’s father, John Altara. There are still active TISBs within the Palace, when it was strategically destroyed a few decades earlier. Before he gets to the dig, his phone rings and Frank skids to a stop. Harriet almost falls over her feet.
Frank turns on his Comm-Chip and his Voice-Converter. “Frank Shannon.”

“Frank. It’s Richard. Am I to understand that someone activated a few TISBs at the site?”

“A vandal, sir. They probably tripped on some latent trigger. They’ll be taken care of when the bombs go off.”

“Right, Frank, but the Altaran Heritage Board is going to have a very difficult time explaining to the public why there are such modern devices in a Palace that was covered by… what did we call them… Storms.”

“I can still-“

“No, Frank, you can’t. Altara Inc. hired you specifically to create the Altaran past. We’ve got a bit of a PR problem with that whole country as it is. This is going to be a nightmare because of your negligence.”

“Mr. Altara, please-“

“Goodbye, Frank.”

As this was an opportune time, the TISBs went off.

David had been sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking the dig when the lights first shot out into the sky, leaking from the turret like spidery rainbows. He watched the lights and bit at his thumb, kicking his feet in the air above the turret. He hadn’t thought about the dig, really. He had been wandering the halls of his thoughts, prodding at his memories with Susan, trying to dissect them, discover something new within them. It was unproductive.

It had made him wonder, too, that such an intangible thing, such as Susan’s hidden past, could be so detrimental to his happiness. He knew it was morally right to ask her about her past, but the possibility was only plausible in some distant reality, a vision where he was strong enough to do what was right, rather than what was easy.

The solution for everyone, he decided, was to leave Altara the next morning. This place was unhealthy for both Susan and him. The more he unwittingly discovered because of Altara, the less he wanted to be in the country. He rubbed his hands together, put them on his knees. That was it. “Altara’s the real problem,” he told himself with a slight shake of his head and a slight smile.

The TISBs explode as he repeats this idea, erupting from the earth like all the hidden things he feared. Fragments of stone and metal spray into the air, rock the dig. Each bridge is blown to shreds, but the ropes stubbornly stay tied, flapping like wild worms in the wind. The second round of TISBs is signified by the metamorphosis of the rainbow beams to gold beams. This round is heavier, ripping the earth apart.
The skeletons of the Altaran Elites are launched into the air. David looks into the sky as it begins to rain bones.

He can hear skulls, ribs, femurs, vertebrae clack against rooftops and streets. The shower of buried bodies lasts for fifteen minutes. David squeezes his eyes shut and pretends the rumbling of the ground is an earthquake. When he opens his eyes again, the dig has become a rupture, a popped blister and nothing more. Smoke gently uncoils from the wreckage.

Susan’s body lies beside him, flecked with bits of bone.

How am I ever going to put this behind me? David thinks.

Harriet knows that the skeletons belong to the Altaran Elites, murdered in cold blood by Altara Inc. to initiate the Reformation. She knows this because Susan told her the secret, but Frank tells her that this is only Susan’s version of history. Harriet is passively suspicious for years but, when Susan’s version of history fails to resurface, she integrates it into that human pattern of “Maybe, but what difference does it make now?” The reports stating the truth of the Reformation never have, and never will, make it to Altara itself. They stay locked in libraries, very far away.

A series of investigative articles by the Altaran Heritage Board concludes that the TISBs were set up by anti-Alatara agents to destroy the scraps of Altaran culture remaining to be salvaged by the Altarans. It is later revealed that Susan Altara was the culprit behind the attacks. This last name comes as a surprise to David, who exclaims that he always thought it was Smith, because that is what she told him.

“It’s sad when people are so desperate to avoid the past that they disguise themselves,” Richard Altara says to AHB newspapers.

“Countless historical discoveries have been destroyed by this terrorist act,” adds Frank Shannon. “Whose bodies were these? This Palace obviously held the catacombs of some very important Altarans. We’ll never know the truth now.”

Election Season (Story)

2010-05-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

Rain, glowing like acid in front of neon streetlights. Dark, wet streets glow black against the desolate night sky. Jade is on the curb, head hanging. Blond hair turned to mud in the rain. Neo-music buzzing behind her from the club. Looks up with the weight of the world on her spine. "This is how it ends," she says.

The Watcher stands beside her, trench-coat with a shuttered collar, gloved hands burrowed into billowing pockets. A round hat, turning his face into shadow. "Not having enough money to drink ka'kazaa all night long isn't the end. Come on." Gloved hand reaches out for hers, waits in the air, stiff in the spitting breeze. She doesn't look up, but she waits. A few minutes pass, she locks her hand with his, he brings her to her feet.

He waves a cab from the electric line for her. It sizzles its way through the rain to them, the door opens. He hands her a damp dollar bill, she puts it into the cab, types in her address. The cab door closes and it hisses away. His coat rustles in the breeze left from the cab, hands back in his pockets. Five seconds later, mini-copters fall onto the curb. People fall from the doors, clumsy like leeches. Recordo-phones grasped in their hands. They scavenge the curb, the entrance to the club with their eyes, hunched necks, as if looking for something left behind. Cabs peel up to the curb, more people explode from them.

He stands, still looking beyond the curb, hands in his pockets. They eventually cluster around him, shoving recordo-phones into his face, their voices scampering through his ears.

"Jade Swendal came by here just now, didn't she, sir?" The less experienced ones.

"Excuse me, did you see Jade Swendal sitting on the curb? Could you believe what happened?" The deceitful veterans.

He waits. "I have four eyewitnesses," a more authoritative voice says. "Against. I need, in your words, for you to contribute to this case." The lawyer-reporters. These, the worst, most dangerous of the pack. Will descend into the club, smash their recordo-phones over the bouncer and bartender's head. Will hound the city itself for information. A case will be drawn, lawyers versus lawyers. A result will be reached, put into the Case section of the E-paper. Will be big, but not too big. People aren't interested in the Case section anymore. Hundreds, thousands of cases a day.

He clears his throat and the pack goes silent, leaning over each other with recordo-phones erect and waiting. "Fuck off," he says. Waves his arm at the cab line. The light blinks its acknowledgment, the cab comes beeping towards him. He steps into it.

Behind him, the recordo-phones go limp with dismay. The lawyer-reporters are the ones who recover first, pour into the club.

Jade tries to make her own ka'kazaa in the kitchen. Grabs a blender, caffeine pills, vodka, 200 proof Sunshine, a pint of coconut milk. Just the right amount, a little more. Presses the button, the blender runs silently. She stares out the kitchen window. Rain dizzily dribbles down it, blurring the network of sparkling cablines, the smudged stars of apartment complexes.

Footsteps behind her. "Jade?" Behind her, her mother. Haggard, gray-blond hair bound in a ponytail. One hand holding a pink robe closed. Jade turns, tries to cover the blender with her back. "What are you-"

"What are you doing up." Jade turns a question into an accusation.

"I heard the door," her mother explains, already backing away.

"I got home late from school."

"Okay." The mother puts her free hand up in the air, as if to demonstrate that she means no harm.

Jade snake-smiles back at her. The mother slowly backs through the doorway, up the stairs, closes the door, falls backwards into bed with a sigh that blows hopeless and heavy. Jade drinks the entire blender-full of ka'kaza. The Watcher practically kicks open the door, grabs her wrist. "What the fuck are you doing?"

"I'm home now," Jade says, indecisive with defiance and fear. "No reporters here."

"In front of the window?" he asks, ripping down the shade, gestures towards the three doorways. "Two neighbors still asleep. In the common kitchen?" He swells with rage, a huge frame which seems to inflate until filling the room, squashing Jade against the sink. With a trembling hand, she puts the blender in the sink. Already feels the twisting drill of Ka'kaza spiraling through her brain. Goes limp.

"Damn it," he says, catches her as she wobbles limply towards the floor. Through the doorway, up the private staircase, drops her into her bed. Falls asleep seated in a chair facing the bed. The chair has been there since election preseason started.

He calls Senatorial candidate Frasier the next morning, to tell him that his sister's husband's sister's daughter was caught on the curb of the club, broken down for lack of ka'kazaa.

"Well- shit. What- I mean, what the shit- now, I really wonder why we don't lock her up with the stuff. Would keep her happy- and me, us, all of us, too. You'd be- well, you'd be unemployed, though, huh?"

The Watcher stares down into the Comusicbox, the crystal clear image of Frasier's twitching, erratic, gray-haired visage. Like a trillion tiny worms of color, writhing on the screen. He waits at this seizing pause, because he knows Frasier will make it clear when he wants him to talk.

"What'd they get, huh? What- what is the allegation these vultures have found this time?"

"The bouncer and the club owner now have lawyers. Some L.R's accused them of, what, uh...."

"Endangering an Electoral? What- forcefeeding a seventeen year-old ka'kaza?"

"Ka'kaza is legal at 16 now," he says.

"Fucking, what the fuck when did that- well, what, what should we do? Market W isn't sponsoring me for this shit, you know- they want results, not the face of some fuck-up of a removed niece smeared all over the World Network. That doesn't look good on their product reports and it certainly won’t help the campaign." The image goes blank.

He slips the Comusicbox into his jacket, looks at the window. The pale, broken daylight dulls the billboards, sprouting like mushrooms among the slumped buildings. Already, a grainy picture of Jade with her head in her hands, sitting on the curb. Flickers bright in the sunlight, changes to an unflattering image of Senator-candidate Frasier. The rotten apple doesn't fall far from the family tree, the billboard claims in a hellish crimson font.
Culminates by flipping to opponent Scott Mcarfee's beaming face, heroic against the faded skyline. A red and a green bar glow beside the face, showing that the current population supports Mcarfee by a healthy margin. The numbers are probably made up, but no one is interested in that anymore. Perhaps there is an asterisk hanging from the chart, microscopic beside the bulbous percentage signs, stating that these numbers are from a fifty person sample size, including mostly the Mcarfee campaigners and his immediate family.

He chuckles to himself.

"What are you laughing about?" Jade groans, a hand swept over her forehead, eyes squinting in the dusty sunlight, like a princess from old stories. He points out the window, she watches with dull eyes as the billboard revolves again. "Motherfucker," she says, grabs her Comusicbox from the table, turns it onto the Election channel.

"....race will begin in three months, evidence already against Frasier. Photos here, here. Show a very young Jade on the curb. Almost obviously addicted to ka'kazaa. Reports given by ex-therapist. ka'kazaa dependency." This last part, said again in the melodic chanting of News Speak. "Jade, of Senatorial hopeful Frasier, has ka'kazaa dependency." The pictures again, with new ones already uploaded behind the reporter. "Here, Jade, on the curb, with her Watcher."

She pouts, updates her World account: "Is seriously misunderstood by reporters. Just wanted to see friends at the club, got blown off, real depressed." Back to the News. In two minutes, this entry is floating around behind the reporter. "News from Jade, says just waiting for friends, what do lawyers have to say about it? Bouncer and bartender, witnesses. Also being prosecuted for not testifying against...."

"Turn that off," he says. "It's time for school."

At school, Jade sits in front of the Teach-Matic Board, retypes, mouths the lessons aloud with the other students. Jade is in Class Level IV, a level below her normal age group, but this is because she gets so impatient with the Student Input Board (SIP) that, by the end of each day, she jabs at it in resentment. Many other students do the same. They end school, age eighteen, in Class Level IV, becoming invalid for application at Writer, Lawyer, Accountant, Advertiser, Marketer School. Jade thinks she doesn't care about this.

Three ‘o’clock, the Teach-Matic Board shuts off with an anticlimactic blip. Jade slips down the hallway, looking over her shoulder, looking around corners, gallops down the stairs, through the Delivery Exit, out into the humid air, foggy with spring sunlight. Past cab stops, Internet Stalls. The cab lines are sparse during the afternoon, cabs only occasionally whining by them. Jade wears large sunglasses and a hat to protect herself from wandering reporters. Down one of the damp alleys, littered by broken Comusicbox discs and outdated Comusicbox supplements, where the Trash Chute and the Water Converter Lines burst above the ground, the great, iron lifelines of the city.

In these damp shadows, she puts her palms to her eyes and tries to keep from crying. Even from here, there is a billboard facing her, radiating with her previously secret World Account messages. She wonders which friend sold them to the News Merchants. Probably all of them, she thinks. She hasn’t been able to see anyone but her mother since the election preseason began.

All around her, she can hear the City Screens bellowing with candidate speeches. She can’t tell whether Frasier or Mcarfee is speaking. Underneath this rumbling, the cabs whine through the city like mosquitoes. There is no other news broadcast throughout the city. Jade hears her name over and over again, spilling from strangers’ lips, and curls deeper into the alley, against the moist wall.

She wonders why the reporters never see the correlation between her ka’kazaa consumption and Senatorial Candidate Frasier’s decision to run for Senator. She wonders why they don’t try and find out why she was sitting alone, in the rain, outside a club. With no one there but her shadow of a Watcher. Friends were wary of her now, afraid of being torn to shreds by the media frenzy, only going behind her back to sell party pictures of her or to forge World messages and pawn them to the Merchants.

When she finally lifts her palms from her eyes, he is looking down at her with a blank expression. She is startled into indignation, especially when she sees the flat, black wells of his unsympathetic eyes. He sees the curling of her lip and puts one hand on her shoulder. “You’ll be okay,” he says, clumsily, hollowly.

She snorts. “Fuck you.”

He shrugs, his hand wilts away. “"You want me to suspend your school ID for the next few months or do you want me in the classroom?"

She double-blinks. “What?”

He adjusts his hat, so his eyes drip with shadows. “You are supposed to report directly to me, outside the School’s public entrance, every day after school. You failed. What's it gonna be? No school or a school chaperone?"

“Fuck you!” she shrieks. Shoulders him aside, bolts down the alley. The City Screens still boom with election updates, every so often saying her name with an inflated sense of disgust. Jade. She thuds with flat feet down the alley, turns into a Residence street until slowing down in one of the parks, a few square feet of turf with a tree and a rosebush. Water trickles around it in grooves. A black bench sits underneath the shade of the tree.
She is openly weeping now, hand to her forehead, tossing her hair over her face.

She puts her head against the tree. A few seconds later, something snaps around her wrist and she is tugged away from the tree. He has latched her with a Cuff Bracelet. “Ready to go back to your house and sit there for the rest of the night?” he asks. “It will give you time to decide about school tomorrow.”

She sniffs and walks with him, having no choice, not even in her answers.

The next week, Christians United sponsors Mcarfee's campaign. Mcarfee's speeches include additional comments about God, he wears ugly black T-shirts that say C.U on stubby shirt pockets. The Watcher sees all of this on his Comusicbox, in the kitchen, while Jade types her homework into her SIP upstairs. Frasier's face flickers into existence right after Mcarfee's new speech.

"Can you- fuck, can you believe this? I thought we- we had won with W Market's sponsorship, but this is bad. What- do you think we should lock her up or should we go the reconstructive route?"
"Reconstructive might get more attention," he replies.

"Excuse me, Mr. Watcher, or whatever you're called," Jade's mother says, appearing from the doorway, cradling a cup of steaming tea. "Am I to understand that you manhandled my daughter at a park today? You put her in handcuffs?"

He pulls his contract up on his Comusicbox, complete with the tiny pictures of Jade and her signing it, scrolls down, and presses a button. The Comusicbox's pleasant baritone announces the highlighted text: "The Watcher, if s/he deems necessary, may physically do with the Watched as s/he deems necessary for the ultimate protection of the public, private, personal, mental, emotional, psychological Cause. For more on Cause, press or say 'Cause.'"

He looks at the mother, she looks at him. "I didn't know what we were getting into," she says slowly. "I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this."

"For more on Cause, press or say 'Cause,'" the Comusicbox chirps again.

"Sorry." He makes a face, turns it off.

"It's okay," she says, for no reason.

He has done several Reconstruction cases. They cost campaigns gigantic amounts of money and the results are always dubious at best. The Frasier campaign signs Jade up for a Private Institution. Class Level IV here is as easy as Class Level I in Sponsored Institutions, so Jade's grades almost immediately improve. Each class is a private class, with Jade and the Teach-Matic. Because of this, she is soon recognized by the PI as "the top of her class."

The classroom is a cube. He stands at the wall the whole time, staring into the distance. She sits at the SIP as the questions slowly appear in front of her. They don't fade until she has gotten the right answer. Marvels at her improvement, not realizing the disparity between the schools. The campaign also creates a foundation, Frasier Against Ka'Kazaa for Young People When They Consume it in Excess. They call it Excess for short. Jade leads the rallies by appearing on stage, sometimes reading something embedded in the podium screen. People cheer for her. He watches all of this, amused.

Once a month, he has a day off, while Jade and the rest of the Frasier's immediate family get together to discuss campaign strategy. He spends this day at a Residence Park, one of the ones with rivers steadily running down carefully polished grooves on either side of colorful gardens, ending in dual waterfalls which pour into a small pond. The pond drains into the main water supply and is cleverly distributed for any commercial purpose of WashDryClean Corp's products.

He sits back in one of the benches, relaxing in the sunlight. A man with curly blond hair, a drooping face, and dull eyes sits next to him, clasping his hands. Observing proper bench etiquette, neither man speaks to the other. Until, suddenly, the man with blond hair reaches into his suit and produces a pamphlet which is branded with big letters: "Christians United." The man drops the pamphlet into his hands.

He stares at it, hesitantly opens it. Inside, lies a bundle of money and a neatly printed question: "Can you help those in need?"

The man with curly hair stares directly in front of him, at the grimy brick wall beyond the murmuring river. "I have recently heard that Jade may not need a Watcher anymore, since her Restoration has been so successful."

The Watcher stretches against the bench in response, then puts his left leg over his knee. Delicately extracts his Comusicbox from his inner pocket, looks at it. An e-mail has been forwarded to him: Watcher found by W Market to have questionable past. Please fix.

"C.U is here for you," the man with curly blond hair says. "The Mcarfee Campaign is here for you."
He takes a deep breath.

"W Market is relentless, profit-driven," the man whispers. "C.U will take you in and forgive you. This is what we do." The man hands him another pamphlet, pregnant with bundles. "Consider this a donation, please." He nods, stands, and walks down between the rivers, to the pond, disappears down an alley.

The Watcher turns on his Comusicbox and accesses his World Account. This is his Watcher Profile: Robert T. Walker. Nine Years, Military Involvement. Two Years, Watcher Training. This is the questionable past: Son of Son of Senator Walker (Sponsor: C.U).

Robert T. Walker joined the military to escape the same election hounds that now stalk Jade. His grandfather, Senator Walker, hired a Watcher for the young Robert T. Walker every election preseason and every election season. After his grandfather again ran for Senator as an incumbent, Robert T. Walker decided he had enough of the News Merchants, the City Screens, and the Lawyer-Reporters. He dropped his name to guarantee that they stopped following him, destroyed his World Account, authorized his Death Certificate, as provided by the Military, and then took a grant to attend Watcher Academy.

He is intimately familiar with Jade’s situation but, since Robert T. Walker is dead, he finds that he can no longer relate to it. But now, he muses, the ghost of Robert T. Walker has come back to haunt him with the ghost of his grandfather, the once-marginally important Senator Walker. He again tries to summon sympathy for Jade, before his eyes fall to the pamphlets in his hands.

The Frasier Campaign’s biggest sponsor is W Market. Almost all of the campaign finances come from them. Hence, Frasier emphasizes the need to ‘fully globalize and internationalize the economy,’ since W Market’s noble goal is to give as many jobs to the cheapest laborers as possible. Frasier runs on a platform of W Market’s design: Pro-Capitalism. Stick to the Constitution, the billboards read. The C.U’s nobler goal is to avoid spending money from the States that will end up in the hands of non-Christians.

Within a few minutes, his Comusicbox buzzes with Frasier’s impatient face, peering out at the screen, waiting for the ex-Robert T. Walker to answer. The ex-Robert T. Walker cracks his back against the bench and puts the phone back in his pocket. There’s no need to hear about the e-mail in some glamorous message from Frasier. The bottom line was that he was no longer a Watcher. Now, the question was whether he would decide to help Jade or whether he would help those in need.

“That’s why I stopped, and you should never, drink ka’kazaa… in excess!” Jade proclaims triumphantly to the microphone. This last phrase must be said at the end of every speech, to clear up any confusion as to the recreational uses of ka’kazaa. Overconsumption is frowned upon but, as W Market is the leading seller of ka’kazaa worldwide, consumption is clinically proven to lower stress.

The children in front of her clap, she flushes with the burn of a job well done, and hops off the stage. She expects to see her Watcher, as she is habituated to his hovering shadow, but she instead sees two men in business suits and Info-glasses. News Merchants.

“Jade,” the shorter one says. “You are aware of a man named Robert T. Walker?”

“Uh, no,” she says.

“Robert T. Walker the Watcher,” the taller one adds.

“Oh, well, that’s probably my Watch-“

“Was your Watcher, commissioned by the Frasier Campaign to protect you from the vicious Mcarfee Campaign. Would you like to elaborate on his shortcomings as a protector?”

She shrugs. “I mean, he wasn’t, like, a blast to be with. He kept me from doing things I wanted.”

“Encroached on Personal Freedom (E-PF),” the shorter man mutters.

Jade considers, decides to get worked up about something she had previously gotten over. “And, holy shit, yesterday he slammed me against this tree or whatever and just handcuffed me for, like, no reason.”

“Unwarranted Aggression (UA),” the taller man says.

“Encroached on Personal Freedom II (E-PF II),” the shorter man says with a nod.

It’s unclear whether they are talking to her or not, or that they care about her additional input either way. The Info-glasses are instantaneously recording her remarks, transmitting them to the World Forum. Robert T. Walker will soon be a known perpetrator of E-PF, E-PF II, and UA, three charges which will make him ineligible as a Watcher for any future campaign. Just like this, Robert T. Walker’s violent history makes him unemployable.

It is when the ex-Robert T. Walker sees Jade talking about him in this way, in a widely broadcast video on the City Screens, that he decides that all is fair in this war of gossip. No one, he thinks, is real enough to be spared from the illusions of elections.

The Frasier Campaign’s quick maneuvering fails to counter the Mcarfee Campaign because, as the Mcarfee billboards read: God is on Mcarfee’s Side. Robert T. Walker, ex-Watcher, is shepherded onto a stage watched by the other eager members of the Christians United flock. They cheer for him unconditionally. The Pope hovers behind him on the screen, waving his withered, bejeweled hand, making the crowd go berserk with blessings.

“I have been transformed!” Robert T. Walker reads from the teleprompter. “You may have heard the tales of my old life, as a Watcher, but I have been born again, with the help of C.U!”

The roars ebb and flow, tides drawn to his every word.

“The Frasier Campaign actually sponsors the complete destruction of religion,” Walker says when the crowd settles, lying in wait, a breathing, oozing mass. “Jade is the best of that litter, and you will see it soon, mark my words! They are faithless to God and to the public. I can guarantee she is already drinking ka’kazaa again!” The crowd hisses like a chorus of serpents.

The Pope is relegated to a small screen in the corner, while a clip from Walker’s Comusicbox plays. It is a video of Jade attempting to mix her own ka’kazaa, an event which happened months ago but proves that images are timeless. Walker has kept this image as insurance. He knows that showing the video is a breach of the Watcher Contract, but the C.U has assured him that they will arm him with their most powerful lawyers and he knows, too, that the Frasier Campaign has already destroyed his chances of being a Watcher for another campaign.

W Market pours millions of dollars into a final marketing campaign, but don’t directly attack the C.U for the fear of isolating religious customers. It relies instead on giveaways, to encourage undecided voters to vote for Senatorial Candidate Frasier. Different states attempt to block these actions, but it’s late in the campaign season and W Market has a Law Division which manages to articulate the fact that the giveaways are actually Individual Acts of Charity Under the Name and Directive of the Frasier Campaign.

Frasier wears shirts which are nauseating collages of W Market’s different brands, gives away all sorts of items to attract more customers and voters. They hire spokespeople from sports teams and W Market’s Marketing Department even creates Frasier key chains, action figures, even manages to design a Frasier Cola (“Tastes like Capitalism!”). Unfortunately, Jade’s ka’kazaa clip boasts more than three hundred million individual views on the World Forum. “The real side of Frasier’s sister's husband's sister's daughter,” the video proclaims proudly.

The week of the election, analysts already shake their heads when looking at Frasier’s prospects. “The mistake was not locking her up when he had the chance.”“People just don’t want to see that kind of unwholesome thing, broadcast for all the world to see.” “It just doesn’t reflect very well on his family is all.”

The C.U wins the election and their candidate, Scott Mcarfee, takes office. He vows to bring God back into the country, erase from Public Institutions all traces of evolution and erase from courts all laws legalizing abortion. The broken Frasier Campaign laments that this will be the end of education and capitalism but, for the most part, things stay the same.

Glenn Beck: Oscar Nominee? (Salon.com Article)

2010-04-12T10:19:00.001-07:00

In the newest issue of Forbes magazine, Glenn Beck admits that he "could give a flying crap about the political process." This is possibly the most significant quote in, well, the past few months. The rest of the article states that Beck is more concerned with his company, Glenn Beck Inc., which made $32 million in this past year. He is already well on his way to writing a novel which will capitalize on the same audience that adores him, something that "depicts America sliding into civil war."

An older interview with Beck in The New York Times cites Beck as saying that, if you take what he says as "gospel," then "you're an idiot." Not only that, Beck's own conservative appearance may be a total performance, as he says that he is mostly an "entertainer," like a "rodeo clown." His audience, the people he incites, are also his customers. Extreme Republicans have become Glenn Beck's market.

To drive the point home, Beck admitted in a February USA Today interview that you'd also have to be an idiot not to "notice the temperature change" caused by global warming.

This could be shocking to some at face value, but I'm going to bet that most people won't change their opinions about Glenn Beck, despite the fact that all of this indicates he may not be as righteously and genuinely outraged as previously thought.

We should be cautious in so lightly dismissing something like this. What does it really say? It says that, rather than being honest, Glenn Beck is acting as a leader of political extremists for profit. Beck is not crying for his country, he's crying because it makes money.

Glenn Beck is a shrewd businessman. He is not the indignant, emotional, genuine person he so desperately attempts to portray on air. He is actually selling this image of himself. This is acting that is worthy of any Oscar.

Now, what does it mean for the country that Glenn Beck is one of the most loved or loathed political figures today, but he is doing it for money? It says that politics come second to economy. Think about what a big business political media has become. Doesn't Beck's acting make you wonder who else is acting?

What if everybody is acting, leading people one way or another just so they can profit from the division? Does this prove beyond a doubt that our government been overtaken by profiteers and con men? Even if it has, would we be able to tell the difference at this point?

Transferred Political Articles to Salon.com. http://open.salon.com/blog/blucey

2010-04-12T10:17:00.001-07:00

My stories will stay here.

Destination Inc. (Story)

2010-03-11T20:00:00.000-08:00

Blue. Every morning, Wendy saw blue. She woke up in front of a large painting of a sun setting on the ocean. She had nailed it to her ceiling so she could stare at it when her eyes opened. She kept her windows open so she could listen to the waves whisper to each other outside her apartment. She would sit up without hitting her alarm clock, because she had long ago decided that she needed its full minute of panicked blaring to reorient herself.

Wendy would proceed to light a cigarette and slide the shades away from the window, sighing at the misfortune of her own life as she gazed at the tourists wandering the beach below, scavengers haphazardly collecting and gathering experiences they wished to devour. She sat there for two cigarettes, then rose and dressed into her Destination uniform. She had once been an employee for an independent tourist shop, but then Destination Inc. bought all the independent shops and assimilated the employees. The pay had gone down, but the benefits had gone up.

Wendy coughed loudly after her second cigarette. She was aware that she would probably need the benefits soon. The thought instilled a kind of pale disappointment in her, but no fear or grief. Her life had been dictated by a very factual breakdown of her problems, colored by the constant discussion of the problems, rather than the analysis of them.

She was one of millions of unfortunate people who had decided early in their teenage years that she would die young. She drank and smoked and experimented her way all the way through her twenties, neglecting even the slightest concern for diet, exercise, or healthy living. "I don't even need to exercise, I'm going to stay like this for the rest of my life," she would tell friends who marveled in murmurs at her wondrous shape.

She had never gained weight, she had instead slowly dried to a pale skeleton, wrapped only in one thin, tight layer of skin. She had flirted with the idea of quitting cigarettes, but really only viewed the coughing and shortness of breath as temporary effects. She pictured her lungs as speckled with black ash, an adverse effect that could be shed by taking a break from cigarettes for two or three days.

Slipping into her Destination Blue sandals, she stood in front of her mirror and tugged at the frilly, orange-red Destination Dress. "Thirty-four, still got it," she said, watching her lips form the words and feeling nothing from them. Outside, the sun glared white onto freshly paved streets, making signs and shops shimmer like mirages. Richly dressed children tugged at their parents' hands, screaming with desires. Young couples melted together in the heat, pointing and laughing.

It was a clown world here, Wendy thought. No one treated anything like it was real. She sighed again and her mind flitted to her lunchtime cigarette. She remained firm against the temptation to prematurely smoke it, a fight she won and lost an equal amount of times, and crossed the street, shading her eyes against the harsh sunlight.

Past a broken apartment building painted in bright, gritty colors, past a Mcdonald's and a gas station, stood the glass-windowed warehouse known as Destination. Tropical t-shirts hung from armless mannequins. Polished seashells, imported from several other countries, glittered like treasure in the windows. People poured in and out of the doors, just like the tide.

Wendy adjusted the name tag on her uniform and heaved another sigh of miscellaneous discontent. She was vaguely aware that her life was unsatisfying but, since she had closed her eyes and held her ears against every lesson she had come across, she couldn't pinpoint, or even point towards, the causes.

Jack and Mary already wandered the vast depths of Destination, ogling at the merchandise with the innocent gazes of people who only want to look at and touch things, rather than bring them home. Mary had met Jack with this mindset in the first place, because Jack was undeniably handsome. His jaw cut a perfectly square shape, indicating practical intelligence if not educated intelligence, and the swaying fields of hair sprouting from his limbs, neck, and face landed him in the amicable category of 'rugged.'

Mary had a college degree from a private institution, Jack had gone to a vocational high school, but they had grown up in the same town. When Mary had attended her college, she had been startled at the surplus of respect she had garnered from her male coeds. They had clustered around her, attempting to win her affections with small gifts and jokes, late nights spent in study halls and sexless dance parties. She had tried, and failed, to find a boy who followed these patterns and still exhibited some kind of standard masculinity. She had found Jack at a party in her home town, in a basement, and found his predictable gender stereotyping refreshing. One session of drunk sex had led to another, until these sessions became sober, and then they became interspersed with walks in the woods and movies, until feelings were (inevitably) born.

And so they had married. Mary couldn't talk to Jack about politics, literature, or sociological phenomenons, but she found that he always had witty insights into more specific, localized topics. She comfortably settled into her gender role by acknowledging Jack's practical intellect and allowing him to debase her intellect as 'unnecessary.'

These charms had fallen off, one by one, like the gears of a machine rusting in fast forward. Each time something she found endearing about Jack fell from the mechanism of their marriage, it had landed with a clang, embodied by a fight or, more often, the silent blossoming of resentment. Some things that annoyed Mary: Jack's frequent misogynistic, ignorant comments about everything from women drivers to women politicians. The way he breathed only through his mouth and, consequently, how he ate his food like a cow. His inability to change or learn any new behaviors. The way that he and his brother insisted on getting drunk enough not to remember every second Saturday of the month.

Jack didn't analyze their marriage in this fashion. He only knew that Mary nagged him more and now he dreaded attempting to speak his mind in front of her, and feared telling her about plans that didn't involve her. "Who wears the pants in that relationship?" his brother would ask. "We both do," Jack would say, and then they would order shots of tequila.

Things had been massively complicated when they attempted to have children, and had repeatedly failed. It had been a step in their relationship that they had held so high that they had taken years attempting to collect the appropriate climbing gear. It had excited both of them to finally undertake the task, to design new responsibilities and lives for themselves. When the years revealed that they were incapable of it, their marriage had been caught in stasis, so now Mary and Jack both felt like their lives had come to standstill. Thus, another tragedy of the coupling of individuals.

Their trip to the resort, Destination #42, was an effort to propel their relationship forward. They had no set trajectory, but they knew that it would be impossible to sustain momentum on the passive aggressive course they currently navigated. The vacation reached a tragic point when Jack spotted a set of golf clubs in the Destination store.

"Mary, check these out!" he exclaimed, pointing at them.

She slipped a warning hand on his shoulder. "Very nice," she said.

"How much do you think they are?" he asked, reaching up to tug at a price tag. He whistled.

"Expensive, huh?" Mary asked hopefully.

"Not at all!" Jack took the whole bag down, rifling through the clubs. "All the essentials are in here, too. My birthday's only in a month, baby."

Mary winced at Jack's name for her, as she always did. It had once made her feel like she was valued and protected, a feeling she had never received from the simpering college males who had texted her and written her e-mails expounding their affections. However, now that Jack and her had been married nearly five years, it seemed demeaning and immature, something teenagers should call each other, not fully grown adults. It only reminded her that Jack would never be as grown up as she wished. "You already have clubs, Honey," she said, noosing his wrist with her hand. "You wouldn't even be able to play with them until summer."

He looked back at her, half-defiant, half-pleading. "It's a good deal, though."

Wendy approached them with her hands clasped together. "Can I help you folks?"

"No, we're just-"

"Can I get a discount on these?" Jack asked.

"Jack, honestly. They're not-"

"Let me ask my boss." Wendy wandered away, grateful for the opportunity to avoid the cash register for another ten minutes. She even thought about smoking half of a cigarette before finding Mr. Barndy.

When Wendy left, Mary's mask fell. "Jack, we're not buying those clubs!"

"Why not?" he asked, not taking his eyes from them.

She stuck her finger in his face. They unfolded in succession. "Because one, our room was too expensive as it is. Two, we're going to spend a lot of money on meals here, anyway. And three, well, we're going to want to go on tours of the swamp here, maybe go to an amusement park."

"I don't want to do that. I want to hang out on the beach." Jack peered at the golf club in his hand, looking at his warped reflection.

"But don't you want to see the swamps?" Mary phrased this as a rhetorical question, then acted as if she had already won. "There are crocodiles, and all sorts of birds, and probably snakes."

"I want these!" Jack shouted.

Destination went silent as Jack's words echoed through the three floors. Mary blushed with embarrassment, then anger at being embarrassed by Jack's childishness. This time, she decided, she wouldn't back down.

Watching from the second floor railing was an eight-year old boy named Dennis. His mother and father stood on either side of him with their hands protectively clasping his shoulders. "Awful," his mother said. "Ridiculous," his father said.

Dennis said nothing. He hung over the railing, feeling dizzy. His mother saw his pale face and she knelt beside him. "Dennis. Are you okay?"

He waved her away.

"He needs to go to bed," his father said, and scooped him into his arms.

Dennis and his parents lived in Wyoming, and Dennis had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He had been diagnosed with it from a very early age and lived at least half of his life in hospitals. The diagnosis had hit his mother especially hard, as she immediately sought help from God, while his father merely started to drink whiskey at dinner. Both felt as if they had done something wrong, alternating between blaming each other and blaming themselves, but never blaming genetic chance. Every member of his mother's immediate and extended family had paid them a visit, littered Dennis' room with overly expensive toys and baked goods and ambiguous emotions of hope and grief, celebration and tragedy. One of his mother's aunts had even sent a card proclaiming she was "sorry for their loss."

His mother had shrieked and shoved the card into the trashcan, but Dennis had heard the commotion, so he slunk into the garage to search through the barrels. He easily found the crumpled card. Am I already gone? Dennis wondered, holding the card in his hand, looking out at the dusty stretch of dry grass and dry mountains beyond their ranch.

It already felt, to him, that his body was breaking, piece by piece, and the constant chemotherapy made it difficult for him to tell dreams apart from reality, and especially hard to tell if there was really any difference, besides pain. He often watched the school bus roar by his house. When he looked at the other kids on the bus, he felt invisible, like the future was cruelly rolling past him and no one even looked out their window to wave.

His mother had found him in the garage, staring at nothing, and she saw the card. She had held him and cried until his father had gotten home from work. He saw the card, shook his head, and held both of them. Dennis thought nothing, because he was too young to carve thoughts from emotions, especially when it came to the nature of mortality. Sometimes, they crested the surface of his subconscious, like faint shapes against a dark horizon, but he could never distinguish them from one another. People told him to fight, but he didn't even know what that meant

It still wasn't clear whether Dennis would survive, because the cancer seemed to recede, go into hiding for weeks, even months, and then come back in full force. For his eighth birthday, his father had called the Grant a Wish Foundation. He had filled out forms that made him feel like he was selling his child's symptoms to corporations and, a month later, the officials of the foundation had called him and driven to the house to talk to Dennis. He hadn't wanted to tell them what his wish was, had even tried to lock his door so they couldn't get to him. To him, their sympathy seemed malicious and condescending, like they were agents of the disease itself. They saw all his posters of crocodiles and asked if he would like to see crocodiles in real life. He had nodded for lack of a better response, and they had bought him tickets to Destination #42.

And now he was falling asleep before he had even seen crocodiles. But nothing felt better to him than sleep, because it was only in his dreams where his wishes actually came true.

As Dennis' father carried him down the polished wooden stairs of the store, a group of fifteen environmental activists gathered outside the store. They chanted and waved signs condemning Destination Inc. This particular resort, Destination #42, had recently been exposed as a bastion for corporate waste because the endless stretches of swamp disguised the extent of the pollution. Other Destination resorts sent fleets of trucks to dump more waste into the swamps as well. Newspapers and television shows briefly covered the conspiracy, but then a professional basketball player cheated on his wife.

These activists were, like most activists concerned about the abstract future, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five years old. Their age granted them immunity from self-criticism, because they were too young to hold a steady career in a corporate world and therefore felt free to blame anyone who did work in the corporate world. Some had driven down to the resort in a van, smoking joints and listening to music from the 60's, or music that imitated music from the 60's, while talking passionately about the evils of capitalism and materialism. A select few who had read excerpts of Karl Marx vouched for socialism, although any substantial ideas about how to successfully implement this went unvoiced and unthought. They would then meditate and feel transcendent because, to them, transcendence was synonymous with self-contented complacency.

Tourists walked around the group nervously, trying to ignore the jeers when they saw something of interest in the windows of Destination and decided to enter the store. The activists stood stoically against the indifference of those who passed by them. They knew that if corporations like Destination Inc. were allowed to get away with such flagrant abuse of the environment, there would be no environment left, only wastelands. Many species of bird had already gone missing from the swamps surrounding Destination #42, and fishermen on a small chain of islands to the south could no longer find fish who hadn't been poisoned by the waste seepage from the swamp.

"Not to mention global warming!" the activists would shout after hollering a catchy jingle tuned to the first array of facts. "Ninety-eight percent of scientists agree that global warming is real and our environment is becoming less stable and more dangerous. They predict massive floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, decimating every coastal city in the world!"

Most people smiled and shook their head at these facts. Like most people, they had either decided that no change is so sudden or that there was nothing they could do to prevent this global age of natural disasters, other than adapt to it. Their own lives encapsulated their existence, as each person's individual life was their private whirlwind, and everything outside of it was blurry and muffled by speed and noise.

One of the activists who preyed on people who looked like they disliked confrontation saw Dennis' father come out, bearing Dennis in his arms, and ran towards him. "Sir! You have a young son, how can you be endorsing Destination Inc.'s destruction of the earth he will be living on?"

"Get the fuck away from me," Dennis' father replied, shouldering the activist aside. His mother looked up at the activists once, but her gaze quickly dropped back to her feet. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

The activists confused the father's inability to partition aggression with helpless frustration for what they hated most: the capitalist American man. Several of them broke from the group to wave their signs at him and yell at him as he made his way down the white sidewalk, desperately trying to get to the hotel.

Wendy watched from the corner of the building, stubbing her cigarette on the sidewalk and saving the rest for later. She saw Mr. Brundy at the cash register, then she saw the cashier point straight in her direction. Mr. Brundy's face went from a waxy gray to a veiny red. "Wendy, get in here!" he shouted.

The reason that Mr. Brundy, the manager of Destination (#42) had become so angry at Wendy's brief absence was because Mr. Warren, the vice-president of Destination Inc., had just called him to announce a surprise visit. This visit had been organized by the ancient Mr. Kindle, Destination Inc.'s founder, because he had seen a television interview about the fifteen activists and decided it would be a good opportunity for public relations. "Announce our new program, the Green Initiative, when you see them," he had told Mr. Warren.

"I haven't heard of that program," Mr. Warren said.

"It doesn't exist yet," Mr. Kindle said.

Mr. Warren drove to the airport after receiving the call, because he had to be there as soon as the activists arrived. Unfortunately, he had forgotten about his daughter's dance recital, the second one he had missed in as many weeks. She called him when he sat in his first-class seat, bursting with shattered sobs. "I reserved a seat for you in the front, Dad, because I remember you forgot to get one the last time and.... and...."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he said, feeling a heaviness in his throat.

"You have to turn that off, sir, we're about to take flight," a stewardess had said.

"I promise to be at the next one, sweetie, I promise," he said, but his daughter had already hung up.

Mr. Warren and his wife were divorced. His wife maintained a cold silence with him, punctuated only by awkward visits as she dropped their fifteen-year old daughter off at his house for biweekly weekends and Wednesday night dinners. He imagined that she grinned and pumped her fist in triumph whenever he forgot about the dance recitals or the soccer games, and often agonized over the fact that so much of his paycheck went to a woman who could just as well be spending the money on herself. In reality, his wife simply didn't think of him as much as she once did, because she had moved on. She hated it when he missed their daughter's performances because the daughter would then come home in tears, unable to sleep, feeling like her father didn't love her. Mr. Warren's wife thought that he was a decent person, if absent-minded, but a decent person who had climbed too high on the career ladder to see the ground.

Mr. Warren stepped out of his cab and adjusted his tie, looking for the activists. It wasn't hard to find them. He only had to look for the tourists who looked uncomfortable and follow the chants. First, he decided to look in the store. He stepped through the doorway with the activists shouting behind him, many of them already aware that he was some kind of representative of Destination Inc. Inside the store, Mr. Warren saw Mr. Barndy shouting at Wendy. He also saw Mary and Jack lifting their arms into the air and waving their hands in each other's faces, screaming at each other.

"This is supposed to be a peaceful place for people to go," he mumbled to himself. And, he wondered, what was so evil about a company that designed rest stops along life's highways? Sure, some of the business practices wandered into morally ambiguous territory, but Mr. Warren wasn't interested in ethics involving environments or the structure of society, he was only interested in people's comfort, because people paid for comfort. They didn't pay for companies who nobly strove to change social orders, they didn't pay for companies who cleaned forests and cleaned the air. People paid for luxuries. Life was a given, so why would they pay for the maintenance of life quality?

As Mr. Warren went out to make these points to the activists, Wendy decided to quit her job. She stormed out of Destination, feeling liberated by her recklessness. She wouldn't be well off financially, she thought, but she would be well off spiritually. Isn't that what mattered? She made a point of shoving Mr. Warren as she exited, not knowing who he was, only detesting his suit. Mr. Warren tripped on the curb and fell in front of the activists. They surrounded him, yelling in his face, even though they still didn't know who he was. Jack and Mary started to cry into each other's arms, realizing that their marriage was doomed and that they still loved each other, and neither on of them could understand how these facts could be true at the same time.

Dennis' father punched the lead activist in the face, because this activist had pursued him down the street. The activist fell onto the sidewalk and the two others who had followed the family pushed him. The father dropped Dennis, who cracked his head against a fire hydrant with a distinctive clunk, then lay crumpled beside it. His mother fell to her knees next to him, weeping, as Dennis' father prepared to fight both activists. Someone actually kicked Mr. Warren in the face.

While all of this happened, the ocean had been churning, the tide had been receding. Now, came a tidal wave looming five times as tall as the tallest building in Destination #42. Its shadow fell over the resort and people gazed at it in common, human awe. There was a pure, singular moment of stillness, a black hole of silence sucking in breath and civilization, and then it dropped over the resort entirely. Every single person drowned in an unconscious slumber. The resort fell in on itself from the sheer weight of the waves, flattened into insignificance. Buildings and people became debris.

News teams rushed to the spot and covered the story for three weeks.

The Never Ending Parties of Our United States (Forum Article)

2010-03-11T16:49:00.000-08:00

If you’re reading this, you’re probably in Commons and you forgot to call a friend for company. If you’re reading this and you’re sitting next to a friend, that’s kind of awkward, isn’t it? Unless it’s lunch, I guess. Maybe you accidentally picked this up thinking it was the New York Times. Either way, lean over to the nearest person and ask them this: “Hey, what’s a Republican? What’s a Democrat?” If you hear qualifier adjectives such as stupid, elite, naïve, etc. try to stop them and have them start over. What, exactly, are the values that make Republicans and Democrats so different?

Frankly, I believe that the party line between Democrats and Republicans has become a massive blur of emotion, a beautiful mosaic of propaganda that has been retrieved, sopping wet, from a lake. People mostly decide the party to which they belong by the social values espoused by the party. Abortion and gay marriage come to mind. These are two of the issues that really make people jump into one camp or the other.

Religious? Head towards the G.O.P. Coastal elite? Throw yourself into the Democrats. Make sure to forget that these really aren’t political issues. Someone else’s sexual or religious beliefs are not fundamental to the running of this country, but these social issues have become the most noted values of Democrats and Republicans. People join a party on the basis of these values, then adopt everything else that the party has to offer, and proceed to demean and wag fingers at the people on the other side.

Politics are not sports. Let me say that again: politics are not sports. This isn’t a contest to see which team’s policies get passed. It’s not the Donkey States versus the Elephant States. It’s the United States. What makes you a Democrat or a Republican? Why are people so angry about climate change? Why are they so fearful about Obama turning America into a socialist country? For the love of God, one of the top three most searched “S” questions on Google is “What is socialism?”

These aren’t issues which should turn people into Incredible Hulks. The government isn’t going to abandon capitalism overnight. A proposition that states the Earth is getting warmer shouldn’t cause people to jump into one party or another and angrily decry the opponents of their particular side. That just isn’t productive.

By strictly maintaining two parties and not allowing any other parties to form with our ridiculously antiquated voting system, we’ve become mired by our own inability to compromise. First of all, we need a system where voters can rate their top three candidates and those points are added for each candidate to decide a winner. Is that so complicated? Instead, the right moves farther right and the left moves farther left. Media makes sure the gap widens and deepens with every tiny jab.
Anyone who tries to negotiate is seen as a traitor or a hero. We are actually blown away when a Republican comes forth to vote for a Democrat bill. Is this where we are now?

Honestly, we may be at a point in our country’s history where we’d be better off with no political parties. Both parties have only served to isolate two halves of the country who have a lot more problems in common than in difference.
Meanwhile, newspapers record every movement of the healthcare “reform” bill (remember when it was national healthcare?) like it’s some kind of gigantic game changer.

Since when is forcing uninsured Americans to buy insurance some subversive socialist ploy? I’m from Massachusetts, we’ve had this deal for a while now. It’s too late for Obama to be a normal, Capitalist President, anyway. Ever since he preserved tens of thousands of American jobs with the stimulus bill, he has forever been labeled as a socialist.

The new jobs bill, of course, passed through the Senate with barely a cough (70:28), despite the fact that the government is basically paying companies to employ people. Socialism! Massachusetts’ shiny new Republican Senator, Scott Brown, was criticized by conservatives simply for voting for this thing, while being glamorized for doing so by being specifically mentioned in papers. Bipartisan displays really are that exotic now. Still, this bill shows that we, as Americans, do still have worries in common. Our country is exhausted by this endless party soap-boxing.

I’m done with the interminable whining about bipartisanship. I’m done with the whole partisan thing in general. Oops, but, without party labels, how can we generalize and assume an entire party’s agenda by using one party member’s actions? How can different media outlets pander to, and inflame, specific audiences? Hm, without parties, maybe our elected representatives would actually be able to focus beyond “party politics” and, theoretically, focus on the political bills in front of them. That was their job at some point, wasn’t it?

The Too-True Facebook Conspiracy (Forum Article)

2010-03-10T15:41:00.000-08:00

Let's pretend it's a Saturday night at Bates and, theoretically, you're drinking. Then pretend that you wake up the next morning with only a somewhat coherent memory of the night before. You do detective work for the day, finding out what exactly you did or said and (hopefully) learn some lesson pertaining to your drinking limits. The night was bad, you're embarrassed, but you move on with your life.

Unfortunately, Facebook makes this kind of thing completely impossible. If you were in the presence of anyone armed with a camera, you might start seeing pictures from the night before. Then all of your "friends" can see you pouring a drink on your head or passed out on a couch with marker on your face. Everything you did in your drunken glory is recorded for the benefit of your audience.

Facebook has made us feel an urgency to stay informed about things no one should really care about. People's pictures are near the top of this list. This is well and good if you're trying to show everyone your trip to Italy, but do you really want everyone seeing you leaning into a wall in the Village with vomit on your shirt?

We convince ourselves that these pictures are protected, that they are in a private sphere that can only been seen by an audience of our choice, but this is a reckless assumption. The person who took the picture put that picture in an album. All of their friends can see it, too.

You can "untag" yourself to protect your public image, but the picture remains in the friend's album. If it's especially incriminating, maybe you can tell your friend to delete it and, supposing your friend is a real friend, the picture will be deleted.

But where does the picture go? When someone deletes their Facebook account and inevitably comes crawling back to it, all of their pictures are still there. All of their friends reappear and all of their information is resurrected. This means that there is a hidden server where all of your data is stored. All of your data.

So what happens when you delete a picture from Facebook? Nothing. It goes invisible. Or, as the Facebook terms of use say, "If you choose to remove your User Content... you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content." Read these sometime. They are terrifying. Not only does Facebook keep everything we've ever posted on our accounts, they have the right to "copy" or "publicly display this information for "any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise."

This means that the picture of you walking down the Alumni Walk with no pants is there forever. We use Facebook to keep up with the present, but we are unwittingly documenting our lives. Our wall posts, our messages, our relationship statuses, these are all stored. Everything we have ever put on Facebook is there.

Facebook has this information. What will they do with it? Have you noticed the advertisements as you scroll around on different profiles? These advertisements are directly targeted at the information displayed in your interests.

Companies are using Facebook as the newest platform for controlled marketing. This is fine, of course. As consumers, this panders to our interests as well as theirs. Now, I don't get advertisements for make-up, I get advertisements for bass lessons and video games. How exciting.

I actually changed my year of birth from 1988 to 1959 and, since my status is single, I now receive advertisements for dating websites for "Over 40's." This is incredible. Try it. Change your interests, change your gender, change anything, and the advertisements will adapt.

Take this farther and it gets less pleasant. Facebook can use our information for "any purpose." They have a perfectly chronological database of every single user. The more you use Facebook, the more they know about you. Other users don't know who you look at all the time, or what pictures, but Facebook does.

Think again about our drunken pictures. What if companies looking to hire new employees ask Facebook for a complete record of your user account? Every single picture, message, wall post, interest, and note becomes their property. Facebook could even offer these companies messages and wall posts that aren't from your user account but from the accounts of friends, enemies, ex-girlfriend/boyfriends accounts that have your name in them. And when this kind of thing starts happening, what makes us think we would know about it? The government, insurance companies, they could all benefit from this information harvesting.

Facebook is not our private sphere or our hip, young place. It is actually the most public sphere that has ever been created. Don't bother taking your pictures down, your mistakes are already permanently recorded. My advice? Start posting pictures of you doing community service, going to Church, and diligently studying in P-gill. They're watching.

Hope and Change Are No Match for Our Generation (Essay)

2010-02-07T18:00:00.001-08:00

On a potentially fateful Wednesday, President Obama delivered his first State of the Union address. I sat back, listened to it, and mentally dismissed everything as an exaggeration or an empty promise. It took me a day to consider why I possessed this defensive mechanism. The answer is simple: our generation essentially gained sentience (pinpointed as somewhere between middle school and growing unseemly hairs) underneath the ignorant grip of the absolute worst presidential administration in the history of our country. We have been raised on a diet of complete and utter political suspicion. George W. Bush lied to the American people about matters for which he should be imprisoned. Everyone knows that. There is proof, too. However, as a nation, we have slowly withered into apathy, cynicism, and helplessness.

Nothing capitalizes on this attitude so much as our generational love affair with The Daily Show. Jon Stewart helps us laugh at the disintegration of our country, but this laughter also builds a stubborn wall of complacency. Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, on the other hand, make people impassioned enough to run around having tea parties. So we are either too aloof to contemplate political changes or we are too angry to compromise on them.

We have heard the word "partisan" so many times that it has lost all meaning. Sure, our country is divided between people with different principles. Fine. But why the hell can't we at least agree that the United States of America needs to get its act together? Obama doesn't need to do anything ridiculous like move closer to the center. He hasn't done anything remotely liberal, besides moving to prevent our country from getting taken away by the undertow of our own greed. He enforced the wonderful free market of Wall Street with some bailouts, he prevented the American auto industry from going under. If you think a Republican president would have had a better strategy, I would like to hear it. I would have especially liked to hear it at any point last year.

Obama is already in the center, but every time he moves closer to it, the Republicans move farther right. What else do they want? Guantanamo Bay is still open. Don't Ask, Don't Tell still exists (yes, he said it would go away in his speech, but he also said that last year and the year before). Gay marriage is slowly being crushed. He renewed the Patriot Act. The Second Amendment is intact. Health care reform is in a downward spiral. The biggest problem with the idea of partisanship is that Democrats and Republicans have become totally separate entities and neither seem to have a clue about how to actually fix the country. Our democracy, like our economy, has become based on numbers instead of people. Every politician is primarily concerned with reelection. Every corporation is primarily concerned with profit. As such, risks aren't taken and significant changes aren't made.

Luckily for us, the two have become beautifully, sensually intertwined with the removal of corporate spending limits for elections. We won't ever have to donate to political campaigns again, or really even worry about knowing a single, actual fact about the candidates. We have no chance at matching the unthinkable billions that corporations will be able to pour into elections. The manipulation of voters, the theft of votes, already reached an art form in 2000, but I look forward to seeing the awe-inspiring slander, subversion, and propaganda which now await us.

It is admirable that Obama can stand up at the podium and say that he has "never been more hopeful about America's future" than on the night he condemns Democrats, Republicans, the Supreme Court, the Military, Wall Street, and his own administration for mistakes and partisan habits. That's why he got elected- we wanted someone who made us hopeful. At least for that brief, glorious moment where we believe what he says.

The Island (Story)

2010-01-04T17:07:00.000-08:00

The floating island was home to several hundred men, women, and children. Beyond it, a floating mist perpetually floated, where clouds clung together like errant dreams. Rivers squirmed through the tropical air, bubbling in the misted sunshine, and spiraled off into infinity. Long, endless vines hung from the grassy edges of the island, tendrils dangling down into churning swirls of fog. People told stories about brave men and women who had dared to hang from the vines and try to climb down, but no one could imagine what lay underneath the island or past the clouds, so these stories primarily resulted in disappearances.

The people of the village lived in houses constructed from the moist bark of the island's palm trees. They tended fields of worthless green hay for hours and hours, until their skin felt like it was melting from the wet heat of the sunlight. Night would fall like ash over the island and people would retire to their houses, talking quietly and telling stories. It wasn't a bad life. There were no murders and no suicides.

"Depression is selfish," Father would proclaim above the skies. "It festers from the idea that your happiness is more important than another's."

Father talked to them of their morning duties and their night duties. His troops of masked men would arrive at the villages after the work day and exchange food for truckloads of the green hay. The hay was useless to the people of the island, although the children occasionally made forts and ropes from it.

This is what Nicholas and Richard enjoyed doing after their morning chores had been finished. They would grab handfuls of the sticky green hay and run into the woods. Sometimes, they tied it in tight knots and made ropes, throwing them over the branches of trees. Richard always led the way, as he was older and it took more danger to excite him. He would pull himself up to the first few branches, throw the knotted cords of hay over higher branches, and pull himself high enough to peer over the sparkling treetops. He always looked for something more, some answer in the clouds above, but he never found it, because he wasn't quite sure what he wanted to see.

Nicholas would always be several feet below, sheepishly looking down from his perch. He didn't feel free in the trees, he felt uncertain and frightened, like he was already slipping on the slick branches, moments away from flying through the air and landing with a thud on the tangled green undergrowth of the forest. Richard would look down on him and laugh, then slowly climb from his perch, punching him on the shoulder after they dropped to the forest floor and headed back home.

A year and a month into their tree-climbing, Richard and Nicholas hiked deeper into the forest than they had ever gone. It took hours. They hadn't been required to tend the fields that day, as it was Father's birthday, so they had woken up just as the glitter of dawn began twinkling in the sea of clouds. Richard had made them both egg salad sandwiches, even though Nicholas said that he hated egg salad ("It's for energy," Richard told him). Richard liked eggs because of the mystery they held. The masked men brought them to the villages in exchange for the hay, but never told the people from where they had come. There were no animals in the forest or in the villages.

With their sandwiches in a backpack, Richard and Nicholas trekked across the still fields and into the humid forest. They were some of the only children in the village, and certainly the only children close to each other in age. It was inevitable, then, that they would bond, especially since Father discouraged parents treating their children like anything besides untrained laborers.

Richard had a secret for their hike today. The day before, when Father's masked men had handed food out to the villagers, he had ran to one of their trucks and taken a camera. The masked men used cameras to take pictures of the fields. Richard spent all night looking through the pictures, but every one of them was of a different village's field. He was startled to see how similar they all were. After this disappointment, he had discovered how to delete these pictures and take his own. He had often wanted to remember the grandeur, the unparalleled freedom, of climbing the island's trees and looking down on the island itself, and now he finally had the device to capture this sensation.

Richard and Nicholas stopped at a small creek and ate their sandwiches in the splintered shade of a squat palm tree. Richard poked at the creek with a stick, watching the way the water seamlessly absorbed the stick, wrapped around it. Water isn't much different from air, Richard thought.

"What do you think is beyond the clouds?" he asked suddenly.

Nicholas' mouth dropped open. There were tales in the villages about people who had gone through the clouds, seeking answers, but they always failed to return. "Nothing is beyond the clouds," he said. "The island is the only place for people to live."

"Is it?" Richard asked. He jabbed his stick into the dirt, watched pebbles drift in slow motion from the earth. He left the stick there and stared at it for a long while. Richard's mother had passed away when he was very little and he had always been more interested in life beyond the clouds than most others.

"What else could there be?" Nicholas finally asked, frightened.

"More islands," Richard said. He stood, then, and slipped the backpack over his shoulders again. "Because how can we just be alive among clouds and then disappear? How can we be surrounded by nothingness?" He hopped over the creek.

Nicholas stumbled to his feet and followed. "We don't disappear. Father says that we become the earth. We become part of everything else. "

"Maybe," Richard said. He suddenly felt angry at Nicholas. It was offensive to him, that his mother was just a pile of dirt where hay grew. How could the earth beneath their feet be everything else, anyway? Thoughts flickered in his head like sparks trying to catch. Maybe he would walk until he reached the edge of the island. Maybe he would find a bridge there. Because how else did the masked men get to the island in the first place? He remembered when he was very little, chasing after the trucks as they rumbled away from the village, down the tired dirt road and into the forest, and his father had come hollering after him, grabbing his wrist.

"Don't ever follow the masked men," his father had said, pulling him back to the house.

Did they know about a bridge? Richard wondered. No one knew how big the island was, nor how many villages existed. The roads were like mazes. Some led to other villages, while others twisted in tortured shapes, coiling through the gloomy parts of the forest where poisonous plants grew and the fog was heavy, like the froth of midnight. There was no need to travel on the roads, Father told them, because the fields were right by the houses. Traveling the roads wasn't productive.

Richard and Nicholas had never gone farther than the creek before. The forest grew denser and darker. Colorful flowers bloomed in tatters of sunlight, vines climbed the trees like snakes. Richard wanted to use his camera, but he knew that he had to be patient. Nicholas would start to squeal when he saw it, because he would know that Richard had stolen it from the masked men. So, they squished onward through the damp foliage. The air became stale and burnt, oppressive, as it was trapped by the cells of the leafy canopy above.

Nicholas got more concerned as they wandered farther from the village. It would take hours to get back. He could tell from the mellowing sunlight that it was late afternoon. He imagined the night circles gathering within the spires, with his parents and his sister and the rest of the village all holding hands and getting ready to praise Father, and only then realizing that he was missing. It was forbidden to miss a night circle. Nicholas couldn't remember a single time when someone had missed one. Night circles kept the village connected, reminding people that they were only one of many.

He wondered if Richard even cared about the village. They would have to turn around soon to make it for the night circles. He wanted to tell Richard that they had to turn around, but he was scared. Richard would call him names. Not only that, there was a dark corner of Nicholas' heart that wanted to see what was beyond the forest. He tried to quell his curiosity but, as he walked among the trees, he felt budding excitement. Still, he hoped that they would turn around.

"It's arrogant to assume that you should have the answers to life's mysteries," he suddenly blurted.

Richard turned around. "What did you say?"

Nicholas shrugged, feeling defiant now that he had been challenged. "Father always tells us that. Aren't we going against him?"

Richard nodded. "Of course we are." He shrugged the backpack from his shoulder and tugged the camera from it. He dangled it in front of Nicholas' wide eyes.

"Where did you get that?"

"Where do you think?"

"But the masked men need those to report on the villages!" Nicholas' hands twitched. Richard put the camera back, slipped his arms back through the backpack. He jumped onto a mossy rock and over a small puddle. Nicholas came after him. "So what are you going to do with it? You have to give it back!"

Richard slipped between vines that hung from tree branches like curtains. "I want to show people something that they don't see every day."

"That's not productive," Nicholas said, ducking underneath the leafy limbs of a round tree. They brushed past turquoise flowers and bushes bursting with tiny, blue flowers encircled by thorns.

"We'll give people experiences that they've never had," Richard said. The painting of this scene began to brighten as he thought about the possibilities. "Everyone wonders what's in the other parts of the island. This is the one day a year where we have time to find out." He smiled as he thought of arriving back at the village, streaked with dirt but gleaming with a secret knowledge. He would know sights of which other people only dreamed. He would become like a figure in one of the village's legends. And where, he wondered, did the stories come from? Had other people gone into the forest to try and see what was beyond their village? Or did people summon the stories from air, from the dreamy clouds of imagination? What came from experience and what came from fantasy?

Nicholas grappled at his wrists, trying, and failing, to argue again with Richard. His enthusiasm for their adventure rapidly waned. He could only see Father's face on the television monitor, glaring down at them as they arrived late for the night circle. Most of the village already thought very little of Richard and Nicholas, because of their outings in the forest. "Unhealthy," they said, "Selfish. They aren't helping the community."

The sun folded in on itself like the fluttering of an eyelid. Pale fingers of darkness flexed along the leaves. It was sundown. The boys stopped and leaned against a tree. The forest reflected in their glossy eyes. For the past hour, they had traveled in silence, unsure of themselves, unsure of their thoughts, unsure of their doubts. Neither wanted to speak, for the fear and the relief that the dream would be broken.

A distant horn sounded. Father's broadcast, summoning the villages to their night circles. Nicholas swallowed, looking towards the sound as it bloomed on a gentle breeze. The gust skimmed the fronds of the palm trees and rustled the bushes around them, then went still. He could see his father and mother call for his sister, then call for him. Their pale disbelief when discovering that he still wasn't back from his hike. Could this even be real? Nicholas wondered. How could he be this far from the village as the night circle gathered? He could hear traces of Father's voice on the rolling breeze, rumbling echoes made watery by the shivering of tree leaves. The night circle had begun.

Richard felt proud when he thought of the night circle, and the confusion when people realized that Nicholas and he had gone missing. Something new for them, he thought. They wouldn't be grateful for the experience, not at first, but Richard knew they would come around.

"Richard," Nicholas breathed, "why are we doing this? We need to get back home!"

Richard laughed. "No, we don't. We're free to do what we want." They started to trudge up a long hill. The trees bent with the incline, crooked in their ascent. "We're just like the heroes in the stories."

Nicholas jogged, so he was beside him. "Heroes?" he panted. "That's not the point of the stories, Richard. The people in the stories never return!"

"That's not what I hear when I listen to them," Richard said.

They reached the top of the hill. On the other side, the forest disappeared. In its place was a blackened field, bordered by the shells of houses. The breeze coasted through the empty village, making wooden shutters clap hollowly. Richard adjusted his backpack with his thumbs while Nicholas climbed up next to him.

"What happened here?" he asked quietly.

"Fire," Richard said. He walked down the hill with stilted legs and found the hints of an old footpath leading to the village. Green grass grew in knots along it. The path hadn't been used in a very long time. The sky opened up above the silent village as the sunlight withered and moonlight materialized within the screen of clouds, foaming silver like waves curling into shore.

The village center had been burned as well. Plants had made their way through house floorboards and ivy was slowly dragging the crooked wooden boards back to the earth. As Richard and Nicholas slowly walked through the village, they heard a muffled sound coming from a building at the other end of the village center, one of the spired buildings where the morning and night circles gathered every day.

The roof of the spire had collapsed in on itself. Richard could see a faint light flickering against the darkness of the building walls. He heard a tiny, static voice and approached the spire doors cautiously, ready for something to leap out from the doors and attack him. Of all the stories told on the island, none had ever been told about dead villages. Clearly, these buildings had been decomposing here for some time. Years, perhaps.

Yet here was a light, still flickering within the spire. A sign of life, if not life itself. Richard crept up the three steps leading to the door, but came to a stop when he saw a heavy padlock hanging from the rusted door handles. The padlock was attached to a bundle of chain, strangling the door handles and keeping them immobile. A single board had been nailed across each window to the spire, but both front windows had been shattered. Shards of glass glittered in patches of grass growing at the base of the building.

"Help me up," Richard said to Nicholas, motioning at one of the windows. Nicholas moved in trance, mesmerized by the moment. Every time he drifted too far, however, the nagging noise from within the spire dragged him back, crackled in his ears. He cupped his hands and went on one knee and lifted Richard's foot. Richard grabbed the edges of the windowsill and peered into the building.

The darkness within the spire fell like a mist over broken pews and a carpet burned to threads. In the center aisle of the spire lay skeletons, toppled over on top of each other. Their bony arms reached out across the floor with fingers that looked like claws. The moonlight slipped through the hole in the roof, turning fleshy bones milky, making scraps of clothes glow. The skulls grinned back at him, but the bodies were twisted in agony. All of them were powdered with ash.

Beyond the skeletons sat a tiny television set. It gilded the bodies with its murmuring white light. Richard could see Father on it, directing the night circle. The broadcast was current. The only thing in the spire that was not dead was the image of Father, cutting over the gloom, padding the silence with soft, whispered words.

Richard dropped from the windowsill, his eyes still full with the burned bodies.

"What is it? What did you see?" Nicholas jumped up towards the window, but couldn't reach it. "Get me up there, I need to see!"

Richard shook his head. "Bodies," he said. It was all he could manage. He felt what he had seen gathering in his stomach, forming like a storm. He bent against the wall, slammed his hand against the splintered wood, tried to vomit. Nicholas watched him retch several times, wipe his mouth with the back of his mouth.

"Do you want to see?" Richard asked, standing and putting his head against the locked doors."

Nicholas nodded, but didn't actually feel too sure of himself, not after witnessing the effect the sight had on Richard. Richard, who climbed trees too dangerous for everyone else, who had plunged deep into the bowels of the forest just to see what he could find, the only one who had been bold, stupid, and reckless enough to steal a camera from the masked men.

But soon he was boosted into the air from Richard's hands and his head crested the windowsill. His eyes fell on the bodies, traveled to the television, and immediately blinked with a film of apathy. He slipped back to the wet grass and shrugged, but his mind twisted like a worm under the heel of multiple truths, only coming to rest when he came to his conclusion: "An accident," he said.

"Don't be stupid," Richard said. He pointed at the padlock. "They were burned. Burned because they defied Father."

"You're the stupid one! Why do you think they defied Father? There's no evidence for that. They died in a night circle in front of a television." This was proof enough for Nicholas, because televisions only spun images of Father and his sermons, delivering nothing else but the hypnotic clash of black and white static. The people had been worshiping Father when they had died.

"They were murdered," Richard said. His arm swept over the sagging houses. "Everything was burned. There wouldn't be evidence left."

"Father wouldn't murder them. Is that what you're trying to say? It is, isn't it?"

Richard didn't answer. He removed his backpack and retrieved the camera. He lifted it above the windowsill and took a picture. The flash left a fizzling burst of brilliance against the thin night. The smoky lights of stars hung above them now, glowing like dull coins. Richard turned around and took a picture of the village itself.

"What are you doing?" Nicholas demanded.

"I'm going to show this to the village," Richard said.

"What!" Nicholas imagined Richard stomping back home, running from house to house to show people his pictures. Before he could stop himself, he punched Richard in the jaw. He grabbed the camera and held it in his hands, trembling with shock.

Richard stared at him, putting his hand to his cheek.

"I'm sorry," Nicholas said frantically, "but you can't just use this for whatever you want. It belongs to the masked men. I'm giving it back to them."

"Nicholas," Richard said. "Give it back." He calmly put his hand out, but Nicholas backed away. Richard was much stronger than him, and Nicholas could tell from his smoldering eyes that he was only seconds away from retaliating.

"You're not getting it," Nicholas said. "I can't let you lie to people with your pictures." He shook the camera.

"A picture can't lie!" Richard shouted. "People will decide what to think of these pictures."

"But you're doing it for you, not for people," Nicholas said. "This won't help them!"

"Give me it!" Richard lunged, but Nicholas hopped down the steps and started running. He heard Richard pounding through the village after him. Nicholas didn't know where he was going, but he wanted to lose Richard before thinking about anything else. He knew that he could easily trip over something in the darkness, so when he saw a road leading away from the village, he turned onto it.

His breath filled his ears. The road unraveled ahead of him with worn tire tracks, but none of the tracks seemed recent. This whole corner of the island was silent, except for the wandering breeze, hissing through the trees and blowing against his back. The shadows swallowed him, devoured him, until he could just barely see the outline of his hands in front of him. Richard hollered after him, insulting him and then pleading with him. Their feet thudded heavily on the dirt.

They ran for twenty minutes, maybe thirty minutes, before Nicholas arriving at a sudden cliff. He skidded to a stop. Dark clouds lapped at the broken rock face. Long vines curled out from the forest and drooped over the edge, dangling through the mist. Richard came to a breathless stop beside him. They stared into the clouds, recovering their breath.

"So," Richard said, still panting, "you want to take a picture of it or should I?"

Nicholas said nothing. His body still swelled and deflated with his heavy breaths.

"Think of it." Richard stretched his arms to either side, demonstrating a sign. "A picture of the edge of the island. Everyone wants to see this. Now we can show them!"

Nicholas adjusted his sweaty grip on the camera. "No one should need proof of the edge, they should just know," Nicholas said through his teeth. He lifted the camera into the air.

"Don't throw it, you idiot!" Richard shouted, grabbing his wrist. They struggled against each other.

"Who needs to know that the edge exists? Pictures can lie," Nicholas grunted. "We could be at the end of the island, we could be on the top of a hill on a foggy day."

Richard punched him in the stomach and grabbed the camera. Nicholas buckled over. He tried to tackle Richard's waist, but Richard's knee came up into his face. Nicholas staggered backwards, his arms flailing, and he tripped over a rock. His momentum sent him over the edge, into the mist without a sound.

Richard watched the clouds absorb his friend without even parting. He heard no sound of impact and no scream. So, he thought, this was all there was to life, after all. Perhaps Nicholas would fall forever, but who would ever know? He looking down at the camera, then took pictures of the churning clouds putting it into his backpack. Now, he decided, he would be able to tell his tale of the burnt village as it should be told: Father had murdered people who had defied him.

After this flash of triumph, Richard wept. Nicholas had been his only friend. They had worked in the fields together, just as they played in the forests together. His tears stung his eyes. He turned towards the dark road with slumped shoulders and headed back to the village. He deftly avoided blaming himself for Nicholas' accident. Instead, he blamed Father's preaching and his march home became a hero's walk. He would enter the village, show them the pictures, and the people would be free.

As Richard walked back with only shadows for company, Nicholas fell into the ocean with a salty splash. He sputtered and clawed at the surface of the water. His clothes and his shoes hung gelatinous on his body, and he slowly sunk underneath the surface of the waves. Panic burned in his brain so fiercely that he could only think that he was imagining the water itself. How could he be drowning in an ocean that didn't exist? He closed his eyes to find himself still falling through the endless clouds, flapping his arms against the rushing, howling wind, in the vortex of the infinite drop.

Richard broke from the forest as the sun blurred the clouds with a damp, orange dawn. He ran from house to house, shouting that he had important news. People peered from their windows and doorways at him, rubbing their eyes. Richard shouted that he had proof that Father had killed an entire village. People reluctantly clustered around him, muttering their fears about sacrilege. Some didn't dare approach him, for fear of Father's wrath.

Richard excitedly showed his audience the first picture of the skeletons in the spire, then the burnt village. People asked him how he was so sure that Father had murdered them. They asked him why he thought it wasn't an accident. He told them about the padlock, but had no pictures of it. He didn't have time to show them the pictures of the island's edge before his father burst from the crowd, scowling, and snatched the camera from his hand.

He angrily led Richard back to the house and sat him down in a chair. "Do you think this is funny, bringing back two pictures of some burnt buildings and making accusations like this?" Richard tried to speak, but his father cut him off: "And what about Nicholas? His parents kept asking me where he was. They know he went into the forest with you."
"He fell," Richard said slowly. His throat filled with pebbles as he thought again of his friend, who would always be falling. He told his father the story, then he had to tell Nicholas' parents the story. Nicholas' mother let loose a strangled sob while fissures of grief wrinkled across his father's face. Richard watched, aware suddenly that no words, no sentiment, can replace or displace some things.

The masked men came for him in the afternoon. He numbly walked into the back of the truck with the piles of green hay. No one said goodbye to him. They feared and condemned him for the pictures. Richard sat quietly in the back of the truck, watching the road melt behind him. They stopped at one village, then another and another, until he lost count. At one village, one of the masked men hopped into the back with him.

"Let's see those pictures," the man said.

Richard handed him the camera, which the masked men had let him keep.

The man looked at the camera and shrugged. "That's horrible, but I don't know who did it."

"It was Father," Richard said with the strength that comes from a highly personal belief.

The man shook his head. "Father isn't real. And none of my men did it." He hopped from the truck and it grunted to a start again. They didn't stop at any more villages. Richard stared with unseeing eyes at the trees, unable to make sense of the conversation. Everything faded into a background. They drove well into the night, until finally coming to a bridge. Dozens of trucks moved forward on the bridge, all of them brimming with piles of the green hay. Richard watched. He tried, and failed, to understand the sight.

The truck rumbled over the bridge. The clouds dissolved in front of them until a clear night sky replaced it. Richard stared up at it in awe. The cold points of the stars glittered down on a cool desert. The truck pulled away from the road, parking by a cactus, and the three masked men jumped out.

"Get down," one of them said to him, and Richard slipped down to the hard, dry earth.

"We've only had to induct two others," the man who had looked at his pictures told him. "So we don't really know the procedure. But you can't return to your village. Your people there already despise you for accusing Father of murder, and they think you abandoned your friend. You have become one of us, instead"

Richard looked at each man, trembling. "What do I do?"

"Exactly this," another man said. "Drive around the island, gathering the crops. From here, we drive it to the factory."

"Do you work closer with Father?" Richard asked, clutching the camera to his chest.

The masked men laughed. "There is no Father, only the factory." One of them pointed to an enormous steel building, swollen on the horizon. Pipes belched out endless plumes of smoke. Richard saw that the smoke drifted straight over the island. The factory made the island's clouds.

"Why do you gather the hay?"

"Because people smoke it," the first man said, "so they can feel just as they do on the island, day after day, following Father and not thinking about dead villages or edges."

Richard nodded dazedly and turned to look back at the night sky. He had never seen the moon or the stars without the thick tissue of clouds. He wondered, then, how far up in the sky they were and, if he could fall up, whether he could land on them or if he would fall up forever. Perhaps, if Nicholas fell down forever and Richard fell up forever, they would eventually meet again.

Amazon's Kindle: The Ipod of Books, Papers, and Everything Else (Essay)

2009-11-15T13:06:00.001-08:00

Remember CDs? You may have even handled one recently, if you were illegally burning music for a friend or if you found a Limp Bizkit album in your closet from eighth grade. They're a dying breed. Tapes came before them, eight-tracks before that (I have yet to meet someone our age who even knows what these are), and records preceded them all. What came before that? Well, concerts. Music has been evolving ever since we could plug something into a wall. Nowadays, the chunk of alienating metal known as the Ipod can hold more music than we could listen to in a month.

Books have been a relatively stable medium for centuries. The Kindle is about to change all of that. There are two problems with making books electronic. The first one is that reading a book from a screen is like punching your eyes in the face, if your eyes had a face. Apparently, though, hundreds of hours of innovative research hours have solved this problem: according to Amazon's website, the Kindle "utilizes the latest in electronic-ink display technology." That takes care of that. I've seen one. It really is just like paper.

The second problem of the Kindle is harder to solve: people who read from Kindles look like complete doofuses. It essentially looks like an anorexic iPod, but bigger. Imagine holding one of those on the train and squinting at it while trying to read the latest book in the Twilight series (tentatively titled "A Three Hundred Page Description of Edward Cullen"). However, this might change in the near future when enough people normalize the appearance of reading Dostoevsky from a slab of glass and wires.

When it comes down to it, the Kindle has rather appealing features: a built-in dictionary, the ability to annotate and bookmark anything you want, wireless access to Wikipedia, and the ability to buy a book in less than a minute for ten dollars or less. You can extract and save quotes from books and, of course, have as many books as you want on it. People might even read more, given the tremendous ease of obtaining new material.

Who loses in this equation? Bookstores. Every bookstore would be destroyed. The implications actually have a startling magnitude. What's the point of libraries in an age where you actually have a device that can access any of the books and articles in it? How can libraries even exist then? If they went online, would we be able to check out all of the books we normally could? That sounds suspiciously like Napster or Limewire. We would just be able to download the literature and have it forever.

Imagine if you went to someone's house and saw a completely blank bookshelf, with a single Kindle in the middle of it. "I read all the time," they would say, "just look at how many books I have on this thing." Maybe we could use Kindles to judge people by the books they read, just like we already use people's Ipods to judge them by their music. Speaking of which, there's already Kindle support for Iphones and there will soon be support for Blackberries, too.

We are becoming a paperless society, to a degree that we don't even realize yet. When the Kindle becomes recognized as an acceptable medium, and it will, that could mark the beginning of the end for papers in schools and papers in the workforce. We already prefer to e-mail assignments to teachers. We're soon going to reach the point where the assignments, with grades and corrections, are simply e-mailed back. Meanwhile, any company budget would benefit from the lack of photocopies, memos, and reports that are printed or faxed.

The device that connects us to the Internet, allows us to watch television, call people, play music, and store books and all other papers, is still on the way, but we're very close. It'll just take a buyout or a merge and we'll have it. I've already thought of a name: The iLife.

The Cruise (Story)

2009-11-13T09:31:00.000-08:00

The boat set sail early in the morning, on a summer day. Mark was the first to board. His wife, Linda, followed. The children came last, jostling each other other in their excitement.

"Stop that," Mark said to them, embarrassed.

They either didn't hear or him or ignored him. Tom pushed Alice and Alice pushed Tom. They boarded the boat. Tom was about to push Alice again, giggling, but Mark caught his wrist. "God damnit," Mark said. "I said stop it." He shook Tom for a few seconds and then released him.

Tom bolted to his mother, crying into her dress. Linda put her hand on his head. "Mark, honestly." Alice trailed behind.

Mark led the way to a lady with a clipboard. "The Waldens," he said. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his temples.

The humidity was heavy, broken by bursts of an intermittent ocean breeze.

Linda held the children's hands. They followed Mark to the room on the boat. It was smaller than they expected. Two beds shared a cramped wooden space. The floorboards were warped by the heat. The window was closed.

"Why would they keep this closed in this weather?" Mark asked. He stormed to the window and wrenched it open.

"Try to relax," Linda said. Tom and Alice bounced over to one of the beds.

"I'm trying to relax," Mark said. "I can't relax if it's a hundred degrees in here."

"Go out on the deck," Linda suggested.

Mark untied his tie and threw it on the bed. The children paused to watch him.

"I don't know why you wore that thing," Linda said.

Mark said nothing. He shrugged his coat away and walked out of the room. Linda sighed.

"Can we jump on the beds?" Tom asked.

Linda didn't look at them, but she nodded.

Out on the deck, the sun made foreheads blister.

Mark found a bar on the second deck after walking up a pair of shining, white stairs. His shirt was translucent with sweat. The barstools were glowing in the sun. He sat on one and wiped his face with his handkerchief. "Give me something cold," he said.

There was no one there. He peered over the bar, towards a closed door. There was a stack of plastic cups next to a tap. He took one of the cups and started to fill it from the tap.

"Excuse me," someone said from behind him.

He turned around, still leaning over the bar.

A big man with a beard was staring at him. "What are you doing?"

"There wasn't anyone here. I needed a drink," Mark said.

"You can't wait until the boat gets out of the harbor?"

Mark leaned back to the barstool and got to his feet. "I'm going to talk to the manager about your attitude," he said to the man.

"Good luck finding him," the man laughed.

Mark left the bar and went back down the stairs. People were walking around on the boat now. A few hundred people at least. He bumped into several of them, trying to find someone in uniform. Faces were blurry in the sunlight. The boat hooted and began sailing away from the harbor.

They ate dinner at a restaurant aboard the boat. It was very crowded.

"What did you do all day?" Linda asked when they sat at their table.

"I looked for the manager of this place," Mark said.

"Why?" Linda looked concerned.

"Because." Mark took a sip from a glass of wine. "Because there's no god damn respect from these people, that's why. It's a god damn circus in here."

Alice's lower lip trembled. Tom chewed on a piece of bread and looked at his plate.

"The children," Linda said.

"A god damn circus," Mark said, looking at the menu.

"Are you folks ready to order?" a waiter asked.

"Let me ask you something," Mark said, reading the waiter's name tag. "... Rob. Who runs this place?"

"The restaurant, sir?"

"No, the boat. This whole place." Mark made a motion with his arms.

"Oh. I'm not sure, sir. Sorry."

"I want chicken nuggets," Tom said.

"He'll have the chicken nuggets," Linda interpreted.

He walked back to his room. The children were in bed. Linda was sitting on the corner of it, reading a story to them.

"Let me," he said.

Linda smiled and handed the book to him. The children looked at him with uncertain faces. Linda watched him from behind.

"Where were you?" Mark showed the book to Tom.

"Here," Tom said, pointing.

Mark scanned the page. "Linda, what is this crap?"

"What?" Linda had started to smile, but she stopped.

He clapped the book shut. "Kids, let me tell you a story instead. Would you like that?"

Tom and Alice watched him.

"Once upon a time, there was a man who could turn into an eagle. He could fly anywhere he wanted." Mark spread his arms like wings. Alice giggled. "He flew to the East, West, South, and..."

"North," Tom suggested.

Mark nodded. "The man married a woman who liked that he could fly places. But the man got older and older. It got harder to turn into an eagle, so he walked everywhere instead. One day, he realized that he couldn't turn into an eagle anymore, but he couldn't remember when that had happened. Maybe he had done something wrong."

"Mark..." Linda said quietly.

"He had two children that he loved very much," Mark said, thumbing Alice's nose. She giggled again. "And he hoped that he could teach them how to turn into eagles, someday. His wife wasn't sure."

He looked at Linda and looked back at the children. "The end."

Tom and Alice smiled. "Was that about you, Daddy?"

"Could be," he said. He kissed them on their foreheads.

Linda made a noise and walked out of the room.

He found her at the bar on the second deck. He put his hand on her shoulder.

"Linda," he said.

She was sipping from a straw. There were people all around them, talking loudly.

"Linda," he said.

She turned around on the stool. Her eyeshadow was smudged. Her glass was empty, but she kept sipping.

He leaned past her with a five dollar bill in his hand. He waved it at the bar, but no one came.

"We can't do this," Linda said. "We need to tell them."

He looked at her.

"No," he said.

"Mark!"

"No."

She put her glass on the bar. "They're going to find out."

"Maybe."

She stood from the bar, swaying a little. "This isn't something we're going to be able to hide. You're not doing a good enough job of it."

"Me!"

"You!"

"Listen-"

"Don't touch me." She sat back down on the stool.

"Everything okay over- oh." The man with the beard was behind the bar.

Mark looked at him.

"Did you find the manager?" the man asked, making a face.

Mark tried to ignore him. Linda turned back to the bar.

"Didn't think so," the man with the beard said. "Listen, don't bother this lady. She obviously doesn't want to be bothered."

"She's my wife," Mark said.

The man with the beard shrugged. "Doesn't matter to me. A lady who doesn't want to be bothered is a lady who doesn't want to be bothered. Get lost."

"You see?" Mark said to Linda. "A god damn circus."

Linda stood up. The back of her head hit Mark's jaw. He bit his tongue.

"What the hell?" he said.

The man in the beard laughed as Linda left the bar.

Mark followed her.

"If you find him, tell the manager that I said hi," the man in the beard called.

A light breeze swept across the third deck. Somewhere, a limp flag clanged against a pole.

Mark was panting. He saw Linda perched on the railing, staring at the moon. The breeze washed over her. Her hair swam in the air.

"Linda," he said when he reached her.

She was crying.

The waves quietly broke below them.

He tried to put his hand on her shoulder, but she was standing on the bar of the railing and he couldn't reach her. "Linda," he said.

She looked at him. Her face was white in the moonlight, streaked with tears.

He grabbed at her hand, but it was gripping the railing. He put his palm on her knuckles. "We're okay," he said. "Don't worry, we're okay."

"Did you lock the door?"

"What?"

"The door. For the room."

"Um-"

"The kids!" She hopped from the railing. "Jesus Christ."

He clenched his fists. "You ran out. I had to follow you."

"Where would I go?" she asked, spinning on the deck.

"But-"

"You just left them there," she said. "Jesus Christ."

"God damnit, I'm trying to talk to you!"

"You don't know how to talk to anyone." She brushed past him, walking towards the stairs.

"God damnit!" he said. He followed her down the stairs, back to the bar.

The man with the beard was cleaning one of the tables. He walked towards Mark. Linda walked down the stairs to the first deck. When Mark got to the stairs, the man in the beard was in his way. "What the hell?" Mark said.

"The lady doesn't want to be bothered," the man said.

"Get out of my way!" Mark said. He tried to go around the man, but the man blocked him. "What the hell?" Mark said again.

He looked up at the man. The man smiled through his beard.

"My kids!" Mark said. He turned away from the man and went towards the bar. People were looking at him.

"Drunk," someone said.

"Where's the manager?" Mark said. He pushed his way between people to get to the bar.

"Hey," someone said.

"Drunk," someone said.

"Where's the manager!" No one was behind the bar. Mark turned around. The man with the beard was gone. He walked back to the stairs and jumped down to the first deck. He went back to the room.

Inside the room, all the lights were on.

Linda was on her bed, crying. Tom and Alice were next to her.

"Don't worry," Tom said.

"It's okay," Alice said.

They ate breakfast by the swimming pool on the first deck. The pool was so full that people could barely swim. Waiters walked by Mark and Linda while they sat on folding chairs with newspapers.

"Look at this," Mark said, bending his newspaper towards Linda.

She lifted up her sunglasses. "Huh," she said.

He kept looking at her. The sunglasses went back over her eyes.

"You made a scene last night."

"You're the one who came after me," she said.

"I was trying to talk to you," he said, throwing his newspaper onto the ground.

"Okay," she said. "Talk to me."

"Well," he said.

"More coffee, sir?" a waiter asked.

"Tell me... Zack... who's the manager of this boat here?"

"Exactly," Linda said. She folded her newspaper and sat back in the chair, exposing her neck to the sun.

"Well," he said.

"I'm not sure, sir. Sorry." The waiter walked away.

Mark sat in his chair, grinding his teeth. "Linda-"

"Dad! Dad, look!" Tom dove into the shallow end of the pool.

Mark got up and walked to the edge of the pool. Tom emerged in a spray of bubbles and ripples.

"Tom!" Mark said. "What are you thinking, how shallow is this? Four feet! You could hurt yourself."

"Sorry," Tom said. He swam away.

Mark sat back in his chair. He covered his face in his hands and started to cry.

"Oh," Linda said. "Honey..."

"I can't do this," he said. "It's too much."

"The kids," Linda said.

"It's a god damn circus."

"The therapist..."

"A god damn circus."

"Doctors," Linda said.

Mark stood up. "The manager!" he said. "The captain! The owner! Where are they? Who is controlling this god damn circus?"

People stared at him.

"You're making a scene," Linda said.

Mark stared at the horizon. It was white with sun. "Nowhere to go, but it keeps moving," he said.

"What?" Linda asked.

"Did someone call for me?" the man in the beard said, walking down the stairs from the second deck.

Mark ran to the railing. He looked into the waves and tried to jump.

Generation ADD (Essay)

2009-11-07T13:23:00.000-08:00

Right now, I am trying to write an article. Unfortunately, Pandora is playing. I need to be ready to brand any unwanted song with a thumbs-down or encourage a good song with a thumbs-up. I also have my e-mail open, which I may or may not arbitrarily visit when I finish a paragraph. If I get a new e-mail, it could be a notification from Facebook.

That may warrant a visit to Facebook, where I will be assaulted by the latest activities by some guy I haven't seen in a year and a half, a guy who has just posted pictures of his new motorcycle, with himself tagged as the motorcycle. When I arrive at my social destination- perhaps a wall post from my friend asking when we will get drunk together again or a photo comment from someone else's friend on a photo I took- I will sit there and contemplate writing a response. This process could take anywhere from five to fifty minutes. Facebook has made everybody a politician. You've got to maintain your image.

Back to the article. Hopefully, I won't feel the urge to talk about something I saw on the Daily Show. Speaking of that reference, that makes me think of Jon Stewart's recent Glenn Beck impersonation. Hm, Glenn Beck. How did he get started? I should fire up Wikipedia so I can copy and paste an obscure, wholly irrelevant fact into my article. Wow, did you know he never went to college? No wonder he's so ill-informed about the definition of socialism.

I didn't want to look that up, though, I wanted to look up ADD, because I vaguely recall that it might not exist. Either no one has it or everyone has it. Then again, what's ADHD? Wikipedia redirects me from "ADD" to "ADHD." Does that mean that ADD is no longer a valid acronym?

Wikipedia defines ADHD as a "neurobehavioral developmental disorder." So, literally, your brain is improperly developed to behave. Because everyone knows that "behavior" is an objective concept. Maybe ADHD afflicts only people who know the term ADHD. Do Masai tribesmen also suffer from ADHD? Hold on, I'm not quite sure who Masai tribesmen are... well, there's too much text in the Wikipedia entry, and too little of it is in bold. Forget this.

I am invoking ADHD in its purely conceptual sense. Our generation suffers from the inability to focus on almost anything for a long period of time. We are becoming more and more accustomed to instant gratification in every single way. Forget spell-check. Half the time, that's done auctomatically. If it isn't, we can easily go to the red, squiggly line and... well, only if we're still paying attention. Nowadays, if we have a question about anything and access to the Internet, we will have the answer within thirty seconds.

That question can be related to something obscure, like the Masai, or it can be about someone's new motorcycle, haircut, baby, husband, medical emergency... hold on, I need to mute the computer while Pandora tells me about Netflix.

We get frustrated when there aren't highlighted, one to three sentence answers to our questions. Capitalism is about efficiency and we are now living in a knowledge economy. Our knowledge is becoming increasingly instantaneous, while the process of acquiring that knowledge is being reduced to economy size. When was the last time you sifted through each and every page of a paper by David Hume? Not only is it easier to read a summary, you learn more, too.

That's the most startling fact of our generation: Sparknotes is teaching us more than the actual work of literature. Don't even try to deny it. We are constantly forgoing the delicate, meandering journey through facts and abstractions and musings, instead favoring an immediate leap from ignorance to knowledge. We are starting to think of thinking itself in capitalist terms. We don't have patience for novels that teach us some reverberating lesson about humanity, we'd rather just immediately obtain and record the lesson itself, along with several memorable quotes from an otherwise forgettable block of text.

Unbelievably, my phone just rang. My concentration is broken. Phones demonstrate the phenomenon of our impatience more than anything else. Think how frustrating it is when people don't answer their phone. It seems almost impossible to us that a person would be without their phone at some point. Worse still are text messages. Each one is an obligation. If you don't reply within a few hours, people will get offended. Phones used to only enslave you to one person's conversational needs. The possibilities are now limitless.

Do you think it's a bad thing that our very brains are entering the grid of capitalistic evaluation?We accuse hefty readings of being wastes of our time because they often only impart an ambiguous kind of knowledge, something that needs to be excavated from page after page of inconsequential rambling.

The art of analyzing information has now become the art of analyzing the analysis of that information. We skim scholarly articles, pull out meaningful quotes, and read paragraphs with interesting sentences. We save time doing this and we get more done. The value of our education is set against the clock. Find the way to the learn the most in the least time possible. In the end, isn't that the basis of capitalism?

I feel like this article needs some polish. I didn't really illustrate my point with maximal clarity. But, on the other hand, I'm bored.

The Mirror is Not a Window for the Soul (Story)

2009-09-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

Harold’s wife is cheating on him. He knows it. It’s obvious. She gets home later than usual. It’s happened for a few months. Her excuse is that the newspaper has had to fire some copy editors, so now the reporters have to look over their own articles. It takes a few extra hours.

“Hours,” she says. “Can you believe that? They make us stay like we don’t have to get to dinner with the family.”

Hours, he thinks. Hours of animal pounding, half-heard words in dark sweaty rooms and coiled sheets. The temporary release from the material world and the monotony of stunted dreams and evaporating ambitions. The escape from life through the thrill of sex and the thrill of betrayal.

He knows. He grins when she tells him.

So they eat at eight instead of five. Ted comes home from middle school at two and Harold comes back from teaching at the university at five. Conversations with Ted have turned into walks in mud. Ted doesn’t want to talk about school, Ted doesn’t want to talk about friends, or girls, or generalized social issues. Ted wants to go into his room and use the computer.

Harold forces himself into oblivion with a book, sitting in the living room and looking at his watch, listening to the scraping of Ted’s fingers on the keyboard echo down the hallway, wondering what he’s typing, what he’s doing. This was the pain of a parent isolated from their child by something simple like a growing social sphere, a bubble that inflates with the swelling world and pushes old influences out to the exterior. Cold, starless space.

Diane comes home at eight, as promised. Dinner is scrambled eggs. Harold feels like an icicle. He’s getting colder and stiffer, freezing in his seat. Ted is picking at his food with his fork, scraping at the plate and seeing only the future instead of the present. Harold can see that Ted thinks, or maybe knows: family dinners are a waste of time. Diane is lively, animated, the gravity of the table, bringing Ted and Harold back from the emptiness of their speculations. She deftly laces them together, knits them into family.

But she’s destroying them, Harold thinks. Destroying the family by seeking a refuge from the vapidity of life. Children become the motion of life when you become a statue in the same job, the same routine. It isn’t fair that her life is still in motion.

His dreams have long since crystallized. Life has chipped away at them, crafting more suitable futures, less idealistic plans, sweeping away the powder of adolescent idealism. And the product is adulthood, maturity. Diane is having an affair. She isn’t grounded. She’s seeking entertainment when entertainment in adulthood, in being a parent, is supposed to be manufactured into packages: vacations and club sports and tepid hobbies and gyms and petty resolutions, things to throw a flimsy veil over the stone of middle age just to give it the semblance of flexibility and versatility.

It isn’t fair.

“And how was work today?” Diane asks.

He wants to ask how her lover was today. Harold and her still had sex, but it was quiet, expectant, predictable, distilled by years of mutual experience. There weren’t surprises. Everything that was acceptable and unacceptable had been calculated into an intricate, mathematical formula. Sex was integrated into part of the week. Without spontaneity, passion was sterilized.

“I’m glad it was good. We had to work late again today. Tom and I were forced to edit the entire issue tonight!”

The name ‘Tom’ is a burning lance, a proper noun in a sea of inconsequential babbling. Tom could be the one. He knew Tom. Young thirties, moustached, a man whose trim, youthful form was still in the process of melting into the ambiguous average body of later life. Tom could be the one.

Harold’s teeth show when he smiles, he presses his knowledge into the expression. He wants to show her that he knows. He knows. Her work wasn’t letting her out late. Tom and her, he thinks. Tom and her in the backseat of the car, their car, Tom on top, a flailing fish in the uncomfortable geometry of car sex, then her on top, hunched over him because the car is small, her hair like a waterfall pouring over Tom’s dark eyes, the sweat from their bodies clouding windows and making them slippery.

Harold wants to jump from the dinner table and run to the car for the evidence, to see the traitorous condensation still lingering on the windows, the stain of sweat still imprinted on the backseat. But he calmly chews the last of his watery eggs and nods politely. He says something, a sentence lost in the whirlpool of small talk that precedes and follows it.

Life is predictable, he thinks as he sips his milk.

More evidence on the computer. Harold finds Diane’s laptop, it’s been left open, her e-mail inbox is on display. An e-mail from Tom. Something vague about the night last night. Very vague. Harold smiles at the glowing proof and closes the laptop quietly. It’s time for bed.

He feels refreshed by Diane’s betrayal. It’s something that he couldn’t predict, not in his years with her, not before their marriage, not after it, a cloud that he could never imagine straying into their bland sky. His hurt is mixed with excitement. This means things would change. Diane and he would have to dig for each other. They had drifted apart, into two separate but coexisting entities, and now they had to connect again. How?

It will start with sex. He felt tingles in his toes, his fingertips, the back of his head, adrenaline: passion blooms again, passion pollinated by pain. Butterflies awaken in his stomach, flapping away ancient dust. It will start with sex. Humans thrive on novelty. Anything becomes stale with repetition. This would be new.

Diane enters their bedroom in her short nightgown. It reflects the pale, orange shine of their reading light. She’s taking out her earrings, taking off her necklace in the efficient, unromantic way of marital disrobing. Harold watches the way the nightgown falls like water over her body.

She’s at the bureau, looking at herself in the mirror, rubbing her eyes with a thumb and a finger. He comes up behind her, watching himself in the mirror, watching his eyes look at his eyes. He slips his hands over her shoulders and gently brings her around to him. Her eyelids flutter in surprise, but a slow smile creases as he presses himself against her and they kiss.

The night is new.

Last night was good, Harold thinks as he walks up the rubber staircase to his classroom. It’s a university with dicks painted on doors, with kids who cling to the baggy jeans and sweatshirts of their youth for a lack of direction, buildings infected with children who are stumbling into adulthood by accident. They grapple old affections and hobbies and resist change. Higher education has become the last bastion for teenage irresponsibility.

Harold teaches Econ 101 to an uninspired group of young men and women, a group whose numbers fluctuate between forty and eighty depending on the day of the week. He watches them drag their feet to the class and yawn their way through lectures with a kind of passive depression. His hopes lie in the one child who pays attention.

“Hello class! Happy Friday!” he exclaims as he sets his briefcase on the table, blinking at the fluorescent lights. He hears a few reverberating snorts in the lecture hall and sees the half-hearted shaking of shoulders. This is the best laughter he can prod out of the generation. His eyes roam over bodies in various states of repose. Some have already pulled hoods over their heads, others are slumped across their foldable desks with eyes unfocused.

He can imagine them going to the class: Econ 101, they grumble to each other. At least we can get it over with in the morning, then go back to sleep. They are one congealed mass representative of a generation that is lost, swimming through the internet, Facebook and Youtube, where politics manifest in a public consciousness that changes daily.

Cool becomes consensus, as always, but consensus is founded on celebrity now. And he knows that celebrity is an interminably rotating term, a halo they all seek. The Internet spawned the idealism of the pale-faced people before him. They don’t think that anyone can be famous, they know. Fame has reached excessive heights, to the point where it is gone before it arrives, where no one knows or cares about quantifying it, they only care to be it, to be famous. They want to be known.

The generation before him is disconnected from him by centuries. They have exponentially advanced into terrifying frontiers of anonymity and progress, progress that achieves acknowledgement but remains intangible. They have reached an understanding with the world that floats in undercurrents of hatred and jealousy and prejudice, emotions helplessly dragged by an undertow of uncertain futures and unnoticed dreams, an undertow that drags productivity to the sand below and drowns it, slowly, gently, permanently. And bubbles of apathy sprout and pop in the froth.

A generation of ADD. A generation conditioned to expecting everything but, in expecting everything, achieves nothing. By the time Harold begins his lecture, half the class is already asleep.

Days pass easily. The weekend has long since developed into a black and white pattern of sleeping and eating and reading and watching TV.

“I have one assignment to do this weekend,” Diane says.

One assignment, Harold thinks. She’s visiting Tom at his house now. Things are spiraling out of control. She will sleep with him in the afternoon and be back by dinner. It will be a knock at the door with a look over the shoulder, a whispered greeting and a careful step into the boundaries of the unknown.

She’ll laugh for Tom like she hasn’t laughed for him, not for a long time, and there will be glitter in her eyes that has long since faded. They’ll watch TV and enjoy it, entangled with each other and eating a light lunch, tired sandwiches thrown together after a lengthy session of lovemaking. Not the individual meals of home, where Harold and her make their food separately, eat separately, and are individuals in watching TV, sitting on a chair and a couch, away from each other, occasionally laughing together, but usually not talking, usually not looking.

The television of marriage, of one body here and one body there, of concentration on the show. The television of scandal, of young love, of two bodies here, of concentration on each other’s limbs and lips. The images blur in his head.

“I love you, too,” she says to him. Their lips touch and she’s out the door.

He is left alone. Ted is somewhere, somewhere that Harold doesn’t remember. A friend’s house. Harold walks up the steps to the bedroom and looks in the mirror there, watches himself watch himself. He looks at the reflection of his reflection.

Things are changing, he thinks. Life meanders its way towards difference. He thought that things went still after marriage, but he was wrong. It almost made him smile. Diane’s affair would change everything. It would change her life, his life, Ted’s life. Their endless desert march would find an oasis.

The mirror, Harold thinks, is not a window for the soul. The soul, Harold thinks, isn’t reflected by our actions, it’s reflected by our thoughts. Thoughts, Harold thinks, are invisible. Thoughts are ghosts that haunt the future.

Ted misses dinner and Diane is away on her assignment with Tom. Harold watches the light wither from the dining room windows and eats alone. The house is cold and empty, huddled in the dark. Somewhere, a clock is ticking. Harold finishes his toast and his yogurt and moves to the kitchen, washing the dishes in slow motion. Time is meaningless to him. He watches the night mask the world. The dishes are clean, but he continues to scrub them.

A car pulls into the driveway and Harold turns around. He hopes that Diane is back, but also hopes that she isn’t. Her absence is something he chews on, a texture he savors. Ted jumps out from the backseat of the car and the car pulls out of the driveway. Ted’s friends and his friends’ parents have become mysteries, apparitions behind sliding glass windshields. Ted never has friends over the house. He says there’s nothing to do. Harold wonders what there is to do anywhere else.

“Hello,” Harold says. The word is stiff in his mouth, a numbness he can’t justify. Since when did his son become a stranger? There was a time when Harold could look at Ted and know his thoughts and his feelings. Now Ted is indecipherable like the rest of humanity.

“Hey Dad,” Ted says. He immediately heads for the cupboard, grabbing a box of cereal, something with violent colors, branded with bubble letters, manufactured into shapes. Harold doesn’t know when cereal ceased to be food and became entertainment, mutating into a box of perverse geometry.

Ted will soon slide into his room and use the computer. Harold knows he’s losing valuable time with his son, but everything feels tense and strained. Does Ted sense it? Ted is humming a song. He is oblivious to the calculations. Harold becomes frantic, grinding expressions and questions to dust.

“Did you have a fun time?” The end product is far from satisfactory, flawed, rushed, haltingly delivered.

“I had a fun time.” Ted has filled a bowl with his bright cereal. He pours milk into it. Harold watches the foreign shapes rise to the top of the bowl, neon buoys in a white sea. Ted walks out of the kitchen.

September peels away into the colors of Autumn. The highest score on the first test of Econ 101 is an 89, followed by an 81, then a chasm opens and next highest score is a 73. The average is a 70.

“Where did I go wrong?” Harold asks the silent audience, aimlessly pacing in front of their drained eyes. “This is not good, this is not promising.”

He casts a glance to the projection on the whiteboard. Last year, the average for this test was 75. The year before, it was a 79. Harold doesn’t want this to be evidence for the deterioration of the next generation’s intelligence, but he has trouble thinking of it in any other way.

The kids have been stimulated, electrocuted, by their electronics. He sees them in the elevator with their ipods, walking to classes with their ipods, separate and alone, their shoulders inflated with the grandeur that their music allows them. Each one is their own world, treading on their own feet, skipping into a ruby dawn where pleasantries have withered from the blight of a solipsistic existence.

It’s conditioning, Harold thinks. They’ve been conditioned to ridiculous rules. Or is that his sense of detachment from the future? Maybe he’s becoming cynical as he climbs the hill of generations and looks down below. His eyes stray back to the grades. Maybe. Maybe not.

Someone coughs during his reprimand, making him forget his indignation. He sighs, rounds his desk, and looks at the day’s lecture notes. He has to start again. He has to pull the dead dreams off each and every one of them. He has to walk with them from their graves and hope that some of them make it to the horizon of reality.

It’s raining when Diane comes back for the night. The headlights drip in the driveway and the wheels hiss on yellow leaves. The autumn drizzle hushes the sound of the engine cutting, the car door slamming, the faint jingle of keys and the squeal of the front door. Harold has relished the thought of her coming back so late. It’s almost nine this time. Things with Tom have progressed to unforeseen heights. Would she confess?

Harold knows that Tom couldn’t possibly be pleasing her that much. They were having sex once a day, sometimes twice. Each time was amazing. But she was still cheating on him. Was it an emotional connection, an emotional betrayal, more than a physical one? Did people cheat on each other because they were bored or because they felt alone? Did monotony isolate people?

They have French toast for dinner. Ted retires early to bed because he has a test. Harold and Diane bid him good luck and they retreat to the bedroom. Harold watches her reflection as she changes out of her work clothes into her nightgown, as she cocks her head to the side and takes out her earrings, slips off her necklace.

“I know,” he says to her, watching her reflection carefully.

She doesn’t stop changing. “Know what?” she asks.

“I know,” he says.

She finally stops and turns around. “Know what?”

“About… about why you’re really late from work.”

There’s a pause, a black hole in the conversation that devours the light, the room, their faces, and then spits it back out, a regurgitated reflection of reality.

“What do you mean? I told you the paper isn’t doing well these days. I just have to stay a few more hours.”

“Hours with Tom,” he says. The name is the foundation of his knowledge, of her secret, and he watches her as he drops it.

“Hours with… Harold, what are you talking about? Tom and I are part of the staff that’s still at the paper. We’re there and so are fourteen other people. We all have to stay late. You can come and see if you want.”

She looks at him. He looks at her reflection until his eyes slide right into hers, a liquid blue that trembles and quakes. He blinks slowly. His mind abruptly falls out from the back of his head and tumbles down onto the floor. He loses his balance and staggers onto the bed. The room closes in around him. No escape, no release.

“What? What is it?” Her voice is wind. The rain scrapes the windows.

Truth. He feels himself expanding. He knows she’s telling the truth. His truth was the lie. Life was going to be the same. Life was one long road of stasis. It was impossible to change the future when the future was identical to the present. It was all the same.

He puts his head in his hands and starts to cry.

A New Kind of Truth (Story)

2009-09-22T14:17:00.000-07:00

Tina Point was twenty, but only the first sixteen years of her life had been her own. The last four had been public property. Her every turn, twist, and stumble was recorded for mass consumption through dozens of magazines and thousands of pictures. Her producers had crafted her into a product. They had sculpted her into everything America wanted from an American girl, blurring any edge that was too unique.

She was a singer, a dancer, and a self-proclaimed actor. She owned three houses and twice as many penthouse apartments. There were dolls, clothes, jewelry, perfumes, purses, and shoes named after her brand, all of them colored a distinctive pink-red color known as Tina Fire. Her face loomed down from billboards. Her music could be found on any radio anywhere in the country.

America had lifted her into the sky with countless others, watching her rise with a warm glee and waiting for her to fall. It was a peculiar phenomenon that stars like Tina Point would never wait for their cloud to evaporate. They would always jump or fall or drop or plummet.
Tina fell to the earth on a day of pinching cold in February. It was a Tuesday night in New York City. Sidewalks were crusty with the dust of black snow and moonlight swam in shimmering currents of ice. The lights pulsed against the frozen night, splashing the suspended darkness with watery glitter.

Tina was drunk and she was angry. Her boyfriend, Charlie Denson, had told her that he hadn't liked her debut movie, The Giggle Girls. He said that he thought the characters were annoying and the plot was boring. One could have asked what he had expected from a movie with a title of such alliterative genius, but Charlie's expectations had apparently been very high.

The argument, like most arguments between a couple, dribbled into other shortcomings, hidden dislikes, forgotten offenses. Tina's last concert and Tina's abrasive mother were exchanged for Charlie's lack of talent and surplus of money. Tina, unable to be creative without the help of a team of paid professionals, finished the conversation with a screeching critique of Charlie's sexual performance.

"If you don't like it," Charlie said on the sidewalk outside the club. "Why do you want to fuck me all the time?"

"Maybe I don't!" Tina said. She took a step back to illustrate the gravity of her response, but her shoe caught a mischievous swirl of ice. She fell backwards with a flurry of arms, hoop earrings, and hair. She landed on her beautiful bottom, worth at least a few million dollars, with a noise that can only be described as half-squeak, half-scream.

Her bodyguard, Tony, was at her side instantly. He easily lifted Tina's five foot two frame and stared at Charlie, who had erupted into fits of laughter. "All right man, all right man. Be cool."

"Be cool?" Charlie cackled. "That was fucking hilarious. Did you see that?" He turned to face the brick wall, hoping to find a better audience. After a fruitless search, he again reviewed the performance: "Fucking hilarious."

"It wasn't funny!" Tina gripped Tony's enormous arm for support, a leaf hanging from a boulder.
Charlie sneered. "Yes it was."

"No it wasn't!"

"I say that it was!"

"Oh yeah? Well you think this is funny?" Tina charged and shoved Charlie into the wall. He shuddered against it, slipped on the ice, and fell on his face. He jumped up, swearing and calling
Tina anything that came to mind. He held his nose with the palm of his hand. Blood leaked down onto his lip.

The couple shouted for another ten minutes before Tina was finally put into a car and driven away. This scene would have been forgettable for both of them by the next morning, except there had been twenty-eight photographers in front of it, beside it, around it, above it. People would revel in the story, in the pictures, and satisfy themselves by shaking their heads and muttering comments. A night's fight would now become a nation's news, a spotlight of imperfection that would shine for weeks to come.

Richard Ames, of High Aims Records, received a phone call five minutes after Tina's exchange with Charlie. His Blackberry was his second heart, his second brain. It determined his moods and his thoughts more often than the original organs. He sat straight in bed and grabbed it, shoving it into his ear.

"Yeah?"

His wife rolled over to observe the spectacle. "Who is it, honey?"

"Shut up for a second," he replied.

She could see the dark outline of his hairy chest begin to swell.

"Fine. Fuck. Just... fuck. Get me the best one. Whatever he asks for, just give it to him. She's too valuable to let go of right now, she's only twenty for Chrissake. Yeah. Yeah. Bye."

He sat in bed, grinding his teeth, until his wife put her hand on his thigh. He stared at her from his perch.

"What is it, Richie?"

"Tina Point was drunk tonight and she had a fight with Denson's kid."

"Oh, that poor girl. She just needs-"

"Cut the crap, Sherry. I don't need your maternal instincts fucking around with it. The girl's just fucking retarded. She's lucky I'm here."

"She is," Sherry agreed.

They went back to sleep.

It was in his office the next morning, at one in the afternoon, that Richard Ames awaited his spin doctor. He was watching a television special called "The Lost Girls of America." Tina Point was central to the documentary's revelations. They had edited footage of the fight to make it seem like four different episodes. There was a slow motion replay of her pushing Charlie and Charlie falling to the ground. This program had followed an hour's report on the conversation itself. Therapists with dubious degrees had used creative words to make the mundane into the unique.
His phone rang.

"Yeah?"

"Hello, Mr. Ames, sir. Mr.William Denson would like to inquire as to the nature of your approach regarding the altercation that occurred between your employee, Tina Point, and his son, Charles."

"Tell him that it's fine. He can go smoke some cigars and forget about it." Richard hung up with a grimace. Charlie Denson's father, William Denson, was worth billions of dollars. He could manipulate the situation. He could hire his own spin doctor to make it look like Tina was responsible. Responsibility was the enemy that they all had to avoid and misdirect, something to be tricked and led to a mental disorder, a troubled childhood, a high-pressure society.

A nameless assistant buzzed the room. "Mr. Ames, a Mr. Freednam is here for you."

"Fucking finally."

His door opened and a rumpled kid emerged. He was in his mid-twenties, with a chiseled jaw, a delicate shadow of a beard, and dark eyes. His deep blue suit quivered like water in the office's sunlight.

Richard stood up and extended his hand. "Nice to meet you, Mr..." He didn't introduce himself because he decided everyone knew him.

"Nicholas Freednam." The kid sat down after shaking his hand and stared directly into Richard's eyes.

"Okay, Nicholas-"

"Nick"

Richard controlled his breathing. "Nick, okay, all right, what do you got for me?"

"Got for you?"

It annoyed Richard immensely that there were no "sirs." He had grown so used to these added bells that their sudden silence made him intensely uncomfortable. "Yes, got for me. I need this situation fixed!" He threw an arm at the TV.

"The television, sir?"

Nick's strategic use of the "sir" was offset by the question. Richard stood up. "Not the television! Jesus, what did they hire you for? Fuck!"

"I have corrected many situations, I would guess that's why I was hired. I've corrected Big

Kenny's assault charges, Violet Night's drug charges, Ibrahim Casar's anti-American charges, Rod Richards' rape case, and Evan Tendor's misogynistic, neo-nazi, anti-vegetarian rant."
Richard sat back in his chair. He remembered all of the offenses. He remembered the way that they had dropped into public water with a splash but sunk into some deep, dark place and stayed there. "This won't be a challenge, then. You've dealt with far more evil... situations."

"I don't view things in terms of good and evil, sir. I view them as biased. It's possible to simplify anything into neutrality. You can make good into evil or evil into good. Once you've found the desires that lie dormant in the public mind, you show those desires to the public eye. They see what they want to believe. If you show them what they want, they believe it."

"I didn't ask for a psych lesson, fuck, I have things to do. So you can get rid of... of this?"

Nick nodded. "Easily, sir. I just ask-"

Richard shook his head. "Don't fucking ask me for shit. It will just piss me off. Go and ask my accountant." Nicholas Freednam nodded, shook Richard's hand without looking away from his eyes, and left the office. Richard breathed out a long sigh of relief. He turned to his office window and looked down at the beehive below, watching the frenzied bugs buzz up and down and side to side in a frantic and aimless motion. When he got impatient with the sight, he pulled the shades and ordered a whiskey.

Nicholas Freednam's job was to perfect imperfections. He was a beautiful creature of structure and calculation, of stone and bone where muscle and blood may have been on lesser individuals. He made people see what he knew they wanted to see, but he saw everything. There was nothing a human being could do that could ever surprise him. He had known this since he had turned twenty-one. Each human was an individual, but human nature was inescapable: rhythmic, inevitable, predictable.

He drove to Tina's mother's house in Ithaca because that was Tina's emotional retreat. It was a factory where she went to have her wrongs made into rights and her delusions made into truths. Her mother, Ann Point, was meticulous in polishing Tina's ego night after night. Tina was her favorite doll. She had driven Tina to talent shows, she had persuaded directors to get her into shows, and she had filled out the applications for television talent searches. She had pretended to be Tina, becoming Tina, knowing that what she wrote was what she told Tina to be and what she told Tina to be was what Tina became.

Nicholas pulled into the driveway of the house at around six in the evening. He had listened to three of Tina's CDs in the car- Do It, Change it Up, and Gotta Keep Going. He discerned the overall sentiment of the music and analyzed her voice rather than the lyrics or instrumentals.

Nothing of Tina's music was actually hers. There was Tina, there was music that Tina sang, but there was nothing she actually possessed. Other people in small rooms and offices and daily commutes were responsible for her music. They injected a subject with the virus, the subject became the carrier, and they left for home while the carrier spread the disease as far as it would go. Tina was an assembly line contagion.

There were no gates or guards because it wasn't one of Tina's houses. This was her sanctuary from the press. The feeding frenzy was over, the hyenas had filled their stomachs, and now Tina was licking her wounds. Nick stepped out of his car and looked up at the house, scanning the garden and fence, scrutinizing every color, every potted plant, and every flower. He knew Tina and her mother before they greeted him at the door.

"Mrs. and Ms. Point, how are we today?" He asked as they opened the door for him.

"As well as we can be doing," Ann replied with a consciously pathetic smile.

Nick nodded solemnly. "It's been a rough couple days." He stepped inside and took off his shoes and hung up his jacket on a post to his left. Ann smiled at not having to ask him.

Tina swallowed past a lump in her throat. Nick looked at her, gilding his eyes with sympathy. She was a little, precious black-haired girl with a magnificently slight disproportion between breasts and waist. The industry liked her because she was perfect but not menacingly so. Ideal bust, but not noticeably ideal. Green eyes but not glowing. Lean, but short.

She sniffed when he made eye contact with her.

Ann brought her close with one swoop, hugging Tina's slight shoulders with an arm. It was difficult to tell if she was actually taller than Tina or her dignity and authority simply added a few inches. She was a skeleton of Tina's own beauty, a pale and withered rose that basked in the sunlight of her daughter's youth. People would have called her pretty, but her eyes were too bright, too quick, too worldly. Worldliness meant experience and experience was the opposite of innocence, so society passed over her with a fleeting glance. There was too much life in her.

Nick waited respectfully for Tina's recovery. Radio musicians went from steel to glass because, in their profession, moderate emotion wasn't popular. When Tina's battle with her depression culminated in a slight smile, he smiled back at her, aware that she found him attractive and mysterious. "Fitzy told you I was coming?"

Tina nodded. Fitzy was Tina's producer. He had only told her to listen to all of Nick's advice, that

Nick would become her best friend and most trusted advisor for the next few days at least.

"Great!" Nick said, smiling a smile of encouragement and rubbing his hands, knowing noise and friction would spark momentum. "Would you ladies like to show me around this beautiful house?"

Tina looked at her mother. Ann brightened. "I would love to, Mr..."

"Freednam. Nick Freednam." He bowed a little, which caused Tina to giggle through her teary eyes. "Lead on, please."

The tour was something that only vaguely registered in Nick's head. His automatic responses and compliments on different parts of the house were inconsequential to him. Ann's vanity and Tina's childishness held onto every word, but he was somewhere far ahead of them, processing the house's arrangement, the rooms, the objects within them. He especially noted Tina's room, an overwhelmingly colorful space of lacy pillows and stuffed animals.

Ann's room was a cold, wooden museum full of hard furniture and dark paintings. Tina's unabashed innocence and complete surrender to her impulses indicated she had yet to grow another layer to her, but Nick could tell Ann lived underneath skins of analysis and calculation. She was one of the people who held the strings in the puppet show that was Tina's life.

"Tell me about yourself, Nick," Ann said, leaning against the post of her enormous bed. She was asking for herself and for Tina. Nick smiled and clasped his hands behind his back.

"The basics? I am twenty-six years old. I graduated from Harvard with a degree in Psychology. My job is to help people think." Nick's career had long since transcended any petty therapy sessions. It was not to help people think but to make people think and to make people think they thought. His job was his life. Or the other way around.

"Great, Harvard," Ann confirmed irrelevantly. "That's a good school, Tina."

"I know," she said.

Nick studied her. Tina was withdrawing into herself so she could idealize him through the lens of silence. He patted the side of the bed. "Come on, now. You need to explain your situation before I can help you." Tina shyly sat next to him, looking at her feet and kicking them in the air.

"I'll make coffee," Ann suggested.

No one replied.

Tina Point slowly told the tale of her relationship with Charlie. She fidgeted with every new thought that ran naked through her head and occasionally froze while she struggled to produce a phrase adequate to the emotions burning in her heart. Every sentence, every description, undermined the foundation of her timidity until it finally collapsed. She soon gushed about the year-long affair. Her words swam together when she didn't care enough about them because she wanted to get to the next ones.

She told Nick how she had first had sex with Charlie, how he was her first and it had made her realize that sex was just a stupid thing anyway, just body parts, but then she had felt bad for disappointing God but then decided God would understand anyway, so she had kept doing it and a month into their relationship she started loving Charlie and he started loving her. But he was so retarded sometimes because he would drink too much and make people angry, not her, really, and she liked drinking, too, even though she knew it was illegal but it was fun so why did it have to be illegal? She was practically twenty-one anyway it didn't make any sense.

Then at the club the other day stupid Charlie had drank too much and she was drunk too, but he said that The Giggle Girls was bad even though she knew it was good and there was a fan club and she got fan letters so she knew people had liked it and Charlie was just an idiot he couldn't understand that sometimes people just wanted to see happy things and do happy things and not think about it anymore. And Charlie was jealous because he couldn't do anything anyway, he just had money from his dad and he couldn't sing or act or dance and Tina could do everything like that and she was famous and people loved her.

She hadn't really wanted to push him or anything, maybe just elbow him but he had laughed at her when she fell on the ice so she had just pushed him, big deal, it wasn't her fault he had fallen on the ice and broken his nose and got bloody. Had she talked to Charlie? No, she hadn't, she was still mad at him and she had seen an interview today where he had said Tina Point likes to get drunk and I always have to try and keep her under control, I just guess I wasn't quick enough this time with his dumb little laugh that made people like him even though it was just a dumb little laugh and there wasn't anything to like about him at all.

Nick listened to her confessions with the air of a dignified funeral-goer, nodding and sometimes offering small words of affirmation or pity. She talked in a nervous, self-conscious buzz, punctuating sentences with rapid swipes of an arm or wrist or flick of her hair instead of actual breaths. When she had finally absolved herself, she blew out a long breath and deflated, looking across the room at a mirror hanging from a closet door.

"So you're not sorry that you did it?"

"No!" she said, turning to him but immediately looking back at her feet. His knowing gaze silenced her in a way nothing else could. She kicked at her feet again. "I just think he got what he deserved."

"Well, guess what?"

"What?"

"You have to make a public apology to him."

"A public what?"

"Apology. You have to give some interviews and tell people that there was no excuse for your behavior, but you were having a stressful time. Say you acted immaturely and-"

"But I-"

"Listen. You acted immaturely and weren't thinking. The stress of your latest CD got to you."

"I don't know about that. I don't think I'm stressed at all. I just got pissed and he-"

"You don't think you're stressed about the new CD?"

"No. I like it a lot. Fitzy says it's the best one."

"Good, say that. But think about it, Tina. You were absolutely stressed by your new CD. Who wouldn't be? That's a lot of pressure. All the others have been so good. I have three of them in my car right now, swear to God. Even if you didn't think you were stressed, you were."

She chewed on her bottom lip, daring to look at him. "You know, I think you're right. I bet it was just stress! I won't do it again."

"Great. I'll call some people and we'll set up an interview."

"Okay! Thanks so much, Nick, you're so awesome! I'm going to go tell Mom what we're going to do." She hopped off the bed, flashing him one last glance, and disappeared through the doorway.

Nick sat on the bed alone, looking at the mirror. Not only would Tina start repairing her reputation, she would inadvertently advertise her new CD, the diamond of all her recent stress.
The truth only became the truth when people believed it.

Richard Ames saw the interview the next day. Despite himself, he smiled. "This fucker has got class," he decided. He kept the television on as he tapped his pen against his chin and looked over the sales records for his artists. He was given a daily sheet with the highest selling albums. Tina's album was on the chart, but it had dropped from first place to third, behind the albums of Guns'n'Riches and Sleezee.

"These fucking moms all thinking their kid is going to go and drink and push boys, that's what it is." It seemed odd to him that the more depraved a rapper acted, the more albums they sold. Tina Point and the other matriarchs of the pop herd were supposed to be immaculate in a society that preyed on and embraced flaws. Had Richard Ames attended a liberal arts college instead of a business college, he would have gone on to condemn society's confused expectations for female behavior, a monsoon of identity crisis that poured onto the generation.

Lacking the education to worry about the unchangeable, he contented himself with scowling at the papers for almost an hour. He looked up when he heard an unpleasant bleating from the television. Charlie Denson was on the screen, wincing with forced emotion. Microphones were everywhere, big cheese-grater phalluses that prodded moans and groans from him.

"I don't think she's having a stressful time. Everyone has a stressful time. Like, I get out of work and I don't feel too hot. But I don't go pushing people and breaking their noses, you know? That's not me. That's not who I am. I don't think she should be able to get away from her drunkenness and, like, her pushing just because she said she was sorry. That doesn't make any sense."

"Bullshit that kid knows anything about work!" Richard snarled at the television. He grabbed his phone. His administrative assistant called William Denson, but Denson's phone butler fuck answered the phone.

"Yes, Mr. Ames?"

"Listen here, you fruit: we were fixing the problem. Tell Denson to make his son shut his trap."

"My apologies, Mr. Ames. William Denson feels that Charlie was unjustly assaulted by your employee and-"

"Employee? Christ, don't call her that. She's not a goddamn waitress, she's a goddamn singer."

"Regardless of arbitrary nomenclature designating different positions of exploitation, Mr. Ames, Mr. Denson is looking for a tangible sense of justice before-"

"Justice? The fuck are you talking about? Media justice, that's what you're talking about. He wants the public to be the judge. Don't think I don't know this game. Denson thinks it would be good for his kid to bathe in the spotlight and whack off to all the attention he gets."

"Media justice, justice, masturbatory gratification from said justice, it is defined by the perceptions of the people. They are voting against Tina. The poor boy did have his nose broken."
Richard slammed the phone into the table with an explosive shout. He looked at the television again. Bubble letters asked if Tina Point should be forgiven for breaking Charlie's nose. An Internet survey of whoever the hell had time to do Internet surveys read that 38% said yes, 60% said no, and 2% said that they didn't care. A woman with blond hair and big boobs read the results for the illiterates in the audience.

Edward Hines knocked on the door. Richard knew it was him because Edward Hines applied a haltingly delicate force to the door, more caress than knock.

"Hines, come."

Hines appeared at the edge of the office, looked around, and closed the door behind him. He observed Richard's strained breathing. "You saw Charlie's interview, Mr. Ames?"

"Fuck yes I saw it. Who the fuck does he think he is?"

"Well Mr. Ames, sir, I believe that he thinks he's somebody."

"What a sad mistake. No one is somebody until everybody makes a somebody from anybody."

"Indeed, Mr. Ames. From my understanding, Charlie is planning to exploit his accident to the fullest extent of public sympathy."

"What's your guy going to do about it?"

Hines hesitated and then shrugged. "Something, I'm sure. He said he's the best and I believe him. You heard what he's done for other artists."

"Sure."

"We should be fine then."

Richard Ames was already planning a new perspective for Tina if Nicolas Freednam failed. He would hire some songwriters, get them to write lyrics for a pseudo-punk band, and then hire the instruments. Stick Tina there, paint her with some unconventional make-up, dress her in unconventional clothes, appeal to people's new conception of her. Punk would make her fall in value, but she would still be there. Richard Ames didn't surrender his creations until they turned thirty.

Nick watched Tina pace up and down her living room, squeaking different, Charlie-related insults with every step. He had slept in a small motel in Ithaca, despite Ann and Tina's pointed attempts to make him settle in their guest room. He had watched Tina's interview from his room there, because spin doctors should never been seen with their patients. It was unprofessional.

People wanted to believe that stars were changing and bettering themselves without any outside help. He had seen a clip of Charlie's rebuttal. He admired it, in a way. He appreciated all the unseen hands that carved public images.

He put his hands behind his head and waited for Tina to stop walking around the room. When she finally turned to him for support, an exasperated expression lingering on her face, he smiled at her. "Don't worry, Tina. This isn't a problem. It's not even a setback."

"What? What do you mean?"

"I mean that nothing Charlie says matters. Why? Because you're going to march up to him and apologize in person."

"Apologize! To him?"

"Of course. You were rash and immature at the club. He was the victim."

"He wasn't! I told you that he was mean about The Gossip Girls. I was defending that movie from-"

"Tina." Nick knew that a calm, verbal identification would almost always strip someone of their swollen pretenses. Tina pouted, her bottom lip quivering, and sat down next to him with her chin in her hands. "You need to apologize to him. It doesn't matter what he did. You both did things you regret. You have to take the first step. He's too much of a child to do it himself." He knew

Tina would appreciate this classification.

She straightened. "You're right. He'll never do it. We'll just go on hating each other."

"And that's not good," he said with a slow nod.

"Right! Okay, Nick. I'll do it."

"Then ask him out."

Tina's head spun to him. Her mouth was open. Her glossy pink lips glistened in the lamplight.

"Ask him out!"

Nick repeated his slow nod.

"I don't like him, Nick. He's a jerk! You saw him on the TV. I would never in a million years want to do something like that again."

"You said you loved him yesterday."

"That was yesterday. This is today, Nick! There's kind of a difference if you didn't know."

"The only difference between today and yesterday is the sun and the moon. Neither of those have anything to do with you."

Her doll eyebrows arced downwards in disapproval and she crossed her arms in front of her.

"I'm sorry. I can apologize to his jerkface but no way am I asking him out."

He looked at her, calculating, exchanging values in the algebra of solutions. His mind, a tireless smoke machine, whirred with a thousand images and a thousand ideas while Tina sat there, defying him. The product was a smile. "Fine. Have a party and invite him."

"A party?"

"Right, at your penthouse."

"Nick! I don't want to see him other than maybe apologize to him and even then I won't like doing it."

"I'll come to the party, too. You don't even have to talk to him. I want you to see him tomorrow, apologize, and invite him to your party. Start a guest list tonight."

"You'll come to the party?" She hadn't heard anything past his promise, but he knew that it would all resonate in her subconscious. Tina Point's father was nonexistent. Nick hadn't pried because it was immaterial to their conversations, but he knew that he embodied the qualities of both father and lover. He could see in her eyes that she was confused between obeying him, liking him, loving him, and wanting to know him, whatever it meant to know someone.

"I'll come to your party, I promise." He gave her the smile he knew she wanted to see.

"Oh, Nick! Okay, I'll do it. But I'll only see his stupid face so I can see yours at my party. New York City, I'll give you the address, okay?"

"Sounds nice."

She emitted a slight noise of adolescent excitement and hopped off the couch to find a pen. Her emotions were clay to distractions and substitutes. Nick could make her into anything he wanted.

Charlie Denson was watching a special program on a news network called "Media and the American People."

"I don't think it's good for people," one commentator said. "People are given so much information nowadays that they don't even know what's true and what's real."

"That's ridiculous!" his opponent exclaimed in delight. "Do you think that there was a time when this wasn't the case?"

"Of course! Before mass media, before instant news. You had to know something before judging it. Now it's all instantaneous. The purity of knowledge is corrupted by its instant delivery."

The opponent leaned back in his chair, peering through his glasses. "So one hundred years ago, you would argue, this is your point now, one hundred years ago people actually knew the truth about things?"

"I think that they knew less, maybe, but what they knew was true."

"True! Less!" The echo floated on incredulity.

"Right. People had less access to information. The information they did have was all facts they knew from experience. They engaged the information and then analyzed it. The media has removed that step. The media dictates our society- the television and the computer tell us the truth. We don't analyze anymore. We're so inundated with different points and different facts

that we can't know what's true."

"Let me get this straight. You're saying, now this is you, you're saying this: the more we know, the less we know."

"That's not exactly what I was saying, but I suppose you could characterize it that way."

"Good. The more we know, the less we know. This is your point. Now how about your idea that one hundred years ago people encountered less information. The information they did encounter was information that directly pertained to them. They analyzed it and then judged it."

"Right."

"But why does this make that information more true? Just because people had access to one point of view instead of one thousand doesn't make that point of view truer. You can know one thing about something, you can know a thousand things about something, and every single fact could be a lie. One lie is the same as a thousand lies if it's all false. People believed in their one lie more firmly because it was the only lie they knew. In our day and age of Internet and television, we have access to an infinity of lies. We don't have to just believe in one, we can believe in a dozen. We can believe in half of one and half of another. The television and the computer don't dictate truth, our beliefs dictate truth. What we believe to be true is true. Studies have shown that we selectively choose our evidence. That leaves-"

Charlie Denson's personal assistant, James Twitterfield, arrived at the doorway. "Mr. Denson, sir, there is an acutely apologetic young lady here to see you by the name of Tina Point."

"Tina?" Charlie rose his head from its sunken place in the couch. A lion sensing nearby prey.

"That is what I was led to believe, sir."

"Great. Twitty, go let her in. I don't want to, you know, get off as... whatever. Just let her in and tell her I'm in here."

"Tactful as you are eloquent, sir." James Twitterfield disappeared. Charlie turned down the volume on the TV, but left it on. The two men on the screen were shouting at each other now.

The audience of the show was cheering. Charlie heard Tina's nervous laugh and her tiny footsteps as she padded across the wooden hallway and into Charlie's personal theater, a den of one enormous screen and three enormous couches.

"Hi, Charlie."

He turned with a look of strained indifference, shifting on the couch but not standing. "Tina, hey. What are you doing here?"

She blinked at him, swinging her arms at her side. "Hi Charlie, I came to, uh... How is your nose?"

Charlie tapped it with a cautious finger. "Seems to be coming along fine. The doctors said that it would just heal. I don't need a splint or a cast or something." The statement lingered in the room, its stupidity blooming, waiting to be recognized, then withering upon the realization that neither listener was going to acknowledge or even realize its growth.

"Want to sit?" His lips peeled into his billion-dollar smile.

"Okay. I can't stay for long, I have a, a thing."

"Okay."

She sat on the couch with a straight back and stared at the TV. Her eyes glided with the commercials. "I'm sorry, Charlie." She didn't look at him.

"So you're apologizing to me?" Charlie fed off her humbleness.

"I didn't mean for you to fall or break your nose. It was dumb of me. Sorry."

He licked his lips. "I'm recovering."

Tina looked at a small, neon-blue watch that dangled from her wrist. "Okay, that's good to hear. I'm just, I'm sorry that whole thing happened. I just wanted you to know that. I understand if you don't want to see me again." If Charlie had been more perceptive, he would have noticed the way that the words fell like rocks from her mouth. Instead, he only heard the statement in its flattest meaning.

"Babe, of course I'll want to see you again. Don't be silly." He shifted on the couch, getting ready, but she stood.

"I have to go now." Her performance was nearly as dry as her performance in The Giggle Girls. She turned to him, blinking her pale green eyes. "But you should come to my party. I'm having one at my place in New York across from Central Park. Will you come?"

The frustration rippling through his mind went still. "A party? Of course. Tonight?"

"Tomorrow," she said. "Tomorrow will be good."

Charlie nodded. "I'll be there."

"Okay," she said. She walked out of the theater.

Almost immediately, James Twitterfield replaced her. He brandished a bow. "Sir, Monica

Garling has demanded to see you."

Charlie rubbed his eyes. "Christ. Twitty, can't you make her go away?"

"She has persuaded me that it is urgent."

Charlie waved a helpless hand. James Twitterfield stepped aside, revealing thirty-eight year old Monica Garling, renowned spin doctor of Hollywood fame, a West Coast import by William Denson for his son's profit.

"Charlie," she said, nodding. He opened his mouth, but she kept talking. "Did I just see Tina Point leave this house?" Her hair was a composite color of a hundred different shades of uncertainty, expiring somewhere between dried brown and parched blond. Charlie opened his mouth again, but to no avail. "I told you to deny her any entrance to the vicinity, remember? This isn't good for your image, you know. People followed Tina here. They know that she came in the house. She's probably talking to them right now. What did she say to you?"

Charlie scratched the back of his head. His eyes strayed to the remote control to the TV, resting on the mute button.

Monica circled the couch, an angry vulture ruffling its feathers. "Charlie! Listen to me. Your father hired me to get you away from Tina Point and try to guarantee you your spot for a confessional. Remember? The Private Points of Tina Point. Remember?"

Charlie didn't look at her, instead choosing to stroke the remote. He mumbled something that even he didn't understand.

"Huh? What, Charlie? Listen to me. Stay away from her! What did she say to you?"

"She invited me to a party," he said. "And said she was sorry."

"Sorry!" Monica made sure that there was no doubt in anyone's mind that this was the worst word she had ever heard. "She can't be sorry, Charlie. She broke your nose! Remember?

Remember?"

"Of course I fucking remember!" Charlie said, looking at her. "I remember. My nose hurts. But what am I supposed to do? Go on hating her?"

"You don't hate her, Charlie. Aren't you worried about her? Think about how angry she gets when she's drunk. You don't want to go to that party."

"You told me that she gets angry when she gets drunk. I know. She broke my nose. I just think, like you said, like, I need to be there to watch her when she drinks. I don't want her to get out of control and hit more people."

Monica Garling tasted this sentiment. Her tongue flicked in and out of its cave. Tina Point would be telling the press that she had apologized to Charlie Denson. The media was hovering by the driveway, probably taking pictures and making assumptions as they spoke. They would have evidence that Tina Point had been to see Charlie. They needed something new.

She nodded a few times. "She gets angry when she drinks. That's true, Charlie. You may want to watch her."

Charlie's back settled with her assent.

"Go to that party. That's a good idea. Good idea, Charlie. I like it." She smiled at him. "I'll go, too. I'd like to see... to see how she is when she drinks. Then I can know what you know."

Charlie looked at her and shrugged. "Okay."

Monica smiled again. She didn't need to know how Tina was when she was drunk. This was irrelevant. Tina was an angry drunk. That was what Monica knew. She had never met Tina, but she knew that this was what and who Tina was when she drank. She had, of course, made sure Charlie knew it, too. The one thing Monica Garling did want to know was who was there behind Tina, making her know things.

The party was a a success because success is determined by popularity. Sleezee was there with the B.D Posse. Two members of Violet Night were there. Guns was there, but Riches was due in court the next day and had politely declined the invitation. The Flower Sisters, the Hopeful Trio, Jake Woodpond, Gina Bolani were all there. Some of their friends arrived with them. Tina's penthouse was polluted with celebrity.

Nick had told her to introduce him as a friend. The friends that cluttered around the stars were all sleepwalking, captivated in a dizzied trance as they wandered through a world that was not their own. The only uncelebrity who seemed at ease was Nick, who slipped through the crowd to greet the larger names who arrived. They shook his hand but their eyes jumped over him and landed on Tina as she inevitably trotted to his side. He only glowed with peripheral light.

Expensive drinks were served by tray-wielding assistants. Tina drank Tina Fires, a red-pink liquid of dubious quality unless quality was wholly dependent on the efficacy of its alcoholic effects. If this was the case, anyone in the room would have heartily recommended Tina Fire, a drink usually reserved for girls who disliked the taste of alcohol but relished its effects.
Sleezee was the first person to introduce himself to Nick. His dreadlocks hung like a curtain over his eyes. His teeth glittered with metal. "Yo brother, what's good?"

Nick smiled: analyzing, adjusting, interpreting, predicting. "Everything's good tonight."
"That'll be true." Sleezee raised a metal chalice that held a metallic liquid. His eyes brightened with a misfired epiphany. "I am hip-hop, brother."

"You by yourself?"

"Fuck yeah. Fuck the imitators, you know what I'm saying? It's real right here. I move music."

"Move it?"

Sleezee's eyes were glossy with fame, power, and MDMA. "Ain't no one controllin me anymore, brother. Control is me!" He spun around, thrusting his chalice in the air. He was a metaphysical king in a solipsistic realm, swimming the waves of media but not lifting his head above the water.
"Don't mind him, mate. He's rolling." Brett Fandor, the lead singer of Violet Night, appeared by Nick's side. He scrutinized Nick's face through the blur of his drunk and dismissed it, recognizing it only as a deposit for his forthcoming thesis. He lit a cigarette. "Fucking bloke thinks he's the ruler of music. He's just the ruler of his own pile of shit, yeah?" Brett Fandor's accent plunked like raindrops, sometimes musical, sometimes hollow. "These mainstream artists are right shit, don't you agree?

"These factory-perfect products, they're all on the radio but nowhere else," Fandor said. "They rebel aimlessly, yeah? Propaganda of a nation saturated by insecurity and drama."

"You don't think you are?" Guns had overheard the conversation. "Just cuz no one likes your fag music doesn't mean it's fucking unique. We get money, you don't. We have millions of fans, you have thousands."

"My lyrics are poetry," Fandor blew a stream of smoke dangerously close to Gun's face. "They have messages."

"You can't define poetry and you can't define music. You don't like our shit, we don't like your shit. But guess what? At least we know we're doing it for money. You think you've got some self-righteous shit going on but you make money, we make money, this is our fucking job. We entertain, man. We don't create."

It was a sense of desperation that permeated the air of the penthouse. The musicians had all struggled into the industry and were now enslaved by it. Once they were paid, the inspiration was the money instead of the music. They were cash crops and livestock, harvested and slaughtered again and again. The plain they inhabited was ridden with the ash of their predecessors and the seeds of their successors. They were only as powerful as their appeal.

Tina bloomed from between the shoulders of Fandor and Guns with the air-filled limbs of a drunk fairy. She was frowning. "Nick," she said. His name was irradiated by Tina Fires. "Nick, Charlie is here." She was tugging at his sleeve.

Nick looked down at her and excused himself from Guns and Brett Fandor who, unable to change their opinions and unable to supplement them with additional monologues, had taken to a moody silence, the last resort of the uninformed. He bent into Tina, whose breath was tinged with the orange mint of her drinks. She didn't move her head to allow him space. Her lips dangled dangerously close to his.

"Go, greet him. Act happy to see him. I'll be watching."

"He came with a woman. She's ugly." Tina giggled in her satisfaction.

"Come on, let's go," he said in the polite, amicable tone of someone trying to get a dog to go on a walk.

Tina bounced through the crowd and he followed her down the polished wooden stairs of the loft, around a corner, and down a carpeted set of stairs. Charlie Denson was at the door looking over the heads of everyone else. His roaming eyes stopped when he saw Tina. They swept by Nick, as if trying to consider him as a variable, but the equation was evidently too much to process.

"Charlie!" She said explosively. She hugged him and backed away, looking at Monica Garling.

"Who's your friend?"

"My friend? Oh... uh... Monica. Her name is Monica."

"Monica, nice to meet you!"

Monica showed her teeth, but didn't smile. "Tina Point. The pleasure is mine."

Nick saw analysis. His eyes met Monica's. They stared without acknowledging the other. The unmoving eyes, the cold gaze, they both immediately knew they were enemies. Nick had anticipated this possibility. It was in his job to anticipate everything. It was in Monica's job to anticipate everything. One of them would have to outmaneuver every single set of parameters of every single scenario that the other had created as possibilities.

Monica walked straight towards him, burning an endless potential of evasions by introducing herself to him. "Hello there. My name is Monica Garling." She stuck her hand out. They shook, still staring at each other.

"Ah, Monica Garling? Nice to meet you. I can finally put a face to the name," Nick said. He had never heard of her.

"And you are..." Her eyes glistened with his advance.

"Nicholas. Nicholas Freednam."

"Nice to meet you, Nicholas."

"Nick."

"All right. What brings you here?"

"Oh, I'm just a friend of Tina's. How about you? Are you Denson's..." He raised his eyebrows to finish the question.

"I'm his sister's friend. I wanted to see what one of these things is like."

They smiled in mutual respect for their duel. Tina came back with Tina Fires for all of them. Nick took his, Monica took two. "It was nice to meet you, Mr. Freednam." She retreated to Charlie and began talking to him, giving him one of the drinks. Charlie tactlessly looked in Nick's direction.

"Who is she?" Tina asked, sipping at her drink. Nick looked down at her. It was obvious to him that she didn't care.

"Just a friend of Charlie's, I guess," he said. He extended the crook of his arm. Tina looked at it, puzzled, but she burst with excitement upon reaching the gesture's significance, eagerly looping her arm through his own. "Come on," Nick said. "Let's get drunk."

"I already am!" Tina said. She took another sip of her drink.

Charlie required a firm arm when he saw Nick take Tina from him. "That guy's got my girl. That's my girl!"

Monica pitied him for his masculinity. Men walked on legs of glass pride. When those were broken, they couldn't stand, only roll or stagger or charge. She was typing in her Blackberry, so she didn't look at him when she spoke: "Don't. It's what he wants."

"Wants? Who? That guy wants to fuck my girl!"

Monica swallowed her rage, always in awe at the vast, idiotic depths of territoriality. "You didn't want anything to do with her. She broke your nose. Why would you want her now?"

"He's got my girl," Charlie said glumly.

"He doesn't have Tina. No one has anyone. He's her spin."

"Him? He's like, fucking, our age."

"Trust me. I know. I'm going to find out who he is. My assistant is going to look him up." She finished the e-mail on her Blackberry and strapped it to her belt. She crossed her arms and waited while Charlie marched off to talk to someone who he assumed knew him. When her Blackberry buzzed, she detached it from her belt with all the speed of a cowboy in a face-off. But the bullets were blanks. Nicholas Freednam had brought back no results.

She gritted her teeth. "That bastard." The name was an alias. He didn't even have the courtesy to be fair. Her eyes skittered from Charlie to the loft above. She saw the man who called himself Nicholas Freednam staring down at her over a railing, holding a Tina Fire in one hand and Tina point in the other. He waved.

"Fuck." She strode over to Charlie and interrupted what was undoubtedly a circular and uneventful conversation about Charlie's recent feats. "Let's get your girl. Look at this, this guy has his arm around her. Go up to him and introduce yourself."

"My girl," Charlie confirmed. "She doesn't want to be with him, she's just trying to make me jealous."

"Sure," Monica said.

When Nick saw Monica and Charlie begin shouldering their way up the stairs, he hooked his arm tighter around Tina's shoulders. She looked up at him and smiled, showing him her empty glass.

"My sixth one. I don't even know what's in this, but it's gooooood!"

He smiled. "I'm glad."

Charlie emerged from the crush of people with the mask of pleasantness. It didn't look good on him. He swung his arm towards Nick with the weight of social ineptitude. "I don't think we met. I'm Charlie."

Monica was hovering behind Charlie. Nick smiled. "My name is Nick. Nice to meet you."

"Nick?" Monica echoed.

"Do you like the party, Charlie?" Nick assumed the role of host. "Do you know where the drinks are?"

Charlie reeled from this unexpected conversational thrust. "I... kind of saw them somewhere. Where?"

"He's not Nick."

"They're over there by the counter. I can get one for you if you want."

"The name, it's not Nick. He's lying!"

"What, Monica?" Charlie turned.

"I'll get you a drink," Nick said. He lightly, delicately, placed a kiss on the top of Tina's head as Charlie turned. She glowed for him, looking up, and he brushed her fingers with his, dragging them through that web of promise and desire. "I'll be right back."

"Hi Tina, how are you?" Charlie asked, stepping into Nick's place.

Tina was still warm with Nick's calculated kiss. She looked after him, vaguely aware of Charlie as an imposter and a nuisance. Her mind was electric with Tina Fires. Monica stepped in front of her, blocking Nick from view.

"Tina, what is your friend's name?"

"Nick," Tina said. Her lips hovered on the name, tasting it.

"I don't think it is," Monica said. "Actually, I know that it's not. He's lying to you."

"Lying to me?"

"Yeah, that's not his name!"

Tina blinked at the stranger in front of her. Her eyes rolled up and down Monica's dehydrated hair. It looked like the fur of a starved and dying animal. She converted her dislike for it into female politics: "Oh, I just love your hair. How did you get it this color?"

Charlie was close to stamping his foot at the lack of attention, but he converted his indignant pride into male politics: "Tina, hey, want to go somewhere else? This place is too sweaty and crowded."

Tina turned to him.

"You need to think about your friend," Monica reminded her. "He's been lying to you. His name isn't Nick. His name isn't Nick!"

Tina Point heard the words but they were empty of meaning. Stripping Nicholas Freednam of his name stripped him of his identity. She knew Nick. A woman with disgusting hair and the hints of wrinkles was not someone Tina Point would ever believe.

Nick appeared with two Tina Fires in his hand, cutting in front of Charlie under the pretense of handing him one of the drinks. Tina looked up at him with an expectant smile. He tipped her chin towards him with a thumb and kissed her on the lips while Monica and Charlie watched. Both members of the audience exploded. Monica's head reeled with the implications of the kiss.

Charlie was stripped to his possessive instincts and he erupted into swears, erratic gestures, and threats.

Nick ignored them and leaned into Tina. "Let's go outside," he suggested, already slipping his hand into hers. He gently pulled her through the crowd. Tina Point felt like she was walking on water, afloat with misplaced emotion and misconstrued affections. Monica grabbed her Blackberry to conjure sharks that would tear Nick apart for his transgression. While she did this,

Charlie followed the pair down the stairs and out the door.

Richard Ames almost choked on his morning coffee when he turned on the television and saw a slideshow of photographs with Nick and Tina holding hands outside her New York penthouse. The title of the presentation was "Tina Point Settles on Substance Instead of Style." Analysts were talking over the memorable events of the night with feverish excitement.
"-this is one of the most revealing outlets into these stars' lives," one man said. "Especially

Charlie Denson, whose spin doctor accompanied him to this party. He wasn't allowed off the leash, but he still managed to bite everyone around him. Watch this clip, folks."

Charlie Denson threw open the door of Tina's penthouse, spilling out into the street. Tina and Nick were holding hands on the sidewalk, looking at the sky. Nick turned around as Charlie rushed at him and landed a fist on Nick's cheek. Nick went down on the ice. He labored to his feet. Charlie was shouting at him. Most of the demands had been translated to the television's beeping language of the unacceptable. Monica Garling had gotten to Charlie's side and now she was holding his arm. The shaky footage froze.

"That's Monica Garling right there, folks. She's a famous spin doctor. Can you believe this?

William Denson was trying to teach his son how to feast on Tina's fame so he could grow fat from it. Some of these people are just... just amazing. Now watch what happens. This will simply stun you."

The footage resumed. Monica got in front of Charlie and pointed at Nick.

"Your name is not Nicholas Freednam! You're a liar!" She pointed to the cameras. "Are you listening? This is Tina Point's spin doctor. Not only is he lying to her and everyone, he's manipulating her. Look at this! Look!" She gestured frantically in the direction of Nick and Tina, who were again holding hands. Nick put his lips to Tina's hair, maybe whispering something, maybe kissing her. Charlie fumed behind Monica, but didn't move.

Richard Ames was trembling.

"Now okay, here's an interview we managed to get with Nicholas Freednam who, of course, is no 'spin doctor,' just Tina's new beau."

Nick was rubbing his swelling cheek as he spoke into the camera: "Tina and I met a few weeks ago. I've liked her since we met, but she was dating Charlie so I was just a friend. But, you know, Charlie Denson didn't treat her right. Look at him. He can't control his anger." He released a perfectly self-deprecating laugh. "I'd rather it be me than Tina, of course. I'm glad that he's out of her life."

The analysts were back on the screen. "Folks, we've looked up Nicholas Freednam. There are no records of him being famous or a spin doctor or anything. He's just someone who is desperately in love with Tina Point. I think we all remember the events a few nights ago, where Tina Point allegedly pushed Charlie Denson hard enough to break his nose. I think we can put a new light on that occurrence now, don't you think?"

There was a Hines knock at his door, so Richard muted the television. "Yeah."

Hines peered into the room with his standard, preliminary inspection and then entered. He cleared his throat and his eyes flickered to the TV, which was showing Nick being punched by Charlie at a different angle. He opened his mouth, but Richard spun on his chair and looked out his window.

"Hines, can you do me a favor and explain what the fuck happened? That kid and fucking Tina Point are dating?"

Hines padded over to the desk. "It seemed like that last night, sir. This morning, well, I can't find Mr. Freednam anywhere."

"What?"

"His cellphone is off. He checked out of his motel room in Ithaca. He's not in Tina's penthouse, but Tina is. She says that he left shortly after the media dispersed and the party ended around dawn."

"Did she say why he left?"

"He told her, sir, that he would 'be right back.'"

"Jesus." Richard rubbed his eyes. "So now what?"

"Well, sir, we're back on track. The media is devouring Monica Garling for falsely accusing Nick of being a spin and devouring Charlie Denson for being an all-around menace to society."

"But how could Garling have been falsely accusing Nick? How could no one have found anything about all the other shit he's spun?"

"I have two theories, Mr. Ames."

Richard turned back to his desk.

Hines nodded. "Either Nicholas Freednam is the best, most discreet spin doctor in the world or... or he never was one in the first place. I did some fact-checking on his resume and Harvard has no record of a Nicholas Freednam."

Richard's eyes widened. "Hines, are you fucking telling me you didn't research this guy beforehand?"

"Well, sir-"

"Hines, how the fuck did you find this ghost?"

"He found me, sir. He called and explained that he understood our predicament. He guaranteed it would be fixed. You told me to give him whatever he wanted and he said that he had other clients and he sounded busy, so... and then it seemed pointless. He was doing the job."

"He's a nobody that wanted to be somebody."

"If he had wanted to be somebody, sir, he would have stuck around Tina Point."

Richard Ames chewed on this wisdom. "You paid him already?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well he did his fucking job, didn't he? He spun you, me, Tina Point, and America."
"Sir, I believe he even spun himself. How can anyone know who they are when the only way they know is by what people think about them?

"I don't think that's right, Hines."

"Yes, sir."

Richard Ames spent an hour sitting at his desk and staring into space. Eventually, he summoned the strength to stand, walk to the window, and pull down the shades. He ordered a whiskey and watched William Denson appear on television to tell America that his son was going through difficult times and would be undergoing therapy.

Good, Richard thought. A kid like Charlie Denson needed some serious help.

The Elevator (Story)

2009-09-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

Currently getting rejected in magazines.

A Long Day at the Office (Story)

2009-09-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

Harry Maxwell sat at his desk clutching a handful of papers. His rounded shoulders were hunched into a protective shell. He jumped whenever he heard footsteps behind his cubicle. He would be next. He knew it. It would begin with a quiet, beckoning voice: "Harry, may I have a word?" A platitude would follow, then some form of Hallmark farewell, and he would be unemployed. He had seen three people leave Mr. Corner's office with the swollen faces of repressed tears. First, it was the arrival of the consultant. Now, it was the layoffs.

What would Mary say? Oh, she would make a martyr of herself. Mary the martyr, poor Mary, married to a bald man with a mediocre job. He twisted his mouth. She could barely afford groceries for the two kids. He squeezed the papers tighter. Each one drooped in his hands, one after the other, like a bouquet of wilted flowers. The groceries for the kids and all of her shoes. How many pairs of shoes did you need? How many paintings, how many obscure pieces of furniture and silverware and flower vases? No corner of the house could go unadorned. He gritted his teeth.

Footsteps. Behind him. He squeezed his eyes shut.

"Harry?" It was Bill.

"What?" He had the papers in his fist.

"Aren't you leaving? It's almost 5:30. Did Corner make you work late?"

Harry cleared his throat and felt the blood in his head drain to his face, surging lava flows of embarrassment and relief and shame. He jammed the crumpled papers into his briefcase and stood, turning to Bill.

Bill's eyes rolled up and down Harry's sweaty face. "You really need to stop working so hard, Harry. You're going to kill yourself."

Harry 's lips split into a broken-glass smile. "I know. I'm just going to sleep when I get home." Just to delay the inevitable. The last morning on the job. Tomorrow. He had escaped today, but tomorrow would be it.

"A shame about Tina and Larry and uh... Rob, huh?" Bill asked.

"Yeah." Talk through the teeth. Move robot legs to the elevator. Get home safe.

"Do you think that's it or do you think they're going to nab a few more?"

"I don't know," Harry said as the elevator doors opened and waited for them. "I don't know."

At dinner, he could feel her eyes on him. Tiny razors, slicing him a little with every blink. She could tell something was wrong. He stared down at the slippery chunk of smoked salmon in front of him, watching as it slowly secreted orange juice into a pile of stiff rice. Jill was watching him, too. Ned was already eating. He was fourteen, too old to care about his parents.

"How was work today, honey?" A parrot's voice. Repeating the same question every day, every dinner, for the rest of his life. A roundabout way of asking if anything was wrong or if anything was right. A dishonest and oblique way of interrogation.

"Fine." He took a deep breath and impaled the salmon.

"Daddy, look at what I made in school!" Jill's voice.

He kept his eyes on the plate. "Good. That's good." He almost had the salmon to his mouth, but it wriggled from the fork and slopped back down next to the rice.

Ned laughed. "Great reflexes, Dad."

Mary laughed. "It's a little tough to get a hold of. You could try cutting it into tinier pieces instead of eating the whole thing?"

The question that was an answer and a criticism. Harry swallowed.

"Daddy, you didn't even look at my picture!"

"Jilly, honey, he's trying to eat. He can look at it later."

His eyes darted to Mary, lingered, then went to Jill. "No, show it to me. I'd like to look at it now."

Jill's tiny hand held a piece of cardboard embedded with macaroni. A man with a briefcase, going into a building. "It's you, Daddy!" She squeaked. "Going to work. A long day at the office!"

He opened his mouth, closed it, and looked back at the salmon. No more office soon. Then what would they think? The plate was flooded with salmon juice. Mary's eyes were on him again. He put a hand on his head to shield himself from the burn, but when his fingers touched the sullen, lonely wisps of his hair, he dropped his hand back to the table.

A sniffle. "Mommy, Daddy doesn't like my picture."

"Oh, I'm sure he does. He's just had a long day at the office."

"A long day at the office," he said, looking up at her. The phrase that whitewashed any stains in a domestic setting. There wouldn't be an office after tomorrow. What then? What excuse would she give herself for ending up with him? She had made a mistake, marrying him. A poor investment. A husband whose age went faster and career slowed down. No more job. The house would have to go. Vacations and possessions and dreams, they would have to go. It was the implosion of the most tepid of American dreams. He had been hovering in it, just barely, now it was all going to evaporate.

He realized they were all staring at him. He refocused on Mary, baring his teeth. "A long day at the office," he said again, carefully drawing his breath. His thoughts throbbed in an inflamed cloud. "No has ever said that before, have they?" He paused, waving his fork in the air. "That's real goddamn original. A long day at the office." He narrowed his eyes and jabbed his fork into the salmon as he spoke each word: "Just. Another. Day."

Jill's bottom lip was trembling. A few silent tears bulged from her eyes. Ned was staring at him with an open mouth. Mary's cheeks had turned pink, sunburned with shame. "Kids, why don't you go watch TV for... for a little while?" Mary's voice, the shivers of restrained emotion, the rapidly melting glacier.
Jill started crying, so Ned took her from her chair and led her quietly into the living room. Harry heard him whispering reassuring words to her. Probably telling her it was just a very long day at the office. If only it were that simple.

"What is wrong with you?" Mary's face fell, tears squirmed out of her eyes. He watched. No rational argument here, no confrontation. Just... this. The fluttery little girl he had fallen in love with had turned into a fluttery little woman. And who had she fallen in love with? Not him. Just someone she thought he was. Someone who had long days at the office but came in with presents and smiles and paychecks. Paychecks.

He clenched the table, looked at her, looked down at his untouched dinner, and pushed his way from the table. The chair screeched on the tiles. He paced to the refrigerator, which was pasted with pictures of green days and pool visits and Disneyland. A tapestry of normalcy.

Behind him, the parrot still squawked: "...already having a hard time in first grade and... and she brings something she's finally proud of and what do you do? What do you do?" He listened to the momentum carefully. The inevitable revving of indignation. "You just... you don't even look, then you practically yell at her for it! And Ned? You don't talk to him anymore, but he still looks up to you. He wants to be just like you!" And then the combustion of sobs, the sputtering of the engine, the inferno of self-pity.

He waited, looking at the pictures and chewing his lip. He turned around. "He wants to be just like me? He barely talks to me. It's always you, Mary. You're the confidant. Our teenage boy is going to his mother for advice on being a teenage boy!"

She was on her feet now. Her shoulders were shaking. "Keep it down! How does he have a choice? You're always working and then when you come home, you're a grouch. If you're not a grouch, you're tired. Or your Blackberry is still going off and you answer it! What's more important to you?"

He inhaled, inflating, and then deflated with a fatal whisper: "It won't matter soon." He savored every word.

They stared at each other.

"W-what?" She gasped.

He looked at her with satisfaction. "Lay-offs. More than fifteen of us are getting laid off. I've heard the talks. I know what's coming."

Her eyes desperately scrambled across his face, then around the kitchen. Surveying the last luxuries, the now condemned goods of a condemned life. And she sank to the chair again. "But... what... what will we do? Ned needs braces, just for starters. That alone will cost... and... the house?" She peered up at him.

He looked down and said nothing.

The next day, Mr. Corner called Harry Maxwell into his office. He motioned to the chair across from his expansive desk and walked to the window with his hands clasped behind his back. "Now, Harry, you've been with us a fair amount of time. Ten years? Twelve?"

"Fifteen, sir."

Mr. Corner turned around and nodded. "Fifteen. That's good. I like that." He smiled, but it quickly faded, like a brief burst of sunlight on a cloudy day. His gray eyebrows dived towards his eyes and he sat down with a sigh. "The problem we're facing now, Harry, is a lack of productivity in our workforce. I'm sure you've seen several of your coworkers leaving here with less-than-pleasant looks on their faces."

Harry nodded.

Mr. Corner glanced at the ceiling distantly, tipping in his chair. He put his hands behind his head. "It's an inevitable thing, really. With the economy the way it is, I mean. And, of course, everyone has done an impressive job keeping us in such good shape. But this is a competitive business. You know that and I know that."

He dropped back to the desk and steepled his hands, leaning into his elbows. "Some people shine in times like this and others don't. You, Harry, I think you know what kind of person you are."

Harry looked back, waiting, holding his breath.

"That's right, Harry. You... Harry, you shine. Your numbers are phe-nom-en-al. Now, I've spoken to the Board and they've all agreed that you have serious leadership potential. We're talking about a regional position, Harry. It's big, but I think you can handle it. At least twenty, maybe thirty people under you and..." Mr. Corner leaned closer and waggled his eyebrows. "A substantial increase in salary. What do you say?"

Harry stared back, still holding his breath.

That night, dinner was eaten in silence. Mary slept on the couch. Jill didn't look at him, Ned didn't talk to him. Jill started doing poorly in school, Ned stopped coming home for dinner. Mary grew paler and weaker and more tired, often passing days on the couch. More often than not, Harry would come home and the dining room would be dark. No dinner would be prepared, no children would be in the house.

All of this, because of a long day at the office.

Blaise Stories: Short Stories and Essays by Blaise Lucey

Finding My Writing (Improved!)

Finding My Writing...

The Compassion Revolution, Chapter 1

Jon Stewart Goes Stern Father on Condoleezza Rice (Essay)

The Compassion Revolution...

The Elevator (Story)

The Cruise *Revised* (Story)

The Dig (Story)

Election Season (Story)

Glenn Beck: Oscar Nominee? (Salon.com Article)

Transferred Political Articles to Salon.com. http://open.salon.com/blog/blucey

Destination Inc. (Story)

The Never Ending Parties of Our United States (Forum Article)

The Too-True Facebook Conspiracy (Forum Article)

Hope and Change Are No Match for Our Generation (Essay)

The Island (Story)

Amazon's Kindle: The Ipod of Books, Papers, and Everything Else (Essay)

The Cruise (Story)

Generation ADD (Essay)

The Mirror is Not a Window for the Soul (Story)

A New Kind of Truth (Story)

The Elevator (Story)

A Long Day at the Office (Story)

The Cruise Revised (Story)