The night he drives off the road he’s drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels. His art work doesn’t sell well in Manhattan. But here, alone in the desert, his vision is understood. His eye roams over small hills and catches the Joshua trees and Brittlebush rising. The sun tumbles fast into the sand.

The night he takes out the guardrail he laughs and hollers to the asphalt to let him pass. The desert darkness is comfortable, an old friend’s embrace. The winding canyon walls are large granite hands of God to catch him if he should round a corner too fast, with only a scraped fender and a blown out tire as the cost of his loss of faith.

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There we were, my spirit guide and I, on the western road without a map. And before we could transfer my residual wisdom offshore, my old hitman jumped down from a passing train and offered me a freebie.

Not today, friend. I left that life behind.

You see, all the checkout clerks know my head crashes painful cymbals. They know I have yesterday’s beefsteak but no proper platter. More, I have seven dogs and no memory of how they opened the garden gate. Far above my pay grade, in the contrails of clouds, I study the ancient art of ordinary survival, but once a month or so, a cop taps my shoulder, suggests I sign up for a tax free gunshot of hope.

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And because he never loved, the man never hated, even as the firing squad stood impassive before him and prepared to propel him to another life after another death, although, as skeptical believer, he never endorsed any books of resurrection, and saw instead at the end of the nimble light a barrenness that stretched into an endless discolored dream. In confession of his multiple contradictions, another existence would clearly see his actions improvident but not rewardable with the punishment of salvos and slugs as his deeds had been in this life when he passed the boy’s house for the last time.

The boy’s cries through the cracks of the neighbor’s door leapt intolerable into his concern, or it might have been a pervasive fear of living a predictable life gripped, as sometimes he could be, by tales of imaginary heroes he had read about in books when as a child he ruled the world from under bedcovers in an hour that according to custom lay cataloged for sleep.

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Afternoon gray cloud light. Dark blue river, broad, calm.

A grandson with a fatal wish. A failed wish.

The worst kind.

Grandson has a name. Kyle. He sits alone on a concrete abutment. Barges roll past on their way to Portland. The river, wide and steady.

Barges don’t roll, says Kyle to the river, but the origami folds of his mind don’t give a damn. His incurable wish never rinsed itself in the rain.

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The sun near the river cooled itself in the setting and we climbed down from our family of horses to observe heaven’s descent. Our time fueled itself brief and we drove all our leftover doubts about the world’s disorder as stakes into the sacrificial ground. It would do no good to worry. Outside forces would continue without us, and everything that we could do would only serve to create a future we could not yet see.

But we could imagine and build. And so we left our fears pinned as moths on the collector’s cork.

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In the early predawn light of Indiana Route 161, as his late model car slammed into the side of a tractor trailer rig at 69 mph, shearing off the top of the car and leaving its decapitated chassis to screech beneath the truck and gradually slow and finally come to a stop on the side of the highway, William J. Cooper thought about the time his father had taken him to the circus and how he, with his childish sense of wonder fully intact, had marveled at the lion trainer.

How does he do it, Papa? he had asked. The lion trainer had his head inside the sharp guarded cave of the lion’s mouth.

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When the people of Allentown stepped from the corners of their uncertain fear, the president promised in a voice that weaved a silken tapestry that he would bring an end to their world of distress, that he would free their world of its inscrutable pestilence. He only needed their help.

One young man stood quiet and still. His town, with its beautiful brickwork and iron railings, had become a part of him over the years, every curve and corner. Each tree and street had multiplied him.

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They call it shrapnel in my head but it’s a needle in my cerebral cortex that stitches my thoughts into patterns I recognize when the meat cleaver opens my heart and kills all the ghosts that hide out there, Doc.

And Doc says we’ll figure it out together, but something outside my perception yammers to come in and I ratchet his words into another cubicle of my mind. Outside, a cloudless day stands erect and birds fill the air.

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Feels like San Pedro or Long Beach when I wake up: my tongue ripped thick with sea salt and diesel stink, eyes filled with yellow streetlight burlap sky. Rats gnawing ropes over by Terminal Way

in my head.

Two guys hurry past my bench with underbreath mumbles about bums.

What do they know? Ocean breeze is still free.

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Night. Always night. We applied our masks, raised the curtain, crossed a stage and recited our lines. Instructed words, foretold. Within a dream within a conviction that a thespian forgery of life must upstage the ashen reality we performed outside the confines of the theater.

A play with three acts. Performed to perfection. In silence we thanked the audience as they in cacophony applauded our bows. Forever driven to the accolades of a faithless public. Tragedy. Comedy. Death and becoming. For two hours, we birthed distraction from our human isolation, allowed them and us to briefly both escape.

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Learned a long time ago that people want to hear what they want to hear, not what you really think, so when my father asked me how I was doing, living on the edge of nineteen years under the sun, cut off from the world, unsung and alone, I told him fine, mentioned nothing of the volcano that babbled inside me, furious and ready to erupt but somehow calm, methodical, because a volcano carries no malevolence for its victims, only an uncontrollable desire to breach its confines and redspread its hot seed over the land.

My father nodded and went back to his newspaper, an old fashioned guy, still paid for paper, and I rose from the porch where we were sitting and looked up at the sky that looked down with its dark clouds like it wanted to swallow kids like me and then spit them out because we don’t belong here and we don’t belong there either. We leave a bad taste wherever we go.

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Every morning, Indians. As I wait for the bus, a coffee in my hand, Indians. They come from the alley next to the pawn shop. Chief wears newspapers and duct tape. I’m unclear what we’ve done. Or if I’m guilty.

“Good morning Chief,” I say. “What’s the plan?” Same thing I say every morning.

“No plan,” says Chief. His tribesmen nod. Everyone has mud on their shoes.

“Then what?”

“It’s time you called me God,” he says.

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