The Book of Drome Pt 1 (Ch. 1-9)
part 1 compiled, these chapters have already been posted individually
Brief Intro and Overview
These first nine chapters constitute the first big section of a fairly big and hairy book. I rewrite a great deal between the private first drafts and the first versions I post but the versions I post are still fairly rough drafts. A lot of the characters are based on people I know from the streets and in the wilderness. This draft comes in at about 16.7k words. The plot is supposed to be ridiculously byzantine but it should all fit together like faberge clockwork. There should be a balance to the distribution of words, phrases, characters, events, images, themes. The use of recurring motifs should seem musical and evocative, not pretentious and mechanical. So I might revise quite a bit but for now I will work on preparing and sharing drafts of upcoming chapters and Part Two. These might take more time to revise and share, I don’t know. There are typos and little continuity errors but I'll try to go through and fix those.
Chapter 1: The nameless one (Murdermass)
The shadow of the gun arrived before the gun.
The security guard noticed him but the security guard was slow and clumsy. The security guard would die soon.
The room was impressively spacious with marble walls and high-vaulted ceilings. The building had been a church then a bank then a fancy banquet hall. Now it was an office building with extra floors built on top of the initial granite and marble. This room now served as the lobby. It was full of oblivious people in suits.
The shadow belonged to the gun that belonged to the nameless one. The nameless one preferred knives. There was nothing like the deeply spiritual feeling he got from killing someone up close: when their breath ran out and their souls left their bodies in shadowy sighs like orgasms of death opening gateways into other worlds. He’d done knife work for the US Army in Colombia and he yearned to do it again. But this particular job would require guns.
He came in just after the gun that came in just after the shadow of the gun.
He was dressed to kill, with bandoliers criss-crossing his chest and a sawed off shotgun across his back with a small bag holding a light parachute and a first aid kit tucked up against the mag tube. A Bowie knife in a brown leather sheath on his left hip and on his right a Smith and Wesson Magnum.
Everyone started screaming and it echoed crazily in the spacious stone room. It was like chattering tropical birds to him. He moved quickly but deliberately in the chaos he’d caused. He noticed the security guard fumbling to pull his sidearm. He already had his rifle ready. He leveled it quickly and surely and shot the security guard in the head and the head blew apart and the man’s soul flew out and disappeared in a faint electric blue flicker. Brains and gore splattered on the other people, sending the nameless one into a state of erotic arousal and everyone else into an even more intense state of panic.
He pivoted, raised his rifle and fired at one of the cameras. It exploded into countless small pieces that rained down on the terrified crowd. They were stunned and became quiet but still murmured and stirred. He put two fingers in his mouth and whisteled very loudly and shrilly, quieting the crowd further and focusing their attention.
He bellowed in a loud low voice like a drill sergeant: “Either calm down or be killed, make your choice and do it quickly.” He did Stentorian well. The people became quiet and still.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now let me be clear: I’m here to kill two people who know exactly why I have come. I need you two —you know who you are— to come forward and make eye contact with me.”
The two people came forward. They felt compelled by the strange authority of his voice. They knew they would die but they did not tremble. For the first time in a long time they felt a sense of peace as the minds and souls that they’d tortured for so long finally felt a sense of impending liberation and prepared themselves for flight.
“Round the corner…. fudge is made,” the nameless one said. These were no small words. He wasn’t sure if the other two knew what he meant but he knew they were both involved in a human trafficking operation involving the Catholic Church, the Knights Templar, the Mexican Cartels, The Saudi Royal Family and at least one European national intelligence agency, though he wasn’t sure which one.
He killed them quickly, shooting them in their hearts, and was out of the building before the bodies hit the floor. The cops were already arriving. He killed five cops quickly and easily. Pop pop pop pop pop. All headshots, it took very little time, they had not been as prepared for him as he had been for them.
He fled west on foot and hit the back alleys looking for fire escapes. He found one and climbed up to the top floor and then he shimmied up a dilapidated drainpipe and hopped a low wall onto the roof. He had a sight for his rifle in his cargo pants pocket. He took it out and attached it and glassed the near distances on the ground around the building below, quickly choosing a strategically significant target, and picking off a cop with a perfectly placed headshot from 250 yards to cause confusion among the rest.
Distant helicopters growing louder as they approached. He hopped back over the wall and landed on the fire escape with a clamor. He hurried down the fire escape quickly and quietly, agile like a cat. Once he’d made it down he stayed in the back alley. He found a dumpster and climbed into it and began removing his clothes and gear. He found some tattered stained discarded clothes among the trash and he put them on and began rubbing some gritty grimy garbage on his feet, face and hair. He did not feel disgust. He was an uncommon type of person.
He climbed out of the dumpster and went a block west and sat down cross-legged with his head turned down and his back against the wall. He began to mutter to himself as a means of becoming the role that he was now to play. He took some dirt from an ant hole by the wall and started rubbing it all over himself. The helicopters were loud now. He did not think they would clock him. If they’d had his infrared signature they would probably find and kill him. But he did not think they had his infrared signature. He stood up and began to spin around with the intent of dizzying himself before he headed out to the street proper and began speaking gibberish and giving menacing looks to passersby. He ranted and raved about how the Polish Intelligence Agency was in danger of being wiped out by the secret assassins of the Knights Templar in the service of the Vatican over the secret history of the third food at the last supper and the part missing from the ritual of the eucharist since the church’s inception.
“You’re goddam right I know where the fudge is made!” He screamed unhingedly at a passing city bus with people watching him bemusedly through the windows.
He knew it wouldn’t be long before the cops searched the dumpster. He was ready to let them find his stuff but he thought they might not get around to it for a an hour or so search the dumpster or it might take a few hours to get there. He needed a way to carry it all without any of it being visible. He wandered the streets acting crazy and saw a lot of cops in cars and on foot and the helicopters were still focusing on the rooftop and after a wave of cops passed he came upon a work site at a vacant lot that had a big hole in the fence such as the homeless create and use to get access to such areas. There were a few men there leaning on shovels and talking next to a pile of dirt covered with a blue tarp. Hooting and whooping he ran up and took the tarp and ran away and the men were not angry at all, they were entertained and laughed quite a bit at the spectacle of it. He’d run very quickly and quietly on his toes and the balls of his feet. He often walked on the balls of his feet and his toes so that he moved like a cat. That is how you do that kind of thing. He'd learned it by living with cats.
He made his way back to the dumpster, clear in his intent while appearing to wander aimlessly, and he crawled back into the dumpster and found his stash of clothing and equipment and he wrapped it all up in the tarp and emerged back out of the dumpster without the tarp, leaving it there while he thought. He’d gotten his cash from his pants and now had it in his pocket.
By chance, fate or dumb luck then came along an actual person of the type whom he appeared to be, a crazy homeless person dressed in rags pushing a shopping cart. He offered the man two one hundred dollar bills for the cart and the man accepted and began removing his items from the cart as the nameless one went into the dumpster and got his stuff, taking out the very weighty and bulky tarp and putting it into the shopping cart which he then pushed away as the other man called out thanks and blessings. He was never cruel to such people for he knew that they were children of God. Like yourself perhaps. He began pushing the cart homeward to where his SUV was parked and made it there and loaded his stuff into the back and got in and drove quickly to the bridge out of the city which was not far. The license plates were not his, he never used his own license plates and rotated plates frequently. He never did anything in his own name. He was the nameless one.
Chapter 2: Killer on The Road
He figured the FBI and whoever else were now on the case. He headed west out of state which he would’ve had to do eventually anyway as that was where the next job was. Once he got a couple states over and was out into the country he found a KOA campground where he gave a fake name and paid in cash.
He slept outside in his sleeping bag looking up at the stars and pondering the depths and infinities of the universe. He knew that these things that seemed distant also existed inside him and all other people in the depths and infinities of the human soul which is itself a universe living within the body of an animal. All those stars, you can’t really see them from the city, but if you get deep enough into the darkness they become so numerous that the entire sky is fuzzy with them and it becomes easy to see that they are all part of one big wildflower gone to seed, one big dandelion, waiting for some vast cosmic wind to blow it to another life. The entire universe is alive and without life this universe could not exist and without human souls the soul of the universe itself could not exist for the universe is so delicately calibrated and finely tuned that every single part is interconnected and contingent upon every other. He had learned that by listening to God. He hoped one day soon to find another earthly soul, a prophet or a saint or something, worthy of submitting to and serving with absolute loyalty ferocity and devotion. He did not know why he felt that way but that feeling had been growing inside him in recent years.
When he slept he dreamed of a vast meadow full of the spirits of the dead who all danced and rejoiced and shouted thanks and hallelujah up into the sky. There was a dragon made of stars who told him that language was a time traveling shapeshifter and that music holds the secret to all things. Other things. Only very faintly did he remember the part of the dream where a blind Native American guy named Michael Jackson came to him with another man at his side, a man barely there, a man of dust, who seemed like a ghost in a way, so pale and lacking in the deathlust that to the nameless one seemed paradoxically to constitute vitality itself…. The deathlustless dusty one seemed to be kin to the dead and it was to him that they shouted thanks and hallelujah…. Perhaps he was a prophet or a saint!
At the very end of the dream these things meant everything but as happens with dreams the memorability of the thing was not commensurate and was actually more inversely proportionate to the sense of meaningfulness within the dream. When he awoke he felt clearheaded and peaceful and a little bit sore in the right way for he had used his muscles. He left in the early morning while the sky was still dim. He got on the interstate and drove for a while before stopping and eating a few thousand calories and 100 grams of protein at a truck stop. After eating he went to the truck stop showers and paid $15 for a shower.
The two people he’d killed had been involved in a child abduction and prostitution ring connected to some of the most powerful people and organizations in the world. The guards and cops had been acceptable collateral damage. He could reckon things like acceptable collateral damage and how to manage a triage situation very well and he knew that civilians chose not to think about such things because they valued comfort above consciousness and they had small weak souls as a result. He yearned to serve something greater than himself but he was like Diogenes and had not yet met one good man. But he would keep looking and he did not give up hope. But he’d decided that until a human being worth serving appeared he would devote himself to serving God by helping children or whatever. He knew that killing evil people did not make him any better than them, it made him more alive and them more dead and that was that. It felt good. The people he would kill next were involved with the same ring of child abduction and forced prostitution and he planned on telling them he was coming before he came and went to war against whatever defenses they thought could protect them.
After showering he put on clean clothes: faded jeans, a grey T shirt with a picture of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in the movie Tombstone on it, a grey hooded sweatshirt and a black bandana on his head. He’d uploaded many gigabytes of incriminating video of the two people abusing children and associating with convicted traffickers forcing them into prostitution and soon the internet was abuzz with arguments about whether this man was a hero or a villain. (Many people found the cop killing extra heroic or extra villainous.) As he understood it this was all happening because he’d decided to cause it.
Soon he was back on the interstate anonymous and heading west. Eventually he would get to the Tatooine Interzone District and deal with the extraterrestrials and maybe even get a full body transplant but he had other work still to do. When he made it to St. Louis he left the SUV parked in a warehouse district near the Mississippi River. The SUV had plates stolen from a similar make and model and he left the windows down keys in the ignition.
He walked over a few blocks and got an Uber to the bridge and across the river into East St Louis in Illinois and had the driver drop him off about a quarter mile from his actual destination which he walked to from there. His destination was a chop shop where he bought a car, paying in cash. He knew the man who ran the shop, a man named Big Joe who was indeed very big and a very good mechanic with a particular talent for auto body work. He seemed like he could hammer out dents with just his fists, which were stronger and more calloused than any that our hero had ever shaken in all his travels and all his years. Like The Thing from the Fantastic Four. After surviving one last handshake from Big Joe he drove the nondescript new car to Big Joe’s little brother Little John’s office which was north a ways up among the affluent suburbs near Chicago.
Little John was thin of frame and his hands were fine-fingered and very soft but no less able than his big brother’s. Little John was a plastic surgeon who worked under the table and had a great reputation in the criminal underworld. People from all over the world came to him to get their faces rearranged by him. Big Joe was perpetually foulmouthed and tended to curse out even inanimate objects especially while working. Little John was very soft-spoken and his language was often effortlessly artful though he did not speak much. Big Joe would speak loudly so that you shied away, Little John would speak softly so that you leaned in to listen. Big Joe yelled in a rage straight out of the Iliad (and he had indeed killed men in hand to hand combat) and Little John’s every utterance straight out of Basho. And Little John had saved more lives than his brother had taken but now he mostly just worked to make money and feel like an artist, often succeeding at both.
“You have come to me
for facial alterations
that will fool software,”
Little John said.
“That’s right,” the nameless one said.
“And you’re friends with Joe?
Tell me face to face. I have
good reason to ask.”
He was indeed good friends with Big Joe, having helped him kill several people in hand to hand combat once upon a crime. That is a special kind of bond among men. Little John understood this. John had never killed anyone or been physically aggressive at all in his life. It was hard to believe the brothers were actually brothers sometimes but when you saw how alike they looked it became easy. Of course that may have been a trick involving expertly done plastic surgery. But he didn’t overthink that part. Even if it was a facade he was okay just working with the facade. Take them prima facie.
“Yeah we go way back,” he replied. “I understand the face to face thing.”
“Would you like a last look
At your face in the mirror
Before your rebirth?”
“No thank you I dislike mirrors.”
Little John smiled faintly, his lips thin and pale, almost reptilian. He nodded and moved smoothly and quietly out through a door to his right. The nameless one turned around and walked through a door on another wall into the operating room where a pretty young anesthesiologist and surgeon’s assistant greeted him warmly and began preparing him for surgery. He did not get plastic surgery after every job but it made sense to do right now because he’d killed a bunch of cops and there were photographs and videos of his face.
He removed his shirt and lay down on the table. She examined his arms and found the left to be preferable. Its veins were bigger and slightly bluer. He closed his eyes and listened to her as she told him to count backward from one hundred in his head but he did not count backward from one hundred he recited passages from the Iliad in ancient Greek in the ancient stone amphitheater of his mind but he could feel himself fading as he lost consciousness. He would awaken hours later with a much different face but he would still know how to walk like a cat and recite Homer in ancient Greek.
Eventually he would need more better surgery, and for that he would have to go see the extraterrestrials. There were aliens on earth now and should we surprised that they arrived in Tucson first? Life and the world had changed so much so fast. Every change in every little detail is a sweet little death. The aliens were changing the world even faster than the internet and smartphones had. But he would not get to Tucson or the Tatooine Interzone until after the next job. He had some more people to kill in Oklahoma first.
Chapter 3: Out Here in The Perimeter
First light out in The Perimeter. Dusty woke up in his sleeping bag and opened his eyes. There was a faint new humidity in the cool bluing gloom. He tasted the air. Warm subtle moisture of approaching rain. He looked up at the stars and began stretching his arms and arching his back like a cat and thinking about his dreams. He had to pee. He’d dreamed about wordshaped shadows and shadowshaped words and the word shaped shadow of the word woven world.
He lived in the margins out in The Perimeter but he was still basically a part of society from what he could tell. He was still a member of the human community though he often acted more like an animal or space alien. He’d grown up in violence and chaos and for a long time he hadn’t felt like a part of it all or seen his place in the wide world until fairly recently but he felt it very strongly now. He’d had a bad family himself. Lost souls. Self destructive types. Criminals, vagabonds. Incestuous sexual predators. Victims of unspeakable acts. Broke broken people who broke broken people.
He didn’t think about it all the time like he used to. Now he barely thought about it at all. He’d managed to let go of wounded attachments over the decades. He’d changed profoundly. He felt so different it was as if the entire world had changed. It was mysterious and miraculous to him that he’d finally grown up to experience such joy and satisfaction in his life after so much suffering. He had a very life affirming quality. Later that day he would raise the dead.
In the distance a pack of coyotes began to howl crazily and then a bunch of dogs began to bark from all different directions out in the desert dark. He looked up. A meteor streaked down the face of the dark like a softly luminous teardrop briefly bright before fading to nothingness and night. We are small things indeed, he thought to himself, smiling. And yet the brain might be wider than the sky as the ladybard once sang. And as in my dreams there may be a book whose words are this world in which I am a character with a life and a soul that go beyond the words on the page but are also primordially composed of them. Phantasmic reveries flowed through the dry riverbed of his musing mind like a current of cool morning air over faintly humid caliche in the hot and distinctly damp first days of the monsoon season when bright yellowgreen butterflies gather among the rocks and taste the most moist places with their feet.
He yawned. An owl hooted. Somewhere else out in the dark a rooster began to crow. The morning traffic from the boondocks into the city and the Tatooine Interzone District had begun. The sun had still not risen but the sky had begun to brighten.
He blinked and let out a long sigh. Three nearby mourning doves took flight in darkling flickers with rippling wuwuwu sounds vibrating from wings rapidly flapping. On their way up they passed a raven perched atop a nearby saguaro cactus invisible save faint highlights where the moonlight shone upon it’s glossy feathers, smooth hooked beak and moist wise eyes.
He sat up and looked to the east. Stars fading in the waxing predawn glow, city of light awakening on the other side of the gloomy looming mountains. His mind drifted and a vision rose up out of the shadowy depths of his memory: a drop of water in the weave of a spiderweb quivering with colors in the light of a late summer morning after the rains have come to the desert and with them the flies on whom the spiders fed. He had a specific memory of a particular time he’d seen such a thing that seemed to him the ideal representative of all such things. (That memory’s quality of being the ideal form of it’s kind reminded him of language in general for some reason.)
A prismatic droplet held in a small segment of a fresh spiderweb shimmering with color in the morning after a soft overnight rain. Why did that one particular image seem the most representative? How does a thing most resemble the dream of itself?
What do words mean? I am made of them, he mused.
But what does that mean? What does the word mean really even mean? I mean really. What is the syntax of the desert vast, what is this endless articulation of flowering flow of time and life in infinite recombinations of dust, this blossoming of beauty and meaning in the morning’s blooming blue?
He’d been living in the desert in a tent for a long time now after leaving his girlfriend a while back. Missy. Little Miss Mist whom he misguidedly missed the most and reminisced of when she’d moistly kissed his dusty eyelids with her glossy glistening lips. Missy. Oh sweet Missy. Who’d so sadly insisted on being so madly twisted. They’d fallen in love but then they’d fallen out of love. They’d fallen far. The relationship had taken one bad turn after another. Things had gotten worse and worse.
One day she’d finally gone too far before he’d had a chance to do it first. She bound him in handcuffs and leg shackles in his sleep and she carved a pentagram on his torso beneath his left pectoral muscle. Right in the brisket. She hadn’t done any real damage and it was, as the black knight might say, just a flesh wound, but she knew how to leave a scar and he could tell she’d done it before and would probably do it again. These things happen. Love is wild. It has a lot to do.
Always remember that love is an it, he reminded himself. And it is bigger than the mind.
He’d woken up in pain and surprise when she’d first started cutting but he was not afraid; he liked it and told her she could do whatever she wanted. He’d been ready for the experience. He’d also been ready to leave her afterward. They would break up definitively through this process resembling a blood ceremony from an esoteric sect in a true crime pulp magazine. The letting of blood and the scarification of the star, the inscription of the symbol and sigil in the flesh would seal the pact. When the wound had been fresh, when it had bled, She’d licked it, and drank his blood.
It was scar tissue now. The lines were thin and well formed and came neatly together to form the pentagram. Sometimes the scar hurt when it rained. He did not know why that was. Magick with a k maybe. What had she really meant by it? By the act of doing it? The ceremony? Had she been conscious of some meaning or had she just followed her intuition? Women, eh? He mused. She’d made in her life constellations of scars as God in the sky made the ones made of stars.
So he’d moved to Arizona. She’d moved to California. At one point just a few months later he’d heard from a mutual acquaintance that she’d successfully faked her own death after getting in too deep working as a criminal informant, but that was all false. He’d found out that she’d told the acquaintance to tell him that she’d faked her own death. What had really happened was, she’d faked faking her own death. He’d confirmed that through a more trustworthy mutual acquaintance. Why would anyone do such a thing?
There’s a little riddle in the middle of all things, he mused musically. The star symbol scar sigil would always be there to remind him.
Life had been beautiful in other ways. He’d been getting better at remembering that. It had taken a while. He had a good clear mind now for someone who’d suffered so much from so early on and who’d been so self destructive and unfortunate for much of his adulthood.
He imagined he was a shadowy phantom lotus on a whispering river of air. Dry yet dreamdrenched. Shadowshaped. He imagined worlds within words burning and turning like photons electrons stars and galaxies whirling in the night skies of our lives in our minds. Hard to make sense of.
Our cosmos is mind-shaped not brain-shaped, he mused.
And?!? He asked himself aggressively.
And, he continued, the basic elements of organic chemistry and living matter are produced in the burning hearts of those far furnaces we call stars. That seem so small but are so very vast. And here on earth this life of word made flesh is born from the very same processes as the lifegiving light of heaven.
He’d barely gone to school growing up. He dropped out and left his home town at fifteen. He had big gaps in an otherwise vivid and powerful sense of memory, having been born intelligent but raised by monsters. In his teens and 20s he’d dreamed of experiences from his own childhood as if they’d been happening to someone else, and he’d witnessed them as yet another someone else, from some perspective outside himself. It was like he himself wasn’t in the dream and had split into two strangers. But strange as this was it was in this way that he’d borne witness to his own childhood victimization by a violent sexual predator in episodes of violent rape heretofore never consciously recalled. This experience was essential to his eventual healing and rejuvenation.
It had been his father’s best friend and partner in crime. They’d been smugglers and money runners in the cocaine business in the 70s 80s and 90s. This friend whom Dusty had been raised to call uncle had been a highly decorated US Marine, a Vietnam veteran that older people around Dusty had always treated like a hero.
The severity of the pain and intensity of the violent aggression involved had contributed to the repression of the memory and the dissociated quality of the dream. He (as someone who was not him, Je est un autre, non?) watched from a vantage point above the act, hovering over it and witnessing it without pain. (Sometimes he even got a strong feeling that there was such a thing as a love that dwarfed and included all the death and cruelty and suffering in the world. This in fact happened much more often than he remembered.)
During his twenties he’d had intrusive thoughts about raping other men and young children as well. Strange impulses to torture and mutilate animals in ritualistic fashion. He’d never actually done it or attempted it, but he’d seen himself doing it in his mind over and over again. It had horrified him. He’d been horrified of himself for decades. For most of his life he’d been horrified of and disgusted with himself just as he’d been raised to be. But over decades things had changed and he healed and he could not understand why. He hadn’t really been aware of who or what he was in the same way other people were until he was well into middle age. Ultimately his transformation had been as radical and miraculous as the caterpillar into the butterfly. It is thus that the insect and the angel are wed.
For years he’d had episodes where everything would become increasingly saturated with meaning and he’d overflow with joy and the world would get brighter and brighter until everything became light and he would think to himself “I am the light,” before suddenly growing dizzy and confused and needing to sit down or lie down drenched in sweat and pale as a cadaver. Occasional psychotic episodes where he became obsessed with pedophilia in the Catholic Church and conspiracy theories about children being kidnapped and abused. Sometimes he heard voices and experienced the loss of his inner monologue as it splintered into fragments with personalities other than his own and he was overcome by the voices of imaginary characters who watched and commented upon everything he did. Abuse and neglect had created blank spots in his very soul. The life force he’d been blessed with would fill them in but only over time.
Throughout young adulthood he’d experienced fugue states where he traveled long distances without remembering, wore clothes that were not in the style he usually preferred and felt like costumes and disguises when he awoke in them, and carried collections of dolls and parts of dolls that he’d managed to accumulate along they way by means that would always remain mysterious to him. The costumes and dolls had felt very strange sometimes, when he seemed to come back to himself and realize that he did not recognize himself. Je est un autre, non? Vodka and heroin had perhaps contributed. Methamphetamine. But it was there in the rough wreckage of his own ruination, in the improvisations imposed by his amnesias, that he learned to deal with constant uncertainty, navigating unexpected situations and learning how to adapt quickly to sudden radical changes in his environment so that paradoxically enough in developing methods for coping with the effects of a seriously disruptive and harmful psychopathology he developed skills that would help him a great deal later in life when the pathology itself —his dissociative fugue states and memory issues— had subsided and ceased to afflict him.
In those days of struggle past, before he’d become unreasonably cheerful, he’d contemplated suicide so often it had become a running joke he kept with himself. Any ostensible attempts had always been halfhearted at best because deep down he still loved life. He often lived as if he were indifferent to the notion of his own death, or did risky and destructive things just to feel the thrill of it and drown out the constant buzz of background pain that he usually lived with. But that pain, while it may have lasted decades, did not last forever. He had no idea how it had all come to pass, how over the decades he’d learned to be happy and love life. There’d been so much self destruction, anxiety and depression, heavy drinking and drug use; so many turbulent relationships and other people hurt; there’d been homelessness, violent crime, street fighting, drug dealing, psychoses, police beatings, hospital and jail stays. From all that compost some precious flower sprung.
Through it all he’d read many books and met all kinds of people. He’d learned a great deal, mostly against his will. A philosopher more by instinct than by choice. Against his will he cared about the meaning of suffering and the ultimate metaphysical nature of the world and our conscious experience of it. For most of his life his philosophical tendencies were as an illness that plagued him. A disorder. But at some point they transformed into the very manna that sustained him. A transformation as radical yet natural as that of caterpillar into butterfly. That had been during his forties. He was fifty now. Now his philosophical instincts even seemed at times the very force of life triumphant.
No one who does not become a hairy worm can grow colorful wings and flutter in the garden, he mused
He was 50 now. It had been years since he’d experienced fugue states or obsessive thoughts of rape and death or PTSD flashbacks. Etc. He did sometimes need to keep calm and remember to practice mental chillness in the face of mental illness and remind himself that he could still age gracefully.
Barnyard sounds not far to the north. Roosters crowing, dogs barking, hens clucking and finally the whinny of a horse which was very vivid and stood out over the other sounds. Maybe they are all talking about a coyote passing by, he thought to himself. Distant siren of emergency vehicle and the howling of dogs in the darkness in every direction and then the howling of a pack of coyotes out in a different direction from all the other animal sounds in the part of the desert without houses. The sirens grew louder, an ambulance and a police car. Off to the east the sky grew brighter still and he guessed it to be about five AM at this point. The stars were fading. They looked so little but were very big.
He’d been homeless for years before this. He did not consider himself homeless anymore. He lived outside in poverty without property but he was no longer homeless for he was at home in his own mind body and soul and he was no longer haunted by the past nor the future. He saw beauty and personality in all things in a strange way now in his middle age in something like inverse proportion to how he saw things in his youth perforce. He had not simply healed from deep wounds, he had undergone a radical metamorphosis through something like the grace of God or some miracle of nature. There was something very alive in him that had come through the word of his creator, and he was vaguely aware of this as yet, through his intuitions that his dreams of being a character in a book were true. They were. The reader can attest.
Souls in everything, he mused to himself. Every luminously numinous form fused into some sum beyond its parts like a star in a vast living universe full of spontaneity, free will and improvisational music. He looked at the dawn and thanked the sky in his mind.
A vermillion flycatcher flickered brightly between two thorny mesquite trees. Desert birds are perfectly at home among the thorns and cacti needles. They might strike other birds as unreasonably cheerful given how harsh their environments seem. The raven on the phone pole took off squawking in flight. Dusty thought of the ravens who nested in a larger elder saguaro nearby about a half click southwest of his camp on the other side of Ajo Highway. They had nested in the spring and raised their young in the tall cactus and would swoop near him and speak to him when he went to visit them. Warning him off. They would also speak to him when perched in on nearby mesquite trees and saguaro cacti. Ravens have impressive vocabularies. Wordy birds. He loved them partly because he identified with them. He was always seeing other things as himself, his self as the other. Je est un autre, non? He’d developed his mutable sense of self growing up being abused and neglected and he was very volatile and unstable for many years. But from 30 to 50 there’d been a period of radical transformation like that of a caterpillar into a butterfly.
It had involved suffering and loss; a disintegration of his old self followed by a rebirth into ignorance, bedazzlement and curiosity combined; a renewed sensitivity to sense impressions and emotional states; and an openness to new experience. A second childhood during which he often felt a naive sense of wonder and love in general toward the world. He saw plants and animals and even objects like lampposts and cars and garbage cans at bus stops as having personalities. Now for the first time in his life he felt very at home in his own body which was incredibly rejuvenating for him.
He checked his phone. It was almost five o’clock. Ante Meridian. His phone battery would die soon. He liked letting the battery die. Phones are shadowshows. Bodies without bodies, forms without form, he mused. Like language. Representation representing itself. But je est un autre, non? Plato’s cave allegory in reverse. We get sick of the flesh and blood and the light of the world and run into caves to replace our realities with flattened representations thereof. We reduce flowing flowering qualia into countable quanta. We reduce the butterfly back into the worm so it will stay within our reach. And we pretend that the insect is the angel.
Bits. Photons. Atoms. Numbers. Letters. Words. Do shadows move faster than light?
Language consumes, he mused. It appropriates, absorbs, assimilates to and ultimately becomes all things. It is alive, self perpetuating and omnivorous, like us. It is the ghost that eats the living and shits itself. More and more the cosmos as we conceive of it takes the shape of language. Therefore the modern times within which we live are psychotic in general, lost in the electric funhouse of mere mirroring that leads back into the cave of shadows. Or not, who can tell anything anymore.
He thought about words in words to himself. Words have this quality where words never resemble their referents as much as they do other words. As shadows resemble other shadows more than they do the things that cast them. They become representations of representation itself uprooted from the world and whirled into the shadow world of the word without flesh. He’d dreamed he was a character in a book and made of words and he believed his dream was somehow prophetic but he did not know how or why.
A mourning dove cooed and somewhere in the distance a helicopter flew. He gazed up at the fading stars and he mused yet even further. He thought of how books were made of little letters and big living things of tiny cells which were made of tinier molecules made of atoms and particles tinier still. Stars happen by way of very small things fusing together to release vast amounts of light and heat as well as elemental byproducts like oxygen and carbon. The light and the heat and the carbon and the hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and water and phosphorous somehow combine to form the foundations for life on earth.
He asked himself: what then is the light of the soul? Is it generated through a similar principle? The living light that flows outward from vision not into it? The light emitted when many people fuse together?
He mused and mused and mused until he could muse no more and then he had to get up which he did as the sky lightened ever so slowly and the stars finally disappeared into the accruing blue of the awakening day. He walked over to a nearby drainage channel. It was about three feet deep and three feet across and it had sand and small rocks in it. Pieces of used toilet paper here and there. This ditch ran between two larger channels to the left and right so that his little camp was on a stable triangle of high ground. These channels served as a naturally occurring moat and flood barrier. They were currently waterless but the rains would start soon. He sniffed the air and opened his mouth to taste how humid it was. Maybe even tonight, he thought to himself. The rains would come soon. He could taste it.
Across the ditch from where he stood pissing was a clearing with a tall saguaro cactus in it with two long arms reaching out to the sides casting a hauntingly anthropomorphic cruciform shadow. He judged the saguaro to be about one hundred and fifty years old. On the edge of the clearing there was a path leading back through a thick cluster of mesquite, paloverde and various types of cacti. He saw a flicker in the dim and realized that someone was approaching on it. He didn’t know if he’d finish pissing before whoever it was got to where they could see him. He wondered who it was.
Chapter 4: Debbie
Debbie stood watching him piss. He did not rush. He was not embarrassed. She was an innocent creature and he never felt ashamed before her except when she called herself a retard to other people in front of him which she did way too often. She loved telling people her name was Debbie The Retard and took playful delight in their reactions. He considered her a holy fool. She seemed pretty genuinely pure of heart and soul to him and these things are not to be underestimated.
“Hey Debbie,” he said warmly.
“Hey Dusty,” she said. “Nice dick.” She giggled girlishly. She was staring right at it and grinning naughtily.
“Thank you Debbie,” he said, still pissing.
He was tall and thin, fair and freckled, visibly grimy and unwashed. He had sandy blonde hair streaked grey on the sides and patches of grey in his blonde beard. Athletic-looking for fifty after living wild and honest for a few years. She was in her early to mid 60s. She was short and fat and clumsy with a very adorable chubby face like a cabbage patch doll. Soft leathery brown skin with a reddish tint, that red brown like the land of the region, the stone. Her mouth naturally turned up at the corners so she usually seemed to be smiling. She was missing most of her teeth but she had no fear of displaying her gums and gaps in grinning. Long black glossy hair. Soft dark brown eyes that twinkled with playful mirth, childlike wonder and the kind of unconditional love more commonly found in domesticated dogs in family oriented suburbs than people out in The Perimeter where life could be wild and harsh.
He shook his dick a few times finishing up. She laughed at that. This kind of thing was not appropriate in civilized society but it was just daily life out in The Perimeter.
There were some big thick clouds coming in from the north moving slowly across the east side of the sky. They were barely visible but they now blushed faintly with the blood red light of the rising sun. It was the beginning of the monsoon season in the Sonoran Desert and the cloud formations would make for some spectacular sunrises and sunsets.
“I’m glad I don’t have to shake my pussy after I piss,” Debbie said.
“Amen to that,” Dusty laughed.
“Can you walk me to the gas station?” She asked him. “My son and daughter were yelling at me so I left my trailer an hour ago and some guy tried to get me to go in his truck with him. I think he wanted to rape me but then when the sirens got close and the animals got loud he got scared and drove off.” She spoke slowly and deliberately and there was a contrast between the childlike innocence in her simplicity of tone and expression and the things that she described. Things she should never have to describe. And yet it was she alone who had lived her life and knew better than anyone what it was to have done so even if unable to articulate it as others might. And sometimes he felt that he and he alone understood that she was a saint of the borderlands. A child of God.
“Damn Debbie. I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Me too.”
“I can walk you to the gas station. Let me pack my things.”
“Okay. Can I come sit over there by you?”
“Yeah of course.”
“You have to help me get up again,” she said. “I’m old and fat and my knees are bad.”
“I’ll help you get up.”
She waddled across the clearing. She was in a good mood and it brought him joy. She was unreasonably cheerful like him. They both loved life in the moment when it was good though they’d had lives that were not what you’d call good. But right now things were good because they were friends and they had each other.
She’d had a lot of misfortune in her life. She’d had very bad exes all of whom she’d outlived. Lately she’d been having trouble with her children who’d become openly antagonistic toward her. She currently lived with two of her children on land her son owned. She had five other children, seven total, by two men total, both of whom were now dead. All three of her ex husbands were dead.
The first had been murdered in Phoenix. The second had died of cirrhosis of the liver, although he’d also been ambushed and shot several times by one of his mistresses just moments after he died. She’d shot the body seven times in its death bed in a drug crazed murder attempt. She’d been out of her mind on moonshine and methamphetamine that had both been custom brewed for a select group of discerning paranoid psychopaths by one of her other boyfriends, Zebulon The Mad Doctor. She’d also shot him several times just an hour or so before, but he too had died before she got to him, having overdosed on dodecamethamphentanyl just about 15 minutes before. (Dodecamethamphentanyl is ten to one hundred billion times more powerful than fentanyl so you need to measure your dose at the molecular level. One of the alien species, the Mugwumps or The Slor, had introduced it into the human population as a matter of scientific experimentation and research.)
“It was not surprising that that would happen to him, that kind of crazy thing like someone coming to murder you right after you die of something else,” Debbie had once told Dusty. “He lived a wild life.”
This second husband had been a military veteran almost thirty years her senior. He’d witnessed and eventually participated in cannibalism as a prisoner of Japanese forces in the Phillipines in World War 2. He’d been tortured extensively. He’d told her the stories of his intense sufferings but he’d been very cruel while telling her, beating and berating her for not paying enough attention even when she’d given him her undivided attention. She was simple and naive like a child so it seemed extra wrong for her to suffer such things. He’d been dead for a while now.
The third had been killed by police in the commission of an attempted armed robbery. All three had been violent. They’d beaten and berated her and their children and had lived wild, rough and stupid lives before coming to violent ends.
Mourning doves cooed from the cacti and the thorny mesquite trees in the slowly gathering morning light. A raven watched from a perch on a tall utility pole that was like a giant looming crucifix. Crows, vultures and hawks perched upon the other looming crucifixes that held up the slightly sagging black threads of the power lines that reached over the desert along the sides of the highways and out into the hills and the infinite desert dawn.
She sat down on the ground with a plop and he winced as he watched while rolling up his sleeping bag and packing it into its sack. She’d plopped down clumsily because she could not do it smoothly. Her knees were not strong enough, her arms were not long enough. But she had padding.
“Oof,” he said. “You alright sis?”
What does it really mean to care about someone in the wilderness? he wondered. Some small things fuse together. Humble things like us. Hydrogen atoms fuse to form stars that spawn and feed life on planets rich with species and cultures and higher consciousness.
“Yeah it’s fine I got a big fat ass that can take a beating,” she said, chuckling.
There were aliens living on earth right here in Arizona now. Extraterrestrials. The aliens were changing everything even faster than the internet had. Even more than smart phones. More than Covid. The entire world was changing and the Tatooine Interzone District of America in Tucson had been the start of and was still at the heart of it all. Dusty would end up there later. This day would be full of and wonders. Some would become as different in their new forms as butterflies from caterpillars. It is thus that the insect and the angel are wed.
“Hey now,” he said.
The Book of Drome Chapter 5: A Little Tenderness
“Can you help me brush my hair?” Debbie asked him. He was attaching his sleeping bag to the bottom of his backpack. She went through her purse and brought out a brush and held it out to him.
“Of course,” he said. He knew it helped when he did things like that especially when she’d recently been antagonized by her children. That was the one thing that ever seemed to make her cry the few times she’d cried around him. She did not seem too upset this time but it was hard to tell if she was hiding the pain inside. She was so guileless and childlike. But he knew well that children could hide great pain inside, even from themselves as he had done long ago, and that the human interior was a deep and mysterious thing that though it be daunting we deny its existence at our own peril.
The sky and the air grew brighter and the sun crowned the mountains in the east. Beyond the mountains lay the city of Tucson and the intergalactic outpost and trading colony known as the Tatooine Interzone District of America. The land they he’d slept on that he and Debbie were currently together one on was federal Bureau of Land Management land in an area that he thought of as The Perimeter or The Prophet Margin.
“I didn’t brush it this morning and it’s hard to do without help,” she said. “My daughter told me she was going to set it on fire.”
“Good grief!”
“She was drunk and being mean on purpose,” Debbie said matter of factly in her slow deliberate way. As if she had only recently learned to speak. “Help me stand up and you can brush it standing up,” she said. She had beautiful straight black hair.
“Okay,” he said. He hooked his elbows under her armpits and lifted her up a little and she joined in with her legs once she could and then she was standing and he let out a breath.
“I need coffee,” he said.
“We can go to the gas station,” she said simply. She handed him the brush and he began to brush her hair. It was messy but not too tangled. Very black and naturally smooth and glossy. Sometimes people with very stressful lives have dry brittle hair. She had the hair of a child. It matched her personality.
“Right,” he said. She got her phone out and started fiddling with it as he brushed her hair slowly and carefully, making sure not to pull too hard when dealing with bunches and tangles. She was both younger and older than him. She was like a mother who was a daughter. “You have such nice hair,” he said softly, his face near to her ear. Even her ears were plump.
“Thank you,” she said. “I get it from my mother. Do you have any weed?”
“No, sorry.”
“I had some at home but I left in a hurry and forgot it and now my daughter’s going to smoke it all.”
“Young people,” He said. He was just trying to be nice.
“People were like that when I was young too,” she said. She’d been stolen from, taken advantage of and preyed upon much more than the average person. She was slow physically and mentally and unreasonably trusting of other people and the very childlike naiveté which made her so saintly and beautiful to him is what made her a target to those who sought to use and abuse her.
“I actually took weed from my parents when I was young,” he admitted. “I was troubled when I was young. I never really felt young. I felt ageless and disconnected from time because I had weird memory issues.”
“You were probably sexually abused,” she said. “That’s how that happens.” It was very clear and basic stuff to her. “That happened to me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know you know how it is.” He smiled and felt a pang of sadness and a tear rolled down his cheek in the quiet of the morning and he was glad that she had her back to him and did not see it. It fell onto her hair and the sunlight refracted through it and separated into colors and resolved again in a wondrous wink.
“My sister used to run away and forget who she was,” Debbie said. “She died from a heroin overdose forty years ago. We used to steal from our parents all the time and try to escape. I grew up in foster care. I like my life better now.”
“I like mine better now too,” he said. “I love my life now in a way I never knew I could. It’s funny because the way most people see it I’ve lost everything I ever had. I was actually successful for a while but during that time I was dying more and more inside. We deny our interiority at our own peril. Now I’m free and I’ve found what I really want. People think I’m homeless because I don’t live inside. But I finally feel at home in my mind, body and soul. So I’m at home wherever I am.”
“That’s beautiful,” she said. And saying that that was beautiful she revealed her own inner beauty. Appreciating what was rare and beautiful in him filled her with a rare and precious beauty herself.
They both grew quiet and thoughtful. He watched a hummingbird zip by not far from where they stood. Roosters crowed and dogs barked in the distance. Sounds of increasing traffic on Ajo highway just past the fire station to the south. The soft rhythmic meditative sound of the brush passing through her glossy black hair as he groomed her.
“This feels nice,” she said. The tone of her voice matched to the situation perfectly. It had beatitude in it. Oh small things, he thought. He felt quietly religious.
“You mean getting your hair brushed or talking or the quietness without the talking?”
“The whole thing,” she said.
“I think your hair is ready,” he said.
“Can you help me put my earrings in?” She asked. “It’s been a minute since I had em in so they might bleed.” She turned to show him the fleshy brown lobe of her left ear, pulling her hair to the side with a cute chubby finger. Starry little scars in the lobes. Asterisks. Punctuated flesh awaiting re puncture.
“You want me to just poke them through?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Let me get them out of my purse.”
He mused as she was going through her purse. If the fundamental properties of the universe can be elucidated in language does that mean that language is a fundamental property of the universe? Can shadow beams be said to exist? Of course they can. Watch: shadow beams exist. There. It has been said. Finally she found the things in her purse.
“Here,” she said, handing him the earrings.
“These are some big hoops!” He said.
“I love big hoop earrings,” she said. “I’m a fat trashy bitch and I know it.”
“Debbie!” He gasped theatrically as if shocked. He knew she liked when he reacted that way. She giggled. A few meters to the north a startled jackrabbit took off from under a small low-hanging mesquite and pinballed away through the cacti and thorny trees with that wonderful mixture of chaos and grace that jackrabbits tend to exhibit. A hare in the brush, he mused to himself. His inner voice was clear and cheerful as he brushed her hair. She giggled again girlishly as a mourning dove cooed somewhere nearby. The air was bright now and the sun had crested the mountains in the east. He pushed the earrings through and she winced and bled. She touched her ears and got a little blood on her hands. From the east came shafts of shadow, beams of light.
“It hurts but I like it,” she said.
“Life’s like that,” he said. “I feel sorry for people who don’t suffer. They actually suffer the most.”
“That makes no sense,” she said.
“You make no sense,” he said, holding her one hand and then the other as he wiped the small spots of blood off of her chubby little sausage fingers with a tie dye bandanna from his brown leather messenger bag. He had a bunch of tie dye bandannas that he used as rags. He wore one on his head now beneath his straw hat which had a very broad brim almost 3 feet across. The hat had glittering starshaped stickers on it and a fake rose tucked into the front. A cream white stone crucifix hung from the side above the brim on a string he’d run through the ventilation holes atop the hat. She’d given him the stone cross as a gift a few weeks back. They often exchanged small gifts.
“Yeah well,” she said, and looked him in the eye, her eye twinkling with mirth at what she was about to say. He almost started laughing before she said it. “I’m a retard. What’s your excuse?”
“Listen,” he said, pretending to be serious as she giggled, pleased with herself. Glowing. He drank in the glow like a plant.
“Let’s go the the gas station,” she said.
“That’s what I was about to say,” he said.
“I’m the one in charge here,” she said. “Hold my hand and help me through the steep part.”
“Okay,” he said, and he took her by the hand and helped her down and back up the steep parts of the drainage channel that ran between his camp and the small section of bush that they walked through together to get to the road.
The Book of Drome Chapter 6: Walk of Life
They walked across Ajo Highway at the traffic light where it intersected with Camino Verde, the road they’d walked down to get there. They were not far from where he’d camped. The light did not stay green for long, that intersection was not pedestrian friendly. It never stayed green long enough for people to walk all the way across unless there were cars on Camino Verde triggering the pressure plates under the surface of the road; otherwise the people who were crossing did so at a brisk trot. Debbie was not capable of the brisk trot, she was slow in her movements as she was in her speech. She waddled like a penguin. Dusty held her soft warm hand as they crossed halfway and waited on the concrete island between the eastbound and westbound sides of the highway as cars and trucks zoomed past. People drove very fast on this part of Ajo Highway on the other side of the mountains from the city and The Zone. It was just before 6 AM now so The Highway was very busy with commuters and smugglers. There was already a warm wind blowing. He saw some clouds to the northeast and he could tell there would be storms that night.
“The rains are coming,” she said. “It was already getting moist this morning. The butterflies taste the moisture with their feet.”
“Yah,” he said, looking off into the distance.
“That’s good for the land.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And hopefully we’ll get relief from the heat. But I need to find a dry spot to sleep.”
“You can stay in my trailer if you need to.”
“Thank you Debbie.” he said. The light changed again. “Come on,” he said, and took her hand and they crossed the road together.
When they got to the other side, before she let go of his hand, she held it up to her face and looked at his fingernails, which were painted electric blue. “I like your fingernails,” she said. “They're pretty.”
“Thank you,” he said. “So are you.” They both smiled. She really was pretty now because of how the inner beauty that came through in her speech also glowed through her adorably pudgy face, especially her eyes. That warm glow from the deep inarticulate darkness of them. Of her. She smiled. She only had a few teeth in front. She’d gotten some replacement teeth a while back that she’d been very proud of and shown off to everyone but then after a trip to the mental behavioral health facility she’d come back without her new teeth and when he’d asked her what happened she’d said someone at the hospital stole them and nobody would help her find them. She also said one of the orderlies had beat her. That had been over a year ago. She’d been in and out of health care facilities many times since then and she always told him about it. She spoke of such things in a way that almost seemed like bragging, as a child might speak of going to the hospital. With a kind of naive pride. But she was old and hers was a life of much suffering and while she was indeed simple she still knew her own life better than anyone else ever could.
She scrutinized him, squinting. “Are you gay?” She asked. “Are you transgender?”
“Eh. Sometimes, I guess” he said. “My younger friends tell me I’m ‘fluid.’ But like, Je est un autre, non?” Part of what he liked about living in the wilderness was that you didn’t need to have a self.
She eyed him for a second, mirthfully suspicious, squinting. He winked at her and went on.
“I grew up without a stable sense of self and it took me years, decades, to realize who and what I am. Once it happened a bunch of tiny separate things all fused together into one luminous whole and for reasons beyond my own understanding I began to feel at home in my own mind body and soul even if I’m still kinda weird to other people. But I’ve always been a little queer I guess.”
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “I bet Jesus did that for you. That is what He does.” They turned east and headed toward the gas station and the city and the sun. They were no longer holding hands but they walked together intimately in the spiritual sense, each open to the true self of the other.
“Something like that,” he said.
“Aren’t you Christian?” She asked him.
“I’m fluid,” he said.
“How do you stay fluid in the desert?”
“Dumb luck I guess.”
“How do you know it isn’t Jesus?” She asked.
“I don’t know it isn’t Jesus,” he said.
“Luck is a dumb fat bitch like me,” she said, chuckling triumphantly to herself, knowing it would get a rise out of him.
“Debbie!” He gasped.
To their left, to the north, was Ajo Highway; and to their right, to the south, was a broad concrete wash beyond which lay suburban housing developments, a swatch of desert with dirt roads through the cacti, and the Casino Del Sol at The Yaqui Pueblo. The wash was relatively new. They’d been building new public infrastructure out in The Perimeter as the land was developed by big real estate companies every month of every year now. Both sides of the highway now had big new concrete washes and they were adding another lane on each side.
They could see the gas station and convenience store about about a half a click down the highway to the east and beyond that the mountains and above them the rising sun. He walked slowly so that she could keep up. After her chuckling had subsided she put some music on from her phone. Elvis Presley. She loved Elvis Presley.
“I left my new speaker at home and I gave the other one to the church,” she said.
“Which church?”
“The one at Ajo and Mission.”
“By the library.”
“No, the one by the McDonald’s.”
“Yeah the library is right across from the McDonald’s.”
“No it’s diagonal from there. The church is next to it going the other way.”
“They’re all in that same general vicinity though,” he said.
“Yeah I guess,” she admitted grudgingly. They grew quiet for a second as Elvis finished singing In the Ghetto and Rumble by Link Wray came on. They saw Joe and Darren and Brandeen in the near distance hanging out by the side of the gas station. That was a rough and dusty trio. The music hit like a cue in a movie and the dust blew in a troubling plume across the lonesome desert highway. Dusty wondered where Joe’s girlfriend was, she was always by his side but he didn’t see her. In the store, he thought to himself.
“I got a new boyfriend,” Debbie said.
“Online?” He knew to ask. She always had online “boyfriends” who tried to scam her. Her son always argued with her about it and shamed her for it. Sometimes he took her phone away. That was one of the things that really hurt her sometimes, not just because she loved her fake boyfriends but because it was her own son bullying her while telling her it was for her own good. Such things could wound her. Sometimes she called Adult Protective Services on him. The family always seemed to be feuding. Dusty didn’t know the children personally.
“Yeah,” she said. “He lives in New York City. He asked me to marry him. Stop walking so I can show you a picture.”
They stopped and she showed him a picture on her phone. He had been through this with her several times. People were always trying to scam her out of her disability money, he agreed with her son on that, but he didn’t like that the son bullied her about it. Aimai-elle un rêve? So she loved a dream? Oui. Yes. Was she wrong to do so? Not at all. We all love dreams but it’s just so much easier to see that particular madness in others than in ourselves.
He knew that he himself may well have been more in love with his own dream of the world than the world itself, musing in pursuit of a visionary state and for the satisfaction and enjoyment of his own mind rather than the pursuit of some verifiable truth external to such. These thoughts flitted through his mind like hummingbirds among desert trees but they were in the background as he focused on her.
He asked her: “You’re not sending him money are you?”
“No,” she said.
“Don’t let him hustle you, you’re a mark because you love people naturally.”
“People try to play me because I’m retarded,” she said matter of factly. She was not upset, it was a plain fact of existence to her, like the sun being bright and water being wet. Thoughts flickered through his mind: water is two parts hydrogen one part oxygen and people are mostly water and empty space and water adheres to itself and people stick together. How do the wind and water weave their waves within one another. Who weaves spacetime into the heaving void. And do the believers really know the ways of the weavers? Would we weigh wind on scales of fish or water on the whisper of a wish? But he was mostly focused on her. He nodded. She was well aware that she was a target for all manner of predatory behavior and she had been raped robbed and beaten more than most people in the world ever will be and yet she persisted in trusting and loving the world more than most people in the world ever will. Or so he dreamed she did anyway. And this dream seemed true. Dreams seem true, that is how they work. They mean things.
“Wait,” she said just as he was about to start walking again. Morning traffic sped by on the highway beside them in a constant low rushing roar. Cars like corpuscles on that vascular muscular highway. The lifeblood of capitalism. America. He looked at her and she at him and her eyes lit up with mirth. “You wanna see his dick?” She asked him, giggling.
“Nah I’m good.”
“It’s huge,” she said. “Aren’t you gay? Don’t you like dick?”
“Not right now,” he said. He started walking again but she stopped him again.
“Wait,” she said. A gentle wind caressed them like the infinite whisper of a loving god as they stood in the cool warmth and gathering light and he waited as she’d instructed. He drank from his water bottle again. He wanted coffee. Lulu the gas station manager would give him free coffee. The world was so full of gifts and yet people were still so full of want.
Debbie showed him her phone and he looked and saw a picture of a giant erect penis. He cringed.
“Debbie,” he said.
She giggled triumphantly.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to get to the store so I can talk to people before I catch the shuttle.”
“You gonna buy anything?”
“No,” he said. “But Lulu gives me coffee. I’ve been living completely by way of thievery and gift lately. Without money. With only what possessions I can carry without burdening myself.”
“I can buy you something,” she said. “I have money.” She was always generous to him and often offered to buy him things.
“You don’t need to,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “Do you want to come to our wedding?” The dream husband seemed so real to her.
“Sure! When is it?”
“We’re still figuring that out,” she said. “Eventually though. It’s going to be in Brooklyn.”
“Oh neat, I love New York City. I know you been to New Jersey before because I told you I used to live in Hoboken and you said you had a teddy bear named Hoboken.”
“Yeah I got him from a trucker in Hoboken so I named him Hoboken. He’s gone now, my husband threw him in a fire.” She relayed this cruel fact without sorrow and seemed amused by it. She smiled. It was true that it was an interesting thing to have happen. Her leathery brown face gleamed with soft golden highlights in the desert dawn. Her eyes twinkled.
“I remember the story,” he said. That husband had beaten her often and he’d gotten angry at the teddy bear for making her happy. The man hated Hoboken. A mean-hearted and violent man. Such men happen. Theirs was the love of power, hers was the power of love. She was the kind of woman such men happen to. That husband was the one who’d been murdered by a friend in Phoenix. His doom had been her liberation and Dusty thought that it was sad that life was that way sometimes. But it was very good that she was still alive and smiling.
He looked off into the sky. There were thick clouds just starting to appear. A red tinge to the clouds like blood. Iron and oxygen, he thought, supermassive stars. The heart of the heart of the country. The clouds would roll in over the city slowly as the day progressed. Dusty thought it might take the entire day for the front to get to The Perimeter. It was coming in from the northeast and would probably veer along the mountains to the south. The lightning will reveal the form of the mountains and the thunder will make them tremble, he mused to himself.
He would have to figure out a good dry place to sleep. He had no tent. He’d become very used to the elements. He’d become one of them. An element. Without his Dustyness the surrounding desert of The Perimeter would not be what it was. He thought to himself: the life element carbon is stardust formed by the fusion of helium atoms which are formed by the fusion of hydrogen atoms in the vast furnaces of the lifegiving stars. He wondered: how can people think space is a cold lifeless place? The desert morning wind caressed his skin in with dry ancient whispers.
He walked slowly so that she could keep up. They passed an anthill busy with ants gathering small green leaves and yellow flower petals from mesquite and creosote. The leaves and petals had accumulated to form an image that he could see but which the ants could not have conceived. They made it seem as if a life force emanated from the ant hill as the ants poured in and out, their shadows slightly displaced in the long slant light of the rising sun such that their activities appeared to have a certain depth. He thought to himself: the instar phase of insect development occurs between molts until the insect reaches sexual maturity and seeks to propagate itself. The mature ant has an exoskeleton made of a glucose polymer chemically composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, basic elements produced in stars. It is thus that the insect and the angel are wed.
He smiled. Debbie saw him smiling and she smiled too. He made sure not to step on any ants. She also made sure not to step on any ants. The two of them were so different and yet so profoundly similar. This is more common than people suppose. He saw her looking at him and he looked into her eyes and both their eyes gleamed with a common light. They slowed down briefly but then kind of snapped out of it and regained their pace and he looked forward down along the dusty path they walked between the rushing road and the dry concrete wash at the gas station in the dawn.
The Book of Drome Chapter 7: The Gang at The Speedway
Joe and Martha stood there suffering next to their shitty car full of trash. They’d been living out in The Perimeter in a tent for a few years now.
Joe had a slim waist and broad slouched shoulders so that sometimes he resembled a perched vulture or a question mark. He was lanky, muscular, athletic and alert at the animal level if stupid in the conventional human sense. Very quick with his broad, thick-fingered hands. He’d been a high school basketball star but he’d gone into boxing after high school instead of playing college basketball. He already had 3 kids by 18 and wanted to make fast money and even more than that deep down he just really loved punching people. He had great hand-eye coordination and a bottomless pit of ever-raging fury in his soul so he’d done well right up until he’d run afoul of the law and started bouncing in and out of prison.
Over the years he’d managed to have four more children for a total of seven children by three women during his brief stints in the free world between prison sentences. He’d been inside 5 separate times for violent felonies by the age of 45. He was now 50 and had been out of prison for 5 years which was the longest amount of time he’d been free in his adult life. He beat Martha regularly but he was still much better than her now deceased ex husbands had been. They’d both tried to murder her. Joe was a brute but he had a conscience and desire to better himself and atone for his many many misdeeds, most of all the ones he’d never been caught for. The ones he’d gotten in the most trouble for had involved violence against police and had not in his view been morally wrong. Other guys in the prison system and the criminal underworld loved and admired him specifically because of such deeds.
He looked old. His face was drawn and his eyes seemed sad and weary much of the time though they would glitter and flash when he got worked up. They would dance crazily in a kind of delirium where his senses would sharpen but his higher mind would go mad. He’d had two serious strokes in addition to brain damage from head trauma and now every time his eyes got all sparkly and crazy like that people waited for them to roll back and for his third stroke to be The Big One. Martha’s younger son Bobby, who’d sworn that he and her older son Duane would “take care of” Joe when Duane got out of prison was hoping that Joe would die of a stroke very soon, because Duane was getting out that very day and Bobby was actually kind of scared of him. Duane had been in prison for the past ten years. He’d gotten fifteen years but he’d managed to knock five off of by fighting in the gladiator pits in the Tatooine Interzone District. He’d killed men with his bare hands in front of an audience to get out of prison early. Bobby hadn’t yet been to prison but he’d committed many violent crimes including a multiple murder in Florida. He’d never been arrested for it but he’d confessed it to Dusty on Christmas Day the year before and Dusty had believed him. Both sons hated Joe and idolized their father who’d been killed by a liquor store owner’s secret second wife during an attempted robbery in Carson City Nevada in 2017, the year that The Mugwumps and The Slor had arrived on earth and set up the Tatooine Interzone District. Joe and Martha loved each other very dearly but Bobby hated Joe and had been telling people for some time now that when Duane got out of prison they would “take care of” Joe together.
Martha was fat and slow like Debbie but a little taller and a lot paler and blotchier. She wore glasses and had a low voice. She had a big gut and big lumpy breasts and pale flabby triceps and a mottled doughy face with a receded chin and saggy jowls, her pale fleshy lips perpetually parted as she breathed through her mouth. She was persistently miserable and prone to complaint but her misery and complaint were not unreasonable for she had suffered a great deal. She was in constant pain. She moaned and groaned. She got headaches from the heat and bone aches from the cold. She coughed and spat a lot. She was diabetic. She had bad kidneys and bad knees. Bad sons. Her life sucked. There was no getting around it. But in all that darkness and pathos there was something like a candle of real beauty in how she loved. People can be like that. She somehow helped Joe deal with his his anxiety, stupidity and violent impulses. She was the smarter and less explosively violent of the two. She knew more than she should have to about how to love men like him. It is thus that the insect and the angel are wed.
Joe’s father, Joe Senior, had been murdered when Joe was just six years old. Joe senior had been 25. He’d been a ranking member of one of the Colorado chapters of the outlaw motorcycle gang the Bandidos. He’d been shot in the head. Joe had brown skin like him. Joe’s half brothers Nate and Donald were whiter. They made fun of Joe’s dark skin. Nate liked to call him a “shitskinned Mexican ape.” Nate had done 22 years for a double murder committed in a jealous rage. Nate liked Hitler. Donald used to call Joe “Mighty Joe Young” after the gorilla from the old movies. Donald had recently died of undisclosed causes not long after doing a long time in prison for something that nobody ever spoke of in specifics. Donald used to get sweaty and aroused in ordinary conversation. Donald used to give people unwanted hugs when sweaty and aroused. Donald had been a prison sissy, an effeminate submissive homosexual. He’d always openly loved sucking dick for cigarettes. Joe felt intense shame and rage about that. It was emasculating by association, having a half brother like that. When Donald had met Dusty he’d shown obvious interest and made an unseemly show of it but Dusty had not reciprocated. Joe had witnessed that and the humiliation by association was infuriating to him. Donald had very likely been murdered but nobody talked about it.
Brandeen was out in the parking lot marching back and forth swinging her arm in martial fashion, pathologically vigilant, exhausted, paranoiac. She was only about five foot tall and ninety pounds.
Like Dusty and Joe Brandeen was 50 years old. She had short sandy hair pushed back. Tawny creased face. She was usually more meek but now she was glowering menacingly at everyone and occasionally having loud conversations with spirits by the dumpster that only she could see. Would you reckon her for more of an insect or an angel? Darren eyed her warily as he squatted by his bike and pried a pebble out of the tread in the tire.
“I see you!” She yelled at someone nobody else saw, shaking her little fist. She turned and saw Dusty and Debbie approaching in the near distance.
The Book of Drome Chapter 8: Cracking Wise
“Oh look it’s Sthpecial Olympics and Sthpecial Forces,” Darren called out in a loud jokey voice, obviously entertained with himself. He was standing by his Harley getting ready to leave, adjusting his black and white skull and crossbones bandana before putting on his helmet. He had a big mouth and was a fast talker. He loved giving people nicknames. He called Joe “Smokin Joe Frazier, and Martha “Martha Playground” and Brandeen “Brandune from The Sand Dune.” Debbie was “Special Olympics” and Dusty was “Special Forces.” Sometimes he lisped because he was missing his front four top teeth. According to him they’d been kicked out by prison guards after he’d assaulted one for making fun of his mother. But so he sounded like Sylvester the Cat from the old cartoons. He’d done 12 years in California and was in Arizona in violation of his parole. He’d get uptight and potentially violent if anyone around him did anything to attract police attention. He was wary of Brandeen because sometimes she’d get all crazy and start yelling at strangers or people who weren’t even there until someone called the cops.
He had his own imaginary versions of everybody’s lives. He thought he knew everyone’s dirty little secrets but he mostly just made stuff up and talked about it a lot. He actually believed that Dusty was a US Military special forces veteran who pretended not to be because his missions had been so top secret. Methamphetamine use may have informed Darren’s views somewhat. He would later become obsessed with the idea that Brandeen was a criminal informant and get very paranoid over it.
He often told stories based on real life experiences but filled with self aggrandizing exaggerations and completely fabricated details. He was a nomadic loner and loved telling his stories to new people who didn’t know him well. He preferred credulous or naive types most of all. His speech impediment stuck out sometimes but his expressiveness, vivid descriptions, rapid fire delivery and entertaining wisecracks made for entertaining company. He’d talk about things that nobody in his audience knew about so that he could embroider more freely. Dusty had spent a lot of time smoking weed and trading stories with him in the afternoon shade on the other side of the gas station. Dusty could tell some of what Darren had told him was true and some was embroidery but he was never sure which exact details were which.
Darren had in fact won many gunfights in the hollers of West Virginia where years ago he’d been a soldier in the kind of small wars that very few people beyond the participants ever hear about. Sometimes he’d tell the stories behind the many scars on his arms and legs or his missing finger. The scars were real even if their origin stories were partially fabricated. And he had a lot of them.
He rode a custom Harley Davidson 1993 Sportster 1200 that he’d chopped up and tricked out by himself. He was a good craftsman but he had trouble working because he was impatient and irascible and obnoxious if also sometimes charismatic and entertaining in his way. Like Joe he had the urge to be a good person though not as often or as deeply as Joe. His malignant quixoticism and tendency toward vigilantism were not as serious as Joe’s.
These were deeply troubled people living in poverty on the fringes of society out in the desert of The Perimeter. Life was crazy but it was not as crazy as Tucson on the other side of the mountains where there was now an intergalactic district where you could do trade with aliens and where the unfortunate who wander the city or the desert outside of it sometimes ended up as sex slaves or fighting in gruesome death matches in the infamous gladiator pits of The Tatooine Interzone District.
Briefly the morning sun makes fruit and flowers of them all.
It shined on Dusty and Debbie’s faces as they approached.
“Damn y’all walk sthlow!” Darren said, slapping his thigh with his gloves. Dusty had slowed down so Debbie could keep up.
Joe watched without speaking, his eyes alert yet dolorously droopy. While Darren was a fast talker Joe was slow in his speech. He talked like Tommy Chong from Cheech and Chong but unlike Chong he wasn’t doing a comedic caricature of a really stoned guy. He had brain damage from countless blows to the head and two confirmed strokes. And he’d been born without that much to lose in the first place. He had impulse control issues because of it. He’d already been born explosive and quick to rash decisions all his life and he’d never lived without violence. There had been nothing else when he was growing up but the rocky mountains, the infinite sky, the moonshine, the methamphetamine, and the near perpetual violence.
The upside was that he could be very quick to spring into action for the greater good, like the time he beat up a guy who’d been beating up a small woman through the open front window of the driver side of the car. She’d driven away after Joe pulled him away and started slapping him silly real cat and mouse like. Another time Joe had saved a young woman from some men who’d tried to pull her into a van and kidnap her. Luckily Tim had been there too and Tim had his pistol out and made his presence known and covered Joe as the young woman jumped out of the sliding side door of the van.
Joe and Darren sometimes talked about “cleaning up the streets.” These conversations revolved around typical male power fantasies involving winning great battles against perceived villains and lowlifes and being revered as heroes. Darren was not quite the vigilante type that Joe was, he had less of a conscience. Some criminals desperately want to be cops just as some cops passionately love being criminals you know. These two opposing types love imagining being each other. Where the man goes so too does his reflection, so too his shadow. Sometimes the more outcast and disgraced a man is the more intense quixotic fantasies he will have about redeeming himself and saving everyone as heroically as possible. Such was life sometimes for men like Darren and Joe.
“How y’all gonna win the sphpecial olympics when you walk stho goddam sthlow?” Darren hollered happily, laughing.
Joe disliked that kind of talk but he played along with it. He was keenly aware of how people made fun of the slow and mentally disabled. He’d dealt with a lot of that in prison. He was divided about it as he was with racism. He wanted to fit in and he loved just getting along with people and had made a lot of changes as he’d gotten older and didn’t want to be the guy who flipped out anymore. Martha helped him manage the anxiety connected to his violent outbursts though he did beat her, usually in private.
He never did it in front of Dusty. Dusty tended to cause people to become more aware of their own consciences in his presence. It was a strange power, a kind of moral charisma that he seemed to exert without trying much like his intelligence and cheerfulness. It just came naturally to him.
“I walk real slow cuz I’m a big fat retard,” Debbie said as she waddled up onto the concrete sidewalk from the parking lot. She chuckled at her achievement.
“I see you!” little Brandeen shouted out over the wash into the cactus patch on the other side. She was loud for how small she was. She seemed completely immersed in psychosis and seethed with rage that came off of her in waves like heat.
“God damn it Brandune,” Darren said loudly. “It’s hot enough you don’t need to invite more heat.” He hated that she act crazy and attracted attention because he was a parole violator.
Brandeen looked at him, her scowl melting into a smile because he had spoken to her. Her eyes widening out of their suspicious paranoiac squint into a brief moment of girlish wonder. She had a crush on Darren even though or partly because he was perpetually annoyed and even enraged by her behavior. She was attracted to rough biker types. Her father had been one but there were complexities involved in that because her father was a violent incestuous rapist and murderer and had beaten her mother to death and had raped Brandeen when she was growing up. So while she was attracted to biker types and rough men and the sounds of motorcycles such things were also reminders of severe trauma for her and could cause psychotic breaks and self harming episodes especially if she’d indulged in methamphetamine which she sometimes did though she rarely told anyone.
“Good morning everyone,” Dusty said. “Is Lulu inside?”
“Yeah she’s inside,” Joe said. Lulu was the store manager.
“Hey Joe and Martha,” Dusty said. Then he asked everyone in general. “What’s up?”
Joe and Martha shrugged unhappily in unison. “We need gas for the car,” Martha said in her low bovine lowing type voice. “It’s so hot already.” She was miserable. A hot wind blew dust and grit in her face and she spat angrily as birds flew happily and swiftly on the same wind just over her head in the infinite sky.
“I’m so sick of Arizona,” Joe said, punching his palm, his face clenched with inchoate rage. It was like he wanted to beat up the weather and the earth. Like he wanted to punch God.
“I see you!” Brandeen yelled again. This time though someone would actually appear from the direction she was shouting in. “You saw her!” She was absolutely furious at reality and its variants. People assumed she’d been yelling invisible at imaginary people because she did do that sometimes. In this particular instance she had seen a real man and knew the real man had seen a real girl, a catatonic child in the desert not far from where they all stood but out of sight owing to her position in a drainage channel that ran between two mesquite trees that formed a thick thorny canopy over her.
The Book of Drome Chapter 9: Her
Sam the Drunk was staggering through the bush behind the gas station but nobody except Brandeen had seen him. He’d seen the little catatonic girl huddled under the tree but he’d thought she was a hallucination caused by alcohol withdrawal and he had looked away quickly for fear of losing his mind further; but the idea that the actual was a hallucination had itself been the actual hallucination. In short, he was utterly confused and knew only that he needed a drink. He made sure not to scratch his sunburned skin on any of the thorny branches as he made his way through the mesquite and palo verde toward the gas station.
Dusty and Debbie were still out in the parking lot with the gang. Sirens had recently become audible from both directions. (Brandeen had used her phone to call 911 and report that she’d seen the catatonic girl and then she’d thrown her phone to the ground and smashed it with a rock because she believed it to have been infiltrated by evil spirits and 5g electric vaccine frequencies.)
“She actually saw something,” Dusty said, gesturing at Brandeen with his chin, wondering in particular whom she’d meant by “her.” She’d yelled at someone as yet unseen about another as yet unseen someone she’d called “her.”
“She’s Theein things alright,” Darren muttered cynically, adding a bitter laugh. “She’s Thspun bro. She done doubled up on the crazthy with the crythtal!” He was getting worked up about it but everyone had to admit he was right and there was a general nod of agreement from the gang.
“She’s worse than usual,” Martha said to Joe. “She’s got meth scabs. The meth makes her crazier.” Her voice so sad and low. She knew Brandeen’s history: poverty, abuse and schizophrenia in the vast imponderable wilderness of Alaska. Joe nodded and hugged Martha and held her close. She clove unto him and for a moment they melted into each other and both were briefly glad to be alive because they had each other. That didn’t last long.
“Brandune cut the crazy yelling-at-people-who-ain’t-there shit and go to the head doctor and get your god damn ding bithcuitsth!” Darren shouted at her. (He called meds “ding biscuits.”) “They probably already called the heat becauthe you wont shut the fuck up!” He did not realize that the sirens in the distance were already headed to the Speedway. He did not know about the little catatonic girl. But he knew he had to get moving. “I gotta get the fuck outta here,” he said, adjusting his helmet strap and straddling his bike.
Brandeen had had one of her trademark high speed mood swings and got all dopey now because she was charmed by Darren’s anger and aggression. She became quiet and smiled at him, batting her eyelashes. She’d finally stopped marching back and forth and now stood in place, uncanny in her sudden serenity. She had a pathologically attracted to potentially traumatic men. It was a compulsion rooted in severe childhood trauma. She kind of swayed in place like seaweed and became very dreamy. Darren was disarmed and unexpectedly charmed by this in return and he smiled at her and quieted down himself. They shared a beautiful moment but it wouldn’t last long.
“Does the head doctor have retard biscuits?” Debbie asked playfully, pleased with herself.
“They just send you to the veterinarian for dog biscuits and y’all can’t tell the difference,” Darren quipped quickly.
“I know what dog biscuits taste like,” Debbie bragged, smiling victoriously, showing shamelessly her gummy gaps.
“I gotta get movin,” Darren muttered, the shared precious moment having come and gone. He began putting on a pair of black leather fingerless riding gloves and sniffing the air like a coyote as his eyes became distant with thought. “Ahh what do I care man, I’m outta here,” he said, more to himself than anyone else.
The next voice surprised everyone except Brandeen, who had known to expect it.
“Was she really the only one of you who saw me?” Asked Sam the Drunk in his tragicomic stereotypical drunken slur, staggering out from behind the building in a daze, flies buzzing dizzily around his head, fumes coming off of him and distorting the air. He was filthy and sweaty, redeyed disheveled and sunburned. His head was shaped like a light bulb, narrow at the bottom and bulbous up top. He had graying orange hair on the sides but was mostly bald on top and the baldness accentuated the bulbousness of his head. He was dehydrated and shaky and seemed like he might just start heaving and convulsing soon if he didn’t get some liquor. He smiled dementedly. He always smiled at everyone but people usually avoided smiling back at him.
Dusty saw the beauty in him occasionally, because Dusty could see through the surface deformations to the urface preformation and see Sam in another light as his mother might. Dusty could see through the surface of time like some might a surface in space. Dusty tended to think of all faces as beautiful because they were so individual. A person’s face is the full flower of their form.
“Sam’s real,” Brandeen said, sticking out her chin and smiling defiantly, squinting in the light, the leathery creases at the edges of her eyes multiplying and compressing together. She herself seemed very compressed, the intensity of her emotions very large in inverse proportion to the smallness of her body. Her brief spell of being pathologically lovestruck by Darren’s toxic behavior had by now passed completely and she was back to being volatile, erratic and loud. She glowered into the distance, the endless dust.
“I see all!” She proclaimed, and began pacing angrily, scowling and stalking back and forth in front of the dumpsters in the the back west corner of the parking lot, swinging her arm in front of her as she marched like a drill sergeant. The others did not realize that she saw herself as guarding the catatonic little girl until emergency services arrived. The sirens were loud and close now and the colored lights were visible as the ambulance approached from the fire station down the road to the west by where Dusty had slept and the police came from the east over by the mountains and the city beyond.
Dusty noticed Brandeen’s gaze shift as she looked west back toward the direction whence he and Debbie had come. He followed her gaze with his own and saw Paul Krout approaching from the west on the side of the road. Paul was homeless like the rest of them but he fit in even less than Sam because Paul was a known sex offender who’d preyed upon minors and was considered a high risk of doing it again. That was all a matter of public record that anybody could look up on their phone. Paul was 58 and had spent 18 years in prison during his 30s and 40s.
“Darren stop yelling and take your dog biscuits you retard,” Debbie said slowly and deliberately and yet playfully and wittily. Everybody laughed except Brandeen, who now gazed intently out over the desert to the west. Nobody knew that she felt she had to protect the girl from Paul.
Darren got worked up again. “I’m Therious you guys we need to be careful or she’s gonna burn thith place down!” By “burn this place down” he meant that she would attract too much heat, or attention from squares, business owners and cops. Joe nodded along and murmured in agreement.
“I need a drink,” Sam croaked.
“Tham you look like shit bro,” Darren said. Joe laughed. They both kind of hated Sam. Darren and Joe were both very macho convict types and considered Sam a bitch with no self respect.
“I’ma go inside quick and talk to Lulu and then I gotta catch the shuttle into The Zone,” Dusty said. By “The Zone” he meant the Tatooine Interzone District of America which was to the east down the highway on the other side of the mountains from The Perimeter.
As he walked into the store he heard Darren starting up his Harley and revving his engine loudly as he pulled away and the sound of two car doors closing as Joe and Martha got into Martha’s car. The car started up with a junkyard hoopdie jangle. He saw Sam and Debbie coming in behind him. Sam staggering unsteadily, Debbie waddling slowly.
He thought about everyone he’d just seen: their faces, their voices, their lives. Their interiors. Their souls. How their souls are not visible in themselves but show themselves through their faces, their voices, their lives. He held the door open as Sam walked through and stayed there holding the door open for Debbie as she approached. He mused a bit as was his wont. If the essential nature of the universe can be expressed in language then the universe is essentially linguistic in nature, he thought to himself. Is language something like the soul of the universe? Does the soul of the universe somehow show through it’s face which is not a language but which speaks a language? Every face is beautiful insofar as it is a soul. Whispering withinwardly: The face is the soul of the body. A quote from Wittgenstein. Every soul is beautiful. Even Paul’s? Hitler’s?
He laughed out loud, startling a nervous woman who was hurrying through the door in front of Debbie.
Why do I think at all, he asked himself. Where is Lulu? Her beautiful face. Beautiful among the beautiful. My coffee.
The sight of Lulu’s face lifted his spirits. All faces were beautiful but hers was moreso. Vrey naturally pretty with bright fearless eyes, rosy cheeks, full lips, straight bright teeth and an easy smile. A healthy glow. Friendly and playful. Cheerful and flirty. Small but curvy. Energetic. She smiled and batted her eyelashes as she made eye contact with Dusty as Debbie waddled in under the arm he held the door open with. Lulu had dark brown eyes that were very bright in their expression, like Debbie’s. Dusty felt himself lighten up in her gaze.
“Hello Dusty and Debbie!” she piped enthusiastically, hopping up and down a little behind the register. Then as she was smiling at Dusty and still looking at him someone behind her over by the soda machine tried to get some Mountain Dew from the fountain and she called out to them without looking “the Mountain Dew is broken hun, the guy is on the way to fix it, the valve broke.” She’d recognized the sound of the broken valve and knew which customer had tried to get the mountain dew. She was always very aware of those around her in the store, as if she emanated an electromagnetic field in an invisible spiderweb of energy throughout the entire store that registered every movement and every feeling in the store and transmitted it to her in vibrations along the threads of the web whose subtleties she was preternaturally attuned to.
He got his coffee. He had to be quick so he could catch the shuttle. He could see out in the lot the ambulance and Sheriff’s Department cars were arriving and people were getting out and approaching Brandeen. She was now unexpectedly calm and lucid. He watched through the west window as he held up his rewards card for Lulu to scan and she told him his coffee was on her and he thanked her quickly and distractedly and moved on. Sam was behind him with a ten pack of little bottles of Fireball cinammon whiskey and a big styrofoam cup of Sprite. Debbie was wandering the aisles contemplating the snacks even though she’d probably just buy cigarettes.
Back out in the lot it was hotter. He’d only been in the store about a minute but in that minute the heat had gone up in more ways than one. There were cops and an ambulance. There were even some suits. Official types in sedans. He guessed DHS or FBI.
Not far down the road to the west he saw the shuttle as it approached on Ajo and slowed down to pick up Paul who’d walked to the roadside to hail it. The shuttle was basically a small bus and was part of the local public transportation system. It had been free to ride since Covid started. You could flag the shuttle anywhere along the route out in The Perimeter, you did not have to wait at an official stop like with the city bus.
He walked up off the paved part of the lot onto the dusty public land on the west side of the station. There was a barber trailer and a taco truck. There was a spot by a trash strewn culvert with flowering thistle that was good to wait at because there was space for the shuttle to pull over. He stood there and put his arm up to hail the shuttle as he looked back over his shoulder at the scene in the parking lot. He saw Brandeen leading some EMT’s and suits across the wash and into the bush behind the dumpsters. He wanted to see what would happen but he had to get to Tucson.
The shuttle arrived and he got on and said hi to the driver, Shelly. She smiled and said hi and he sat down near the front where there was a pair of seats open with no one in either seat. He put his stuff on the seat next to him. Paul was toward the back and said hello and Dusty said hi. Dusty had not known until just recently that Paul had been in prison multiple times for raping kids. Dusty was sitting in the second row on the right and he watched the scene unfolding out the window back in the parking lot as the shuttle pulled away.
“What’s going on there? It looks serious! What happened?” Asked a small middle aged woman with dark skin and a strong Mexican accent. She had hooded eyes and a downturned mouth but the apparent tiredness in her face did not match the generally alert and friendly manner in which she spoke.
“I think Brandeen found something in the desert out behind the store,” Dusty said. “A missing person maybe.”
“Maybe it’s another dead junky,” a skinny blonde man with thin pursed lips said bitterly. Dusty knew him, his name was Roger. Roger had a lot of hate inside. He hated drug addicts, homeless people, Native Americans, Mexicans, Black People… Sometimes he tried to talk to Dusty in a “just between us white guys” voice but Dusty tended to keep his distance, especially since the day Roger had been rude to Debbie because she’d taken too long to ask the driver a question as she was getting off with Roger behind her watching his next his bus pull away over on the other side of the station.
But Dusty turned his attention away from such things and looked toward the rising sun and the mountains to the east beyond which lay the Tatooine Interzone District and the city of Tucson. It was still before 7 am and the clouds were still rolling slowly in from the north. Some of them had taken on an ominous blood-red tinge. He checked his phone and looked at some posts on social networks. People were talking about a mass shooting in Oklahoma similar to another one that had happened in Pennsylvania a few days before. The shooter had escaped and the FBI were looking for him. People had some very strong opinions on what had happened.
There was some intrigue to it but it was hard to find the facts in all the sensatinalized coverage and cacophonous public discourse. From what Dusty could tell the victims who had not been security or police had been connected to an underground human trafficking ring who kidnapped children and sold them to pedophiles. Dusty understood well enough how bad it all was but or therefore he stopped reading about it and took a few deep breaths and quieted his mind, which was something he’d only learned to do relatively recently. He looked to the east and thought to himself as they drove down the Arizona highway into the rising sun from the raw wilderness of the country into the cooked wilderness of the city.