2: The National Anthem

There is most of a city between these two. The roads between them split and dip and end, frustrating any chance at a straight line. Concrete walls stop bullets, they swallow one's voice and deny one's image.

Other way round there is most of a planet with valleys and rivers, deserts and oceans, plains and canyons, and towns that read like punch lines on a map. Some of them make for adequate meeting sites.

3:Can't Stand It

What Kadrey knows: there is no reason to have lunch in the baby mall situated within this building's guts. Festering with humanity by 11:55, it becomes a grueling miasma difficult to wade through, exhausting one during the very hour reserved for recuperation.
What Kadrey does: lunch is eaten at the wokstation where there will be no waste of time, energy or social tolerance. This action awards him 18 to 22 minutes that belong to no institution or biological need. In this time Kadrey thinks about fighting. About winning fights. The opponents and settings vary. The style of fighting changes from 70s Hollywood tussles, to Jack Kirby throwdowns, to UFC massacres, back to Hollywood for golden age duels. The ending is always the same, it will brook no modification, mutation, or innovation: the fallen opponent receives an uncivilized kick to the ribs. Kadrey will feel his leg swing back, every joint perfectly aligned as if on a track, then there is the acceleration toward the offered torso, surprisingly effortless, which doesn't end in impact but is transmuted into a wave of pleasure racing past epidermis, then through the nerves, spiraling up the spinal chord, and finally redefining the brain, changing chemicals, opening up transmitters, allowing brand new divorces and unions. It's a party.

5: Planet Telex

In his car, hands at ten and two, Kadrey is waiting for the frenzy of coworkers fleeing the parking lot to die down before turning the key. He is thinking about the paycheck already en route as electric impulses to his only account. The one in charge of shelter, sustenance, entertainment and emergencies. The one that can never grow quite large enough to actualize desire. He is thinking about all of these fixed numbers that he lives with: the rent, the cable, the insurance, that kid in South America ("just pennies a day") and so on. All of them will be debited automatically from the account. The mighty paycheck will be reduced to a measly allowance in no time flat. Of course there is time. Time enough to change his automatic settings and live at least for a little while with his full compensation. To look at the screen and see what he is worth for real. And then maybe to apply this power towards something significant. Something unexpected. Fuck the rent, he can take the money and run. But where to? And how far? It isn't that much money.

6: Two Against Nature

Evan got out of the car and the surveyed the street. It was a crap scene. something starring Lee Majors on the way out. Extras casting had no real budget and Wardrobe was all newbies. These tiny towns were all the same: no hope for a decent meal or real conversation. Just a place for beer and cigarettes. And maybe some flashback candy, a Charleston Chew perhaps.

Kadrey always got out of the bus at these insignificant places. Sure, the man always needed a pee or a cigarette or soup, but there was real excitement for him in visiting these alien colonies. The tide of civilization had receded but these folks and edifices had held on to the soil with quixotic determination. A fascinating stain on the land.

7: Alpha Beta Parking Lot

Sleeping in a car moving across this continent is time travel; you're very likely to wake up in another era. That man you just locked eyes with could have been your grandfather. Before the War. This brand and that cut are were not, until today, things you know from experience but from heavy-lidded memories of late nite reruns. You start to wonder how exactly the world twists around you while you sleep. You look at your hands expecting scars and calluses to still be in your future. You get a little paranoid.

8: Sky Blue Sky

They went Downtown on a Sunday.

Nothing going.

9: The Late Greats

With the earnings from the race they go into that little record store across from the Barnes and Noble. They're there until closing, carefully selecting; this will be the soundtrack to their entire October and maybe even November if money's tight.

On the road they test out their new materials. As the tones and stories fill the Civic they slip in and out of new characters. Testing them out. Gripping the wheel a certain way. Twisting their features into unfamiliar expressions. They are renewed.

10: I'm Only Sleeping

Geography has a strange influence on the radio

Sounds become liquid and tactile

Voices turn to syrup

Putting forth great anger enrobed in great civility

Beats migrate to your sternum

Colonize your heart

And turn humours a golden hue

Radio is sonar

And every song

Is Answer

Is Illumination

Is Location

11: Softest Bullet Ever Shot

12: Theologians

FADE IN
Ext Night-A deserted highway in the middle of the night. It is very dark but not pitch black. A solitary Honda's headlights are the only things gliding down the macadam.

CUT TO
Int Night- Two men are inside the car. A haggard looking KADREY is at the wheel. EVAN is passed out in the passenger seat.

CUT TO
Highway-The Honda going down a hill. The headlights suddenly go out. The car pulls over.

CUT TO
Car Interior-Kadrey opens the door and gets out in the huff. The automatic light wakes up Evan. He is a bit disoriented. Off screen Kadrey is cussing up a storm and we hear him kicking the bumper and the hood.

EVAN:
What's going on man? Hey Kadrey. Kadrey! What's going on? Kadrey what the...

KADREY:
[tossing himself into the driver's seat] The lights are dead.

EVAN:

Lights? Both of them? That doesn't happen man.

In lieu of a response, Kadrey makes a frustrated gesture towards the front of the car.

EVAN:

How long 'til sunrise?

KADREY:

I look like an Apache chief to you?

Kadrey balls up his jacket, puts it under his neck and reclines his seat all the way back.

EVAN:

You really going to sleep?

KADREY:

If you let me.

EVAN:

Man, I'm wide awake.

Kadrey digs around under the seats and finds a flashlight. He hands it to Evan. He digs around some more and comes up with a book.

KADREY:

Here. Read.

EVAN:

[looks at the book] Where did you get this? Arthur Miller is ass.

KADREY:

I know he's ass, but it was only a dollar.

EVAN:

[sort of fascinated by the book now] Attention must be paid.

KADREY:

What?

EVAN:

Attention. Must. Be . Paid. He wrote that. That's some sentence. "Attention must be paid." It's like awareness, imperative, existence and economy. In that order.

KADREY:

Evan. Read. Sleep. Marvel. Just shut the fuck up while you're doing it. Please.

13: Don't Take Me Alive

Evan decided to look up an old buddy. Since we were in town and all.




His family had no news and no curiosity. I think there was a peak of lassitude in their answers but I won't swear to that.

He was not at work where they told us he'd dropped by if and when he was needed.

He was nowhere. And if he was somewhere then we had no idea of what that looked like.

14: Gaucho

Right before daybreak, Evan found him in the sliver of space between two warehouses; Kadrey was crying.
"Kadrey, It smells like jizz and fried chicken. How you even breathing in here?"
"Please. Please don't tell anybody."
"Who'm I gonna tell. You're everyone I know."

15: Bad Sneakers

Drinking in worn out clubs with young ladies.

Trailing the music by half a beat.

Pissing in badly lighted johns crowded with scoundrels.

Smelling like smoke and vinegar.

Feeling like ashes and leather.

Forgetting what day it is.

Only Evan is having fun

16: Lucky

17: Equivalents

Kadrey says:

"Everybody is from TV"

"Everybody looks like somebody else"

"No one's got their own face"

"Not Any more"

18: Sheep Go To Heaven

Chapter 1: Wherein our heroes are stranded

...

Chapter 2: Wherein brambles ruin an excellent pair of pants

...

Chapter 3: The lavender and champagne rescue

...

Chapter 4: Wherein a bond is formed

...

Chapter 5: The contagious dream

...

Chapter 6: Leaving the Lautners

...

Chapter 7: Wherein an option loses its abstract nature

...

19: How To Disappear Completely

Kadrey was blind for an entire day. Blind is perhaps not the correct term but in my personal vocabulary and , I believe, the entirety of the English language it is the closest approximation one will find of his 24 hour affliction. The peculiar mechanism that transforms light into the multitudes of the world was corrupted and shapes, colors and depth were lost to the poor man. For an entire rotation of this Earth, Kadrey was not immersed into the inky blackness customarily caused by the absence of light but was trapped in the words of Paul Auster. It is not that this building or that hydrant were beyond his perception but rather that they were replaced by a descriptive paragraph in the style of his prose. Kadrey was quite certain that it was Auster.

After the crisis had passed and Kadrey was once more able to slowly move his gaze through the subtle shifts in the blue of a summer sky, he rather surprised me. "I could have lived with it," he told me, "if I had a good variety available to me. If this car were described by Chandler or this lamp post by Bukowski, I maybe could have lived with it. I could have enjoyed being immersed in words."

20: What a Shame about Me

The heavy silver ball rolls up his spine

Rumbling

Picking up speed and mean

The gray loosens up

Ready to embrace the coming destruction

The end is blind

Skin gets the final solo

The silver ball makes no decision

It shakes a memory loose

It took a week to heal

And is propelled through the gray

Until it hits another cluster

The cold gritty wall at his back

Hot breath rushing out his nose

Waiting for Carl to give up

It's getting darker in his own head

And all sound is collapsing into pink

Standing in a stream

Water is not

One thing

But many snakes

Each with a slightly different coldness

The silver ball is the same

All over and to the core

There is a clear separation

Between the pole pushing up against his leg

And the leg giving up

What was a closed circuit is open

To the whole world

And the world to it

Communicating through pain

The silver ball

Does not loose speed

After a collision

Fifteen thousand pounds

Fifty four miles an hour

Feet off the ground

21: Pyramid Song

People

Of Course

Matter

But so do Things

Things

Matter

And also Places

On and off the highway a dozen times tonight looking for a bit of real estate from my 5 foot and below days. Evan is remarkably patient. Is this a real memory? Running with some cousins in the woods? i don't really remember their names. i know the occasional flu had me laying in the living room, nursed by Mom and TBS. Swiss Family Robinson. Little House on the Prairie. Didn't one of the Ingalls sisters loose her sight after some illness? Was fever involved? Glad i never lost nothing. Nothing that big. Jasper! The big dumb one was called Jasper. Jasper and then my last name. That's him. Dumb son of a bitch but funny. Funny goes a long way. Bet he's married now. Paunchy with a litter of dumb kids all his own. Living like an adult. Jasper.

Time done ate it up to shreds but the old cabin still squares with Kadrey's description. Lucky bastard, it's like something out of a Paulsen book out here. I should holler, but I'm in no hurry to have him see the place. I imagine of a bunch of kids inside, their life force tied to the cabin, rotting away at the same pace. Moss and crawlers coming out their mouths and ears. Tiny bugs making songs in their hollow bellies. I'm going to be sick. I need a cigarette. I holler out his name.

The cabin was a mess of flames. The men left the woods.

22: Kidsmoke