'smoking vegan, smiling gun' -- part four
This is the end. This is



eighteen



I was pacing a stopping bus when the Waffle House Family Restaurant came up in my sight. Its sign reflecting harsh yellow sunlight was the signal of three-thirty's passing. I checked my watch with a sweating brow. I found my fingers in my left cargo pocket, and grabbed some quarters. With my right hand, I pulled open the tough metal and glass door and stepped inside past a machine full of dirty stuffed animals. The waiting area booth was empty, as was the one child-sized chair stacked high with picture books and a single white stuffed rabbit that looked like it'd gone through the muddy jaws of three angry dogs.

A woman with a face as wide as my shoulder asked me if I was alone. I told her I was meeting my friend. She believed me. I strolled into the smoking section with my hand holding clothed metal away from my skin. In the darkest booth, in the place farthest away from where the sun reflected off the Waffle House sign, I found the fat woman with the chipped face chewing the end off a piece of sausage.

"You wanna sit down?" she asked me, before I was even sure I was looking at her.

"Yeah." I sat in the booth. Its ripped leather was cold and hot at the same time.

"You gonna buy me another hash browns?" she asked.

I almost corrected her, "Another hash brown." I didn't, both because I was in no position to correct her and because I wasn't really sure I was right.

"Let me see how much you got."

I put a handful of quarters onto the table. The rest, I needed for the bus.

There has to be a bus ride somewhere, I was thinking.

The fat woman scoffed at my handful of silver.

"You ain't getting much for that."

I clicked the smiling gun barrel against the tabletop before dipping it underneath, where two of her feet and one of mine were planted on the floor.

I was hot. I was cold. I was crazy.

The woman laughed a piece of sausage sideways into her throat-hole.

"Lot of good that's gonna do you," she said. "You need to check your head."

I tapped the gun against the bottom of the table. The woman put down her fork and picked up her napkin. She looked at her hands as they made the paper transparent with grease. "You've exited logic, Jack."

"Tell them this is over."

The woman folded her hands. "I can't tell them this is over unless it's actually over."

"It's over now," I said. "I don't know who you people are or what the fuck you think you're doing -- just -- this is stupid."

"If it's stupid, it's all your stupid fault," the woman said.

She paused.

I take it she was waiting for someone to chuckle. No one had chuckled. No one was there, except me and her. The only Waffle House in town was empty when John Mellencamp was in town.

"You think we're doing this for ourselves? You think we get something out of this?"

"Look -- I don't give a shit. Just call this thing off. Or quit the joke. I don't give a fuck."

The large woman took a short sip of some coffee.

"We had you figured for this. You'd fail the first run, we'd give you a demonstration, and then you'd go for the second shot. We had it all figured out."

I tapped the smiling gun barrel against the bottom of the table.

"You didn't have shit figured out."

"Oh? Did we? Didn't we? Look at this guy," the woman said, as though unaware of her audience's being gone. Refolding her greased napkin, she shook her head and asked me, "Why did we even bother to have a demonstration set up if we didn't think we'd have to use it?"

The waitress showed up, and dropped a cup of coffee in front of the woman and a glass of water atop the kids' word-find placemat in front of me.

"He'll have a cup of coffee."

"I don't want a cup of coffee."

"He'll have a cup of coffee."

"I'll be right back with your cup of coffee."

"See, Jack? You're not persuasive enough."

I touched the trigger. "Fuck you."

"Now, now, Jack," the woman said, opening three packs of creamer. "Don't confuse me for someone else, Jack. Let's talk, here."

She looked at her gold man's watch.

"It's almost a quarter till four. Your foot-washing girl's gone in fifteen minutes."

"Where's the van?" I asked, tapping the gun on the bottom of the table.

The woman laughed: "Ho, ho, ho."

I sniffed. Everything was bacon and maple syrup.

"You're not going to rescue her. It's not worth your time. And besides, you don't care. We've already figured all this out. We're just trying to show you something is all. Now listen."

"I'm listening," I said, maybe trying to sound angry. I'm not sure if it worked.

"You're going to get out of here, and take the bus. Here." She slid the quarters across the checked tablecloth. "Here, you're going to take the bus."

The waitress brought my coffee and left with the grace of a ballerina. I looked into its blackness.

"You're going to take the bus home," the fat woman went on, "and you're going to relax, chill for a bit. Take a nap, take a shower -- whatever. Make sure you're up by just after sunrise. You're going to take a car -- your roommate's, your girlfriend's -- and you're going to go where I tell you to go."

"Where's that?"

"You're going to go to John Mellencamp's house."

My upper lip moved a centimeter.

"What? What the fuck?"

"You're going to go to his house, and finish what you started." She took a gulp of your coffee. "Just like you're going to finish the coffee."

"I didn't start the coffee," I said, and immediately wondered why.

"You allowed it to be ordered. That's as good a start as any."

My eyes on the eyes behind the fat woman's fat glasses, I gulped down half the black coffee.

"You're a big, strong man, Jack," she said to me. "And I take it you wouldn't want to stop for directions. So I'll save you the embarrassment."

She lifted her empty water glass, and I noticed it had been pinning down a folded-into-fourths sheet of paper. She picked it up gingerly and tossed it atop my handful of quarters.

My coffee was three-quarters finished when I put it down for good. I picked up the piece of paper, and unfolded it. A wet ring from the glass that had held water multiplied before my eyes.

It was a color printout of an internet page. It showed driving directions from my house to John Mellencamp's. His house was in the middle of the woods of a national park just off Highway 46. It'd take me eighteen minutes to get there. The table of directions took up less than half the page. The rest was white, and time-stamped. The dead center of the left side of the negative space was punctuated with a splot of creamed coffee.

"It's all for you Jack," the fat woman said as I stood up. "This'll be the greatest thing you've ever done. The most you've ever lived."

The ropish animal of a little white weasel showed itself on the woman's shoulder, just then. It opened its red eyes, and made no sound.

I had the gun back in my cargo pocket. I was sweeping quarters into my opened right hand.

"Yeah, sure," I said, pocketing the driving directions.

I left one quarter on the table for the fat woman, and I didn't look at her as I navigated around booths and tables searching for the sun. I didn't look for the little dirty stuffed rabbit, either, and I almost wondered why some day.



Outside, where the sun was still yellow, and turning orange, my skin turned soft pink in the heat. The next bus would come too soon. I stood on the corner across the street from the Bloomington Courthouse, and the sun smiled off its windowed surface and glared at me.

The bus stopped at the curb beneath my feet at five till four. I dropped some quarters in and took my seat at the back. On any day where I wasn't carrying a gun, I'd put my arms up like flanked by beautiful women. I didn't that day. I looked ahead with my hands on my knees.

The elevated back of the bus, with its forward-facing seats, was a throne above something lonely on the day John Mellencamp was in town. Only two girls in T-shirts were conversing, and they were conversing quietly. The bus dipped and creaked as it bobbed in the wind and sailed down the road.

The bus stopped three times, picking up two passengers. It reached Third Street as the Indiana Memorial Union clocktower struck four o'clock, and a quite obviously real explosion shook the ground, and the bus, and the T-shirted girls' resolutions. The bus sailed on down Third Street.

"Something totally just exploded!" the first girl in the T-shirt screamed.

I was behind myself with a fear-like feeling.

"You have to stop the bus!" the second girl in the T-shirt screamed at the bus driver.

"You have to stop the bus!" the first girl agreed. "Something exploded!"

"I think it was up ahead of us!"

"It might have been up ahead of us!"

The bus driver turned his swarthy, leather, half-shielded-by-sunglasses face fifteen degrees to the right. Skeleton hands at ten o'clock and two o'clock on the steering wheel, he wasted no time in saying the half-wrong thing he said.

"And it might have been behind us. This bus stops for nothing."



nineteen



At home, no lights were turned on. The balcony windows were opened with a view of the downward-arcing sun. The sun stained orange a courtyard of weeds and pieces of concrete walls that went nowhere. A kid's bike might have been gleaming, bleached in the cold of the sun.

I stood in the kitchen, the center of my muted world. My hands were planted on the counter. My right hand sat next to the smiling gun. My left hand was mere inches from a note that used a car key as a paperweight. The note was from my girlfriend, and so was the car key.



Jack:
I had to go out for a walk to clear my head.
You can order pizza from Pizza Express tonight.
Get whatever you want. I'll eat whatever you get.
--Diane



A whole sheet of paper held these neat lines in its dead center. The blue lines of the college-ruled paper held the words tight, with discipline. A tear had landed directly upon the "from" in the second line of her note. I measured it with my eyes for a little bit. Was this the center of the piece of paper? It seemed like it. Or was it an optical illusion?

I trained my gaze through our empty living room, past the turned-off television, and onto the moving sun beyond my balcony window.

I wanted to be a very, very small child. I wanted to be someone else's very, very small child, all assembled and together. I was hungry for the pasts of others.

The telephone rang. It was my mother.

"Your cousins are in town," she said.

I'd moved to the sofa I know not when.

"They came up on a surprise visit."

"Oh, wow. All the way from Pennsylvania?"

"Yeah, they drove all this way for me. I told them they didn't have to do that shit." She laughed. "What are you and your girlfriend doing this weekend? We were going to take the girls up to the zoo tomorrow. You two can come. Your girlfriend's never met my sister's son's girlfriend, has she?"

"Nah, she hasn't."

"Why don't you come on up?"

"I -- I don't know."

"Is she in another one of her moods?"

"What moods, mom?"

"She gets pissy. Don't pretend like it never happened. Whenever she has her period -- I can tell. Is she having her period?"

"No. I mean, I don't know. She could be."

"You can't tell?"

"No, I can't."

"So she might be having her period."

"No, no. She's just . . . been having a rough week. Lots of studying, exams."

"Is she taking the -- what's it called? -- the Bar any time soon? I keep telling my sisters she's gonna be a lawyer."

"I -- she has to graduate first."

Did she?

"Shit, you're in a mood. You sure you're alright? Come on up here, see your cousins."

"I don't know -- I don't think she'd want to."

"Hmmm."

"She got into a car accident today," I said, measuring the words against the width of my television in the semi-darkness.

"She -- she what? Oh, my, God. I'd never believe it. That girl's a good driver, I always tell my family. I'd trust her over you any day."

"Yeah, yeah it's just -- a parked car hit her."

"A parked car hit her?"

"I mean -- I mean, she was hit while she was parked."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, it was a hit-and-run."

"Well, I'll be. She parked out on the street? Was she downtown?"

"Yeah, mom, she was."

"Yous kids don't remember when I tell you not to park downtown."

"She has to park somewhere--" I started to say. I stopped. I found the sun dipping beneath a line of clouds, turning the world a shade lavender.

"Do you want to talk to your cousin?"

"No -- no. I have to go soon."

"Where do you have to go?"

"It's -- it's Friday night. I'm going out to dinner."

"With your girlfriend?"

"Yeah."

"What are you having?"

"Pizza," I said, thinking of a pink plastic cup.

"Pizza?"

"Yeah."



Three hours later, it was nearing eight. The sun was nearing down. I stood in the kitchen, in the silence, with my girlfriend's letter lying side-by-side next to some internet-printed driving directions. I committed them both to memory via much squinting, and then found some kitchen matches in the drawer by the sink. I balled up both pieces of paper and lit them. I dropped them into the sink, where they glowed and smoldered like rubies beneath a river.

I scoured the cupboards for liquor. We were out of rum. We were out of vodka. I found a nine-tenths empty brown bottle of generic whiskey, and set it on the counter next to the smiling gun and the car key.

The light that spilled out of the refrigerator eclipsed the smoldering papers in the sink. We were out of wine coolers. The only thing alcoholic in the refrigerator was a single bottle of nighttime cough syrup. It was a different one from before. I put it in the microwave, punched in the numbers for one minutes and eight seconds, and stood looking out at the reflections of my kitchen lights in the glass balcony door. White strips outlined the partially open refrigerator. An orange glow emanated from the sink. A golden rectangle glowed from the microwave. I peered ahead at these lights behind, beside, and before me.

I closed the refrigerator. In dark silence, for thirty seconds until the microwave beeped and the golden rectangle vanished, for five minutes before the inherent moisture of the metal kitchen sink muted the red smolders of paper, my own private heartland, I cried for all the things I'd never get to be as the person I was before today.



When all was said and done, I downed the bottle of cough syrup in three gulps, and left.

Without the car key or the gun.

I came back up into the apartment ten minutes later, and flipped on the kitchen light. The key twinkled at me from the countertop. Next to the pink-blest black smiling gun, the key was a real object in a fictional world.

Before leaving the apartment, I let cold water run, washing black paper ashes down the drain. The water squealed out of the faucet with the sound of a weasel sailing over a spice rack. The ashes were gone in two moments. The cold water somehow brought a smell of cool flowers in a young girls' freshly washed hair on a warm day out of the depths of the hot paper ashes.



twenty



Most people don't know Bloomington, Indiana has a national park. Fewer people know that John Mellencamp keeps a summer home there. I am almost neither of these people.

I slid in off the highway just when it was getting curvy. The curves of Highway 46 are dangerous, in that no lights line the road's sides. The curves are also more interesting than the road's normal long flatness.

I pulled up onto gravel, and toward the front entrance of the park. A ranger-ish fellow with a flashlight longer than my arm and a belly wider than my height approached not-my car.

"It's late, all dark and scary out here, getting warm," he said, in the same sentence.

"It is, man," I said.

"You gonna be camping?"

"Nah, nah."

"You ain't coming to go skinny-dipping, are you? Don't lie to me now." He chuckled something that vibrated the volume of his body.

"Naw, naw, man," I said.

"Well, there've been kids out this time of year. Getting rowdy, drinking, you know."

"Yeah, I know."

"You're not one of them, are you?"

"Naw, naw."

"Alright." The ranger-man stood back up, and put one hand on his side in a position that suggested he actually wanted to put it on his back. "So, what brings you up here, then?"

"Canoeing," I said.

The ranger shook his head. It was the wrong answer.

"No, no, I mean -- my friends were canoeing out here today. I drove them up here."

The ranger shined his flashlight all over not-my automobile. He seemed to be measuring the reflection capabilities.

"I'd'a remembered this car," he said. "I'm pretty sure I would. This broken headlight and all."

"I was in another car," I spat out.

"What kind of car?"

"It was a -- uh --" I reached "-- a GMC Suburban. A big black one."

"That's a nice vehicle. Your friends brought their own canoes?"

"Nah, they . . . they rented one."

The ranger made a long, low, "Hmmm."

"They did."

"They'd have to have returned it before six." He leaned forward, bringing his face close to mine. For a second, I thought he was going to take a bite of the steering wheel. He spoke with breath like fresh-clipped grass. "What have your friends been doing since six?"

I shook my head. "I -- I don't know. Hiking?"

The ranger-man let out a guffaw.

"Aw, I hear, I hear you, son. Come on, come on through, they're probably waiting for you. They're probably waiting for you. Come on through."

He took a few awkward dance steps back, and shined his arms-length flashlight out down into the dead blackness of the gravel path.

I inched forward, gave him a nod, and rolled up the power window. I'd just gotten past the only human opposition I'd need to get past.



The rest of the evening's opposition was mostly road-related. Having one headlight meant only half of the darkness suffered a puncture wound of the luminescent kind. I was supposed to take the first left turn and the sixth right turn I came across. Unluckily for me, I missed the first left turn altogether, and didn't realize it until I'd already missed four more turns. I was heading deeper into the forest, and wondering when I could turn around. I kept picturing the worst, thinking I'd come across a deer or something. I didn't come across a deer.

I came across a campground. Old men in fishing vests were grilling wieners with miniature, equally bucktoothed versions of their selves at elevated metal box-pits in the middle of a grassy conjunction of wood, gravel, rock, dirt, and grass. They stared into my headlights as I ripped a crude three-point turn in the half-darkness.

I went back down the same road I'd first traveled. Only now, I was speeding over rumbling wooden bridges. More foliage poked out of the darkness toward my eyes. I turned on my one surviving high beam, turned off the radio -- some local talk station that wouldn't shut up about Mellencamp -- and leaned forward, toward the road before me.

The road curled around hard to the right at one point, and stopped. Rising up on the left side of the road was a wall of large rocks, cracked like big pieces of poisoned candy.

I turned around again, and headed down what I thought was the same road. This took me over many long bridges, and eventually to a rock wall flanked by out-of-use campsites.

Someone slapped their hand down on the hood. I rolled down the window.

"Shit, dude, what happened to your headlight?"

I turned on the dome light. Some kid with bleached blond hair and a bottle of Corona in his hand was looking in at me.

"Shit, dude, I'm sorry. Thought you were someone else."

"That's alright," I said. "Hey, could you tell me how to get the hell out of here?"

"Sure, man, sure. Where you trying to get?"

"There's some farmland up out north of here. I'm trying to get through to there."

"Shit, man. Shit. You'd have to go all the way back, man. Shit. I'll see if my girlfriend can help you. Hang on a second."

The guy ducked back into the darkness. The smell of black smoke mingled with the new car air-freshener.

He appeared again in a quarter of a moment.

"Dude, we got hot dogs, if you want one."



An hour later, and I hardly remember how, I was one-eighth drunk on Mexican beer. I was eating a blackened hot dog. There was nothing to clothe my naked hot dog -- neither bun, nor ketchup, nor mustard. I ate it with a wet napkin -- like from a truck stop -- as my only utensil. I was careful to keep my fingers not greasy. With clean hands, aloe-smelling hands, I ate my unoriginal hot dog with relish of the non-condiment variety. My stomach accepted each downed piece of hot dog with a hiss.

The guy and his girlfriend were like unclothed hot dogs, too. The guy's skin resembled the too-tanned color. The girl -- short-haired, elfish, with a loose-knit shawl of sorts spread from around her back -- moved the fingers that weren't holding beer like she was knitting something. They were telling me about their spring break.

"We went to Hawaii with his asshole friend."

"Yeah?"

"He ain't an asshole, bitch."

She laughed. "The bastard's brother was getting married."

"Lots of people get married in Hawaii these days," I said.

"Nah, nah," the girl said. "It's not like that. They live in Hawaii."

"Oh."

The guy mused a muse one can only muse on Mexican beer: "Where do people who live in Hawaii usually get married, then?" He put a little too much emphasis on the usually.

I took a bite of my aloe-infected hot dog.

"Hawaii?" I ventured. I took a swig of beer.

"That bastard's supposed to be coming to pick us up."

"He drives the same car as you."

"It ain't my car," I was privy to admit.

"Whose is it?" the girl asked. She had a voice like a grown woman, which maybe she was.

"It's my girlfriend's."

"Ahh."

I finished my hot dog in silence. We went on looking at a tangled pyramid of glowing, busted wooden logs in silence. The guy pulled out a small pipe, and lit some marijuana. He passed it to his girlfriend, who accepted. I declined. Maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe I should have.

They smoked until there was nothing to smoke.

"Bastard ain't here yet."

"He's coming."

"Give him a call."

"I can't get a signal here."

"Shit."

I looked into my empty beer like it was a telescope.

"A lot of people getting married in Hawaii these days," I said to the fire.

"Hawaii's great," the girl said, reminding me of someone at the end of a tunnel in my mind. "You ever been?"

"Nah, I haven't."

"You should go sometime," the guy said.

"It was great -- even though we had some shitty shit times."

"Shitty? Like how?"

"Bad things, man," the girl said, to the fire.

The fire was making no noise in return. Neither snapping, crackling, nor popping, it quietly smiled at all of us.

"We were driving," the girl said.

"Yeah?"

"And . . . this guy. We . . . we hit this guy."

The girl was looking directly into the frozen fire.

I for some reason cleansed my tongue of the beer-and-burnt-hot-dog flavor by licking the aloe wet napkin. It didn't taste too bad. I licked it again.

"We killed him. And then . . .

"And then we . . . threw his body into the ocean!"

I looked at the girl. The guy was quiet.

"Really?" I asked. She wanted me to ask something.

The girl let a low snort roll out her nose.

"No. Shit. No. I'm just fucking with you."

I stood up, and cracked my back. I made my watch glow. It was ten-thirty.

"I should get going."

"Where you headed, stranger?" the girl said with a giggle.

"I have to go to John Mellencamp's house," I said.

"Shit. You shitting me?"

"Nah, I got to go there."

"Why?"

"I'm gonna kill his ass."

"Oh, right on," the guy said. He was poking a toothpick into his pipe.

"Rock out," the girl whispered.

I made a gun with my fingers.

"I'm supposed to shoot him in the face."

The guy made a from-the-hip pair of devil horns with his right hand. "Rock and fucking roll."

One piece of firewood broke with a great snap, then. The girl looked at it with a suddenly-sobered blink.

"You need directions? Shit, I can hook you up."



Four short moments later, I was hooked up. In a silent, air-conditioned, new-car-smelling used automobile, I was gliding soundlessly over wooden bridges toward forest curves and walls of poisoned-candy rocks. In a miracle of one person telling one thing to one other person, the woods opened up with a yawn of sky. Where bridges and creeks and trees had dominated, all at once the sky became stars again. Cornfields lined either side of the liberated road. A large house more than a hundred years old loomed up at the end of the path I was on. No lights were on in its windows.

This was the most living I would ever do in my life.




twenty-one



The driveway was dirt. I was able to roll up without a sound. I parked next to a large sports utility vehicle that was not a GMC Suburban. The SUV was shiny, and black, and reflected the stars. I exited not-my car, pocketed my tiny gun, and closed the door. I patted myself down to make sure I had the car key. I did. I leaned, cracked my back, and yawned at the thick handful of stars smeared across the sky. My eyes moved seconds after I told them to. I shook my head hard, left to right, snorted, scratched the side of my nose, and headed up to the porch.

My tennis shoes against the dirt driveway made a sound like workman's hands clapping dust off denim.

I measured each breath with precision as I approached the front door of the Mellencamp House. The front porch, the whitewashed boards -- it was pretty classy, if something you'd see in close-up on the front cover of nine out of ten new American fiction novels.

I stopped breathing when I reached the door.

It was open. The glass surrounding the storm door was shattered, like with a crowbar. I tucked my hand under my polo shirt, and reached in between fragments of the glass. I pulled the frame of the door open, and supported it with my back as I reached for the doorknob.

It was then that it struck me. Someone had drawn something on the white front door.

It was in thick, nasty charcoal. I touched it with my fingertips, and pulled then away blackened. The charcoal was fresh. I squinted my eyes to see what it was.

It was a pair of lips, elongated. The blackness of their shape was the opposite of neat. Steaks of it appeared runny before my eyes. The lips were puckered in a ghastly kissing position. The drawing job had been so rushed that you'd almost think it was a contour sketch of a wet head of lettuce. In the moonlight, head swirling with cough syrup and Mexican beer, I was able to discern the shape of the lips.

I opened the door, and stepped into the dark house.

Broken glass crunched under my feet. The carpet couldn't have been more than three millimeters thick, judging by the wood-on-wood sound my footsteps made.

The staircase to my left was illuminated; the full moon beat down with subdued anger through a skylight twenty feet above. I took three steps toward the living room, and stopped dead.

There was a smell stuck in my nose like a scab from a pimple I just had to go and scratch. I wanted to reach in and pull it out. It was bitingly fresh aloe, and flowers in a cool breeze, women's shampoo on a warm summer day. It was the smell of burnt paper. Burnt newspaper.

The trail of smell lingered up the stairs. I followed it with my right hand clamped on my clothed gun.

A long hallway ran the length of the upper floor. I counted seven doors on each side before I stopped counting. At the end of the hall was a tall window with an elliptical top. Moonlight shone in, revealing a trail of blood and broken glass leading to the fourth door on the right.

My body felt very cold. I ran my hand down the height of my face, and breathed into my moving palm. A curtain of sweat broke and leaked salt into my eyes. I breathed with my nose, and reclaimed a few tears, and then almost sneezed. I shook my head. Something felt moving inside.

I followed the trail with my hand on my pocket on my gun. The walls of the house creaked. I stepped over a ripped and once-white stuffed bunny, and reached into my pocket for the smiling gun.

The door I had to open was already opened. I opened it again.




twenty-two



John Mellencamp was sitting on top of an opened box of Christmas garland in the middle of the room. His arms were stacked atop an acoustic guitar sitting in his lap. His chin rested on his forearms. His round eyes were closed. A small lamp in the corner was plugged in, its raw light bulb emitting sparks toward the soot-painted ceiling.

The far-left corner was piled high with blackened, burned baby diapers like peppered, bubbly, lumpy milk. A cracked chair leg and a golden French horn stuck up out of the middle of the grotesque pile. I used the hand that wasn't aiming the smiling gun to shield my lower face from the flavor of roasted flowers.

I cleared my throat, and almost began to speak. Mellencamp opened his eyes, and looked into mine.

"I--I."

He curled up his lips like he wasn't pleased with what he was seeing.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" some woman screeched from behind me.

I turned around, and felt a hook latched around my nose bridge pull my face backward. I screamed inside-out.

My mother was standing at the door, squeezed beyond imagination into a cheerleader's outfit. Red, white, and black -- the colors of my high school. Her feet were bare and black with soot, the fat toes resembling grilled sausages.

She held a dripping red knife above her head in a Psycho-grip.

"Don't you touch him! Don't you fucking lay a finger or a bullet on him!" she wailed, the sound of a future dissolving into smoke.

My mouth was open in a bean-shape by this time. I clutched the gun to the side of my head. And let a low sob out the side of my throat. And saw something not entirely beautiful glinting, orange, at the end of a tunnel.

Mellencamp was advancing toward me, his guitar suspended in front of his body.

"Baby -- don't -- keep cool -- baby. There's no bullets in that gun."

I turned the gun over on its side. I looked at the lips, puckered up for me.

My mother growled in my and Mellencamp's direction.

"Drop the gun," Mellencamp said, in a smooth little voice.

I was crumpled halfway forward. My left hand away from my face, I was pulling in through my breathing holes the taste of flaming decadence. My head buzzed like television static.

When John Mellencamp seized my wrist with his left hand, with his string-fretting hand, I screamed. It felt like having a fishhook on my heart pulled upward. Then, in through that small, curved sharpness came a wide gust of cold air. It was cold as the North Pole. It was cold as the South Pole. In an instant, I expanded to encompass both.

I was growing big beyond my time. I was so big I could see the past. I was so big I couldn't see the future. I could see sand of the present covering itself in waves. I could feel bullets from wars and knives from murders stabbing me in little patches of warmness.

I was growing so big I wanted to be small again.

God, can't You make Me small again?



twenty-three



A blink of an eye was more than enough time for me to pass through the cloud cover. A blink of a stopwatch's second hand was enough time for me to surface above a donut-shaped columnar building.

I fell fast and hard and gray, catching a flash of cornfield out beyond one border and highway out beyond another.

Three palm branches struck my face as I fell.

Whap

Whap

Whap

I smacked a round little body of water with a skrash. The coldness hit me as warmness. It warmed my body to the temperature it needed to be warmed to. It denied me of the ice that had collected during my fall. And eventually it too grew cold, with me.

I floated to the surface of the water. Not yet dead, my body rolled over so I was looking up at the navy blue sky.

I lost track of the time I spent floating there.

"Oh my God! Oh my God, are you alright?"

I sat up, even as I floated in the water.

A woman with a frizzy perm and a frizzier lavender sweater was coming toward me with her elbows bent like a doctor about to perform surgery.

"I'm -- I'm okay. I'm alright."

"My God," the woman went on, and leaned toward me. She offered her hand. I took it. It was wrinkled, and tougher with calluses than mine. She pulled me out of the water, almost stumbling backward onto the seat of her jeans. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"Yeah, I'm alright," I repeated. I smoothed my hands all over my face.

"You're lucky I saw you from the window," the lady said. "What were you doing, taking a little swim?" She let out a small chuckle.

She guided me through a tubular tunnel and to an elevator.

"Come on up to my office -- I'll get you a towel."

Up in her office, she did indeed get me a towel. I dried off my hair. My clothes were soaked to the bone. I yawned three times in the orange-and-red light of this woman's office.

"I'm Nancy," she said to me.

"I'm Jack," I told her.

She pointed out the window.

"You're lucky I saw you," she said, again.

"Lucky every office has a view of the water," I added.

"Well, if I'd been at the other side, I'd only have had a view of the moat!" she said, sounding worried. "I'm the only person in the office this late!"

"Oh, don't worry," I told her. "I wasn't going to drown or anything. I was just . . . kind of floating there."

"Hmm. That's what everyone says. Just floating there."

"Yeah, floating there."

"Floating there doing what?"

"Just -- floating there, thinking."

"Thinking about what?"

"About my mother."

"Oh, is she alright?"

"She's sick," I said, almost thinking it over. "She's really sick."

"Oh, no," the woman named Nancy said.



"My mother had leukemia for a year," this woman was telling me in ten minutes. She'd gone through a leather document bag for a copy of Canvas, the Indiana University Student Literary Arts Magazine. She flipped through it. She'd written a poem called "Diagnosis."

"I take the part-time classes. Business management and web design. I won the prize at the reading," she said.

"Oh. What happened to your mom?"

"Oh, she just passed away last year."

The woman named Nancy gave me the issue of Canvas. "Here -- you can keep this. Read over my poem. It's long. Like an epic kind of . . . ballad, or something."

"Sure."



"I can give you a ride where you're headed," she told me in five minutes. She was in front of her computer, with her hair tied back sticking ropes up and down behind her head, and glasses on her face. The little gold-plated touch lamp at her computer's side lent her an unusual shape of lighting.

"Sure, sure," I said. "That'd be great. I'm kind of . . . out of my way here."

"I can understand you wanna get home. I'll just be five more minutes. Lord knows I've been looking at this all day."

I stood up from my chair with a view of the palm-tree-endowed enclosed pond, and stood behind the woman named Nancy. She was looking at her computer monitor with wide-opened eyes under her glasses.

"You see this?"

"Um . . ."

"It's a design for our website."

"What website?"

"This company's website."

"Oh."

The internet browser window was a pure shade of black.

"It's . . . black," I said.

"No, no, look closer."

I leaned in closer. I didn't see anything within the blackness.

"Give up?"

"Yeah," I said.

"There are little tiny blue crosses in the background. They're so thin you almost can't see them. See them?"

I narrowed my eyes, I squinted, I relaxed my eyes. I saw nothing within the blackness.

"Come on, look closer," the woman said, rolling her chair a few inches to the left. I trained my eyes on the monitor again, and she looked at the side of my face.

"Some days, I don't even see the little crosses myself. We're at a quandary -- do we make them bigger, or smaller, or what? Should they be more noticeable, or is it more of a reward for people to discover them if they're hidden? Don't you feel so great when you discover something hidden?

"See -- this company, we sell . . . well, heck, it doesn't matter. It's boring. Still, they told me to make a website that would be 'well-hit.' They wanted it to be 'popular.' So I think if the crosses are hard to see, when someone does notice them, they might, I don't know, send a link to their friend or something. That's the best I could think of. I can't do the rest of my design without a background, so, well . . . Isn't that strange?"

She was still looking at me as I looked for the smallest sign of blue in the blackness.

I felt my skin grow hot. With great unease, I put my left hand on her right shoulder.

"It's kind of strange," I said.

She looked down at my hand. I bent closer, and kissed the side of the woman's neck. Her skin was soft and strong as suede. I let my tongue touch it.

Her chair scooted two feet to the left. She swiveled around, and looked up at me. She touched her hands to her hair. She took a shallow breath, and held it in like it was a deep one. I stepped back. She scooted over to her desk, and shut down the computer.

"Maybe we should be going," she said.

I clutched the poetry magazine, and let her take me wherever she was going.



Her minivan was cold and dark as the night itself. She pulled out of the underground garage, came out from under the moat via a ramp, and shot out onto the highway. A right turn onto Third Street eventually took us downtown. Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69" was playing on the eighties station when we turned left onto Kirkwood Avenue, lit up blue by moonlight and still as the castle in an empty fish aquarium, like an amusement park parking lot during a world war.

"Those were the best days of my life."

"That's you?" she asked.

I reached into my left pocket, and pulled out a GMC key on a GMC keychain.

"That's me, yeah."

She stopped parallel to the onyx-colored Suburban. I disembarked her minivan, and thanked her for the ride.

"Looks like someone got your windshield there," she small-talked.

"Oh, they did."

Beneath my driver's side windshield wiper was a goldenrod-colored rectangle of paper. It was an advertisement of some sort. I took it, and folded it in half.

"It was nice meeting you, Jack," she said, and maybe meant it.

"It was nice meeting you," I said. The passenger's side window rolled up, and hid her face behind a deep tint.

I unlocked my car, got in, and threw the folded advertisement onto the passenger's seat.

I started the engine, and the air-conditioner blasted me in the face like a chorus of French horns. I turned the radio down to a whisper, and rode down a dead Kirkwood until Walnut Street.

Where did I live again?

I followed Walnut Street north until it joined with a clean and clear Highway 37. I took Highway 37 south headed toward Louisville, Kentucky. I figured that was as good a place to start as any.

Somewhere out near the border, the radio went dead. Before me, stretched across the highway and only across the highway, was an opaque golden rectangle of light I could have avoided if I'd decided to take the Suburban off-road. I didn't go off-road. I drove straight toward the rectangle of light, toward a reflection of myself driving myself, placid and fearless, toward a chance to look at everything again from the beginning, rationally, and maybe decide if and why I might have had some best days.

I wasn't scared at all this time.

The next time, I'd be petrified.








[note handwritten on the back of an advertisement for a tanning salon, clipped to the windshield of an abandoned car with a broken taillight]



Hello, sir or madam. I don't know you and you don't know me. However, I will be very blunt. I've been waiting for you to come out of wherever you are, and I'm quite honestly getting tired.

To the point:

Parked behind you, there was a woman in a well-maintained, gently used car. She'd gone into the deli to try to get seated, and been told she had to wait a couple minutes, I figured. She was sitting in her car with the radio on, singing along very slowly to the music. I was watching her from the ice cream parlor here. I was watching because it was interesting. I'm sorry if you think me some kind of gossip or voyeur. However, what I saw next was very strange, and I think you may agree.

At one point, it looked like the song changed. The woman stopped singing along. When she stopped singing, I noticed she was very pretty. Instead of singing the song, she started to cry. She cried for a few minutes. She had her head on her hands on the steering wheel.

After a few minutes of this, she sat up straight. I could see her shaking.

She then did something very, very strange. She exited her car, and opened the trunk. From the trunk, she took a small metal baseball bat, and swung it again and again at her front left headlight. She smashed it, and screamed. When it had broken, she stopped, and looked at it. She was then very quiet.

When it looked like she'd just realized what she'd done, she turned the bat on your car. It was very random, and very fast. She took one swing at your rear left taillight. I'm not sure if it cracked or not. There was a loud, terrible CRUNCH. The bat recoiled, and the woman stopped. She let out a little yell of horror. She ran back to her trunk, threw the bat inside, jumped into her car, and drove away. She drove away so fast -- and she was acting so strangely, as I've described above -- that I don't even think she noticed me watching her the whole time.

I beg you to forgive this woman. It seems to me she was having some serious problems. She seemed very sad. She seemed very sorry. If you're religious, please remember what the Lord says about the unfortunate. If you're not religious, I'm sorry if I offended you.

Either way, please forgive her. Take no legal action of any kind; don't question witnesses; pay the damages yourself. I beg you to forgive her. She was obviously suffering some kind of stress.

Thank you.







tim rogers was born in 1979. he lives, most probably, in tokyo, and he does not hate john mellencamp at all. he can tell you honestly, however, the he prefers punk rock.


Okay, if you read all of that -- or any of that, I'd like you to email me.

In my original update, the one that got devoured by time, I said a whole bunch of extra shit about the book. I said, well . . . I don't remember everything I said. I tried to convince people to email me about the book is pretty much all I did.

I really don't care anymore. I guess this is the internet's way of telling me to let the novel speak for itself, or something.

I have decided to leave these entries up for only seven days. That gives the copiers and pasters of the world until Thursday, July 24th, 2003 to do their respective things. After then, this journal might just be deleted. At that time, God willing, I'll move on to a better place, in more ways than one. I'd like to think I'll see you all when I get there.

Until that ever-elusive someday,

--tim rogers