(This one's pretty rough. Not like they haven't all been, but this one's even moreso. But I'm think I'm starting to get an actual handle on where it's going. So, shit, hopefull this'll be worth reading sometime soon)

Eight.

I wasn’t working the courier gig when Osama put the torch to Cleveland. Shit, I wasn’t working any gig. I was just twenty, two days past my birthday, still at Western, thinking that an English degree would be a nice thing to have. My folks had put the cash together to buy me a used Caprice Classic, one of the ones that looked like an upside-down bathtub. Old cop car, still had the spotlights mounted on the doors, the hole in the trunklid for the big whip antenna plugged with a sloppily welded disk of rusting steel.

That was a fun car, friends. Wide and mean and fast. A highway cruiser if there ever was. So many nights of flying down the Meritt, the big calibrated speedometer pegged and 115 mph, fat rubber thumping over expansion joints, boombox in the passenger footwell blasting out the Pixies and Black Flag. That’s what I did, back then, in the absence of friends or any real kind of social life, just drove and drove, late nights under a full moon, chasing my headlights. It’s nothing I can suggest as a replacement for, y’know, a life, but it was nice. The romance of fast travel, of fooling myself into thinking that the perfect girl was hitchhiking just a mile or two ahead, that I’d cross into New York and there’d be an adventure, there’d be a high speed chase, gunplay, chances for heroism. The stuff that’s unbearably appealing when you’re that young, when you’re looking for an excuse to take you far away from home. When you know that you’re destined for more than the simple like you’re living, but destiny’s taking its own sweet time reaching out to sweep you away.

Yeah, I was with that car when I got word about Cleveland. Pumping gas at a Mobil station in Greenwich, eleven o’clock, the first real cold of winter whistling past me as I leaned on the Caprice's back door and squeezed the pump handle. 11/9. Easy symmetry. Horribly fucking obvious. I’m sure the Feds were watching the date, like they were watching Christmas and the fourth of July and the midterm elections. Fat lot of good, right?

I don’t really remember if I heard it from a news report playing on the sound systems at the pumps, or if I got it from the cash register kid who came out and grabbed my shoulders and cried and wouldn’t let go of me, or if I tuned in the radio to 1010 WINS as I jammed back up the highway at 100+ mph. I got it somewhere, got explosion, got radiation, got thousands, tens of thousands dead, maybe more, got that what there was of the DHS was marshalling its forces, National Guard troops and state cops and regular army and every emergency crew in the Midwest converging on the scene as fast as they could, got that President Jr. was in the air and jamming for safety, got that the Secret Service was hustling every member and Congress they could find into bunkers, got that NYC, Boston, LA, Dallas, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, every state capital, every national monument, was in state of complete emergency lockdown. Got that a lot of the power grid had collapsed, that trains had stopped dead on their tracks, wherever they were. Got that every news agency on the planet had news vans heading towards the smoke and the screaming, got that the FAA had grounded every aircraft in American airspace and that F-16’s scrambled from every Air Force base in the country had shoot-to-kill orders for anything in the air that wasn’t a bird. Got that we’d gotten hit again, and that it was worse than we’d all been worrying it would be, that our borders were as secure as tissue paper. Got that my balls had crawled up into my stomach and that I couldn’t stop crying and that I couldn’t stop punching the steering wheel.

Got it. All of it.

Mom & Dad were in their pj’s when I got home, eyes pinned to CNN. Mom cried and hugged me, Dad cried and sunk his fingers into the arms of his easy chair. I made coffee and the three of us sat and watched the reporters doing their standups twenty miles from the new Ground Zero, split screens between the smoke and the studio and an empty podium that would, presumably, be soon occupied by some harried, suited Fed who would tell us what had happened and how it wasn’t the current administration’s fault.

No, we didn’t sleep, of course. I don’t know that too many people in North America did. Around sunrise chief DHS blockhead Tom Ridge got on the air and told us that Cleveland had seen the triggering of a dirty bomb, somewhere in the heart of downtown. Several hundred tons of conventional explosives, repurposed fertilizer mainly, interspersed with a fine sand of slightly enriched uranium. Slightly enriched meaning that the stuff wasn’t anything even approaching weapons-grade, so you couldn’t make it go the big firecracker, but enriched enough that it was currently spewing out hard gamma radiation. Gamma radiation, he explained, is made up of fast-moving particles that have enough velocity to tunnel into things. Things like human beings, mostly. They tunnel in and destroy cells, weaken bone, lodge in the cellular structure of anything organic. And they keep doing it for a long time. He wasn’t sure how long, it depended on how enriched the uranium was, but they were working on it. He’d let us know.

And the really rotten part wasn’t that the stuff was there, really. It was that the explosion had been designed, it seemed, to throw all that shit as high and as far as possible. They figured the spray pattern went out about two miles. But there were high winds in Northern Ohio, and the uranium sand was fine enough to be carried aloft for quite a distance. They had projections that showed the winds carrying all those hard gamma particles fifty, sixty, as much as a hundred miles south. They were evacuating Ohio all the way to Columbus, just to be on the safe side. Citizens were leaving their homes peacefully, heading out of the way of the cloud in an organized fashion. CNN threw up a helpful graphic over Ridge’s shoulder, showing a blobby red cloud spreading through the state. Then they switched to a live shot of a packed interstate, filled with Ohio state license plates getting nowhere fast. The crawl at the bottom of the screen estimated that better than a million people were getting The Fuck Out of Town. The National Guard, Tom said, was setting up mass refugee camps below Columbus. They had water and food and bedding for up to a hundred thousand people. I guess the rest of them would just have to check into a Motel Six or something.

School was cancelled the next day. Something of a new tradition there. National tragedy; lock the doors, tell everyone to stay home. We watched tv and made sandwiches. I ran out of cigarettes and didn’t bother going to the store for more. I didn’t want to talk to anyone I didn’t know. I didn’t want to have to think up responses to conversations I didn’t want to have. I didn’t want to have to really accept what was happening. I watched tv and heard them say Osama, Osama, Osama, jihad, Muslim Extremists. I showered and shaved and watched tv some more.

Seven.

The courier thing isn’t tough. It’s boring and it’s stressful, depending, and it’s either fun or a pain in the ass, also depending, but it’s not tough. You get a call, you drive, you steal a parking spot, you run into a building with your clipboard and your smile, you fill out a tag and take your package, you run outside in time to beat ticket, you drive, you steal a parking spot, you ride an elevator, you get a signature, you call in. And then wait and get a call and drive and whatever. It’s monkey work. It’s something that generates paychecks. It’s a job.

You make little friends, the places you go a lot. The pregnant receptionist at the lawyer’s office where you always have to wait around, she tells you about her husband and about how the fetus is growing and she nibbles on little snacks behind the potted plants perched on her station and laughs when she tells you about how much she eats. The black English chick at the mortgage company, the one who looks like hiphop but talks like Masterpiece Theater, she’s flirty with that accent and gives you the web addy for the online Goth bondage club she runs. The latina lab tech who calls you cute little pet names and tells you about the guys she dates and shows you the biopsy samples that you’re about to deliver to Long Island, spongy little masses of lung cancer, bloody cuts off a tumorous cervix, a yellowed wad of cirrhotic liver floating in cloudy saline.

It’s ten or twelve or fourteen hours a day of moving things from one place to another, the last vestige of analog in a digital world. You’re entrusted with things that can’t be reduced down to code and shot through a modem, stuff that’s too precious for inhumane handling. You’re a replacement for email, for faxes, for text messaging. An mp3 can travel all around the web in the space of two heartbeats, but the master tapes go from Hartford to NYC in a dented Crown Vic doing 90 mph down the Meritt Parkway. I’ve held in my hands the financial security of first-time homebuyers, the legal writ that gets an 18-year-old bargained down from Murder One to Manslaughter, the blood sample that can match a newly deceased heart in Philadelphia to a dying housewife in Mahopac.

And for all of that, I’m nameless and faceless. I’ve got a badge that nobody ever looks at and a green polo shirt that’s all the identity I’ll ever need. I wave a clipboard and a security guard with aerosol mace and a 9mm barely looks at me as I run up the fire stairs. Receptionists hand over the confidential financial data for a multimillion-dollar company without even looking me in the eye. I get paychecks for a hundred employees, cases of twenty-year-old single malt scotch, I get diamond rings and $50,000 paintings. My signature is a scrawl. My last name is nowhere to be found. I’m a shaved head and a noxious grin and $20 shoes heading for the lobby with the potential end of someone’s career under my arm. My only trace is a yellow flimsy from a three-part form embossed with a phone number that’s two years out of date. I’m the ghost in the machine, the oil in the gears. I’m anonymous and essential and hold nearly endless power over the bastards who pay me to run their one precious, perfect, absolutely necessary thing from here to there.

Really, it’s a good thing that I’m such a nice, honest boy.

Six.

"T'were Scumblefuck what brought me down, yuhonuh. He were promising wine and chocolates, yer, wine and chocolates down in the garden, by the trees by the river. He promised, yer, and when there weren't none he just larfed and larfed and he pinned me down and then m'lord Shi-Shi, he came outta the wood and he did me, yer, did me peculiar with hot irons and what, barbed spikes and such, he..."

"Peculiar, Tug?"

"Er, yer, yuhonah."

"I don't get the reference, Tug."

"M'backside, yuhonuh. M'hole, if ye know."

"Your shithole, Tug? Your anus?"

"Aye, yuhonuh, as you say."

"Ah." Your Honor smiled with sharp yellow teeth and waved her gavel. "Please, Tug, continue."

Tug shuddered, a gray blob of pudding overflowing the witness chair. I swear, a single goddamned teardrop rolled down his blubbery cheek.

"Aye, yer, and m'lord Shi-Shi did me with his red-hot irons and what, while Scumblefuck held me down and larfed and whispered in m'ear."

"Whispering is important, Tug. What did he say?" Your Honor planted her elbows on the bench and leaned in towards the witness chair. Something sexy about that, the robe falling away from her arms, thin wrists jangling with gold. Her bangs falling across one eye. More silver than gray, y'know, in that sheaf of hair. More sparkle than fade. Finely aged. Just hitting her stride. I sat back, arms cocked over the back of the bench, grinning. Whatever the Sheik had in his flask was hitting me pretty hard.

"I dunno what he said, yuhonuh. I's yelling then, m'lord Shi-Shi going to town on me peculiar, red-hot and what."

"So, really, Scumblefuck could've been telling you that you could leave whenever you wanted, right?" Your Honor smiled wide, bright red lips wet, glistening. I held out my hand for the flask.

"Errr." Tug looked around the court, tiny little red eyes scanning for I don't know what. Cue cards, maybe. Simple hand signs from his lawyer, perhaps, signaling his next statement. Something. Fucking Tug, five hundred pounds of fat and muscle, as timid as a sheep, tears on his cheeks. Jesus.

"Should we get him in here to testify?" Your Honor snapped her fingers at a baliff who ducked out the door and came back two seconds later, holding Scumblefuck by the collar of his tweed jacket. All three feet, fifty pounds of Scumblefuck cursing and spitting and holding up fists the size of peach pits. Tug screamed like a girl. Like a little girl. Like a little girl who's just seen a spider. Scumblefuck stared and pointed at that fuck fuck and let loose a stream of profanity that'd do George Carlin proud. The imps and angels and saints and embodied emotions in the courtroom began to giggle. The Sheik slapped the flask in my hand and I spun the cap off onto the floor.

Your Honor slammed down the gavel once, twice, three times. I tipped the flask and felt hot gold slip down my throat. The Sheik put out his hand and I passed it over. Scumblefuck kept cursing and Tug tried to push himself up over the back of the chair. The baliff holding Scumblefuck tried not to smile.

"SHUT UP!" Your Honor slammed down the gavel a few more times and the courtroom quited down, except for Scumblefuck, who just kept on with the fat cunt bitch rip yer fookin' tits off and shit on yer lungs and use yer nuts as ping-pong balls while ye fookin' watch until the baliff clapped a hand over his mouth.

"All right, Tug, you can go on." Your Honor reached down and patted the mound of his shoulder.

"Well, yer, yah, Scumblefuck, he pinned me while m'lord Shi-Shi, he did me peculiar."

"Yes, Tug, you said that already. What happened next?"

"Yer, yah, well, that was it. And I come her to tell yer." Tug smiled with the nubs of his sugar-rotted teeth, pleased with the neat conclusion to his tale.

"Oh. Hmm. Well, Tug, getting a red-hot poker in your butt, well, you'd think you'd need some medical attention, right?" The Sheik tipped the flask and I put my hand out for it.

"Yer, uh."

Your Honor leaned in close. "Look at me, Tug."

Tug spun his head, rolls of fat chasing each other out of the way. His nose came to rest an inch from Your Honor's. The Sheik slapped the flask into my hand.

Your Honor crooned. "Tug, sweetie, shouldn't you be dead right now?"

"Yer, yer, uh." He turned and looked down at the floor between his splayed toes.

Your Honor leaned in closer, her lips and inch from Tug's ear, her tongue flicking his loose gray skin. "I mean, m'lord Shi-Shi doesn't screw around. If he decided to sodomize you with red hot irons, Tug, honey," a throaty whisper that sent a shiver through the crowd, "he would've poked out your eyes from the back." I tilted the flask and swallowed deep.

Tug began to blubber, his shoulders shaking. "Yer, yah, yer right, yuhonuh." Your Honor reached down and patted his quivering neck. The way her robe molded itself to her breasts as she stretched, I got this feeling she was nude beneath. The Sheik held out his hand and I tilted the flask again.

"So, Tug, sweetie," she slid her hand under a number of his chins and pulled his face back to hers, "I think you're telling me a lie, and for that lie, I think you need to be punished."

"Oh NO, NO, NO!" Tug pretended to try and pull away while Your Honor's strong fingers sank into his cheeks. His hands splintered the arms of the witness chair, his kicking feet put holes through the wood of the witness stand. Scumblefuck gyrated around and screamed past the baliff's hand, i hope she arsefoocks ye with a stallion's cock ye fookin' great lump of babyfat..

Your Honor crooked one finger at a free baliff and he swaggered on over, thumbs in his belt, grinning, head cocked to one side, cock o' the walk. The Sheik flapped his hand at me and I took another pull off the flask. Your Honor leaned over the bench to whisper into the baliff's ear and the entire courtroom audience sat forward in the benches, trying to get a look at her cleavage. The baliff grinned and nodded.

Your Honor sat back and banged the gavel once or twice and cleared her throat. I thought about passing the flask back to the Sheik and took another drink.

"Okay, Tug, I think it's pretty clear that you've been lying to me, right?" Dripping honey, syrupy, so sweet it could have been a lover's coo in the middle of the night.

Tug, his head practically between his knees. "Ah, yer, yuhonuh."

"Tug, honey," she patted his warty head, "you can't lie in court. You know that, right?"

"Aye, yuhonuh."

"So, are you ready to be sentenced?"

Tug ducked his head low, trying to hide the smile that everyone saw. "Aye, yuhonuh, if I must."

Your Honor smiled, all lips and spit-slick teeth. "Then, Tug, I sentenced you to be whipped in the plaza in the middle of town until such a time as Big Tom here," she gestured to the swaggering baliff, who grinned so hard that he twinkled, "figures that you've learned your lesson."

"Is he going to make me get nekkid?"

"Yes, Tug, buckass nekkid for everyone to see."

"NOOOOOOOOOOO!" Tug thrashed back and forth while Big Tom took him by the arm and led him out of the witness stand. Tug moaned and whined and kept walking faster until Big Tom was trotting to keep up by the time they got to the courtroom doors. Scumblefuck twisted loose and chased them down the hallway, screeching. The Sheik punched me in the shoulder and grabbed the flask. Your Honor banged the gavel again and everyone in the courtroom swiveled towards her.

"Okay, court's adjourned. Get the fuck out or I'll have the joint flooded with tear gas." She stood and every set of the eyes in the place scrabbled all over her, trying to focus on one particular swell under the gown, trying to imagine the shape of the flesh that shaped it. The Sheik took a deep pull on the flask and handed it back over. I took and drank, my eyes pinned to arcs of Your Honor's hips. She sauntered out of the courtroom, clicking away on black patent spike heels. Nobody spoke. Shit, nobody breathed. The Sheik put out his hand and I passed over the flask.

"You ready, man?"

I looked down, tried to see if my railspike was as obvious as it felt. The Sheik laughed. "C'mon, man, let's head down to the Promise." He tipped the flask. "Girls always like to see you after a day in Court."

(Inspired by red wine and The Pixies, so, shit, don't expect too much.)

Five.

Just a name for now: Scumblefuck.

Nice, huh?

C'mon, it's a good name. You know you like it. You'll be calling people that in a couple of days. You'll try to steal it, make your own character out of it, try to claim it as your own.

But it's mine, dammit. I thunk it up, I posted it. Minemineminemine.

Have a lovely night.

Four.

For me, anyway, the second attack was almost a relief. The other shoe dropping. Thanks, Osama. The tension was killing me.

(MORE TO COME>>>JUST NEEDED TO GET THE IDEA OUT)

Three.

My passport had been stamped in NY, NJ & OH in the last couple of days. Sitting in a truck stop parking lot, watching the big interstate haulers pulling up the pumps, flipping through the little blue book. CT blue, state flag blue, same color as the cop uniforms and the lawn around the governer's mansion. That deep, dark, oh-so-very-fucking-serious blue. Blue that humorless Puritans would wear on wedding days and at Christmas dinner, the blue of the ocean along the Platinum Coast in winter, the blue of summer nights after the red of the setting sun has left the sky.

Blue for CT, black and gold for NY, green and silver for NJ, crimson with purple for OH. Clean entry stamps with a bar code embossed along the lines for Citizen Travelling. The CT passports have an even thousand lines for travelers, ten pages with a hundred lines each. We nutmeggers tend to cross over the borders a lot, down to the City, up to Boston. Business and pleasure, deep troves to mine when our own little rectangle of ground gets played out.

There's been talk, lately, of recombining the old Tri-State alliance and adding in MA and RI to the mix. A superstate with a lock on Long Island Sound and a massive chunk of the northwest shore. Won't happen, though, I think. NY and MA have been eyeballing each other nervously since the first Continental Congress, that big long border out in the middle of nowhere a blurry line of distinction at best. The no-man's-land they set up isn't more than a decade old, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars worth of scanners and cameras and shotgun toting 'bots keeping each state's riffraff safely contained. Even if the governments could come to terms, the public hue and cry would squash it down. The Herald and The Times would eviserate the politicians in their editorial pages, would call for The Safety of the Citizenry, the Maintenance of The Peace. There would be mobs in Quincy Market, in Times Square. The militias would lob hand grenades at courthouses and revenue offices. It would be mad fucking chaos.

CT wouldn't care one way or another. We'll be rich as long as the Feds keep buying our helicoptors and our submarines and our jet engines, and, really, who's got the juice to tool up new high-tech production lines nowadays? Pratt & Whitney and Sikorsky and Electric Boat have all the drawings, all the techs, all the tools to keep the war machine churning over. Everyone else is back to coal furnaces and biomass. We've got the Big Reactor under East Haddam and can turn on enough power to melt every hunk of iron ore that comes out of the PA mines. We've got defectors from MIT and CalPoly sneaking across the border on a daily basis. We've got the best minds on the continent working towards keeping us wealthy and safe and contest. The state troopers carry better guns than the secret service. We're a year or two from maglev highways that'll get you from Danbury to New London in twenty minutes. A decade from full-body replacement cloning. A generation, at most, from rocketless spaceflight.

Of course, that just makes the rest of them hate us. They'll talk nice to us, buy our stuff, kiss our asses, but they're just waiting for it all to collapse. Hating the Overdog. Too candyass to fight us, but never willing to believe that they've rolled over. Even when we're alone, out on the road, there's something almost mythical about us. People back away when they see a CT passport, a citizen tattoo. Hear them whispering about how we all go out armored under our skin, how we've got implants that make us telepathic and telekinetic, that we can breathe flame and run at a hundred miles an hour. We smile with our perfect teeth and speak our eloquent dialect and shake hands with dry, smooth palms and the people we meet grin and shiver and give us as much space as they can. Inside, we're giggling like little children, watching them bow and scrape. Amazed that such a small amount of managed disinformation can work so well.

But the passport's worrying me. It's been tagged at each border by a reader/stamper, a quick and dirty search for outstanding warrants, a fast body sniff for drugs, a pulse sent back to the Fed mainframe, telling them exactly where I was, exactly when I was there. If anybody with some juice is looking for me, shit, I'm like neon out here. And the Voice, seems like he could get himself inside of the machine, if he wanted.

You hear stories about weak spots in borders. Out in the middle of a forest, or across a river. Places where the infrared contrast cameras conk out and don't get replaced for months, where the satellite flybys can't penetrate the ground cover. Places where you can slip in without letting the DHS and the FBI and the CIB know all about it. Adventure story stuff that you shoot around the dorm room. 'My cousin did it once, getting down to Mardi Gras.' 'My brother does it to shoot deer in New Hampshire.' Probably bullshit, but there's a consensus that the dealers know how to do it. Have to. There's not a border gate in the country that wouldn't pick up dealer weight of anything coming across a state line. The machines were built to be good at just a few things, and drug sniffing tops the list. The only thing the Feds pay more for than dealers are terrorists. States need as much income as they can get. But the dealers get through. Therefore, Occam's razor, the dealers know how to get through.

Which, of course, is why I'm sitting in a truck stop parking lot, looking at the parked rigs, watching a skinny blond mullet teen go from open window to open window, the drivers popping open the door, an exchange of handshakes, can practically smell the money and the meth going back and forth, and then on to the next.

The blonde mullet, he's on the frontline. He won't know shit. But his boss, or his boss's boss, they'll know. They'll be willing cut a deal. At least, they'll cut a deal with a CT hardass.

I step out of the BMW, roll up my sleeves to show my glittering New Canaan Resident tat, and stride across the baking blacktop, smiling with my perfect teeth, flexing my smooth, dry hands.

Two.

It's OH, I think, when the Nokia starts buzzing and spitting and hopping around on the passenger seat of the BMW. Why I didn't leave the fucking thing in CT, I dunno. Habit, I guess. Or just the inability to let go of something that seems so valuable. Drowning man clutching a bar of gold. That kind of thing.

Yeah, and it's buzzing and jumping and sparks are flying out of it because it gave up anything so normal as ringing weeks ago. Ringing is what happens when your friend is calling you up. When your cell becomes a conduit for, whatever, ringing, apparently, is just too fucking mundane.

But there's no way I'm picking up the damned thing when it's spitting sparks and jumping up and down like a mouse with an electrode up its ass, so there's no real simple solution until the Voice comes burbling out of the earpiece, dozens of times louder than the good folks at Nokia ever planned on a voice being, and fills up the car with subsonics and phlegm.

Davey? Davey, c'mon, man. This is silly. You're not running away from me. You're never running away from me. You're always running towards me, no matter what.

A voice like the biggest, baddest DJ that ever hit the airwaves. As deep as a mine shaft, bass to rupture your eardrums, smooth as fresh snow. The windows rattle, even in their snug frames. The surface of the rearview mirror is rippling like oil. The phone is bounding around on the passenger seat, bumping against the door, spinning cartwheels around its own center.

Davey, please, please, man. Just talk to me, okay? Let's just have a chat. Let's get this stuff out in the open.

He'll go on all damned day if I let him. He's pausing for breath, inhaling like a GE turbine warming up on the wing of a 747. The phone's bouncing up and down and up and down and I reach out and snag it in the middle of what's looking like a midair figure-8 and punch the END button and the Voice's inhale cuts off in mid-whistle. The plastic case is warm and greasy in my fist, like it always is after I get a call from him. Or Him, I suppose I should say.

I drop it and wipe my hand on my thigh and try to focus on the road in front of me. It's an interstate, I can tell you that much, and I seem to be headed for Colombus, but beyond that I'm lost. South, though, heading south. You can't get to Colombus from CT without going south, unless I somehow managed a circuit through KY without any solid memory.

Why the hell would I be going south?

Hell, that's right. That's where I'm heading. TO GET TO HEAVEN, GET A RUNNING START IN HELL. And the only Hell, friends and neighbors, that I know of within driving distance, is a big ol' one star hotel just over the border from OK.

The stars at night,
are big and bright,
deep in the heart...

Fucking hell. And in a BMW no less. I'll probably be raped, gutted, castrated, lynched and raped again within a mile of the border.

I drop the hammer and watch the BMW's speedometer climb into the triple digits. What the hell. Might as well get it over with.

Had I met him yet, the Sheik would've just creamed himself over my bravado.

One.

It's a full moon and me and the Sheik, we're riding dirt bikes out in the desert.

Whining little Honda with 250's that buzz like mosquitos and knobby tires that bite hard into sand and dirt and mud. The Sheik guns it and bounces high off a shallow ridge, a jangling bit of leather and chrome arcing high over spitting lizards and shadowy weeds, and I follow. High and up and over and crashing down, the bike flattening its suspension, my knees buckling, my arms buckling, my body compressing over the fuel tank as we hit the ground. But the bike stays up, straight and even, the front tire nestled into a smooth track laid down by the Sheik. He turns and smiles, all sunglasses and supernaturally white teeth, thick black hair whipped back by the wind. I smile back. He twists the throttle, hits a ridge and goes flying over the sand.

I'm heartbroken. I'm heartbroken and angry and falling to pieces. My bones are sagging. My lungs don't fill. I can't focus on anything further away than my hands. My ears are ringing. My teeth hurts. My tongue is mossy with mold or bacteria or dryrot. My gums are dripping red into my spit. My stomach and my liver and my kidneys, they're just floating around inside me, bumping into each other, wrapping around my spine, squeezing past my ribs. Untethered. Loose. Uneasy.

Which is why Sheik Europa, why I went and dug him up from the titty bar and asked him to take me out for the night. 'Cause it's the Sheik, y'know? Nothing but testosterone and alcohol and adrenaline, the attention span of a ten-year-old on speed, a fundamental love of fast cars, strippers, guns, motorcycles the occasional bit of mindless violence. The Sheik is where I go when I'm cruel to Mags and I need to forget what a complete piece of shit I am for a little while. For those couple days or that week when it's nothing but party and party and drink and fuck and speed over the desert on dirt bikes, hit the Autobahn in a 300 mph Ferrari that hasn't even been conceptualized yet, get in fistfights with cops, drink till I can't walk, pass out and wake up in a bed the size of a Cadillac with Victoria's Secret models snuggled up left and right.

I don't like myself all the much when I'm hanging out with the Sheik, but, really, that's better than absolutely fucking hating myself. If you don't believe that, then you've never been enough of a bastard to hate yourself. You've never fucked someone over so hard that you want to throw yourself off the nearest building, knowing that you'll be heading back to do it again in another few days, a week. When your only remaining escapes have come down to the artificial oblivion of 24 hour partying or just slitting your throat and you're beginning to not see much difference between the two...once you know that, once you've been to that part of your head...fuck, there's no point. Never mind. You know or you don't.

It's all about Mags, right? It's always all about Mags, and the Sheik knows it and he's a friend enough to not try and get me to talk about it. Just brings out his toys and turns on his smile and we go off into the night, fast cars, loose women, strong drinks. That's all I need him for, really. It's as bad as what I do to Mags, what I'm doing here, to the Sheik. But he, at least, can cut me loose, if he ever really wants to.

Which he won't. He doesn't really get it, the betrayal that's at the heart of all your fair-weather friends. All his friends are fair-weather friends. He feeds off it. It makes his life perfect and beautiful, to see his pals only at their darkest. He loves his own glitter, his own pristine existence. His friends, me, really, just show him how lovely and wondrous his life is. The joys of simplicity. The joys of the simpleton. The joys of being not-too-terribly-concerned about anything in particular.

He was the first friend I made out here. Still kinda wondering how that happened.

Just for myself, really, unless something good occurs. A reason to work on fiction every goddamned fucking night. If you know me and you're here from an invite, thanks and feel free to be brutal. If you're some damned stranger who stumbled in, well, hell, welcome. If you know what you're talking about, speak up. If you're some kid, some stumbling illiterate, some half-brained zero who took a wrong turn in the endless search for animal porn, well, really, just shut the fuck up and let the grownups talk.

Anyway, here's to hoping.

Cheers.