He woke up that morning with embers in his skull. There was half a bottle of whisky on the table and half a page of nonsense in the typewriter he didn’t remember typing. He skimmed it in the dusty glow of the desk lamp. Something about glaciers and foghorns. Bubbles slipping out of a dented hull. Then a bit about pickaxes and clouds that was italicized. He pulled it out of the typewriter and flipped it over. Today he would be a cartographer, an explorer of far off lands, a records-keeper in a candle-lit study on board a moldy, creaking galleon. The floor was moving under his feet, and he almost believed it.

He drew his pencil from the flimsy scabbard of his pocket. The pain in his leg where he had slept on it told him it was there, and did not need to be sharpened. He switched off the desk lamp.

The pencil began to move, and he watched it intently, wondering what his arm was drawing. It must be something marvelous and imaginative, for his hand to move with such deft fury. The strokes were intensifying, the page slowly darkening as his fingers shaded and outlined and sketched. Through the darkness he could see faintly the grain of the table manifesting itself in the wrinkles of the stale graphite. The elevations of the mountains and valleys would have to be dictated by the wood of the table. There was no way around it. Nothing else to draw on.

The pencil scratched for what seemed like a year and a day, the ship rocking back and forth, his vision blurring in the quivering candlelight, the walls of his study folding in on themselves as the sailors slaved to guide their vessel home somewhere far, far up above. He listened to the sound of boots against the deck, hearty laughter, and urgent orders yelled over the din of countless storms. He charted the coastline as they sailed, measuring each edge of the phantom continent, drawing rivers that roared like animals and overgrown forests and mighty lakes that reflected the moon at night. He polished his map to the final detail: an elegant compass in one corner, a mighty golden point aiming northward.

Theo set his pencil aside with a motion he thought would have seemed significant from an imagined perspective directly over his shoulder. He was retired, and the world would search long and hard before finding a cartographer with the skill, and what’s more, the abject humility he had managed to attain and preserve over the course of his arduous career.

He switched on his desk light to see what he had drawn.

Before him on the table, sketched with laudable dexterity on the back of a meaningless dream sequence, displaying artistic techniques of texture Theo had never before learned or utilized, was a lucid rendition of a brick wall.

Theo stared at the picture with what he wished was disbelief, disgusted to find not a piece of himself surprised, even as his eyes rolled over the beautifully detailed compass that lay tucked into the corner of the page, inexplicably without points of any kind.

Please inform me if you are still alive out there, wherever it is that “there” is.

Chances are, I would like you to know that I am alive, too. And I miss you very much, whoever it is that “you” are.

If my last correspondence with all of you lovely people isn’t enough to persuade you that I should not attempt to construct sentences when I’m suffering from severe sleep deprivation, I don’t know what will.

Except, perhaps, this here entry I’m writing right now.

~~Right now~~

Here we go. Okay!

But first, I must attend to my laundry, which is at this moment being peppered with bagged lavender in the room below the room I am in now. (After several cycles in the dryer, these same lavender bags, I will have you know, can be opened and sprinkled on the surface of one’s carpet. Later, after much of the wonderful scent has been absorbed into the fibers, you can vacuum it up. It’s great.)

Here I go–

(Standing up, now.)

Okay, my clothes are sufficiently dry. Is it wrong of me to enjoy doing laundry? I am referring here to the folding aspect of the chore. You know, it’s not even so much a chore for me. It is, I think, a hobby. It’s a nice thing when your hobbies just end up being things you would have to do otherwise, though I suppose laundry isn’t necessary for everyone. For instance, there’s this guy at work that I like a lot. He’s a real nice guy. He spends most of the night washing dishes and listening to Animal Collective. But, man, that guy fucking stinks. His ex-girlfriend, who happens to be one of the few friends I have these days, told me, once, that he stinks even after he gets out of the shower. I think that’s sort of cute, actually. He’s really hairy and has severely Eastern European parents back in Boston, supposedly, so maybe that explains it. Just the other night I happened to meet his roommate, whose name was Renee. What a nice girl she was. She told me, candidly, that this guy — he’s Alex, by the way — never does laundry. Never. Never ever! Dude can hug a pillow, she says, and the pillow will completely absorb his scent. And boy is it strong. Whenever he walks by me, there is literally a stink that hangs in the air where his body has just passed through. It’s gotten to the point, as creepy as this sounds, where the scent has sort of grown on me. I guess I just really like this guy. Honestly, he’s a swell guy. I’d have him over to my house every day if I thought that his unique musk (terrifying, unworldly odors) wouldn’t ruin my carpeting with his socks. No amount of lavender is going to get that shit out. Damn, that’s a shame. I really like that guy. What a nice guy. (That’s a hell of an Achilles heel.)

I guess what I meant to convey in that last paragraph (I’m very tired) is that laundry, to this guy, is an afterthought. Maybe it’s a non-thought. To me, it’s how I like to spend twenty minutes a week — just folding laundry on my bedroom floor. It’s sitting behind me in a huge pile right now, waiting for me to form beautiful creases in its lavender-scented fabric. I am hotly anticipating this mathematical action. What does this make me? I don’t know — something bad, though. Good thing I don’t care about anything, or I’d be in a hell of a lot of trouble right now, which is to say that I’d have a major personal crisis on my hand, what with enjoying folding laundry and all.

Please excuse me while I perform the most satisfying part of the week to come. I sort of wish, in a way, that I wasn’t being completely honest right now. God, I need help.

Okay, so . . . that’s all done, now.

It’s not so much the folding that interests me as does the finished product. I like stacks of things. I love ordering magazines and books and so on. It just looks so nice, having rectangles of equal length and height stack up like that. I create little squares with my t-shirts and oh my lord do they ever look satisfying in a neat little pile. About a year ago I ditched my dresser and placed a huge wooden box with three faces on top of the dresser with the intention of filling it with clothes. Why, I thought, must I bury clothing beneath other clothing in a big box filled with drawers? I always ended up wearing the same shirts and pants because I just lifted stuff of off the top layers, which were then washed and place . . . back on top of my other clothes. They say you’re supposed to do the same thing with produce so you don’t forget about it in the crisper bins, should it rot out of your sight. I like it all upfront and there, food, laundry or otherwise.

So, this box — it’s real nice. See, this way I get to stack t-shirts and corduroy pants in enormous, towering stacks and select from their colors and shapes and textures at a glance. Does this make sense? Maybe it’s just a physical manifestation of my unhealthy thought processes. (Who the hell enjoys stacking things besides sociopaths?) And all of my socks, all two-hundred of them (oh God I’m so twisted), create a mountain of cotton behind everything else. I can pick what I want to wear at a glance. It’s so great! Maybe that’s what jolted my interest in laundering my clothing. I wish I could demonstrate to you how fast I sort and fold everything. The whole process is really spectacular and beautiful if you’re the kind of person who will never be accepted by society.

What else, what else . . . Well: I have been sleeping on a yoga mat at the foot of my queen-sized bed for maybe two months now. A few years ago, I slept inside my walk-in closet for six whole months, which is extremely sad. I’m not even kidding when I say that the mental image of that point of my life just flashed through my memory at the brief thought of composing the previous sentence, and it filled my whole being with dread and regret and horrible black-fucking-nothing. The whole yoga mat phase I’m currently going through is nothing like that. It’s just too hot up there on the bed, among other things. That and I like having the novels I’m currently reading, whatever those may be (I won’t say), and my little brown journal given right next to my head on a little shelf I ordered from Muji. The journal as well as the books are of course in a neat stack (phone a doctor, please). I have a smaller notebook that I use to make lists of ways I can better spend my time. When I use the list, it works. I end up with really productive days. Please know that your idea of a productive day is likely far different than mine. I have to remind myself to go outside, for instance. I have to remind myself to do normal things, sometimes (frequently). At the end of every night, I usually add to it, mapping out the very next day and so on. Next, I write a few sentences about what it is I hav done and what I’m thinking at the time. I picked this up from my friend Eddie’s grandfather, who, before going to sleep every night, briefly jots down three or four quick sentences that define his day: “Swam in the morning, did fifteen laps; Eddie went to Maryland to see friends, will be home on Thursday; dinner was delicious, had roast beef with carrots; played Solitaire and watched a television program before bed; accepted mortality, awaiting the inevitable.” It was really fascinating to read this stuff without permission one day. I liked it. I thought, hey, I’ll do that, too. It took me a while to remember that I wanted to end my day the same way Grandpa Long does, but I’ve been keeping up with it and, yeah! It’s great! Thanks, Grandpa Long.

The yoga mat is of adequate comfort. I do not often sleep. Man, I sure wish I did. I just don’t know when I’m supposed to anymore, because I’d rather be doing other things. Often I simply lie there for hours and hours without realizing that I’m not asleep. I’m not conscious either, but I’m not sleep — how strange, yes. I guess I just rest there and listen to the noise in my head. It’s getting so loud. When will the sounds cease to be so loud? I need some sleep, over here. Last night was the first time in three months that I went to sleep before 5 am. Wow! That’s pretty bad. I should really try to do something about that. It’s only 2:30 right now, so I promise to stop before 3 am. See, I don’t want to stop, though, because stopping means going to sleep, and sleeping means several precious hours of my day are going to vanish and then I’ll have to snap into consciousness and drive to Baltimore. I only ever go there when I have to work, so you can probably guess why I’m going there in the morning. Man, what a waste of fucking time all of this is! I’d like my time back, thank you! Give it to me!

(Where is it?)

It was so bad for me back in May that I ended up going to work twice without any break in life between the two shifts, which is to say that I went to work and then stayed up all night and all the next morning until I had to go to work again. I really felt like I’d gotten in a horrible car crash that day; it was a hazy time. I recall that dreamlike feeling of drowsy waking life, and scanning my recent thoughts and memories for a sudden end to a car ride — had I died? — and more importantly, was Hell just a restaurant in Baltimore? It seemed feasible, to be honest. So far as I can tell, I am alive. I don’t mean to convince you that I’m alive, though. “So far as I can tell,” at least to me, is a very shaky statement due to the fact that I am the one saying it. I hope this makes sense, by which I mean I realize it probably makes very little sense but that you believed whatever it is I have said anyhow. Though, hey, that was one of the absolute worst days of my life, the “day” (technically it was two days) I went to work without any break in consciousness. I came home and wrote a seven page paper on Kant and Mill. It made me wish that I was dead. At some point I collapsed and drooled all over myself for fifteen hours, and that was that; summer began; I went to work again the next day; summer pretty much ended; here I am.

Here I will address Almighty God: Please, I’m done. Can I go home now?

I have about six months left here in this rat hotel of a city — this stinking shit-pond. May I retire? I don’t really want to do anything after I’m out of here. I’d be content to fold laundry for large sums of money, if someone out there is the proprietor of some insane business that employs sick, sick people like me who finds triumph and deep philosophies in the craft of clothes-folding. I would be all right with that. It beats the hell out of what I do now, which is angrily drive to that festering swam and clench my teeth for six-to-eight hours. My manager, a nice enough dude, constantly says things like this to me whenever I drop a fork or develop dark circles around my eyes: “Get it together, man,” “Wake up, man,” “Pay attention, man, come on,” and sometimes just plain old, “Come on, man.” Often I’ll rub my purple-ringed eye sockets after he says one or several of these trite expressions and feel like coughing, only I don’t cough. And boy do I wish I could cough then, because it would really, truly reveal to all in orbit of my tiny universe, and maybe even me, how utterly pathetic this bath of chemicals and carbon and water is. Instead I waver on with a sort of phantom electricity to me.

Just yesterday, a table of red-headed girls sitting on the patio summoned for me and inquired if I was having a bad day. I guess I looked pretty glum. “I’m at work,” I said. “It’s a bad day forever.”

“Cheer up,” one of the girls replied.

“I can’t.”

“And why not?”

“Because I’m not doing laundry.”

Not twenty seconds later, I was back inside the restaurant, clumsily clopping around on the heavily tarnished wood flooring without any purpose to my movements. My phantom electricity willed an ice bucket to slip from a shelf, which clattered on the floor psychotically, silencing the entire restaurant with its awkward, hollow rumbling. The chewing of food and banal conversation ceased abruptly. A hand was felt on my left arm; it meant I’d made a terrible mistake.

“Come on, man,” said a dark voice connected to the hand. “Wake up.”

Bray, you old mule; just once more. It’s okay if you don’t feel like it, though.

Oh? Well, I thought so. Let’s go to sleep. Come on, now. Turn off that light.

Yukio Mishima, at the end of his life, was a fairly buff guy. After spending 15 years developing muscles that currently occupy my nighttime thoughts, he ritualistically sacrificed himself in front of a bunch of dudes who were, by all accounts, too enamored with Mishima’s supple frame to notice that blood and intestines were spraying all over the floor.

If anything, this sort of solid determination to do something, whatever it may be, has motivated me more than anything has in the last six years. Often I am motivated by the avoidance of failure rather than the search for praise. “They” say this is something of an introvert trait. I think that, maybe, assigning four letters to your personality in order to better understand yourself is about as effective as believing that someone’s behavior is wholly dependent on what day and month of the year they were born (only dumb girls believe in astrology, by the way). Well: here I am, motivated to stick to loose-but-soon-becoming-rigid schedule of “things” I want to fill my hours with, alignment of the stars be damned. I march forward because I have nothing else to do. I may as well make use of my time. Maybe I should plan something big. Fifteen years of exercise to build a super-body, only to flay it in front of the Japanese government — man! That sounds like a hell of a way to spend one’s time. Maybe I’ll do just that, but rather than demanding that the Japanese form an standing army in postwar Japan, I believe I’ll just commit seppuku at my mother’s house, or something. I’ll spend the next two decades doing insane things like reading and working out and talking to myself, only to emerge a muscle-rippled sociopath dedicated to dying on the hardwood floors of my mother’s home.

Maybe I’m just joking!

Though, yes, I am motivated, I think. And why not? Mishima may have had a better reason to be motivated, but his motivation motivates me to be motivated. When summer began last year, I was unemployed and poor and I had three whole months to sit around and be unemployed and poor. This panned out for maybe three weeks before I began writing in a journal and devouring literature and running at night while everyone else slept. I kept track of my days with charts and lists that prompted me to affirm my existence rather than simply existing for the sake of it. Prior to this disciplined lifestyle, I was nothing more than a slug (literally) squirming around on the carpet of my upstairs bedroom. My friend and brother Daniel “Kiko” Lama once told me, a long time ago, that when the sun made itself scarce in the winter months, so too did his ability to feel happiness. There’s a whole scientific explanation for this, supposedly. I mean, it makes sense. For whatever reason, I felt almost the exact opposite: it is summer that robs me of my ability to do or feel anything. And why should it! There is, yes, so much light, so much time, so much space. However, I am not Bird Man of the 1960s animated television program, so I do not receive my powers from the sun. Rather, I have to conjure up this power myself (which, not surprisingly, given the low tolerance for light that my skin has, is sapped immediately by the intensified ultraviolet rays of the summer sun).

It takes charts and lists and restraint and an ongoing avoidance of the sun to give me even a decent chance at doing normal things that normal people do. I have to remind myself to go to sleep, sometimes. Just what in the hell is that! All the alarms and bells on my body are broken, I suspect. That’s a shame — I would like to fall in line, sometimes. (I wonder if I actually mean that . . . ?)

(No.)

As I sit here, aged twenty-two-point-five, eating an (organic) peanut butter and (organic strawberry) sandwich (on lightly toasted cinnamon raisin bread) and sipping down (organic (chocolate) soy milk out of a little coffee cup with a tiger-stripped cat on the side, I wonder: well, just what is it I wonder? I wonder about a lot of things. I guess I want to know if I can unmake myself. I had grown up believing that we, as human beings, eventually plateau. I think this is a popular belief for children to hold, because we don’t witness a lot of change in our parents until we’re grown up and they grow old. Raising children, I’m sure, puts a stop to a lot of personal projects and mental maturity. All that diaper-cleaning, wiping-shit-off-of-the-walls, shoving-food-down-the-mouths-of-newborns-while-speaking-in-”baby” (I do not refer to my own upbringing with these examples (my parents never spoke to me in “baby” and I was quite neat), man, that’s got to do something to an adult’s mind. Eventually you just sort of stay the same person until you soften up in your golden years. I’ve witnessed this in my own father. There’s still a person inside of him, I realize now. That dude is still growing.

My ambivalence towards aging stems from the fact that growing hurts, and growing is constant (that is, if one never has children (which includes me (sorry if this offends you, children from the future that I had on accident))). No children, more time — oh, no! What am I going to do with all of this time? If I’m not alive to make another, I need to figure something out. This is why, I think, I have to stick to a schedule that allows me as little time to reflect as possible. I’ll be consumed to death if my mind is let out to graze for too long. That means, generally speaking, that I’m only really at danger of “discovering” things I ought not to when I’m in one of the following places: 1) the bathtub, 2) an airplane, 3) in bed at night. I, like Mishima, need purpose. I need something worth killing myself over. I guess it would be silly if that something didn’t involve bodybuilding.

By God, just what is it I’m even rambling about any more? I wish to be left alone is all. I will continue to write these words here in this terribly quiet, indifferent life I lead.

For the last year, I have been incubating. This is the best way I can say it, I suspect. I emerged on the Fourth of July, of all days, and visited some people that I hadn’t seen collectively in over a year. It was strange and amusing and wonderful. There was something comforting about the fact that no one had changed at all; and there was something sad about the fact that no one had changed at all. After escaping the clutches of a particular unchanged being (whoa!), my old compatriots and I devoured terrible food at an old haunt and I spent two hours talking until my teeth were dry. It was so strange. I probably hadn’t spoken to anyone as much in a year or so as I spoke to those fine humans that night. I felt, to some degree, that the person I like spoke that night — that he still exists! What a triumph that was. And here I will say that the “soul” of someone is always there, and that is the part of my old friends that I acknowledged and revered that night. When I speak of this “unchanged” portion of these dinosaurs, I mean simply the shit gunking up the cellar of their minds. Hello? Dinosaurs-of-my-life? Are you listening? Clean that shit up!! You’ll be all the more wonderful once you eradicate this dark smoke (except for one of you — you’re rotten for the ever and always, I’m afraid).

It didn’t matter that night that I have spent the last year sculpting my glutus maximus, or that my shoulder muscles are carved porcelain — inside, a friendly creature that on good days I readily identify as “I” spoke out in a way that was both new and familiar. Who gives a damn about the book-reading and the bike-riding! Oh, yes!! It was quite a thing. And when these friends of mine talked, it didn’t matter that I had spent the last year sitting at the foot of my bed reading and writing and not speaking to any of them. Is this “hope”? (No, no — I’m afraid it isn’t, but it was spectacular, whatever this thing was.)

The very next evening, I found myself with friend and brother Jason Long. We visited dead friends in a swirling, sad part of the land that raised us. We talked about growing until our dying day. On the way home, the presence of a field mouse on the road was enough of a reason to dismount from our trusty bicycles. The two of us watched it hop along the asphalt until the blackness pushed us in directions away from familiarity and into the arms of treacherous, reflective sleep.

“I feel like I can’t move anymore,” Jason told me at one point. “Like something that was once there is there no longer.”

The field mouse hopped away and we grew a little older watching it vanish.

The moon was a white hot sliver behind a fog, and as the world spun on its broken axis a young man stood by the side of the highway feeling the gravel between his toes. Each pair of headlights was a blow to his brain. The cars would not stop screaming. The wind they carried was a humid blast that sucked the smoke from his eyes, smoke that seeped from a slightly open mouth all across his blank face. The wind did not alter his expression. The edge of the highway was the first step in a long flight of black stairs, coagulated in winding shapes that insulted gravity and reason, designed and built by the only architect who could afford to sell his soul to the center of the earth. He knew this because the shadows told him. He knew what the shadows said was true because the bright lights were telling him otherwise. The bright lights hurt his brain.

As soon as he took the first step up onto the pavement the cars began screaming louder, in tones that exploded high and curved low as they swerved around him, accompanied by roars and curses muffled by shatter-proof glass. His expression did not change. Each step on the staircase was higher and darker, and out of the corner of his eye he saw its spiraling form leading all the way up, away from the ground and the screaming bright lights that wanted him to stay, up into the air and through the animals in the clouds, spinning farther into the night sky, arcing straight into the black center of the moon where the lights and the noises would never touch him again.

The cars kept sliding and screaming. But his expression could not change. It was a long and narrow way, and he needed to concentrate, to keep his balance.

I want you to know that there was actual thought preceding this — whatever this is (what is this?). Usually, I just start typing. As I have maybe or possibly never said in the past, I don’t really consider what it is I am going to say. There are so many dark and quiet thoughts rattling around in my head at any given moment that I am sure there is medical term for my existence. Is this bad, I don’t know! I’m listening to fantastic music. My computer screen is black and white. Goodness! It sounds like I’m ready to say something. Though, when I literally (literally!) sat down to think about whatever it is I’m about to say, here on my little bed of folded blankets and pillows at the foot of my very real, very large bed, I couldn’t really think of anything. The only thought that flashed across the big black nothing up there, amongst the static of storms, was Texas. I am as excited as I ever get on this night, because I know that as long as I am alive in a month in a half, I’ll be on a plane to Orlando, Florida to board another plane that will eventually swoop and swarm around towering translucent clouds and land in Austin, Texas where wonderful creatures live. Oh, them. Oh, me! We will be together again — la, la!

Right now, though, I’m afraid of spilling this glass of water all over this machine that lets me talk to the rest of the world (hello, world!). I should try to sleep, but I’m not going to. My cousin said of sleeping, once, I think, that he would rather live to be fifty-five and never have to sleep. It’s possible he said this. I guess I could go for some never-sleeping right about now. When I was younger and computers were enormous and capable of eating God, sitting on the floor with a glass of delicious, sub-zero temperature water was simply a vision of the distant future. Back then, hell, sleep was something else. I remember waking up and feeling like some crazy shit had just happened. Some crazy shit happens to me every night here in the present day, but it’s not good crazy shit. It’s crazy and it’s most assuredly shit. There used to be a lot of flying and believing in unbelievable things. I miss those things (I miss everything (seriously, help me)). Now — now, what even happens? People scream at me in my sleep, people die. I wake up and realize that screaming and dying sounds a whole hell of a lot better than sitting in a room someplace in this shit-pond of a city and learning things or making slave wages. To be sure, there is a lot of screaming and dying in my life, asleep or not, but at least I’m letting my body do what it is my body needs to do when I’m away from here and asleep. This is getting confusing.

What I’m trying to say, I think, is that I don’t want to spill water on my computer. Then what would I do! Probably scream and die — and not for nothing, either. I have a lot of great treasures on this little thing. I think I was maybe half-joking with that last sentence. I’m also trying to communicate that sleep doesn’t feel like a break in between days, anymore. Tomorrow may as well be right now, as far as I’m concerned (because it is already). Sleep, today, is a black-out period that eats time. And I can’t have it back. And I’d rather be doing creative and stupid things with that time (which explains my present actions).

I have just turned on a small light next to my little end-of-the-bed office. My eyes were starting to twitch. My God, am I aging? I certainly hope not. If I wake up tomorrow and I’m nine-years-old again, I wouldn’t complain one bit. At least there would be a whole lot of happy nothing to fill my day with instead of a lot of nothing-something. Does that make sense? Maybe. I have reread it and it makes perfect sense to me. Then again, I’m a fucking psychopath.

Recently I have been spending any spare time I have with a truly wonderful young man who I owe many breakfasts and dinners to (I’ll get around to this eventually, I think). We have been riding bicycles through toxic wastelands and it has been more fun than anything else I’ve done in the last four years. Because our thirst for action takes us out under the cover of darkness, we see some surreal and amazing things, as you can imagine. I wonder how close we’ve come to toying with death — what with all of the nighttime street-riding and friendly gestures and greetings we offer up to our fellow night owls, bike-mounted or not. Usually people are very receptive to this unexpected friendliness. We may appear crazy, I imagine, but there’s no way they’re less crazy than us, so they say hello back. Sometimes they don’t. Two weeks ago a I rode by a guy sitting on a small bicycle outside of a cemetery. He was just staring at the graves with his mouth wide open. I said sometime friendly to him, and he slowly turned his head to face mine, mouth gaping like he’d just swallowed a whole cantaloupe. Hell, this guy looked like he was into that sort of thing, so maybe I walked (biked) in on something insane and disturbed his trance.

And all the bars! We fill our water bottles up wherever possible. I’ve been using the McDonald’s drive-through window to fill up, but that didn’t pan out two nights ago because the employees were smoking pot on the roof or something. And when we peered through the window, the tile floors were covered in un-mopped brown, bubbly toxic water. Hey, I think I’ll get my water someplace else! We ended up at this tavern in Old Town where a red-faced fat man jokingly accused me of stealing the quarter that he’d dropped, which I bent down to retrieve for him. He screamed something in my face and smiled with yellow teeth and I just shrugged and waited for the stone-eating ogre-bartender to finish filling my bottle with chemical water (seriously, what the hell did he put in there?). Everyone smelled like rotten pineapple. We shrugged and left.

Earlier we’d seen a drunk man abandon his car on the railroad tracks after attempting to drive down them. The police were swarming the area. They didn’t mind us, so we kept on pedaling.

By the end of the night, we’d moved our legs in terrific unison for nearly twenty-two miles. I felt like the man with me was closer to being a brother than my actual brother ever will be. Our faces beamed with sweat and genuine smiles. We were tired. We drove home.

As we left, a large black man wearing a white sweatband around his naked forehead pedaled by at a ferocious speed and offered up a greeting. We didn’t feel like freaks after that (I felt sort of dejected for not being a freak any longer). We’d met drunk girls and chatty teenagers and strange beings, and here comes this dude. Maybe we’re still freaks — just freaks together. I’d ride with that guy. I’d take him with me to Austin, if he wanted to come with.

I’d let him sleep in my bed.

I think I’ll go there now, actually (I have finished my glass of water, so everything seems to be okay).

Well–

The foot of my bed, anyway. Well, well! Black-out-nothing time. Screaming and dying. Awake and alive somewhere, sometime. I can’t take much more of this.

Scream!

(Die.)

And the sound of strings, strings — somewhere, somewhere.

Turn out the lights and do push ups until your muscles bleed on the inside. Call home and tell the parents you never got to know you won’t be coming back. Jack off until you can’t stand the thought of anybody touching that thing ever again. Smash your guitar at the end of the show and leave the pieces for the rat nests. Walk out of the room without a word and leave her there, speechless and ugly just like you. Jump off roofs from successively higher altitudes until you break a leg and learn your limits. Keep punching until he can’t move any more, until the child in you is dead and blossoming with fungus. Cancel your birthday party. Call your friends and tell them what you really think. Call all the girls you loved and tell them you were lying. Call your flesh brothers, you only have one or two, and tell them to keep the light on outside their doors. Then throw your phone into a lake and scream into the darkness like a wounded horse. Walk and bike and drive and fly until you’ve gathered sufficient weaponry to murder your beautiful ideals and morals and plans. Pull the world’s eyes out of its guts just long enough for it realize what’s been happening and burst into hapless convulsions.

Then laugh. Laugh loud enough to wake me up. I want to hear that laugh. It will give me the courage to do what you have done. The courage to cease my search for dreams supposably hidden behind reality, to cease poeticizing, to cease this cyclic metamorphosis, to step into my body, to singularly and wholly be.

The sun will be rising soon now, won’t it?

Yes, I think it will. I will watch it from the darkness of my bedroom, much as I do every morning. When, I wonder, was the last time I was able to sleep before light struck the darkness in half? It has been so long. Maybe months.

I watched the sunrise over Montréal just the other day. That was a nice sunrise. I think that I will hang on to that sunrise for a long time. As long as I can, maybe. How long is that?

And now I will watch it yet again, here in this bedroom next to the highway in a place I want to be done with. Far from here — that’s where I’d like to be. Maybe the commonwealth where so much of my little life has sparked and fluttered with pictures that now live inside my brain. Maybe Montréal.

A cat is perched on my windowsill. He knows what is to come. There are maybe eight minutes until the big reveal, but no one will be surprised. I know this cat. He’s a nice little creature (shall I really use “little” to describe him?).

Any moment now. I don’t want to see that sun today. I want to end without light and return without light. It’s unbearable out there once seven-minutes-from-now takes place, all hateful and angry. Heats up the ground and all that. I would be okay if it stayed like this for three months — just blue and black and quiet. I think the cat on my windowsill would appreciate such a thing.

Why am I here? I want to go there.

Wherever that is.

God! Let me go!

What am I still doing here!

I can see it now . . . it’s time to go. I will pull a thick sheet over the glass and shut my eyes tight.

The sun was setting and the earth turning so that night would never fall and the fullness of day would never shine. The world was wrapped in the golden haze of summer, the sky pouring out layers of orange and tranquil emotion. The children were wearing the black and red cloaks of feared wanderers, boards of driftwood nailed together slung across their backs, imagined into great steel broadswords wielded only by the strongest and bravest, held in place by straps of torn clothing or thick leather sheaths. They followed the path through the plains, bordered on either side by tall grass and knotted, blossoming trees. There were bright yellow stars on the wind that seemed to free themselves from the stalks of wheat and rise as the air carried them across the broad road of trampled grass and dust. They climbed the old trees and plucked winged insects from the green leaves, building on muscle and knowledge. As they journeyed on, the living trees disappeared, and instead they found themselves bounding over felled lumber. Soon the lumber too was gone, replaced by wooden frameworks pieced together with rusty nails and lattices of black rope, a maze of children’s equipment that grew more complex and dangerous as they climbed their way through. The sky began to darken as the framework moved around them, pieces of wood and scrap metal whizzing over their heads as they crossed twisting bridges with death roaring in waves far below and they were no longer dancing through nature but running, sprinting, fighting for their survival within the acid-seeping entrails of a hostile factory, dodging bladed gears and robotic knives still clutching the splintering hilts of their childish dreams slung over their backs that no longer fueled the adventure but weighed them down heavily, and they would never know it but all along they had been inside a factory ever since the plains and the trees and the summer grass, the road an assembly line strengthening and training them to be machines and unfeeling, deadly ones, funneling them into the black distance where flames licked at the starless night sky and where men killed and were killed over and over and the only dances were those of unforgiving, roaring shadows.