Rad!

My seat rattles every time the illustrious G. Harv presses on the gas. Piece of junk Ford truck. But at least he plays good music and has some nice big bags of Chex Mix in the cabin. I watch as the little gusts outside turn the windmills and sweep the dreary flatness. The quivering hot sunshine brings the lane markings into sharp relief, set upon a straight, lonesome road to Phoenix.

My bewhiskered friend winces into the rearview and spots something he doesn't like. "Fucking Morongo trash!" he grunts, the cherry on his almost wholly consumed spliff blackening his lips. He shoots a glance at the speedometer, which is frozen on one-hundred-fifteen. Suddenly I hear the distant echoes of gunshots, and look behind me to see blurry black sedans tearing through the wasteland. They've been sent by the casino to get their platinum back. That platinum is sitting on my lap inside a battered leather satchel.

"Drive!" G. Harv growls. By the time I hear the command, he has already acquitted himself of steering and thrust his torso completely out of the window. The sedans swim toward us like demon serpents through the wake of our exhaust smoke; he aims a bazooka at one of them. Hastily I grab the wheel just as we've started to veer into oncoming traffic. He fires off the first warhead, then his hairy white arm slithers blindly into a duffel behind the driver seat. He yanks out another rocket and rushes to reload.

"Pull the lever!" he hollers through the wind. "Which one?" I reply. "That one, you dopey Scotsman!" he snaps, pointing at a black handle inside a small glass case on the dash. I pop the case open and pull it. Azure flames spew out of the exhaust pipe, a queer melodic whine emerges from the undercarriage, and this worthless pickup blasts off like a bullet, I mean fucking crazy accelerates — neck-snapping shit that crumples our bodies and tosses them against the back window of the cabin.

G. Harv lets off a frenzied scream. Something under the hood catches fire. The passenger door rips off, clatters once on the highway and is gone. I try to yell "You fucking bastard!" but the ridiculous velocity keeps my jaw held shut. Soon my gut starts to twist, my pharynx spasms, and I puke inside my mouth, a little squirting out from between my clenched teeth. G. Harv is trying to get to the leather satchel, an agonizing feat considering our limbs now weigh about a thousand pounds.

The deafening wind howls past us, like hordes of ghosts fleeing from a tomb. Crumbling pieces of truck chassis leap through the windows. I strain to see a hideous charred face screaming my name: it is G. Harv, grinning at me with those foul tobacco teeth. He pushes a gleaming bar of platinum into my face and lets off a mighty, victorious chortle. "Sometimes we's up against it!" he exclaims crazily. "Yucca dudes don't got no brains, man!"

"Right you are, dude!" I reply, and we speed away into the atomic twilight...

Second Person

You rouse from another long night of dreams. These first few waking moments, before your mind asserts itself, will be the only peaceful moments you have today. You look to notice the pillow beside you — unoccupied, the way it has been for the last three months, the way it will surely continue to be. The sight of it, still pitted in the middle, the remnants of the sugary perfume still in the fabric, brings the memory of her searing into your heart.

You effect every little act — the tying of your shoes, the turning of the key in the car door — as if the whole world just might be watching. Your words are modest, your steps are lingering. You desperately hope for some serendipity today, perhaps to find some cosmic meaning in your misfortune that might make it just a little easier to cope. Though you know too well that hope itself is the only relief you will likely happen upon.

At the stoplight, a cute girl in the car beside you glances at you casually. Maybe a trifling thing to any other man, but this simple glance lays hold of you, the way that all female attention lately has. You quail with diffidence and quickly turn your head the other way, ignoring the crazy questions a broken heart asks itself about complete strangers like her. Those questions don't really matter. Neither do the answers.

You feel prepared enough when you arrive at the cemetery. One day you will let your lover go, cast off the pain, tuck the fond memories away and move on with your life, but today you need her. You hope she will be waiting for you at the grave site, recalled to life; you hope it was all a mistake, that she had to go away for a bit, but she's back now and ready to go home. The hope absorbs you. You need to indulge it, if only for one more day.

A tap on your shoulder causes little alarm. It's the girl you saw at the stoplight. She stands close to you, her eyes radiating sympathy; her bearing graceful, honest. Somehow you're not surprised to see her, somehow you don't mind her company at all. You remain poised, gazing back at her with little tears in your eyes. You have questions, but you don't need to ask them: the answers don't really matter. No need to tell her you've been wounded, no need to share your cautionary tale. She can already see all of that. You just look at her in this moment, openly, relinquished of the need to be anything other than you.

She smiles at you bashfully and says, "I love your car."

Splattered-Out, Ch. 2, pt. 1

Blazzy Gavins had his own island. And on his island he had a cabana, a simple round cabana built out of bamboo. From far away it looked like a very large coconut, partly submerged in the white sand, with a drink-umbrella roof and a toothpick chimney. On this particularly easy afternoon, Mr. Gavins sat with his best friend, William Dreams, on the patio of his cabana to watch his faithful palms sway in the moist sea breeze, and smell the salty foam of the ocean waves as they broke on his island's long shelves of sand. In one hand Mr. Gavins held his drink, a Staccano Sling, and in the other the cleft ass of one of the numerous busty women who lay about his island like so many cats.

Mr. Gavins' eyes squinted up toward the brilliant turquoise sky. "I don't know what I was thinking," he said. "Why did I have to ruin a perfectly good bamboo-framed futon just so the ladies and I could have a puppy pile in a gallon of lubricating jelly?"

"Sex?" William replied.

"No, not right now dude, I'm still recovering," said Mr. Gavins. "I haven't had this much booze or sex in a one evening since I was in the priesthood."

Mr. Gavins had gotten drunk again last night. Blasted gin and tonics, and mojitos, and subcutaneous shots of Petron, blast them all. But William wasn't surprised by this behavior, not a bit.

"I can't think of anything worse than a hangover," Mr. Gavins said, the woman beside him nuzzling him with her cleavage. "Well, okay, it might not be as bad as getting hung by your dork from a ceiling fan — but it's still bad."

As Mr. Gavins pontificated, William eyed the orgiastic concubines. "Dude," William said, "one of your pirate hookers just ran off with my bag of Mongolian Chicken Crispies."

"You and your damn Mongolian Chicken Crispies," Mr. Gavins replied. "I don't know how you can eat as much of that stuff as you do and still remain so trim."

"Yeah, lucky me," said William. "I'm sorry to say I'm hopelessly addicted to them. The things pretty much control my life. I'd rather snap off my left arm than have to give up a bag of those salty-ass rinds."

"But look at you," said Mr. Gavins, "you still have a perfect Grecian physique. You make me sick with envy. So your blood pressure might be a little askew, so you've probably pickled your organs with all that sodium, but your abs — they look like they've been sculpted by Michelangelo. And you know you have an ass like a seventeen year-old girl. In fact, if you asked to spoon me naked —"

"Uh, thanks, I get it."

"— I would consider it. In a straight way, of course."

"Come on," William said. "You, a man with his own island, and a harem of untamed prostitute slaves, are envious of me?"

"You'd better believe it," Mr. Gavins said. "Sure, my friend, by some accounts it might look like I've got a pretty good thing here, but I'll be honest with you, my life is a little mundane."

"What?! Hah! Listen, you may think that a life of whoremongering in your personal tropical paradise isn't exactly thrilling, but I'm going to let you in on a little secret: this Grecian physique you envy so much used to suck dick every night for heroin. How's that for mundane?"

The conversation came to a sudden halt. Once again, for a few moments, there was nothing to be heard but the undulating noise of the ocean waves, the commotion of the palms against the air current, the cawing of a dozen seagulls in concentric circular orbits above, as if tracing the inner surface of an invisible dome. Mr. Gavins, stunned, amazed, looked carefully at William's face like a man shopping for a new television.

"Really!" Mr. Gavins gasped. "What grade of heroin?"

"Uh, the eighteen thousand dollar grade," bristled William.

"Hmm," said Mr. Gavins, grinning. "Well, in my book that makes you one lucky bastard."

In this way William and Mr. Gavins wore down the remainder of the afternoon, just as they had wore down so many afternoons before. They reminisced; they spewed scurrilous jabber; they laughed long and hard over their absurd misbegotten lives; but mostly, they drank themselves into the bucket. Before long the sun began to set, and the sky along the horizon swirled with orange and caramel hues, darkening upward. Beneath the last rays of sunlight the shoreline glinted and sparkled, like lost pirate treasure had broken away from a sunken ship and floated ashore. The seagulls continued to complain.

"All these girls," William said, "they always seem pretty happy to be here. I mean, how is it they don't feel, you know, a little exploited?"

"Heh, you sound as though this place is a salt mine or something," Mr. Gavins said. "Listen — these babes, they like me, you know? They want to fuck my brains out. They want to party. They're here because they love it here. They love this perfect weather, they love my crib, they love not having a care in the world. It's not exploitation, it's more... symbiotic." Mr. Gavins affected a sagacious manner. "Should it make a difference that they have no means of escape?"

William, though he tried, couldn't find a reason to argue. Perhaps it was the magic of Mr. Gavins' moss green leather jacket, smelling of his supreme wealth, that made everything he said seem just a little more compelling. Or perhaps it was his Siamese crocodile boots; or his disposable medical exam shorts made from recycled paper, which had a small wet spot on the crotch; these were the only articles of clothing Mr. Gavins had on at the moment.

But the likeliest reason was that William was completely blasted on Staccano Slings.

And then Mr. Gavins, pallid and unshaven, rose from his patio chair and stumbled ataxically into the cabana. On to the central room, where he was surrounded by hundreds of large monitors, all broadcasting various channels of news, pornography, cockfights, and knife-throwing events. A large scrolling display, which wrapped continuously around the walls, spewed forth a steady diet of wagering odds — for this was how Mr. Gavins made much of his sickening fortune.

He poured another pair of iced cocktails — an even mixture of transparent carbonated fluid and painfully cold, transparent, triple-distilled fluid — and he watched as thick rivulets of condensation began to cling to each crystal highball. The budding droplets, now creeping downward, passed and distorted hundreds of upwardly darting bubbles within. Mr. Gavins, desperate not to notice the room spinning around him like an unbalanced carousel, decided that the subtle force of this crystic, alcoholic en passant would hold him upright for long enough to get back to his patio chair.

But when he returned, William's chair was empty.

Mr. Gavins, a little nonplussed, but mostly ready to lie down and pass out, slung himself onto the nearest sturdy object and took a glance of his immediate surroundings. He couldn't see William anywhere. He looked down at his cedar wood patio; it was still affixed to his feet. No longer a patio though, but a wooden raft, tossing about at sea — an angry, tumultuous sea of top-shelf vodka. He looked up; the soaring flock of seagulls had transformed into soaring twinkles of starlight. He tried to survey the island again, which now appeared to be in a gyrating freefall, and suddenly he caught sight of the most marvelous spectacle of the evening: the drinks, still in his hands, and he hadn't yet spilled a single drop.

Splattered-Out, Ch. 1, pt. 4

Straight ahead, where the alley intersected with a small side road, Callus noticed his opportunity. On an unassuming concrete building was a small pivoted window, which swayed noisily as the breeze drafted through the corridor. It was low enough to the ground that he could dive through it, if only he could make it across the road. Sure, he would probably end up in somebody's basement, but at least it would buy him time.

Barreling toward his only escape, with wild dogs snapping at his heels, Callus could hear a bevy of footsteps flocking into the alley behind him. "You're surrounded, Presexed!" a man shouted, but Callus didn't buy it. The window was too close now. His escape was too imminent. He burst out of the alleyway and made the biggest leap his titanic leg muscles could muster. It was the kind of leap that could win a basketball game.

Callus coasted fearlessly through the air. He saw the window in front of him. Suddenly he saw the window zip out of sight. Then he saw asphalt. The next thing he knew, his body was tumbling violently along the street; in another moment it was lying in a marred heap against the curb of the sidewalk.

Callus lay there, quiet and bewildered, while blood trickled from his head and elbows and all the rest of him. His breaths were rapid and shallow; they registered to him simply as pain. He wanted to open his eyes but couldn't, only hearing the drove of feet pour out of the corridor and gather all around him. With an excruciating effort Callus reached for his riot shotgun, but found nothing.

He sensed the subtle force of several large pistols aimed at his face. "Mr. Presexed," a familiar voice above him said. Callus jimmied one eye open with his fingers and looked obliquely at the speaker. It was the blurry but unmistakable figure of Og Pog's chief constable. "Mr. Presexed," the man said again, "I'm sorry to say I have to place you under arrest."

"I think I need a doctor," Callus mumbled, barely coherent. "I don't have any feeling in my right hand."

The chief looked at Callus's hand quizically, discovering his own steel-rimmed boot standing on top of it. "Oh!" blushed the chief. "Sorry about that."

"Hold on a second," Callus replied. "Did you just say you're arresting me?"

"I'm sorry Mr. Presexed. I really don't want to do this, but the evidence we have gives us more than enough cause."

"Evidence? Evidence of what?!"

"Aiding and abetting a known felon."

Callus's jaw dropped. What the hell was going on here? The only thing Callus was ever guilty of was defending this forsaken slag of a world. Besides, he figured he had already taken out all the known felons. But when he saw the solemnity in the chief constable's eyes — the regret — it felt like being nailed to a cross. A fitting thing, Callus thought, since his body felt like it had just been scourged by Roman soldiers.

"I still think I need a doctor," Callus sighed.

"I'll see what I can do for you, Mr. Presexed," said the chief. "Attention troops! Can somebody here get this man some drugs?"

The question was met with heavy silence. "That's unfortunate," the chief shrugged. "Well, I tried."

And then, after getting handcuffed by the man who had entrusted him with the protection of the planet, Callus again found himself shuffling wearily down the main boulevard. He stared wistfully into the distance. The Og Pog skyline still had such a charming effect on him. A handful of skyscrapers, all of them pitted and scarred by decades of bombing raids, remained defiantly erect, as if in a competition to see which would be the last one standing. Callus knew those skyscrapers from when he was just a boy. They towered above everything: the poverty, the injustice, the noise and confusion of the urban core, the mire of despondency. Above it all, they were free.

The police headquarters facility, on the other hand, was a total cesspit. Inside, tasteless false-mahogany paneling lined a common area cramped with tables of dirty styrofoam cups, used ashtrays, and messy stacks of legal paper. The chief constable led Callus to a dank, windowless room, where they sat down alone. Well, not completely alone; several guards flanked each wall. By now it didn't surprise Callus to see that each guard had his pistol pointed directly at Callus's head. The chief constable remained silent for several minutes, fidgeting with a pencil while gazing disconcertedly at a laptop computer on the table.

"I want you to know," the chief eventually began, "that I will be treating your case with utmost discretion."

"Oh, is that so?" Callus replied. "Is shooting at me from a rooftop your idea of being discreet?"

"Mr. Presexed," said the chief somberly, "The man who shot at you was not part of our force. I'm sad to admit nobody on our force knows how to shoot like that."

"What?! How many enemies do I have in this town for godsake?"

"You've made enemies all over the galaxy, Mr. Presexed."

Callus squinted with skepticism. "Chief, let me ask you something. Have you ever had to dodge flying sawblades before?"

"No, Mr. Presexed," the chief stammered, "I have not."

"Have you ever been lashed by a blue-flaming chain whip?"

"No — well, not a real one anyway."

"Have you ever found yourself in the kind of conundrum where, let's say, you're making passionate love to the commissioner's daughter, and suddenly out of the corner of your eye you see a missile heading right toward your motel room?"

"Of course not, Mr. Presexed. Those sort of things doesn't happen to normal people. Did you say the commissioner's d—"

"Right, of course not," Callus interrupted. "But what I mean to say is, I've been through a lot over the years trying to keep this world safe from harm. Whatever evidence you may have against me, Chief, you above all should know I am innocent of any crime."

"That's exactly what makes this case so difficult for me," said the chief. "Mr. Presexed, can you handle a few unpleasant facts?"

"No, generally not."

"Oh, okay. Well, the first is, I think I'm in love with you."

"Yeah? Hey, that's cool. I already had a hunch. But really, Chief, I'm afraid it would never work out between you and me."

"Yes, I know, I know," replied the chief deflatedly. "Moving on then. We have in our possession an authentic video capture of you making a large monetary transaction — it aggrieves me to say this, Mr. Presexed — with none other than Juarez Glade."

"What? Juarez Glade? You mean the transvestite?"

"Mr. Presexed, Juarez Glade is one of the most feared pirates in the galaxy."

"Juarez Glade is a doddering old queen. He wears blush and eyeliner and I'm also pretty sure he doesn't have a cock. Haven't you ever wondered why he's always handling cucumbers?"

"Whoever he is, we saw you accepting a briefcase from him, filled with cash."

"Ridiculous. I have no memory of any transaction with Juarez Glade. Listen, Chief, this is obviously some kind of setup. I'm not about to go down in history as the guy who brokered a deal with the galaxy's prissiest cross-dresser."

"You'll just have to see for yourself, Mr. Presexed."

From his pocket the chief removed a small thumb drive and inserted it into the laptop computer. Slowly, reluctantly, he swiveled the laptop toward Callus's view; and, turning his head as if to avoid witnessing an execution, struck a key to start the video.

What Callus watched on the screen over the next few seconds was possibly the most atrocious thing he had ever seen. It made him recoil with nausea; it made him question if he possessed even one ounce of sanity. And it filled him with those agonizing feelings that inevitably accompany one's imminent condemnation.

But it wasn't seeing himself accept a money-stuffed attaché from a man in a tight leather leotard that made him so upset. Any individual convinced enough of his own innocence could handle such a sight. It was seeing himself, with a rascally smile frozen to his face, shamelessly groping Juarez Glade's bulgeless crotch.

Pelée, pt. 1: Introduction

I stand in weeds, knee-deep; I look down at the body of a chestnut-colored workhorse, dead since last Tuesday, covered in crawling flies. The carcass is bloated, splotched. The flesh slicked in a filmy ooze, its body pocked with inch-thick welts.

"What killed this horse, sir?"

"Centipedes. Hundreds of them, about a foot long each. They came out of the brush." I pointed to the jungly growth, fifty yards off. "They came with the ants and bit the animals to death."

The swarming cloud of flies simmers in the midday sun.

I am talking to a journalist, a fat round man from Basse-Terre. We pivot and survey the still-smoking remains of St. Pierre -- unquenched fires still burning in the rows of shacks by the sea -- and I stand with numb shock as I face the vision before me. A city of 30,000 -- a few days ago, it was a lively port. Now it's a wasteland -- smashed stone, splintered wood, decaying corpses.

Perhaps I should start from the beginning. My name is Louis-Auguste Cyparis. I am 32 years old, born to a poor nigger family in the French West Indies. My father disappeared before I was born. At the age of eight, my mother died from yellow fever, and I was sent to live with my uncle in St. Pierre. This was where I would grow up, make my trade, and eventually witness the catastrophe that transpired there.

I'm what you might call a roughneck, a roustabout. I take whatever jobs I can -- harvesting the fields, hauling barrels at the distillery, working as a longshoreman. Laborer's work. When I was 16, I started working in the cane fields, swinging the machete. At the time, I had some notoriety for being able to fell a stalk with one blow, which was unusual for a kid. I guess the good lord gave me muscle, and this is how I earned the nickname Samson, a name that would stick with me throughout my adult life.

They tell me I'm the only known survivor of what is already being called the worst natural disaster of the century. And today, I look upon the remains of what was my home: my friends, my family, my livelihood -- buried now in ash and rubble, all destroyed within an hour.

Buttermilk Spice

"You're really something else, Dominic," he remembered Mr. Schniebel telling him before class. "Rest assured you'll be getting plenty of extra credit for this."

God knows he needed it. Dominic had A's and B's in all of his other subjects, but biology class just didn't click with him. Ecology, cell structures, Punnett squares, none of it made a bit of sense. It didn't matter. If he really wanted to stay in the National Honor Society, he would have to find a way to earn a passing grade.

"Hey Dominic," his lab partner whispered, "did you see what Christina is wearing today? If you get a chance to walk past her, you can look down her shirt and totally see her bra."

"Oh," Dominic replied distractedly, "that's cool."

"Okay class," announced Mr. Schniebel, "please remove your slides from their storage trays and place them under the microscopes."

It was the first week of the human development chapter, and today was a very special lab class about it. In fact Dominic had to get a permission slip from his dad just to attend: he and his sophomore classmates were going to look at sperm.

"Adjust the microscopes to the middle setting," the teacher continued. "When you're ready, go ahead and have a look."

After carefully clipping the slide under the microscope lens, Dominic peered through the eyepiece. It was the weirdest stuff he had ever seen in his life: bulbous heads, squiggly little tails, most of them motionless but a few still twitching, afloat in a puddle of yellowish ooze. Up close they looked like bugs trapped in a big, messy spider web. Beside him, Dominic had his textbook opened to pictures of fetuses in different stages of gestation. He pondered how the slimy tadpoles under the microscope could ever grow into those mutant creatures on the page, how those mutant creatures could somehow become real people.

"As you can probably guess," Mr. Schniebel, "the white spots with tails are the spermatozoa. The stringy, pulpy matrix they are suspended in contains the nutrients the sperm need for the journey through the female reproductive tract. That matrix comprises secretions from the male prostate and Cowper's glands."

Meanwhile, students all around the classroom were gasping in astonishment. Some thought the lab was awesome; others had to pull away to keep from gagging. "Mr. Schniebel?" a little Asian girl asked. "Why is it so gooey?"

"Good question Suzie." the teacher replied. "The adhesive properties of semen allow for more efficient movement of the sperm."

"Why does it smell like bleach?" another kid asked, holding the slide up to his nose.

"Who knows, Adam. It's just the way it smells."

Everyone continued to marvel at the strange and wondrous features of the semen under their microscopes. But Dominic just couldn't get excited about it. He was still thinking about his extra credit project. Did he really do a good enough job on it? How much would it change his grade? It didn't help that Mr. Schniebel had been staring at him throughout the morning. As Dominic struggled to keep his eyes averted, the teacher stood up and approached him.

"Everything okay, Dominic?" the teacher asked.

"What? Oh, yeah, fine, Mr. Schniebel," Dominic said anxiously. "I'm just fine."

"Just making sure," Mr. Schniebel said, flashing a mischievous smirk. "You're a really good kid, you know that?"

"Thanks, Mr. Schniebel."

Watching the teacher walk away to supervise other students, Dominic breathed a sigh of relief. He simply didn't feel comfortable around Mr. Schniebel, not today anyway. He decided to take the slide out from the microscope stage and examine the cloudy splotch in the center with his naked eye.

"Damn," Dominic uttered silently to himself. "I can't believe I just had to eat a load of this stuff."

He could still taste a thin film of it in the back of his throat; the remembrance of it made him queasy. Glancing up at Mr. Schniebel across the room, Dominic began to shiver with remorse. Did the National Honor Society have to matter that much to him? In that moment, Mr. Schniebel looked back, a dark twinkle in his eyes, assuring Dominic of his promise with a simple wink.

Breakfast

I'll tell you how it made me feel. It was like being tied down to a bed in an old Parisian hotel room with a cracked ceiling and a mouse scurrying to and fro on the dusty wooden floor. It was like lying on that bed, being ridden hard by a gorgeous and absurdly expensive prostitute, one with perfect tear-drop breasts and a tightness that made me feel like I was sure to rip something. It was like looking at the necklace around her neck, flailing about, with what appeared to be — could she stop bucking for just a moment — a pendant of Jesus on the cross. It was feeling her nightstand-quaking climax, so powerful it made her pee just a little bit by accident; but I didn't mind. It was all of that, faded into the background of my awareness, because I was busy searching the picturesque Paris streets through the only window in the place, my view obscured by a pink carnation in a simple glass vase on the ledge. Amidst the murmur of city traffic, the periodic yells of bellhops, the distant cawing of birds, I was searching, searching, searching for the person playing that beautiful clarinet. Yes, it was like that.

Upchuckle

"I'm doing everything I possibly can," he said, his fat fingers wrapped around a margarita. It was 4:30 in the afternoon; I stared at the sidewalk. The concrete shimmered brilliantly beneath us.

I've found it dangerous to gaze too closely at other people's faces. A man's entire biography is written there. In the lines and folds of his expression, within the eyes' deep shadow: a story desperately told. The story can scar your soul. The story is, inevitably, pain.

His life is seriously coming apart. Soon enough he would be high beyond belief, cocaine coursing through his bloodstream, staring at the ceiling, mouth agape, his problems all but forgotten. And I knew, even then, that I possess not nearly enough will or compassion to help him -- to lead a blind man from the shattered glass of his own life.

I excused myself, leaving him to lacerate himself on the shards.