Every day like today I walk in and watch him pour ferment into the mouths of woozy patrons, dispensing vice for a fee. At the end of each night he and I peel the drunkest from their stools before collecting sop-wet singles from the bar. Tonight was a good night, he said counting, and I nodded and asked how much. He told me but I didn’t hear the number. Still I smiled because he looked proud.

We walked outside, where I brought the gate down. He pulled some keys from his pocket. He locked the gate and we walked toward home. All the way we watched his profit manifest itself in every ripped regular who stumbled through their shame, smearing themselves along the walls of shuttered businesses until their legs invariably gave. Some picked fights and others vulnerable women. They each only needed the dulcet pardon of one too many before letting themselves go and he gave it to them. He was a ringmaster of hidden demons who made his living condemning callow souls to the darkest alleyways of their id.

We walked over them smashed across sidewalks there with the day’s dross and dog shit. I should have known better than to trust the bartender but I was young and hadn’t yet discovered bottom.

The world was outside and it was finally over. Vivienne turned the knob shut. The dead lock slammed in its socket and rung through her fingertips, startling her more. She watched her slow hand tremble up toward the door chain, where it fumbled to hitch the bolt to its frame.

Vivienne collapsed against the back of the door. Her knees buckled as she fought, halfhearted, against her own giving way. She sagged to the floor, legs splayed, resigned. Her purse slipped from her shoulder and sounded the cacophonous miscellany within when it dropped beside her, which only aggravated the throbbing in her skull.

It was night inside. She was a shadow evolving through indignity: growing at the entryway, first slithering, then crawling, kneeling, reaching for side table assistance while knocking over some clunking effect before she trembled for stumbling. Her heels pounded the floor and inside her head so she shed them—now struck by the revelation of her clothes, which led her to strip.

She molted in dull frustration from her little black dress, her black lace panties and bra. She struggled with her necklace, attempting to pull it over her head—choking—before the tension snapped, dinning pearls in a hurried storm across the hardwood.

Blind and exposed, Vivienne made her way toward the bathroom. She staggered into the bathtub, pulled the knob, lifted the pin, and cringed under the stinging cascade that pelted down.

She reached for the knob and turned it further.

Steam stifled her breathing. Fetal, singed. She began to cry from the scalding pain of the water and what else. She lay in searing darkness trying hard not to think.

And she turned the knob still further.

And she screamed out with inhuman pitch and agony, melting in the cruelness of her condition, away in the mercy of the tide, melting in the mist of her own boiled blood, melting away in simmering skin, screaming in fear and pain and relief and gratitude for the fact of death and control over when.

If I could be reborn, if I could be somewhere simple, where streets aren’t wet with sick and slop. If I could be a gentleman. If I could be someone I loved. Someone who knew how to love her. Then maybe I would know what to say those nights when we sprawled beneath the star-lit everything.

I closed my eyes and breathed deep the fresh, fragrant hay rounds near the bypass. Where we lay was enveloped in an orchestra of crickets supported by the steady bass coming from my truck engine. It was cold, but we were warm.

“Think you’ll get one of ‘em noo-yawka accents?”

“I don’t know, I guess, maybe,” I replied.

“It’s scary, but kinda a little exciting, too, you know? Going out there, getting to be the sorta man you’ve always wanted to be.”

She gripped my hand. Faith was brave, so it was easy for me to convince myself that she wasn’t terrified at the prospect of my absence. I shifted to sit up and, in doing so, withdrew my hand from hers and folded my arms around my knees.

“Honestly, I really am excited. I’m so ready to leave this shit town, Faith. This so-called ‘real America’ slug of a community, where people got no vision or sense of possibility, where every concern is daily and books are for holding tables up. The urban life…”

I paused, noticing her wide eyes trail to stare at the dirt where our hands weren’t.

“It’s where I’m supposed to be. I mean, I’ve got family and friends here, and I’ll miss them—you, the most. But you ever get that feeling? Like you weren’t born where you were meant for?”

“No, I get what you’re saying. I know how you felt for a long time. But we’re not the same. You know that; you say it all the time.”

“Faith… that’s not—”

“No, listen to me,” she interrupted, which was good because I didn’t actually have words to say, much as I felt the need to say something.

“I love my family, Carson. I don’t know how far I’d want to move from them. I’m a part of this community, I see myself in it. Sure, it’s got its problems, but that’s everywhere. I don’t know how much better off I’d be anywhere, ‘cause I don’t think places do that for folks. And if you’re just going somewhere ‘cause you think it’ll make you better, I’m betting what you’ll find is the same you in both places with nothing changed but the scenery.”

I wanted so badly to have something to say. Goddammit, I just wanted her to stop. But instead she shuffled around and sat straight up so that her eyes were level with mine, and she just stared into me and insisted.

“I hate when you talk about our hometown like it’s the darkest part of space. People here may not be much learned or cultured in the ways you figure as appropriate, but that don’t mean they’re not good people. You condemn what they like as silly. Who are you to judge what other people put in their hearts?

“You tell me they got no ‘vision for the state of the world.’ You call ‘em idiots ‘cause they don’t see what’s out there, and you’re headed out soon to prove you’re right. But I’ll tell you one thing, Carson: so long as you don’t got the right eyes for it, no matter where you’re at, you’ll always be blind to what’s right in front of you. And that’s sadder to me than any country hick who’s never been to the opera.”

The city below was shrouded in the distance to here. Faraway sirens and three a.m. trains groaned for attention amid the pitch dark of my thoughts. Tipsy pedestrians doddered home in an undertone of drunk emotion, which, caught in the updraft, winded together and danced loose with leaves and light refuse until it finally reached me in a solitary whimper, a medley of how the world felt, and we bonded.

I lay flat against the roof, staring at the big, black nothing above me: a sky poisoned by the steady drip of street lights and neon signs. The surviving specks weren’t stars at all, but suggestions of a reality rendered unreachable for the blind-sided citizens of tomorrow. I made company from bottle and cigarette; the cig bonded to my chapped lips by the charity of spittle and good whiskey. I shivered at the truth of my condition and longed for any of the more temperate months of my life, that she would knead herself into my side and thaw me from this cold Fall.

I took a final drag. The toxic filled my throat and lungs with a coffin taste. I stifled the burning cig in the ground next to me.  A faint singe of tar itched at my nostrils. I descended like a nadir-oriented dervish into the lowest spirals of discontent: not whirling myself but allowing the world through liquor to whirl about my stock-still body; not redeemed from but numbed to sensory distractions, which themselves were not heavenly nor beautiful, but muddled in the true stink of the universe.

The secret lay in his gait. He had only to think of his own lightness lifting him from the unforgiving streets of his neighborhood, until his toes dipped lower than his heels and his legs began to dangle. He skipped slow above the familiar, broken streets and sidewalks, over fields of earth and crabgrass.

It was getting hard for Michael to distinguish between his visions and reality because he woke up in dreams just as soon as he’d in fact fell asleep. In his dreams, nothing was much different from his waking life other than in his dreams he could fly. Some days the soft breeze would buoy him slowly higher, until he could kiss the stratosphere, and it was there he would meet with God.

God was a cartoon character he imagined from the box of his favorite brand of cereal. He spoke in a hushed, encouraging tone, with the grit of experience in his omnipresent throat. His was a God for five–year–olds—an amalgamated God, built from positive experiences whose power far exceeded a child’s scope of understanding.

“Hi, God,” said Michael, sanguine and unaffected.

“Hello, Michael. What’s on your mind?”

Michael spoke casually with the savior of man, for he was still at that early stage in a young Christian’s upbringing when God is a close friend, not yet realized as judging father; when Sunday school teachings play loose with scripture, reading only the parts with animals, and never from Revelation; when the meaning of terms like sin and salvation are yet unfinished in a youngster’s lexicon, and the bloodletting of Christ is something more easily memorized than understood.

“I’m all alone. The kids at school make fun of me because of my flying and, and nobody likes me and nobody believes me and they make me not believe myself sometimes,” Michael said, forgetting to breathe and refilling his lungs with too much air before letting it out again in an anxious huff.

Michael often worried about the people on the ground, so heavy with despair. What if they fed it to him? What if they convinced him he was only ever a little kid and a liar? Maybe he’d grow up and convince himself none of this was real, that he’d been tethered all along, that he wasn’t special and God was just a figment. Such thoughts deflated him; he hated thinking them.

“God, I’ll stay up here with you,” Michael said as a matter of fact, but also as an offer and a plea.

God looked at him with gentle sovereignty and the boy’s lips started to quiver because he already knew he couldn’t.

“Now, Michael, don’t cry. It’s not because I don’t want you here with me, you know that. But I didn’t make everything down there for you to run away from it. It’s down there for you to live. Do you understand?”

Michael wiped his face in his shirt sleeve and nodded, in that way children nod when they’re merely through with sobbing, not having learned their lesson but feeling sorry for having done something that required it.

“God, I hope I never get too heavy to be here with you,” Michael said with a mouthful of clouds, but someday he would.

An underwhelming fuck and a few dollars on the nightstand: this, my friends countless reminded me, was what being a man felt like. Before the military, I had only ever made love. But I finally understood that love was effeminate. Sex with a prostitute was less exchange than broadcast, not love or even fucking but better described as being fucked at. They assured me affection was an innocence cured by distance and whores, and I believed them.

But when I came inside her it felt like I hadn’t arrived at all. The girl sighed in broken English before unsanctimoniously pulling me out. She breathed out numbers and headed for the bathroom. I lay there in my used condom and words, empty words, in a lazy attempt to clear the dazed discomfort of the moment. I asked her how long she’d been at it and she answered something I couldn’t make out over the running faucet. My eyes hung around the room before settling on my limp member, and I asked her what for. The water stopped. I awed at how she slid stammeringly and slumped against the doorway, looking like something the whole world had happened to, when she told me, simply, “school.”

There’s nothing in the universe so sad as a boy growing into a man.

When I told the story later to my young comrades, I told it vigorous and misogynistic, and they laughed. We stood each self-impressed in the middle of Pattaya’s red light district as thousands in our midst gave themselves quietly to indignity. I drank Singha beer and paid others’ bar tabs as that girl somewhere worked herself raw through college and life. We smoked cigs and chucked our scorched stubs to the asphalt, then trampling through streets and go-go bars, shucking from our pant legs an eternity of dirty children peddling I–didn’t–care–what.

We reported back to base just before curfew, drunk and brotherly. In the morning my friends built a road or a school or whatever and I wrote a story about what the Marine Corps was doing to help Thailand.

Weekdays on the R train always offered Daniel hope for humanity.

There he would sit quietly with his knees tucked together in his Sunday best, but it was Wednesday. He cautiously folded his hands over his lap, taking great pains to place them discreetly around the inscription on the Bible he carried around for effect. Catching the train at Forest Hills, he suffered through stops separating him from purgation: a saccharine seraph named Christina who had charity in hazel eyes and bleeding heart.

She boarded from Kew Gardens on the way to the church, and for only those few eternal minutes, Daniel was immersed in pleats and everything that was good in the world. When she entered the train, he would wait for her to near before promptly offering up his seat in the vacant car, and she obliged him. While he might have otherwise lost himself in the sight down her blouse, it was her conversation that kept him honest.

It must have been her innocence.

As a man felled amid this callous world, Daniel couldn’t help but find her innocence alluring. And who wouldn’t? She sounded so hopeful in that way cynical minds undermine as naïve. She was one of the last living souls in the world who really still believed in God, and not just for fear and careful upbringing, but because it just made sense — you know? — for compassion to be sourced in something grand and unwieldy. There was, after all, so much love in this world, she alleged.

“You look nice today, Daniel,” she said regardfully, trying not to giggle as the excess from his side-slicked hair sometimes dripped down onto her head.

“Thanks,” he meekly replied. It was always challenging, at first, to stare down at her open face looking back up at him and not wander to desperate places. But once she spoke, it was hard to concentrate on anything but her words and how lovely she was. He stuttered back a quick, “y-you too,” and hated himself for it, but her smile kept him from being too hard on himself.

Against both his nature and parole, he asked her how her day was and she laughed, saying it hadn’t really started yet. He bit his lip and smiled and she told him she’d had a good breakfast; that her father was still absorbed in the classifieds since his bad back put him out of a job six months ago. She made a joke about how her dad had slowly transformed into the back of a newspaper at the dinner table and he laughed and it was genuine. Occasionally her eyes slinked toward the book in his hand and he held it by its edges to make it easy for her to see he was a decent person. She made him feel decent, and when he wasn’t, she made him want to be.

He grimaced at each jerky halt of the train, counting down from three until the last before he’d never see her again (until after school.) His despair and boldness rose concomitantly with each new flood of passengers. It was typical for their most substantive conversations to take place right before her stop — deep and meaningful, when he was most fraught with all the lingering of an unconfident lover. The questions themselves were haphazard, but the heed in her answers determined the timbre of his days. An off question followed by an uninspired response could lead him down spirals of self-loathing Catholic guilt could never aspire to match.

“What’s you favorite verse in the Bible?” he finally breathed out.

She paused furtively, seeming to tease the question with her tongue behind pursed lips. “Wow,” she said simply. He knew not to say anything, to make himself wait for her answer. “I guess,” she inadvertently lured with long-drawn hesitation before her lips loosened … suddenly lost to the cruel, juxtaposed city worker’s voice railing over the intercom: “NEXT-STOP-STEINWAY-STREET-STAND-CLEAR-CLOSING-DOORS!” She instinctively prodded him out of the way and was about to hurriedly wave goodbye when she noticed.

Even if his face were able to hide the anguish, Christina knew. Theirs was an implied relationship. She stole the Bible from his hands and fingered the edges of the closed book before opening it from memory. Taking Daniel’s hand in hers, she thrust his index finger unromantically against the page as he inaudibly swooned for their convergence. She held his quivering digit steady for one last moment before letting go and running off to squeeze through shuttering doors.

Daniel looked down at the pages, his finger pointed in the margin between two verses in the Book of Proverbs. He read them once quickly before whispering their their words in mourning:

To man belong the plans of the heart, but from the LORD comes the reply of the tongue.

All a man’s ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the LORD.

What plans has God for a Daniel, he asked? He interrogated the supposed savior of mankind in silent lament; what plans had He for a man whose intentions were ever at battle with his God-given instincts? And if he was indeed a monster, not just to society but to the LORD, then from whom were these motives derived? From Him — or himself?

Daniel’s worrying eyes rose to the platform passengers scuttling past each other, searching. And when he couldn’t find her face, they rose further to God, searching. And when he couldn’t find Him, they fell back to his shoes, exhausted.

As the train continued its screaming trajectory through dark, interminable tunnels, so did Daniel.

Daniel got lost in the soiled scene taking place on the tracks beneath the subway platform at 51st and Lexington. He stared at two rats gnawing hungrily at the mangled corpse of a third and thought about the idea of progress.

We’re dirty things. We started off on all fours like all of God’s creatures, and with accidental reason we evolved some air of superiority so that we stood straight and tall with all the privilege of the universe strung along at our bipedal heels. But there’s still a slimy little reptile lurking like id under all that confirming cortex, a furtive homage to our barbarity still with us. We couldn’t stand the jungle heat so we created a society for ourselves. We’ve dressed ourselves up in clothes and war. We lost the taste for simian death and distanced ourselves using technology until we could no longer see the thing we killed with our eyes. Our fights became combat and our enemies became political. We put numbing condoms on our nature with lusty hope that we could last longer. Has it worked?

The E train flew in over the vultures and their carcass and Daniel boarded with the rest of humanity.

Winter comes ‘round every once in a while to remind you that you got no one to keep you warm. All that cold breath gives you a cover for your shiverin’ and keepin’ to yourself and holdin’ your books real tight and stayin’ inside.

These nights the black chill comes on real quick—and darker than before—so’s you don’t forget you can’t trust even your own eyes to keep you from stumblin’ over yourself. Nights like these, reason is a little lamp on your nightstand that whispers to your rollin’ ‘round that it ain’t too late to just git up and pour yourself a glass of numb. But it goes down the wrong hole and another, too, and still another, ‘till it leaves you sprawled out in the wet grass thanking Jesus for tall wooden fences and neighbors good enough to pretend they ain’t heard nothin’ last night.

And you cry to yourself and to God for birth and death and the whole rotten show between. And you ask the good Lord why he lets those little demons so close to you and if there ain’t no demons why he gets off on not tellin’ you who you are and what he wants from you. ‘Cause life’s too short to not know what, and if I wasn’t a preacher’s son I was on 4th Street until my cheeks were flush.

And when I wake up in the morning in a pile of my own sick, I wonder what’s the point of being good or bad or anything at all. ‘Cause I done both and I ended up here, while folk better than me have done pretty awful for themselves, while devils in suits get the whole lot in life and pretty tombstones with pretty words on ‘em when they die.

Father, sir, you did a lot of talkin’ about God’s love until I gave you a reason to bring out the belt. And I can’t say I’m mad at you anymore about any of that, ‘cause maybe all you were doin’ all along was showin’ me what God’s love was about. So you beat me. Well, I’m beaten. And I’m red and I’m sore and my eyes are sunk in and so far as I can tell God’s love ain’t nothin’ but a stray bitch on my lawn sniffin’ at my ass at dawn tellin’ me I’m late for work.

Nights were the hardest. After the sun settled behind confection homes, dark seeped in like monoxide and him here alone in a house full of mirrors again. The bourbon cap: another kept treasure lost, now only to physical reach. White-collared shirt undone two buttons down and his tie with slack, pressed against the back of his neck and around and hanging off the loveseat like a haphazard suicide he was too exhausted to complete.

Sprawled out there like a squatter in a familiar condemnment—the cable out, the phone line cut, the food rotted, spoiled, festered, putrefied—he alone with his thoughts and all of these goddamn mirrors. And the bottle (empty) and the mailbox (filled):

Letters from friends, from family, why haven’t you called? how are you handling? are you OK? and all the love and the guilt trips, you’ll get through this; late, second, third, final notices followed by notices of discontinuation of service; the grocery store coupons and notifications of subpoenas ad testifacendum and notices of court determination upon defendant’s nolo contendere plea. Outside there was a stack of papers hidden in tin and dictating in reverse chronology the past to which he’d refused to commit as far back as the first unopened postmark, dated July, 23, 2003.

That was when life stopped for Ever Brennan, almost three months back, and he fell into the same wasted position on the same piece of furniture on an evening as dark as this and him too.

The playroom was still littered with the toys his girls played with and his sink was still filled with the dishes his wife had stopped washing and his doorbell was still ringing with the lazy pleas of his prostitute for him to get off your fucking ass and open this fucking door ’cause I’m not coming through the window again.