Between Earth And Frank

x-teenth failed novel attempt by P. H. Madore http://freemadore.info Afterbirth that might have been titled “Between Earth and Frank.” Don't steal my shit, I'll kill you. Why would you want my writing anyway ? You're retarded, go away. Written: 11/3/08, 11/4/08, 11/5/08, 11/6/08, 11/8/08, 11/9/08, 11/14/08, 11/17/08, 11/18/08, 11/20/08, 11/21/08, 11/23/08, 11/26/08, 11/27/08, 11/29/08

Between Earth and Frank PART I 1A

GETTING INTO FIGHTS AND LOOKING SORRY FOR IT

That fucker thinks he's tough, looking at my eye like some sort of leprosy, but fuck him I still got the other eye, Frank thinks. At the cafeteria with a blackened eye again. Always doing this. Getting into fights and looking sorry for it. This weekend wasn't any different. Something crazy's happening lately, even three days ago with the fight. People are hearing his thoughts. He knows it's crazy, and perhaps he should get himself checked out, but he's sure he's not

saying anything, and yet people are still hearing all the awful thoughts in his head. The guy he was just talking about, the beefy mobster looking dumbass with the beard, he's looking around right now. Looking to see just who had the courage to say something that was never actually said. Outrageous as it seems, it hasn't all been negative. Yesterday, at the copy machine, a place he rarely visits, being a mailroom clerk and occasional errand boy, a beautiful woman with the red hair of a Nordic goddess and the body of an Egyptian queen heard him think something quite exactly to that effect. Almost lunch time, and so most people had already vacated that particular floor of the building, and so she, as with the guy currently scanning quite dumbly

his culprit, simply knew that something which had never been said had in fact been said. Voice soft and gravelly as 1931, she said, “Well, no one's ever said that before. How beautiful and daring and bold of you. I'm married, boy, and you're quite young, but I'm almost a numb slut hiding in the lapels of modern morality via the courtesy of a marriage into money. Or so my dutiful husband says. Listen, you're cute, black eye and all. I guess I'd probably be pretty turned on by the story of how you got it. Such a prole, like my roots, wonderful. Listen, here is my phone number.” “Wait,” he said quickly. “Is this happening?” Charming her all the more. All of this over something he'd swear he'd never said, to himself or to anyone, even to the

God he's long since lost faith in. She'd said, “Oh yes. This's just the beginning. I'm wet right now, but I can wait. I'm used to waiting. Forever. Jesus I hope you'll fuck me!” She looked around, coyly placing hand over ruby lips, regaining some sense of situational awareness. “I must be going now. Do call, okay? Hmm... a harmless kiss... so romantic... may I?” His eyes wide, he nodded: north-south. Yes. And so she placed her lips on his, and it was unlike the lips of the girls, the whores, he'd been with his entire life. An experience all its own. Her lips were wet and perfect and full and sensual. Her kiss was not an expression of lust or anything else, it was an expression of love wrapped up in lust with the benefit of some contact. He'd be crazy not to

call her, and in his right fist he held this scrap of paper where she'd so heavenly scribbled digits which would allow him to enter into a fantasy, random and sudden as it was, and crazy as it had begun, unlike any he'd ever dreamed. Promptly afterward he masturbated in the nearest bathroom. His only evidence that any of that had taken place was the piece of paper she'd written on. Supernaturally he blew his load onto the white tiles and felt the world was suddenly within his grasp. Now the beefy dick with the black hair, once again he looked at Frank. Frank responded with a you-must-be-crazy look. He held his lips firmly shut and transmitted the thought: the guy who did this, his arms were

bigger. I'll murder you. The guy couldn't take it, had no clue what was going on, and so stood up and left the cafeteria. He looked scared. Frank liked people to be scared, at least when they deserved it. It was something he didn't often think someone deserved, but there were always those who did. And so he felt no guilt.

1B

Not an alcoholic, but this Friday Frank can't think of anything but getting annihilated drunk throughout the evening, throughout the weekend. Though he knows he'll regret it and

all that comes of it. He'd rather be writing or fucking or doing anything that might add up to some progress in the pathetic life he's carved out for himself. Anything besides drinking, but by the time a given week comes to a close he's so angry and anxious to shove off and away from the world as he knows it, a place dire and unfriendly to him and his class of people, a term which in his mind has never had any exact definition, just the emotional satisfaction of existence—a class, something he can say he belongs to. The time will come, his bosses will be long gone, always leaving early on Fridays, and he will punch his name into the electronic clock and be gone from this desolate office building. Speaking of the building.

He'd seen so many like it around town, that it made him some mornings feel like part of a conspiracy at blandness. While certain things in the world were meant to progress and gain beauty from their own progression, the business world seemed to be going the opposite direction, even down to the around the necks of the professionals Frank worked quietly, invisibly around. Speaking of these professionals. What was with all the instruments of constriction they used on themselves? A tie, a watch, a wallet—all things you'd have found on any of them. Frank had never seen the purpose of a wallet, though he owned one. When he went to work he tried to seem as “normal” as he could. He'd never understood the meaning

of the term, but he'd always also thought that to spend too much time on such a broken set of definitions as “normality,” was every bit as bad as desiring to be normal, and perhaps even founded in said desire. Sometimes he had epiphanies like that, most days he did not. In this regard he was like every other man. And he'd grown up like every other man, from the womb forward only a few things had been much different about the life of Frank. Today liquor ruled his thought process. There had to be something to rule it. Otherwise he'd probably not function well for long in his role as a cog at a machine called Dynasty Corporation. There was little so dynamic or royal about a place that dealt in the sale of

office supplies. Today liquor ruled his thought process. Thoughts of cool drinks in snifter glasses or shots devoured from the comfort of an outside table with a cigarette in his hand or, most likely, the comfort of the bottle as it left the freezer and reintroduced itself to him. He'd put some rum in there, in the freezer, a week before. Every night since then he'd opened the freezer. He'd secured the bottle. He'd looked at the bottle. He'd taken a good look at it, and then opened it, and taken a good sniff of it. A good whiff. If he was to get drunk every night of the week, he'd be an alcoholic. Something Frank was not was an alcoholic, so each night he resisted the temptation. And quite well. This was Friday. Though there was always

work to be done on the weekends and sometimes he was drafted to get some overtime work, a thing which Frank didn't mind, and perhaps the bosses picked up on that and thus never gave him any, there was only a small chance that he would still be enlisted to do any of it. It was the path to promotion, the whole working on the weekend thing, and he doubted he'd ever see that path in all its cocksucking glory. He didn't mind working the weekends because the building was deserted and once he'd smoked a joint with one of the janitors whom he'd caught with it. That day rated as “awesome,” because he survived it without the any suicidal thoughts or the need to get drunk. He just went home, devoured leftover Chinese food, and went to sleep. Next morning he woke

up and didn't have to work. He'd been able to write his first poem in months then.

1B-1

Not an alcoholic, but this Friday Frank can't think of anything but getting annihilated drunk throughout the evening, throughout the weekend. The work day ends, as all such must, and Frank is elated, for the weekend has begun, and over the past few years he's realized that that is where the most life takes place. All across America, people die five days a week and live two or three. So many are lost in the race that it seems it's been this way since the dawn of time, but there are a precious few who know better.

Bottom-feeders, much like Frank, who refuse to better themselves. A rebellion all its own, they simply subsist as best they can, work whatever jobs come their way, and carry on in just such a manner as affords them the most happiness. Happiness is currency to these precious few thorns in the side of society, pimples on the ass of progress. They're not complainers, no, that's too broad a definition, and perhaps a compliment for them. Frank has hashed this all out in his own version of rum diaries. He writes journalistic, often retentive, cataloging and chronicling the life of a proletarian outcast. They have no friends. Once, Frank wrote: “Freedom is found in solitude, often with a caffeine headache and three days laid to waste

in the pursuit of some goal, and unchained, it comes from within thus.” Someday he'll find meaning within all the words he's filled a bunch of notebooks with. Not just any notebooks. He has two preferences when it comes to his haphazard gonzo writing, and they are: 200-page composition notebooks and Paper Mate pens. Though he hates the logo of the Paper Mate, thinks it retarded and insulting. There is no better time for him to know he's crazy than when he has arguments with unimportant items like pens or computer mice. As usual, tonight his intentions are to stay home, get drunk, and keep himself busy. Perhaps he'll read but probably he'll just stand outside on his first-floor balcony smoking a

cigarette, until the liquor gets the best of him and he must soon make his way to the bed piece. Bed piece, head piece: don't you love her madly? The bus ride to the other side of town is too slow. A bum three persons away has a brown-paper wrapped pint of something, is sipping it as if no one notices. Frank offers him the price of the pint for a good haul off it. The bum gives him two good swigs and smiles and tries to engage him in conversation. It's been too long since Frank was homeless; he used to feel he at least some talk to the bums of the world. Now he didn't feel anything, least of all a debt to anyone but his landlords and bill collectors, which were few. He spent every dime that came his way, weekly, but he didn't

have to. It just happened that way, and sometimes he hated himself but most days he did not. In the door. Stripped naked in the kitchen. Fixed the first drink and changed into something more comfortable, a pair of pajama pants. Easy enough to stay alone in pajama pants, he thought. Then he thought of college and high school girls wearing pajama pants. He had a boner then and decided to masturbate. It took some time. He did this so mechanically that it would never have given him the opportunity to think that perhaps most people didn't masturbate. He'd have only seen it as one more thing setting him apart from, above society as a whole. That's all. Just one more thing to outcast him in this play on lives. Were there gods,

they'd surely not be the kind of mad hating fools that the various puritan tribes made them out to be. He'd realized somewhere along the line that hating religion was also cliché, and if there was one thing he was not, it was cliché. Hours pass and he is drunker and drunker, and still awake at around ten PM. He thinks it's probably time to start really getting drunk. He throws on a holey white t-shirt, shoves ten dollars from a kitchen drawer into his pocket, and leaves the apartment, headed to a nearby liquor store. It is here that the fight will take place. There is a ghetto type buying some kind of vodka and there is an Asian buying wine. Rice wine. Frank has a funny loud thought he'll never remember later about stereotypical

ethnicity and this is when he's attacked. Bam, bam, the man is throwing him around the store, crazed and raging. He's too drunk to resist, and in a way he enjoys the pain. Soon the police will arrive and Frank will not file a report, press charges. The Asian will swear Frank said something, but the store clerk will say the Asian is crazy and that he wants to press charges, file a report, that he never wants to see the crazy Gook again. Frank is given his bottle of rum on the house for being so cool about the whole thing, matter-a-fact make it two, and goes home wondering what the fuck. Next morning he wakes up with the black eye and little recollection.

2A

TRANQUILIZED FREUDIAN SLIPS

Steady now, steady now. He's awake this morning, thinking about calling the woman. A storm of written pages. He'll be crazy not to. Wise men would mutter such. First he must envision an original conversation. If for nothing but his own satisfaction. Somewhere buried within the pages written the night before, there are words worth saying to a woman of her caliber. Of this he thinks he's sure. Doesn't get sick anymore in the morning and despises sentences that begin with pronouns. Once he counted every word in every page and slimmed them down accordingly, but in those days he didn't have stories to tell. These days he sees

through the rare cracks of society. These nights, he swears he sees the desolation silver of the moonlight. Reading through the pages beside the mattress on the floor of his room he's finding things. Worth savoring, which leave a greedy taste in his mouth. It's a greedy taste that keeps people interested in life, he's figured for some years now. He flips over a typewritten manuscript and with his red pen, on the hardwood panel floor of the $320-per-month room, he writes the basics, figuring these are where all lives must begin: I was born in 1985. In a city by the sea named Providence. My name is Frank Zachary Mathias. My name is ridiculous. Things like this occur in the world, this much has always been known.

This last sentence is ridiculously preachy, he tells himself, and crosses it out. Now there is chaos and confusion on the page: it's all in red, and he uses red to moderate the better crap he comes up with. This is something else completely. This even requires precursors and other things to happen, so he begins these. Showering, a must. Yes. Picking up the room, the best it can be picked up. There is no furniture besides his mattress, unsheeted, and this ratty brokedown camping chair he found outside a dumpster some streets not too far away to tote it one night home from work, when he'd spent all his bus fare. There were times he found it crazy that he worked in such a monied institution and still managed to run out of money. Such was the way of the world as

it stood, he believed, though he likewise believed that all things standing were bound to one day not stand, that is, to fall, and occasionally he recited vague inner predictions of the end of society as it had “for too long” been known, and in these moments felt more cliché than ever but couldn't bring himself to care. Couldn't bring himself to bat an eye at his own false melody, for he knew also that things like that were bound to happen, and things like that were bound to end as well. Somewhere in the distance, he was sure, abandoned guitar strings were strummed. This much had the ability to comfort him. First sin was something not worth scratching on chalk boards in societal dining halls from a thousand years before. All that

madness was bound to matter never more. Switchblades were once the wave of his future, he'd once believed, but didn't bother to carry out that future. Never robbed a man. Felt offbalance whenever he really thought it through. And so many prime targets at the workplace, weren't there? No more than any other such kind of place, surely, but they were there, nonetheless, waiting to be raped of their money. Like whores who couldn't sell what they were offering. He tried again. A city by the sea, 1985, I was born. The first thing I remember is my mother getting angry that I'd beaten another little boy up. Better. Something like that could develop into a conversation with a woman like her.

Apparently she had things to say. He remembered her words, not exactly, and then was disturbed by the memory of what had started the whole thing. She'd heard his thoughts. Somehow the volume of his thoughts had been turned up so high that it made it through the thick skulls of other people and they understood what he was transmitting, although his transmission was involuntary. The whole idea scared the fuck out of him. In nights for years he'd dreamed of such a day, but he figured it a fluke, and maybe she was playing a game with him. Maybe she wasn't real and he was flaking out. Maybe he was losing his shit. Maybe. And then the other guy, what of him? The other guy never actually said anything, he never made a scene, not the way she did. In her

case there had been no doubt of who must have thought that out loud. Tranquilized Freudian slips. Lima beans. His thoughts would sometimes wander so vicious, uncontrollable. The piece of paper he'd scribbled on, he took it and set it on the bed. Next to it he set the cell phone, first having to get it out of his coat pocket. Winter had come again already. This was a thing that amazed him every year. Another year had passed and he was still alive, still having headaches and still wondering things, still looking forward to a glory that may never come. Somehow, if he just kept writing this mad journalistic prose, somehow something might come out of all of it. Perhaps only a piece of prose, very short, worth publishing, but if published in just the right

place, it could take him away from all this. It could change his life and pay his bills. It was not a thing unprecedented. Such things had happened in the short history of the large country he lived in, a place called America. Such things had happened. He could write a life just this way. And as he neatly stacked the pages out of order in the corner, on top of a mad stack of much the same, most of which he wasn't proud of, he realized that perhaps that had been what he had been doing all along, and he'd just not had the gumption, the ambition to notice. Possible, possible. Steady now, steady now, the winds are blowing in your favor. These are the kinds of thoughts that rolled through his head exactly at times like these. The call must be placed.

2B

The number was dialed as if by itself and the call was connected and the woman on the other end whispered. She said, “Already, I know who this is. It's grand you've called.” “Verbosity is a crime,” he told her. “So may it be, and I, a criminal,” she chimed in. Perhaps he was falling in love with her. But oh-no probably not. “What have you been doing all Saturday morning?” he asked. Seemed a valid question. “I have been wanting to know who you

are.” “And I the same, no less and of course. I love the way life treats me good occasionally and most of the time I have nothing to speak of. Some days I feel elated, mood bettered and humorous. Others soberly humorless. I can't be to blame, or can I?” “You can. You the same—as in yourself or myself?” “Yourself, of course, beautiful. I am mystified by our first meeting, and I didn't much believe this number was real.” “You commented on reality before, the other day or wasn't it yesterday?” “Yes, this all seems unreal. I'd tell the truth about it all, but you'd be flabbergasted and unbelieving.”

“You could try me right now, or wait until we see each other in person. I never have these conversations in my normal life. I want a secret life, that's all. If you or any good many could provide such, I'd be astounded and suckered in for life. Life. Life is what I'm seeking. Is that a pursuit worthy?” “Worthy? Yes. However, I am not a good man.” “Our dialog is so... so it's own, lover.” “A lover who's not made love to you?” “That much can be cured, handsome. Listen, my name is Linda. I am older than I look. I take care of my body. Right now, if you wish, I will lie to my husband,” she whispered aloud. “I will tell him I am going to the gym, and I will come and love you until the heavens

end. I will not want to go, but duty will drive me to, I am good like that.” “If you are to come here, be warned: this is the place of a pauper. I live in a different world, and I am younger at that, so I haven't even had the benefit of a life to spend in pursuit of the kind of life that was handed to you.” “Right, right, this much I expected, dear. Will you let me come?” “By cab or by bus or by the prettiest moth you can find, yes. First we must make introductions. Phone introductions will work. You are Linda and I am Frank. You are Ms. Linda and I am Mr. Frank. I was born in 1985, and you were born not too long before that. You have red hair and mine is brown. There, introductions over, all the rest can be learned in

pillow talk. Surely you'll deal with the shoddiness of my dwelling?” “Sex is what I'm after, and conversation. The latter you provide quite well, if you don't mind my saying so. And so I say so. I love to repeat things, sometimes I get a good taste in my mouth by the words I spit out of it and I can't help but want to keep it. I hope you'll nevermind that, lover. May I come now?” “Or before, as soon as possible. Here is the address: 1039 Harlem Avenue. I will stand outside at the position of attention until you have arrived.” “I don't know what the position of attention is, but attention is what my husband did wrong, although I never truly loved him, not like I feel for you already, like I feel this

thing where... Well, that much can be worked out with our bodies, yes? I have the birth control, have you any diseases?” “Of course not, I never get any sex, or at least not any unprotected sex. A rich woman can carry my child anyway, though, so whatever may happen, let us let it happen...” “Right, right. A cab to 1039 Harlem Avenue will be called momentarily. I can't wait to see you, to see your face as you reach the point of ecstasy only two lovers can give each other. I see you lust for greatness, perhaps this can go on, perhaps it can't, please don't take anything personally, just take it for what it is: as of now, I am only looking to fuck in as vulgar a manner as can be done, and so we will, but perhaps more can lead from there. We can plot

to murder my husband. Oh I said that out loud. Someday I'll believe every word you say, I am a sucker that way... And well, I ramble, I'll be seeing you!” “Right.” And click and click, his erection stood and he wasn't sure if the conversation he'd just had was real. He loved the feeling of surreal that surrounded this woman. Linda. How many women in the world were named Linda? Oh, who was he kidding? Such a name was common enough. The whole affair made him lust for a cigarette, not greatness—but fuck it if she took him wrong, at least he'd be getting the physical satisfaction out of it. And with a piece like that, he'd be crazy to complain.

2B-1

The rich woman, name Linda, or so he remembered, she arrived nearly an hour later. He'd spent a solid fifteen minutes cleaning his room. There weren't many possessions to clutter the place. The bed, the printed journalistic hack writing, computer, printer, an ashtray, and cellular telephone. A closet in which he hung his work clothes, a built-in ironing board within. A floor on which to store his non-work clothes. The one thing he sometimes felt he was missing was his own refrigerator, though it was not as if anyone ever actualy messed with his stuff in the shared fridge. Everything else he spent his money on ended up as either broken glass on the

sidewalk, crumpled packages in the garbage, or returnable bottles when he didn't feel apathetic. He stood outside the building where he lived, a two-story clapboard kind of tenement complete with flat roof and poor design. Some of the things inside were fixed up to look more expensive than they were, the things a potential renter might see when she walked through the front door. Outside, the city's dregs, desolation and depression, needles littering the ground and broken glass and prostitutes walking the streets most of the time, taking turns on inbound Johns or potential Johns. Everywhere, unattended garbage. Waste. Neglect. Neglect and waste. Words that came to mind in description of the surroundings of where he lived. And Frank had picked up on all of this

more keenly waiting for Linda than he ever had at any other time. For the kind who liked to write things down, he'd never quite been observant enough. He'd seen things, of course, but it was easy for the whole of the civilized world to fade into background and supportive noise for him. So it was that he saw this early afternoon the true chaos of his immediate surroundings. He didn't feel angry, or even all that nervous, though nervousness became part of him for the first time in so long he couldn't remember. Nervous that she would arrive at her destination, see the filth that surrounded his home, and tell the cab driver she was sorely mistaken, and he would never hear from her again. And he would see her at the workplace, and she would ask him to stop calling her.

Surely she would make up some kind of story about how her husband had gotten involved in the whole thing, and he'd not believe her, and perhaps with his newfound powers he would communicate his doubt with nothing but his mind and be granted in that moment an opportunity to fuck with her. She arrived. She did. Majestic, like a queen paying a visit to a village in the outer reaches of her kingdom. Queendom, in this case, being that she came across like a black widow who'd never known even a hint of guilt. The expected look of distaste or disgust on her face was not there. Neither the expected vibe of condescension and self-righteously uptight-lipped expression. Instead, she, like himself, did not seem to

notice. A sigh of relief overtook him, and he didn't bother to hide it. Realizing suddenly that hiding anything would ruin this moment, this day, even the rest of his life, he decided against making anything less than perfectly obvious, even the fact that he knew, right then, that he was madly in love with this woman. The fact of her societal inclination was lost on him; he'd grown up poor and would happily achieve the grave as such. Again the surreal feeling, again the notion that perhaps all of this was a trick of his overactive imagination. Again with all of that. Apparently she noticed only him. As he now only noticed her. Someday the crud of the city, the echelon of her lover's caste, would make itself clear to her, as it had today to he himself. That day could be an eternity from

now, she figured, and neither of them cared much for eternity or notions thereof. The cab, a typical yellow workhorse with a finish line running the length of it, sat in the center of the street, its driver counting change, and said driver began to say things, to shout things after her. Frank asked her, “Need you pay this man any mind, or what?” “No, no, I gave him a hundred and he is probably confused. If he's the smart crook I'm sure he is, he'll be gone before a moment or two has passed.” About this she was right. Inside the house they stepped. Linda made a comment, the place looked better inside than out. Frank said his room was another story. Not appalled, she said it was sort

of romantic in its own way. Its own mad way, is how she put it. “How long have you got?” Frank inquired. “Oh, long enough... surely this place isn't good enough for you?” “It's fine. Fine. I've lived in worse. I've been homeless. You see there is a place to hang my work clothes, a place to stash my non-work clothes, a place for me to sleep, and a means for me to write.” “I see that you have written. I would like to read these words. Rather, I would like you to read them to me. You know, I have always sort of envied people like you, Frank. You are luckier than I in a way. You've got character, you've got style. I've got money, and I don't

even class. I--” “Oh, you have class, my dear, that you do. Please, sit, will you?” And so she did. And so he did sit beside her, lighting a comfortable cigarette. She didn't complain, nor did she ask for it when she plucked it form his mouth and began to puff greedily. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen a person of wealth smoke that way, not unless they happened to be drunk or under duress. Could it be an act, was she pretending? Well, if so, it was for his benefit, right? Thus, who cared? Who could? Just look at this woman—so supple from chin to chest, stomach to ankle. Perfection of its own. It happened again, just then, as he had these thoughts, as his arousal triggered itself.

She heard, again, something which had never been said. She'd been looking off out the window, waiting for him to make a move, though she was completely comfortable with kicking the sex games off, and then these words came through, in a voice which sounded exactly like his though not somehow, words of pure passion, perhaps the voice of passion itself: an act, pretending, ah but she is so gorgeous, from top to bottom, perfection, and so I don't care... “You know just how to charm a lady, don't you? Well, I'm not a lady, so your charm works twice as well... Fuck me now or forever hold your peace.” “Here, in my hell-hole, and sober?” he verified. “Oh, god, yes.”

The deal was sealed and soon the first of many deeds was done. First time around his passion got the best of him. Years had passed since he'd fucked sober. Whiskey dick was his friend, but this time around it just wasn't there. And oh well. Steady now, steady now. Not disappointed, she said he was young yet, that she would train him. They had all the time in the world. Right then she didn't care if she ever returned to her husband's bed. There was nothing very glamorous about being rich, she explained, more often it was boring. Which is why she did things to entertain herself. She too wrote, she painted, she did a lot of things very badly if only for the release. Security was not a provision of liberty, mental or otherwise. Four times that afternoon, and two more

by early evening. Neither could get enough of the other. Both felt like virgins, newly discovering the genius of their own failed human design. Lovemaking came naturally for them both, they were both just those kinds of people, or so they thought. Then began the drinking, the excuse-me-honey call to her husband, a matter of courtesy, and she found herself explaining exactly what was going on, and her husband's reaction was simple: “I have been fucking the tennis instructor for five years.” “Yes, I know this,” she told him. “I know you could care less for any sport, unless it's sport-fucking. Which you're not that great at, just saying.” “I know. But she pretends I am. She wants

our money. Perhaps this Joe of yours wants the same. Careful of that, hmm?” “I think he's content where he is. Neither of us have the balls to divorce the other anyway, at least not right now, so anyway, I will see you when I see you, hopefully you understand I've never loved you.” Surreal. Frank thought: surreal. The phone hung up, she said, “Yes, this is crazy to me as well. But oh well and so be it this is the way I live. I live free when I can, enslaved the week long. Every week. As I must. Please don't ruin this for me, may we now get drunk?” “Of course. Anything, name it.” She named it.

3A

THE DISTANCE BETWEEN MORTALITY AND REASON

“We were scared and tired and barely seventeen...” --The Gaslight Anthem

As has been said, Frank was born Francis Zachary Mathias in Providence, Rhode Island, to Peter Hubert Mathias III and Penny Jean Lifshin on Janauary 23rd, 1985. Average parents, though it's important to note that his mother will never let him forget that her New Year's Eve was ruined that year because of her pregnancy. Frank's whole thing is that it's not his fault, he didn't choose to be concieved or born. Peter met Penny at an REO Speedwagon

concert and never let her go, at least not until Frank's tenth year, by this time having had a second child with her. Restless and wanting to ramble, Peter did just that, and things haven't been the same between him and Frank since then. Divorce doesn't go over well in the Catholic church, and it's not the kind of thing that can be easily shrugged off, but Frank and his mother have managed, and Frank's father was at least deeply apologetic when it came time for such things to be discussed. For the situation it left the kids in, one that was becoming increasingly common around that time. Eventually his father landed a steady job somewhere out west, and the child support checks became more regular, and the financial struggle seemed to lighten up around the

house, but by this time Frank was almost a teenager, and whether he knows or admits it or not, he was already ruined by then. He knows he's broken somehow, though some days he feels alright, and the chances are it all happened before his twelfth year. Never molested sexually; no, it was just his mind, like so many other kids in his day, was raped by too much thinking about things that kids shouldn't have to think about, or at least the same people who put them through it would say that they should not have to. Frank always felt that mentioning things like this had the ability to lead any conversation or narrative down the wrong road, one of debate. As if such things are up for debate. It's so simple: be good to children, don't make them think about things

unless it's a means to challenging their developing intellect. Grew up a loner, of sorts. There were friends. They all seemed to share the same name. Now Frank is 21 and he can't say he has any friends. He lives so far away from all the people he once knew. At seventeen he was on his own, didn't want to be a leech. His mother would have had him on for as long as he wanted to stay in her home. Perhaps it was a bit of that restlessness that his father felt so compelled by that drove him, a genetic transferral of courage. The balls to make a world supposedly for the taking like a preacher's daughter clearly for the taking. If that makes any sense, I don't know, it's something Frank said once, and I kind of liked

it, so I repeated it here. One friend he'll never forget, well now before that, let's dissect a bit about why he has trouble forgetting people or places. Perhaps when his father had to go, for his own reasons which Frank has come to respect, perhaps it was then that Frank became reliant on memory as a means to keep people alive. When the phone never rings with their voice on the other end, when the gravel of the driveway never crunches with the sound of their truck tires, the only way to keep someone you love alive is to remember everything you can about them. If you get to doing this unconsciously later in life, like with your first love, for instance, maybe it's more concentrated. If you do it as a little kid, perhaps it can fuck you up: perhaps you'll start

doing it with all people. So maybe that's why Frank can remember the smell of the shampoo in his first best friend's mother's hair when she bent down to kiss him and his friend good night, because she was just that kind of goodhearted Irish New England woman who never felt her love was something to be kept inside, always was showing it to everyone, and never turned out to be some kind of modern soap operatic version of Missus Robinson. Maybe if you have to remember everything it becomes a means of survival and you do it. So this friend of his, his first, his name began with a J. Frank drinks all the time to get rid of memories these days, and he'll never admit that much to you. You walk up to Frank and tell him he's drinking to forget, he'll say

something contrary. And he'll make it sound as cretin as possible, so you won't get the hint that maybe th thing you had to say could make sense, because Frank wants people to believe he is simple. Survival is easier for the simpler minds of the world, Frank has seen that his whole life, and the world hasn't changed enough in twenty-three years for him to change his mind. The friend whose name began with a J, this friend could have been great. Computers or business, he was going places. When they were thirteen Frank smoked a lot of dope. He loved it, he didn't have to think of things, he didn't have to remember that people had already died, people had already left, and once this friend, this J, well he showed up down to the trailers where Frank and his mother and

little sister were living, and said, “Let's go to the movies, all of us,” and there was a van full of people. Most were mutual acquaintances. Frank protested: I've got no cash. Worry not, they said, we have plenty. All of it stolen, it turned out, but Frank didn't know that. He was high and wouldn't have cared anyway. As long as he was high, the world seemed an alright place to exist. He read books still, but kept that to himself. Read a lot of books. Which is beside this point, the point being this guy, this guy who was driving the van. Well this motherfucker. He asked Frank what was wrong with Frank, on their way to the movie theater across town. Frank shrugged, said, “I'm high.” Frank will never forget this moment. This is the part where the guy, with his older-guy goatee

thing going on and his propensity for smoking cigarettes, he said, “No, no, man, you're doing it all wrong: crime is a much better high.” Frank thought this one of the most retarded things he would ever hear. He started a journal that night for the purpose of recording that this retardation, so that he could remember. Before his friend dropped him off, the kid, whatever his name was, probably started with an R, well, Frank said to his friend, R sitting right there, he said, “Look, this R guy is trouble. He's going to end up in prison. Don't end up there with him.” J ignored Frank, and R just smirked at him, and this is when Frank started losing his faith in people. Not in humanity, in people. In people and their ability to make positive choices for

themselves.

3A-1

There were friends growing up, sure and of course there were, but it is the nature of friends to drift apart, unless they become lovers, which can go either way, but usually goes the way that cynics believe such things are destined to. Frank is naturally a cynic. And at seventeen, as has been said, he struck out on his own to take the world by storm for himself. Long before he knew what truly being a social person or a socialist meant. Long before, he struck off on his own. And time always went slower for him. Months in Frank's world of progression were the equivalent of years for his peers, all of

whom were destined for college and certain mediocrity: numb and distracted. The two years he spent before he first went to jail, during which he held more jobs than he could remember. Worked for temp agencies and labor pools. Telemarketers and drug dealers and. Once tanned, living in the deep Red South, he occasionally became gainfully employed by going to where the Mexicans were picked up near the home improvement supply warehouse superstores by keeping his mouth shut and working hard. The cash was good, that's all he knew. And most of it went to his habits: cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana. Habits he may never break. Sobriety wasn't for Frank Mathias, a conclusion reached too early to count as much of a conclusion.

Ah, but he was virile then, and vitriolic and victorious. Memories of his “prime,” such a short time ago, indeed a whisper through time if anything, always bring a crisp taste to Frank's mouth. Probably always will. Because sometime after doing his first stint in jail, a situation which had origins he may never be sure of, something changed within him. Reality set in. The dream became the lie. The world was no longer an oyster for drinking. No longer a cup overflowing. And this haphazard history brings us to the present, the more important present, the one where Frank doesn't care if you care, and won't even have the motivation to get into such a discussion. Where he has nothing to prove and knows he has nothing to prove. He's no

longer working his way up in the world, he's working his way through the hours between now and inevitable demise; the distance between mortality and reason. Frank has landed the best job he's ever had, or anyway the least physically demanding. He has reached the point where ambition is more of a notion than a reality. He's managed to kick the dope habit, but drinking overtakes him. Seems like the minute he became legal it started to make sense to drink more. The freezer always has liquor in it, bottles chilled and legendary. This is the longest he's been at one address since he left his mother's. This is the longest he's been at one job since he scraped together enough money for a month's rent and got himself off the streets. That took some

gumption, but often enough, and he writes about this constantly in those wacky journals of his, he can't even see that same person in the mirror. Though not a day goes by that he doesn't think about his days on the streets. How romantic, to dive in a dumpster for your supper. No, he'd be serious if he said this out loud. If you gave him the chance, if you bought him a drink and said, “Tell unto me your story,” he'd say something like this with all seriousness. “To shower in the bathrooms of beautiful women trying to save and smothermother you; to dumpster dive for your supper from the best restaurants in a given city; to find Gucci shoes on the sidewalk outside an upscale bar... how romantic the bump-about's life can be.” Perhaps he has said things like this. If he is

good at remembering everything about the people who make an impact on his wayward life, he is terrible at remembering himself, the one living said life. Frank drinks almost daily, though most nights he doesn't get drunk anymore. Frank has sold out, in his own opinion. To those who never lived on the edges of society, this doesn't even seem a sensible proposition. Selling out is a good thing in their world. But Frank knows that Frank has sold out, and that is what makes all things real to Frank: Frank thinks it is so, and therefore it is or will become so. Things are never as perfect in reality as they are when you think them. Frank is never impressed by his own thoughts. One day, he'll be well-known for this self-criticism. If only Frank could see in the

bathroom mirror the makings of the next lost lover poet for the ages. Ages. If only. Frank has sold out, but things are better as a result. He always pays his rent, is never late for work, always has money for cigarettesliquor-copypaper-ink and once in awhile something else will bite into his meager paychecks. Thing is, he's working now in the kind of organization where all this is exactly enough to get him where he might want to go. That's Frank's whole problem as we find him, projecting thoughts into audible form as a result of their passionate force. Whole problem is that he doesn't anymore know where he wants to go. Some days he is sure that this is not a reference to the work place, where he never feels like he can be himself, which at least

he could do back when he was working manual labor jobs, that is, speak freely and still be fed. Free thought is a bane to the existence of plain building corporations like this one, where he's a mail clerk these days. And this is how we find Frank, and the year is 2005, and all of this is true, even those which seem impossible. There is a Zippo lighter. Back in the day, and rest assured we will soon return to the present, but back in those days, with J and R and the rest of the retards that bore a mediocratic fool like Frank, Frank and J stole a pair of matching Zippos. Frank was never much of a thief but it was the county fair and he was feeling bold and J always spurred things on, up until he ended up a felon, he did, and now he seemed so defeated, all the time,

deflated, but nonetheless, there were these two Zippos. The only two like them they'd ever seen anywhere. The game was you had to throw these darts at these balloons. They spent their tickets on throwing all the darts they could afford, they hit the balloons, then to get a prize you had to throw a ball and knock the prize down. “Fuck madness,” Frank might grumble. All their tickets, and these were poor kids, and instead of the Zippos they get something lame, a stuffed toy maybe, no one remembered any of that. This Zippo sitting on the window sill in his room, this is the story of it. The carnie fucked them. He said, no, you take the stuffed toy, when they pleaded with him. They made a raitonal argument: hey man, we've been here over an hour at your gay little stand. We gave

you all our fucking tickets, we don't have anymore. Just give us our goddamn Zippos and we'll leave peacefully. The carnie said no. Moron. As if these kids had anything to lose. So they walked away, pissed, and talked it over. It was decided: they'd take that bottle of whatever, something cheap, from J's mother's boyfriend and they would smash it in the field near the fair, and they would sleep there, and that night, they would hop the turnstiles and take their prize. And walk away as if nothing happened. They were fourteen years old, these dumbass kids. Before the passion left his veins, when he was never wrong. They succeeded. The carnie smelled like heroin, but Frank had no inkling about heroin then, that ame later, and he survived it, but anyway, the carnie

looked dead, smelld like burnt hair, and they took their Zippo lighters right off the shelf, and they walked away from there that night elated. And years would pass before too many things went wrong. And they'd doctor those lighters, they were authentic and not often seen where they came from. No, nothing nice was ever seen. A fucking Cadillac was a luxury car. A Corvette, passing through, must be. And none of this makes any sense, but it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to because I wasn't there for any of this. I am just painting a picture of the madness that developed our passionless unmotivated friend Frank who all of a sudden has these upsurges of emotion which somehow, somefuckinghow, as you've seen already, they translate into ESP or something. Whatever it

might be called. He's going through this all of a sudden and this is why: once, he lived; it's like he's a walking ghost and he's transmitting things from the great beyond. Answers, translations, adding up to simple communication he's too paralyzed to say aloud. As with Linda, or the punkass bully motherfuckers. That's what's going on. In plain English. And all of this will be rewritten, but I'll leave this line so you know. So you know how this all was so frustrated and broken. The things you're telling me aren't making any sense, that's what you're saying, and that's because you need to let go. Or perhaps you don't need to let go, no, but Frank has, and that's where he is. And thus into the present, enough of this sidestepping conventional

bullshit. Linear time is for historians, and this is anything but a history, or rather, anything but a complete history. This is between Earth and Frank.

[heavy editing must be done to 3A-1, 3A, and all previous, of course—BUT FOCUS ON 3A-1, develop rough coal into diamonds]

3B

In the last city, there was punk rock. And shows thereof. Music Frank could really dig. Bands that would within two years be multinationally famous were thanking Frank and the rest of the tiny club crowds for showing up. During all this, Frank got the ambition to pick up a guitar.

He knew not what he was doing, he knew only that he liked the feeling of the the guitar in his hands, the body of it resting against his hip, his other hand poised to speak music. He so desired to do it, so desired to do it well, that he quit a job one Wednesday and sat in a frat house from then until the following Monday morning with that guitar. Food came his way now and then, everyone assumed he belonged where he was. From a previous job he knew one of the frat boys, so things worked out just fine. Some of the parties, that frat boy would pass by and be like, “Man, yer always here these days.” And Frank found no need to argue. It was cool enough just to sit still and appear to be able to play a guitar. The genius instrument.

He played with it and played with it, not knowing to whom it belonged. At times he had epiphanies about it, as if he could stay right there forever and nothing would change, nothing would break down, the guitar would always remain in his hands and he would always remain clever enough to do anything with it. Things don't always remain, though, especially those which do not exist. He tried and tried, but in the end the guitar turned out to be much like the pen for him. Once in awhile something brilliant came out of hours of constant attempts and assaults on laziness within, and the immediacy of his music was exactly the tone he'd been going for—most of the time, it sounded like pure unfounded unprincipaled crap, and Frank had never even

bothered to learn how to tune a guitar. He figured lessons would come around eventually, but he was not in a place of learning. So that Monday morning, all the frats passed out where they lay, around the building, he felt it necessary to leave that place, possibly to, with much regret and little regard, find a place to sell his time to like a normal person, like the person he was once again up until that Wednesday night slash Thursday morning, the common worker. He stood up and, without thinking, walked out with the guitar. The guitar player knew right away, even asleep, but could only grin: the burden of the creative spirit had finally been lifted. And now the curse had taken over Frank, and nothing ever came of it. Not even one good

song. Just covers, the ability to do what had been done before. A metaphor for life. For the careful road. And so on. For everything not borrowed, for everything owned: a metaphor.

4

WEEKENDS ALL COME TO AN END

They spent the weekend drunk together, Frank and Linda did. Unreality was the overwhelming vibration. A good vibration. Sunday evening, as she prepared to go, her clothes clean thank to the washer and dryer in the basement of the boarding-house style place where Frank lived, Linda said to Frank: “We

must not carry this over to work. I hope it is enough for you that my husband is fully aware and does not care. Please do not dare, we both have our lives to lead. For now they have intertwined, they have, but let us not be fooled into thinking this means anything.” “You must be forgetting that I am a man. Men are pigs, love. Perhaps I couldn't wait for you to leave.” “Nonsense,” she said sharply, almost angry. A tear forming. “Of course it was, don't take anything I ever say so seriously.” “This weekend would never have happened if I did not.” “About that. Nothing was ever said. You heard a thought of mine, and I remain unsure

of how this whole thing works. I think I need some kind of examination of my head,” he explained. “Right, right, sure. Why you'd not take credit for the brilliant un-obvious pick-up line, I can't figure, Frank, but I don't care. The sex was good enough, satisfactory building up to ecstasy, you were out of a practice--” “With a woman of your caliber, maybe--” “But still you carried me through to orgasm after orgasm, and that is all I was after this weekend. There will be plenty of time to discuss anything else, any other arrangement.” “Yes.” “Yes.” “So here is one last drink to weekend love affairs, right, Frank?”

“One last toast. We shall use the rest of the bourbon. You stocked this place pretty well, I hope you know. There remains rum and beer and cheap champagne.” “Bourbon it is. I love the way it makes my teeth look.” “I love the way it makes you look.” “Time may slap you in the face for that one,” she warned him. “And so it may—may it live for the rising tides of vaginal fluids, right?” “Right. Toast, then--” “I just did, I'll start over—no mother ever dreams that her son is going to grow up to be a clerk. Mothers are more ambitious, and so may they always remain. I'm sorry, but weekends all come to an end. A time has come and passed,

something has died inside, and I no longer feel it an option to just quit the job,” he raised his glass, which she had poured for him. Always doing things like that, Linda was, servile things that turned him on all the more. She cared about him, in some ways at least, and he wasn't used to that. “Here here.” “Now you'll be leaving,” he said as they drained their glasses. “For now.” “I hope you return,” he said, standing up and embracing her in a dipping kiss. “As do I. I hope you remain. Don't flip out and disappear, I know you have a history.” “A history and an injury. I've enjoyed you. How I'd love to keep it going. As I say, things

have changed within me. I regret this much at least. I wanted to tell you I loved you, but I was and am afraid that it will drive you away. You're already on your way to being gone, though, so fuck it, Linda: I love you.” “It's late now.” “Alright then, has the cab yet arrived?” “It will, sure, let us wait outside together.” “Anything you desire. We must give ourselves to each other, we must be in this together, dedicated to the infernal madness that is our sexual relation.”

5A

LINDA, REITA, UNFAIRNESS, AND HIS ACHING BACK

Emancipated, Frank goes into the next week with a new vigor he's not brought to a workplace for sometime. And his work suffers for it, because people are kind to him, this changes things, and so his zeal lasts a day. He thinks, If only I had a job I could give a fuck about. Like killing people or animals or something. Even something so stupid as building the future of the industrial world with my two hands or delivering mail to people through snow and sleet and rain. Anything in which I could feel I was making great contributions to society. Though fuck society. Yes, fuck society.

5B

Linda speaks to him periodically. To him not long ago it seemed she could have been the love of his life. She was only vacationing. A tourist in his life. He sees this now, every morning when she walks by, eyes glazed, pretending not to see him. Every night, his cell phone's call log empty. And so be it, this is the only thought on the matter he can muster. When she speaks to him, she speaks in professional words. The conversations are not memorable. After all that seemed to flow between them, there is now none of that left. He's not romantic enough to muster any emotion to convey to her, and so none is conveyed, and so life goes on in such a sallow manner that he can't bring himself to care if he ever does see her again. Three weeks

pass and she is a memory and in the life of Frank, this is nothing new. So few things are new anymore. And there is no completion to that sentence: so few things are new anymore. That is all. That is all that is important. He can go from one thing to the next without losing a damn thing, he can think from one thing to the next without feeling at all. Sometimes the church folks wander through his neck of the city. They say things to him, and sometimes they can see that he is one of those truly lost souls, one of those long forgotten. Never to return to their holy kingdom, supposing it exists. And he can see within them that they have their doubts, and once in awhile this will piss him off so, sitting on the stoop, and he will so desire to say so, but

there is no need to argue, especially about something so unresolvable, and there is no reason to start a fight where there was no fight before. He firmly believes this. Passion and fire, they have their own realm, and it's been a long time since Frank lived in one. But one Morning, a weekend morning, it happens to have become a Sunday. On the stoop, smoking a cigarette from the night before, one that he had forgotten about, must have fallen from that last pack, a cigarette sitting on the stoop lonely and needing a home. Rests it on his lips and lights the damn thing. Thinks of the inspiration of movies for awhile. Think of people who pirate endless video footage onto their computers so they can see things. Sot, rot, and so forth. So they can see

pornography. New pornography, old pornography. He's thinking about pornography when they interrupt his thought process. The church people, arrived again, with something to say, a brochure he simply must read. Sure to put a new spin on old nonsense. He thinks, What the fuck. He thinks, What I call liberation, you call sin. What I call America, you call a nation doomed to hell. What I call nonsense, you call gospel! How do you people fucking live with yourselves! It happens again. The poor elderly black woman, she didn't know what she had coming to her. He is looking at her, smiling, and his lips have not moved. He is taking the brochure from her politely, surely it will go in the trash like all the rest, but he has a policy not to be

rude to anyone passing things out, even foolish things. A foolish policy. The look on her face is quite damned. She looks in pain, like her mind can't process what's going on, but worse it looks like she is hearing what her mind can't process, and Frank has not said a word. He hasn't. She struggles with speech. He sees she has a name-tag. It reads: Reita. He can't stop thinking about his aching back. The relation of an aching back to the song by Nirvana called “Pennyroyal Tea.” He wants to say or maybe sing the phrase, “I have very bad posture,” to this woman, but he is afraid she might him if he says anything more. Though he hasn't yet said a word besides, “Thank you.” Which is two words. Chances are she didn't hear that. Instead

she heard his heroic anti-church thoughts. And now she doesn't know what to do. Maybe he should remind her that it is Sunday. He decides that no matter what, if she musters any words, he is going to respond, “I have very bad posture.” In some ways he feels this would be relevant, or if not relevant, it would be cognitive. He actually thinks that word without really knowing what it means: cognitive. He makes a mental note to look that word up, but since he forgets all his mental notes, he already knows how stupid an idea that is. How stupid all ideas can be. How stupid everything is. He could rant for weeks about the meaning of stupid. He does know what that means. This woman is stupid, he thinks. America is stupid. All Christians are stupid, especially males. All Muslims

are fucking stupid. Everyone is stupid. He realizes suddenly that he is doing deductive work here, and the results are obvious. Nothing is changing, she is not hearing the transmission of these thoughts. She doesn't have a window on his mind. This means one of two things: the transmissions, as he has come to refer to them in his very gonzo liquored journals, are connected to hyper-emotion, such as anger in the heat of the moment or more refined and romantic emotions as in the case of Linda at the copier machine; or, conversely, he simply has no control over when he transmits things. This thought process takes place within the space of thirty seconds in the mind of Frank, and during that time the fat black woman named Reita goes from standing there, judgmentally staring

him down, to shaking her head, to walking away mumbling something about lost souls. He thinks, It's not fair. Two things are unfair right now. One, I feel no guilt or remorse. I haven't known those feelings since I was a young teenager, at least not regularly the way average god-fearing Americans do—no, I've only known it when I let someone down that I did not mean to let down. And then it's not remorse so much as regret, though regret is not keen enough a description for how I feel. Dissatisified, maybe. Am I really having this internal dialogue right now about nothing? Why do I sit here and do these things, on Sundays in a city where the beer store is open? Because I know of my own alcoholism and try to keep it under control, that is the answer, and there are days I want to be a straight-edge vegan age 24 with a bachelor's in

anything smart-sounding. The other thing that is unfair, and yes I know, I almost forgot that there were two things; the other thing that is unfair is that I cannot hear other people's thoughts, but somehow they occasionally get the opportunity to fucking hear mine. That is bullshit, if God is listening I want him to know that, right now: that is bullshit. I'd love to hear the god-lover's doubts and confessions. Oh how I would love it. And were there a way to record such random transmissions, I'd be the most transgressive, advanced journalist in the world. This will never happen. Or it may. Fuck, a month ago I'd have said that what has happened would never have happened. And now it has. I think I am tired of my job. I think I don't know what I am doing anymore. This is why I'm perpetually at a crappy job. I am old now, I want to be young again.

Youth and beauty are underrated. There are a lot of underrated things. I could think just this way all day, but I have run out of cigarettes. Of course I have no money to secure more at this moment in time, because the rent has passed. There was a time I would consider rent weekend to be the weekend of considering future possibilities. Here in this shoddy building I have let myself stop dreaming, at least beyond the very concrete goals of staying off the street and staying employed, which at one time were very much dreams in and of themselves. Yet I have let myself stop thinking more grand thoughts than that, to stop thinking that maybe I could conquer the world if I really tried. It is a world made for conquering, and look at the half-tards and ingrates that have managed it thus far. I need to read more. There is a book in my room. I should go get it, along

with enough change to buy a pack of rolling tobacco with papers, and I should read until I fall asleep tonight. I will show up to work. I will because I always do. As much as I hate to, I do this. Frank's internal dissertation went on another fifteen minutes before he brought himself around to going upstairs and getting the book, a biography of a great revolutionary in China named Mao, and exactly a dollar and thirty-seven cents in silver and copper coins. With this dollar-thirty-seven in his right hand and the cradled in his left, resting sort of on his hip, he walked to the end of the block, took a left, went one block up, and then diagonal from him there was a corner store. Everywhere in this city either sold single Newport cigarettes or packs of rolling tobacco. He preferred Bugler,

but this place had only TOP. He would make the TOP work. During the week he might borrow money for cigarettes or he might steal it somehow or he might do any number of things, but as soon as he could, he would trade that TOP up, perhaps for a pack of Bugler but maybe better. It's been so long since he bought a carton of cigarettes that he has forgotten what it feels like to be secure in that one thing. To be secure in anything. And this is part of what is driving him mad, driving him restless. He never travels enough. His life is too boring. There is so much exploration he could do right here in the city. Parks, alleys, and things. So much, yet he sees very little outside the professional world where he is a tourist and servant, an indentured servant supposedly free

to do as he pleases.

PART II

1A

STUCK LOST. STUCK LAZY.

Three months have passed since Frank decided to quit his job and do something new, and that decision took place about three weeks after his time with the luscious Linda. In the old days he would have done this all quite differently. The day after, a couple days after, or even the day of the decision, and the deed would have been done. He's grown a little older now, though. A

little older means a little smarter, maybe, it depends on the way a person looks at such things. Frank works at the sort of regular, average, desolate place where the rules is a notice of two weeks prior to quitting, this way the bosses can hassle you or find a replacement or be sure to demean you as much as possible during those two weeks. Frank hasn't even given the two weeks' notice yet, but he will. He will. He will do things by the book when the book is there for all to read. The month is July. Since the month of April he has had a simple, weekly goal, and has almost lived up to it. This is another change, another product of getting older: he finds himself more able to accomplish simple goals and tasks he lays out for himself, like clothes for a workday, and finds it easier to

focus on things, simple things even, mundane things, like reading a book. His attention deficit disorder has faded with time. He's always believed that things like attention deficit disorder are natural to human beings, especially while human beings are younger, and they are exacerbated in the prime, and they gradually lessen over time, as the human gets older. Attention Deficit Disorder. Bi-polar Disorder. Restless Legs Syndrome. All of these things, and many, many more are just pure bullshit to keep pharmaceutical companies in business, he believes. He practices what he calls folk medicine. He has the callow belief that putting the word “folk” before anything makes it okay to be uninformed but still bullshit through things, make conclusions. It's not okay

without the folk, because “folk” implies inherent falsity, makes it an exception to typical reality. Minus digression: his goal has been to save a meager forty dollars out of each paycheck. Two twenty dollar bills. To the passive reader, this may seem a tiny goal, simple enough, too easy. But in a world where money is the key to everything, in a world where rents are always due and money is not something someone is custom to saving (nor time), it is a great difficulty to save anything. But he has accomplished this. Now, he is paid a rate of nine dollars an hour. He works about forty hours most weeks, and some weeks a few of overtime. So for an average work week his gross pay is forty times nine dollars, right?

Right. That is, $360. The tax rate where he lives is high. He pays about $90 in taxes. His rent is also not low, not as low as it could be, and then there are travel costs, either by cab or public transit, depending on whether or not he's late, and so on. So at the end of three months, he has managed to live up to his goal of saving forty dollars a week for the great escape. And this doesn't amount to much, either. It amounts to roughly five hundred dollars. All in a coffee can. From the days when he'd had a coffeepot. There are also a good number of coins in the can. From before, when he'd save his change. Though often enough he managed to dip into this reserve for the purpose of the purchase of a pack of cigarettes or a forty-ounce beer or anything. Anyway that probably added another

twenty dollars. “It's not enough,” he says aloud, depositing his latest savior. And it's not. He can't get far enough on five hundred. He has to do something for more, he just doesn't know what yet. Something will come to his mind. Something, anything will appear. Until then, though, he's stuck. Stuck here, stuck in this city. Stuck foolish, stuck crazy. Stuck lost. Stuck lazy. Just stuck.

1A-1

The first idea is to collect bottles, like he did when he was young. Copper. Things like that, the authorities would take them back. They'd pay him when they took them back. By the

pound, by the piece. Bottles five cents. Copper, it depended on the day. He'd once done this for the purpose of buying drugs with his best friend Josh. He could sell his laptop. He could sell his laptop and buy something else when he got to where he was going. Without any idea of where he was going. There had to be somewhere to go. There had to be anywhere away from here. The women here were all wrong. Wrong was the wrong term for it, but nonetheless they were all such. They were whatever they wanted to be and he didn't want them to be that. There were times when he could hardly bring himself to think about them. He'd think about screensavers and American History. He'd think about anything other than women. Because the

women in his life weren't right. Linda had been right, but Linda was a flash in the pan. She'd called her husband, as has been recorded her, in front of him. But he'd never for sure if she had actually called him. She could have been calling anyone. He thinks, This novel sucks. He thinks, This life of mine, it would never be worth writing about. He thinks things all day. And sometimes he thinks about what other people are thinking. No one will buy that piece of shit laptop. No one will buy any of his ratty possessions. He hasn't much in this world, and none of it is worth anything. He remembers a savings account he once tried to keep. At a bank not far from here. The bank was sheisty about everything and Frank despised the bank. Frank despised everything sometimes. He didn't

know what he was doing anymore. He'd say, “I don't know what I'm doing anymore.” He'd say it aloud when random strangers were passing by the stoop or he was sitting on the subway on his way home from work. He'd get the notion that all of this was taking place in a fashion that would make sense one day, someday, but that day wasn't today. Today was where was, where he was living now, and that was the worst of it: there was no guarantee of a tomorrow for men like him. He'd say, “There is no guarantee of a tomorrow for men like me.” He felt that the man who would write his biography, which would never be written, would be a ridiculous kind of man. A man who thought he had something to contribute to society but did nothing but blah blah blah. It would take a long

attention span for someone to actually suffer through a novel which was anything like the life of Frank.

2A

ONE OF THOSE TERRIBLE DAYS WHERE EVERYTHING WAS ONE DAY SURE TO BE FORGOTTEN

At work one day a couple weeks later, he hears the song by Billy Joel regarding Billy The Kid, and he realizes that Billy The Kid was right, that all bank robbers, all thieves, they were radical and they were right in what they did.

Unlike the normal boring lives of their peers, of the people who lived during their times, these people had the nuts to just go out and take what they felt society owed them. And who determined what was owed? They did, of course, which was the beauty of it. Frank feels that his own flawed logic is the most grandiose thing that ever occurred in the mind of someone with the last name Mathias. Frank feels very little, really, and just thinks up a bunch of stupid shit no one will ever care about. He finds it hard to think most days. Concentration is a killer. Killing is a concentrated art. Frank thinks that if he robbed and killed someone and got out of town before anyone ever noticed he'd be good to go, on the run

maybe, but good to go. But such a thing leads to repetition, really, requires it, and he's not interested in doing a thing like that more than once unless he really has to. He's always figured that someday things like that would need to happen over and over again, but it would be on the same day. And that would be one of those terrible days where everything was one day sure to be forgotten. He thinks maybe he could go to the bank where he got the savings account that time, where the savings account still probably has a few pennies in it, maybe he could go there and get a loan for this big move he is planning. Oh but probably not. The story of his life: oh but probably not.

3A

Frank wanted to be a computer programmer when he was young. Now Frank just wants to make coherent sense for one day. He doesn't have to leave the city to do that. His life is not interesting and he knows that this is a repetitive thought to have, to be having right now. Frank has neighbors now, people who live in the same building or next door, people that know who Frank is, and he hates them. He doesn't hate them but he hates the way that one of them, one whose name begins with an R or with a T, who likes to come and knock on his door only to ask for a cigarette because he always spends his money on this dumb slut of a girlfriend that this guy has gotten recently and this guy was

pretty lonely before that. Frank stands up and dances. Frank does a jig. Frank tries to get motivated and buys about a gallon of coffee from the corner store in the form of Starbucks glass bottled coffee. Frank feels weak like he should do some push-ups. Frank feels lots of things and knows that having feelings is a sure sign of madness. Frank can't get over the past. Frank makes so many mistakes. Frank is Frank and Frank doesn't matter to anyone besides Frank and to Frank this is the important thing. Frank does this thing where he is marching while he stands up and has thoughts. Frank should brush his teeth more often. Frank is absolutely out of control and he wonders if there is a path to ever get back to.

3B

Frank walks down the street right now counting words he sees. His count is over fourteen thousand. He finds it outrageous that he can even count that high or that numbers that big even exist. Why should a number ever get that high if it's so intangible? Why do humans have the fucked need to keep track of things after they grow into such a density? Frank buys too many books, too much literature. He reads it in ten minutes. Frank doesn't know how great he is. Frank is a hero to some people but he'd never admit that he's even an anti-hero. Frank is an unreliable narrator. Someone comes up to him as he stands

outside a building, looking up at it, admiring the way it towers over all things. In this instant he can't leave. He thinks, Everything is foggy. We may be the last living souls.

3C

The person who came up to Frank, it is a man who says, “Your name begins with the letter T or R, doesn't it?” Frank says, “No, no it does not.” “Well, that's not a problem. I see that we have a similar problem.” “What is our similar problem?” Frank wants to know. “Our similar problem is that we both have words bubbling within our soul.”

“Not a queer or anything, are you?” “No, why?” “I've been having homo-erotic dreams about old friends lately, they are disturbing me, so I can't associate with any queers or whatever they're calling themselves these days. They've always got some new hyphenated term for everything, these weirdums. Like how I'm making up insults all the time. They're all crazy anarchists is what they are.” “I can see you dream of anarchy.” “Stop being so mystical, asshole, and don't follow me. Yes, I have the strangest dreams, things are always happening, things are happening in semi-linear ways that usually force me to awake quite breathless.” The man follows Frank anyway.

3D

Friendships are based on a lot of things in modern society. A vague thought in Frank's head, the back burner. The random person who followed him is becoming Frank's friend. They are having beers and coffees at a place with a shamrock over the entrance that serves both at all times; it was this much in their signage outdoors that brought them to this point. Frank says, “I think my thoughts might find some claritarian traction if I were to use a guitar and lyrics to spit them out as often as possible. Build a recording studio out of used refrigerator cartons. I hate that sometimes,

especially when intoxicated, the only way to speak your mind is to use words that are not in the dictionary.” “This is possible. It's your language too.” “What is your name again? Did you notice we're having two conversations at the same time, taking turns?” “My name is Robert, and Robert is my least favorite name.” “What a thing to say.” “I know, right?”

3E

Some hours have passed and the two men have done little besides make vague, poetic conversation, and look around at the faces of

the regulars. Pretty slow for a Thursday. Frank can't remember why he has the following day off, but he does. Frank finds this much of it fun, the conversation. He'd like to say so but he just can't. Gets this way from time to time. Other ways that he gets from time to time include: cold sweating, broken down, forgetful, moody. Just gets to the point where every fifteen minutes he feels a different way. But today is not one of those days. Today he is feeling generally happy, at least since this guy attached himself to Frank. Frank talks to Robert. Makes inquiries. Frank says, “What do you write about?” “There is a genre called Steam Punk of which I am a fan. Nonetheless I've never been able to construct an original situation wherein

new technology exists in the old times. The most famous Steam Punk operatic thing I ever saw was probably Back To the Future. So I don't write Steam Punk, I don't write any genre. I have this palm pilot in my pocket with some writings on it,” Robert explains. Robert removes a fancy palm pilot from his pocket and hands it to Frank, then gives instruction to Frank on how to use it. Frank respectfully takes the instruction, but he is so technologically brilliant, a fact he denied all through his youth so as to keep himself distanced from “nerds,” that he knows exactly what he is doing though he has never touched this particular piece of equipment before in his life. He toggles the Writing in question, reads

ten lines, and is elated: here is a talented writer. Possibly. Every man can hit his high point in a given vacuum, right? Frank needed to remain skeptical in order to remain aware. “Why do you not publish yet?” “Maybe I have, under other names.” “What kinds of names?” “Mike McKinstry was up for grabs after someone killed him, so I used that one.” “I see.” Frank says, “I am interested in you now. Let us drink a shot to that.” “Two shots just for the hell of it.” “I cannot afford two shots.” “I am paying for all of our drinks.” “This is an expensive bar.” “I am to worry about that.”

“Right.” Frank notices for the first time that this a black man. 3F

Frank and Robert get smashed in the bar with the shamrock over the entrance that serves coffee and beer all the time that it's open. Frank won't later remember the name of the place. He's been contemplating a bar fight, but there is no one here to bar fight. Everyone here is old or stupid or somehow disabled. On the way out of the bar, Robert says to Frank, “I've had an idea for a long time now. If I could get sixty people together, and each of them could commit to write one sentence on a certain minute of the hour, with synchronized

watches, every hour, we'd have this amazing story after a few weeks or months or decades. Something great would come of it. I've had this idea for a long time now. Years.” “That is quite an idea. I want to leave my phone number with you, Robert.” “This much was pre-determined.” Frank and Robert exchange phone numbers and go their separate ways. Robert buys Frank a cab ride home. Robert walks home, because he doesn't live very far.

3G

At home, Frank goes to sleep and has a dream about himself and his father trying to do something, like go fishing. Can't remember the

next day what the dream was actually about. Him and his father are about to go do whatever it was they were trying to do when suddenly there is a twelve-gauge shotgun in Frank's hands. Frank doesn't know why it's there: even in the dream, Frank has no fratricidal intention. Frank's stepmother makes a ruckus. Frank and his father don't go anywhere. Something that never happened in Frank's life before, Frank's father says: I am broke, man, that's why we can't go. Even in the dream Frank can see that his father is lying. Frank's father never lies in real life. This is part of the reason Frank's father is a good man. Frank writes a short journal entry when he awakes sometime in the foggy hours. Just wants to say something specific. This is how the

journal entry reads: Letting go of everything. Want the people that I know to know that I've no soul. He sees the inherent falsity of this statement. No one can let go completely. Still, though, he is comfortable with having made this statement. He could tell that to someone and not be bothered by having just told a lie. That's the best kind of lie, he decides. The kind you feel no shame in telling. From birth we're told lies. Lies can be useful. Can be painless. “Victimless lying is on sale, two for one, at the dollar store.” This last thought had trouble making sense even to Frank. Frank walks around his room for a moment, aimless.

He sits cross-legged between the wall and his bed. He looks at the wall and sees colors in the darkness. They are orange and black and gray. He hears a song with no reference or overtone in his head. Perhaps there is music within his soul, Frank wonders if there is. He continues to stare at the wall for awhile. He feels important before the wall. The wall and Frank have many things in common. Frank thinks of wallflowers, what meaning has been attached to them over time. The idea of sitting idle while life goes on around you. Ideas generally. Frank feels good just to be alive momentarily. The sadness, the sickness, the weakness—Frank-s humanity—has all gone away in this moment. He could break down right now in clever efficient ways. Ways not

seen before. He could become the medium for a new society to be built upon. Or anyway this is the madness within him in this moment. In this moment he wishes that he were a computer. He is tired with no will to sleep, no will to return to dreams. He reaches to near his bed and secures a notebook and a pen, not his journal. The notebook is one he's labeled “jottings” but never jots in, never doodles in. Frank is not artistic enough to do anything. This is a thought that runs through his head. He suddenly wants to be famous. He looks around and says, “I would like to be famous.” He says it just loud enough that someone passing by on the street outside would be able to know that it was said, but probably would not make

anything of it. He wasn't screaming it or anything like that. He was just saying it, aloud, as if it simply needed saying. He scribbles across the top of the open page: COLORLESS AND CLEVER ON A MONDAY: THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRANK. Philosophy. This phrase does not evoke much in the way of dust particles within him. Dust particles being how he's always perceived inspiration. Dust that gets wiped off and suddenly takes the form of something else, an amalgamation of all its originating sources: here we have a dog-man-cigarette-coffeepot. Now you can see him, he thinks, now you can see me. Frank writes the following. Invigorated,

his mood is not better yet, but he knows that there are pages which should be written which are not yet written. Much like the words he had spoken aloud just a moment before. If I were to write this down, the full extent of my philosophy, for every man has a philosophy except the man who has no soul, and for a moment I have had no soul, and perhaps it is only through letters, the reading and writing of words, that I regain said soul, but if I were to write these words in a complete form, such as a book of philosophy, I don't think anyone would ever see me for me. I could scribble in this exact spot at this exact frozen unadulterated moment in history for the next twelve days, come out with something absolutely genius, and I don't think one thing would be changed by my having done so, except that people would now see

me for my philosophy, not for my personality, and this would be tragic. Frank stopped writing. Metallic, that's how it felt when he stopped. A click, a sharp flicker of thoughts. One stream to another. He'd have liked to say something out loud again, but suddenly he was tired enough to sleep. To make the sleep better, he decided, he'd smoke a joint. He had no dope, but it would be easy enough to get. One of his roommates was probably up with friends smoking dope right now. This sort of thing was always happening. The doping, the all-night rituals of brotherhood in the neighborhood. Frank enlists a t-shirt so as not to look crazy. He picks up a five dollar bill from somewhere. By the time he is at the entrance to

his room he doesn't remember where the five dollar bill came from. A person like Frank won't use a wallet for two reasons: it may get stolen, for one, and for another, having all his money on him all the time would produce a Frank more prone to spending all his money, going for broke. Frank smells the sweet smell of marijuana mixed with the haze of crack cocaine, across the hall. The light is one, the music is low, Frank knocks loud on the door. The roommate answer. Frank holds his money up. “I would like to purchase a joint, please.” The roommate's name begins with a J or an R or a T, Frank does not remember. Frank thrusts the five dollar bill almost rudely, but the roommate is too blitzed to much give a fuck at this point. The roommate has three or four

whores in his room, all of whom are probably just there for the drugs, but if they have to work a little bit for the food of their addiction, they'd do it. Their addiction would willingly sacrifice them completely, would give over everything they had to some man or any man, for a single hit. Addiction was a crazy thing, thought Frank, and Frank knew because he smoked so many cigarettes he didn't know what to do with himself when he did not have a cigarette in his hand, and it was only recently that he forced himself into new habits that would cut down the smoking for him. Times like these made Frank think how crazy it was that there was no driving compulsion besides the elements of society and how people reacted to them in this life. That was all there was.

Vague, everything vague. Frank waited at the door. His roommate returned. His roommate nodded. His roommate dropped an already-rolled joint onto the floor, nodded again, and shut the door. Frank didn't feel offended. The roommate obviously had business to attend to. “I don't go to college anymore,” Frank said aloud. He gathered up the joint and took a few reverse steps into his rooms. He was feeling robotic. It had been so long since he had smoked marijuana that he was not sure how his body and mind would react to the substance. He did not care how his body and mind would react to the substance. He was sure that he would wake up feeling surrounded by the genius of life. Just utter life, and joy.

Frank lit the joint. Frank spent a thirtyseven thinking about food, mostly sandwiches grilled of ham and cheese. He felt strong enough to read from a book. A biography of a long-dead revolutionary. There were things around, around and about, in Frank's mind. Things he could get back to one day. Synapses slowed. Frank had only had to smoke two or three puffs of the joint before his brain was cooked and his body was paralyzed in a good way. Frank put the rest out in his ashtray, promising himself to get back to that. He felt good at this point. Frank stood up dizzy, walked over to where sat his coffeepot, and brewed a pot of coffee. Frank smiled at the thought of percolation. Things percolate. It was a word that brought to mind grainy images

from historical documentaries regarding the commercial success of coffee beans in the United States of America. Little meaningless things like that. Frank had no desire to give in at this point. It almost bothered him that he would not be going to work today. Work usually brought back a brief thought of the woman, and what was her name now Frank could not remember, but thoughts of work usually associated themselves with thoughts of her. This time they did not, and the only thing close to Frank having a thought of her just now was that he was simply conscious of not thinking about her. That was good enough, close enough to over it. Frank thought of a lot of things that did not make any sense. He thought of how grand

it would be if he could just throw together a piece of writing that anyone would want to read. He thought a lot about his new friend Robert. Robert was a man who knew things about the world but would listen to what other lesser mortals had to say just for the hell of it. Frank thought, I would like to become better friends with Robert. Frank moved into the day that way, with coffee brewing and periodic hits from the joint. He felt his discipline slipping but could not be bothered by its passing.

4A

Frank called Robert. There was a conversation. A meeting was to follow. Frank still suspected

that Robert was on the gay side but did not care. Robert was the only person who had taken an interest in Frank in the past two years, and that was good enough for Frank.

4B

Frank got drunk suddenly. He'd had a bottle of liquor in his refrigerator and the day was just too strange, he could not help himself, so he opened the bottle, the opening was metallic, and he began to guzzle it. Half of all the liquid going down his gullet was alcohol. Frank could not help himself at this moment. Frank was getting drunk. The feeling spread from his throat to his legs in rapid succession. Suddenly things were clear: Robert was his only

remaining friend, and together they were the sons of the future or something. There was something great between them, that much was for sure, Frank just was not sure what. Before leaving for the meeting he felt that some things needed to be stricken from pen to paper, words that mattered, things that needed to be said though he wasn't sure how they would be said. He picked up a pad and paper after he got back to his room and he tried to write these words down but nothing came out. He was afraid that if he adjusted himself for comfort right now that things would get even more difficult. He feared the day would eat him alive. He said aloud, “This day may eat me alive if I am not careful. I just need to breathe.” Breathe he did. Frank stood still and kept

breathing. The meeting was not far away, but he was not sure he could make it. Frank knew he would make it, he was just joking with himself. He was having himself a rare moment of clarity, that was all. Frank wanted to say things out loud. Frank needed a conversation that would last forever. He understood somehow that this was what love was, was an everlasting conversation, but he wasn't sure he'd ever actually find one of those, or anything even close. There was the woman from the workplace. She was a good woman, a good disloyal whore. All whores are disloyal, Frank felt, and all women were whores. No, that wasn't true at all. Frank just thought it would break up the monotony if he said things like that out loud from time to time. From time to

time he found faith hidden behind crimson curtains. He was trying to make a statement with his life but that life still needed definition. Frank was a long forgotten savior or something. Frank stopped staring out the window. Frank turned around and walked out his door, shutting it behind him with an autolock feature that he didn't need because he didn't have enough for people to steal anyway, and he walked down the stairs out into the street. He stood in the middle of the street for maybe fifteen seconds. He looked around to see if anyone was noticing him standing there in the middle of street. Nobody was noticing him standing in the middle of the street. So he walked back onto the sidewalk and began to walk easterly, in the direction of the place

where he and Robert were to meet. He knew what he would probably say when he and Robert greeted each other. He would probably tell Robert that Robert was his only friend. Robert would probably say something cryptic, and the world would continue to spin around, basically. He would forget to say things. It was a normal cycle for Frank: he would think of things that he wanted to say and do, and then he would not do them. It was a very simple concept, in English it was called procrastination, but Frank couldn't grasp it, it seemed much more mystic than anything that simple for Frank. It was a shot to his brain. The world seemed to tremble before him, before Frank or anyone. Frank passed a lot of mean looking

characters on the two-mile trip. He was headed to the bar with the shamrock over the entrance that served coffee and beer all the time. He was quite drunk off a cheap whiskey called Jeremiah Weed. He had just guzzled a whole bottle before he left. This was true. Frank wasn't sure if he would keep drinking or not. All he knew was that he would keep living. So many things had been introduced into his life over the past six months, and none of them could really matter. All the time he was looking forward to his next cigarette. He couldn't ever bring himself to not focus on things like smoking cigarettes and drinking and possibly getting busy with various slutty women he would run into over the course of a given day. There were new incoming women at the workplace.

Something chaotic needed to go down at the workplace. All of these drunk babble thoughts were running through his head. He was having the sort of drunk where everything is just barely out of your grasp but you refuse to admit it. You still think you're very much in control. It's hard to get out of control drunk for Frank anymore. He'd have to probably be dry for many days, weeks, months, in order for the alcohol to have the same effect on him that it once did. When he first started drinking he was twelve... these thoughts were running through his head as he stepped in under the shamrock and then there she was, like a dream from the past or a bad memory coming to life, occupying a bar stool and occupying one's vision and

taking control of the situation and breaking things apart and letting everything go grainy and then the music in the background, oh that fucking music could destroy anything. And you'd feel all artistic with your cell phone cameras, you all across America with your cell phone video capture, you'd sit and watch the whole thing go to shambles and you would muse on the idea of tape versus digital media as told to you by the fucking guy at Best Buy and none of it would matter, none of it would account to anything in comparison to this woman, this woman from the past, some months past, just sitting here minding her business at a bar with a shamrock over the entrance which serves alcohol and coffee at all the same times and they're improving their

selection of coffee but not their selection of wines because nobody really likes wine anyway it's just a way to attract that occasional rich customer, like this bitch, yes like this evil twat, with her selfish ways. Linda. Linda. Linda. A melody running through the mind of Frank. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Linda, sitting here, picking feminine charm from her craw like nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Frank wasn't drunk enough to see three of her, not yet. He was such enough to say something out loud, maybe addressing her directly, at this point at the entrance to the bar with the shamrock over the entrance, he wasn't sure about this or about anything. He was sure that life with Linda was like a hill you

had to get over, and once you were over it, you could go anywhere with the momentum built. She hadn't even looked left just yet. She was just sitting there staring at a screen placed five or six feet above on the wall behind the bar, above the top shelves of liquor and so forth, displaying a soccer game or something. He wasn't sure what her big idea was. Maybe she was trying to get picked up or something or maybe she knew he would be here but that might only be the case if the world actually did revolve around Frank as Frank sometimes expected, but such thoughts were between Earth and Frank. Frank and Earth had so little in common that sometimes Frank thought or wished that he came from somewhere else. He took a few steps forward and he said

to her, in a thunderous voice, he said, “Hello Linda.” Linda didn't know what to say back. Frank got upset when nothing was said, and so suddenly his rage was flying through him, and not as he suspected, his rage was not diluted by the alcohol, perhaps it was even heightened. Frank began to say things without saying them. He began to express love and loss and he was conveying images of when they'd had each other and in his head there was a song playing in which the singer talks about him and his lover maybe having each other again. Maybe he'll come around and see her again. But now things were reversed. Frank was almost in a trance, just standing here looking at this woman named Linda. And nothing mattered in

this moment. Maybe it was true that she deserved much better. He wasn't having clear thoughts. He'd lost so much blood in the bottle. Finally she said, knowing how crazy Frank could be and the crazy things that could occur when he was around, she said, “Hello, Frank. How have you been, handsome?” Frank couldn't take it. He walked away to an empty table in the corner not far from where Robert would surely come looking for him soon. Linda just stared after him. She wasn't sure if she could bring herself to follow this young Frank, this guy she'd once had a short affair with. She had known then that she could fall deeply, passionately into love with Frank, but she couldn't have brought herself at that point to pursue any such thing because the only

way it could have ended up was some kind of twisted ruined Romeo and Juliette affair wherein the husband who had been cheating on her for many years somehow ended up dead and buried in a backyard somewhere and her and Frank were quite calmly enjoying the fortune her husband had spent his whole life working for. She had called him that day when she was with Frank and he had not picked up the phone, and the reason he had not picked up the phone was probably that he was with his own affair, and not interested thus in taking calls from his wife, who he probably felt was little more than a burden these days since the bitch would not even put out, yes Linda understood thoughts like these. That men had them, wrong as they seemed, but in this world,

she had learned in thirty-something years that on this Earth there was little that was absolutely right or absolutely wrong, it was only the duty of the righteous to devise such nonsense, and it took a lot of nerve to have such notions of grandiose bullshit. She was thinking all of these things and looking after Frank when Robert stepped into the bar. In Robert's hands he was carrying some books he planned to give to Frank. Robert knew Linda through Linda's husband from some time ago. He gave her a nod and then kept walking toward Frank. Frank saw the nod and was prepared quite literally to lose his mind. He wanted to scream out loud that she was ruining one of the last safe and sane places between Earth and Frank and that she was ruining it

with intention to ruin it alone and that this was an outrage if not simply and purely fucked over and warmed up on coffee and cigarettes. Frank needed to sober up, he wasn't sure of himself at this point. He might do something outrageous. He might do something he'd later regret. He'd probably do it no matter what at this point. He might pick up a salt shaker off the table and launch it in her direction and hope to see blood, anyone's blood, as a result. He wasn't sure if this much was really possible, but he could always hope, right? Robert said to Frank, “In between the lines there are so many things going on with you this instant. Are you alright, Frank?” Frank said, “I think I am going to be. She is ruining this place. She is destroying it with

perfection.” “To some perfection is so natural they don't realize it.” “She is flawed in no way.” “You're speaking of Linda?” “Yes, her. Here, cunt.” “Things like this are to be expected every few years in the world, Frank, you have to live with it.” “I am still young.” “Yes, you are.” “I'm still a whole lot worse for wear.” “I suppose. I brought these for you.” Robert handed the books to Frank. Frank accepted the books. He didn't want to look at them yet. He just wanted to hold them. He wanted to break down. Things were always

breaking down. Everything was broken. He was worse for wear. He felt this phrase needed repeating. “I'm still a whole lot worse for wear.” “What do you need in your life, Frank?” “I need to forget where I came from.” “Is that all?” “Yes.” Robert stepped away. Frank stared at the wall. Robert secured a full bottle of something strong. Robert and Frank proceeded to get stupid drunk.

4C

Early the next morning with sunlight gray as stone coming through a window Frank had never seen before, Frank awoke sweating and

disoriented. Immediately he tried to stand. Standing did not seem very possible. He checked his pockets and found he had everything he was supposed to have and something extra. The extra was a note. Written in the hand of Linda. It said simply, “The world is ours and you know how to reach me. I'm sorry I destroyed this place with perfection. That much came through your babbling right now. I'm glad you seem to be enjoying yourself even if I can tell that you are quite miserable right now. You seem to be having trouble with traction. I think I might be in love with you. I shall wait until you've cleared your head enough to call yourself ready. Linda” No surrender, Frank thought, no surrender. The place was a large room. There were

various ritzy things all over. Artwork and sculptures. This must be Robert's abode. Frank never made it home last night. This hadn't happened for years. He seemed to have a knack for always making it home. It was now Sunday. Tomorrow there would be work. Frank breathed. Frank went back to sleep.

5A

Frank felt profound after work on Wednesday. Profound for unaccountable reasons. Frank didn't know a damn thing that was profound, but he didn't know a thing that wasn't either, and right then it seemed that was reason enough on its own to have such a feeling of profundity that no one might refute unless

really provoked to do so in such a mood of assholery that it was more catharsis than anything. He sang songs he hadn't heard for years. The work day had singed him. It had gone by so quick, burning his lungs and ruining his memory. He just wanted someone to call him on his phone. Someone other than his new friend Robert. Friendship with Robert seemed easy enough: Robert would do all the work. Perhaps all Frank needed in his life was a goal or something. Something to shoot for. Frank felt like he was mentally bleeding out. Bleeding out.

5B

Frank stood outside his building shouting things that night. Not even drunk, he just felt that things needed to be shouted in a direct, forceful way. The people who were victims of his shouting, they didn't seem to mind it all that much. They mostly kept walking or marching or doing whatever they were trying to do. They were conciliatory about it. All of them. “This is the new union! Consolation has become the means to every end! You must surrender, you must be willing to get on your knees and turn it all over now! Society is owned! Everything is taken for granted! We're all bleeding! I had a dream of crayon skies and broken yellow buses taking over! I had a dream

of anything at all! I had a dream yesterday that today would be my last! Take me now!” A police officer pulled up in his cruiser. The police officer was black but he had never been poor. You can tell a poor man by the way he looks at you. If you are poor and he is poor there is an understanding in the way you look at each other. There was no such understanding here. Frank said, “By your filth ye shall know them,” very quietly, just between him and the cop. The cop probably took this as a challenge not worth meeting. He could tell Frank didn't actually want a physical confrontation with an officer of the law, he just wanted the law to mind its own. The officer, whose name was also Frank,

said, “From Frank to Frank, you gotta calm down or you will get arrested. I won't have to do the arresting. Something stupid is bound to happen if you carry on this way. Everything here is black and white, see. I don't want these people getting the idea that I am arresting you just because you're the only white man living here. I think you're brave for that. I won't even live here. So carry on, just keep it down. You can talk all the crazy shit you want, that's not illegal. Harassing people, and you know, disturbing whatever peace this neighborhood has left, those things are illegal, and so you should cease fire, Frank, just cease fire.” Frank had only one question as a result of this little speech. “How did you know my name, man?”

“Everyone around here knows your name. You stand out a little bit. Most of them like you around here, they watch out for you sort of somehow. I don't know. Just calm down, back off, you'd be better off going up on the roof and jumping off than carrying on like this, so please just knock it off right now, okay? Can you do that for me? I'd really appreciate it.” “Alright, deal,” Frank said.

5C

This is stupid. I quit.