Under the Pull of the Water

Under the pull of the water.

That’s the expression they used. My uncle did not drown. He simply lived his life under the pull of the water. It was why he was always alone. No one could stand the tension of it; the pressure of it. He got a look in his eye every time he saw a slow flowing river or a still lake. He shivered every time he saw a tub full of water. They say an allergy is often caused by excessive exposure. I guess that makes a bit of sense now.

We were a river people. We always had been. Our father’s fathers rode logs down the rivers to the mills. Our fathers fished the bays and crewed ships down the St Lawrence. Our kin built and repaired boats. We were river people.

And yet, so few of us knew.

My uncle made people afraid.

Every time he walked by a river. Every time he went out in a boat. Every time he walked across a bridge he would physically struggle to keep his eyes off the water.

So it really came as no surprise that his clothes were found neatly folded in the bottom of an abandoned skiff next to an empty vodka bottle. It was no surprised when the police cycled through the family call tree trying to find someone who cared enough or could handle going to identify the waterlogged husk they finally found tangled up in some sunken trash half way from the shore. And it was no surprise that the duty fell to me. It was, after all, my family. They’d all lose an eye to the fates if they dared look beyond the end of their own noses. I sat a long time in that stale hall sipping cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup and trying to bury what I just saw from my mind. I was literally the worst person to do this. If I didn’t get this down and under I would never sleep again.

Because like my uncle, I knew.

The water was not benign.

It had intent. It had preferences. And some people were just plain craved.

I was twelve.

The school I attended marched us all, one day a month, across the snow field and out the gate and down the road to the University’s athletic halls where the pools would be used to teach a bunch of skinny pale preteens how to swim. The halls were old red brick with windows high up in the walls, slanting sunlight down to the water at weird angles and amplified by big round hanger lights at intervals along the ceiling. We stood around shivering as some muscled university guy explained how to not die in the water. I remember most of the boys were giggling as they looked at the girls in their bathing suits; noticing skin for the first time. I was trying to listen but I was scared. The water looked awfully dark. And the muscled university guy was wearing a really small bathing suit and a muscle shirt and I couldn’t stop looking at the muscles of his legs and feeling a weird tingly feeling.

All this for education: A bunch of cold kids about to be a bunch of wet and cold kids.

My memories of the day after that moment are jagged. I threw my dirt heavy and well and it didn’t just cover the moment of the trauma; it spread, and it covered a bunch of the things leading to and from the moment. The story, as I heard it later, was that during the free swim in the shallow end of the pool a guy named Brian Lannister saved my life. He saw that I had sunk under and had not come up. No one bothered to ask Brian why he was paying such close attention to me. He was a hero. You don’t question the little details surrounding heroics: it ruins a good story. Brian apparently got under me and wrapped his arms around me and kicked as hard as he could until he broke the surface with me and then someone screamed and then the adults came and he was a hero and I was a near drowning victim and school trips to the University pool came to an abrupt end; a thing some people still blame me for. I guess they have nothing better to spend their time and energy on. I do not question.

Brian the Hero.

Two days later Brian the Hero accosted me in the boy’s room during third period. He pushed me backwards. I tripped over a toilet and almost fell. He caught me. Big hero. He slammed my head hard into the wall and pinned me there. I saved your life you fucking little twink. You should have died, as all of you should do. But I saved your life, so you owe me. You need to be skinny, pudgefuck. So I am going to help you with that too. I am going to make you perfectly fuckable. You can thank me later. You are going to give me your lunch money, every fucking morning, or I am going to knock your teeth out with a brick. Understand?

Brian the Hero.

The thing is though, Brian actually did me a solid that day. He taught me one of the fundamental lessons of this world that would serve me well all the rest of the days. He actually did save my life that day because although I know it was his foot on my back holding me down under the water; he did not feel the water pulling at me when he finally grabbed hold of me and pushed for the surface.

He did not feel the anger or the sacrifice being pulled away at the last moment. He did not feel the water’s sudden hunger for me.

He taught me the truth of the thing that would make me weary for all of my days, but explain things to me like the fate of my uncle.

He taught me that the water was not benign.

And some people were just plain craved.

One summer night a girl named Kimberly jumped off a bridge. Kimberly was a bright and vivacious girl. Everybody loved Kimberly. She was the one who always volunteered to help organize things. She was the one who would stop every time someone near her needed help. She would leave her bike on street corners and get off to help old people cross the street. She would give all of the money in her pocket to someone sitting on a street corner having the worst day of their life because, well, nothing she would do with that money would matter more than that person having their first meal in who knew how many days. In a world of people going out of their way to skin the meat off of everything around them for their own gain Kimberly would give her arm, freely and willingly, to help someone in trouble.

Which led to her jumping off a bridge.

The story I heard came while I was laying on a thin mattress on a floor of an apartment filled with furniture made of milk cartons and cardboard; books and empty beer bottles covering every conceivable surface. A typewriter sat on the only table and a small television sat on the floor in the corner lighting the room with the flickered blue/white light of the static of an unclaimed station. My boy at the time, a University guy with amazing legs who had a penchant for bikini briefs, was curled up under my arm telling me about her. We were passing a joint back and forth, the ashes falling onto my chest and belly and his finger drawing strange patterns in the still burning ash. It was old school magic on a full moon night. It was one of those rare nights where I felt something someone might mistake for happiness.

Kimberly had come across three guys by the side of the road beating on a fourth. It was just one of those things. Without the context of the story I can neither judge not condemn; despite feeling a slight growl of anger at the concept of a wolf pack and an unfair fight. I do know one thing though; I am a coward. I always have been. I am no good in a fight. I would probably have jumped into the bushes to witness, and later, to testify. Or I would have ignored it and walked on and let the fate of others play out as their stories and decisions decree it should.

Kimberly found a heavy piece of wood and approached the fray. The details vary on what happened next. No one seems to know what happened to any of the four men involved in the story. All that seems to matter to the narrative is that the next scene involved Kimberly, her clothes torn and her lip bloodied, running out onto the Amnesty Bridge and with their heavy boots rumbling the wood beneath her feet, threw herself over the side… missing the piling by inches and crashing rather ungracefully into the water. It was the sort of thing they tell you happens all the time; usually dumb kids jumping into the water on a hot summer evening and smashing their brains out on the piling or the supports and getting found a few hundred yards upstream in the rushes. But Kimberly fell, and missed the piling, and hit the water, and despite losing consciousness from the impact woke up a few hundred yards upstream on her back in a stony cove.

“They say she never stopped laughing when she found her way to a corner store with a phone. She never stopped laughing when the police came to talk to her and took her to the hospital to get checked out.”

“That was probably adrenalin. I giggle like a madman every time I get the shit kicked out of me.”

“Yea, but you like that kind of thing.”

“Only when you do it sweetie.”

The University Guy says nothing.

By all accounts, she should have died. I have gone out to that bridge and bit my lip and looked down. There was no way. The water should have taken her. Even if she had avoided dashing her brains out, the impact should have broken bones, not just bruised some ribs. She should have screamed, swallowed water, and gone down.

There was a girl named Kimberly, a girl that everyone loved, that the water did not want. Did it feel the world still needed that blinking little firefly of goodness in our perpetual twilight? Did it feel revulsion? What caused those forces that grab and pull me so violently in my dreams hold her up and guide her broken, unconscious body to safety?

I sometimes have dreams about a girl named Kimberly. In my dreams she married a strong jawed greying man named Brian who tries to drown her in a bath tub. He stands on her chest pushing her down under the water and masturbates as she struggles to surface. Then, sated, he leaves the room without a glance at the body. He never sees those green grey eyes snap open. The water doesn’t want her. He never sees her surface, or smile as she reaches for a heavy piece of wood that she finds behind the toilet.

I never actually see her beating him to death but on some nights, some really, really good nights, I do get to hear it in my dreams.

They say it was murder, and a really easy one to solve. The story defied most logic (as all acts of sympathetic magic tend to do) but the crime itself was easy enough to solve. After all… she had left the gun in the sand in a circle of stones and even drew arrows in the sand leading from the road to it. His ID, and his wallet, and his cell phone were all placed in a water proof bag and nailed to a tree; a giant chalk circle and arrows on the bark pointing to it as well. The gun was a bog standard revolver; Smith and Wesson, 32 caliber, one round fired. A note, on simple lined paper in an archaic form of cursive, was sitting at the foot on the tree under a rock… with an arrow of twigs pointing to it.

It read: My name is Cassandra Nova and I live in the second cottage down the Markham Lake access road. I am usually found there or about most days. If I am not there you can find me at the Church in Markham helping out or at the Metro in McCain getting my groceries. I am aware of the criminal nature of this act but, it having been requested of me, it was what needed to be done. I have lived a simple life helping those who have nowhere else to go. This was simply another case of that. I have all of our correspondence to help explain WHY this happened, in case you need it to help or inform your work. I look forward to meeting you. I will have coffee on.

Like most cases of sympathetic magic it defied logic. The most that the divers and the forensic teams could put together was that he had walked out into the water carrying the cinder block that was tied around his neck. He walked out into the water until it reached about chest height. When he began to falter; in either desire or of fear, she fired a single shot that he took to the shoulder causing him to drop the block and be pulled under.

I don’t think anything will happened to Miss Nova.

The water protects those that provide for it, just as it devours those that fear it.

It is a predator, water is. It really, really loves those that fear it. But, it is also part of an ecosystem. It knows that everything remains connected and, in that, it must work with others, and protect others, on occasion.

There is a reason why we evolved the way we did.

We are mostly water.

I am sitting on a rock facing the setting sun.

My feet are dangling in the water.

I can feel it.

I can hear it.

Some people were sitting here with me a while. We shared a bottle. We told stories. They faded away. They wandered off. I don’t blame them. In fact, I very much understand. I think they are probably seeing it in my eyes. I am thinking about my uncle. I am thinking about Brian. I am thinking about the goodness of someone like Cassandra Nova and the unworthiness of a girl named Kimberly who was, at her most basic, a being of pure unconditional love and thus without taste to something like the water. I am contemplating what her rejection makes someone like me; so wanted, so desired. I am sitting looking at the golden light bouncing off of the water and will admit to its beauty but know better about feeling happy or comfortable in this moment.

When you are under it, or when you are of it, or when it is looking openly at you; it is dark.

The darkest of the dark.

It may be today. I do not know.

It may be tomorrow. I do not know.

I do not know much of anything except that it is there. Always there. Whispering at me. Growing in me. Reaching and caressing my toes, my ankles… pulling, but not pulling hard, enjoying the tease of it and the buildup of it.

When it happens, please know, it had nothing to do with you.

It had nothing to do with anything.

This is old world magic.

This is an ages old affliction.

My people are of the river.

And the river, the water, always required a tribute.

It pulls at those of us it deems worthy.

Those that bloodied ourselves on the rocks of our childhood terrors and years later kept spilling blood. Those that wrote to women of old world power like Cassandra and presented her with a victim who may not have believed the truth or may just have believed I was some misinformed fetishist with a suicidal ideation but was bound to help me out either way. Those of us that were taking a beat down from three hired bad boys from the leather bar knowing full well that Kimberly would come to my aid and, being of brave heart with none of my fears (in fact, she tried harder than most to teach me to swim in high school), would jump off that bridge in a heartbeat. She was wild that way. A fearless loving godness. Pure goodness. Of course she took to caring for my queer, ridiculous and traumatized ass.

When it happens, please know, it has nothing to do with any of you.

I love you all and always will.

I just never stop hearing it.

I am forever under the pull of the water.

Nuthouse Revelations

i) To Stay His Hand

It’s something that a lot of people have given a lot of thought to. It’s the kind of thing that keeps the open-minded up late at night. A lot of people sense that he has power but in these days of classifications and categorizations they have a hard time defining it. He is certainly not rich. He lives, and is comfortable, a lot closer to the poverty line then most people would like. He’s not famous. Half the people who see him don’t know his name. He has no time for politics unless its to make fun of politicians with a cup of wine in his hand. And yet, he has power. Some people feel it radiating off of him as he walks down the street. But these people are far too sensistive to be of much use to anyone. Some people see it when they are looking into his eyes. But these people are foolishly in love. They’ve considered having him arrested but they fearing giving him a stage on Court TV. They’ve considered having him murdered but, having learned their lessons, they fear nothing so much as the creation of a martyr. They’ve tried to have him hurt but his world is dominanted by a golden rule of four: Break one of his fingers and he will break four of yours. They’ve sent hookers at him and now he has apostles. They’ve pumped drugs into his arm and now his meekness is cool. They know how it happened the last time and they know that it can’t happen again and yet he is here, and they feel it… the taints of the divine that radiate off of him are all so subtle when he’s touching the sick and explaing sunsets to the blind. And for the love of, well, him…. don’t get him going on the subject of demons. Mad fuck can’t stand those traitorous little shits.

They plot and plan and scheme. They are mad to stay his hand.

Because he’s back.

Which means their time is about up.

ii) Scattered Wings

The good father gives me aslyum, albeit wearily…. his faith not completely reconciled with what his senses were telling him of what I am. He had heard the stories of course, news of the falling ones were all over the major networks. CNN had gone into full crisis coverage mode and were desperately looking for a priest to provide them with some decent colour commentary. There were gatherings of the faithful forming in just about every large field in America. Banks were closed and the might juggernaught of human industry… boredom… finally found itself relieved of it’s crushing burden. Not since Y2K has their been this much talk of the rapture. Not since the millennium had so many people thought about the impermanence of life or the positions of the stars in the sky or the future. For once, they considered that it might not be as inevitable as they had thought.

He steps aside and lets me in. I come in awkwardly through the small door, the case with my trumpet hitting the good father in the belly. I smile and shrug and make what I hope is a hapless and hopeless gesture. He sighs and shakes his head and leads me to the living room.

It didn’t have to be like this of course. Nothing ever had to be as difficult as HE made it. He was mad ass crazy for the dramatic. Of course, if we could talk… if we had been designed with voices that could shape sound instead of just light, we could tell you the truth about what was going on. It is not in our design to lie. This is probably why he didn’t give us voices. Of course we know what this chaos would bring. That, really, was the whole point. But we speak only in light. The good father gives me asylum. His housekeeper sets me up on the couch as well as she can with the wings getting in the way and gives me a bowl of barley soup.

The good father locks himself in his office with a bottle of bourbon and a rosary. I honestly don’t know which one will help him more. I hide behind the curtains and keep my eyes trained on the darkening sky. My case, with the trumpet, sits at my feet.

I think I am supposed to pour my bowl out upon the Earth. Millions die. Film at eleven. I don’t know. I forget how it goes. It haven’t read the book in a long time. I can do a mean Dizzy Gillespie on the trumpet though.

I pour forth my bowl. My soup makes a hell of a mess of the carpet.

I pray to god, Hey Chief, remember me? My prayer? That he’ll rapture away the housekeeper before she acts on the look of murder I see in her eye.

“So, what you’re saying is the end of the world is night and…”

But he says nothing to me, his words are all used up.

He just stares at his Jello, and scratches at the lesions on the back of his neck with fingernails that he will not let our keepers trim. He wonders where his hookers went. He wonders why I am not carrying my trumpet. He wonders why there are feathers all over the blood stained tile floor.

The Conspiracy (123 Days Remain)

The boy was broken early and he never got better. I don't know what happened that last day. Even in a world of instant communication and 24 hour news; when those that want their laundry hidden thus command, the laundry remains hidden. It would take days under the bed to find the crusty socks and cum stained sassy panties. And they have dogs. So even the most devoted of us will be scared too scared to look.

This is the new world.

There will be whispers over scarred pub tables. There will be locker room banter from bit players in the B Plots that you might catch if you happen to be hiding in the right stall on the right shift change but there will never be any actual proof.

This is the new world.

So you are left standing there, forehead to the sweating tile wall of the shower as you try to scorch feeling into yourself just knowing that the reality in your mind is as good as any other for the end of the story. If they removed him from the field, any old tale will do. So as you stand there, weeping, you realized that as much as it hurts and as hard as it will be; the writer must put pen to paper. The writer must tell his story or else he will be, forever, lost.

And you love him too fucking much for that.

The boy was broken early and he never got better.

It will probably start there. For everything else that he was; everything that he did; all that he wrought; all that he destroyed; all that he stood for and all that he said (he said it... I swear to god he said it); the boy was broken early and he never got better.

I don't know what happened that last day. I only know the determination with which he walked out of my life, armed, wanting to make a difference. I knew that it was coming and I could do nothing to stop it. I was smitten. I was foolish. I thought I could heal him. I thought that I was enough. I fell in love with a dream. I thought that those moments we had; sipping beers, shagging in our shitty motel room bed, endless nights talking under that blinking neon glow; I thought that would have been enough.

I was wrong.

I don't know what happened that last day. I only know that he left me there spent, sweaty and sated; crashing towards a feeling on intense alone that would forever defy my ability to describe or explain. I only know that he left, armed, so that he could live out his anarchist cowboy dreams.

Then I got the call that he had been found up North. Off the record, you understand. You never heard this from me.

Then I got the call that they had to lock him away, for his own good you understand, mentioned only in redacted files slipped into the burn boxes and secure vaults of the Ministerial Men in their expensive well cut suits and a National Police Force with a fetish for horses and hazing the new recruits.

Then I got a call that he was dead.

And with his death came a confirmation. Someone, not me, had walked into a medical examiner's office and, when the sheet was pulled up and off of his beautiful and (you didn't hear this from me man) broken face: someone, not me, had identified the body. The boy had been broken early and the man was released to a stranger to be put in the ground or... used as a prop or... sat at a table where they can watch his face slowly decay as they toast his absolute and perfect failure.

They released his body, under the fake name, to a stranger.

The cover was good. The cover runs deep.

This is the new world.

I do not know what to make of these scattered fragments that I have managed to unearth. I do not know what to do with these feelings. They are erasing him. They are erasing everything about him. There are days, too many days, where I question what I have known and felt. The room, I am still in the room, has lost his scent. He no longer haunts it. I can look at the bed and simply see the bed; not the lingering image of him splayed out in smiling up at me. I do not know what to do with these scattered fragments. I have done my time. I swear I have. I have done my time in mourning. Why do I still feel like this?!

I have done my time in hiding. I have done my time with cigarettes and cheese and coffee; scotch and cigarettes; frantic masturbation in the hope that orgasms will unlock memories and make me feel anything other than this emptiness. I have done my time trying to figure out the one guy who might have been the love of my life had I anything like the proper wiring for love within me. Suffice to say, it didn't work. I have spent one hundred and twenty-two days sitting here chain smoking and trying to prove that he didn't die in vain and that something, anything, could be made of his life.

I think I am beyond living in pain, and fear, and doubt.

And yet, I still feel like this!

I think I am beyond anything.

Like him, this is me on the 123rd day.

This is the new world.

It has not escaped me that to hide someone, they have to know what to hide. There is existence in the shape of the hole they are trying to fill.

It has not escaped me that those whispers that have come back to me came back to me.

They know that I exist. They know that I am here. They hope that I am broken beyond repair. They hope that I am twisted beyond caring. They hope that I will not get it into my head to go forth and have a look.

I know that if I were to peer out these blinds I would likely see something here that doesn't belong. For all their arts of magic and trade craft no one is perfect. There is always a tell. They know that I am here. They know what I know. They know who he was, to me, and that makes me a danger to them. I am surprised they have not yet delivered a message. I wonder about the nature and the strength of their hope.

I am surprised they have not yet delivered a warning. Maybe they are waiting. Maybe they are waiting to see what I do. If I stay here, like a good boy, trapped in this room and the memories; drinking my drinks and trying to fuck myself to death in memory of him they can get away with just a light surveillance for one of their dark suited fuck ups.

Or the writer might write, because there is a void, and I keep hearing that nature abhors a void. The shape of the hole is a story in itself. A curiosity. Someone may ask, which means, someone may ask me.

I wonder how much they know about the timing; his prolific use of the magic of suns and hours and days. I wonder if they know the meaning of the moons, or how much they know about the mythology. Am I dealing with mortal men with mortal desires? Am I dealing with a people bought with comfort and money and dental and retirement plans or am I being watched by puppets, by shadows, by the things the medications are supposed to prevent me from seeing?

I should mention that.

I should be clear about that.

There are drugs. There are drugs that they insisted I take in exchange for no longer being held in those soft white rooms. There are drugs that they insisted I take in exchange for their silence on subjects that might prevent me from obtaining those comfortable things like comfort and money and dental and retirement plans. There are drugs that they insist I take to prevent me from seeing the wheels within the wheels and just grounding myself in the simplicity of the moment. They will keep me out of sight. They will keep me out of the system. They will keep me from being ground up by the law.

The boys were broken early, and they never got better.

It is why they fit so well together. Shards of a whole slipped together like the puzzle pieces of a much hidden truth. Two separate stories, two separate histories, flung in opposite directions came together like velcro and became a narrative. Maybe that's why it hurts so fucking much now that we've been torn apart.

So is it the suits?

Or is it the Shatterlings?

Is the Oligarchy of the rich and powerful who's machines grind up the Earth and the poor who walk it for their own inflated consumptive desires or is the Theonomy?

I have seen them both.

Is it the Government's man trying to fit in at the corner of the bar (seriously brother, who reads a book in a honkytonk) or is it a shadow?

I used to see them. I used to see them clearer before the drugs. Now that I am off of them the true sight is coming back.

Like him, it has been 123 days.

They have worked their way through my system.

I can see again. I can feel them again.

They are here. These god’s children.

They don't love us.

They are not here to save us.

We were broken early. We never got better.

I can smell them. I can hear them.

The armies have started making moves. The ground trembles slightly beneath the weight of them. Maybe war is coming. Signs and portents. Signals blasting over alien frequencies; commands, pleas, entreaties. The dead mouse in the shower. The girl next door who will not stop crying. Languages we don't understand but voices we empathically feel. Some are angry. Some are frightened. Some feel pity. Some render us insane to even think on.

It had been 123 days of bliss.

The boys found one another. They lay together. The shards combined and they became bound.

From singular stories came a dual narrative.

I don't know what happened that day.

I don't know what happened to him.

They erased him.

They know I am here.

It has been 123 days.

I am a name in redacted files heading to the burn boxes and locked cabinets of Ministerial Men in expensive suits and a National Police Force that looks faggier than I do in red.

There is no corroborating proof.

There are no police reports.

There are whispers, whispers, always whispers.

And the trembling ground. And the shaking hands of strangers trying to get shot glasses to lips. There is the strange behavior of children. There is the way dogs act strangely around me now. I know it. I know it. I feel it. The writer must write again. Nature abhors a void. The infection exists. The angels are falling and the shrapnel of them are fucking things up good and proper in the world of the second, more beautiful child. The curious sadists are moving shadows around the board. The men in suits are building greater and stronger machines to grind us into dust.

There are shards here.

All over the floor. I step on one getting out of the shower. They blend into the ugly shag carpeting. There are shards all over the floor. Bits of me. Bits of him. Bits of the angels. Bits of the shatterlings. There are people. I know there are. There are people like me. There are people who look, who see, who know. There are good and proper people with good and proper magic slowly speaking spells, gathering power unto themselves because like me they feel it.

They know.

It has been 123 days.

And like him, it is time to leave this room.

It is time to write things down.

It is time to see what the fuck is going on.

He was broken early.

He never got better.

And he only came to realize when he stopped taking the drugs he traded freedom for and accepted a single simple truth.

I am me.

And fuck them for hating it.

And with this thought: he will bring about the end of their dominance of the beautiful human world.

It has been 123 days.

It is time to leave the room.

Unity

If it is a diary then he wrote it with the peculiar dyslexia achievable only through pure dyed-in-the-wool shithouse mania. Insanity personified by the use of certain words scribbled upon the page. Dill had dealt with manifestos before. He believed there were no written words that could disturb him. Then there was this. This thing. This monstrocity. This thing was simply beyond. Beyond his ability to comprehend. Beyond his ability to deal. Never had he let words scared him before.

This thing was more than he could handle.

It was formed like a journal except that it went backwards in time from the beating death of the author, through a thousand acts of violence to the one normal day the author seems to have lived.

April 20, 2000

The end point, or the beginning, depending on which way time flows in your world.

April 20, 2000

On this day the author woke early. He wrapped himself in a blanket and put on a pot of coffee. He ate a light breakfast while reading a few chapters of an Ed McBain novel. He showered and he dressed. He bought eighty-three dollars worth of groceries. He went home and masturbated, twice, to an X Rated web movie starring some Russian girls that seemed far too young to be wearing that much make-up much less getting it on with one another. He called up some friends to convince, cajole or trick them into doing Pho for dinner and then joined them afterwards in the pub. He was home by midnight and drank some warm milk while watching an episode of Homicide: Life on The Street.

He wondered where she was that night.

He hoped she was having fun.

The next day, so three pages previous in the diary, he would kill a man in cold blood.

He would take the life of his neighbor of seven years, a man named Alexander Ramius. He would put a hammer to his head the moment he opened his front door. He would then walk into his house and turn down that damn stereo. He would admit, of course, that Carl Orff was a genius. Some of his music moved him in ways the four chord rock of today just could not. But, if he had to hear “O Fortuna” one more time… just once more… and the daft bastard wasn’t even listening to the opera. He lwas listening to the soundtrack of “The Doors” movie. The god damned Doors!

The day after that (or the day before, again, he was influenced by that time thing) he would writes pages about the fact that blood, or at least the blood of this one women laying in this one bed, was in fact rather warm. So let it be known, he put in a note beside the bed for whoever found the body, that she was killed in warm blood. Not cold. Such things are important for posterity’s sake. Thank you.

In thirty days six men carrying steel piping would beat him to death. Did they know him? Was there a reason for it? Of course there was. Six men don’t randomly search out heavy steel pipes and roam the streets looking for someone to beat to beat the tar out of. Critical insanity is for those of the european tyrannical and dictatorial stock, possibly brought about by all those centuries of inbreeding. There is always a cause and there is always a reason. It may not be rational, but it is always there.

So, by comparison, April 20 was a normal day.

Except Dill knew that this day was not, nor could not, ever be considered normal. April 20, 2000 was the day that Kara was taken from him- the electrical current of the soul snuffed by the bungling incompentence of an ER surgery team at Boston General. Complications, they say, of trying to pull a .32 slug from the cavity around the heart.

The bullet had been taken into her soft breast while he was having one for the road with his friends at McGinty’s Hall. The current of her soul flickered, flashed out and blew the fuses while he lay on the couch in his living room wondering where she was and whether or not she was having fun.

April 20, 2000

That was the day he found a killer’s manifesto amongst her private things written in a hand not completely unlike his own. He was standing in her bedroom, her underwear drawer open before him. It was hidden in there, amongst her panties and bras and condoms. Wrapped in a black lace thong.

That was the day Dill took up the way of the gun.

They say that destiny is already written and that there is a unity between our souls and the words on that page. They say that some of us even get to see the book. But I tell you, they tend to say lots of things in attempts to seem smarter then they actually are. As a child of the 20th century I have been born and codified into the church of the propagandist. I am a spin doctor. I am what I represent, not what I am. By words on a page. By stories in the news. By the things she told her friends about me that night, before the gun, before the bullet, before her life ended.

With book in hand, Dill was of the gun now.

He wears a broad smile upon his face.

He had no regrets as he moved towards page one, gun and book in hand, ready to be murdered.

Unity.

Unity is all.

So say the words, on this page.