A Scroll of Found Writing

Iron Gods

c. 2000

How much of your life is an absolute lie? You think you're well-informed because you read every newspaper, watch the news, browse a million and one Web sites. And yet, every word that is spoken is a lie. Every sentence typed has been crafted and conformed to a very precise mindset. Every image has been chosen and edited to inflame you in an exact, precise way. You think you're doing well because you have a good job and you make good money and buy nice things. And yet you're just a pawn, a skill set, a cog in the vast wheel of the world economy that dictates the true direction of the world. Your purpose, regardless of what your profession is, is to earn money by performing certain actions for a certain number of hours a day so you may earn green slips of paper to spend on things other corporations make so the whole damn thing can keep whirring.

You think you're happy because you go out and have a good time, and you do what you want. And yet your beer and cigarettes, your socially approved drugs, are poison when ingested in the quantity that you do. Marijuana's not a tool of enlightenment, it's a joke. And nature's only an option if there's a chemical toilet and a shower nearby. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to posit the following theorem, first introduced by Moby: Everything is Wrong. I mean, what are you doing? You're sitting in a cubicle in this over-conditioned building in the middle of a crowded city. You're sitting in front of a glass and plastic monitor, bombarded by electrons, reading information that may or not may be of concern to you. Your back hurts, your eyes are sore, the air's awful. The weather isn't bad for December, but you never consider that having 70-degree weather in Boston in December might be a bad thing.

You drive to work by yourself in a plastic and steel vehicle that burns toxic fuel, thus increasing the heat. You have ATM cards that hand out cash whenever you ask, credit cards when the cash isn't enough, and a million ways to buy the same crap. Meanwhile, Torquemada's getting ready to torch 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Representational democracy has been exposed for the lie that it is. You've known, all along, that it was, that government really didn't matter because you and I and everyone else who isn't a rich white man doesn't have a voice and corporations have been buying and selling politicians since the late 19th century. You see the executioner bringing William IV up the stairs because William IV had bad sex with an intern and then didn't tell the world about it, and you realize that the Constitution means nothing, these jackasses prancing around in Washington are doing absolutely NOTHING for you, that everything you've been told since kindergarten was a damn lie, and your faith is gone, but you can't shut it off.

You have a million different media sources all saying the exact same thing. No matter how hard you try, a newspaper or a TV or a Web page is screeching about the same thing, parroting each other and reinforcing the idea that you should really care. And you try and shut it all off and make it all go away, but then you're soaked in quiet, and you've been trained that the only times you should be quiet are during tests and when you're sleeping, so you turn something on or pick up a paper and read the same garbage they want you to read all over again. And eventually you care, because you can't get away from the shit, so you give in. In a sense, you do care, but not how they want you to care. You care about more important things, like the fact that everything seems wrong and NOTHING - not one goddamned thing in your life - has turned out the way you wanted it to.

But you can't admit that - you'd never admit that to yourself - so you get really, really, really angry at Henry Hyde, until a brilliant commercial comes on and takes all your troubles away. Why Won't You Play With The Other Marionettes? You can't possibly think of any other alternative to the way you're living now. You want change - your body, mind, heart and soul scream for it. Is it you? Is it the world around you? Is it this crappy 17% marketed and advertised lowest common denominator world that everyone has been force-adapted to live in? You remember the weird kids in high school, the ones who didn't join Student Council, or the cool kids who didn't give a shit and smoked pot all day long. Is that what you need? You know you're doing better than them, you know you are.

Because...I mean, look at all the stuff you own! And yet, something has to give. Something has to give way. But you can't think of what to do - you're paralyzed because all your schooling has prepared you for is to be obedient, to sit in uncomfortable chairs, and to make money as quickly as possible, regardless of any mitigating factor. All you know of history is that things were a lot worse back then, before America, because there were wars and stuff and people didn't bathe and you can't even conceive of a world without skin moisturizer. But something's got to give, something has to change. I mean, you don't think the world can just continue on this merry little jaunt forever, do you? You don't think it's always going to be like this, do you? I mean, you don't think the goddamn United States of America is going to exist forever until the planet explodes, do you?

You don't think IBM and AT&T and Dow and Proctor-Gamble and the Coca-Cola Corporation are going to last forever, do you? No, something's got to give, and if it's not the two-legged primates running around, building stuff, ripping holes in the earth and shooting each other, if the humans won't change, then something else will, like global climate patterns. Maybe the sea-going plankton that's the basis for all life on the planet will die out. Maybe a comet will hit the Earth, except without Bruce Willis there to save the planet. Maybe Iraq will quit toying with everyone and launch that one nuke that begins Armageddon. And it'll be the end of the world. Or should I say, the end of your world. Because everything will die out, and the cities will burn, but the planet will go on and adapt to the assfucking we gave it.

And new life may evolve, or it might not. But the planet will still revolve around the sun for the next 7 billion years, until the sun expands and atomizes the planet. The Tyranny of Belief But let's face it. No matter what happens, you can't do anything to change it. I mean, look at you. You're just one person on a planet of almost 6 billion. Let's write that out: 6,000,000,000. You're nothing special. You're just a virus gone out of control. You're a drone, buzzing around for the queen bee, and if anything threatening (read: different) comes along, you'll have a kneejerk reaction and plunge your stinger into it. And you'll die, but the hive will be all right. You have to believe this. All the evidence points at it. Statistically, you're nothing. Psychologically, you can be classified, filed, categorized down to the nervous twitch of your fingers.

Sociologically, you've been profiled from birth, starting with a pink or blue blanket and going through to spending habits and opinion polls. To the United States government, you're a number, a nine-digit number that pays it money to fuck you over. But you can't accept this. You just can't...you had hopes, you had aspirations, you had dreams of a better life. It can't be over - there still has to be hope - if there were only some way to escape... But escape's impossible. There's no more wilderness. The Amazon is still being torched so McDonalds can graze cows for their shitty food. Central and Eastern Europe still looks like a tar pit. The radiation from the Chernobyl meltdown hasn't gone away. And no one's selling the islands anymore, and they're drinking Pepsi in the Congo. But you see, the problem isn't with the world, it's in your head.

Your mind is a cage, wrought with beliefs that have been hammered into you since you came out of the womb. And if you found the door of the cage unlocked, you'd scurry out and realize that you knew absolutely nothing about the way the world really works. Your survival skills are nonexistent. You've been so disconnected from your roots, from nature, from the elements, from instinct that you're broken into fragments, and nothing has joined together and nothing fits right anymore. And so you dart right back into your cage and slam the door. After all, it's not so bad - it's comfy, and you've got this great apartment and friends to hang out with and the the bartender at your local haunt knows you, and you own a Playstation and a PC and a brand new Jeep Cherokee, and besides, you've got two weeks of vacation time coming up.

So you go out and drink and smoke and maybe hook up and finally you pass out drunk at 1 A.M., and you're gonna be a mess at work tomorrow. And while you sleep, the men with the cold smiles and the iron eyes smile with satisfaction, and they turn off the stars.

Flying

c. 2000

One time, I was on a plane by myself. I was leaving everything I knew, everyone I loved, everywhere I had been, to try and stake my claim. To get my career, my passion, and my life going. I looked out the scratchy Plexiglass window. I saw the sea of clouds below me. I saw the horizon, infinite and daring. I looked down at the green and brown earth. And a wave of vertigo overcame me. I grabbed the armrests tightly, squeezing my eyes shut, trying to make the world stop spinning...no good.

I could feel, concretely feel, every inch of every foot of every mile between me and the ground. At that moment, aerodynamics didn't mean a damn thing - the only thing keeping me and the rest of my plane from falling 35,000 feet to my death was my sheer willpower. I was freefalling in a blue void, and I couldn't make it stop. I had never been afraid of flying before.

In the new place. Lying in bed. Dreaming of loves and drives in the process of dying. Candles at various places, since it soothes me. Evolution is chaos measured out in observable spans. Everything always changes, reacts, nothing is static. I'm no different. I have gained and lost and smiled and frowned and all the rest. I'm no different. My eyes shut. And I suddenly bolt upright in bed as HE is there, enveloping me, my essence, my body, I can't scream, he has wings, he's filling and growing beyond me, and for one brief second, for one timeless instant, I know what power is... power is the fire of heaven under your wings...

And nothing is ever the same.

Still it continues. Still it goes on. I'm about to make a bad choice. It will affect me in ways I could never have imagined. It will be a bleak period in my life, bleaker than I first recognize. It will stifle me in ways I won't see until much later. Something knows I'm making a bad choice. I'm sleeping. And I'm flying. I'm three stories above the ground. I'm floating above a parking lot outside my apartment building. And I can feel it, I can feel it in my stomach, the sensation that tells me you are the only one who can decide where to fly to.

I wake up.

Tied down shackled chained to the ground wrapped in iron and thrown in a river Lilliputian ropes be practical buy the sky and sell the sky two feet swallowed by the ground someone set me free, okay? I start working. The evidence of some of that work still exists elsewhere on the Web. Most of it is inside me. For I'm seeking ekstasis.

Waking up. Sun shines. Blue sky masks cold wind. A culmination. A confusion. A confirmation. And a clay mask slides off my face and shatters on the ground. So then there's me. Just me. No expectations, no worries, nothing that has been forced on me from outside. No chains. Just me. And it's scary, because at least when you're chained down, you have an idea of what you're capable of. Here, there are no boundaries. The sky, literally, is the limit.

And I still have that sick feeling in my stomach. It'll always be there, to remind me of where I was, what I struggled against. I'm flying. Finally.

Thoughts Of Death Abounds

c. 2000

Geller was hunched over the shells, counting which ones were up and which were down. The shells were on the reed mat on top of the chalk circle that had been drawn on it. Next to the mat was the Eshu, cocunut with a shell face, surrounded by a cigar, toy vehicles, and $21 from my pocket. We sat facing each other. We had already given our thanks to Eshu, thanked our ancestors, and wished for protection for loved ones.

Now he was divining the will of the *orishas*, the divinities of the Yoruban culture of West Africa. He handed me two stones. One meant "yes", the other meant "no." Without looking, I put a stone in each hand and held them out. Then he gathered up the sixteen shells in his hand, and with a sharp slap, he cast them on the mat. He hunched over them, muttering, then looking up past me at - what? The air? Something else?

An orisha? Then he tapped my hand. I revealed the stone. Yes or no. This went on for about ten minutes. After each "yes" he would make a note. Then he sat up and told me what it all meant in that jazz-inflected voice that echoed Lenny Bruce. "You have two warnings. The first is for your brother. He's in trouble, death's stalking him. The other's for you." "Death?" "It came up 7-9. Thoughts of death abound. Hey, remember, death also means change.

But you have to perform an ebbo (sacrifice) for Oya' so Death will get off your brother's ass." He outlines the ebbo that I must perform for Andrew. "Second, your head's confused. You need seven ebbo oris. That'll get your head on straight. I'd also consider getting your own ori -" and he gestured towards a shell vase, brilliantly colored, hiding amongst the various objects that compose the Gellers' shrines to the orishas - "so you can feed your head on your own.

But you need these ebbo oris. Don't try to overextend yourself right now. Don't try to think beyond what you're comfortable with. Wait until your head's straight and then you can move forward." Later, I will find out that my own orisha is Obatala', the King of the White Cloth, who resides on the summit of the mountain with the pure white snow surrounding him, who sees everything, who is the only hermaphoditic deity in the Yoruba tradition (Obatala has both a male and female aspect, much like Hindu deities).

As a child of Obatala, I should never wear anything black. I think about the black sweater and Doc Martens I just bought a week ago and curse silently. It is also my destiny - not now, but somewhere down the road - to be initiated into the Yoruba tradition. This fills me with some sense of trepidation - after all, what do I know of African animistic traditions? - but also a sense of calm, of intuition telling me there may be something here.

I must also bring seven eggplants the next time I visit the Gellers as an ebbo for Oya', the orisha of the wind.

Monday morning. I have two hours before I get back on a plane to Pittsburgh. I'm in a park, atop a hill. With me, my purchases of the morning: a flask of Bacardi, a cigar, a container of chicken livers, nine eggplants, and nine pinwheels. The idea is that the wind will pull Death away from my brother. I offer the rum and cigar, I dig nine holes, bury the livers, put an eggplant on top of the holes, and plant the pinwheels around the circle.

And then I get the hell out of there.

I have had dreams that people close to me have died. They are quite vivid, and I believe they mean something at that particular point in time. I read Kristin's latest entry (http://www.sperare.com/new/28march00.html) and was reminded of those dreams. Meanwhile, yesterday I worked thirteen hours here in Pittsburgh and didn't mind at all. In fact, I was enthused. This was after I had written an angry letter to the resource manager at my company back in Boston. I told her that if I had known that I was expected to be, essentially, a consultant, working 13-hour days, travelling on site, working on boring, stupid projects - in short, if I was expected to give up my life to devote to my job - then I never would have taken the job.

I was ready to quit, give it all up, my salary, any prospect of growing in this stupid company, my security, and I told her that. The resource manager said she would see what she could do to help me.

Sometimes, you must be ready to lose everything before you grasp what you need.

Pygmalion

May 2000

There is something about the Internet that turns me into an utter fucking moron.

No, wait, it's more complex than that. I'm a trusting soul by nature, and having been online in one form or another since I was 15 has cultivated a certain deliberate naiveté within myself. I go online inherently trusting that there will be no bullshit, that everyone here has the same degree of openness and honesty that I do. Although I don't trumpet the private details of my life for all to see, I have been known to open up to people I've met online. Why not? After all, what's the worst that could happen?

This is about a girl, and we will call her Jane because that's what her ad said her name was.

Ah, yes, the online personal ad. A combination biography, F.A.Q., come-on and plea for attention. Like a personal home page, except (c)overtly looking for sex.

I had put the ad up in May of 2000. This is when my ex-girlfriend/roommate and I had finally called it quits, and suddenly a circuit flipped and my libido kicked into overdrive and the only thing I could think of was pairbonding with another human female as quickly as possible. This urge was sated after a number of encounters, some successful, some not. I became acquainted the three-hour date, and suddenly it became a model of what my romantic life was. However, after several months of meeting total strangers on the Internet and having sex with them or not, I decided that this was not what I wanted from my life, pleasant as afterglow could be. No, casual sex was all well and good, but after a while it became obvious that I was ready yet again for LUV, that LUV would solve all my problems, that I was back on my feet, having worked all that lust out of my system and ready to head back into the Real World, a wiser, more mature man.

So why was I back at the site? Well, an impending move threw into stark relief the fact that my destination offered me only a few friends and acquaintances, so what could it hurt to meet new people? I quickly threw together an ad saying I was looking for anyone, really, who seemed cool and who wanted to meet a Boston transplant. Looking at my old ad, however, prompted those nagging habits, and soon I was idly scanning available women in the Boston area.

Which is, of course, when I saw Jane's ad.

Red hair. That's always a good start. The lovely facial features didn't detract, either. The last good book she read was Modern Man in Search of His Soul by Jung. Outstanding. Her favorite sex scene was from Eyes Wide Shut – where Tom is into Nicole, and Nicole is into watching Tom be so into Nicole. Brava. Oh, what the hell.

What the hell.

A week passed and this totally left my mind until she replied, saying that she had been kayaking for four days and sorry she didn't get back to me and how are you, Scott? And I am fine, and tell me about your kayaking, oh and that's interesting, and you paint and play piano, do you? And you love jazz, and you grew up in the South, but your family now lives in California, and say, you wouldn't happen to have an instant messenger account, would you?

The IM window. There is a certain dread to the IM window, coupled with intangible possibility. It is a square, waiting to be filled. It's better than email, because it's closer to simulating actual conversation, but it is not ideal. However. It is safe, anonymous, and if they piss you off or scare you, there is always the blocking option. So.

She is at work, I am unemployed. We are both talking. And never in my life have I experienced instant chemistry, let alone over a fucking IM. But there it is, from nowhere, boom, and as stupid as it is, it cannot be ignored. Certainly not, as it just builds and builds and reactions are occurring and bonds are being formed and the next thing I know she's excusing herself, because she has a meeting at 6 and she needs to go to the bathroom beforehand and –

There is a certain something about a woman telling you she's going to masturbate at work that tends to short-circuit the higher brain functions.

Of course phone numbers are exchanged. And of course I call her later. And of course I am so ready to forget the lessons learned from before because this is hot, this is the sizzle, this is that amoral, will-to-power feeling that justifies itself, this is not just lust but mad lust and that is its own excuse.

And then she spills that the meeting she so recently attended, all flushed and glowing, regarded her flying out to San Francisco the next day after work, and she would not return to Boston for at least a week.

Now, normally I am a sensible man. Normally, I would be content to say Aw shucks and I guess we'll meet when you get back and let's take this time to get to know one another. But this is hot. This is amazing. She is sexy and beautiful and smart and artistic and she's read Jung and she jilled off at work after talking to me and well, goddamnit, now we're both aching and it must happen. Right. Now.

I must admit, I was surprised that she actually considered inviting a total stranger over to her house simply for the purpose of sex – no date, no dinner, no so what do you like? But it was that hot, and the perfect minx that she was, she was struggling with the issue. Of course she would, because all that lust and libido must be balanced out with an ethical and value system that would recognize that what we were considering was absolute lunacy.

"Please," I said. I didn't beg, I didn't plead. I didn't have to. I didn't have to con her or lie to her. I didn't have to cajole or flatter. I just asked, and even the asking was wonderful.

She said no.

I accepted her no, after asking three more times.

So we made do with the materials at hand, and swore that we would have to meet up as soon as she got back, and isn't this crazy?

Yes. Yes it is.

And there's something about having not met a person and being totally captivated by them that suspends judgments. Because, after all, you keep telling yourself, you've never met this person, so there's nothing really there, and you almost believe it. And yet. And yet. And yet there's that thing. And you have your doubts, of course, but then a few well-placed words make those evaporate into thin air. So for the next four days, through phone calls and Yahoo! Messenger, this bond, this crazy bond develops, and holy shit, she's just sweet and lovely and nice, she is smart and gorgeous, she is a network security engineer but she paints, she is going to be so good to throw on the bed and maybe I should meet her at the airport and maybe she'll visit me in New York and this might be that proverbial One that just lands in your lap out of fucking nowhere and –

And then this is when things go from crazy to utterly fucking insane.

She mentions this friend she has that's really cool blah blah blah. I wasn't paying attention, really, because the sweet Southern lilt of her voice was just hypnotizing. Maybe she'll compose a song for me. My friend is just really cool, and you should get to know her. I wonder what her lips will taste like. I'll give her your email address. Whatever you say, my dear.

And lo and behold, there's an email that Sunday from Jane's friend and how do you do Jane told me to write you yadda yadda yadda whatfuckingever.

"I got this weird email out of the blue. From someone you told to write me?"

"Oh yeah! Melissa! She wrote you?"

"Yeah. Seems bitter. Whatever."

And there is more babble, and then six words that no person ever wants to hear:

"I have a confession to make."

Oh?

"You're going to be mad at me."

Huh. Um. What is your confession, Jane? And after a deep breath, the first crack:

"I don't play the piano and I don't paint and I'm not a natural redhead."

Well.

She's never read Jung. Her friend has. She never saw Eyes Wide Shut. Her friend did. Seems like her friend has done quite a lot. And Jane's done a lot of copying. For eight years. To the point where she went to a speech therapist to change her natural California accent to a Southern accent. Because she didn't grow up in the South, but her friend did.

Well.

And she idealizes her friend and considers her perfect and the epitome of what an intelligent, artistic, interesting woman is – because Jane is many things, but apparently not those three things – and yet is insanely jealous of said friend because she is something that Jane will never be.

Well.

And all those lines, all those thoughts that I thought were hers, were ripped straight from her friend's website. Irony is so bleak when it happens to you.

It takes about a day for the full implications to sink in. It takes me that long to fully understand that I fell for a mask, a mirage, a role that Jane had been playing for eight years, a lie that she finally got caught in.

Was it love? I don't know. It was something. There was that thing, this insane bond formed with a total stranger who seemed to reflect every ideal quality I could want in a lover, and suddenly that thing was gone. She was gone, this strange Jane-Melissa fusion, and left in stone were plain Jane and her object of iconoclast desire.

To this day, I have no idea what the truth really is. After a revelation like that, truth and trust are the first things discarded. Melissa and I attempted to talk, to make sense of it, but there was too much suspicion and hurt in the air for anything good to come of it, and now everyone has lost, leaving me with broken bits of a hollow statue strewn throughout emails and phone conversations.

There are two modes of sensing, I believe: projection and observation. Observation is the taking in of stimuli and recognizing the uniqueness of that thing as a separate object in the world. Projection is your imagination attaching meaning to another object based on your sensory input.

The Internet excels at projection. We cast our nets out here, we make our wishes, we build our realms. We're not really here, but our presence is felt. It is an illusory state, this feeling that we're here and that we can tell who these other people are, but there's a divorce from fact. There's no way of really telling anything about anyone else. We look at those words coming across the screen and we create a person, and we trust that it's accurate.

I think the next time I go all stupid for someone, or even just get turned on by them, I think it'll be because of the smell of their hair, or the way their eyes catch the light, or that contented laugh they make. I think I'll listen to their words, rather than read them. I think I will fall for a real person, not a fabricated one. I think I will take time and relax and be patient and see if this person really is someone I want to interact with in any serious way.

And the instant messengers will stay off for a while, I think. I think that will do just fine.

The Impossible Bliss of Self-Mutilation

2002

You’re staring at me because you see what you wish you could be. You can’t help it. I used to be like you, worrying about what was mine, grabbing everything I could and guarding it like a dragon on top of the hoard. But you hold on too tight, and you’ll lose it anyway, and it’ll hurt more. You gotta learn to let go, like me. You can’t be afraid to lose everything.

The thumb was first. Left one, because I was still pretty hesitant about this theory of mine and goddamnit, if I was wrong, I still wanted to be able to sign my name - I was a righty, after all - but what good is an idea if you can’t test it, right? So I grabbed the electric turkey carver and let me tell you, when the serrated motorized blades first chewed into the flesh it was heaven and hell wrapped into tender little nerve endings, and at first I nearly pulled away, that automatic notion, but I forced myself, goddamnit, and after a few seconds the blissful wash of endorphins crashed down upon my face and it was cake after that, and I thankfully managed to find that weak space in the joints so I didn’t have to carve through bone, and it fell on the floor with a wet thud, and goddamnit but if the most painful part wasn’t cauterizing the wound on the electric stove. But all stories have happy endings and the antigens were swirling around and let me tell you something, Neosporin is your friend.

The right pinky was next, and I gotta say that was anticlimactic. I was all hyped up, ready for a repeat, but after you’ve sawed off your thumb, the right pinky is nothing. It’s betting $5 after you hit blackjack with a $100 chip. So it stung for a bit, and there was a bit of an infection, and it really just kinda pissed me off, so in a fit of anger I took the whole damn wrist off, and that was a thing, let me tell you. Not the most responsible of acts, true, but what’s done is done and you can’t look back and think, “Oh, Jesus, I wish I hadn’t amputated my right hand.”

The nose was a cinch, although I did need some assistance. I mean, your thumb is one thing, but trying to saw off your own nose could lead to disaster. Chet was good - he was a trained surgeon, you know, before he fell to drink - and really, who needs a fucking nose anyway? Ask Michael Jackson, right? I thought about taking off the ears, but really, you kinda need your ears to bring in sound, and after Reservoir Dogs, ears were cliché.

Nipples were a joke. A straight razor and a curling iron, that’s all you need. Hell, anyone could saw off their nipples without a second thought.

When the idea about the testicles came into my head, I thought – just for a second - that maybe that was going too far. But I was just staring at them, really, and thinking, “Damn, these are some ugly paperweights I got here.” I haven’t been with a woman since 1995, and to be brutally honest, I ain’t missed it a whole lot. So with one quick stroke, BAM! I was gelded. I thought about taking the ol’ Alaskan Pipeline off as well, but I kinda needed that for excretory purposes – if you’ll excuse me bringing up such things - so I still got that ugly appendage. I don’t like it, but it’s that or dialysis, and my income isn’t what it used to be.

Now, up to this point I’d been functioning pretty good in society. Granted, I wasn’t king of the prom, but who needs that, right? Here I was, proving that you didn’t need all these extra doodads and whatnot, I was doing just fine. Granted, I wasn’t making disability ‘cause of the “self-inflicted” nature of my wounds, but damnit if I didn’t feel good because I just got rid of everything, right? I mean, what was I gonna do with all that stuff, anyway? So when the idea came round to “what next?” I gotta say the legs were prime candidates. I briefly considered a hot poker in the eye or maybe taking an ear off at long last or maybe going to the shoulder with an arm - I mean, I got no right hand, so why not lose the whole damn thing? - but that woulda been a copout. I was on the edge, right, and up till now I’d kinda been skirting around the cliff, just wondering if I could actually do it, I mean, you can still function with no nose and no thumb or right hand or nuts, right, but I mean, that’s just chopping off non-essential stuff, so goddamnit, I was either gonna commit to this or I’d just throw myself off a bridge, I swear to GOD that was the thought going through my head, “Jesus, it’s either me or the legs.” So, really, the legs had to go.

Everything else was prologue, everything else was cake compared to this. And I gotta admit, for the first time I felt doubt. Like, is this the final threshold? Is this gonna be the make-or-break thing for me? Is this gonna be the line in the sand? I tell you, I thought long and hard about that one, over a lot of Mich Light. Thank God for straws - I never thought of the practical applications for losing both my thumbs. Well, one thumb and a hand, but really, what’s the difference, right? So after long last, after months – months! - of thinking, I went ahead.

My friend Chet, the one who helped me with the nose, he prepped me real good for the legs. Heh. I remember that I flashed back to that story in the paper, about the hospital in Tampa that got sued because some poor surgeon amputated the wrong leg of a patient, like it was supposed to be the right leg but they took off the left, and then they had to go ahead and take off the right anyway? Don’t know why that came to me, really, but I swear to God, Chet put the mask over my mouth - against my objections, I must add, because I wanted to feel the goddamn things coming off, but no, Chet the Surgeon has to have his safe conditions and goddamn, “You might not survive if we take them both off without anesthesia, the shock might be too much for your system,” and Chet put the mask over my mouth and...

It was as if God Himself had come to me and covered me in a blanket of wool, wrapped me up like the Baby Jesus, and my God, I could feel it. I felt the fucking things come off of me, I felt Chet sawing away, I felt it all, and goddamn if it didn’t hurt like a fucking bitch, goddamn if I didn’t want Christ Almighty to take me into heaven, I don’t know what the fuck Chet gave me but I could tell you it wasn’t working, or maybe working too well, who the fuck knows, right, but fuck if I couldn’t feel my entire body torn apart by horses, that’s the thing, right, I knew in the back of my mind that Chet was fucking taking a hacksaw to my legs but in this place I was at, God Himself had the Four Horsemen of the Fucking Oh My God Apocalypse tie a rope around my fucking legs and pull, pull, pull like no one’s fucking business and I gotta tell you, I wept, even though I was knocked out to shit, even though I was just some random unconscious hunk of flesh, I wept, tears came outta my FUCKING EYES, you jackass, you fucking no-good pansy, sitting there in your fucking tower, afraid of everything, you suckass no-good piece of trash, I fucking WEPT, because God and Jesus were whispering into my ears, “You’ve done well, My Son, you’ve done well,” and when that ended, I woke up in a bed and goddamnit I had no legs and for fuck’s sake I remembered every nerve spasm, every blood vessel erupting in abject hopelessness, every muscle being torn away from its host, goddamnit I remember feeling the spirit move me, feeling those fucking germs invade, feeling the cells in my body doing everything they could to stop that saw from going through my thighs, feeling every last bit of myself resist, trying to stop it, and then I just gave up the ghost and what the fuck do you know but my legs were gone and there they were, floating like fucking magnetized pivots hovering above the good green earth, and Lord knows I didn’t die right there and thank Jesus for keeping me safe and delivering the message that I knew he wanted to be known.

Phew. I gotta, say, it’s been several weeks since the operation, and I’m still not used to it. Chet got me a Lark, secondhand - well he stole it from a nursing home but fuck them, those old fucks don’t need it anyway - and I still have this urge, this incredible urge, just to stand up, on my own two feet which ain’t there anymore, but still, I just wanna stand up, me with my thumb and hand and nose and nuts and legs, and just stand up at every one of you self-satisfied motherfuckers who look at me and quickly turn away and scream in your face, “YEAH, I DID IT, MOTHERFUCKER, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO???” That’s what I want to ask you, what the fuck did you do? Did you take the risk, did you fuck around, did you bother to think about what you’d do if you didn’t have a thumb, fuck you. Fucking motherfuckers, who cares about you.

I gotta say, though, I get tired easily. It ain’t like the old days where I could party till dawn. Chet said that my body wouldn’t easily adapt to everything I’d done to it, but fuck him. I know what’s up. I know what the deal is. I’m getting stronger. Yeah, I can’t walk, but I got a sweet ride and I got my mind and I got this knowledge, this thing, right, and motherfucker, I did the right thing, you assholes, you fucking no-good assholes strutting around like you own the fucking place but you don’t know anything. You fucking robots. You fucking gene zombies strutting around. Fucking lose something, you assholes. Fucking give it up, you fucking no-good pieces of shit, you fucking...you fucking...you fucking...

Fuck. Fuck, I ain’t got no legs. What the fuck.

Fuck them, man. Fuck them. They don’t know. They don’t know. They’ll never know.

Fuck them. Fuck them.

Fuck them, yeah.

Fuck them.

The Vigil

November 2003

One of two scenes embedded in Fire.doc, reproduced complete and unedited from where the source document’s opening word-association litany ends.

“There’s something about death that’s very awkward.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Well, think about it – you have this body, this magnificent construct, and suddenly it just stops. And you’re left with this fairly useless corpse. Think of what would happen if we didn’t pay an entire class of people to mop up the streets. Think of dead people piled up on the sidewalk.”

“The original idea was that there wouldn’t be any sidewalks, that the body would fall upon the ground, decompose, offer a bounty for vultures and insects, and then return to nature. It’s no more awkward than a deer rotting in the forest. But now, you have this idea that – that the body should be preserved, that we have to save this thing, which is really an old idea, that it’s Egyptian, that the body is important after the soul leaves, that –“

“So you’re arguing for a soul?”

“Wait, let’s not get sidetracked. You brought up the awkwardness of death.”

”And you brought up the idea of a soul. Which ties very neatly in with death, since we all generally agree that’s when the soul leaves, if one believes in it.”

“Well, I – yeah, but, see, a soul, that can mean anything, animating energy, electrical processes, that –“

“But it doesn’t mean anything. It means a very specific thing, that you survive after the body dies. That’s a religious concept.”

“Not necessarily. It doesn’t have to be religious. It could be – something, I don’t know, it’s not religious.”

“The idea of a soul isn’t religious.”

“No. I mean, what, you have Hermetic philosophy, you have all kinds of things, I mean – well, what the hell is religion, anyway? When does a belief become religious?”

“When it talks beyond what can be proven.”

”Oh, come on, that’s a lame definition.”

“No it’s not. You can’t prove it, therefore it’s religious. It’s faith. You’re basing something on faith.”

”No, no, no, that’s born out of a relatively recent phenomenon, the idea that – “ direct eyes, direct angles – “science proves everything. I mean, back in Biblical times it didn’t have to do with what could be proved. It becomes a religion, I think, any idea does, when it becomes an institution, when it stops supplying answers – I mean, you’re talking about observation and coming up with things, reasons why these things happen, and that’s just a natural inquisitiveness we all have – but religion becomes religion when it stops supplying answers and becomes a set of dictates and laws and a way to behave rather than an inquiry into why things are they way they are. Right? Do you follow me?”

“I don’t really agree, but okay, I follow you.”

”Wait, don’t be so contemporary about this. Think back, think of the first time someone looked at a fire or up at the sky or just wondered aloud, ‘How did all this happen? How does it work? Where do I come from?’”

“You tell me not to be contemporary about it, but I can’t help it, because religion is so useless nowadays that anyone who still clings to it is an idiot. Basically. I mean, who’s going to believe in a big old guy in the sky who throws people into Hell? Morons. People who don’t want answers. Why do people die? They die because their body stops working, or turns against them, or they get hit by a car and the body is injured beyond the point to repair itself, or they just – they just die. It’s chemistry and biology, it’s not some big mystery. But you want people to have some sort of big reason why they live and die, and there isn’t. God didn’t put us here, the Devil isn’t waiting for us –“

“See, this is one of my pet peeves. Every time some atheist gets uppity, they bring up Christianity, like it’s the only religion out there, like it’s the only possible solution. There are plenty of other religions that –“

“Suck just as much?”

“Wow, way to be an asshole.”

”Well, come on! First off, I know a thing or two about religions, but the fact that I was able to say ‘God’ and ‘Devil’ and the first thing that came to mind was Christianity makes it obvious that these aren’t real complex systems! You got God on one side, the Devil on the other, and that’s it! That’s the whole shebang. But, like, Muslims are just as deluded as anyone else –“

“Islam, my friend, despite our current political situation” – and here the sarcasm was tight around her voice – “happens to be a beautiful and complex religion. During the Dark Ages? When all of Europe was pretty much a wasteland? The Islamic regions of the world were involved in science and alchemy and the arts and it was beautiful –“

“But look at it now. Where is it? What do we have? The only reason anyone pays attention to Islam now is that that’s where the oil is. Is there anything useful that Islam is doing today? No!”

An angry pause as she sits there, stewing, trying not to hit him. Finally: “There’s still a place for religion. For something greater than us. For the mysteries. There’s still this drive we have to –“

“What mysteries?”

A stumbling pause. “You know, the grand mysteries, the questions of why we’re here, what is here –“

“We only ask those questions because we have too much time on our hands. There are no mysteries, and anyone who thinks so is fooling themselves. There’s no motive, or purpose, or anything like that. We’re just monkeys with too much cleverness. We’re born, we live, we die. That’s that.”

She stares at him with frank disbelief. “What happened to you?”

”What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Where is all this coming from? When did you become a nihilist?”

”I have a credo.”

“Shut the fuck up. I don’t like this. This isn’t like you. What’s going on?”

“Nothing! What? Nothing’s going on. Don’t worry about it. Relax.”

“Don’t worry about what? What am I not worrying about?”

”Debbie, I didn’t mean that there was anything to worry about, okay? Jesus. Stop reading into shit.”

“Well, if you’re going to say stupid things, then I’m going to wonder what the hell’s wrong with you.”

The steady pain suddenly flared, a Roman candle reaching for the back of his eyes. “Oh, Jesus, fuck you,” he managed to get out, trying to cover the wrenching of his innards. He stood up, feeling the outpouring of sweat on his face. In a flash of lucidity, he prayed she wouldn’t notice. “Stop being so goddamn condescending for once and admit you don’t know everything.” He turned toward the bathroom hoping that she saw anger and not instinctual panic. He pushed the door open, flew into the stall and got the lid up just before his stomach emptied out. It was a series of awful moments before he felt able to open his eyes. The toilet was filled with pure bile, streaks of red barely visible amongst the porridge of yellow. No food at all, no half-digested fragments, and it took him a second to remember he hadn’t eaten anything. He felt the cool air of the A/C brush against his face, and he realized he was drenched in sweat. He hated his body. He hated that it couldn’t just die now, that it was this process, this time-consuming process that frayed him. His nerves were traitors, endlessly reporting pain, nausea, decay. He wanted none of it. Where was the euphoria of the diagnosis? Where was the certainty of the end? This was not part of the deal. He was promised death and it was not coming fast enough for him. His mind turned quite calmly to other ways. His former dealer, Carter, surely he would have something to keep him sane – no, not sanity, something to OD on. Heroin, maybe, black tar heroin, didn’t matter what kind, just a nice big healthy dose of it, no, Carter would get suspicious, his tastes had been candy-flipping and asking for a nice big bag of opiates would make him squirrely, get his antennae twitching, not that Carter would care but fuck, what a cliché too, smack OD, no darling, we will not have any of that, no bloody bathtubs, no sleeping pills, no we are going out in style, darling, they will remember this one, what about buildings? bridges? No, still too cliché, they would have to take all the good ones from him, wouldn’t they? Fuck, darling, fuck.

Standing up was a victory. He could feel waterfalls headed towards his shoes. A deep breath. The sound of the faucet being turned off, and then footfalls as a shortish Mexican avoided his gaze and succinctly left the john. He hadn’t closed the door of the stall. Looking back, down at the bowl, the flotsam within looked alien. He flushed, destroying all the evidence. Walking to the sink, grabbing a paper towl, soaking it in cold water, wiping the sweat from his face. He drank some, washed the awful taste from his mouth, spit it out. Looking in the mirror, seeing the sinking eyes, the yellowish tint that he was trying to ignore but couldn’t, the awfulness of what he saw before him. The door opened, his gaze dropped, he quickly finished it up, collected himself, and strode back out to find the table deserted except for her half-eaten meal still on the tray.

The Calamity

November 2003

The second of the two scenes embedded in Fire.doc, likewise complete and unedited from that point on.

You see, it starts like this. What we are talking about is the release of energy. All things have energy, yes? All things are energy, if you want to split Einsteinian hairs about it, but all things have a temperature, correct? We’ll take basic physics now and work our way to general relativity soon enough. Something’s hot, something’s cold, something like that. Everything has an innate temperature.

So what you’re seeing around you is a world with a pretty narrow temperature range. By and large, the ambient temperature of our biosphere kinda wiggles between -20 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on exposure to solar radiation and environmental conditions, that sort of thing, right? That’s a pretty small area to think of. And yet the variance! Hell, you can tell the difference between 60 degrees and 70 degrees, right? It’s quite easy.

But here’s the thing: everything radiates energy. I mean, you know you have a temperature, you’re radiating in the infrared spectrum, just below visible light. That’s right, you are a radioactive body. A slight difference in wavelength and you’d be glowing in visible light. And really, your entire body is a reactor. You’re a cooled reactor, designed to break apart fuel into glucose and amino acids in order to produce energy to sustain yourself. You’ve got fission happening every second of your life. Granted, you’re not breaking apart uranium, but you’re an energy processing machine.

Now. It’s the use you make this energy have that’s what’s important. See what I mean? Like, okay, your body contains a certain amount of energy. No, fuck The Matrix, you’re not a battery for shitty robots. What a waste of time that was, right? I mean, let’s let Keanu figure that one out later, but humans as a power source when you have access to nuclear fission? And since it was in the future, can we also assume the secrets of nuclear fusion have been discovered? So yes, let’s harvest humans and their puny electrical and heat output and ignore the fact that we can build portable reactors inside of every sentient being. Well thought out there, Wachowski brothers. Okay, I’ve digressed. Where was I? Yes, the body produces a certain amount of energy. Now you can use that energy for certain things, and this is what we mean by squandering energy. No, you know, this Matrix thing is tweaking my cheese here. I mean, seriously! Evil robots want to use our body energy for themselves, so they plug 10 billion people into a manufactured reality? I mean, let’s talk about the computers that have to house this thing, right? My fucking laptop gets hot after an hour of use – what kinda processors are they using that just don’t fucking melt the instant they’re turned on? Do you realize the amount of computations you gotta use to process a VR simulations that can compensate for every known phenomenon that occurs on Earth? No, listen, I know it’s a metaphor and it’s all some sort of Gnostic bullshit about a world of lies and shit, but it’s a shitty metaphor, all right? And then when it comes time to literalize it, right – I mean, it’s all well and good as a comic-book type of thing and it’s “ooh, spooky, the world isn’t real” and then Keanu does a bunch of karate and it’s all fine, but then you throw this thing out there, this throwaway metaphor about bad robots, and then the time comes where you gotta address that. You, the emotionally stunted directors, have to sit down and come up with a movie about evil robots and a huge computer program that doesn’t plain suck ass. So what do you do? You make some bullshit about Priscilla Queen of the Desert being able to clone himself and you have some sex in caves – and that bullshit, that right there, that’s straight ripped off from Dune, the rite of joining, right? Not that the entire movie isn’t a ripoff of something or other, and if I were Grant Morrison my boot would be so far up their asses he’d kick out their teeth – and then you have some bullshit about trucks and guns and I don’t know what. Okay, the point is that you have this energy, this isn’t – hold on –

He drinks some water.

Okay, I’m cool now. No, see, you have this energy about you, right? This isn’t some New Age bullshit, either, I mean, yeah, you have energy spillover that takes the form of an aura, and yeah, you got charkas, most people call ‘em glands, but whatever. You have energy. You do. And the first two decades all that energy’s about growing and creating more you cells and making you as large as you possibly can so of course you’re not thinking too much, you’re just fucking growing and absorbing and getting all this shit going and it’s only once the work of the body’s complete that you can actually take this energy and focus it on other things, right? So here you are, with all this potential energy, and the sad thing is most people don’t realize it. They got their own thing going on, they’re too wrapped up in whatever, they never realize they can take this energy and throw it anywhere. And that’s what they’re telling you, on TV and in the media, that’s what they’re telling you: where to put your energy, and if you aim yourself somewhere that They don’t approve, They’ll fuck you, man. Like, say you wanna take that potential of yours and apply it towards discovering a renewable source of energy for cars, completely clean, free energy, like Tesla, right? Say you wanna do that? Well, first they’ll inquire, ever so nicely, about what you’re intending to do with this little invention of yours. And of course you’ll be honest and tell them what it is, and they’ll offer to buy it from you. Now, if you take their money – if you think that you’ve scored and you’re all set, I mean, there have been long, sleepless nights, months, years working on your little free energy device – so if you take their money, they take your device and throw it in a vault and never look at it again. Gone. Never see the light of day. There are documented cases of shit like this happening – water engines and shit like that. Okay, but let’s assume that you refuse, and you say, “No, sir” – because they’re always guys, or at least they think like them – “No, sir, I will not take your money,” then they fuck you. They stop at nothing. Because people can’t have their energy for themselves. They gotta be told how to use it. Because what they want is for people to worry about the shit that won’t advance us farther, into the future, where we’ll be free. And that’s the truth.

He checks his water.

Shoot, I’m out of water. You’ll pardon me, right?

He gets up and heads towards the kitchen. Edward and Maria exhale.

Edward: I apologize for that. He gets going about that quite often, actually, it’s a bit of a tirade of his. Especially his Matrix stuff.

She smiles, politely and eminently unreadable.

Maria: Whose roommate is he again?

Edward: Oh, Sung’s, over there.

He catches her eye, stumbles, self-consciously looking at the ground. She tilts her head, studying him, waiting him out. After long seconds of looking elsewhere, he manages to think of something safe to say.

Edward: Lovely night out tonight. Apart from the smoke, I mean.

Maria: I don’t know, I like the smoke. It’s better than smog, at any rate. Smoke has character.

She inhales, taking the time to let the air touch every capillary. It’s another thing that makes Edward stare at her, something so outside and his experience, this creature, this magnificent woman in front of him, her eyes catching the light from the tiki torches – why on Earth did they light torches? Isn’t it hot enough? And the fire’s only about 20 miles away, isn’t it? Is open flame a wise idea –

Maria cradles her hands, finding support on his shoulder. He turns to her just as she blows on his neck, and she delights as he squirms.

Maria: Hey.

Edward: Hello.

She has a devilish grin.

Edward: You’re being cheeky.

Her eyebrows raise and her grin gets bigger. He finally manages to forget the other people.

Maria: Let’s go.

Maria pulls Edward by the hand and leads him around the house.

Identity Theft

2009

"You're not Gary, are you? "

I was just coming out of the gate, heading to my car. I stopped for the briefest of pauses, then replied, "Yeah, I'm Gary. "

"Hey, I got your widescreen TV here. "

"Oh, man," I said excitedly, "I didn't think it'd get here until tomorrow! Excellent. " I propped the gate open, let the guy (named Jake, I would later find out) in. I led him to my crummy Van Nuys townhouse, showed him where the TV would go, and watched him load it up from his van. We chatted briefly about how good football games would look in HD (he had a model like this himself, he said), about the fucking Lakers and why they weren't in the Finals, and other random conversation. I signed the receipt, Jake wished me a good day and off he went. I hooked up the TV, called the cable company and put HD channels on my lineup.

Later, my housemate Tom came home to find me watching the Food Network. "Holy shit! Look at that thing! Where'd you get it? "

"It's for Gary. "

"Who's Gary? "

"I don't know, but remind me to thank him if I meet him. "

Tom gave me a look but wisely declined to pursue the matter.

Later that evening, I reflected on my ill-gotten television. It had been surprisingly easy to -- some would say "scam", I would prefer "engineer" -- a television from poor old Jake, who would surely be in trouble once the mistake was discovered. It had been very easy to be Gary. Gary was a Lakers fan. He also enjoyed football. Gary was an alright guy. I wondered what it would be like to be Gary.

At checkout lines and cashiers, I started signing Gary's name. I would introduce myself to strangers as Gary. I encouraged my friends to start calling me Gary -- jokingly, of course. The apex was picking up a girl -- Jen? That was her name, right? -- at the Standard. I almost forgot who I was when I heard her whisper "Gary" in her bedroom.

This was all well and fun, but I had to confront myself and tell myself the truth: I wasn't Gary. Gary had a history. Gary had an outlook on life that could be radically different from mine. Gary probably looked quite different from me. Furthermore, being Gary was interfering with my own life. I was showing up to the mailroom late, the bills weren't getting paid, and I found myself unable to divide my attention between what I wanted and what I assumed Gary would want. So I either had to back up and let Gary go, or I had to fully commit to this.

It was very easy finding Gary. After all, he lived in the complex. Gary looked nothing like me: dark black hair, goatee, tattered UCLA cap, a good seven inches shorter. These were all important, to be sure, but who was Gary on the inside? What thoughts flitted through that head of his? Whence did his soul spring from? Had he ever been in love? What were his parents like?

One night, I watched from my window as Gary left, clad in his customary ratty T-shirt, faux-worn khaki shorts, and Nike flipflops. When I was sure he was gone, I slipped out of my house, jimmied his window, and snuck into his bedroom. Depressingly spare. A few pictures of better days. Beat-up old computer. Full-size bed directly on the floor. Hmm. I began looking through his papers, figuring out just what he was up to--

"What the fuck? "

I whirled. Gary was standing there in the doorway, bewildered, keys in hand.

"Gary, it's not what you think --"

"Get the fuck out of here! " He charged me, took three steps and started to swing. I raised my hands to protect myself, caught hold of his arm, and pulled--

Something detached. It all happened in a blur. The next thing I knew, I was staring at my right hand, which clutched what looked like Gary's. . . skin? I heard a thump, and saw that. . . something had fallen on the bed. It looked like an artist's manikin: humanoid, yet grey and nondescript. It looked of average height and proportion. The surface was perfectly smooth and matte. Its chest was rising slowly and steadily, even though there was no mouth to speak of.

I looked back on the skin I held in my hand and saw it was more than a skin; it was, for all intents and purposes, Gary. I held everything that he was. Taking a deep breath, I slipped the skin over myself and felt myself shrink, widen, feel more aggressive, less conflicted. Memories swarmed me, my vision seemed to shift. I coughed and it was Gary's cough. I took a step and felt how Gary would stand. I placed the manikin that used to be Gary in the closet, closed the door, and left the townhouse. After all, I was late meeting my buddies.

Holography

2009–2012

One complete, self-contained movement — Jeremy Constantilios’s flight into and landing in Los Angeles — excerpted from a chapter running to roughly 10,500 words, ending at a natural scene break.

Jeremy Constantilios has solved all the sudoku problems in his book, but that is not stopping him from attempting to calculate more in his head. He doesn't quite understand his own attraction to sudoku; he has never given much thought to math, really, but perhaps some sort of symbolic logic lies beneath it? Make a note. Also note how engine noise operates as white noise but in such a manner as to not actually soothe synaptic activity but rather act as an interference pattern to relaxation. No one ever actually sleeps on an airplane, even in first class. This is his first experience in first class; he felt that such a momentous occasion warranted an upgrade from the coach ticket Endeavor (should really be spelled in the British manner) had sent for him. It's not as if he doesn't have the money, after all, and it is all right to permit himself such an indulgence, for after all this errand is thoroughly ridiculous. (Someone wrote that. Maybe I did. Write that down.)

Six hours on a plane and nothing left to do. He has already reread the novel Johnathan asked him to blurb (someone's M.F.A. was unwarranted, let's leave it at that). He could make more notes, but to be honest, most of his focus is on getting off the plane. He is craving freedom, escape, a mad dash through baggage claim into the waiting taxi and an excursion throughout this oncoming wasteland. (I am actually craving a cigarette.) He picks up the SkyMall catalog. The largesse of corporate America beckons him in the form of golf accessories. (Make a note: possible connection between modern-day executive and actual ancestor who was an original Scottish golfer? Story idea. Do some research when you get back home.) He looks around at his fellow first-class passengers, an obvious amalgam of rich white men. It is almost focus-groupesque (is that a word? It is now.) in its composition.

Jeremy unbuckles his seat belt and stands up, excusing himself as he passes his neighbor on the aisle seat. He looks up and down the aisle and wanders back. Most of coach is conked out, and the ones that aren't have their eyes glued to the individual television screens. (Domino effect of consciousness. One large reactor pile? Make a note.) The cabin is crowded. Jeremy gulps nervously without realizing it and walks towards the back of the plane. He is on the left side (the port side, in nautical terms, which would not make sense in an aircraft). He reaches the back galley. A stewardess (excuse me, flight attendant) is reading the latest Us Weekly. (I once had a crush on Christina Aguilera, before her Jezebel period.) He crosses through the galley and up the (starboard) other aisle. He heads up to the front of the plane, begs pardon, and resumes his seat. He drums his hands nervously. He looks over and finally notices that the one woman in first class has been diligently reading his book.

Jeremy ponders this. He looks at the woman: older, maybe mid-40s, walking Burberry ad, not at all what the target demo for Strange Attractors: A Love Affair with Chaos was thought to be. He thinks, for one second, about the radical and fundamental changes in his life since the book went bestseller. He wonders if he should say something:

ME: Excuse me, I couldn't help but noticing you enjoying...my book.

HER: Why, yes, yes I was. Why, look at the picture of this author. He looks

just like you!

ME: (chuckling wryly) Why, yes. Now how about you unbutton that blouse

and give up those rude titties. Damn.

Jeremy blinks. That was not where he thought that scenario was going. He takes stock of where that thought could have come from. He approaches some decidedly unrational motives that he cannot be bothered to explore at the moment. He blames his recent predilection for the online comic Achewood -- in particular, the character of Ray's rather obvious and over-the-top heterosexual shenanigans -- for the unwanted digression. He looks over at the woman, who is still engrossed in his book. Her titties remain bound. He thinks of April lying in his bed, nude and serene. He quickly pushes the service button. A flight attendant (stewardess) approaches. "Yes, sir?"

"Vodka tonic, please."

"Of course. Would you like lime with that?"

"Yes. Yes, I like lime. Lime is good. Oh, and if you have little crackers? Do you? Have little crackers?"

"We do."

"Yes, I'd like some of those, please, thank you."

She smiles and leaves to fix his drink. Jeremy releases his breath but not his tension. He looks out the window. Not a cloud in the sky, and straight down the land is brown and littered with white housespecks. He feels the plane shift alignment. The seat belt light blinks, with accompanying sound. "Ladies and gentlemen," the stewar(flight attendant) intones, "we have begun our initial descent into Los Angeles. We do ask that you please return your seat backs and tray tables to their upright and locked positions." He can recite this spiel by heart, this reassuring catechism that The Plane Will Land. The flight attendant arrives with the drink, places it in the seat arm-holder -- did she just wink? There is also a packet of Chex snack mix. He quickly takes a gulp of the vodka tonic (weak) and begins scarfing down the crackers. He looks down out the window again, and sees sprawl. Nothing but sprawl as far as the eye can see. He follows the mountains up the right side, and in the forward distance, he sees nothing but sprawl, more sprawl, and then haze and the blaze of the sun reflecting off the Pacific. He gulps down more of his drink. A visitor from the mysterious East. Well, he reassures himself, every great author makes a pilgrimage to Hell.

Jeremy waits patiently for baggage claim, wondering about structural inefficiencies in airports and if it isn't part of the design, and maybe it's part of a larger network of institutionalized inconvenience that the engineers of modern consumer capitalism have foisted upon their mass/prey. (Very Gladwellian.) He suddenly realized someone is attempting to take a cameraphone picture of him. Looking over, he surprises a girl (21, 22?) holding a pink Blackberry, angled haircut, unnecessary puffy vest, releasing an involuntary, whispered "Oh shit!" Jeremy smiles in spite of how intensely embarrassed he is, praying that no one else has noticed. The girl quickly strides over. "Oh, my God, I'm so sorry, I didn't, like, I didn't think you'd like look and wow, yeah, cool, huh?"

"Oh, it's, it's, all right, I mean," he gets out.

"I'm just sorry, I know it's like not the thing to do, but like, I love your book, I LOVE it!" She is very loud, and he inwardly cringes. "Oh, my God, I saw you on The Daily Show, you were GENIUS. SO FUNNY."

"Uh, thank you --"

"Yeah!"

"Thank you, that's -- they have writers, they're funny, funny people..." Jeremy is slowly dying inside.

"Oh my God, could I get a picture of us?"

He looks around. No one else is paying attention. "Uh...sure? Sure."

She squeals and the next thing he knows, she's pressed up against his side, arm extended full length and above them, in perfect Facebook-pic pose. He ekes out a smile. She checks the picture, and with effusive thanks heads off to the other end of the carousel. He distinctly hears her exclaim, "oh my god, so nerd-hot." Jeremy finally breathes again. He makes sure the girl his gone. (Should have gotten her number. What? She's, what, twelve? But still!) He realizes an old man next to him is chuckling. He freezed.

"Gotta roll with it, right?" the old man says.

Jeremy weakly nods.

"Rough life. Heh!" The old man turns away. Jeremy slowly exhales.

Jeremy finds the driver with the CONSTANTILIOS sign. He gets in the car, checks his iPhone. Voicemail from Randall, emails, Facebook updates, text message from April. He reads it and quickly deletes it. He watches Los Angeles go by. What it looks like is a patina of palm trees and white apartment buildings. The air is yellow. (Probably due to an abundance of dust, pollution and a relative lack of airborne moisture due to a desert climate. Make a note.) It doesn't seem real. (Jet lag. Must be jet lag. I think it's later than it is. That's it. I'm very tired. I don't want to be here. Get this done quickly.)

The car arrives at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Luggage whisked away, credit cards exchanged -- he has become quite adept at these transactions as of late -- and he is in a suite, overlooking the Los Angeles basin. There is a pool and more palm trees and the vastness of the sprawl neverending. It is 3:30 in the afternoon, and he has no idea where on Earth he is.

Projection

2009–2012

A symphony. The pillars of the concert hall, wisping upwards like smoke, curved, sandblasted metal because the glare was too much for other buildings. There will be no mirrors in the desert; this is the sun's kingdom, and to amplify or reflect is pointless. Only refraction will do. Split the intensity of the white light through a shroud of burning hilltop mansions and then you have the strangeness of the Southland. Burn through pictures ranging from twenty-four to thirty frames a second and you have the soundstage, the live- action set you've seen a hundred thousand times and never recognized. Production costs are cheaper here. Oh, where was I? Yes, the project. The project, to write about what happened to me in L.A. Actually, stunningly easy to, if I wanted to get to the point: my heart got broken. Wait, hold on, not that simple.

Surely not. It's odd, isn't it, that my reference point to L.A. involves both architecture and music; not the great dream factories lining the 101, not the hordes trying too hard, not the sun or sand or surf or any other multiplicity of cliche', but the metal bands of the concert hall. It's a landmark, surely, unique to the city. People flock to see it. It's really the only reason to see downtown. I'm drifting. I've been drifting for a while and am surfing currents of a whirlpool -- I know this, I can tell, but it's important not to realize it -- attempting to get this project done. This project is based on what happened to me in L.A. See, there are components -- okay, the core is as said, a tale of heartbreak, but also of revelation, of universality, of the earth cracking open and revealing its naked, molten heart, of lands shaking, flames and sin and.

Well. To begin. At the beginning. I made the journey on my own. People do this, of course: they pack their cars up, leave everything they've known behind and head (normally) westward to Los Angeles, city of dreams. I "joked" to friends that every great writer makes a pilgrimage to Hell. This is strange, for as far as we know, only two ever really made anything even approaching an imaginative journey there, but -- obviously, it works, because it's Hell-A, cultural heat-death capital of the world. (Not true, actually; Los Angeles ascended in the 1980s, replacing New York as the world cultural center, but it's gauche to say so.) So there was me, just another guy with a screenwriting degree, in a car going westward across the U.S. People don't leave just to make it. There is always something else lurking in the background, even if they don't know it.

A grad school acquaintance who had gone to school in Occidental told me that if you go to Los Angeles thinking you might have fun for a few years, and then leave, you'll have a blast. If you go there to try and make it, you will end up stuck there, trapped and miserable for all eternity. He left after two years, went to film school, and now works for his father's advertising company. Or did; he is now on the Internet, looking for a job in Boston. I have another friend, Chris Sadler. I used him as the basis for a character in two scripts. He works in film. He went to film school in Orlando and now works with Sam Raimi and Jon Favreau. He is a character, the sort of person who is referred to by last name.

He became a character in my scripts as a free spirit, mad, unhinged yet unabashedly vital and dynamic. I haven't seen him since I left. I'm drifting again. This is a story about drift, creative drift in particular. There is a phrase in the Industry: development hell. This is when a script or a story or a property simply can't get past the gatekeepers of a studio or production company. For whatever reason, it never gets green-lighted, never gets transformed into actual movie, not even to sit on the shelf. No, instead the script gets rewritten endlessly, new characters thrown in, dialogue rejiggered, the plot altered beyond recognition, never to see the light of day. This is a story about failure, and a broken heart, and hell. There is a peculiar vanity common to anyone attempting to break into the Industry.

You have to believe, despite anything else going on in your life, that you deserve to be a part of the greatest cultural-commercial apparatus ever mounted in human history, in the face of intense competition from everyone else who believes that. This manifests as drive. Ultimately, it is less important about what someone accomplished in the Industry than the fact that they accomplished anything at all. L.A. is mulched by the spirits of failed aspirants. Those who do make it cling to their ledge on the hills. The thing is, there's not too much to my tale before I met L.A.X., which is how she will be known as. I bummed around for six months, sleeping on floors and spare beds. I worked in the mailroom -- of an Internet search company in Pasadena. (Even in the cliche', I was doing it wrong.) I would come out to my car and wipe the ashes off the hood that floated southward from the hillfires miles away, fueled by hot winds.

I finally found web work, a steady apartment. Although I had ostensibly gone out for the Industry, my lack of vanity/drive was apparent from the get-go. I mingled with old friends and acquaintances, decidedly keeping most newcomers at arms' length. I did not trust a soul I didn't already know. This is where everything diverges. I met L.A.X. at a bar in Santa Monica on New Year's Eve. I do not meet people at bars; she is the sort of woman who gets hit on at bars all the time, most notably (and in this case, unsuccessfully) by Nicolas Cage. She had a green fur hat on and long red valkyrie braids. I had arrived with Sadler and his friends; soon, she and I were chatting and bumming cigarettes. I asked for her phone number or email and got the latter.

See, what they don't tell you at all is that Los Angeles is an otherworld. It doesn't quite exist within reality. There is an overlay; the trite phrase "dream factory" has a lot more truth to it than you realize. It is an eternal liminal state; the transient nature of the population, the ever-shifting production of literal visions that half the world sees, the interplay of psychic reality makes the Los Angeles Basin more than a meteorological microclimate. A pocket of the world with an entrance to the underworld bounding the eastern border. This is a failure, you realize. I am trying to explain to you what happened to me in Los Angeles, and it's all circular and tangenting and who knows if I'll ever truly find the point. A chaos butterfly; a Lorenz attractor; two focal points around which events swirl.

Accept that this won't be a three-act blitzkrieg on your senses and we'll be fine. After an initial email flurry, we had a marathon phone conversation, the sort you have and you hang up after three hours with someone you don't even really know and have a peculiar sense of certainty, of destiny taking hand. I picked L.A.X. up at her apartment in Mar Vista and we headed downtown to the MOCA for a Frank Gehry exhibit. The Walt Disney Concert Hall was about to open nearby, so they obviously wanted to ride that trend. We went in, nervously holding hands. I've written this tale too many times; its pieces known by heart only to me, rewritten, recast, rearranged. To say the date went spectacularly would be an understatement. When I left her apartment after a day spent in cars, at lunch, in bed, the world was not the same.

She had magnificent eyes that would change color; they stuck with me. I've written this part already. I wrote it so many times afterwards, always revisiting, always recounting. There is a complete dissatisfaction with a project that can go nowhere. It's too complicated; too intricate; what you want to convey won't work. Vita Nuova is a work of desolation, but also of triumph. It conveys absolute desperation at the same time it elevates the reader's soul, even in translation. If you read Agua Viva, you will understand the debt I owe Clarice Lispector for perfectly crystallizing this emotional devastation so that I don't have to try. I am not that strong. I am no Dante; nothing gets sublimated nowadays. Except for the bits about the placenta; those don't really apply to me and should be considered entirely metaphorical on my end. (Metaphorical Placenta: your imaginary band name of the week.) I am already editing this.

What happened was this: in 2001 I wrote a script called Truth and Beauty. It was about an out-of-work actor, Brian Sharp, who comes across a real, live Muse. Euterpe, as it turns out, muse of music. Incompatible artistic goals, but that's enough to get Brian back on the road to his true calling. I showed the script to a few people out in L.A. It wasn't commercial enough, that was the main verdict. My friend Cosette said that it read like a novel. Story of my life: never quite the perfect form. This should be a song. This should be a pop song about heartbreak that sounds amazing. This should be an opera, an epic, a symphony. Children two centuries from now should hum this theme unconsciously. The music would be used in movies, completely out of context. I want this to be over.

I want this off my plate. I have other work, surely, to do. After this, other things might interest me, but for years now, it's been the project. It exists beyond capitalization. When I first got back to Boston, a place I did not want to be again, I sat and wrote the history of what happened. It was, predictably, unreadable. Almost intolerably emo, it was the first strata of excavation into what happened. Necessary, but in no way ready for anyone outside myself and a trusted confidant. See, that's the thing. Here is the simple truth: I got my heart broken. That's not enough, though. You can't do anything with that. You can't make mirth or miracle from that. So you work at it, hoping something will come out. From the experience of going over all this, endlessly, again and again, I have extracted gems, metals both precious and practical, hidden treasures.

Paradoxically, though, that makes it even worse, since to be traded, gold has to be smelted into ingots, gems mingled with other gems, and here I want to craft some baroque jeweler's masterpiece, priceless and utterly unavailable. L.A.X. was copper, through and through, the perfect conductor. She and I had very different backgrounds, hers being much more chaotic and terrifying than mine (poverty, abusive father, running away from home). She, like me, had nothing to do with the Industry; her job was art-directing GMC truck brochures. We had very little in common, in hindsight; what you think is terribly urgent at the moment reveals itself later to be superficial. What we did have was an unmistakable physical connection that instantaneously became a spiritual connection. It went straight from the profane to the sacred in about half a second. I was in love.

Here she is, the reason for me being here in L.A. in the first place, to find her her her. Besotted, besides myself. She was more reticent, more cautious, less willing to extend herself emotionally. This was an early hint, one I cheerfully ignored or mischaracterized as a challenge. She met me soon enough, but it did take a bit of work. I barely noticed. It was so obvious that this was going to work out, that we should be together, that everything else was mere detail. In my country, we call this "foreshadowing." Part of the project -- and, in fact, the central character -- is Jeremy Constantilios, an ill-considered pastiche of late 20th/early 21st-century young American writers like Johnathan Safr Foer and Dave Eggers: precociously brilliant and hopelessly earnest. Jeremy would be going to L.A. to talk to agents and producers about adapting his novel, Strange Attractors: A Love Affair with Chaos, the story of an semi-autistic mathematician and an English professor's romance.

It had "prestige picture" written all over it. Of course, during the course of the story it would turn out that Jeremy's beloved novel gets manhandled and chopped and axed, especially as his love affair with one Allison Byrd, a catalyst he meets in L.A., goes from intense to out-and-out crazy. Jeremy would be a walking thesis about the creative process in L.A., less a person than a characterized grudge. You see, I lost my memory for a while. What I would do is this: sit in the Literati Cafe and write, write, write. Endlessly attempting to reassure myself that everything was all right. I had no thoughts about the project back then; I was merely trying to keep myself sane. I did not realize that I was encoding quantum information into words; I was trying not to lose my goddamn mind in a place where it would be exceptionally easy to.

I was at sea. What happened was this: three months into our relationship, L.A.X. came over one day and told me that the great love of her life from eleven years ago had come back into her life and was making a serious play. She was torn. He was stable, secure, and had the power of memory; I was fresh and new, but not stable nor secure at all. Moreover, she feared the "experience gap" between us would be too much to surmount. She loved me, but she was torn. She was going to break up with me, because it would not be fair to me to be so torn. Obviously, she was not torn at all. She was confused. She was in love with me, but this interloper from the past was a ghost, a shadow, nothing to take seriously.

I almost agreed to this, but then I gallantly declared that no way would this bring us down, that she and I were in love and meant to be together, and it was perfectly obvious to all that this was a minor speed bump. There are several gaps in logic here, ranging from sidewalk cracks to chasms of deep rationalization, but that was my mindset: there would be nothing to prevent us from getting the hell out of L.A. and living our life together in complete bliss. Project. Focus on the project. When she told me that she was getting back together with him, my first reaction was scorn. At first I felt really strong; I had told her how unhappy it made me, and I was justified. I was right, damnit, and I had no reason to feel bad for being so forthright.

This lasted about three minutes before I was scrambling to try and do something, anything to get her back. 'Twas not to be: not only were they back together, but he had proposed during a trip to NYC (at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, no less) and she had accepted. When I learned this, I was incredulous, but what could I do? To use a poker analogy, we had four eights -- four of a kind, damnit, and you go all in on four of a kind -- but they must have had a royal flush. At this point, her judgment had not yet come into question. I accepted this. I wrote a long blog posts to a select group of friends about what had happened, how even in the midst of all this heartbreak I got it from some cosmic standpoint, that it was going to be okay.

I published it to the Web and promptly came apart., the earth fissuring and swallowing me whole. This is the part of the project that I am having trouble navigating. This is where I am stuck. So Brian Sharp -- who has somehow made his way to Los Angeles after his affair with Kirstin nee' Euterpe -- has fallen in with a troupe of actors whose job it is to act in the stage of life. That is, they get scripts from Somewhere and portray real people doing their thing, wandering about, in order for certain things in life to happen. You could be in line at a store, and that strange-looking dude who's needlessly arguing with the clerk could actually be an actor, perhaps even Brian Sharp, playing a part, his purpose to delay or otherwise evoke something in you or the people around you; some arcane method to the apparent madness that he might not even be aware of, all Stanislavskian intent and submergence, but yet this little scene you witnessed is one of the pivot points of the forward motion of space- time, one of the little joints that keeps it going.

Maybe by delaying you in such a way, he causes you to meet the person of your dreams, or to keep you from getting in an accident on the drive home. Maybe it's something more sinister: maybe he's trying to enrage you, get you to do something you normally wouldn't. Maybe it has nothing to do with you; maybe it has to do with the ex-con standing in front of you. Whatever the purpose of this little scene is, it happens and life once more moves forward according to the script. I'm not entirely sure why Brian is in L.A., except inasmuch as Brian is some projection of me and, well, I was in L.A. Couldn't be that simple. Needless to say, Brian's stuff is giving me trouble. As written, Brian is learning about the troupe of real-life actors as we do.

This is in keeping with the stylistic choice I made regarding Brian, in that he would be written into a movie-like plot. This is the reveal/training sequence part of it, and I am stuck. See, it's one thing to advance a concept: there is a man learning how his new gig goes. Dramatizing it, on the other hand, takes up a lot of space on the page, especially if you're writing the back-and-forth in screenplay format, as I am. Have I mentioned the stylistic tricks I'm up to? Brian's written entirely in second- person, except for dialogue, which is in screenplay format. Jeremy is written in an entirely obtuse sort of David Foster Wallace-esque style. In what is either a magnificent literary move or an unwillingness to directly confront an emotionally charged moment, the actual content of the moment after he meets Allison is a footnote.

I'm obviously very clever. I should get a big pat on the head for this one. So basically Brian and Melinda (his trainer) are, right now, stuck in character at the Baja Fresh near Amoeba Music, not going anywhere. This is not where I wanted this to go. The actor subplot is a conceit I threw into the mix because -- This is going nowhere. Around and around in circles. After L.A.X. finally ended things, I thought I was done. Maybe not quite suicidal (now that would have been emo), but with that pure despair of the truly heartbroken. I was on IM a lot, talking with anyone who would have me. I was also on the phone with my mom. If you are talking to your mother about relationship problems, things must be really bad. What happened, though: reality became a bit...hmm.

I am going to write this, and it is going to sound like I either am crazy or was, and I fully accept this possibility and interpretation, but reality became heightened. It had already started when I noticed certain similarities in both event and specific detail between the way things went down with L.A.X. and the plot of Truth and Beauty. It increased as...all I can say is that I would look up and perceive things, strands of cause-effect, shimmering glances up the hills...I was in a lucid dream. It was magic occurring around me and through me. It was the otherworld, a fae enchantment. Titania and Oberon were standing by the pool of their house off Mulholland, staring down at me, watching the ass's progress. The La Brea tar pits were a vast untapped resource, dream-ore of the dead waiting to be mined and refined in the great factory floors in Burbank and Culver City.

Life became a movie: fast-paced, emotionally amplified, intense, urgent. Everything had meaning. Alternate this with plaintive heartbreak and the worst sort of wallowing. Spider-Man 2 broke me -- maybe the redheaded girl I loved would break off her wedding and come back to her true hero! Strangely, I didn't write anything; that would only occur when I was in the states with her. There was one night.

Having done my work, I excuse myself and take a seat next to the owner of the house, a British commercial director, talking about the house he's building higher in the hills, the regulations for fires and mudslides he has to comply with, the bitch of it all. I sit there, beer and cigarette in hand, half-heartedly listening to him, and then suddenly she is there. She isn't really there, but I suddenly sense a parallel universe, a quantum overlap, the train of quantum possibility where we are still together. I look around. No one else seems to notice the phantom sitting next to me, with her eyes and smile playing on me. I look at her, and she's laughing and radiant and just enjoying all the silliness surrounding us.

I have the vague sense of a parallel me, flirting and laughing and making fun of the people around us. There are discrepancies between this universe and that one. I see the real world and notice how it is different from the parallel one - people out of place, other arrangements of groups, generally the same but the details different. I'm only missing her, I think. I am only missing her and wishing she was there. This isn't real. Real or not, it persists. I am skating on quantum configurations, the waveform collapsing in two similar yet very distinct ways, and I see them both simultaneously. I reach out to take your hand, but my fingers slip through. His fingers don't; they hold on, and your eyes sparkle and reflect. I pull my hand back, pull myself inward. I look back at the path these two universes took to find the one event that split it off.

If I can find that, I think, I can go back. I can go back and change things, I can make things different, things can work out different, things can be the way they should be. I fly backwards, the two universes are my tracks, and then then converge in a vast fog of cause and effect, a chaotic and muddled mess, I try to get my bearings, but the interplay between us is too dynamic and volatile for any one instance to cause the fork. There were a million tiny variables, each one a Feynman diagram of just how probable its collapse into the desired waveform could be. I could trace it back farther, extending to before we met, each of our two tracks, to find just what the setup was, how it could have been changed, but there is a limit to what I am willing to do, how much history I am willing to change -- no, the only limit is how much I can actually change.

There, in the swirling mist of possibility, I realize that the fork was set well before that chance encounter on New Year's Eve, that we were tuned instruments flying in vectors set by actions far beyond our conscious thought, and that we would swing around one another for just long enough to give us momentum to go our own ways. And then I have to stop looking, as I start turning forward and when you look forward, you don't prophesize, you determine, and right now I am just not in the best state to determine anything. That is the only thing I am certain of. It is important that Strange Attractors gets made into a movie. Someone has decided this, Upstairs. I arbitrarily assign it to some cosmic entity, some Plot Motivator. In order to properly get Strange Attractors made into a movie, they have to transform Jeremy a little bit.

So they go for a tried-and-true motivation: the muse flip. Jeremy will fall in love with a woman with muse-esque characteristics, who will motivate him to turn out a good adaptation of his book. The script will then sail through the development process, hit the screens and voila, the world keeps continuing. What will happen is this: Jeremy and Allison will fall in love. Brian, then, will adopt the persona of Allison's old flame; tempt her, but ultimate she will stay with Jeremy. This will intensify certain passions and keep Jeremy fired up and presumably add flavor to the work. However, things go awry; things do not according to plan. The scenes between Brian and Alison do not stick to the script; Brian is forced to improvise, and lo and behold, Alison ends up going back with her old flame.

The plan is thrown into turmoil and disarray. As artistic intentions go, this is probably the most transparent. Obviously, the entire weight of the cosmos was contingent on L.A.X. and I being together. Obviously, even five years after the fact, emotionally recovered and in a much better place in my life, I still want the satisfaction of being right, with the weight of the Universe behind me. Obviously, my intention here is to have some modicum of revenge against the woman who broke my heart. Obviously, all this must be justified. I say this and yet simultaneous recognize the larger schema; to wit, there are cycles within cycles, plans within plans, events that emerge from other events beyond anyone's reckoning. A month after L.A.X. left, I was on a date with a buxom redhead, but it wasn't going well. I was still broken, and broken up.

Lo and behold, I get a call from L.A.X. I had enough sense, at least, to not return the call or pick up during the date. It becomes pretty obvious I am in no shape to think of cavorting with ladies, so I excuse myself for the night. I listen to her message. I think to myself, "It's a time for closure." I call her back. We begin chatting, it's awkward and painful, but whaddya know, things aren't going so well with the Old Flame. She may have made a mistake. I can sense now, looking back on it, that this is when the rift really began. The endless loop, the strange attractors come from the rush to enter back into heartbreak, to live there, to exist in a state of turmoil. I will be the white knight, the hero, rushing back in to save her from herself, and all will be made right again.

Our connection will resume. It'll be like old times, all those months ago. She does manage to extricate herself from her situation. We do end up getting back together. Once more in orbit. In the project (this fucking project), Brian, through some adroit improv and manipulation, gets Jeremy and Allison back together again. However, they end up trapped in a strange loop, a game without end, a Groundhog Day of near-madness, a browser window endlessly refreshing. This is, of course, how L.A.X. and I went for about six months. We would circle towards one another, connect, then swing apart, but then gravity and attraction would bring us closer together, and the cycle would repeat until we exhausted ourselves, until we couldn't do it anymore, until I finally got angry enough about the whole calamity to vent my spleen. Even then, it still lingered for a spell, until the whole thing was mercifully over.

Jeremy was done; Jeremy was spent. Jeremy would sink into the tar pits of La Brea, to be reconstituted. Brian would escape with Melinda to the East Coast. The last time I saw Sadler in person was when we saw a show at IO West. It was a warm Sunday afternoon; Hollywood Blvd. was essentially deserted. We both looked like hell. He had just been dumped by his girlfriend. "I'm a fucking pig, man," he said, with the acceptance of true self-loathing. I had nothing to respond with, nothing to give him; I had squandered it all on myself. What happened was this: I was in my apartment in L.A. on a Sunday morning. Things were looking grim. My job was ending, my lease was ending, and I was out of my goddamned mind. I stumbled into the bathroom for a stressed-out early morning piss.

I thought to myself, "Well, what do I do now?" The glass doors of the shower shook. I thought that the upstairs neighbors were stomping about. The doors kept shaking. Everything was shaking. I was sitting on the toilet with the building shaking around me when I finally realized I was going through my first earthquake in L.A. In order to further empathize that I should get the hell out of there as quickly as possible, a second quake shook me while on the 32nd floor of a skyscraper days later, as I was thinking about moving back to Boston. You can't write these things; you can only recount them later. What I did, then, was have one final dinner with L.A.X. It was going along, predictably bad enough. I was still unnerved; she has just started seeing someone new.

It was awkward and tense. Then I spied a diamond on her left ring finger. The someone new that she was seeing was, in fact, her new fiancee'. The project would have ended with L.A. consumed by flames. It has taken years to emerge from that dreamstate. Boston was ideal: deadly dull and lacking in imagination, although I didn't help myself by self-medicating with weed for so long. I wrote, I brooded; I came apart, came back together again. It took time and thought and a new relationship to begin a climb upward again. I got ambitious: I would revisit the L.A. thing, after so long. Jeremy and Brian, they came into being after all this, once I was determined to get this thing off my plate for good. I had an outline; I had an entangled mess of multiple plotlines running parallel; I had everything in the last eight years crammed into one single project.

One more go-around. The arcs curled like smoke. I wrote, and it felt -- stronger, but not good. It felt like exercise. It felt like I was too clever by half. Lacking heart or soul, one might say. More to the point, though: it felt unnecessary. It felt at odds. It felt tangled. What I was taught in film school, in my screenwriting courses, is one of the few axioms from that education I still keep in mind: plot must come from characters, not the other way around. I had a ready-made plot for which characters could be fused to. Looking backwards. A double-slit experiment. Pour that particular creative light from me with only the left slit open, and you will see Brian Sharp, rakish actor, graced by muses, sardonic and detached, yet hungry for more after the brief glimpse of the otherworldly delights he was afforded.

Cover the left and open the right and there's Jeremy Constantilios, ridiculous pastiche of millenial-lit cliches covering a skeleton of neuroses, unsteadiness and brilliance. Now, open both slits: instead of seeing both simultaneously, you will see an interference pattern of sexual and creative desire, projected onto a silver screen. Double vision brings actual clarity: two eyes, the strange attractors, bending possibility. Two creative urges -- one direct and up-front, the other secretive and guarded -- that only reveal themselves monovisually. The double-slit comes from the physicist Richard Feynman, who taught at Caltech in Pasadena for many years. He postulated a quantum theory of light that seems absolutely impossible but which is inherently true. From this double-slit experiment, he deduced, mathematically, that a photon of light shot at a piece of cardboard with two slits open will, in fact, go through both slits simultaneously.

In fact, that photon will not only go through both slits simultaneously, it will also go in every possible direction at once. What we see as light is actually all these photonic possibilities canceling one another out until we are left with the interference pattern. Light is actually a field of quantum chaos. There, in the Southland, where projectors stream forth focused beams of light onto screens. We have all gone into a world of light, of holography. At the speed of light, there is no time. Five years ago is the same as today. What changes is us, defined by our lack of -- I'm drifting again. The project's done. There is, quite literally, nothing left to write. There is no dramatic resolution here. It's not dashing enough to be romantic; it's not sad enough to be tragic; not funny or happy enough to be comedic.

Besides, I'm terrible with endings. I warned you. After a few years, I got back in touch with L.A.X. She had gotten married, then divorced; it sounds like she went through hell and back. It disarmed me; my intention was no longer what it once was. Sadler is doing really well; I just saw pictures of his wedding on Facebook. Things change irrevocably; we exit cycles. What's left, after all that time, is an equation, running outside me now, its own other world, of two strange attractors caught in a loop, one that I can look at from afar and remember its pull, swirling upwards and out, like smoke over hills refracting the endless yellow light.

The Crocodile Photograph

undated, later

When I saw the photograph of the woman in a bathtub with a crocodile hanging in Nancy's hallway, I knew I had to have it. The woman was wearing a 1920s-style bathing cap and the crocodile was only up to its snout, and the photograph was done up as an old daguerreotype on a silver plate. I couldn't fathom why someone would create it.

Nancy crowed triumphantly. "Oh, that thing, we found it in this random gallery on South Street in Philly when we lived there -- god, when was that, five years ago?"

"Four years," answered Derek. I resented Derek for having married above his grade. Nancy was clearly slumming. Derek was the sort of dude who let his neck hair get out of control.

"Only four years? Anyway, these little University of the Arts kids had started their own gallery and I saw this and just adored it." Nancy had a pixie haircut and impossibly small breasts. The hell was she doing with Derek? "It was only two hundred dollars."

"Playing the art market," joked Derek as he poured malbec into Crate and Barrel wide-mouth glasses. What a tool. Dinner that night was some sort of vegan lentil garbage that I crammed down with a look to Jennifer that she owed me for this. Jennifer rolled her eyes at me and gossiped with Nancy about other Wellesley alums, who was having a baby, who was moving back to the area, who was having a baby and thus moving back to the area.

"Pats are looking good this year, don't you think?" Derek was being cordial.

"I don't follow American football," I replied.

The dinner party dragged on way too late. By the time we got home, I was openly complaining about the quality of our social lives and Jennifer was refusing sex because the tannins were giving her a headache. I played some Call of Duty and jerked off. Jennifer was snoring as I piled into bed, kicking the dog down to the floor.

A week or so later, Nancy asked Jennifer if we could housesit for them while they went to a cousin's wedding. "In Utah, no less, a destination wedding, honestly, who has a destination wedding in Utah?" Jennifer swiftly volunteered me to check in on their twin Siamese cats, Lacan and Derrida. I sensed an opportunity. I bounded over to their Somerville loft, let myself in, emptied two cans of nasty-smelling cat food onto plates ("loaf in gravy," they called it), grabbed the crocodile photograph off the wall, returned home and hung the picture in my man cave next to the framed Pulp Fiction poster.

I was busy sending rockets into multiplayer asses when Jennifer finally noticed the photograph two days later. "What the fuck is that doing here?"

"It's mine now," I mumbled into my PlayStation mic. "Payment plan."

She looked at me like I was crazy. "You stole their fucking photograph! The fuck is wrong with you?"

I didn't turn. "They want it, they can have it back when they come get it. It's mine now."

She tried to take it off the wall, but I quickly stood up in between. "This is the man cave, remember? And what are the rules of the man cave? The ones you made me adopt? This is the -- what was it? This is the only place in the house where I can have my things and you can't say anything about it."

"I was talking about your movie posters, not about stolen artwork."

"Mine now. You're intruding on my man cave."

She had an uncertain look in her eye as she backed away. "You're giving that back."

I didn't, though. I was also surprised that Jennifer didn't say anything about it afterwards. The next day, I figured out why. Derek, freshly backed from Utah, was at the door.

"James, I'm not sure why you took the photograph but it's very uncool. I'm here to pick it up."

"Sorry, bro, but it's Nancy's to pick up."

"I'm here for Nancy, so cough it up."

"'Fraid I can't, chum. Besides, I've grown attached to it."

"Dude, hand me back the photograph or I call the cops."

"The cops? Really? We're going to involve them in this? Tell you what, you bring Nancy by and we'll talk this out."

"What does Nancy have to do with this?"

"I will return it to her and no other." Slam.

Two hours later, Nancy, Derek, and Cambridge's finest showed up. The officer seemed as bemused as I was by all this. Nancy stood there, arms crossed, waiting expectantly.

Fuck it, I thought. I handed back the photograph. Nancy scowled as she turned away, Derek sneering at me as the cop was glad to be done with this.

"Hey Nancy."

She turned.

"I bet your pussy tastes like grapefruit."

I only had a second to enjoy the shocked look on her face before Derek flattened me. Of course, assaulting someone in their own home in front of a cop is not the smartest idea, and yes, I was going to press charges, officer. Nancy started screaming about pressing charges for theft, and Jennifer was throwing me out on the sidewalk, and I checked into a room at the Charles Hotel with nothing but a cell phone at 47%.

It was worth it.