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+ten
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+All points bulletin-universe in retreat-wasteland poets die of heartache-epiphany-no spacemen-detour-dinosaur bones churn under wagon wheels-future excavated-time bound memory-never happened-non-event-heart beats-broken timepiece-lonesome thoughts- stave off chill-to be free-red white blue disease-surrender-blazing failures-defeat-set free- Christ-Joan of ark-Gandhi-Montezuma-world paused-infinitesimal second-watch them fall-nothing but continual drumming-beating through African congas-you alone-get your life preserver-cut out the poetry-cut to the main artery-
+
+Manhattan goes helter skelter the minute I emerge from the Holland Tunnel. The first thing I encounter are detour signs, which send me uptown when I want to go across town. Everything is moving too fast. I'm used to walking the streets, not driving them. Street signs whip past in a blur. I look in vain for a landmark, something I recognize, but I see nothing. Every street I try to turn on is blocked off or a dead end. Finally, at some length, I get across to the Lower East Side only to find myself heading off the island on the Manhattan Bridge. I encounter more detours in Brooklyn. I'm completely lost now; I roll down the window and ask an old man with a tuba for directions back to the bridge; he plays me a guttural song. I manage to make it back into Manhattan, but this time I end up way down by Battery Park. My frustration is mounting. I decide to admit defeat. I pull over somewhere in the financial district and call Maya. After her initial shock wears off, she gives me directions and I set off again. But the minute I get back in the car, the streets are all jumbled up in my head. Did she say Houston or Canal? Was it West on Houston or East on Canal? Was it right on Essex and past Delancy? Or was it right on Essex left on Delancy? I pull over again about ten minutes later and call her back. She laughs and tells me I'm closer this time, even headed in the right direction. I just haven't gone far enough. Maya promises to come out and flag me down. I'm exasperated by now, Manhattan was not designed with cars in mind. I feel like I'm driving in a maze at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I can never see more than two blocks ahead. I drive right by Maya, but luckily I see her jumping up and down in the rearview mirror, and I flip a U-turn. I park in a loading zone in front of her building and get out to drop off my bag. I am frustrated and angry.
+
+Snow is just starting to fall on the icy blacktop. The street is already a sea of snow, slush, salt, and ankle-deep puddles from earlier storms. Maya is wearing a long, black, down parka. Her hair is tucked under a knit hat and she has on wool mittens. She smiles at me and comes running up to give me a hug. I rudely brush her aside. She balks and slowly, nearly imperceptible slides toward the curb. She draws up and crosses her arms. "you aren't even going to give me a kiss?" I want to find parking I want to get rid of the car I want to make the lights stop flashing I want to turn down the noise I want to make the cars slow down I want to paint lanes in the street. I want to kiss Maya in a dream, running into her arms, a celluloid reunion,  the hero and heroine see each other at a distance and start running. To Have to Hold, and yet one brush something closer to The Shining has emerged. I apologize and give her an obligatory hug and kiss. 
+
+I lug the suitcase upstairs and Maya goes with me to park the car, lest I get lost walking home. She is miffed at me. She has a hurt expression on her face, but we struggle onward trying to pretend nothing is wrong. To cheer her up, I tell her that I think I'm going to stay. Her face breaks into a smile, "Are you going to live with me?"
+
+I tell her I am. "Now and forever," I say, thinking as I do that I've said that before. Twice.
+
+"God," she exclaims, "I have been waiting to hear that for two years now. I can't believe you're actually here." She cups her hands around my face. Her eyes are younger than in my lantern lit memories. Her mittens catch in my stubble. She leans over and we kiss. Her nose and cheeks are icy cold, but her lips part and her mouth is warm. Our tongues circle each other, the light turns green, a car honks.
+
+We find a temporary parking spot two blocks over and we run home through the falling snow. When we get in the apartment I finally pick her up in my arms and for a little while everything is perfect. We kiss and start ripping each other's clothing off. Clothes fly about the room, covering furniture and floor. We fall in bed naked and groping.
+
+Later, we sit in bed smoking cigarettes, resting. She is naked, legs crossed, wearing a red feather boa around her neck. Her now blond curling locks are ruffled from sex. She puts the filter tip to her lips and softly takes a drag. She smiles at me. "Sil," she says, "are you sure this is what you want?" I nod and look at her eagerly. She looks at me with a face I don't recognize. 
+
+ "You're going to need a job up here," she says. "New York's expensive, are you sure that's what you want?" 
+
+"I only want to be with you," I say, but the word job forms a black cloud over my head and panic sets in. I start to see myself wandering the streets of New York penniless and insane, begging for food in alleyways. I drag harder on my cigarette, but the fear is already rising up the back of my spine, it lodges at the base of my brain. This is New York; New York is not a cross-eyed dream you had even though it seems that way the minute you leave. This is real, steel and breathless concrete real. There is rent to be paid and food costs a fortune. My savings is nearly depleted. I have to find a job. My heart speeds up at the very mention of the word let alone the action it entails. 
+
+"I think I have job you might like," she offers. "We need a graphic designer at the agency. You would be doing comp card layouts... You know how to use PhotoShop right?"
+
+"I could do that," I say thinking that I probably can't. but the job searching panic I feel means I always take the first one offered. I never stop to think whether or not I will like doing it. Having a job relieves the stress of having to find a job. There is no job as bad as needing a job.
+
+I start kissing her again. Her mouth becomes a warm sanctuary and I climb right in. My hands stray to her breasts, her ass, and then, cupping her face in my hands, I lay her back on the bed again and kiss my way down to her smooth cunt.
+
+We stay up until the early morning hours exploring all the nooks and crooks of each others bodies, making sure that we remember them, that we know them in the biblical sense. Maya falls asleep around four; I sit up smoking and thinking what a great thing this will be. I am going to stay in spite of the panic. I fall asleep with visions of perpetual happiness lodged in my brain. But in the back of my mind, a spellbinding feedback loop begins to start spinning, softly, slowly, round and round. 
+
+When I wake up Maya has already gone to work. The note on the pillow says that she wants to meet me for lunch, but it is already past the time she wants to meet. I jump out of bed and call her. "No big deal," she says, "I got busy anyway. Let's meet in half an hour." I hang up and walk around the apartment for while, getting a feel for it. It's an absolute dump, but Maya had already told me that many times on the phone. She is merely subleasing it. The real owner is in New Orleans. Maya's friend, the permanent resident of this place, has the absolute worst taste I have ever laid eyes on. 
+
+Maya has done her best to get rid of the atrocious ornamentation that filled the place when she moved in two months ago. The closets are choked full of the girl's knickknacks, shoes, purses-the girl had twenty-seven purses, and those are just the ones she left behind-and of course clothes. Awful punk rock memorabilia-posters, patches, buttons, record covers-is stuffed under the couch, along with the rest of the girl's abominable artwork and decorative trinkets. But even still, the furniture itself is enough to send you into fits. Chairs are held together with twist ties from last year bread bags, antiques the girl called them when Maya first looked at the place. The living room is dominated by a pink couch that was probably red, maybe even nice, in 1932. Opposite the couch, where one would have expected a television, there is instead a massive chest of drawers dominating the wall. The bedroom is so small it can hold only the bed. In the living room, against the wall and between the windows, is a table, well chewed by some mangy dog. And the dog, ah the dog... I see a picture of the dog on the refrigerator; it's the kind of Tijuana mutt that no one in their right mind would actually let in the house. The psoriatic mutt has left behind double its weight in shedding, little clumps of ratty hair and flakes of dead skin are everywhere. The worst part of the place is the Persian rugs. All three of them look like centuries worth of Persian kings and queens have danced countless nights, and maybe even played a few games of polo, on them.
+
+I go in and start the water for a shower. At first it's nice and hot. I get in and lather up my hair, but then just as I am going to rinse the soap from my eyes, the water turns frigid and I scream in shock. I prance to other end of the tub, trying to escape the icy claws, but the tub is too small to escape. Soap burns my eyes. I slip and grab out for something to hold onto. I accidentally pull down the shower curtain, trip on the tangled mass and fall on my ass right in the middle of the ice-cold stream of water. I fumble frantically with the knobs, turning off the cold water, but before I can get the knob for hot turned off, a scalding blast of hell hits the back of my neck. I scream again and jump out of the tub.
+
+I rinse my hair in the sink and put a cold towel on the back of my neck to sooth the burn. I sit down on the cold kitchen floor, naked and defeated. I light a cigarette and try to believe that the world is not marshalling all it forces against me. Eventually I get dressed and go out to meet Maya. 
+
+Outside the air is a Moroccan dagger stabbing at the tiny slivers of my exposed flesh that my scarf fails to cover. I round the corner at the subway station and a blast of wind goes right through all my layers, as if I have on nothing at all. Maya and I have a late breakfast at the Waverly. I mention nothing about my disastrous shower. Instead I pretend to be eager to start work. Money, I am thinking, must make money. It turns out that there is nothing for me to do yet, so I go home to take a nap.
+
+I walk in the door wanting to do something-clean, rearrange, douse with gasoline- anything. But every time I set about to do it I become overwhelmed by the scope of what needs to be done. I give up before I lift a finger. The excess of trinkets and knickknacks drives me up the walls and makes me claw my way across the ceiling like a terrified cat. The same horror starts to carry over out into the city when I go for an evening walk. The cold just adds to the overwhelming din and confusion of the city. There is too much, everywhere there is just too much. Too many shops selling the same things, too many restaurants serving the same things, too many people screaming hollering for cabs, too many honking horns, too many yelling kids, too many roaring trains, too many buildings, to many smells wafting in the street, too much garbage, too much slushy snow, too much sound and sight and noise.... I walk in a stupor. My body is in shock; sensory overload has shut all my circuits down. I am not ready for this. This is not the summertime New York that I know where everything is a shining celebration, everything is warm and inviting. The city I thought I loved has turned to a hideous leviathan, baring it's teeth and snarling at me.
+
+I meet Maya later for dinner and already I feel like the whole city is against me. We go out for sushi and, as if to prove that New York has no love for me, I come home with food poisoning. Instead of making love, I spend the night retching my guts up in the toilet and talking to the mouse that lives behind it. Maya checks on me periodically to make sure my fever doesn't increase. I put on smile for her, string of vomit running down my chin. I look in the mirror for the first time in ages. My eyebrow is still missing. My hair is turning grayer. I wipe the vomit from my lips and drink from the faucet. The water hits my churning stomach and I realize I have made a mistake. I pitch forward, and stagger back to the toilet. The mouse scurries out of the way, into the wall. The mouse is my only friend, cousin to the rats in my ceiling back in Georgia. 
+
+I spend the better part of two days alternating between lying in bed and hugging the toilet bowl like it's the son of God. 
+
+Eventually I get better and start to try working on the composite cards. I am supposed to lay out photographs, create a design for them, and then pass them along to the printer in Brooklyn, named Lenny, who doesn't like me because he wants my job. This is all I know. I have no experience and not even the vaguest understanding of what I'm supposed to do. I know the basics of the situation, that is, I know how to use the computer program, but I don't know what to do to the cards to make them look good. I've never even seen a real composite card before. Maya gives me some tips and pointers. I look at lots of magazine ads and try to copy them, but the photography I have is subpar. Everything I do looks like a two-bit hack job, which, of course, it is.
+
+Maya and I are both working for a woman named April, the master of ceremonies for the Real North Modeling Agency. April is in her early forties, her hair is a red mane and she has an infectious laugh. She has managed models before for big companies I've never heard of, but Maya assures me they are a big deal. Somewhere along the way, April decided that she wanted more control, so she is starting her own agency. I meet her for the first time in a midtown steak and drinks type of place. I take one look at her and my heart sinks. She's insane, you can tell by the the way her lips move and words come out but no meaning accompanies them. I smile a lot  and try to match her hair brained enthusiasm. She doesn't listen very closely to what I say. She keeps asking me what South Carolina is like even after I tell her repeatedly that I'm from Georgia. I can't decide if it's some sort of insult or if she genuinely doesn't hear me. Maybe she thinks there's no difference. Maya has the utmost respect and faith in April. She assures me that April is a good woman and that she really knows what she's doing. I really can't say because I don't have a clue what April or I are really doing. I know what Maya is doing. Maya is the director of new faces, she finds the models. She works around the clock and she isn't even getting paid. She and April exist day to day on the money they get from signing up new models. April and Maya start going out for drinks every night. I prefer to sit at home. 
+
+They talk about renting a space to run the agency out of, but in the mean time all five hundred models have Maya's phone number. They call the house at all hours of the day. The phone rings during dinner, during sex, while we're trying to take bath, as we're walking out the door, as we're walking in the door, as I'm working on the computer, as I'm trying to fall asleep... And when we don't answer the phone they hang up and call Maya's cell phone. Maya spends so much time on the phone that I have to go out and get a cell phone just to be able to talk to her. 
+
+Maya has left the building, metaphorically speaking. I hardly ever see her and when I do, she's on the phone the whole time or we're running from one errand to the next. We eat together and we sleep together, but beyond that she is out of the house and I'm stuck at home staring at a fuzzy flat screen populated by smiling idiots from Ohio with clichés in their eyes. She has found something in her life-direction. For Maya, something is happening, something that I'm not a part of. For the first time we start fucking. In the old days we had great sex. Sometimes nasty sometimes sweet, but we never fucked. We start fucking. Great pornstarstyle fucking. Hair pulling ass slapping heart attack fucking. It's the best sex we've ever had and it scares me to death. Afterwards I sit in the kitchen thinking how strange it is to have break-up sex before you break up. I'm an optimist though so I ignore the implications.
+
+After a few weeks a routine forms. Maya leaves before I wake up. I get up and meet her for breakfast at the Waverly. Then she goes back to work and I go home to work on the cards. I sit at home staring at a computer screen. I remove skin blemishes, correct photographic errors, lose weight when it's need, reshape faces, re-color eyeballs, reshape and enlarge eyes, slim butts and enlarge breasts... everything in advertising is a lie from beginning to end... Part of it makes me sick every time I sit down to work; the other part has fun chasing clever rationalizations around the feeble nether regions of my atrophied conscience. The sad part is that I actually like the people. I like the models-as people I mean. They are all good people, sure their vain shallow and think they look a lot better than they do, and sure most of them will never be Rhodes scholars and sure you could have a more interesting conversation utilizing a telephone pole and decent imagination, but it's not their fault. they work in the modeling industry its their job to be vapid and intellectually feeble. Their the sagebrush at Los Alamos, scorched without knowing why. 
+
+Maya gets home nights around nine or ten and talks of nothing but models. Everything we do has became models, which are good, which are bad, what stage of production they are in, how well the business is doing, what more needs to be done... models, models, models. Nothing else. There are some vague and ill-conceived attempts on my part to express the growing jealousy I feel, but to no avail. I begin to be increasingly hurt by every word coming out of Maya's mouth-not one of them has the slightest acknowledgement of my existence. In the past when Maya and I had spent time together we were the center of each other's lives and now that we are finally living together we are farther apart than we have ever been. One morning decide to walk home from breakfast and on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal I pick a bundle of sagebrush and start burning it whenever Maya walks in the door.
+
+The job only makes it worse. Every time I sit down at the computer to work on retouching the images I am reminded of how miserable things are. I stare at the faceless models and they stare emptily back at me from the screen. I can hear them laughing at me, flaunting how much more important they are to Maya. I am descending into a hellish nightmare of self-doubt, whirling around an abysmal sense of worthlessness. And I'm losing my sense of humor. I stare at the photographs for hours trying to figure out what the hell to do with them. 
+
+The phone rings and suddenly I have the brilliant idea to clog the line with an Internet connection. I get a reprieve from the incessant ringing. Out of habit I checking my email and find that Dean has been trying to get a hold of me for two weeks. I email him my new phone number, but make no mention about the state of things. He too is in a terrible state, almost as bad as I am. He quit his job after only a month back in LA. He fled back to DC where he has taken up again with Alexis. He claims in his email that he is only staying there because he has nowhere else to go, but we both know that isn't true. It's quite a document, the email he sends, it starts without even an introduction. "I fear normalcy in any shape. Anything that has been agreed upon by enough people to actually be called 'normal' is something I am not interested in. Primarily, because in my assessment of the world's population, you could fit the intelligent peoples of the earth on the head of the proverbial pin. You said once, while I was staying with you, that 'a genius only knows he's a genius if he's surrounded by idiots.' After my brief return to LA, I concluded that I am in fact a genius by simple default, everyone around me was a grade A moron. I will always be grateful to LA for showing me that there was place where I could surround myself with millions of examples of what I try to destroy in myself.... The niche I attempted to carve out, or should I say that the niche society attempted to carve out for me, fit about as well as an airline seat does a five hundred-pound man's ass. My parameters lie outside the curriculum of everyday thought.... I have now decided that genius must find a societal outlet for at least one thing they create -otherwise they are doomed... The good things that happen are a flood of orgasmic joy and I cling to them. I don't believe in depression. Depression is a tag put on someone who is 'positive' impotent... When it comes to having faith in a positive future I'm as limp as a seventy-year-old porn star. Positive things happen occasionally by the flick of a flint, but counting on them is time I can no longer waste. Let it all come down. Expect the worst and you'll relish the best. Expect the best and you'll wallow in pain. So I went looking for the worst. I came back here to DC to be with Alexis.... In truth I have been enjoying myself, but that feeling is fading fast... I heard from Jimmy that you were in New York so I wanted to send you this ASAP. I may need to spend a little time on your couch in the near future. The money I had is nearly gone so I can't get much farther than New York at this juncture."
+
+I feel woozy. I lie down to take a nap but I can't sleep. I lie there like a somnambulist, staring at the wall thinking of nothing. Maya comes home at ten and finds me in the darkness. My fever is back and my lungs are clenched up tight as a boxer's fist. I hack and cough all night long spitting chunks of brown phlegm in the sink. I can't sleep. By morning dark rings have formed under my eyes. I look and feel exhausted, but I still can't sleep. The anxiety attacks return in the midst of my illness. I am feverish, coughing, sniffling, sneezing, and contending with a racing heart that seems intent on pounding right out of my ribcage. I forget to log on to the Internet and the phone rings incessantly. I hear the neighbor's television through the walls. The mouse is scratching at the ceiling. I hack up blood into a tissue. My fever climbs to 103 degrees. Giant moving cranes roar and screech across the street. The bleat of construction vehicles in reverse is ceaseless. The phone is still ringing; the room spins in circles around my head. Maya is no where to be found; she hasn't returned my phone call. My stomach growls, I am starving, but I can't bring myself to eat. There is no food in the house except grapes anyway. I flip through afternoon talk shows watching 'fat women and the men who love them.' The phone rings again and I can hear Maya's voice on the machine, but I'm too weak to get up and answer it.
+
+When my cell phone rings, I assume it will be Maya. I desperately want to hear her voice, but when I answer it, it turns out to be Dean.
+
+ "Sil! It's good to hear your voice." He sounds frantic. "I'd love to chat but I don't have the change... got a cell phone huh? Did you read my letter? I hope it's all right, I bought a train ticket for tomorrow morning... I'll be in the city around noon. Can I hang for a couple of days until I can find some cash and get out?"
+
+"Sure Dean. You're always welcome..." I am thinking of how to phrase the situation. The last thing in the world that I want to add to an already desperate situation is another desperate person. "Great," he says before I can get a word in edgewise, "see you tomorrow." He hangs up without giving me time to fully explain things, but I figure that's his mistake not mine. 
+
+Morning finds me still feverish and shaky, but I get up anyway. I meet Maya at the Waverly for breakfast. I see her off to work and head uptown to meet Dean. I stagger along in a feverish nightmare. Gargoyles and fiends stalk me from shadowy buildings. They prowl the streets in mobs. Their claws ripping and tearing everything to shreds. They hide around corners; I lurch across the street. They leap from cabs and busses, claws extended, teeth bared, trying to rip me limb from limb and drag me down with them into the fiery pits of the underworld. The world moves in stop motion film, blurred out of focus and intent of tripping me up as I walk. Things that aren't there keep darting in my peripherals and I can here Mayan priests, the chiclet boy, fiends, demons, and phantoms growling and chattering in the shadows.
+
+Dean is sitting on a bench across from the newsstand in Grand Central. He looks haggard from lack of sleep and excessive facial hair. "Sil..." He looks up weakly.
+
+"Dean..." I sound like a weather beaten sixty-year-old man. "It's almost noon, you want a drink?"
+
+"Ya," Dean tries to smile, " that might raise my spirits."
+
+ We head across the street to a bar. I keep my head down to avoid the devilish creatures swooping down from above. We sit down at the bar and order a couple of beers. Dean takes off his coat and slumps his head down on the bar. "Things are bad back there. She doesn't even know I'm here. Neither does my job." He raises his head when the bartender sets down the beer. "But none of that matters a wit," he sighs. "What's wrong is what's always been wrong, and what that is remains an absolute mystery to me. Did you read my letter?"
+
+"Of course. Always such cheery words you send."
+
+"Yes, well, you know how much easier it is to write than to talk. Anyway, I meant most of that stuff. I'm lost and alone. He stares at his haggard reflection in the mirror behind the bar. "Do you ever feel that the whole world has turned against you?" 
+
+I want to say that I do, that I feel it right now, but the boy with chiclets is glaring at me, calling me a worthless gringo and kicking my leg under the counter. I lie to Dean and tell him that he's alone. I tell him that things will brighten up. I tell him that the world is getting better. The Mayan priest throws his head back and laughs hysterically.
+
+"No it's not," Dean shakes his head. "The world is getting worse Sil. It's never going to get any better. This whole country is certifiably insane. I have to get out of here somehow. I think maybe I'll go to France." He lights a cigarette and groans. "Oh god, what the fuck am I talking about? We both know I'm never going to France." He laughs ironically and drinks down his beer in one long gulp.
+
+I light a cigarette. I blow the smoke back behind me. The boy with the chiclets goes into fits from the smoke. He runs out of the bar and comes back with giant growling, snarling beast in tow. It has alligator eyes and long fangs dripping carnage. Its leathery hide is covered in warts. It snorts and shakes its head. It looks at me and licks it's lips. The boy laughs. The Mayan priest comes over and rubs its head.
+
+The bartender brings Dean another round of Guinness without being asked. He is listening in on the conversation. Everyone is listening in. A crowd of half-decomposed bodies lines up at the end of bar groaning and moaning and waiting for Dean and I to be put in the gallows. They drag a guillotine out of the bathroom. They are screaming for our heads. The priest whispers in our ears, when the blade falls, get up and run, get up and run, get up and run... I can hear them placing bets on how far our headless corpses will run.
+
+Dean turns and claps his hand on my shoulder and looks intently in my eyes. "Sil," he says, "I want out of this nightmare."
+
+I consider it for a moment. Get up and run, get up and run, get up and run... "I got news for you Dean, there is no way out." He turns away from me, "you can't do it, you have to walk through the nightmare to come out the other end." The priest doubles over in fits of laughter and the little boy throws his chiclets out in the crowd. The ghastly decomposing figures clamor over each other trying to get at the gum. They rip each other to shreds; shrieks and howls fill my head. I start to shake.
+
+Dean drinks his beer in one long gulp again. He motions to the bartender for more. "Fuck that," he says angrily, "I'm gonna find a way out. And who the hell are you to say that anyway?" He looks at me with fire glowing in his eyes. "Where do you get off telling me that? I thought you would be the one person who would understand where I was coming from?"
+
+I shrug my shoulders and sigh deeply. "If you want to go, you just go. It's that simple, you don't have to debate it with yourself; you don't have to get approval; you don't have to ask; you don't have to plan. You go out for the paper one day and you don't come back. You book a flight, a boat, a train and you just go... like we did last time. I just don't think it's going to help." 
+
+Dean is silent. The room is spinning around my head. Lights streak from the motion. Faces stretch out sideways and take on hideously evil dispositions. Time speeds up. I am thrown forward. The fabric of reality is ripping and I'm falling through into some other place-some great inferno of perdition. I run to the bathroom and splash water on my face. I feel like drugs are coursing my veins, but none are. My heart is beating like a jackhammer. The priest is staring at me from the mirror. He lifts his blade to my eyebrow and pushes it against my flesh. I feel a sharp pain and bead of blood begins to form. The thin rivulet runs down my cheek like a tear. The mirror wobbles and shakes. The priest leaps forward driving the blade into my head. I'm too weak to scream.
+
+I come to on the floor. An old man is shaking my shoulder. He asks if I am okay. I stand up uneasily and look in the mirror again. There is a cut on the scar of my eyebrow; I must have hit my head when I fell. I thank the man, and he leaves, shaking his head. I wash off the blood and put a paper towel to my head to stop the bleeding. I open the door and step back into the bar. The priest is gone, so is the chiclet boy and all the rest of the hideous, clamoring monsters. Halfway across the room, I stop and study Dean. He is staring emptily at the mirror behind the bar. I notice for the first time Dean, as he really is, I feel all his dilemmas as if the net of synchronicity is merging us into one single entity. It occurs to me that he may be right. Perhaps he should run again.
+
+"Dean," I say as I sit down. "If it makes you feel any better, my life is at the bottom of a toilet bowl too. I'm losing Maya. I can't stand the thought of it, but it's already too late." I finish my beer and order a couple of shots of whiskey.
+
+"Shit Sil, I'm sorry. If I had known that I wouldn't have come up here and laid my shit on you." 
+
+I glance over at him and do both shots myself. I order two more and let Dean have one this time. "That's not the point," I tell him. "It actually makes me feel a better knowing I'm not the only one screwing up my life. Besides I might be able to help you. Why don't we go down to the airport and book a flight? Why don't you go to France right now?" I raise my shot. Dean looks helplessly at me, but raises his shot to toast. "Let's go right now no more talk no more contemplation, no more words. From here on out only actions, pure honest actions," I throw back the whiskey; it burns down my throat. Dean does the same. I order more. And more. We drink faster and faster.
+
+"I can't just disappear to Europe on Alexis," Dean complains. "I have to at least call her."
+
+"No you don't," I glared at him, "come on let's go." He's losing his nerve. I grab him by the arm and start to drag him out. He consents and lets me pull him out of the bar, but in the vestibule he stops. I fear he will change his mind, but he only wants my assurances that I will explain everything to Alexis. I swear to him that I will and push him out into the street. I hail a cab.
+
+As we ride out to La Guardia International, I double-check the one potential flaw in my plan. A plan which I now see leading Dean high into the Himalayas where he can at long last gain the secret of the universe from some ancient Tibetan shaman, so old he remembers the time before Buddhism... "Hey, you still carrying your passport at the bottom of that bag?"
+
+Dean lurches drunkenly down and pulls the suitcase to his lap. After rummaging though it for a tedious eternity, he produces the tatter document and smiles. I sit back, but Dean leans over and drunkenly grabs me by the shirt. He gets right up in my face, "now Sil," he growls, "you promise to me that you will go to Alexis and explain the situation to her, tell her that I love her and I look forward to being with her again someday, but for now, I have to do this. You'll tell her all that won't you?" Tears are streaming down his face, from what I'm not quite sure, but I feel compelled to lie to him.
+
+"Of course I'll call her as soon as you're safely in the air."
+
+"No! You can't call, that won't work." He shakes me by the shirt. "You have to go to DC tonight and tell her in person, someone needs to be there so that she has a shoulder to cry on."
+
+The thought of Alexis crying on my shoulder sends homicidal shivers down my spine, but I agree just to shut him up. 
+
+It takes about forty minutes to get to the airport. I shove some cash through the window like a madman and I jump out of the cab, dragging Dean behind me. I steer him straight to the Air France desk. I leave him to the side and step up the attendant. "I need a one way ticket to Paris," I say proudly, "on the next flight."
+
+She looks the two of us over and seems to be trying to decide whether or nor we are serious. I pull out my wallet to encourage her on. She types something in the computer and then smiles at me. "I have a few seats on the one o'clock," she says, "but its already started boarding, you'll have to hurry." I smile at her and demand that she sell me one. She seems flustered by my enthusiasm and urgency. 
+
+"How much?" I ask as if it's unimportant.
+
+"One person," She hesitates and I glance over at Dean. He is slumped down sitting on the floor with his hands in his face. "It's going to be eleven-eighty with taxes and airport fees," she says.
+
+"Done," I smile, whip out my credit card, and hand it to her.
+
+"Can I see the passport of the travelling party?" She looks at me triumphantly as if she thinks I will have overlooked this detail. I grab it out of Dean's hand and shove it under her nose. While she runs the credit card I start Dean in the direction of customs. I run back to finish up the paper work. He is through customs by the time I come over with the ticket. I hurry him down the concourse, thrusting the ticket in his hand. I give him the rest of my money. It's only about two hundred dollars after I take out return cab fare for myself, but at least he'll have a few days to figure something out. He'll probably hate me in about three hours when he sobers up at thirty five thousand feet over the Atlantic, but it'll be too late by then. At the entrance to the ramp I stop and give him a hug. We hug for moment, the way straight men are not supposed to hug in an airport concourse, and then I turn and march out without looking behind me. I'm not sure if he'll go through with it or not, but either way I figure as long as I don't see then he'll always have gone in my mind.
+
+I go outside and sit down for a cigarette. It takes a few minutes to find a cab that won't mind my nicotine habit, but eventually an Islamic looking man motions for me to hop in. It's a spectacular feeling that sweeps over me as the cab emerges from the Lincoln tunnel. The sky seems immense and wide open, as if imported from Montana. The first rays of orange are painting the tops of the skyscrapers and the whole world seems turned upside down and shaken. Loose change clatters on the sidewalks as worldwide pants are emptied and all the hopes and dreams of eight hundred thousand years fall down on me and pick me up on their shoulders. I feel boundless, timeless and completely, utterly divinely free. I feel like I am the one on my way to Paris.
+
+
+