Tower of Brahma. Chapter 64. One Last Thing. (edit)

11/21/10

I fell to my knees, my body slack and drained, arms folded before me, sweat dripping from the tips of the long hair that draped across my face. I had done it, had gripped the World Serpent by the tail and ripped it free from my sternum, its fangs sliding free from the apple in my chest. The venom spouted forth from the bite marks and gushed out before me. I was free.

I walked hand in hand with her as we took in the late Fall evening. I knew something was wrong inside, but I could not force my body to expel the bitterness and anxiety, couldn't imagine a life that didn't make me feel alone and outcast from any other human beings. For so long I wanted connection, communion with something other than myself. Glancing at her in my peripheral I couldn't acknowledge the power between us.

Years later, I'm carrying our child down the stairs as she toils away at her art desk. We exchange quick smiles as I pass her by, our daughter smiling and bouncing in my arms as we pass by on our way to the kitchen. I whip together a small lunch and bring it in to her, which, she reluctantly turns from her work to enjoy with us. We're a family, and bound together beyond what words can explain.

Every now and then I pause before our library and run my fingers along the spines of the novels and textbooks until I come upon a title: the Tower of Brahma. Of all the books we own, this is the one that matters, for it is mine. I spent seven years of my life in a hell of my own making, constantly exposing myself emotionally, then encrypting it in poetic verse and obscure allegory. It's a completely self-indulgent text, filled with short stories, poems, essays, all scratching away at the black charred surface of my heart.

I laugh to myself there, letting my head drop a moment, eyes closed and taking in what had happened so long ago. A conspiracy of self consumed me, a labyrinthine plot through the inner workings of my mind, all in a desperate attempt to be happy, to gain enlightenment and become fulfilled. But when everything becomes an escape, you lose track of where you're going, frantic to flee whatever it is that's trying to kill you.

In my case it was me. Or the poisoned me that I created based on people's perceptions and their selfish demeanors. I tried so hard to change who I was, all while desperately clinging to the past as I had no idea who I was without all that anger and sadness. I was unwanted and unloved, mainly because I wanted to be. I teased myself with the idea of suicide endlessly, hoping that at least that was one way to be truly free.

I hoped that plotting out this book, this collection of a couple hundred pages of printed text, chock full of my ideas, my pain, my desires, I had hoped that this was what it took to reprogram me so that I could live here in the world and be one of you. But it didn't work like that. I wrote it. I read it. I even tried to sell copies of it for awhile. Some people had read it, I even got a handful of positive comments, with no one taking the time to throw a negative one my way.

Who'd I write this for anyways? When I re-read it, I didn't even know who that person was anymore. The vague details seemed familiar, and there was something about the core of the narrative that I connected to, but I couldn't relate at this point, less and less so as the years went on. I was a father and husband, I taught at the Community College, helping young writers find their voices and molding them into words. I walked through my life with a smile and a kind word for those around me.

I wasn't alone. I never was except for when I truly wanted to be. I just felt I deserved to be. Years of struggle forced me up out of myself, made me wake up and take stock of this life I was living. Thankfully some subconscious program forced me along, building up the staircase I would need to ascend in order to take charge of my life. So, when I wrote that last chapter, when I let go of all the misery I thought was so essential to my being, only then was I able to see things around me clearly.

I was working for the Daily News, breaking the latest disasters, a Blackberry on my hip and a blazer on my back. I had a girlfriend that would never give up on me, who wanted more than anything to be my wife, to be a parent with me. There were a small collection of friends who saw in me a magnetic and charming person whose company they enjoyed. There was no shortage of personal and financial wounds that needed to be repaired, but the stage was set, and I was in charge.

I heard Millie shriek with joy from the other room as Jazmine tickled her making googling noises. My child and wife, my family. I didn't bother taking the book off the shelf, I never do anymore, hardly even think about it really. The second book is nearly complete and I really don't know if I'll do anything except print up a copy to slide right next to this one here. Jazz would want me to, she thinks it's important. I think she just wants me to feel good about it, which is why I love her.

No one else needs to read this. I don't even need to read this. Yet, it had to be written, if for no other reason than to save this writer's soul. I imagine a young punk picking up a used copy at the bookstore on St. Mark's in the East Village. He'll love it, hate it, slip it into a back jean pocket, leave it at a friend's house after they smoke and run out to a show taking swigs from their flask. Some idea or sense of the words will have made some impact on him, altering how he experiences that night.

Maybe he writes his own novel, or starts a band, swiping a chapter title for a song that will never be played beyond dive bars and dingy basements. I like to imagine that in years to come he'll have read my adventures in New York City during the first decade in a new century and wish that he had lived back then, when things were more visceral and real, never really knowing that fiction is all based on the same mundane reality we all experience, only altered and ignited by our innate desire to be more than we are.

And the day will come when that young man realizes that there's nothing more rewarding than to have your moment, record it, process it, and then to let it go. From there you are truly free to do whatever it is that you wish. And right now, all I want is to go look on my family's smiling faces as I enter the room. That is what's real. That's the happy ending that no book will ever give you.

Stop typing. Stop reading.

This is the end.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 63 Pt.2 - My Life Til Now (edit)

6/20/10

It was the true dawn of the internet. My first screenname was RDMASQUE, my teenage superhero/vigilante alter ego, with a slight nod to the Poe short story 'Masque of the Red Death', where upper society is killed by a plague at a fancy dinner.

I would hang out with my friends, then come home and log into the TOWN SQUARE - LONG ISLAND room on AOL 2.5 and then make fun of the losers that hung out in there. We'd play WAV files that we each had surprising one another with well timed gags.

And after losing my virginity I found the anonymous aspect of IM flirting to be a godsend. Finally, I didn't need to feel awkward in person and I could just say whatever I felt, be as snarky as I wanted, type bold statements that would be so unlike me in person. I was able to come into my own and redefine myself.

Eventually we met up with those losers online in real life, and we were the cool under 21 kids hanging out with late 20's social rejects. There was some common bond of outcast status that made it so that a group from all walks of life could congregate and create our own scene.

At this point in my life, my grandmother dead and buried, my ex long forgotten, and a guy obsessed with me now just a suicide statistic, I was numb to everything. A headbutt from a bullying friend to my sternum shut down my heart chakra and I didn't care or think about anyone else.

I slept with a few girls, some who broke up with their boyfriends for a week just to sleep with me, some who asked if we were going out as I entered her. I was relentless in my online flirting and it led me to have sex with the hottest girl I could imagine, who left crying immediately after. She drunk drove home to her boyfriend.

Then I began dating a 27 year old just before I turned 21. A weird mix of friends all gathered at the surprise party my parents threw for me. My friends all bought me Playstation and the Die Hard game. I drunkenly bought everything at a 7-11 at 2am. I had everything I could have wanted.

But she became obsessed, checked my emails after we broke up. Somehow she guilted me into dating her for another 6 months. I would sit and watch Tom & Jerry with this girl who had finished Grad school for Psychology, and imagined hitting her in the head with a brick. I didn't want to be there with her but couldn't get out of it.

I hung out with my friends as often as possible, finally discovering weed, smoked and watched Traces of Death while eating hot wing potato chips. We'd play multiplayer Goldeneye and Starfox on the Nintendo 64, killing each other virtually over and over again. One on one they were my best friends, in a group I was the butt of the jokes.

Somehow with my group of friends I entered their world of comic books and role-playing as the patsy, the jester, the one you could tear down just to watch me twist under sarcastic insults. Initially I embraced it, eager to fill a role after leaving the non-existent family dynamic I had. I went from unwanted oldest child left alone with a TV, to doofy victim of insecure teenage dorks.

College passed in the blink of an eye without so much of a memorable experience. I had gone to Nassau Community College instead of SUNY New Paltz in upstate New York. I would've found a hippy scene up there and become a different person but instead entered the 13th grade with my friends, staying at home in suburbia.

I wrote everything I could, screenplays, poetry, short stories, even filmed two short movies. I had technical ability but no real life experience to write about. With words I could convey emotions, put you in a scene, but what was it that I had to say? Nothing that wasn't derived from some comic book or action movie. So I gave it up after I graduated.

I had worked since I was 11, from a newspaper route, to helping deliver candy and sodas to train stations in Jamaica. Then I ran the kiddy rides at Adventureland when I was 16, was a cashier at Waldbaums when I graduated, and wound up at K-Mart in the electronics department in college. I bounced to a brief stint at Sears as a TV/laserdisk salesman, and finally wound up at Jiffy Lube, despite knowing nothing about cars (and my dad was/is a mechanic).

So this all led up to some point. I began avoiding the 27 year old, showing up hours late to work after nearly getting arrested at a hotel party off the LIE, and I was about ready to make a stand with my friends. The ringleader, Ed, had made out with other girls behind his current girlfriend's back, and she knew I was the weak link so she came to me to find out the truth.

And with that passive aggressive revealing of the truth, breaking the bros before hos code, I no longer had friends. Everyone sided with him over me, having too much fun with his smartass comments and magnetic personality. In one summer I had isolated myself utterly and completely.

I had just begun dating Rebecca. She was the girl I jumped to in order to escape the older chick. Rebecca also had gotten me a job doing customer service with her. In a few months I became the trainer, and was making more money than ever. It was an easy job and with my infinite patience I never was rude to these idiotic people that bought "rare" coins or VHS tapes about trains, super car lube, or breast enhancement cream.

It was a new life and with it a new direction. After drawing in MS Paint at the job, I thought I wanted to do artwork on the computer. After all, my dad was obsessed with computers, making music, short animations, DOOM levels, and so I figured my affinity for computer programs could make up for my lack of art skill.

So with a friend Dan, from the High School gang, also ostracized, we went to graphic design school. We learned Adobe desktop publishing, Flash animation, HTML and 3D animation. I really took to it but never excelled at it, much like everything else I did in my life. But I had new friends and went to see their bands perform around Long Island.

I had quit the customer service job and was selling whatever I had to eat and used credit cards to buy comic books. My girlfriend Rebecca was hiding out in my bedroom on a nightly basis as my parents fought about my irresponsibility.

My father saw me as wasting my potential, not being the sacrificial martyr he was, slaving away to support a family he seemingly didn't want. My mother defended me as I always took care of my accounts, paid my bills, and other than never doing anything around the house (set by my father's example) I was a good kid, if not a bit lazy.

It was the end of the 90's and Y2K was nearly upon us. For all the anticipation, it was a non-event, years of build-up and no payoff. Except it was apocalyptic for me. Everything was on the verge of breaking, and sure enough there was one final death blow to my life.

Rebecca and I went to her friend's house party. Her ex that endlessly cheated on her, making her a paranoid, jealous mess (with her sketchy dad's help), was at the party, flirting with girls despite having a girlfriend who wasn't there. She watched him as a joint was passed around.

I was nervous as she was not okay with smoking. I asked if it was cool, and she nodded, but when it came around to me she had left to go do shots. I barely took a hit, mostly to be social with these strangers, and then went to sober up a bit before driving back. When I found her and brought her to the car to head home, she was drunk.

I wanted to be honest so I told her that I had smoked a tiny bit. She unleashed an insane rage upon me, punching the glasses off my face, kicking me, as I tried to keep the car from sliding on the black ice of Sunrise Highway. I got her to my parent's house and locked her in my room. I crouched into a ball keeping the door shut as she wailed on me.

I had a moment, I knew if I could smack her hard enough, I could knock her unconscious and finally relax. I slapped her as hard as I could, then felt guilty on how justified I felt at lashing back at her. When I couldn't take it anymore I let her leave to go crash drunkenly. My mom and sister woke up and talked her down.

It was over. I wouldn't stay with her. That was a line that was crossed. I had been thoroughly emasculated. But she feigned some sickness and I took care of her. The ultimate fucking chump. She played me and I fell for it. By the end of the mysterious two week sickness spent in my bed, the drunken attack was a distant memory. I tried to blank it out.

But it was there. When my friend Dan went out to lunch with her one day, he went Basic Instinct crazy on her, telling her that me and him had hooked up and that I was his first. To this day I'll wonder exactly how this conversation went down, but that was it for my friends. I didn't even question her and cut him off instantly.

Then we moved out together. Her nesting instinct took over and I became some lazy asshole she lived with. By this time I had gotten an office job designing medical and financial forms, placing the Wong-Baker scale into hospital charts and typing 4pt legalese on the back of loan applications. I needed a creative output.

So on January 1, 2001 I decided to start writing comic books. In a month I had my first script about a fallen hero, now a junkie vigilante, an unwitting pawn of the devil. It was good enough for me to look for paid work and I got a gig scripting a few 28 page one-shots based on this guy's characters. I got paid $50 a script, but then the company folded.

It was enough of a tease that I decided to work on my own. I had an idea about a modern day Chow Yun Fat style master of kung fu who would avenge his father against superpowered illuminati members. At a networking panel at WizardWorld Philly I met an insanely talented kid named Chris (my father and grandfather's name), and later my personal guru/idol Grant Morrison at the DC Comics booth.

It was a sign. Chris and I began working on a new comic, a sci-fi/fantasy kung fu revenge story, and it was my only outlet. I had no friends to go out with, no family I wanted to keep in touch with, and a girlfriend that was more of a roommate. The comic came together and we began showing it around comic conventions, talking to any and every professional.

But I felt stupid. The quiet shy kid that let this genius artist get all the attention and glory. It was enough at first to have him believe in me and my writing. But after countless hours standing silently beside him, listening to endless praise of his work, I just felt empty. Not worth anything. No life. Basically invisible.

I had one friend at this time, the old rebel without a clue Dennis. We had reconnected and rode mountain bikes through trails. It was nice seeing someone from when I was a kid, even if he was the troublemaker who took my first girlfriend from me. Now he was engaged and growing up.

But once again, when it was just us we'd be close, tight, talking about anything and everything, in front of others, he'd berate and hit me. I couldn't take it anymore, my anxiety levels were peaking, I wanted to freak out, but somehow I was just holding on to my sanity.

Rebecca got two little pugs, having always been an animal person, and now well adjusted enough to be stable and be close with her family once again thanks to my patience and therapeutic advice, so she didn't need me anymore. And then my parents split up. My mom comes over to tell me, but instead breaks down into tears to Rebecca when I leave the room.

My father says he'll come by and talk to me about it but never does. He blames Rebecca for the breakup because of a supportive message she wrote to my mom (he checked my mom's email of course), not because of any of his flaws or faults. I don't talk to him for two years after that happily. He changes my AOL password on Father's Day months later.

I feel unfazed by the whole thing, half wanting/expecting it since I was old enough to know that parents could split up. They were together since they were teenagers and were not much older than I am right now as I write this. They needed a life. Instead they repeated patterns.

My mom found an asshole boyfriend who was about the same age and disposition as my dad. My dad found an older woman who was simple and sweet, not unlike his own father did when his parents split up, at just about the same age. Repeating cycles.

My grandmother's death was the real end of the family, but here it was, the final death rattle. There was no family anymore. No friends around either. Just a girlfriend who wanted nothing to do with me and her sister, who both ignored or talked right over me. I was often told to shut up or be quiet.

So I broke down. That was it. If my parents splitting up wasn't enough of a reason to be listened to, nothing would. I laid on the floor rocking back forth mumbling "I can't...I can't...", over and over for hours. I was totally lost. What was the point of anything? Movies and comics were empty distractions from life, my office job was all I had, what was the point of anything if you couldn't share it with anyone?

I became depressed, smoked weed excessively, watched as many fucked up movies as I could, hoping that I would feel something. But I didn't. The social anxiety amped up so that I couldn't even go to a store in the mall, which was my one distraction outside of work and home.

Rebecca began seeing a therapist, and eventually I went along for couples therapy. I found myself thinking of how mentally superior I was to the therapist, but she did validate all my frustration which I found to be liberating. I went to my own therapist but gave up on her when she couldn't remember my name or what I talked about week to week.

Traumatized by the PETA videos Rebecca had shown me forced me to become vegetarian, preying upon my squeamishness at eating dead animals. I would eat frozen veggie burgers and chicken noodle soup with the chicken plucked out. I watched artsy and disturbing movies on my lunch break. I had a routine and began going to the gym.

I was feeling better day by day but I was still afraid of life. I'd constantly push myself, going out to bars to see local bands, went for a day trip up to New Paltz to see the college I could've gone to. The comic was coming along but I really needed to write for myself again. I needed to purge my soul with words.

I thought back to the screenplay I never finished in college. Two secret agents sent to a remote Hindu temple to complete the Tower of Brahma, thus ending all of existence. It was a cliched action movie, with tidbits of existentialism. Shootouts, car chases, and badass black suits.

So I started writing. Somehow a guy past his prime, late in his 20's, changed everything about himself through those words. I went to San Diego to promote my graphic novel, and when I got back, I found myself going out to Long Island City to see the Scissor Sisters at PS1. A week later I was in the East Village seeing a friend of a friend's band. And then I met a girl.

Diana drew me in somehow, made me feel bolder than I ever felt, and she wanted to listen, to get to know me. So I told her everything, and a month later I was living with her down on the LES outside the Williamsburg Bridge. I ended things with Rebecca, quit my office job, and threw everything into storage. I lived out of my car with a few bags at her place.

I got a job as a paparazzi photo editor working the late shift, coming home to Delancey at 4am. With Diana I hit dive bars, gallery openings, fashion events, and saw almost all of Manhattan. From the Financial District to Upper West Side, Governor's Island to the Highline (before it was renovated). She loved playing tour guide and I got the crash course in the city that I needed.

But she was cold, and something must have reminded me about my past ex-girlfriend's with her, so I cried and acted out and purged my soul all over her. We both quit the photo agency and went to Columbia where we got taken around by her family. After that we went to LA where we got tattoos. But when we got back it all fell apart.

On July 4th she left for Vegas for a girls weekend and I went to an open bar Gen Art event with Jared, the guy's band I saw that night I first met her. We got ridiculous drunk and by this time I had experience being blackout drunk, having gone into a walking coma at the MoMA, vomiting on the F train, collapsing on Eldridge.

So when we blacked out that night it wasn't that much of a surprise but the British female voice that was on my voicemail the next morning was a shock. It seems I somehow picked up a girl while totally unconscious. Or I guess she picked me up. I meet her a few weeks later (she went back to Australia for a few weeks, and yes, Australian with a British accent), and I had no idea what she looked like.

I pass her on the street without knowing, observing her hotness. We eventually recognize each other and hit up a sake bar, where I proceed to tell her everything you've just read, give or take a few tidbits. We hang out a few more times but when it gets a bit serious she ends things, just before my birthday.

I'd been living with my ex in her friend's apartment on 15th and 5th Ave, but after a trip up to the top of the Empire State Building, I leave for Boston. I hit up a comic book convention with my fellow creators, newly formed as a studio collective dubbed TenTon Studios, and we get drunk, ridiculous, and it'd be one of the best times any of us had.

I tell them I don't know where I'm going to live, I was getting unemployment for a few months, no idea at all what job I'd be able to get. Jay and Jong invite me to come back to their place to crash in North Alrington, New Jersey. In three days I'm eating meat and smoking cigarettes again, and suddenly hooked on Starbucks Americanos.

After a few months of living in the Garden State and hooking up with some Jersery girls, I move back to New York City with my last paycheck from Cingular customer service training. I had gotten a job at the last possible moment at an Alphagraphics and spent what money I had coming into the city on the weekends so I could drink with Jared, sleeping on his floor for two days at a stretch.

Eventually I just blew my last check on rent to move in with him and to save money I brought all my crap from storage on Long Island and lugged it up four flights. I was basically just living in a storage unit with 30 long boxes of comics and a mattress on top as my bed. All my other junk was still tucked away in boxes, but I made it my own.

It was a one bedroom, where he had the living room as his room, and my bedroom held the bathroom. The shower was in the closet and we were living on top of each other, or would be if I didn't work nights and he worked days. It somehow worked out for a few years and we had gotten close enough where it was fairly comfortable.

We would go out every free night, run the gamut of East Village and Lower East Side bars, hit the girls with our routine where we pronounce that despite our closeness we were not gay, not even a little...but yeah, we were gay. And it made them all laugh every time. And maybe there was some weird physical side to us, not an attraction, but an understanding of our dynamic.

He was the sadistic one, so dreadfully insecure that he'd have to constantly bring me down (and everyone else for that matter) to be "funny", and I would once again play the part of slapstick sidekick, taking the abuse in order to feel like I was playing my role, a comfort in the schtick. But, like before, I grew resentful, realizing that he only did care about himself, and was only capable of caring for himself.

We switched off for months at a time in relationships so we started to not see each other. But all my friends, my social life, everything was his. I barely had a small handful of friends and so found myself in relationship after relationship. Once I was the one who felt the pain of disinterest, and became an obsessive lunatic, but mostly I got involved with girls then plotted my escape route.

And I'd do this by being my best self, a facade of awesome that would be whatever they wanted. And when I began to see their flaws, things I couldn't live with, exaggerated pains I felt, a disrespect I wouldn't accept. Each time I said too much, made things as messy as possible, and this even ended with my having to call 911 to have an ambulance stop my young ex, just a sophomore at NYU, from slicing her wrists open.

Right before that I ventured to Amsterdam and Paris with my friend Ben from New School. I had taken a few semesters a year before and met him in my first writing class. He was much like the lost (and cooler/more badass) younger brother I never had. Of course I fucked up my financial aid and never got to go back to college after the trip.

With two new credit cards we headed out to Europe and smoked as much as we could stand, exhausting ourselves as we wandered around the canals, dodging bikes. We smuggled some on the train to Paris and smoked out the window of our hotel in the middle of La Siene overlooking the Palais du Justice.

We found Paris to be dead, but to its credit, so were we. Beaten from the travel, the smoking, the drinking, the 'shrooms, the cold Amsterdam air pouring into our room as we chained smoked and zoned out to MTV Europe. I fell in love with Amsterdam, and on the last night I was so high that I uncovered a power to project a fictional reality around me.

Or was it there the whole time?

I came back and within two months I was engaged to who I thought was my female counterpart. She was an ex-model with a sarcastic sense of humor, tall and thin, goofy in her choice of style. Unique gets tossed around a lot, but I dare anyone to find me someone more so. Of course, she was also bi-polar and a borderline alcoholic who was addicted to karaoke.

I moved in with her after four months. Things ended badly with Jared and his latest girlfriend who I absolutely loathed. Oh, and I had also gotten laid off (aka quit because of a significant pay cut) and couldn't find another job. I was broke and she was helping me as best she could. By the time we lived together, the honeymoon was long over.

All my insecurities bubbled to the surface. I couldn't do karaoke. I couldn't take everyone wanting her. Girls would never want me like guys want her. That imbalance consumed me. My self-worth plummeted as she went off dressed to the nines to be hit on by men with jobs, power, confidence. I was just an unemployed, neurotic asshole.

Our clashes were epic. We'd scream, I'd storm out, walk the streets, sometimes blackout drunk and bleeding from smashing something. I often contemplated and nearly committed suicide. I began therapy and it helped, but I never felt such despair in my life. I had no way out, my debt was growing, and she couldn't fulfill me.

My addictions were exposed. I needed to smoke to alleviate boredom. I wanted to fuck to lose myself, to dominate her, to control her. I needed it more than air or food. And I never got it. I obsessed about it. I became delirious, paranoid beyond even my imaginings. I had to face myself and all that I wasn't, all that I expected myself to be.

I kept writing though. Working on comics. Started a podcast. Truly it was my most productive year in that regard. I suddenly had an internet radio show with an audience, a new comic in the works, and I was nearing the end of a novel I had begun six years before, when I was a totally different person. Some finish line was coming.

I got a job at the Daily News, a major metropolitan newspaper. I was excited. This wasn't just paparazzi bullshit (though that was still present), it was news, world events. I was working a five day work week, night shift, and lost all contact with humanity. I didn't go out, the money I made wasn't enough, the relationship was really failing despite desperate attempts to salvage it.

The holidays came, and she went to her parents. I went to work. I can't imagine a worse time in my life. After the New Year, 2010, I was working on pictures of the devastation of the Haiti earthquake, color correcting a photo of a man crying, screaming in anguish, as he holds his daughter's dead body, and I wished I was him. I wanted true pain. I wanted to have my entire life crumble around me.

I held a knife against my wrist for hours before I checked myself into the ER. My therapist had recommended it multiple times and it had finally gotten that bad. They recommended I sign myself in, and I did. I surrendered myself to their care. They told me when to wake up, when to sleep, fed me, and medicated me.

I saw the hope in the eyes of the much further gone cases around me. They held on to dreams that they would most likely fuck up once they got out. They had lives they wanted to return to that their disorders would destroy. Or they were too withdrawn and a mess to do much of anything but ride out the rest of their days.

After a week they released me. I was free. Lauren and I were suddenly back together and doing well after she came and visited me all week on the inside. But that wouldn't last. We had to move, barely staving off court because we couldn't afford the rent at her place. We fought as we sought out places in Brooklyn. On the last day possible we found a two bedroom in Clinton Hill.

After we moved in, we split apart. We lived separate lives, had smaller and smaller breakdowns and screaming matches. Finally, we just ended it. It was over, but neither of us could go anywhere. We couldn't afford it. I secretly (secret even to me) held onto hope that this was like all the other times, and we'd go back to how things were. Then she slept with Lady Gaga's DJ.

I went through the stages of grief, said horrible things to her, hurt her as best as I could, not that she would ever show it. So instead I just died inside until I needed to go on, there was nothing else to do. I pushed her out of my head a bit more each day. I embraced what was around me that made me feel good, happy. It was such a foreign feeling at this point.

I've just moved out, tossed all I own into storage, found a sublet in Harlem, and said my goodbyes to her. My father just went to rehab for alcohol in Florida, down by his family. My sister is about to get married. My friend Boston has survived being a cop and is now a park ranger in Massachusetts. We have a ton of projects we want to work on together. I have one more chapter to write in this book.

A whole new life, not even a new chapter, but an entirely new book lies ahead of me. This is everything that is now behind me. I finally release it all. It's made me this person so I could do what I'm about to do.

The Tower of Brahma. Chapter 63. Fire Over Water. (edit)

6/21/10

My parents had sex in the back of my dad's Mustang, necking after hours at the park around the corner from where they lived. My pops was 17, worked at the Dairy Barn, and tuned up his car after class. My mom was 15, had knee surgery that put her field hockey days behind her.

I was conceived.

For reasons unknown to me I was not aborted, but rather, I was born on September 21, 1976, a Tuesday at 2am. My parents wed four days before at City Hall. My mom started taking night classes to graduate a year early. My father enters the workforce as an auto-mechanic.

I say I don't know the reason these teenagers decided to keep this child, but I do have my suspicions. I think my father to have assumed the role out of a sense of martyrdom, quite possibly like his father. But thinking on it now, my widow grandmother on my mom's side, an Irish Catholic, was perhaps the deciding factor.

My dad showed me how to change the brakes on our car, got to really enjoy all the cool Star Wars toys, and have a small victim for his boyish pranks. It was all a joke, he was teasing, he didn't mean to scare me like that. I begin to see my father as an object of fear, of aggression, humiliation.

I cling to my mother, who reads to me at night, and smiles every time she looks at me. She loves me more than she realized was possible, quite literally shell-shocked from her nearly virgin birth. A child with a child, a girl who never knew her own father, an electrical engineer in World War II, dead of lung cancer before her third birthday.

The rift, the crack, begins to widen every day. My dad gets shitfaced and off-roads with his friends, who eventually have their own kids, and it becomes a ritual to go camping, drink, and laugh their asses off at their children's expense. Or at least for my dad that is.

My sister is born. I hear stories saying that I was sweet and tender towards her as a baby. I recall nothing but disdain and half-hearted bitterness, never fully realized jealousy. Something happens before I can really be aware of how I feel about having a younger sibling.

I die.

I choke to death on a piece of hot-dog. The thick-skinned kosher kind. I turned blue, passed out, and was rushed to the Emergency Room where they removed the chunk of wiener with tongs. How long I went without breath, I don't know. Did I subconsciously yearn for death, or perhaps attention, at so early an age?

Most of my memories from this time are vague, just as they were years before. I recall a scary Dracula in a house window, Vienna Fingers in my lunchbox, a Matchbox Car in my hand, as I walked besides my mom to pre-school. We raced cars along the floor, I came home with a bootleg, cheap ass orange truck.

They tell me there was a dog at that apartment, the landlord's dog, named Max. He was big and scary with a loud ass bark, but we were friends. As the story goes, I was sleeping in his pen area besides him. He awoke, startled from a dream, and clutched my face in his jaws. I still have the scars.

We move to a poor white/middle class black neighborhood. We have an apartment under a rockabilly couple that have a snake, rats, and a tarantula. In the driveway is an old 30's Ford (complete with painted flames and running boards) and an El Camino.

We live next to a wooded park, complete with amazing hills, a playground, and tons of inchworms and caterpillars. My best friend was the white trash kid across the street who lived with his old aunt. I piss through his window from outside, we ride bike trails we build in his backyard, and get stung by a hive of bees in the massive tree that sat in front of his property, hiding away the rundown house and overgrown yard.

I recall thinking, I'm afraid of heights, as I look up to a tree far back on his property that had been struck by lightning. It was charred and split at the top, a good thirty feet above us. Beyond the fence is the farmland where we would pick strawberries each year.

I get new sneakers, and two older boys force us into the back of their property down the street. They tell me to close my eyes, my friend yells to me not to. I am frightened by their demeanor so I comply. They tilt a wheelbarrow over, spilling gray mud all over my feet, covering every inch of my new sneakers. I walk home into the sunset with my friend and the sun dries the mud, it cracks off, and my shoes are still perfectly fine.

I watch TV with my parents, Darth Vader's helmet being lifted up, his pale, sick frame underneath. I say, "I guess Luke didn't get his looks from his dad." My parents erupt into laughter. We're a family, watching Star Search, a man singing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', the Muppet Show, and ALF.

My dad teaches me to ride my bike, I can't make left turns for some reason, and wasn't too good at stopping. I put my arm out reaching for this rusted car as my wrist drags along the metal. I still have a scar running just below my thumb and down across my wrist.

The power is out and the windows are shaking. We're huddled around candles as Hurricane Gloria rages outside. It nearly tosses a tree from the park into the house. During the eye of the storm, we step outside, basking in the eerie calm of the moment. Everything is ripped apart and smashed, tree branches scattered everywhere, entire bushes uprooted.

My friends get together to survey the damage. My black friends all have big houses, circular driveways, and built-in pools. I watch as one friend's sister falls into the pool, getting tangled in the sticker bushes that were deposited in there. She thrashes about and almost slips under the thorns and branches.

Awhile later, we camp out in that friend's backyard, which seems to go on for miles. We goof around, jump from tree to tree, armed only with our flashlights. We get in trouble and are made to come inside. From the bathroom window we spy the next door neighbor building something as his girlfriend comes out in only a nightshirt. I see her vagina as she bends over to kiss him.

When winter comes, we hit the park's hills with our sleds and fly down the slopes. My little sister jumps on the back of mine and we slip down the big drop. A kid comes soaring down on top of us in his wood and metal sled. My leg is crushed, and my sister's head is bashed. We need to keep her awake once we get home.

As a family we sit down to play Cabbage Patch Kids: the board-game, and when they remove the top I spy it instantly. A piece of construction paper with a crayon stick figure drawing. Crude cave etching of a naked man and woman, with word balloons proclaiming some sort of unknown sexuality. I am instantly mortified at this unexpected intrusion into this, my dawn of sexual discovery.

Everyone laughs as they can just barely make out what it says, what it means. They laugh again when I fill out the ID card in my G.I. Joe wallet as SEX: No. My sister comes out with a random statement, "Dad has too much sex." My sister runs around naked often. My dad spanks me once, but it is so terrifying that I see it as a freeze framed moment of panic.

I remember a story where I sat in the backseat of the car after a fair, a smile on my face as I held firmly to the string on my HULK mylar balloon. Suddenly, without any warning, my dad whips around, rips the balloon from me and tosses it out the window. It seems it was reverberating in the wind and it just had to go.

Did my dad pick on me, not knowing how to relate to boys (having two older and two younger sisters) and acting out his immature jealous rage against me, the male who was perhaps taking his wife from him? I can't imagine he loved her with any depth or passion, and most likely just wanted her physically, unable to show emotion beyond that.

Either way my father was done with me once we moved to Massapequa. I was almost done with elementary school, where I was the quiet kid who identified himself as a klutz, and began a new life among kids who'd known each other for years. When I was 11 my dad told me he wasn't going to be there for me going forward.

I made some friends here and there, lots of people were really friendly towards the new kid in the Yankees hat. My first friend slept in his tighty-whities when I stayed over and had Barbies in his room; he came out over a decade later. My next friends lived far away, and were bad kids, a weird mix. Then I met the four who would make me leave my comfort zone.

There was the charismatic leader (momma's boy), the hard luck kid (trouble magnet), the rebel (with daddy issues), and me, the mascot, the punchline, the scaredy cat. We stayed out past curfew, rode our bikes around, talked to girls selling friendship bracelets. I just wanted to return Blades of Steel, the NES game I rented from T&S Video (our acct.# was 1012).

But they wanted to talk to girls, so we hung out with girls, stood on their corners under amber streetlights, innocently flirted with childish flair. I stood back, embarrassed, scared, uncertain. I had a paper route, and video games to be played, maybe shoot another short film on my PXL2000 with action figures. I didn't want to talk to girls.

They threatened to throw a bike at my head if I didn't ask this girl out. After our first night we were paired off. I spent the last part of the summer before High School hanging out in basements, watching Road House, doing tricks on our BMXs to impress girls in oversized Champion sweatshirts and neon skids, while they ate Combos and drank Diet/Caffeine Free Coke.

They wore scrunches in their hair, Keds on their feet, two pairs of socks, one overflowing and colorful, and danced to BelBivDevoe. I wore net belly shirts, Bugle Boy jean shorts, and had a good sized pony tail with my overly grown out spiky hair. Eventually I put my arm around my "girlfriend" and kissed her. That was it. (A few years later she had a baby before finishing High School.)

Then I met her. My first real girlfriend. She was the object of everyone's desire. A girl two years younger than her friends, but two years of physical development ahead of her friends. She had boobies. And she was really hot. And she thought I was cute. Once again, they made me ask her out.

We all went to Adventureland right around our birthdays (hers just three days before mine), and rode the rides, played games, and enjoyed ourselves. We were kids, still innocent and playing at the adult concept of dating. But we never kissed. And due to an incident where I got taken off my friend's roof by the cops, I would be grounded for two months and our young romance was cut short.

I breathed a sigh of relief, thanking my parents almost, for this opportunity to get out of this crazy, complex world I had stumbled into. There were all sorts of games and twists, to everything that was said back and forth. It was overwhelming and I was glad to get back to my simple life in my bedroom. I was raised by television and embraced it once more.

But it wouldn't last. I would be free to roam once more after New Years Eve. On January 10th I had my first kiss outside the girl's house. From there it was a slippery slope. We began making out a lot, then heavy petting. Eventually her hand took ahold of my penis and she jerked me off. It was amazing.

I wanted her to do that all the time. We went for a record 13 times in one day. I was consumed by the feeling, addicted to her firm grip releasing this fluid from me daily. You see, I had never done this to myself, never explored my own sexuality, alone in my bedroom, before she showed me the power of another person doing it.

It lead to my abandoning my friends in the living room while we were in the bedroom. If we were at her house, when her parents made me leave, I'd take the raging hard-on I had and beat off in the bushes across the street to avoid blue balls. Our song was 'After the Rain' by Nelson, although should have been 'Don't Treat Me Bad' by Firehouse.

She couldn't stop thinking about my friend. The rebel who I had gotten very close to. It was his house the cops took me off the roof of. We shoplifted wine coolers, Doritos and cookie dough. We stole recycling from one supermarket and returned to the other to make money. We paid a guy to buy us survival knifes at the magic shoppe in the mall.

I set things on fire. Leaves, paper, cars, the siding of a house. I would carry a lighter, as I took to smoking now and then by this point, and light things as I went. No one had ever gotten hurt. I was lucky. I even got beat up by a cop for not smoking weed, him insisting I was the lookout. He took me to a back alley and roughed me up.

And it was this friend that I went through it all with, all part of his troublemaking schemes, that she now wanted. I slammed the door in her face as she tells me, then I convince him to date her, while fooling around with her on the swings on the side. I abandon them both. I see them together at one of our friend's brother's funeral, who had killed himself, hung himself, out in the backyard. He was feeling up her skirt at the wake.

If I had left my metamorphosis to chance in Junior High, I would actively reinvent myself for High School. I ignored the jocks when they asked me to play basketball as I finished my paper route. Instead I discovered the kids reading comic books and playing Dungeons & Dragons, and found my way in. I would play the thief, or assassin. The morally dubious rogue, often the punching bag for the others.

This group were introverted, self-conscious, and sadistic. They would mock, taunt, insult, all to get a rise out of you, and no one would react more than me. The fat kid beat on me, the lying kid would play with my emotions, the trickster would build me up and tear me down. But I loved it. It was a dynamic I could belong to. A band of brothers, all fighting evil in our basements with dice.

I was never anyone's best friend. We'd all take turns hanging out, the dynamic always in flux as one person was around and someone else was pissed at someone else. Eventually, the abuse became too much and I fought the fat kid. I wailed on him, I held him down and kneed him in the spine, I smacked him with fake fireplace logs. But then, I finished him off a few weeks later.

He had called up one of us, and while someone was trying to candy coat why we weren't hanging out with him, I let loose: "Nobody wants to hang out with you because no one likes you." I gave him the reasons. The weakest of them all stood up and said enough; I finally stood up to someone. He was docile ever after that (despite later head-butting my sternum during art class, shutting down my heart chakra), and years later credited me with helping him change.

I daydreamed all throughout high-school whether it was a short story about a hard boiled private dick and his motley crew of mystic misfits, or looking at the girl next to me in Social Studies' bra as it stuck out the side of her tank top. I would slip my hand into my jeans and invisibly masturbate during class. I became notorious among my friends for it.

I stayed away from girls, but became a chronic masturbator. I would wait until my parents were asleep and spend hours watching softcore porn and stroking myself. I think I may've permanently screwed up my neck and back from the way I would lie as I came into the top of a shoe box. I would wait for the hottest scene with a short haired brunette and then come.

By Senior year, a shift had happened. We were suddenly cool. The jocks became metal-heads and did drugs. They thought we knew martial arts. My dorky musician friends were suddenly hot as hair metal expanded into grunge. We wore flannels and black leather jackets, ripped jeans and construction boots untied. We hung out with head cheerleaders and prom queens on our first day of class.

As the year went by, we got involved. Went to dances, I wrote for the literary journal, played battle of the bands. We did whatever we wanted, from staging broken neck fights (cracked Tic-Tac boxes), and shooting up the hallways with disc-guns. I began getting attention from girls again, and my friends could see this. Suddenly, my friends who hated me, loved me.

And I had my first crush. She was tall, dorky, on track and the basketball team, and a smart kid. She was also beautiful. Freckles with a sweet smile. She never had a boyfriend, and so after a setup worthy of a High School coming-of-age rom-com at the Homecoming dance, we dated. We made out for most of The Bodyguard. She once whispers "You're driving me crazy..." in my ear as I kiss her neck.

A week or two later we're done as she becomes even more aloof than she had been before, flirting with my other friends. And considering my track record with friends and girlfriends, I reacted poorly. I tried to control her, she let me go. She wound up dating a friend of a friend of mine for awhile after High School who I no doubt took her virginity.

I was definitely into girls again, but aiming that high was scary, dangerous, devastating. It brought out a madness in me. Then I saw her. She was tiny, thin, with curly hair and an acoustic guitar in her hands. She seemed to sit outside her group of friends. A general dislike towards her. I was smitten.

A month before my prom (as she was two years younger) I lost my virginity to her. We were fooling around on my bed, down to underwear as I grinded on her. She whispers in my ear "Don't tease me." I spend a moment in shock, before grabbing the condom I had stashed in my CD rack, that my friends had stolen from this girl's older brother's room years before, the one that had committed suicide two years earlier.

A month later we're having sex in the back of the limo after prom, my friend having sex with his girlfriend on the other side, our jackets hanging between to section it off. The odd thing is I sort of 'dated' his girlfriend for a few weeks the semester before. Nothing happened, but when that friend years later turned psycho on a girl I was dating, saying that me and him hooked up, well, that's just odd.

What distorted memory could he have? Did we do something and I don't remember? I did wake up in just my boxers on the senior trip, where he and two other friends were all sleeping in the same room. He wore dresses and makeup, liking gothy new wave, and the Crow. I don't even know what to think other than a memory I have of me with him as I cried hysterical while Candlebox's 'Far Behind' played in the car.

Then there was Freddie. All through my senior year, Freddie would ask me things like "If in the future you met a girl and it turned out she used to be a guy, what would you do?", to which I would respond earnestly, that it depended on how I felt about the relationship. I failed to see the connection between that question and his insistence that he was a woman in a man's body. I was incredibly naive, dumb, or in obvious denial.

All year he would ask me things during Government class. I was eventually told that my picture graced the locket around his neck, that the poem he wrote in the journal was about me and my "flowing locks", and his position as editor is why it featured so many of my stories and poems. Then, one day, while at rehearsal for the Disney Revue (I did it for a girl) he told me he loved me.

I told one person, who told one person, who eventually got it back to him. He was pissed, and I got the diva cold shoulder for the rest of the year. My tiny girlfriend would be threatened as things got catty. Soon enough, we graduated, and I wouldn't hear about him again until the following Fall, on the day of my birthday as I'm about head into work, as a cashier at Waldbaums.

He was dead. The morning of my birthday, he had written a few notes to friends, swallowed sleeping pills, and pulled a plastic bag over his head. My friend's brother, a firefighter, found him and the word quickly spread. I don't think I went to the memorial, or the wake. I was numb to it. Indifferent. I thought I should feel something, but I didn't.

Three months later, and it's Christmas. Just finished my first semester of Nassau Community College and had driven away my girlfriend by sleeping with the girl who was with my friend in the limo during prom. I was working at K-Mart with my now ex and had to tell her that in order for her to leave me alone. I couldn't get rid of her and she would be back months later to have random sex with me in the stock room.

She had surrendered her identity to me, left all decisions to me, wanted to do whatever I did. I couldn't stand the power and control, and I lashed out her angrily time and time again. I had to be meaner and meaner, trying to make her hate me so I wouldn't have to be responsible for her.

She eventually went on medication after a breakdown, then went back to school and is a thriving academic of medieval history. She was adopted and found her real parents to be a genius physics professor and a schizophrenic drug addict.

But I was untouchable. Having fun with friends, driving places, hanging out at diners, smoking and drinking coffee. I couldn't think of anyone but myself. Certainly not a troubled youth with gender issues, or a fractured young girl with identity problems. And definitely not my grandmother who was wasting away from chemo as cancer destroyed her.

Three days after Christmas, she died. I vaguely remember her wake, hardly recall her funeral. She was the center of our family's universe, the lynch-pin that held us all together. A tiny spitfire of a woman who showed me NYC, took me to work with her on Queens Blvd, and made me pancakes whenever I wanted. Her huge house was always an adventure waiting to be explored.

And during Christmas dinner, I couldn't even look over at the couch and acknowledge that that bag of bones was my grandmother, the greatest, coolest, hippest, most selfless woman I had ever had the good fortune to meet in my life. She was everything to me while growing up, and somehow during my teen years, I forgot that. And then she was gone.

My family dissolved over the years after that. No more holiday dinners, just makeshift Thanksgivings, empty Christmas Days, joyless Easters. I couldn't feel anything and began just having sex with any girls who showed me attention. Cute, nice ones that I hurt, and hot, sexy ones that left my house crying afterward, back to their boyfriends that I never knew about.

Tower of Brahma 62.i Solo Inferno (edit)

6/14/10

To say it was dark, to say I was alone, would be to acknowledge the existence of those words. There was only my flesh, the energy that coursed through it, and the concepts in my grey matter. My skin was drifting apart atom by atom, cell by cell.

I lit up from the inside, glowing crimson within my groin, shifting to orange among my abs, canary yellow from the diaphragm, a burst of green from my sternum, throat tightening around bluish illumination, and purple popped from my forehead. Stoplight magnificence in eternal void.

Pulling a coin from my pocket, a beautiful woman carved into its side. Flipping it over, it mirrored my own third eye, a reflection of my insides shining within. It pulled free from my hand and slipped flawlessly onto the horn of light protruding from my skull.

Fifth Avenue decadence, dollars turning into fabric, less with each season, the money becomes abstract plastic. A new look, a pretty thing to wear, to pretend to be. Each cycle delivering the anti-dote or evolution to last year's debacle. Appearance is all.

Every shred of clothing shows how you feel about yourself. Empty in crisp starched shirts, not caring in cotton, draping yourself in sheer shimmer. You try and capture eyes, daring them to hold you higher, momentary fix for the vacant chest. You never learned to love. You are a void. You don't exist.

A pulse of golden energy rippled down the horn and swept through my body. The ring was gone. Absorbed. Passed through my person. I felt as if a rotten piece of my lungs were torn from my body. A sensitive, band-aid ripped off absence. A tumor of black smoke evaporated before my eyes.

In my left palm I held another coin. I had it pressed against my crotch, the red beam from my erect cock embraced the metal's cold touch, slipping over it like a second skin, a receptacle to withdraw into. On the side upwards on the coin I saw an image of a demonic goat face stretching thin as it pulled down over my shaft.

She walks by, the bar freezes, and you're alone, the patrons all incidental nobodies as you take her in. The smell sifting from her hair as it brushes up against the exposed skin of her back, skin that dips down the curve of her spine, dropping into a dip above the crack of her dress.

You spin the room around, diving among the onlookers, wiping your eyes over her bust, riding the division of the plunging neckline, sharp chest bones highlighting the subtle sternum rib rifts in her cleavage. You want to throw her down and love her.

Your eyes drift higher as you lower your brow. Nose twitch, smirk, inhaled breath, prowling on top of her, pinned in your grasp, smiles stifled on her lips, hair tussled as your grip, slides up and across her flesh. Gripping, biting, rubbing your chin over her stomach.

She leaves her body, electric jolt of pleasure pumping from her womb, a trigger clicked as shivers shot to her toes, tensed in an orgasmic clutch. She comes. You leave. Your use is fulfilled. Activated another to a higher calling. You're not allowed to connect with her. Any of her.

My cock feels like dead weight, a thing of wet clay, falling apart in my grip. I panic for a moment before realizing that it doesn't matter. Let it melt away. It only caused false ego, obsessive territorial marking instrument of my destruction. There is no salvation in the phallic. Only a load of empty enlightenment.

The semen seeped into my stomach, dripping into the cracks, gooping its way through intestines. Liquid life, plasma seed paste, a short lived spaceship out of the body universe into the egg, where one would strive to become a living entity in a larger reality. Only...there is no egg.

I am a shell, meat, a gear that grinds itself free of white grease. Mechanical masturbation drawing its strength from my guts, which are all becoming slippery and sliding free from me. There's no food inside, never been much of an eater, the sickly lining always misaligning my meals.

Never was I taught balance. I do it to excess, then diminish in guilt and depression from the over-consumption. If I feed my problem, it dies, but if I starve it, it will suffer. I will suffer. I should suffer. If I deny my needs I control my body, therefore myself. I exist because I can damage myself. Spite is my sustenance, bitterness my bread.

The snout that was my belly button, my rolls crumbling away, breasts drooping into pig ears, I was dissolving. Whole slabs broke free and plopped into non-existence. A torso of a man, my arms flailing about, unsteady in my undoing. I grip my sternum, slipping digits in-between ribs, dug my nub-like fingertips inside, pressing deep into my lungs.

And I tore myself wide open. An emerald elegance erupted from my chest cavity. A shaggy chlorophyll presence puffed out and blossomed. The air, or lack thereof, dried its leaves into crispy brown chips, twinkling into the breeze of damnation in a billion flakes.

Soil that once fed a great tree, the form of its roots still inverted in its dirt mold. There is no purpose now, nothing to feed, to have bloom inside you. All that remains is dug up earth, a gaping wound, nature's broken heart. Packed down tight, perhaps growing the means to dissolve a corpse. A host to worms, maggots, bacteria. It dies in you.

So why bother? Give up the struggle. Life is dead. There remains nothing to fight for. Your purpose has been fulfilled. Propagation mechinization. Now go listen to sad tunes, have a drink of scotch, sit in your simple self-pity...and die. There is no point. That is all.

Tower of Brahma. 62h. Hell is for children (edit)

6/7/10

I pry myself from inside the egg, peel electron layers free from the warm embrace of an alternate reality. The digital dream of my older self was now over, his spirit in the hands of the Prince of Lies, finally at his mercy.

I snap back to my body, the scorched park wide open and tangible all around me. The eggs still sit stacked in an open pit, vulnerable flesh and blood bobbing inside. They lie there, cut off from fantasy, their heartbeats thundering through them as never before.

The devil gives me a vision.

Anthropological devolving, mankind disappearing before my eyes, from meta-post-post-modern (MP2M) to neanderthal, primate/lizard division, amphibious single cell organisms, entwined tails, penis to anus, testes within womb. The balance is restored.

The atom spins wild, rollercoaster centrifuge, colliding on magnetic force field pulls. A vibrational superstring wobbling in the spaces between neutrons, eleven dimensions rippling in the cosmic wind. A freshly laundered sheet, flapping on a clothesline, spring in full bloom as the sun sets.

The end.

Sixty three lives simultaneously...suddenly, cease to exist as each body within each pod ignites with hellfire, scorching the individual inside into ashes in the blink of an eye. I hear a dull screech as the internet dies. The electronic age has become extinct.

I return to my body just as the devil draws me down into his realm.

A void of ash, wind scattered remnants of entire species whipping about us. Every sinner left is gone. All traces of human anatomy has been torched, all souls converted back into bio-electricity, siphoned back out into the fourth dimension.

He scoops up a handful of cinder, remains spilling over the sides of his long slender fingers, and raises his open palm to me. I know that this is me. What I become. My death, or rather the moment just beyond. My final judgment.

And I am to be the judge.

Tower of Brahma. 62G. God's Not Home (edit)

5/31/10

"So, now you know why I've got to end it. All of it. Before it goes any further."

I was convincing. Years of running a mass(multi)media empire refined my charisma to a fine edge, capable of stabbing right into your brain like a needle.

But his success has made him weak, out of practice, having bent the remaining humans to his will, their very survival dependent on his vision.

And I'm not him.

Not yet. But I know how he thinks. I know it's not an act of altruism, a heroic deed, like he's trying to pitch it to me. This is a way out. A way not to deal with the consequences of his actions. Even at sixty I still can't own up to responsibility.

"Bullshit. It's all about you. Just tell me the truth."

What does it matter? At this point, the last scene between two living human beings, dialogue zipping between our neurons like electronic telepathy. Our chat room simulation was that of the villain's lair, complete with viewscreen, dome, and throne. A place he could think. Somewhere this desperate future version of myself could hide and scheme to save his soul.

"You know the deal then. It's what landed you here. Forced to handle me. Yourself." His shoulders went slack, he tried to let go, be himself once again, but I saw the tension cling to his muscles.

"You're the one who brought me here, to the future, to the end of all things." I fought to muster up righteous anger. Where was wrath when I needed it?

"Yes. At great expense." Turning towards the background, he produced a thumbcontrol from his pocket.

Click. The walls flickered and vanished. The secret headquarters of the man who kept the devil at bay just ceased to be. In the dark of imagined space, we stood there, not looking at each other.

"Then why do it if you knew I'd come here to stop you? You must have done this when you were me...", my voice was oddly confident, a rumble in my chest like a proud lion.

He spun around, pivot on heeled boots, a whip-crack of an arm, extended finger pointed at me, aimed directly at my brain. He held it as the spotlight popped on, then slid his shadows at me as the beam dropped. Glancing upwards in a snap, sunglasses popped on his face.

"I never succeeded when I was young...", the stabbing tip of his piercing obsidian fingertips darted into my peripheral vision.

My hand whipped up, slapping aside his shadow, spinning his body sideways, he was ready with a cocked back southpaw. I finally make eye contact, and take a good long look at who I really am, what I eventually become.

An old man with a sack full of theatrics. Playing the streetfighting action hero, past his prime, shades of supercool wannabe in every step. Afraid of people so finds a way to be alone. Afraid of not being the most important person in history.

So secure in the idea that he's Jesus, unwilling to believe himself to be Judas. Fame makes strange bedfellows with faith. Not a young man, but still a kid. Damaged goods. He tried and failed to stop the end of all that ever was. I will try and fail.

Therefore I will destroy the universe.

His fist slaps into my palm. FWAPP! I pause the scene just long enough to crack him into pieces. The crinkled bits littered the floor. The burning embers of his remains howled as the digital dirt digested him.

"See you in Hell."

Tower of Brahma. 62f. Over & Over (edit)

5/24/10

I dove deeper into the system. The web of illusion that these overgrown unborn babies all pretended was reality. They changed the channels on each other, watching private lives that were lies, wish-fulfillment imaginings of personal experience...no more than dramatic reenactments.

There was a hierarchy. A tower to climb. Each flabby, sleeping slob brought me closer to the reason this humanity holdout was able to even exist. How could it keep going? What held it together? Solar powered panels, inter-connectivity, hive mindless entertainment machine.

Why not just let go?

There were scientists, mixed among philosophers, those of us that had answers, or at least a study guide, a rule-book, that made sense of the chaotic cauldron we were birthed in. A step by step reason formula that formed structure around the formless void. They were plugged into a meditative state, pumping knowledge into recording devices, free to ponder and pontificate.

There were theologians. No actual men or women of faith, but historians and scholars, briefed on the great beyond. They too processed bits of data, translated from ancient alphabets, the musings of early mankind. The bold truths that came over told them everything that they already felt.

Fictioneers, fictionauts, falsehood mythmakers, the greatest living writers, story structure specialists, all hammering out a plot that was so precise, they believed it could puncture the essence of all dimensions. This was the armory, letters lined in rows, grouped in paragraphs, given power and purpose.

Destroy the entire thing. Everything. The reality of Earth. The concept of reality. The idea of Heaven and Hell, the Devil, and God itself: these would all die, stuck and bleeding across the higher realm. And if we were lucky, that too would burst apart and be obliterated, and beyond.

Devout disciples drilling into the ether, whipping together adventures, played out before them, for them, by them. Self-satisfying action, the dramas each sprouting a new direction, inspiring each creator to fine tune and edit. There had to be one last story to tell. A final epic where each word died as you read it, a book that evaporates upon absorption of even just one reader.

It must be at the end of this race. For infinity was merely a word for the endless unknown, a word and idea created by man, so therefore irrevocably flawed. There was a cliff, known reality was flat, an edge to carry what was left towards, to jump off of. The bliss of non-existence.

Surely that was better than suffering eternally.

Tower of Brahma. 62e. White Lie Like the Devil pt.1 (edit)

5/17/10

I got inside. Networked my self into one of the oval cocoons sitting in post-apocalyptic Prospect Park. Connected with one of the last sixty four people left alive, if you could call this living.

Naked, encased in gelatinous electrolyte rich ectoplasm, asleep and surfing the world wide web (now no more than a sad server no larger than a message board). They lived digital dreams, recharging and recycling their energies, feeding their personal re-wombs. Safe from Satan.

Or so they thought. I psychically slipped into one, a developer for the wonder material that comprised the skin of these lifesaving eggs. He was granted passage as one of the creators of their salvation. In return for his genius, he plugged in and tuned out. I patched into his video feed.

Brushing his teeth. Shower scene masturbation. Dress for success and off to work. A coffee and bagel as he passes thousands of artificial simulations of the rush hour masses. None of them real, but for the illusion of a real life, a mundane routine, boring living, 9 to 5 workweek humdrum. This is what he wanted.

I rode his signal to the next pasty person floating in goop. This one wired the globules for audio/video, was integral to the development of the interface, and was otherwise completely and utterly a drone. His feed fed him sex in a non-stop loop, penetrating and pontificating upon every manner of persona.

I skipped along a few more technicians and mechanical misanthropes. They all sought some singular simulcra of happiness. Drugs, endless streams of pixellated heroin seeping up into veins. Pain, straps of leather slapping and cracking against electrical inputs that served as skin. There was nothing but self-destruction spread among the saved.

Until I came to a poet. A garden. A gifted lad, living renaissance simplicity, dining in decadent halls, gliding along in suits with maidens at balls, lounging with feather quill pen and parchment, scribbling along for days on end. He sought to uncover the mystery of love eternal, while alone in a bubble.

Next to the poet was the artist, swiping across landscapes, thinking outside the canvass, breaking physics down and reshaping all that was around him. The cosmos came into being as he tipped his finger into the dark infinite, rasterized edges sawing into the endless monitor display. He swapped paintbrushes, hit the airbush tool, added a gradient.

I thought about what art would be with only the artist to gaze upon it, what poetry would sound like with only your own voice to speak it. There would be no audience, no outside force to create meaning or be communicated to. No one there to place a label upon your creation, no pressure to please anyone but yourself.

Most likely a Hell disguised as Heaven.

Tower of Brahma. 62 D. This is a novel. (edit)

5/10/10

Art does not exist in a vacuum. That was the last lucid thought I had running through my brain as I scrambled to put down the information that was growing in my mind.

This book is something important. I'm thinking of something, devising a plan, scoping the pattern of everything that is and ever will be. The meaning of life, if possible, but exploring every mystery between here and there.

It doesn't matter if this work matters in any way with any piece of writing that has ever been created. Whatever came before was of its time, crafted by its influences, bending an idea through a symbolic pattern of letters from something called an alphabet.

And in English no less. By an American. From an historical aspect, what could be more removed from anything ancient and physical? Far from that battle of survival, wits and strength, tempered with wisdom and experience. The language was new, the country was new, it's people so diverse genetically, a true culturally and socially enmeshed mankind the likes the Earth has never seen.

We dwelled mired in the daily occurrences of pop stars, celebrity corpses, and mad branded icons of fame. We hungered for reality, senses sharpening, pulse-rate quickening, visceral moments. Some of us wrote those down, painted them, screamed them out with notes. We made Art. Abstract thought given form brought humans out of the darkness of their being.

Stumbling towards the bright light, the pretty flame, rationalizing with logic our hearts desires. We wanted more of whatever was beyond our grasp. We were two opposing forces spun into motion, still spiraling outwards from the Big Bang. An atomic birth, a quantum fusion, energy reacting, exploding into infinity.

Everything gets bigger as things get smaller. The possibilities are greater as our souls and bodies are battered and run down, kept occupied with a weekday task that allows us with just enough life left in us to drink our cares away. Our gadgets shrink in our very hands, digital landscapes opening up in our palms. You gaze down into the app that will become your personality.

A metal/plastic all-purpose personality storage device. Digital images, handheld video, mp3 soundtrack to score our descent. We simultaneously drop into Hell as our consciousness transcends to Nirvana. Our bodies rot, our awareness expands. Those left alive live comfortably, within gelatinous sacks filled with nutrient goo, wired for Blue-Ray, Plasma HD, 3D, stereo surround-sound, Hi-Def, Bluetooth Wireless Connectivity to the Central Router.

The last bastion of humanity. The 64 blobs that lie on the horizon, sitting in bunches sometimes, swatted into a ditch of scorched earth by some wandering demonic beast. I counted them out and checked them off. The devil wanted an exact number. Who's left?

And I was the errand boy. A younger self of one of these sad sack, re-wombed, pathetic examples of the last people on earth. In one of these bobbing water balloon eggs was me at sixty years old. Having become successful enough to afford my very own Armageddon life-raft, I apparently somehow pluck my 33 year old self, me, and plop him here after God's Reckoning.

A New York City picked clean by rotted, gnarled bits of bone that these monsters call teeth. Large stabbing, piercing, eviscerating tusks of mustard colored fangs. Bits of human carnage wedged in its gums, a discernible body part popping from a back molar as it screeches the deadening shriek of eternal damnation.

This moment is your last.

But its not. The devil has a deal. Live. Walk. Experience what's left of my race. Then sign the contract, get whatever I want, do a favor for him, and eternal bliss. Wait, what's the favor? I don't remember offering up my services in any sort of post-apocalyptic janitor, sweeping torsos and limbs into bins, clearing streets of bodies.

"That's not what I want." It really wasn't a big deal.

"Alright, well I signed...", I said. "What now?"

That's when he left me in decayed Brooklyn, shattered brownstones, a ring of rubble circling Prospect Park. The temple that was the Brooklyn Museum still stood, despite savage anger delivered to its columns by all manner of misshapen beasts. I had a free pass. All but invisible to their animalistic senses, their bloodlust.

It was here, besides a lake of hellfire, I found a stash of the orbs. Giant old pantyhose containers, the oversized Easter eggs, and inside every one was a blob of white chocolate. A rich executive of a company, the designer of the orb technology, the president perhaps. But each one had something in there that I needed.

I tapped one with my foot to watch it warble like a water snake, but it held firm, not quite the kiddie pool inflatable I imagined. Flexible but secure. It looked like something found in nature from another planet or dimension, totally acceptable sitting in a giant nest as massive leathery wings flapped all about me, their shadows dipping overhead, as if to keep me on task.

From my pocket I pull out the handheld that the devil gave me. It was clunky, old school, had heft and weight to it. Dark wood paneling, vinyl grooves, and a chrome finish. The screen came to life, flickering from Apple IIe green dot matrix, to 16-bit, NTSC to PAL, VCR quality. It snapped with my brain and I began to interface.

I went inside myself first. Realizing that the lump of plastic and metal was just a formality. Something that resembles what I knew in my life, the tech of my era, to represent an idea. Connecting electronically, which triggered the psychic link. And from there, I took aim, dead center of the oval before me, and fired.

9600k baud modem squelch.

Tower of Brahma - Christ, This is Easy - 62.c (of 64) [edit]

5/3/10

Buy a drink, blend in, slip between the cracks. You're a normal human being enjoying an alcoholic beverage. At a bar where people gather to consume and forget, a place where your past and these consistently shaking hands should be forgotten.

Confidence is hard, carrying a deflated ego across the world, hefting the bloated carcass of a self along the power-lines of my life. After Jesus was resurrected he assumed a false identity, scouring the land for all that he could fix and realign.

Now it's my time. I'm here, in his name, reborn in his image, sweeping over all that I see to enlighten and brighten against all odds. I know you hate me, envy me, and it's quite alright. I really don't mind.
I have a job to do. I am carrying the weight of everything else within me. So display your discomfort, explain your dilemmas, and know that I'm listening. I may not seem like I care, but I totally do. I want us all to be happy and fulfilled.

A few drinks makes it better. A smoke outside, a beverage in hand, the night's coolness set upon us all. Abuse of alcohol makes it easier to interact. Makes our fallible human nature that much easier to consume. It's better than being revealed stark sober.

I don't judge you, even though I do, but I love you all nonetheless. I know how hard it is. I've experienced it first hand as one of you. Talk about it all like it matters, dancing among the discourse, taking in the pain and beauty of every day living.

I will swallow it all and make of it what I can, I promise you that. It's my pleasure to be of service, my disrupted youth, my flock of helpless servants to oblivion. I put words down and make this all a bit easier to consume. It may not be to your liking, but it's all I can do to take in and digest the everything that surrounds me.

I creep out of the crypt, dancing before your eyes, breathing in the discord in your discourse. I shave my beard into a fierce goatee and slide into society. You don't see me here but I know that you appreciate my efforts.

You're welcome.

Tower of Brahma - U.R.B. - Chapter 62b. (of 64) [edit]

4/26/10

The beast rose from over a knoll, all snarling and slobber, hungry for flesh, the natural malevolence shone in its eyes. I froze in my tracks, silencing my body as it trembled.

"Bitches!" he screamed across the subways tracks, followed by incoherent mumbling, punctuated by, "Whores!"

The draft down the tunnel wafted the aroma of urine and a bar floor combo alcohol stench. A train barreled down the tracks, perhaps just a station away, shoving the air currents along the platform, carrying the man towards me.

His boots shuffled across the tiles, smearing Saturday Night vomit along like a slug. Drool slipped from the corner of his mouth, snot dripped from both nostrils, and I think he shit his pants.

Passing the row of empty benches between us, he shambled up in my peripheral vision as I tried to read. The words I was running my eyes over disappeared altogether, my concentration long ago broken by his outburst. He was nearly upon me.

The train light erupted from the dark mouth of the tunnel, propelling the metal mass towards my direction, the wind whipping up, sweeping over my body, the air curling below my nostrils. My eyes closed for an extended blink and I could sense the madman's hand as it reached out for me.

Someone stepped out of nowhere and thrust their arm forward, open palming the bum, ripped off his feet like crumpled notebook paper, tossed aside without a thought. I watched as the force left the arm extending behind me, into the frail and elderly body, the sick, weak flesh that was covered beneath dirty rags, soaked in filth.

The bum mouthed the words "Burn."

Or so I thought. Just before the B train shredded and splintered his person, obliterating his skeleton, pulping his limbs, grinding his organs into paste. It splashed up the front of the train as the driver shrieked in horror and slammed the brakes.

The train screeched, metal shearing metal, twisted whine of polished friction. The wind dropped instantly as the doors 'DING'ed open. A hand appeared on my left shoulder as a face drifted in on the right. It was him. Me. The last one. Smiling.

"Come on Charles. Time to do this thing." His left arm gently pushed me onto the subway car, like a piece of meat shuffled along a conveyor belt.

"What the fuck do you want?" Bastard.

"We gotta wrap this apocalypse up."

I knew he was right. Just as I knew that the derelict that was just slaughtered didn't matter. I didn't need to ask why, or proclaim the inhumanity of it all. No one was left to care. The human race was down to bare bones.

"Stand clear of the closing doors." Automated convenience.

I dropped onto the bench. The doors slid closed. The man came into full view as he held onto the pole. It was me in my sixties, maybe after I worked out for a few years and hired a stylist. Looks like I got my teeth done too. A rune tattoo behind the ear.

Bastard. A shimmer formed around him as the train chugged onwards. The car lurched forward and the space inside began to warble. All around me became fluid. It condensed, drawing me in, sucked down the drain. We built up speed and the bubble shrunk, pulled me up onto my feet, standing before the elder Charles Crown.

I pulled back, arched away from him, wasn't there an issue with two beings of similar matter touching each other? A personal paradox that'll bash time and space apart?

He saw the look on my face and smirked. We curled up in an oval lounge space, intimate and cozy, practically sitting on top of one another. And with a faint BOOOM, we banish ourselves from the material plane.

"Where are we going?" It was the only question I had on hand.

"Beyond."

Tower of Brahma - I Saw A Mountain - 62a (of 64) [edit]

4/19/10

Valhalla. The point where two opposing forces begin to separate, water vapor eradication of eternity, one drop at a time, a shimmering sphere wall, ever expanding.

Charles Crown stands before the crack of all reality. A dividing of houses, life crumbles all about him, shifting rifts tearing itself apart.

Fuck, he sighs.

That's what it all meant. He's the one who first sees the bubble begin to burst. Nothing special, just happens to be him. No great destiny other than being first on line at the dotted line, the parting of two parallel dimensions, Strange savage Arayan Norweigan wolfgod, and myself.

The Spider sheds its skin, leaving behind a venomous grin, seeping with sinister lies. The weapon with which to kill the serpent. But first, escape.

Run for your lives boys, this chapter is at an end.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 61 - Inferno (edit)

4/12/10

I sit in the NorthWest corner of the park, just past the scorched bars of the kid's playground, but before the massive burning ember, the eternally blazing, giant tree trunk by the exit. Where homeless men battled West Village kids with their Kings, Queens, and Knights. Strategy and conquest are long lost concepts here, mere scuff-marks across a blackened chessboard.

"The portals of Darkness are open and the shadows of the dead hunt over the earth..."

More like linger and stare at the human, sunglasses and cap, cigarette and paperback in hand, as he rests his feet on the battered, melted plastic table with a chargrilled quilt upon it, a banged up typewriter, and a small stack of black and white photographs. The human takes a drag of smoke, exhales into the ashy, brimstone day, and writes this sentence in his head.

I put down the paperback, can't read on a day like today, I've a mad on for writing and I must force it out, destroy this section of time and space once and for all. The demonic forms all hustled by me, ignoring the last remnant of the Twentieth Century that isn't bound up in his very own bubble universe.

The rest of the world is floating out at sea, or in an underground bunker, tucked in a secure room of giant, gelatinous cocoons floating inside their own private, inflatible web; "in-case-of-Armaggedon" your reality becomes a flotation device. They all sleep, log-online, go about their day in a total delusion of business as usual humdrum.

But not me, I never grew up with one of them fancy realities. Seems a future version of myself brought me through time to save himself from something, and I bursted out of my little bubble, spilling out into the world. So, here I am. Selling thoughts and memories to the tourists from Hell in a Nightmare Futuristic Dystopia. Cybernetic monsters, wailing banshees giving birth, child-like creatures of disgusting evil, they all stroll by and throw their disapproving looks my way, or refuse to acknowledge my existence, and even sometimes, sometimes they run past in fear. God only knows what they think, how they see me.

Occasionally though, one will happen by, intrigued by my small setup, and ask what it is I'm doing.

"I'm selling my wares, to make a wage, so as to live another day."

This usually leaves them stumped and an easy mark, so I give them the spiel about winding up in the Inferno, rat-a-tat-tat down a paragraph or three on the back of a worn photograph, and then see their reaction. They read it there, but it doesn't register. They toss a piece of hellfire into my bucket, and go about their day. I slip on the shades, kick back in my kicks, and read another page.

They go home that night to their perch in a blown out highrise uptown, place the photo on their coffee table, devour whatever scraps of flesh they have about, and secretly think about my poem. The words jingle through oddly wired meat, stimulating electrical impulses to begin firing, forging connections never made, producing desires and longing for something pure and beautiful. Then their head explodes.

It's a cruel trick, but they're fucking demons, and they've got fangs and claws and an utter lack of respect for humans. Not that I blame them. They've just come in as the supernatural immigrants to the Promised Land, shoving aside the fat, complacent indigenous people.

The humans now live virtual lives, alone in a bubble, interactions between individuals now just projections on a screen, as interchangeable as a click on a remote. See the world however you'd like, absorb nutrients through the gel you swim in, let the skin of the bubble suck in the dying gasps of oxygen and rays of sunshine, letting you live to connect another day.

The Divine still twinkles in me as a ray of light beams down between clouds of filth, adrift in soulless skies, God's taillights as he drives off. Most pure evil beings can't even see pure goodness, so most of the time I'm safe, but the madmen can still see. Demented x-ray vision of my disguise, so they were the immediate threat.

I'd usually just knock them unconscious straight away. Letting them speak for more than a moment could be disastrous  And granted, some are more "with it" than others to be sure, but no one stays sane long standing in the path of the beasts of the apocalypse.

I live on a fourth floor walk up in Greenwich Village, just off Washington Square Park. The fourth floor I find is just tall enough that the more lazy, mindless mutants don't climb that high, and just low enough that the reapers can't spot you from their skyskraper perches.

I drag my bucket and sling the typewriter over my shoulder, leaving the table downstairs, probably be beaten up, but not worth the effort to bring it up. I toss the hellfire into the pit in the center of the room, tighten the pentagram around it, and fire it up.

I stared long and hard into the flame, the fire, fundamental force of nature, erratic molecules, essence, idea, word, sound. All self swirls upwards in a backdraft breeze. The crossroads clashed, an X branded beyond my mind, unicorn socket insert, click connect. Twist, turn.

The engine started in my skull. It rocked on the hydraulics and rumbled teetering on the tip of my spine. My circle grew, ignition of the sigil, unlocked reality cheat code transports you to the Darkness.

He lifts you up and acknowledges you, appearing as an equal so as to make you underestimate him, and take him for a man. His great joke.

The devil removes his hat and stays awhile. He's got a sound system he carries with him, tessaract tucked into his breast pocket. As he sits a plush chair appears beneath him, and the decor flickers to one of his fancy in that moment.

"Take your head out of the fire already." He clicks disapprovingly. He's tired of my games.

"Aaahhhh." I throw my head backwards, brushing back my hair, wet from the flame.

"Hey."

"What's up?" He was pretending he had something else to do.

"Let watch Faust again." I settled into his version of the room's reality. I knew he'd want to smoke, so he'd definitely have snacks appear. Probably some beer, and God willing, some Whiskey.

"You want to sign or not?" All business today I see. Well, fine, maybe it was time.

I took the devil's offer for a test drive awhile back. I didn't really love it. I kept getting it confused with the human virtual reality, and well, milling about besides demons in post-apocalyptic future Manhattan? That sounded awesome at first.

Over time, he'd pop up, offer to send me back to my reality, to give me power, fortune, glory. Meh, in a way this was a blessing. A vacation from the burden of responsibility, some time for the devil and I to just hang out, watch some movies, sometimes talk. Although I'm sure he denies it.

At some point I realized that I was that last one. The very last soul he could tempt, unable to pierce the holy coating of mankind's deliverance. All he can do now is choke out the life of the planet's ecosystem and the humans will all have to pop out of their little pods or else drown in their embryonic filth.

So we usually just chill, I dig up some of my past, hock it in the park, get enough flame to invite him over to hook my ass up on freebies. He seems all sour so I try and get him talking.

"Remember when you let me have superpowers and we shot across the planet?" It was like a boneyard obstacle course.

"And that demonic King you introduced me to...Beedazzle, when we drank ourselves stupid and wound up destroying his army? Oh, man, I tell ya..."

I let my words trail off, sensing that he wasn't in the mood. I guess I don't know what to do now. I may as well sign. I work out the angles and wonder how it could be a bad deal.

I figure he gives me enough rope to hang myself, I take it and then can't go back to how life was before. A private reality that I have ultimate control of. But the humans over the hill offered me the same thing and I refused. My every desire is taken care of.

Of course, he'll lead me down a path that rises and falls. But that's not pre-ordained, he can't be master of all time and space, he's just hedging his bets on our penchant for destiny. I look over at him and imagine a great winged beast, a concept of absolute horrific and terrible evil, squeezed into a human shape sitting across from me.

He smiles.

"Fine. Let's do it. I was getting tired of looking at your creepy-ass face."

I drew blood across a Gothic barcode, bleached into the DNA smart papyrus, and suddenly I felt better. I saw virgins defiled on altars, an all seeing eye penetrating their dignity. My back didn't hurt, I could breathe, my mind was clear. War, Famine, and Plague seeped from my pores.

I was aflame and adrift all at once. Spinning round, throwing earth into the air with reckless abandon, I was scattershot chaos shattering the darkness. I stood my ground, and lifted myself up, surging with replenished strength.

I smashed the devil's face, shattering his fragile humanity with a single blow. I think I surprised even him, for in an instant I saw that flinch, and knew he wasn't all-knowing, cause he didn't see that coming.

His reality crumbled away with his person in the vile cross-breeze of ember and ash. The flame flickered and died down. The devil has left the building, and left behind something interesting. I fished through my pockets and found the seven deadly sins.

That son-of-a-bitch. He needed one last human to carry them for him. But I think I know why he was so nice to me. He knows I'll get rid of these for him. For him and everyone else. I'll face down the evil that's so big that not even he can see it fully.

I draw the first card, see my first sin, and and face myself.

The Tower of Brahma. Sexty.5 (edit)

6/2/09

I stand inside the bubble besides my older self. He looks on as the wall inside flickers to life. We're in a fancy ballroom. Tables ornately decorated, intricate carvings lining the walls, pulled back heavy curtains revealing not a window, nor door.

"Feel free to flick it around to whatever you like." Older Charles tossed something to me.

It was an oval shaped button about the size of my thumb. The groove of it slid across the tip of my finger, the ridges whirling around the spiral of my thumbprint. It began to grow, seeping around my fingertip. I pressed down against my forefinger.

The wall flickered and suddenly I was on stage, in the middle of an empty amphitheater with 360 degree seating. Spotlights popped on at the zenith of my bubble. I threw my hand up to hide from the light and clicked again.

I was floating in space, not weightless, but the tiles beneath me did begin to slowly rotate and swoosh. A spaceship popped into position about 50 meters out. From it stepped out an alien with enormous brain throbbing out of its skull.

I clicked. Again. Heavenly clouds, the alien becoming an angel, harp and all. Click. A pirate ship, and a buccaneer boarding the ship. Click as he got closer. A desert, the devil. He stood before me. I clicked at him, while Charles stood beside him grinning.

I was sitting in a chair, a lab of minimal sleek design all around me. The bubble looked transparent and closer than before. The wall of it was just outside my reach. I extended my hand out, just brushing the skin of it with my fingertips. The devil stepped into view.

Only he wasn't the devil, nor an angel, and not an alien by any imagination. He looked like a friend. A bearded, bespectacled, much older, version of someone I knew. He looked at me with amazement, then glancing over at older Charles, who stood, smug with arms folded across his chest.

"I told you I'd do it." His smile broadened. I noticed he was outside my bubble.

"This should tell us everything we need to know. We can get you free finally. We did it!" The familiar man grew increasingly so with every gesture and mannerism.

I clicked again and we were sitting in a dive bar. I sat at the bar and a fresh pint rose from the counter. I downed it fast, following with a gin and tonic, and a whiskey on the rocks. I slid my thumb just so and a crowd of people eased into existence around me. My heartbeat rose, my lungs gripped tight, my mind raced.

Charles and his friend were still around. Patting each other on the back, ignoring me as if I were not even in the room. But I wasn't in the room, was I? I was wrapped up in some sort of inflated sleeping bag, kept sterilized and uncontaminated, so they could test me. Poke and prod while staying away.

I slid the thumb quicksilver putty back and forth. I made it harder, denser, thicker. With a flick of my finger tip the metal shot out to a point. I ran the edge across my jeans, pressing it against my thigh. Sharpened it with precision with denim friction.

I glanced sideways at the two of them there and my inner beast grew. I growled and ran the ridges of my teeth together, exposed slowly from beneath a lip sneer. My arm with the blade cocked back slightly, the tendons and muscles taking a step back and preparing for action.

I leapt forward, smashing the bubble against their own, keeping me a good five feet away, but I felt my own bubble compress, smooshing me into a bear hug. Charles and his cohort looked startled at me. I swung the knife around, slicing the air completely in half. A tear grew across the virtual reality of this dive bar chatroom.

Fiery chasms were revealed beyond my own deflating universe, a hellish landscape of craggy lavarocks, ash floating all around, whooshing into the bubble walls. A protective fluid seeps out of the bubble, the clearest of water, thick with syrupy cleanliness, spilling out like a torn backyard pool, starting small with increased pressure and speed. It evaporates as it touches the surface, transcending forms, rising as holy steam.

I hit the ground and the air doesn't seem so bad as I cough it out and suck it in. Feels like when I smoked. I watch as the final yard of the bubble is consumed in flames, Older Charles and bearded sap gasping in horror at my fate. Suckers.

"I'm not saving anyone but this Charles Crown." I thumbed myself in the chest, laughing at the absurdity of the situation.

"Where the fuck am I?"