Year: 2011

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I turned to look at Rain blushing; the door opened a crack stopped by a thick security chain.

“Yea what is it?” Said a pair of dark eyes.

“Marla open this fuckin door, I really need to come in!” Rain screamed, pounding on the door. Had they followed us?

“Shit. Hi Rain. Wait a second; I need to put on some cloths.”

The sound of someone walking around was followed shortly by the soft metal slide of the chain being removed.

Marla opened the door and let us into her small apartment. It was cave like inside, the walls covered with dark tapestries interspersed with Type O Negative, Tool, and VNV Nation posters. The windows had been covered with foil.

Marla stood before us, one hip cocked out, hands on her midsection. She was dressed in an extra large white zombie t-shirt and little else. A cartoon zombie with a large X burned into its head stared back at us. Her bare legs where covered to mid thigh by the long black t-shirt. Her coal black hair, a series of thin dread locks, was pulled back into a single large tendril. Both arms were as covered with tattoos like Rain’s, I noticed several pieces that could have been by the same artist. Marla was the kind of girl that shaved off her eyebrows and drew them back on.

I stood awkwardly to one side as Rain explained why we were there.

“Fuck girl, you in some serious shit. Them Irish guys don’t fuck around when it comes to lending out money, especially now-n-days.” When she talked I could see that she had split her tongue. I had seen that on a website once. The tongue is split down the middle so that the end looks like a snake tongue.

“What the fuck is he staring at?” I looked down quickly, blushing even harder than I had before.

“Marla, Quentin, Quentin this is Marla.” Rain introduced us. “It’s a long story; can we stay at your place for a couple hours till things blow over?”

“Sure honey, you know you’re always welcome here.” She smiled.

Marla was apparently into the color black. Most things in her apartment were black, or a deep blood red. I sat on a black couch trying to stay awake. The stress of our flight from the Irish mob had worn me out.

Marla got us some water; mine came in a tiny mug with Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas on it. His skeletal arm made up the handle. She turned on the Television and handed me the remote. I turned to the local news channel. The main story was the fact that 4 hurricanes were currently in the Atlantic at the same time. They were all expected to hit the east coast in the next couple of days. There was no news about a couple of people forcefully kicking there way into any local apartments.

Rain and Marla talked about Rain’s problems. Marla didn’t seem to notice or care that when she sat down her black lace underwear showed. Her legs had long stitched tattooed along the outside, like she was a giant doll held together with string. I made sure to keep my attention on the news.

“I can’t go back to work. If they could find me at my place they will know where I work.”

“Maybe you can get out of town, your cousin in Cali?”

“Have you seen the price of a bus ticket? Now that gas is so expensive, I can’t afford that shit.”

“You have your bike”

CNN had stories about the likelihood that hurricane Martha, Ned, Ophelia, and Peter would slam into the entire east coast from Florida, to Maine all at once. They had graphics that looked like a bar graph, with the paths of each storm lined up in nice lines set to run into land in an orderly pattern. I flipped through the channels, Fox news was running a special on the “Terrorists in Our Midst” they were currently highlighting a couple of ELF members that had set a bunch of Hummers on fire in Oregon.

“I left it at the apartment, and besides what am I going to do ride to fuckin California?”

“Shit, girl I seen how you ride, you could do it.”

“Thanks, but there has got to be a way to reason with these people, maybe I could get them some of the money and then they would let me pay the rest back slowly…”

“How long are you overdue?” Marla placed a hand on Rain’s leg.

The home shopping network was selling air filter masks with hello kitty patterns on them. Seems yet another mega-fire was ravaging the west. No reason to look unfashionable when dealing with elevated air particulates.

“They said I had till the end of the month to pay them back, I guess they wanted it early.” Rain said putting her head into her hands.

Discovery was running shark week again. Great whites leaping out of the air with seals in their mouths, the announcer explained that the shark attacked from below and the leaping broke the seals back so that the shark could swallow it easier.

“Well girl you have to do something, don’t worry we will figure it out.” Marla used her other hand to gently rub Rains back.

Click. Soap opera, yes he really was the twin. Click. Commercial for the new 5 dollar menu at Burger King. Only five dollars! What a deal. Click. Trade in your car for a scooter, at Bobs scooter world “stop paying high gas prices, scoot in style at Bob’s.” Click. The Russian rocket powered train was capable of speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Click. Another shooting in Dorchester. Flip. 200 killed in suicide bombing in Iraq. Click. The house debating the water distribution act of 2007 on CSPAN. Click. Click. Click. I couldn’t stop, Marla had over 50 channels and I had to watch them all, preferably at the same time. My thumb had ceased taking order from my brain. All systems were on full autopilot. The familiar itch started in my frontal lobes.

“What’s wrong with him? ADHD?” Marla said looking up.

“I am not sure.” Rain stood and they both looked at me.

Rain placed her hand carefully but firmly onto the remote and pulled it from my hands. My eyes had gone blank and my mouth hung open, my thumb continued to press buttons that were no longer there.

“We have to get out of Boston.” Each word took my entire strength to get out.

That’s when I began to scream.

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I had never actually heard a flashbang before, but I had seen enough TV to know what was going on next door. Someone had just unleashed hell on the poor bastards that inhabited the apartment next to Rains, and even through the walls we could tell it was no party.

“Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, FUCK!”

She was a whirlwind, grabbing her bag, and then reaching under the couch to grab a small package wrapped in brown paper. It came away with the sound of tearing masking tape.  It was addressed to her, and the from address was a hospital room, it went into her pack which she slung over her shoulder with a practiced flick. She took only a second to secure her aviatrix helmet and goggles and then she looked at me.

She didn’t need for me to speak; the look of terror on my face spoke volumes.

“Back window, run, NOW!” She ordered.

She pried open the one and only window in her apartment and quickly jumped out. The apartment was on the first floor and it was only a couple feet to the ground. The air outside was muggy and warm.

Rain gripped my arm painfully and led me towards a large dumpster behind the apartment complex, a quick glance behind me showed grey smoke pouring out of the window next door.

“I lied on all my paperwork, I just hope they don’t hurt the neighbors” Rain explained quickly as we snuck towards a small alley that led out to the main road.

“Fuck, I didn’t think they would be this interested, or come this soon, fuck!” She hissed under her breath.

We had only gone about a block when walking started to feel like drowning, I was not ready for anything more than sitting, eating and sleeping.

“Rain, not to be a downer, but I am not going to be able to go much further.” I managed to wheeze.

Looking left and right she once again grabbed my arm and started leading me down the street. We entered a small building that had a large T painted on it. The sickly warm air of the Boston T hit my face and nose causing me to cough. A stream of people pushed up and out of the subway, happy to be entering the relative cool of the air above.

Rain reached into her bag and handed me a small white card that had a small cartoon man on it. She then found one for herself, we pressed the tiny RFID tag in the card up against a reader and with a “boop” the doors slid open.

We were adrift in a sea of people, Rain held my hand, some of her tattoos spilled out onto the back of her hands. She herded me into a train with a red stripe down the side, the outbound to Braintree.

“I know a person we can stay with till this blows over.” We sat down in the blessedly air conditioned train, a strange smirk on her face.

“What exactly is ‘this’?” I asked trying not to sound too ungrateful towards the woman who had recently saved my life.

She looked at me, her face changing abruptly to a mask of confusion and fear. “I uhh, borrowed some money from these guys. Only a couple thousand, you know, with all the economic bullshit going on I needed it to help someone out of a jam.”

My brain suddenly felt, itchy, like a small rodent was crawling around inside my head. “That’s why you were going to jump off the bridge, because she died, and you couldn’t help her.” The words ran out of me.

“How the fuck do you know that!” She spat, tears welling up in her eyes, “Are you some kind of fuckin weirdo stalker?” She pulled away from me, I could see it in her eyes, she wanted to hurt me, she could have too, years of carrying heavy bags, and riding hard through Boston traffic had made her strong. She was getting ready to fight or flee.

“Wait! I am not a weirdo I promise.” People were starting to look at us. It is not every day a skinny corpse and a punk rock prep schooler get in a fight on the T. I leaned in closer and spoke quietly. “I promise, it’s just something I can do, if you give me enough data points, I can calculate a prime projection based on optimal probability.”

“What the fuck does that mean in English.” Unaware and uncaring about the stares of the other passengers.

“I am not sure how it works, but if I get enough information about something, I can ‘know’ stuff about it. Like you, I didn’t know enough about you to know all the pieces, but when you said that it gave me enough information, and well, it just shoots out of me, I can’t always control it.” I was trying to whisper. It wasn’t working.

I placed my hand on hers; she jerked a little but didn’t make me move it. “I am glad you didn’t jump, I would be dead right now if you hadn’t”

The trains started to slow, which was accompanied by a horrific squealing noise as the brakes hungrily gummed the wheels. A sound like steal fingernail running along the worlds largest chalk board, god I hated the T.

“This is our stop.” She stood up, letting my hand go. I couldn’t tell if she was pissed off or just mulling over what I had told her. We quickly exited the train into the sweltering North Quincy T Stop. People moved swiftly towards the exits to escape the oppressive dead air underground.

The escalator was broken and so we had to climb several flights of stairs. It was slow and grueling. When we reached the top I had to take a break. We sat in silence.

How had I known her mother had died in the hospital, unable to get the medicine she needed to fight her cancer? My thoughts wandered, I started to wonder about what had happened at her apartment. What kind of people go through all the trouble of doing a full on ninja assault on an apartment just to get money back from a bike messenger? How much money was ‘a couple thousand’?

After I had rested, we walked north slowly. We crossed over a bridge and I could see the train bridge we had just rode over to my right, some daring kid had crawled out and scrawled his tag 7 feet high with shiny silver paint. That ledge had to be just a couple feet wide, and the water was a long way down. That’s some commitment to your art.

We rested again at a small gas station at the base of the bridge, Rain bought me a Gatorade and I drank it slowly. We had walked about a mile, and I was absolutely exhausted. I sat sweating in the warm winter sun. Dead weeds grew up between my feet, seems I wasn’t the only one hating this heat.

We walked behind the gas station to a small apartment; Rain stopped and looked at me.

“I am sorry I called you are weirdo stalker on the T. I was just a little freaked out that you, could like read my mind and shit.” She paused, looked down at her feet then back at me. I could tell this was not the end of this conversation.

“One more thing, this girl we are about to meet, she is umm a little strange.”

“Strange?”

She knocked on the door, then turned back to me.

“Well let’s just say she marches to her own drummer. Oh, and we have sex once in a while.”

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“Jesus Christ man you need to stop fuckin passing out.”

Memories washed over my brain like someone was basting it like a turkey. My head felt like someone had been playing soccer with it, and for some reason my mouth tasted like pennies. A quick internal diagnostic revealed that I had foolishly bit the inside of my mouth on the way down.

I opened my eyes to see Rain sitting next to me as I lay on the couch.

“Hi, yea sorry, you must think I am a real weakling.” I sat up slowly. She took that moment to stand and look at me sternly.

“Ok listen, your not going to fuckin die on the couch, for some stupid ass reason I dragged your ass home, and now well, you owe me. You know like in those Chinese movies, I saved your life so now you owe me a favor.” She looked serious.

“Umm” I sputtered, talking made my head feel like my brain was vibrating painfully inside my skull.

“You need to eat and then sleep.”

Rain made me some pasta and some steamed carrots. After she made sure I was full enough I was made to drink a Nalgene of water, then she forced me to lie down. It didn’t take long before I passed out.

It wasn’t like falling asleep it was like falling off a cliff. I slept like an inanimate object. My body was in maintenance mode. Repairing, and recharging. I don’t know how long I slept but it felt like a long time. I awoke to find the one room apartment empty, Rain was gone and so was her bike. A note was attached to the apple crate in front of me.

“I left some more ramen noodles on the stove, had to go to work, be back at 4pm” It was signed “R.” Why was she being so nice to me? It seemed like part of my brain new the reason, but refused to spit it out. Something to do with her flying, no not flying falling. I was very frustrated with my brains inability to function.

I took a chance and stood up. Standing with out passing out, check. I looked at the clock and saw that it was almost 4pm. Nothing like a 20 hour nap to revive you. I made myself a bowl of ramen noodles and ate them quickly, enjoying the salty goodness. A man could get used to this eating and sleeping thing. I hadn’t felt this good in months. As I finished slurping up the last bit of broth, I heard a rustling of keys at the door.

“Hey you woke up, good” She said as she placed her bike against one wall, and dropped a messenger bag off her shoulder. She was sweaty and dirty, dressed in a pair of Capri black jeans, and wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a guitar on it, her hair was still tucked up under that aviatrix cap. Her colorful tattoos, a myriad of flowers, demon women, and a million other things covered both arms like sleeves.

“Hi, thanks for letting me crash here last night.”

That strange glassy look returned to her eyes briefly, and she said “You need to stop fuckin thanking me for doing what anyone would do, now hold on a second I have to get out of my riding gear” This apparently meant that she was going to take a shower, I sat on the couch and listened to the shower run.

Her apartment was small, the walls covered with posters for bands I had never heard of. A couch, a couple shelves and a small crate were all the furniture. A couple bike frames, wheels, and other random bike parts leaned up against one wall. Some tools, and a couple bike parts catalogs sat on the apple crate.

When she returned to the main room she was once again dressed like some catholic school girl/punk rocker hybrid. She still had that funny hat on, the goggles on the top of her head. Her blond/brown hair fell out of the helmet on the sides and the back. The army boots were back, this time the fishnets were red instead of black.

She sat on the couch. We talked about her job. She worked as a messenger in downtown Boston. She was one those crazy people you see hauling packages all over town on bicycle. I always thought it must take some sort of brain defect to ride your bike around in city traffic. It seemed her currier company was one of the few places doing alright in this economic shit storm. Bicycles don’t need gas.

I let her talk, choosing not to say much about myself. Mentioning only my mother in Ohio, and how I had only been living in Boston for a while. She told me she was from the city and had grown up here. She didn’t mention her family.

She made us some vegetable dish comprised of sweet potatoes and some sort of squash. It was hearty and filled me up. After the initial small talk was over, we sat awkwardly on her couch. The conversation had come to one of those pauses. She fidgeted with the couch. I looked down and I saw a small airplane tattoo on her arm.

Seeing that small plane seemed to knock something loose in my head. A feeling I had been having, like I had to sneeze but not being able too, vanished. The memory of Rain falling, her hair and the straps of her helmet flying behind her as she soared through the air, exploded into my head.

“Rain, I know why you were on that bridge.” It flowed out of my mouth before I could think.

She looked at me, her face suddenly grim. “What do you mean?”

“You were going to jump off that bridge; you were going to kill yourself.”

She looked like she was going to cry. I wanted to reassure her, tell her that I was going to do the same thing. I wanted to help her in the way she had helped me.

Before anyone could say anything the sound of wood breaking filled the air followed instantly by a monstrous ear popping crash from the apartment next door. Men could be heard screaming, bits of plaster fell off the wall. The apartment started to fill with the rotten egg small of sulfur. Something had exploded next door.

She shot up, grabbing her messenger bag and started running towards the back window.

“Shit! They found me! We have to get the fuck out of here now!”

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I suddenly felt very weak. Throwing up was fighting with passing out to see what I would do next. I can’t save the world, I can’t even feed myself. What was this inked up, punker with an Amelia Earhart complex talking about?

“Save the world? You have to be kidding”

Of all the reactions to my incredulity I wasn’t expecting the one I got. A look of disheartened sadness flashed briefly through her eyes and was gone.

“Well whatever, do you still want those ramen noodles?”

Do drowning people want air? The simple stupid needs of the flesh suddenly came pouring into me. Where had I been? What had I been doing? It didn’t matter at that point. I was so hungry it felt like my stomach was trying to eat my lungs.

“Yes, please.”

She started boiling some water, and ripping open the familiar packets of dry noodles. It was less than 10 minutes before a steaming pile of oriental flavor Top Ramen was plunked down in front of me.

“You have to get the Top Ramen brand, not the Maruchan brand. The Maruchan has beef powder in it.” Rain announced at she sat a fork down next to me.

“Fuck that shit.” She added, as an afterthought.

“You’re a vegetarian I take it?”

She responded with a sort of shrug that said “isn’t it obvious?” I couldn’t really be bothered to notice at that point. I almost burned my lips off in an effort to get at the noodles. Never before in my life had food looked so good.

Rain sat down across from me on a stool made from an old apple crate. Slats of old wood painted with the smiling face of some blond boy grinning from ear to ear holding a giant green apple. Now I understood how someone could be that happy about apples.

What I had been doing on that bridge suddenly started to wash over me. Was I really going to kill myself? I raised my head in mid swallow.

“About the bridge, umm… thanks. I am not really sure what I was thinking, but I am glad you saved my life.”

It came out awkwardly through a mouthful of noodles. She looked at me tilting her head to one side as if she was pondering a response and said simply.

“No problem, eat your soup and then we have to do something about that stink coming off you. My old dog got sprayed by a fuckin skunk once, maybe we could cover you with tomato juice?”

It wasn’t a smile, but a slight uplifting of her eyes that said she was trying to lighten the mood a bit.

“How about a shower?” I asked tilting the bowl to slurp the last of the salty broth.

The bathroom was just big enough for a single person, a stand up shower, a small sink and a toilet. I stood for a long time under the warm water, letting it fall over me. Something had changed. I felt…different, like some part of me had been turned down, or turned off. Flashes of memory would strike out at me, making me shiver.

Like a TV left on for too long, the memory of my past life had formed a ghost image in my brain. The data, the streams of words, images, and video echoed in my head. Is this what drug users feel like when they are coming down? I finished washing myself and stepped out of the shower.

Wiping my hand across the mirror I looked at myself for the first time in weeks. Who was this zombie standing in front of me? I looked like shit. Were those my eyes staring back from sunken pits? They had shown us pictures of people like this in history class. People who had survived concentration camps.

I looked down and saw that Rain had left me a clean pair of jeans and my army jacket. The pants were small, but they still hung off of me. I walked into the other room to find her working on a bicycle.

“Feel better?”

“Yea, thanks for the pants. Rain can I ask you something?”

She stood up, wiping grease on a bandana stuffed in her pocket.

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

For a brief moment her eyes got glassy and I thought she might cry, then in a calm voice she said.

“What, a person can’t be decent anymore? You obviously needed fuckin help, and well… I was there and well…here we are.”

She said it with a finality that made me reluctant to push the matter further. I was thinking about asking her for some more noodles when my head started to feel kind of strange.

The vertigo came fast and hard upending the world and making me feel like someone had violently kicked my legs out from under me. Just before the ground came rushing up to meet my head I had a very clear vision of Rain falling, her skirt flapping in the wind, the goggles from her aviatrix helmet pulled down over her eyes.

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I had forgotten how confusing Boston could be. None of the streets seemed to lead where I wanted to go. For fucks’s sake, all I wanted to do was find someplace to lie down and die. I stumbled and shambled in no particular direction, moving for the sake of being in motion. I looked up when I felt a warm breeze.

“That’s interesting, I wonder what are all those cables are holding up.”

“How did I end up like this?”

“Why am I on this bridge, and why do I smell so bad?”

“Huh, what did you say?”

“What?”

“I said, what did you say?”

“Am I going crazy? I said ‘why do I smell so bad.’”

“I don’t know but you ain’t fuckin lying.”

Had it really come to this? Was I having an argument with myself? I lifted my head once again to try and see the side of the bridge. If I could just get to the edge I could get this over with.

“Just a little further.”

“Where you going?”

“If you must know, and I don’t see how you can’t know already as you are me, I am going to toss myself off this bridge, now will you stop asking questions and let me get on with it?”

That seemed to silence the voice. The exhaustion gripped me, just lifting my leg to the first railing was a struggle. With a pathetic grunt I managed to mount the railing. Visions of the future danced through my head, it was all going to be so horrible, all so depressing. I just wanted it to stop, I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to care. Any second now, I would get tired fall forward and gravity would take care of the rest.

The world started to climb the edges of my vision as I slowly tilted forward. The whole place started to close in like the aperture of a camera, this was the end. I didn’t feel a thing. The darkness engulfed me, and I fell.

“Hey man don’t fuckin die on my couch.”

“Wha…” I creaked. Was I dead? Was this hell? If you are bad and die do you get berated for all eternity?

“You better not die on my couch, not after I hauled your ass all the way here, for a skinny little shit you sure get heavy after a couple blocks.”

That didn’t sound like me, even in my head I never swore that much, and it was a decidedly female voice. I opened my eyes only to be greeted with a searing pain as light from a nearby lamp assaulted my sensitive retinas.

“Could you turn that light off, it is really hurting my eyes.” I pleaded.

I heard the clicking and the pain slowly drained away, to be replaced by a dull all-over ache. It took a second before my eyes adjusted to the dimness. I was in someone’s home. A small efficiency, the kind of place that has the kitchen in the living room, that also happens to be the bedroom, a shit hole for poor people. Exactly the kind of place I had been evicted from recently. I tried to raise my head to get a better look around, but felt dizzy and let it fall back down.

“You need to eat you’re fuckin skin and bones man.”

I tilted my head toward the sound of the voice.

Slowly raising my eyes I saw a pair of old army boots unlaced at the top, fishnet leggings under a checkered skirt, and the bottom of a men dress shirt unbuttoned at the base, to reveal a stomach covered in tattoos. A catholic school girl from punk rock college.

I slouched into a seated position. After the head rush wore off, I could see the rest of her. The dress shirt was also unbuttoned at the top revealing more tattoos, and a head of dirty blond hair barely kept under control by one of those hats Amelia Earhart used to wear. Not your usual attire, but who was I to judge? I smelled like a dead animal and had been wearing the same cloths for weeks.

“Why aren’t I dead?”

“Dead? You fuckin should be, you were climbing over a guard rail at the entrance to the bridge foot path and then fell backwards into traffic. You’re lucky I saw you end pulled your ass onto the sidewalk before someone ran you over.”

“Oh…”

What do you say to someone who saved your life, when maybe you didn’t really want them to?

“Thanks…I’m Quentin.” I said, unable even to hold my hand out for fear that I would fall over from exhaustion.

“I’m Rain, nice to meet you. Why don’t I make you some ramen noodles, and then you can tell me what you meant back there.” Rain said, bending down to take a closer look at me. She had green eyes.

“What do you mean?” I couldn’t remember saying anything.

“You said that I was going to help you save the world.”

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Newton said that objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Life is kind of like that. Economic and ecological catastrophes shouldn’t be any reason to stop living the American dream. Just because the world was ending didn’t mean anyone had to notice, at least not right away.

I noticed, in fact I more than noticed, I knew. Something inside me had changed after the sub-arctic methane release event (people on the net started calling it the Canadian Gas Chamber). Almost every living thing for 50 miles of the event died during the gas venting, because this was mostly fish and a couple birds, it was quickly pushed off the front page of Google News by the next massive suicide bombing in Iraq.

I knew this and a lot more, because it was now my job to know these things. “My job” might be a generous description of what was happening to me. I couldn’t help but know about what was going on. It was like some giant unforeseen hand was forcing me forward. I spent days surfing the web, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep. The city outside my doors a distant memory.

I sold my car for rent money. The kindly old lady in the apartment above me would bring me food from her meals on wheels cart once a week telling me that I should get out more. The person I saw in the mirror had lost 20 pounds, not an insignificant feat for someone as skinny as I was.

My hair was greasy, my apartment was filthy, and my cloths were stained with sweat. My eyes burned so red I looked like a monster. Through it all I continued to absorb data. Reading, looking, hunting for more, always more. Not just facts but patterns.

Was this madness? Was I going insane? I knew something was happening. I started to see pictures, started to know things before they happened. I can’t tell you how I did it, just that I did it. I wasn’t telling the future, I was reading patterns.

Stuff happened, weird stuff. Winter never came that year for most of North America. I knew it was going to be like that. I predicted things like the burning of Detroit, the rebellion in France, the resurgence of small pox in Africa. If you held a gun to my head and demanded to know how, I couldn’t even start to tell you how I was doing it.

I started to post my “guesses” to an obscure message board set up for a five year old cat food recall. I don’t know why I did it, I just did, something inside me told me it was the right thing to do. This was what I did; this was my life, a sad pathetic little man raving to no one in particular.

What a life it was, glued to the computer 24 hours a day. I couldn’t feel, couldn’t sleep, as the world died outside, I died slowly inside. For an entire year I managed to survive like this. My skin started to turn translucent from lack of sunlight, and my teeth loosened from malnutrition. I was dieing, slowly, but it didn’t matter. Only the data mattered. Only the patterns, the reading, the knowing. If I could just learn enough, maybe I could do something…maybe I could stop it.

Eventually even the love of a mother couldn’t sustain me, and she stopped sending me money. I was quickly evicted, the landlord kept my computer as a down payment on the cleaning bill for the place. I remember him saying, “You’re the weirdest little freak to ever dirty up my place, get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”

I found myself on the streets, with nothing but the clothes on my back. A ratty pair of jeans, Airwalks, black t-shirt, and an army jacket I had gotten at a thrift store because it had a lot of pockets. My mom wanted me to come home, but she lived half way across the country, and I was in no shape to travel. I tried the library computers a couple of times. They wouldn’t let me sit there for more than a couple of hours. Besides they wouldn’t let you visit all the sites, the data stream was limited, I couldn’t see the patterns.

Drunks will talk about a moment of clarity, a brief window of understanding that changes everything for them. I woke up from one of the few naps I was able to take and realized that I was on a park bench. I hadn’t eaten in days and was on the edge of delirium. The world was falling apart; no one had time to worry about a skinny kid. I hardly had the strength to stand up, but I began walking.

I figured this was the end. I would find a nice back alley some place, lay down under a cardboard box and quietly die. That was before I met her.