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.

Black man jaywalks before a cop | Theland E. Thomas

left, right, clear path

Cross.

He rounds the bend.

Oh, shit

heart pounds, sinks, fear

popping adrenaline shots-

No phone.

Blinker without lights passing.

relief

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

Falling in Love is Easy, Being in Love is Hard

First Chapter - My Name on a Car

            Out the window he (His name is Emile, he is 28 years old, and, last year, his second novel was written up by the New York Times as the “New Great American Novel.” He suffers from anxiety and depression, which becomes particularly crippling during periods of extended social interaction, in large group scenarios, and when speaking to red heads with dimples. His sole sexual experience occurred his senior year of college, with the ensuing panic attack leading to him dropping out of university. He has since developed an exhaustive interest in pornography, which has persuaded him to leave sex well enough alone, for sanity’s sake) sees a single star, this great lost soul, found himself out here for the stars and yet they now are enshrouden perpetually by clouds. In the perfect darkness of rural living, all appears as black, the night lit instead by computer screen alone, pulsing against cornea.

            The complex processes of love, distilled a simplest gesture, they call it online dating, but isn’t it really just socially approved judgment of one’s peers? A like or a pass, a yes or a no (a binary choice?), a hundred million women all possessed of beauties, great and small, slight and magnificent, legion and lonesome, all but none, suggestions of what he could have, can this really be the way to love, a yes or no to a blank-faced screen? Or is this but a crutch, for those too unable to approach the processes in person, content instead to leave out the middleman (shitty parties, late night bars?), but the process made all the more vapid in their simplification. He asks and answers at once, yet still onwards he presses.

            She of red hair, likes hiking and camping, staring at the stars, and from them what meaning does she derive? God, perhaps? The idea of her hints at something that he wishes, at heart, to be an inevitability, and even if the profile hides the reasons why she is as impossible as all the pretty faces yet passed by, some step forwards will end always in a step back, tripping table topped, she just doesn’t respond or for some reason or none it just doesn’t work out, this time and the next time and last time.

            And he asks himself why he’s here, and how? And he doesn’t have an answer, though he lusts for one, an answer, and much else. He reminds himself he’s happy (enough). That, when he plays the game, he’s not, so he should just give up, let himself succumb to his own contentment.

            He remembers a birthday party he went to once. An important one. A post-university graduation, pre-real life birthday. Not his, no. Five people were there. One not by choice, one the celebration’s centre. It cut him deep, this birthday, a friend left with nothing in the end - not the end of all things, not yet, but the end of much which once mattered, that which once flowed against the end of all things. Where will he stand at all his endings yet to come, where was he at those that have passed him by already? Will he have to stand alone, left only with his skies and his car, this desert, so chosen for its artifices of meaning, love not had, or may yet one appear before him to grant him someone to stand beside?

            And then his inbox pings and he gets a shot of dopamine, a rat in some cheap college experiment (what makes us happy, and why is it MDMA?), the simple suggestion in amongst the void self-created of someone out there thinking of him.

“Hey man,

Saw this and thought of you. LOL.

- Marco”

Then a link, apostates.com, a miniscule twitch of muscle, subconscious, then a click, unnoticed for the familiarity, not so dissimilar to waking mid-winter, frost on the window, bed warmed by another, or, alternatively, high summer, the bed comfortably cool, for its loneliness. An expansion of color, not bright or overwhelming, chosen instead for its simple eye catching boldness, and a header proclaiming “The online anti-dating service for those trying to just get the family off their back.”

And he wonders again how he found himself here. He is reminded (quietly) of why.

A family, man and woman older, 60s, early 70s, and four their juniors, one early twenties, the other three late (one hand held under the table with the other, their eyes hinting most slightly at something a fool might term Love), set across from one another at a long table, visions of their cross-wise partner obfuscated by decadent candelabras, place settings of silver and silk, money and time long past, contrasted colours, white table cloths, china, each the five wear deep colours tuned for a dance, and walls set similar shade behind the rippling afterbirth at candle-light edge except where interrupted by windows, gothic, (American?), looking out on a snow ensnared woodscape, Fairytale without a happy ending, the snow yet coming down, hard and fast, steep angle, and yet behind them, a Christmas tree, lit up a dozen colors, and this should break the mood, but, somehow, it just reinforces the general atmosphere of a place escaped from a time long gone.

She (her name is Emily, she is 28 years old, the company she founded one of the most valuable in the world, and she has had sex twice, the first time with a high school sweetheart who she promptly dumped, never to speak to again, the second drunk with a freshman, she just on the cusp of graduation, no, it’s not that she doesn’t enjoy sex, and no, she’s not a fucking lesbian, stop asking, it’s just that, well she’s 28 years old, is the wealthiest woman in the world, is not in the technology business, but the East India Company for the modern age, empire building business, and, really, she can masturbate can’t she? She has things on her mind more important than sex.)

“So Emily, how are things with Jeremy?”

“Jeremy?”

            “Yes dear, the boy you were seeing last... last uh...” the next words tumble forth slightly choked from her mother’s slight lips “last Christmas.”

            “Oh, yeah, Jeremy... sweet Jeremy...”

            “You broke up didn’t you?” Her dad never much bothered with subtlety.

            “Yeah.”

            “Oh, honey, he seemed so nice...”

            “You never met him.”

            “No, but...” Emily primes her tongue to move and her lips to separate, but her father, he cuts a glance across the table and it stabs straight into her heart and her tongue, and the truth is bit back.

Silence hangs quite foreboding, as a dead man, over the table, and none the five dare utter a syllable. Outwith the home, steel and glass and concrete (a suggestion at something?), wind whips hard, nature trying to reclaim the human soul, maybe, or simply a vaguest of hints that judgement is coming, given time.

“Well dear, you must remember, you are getting older, and there are things more important in life than, well, your career.”

“Yeah, like what mom?”

“Not to be too on the nose about this, but, really I think what I’m getting at here is love. No need to rename the wheel, as they say.”

“They don’t though.”

“Don’t be a pedant. You understand my point. You won’t always be so young and pretty.”

“Really?”        

“Really what, dear?” Her siblings, they trade glances, nervous like, they already found some sort of love, even passing thought it may be, this but an eternal precondition, an expectation signed on the dotted line along with all the other terms and conditions, and this temporary love, well it keeps their parents at bay, even as it keeps their parents together, and her brother, he thinks maybe what he could do if he was not so bound, a motorcycle against an empty, endless horizon. That, or a bottle of JD every night, as before she saved him, or so he must keep repeating over and over and over against the dark night shone in, this particular night illuminated piss yellow.

            He remembers back, as he looks over the web page, to an evening past, steering his car through desert night, back tires slipping occasionally on sand as he takes turns well past 70, it built from mere scrap with his own hands, grease and oil spilled across them, the act of building something, My Name on a Car, should be a song title (probably is), we own only that which we understand down on some deeper level, past intuition, beyond vestiges of love or devotion or carnal knowledge, down to the fundamentals of creation. But shouldn’t, then, all parents, understand perfect their children? He knows at heart this is not true and can never be true and will never be true (So honey, are you seeing anybody? No, I’m fucking not, now will you just leave me the fuck alone and never talk to me again? But of course he can’t say that...). He lacks children of blood and guts, so he loves and understands onto his car what most fail to understand onto their spawn. The love, though? The love is always the question, and doesn’t he love enough? And not the car, no, but he has his people, eccentric though they may be, a Jazz drummer in Tokyo afraid of the quiet, playing long into the night, faster and louder ever on, so that may never have that perfect loneliness that comes in the silence, the motorcycle racer from Rome loved seemingly by every woman he sets his sights on, but each night holds a revolver to her own head, daring his deepest self to just pull the damn trigger, even the alcoholic old junkyard man, famed by all his fellow drunkards and wastrels for his intelligence so immense as to lay low the basic desperation of his own existence, he knows them and he loves them, and is this love not enough? This great carnival of freakery, and he their oft-disappeared ring leader.

            In front of him, an about page, usually unnecessary on these online dating sites, it doesn’t take any time getting to the truth - “Apostates.com is a different kind of online ‘dating service,’ designed for those of us tired of the constant notion that a romantic relationship is the be all and end all of existence. It is, instead, a service to find individuals with similar views on relationships, and make arrangements by which to convince particularly over involved family members that you are, indeed, in a healthy relationship. Apostates.com is not a dating site. Instead, think of your fellow site users as partners in the grand battle against our social conditioning which suggests that romantic love is an absolute.”

            Then, the requisite “Try free for 30 days.” Damn. Tinder and Okcupid get on fine on advertising revenue and premium subscriptions, why can’t this... but, he supposes, their service is more particular, more niche, like his junkyard philosopher preaching to those well and truly committed to the one-two punch of solipsism and nihilism, not just as an idea, but a lifestyle, a prison break for the self-imprisoned.

            He begins entering his personal information, and, with his free hand he taps out a bass beat playing wildly through his head, slamming its way across an old jazz record. His hi-fi system lays silent, but the mind creates what the mind creates and for him, that is often enough, and, more often still, far too much.

            They set around a room far too empty (clean lines, Mom once said), the TV buzzing away contentedly pride of place on the mantlepiece, as all the rest sit far too quiet, glancing furtively to one another, as if something is about to go fast wrong, but what they don’t know. It can’t though, this is Home and Home is safe and comfortable, right? Especially now, Christmas tree lighting up faces un-cherubic in tones of mirth but the fake needles they are white, because, again Mom said, it is cleaner, and outside the wind is whipping harder, and Emily glances out but the view lies cloaked entirely now. She wonders what she could see out there, whether any dare venture out, to seek the utter isolation of a world past our own pre-conditions for existence.

            The TV crackles none the louder, but the following she hears, above the usual babble -

            “In China, the new Simian Flu virus continues to spread, confounding all efforts by the government to contain this deadly new disease. The official death toll stands at 2.3 million in just six short months, although independent observers estimate the actual number at as high as eight million. As the death toll continues to rise, the control of the Communist party continues to crumble, prompting rumors of an imminent coupe.

            Elsewhere, economists have estimated that, this year, the value of the Euro fell a full 22%, leading to a mass-devaluing of the government debt of much of western Europe, not to mention an almost unheard of rise in unemployment.

            While the United States has thus far avoided the most direct effects of what many are terming the “year from hell,” the decline of our European and Chinese economic allies pose serious risks for the future of the American econo...” The face flashes out and Emily’s quickly cuts over to a remote stood extended out from body, straight, aimed like gun to head, her mother’s face behind it, normally sharp eyes dulled slightly by a few extra glasses of wine at dinner.

            “Enough of that.” Her mother’s voice is curt.

            “I was watching.”

            “We’re spending time together as a family. We don’t need the TV on for that.”

            “No one’s talking.” Her mother mumbles something, but she doesn’t catch it. The silence freezes over once more and none can move but for the thick layer of ice that has crept under the window sill, across the floor, up the legs of the furniture, and across their bodies.

            Though many they wear smiles, slight though they may be, inwards they grimace, they cry, they demand of God himself for a way out, an escape from this great, immortal cage. Her little brother, well he asks to be set free, for his car’s tires to give out on a patch of black ice, the flecks of snow hurtling in perpendicular against his vision, headlights crossing out trees and an occasional flicker of what may be asphalt or just maybe death bringer, it now legion, and in this moment he wonders what he will truly see, in the place into which now he cries. He wonders if she would have loved him if he’d just tried that one bit harder, if he’d been richer, dressed better, another layer of muscles, another wry smile, another well timed joke, but he knows she didn’t and that’s what matters. He can hope all he wants for another shot, and this is what he sees in the place on which he smiles, but inwards all he can see is the sliding asphalt, and a tomorrow of darkness.

            He will live another fifteen years. The road won’t take him, not quite, but the pills that will take first his soul will claim his body once that clock runs down.

            Her dad, well, he’s already had his great tragedy, and now he ages with dignity, for dignity is all he has left. He was still just a kid when he got in that car (death and automobiles - a great American theme?) and he was still just a kid when his best friend’s brains were sprayed all over his leather jacket, and then he was never a kid again. When he got out of the hospital a few months later, he married his childhood sweetheart, and he always said that was the best day of his life, but that was an outright lie. It was someone’s best day, and someone’s worst, someone's long forgotten hurts. For him, it was just another day passed behind a shroud, a certain part of him, a part that could still feel bests lost back in the passenger seat of a Buick. But he’s here now, and he knows that Buick has long been reclaimed by a junkyard on some forgotten patch of earth, tucked maybe in between pine trees in some little town, run by the great unknown philosopher of our age. And that rusted out hull of the old car, maybe someday a forgotten artist who lies long under the stars, his own escape from the cage, will find it and build something that can roar out once more. And maybe those dreams of being a kid will be not so forgotten as he rips long through the desert. Maybe the ideal will come out once more, and the wind will whip once more through the cabin, the strains of some sad Springsteen song blasting out of the radio. Or maybe the hulk will rest forever there, settling deeper and deeper into the sands until it is forgotten forever to time.

            “Look honey, we just don’t want you to look back on this time in your life and, well, wish you’d found someone.”

            “Why don’t my brothers get this speech? They aren’t married.” Her mother smiles wryly.

            “It’s not about marriage.”

            “What’s it about then?”

            “Trying.”

            The tactility of memory is a unremarked upon condition, but do you not occasionally have one of those memories best described with that simple word, and does the simple re-experiencing of it not destroy the present a little further? The sort of memory that makes the imagined past more of a place than the present, like you could pull open its walls and step straight through, into a different existence where, it seems, through the strange drug of misplaced recollection, everything is okay, and if you could just step so far back, you could make everything okay forever more. The memories, once you begin to consider them come at you scattershot, laying in your bedroom with friends just feeling the texture of carpet after taking Ecstasy, hanging out in a back room in high school reminiscing about the future you just know you’ll have, driving fast across back roads, loud music blowing out your eardrums (there you go, the road again), considering your infinite freedom, considering how easy it would be to turn for Mexico and just go, forever on, south until the Americas run themselves out, an only alternative to the inevitable path, down a hill sloping just a little more each day downwards. You also remember being small and walking with your parents through your woods somewhere. It is near dead silent, and you are at peace. This last memory though crumbles at the seams and dark smoke begins to crowd inwards, and you consider whether maybe you dreamed it.