Bus Stop | Alexander T. Damle

            On September 31st, 1893, William Cormac walked out the front door of his farm house, inside which, down a hall, up stairs that a decade and a half earlier he had constructed carefully with his own hands, nails and boards bought with coin made from working in other mens fields, lay his two sleeping children, he their sole watchmen after the death of their mother, and he walked five miles down the road, and sat down by its edge to wait for the gold line bus. He sat crosslegged and stared out down the long road towards Denver, expectantly, anticipating the invention of the internal combustion engine, the birth of the bus, the creation of the Denver bus system, the laying of routes this far out into the countryside. He knew it would take a great time, but he would wait. What else was he going to do?

            After one week’s time in which he did not move from his spot, Thomas Crittenden walked up to him and spoke to his old friend.

            “William, why then doth thou set here when there are crops to tend?”

            “I must wait here for the bus. If I leave to tend my crops, I may miss it.”

            “In this then I see sense.”

            “As in all things born out of the internal combustion engine.”

            “The future.”

            “Yes.”

            So then Thomas walked on for he had his own crops to tend, and, after all, not all men may be blessed at being the great diviners of future-tech and hangers on to the end times. As he tended his crops, William remained sat waiting for the bus.

            One year later as William Cormac still sat waited, his eyes not once shuttered, his legs not once stretched, he received a second visitor, and he rode a pale horse, for it had a condition which limited the amount of pigmentation in its skin, and William greeted the rider, Pastor Jonathan Radley.

            “William, man, how’s it hanging dude?”

            “I wait for the gold line bus.”

            “Far out, man. Listen, I’ve gotta tell you something, and it’s some seriously bad news man.”

            “Yes, father?”

            “Your kids man... dude, they’re, like, totally dead, man.”
            “May I ask how?”

            “They, like, starved, because there were no crops. They didn’t, like, want to go look for food because they were, like, waiting for you to come back, man.”

            “This is sad, but understood. After all, what are we if we do not wait? I must not leave my post for fear that I may miss the bus, and they could not leave the home for fear that they may miss me.”

            “Radical, dude.”

            The years wore on, like a carousel revolving about its axis, its forward progress an inevitability, lit up under fairground lights, ground sticky with dropped cotton candy, crunch with spilled popcorn, screams of ecstasy fill the air, young couples losing themselves into each others eyes, parents looking with passivity after their children in a place of safety, while behind the men’s room a strange man approaches a boy who has become cut off from his parents, but the lights of the fair ground are lit up all the brighter, people sing and laugh and dance, because no one goes behind the men’s room, and still William waits.

            In 1914, the first car rattles past the bus stop, and William waves his hand slightly at man’s forward progress, though he knows still that his bus is a long way off, and still he has not even begun to stir from his spot, not let his eyes drift closed.

            One day a few years on  from that first car, a man sees William’s spot on the ground, passes him, turns, then walks back to him.

            “Are you the prophet William Cormac.”

            “We are all then prophets in waiting.”

            “But you have waited the longest of all.”

            “No. Those in the grave and those unborn, they are the ones that truly.”

            “How then, how may I find grace?”
            “You may sit as I do, but most men eventually will stir. Only in death will you find true peace.”

            So the man took a gun out from in amongst the folds of his clothes and blew his brains out, a fine red mist carried on the breeze into William’s face, a mist that William politely wipes away.

            Time moves more slowly now, as change comes faster, and the road is widened, then paved, and in 1934, the first pilgrims begin to move slowly past William, in cars hacked together from pieces of burned out souls, the bits of salvage of lives now owned by the banks in this time of near-oblivion and grand desperation, when the only hope is in the west because we have now conquered all else, save that beneath the seas and up in deep space. These pilgrims pass William without remark, only occasionally asking him for a bit of food or maybe a place to stay on the long road of their endless journey, but William declines each as the last. These people are waiting as he is, though they wait for death or salvation that will not come, and Tom Joad will be forgotten on the beaches of Normandy, across the fields of Europe, deep into the heart of Germany, blood and fire and steel, and then the young men who lived through hell shall come back and they shall again wait for salvation in the form of the office and the nine-five, but still though William shall not stir for he knows in waiting he will find what all they search for, and in waiting he need not age, and he need not fight, and he need not eat, and he must simply sit and keep eyes open, turned towards the road.

            In 1963, men come and work around William, and they build over the farms, over the crops awaiting harvest, create that which are called skyscrapers, tall buildings, glass and steel and concrete, and one of them, on his lunch break, takes his little brown bag, contents: one bottle Coca Cola, one ham and cheese sandwich, one Gala apple, sits down next to William, and engages William in his first conversation since the dead man.

            “What’s your name?”

            “William Cormac. And what is yours?”

            “I don’t remember.”

            “That’s a shame.”

            “Truly it is. I lost my name along with my bible up a prostitute’s cunt.”

            “How did they end up there?”

            “The same way I ended up here.”

            “Ah yes, this would make sense. May I ask what you’re building here?”

            “Sodom and Jerusalem.”

            “Is it not Sodom and Gomorrah?”

            “We all lost our bibles, so we had to improvise.”

            “I see. Well, I think your friends are going back to work.”

            “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

            “Until then.”

            The man never returned to William, for the next day he awoke and remembered that his name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and he was supposed to be president. The construction crew was sorry to lose the unnamed man, being as it was that he had the strength of ten normal men, but that, they supposed, was one of the benefits that came with the presidency.

            More years flittered by like old newspaper caught up in between buildings in a big city as the spot in which William waited now was, great buildings built up high, man trying to escape his chaining to the devil. More now asked William what he waited for, in his old fashioned clothes and slicked back hair, like no vagrant they’d ever known, and still he told them he just waited for the gold line bus. They told him the bus did not stop there, until 1976, when men came in to install a bus stop. This was the first time William had moved since 1893, and he found his legs were cramped upon standing, but once they had the stop in place he was able to go on waiting in greater comfort.

            Eventually a young cop came along.

            “Sir, you cannot sleep here.”

            “I’m waiting for the bus.” The cop looked at the bus schedule posted on a sign next to the bench.

            “What line, sir?”

            “The gold line.”

            “There is no gold line bus in Denver.”

            “That’s why I’m waiting for it.”

            “I suppose that makes sense. I’m sorry I disturbed you.” The cop paused and looked at William. “Do you want me to bring you a book or something?”

            “How could I wait if I had something to do.”

            “Of course, my mistake, I’m sorry.”

            “Don’t be sorry. After all, I’m only waiting. Some day I will stop waiting, and so will you.”

            The cop walked on to continue his beat, the usual non-actions of a patrol in a nice area of a big city, until he turned down an alley at the end of his shift to take a short cut to his favorite diner, in which there was a pretty young waitress by the name of Jo, who would serve him pie and flirt with him, and today he would ask to go to the pictures with him, but on his way down the alley he saw a gang of young men beating up an old dog, and when he approached them to try to help the dog, one of them took out a pistol and shot him in the head, and his brains exited through a hole in the back of his skull, and later the young men would go into the diner, point their guns around, ask for the money, and Jo would try to go for the door, but the same young man would shoot her, then watch her bleed out through the hole in her stomach.

            William of course didn’t know any of this and it affected him not at all, after all, he was only waiting for a bus.

            Time went on, other buses stopped, drivers asked him where he was headed, and when he told them he was waiting for the gold line, they simply shut their doors and drove on.

            The years, so many years, drifting past, forgotten by dead men, held onto like a gift from a long lost love by live men.

            Once a thief tried to take William’s wallet. William gave it to him, but when the thief looked at in his hand, it turned to ash.

            “What’s all this then.”

            “I’ve been waiting here a long time. Wait long enough, and we lose hold of object permanence.”

            “Yes, that’s obvious, of course. I have a degree in theoretical psychology from Harvard, after all. My question was why ash?”

            “I don’t make the rules.”

            “Yes, you are right in that.” Then the thief went on.

            On the twelfth of April, 2015, a young man with a stylish haircut and dark clothes came up to William and sat next to him on the bench, looked him up and down. After they sat there together for a while, the young man began to speak to William.

            “Look man, are you going to give up on this soon? I’m really getting tired of this.”

            “Who are you?”

            “Well, I’m the writer, I suppose.”

            “Ah, yes. Well, you created me. That doesn’t mean you can kill me.”

            “If I could kill you, I already would have done. I’m just asking you as your father if you could just give this up.”

            “You’re too young to be my father.”

            “How old do you think you are?” Then William was two days old, the genesis of an idea to it’s expression on paper.

            “That’s a neat trick, but it doesn’t solve your problem. Why do you want to end this?”

            “I’m running out of things to write.”

            “You’re a writer. When you run out of things to write, then you are nothing. But I have a solution to both of our problems.”

            “Yes?”
            “Give me my bus.”

            “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”

            “Because you’re scared and you’re lonely and you’re only doing this to stop you from thinking.” Then the writer got up and left.

            A few hours later, WIlliam found himself very tired, and, reckoning that he’d been waiting one hundred and twenty two years, the bus wouldn’t just happen to come if he closed his eyes for a few moments.

            He woke up ten minutes later to see the gold line pulling away without him

Bus Muse | Theland E. Thomas

My responsibilities hang from my shoulders, a heavy cape that trips me with every step. This week, I have four essays and a test. Better study up. Better schedule my time. What day for what essay? What if it takes longer than I thought? Don’t forget you have work today. And when you’re at work, that needs to be the biggest thing in your life. These sales goals the most important we’ve ever had. We need to perform this month. We have to hit our goals. These goals are important to me to because I can get a small bonus even though I’m already being paid, and don’t I want that bonus on the end of the string? Who doesn’t want a little extra cash in their pockets? And we have to pass our audit. My bosses scream: NO MISTAKES! NO HUMANS! You will fail if you are a human. Are you mad? Didn’t you know this was the name of the game all along?

Yes, I want that dream on a string. That’s why I work so hard. For the dream. I want to work my way up the hamster wheel and earn enough money to live comfortably and get it all together and make my mommy proud.  We came from a third world country, and now we’re Americans. An opportunity some people only dream of. Wouldn’t want to squander that. My mommy wants me to make something of myself. Make her hard work worth something. I don’t want her life to be a waste, do I? Better not waste mine.

I don’t have time for a relationship. I’m too busy working on getting it all together so I can make a better life for my wife and kids. I don’t have room for love. I take all of my emotions, and I squeeze them into a chest. And I lock the chest in my chest and ignore it as it threatens to burst open and ruin me. Better keep it on lock. You don’t want anyone seeing what’s inside. Better to be a functioning member of society. Better to be the helpful, smiling face. Better to be a successful businessman. Better to play the role. My bosses scream: NO EMOTIONS! NO HUMANS!

Right now, I’m a student and a banker, but soon I’ll be a lawyer, and then everything will be better, and I’ll start loving life. After I get everything I want, I’ll start loving life. Until then, it’s back to the grindstone. Until then, I will continue to forget my needs. I will continue to ignore that pesky necessity of sleep. I will continue to chase the prize at the end of the string. I will continue to hustle. From one place to another. I will never sleep and never wake up. I sip the coffee. My bosses scream:  NO SLEEP! NO HUMANS!

Be efficient. Be effective. Be intelligent. Be persuasive. Be successful. Be marketable. Pull my strings. Rip out my heart. Cull my emotions. Erase my personality. Mechanize my body. Lobotomize my brain. I scream along: NO HUMANS!

Burning by the Stars | Alexander T. Damle

The first rays of sun pry their way in between the blinds and through the crust on my eyes. I roll over on my side and stare at my phone, ticking down minutes, seconds - back to sleep or not, same question every morning. And then the screen lights up bright, and I know what’s coming.

The screeching beep cutting deep through skin and flesh and into the tendon, just like every morning. I raise myself out of bed slowly. I look at the picture on my nightstand of her holding my boy’s hand, and I smile a little when I look at it. It was taken back when he was just a few years old. We went to the zoo. That was a happy day, all of us just... together... watching his wonderment at the animals. He liked the hippos the best and when I asked him why, he just smiled at me.

I pull myself out of bed, take a shower. When I open my closet and let my eyes wander across all the near-identical shirts, I remember my closet in high school, concert t-shirts for shitty rock bands long forgotten, all their contributions to the world, all the love and passion that they lived into their art, lost but for my fleeting dreams of a time gone by.

After breakfast, I take my lunch, made the night before, out of the fridge, toss it in my laptop bag, grab my thermos full of coffee, almost forget the car keys.

The bag gets set in the passenger seat in a moment so repeated as to be instantly forgotten. Key in the ignition. I imagine a muscle car roar as I pull my little Toyota Camry out  of the garage into the street. It’s barely 6:30 in the morning and the sun is casting the shadows of the mountains miles out across the plains, the suburbs to the city, a million people all getting ready for work and school, pulling shitty cars bought on safety ratings out towards the interstate, just in time to hit the commuter traffic.

I get to the office, sit down at my computer, hit the power button. Same thing a million times before and after, early morning power-ons until I hit retirement and they let me die quiet. This sort of thinking is poison for the mind, considering the endless, day in, day out repetition marking the long, slow walk unto the void. It’s pointless to question, so I just focus on the screen in front of me.

            I try to stay focused, actually get something done, but as the early afternoon sets in, I feel the world around me start to slip. It’s the American Dream, over and over and over and over. Day after day. Shower, dress, breakfast, commute, work, lunch, work, commute, TV, dinner, bed, shower, dress, breakfast, commute, work, lunch, work, commute, TV, dinner, bed, shower dress, breakfast, commute, work, lunch, work, commute, TV, dinner, bed, counting the seconds until the weekend, right up until Monday morning when you start your count again.. Childhood wonder, teenage angst, young adult passion, then work, so much work, and then, when your body and mind finally start to rot out from the endless, hopeless repetition, then they tell you quietly to leave and never come back. And you think, finally, that’s going to be the good part, the retirement, the finally having the time to do whatever you want, no work or school left to worry about. But after so many years of conditioning to only want to make more, it’s impossible to be happy just stopping. And, after all, how long till your mind and body are such that you can’t enjoy so much as your breakfast? And when you reach that stage, all you have left is to lay out under that South Florida sun, waiting for death to finally take you.

           

            I walk in the front door and let out a sigh.

            “Peter! I’m home.” He doesn’t respond. I figure he’s in his room. He usually is. He works a few hours a day, and he always get’s home before me, then goes straight to his room and locks the door, puts his headphones in. It didn’t used to be this way. Just a few years ago when I got home he’d always be here to give me a hug. Still, I know what he’s going through. Christ knows I was an ass myself when I was his age. I knock on his door, and he still doesn’t answer. Every time he does this, my heart skips a few beats. I know he’ll always be inside, but it’s always so easy to convince me that today he won’t be.

            I push his door open and my heart stops. He’s not here. Not his shoes, not his backpack. Nothing. I lean back against the door frame and take a few deep breaths. I can’t face this, not even the possibility. I take my phone out of my pocket and notice the text he sent me an hour ago letting me know he’d be home a little late.

            I wander slow back into the kitchen, try to calm myself down. I feel silly, but it’s a justifiable silliness. I just stand, head leaned up against the fridge, for a good ten minutes. It’s July in Denver, and that means 90s. The cool metal feels good against my skin, keeps me sane. I hear the door open. I want to run over there and hug him but I know he’s fifteen and, well...

            “Hey Peter, how was work?”

            “Oh, you know, it was whatever.”

            “Eloquent as ever.”

            “Yeah...”

            “Listen, later, after dinner, we’re going somewhere. We both have the day off tomorrow, so...” He goes back to his room to do whatever it is he does in there all day. If he’s anything like I was at that age, that means play video games and masturbate. I slump down on the couch, turn on the TV. I stare listlessly at whatever salesman’s pitch of the American Dream set to a laugh track is on today.

            We eat dinner later in silence, eyes glued to our respective phones.

            After we eat, I sit on the couch a while and watch television, subject already forgotten, in one ear and out the other, as they say. It’s just something to pass the time, no different than work or family or art or love. Finally, sun is down properly.

            “Peter, come on, we’re going!”

            “Just a minute dad.” I grab my car keys, and I wait. I desperately want for Peter to enjoy tonight. I want things to be like they were in the picture by my bed, but I know that’s not going to happen.

            I let him drive. Windows open, the same shitty classic rock station blasting over the radio. Even as I caution him to drive carefully, slowly, all the wisdom it’s my duty to pass on, I revel at the freedom in his eyes, the infinite opportunity offered up to him by the road as it once was to me. Back in highschool, as soon as I got my license, anytime I felt too trapped by my shitty hometown, I would drive off into the desert, wind in my hair, that freedom I saw just over the precipice of college beating in my heart and head. If I’d known then that I’d end up just an hour away from that town, making my kid live the life I did... I don’t know.

            Still, in this moment, in his youth, in the inexhaustible promise of college’s inevitable supposed-infinite liberation, in this moment he has true freedom, that great wonderment of life known simply as possibility.

            I direct him south, away from the city, nearer to where I grew up. Soon, we’re off main roads, speed limits pushing up past 50 around blind curves with no streetlights, simply because people around here don’t care if a stranger wraps their car around a tree.

            We turn onto a dirt road, head up the side of a hill, park.

            “Okay dad, where the hell are we.” I smile at him.

            “For years in high school, me and my friends would come up here the night before the Fourth...”

            “The third you mean?”

            “Don’t be a smartass. We’d come up here on the night of the third of July and set off fireworks. We always spent the fourth with family, but the third was ours. Our time to celebrate real freedom- driving wherever we wanted with no where to go.” I open the trunk and delicately lift out a box of fireworks.

            “Why here?”

            “We’re not quite there yet.” We start up a path that leads away from the parking lot, walk for maybe fifteen minutes.

            At the apex of the climb, I see my son catch his breath. We stand at the edge of a cliff, the desert below us, stretching away up to the lights of Denver, blurs of colour cutting out through the night, all the straight lines of the city’s grid streets. The American dream willed into existence by force of collective belief. Suburbs built on working hard for your kids so they can do the same, nine to five rat race office job soldiering away so you never have to do a day of real soldiering. Then the older, blue collar neighborhoods, the bleeding edge of the urban sprawl, people getting up early to run the basic infrastructure that keeps the city humming along, riding the parabola of the American zeitgeist. Then all the rich young hipsters, at that perfect age where you have the career that lands you money, without the impositions of time borne out of children and marriage, life all music and movies and sex and recreational drug use. Finally the immigrant neighborhoods, Mexican, mostly, the new age, the next story of the American dream made real after years of struggling and striving and fighting. Pretty soon the people of those communities will be part of the suburban collectivist non-life, but, for now, they represent all the passion and drive of this country, the dream that their kids can have lives better than theirs, if only they just work a little harder. I put my arm around my son’s shoulder.

            Together we set up the fireworks.     

            They ripple and crackle up through the sky, spitting out tails of hellfire as they hurtle up towards the stars, their twinkling guide points unencumbered by city lights. At the apex of the rockets’ arcs, they flash bang outwards in a shower of sparks, red, blue, yellow, green, white, burning out bright and brief, trickling and melting out towards the ground. Our faces are lit up in glowing color, their tones surprisingly natural in our age of harsh neon technicolour. Peter’s face surprises me with its youth, under these lights. It’s a childlike wonderment that men seem to reserve for explosions, and I’m glad to see it on him. I think briefly of peoples’ faces lit up by computer screens, but the thought exists simply and without concern, a mere atmospheric twang in amongst the rolling thunder of the moment.

No Escape From Reality | Theland E. Thomas

My bed is black, my room is black, the space behind my eyelids is black, but there are shades of light floating, spinning, changing, barely visible in the black. Heavy eyelids are not the cause as much as another state of mind. I feel my mentality shift from processing alertness to the calmness of flowing waves, and in this state, I lose sense of my heavy body and begin to drift out to sea to a new world not quite bound to the one I’m tethered to in wakefulness. I’m traveling on the black sea of my mind, the faint buzzing of electricity crashing about me, moving me deeper into tranquil numbness, silence, sleep.

I travel on the waves with the content knowledge of past experience. I know where I’m going, but I don’t know what I’ll find there. Soon, I arrive on the shores of a new reality. I know when I arrive, I won’t be fully aware I’m dreaming. That it will be just like wakefulness, but with a different set of rules that make complete sense in context. I hear the tick of the clock on my wall distort until each tick is a piercing, metallic ring, like the pounding of steel beams against each other. The black quickly deteriorates from the middle, another scene bleeding through.

It’s a bookstore. I’ve just entered, and I walk past the popular fiction display at the front, the smell of coffee wafting from the shop on my left. I love bookstores. They’re almost too much - a place stacked with shelves and shelves of thousands upon thousands of books with pages upon pages of alternate realities, differing perspectives of life, love, sorrow, and happiness. It’s a place of infinite possibilities. I remember days of youth spent in libraries and bookstores, reading books without buying them, the new book smell, fast food, essays and quietly waving goodbye, the second-to-last person to leave.

I take a step toward the fiction section but for some reason am compelled to look to my left. There, I see a girl I know but am afraid to recognize. I can see emotions battling on her face, eyebrows knitting as she starts to smile, then her face softening with worried, hopeful eyes. She lifts a hand. “Hi.”

This inevitable meeting is something I’ve consistently prevented myself from thinking of, and now, confronted with it, I don’t know what to do. She might disappear if I turn away, so I do that. Everything behind me fades into a blur of grey as I walk around the display Now, before me is a man in a trenchcoat with a hat pulled low over his face. He seems to be smoking, but I can’t smell anything but the delicious new book smell blending with the coffee. The man reaches into his coat and pulls out a container. “Hey, man, you want some hummus?”

“Actually, I do.” I take the container from him, and he gives me a spoon.

“This is going to be the best damn hummus you’ve ever tasted.”

I pry the lid open and eat a spoonful, realizing that this is, in fact, the best hummus I’ve ever tasted. I remark, “You’re right, this is the best hummus I’ve ever tasted.”

“Told you,” he said. “That’ll be just ten dollars.”

I nearly choked on my second scoop. “What? I’m not paying ten dollars for -”

“Look, you took the hummus. It’s ten dollars.”

“I don’t want it.”

I try to give him back the container, but he refuses to take it. “Hey, I offer you some hummus, and you take it, and then you don’t want to pay me. What kind of a person are you?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have ten dollars.” I wag the container in my hand, but when he doesn’t take it, I drop it, turn around, and walk away.

The girl is gone. I escape into rows of bookshelves, keeping my head bent, scanning the spines. What I’m looking for, I don’t know, but I’ll recognize it when I find it. I search thoroughly, scanning each individual title, author. I search row by row, up, down, and across, but I still can’t find it. I move to the next row and stop, startled by who’s standing there.

My heart plummets and races at the same time. It’s my dad. He’s spent eight years avoiding me, and I’ve spent eight avoiding him, and here he is, casually browsing through a bookstore as if he has a life outside of my supposed construction of him. He sees me, and his face lights up. He says my name, and I frown in disgust. He takes a step forward, and I take a step back. I don’t want to deal with this right now, so I turn my back and walk away, hiding a frenetic impulse to run with a collected demeanor.

I turn between the bookcases until I feel I’ve lost him. I slow, along with the thumping in my chest, and turn one more time. There she is again. Ana. I nearly jump when I see her. This time, the hope in her face has been eclipsed with sadness. She utters a dejected, “Hey.”

“Hey.” I stand fair distance from her, an asinine precaution considering that she can hurt me from any distance. The mature thing to do would be to stay and talk things out, but a little, red alarm is screaming in the back of my mind.

“So,” she starts, “how are you doing?”

Ana stands immediately before me, and there are books on either side, but beyond that is a blur of grey. She’s looking at me, awaiting my reply, and I can feel the tension of an unstable reality pulling me at the seams. I need to escape somehow. I need to change the course. Time seems to stand still, and I have the odd sense of the gears in another part of my head turning. I’m thinking, but I can’t access what I’m thinking about. And that’s when I realize that this is a dream.

I turn away from Ana and walk deeper into the store. I don’t want run from her just to bump into my dad again. At the same time, I’m pushing to find a way out. I’m straining to get back to that state of blackness, back to the sea through which I can bubble to wakefulness. But, it’s no use - I’m stuck here. In the middle of the store is the man in the trenchcoat standing behind a small stand that holds canisters of coffee.

Coffee! That’s what I need! Coffee can wake me up! I approach the stand and ask, “Can I have some coffee?”

“Yeah,” the man says from below the brim of his hat, “for twenty dollars.”

“Twenty dollars! You know there’s a cheaper coffee shop right over there, right!”

“But that coffee won’t keep you awake. This one will.”

“Fine.” I pull a twenty from my pocket and lay it on the table. What flavors do you have?”

“Got regular, decaf, and hot water.”

I take the regular and sip it vigorously as I make my way back toward the door, bracing against the searing heat that burns my mouth and raises the bumps on my tongue. The shop grows fuzzy in my peripheral as I approach the exit. Black spots swim in my vision, and, though I’m standing, I feel as though I’m not upright. My eyelids are heavy as I feel myself drifting from the dream and repopulating my body. Finally, I push on the door…

And it’s locked. I snap back to the bookstore with a sense of dread. The door shifts and buckles against my futile pushes. Dread crashes over me, an uneasy swimming feeling. I’m trapped. I turn from the door and scan the building. Leaking coffee slides down my fingers, drips from the cup, and disappears into the stylish, spotted carpet.

I don’t see my dad, Ana, or the trenchcoat guy, so I pick a armchair in the corner and pretend to read a titleless book from the shelf. I hold it in front of my face so I can peer over it, but then I hear a voice to my left. Of course, it’s Ana. I gulp, my throat suddenly dry.

“Oh, hi,” I say, “what a coincidence running into you here.” I look at the book, realizing that no one could have gotten three-fourths of the way through in such a short amount of time. Nervously, I stand, placing the book upside-down on the chair’s arm. I grip the coffee, using it as a barrier between myself and her.

“Hey,” she says. She’s nervous too. She’s wringing her hands and biting her lip. Despite the cold front I put on, something inside of me goes soft. I want to embrace her, to be close to her again. To tell her everything’s okay. To forgive her.

She continues. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, but…” she looks down at her feet. I’m not ready for this. I know what she’s about to say, but I’m not ready to forgive and forget or to let go of the acidic pain I’ve been clutching. “...I’m really really sorry for what happened. How I treated you… it wasn’t right, and I’m so sorry.”

The tears welling up in her eyes trigger my own, and I don’t try to wipe them back as they fall. I try to say something, but the words won’t come. I desperately need to get out of here. I take swig of coffee.

Suddenly, a shadow overtakes Ana. It’s my dad, I recognize more through implication than through form. He’s eschewed his human form for that of a shadow that towers tall and spreads wide and bleeds in disappearing currents. Fear strikes to the core of my being, and I turn to run, but the shadow expands, enveloping Ana and everything around me until I’m floating in a completely black space. Before me, I see remnants of my dad’s distorted face hanging in the air, his eyes, nose, and mouth disassociated from any physical body, his features one with the darkness.

“Son,” he says, his voice muted by surrounding black, “We should make some time to talk.”

I cross my arms, and I know if I turn my back or close my eyes, his face will still be right there in front of me. “I don’t want to talk to you,” I say.

“Son, you have to understand. I am a sinner. Will you please hear me out?”

Anger and pain rushes to the forefront, and I hate that it manifests as hot, seething tears. “Why should I?” My sobbing voice can’t convey the hatred and bitterness I feel, though I try to squeeze it into every word.

“Because I’m your father,” he pleads.

“No,” I shout, the anger bursting forth. “You were my father before you left, but you threw that all away. I’ll never forgive you!”

With that, my dad’s face dissolves, and the black seems to swirl to a central point, releasing me into the bookstore. The light blares into my squinting eyes, and I hear a horrible sound - a collective wail, sorrowful, heartfelt weeping from an entire crowd. What’s going on? My eyes adjust, and I see the man in the trenchcoat looking down on me from under his hat, shaking his head. Behind him, is the weeping crowd - my family and friends - my mother, brothers and sisters, my best friend, my grandparents, Ana, and my dad - all crying uncontrollably, all covering their faces. My mother holds my grandma as she sobs, staring at me with the black make-up smearing down her face. My best friend covers his mouth and shakes his head at me. Ana hugs herself and rocks back and forth, unable to meet my gaze, and my dad sits cradling his face, his tears soaking his shirt.

The weeping is horrible and overwhelming. It rattles me to the core until I’m weeping too, crumbling to my knees, and I lose grip of the coffee and shut my eyes as the tears stream and flow like water from a creek flowing naturally between rocks at night, traveling in aimlessly in a direct route going further and further and deeper and deeper and closer and closer until I open my eyes in my dark room with a heavy heart and a gasp.

I roll onto my side and find my phone, prompting its cold light that cuts the night. New message from Ana: “Hey”.

I open it up and type a cautious reply. Then I delete what I was writing. Then I delete her message. Then I delete her contact information. Then I roll over and go back to sleep.

Syzygy | Alexander T. Damle

            Great monolithic slabs of luminescence rise high towards the heavens, and as they loom above our Babel, we gaze long up at them in a reverential wonder. Flickering, rippling across their surfaces are images of that which we can buy for the souls that we sell. Behind the screens men and women tethered to more screens, fingers tapping away as pincers on insects, ants scrabbling at bits of sand to build grander super-structures for make benefit some long forgotten queen. Their eyes reflect colours great and beautiful, neon light and steel and glass and bits and pieces of forgotten history painting out the landscape of the city, all born out to hide a concrete infrastructure looming large and ugly beneath the fragile, gilded surface of restless abandon and loud, throbbing music.

            Young people skip as happy idiots through the streets arms clutched round each other tight, clothes made out of the materials born of icy machines thrashing up and down long into the night, their minds and souls and very spirits consumed by the plunging, crunching parasite these nights all worship. Empty bottles shatter on the asphalt’s soul sucking blackness as we pray to gods we stopped believing in when our ancestors discovered the cold cathode.

            They’d do best to remember those old gods though, tonight above all nights, before all nights, for tonight is the syzygy, when the cosmos comes into weird alignment and square peg into round hole falls and we slip long over that precipice that finer men call sanity and the rest of us call happiness.

            According to the dictionary the old woman with the tritium lights threaded through her hair has encoded deep into her brains, a syzygy is a time when all that weird cosmic alignment holds itself up for our gaze and we all get a little broken. Tonight’s the night when I sleep under a roof though I know all these behemothic structures my fellow man forces their souls prisoners to are on the verge of collapse down on their heads, but I forget to care because this is the night of the syzygy.

            So a Vagrant walks into a bar, punchline, roll on snare drum but no one laughs because the moon and the sun are in alignment and that old woman says that ain’t never supposed to happen. The bouncer simply nods though I look younger than he because my eyes betray the truth my skin and hair do not. Pierced through his right eyebrow is a little tube of green light. I wonder at how he sleeps.

            All the faces are illuminated cold sterile blue neon tones. The music is tripping over itself in a rush to get out the door, but then it loops back and a voice implores us some long-gone message of love, its beats harsh and broken, run a few times through an auditory meat grinder. I set myself down at the bar and the bartender gets me a drink that I figure I don’t have the money to pay for because why would I, but then a woman comes up behind me and offers to pay. Before she can the bartender says the drink is free for such a good customer, though I never before have laid eyes upon his face, not in this life.

            She sits down next to me and unto her eyes I am swallowed up big amber pots of honey reminding me of some beautiful creature I saw once upon a mural, before they painted over all the murals because cleaner is better and society forgets about the beautiful in the name of the perfect. Her skin is pure white milk and clean as the city tries to be, hair long and straight and dark, and I feel as though I am falling into some dark spot on a dying sun.

            We sit and look at each other and talk little clipped off phrases - pronunciations about lives no one lives outside of those big screens outside. She touches a hand to my face. It’s warm against my cheek, in direct opposition to the skin’s porcelain tone. Then she asks if I want to take her to bed and I tell her I can’t afford her and she looks offended but I say its my soul that can’t afford love in this time for that which the syzygy gives it will also take away. Her eyes go a little crazy and she says something about fucking myself with a glass bottle and I tell her that’s just how it goes. Then she takes my hand and asks me to walk with her and I feel light headed but I tell her no, I have my reason for this place on this night amongst all, and she leaves on her own, slightly dejected.

            And as the door takes her into the night, a gentle pitter patter of rain drops across polished stainless steel washes in, accompanied by hiss imperceptible to all but a dog’s ear, telling the forgotten tail of spit fire falling from the sky in punishment for our sins, and with the raindrops come five men in long leather jackets and dour looks, walking a little funny on one side, compensating a weight that feels itself out in more than simple ounces. The man in front’s hair is bleached the color of sand when sand was still the colour of bleach, before the pollution came and the war made it stay, before nature burned itself out trying to keep up with us, a time when we took a simple pleasure in lying in the sun by the sea. As I remember what it is I am here to do, my thoughts turn to whether this mere boy ever truly saw the sea, not just the tar black oil slick that feeds the shipping lines running into this land of empty, echoing steel, and I consider that he probably has not, and I feel the subtlest tingle of a bug landing on the back of my hand, despair, at this consideration. They feel the weight under their arms but they know not how to use it. Broker has long made assurances such as that, but tonight is the syzygy and tonight is the night on which I challenge Broker finally and forever.

            My hand reaches under my own coat, tattered, frayed, broken, patched together as lives after a great flood. I feel cold steel between my fingers and as it leaves its nest under my arm, I feel my hand naturally snap to its form, a fly to shit, each contour of its grim structure designed, shaped, formed, around the idea of my hand, the idea of the few hundred grams of pressure I shall soon exert over and over until the air smells of sulphur and iron, and my ears ring and the men in long coats’ ears ring nevermore. I see the barman hit the floor and I see five hands reach for their own coats but too slow.

            My hand is out and the gun with it and already I squeeze the trigger even as my left hand moves into cup and saucer, and my body turns to center axis relock, and I hear fire and men scream and I see blood leap up in shade absurd under harsh club light, even the pounding music not enough to mask the carnage, man and steel reforged as one, and I squeeze and aim, squeeze and aim, and blood is now painting wet and sticky the floor, and the bleach blonde hair is the colour of October sky. Yet one man screams out, holds his knee, like the palm of his hand can pull back in the blood and bone that is doing its best to leave him, and I level my gun and pull the trigger quiet and slow, action reaction, consequences forgotten on this night of vicious symmetry, beginning and ending with blood. The barman stands and looks to me.

            “Vagrant.”

            “That is as I am called.”

            “Vagrant, what the fuck have you done?”

            “As had to be done.”

            “Broker is gonna lose it...”

            “As he should. Do not worry. I will kill him.”

            “You can’t just fucking kill Broker, you know what happens then, Jesus Vagrant, you used to be a professional, man.”

            “And I thought you no longer recognized me. I have not been a professional since Broker took my profession.”

            I walk outside and I see a man, and behind the man is a car, and in the man’s hands is a rifle, enough bullets to cut a man to pieces bite sized for the carrion, and then the man is on the ground screaming for the bullet in his gut and he casts his rifle away, and I pick it up.
            “Driver.”

            “What the fuck do you want, Vagrant.”

            “I’m working again, Driver, and you’re going to call Widow and tell her I just killed her son, and that Corporate hired me.”

            “Vagrant, Jesus, that’s going to start...” he grimaces for the life leaking out of him “Start a god damned war.”

            “Of course.”
            “Broker...”

            “That name only carries power for men with a past to be exposed, for secrets to be revealed. I am a simple man. I am flesh and steel come together to draw out blood.”

            “What about the rest of us... you son of a bitch...”

            “Make the call.”

            And as I took his rifle, I take his car, and I know the war will begin, exactly as I hoped, exactly as I planned. This is the night of the syzygy, when normal men take total leave of sense, in favor of the carnal, prehistoric truth, us, our great megalopolis despite, no more than neanderthals pawing about in the dark, long branches sharpened to points, hunting mammoths though we know they may trample us under foot.

            Out on the streets of the city the car slips smooth, lithe, as again steel formed into flesh through the hand and mind, a fusion of electrical impulse and grander design. The city spreads out around me and I see cars racing towards the drop bar in whence I just slaughtered a half dozen sons and fathers and lovers and leather coats, police cars armed into tanks, long black sedans with stony faced shooters ready to meet a maker they had forgotten in favor of sex and pills, long night dopamine dumps, thrusting and pushing, fucking and sucking and licking and throbbing, pulsing. I wonder at the grand cosmic weirdness of it all - the firing of electrons and the breaking and reformation of atomic bonds across millions of billions of trillions of eons built up and down again, stars born and died across galaxies of a number unknowable, all pieces of some great scheme or the pure essence of random absurdity, all built behind this moment just before a grand explosion of violence under the star’s alignment called the syzygy.

            I pull the car out onto the freeway and echoing stark miles down the road away from me is the Edge, Broker’s great watchtower, his skyscraper looking out over the city, home of many things unknown to me but one that is, and that is Broker, a man whose very name seems to grant even this city’s biggest psychopaths the whispered fear of children speaking of the monsters that lay beneath their beds, but here there is no father figure to lift up the bed skirt and look, here the only one left allowed to stand truly is Broker, and Broker is no hero. Two hundred stories, the outside of every one a screen, one great canvas upon which Broker may paint his threats, on which he promises this city its peace, its prosperity, in exchange for only its fear, its subservience, its life blood.

            The great screen crackles to life with a hum palpable at the deepest marrow root of my skeletal structure even yet a few miles out, through every piece of steel and glass and cement that builds this place, past every hazy boozed out oblivion, down every stoned state of existential bliss, every needle and snort, every orgasm, a hum felt in all our hearts and minds for we know that Broker is about to speak, and when Broker speaks, you’d best listen, lest you too fall prey to his omnipotent wrath, his cyberactive vengeance. The screen crackles to life, and we all watch, and we all listen, for in this screen is every screen, every phone and television and computer and tablet, for that is part of the deal, in exchange for our peace he takes our screens as his own face, his own Orwellian vengeance. Not that he needs to watch, not that he bothers to watch, because the promise of him is enough, because our eyes are all too glued to his face to dare oppose him.

            The great screen crackles to life and upon it is his face, angular and handsome, eyes bitingly intelligent, all other features ageless, and out of the face comes a voice that is also a post horn and also the word of god.

            “Tonight, I hear gun fire rattling down our streets. It must stop. You have six hours to restore peace, through arrest, blood, or negotiation, before I fulfill the promise I made when first you met me. I ask that all citizens stay indoors, stay safe, and allow the men of violence to solve this violence themselves.”

            So it is with Broker, simple statements, quiet threats, uttered as promises, claims of peace born only at the cost of war, but what is peace without the threat of war, what is love without hate, art without carnage, beauty without shit, where once this city was the world’s crowning achievement, perfect collusion of the yin and the yang, the great and the terrible, now it is a place of people barely living under a constant shroud of fear.

            Before Broker I was a cog in the city’s undying superstructure, one gear turning another so that the grand machine may never stop, violence to bring about peace and peace in fear of violence, art and beauty born of struggle and chaos. I killed men for a living because that was what I was paid to do, because in the city before the Broker it was a job that needed doing. Before the Broker the old woman that spoke to me of the syzygy was a muralist, painting the most beautiful things across forgot swathes of steel and concrete, but now no one dares to vandalize what the Broker calls his creation.

            Before the Broker, this city had two masters, Widow, who took her throne after her husband died, and Corporate, a cold, even headed man, exercising violence only as a matter of necessity. Corporate owned me because he paid better, but in that city loyalty extended no farther than a paycheck. No one really noticed Broker at first, when he was just a petty dealer of information, a way to get a cop who wanted desperately to be straight back into the fold, to keep activists in line, to make sure a judge kept your man out of jail, kept you out of jail. He was as the rest of us, a pusher of a particular product, drugs or women or death or information, all products, all the same. We forgot, though, that information is different, information is powerful, information is a spider spreading its web across a void until naught can pass through for fear of becoming ensnared. We thought he gathered information as requested of him, but really he was gathering everything on all of us, for every man, woman, and child in the city, he knows a secret, deadly, destructive, the sort of thing that would make life very hard to live if it got out.

            Corporate and Widow and ten thousand angry foot soldiers on each side saw it happen, and together they conspired to kill the one that whispered in back alleys, under bridges, in dingy bars late at night, was being named Broker. But Broker knew, just as he knew all the rest, and his proclamation was simple - if ever he should die in any circumstances not strictly natural, it would all be revealed, every secret great and terrible.

            Then the proclamation was extended, and he declared a war on violence, and any who tried to make a new war, a real war, a war of blood and flesh and steel, their secrets would be released and they would be undone. And we all thought he was crazy, but, despite, the fighting stopped, and all the city’s crime came direct under his control, and if you broke the law it was only with his express permission.

            And then those of us who were told to kill was to live were suddenly without job. Some moved back into the fray, got real jobs because Broker left no other course. But not me. I couldn’t bear the straight life, the drugs and the booze just to get through. And that is when I became Vagrant.

            I find the car that belongs to a man quite likely now dead in front of the Edge, for in the fusion of flesh and steel that so defines us, the motions of driving, the thought process of navigation, have become fused to firing of cylinders and the tight squeeze of brake pads against rubber. The building up above me rises and I see the people of the book turning their eyes to god, but their god answered back in that past threats, their god saw violence’s purpose for its own sake, recognized the great fallacy of eternal peace in a breed cast in a crucible moulded of the penicillin promise of eternal war.

            The Edge’s face is a sheer, rippling black with the screens off, interrupted only by occasional spotlights, rendering it ever visible across the endless expanse of concrete that it reigns over, stretching up into the low hanging smog. The lights in the lobby are on and a dozen men and women stand tense and sweating, their flesh clinging tight to high calibre, high capacity assault weapons, but they know as well as I do that, if rumors of Vagrant’s return are as founded as I know them to be, then this can only end with their blood spread across the sparkling tile floor. I reload my pistol and grab the rifle off the seat beside me, step out of the car, the rain pawing at my face, warm with the transient heat of the city’s streets, washing off the layer of grime that finds itself an essential part of the life I have chosen, and I am renewed, as again I find my purpose.

            The doors slide open for me automatically, and I consider that maybe if they’d been locked, the job I have to do would not be done so easily, or its basic process would be delayed, but it is too late for that now as I raise my rifle and a body hits the floor in a roar of fire as blood leaps from its chest and face in a squelching, squirting fountain, and all at once there is a cacophony of gunfire, and I find myself running ducking, rolling, aiming shooting, and a man’s face vanishes across the room, and I throw myself over the reception counter and a woman is there too, her with a shotgun, but my knife is through her throat before she can cry out, and her blood mists across my face as the rain, the noise is deafening, but it’s been many years since I noticed the sound, the blood, just now me and steel as one, and bodies on the floor and screams of men because that is one thing you can never cease to notice, and all at once is a blessed silence, and I look out around me at an array of bodies and I think to myself that they all were deluded by Broker into thinking they lived in an age of peace, and in a gift beyond the lead I taught them the essential un-truth of this assertion.

            I ponder briefly how I might scale the tower now that those few that once absurdly called themselves security now lay dead, and I think of two hundred flights of stairs, and I think of the twelve labours of Heracles, battle fought long and hard against lion of unimaginable size, when guns were just a fever dream of men who deigned to call themselves heroes despite a gut clenched desire against the rending of flesh from bone. I cut the heads off a hydra only to have them grow back, a continued struggle as proof of my quest’s righteousness. Chase a stag that can run faster than my bullets may fly. As I ponder driving a boar into the snow, in a time when snowfall is long forgotten to a past a few essential degrees colder, a sleek panel opens across the room and I see an elevator, and with that I know Broker is ready to face me, come what may.

            The back wall of the elevator is wrought in glass, and through it I watch the city stretch impossible away, tumbling out ever further in that which was once countryside but is now just further reaches of the endless swallowing expanse of light and energy, the day by day more infinite expanse of Broker’s land. As I fly upwards at a speed that feels an affront to god’s laws of gravity, I wonder at the lives spread out below, all the secrets and lies that define them, that, in the hands of Broker, cage them and keep them. I think of all this and I think of how, in just a few moments, every last one of those dirty little secrets will be known to all the world, the moment that Broker lies dead by my bullet, in death fulfilling his last promise to the city, his promise of total truth. What freedom will they then have, knowing that all their darkest angles are known to all, that they are no longer held prisoner to the vampiric urges of past sins that refuse to die. On this night of the syzygy, the rules of our reality, the basic physical laws that define this city, shall be undone, and force will become equal to past times willpower, no longer a simple matter of mass and acceleration, the gazelle will preside over the lion by way of the bullet, the grand old war between Widow and Corporate shall begin anew, and all of us workless killers shall once again have their place and purpose.

            The halt in motion is sudden, sharp, unnerving, and I know it is my time. As the doors slide open, I drop the rifle to the ground beside me, its magazine exhausted, and draw my sidearm. The place that the doors welcome me into is like no world I’ve ever believed in before, a space echoing, cavernous, but not empty. Only Broker would build a crown like this, walls all glass, city stretched out in every direction, but more than that, this is a server room like I’ve never seen, a dozen tanks on either side of a central walkway full of hulking pieces of blinking, flashing steel, suspended in cooled oil, the sort of vanity project that only one with the endless money, power, of Broker would ever consider, all the oil illuminated from below with a radioactive green. At the far end of the room lies a desk, and sitting behind it is Broker. I advance towards him, a distance of easily a hundred metres. I raise my gun, hold it steady, and, as I approach, a young woman comes out from behind a desk and I consider that she does not appear as expected, but I care not, in her eyes I see the one that we have long called Broker. Icy, steely grey, the flat, intimidating, clinical metallic glint of a CPU cover, of clouds on a day promising acid rain, of the cold, broken, metal that stands in place of people across this city, eyes the color of death.

            “So, I suppose you’re Vagrant.” I keep walking towards her. “You need to stop this, now. Before you do something stupid, something you’ll regret.” I don’t stop. “Wait, just fucking wait, listen to what I have to stay!” I’m still closing distance and I’m just a few feet from her. “Wait, Jesus Christ, wait, please, none of this is what you think!” She’s crying now as I point my gun at her chest and I squeeze the trigger, and she clutches the hole in her middle, blood pouring out across the floor, once cleaned with clinical precision, and pitches backwards into one of the server tanks. Her body floats towards the window, and Broker again looks out over her city, neon lights and cold steel for as far as the idea of man exists, a hundred million faces alit with a hundred million screens. Tomorrow again I shall work, even as the city burns out bright for what may be one final tonight. Tonight, the old woman’s prophecy has held true - the syzygy came into being and that which it wrought can never be undone.

            This passes through my mind, as the floor around me begins to rumble, the oil becomes of magma, and I smell something I have never smelled before. The ideal height at which to drop a hydrogen bomb approximates to 550 metres above the surface of the earth. At this altitude, the effects of the bomb will be widest spread, the burst of light and subsequent atomic fires allowed to ripple out across the surface of the earth, burning through all that stands in their wake, flesh or steel or concrete, unstoppable, endless, true power, true freedom, true god, and I remember that the Edge stands too at 550 metres, and I need not wonder at this grand coincidence, need no longer ponder the purpose of oil cooled servers, for I know their meaning, the great divinations of architecture and nuclear physics conducted long ago, one perfect master plan, a great proof at man’s inherent failure, his lust to sow only violence, even in the face of his own destruction. In this moment, I love Broker, respect Broker, one stronger than Widow, smarter than Corporate. My eyes tear up not in sadness or horror, but in absolute wonder at the lesson we shall all learn in consequence of my careful bullet.

            This is the truth of the syzygy, when nothing is as it seems because it never amounted to anything anyway, and the greatest light in a city of blinding brightness shall be not neon or halogen or compact fluorescent, but atomic.