“What’ll you have?” Sam said, already pouring the beer, sliding it across the bar to that same old spot in the corner.

Norm slumped onto the stool. “The pressure’s getting to me,” he said, taking a swig.

“Still on the job hunt?”

“No. You know how Vera and I have been trying for a kid?”

Sam wiped water from a clean glass. “Not going so well?”

“Doctor says my swimmers aren’t swimming. Low motility.”

“Sorry to hear it. But hey, there are options.”

“I can’t even face going home, Sam. Vera’s always wanted a baby. She’s been yacking about it ever since we started going together in high school. Meanwhile I’m out of work, can’t give her a kid. It’s getting harder and harder to wake up in the morning.”

The door swung open again. “Hey, Cliff,” Sam said, lifting his elbows from the bar, turning to look behind him.

“Afternoon, boys,” Cliff said. “What would today’s topic be?”

Norm shook his head. “Nothing.”

“How’d the route treat you today?” Sam poured another beer, the head sifting off around the rim of the glass, perfectly.

“Never mind the route. I met a woman.”

“Do tell,” Norm said, draining his beer.

“Name’s Candy.”

Sam poured another for Norm, and one for the woman sitting at the side of the bar. “Where’d you meet this Candy?”

“Well, she’s one of them women you talk to on the phone.”

“A phone sex operator?”

“Bite your tongue, Norm. She’s like a companion. Someone to call when you’re looking to talk. That’s all.”

“My bad.”

“She said I’m different from the other men she talks to.”

“That’s for sure,” Carla said, emerging from the pool room with a tray of empties.

“She’s no Vera though, Normie. You got lucky there.”

“I know it.”

“Lucky I didn’t get to her first, that is.”

“Come on, Cliff.”

“Just playing around, Sam. Norm knows I wouldn’t let him stand in my way.”

“Shut up.” Norm slammed his glass on the bar and slid off the stool, pushed his gut against Cliff’s. “Just shut up.”

“Guys,” Sam said, “let’s all calm down. Cliff, why don’t you go shoot some stick or something?”

Cliff sulked into the men’s room, locked himself in the second stall. He muttered to himself as he unzipped his regulation gray pants. He closed his eyes, thought of Candy’s smoky, lounge singer voice. She had a way of making him forget everything, of making him feel as if he were somebody, maybe even postmaster general material. His mustache twitched as he tugged at himself.

Norm drank his beer, watching the Sox lose one in the bottom of the ninth. For the second night in a row.

“They need your arm, Sam.”

“An arm. Not mine.”

“You might have given up some dingers, but nothing like these hacks they’ve got now.”

“Listen, Norm. You and Vera, you’ll be all right. You’ve weathered a lot of storms.”

“I hate to disappoint her. Sometimes I can’t find a reason why she’s still with me.”

“She loves you, man. You know that.”

“You’re probably right, Sam. How about another brew?” Norm gulped the beer in front of him to make room for the next, to keep his mouth occupied until it could find some way to form the words that would explain to these people, his friends, that Vera had left him. How it had been years, and he’d yet to find the words, was beyond him, was buried somewhere deep in the past under many more failed attempts at the truth. Sam placed a fresh brew in front of him. Norm lifted it, thought of it as a toast, and maybe after this one he’d be able to say it all out loud.

That night, as every night, Sam picked up the stools, one by one, swung them upside down and placed them atop the bar. Carla dimmed the lights on her way out that swinging door. The feeling, the dread he’d never learned to kick seeped in, seemingly from his fingertips and up under the sleeves of his sweater. He was alone, and it crept up the back of his neck, made his spine tingle. He looked at the bottles, row after row of them, and felt the sweat form along his receding hairline.

He reached for the mirror he still kept under the bar. It wasn’t all vanity; sometimes the sight of himself—as unexpected as it always was, no matter how much he prepared for it—was enough to make him feel as if he were not alone. If only for a moment. Sometimes he ended up sleeping on the couch in the office, unable to get his legs to hold him up long enough to make it out the bar, up the stairs, to his car. Let alone survive the drive home and the utter emptiness of his frosty apartment. Sometimes that glance at his reflection was just enough to stave off the loneliness long enough to keep his hands off the liquor. Long enough to remember this bar was the closest thing he had left to the limelight of his career. It was the faintest idea of a home. It was a place where, when it came right down to it, people knew his name.

As he emerged he saw the cat caught on a spike of the fence. The cat whined shrilly. He paused for a moment eyeing the cat and weighing the hammer in his hand, then put the hammer and nails down on a chair and paced over to the fence. He reached his hand towards the cat and she reached back with a hiss.

Small beads of blood appeared in a line down the top of his hand. He pressed his thumb against the cut, pressuring the seeping to stop. He glanced at the hammer, he glanced back at the cat.

He looked around the yard until his eyes fixed on an old towel hanging from the clothesline. As he plucked it from its pegs, he looked up and down the street, checking for neighbors. Seeing no one, he walked away from the clothesline and threw the towel over the hissing cat. He reached down and grasped the cat firmly though the folds of cloth. He pulled.

The tension on the wire increased for a moment, then released as he drew the cat away from the fence. A tuft of bloodied fur was left wrapped around the wire. He lowered the cat to the ground and released the towel. She darted back to the shed where she kept her nest. As she licked her wound, he retrieved the hammer and nails from their chair and climbed up the ladder set against the house. On the roof, he hammered down the loose rattling iron sheet which had kept him awake at night.

When we woke up on the island again we thought we were dreaming nightmares and I said to you that I wanted to stay in bed all day and eat ice cream from the tub and you said you were okay with this and you would bake bread from scratch and we could eat it with dinner. I said I’d put sauce on the fire right now, right this second, so by dinner the acids will be cooked out. Sometimes this is all we need. The carbs are beautiful things that attach to us like parasites and keep us warm all the time. I don’t care if I die young I said. I don’t care about my familial history. Fuck heart failure, right now all my heart feels is foam collapsing on sand.

In the night I kept telling myself that everything was absolutely fucking fine. I did this near the fire, sitting on a driftwood log. Everything was not absolutely fucking fine and we both knew it. You hadn’t spoken to me all day. I kept thinking fear is a very tall glass of water. Kept humming happiness is a warm gun. I knew which pairs of underwear you had put in your luggage and I knew which pair of underwear you had on and these shouldn’t have been my thoughts but after repeating everything is absolutely fucking fine I looked at you in the firelight and followed the lines of your clothing down to your thighs and thought I want to fuck you like a savage.

When we woke up on the island a third time we knew that we were dreaming and we came together wearing thin blue sheets. I didn’t cry and I felt like you were crushing me beneath the weight of your gigantic heart. I closed my eyes and watched your gigantic heart swallow me like a flat pill. It was a beautiful pile of laundry on our clean mattress, it was a room with a door and painted white walls. It was high school and the sun leaked around us like I promised you with all of my strength that I would never stop looking at you.

Repelled by thick layers of suntan lotion, the water could not penetrate their rubbery skin. It was 2:37AM, which for the mistaken orange people was still night. A sunrise in Japan, edited out in the minds of North America. Somebody’s chewing gum was in another person’s mouth. It was all really confusing, where teeth ended and other teeth began.

Meat was cheap, soaked white things pink. They wore steak suits when indoors, rubbed Cheetos at lunch break between fingers until it was just powder. Hurt by the clock, they snapped off minute hands, hid them inside drawers. Anuses as trumpets supplying weightless notes into huge t-shirts, shit on carpet until it was finally Friday. Until it was to 2:37AM again.

Do not consider this a bath or voluntary swim, just a mistake—not the violent trajectories of their lives, but how cold the water was. The moon, night punctured, pulled the tides under which the ocean inhaled the land. This water was unwalkable, unspeakable, and with each crashing wave, the mistaken orange people became less and less orange.

When you were younger, you were beautiful. You looked sexy, and interesting. Now you just look tired, mostly. Your golden hair knotted and plastered on top of your head, moistened by the beads of sweat that cascade down your scalp. Your legs and breasts which once boomed like the bright lights of a city now lay there dimming with age. Only shedding light on forgotten trails, potholes, and depressions. When you were younger, men would call you for days on end. But you got married too young and divorced too late.

Now the only person who calls you is your mother.

She asks you “Why don’t you date any nice men anymore?” And “Why don’t you move back home, stop all this California nonsense.”

And you laugh when she tells you “Harry’s new wife is pregnant.” And when she doesn’t respond for a while and you think she’s starting to pity you. You tell her want to come home and visit. She giggles excitedly and you can hear her smacking her lips as she says, “Oh Kell, that’s so wonderful. You should really meet Barbara’s son. He’s a big realtor, and doesn’t care that you don’t want children and have already been married.”

When it was finally over, you wish you hadn’t come. You sleep in your childhood bedroom, still adorned with stuffed animals. You begin to feel horribly old. Minnesota is colder than you remember. And your mother, although you’re almost forty, still refuses to let you drink with her. You go on a date with Ted, the realtor, who has plastic hair. He orders your meal for you, and tells you how the market just isn’t what it used to be in 1998, when he started his firm. You drink too much wine and tell him you haven’t been with a real man since 1998.

The dinner was so far unsatisfying for Ted. Ted was a large man, with a mustache. Growing up he had always understood that a well-groomed mustache was a good indicator of success. When he started his real estate firm, he grew a large mustache and accredited it for much of his wealth. But you were uninterested by his success as a realtor. You kept looking up at him grunting in between glasses of wine. He didn’t find you particularly attractive, but felt there was something becoming about you. Ted liked that you lived in California although you did not seem quite glamorous enough for California, he thought. Ted also liked that by your fifth glass of wine you made it very apparent that you intended to sleep with him.

Ted’s house is cold and overcompensating. He has a wine cellar and a TV that is far too big for a man living by himself. He refuses to turn the lights on while undressing you. Afterward, you ask him to tell you you’re beautiful and interesting. He sighs and tells you he has an early morning tomorrow and should probably take you back home. You turn the lights on and gather your clothing.

When it all started—your marriage deteriorating, your divorce—the move to California seemed like the best thing for you. You and your husband were barely talking. Your conversations had become a series of grunts and sighs in competition of who could hurt the other more. Then one day at dinner, calm and quiet he said “I want a divorce.” You just sighed and finished your salmon. The papers were filed and you bought a ticket to California. You were barely in your mid thirties, and tired of the cold. But you didn’t know how to be alone anymore. You slept with far too many men. You tried dating a few. But when they stopped calling you back, or you found out they were married or not looking for anything serious, the glass of wine you always drank with dinner turned into two glasses, then three, and then the whole bottle. But you tell yourself, It’s okay. You’re just having a good time.

After all, I was up there. I was up to something. I was up there, and there was no one to tell me what I was up to up there. There was no one to tell me about what it was like to be up there. And there was no one I could share the experience of being up there with, because everyone else I knew was still down there, below where I was, trying to find a way to get up to where I was, so they could come back down later and tell me what it was like to be up there.

I like the fall off the precipice of organization. I like running headlong into the lack of control my life seems organized around. I like reaching out to grab the wind and pull it toward me like I can make of it something that looks like I made something of it.

I’ve had all the love sucked out of me before. I finally remembered I was here to try to find my way to Wonder.

With Wonder, it didn’t feel like having a cigarette together. It didn’t feel like touching the tip of something to your tongue and lips, getting it wet, and then handing it over to Wonder to touch the tip of the same something to her tongue and lips and getting it wet and then getting the wet I got it wet with mixed with the wet she got it wet with. It didn’t feel like handing over the organization of my life, either. It felt more like getting tutored in a new form of organization, one that hadn’t ever occurred to me. It felt like being asked to organize myself around my own system, the way Wonder had organized her life around a system. It was something I was just about ready for.

Wonder’s system had to do with precipitous speed, I think, and self-discipline. Wonder was out there living large for me to see, and I watched and learned. By the time Wonder and I left the hallways of our childhood, I was slotted into the process of my life like the learning was totally over. It wasn’t so much that I felt out of control, it was more that I felt as though I wasn’t really a part of the process at all, not even enough a part of it to feel out of control. I was outside of control. I was outside of everything.

I ran the water in the sink. It made a kind of hissing sound coming out of the tap and hitting the stainless steel basin. I could see a distorted version of myself in the stainless steel basin. I looked tired and distorted. I needed to get some sleep. If I lived in Tibet, I thought, I could get more sleep. I went to the fridge. I pulled it open. I got out a tin of something. I consumed what was in the tin. In about five minutes, I was going to go to a meeting on a street about five minutes from where I lived. I had never been to a meeting before. This was going to be my first.

I went to the ridge. I pulled open my jacket. I got out my penis. I consumed a chocolate bar that was in my pocket with my penis dangling over the ridge. In about five minutes, I was going to go to a meeting on a street about five minutes from where I lived. I had never been to a meeting before. This was going to be my first.

An experience is an assemblage of moments that are gathered together in the imagination of a person having an experience.

In a way, this story is the story of some asshole. I’m that asshole. I’m the star of the story, even though it means I have to be an asshole, because the star of this story was always going to be an asshole, even before it was me who was going to be the star of the story.

Some questions about yourself assemble on the shore of your sainthood. Same piece of shit idea you always have. The boat sailing closer. Your eyes going squinty to try to see if there’s anyone on that boat, and, if so, who is it? Who is on that boat today, you ask yourself. Everyday it’s the same piece of shit idea about the same boat with someone on it. Every day you hope the someone on the boat is someone different. But it never is.

Same as a piece of writing is an assemblage of words gathered together on a piece of paper, your inane questions to yourself are proof that you do not know the name or the number of the entities that you might possibly assemble as you imagine, in discrete bouts of imagining, the moments that you could treat as experiences; and, yet, you want to break these assemblages down, disassemble them, and render in words these experiences that stand as impregnable entities for you. What is wrong with you?

Getting rejected by Wonder was devastating. It felt like: Maybe I’ll let you put yourself inside me, but not yet. The taste of that possibility made it hard for me to catch my breath, as though Wonder let me put my hand inside her shirt. It was not so much like having my hand inside Wonder’s shirt as it was imagining my hand inside Wonder’s shirt. Not this time, Mister, Wonder seemed to be saying. But, if you play your cards right, maybe I’ll allow you to violate me one day. I wanted so badly to violate Wonder. But, by the time I figured out what it was that was hurting so much inside, Wonder was gone.

The boy put his hand on the girl’s bum and kissed the girl on her lips. He kissed the girl goodnight with the soft half moon of her bum flooding some scary chemical up through the veins in his arm and into his entire body. This had never happened to the boy before. The boy didn’t know what it was that was flooding into his body, but it seemed to be flooding into his body straight from this girl’s bum. He felt that whatever it was that was flooding up his arm from the girl’s bum, it must be toxic. Yet he couldn’t take his hand away.

I spent the afternoon with you while you pretended to be pregnant. In your yard I tried to be a doctor. I didn’t know that we would die. At night I slept easy.

Once, we went through the woods and threw rocks at the river. It was snowing in a way that made the water look drinkable like a slushy. You told me you wanted a boyfriend and I didn’t think about your belly. Instead I imagined myself slipping on the bank, falling into a warm bath.

In your garage we tried to sell your father’s tools. No one would buy anything else. The tools were all they wanted. We didn’t make much money. I hadn’t learned to barter. In the evening we crossed the street and whispered to each other on the playground. I climbed the walls and looked down at you, blending into the gravel like a magic eye. I could hear our parents through the fences.

Once I went outside early to watch your mother walk the cul-de-sac in her yoga pants. She was always walking in the morning and you said it was because she had to keep herself pretty. She taught a class at the Total Fitness twice a week.

Once I promised that I would meet you in the morning. I tried to pretend that I couldn’t hear my phone. I remembered that the Natives said you could record the sound of a plant dying with tiny microphones. One wore a bright vest while speaking to us. Later, he played the drum he carved from a tree and I thought you might forgive me.

Not all the Natives are like this. One lives in a junkyard, DISTURBED tattooed across his throat. I haven’t been to prison. He tells me to cut my hair and when he does I wonder what you would think of me like this, sitting in the garage on a step ladder, the scissors of a convict trimming my sideburns.

I wonder what your mother would think as she numbs her legs the morning I come down the stairs to go away.

Still, sometimes, I look at pictures of you. You do not look the same but this is because you are dead like me. Like the plants, we’ve made noises you can only hear with tiny microphones. No one has recorded this, they will never know.

Dew covers Laverne, who sits stiffly on the couch.

Shirley is in the kitchen. She is taking everything out of the cupboards.  She is clearing clogged pipes with corrosive liquid. She is defrosting. “How long will Laverne sit in on the couch, glistening but immobile?” Shirley wonders.

Shirley notices, through the window, that it is night. The window is above the sink where Shirley has been washing dishes all day. Half of them are Laverne’s. “When will she help me with these dishes?” Shirley ponders.

Shirley begins gathering ingredients to make a casserole. Laverne will only eat complicated casseroles. Shirley has no choice but to make them: if there were no casseroles, Laverne would starve. Shirley sings, Schlemile, Schlemozzle, Hausenfeffer Incorporated, under her breath as she slices vegetables. She doesn’t want Laverne to hear. “That’s water over the bridge,” Laverne would say, if she were speaking.

Shirley looks over at Laverne, and sees that Laverne is now damaging the couch with her moisture. The wet beads that have covered Laverne are now rivulets that course the contours of her body. “Laverne’s like a waterbed addled with pinpricks,” Shirley thinks. She resumes the intricacies of casserole preparation, not noticing that Laverne has become a spewing fountain.

Shirley gets further lost in the details of the casserole assembly; there are so many layers involved. The endorphins pump through her and her hands and eyes escape the ties of the body proper and plunge into the essence of the casserole, its vine-ripe heart.

When Shirley looks out the window again, she sees that it is day. She admires her exquisite casserole, the breadth and depth of it. She looks over toward Laverne, but can’t locate her. She is concerned that Laverne has drowned within the waterlogged couch.

Shirley finds Laverne unconscious and bobbing on the surface of the couch. She watches Laverne’s chest very closely to see if it is moving. When she sees that it is not moving, she resuscitates Laverne by putting her dry mouth to Laverne’s wet mouth and blowing air into her. When Shirley is convinced that Laverne is breathing, she pops the casserole into he pre-heated oven.

Shirley joins Laverne in the couch, and she struggles to keep afloat. Shirley is worried that Laverne might kill them both with this excessively fluidity. Shirley pulls herself out of the couch and dries herself with a towel from the bathroom. She goes to her desk and makes a paper boat that she places in Laverne’s lap where it sails from thigh to thigh. Laverne smiles slightly at the uneventful journey, and her fountainous form transforms into the consistency of a sponge.

The timer dings and Shirley takes the casserole out of the oven. It has the most gorgeously browned skin and delicate bubbling edges.

Laverne and Shirley eat the casserole, and when they’re done, Shirley uses Laverne’s newly absorbent body to clean the dishes.

The leader turned to the prettiest girl and said something rebellious.

The girl felt warm inside and wanted to lie on the ground and roll around for awhile. They were loading up the van though, and she couldn’t.

The leader told the four other people to hurry up. They loaded things out of their dorms into the white rental van as fast as they could. They made sure not drop any of the potatoes.

They loaded the last of the explosive potatoes and got in the van. They had a thirty minute drive ahead of them, so the leader put a CD in the player and they listened to Frank Sinatra as they drove towards the White House.

The prettiest girl admired the potato-launchers they had made. They were white and long. She remembered the leader twisting pipe into pipe. She put her hands on her abdomen and tried to calm down.

The leader drove carefully.

He said a few things to the van full of people. Inspirational things. He reassured them that this was the right message to send, that the fucking pigs will get it now.

They were getting close. The leader turned the music off and everyone listened to the traffic.

They got to the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania and parked on the sideway. People began to honk. They got out of the car and shouted at each other as they unloaded the van. They had to be fast. They took out the spud-guns and set them on the sidewalk. They fixed angles. The potatoes were carefully loaded into the guns. They aimed at the west wing and hoped the potatoes filled with RDX would explode upon impact.

They fired. Pedestrians screamed at them and called 911 and the police. The potatoes shot out of the white tubes with a thunk sound and arced through the sky and out of sight.

They fired fifteen potatoes. They had five left. The leader let the other three load and shoot and he pulled the prettiest girl into him and kissed her neck. The girl stopped breathing and almost fainted. The other three said that they were out. They all followed their plan. They lay face-down on the sidewalk.

Sirens came. The Secret Service and Tactical Response teams came first and held their automatic weapons on the students. The police came but were held off by the government tactical units. They put black bags over the assailant’s heads and tied their hands. They loaded them into an unmarked van, much like the white rental. The leader couldn’t speak and the prettiest girl couldn’t be pretty underneath the black bags. If they spoke, they would be hit, they were sure of that. They kept quiet.