Distortion

By Stephen Beachy

It’s the 90s. Reggie, a young hustler, is bouncing around the country trying to stave off personal catastrophe. With his own drug-addled sense of history merging with prophecy, and his own destiny merging with something he begins to suspect is evil, the scope of the catastrophe seems increasingly cosmic in proportions. “Dad” was never a very good idea to begin with. Transmissions from “Mom” suggest an impossible distance fueled by nostalgia for unhappiness. In a landscape of airplane disasters, arson fires, viruses and the confounding stew of humanity in the backseats of Greyhound buses, his story intersects a variety of characters equally unmoored from the reference points and false hopes offered by a mutating social order. Encountering film directors, producers, aspiring actresses and refugees trapped in their own stories of impending doom, his unlikely ascent to something like fame begins to seem like a nightmare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebel Satori Press
• Release date: Mar 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781608640614

Stephen Beachy

Stephen Beachy's first novel, The Whistling Song, was published in 1991. Distortion was originally published in 2000 and his twin novellas Some Phantom/No Time Flat in 2006. His fiction has appeared in BOMB, Best Gay American Fiction, Best Gay American Fiction Volume 2, High Risk 2, the Chicago Review, and elsewhere. He lives in California.

Book preview

DISTORTION

by

Stephen Beachy

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

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Copyright 2010 by Stephen Beachy

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PROLOGUE:

SUNDAY NIGHT

PROPHECY

Again I admonish you, you who exist: be like those who do not exist, that you may dwell with those who do not exist.

—The Apocryphon of James

***

Directly after leaving the station, you'll collapse into the first cheap bed. Daylight, its sounds and activities, will continue relentlessly on the other side of the blinds. You'll wake partially into it, feel vaguely guilty. Getting there—the bus and its vibrations, the dim predawn light, the stumbling and blind registration—will be incorporated into your sleep. Regions of nothingness, intense kindling of dream, all decentered and far, far away. The tv will run continuously, although you won't remember having turned it on.

Everything has been real weird for a long time, and is continuing to be so; it resembles a crossroads on a windswept plateau. Blue road, black road, green road, red road. A cactus outlined against a starry sky. A dim, distant howling. The evening star is steady behind all the moving lights, satellites and airplanes, racing around the globe. The sky is pink in a wide arc at the horizon and then upwards of that liquid and blue.

Night comes. The wind intensifies in force and aggression. You have to be absolutely alone to really think about it, you're almost sure. To feel what it's like in the middle of that.

You're in San Antonio, a mildly sordid hotel room, small, airless, pink. Radiator cranking out stale heat, crooked blinds through which you'd expect to see one lonely, blinking neon sign. Instead, the wind is simply rising.

Your throat is dry and hollow. Who you are and what you're doing return to you slowly. Later, you'll remember fragments of your dreams. Now, you feel disoriented. This sexy guy on television tells you the news, the mouth making slow fellating motions. The news is death, etc., shivering once and spreading around the globe in a web of blue electricity: malignant phosphorescent dreams crisscrossing the atmosphere. Really, the news is only death; the etc. is just the blowjob you imagine, lips of the sexy image sliding up and down your cock. On closer examination, he looks reconstructed, fake, as if his lips have been inflated. He's talking about life rafts. He's turned the dream of your death into another boring fact. You touch moist underarms, your belly button, pubic hair, all the smooth or furry primate features, thinking: I could be a caveman. That newscaster thinks you're only a ghost, zigzags in the air, a dim electromagnetic presence.

Quicksilver rises and falls erratically in thermometers and barometers and weather is shaped into words. The weather (wind, sheets of ice, record cold) shifts in complex patterns, rippling out instantaneously, like the words that describe the weather and the declaration of your death. You'd always imagined your existence would remain intact, even when no one believed in it, but you feel yourself fading. You'd always imagined ways to vanish and drift. How did that song go? You're the boy—that could enjoy—invisibility.

The pink walls are beaded with oily drops, like you're inside a sweaty stomach. The newscaster says something about tragedy and a sense of confusion. You turn down the sound.

How you came to be here: far away, the airplane falls noiselessly, silent faces pressed against impenetrable windows. You were supposed to be one of them, your plane ticket tucked into your underwear for safety, with your traveler's checks and ID. You'd been following a beautiful light-skinned boy through the maze of bushes in the park, under a textured stone archway, into the city, when the rain came, sweeping between rows of buildings in gusts. Brief eye contact had suggested that the boy might be available for a price. You imagined that price as a vast, absurd landscape of tactile and criminal acts, a hip-hop version of Hieronymus Bosch. Under a purpling sky, the boy joined up with a group that could have been his older brothers, progressively harder, fuller bodied, more threat in their eyes. You watched them enter a crumbling brick hotel, ducked into a dark theater entrance out of the rain. They never came out. You toyed with the idea of missing your flight, but took a taxi to the airport instead.

In the airport lounge you met the doomed man who was eager to get onto your flight. The man was wearing a white shirt, black wool pants, and a wool cap over long, lustrous hair. Your typical jaded traveler, habitué of airport bars, but with an air of tarnished elegance: cigarette-stained fingers, Aquarius belt buckle. Every surface around you seemed unnecessarily bright and false. You weren't sure if the belt buckle was being worn ironically or not. The doomed man smoked Camel Filters, leafed through a magazine of items he could purchase with his Camel Cash. Overhead speakers played a Muzak version of Ben, Michael Jackson's love song to a rat.

Where you headed? you asked.

You said it as if you didn't really care, but were working to kill time.

The man looked thoughtful.

You remember in that movie, he said—somehow motioning with his eyes toward the music—when Ben, the wounded rat, returns as a sort of war hero to be reunited with his boy lover? Who doesn't love a good surprise ending? Michael Jackson is certainly the most complicated Jehovah's Witness in the world, don't you think?

Similarly, he went on, the Mayan Lords of Death were defeated with the collusion of a mischievous rat. The rat showed the hero twins where their father had hidden his ball game equipment, so they too could play ball games in hell. The rat was given the right to nibble at the squash and corn in the fields forever. It is only when this promise was broken, we might note, that Ben became murderous. Ben was good at heart, but a rat has to eat too, even an army of rats. I see Ben as the retelling of an ancient myth, but this time costarring Meredith Baxter-Birney.

But enough talk about destinations, he said.

You shrugged. Whatever. You didn't like this guy at all, but convinced yourself that what you were feeling was indifference, so as not to feel slighted. On the other side of the man, a woman with orange hair was sipping a blue drink. She was talking about Brazil with somebody else. She hated Brazil.

The doomed man stared intently into your eyes. The tv was now blaring overhead. Later, you wouldn't remember anything about the shows, except that they involved a modulated male voice-over.

The man claimed he hadn't stepped foot outside of airports or the planes that took him from one to another, for the past seven years. Hotels at times, but only if connected by underground tunnels. He was approaching randomness through a labyrinth of itineraries and delayed flights, metal detectors and long striated tubes from gate A, B, C, D, etc., straight into the various airplanes always going to the exact same place in a different city.

Was it part of the game to pretend to believe the things that people told you? You liked to think of it as a recent historical development, our ability to neither believe nor disbelieve a given statement. In the old days, everything was either true or false.

An experiment, the man said, to see if randomness would provide the space for love to appear.

He laughed.

It won't, he said. My feeling now is that you have to build elaborate traps.

And where are you going? the man asked.

South America, you said. By way of Caracas.

They sell the most intellectual books in the Caracas airport, the man said. Can you imagine coming across something by Adorno here?

The purpose of your trip? he asked. Vacation? Adventure?

You gave your stock reply which had something to do with studying the language, an interest in the political situations and culture. You didn't want to seem like one of those people on fixed incomes who went to cheap, foreign places to live simply for economic reasons.

I'm a cartoonist, you said. I'm working on a cartoon about that stuff.

The history, the culture, said the man.

You nodded, feeling stupid. You were receiving money from your art school. Time to do nothing but draw.

As an artist, said the man, what's your opinion of this towel?

Two stylized phallic camels wearing sunglasses. You didn't get what you were intended to feel. Disturbed? Amused? Ironically detached? Airports lack depth, you decided, and remembered the boy in the park. Butt lost in sweatpants, he lifted his T-shirt, fanning the belly.

I'm waiting to have my vision, said the man. A vision that actually happens, it's actually there. I'm a trust fund baby, as you probably guessed. What's your name?

Aaron, you said.

Really? Mine too.

You glanced at your watch, refused to believe. That boy's gesture was more compelling than this. Fanning a belly could be innocent. Children revealed their nipples without a second thought, but that boy's gesture was actually so sophisticated that you blushed and looked away. When you looked back, the belly was still in view.

What kind of elaborate traps? you asked.

The man shrugged. Tangled webs in which the most beautiful souls would be ensnared, for somebody else's pleasure, whose?

Maybe randomness is my only hope after all, said the man.

He ordered a screwdriver. Fight off scurvy, he said.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You decided he was secretly hoping for some immanent order to emerge, the faint tracings of an invisible map webbing out into reality like electricity inside a dead rabbit.

I'll sell you my ticket, you said.

The man arched his brow.

A stop in Miami, you said. They've been hunting tourists there, but if you aren't going to leave the airport, I'm sure you'll be perfectly safe.

The man smiled. You had stepped into the role of Destiny. This was power and it was real, no matter how poorly understood, it was not somewhere else altogether. You were shimmering. You hurried back to the brick hotel, where you had last seen those boys, leaving the doomed man at the gates to the metal detector.

The cement floor of the desiccated building was covered with sawdust. It was being either torn down or renovated. You could see where people had stepped, moved, sat, a layering of subtle footprints, traces of bodies. Bodies muscular and warm, together on the floor. Rain drummed on the roof. Bright splotches of paint exploded across the walls in amphibian shapes, elaborate graffiti tags blending together. Tiny outbursts of ego splattering in black, red, neon green, danger orange, to create this design: an X ray of the brain of some newly hatched beast. Splayed skeletal shapes of synaptic connections, electrical or chemical, hyperpolarized membranes, shape changing, receptors flickering by the millions between on and off states: against a multicolored background stand black threadlets, some slender and flowing, some thick and aggressive, in a pattern punctuated by small dense spots, alphabetic and molecular. One of these tags could be the boy's. The sensation was that of incredible loss. At the same time, you felt on the verge of some intense thought or emotion. This passed. You took the bus south, to San Antonio.

Far away, the airplane falls noiselessly, silent faces pressed against impenetrable windows, viewing their own descent from within that falling motion. Their brains are a tangled glomeration of sensation and memory so complicated and extreme. A hushed splash as the plane glides into ocean. Entrance erased by steadying waves, a slow-motion fall toward bottom. You think of the waning drone of lawnmowers across empty summer afternoons, tv specials on the mysteries of the Bermuda triangle. Endless sky over endless water and drone of an approaching plane. As it passes and fades, humans down below are still alive, struggling toward the surface to breathe.

In your hotel room, you discover you're presumed dead. The newscaster moves his lips and tongue. Because you turned down the sound.

The carpet in the hotel hallway is water stained with strange clumps. The desk clerk is nowhere in sight. You wade into the December dusk, paper tab of acid on your tongue.

***

Andrea dreamed about fire, so called Mona at the house. Probably just a dream about Aaron's death, Mona reassured her. Mona pictured the dream as a throbbing orange glow punctuated with human screams, kind of soothing and lovely, really. Sometimes Andrea's dreams were predictive, but uselessly so. Call me later, she said. Dwight's throwing a tantrum.

This wasn't true. All the kids in the group home were safely in bed, except Jo. Jo's at the kitchen table now, staring at her with what Mona guesses to be some sort of thick, voiceless love.

Clock here doesn't tick, sort of buzzes, continuously.

Snowing now and she feels like she's living inside a song by some halfway famous Minneapolis band, one of the depressing laments as opposed to the harder core stuff. Fluorescent kitchen surrounded by lack. Midwestern college town over winter break, empty, dark, a few unidentifiable strangers dash from building to building, avoiding the wind.

Mona hasn't cried, although she feels like she should. Shock, she tells herself.

You wouldn't let some idiot stick a hairbrush up your butt, would you, Jo? she asks. Jo grins, wiggles her fingers in front of her face. Jo always gets the joke. The joke is that Mona's asking a developmentally disabled virgin for advice on her sex life.

Just because you were drunk and he was kind of cute?

Mona wears gaudy earrings, polka dots, her look these days a cross between little girl and slut, at least what passes in the imagination of this slow town for slut. Mona: a good lay. A few years from now her cropped, hennaed hair could be long and blonde, she could have a boyfriend with a pickup truck, drive around listening to country western music. Everything she does is just a phase, from the outside. Sexy as hell once, a few years back, when she was doing a lot of speed. Lost weight everywhere except her chest. The sort of men she slept with pretended to be talking to her, but they were talking to her tits. She doesn't miss it.

Then last year her sister was shot by a couple of teenagers who robbed the diner where she worked. Cops used it as an excuse to harass more black men, and people started coming up to her, people she barely knew, telling her about their own tragedies. Cancers, stillbirths, all manner of death, sickness, disaster. More information than I needed. Yeah, yeah, my sister's dead, she said finally. I'm driving her car, see?

Aaron's death, in an airplane crash, seems like one of those unreal stories told by strangers. Aaron was her friend, worked here at the group home. Used to take the kids to the park together, sit on the swings, talk about nothing, about men. About nothing.

Puts Jo to bed, returns to the depressing kitchen. Reads her horoscope for the sixth or seventh time, like it's incredibly complex. She is a Taurus, it's true. She'll never get too far from home, her mother's her best friend. Now she plays with a paddleball and everyone loves her loud laugh that rings through bars all night. She's twenty-five. A history of not working up to her potential, which is, they've always loved to tell her, enormous. Dropped out of the university three times, no longer imagines going back. Used to seem funky and happy and wear cool earthy (but not at all hippie stupid) clothes, putter around the kitchen singing Rickie Lee Jones. Now she just wants to pick up men, lose herself in stupid obsessions with a bike-riding ROTC dork or a bisexual dentistry student. Those men are good in bed. They're the good lays, she's so much more complicated than that. Bound to emerge, any day now, on the other side of despair. Find new interests, formulate career goals, make new friends. Men are like snacks for the journey.

This job requires nothing more than a willingness to claim a high school diploma and clean shit off the walls occasionally. Stuck here overnight, the kids in bed, house parents watching cable in their room. Kitchen's quiet. Sips bad coffee from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mug.

Reads the crayon essay on the wall for the zillionth time about PEOPLE. And what a person does, it moves around and lives in different houses. It can also live in a tent or an igloo or a bamboo house built on stilts. Ex-client, elfin face syndrome, her vocabulary was huge. Back in the old days, this house was higher functioning, but gradually Robin and the mildly autistic had been moved out, replaced by preverbal mongoloids, combinations of autism, brain damage, and hyperactivity, and Mark, who sits around and plays with beans and points and claps and moans and says Boo.

Wandering through a house at night, in an impossibly sheer nightgown. Like wearing a ghost. Settles in, in front of the television, remoting here and there: beyond the relentless blather about the plane crash, the airwaves fill with baroque psychedelia, queens with cocker spaniel faces, mandalas of flying monkeys, kaleidoscopic ogres disguised as love. An older generation's responsible for this, that one famous for having taken a lot of drugs. The phone rings. Andrea again. Really, Mona, I'm totally weirded out. For a while the chattering, disembodied voice resembles comfort, but eventually the softcore slasher movie on tv seems more compelling.

Dwight's screaming upstairs, she says. Gotta go.

The movie tires her out. Total gore fest, but seems to be making the point that nuclear bombs are bad. Isn't even doing it in a scary way.

Cement trucks are shitting out nuclear wastes. The children or monsters have bald, veiny skin. Eyeballs like electric bulbs attached to teased and straightened intestines. Scientists busy in the basement, mucusing down the tubes. They've just returned from Panama, where they gathered primate specimens. Government experiments, infusions, laboratories, pregnancies. Once the tubes have been thoroughly mucused down, they'll be funnels she'll have to whirligig around, like a slide, but exitless.

A basement scientist, saying at her: We'll twist it into a most sullen unconscious, where it will be compost for future advertising copy. Our first task, to describe space, in forty-three chapters, according to the property of volume. The all-too-common science fiction vision of an American wasteland: the first chapter focuses on the formation of, and hygiene. The second on the gradual acceptance of and populations accustomed to range artillery fire.

Richard Nixon's back there with ropes and titty clamps and crotchless panties, expletive deleted. Once dead, freed from its prison of flesh, Nixon's luminous flickering soul will flit among clouds and light and rainbows, where spirits mingle with the unborn. He'll be able to assume numerous forms. Butterflies, hummingbirds, vapor, rain.

First, it's 1969. In the Dreamtime, the apocalypse is always just beginning. Little Mona wanders around a house that's being remodeled. Wears green bib overalls with flower patches on the knees. Her father in earnest conversations with carpenters, cement masons, acoustical ceiling apprentices, insulation men, painters, all union. They offer Mona sweets when her parents are out of the room, hard butterscotch suck candies and chocolates. A convoluted wood-frame house, with bay windows, hardwood floors, small confining rooms, but plenty of sunlight in the kitchen. Filtered through trees that shed walnuts, little bitter berries, or seeds that look like helicopter antennae. Her father goes on at length about how this house will contain their fondest memories. Mona sings meaningless rhymes and plays with a tiny plastic puzzle that makes a smiley face if you get it right. Her mother observes that the wallpaper belongs in an asylum, the bathroom's pale green seems institutional, and the whole structure's a prison, in terms of letting in sunshine. Drinks and drinks in the day's fading light, disappears somewhere while Daddy busies himself with maps and instructions. Dozing among boards and rugs and debris in one of the upper bedrooms.

The scientist carries thick pinkish wads of foam insulation curled like scrolls. He opens the closet door to find Mona covered by her mother's perfumed clothing. Holds up a crowbar.

This incisive tool has rendered the remarkable accessible to commonsense experience.

It's 1969. The FBI is busy. Mona is being prepared for her husband, who will slobber and rape her.

We can measure and record the evolution of this Carpenter, the scientist/insulation man goes on, to a Mona who is spinning into the interior of the closet, down a funnel, who expected to do his research in the laboratory, but he was wrong. Here is the beginning of the defeat and destruction of women.

Tunnels being constructed, for every story that the structure proceeds into daylight, clearly visible to all the monstrous gods and their agents (woman-haters: invulnerable, plus they could bear children in weird ways), mutants are digging pathways just as deep beneath the surface, creating a structure just as huge and upside down. Scientists above are placing monkeys inside compartments where they spin around like laundry. They're being prepared for space travel. Scenes are continually arising, unpleasant in a more than unobtrusive way, but now she's smiling, and now she's to be tolerably sober. Freshly showered, she finds herself compelled to attribute intelligible words to others. Her little-girl stockings, dancing around her perpetually unfinished room. How does she exist in this atmosphere? This isn't what dreams are like. It's a sort of limbo between half-sleep and television. She's anxious about the fact that she's smoking in bed, even though she isn't. She hasn't had a cigarette all night.

Out the window, on the moors, dancers are finding release in their torsos. Martha Graham or somebody. The committee chooses an additional black coach for the team. Their project is some sort of convoluted speaking to the man. The man is her husband, and he's driving toward them in his convertible, through hot Southern towns. Mouth slit at the corners, one eye half out of its socket, green, wholly green. The mutants stand on their knobby spines.

Television flickers. Breathing. Behind their lids, Mona's eyes are rapidly moving.

***

You rub an apple against your shirt, bite. Traffic rushes past. Construction workers tear up the street. Packed into jeans and T-shirts and the cold pressing in.

Men lift buckets, twist their torsos. Grinding noises, ropes and tools and cranes. First stars, wind. Rafters crisscrossing overhead against pink orange sky.

You watch a construction worker in pale jeans, shirtless, a young man with tiny nipples and a hairless chest. Metal scrapes against metal, a crane picks something up. Something crumbles.

Machinery whirs and groans, the sound of in or exhalations.

If something collapsed, if signals got crossed, a young construction worker could find himself pinned under beams, a limb severed, dying a public death as helpless passersby looked on. The young worker's biceps are lightly powdered with dust. Briefly, he meets your gaze. Lust or contempt? You decide to think of the worker as a young tough.

The young tough could build you a high room where you'd gaze out over the world. His heavy flanks fill out the butt of his baggy trousers. Outside, it's cold and muddy, body parts and skulls protrude from the roadsides. Inside, he rules you. You watch television incessantly, his shows, cops or football or heavy metal videos. Some fifty-year-old guy in skintight pants and big hair wiggles his ass and lips at the camera and sings about gender confusion.

The young tough has traced maps, layers of onionskin paper with blue pencil lines, squiggled Masonic symbols, but certain rooms are off-limits, or he says they don't exist. Pats your ass like he owns it, bends you over the kitchen table. Meanwhile, through the cracks in boarded-over entranceways, a pale blue flicker from the tv is falling into rooms that had been dark for centuries. Beyond, other dimly outlined doorways appear. You can sense these further rooms, connected by narrow cellars, gaping elevator shafts.

Lately, you'd been listening, imagining you could recombine the signs. You'd wanted to become something different. Or to clear some space for something different to arise after you'd gone. You like to see yourself as the sort of person who'd risk everything for that, for change. You hear voices in the gathering wind, fossils of carved vapor, phantoms striking matches. As the temperature increases, children's bodies are transformed, dampened with sweat, as in the elaborate symbolism of a vague alchemical process in which nothing stands for what it pretends to.

The worker's ignoring you now, he has important, virile things to do. Nothing but thoughtless repetitive tasks. It's not like this guy's an architect, it's not like he's designing beautiful or intelligent buildings. This structure's hurried, prefab. Not that getting laid out on the kitchen table like a woodworking project wouldn't have its charms, infrared explosions providing intermittent light from the tv, he gets it all the way up in you, and out, and in, his glowing blue torso and rhythmic breathing, as elected leaders say, I think we had minimal loss of life, and we sent the message we needed to send. Still, your desire is to be much closer to what you're hearing. To what can be lost.

In the bright chill, the city glows. You cross a torn-up street through a makeshift wooden walkway. Danger signs, buckets of tar, pools of wet cement, piles of earth, beams, boards, fragments. Around the corner you step into the bar.

Heat, face flushed. Clink of glasses, last day's light shooting through window blinds. Pinball machines, sex trivia, older men mostly, younger men only in pairs. Your feeling of loneliness and consolation is a conditioned response. Ah, the return to the imperfect, yet necessary warmth of the human community. You don't want to settle for consolation. Beer in a glass, bits of conversation.

You can't just sit there all night hating him. Hating him is no way to spend the whole night. Hating it..

It's all a joke to you. Always in fancy dress, like the world is a silly little tea party.

Te gusta las culebras? Las culebras?

Your empty glass reflects day's last sad pink light, cold Texas skies. The sky outside promises more entanglement, tactile sensations. Prickly feeling in the forehead.

Oh look, someone says. There's that plane crash.

On tv, divers are going after the wreckage. There are close-ups of both calm and distraught people.

Fatalities? someone asks.

Oh, hundreds I imagine, says the first man. Entire families, entire socioeconomic groups. Thousands, millions.

I don't do funerals anymore, know what I mean?

You move toward the door, cold blast of blue air, pink light, dying skies and out. Tunnel back past construction, gangways, all of that as if in ruins, peeling walls, broken windows, a flimsy veil of pungent smoke. You turn corners, through the city, along canals. Closed shops with incredible glass.

Seven sturdy, gorgeous women, fabulous red hair tucked into their wet suits, perform a choreographed dive into the wreckage of the plane. Orchestral music, squids, turtles, porpoises. They swim in strict geometrical patterns, past corpses soaked in jet fuel. Seaweed winds through the eye sockets, tangles around pale limbs that have taken on an unearthly cast in the green, sunlit water. Carry-on bags float past, ripped open at impact, spilling their contents like remnants of some submerged continent's purposefully lost civilization. Neckties, deodorants, laptop computers, briefcases full of critical information for mergers, consolidations, marketing schemes, conveniently printed in a universally understood, uniform script. The women weave gracefully through the debris, uninflated flotation devices, uneaten trays of chicken with rice, fruit salad, specially prepared low-sodium meals, slow leaking streams of blood. Barrels of nuclear wastes, hospital chemicals and discarded syringes, Coke bottles being slowly transformed into exquisitely smooth unrecognizable glass. Sharks are on their way, lured by the blood. Injured sharks have been known to devour their own entrails, spinning around like sleek water snakes. In the midst of this potential danger and confusion, our heroines flutter-kick sweetly into the cockpit, where the prize awaits: the black box, key to all the relevant mysteries, transcripts for a quick and easy gnostic initiation, container for this secret knowledge: the hidden cause of this failure of the modern way of life. Faulty engine parts? Pilots on drugs? UFOs, terrorists, a conspiracy of oppressed baggage handlers? The lead diver, with a fluorescent X painted on her wetsuit, clutches the treasure to her chest and, with a sylphlike quiver and kick, glides back through the rotting corpses and colorful marine flora toward the surface. She merges into that green sunlit region, red hair streaming behind her.

You were saved; you're the elect, it would follow. The man you sold your airline ticket to would be dead. Because the ticket had your name on it, nobody would know who he was. In the meantime, traffic circles around you, following various orange arrows.

In the park, across from the bus station, a boy is muttering to himself and lighting the fringes of his clothes on fire. You hear a word, a phrase here and there, which, out of context, seem to form a secret message just for you. Combined with the throbbing of the boy's body, the message is imprinted deep in your tissues. The boy strikes you as dangerous. You're like a Pavlovian bitch in heat. To convince yourself of free will, you keep walking.

Stop then, look back. The boy squints at you. You sit on the bench across from him, like you've suddenly grown exhausted and need a rest. The boy glances at you, lights another thread hanging from his jeans. You light a cigarette. You're too nervous, can't focus. You look away, imagine the boy's body in motion, screwing like he means it. He's looking straight at you now, as if challenging you, or else looking at someone behind you.

The summer you were twelve, you were in love. You rode your bikes across town to an abandoned amusement park. Adventureland had opened up fifteen miles outside of town, with bigger roller coasters and its own hotel.

The huge curvy slide warned KEEP OFF. The boy yelled something ridiculous and slid. The echoes bounced around, threatened the park's warped structures with collapse.

You entered the House of Mirrors through a plain wooden room sloping upward. It was intended to create some optical illusion, but you didn't get it. Flawed vision made concrete? You crawled through the tiny entrance at the other end into the mirrored maze. What originally promised an infinity of mutations on the theme of yourself soon worked itself out into a few boring warps and elongations.

Silence. Your friend, the boy you love, is somewhere outside, maybe in the woods.

Woods or forest are home to bandits, wild animals, weird shrieks and howls, sex, strangers on paths, sorcery, darkness, possibility, escape. The vegetation gets bushier, the path less clear, the sun set long ago. Here's a clearing where what looks like some cottage used to sit, but now there's just this door, knob and all, leading from nothing to nothing, a threshold between swarming luminous darkness and swarming luminous darkness. Imperceptible waves, criminal particles, heavy breathing, demon lovers, wolves. An adventurous child takes a handsome murderer's limp tool between his lips.

What's up? says the guy with the lighter.

You shrug. He signals for you to sit next to him, holds his hand over the flame, pulls it back, bounces up and down. Like he's suffering from a brain dysfunction involving the same neurotransmitters affected by the stimulants. His body is all over the place, like some surrealist painting of sex. A patch of underarm hair next to a smooth young chest.

Yeah, I like fire, he says. I like a lot of things. You like a lot of things?

A pause. You say, I like a lot of things a lot.

***

Mona wakes up thinking she's in a dream that the house is on fire. But the house is on fire, she says. Way too calm, hurries to the houseparents' bedroom.

Uh, Jeannie? I think the house is on fire.

Jeannie panics appropriately. Smoke pours out the bathroom, flames lick walls. The kids all sleep upstairs, on the other side of the fire. The husband's calling 911. Mona walks past the fire, hotter than it looks. Brian's sitting up in bed, Mark's a stone, slugs her when she tries to rouse him. Lighter and less violent clients first, she decides.

Carries Dwight, still practically asleep, past the fire and past Jeannie, gathering albums of photographs, onto the front porch. Sticks her head back in.

Uh, could you like watch Dwight for a second? Maybe find him a coat? It's freezing out here.

Dwight screams, smacks himself on the head, saying, No Dwight, no Dwight! Unfastened photos fall from Jeannie's hands. Mona grabs the couch