Various Appointments (to be completed, soonish)

ONE 

At night, he'd lay a plastic tarp in a wooded area near the edge of the city he relied upon, a certain modicum of gratitude in the ritual. He'd remove the comforter from the large leaf-bag, unroll it, shake it, lay it upon the tarp. He'd take some default note of the temperature--typically cold--and provoke a small memory of endurance, push against the unkindness of his situation. It was all but permanently bad, hardly more than an accumulation of rudeness and inhospitability that consumed the energy and good will that wagered against it. He'd lay a backpack with a few books and like supplies and everyday needs such as a toothbrush at the head of the blanket and remove his coat and sweater and fold them into a pillow and set the bundle atop the backpack. The hard air running slow and steady through everything. And on nights when he was sober enough to, he'd remove his shoes, socks, pants, shirt, and set these somewhere dry enough, close enough, for the morning. When  he wasn't sober enough he'd do it in the dark hours afterward with a flippant pledge to correct this haste and laziness in the future. He'd encounter insomnia anytime sleep was wanted. Like some wretched buzzing from the inner-layers and through the sensory cortices of his mind, the obvious, living and conscious features of the world nagged at the young man's thoughts with a repulsive sort of ease. The cheap, predictable day: the loud, overgrown teenage-gangsters you littering the city streets and dayrooms and cafeterias for the needy, the lack of options, the contempt for family & friends and everything related  that came to a decided and almost indecipherable failure. He felt a competitive hatred in his bones if not his anguished soul. An energy he believed others carried under foreign headings of their own description. As though every heart contained within its structure an inexhaustible capacity for the selfish and selfless alike and required merely the least invitation or will to express its intention and philosophy into the world it populated. All the shit and grief and hassles and the reverberation of their consequences from the beginning of our collective species until the limits of a barely imaginable future. He turned in the gentleness of the blankets, scraped the big toe of one foot beneath the sole of the opposite foot, clawed and tugged at his scrotum and stretched his limbs to momentary ecstasy while uttering arbitrary mantras or counting backwards from 200 or waiting until sleep muted all thoughts and thinking  whatsoever. 

....

Lightening seemed to bang from the walls and the buildings and the cars and even the people as Randal exited the parkinggarage and the by-way between it and a row of stores on Main St., the city-smell of oil and gas and a billion tiny germs shuffled into the wind and the air like some unsettling conglomeration of greed and hurry and want and purpose. Weed was neither some doorkey to infinite insight & creativity nor trapdoors neither of psychological hellscapes beyond all endurance & comprehension yet an ineffable combination of both. Elation and momentary joy accompanied the first hits, the big coughs rattling like therapeutic paroxysms, the nerves tender and excited and happy. Then, the convenient rush of dopamine inviting weak paranoia, suspicion and the unknown lurking after every moment. The younger Randal dismissed warnings about the psychotic nature of the drug whatsoever: The older Randal simply meant to endure against the consequences of the drug until they became something strangely enjoyable. The big headrush of intoxication took on the meaning of shoving an enormous boulder uphill. He wanted to feel himself, desperately. He'd a kind of educated animosity for awakenings of the soul, as it were, regardless were they his own age or older; yet fair enough to add that he identified and was vaguely inspired by comparisons to results of PTSD sufferers, veterans of that deplorable war, some fragile bond of experience and meditation organized and expressed into a house with both windows & doors that he could enter, exit, explore from the belly of its tender and invincible walls of self. In some ubiquitous deaf moment the memory of a note of something better. 

He turns from a wide alleyway, two large, separate buildings, an office tenement and a line of private-commercials, turns right onto the sidewalk and the early-midmorning foot-traffic of moving-statue people handing out in front of bodegas and what else and other people on their way to various appointments. His own walk with a heavy bounce that seems to interfere and dance with the weed in his veins and synapses and the past and the future and the living world and the dead one. 

...

  

 At night, he'd return to the campsite with the wish his things hadn't been disturbed or caried away even as bitterness pinched his heart and he told himself the gear could burst into a white/red flash and its ashes scatter to the leaves and the dirt. He'd walk along Route 44, into the cooling dark and the cars in either direction sweeping past like an accidental parade of sentinels or members thereof, each lost with a certain confidence and the world an improvised house of the life and creatures it gave territory and shelter to. In his blindest drunks he knew his direction, he couldn't be lost, his heart, blood, sure as a razor. Alone and with a sordid glory that muted and sometimes wholly folded the soft lies and endless apologies and recriminations of the sinners and the junkies and the security staff and the cashiers and the thugs and the crackheads, dope fiends, shitheads, retards morons, and the modest, the bitter, and the other people, too, and as he came to a conditional acclimation of his bizarre environment and the anomie it pulsed with and the uncertainty that penetrated to the deepest fibers of his body, Randal ascended down the hill, thinking and not-thinking thoughts of the beloved dead, into the mostly-abandoned acres of concrete punctuated with little else save the fastfood restaurant and the stone, skeletal floor where the K-Mart used to be, and he was alone and he had all the time in the world to think about it. 

**** 

TWO

He awoke the next day with the warmish air reaching into his lungs, into a place that hadn't been available in a very long time. He climbed out of the blankets and stood to get dressed and he shook out his blankets and folded them as usual and a loose kind of reverie as he pushed on the top of the bundle and the plastic grew after gravity let its pressure elsewhere and his feet met the earth and his eyes looked through the trees of the wooded area, small birds gossiping their hellos to the day and where the coming angst of the day went zipping with bass and violin and the borders of a seemingly immeasurable world pivoted, oscillating toward Randal and he stepped onto he concrete, the desperate, secret weeds lifting themselves out of the ground and his body went smoothly to the fastfood restaurant and he went inside to wash-up. 

He exited and he didn't look any different than anything else in the parking lot, people running idle cars, cars circling the drive-thru, and his bones stiff, yet the quality manifesting some nameless assurance. Of a sudden, he wanted some activity. He thought to pick up cans. He'd little need for the money, but there was something in the task of doing something that got you something. It put you in the world and kept you there. 

He moved toward Route 44 but then right up the hill and the traffic was slow until the highway leveled and the view opened up a quartermile or so and Randal mapped out a flexile course to the city and the deposit place and he knew maybe a halfdozen streets and little pockets, neighborhoods where at least a dollar or two could be put together and he picked up a cloth grocery sack from the grass after an intersection moving along with a dumb confidence, the chatter and the undue animosity buried in the scared, normal world ahead. 

He remembered doing this, in a different city, years ago, between other houses that he'd lived in that he hadn't lived in yet. There was a cool/mean edge to it, something like a high and what he'd imagined it'd be like to be in a fistfight. Anger painting itself through the viscera and the heat in the cerebral cortex, almost gentle where its announcement made for pause and a mirage of reflection. The natural fact of the world becoming something ineffable. 

He went where the kids played basketball and people drank and smoked crack & weed and no one knew his name yet their voices felt pointed at his ear and he knew they hated but he didn't know why. 

He wondered if he was provoking or enabling something and he scooped up cans where he saw them, adding them to the bag and moving along just so. 

The day some kind of prison without guards. 

****

He'd gone into a yard he wasn't sure if he should've been in or not with the sack about half-full and his lefthand free and ready to lift the edged-lid of a 4 ft. rectangular garbagecan, and with his head-and-torso bending into the morass for a few exposed bottles the voice came. 

"Heyh." 

'Shit.' He let go of the bottles and pulled himself to his feet on the ground and turning ready to say he was sorry... 

"What're you doing." The strange black face looking for his answer. 

"I'm... I'm sorry. I didn't mean..." 

"I didn't ask what you meant. I said what're you doing." 

Bad nerves and shame and introverted angst. "I'll leave," already walking away. 

"You shouldn't be digging in peoples' garbage cans." 

He could see his way down the block and no one was going to get in his way. He just kept walking. 

"If I see you again I'ma call the cops." 

'Fucking asshole.' 

**** 

He'd collected about two grocery sacks' worth and then he came to a clean white kitchenbag loaded with empties, all rinsed out water bottles and soda cans, little red and green flashes of aluminum in the transparent matrix of Deer Parks and storebrands they were shuffled amongst. Leaned against a wheeled-trash barrel on the corner, so pick-up must've been tomorrow. It was luck. Luck could make him uneasy.  There were clear rules in his mind about what you should and shouldn't take--some neighborhoods were hit by people who regularly went there and Randal'd understood that they had some kind of relationship with the people who lived in the houses or the stores or whoever and even if it wasn't anything that'd actually bring you any trouble he'd get an uneasy feeling when he considered collecting what was found. 

He always felt like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana was trying to gauge the weight of the idol on the gravity-switch (right before the giant boulder is chasing after him) and he always gets it wrong. 

He took the white kitchen bag and tied its sealed-in drawstrings with the others he had and decided that was enough. 

He didn't really need much more. He didn't really need money, just what money could buy you. 

Seven bucks bought two or three decent beers. He'd take his time. 

**** 

Everyone seemed to work in a stressed conspiracy. It was like their minds were all waiting on the same question that no one had the nerve to ask. Hands pulling bottles out of shoppingcarts and enormous gabagebags sprayed over the metal-rimmed wood tables either hung off the cinderblock wall or the island between them, this tight frenzy of people that affect a space with their words and the shapes of themselves in some unacknowledged commotion or agreement without benefit of context. People sorting the day's empties with a strained kind of casualness. It wasn't foreign but you couldn't hold the meaning for long. The things they said were untrustworthy yet what trust had been violated had been quarantined from inspection. He found a spot on the table facing the sordid excuse of a parking lot. Their voices moved around him but no one addressed him. Like someone calling your name with the intention to ignore you once you'd turned to face them only they did so while in plain eyesight. This alienation that wasn't alienation as he moved his own empties into a few red trays of 24 and felt sick without logic or recourse. The time going slowly. With nowhere else he had to be. But not wanting to be there. You'd realize someone was lying and someone else was covering for them and everyone else either knew or whispered something to the person next to them or people called to the person talking in a kind, coded sort of way to shut-up and Randal got to finishing with a few more trays and he brought them to a window in the building and the voices subsided, starting to talk about something else and he thought about when people said they couldn't think that in a way they were actually thinking so fucking much that there wasn't a thought to be found in any of it. 

**** 

"Have any you seen Christina?" 

"Who?" 

"Christina." 

"Who that?" 

"I don' know. This dude lookin' for some'oney name Christina?" 

"She's usually here in the morning. She stays at the shelter." 

"So why you ain' at the shelter?" 

"I don'-- I don't really go there. It's not a big deal I was just wondering if she was around. My name's Randal by the way." 

Their eyes were staring at him without staring at him. It wasn't just being white. It was being someone who wasn't part of their routine. 

"You got any money, Randy?" came another voice. 

"I--" He actually thought of it. "No, not much, not really." 

"I can get you something. You lookin for some hard?" 

"He knew that was crack. "No... I don't fuck with that." 

Mostly everyone else who was doing anything at the Partnership Center took the quickest way through their conversation and a few others either leaning against the building by himslef with his eyes closed and a pair whisper-talking but now a guard had exited the building, black clothes, black hat, white skin. "What's going on here, Gentlemen." 

"I'm looking--" 

"He lookin for some chick name Christina." 

"Christina who?" 

"How should--" 

"I don't know her last name." 

"Well if you can give me--" 

"Look: it's probably not a big deal. It's not a big deal She's probably not here. I'll find her later..." 

"Well I can help you if you tell me what she looks like." 

And he had the idea to go. It was too early for this shit. It was always too early." 

....

He didn't see her that day, of course. He strolled around the block near where Route 44 sweeps the tenements and a half dozen streets move parallel to the main avenue and the bodegas, feeling lost and unentitled. The sick loneliness that feels like suicidal ideation and feckless ridicule. Where a billion different memories of yourself and other people converge in your guts and sometimes there's a voice but never a pair of words or a single one let alone sentences to infer meaning & respond to. Your thoughts become drowned out by a whirlpool of doubt composed of the deathly assurance that led you there. He stopped. He took the scent of the city-air and some hirsute displeasure like feral dogs you weren't invited to pet yet circled through the streets and memories and the blindworld at some indefinite horizon. The pain of yearning that matches your own and yet stalks you with bewildered inquisition.

He moved down through the shit and the recession of echoes from where a countless number of herds made their journey through its matrix, the extinct and landless and no longer suffering where noble & ignoble peril closed and its chapter became the names of the streets and towns and churches and bridges to be renamed over and over by those of the means and inclination to do so. 

He moved into that and smiled a smile without laughter. Angst anchored in a well that betrayed all laws of physics and time. 

Then someone drove past and called him an asshole without calling him an asshole. 

He moved with his doll/shark eyes, careful to not get hit by any cars. 

He had this map of everywhere he'd been to in the last few months or so and everywhere his feet'd taken him in the years and lifetimes previous to that. He thought of the map as he turned toward the main avenue of Poughkeepsie, lighting a cigarette and his whole face counting pebbles on the sidewalk, the dumb, inaudible chatter of thugs, urchins, junkies, the collective et cetera as it were and Randal walking up the street where dreamwalking took him gracefully back to the bodega and his curt motions set the cigarette on the metal edge of the windowsill, its smoke... Passed the coffeecounter, chips, to the coolers, door open, can in hand, turns... "Back again so soon..." "Yeh..." nods, change in palm/fist, and out to the street outside, where he retrieves the cigarette from the sill, sucking, drawing deeply where it hit him in the lungs and the belly and he looked off with the kind of aplomb that only comes from those who've confronted their damnation.  

**** 

THREE 

He woke up the next morning feeling the mild ache of being spent but with his energy swiftly regenerating, becoming restlessness, the need to do something. Without steady work, without school to focus on or personal relationships to invest in & be a part of, Randal's hours/days/weeks were burdened with a vacancy of purpose that seemed to effortlessly fill with meditation and madness. He'd been lightly familiar with some of the counselors and mental-health coaches available through the college he'd attended and there was some reason to believe he ailed from a lingering depression pressed into his psyche from early-adolescence. Most people his age weren't strangers to drugs & alcohol, however, most off them didn't fade & return from & fade back into days and weeks of silence (or little talking at any rate) and give the impression of a serial-bomber who merely wanted to become acquainted with the people he intended to murder with incendiaries.... No tragedies or noteworthy episodes came to pass other than the almost-yearly screaming arguments inspired from the political climate of the world and its larger meaning and the trajectory of the human race in general -- that would reliably end with Randal moving to somebody else's apartment/house, until finally the last Friday Night of Unnecessary Stupidity turned Randal to Poughkeepsie with what he could carry or store with some confidence. 

It was strange to stand of a sudden. The world both clapped into place and felt unbearably full. There is a powerful feeling to waking up outside. No matter how cold or hard your surroundings are, the body gradually eases into some primitive fashion of renewal. As though the gods of volition shouted their breath into you upon request. 

He stood and gathered his senses and put away what needed putting away and went to the fastfood-restaurant and thought to pay a visit to Social Services and talk to whichever psychiatrist was around. 

**** 

The light of the room provoked a meaningful, uncomfortable instinct in Randal's soft, volatile core. The non-scent pressure of order saturated each thing without interruption and the sound of anything from a word to a shift of position, alteration of position, carried some incorrect yet important reality. 

She was pretty and he gave himself some detachment for her attractiveness, yet context had its way and his ears were functioning enough that his mouth produced the right words to her prescribed questions and some thought inside him keenly told him to be clever and the death of a thousand broken promises shattered against the steel & glass of their expert skill. ...It were as though Randal Fincher was meant to be a lesson of some kind, precisely written into the fabric of his life, demanding, dreary fate nagging whatever futile stoicism it could find. 

Randal held her as distinct from, yet a part of, all else his heart & eyes clapped to within that haunted city, where to enter a door was nearly to enter a home. Where your neighbors came to be your family, and you knew less about your family all the time. 

Everything was quite orderly and predictable and beyond his friendly-inclination of minded-lust Randal merely excused himself back out into the day and this impossibly tall blackstone truth of the fragility of humankind's development moved as freely as a cloud over his efforts. 

He counted the dollars in his pocket. It was enough. 

But something else would come asking. 

****

FOUR 

"Are you sittin'g here?" The hot, untrustworthy breath of one of the homeless crackheads from around the shelter/kitchen, Tyrone, stings Randal's nostrils while he's trying to eat. In a fraction of a second: "Are you sitting here?" 

His social anxiety shoots up like a black vein in the paralyzing banality of Tyrone's voice and so many dozens of others spitting a million different words that have less and less to do with each other and anything at all. 

"What?' says Randal. 

Tyrone sits down with his tray and 3 other guys Randal doesn't know but look familiar -- maybe from Christina -- with him; there's a bizarre formality to it but no one would point out there's a bizarre formality to it. 

"Hey, listen: you smoke sizzle?" he says, immediately going for his food. 

"I just smoke weed and drink, but maybe I drink too much." 

"Tyrone can get that if you wan' it," says one of the other guys, James, carefully, with peculiar flawlessness. 

"I can get all kinds of shit." 

The other two, David and Keith, look respectively curious and incredulous. David's eyes, the lenses of his eyes: have this shine of a promise that wasn't kept but sought afterwards regardless. Keith flips his eyes over Randal with equal amounts of pity and spite, but the feelings wither soft as clouds. 

Randal tried to focus on his food but their company had some awful, deplorable influence over him. "I should probably stick to what I know," he said. "I have enough problems finding money, as is." 

"You wanna make money?" said Tyrone. "I see money all day..." 

The appeal of it had something to do with the appeal of saying 'fuck you' to something else, something else associated with nothing else besides itself, whatsoever. If lives can be simplified as a collection of maybes & choices & facts, then the value or consequence of Randal's seminal & pivotal shift towards crime should include the in-competence of his other options. Elsewise, he would've been pulling dead, burdensome nails from crumbling walls occupying properties of lobstertrap-scam plots of other cityscapes. Running the machinery of America's tenuous contribution for & relationship with the rest of the world and directly- and indirectly with itself. He'd be painting the walls of a building he never thought anyone should enter. If crime is some result of bad parenting and yet emotionally-satisfies the intention of parenting--with obvious exceptions--then what: are parents in the jungle of their own lives? Animals with dark bellies blinking at their chances. 

****

He ended up staying at Dave's family's house/apartment. Tyrone, without consulting Dave, insisted that Randal make himself comfortable there for the indefinite future and it was certainly an improvement over the habitable but feral place of nowhere and Dave's family were well in the habit of seeing ephemeral faces move into and just as soon out of their walls, doors, home. The building altogether was little more than a heated cement cave with a satisfying, if modest feature of electronics and the luxuries of a middleclass kitchen. 

Randal laid down what he'd owned in the world up to that point in a small piece of the floor of a livingroom-made-sleepingquarters with two other people who slept there frequently. It was nothing he would have thought to ask for, but he was grateful for it. The alcohol, tobacco, weed-flavor of his way there arbitrarily repeated,. lingered in his throat, mouth, lungs. If they had bad intentions, they didn't have bad intentions towards Randal, personally. Only, he preferred the temporary ambiguity of the street to the certain dissatisfaction he'd have for a more "civilized" life. His head cradled nicely in the bookbag covered with a sweater on the floor and his bones slid here & there, like a JENGA puzzle teetering and he wasn't troubled with a thought at all as he perished effortlessly to many hours of sleep. 

**** 

FIVE 

When Randal woke up the next morning he met Alisha, Dave's youngest sister, sitting at the kitchen table with an expression of confused gluttony lost in her demeanor. The warm shadows of the dawn perforating the indefinite, coming day finding their certain path, clever, mute. 

"Oh," he said. "Good morning." 

Motionless, exact eyes. She said nothing. 

Randal moved one of the wooden chairs at the table and sat down. He didn't seem to be doing anything impolite, but he wasn't sure. Every other silence in the room felt like a police siren evaporating in its own volition. 

He wanted to ask where to make a cup of coffee, or something to drink, but his energy was consumed by something lame, consistently, whenever he made an attempt to say the words. 

Dave walked into the kitchen a little while after that. Fat, tired, noble, he filled a metal kettle with hot water from the sink and put it on one of the three- working stovetops and went to a cupboard filled with assorted coffee cups and only briefly looked at them before he said, "Randal, do you want some coffee?" 

The prayerish words distracted him from something. "Yeah?" 

Alisha glared at her younger brother with something between jealousy and contempt. "Where's my watch, David?" 

"What watch." 

"The watch I just found and just had." 

"Look in your sockdrawer." 

"I don't put things in there!" 

"Maybe you did." 

"Some'oney stole it!" 

"Ain't no one stole shit." 

The hot water was starting to boil. 

"Get up and make your coffee the way you want it, Randal." 

His ears moved dumbly to the command, like little red spiderwebs of instinct mapping out something temporary yet reliable. The ways leaves are devoured by the wind and the earth. With fragile, drug-soaked legs Randal stood up to stir together a cup of coffee. 

**** 

Dave's father, Gary, was neither an abstemious nor an insensitive man, and if he spoiled his children he did so in order to compensate for whatever portion of life would be denied to them under life's natural circumstances and when his heart was at its most sober he knew they were fated to endure whatever trials of grief and injustice and depravity were bound upon the courses of their decisions, etc. etc. 

When he met Randal Fincher it was simultaneously jarring and an uncanny and unspecific sort of relief. It wasn't as though he'd never seen a white face before, but it was the first time he'd seen one like this, or maybe just that Randal had been sleeping in his house of a sudden? 

He asked the two of them if they planned on searching for work when he saw them the first morning Randal had taken to staying with the Wallace's and Dave lied and said yes. 

He spoke to Randal with suspicious consideration, he was stern, yet thoughtful. Cold words of wisdom on unlikely ears. 

They left the apartment/house in search of something to drink and smoke for a few hours and the day crawled out of the belly of something ineffable and insuppressible, some travesty looking for the proper circumstances to take hold.  

****

"Pull up a chair, Randal, Tyrone was just about to explain how he's gonna make us rich beyond our wildest dreams." 

Randal and David took their seats at opposite sides of the cafeteria table, peeling themselves from & back into the palpable gossip that saturated the room like some anonymous, speculative phantom. 

"Ain't nothin wile about it," Tyrone argued to Keith. "It's sure money. You just too scared to hustle." 

Randal was deeply preoccupied with his hands on account of the haze weed he and Dave had consumed during their walk from Dave's house. Some discreet hunger rattling in his pulse. 

"You mean I'm too smart to've faith in You." 

"What does Tyrone want to do?" Randal naively asked the table. 

James had this look of mean pity, the kind of gesture meant to slap someone in the mouth. 

"I'm try'n ta do better for myself is what I'm try'n ta do," said Tyrone. 

"You don't have to go to jail to read books, nigga," said Keith. 

"I ain't gotta read books to stay out of jail." 

Randal wasn't so stupid to realize they were talking about selling drugs or stealing things to sell through a fence...but he was stupid enough to be curious about it. 

He said, "But I mean: what do you literally want to do?" 

"He thinks he can get away with robbing a grocery store and he's gonna buy houses for pennies on the dollar with what he takes." 

Nothing else in the entirety of the room interfered with- or challenged this idea. Nothing to distract or antagonize or cajole. 

Some hot light of opportunity flared in Randal's frontal lobes of a sudden. Enablement confused with support. Tolerance confused with reparation. This elusive feeling in his hands, how he sat, the dumb volume of the room pressing on his senses. "Do you have a gun?" he said. 

Tyrone, internally, flipped away a smile. "Piss-t." 

David jerked his tray to bump against Randal's. 

"It's gonna be cold, today," said James. 

"Who'da thought," said Keith. 

Tyrone licked his lips and finished eating his food. 

David said, "What time is it?" 

Early, as always. Too much time to wait and hardly enough to get somewhere with it. 

They took their noise from the noise of the cafeteria and something else would replace it and something else would replace that. The smallest, fewest words, whether good or bad, accumulate, until eventually the shape of them leans one way or another and all impermanence is absorbed into an immeasurable past. 

**** 

There was a terrible magic in the sight of the gun when Tyrone showed it to Randal, later. Hard metal of a tiny building, designed for exiting faster than entrance. The ephemerality of violence extinguishing the trespass of something else. The slim trigger of choice pivoting between yes & no. 

Randal considered it impolite to ask if Tyrone had ever shot at (let alone killed) anyone with it and in fact the weapon had never been fired save in demonstration and even beyond the attempted robbery this woeful history of events takes into account only came to rest in a neglected arsenal of violentless prosthetics and if either Tyrone or Randal held malice for any substance or influence in the world it was intended for money, not blood. 

They should've been better people. With more options. 

****

SIX 

The discreetly intoxicating, Italian lights of the supermarket tangled and faded along with the ghostly drips of white from the streetlamps and the distant, fugitive stars all but totally consumed in the darkness after them. The steady broadcast of conversation concerning the remainder of the evening while the feet of the bodies that performed them navigated the crowd and the sidewalk and a hundred-thousand thoughts & intentions & grudges & compromises were spat from nothing-to-being-to-nothing again. The dense yet magnificently aggressive, demanding size of it put a bitter sort of warmth in Randal's semi-feral heart. Not a sunset but a sun moving in the opposite direction it's expected to. The bullets of the gun were somewhere else since the gun had no bullets. Empty visage of a playingpiece lost from a game. The air of the sidewalk and the people moving around him soaked into his blood & lungs with the crisp affirmation of something used to getting its way yet with a bizarre hostility for said freedom. 

Tyrone felt himself guiding Randal through the entrance of the store, hoods and scarves over their heads & faces, black clothes whispering into the soft, palish indoor-light that let itself to the colorful flags of merchandise and the assorted figures that shuffled between them like toy figures with human wants and dull muscles. Tyrone saw the cashier they were going to demand the money from and he licked his lips underneath the scarf and gripped the handgun in his pocket and his heart swelled to something tight as a brick. 

Randal swallowed a fat pig of anxiety and followed his terrible partner's lead and they approached the convenience-counter and the girl had this inexcusably naive blush of lostness in her eyes when she moved from the task she was relenting in order to see what the criminals wanted. 

"Hello?" 

"Money." 

"Excuse me?" 

"You wanna get shot in the face?"

"My name's Natalie." 

Tyrone took the gun out of his pocket. "Do you wanna get shot in the face, Natalie?" 

She lost her sense of humor. "How much money do you want?" 

"All of it. Paperbag." James was sitting in  his car, waiting for them, a few blocks away. Keith, obviously, would have nothing to do with it. 

Natalie worked at the register as though she were performing any regular part of her job. When her fingers touched the keys it was the same as if she'd been ringing up some kind of exotic fruit or offbrand type of candy. 

The impersonality of all this did nothing to ease the tension in Randal's nerves. 

Natalie put the bills from the register into a paperbag, then attempted to hand the bag to Tyrone before he said, "Safe too bitch. Or a bullet in the face." 

The other people in the supermarket had of course become aware of their illegal presence by this time, but the consensus of the room had been to humbly forfeit the choice to interfere and allow this minor tragedy its chance to transpire, somebody else's fight, somebody else's struggle. 

She finally gave them the money--about $4,000--and they took it and Tyrone put the gun back in his pocket and they left the place as anonymously as they'd entered except there just happened to be a police officer standing on the sidewalk, with his partner, talking to a black man in his 50s who'd been drinking alcohol out of a thick glass bottle, and the first police officer noticed Tyrone in his hood, scarf, exiting the store and the paperbag of money in his grasp. The police officer snapped into soldier mentality. All bets focused. 

Randal didn't have a fucking clue how to react...but Tyrone sure as shit did. He busted from immediate view, through the parking lot of the place-next-door, where he could bang a few turns and get to the car soon enough. 

That moment would stay as vivid to Randal for some years afterward as any painting of ancient gods housed in a museum or personal collection. 

"Grab him." 

The second cop's hand flexed upon Randal's bicep and the cop wasn't without pity, almost recognizing Randal, almost wanting to, and Randal only heard Tyrone running away, soon enough making it for James and the hidden, parked car. And the undesirable, uncertain future becoming more certain until colder questions replaced their consequences.

Randal lost something as the handcuffs bit onto his wrists. His only thought was to listen for a good, appropriate question. They put him in a cell where he slept that evening before he thought of one.  

**** 

The walls of his cell hung as painlessly and innocently as the dead. Tombstone material leaning into the vast, shapeless dark of its impersonality and emptiness. It was strange, he thought, how each hour of one's life could finally, indisputably, persistently be resummarized, recontained into what time determined in the influence & fall of itself. How all lives are collected as one and it, too remains porous to the lives thereafter. He wanted to be in a comfortable bed in a dignified house but had no name for such a place. 

The night dripped with something barely palpable, but good. As though harmony itself, simply, slowly, nodded its invincible head from side-to-side and its eyes saw more than can be seen. As though a god with many powerful hands joined to their counterparts with such aplomb to raise & preserve the dead until the last of it was all that remained. 

And sooner than later, he fell asleep. 

**** 

SEVEN 

Tyrone zipped like a needle into the night. Merciless determined self-preservation. The money was damp with fear and many other possibilities. Each bill a lie and a promise and a choice and a chance for something otherwise separate from its day. The evil that dwells and ruminates in the affairs of peoples' values isn't evil without supporting contexts. The desperate conditions that inspire an equally desperate want for finance & resources are surely as culpable for social decline as the crime that results in defense of its degraded situation & livelihood. Tyrone released the gun that'd stared with a harmless, dead eye at the cashier some impossible minutes, fractions earlier down a sewer-drain, not to be unearthed for part of a century later,  his precise semi-muscular fingers kissing a silly artifact that made a sort of re-entry into the world around the same time Randal would be released from the bizarre & often tranquil limbo of trials and introductions and various appointments that stood as readily as rooms in a hospital, or the details of the laws his lawyer, a public defender, and the prosecuting attorney discussed in that audible, yet indecipherable code as foreign as numerical descriptions of a human face. 

He had at least 300 ft. on the cop that was pointed in his general direction but whose greatest consequence was pride, not freedom and sophistication, ultimately, is rooted in the wild, daring impulse to educate itself by default. The cop wasn't slow. He just wasn't as fast as Tyrone. 

Tyrone felt James slipping the car out of its spot and into the night street quiet as a kitten and they were soon another member in a parade of sentinels, among a thousand other strangers who weren't talking or even thinking much about Randal Fincher, who didn't have much to say or think about them, either. Everything belonged to someone and even the clumsy wind had become accustomed to certain habits. 

**** 

The police asked Randal if there was someone he wanted to call, he had a right to do that. The names of his father and his mother and a handful or so of other people flipped into the nerves behind his eyes like numeral on a cash-register. He didn't want to move to say their names. He didn't say their names. One feeling deteriorated and something else announced itself. 

"Armed robbery your idea of a good time?" The police officer was white and young. Face as hard & clean as a billiard ball. His words sounded almost sarcastic for the seriousness of their intention: like he held some detachment from his responsibilities, but there wasn't so much as a quarter/fuck of humor in Randal's considered responses to his question. The absurd...or, the Dharma, if you please...has a dumb, yet indisputable sensibility to undermine even itself. On some crazy level, Randal--misbegotten son, failed student, hapless attempted thief--wanted to tell this perfect stranger in his pressed uniform (and the convenient formality of being arrested) eclectic and infrequently whimsical things about Dave and Tyrone and James and Keith and sleeping on Dave's families' floor like a refugee of some unnoticed, unpowerful country lost in the very chance of itself. Petty arguments or brief explosions of joy or incredible shock & terror as alive & dangerous as a tiger or the feeling of driving in the backseat of a car to somewhere you never once in your life considered the real chance of driving to, scared, unsure, excited, or the inundation of serenity that accompanies the insomnia hours of the night and a million improvisations of houses. He wanted, lazily, to tell this cop about all of that, but instead he just waited in the cell like a bus or a cab or someone was soon to come along in their part of various appointments. His nostrils, face, lungs, blood in the air-conditioned air. Flickering want of something to drink, or a few drags from a cigarett, but then extinguished by its own volition. The steady, enduring silence of finality, uncomplaining resignation to the entropy of human life. Sleep. 

**** 

EIGHT: ALL THE MEMORABLE THINGS THAT HAPPENED WHILE RANDAL SPENT AN UNNATURAL AMOUNT OF TIME IN JAIL.