Falling in Love is Easy, Being in Love is Hard, Chapter III | Alexander T. Damle

Third Chapter - A Supranational World

            As Emily drives across New Mexico, the speed limit plus five (she thinks subconscious even as she sees the scenery rush by a little too fast), the sky seems a perfect blue, not even the faintest wither of a cloud, and then she sees her car’s thermometer clamber past 100 and she brushes a bit of sweat from her brow. Down to Roswell to meet a guy just so she can bring him home to her parents. Sure, she has business there too, but isn’t that what Skype is for? The movements of the road begin to become subconscious, as the asphalt stretches out straight and infinite, and all the other traffic seems to vanish. She keeps catching the speedometer drifting upwards, turns up the music, Cecil Taylor’s “Unit Structures,” an album she has compared on numerous occasions to falling in love - she wants to understand it, but can’t, and knows she should like it, but just can’t force her brain around its most basic processes.

            Her Land Rover fits this earth, a symbol of absolute colonial control over the patches of ground that can only ever truly belong to shifting sands and pure blue sky, and yet the great colonialists claim still to own here above all else. A car built to make its driver feel as though, out here, even out here, especially out here, nothing can touch them.

            Between Lincoln County and Roswell there is not but earth and monuments to what came before, entire towns demarcated on GPS now nothing more than an abandoned building or two lay next to a half-fallen post box, Kochia growing up and swallowing last symbols of civilization back unto the earth. A few semis use the empty roads as easy shipping routes, but most of the time even they keep a distance away from this land of decay, and all is silent but for the cry of crickets, Desert Sage rustling in the breeze.

            Then a great rumbling screams across this barren earth, starting low, the level of a nightclub base line, a sound you feel while still you know not if it’s real, before, with the grace of the doppler effect, it rises upwards to a screeching treble, and when again it’s gone there the asphalt already near-boiled under New Mexico sun lays now even hotter.

            He went with the car instead of the bike - he wanted to make a good impression, afterall. In some prior life the thing had been a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T, but it is useless to focus on one so long dead, a name attributed to an idea, a time in automotive design that, while Emile held it in certain respect, so too did he find it outdated. Power steering and power braking, a brand new acceleration system, roll cage (just in case), new engine, blower, he even lost the ridiculous radio antenna off the front, replaced instead with satellite. Inwards so too modernized, a full GPS system, side and rear facing cameras connected to a full HD monitor. He was, he figured, ready for the end of days.

We all think we’re ready right up until days end and we realize just how dependent we were on the basic cycles, even out here where day and night are dictated by sun and moon rather than the gravitational overpower of 9-5.

           

            Emile arrives in the parking lot of the cheap burger joint Emily suggested meeting at a full fifteen minutes early, and, rather than going inside, he sets in his car (the old bench seats long replaced with buckets), questioning whether he still has time to give this up, just go back to his fortress in the desert, and never speak to his family again, for he knows at heart that if he goes home alone once more, a part of his mother may just die, and a part of his father might never again grant him the faintest modicum of respect.

            The car’s clock (one of the few parts still analoge against a digital age) ticks away the seconds, and yet he doesn’t move

            Emily, on the other hand, pulls up exactly on time, immediately leaves her vehicle, locking it behind her, then stands stock still, facing the restaurant, a dull breeze blowing behind her, the lone tumbleweed amongst garbage a casual fuck-you. She considers why she’s here, maybe at this diner, maybe in this state, in this life, on this earth, existing still at all, what’s the point? Creating an empire then using it simply to satisfy her parents, when does it end? So she turns on the heel of one of her bespoke cowboy boots, flight in mind, when fate makes its last little push to shove its separated soul back together, and Emile, courage finally in hand, moves towards the door as Emily moves away, and the two almost collide, before, fate, again weighing in, seeming this time to making an honest effort to avoid a true romantic comedy deus-ex, stops Emile dead in his tracks, leaving the two an inch to spare of humiliation, and both thinking about some moment in a high school hallway, rushing to class, books flung every which way and muttered apologies and protracted attempts to avoid the slightest eye contact.

            “Holy shit.” Emily reacts first.

            “Sorry.”

            “Hey, no worries, you didn’t actually walk into me.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Uh... are you?”
            “Emily?”

            “Emile?”

            “Shit.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Uh...” Emile glances about, rubs his arm nervously. “Should we, maybe, go inside?”

            “Sure, yeah.”

            Up to the counter they step, slightly out of sync with each other, maybe intentionally, or maybe subconscious. Then, once more, at the counter, fate takes hold and, the restaurant empty, all hands on deck, their orders are taken simultaneously, and, just out of ear contact with each other, they accidentally order the same dish, an observation that, when it emerges casually from the mouth of one of the counter staff, is a point of mutual contrition and, it is agreed upon quickly, equal embarrassment. The order is not unusual, in fact, if the question was posed to the staff, they might suggest that a green chilli cheeseburger is their most popular item. Paired with diet Coke, even, is quite common. Where the situation became unusual was in the specificity of the differences, Emile’s insistence on extra pickles, Emily’s insistence on none, Emile’s choice of mustard, Emily’s of ketchup. These choices, slight in the Grand Scheme of Things, act as a quiet symbol of connectivity on some level of genetic sandwich design (if your dad likes onions on his burgers, will you?), and, maybe, just maybe, the soul (if the you of a past life liked onions on their burgers, will you?).

            But sandwiches and the soul are two very different things.

            “So.” Emile starts then stops again.

            “I don’t really know what we’re supposed to talk about here.”

            “The site had a primer...”

            “I know. I, well, I was supposed to... my secretary... uh... do you know who I am?”

            “You own a company. A big one.”

            “Yeah. A big one. Uh... Apostates.com is one of our... products.”

            “Oh.”

            “It was one of my personal projects, actually. My parents...” She makes a noise half laugh and half cough.

            “I get you.”

            “Yeah, I suppose you would.”

            “So what, you drove all the way down to Roswell to meet a match? The site seems to be doing well, I would have thought you could have done fine up in Albuquerque.”

            “Eh, you’d think so.

            “What do you mean?”

            “I mean, well, hell, I wrote the fucking algorithm. You’d think I’d be doing great. But truth be told, you’re the first real match the system has made for me.”

            “Probably says more about our folks than it does about us.”

            “Yeah.” They pause, bite into their burgers, and, it is noticed by the janitor mopping silently in the corner, that the motions of their jaws match each other perfectly. Emile breaks the silence.

            “Maybe we should talk about our parents?”
            “Yeah, that would be a good starting point.”

            “So, I mean, I’ve got to say, I’m a little confused... you’ve got to be worth a hell of a lot of money, you’re really successful, but you still need some website to get your parents to leave you alone?”

            “Yeah, well, I never quite was what they wanted.”

            “What did they want?”

            “An artistic type. One who actually made a little money, sure, but, well, my mom is a successful painter, my dad writes movies. Coming from that, I think you can kind of figure I’m a failure in their eyes. I’m single, with no sign of that changing. I don’t really give a shit about much beyond my company.”

            “And why is that?”
            “Heh, it’s not easy to explain. I just, I’ve always had this desire to build something, something great that will stand the test of time. And more than just another web whatever point O company, instead, something to challenge the way we live and think. A company more powerful than a nation, with the right... the right ideology.”

            “I looked you up. You own mines, pharmaceuticals, arms manufacturers, hell, even a PMC or two.”

            “Necessary evils, in my mind, at least. Especially if they are held in the right hands. Turn on the news, see what governments have managed to do, a world where we always work ourselves to death for money that’s meaningless. So I thought, maybe we rebuild ground up, create a supranational world, where we all are given the opportunity to live the lives we want.” He casts her a rather questioning glance. “Oh Jesus Christ, now I sound like a fucking James Bond villain.” She stares out the window listlessly, but he smiles at her.

            “C’mon now. I live in the middle of the desert alone in a house I designed myself driving home made cars and motorbikes, drinking and writing, hanging out with alcoholics and schizophrenics, wishing death on the world. I’m half Cormac McCarthy sub-plot, half late-period Fitzgerald. We all have our cliches.”

            “Ha, well, I think most people would rank Bond Villain a little lower on the social ladder than modern hermit.”

            “Most people don’t know shit. Bond’s a sociopathic womanizer. The villains always aspire to something more than violence. Except, you know, the shitty Pierce Brosnan era ones.”

            “You strike me as a Roger Moore fan.”

            “Oh yeah, got me there.” Each of the words he lets drip with sarcasm.

They both start laughing, and the staff, they all glance at the two, confused, slightly, the man looking climbed just now from under a rock, living amongst the rattlesnakes and the Desert Mallow and the Sand Verbena and the coyotes and carrion, and she climbed out of the back of a world that doesn’t seem to exist down in Roswell any more, just aliens, wealthy farmers, and a whole collection of American refuse.

            “So what about you, Emile... what’re your parent's’ problem with you?”

            “They wanted someone who’d get a good job, probably a great job, make a ton of money, settle down somewhere hospitable and connected, be the sort that they could tell the three friends they have left between the two of them what a fucking success I am. They wanted me to get a nice wife who works another sensible, well paying job, have a couple of kids to fucking hate. But, really, the wife and kids were always secondary to the money.”

            “Sounds like we’d do well to switch parents.”

            “If only, right?”

            “If only if only.”

            “What do you hope to get out of this then, Emily? Someone to post pictures with on Facebook so your parents leave you the fuck alone? Like, what’s the next step, I mean.”

            “Honestly? I need someone to bring to Christmas next year. Every year it’s the same fucking conversation. ‘Emily honey, you’re getting older, you need to meet someone while you’re still young and pretty.’ Fuck that shit.” In this moment, Emily looks about as pretty as the tailless old tom cat that sometimes follows Diablo in his dealings, her fists bunched in quiet anger, the muscles of her face pinched, and yet her eyes, they betray tragedy, death more closely pursuing every second of every day, just need to keep the right edge the curve...

            “Yeah, don’t disagree with you on that. We love our families because we’re told to love our families, and because they paid for us to live whatever shitty lives we lead now, but does that justify years of emotional manipulation and abuse? I mean... shit... I don’t want to write my own tragedies onto you, but...”

            “No, you’re right. And yet still we seek their approval.”

            “Meeting strangers in wind blown cafes in the middle of Nowhere New Mexico in the name of finally making them happy.” He pauses. “So I have to kind of ask... I don’t know. I don’t know if this is something I’m supposed to ask on this fucking thing, but whatever, flying blind here... Why did you give up on actually finding someone?”

            “It’s not worth it. It’s not worth the constant fight that, in the end, I’m always going to lose. I have what I want, what I need. My company, my empire. My Great Creation. I built it all from nothing, and it’s going to change the world. And it won’t get angry at me when I work late. It doesn’t need me to ditch out on an important meeting to pick it up from school. It won’t just fucking leave me. It doesn’t care that what makes me happy is what I’m expected to just care about as long as it keeps it going. I’m in love, sure, but it’s something deeper... Jesus... now I sound like the Fitzgerald character.”

            “We all have our moments.”

            “So what about you, why’d you give up?”

            “Anxiety. Depression, paranoia, a whole laundry list.”

            “You seem alright to me.”

            “Sure. We can talk, talk forever, but that doesn’t mean I could ever love you like I’m supposed to. It would kill me. I fall for my waitress every time I go into town for a slice of pie, and that’s enough to start me downing bottles of whiskey, putting my fist through walls, screaming at nothing. I can’t fucking do it. I tried so hard for so long, and it was killing me. I did finally actually fall in love, eventually, but it didn’t make me happy, the opposite, actually. The closer we got, the more I felt the need to just run, run forever until I fell off the edge of the earth. I, uh, well this girl and me, we finally had sex. I don’t know if I should get into this, but, well, I had a panic attack. For a week afterwards, I didn’t leave my room, just sat in the dark. It took months before I could even talk to other people again. Over the course of the whole episode, I managed to lose thirty pounds, drop out of college, and almost kill myself. And then I thought back to what my life was like before me and this girl ever got together, and I realized, well, it wasn’t Disney Channel happy, but it would do. I was content as long as I was on my own, living the life I wanted, writing the things I found beautiful. So that was that.”

            “And then you moved to the middle of nowhere in Lincoln County.”

            “Yeah. Being around people too much makes me lonely, reminds me of what I’ll never have. Jealous. Out in the desert, all you have to be jealous of are the fucking Jackals, for their lives of perfect nothing.”

            “But that still leaves your parents.”

            “Yup.”

            “I get it. So you’re a writer then, that pays the bills?”

            “Hah, well that’s the funny thing. I am a writer, and a damn good one at that. Thing is though, damn good writers don’t make enough to buy and fix up a 70’ Challenger R/T. I write erotica on the side. I’m one of the most successful writers of male-perspective erotica in the world. Different name, of course. I wonder what my readers would think if they knew I’ve only had sex once.”

            “I guess you must study the subject pretty hard then.”

            “Pornography is one of my favorite hobbies.”

            “I have no idea how you’re still single.”

            “Fucking hilarious.”

            “So what do you think?”

            “About?”

            “Is this going to work?”

            “Depends.”

            “On what?”

            “Whether, in my parents’ company, you can pretend to be the person everyone on earth seems to think you are, as opposed to the one sitting across from me now.” She greets him with a smile wry and tired and a little bit broken.

            “Make comments as elegantly writerly as that and my parents will dig you. Just keep your mouth shut about the erotica.”

            “Isn’t it funny?”

            “What?”

            “I feel in a way like we’re somehow different parts of the same complete person, what should’ve been one become instead as two. Born complete, we could have done something great. As is, however, we can barely function, reliant instead upon the will of machines to bring us unto the image our parents wish to bestow upon us.”

            “Jesus.”

            “What?”

            “You talk like you write.” He smiles briefly.

            “Once in awhile. Mostly I just alienate people. Or piss em’ off.”

            “Yeah, I can see that.”

            “Where do do we go from here then? Do I just show up at one of your family dinners?”

            “You could, but I run a social media empire. It might raise some eyebrows. We need a picture from one of our “dates” to overshare with the universe.”

            “Sure.”

            The two lean in close together, and Emily puts her arm around Emile’s shoulder, and at this he startles slightly, and she thinks to say something to this, but finds her mind run suddenly blank of words. In this first settling of connection as flesh touches most briefly flesh, if this tale were as many (most) that beset themselves upon us, the two might now feel the first lingerings of love, some suggestions at stirrings in the nether regions, fluttering of the heart, a slight sweat on the brow.

            But this is not one of those tales. There is a feeling at this touch, beyond the discomfort, but it is not love, rather something else, that perhaps of two twins separated by an eternity found each other for a first time and hopefully for an only time (never need again separate), and this touch symbolizing a settling of electrons back into their natural state, a formation of a perfect covalent bond, from where once was only the mighty flashing fluttering of oblivion and chaos.

            As the shutter on the phone camera slams down, and light is dispensed invisibly inwards onto the lens, and the image that once was now is, this time replicated in pixel form for all time, behind the two, on the busy street, a homeless man wanders into traffic, and cars swerve to avoid him, drivers lean on horns, but hear he does not, and above him he waves a sign proclaiming that the end, it’s really fucking nigh, and he may be right in this (is right in this), and as the traffic surges around him, as water rushing up about a rock in a river, somewhere in southern India, a child coughs heavily, and, when she takes her hand away, sights blood, and she begins to cry and her father cries too, and they know that what comes now knocking at the door is the Angel of Death but what they don’t yet know is that those who ride with him are the other three horsemen, dragging the apocalypse behind them, and, meanwhile, in a small bar in Athens, a handsome young man sips languorously of Ouzo and speaks of organizing together and doing something about the fucking filth coming to infect Old Europe, and in a few years the same man will be giving the same lecture, now to hundreds of thousands as, all around him and his listeners, the economy of Old Europe runs its course down  the bowl, past the closet bend, through the city sewer system, into a filtration plant, then, finally, is dumped summarily into the sea, and by this point, not even the Great American Leviathan will be able to shelter itself from the horsemen, now legion, and two people, that initial moment guaranteed eternal by the shutter, will live together in a house on the edge of a desert, watching the last lights of civilization flicker out, as yet the stars persevere above, and remaining from that moment in the little diner in Roswell, they have still the one last Thing left to any of the last remnants of humanity, and the covalent bond of their touch still remains, even as the young man who once liked to drink Ouzo rots in the streets of Athens from a bullet issued forth from his own gun, blood of his countrymen spilled around him, despite all his hatred to the contrary, and as the moon rises over the desert in ten thousand years, a ray of silver light will cast out, through the long shattered windows of the home, over a concrete countertop, past a long rusted faucet, before running headlong into a faded, tattered photograph stuck to a decayed refrigerator, and from that photograph onto the moon will gaze Emily and Emile, friendship struck in the moment in the diner now eternal, against all time.

Falling in Love is Easy, Being in Love is Hard, Exception I | Alexander T. Damle

First Exception - Double Action Trigger

            Emile Henderson was born at 7:30pm on the 28th day of June, in the year 1995 in Rose Hospital, Denver.

            Emily Hanover was born at 7:30pm on the 28th day of June, in the year 1995 in Rose Hospital, Denver.

            Twelve days before their collective birthday, they meet for the first time properly in Roswell, New Mexico. At their first meeting, Emile wears a navy blue shirt and black jeans. Emily wore a black blouse and blue jeans.

            On the day of their collective birth, elsewhere in the world, Emily’s grandfather would pull three people from a burning building, while Emile’s grandfather was killed when he fell asleep a lit cigarette in between his teeth.

            Each has a birthmark in the shape of a triangle, Emile’s just below his right eye, Emily’s on her left pinky toe.

            Does fate ever feel a sense of irony, or is it simply chance and circumstance? Are these two so drawn together by birth and life and (eventually, it may be presumed) death as simply a matter of that being just how things go, or are deeper forces at work here, some driving engine, some godly ulterior motive?

            When each were sixteen they, unbeknownst to each other, passed each other heading down E470 between Denver and its International Airport, her on her way home from a trip to see for one last time a dying childhood friend, moved now to somewhere warm to pass quietly from this earth, he on his way to witness the birth of his uncle’s first child. As their cars passed each other, they looked out the windows at the exact same moment, and saw each other separated by a median, and though they do not now remember it, one moment amongst many, in this their fates were tied further, a second meeting, beyond the nursery. Their souls, perhaps, drew to each other in that moment of proximity, remembering fellow passengers on the bus from the beyond to that hospital in a Denver now long gone.

            In moments of ultimate life and death, what draws these two together? For souls, as is well known by now, do not travel by bus, but instead by idea and quiet words, the faintest suggestion of their very existence, uttered forth only, at least in the case of rational men, in Final Moments, caught in rainy neon-soaked back alleys, knife thrust quick between ribs, and the soul, here, in these last words, these last, dying demands of Something More, well here it truly travels.

            Every woman who Emile has ever fallen in love with (five, by his count) has been named Julia or Juliet or Juliane or something similar. Is it Freudian? Or has the word itself simply run amok in his head, as a virus?

            But Emily, she too is prisoner to a name, for each man she has loved (seven, maybe) has been named James, Jamie, or Jay. Does this then further indicate a binding of their souls? Or is maybe the suggestion of a virus more correct, some mold spore breathed in together in that nursery now leading to life choices just one slight variable off each other?

            By whatever means the two were drawn so similar, we can presume so too that they were somehow destined to meet in the way they did, when they did. And from this, we can also presume that it was natural that from their first meeting they would find it impossible now to break away from each other, tied at the waist, by friendship or some deeper force of nature.

            This is not a love story. Rather, it is the story of two people whose souls were somehow intermingled, aspects of humanity forgotten by God in one, overcompensated for in the other, so that, when they met and combined their respective lives and intellect, they became something far greater than the individual, instead molecular and spiritual simultaneously, a perfect devotion that holds past the end of Something, on through the end of Everything, right down until the great so-called Gods that exist just beyond our plane of understanding, creatures of dark matter or pure light, depending who you ask, will study this bond forevermore as a sigil, in amongst our world of hate and violence, of something good to stand long past the fall of our greatest symbols of Civilization.

Falling in Love is Easy, Being in Love is Hard, Chapter II | Alexander T. Damle

Second Chapter - A Time for Sons of God

            When she gets to the office each day, she spends ten minutes just sitting, before she truly begins to work, a daily reminder to the self as to where she is, as the world around her does it’s best to unground her, to rip out the carpet from underneath her and reveal to her that she hangs over clear blue sky, a problem all the more powerful as slowly the world’s global economic engine grinds down, gears slowly wearing away their spokes, and this time no one around bothering to fix them back up to snuff. No, it’s not the apocalypse, but it may just be the end of something, and most particularly the end of her everything, but maybe, just maybe, that’s what it will take to prove her point.

            Maybe this time her parents will actually consider what she’s been saying all these years.

            The company, a conglomerate, technically, although, as with many of the aspects of her Great Creation, the line between truth and technicality is far spread. Started at an ideological level out of a dorm at the University of New Mexico (she’d gotten into better schools, sure, but that wasn’t the point - as little debt as possible would be necessary to build her Great Creation), but with all papers filed in a one room basement flat in Monaco, over-leveraged from day one against the company that did not yet exist, all expenses in initial setup taken against the vintage Porsche belonging to a friend’s grandfather. The debt was there, but only where it would pay for itself directly.

            The power of the Great Creation was not in the idea, not really. The idea was there, but there are many ideas, both Great and Terrible, and not all the Great ones become Creations, and not all the Terrible ones are allowed to die as vagrants in back alleys.

            So the initial idea was allowed to grow, to pay off all initial debt, and, in the course of a summer in that basement flat, the right People were already talking about her Creation, entitled Spectre, a new kind of subscription driven social network, where people paid for their privacy, rather than using their privacy to pay for their fun. No customer data would be sold to third parties. It was a tempting marketing line.

            The information was still stored, used internally as the first building blocks of the empire that was soon to come. But internal use seemed natural, so long as it was simply a social network, and the visage of what it was to become remained secret dreams of her chosen few.

            And soon the angel investors started circling, with their promises of huge quantities of capital, and not just the usual quiet runners of the world machine, they who set behind a shroud and direct all the grand puppet strings with an infusion of cash here, an investment there, a quiet word in a smoky room, thousands of futures gone in a whisper, but the good men as well, the honest men, those who wished to build a New Web free of constant surveillance. If only they knew what they were buying and building.

            Investments were secured, finances were held more on track. She finished university, wanting not to be just another Zuckerberg model apostate. Do it right, do it straight, then build the empire. Rather than expanding upwards, reaching for the mantles of Facebook and Twitter and all the rest, her company moved sideways, thanks to them so-called as angels.

            Every tiny start up who interested her and her advisers was bought up for whatever exorbitant sum its owner named. The angels got nervous, but the picks mostly seemed to be right, and each new arm of the company grew to support the head. Five years in, her company’s market value surpassed Facebook. There was no IPO. There would be no IPO. No stock, no board, all hers, all the little arms. The initial angel investors had all been quietly bought out. The various branches of the company were positioned to most ideally serve the centre around which all they rotated, led by individuals all uniquely loyal to Emily.

            Her take home salary was, of course, by the standards of the average world-dweller, exorbitant, but by the scale of the company, by other companies like it, rather unimpressive. She had a nice home, but she based out of the ABQ after all, not Monaco, and nice in Albuquerque is a statement that comes with certain qualifications. It was her style, she always said. It was about the company's success she always said.

            When she was small, and she’d shown such drive, her parents used to tell her constantly that it wasn’t worth it, the focus, the construction, it would never be anything. Just a soulless entity sucking the marrow of the world for make benefit its own skyward trajectory.

            They would know, eventually. This company could be something more, not just yet another social media site, but a global force, controlling the flow of the great Everything, supranational, beyond, in its own great web, the mere squabbles of men or gods, instead one great collective god, every trip to the store, every peek at the web. Every hospital visit. Every war. All would borrow a part of her company, and as a result it would only grow.

            And then they’d have to see, right?

            Its values would be iconoclastic, a rejection. Certain industries she wouldn’t touch. The wedding industry, for one. The mortgage industry, for another. Arms are fine, but we all have to die someday, as she always said. But controlling the absolute freedom of the individual? That was a step too far. She would control the world in her own image, of life beyond the zero sum game of marriage, family, death, a farewell to values.

            Even if it meant the end of something.

            Of course, it wasn’t there yet. It was large, it was powerful, it had its hands in much the world, but it wasn’t yet the one power. And she was starting to catch the eyes of those for whom a supranational superpower would be of gravest concern.

            A few months prior, her company had announced a new product, another social network. It was noticed in certain circles, but it would not make a major impact on the company's finances, one way or another, a mere footnote on a quarterly report. It was created as everything, writ solely for her. A way to finally provide for her parents what the company never really could, a boy to bring home without having to bring him into her home.

            He awakens with his face half stuck to his pillow with drool, ensnared amongst sheets, body stuck fine with sweat. He considers immediately that he probably should stop sleeping with sheets until noon living as he does in a land of 110 degree summers, but then remembers he doesn’t care.

            As he extracts himself from the sheets, looks down at his body, muscles sinewy beneath tanned flesh, it could be attractive if anyone with any real subjectivity were given the opportunity to see it, but then that just becomes, really, a certain kind of Schrodinger’s Cat, and he looks up outwith his floor to ceiling windows, and the desert it stretches out to meet the feet of mountains stood commanding fifty miles away.

            The ground lies flat, desert sage, low brush, the slightest rise and fall of hills, sound wave palpitations out, a clear view all the way to the first bastions of humanity, a faint cluster of dwellings and shops, a road spooling out in either direction, and in one it runs past him, with a dozen miles keeping the cars from his door.

            He watches vultures flip and slide across thermals and he remembers where he first learned that word, some book he read when he was small about kids who turned into animals in order to destroy some alien menace. He wonders why it should come to him now as he watches the vultures free, but maybe it’s the incredible ability of empty blue sky to cross infinite time and space, this sky now above him the same that he saw still a child, caged to his parents’ very particular set of values. Freedom now, not absolute, but close enough.

            The vultures settle downwards on some point, dark against the not-quite-white sand, way out at the edge of his property, and he picks up a pair of binoculars set on his bedside table, looks to the point. A coyote lays with guts hung out, sparkling amongst the sunlight, and then the vultures, they begin to pick at the corpse.

            Putting down the binoculars, he stands, feels the cool hardwood floor, then feels a slight crackling of bone and muscle weighing down on itself, his self each morning felt slightly heavier for the mere effort of getting out of bed, and he wonders each morning if it is a sign of age, weight, or the depression seeking its way back onto the marrow of his soul (its last assault still inscribed onto bone and flesh and nerve endings and joints and heart and soul and body real and politic and spiritual forever as bullet holes in the side of half the buildings in Baghdad or Mogadishu (name a 21st century war zone - there are plenty) and he wonders half if it isn’t a might presumptuous to ascribe his own spiritual conflict onto such fights for flesh and blood, but, he remembers, there is still a life thrown into the mix of this war). Then he feels his knee pop, and pain ripples up his back. Fucking jogging, greatest conspiracy against modern man rendered by so-called doctors, right up there with love itself...

            He wanders out of the bedroom into the great room, more floor to ceiling windows to one side, looking out on the same desert, and behind the back wall, solid dirt and rock behind concrete wall, the beginnings of another mountain, and beyond the great room and the kitchen is his garage, letting out in a cleft cut into the foot of that mountain, but in that garage, well that’s his true freedom now, 0-60 in 3.4 seconds, but will it be fast enough to beat the devil inside him? Find out in tonight’s episode of Drunken Asshole in a Muscle Car, or, alternatively, nearly laying out his shitty 40 year old Triumph with every turn as both tires lose traction in desert sand, and he hopes that this time maybe he will and there will be a conveniently placed rock.

            Then there is a knock at the door, and at first he panics, then he goes for the bath robe hung slack over couch, it’s lowest folds touching the floor, a weight pulling it down, threatening to rend it from its place of purchase. The weight, he grabs, a Sig Sauer P220, switches off the safety, holds it just behind his right buttock (half exposed in his underwear), and moves carefully to the monitor by the door, connected to CCTV.

            Upon his stoop sets a tall man, dark complexioned, black cowboy boots, jeans, stained, (is that blood?), black t-shirt, black cowboy hat, a Smith & Wesson 29 on his hip (Dirty Harry’s gun of choice), and the whole picture, well it speaks quite loud and clear - this is one bad motherfucker, and the door, with him at its other side, must now and forever stay closed. He stands with his weight back on one heel, and his arms are crossed. His long hair hangs loose, and he brushes a lock aside as he waits, an image of serenity, with the vague suggestion that so much as a fly on his nose would free the revolver from its holster, and he wouldn’t hesitate to use it.

            But this monster our hero knows, unlike so many that come a’knockin early in the morning, and he knows how to make this monster bleed, or, as necessary, work for him, and moreover he knows that this one too is a disciple of the junkyard prophet. Five locks click open, three electronic, two traditional.

            “Hey Diablo, what’s up?” Diablo is the name he chose, not the one chosen for him. He was born Jesus Estevez Estrada.

            “Hey, uh, hey man. Emile. I was thinking we could uh, maybe take a ride and, maybe shoot some rabbits? I think they’ve been getting into the plants again man.”

            “Why do you think the rabbits are getting into the plants?”

            “Well, I know how many there are and there aren’t as many as there are and I think someone is sending rabbits to fuck with my crop. Profit margins and competition and all that.”

            “Who is someone Diablo?”

            “Well, my competition. Or maybe the DEA is on to me, but I’m always so careful, so it must be my competition.”

            “Your competition is sending rabbits to fuck with your pot plants?”

            “Yeah, yeah man. Will you help me?”

            “Sure man, sure.”

            He dresses, straps his gun to his waist, then pulls his bike out of the garage, puts a helmet on, looks to Diablo’s Harley, gives him a halfhearted thumbs up. They ride and as they move from the mountains the desert kaleidoscopes out around them, flashing by images at 70mph, whirls of dust and bits of sage, bugs smacking into helmet windscreen, at least for Emile, Diablo, well they cut straight at his face, but he seems not to mind.

            They stop eventually at a wind swept vista, below them in a small valley a green house, tiny, really, but with enough space to provide all in the county so inclined with weed. “Look on my works, ye mighty and despair,” this the whole sum pushable product of the self-famed drug king Diablo, but it’s his and that what matters, and he gives away more than he really sells, but still he sees himself as he wishes others to, and this, the doctors say, may be for the best.

            No one has the heart to tell him that cannabis has been legal in the state of New Mexico for half a decade.

            The money, what there is, not a lot, but enough, comes from his parents, his mother grown rich in the fruit shipping business. They say let him sell his weed, it keeps him from the real Bad Motherfuckers.

            First episode, had to hire some private dick/wanna-be private soldier to go over the border and drag him back.

            Now he’s left to his devices, to run rabid over this empty country, kept in some sort of place by the prophet and the writer, but what kind of guides are more ever lost than their flock? This isn’t a time for Sons of God.

            “Diablo, I’m not sure if these are the best guns for shooting rabbits...”

            “Rabbits are stupid sons of bitches. The noise’ll let em’ know we mean business, you know, and we mean business, don’t we?”

            “Sure man.”

            And so they set themselves to their task, going through dozens of rounds each, no rabbits dead, though one field mouse, somehow with the mis-luck to find itself in their gunsights. Meantime the sun, direct overhead, seemingly unmoved despite the passage of what feel hours, beats down on the backs of their necks, and Emile starts to sweat profusely, before finally setting himself down under greenhouse shade.

            Finally, Diablo, bored of his futility, sets next to him, pulls a small bottle of JD out from his half open shirt.

            “So Emile, how’s the writing business treating you?”

            “Still making money off that same book. No one ever wants to read anything I publish under my own name.”

            “I hear you. Jesus I ain’t.”

            “Sure man, sure.”

            “Your parents still after you about getting a girl?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Eh, it isn’t, well it isn’t worth it, not for people like us, we’re meant for something more, massive product for me, but you, you’re an artist, man, and that’s your deal, so fuck the whole love thing, just a distraction. God would I like for a girl to let me touch her breasts.”

            “Yeah. Well. There’s worse things to miss out in this life.”

            “Mhmm. Like whiskey under a noon-place sun.” Each take a sip, and Emile wipes a sliver of spilled liquid from the hairs on his chin.

            “I actually found something last night.” Diablo looks to him. “Not someone, something, a new online dating thing. Not dating, but, well, a way to throw my parents off the fact I’m not dating.”

            “Lies trap you and then you believe them and it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake and then that’s how I end up a little confused sometimes.”

            “Better than my parents telling me I’m worthless every chance they get.”

            “Well, yes, that’s true. So did you create an account?”

            “Yeah. We’ll see if it goes anywhere.”

            “You say that like a character in a rom-com, setting up the first act of the story for the inevitable moment when the two heroes fall in love with a first glance, but it seems to me that would run directly contrary to your purpose... of course it would direct support Theirs... no, not your parents, no, deeper, bigger forces. The biggest conspiracy against the American people isn’t the demonization of drugs, or the staging of 9/11... But the conspiracy of love, the idea that all we must find is one another, someone to complete us, and only then we’ll be happy. It’s why we work ourselves have to death, buy homes we don’t need, drive cars we don’t want, drink ourselves straight to our darkest places listening to music we hate, all in the name of love. There will never be a revolution because we’re told all we need to find is love, then everything will be okay now and forever.

            Emile levels his gun, held tight in both hands, slides his finger ever so slightly onto the trigger, then fires, and in a flash of fire and smoke a leaden round leaves the chamber and for the life it is about to take it hangs heavily impossible in the air, now become an inevitability, but with death now so immediate, so too it becomes an afterthought, and, Emile likes to think, in this moment as the lead flickers through the air, the rabbit lives for the first time in its foreshortened life in total freedom.

            She drives amongst the streets of Albuquerque, but she is not a part of them, behind the wheel of her imported Land Rover (somehow, the American models never seemed to suit her), instead she seems to look down on the half empty city, poor and desolate, beaten down on by the sun and the cartels and the natural poverty of a land without resources of its own. (And yet they, of web 4.0, somehow they elevate it, make it the centre of Something).

            She parks her car in a lot by the Rio Grande and wanders down to the water, by which lies a bench, and here she sits, waits, watches the muddy ooze drift slowly by, lazy, having the sort of spring day all the City Rats wish they could have, quiet and warm, detached from the urban chaos.

            Eventually, she is joined by another woman, about her age, give or take, but instead of her sharp cut suit, expensive haircut, she is cloaked in dirt ladened rags, hair long and thick and greasy, a few missing teeth, youth manifests differently when separated from money.

            “Hey Emily, how’s it going?”

            “You know. Going, despite our best efforts to the contrary. What about you Cecilia? Getting enough to eat?”

            “I don’t need to eat.”
            “That is patently false.”

            “Don’t want to eat.”

            “Come on Cecilia, don’t give me that.” Cecilia gazes at the river, ponders her next words, and sees what Emily sees, and in this, the two see as one.

            “You’re my friend Emily, not my benefactor. We both make choices. All make choices. I live with mine, you with yours. I ask only for your respect of that fact.”

            “I’m sorry, I just... worry about you.”

            “And yet you could save me, elevate me.”

            “And yet I don’t.”

            “Ah yes, the great iconoclast, we all live the lives we deserve, and most of us deserve nothing at all.”

            “We deserve what we want to deserve.”       

            “Then what do we want? You think I don’t want a home and a job and a savings account?”

            “No. But would those things make you one of us? Could you ever be part of straight life?”

            “No, but neither are you.”

            “I chose to be something better.”

            “Better or worse or straight, we’ve all gotta die someday.”

            “Yeah, but wouldn’t you like to leave something behind?” Cecilia snorts.

            “What, the company? When I say, we, I mean everything always. Everything dies, man and machine, force of nature. We exist while we exist and before that and after that ceases to matter.”

            “Then what the hell are you doing with your life? Are you even happy?”

            “Are you?” The silence hangs heavy and the trees seem to dip their branches even further towards the water, the river itself seeming to bulge downwards as if God was aiming to smash it all out in one smooth stab with a lit cigarette.

            “So... how are mom and dad?”

            “Why don’t you ask them, Cecilia?”

            “Please, Emily, if I so much as bothered to show my face, they’d probably use the opportunity to make you the honorary black sheep of the family.” From beneath the folds of her clothes, out comes a small bottle of JD, and she drinks of it heavily, then passes it to Emily who takes a quick sip.

            “Yeah, well, probably true. I don’t know if I’d mind that much - might get them off my back about finding a man, or whatever their fucking problem is.”

            “What happened to your new passion project, what was it? Apostates.com? An entire new division of your company, created just to convince your parents you’re getting laid.”

            “Well, somewhat to my surprise, it’s actually turning a small profit, so there’s that. I still haven’t matched with anyone though, which is kind of shitty, considering I wrote the algorithm.”

            “Wouldn’t that be something, if the program you designed just to find someone to satisfy our parents determines that that someone doesn’t exist?”

            “It would be something alright.”

            “Maybe you could just just stop worrying so much about making them happy? After all, you run one of the most powerful companies in the world at the age of 28. Maybe you should assume that, if that doesn’t satisfy them, nothing will.”

            Emily turns from her sister, and though the sun is set for noon time, hung straight overhead, casting all in light, her face becomes of shadow, set apart from this could-be doppelganger.

           

            Emile from his office, one wall all of windows, watches the sun set in shadows, as the mountains beyond him become cloaked in shade, and as that shade rushes up to meet his home, swallowing all in black, just as the stars and moon come out and he sees all the way up through eternity into god’s nether regions, out here the stars allowed to shine bright and unblemished, Roswell just a touch too far away to poison his vision of eternity.

            With the stars up and he now amongst them, he sits back at his computer, ready to continue his next work, a story of two people meeting from across a great divide and forming an unshakeable bond, he sees an email, in the “Social” tab, one laid most often empty. The subject mentions a match and he begins to delete it, when he sees the sender is “Apostates.com.” He clicks through to the linked profile, and as his eyes scan, he sees a vision of that which his parents wished him always to be.

            Emily watches the sunset from her penthouse office, and the effect is not so grand, for the lights of the city blot out the stars, leaving only grey mass, and across from her office she sees another skyscraper, and within, another conglomeration of people working too late for reasons forgotten. She, though, finds herself content, company more successful than ever, something to leave behind.

            The day nearly done, markets across the world closed or closing, time to set off for the hills that couch her home, she checks her personal email, a luxury she rarely allows herself during the day. More of the usual, a mention of a high school reunion, sales offers, her mother looking for an update. And then, from “Apostates.com,” a match, and, somewhat hesitant, the coincidences of today’s conversation, she opens the email, and she sees a man just the sort she could see her father, he a younger man, befriending, or her mother, were her heart still with her, loving.