Love enters in ways which baffle the mortal mind. I do not know exactly how it works but I imagine it happens the way one learns a language or comes to have a nightmare after spooky film. It weaves its way around our immortal breath, which comes in and out of us like our mortal wind, and the many spirits dance; for that is what it is to dream; to let the spirits dance. It is Autumn now and things will die. Things will decay. The spirits shall leave their hosts and be shuffled in the air, and they shall hide in the world. The body shall become as a vegetable, plain and lifeless, and as a child carves expression into a pumpkin, so shall man and woman decide their animation, moving forward in the schema. Ask me where love hides. Ask me which door, love, the ultimate treat, lay shining behind. I was hoping you would tell me, for my bag thus far is filled with trick. In the land of the stranger the spirit dance not. The moon austere and the sun unforgiving, the land of the stranger has no God living. Ask me where love hides. Ask me again and again. Ask me in nightmare or daydream; shadow, rainbow. Ask of me where the fruit is ripe; where the candy apple smiles delight. Where eyes may meet and where words may land; where accidental harmonies are part of God’s plan. In the land of the stranger the stillness is loud. It is death on the heart and long live the brain. The land of the stranger is fear in the lungs; man is a cough; woman, a stain. In the land of the stranger a woman is reduced, to a paycheck a month and a bottle of vermouth. But ask me once more where the love is allowed.

It was on one of my strolls around town that I made a kind of discovery. I had been lost in the song of a bird when I happened to glance through the window of a breakfast place, and there he was, that pale man with the tan hands, the one who had been after us, he was sat down dining. I went in and stood before his table. When he looked at me he laughed and then motioned with a hand to the seat across from him. I sat down. "Good food here?" I asked. He nodded, grinning. "Where's the other one?" "That idiot?" he answered, "good riddance to that headache." He picked up his fork and attacked some eggs. I didn't say anything. When he noticed my confusion his chewing slowed, then he wiped his mouth with a napkin and stopped grinning. "Kid, it was the easiest job I'd ever done. Really, I mean...listen, you've got heart, that much is clear, but the world...the world is sleeping...and let me tell you, it'll die for its Z's." "Tom Gettysburg..." "Gettysburg is a fiction, understand? He's a wax figurine one thousand feet underwater, get it? You get close, he melts and you drown...see what I'm saying kid?" "I don't believe it." "No, the problem is you do believe." "I know," I said. His grin came back and he shook his head. "Man, what is it with you people? That's exactly what H said. 'I know' he always says." "Who's H?" "Another damn shadow, like all you people who think a fiction is worth pursuing. See where it gets you, heck what do I care?" He motioned for the waitress's attention. I got up to leave. H. Who was H? Before I got out the door I stopped and turned. "Why was it an easy job?" I called out to him. "Like I said kid, the world's sleeping. You might be awake, you and your Milky Way buddy, but you're too busy listening to the snoring. That shit would make even me faithless, and I don't believe in nothing. I make my money, that's all. And heck kid, I don't even believe in these dollar bills. No gold standard, kid, no gold standard."

It's a good thing man cannot tell the future with absolute certainty, for he is a creature that leans into slumber when the dots of the dice are known. He looks up at the dots of the heavens and is baffled, and sometimes he curses that he knoweth not paradise; but he should thank his lucky stars; for that is to be grateful for what you own, yet know not. I was home and watching a fly crawl across the glass of a coffee shop window. It could smell the donuts. So could I. I was wondering when I would see Milky Way Joe again, or if I would. He left as a dying man trying to rekindle the fire of his hopefulness, his tarantula faith. Joe handed people riddles and the people put them in their pockets as if they were receipts. It was only later upon rediscovering them, that they realized they were carrying around something unresolved, that they had pocketed mysteries. And by then, Joe was nowhere to be found. From Portland to Boston, to Mr. Tom Gettysburg, the melodies and the love, the end of the world haste. All of it was like pulling napkins out of a dispenser and not knowing what to use them for, and to throw them away would be a waste. I wandered around town. I walked and walked. The humble brick of the building that used to be the library whispered to me as I passed by. The playground I knew was not the one the kids played on anymore. I pitied them though I knew their updated one probably wasn't any less fun to play on. In the stained-glass window of a church I could see the figure of a man bowing his head. As I got closer I could hear music playing. I tried the doors. They were locked. When I peered in through the window I could only see empty seats and some candles. Is that you, Tom Gettysburg? I thought. Is that you praying alone, lighting candles on your own, holding on to the last remaining spoken prayer? In the night I picked up the guitar gifted me and a melody poured through into the room. I entitled it "Since Kansas City". Quitting You say that you're quitting, dear Throwing away all your figurines That look like movie scenes Is it just too much? To be here with you now? And so we've got to be apart I have not been the same Since Kansas City It was not cold It was not warm It was not of this world at all I do not love you any less I just can't get up this wall What did a man pocketing mysteries do with such creations, such melodies, such words? I whistled them over into existence and hoped Tom Gettysburg might hear them. Can you hear me Mr. Gettysburg? Can you hear the frightened child and the roaring lion, the frail old woman with her baguette half way through the crosswalk, the frantic teenage girl all dressed in black, the bold and clever young boy with his fishing rod; can you hear them Mr. Tom Gettysburg?

Caught a quick case of the miseries on Twenty-two East, hastening on past New Alexandria. Old love was in my brain, which created a vision of the future that flickered from heavenly to grey. Lord help those in the grey. The name of Tom Gettysburg briefly came to mind. Tom Gettysburg...who? What? Push it aside, old boy, and go on home...you want to drive yourself mad? And so I spoke to myself in my head. Nothing had happened. The only thing which happened was the falling away of all those involved. Allie. Joe. Off to find something real, I suppose. Milky Way Joe, you sure spoke of gold, but I'm afraid I might be made of dust. What are you, Tom Gettysburg? An illusion? A mirage? I stopped in Scranton, Pennsylvania, did laundry, rented a room, watched a couple episodes of The Office, then fell asleep. When I dreamt, I dreamt of Allie. She sat across from me in a diner. "Down?" She asked. I pushed my coffee towards her. She took a gulp, went "ahhh" and then put it down and slid it back to me. "Yeah, I suppose," I replied. "You're not dead," she stated for the brighter. "Yeah and I wonder why. I wonder what the heck I do around here anyway." "Go home," she said. "You've been gone too long." "What's waiting for me there, more dust? Am I some dust collector, Allie? Is that who Tom Gettysburg is, the ultimate pile of dust?" "Why don't you find out?" she said. "Go home kid." When I woke up it was early morning. I was five hours from home. It was time to cross the Hudson.

Something had happened. Something had gone on between Kansas and Ohio, but my brain wouldn’t work and I found myself lost in fatigue. Joe was gone. Milky Way Joe. He was gone. At least I knew where he went though. I dropped him off at Indianapolis International and he caught a flight back to Portland. “Will I see you around Boston at all?” I asked him at the gate. “You’ll see me,” he said. And as he walked towards the doors he turned, grinned and waved. And then I was alone, so I drove. I didn’t get too far. I barely made it into Ohio before I had to pull over and shut my eyes. Odd dreams came that I did not remember upon waking. No music had been played. The guitar that had been gifted to me and the voice which had sung a song, they were both discarded. It didn’t seem like anyone needed a song from me. And what the hell happened between Kansas and Ohio? What went on in Illinois and Indiana? Something important but I was too tired to relay it. I was beat. I was a mechanical man. And I was a man without a home, going home, mixed up and chewed up. The dark crawled in around me in an apartment I rented for just a night. The guitar and the voice and the melodies, it was all a beautiful thing, but a thing which was bouncing along, making its way down the road, and soon it would end up in the river. I would not join it. Soon it would part from me. What happened between Kansas and Ohio? I asked for an answer in the dark but knew I wouldn’t get one unless I slept, and had better dreams. Something had happened when Milky Way Joe and I crossed the Mississippi River, pondering the blues as we soared over the bridge, nestling ourselves into the palm of Quincy, Illinois. We both changed the instant it happened. I wrote a song that night while Joe went to sleep. I wrote a song and stretched. I stretched my legs and my back and I breathed like a yogi. Then I awoke in the morning and opened a window, letting the aroma of a petit thunderstorm tap its jazz into my nostrils. I made a pot of coffee and poured myself a cup and thought about love. Then Joe came down the stairs and we hit the road. We saw where Lincoln was buried in Springfield. The majestic tomb cradled the king under ten feet of cement. Someone had tried to steal his bones once and Milky Way Joe said “someone’s always trying to steal the frame of a great man after he’s been long dead.” Then I took out one of my favorite letters of history, a letter from Lincoln to a woman he knew before his wife. Before reading the letter aloud I apologized to Mrs. Lincoln, if it should be disrespectful to read a letter her husband had written to another woman. And after I read it Milky Way Joe said “that was right as rain Roc. That man belongs to the ages and you belong to love letters.” We kept on keepin’ on, right on into Indiana where we spent the night at an old house on the top floor. The bedrooms each had a rocking chair in the corner. “You see man,” Milky said, “you put an empty chair in a room and you’re asking for something to fill it and watch you while you're sleeping.” I hit him on the shoulder and told him I wouldn’t be able to sleep if he went on like that. In the morning we visited James Dean’s grave. Joe put a pack of cigarettes beside it, we said “Thanks Jim,” and kept on rolling. We caught a baseball game, shot pool, went around drinking beer, had an argument, made up, slept for two hours, and headed for the airport. And that was that.

We drove for three and half more hours until we reached Manhattan, Kansas in the dark. I put my head against the driver’s seat window in the dark, parked at some motel. Everything looked stranger at night. What did the melodies mean? They kept returning to my mind every now and then, but then there were times when I forgot about them entirely. Joe and I did not belong to this world, this current world, and yet we did. We were there. We had been born. We were each other’s contemporaries, and everyone else’s, whether we liked it or not. And yet how could a melody in a nobody’s head belong in the world? Allie had found her place, somehow. I woke up in the early hours of the morning when it was still dark and envied her. Where was this church of the setting sun where children take your hand and lead you into the mystery? Where was that for me? I tossed it aside. Not Allie, just the envy. It wasn’t good for me. Joe was still sleeping in his motel room when I went to go watch the sky get bluer and bluer. There was a coffee shop across the street, I did it from there. What did anyone know about love? What could anyone want from anyone else except a burst of desperation in the right direction? I smiled at the sky. I smiled at my desperation. It was a melody, it always was. That feeling. That bright angel which ached right in the pit of my stomach. It was always a melody, my whole life. I only had to let it rise up. Who would hear it? Where would it be played? When written, would it leave the notebook? Would the sky listen? Joe and I hummed on into Kansas City. He was getting his breath back. From the both of us there was a deep letting go, one that would not rise to the surface and this made us feel incomplete, like we had forgotten something. It weighed on Joe’s mind. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s illogical,” he said. They were strange words coming from him. “It’s a bet either way, if you want to think about it logically,” I replied. “Allie bailed man. She fuckin’ bailed. What else is there to say? Either that or they got to her man. She’s as plucked as last year's wheat.” “There’s much more to say than that. Only, I can’t say it. Not yet. Will you cut the shit? What’s the matter with you, huh?” He was trying to break the hearts of the world by breaking his own. But he couldn’t break mine. For some reason I felt no one could, but they could try, I almost welcomed it. “Am I missing something here?” “You’re missing everything, right now. You might as well be off someplace else, looking for a roller coaster or something, MW. What are you talking about? Are you missing something? Yes! You are! For crying out loud! Have you forgotten about Tom Gettysburg?” “Tom Gettysburg. I don’t know nothing about no Tom Gettysburg.” It was all crumbling. His eyes were turning gray. I parked the car in the next town we came across, a small one with the world’s largest pecan. “I don’t think it’s real man,” Joe said. “Sure it is,” I said. I needed a cup of coffee and I knew Joe sure as heck could use a pick me up. We went into a place that did ice cream and cheesecake and sandwiches, as well as coffee. There was an older woman with gray hair behind the counter. She greeted me and asked me how we were. “Doing fine, thanks. We were hoping to get a couple cups of coffee.” “Sure thing,” she replied with a smile. A younger girl came out from the kitchen and offered her help. “Good day today?” I asked, and I meant it in the human way, as in how’s your faith in things today, but no one ever says that, not least to a stranger. “A little slow,” the older woman said. Joe took a seat in a booth and slouched his head forward. His face almost drooped onto the table. There was a far away look in his eye, as though he were losing the will to see at all. Too tired to even bother closing them. What was the use? He’d simply need more sleep when he woke. And then it happened. I spotted a guitar in the corner of the room. It was barely visible, most of it was in a shadow, but the unmistakable body shape of it peered into the light. A strange sensation befell me and I went over to it. I didn’t even ask for permission, I just took it in my hands. It was light. Old and light. The wood felt hard and played, and the strings, they still looked good for strumming. Not one shred of doubt overtook me, for I remembered playing, singing, a very long time ago, perhaps in another life, perhaps in a dark and painful one I had learned through necessity. Before I could think I was out with it. “Can I play you folks a song?” “A song? Well certainly,” said the older woman. The younger one nodded her head. And I began to play, and I could play. And I began to sing, and I could sing. “I’ve held dear certain things I’ve only felt when you were near old friend remember the time we spent…” My eyes were closed and I was somewhere half in my head and half out someplace else. It felt like reaching for the angels, balancing on some beautiful platform. Occasionally I’d lose my balance and wonder if what I was doing was ridiculous, but I kept on at it anyway and fell back into the playful mystery. When I finished I opened my eyes and all I could see were smiles. And then I looked at Joe and I could see that he was smiling. They were not smiles like you’d think. They were not ear to ear or crystal grins. These were the most genuine smiles I have ever seen in my life. For on the faces of those I had sung my song for, was the expression of a peace given. And something else too, a kind of anticipation they had for more, but not from me, perhaps from themselves. A light had poured through the song and they knew it to be the one which animated their eyes. We were given our coffees and they gave Joe a slice of raspberry cheesecake. The young woman showed me a picture of her baby. “He looks like a happy little fella,” I said and then thanked them for the coffee, for the nourishment after a lot of goings-ons. Then they asked us what we were up to. I went to speak but did not know what to say. I didn’t have to. “We’re looking for Tom Gettysburg,” Joe said and went for the door. They looked at him puzzled then returned their eyes to me. “Will you take that guitar with you?” the older woman offered. “I couldn’t.” “No one has played it in a while. Seems like a waste to me.” And I took it.

When Milky Way Joe was a little kid they told him he was stupid, told him the earth was flat and that love was something only to be seen in filmography. One day little Joe was sent home early for putting his fist into another kid’s face. The nose had been broken. When his mom asked why he did it, he said the other kid spit on the pink princess dress of one of the girls in his class, and tried to cut it with scissors. He was taken out of public and homeschooled until high school. “Freshman year I hit another kid in the nose. I felt bad about it.” “Why did you do it?” I asked. “Ah shoot,” Joe said. He was riding upfront with me. Allie was sleeping in the backseat. “Nobody listens to a good kid sometimes, you know? Nobody listens. Then the good kid gets real bad at talking because he can’t practice it. This kid kept putting mayonnaise and mustard and ketchup and stuff like that in this other kid’s backpack. I watched him do it for half the year. But not everybody was like that, you know? I shouldn’t have hit him. I could have not hit him. I wouldn’t have if I had been able to talk to somebody about something.” “Talk to someone about what?” The sun was up. We were in Kansas. The land was blond beard stubble on one side of the road and grey beard stubble on the other side. Crops of corn and wheat a foot high. Sometimes both the land and the road were the same color, a reddish purple. “I needed to talk to someone about the world and what’s outside of it. There wasn’t anyone with any guts though. So my fist ended up leading the way. Compensation, compensation. You kick nature out the door and it’ll come beaming through all the fuckin’ windows. I haven’t hit anyone in the face since. It made me sick to tell you the truth. It’s a damned rotten thing. Maybe a fight’s good when it’s good, I don’t know.” The towns had no coffee shops. They were small and looked abandoned, but they weren’t, far from it. We drove by a little girl playing in a parking lot. I pulled in and parked. “Hey Allie. Allie,” I said and shook her shoulder. She woke up. “What? Hmm? Yeah?” “I need you to go over there and ask that little girl where the church is.” “What? Why?” “I just need you to.” Allie got out of the car and walked towards the little girl. I watched it happen in slow motion. The long red hair, almost orange in the sunlight, surprised the little girl with joy and she went playing in it. She twirled it around herself like she was on a swing set and laughed. Allie laughed too. Then they were speaking but I couldn’t hear from the car. There were whispers. Allie glanced back at the car in contemplation. I called out to her. The little girl took Allie’s hand and led her away. I tried to yell, but no sound would come out. It was a dream and I knew it. When I awoke, Allie was gone. We were parked in a small town called Hoxie. A water tower with the name stood tall and glistening right across the street in a setting sun. It was just Joe and I. “Where’s Allie?” Joe asked. “She went to church,” I said.

It was Allie and I up into the early morning hours speaking on the crazy whirlwind of things and throwing our theories off of some balcony to see if anything made a splash. She was an eerie kid, that Allie, and that’s why we got along. She was talking about the swamps of Louisiana. “You should see ‘em, you should see ‘em Rocco!” “Have you ever seen them?” “Well, no, but you should see them! They’re spooky and beautiful and I’ll bet they just swallow you up without making you drown at all. Riding on into it. Swaying on into it. And the crazy reptiles!” I was trying to set up what she was talking about in my head, but something else was fighting for center stage. My calmness was subsiding and something a bit impatient was taking its place. Basically it was this: where in the heck were we going? and what in the heck were we to do? “Say,” Allie said, “how come he’s so bushed all the time?” Milky Way Joe’s snoozing eyes were in my rear-view mirror. His head bobbed along with the car. “He’s dying,” I said. Allie shot her head back at Joe. “No kidding?” “No kidding,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?” “I don’t know.” The sun had yet to pierce anything and say hello and I was wondering when it would. I stopped once to put gas in the car and get a coffee. I put the cup on the roof of the car and squeezed the pump in the chilling air. I could see Allie snoozing, her head almost completely horizontal and resting on her shoulder, her long hair consuming her like a cloud. Then I saw Joe and a shock seized me. His eyes were wide open and bloodshot. He took a massive breath in and his body began jolting up and down with nervous excitement. Then he wiped at the foggy window frantically and tried to peer through the little slot which quickly fogged up again. I heard a muffled groan then heard the door open, the the sound of his shoes shuffling and scratching on the concrete. “Joe, you all right?” I said. “It’s the rougarou! The rougarou goddammit!” He was shuffling back and forth on the pavement as if he was playing defense, waving his arms up in the air and looking around for someone to give his warning to. “Whoa man, take her easy! What are you trying to say?” “The rougarou! There isn’t enough time to prepare…” His voice trickled off. Whatever energy had snatched him up was putting him back down. I swear I saw all the breath go out of him as his arms dangled freely and his shoulder fell hard against the car. Allie was up. We helped him into the backseat and then I went into the store to get him some water. The guy at the cashier told me to take the water and beat it, that he didn’t like the scene we were making. I didn’t say anything. As I returned to the car, a pickup truck pulled in behind us. Behind its headlights I could see two familiar faces. It was the man and woman who had questioned me at Blondie’s. The man got out and was preparing to pump some gas, but he didn’t take his eyes off me. I peeled out of that place, engine screaming and all. “What a hurricane!” Allie cried. “You had some kind of nightmare, man!” I couldn’t believe it but Allie was thriving in the excitement. She was in the backseat with Joe, holding him like a baby. “The rougarou…the rougarou…” Joe was going on and on. “Rougarou!?” Allie declared with amazement. “I’ll be damned Rocco, he’s rambling on and on about the rougarou.” “What’s that?” I asked. I was looking in the rear-view mirror like a maniac, anticipating the tail of the friends who had joined us at the gas station. “The rougarou is from the bayou. No kidding, man, I was just talking about the Louisiana swamps. Shoot, Joe, I’m sorry. I think I triggered a nightmare for him.” “The rougarou…we gotta get away…” Joe went on murmuring. “Rougarou is a kind of werewolf creature,” Allie said. “Thing’ll rip your throat out.” “I’ve got a tumor,” Joe suddenly said with more lucidity. “That’s why I’m dyin’. They couldn’t get old MW Joe with a bullet so they put something in his brain.” “How long do you have?” Allie asked. “Doctors sat my mother and me down and said maybe two months, maybe five years. They have no damn clue. But I know what’s what. I know. Do you guys really believe me? You believe we’ll find Tom Gettysburg? What do you think? You think I’m crazy? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” “Shhh,” Allie said to him. “Take it easy. I believe you. I’ve been listening day in and day out to so-called sane people all my life. Even if you are crazy, I’m glad I came.” “You wouldn’t believe this nightmare folks. You wouldn’t believe it. It was so real. The rougarou, that motherfucker. I was on an airplane reading the funny papers and some bastard had cut out the final comic strip, some bastard cut it out so no one would know the punch line. Next thing I knew I was on a train and this gorgeous gal was sitting across from me, but her face melted into a cup of broccoli cheddar soup, and I was screamin’ out for someone to help this gal, but instead this real greasy bastard with a mustache came around and he asked for my ticket, so I gave it to him, but then it turned into a small piece of bread and he tore smaller pieces from it and ate up the soup with it, and I said ‘aw man you’re a fuckin’ lousy greasy ticket eater’ and my words were coming out all weird and I started thinking everything I was saying was off and wrong. Then I wasn’t on a train anymore. I was rowing a boat in the bayou and this gypsy woman was talking about the rougarou. The full moon was behind her through the mist and I was starting to feel awful. Then this real tall sonofabitch was walking through the swamp. And he morphed into the rougarou. A terrible creature. The thing had flesh hanging from its teeth from the last kill and its eyes were glowing with spirals. It was bony, not muscular, thin as can be, creepy thin, and fur like mold. The damn thing looked like it was melting. And then Roc, you were there, and you started trying to hum one of your melodies. And Allie, you fuckin’ rolled on in on some kind of waterboard, and you had buckets of paint that were leaking into the swamp and making all these halloween colors appear, like glowing green and pumpkin orange. And you began, the two of you, to battle this fuckin’ monster. Allie, you were hauling paint up into the air and it was sticking and it constructed this wall that was also a treasure chest, and when it opened the rougarou couldn’t help but be drawn in by the golden majesty of what was inside. I couldn’t even look directly in it or I felt I would lose myself. And Rocco, you were singing the greatest songs I’d ever heard. And it all seemed like it would be all right, that you two would defeat the monster. But suddenly I was disappearing, and at last I saw the creature multiply into these other sharp-toothed fiends. There were so many of them. So many…” There was perspiration on his forehead. “He’s as hot as a skillet,” Allie said. “I’ve got to get us off the road and out of this car,” I said. “We’ve been driving too long, and plus, we’re being followed.” “We are?” “Yeah.” “Fuckin’ so many of 'em…” Joe was rambling, he was delirious. I got off at the next exit and began taking random turns. I didn’t know where to go, but at least I could confuse those two following us. I had this terrible dread that if I didn’t get Joe someplace he could rest, eat some food and regain his strength, that he would die right there in the backseat.

We sat in the living room and waited for him to wake up. I sat in a chair and Allie sat cross-legged on the floor. “What’s his problem?” Allie asked. “He doesn’t have a problem.” “Is he drunk?” “I don’t think so.” “Is he a lunatic?” “Not completely.” Joe sat up slowly and then bobbed his head forward, moving his mouth as if the sleep had been a meal and he was finishing up chewing. “Yep,” he said, “that’s where they go sometimes.” I looked at Allie and she looked at me. “Who’s Tom Gettysburg?” Allie said. She was all no-nonsense. “Roc, what day is it?” And he yawned and then let himself fall back on the couch. “What year?” he added. Allie sprung up to her chuck taylors, took Joe’s wrists in her hands and yanked. “Hey! Hey! What’s the big idea?” “Joe, you’ve been sleeping since yesterday. For like eighteen hours you’ve been sleeping.” “Who’s she?” “That’s Allie. I invited her to help me bury your body ‘cause I thought you were dead.” “Really?” “No, not really. Why don’t you give her the scoop huh? And fill me in while you’re at it. You’re a person of interest, by the way, and now I’m on the radar.” Joe pushed himself up off the couch and sighed strongly. “Don’t you think I know that? Shoot! I’ve got the whole militia after me. They’d unleash Kong after me if they could. But the sonsabitches killed Kong too. Can we trust her?” I nodded my head. Joe put a cigarette in his mouth and then immediately took it out. “Gettysburg is the last man standing. He’s the last good cat there is.” He pointed the cigarette at Allie and then at me. “He's at the end of the road, Gettysburg is. And he doesn’t even know it. The last of the best is about to take a swan dive into the deep end of everyone’s miseries. It’s all pooled up! We thought it was nothing!” He put the cigarette in his mouth, grabbed his bag and then sprung out the door. We were on the road at eight o’clock at night. I was driving. Allie was riding passenger and Joe was sprawled out in the back with the window down, lighting cigarette after cigarette. “This guy keeps smoking like that and we’ll all be dead by tomorrow,” Allie said. “Smoking, is a human tradition,” Joe asserted poetically to the roof of the car. “Joe why don’t you give it a rest eh?” Joe tossed the cancer stick out the window. He leaned forward against Allie’s seat. “I wasn’t able to get the guitar, as you may have noticed.” “That’s all right man.” “Wait, Rocco, you play?” “No, not really. It was kind of a half-cooked idea. Sometimes I’ve got these melodies in my head.” Allie was smiling and looking out the window as if she was trying to hide it. “What are you smiling about, good-timer?” I said to her. She did not take her eyes away from the window. She watched everything outside move along like a picture show. “Sometimes I hear whole horn sections," she began, "and crazy strings. And they paint for me. The conductor whips her arms emphatically and splashes of yellow, splashes of blue, visions of pink go bleeding towards some vacant space of everything.” I looked at Joe. His face was squinting at the notion, trying to picture it. He returned to the back seat and lit up a cigarette. “So what,” Allie continued, “was this supposed to be a tour bus?” “I suppose so. I’ve got a bunch of words written, some melodies. I don’t know who we were going to play for though.” I turned back to Joe for a moment to see if he would come to the rescue, fill in the gaps, but he was sound asleep with his hand dangling out the window. I watched the cigarette get taken by the wind. Why was he so tired? “He’ll start a fire someday, that one.” “Looks like he already has,” Allie answered. “He’s got us barreling east in this car, hasn’t he?” The road was dark and the path was only lit a little ways ahead of us. For some reason I was calmer than I had been in a while. Not resting. Calm, and ready. “No, it’s not him. In fact, MW needs us more than we need him. And for some reason I can’t understand, and I won’t speak for you Allie, but I know something’s waiting for me out there,” and I nodded my head towards the dark. Allie peered into it. She was not calm. She was apprehensive. I did not think to tell her it would all be all right.

When the pale man and the glossy-lipped woman exited Blondie’s, I turned my attention to Eli, who had come out from behind his post to eavesdrop, pretending to wipe down nearby tables. “Those two were in here a couple days ago, looking for you,” he said. “Really?” “Yeah. That guy gives me the creeps.” “The woman doesn’t exactly make me feel at home either,” I said and rose from my chair. “Who are they?” Eli asked and threw the washrag down on the table. “All I know, Eli, is that I’m the good guy.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. Answer me this, in the movies, who’s the one who puts an uncomfortable kind of a pressure on the good guy?” Eli thought about it. “Well, big dog, that would either be the annoying obstacle character, you know, not quite the bad guy but might make it so the bad guy wins because they slow the good guy down, or the mentor, you know, the coach, like Mr. Miagi, cause the good guy is forced to grow and that can be quite difficult. Yoda too, that’s another example.” “Yeah, neither of those two reminded me of Mr. Miagi.” “Or Yoda.” “Yeah, I wasn’t getting a Yoda energy at all.” When I left Blondie’s I was looking over my shoulder. I didn’t want to be followed back to my house where Joe was probably still conked out on the couch, so I went for a walk up Main Street to the book store. I knew someone who worked there, a musician. “What do you say Allie?” I said as I walked in. Allie was putting books up on the shelf. She was a strange cat. She had long red hair that almost reached her ankles and she’d read every single book in existence. She could play every instrument and spoke three languages apart from english. She could sketch like Da Vinci. What was strange about her was that after she wrote brilliant music or sketched the soul of seemingly inanimate things, she tucked them away, frowned, and continued her existence strictly as a bookkeeper. No one knew how competent she was at vivid visions, but I did. “Not much,” she replied. “I haven’t seen you in a while. You haven’t been working.” “I quit, kind of.” I picked up an old book with a fanciful cover. There was a kitten whose whiskers turned into a bridge and a pair of lovers were slow dancing on that bridge and behind them was a great big yellow moon. “You like that cover?” Allie asked me. “Yes, I do. But how does it read?” “Lousy,” she said. “That’s the way most beautiful-looking people are by the way. They look great but they read lousy. You ever try and read a beautiful-looking person? It’s like talking to a brick wall. It’s like trying to swallow air with a spoon. It’s like trying to look out a window that in actuality is just a television shut off.” “All right, all right,” I said. “I believe you.” “Well anyways, say, when’s the last time you were fishing?” And she held up a copy of Huckleberry Finn. “Years,” I replied. “You?” “When I was little. I loved it but I don’t bother doing things I love anymore.” “Yeah? How come?” Allie jammed a paperback into a tight spot between two hardcovers. Then she picked up a stack of nine or ten books and carried them elsewhere. I followed her. She went down an isle and rolled the shelf ladder alongside her. “Here, will you hold these?” She asked and before I even answered she foisted the stack of books off into my arms. “Yeah, sure.” She climbed up the ladder. “You know what your problem is Rocco?” “What?” I asked. “Here give me that blue one. I can tell everyone’s problem, just give me around three minutes with them.” “Well don’t keep me in suspense.” “Here, that red one. Okay listen. Your problem is that you’re astonished whenever anyone wants remotely anything to do with you. Correct?” It was blunt, but it was Allie, and for some reason it was easier to come clean with a person when their hair almost touches the ground. “Yeah, sure.” “It quite literally blows your mind. You can leave those three on the bottom shelf, just tuck them, yeah, that’s right, thanks. Now listen,” she said and climbed down from the ladder. She looked me in the face with eyes like a kindergarten teacher. “People would like to know you.” I looked down at the ground and scratched at the back of my head. “Don’t look down there, look at me.” I looked back up. “Truth be told, I can’t tell everyone’s problems. But I can tell what your problem is because it’s the same as mine. I could sing with the angels, Rocco, and maybe you could too, but quite frankly, and you’ll understand when I say this: fuck ‘em.” “Fuck who?” “The people. But see that’s my problem. I don’t trust people. I have no faith in them as a mass, as a group. They are too good at destruction when they get together. They worry too much about impressing and surviving and striving and winning arguments.” “You’re confused about this, aren’t you Allie?” “Very. All I know is I need to protect my work. If you give it away carelessly, people will tell you what it is and what it’s worth. They’ll tell me I’m a woman. They’ll tell me I’m white. They’ll tell me I’m queer. They'll tell me I'm missing Jesus. They’ll do it all except listen to what I’m trying to tell them from the depths of me. Now tell me, how in the heck am I supposed to hand them what keeps me alive and going on a silver platter, when I know they’ll look right past it and try to explain me away in book covers?” “I suppose you have faith,” I said. “Faith? What faith? I don’t believe in that kind of thing.” “You see, you knew the problem, Allie. You’re so very clever at identifying the problem, as all good critics are. You remind me of somebody. But you see, I’ve got the answer for you. Faith.” “You want me to start going to church?” “No, I want you to know that you know nothing, that what you need is outside your understanding, but you’re going to have to reach for it as if you know it’s there.” “What’s there?” “The strength to hold on to the work and the worth, even when they are trying to tear it from you. But if you deny yourself the faith in that strength, you’ll hold onto it like a scared little kid, forever.” “But that’s just the thing Rocco, you’re just a straight white male, aren’t you? Who the heck are you?” “It’s all smoke and mirrors, Allie. People don’t really think that way. At the end of the day, or of the century, they’ll return to what gives them a good life. Sure they’ll do some damage till then, to themselves, but Allie, your work is brilliant. I don’t know about my work, but yours is absolutely necessary. You see? If you give the world a treasure so necessary, so integral to declaring that life is worth living, that love is worth having, even when saying goodbye, even in the face of death, in the face of despair; if you do that they won’t give a damn what color you are, how much money you have, or what flag you fly. They’ll take the work and carry it onwards, as you have carried your heroes in time.” “My feet hurt,” Allie said with an unfortunate look on her face. “I’ve been on them all day.” “There was once talk of a slave, Allie, Frederick Douglass spoke of the rumored story. This slave forced his master to set him free, and do you know how the slave did it? The slave revealed to him the truth, through the competence of beauty, that to be a slave master was to corrupt the soul. Do you dare have that much faith in your truth? In your competence? How much do you actually believe in the arts? In the soul? Lean on your work. Make the gamble. Bet on love.” "Then give it to the world," Allie said under her breath. Her eyes widened. She was beginning to believe, as I was myself. "Allie..." I wasn't even sure what I meant when I was saying it to her. "...Tom Gettysburg. We're looking for him. I think we'll need your help." She looked at me, puzzled.

Then I had a kind of nightmare. I dreamt of a world which only noticed you when you were in its way, and it pushed you along. The people of this world were only allowed to bond over trivialities, like what color car they drove and what they thought the best animal was. The only things which connected them, which they celebrated, were odd, curious things like how many buttons they could tear off their shirts, what visuals made their bodies vibrate, and how many eyeballs they could collect. And when, after all which was necessary to manifest something into the world had been done, after all the tears and sweat had fallen; it did not manifest. Nothing ever came into reality. A carpenter would plan a house and build the structure, only to return to it in the morning and find it gone, nothing but the bare land before him. A woman would write a masterful symphony, spending night after sleepless night, her eyes aching, her ears and fingers working at the piano, only to find the notes on the page whiting themselves out before her eyes, and before she knew it she was tearing it up and throwing it in the fire. All endeavors were like dangling carrots, always vanishing before anyone could bite. In this world I dreamt of, visions were invested in carelessly and half consciously, then terminated before completion. Potentials were crafted, then aborted, unwanted. And this was done over and over again until the people of that world began to say “why bother?” and “what’s the point?” and “nothing matters anyway.” And it was all being done in the name of the Highest. And they knew not what they did. The only thing some people knew was that for some reason they could not wait for the day to end, and to go to sleep. Milky Way Joe showed up at my door on a Wednesday. He was wearing a Boston Red Sox jacket and combing his hair back like Elvis, and his faded blue jeans had a massive hole in one of the knees. We were the same age, tumbleweeds of twenty-five, but something about him made you think he was immortal, a time traveler, preserved in ice but still moving. “Are you ready to go or ain’t ya?” He said this right at my doorstep with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “Not really, no. I didn’t know when you were getting in. How’d you get here from the airport?” “I hitched. Look, we don’t have much time, we need to get to it now. We need to fly.” It was noon and the air was heating up. Joe came inside and ducked his head under the kitchen sink, slurping up the cold running water. Then he quickly went over to the couch, unfolded his body down, and fell asleep. He was out like a light. I went over to Blondie’s and got a cup of coffee. I had stopped showing up for work there a couple weeks prior, when Joe called. Eli gave me a free cup. “So what happened to you, big dog?” “I fell in love,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. “Well, that’ll do it.” “How’s Selene?” I asked. “Selene quit. She told me to go do something with my own body and then let the air out of one of my tires. Why are you laughing?” “Because I think she aimed to get all four, but the first one took too long.” “She is an impatient one, isn’t she?” “We all are,” I said. I had a seat over by the big window in the front and leaned my face into the sunlight. I closed my eyes and breathed in the daytime through my forehead and my temples. I didn’t feel too good. I felt like crap. I wanted to take big slugs of the coffee but it was scorching hot. Then a man and a woman, both of about thirty-five years of age, sat down at my table across from me. They were dressed like young parents, jeans, t-shirts, odd-colored sunglasses, and good haircuts. They smelled really good too, like lavender and oak tree and lemon combined. The woman had dirty blond hair, as straight as a doll’s that was cut short right at her jaw line, and she wore a thick coat of lipgloss. The man’s face was deathly pale, almost like he was sick, but his hands were tanned and one would think he modeled watches. “How’s it going?” I asked. They weren’t Blondie regulars I recognized, but I thought they might be customers who knew me. The woman reached for my coffee and started to raise it to her mouth. “Oh wait, that’s really hot,” I warned. “Is it?” She paused the cup just before her lips. “Yeah, that’ll burn your situation up real fast.” She put it down on the table and then looked at her companion. He was giving her a disparaging look through his sunglasses. “I thought it would have been cool if I took a sip of his coffee,” she said. “Why?” “Yeah why?” I echoed. They both looked at me. “Because,” she said, “it’s like we’re in charge.” “He’s about to know that we’re in charge, once we start talking to him and explain the situation.” “I already sense that you two are in charge of something,” I said. They both looked at me again. “But maybe we should just leave the coffee out of it. Or we could get some cream, I used to work here.” “Shut up,” the man said to me quite casually. “I’ll just shut it for now though and listen.” “Good.” The man motioned to the woman with his arm and a strange warping of the side of his face. “What the heck was that?” she asked. “Oh for the love of, just start, come on, tell him what we’re doing here.” “All right, I mean, you looked like you were having a seizure. Listen kid, the way we understand things, you may know something that we would like to know too. That make sense?” “Sure, I guess so.” “What do you know about Gettysburg?” A small shot of dread poured itself over in my stomach and I immediately reached for the coffee. “Wait I thought,” the woman continued, but it was too late. The liquid fell onto my upper lip, burned that, went past my tongue, burned that, then fell down my throat and burned that as well. I put the cup down on the table. “That was very painful,” I said. “What do you know about Gettysburg, kid?” the man said. “Well,” I swallowed, “it’s probably the most famous civil war battle. Lincoln, right? Gettysburg address? I actually know some of it.” “Not that Gettysburg, kid.” The woman put a hand on the man’s arm and his body jolted a little. "What?" she said. "Nothing, just your nails, they're kind of claw-like." "They are not claw-like. What the heck kind of thing is that to say?" She rolled her eyes, then continued speaking to me in a calm, instructional voice. “We know, that you know, that Gettysburg is the name of a person. Okay? We know you’ve been in contact with a Mr…” Her shoulder popped up high as she reached into her pant pocket. She brought out a small piece of paper and consulted it. “...Milky Way Joe. That’s actually his real name.” “I don’t know anyone…” I began, but she interrupted me. “We intercepted a letter he wrote you. A very strange letter.” And I thought that odd, for I had gotten Joe’s letter. There hadn’t been any signs of it being re-sealed. “This letter mentions a certain Gettysburg character that you two will track down. The mentioning of this is brief. The rest of the letter, which is a long one, is an in-depth account of a dream this Milky Way Joe had, of you and a purple alien woman. And I mean it is very in-depth, it is borderline smut, this letter.” It must have been another letter Joe sent after the first one. “We’ll be real frank with you, kid,” the man cut in. “You’ve found yourself involved with some bad company, sketchy people who will eventually get you in a lot of trouble. Do you have any idea where this Milky Way Joe is?” “No,” I said. “No idea.” “You’re absolutely sure?” The man leaned in and his eyes peered into mine, peaking out of his sunglasses. The woman leaned in also, and she put a hand on my arm. “Oh wow!” I exclaimed “What?” “Nothing, sorry, I just, your nails, they surprised me. They’re just very, they’re long.” They both leaned back into their seats. “If you hear anything, you contact this number.” And the man took out a white business card with just a phone number on it and nothing else. He put it on the table. And then they left me.

I was never to have an intimate moment with Selene again, for she became the strange elusive one, hurrying to and from things which appeared to make her miserable, slipping away from all things in between. Eli made jokes and they went clear through her, ghost-like. From my perspective she had lost all interest in what was in my mind, in my heart, and so I dared not share. One day I asked her, “why don’t you meet me in the middle?” and she stared at me like I was a second cousin she hadn’t seen since childhood, one she was never close with, not even a little bit. “Forget it,” I said. And she went on her way. There were many Selenes in life, waiting to drown or waiting to be saved completely, but there was no in between; the in between was their own soul moving and taking part; and they no longer had faith in something like that; the beautiful had become ordinary. Sometimes on lonely nights I half expected her to be somewhere I was, and the fact that she never was made the stars stretch even further apart. Thus, resilience became a vice, for we could put up with what kept us from things greater; we could put up with the darkness, when the stars were waiting for us to leap. And I was the same, waiting for the paramount, reaching for the miracle. The difference between me and the Selenes of the world was I still believed it was possible. The stars had not blurred into the rest of the night, nor had the moon, not for me. I wouldn’t allow the blur to claim me, as the others had given it permission to slow dance them into oblivion. For my life was rife with rude reminders, and I knew what followed a cursing of the moon, a cursing of thine own hands, a cursing of someone else’s. The best I could do for myself and the Selenes was pursue the cure: a beautiful truth so potent that it would shake the drowning cinderella from her slumber, the heartsick little prince from his isolation. In the worlds where the sublime flattens, the peculiar ones must reach again for their apples. There were planets waving at me that no one else could see. When Milky Way Joe called again, I was eager to begin. “Who’s this Tom Gettysburg?” I asked. “How do you know about Gettysburg?” “What are you nuts? You told me about him.” “How do you know it’s a him?” “Because you said, ‘I found him’, you called him that.” “Oh, okay, well I don’t know man. Gettysburg is a complicated subject.” It wasn’t going as I thought it would and my hopes began to deflate, but then he said it. “Roc, this Gettysburg guy, Tom Gettysburg…if we lose him…it’s over.” “What do you mean, over? Why?” “Because he’s supposed to fall in love. Not just that, he has to pursue that love. And he must succeed. Don’t you understand? He must succeed. If Tom Gettysburg does not love, then none of us will.” I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing. It was confusing from my place on the ground, but I believed in the sky enough to give it the time of day. “Roc, Gettysburg is where the angels have drawn the line, okay?” “Okay,” I said, “okay. But I don’t understand what we do.” “Well first things first, we gotta get on the same page here, you know? We’ve gotta be ironing the same suit, you see what I’m saying?” “No, I don’t.” “Roc, I’m in Portland. Where are you?” “Oregon?” “Yeah, Oregon. Are you still in Colorado?” “Yeah. What the heck are you doing on the west coast?” “I’ve been looking for Gettysburg man! I’m serious about this. Now listen, I’m going to catch a flight to Denver. Do you still have your car?” “Yeah.” “All right, I can be out there next week. Can you play guitar?” “What?” “Never mind. I’ll fill you in when the time comes.” And he hung up. Three days later, Milky sent me a letter. This is what it said. “Roc, Here’s the honest to God truth. I was bed-ridden for quite some time. It felt like forever to me. It felt like a hazy, cold hell, and sometimes it was hot, sometimes it was panic and ants crawling all over the place. But then that coldness, that numbness, that was the scariest part of it all when I look back, because I didn’t care, I couldn’t care, about anything, not anything at all, because my head, skull and brain, was a damn wrecked skyscraper, abandoned, time-worn, overgrown, windows shattered, wildlife living in the offices, ocean water flooding out the living room and kitchen. It was no good, my friend. Somehow, someway, as life will have it always, I got back. I’m back now, and I’ll never let what happened to me happen again, and I believe I was there for a reason. I don’t want anyone to ever have to go there, and to those who haven’t gotten out, I want to lift them by their better dreams, right on out of that cold unforgiving place, that they may reach for that good peace, that good loving. There was this vision I had, and the vision was of you. It was a dream and you were its subject. I saw you playing an instrument, a fusion of a piano and a harmonica and you were also making love to a beautiful space woman, her skin was a light purple and you made her make sounds like a harp makes. It was the most beautiful music I had ever heard, that anyone had ever heard in the cosmos, not because it was technically proficient, but because you dared climb out of the darkness, because you dared believe on the cosmos itself, beyond the cosmos, to that place lovers go to make music. I am bringing you a guitar. I don’t know if you’ve ever played, but I know you can write. You must write some songs. And we must drive back to the east coast, and you must play your songs for the people we meet along the way. It must happen. This is how we find Tom Gettysburg. You must play our way to him. You must sing our way to Gettysburg, and he must realize his love, that the world may go free once more. Earnestly Among It All, Milky Way Joe” It was an odd letter, of course. It spoke of visions and of dreams. Of outlandish plans and ideas. But it was better than the dull. And it was better than the standstill. And it asked of me something, and asked of him something. It even asked of the world something. Something rising. I began to write poetry in my journal. And I began to hum melodies in my head.

And so everyone has their secrets, secret woes, secret fortunes, is that so surprising? Selene was a writer. She wrote really bad reviews. Perhaps they were good, fantastic even, among the world of reviewers, but if you ask me, that game is a coddled one. This made her like me even less, which I did not think was possible. I called her a professional critic. “I comment on trends. I point out their flaws, I point out what’s useful in them.” “Fantastic,” I said. I was filling up little plastic containers with salsa and she was popping the lids on. “I don’t understand what your problem is, why do you even care?” “When someone has a problem and I think I know the solution, I speak my mind, that's all.” “I don’t have a problem.” “Clearly. Listen, you’ve got criticisms for what other people are doing. Huge surprise. Massive surprise. You see something wrong with the world, feel something deeply off and not falling into place in a majorly catastrophic way. It’s making you hopeless and making you believe there isn’t a proper way things work. That you could do everything right, everything you’re supposed to do, and you would still get ignored, get shafted, get isolated, do harm, be a burden. Yet there is still something about you, some shining light, that you know, if you could only manifest it fully, or even a damn quarter of it, that it would help you and everyone else. Am I talking sense or not?” She nodded, two strands of hair on each side of her forehead dangling down like vines. Her brain was a damn rainforest full of much more than critiques on the desert, but no one ever bothered to tell her. That was the real critique of the masses, that they swallowed individuals and boiled them down to nothing. Generation after generation of faithlessness. “That’s why I’m writing,” she said. “That’s why I haven’t quit.” “Well it’s going to turn into why you quit. Believe me. It’s why people quit what they’re passionate about. And they do it gladly, with a desire to stomp it out. Unless they get a handle on it.” But we could not fill up little containers of salsa for more than ten minutes. There were customers to serve, coffee to pour and croissants to warm. For the rest of my shift I could feel her sitting next to me in some theater, it didn’t matter how far away she was, we were both sitting and looking up at the screen and we needed to know what came next in the story. Months had gone by since I left home. I was working the words every day but it felt like chipping away at a planet made of cement. Sometimes I thought about Milky Way Joe. He was a kook, but he was human in that golden way which gets lost from time to time in history. Paris in the twenties. Every day I wondered what it would be like if no one had cell phones. What it would be like to know people. To have friends. Have a lover. It was more than that and Selene was putting it into picture for me. Everywhere I went I watched what people were watching, and it was always other people. People wanted people. People needed people. And yet if people were stars then the darkness was growing and the void between stars expanding. I felt it. Selene felt it. Everyone felt it, you needed only to dig the tiniest bit below the surface to find the strife. It was right in the middle of my connecting dots that I got the call. It was Milky Way Joe. “Rocco. Rocco? That you? If that’s you on the other end here give some kind of sign. I’ve got news, I’ve got page number one through one hundred. I’ve got the damn holy spirit wrapped up in a to-go bag. Rocco? That you Abraham?” “Well give me some time to answer,” I said. His energy was unrestrained, he was cosmically frantic, he was rocking San Francisco. “Okay good. Good. I have to talk to you.” “Did you call me Abraham?” “What? Listen, I’ve only got a couple minutes.” And he was chewing something. “MW are you eating something?” “What? No, I only read at night. I can’t have any second-hand material coming in before midnight, it needs to be all me, all bone and no stone.” “All right, slow down. Chew properly whatever you’re eating. How are you doing?” “I’m doing great man, thanks. I got your phone number from someone down at the bookstore. I had no theory whatsoever that you were a key stomper.” “A what?” “A key stomper, you know, a letter lover, a cloud precipitator, a starving David.” “What?” “A writer. A writer Roc, I didn’t know you wrote. I read your book. It’s fantastic. I was through it like someone going through it, you know? Someone having a rough time, but instead it was me reading your book and I loved it, it was a revelation, a damn trip to the outer limits, it was my comforter.” He was out of his mind, Milky Way Joe was, but it was just what I needed to hear and feel. The world needed Joe’s hope, as wild and unpinned as it was. “Ah crapola. Listen Roc, I gotta go, I’m helping Loretta clean her van.” “All right, all right, no problem, just call me back.” “Listen Roc…it’s Gettysburg. Tom Gettysburg. I found him.” “Who?” “I’ll call you back.” And he hung up. A week went by and it was a restless one. Everything was gray and beaten down. I came out of the grocery store and a man with a dirty face was eyeing me down, and he said “London town.” I said “What’s that?” and he went “London town.” I drove home, took a shot of tequila, threw up, and wished Milky Way Joe would call me back and tell me who Tom Gettysburg was.

Milky Way Joe and I lost touch soon after we met. He had given me a phone number at which to contact him, but when dialed, it rang for a curious amount of time until something that sounded like a crow made me hang up irritably. Meanwhile, that first novel of mine went navigating through the streets of nowhere, where it eventually vanished from my attention completely. That was no problem. It had really only been a means of beginning, of getting things turning. The first draft was the final draft but I gave a damn enough to write it in the first place. It wasn’t long until life opened up through the lens of working words. The first thing that happened was I got robbed. Someone reached out to me on the internet and told me that they liked my work, and asked if I would write a children’s short story for their nephew. The nephew’s name was William, he had a dog named Maxxie. The double x’s should have been the alarm that I was about to be bamboozled, but after a dry spell one jumps at an odd colored drop. I finished the story in a short amount of time. William and his dog take a rocket ship to the moon and glue it back together in order to save the world. Cute as can be. I was sent a two thousand dollar check, at which point I was told they accidentally wrote one zero too many, but I could cash it and send them back the extra money. Bad check cashed, money lost. My bank was not happy about this. In the end of it all my checking account clutched at fifty dollars and a resilient thirty-six cents stared at me from my savings. The second thing that happened was my girlfriend kicked me out of our apartment. She said I might become an alcoholic. I asked why. She said I romanticized life too much and made the real thing dull in comparison. I said I didn’t make life what it was, then went on an incoherent, abstract rant about how we could get better at making life what it was. She started gathering my things in a pile on the bed. I put them in a heavy duty trash bag and went out to the street. She asked me where I would go. I said Colorado. She asked why. I said the mountains seemed romantic. And I did. I borrowed some money and headed west. Other than a flat tire in Indiana, I arrived in Longmont, Colorado, where I had found a cheap room for rent on the internet. I was one for two with the internet and three for four with tires, lonesome as heck but hopeful. I got a part time job at a coffee shop and worked words everyday. That’s how I met Selene. Selene walked through the world on a sheet of ice, clear as glass with a depth of seven thousand leagues below. She worked with me but I hated her, for some damn reason, and in turn, she loathed me. I remember on my second day she said I resembled a dog she had when she was little. “What was its name?” I asked. “It was a she. And her name was Misty.” “That’s a pornstar name,” Eli said as he squeezed by us with a trash bin. “Not everything is porn-related Eli, especially if you’re not addicted to it.” “If you’ve never been addicted to it. Past tense. I don’t watch porn anymore.” “What is it exactly that Misty and I have in common?” Eli jammed his face between us. “Would have had in common. Past tense Rocco. I think Misty is fuckin’ dead.” “Shut up Eli! Why are you everywhere all the time? Why is he always listening?” “The man has good ears,” I said. “Thanks man.” “Of course,” I shook Eli’s hand. “He’s got a nice full head of hair too,” I said to Selene. She rolled her eyes. And that’s how it was at Blondie’s Cafe. It was a lot of nonsense and shouting and careless commenting and eavesdropping, and surprisingly often it was heart to heart and mind to mind. One day Selene came in with tears in her eyes. She was hanging up her coat in the storage room and sniffling, erasing the sentiment on her face desperately with both her hands. “Hey Selene,” I said. She did not turn around. “What,” she said curtly. “Can I do anything for you?” “No. I’m fine.” “You don’t seem fine.” “Do yourself a favor and…” And she broke further, and more rain came out. She turned to face me, less ashamed because now she had her weapons loaded, her insults known. “...and don’t even try to know what anything is…” It was clunky and she knew it. “Oh shit,” she said. “Never mind.” I moved closer to her and picked up something she’d dropped on the floor, a small envelope. I held it out in my hand. She inspected it for a moment but turned away, her long black hair flooding over the side of her face. “Read it,” she said. I opened the envelope and unfolded the paper inside. I read it. “I’ll bet those bastards didn’t even read my work, I’ll bet my resume wasn’t in the proper format. Rubbish. I’ll bet…hey, how in the hell do people like that come to be in charge of what comes in and what goes out anyway? That’s why there’s nothing worth reading out there. That’s why…” “Listen, Selene, I didn’t even know you wrote.” She looked up at me with tear stained eyes, red moons that were wet with bitterness. It was then I caught sight of how truly cute she was. Behind the veil of wounded wings and horns that crutched a fear, I melted in the actuality that she glowed. There were darkened street signs on her cheeks as well as avenues of adventure that curved up into her nose. Head-in-the-cloud restaurants and classic cafes, that only someone living there devotedly would know about, they poured across her forehead and brow. Swans sailed along the lakeshores of her jaw line, their ripples moving closer to me from the unknown setting sun which was her chin. And finally there was the firmament of her mouth, separating lip from lip. And I wanted to be there, for it was heaven. “Hello?” “Huh? What?” “Perfect. You’re a piece of work, you know that?” And she walked away from me. She thought I wasn’t listening. The truth is I had been listening to something you rarely ever get to listen to. I actually saw her for a moment.

I met Milky Way Joe at a coffee shop on Newbury Street. That's in Boston. He wasn't exactly strange, but with the way he moved he made you think something was going on, something you weren't wise to. Always hunched over in his seat and looking over his shoulder, bobbing his head up and down and saying "Yep, yep, that's where they go." I had just published my first novel and was invited to speak to some kids attending Northeastern University. I had been dreading it because I knew they were better writers than me, I just had a certain amount of guts where they didn't. The truth had been revealed to me: that sometimes the only difference between the so-called greats and the so-called ordinary people was that the so-called greats bothered to try. I arrived an hour and half early and there were protestors blocking the entrance, something about bad breath, I kid you not, they were protesting mouthwash or something, and bad white people and ban listerine. In any case I had to go around back through the alleyway to get in. That’s when I met Milky Way Joe. He was standing in the alley holding a paper up to his face. He decided to start pacing at the exact moment I was moving past him. We kissed shoulders. “Holy hell!” he yelled and let himself fall into some trash bags. I mean really he didn’t have to fall, he kind of used the momentum to purposely sit down in the trash. “Well look at where I am now!” “I’m sorry man, I thought you heard me coming through.” I went over to help him up. When he got to his feet he dusted himself off and then started scanning the alleyway. “Say, how do you know about this back entrance?” And before I could respond a couple of college girls exited the door laughing. Joe and I parted like the red sea and they went on through. “Don’t answer that,” Joe said. “Hey!” he ruptured with a newfound hope. “You can help me.” “I don’t think so man, I have to go,” and I started for the door but he was quick to follow, on me like a fly. “Wait, hold on, hold on. You see, I’ve got this love letter.” I stopped. Those kinds of things interest me. He held the paper out to me. “Would you read it? Just tell me what you think?” “You want me to read it?” “Yeah.” “Oh I don’t know man, isn’t it personal?” He shook his head. “All right, fine.” I took the letter from him and started to read it, but he snatched it right out of my hands. “Don’t you want me to read it?” I said. “Maybe it would be better if I read it to you out loud.” “Sure.” I leaned against the alleyway wall, crossed my feet and stuck my hands in my jacket pockets. Joe worked at his composure. He struck a kind of elegant pose and slapped on Italian eyebrows. I swear he looked like he was taste testing a pasta sauce. “Dear Loretta,” he began, “I’ve been frozen in time ever since we happened to disagree with one another. You really know how to make a man feel miserably small. I’ve got this nightmare see, and it makes me feel awful when I recall it during wakeful hours. Did you know you’re the first thing that’s given me some shred of defense against that terror of mine? And like I said, you made me feel real small, like I was not worthy of your pinky finger. But you see, I would rather have someone to contend with than have no one at all. And your eyes, where am I ever going to see eyes like that again? Now that’s my nightmare, never seeing those eyes again. It’s true I’m a fool. It’s true also that my legal name is Milky Way Joe. I changed it when I was fifteen and I just have not had the spare dough since to remedy that. Regardless, I love you, straight up, and I think we should be married. Yours if you’re game, MW.” Joe gazed a hole into that letter for a brief moment, then let his arm flap down like it was made of rubber and the paper cut sharply through the air. “So what do you think?” He had a sad way about him. “Honestly?” He nodded. “I thought it was really great.” “Really?” A breath shot up into him and the sadness seemed to wash away like soap bubbles under a hot shower head. “I mean it did get a little, I don’t know, odd there at the end, with the whole I love you and let’s get married thing and hold on a second, is your name really Milky Way Joe?” “Okay that’s enough, I just let you read my love letter didn’t I? No more free, personal freebies, all right? Yep. Man, that’s just where they go, isn’t it?” I threw my hands up and went for the door. Joe went back to reading his letter. The cafe was also a bookstore and on that day it was busier than I had ever seen it. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought, there is no way this is all for me. I could see the space by the window overlooking the street where I was to address everyone. The tables and chairs before it were already occupied with energetic young minds babbling amongst themselves. I snuck over to the bar and took the farthest stool, burying myself away behind thinking knuckles. “Hi there,” said a pretty blonde behind the counter. “Know what you want?” “Just a cup of coffee please.” “Rocco?” I turned. “Oh hey Tim, what do you say?” And I went to shake his hand but he met me with a fist bump, so I had to convert my greeting currency into his halfway through the journey. “I’m really glad you decided to come still, I think you’re really going to like Ray’s mind.” I leaned forward with an ear. “What’s that? Ray?” “You did get my email, didn’t you?” I shook my head with pursed lips. “Ray Verdure. Ver-dure. Ray? You know, the French novelist? He suddenly became available to us. I’m sorry man, we couldn’t pass the opportunity by.” I leaned back in my seat. Something deflating came over me, half disappointment and half relief. “Of course, of course. That’s all right,” I said. He gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Oh my, speak of the devil.” And I watched him hurry over to greet who had just come through the door, a cool and sharp apparition, donned in black leather, his face tan, his eyes hidden behind blacked-out aviators, his jaw and cheeks speckled with a shadowy beard, his curly dark hair weaving itself outwards towards everyone in the room. “That’s him, that’s him!” the pretty blonde behind the counter whispered with Beatle mania as she set down my coffee. “He’s perfect. He’s a dream.” I turned from the scene and leaned over the countertop, rubbing at my forehead with an open palm. The blonde continued her biography. “And he’s a writer too. A poet. A visionary, really. A romantic. Have you read his work?” “Could I get a to-go cup for the coffee?” “What? Sure. I mean, yeah of course.” “I’ll take a slice of that blueberry pie as well.” “To-go?” “Yeah.” The back door slowly closed behind me and with it went the volume of the ovation for Ray Verdure, who I am sure was a swell bloke. Outside the air was satisfying and the racket of the city, the cars and distant thuds of construction and nearby birdsongs in the park, it was all a sympathy to my exit of rejection. I started to walk because that’s all one can start to do when something they thought was there for sure wasn’t at all. “Hey! Buddy!” It was Milky Way Joe, calling out to me in a muffled voice because he stood by a food truck chewing a hot dog voraciously. I put a hand up and waved to him but continued walking in the other direction. After a few steps I checked to see if he was after me. I could see him speedily decorating the rest of his hot dog with a sloppy amount of ketchup and hastening in my direction. Oh brother, I said to myself. “Say, say, where are you heading?” he asked me. “The park.” “You got any peanuts?” “What?” “Peanuts. You got any in your pockets?” “No, why would I have peanuts?” “What kind of a maniac goes to the park without something to give to the squirrels?” That day, it seemed, was a continuous throwing of my hands up at the world. It was all absurd. We were walking together now, Joe and I, towards the park. “I can already see them all, you see them?” “Yeah, there’s a lot of squirrels in the Common,” I said. “Yep, that’s where they go. Look at those bastards.” “What?” “What’s that, pie?” “Yeah, blueberry. You want it? I lost my appetite.” “Do I want it?” And Joe took the pie-shaped box from me and the plastic fork and began digging in. The sun was beating down, it really was a terrific day. My newfound company was strange but I appreciated it. We passed a statue of George Washington on a horse and both gazed up at its majesty. “Now that’s how a man must feel, my friend.” Joe pointed at it with the blue-stained prongs of the fork. “He must feel like he’s won a great battle, but more than that, because he could be down in the gutter. He must feel and believe that grace is within reach at any moment, under any circumstance.” I marveled at the craftsmanship of the bronze statue, the attention to detail, and then the green impressionist waterfall of a weeping willow caught my eye in the distance behind George. From our perspective it was as if nature rained down to dress him in her bounty. “She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace,” I said. “That’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s what every human being should get hold of. What was it you said?” “An ornament of grace.”