Spin Glass

Devotion wakes me up hyperventilating out of a swirling violent nightmare again—God all my dreams are fucking violent lately being torn apart limb from limb and screeching with abject anger at a red sky and all the milky blood and pus and urea seeping out of a half-rotting body with tendons snapping help me God please God help me help help me God but I wake up—devotion wakes me up with a headache and a heartache and I pile out of bed on repeat and the floor feels like Tabi's wool and I nearly throw up and bring myself upright again with the bed for comfort. There's a thumping in the floor and the feeling of a presence passing by the bedroom door. Devotion seethes through my veins and rips across my fur and explodes out of my skin. Devotion is an intense heartbeat that I can feel like stabs in my throat. Two hundred beats per minute. Spin glass is a form of magnetism so disconnected from order that it can only be understood as forced randomness wherein individual particles have 'spin' at values which don't correspond. Like strangers. They hate each other in there. Comparison is made to glass because when quartz is melted down and reformed it is no longer crystalline. When you mold anyone or anything into a given shape from the one it was born into then every single layer of the material is wrong and unpredictable, same as where it got poured into the mold hot and steaming, just where the pieces lay, just where the pieces may. Then spin glass is actually just like silica glass because it is stable only because it refuses to change and not because of any structural stability inherent to chaos. It is called 'metastability' because it only implies stubbornness, or else an inability to imagine anything else. Isn't that what stability is in a physical sense? Isn't a bridge stable because it doesn't want to fall? Then again a knife is stable too. All the atoms are very attached to one another and hold still and refuse to change because the status quo is too powerful unless great heat is applied, and until then see the knife go in and out of a chest and reduce it from screaming to rubble. Yes: this is the problem with me. I am unable to imagine. Oh God I am forgetting something, there's a fucking hole in me, devotion is blood seeping out of a wound I can't find. Get up. GET UP. I stumble into the bathroom and switch the light on and I think this might have been somebody else's hair brush maybe Cav's and I wonder if we both slept here last night but no, he's been in a stupor the past few days, all fascinated by Tabi, of course it's Tabi, always making people trail him and treat him like a lord. No, Cav's hair brush all matted with fuzz is obviously just something he forgot. I push it to the corner of the counter and slap water from the sink all over my face and then my naked body and take deep heaving breaths and pant and now I'm dripping all across the floor.

Look at yourself. There is an angry and frantic creature in the mirror there all guilty for no reason and all useless even though he is in the happiest place in the world. Go masturbate before you leave your room you don't want to fall for him, always something I tell people when they arrive, don't fall for him too often, don't you want to be functioning? Maybe you don't. Heart attack and I lean forward and grind my teeth and yell out strangely and dry myself off with a towel hung over the shower and scamper to find clothes again.

I dress up in pastel whites and blues, and a purple blouse, and long pale stockings with garters, and that half-remembered sun hat battered by being folded in a drawer, and I stare at myself again in the mirror and how long has it been?

No answering that. No answer could satisfy. I think about what if it were a month or a year or ten years but the fact is that I've had time scooped out of myself again. And it gets me panting and shuddering with anger. Fuck you. Fuck you who did a single thing to me. I didn't deserve this. I didn't want this. What is wrong with you now? What's wrong with you? I stare at the door and brush back my fur and seat the sun hat further on my horns and exhale and it feels like there's rocks in my throat, but memory assures me that nothing is wrong with me and I'm doing just fine, rather well in fact, rather wonderfully, finally at a good place in my life, et cetera. You ever see a goat as dumb as this one. I open the door inward and step outside and don't close it after me.

His house, Tabi's house, is invulnerable now. There are no scratch marks no track marks no sun spots, and the carpet is kempt like mowed grass, all soft underfoot, all unremarkable and fuzzy. The landscape is six thousand square miles of flower farms where a plane could land and I have to keep my mind low in the troposphere to keep from drowning in cloud cover. Yet in turn in spite of the plushness of the carpet and the slickness of the wood I have come to use the word 'bunker' for this place in the woods because of how it is used to insulate its inhabitants which, as of late, have been a dozen human beings shaped half like animals hiding from the world for many a reason. My steps are heavy and I feel as if I have some kind of fury in me refusing to stay its hand. My hands are refusing to stay.

Shuddering. There are lightning bugs in my palms. I hardly have the breath to get to the end of the hallway. I smell the house before I've turned the corner.

See it now as it is with many subjects on canvas burning in firelight.

A hall, his foyer, with walls upon walls of books and sun's eyes pooling into it all like ambrosia;

and the brightness and astounding fury of it is not masking any of the detail, as sharp shadows bring it all into a sober beauty as if cast out of the cover of some great novel;

and with this my steps become light again and I bear witness to it;

a great unified hotel, where eleven people reside and the furniture is awash with flopped-over clothing and a smell of sex and exhaustion and heat and tiring compulsion;

where upon a kitchen counter a bare-bottomed man flips up on his smartphone and mugs of coffee expunge steam into a worldly atmosphere such that it is all so deeply hot and muggy;

where mixed together like a pile of fuzzy and furry limbs two men curl into their own shapes atop a sofa chair and wait for dawn but dawn has already come;

where with bodies lumped together on a plush-pillowed couch with laptops alight three men have the television on but largely have forgotten why it is here;

where one man spots me with blackened eyes tired from a night half-slept and waves with his stocky limbs all curled up on a stool beside the kitchen and his onyx feathers groomed but not all fully known;

where two mulling around at the corner nook reading standing up notice me and perk up and one of them signs "Hey! Good morning!" in sign that is perfect; all stuck running in place;

where there are no signs, no markers, no numbers, and yet the world is so much easier to understand, craggy and thorny and warm, so warm, so warm.

It is nine AM, as it always is when I wake.

It is my responsibility to be alive.

It is a fantasy that turns over unending.

Bags of luggage splay about the foyer like dissected carcasses sunning and rotting mostly gone but intact for the courtesy of an exit route. Plates and tiny bowls and coffee mugs dot the room always a day or two old and only carried the twenty steps to the kitchen on an uneven tempo. The furniture has all been thrown about every-which-way and no longer maps to beauty but to convenience. The air is oppressive and the floor a maze of clean debris, and as my eyes trail across it all, frozen in body and in pose, I see him.



You have met Tabi. The walls have gone sour and the world is a sauna surrounding him and in his worked musculature and in his matted wool I see a being who is finally as tired as he wishes to be. His limbs are lithe and his head tilted down, and his ears droop, and his gaze remains square on me. There is an expression stricken on him like a smile, but only like a smile. Divots of darkened skin hold his eyes aloft. He is naked but for two features: eyeliner applied such as to bring out a certain authority in him, applied in black and curling up his face; two tabi socks tight against his calves so as to hold up on his digitigrade legs. His pinkish penis hangs dull between his thighs and a spot of wear has applied itself to his stomach shaped like where a head might rest. He saw me long before I saw him.



I give him acknowledgment and in turn he allows me passage into the kitchen and as soon as I make that rightward turn I am followed by another man.

Jay is the other person in the house who cooks but I do not really know what drives him to do it; he has never managed to learn ASL beyond the simplest of things but he writes fast on little slips of yellow paper and allows me a response and in that way at least gives me the opportunity to talk to him. I do not know very much about him at all but he looks like a rat, or a tall rodent of some kind walking around on two legs. His hairs are kempt and gray and his eyes wizened and yet he has the demeanor of someone right out of college, aimless but on edge, trying to attend to the world. By the time we convene and he tells me good morning and I tell him good morning, most of the other men in the house have risen. They are all chattering amongst themselves they approach the spot where a marble-topped island separates the foyer from this kitchen, and they are leaving instructions for what they would like for breakfast. Routine. Jay and I split labor but we both need to know what to cook and the meal of the day today is eggs on toast.

Two men order in ASL. Gaiman and Almond are fluent enough at this point. Bacon, fried eggs, buttered toast. Fried eggs, buttered toast. "Do we have any rye bread?"

"Always," I tell Almond, and I offer him a little smile. His real name out here isn't Almond but that's how I met him so that's the name I use in my head. Gaiman's real name probably isn't Gaiman either, another online name but another good one. He resembles a crocodile or an alligator I don't know which. He is from São Paulo but at some point early in his life—as I gathered—he moved to California then eventually Colorado with a family member, and one of his sisters was Deaf so he learned Libras growing up, and so ASL wasn't as hard a transition. Really he is one of the few people who I feel is actually pretty fluent in the way that Tabi never was—fluency is what makes me feel less alone. Almond learned ASL starting here and is clever enough to be good at it fast, but not as good as Gaiman, but of course I am always rooting for Almond because I feel as if he is doing his best, always, always and with everything. New York for his whole life, mostly Brooklyn, family upstate. Wandered here after his breakup or during it, so I am told.

The other six men do not know any sign language at all, or only token efforts. One orders in ASL but poorly: Eggs, toast. I have to ask Cav how he would like his eggs and he freezes up and writes down 'over easy' and apologizes with his hands over and over. I remind him to try fingerspelling when he can't find the words and he agrees and tries to cool down his panic. Cav looks like a mule deer, ears perked up large. I will get into him later but for now that's adequate information.

Two of them—they were watching the television earlier—enter the kitchen alongside Jay and I; there's David who pulls out an apple and a banana from a bowl and some still-sour strawberries from the fridge and cuts himself up a bowl full of fruit all on his own because he never really wants what everyone else wants. He is a bat but not a fruit bat, although I suppose he's gay enough to be one, but he has the hognose of a vampire bat and does not hardly talk to another person in the house save for Tabi, always Tabi. Then sliding in behind us is Ives who gets himself a bowl of Rice Krispies and kisses Jay and makes the whole process sluggish but at least he doesn't particularly get in my way; he is a bug, maybe a beetle crossed with a praying mantis, but of course with two standing-up legs and a bunch of extra hands. The house is awash in bodily euphoria and undue affection that should somehow deplete eventually, but we are instead drowning in an endless honeymoon of hands, kisses, thank-yous. There has never been an argument in his house longer than a few words.

David is Finnish—met Tabi on a trip he described as heavenly, found the house beneath the woods—he is forty years old. Still giddy about a Quake tournament he won in 2002 though. Ives and Jay were the people who left the house right before I arrived. They are from Montréal and younger than me.

Barry who had his ass on the counter earlier asks for scrambled eggs and salmon on toast and do we have avocado that's any good? I write yes. He writes good. He thanks me with a big smile. He is large, easily distracted, he is a cat and has fuzzy fur all on end as if driven by static electricity, although behind his eyes I see a lack of understanding of me or what I am. He has rarely talked to me, usually just past me. I don't know where he's from or what he does besides fuck Tabi and scroll through videos on his phone. On occasion he makes food—lavish dinners that take four hours—but it's rare. He's chattering with everyone all at once about something I don't follow.

And in general when these men talk they talk to each other out loud and I couldn't have the slightest hope of understanding them. There are no lips to read, not really. There is nary a cursory effort to translate the conversation—what would they even say? Yes we talked about this and that and this and that and so on and you weren't there for any of it. I'll just be here in the kitchen. Far over their heads I feel Tabi's presence but can't see him behind them all in their swarm.

Then there is Kim who gets fried eggs on buttered toast and Lewis who gets the same and I reckon they're just trying to not make a fuss. Lewis has immaculate fuzzy white and purple fur and I don't even know what he's supposed to be. He was popular online and apparently talks loudly, talks romantically. Kim is a hyena or a human who looks like one and he is tall and intense and, besides that, I know practically nothing about him. Don't I know practically nothing about all these people? I know how they look naked, how they look when happy, how they look when exhausted. I know only their effect on canvas. In those fuzzy brush strokes I derive no understanding.

In all I feel that there are too many people to keep track of or care about deeply. Although I think that's an unhelpful line of reasoning, it does explain how poorly I know most of them. It isn't like I don't know how they function. I think they are worthy of painting—they have changed their bodies like I did, or specifically Tabi changed their bodies like he changed mine, all into furry shapes, all mapping to the sensory experience that has tended to bring people here—the want to be in a body that fits your wants. In that way I can appreciate the aestheticism of the house. There are men in pose at all times and they are more beautiful, more themselves, than before Tabi found them. But it is not my house anymore, not really, not my living environment, not one that I am welcome in to the degree that they are all welcome in it.

Then again I am not sure anyone is more welcome than the other. I am simply easy to ostracize. I'm cooking eggs now.

For Gaiman I add hollandaise. It's something he loves but never remembers to ask for. Almond gets some microwaveable fries—I'm not sure why he likes this brand so much but he lights up when we pick it up from the Room—and for Barry I cook his eggs a little underdone because I am guessing he's a purist who hates overcooked eggs, but then again he is rare to complain. Kim salts his eggs no matter how much I season them and Cav compliments everything about my cooking even if I mess something up. He once wrote that he actually likes burnt toast but if he's serious he should phrase it differently.

In all the process takes fifteen minutes. Jay handles the toast and those fries and I handle all the eggs and it fills my vision with steam and burning oil and butter and the scent of stupefying protein and umami and I stare into the pan and it stares back at me; two eggs two pieces of toast per order so two frying pans at once and splitting the scrambled eggs and my hand is trembling and is anyone out there?

Plate.

I serve Lewis and he goes flush and waves at me up close. Then I serve Kim and he re-salts his eggs. Then Barry with avocado, then Cav eggs over easy, then Gaiman with bacon and hollandaise, and Almond with fries, and David and Ives already served themselves, and Jay and I put together his meal last, and it's over.

I don't know what I'm looking at.

I know only their effects on canvas. Do you even remember which names correspond to which people? I've given too much. I've been given too much.

A dream with too many elements. I would call it busy but it isn't getting anything done.

Now it can be seen: a collection of animals lurking on two legs, a collection of human beings stuck and moving, a house in a stinking orgy. Two men of fur and fuzzy chitin continue to grope. I see a cat messing around with a hyena, then a crow, and Almond reciprocates, he's happy for touch, and they all have plates aboard their hands and are eating with speed and oily hands and all the hard work evaporates and it's like Jay forgets he worked on it because he doesn't savor a single bite, and Lewis cracks a joke, and Gaiman signs it to me so I smile. But my eyes are actually on somebody else.

Through all this he hovers unmoving staring back at me.

His shape reminds me of stress. Panic. His gaze reminds me that I woke up in hell and only now am I going back to that mood. I am missing something. I haven't eaten. Don't you want to eat? I don't feel hungry. Something is devouring my insides tearing away fat organs tendons bones. Look at him. Look at Tabi and see how he holds still and then suddenly he doesn't, for the first time he moves.

He floats to the entrance of the kitchen before I've realized. And he signs, "Darling, could I make you something?"

"Yeah." I lower a little and feel myself smile. "That would be nice."

He comes closer and offers his hand. I take it. "Good."



I suppose there has not been a lot of change between us after all. There are boundaries and rules and maybe aesthetic differences but the time has done little to make myself and Tabi interact in new ways. Now and then I have treated him like a god, I was very obsessed with that at one point, but now I'm tired and overwhelmed and sometimes in the tiniest voice at the bottom of an oceanic trench I whisper that I love him, I love you still, and I do not need to devote myself to him because he has nine other men to treat him like a deity. I see how they ogle him as he passes. I see how they protrude thirst. Sometimes somebody like Kim or David will just start masturbating in front of him and Tabi doesn't mind and nobody else protests and sometimes they all get flustered and there is a lot of feverish and impulsive and shameful masturbation in his house; lust overlapping joy overlapping embarrassment and sometimes Tabi simply floats in the center of the foyer and enjoys the company and don't you see his exhaustion showing through in satisfaction? The days are made of fucking, aimless sex and I-love-you and boredom staved off by orgasm and afterglow replacing sunlight and long destitute nights of cuddling in a pile. I don't know if any of these men even know each other. Not in a real way. And then again maybe they really do, maybe there is understanding, maybe the love is real. Same as maybe our love is real, Tabi and I. It is not alone but a crowded room can, at rare moments, feel intimate.

I'm sure intimacy is the real reason they stay.

A cult works its magic on a human mind via a three-pronged attack: first is a contrast to what makes your life shit at a given moment, like your family or friends or your responsibilities or the prospect of terrible uncertain hours at Seven Eleven or, of course, a tendency to self-destruct. A contrast has to be made. In his house you do not work. You do not have to contact family, although you can, but you really won't, not often at all. In his house you don't need to take care of yourself because he will do that for you. Second is an erasure of your memory of everything else. In brief moments it will come back to you because especially in my case nothing is ever really erased, just pushed back, pushed further and further back. You will forget, or maybe choose to forget, that anything else good could ever happen. You will forget that intimacy is not unique to his house and you will forget the abject happiness that you felt sometimes outside, and you will figure that this is the only way that things can be. Third is a voice. It is not always Tabi's voice. Sometimes it is your own. Guiding you forward. Insisting that there is a plan. There is a future.

I do not know that a thing will change in the next thousand years, not in Tabi or me or any of the people he has brought into his orbit, and that is why it is so beautiful and inscrutable, and that is the plan. Paintings are not allowed to die. Paintings are not allowed to change. We are meant to hang up in a museum prettier than anything; then the museum grows; more portraits of men in bliss; gallery; superstructure; tomb.



Tabi has a recipe book. No, it's just a novel. Cat is the title. I've read this book and it is a nightmare. Typical fare for the house, for its bookshelves. There is a recipe for pancakes in Cat and he is making me blueberry pancakes. It is going to take you forever to do that.

"No it's not." He grins. "The book says twenty minutes. Can you wait?"

I am leaned up against a counter and free from the sea in the foyer. "I can."

So I wait.

He looks gaunt, is the word. Like he has burned something away in himself. I still see a remarkable beauty in him that drives me to stare but I reckon he hasn't been eating well the past couple months. Maybe he has and this is just how Tabi looks when he has a house full of people. Not even full, though. Not nearly as full as it could be, but the stomach was running on fumes before. A while back he insisted that he was happy with just me, with just a few people even, but now he is completely unable to hide his satisfaction. He has a congregation. But not quite that. Or at least he wishes it weren't.

I never let him cook for me but we'll let this one slide.

"Are you gonna get grabbed after this?" I ask.

He gives me a sly look. "Obviously. Probably Cav. The others are going to do something in the soft room if you'd like to join them."

"I'll join Cav."

"I assumed as much."

For all that Tabi professes with confidence, I think he is incurious in a deep way about some things. Cooking is, and has always been, an awkward thing for him. Not that he lacks the physicality but it never strikes him to experiment. This recipe asks him to mix dry ingredients together to make a pancake mix; he does not dare to ask me if I'd rather he uses something pre-mixed, he does not realize I'd like it better if it came right out of a box. He also does not try a different proportion than what the recipe tells him. He reads this book Cat and uses it as gospel. I suppose that's alright. We both need gospel. He mixes and mixes and smiles at me and mixes and someone calls out at him and he responds and then he gets into a conversation while mixing, and then finally feels satisfied, then puts a pan on the stove to start heating it up, doesn't even start that early, and then tests the pan with water like I taught him to, and finally mixes in some fresh blueberries into the wet mix—as late as possible, I guess to ensure the freshness he would say—throws it all on the pan in two big blobby chunks and uses a spatula to separate them. Tabi I don't care if they melt together. That makes it better. Sometimes I miss eating cheap shit for breakfast. It makes Tabi happy to cook for me but the best breakfast I've ever had was a day-old Taco Bell burrito in the fridge that I heated up after a long night of sickness and ate while crying. But this is nice too. He peels the pancakes off and piles them in missionary position atop a plate and drools syrup from Best Foods on top and, once it's sat in my hands, he signs, "Enjoy, now." He signs it like a command. Fine, I'll enjoy it. I'll enjoy it right here with you. I scrounge for a fork and keep my eyes on him.

A few brief moments when it's really just him and I. We sign too quickly for even Gaiman or Almond to pick up on.

"Am I supposed to do something today?" I ask.

He considers it. "Not that you told me."

"Can you guess for me? I feel like I forgot something."

"Sure." Tabi leans back against the counter, though of course he is still floating. He takes a deep breath and really ponders. Or at least he has a good thinking face. "Did you invite anyone to get painted? Did you invite anyone to paint? Perhaps you and Gaiman were going to go on another walk?"

"No, that's tomorrow, I thought. And I painted Cav yesterday, so."

"Were you planning to send out the message again?"

And I have to pause.

I haven't thought about the message in a while.

"No, definitely not," I eventually decide to sign. "Not in a long time, you know that."

He nods. "I've been handling it lately."

I don't know what to say. He has me frozen up. I'm in the middle of a bite. "We stopped," I tell him. "After Almond. Didn't we?"

Tabi grins and puts out his arms a little. Motioning at all the others. "Clearly not from what I can see."

"We stopped."

"I don't know why we would."

"We stopped," I sign again. My fork falls onto the plate. "Tabi, we stopped. I'm right. We decided to stop. I remember that vividly. After Almond messaged us I had a nightmare that night and woke up and said we had to stop sending it out so we stopped posting it. Because I was scared he would come here and ruin his life. I remember it perfectly."

He waits for me to finish, takes a deep breath, and his tone is very straightforward. "Yes. I remember this too. But eventually you asked him to come here."

"No."

"Yes, you did. You asked him, would you come back? Your words."

"I didn't do that. You did that." I scowl at him. Fucking cooking me blueberry pancakes and lying to me, piece of shit. Piece of shit cult leader lying to me to feel like he has control. "I wouldn't tell Almond what to do. He came on his own volition. The message is volatile, that's why we stopped sending it."

Tabi's expression sinks. There is never anger in him. "I understand," he signs, "but you certainly did ask him to come here. I do not remember exactly why. But you asked that of Almond—then Gaiman—then everyone else who emailed you. Ask Almond, he'd agree."

"I would not do that in a million years."

He just frowns and shrugs.

And I feel myself welling up. "I don't want to yell," I tell him. "I'm sorry, I don't want to yell. I want to go with you and Cav. I'm just freaking out. You know I don't forget these things."

And he nods to appease me. "Of course, darling," he signs lowly. "Of course you don't. It may easily be my own faulty recollection. It happened so fast, didn't it?"

"Yeah." I tremble. "It did."

"We don't have to talk about it right now." Tabi is smiling now, smiling slightly, or maybe it is a very large grin, maybe he knows something I don't. "You can finish eating and come with Cav and I if that's what you'd like. Or paint, if you'd like some space."

"I want to go with you."

He nods.

I eat like I've got an inferno in me.

Tabi wouldn't lie to me about this. He wouldn't but I wish he would. Our boundaries dictate that Tabi will not lie to me for any reason but wouldn't it be nicer if he were to blame for this? Imagine asking Almond, in the middle of a good thing, to leave. Imagine asking him to go steal a car and walk into the woods like I did. He had that guy, that guy, what was his name? He had a life in New York and he was gay and happy and maybe he had some rough moments but one rough moment shouldn't be enough to ruin it.

But that is the problem, isn't it? If you know Tabi's house is out in the woods somewhere, then any low spot—a breakup or abuse or a depressive streak—is enough to bring you to some very dire thoughts. What if I stopped my life in its tracks and ran away to find him? What if he picked me up out of this? I would not need to do anything anymore. I would be set. It would all be fine.

If I had sent Almond a message asking him to come, then it is my fault that he is here now.

Wasting his life.

Abandoning his family.

I don't even know what he was doing before. Maybe he's doing okay now. He likes to write poetry, I've noticed, and he shows it off, and it's all imagery of faded firelight and woods overtaking campsites; maybe it is okay that Almond is here, maybe he is happy.

"Maybe Almond is happy," I sign, mulling about with a scrap of pancake saturated with syrup.

"Of course he is."

"Maybe."

Tabi laughs. "I can't always know if people are happy, but I can tell you for certain that Almond is, at least on the large scale, at least in the terms of a soul."

"How do you ever know?"

"Because he wouldn't be happier anyplace else."

I don't know what he means, and I stare back at the plate until it devours me.

I am forgetting something. And not just would you come back to his house? but something worse, something greater, something I didn't mean to forget. If I did message Almond and Gaiman and all the others then I would feel awful about it, I would do everything in my power to blast it away from my mind. In fact now I'm doing all I can to forget it once more and never bring it up with Tabi because I'm happier when I am oblivious, I'm happier when I am oblivion. No, this isn't that. I want to remember.

There's an empty chair in the house of my mind and fire is blowing out the windows.

Then I'm done with the pancakes and scrubbing the rest of the sticky syrup down the drain and washing the plate and staring down at my hands and is there blood on me anywhere? No and hardly any in my body. All strained thin with a heartbeat racing again. I leave the plate in the dishwasher and tremble and get hard because I'm crossdressing in a house with ten other people and because I'm looking at Tabi and his socks and trying to forget, blast my mind clean, all of it gone, sex and intimacy and nothing else. "Cav is on the verge of whining," he signs, grinning.

I look over. Cav, the deer-man, has an expression like he just got lucky but instead he is beckoning Tabi forward. Legs a little crossed. Belly full of breakfast and a head of dreams. He waves.

"Alright," I sign. "Lead the way."

What kind of awful person am I? Why would I do this to Almond, to Gaiman, to Cav, to David? Why any of these people? They were living fine. Or maybe fine. Maybe some savior complex rose up in me. Oh, you're helping them. Oh, his care is so good. Reason enough to ruin their lives. I wouldn't. I swear I wouldn't. I am being lied to. I wouldn't message them. I asked them to never come back and they're here so what happened? I'm walking now. Walking with Cav. He keeps looking at me funny. We're passing by everyone else already long-done with their breakfast, and Almond gives me another little look from far off, always so far off, and I don't even catch what he's asking of me but I wish I could.

We're shuffling through the halls. Cav is looking at me and then looking down. He has this habit of staring at my legs. I guess I like it. I guess it's fun. I am tugging at my stockings and he grins stupidly and we reach an unoccupied bedroom and Tabi clicks the handle down and when he shuts the door behind us we turn into animals.



Here is the situation with Cav: Cav has a foot fetish and is decently fond of socks, sort of in the way that I am madly fond of socks. This is one of the only things him and I have in common. Cav used to play hockey and used to be a programmer and is a wine enthusiast—I have nothing of interest in any of those hobbies and Cav does not care at all about painting or cooking or... whatever it is I do all day, lounge around, mope, fuck Tabi. We have that in common. A foot fetish and a tendency to fuck Tabi. It's not like I don't like Cav. When he looks at me I get some of those butterflies in the stomach that I used to when I was really lonely back in Austin, that inclination to do something quick, go, go, go, but also I think that it would be a non-starter for me to call my friendship with Cav a relationship. I think he's just fine with that too. Nobody else in the house has a foot fetish except for him and I, so it is something borne of out of convenience and it is, at times, very intimate.

There is some obscure romance in holding someone's foot. It implies that they want you to touch them there, as it is otherwise hard to do on accident. And having a fetish—and sharing it—is a profoundly vulnerable experience. I am baring my soul. I am welcoming embarrassment and welcoming scrutiny. It makes me shaky.

Cav is shaky. Cav, you're sitting with your legs out on the bed and you have plenty of support with your hands on the comforter and with Tabi putting you in his lap. You have him for support and you're so shaky. I am putting my hands around your feet where you have put on black socks and I am giving you a massage. When he was made into a mule deer on two legs, he asked for plantigrade feet with three toes on each foot. He also asked for his feet to make him aroused when they're touched like this. And since I met him that has been all I've wanted to do with him.

Just touch his soles and make him shake.

Tabi has his arms around him, has him basically hugged and made immobile, and with a little shift of his fingers he is playing with his penis. Just little touches, little taps. Cav trembles so much that his droopy ears sway, and he is panting desperate for air, his belly and chest coming up and down, up and down, and Tabi's fingers droop by his tip again and his head comes back down, and then up again, and his jaw is agape like he has something wrong with him.

Are you close enough to feel my thoughts? Yes, barely. Through him. Are you enjoying yourself down there? I can't see past your skirt. Yeah. I'm in a good mood. I feel like I'm forgetting something. Well, don't trouble yourself when you're busy like this. Alright. Cav swirls his head around in a daze and exhales until he's empty of breath, and squeezes his hips together to try to push down on his balls; he jitters and extends his toes, now, and I have both my hands around his soles as joysticks to his soul. I am posed like I am about to pounce on him, on my knees, divots in the sheets where my legs and elbows support me, skirt hanging down and hiding me but I am erect and I am desperate and I don't want to touch myself because I won't be able to stop myself. Cav's socks are nylon. I like nylon. "I like nylon," I sign to him, awash in the moment, huffing, maw open and I am teething and drooling and Cav doesn't know what I signed but he didn't see anyway and my hand goes back to his left foot. He didn't see that, you know. I like nylon. I love nylon. I could kiss nylon. Do it, then. He likes it. Do it now, darling, don't make him wait. He knows it's coming. I feel something crack in my brain and I sink down further until my head reaches the comforter and a moan escapes me, and I want to masturbate so damn bad, and instead I crawl my face into Cav's foot upright and bury it in the warmth of his sole. And because Cav knows what I like he curls his toes into my face and scrunches up on me and squeezes me and crushes my forehead and my horns bump up against his big toe. This is pathetic. I feel pathetic. I am grunting and groaning aimlessly into a man's foot. I hardly know this man. That's why I like this. I don't have to justify myself. I am nobody to Cav. I am nobody at all and my hand goes down and brushes aside my skirt and when I reach my length it is sopping wet with precum and has escaped my panties and, fuck, fuck, fuck me I want to jerk off, but even just one touch starts getting me jittery. Darling he wants something else. He wants your feet on his groin, do you understand? Yeah. Nylon. Clear your head. You're going to be here a while.

Where nylon expresses slickness and a little coarseness, silk is only soft. It feels the best to wear and according to Cav it feels the best on one's crotch although I like all socks quite well because, again, a fetish corrupts the brain's reasoning centers. These stockings of mine are silk. I have to roll over and crawl into position, inching along with my skirt up and my length throbbing, I feel like the most awkward person in the world, but finally with my feet bare but for silk I have put myself up on Cav and use his penis as a footrest. I lay on my rear and lean back. His legs go to either side of me; he places his feet in my hands and begs me in a moment of clarity to keep going. "Keep going," he signs. That's one of the only signs he knows by heart. He knows 'keep going' and 'please' and 'more' and 'stop' and 'I love you' and it makes sense given what I know that that's all he'll ever bother learning. I'm sorry, Cav. Do I know you? Do I know you, really? Do I know you deep down? Who do you remind me of? I grip his feet and look at the sight of him curling his toes into my hands, and I press his length into his stomach, and it feels perfect. I don't know you. I don't know who you are. He starts curling up against Tabi in completely astonished delight, that face contorting into all sorts of expressions, as I grip him by his soles; he is leaking now against my socks, he is completely powerless against me. I had my body designed in a specific way when I got here too, Cav. Maybe subconsciously. Maybe deep down I wanted to be a goat but I wanted my toes to move independently. It's all fantasy. None of it makes sense. I am making him screech when I squeeze his tip between my soles and eventually he wails and taps out and tries to take a breath and like ten earthquakes he is nothing in my hands and in my feet until finally he is something, he is something tangible, he has thrown himself forward with desperation into my weight into my body and is on top of me weighing as much as a planet and he is kissing me with such fury that it feels like I'm in love but I'm not, but it feels close enough, and I grunt, and I'm smothered.

Sometimes you are overwhelmed and just feel like cuddling. It does not always make sense to fuck in ways that make sense.

God and how this dissolves now, it completely dissolves, no more boundaries no more plans, we both want something but can't decide and Tabi looms over us and we roll into each other's weight and he wants to play with my penis but he's too jittery to keep his attention for long, and we go upright, and I can't breathe through all the kissing, and here is Tabi now, this force of nature into a collapsing building, and he holds me close and holds Cav close and I kiss someone's chest and I am completely lost. I sink over someone and a leg goes over my neck and Tabi's socked feet compress me into the mattress and I start groaning and begging verbally, then signing, then Cav is trying to wrap himself all around my legs; he has been staring at me all morning waiting, waiting, waiting, can I kiss your stockings please. Like we are primordial now we crawl along the bed and I kiss Tabi on the groin and he finds himself hard and chokes me with socked feet and I start begging again please choke me please choke me. Catch your breath darling. Breathe. I am without recourse. Cav is above me now. Leaking pre on my back. Bedlam.

At some point the exhaustion sets in and I am laid on my back throbbing hard and panting for air. Panting. Hah. Hah. Hah. Let me breathe a second. Tabi is up above me and to my left—hello—and he rests his feet on my chest and stomach, his soles pressing into my fur, and it feels like enough to suffocate me. "I'm suffocating," I sign lazily. And below me is Cav. He is eating my toes. Not eating them. Just gnawing on them without his teeth. Soft tongue against silk stockings and his ass up in the air and his little deer tail wagging with no control in it.

My hand goes down to my shaft and I am sopping wet with pre. Skirt is sticky. Do you want to get closer now, darling? Do you want to finish? Cav wants to finish. He is masturbating down there. I look down at him and he is sucking on my foot and his tail is wagging and his shoulder sways back and forth in a dazed masturbation. And my jaw is agape in a hypnotic swill and I am something devoured by a beast. Just my nervous system remains. Cav looks like someone familiar. I look like someone familiar. I am missing a part. Can you give me a little footjob? Oh, of course! Can I help you over there too? I look over and Tabi is hard and how can he just sit there watching? I'm doing very well on my own. I'm always doing well. I want to please you. Devotion is pathetic when it's in me but I can't make it leave. I want to please you. Then be happy for me. Be happy and you will have done precisely as I wish.

Tabi puts his foot on my thigh and his socked toes between my base, and grips me and waggles me around. And Cav starts kissing me faster. I think he's close. I think I'm close. Who is this man below me? Who is he? I'm going to forget you, Cav. I'm going to forget you forever.

Keep jerking. I want you to finish on my socks, honey.

Honey is so sweet.

Honey is sickly-sweet. Where have I heard that before?

Where am I falling? Down a deep dark that envelops me wholly. My breath is going steady again. My hand is finding a rhythm. Tell Cav I'm happy. Tell Cav I love you both. I love this. I'm happy. I'm happy. My head sinks back and all I can feel is soft cloth soft toes masturbation and I love you I love you I love you. I love you. I sink back. Honey is so sickly sweet. I'm close. I'm close—I'm close, put me over, please. Please. Tabi stuffs his right foot into my chest harder until I feel my lungs collapse and explode and I finish.

I empty out like I've been stabbed. My fingers go spindly and I shake and whimper in orgasm that weakens me to the point of paralysis. Good. Good. I'm dribbling cum down my length and it pools up on Tabi's foot and I melt into static on the bed. And Cav won't give up. He won't stop kissing. When I'm drowning in the orgasm and good feeling floods my brain, all the walls cracking open, he makes his move and makes it hurt. Brings my right leg up into the air while I'm still hypersensitive and I wail and cry out but Cav is humping me, the small of my thigh with his dick rubbing into the silk of my stocking. He is kissing my sole, he is begging, he is acting like an unleashed animal. I wail and wail but he doesn't stop.

He's enjoying himself, honey.

Honey is so sweet.

Honey is sickly-sweet. What the fuck am I doing right now? Who is humping me?

Cav hangs his head around my calf and he looks like he's dissociating. And he humps a bit more and finishes. And squirms around on his knees. Warm sensation and my stocking gets sopping wet. I'm trying to shake him off because it actually aches the way he has my leg but he doesn't care and he holds on and I drool and my head falls back and I stare at the ceiling. He keeps humping. His length spewing lines weakly into the small of my knee. And he keeps doing this. And Tabi doesn't even change his expression at all. I'm starting to zone out and feel like I've done something wrong and then my leg falls to the bed limp and my head goes slack and I fall into a concussed daze.

Cav is still wrapped around my lower end. His forehead full of fuzzy hairs scrunches into my thigh and he seems an unthinking thing. And after Tabi has drained me a while with his foot shaky from holding it up, he pulls back, he goes criss-cross, and just stares at the two of us.

"Good," he signs, so quiet, so satisfied, with a grin striking him. He starts to melt into the background and I am not breathing okay. I am not good. "Good."

I am forgetting something.

I'm forgetting myself. Losing all the parts of me. Losing anything that made me myself. I'm sure in a spat of weakness I would cast away my Deafness and become just like the rest of the completely faceless faces in this house. I mean it when I feel that I've forgotten who Cav is. He is as sweet-faced and oblivious as everyone else. As stupid. As pitiable. He is barely able to muster the energy to keep humping my leg through a long-trailing orgasm but he keeps doing it. It could easily be Almond. It could easily be David, I have had several nights with David, almost entirely noncommunicative, aimless joyful blind sex of nothingness. I don't know who you are. I don't know who I am. I am beginning to be an appendage of something else and I am forgetting something. It's fine, darling, if it's something you're forgetting then you'll remember it again soon. You have a brilliant mind in you and nothing leaves you. Nothing leaves you for long. It's fine. I am forgetting something. My heart is pounding do you want some water? I'll get Cav some water, do you want some water, honey? I am forgetting something. Honey is sickly-sweet.

Are you in there? Are you just resting? He hovers over me with a pleasant expression. His wool is matted and white and shimmering in the heat of the lamplight. Tabi is all I can focus on. He starts to sway. Would you like some water?

And then a little thing approaches me in the dark.

Like a rat scurrying between shadows.

It is an old voice I have had for a while called memory.

Memory tells me you forgot all about Euclid.

Haven't you noticed?

Not just you. You forgot about Euclid and so did Tabi. Tabi forgot about Euclid and so did every single person in this house. Then the walls shuddered and the floors gave way and the world ached and a screaming screeching wailing little Euclid fell through and stopped existing and everyone stopped caring at all. There is no trace of him. There are no footsteps. This house is invulnerable.

You forgot about him and he's gone.

He's gone.

He's gone.

For a moment there on my back I am woozy and then all the blood has rushed to my extremities in uneven pulse; I find myself upright and swaying on my ass like I've just been electrocuted by some foul machine and then I have fallen off the bed and onto the floor and Tabi tries to catch me in a carry but his arms are too weak for my sudden weight and I thunk onto the furry carpet like a stone. Concussed again or feeling like it. Euclid. Euclid. The hundredth-and-first tree. He was me. He was me the day before I left this house, and he got his limbs torn off and his face removed, but then Tabi felt so very awful that he fixed him up and put him in the house and then Tabi had two of us, two of us, but I was the worse one, the shittier one, the one who fucked up, and now Euclid is gone I am wailing I am crying what happened what happened what happened?! I am screaming now. My voice is porcelain shattered by a hammer. Cav is peering out at me from the bed and Tabi has floated by my side.

What do you mean what happened? "Can you sign? Are your words intact?"

"Euclid," I spell. Too fast for him to read but Tabi never reads my signs anyway.

"Yes?"

"I forgot. I forgot. Where is he?"

"I don't parse what you mean, darling. I'm sorry."

"Euclid."

"You."

"Euclid."

"You?"

"The hundredth-and-first tree."

And he gives me a little look that indicates no understanding of anything at all. A great and serious pain erupts in my chest and it weighs me down further into the carpet. Quickly I am awash in tears. I don't know what's happening. I lost him. I lost somebody. He's gone in the way that Lone Star Lanes is gone. He's gone in the way that he was never here. Just the hundredth-and-first tree. Irrelevant. And my limbs contort and toes and fingers go into the carpet and I yelp out and I see in Cav a sort of shock like he knows what's going on, but in Tabi I see nothing, in Tabi I see nothing. I have never seen anything past his eyes. A machine turning unending without oil. His gaunt body lowers by me and tries to hold me, but I am not taking it, and so I fall until he has his arms in the open air weak and tired. "What is hurting you so much, my love? What's wrong? I need to understand. I need to understand."

"He fell through the world," I wail.

"Oh my God," he signs, and all goes deathly still in the house at once

and the lights dim

and his eyes require my

full attention

lost in it but finally there is some inkling

of him

in him

all gone

all worthless and tireless

a machine turning

spinning

behind

glass



I am forced to take stock of the damages. I am forced to ask all the empty-eyed souls in the soft room to stop their activities and gather round and I have to ask them a simple question on a slip of paper and they have similar responses. All of them flatly useless against this.

Almond and Gaiman sign that they have never known another goat like me to live here. Gaiman expresses apologies; Almond looks scared. I think they both know what this means.

Cav has nothing. He has never met Euclid. Aren't you Euclid? "I've never used that name with any of you." But Tabi has.

Ives and Jay are still only half-clothed and clutching one another but they tell me that they don't know what I mean. Lewis puts a hand on my shoulder and looks deep into me and I think this poor stupid fucking idiot is crushing on me. Not right now. Please. He doesn't know a second me, either. David, Barry, Kim? Not even a chance they do. Some days I hardly think they know a first me.

So there is no Euclid in the house and no recollection of such a thing. I am unsure how he even came back to me given how much squeezing it took for a place like Lone Star Lanes to return.

There is no Euclid and there was, in effect, never any Euclid. Of course causality fails me here, utterly, completely. Because his effects can be felt. He must exist in some form if my memory has him. But otherwise my words are bows and arrows against lightning. He is nothingness. He is an idea, and a gone one.

Euclid.

Look at these men. Look at these people. How am I supposed to see them as they are, and not as I feel they are? Certainly they all appear empathetic and surprised; nothing betrays this demeanor. And yet I know, or certainly I think I know, that they are desperate to get back to the soft room. Devotion is lobotomy. The soft room is a recent addition made out of artificial fluff and it is an orgasmic house of crawling on each other in a wet and gay mania. It is where they want to be. But I am making that up. I am, like Tabi, assuming so drastically for them.

Maybe they do care. I just can't see it.

Of course when I do explain more of what is going on, I am reminded of the fact that these men are overwhelmingly quite clever and familiar with the source material. One by one they understand and come to the same conclusion as me, the one that feels so obvious as to be screaming in a Cochlear. Euclid has fallen through the world sort of like Tabi always said he, himself, might, or implied he might, but to Euclid this phenomenon has come true—or at least most likely it has come true, why else would he go forgotten by everyone like this?—and so there is only one place where he has ended up and the solution really shouldn't be that terrible, should it? He must have fallen into the Room below the house. Just go and get him. Right?

"No," Tabi tells us. "There are a lot of places down there, places walked by ghosts or staffed by shadows, or which cast the impression of people, but nobody is there. I know it. I am always aware of what falls and comes to me."

So maybe it has not come to you yet. Maybe he has not come to you yet, says Almond.

"Yet is a strange word to use. I don't know how long these things take. The concept of 'taking time' or 'travel' don't really work. I would be lying to say anything for sure."

And I am sunken against a footrest, an ottoman, on my knees looking like a beached fish, my jaw half open, my breath heavy, what do I do? What do I do?

Nothing. You don't do anything. On a day-to-day basis you are practically invisible.

Euclid.

Tabi will proceed to ask me some more questions about Euclid and falling through the world but for a little while I am entirely without input or output, and I simply remain, I freeze, I pause for ten minutes until the most of them have seen my sorry state, offered an apology, and then left without letting me catch them. And Tabi, too, gives me some space. And then the room is empty.

I don't want to be responsible for this.

Or anything.

I don't want to be responsible for Max's car being left by the side of the road. I don't want it to have happened but most of all I don't want to have it on me forever. I don't want to be responsible for anything. I want nobody to rely on me. Or worry about me. I want to be like Euclid.

For a long time now I have stopped wanting to be loved, and I have just wanted to love.

My heart is wracked with some immovable pain, and I fall forward onto the ottoman, and drift into a brief sleep.



Nothing tangible wakes me up.

Maybe an errant heartbeat or a bad dream. I don't remember.

The living room is a disarray of melted-together visions, all still hot with human presence but empty, except for one corner, where a sofa chair lay in ambush, embedded between bookshelf-laden walls, plying a small table, the most isolated section of this entire room all obscure and invisible. In this corner Almond sits half-sunken into the chair writing on notebook paper and he sees me when I come upright, and I see him when he drops what he's doing and stares back.

The room feels cloudy and I am swept through a weep of delirium, dehydration. Body slipping into itself from nausea. A chill runs down my throat and my heart feels like sandpaper, and Almond just stares back at me. His feathers are kempt perfect and his eyes impossible to interrogate, or maybe the opposite is true—maybe it is impossible to ignore the emotion pouring out of him, his empathy, his fear, this fear stirring right now as he looks at me and sees the sickly person I am now. It strikes me not in his eyes but in his pause. He is always looking at me from afar and shooting some message, something, something, but I can't make it out, I can only guess. I have done enough guessing. I spent a long time guessing on the subject of Euclid and it will do me no good to presume.

So I swallow what feels like bile and stand up and walk to him looking probably like shit but I have never known him to judge.

"Hey," is how I start.

And he lights up, and his cheeks show the barest of a smile that a crow's body can. "Hi again," Almond signs.

"You aren't with the others?"

He flashes me a look. "Got too freaked out to feel horny."

And I flash him a look. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry, man. Please." He enunciates please, and then again, weaker, like an aftershock. He has a tendency to do that. The way he claps his beak, I think he often repeats himself as he signs, under his breath, with his hands.

"Okay, well." I scratch at a matted bit of fur on my body. "Sorry in general. I'm worried about you, now. And me. And Tabi—er, Genuine. You get it, right? You get it."

Almond nods firmly, like he's knocking a tentpole in the ground with his head. "He's been talking about people falling through the world the whole time I've known him—or at least implying it. I didn't buy it. Did you buy it?"

"Yeah."

"But you can see how I didn't."

"Absolutely." I feel myself sinking a little. I don't think it's a good thing, how earnestly I believed Tabi and still believe him about all this, the mythology of this place, the house which is in every spot of the woods. I'm not proud of it. "Did I say anything about who Euclid even was?"

He nods. "Somewhat."

"Tabi made him," I sign, aimless, pointless. "I—I don't even know what to say past that. He was keeping me in the Room above the house, many of me, every night. I knew Tabi wouldn't make this up."

And again Almond nods, a dipper-bird with concern past his blank expression, or at least I hope it is concern. I hope somebody is watching out for me. "I know. You told me all about that online."

"And you still came back."

"Uh-huh."

"Why did I lure you back?"

He pauses and digests this. "That is a very strong word to use," he signs. "Lure, right?" He repeats my sign, laborious, practiced. I'm surprised he knows it. Maybe from context clues. And I don't know why I use that word.

No, I know why.

I am setting traps in the woods for animals to fall in.

I put out bait.

I took them live.

I didn't do that. I wouldn't do that. I am not so terrible as to do that. Please.

"Did I tell you to come here even though you had good reason to leave, Almond?"

"You didn't lure me back," he signs. "If you did, if that's how you see it, I can't tell you why you did it."

"I was lonely," I tell him.

"Yeah, I know."

"It was stupid. It was awful and selfish and I'm sorry. You should get out of here—you of all people do not deserve this fucking treatment. What happened to that guy in New York?"

Almond blinks. "That guy in New York? Jackson?" I nod quick like I am without language again. "We broke up. Please slow down."

"Okay."

I slow down to a halt.

Almond stares at me.

"I love Genuine," he signs, slow, methodical, and straightforward. "It didn't work out the first time, you know? It also wasn't going to work out this time, but he kept working at it. That night last year in that ballroom he found—when he proposed to me. I still think about it." Almond offers me a muted and yet entirely chipper expression. "I have never gotten to tell you how much I worry about you. You take responsibility for everything, but—" He winces as he prepares to hit me. "—you don't really change or remember anything. You hardly remember when we talk, it feels like. That's just how it feels. I want to be your friend again."

"I don't know how long it's been," I sign.

"A while."

In general. I don't know how long it's been.

I don't want to check. I've never wanted to check. It is a wound that only exists when I look at it. How many years has he scooped out of me? How many years was I alright with losing?

Scouring Almond's face for answers is obviously futile. These bodies don't age. Or they do and we never get a chance. "You really want to talk about all this right now?" he asks me.

"It's been haunting me, yeah."

He pauses. He's collected his thought like weapons. "Yes, you did message me asking to come back to the house. Or Genuine did, pretending to be you. But I don't want you martyring over it. Things are as they are."

My jaw is threatening to go agape and I am going to break down again if I let myself process that statement. Okay, then process it, you fucking moron. He is asking you not to martyr over it. He is telling you to just move on. That's the easy route. Don't take responsibility for anything and just carry on.

"I don't want to hurt anyone else in my life," I sign. "I don't think calling people here was a good decision. So I won't do it. Anymore."

"Maybe someone else will, then." He laughs at that but his expression is humorless. It is not a joke and it isn't funny and maybe Almond of all people gets it. "You're allowed to feel bad about it," he elaborates. "But I'm the wrong person to ask for forgiveness, because I turned out okay."

"You're sure?"

And Almond looks me in the eyes and through his material gestures I am unable to discern absolutely no truth, because we are all aberrant planets floating through endless void and our inner worlds are completely alien to one another. I only have the shadows cast by his hands. He has only words, casual, repeated, like mantras against wind. "You should know me by now, man. I'll fuck off if things get bad."



Will you?



What does it matter.



What's happening here is an overflowing sea of aimless, consequenceless emotions, all contained within this house, all contained within these woods, a placeless place, a fountain of love that cannot actually be resisted. You cannot love Tabi but you must be loved by him. You cannot rest. You cannot recuperate. The assault on your brain—your boundaries—your self will be so overwhelming that it will make you into a doll, an automaton, more than you already were. You will wake up one day and Euclid will be gone and who is this in his place.

What does it matter.



I have a headache worse than before when I leave Almond there and then. I bring myself back to the center of the foyer with him just there staring but I can't bear the thought of sleeping any longer and Euclid fell through the world and, most of all, it is difficult for anybody to even bear to care that that happened.

Did you ever read Where The Wild Things Are? The title is referring to people, little kids, all wild-eyed and immature and angry, but I have grown up and I feel no less frustrating to deal with. I look over at the adjoining hallway furthest from Almond and retrace the steps in my mind. I know how to reach the soft room. I know how to be felt again. I know how to continue to dissipate. For years. If it wasn't this fate it would be death in the Room above the house.

I could be here for the rest of my life.

How long have I been here?

The heat from the soft room is cacophonous and catastrophic, it could kill a man, it has killed men. I am thinking of a rat in a boiler. Turning unending. The water is hot and swirling and melting the fur off of the bones. Then I turn to the opposite hallway and then back and all routes lead further in, and I step through the arch, and I walk along the steps in the carpet, which still give no indication of human presence, and at times my gaze goes back up to the gnarled tangled mess above me—polished oak that only feels like branches—and by the time I come to, I have reached the entrance to his house again, and I press on the door and try to pry it open, and I can't open it, and it is too heavy for me, and I falter, and how long has it been? My muscles fail and I sink into the floor and weep aimlessly. I can't go. I can't go. It is not that I am unwilling but I have become physically unable. It isn't that I won't go anymore. It is that I am made of the wrong parts to leave.

I have become so thin.

Half.



I do not expect anyone to find me but especially I do not expect it to be Almond. But he does, and he is here, and a certain level of understanding in him shows through once more, because he asks me:

"Do you need a ride somewhere?"

And while I am unable to articulate precisely where I would like to go, I tell him that I need to go.



For reasons unclear we retrieve some things from the basement. A lot of old things. I used to have camping equipment that now resides in a cardboard box beneath a piece of maple supports and Almond has warmer clothes—right, it's cold out—he has a puffy green jacket from a defunct company which he throws over me and my blouse, and he says the sun hat will work fine but it doesn't look right for the season. He, himself, puts on various wooly things like an extra sweater and a beanie and gloves that Tabi sewed him, and a big backpack to carry stuff, but it's empty now, because we are taking his car, and he does not particularly know where we're going either but he insists that, yes, there is somewhere we need to get to. And also in the basement is a collection of old things that used to belong to somebody with my name, but I have already told you about the bulk of that. But I am back at that pile of old things staring at it and wondering what use any of it is to anyone. Are we going to camp out there? Almond would like to know if we're actually planning on camping or we're just traveling. I need your help with these boxes. There's at least one tent under there. I think I've lost some muscle mass. Almond takes my hand in his. I feel like crying again. He says, yeah. You look gaunt. Gaunt is the word. "Are we coming back?" he asks. I tell him, yeah. I think we're always coming back. But first I would like to go out there because there is a spot in the woods where we need to go. It's in Michigan. Or, no, it's in Jersey. No. It could easily be in Texas. It is somewhere that trees grow and animals live. When we walk outside where the hell are we going to end up. "So a tent would be helpful," says Almond. He helps me lift some boxes and we fail to keep it steady and a pile of school papers splatter across the floor like blood and I am tempted to scrounge it all up again, all the hard-won essays and math diagrams from third grade with little sketches of dogs and birds and goats on all the margins, but in reality it is from so long ago that it no longer matters. It does not belong to me. It belongs to the floor. The tent has a hell of a footprint in the bottommost box and by the time Almond and I retrieve it, there are bits and baubles all over the floor, and gifts, and an old wallet, a broken watch, a book or two. A textbook. I don't know why I brought any of this. Maybe it just ended up here. Rooms like to collect clutter. People don't do it on purpose so who else is to blame?

A tent and a case of water bottles from upstairs and various snack bars and a whole plastic container of cashews and two packages of beef jerky and a soda that Almond's in the mood for and I wrap up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for myself. How many days are we going to be out and about? I guess my body parts are just excited to feel like we're going somewhere different. I can't stop thinking about visits out to the lake with Max. Maybe they were not essential. Could have fallen through the world. But I liked them well enough.

My neck is starting to ache for some reason, but I am still excited when we reach the door lugging all this with us, and with Almond's old car keys in his left hand, hanging loose, and at that point we find Tabi by the entrance.

He is floating six inches off the floor and naked and blank-faced and he has his hands open-palmed like he is confused.

"Are you two leaving?"

I give him a little, reassuring smile, so that he does not implode. "Just a few days."

Tabi smiles back, of course. "Oh, good. You could certainly use some air."

He looks gaunt, is the word. Like he has been starved and battered and beaten. Like he has given all he has. He is out of himself. This is what you want, isn't it? It is always what you want. And I am looking at him and Almond seems eager to go, but I am eager to have Tabi leave my presence, and I just look back at him, and you know my thoughts, don't you? You are able to know what I know. You are always invading. There is no secrecy that you are not a part of, that you did not orchestrate. So I want to tell you something. Or maybe it is just for me, because you give no indication that you understand.

You told me you would always think of me, but you forgot about Euclid. So what was any of that worth.

You were the last thing he had. I failed him and so did you.

You are a very sad person whose orbit I am unable to escape. I am made of the wrong parts.

You have taken my me from me.

I am out of myself.

He floats there another moment and Almond tells him something out loud and, with the sense somehow that he is intruding, he floats back, back, back and away, and turns face, and retreats to the soft room where he may be worshiped once again. His form is sticks and fur all glued together and his slender digitigrade legs and his socks and his dizzying height catch my eye but then it's gone, and he's gone, and tension wells up in my chest as soon as it leaves the back of my neck reeling. My breath nearly gives out. Going to fall again. And Almond retrieves me by the arm, and holds me up.

"Where are we going exactly?"

And I finally articulate it. "I have a spot near where I used to live," I sign. "I'll know it when I see it."

He hands me a faint bit of levity. "We'd need to get gas to get all the way to Michigan," he signs.

"What do you mean?"

"I parked my car in front of the house, but that was west of Albany," he muses. "New York. Bit of a drive."

"Well," I sign, "let's see where we get dumped out."

Again I try the interior door with my own hands and although I am reinvigorated with some faint sense of purpose, it is simply too heavy. I try again, and again, and then Almond helps, and eventually it gives, like it always does. And we are within this entrance area—this little, cold room which I have not visited in some time, where two coat-racks are wearing somebody else's clothes and there are three pairs of running shoes that don't fit animal bodies, and are tremendously old at this point. They could have belonged to anyone and don't belong to anyone now. And ahead of us is a much lighter doorway whose only purpose is to keep the rain out. Inviting to all but nature. And although it weighs less it feels as if it holds back a lot more.

I am the first one to open the door and, as it swings out emptily into a semi-damp cold morning air, where frost attacks every inch of every bit of shrubbery, I instantly know where I am. I've thought about this a lot. South of Manistee, you turn east off the thirty-one onto Hoague Road, this is the easiest way towards our location—you head east away from Lake Michigan, deeper into the semi-rural that falsifies its status as woods, eastward past people's gargantuan backyards which constitute acres instead of square feet, and you drive around the much smaller Hoags Lake, north, then east again, east until the woods consume you, and finally some patch of road will feel familiar, like you are approaching a place you used to live, and

I'm sorry. Instructions come too easy and I promised I wouldn't give anyone directions like this. Regardless that is where we are again, the maples and beeches all frozen and sodden and dead border a front yard overtaken by a sea of weeds, an endless patch of relentless deadfall turned into livefall, so thick that a path no longer even exists. It has fallen through the world in a more literal sense but I can still just faintly remember when it was intact some years ago, all trimmed and kempt like the prettiest wool of the most beautiful man. Nobody has seen it in a while.

And, of course, Almond's car is not here.

His car is still in New York, it's at least one tremendous road trip away. We are presently in upstate Michigan and we need to go a ways south of Grand Rapids. I don't think my legs could take me a fifth of that distance. I am all sticks.

"Okay," he signs, after a pause to think it all through. He has, by now, noticed the predicament. "Figures. Can I try?"

"Try what."

"I can try opening the door instead. Try looking away and... not thinking about Michigan."

And I give him the most meager smile, but it's an earnest one. "Magic and the occult," I sign.

"Well, maybe."

So we back up off the porch and shut the door, and stupidly—just in the way that you might try thwacking a flashlight to make it work, the same kind of aimless, kinetic hope—we wait a few seconds, we close our eyes, or at least I close my eyes, and then I think about somewhere besides Michigan, anywhere else, I am thinking about a shore on a countryless beach, and then Almond opens the door and it isn't Michigan anymore.

Is this where he found the house? The day is overcast here, foggy and shockingly chill against my face, and I would have to guess it is New York, now. A patch of woods off a side road of a side road—probably a path of nonsense Almond took here both times. The yard is semi-intact, broken up by fallen branches and a cascade of maple leaves, but it is still definitely winter, and a mish-mash of old snow collects in the corners around collapsed wood. It tastes like bark and smells like a creek running through gravel. There are some features of the front of the house that appear the same, like the porch, but it is not the same. It is not made of the same stuff. The scratches and divots from birds or air or water are different. The house is, by all appearances, different. A duplicate. Superposition.

Though I suppose that hasn't stopped it from being real.

There is not a driveway in front of the house but there is a spot in the corroded fence wide enough to fit a vehicle and one is, in fact, sitting right here, an old Nissan Versa half-embedded in loam, coated in muck and branches and leaves at least a year old and probably more. And Almond is holding his keys in one hand, almost slack in the jaw. Then he stuffs the keys in his pocket again, but only to get his hands free, and with an excitement that's almost childlike, he turns to me and signs, "that was very cool."

"So is it whoever opens the door?"

We go back and try, and after a few minutes taking turns swinging open the entrance, we confirm my guess. When we both take hold of the handle at the same time it seems random, but we decide it's picking whoever puts their hand on it first, and we're never quite simultaneous. The thought comes up to ask someone else to join and try the door, to see what happens, to see if it works for them, too. The conversation stops for a second, and then Almond glances off, and signs offhandedly that Gaiman might like to try, or maybe Cav. And then another sort of invisible entity hangs between us and I think about Euclid again, and that is what this is about, and it is this horrifying sort of gnawing sensation that I am fucking up, always completely fucking up, wasting time, losing things, losing memories, losing Euclid, all in this mess of other men and other possibilities and Tabi, always Tabi again, this all-encompassing black hole of thoughts and emotions and I think it would be best if we started driving.

It is silly. We could probably make it to Grand Rapids some other way, I could get us to hitchhike again, or we could just hike if we put in some effort, but Almond has his mind set on checking his car and miraculously the engine turns on and kicks up a few leaves and the windshield wipers start flailing limply, and again he asks if there's anyone else who should come along. I don't have an answer.

"Tell me if you want us to do this alone," he signs.

"I think I do," I sign.

But he pauses and gives me a little smile, just faint, mostly in his eyes. "Are you gonna steal my car, then?"

"No."

"Exactly."

I want to laugh, but by the time I've processed, Almond is already out the driver-side door, running back inside to grab the others.



Six-hundred and fifty miles by car and it is snowing in Pennsylvania and by this point Gaiman has taken up driving to let Almond sleep in the back. I cannot overstate how much I like Gaiman; he has a snarling smile across his reptilian face and can sign one-handed while he's driving, at least when we're coasting, and he keeps me company, and I keep him awake. What do we talk about? What don't we talk about. I am murmuring and rambling all about Euclid, he keeps asking, Almond keeps asking, Cav keeps asking, who was he, what was he? It's like we are untangling a puzzle that Tabi built for us. The Room above the house. The bodies. I am desperate to try and explain my train of thought and why we're headed to Michigan and Almond keeps apologizing—no, he's asleep, he was apologizing earlier—for insisting on this trip, but we're all in good spirits. Irregular snowfall is settling against the windshield and building up along the sides of highways. It's warm in the car now. I am taking off the bulkiest clothes and snuggling up in a sort of half-warmth and staring out the side window for an hour at a time. Almond's car is filled with the kind of endearing trash that you leave behind because you're using it all the time and don't have the energy to pick up wrappers, and he has a phone holder which is empty, and a book with a pale blue cover on the dashboard nuzzling the windshield, and there's a little prayer card in a pocket beneath the sun visor, kept as a kind of joke, Almond doesn't remember where he got it from, but at least Jesus is watching him when he drives. But again he's not driving he's asleep. Gaiman is our guide.

"Should we stop for the night?" I ask him.

"I can make it," Gaiman assures me. "I'm not even tired."

"Yeah, but we brought a tent."

"It looked teensy-tiny."

"Yeah, but you shouldn't have to drive the whole night. Come on." I'm goading him now.

"I can make it." He blinks fast, bonks his head with a fist.

And I just laugh, and I tell him, no, we should really camp out and get him some rest. He tells me he's not even tired. Oh yeah, you're not tired? What's six times eighteen. He pauses. "If anything's going to make me crash the car it's a goat distracting me in the passenger seat. Also, one-hundred and two! Take that! Fuck you!"

By the time we do resolve to park somewhere quiet and camp out, it is only about five o'clock despite it getting dark fast, and Almond is chipper and awake again, and we all eat paltry dinner in the car—I went back inside and made a few extra peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before we left—and we wind through some offbeat roads until Cav spots a sign, starts bouncing up and down in the back seat, finally gets Gaiman to turn left into a designated camping area in the enveloping dark, where oaks and pines loom eagerly over a gravel clearing with only the faintest hints of human presence found in tire tracks leading inward, outward, roundward. A black-barked tupelo rests dead surrounded by a mulch of rotting leaves on the far end. The silhouettes of two outhouses stand in solace and lean like they are praying. Almond's car slides just past, rolling into a relatively-flat spot, and we park, we get out with flashlights; in a hurried excitement we scrounge around for firewood, and in ten minutes we have a variety of dry things from under cover of the outhouses and from bits of a collapsed fence to our right, and Almond drizzles a heap of lighter fluid on a pile and we get a campfire going. We talk about everything we can imagine around the fire—this time we avoid the subjects of Tabi and Euclid. I sign slow for Cav, so slow, I repeat myself until he's able to follow along. I don't hardly mind. It reminds me of when I was taking ASL classes. What's the sign for deer?

We only spend about an hour like this and the fire doesn't last long. There is no way to comfortably sit but we stand and Gaiman tells a ghost story. "This phantom did not occupy a house," he signs, "but it did occupy the space around a house, a very oversized house, which belonged to a man named Arthur Montagnes. Arthur was a rich man—terrifically wealthy and reclusive. He had inherited all he knew from his father, Doctor Ivan Montagnes, a dentist who serviced an entire town out in the Outer Banks. Arthur, in contrast, did not know a trade and could not parse a single academic subject. He was impossible to educate, but he taught himself all kinds of superstitions. And one day, while he was in the middle of setting up two amethysts on a windowsill on the west end of the mansion, one of them toppled over all on its own. And that was when he realized that something was out there. Something in the deep. Something in the dark."

I don't know where Gaiman heard this story or if he is making it up as he goes along. Cav tries his best to follow. Almond is stuck in fierce attention. I cannot think of anything more terrifying than being in that house. And at the end there is no ghost, as Gaiman tells it. There is nothing in the house nor outside of it. I don't want to retell it in detail—it was funnier with Gaiman's delivery.

It is only when the fire starts dying out to another rush of cool wind and gentle snow that we all break apart and realize, individually, that we are exhausted; we spend ten minutes in a frustrating dim light setting up the tent, but Gaiman and Almond start to realize that our idea of actually using it for shelter is hopeful at best. We don't even have sleeping bags. Do you want to freeze to death? Your fur isn't going to keep you warm. You are underweight. He's not getting fed enough. Are you starving this poor thing on purpose. Cav and I are trying to argue for our idea, but it's cold, it's very cold, the wind isn't treating us nice. Just sleep in the car. I feel chilly the moment we get in. Cav bundles up and snuggles up for shared warmth and I think he gets hard from the touch but I can't focus on him, not now.

Instead I just lay across the backseats in a nothing-space. Cav is on top of me but I'm not there with him. I am trying to not lose track of Euclid against every bone in my body trying to tear me away; there is a wilted-away goat somewhere begging for anyone to care about his existence. Are you there or are you just resting?

I don't sleep well.

No dreams but I keep worrying that I'm going to have my eyes extracted out of my head. It wakes me up out of calm and puts me into a dull panic, heart racing but body stiff, and then I fall back into it, and so on. Like a running wound that keeps throbbing with pain.

When I crawl out of the car the gravel is all shimmering in a blue-white morning light and spots of frost cling to the corners of all the windows. Sleep-heat and fur keep me barely warm enough to function, and Gaiman has snatched Almond's old sweater, but I figure he needs it more than me. It fits about as well as you'd expect.

We fold up the unused tent into a crumpled corpse and pile into the car again and Almond peels out with speed. There isn't a lot of talking.

In the passenger seat I watch trees roll by the side of the highway and my mind wanders to the house again, the house in the woods, like a pit with slick edges. Beckoning me in.

But that isn't where we're headed.

There is a place that goes deeper.



For months last year I was painting that spot. It did not appear to me in dreams and it did not stick—it was one of a few things whose memory I could not actually pull up for my mind's eye. I have a memory that is eidetic or photographic or something along those lines, but every time I put this pit on canvas it was different. Harsh auburn lifting up above a blackness, streaks of overpaint with tiny brushes all mottled with dried acrylic, melted hours mixing colors until it was appropriately dingy, dire, cold. Cold above all. It is difficult to express how cold it was at the time. It was early spring when I got there and just being out of the car felt like I was chancing it. It was a four-minute walk from the closest trail which was already obscure, and I walked semi-south but partially east and west in a winding form as I was not using the sun or the stars as a compass and was trusting, or perhaps deliberately not trusting, my own instinct to run. And when I painted it, the only thing that remained was the emotion of the spot—the trees, the size, the form of it are all vague and faceless, but there is a seeming pit in it treading down into the world. I could not get paint black enough for that darkness.

And one time Euclid saw my collection, all these portrayals of a terrible spot in the woods, and he knew where it was, and he knew what it was.

Or maybe it wasn't last year at all. I don't know if Euclid was still around at that point. Maybe he disappeared earlier.

Or later.

A linear description of events is useless.

We're forced to stop for gas as Almond foretold and we head somewhere dingy without people and use one of the pumps glancing every which way, trying to avoid getting any funny questions about our appearances, but the place is mostly quiet aside from a zonked-out clerk behind the counter who doesn't hardly look our way. Gaiman brought cash—it doesn't take cash. Cav fishes up a very old debit card—his account is empty. I suggest we ask the clerk for help and we discuss that idea for a little while, is it okay, are we going to freak him out? How much does it matter? But eventually Almond finds a credit card in-between seats and tries to fill the tank, but it doesn't work, but out of pure desperation he tries to buy only ten gallons and it clears and we speed off over the border into Michigan. It might not have even been Almond's credit card. A lot of things fall through the world and end up where they're not supposed to be.

Besides morning laze and a lack of chatter there is little indication that the drive stopped. The snow is dying down, developing into faint drizzles, occasional rain, all in spots where the cloud cover breaks haphazard over the highway. We avoid Pittsburgh and Akron as a matter of course, weaving between population centers into Ohio and trying to avoid passing cars, but I am sure somebody—or many people—have seen us the way we are now. I'm just not in the mood for traffic. Nobody is. Nobody is certain what it'd feel like.

Earlier when Cav's card declined he looked like he was about to cry. Old habit.

Almond weaves us clockwise around Toledo and across the Maumee, first west on a highway called Six, and then after barrelling through a short stretch of Indiana, we finally cut north on a highway called Sixty-Nine. The roads we ride are buffered by endless leafless bushes pretending to be trees, thickets amidst empty plots and dug-up grass and green-blue skies, and frozen weeds tufting out of every corner, all the cars headed nowhere. I catch the hint of the presence of buildings sometimes; places with names like Dollar Tree and CVS and Burger King, and nobody is ever going to think about these places, but then again they don't think about Gene's Donuts and Ocean Sky and The Green Apron and all the other disappeared places and everything is always falling in line with the waves and sinking, sinking, sinking. All passers-by to something bigger and uglier I can't see.

The heater feels nice. I can feel January trying to claw at me from every angle and Almond knows better than anyone that his car can't keep air in to save its life, but the heater blowing in my face and a blanket over me feels good. We stop someplace unoccupied to use the restrooms and eat—more power bars and the occasional cashew from that big stupid jar—we set up on a picnic table and check phones that are mostly out of charge, and Gaiman thumbs thoughtfully through a book with a laminated cover, and Almond is asking me, can you draw a map for exactly where we're supposed to go? "And," he signs, "a map for exactly how to get back to the house, in case." He signs 'in case' twice. Worrying is his tendency.

I set to the task on the back of a notebook page with Almond's poetry scribbled all over it, and when I sketch things out like this, when I number roads and name all the little curves of the place, I feel in abstract a staggering inability to actually get away from anything in the States. Even these obscure spots are a ten minute drive from a Five Guys or something. The woods are all manmade. You can drive to his house, for fuck's sake—right off a major highway and into a dream. It doesn't feel right. It isn't right. Or at least I was hoping for something different and never realized.

Almond tells me my memory is good. "You're sure this is exactly where it is?"

"I can only assume it's gonna be there for you, even if I'm not," I sign. "But we didn't test that."

"Well, it's not that big a deal." He shoots me a coy grin, a little tired. "We can always just drive all the way back to the house in New York." But he hopes not.

We eat like we're not hungry even though we are, because this really is no way to keep a person fed, but we nibble and groan and stretch for a half-hour until we're tired of the cold, and pile our garbage in an overstuffed garbage bin by one of the bathrooms, and then we pile the garbage that is our own bodies back into Almond's car and get going for one last stretch into the depths of Michigan.



An interchange shaped like a clover and we make three rights to turn left and end up on the Ninety-Four, west a half-hour to a highway called the One-Thirty-One, now aimed directly north, like we are charging forward with a pike, threatening to pierce Grand Rapids. I am staring ahead all sunken into the carseat exhausted and overheated expecting to see some great beast or else expecting something in the shape of Max and his stolen car, but we're too far off, we're too far off, carving wavy lines through more tiny artificial woods with condensation bubbling up around the corners of the windshield, and long stretches of plains and ranches and chill-battered farmland. And then just as we aim true Gaiman and Cav start studying the map I made and compare it to the only remaining phone with charge, and they convince Almond to turn left early, so we do not actually reach Grand Rapids and we never will. We dive onto a miserable main street of a little town called Wayland with a McDonalds on the corner and Almond swerves us left on a road headed out of said town, and like that we are suddenly alone, there are no other vehicles, and it feels easy to imagine that they have never traveled here. Amidst planted trees and mowed lawns this road travels half-injured by the world but mostly intact like concrete that has forgotten it used to be silt and cement. Some trees lay thin and gaunt and others are evergreen yet tired and I can feel my heart pounding because I think I have been on this exact avenue before, alone, blind, my senses all deprived on purpose and my brain rotting from a Lexapro double-dose. I think Almond can see me shaking. I am not shaking but he can see it. He sets a hand on my shoulder.

I know my state of mind. I was trying to find someplace obscure but as someone raised in a variety of mostly-urban environments I had no clue what something like that would look like. I was trying to go to where the wild things were but I was never going to find anything that was not put there on purpose. Tabi was put there on purpose. He was a creature of the woods but he danced around bonfires lit by men who lived in cities.

The road ends where an audience of dead birches gather and Almond parks us sideways between where a dirt road merges with asphalt, and when we get out of the car, the sun has managed to poke through scattered clouds long enough to make it a little muggy, as air from the lake shimmies its way into the forests. Though when the wind picks up as we collect our things it becomes just as chill as this morning.

Cav wants to bring food, stuffs a few snack bars in his pockets. Gaiman lugs a case of water bottles and Almond, to his credit, has been paying attention all this time. "Just a short walk, right?"

"Yeah. We go on this path in the woods and then go south along the creek."

"Okay."

A path goes between those awaiting crowds of birches but they stand as if they have made way. It is rather wide—a couple people across—and there is, against my worst notions, a sort of optimism in me, a sort of excitement, an anticipation, as if something or everything all at once will make sense and be fixed and it will be okay, I will be okay, I will find Euclid doing this, somehow, for some reason, it will just click, like when I stole Max's car and drove aimlessly in the woods and found his house there, laying alone, I do not remember why, I do not remember why I got to that point or for what particular reason I thought that was where I would find it again. More magical thinking now. Just more of it because the tangible world has been uniquely frustrating.

The roots are tangling with the dirt here, all the loamy mud laced with ice and balling up in clumps; the occasional shifting of the trees indicates a spat of wind that we can no longer clearly feel. All around us semi-native trees encroach until the sun is nearly gone but the brush is not thick enough to hide in. There is, instead, the ever-present sense that a human being walks this path every day or so, that it sees the occasional presence, that it will not easily go forgotten. It is familiar enough to me and I am hoping not to lose the way.

When we see the creek up ahead that optimism once again wanes. I know this shore and knowing it is not any comfort, is it. These are memories like blood.

Cav and Almond and Gaiman trail along with me, some distance away. I am not sure what they see in me besides a lost goat. I am not where I am supposed to be. We take a step off where the path fades out of existence and I see it again in my mind's eye—a painful wandering, I can still feel it in my shins hitting branches and going uncaring out as far as my body would take me until I was alone, as alone as I could manage.

Following these old footsteps now. They left no trace, I left no trace. Euclid left no trace at all. No silhouette sitting there cross-legged staring at me from afar, begging to be understood even a little bit, but I did not know him, and he did not know me, and I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. This is my fault. This is my fault. How did it get this bad for you, Euclid? I was supposed to be there for you. I was supposed to be there for Almond too. And Max—I was supposed to take care of my roommate. I should be making money and sending it home to my parents, too, don't you remember that? What about my cousin? I fucked over my cousin somehow I'm sure. I fuck over everyone. I am made of the wrong parts to be trusted. I nearly trip over some roots from a beech and stumble and have to reside on the side of a dead stump with bugs livid from my presence and some thirty feet from the edge of the creek I see a clearing.

I tell the three men following me to stay some distance away in case it opens under me. "Do you mean that literally?" asks Cav. But I simply step back and away and where the underbrush all makes way for a spot of wracked earth, frozen and refrozen and with leaves filling dead stumps and collapsed saplings, and I step into what I presume is the dead center, and I reach out as if there is something to hold. The handle to a door. My door.

I have been here before.

And I get the inclination deep within me to try banging the flashlight again. Trying to get it to turn on. Trying to get things to work like they once did. Magic and the occult.

I turn around and I ask,

"Would you close your eyes and stop thinking about me for a little while?"



The back of my neck is screaming. It is saying something that I can't hear.



Devotion is a willingness, or perhaps an eagerness, to destroy one's self for something else. Erasure. Devotion is evaluating one's self as an object that can be spent for some quantity. Devotion is blood in my veins running cold and I am stood there and then I am very suddenly all static, all my fur wilting off or else clinging to me in a senseless fathomless void, I am falling but falling does not make sense, I am traveling without a destination. Like I have been thrown in the waves. I am weightless. A vacuous underground expands infinitely and I splatter against it and it is dark.

I reach out but it becomes useless. The mere movement of my arm makes me feel like I am splitting in half, all the skin and tendons carefully arranged by Tabi tearing apart suddenly, and then clinging back to bone as I lurch back, stock-still and diving further into a fathomless black. My eyes flicker between open and closed. I feel myself dreaming.

There are no stars in this night sky.

God.

I am holding my breath now.

Please, let there be something, God, please, please, please. I want to feel your hand around mine.

It's taking a while.

It's taking forever.

I will never reach anything.

At first.

Then I start waking up in pieces, like every spot of old fur is clinging back onto me after being lost in a storm, and I feel my wiry body colliding with itself again, clicking together, click click click, a doll, and I groan and scream and wail and beg for him to be here again, but there is no him anymore, there is nobody here for me, I try to feel a hand around mine but all I feel is movement, endless cacophonous movement growing more and more terrifying, the infinite black is a pit I fall into, I fall further, wind against me, or maybe fear, just fear and nothing else. Devotion is a cut spinal column. Can anyone feel me around them? Is there anything of me? Is this what Euclid felt? This is all he went through all day and night for an eternity, all forever being meaningless, an afterlife of ideas that stretches on forever and oh my God please hold my hand, please tell me you're there. Tabi? Tabi? Please, I love you. I love you. Have you heard me say it in a while? I would tell you it ten thousand times. Devotion is a lonely son of a bitch floating adrift in an empty bottle of champagne. There must be some kind of grounding rhythm I can use to bring me back to earth, to ground, please, I just need ground to hold onto, a floor to stop me. Marks in the hardwood where furniture keeps getting dragged around and lingerie popping out of overturned suitcases and all this in a phantasmagorical death-dream like I am wilting away into nothingness, there must be some kind of grounding rhythm says a voice in a typhoon four miles deep in the ocean; memory tells me no, no, no, there has never been anything of yourself capable of holding yourself up. You are useless on your own. From top to bottom. How much of you did you make? Memory tells me all of it. I am myself and only myself. Devotion is my heartbeat. And I land on the concrete.

A blackness still envelops me and a vicious scraping sensation against thin silk stockings on my knees while I scramble forward in an unreality. Concrete is what the human world is made of by weight and by volume and if you touch concrete you should know that human beings are holding you back. It is a hard rocky substance almost like stone but it was ground up and plastered together first like so many body parts congealed in a soup making an end project uglier than sin. My palms struggle to keep me crawling. Can't stand. Too weak. It's entering my body in stages, this overwhelming exhaustion, this cold, this fear, where the fuck am I going? In general. How long has it been. In general. When you mix concrete you put aggregate stones inside a vat of cement like myself. I am still whimpering here. A pain enters me in the shape of a stab wound from years and years ago. Along the back of my neck I can feel my own footsteps that I can't manage. I lurch forward I run I run I run there is no running to be had

there is no night, no light, no anything, just this resemblant concrete plain which is all that there is; we are atop a prison, I know it, I know what these walls are made of. My body is all fuzz and warmth and I wish you were holding me.

I grab clumps of the floor and they seep through frail fingers like sand. You used to know the way, Tabi. You knew how to get where we were going.

I feel like throwing up again. That will fix this. Just give me a second away from the rummaging, all this partying in the foyer, I need to throw up off the balcony. It is cold in April this year and here comes that asphalt again, faceplant, blackened by blood but grayed by sun, a left turn, a dirt path, out and onwards to the creek, another left turn, a pit with slick walls, a sand trap, a monster at the bottom, stop thinking about all that. Try to imagine a place. There has to be a place here. There has to be something here. Horror vacui. This is a Room of my own creation. A trash bin full of everything that collects in the corners of places that don't matter. When the world dies, where do its body parts go? Where do I go?

There are no answers and there is no truth. There are only passages in an empty house. The fire is all it has ever known. My vision alights in a terrible inferno. Light. Light. Light and power. All the lamps flickering to life in a Godless heaven.

I feel it come in spots

then go in spots

it needs space

until we go further down it does not have room to manifest

and then it has all the Room it ever needs.

At the foot of a pile of deaths are all the tiniest of things that got dropped on the floor, leaves and thumbtacks and buttons and knots of thread and scraps of food, and lint collected along the edges of chairs brushed up by wind, then there are toys and baubles and memorabilia, and envelopes opened with careless hands alongside discarded glitter shed by birthday cards and get-well-soon cards and more paper scraps, more blanks, tissues and toilet paper and paper towels with mucus, and a driver's license before the one now, a red phone case, a blue condom case, an eight by eight-inch screen-printed illustration on the front of an eleven dollar T-shirt made out of materials that have no home, a floor all matted with the kind of dust that comes like the sunrise, walls towering out of plaster and polycarbonate, plastic wrap clinging to armchair legs and scraps of wood tossed aside with the brush of a hand, two pencils in a computer case, two pens in a pencil case, a water bottle behind two water glasses too tall to properly use, an account of a relationship in a house in the woods, a diagram of a line going up and down to indicate pressure being put on a metal box, a depiction of two particles interacting at a quantum level, the principles and built-up lies and justifications and heartfelt exhales involved in terminating a relationship that's gone on too long, and is otherwise stale, but for a few lingering hopes and dreams and doubts, and some of the sillier things, like if I break up with you, what is left of me, what about our plans next summer, or our plans last summer, and tufts of grass that find their way inside and the little springtails that cling to that grass and the careless kick of a shoe that shoves it outside, and roots upon roots upon roots, all kaleidoscoping in a quiet rapture of the sky, woods, moons, a simple depiction of breathing, a heart beat, then the shutting sensation of a door, and further up the pile are real deaths, actual deaths, or else the intentions of deaths, broken things, particularly terrible things, corpses of people who I never knew and corpses of those I did, like those wailing dismembered rats, and those goats scurrying through the halls, all shaped like abbatoirs in ecstasy, and the ravens and bats flitting around a blackened corridor, and the deer snatched from birthing rooms still in the muck of life, and hands choking that life out of things drowned in boilers, and the sensation of a bodily death mixed with a mind's death, the corpses of a type of terrified animal trapped in the Room above his house, all earless primarily but also eyeless and noseless and noiseless now, all shut up thinking about him, all these skulls waylaid in perfect symmetry, all those heads nodding along, all those necks cut at the base, all fed piecemeal by plastic tubes and nutrient slurries, and non-Euclidean twisting shapes of bags on heads and endless white formations of land upon land upon land, space unending, pits without edges, skies without seas, and a frying pan from a garage sale, an old couch cushion that got too shit so we threw it out, a chair that leans back with a broken switch, all fluffed up and cushioned so as to let you sleep in it in an emergency, more furniture that died, more ovens that stopped working, some as normal walking husks others as ones that needed replacing, some corpses by the sides of roads, some furniture for free but too shit to justify their price tags, dollar bills lost in tax and in accidental transactions, little fees for breathing, little fees for existing, utensils all clogging up kitchen drawers and drawings that don't get finished, all these disproportionate sketches of watercolor or pencil or ink or acrylic on paper or canvas, all the heads shaped wrong, all the bones misplaced and mislaid, the wild sensation of a panic attack swirled away into it's-fine-it-won't-happen-again, pacing in circles, hours wasted, days wasted, years wasted, lives wasted, or else lost, capsized in a formless and abstract flood the size of the universe, my own Sargasso, and further up along the pile I crawl, I crawl, I have nothing but crawling now, under me lays a colossal and unfathomable monster whose form is and is all that it isn't, all this garbage which is nonetheless crucial gone to waste and wasted and forgotten and all of it dust in a turbulent wind which has me by the neck, with no light overhead, a room in no house at all, a Room in the house still on fire still coughing up great black smoke, and as I reach the peak of the pile there are leaves again and thumbtacks and buttons and knots of thread and scraps of food, and hopes, and dreams, and wind against a battered face, and triumphs, but most of all there is collateral, all these things forgotten for my sake, and for his sake, and why won't you just be a good boyfriend to me, why won't I be a good boyfriend to him, I am made of the wrong parts, all scattered here, all these bodily functions splattered across the pile which are supposed to mean something, if only you step back far enough, if only you look from far enough away, it will appear in the shape of someone, of someone better, surely the parts are there, surely I could improve, but there is nothing and nobody in this pile, only this afterlife of ideas in a dull, still, and aimless horror, all screaming out, all silenced, quenched by a thin stream to the west and a cavernous, yawning pain from the east, still in the shape of a man, still with his hands around me, but there is no trace of him, save for just one piece of him, curled up atop the pile, his legs wrapped around his arms wrapped around his legs, Euclid, this malformed horrified person, who has had his Deafness ripped away from him, that too in the pile, and here he lies utterly paralyzed and whimpering and crying out, is there anybody, but there is only me, and in a weary and thin frenzy I reach out at him and I hold Euclid and hold him tight and sob as his head descends into my arms, I have you, I have you, I have you, and I feel at his chest and I ensure there is a heart still beating.

Ba-thump.

Ba-thump.

Ba-thump.

On April 26th, 2020, I came very close to killing myself. Just ducked under the rung at the last moment, not for any particularly profound reason, not because I was saved or because I had a realization, or even because I wasn't 'capable' because certainly I was going to do it, but on my way to the clearing in the woods I tripped and got my knee all scuffed up, and then I couldn't manage to find the energy to kill myself anymore. It felt silly at that point. I was in that place by the creek because I thought it was deep in the woods—it was just someone's backyard, but let's move on—and hopefully that meant I wouldn't bother anyone or scare anyone. It's stupid, I know it's stupid, and again let's move on. I brought a gun to do this and gave up and took sixty-eight steps all the way back to my car and drove back home to see Max and he had had a really shit day at work, so I made us jambalaya, and I put on a movie, the new Godzilla movie, and we rode the rest of the night out, and I was a ghost. The only reason I existed anymore was a patch of roots that I stumbled over and a thorny bush that made a wound too annoying to ignore. Max didn't know it, didn't need to know it. I was just hanging around in a suspended state like a phantom still attending to my duties, and at any moment I could zone out and imagine I wasn't there. Actually this is a terrible mindset to be in, because it makes repeating the act pretty easy and appealing. But again for no good reason I just never got the chance. There was never a great opportunity. Sometimes I would think about that clearing a few paces away from the creek and ideate, and I'd remember that I was a ghost floating around, not really here, not really intruding, and that would give me some solace. It was my little fantasy for a while. Until, like a lot of things, I forgot about it in favor of whatever was more pressing at the time.