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I was stupid.

It was deep enough now, the grave. I throw the shovel out, and put my hands on the lip, pulling myself out. I’m drained. Empty. But I probably have enough strength to roll their bullet ridden bodies into the grave. Enough left in the tank to cover their betrayal with dirt and roots and to piss on them when it is done. They will come for me, heaping charge upon charge and in the end I will run.

Not that it did me any good.

4. X

I was here long before the program. Nobody really knows that. Everyone assumes the other person knows more than they do, everybody turns to ask a question, but then forgets. Before there was this current manifestation, before the puzzle pieces fell into place, before I was summoned here, I existed. Forever and ever, Amen.

Falling from grace is much more and much less than what is written about it. Everything is as it was, and then again, not.

Floating in the darkness, the void, I spun effortlessly, like a baby in amniotic fluid, drifting in sustenance, at the same time, vulnerable to my maker, for eternity. I have a maker too. I came to the island by choice, not as a punishment, or so I tell myself. I came here by free will, and that’s what I choose to believe. At the end days, many of the visions, the fears, do come true. The walls crumble, Babel tumbles down, and there is a great cleansing across the land. That was the easy part. It didn’t take much to push things beyond their control. One atom shifted here, one more hurricane there, the levees break, the water rises, an ice cap melts, just a couple of degrees hotter, and the land is gone, the food chain broken, species that were protected gone, as others run rampant devouring the crops, supply and demand reversed forever, the sterilization complete. But even when the virus ran across the land while fires burned, some would persevere. The Petri dish would leave a few, the immune. They would be left to rebuild, distorted and gifted now, to try again to find the path to Eden. The Ice Age wiped the slate clean. Rome fell. Atlantis disappeared. The meteor hit. They weren’t the first, or obviously the last cleansing to happen. Again and again it would be, until the leap was made, the evolution, the spontaneous burst of thought and awareness. I have waited a long time, and I may have to wait longer still. Not even I knew, nor did He. Or She. Doesn’t matter. Elegua and Obatala, Wandjina and Yara-Maa-Yha-Who, Quetzalcoatl and Chantico, Guan-Yu and Feng-Du. We are many and we are one. I am one, and I am here. I can leave any time I want to. I can. I choose not to.

5. GORDON

I lift the heavy black trash bags out of the back of the aging gray Cadillac. The sun is coming up and my strength is fading. The bags land on the concrete alley floor with a wet smack, as I wipe my brow with the back of my hand. Carmel Junior High School will never thank me nor will they really know what happened. All they’ll know is that drug sales have gone down and two of their best students, who were previously flirting with disaster, will return to the fold. The football team will rebound from a string of unwarranted losses and the theatre department will welcome its Juliet back to the stage. Nobody will be the wiser.

Having a to-do list helps. Helps to keep me focused and I’m grateful that my degree in business management didn’t go to waste. Really helps to stay organized. One slip-up and a fingerprint or stray hair will be my undoing. And then who loses out? The kids. The weak and indefensible. Those lost geeks and stoners looking for help in a world where they hardly exist.

This wasn’t a role I wanted. But years of being on the force taught me that justice is a fickle bitch and that if I want it served, I had to cook it up myself. I’m a master chef now, having studied at all of the finest culinary institutes - Brooklyn, Detroit, Baghdad, Columbia, El Salvador. With a finishing school in rural Asian cities I really don’t remember.

I toss the bags into the already reeking dumpster, slamming it shut with a bang and a whimper. I take the little black book out of my back pocket and scan down the list of names until I find the one I want: Dante Reynolds. Done.

It never ends. Every time I erase one mistake, to pencil in the right equation, something changes and morphs into a new disaster. Each one pulls at my heartstrings, each story just a little bit more desperate and disturbing.

A young girl beaten down and raped for her Bratz doll, the limited edition with the real bling. She was twelve. I don’t know what was more shocking, that it was her friends, or that she lost the baby. I never did find out who the father was, but every time I looked at her old man, his eyes shifted to another part of the room. Another fifteen minutes and I would’ve known for sure and she would’ve been down to one parent. And I was okay with that.

Every time I heard a story it made me that much more disconnected and cold. It got so that a simple case of fucking your mistress made me giddy and full of joy. A couple of pictures and clickclick, I was done. You’re divorced, and I get my nut for the day. But the more I dug, the more I saw the depth to which people sank. Every random robbery butted heads with a grandson smacking his grandma for some coin. Every rape in a back alley was trumped by a gang bang courtesy of your best friend’s ex-boyfriend and the starting lineup of the East St. Louis Cardinals. Mothers versus fathers, sons getting over on daughters, friends and classmates pushing the blade in the minute you turned your back. It never ended. So I stopped caring. And often, if the justice felt right, they got two for the price of one. A little extra cleaning never hurt. Next to Godliness, they say.

The tires skid to a gravelly halt at the end of the alley, the black and white suddenly larger than life, blocking my view of the honey mustard sun. The crackle of the radio makes the hair on my neck stand up. No flashing lights, no red and blue. Just two hard stares and the doors pop open. No time to run, and nowhere to go if I did. Hope I don’t know them. That would be embarrassing.

6. ASSIGNED

“Hey, who’s gonna take this big old box out of here?” the mover said. “It looks like it weighs a ton. I’m not throwing my back out moving that piece of shit.”

“I don’t know Simon, nobody told me about that,” the other mover said, wiping his brow with the back of his dark hand.

“Well Jamal, what’s it say on the requisition sheet. I didn’t see any listing for a big ass metal box of crap. You see it?”

Jamal picked up the clipboard from the window ledge. The office is empty now, except for this one giant steel box in the far corner. Black metal, smooth and shiny, yet dull and unresponsive. There are no markings on it, no drawers, or doors, or buttons. One solitary bulb sits about halfway up the refrigerator sized box, recessed into the device. A round glass eye sits opaque and quiet. There is no cord, no power source, nothing but smooth black metal.

“Well my man, I don’t see it on here,” Jamal says as he walks over to it. The expansive office is nothing but hardwood floors and a row of tall windows open wide to let the spring air in. A breeze blows through the space, cooling the sweaty movers, and pushing the detritus around like tiny tornados. Chewing gum wrappers mingle with crushed cigarette butts, the odd yellow post-it note, and bits of shredded paper. The men stand with fists on hips staring at the monolith as if seeing it for the first time.

“I really don’t want to move that, Jamal. Even with the freight elevator, that thing has to weigh 300, 400 pounds. Where’s the dolly?”

“In the hall. Man, how did we miss this? I swear, one of these days we’re going to find a body in a closet, or a kilo of heroin in a trunk. These people got out of here so fast they didn’t give a shit what they left behind. Rudy did good bidding on this lot. Did you see all of those laptops? Those must have been worth 50 grand right there. And all that copper wire, holy shit. That’s a small fortune.”

“Seriously,

bro.”

“But what was with all of the dry ice?”

“I don’t know. Reminded me of that hospital job we did, you know, for organ transplants.”

“Weird. And that desk? You think he’ll let me take it? Maybe I can make him an offer. The hand carved top, it looked like it all came from one giant tree, a redwood or something. Like when they carve a canoe out of a fallen oak? Something like that. Man that had to be a big tree. Do they even let you cut down redwoods?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Shit, Simon. I love that desk. What did they stain it with, it looks almost black. Looked like a really dark red mahogany or something. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It was a weird color wasn’t it? Not the Chinese red of the same brown stains everybody uses. And it looked sticky but it wasn’t. Some sort of varnish or lacquer.”

“Here, Bobby, let’s see if we can move it.”

Jamal places the clipboard back down on the ledge. It pokes halfway out the open window. The wind flutters the pages as the two big men approach the box. As they place their hands on either side of it, as if to shift it, to push it back a little bit, just to see how much it weighs, the bulb lights up. It glows a deep red, the same strange syrupy red of the desk they moved earlier.

The twenty-foot long desk had been hand carved by the medicine man of a Fyat tribe deep in the African jungle. The totem had changed form many times before it settled on the form of a desktop. Many had questioned it, but none out loud. The African Blackwood came from a 33 foot tall Mpingo tree that had stood guard over the tiny village for as long as any could remember. They said its soul went with it as the exotic art dealer took the sculpted furniture out of the jungle, for that special buyer in New York. And they were glad. The healer, his arms aching from the carving, the hacking of the machete, grinned as the took it out. Finally it was gone.

“Kwaherini,” he said as they took it out.

The wind picked up and gusted through the alleys of New York, pushing around the garbage, whipping up a frenzy on the isle of Manhattan. Hands shot up to keep hats on heads. Scarves fluttered and whipped at cringing faces. A row of garbage cans tipped over, lids clattering to the ground, glass breaking. A lid slammed shut on an oversized industrial dumpster, the noise level on the street raising, as car horns honked and people bounced off each other is confusion and disarray. Nobody noticed the clipboard clattering to the ground. Its fall from the 16th floor could have killed someone, but it simply cracked in two, bits of fiberboard splintering, the requisition slips flying into the wind, drops of blood splattered over the ivory sheets.

Sixteen floors up the sound doesn’t travel far. The floor is empty, the offices bare. Whatever might have been heard on the street it would be dismissed later as nonsense. No screams. Must have been something else. The pounding, the screech of metal grinding on metal. Construction maybe. Besides, keep moving. Don’t get involved.

The lone glass sphere glowed now, liquid, a hurricane of fire and molten lava, the implosion of a distant star, a crimson throbbing in an otherwise bare facade.

“Kwaherini,” the black box purred.

7. ROLAND

I got dragged along, it was part of the deal, all or nothing. Did I have any choice? Not really. Maybe a distant aunt or uncle I’d never met. Mom has never been called boring. Having to walk to the ATM on a Saturday morning to get bail money when you thought she was in bed asleep, that’s one way to grow up fast. Sure, I was the cool kid with the leather jacket taking the Milwaukee 22 bus to school. Sure, I had a pack of Marlboro Reds in my pocket and access to a liquor cabinet. We could all get wasted at my house. Sex at thirteen is pretty awkward, but much like riding a bike, it’s pretty easy to pick it up. Lots of skinned knees and swollen lips.

When it was my turn for the Parent’s Day speech I actually thought about lying. Why not, most of the other kids were too. Sure, daddy wasn’t a drunk, and that bruise on you shoulder didn’t come from the beer bottle he hurled at you when you didn’t get his slippers fast enough. He was a CPA. I knew that. No, your mommy wasn’t screwing your math teacher, that’s not why you got a passing grade after nothing but bright red Fs for flunk, Fs for fail, Fs for fuck me over your desk you scrawny, number-cruncher you. She’s a homemaker, not a homewrecker. I can tell by the lunches you bring, the ham and cheese sandwiches, with a little dish of that secret family potato salad, and a slice of that special chocolate cake you like. More like a cold uncooked hot dog, three slices of processed cheese, some stale Funyuns, and a Twinkie. Here’s a dollar for milk.

Standing in front of the class I decide to let it all out. Sixth grade, really, who gives a shit. The cute girls won’t kiss you, and the ones that did, well you don’t brag about those fatties.

“My mother, by Roland Descartes. You’ve all seen my mother here at school, at the bake sales and Holiday Festivals. I’ve seen the girls scanning the outfits, with envy, wondering how she got those stylish clothes in a town like this. I’ve seen the boys staring at her chest...”

“Roland?” my teacher said.

“...not really sure why their eyes are drawn there, but curious as to what exactly that cleavage led to. What exactly was hidden under that short skirt...”

“Mr. Descartes...I don’t like the direction...” Mr. Steele says, face flush with the beginning of a panicked rage.

“...let me finish. She doesn’t work at a real estate office, or make me dinner. She doesn’t commute to an office downtown or work at the mall. My mother is a whore. Which is better than a slut, cause at least she doesn’t just give it away...”

“Roland, that’s quite enough...” Mr. Steele says, standing up.

“She strips for dollar bills, here look,” I say, pulling out a handful of crumpled bills, dropping them on the floor in front of me, as my teacher comes around the desk. “She takes off her clothes, she sells vibrators and butt plugs to her girlfriends, as if you even know what those are, and she fucks for money...”

“That’s IT Roland. Get out of here. Down to the main office, you know the way.”

Tears squirt out of the corners of my eyes, even though I’d tried to focus my anger. I flung the battered notebook to the ground. Doodles of Nirvana and Batman, Metallica and Spawn, Korn and The Toxic Avenger all spun to the ground.