Khary Bello at the boardinghouse window. Morning. Tattered side city. Scattered sky clouds. Small hunger. No voices. August.

Streetside, shoes cracked, he walked. Each day the same. Walk the old districts for a small job for a small coin. Sweep out a doorway. Throw a bag of trash in a pile of other bags of trash. Pity work for an old man, but he managed. On occasion thrived.

On the sidewalk a hatch opened in his mind and a voice dropped in that spoke in broken tiles and sparks from a bench grinder. It grated out the word bomb and Khary Bello put his hands to his head and whispered oh god.

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At times, beneath the lunar inception of night, when old memories, sharp and serrated, slice his serenity, Enrique Roberto Lopez Sandia recalls when he was a child on his way with his parents to the old country and how he wondered why one country should be old and another not so old and how his parents had little tolerance for his nascent peculiarities and so threw from their mouths repelling spears of words like: because I said so. And: one day you’ll understand.

In the harsh fluorescence of the airport terminal Enrique had crossed a threshold with his left foot first instead of his right and knew that a majestic misfortune would soon slide from the skies in retribution for his error, for he had read the great Book of Fates and had acquainted himself with all the reckonings that stalked a life. He knew how they stood ready to strike like a phalanx of hostile intendants if the unaware or careless should stray from the cautious path.

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When Ernest Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun in 1961 just shy of 62 years old, he did it because he saw the spiritual progression of those two numbers and because he had too much success in life, said Marcus as we paused outside a barber shop on the Avenue of Saints just down from the cathedral.

I was trying to light a cigarette and almost dropped my matches. That’s nuts, I said once I got the cigarette going. Who kills himself over success?

I’ll tell you kid, said Marcus. A guy seriously wounded in the war. A man with four wives and two plane crashes to drink to.

More reason to live, I said.

To you maybe, said Marcus. But Hemingway saw his death coming later that year and wanted to show it who’s boss.

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Tuesday. Hollis Jenkins walked to the mailbox. Never a letter, but he had to clean out the junk every damn day. If not, some kid would pull it out and throw it in the street. Because he could. Mean or unpleasant or merely bored. A world of because they could.

Hollis had no affection for the outside world. Only a fierce defensive duty for his house and property. A government pension bought him beer and meat. And ammo. Beyond that, for all Hollis Jenkins cared, the world could bathe in its cesspits.

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The man came home. Like many do. Tired of his job. His life. The rent due and a bank account barely. A movie on TV and he watched it without watching. Some old black and white thing about a man who came home to a satchel of money in his bedroom because he had robbed a thief.

It didn’t make sense. The man came home like so many come home. From the movies with popcorn in their teeth or from work with dread in their heart. Movies. Life. They don’t make sense. Maybe the man got off at the wrong stop when he left work. Or the movie. Life just the flip side of death.

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Nothing existed before his blindness. The past too was sightless. For uncounted time he lay enclosed in darkness alone with disjointed thoughts in his dark world. A voice said wake and he stood, a boy in a lighted room next to his father in bed who slow exhaled a tubercular life. A voice said sleep and again his eyes filled with unyielding black. He breathed quiet and slow another long time in the dark. A voice said wake and the final fire in the world entered. Illuminated his cell. He sat alone, naked, adult. Skin translucent and spotted. Clothes lay nearby, he dressed. A stairwell, descent. A sign read Hospital St. Thomas. He pushed open the door to a city street filled with nimble light and life.

Can you help me? he asked a passerby and the person said no for haste of a promise to be someplace when a bell chimed the hour of agreement.

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Night. He pushed the old car hard for the shipyards. Missed an onramp out of San Fernando, dropped onto the streets of Van Nuys. Rushed when he could down the carchoked boulevard. At stops his redlight brakefoot edgy, eager to free the engine from its idle.

Crime scene ahead. Ambulance, stretchers, sheets. He took a hard left on Magnolia, ran deeper into the body of the night. Cop said driving too fast but we’ll let it go this time. A shared forearm tattoo. Brother both victims of the same wargod pressgang that flew home so damn many coffins.

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Right there inside the hall of Senators full of meat and presented to the cameras that pick him up and shoot a verdict of his face out to the world sits Mr. Stuart Alexander to testify before the political dinosaurs that will soon hobble out and question his beliefs and practices in the hope that they may stay relevant within their shrinking constituencies and maintain on their juiceless features the captivating glow of a television spotlight. Young Mr. Stuart Alexander, accustomed to getting what he wants, doesn’t fear the senatorial relics that teeter on the brink of extinction. The world belongs to the fresh.

Do you see us? asks Senator Erstwhile, chairman of the committee and grandfather to at least three dozen boys and girls who have unfortunately inherited his fryingpan face and his overactive eyebrows.

You are barely visible, says Stuart Alexander. On the edge of worthlessness and sooner gone better.

I was talking to the cameraman, says Senator Erstwhile. We still rule the world.

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A bell in the distance is always a bell and not yet a death knell as you grasp brambles and branches for a ration of natural guidance and consent to a series of red streaks they grant as stigmata on your forearms and hands.

You are not an abandoned spirit, rather one of many pilgrims who follow a related road, a path scratched on a map with sticks and hard blood that carries you to another garden door.

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Laura stood in the kitchen, stared out at the neat rows of brown houses.

Morning. Gray sky. A knock on the door.

“Yes?”

“Sign here.” A clipboard. A letter.

She closed the door, held the letter, looked at the sender, set the letter on the table, went back to the kitchen, stared out at the houses. A light rain fell.

The day moved across the sky. The gray remained.

At dinner, she told Paul. His face stayed stone. “We better read it,” he said.

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His beliefs are living beings, Holden says, talking about himself again. At first they fall as impoverished angels into his eyes as dawn paints the window reddish. Then they lather his daylight with hard thoughts of who should receive a suggestion of death and who a short sentence of life. They tumble into the crevices of his doubts, clamoring with their sharp edges of how he must rise and admire his administration of justice.

What's that? I say. You're not a great god, not even a mayor or a teacher. Only a failed novelist.

True, he says. But we all have more inside.

Give me more coffee, I say to the waiter. He bows and retreats to the kitchen.

It wasn't always like this. Before the world rolled clouds across the sky faster and made clocks our masters, we rode from one end of our neighborhood to another on bicycles, playing the pedals like drums. We pounded rhythms with a ferocity that thrust phantoms from our dreams and gave them flesh.

Holden clears his throat. Do you remember how we loved Antonio?

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As a bird I would gently fly high above buses and those who mount sidewalks on a hardline damp day of waging war with office chores and bills to pay – but I’m a mere creature of arms and legs, and cannot reach an alien heaven from this Avenue of Saints. I’m stranded on the far shore of salvation.

On this street James and Julie and I are in the rain, our cardboard roof tapping the same slow hymn I remember from when I was a simple victim of family pain that thrust me from a home into the cold.

Once this city rested on a heart, but now it’s broken and spent. Some few lucky grabbed a good life by the throat and squeezed it hard with their coffee delight and the freedom of another birthright. And oh, how they do fast-track their feet when they pass, never sleepless at night of what would happen should they not make the rent on time.

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