It is a certain hill the one
 I imagine when I hear the word "hill" 
and if the apocalypse turns out
 to be a world-wide nervous breakdown
 if our five billion minds collapse at once 
well I'd call that a surprise ending
 and this hill would still be beautiful 
a place I wouldn't mind dying 
alone or with you. -David Berman

Chapter One

I. Chaos and the passage of time.

That still looking beautiful hill is still standing wherever it stood then, and still it pays no mind to the minds that peek out of their draperies and shirt sleeves for hints in lieu of divine or otherwise personal inspiration, obstinate and warm, like a blanket in a picture frame. The same re-run of Tom & Jerry plays on the same televisions in different living quarters, and different faces with the same disappointments and the same satisfactions try to ignore it. Beautiful losers, beautiful faces in Montreal, California, before the establishment of the mission trails of blood and salvation, before the path to heaven had been cleared, before the knowledge of the existence of hell was commonplace.

These were uncommon faces of the same personality, I used to think. Obstinate and warm, like the barrier between children and parents speaking different dialects of the same dying language. A language that ceaselessly reminded me of the countless places I’d considered being a revolutionary but never was, places I’d begged late at night muttering underneath the sounds of air conditioners and midnight assembly lines to provide me with determination enough to make a difference, or at least to notice some cardinal wrong worth righting. It never came, only I did, alone on countless sober summer nights dreaming wine and winter, reenacting ice cream dates I’d had when there was still a bounce in my step.

Pale and jaundiced as Yossarian’s liver (I once compared everything to Yossarian and his liver), and as it was, all gravy and leaking maritime thrive, the colloquial trend for slang and jargon was at a stalemate with nationalism and seemed to have a slant toward vulgarity. I was a roughneck at the time, confronting my demons within and without the confines of financial stability (in other words, I was a bum), and only through third party interaction was I exposed to the quavering voices and liberal/bigoted tirades of the day’s auspicious, learned youth. My exploration of the yellow space between cupboards on the fringe of poverty often resulted in my questioning of west America’s West Hollywood notions of malnutrition and spiritual depravity, the truth having been lost somewhere between shantih and jihad, and often I would sit at home with my shoeless feet wrapped around the legs of a metal picnic chair contemplating my inevitable slither into the abyss of 21st century despair.

The omen was something I’d grown used to, and I nursed it like a sixteenth martini, pressing it between my lips voraciously and hoping with a steaming hot chocolate passion that my premonitions would be fulfilled before my dreams were. That hope yielded recompense for the painful fact that the virtue of my promises was about as reliable as an ‘87 Hyundai. This I discovered while pissing in the wind in the general direction of Prague one sunny afternoon after teas and cakes and ices and a tiff with an emotional wreck, thinking thereafter that my promises were all of shoddy manufacturing--mediocre assembly of mediocre parts--and that from then on I would rather hand out aimless declarations of love than my word of honor. The obituary precedes the will; the will dispenses nothing but curses. I wanted to go to school there, at Prague, before my perusal of Fowles and Kafka convinced me that it had little to offer other than recourse for the overactive imagination and a library for the blind. There was a time when the books I read stopped reminding me of life and started taking its place. There was also a time I dreamed of living somewhere where kids wore book-bags with books in them and scoffed at me silently from behind their wide-rimmed eyeglasses and draft tables. I was an avid fan of infamy. I was also young and, albeit more astute then than now, relatively stupid. Laden was already dead, and as far as I was concerned (and despite the insidious presence of red, white, and blue handlebar streamers and the endless Hunt For The Evil One), so was America.

For three years I tried to recall lessons I’d learned from people I’d known, successfully convincing myself that I was a student of the world, and that every sparkling face and every shining intuition I encountered was a teacher. Once I made a real teacher cry, an English teacher, and the only thing I learned from her was that I was capable of making people cry.

--Such a shame, you should have let them take away your miter, my friend Gil had said.

I’d been threatened with real expulsion from a real private academy and a speedy ferry to real destitution if my refusals to apologize to her were not reversed. I succumbed and in reality, the flip side of my iron will turned out to be the softened side of buttered toast.

--I’m sorry.

The convict’s resolve dissolved.

--It’s okay, it’s okay. I understand where you were coming from. 
--No, you don’t. 
--Yes, yes, I think I do. 
--I’m only apologizing to you so I don’t get expelled. 
--Isn’t that... isn’t that sweet? 
--What was your major at CSU Dominguez Hills again?

I wanted to put a dart through the portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the cover of the textbook she carried. Her composure failed her.

--Accounting, why? 
--Never mind.
 And that, as they say, was that.

On retrospect my methods were vindictive but my intentions were good, and although I’ll admit that I was wrong, I was also right. Truth hurts, I asserted, but I was in no position to distinguish truth from fabrication, and my fabrication encompassed everything around me, from the holes in my sneakers to the omniscient blue print in teacher’s edition textbooks. Never place the answers in the hands of those who fail to understand the questions, was the prevalent observation I’d concluded with, and being the type of student who interprets what he’s learned to suit his own tastes, I altered my life’s focus to accommodate for bewildering questions of my own. Questions for which only I had answers, and I made certain that only I knew how to render them coherent. Were my answers even right?

>Gil often said that I forced myself into situations ideal for proving him right, and consistently I would squirm, fettered, to turn the tables.

--I’m going to provide myself with the opportunity to actively and effectively help people. Gil said.

--I don’t know what I want anymore, Gil. I want to play music for eager faces; I want to capture the attention of the masses and hold their attention until I come up with something worth saying to them.

--They aren’t individual faces anymore. Your face is their face. It’s their particular organs you have to appeal to now. Their howling livers, their sputtering lungs, their dark, lonely fingers and their untouchable sex.

--You don’t have sex. 
--That’s not my point. 
--Then what is your point?

--You can’t wait for your little world to disintegrate into a puffing ball of ash that’ll blow into your eyes and change your life. You’ll have to burn it away for yourself. That’s why I’m going to China. You better come, too.

--I can’t afford a vacation to China.

--It isn’t a vacation. It’s a pilgrimage, and you can afford whatever you’re encouraged to afford. I beg you, my friend, I don’t want to be right this time.

--Don’t be so arrogant. Your fans would be offended. 
--You are my only true fan. 
--Shut up. 
--Look at this cigarette, Gil said, depositing ash into the palm of my hand.

This shining nugget of indecision, transfusing into liquid air, eating away at itself and throwing all of its meaningless marks upon a world that not only doesn’t appreciate it, but dies slowly along with it, because of it, and for it. We mustn’t let ourselves live like this, not unless our goal is to die with the same world we are trying to save. At this rate we’re going to wedge our butts into the cracks of dissipating marble columns, we’re going to ascend the sides of ivy halls, we’re going to thrust our stinking yellow remnants into humankind as a testament of our shimmering desire to help it. We’ve got to stop ourselves before it’s too late. That is why I am going to China. You better come, too.

--You should quit smoking, first.

--So should you.

I’ll go, Gil. I’ll go because you want me to, and because I don’t want to leave a testament of my shimmering desire, I want to fulfill it, I want to leave a colorful stain in the incorrigible cracks and withered wrinkles of your face, and mine, and everyone’s. I want a mind-altering experience that will change everyone’s mind. I want to take their apprehension by the hand and lead it to water. I want to soil my hands with their dirt and sculpt a crumbling caricature of myself, a statue that will fold under the rain, sink away into the sand, and leave a purple stain on the gravel erected over its grave.

--They’re not faces anymore.

--They will be.

--I’m sure you’re right, whistled Gil. Somehow.

II. ...

-- Shut the fuck up, she said. No-one fucking talks like that.

Sometimes when certain people look at me I feel more narrative, more physiologically reactive, more radioactive. In the know, as the kids say these days. It's then that I start talking too much. I have a tendency to forget that someone's there, in my face, looking at me, touching me. Indeed, it's possible that they may even be listening.

So suddenly, there I was, tickling the stratosphere's ass. I looked up at her; she was hovering over me, her knees were drawn very close against my ribs. I wished for one of two things--that I should forget her name entirely, and permanently, or that I should muster courage enough to utter it. I was aware of the unlikelihood of either happening. We were ground into the earth violently, two meteorites hand in hand, still smoldering from the pressure of atmospheric reentry. I eyed her--and she interrupted my contemptuous glare with a contemptuous epiphany.

This is the only way you really know me, isn't it. It more closely resembled an accusation than a question. She leant forward, her hips dug into mine, her breasts managed to find their way to my lips. I let myself be distracted, but once my mouth was wrenched free, I went out of my way to ignore her.

--You know, I'm not so sad you're gone these days, I said.

She prodded me with her eyes--she must have known I was trying to hurt her. I went on.

--I'm not going to pretend that any of this has been preceded by any original thoughts, I quipped. It's been brought to my attention that there is, between all things--especially in the relationship between a man and a woman--a sort of common ground. The shade between two overlapping circles. Some inexplicable bond. Gravity, ligaments, rubber cement. Something between us I've never been able to see, something you've always seen. Of course now that it's too late I'm beginning to notice that it's there. Or that it's leaving.

Her eyes were wounded, or maybe my wounded eyes wanted hers to be. She was on the train, it was scheduled for departure, I was standing on the boarding platform; she was skint, I was scared stupid. She turned her face down, away from my idiotic, inquisitive stare. Somehow I got the impression that she knew I only ever talked in order to get some reaction, any reaction. I didn't care if it was good or bad. Fortunately, I wasn't done yet.

--I've decided that love is a reel, and I'm the bait. I just haven't figured out if you're the fish or the rod. Either way I'm pretty sure you can agree that the cord's been cut. I've resigned myself to the fact that it's my fault entirely, and I know there's nothing I can do to fix the anything of everything, but you're still here. It's only a matter of time before you're not anymore.

The bowed head, the muddled eyes, the restraint in her weight. She was already untying herself.

I've since realized that everything I did to her and with her and for her and because of her was in some fucked up way the worst I could possibly have done, all the way up to those last tendentious moments of bitterness and bated confrontations on a cellular phone waiting for the bus to take me home. I should have said, simply, that I was sorry for everything, and made one of the earlier days the last daze, instead of drawing it out and trying my damned hardest to encourage in her a raucous malice for everything that came out of my mouth. I wanted her to spit bile. Of course then I didn't consider it fair of her to leave me without letting me hate her first. The least she could've done was shatter my guitar into a million priceless pieces over my head, or key my sister's car, or put a brick through my bedroom window. Unfortunately she was much smarter than I was. So she was nice.

                         you fit into me 
                                  [you manipulate me] 
                                   like a hook into an eye  
                                   [and chain me to a lovely normalcy] 

                                   a fish hook 
                                   [you murder me]
                                   an open eye 
                                   [because I ask you to] 
                                                 -Margaret Atwood 
                                                 -[anonymous]

--Absolutely, she was shouting, quietly, painfully. I can definitely love someone and never want to see them again. Love isn't all cigarettes and chocolate milk, you know.

 --Tighten my umbilical noose, why don't you.
--Kurt Cobain is dead. 
--So are you. 
She kicked me in the proverbial jaw, and effectively shut me up.

--You could've done so much better. You pin yourself up on your wall as a slobbering emotional fool, a quasi-romantic thoughtful and considerate friend. A friend with feelings, who's conscious of the feelings of others. But you're just a baby. A big baby.

I wanted to throw a box of crayons in her face, but she didn't give me enough time to.

--There was always a really weak part of me that never wanted to leave you. Maybe it was my heart.

That was the last thing I ever heard her say. The choo-choo sputtered to life, and I thought I'd caught a glimpse of a grin bless her beautiful mouth as she turned to settle herself into the cabin.

This train is bound to glory, her dejected smile said, and like I knew she'd already been for months, she was gone for reals, as the kids of yester-yore are known to have said.

Between all the second chances of delivered speeches and solemn requiems there had always been an abyssal chasm between us. I'd read about similar pits between people, bottomless, and yet absurdly narrow, no wider than a lazy, stylistic shuffle forward. Eternally looking down at the cracks in the sidewalk, preposterous little pedants, we'd stopped on either side and just never looked back up. Obviously we didn't find one another interesting enough or endearing enough to take a small step of faith toward ataraxy, so in the end we turned around ass-backwards and scuttled away in opposite directions. Which worked out for the best, I suppose. Ataraxy, my ass.

I have no regrets.

I still owe her money.

--If an ideal relationship could be placed on a continuum, she told me once, it would look something like this.

She drew a line in the air, the forefinger and thumb of either hand pinched together at both ends. Maybe three or four feet in length. In the very center of the line she placed a C by making a sideways cup with her right hand, her perfectly simple, perfectly supple and extraordinary hand. It was seared onto my forehead as her final and most deliberate Curse; it was pointless for me to try to argue with her. So, for once in my life, I listened.

--I am one end of our continuum, and you are the other. The C in the center is a representation of Compromise. Note that Compromise exists at exact distances from both points A and B. For now, we'll give the line between points A and B a name. We'll call it love. Love, huh. Obviously, I had no idea what she was talking about.

--You're never going to listen to me if I try to explain this any other way. I'm trying to describe my feelings in a way only you would want to hear it. Without feeling. Only respite for you and your self-styled egoism. When I'm done, please feel free to tell me again why I'm completely wrong, Mr. Imagination.

I blinked, waiting impatiently for my turn to speak.

--That's an example of an ideal relationship. I'm sure you don't really have any clue how many times I've had to wish that our relationship even remotely resembled that continuum. Unfortunately, here's how our love works.

She drew the same line in the air--that horrifying and decadent line--her right hand pointed at me, her left at herself.

--Points A and B remain the same. Our continuum remains the same. The only difference is, of course, the location of point C. It may seem trifling to you, banal to you, for fuck's sake even idiotic to you. But then again, what doesn't?

She slid her left hand (I remembered that once upon a time, "left" was synonymous with "sinister") along our love, curled it into the shape of a Curse (like a shaft of soggy bamboo, the sort you see on the windows of Japanese marketplaces wound together to support fragile, smiling effigies of video game characters), and placed it an inch away from the finger she pointed angrily(anger was her most recurring theme), belatedly, correctly, at me.

--This is your idea of Compromise. Simple, like onetwothree. The end.

She never spoke of it again.

III. --What are they doing outside at this hour?

--They're trying to lose weight. My head was thrown back against the headrest, and I came to the jarred conclusion that a car was moving, and that I was tentatively situated somewhere therein. I'd been screaming, shouting, probably about something inconsequential, some forbidden existence, some gratuitous soul, or some fantastic ghost of Ramadan past. Of daffodils and damnation, it might as well have been. There were two pairs of eyes scrutinizing me without seeing me, and I could smell pity in the air as though it were on fire. It smelled like coffee. Bad coffee. The double bastard was working just fine.

-- Stay away from girls with algebra textbooks, I muttered. My hands were trembling.

-- Fuck that, two eyes said from the backseat. Girls who write sociological treatises on the likelihood of male members of demographic minorities being heartless twits are really prone to having socio-pathic tendencies. The leit-motif for the day is misogyny, asshole. I'm glad you stopped yelling. You were giving me a headache.

John is a bright boy, although there's no insidious light projected by his eyes that penetrates your soul like stalactites of passionate incandescent manifest brilliance the likes of which girls read about in Cosmopolitan and Jane (while being completely different, these two periodicals mysteriously manage to be exactly the same) under columns titled "How To Achieve Mutually Gratifying Congress" or "Why You're In Bed Naked After Sex With A Hot Spot For Zucchini," respectively. To the contrary, his brilliance is a pale fire.

I thought about this as I counted the reflectors poised stubbornly outside the windshield, trying in vain to thwart the passage of a million steel juggernauts. It seemed to me that they were intent on preventing World War III. They, like everyone else whose opinions don't fuel automobiles, were failing. Their revolution saddened me, so I shut my eyes.

Then it dawned on me. I wasn't in a car, I was on a bus. I was startled awake when a headstrong and foolish reflector was trampled underwheel. Changing lanes. The pair of eyes that didn't matter much to me left my memory almost instantaneously to become two smoldering coals buried in the sand after an ugly bonfire on an ugly beach with ugly people drinking cheap beer.

The other two coals I saved, but I hadn't bothered to let them cool before plucking them from the pit and squeezing them into my hungry palm. I opened the hand that cradled them and studied them very closely. The coals were neither close set nor years apart, and I realized that their green fire would never sputter out. The coals believed in genetics. The coals did not believe in love. They were beautiful. They were brown. They slept in a virtual cell, the doorknob of which was a marriage between analog and digital decorated with buttons of different, vibrant colors. The doorknob was the cell. It made worlds go round.

I contemplated all of this, and my affection for John began to swell and churn in a crock pot of halcyon circumstances, gurgling happily with laughter and prosperity. Two tenebrous hours later, I was still awake, and I was still moving. I questioned myself, baffled by the fact that I had conceded to dedicate three and a half hours of my life to mass transit as a means to the simple end of John's home, but it didn't take more than ten seconds for me to realize that my commitment was mathematically greater than the two dollars and fifty cents plus three and a half hours the bus offered me but significantly less than the forty dollars plus twenty minutes a taxi cab could just as easily (not to mention more conveniently) have provided. I sat up straight, thoroughly satisfied with my ersatz magnanimousness, and I decided that the English language contained far too many words dominated by soft vowel sounds. Soft vowel sounds show a gentle attitude of an author, a critic once wrote in a discussion on Blake's "The Tyger." First of all, I wasn't William Blake, and second, I knew how to fucking spell "tiger." It didn't matter to me what incarnation of our mutual language Blake had suffered his entire life through, he was long dead and I was still alive and hale so I had already won. I always won. Victory was highly subjective to me then, and more often than not it was relatively marginal.

In the video games (as opposed to in the movies), victory is always under quarantine; it's there, it's just isolated by difficulty settings and try agains. Eventually the red tape is cut, the quiet beach in Hawaii liberated, and the credits roll. Smiles spread like leprosy. Sometimes in the confusion cords get tangled, tears get shed, and as glasses of scotch and ice clink together in the matutinal light of post-epicstrategem conquest, exhaustion settles in and controllers are replaced with kazoos. Music proceeds to fill the air, and pandemonium does what it is so notoriously known to do. It ensues.

Christmas was nearing, and it became painfully obvious that Stevie Wonder's rendition of "Ave Maria" made me exceptionally happy while that of the Vienna Boys' Choir made me exceptionally sad. Not to be crass, but from this I discerned that my balls were very obviously far more important to me than my eyes. Someone told me once that if you can't joke about race, then there's nothing left to joke about. I think the same goes for anything discriminating or harmful in any way, shape, or form. Pigeons don't dig holes for water. They dig so that eunuchs and blind men can one day be treated as equals on the totem pole of incredible people. Incredible people have always been the butts of jokes. Butts in blue jeans two sizes too big.

John and I made a promise once to never give one another Christmas or birthday presents, and I was never sure whether this was an indication of the unspoken and unconditional nature of our friendship, or if it had just been the easiest, least incriminating, and most financially accommodating way to tell one another that we were both cheap, lazy assholes. Call me weird, but I always romanticized the latter. It just so happened that I'd had a gift or two for him in my bookbag, gifts that had to be given prior to the holiday festivities in order to avoid setting promise breaking records; the kinds of gifts that I would much rather have kept for myself.

I posed a question to the hot coals in my hand. --What are we going with ourselves? --This analog stick is way too sensitive, John answered. --I asked you a question, jerk.

--I mean, look at it, he went on, it may as well not be analog at all. You pull it down, and it just snaps right back into place. It's like a Byronite who refuses to realize that someone's trying to break his heart.

I was reminded of the NES Max, with its little pseudo-analog jog dial and multiple turbo-settings; I remembered using it to get high scores on NES Track & Field. But no, it occurred to me that I was talking about something far more consequential. It occurred to me that I was talking about my future, and not about my past.

--I haven't read Byron for three years. Even three years ago, I hated him.

--Remember when people used to call you George Gordon?

--I'm not talking about yesterday, John. I'm talking about tomorrow. Not just mine, either. Yours, too.

--I see beer in my immediate future, John said. Hey, did you know that Del has a song about video games?

--Yes, I knew that.

I told you that, I said. Did you know that Del doesn't have a driver's license? --I told you that.

The coals were met with a blank, absolute bouleversement on my part. I realized that our conversation had been eerily fulfilling, and that my initial question, however blatant it may have been, had been answered rather sufficiently. For the second time in one hour, my introspective spirit had been satiated. I had no more questions for the coals, or for myself. We were free to step down.

The bus choked, and immediately it began to snore as the air brakes were engaged.

I could feel the sawdust beneath my moccasins as I stepped onto his balcony, and cleaned my feet before entering the living room. John was sitting on the couch, his hair was a mess, and the remote control was held in a hand that didn't seem to have the frenetic energy to operate it. There were canisters of spray paint arranged neatly on the coffee table. None of them had caps on.

--Have you been huffing paint? I asked.

John did not raise his eyes to meet mine, nor did he make any attempt to greet me at the door.

--What.

God, did you remember to render everything?