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i remember where i got my love ／愛をもらった場所覚えてるよ

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 11:08:45 GMT

This is the last entry in this journal. The journal will not be deleted. It will remain here. I'll be deleting a few entries from it in due time -- the stupid, short ones -- and keep only the posts that are significant to the, uh, "story."

For now, enjoy the final entry, if you can. It's long. That's about all I can say.

I just finished taking a cold shower. It was the first time I tried to do that in a time. It was a nice thing to do, on top of many not-so-nice things to do.

I've been thinking for a while, about transcription, mistranslation, and misinterpretation. That all human communication is, indeed, a string of lies, and that one human can't even trust himself to trust another human properly.

I'm also in the market for some porn. Everyone who looks up porn has some tips. I'm on DSL right now; I figure, that's what people do with DSL -- download porn. Someone tell me about where to find some porn. Own up -- wherever it is you get your porn, give away the secret.

I'll give away mine, too -- I don't even use it anymore.

I thought a little bit in the shower about love. So I figure I'm going to write about love. Someone read this. I know I have people all over the world reading what I write, and some of you are Japanese, so I'm going to put in passages I like about love, in Japanese, and then translate them. Mistranslations and/or embellishments will appear in brackets.

**

How can I give love when I don't know what it is I'm giving?
How can I give love when I just don't know how to give?
How can I give love when love is something I ain't never had?
Oh, no.
Oh, no.

You know, life can be long
And you've got to be so strong
And the world she is so tough
Sometimes I feel I've had enough

--John Lennon, "How?"

**

You know, I feel like this is one of the few songs on earth, in English, that I might have written. This and "Norwegian Wood." Mostly because of the lack of negative particles.

"How?" is something I would have written in high school. "Norwegian Wood" is something I would have written in college.

This is something I'd write now, about a child:

***

子供の言葉：

私は、私の愛は信じるものと言ます。私の愛は私に下ったものです。生まれたとき下って、大人になるまで持ってるものです。「死ぬまで持ってる」と言えません。死が知りませんから言えません。まだ分かってないことが多いです。愛も。

***

A child's words:

Love is something I believe in. My love is something that was given to me. It was given to me when I was born, and I will hold [onto] it until [long after] I become an adult. I can't say "I'll hold [onto] it until I die." Because I do not [yet] know death, I cannot say this. There are many things I do not yet understand. Like love.

*****

The Oprah you see in your non-Chicago cities is the Oprah that airs in Chicago at eleven-thirty in the evening. It was airing just after Big Joe went to bed. I was sitting on the makeshift futon on the floor, looking at my piles of black socks, fingering the perfect Shelby knot still in place around my neck. My god, I became an expert in tying a tie, today. Tonight, I watched Oprah. The topic was the rise of masturbation in young teens. A woman was shocked to find, in her daughter's room, a vibrator. Her daughter was fourteen years old. The daughter also appears on the show. She has braces, making her mouth metal like an old black Chicago beggar's, except she's young, and pretty, like a　apricot-skinned flower.

In the shower, I honestly tried to masturbate. I couldn't. It's not that I don't have the power within me; I just couldn't do it. Not with all the bad things that happened today, climaxing with me watching "Will and Grace" in a giant sofa in a giant Chicago office building's corporate break room. I ate a burrito Big Joe had racked up on his company expense account. It was alright. I could hardly taste it. I turned on "Will and Grace" after the first fifteen minutes of Robert DeNiro's directorial debut-ish piece A Bronx Tale struck me as too voice-overed.

I went to check my email on Big Joe's office computer, only to find that I'd left my Outlook Express open at his house, and therefore wouldn't be receiving any email.

I sat in front of the TV, alone, and wondered.

To my right was a wall of windows. Looking out, twenty-something floors down, Chicago sparkled like a translucent city beneath a front-lit reflection.

Haruki Murakami says in an interview that one night, a "joyous" thing occurred: he heard a "little voice" -- a "whisper" -- telling him to start writing a novel. He was 29. He wrote a novel. It wasn't great. He wrote another, and another.

I don't have voices telling me to do anything.

I have voices now, and they're my own, and they're telling me to say, yes, I've masturbated in other people's showers before. I can't say I'm sorry. I can't say I'm not sorry, either. The act is what it is. It's something that comes up.

I can't very well say I'm ashamed of urinating in other people's toilets, can I? I can't say I'm ashamed of defecating in their toilets, either.

It's something that comes up.

If I've masturbated in your shower, and you have some proof: well, sorry. It is, as I have said, simply something that happens. You're welcome to do it in mine, whenever you want. Just don't announce it beforehand, and we'll be okay.

*******

8/19/2003:

今クランベリージュース飲んでる。苦味だ。あの苦味好きじゃないけど飲む。クランベリージュースは泌尿器の健康にいいから。ビンに書いてあるんじゃ。俺は「大人」になるとビンに書いてあることを信じるようになったんだ。残念。ちょっとつまらない、あの「大人」のビンに書いてあるものを信じる癖。

俺が書いたことより信じやすい、あのビンに書いてあることも。

*******

8/19/2003:

"Right now, I'm drinking cranberry juice. It has a bitter taste. I don't like that bitter taste, yet, I drink it, because cranberry juice is good for the health of the urinary tract. It says so on the damned bottle. In becoming an "adult," I've come to believe things that are written on bottles. It's a shame. It's a little bored, that "adult" habit of believing things that are written on bottles.

"Things written on bottles are so much easier to believe than even the things I write."

*******

Actually, I was almost kind of ashamed of urinating in someone's toilet, today. It was Big Joe's toilet. I tried to urinate, and it wouldn't come out.

See, for a few days, I've been drinking cranberry juice. Three times, someone mentioned something about the cranberry juice, when I told them about it.

"You got a kidney stone, or something?"

Big Joe asked me, on the phone yesterday, when I told him I was coming up to Chicago, and that his mom had indeed dropped off his green card like she'd said she would, "What, you passing a kidney stone?"

This was all fun and funny -- until around nine this morning, when my Brita-blest clear urine turned violently, painfully, numbfully red for a split second, then yellow as popcorn salt.

Something pinged against the toilet porcelain.

I . . . don't feel any pain in my groin anymore.

For the moment.

At the moment, what with the site of bloody urine disturbing me violently, I took this to be a bad omen. It turns out now that it might not be so bad.

Maybe not. It's still a little too early to tell. It still kind of hurts. And I can't seem to urinate in a single stream too efficiently. I'll work on it, I imagine. At some long, long, far off time, when it's probably gone and healed itself.

} { } {

It was about a hundred and three in Chicago today, and a hundred and ninety in a suit. I managed. It kind of cool in here, now, at 2:04AM. I'm providing sideways advice and halfhearted graphic designs to the efforts to launch the insert credit's first finest hour. The goal of my halfhearted graphic designs is to spur those who would rather use no graphics at all to think of something better. They didn't exactly think of something too remarkably better. They thought of "abstract" -- solid colors. Oh, well, they're good people, at least. You can't take that away from them -- or can you?

What, really, can you take away from a person, in the nitrogen-cycle-sense?

*************

少年の言葉：

僕は、僕の愛は欲望の真っ暗な真ん中に本当に生きてるものだと言ってるんだ。僕の愛が怒ってるような気持ちだ。両親からもらったものじゃないし、自分の真っ暗な中によく覚えてない時から生きてるんだ。僕の死ぬときにこの僕の暗い愛も死ぬ。

*************

A young man's words:

I say my love is something that exists in the pitch-dark dead center of my [lust]. My love is an angered-ish feeling. My love is not something I received from my parents[;] it has been living deep within the very dark center of me since a time I cannot remember. When I die, this dark love of mine dies with me.

*****************

Among the last lines of The Death of Ivan Ilyich:

"Death is finished. There is no more death."

I like the way it sounds in Japanese. I once flipped through to the end of a Japanese translation:

「死が終わってしまった。これから死が無いだ。」
("Shi ga owatteshimatta. Korekara shiga nainda.")
トルストイの「イヴァンイリイッチの死」より

I like the way it sounds when you substitute "Ai" ("Love") for "Shi" ("Death").

「愛が終わってしまった。これから愛が無いんだ。」

"Love is finished. There is no more love."

{}][{}

Does it have to die with me, though?

I'm not sure.

If my love is something that exists deep, deep in the dead center of my lust, of the reactor that generates my goal-orientation, whether those goals are fame, fortune, or a fuck, they're my goals, and as long as someone remembers someone who remembers them, whether they're accomplished or not, my love is somewhere encoded within them.

Deep, deep, deep inside me, and the words I say, it's there. Anyone who hasn't seen it until now -- anyone who doesn't see it now -- they don't see it because they don't need to see it.

These are hardly words you'll tell your grandchildren.

These are words you'll tell yourself you told yourself.

*****************

I remember where I got my love. I remember it very clearly. It was a day I'd eaten graham crackers in kindergarten. I wasn't particularly hungry for them. I wanted to go home. Kindergarten was loud. Outside my house for the first time in my only five-years-progressed life, my ears were now fully realizing how horribly sensitive they are.

I talk about them all the time. Always, you hear about my "Hell Ears" like it's some kind of gimmick. Well, in a way -- it is. In another, darker way, it's not.

My Hell Ears are not enjoyable. I can hear cars from five street blocks away. I can hear Big Joe's air-conditioner and his breathing over my 100-decibel music, and someone's walking a dog -- at four in the morning?

Kindergarten made me sit in the corner, and cry. I didn't like being in kindergarten. Everyone was so noisy. I didn't know yet that they weren't as noisy at I'd thought they were.

At that time, I loved my mother like a young child does. She said she loved me, and I don't doubt that she did. I stopped loving her that way quickly, and slowly, at the same time. That doesn't mean I stopped loving her altogether. In the mass of my love, there's a piece that remembers her like it's supposed to. It's just smaller, and a different color, so I can still remember it.

I lost the nature of that love when I made my own.

I made my own while sitting at a low table in a kindergarten class near Newark, Delaware. It was a low place, and bright in illumination, and full of white people who looked like me.

There was a Chinese girl who sat far on the other side of class. Her name was "Chung." That's all I knew. I never talked to her. I ended up moving two weeks after I saw her.

When people ask where my fascination with Asia began, I always tell some lie or another. Or I say I don't remember. Here's a tip: when you're dealing with the me who calls himself "Tim Rogers," realize that when I say "I don't remember," it means don't want to talk about it, or I just don't want to talk to you, personally.

The truth is, I liked Asia because of this girl. I came to want to know more about her. I said before that I never had a "girls are icky" phase. Well, whatever "girls are icky" phase might have at some point spawned in me was miscarried that day I saw that Chinese girl for the first time.

She was so quiet. She was sitting in the corner, crying quietly, alone.

The teacher kept trying to talk to her, real soothing-like. The teacher, a black-haired white woman named Mrs. Newman, kept bending down and touching Chung's back. The Chinese girl kept crying, the beginning of my woman in the window, hands on her face, something I still see today and weep when I can't remember anything else, when I think of precisely how much of nothing one person -- myself all-included -- can ever become.

Where is she, today? Something tells me she's dead. She most likely has to be.

When I saw her, it struck me like that: this girl won't be alive when I'm old enough to wonder where she is. She's my love, love in a five-year-old girl. She's my death, both the beginning and the ending of it. From a long time ago, before I was able to question it, to now after her death, she's been weeping at the dead center of my lust. She is the reason I can never have children, and I can't remove her except with my own death. It's a cold notion. I don't entirely like it. I can't get rid of it, however.

That's where my lust came from. My love is inside my lust, and my lust is inside my love. It can't end even with my own death.

*

Here's where it becomes more concrete. Here's where, if this were fiction, you'd accuse me of "overkill." It's not fiction, however. It's me talking honestly. I'm not afraid to do that, anymore, not about this.

(Oh, shit -- I just touched my right glasses lens. I now have a . . . smudge. Forgive me for typing with my right eye closed.)

The girl never stopped crying, that day. It was fourteen days before my family moved to Kansas. I wouldn't see the girl too much after that. Though I'd remember her name even until now, I wouldn't use it in my mind, anymore, after that day. Her name was filed somewhere outside her body and her soul and her little lavender dress and her butterfly barrette.

Her mother came to the class. The teacher didn't know what to do with the girl who was crying without making a sound, at snack time. She might or might not have had some issue with the graham crackers. They were golden. I myself couldn't really stomach them, back then. I ate, anyway, and drank my apple juice, which I still drink now.

Her food and drink was untouched. It was a little after ten in the morning. That's when snack time was.

**

I'm . . . shaking as I type this.

**

Her mother showed up, to escort the girl out of class. Whenever the girl next came back to class, always in a pastel little dress with some ornament in her straight black hair, she was silent. She never spoke, for the thirteen days I was in her presence from across a classroom.

When her mother came into the room, the girl was quiet.

My god, her mother was beautiful. It was the first time I'd ever seen something so beautiful. She was in overalls, and was wearing a man's gold watch. Her hair was pulled back in a long braided ponytail. Where she'd come from to pick up her daughter, I don't know.

Her mother couldn't have been any older than my mother. She might have been twenty-seven, or twenty-eight. The mother nodded at the teacher, while the girl watched them, her lips closed. When at last the mother and the teacher were done talking, the mother took the girl by the hand, and she began to cry again. Some few feet before the girl and her mother reached the classroom door, the mother let go of the girl's hand.

I don't imagine I could understand what I was seeing. Or maybe I could, in the same way we all understand anything that can be understood.

Looking at her filled me with a feeling like I had to go to the bathroom, except I didn't have to go to the bathroom.

I think that's when my kidney stone began to form.

(Or . . . not.)

The best way I can describe this to someone close to me is to say that I wanted that woman as my mother, and I wanted her to make me cry.

Or you could take the blunt route, and say that I, at five years old, wanted to have violent, submissive sex with that woman.

Long, long ago, and far, far away, this happened. And it still gets me now. A woman some six times my age had aroused me while I was eating graham crackers.

And today I passed a kidney stone that might not have been a kidney stone. It hurt like nothing has ever hurt me before. I lived through it.

****()****

私はきっと悲しみの　
真ん中あたりで泣いている
私はきっと喜びの　
真っただ中で笑うんだ

あー　この旅は　
気楽な帰り道
のたれ死んだ所で　
本当のふるさと
あー　そうなのか　
そういう事なのか

ぴりーぴりー
ナビゲーターは魂だ

--ブルーハーツの「ナビゲーター」より

****()****

Watashi wa kitto kanashimino
Mannaka Atari de naiteiru
Watashi wa kitto yorokobino
Mattada nakade waraunda

Aa-aa, kono tabi wa
Kirakuna kaerimichi
Notarejinda tokorode
Hontouno furusato
aa-aa, sounanoka?
Souiukotonanoka?

--The Blue Hearts, "Navigator"

[Clearly, in the dead center of my sadness, I am crying. Clearly, at the height of my happiness, I'll laugh.

[I'm truly at ease on this journey. I'm at ease because I'm always on my way home. My home: is any place I can die along the side of the road. That's my true home. That's how it is. Isn't that how it is?

[I'm adrift upon the sea, always on my way home; my navigator is my soul.]

"If I die at the side of the road, that's my true home."

"Life is a journey home."

"My navigator is my soul."

"If I die in the middle of the road, that's my true home."

"Life is about going home."

"At the end of the journey lies home."

"Home is at the end of the road."

"Home is out, adrift, across the sea."

"When in the middle of a sad time, you're crying. When happiness is at its height, you will laugh."

"When in the middle of a sad time, you're crying. When happiness is at its height, you will laugh."

"You're coming home."

"You're dying."

So am I.

"My home is wherever I can comfortably die."

"I will die weary."

"You will die weary, too."

"Everyone dies weary, at the side of the road."

*

There are things in there no one said.

<>><<>><<>><

I did, a few times, sleep with older women. It's the thing I always wanted to do. A few times with a 32-year-old Japanese woman. Just once, it was with a Chinese woman in her late thirties. Once or twice, it was with a 43-year-old Japanese woman. The last time, it was with a woman whose age and nationality I could not discern -- I think she might have been Thai -- who I met at a bookstore. She was most likely in her mid to late forties. "Forty-seven" seems like a good number -- a prime, and a magic one, at that -- so we'll go with it. Just once, with a forty-seven-year-old woman. Well, it was actually a few times, if you catch my meaning. More than a few times, actually.

No, I'm not bragging, honest. I'm just reminding myself of the things I've done, as a person ought to be allowed to do.

My ex-girlfriend, when I finally told her about this -- not the forty-seven-year-old; the other two -- got angry. It was after we'd broken up. We were in Chicago for something or other related to a job interview. I was wearing a suit, like I was today. It was the day after my birthday -- that is to say, my younger brother's birthday.

We were eating pizza at Gino's East in Chicago. It was good pizza. How we got on the topic of sex with older women, I don't remember.

(Or do I?)

Anyway, my ex-girlfriend -- Korean, two years my junior -- pounded her fist on the table, rattling silverware and cast-iron pans, rattling the very checked tablecloth and the very smell of pesto in the air. A lot of customers quieted down with the rattle, and thanks to their quieting down, they all heard what she had to say. I had tried to stress the Chinese woman; her being not Japanese spared me half an argument and another description of how Japanese soldiers had raped Korean women during World War II.

"You know? You know what that is? You know what they call . . . this?"

She was stuttering. Her speech had been horrified into an internet shorthand/Konglish hybrid.

"Wh-what?" I asked her, half-ashamed that she'd try to stab me.

"They call this a MOTHERFUCKER!!"

With two exclamation points, she said it. My Hell Ears detected dozens of jaws dropping.

I tried to defend myself, and she wouldn't hear it. A white guy fucking a Chinese woman -- Chinese women are filthy, you know -- is one thing. A white guy fucking a Chinese woman more than twice his age? What the fuck is wrong with that?

I had to explain: nothing is wrong with it. It's what I wanted to do. It happened for a true reason. I willed it to happen. I wanted it. It was the most I could want.

)()()()(

Yet, at the same time, deeper down, there is indeed something wrong with me. Something deep, and dark.

I've described it before. I can't help it. I describe it to some people in short bursts.

I can't control my mind. Sometimes I don't know when beginnings are closer than endings, or endings are closer to beginnings.

I have to tell this to someone:

I hear things. Lots, and lots, and lots of things. I hear things all day long. I hear telephones ringing. I hear dogs barking. I hear scorpions scuttling on wooden floors. I hear fire engines when they're not really there. I don't know when things are there and when things aren't.

Most of the time, I can't sleep because of the things I hear.

I can't control my ears.

Surely, somewhere, right now, a scorpion is scraping its pointed little feet against a dry wooden floor. If I think I'm hearing it, well -- it must be happening somewhere, right? Yet, I'm not hearing it for real.

I've managed to live a fairly decent life this way. I've managed to not die. Last night, in Dunkin Donuts, I managed to get a blonde woman high on both life and marijuana to pay for my dozen of mixed donuts.

I ate two, and then got diarrhea. Now, I think I'm constipated. I've never been constipated before, so how the hell would I know?

I'm used to excessive excretion, what with my inguinal hernia. That's not the point I'm trying to make, however.

It's sounds, most pointedly sounds that aren't there.

I talk to people constantly, when they're not there. I talk without moving my lips. It's like I'm rehearsing conversations that may or may not ever happen.

I think a lot of people do this.

I used to do it constantly. It was always with one particular person that I talked. Lately, I haven't been talking to anyone.

---

This isn't about separating real from unreal. Leave that to science-fiction.

---

This is about my being selfish or not selfish, and how I ended up not selfish. It has to do with my love -- the dark one, the one that's deep inside.

I was at a bookstore one day, when I met that Thai woman. I went to her house and had sex with her many, many times. Me, a person who has never taken drugs or smoked a cigarette or drunk alcohol, sometimes loses memories for a short span of time. I guess it's like a computer slowing down when too much shit is stored on its hard drive.

I lost the memory of that Thai woman for a long time. I still don't know where it went. I remember where it was when it came back, however.

Here's the story of how I lost my selfishness.

First, a preface.

I was in Las Vegas one night. Big Joe was in a club. He'd paid fifty dollars to enter. I sat at a bar in the Bellagio, striking matches, blowing them out, drinking iced water, and looking around. I was dressed up pretty nice, in a cowboy jacket and jeans and a shirt the color of a Dr. Pepper can. And a black tie.

I saw a woman sitting before a row of slot machines. She was Japanese. She was wearing a long tan trench coat that must have had forty buckles down it. She had big black sunglasses on her face, and she was smoking a cigarette and playing the slot machine.

I managed to talk to her after kind of staring for an hour. She told me she came to Vegas once every two weeks, on "business." She only stayed two days at a time. Sometimes the weekend, sometimes not. She played the slot machines all night, because she didn't want to bother to adjust to the time zone difference. She had tempered herself into the equilibrium. She was allowed by time to exist in two places at once. She was two people at once.

She was a miracle of people-physics; like a cylindrical truck with a hole a person-length wide was speeding at just the right speed as she fell at exactly the right speed to land on her feet without collision.

She bought me a Sprite.

Second, a foreword.

A woman at the airport in San Jose bought me a Dr. Pepper because I was wearing Japanese sandals, and was able to say I'd just gotten back from Japan, and meant it.

Third, and introduction.

I really, honestly do like some things just because they're different from me. I think everyone does this, in some regard.

The story -- or, "i remember where i got my love".

I'd gone nine days without food or sleep in Tokyo. My head was caving in. I walked from Saitama to Ikebukuro, and then ended up somehow in Sugamo, staring at a guy who was reciting Buddhist sutras at a temple. I burned some incense, and cried at the smoke. I stared at bowls of plastic tempura in a window.

Nine days. People tell me this is impossible. It's not. I know it's not, because I lived it.

For nine days, I drank cheap coffee at internet cafes. I'd pay the 100 yen first-hour fee, and drank six or seven cups of coffee standing up.

It was a dark time. I don't remember more than most of it, and that's the truth for once.

I ended up in Sugamo Station a little before ten in the morning on a Tuesday.

I was wearing a pair of jeans. I didn't know where I'd gotten them. I was crying at a display of bread rolls in a bakery window.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, very gently, like a cool breeze, like a John Lennon song.

"Can you swim?" a girl who tried to be many things, and was still a girl, had asked me, in an email, two weeks earlier. She followed this question by saying that she was listening to John Lennon's "How?" while getting ready to lay down and die. She was getting sleepy.

"I'd like to swim with you. So can you swim? Let me know in your reply."

I never answered her question. She didn't have the right to ask it.

Standing behind me as I stood before the bakery window was a Japanese woman. She was in her mid-forties. She looked Thai. She had a tight, youthful face, and her long coat and sweatpants concealed what I later learned was a marathon runner's body.

"Are you crying?"

She was speaking English.

"No."

It was the truth. Or was it?

She made excuses for speaking English so presumptuously.

"It's alright."

"My English is so bad."

"No, it's not." It was the truth. I'm honest when nine days hungry. It's almost like a high, that kind of food-lacking.

"I worked at a bank in Tokyo. An international bank."

(Aside: Haruki Murakami says he hated running his own jazz club in Tokyo, because he had to deal with people. His parents hated him for refusing to take a company job. Now, he has an office in Tokyo, where he goes to be alone, and write. That's nice. He's . . . normal, though. He doesn't have any problems. It's a bit inspirational to know when in the middle of telling a story like this.)

"Oh. Your English is really, really good." I wasn't exaggerating.

"Why are you sad?" she asked me.

"I'm hungry," I said, in the mood for honesty.

In fifteen minutes' time, we were walking down the road into deep Sugamo, stopping at stores. She bought me a pair of 100-yen wool gloves at a 100-yen shop. She bought me a pair of house slippers -- if I wore them instead of regular socks, my feet wouldn't get so cold. She bought me a hot can of tea. It hurt to drink it. I told her I'd lost my home and my friend and my everything. We passed by a Tendon Tenya tempura shop, and she asked if I wanted to eat there. I imagined the smoky taste of the sticky donburi sauce on the top of the roof of my mouth, and I gagged, almost. I said, no. My stomach felt weak. She suggested udon, and I didn't refuse.

Rather than take me to an udon shop, she took me to a supermarket. She bought a large package of noodles. She bought a lot of things. She bought me a tall bottle of Aquarius sports drink, which, high in electrolytes, would be good in a food-deprived stomach and a nutrient-deprived body. I was spotting out. My eyes were hazy. Footsteps felt like far-away electricity ticking beneath the rocky feet of crows on a power line in a desert somewhere. She bought a box of cookies. She bought a thick package of tofu.

Then she took me to her home. She didn't have furniture in her home. It was a half-sized, tiny Japanese apartment. It was smaller than the ones I'd seen some foreigners living in. The floor was brown, and wood.

Rather than a bed, she had an air-mattress. I was hazy, and immobile, when I sat on it. She used an electric pump to pump it up. On the walls were pictures of Bob Marley and Jim Morrison. There was an ashy smell like peanut butter in the air. She told me she'd been living there since she quit her job. She's been so bored up here, alone, lately.

Later, I thought it was the Thai woman from years before who'd had an air-mattress. It wasn't. She didn't have an air-mattress. It was silly. The Thai woman, I realized today, while walking well out of my way to guide a white woman who took up the wrong line of work to a train station in a city that is not hers -- nor mine -- lived in a high-ceilinged house with a big, puffy bed that made no sounds.

It was with this Japanese woman, whose name I never learned, that I sat on this air-mattress, which kept deflating, and watched Bob Sapp on television. She smoked a cigarette and saw that I kept down a cup of tea. Then she went to make udon.

She put out her cigarette in a jar like you'd use to keep pennies. She made my udon noodles like she was putting on a sweater. She was already wearing a sweater -- big, and purple, and thready. Her hair was up in a ponytail. Her hair was kinky and curly. She wasn't unattractive at all. With the back of my head touching the inch-thick wall behind the air-mattress, I studied this woman's sweatpants. I could see the curve of her ass. She wasn't wearing underwear, or else she was wearing a thong. She made the udon boredly, putting sweater after sweater of steam into the air. She didn't turn on the vent. The wet smell made me hot. I sighed, and fell asleep with my back against the wall, as The Pink Panther -- the movie -- came on television.

The woman had brought a tray to me, in time. She put a big flat spoon and a pair of wooden chopsticks into the udon. She made me another cup of tea. She saw that I drank it. I said I wanted something cold. She gave me some of the sports drink. I ate one noodle, with chopsticks. It was good -- she'd made it vegetarian, for me, and it tasted boiled in soy sauce -- and the hard tofu was better. I took three bites of a tofu cake. Then a fourth. My hand was shaking. My body had grown so warm inside that I was freezing cold.

All this, from what? I was thinking. What the hell is this? I did this to myself. I'm not in a war. I'm not fighting for any cause. I'm just me, down on my luck, hot and cold, and I feel like I'm going to die.

I'd been wandering shopping arcades and department stores for so long I didn't know the interior of an apartment when I saw one. I was hearing corporate jingles on a three-second loop. I was alone.

The Japanese woman was spoon-feeding me udon.

"You're a mess," she kept saying, in Japanese. "You need some rest. You need to eat this."

The first feeling I'd felt in a long time came over me. I tipped and swerved to my feet, and found the bathroom. I vomited chunks of tofu and ramen into her toilet. I was reverse hungry when I collapsed on the air-mattress again.

The Pink Panther was still on as she was feeding me azuki red-bean-paste ice cream with a tea spoon. At one point, she went outside, and came back with more ice cream. The first carton had been freezer-burned, and probably wasn't too good for my health.

By four in the afternoon, I ate three of the now-cold udon noodles, and then vomited again. Her bathroom smelled like cherry air-freshener and dirty orange juice by the time I was done.

I sat on the mattress again, now fully recharged. Vomiting can make you feel better sometimes; in the case of having not eaten for nine days -- longer than I hope to not eat again -- it takes two vomits, I wager.

By the second vomit, the little wooden apartment was dark. Some blue light cut in through the balcony curtains. The television set made everything glow.

She turned down the television volume, and smoked another cigarette, and talked to me. I talked to her, and drank some hot tea. I was warming up.

At one point, she put her head on my shoulder. I didn't move. I froze. At another point, when her cigarettes were put away, she laid her hand gently on my crotch.

"Maybe you'd feel better if we had sex?" she said, in English. "I'll be on top. You don't have to do anything. I'll be slow."

I'd be lying if I said that didn't do something for me.

I'd be lying if I said it didn't do two things for me.

I immediately burst out into tears, and fell over onto my side, away from her, on the mattress. She sat there and looked at me, with shame.

I remember the way she said it: "I'll be slow." Like reciting a nursery rhyme.

"I'm sorry," she said, again and again. Eventually, I gave up, and let her take me to a bar, where we sat for three hours, talking.

She ordered a pizza, and talked about her dead husband. She had given me some old gloves of his. She'd given me two pairs of gloves in one day. Today, I still have neither of them.

The cheese on the pizza didn't sit well with me.

Then she ordered mushrooms. My least favorite food on earth -- a whole plate of them. She ate one, and then picked up a mushroom with her chopsticks and brought it to my mouth. I ate it, and then I ate the rest of them, with my own chopsticks. It was like flesh ripped straight off the side of someone's heart.

She gave me a piece of paper with her email address on it, and five thousand yen, at the station. The station smelled like a vegetable market and cigarettes and cinnamon. The woman's lips were chapped white at this time. It was after seven in the evening.

I took her money and her email address.

She'd said, at the bar, in Japanese, "I'm going to give you my email address. When you get better, when you find out what's wrong with you, and fix it, maybe we can meet again?"

I knew I could never see her again. Under those circumstances, no one can meet her ever again.

"I'm so lonely," she said, at the bar. "No one will touch me. No one will let me touch them. I'm so old. I'm going to die, old and alone.

"I want someone to fuck me. I want someone to fuck me from behind. I want someone to fuck me in the ass. I want someone to eat my pussy. I don't care who. I want to suck someone's dick again. I don't care whose. Like I was a girl again. I need it. I've always needed it. I think I've never had it."

"Can I . . . kiss you?" she asked me, at the train station.

I couldn't be selfish. Someone who pulls in air and pure air, air and living air, from all around, waiting for a prize, stood before me. I made her less tired with my gestures, with my life, with a piece of my love.

I shook my head. Like a grateful gentleman, I kissed the back of her hand, and I got on the train, and I never saw her again. I spent some of her money on a meal of tempura the next morning, and then put the rest toward the first month's rent at the coffin I lived in for two months.

I wasn't selfish when I took that money. I was a promise she'd bought, that some day, someone might fix what's wrong with them, and come back to her, and love her deeply, and darkly, and until she was dead by the side of the road, in her true home.

Which is to say, if I have love for her, it's dark, and it's somewhere no one can touch. I can't ever see that woman who made me udon, ever again, and I'm not sad.

The dark young man inside my heart is saying: I should have fucked her, like she wanted.

The child behind me is asking, "Did the girl speak to anyone after you left?"

The adult before me is shaking his head. "Either she went on not talking forever, or she died."

My God, I couldn't go on if she lived to have friends. I couldn't live with myself, or with anyone else, if she ever made any friends and ever approached a normal life.

My love won't and can't grant her love of her own, and if she were still alive, she'd be grateful.

**

I'm saying these things, here, in public, because I'm done. I'm done trying to fit in. I won't do it anymore. If I accept a job at a Japanese 7-Eleven, though I may wear a uniform, I'm doing it on my own whim, and the manager, hopefully, will not be able to read this, much less find it.

Don't call me immature. I know maturity. I choose to be blind to it. This is who I am.

Today, I finished growing up.

I have decided to continue as what I am.

I am broken. I can never be fixed. I am broken for you. I can never be fixed for you. I am broken by myself. I can never be fixed by you.

I have remembered where I found my love.

It's right here:

***********

大人の言葉：

俺の愛は俺のものだ、と俺が言ってる。相手のものではない。俺の愛は俺だけのものだ。愛された人は俺を愛すると選べばいいけど俺を愛しなくてもいい。俺の愛は盗めれないことばかりでなく失えるものではない。俺の愛は全て俺のものだ、死ぬ日まで。

***********

An adult's words:

I say, my love is mine. It does not belong to anyone else. My love is only mine. If the loved choose to love, that's okay; if they don't love back, that's okay. My love can not only not be stolen from me, it can also never be lost. My love is all mine, until the day I die.

*****************

My love is mine.

And I am yours.

(

Today was the second-worst day of my life, and yet, I've come up with an excellent T-shirt idea: a black shirt with white text that reads

I LOVE.

Period included. Maybe even a Japanese version?

"俺は愛する。"

Maybe black, with white design? Ripped-off sleeves? Someone make a shirt like this for me, someone with access to a shirt-machine. I'll wear it wherever I go. In winter, I'll wear it over something heavy.

)

I removed an article from insert credit last week. Rather, I had it removed. It was an article I'd written in November of 2002. I wanted it to be posted when it was at least three months old. This was done; the article was posted in April of 2003, upon my return from Japan. The article is now gone.

I let it stay on the website for four months. In those four months, other articles were written that referenced that article. When the article disappeared, it left holes.

I like holes in the internet as much as I like the idea that, if all the computers in the world are turned off, the internet will still, technically, "exist."

I like being inside a website with white text on black, and then clicking on a link, and suddenly seeing a black-text-on-white 404 error page. Where did the page go?

More than anything else, I like getting emails from readers who begin by complimenting me on my latest article, continue by referencing an article (not by me) which references the deleted article, and then asking where the deleted article went.

This shows me that these people read my new article, read another article, and then saw a link to an article of mine that they know they've read. I like my hypothesis:

They would not click on the link if they hadn't read and enjoyed the article which has been deleted.

I like when they ask where the article's gone, and I pretend, "I don't know."

I like the hole. I like the adventure of it.

Most other people don't. They immediately fill the hole, or else keep digging around it, to make their whole world a hole, and I say to those people:

My love was never yours. It wasn't anyone's, except mine. If you wanted love, you needed to make your own.

You can't share love, and no matter how early, it's too late to try. It's always too late to try. Life isn't about trying, or even thinking about trying. It's not about doing, either. It's about being.

Love is. Mine is, anyway.

Only now, from you who I always saw and heard clearly, I die, as the sun rises over Chicago.

This is the end.

Thank you for reading.

--tim rogersの最後の冒険が始まってる

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 04:33:20 GMT

I almost broke some old black dude's arm today.

I was leaving A Building near Clark and Lake in Chicago at a little after six-thirty PM, en route to a rendezvous with Big Joe near the Chicago Sun-Times building. I had punk rock in my ears and a Slurpee in my hand. It was a big Slurpee, and melting. That might have been fucking with me. Or it might have been something else.

So anyway, me with the Hell Ears and all, I heard, over my punk rock, this Old Black Beggar Dude on the corner says to me, "Hey, man." He wanted change. I ignored him, made like my ears were too filled with music, because for any normal person, they would have been.

Then the dude does something wrong. He starts to follow me. Now, those of you in Los Angeles will know beggars as pretty docile. They try to get your attention, and if you don't give it to them, they don't try to take it anymore.

Well, the bitches in Chicago is persistent. Persistent enough to follow you, and then do something you never do in the United States of America -- and not in other countries, either, though for different reasons -- he touched me. Not only did he touch me, he touched me with all five digits, on the widest part of my shoulder. Gripped it, almost.

His left hand, my left shoulder.

I swung my left arm up and around, catching his at the elbow. It was a split-split second later that I had the old bastard's arm in an aikido lock. It hurt him so bad, it was even hurting me a little bit. He made a squealing sound like a pimp being slowly deflated.

With my right hand, I pulled my headphones down to my neck. The old guy's mouth was wide open.

"What the fuck -- what the fuck, man?" He had a whole bunch of metal teeth. They weren't gold. They were some far less precious metal.

I narrowed my eyes at him. I might have looked angry. I wasn't. I was simply caught off-guard. His mouth opened in the shaped of an "ai."

"Ai," the Japanese word for "love." Were he Japanese, he might be about to admit something deep and/or soul-rending.

"What?" I said to him.

"Sh-shit!" he yelled.

I let go of the guy. He took off running away from me like a kid chasing a school bus. He sure could run.

It happens, sometimes, that I get caught off-guard. I'm usually brought back on-guard very quickly. I learned some six months ago, one night, that I was not at all selfish. I think the only person I told that story to is aderack. It's not a bad story.

Well, I learned today that I might, really, be the kind of person nobody should fuck with physically.

When I get back to Japan, I'm going to continue with aikido. There's an intelligence to it, you know. There's a sense, when you look at a guy -- any guy -- you can think, deep down inside: I could beat him.

Kids in high schools will talk about their abilities to beat up anyone. Yet, there's a level somewhere behind all that shit -- there's a level of intellectual belief in your ability that, combined with stances and poses, can make anyone invincible. That shit you see on certain anime shows, where martial artists compete with their psychic powers -- there's a certain truth behind that. When two people with that belief clash, that's where adrenaline comes from.

The so-minded person is capable of anything.

And that's hardly the point of this entry. The point is that you don't touch someone in American public. You just don't do it. People in this country are born paranoid of muggers and murderers and rapists, even people from shit-towns like the one I'm from.

You don't touch someone, especially when you want them to give you money.

Unless, of course, they've agreed to pay you afterwards.

Or, better yet, if they've paid you in advance.

Some little black kids came up to me when I was standing on the Michigan bridge, looking down at the canal, listening to music and sweating. They were raising money for school. Some christian group at their christian school. I gave them two quarters. I didn't even take off my headphones to see what they had to say. I just gave them the quarters. They didn't even thank me.

They knew better.

I'm going to have boba tomorrow. And then maybe die. How I'll do either thing, I don't know. Death is a good thing, though -- in the metaphorical sense, of course.

I'm going to take a shower.

I've got something else I'm working on. It might go up tonight, on this very page. Or maybe it never will.

Oh, and something big might be on insert credit tonight. Be sure to check it out. If it goes up.

Tue, 19 Aug 2003 23:20:16 GMT

You know, every time I used to write a new article for insert credit, I used to link it in this livejournal.

Like this.

These days, though, I'm too busy with far too many things to do that. So I don't do it.

Besides, everyone who cares probably reads the site every day, anyway, right?

And you hardly need me to bring you interesting news stories when you've got, say, Slashdot Games or some shit.

Hmmm.

I'm not going to Chicgago tonight. I'm going to Chicago tomorrow, instead. Either way, I'm still going to Chicago. It all still amounts to me in Chicago.

With all hope, I'll be in Tokyo in a little over three weeks. With even more hope, I won't be back to Indianapolis, Indiana ever again, and I won't be back to the United States of America for a long time. I won't go ahead and badmouth anyone here. I won't give a kind of Bilbo Baggins last speech about how I've known half of you half as long as I'd liked and liked half of you half as much as you deserved, because, quite frankly, I don't do that sort of thing.

I'm not an audience-burner. I've never been able to fall in line with that aesthetic. I've been accused, before, of self-importance; of writing things because I, myself, like them. I can defend this easily by saying that I wouldn't want to write something I don't like. Now, I have, as an exercise in tone or structure, at times written entire essays or novels in narrative voices I loathe. That's not to say I consider this more important than, say, what I'm doing right now.

A writing professor once told me that you have to know your audience. A guy who pretended to be my literary agent, and is now half-dead hopefully bordering on three-quarters dead, once cited Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake as an example of audience-loathing writing.

I say to the people of the internet: there exist differences between not seeing the audience, not knowing the audience, not minding the audience, and acknowledging the audience, insulting the audience, and hating the audience. Truth be told, each of these things can be done either very poorly or very well -- except insulting the audience. Yes, hating the audience can cause beautiful results -- look at Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood, written for the kinds of high school romance-novel leisure-readers the author loathed.

Insulting the audience is simply not smooth, and not cool, especially if the audience can't fight back. Kurt Vonnegut oversteps many hundreds of boundaries in his later novels, and bitterly.

There are people who like this kind of thing. Unfortunately, they are far outnumbered by the people who do not.

"Tim Rogers" is ending. Very soon, there will be no more "Tim Rogers." I had planned to retire the name this April, and got hung up on certain things. Now, I figure, it's closing in on that time. With another move to Japan and another autumn comes another name and another persona. What you're reading right now is the "real me," both apologetic and unapologetic.

In closing, FUCK YOU YOU DUMB BITCHES.

(Now, see, I didn't mean that -- it was supposed to be a joke. There were . . . grounds for it. Given the above example.)

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 20:11:52 GMT

Idiotic assholes of the world, listen up:

If you are right now in the presence of an infant, and you feel somehow compelled to speak to it, fucking speak normally. Infants learn to speak a language by hearing it spoken normally. It takes them many months, maybe even years, to learn to shape their tongues correctly to speak normally. The sounds they make during these months or years are a result of linguistic adaptation.

Do not -- I repeat, do FUCKING not -- stand around imitating the damned baby's sounds. If it were old enough, it'd be insulted by your mockery. Since the babies of the world are not old enough to be so insulted, I stand insulted in their place.

I stand even more insulted by the people who tell me that "babies react to high-pitched sounds." Yes, doctors have proven that babies react to high-pitched sounds, however, it is only a reaction. What kind of reaction is it?

We can tell that animals react to being stroked. We can also tell that they react to BB-gun pellets.

I stand before you, idiotic assholes, as someone who is smarter than you. And I say: your baby is learning more English from the fucking television you never turn off than from your assholic babbling.

I now back this statement up:

As one who has studied linguistics and even taught conversational English to past-their-linguistic-prime salarymen in a country as lingually disabled as Japan, I have become enlightened. See, in Japan, the misinformed company I taught for -- managed by a whole load of baby-patronizers, I imagine -- had a rule whereby all students were supposed to learn English by speaking to one another, with only the barest hints from the teacher. This accounts for the close-to-zero level of progress of all students enlisted at that school. Through witnessing these people making fuzzier linguistic copies of fuzzy linguistic copies, I have come into the posession of a nice little bit of practical knowledge.

I know, if nothing else, this:

People learn to speak by imitating you, not by imitating you imitating them.

Save an establishing IQ: stop being an ignorant asshole.

Thank you in advance. With all hope, the generation after this one won't drop out of high school to sell narcotic cough medicine to kids in gas station parking lots.

Sat, 16 Aug 2003 02:25:13 GMT

I now have Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

If you were, uh, going to send me a copy, don't do it. Deep thanks for the offer, at any rate. Keep it for yourself.

I'm about to start playing.

b00m.

EDIT 21:36:

and it froze during the portrait selection phase of the character generation.

it . . . won't start.

my xbox is . . . dead.

holy motherfucking shit.

God doesn't want me to play this game.

tim rogers on the current cinema, 08142003

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 08:36:09 GMT

EDIT: first, your new desktop wallpaper.

Now, continue.

pyramid108: i think pirates is kind of a movie miracle
pyramid108: it's the cinematic equivalent of the chicken that lived a year without a head
idprism: ha
idprism: :]
pyramid108: i mean
pyramid108: there's a huge . . . HOLE in the movie
pyramid108: like, a GIANT one
pyramid108: yet
pyramid108: it's still wholly watchable
pyramid108: and even UProckingly enjoyable
idprism: it is enjoyable
idprism: to what hole do you refer?
idprism: i think there may be more than one
pyramid108: i mean
pyramid108: there's just a giant part of the movie where every line of dialogue
pyramid108: just . . . everything is collapsing in on itself
pyramid108: it becomes a cinematic black hole
idprism: haha
pyramid108: yet, johnny depp makes it watchable
idprism: he does
pyramid108: it's . . . kind of senseless
idprism: indeed
idprism: i mentioned that on someone's livejournal
pyramid108: theyre going back and forth to and from that island
idprism: morganlight's maybe
pyramid108: rescuing one guy, then another guy, then the girl
pyramid108: the ending is FUCKRIDICKULOUS
pyramid108: . . . yes, i just made that word up
idprism: haha
idprism: i figured
pyramid108: and i'm not referring to the BRILLIANT final shot
idprism: with the monkey?
pyramid108: no
pyramid108: where johnny depp is mumbling the pirate song
idprism: oh
idprism: that
pyramid108: the monkey doesn't count
pyramid108: heh
idprism: haha
idprism: ok
pyramid108: that's not brilliant
idprism: i know
idprism: -.-;;
pyramid108: that's like . . . a teaser of a teaser
idprism: yeah
pyramid108: you know
idprism: so do you sit in til the end of the credits like i do?
idprism: or did you just hear about that somewhere?
pyramid108: how sometimes movies end with 'BOOOOOM, WAIT FOR THE SEQUEL, BITCH!'
idprism: oh yeah
pyramid108: well, that was . . .
pyramid108: 'BOOOOOOOM!
pyramid108: 'LOOK AT THE MONKEY, BITCH!'
pyramid108: which is . . . not the same
idprism: hahaha
idprism: its not
pyramid108: it's more of a 'this COULD be a teaser, if it WAS A TEASER!'

an interview

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 22:28:22 GMT

This is one of those interview things. The questions are from ferozan.

1) will you move to japan permanently someday?

No.

2) why are women better companions than men?

Because they're smarter. And for the most part, they don't treat everything like it was some kind of football game.

I was watching this dating show last night, where a group of men is trying to win this one woman. The thing is, if and when the woman chooses them, the guy can then choose to dump the woman for a million dollars.

This one thick, large guy was standing before the woman during the elimination phase, and sweating. We heard a voice-over of his strategy, as related to the camera earlier that day:

"Times like this, you just got to keep your feet planted, keep breathing, think of the game plan, keep your eyes on the prize."

What the fuck?

If there had ever been an argument that men thought less than women, and if that argument had been meant to cast men in a negative light, I both hate and like to inform the world that men think more than women, and that's what makes them worse.

You think I got where I am by thinking?

. . . Well, then again, where am I? That's a good question.

I always recount the story of my high school experience. How I, as a child, never went through a "girls are icky" phase, while all the other boys grew up hating girls. The girls, though -- they didn't hate the boys. They were picking which boys they wanted to marry, back when they were five. Does this make them more thoughtful, or more instinctive?

Suddenly, at age fourteen, the guys were throwing around profane terms for female anatomy and sneaking pornographic magazines out of chain bookstores. I held the same opinion as ever, from long before.

I disliked that kind of ambivalence, and not because it wasn't mine. Just -- in general.

3) what is your favourite (and least favourite) country out of all the ones you've seen so far?

I like Japan the most. Germany appealed to me the least; however, that was more of a "bad experience" thing than anything else.

Then again, I had some bad experiences in Japan, too. Far worse experiences, if you count them all up.

Maybe I just like being surrounded by a foreign language that looks nothing like the language I grew up surrounded by.

4) what the hell happened to drunken tiger?

They're still around, you know. They released a new CD back in February. I listened to it at a record store in Shibuya one morning. I didn't buy it, because . . . it sounds too much like American hip-hop now. I guess you could say they done sold out.

5) if you were made to choose: movies or music?

I guess music. Because I could always do something else while listening to music. And I could always make music more easily than making movies.

. . .

The rules say that I'm supposed to ask you people if you want to be interviewed by me. And then you post a comment here or some shit. So do it.

legal action of the eiffel tower variety, bottom suit jacket buttons, urinary tract infections aglow

Mon, 11 Aug 2003 17:56:18 GMT

Did you know it's legal to publish a picture you take of the Eiffel Tower during the day, yet a published photo taken of it at night is subject to copyright laws?

It kind of reminds me of the bottom button on a suit jacket. See, the bottom button exists to be unbuttoned. However many buttons there are, the one that's on the bottom is never to be buttoned. Now, before you ask why they include a bottom button, let me point out: It's like the last day of school. Remember the last day of school, when you were eight years old? You might have complained, "Why is today the last day of school? We're not doing anything today. We're just sitting around, watching movies, talking about summer vacation." Well, see, if today isn't the last day of school -- if the last day of school were yesterday, you'd have been complaining similarly.

Someone accused me just yesterday of having no sense of symbolism. Another someone asked me, "Don't you have any sense of formality?" These are questions they were made to ask by my Columbo-level of Fucking With People In Public.

Oh, oh, no: my sense of symbolism is in truth far greater than yours. My sense of formality is in truth far more acute than yours, in that I know formality, I know maturity, and furthermore, I know my own personality. I simply choose when to let each one show.

Yesterday, I stood before a rented church in a rented tuxedo with rented friends, after guiding a rented girl down the aisle. Be aware that the word "rented" does not indicate any kind of distaste. It simply means that everything was, for the moment, whether I wanted it to be or not, temporary. These are places and people whose time I can only share when situations and circumstances are in certain line. As I stood before this church, the top three buttons of my suit jacket were buttoned, following the closest thing the wedding came to a cinematic disaster: the top button had popped off, requiring the wedding director, the one who'd ask me at the reception if I'd like a plate for my slice of cheese, so I actually looked like I belonged here, to fish a safety pin out of her pocket. Everything went well. The top button -- which someone at the rental shop had tied on, maybe as a prank -- was buttoned, the bottom stayed unbuttoned.

So you may ask: why have a button, if it has to stay unbuttoned? Why have a fourth button at all? Why not simply have three buttons? And I tell you: because then the third button would need to stay unbuttoned. I tell you: I've seen it happen. I've worn three-button suit jackets with two buttons buttoned. I've worn two-button jackets with one button buttoned.

And then you say, well, the tuxedo vest you wore yesterday had buttons that didn't even have buttonholes. They were just kind of stuck in the "fastened" position. And I say: that's different.

In related news: I hate -- I fucking hate when people ask me what I'm eating. As a perhaps-not-normal person -- I've come to accept this, maybe -- I don't eat what more-normal people do. That's not to say I like being different, or that I'm trying to be different. It's just what I do. It's how I am. I won't start apologizing now, nor will I stop doing it now. I'll let the wind keep blowing, and keep eating the sometimes-hateful things I eat. You, people of the world -- including and/or not limited to my brother's wife -- please, don't assume that both because I like talking and because I eat these strange things, that I'm dying to tell you what they are, choking to tell you all about them. And don't walk into my kitchen and ask me what the hell that smell is. My mother used to make Polish ground-beef-filled-cabbages, the name of which I remember, and can even spell, yet choose not to do, and they smelled more horrible than horrible itself. Nothing I make for myself to eat smells that bad -- I cook bland things, to tell the truth, and then douse them in Tabasco; such is the lopsided sensitivity of my taste -- so you have absolutely no right to complain, or to pretend to be complain. And you can say I'm being pretentious when I say everything I've said in this paragraph, and you could say it until right now, when I say this: I don't hate you because of this. I simply hate that such situations arise.

I'm the bottom button on a suit jacket. There's a buttonhole I can see. I am aware of the buttoning process. I know all the rules and all the methods for being buttoned. Yet I shall not be buttoned.

I'm reminded of something Miyamoto Musashi says in the Book of Five Rings, about how his positions will make any person armed with two swords and the willingness to see invincible, and how this one guy in my Japanese class who thought "like a Japanese person" didn't understand the differences between lines and rays, or even line segments and lines, when I told him what I told him about Musashi's Geometric Invincibility. Yet, he read the book, over and over again, and said he did so because he absorbed the philosophy "like a Japanese person." That's pretentious; it's even more pretentious to tell me that I don't understand Musashi because I don't understand the symbolism of the Void, and I cannot give myself to the Void. I'd say you're just lashing out and grabbing at the last few sentences of a book you don't understand. I'd then ask: if I'm not the Void, what am I?

(In a connected note: I hear the Void in television commercials for wholesome family products where people smile with white teeth, and the music is a kind of throaty rock and roll where drums, bass, vocals, and guitar blend into one instrument, and I wonder: who wrote this? And I think: no one.)

In closing, I wonder how one gets a urinary tract infection. I've got cranberry juice on the way, over here. I talked to a fellow groomsman about Neverwinter Nights for an hour during the rehearsal dinner, only to see him that night drink half a bottle of NyQuil before bed, and then feel ridiculously sick about six minutes into the reception the next day. This diagnosed-as-genius brain of mine has put two hundred and two hundred together, and come up with both four hundred and "maybe I have the flu." This morning, I realize that more, though only after a strange experience involving the toilet.

See, as a person with much Inguinal Hernia Experience, I have honed my urinating ability so that I can hit a Cheerio in the dark from fifty feet. I have, at times, and jokingly, suggested that once I start my own religion, I'll propose an "Inverse Ramadan," where no follower of me is permitted to use the bathroom during daylight hours, so that by the end of the day, you might feel, with regards to urinary tract, how I feel every fifteen minutes. Yes, yes, I'm getting the problem looked at once I get some money. I'm getting the best-trained doctor to fish that link of small intestine off my bladder and out of my scrotum, and I'm going to make sure he has a good time doing it if it kills me.

Yet, yesterday night -- last night, if you like short words -- something strange happened. Allow me to relate:

That twelve-hours-without-making-water feeling arose. I stepped into the bathroom. Nothing.

It didn't go away. I had to squint to get to sleep.

This can't be good, can it?

Or is it simply fitting behavior for a bottom suit-jacket button?

If living -- nay, speaking -- nay, using words -- nay, trying to transform thoughts from thoughts to something else -- is essenced in being mistaken, how am I mistaken when my brain tells me, right now, that I have to go to the bathroom, and my words on this screen tell me that right now, "It's not going to work"?

I learned yesterday, and at a wedding, in fact, that I am too trained in my excretory sensitivity to ever, under any circumstances, urinate in my pants, even if I'd wanted to. In addition to ruling out comfortable scuba-diving and uncomfortable body-in-bed activities of the sleeping variety, this makes me something of a symbol myself, of myself.

Anyone who uses these traits in a character in a story is not subject to legal action, unless that story is a novel, and that novel takes place as night, when the lights are aglow.

That's all. I think we should call it a day for now.

sad word from japan

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 18:45:09 GMT

Got an email from Jun-chan just now. She writes:

また3人でガスト行こうね！drink barしよう。
でもよく3人で行ったあのガスト最近閉店したんじゃよ...。思い出の場所だからちょっぴり悲しいよね。ガストが壊されてマンションが建つ予定よ。

Yes: The Gusto Skylark Diner me, Jun-chan, and Sachiko used to eat at has been teh closed down and marked for destruction. They're building more apartments in its place.

That sucks ass. Places like Gusto, with their huge fries, get shut down, and stingy-bitch places like Saizeriya and Jonathon stay open. The Japanese have so little idea what makes an American-style family restaurant good, and it's a shame.

Shit.

Mourn, yo.

the tateishi-yotsugi-yahiro yotsugibashimae gusto skylark family restaurant, near asakusa, shitamachi: 1969-2003

now it has fallen into teh a darkness of memory

Mourn.

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 08:08:00 GMT

"this much skin"
4-8-2001

Ferozan stepped out of the bath on Saturday evening just as she sensed the water was starting to grow cold. With only a towel around her body, she walked down the hall to her bedroom.

Ferozan had recently purchased a full-length mirror, which replaced the smaller mirror she'd normally stood in front of when she brushed her hair. In the dark quiet of midnight, Ferozan stood, brushing her thick hair, untangling all the knots, letting the bottom seven-eighths of the mirror's reflective surface go to waste.

The evening was warm, and the surface of Ferozan's skin still retained the heat of the bath. She pulled the wiry brush through her hair again and again. She held the end of her hair with the hand that wasn't brushing. Again and again she winced as she pulled the brush through her hair.

Just as Ferozan pondered slipping into her pajamas and lying down in bed, she also pondered sleeping in the nude. The night was so warm and pleasantly rainy, the damp breeze was flowing in through the windows; it was the perfect night to sleep with only a single, thin sheet covering her body. Ferozan winced as she thought this, both because she was ashamed to think such a thing and because she had just, at that time, pulled the hairbrush through a particularly persistent knot. The towel that covered Ferozan's body was still damp, and it was losing the heat of the bathwater far more quickly than her skin. The surface of the towel gave off the perfumed scent of damp cloth, and as the breeze whispered through her room, Ferozan could smell only the smell of the towel.

Ferozan set the brush atop her dresser, then undid the fold on the towel and let it slide to the floor. When she looked at herself in the full-length mirror, she realized how long it had been since she'd seen herself fully naked. She closed her eyes after seeing her reflection for just a second. The smell of the damp towel and the gentle tapping of the rain combined with a thought Ferozan was not equipped to understand, and she opened her eyes.

She could never remember seeing so much of the surface of her skin at once. The imperfect beauty of her naked body struck her as no notion more complicated than the single thought, "I really do have this much skin." Ferozan spoke these words aloud.

Ferozan had been a woman for some time, and she was denying herself something. Ferozan smiled, and as she smiled, she saw herself smile, and as she saw herself smile, she wondered when the last time was she'd seen such a beautiful thing.

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 03:08:56 GMT

I made a list of my favorite movies.

I'm not sure it's done. I'm not sure it's accurate. I'm pretty sure.

Someone say something about it.

I've got . . . something to do.

dictatorial directive downloading insistence of the day 07282003

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 01:45:57 GMT

God in an orange paper bag.

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a [...] </a>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

God in an orange paper bag.

<a href="http://www.kevkev.net/music/hoover.mp3"</a>Download this now, or I'll fucking kill you.</a>

That is all.

one-sided editorial from the campaign to abolish names in 2004

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 19:06:23 GMT

Melina: Have you lost your mind?
Quaid: No, Cohagen stole it from me.
("Total Recall," 1990)

This little bit of dialogue is good. It's a nice little turn of words. It inspires people to chuckle.

Let's look at it more deeply.

Why wouldn't anyone walk out of the theater quoting this, even in 1990, when people quoted everything Arnold said?

What lines did people quote from this movie, lines that people quoted over the phone with relatives in Pennsylvania?

Sharon Stone: Honey -- we're . . . married!
Arnold: [Shoots her in the forehead] Consider that a divorce.

The closest we get to a name there is "Honey" -- a pet name, a universal.

This is how it works:

Names aren't quotable. Sometimes, they are.

To wit:

"Ginger Lee, I've done a bad job of being a good person."
(TRIN(N)IT(T)Y, by tim rogers)

Usually, they're not.

Look at the above line, way at the top here. Think about it hard. Now look at this variant:

A: Have you lost your mind?
B: No, they stole it from me.

It feels like something that belongs to us, regardless of its truth within its silly little movie world.

Right?

Thoughts?

And . . . that's all I really got to say about this.

Sun, 27 Jul 2003 23:18:38 GMT

I wish I looked imposing. That way I could really walk into a room and demand stuff.

Combined with the powers I've got already, a sincerely imposing look would make me nearly unstoppable.

'smoking vegan, smiling gun' -- part four

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 08:07:51 GMT

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

'smoking vegan, smiling gun' -- part three

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 08:02:02 GMT

Yes. This is

thirteen

"I hit a guy."

"You--you what?"

"I . . . hit someone."

"In the face?" was my first question. It had, seriously, just popped into my head. I imagined my girlfriend punching the School of Journalism Dean right in the side of the hair-trapezoid.

"Shit, no. Not in the face. I mean, with my car."

"Oh, fuck -- you hit someone with your car?"

"Well, not a person -- another car."

"Another car?"

"Yeah."

"Oh." I remembered it wasn't my car she was driving. I'd only ever driven the thing four or five times. I didn't even think to ask about damages. I didn't know in which way, precisely, she wanted me to care. As she was silent, I took advantage of the moment to formulate a question. "So . . . you're going to be late?"

"No, no. Well -- yeah."

"Well, that's fine. I can . . . walk."

"No, no -- I need you to do me a favor."

"A favor?"

"Yeah. Could you go downtown, and see if the car is still there?"

"The -- the what?"

"The car. The car I hit. Can you see if it's still there, or if the cops are around?"

"What the hell -- a hit and run? You did a hit-and-run on this guy?"

"Shh! Yeah. Yeah. It was only a little bump, I mean, I don't even think his car suffered any damage. A big fucking huge car -- it was a GMC Suburban."

"A GMC Suburban?" I immediately pictured it black.

"Huge fucking car, yeah, a black one."

"Where did you hit it?"

Now my girlfriend's voice got quiet, like she was either lying about something or aware of passersby.

"Right on the . . . rear driver's-side-taillight."

"Driver's side taillight, you mean?"

"Yeah, that's what I said."

"You said rear driver's side taillight."

"Same thing."

"Well," I said, and then stopped. There was no use.

"I was trying to get a parking space outside the Village Deli."

"The Village Deli?"

"Yeah, you know, that little place with the good chili? We've been there a few times. Right on Kirkwood, right across from Kilroy's bar."

"Yeah," I said, feeling strangely underwater. "I know the place. I remember the place. I remember it well."

"There's that little ice cream place next door. Little place. You remember the name?"

I didn't.

"No."

"Oh. Hell. Well, you can see the GMC Suburban from there, I guess. Just, uh -- go out there, sit down -- they've got places to sit outside -- get some ice cream, and just keep an eye on the car for me, alright?"

"All . . . right."

"Are you writing this down?"

I opened my mouth, and gasp-sucked in a few words from the smoky remains of the bowling-alley air.

"Am I supposed to be?"

"Where the hell are you right now?"

"I'm in the Union."

"What the hell are you doing there?"

"I was . . . playing pinball."

"God damn it, you got out early, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"God damn it. God damn it."

"I . . . sorry."

"Are you writing this down?"

"Writing what down?"

"The license plate number."

"Oh. No. What was it?"

"It was simple. It was the word 'SMILING,' only with a numeral one in place of the first 'I.'"

"Smiling, I got it."

"You got it."

"I got it."

"You wrote it down?"

"I got it," I said. "SMILING, with a one in place of the first 'I.'"

"You got it," she said, and then breathed.

"So, uh . . . where are you right now?"

"Gas station," she said. "I'm going to go home and lay low for a while."

Lay low?

"What about the Law Library?"

"Fuck the Law Library. You're alright taking the bus home, right?"

"Uh . . . yeah."

"Shit, I got a broken headlight. Broken headlight. Shit."

"Shit," I chimed in.

"Shit, look for the glass. Orange glass. Make sure there's not any on the road. Make sure there's not any cops looking around the pavement."

"I -- I don't know."

"If there's no glass, ask around. Be inconspicuous about it, okay? Don't just ask if there's been any police activity or whatever. Don't be dumb."

"Oh -- okay. Okay."

"Shit. Are you on your way there right now?"

I looked at my reflection in the pinball machine. I looked at a clicking and ticking clock near the asbestos-y ceiling, and I half-yawned.

"Yeah."

"Don't use any more of my cell phone minutes. Let me know the details when you get home."

"Um, okay," I said.

She hung up on me.

I hung up on myself. I stuffed the phone into my pocket, and stepped around the corner and into the pool hall, where the black kids from earlier were gone. I half-expected the Smoking Vegan to be waiting for me with a pool cue in a kung-fu grip. She wasn't. She was nowhere in sight.

I stepped into the wide underground hallway. Before me was a staircase more than a hundred years old. At the top of it was an exit to an awning-covered outdoor corridor that led to a cherry-tree-lined sidewalk-parkway that led to the Sample Gates, which aimed at downtown Bloomington, Indiana. I was just a three-minute walk from the scene of a crime, and it was, by all printed accounts, a good day to be outside.

fourteen

The scene of the crime looked like nothing of the sort. A lazy day outside, which felt almost air-conditioned, was making my back sweat quietly. I squinted like someone who needs sunglasses, and traced Kirkwood with my eyes. Out in front of the Village Deli, every curbside parking space was empty except one. That one un-empty parking space was un-empty with a large black GMC Suburban. I stood and looked at it, with my hands on my hips. I squinted, and sneezed. There was my sneeze, I thought, looking at the broken shards of orange headlight on the pavement. I always sneeze when stepping outside on sunny days. Here, I'd stood outside, under the awning, yawning, for a whole thirty seconds, waiting for that sneeze. I wanted to get it out of the way before my little walk. And there I was, at the end of my journey, sneezing in anticlimax.

The license plate read "GVN."

"'GVN'?" I thought. What the hell did "GVN" stand for? I mulled it over for a minute. We always abbreviate "government" as "GOV'T." Would it not be more efficient to make it "GVN"? Or maybe "GVR"? Everyone forgets about the "N" in "government" -- well, that's no good. Here I was, forgetting about the "R" in the same manner.

Or maybe someone was wanting to spell "GUN" in Latin?

I squinted more deeply at the driver's side taillight -- sure enough, it was cracked. It wasn't a big crack -- it wasn't even noticeable at all, really. The person owning the large vehicle could probably step out with their donuts and coffee or ice cream or gumbo, or whatever they had, and just get in without noticing a thing.

I walked down past the vehicle. When I'd reached Nick's Pizzeria, I turned around on my heel, and walked back. I rolled my eyes at the implausibility of what I saw: there was a piece of yellow paper stuck beneath the driver's side windshield-wiper. Was it an advertisement for a bar? Or a note written by a bystander, including my girlfriend's license plate number?

More importantly, what about the letters "GVN" had made my girlfriend think of "SMILING"? Where was the cognitive connection? Sure, I could believe she wasn't thinking straight at the time, just -- I couldn't begin to wonder what had connected where in her mind.

I put my hands in my pants pockets, and thought of what a fuck-up we had here, and shook my head a few times, and looked up at the clear blue sky -- and just then, out of nowhere came a guitar chord.

Somewhere nearby, John Mellencamp was singing "Jack and Diane."

Oh shit, it was a bad moment to be alive.

"Jack?"

"Jack!"

Someone was calling to me from a wooden folding chair set up on the deck outside the Jiffy Treet ice cream shop. I wheeled around.

Here we go:

There, sitting on a chair with a perfect view of the scarred GMC Suburban, was the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl.

I didn't have to acknowledge her. I'm weak. I'm so, horribly, sadly weak. I'm as afraid of the strong as I am of the weak, someone would tell me later that day. I'm as afraid of beginnings as I am of endings. I'm so afraid of beginnings I don't know when the endings are coming. I'm so afraid of endings I keep wondering if I'm yet past the middle.

fifteen

I acknowledged the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl for the first time in her capitalized existence, and I sat down, and let her buy me a vanilla ice cream, and we sat out of the shade, both looking at the damaged car, lower bodies covered and shaded by a broad round whitewashed table, as music I despised played not far enough away, and we caught up on old times. For a little while.

"You don't like John Mellencamp?" she asked me, at one point. I looked down into my vanilla ice cream, and at the table beneath it. Was she wearing sandals beneath the table?

"I don't like him."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. I just don't like him."

"You don't like him?"

"Well, I mean, I don't like his music."

"Why not?"

"It's just -- it has this bad feeling to it."

"A bad feeling?"

"Like a hot summer day, when the air-conditioner is broken."

"A bad memory?" the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl said. She wanted to prompt further revelations.

I shook my head. "No, it's not that simple. I mean. Not that complicated. I mean, it doesn't have a face."

"What doesn't have a face?" the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl wanted to know. She wasn't being patronizing. She really wanted to know. She was licking the concave of her pink plastic spoon with her eyes locked on me.

"I mean, the bad feeling doesn't have a face. It's like -- like, a bad feeling without a personality. It's just kind of -- you know, there."

"Oh."

"Like, there was this one day, I was in high school. And my mom's nephew--"

"Your cousin?"

"Nah, nah, my mom's nephew."

"Um . . . He'd be your cousin, then?"

I shrugged. "I never thought of him that way. Anyway. It was summer vacation for me, and this guy had come to visit my mom for some reason."

"For no reason?"

"No, I mean, he had a reason. It just wasn't overly stated."

"Well?"

"Well, my mom had just been diagnosed with diabetes. She was on all kinds of medicine. She had to check her blood sugar. She'd always be telling me, 'You better not act up, or you'll raise my blood-sugar.' It was a real load of sh--tuff I just didn't care to hear. I mean, she just did it to mess with me. I didn't need to hear that sort of thing. It was cheap."

"Well, maybe her worrying about you did--"

"No, it didn't. She didn't have anything to worry about. I mean, he--ck, she didn't even let me walk to school. She made me take the bus. I didn't eat lettuce until I was seventeen years old, because I'd been afraid of it when I was a baby, and she didn't want to expose me to it. She didn't even let me go outside. She bought me a bike for my birthday when I was twelve, and wouldn't let me ride it."

"That's no good."

"It's horrible."

"So what about your cousin?"

"Oh. Well, my mom's nephew came into town one day during the summer. He had a girlfriend. The guy was -- I don't know, in his mid-thirties. He had a girlfriend who was twenty-four, I think. She was a really . . . chunky girl. They drove all the way up from Pennsylvania."

"Pennsylvania?"

"Yeah."

"Why were they in Pennsylvania?"

"Well, I mean, that's where my mom was from."

"Have you ever been to Pennsylvania?"

"No," I said.

"Oh, I have. It's nice."

"Is it? Well. This guy and his girlfriend came from Pennsylvania. It was a long drive."

"Where in Pennsylvania?"

"Philadelphia, I think?"

"Yeah, that's pretty far. About thirteen hours."

"Yeah, thirteen hours. So they came all this way to see my mom, because she'd told her sister about her diabetes, and how I was making her worry, and how her blood sugar was up, and how she didn't have much longer to live -- and this guy came to investigate. To see if she was alright, or if she was dying, or what."

"Okay."

"So my mom was happy to have them. They were only around for a weekend. And she was driving them around town, showing them everything. See -- my mother has never been on a highway of any kind. It's just not in her blood. She's scared to death of the highway. And, I mean, Indianapolis has plenty of them. The 'Crossroads of America,' they call it. She always takes the longest routes to get wherever she has to go. She takes 86th Street to get to Castleton -- she works down there, you know. It takes her a half an hour to get to work every day, when she could take 465, and be in Castleton in four minutes."

"Maybe she likes the long way?"

"No, she doesn't. She complains about distances, gets vocally angry when the news reports talk about rising gas prices. It's a real joke."

"I bet."

I squinted. The sun was still rising, it looked like. It was already more than half past one. The sun hadn't finished rising. The grooves in my forehead collected sweat, which then curtained down toward my eyes when I relaxed my squint to finish my ice cream.

The GMC Suburban stood there, absorbing all the sun's rays. The windows were tinted as black as the paint job.

"So yeah. She was taking this nephew of hers and his girlfriend around, down to Castleton, and she was going like thirty miles per hour, just pointing out the window at everything. 'That's my grocery store.' 'That's a club where the kids like to hang out.' 'That's the gas station where I get my lottery tickets.'

"And it was so hot. I was baking in there. She wouldn't let me stay home. I was sitting in the back of her minivan, reading a book--"

"What were you reading?"

"What?"

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Oh. Oh, I was reading The Hobbit."

"I've read that."

"Lots of people have. Anyway. So I was baking, and my mother refused to turn on the air-conditioning. She was afraid it'd take up her gas. So I said to her, 'Mom, why don't you turn on the air-conditioning?' And my mom said, 'We're not made of money.' And she asked her nephew and his girlfriend, 'Are you guys hot?' And her nephew said, 'No, we're alright.'"

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl nodded. I looked at my spoon, sitting atop a smear of mostly-melted vanilla. I depressurized my lungs with my lips in the shape of a small O. It was a slow, contemplating exhale.

"So, that's the kind of feeling I get from John Mellencamp's music."

"It reminds you of your mother?"

"Well, it -- no." Hadn't I said the feeling didn't have a personality? My mother, if nothing else, has a personality. "I mean, the feeling of being hot in a car, where the air-conditioner is off, yet could be on."

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl folded a napkin, and dabbed at the corner of her mouth.

"Was she listening to the radio? Was there John Mellencamp on the radio?"

I opened my mouth, and looked at the GMC Suburban. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl looked at me looking at it. Over the spring wind, no John Mellencamp tunes played. I was prepared to lie, to embellish, to emphasize, to say, "It was this very one that he's playing right now!" I was afraid I'd not be able to remember the song name from such a distance -- we could only hear guitar, not voice -- and I was even more afraid that I would be able to remember the name. I probably knew all the songs' names. I couldn't not know all their names. I'd pretend I didn't know the song's name.

What would the next song be? He'd just belted out "Hurts So Good," preceded by "Wild Night" -- what would be the perfect song to come next?

"She was listening to the radio, come to think of it. Oh my God, you know what -- during the drive, 'Summer of '69' came up."

"'Summer of '69'?"

"Yeah, you know the song?"

"Yeah. It's by Bryan Adams."

"Bryan Adams?"

"Yeah. Did you know his mother is Japanese?"

"She . . . she is?"

"Yeah, everyone in Asia knows Bryan Adams."

"Bryan Adams?"

"Yeah. Bryan Adams."

I looked into my ice cream cup. I half thought of vomiting all the vanilla back into it. My jaw was dropped open. I almost needed some help closing it. A single white Pontiac coupe-de-something rattled down Kirkwood, past the Suburban. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl and I followed it with our eyes. Downtown Bloomington was a ghost town when John Mellencamp was in town.

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl was whisper-singing, with her eyes closed:

"'Got my first real six-string / bought it at the five and dime / played it till my fingers bled / Was the Summer of Sixty-Nine.' That the song?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, that's Bryan Adams." She giggled. "All these years, you thought it was Mellencamp?"

I stuttered. "Well, I mean -- I mean, that's not the only song of his I ha--dislike. There are -- there're plenty of others."

"I see, I see," she said with a nod.

"'Those were the best days of my life,'" she went on. The same Pontiac rattled by again, like a lamppost in one of those cartoons where one naked yet humanized animal chases another. Except no one was chasing anyone in Bloomington, Indiana that afternoon John Mellencamp was in town.

"Do you play any guitar, Jack?"

I shrugged. "I . . . well, I've never even touched a guitar."

"Why not?"

I sniffed the air. I detected nothing of note. Then again, what I had set out to detect with the sniff, I don't know.

"It just wasn't my thing. I was never musical."

"What about in school? Didn't they make you play the piano or anything? Like, in music class?"

I thought back to my public education. I'd spent those "best days" of my life in rooms where the furniture was still made of wood. I used to watch the public television channel, where they showed university classes when my mother wouldn't let me watch cartoons, and I'd feel jealous of the neat, white plastic chairs in the lecture halls.

"I didn't have a music class."

"Oh, that's too bad."

"I've never touched a music instrument, ever," I went on.

"Oh, yes you have," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl said, slapping her hand weakly onto the table.

"Have I?"

"Don't you remember the day we first met?"

I had taken my Scotch-Irish trombonist friend home one night. I walked her up to her dorm floor. She went into her room without inviting me inside. Her roommate was sleeping, she said. She then added that she, herself, was not feeling well. The two negatives didn't add up to a positive for me, and I headed for the elevator.

Before I could reach the elevator, the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl jumped out of the bathroom and into my life.

"Hey you!" she said.

"Yeah?"

"Can you help me with something?"

She was wearing a pair of gym shorts and a high school volleyball shirt with Korean writing all over it. Her hair was tied back in a simple, high, loose ponytail.

I followed her into the cavernous bathroom. I noted the tiles were different from the tiles that lined my dorm bathroom floor when I'd lived in the same building. My tiles had been brown, and rectangular. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's were pink, and square. Then again, aren't all squares rectangles, when you really think about it?

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl was wearing noisy flip-flops that thwap-thwapped and echoed all the way into the depths of the bathroom. Their color was as much a mystery as their sound wasn't.

There, in the last shower stall -- the only shower with an accompanying bathtub -- she showed me her French horn.

The water was running from the spigot. The water was steamy. The French horn, a magnificent, clean, convoluted set of skinny golden contortions, rested in the end of the bathtub opposite the running water.

"The valve is stuck," she told me. I then stood back as she dragged the multi-thousand-dollar piece of metal underneath the running water. She hooked the offending valve with her index finger, and pulled demonstrably.

"You got to pull it like this," she told me.

"Oh -- okay."

"I'll hold it under the water."

"Okay."

"You just pull on that valve."

I pulled on the valve for five minutes.

"Why are you running it under hot water?" I asked, just making conversation.

"It loosens the metal. Here."

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl scooted her body around mine. She was still holding onto the horn.

"You hold it right around this section. Don't let any water in the bell."

"The what?"

"The bell. The big open part."

I did as I was told. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl pulled and pulled on the valve. She stuck the back end of her gym shorts up with each pull, and I started thinking evil thoughts.

"You know, the French horn is the longest musical instrument in the orchestra," she was explaining, at one point. Like a regular TV talk show host.

"Some people think it's the contrabassoon. They're wrong. See, the French horn, if you uncoil it--"

The valve popped off.

"There it is."

"Why did you need the valve off?" I asked her, as she turned off the water.

Back in her room, she showed me why: she had another valve -- a longer one -- to replace to old valve.

"Just routine maintenance."

"Remember?" she asked me, about our magic moment, those years later. Out of the tops of her eyes, she watched the GMC Suburban.

"Yeah -- yeah, of course I remember."

"Well."

"Yeah, well, I mean -- I mean, I've never held a musical instrument with the intention to . . . play it, you know."

"Yeah, I know," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl said.

"You know, I gave up the French horn," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl was telling me ten minutes and two Mellencamp tunes later.

"Did you?"

"Yeah, I changed my major."

"Oh yeah? To what?"

Here, the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl beamed. A woman in her fourth or fifth decade stepped out of the Village Deli with a Styrofoam cup of something. She headed out across the street, past the Suburban, as the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl and I watched.

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl was bending down underneath the table. I didn't bend to watch her. I waited, and drummed my fingers on either side of my empty ice cream cup.

When the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl came back up, she had a long black art portfolio in her hands.

"I'm doing architecture!"

"Oh--oh?"

"Yeah!"

"Well, good for you. Did you -- uh, as a grad student?"

"No, no, I'm kind of a sophomore again. Oh, this is good stuff, though. You want to see something great?"

I smiled. It was a real smile, real as the sunshine was bright.

"Yeah, I could go for seeing something great right about now."

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl unsheathed a long piece of green, faintly recycled paper. On it were drawn many precise lines with one very precise pencil. It was a top-down look at a donut-shaped structure.

"See, see, did you ever notice how office parks always have a man-made body of water outside?"

I nodded at the donut structure. "Yeah -- yeah, I did, kind of. And a fountain, too?"

"Yeah! You know what I'm talking about. Well, see, I always thought, what's the deal with the water? I mean, the only people who ever see it are in the cars driving by. The people inside are working -- hard -- all day, and they don't get to see the water. Is it for the clients? No -- they don't have to think about that. The clients who come to some office park out on the highway are only coming there because -- well, you know, they have their reasons. They're not going to worry about some dumb little pond. Right?"

"R-right."

"Well, I figured -- why not put the water where everyone can see it?"

"E-everyone?"

I was getting choked up about bodies of water. I could have used a glass of water, myself.

"Yeah, see--" the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl took out a pencil and gestured at the diagram "--there's a hallway running through the middle of the circle. There are cubicles all around the circle, right? And each one has a window -- the walls are made of glass. And see, there's this empty space in the middle. At the bottom, there's a pond.

"Now, for the people whose cubicle windows look out on the other side, there's a moat."

"What about -- I mean, how do people get up to their floor?"

"There are two elevators," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl explained, pointing at the three and nine o'clock positions on her donut-building.

"Do -- do the elevators have a view of water?"

Her eyes disappeared beneath her smiling cheeks.

Smiling, SM1LING.

"Of course. They have a view of the moat."

"And, uh, how do people get . . . in?"

"Well," she said, tucking her mechanical pencil behind her ear, "there's a parking garage underground. There's a ramp -- here -- that goes under the moat. Everyone parks underground, and the elevator comes straight up from the garage. Impressive, huh?"

I looked at it. I was trying to get the eyeball part of my brain around the underground parking garage idea. Was it safe to position it right under a lake-like structure?

"Isn't it -- I mean, wouldn't it be kind of, you know, bright? If the walls are all glass, I mean."

"There are -- you know, shutters and things. People can block out the light if they want."

"And block out the view of the water."

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl looked at her left thumb, and moved her eyes left to right three times. She bit, then un-bit, her bottom lip.

"Well, maybe. Still, if they wanted to see the water, they could see it."

"Of course. Sorry."

"No -- no, I know the design isn't perfect. Still, it's an -- it's an exciting idea, isn't it? I mean, no one's ever thought of it before."

"No one?"

"Yeah, no one."

I was about to ask her if she'd looked it up, or something. I didn't. At that moment, a police car came cruising down Kirkwood. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl and I both watched it for signs of slowing down. It didn't slow down. The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl leaned forward in the silence. A song had just ended.

"Something wrong?" I asked her.

She sat back down. "No, no -- nothing."

I cleared my throat. I thought I might have found some allergies somewhere.

"So, were you -- waiting for someone, or something?"

She looked at her hands. They touched each other like a horn-player touches a horn. She looked up, and blinked.

"I saw something kind of strange, a minute before you got here."

"Something strange?"

Far away, people applauded, with the sound of popcorn popping in a mile-off microwave oven. A wind blew, and it was cool. It cooled off my becoming-pink face as the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's own face grew pink. We were both falling into embarrassment about the same thing.

A long white van rattled onto Kirkwood, and rattled by in the still silence. It turned left on Dunn Street, and went out of sight.

"Something strange?" I said, with a chuckle. "It sounds pretty -- strange. What, uh -- what did you see?"

The Devoutly Religious Korean Girl touched her blueprint with four fingers. She kept her thumb to her palm, and her little tongue to the backs of her front teeth.

"I guess you could call it -- a, uh -- a hit-and-run."

"A hit-and-run?"

"Y-yes."

"On that Suburban there?"

I put my hand on the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's shoulder. It was bare. I had my hand on her skin that felt like soft rubber.

She nodded.

"I . . . I saw you looking at it," I said.

"I-I'm waiting for the owner to come back. So I can . . . tell him what happened. I was the only person who saw."

"Why don't you leave a note under his windshield wiper?"

Here, as John Mellencamp started singing "Jack and Diane," the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl went deathly silent.

"Did you leave a note under his windshield wiper?" I asked her, my insides growing hot.

She shook her head, and was in tears.

"No -- I have to tell him in person. It's just . . . I can't explain it. I have to tell him in person."

"There's a note under the windshield wiper," I said to her. "Did you--"

"No!" she wailed. "It's an advertisement. It was some kid on a bike. I -- I don't know what it's for. I'm sure it's -- I don't know. I thought I'd write something on it. I was the only person who saw. I have to tell him in person."

Mellencamp breezed through the opening and into the first verse of "Jack and Diane," which I am almost always quick to note was voted "Worst Rock and Roll Song of All Time" by some magazine I read somewhere once.

I couldn't hear the words. My mind supplied them:

"Oh yeah -- life goes on -- long after the thrill: of living: is gone."

"Didn't he sing this already?" the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl asked me, taking her hands off her eyes.

"I -- I don't know."

"He sang this already, didn't he?" she asked me.

"I -- I think he . . . he might have."

"Why's he singing it again?"

"Maybe he's . . ."

She was standing up. Her knees were bent beneath the table, when the white van from two moments earlier screeched and wailed and sailed right through the stop sign at the crossing of Kirkwood and Indiana Avenue. When it jolted with the force of its brakes, it jumped and leaned forward like about to do a front flip.

Two doors on each side, one door on the back: all flipped open when the van was stopped. Four girls' figures dressed in black from bandannas to gloves were on the street in an instant.

"You aren't going nowhere, bitch," one girl said, aiming a pistol and shooting the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl right in the neck.

With a tweet and a thud, some tiny dart appeared to stud the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's pharynx. As she crumpled back, her right hand caught her blueprint, and pulled it down.

"You too, shorty," this short girl said to me in a smoker's voice, just before the pain of a gorilla-throat-punch socked me in the neck and knocked me down. The back of my head cracked into pavement just after my metal chair clattered down.

"Let's go. We got minutes to work with here, people," the girl was saying, as I faded to black, and she was indeed, in voice and in bones, from bandanna to boots, the Smoking Vegan.

sixteen

At the long, skinny end of a dead world, something not entirely beautiful glowed not entirely beautifully. I reached out for it with my eyes, and my head, and the liquid sounds surrounding it, all grew longer. Two sides of something too pretty were stuck together like with syrup. A hoarse voice pulled them apart.

"Wake up."

The Smoking Vegan was pointing at me with an orange cigarette tip in the white-sunlight-streaked darkness of the back of a van.

"Get the fuck up, come on. Get the smelling salts again."

The radio was turned down low. Random twangs of guitar flipped out louder than any other sound, save the swirling in my head. The Beatles were singing "Wild Honey Pie." The hyperactive bongo percussion vibrated the yellow spots before my eyes. Wailing of "Honey Piiiiie" slipped forcefully into my ears beneath the Smoking Vegan's whispers.

My polo shirt's top button had come undone perhaps not of my own doing. As "Wild Honey Pie" climaxed, a circle of hot heat touched and stuck to the top of my breastplate.

The Smoking Vegan was burning me with a cigarette. Its glowing tip held my bone-flesh like a magnet holds a refrigerator. I gasped up into a sitting position, and blacked out.

When I opened my eyes, I was still sitting. "Wild Honey Pie" had turned into "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill," and "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" was already half over.

"All the children sing . . ."

"I'm up, I'm up," I said, when my eyes opened again. The need to say so might or might not have stemmed from the fact that my hands were cuffed behind my back. It felt something like the back corners of my consciousness were torn and folded together. My internal monologue slipped into plain-style prose.

What the hell is going on here?

"You want to know what the hell is going on here, Jack?" the Smoking Vegan asked me.

"I'd, uh, appreciate it," I think I said. I was sitting on the sticky, wooden-feeling floor between two felt-covered boxy benches on which sat tall girls in black jumpsuits and ninja ski-masks. The air in the windowless van tasted like a fabric shop in the dead of summer, on a day they're having a sale, plenty of perfumed ladies showing up and sweating for many reasons.

The Smoking Vegan's lips smacked, and I took in her face. She sat with her back to the van wall, her legs pulled up and spread out with the foot-soles to the seat-floor. The bandanna-ed forehead of her unmasked face whipped around to gesture at a girl crouch-standing with her back to the partition that separated the back of the van from the captain's cabin.

"Give it to him."

The girl reached a gloved hand into her black jumpsuit's cavern of a body-pocket, and came out with a little black gun. She dropped it rectangularly in the middle of my groin. I made an "unf."

"You like James Bond, Jack?" the Smoking Vegan asked with a lip-smack.

The gun was a Walther PPK. The very same model used by James Bond.

"A little bit."

"You watch Bond films with your dad?" she asked.

"I don't have a dad. Now what's this--"

"When'd you see your first Bond film?"

"I was eighteen."

"Which one was it?"

"Octopussy. Now--"

"Octopussy. Shit, it was Octopussy. Shit."

All the girls let out high little short chuckles.

"Go on, take a look at it."

I looked at the gun. It was small. And black. I couldn't see much more, as it was buried in the loose khaki of my crotch.

"Flip it over for him."

Girl Number Three clicked open a metal pointer, like a teacher uses during a lecture involving a blackboard. With the antenna-bulb tip of the pointer, fished into the trigger-hole and flipped the gun over.

Drawn on the other side of the barrel in neon pink ink was the distinctly female shape of lipsticked lips pulled up into a tight grin.

"That's Smiley," said the Fourth Girl sitting behind me. She kneed me between my shoulderblades. "Ain't she cute?"

"Sh-she?"

The four girls let out a kind of female belly laugh. The way girls laugh when they're out of sight of men and pop-culture.

"You not privy to commit a felony with a female gun, Jack?" said the girl with the metal pointer.

"F-felony?"

"Shh, shh," Smoking Vegan vocalized. She had her arms stacked atop her knees. Her cigarette leaked flakes of white ash onto the floor by my feet. "We're gonna let you take this easy, Jack."

"Take what easy? Where's my fr--where's the Korean girl?"

"She's in the front seat," said the girl behind me.

"Sleeping like a baby on a summer day," said the girl with the pointer.

"We got good watch over her," said the girl who'd thrown me the smiling gun.

"Jack," Smoking Vegan said. "Jack, look at me."

I looked up at Smoking Vegan. Her eyes glowed beneath her partial brow ridge in the darkness of the back of the van.

"Have you ever killed anyone before?"

On any other day, I'd have told her she really should watch her "Ever . . . before" constructions. Since I was in no condition, handcuffed or not, to gesture toward her inefficient grammar, I kept quiet, and shook my head.

"Well, you will, before today is over."

"Sad son of a bitch," the girl behind me chuckled.

"Shh," Smoking Vegan said. "Now, Jack."

"Y-yeah?"

"Do you know John Mellencamp?"

"Yeah."

"You're going to kill him for us."

"K-kill him?"

"Yes. You're going to kill him."

I narrowed my eyes at the Smoking Vegan, to see if she narrowed her eyes with me. When a frat guy in the bar right across the street had said, years ago, something about my ex-girlfriend, and we ended up in a fight, this is how the fight started. I narrowed my eyes at him, and he narrowed his eyes at me, and the anger was manifest. When I narrowed my eyes, she greyly embodied her feminism with a relaxing of her face. This is how my fight with her began.

And it soon ended.

"What the fuck? Are you fucking serious?"

"Sad motherfucker," came a voice behind me.

"Hey, fuck you," I said, twiggling around left and right.

She kneed me in the back of the head.

"Dumb motherfucker," the girl with the pointer called me.

"Fuck you," I hissed up at the Smoking Vegan, who I antagonizingly wished had been smiling like her gun that was now mine.

She looked at me like you look at a penny on the sidewalk you're not going to pick up.

"Sad motherfucker," said the girl who'd thrown me the gun.

"Enough," breathed the Smoking Vegan. "Now, look, Jack," she said. "I can understand your unwillingness to do this. So we have a little incentive for you."

The other three girls' snickers clicked like Wild West gun hammers. The girl with the pointer tapped the metal shutter, and it slid open. Light from outside the windshield navigated into the stuffy cabin, and made things feel cooler. "Cry Baby Cry" oozed out the square hole and into my ears.

"Cry, baby, cry -- make your mother sad."

A hand brandishing a bandaged and red finger rode a tattooed arm out of the hole. It was carrying a cream-colored envelope. The girl with the pointer took it and gave it to the girl who'd thrown me the gun. She gave it to the Smoking Vegan, who relaxed her posture so her feet touched the floor.

She thwipped open the binder as the shutter shashed shut. As she licked her right index fingertip, a white weasel uncoiled itself from somewhere intangible around her jumpsuited groin area. Writhing and undulating, it wound its way up onto Smoking Vegan's shoulder, where it crouched down and looked off at no adversary.

Smoking Vegan took up one photograph, held it at her shoulder-level, and let go. It slid forward on air without friction. It passed back, flitted forward, edge-struck my middle-chest, and float-landed flat in my lap.

I looked down, and felt something grab my nasal septum and pull, hard and fast, and forward. I all at once wanted to produce maybe-red liquid from some part of my face, and leak it all over. My throat grew cold and tight.

It was a large black and white photograph of my apartment. From a position just outside the window, I was looking in at a frozen some-hundredth of a second of life when I wasn't around. My gay black roommate was sitting pantsless in his big black beanbag chair with his hands behind his head and his eyes forward on my television. A form wearing my girlfriend's favorite blouse was on her knees, bent forward, her face between his toned and shiny thighs.

"What the hell is this?"

"What the hell does it look like?"

I don't remember who said that.

"Is this . . . ?"

"Yeah, it's her, Jack," Smoking Vegan said. She leaned forward, and put a hand on my shoulder the way her weasel had its four legs on her shoulder.

"Fuck you," I said, shaking her hand off. "Fuck this shit. Fuck this."

"Fuck you," Smoking Vegan said. Her weasel let out a low kworwl. "I went through a lot of shit for this shit. Shit, you wanna see another photo?" She thwipped through a few more photos, and held one up with its back to my eyes. Lightless as the surroundings were, I couldn't see through to its front from its back.

"You can see her face in this one, Jack. Her eyes are open and everything. You wanna see?"

"Shit -- shit, no." I looked down to the picture in my lap, then back up to Smoking Vegan, then off at the wall between the two girls.

"So you see what we're dealing with here?"

"I -- I do."

"So you're going to help us?"

"H-help you?"

"Yes. You're going to help us, or--"

"Or what?" I said. It was more of a blurt. I simply wasn't connecting the two pieces of information they wanted me to connect.

"Or we'll send this photograph to your girlfriend."

The girls all started laughing now. The weasel growled lowly in five or six short bursts.

I scoffed.

"What's so fucking funny? What's so fucking funny?"

The Smoking Vegan shook her head. Her ratty hair swung and whipped her neck. "Ignore these dumb cunts," she said.

"Yeah, ignore us," said the girl behind me with a shoulder-blade-kneeing.

"See, Jack, we've had you checked out," said the girl with the pointer. The Smoking Vegan lit up another cigarette as the girl went on explaining. "We send this to your girlfriend -- we'll make it kind of a normal-looking piece of mail, with her name on it. We'll make it look like a bill or something, something you'd never open. Just in case you start getting all pissy-vigilant with the mail, we'll send a fresh print of it every week until we're sure she's got it."

"And then," began the girl behind me.

"And then," the girl with the pointer went on, "she'll want to marry you."

I scoffed. "Shit. What the fuck?"

"And you won't say no," said the girl who'd thrown me the gun. Her tone was cheery.

"What? What makes you so--"

Before I could finish my own sentence, I interrupted myself. I looked over at Smoking Vegan, who was in the middle of a cheeks-concave-making drag. She merely closed her eyes in my direction, and gave a short nod: They know what they're talking about, the nod said. Best just listen to them. It was the nod of a nurse with a clipboard who stands by as a doctor delivers a leukemia diagnosis.

"We've got it all figured out, Jack," the girl behind me said with the tone of a grave nod. "She'll never tell you that she knows, and you'll never tell her that you know."

"It'll be misery."

"It'll be the worst thing that ever happened to you."

"It'd be a long life worse than a quick death."

"We've had you profiled since you wrote that god-awful poem."

"Hey, my poem wasn't--"

"Wasn't what?" the girl with the pointer asked with a shake of the head. "If you're going to tell us the poem wasn't some kind of cry for help -- if you're gonna say you didn't mean to communicate something in that shit, don't. There's no point lying here."

"We've so got you covered," said the girl behind me.

"I can -- I can."

"It was only a few times, Jack," the Smoking Vegan spoke up. "We only caught her twice. She feels worse about it than you do. And she never has to know that you know. I mean, you sure as fuck wouldn't tell her, right?"

"And besides, you're not exactly innocent yourself," said the girl who'd thrown me the gun. "You have lusty thoughts about other women."

"I don't -- they're just --"

"What? Just manly thoughts? Puh-leeze. We've heard a share of that bullshit. Shit. It makes me sick."

"You sad bastard."

"How's about this for some incentive: you don't do this shit by four PM, and we off your little footy bitch here."

"You -- what?!"

Smoking Vegan looked down at her black lap. "By midnight, we deliver the photos. The whole reel of them. Do as we say." She looked at me. I squirmed a tenth of a degree to the right. "Please."

"There'll be cops -- bodyguards. They'll see me. What do I do, just walk up with a pistol and shoot him?"

"In the face, preferably."

"The . . . the face?"

The Smoking Vegan looked at me, and made herself cold.

"Yeah, the face'd be the best bet, don't you think?"

"I'll -- I'll go to jail," I spat out. "They'll fucking execute me."

"Shit, shit, nah. You don't got to worry about that shit. What's gonna happen is--"

"What's going to happen," the Smoking Vegan picked up, "is they're going to arrest you. You'll be all over the news. And then, you spend a week in jail, and you mysteriously get off. No harm done to nobody."

"Except that Mellencamp bastard," one of the girls chuckled. She stopped when the Smoking Vegan shot a steely cold glare.

The Smoking Vegan let out her current lungful in my direction.

"I -- I'll get off?"

"Start a new life," Smoking Vegan exhaled. She tapped her cigarette on her knee, and leaned forward. She folded her hands like in lazy prayer. Her cigarette stuck out between two locked fingers. "New name, new face, new everything. We got you covered."

"What's -- why Mellencamp?"

Here the Smoking Vegan stood up, and gave a whistle. The van rattled to a start, and dipped to the lower left, and tipped half-over, and started to said down Kirkwood away from the music I couldn't hear.

"Best not to think of why it has to be Mellencamp," Smoking Vegan said. "Just think of him as a figment of your imagination. Imagine you're killing an inner demon. Think up something insane. Like you're killing an abstract concept or some shit. Just believe me when I say it's going to be alright."

"Be-believe you?"

"Just like you believe me when I say this."

Smoking Vegan clamped her lips on her cigarette. The van sped around another left corner, squealing hard. The weasel let out a kworwl as Smoking Vegan pried up the semisolid felt that draped her former sitting platform. Revealed were four pairs of giant plastic jugs with an alarm clock duct taped to the front.

"C4," the girl behind me said, with a knee.

Smoking Vegan's clunky digital watch swung low, around to the underside of her wrist. She held her arm up limp-wristed, and gazed at the flow of time with her wide eyes.

"It's coming up on three o'clock. Your girl wakes up at five. The bomb goes off at four -- unless you give us a reason to disable it."

The brakes jolt, and I fell onto my right shoulder, clacking the upper-right-corner of my head onto the ribbed metal floor. The force of the fall managed to slam shut my jaw.

"Uncuff the bastard. We're here."

It was Smoking Vegan who'd spoken to the girls who uncuffed me. Then she spoke to me.

"Don't even think of shooting us. That gets you in trouble. We've got plenty more photos."

The van's back doors creaked open with the sound of a wood-chipper. A wide girl with a flat rectangular off-fleshtone gauze-riding bandage engulfing her nose looked in at me and clicked her teeth.

"Time to kill, shorty," she said.

I let my fingers feel the smiling gun, and I stood half-up mostly weakly.

seventeen

I crossed through the basement of Jordan Hall, where some students faced no greater trouble than method of payment for copies of transcripts. I had a little, cold, not-silenced gun in my khaki cargo pocket. I grasped its fabric outline as I walked half-bent-over to my right. I stopped at a water fountain to inundate my cotton throat. The pillowed gun clunked against the water fountain when I bent over. Machine hit against machine in a way that made me paranoid. I stood up, rubbed my hands over my body, and headed to a tunnel into the Union Building. I entered on the side of the computer kiosks. I took my hand off my shorts covering my gun so I could crack my fingers and make ready to type on a too-small keyboard.

I opened my school email account. There was one message -- and the sender was a girl. I scratched my unshaven face, wondering if I knew the girl. The subject was "J351." There was a file attached to the email. Closer inspection revealed it to be a text file of her final project.

Her tone was coy:

"I figure, since in a real newsroom, editors are free to share their stories with one another, I could ask you to look over this, just, like, as a favor, right? I mean, if there was some rule against it, that'd be, like, telling a physicist that he couldn't use a calculator."

I opened my mouth like I'd just tasted bile. Actually, what with my cold skin and shaking stomach, I probably was tasting a little bit of bile.

I looked at the girl's name for a solid five minutes I could have been using to kill John Mellencamp. In the cold air-conditioning of that low-ceilinged ghost-town of a basement, I tried to connect the girl's name to an image. I kept coming up with the braces-face of the girl who'd asked me whose cell phone I was carrying, the girl who wanted to see the Dean, and that just seemed ridiculous. I couldn't see that girl talking this way.

And then my eyes opened. I patted down my left pocket.

The phone was gone. All I had was an apartment key.

I looked back at this girl's email, and hit "reply." With cold fingers, I typed:

"Hello. I'm having a bad day."

I looked at the two would-be sentences for two cycles of thirty seconds. Each cycle brought to mind some fresh and overflowing new and exciting idea for a handle on my situation, or else a way to continue the writing.

When I was done thinking I decided to stop thinking. I canceled the email, almost thinking, If not her, if not someone I don't know, then who do I have?

I patted down my gun, logged out of my email, and continued down the low hall toward the Dunn Meadow end of the Union Building.

I surfaced a hundred-some meters from Mellencamp. I kept my right hand in my right pocket in such a way as to let me grip the gun. I came up on a low concrete stairwell populated by smoking guys in hard hats. One of the guys said something to me.

"Yo," I think it was.

"What's up?"

I headed down the stairs and behind a brown dumpster. I paced behind the dumpster, temporarily unaware of the girls saying their goodbyes at the Indiana Daily Student's specialized Journalism Building exit. When I heard one let out a shrill cackle, I patted down my body and skipped off toward the hubbub in the street.

Girls in T-shirts and guys in T-shirts just couldn't help standing around and being proud. They shouted at their hometown hero, and he looked up and to the right as he wailed and sang.

Mellencamp was out of my sight. When I rose to my tiptoes, his scruffy mat of hair plucked into view, then dipped away. He was singing about "Little Pink Houses," like the kind you'd see and be proud of in a small town. He was singing the shoulder-length of two hundred people away from me. Using my own shoulders, I moved the shoulders of others. Without shouting, without singing along, and almost without knowing the words, I rhythm-walked my way to the front of the crowd with slowness and minimum bumpage.

Once, a guy in face-spanning sunglasses and a mullet turned and glared his teeth at me. He clearly wasn't a college student. His face was too dark with tan. His neck was tanned red. His mustache was fuzzy enough.

"The hell you think you are boy."

He didn't say it as a question. It was hardly language.

The sun was moving up when a final chord infected the spring air. Mellencamp cleared his throat at the microphone as I tiptoed with haste to within a small lynch mob's viewing distance.

"This is my last song. 'I Was Born in a Small Town.' Ain't it the truth."

He didn't speak his last sentence as a question.

His swarthy stature, however, lent him the air of being right. Quick and to the point, he'd announced the fun time was coming to an end. Alone and with an acoustic guitar and an amplifier and a microphone, John the former "Cougar" Mellencamp stood in faded wrinkled blue jeans with a black belt and a tight white T-shirt. His neck was framed by two thin strips of muscle. His fingers, from a distance, appeared to be with flat tips and short fingernails, like a man who works for a living.

I meekly muscled my way to the top of the mob. Now three people-thicknesses from the Man From Indiana himself, I felt down my gun again.

"I was born in a small town."

I spied the front of Mellencamp's head with the front of mine. Like the music or hate it -- as I did -- I couldn't help feeling some kind of feeling. It was the feeling of standing in the middle of something performed live. It was the feeling of something being live before something dead.

I felt down my gun as I looked for Mellencamp's shining eyes. This wasn't what I wanted to do. This wasn't where I was supposed to go. My esophagus stretched to accommodate a raw, packed snowball of some feeling.

Was it guilt, or fear, or something else? I almost felt around long enough to find out.

My hand squeezing clothed metal, my eyes locked looking for another man's eyes, I felt alone in the spring wind. Hair on my arm became self-aware. My fingers went light. My center heated up.

I felt for the gun.

Mellencamp locked eyes with me. He opened his mouth, smiled whitely, and gave me a deep, dark, glassy-eyed wink.

I turned, and bolted. A crowd jiggled like bowling pins that weren't going to fall. My center of gravity slipped a foot; my right hand touched my right knee.

Some man with a mullet gripped a big red Thermos with his arms when I slid his way. He turned his back in an effort to save his beverage.

"Damn, boy."

"Sorry. Sorry."

I apologized my way out of the crowd. The northern fringe of the crowd was the northern fringe of Tenth Street. I stood back, leaned forward, listened to a song about a small town with my hands on my knees, and breathed in the wind.

Sitting on the sidewalk near the stop sign at Tenth and College was a girl in jeans and a sorority sweatshirt. Her feet spread out in front of her, displaying nylon sandals. Blonde and thick-faced, she kept her eyes and thumbs on her cellular phone. A friend in a blue camisole and a linen skirt was watching the semi-far-off mob with little interest. I looked at her with less interest than she looked at Mellencamp. I was panting out cold air. She widened her eyes at me, a flirty substitute to a wave -- or a signal of animosity. Hardly thinking, as fast as I'd even run anywhere in my life, feeling two handfuls of quarters I'd planned to use on pinball and the bus slap against my left knee, my right hand keeping the gun from doing the same to my right knee, I bolted down Tenth Street without looking back, not hearing -- not this time -- the girl with the cellular phone ask her friend "What the fuck was with that guy?"

Part four -- the ending -- is coming.

Yes.

'smoking vegan, smiling gun' -- part two

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 07:59:50 GMT

eight

Some people say there's no past, and no future, just an ever-changing present. Events stack up like snowdrifts, or sand dunes, making the present a never-existing pile of existence.

Some say time loops around. And not just in a "history repeats itself" sense.

In this sense, I'd say that the first time I should have realized the Smoking Vegan was going to get me was when my girlfriend bought her used car. This was six months before I met the Smoking Vegan at the poetry reading.

My girlfriend's car was supposed to cost her $9,100. It wasn't a bad price, for what wasn't a bad car. My girlfriend did research on all aspects of the deal. She figured how much her insurance would cost. She took into account the state of Indiana's ridiculous license plate tax. She sat up at night at the dinner table in our shared apartment with a leather portfolio full of yellow legal paper. She scribbled calculations and figures with a ballpoint pen. At some points, the end of the pen was in her mouth. At other points, she was using it to punch keys on a calculator.

She went back to look at the car a total of four times. I went with her the third time. The car was a magenta kind of maroon that struck me as neither wholly pleasant nor wholly ugly. My impressions were important only one out of the four times the car was viewed, perhaps because my usership of the car -- barring emergencies, strictly passenger -- was about one-fourth normal.

On the fourth time my girlfriend went back to have a look at the car, she went alone. What happened then, I can only be half-sure. She came home a hundred-percent more car-endowed, and fifty-percent pissed at something. She drank a peach wine-cooler and looked over a law textbook at our dinette table with the ceiling fan on. My -- our -- gay black roommate was out playing basketball with some female friends.

I asked my girlfriend what was wrong, and she said, "Nothing." I asked her again, and she said nothing. She was wearing her reading glasses, and sniffing with hay fever. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and loose. She was scratching the paper of her textbook pages with the end of a pen.

The next day, my girlfriend bought the car. She uses that car even today.

I wasn't sure until the second time everything came around what had happened to my girlfriend during her fourth viewing of the car. It really wasn't too complicated a thing. It was simple.

She asked to see inside the trunk. The dealer -- a guy in a black suit with a white shirt and a yellow tie -- popped the trunk open, and blasted some comment about its square-footage. My girlfriend was in a blue T-shirt-ish blouse and khaki shorts. She wore a quizzical expression from the second after the trunk was opened.

It was clean, and black, and felt. It smelled like something old made new again. If you were two feet tall or made of porcelain, it'd have been an appetizing bed.

Tucked toward the back of the clean, black, felt trunk bed was a shine of aluminum longer than half of human arms. My girlfriend began a legal-precision inquiry.

"What's that?"

"What's what?"

"That, back there?"

The salesman kept his right hand on the opened trunk as he leaned in. He narrowed his wrinkled ocular orbit-muscles as a sheriff in a movie about a small town would.

"It looks like a bat."

My girlfriend wrapped her torso in her arms. She squinted, and looked.

"A bat?"

"Yeah," the salesman confirmed. "It's a bat."

"What kind of bat?"

"It looks like a metal one."

"Let me see it," my girlfriend commanded, just to command something.

"Go on, grab it," the salesman said, maybe-lost. "Feel free to touch anything."

My girlfriend's arms didn't leave her torso. "I want to see it," she said.

"Okay," the salesman said, before going quiet.

A strand of my girlfriend's hair found the corner of her mouth. Her right nostril flared. Her left one might have stayed its original size.

"Let me see it," my girlfriend repeated.

This goes on for three more repetitions before, every time, the salesman reaches in, and pulls out the bat. The rubber grip is just small enough to fit within the width of his hand. The bat's metal surface is lonely, and shiny, and not chipped.

My girlfriend takes the bat in her hands and holds it with a sword-grip. Her little purse slips down to the crook of her right arm. Like the end of it is a laser pointer and the sky is a diagram full of charts and graphs and important figures, my girlfriend turns her wrists, then shoulders, then elbows, then waist, like a Barbie doll testing its own articulation limits.

The salesman, in present tense now, is tensing up. He's such a seasoned salesman he's sweating beneath his clothes. His face stays dry like dry rubber. Not in the least tempted to hook a finger under his collar to release some steam, he manages to ask, and rosily, under the sun, "Do you . . . like it?"

My girlfriend, waiting back in the past tense, looked at the top of the bat from a distance; she seemingly regarded it as a telescope aimed at some celestial body she'd rather not see. No -- she couldn't see it. One look at it from any distance would turn her into stone.

"Yes," she said.

"You can keep it," the salesman said. He put his hand atop the opened trunk, and smiled. His touch of hand on trunk was not sexual in the least. My girlfriend didn't notice. She couldn't have possibly.

My girlfriend bought the car that day. Without the use of words, the bat was put back into the trunk and sealed away. When my girlfriend drove home, it was in her new car, with her new tee-ball bat inside.

She never said anything to me about the bat. She never said anything out loud to me about a lot of things. That night, though -- when the wine cooler and law textbook were spent, as she punched at calculator keys with the end of a writing instrument -- she was telling me about the bat without telling me about the bat.

It's neither the case that she was proud of the bat nor the case that she was ashamed of the bat. She simply didn't tell me about it because she was confused. The bat confused her. That bat, in the trunk of that car: when she'd seen it for the first time, it was like a rare fit of wordless poetry. A shiny, not-chipped, not-banged-up metal bat, lying on its side, rolled to the back of the trunk of a car that would sooner or later be hers. Nestled some place safely in the back of the trunk, its name -- "EASTON TEE-BALL" -- hidden by the courtesy of its roll, lying atop charcoal-colored felt, it was a cylinder that itself felt nothing.

The metaphysicality of the situation, for my girlfriend, was only the least troubling thing. When she saw that bat, part of her, eyes shaded by an opened trunk on a sunny day, came to feel like gray clouds were sweeping in, and it was going to rain a humid rain. Far from feeling troubled at weather, she was troubled at the most concrete, most down-to-reality reality of her reality:

Why hadn't she checked the trunk before? She'd looked at the car three times -- and once with me, which didn't count -- yet she never asked to open the trunk? She never looked inside the trunk?

Had my girlfriend been a man, and I myself been the woman, I'm guessing -- and maybe educatedly -- she would have beheld the bat for the first time with a kind of jealousy: had someone else opened the trunk before, and -- when the salesman wasn't looking -- tucked the bat away in there? It wouldn't be my girlfriend's nature, were she a man, to question why another man would do such a thing. It would, however, be mine. And that is the point of this anecdote.

**

It is further the point of this anecdote to say that my girlfriend's fears that she'd never find a job, that she'd never pass her Bar Exam, and that she'd never make enough money to pay for all the things she wanted in a future that most likely didn't include me all came to a tapered, aluminum head the morning she purchased and drove off in a used car containing a not-used tee-ball bat. At twenty-four years old, wearing a newish pair of glasses with tortoiseshell frames, my girlfriend passed the point in her life where she was too young to think about getting too old. I could only look at her, half-fathom her expression as she squinted down her calculator, and offer her one banana from a bunch.

I should have noticed, then, that the look in her face was the look of a person who feared that she wasn't noticing enough, and never would notice enough. I should have noticed this only because I didn't notice it. It is my human vortex that I'm only capable of future noticing my failure to notice one past thing after I've noticed a problem in the present.

No large amount of forethought, I hear, is ever enough. Otherwise, it depends on what you consider to be "enough."

It wasn't enough, for her, for me to sit at the dinner table peeling a banana with care. It wasn't enough for me to finish the banana, break apart and stack the sides of the peel, and sit with folded hands, beating my tongue against the sides of my lower mouth cavity, until she asked what was making that noise. She needed her concentration to figure out how much gas her car would burn on the way to Chicago the next weekend. I was not invited to Chicago. It was her friend's wedding, not my friend's wedding. If it had been my friend's wedding, I'd probably have invited my girlfriend.

I went to bed, as not drunk as, in a few months, I'd be drunk every night. Sprawled out on the bed until she never showed up to push me rolling over, I felt my body grow small, and large, and even my hair grew longer. My sense of direction spun inside my skull like a small pebble. Which way was south, east, west? North? Northwest was where Chicago was. I felt my hair grow longer, into a northwest-pointing, loose ponytail. Until then, I'd had no idea what a ponytail felt like. Part of me was closer to Chicago. I wondered as I slept how many girls from Chicago have loose ponytails.

My girlfriend sat out at the dinner table with fear in her face for as long as I slept. Who is she? What's her name? How often does she get hungry? What's her favorite cold thing to drink? Why didn't she want a banana? Did I really care to see her eat something? Does any of it matter?

The most that matters about her, and the small thing that I noticed when I knew that, at some point in the past, the Smoking Vegan had bewitched me wrongly was that the taciturn fear on my girlfriend's face was at once her defining characteristic and no more telling than a signature.

They say you can tell a lot from a person's signature. If you look closely enough.

A cashier at a drug store has no trouble declaring a signature authentic when you use a credit card. They'll just look at the credit card, look at the loops you put on paper with pen, and think "That's about right."

From that point, for more than a year, my girlfriend's facial signature looked like just a lot of loops. I figured anything with that many loops must have been the real thing, and never noticed I was failing to notice the loops weren't even spelling out her name. It'd be more accurate to say they weren't even spelling out any words at all.

nine

If you must know, I did once or twice imagine sex with the Smoking Vegan. I imagined dry, unbuttered sex with the Smoking Vegan over breakfast. Whether I ate toast with jam or eggs with ketchup or cereal with skim milk or bacon with grease, alone or with my girlfriend, sex with the Smoking Vegan once or twice was on my mind. Only over breakfast.

Once, over lunch, when sex with the Smoking Vegan was off my mind for the rest of the day, I asked her what had happened in Hawaii.

It was three days before the first day of spring, and more than a week since the end of Indiana University's Spring Break. We were on a bench with a view of the arboretum, I with a bag of peanut-oil-fried potato chips and a box of one-hundred-percent juice, and the Smoking Vegan with an organic bagel and no juice -- for she'd given it to me.

"I don't need that shit," she'd told me. "I got a bottle of water."

I didn't see her bottle of water, and I didn't look for it. Instead, I asked her a question, like making conversation.

The arboretum's famed cherry trees had yet to bloom. I'm not sure I've ever seen them bloom. Ten months out of the year, they're the color of dead wood, like a mirror of a winter behind or a telescope to a future winter. Eleven months out of the year, I'm busy doing something I don't want to do.

So I asked the Smoking Vegan what had happened in Hawaii. She was finishing her organic bagel when I asked her the question, and staring at the tip of a cigarette, inhaling, when she smacked her lips and resolved to answer.

"Two people got married. I got sunburn."

I slid the ends of my eyes over Smoking Vegans jutty shoulders. Shadowed with sunlight and twigs of a cold dry dead tree, she had freckles. The freckles, too, had burnt in the sun. Smoking Vegan's bandana that day was a dried blood kind of brick red.

At home, there was a documentary on one of those channels that shows documentaries. My gay black roommate was sitting in his big black beanbag chair with a sack of tortilla chips, a backwards baseball cap, and full attention. He didn't greet me. I didn't greet him. I stood next to him with my hands on my hips, and took in what he was taking in.

They were talking about Tanya Tucker. She was a country music star, and one I'd honestly never heard of until that afternoon. If my mother had been around, I could have admitted I'd never heard of Tanya Tucker, and she'd probably have told me it was impossible for me to "live in this country" my "whole life" and "never hear of Tanya Tucker."

They showed this guy with a face like a burlap sack. He had a mustache that wouldn't have looked out of place on an antique lampshade. He was proud of something.

"We took her into the dressing room and told her to sing for the man, and he couldn't believe the voice that little girl had."

I could imagine the man's face slightly less burlap-sack-like. He had his hands on a little girl's bony shoulders, and was guiding her into the dressing room of some kind of famous singer, and he asked her to sing. He had a look on his face like a woman with a baby in a beauty pageant.

For a few small seconds before I asked my gay black roommate if we had any more of those peach wine coolers, I wondered when and why no one ever pushed me by the shoulders into an important person's dressing room. I wondered why I'd never tried to sing. I wondered where my life -- or anyone's, really -- really heads after their first sold-out show at the Grand Old Opry.

The burlap-faced man spoke with authority when he said "And the rest was history."

His words made me swell with desire to drink, and feel big and small again.

"Two people got married. I got sunburn."

And I think: that's about right.

smiling gun.

ten

The day I was hired to assassinate American Rock Legend John Mellencamp, formerly John "Cougar" Mellencamp, began with a morning almost halfway like any other morning. The sun was high and yellow, the air was clean, and my alarm went off at ten-fifty-eight AM.

I broke out of a sleep that smelled like alcoholic floor cleaning and into a waking that smelled like overburnt raisin toast. A scraping metal butter knife somewhere was spreading cream cheese over raisin toast, drowning the smell. I scratched at my T-shirt after I'd put it on and yawned into the hallway.

My gay black roommate stood, a curious sight, spreading cream cheese he'd stolen from his job at a bagel shop over a slice of raisin-bread he'd bought full-price at the supermarket. Over jeans and a polo shirt, he wore a crayon-green apron. On his bald head was a visor. Those hands that could and did frequently palm basketballs were performing a culinary task of such small-scale I almost recalled King Kong with a woman in his fist. Who was that woman? What was the actress's name? I stood in the hall, wondering, until my gay black roommate folded his long legs enough to fit into his beanbag chair. He turned on the television, and took a bite that consumed half his slice of raisin toast. The news was on, and I was in the kitchen with a glass of water.

"It's that Mellencamp bitch," my gay black roommate said over a mouthful of crispy raisin toast. He said it like I'd asked him a question. I hadn't. I was a glass of water richer, and still looking through the cupboard, just because.

"Mellencamp?"

"Yeah, that John Cougar Mellencamp asshole."

"What about him?"

"He's on TV."

"Why's he on TV?"

"Fuck if I know. Look at the bitch."

So early in the morning, and my roommate was already moody. It must have been because he'd just gotten off work. He worked three hours a day at the bagel shop, four days a week. It must have been tough.

I eyeballed the TV. Sure enough, there was Mellencamp. He was wearing jeans and a checked blue button-down shirt. He was smiling, and wrinkled like a catcher's mitt. He was sitting in a chair in a television studio talking to some woman with jagged frosted hair.

"I like to see the kind of turnout we get. It's a real thrill," I caught him saying.

"Fucker's giving a concert downtown today."

"Downtown where? Downtown here?"

"Downtown here, yeah. Cracker son of a bitch."

"Where in downtown here?" I asked.

"Fuck if I know. In the street."

"In the street?"

The news cut away to footage of Mellencamp in the middle of some city street. It was a real American city street. There was a barbershop somewhere in view. If its neighbor were a candy shop, I wasn't able to tell. The camera stuck on Mellencamp. He was strumming an acoustic guitar with a pickup. He had a microphone a quarter of a foot in front of his smiling face. The music was thankgodfully muted as the interviewer asked questions. I was listening to neither the questions nor the answers. My roommate went on talking, and I looked for a harmonica, or else another band member. Some drums, a bass, or something. Was this guy really hot enough to stand in the middle of a street, alone, with a guitar, without percussion or bass? Was he that cool?

"John Cougar Mellencamp Fucker was up in Indianapolis yesterday. It's a surprise thing. Touring the nation or some shit. Started in Indiana. He's coming down to Bloomington today, it being his hometown and all."

"Hell."

"Yeah, so watch out for that bastard."

I clamped my lips around the rim of my glass, and repeated: "Hell."

"Watch out for that cracker motherfucker."

"I will, I will," I assured.

"He might be poking around corners or some shit, looking to start trouble."

In a second, I was standing back behind the kitchen counter, looking in at the living room, fumbling with the twist-tie on a loaf of white bread. It was orange, and torn. A piece of silver-colored wire jutted out and glared at me. I avoided being cut, at the expense of taking more than a minute to open the bread. When it was open, I had no idea what I'd wanted to do with it. I dropped a slice in the toaster, took a sip of water, cracked my back, and yawned. The newswoman went on talking about the way John Mellencamp's brand of rock and roll had "changed" the "historical landscape" of the "State of Indiana." I wondered how big an accomplishment, really, that was. In a standing half-sleep, I reminded myself of man-made lakes outside office parks. If I ever get a job, I thought, I'm going to be seated in a cubicle with my back to a door whose other side is positioned opposite an office door that opens into an office with a view of a lake. What's the use of constructing a lake at an office park, if the typical employee can't see it? It was a half-hungover Zen-meditation one-hand-clapping kind of state of mind, with the slight intrusion of a TV news broadcast's capsule John Mellencamp rock and roll history, set to the time limit of a toaster set on "light." My toast popped up about as white as I am. I didn't look for butter. I thought half of one time about frying some bacon, and gave it up. I crunched into the toast with mild anger. It made a sound like an old woman balling up a square of sandpaper.

"You got your class today?" my roommate asked me, eyes still on the Mellencamp still on television.

"Yeah," I said, chewing my dry toast. It made me thirsty. A sip of water rendered the cut-up toast pieces in my stomach acidic sponges. Some bubble of gas got lodged halfway up my esophagus.

"Your ho said she'd pick you up at the mall."

"The mall? The mall?"

"Yeah, she said she'd be waiting for your white ass outside Applebee's."

"Applebee's?"

"That's where she picked you up last time."

"Yeah, it is. It is where she picked me up last time."

"Well, there you go. So that's where she's picking you up again."

"Well, I didn't ask her to pick me up there again."

"She said she picked you up there last week, and the week before."

I thought back two weeks ago. The week after spring break, I'd gone to the mall to buy a new pair of comfortable walking shoes. I'd eaten a pretzel with cinnamon, played some Street Fighter II in the arcade, tried on a baseball cap, and then called my girlfriend from a payphone when I realized I was on track to be late. The week after that, I'd woken up at seven in the morning for God-knows-what reason, and my girlfriend was still at the Law Library. I went over to Steak 'n' Shake around seven-thirty, ate some strawberry pancakes and sausage, and drank three-quarters of a glass of syrupy orange juice while thinking about sex with the Smoking Vegan. Around nine in the morning, I found myself looking over a display of feminist literature at a Border's book store; much later, I repeated the pretzel ritual at the mall, before calling my girlfriend from the same payphone. Come to think of it, it might have been the payphone adjacent to the same payphone.

"Well, . . . yeah," I said, long after the conversation had disappeared, long after the news had started talking about something else.

"Yeah what?"

"Yeah, I was at the mall two weeks in a row. That doesn't mean I'm going to be there this week, though."

"Shit. I guess she just figured it was your new Friday thing."

When he said "Friday," I realized -- it's Friday. I should be at the mall or something.

"Well -- it's not."

"Well, it looks like you don't got no say in it. She said she's going to meet you there at eleven-thirty. Outside Applebee's."

"Why Applebee's? Last time, it was the side of the movie theater?"

"Well, you know how she don't like driving around the mall like that. She said it'd be easier for her to pick you up near Applebee's."

I opened my mouth, felt air touch the insides of my cheeks, and then closed my mouth. There was nothing more to be said. Someone else had clearly thought this portion of my day out way ahead of time; as a person who had done such, they were probably right.

"So, uh, what are you up to today?"

My roommate didn't have classes on Fridays.

"I got to go meet someone for dinner."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. I haven't seen them in a while."

I almost scoffed. Here, this two-meter-tall black man was omitting pronouns in his speech. It reminded me of the way my best friend in the ninth grade talked about girls. When he'd finally made friends with a girl, he wouldn't stop calling her "They." I didn't bother to note the sitcom-ish shame evident in his speech; rather, I marked it for its stupidity and tactlessness. Why not just say "She"? He wouldn't say "They" about a guy, would he? Of course not. Now, my gay black roommate -- did he really deserve to be any different? Worse yet, did he think he'd have to use "They" in front of me when he was talking about another man? Did he think I was somehow unaccepting of his homosexuality? Did he think it made me uncomfortable? And if he was meeting a girl -- what does that say about children, if anything?

I was whisper-talking at a corner of a slice of white toast. I put it in my mouth, soaked it with saliva, and swallowed. My roommate went on looking at the television. They were talking about rock and roll again.

"Fucking cracker John Cougar Mellencamp motherfucker."

Dusting crumbs off my hands, I informed, "You know, he dropped the 'Cougar' from his name back in, like, the eighties."

"Well, shit. I didn't know that shit."

"Well, uh, neither did I."

My roommate scoffed at the television. "You know, his bitch wife came in this morning."

"To the bagel shop?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"She knows the owner. She, like, went to high school with him or some shit."

"Shit."

"Yeah, he gets her free bagels, all the time. Fucking bitch. She had this grin on today. I wondered what it was for. White bitches and their bagels. Shit."

"She's a bitch?"

"Yeah, shit, ain't you heard?"

"You never told me about this."

"Well, fuck. Shit, man, you never ask how my day at work was or nothing. Shit. Well, shit, she's a real bitch."

"How?"

"How what?"

"I mean, how is she a bitch?"

"She need some kind of excuse or something?"

"Nah, I mean, what's wrong with her? What's she do? What's she say?"

"Just envision a bitchy bitch, and you got it."

"I'm thinking of some gray-permed woman in a nurse's outfit, missing half her teeth."

"Nah, shit, whitey, that ain't how it is. She's . . . she's one of those supermodel types. Kind of. Look like she was a cheerleader in high school or some shit. Shit, she ain't a cheerleader now."

". . .Okay."

"Yeah."

"So, what does she say? Is she bossy? Mean? Pushy?"

My gay black roommate snorts. He's looking at the television. Five minutes after its first airing, the Mellencamp interview is repeating from the beginning. The Indianapolis news broadcasts want to give everyone in their wrong mind time to call in sick to work and drive fifty minutes down to Bloomington.

"John Cracker Mellencamp," my roommate is saying when I decide to go to the mall.

He's still staring at the checked flannel and blue jeans of John Mellencamp when I emerge from my bedroom in a black T-shirt and blue jeans of my own. I put on my comfortable walking shoes, and I'm gone, without even noticing that my roommate still has that half a slice of raisin toast in his lap.

eleven

It was cold inside the mall. My bare arms turned red like in hot bathwater. I ate a hazelnut pretzel at a plastic table in the section of mall hall one might call a food court. I read a copy of the Indiana Daily Student while I ate the pretzel. Another (white, male, rich) student had died of alcohol during some kind of fraternity party the night before. It was his nineteenth birthday, and he drank enough to cause him to vomit six times in his sleep. The first time he vomited, it was into his pillow; he was lying on his stomach. By the fourth time he vomited, one of his friendly and drunken housemates saw fit to roll him onto his back. He then vomited two more times. Unlike in the cartoons, the vomit didn't form any kind of geyser. It just kind of bubbled halfway up his esophagus, splurted up into the back of his throat, and settled in the upper part of his trachea. The article is very clinical, and even technical, in the way it describes the physics of the vomit-settling. No more than fourteen hours after the death, autopsies are revealing things like questionable lividity -- apparently, some blood settled to the inside of the dead bastard's elbows, indicating that he might have died on his stomach. If this is the case -- and the Indiana Daily Student will let you know by tomorrow -- then there's a chance he died of alcohol poisoning, not dumb luck of the vomit variety. If it's alcohol poisoning, we can expect a sad mother to give a televised speech about responsibility to the entire frat house. This isn't the question I wanted answered, however. My question wasn't even a question. No, the tip of my inverted pyramid was much smaller. I wanted to know what kind of sheets the kid was sleeping on. When I wondered that, I felt like I'd just gotten to the end of one long sentence in the story of my life. I didn't even remember what I was getting at when I got there. All I knew was that I'd ended in a different tense than I'd started in.

When I looked up from my newspaper, it looked later than it did when I'd first looked down at it. To be sure, it was later. Still, something about the later-feeling left a bad taste in my mouth. The mall felt darker.

College Mall is a dark mall. Far away from a metropolis, far away from any other mall, and guaranteed patrons by the close proximity of a university full of kids with nothing else to do, College Mall doesn't have to resort to petty interior decoration tricks to get people shopping. There isn't another GAP or Abercrombie for miles; if the late-teenagers want to show up for the first day of Generic Business 101 in uniform, they're going to have to settle for this Eddie Bauer, or no Eddie Bauer.

A little girl with hair like a rag doll's and eyes bigger than her forehead was looking at me from behind her mother's back. Her mother was waiting in line for a chicken sandwich. The look on the girl's face -- like a boy fifty feet away from her had just tossed a boy fifty feet away from himself (and a hundred feet away from her) a toad the size of a silver dollar -- made me vaguely hungry for chicken fingers.

I checked my watch. What time was I supposed to meet my girlfriend again? It was a minute after noon. I stood up and folded my newspaper. I walked past the hat shop, and three kiosks selling wretched multicolored glass beads. Beside a place that sold daggers and crystal statues of dragons was a Kay-Bee Toy Store. A large piece of human male was stuffing giant yellow rubber balls into a white metal cage as tall as he was. Just as it occurred to me to check out the ATM, this guy piped up.

"Yo," he said.

I looked at him. If not for the bald head, I got the impression he'd have had a receding hairline. If not for the large yellow ball he held between his hands, I'm sure I'd have had the opportunity to more accurately represent his fatness. His nametag said "Gary."

"Gary?" I asked him, like I wasn't sure. I was sure.

"Yo, Jack," he said, like he knew me. He did.

"How you been doing?" I asked him. I already knew.

"Last year of my MFA."

That means "Master of Fine Arts;" I used to like to joke -- to myself, since I never took up the practice of talking to other people about such things -- that it stood for Mother Fucking Asshole. Which was supposed to describe Fat Gary. See, that's clever. I used to be clever like that.

"Wow, third year already, huh?"

"You working on that MA in Journalism?"

"Yeah."

"We both never left IU, huh?"

"I guess not."

"You been writing anything, you know, creative, lately?"

"Not unless you count commenting on student papers."

"Oh yeah? Can't you never tell them how much they suck?"

I had my left hand in my left pocket. My right hand gripped my sweaty forty-two-ounce cup of Coca-Cola from The Great American Cookie Company.

"Not really, no."

"They don't have workshops in journalism classes, do they?" Fat Gary said with a scoff.

"Not really, no."

"Remember that workshop, years back?"

"Not really."

"It was kind of fun."

"Yeah, it was alright."

"Dr. _______ is my mentor, this year."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."

"I wonder if he remembers you?"

What a nice question for Gary to ask on my behalf, while himself wearing a polo shirt carrying a toy store's logo. Were there no paying jobs in the English Department? Hell, are there ever paying jobs in any English Department?

"I wonder," I said.

"Hey, I saw you at the poetry reading a few months back."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," Gary went on, palming and squeezing his yellow rubber ball. "Really wacky shit. You wrote that poem?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I did."

"Sorry I didn't get a chance to say hello."

"Likewise."

I think -- and I'm probably not mistaken -- that Gary had read a story at the reading. The story was most likely about leukemia. All of his stories were.

When we were in the same fiction workshop, he'd won an award for a story about a young guy with leukemia which he kept a secret from his mother, in a shopping mall shortly after it opened, with his girlfriend, searching for the suit he'd be buried in. It was narrated by the girlfriend. The girlfriend was a "Smart cookie," as the teacher put it.

As the narrator put it, early in the story, at a point when the girlfriend pushes down the boyfriend during an argument, "Now, I'm a short, petite, maybe even mousy girl. Still, that boy went down like a gumball machine." The workshop attendees, ever-the-lazier-than-the-writer, commended: "I like the gumball machine line." At one point, the girlfriend complains about her life with a leukemia-stricken boyfriend, shedding light on their lack of money, their cold apartment, how they use the oven for heat: "Sometimes I want to stick my head inside." The teacher said this "fusion of humor and dead-seriousness is big in today's literary fiction."

My tales of life with an inguinal hernia went ignored, no matter how subtle or un-subtle I told; when asked if he'd known anyone with leukemia, Fat Gary struggled to answer. I don't remember what he said. He might have said something about how leukemia interested him enough to make him want to write a "collection of short stories about coping -- with the pain of leukemia." The title was most likely something very unobtrusive. I don't remember what it was.

I do, however, remember a story he'd written about a man whose mother had just died of leukemia. He met his stepsister for dinner and will-discussion, which climaxes in kind of a romantic relationship. At one point, when the stepsister orders a drink for her stepbrother and is asked why she knows what he wants, she replies, "Because I'm a detective. I'm incognito. I know everything. I've got it all researched." During my round in the workshopping, I told him the facts -- after everyone had expressed their delight at the "spiciness" of the "stepsister character," I pointed out how dumb that "detective" line sounded.

"I just . . . I don't know," I told him. "I just don't think it fits. It feels weird. It's kind of embarrassing. Like watching your little brother die in a play." I was only speaking so many words because they were flowing out; I was criticizing Fat Gary because it was easy, and to me, my words weren't unnecessary. Far from my usual terse "Yeah" or "No" criticism, I was being specific on how his piece made me feel.

Gary drummed sausage fingers on the table and looked at me with a level stare. His eyes had a socket-y kind of look that made his nose appear bigger when he was talking defensively about something.

"You mean it fell flat? If you want to say it fell flat, just tell me it feel flat."

I didn't know what to say. I was sure "It fell flat" wasn't quite the expression I was looking for. My attempts at further criticism, sadly, fell flat.

I dropped the class soon after that. Gary had four other stories due that semester. I'm sure at least four of them were about leukemia. And after the detective incident, I was certain he'd never known anyone with leukemia in his life.

Years later, he was asking me a question in a friendly tone. He was asking it not scared. He was asking it a little jealous, and air-conditioned. He'd only been on his feet for two hours, three tops. Though he'd be on his feet for eight more hours that Friday afternoon, he wasn't thinking about the future, or my and his almost-headbutting past. He was only thinking about the present -- maybe a little jealous, like I said -- maybe just making a little conversation.

"Say, you hear anything about Mellencamp being in town today?"

Half a second passed, me with my hands in my pockets, cold arms red, warm, goosebumpy like in hot bathwater, and I toyed: with my house key in my left hand in my left pocket, and with the idea of teasing Fat Gary. I let go of the idea

"A little bit, yeah."

Outside, it was sunny, and not sweaty. The sky was blue without clouds. No clouds clouded the world over, no clouds moved in the wind. Turning fifteen degrees at a time, squinting in the sun at the flatness of the paved plain of a shopping mall parking lot, seeing stories-tall signs change places on the horizon under power lines that separated one world from the other, I got the impression that the sky was moving.

Whether the sky was really moving or not, my girlfriend's car was moving toward me with the right turn-signal blinking. She stopped with the passenger's side door a half an inch away from optimally lined-up with my hips. With a click, the door unlocked. I opened the door and ducked inside, where the air-conditioner was louder than the radio.

If I had leukemia, and I had just been shopping for my burial suit, and my girlfriend had had to go inside to retrieve me, that's where my being late would have gotten me knocked over like a gumball machine. With no leukemia, the most I could do to make my insignificant other angry was try to put my sweaty forty-two-ounce Coca-Cola in her cup-holder. With no leukemia of my own, the most confrontation I'd see would revolve entirely around someone else.

That is, she said:

"I circled the parking lot three times."

Here, I didn't have to ask, "This parking lot, or the whole mall parking lot?" I asked it anyway.

"Just this parking lot," she said, motioning with the corner of her forehead to the cracked concrete surrounding Sears and Applebee's.

"Oh," I said, not being able to tell you how the information made me feel.

"I'm taking you to the journalism building?"

"Yeah."

"You'll be done at two-thirty?"

"You're going to the Law Library?"
"Yeah. Two-thirty?"

"The students are working on their projects today. I might be able to leave early."

My girlfriend turned the right turn-signal on, and prepared to slide out onto College Mall Road. With microwave-oven precision, she removed her cellular phone from a compartment inside the armrest. She dropped it onto my lap.

"Have them page me at the Law Library. The number's on the speed dial."

Here, for the last time in a long time, I was tempted to use her name at the beginning of a sentence.

". . . Uh . . . I don't need to bother with that."

"Well?"

"I can just meet you at two-thirty."

"What, and make you stand around?"

"I'll find something to do."

I remembered the pinball machines in the basement of the Indiana Memorial Union Building, conveniently connected to the journalism school.

My girlfriend's car began the journey toward Third Street. The cellular phone in my lap began to vibrate.

I picked it up. I showed her the face, and the incoming phone number.

"You want to get this?"

"Ignore it," she said.

Her eyes were on the road. Her eyes were hers. Her cellular phone was in my hand. Her cellular phone was mine.

I hear they can cause cancer. Maybe, by the end of the day, I could put a nice down-payment on some leukemia.

eleven

The dean of the Indiana University School of Journalism has a trapezoidal prism of hair atop its head. The dean happens to both like me and teach the magazine-layout/editing class I assistant-taught on that day. The students were supposed to be working on their final projects. When the dean hadn't shown up past the first fifteen minutes of the class, everyone decided not to do their projects. They were talking.

I couldn't see why anyone in their right or wrong mind would want to do a boring magazine layout project, anyway -- especially with the iMacs in the Journalism School computer labs. Seriously, could they have picked a worse sponsor for a journalism school's computer labs? iMac keyboards are about one-eighth the size of normal keyboards, and eight times as sticky; when a student takes it upon him or herself to major in a subject where each spelling error results in a lost letter-grade, this is an unnecessary insult. Normally, I'd unplug my own keyboard from my own computer, and carry it under my arm like a rock guitar. On that day, what with my having been scheduled to walk to the mall and eat a pretzel, I'd forgotten.

I didn't try to push the students to complete their projects. If they wanted to sit by and fail the class, that was fine by me. It meant less papers to grade.

It wouldn’t have been so boring to grade all of their papers if they weren't all doing the same thing. Essentially, the dean had dredged up some old New Yorker article about Tiger Woods, typed it up, and inserted hundreds upon hundreds of random spelling and grammatical errors. The students were to fix the errors, create creative infographics, and invent an inventive new layout.

My project -- I had to do one, too -- was to research and write a feature article and create a layout. This took considerably more work, and made me considerably more irked when the kids kept talking during class.

I was writing about an English school in Indonesia. It was easy to pound an article out. All I had to do was look up the information, send a few emails, cultivate a few statistics, and I had a nice-sized lifestyle piece. I tried my best to use descriptive language. I wanted to paint a picture -- otherwise, the article wasn't interesting. Who wants to read about an English school in Indonesia if it's not interesting?

I had names of teachers, names of cities, names of villages, and names of islands. I'm not sure I remember even half of them, now. It's not important. The names were never important. I just plugged them into the article, making sure to spell everything correctly, and then surrounded the names with descriptive language.

The water is blue, and mirrored. The sun is high and white. The clouds are translucent, and puffy. Night falls after ten in the evening.

The teachers, because of immunization issues, live in air-conditioned huts on a rocky shore a half a mile away from the island on which the school is located. Every morning, with the sunrise, they awake, bathe in a lagoon, board a canoe, and paddle past jagged rocks, under a big wooden watchtower platform in the water, and to the beach where the village is located.

Here, I inserted a great quote from a female teacher about how, every morning, it's like the first time arriving in the village. Every morning, a few kids -- skin shiny, black, and wet from a morning swim -- line up on the beach to gawk at the teachers like they've never seen them before.

I then talk about the program, and how it got started. Who wants to send foreigners to Indonesia, to teach English, of all subjects? How much of a demand is there for English, in Indonesia? Why teach Indonesian kids English?

I quote a male teacher as saying that everyone -- even implicitly unfortunate little Indonesian kids -- deserves a second chance. I then try hard not to ask, "Second chance? What about a first chance?" That wouldn't be consistent tone.

At this point, I resolve to tell an anecdote. One morning, while bathing in a supposedly pure spring, a male teacher's groin attracted a large number of not-quite healthy slugs. It was shortly before sunrise, so he didn't notice them until he'd already started to get a little lightheaded. This happened to be on board the canoe to the English school. He freaked out at this point, screaming at the native paddling the canoe. He commanded him to stop. The teacher jumped in the water, and flailed around, screaming, for half a minute, before spasmodically climbing up onto the first tier of the watchtower standing in the middle of the lagoon. With his arms held out wide like hugging a grizzly bear, he gripped one of the log watchtower struts, and moaned, and wailed. A female teacher had to follow him up the tower. He kept inching away from her, screaming that she should stay back. He didn't know what was wrong with him. He thought he was possessed (earlier, I mentioned something about spirits of the islands, so as to avoid tossing in something parenthetical at this point). The female teacher told him to stop being silly, and tried to lure him away from the strut he was hugging. He wouldn't move. So the female teacher took the initiative: she scooted around the other side of the wooden tower, and grabbed hold of the male teacher's swim trunks -- yes, the male teachers taught classes in swim trunks and sandals, and I had some full-color photographs to prove it -- and yanked them off. They tore like something out of a cartoon. The male teacher screamed like a female as the boatman laughed. The male teacher then jumped into the water. Everyone laughed. How many people "everyone" consists of, I'm not sure. I think there were two other teachers in the boat.

My first draft of the story mentioned that two other teachers were in the boat. My second draft left this detail out -- I'd gone over the 3,000-word limit. Also left out of the second draft was my description of the boatman's rowing all the way back to camp so the teacher could put on a new pair of pants. My second draft skipped straight to a candid quote by the male teacher in question, in which he says he's now able to laugh at the incident, and think of it fondly -- he even goes so far as to call it "good times."

This is where the drastic change of tone occurs. The teachers awoke one day, as the story goes, to find the canoe unmanned. The boatman was nowhere to be seen. They board the canoe, paddle to the beach, and see the village smoldering. In the night, some Muslim group had attacked the village and destroyed the school, mistaking it for a Jesuit church. I then list facts about the Muslim situation in Indonesia, give a "where are they now" of the teachers, and close everything up with an image of the high tide coming in under the watchtower.

The gist of this assignment was to teach me precision in editing and revising my own work -- both written and visual. The way the exercise was to teach me this was pretty simple. I had to turn in two stories: the first was to be between 2,900 and 3,000 words, and could be laid out over as many pages as I saw fit. The second was to be between 750 and 800 words, and restricted to one page.

It is, perhaps, impossible to write the short version of the story first without raising innumerable red flags deep within the Indiana University School of Journalism Dean's trapezoidal prism of hair. The reason for this is that written small things can't become bigger without a certain degree of awkwardness. That awkwardness is like the inverse of stretch marks on a human being who lost a lot of weight very quickly. Though the small thing made large might fit the size requirement, it will not do it cleanly, and this is the problem. It has to be clean. Everything in the world of precision writing has to be clean. Otherwise, what's the point of precision?

The only way to complete the assignment, the dean knows, and I know, is to write the long story first, and then -- as per creative writing classes -- "kill your babies."

Looking at my 3,000-word article, it didn't take long to notice that the anecdote about the leeches and the ripping-off of the swim trunks was longer than the anecdote about the burned-down village. The latter being the point of the essay, anyway, I figured this wasn't good. So I spent a week removing the leech anecdote from the writing.

It was slow. At first, I tried trimming two or three words out of every sentence. With each deleted word, with each restructured sentence, I took a tally in my head, counting backwards from 2,991. After three days of trimming, I started to question where I got off thinking I could keep this part of the piece in any form. I had 2,601 words to turn into 800. The entire leech story would have to go. So I cut it out. I then had 1,714 words. This was still twice as much as I was allowed.

During class hours, I brooded about this. I chewed on pencils, avoiding the erasers. When a student asked me a question about his or her boring paper, I answered it boredly, and then went on brooding over my story.

It cut straight from the quote about showing up on the beach every day and into the bit about the boat being empty that one fateful morning. Without the story about the leeches, this didn't flow for me. The dean had a look at it, and told me to try to read it one more time, as a reader, not as a writer -- try to imagine I'd never read the story before, and then it would start to seem that way. Did the story not flow without the leech anecdote? Or was I only missing it because I'd written it? Was all the information still in place? Would it still be a good read? Remember, you're being graded on layout, editing, and content.

I went the shallow route, and cut two hundred words on a sentence-to-sentence basis. At one point, in quick, wood-tasting semi-anger, I trimmed the story down to 600 words by way of removing every piece of description. The Reader's Digest version of my story was slim, to be sure -- and also flat and dull. I saved it into my personal online directory, and never bothered to look at it again.

On the morning the dean didn't show up to class, I was staring at a 1,601-word version I almost liked. I was chewing on a ball-point pen, and the window to my right was opened wide. The yellow, bright air outside, not blowing in, reminded me of a thawed, empty refrigerator that's still plugged in. The metal electric fan on the ledge by the printer wasn't plugged in. It didn't need to be.

One girl in a "SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM" sweatshirt poked by to ask me where the dean was.

"I have to talk to the dean."

"Oh."

"It's about my project."

"Oh."

"Do you know where the dean is?"

All of the other students were chattering mostly quietly when this happened, about nineteen minutes past twelve-thirty.

"I don't know where the dean is."

"Can you call the dean?"

"Can I -- can I what?"

"Call the dean?"

The girl was pointing at my girlfriend's cellular phone. The phone is a metallic kind of lavender, and clearly not mine. At least, to me, it's clearly not mine.

"That's not my phone."

"It's not?"

"No."

"Whose is it?"

Here's where I looked at the girl. She had a face caressed by acne scars, and hair curled by a vengeful genetic god. She was leaning forward in such a way as to suggest hands on knees. She licked fat silver braces.

"It's not mine."

The sound of an official key in the official lock of the official computer lab shut the thirty whispering girls up. The door clicked and rattled open. The dean strode in, trapezoidally excited about something. The girl with the braces turned around, and said "Dean!"

The dean was by now in the middle of the aisle separating the two rows of rows of computers. Hand to side of face, the Dean declared, "John Mellencamp is outside!"

The girl with the braces dropped a pen when she squealed. I followed it to the carpet.

When the dean said "Class dismissed!" -- that's when I noticed the pen was mine. When did the girl with the braces take the pen from me?

I didn't care. From outside, on the dead-refrigerator wind, a single strum of a low-E string being tuned floated into the opened, dirty window by my right shoulder.

I fixed my eyes on the single compound word "wooden," embedded within my computer monitor. I held my gaze with the force a man applies to a bear-hug on a watchtower strut after he's just been stripped of his pants.

"You coming, Jack?" the dean asked me, when I was the only student left.

"Nah, nah."

"Not a Mellencamp fan?"

"Nah, it's -- it's not that. I've got, uh, work to do. Lots of catching up to do. You know."

"Don't work too hard. And lock the lab up."

"Sure."

I went on gripping the watchtower strut in my mind, pantsless, until thirty-six minutes after twelve-thirty. My 1,601-word story was now 1,533, and I felt like I needed a cigarette. Only I don't smoke. I stood up, pocketed my girlfriend's cell phone, and somewhere deep inside my brain resolved to find someone who did smoke.

twelve

The Smoking Vegan was waiting for me outside the front of the Journalism School. She was smoking a cigarette. Seeing her fingers around the cigarette made me push my right hand into my right pocket, and push down on the lavender cellular phone that rested there.

With the back of her head, she motioned to the street, and greeted me without greeting me.

"You hear about this shit?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Fucking hick bastard."

"Mellencamp?"

"The whole town's in an uproar about him. People are cutting work and everything. Traffic on I-46 is backed up past Seventeenth Street. Hell."

"Shit."

"You hungry?"

"A little."

"Want to go to the Union? I forgot to bring a bagel today."

"Sure."

The Indiana Memorial Union Building, on a day when Indiana's Proudest Son is come to town, I take it, is always something like a ghost town. On any other day of the week, the dozen-dozens of students lodged around on benches or food courts chairs would have looks of mostly-contentment on their chewing, talking faces, like they felt pride to exist beneath the seven-foot ceilings of the Largest Student Union Building in the World. Sometimes, you'll catch someone passing around a rumor about how some Chinese university is trying to build a larger student union building in China, and if the person passing that rumor around isn't a business major, they might mention how Indiana University's Musical Arts Center's stage is only inches larger than that of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and it was made those few inches bigger for the bragging rights alone.

When Mellencamp is in town, the kids behind the Pizza Hut counter wear frowns, and serve no one. It made me wonder, that one time I saw it -- saw the emptiness of a usually-filled place -- how many people could fit in the street, within hearing distance of that one amp, that one guitar, and that one man.

The Smoking Vegan and I shared conversation about ants (how many it takes to lift a piece of steak) and club soda (why, really, does it get out stains?) as we sat at a table overlooking a staircase that reminded me of something unspecific about middle school. I drank what remained of my two-hours-old sweaty paper cup of Coca-Cola as I took turns listening, then being listened to. It was less difficult than it might have been.

The Smoking Vegan had a lot to say. My mind wasn't on what she was saying, nor was it on predicting what she might say next. It was on counting the students in the cafeteria.

People were evacuating the place like it was a nice day outside. In a way, I suppose you could say it was a nice day outside. You couldn't tell from the Indiana Memorial Union cafeteria. There are no windows. I sat across from the Smoking Vegan as she sipped a bottle of spring water. Her big amber eyes leapt out of her skull and followed each deserting student out of the cafeteria.

"Busy day," she said, and she didn't mean it.

"Tell me about it."

"These hick bastards."

"Yep. Hick bastards."

"Come on," Smoking Vegan said, holding her bottle of water under her arm. "Let's go play some pinball."

"Sure."

I followed the Smoking Vegan down a hallway that had once been three hallways. One floor was made of tiles you'd see in an elementary school classroom. One floor was made of tiles you'd see in a university dormitory bathroom. The other floor was carpeted in thick green. Smiling down at the thick green carpet were various paintings of various old people in old clothing.

In a little grotto in the basement, a pair of black students with arms thicker than my head were playing pool and talking loudly. They were dressed entirely in sweatpant material, and one of them was chewing a toothpick when he tipped his head to the Smoking Vegan. The red-faced girl behind the bowling alley's shoe-rental counter was reading an issue of the school newspaper with a dropped jaw and frequent scoffs of teary anger. The Smoking Vegan kept her eyes on the shoe counter girl as she rounded the corner. She watched the shoe counter girl like an off-duty crook watches a cop.

I laid a hand atop a Star Wars pinball machine from the early 1990s. Using my right index fingernail, I groped at the glass. Someone had taken a blunt object -- most likely a key -- and scratched a long, wide groove into the window to the playing field. With all the internal bonus lights turned off, the inside of the pinball machine struck me like a the interior of a closed shopping mall. I envisioned an off-duty gumball machine somewhere around a corner, and a still on-duty security guard, or woman pushing a floor-buffer. My imagination wasn't strong enough. I let my thumbnail settle into the key-scratch groove. I felt it, with carved-out wonder. I though philosophical things I couldn't begin to describe. Beneath a place where thousands of students ate lunch daily, just not today, behind a would-be pool hall, I was thinking -- and I know not why -- that the person who'd scratched the pinball glass with a key had wanted to touch the pinball.

"Look at this shit," the Smoking Vegan was saying.

"What shit?"

She held up a newspaper. The front page headline was eighteen points larger than regulation. If it hadn't said what it said, someone on the Indiana Daily Student Staff would probably have gotten fired:

"MELLENCAMP IS HERE!"

There was a picture of John Mellencamp playing his shitty little acoustic guitar in the street. It was that same American town I'd seen on the news that morning. Behind him was a barber shop, and . . . just beyond that barber shop was a candy shop. Hadn't I imagined a candy shop that morning? Was I psychic or something?

"Where did you get that paper?"

"It was right here, on the NeoGeo."

"Right there?"

"Yeah, rolled up."

She rolled up the newspaper, and tucked it between the joysticks and the television monitor of the NeoGeo cabinet. The paper unrolled a little bit, and spun. Both the Smoking Vegan and I looked at it when it did so. I picked up the paper, as the Smoking Vegan reached into her corduroy jacket pocket for her cigarettes. She licked the length of the cigarette as I unrolled the paper, and saw that headline again, for the first time:

"MELLENCAMP IS HERE!"

There was that picture of John Mellencamp. He wasn't even looking at the camera. Though I already knew -- thanks to Indiana University's Visual Communication J210 -- that it was wrong to take a picture of a subject who was looking at the camera, since Mellencamp was the subject, it struck me as distastefully unaesthetic. How dare he . . .

"Hey, is this a special edition or something?" I asked the Smoking Vegan. She was going through her pockets for a lighter. She kept her cigarette clamped in her teeth.

"Fuck if I know."

"It doesn't say 'special edition,'" I said, inspecting the paper.

"Should it?"

"Well, yeah," I said. "I think. I mean, I read the paper this morning. The front page story was all about some kid who drowned on his own vomit last night."

"A frat boy?"

"Yeah."

"I heard about that shit yesterday."

The Smoking Vegan had found her lighter.

"Where? The paper? Word of mouth?"

"Could have been," the Smoking Vegan said, exhaling her first puff. "You wanna play some Samurai Shodown?" She threw her amber irises at the NeoGeo's faded television screen. I rolled up the newspaper like strangling a snake. I scanned the lit-up panel with the game selections in it. It was either Bust a Move, Samurai Shodown, or Shock Troopers: Second Squad. I remembered the latter, from my own college days.

"They have Shock Troopers--"

"Nah, chief, it don't work. Only Samurai Shodown."

I stared at the faded monitor. It should have cycled through all three choices. However, when the Samurai Shodown demo ended, the next demo to begin was . . . Samurai Shodown again.

The announcer read, in Japanese, dramatically:

"A Samurai fears not death."

A minute later, I was afraid of something else. Cigarette clamped in her teeth, the Smoking Vegan was smoking me again and again. I was running out of the quarters I'd need for the bus later. The Smoking Vegan's cigarette tip turned as white as her bandanna was green. She managed to puff and exhale without removing the cigarette from her lips. On any other day, when her hands weren't so busy clicking a joystick, I'd not find the lip-dexterity so overly interesting. Somewhere neither inside me nor outside me, I was thinking of how the Smoking Vegan might kiss, if she were to kiss something.

The Smoking Vegan's onscreen avatar was Earthquake, a great fat ninja whose weapon was a hooked blade on a chain. I was Nakoruru, a purple-haired, four-foot-tall girl ninja with a pet falcon. The game was muted. As the giant fat man vertically and horizontally slashed the tiny purple girl, the only sounds to show for it were the angry clickings of fingers on buttons, echoed on the shallow Union Building ceiling, calling to mind keystrokes on keyboards on computers in a nuclear bomb shelter within a mountain.

It was a mismatch in more than just aesthetic terms. The Smoking Vegan played the attack buttons like a four-keyed piano. She manipulated her joystick with the ease and grip one uses to tap ash from a cigar. I was pounding, tapping, and losing. I was thinking we'd come down here to play pinball. The humid basement air filled with a wet-nicotine aroma. The fat man stomped on the little woman, and then finished her with a hook-blade-slice that tore her chest open. A geyser of red blood sprayed up. The screen faded at the conclusion of our seventh furious battle; when all was in blackness, I could see and feel the Smoking Vegan's reflected eyes looking at my reflected eyes.

She fetched the cigarette from her mouth and tapped out some white ashes onto the tile floor. Her cigarette in her right hand, she scratched at the index fingernail of her left hand with her index thumbnail. She watched the fingernail-on-thumbnail scratching as I stepped back from the NeoGeo cabinet and grabbed the abandoned newspaper.

The Smoking Vegan threw her left hand to her side. With some kind of red-haired grace, she brought her cigarette-holding right hand down to the flat surface of the NeoGeo cabinet, just above the "B" button of Player Two's joystick. With a hiss, the plastic sputtered and curled around.

"Let's go," the Smoking Vegan said to me, and I didn't refuse.

She was already gone out into the pool hall when I made the decision to go with her wherever it was she was going. For those few seconds without the Smoking Vegan, I stared at the singed NeoGeo. There had been a few other cigarette burns before the Smoking Vegan's. The idea of the vandalism isn't what bothered me, however.

I'd lived -- how many years was it? -- this long, and seen many a cigarette-burned arcade cabinet. Yet it's taken until right now, today, to actually see a cabinet be burned.

I felt like something beyond me was ending, or else something involving me was about to begin. It wasn't a good feeling. It made me thirsty. Tap water would have done nicely.

Just as I stepped around the corner, past the sleepy bowling-alley-shoe-rental girl, my right pants pocket emitted a hard vibration. I ducked back, out of the Smoking Vegan's possible earshot. Hip to an old pinball machine, I took out the cell phone, and had a look at the incoming phone number.

"PAYPHONE," it said.

Who would be calling from a payphone?

I pulled the phone further out of my pocket. Many of the flowery dangling ornaments got stuck on my house keys. I had to wrestle with metal cords and chains for three moments before I was ready to pick up the phone.

"Hello?" I said, looking at my reflection in the Star Wars Pinball scoreboard.

"Jack!"

"Yeah?"

"Damn it, why didn't you pick up?"

It was my girlfriend. She was speaking in a nasal scream-whisper.

"I . . . had trouble with the phone."

"Damn it," she said through her teeth.

"Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. There's -- there's a problem."

"A problem? What kind of problem?"

My girlfriend took a breath with a sound like she was lowering her voice into the phone with a fishhook.

"Listen -- there's been . . . an emergency."

I gulped. "A-an emergency?"

"Yeah. An emergency."

"What . . . what kind of emergency?"

My girlfriend thought about it with a hum.

"It's an . . . emergency!"

'smoking vegan, smiling gun' -- part one

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 07:57:07 GMT

Hello.

I've been trying to update this for a few solid hours. It's annoying. Apparently, it's over the length limit. What the hell ever. So I'm doing it in four parts. Or something.

A novel by me, dedicated to someone who's not me. This is

smoking vegan, smiling gun
a novel
by tim rogers

smoking vegan,

one

Fuck John Mellencamp for starting all this. Fuck him in the back of the neck with an icepick. "Rock and roll" my ass.

I mean, that's not to say I hate John Mellencamp, or even dislike him. As far as people go, for all I know, he's alright. If I met him under circumstances that didn't involve a weasel, a handgun and a hit and run, I'm sure we could have sat down and had a nice, honest conversation. For some reason, I take it he'd have been a good listener, as long as he didn't mention music.

The reason John Mellencamp shouldn't mention music is because he makes music. He makes music of a certain variety that I wouldn't trust on a guy who mentions music to me.

Take a big fat ball of "rock and roll," drop it into the colander of Midwestern "popularity," and let it sit for an hour in a sink. The unwanted bits that are evil and chaotic enough to stick to the drainpipe -- that's John Mellencamp's music.

I so strongly voice my dislike for John Mellencamp's music in an effort to achieve a certain modicum of honesty. If I pretended to like John Mellencamp on both personal and artistic levels, you'd get this eerie sense that I'm lying to you. That eerie sense would happen to be right, because I would, in fact, be lying to you. So I'm being honest.

I'm also being honest when I say that as long as John Mellencamp stayed off the subject of music, he and I would probably get along quite well. I'd buy him a drink, or something. Maybe we'd end up playing darts. I play darts like a son-of-a-bitch. There's ninja blood in me, I swear.

I mention the darts and my idea about buying John Mellencamp a drink because I want to show you that I, innately, have no hostility toward John Mellencamp, nor do I have any reason to try to kill him.

Why, really, would I want to kill John Mellencamp? I mean, really? He's not a bad person, I'm sure. Sure, he makes music that makes me angry. Yet, if this music happens to come up on the radio, I change the station. It's not as if anyone is pressing John Mellencamp's music into my ears and making me listen to it. Let's get realistic here.

I can recall the exact moment I realized my dislike of John Mellencamp's music. I was in high school. My mother was in the kitchen, with the radio on full blast. I was in the living room, on the sofa, doing homework. My mother was baking cookies, and singing along to "Jack and Diane." It was an otherwise quiet day in the cold of winter.

"Here's a little ditty, about Jack and Diane -- two American kids growing up as best as they can."

Or maybe they're growing up "In the heartland." Either way, you get the point.

I mean, what the fuck?

Next, my mother started singing along to "I want you to dance naked." This, I couldn't take.

I wanted to tell my mother to turn off the radio.

I didn't.

She was scary. She screamed her way through my childhood. She has diabetes now.

"Summer of 69" came up next.

They were having a John Mellencamp weekend. Two out of every three songs they played on the damned radio were by John Mellencamp. They always did this in Indianapolis, Indiana. That's where I went to high school. After high school, I wound up not too far from home -- at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

This was also John Mellencamp's hometown.

After college, I ended up at graduate school, also at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

It was during this graduate school experience that I, quite ridiculously, ran into John Mellencamp.

That's getting ahead.

How this story gets from me studying magazine journalism to my trying to kill John Mellencamp is a bit of a tale. I'm not sure I understand it. There's probably a greater chance of you understanding it.

I might as well get started.

two

One more thing, though -- about John Mellencamp. I'm mentioning above about how I think he must be a decent guy, because I really believe it. I'm mentioning how I hate -- dislike -- his music, because it's something of a character flaw in me. I took creative writing classes in college. They told us, then, that characters had to have flaws. It's hard to see my own flaws. So I'm stressing this one that I know.

My creative writing teacher was gay, and he hated Stephen King, because Stephen King was popular. I'm pretty sure that he hated Stephen King because of his success, not because of his books. This gay writing teacher -- his hatred of Stephen King was pretty much the exact inverse of my dislike of John Mellencamp.

It's like this: the gay writing teacher -- I say he was gay, because he was -- when someone mentioned Stephen King, he got this look on his face.

"What about him?"

He never expressed any specific disdain toward Stephen King's work, not even once.

Well, once, he got close:

"When you're famous, you can write 300,000-word novels, too. For now, stick to short stories, or nothing."

And once, when he was talking about character flaws, he got pretty close to an outright criticism. This gay writing teacher said that Stephen King's idea of a realistic flaw was to afflict his characters with some sort of illness the recovery of which is central to the story. For example, the guy in Misery is bedridden following a car accident -- and later has his foot chopped off by his "Number One Fan," who's holding him hostage in her house. The warden in The Green Mile has a urinary infection that might be contributing to the staleness of his marriage -- or so it goes in the beginning of the book, before he meets a big, black, angel of a prisoner who heals him.

"Two-dimensional," my teacher called it.

At the time I took that class, I had an inguinal hernia. If you don't know what an inguinal hernia is, the best way to explain it is to say that it's what a doctor is looking for when he asks a guy to turn his head and cough during a physical. If that's not specific enough, try this: a link of my small intestine protruded into my scrotum, causing me the pain of being kicked in the groin with every footstep. It compressed my bladder, too, making me urinate every fifteen minutes, on the fifteen minutes. It was like clockwork. I wasn't much of a writer -- the other students in the class always shrugged my work off as "I liked it" because "it was good," and "It was good" because "I liked it." No one seemed to notice that all of my narrators had inguinal hernias. I'm guessing the gay writing teacher did.

He probably thought my narrators were "two-dimensional." Oh, well. I had to drop the class because he was failing me. I'd not turned in a story on time. He made me come visit his office, where he told me the most important part of telling a story was having a story to tell.

Quite frankly, this gay writing teacher told me, I didn't have a story to tell.

He had photographs all over his wall. He was from Puerto Rico. He was balding, at thirty-five. He had a beard. He was an all-around nice guy.

I later read his book:

Gay, from Puerto Rico, bald, with a beard.

That's about the gist of the story.

He probably had a hard time growing up. According to his author bio, he was an only child.

His book didn't mention the Beauty and the Beast poster on his wall. The Beast looked more menacing than ever in his buffalo-ish cartoon shape, on the wall behind this bearded balding gay Puerto-Rican writing professor.

So, this writing professor in reality:

Gay, from Puerto Rico, bald, with a beard, fan of Disney.

A minority in a minority in a minority in a minority in a majority.

"Accentuate the minority" must have been this guy's motto.

Or maybe it was "Poetry? What the fuck?" He liked to scoff loudly at poetry. He was always carrying around books of the stuff and scoffing at it. He hated poetry so much he read it voraciously.
He hated text-emphasis, too. Vocal emphasizing was okay. Text-emphasizing was not. If he saw italics used for any purpose other than book titles, his red pen was going to make a showing.

Before meeting this guy, I'd never had a creative writing professor actually mark my papers. Isn't it all supposed to be up to interpretation?

"You have some talent for story-telling, really," he told me, at that last conference.

I shook my head. "It must be the journalist in me."

"You just need a story to tell," he went on.

"Hmm."

"Something personal."

"I think I'll stick to poetry."

"Poetry?"

"Yeah. For blowing off the creative steam."

"Shit."

Prior to meeting this guy, I'd never had poetry's purpose so clearly laid out for me:

"You know why poetry exists?"

"Um . . . why?"

"So semi-intellectuals can occasionally win twenty-five-dollar gift certificates to Red Lobster, from Yale."

Hmm, I thought: this guy's using his second language well.

I should have heeded his warning. No good comes of poetry.

I was too cocky. I walked out of that office with a second signature on my class-drop slip. And a copy of Indiana University's student literary magazine, Canvas, which he suggested I "take a look at," if I was "so interested in poetry."

He was right, though:

No good comes of poetry.

Maybe he was right about everything else, too?

If I'm going to tell you a story, I'm going to have a story to tell. And I'm going to make points, and be personal. I'm going to emphasize myself. And I might teach you something.

Lesson number one:

three

No good comes of poetry.

I wrote a poem deep into the fall semester of my first graduate year. I wrote it to blow off steam during a big, boring busywork project on magazine writing, editing, and design. It was for a nonexistent sports magazine. I did it well, and doing it well meant doing it tediously.

The poem was written on a whim. It was about a certain devoutly religious Korean girl.

She was, as I've said, devoutly religious. She attended church sometimes more than thrice a week.

Being devoutly religious, however, did not prevent her from having much sex, with me, of all people.

This was during my senior year, before I met the girl I'm currently living with.

That devoutly religious Korean girl was nice and firm and short. Her nipples were black as coal, little as big diamonds, and firm as pencil erasers. When she was naked, they were like vortexes for my eyes. Nothing else mattered -- not her jagged teeth, not her thin hair, not her solid abs. Not her feet.

I never once looked at her feet. I'm not a foot person. I've actually never known anyone who was a "foot person." I'm not sure I know what it means, precisely, to be a "foot person."

Still, I wonder why I never looked at this girl's feet. I had every right to. Like all other non-amputees, she had two of them. I could have at least looked at at least one of them at least once.

What makes this non-foot-looking even stranger is the fact that she regularly washed them. She made a point of drawing out the process. She'd heat up the water, gather up her sponges and moisturizers, and wash her feet for ten minutes. At my place, she used the kitchen sink. At hers, she used the bathroom sink. Her bathroom had pinned-up pictures of supermodels. My bathroom had walls that functioned as a shoulder-massage when you stood up and sat down on the toilet repeatedly. At her house, she had her little pink soaps. At mine, she used her hands.

After sex, she took a shower. She would announce it three minutes beforehand. Then she'd get up and head for the shower.

She didn't have an ass. She was too short. So there was no real incentive to watching her naked retreat to the bathroom. If we were at my place, it was usually Saturday night, so I picked up the remote, and turned on some basketball. My roommate and best friend, gay as he was, and black, always went to the basketball games on Saturday night. He loved Indiana University basketball as much as he loved Corona beer and hanging out with lesbians. He was out mystifying his homosexuality, while I was stuck having heterosex with an assless girl, the both of us totally lacking in mysticality.

I lacked mysticality because I was a white heterosexual American male. She lacked mysticality because her religion forbade it.

Even so, there might have been a little bit of mysticism in that devoutly religious Korean girl. When she started up my shower and padded back through the bedroom and into the kitchen, where she washed her feet, it put some kind of feeling in me. She flowed through a room. Her path from the bathroom to the kitchen was set in devoutly religious Korean stone. She displaced waves of mysticism as she moved, and made me feel it. I felt it all the way from the bed. What I felt was the very thing that had attracted me to her in the first place.

Strange words:

"She lacked mysticality because her religion forbade it."

The forbidden mystical slipped off that dark-nippled devoutly religious Korean girl like water off a duck's feathers. A wake followed her on her path to wash her feet.

Naked too, I once followed her into the kitchen. She had one foot up on the rim of the sink. With her right hand, she was repeatedly testing the temperature of the water:

"Too cold. Too cold. Too cold."

Somewhere in my mind, "I want you to dance naked / if you'd like I'd join you."

She was humming, and drumming the metal of my kitchen sink with her toes. They must have been flexible as a monkey's. I wasn't looking at them.

I put my hands on her hips, and she didn't move. I kissed her on the loose, soft skin of her neck.

"Too cold," she said, of the water, or of my hands.

Inside, she was still warm.

The kissing devoutly religious Korean girl bit tongue. Extended sessions felt like licking Velcro.

We were back on the bed in a second. She was sitting on top of me, and she had her feet pressed to my sides. Her feet were absolutely freezing, as the kitchen sink and the shower kept running, united in their mission to use up all the hot water before my gay roommate could get home, shower, throw spaghetti into the microwave, and watch ESPN.

At the moment, I was thinking of black nipples.

Seconds later, something occurred to me: I could go for some spaghetti right now.

Years later, I was working on a project, and remembering that night -- either because my project involved basketball, because I was cold, or because I was living, at the time, with my current girlfriend, who was always out doing things that I never had to do, meeting people that I never had to meet, and driving a car that I never had to drive. It was all part of law school, she assured me.

I was horny, and a little drunk, when I wondered why I didn't look at that devoutly religious Korean girl's feet that night when I surprised her before she could start washing them. When she sat astride me, all I saw were nipples. Like two black eyes staring right back at me. As for the devoutly religious Korean girl's own eyes -- they remained closed. Maybe she was praying.

Who was she praying to? The God of minority minorities? What was she praying for? A majority?

Furthermore, what had happened to her? Why did she and I quit seeing each other? I was drunk, and in a poetic mood, so I didn't remember.

What had started out as a poem of longing for another chance to look at the girl's feet deteriorated into something of a vaguely veiled criticism of religion:

Washing your feet in my kitchen sink
Showing spiritual calves a-flex
In black nipples we trust, nonstopping to think
Synapse soaked dirty with Jesus Complex

Show face at high place four times a week
Lender of money is slender to loan
Hotwatertight roof refusing to leak
Angry, hesitate, cast the first stone

Stand up legs high first in a crowd
Spigots' flow random significant verses
Shower when seated naturally loud
Closed-eyes closed-feet quiet-curses

Virtuosity baptized what you need so few
Not not enough to let let touch you

It was something of a sonnet. I rattled it off, titled it "Jesus Complex," drank another beer, and looked at the clock.

"Basketball? What the fuck?"

"You know why basketball exists?"

"So people can feel better about their selves, and be tall, and triumph over minority?"

"So semi-intelligent people can win twenty-five-dollar gift certificates to Red Lobster, from Yale?"

"So mostly-talented people can win twenty-five-million-dollar gift certificates from Nike?"

My girlfriend hadn't gotten home yet. Neither had my gay black roommate. It was after midnight, and I was talking to myself. I blacked out for two hours, and woke up with all my work finished.

Imagine my surprise when, a month later, I got an email from Canvas, the Indiana University student literary magazine.

Here we go: I'd won first place in their annual winter poetry open.

They didn't give me a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to Red Lobster. They did, however, invite me to a reading with free punch and cookies, and they did love to hear my story.

It was at the poetry reading that I met the Smoking Vegan.

four

The Smoking Vegan began stalking me, I have since surmised, three seconds into my reading of my poem.

In the next few months, I'd wonder, "What business does a lesbian have stalking me?"

I have to admit I wasn't sure whether or not she was really a lesbian. I gave her the benefit of the doubt from the start.

Why she looked like a lesbian, exactly, I can't quite put my finger on. She wasn't tall. She wasn't beefy. She wasn't biker-like. She didn't wear anything of any kind of leather. She was dressed like a vegan, with a skirt, and freckled. Her ratty, oily red-brown hair, like dirty pasta, hung out below a cowboy bandana, probably cotton.

Her shoes were poly-leather black platforms. She hovered, and green-eyed me with unsympathy as I top-teeth-scraped the pink icing off a butter cookie. I enjoyed my dairy in a tart way without noticing anything that wasn't pink or buttered or baked. When I saw the short, freckled girl's nose-squinching look, I didn't immediately take it to be that of a beflustered vegan. It was more of a "Pal, do you have any idea what you're doing?" look. It was less of a look of an animal-lover tempted to break my kneecaps with a golf club, and more of the look of a technicality-fearing elementary school science-fair-winner about to brain me with a cookie-eating textbook. Either way, violence was in her look.

The cookies weren't so good. I'd had better. I'd have better. The butter part of the butter cookie was too moist in a gagging way. It made the backs of my nasal passages feel acidy, like drinking orange juice through a straw, through my nose. The Smoking Vegan, who was neither smoking nor immediately vegan at the time, snorted at me, crossed her arms, and said something to her companion.

Her companion was slightly bigger and beefier, yet somehow more immediately feminine. She wore her mind on her bare and pimpled arms. A silver stud in her nose reflected the evening orange café light. The reflected orange light gave the impression of a space-hole in this girl's nose. Looking at that orange and shining space-hole increased my hunger. I packed two more cookies in and saturated them with red punch.

"They make that with lava rocks, you know," the Smoking Vegan said to me. Her voice was thin as mountain air. That's not to say she climbed mountains, or that I did. She, at least, possessed the agility to dodge a good avalanche or two: she had sidled up to my side I know not when.

"I don't taste them," I said, throat full of confection and punch.

"Nobody does. That's the point," she said.

She wanted me to say, "So why do they put the lava rocks in there, anyway?" I didn't say it. I was against falling into some befreckled vegan girl's semantic traps. So I said, "So I see."

The Smoking Vegan snorted, and looked out at the khaki-and-flannel poetry-adoring wave. Her snort moved fluid like a smoker's. I could hear the inside of her small head churning with something. I scanned her baggy body for a cigarette-pack-bulge. She had one, in her loose brown corduroy jacket. The jacket hung low over her tank-topped skintight petiteness. I had just found the cigarettes when she spoke up.

"Your poem was interesting," she said.

"Thanks," I said.

She made a small circle with her lips, and took in a cigaretteless drag.

"I was on the committee."

"Ah," I said.

"I'm a senior," she said.

"I was a senior, once," I said, I know not why.

"I was in charge of all the selections."

"That's a lot of responsibility," I said with a cough. The cookie in my esophagus turned sideways and pushed down the sarcasm.

"Shit. No kidding. All this talent."

Either I didn't catch her facetiousness, or I didn't try to. "You get a lot of submissions?"

"Hicksville," she said. "Abercrombie-and-Bitches. This place. Shit."

"Don't like Indiana?"

This was the first time the girl mentioned John Mellencamp.

"Fucking John-Mellencamp-ass bastards."

"John Mellencamp, did you say?"

"Yeah. You heard of him?"

I scoffed. "Every damned day," I said.

"Oh. You struck me as a guy not from around here."

"I strike me as a guy not from around here, sometimes."

"No kidding. So what's your beef with Mellencamp?"

"My mom used to sing his songs."

"Ouch."

"You're telling me. Nothing like a menopausal woman trying to sing along to pseudo-rock-and-roll."

"Does she still sing along now?"

I shrugged. "She has diabetes, now. I'm guessing that does something to her energy level. For all I know, she's still menopausal. So there's no ruling it out."

"How you grew up to write poetry . . ." the girl said, like there was going to be a second half to her sentence. There wasn't. I continued drinking lava punch, she continued breathing as though through a cigarette.

I finished my cup of punch.

"The poetry isn't much," I said, a minute too late. I talked while biting the rim of the empty paper cup.

"That's what they all say."

"Ah."

"I liked your reading."

"Oh?"

"It felt like I was hearing the poem for the first time."

I scoffed. "It felt like I was reading it for the first time."

The girl snorted. "We were wondering if there was a story behind it."

Still biting the empty-paper-cup-rim, I spoke: "I'm pretty sure there is."

five

By the end of the poetry reading, the Smoking Vegan, who had yet to reveal herself as a smoker and a vegan, gave me her phone number and email address. The twenty "people" who worked hard three days of the semester to put together Indiana University's premier literary arts magazine liked to gather and drink coffee and talk about philosophy on Friday afternoons. They'd enjoy my company, Smoking Vegan told me none too enthusiastically.

I showed up at the Waffle House on Jordan Avenue a little before noon and left during sunset. The Smoking Vegan was sucking on one cigarette as I entered and a different one as I sat down. The Smoking Vegan's table was populated by sorority girls in sorority sweatshirts. All of them dined on dry wheat toast and black hash browns. At the head of the table sat one large and bubbly-fleshed woman of about fifty. She could have been simply thirty and wrinkled. She put away plate after plate of sorority-girl-funded sausages and eggs. I ordered a hamburger, and everyone looked at me. Smoking Vegan had told me beforehand that she was going to pick up the check, so I figured there was no risk.

The large woman talked on and on about something in the Bible. Something about women being submissive to men. She was a real anti-chauvinist. She attacked the Bible in words as general as her fork-cuts of egg were sloppy. My French fries tasted like menthol, and I didn't complain.

"Jack?"

"Yeah?" I said. I was staring at a French fry I'd dipped in my peppered ketchup. I like peppering my ketchup, rather than peppering my fries. It helps the pepper stick. If pepper doesn't stick, what's the point?

On this day, the pepper reminded me in a stomach-trembling way of black cigarette ashes floating in a public toilet.

"You can tell us about your poem now."

I let the French fry slip out of focus; behind it, there was the large woman with the wrinkled and chipped face. She was talking to me.

"Oh, sure," I said, and dropped the fry. I wiped my hands on a big cloth napkin, and cleared my throat. Smoking Vegan scraped her fork most unpalatably across her plate, as if to silence a crowd that didn't exist before they could make noise they weren't going to make. She wasn't looking at me. She sat next to the large woman and her biker-ish lesbianlike friend with the nose stud. The both of them were smoking like it had already gone out of style. The air was left with minty nicotine. Smoking Vegan and company were left with cartons full of dead trend.

"There was this girl," I said, gesturing. Stopping and starting, I spoke: "This Devoutly Religious Korean Girl."

This raised vegan eyebrows, and two non-vegan ones. I checked myself, and choked on my quickly-becoming-menthol mucus. Why the hell had I spoken her name in capital letters? Had I ever thought of the devoutly religious Korean girl as the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl before? My style, my enunciation: it raised eyebrows. Maybe I really did have some gift for storytelling. I'd best not flaunt that gift too flamboyantly, I thought, in such feminist company. I used my storytelling like you wear that sweater your aunt got you: constantly adjusting the cuffs, and the collar, though only in her presence.

All in all, the tale of the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's feet-washing took an hour. It got pretty drawn-out. I kept going off on tangents about my former gay writing professor, my inguinal hernia, and character flaws. I employed a bit of what might be called a sense of humor in the telling of the story. The large woman didn't laugh. Whenever everyone else laughed, Smoking Vegan looked at the large woman, and decided not to laugh. The large woman didn't look at me. I didn't look at the large woman. I was looking at the Waffle House sign: out in the parking lot, two stories tall, glittering in different ways as the sun moved.

At the conclusion of my story -- me at home, cold, horny, semi-drunk, my girlfriend out at the Law Library -- the table was silent. A dozen vegans' glasses were empty of organic orange juice. I had even gone so far as to explain each one of the poem's lines in detail -- I had no idea why else a sorority girl had handed me a copy of Canvas the second I sat down.

"So," the large woman said. Her "So" was short and stabbing.

"Yes?" I asked. I was pushing a peppered-ketchup-cover French fry around my cold plate with a fork.

"So you still fantasize about this Devoutly Religious Korean Girl?"

Now everyone was capitalizing her name.

"Not really," I said. "I was just thinking about her a little bit, that's all. I was a little drunk, and thinking about her."

"Uh . . . huh."

"What? What?"

"You have a girlfriend, you said?"

"Yeah," I said.

The large woman snorted. "Typical."

"Now," I said, "I didn't say I was fantasizing about her. I'm just saying she crossed my mind, that's all."

The large woman pointed a fork-impaled sausage at me.

"Check your head," she said.

"What?" I asked her.

"Check your head," she repeated.

I tried to say "What?" again. I tried to start some piece of some syllable several times, only to continually get the "Check you head" treatment. The Smoking Vegan, my sole defender, wasn't defending me. Eventually, I gave up, and the large woman began talking about tarot cards. I looked out the window at the Waffle House sign, and the sun's reflection nearly blinded me.

six

It was three days later that the Smoking Vegan's stalking began in earnest. She showed up outside my journalism classes -- the ones I taught, the ones where I assisted professors, the ones I took -- with a bag of organic bagel, just headed to her lunch. She was a journalism student with a minor in philosophy. She liked poetry. She wrote it, and she read it. Three times, walking with this girl into the Indiana Memorial Union building, where we sat and ate and drank -- I Sprite and hatefully undelicious pizza, she aforementioned organic bagel and some one-hundred-percent-juice juice -- I felt like bringing up the Yale Red Lobster Theory of Poetry. I always backed away from jumping into the joke -- either I feared the negative attack at poetry would send this girl over whatever edge she was standing on, or that the mention of lobster would break her poetic confidence: why write poetry, if the most you can aspire to is to win a free meal you can't eat?

Why I felt like the girl was teetering over some edge of extremity, I don't know. Her behavior wasn't the oddest I'd ever seen. She walked calmly, talked calmly -- perhaps with a slow, clinically depressed drawl -- and stalked calmly. I don't even know if I could consider it "stalking" per se. We were both students in Indiana University's relatively close-knit journalism school. We passed one another in the halls at least twice a day. She didn't always say hello, which is either typical or atypical of a stalker, depending on your perspective. For one thing, I didn't say hello, either. I barely looked at her. Which isn't to say I overly disliked the girl. I really didn't like looking at anyone when I walked from class to office with anger, frustration, hunger, and a cup of coffee. My purposes divided, my schedule laid out before me: I didn't have time to look at and say hello to random people. I was sure it was the same with the Smoking Vegan. When the day's chores parted like chauvinistically biblical seas, "before" on one side, "after" on the other, "lunch" being the space between, that was when the Smoking Vegan ran into me with time to talk. And talk we did.

Most of the time, I talked about my gay black roommate's mystified homosexuality, and his job at a bagel shop. It turns out the Smoking Vegan had been there a few times, before she found the bagels she currently adores enough to pay tribute to every day.

"He works, like, twelve hours a week," I said.

"He complains about it all the time," I said.

"He says, ‘Shit, man, why the hell don't you have a job?'" I said.

"And I tell him, ‘Man, I teach classes and shit. This is a job. Especially when you're surrounded by students who use "borrow" as a transitive verb,'" I said.

Drinking Sprite and eating barely-classifiable-as-pizza pizza, I told these stories in such a way as to incite riots of laughter, or at least questions, in any self-deprecating journalism/philosophy student. She didn't laugh. She munched her bagel, and listened with her dirty-green eyes wide open. She sipped her juice, and nodded. I felt like a comedian who was dying out there.

The reason it seems now like she was stalking me is because of her lack of advances. She didn't jump out at me. She didn't try to grab me. She didn't say insane things about self-mutilation. Somewhere buried in the back of her not-an-attitude attitude, the stalking shone through, and I could see it. The Smoking Vegan could not hide her madness from me. Rather than give her the cold shoulder, I walked with her in rain before and after winter break. Even on Valentine's Day, I met this Smoking Vegan, and it was then that I loaned her a book she took a month in returning.

I lent her the book, in part, because she was so damned lazy in the revelation of her insanity. Before I could decide the girl was dangerous, she had to prove me right about her being dangerous. She had yet to do that. Nearly two months I knew this girl, and she hadn't shown herself to be pretty much of anything. What a half-assed stalker I ended up with, I lamented, and still never mentioned my girlfriend. It was so easy not to. You'd never guess how easy it was. I came to understand how not-yet-caught serial killers can be so cool about their everyday life: the kid who rings up your milk at the supermarket doesn't even know anyone's dead.

We were outside the Indiana Memorial Union when I lent the Smoking Vegan a book. We were under the eaves, looking out at the more historic-looking part of Indiana University, with pretty flowering trees and law school and all, staying back from biting cold rain. Smoking Vegan was smoking, and I had my hands in my pockets. I was cold in jeans and a sweater. As it rained, the sweater picked up distance condensation, and I dug through my backpack for my girlfriend's collapsible umbrella. The corner of a book poked out of my backpack.

"What are you reading?" the Smoking Vegan asked me between drags. This was as much of a question as she ever asked.

I pulled the book out of my bag. Gesturing at the cover like it made my explanation easier to understand, I spoke. "It's Toddler-Hunting, by Kono Taeko. It's kind of feminist Japanese literature of the 1970s. It's pretty heavy on themes of sado-masochism. There's this one story -- ‘Ants Swarm,' it's called -- where a wife fears she's pregnant. When she finds out she's not pregnant, she and her husband celebrate, and she begs him to beat her with a fishing rod. The next morning, she goes down to the kitchen to find that she'd left a piece of raw meat on the kitchen counter, and this swarm of black ants is covering it. It's kind of a nasty image."

"Cool," the Smoking Vegan said, a one-word verdict. It was only when she passed judgment on my synopsis that I began to scrutinize the details. Had I gotten it right at all?

"I'll have to read it sometime," the Smoking Vegan said.

"Here," I said, handing her the book. "You can read my copy."

And the Smoking Vegan took the book. Her loose and green wool sweater sleeve brushed the back of my hand as we made the exchange.

And there it was: for the first time, I had given the Smoking Vegan something of mine. She was bound to freak out before she returned it.

She didn't freak out. The closest she got to freaking out was calling me on the Thursday night before Spring Break. My gay black roommate answered the phone. I was in my room, at my desk, chewing on a pencil, avoiding the metal around the eraser. I'd rather have a pistol pressed against the roof of my mouth than touch pencil-eraser-metal with my tongue.

"Heads up, J," my gay black roommate said, and gave the cordless phone a good spiral toss into my room. I caught it before it could put out my computer screen.

Expecting it to be my girlfriend complaining of broken-down car again from a law library pay phone, I let out a hearty "Yo."

"Hey, Jack," the girl said.

"Oh, uh, hi," I said, wondering: how did she get my phone number? As stalkers do, had she looked it up somewhere?

"You gave me your number back at the poetry thing," she said, when I didn't say anything.

"Oh, hi," I said. "I did."

"I was just calling to let you know I want to get your book back to you."

"Oh, the book?" I said it in such a way as to suggest I'd forgotten about it.

"Yeah, the book. I finished it, like, a week ago. I keep forgetting to give it back."

"Oh. Well, just bring it by my class tomorrow."

"I can't," the Smoking Vegan said. "I'm leaving for Spring Break."

"Spring Break?"

The Smoking Vegan let out a smoky sigh. "Yeah. I have to go to my cousin's wedding, in Hawaii."

"I see," I said.

"Anyway, I wanted to get it back to you before then. What do you say you come over and pick it up?"

I looked at the clock. It was inching toward eleven-thirty.

"Sure," I said.

"Who was that?" My gay black roommate was watching car racing highlights on television in a bean bag chair.

"Some girl. This student of mine."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."

"What she want?"

"She wants to turn in a paper early. I'm going to drive by and pick it up."

"Why don't she just email it to you?"

"I don't know. She's old-fashioned, maybe. Likes a hard copy. Can I borrow your car?"

"Shit. Why don't the little bitch come to you?"

"I don't know. She don't got a car."

"Well, neither do you."

"Shit. Can I borrow your car or not?"

My gay black roommate showed his white teeth. "Shit yeah. I was just playing. What's her name?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. She's just some smoking vegan."

This was the first time I called her "smoking vegan" aloud.

"A smoking vegan?"

"Yeah, Smoking Vegan."

"Smoking Vegan?"

"Yeah, a vegan who smokes."

"Shit," my gay black roommate said, pulling his knee to his chest. "I know plenty of smoking vegans."

"Well, I don't. Where are your keys?"

"By the microwave."

"Thanks," I said. "I'll be right back."

seven

I arrived at the Smoking Vegan's friend's place at a little before midnight. It was out on the west side of Bloomington, in an apartment complex the size of a strip mall. I parked in the lot, and headed for the designated townhouse. A dog barked on an enclosed porch. It sounded hungry for something real, like a baby wanting a steak.

The Smoking Vegan's friend's townhouse was number 973. Surrounding the entrance was a porch with a storm door. The storm door's mesh was loose like an old lace tablecloth. Maybe a bit of my mother's genes had rubbed off on me: I didn't want to open any door that wasn't mine without permission. I pondered with my hands in my pockets: how does one knock on such a weak door? Within the enclosure, the golden numerals 9, 7, and 3 twinkled at me like gangster-gun-barrels.

I wasn't alone and thinking too long before the Smoking Vegan's friend showed up on the porch with a plate of fork in her hands. What had been on the plate was anyone's guess. At first it struck me as a plate awaiting a chunk of birthday cake. Further inspection found three yellow-like crumbs near the dead center. The fork was clean.

"Jack?" When the girl talked, an inner-mouth piercing somewhere struck a tooth somewhere else. I tried to imagine the mouth-piercing hooked on a fork tine, and shivered so hard I made a fist. I must really hate myself, I thought, to imagine such things.

"That's me."

"You got here fast."

I tried to think up an excuse, and couldn't, not before the girl threw open the door, and there was the Smoking Vegan, sitting Indian-style on a wall-to-wall shag carpet and leaning forward.

"You got here fast," Smoking Vegan said.

Rather than make excuses, I agreed: "I did."

Smoking Vegan patted the floor a few feet to her left. She had to tip over halfway to do so. Her left arm extended, and flexed. She was wearing a ribbed olive green tank top that made her look more muscular than she could have been.

"Have a seat."

"Sure."

I sat down a whole three feet from Smoking Vegan. She wasn't smoking at the time. Before I could wonder why not, she asked me if I didn't want something to drink. I said I wouldn't mind it.

"What do you want?"

"What have you got?"

She wasn't sympathetic when she said "Nothing artificial."

"Something real is fine," I let her know.

Smoking Vegan got up and headed through a beaded curtain into her friend's kitchen like it was hers. She reached into a cupboard, slashed some things around inside, and started running tap water. Her friend smiled at me from the olive-colored sofa. A stick of incense was burning on a plastic plate on the glass coffee table. I choked inwardly as Smoking Vegan presented me with a plastic Pizza Express cup of filtered tap water.

"Ahh, Pizza Express."

"You like Pizza Express?"

"Kind of," I said.

"We just had some stuff from there," Smoking Vegan's friend told me, as Smoking Vegan clicked up a cigarette.

"Oh yeah? What'd you have?"

"Breadsticks," Smoking Vegan said with her lips Popeye-clamped around her cigarette. She removed it with a toke grip and tapped out black ashes onto her plate of fork.

"They've got good breadsticks," I said, just to say something.

"They do," Smoking Vegan's friend said.

"It's because they put salt on them that they're so good," I went on.

"Yeah, that salt is good."

"And the cheese sauce is excellent."

Smoking Vegan scoffed smoke. "I wouldn't know," her friend said.

I took a short sniff of Smoking Vegan's smoke. My nose half-coughed.

"Well, take my word for it," I said.

"I guess," her friend said, and was silent.

For some reason, the smoke and the incense and the plastic-tasting tap water pushed me to criticize the vegan lifestyle a little further.

"So, when you guys order Pizza Express, what do you get to drink?"

"We just ask for water," Smoking Vegan said.

"Yeah, water," her friend agreed.

"You trust their water?" I asked, maybe joking.

"We don't drink it. We just want the cups."

"Ahh, the cups."

"Yeah, the cups."

"I knew a lot of people who used to collect those cups," I said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, in my dorm."

"What dorm did you live in?"

"Forest. Out on, uh, Third Street."

"My sister's friend lives there," Smoking Vegan's friend confessed. "What tower were you in?"

"West. Floor four. The only male floor in West Tower."

"Oh," Smoking Vegan's friend said, looking to her lap. "She's in East."

"East?"

"Yeah."

Smoking Vegan crushed her cigarette on her plate like a dead bird crushes a pane of glass. She measured a breath of the air like she was still smoking.

"This was when?" she was asking me.

"When I was a, uh, a junior. The spring of 1997."

"Ahh," Smoking Vegan said, like it mattered.

"My roommate had a big collection of the cups."

"Your roommate?"

"You had a roommate?" Smoking Vegan wanted to know.

"Yeah," I said. "He was gay."

"Did he have all of the colors?"

"Colors?"

"Yeah, of the cups?"

I looked deep into the plastic depth of the cup in my hand. The color of the tepid tap water didn't register. I blinked, like at chlorine.

"Not really, I think. He had a whole hell of a lot of them."

"Did he have the pink one?"

"There's a pink one?"

Smoking Vegan was rummaging through a paper bag. At one point, she turned it upside-down and shook it at her plate. Grains of salt hit plastic and ash like pepper raining on snow. A little cylindrical plastic cup of cheese with a lid landed in the ash mountain. She picked it up and dusted a black ash off its side with her pinky finger as if her other three fingers were holding a cigarette. They weren't holding a cigarette.

She pushed the little cheese cylinder across brown shag until it came cheek-to-cheek with my cup of water.

"You must be hungry," Smoking Vegan said. I opened my mouth halfway, made some sound with my nose, and picked up the cup. It was warm.

"My sister says she got a pink one."

"There's a pink one?" I asked again.

Smoking Vegan's friend kept her hands clasped in her lap. Her eyes stayed dead on a blank television picture tube when she said, "I've got no reason to believe the little cunt."

"Why don't you ask her to show you?"

"She says she threw that shit away."

"Well, if I ever get a pink one, I'll give it to you," I said, feeling generous.

"I don't need that shit," Smoking Vegan's friend said, like she should be giving a dismissive little wave of her big jeweled hand. She didn't.

Smoking Vegan had already lit another cigarette with a match. She sucked in filtered air. From within the cigarette came the sound of a three-millimeter-tall man wringing out a dry newspaper. I imagined him in a trench coat.

"So you had a collection of the cups? What happened to 'em?" Smoking Vegan pretended like she wanted to know.

"They were my roommate's," I corrected. "And I, uh, played golf with them."

"How do you play golf with plastic cups?"

"That's a little weird."

"I mean, I used them for holes."

"Why not just go play mini-golf or something?"

"IU's got a nice golf course."

"I . . . I played golf in the hall in my dorm, I mean."

"Oh."

"I had a little nine-hole course," I explained.

"The people in your dorm didn't mind? Weren't they scared to walk around or some shit? Scared a ball was going to come flying out of nowhere, or they'd slip and fall?"

"He probably just putted them around."

"Nah -- I used practice balls. Plastic ones."

"So you drove those practice balls down the hall?"

"It was good practice for my swing. If I could hit the ball in such a way as to keep it from hitting the walls, I was doing a good job."

"Ah."

"Since the hallways weren't more than, what, fifty feet long, and the balls bounced so hard, it was always a matter of restraint. I had to contain my swing. It was better than mini-golf."

"Restraint, huh?" Smoking Vegan spoke up, like she didn't want an answer. When her answer didn't come, the shag room returned to the sound of incense burning, like a tap running water a half a mile away. Her cigarette ticked like a bomb as it burned. I reached for something to say like a golfer reaches into his bag of clubs.

"I played the whole thing with a pitching wedge," I mumbled out, just as Smoking Vegan sprang to her feet like kung fu. It was when she dusted her hands that I realized she was finished with her current cigarette. The incense stick was down to half-length.

Smoking Vegan was gone for a second, into a dark room that made me think of a movie about a drug addict, or many movies about many drug addicts. I could almost feel the blue light eking in from behind a black sheet tacked to a bare window. I could almost see a close-up of a burned and bent silver spoon, or a rubber hose around someone's arm. I didn't. For one thing, this wasn't the movies. For another thing, vegans don't do heroin, even if they live like they do, no matter how much they smoke tobacco. For a third thing, it was only midnight. Surely enough, though, the sun was rising somewhere. It always is, you know.

"So, you, uh, you still play golf?" Smoking Vegan's friend wanted to know, with her hands in her lap.

I had quite unknowingly removed the lid from the cylinder of cheese. I bent it in half like a slice of good New York-style pizza.

"Nah, I gave it up."

"Why'd you give it up?"

I scooped up a half a mouthful of warm yellow cheese. "I got my own place."

"A house?" Smoking Vegan's friend said.

"Nah, an apartment."

"You got a roommate?"

"Yeah."

"So it's not your 'own place,' then."

"Well, I mean, it's more of my 'own place' than a dorm."

"You don't like dorms?"

"Well, I mean, I'm a grad student now."

"You're too big for dorms?"

A lump of cheese was cooling in my mouth. It reached thermal equilibrium with my throat. I swallowed it. It stabbed its way down my esophagus. The incense went on soundtracking the silence, and stinking the place up beyond cigarette smoke.

"I just don't have time for all the noise. Parties, drinking, crazy shit, people laughing and hooting and hollering, partying."

"You don't ever party on your own?"

I looked at the girl. Her hands remained buried between her sweatpanted thighs. Her eyebrow rings twitched up a face-fraction.

"Not particularly, no."

"Your roommate wouldn't appreciate it?"

I shrugged, and scooped some more cheese into my mouth. I used my bottom teeth to press it against the backs of my top teeth. I breathed once, through my nose.

"Maybe not."

"What's he like?"

I thought about it for zero seconds. "He's gay."

"The same guy from junior year?"

I had to think about it for one second. "No."

"Are all your roommates gay?"

I took two seconds of thought. "Usually."

"So what makes this guy original?"

Three seconds of thought weren't enough. My shallow dive into thought came up with only "He's black?" Maybe I shouldn't have worded it as a question.

"So he's black and gay?"

"Yeah."

"Sounds like a fun guy."

I let out a scoff. And then another. A balloon taped to my hard palate was deflating into the top of my throat.

Smoking Vegan appeared in the bedroom doorway. With her right shoulder, she tossed up the white sheet that hung over the entrance. As she shifted herself downward and Indian-style next to me, I thought Aha -- I knew there was a sheet hanging over a door somewhere.

Smoking Vegan had a cold dry cigarette between her lip-corner, and a knitted hemp backpack as scraggly as her hair was red resting on her cotton pant leg.

She had one arm in the bag, and I scanned her triceps for tattoos like you'd get in prison. I was imagining Smoking Vegan at a weight bench in a jail yard. I found only freckles too red to contrast with the sunburn she'd no doubt pick up in Hawaii.

"I got your book," she said through the cigarette.

"Ah, my book."

Smoking Vegan's freckled ringed fingers slid the paperback across the shag carpet until it was cheek-to-cheek-to-cheek with my cheese and cup of water.

I picked it up with my fingers on the pages side. I flapped it like a broken hand fan.

"My book."

"I didn't know you were into that kind of shit," Smoking Vegan said, tossing her forehead at the book, focusing her eyes on her match-flame. "You seem like more of a pop-lit kind of guy."

"Oh," I said. "Oh."

Smoking Vegan had grown an attitude as a cigarette grows an orange tip. Smoking Vegan sucked in her attitude flame, and the room vanished silent. I detected a faucet somewhere leaking. My eyes blinked and my skin goosebumped.

"My teacher said she read that book forever ago. Back in the seventies?"

"The seventies?"

"Yeah, I think that's what she said. You met her, remember?"

"Her?"

"Yeah, you met her."

"I met her, yeah. She read it in Japanese?"

"I don't think so. Why would she have?"

"Because this translation was done in 1994."

"She might have been bullshitting, I don't know."

Smoking Vegan aimed the top of her eyes at the olive sofa when she tapped out two lumps of ash. At first orange-black, they soon blinked into white. I looked from the lifeless ash to the girl paralyzed into staring at her hands.

"Interesting stuff, though. Nice language."

"Very subtle, yeah."

"Strong sometimes, too."

"Yeah."

Smoking Vegan took her time on a puff of the current cigarette. I let my eyes unfocus over the relaxing girl on the sofa until everything faded into orange.

Smoking Vegan said something about something poetic. Maybe she said it poetically. Or maybe it was a concrete literary analysis. Which is which is lost to time. Her words rose like incense-givings, and mine, mere answers, dripped out like water-drops containing smoke-clouds.

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"I think so."

"That's right."

"Yeah."

Confident in criticizing without audience, she was spinning a half a story of her own, taking baby steps away from a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to Red Lobster from Yale as she sat on the very brown, very shag floor of her world. Her words, making no sense, struck the veins inside my skull, and my soul sighed. I dipped my finger into my cup of cheese. Before I could clean it with my teeth, I wished I was smaller.

I used to drink milk, I was thinking. Milk without liquor. Milk had been so good to me. It had lifted me up from weak to strong. Half-drunk and in bed when my girlfriend comes home rattling keys, I'd be feeling like a blob psychically out of control. I'd take up the whole bed. My right big toe would be feeling the metal knob on the closet door. The upper-left corner of my head would be stabbed by the alarm clock. My left pinky finger was buried in my pocket in my jeans on my floor. My right index finger stretched out across Heaven, maybe touching God's index toe, maybe caressing the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's golden arch. It made me feel big, and cosmic.

When I drank milk it was to make me big. I wanted to grow. I wanted to ride the rollercoasters. I wanted to be taller than my mother.

It was during my first year of high school that I grew taller than my mother, and she was diagnosed with diabetes. I grew antisocial, and her right hand grew to be an organic lid for the M&M jar. She ate candy, and I napped for six hours every day after school. I'd get home and think I wasn't tired, and I'd lie in bed and wonder where the hell I was until I realized where I was and I didn't want to be there. A radio was always playing somewhere. In those days, I was reading The Hobbit, about how fifty-something-year-old tiny-man Bilbo Baggins goes on a long journey through dirty places. I'd think of the glory he found on days when he found real cities with real houses and real beds. I'd think that no bed is realer than one's own. When he mourned in faraway places, it was for his own bed. When he slept in other beds, he was small. I wondered, with wonder, what it was like to fit that squarely in the middle of a regular old sleeping platform.

I wondered what it was like to find something real in someplace faraway.

In the Smoking Vegan's presence, as she went on about nothing interesting, I came to wish I was a shag-brown little teddy bear in her pajama-panted lap. If she'd touch me, that'd have been alright.

No one touched me, and I almost slept Indian-style until the girl zoned-out on the sofa snapped out of her trance and mine with a six-year-old scream -- both high-pitched and like it had been building up for God doesn't know how long.

"Fucking shit! Fuck! Shit!"

Smoking Vegan actively crushed a cigarette. Her hand followed the butt to the plate. She was on her slipper-feet in an instant, as surely as I was wide-awake.

"What the shit!"

I rose up to my knees and leaned over.

Smoking Vegan was speaking thoughtful-like:

"Now, just--"

The pierced girl flapped her right hand. Dangling off and stuck to her index finger was a long white weasel. It flapped like a narrow banner, curling into a circle at the end and unfurling. Its growl was near-invisible in its lowness. The weasel held on for dear anger. Its eyes sparkled like rubies.

The girl was on her feet.

"Fucking little bastard has my ring!"

"Chill!"

I was on my feet in a half a second. My jaw was half-dropped, half-cocked in imitation of a Midwestern overbite that doubles as a third appendage.

"Let go, fucker!"

My eyes were widened on the verge of squinting. My knees were bent. I was leaned forward like Superman about to fly.

"W-w-w-w-here'd that weasel come from?"

"It's a fucking ferret!" the pierced girl bellowed.

"It's a fucking weasel!" I screeched, pointing a finger.

Smoking Vegan dedicated one jeweled, freckled hand to each of the weasel's pink and scurrying hind legs. What with the pierced girl's weasel-waving, the two of them looked like kids illustrating wave amplitudes with a white and fuzzy Slinky.

"Stop it! Hold him still!"

The pierced girl didn't seem to hear the Smoking Vegan. Her weasel-flapping went on for a whole six seconds. I felt veins rising to skin. Beads of sweat were shaking on my temples as I witnessed the struggle. I felt a squirt of adrenaline somewhere near my Achilles tendons.

"You-you-you -- weasel!" was all I could offer the situation.

And it did the trick, too. Right after I screeched "Weasel" at the two girls and the weasel, the furry rope of a creature went limp. It let go of the pierced girl's finger, and she pulled her hand up to her face for inspection. I felt almost like a hero. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.

"He's a sweetheart," Smoking Vegan was saying to the weasel's little weasel face.

"Dirty little fucking bastard," the pierced girl was grumbling.

"He's a sweetheart," Smoking Vegan cooed, cradling the little bundle of energy in her arms like a baby. The thing was making a little-bundle-of-energy-sound. It was as if a battery-operated motor were embedded somewhere in the long white sausage-shaped animal.

I was back to Indian-style on the floor, and biting the rim of my plastic Pizza Express cup. I looked into its depths, and saw one of my eyes reflected deep black. Somewhere near the bottom of the cup grew to imaginary depths. Something lay beneath everything that was above me. The water smelled like plastic, and the plastic smelled like nothing.

"He's a sweetheart. He's a sweetheart."

Smoking Vegan was sitting next to her friend. My hands were shaking as I nodded off into my cup of water.

"You have to know how to talk to him."

I let my eyes float up, as my teeth continued to grip the cup rim. The pierced girl leaned her pierced face toward the little weasel in the Smoking Vegan's arms like a baby. She looked at the weasel and bared her teeth.

"Bad. You bad little cocksucking sack of rodent-meat."

At this point, the weasel, like full of karma, latched onto the pierced girl's bullish nose ring with its tiny teeth. I knew from the starting instant that it wasn't going to let go until something was torn. I watched it like you'd watch a train wreck if it happened in super-slow-motion and you had a comfortable place to sit. And something to drink.

Teeth gripped plastic rim; nose smelled water that smelled like plastic.

"Oh my god get this fucking thing off me oh my fucking god."

I wasn't thinking of the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl at all during this time. I don't know what I was thinking of. I don't pride myself in my thinking, or my way of thinking, or even in my thoughts. Yet something strikes me as dangerous about a time when I can't at least know what I'm thinking.

All I have regarding the time I watched the Smoking Vegan hold a weasel's legs while said weasel's teeth clamped on a butch girl's bullish nose ring: it's a sensation, like fingers minutes after they've been dipped in maple syrup. I was recalling French toast like French toast was something worth remembering. Like French toast was something you get once, and you never get again.

When Smoking Vegan talked her friend out of hysteria, and her friend held her face as still as a peach tree on a clear day, and when she whispered about how one more time she wanted that fucking thing off her face, I realized Smoking Vegan was utterly harmless. She wouldn't and couldn't hurt me, now or never. I was wasting my time if a hurting-for is what I was seeking. I poured half of my eyes into the moment; half looked at its own reflection and showed me that I wanted to go home. I was bored in the sight of something metaphysical, between an unoriginal thing, an unoriginal thing, and the original thing they made when they combined. I was shrinking to fit inside my reflected pupil and curl up.

"He's a sweetheart. Let go, sweetheart. Let go."

I wished my water smelled like vodka, at least.

My mouth was full of water, my cheeks puffed up like I was holding my breath, when the pierced girl screamed a scream that you'd swear would come out of a canvas painting of a cayenne pepper if you'd torn it with a sharpened bamboo pole. The weasel let out a bobcat kwowrl, and a stream of blood as thick as a ballpoint pen shot down out of the pierced girl's septum and struck shag.

The incense hit its end and hissed, and maybe-spun on a plastic plate reading "Happy Birthday! You are a Special Person!" I didn't get close enough to scrutinize the Associate Press Style violations of its wording. I don't wager I could have. Something angry and hurt would have picked me up and thrown me toward the microwave.

"Fucking hate you!" the pierced girl, now a piercing shorter, yelled out of her gurgled-with-blood nose. With hands soaked red, she snatched the weasel out of the jaw-dropped Smoking Vegan's hands, and threw it two-handedly into the kitchen.

The weasel flew over the mini-bar. It flew over the four-slot toaster, used each other morning to toast yeastless bread. Its white fur now painted red, it flew above a stack of newspapers, beneath a hanging wok, and crashing into the spice rack atop the microwave. A jar of maybe-paprika hit the cement floor and busted. The weasel was gone behind the brown box of the microwave.

Smoking Vegan didn't turn around to say a word to her friend. She kept looking into the kitchen with the fervor her friend displayed in cupping her hand beneath her blood-pouring head.

I was on my feet, with the cup of water clamped in my teeth, eyes forward on the microwave. My book was in my right hand. My conscience was in my left hand, in my pocket. My attention was forward.

With a clattering of many jars of many spices, the weasel leapt with power and landed, legs leaned back like ready to fly forward with anger. The weasel's sudden appearance atop the microwave, its soon-adopted cocked-and-ready posture, its new and angry kworwl: the plastic cup made to fall from between my rows of teeth, the shag carpet soaked in part, a jet of water blasted up through my sinuses and bubbled out my nose.

I couldn't keep the gagging sound out of the back of my throat. I couldn't help scraping the sides of the top of my esophagus together with what could have been a laugh.

"You think this is funny, motherfucker?" the wounded girl said. She had her head leaning backward. Her left eye, like a fish's, had swiveled around to face me. Blood coated her face like she'd just won a cherry-pie-eating contest. I took it that where she came from she must have seen her fair share.

She went on defending herself against nothing as I checked my head.

"Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you, motherfucker."

"I . . . I . . ."

Smoking Vegan was approaching the microwave with a plastic spatula in hand.

"Come on, sweetheart."

I forget why I was wiping my left hand on my khaki-thigh.

Smoking Vegan turned her head halfway around.

"Maybe you should go," she said.

"Maybe I should."

"I'll, uh, see you after spring break?"

I held up my book, like showing her the back cover description.

"Just stop by my office anytime."

"Cool," Smoking Vegan said, and kept inching forward toward her sweetheart.

The wounded girl, while bleeding, pivoted around grimacing at me as I left. I could see caked brown blood outlines around all her bared teeth.

I didn't feel obligated to apologize for the spilled water, what with all the chaos in the townhouse at the moment. Surely, blood on the shag was more immediate a problem than water. Spilled spices, a red-stained weasel, a torn septum: those girls had more than enough trouble to deal with. There was no harm in adding a little more. More than enough, don't you know, is just more than enough.

Maybe, I wondered as I started up my gay black roommate's car, I was only guilty about the cup because I'd failed to notice what color it was?

It was a big, bad deal, not knowing what color the cup was. To reiterate, I'd played something of a sick-little mini-golf game with multicolored cups from the same establishment all throughout my junior year of college. At one point, as I'd neglected to tell Smoking Vegan and her friend, I started up a tournament, one that proved quite lucrative. I scammed a couple of wannabe frat boys out of three hundred dollars one night. At one short point, I felt like a kid playing a board game with his poor neighbor, making up rules as he goes along. I never got too guilty. There was no reason to feel guilty about earning money.

I pulled the cord on the golf game soon after making the three hundred dollars. I figured I'd quit while I was ahead. Forty of those three hundred dollars went to buying beer. I spent twenty on pizza from Pizza Express. Twenty dollars got matinee movie tickets and popcorn for myself and the Scotch-Irish trombonist who led me to the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl. Fifty bought me groceries for two weeks. A hundred and seventy bought me a thirty-something-inch television from a neighbor who'd bought more marijuana than he could efficiently sell.

This isn't to say that I remember how I spend every dollar I earn. It's just to say that I remember how I spend every dollar I earn interestingly.

What this has to do with the story is probably nothing. You can consider it simply a spelling-out of character flaws before the next phase of the narrative begins. That'd probably be best for everyone.

It might also help to know that I was thinking small when I sat down in my gay black roommate's car.

I was thinking smaller and smaller as I sped down along the side of highway 46 in the orange, black, and gray night, past a veritable death row of office parks. Between the stone ocean of each office building and the paved river of the highway was carved a medium-sized, man-made lake. Each lake, during the day, sported a fountain that sprayed into the air, an illusion of something worth being illusive. At night, the fountains were off, and I wondered what, really, was the purpose of a fake lake outside an office park on a highway. I was thinking of the small comfort, if any, that lake's presence offered anyone sitting, bored, in a cubicle.

I was thinking that I wanted to go home and drink something that'd make me feel bigger.

At home, where all was dark and blue, I couldn't find any liquor harder than soft. The closest I got to payday was a bottle of for-some-reason refrigerated nighttime cough syrup. I couldn't bring myself past the chill of the plastic. I put the bottle into my microwave until it was warm. It didn't take long. After drinking it, I'd go to bed and pass out for the weekend. In my sleep, jangling keys be damned, I'd grow larger, stretching out to consume all of the space I didn't want, all of the space that was mine anyway.

I fantasized about this psychic growth while my cough syrup stood on the edge of a circular plate, and spun. Within my white microwave, the red contents of a plastic bottle, bathed in golden light, were heating from the inside out. I rubbed my temples, and sweated, in the

'not entirely a bad piece at all'

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:59:13 GMT

That novel I said I was going to post into the livejournal?

It's really, really, finally done now.

Really. I just rewrote the last SIXTY PAGES THIS MORNING.

I now have a fucking migraine.

First person to email me about when I'm putting it into the livejournal . . .

. . . gets shot in the neck.

It'll be later today or tomorrow. Like I said, it requires mad formatting alterations.

It is: 40,580 words -- and the slowest god-damned 40,580 words I ever done wrote.

It begins like this: "part one."

And it ends like this: "Thank you."

Some novels, they say, don't know what they want to be. While if you would have asked me a week ago I would have said -- and maybe even quipped -- that this novel didn't be what it wanted to be, now I'd say otherwise.

It's come up as not entirely a bad piece at all.

However, I can't count it as a "real novel" of mine. If any of you want to steal it, pretend it's your own, and/or try to sell it, please do. I don't mind. I have another novel I wrote three weeks ago that I believe represents the direction my work is headed far better than this little throwaway.

Don't let the excerpts fool you -- this novel is very dense. And has lots of poetic language. Flowery language. Kevin at video-fenky said of an excerpt "Your prose is . . . purple."

(Protip: that's not a compliment.)

Here's the deal. I will post this novel, entitled smoking vegan, smiling gun, for all of j0s pleasure or whatever you call it. I will leave it posted -- in its entirety -- in a public livejournal post for SEVEN DAYS, then make it FRIENDS-ONLY, then make it PRIVATE three days after that. Do whatever you can to it during that window. Copy it, paste it, send it to your mom, or whatever.

Quote passages, I don't know.

My better novel, which only three people I know of are going to read (Protip: one of them may or may not be me), is entitled electric sexism. It's about Japan. (again) It's my best novel yet about Japan, however, and j00 can quote me on that. Like . . . I actually think I'll be able to . . . sell this one.

First, though -- a GROUND-UP REWRITE!

It might be the funnestest ground-up rewrite EVER!

Yes. Even funner than the one I did for DH.

Which I'm considering renaming from DH: episode one: a thirsty demon in tokyo's parking lot to

DH Grey and a thirsty demon in tokyo's parking lot

how da hell does that sound?

I think my laptop keyboard is dying. I have to push the keys more . . . hardly.

Or maybe it means my fingers are tired?

Holy hell, my fingers are tired. My wrists ache.

You try writing 180 words per minute for seven hours, typing and retyping 12,000 words until you kind of like it.

Shit.

It's time for a little bed. Call with your donations or whatever. Still accepting paypal.

*coughMovingtoJapanagainattheendofAugustcough*

There, I formally announced it.

Hm.

fun with pr0nb0tz

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 00:50:24 GMT

[19:40:39] cuteefunpie27: hi... anyyone there?
[19:40:47] pyramid108: um
[19:40:49] pyramid108: anyone THERE?
[19:40:53] cuteefunpie27: oh yourr there :) hi...
[19:40:59] cuteefunpie27: a/s/l (age ssex location)?
[19:41:08] pyramid108: fuck you/die/in front of your mom's tombstone
[19:41:26] cuteefunpie27: im 27/f/USA. was lookin at your profile. thought you migght like to chat.
[19:41:39] pyramid108: i'd like to chat with your CORPSE
[19:41:47] cuteefunpie27: so what have you been up to pyramid108?
[19:41:56] pyramid108: pondering violent homicide
[19:42:05] cuteefunpie27: cool. i was just hangin out waching tv. i was getting kinda horny :) (*blushes)
[19:42:11] pyramid108: people get that way sometimes
[19:42:17] cuteefunpie27: feel like a little cyber fun with me ? llease please...
[19:42:28] pyramid108: i'd rather shotgun my inguinal hernia
[19:42:44] cuteefunpie27: was just browsing the yahoo profile thing
[19:42:47] pyramid108: i bet you were

from an email to someone who's probably not you

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 06:43:46 GMT

i just wrote this:

at the long
skinny
end of a dead
world something
not entirely
beautiful
glows
not entirely
beautifully.

. . .

i . . . don't know what that means, really.

and i am NOT listening to morning musume's 'SOUDA, WE'RE ALIVE!'

even if i was, it'd only be because my headphones are plugged in, and
they're on the floor.

and even if that was the case, and if i had strong ears -- which i do -- i
wouldn't think ANY part of the song was 'AWESOME,' even the part where no
one is singing, which WOULD be the most awesome part, if i thought any part
of it was awesome -- if i was listening to it at all.

you presumptuous son of a bitch.

i made a games list on IGN

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 10:36:55 GMT

----- Original Message -----
From: "tim rogers" <tim@insertcredit.com>
To: "Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh" <ericjonrosselwaugh@insertcredit.com>
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2003 5:29 AM
Subject: Re: a list

> here is my list.
>
> http://users.ign.com/collection/pyramid108
>
> i . . . think i probably forgot a bunch of shit.
>
> i have boxes in the basement, you know. stuff i haven't seen in years.
>
> at one point, while inching down the NES list, i saw a title that struck me
> as familiar. i paused a second. then, removed my hand from the mouse.
>
> my hand shot into the cardboard box right behind my head, and flew out
> instantly, holding a cartridge:
>
> "THE KRION CONQUEST."
>
> i said, 'yeah, i DO have that one.'
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh" <ericjonrosselwaugh@insertcredit.com>
> To: "tim rogers" <tim@insertcredit.com>
> Sent: Monday, July 14, 2003 4:06 AM
> Subject: Re: a list
>
>
>
> >am making a list of my games at ign.
>
> r0x0r.
>
> I... did that, and then let it lapse. I keep my own ugly personal list
> up-to-date. Just -- not IGN's.
>
> >Sonic
> >Adventure DC Sonic Team Sega 8.6
> >Sonic
> >Adventure 2 DC Sonic Team Sega 9.4
> >
> >someone must burn.
>
> Someone must.
>
> It's all about the Knuckles levels, yo.
>
> Yo. Yo. YO.
>
> ... Yo?
>
> Yo!
>
> Uh! Uh! Yeah.
>
> Findin' the em-a-RULZ. He feels 'em in his FEET!
> Diggin' thru da WURLZ, an' givin Rouge the MEAT!
>
>
> --
> Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
> Staff Writer (amongst other tricks)
> http://www.insertcredit.com

i feel like i'm going to go to hell for this shit.

$12,476.11 worth of games. and you know what? i'm just about positive i didn't pay half of that for all of these. which means . . . well, tell me, what does that mean?

i'm sure i understand it. i just don't feel like explaining it.

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 03:02:28 GMT

[20:50:07] _________: "________ finds it ironic Tim Rogers thinks Harry Potter books are getting long."

Oh, really? Is it really that ironic?

People don't seem to recognize the difference between being long for story's sake and being long because of wordiness.

I'm not saying the books are too long so much as I'm saying they're too full of shit that doesn't have to be there. Extra words. Whether I write long things or not doesn't matter; what matters is that my length in writing is full length; not empty.

In the comments on the abovelinked entry, I give an example of the book's wordiness. "Ron went over to the table where Harry and Hermione were sitting, and sat down at it."

If you can't notice how this is wrong, and/or how could be corrected, and even then, if you can't notice how drastically cutting a few words like this out of each overlong sentence would shorten the book, well: you most likely don't know the true definition of the word "ironic," either.

b00y4m.

Yes.

DEATH MUST DIE (or, 'this is the end of death')

Sun, 13 Jul 2003 11:14:07 GMT

I just finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Yeah, about fucking time.

Before I commence, let me say that, almost a year ago, when I started this journal, I confessed to being defeated by abovementioned book's lack of semicolons. Well, I stood up and trounced the motherfucker tonight. Kicked it in the ass and told it no fried chicken for you, fatty.

Now.

Listen here:

Someone once told me Steven Spielberg's AI was "a good movie, because they show a bird in the beginning, and they show a bird in the end, too."

This person went on: remove one bird from the movie, and the other bird is useless. Take the bird out of the beginning, and the bird at the end is just useless filler. Take the bird out of the end, and the bird at the beginning is just a boring image too early in what should be a wham bam fuck you ma'am screenplay. The presence of both birds indicates narrative continuity.

Yesterday, I walked Castleton Square Mall in Indianapolis, Indiana with my little brother. We were talking about my determination to finish Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I told him about the AI Bird Theory of Narrative Continuity, and he almost almost got it. He ended up not getting it.

We talked about narrative birds:

See, every one of Harry's lessons is explained. The names of the teachers, the names of the spells, the names of the students who turn around and whisper when Harry, Ron, and Hermione do something loud and/or rulebreaking.

One dialouge pertaining to the story begins at the end of a lesson about transfiguring porcupines into pincushions. We are told (in parentheses) that do-nothing-well Neville Longbottom's (pincushion still moved when you attempted to stab it with a pin).

Then we're told that visiting student and fellow champion in the touranment Viktor Krum is sitting in the library, sulky, reading a book.

As a champion, he's exempt from end-of-year exams. Harry, however, is a champion, too. He, too, is exempt from end-of-year exams. He is not, however, exempt from classes. By this rule, Krum, too, should not be exempt from classes.

Yet, we are never given (not even in parentheses) the name of a single book Krum is reading, even though he's apparently quite fond of them.

Oh, oh, when Hermione is helping Harry research spells for stopping dragons, we're treated to a whole gaggle of names of books -- many of them rhyme-y and sounding like things in children's poetry. Yet Krum's reading material is never named. As far as academic things go, we've no clue what Krum is into. We don't really know what makes him tick.

So I asked my little brother, how would he deal with this problem in the book?

My little brother asked, what problem? This isn't a problem, as long as it's all interesting.

I told him, well, inconsistencies like this are always a problem. Even so, I'll give it one thing: inconsistent or not, the book is entertaining. Still -- imagine we're trying to make this into a movie. Imagine we want it to be only, say, three hours long. No one in their right mind would watch an eight-hour movie based on this book -- or any book, and eight hours is how long it'd have to be to mirror the plot as the first two films have.

He said, well, the only solution he could think of would be to talk about Krum's classes. Mention the name of a book, or show lessons on board the Durmstrang ship.

I had to inform him that this would not make the story shorter. He gave up.

I told him it was like this. If AI was too long, and removing one bird would have made the other bird worthless, what is the solution to making it shorter?

He said, leave the birds in, and trim out other things?

I said: kill both birds.

Now let's talk some more (about parentheses).

[04:23:08] pyramid108: dumbledore just opened the chest with the REAL MOODY inside it!
[04:23:09] pyramid108: heh
[04:23:32] pyramid108: i'm expecting him to say that some PHANTOM wizard was controlling crouch, and making him control this other guy, who was impersonating moody
[04:24:15] ferozan108: heh
[04:24:24] ferozan108: at least you're finishing the fucking thing
[04:25:02] pyramid108: yeah
[04:25:05] pyramid108: i have paused again
[04:25:09] pyramid108: he used POLYJUICE POTION to TRANSFORM into moody!
[04:25:10] pyramid108: heh
[04:25:14] pyramid108: of COURSE
[04:25:18] ferozan108: yep
[04:25:29] pyramid108: now i cant criticize rowling for going into that long parenthtical paragraph earlier!
[04:25:34] pyramid108: when she mentioned moaning myrtle
[04:25:48] ferozan108: yep
[04:25:57] pyramid108: "Moaning Myrtle was a ghost who had died in the girls' toilet years ago. (Harry and Ron had used her bathroom to brew Polyjuice Potion (which is used for turning into someone else. . . (and made of . . .))so they could turn into Crab and Goyle (two Slytherin that are close enough to Draco Malfoy so as to receive the information they needed (which concerned . . .)))
[04:26:33] pyramid108: heh
[04:26:40] pyramid108: i paused for a second after typing that, wondering:
[04:26:41] ferozan108: yep
[04:26:46] pyramid108: did i put the right number of parentheses?
[04:26:48] pyramid108: i'm thinking . . .
[04:26:51] ferozan108: heh
[04:27:00] pyramid108: that's the kind of feeling a mystery writer must have when s/he finishes a book
[04:27:04] pyramid108: that exact same feeling
[04:27:12] pyramid108: wondering if s/he put in enough parentheses
[04:27:28] ferozan108: hmmm
[04:27:36] pyramid108: i'm guessing the last thirty-seven pages of this are going to be parentheses, then

And they were parentheses.

I have not yet read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Using Empirical Semantics, I am able to spoil the next three volumes of the series for you:

From: tim rogers
To: ferozan
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2003 5:38 AM
Subject: DEATH MUST DIE

'Somewhere in this enchanting mixture is a formula so brilliant it eludes analysis. . .' (Mail on Sunday)

Hmmm. Let's analyze elusively, then.

Book Five: Sirius Black
Book Six: Cho Chang and/or Cornelius Fudge AND a new character
Book Seven: Snape, while killing Voldemort; Dumbledore

There's more, too.

--tim

---
www.insertcredit.com
www.japanku.com
www.livejournal.com/users/pyramid108
---
"Wu said in his commentary, 'White 108 was an extremely difficult play. One waited with not a little excitement to see where it would fall.'"

I have admitted since all this that I can now write a screenplay based on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, one which will be less than three and a half hours.

My verdict on this book: if overlong and missing a few too many semicolons, there is good entertainment buried beneath it. A good afternoon at the movies is buried in this book. I won't call it good literature. I will not call it a good story, or even good fiction. I will, however, call it good entertainment, and leave it there.

Good background noise while attending to the task of gastrating popcorn.

I can sucessfully, I think, spot each pair of birds in this novel, and kill each of both of them.

We can start by never, ever, mentioning the Blast-Ended Skrewts.

And/or Hermione's little House-Elf Liberation Front bullshit.

And/or Harry and Ron's adventures in Divination class.

YES, YES, THAT'S THREE PAIRS OF BIRDS SHOT DOWN! MUST KILL MORE!

That, and the ending, those wonderful thirty-seven pages of parentheses -- I can have it all over in seven minutes.

Ooh, you don't believe me, do you?

Well, hell. You don't believe me about a lot of things. And you do believe me about some things that you shouldn't believe me about.

Like me deleting this journal.

Shit.

download these mp3s or i will cry

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 21:36:52 GMT

Tim Rogers has kindly let me host some tracks from the Random Outburst demo on a site that isn't even his. Whatever. Download anyway:

Jesse's Song
and Ska Pants

I guess I'll let the music speak for itself. It's best that way, as Tim Rogers might say.

--Chris Peditto is not wearing (ska) pants at the moment