Babylon

Babylon
by
Daisy Anne Gree

For Gabriel
I am all yours, forever.

Smashwords Edition

Cover art and design © Sarah E. Melville 2009
All Rights Reserved.
2009 first print edition published by Anubis Scribe and proud to be associated with Year Zero Writers.
Babylon © copyright Daisy Anne Gree 2009
The author asserts the moral right to be named as author of the work.

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Discover other titles by Daisy Anne Gree at Smashwords.com

Huge thank yous to: Phuel, Azazel, Oli Johns, Dan Holloway, Sarah E. Melville, Year Zero Writers, Kevin Dunn, Geneva13, and Benjamin Seymour R.I.P.

Prologue: The Bone Yard

Somewhere to the left of the highway, a wooden house stood on arid land. When you sat on the porch and looked all the way around, you saw nothing at all. 

You couldn't stand in the backyard, because it was filled with bones. Piled high, and in no particular order, some say there were bones to represent every creature on earth back there -- you could pick them out if you looked at them hard enough, and for long enough. At night though, when the moon was out shining on those old bones, they melded into a white sea, indistinct and troubling.

A witchdoctor once lived in this house. He would spend his nights calling out to the Devil, singing the Hymn of Lucifer:

He is the king of Hell
He has two heads
One is the king of hell
He has two heads...

No one lived there anymore. But a tall man was sitting on the back porch with an old record player next to him, on which Mississippi John played the Avalon Blues. The man looked at the bones as the moon rose. Come on home now, he said quietly into the night, it's time to come on home...

Part One: With Signs Following

I counted my breath in and out, rough and ragged. A fractious rhythm among the others, the slamming oven doors and the clanking plates, that surrounded me. The air inside was so thick and heavy that breathing felt like drowning. As the seconds wore on, one noise began to swell and smother the rest: the slow and steady buzzing of the fluorescent bulb above my head. It was feverish and nauseating, as jarring as a jackhammer on asphalt.
My heart rate surged and I brought my hands up to my temples. The buzzing began to transform, its timbre deepening. It grew into a deafening roar, like an angel's fall from grace. Just as I was about to pass out, the sound stopped abruptly. I opened my eyes hoping for a sign that others had heard it too. My question was answered as I looked around the kitchen and saw that no one seemed perturbed. My stomach sank under the weight of this observation, and I turned and stumbled out the back door, into the alley that ran behind the restaurant.
Outside it was damp and cold, a thin fog bestowing undeserved halos on the harsh street lamps. A rat rustled in the accumulating garbage. I lit a cigarette and leaned back against the wall. The back door swung open again and a sweaty, red-faced Andre approached me. He was a friend of mine, but at that moment, I remembered that I was feeling mighty disappointed in him. He leaned back against the wall next to me. I handed him a cigarette and lit it for him. He exhaled his first drag in a very forceful fashion, and the hiss of it made me cringe.
“Don’t worry, Daniel, they can’t fire you for being nuts,” he said after a while.
I pondered this, unsure of its veracity. But, I couldn’t keep my mighty disappointment inside anymore. I said,

“Did you really suck Chef ’s dick?”
“Look man, I made two batches of really bad Gnocchi. He was going to fire me.”
“Yeah, I know. But he’s such a motherfucker. And last week you specifically told me that, of all the dicks in the world, his was the one you would never suck.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Yeah well, it was easy to say that before two batches of bad Gnocchi.”
We both looked straight ahead and smoked in silence. After a minute or two, he said,
“I resent your judgmental tone.”
“Look, I have nothing against you sucking dicks…”
“What the fuck is your problem, then?”
“It’s just his dick, you know? That’s like, the worst dick in the whole world.”
“Well, it’s alright for you, since they can’t fire you for being nuts.”
“Let them fire me, I’m not putting that fat fuck’s dick in my mouth, I can tell you that much.”

The sound of angry cats floated down the alley towards us from somewhere nearby, and we turned and went back inside, Andre to his bad Gnocchi and me to my tables and customers. I felt jumpy and nervous for the rest of my shift.
By the time I got home, it was around 2 am. My roommate Brian was out and the apartment was still. I went into my room and lay down on my bed. I turned out the lights, but the bulb from the hallway shed a beam that illuminated the wall opposite me. As I watched the wall, a procession of shadows darted across my room. Shadows of people running backwards and forwards. I could see them clearly, and every now and then, one of them would run right at me, only to turn to nothing at my chest. 
I closed my eyes to block them out, but as soon as I did, a buzzing noise started in my ears. I covered my head with my pillow but the buzzing only grew louder, slowly turning once again into that roar. And on top of that, I could hear my name being whispered. The whispering seemed to be coming from many voices, creeping closer and closer to me, until they coalesced into one loud voice, shouting over the hellish roar – 
“Daniel!”
I pulled the pillow off my head and opened my eyes to an empty room, and a quiet apartment. I got up, lit a cigarette, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. I made a whole bunch of coffee that I didn’t drink. I paced all over the apartment. I bit my nails. I went back to bed and lay there until the next afternoon – neither awake, nor  asleep, every muscle in my body tense.
The following month dragged by in a slow horror of deterioration. The world around me became sinister and surreal. My dreams and my waking hours started to blur in my head, making it hard to determine which was which. I couldn’t stand the sound of the TV, the phone, the radio, the refrigerator, and the neighbors walking above me. The noises sent me into a frenzy, and I ended up holding my head under in a sink full of cold water, just to drown it out and freeze the panic.

One day, Brian came in to wake me up for work, saying,
“Dude, get up, it’s 4:30 already.” 
He left the room, and I lay there panicking because not only did I suddenly have no idea who he was, I also no longer had any idea what 4:30 actually meant. I had completely lost the concept of 4:30. Who the fuck is that guy and what the fuck is 4:30? It took me a good ten minutes to remember. I started to lose basic human concepts...time, cognition, faces. All the words that came out of my mouth started to sound like gibberish to me, and nothing anyone else said made any sense.
Dread followed me everywhere I went. It became impossible for me to leave the house at all. I’d open the front door, only to become overwhelmed by anxiety. I’d end up sitting under the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and feeling a horrible certainty that I was losing my mind again and there was nothing I could do about it.
It was really no surprise, then, when after a month of missing so many shifts at work because I couldn’t go outside, I got a voicemail from Chef Fat Fuck telling me that I was fired. I listened to the message, and then I threw my phone out of the window. I went into the living room and sat down in the only armchair that we had. I sat there for a while, just thinking about things. After about half an hour of just sitting there thinking about things, I felt that I had come to the only possible solution for what I was currently going through. 
I got up, went into the bathroom, and ran a warm bath. When it was full, I got into the tub with my clothes and shoes on. I picked up the razorblade to my left next to the bottle of shampoo, and I proceeded to cut open both of my wrists. I submerged them in the water, and I settled back to wait. All kinds of thoughts rushed through my mind. How I wanted my body burned in the desert like Parsons. How I didn’t have a friend that would steal my body and burn it in the desert like Parsons’ friend did. How I didn’t have many friends, and how shitty the few friends I did have were because they wouldn’t steal and burn my corpse. Yeah, all kinds of thoughts.
The trouble was that I just didn’t seem to be bleeding out fast enough. What the fuck, I thought impatiently, pulling my wrists up with some effort to check that I had cut them vertically not horizontally. Yep. Two deep vertical cuts on both wrists. I mean, yeah they were bleeding out and all, but they sure were taking their sweet time about it. I then started to feel quite light-headed and so I decided to try and be more patient about the whole thing. That was, of course, until I heard Brian coming in the front door and I realized that I had forgotten to close and lock the bathroom door.
Goddamnit, this was really going to throw a spanner in my works. There was only one thing for it – I was going to have to get up and close and lock the bathroom door. Easier said than done. I managed to get one arm out of the tub, and it kind of hung there over the rim for a little while as I manoeuvred awkwardly until I could get the rest of my body out of the tub. The only problem was that my wrist had bled over the rim and all over the bathroom floor in front of the tub, so that as I tried to take a step towards the door, I slipped on my blood like a clown on a fucking banana peel and I landed flat on my ass instead. At that exact moment, Brian decided to present himself in the bathroom doorway, taking in the spectacle of me sprawled in a pool of my own blood on the bathroom floor.
“Hi Brian,” I said grinning at him, because suddenly the look on his face made this whole thing the funniest moment in my entire life, and then I started laughing my ass off. Laughing my ass off is the last thing that I remember from that day.
After the seven days I spent at San Francisco General Hospital, including three days for a psych evaluation, they threw me back out into the world. I’d managed to convince them that I was heartbroken over a girl. I didn’t tell them anything about my past or the medication that I was supposed to be taking. I walked out of the automatic doors into a bright and sunny afternoon. I sat down on the curb in-between a dead rat and a crackhead. I knew he was a crackhead because he was smoking crack at the time. I scratched at my bandaged wrists and tried to pat down my mussed up hair. The crackhead looked down at my wrists, and then up at me. He motioned with his pipe, but I turned him down. I looked at the dead rat on my other side. It must have been crossing the road. Its fur was matted with dried blood, its face frozen in a painful grimace. 
“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” I asked the crackhead suddenly, turning to face him.
“How the fuck should I know?” he responded.
I had actually been wondering that for the past few days in the hospital. No job, no way to pay rent, my mind slowly melting out of my ears. Things didn’t look too great for me. I had come to San Francisco seven years earlier to become a great writer. I was going to write the great American novel. I was going to write books that were better than anyone else’s. Yeah. What I did do was write average novels that no one wanted to publish and instead I worked as a waiter. This was not what I had come here for. I could only see one option left. 
“I guess I’ll have to go home,” I answered him.
“Where you from?”
“Babylon.”
“Babylon?”
“Babylon, West Texas.”
 “’I will bring him to Babylon…yet shall he not see it, though he will die there,’” he said looking at the sky.

My wounds ached a little as a murder of crows swept across the clouds above.
I sold my guitar, my amp, my laptop and my stereo system to the smack dealer who lived upstairs from us, and with the money I bought a piece of shit car from him. It was a beaten up 1985 Ford Fiesta, and it was falling apart, but he said it had life in it yet. After I had sold all of that, I didn’t really have anything else to pack except my clothes. I gave all the books I owned to Brian. He sat watching me pack my suitcase, perched on the end of my bed.
“Who the hell goes back to Texas?” he asked me, appalled.
“I’m from Texas,” I answered a little defensively; being from a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in the West Texas desert always left me feeling a little inadequate.
“Yeah, you’re from Texas, but you’re not supposed to go back to Texas. I mean, what the fuck are you going to do in the middle of the fucking desert?”
“Work in a gas station.”
“Funny,” he said, shaking his head.
“Who the fuck is joking?” I said.
After I left the Bay Area, I drove straight through to L.A. I got something to eat at a taqueria downtown, but I got out of there quickly, because L.A made me so uncomfortable, heaving the way it did with its own rotting brand of delusion. From there I drove for the remaining 14 hours straight, stopping only to piss and get gas. The land became progressively drier, the roads got emptier, and everything got quieter. The moon loomed huge over the mountain that dominated the view from my youth that now passed before me as if nothing had changed at all. 

Eventually, I pulled off the highway at the unmarked exit. It had always been unmarked. Nobody ever came here willingly, so why point the way? I pulled the car over on the side of the road and got out to look over the land to the right that raced off toward the mountain. I waited, looking until I could see them. First one, then two, then three. There had never been an explanation for them, these Babylon mystery lights. Nobody knew what they were, but they were always there, strange dancing orbs, glowing yellow and orange. It had been seven years since I had seen them. I watched them for a little while before getting back in the car and driving the rest of the way into town.
It was really late when I parked near Main Street. I walked around until I found the one payphone in town. It wasn’t that hard to find, since it was in exactly the same place as it had been when I had left. I leafed through the phone book until I found the name I was looking for. I popped in a quarter and dialled the number. A croaky voice answered on the other end. It sounded strained, like someone who had just taken a hit off a bong and was trying to answer the phone and not exhale at the same time. 
“Ethan?” I said.
“Yeah, who this?”
“Daniel.”
“Shit. Sheeeeiiiiit. Daniel? Dude.”
“Ethan I’m in town.”
“Sheeeeiiiiit. Really? Sheeeeeiiit.”
“Yeah, really.”
“Come on over, brother. You know the way.”

I hung up the phone. I did know the way indeed.
When I got to Ethan’s house, I parked the car and turned off the engine. There was nothing around his house. It was one mile outside of town. I walked up the stairs to his porch and went to ring the bell. My eyes fixed on the front door, and on the dead chicken that was nailed to it. I looked at the dead chicken for a while, hating myself and everyone else in this town vehemently as I did so. Then I rang the bell. Ethan opened the door, naked. He smiled a big old smile and motioned me inside. I wish I could say that I wasn’t used to seeing Ethan naked, but that would be a lie. 
“The Prodigal Son returns!” he said, handing me a beer. 
I motioned the beer away. 
“What, they don’t drink in fucking California now?” he said disdainfully.
“Oh they drink a lot in California.”
“How long you been dry?”
“Four years.”
“Is it the meds?”
“No I stopped taking them.”
“Then why?”
“It’s loud enough in my head.”
“Yeah.”
So, there I was, sitting opposite a naked Ethan, in his house with a dead chicken nailed to the door, in the middle of the desert. I lit a cigarette as Ethan went into his kitchen to find me a soda. Shadows jumped in the corners of the room, and I closed my eyes against them. The buzzing, the whispering…”Daniel…Daniel…” As clear as day, the voice was in my ear, and I felt the breath on my skin. I jolted and opened my eyes. Nothing.
Ethan came back in and handed me a soda. I sat miserably sipping it and smoking in silence while he stared at me quizzically. Finally I said,
“Ethan, the dead chicken…”
“Yeah, I found it.”
“Why’d you nail it to the door?”
He thought about this for a minute. Then he answered,
“I don’t really know.”
Two weeks after arriving at Ethan’s that night, I was renting my parents’ old place towards the western edge of town. About a year after I’d left, my parents had packed up and moved to a retirement village in Florida. My granddaddy had lived and died in Babylon, and his grave lay just east of the highway in a cluttered and overgrown cemetery that no one really kept clean. I guess my dad decided that he didn’t want to lie in the wormy earth around here. I hadn’t called them to tell them that I was back here. I didn’t really want to talk to them. I didn’t really want to talk to anyone. 
I had no neighbors to speak of; the street was almost empty, adobe houses lying quiet and low. I was working days at the goddamn gas station with Dale. Like Ethan, I had known Dale since birth. We had gone to school together, all of us. He worked in the garage fixing cars, and I worked selling snacks and gas in the store. Hardly anyone ever came in, so we had a lot of free time, just sitting there. We set up two lawn chairs outside the store. I could have spent the time reading, I guess, but I didn’t feel like reading. Not a single word. Instead, we sat on those lawn chairs, smoking, and staring out at the scrubby desert landscape. The desolate nothingness spread out before us like a never-ending alien planet. The sun beat on down, and scorpions scuttled about. 
I was driving home from work when I remembered a house a little ways outside of town. It’d been the house of a witchdoctor, back when I was a kid. He was old even then, and we weren’t supposed to hang out near his house, so of course that’s where I hung out most of all. He was always nice to me, but mean to everyone else. He used to drink chicken blood out of a beer glass. When I would tell him it was weird to drink chicken blood, he’d ask me what I’d had for dinner. I’d say chicken and he would nod and smile.
I decided to take a detour and drive by his house. As I was driving, I saw the ruins of old Babylon in the distance. You see, Babylon had burned once. Back then, it had been split down the middle by railroad tracks. The people on the left hand side hated those on the right, and vice versa, although there was no real reason for this. It just was.  One night, a fire broke out on the left hand side. Thinking that the people on the right side of town had set the fire, the men from the left went and set fires on the right side. The right side burned down to the ground. Seeing that the left hand side had not fully burned down, the men from the right went over and burned down what remained of the left side.
Babylon had burned that night. It was never recorded, what had started the original fire on the left hand side. The town was rebuilt, but some of the old burned remnants still stand on the edge of town, like the blackened faces of old pioneers, watching, waiting.
I drove until I could see the old witchdoctor’s house. The porch light was on, and through my open driver side window I could hear a record playing. I parked my car and wandered over to the house. There was a man sitting on the porch steps with an old fashioned record player next to him. He was staring upwards into the night, leaning back on his elbows. I stopped at the bottom of the steps.
“’Down A Dirt Road’,” I said.

The man moved his eyes slowly from the blackness above to my face below. He was wearing a black suit with a white high collar dress shirt. His skin was porcelain white and his hair as black as his eyes. He looked like he should’ve been in an old photograph with Frank and Jesse James.
Although his position was almost recumbent, his long limbs gave me an uneasy feeling of restrained strength and speed, like a snake coiled in the moonlight. He stared at me for an uncomfortable amount of time without saying anything at all.
“The song,” I continued, “Charley Patton: ‘Down A Dirt Road’.”
Another disquieting amount of time passed in silence before he finally sat up from his reclining pose and, without taking his eyes off me, answered definitively,
“Yes.”
This was turning out to be the worst conversation that I’d ever had, but I was intrigued because I hadn’t seen him around before and he was at the witchdoctor’s house. I impolitely climbed the stairs and sat down on the other side of his record player, lighting a cigarette. I motioned the pack of cigarettes towards him, but he didn’t react. His eyes had followed me up the steps and were still squarely fixed on my face. I exhaled as quietly as possible. I couldn’t take the scrutiny of his stare anymore and so I blurted out a question,
“Is Miguel here?”
He didn’t answer. I tried again,
“You know, Miguel? The guy that used to live here. Drank blood. Kept all those bones in the backyard. Is he still here?”
“No,” he answered with a faint smile.
“Did you buy the place from him?”
“He called me, and I came. He’s not here anymore.”
I smoked some more while he said a whole load of nothing. The silence started to weigh on me again. I looked up to the sky, where he’d been looking when I arrived. 
“What were you looking at?” I asked him, turning my gaze back to his face. He kept his eyes locked to mine for a full minute and then looked off in the other direction.
“Sidereal splendor,” he said pointing to the Milky Way, visible above, “and the ashes of contempt,” he pointed to the burned out buildings of old Babylon, squalid in the luminescence.
Then he looked at me.
“An unattended stove,” he said solidly, heavily.
“What?”
“An unattended stove. That’s what started the fire on the left side of town on the night that Babylon burned. You wanted to know, and now I’ve told you.” 
The next morning, I woke up and realized that I had no recollection of what had happened after that. One minute it was unattended stoves and the next, I was waking up in bed. I got dressed and got in my car. I decided to take a detour before work and drove down to Doc Holliday’s office on Main Street. 
Yes, his name really was Holliday, but I had always harbored a secret notion that he had only become a doctor so that he could call himself Doc Holliday. He wore a big hat, and he was old, fat and loud. I hadn’t seen him since I had gotten back, and sitting there in his chair, I felt about 16 years old again. It was awful. 
  
“Well, well!” he exclaimed, “Tell Doc Holliday what’s been goin’ on.”
Man, I hated that crusty old fucker. Still, I was feeling completely at a loss, and I proceeded to tell him everything, from the last month in San Francisco until now.
“Ahaha!” he bellowed when I was done, “Nothing changes, does it Danny boy?”
 He wrote out a prescription and handed it to me. I looked at the name of the pills.
“Isn’t this a bit hardcore?” I asked hesitantly.
“Son, you’re buckets of crazy. Always have been,” he looked at me pointedly over his glasses, “We don’t want to have to go back to the nut house, now do we?”
“No,” I muttered.
“By all rights, I should lock you up again, you crazy sumbitch. Now just take those pills and let’s hope it’s enough this time. Oh, you’re gonna have to drive down to Hermon to get them.”
“Hermon is a two hour drive,” I protested.
“You gonna put a driving limit on sanity and purity of soul, son? Now, git,” he yelled, patting me on the back, hard.
I went to work and sat out on the lawn chair, looking straight ahead toward the mountain. As Dale stretched his legs in the chair next to me, I exhaled and said,
“Gotta drive to Hermon.”
“Sheeeeiiiiit.”
“Yeah.” 
“When?”
“I’m fixing to go tomorrow.”
“Alright.”
The silence descended once again, and I got a troubling feeling, the realization of how quickly I had reacclimatized to being here. Even my accent was becoming pronounced again. It was starting to feel like I had never left. It felt terrible.
When I was a little kid, five years old, I had a yellow rubber ball. I would spend a hell of a lot of time in my room with it. I would sit at one end of the room and roll it towards the wall at the opposite end. Once it had started to roll, I would jump up and race it to the other side. If I beat it, everything would be alright. If, however, I didn’t manage to beat it, and the yellow rubber ball touched the wall before I did, then something bad would happen.
This thought would prey on me relentlessly, and I would get so stressed that I would double over in pain. I would beat myself in the head with my fists and I would retch and cry. My parents thought I had a stomach ulcer, but Doc Holliday said there was no ulcer. He told them I was suffering from OCD. Nobody really knew what that meant but him. To me, it was a constant sense of impending doom, with a yellow rubber ball to try and ward it off.
That was the earliest memory I had of the noise in my head. Later on in my life, when I started to deteriorate further, the Doc said I had developed schizophrenia. Again, only he really knew what that meant. All I knew was that it never gave up; it only got worse and worse.
Pushing rubber balls out of my mind’s eye, I asked Dale,
“Would you rather be Icarus or Sisyphus?”
“Huh?”
“I said, would you rather be Icarus or Sisyphus?”
“Neither. Both of those options fucking suck.”
“Well, suppose you had to pick one.”
“I’d rather die.”
“Suppose death was not an option.”
“Jeeeesus.”
“Come on, answer the question.”
“Lemme think on it…” he said. He leaned forward and spat into the dirt, then continued chewing tobacco thoughtfully. 
A good few minutes passed us by. During this time, I actually saw a tumbleweed or two. 
“Alright. I’m going to go with Sisyphus,” he answered finally.
“What? Come on. Anyone can see it would be better to be Icarus.”
“No, seriously. Now that I think about it, I actually think that Sisyphus had it pretty good, man. All he had to do every day was roll that fucking rock up the hill. That’s all he had to do, every single day. Then it would roll back down again, and all he’d have to do was get up the next day and start rolling it back up the hill. No uncertainty, no worry, nothing. I mean, suppose he rolled that rock up the hill, and it just stayed where it was, and that was that. Then what the fuck would he do? What would he do with himself? He’d have nothing to look forward to. He’d have time to think and worry and get angsty and all that shit. No, man. Sisyphus had it good.”
 “I think you’re wrong. I think it would be better to be Icarus.”
 “Why? He was a fucking idiot.”
“Don’t call him an idiot,” I said with surprising emotion; I had no idea when I’d gotten so attached to this stupid subject. “OK,” I continued, “so he flew too high. But how are you supposed to know that you’ve flown too high until it’s already too late? And after being up so high, I don’t think he cared at all when he started to fall.”
“Really? And what happens after you fall?”
“You hit the ground running?” I ventured.
“Yeah, and then you break both your fucking legs.”
I sipped my shitty gas station coffee and scratched my head. 
“One thing that always bothered me, you know…” Dale said then.
“What?”
“Why, in all of those Greek myths, was Zeus forever coming down to earth and turning into bulls and swans and raping women? I mean, it would have been so easy for him to just appear somewhere and say, ‘Hey, I’m Zeus. You know, Zeus, from Olympus,’ and women would have been just throwing their pussies at him.”
“No one wants to read a story like that, man. That would suck. You couldn’t write poems about that.”
“But you can write poems about bulls and swans and rape?”
I got up and started to walk back and forth. I was trying to remember the words to Yeats’ “Leda and The Swan”…
“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still...” 
I suddenly remembered every word in every line. I paced back and forth as I recited, with a growing erection, then looked over to the mountain and finished,

“Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?”
Dale had been watching me, and I turned back from the mountain to face him triumphantly, as if there was no way that he would fail to see my point, that yes, you could write poems about bulls and swans and rape. But instead, he leaned forward, spat out tobacco juice and said,
“See? That just fucking sucked.”
“That was Yeats!” I protested.
“Don’t mean it didn’t fucking suck.”
I sat back down with my boner.
“Hey, didn’t she, like, lay a couple of eggs after that?”
“Yeah, she did,” I sighed.
“That’s just weird, dude.”
I was disgusted with him for about an hour after that, and could barely bring myself to look at him.
Half an hour before closing, Betty came into the store to buy smokes. Betty was almost as old as my mom, and had known me all of my life. I’d run into her about three days after I’d gotten back in town, in the diner at the corner of Main and Mystery Streets. The owner of the diner, Zeke, was a Babylon native, but he’d always hated the Texas heat and so he kept the air conditioning on full blast, all the time. It was fucking Siberia in there. I had taken to sitting in there in the mornings, with my jacket wrapped tight around me, drinking coffee and getting ill. Anyway, on that day, Betty had come in for breakfast, and she’d seen me at the counter.
“Daniel? Is that you?” she’d said breathily.
“Yeah. Hi Betty.”
“Well, hi yourself, stranger! When’d you get back here?”
“About three days ago, Betty.”
“God, you grew up so handsome! Aren’t you handsome! Zeke, didn’t he turn out real handsome?” she smiled over at Zeke, who just grunted and went back to scratching his balls.
“So handsome,” she continued, smiling back at me now. 
To be honest, it had creeped me out because she was about a hundred years old and was missing three of her front teeth. In the end, I’d had to hightail it out of the diner to get away. But, in a town like this, it was impossible to avoid anyone at all, and Betty shopped at the gas station every day. 
She bought her smokes and a soda and then went outside. She motioned to me through the window to ask if she could sit in my lawn chair. I gave her a thumbs up. I watched as she opened her soda can, lit a cigarette, and turned her gaze up towards the darkening sky. When we were locking up, she was still there, looking up. Dale told her that we were going home for the night.
“If it’s alright with y’all, I’m just going to sit here for a while more,” she said quietly.
We left her there, her eyes on the heavens.
The next morning, I finally got my shit together to drive down to Hermon and get my medication. I looked at the prescription again. Haloperidol. I wasn’t excited about it, but I was more afraid of what would happen if I didn’t start taking them again. I spent most of the day in Hermon at the used book store. I bought a book about witchdoctors. 
On my way back home, about seven miles outside of town, I passed a church. It was basically a flat-packed kind of prefab little building, painted white, with a passage from the Book of Mark scrawled across one wall. It was new, and as always, anything new around Babylon intrigued me.

I pulled up in front of the church, and opened the car door. I heard singing coming from inside, so I crept over to the front of the church. I peered in through a crack in the door and saw a bunch of people dancing and some guy up front on a makeshift pulpit. He only had one arm and he was raising it up above his head. In his hand was a glass jar. He paraded the glass jar around for everyone to see, and then he drank from it, dancing along with the others while some real rangy-looking redneck played guitar. 
 I heard a man’s voice behind me say,
“He’s drinking strychnine.”
I jumped a little at this, and turned around to see the tall man from the witchdoctor’s house. The man with the record player. He was looking at me, and the longer he looked at me, the more uncomfortable I got. 
“Why is he drinking strychnine?” I asked.
“He’s praising the Lord. Later on, he’ll handle serpents. Maybe he’ll lose his other arm.”
“Snake handling? Snake handling is illegal in the state of Texas.”
“When did the law ever stop anyone from doing anything?” he replied.
“Are you a part of the congregation?”
He smiled then, and said,
“No.”
I woke up on the floor of my bedroom. I had no recollection of leaving the conversation or the church, no memory of driving home, walking in the house, falling onto the floor. All I could see was that it was seven hours after I had last looked at my watch, pulling in to check out the church. I got up off the floor and found my meds, in their plastic drug store bag on the bed. I took the dose, and sat back down on the floor, smoking and twitching until dawn.
Two nights later, I was hanging out with Ethan at his house. We were out sitting on his roof. I was playing his guitar, while he sat and got baked, naked. Ethan, Dale and I had all gone to school together. There had been a music teacher at this school of ours. His name was Mr. Perion. Ethan had always been pretty good at playing guitar, and when we were in seventh grade, Mr. Perion had taken an interest in him. He began to give Ethan after-school lessons down in the basement music room. After a few months of these lessons, Ethan started to get quieter. He got angrier. He started to sit around naked. A lot. I asked him a few times why he wouldn’t put some fucking clothes on, and he would always have the same answer:
“I can’t breathe…” he would say.
Eventually, we didn’t see Mr. Perion anymore. No one said anything about it, and there seemed to be an understanding that we were not to talk about it amongst ourselves. I think Ethan’s dad was embarrassed about it. He didn’t really talk to his son much after that. He didn’t even look at him much, just kept telling him to get dressed. But Ethan was never comfortable in his clothes after that. And, if it meant he could breathe a little more easily, I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him he couldn’t be naked.
So, there we were on his roof. I looked over at him, and saw that he was looking up at the sky. I stopped playing, and looked up. The whole galaxy flowed out across the velvet night. It shimmered, and the longer I looked at it, the closer it seemed to be. I saw a couple of shooting stars. I saw the full moon, and it looked to be the biggest moon I had ever seen. While I’d been gone, I’d forgotten what the sky looked like. What it really looked like, without all the light pollution from the cities. I remembered then why we all looked up in Babylon. It was a hell of a lot better than looking straight ahead.
I heard a far off rumbling. It sounded like horses or something.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Ethan.
“Hear what?”
“Horses.”
“No, I don’t hear anything.”
“Shit. I hear it. Are you sure you can’t hear it?”
“Maybe it’s El Muerto,” he said in a softer tone.
El Muerto...there was something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Back in 1850, a man called Vidal had been beheaded for rustling cattle in the No Man’s Land in the contested territory between Texas and Mexico. The rangers then strapped his headless body to a horse, hung his head from the saddle, and sent it off into the night to be a warning to others that might steal. People all over saw it and got scared. They shot at it, but on it rode for a time. When it was finally captured, all they found was just a dying horse with a shriveled corpse and a disembodied head as cargo, both riddled with bullets. The dead man and his horse had been killed again and again and again. 
The horse and its ghastly baggage were disposed of. But that wasn’t the end of Vidal. People still reported seeing the apparition that became known as El Muerto, riding at night. People still reported shooting at it. We’re afraid of our own nasty history; our bad deeds riding around after dark, refusing to be forgotten.
“Maybe I’m just hearing things,” I said, exhaling smoke.
“Don’t worry, man. Maybe it really is El Muerto.”
Would you understand me if I told you that actually made me feel a little better? I don’t really expect you to understand me, but I guess it would be nice if you did.
I had hated sleep for most of my life. I had a theory about this: Inside of me, there lived an entity that I liked to call Jim. Jim was a skinny, sweaty dude with thinning, greasy hair. He wore a stained wife-beater, an old beige short-sleeved western shirt, open to the waist, and he had a cigar perpetually hanging out of his mouth. Jim lived in a dark, damp room, somewhere in my head; there was only one bare bulb in there, and the walls were deep red and shiny. During my waking hours, Jim spent his time furiously splicing together the most disgusting, vile, blasphemous, dirty, depressing, evil images that he could find, and jerking off to all of it. Then, he would wait until I went to sleep. I couldn’t avoid him. I couldn’t get away from him. Once I was asleep, I’d inexorably end up in his shitty little room, I’d sit down in a ratty old brown corduroy lazy-boy, and I’d wearily say,
“Alright, Jim. Flip on the projector. Let’s see the bit with the eviscerated animals again.”
And then that son of a bitch would grin, and say something like,
“No, man. The eviscerated animals thing was fucking nothing. Just wait ‘til you see what I got for you tonight.”
And so the nightly blood, gore and snuff films would begin. Nothing was sacred. I would writhe and cry out and lose my breath.
“Jim, you sick fuck! What the hell is the matter with you, goddamnit!?” I would yell.
But it made no difference. When I went to sleep, Jim was always there. And when I woke up, that son of a bitch would ruin my days with the remembrance of what horrors were inside of me.
I hadn’t hooked up a phone at home, since I didn’t want to hear it ringing. But, to put off sleeping for as long as possible, I decided to stop at the payphone in town while I was driving home from Ethan’s. I had been back for long enough, I thought I should call my parents and tell them. I parked the car in front of the payphone, got out and closed myself into the phone booth. A little fluorescent bulb flickered on over my head. I squinted my eyes against the glare of the bulb. It seemed to be flickering in a weird way, rhythmic and pretty maddening, to be honest. And that infernal fucking buzzing…
Get a hold of yourself, I said out loud. I took a deep breath and tried to focus not on the fluorescent bulb, but on the task at hand. Why had I come to this phone booth again? Why, why why? Oh yeah, I was going to call my parents. I picked up the phone, and put it down again. I really didn’t feel like talking to them. They didn’t like me very much. For a few moments, I thought about calling my older brother. He lives in a small town outside of Austin, with his second wife and their one thousand kids. I was going to call him, but then I remembered that he didn’t like me much either. 
It was too much hard work to talk to any of them, and I didn’t have it in me to go through it. Plus, the fluorescent flickering and buzzing was starting make me nauseous and dizzy. I turned around and opened the door of the payphone, leaning over and throwing up on the sidewalk outside. I stood up again, closing the door so that the bulb would shut off, leaning back against the glass. Just then, Betty drove by in her pick-up truck. 
“Who you talking to there, Daniel?” she asked, motioning to the payphone.
“I ain’t talking to anybody, Betty,” I answered.
“Nobody to call?”
“Nobody to call.”
She just sat there with her engine idling, staring at me. 
“I’m probably not gonna move for a little while here, Betty. You should probably get on home,” I said in the kindest way I could find to tell her to fuck off and leave me alone. 
She took my hint. Maybe she wasn’t as dumb as she was ugly.
I got back in my car and drove out to the witchdoctor’s house. I found the stranger sitting on the steps again with his record player. I parked and walked over there. The song coming from his record player was Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘John the Revelator.’ He wasn’t looking up at the sky this time; he was looking right at me. I climbed the steps and sat down as before, lighting a cigarette.
“I love this song,” I said by way of an explanation for yet another of my intrusions into his space, “and I really don’t want to go to sleep.”
“Nightmares? Are you afraid of your own metaphors?”
“I’d rather just be awake.”
“This is all metaphor, too.”
“Well, it’s slightly less wretched.”
“Is it?” he asked, his eyes falling to the bandages on my wrists, “because the evidence would suggest otherwise.”
I looked down to the bandages myself, then off towards the ruins.
“It never makes any sense,” I responded.
“Which set of metaphors are you referring to?”
“The dreams; I never have any idea what they mean…” 
I paused to inhale a drag on my cigarette, then exhaled and resumed talking simultaneously, 
“…so are you saying the imagery could have nothing to do with the meaning?” 
He didn’t answer. His eyes just fixed on mine. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t blink, he didn’t, at that moment, even seem to breathe. I kept talking, 
“Perhaps, then, the meaning is far more innocuous than it appears?”
“Why don’t you ask it?” he said in a tone so authoritative that I found myself sitting up straight.
“Ask it?”
“Yes. Question your metaphors, if you’re willing to accept the answer.”
“You don’t think the meanings are innocuous?”
“No. I think your meanings are far worse than anything a massacred, reanimated animal would seem to convey.” 
I opened my eyes in my bed the next morning. I took my pill, after throwing up for a little while. I still hadn’t taken the bandages off my wrists, because I hadn’t even showered since I‘d been back. I only brushed my teeth and shaved to avoid looking like a goddamn hillbilly. But as far as personal hygiene went, I didn’t give a shit. There was nothing in my refrigerator because I only ate at the diner or at work. I hadn’t done any laundry. I hadn’t made the bed. There seemed to be a real thick layer of dust accumulating around the house. It was fascinating in its uniform coverage. I sure wasn’t going to do anything about it. 
The first date I’d ever been on, when I was 13 years old, had been with a girl called Cindy Myers. She had long brown hair and big brown eyes; a real pretty quarter-Apache girl. We’d gone for a walk, out to where the burnt ruins were. We didn’t really talk as we climbed around inside what used to be a saloon. After some awkward maneuvering, I’d managed to get her to sit next to me. I was still quiet. 
“What you thinking about?” she’d asked me.
“I was wondering what it would feel like to use that big rock over there to break your skull with,” I’d answered honestly. 
“You were not.”
“I sure was.”
“Well, what you thinking about now?”
“I’m wondering where I’d bury your body.”
“Why would you think these things?”
“I don’t know. I can’t really help it.”
“You can’t?”
“Nope. Believe me, I’ve tried. I just always think of the worst thing that I could possibly be thinking about, and then I can’t stop thinking about it”
“Well,” she’d said resignedly, “if you can’t help it, then you can’t help it.”
Cindy dated me for a whole year after that. Then her family moved to Hermon to find work and I was heart-broken for almost two hours.
The thought of what Cindy was doing now crossed my mind as I watched Dale actually fixing a car in the garage, four days after I had started the meds. He’d been doing it for quite some time. Maybe he wasn’t very good at it. He kept glancing over at me, and finally he tucked his rag into his pants and walked over to me.
“Shoot man, I can’t take it anymore.”
I didn’t actually answer him, because I was finding it pretty hard to talk or swallow. 
“Your face,” he continued, “your goddamn face. It hasn’t fucking moved for hours. I’m serious. It hasn’t moved an inch. It’s really freaky.”
I would’ve looked away, if I could have. Thing was, I was having trouble moving my eyes, too. In the end, I had to just plum walk off to get away from him. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to look like anymore. I could have been anyone. It didn’t even matter. I wasn’t going to recognize the sight of anyone in that mirror, so it didn’t even matter. Maybe you haven’t noticed this yet, but at some point you will. At some point, you will notice just how flimsy this thing called reality really is. 
I went back out and sat on the lawn chair. I didn’t want to freak Dale out anymore. It was true that my face hadn’t moved. It was true that I couldn’t really talk or swallow, or move my eyes, or stop my tongue worming around in my mouth. It is at times like this that you have to wonder if the medication is worse than the disease. Shit, I just needed a pair of coveralls, and I’d be like one of those masked killers from an ‘80s slasher flick. Except that I wouldn’t need the actual mask, of course, because my goddamn face was already doing a fine job of looking like one.
The next night, Ethan picked me up in his van. He’d invited me to go camping in Big Bend for the night with him and a couple of girls from town, Susan and Patty. Ethan was fucking Patty, and Susan had been brought along for me to fuck. I remembered her from high school. She had thin white-blonde hair, did a hell of a lot of cocaine, and was forever taking all of her clothes off and driving home at night in nothing but her little red panties. Maybe she should have been fucking Ethan instead of Patty. Patty was someone that I barely even remembered from school. She had less personality than road kill. 
As we drove, I played the guitar aimlessly. Nobody seemed to mind too much, since the closer you get to Big Bend, the fewer radio stations you can find, until finally, there’s only dead air. I watched one cactus after another, I saw limestone canyons, mountains, and a desert so barren that you started to feel like you were on the moon—in fact, astronauts used to do their training there at night, before going on the lunar expeditions. Big Bend national park is over 800,000 acres, and you could be there forever and not run into anybody. Legend had it that this was where the Great Spirit had dumped all the rocks that he had left over after making the rest of the world. It was true badlands. It was raw. It was empty. I felt at home there.
Stars were falling like rain that night. Some lit up the sky so brightly that it almost looked like daylight for a few moments at a time. I sat next to Susan on a blanket, playing some piece of shit song to her.
“Did you write that song?” she asked me.
“Yeah.”
“It’s real pretty.”
“It’s the only one I got,” I shrugged. 
She looked out into the night, completely ignoring the sky show above. She sighed a little.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Oh. I’m just thinking about Steve,” she answered forlornly.
“Who’s Steve?”
“Steve is my dog.”
“You called your dog Steve?”
“Yeah, I called him Steve. What about it?”
“Just seems like a weird name for a dog. Steve.”
“Steve.”
“What about Steve?”
“What?”
“Why are you thinking about Steve?”
“Oh, I’m just worrying. He’s been gone. Went missing three days ago.”
“Steve’s been gone for three days?”
“I know. I know. I’m just worrying for nothing. I’m sure he’s OK.”
“He’s probably dead by now.”
“Excuse me?” she said, turning around to face me, distress and shock in her eyes.
“I said, Steve is dead. He was probably dead on the first night.”
“God!” she exclaimed in horror. 
Patty untangled herself from Ethan’s naked groping, and came rushing over.
“What’s wrong, Susan?” she asked stroking her hair. 
Susan was now crying, so she couldn’t answer. I looked at Patty.
“She’s a little upset about Steve being fucking dead and all.”
“What?” Patty shook her head, “When did she hear that Steve was dead? I thought he was missing?”
“Yeah, she was kidding herself about that. I just pointed out the truth.”
“God, Daniel!” Patty shrieked, “You’re still such an asshole!” and with that, she carried off a crying Susan toward the van, where she sat with her for a while.
“Did you tell her Steve was probably dead?” Ethan asked me.
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“Ha! Hahahaa!”
“Well, am I wrong?”
   “Hell no, brother. He’s probably deader than a doornail.”
   “Steve is dead. Long live Steve,” I said in tribute. 
I didn’t fuck Susan that night. Instead, I watched the stars falling like rain. It would have been nice of me to hope that Steve had seen at least one of them before drawing his last doggie breath, but I’d never met Steve, and so I really didn’t give a shit either way.
When we got back from camping, I drove down to Doc Holliday’s office. I’d only just remembered that I needed to get the stitches cut out of my wrist wounds. I hadn’t taken off the bandages yet, but I figured it was about time. I sat in his waiting room, watching his secretary. She was about fifty or so, plain, heavy-set, and mean-looking. The clock ticked loudly, one second passing after the other, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day…I was beginning to think in terms of forever. Babylon felt like eternity to me. It felt like purgatory or hell. I couldn’t decide which. I guessed that time would tell, and time was passing by in loud increments when Doc Holliday finally emerged through the door to his room and motioned me to come inside.
He sat me down on the examination bed, and then looked at me analytically over the top of his glasses. 
“How’s them pills?” he asked me.
“They’re…”
“I’m not asking you the square root of pi here, son. Either them pills are OK or they ain’t. Which one is it?”
“Depends what you mean by OK?” I ventured quietly, recoiling a little from his abrasive countenance.
“Sweet baby Jesus, give me strength. Are they working or not, boy!?”
As he was yelling the last part of his sentence at me, I saw something flickering out of the corner of my eye. I looked over at the wall to the left, and through the wall came a huge shadow person. The shadow was as black as night, but all around it was a glowing white light. The glowing white light began to flash as I watched it. It flashed and lit up the whole room.
“Well?!” he tried again, and I turned my face back to him.
“Yes,” I lied, “Yes, they’re working.”
“You sure, now?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“No need for the cuckoo’s nest, then?”
“No! No no. No need.”
“Alright then. Ahahaha! Well! What is it that I can do for you today?”
“I need the stitches taken out,” I said, presenting my wrists to him. 
He looked at them for a moment and then wandered laboriously over to the sink to wash his hands. It took him a while to go anywhere, because hefting his own weight around was tiring, I suppose. He put on some gloves, and then came back and sat down. He grabbed hold of my wrists and turned them this way and that. Then he went back and rummaged around in his bag. He took out a pair of scissors, and came back over to me. He cut open the bandages. When they had fallen off, I looked at them on the floor. The dried blood had made an imprint. The imprint looked like a path, with a fence and some trees. It was almost pretty. 
He looked at my wrists again, turning them this way and that. I looked at them, too. The scars were long and ugly. They were red and puffy and strange. They made me look a little like Frankenstein’s monster. He looked up at me and said,
“How long you had these stitches in?”
“I don’t know. Since a week before I got back here.”
“That long, huh?”

“Yeah, that long.”
“You idiotic sumbitch.”
“What?”
“You let the skin grow over the stitches, that’s what. Now I’mma have to cut them suckers out.”
“Whatever. Just get them out.”
“Don’t you whatever me, boy, that is more work than I wanted to do this morning, I can tell you that much,” he sighed and went back to his bag. 
He brought it over and sat down in front of me. He started to cut into me, digging under the skin to pull the stitches out. I made a small intake of breath at the first installment of pain. But that is all it was, I assure you – a small intake of breath. Barely noticeable, and completely understandable. However, as soon as I had made the small intake sound, tiny as it was, Doc stopped what he was doing, and looked at me over his glasses, his eyes disdainful and admonishing.
“You gonna whimper like a baby throughout this entire process, son?” he said.
“I wasn’t whimpering,” I protested.
“You were whimpering, goddamnit, and I ain’t got the stomach for a grown man that whimpers.”
“I didn’t whimper!”
“I don’t care what you want to call it. It was appalling that a man should make such a noise. I’m embarrassed for you. I’m abashed to be sitting opposite you.”
“Fine! I won’t even breathe for the rest of this procedure, if it’ll make it go any faster,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Much obliged,” he said, bending back down over my wrists, and digging in deep. 
Any time I fidgeted in my seat, or cocked my head, or in fact did anything at all for the rest of the time that I was in there, his head would jerk up and his eyes would fix me with a stare that would silently intone, 
“You weren’t going to be acknowledging any pain, were you son? What kind of man does that? Women, son. Women acknowledge pain.”
That afternoon, I took myself out to my granddaddy’s grave, out in the cemetery past the highway. It was the sorriest looking cemetery that you could ever set foot it. No one cleaned it, no one trimmed the weeds, and no one dusted the dirt and grit and sand. Gravestones fell over and cracked, no one picked them up, no one repaired them. Some of them were really old, though, so it was pretty amazing to look at them. 
I liked it out there. I would lie on the ground with my face to the sky and pretend that I was dead. The blue expanse above seemed so huge, and the longer I lay there, the more I could convince myself of it. The buzzards that circled overhead – I imagined them picking me dry, until I was nothing but a grave-less pile of bones getting blown about by the wind, left untouched by human hand. I wanted to lie still enough for long enough, so that those birds would descend and eat me alive. Just eat me alive. I won’t struggle, I promise.
My granddaddy had the biggest gravestone in the whole cemetery. This was because it had to fit what he had written for it. He’d been a cowboy and a poet, and a manically depressed old fucker. My dad always said that I got the writing talent from my granddaddy. As I looked at his gravestone now, I read it out loud:

“Nothing stolen, nothing borrowed
Nothing joy’d and nothing sorrowed
Nothing given, nothing taken
Nothing promised nor forsaken
Nothing thought and nothing spoken
Nothing fixed and nothing broken
St Michael don’t you come for me,
I’ve done nothing worthwhile you see
After I die as the years wear on
Just leave me here in Babylon.”
I finished reading it out, and I started to laugh. I laughed really fucking hard. I took the pen and pad that I carried around with me out of my pocket, and I wrote my granddaddy a note from me. I wrote:
Now, there is more of my shadow than there is of me
The two no longer move in unison
Regret moves a little more slowly
I regret everything I’ve ever done
I want complete forgiveness
And a river baptism
To drink strychnine in a faith acquiesce
A remembrance of catechism

To burn my knees on the cold stone floor of the church.
I left behind each deed
Alone where they stood
Refused to look or pay heed
And they buried themselves like wood
Sending out roots beneath
Making my land rotten underneath.
My prairie is unstable now, it shakes all the time.
I have to go back
I have to unearth them all
I have to dig and collapse
Just like Saint Paul
To burn my knees on the hot dust of the desert floor.
I folded the paper up and left it there, in front of his gravestone. 
At work three days later, I was outside looking toward the mountain, and something caught my eye on the ground a little ways off from me. I walked slowly over to the black lump that lay there, and looked down at it. It was pretty gross. I turned and waved Dale over to me, and he approached, quizzically. He nudged the black lump with his shoe.
“What the fuck?” he asked.
“Steve,” I answered.
“I heard he was missing.”
“Like I said, Steve is dead.”
We left Steve there and went back to the lawn chairs.
After we closed up that night, I walked back over to Steve and picked up his lifeless carcass, loading it into my car. I drove it out to the cemetery and left it near my granddaddy’s gravestone. I left him there to be picked clean by the buzzards. After that I went driving around until I came across that church. The doors were wide open, but there was no one inside. 
I went in and wandered around. Three candles burned on the makeshift altar at the front. They burned beneath a cross and a painting of Jesus that looked like it had been cut out of a magazine. I heard something rustling behind the pulpit. I went back there and saw a cage with a large rattler coiling around inside. I stared at the rattler. I heard someone walking towards me and as I looked up, I saw the stranger from the witchdoctor’s house. He sat down on one of the folding chairs facing the pulpit and crossed his legs, fixing me with a strange look.
“Are you going to handle that serpent?” he asked me.
“No,” I said, coming out from behind the pulpit and sitting down opposite him.
“Why not? Don’t you think the Holy Spirit will protect you?” he said, leaning forward and grabbing me by the wrists. 
I didn’t pull away from him. 
“They say all you have to do is repent,” he said.
“I regret everything I’ve ever done.” I replied.
“Regret and repent are two different things,” he said, tightening his grip on my wrists. 
I still didn’t pull away. 
“Do you repent? Are you sorry?” he asked.
“No. I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all.”
After I spoke, he released my wrists and settled back in his chair, smiling. 
“I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t handle that serpent if I were you. Although, between you and the serpent, I wonder which one of you is the more venomous?”
The next thing I remember is walking toward the glass doors of the diner. Keeping my composure, I went through the doors and sat down at the counter. I wrapped my jacket around me and ordered coffee and eggs. I saw a poster behind the counter. It was a “Missing Dog” poster for Steve. But the dog in the picture wasn’t the same dog whose body I had taken to the cemetery. I pointed at the picture and asked Zeke,
“Is that Steve?”
“Yeah. I’mma take it down now, though.”
“Why?”
“Steve came home to Susan yesterday. She said he just came wandering into the kitchen, like nothing had happened at all.”
“Steve’s alive?”
“Yep.”
“Well, shit. Which dog did I take out to the cemetery tonight, then?”
“Y’all took a dog out to the cemetery?”
“Yeah, a big black dog. Been dead a few days it looked like.”
“I don’t know. Can’t think of any big black dog from round here.”
“Ah well. The buzzards will take care of him now,” I said, sipping my coffee. 
I stared at my eggs until they went cold, and then I drove home, thinking about a big black dead dog that nobody gave a shit about. It seemed appropriate somehow.
I remember a day, when I was twelve years old, when I came home from school and finally realized that there was nobody else at home. There had been nobody else at home for a while, but it had failed to really sink in until that day. Everything else that followed on from that day had inevitably led me to where I was. Here, in Babylon, in my parents’ old place, which was falling apart around me.
When I had first moved back in there, it’d been fine. But the longer I was there, the more things started to go wrong. There was the mess, and the excessive accumulation of dust, of course. Now add some broken water pipes, a leaking ceiling, a busted washer/dryer, and a shattered shower head. We’d also been having sandstorms, and the dust and dirt had been seeping into the house through every possible crack. It lay scattered on the floor and it covered counter tops. It ended up in my bed. Some of the storms were so bad and it got so dark that they switched on the street lights on Main Street in the middle of the afternoon. It was all over the inside of my work space. Dale and I would get bored sometimes and cover ourselves in it, running around outside in the strange gloom, looking like limestone ghosts, like dead angry frontiersmen looking for the stolen Aztec gold they’d hidden in the mountains of what used to be Mexico.
Betty came in to buy her smokes and soda, and she fixed me with a big grin and said,
“What the hell happened to you?”
“Been out in the dust,” I replied, shaking out some dust from my hair onto the counter in front of me, “I guess you don’t want to sit outside and look at the stars tonight, Betty.”
“No.”
“No. Because you can’t see shit out there. So I guess you’re going to have to take your soda and smokes home.”  
She turned and looked behind her, at the lawn chairs that I had brought inside. She turned back to face me and asked,
“Can’t I just sit there instead?”
“If you like,” I said slowly, a little perplexed at her suddenly sad mien. 
I watched her go over and sit down on one of the chairs, looking out of the glass door that rattled in the wind.
Dale had taken off early to go home and get drunk. Some days were just too much for him, although nothing in particular would seem to separate the days that were alright from the days that were too much for him. All our days were pretty much the same, and yet only some of them left him in need of dulling his senses. I guess some days it is just hard to be. It’s just hard to fucking be at all.
This had been one of those days for Dale and he had closed the garage early and gone home to get wasted. When it was time to close the station, I did everything that I needed to do and turned out the lights before going over to Betty and sitting down in the chair next to her, in the dark.
“Why don’t you want to go home, Betty?” I asked her. 
“Daniel, do you think I’m pretty?”
“No, Betty, you’re not pretty.”
“I’m not, am I?”
“No. Are you depressed because you’re ugly?”
“Not really…”
“Because if you are, I understand. I mean, the world runs on beauty. Our basest instincts are driven by it, and yet so are our highest endeavors. So, if you’re depressed about that, I know how you feel.”
“You’re not ugly.”
“I’m not ugly, but I’m crazy, and nobody likes that either. For the same reasons. Bad genes and all.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But I’m used to being ugly. That’s not why I don’t want to go home,” she said as I stood up. 
She followed my cue, and I held the door open for her. I locked up and then turned to see her displeasing frame silhouetted against the mountain in the night.
“You wanna come home with me?” she asked.
“Yeah, alright,” I answered. 
As I drove Betty home, she watched the land roll by the car window in silence for a while, before asking me,
“Is it true that they got a drive-in theater in Hermon now?”
“Yeah, they do.”
“You been there?”
“What, Hermon?”
“I know you been to Hermon, dipshit. I meant the theater.”
“Nope.”
“Oh. I always wanted to go to a drive-in,” she said as we pulled into her driveway. 
 When we got to her porch, she put her key in the front door and turned it. Before pushing the door open, she looked at me and her expression was pained.
“What is it?” I asked, “Why don’t you want to go inside?”
“Well,” she sighed, “I guess you’ll get the picture.” 
When she pushed the door open, I really did get the picture. It was utter chaos in there. There was stuff everywhere, clutter piled almost to the ceiling. It looked like Betty had been hording everything she came across for a very long time. Small pathways had been worn into the debris. One pathway to the bathroom, one to the kitchen, one to the bedroom. But they were barely traversable. 
It smelled of unhappy ugly old lady in there. Her head hung low next to me. I looked at her and then walked inside. She followed me in and offered me a glass of water. I accepted and then she told me that she wanted to sit out on the porch instead. 
We went outside and sat on the melancholy and under-stuffed couch that graced her porch. I pulled my knees up to my chin, smoking a cigarette and looking at nothing in particular. Finally, I said,
“When was the last time you threw something away?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really remember. It feels like it has taken over my whole life now, you know? Like, the inside of my house is a reflection of the inside of me. And it’s a goddamn mess.”
“I want you to give me something.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t care what it is. I just want you to go inside and grab the first thing you see and come back out here and give it to me. To keep. And you can never have it back.”
She got up and went inside for a moment and then came back out holding a small rubber dinosaur.
“I found this out by the cemetery,” she said. 
She held it out to me, but as I went to take it, she didn’t let go straight away. We had ourselves a little tug of war, before I said,
“Give it to me. Now.”
She let go, and I put the rubber dinosaur in my pocket.
“What are you going to do with it?” she asked miserably.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t mean jack shit to me.”
When I got home, I lay down on the bed in all of my clothes. The shadows raced each other across the room. My skin crawled as I closed my eyes. I gripped the rubber dinosaur tightly in my hand as the voices came closer, as the breath caressed my ear, as my chest felt heavy and my legs grew weak,
“Daniel…Daniel…Daniel…”
A few hours later, I awoke to my dark room illuminated by vivid flashes of light. An unholy thunder rolled outside, and I got up and crossed the floor, over to the window. The night was black as oil, and the barren landscape lit up starkly every time the lightning flashed, the mountain visible in powerful strobes, the desolation coming alive with restless energy, with electrified power, the rumble of the hooves of El Muerto’s horse indistinguishable from the thunder, that ghostly steed and its headless rider, and the ghosts of every goddamn outlaw that ever traversed this wretched terrain, every murderous deadbeat buried on unconsecrated ground in the desert now roaming with the flashes, I watched them all discursive in the storm. As the power grew and built, and the night became charged to an almost unbearable degree, as the whole sky appeared to catch fire and burn before me – I watched the ghosts and their frenzied procession and I asked them,
“Do you repent? Are you sorry?”
And I knew that every single one of those sanguinary sons of bitches would give the same answer that I had,
“No. I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all.”
The morning was quiet and proffered a feeling of slight expectation after the tumultuous night before, as if the very sky were holding its breath. I went out on the porch with my cup of coffee and found a letter there addressed to me. It had been hand delivered, and was written in very neat and careful handwriting. I opened the mauve envelope and unfolded the letter inside. It was slightly scented with lavender. It was from Mrs. Cole up on Cole Farm. 
She wrote that she and her husband, Mr. Cole (his name specified in case I was too inherently fucking stupid to remember), would be mighty honored if I would come on over for dinner that night. I was to excuse the tardiness of this invitation because Mr. and Mrs. Cole had been over in Corpus Christi on vacation, and had only just come back and heard of my return. There was no way to RSVP the invitation, which was pretty typical of Mrs. Cole. She never allowed anyone the option of not accepting her invitations, confident that anyone would drop anything they were doing and head over to Cole Farm on a moment’s notice. This had always irked me considerably, but it wasn’t like I had anything better to do that night, so I made up my mind to attend. I would drive down there after work.
Dale looked at me as we sat on our lawn chairs in the mid-afternoon heat. 
“You ever think about your death bed?” he asked me.
“Who says you’re gonna die in bed?” I answered.
“You know what I mean,” he said irritably.
“Yeah.”
“I was thinking about it last night, in all the thunder,” he continued, pausing to spit tobacco juice on the ground, “and it occurred to me, like, if I died tomorrow, I’d have nothing to look back on. Which was kind of depressing, so I cast my mind forward – like, say I die when I’m eighty years old? And the worst thing about it was that I still can’t see as I’d have anything to look back on.”
“So?” I sighed, “That doesn’t make you special. 99% of the human race will have to meet their maker and say, ‘Well, I wasted all the goddamn time I had down there doing nothing of consequence. Nothing I did mattered one fucking bit. In a couple of years, no one will even remember that I was there.’”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No.”
“Why not? It should.”
“Why would it bother me? I don’t place much value on it. It’s a tired old thought process and I’m past giving a shit about it. In fact, I’m kind of embarrassed to be having this conversation at all. But, you’re my buddy, so if your meaningless existence really bothers you, I’ll do you a favor and kill you. You just say the word.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“Sure would.”
“Well ain’t you just the best friend in the world.”
“Better friend than you. Where were you when I tried to kill myself? Three times I tried, and no one fucking helped me.”
“Sorry ‘bout that, Daniel. But the first two times you tried it, I wasn’t expecting it, and the last time, you were in California. If you wanted to die, you should have just come on home to Babylon right then.”
“’I will bring him to Babylon…yet shall he not see it, though he will die there,’” I remembered.
“Amen, brother. Amen.”
After work, I drove out to Cole Farm with mixed feelings. The sun was setting, and the desert earth turned red, as though the blood of every bastard scalped, stabbed, shot, hung, dismembered and beheaded around here were seeping up to the surface demanding to be avenged. That’s what sunset was to me, in Babylon. Blood and ire.
Cole Farm was the largest ranch in the whole county. When we were kids, it had figured heavily in our lives. It was the only place that the local ranch hands could find work. It was the home of Mrs. Cole, who had been our English teacher, and Mr. Cole, who used to hold sleepover camp nights for the local kids. 
It had also been home to so many legends and stories that it was hard to keep up with them. It contained the land on which the mystery Babylon lights danced, and it had sightings of everything from skinwalkers to El Muerto, to UFOs. Ghostly women roamed the area looking to seduce and kill lonely cowboys, and long forgotten outlaw battles replayed themselves over and over again for those stunned to see.
As I said, I had mixed feelings in relation to Cole Farm. While Mrs. Cole had been the first person to encourage my literary aspirations, she was also the main cause of my first incarceration in the nuthouse. Thus, my initial thoughts upon hearing her name mentioned were,
“That old fucking bitch.”
Or
“That conniving old fucking bitch.”
Or
“That wretched, manipulative, conniving, old fucking bitch.”
On the other hand, she had compared me to Hemingway, and baked me cookies and had generally given care as to what was to become of me when my own immediate family had dispersed and disappeared and couldn’t have given a shit about anything to do with me.
Twilight stretched itself languidly across the sky as I parked in the courtyard outside the main ranch house. I got out of my car and walked up to the front door, ringing the bell with one hand and clutching the mauve, lavender-scented envelope in the other, brandishing it in a desperate effort to justify my arrival, as if they would have forgotten their invitation and would resent my disheveled appearance at their door. 
Mr. Cole answered the door, his imposing presence jolting me back in time a decade. He outdid my 6’1 by standing at a towering 6’7. He had broad shoulders, a shock of white hair covered by a ten gallon hat, crisp shirt, jeans, boots, and eyes as sharp as diamonds beneath heavy brows. He was muscular, curmudgeonly and Doc Holliday’s closest friend.
“Daniel,” he greeted me sternly, “You better come on in. Mrs. Cole been cooking up a storm all day.” 
He stepped aside to let me in, then closed and locked the door behind me. I stood awkwardly in the entrance hall, still holding that mauve envelope.  I could smell apples being baked and I could hear the familiar sounds of Mrs. Cole singing while she bustled around her kitchen. They weren’t endearing noises, in fact they bordered on irritating. 
“Well, go on in and sit down, son. Or did you want to stand here in the entrance hall drooling like a jackass all night?” Mr. Cole said, motioning me into the living room where I sat down in an enormous armchair that only served to reinforce the notion that I had regressed 10 years or so.

I sat there in silence, unable to do anything except stare at that damn envelope, still gripped like a rosary. Mr. Cole came and sat opposite me, snatching the envelope out of my hand with a withering look and a sigh, and depositing it in the garbage can.
“You want a whiskey?” he asked me.
“No…” I started to say, but just then Mrs. Cole came bursting through the doors leading to the kitchen. 
While Mr. Cole towered above almost everyone, Mrs. Cole was the shortest woman I had ever seen. She couldn’t have stood more than 4’5. She came rushing over to me and I stood to be polite. She reached up to cup my face with her wrinkled hands, and I had to stoop a little to let her.
“My darlin’ boy! What have you brought me?” she exclaimed, with a crinkly-eyed smile. 
Out of my back pocket I took the notebook that contained everything I had written since I had been back. I knew she’d want it. Her eyes lit up as she held it in her hands and said, 
“Oh! I just knew you’d bring me something!”
Yeah well, you’d better not use it to get me locked up again, you wretched, manipulative, conniving, old fucking bitch, I said in my head, wondering if my eyes betrayed me. Still, I’d brought it for her because I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to compare me to Hemingway again, to make me remember the kid I had been, the clever one with all the potential, and to forget the man I had become: sad, crazy, and done for.
At the dining table, Mr. Cole again offered me a whiskey, which I again turned down. Mrs. Cole gave me an orange juice, which inspired such disgust in Mr. Cole that, as I took my first sip, he was moved to shake his head and mutter,

“For a grown man?”
Dinner passed in a haze of regurgitated memories and anecdotes, and a series of cold hard stares from Mr. Cole to my glass of orange juice.
We talked of the camp-outs that Mr. Cole had hosted for us kids. We used to play pranks on him at first, like filling his boots with beans and stuffing his pillowcase with rocks. He never said one thing about it. One night, though, when he’d had more than he could stand of it, he came to the camp fire with a sack slung over his shoulder. He told us all to sit in a circle and as we were thusly arranged, he emptied the sack into the middle of the circle. Out came a big rattlesnake. Kids went running and screaming in every direction, except for me. I couldn’t bring myself to move, instead finding myself staring transfixed at the rattler. It coiled itself to strike me, but as it opened its mouth, I saw that it had no fangs. I looked from the snake to Mr. Cole. That son of a bitch had just defanged a rattler, but all he did was look at me and nod once in silence. We didn’t play any more pranks on him after that.
What we didn’t talk about, over the heavy potatoes and cloying apple pie, was when I had handed Mrs. Cole one of my notebooks when I was in high school, only to wake up the next morning with Doc Holliday and an orderly in my bedroom, coming to haul me off to the nuthouse, at the behest of my very concerned English teacher.
I had been taken to the mental institution over in Hermon, locked up and very angry. My days there were blurred and unreal. The one thing that I could hold onto was that every morning a nurse would come and wake me up at 8 o’clock sharp. She would wake me up and she would medicate me, and then she would go away. She became the cog around which the wheel of my days would spin, strange and off-kilter. I began to rely so heavily on this brisk and plain woman’s indifferent care of me in the morning that she became the first and only woman that I have ever been in love with. I proceeded to write her epic love letters, which she promptly turned over to the psychiatrist in charge, who in turn extended my stay because of them. I thought myself to be a fledgling Lord Byron – misogynistic and betrayed, but unable to stop loving that Jezebel in comfortable shoes.
After dinner, as Mrs. Cole gathered the plates and shut herself away in the kitchen to do the cleaning up, Mr. Cole motioned for me to follow him outside. As soon as we had stepped out into the courtyard, he realized that he had forgotten his pipe and he went back inside to get it, leaving me there alone. I lit a cigarette and looked up at the motion-sensor floodlights. I watched as fat-bodied moths as big as my hands battered and burned themselves to death in a desperate bid for the light. As they fell to their doom, they were immediately replaced by two or three more, questing for a bright but deadly embrace.
Mr. Cole came back out, and we walked out over his land for a ways. As the floodlights switched off automatically, the night immediately closed around us with all of its density, and the land became raw and wild under the light of the swollen Texas moon. We stood smoking in silence for a while. My eyes adjusted themselves to the light, and I began to pick out black shapes dotting the land directly in front of us, erratically placed, but still seemingly grouped together.
“What the hell are those?” I asked, pointing ahead with my cigarette.
“Them’s some dead crows,” Mr. Cole said, his pipe wedged firmly in the corner of his mouth, “Damn near sixty of ‘em.”
“Did you kill them all? I asked, surprised.
“Nope. They just dropped dead as they flew overhead. All of ‘em. At once. It was raining dead crow out here.”
“How could they all just drop dead? What the hell killed them?”
“I ain’t got the first idea, son. Boys from the county come out here and took one of ‘em back for testing. They ruled out any kind of disease. Beyond that, they got no idea either. Damn things just dropped dead.”

I looked at the carcasses, able now to make out the twisted bodies spreading out before me. I felt very uncomfortable.
“You can’t just leave them out there,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I aim to do,” he replied, blowing out a plume of smoke, “I’mma let nature take care of its own. I’ll come clean with you: I’m too spooked to go near ‘em.” 
“For a grown man?” I said, to which he cracked his first smile of the whole evening. 
He walked off towards the house and the floodlights, but I stayed out there a little longer. Just me and damn near sixty dead crows.
When I got home, I found myself walking around the house just looking at it. I realized that I hadn’t done that since I’d moved back in. I’d been there sleeping, sitting up, smoking, reading, drinking coffee but not looking at it. I noticed that I needed to add an ominously sagging crack in the living room ceiling to the list of repairs that were piling up around me. I thought about what Betty had said about her house reflecting her mind.
“It really is a goddamn mess,” I said to myself, standing alone in the middle of the kitchen. 
Moving into my room, I looked at the mantelpiece. I saw that there were pictures in frames perched there, dusty and faded looking. I hadn’t looked at these since I’d been back. My mom used to have a habit of keeping every photograph ever taken by anyone in her general vicinity. She used to have two huge bags filled with photographs. They were so full that they were almost impossible to pick up. When I was little, I’d dragged those heavy bags into the middle of the floor and pored over them for hours at a time. 

I’d stared hard at photographs of my granddaddy, his eyes so strong and strange in the sepia. I’d looked at the faces of my parents when they were young, at the odd expressions of my stern Grandmothers. If I had to take a stab at guessing why, I would say that I’d been looking for myself somewhere in all of that. I didn’t know who I was and I didn’t even know where to begin looking. It was as if I didn’t really exist, like I wasn’t there at all. It was a feeling that followed me my whole life long – that when people looked at me, they were looking right through me, they were looking at a mirror, they were looking at a blank canvas which they could paint any way they wanted and that stain would be on me forever. But no one had ever seen me. Not my parents, not my brother, not my friends, not any girl I’d ever been with, not one person who had ever looked at me had actually seen me. It was inhuman and maddening. I was a transparent man, or a reflective man, like some sad sack of shit character from a children’s story that was meant to teach love and acceptance but only taught the crappy way of the world.
I picked up the dusty frames one by one and looked at them. There was a picture of my parents in their twenties, on holiday on the Gulf Coast. Then there was a picture of my brother and I as kids. We looked miserable; a couple of miserable kids holding cotton candy in the sunshine. He was happy now, my brother. He was happy, and he deserved it. I looked at my own miserable kid face; I didn’t know what I deserved. Unrepentant and angry, I didn’t know what I deserved. Maybe my lousy life was exactly what I deserved. I didn’t lament my lack of meaning, like Dale and his tired old existential angst. No, that wasn’t it. This is what it was: the face that looked at me from these photographs was the same face that wanted Mrs. Cole to affirm its genius. It was just the insistent refrain of wasted potential; it was that I never became any of the things that I had thought I could be back then. Instead here I was looking at this sad-faced kid feeling kind of ashamed of myself, I think. 

How many kids grow into the adults that they want to be? Did anybody? Who were these people who didn’t fuck themselves over, because I sure didn’t know any of them. That night was anything but tender but the morning that followed was infinitely more terrible, for I watched it creep in without any feeling left at all.
Two days later, I stood outside at work, surveying the landscape. I surveyed the landscape daily, scouring it with a critical eye, though I’m not sure what I was looking for, seeing as it was the kind of landscape that hadn’t changed for thousands of years. Just dirt, dust and mountain. The side effects of the meds I was on were rearing their collective head again, and I twitched in the sun, grinding my teeth and trying hard to swallow the soda I was drinking. 
I turned and looked into the garage where Dale was still working on that same goddamn car. It was the same car and it had been the same car for so long that it had, to me, become a symbolic car, a flag of his ineptitude and apathy, an ownerless vehicle that existed only to have Dale fail to fix it daily. I looked away and down at my boots. I zoned out for a couple of hours, ending up at the diner that evening with Ethan without any real idea of how I’d gotten there.
After four cups of coffee, we went and stood outside. Ethan was tugging at his shirt collar and the waistband of his jeans distractedly, the discomfort of having been fully clothed for over nine hours becoming too much for him. He worked over at the town hall as a maintenance man. He put in his 8 hour day, clothed and normal seeming, and then he would get in his car and start to undress even as he drove, often being completely naked by the time he reached the safety of his driveway. Today he’d had to remain clothed well past his norm, on account of us sitting in the diner for a while, and it was making him jittery. I’d been thinking about something for the past couple of days, and I chose to bring it up with him then.

“Ethan, I need your van,” I said.
Ethan looked at my car, parked nearby, and then looked back at me.
“What you need my van for? Is your piece of shit busted?”
“No, my piece of shit is fine. I just need your van.”
“Why?” he asked, suspicion coloring his face now.   
“Because it’s bigger than my piece of shit.”
“What you need the room for? A dead body?” he said, giggling.
“Yeah,” I replied, “Sixty of them.”
“What!?” he exclaimed in shock, and then as realization dawned in his expression and he continued, “Oh hell no. I know what you’re thinking there man, and there ain’t no way that you’re gonna fill my van up with sixty fucking dead crows from Cole Farm.”
“Why not?” I asked, 
“Why not!? Shit, Daniel.”
“Man, you have a dead chicken nailed to your front door.”
“It’s not the same thing. Shit. Sheeeeiiiiiit,” he looked sad as he sighed out the last part. 
His eyes searched my face, and all he could do was look sad. I broke eye contact and looked down at my boots. I started to feel myself zoning out again, but I was dragged back to awareness by the sound of someone hollering from up at the top of the street. The hollering came closer and closer until there before us was the sight of a big, hairy ranch hand running past us wearing a crown of flowers and an old grandma-type floral gown. His feet were still clad in boots and he ran grinning like an idiot, yelping at the top of his lungs.
“Is it that time of year already?” Ethan said, staring at the man as he passed us.
“Yep,” I replied, “Little Miss Babylon.”
For as long as I’d been alive, the specter of Little Miss Babylon had crept up on the townspeople waiting to strike fear and loathing into their hearts with the sight of some motherfucker in his grandma’s dress running through the streets in a victory lap. No one knew where or when the tradition had started, but every year, the local ranch hands went out to the desert, got all hopped up on whiskey and meth, and held themselves a beauty pageant. 
This beauty pageant was open to men only, and consisted of all of them dressing up in drag and singing, dancing and parading around until one man was crowned the winner, always the most hirsute, the dirtiest, the ugliest son of a bitch of the bunch. That winner would then go back to town and run through the streets hooting and hollering until he had been down every street. Ethan and I, at the tender age of twelve, had taken peyote and had decided that it would be fun to go out there after them and watch the proceedings. In the state we were in, and perhaps in any state that one could possibly be in, the whole thing was so horrifying that I was glad I didn’t remember most of it. If Ethan remembered more than me, he wasn’t owning up to it.
“You know, when I drove out of here seven years ago, my last thought as I got on the freeway was that I was looking forward to never seeing Little Miss Babylon again,” I said, “And now that I have seen it again…”
“It’s even fucking worse than you remember,” Ethan said, shaking his head.
“Yeah.”

On my way home, I drove past the gas station and saw Betty sitting in the back of her pickup which was parked outside it. She was looking up at the sky and drinking a soda, smoking a cigarette. I pulled in beside her truck and rolled down my window. I didn’t say anything, but she looked down at me and smiled. 
“I’ve seen three UFOs tonight,” she said happily.
“Did they abduct you?”
“No, but I wish they would. I see them out here almost every night. I wonder why they don’t.”
“Probably because you’re all covered in ugly,” I replied.
She laughed and said,
“You ever been abducted, Daniel?”
“Nope,” 
“Probably because you’re crazier than an outhouse rat.”
“Yeah, I reckon aliens don’t want any bad genes either.”
“Well, they don’t have to take my DNA, damnit. Why won’t they just take me for a ride?”
“How about you take me for a ride?” I asked her, suddenly noticing the amount of room in the back of her pickup truck.
“In my truck? What’s wrong with your car?”
“They won’t fit in my car.”
“Who won’t fit in your car?”
“Damn near sixty dead crows.”
“From up on Cole Farm?”
“Yeah.”
“Where you aiming to take them?”
“The cemetery.”
“Leaving that big black dead dog decomposing on your granddaddydy’s grave isn’t enough for you?”
“No, it’s not enough.”
“You gotta bring him damn near sixty dead crows too?”
“Yeah.”
“It really means something to you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if it means so much to you, you can use my truck,” she said finally, jumping down from the truck bed. 
I got out of my car, rolled up the window and locked the doors. I got into the driver side of her truck and started the engine with the keys that hung from the ignition. She looked at me through the passenger side window. I leaned over and rolled down the window, cocking my head in curiosity as I looked back at her. She fidgeted on the spot, looked around and then fixed me with a strange stare.
“Can I come with you?” she asked me.
“Get in,” I answered.
Clouds were covering the light of the moon intermittently, so Betty got a couple of flashlights out of the glove compartment and handed me one. She looked at the corpses lying scattered around and took in a sharp breath before saying,
“I guess we should get started. I’m thinking that it might take a while,” and with that she strode off and started to pick up feathered carcasses, dropping them in the back of the pick-up. 
I hadn’t expected her to actually help me pick them up. I stood surprised for a moment.  Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I looked to my left. I heard a buzzing in my ears, that specific buzzing, and as I watched the shadows coalesced into a man, that man, the stranger, the watcher from the witchdoctor’s house. 
He was kneeling shirtless in the dirt, his back to me. The buzzing in my head swelled steadily, and as I looked at his back he contorted and writhed, two small nubs breaking their way through his skin. These nubs twisted and grew outward, blood running down his back. They twisted and grew outward until they were two giant black feathered wings. As the wings spread in a final majestic manner and the blood pooled in the dirt under him, he let out a huge cry, that roar, that infinite sound that haunted me day and night. I felt faint and I passed out right there. 
I woke up to Betty bending over me with her flashlight, shaking me. I sat up and looked around.
“Did you see him?” I asked her.
“Who?”
“Him, did you see him?”
“I ain’t seen no one but you. Now are you gonna lay around all night, or are you gonna help me with these damn birds of yours?”
I stood up and, shakily at first but growing more comfortable, loaded the corpses in the back of the van. She’d been right; it did end up taking a while. It took a real long while before we finally finished loading them. We drove off into the night, towards the cemetery. There was a George Jones cassette in her tape player. It seemed a totally appropriate choice of soundtrack for this mad man’s mission I had dragged her on. 
When we got to the cemetery, I backed the truck up as close as I could to the grave and we got out. It took another real protracted amount of time to unload all those birds. We put them near the rotting body of the dog. They were piled up like some strange tribute pyre. When we had finished and we were walking back to the truck, it hit me suddenly what a goddamn weird thing I had just spent my evening doing. It freaked me out badly, the birds, the vision of the watcher and his wings; I was feeling very much as though I would disappear into an abyss of nonsensical insanity right then and there. 
I looked at Betty, my eyes panicked. She looked back at me and shook her head. Then she started to laugh. She laughed so long and hard that I broke down in a fit of giggles too. We fell onto the dirt laughing. I drove her back home and I went inside with her. She lay down on her couch, after we had located the couch beneath a bunch of trash accumulating there. I sat on the floor in front of the couch. I picked up the first thing I found on the floor. It was a snow globe with a picture of New York City in it. I held it up to her and said,
“Give it to me?”
“OK. You can have it,” she said sleepily and her eyes closed. 
I watched her for a little before saying,
“Betty? I’ll take your truck to work tomorrow and clean it out for you.”
“Mmmhhhm…” she hummed, half-gone.
I played with the snow globe for a while before I took it home with me and put it on my mantelpiece, next to the rubber dinosaur and my kid photograph, eating cotton candy miserably in the sunshine.
The farcical nature of all human interaction, the sheer dishonesty of it, the seemingly necessary manipulation and the glaringly evident petty self-serving origin of it left me feeling so utterly disappointed that I shrank away from it as much as possible. I hadn’t always been like that. I had tried to reach out a few times, especially when I was younger. But, when you are drowning in your own insanity, no one was going to give you their hand. They become fearful – maybe fearful of what insanity represents, of what it could mean, of the possibility that it could be contagious, of the fact that it would require them to be uncomfortable, hurt or harmed in some way. 
It is in this way that you realize that fear is far stronger than love, that it will overcome love and then you feel that because of this, love must mean nothing worthwhile. What “I love you,” really meant was “I love how you make me feel when you make me feel happy.”  If you scare them, however, that love will crumble in the presence of fear, and they will watch you drown and then blame and resent you for being in need. And so love came to mean nothing to me, and the only time that I felt alive was when I was thinking about dying. I thought about it all the time, to the exclusion of everything else. 
I thought about that 24 year-old girl in Japan who threw herself into a volcano in the 1930s, and the estimated 940 people who followed her lead until they had to close public access to the mountain two years later. I thought about Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon as a form of protest, and the two protestors who followed his lead and set themselves on fire in Korea in 1987. I thought about the corpses that were found which had been cut, shot, poisoned and hanged because the person, having failed to die using one method, just kept fucking trying until it worked. I thought about the old man in Australia who had built a suicide machine using plans he’d found on the internet so that he could kill himself on his front lawn to avoid being shut up in a nursing home by his family. I thought about all the shoes and bags and briefcases that they found on the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge, tokens of people who had thrown themselves in but will never be acknowledged because they only count the bodies that wash up. I thought about all the people who were currently eating pills, blowing their brains out and breaking their own necks in acts of ultimate desperation. 

I thought about all of it, I thought about it from every possible angle, every single perspective. I absorbed it, I became it, I mythologized it and then I subverted and destroyed it.
 But my own suicides were not like these. My own suicides were not poignant acts of desperation. Mine came from a place much colder, much darker, far emptier and completely bereft of feeling. I simply wanted to die because I didn’t have the heart to live and I suspect that I never did. This was not a human way to feel, thus I felt transparent and phantasmal. Thus I felt that no one could see me, that I was a ghost roaming the desert, the walking dead who just wanted to finish the job. 
To get up every day and go through everything that you have to go through in order to live your life, there has to be inside of you a spark, an energy, a determination to just be. I could see it in everyone around me – they were fighting to be, sweating, toiling, trying and rejoicing, each of them, to just be. Their eyes burned with it and it in turn warmed those who felt likewise. 
In my own eyes, however, what I saw was a putrefaction of that will. A perversion of the will to live into the will to die, by way of a freezing cold disdain for life’s stupid goddamn spectacle. I could be given to think, if I indulged in a little hyperbole, that there was something quite evil in that, in me. But I couldn’t repent, I couldn’t be sorry; I couldn’t stand to be at all.

Part Two: Perpetual Desolations

Wild fires were burning one county over from Babylon. We heard tell of thousands of acres ablaze as fire-fighters desperately dug up the ground and cut down the brush that was fuelling it. I begged the heavy winds that were carrying it to bring it our way. I wanted to see the land in flames, scorched and seared under the punishing sun, lighting up the night under the incurious moon. I closed my eyes and called it to me. If like attracts like, then the destruction would come for me. I just had to wait.
When I arrived at work on a Thursday, Dale was looking stressed.
“Big Joe is coming in today,” he said tautly.
Big Joe was our boss at the gas station. He owned a few of them, dotted around, among other things. He was an Apache, a behemoth of a man. Like Mr. Cole, he stood at around 6’7 and his shoulders were so broad they seemed to block out the sky. He never came in, except when something was bothering him.
“I bet he’s coming down here because he hates you,” Dale continued.
“He doesn’t hate me,” I lied.
“He sure does.”
It was true, he did hate me, so it was weird that he’d hired me at all.
“Nah.”
“He told me that the devil walks with you.”
“That’s a stupid thing to say.”
“He said it, not me.”
“Maybe he’s coming down here because of that goddamn car you can’t fix,” I sighed.
“Ahhh, Sheeeeeiiiit.”
Dale hurried off towards the garage to fail to fix the symbolic car yet again, and I watched the windows for the arrival of Big Joe. 

When I was born, I was premature and very sick. For seven months, the doctors told my family that I was going to die. My granddaddy got sick of sitting there waiting for me to die, and he decided to do something about it. He took me to see Miguel, the witchdoctor. Miguel had covered me in symbols drawn in warm blood. He’d rubbed the blood on my lips, looked up at my granddaddy and said,
“He’s promised to Lucifer now.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn who he’s promised to, as long as he’ll live,” granddaddy had said.
“He’ll live, he’ll live.”
My parents never knew about it. Granddaddy only told me when I was a little older, and he swore me to secrecy. I hung out with Miguel at his house every chance I got. He was always nice to me, and it was my little secret to hang out there with him. He taught me to sit in front of a mirror with a candle and call to the devil. He taught me to sing the Hymn of Lucifer:
He is the king of Hell
He has two heads
One is the king of hell
He has two heads...
I was trying to remember the rest of the song, when I saw Big Joe heading my way. I hadn’t been looking forward to it when I’d thought it was going to be just Big Joe, so you can imagine my chagrin when I witnessed coming towards me, not just Big Joe, but Doc Holliday in tow. Shit. What was that old fucker doing here? Shit. They came in the door, and Joe stood looking at me as though he really could see Satan standing at my left shoulder. Doc came forward and leaned on the counter in front of me.
“How’s them pills working for you, son?” he asked.
“You come all the way down here to ask me that?” I snapped back at him.
“Well, you see, I was fixing to spend a nice morning doing nothing of consequence at all. But then I hear tell of you, you sumbitch, creeping out to Cole Farm and stealing sixty goddamn dead birds. Now, I hear this news and I get a little vexed. I’m sure you can understand why. It ain’t natural for a man to be creeping around at night stealing dead birds.”
“Who told you that?” I asked nonchalantly.
“Mrs. Cole done told me.”
That wretched, manipulative, conniving, old fucking bitch, I thought to myself, and this time I knew that my eyes betrayed me.
“I didn’t steal them,” I said, “they weren’t anybody’s to steal. Just because they dropped dead on Cole Farm, it doesn’t make them Cole Farm property.”
“I’m even more vexed, son, that you appear to have missed the point here. The point ain’t whose goddamn birds they were, the point is that you were out there at weird hours of the night collecting animal corpses. I can’t tell you just how uncomfortable that makes me.”
I didn’t have a defense for this. There was no way to explain it rationally. I gave up a little in the face of his ruddy sanity.
“The pills are working fine, Doc. I took the birds to the cemetery. I don’t know why.” 
I looked over the Doc’s shoulder at Big Joe who was shaking his head. He turned and left.

“I’m keeping my beady goddamn eye on you, Daniel, and if you need to go back to the mad house, then that’s where you’re gonna go,” and with that he walked out after Big Joe. 
I exhaled heavily. Oh no. I’m not going back there, you fat ugly son of a bitch. Just you try it.
Three and a half hours later, I was on my fifth cup of shitty coffee, sitting outside on my lawn chair and staring at nothing in particular. Ethan pulled up in his van and got out, adjusting his jeans awkwardly and coming over to sit next to me.
“Where’s Dale at?” he asked me spiritlessly.
“Being a defeated, deficient and defective mechanic,” I answered with equal lassitude.
“He ain’t fixed that car yet?”
“Nope.”
“Sheeeeiiit.”
“Yep.”
“I think we need to get the fuck out of Babylon. The three of us. We should just get in my van and go down to the Gulf Coast. We should go to Galilee.”
“We can’t go to Galilee. If both Dale and I go, who the fuck is going to mind this piece of shit?” I said, motioning in an expansive manner in order to take in the entire gas station.
“Let me figure something out. I’ll figure it out,” he said, and with that he got up and walked towards the garage. 
I sat very still in the heavy heat. Five minutes passed and then Ethan came out of the garage and got into his truck and left. His gait had appeared purposeful, so I assumed he’d gotten Dale’s assent to the planned vacation. It started me thinking about the sea, and how far it seemed from this unending, unfailing, uninterrupted sabulous scenery. 
After work, the plan was to drive to Betty’s place, pick her up in her cleaned out truck, then drive us both back to the gas station so that I could get my car. But as I pulled us back out of her driveway, instead of heading straight to the gas station, I went in the opposite direction. She turned and looked at me quizzically.
“You been sinning there lately, Betty?” I said quietly.
“Maybe I have, sir,” she answered me, smiling.
“Then it’s a good thing we’re going to church,” I smiled too.
We pulled up to the little white building in the dark, and when we got out of the truck, I could hear the music coming from inside. We went in and sat down in a couple of the empty chairs. That rangy-looking redneck was playing the guitar again, and the preacher was yelling over him. 
“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners!” he was shouting, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us!”
“Praise the Lord Jesus!” the congregation was shouting back. 
It was as hot as Hades in there. The guitar grew louder by the minute and a couple of the members sprang out of their chairs and started speaking gibberish. Others danced jerkily with their eyes closed and their arms raised. The preacher yelled on:
“And the Lord Jesus rose from the grave! And he said unto them: And these signs shall follow them that believe! In my name shall they cast out devils! They shall speak with new tongues!”
“Hallelujah!” the congregation shouted back.
“They shall take up serpents!”
“Amen!”
“And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them! They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover!”
“Praise Jesus!”
At this, the preacher lifted the jar of strychnine off his little table and held it up.
“Do you have the faith? Who has the faith?” he shouted. 
One woman flung herself forward and grabbed the jar from his hands, drinking it and then throwing herself to the floor in apparent ecstasy. Four more people stepped forward and drank and they danced and the preacher yelled about how they were saved by the hand of the Lord. He then went back behind his table and pulled out the box with the rattlesnake inside it.
“Hallelujah!” went the chorus of voices as they set eyes on the snake.
“They shall take up serpents!” he continued as he lifted the snake out of the box, “and when you take up this serpent, know that God will protect you, for this serpent can only do what God allows it to do!” 
He held the snake up above his head and everyone shouted praise to the Lord Jesus. I found myself getting up out of my chair and pushing my way to the front. I locked eyes with the preacher and he was about to hand the snake to me, but instead he turned pale and backed away. Then the son of a bitching thing bit him right on the hand. I turned to look at Betty and saw that seated behind her was the watcher from the witchdoctor’s house. He was staring right at me again, smiling. I looked back towards the preacher who was being carried outside, and then back to Betty and the watcher, but the watcher was gone.

We went and stood outside with the other congregation members, and Betty asked a woman with freakishly long hair if the preacher was going to be alright.
“Oh, he been bit 20 times afore!” she announced proudly and then wandered off. 
We got back in the truck, and I turned to Betty and said,
 “What did you think of church?”
“That preacher,” she sighed, “I never seen a man ignore so many good places to shut the hell up. He was braying like a bonehead in a whirlwind.”
I was trying to keep my mind off what had occurred inside the church between me, the preacher and the serpent, trying to keep my mind off the watcher, trying to quell a mounting uneasiness that was threatening to flood like a broken levee.
“You know what that preacher reminded me of?” I said, looking ahead into the dark as I drove.
“What?”
“There was this letter I read once. It was a letter that Abraham Lincoln had received in 1860, from a Louisiana man by the name of Pete Muggins. I know the letter off by heart, because I am fairly certain it is the greatest missive ever penned, not for the reasons behind it, but purely for the content of it.”
“What did it say?” she asked.
“It said, ‘God damn your god damned old hellfired god damned soul to hell god damn you and goddam your god damned family's god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell god damn their god damned souls to damnation.’”
That night I dreamt of a thousand places that I’d never been, and I dreamt of killing a thousand people that I’d never met. In these far off climes, I was every monster that had ever lurked in the hearts of all of these people I had never met. I was every monster and I killed every person, their corpses piled up inside the abodes that I slithered home to. 
At the last, I was a young me, a seven year old me, a dead and bloodied seven year old me, angry and murdering these men and women I had never laid eyes on before, and yet who inspired in me such rage and hatred that when I awoke from these dreams and opened my eyes to look at my empty room, I found it wasn’t empty at all. There in front of me, as plain as anything, was the angry, dead and bloodied seven year old me, looking me right in the eyes. 
It screamed and screamed; it lunged at me. No matter how many times I tried to close my eyes against it, it would be there when I opened them again, the screaming incessant. This went on for what seemed like hours, though it could have been minutes or even days. When you get right down to it, there is no difference save for perspective; strange terrors lengthen time like looming shadows cast by unknown moons.
I woke up the next morning to find Ethan on my front porch.
“You look like shit,” he said breezily when I opened the door.
“Gimme a cigarette,” I said quietly.
He handed me a filterless smoke. I put it in my mouth and he lit it for me.
“Take a shower after work or something,” he said then, “’cause we’re going to Galilee.”
“What? How’d you swing that?”
“Oh, I rounded up a couple of those meth-head ranch hands that were looking for some extra work. I cleared it with Big Joe this morning. He may hate you, but he sure loves me.”
“How long?”
“I got you and Dale covered for a week.” 
“When?”
“Starting today. Take a shower and get your shit together. I’mma come pick you up after work.
Later that morning, Dale and I sat outside on our lawn chairs, with his shitty hand-held radio between us. Most of it was dead air; we could only find one station. It had a sermon, a sermon that repeated itself as if it were just a tape looping over and over again in some abandoned radio tower in No Man’s Land:
“Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, repent ye, repent ye…’” it said.
“Daniel,” Dale said with a mouth full of tobacco, “turn that goddamn son of a bitch off. I can’t stand his braying anymore.”
“Amen, brother,” I said, turning off the radio with a smile.
On my way home from work, I swung by Betty’s house with a pack of smokes and a can of soda for her. She hadn’t come by the gas station that day, so I decided to do a home delivery. She stepped out and closed the door behind her. We sat on the sad gray couch on the porch.
“It was real nice of you to bring these by,” she said meekly.
“I was wondering why you didn’t come in,” I said.
“I just couldn’t find the energy to get up today.”
“You been in bed all day?”
“Yeah. Really, thank you for bringing these by.”
“Quit thanking me, it makes me uncomfortable.”
“Sorry. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”
“I also wanted to make sure that you didn’t get in any trouble for helping me with those goddamn dead birds.”
“No, no. I didn’t get in trouble. Why’d you ask?”
“Because I got in some trouble.”
“Seriously? What happened?”
“Mrs. Cole told the Doc, and he came in to see me with Big Joe. Said I was making him uncomfortable.”
“Everybody be getting uncomfortable around here lately.”
“I guess so.”
“Why did she tell the Doc?”
“Because she is a wretched, manipulative, conniving, old fucking bitch,” I said, letting my mind wander to the possibility of killing her and leaving her dead body up at the cemetery with the dead dog and the damn near sixty goddamn dead birds.
“You forgot passive-aggressive,” Betty added with a smile.
We sat in silence for a moment, and then I got up to leave.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said to me.
“No you won’t. I’m going on vacation.”
“What? Where?” she asked, a little deflated.
“Galilee.”
“For how long?”
“A week.”
“With who?”
“With Ethan and Dale.”
“Oh,” she hung her head a little, then looked up and smiled at me, “Well, have fun!”
I walked down the stairs, then turned back to face her.
“Hey Betty?”
“Yeah?”
“You want anything from Galilee?”
“Yeah. I want you to write me a letter every day.”
“You really like some hackneyed shit, you know that? Drive-in theaters and daily letters. Aren’t you embarrassed?
“Not really, no.”
I thought about it for a minute.
“Alright then, ugly lady. A letter a day it is.” I said and walked back to my car.
When I got home, I went into the bathroom intending to take a shower. The bathroom had two light switches, one to turn on the regular lights, one to turn on the fluorescent lights. When I switched on the regular lights, there was a loud pop, and I jumped as the bulb blew out scattering glass on the floor. I reached out and turned on the fluorescent light, my eyes closing against it, my mind registering the buzz unhappily. I picked up as much of the glass as I could find, then I got undressed and turned on the shower. It sounded loud and shrill to me, but I bit down on my tongue and got under the water. 
The water felt like melted wax on my skin, hot and cold at the same time. I closed my eyes to block out the light, but the sound followed me and started to build in my head. I was breathing heavily, turning my head into the spray. I’m drowning, I told myself. I want to drown. I want to drown. I want to drown and be a bloated prince in a sunken town. The buzzing grew inside my head, and voices came from every direction now. Murmured conversations and a repeated calling of my name, closer, closer, closer, in my ear, my opened eyes saw shadows race across the bathroom floor, the buzz turning into that roar, so dizzy now I fell down, black, nothing.
Without knowing exactly when I had woken up, I found myself getting dressed and packing a bag. It was as if my body had been on autopilot while my mind was breaking down. I wondered what would happen if my mind broke down permanently and never came back online. If my body just walked around doing things on autopilot, would anyone even notice? The doorbell rang, and I answered it to find Ethan and Dale standing there looking at me strangely.
“What?” I asked, hefting my bag onto my shoulder.
“Your head,” Ethan said, motioning to his own forehead.
I reached up and touched my forehead, feeling the wet and looking at my fingers to find that they were red. I was bleeding.
“I fell in the shower,” I answered, recognizing one of those wonderful circumstances where you can tell the truth without really telling the truth at all. 
“How did you manage that?” Dale asked incredulously, “Only old people fall over in the fucking shower.”
“Are we gonna stand here all night or are we gonna go?” I asked irritably.
“We’ll go, Daniel,” Ethan said, softly.
It was a ten hour drive to Galilee, and Dale and I offered to split driving responsibilities so that Ethan could sit naked in the back of his van, on the condition that he played the guitar so that we didn’t have to listen to the old hellfire and brimstone preacher on the radio. I went first and Dale sat in the back with Ethan, getting drunk. So drunk, in fact, that I knew I was going to end up driving for the full ten hours. The two of them eventually passed out, and I drove on. After a few hours, the dark and empty highway became illuminated with a glow. A few minutes more, and I could see them – the wildfires spreading out to the side, scorching the dirt, and turning the sand to glass like the vengeance of an angel.
In the minutes before sunrise, we pulled into Galilee. Dale opened his eyes and climbed into the passenger seat next to me.
“This place is a goddamn dump,” he said, yawning.
And it was. All that was left was a gas station/motel, a church, a post office, a grocery/video store and an elementary school. It was deserted as we pulled into the parking lot of the four room motel that sat behind the gas station. We checked in with the old man who stood stooped behind the counter inside, Ethan bought a whole bunch of beef jerky, and then we walked in the direction of the beach. Seagulls and pelicans flew in ever decreasing circles above us, as if their will to be aloft was fading with the darkness. I looked down as I finally felt sand underneath my boots, and I looked up again to find the sea glinting under the gulf coast sun, everything looking as washed out as a Polaroid picture. The sound of the waves filled my head and the breeze ruffled my hair. I sat down heavily on the sand, my hands feeling the seaweed strewn about me. Here in this piece of shit town at the end of Texas, I saw the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen in my life.
Ethan sat down next to me as Dale walked out toward the sea, picking up driftwood as he went. When he got to the edge of the water, he kept walking in, clothes and all, up to his neck in water and holding a pile of driftwood.
“You know what I heard?” Ethan asked me.
“What?” I said wearily.
“I heard that Cindy Myers lives here now.”
“Cindy Myers? Here? I thought she was in Hermon.”
“She was in Hermon, but she moved out here when she got married. Works down at the post office.”
“Funny. I’m fixing to go the post office later anyway.”
“Well, say hello to her for me.”
“I will. Now, can it. I want to watch the sunrise in peace.”
“Do you even know what being at peace is?” Ethan asked, squinting into the sky above.
“I guess not,” I said looking down at my hands, which were covered in seaweed.
“Yeah. Me neither.”
When we went back to the motel, I sat down and wrote my first letter to Betty:
Dear Betty,
We just arrived here in Galilee. The sunrise was incredible. I was going to say that I wished you could have seen it, but since I didn’t think of you at all until just now, I guess that would be a lie. I feel as though my life is crashing down in flames and dismemberment, like an epic plane crash, but in a very non-epic fashion. Try to imagine an epic plane crash with the flames and dismemberment, but imagine it as somewhat dull and ignominious. That is my life right now. I was feeling outraged about it earlier, but I lost the energy to do so and now I am ambivalent. 
I hope you are well,
Daniel.
When it was done, I got up and walked down to the post office. It was about a fifteen minute walk, and it was silent the whole way. I opened the door to the post office and went inside. Behind the counter there stood Cindy Myers. I went up to her and smiled, cocking my head on one side.
“Can I help you?” she asked me, her face not showing a hint of recognition.
“I thought when you escaped Babylon, you were supposed to go somewhere better,” I said indulgently. 
She looked shocked and I continued,
“Don’t you remember your first boyfriend anymore?”
“Jesus Christ, Daniel?” she said finally, her eyes lighting up a little.
“Hi Cindy,” I smiled.
“What are you doing here?”
“Posting a letter.”
She looked down at my hands and took the letter from me. 
“Your eyes look the same,” I said.
“I got real fat, though,” she answered.
“Yeah, you did get real fat,” I agreed.
“You got real skinny,” she continued.
“I don’t eat much.”
“How come?”
“Meds kill my appetite.”
“So it wouldn’t do any good to ask you to come over to my place for dinner?”
“Maybe I ought to ask your husband what he thinks.”
“Yeah, you could, but you’d have to wait until he comes back from Iraq.”
“I ain’t got that kind of time.”
“No?”
“No. I’ll make you a deal. You take me to the cemetery, and I’ll come back to your place and watch you eat.”
“I finish at four.”
“I’ll come back at four, then.”
With that, I turned and left. I walked back to the beach and fell asleep on the sand, the smell of dead fish permeating my dreams.
At four, I picked Cindy up outside the post office, and we got in her car to drive out to the cemetery. Galilee had the oldest cemetery in the state of Texas. There were over six hundred marked graves, but it was estimated that the number of corpses was over one thousand, many of them having died in a yellow fever outbreak back in 1862.
We sat down among the dead, and she looked me in the eye and said,
“Why are you on meds?”
“Because I’m crazy. But you knew that already,” I answered.
“Did they ever figure out what your problem is?”
“I’m schizophrenic. They put me on anti-psychotics.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“It’s OK. It’s not your fault. Why did you get so fat?”
“Comfort eating, I guess.”
“Comfort from what?”
“I don’t know. I heard you left Babylon for a while.”
“Yeah. I went to San Francisco. How long you been married?”
“A while now. When I was younger, it was all that I wanted, just to get married. But then I got married and I…”
“You what?”
“I don’t know. It’s nothing special. It’s just life, I suppose.”
“Sounds romantic,” I said wryly.
“No such thing, if you ask me. You want to wander around a little? Look at the gravestones? Some of them are funny, you know. I come here to put out some flowers sometimes. Clean the place up for these dead old bones.”
“Yeah, let’s wander.”
We walked around not saying anything to each other for about an hour. I could still hear the sea, and the sea birds above us. Gravestones stood to mark whole companies of men who had “perished” in Galilee Bay. Without agreeing on it verbally, we walked back to her car and then she turned to me and asked,
“You still want to come back to my place?”
“Yeah, I do.”
It was a little house on the edge of town, a white house with white flowers outside. Inside, it was cramped but clean. She stood at the kitchen counter with her back to me. I walked up behind her and pulled up her skirt.
“I’m married,” she said quietly.
“He’s not here.”
“I’m fat.”
“Your eyes are the same.”
“You’re crazy,” she breathed.
I bent her forward over the counter.
“You’re lonely,” I said.
Afterwards, we sat facing each other across the kitchen table. She was eating a corndog. I looked down at my wrists, tracing the scars with my fingers. She reached out and touched my face.
“You couldn’t see my eyes from behind,” she said.
“I figured I should just fuck you while I could still get it up,” I said smiling, “God knows these meds are awful.”
“Do you really need them?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t bring them with me. I don’t want to take them anymore.”
“Then don’t take them anymore.”
“Fine. But when I end up losing it completely, I’m going to blame you for it.”
“Why?”
“Because I sure as hell don’t want to blame myself.”
The next morning, I woke up back at the motel. I lit a cigarette and sat down to write the daily letter:
 Dear Betty,
On my first night in Galilee, I fucked Cindy Myers up the ass under a framed photo of her wedding day. The weather is really nice here.
Hope you are well,
Daniel.
I went to the post office to send the letter and to ask Cindy to spend time with me after she got off work. I then went back to the beach to find Ethan and Dale. Galilee was so dead that we basically had the beach to ourselves. I was happy about this because I was nursing a strange and overbearing feeling of threat and fatigue, and I couldn’t have borne talking to anyone that I didn’t already know. I watched the water undulating under an unrelenting sun, and I played out my own death in my head in as many ways as I could come up with. Only in those moments of fevered imagination could I perceive that peace of mind was possible. The sound of the waves and the sight of the boys fishing and catching nothing, the sea-birds diving, the strewn debris, the sad empty buildings of the seafront, all felt as a bubble of dreamlike conciliation, as though I could just die where I lay without cause or trouble. As if I could just let go, as if Anubis himself would walk from the water to take my hand, all thought gone and everything I ever was turned to dust, meaningless and unreal. It was beautiful.

Later, Cindy and I sat in her backyard drinking iced tea. Her homemade iced tea was awful, and the weakening rays of the afternoon sun illuminated her face to show the wrinkles and marks of someone who had not aged well. I sat back in my chair and I felt, for a moment, a little happy. 
“What are you thinking about?” she asked me.
“Blackwell’s Island in the East River.”
“Never heard of it,” she said inquisitively.
“It’s called Roosevelt Island now. But back then, it was called Blackwell’s Island. New York City bought it from the Blackwell family in 1828, and they built a prison and an insane asylum on it.”
“God, that must have been some island.”
“Oh, it sure was. They opened the asylum in 1839; it was the first municipal one in the U.S. They had plans to make it a new kind of asylum, a moral care kind without barricades or shackles. But they ran out of money and only two wings were ever built. It became horribly overcrowded, and the convicts from the penitentiary were used as guards and attendants. Can you imagine what it must have been like in there?”
“I’d really rather not think about how human beings treat each other, especially how the strong treat the weak.”
“I was in the nut house a few times.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“I’m not weak. I wasn’t there because I was weak. I don’t know anyone stronger than me.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
“I know you didn’t. Just don’t ever say that again.”
“I won’t. I won’t say it again. I will say, however, that you could use a haircut.”
“You got scissors?”
“Nope. Only thing I’ve got is these garden shears.”
“Well then, get to shearing, woman.”
Not only did Cindy make the worst iced tea that I’d ever had, she gave me the worst haircut I’d ever had, too. But I fucked her in the backyard, under the stars, in a corybantic strive for deliverance.
The next two days passed pleasantly enough, but on the third day, I woke up angry. I couldn’t find a reason, but the rage welling up in me was overwhelming and I couldn’t squash it. The boys went down to the water and I testily told them to go ahead, I would catch up with them later. I smoked cigarettes and paced the room. My breathing quickened with my heart rate and my mind became increasingly deranged and disordered. I turned off all the lights and I smashed the TV. Still the noise in my head grew, voices just on the edge of intelligible bounced around and shadows ran amok. I thought I would combust, and I banged my head against the wall until blood started to run from my nose. It ran down my face and onto my shirt and with it came release, and so I kept banging my head until I felt a hand touch my back. I jumped and turned to see Cindy standing behind me. Panting, I just stared into her eyes and she came forward and held me lightly for a moment. Next thing I knew, we were seated on the floor, and she was pressing her rolled up sweater to my nose to try and stem the bleeding. Epistaxis. Bleeding was once thought to be the best treatment for the insane. As I sat quietly, I couldn’t find one goddamn reason to disagree with that.
Ethan and Dale came home and took in the scene, looked at each other and nodded. Ethan sat down next to Cindy, and Dale lay down on the bed. 
“Did Cindy beat the shit out of you?” Ethan asked, smiling.
“He beat the shit out of himself,” she interjected.
“Well, we were kinda thinking that we should cut this vacation short. You know, there’s only so much sitting around on the beach you can do, and if I have to watch Dale try to baptize himself in the water even one more goddamn time, I’ll be the one killing myself.”
“It’s because you don’t want to keep your goddamn son of a bitch clothes on, isn’t it?” Dale asked from the bed.

“I’m going with that theory, too,” I said, muffled by Cindy’s sweater.
When we left that night, I kissed her goodbye. I kept the bloodied sweater.
As I drove us the ten hours home, Ethan played the guitar, naked, and I told them a story. One night, I said, Coyote was out hunting. He chased a rabbit but it got away. It was too dark for him to hunt and he was getting annoyed. He watched as Eagle swooped down and hunted with ease. He convinced Eagle to team up with him, so that maybe the two of them could catch more prey together. But still, Coyote couldn’t see well enough to catch anything. He told Eagle that he needed some light. Eagle caught sight of some on the Western front and they set off in search of it. 
They came to a village where the people were dancing a spirit dance. In the middle were two boxes. One box contained just enough light to see by, and the other box contained a dazzlingly bright light. Coyote told Eagle that they needed to steal the box with the dazzling light in it. Eagle tried to suggest that they ask to borrow it, but Coyote told him that the people would never lend out something so precious. So, Eagle quickly slipped the small light from the other box into the box with the dazzling light in it, and carried it off in his talons, with Coyote running along to catch up. Four times, Coyote asked if he could hold the box, so finally Eagle gave it to him. But, Coyote could not contain his curiosity and he opened the box. The small light flew out and up into the sky and the moon was born. Under the light of the moon, the plants began to die. Then the dazzling light flew out of the box, up into the sky, far away and so the sun was born, but it had flown so far away that it grew cold, and winter descended onto the Earth for the first time.
“Sounds familiar,” said Dale reflectively drinking his way through a bottle of bourbon.
“Of course it does. It’s Pandora’s Box, and Prometheus, and The Garden of Eden. It’s all the same story, told over and over again. It’s just another version of the Fall,” I muttered.
“The fall from grace?” Ethan asked without stopping his playing.
“Yeah, the goddamn Fall From Grace. The soiling of our benighted state. The Original Sin. I’m still waiting for someone to explain the sin to me, though, because as far as I can tell, there ain’t nothing Graceful about ignorance.”

Part Three: Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling

My days began to bleed into each other, each second following the other with only slight difference. It was as if, with each moment that passed, everything in the world was destroyed and rebuilt to be a mildly more humiliating and disconcerting version of the one that came before. In this way I descended into ever lower depths of tedium and despair, but slowly, so slowly as to be barely noticeable. 
My nose still hurt and seemed to not want to heal, and I looked at it ever more puzzled every morning. The drive to work saw nothing but dust and tumbleweeds, and the mornings rolled on soundlessly. At lunch every day, I would eat the same sandwich. It was a pre-packaged cheese sandwich that we sold at the gas station. It tasted like shit, and it made me nauseous to boot, but still every day at lunch I ate this sandwich, and only this sandwich. Afternoons were hot and still, filled with my own mirages and the looming figures of the mountain and the cemetery. I would sit and watch, and think about dying. The dust would blow and cover everything, and then evening would come and I would sit on that chair, watching Betty while she looked for UFOs. I would go home and lie in bed, woebegone at the prospect of the increasingly vivid and upsetting nightmares that would come as my eyes finally closed. Then the next day would dawn and progress as before, but imperceptibly worse, and there I would be, a sad sorry son of a bitch on a lawn chair, eating a nauseating cheese sandwich and dreaming of death.
At just such a moment, as I sat, I heard a truck approaching. A beat up old pickup pulled up, and out got a guy about my age. He was dressed smartly, though his clothes looked old and a little worn. He walked over to me, and I stood up, still holding that goddamn sandwich.
“Daniel?” he asked me, holding out his hand.
 I shook his hand and nodded. I felt wary, since he knew my name though I had never seen him before.
“My name is Jacob,” he continued.
His diction was deliberate and perfected, as though he had worked long and hard on it. Still southern, but perfectly so.
“Do I know you?” I asked, clueless.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Dale coming out of the garage, wiping his hands and squinting over to see what was going on.
“Not directly, no. You attended my daddy’s church recently. I saw you there, but I do not think you saw me.”
“No, I didn’t see you. I didn’t really see anything except your Daddy and that rattler he was handling.”
“Is that all you saw?” he asked, looking me right in the eye.

My mind went to the memory of the watcher sitting behind Betty in the church that night.
“Yeah, that’s all I saw,” I lied, “How’s your daddy doing after that bite?”
“He’s dead,” Jacob said, with a strange half-smile on his face.
“Well shit. Sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you. Thank you. See, that is why I came today. I would like to invite you to attend his funeral tomorrow night, up at the cemetery.”
“I didn’t know your daddy at all; I don’t think he’d want me at his funeral or anything like that.”
“He looked into your eyes right before he died, Daniel. That’s a whole lot of knowing, right there. Please come.”
I shifted uncomfortably on my feet, narrowing my eyes against the sun and looking him up and down. He made me feel guilty, standing there like that. Not for anything that I could put my finger on, but guilty just the same.
“OK, I’ll come by after work tomorrow.”
“Thank you. I’m real pleased to hear that,” he said, smiling that vague smile again, and walking off to his truck. As he got in, he waved and called out,
“Looking forward to seeing you there, Daniel.”
As the truck drove off, I sat down again on the lawn chair. I looked at my hand, only to realize that I’d had that entire conversation with that goddamn cheese sandwich still in my hand. I took a bite, chewing it disconsolately, and Dale wandered over and sat down next to me.
“Who the hell was that?” he asked, spitting tobacco juice onto the dirt.
“The preacher’s son,” I answered with my mouth full.
“The snake handlers? I hope he didn’t come down here to do some goddamn ministering or proselytizing or nothing like that. We get enough of that shit on the radio.”
“We sure do.”
“Tell him to get his gas somewhere else,” he said, adjusting his pants at the waist.
“There ain’t nowhere else.”
“Well shit.”
“Yep.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well shit. What did he want?”
“The preacher’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Snake bite.”
“Stupid son of a bitch.”
“Yep. Wants me to go to his funeral tomorrow night.”
“I hope you told him no.”
“I told him yes.”
“Well then, you’re a stupid son of a bitch, too.”
“Amen, brother.”
As I drove away from work that night, I found myself inexorably heading towards the witchdoctor’s house. I found the watcher on the porch, leaning back on his elbows and looking up at the sky. His record player skipped a little, but I recognized a song that I loved.
“And the days keeps on worryin' me, there's a hellhound on my trail,” I sang along quietly, standing at the bottom of the porch steps.
The watcher sat up like an uncoiling serpent, and looked at me with his head cocked on one side.
“Sit,” he said, and I found myself climbing the steps and sitting next to him before I even knew what I was doing. 
He went back to watching the stars, sitting up as straight as a rod, but he didn’t speak. I looked down at the scars on my wrists, and then felt my broken nose with cautious fingers. I suddenly felt more tired than I had ever felt before in my entire life.
“I saw you at the church,” I ventured to say.
“I know,” he answered.
“He’s dead now. The preacher is dead.”
“I know.”
“Snake bite.”
“He was a man who lived by a verse in the bible. But in the bible it is also written, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.' Maybe he didn’t read it all the way through. Maybe he skipped a couple of verses here and there. Perhaps, in the conflicting messages, he was unable to discern any sense."
“I don’t think that ‘sense’ is a word he lived by,” I said, lying back onto the wooden boards of the porch and closing my eyes.
“The church causes you discomfort?” he asked.
“Yeah. It causes me discomfort.”
“Ask yourself why,” he delivered in a whisper, but this whisper was right in my ear, and I thought of all the shadows that breathed my name at night.
His last sentence stirred something in me that I cannot put into words except to say that it burned just a little. I heard nothing more from him that night, but I kept my eyes firmly closed, and Robert Johnson sang on as I mouthed the words with him,
“I got to keep movin'
 blues fallin' down like hail,
 and the days keeps on worryin' me,
 there's a hellhound on my trail,
 hellhound on my trail,
 hellhound on my trail…”
Dale didn’t show up to work the next day. I wasn’t surprised; it was about time that he took another day off to bemoan being and existence in general. There were no customers, either. I heard no sounds from oncoming vehicles, I heard no calls from any animals, no airplanes. Everything was utterly silent and still. At times like this, looking out towards the mountain, with all being so barren and my breathing being the only thing I could hear, it seemed to me that all of this, everything I could see and feel and touch and hear, everything I could smell, was rolling out of me like an arid flood. There was nothing else. I was all and all was me. And what was I? Just thoughts and feelings that meant nothing to anyone, least of all myself. When we get right down to it, and this is what bothers us all, we are all based on memories that we had no way of proving even happened at all. We could have come into being right at this exact moment; everything could have been created right now exactly as it is, with these memories of ours in place. 
People never tire of saying that experience makes us who we are, but experience is as ethereal as ghosts, haunting our behavior like demoralizing specters. What bothers all of us is that we know that personality is for shit, that it is transient and flimsy, that we will never mean anything we say, that everything we’ve ever been through is figmental, and at the bottom of this illusion is just a black hole that refuses to be filled, no matter how many jobs, wives, husbands, kids and dreams we try to cram in there. 
All the time that I was growing up, the one thing that I’d craved from my family was reassurance. Just a basic, benign type of reassurance that everything wasn’t going to hell. However, my family consisted of the three least comforting people on planet earth. Wrapped up in themselves, I fell somewhere outside of their spheres of existence, and I wandered around in my own one, unsure and terrified, like a cracked and crazed version of The Little Prince, my planet populated solely by monsters, and all the monsters were me. And now, all grown up, I had stopped trying to cram things into my black hole. Instead, I starved it completely. This was a damn honorable way to go about things, if you ask me. Goddamn honorable indeed.
“Hey there, mister,” Betty’s voice came at me from the left, as she sat down in Dale’s vacant lawn chair. 
I jolted out of my reverie.
“Where’d you come from?” I asked, as I hadn’t heard her coming.
“I just came out of the bathroom in back,” she said smiling.
“Did you crack the mirror when you looked in it?”
“I tried to avoid your mirror, sir. Wouldn’t want you to have to replace it and all.”
“Mighty considerate of you.”
“I try,” she smiled again, “Is it just you today?”
“Yep.”
“Dale doing OK?”
“Nope,” I said, getting up and going inside. 
I grabbed Betty’s smokes and soda, and went back out, handing them to her. Evening was falling on us fast. She looked up at the stars. I looked up with her.
“Oh my Lord! Look, Daniel! Do you see it?”
I looked up and saw what she was freaking out about. What had at first looked like a star, had begun traversing the sky quickly in one direction, reversing, and going back the way it came. It did this a few times, before it just plain disappeared.
“Did you see it?” she asked me, happily.
“Yeah, I saw it Miss Betty.”
“I sure wish they’d come and take me away somewhere else.”
“How do you know it would be somewhere better?”
“I don’t. I guess I’m just hoping it would be different.”
“So you’d still go, even if where they took you was worse than here?”
“I sure would. Just so long as it was different.”
She was quiet for a few minutes, and then started rooting around in her purse until she pulled something out of it. It was a dream catcher, and she handed it to me. I took it in my hands, turning it over and over again.
“For the nightmares,” she said earnestly.
“Thank you,” I answered as I put it in my jacket pocket, “I gotta get going now.”
“Where ya going?”
“The cemetery. That preacher’s son asked me to come to his funeral tonight.”
“Tonight? But, the preacher’s funeral already happened while you were in Galilee,” Betty said, puzzled.
“You sure about that?”
“Damn sure. I was there.”
“Well then, we’ll just have to see what he wants from me tonight.”
Betty grabbed my hand as I went to walk off.
“I’ll come with you,” she said.
“No.”
“Then don’t go.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, pulling away and heading to my car.
I parked on a dirt mound, and made my way over to the cemetery by the light of the moon. I saw Jacob’s silhouette, standing over my grandfather’s grave. I walked over and stood opposite him.
“The funeral already happened,” I said.
“Daniel, I thought you might like to pay your respects, seeing as you missed the funeral,” he answered in his measured and perfected tones.
“I see, where is he buried then? Because right now, we are standing over my granddaddy’s grave.”
“Yes, I will take you to his grave in just a moment. But, I was momentarily intrigued by these…offerings?” he said, pointing to the decaying dead bodies of the creepy dog and damn near sixty goddamn dead crows.
“What, these here disgusting carcasses?” I asked quietly.
“Yes indeed.”
“I put them here, for my granddaddy.”
He cocked his head on one side, and then motioned me to follow him. We walked over to the new grave and were silent. Thunder sounded in the distance. Dry thunder rolling across the desert, making its way right to us.
“Why do you think your grandfather would have wanted you to leave those dead things on his grave, Daniel?”
“Because it is reflective of his philosophy.”
“And what philosophy is that?”
“That this world, this place that the human spirit finds itself in, is nothing but a stinking goddamn disgusting carcass.”
Jacob smiled at me, that vague and unsettling smile of his. I walked away, and heard him calling after me.
“I don’t think you are crazy, Daniel.”
I looked back over my shoulder, and turned back to face him. In the night’s shadows we were both faceless shapes.
“I wouldn’t hang out here for too long tonight, preacher’s son,” I said, “This is unconsecrated ground.”
“All cemeteries are consecrated,” he replied steadily.
“Not this one. This land has swallowed too much blood. If you wanted to consecrate it, you’d have to burn it.”
“I don’t think you are crazy” he repeated slowly as I walked away, “I know what ails you, and I can help you.”
When I got home, I felt very grumpy, and this was duly exacerbated by the sight of the lavender-colored envelope that lay on my porch. I picked it up, I smelled the dreaded lavender scent, and opened it up, incandescent with rage as I read Mrs. Cole’s letter. It seemed that the wretched, manipulative, conniving, old fucking bitch wanted to see me that night, and could I please come no matter the time. It was still relatively early as my meeting with Jacob hadn’t taken very long. I turned and went back to my car, heading for Cole Farm in the thunderous night that was occasionally lit up by bright flashes of lightning. Still, no rain fell at all.
I stood at their front door, holding that goddamn lavender envelope again like a flag. Mr. Cole answered, and glared at me. I guessed that he was still mad about me stealing those damn near sixty dead goddamn crows. The first words that came blurting out of my mouth were,
“Those birds weren’t yours, so it wasn’t even stealing. You know that, right?”
“What you did son, it was goddamn creepy. Real goddamn creepy indeed. And what I object to is the fact that you were conducting nefarious activities on my son of a bitching property. Do you understand what I am saying to you?” he said loudly, as if by speaking loudly, he could make the drooling loon in front of him understand more clearly. 
Well, I wasn’t going to take that lying down. 
“Don’t you talk to me like I’m some dribbling, self-soiling hayseed, you giant lumbering idiot,” I shot back.
“Excuse me?”
   “Oh, my apologies. Don’t you talk to me like I’m some dribbling, self-soiling hayseed, you giant lumbering idiot, Sir.”

With that, I braced myself for what would have been a real painful punch in the face, if it had not been for the fact that his poison dwarf of a wife chose that moment to come bustling out and lead me off into her kitchen by the arm. She sat me down at the table and took her seat next to me, patting me lightly on the arm. I had an urge to snap every single one of her fingers off.
“You shouldn’t talk to Mr. Cole like that,” she tisked and tutted.
“Why did you call Doc Holliday?” I asked.
“About the birds?” she said, innocently.
“Yes, Mrs. Cole, about the goddamn, son of a bitch, hellfired birds.”
“Well, I was worried about you, Daniel. I can’t have my little Hemingway suffering if I can help it. Now look, I’ve read what you gave me and I think it’s so very good. I just wanted to tell you that.”
Despite every better judgment, I basked in her compliments. I knew that was why I’d driven down there that night at her behest. I knew what I’d written was good, and I knew she would tell me that, and I knew that I needed to hear it. Beyond that, I just didn’t care. I left the house shortly after that. As I walked around the property, I saw a lone goat wandering around. It wandered over to me, and stood looking up at me. I was transfixed by this goat, and I don’t even know how long I stood there, or how I got home. All I know is that I woke up in bed, shaking from nightmares with a goddamn goat in my bed.
The goat and I sized each other up for a good ten minutes or so, while I got dressed and it chewed on the armchair by the window. I had no idea what to do with it, so I led it out to my backyard and left it a bowl of water.
Sitting at the diner that morning with my jacket wrapped tightly around me, I sipped my coffee and looked across the table at Ethan. He pulled at the collar of his shirt miserably. When his eyes finally settled on my face, he sighed and said,
“What?”
“Hmm?” 
“What is it? There’s something you want to tell me. Spit it out, man.”
I took a deep breath, and motioned for him to step outside with me. Out in the warm morning, we lit cigarettes and I shuffled my boots in the dirt.
“I think I done stole a goat.”
“Come again?”
“I said, I think I done stole a goat.”
“Well, either you did or you didn’t.”
“Did or didn’t what?”
“Steal a goddamn goat.”
“I’m pretty sure that I did. I don’t remember it. One minute I was staring at it up on Cole farm, the next thing I know, I’m waking up in bed with this goat.”
“In bed with the goat?”
“Not like that.”
“You sure about that?” Ethan said, giggling.
“Quit kidding around and tell me what I should do with this goat.”
“Kidding!” he said, my accidental pun apparently the height of humor.
“Ethan.”
“OK, OK, sorry.”
“What the fuck am I going to do with it?”
“Why’d you steal it?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Where is it now?”
“In my backyard.”
“Well, you gotta take it back to Cole Farm. You got enough trouble over those dead crows.”
“Yeah. How the hell am I going to sneak back there and unload this goat?”
“I’ll come with you,” said Betty, who had appeared at my side, squinting in the morning sun, “we can use my truck.”
“And I’ll go down and visit with the Coles and keep them busy,” said Ethan, “I’ll come by your place after work,” and with that, he walked over to his van, chuckling to himself.
I turned to Betty, and took the dream catcher out of my pocket, handing it back to her. She looked up at me quizzically. 
“It doesn’t work for shit,” I said by way of an explanation.
She looked down at the dream catcher, and then back up at me,
“Maybe I just need to get you a bigger one.”
I told Dale of my plans for the evening, and he also spent the day chuckling to himself. Our whole work day consisted of him casting amused glances my way, and of me wanting to smack him upside the head. When evening came, I drove home where Betty and Ethan were waiting for me. Ethan then took off to Cole farm to begin his visit with the giant lumbering idiot and the poison dwarf. Betty and I went into my backyard and escorted the goat out to her truck. I sat in the truck bed, holding onto the animal and scanning the night around us. 
When we were about to approach Cole Farm property, Betty stopped the truck, and I walked on alone with the goat. I figured it would be easier to sneak onto the property on foot. Right outside the farm’s fence, something caught my eye. Out in the distance, I saw the figure of the watcher, standing looking right at me. Both the goat and I, we made our way over to him. When I was in front of him, I saw how very tall he was; taller than Big Joe, taller than Mr. Cole. He reached out his hand and stroked the goat under the chin. It stood next to him happily.
“For me?” he asked.
“I was taking it back to Cole Farm,” I stuttered a little.
“Did you unload your sins on the goat, Daniel? Did you unload them on the goat and bring it to me?” he said, looking down at it, and still stroking it.
“Why?” I asked him.
When he looked back up at me, it was as though his eyes were on fire, and he said:
“Send the goat to me, Azazel, let me take on the sin. But it’s not enough. So, let me bleed for the sins. To me ascribe all sin, nail me up and let me bleed.” 
Betty and I ended up sitting on that deflated gray couch on her porch.  She had found me passed out where I last remembered being, just outside of the fence. I lied and told her that I’d returned the goat, even though I had no idea where the goat and the watcher had gone, and we had left Ethan to enjoy his evening with the Coles, which I was fairly certain would not last long, as Mr. Cole was made exceedingly uncomfortable by the fact that he knew Ethan didn’t like to wear any clothes. Ethan would have been naked before he had even pulled into his own driveway, probably getting high and playing guitar, and trying to forget how angry and fucked up he was. He was never going to get any better. This was who he had become, for better or for worse, and most of the time, the best you can do is to just deal with it for what it is. To look at yourself in the mirror and say to yourself, 
“Maybe my life won’t last very long.”
Find that comfort where you can, but let it be real comfort, and not some fabricated bullshit. You’ll only see through your own lies eventually anyway.
“Maybe it’ll all be infinite,” Betty said, motioning at the universe with her lit cigarette.
“Infinite? Jesus.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I find the concept of infinity completely and utterly horrifying.”
“Well, that’s one way of looking at it.”
“It’s the only way of looking at it.”
“Or, you could choose to think that it’s beautiful.”
“Do you believe in life after death, Betty?”
“I guess I do.”
“How do you know it’ll be any better than this? It could be worse.”
“That’s OK by me, just so long as it’s different.”
“What if it is exactly like this? Just this, every day, for infinity.”
“It wouldn’t be.”
“It could be.”
“It couldn’t.”
“It could. It could just as well be like this as it could be like anything else.
She paused for a second, then answered,
“Now that is truly horrifying.”
After my first sojourn in the nut house, I came home and started a stellar career in compulsive lying. Nothing that came out of my mouth had any veracity in the traditional sense. I began correspondences with people that advertised in the back of magazines for pen-pals. I always wrote as someone else. I wrote as lonely middle aged women, as lusty old men, as ribald teenagers, as gay men and lesbians, as mothers, fathers, fishermen, lumberjacks, prisoners, drug addicts and lawyers. I told my friends outrageous lies; I lied to my parents, to my brother, to the Doc, to everybody who had ears to listen. I invented lives and memories and feelings and problems and issues, and I was able to live them as fully as I was able to live my own life. 
Soon it became difficult to distinguish myself from these other people that I’d invented. It seemed that I was just as capable of being any one of them as I was capable of being Daniel. Daniel was as much a set of reactions based on past experiences and conditioning, and inside my mind, I watched him react from an objective distance, just as I did with my invented personas. So it became clear that Daniel could be seen just as much as an invented persona as any of the others. Daniel was meaningless; I wasn’t Daniel any more than I was anyone else. The real question became, who was I? Who was the “I” behind all these reactions and conditioned responses? If I could just as easily change my name to Ted or Marcy or Michael, and start liking all the things I hated, then who was the consciousness behind it all? Who was the “I” that could inhabit so many personalities, just as fully as it could inhabit Daniel, and yet for some arbitrary reason, decided to use Daniel most frequently? 
This made Daniel as unreal as anything else; this made the “me” that people interacted with into something insubstantial and flimsy, and not always easy to hang onto. It amazed me that that people didn’t seem to notice how unreal they really were. As you can imagine, this kind of thinking had the same effect as any type of thinking has on an intelligent human being: another stay in the cuckoo’s nest.

Part Four: Yet I marvel at how this great wealth
has come to dwell in this poverty

The wildfires had been making their way steadily towards Babylon. It was all everyone at the diner wanted to talk about. The state fire-fighters couldn’t get the blaze under control, and it was rushing across the desert, pushed by unyielding winds. Nobody knew what effect this would have on our town, but I guess there really wasn’t anything else to talk about, since nothing happened here, ever.
It was getting harder for me to sit in the diner for breakfast. The noises were becoming overwhelming for me; the clatter of cutlery, the frying of eggs, the incessant chatter. It made me cringe and want to rush home and hold my own head under water. As I watched Ethan sitting across from me, I realized that he was getting worse too; it was becoming harder for him to control his anger, harder for him to sit there with his clothes on. Sometimes I wished he would get naked, cover himself in honey, and run screaming through town chased by bees, like an even more macabre Little Miss Babylon. Or I wished he would take to horseback and ride around screaming his head off at night, giving El Muerto a run for his money. In fact, I just wished he would do something other than just sit there. Goddamn it, anything would have been better. In turn, I’m sure Ethan wished I would do something other than twitch and cringe, and snap at anyone who talked to me.
It was true; I was beginning to lose any patience that I may have had. Lord knows, I had precious little to begin with. But, now it was completely gone. My nights were filled with so many hallucinations and specters, so many shadows and voices and nightmares, that by dawn, I had nothing left in me for anyone else. At my worst moments, I actually had no idea what anyone was saying to me. Anything they said sounded like gibberish. In my better moments, when I could understand them, I cared so little for what they had to say, that I couldn’t stand to hear it anyway.
Still, I refused to take the medication. The side effects were unacceptable to me. Unless someone had experienced the displeasure of taking an anti-psychotic, it was impossible to describe how it felt. Yes, they would have helped me. They may have mitigated the symptoms which crippled me, sure. But, worse than the horrible physical side effects, worse to me than any of those, was the feeling that I was slower when I took them. I’d rather be fucking crazy than dumbed down, and I rationalized this by casting myself aside from other loons, by the distinguishing mark which was the fact that I was able to control my madness. I could see it, I could feel it, and I could make sure that I didn’t do anything too untoward. Maybe that was my biggest mistake, or maybe it was the only sane decision I ever made. Does it even matter?
One night, I found myself driving back towards that church outside of town. When I pulled up, the lights were on, but I heard nothing coming from inside. I opened the door gingerly, like one strangely does when one thinks the building is empty. I saw Jacob up at the front, bending down and looking inside the rattler cage that he had placed on the altar. When he heard the door, he looked up at me and smiled, motioning me forward with his hand. I walked up to where he was, and took a seat in one of the folding chairs, leaning back and sighing.
“You gonna handle that there serpent?” I asked him lazily.
“No. No, I’m not,” he said looking back down at the cage, “I always told my daddy that he should be careful who he handed the serpents to…” he looked up at me again, “Anyway, that’s not really my specialty. I have a different calling.”
“That’s probably a good thing,” I said, my eyes caught by the crucifix hanging on the wall next to me. 
I stared at it, and the more I looked at it, the more transfixed I became. Then a full on terror began to well up in me, a terror and a disgust and a horror, all focused on this cross. I got up and started to back away. 
“Is the crucifix bothering you, Daniel?” he asked me sharply.
“I have to go,” I said hurriedly.
“I’ll come and visit with you in your home, then?” 
I didn’t say anything to that, I just left quickly, got back in my car, and drove over to the witchdoctor’s house, hyperventilating. I ran over to the porch, hoping to find the watcher there, as I was starting to find his unsettling presence to be the only comforting thing in my world. And there he was, listening to Blind Willie Johnson and holding a crucifix exactly like the one at Jacob’s church. He looked at me and said,
“Sit.”
I climbed the stairs and sat down, lighting a cigarette. The watcher looked down at the crucifix he was holding, and began to speak quietly,
“A sacrificed god-man who is resurrected, is a rite that is as old as time. The god-man is sacrificed, and he is eaten, thereby those that eat of his flesh and drink of his blood gain his immortality, and by the shedding of his blood, sin is atoned for. ‘Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.’”
“Well, that’s horrible.” I answered.
“The god-man would partake in eating himself. In this way he communed with his people. Have you ever taken communion?”
“No.”
“Haven’t you read your bible? It’s really quite clear.”
“What, the eating of Jesus?”
“It would seem so.”
“I thought it was symbolic.”
The watcher looked back down at the crucifix he was holding.
“Is it?” he said, letting the crucifix fall inverted between his finger and thumb. “Is it, really? Or is it the same story told over and over again? I, Azazel, took on the sins of the scapegoats. Then, I took on the sins of the world. I partook in the meal of my own flesh and blood. I bled and died for the world. And I commune with the world when they eat of my flesh and drink of my blood.” 
I hung the crucifix up in my living room that night, upside down.
The next few days saw Dale looking worse and worse, and eventually ending up in the hospital in Hermon with alcohol poisoning. Betty and I drove down there to visit him. He lay in bed and stared at me and then started laughing. That’s all he did; he laughed, and I laughed with him. Betty stood by the window, fiddling with the flowers she had brought along for him, but which had wilted in the hot car during the two hour drive. It seemed far more fitting to me that flowers for Dale would be wilted, even if the significance would be lost on him, and I’m not sure it was.
When we got back in the car to drive home, I looked over at Betty sitting in the passenger seat. I put the car in drive, and I headed in opposite direction to home. After we’d driven through the center of Hermon, Betty turned to me, but she didn’t say anything. Eventually, fifteen minutes later, we got to our destination. I pulled up and parked the car.
“I’m sorry that there isn’t actually a movie playing,” I said.
She gave me an enormous smile and said,
“You remembered! I always wanted to come to…”
“I know,” I interrupted her, “Daily letters and drive-in theaters and hackneyed drivel galore.”
“Thank you, thank you,” she said whispered, looking up at the big screen in front of us, reflecting our lives, blank and motionless.
“Can we just stay here for a while?” she asked me.
“Sure we can.”
And I knew at that moment.
At the gas station alone, I was in a prime position to watch the approach of the fires. It began with a pleasingly orange tone to the skies above, and then the smoke started to drift our way. The smoke combined with our local dust storms to make it rather hellish to be outside at times, and so I packed up the lawn chairs, moved them inside and smoked, staring out at the swirling mess. One day, Doc Holliday fought his way through the flying dirt and, still holding onto his hat, dusted himself off as he walked over to where I stood behind the counter. My stomach sank at the sight of him.
“Need gas?” I asked, hopefully.
“Son, you know damn well I didn’t come here for gas.”
“How about a Twinkie?”
“Nope, nope, seems to me like I wouldn’t have dragged my poor, sorry, son of a bitching self through this shitstorm of debris to come down here for a goddamn Twinkie.”
“Oh.”
“You know exactly why I’m here,” he said narrowing his eyes and fixing me with a glare that seemed to say, you wouldn’t be dancing around the truth, now would you? Women son, women dance around the truth.
“Yeah, I guess I do know.”
“You haven’t come to me and renewed that prescription of yours. From which I can deduce that you ain’t taking those goddamn pills. And when you ain’t taking your goddamn pills, I become vexed. I don’t like to be vexed, son. I don’t like it one bit, I don’t aim to keep it up. One of us is gonna have to break here, son, and it ain’t gonna be me.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna take them anymore.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“What are you going to do? Make me?”
“That’s what they’ll do in hospital,” he stated quietly, and walked out. 
His threat hung in the air after him, and it made me sick.
That night, as I sat under my kitchen table in the dark, trying to slow my heartbeat, there was a knock at my door. I assumed it to be Betty or Ethan, so I opened it without thinking, only to find Jacob standing there.
“Oh man,” I sighed.
“Is this a bad time?” he asked, pushing his way past me into the living room.
“I been dealing with the goddamn medical establishment today, I don’t think I’m up to dealing with the Church too.”
“That doctor been harassing you?” he sat down on my couch as he said this.
“Yeah. He’s pretty much harassed me since I was born. He’d have harassed and institutionalized me in the womb, if he could’ve,” I said sitting opposite him.
Jacob laughed.
“He doesn’t understand you, Daniel. He never will. He’ll just do you harm.”
“And you?”
“I understand you. I was like you once. Can I share something with you?
“I get the feeling that you’re going to share it with me no matter what I say.”
“Yes, yes I am. You see, I was once like you, but my daddy cast three demons out of me, and I have been saved since.”
“Three demons, huh?”
“Yes, three of them. And when I was free of their evil influences, I was also freed from the evil influences of the doctors and hospitals. I see the demons in you too, Daniel, I see them as plain as day. And I can cast them out.”
“I think I’ll pass on that,” I said, and he turned and looked at the upside-down crucifix on the wall.
“Are you sure you want to pass? Why did you steal this crucifix from my church?”
“I didn’t steal it. Someone gave it to me last night.”
“I saw you steal it, Daniel.”
I didn’t reply.
“And now you have placed it here, upside-down. Can you not see the Devil’s influence here?”
“Let me tell you a story,” I found myself saying, “I was born dying, you see. So my granddaddy promised me to Lucifer and I lived. Just like you do at church, I drank blood and I communed. You ever heard the Hymn of Lucifer?”
After I said this, we looked each other in the eye, and he got up slowly, gathering his coat. I’d driven the Doc out of my presence, and now I would drive this goddamn preacher’s son exorcist out of my presence, too. He left in silence and I locked the door behind him. Why couldn’t people just leave me the fuck alone? I wondered, as I went again to sit under the table and quiver with a nameless fear until morning.
The fires were coming in from the direction of the ruins. It seemed Old Babylon was to burn again and with it the cemetery. If they kept coming, New Babylon would go down in flames, too. Good riddance, I thought to myself, as I watched their approach and willed them forward. I felt completely empty, and inside of me there was enough space for a whole world to burn. 
I found myself at Betty’s house, in her living room, looking around for a place to sit. She hadn’t been outside of her house for a few days, and I had to knock at her door for a long time before she answered. I smoked and sat down on a free patch of floor. 
“You know,” she said from her recumbent position on the couch, “I’ll never forget how nice it was of you to write those letters, and for taking me to the drive-in theatre.”
“Even though the letters were shitty, and there was no movie playing at the drive-in?”
“That doesn’t even matter.”
“OK.”
“But, you don’t have to sit here when I’m all down like this. I don’t want it to rub off on you, or anything like that.”
“Betty?”
“Yeah?”
“I got nowhere else to be.”
That was the truth, for whatever it was worth.
People started to evacuate as the fires drew closer. They headed for Hermon, and Babylon was left completely deserted. I sent Ethan on his way, telling him to visit Dale, and that I would be there right after him. Then I drove over to Betty’s place, and got her to open up her door.
“Betty, you’ve got to go.”
“What about you?”
“I’m fixing to go, after you.”
“Then I’ll just wait for you.”
“No, you won’t. Go and wait at the hospital in Hermon with Ethan and Dale. Ethan will look out for you.” 
She didn’t want to go, but her strength of will was not as strong as mine. I put her in her truck and sent her off. The Coles had left their ranch, Doc Holliday had vacated his offices, and Zeke had left the diner. Patty had packed up, and taken Susan and Steve, and the ranch hands had fled. I walked around town, marveling at the desolation. I adored it. I felt on the edge of a precipice that I had been trying to throw myself down for all of my life. 

As I watched the color of the skies change with the approaching inferno, I remembered an old country song by Stan Jones. It was about a cowboy who sees a herd of red-eyed cattle being chased across the sky by the ghosts of damned cowboys.  They tell him that if he doesn’t change his ways, he’ll have to join them for eternity, “Trying to catch the Devil's herd across these endless skies.” I could feel them in the thunder that rolled, and could feel them in the heat that grew closer. 
I stood looking at the mountain, as the flames reached the ruins and began to cleanse the blood-soaked ground of the cemetery. I hoped that my grandfather’s bones would burn until nothing was left of him, because that is what he would have wanted. I knew that the church had burned down already, Jacob having taken his people and fled elsewhere. In turn, it would all be gone. Doc Holliday’s offices, Cole Farm, the diner, and Betty’s house. It was Betty’s house that gave me the most amount of joy, because I knew it was the only way for her to let go of everything that she weighed her miserable life down with. If life was to be miserable, then let it not be heavy, too.
I walked through the burning desert, accompanied by the Devil’s Herd, by El Muerto, by the UFOs, by all the slain and damned souls, by carnivorous ghosts and ghastly nightmares made real. The land was wild and raw, the flames had un-tethered the spirit that ran rampant here once and now again. I made my way to the saloon in the ruins, the place where I had tried to feel up Cindy Myers that day back when we were kids. The roar of fire was so loud, that for the first time in I don’t know how long, something had drowned out the noise in my own head. As I walked into the saloon, I sang a song. I sang the Hymn of Lucifer. I could finally remember the whole thing:

“He is the king of Hell
 He has two heads
 One is the king of hell
 He has two heads
 One is the king of hell
 The other is Jesus of Nazareth
 The other is Jesus of Nazareth.”
I sat down in the middle of the floor, cross-legged. I felt like Quang-Duc, the monk who had set himself on fire, and I felt like the girl who had thrown herself into the volcano in the ‘30s, and the 940 people who had followed her.
I saw the watcher standing at the doorway, and he made his way over to me.
“Will this hurt?” I asked.
“It will hurt like hell.”
“Good.”
I had known it back at the drive-in theater. Betty had looked so happy, but I’d known that as soon as she went back to her house and got swallowed up in all that clutter, she’d be lost again. I knew that Ethan would never feel any better at all. I knew that Dale was going to drink himself to death slowly and ignominiously. I knew Doc Holliday would continue to follow me around like my shadow, and if not him then some other doctor, and if not a doctor, then some crazy fucking priest with a bible and a quart of Holy Water. 

I knew all of this. I knew that not only did I not want to try to cram things into my own black hole anymore, I also couldn’t stand to watch anyone else do it either. I couldn’t stand the nightmares, the pain, the anger and the fear. I couldn’t take the meds and I couldn’t stand to be off them. I had no love for life, and the horrific toll it took on the human spirit. Truly, maybe we were all in hell.
The watcher’s hand never left my head. My life paraded in front of me as I burned in excruciating pain. A whole life’s worth of memories and experiences, dalliances and affairs, conversations and fights, deeds and static time. It all paraded past my eyes in great detail and clarity, and none of it meant anything to me at all. It didn’t mean anything to me and it didn’t mean anything to anyone else either. I could have been me, and I could just as well have been anyone else. It was meaningless, and yet it had happened. I had been alive. Marvel at that.
Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever."
On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?" 
 Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, "Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe." For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him." 
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. 
John 6:53 – 6:66