Till Human Voices Wake Us

By Dante Dapolonia © 2009

I did not intend this. It is important to understand. I did not intend this. Look at
me. I did not intend. Isn't intention the essence of sin? Look. No one can say that I
wanted to be hiding like a fox in a hedgerow with a pack of dogs howling in the distance.
Who would choose that? Who would stir their will to that? And of will? Shall I speak of
will; if intention should I not speak of will? Free? Who is free? And then trot out in
elliptical answer a modern treatise on quantum mechanics. All nonsense. I am nonsense
hiding from the question, for finally it doesn't matter how I got here with the dogs baying,
the dogs circling. It matters only that I survive.
I am writing this as I sit in a cafe in a run down area of Portland, Oregon. I could
be anywhere, at least in the United States. A broad street, heavy traffic, strip malls, fast
food, car lots, an occasional big box store. I own a house in Hillsboro, Oregon. That's
Portland. Suburban Portland. I have a house, a bank account, two ex-wives and a load of
debt. I am a reputable person, more or less. An accountant. Well, not a CPA. A
bookkeeper. Fine. But I didn't cook any books or embezzle my way into this mess.
I was at home last night, sitting by the window in my bedroom. It was a rainy
night; soft rain fell on the driveway and on the street out front, and the darkness was not
threatening. Just darkness. I often sit in the dark. I was worried and the rain was soothing.
The sound of water running in the gutters was soothing. I didn't hear anything. I didn't
hear a thing. Except the rain. The window was open. I had been in bed and got up to open
it and had sat close to it, to hear the rain, to feel the air. To worry. A light slid across the
walls from the doorway, came to the bed and then went out. A single narrow beam so
quick that I doubted I had seen it. Without a sound. Then a noise like angry spitting fell
into the room, louder than the rain, much louder, but still nearly silent. Then a man's
voice, as calm and soothing as a doctor's, 'Check him'.
Someone had just tried to kill me. The blankets and sheets were rolled. Boom,
boom, boom, or rather spit and had I been sleeping I'd have been dead, one to the other in
an instant like a bad poem with a stanza or two or three on the tangled web of sleep and
dream and life and death. I didn't think of that at the time. Art requires leisure, after all.
I tumbled through the window, knocking the screen out with my bald head, rolling on the
wet grass and stumbling to my feet like an out of control gymnast. I fell again at the fence
and ran across the street and behind a neighbor's house and kept running, between
houses, across yards, the air frothing in my lungs like churning seawater and the rain cold
on my bare skin. I was naked and had no shoes. And someone was trying to kill me. Do
you understand? I'm an accountant. More or less. There's nothing about me to inspire the
passion to kill. Nothing. My ex-wives didn't even yell at me. They just shook their heads
and walked away. I'm a person who disappoints. But no one gets angry. Of course that's
naive, isn't it? As if anger had anything to do with the need to kill. To kill me. Fear.
Perhaps fear.
I was lonely. My second wife was gone and I wasn't dating. The word alone
frightened me. I hadn't the nerve any longer to sit across from a woman and converse. To
make social noises, the cries of polite response and body language, a bird dancing across
the sand, wings stretched, throat puffing and popping like a feathered drum. Absurd. So I
hit the chat rooms, the people sites on the Internet, and realized, as I'm sure others have,
that there I had no baggage. I had nothing but the air around me. I was free. That's the
illusion and the illusion felt like the breath of god giving me life. I exaggerate. Of course
I do. That's the point, isn't it? Exaggeration bore no stigma. I am who I pretend to be
without the annoying constraints of reality. It sounds pathetic now. The mantra of a dusty
old spider luring victims to his web, a flim-flam artist seeking the wealthy and foolish, a
leering, panting old sot in ragged expectation of nubile maidens, the seventy virgins of
paradise, young boys, girls even younger. It could be. It could have been. But it wasn't.
That is the possibility. Freedom is fraught with danger. But it wasn't what I meant.
I just knew, quite suddenly as I sat in front of the computer that I needn't be a
middle-aged bookkeeper, bald, fat, a lonely failure. I needn't be what I seemed, even to
myself. So I became who I wanted to be. Who is to say that wasn't really me? Strip away
the accidents, the pratfalls and stumbles, the decisions best forgotten, undone and done
again, and why is that not me? There is intention, pure and simple. If the sin lies in the
intention then does not the reality also? And does it matter? Really does it matter? In this
electronic world where the lies are imbedded, in life, in reality, does it matter? Tell me
what's real and I'll confess to lying. Is the sky blue? We see it that way. As we see. But
what are we? And why? This flash of radiation we call blue, that we call seeing. That we
are.
I did not flaunt anything. I didn't spin a web. No traps. Just words. Words through
the pulsing air. I have always wanted to be a writer. I thought it was something I would
be good at. I've read a lot, not trash, not modern tales of murder and mayhem, the
classics, Hawthorne, Henry James, Fitzgerald, poetry even. Even poetry. I've memorized
poetry because I thought I might quote it sometime. I never did. I couldn't find the
moment. It's hard to work into a conversation, especially if you don't have many
conversations.
I know literature and I thought that all I needed then was to write, just sit down and write.
It was a matter of time, the right moment. I couldn't find the moment. But when I created
myself anew the moments hardly mattered, that I hadn't quite found, had never really
written. Because I said I did and I am who I say I am. A famous or nearly famous, or
perhaps obscurely famous writer whose name, if known but I would not reveal, would be
familiar to the cognoscenti. A wonderful word, a lovely word, for people I would like to
know. I didn't say this. I am not stupid. But I implied as much, as such, this who I am,
perhaps. And it's who I became in this amorphous digital world, a hard, cold fact created
in the soft matrix of assumed precision, sort of like a description in a Henry James novel.
I didn't claim I was tall and handsome and young and rich with fancy cars and yachts and
a ready at the trigger nine-inch erection. It was the Internet but I wasn't totally lost. I was
still myself, or who I intended to be. And my question remains, how is that less who I am
than who I aim.
I enjoyed myself and I wasn't lonely anymore. I developed what I might call a
following. Perhaps that is too egotistical. I had friends, people who sent me email, who
looked for me when I was online, told me their thoughts, literature, art, politics, though I
tried to avoid politics, I really did, as if the mundane were beneath me. God or not, the
cosmos, the meaning of meaning, these were the fodder for my intellect and soul. Yes,
soul. An artistic and yet cold, hard eyed soul, a Leonardo, a Michelangelo. I eschewed
politics except in passing. And my friends consulted me, thought of my thoughts when
they thought.
 I avoided the aesthetic as well, the soft belly of art, the damp wrappings of
romanticism where the indefinite, the ineffable, passes for thought when there is no
thought but only longing. No D. H. Lawrence for me and James does drive me crazy.
Sometimes. I have told people. I don't hide who I am. A realist. A scientist with an
artistic sensibility, perhaps a visionary. And having become that I was compelled to be as
I was and to do as I said I had done. So I wrote a story. I really needed to, didn't I? Not to
bolster a false image, an untrue persona, but to confirm who I had become. Perhaps I
should have constructed the story differently, made it more definitely a work of fiction
and myself as known to these many new friends as less of a hard eyed realist with quite
so many contacts in the establishment. I've said I avoided politics. Well, I did. But I may
have implied a certain standing, informal certainly, among the power structure of our
government. By that I meant, if it is the image I created, or part of it, those sort of people
who, unsung and unknown, do the work of government while politicians come and go
claiming credit, like ants working while the butterflies swarm. Well, perhaps I did. The
story was bolstered by that image, made more believable.
Now it could be said that a story of any worth should stand on its own. I agree.
Absolutely. One thing just led to another, without a definite intention on my part. Again
that word, intention. Sometimes things just get out of hand. The tangled web. Bobby
Burns understood. I worked very hard on my story. I felt it deserved every support I
could give it, the persona, and timeliness. I did not discuss politics or want to play with
politics but felt a subject of awareness and importance, current importance would add
power to whatever I contrived. So I chose global warming. Perhaps that was a mistake. In
hindsight, the clearest of vision, always isn't it, this hindsight? I wanted currency. I
wanted something of importance. Global warming is the slavery of our time, the problem
that will not go away, the problem by which we will be judged by history, even if it's not
a problem, do you see, even if it's not, though I judged it to be real and inexorable or I
might not have used it. And we are the generation of

Pierce and Buchanan and Polk waiting for our Lincoln, and stretching a point, I realize,
stretching, I was to be the Harriet Beecher Stowe. I am not without ambition. I think I'm a
better writer than she was. Read the story. Many people have. There is no sin in ambition
that should have left me naked cowering in the rain, chased by people with guns as if I
were a rat, not even a fox, as I said before, not even that, without the honor of cleverness
or plush red fur, a bushy tail, not even a bushy tail but my ass, dirty with mud, puckered
with age and cold, pale and unlovely. You see, I am a writer.
There is an element of chance also. We are all victims of chance. That sounds like
something a Greek might have written, something I might have quoted as if it were truly
a quote. Fate, isn't it fate to which we are victim? Fate is blind and blind fate is chance as
far as the victim is concerned. Am I making sense here? I am still agitated. I can still feel
the cold horror of the rain on my naked flesh, the night air of darkness, the taunting
contrast of comfort in those lighted houses I ran past and hid behind. It was last night,
you see, only last night.
I began talking with my Internet friends about my story.
I was a writer. I presented myself as a writer, but also as a scientist, as someone versed on
science, accustomed to the rigors of demonstrable verisimilitude. When I say the story
began this, perhaps I mislead. True beginnings can be difficult to designate. The story did
begin in fact when I began talking about it in the sense that ultimately the talking, this
internet communication, emails etc. became the story much as the dialogue in a film or
play or radio drama becomes the story. I added radio drama because I am thinking of
Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre production on radio back in the day. It was a radio
version of 'War of the Worlds', an even older story by H.G. Wells. Old, ancient, and yet
the drama when done by Welles had the country in an uproar. Ridiculous. It was beyond
understanding. Everyone knew there was no one on Mars, and yet the Martians were
invading. Panic, fear. And I thought last night that this is what has happened. Now. To
me. Somehow this story has been believed. But why kill me? Why kill the teller? I don't
understand. Or I begin to understand but would rather not. No, I would rather not.
I never did quite write the story. I made conversation.
I made presentation, as drama. But chance. I was talking of chance. As I began, I came
across two seemingly minor blurbs of scientific news in the local paper. One was a
hypothesis by an astronomer, an expert of the solar system, that there had once been
oceans of water on Venus. This was some sort of infrared mapping done by a NASA
flyby or landing, or some such thing. Venus is now completely covered in cloud and has
a surface temperature of 900 degrees. More or less. There are pictures of the surface from
the NASA missions. A rocky desert, dry, hot, no water. Then an unrelated story spoke of
finding the amino acid glycine in the dust and ice of a comet.
There is a theory that these complex molecules have formed in the maelstrom of space
and came as debris to this planet thus leading to life, evolution and yours truly. Of course,
I don't understand the details. Mars, Venus, glycine, evolution. Fine. I saw the beginning
of my story.
I claimed to my Internet confreres that I was researching a science fiction story on
the planet Venus, or somehow involving Venus without being specific. I may have
become a touch grandiose here. But the image of water, cool, blue water on that desert
planet was intoxicating. And I had my idea. That had come to me immediately, with the
newsprint still crackling in my hands. I said that in my research I had accessed the NASA
web site for photos of Venus from the mission that had landed on the surface. Since I
portrayed myself as the sort of person well versed in computer usage it seemed logical to
carry the masquerade further. I accessed NASA but went beyond the well known public
site, beyond the known photos, the rocky, hot desert land, into a realm of photos that
NASA and those controlling the agency had chosen not to make public, had in fact
classified to the highest, most restrictive level. I feigned surprise at this. Why would they
do this, never quite specifying who 'they' would be, NASA mangers to begin with and
then intelligence operatives and finally, certainly political managers from various
administrations past and present. A big secret, carefully, carefully controlled. But why?
What had I found?
I'm not lacking in imagination. I know what makes a good story. Fear. Sex,
certainly, beautiful men and women, heroics, but most perfectly, fear. I said that I had
found photos from a Venus mission that NASA had reported as a failure. But the photos I
had uncovered by hacking into the closed NASA database showed a rover covering the
rocky landscape and then a clear, almost harsh photograph of what appears to be a black
stone tablet, a polished smooth rock about a foot square lying among the debris. On it are
etchings, marks cut into the surface of the stone as if by intention, as if with a purpose. A
language perhaps, something with meaning but indecipherable as far as I could see.
Seeking information on this mission, this failure no longer spoken of, I claimed to have
found evidence that NASA had successfully brought this stone back to Earth. But I said I
could find nothing more. My access terminated before I could find out what had been
discovered from this odd black rock. It could well have been a natural geological
phenomenon. Earth rocks are replete with scarifications on which the imaginative might
discern things not there, writing that meant nothing, words that were not words. I was the
sensible scientific man. Yet why had this stone warranted retrieving from an alien planet?
Why that, I wondered aloud, or rather clicking clicking clicking on my computer
keyboard. I said I would enlarge the image of the stone I had lifted from NASA and see if
I could figure out what, if anything, it had to reveal. A code breaker as well as a computer
whiz. Do you see why I say 'grandiose'? I was, I admit, enjoying myself.

I hadn't really hacked into the NASA site. That needs to be understood. I have
trouble entering familiar websites, with my user name and password. It never works the
first time, does it? Not for me. I have not the capacity to 'hack' anything. For me the very
word still means a taxicab. I did nothing illegal. That needs to be understood. Telling a
story is not illegal. Being dramatic, spinning a few self aggrandizing lies, who has not
done this at one time or another, whether on the internet or within the slow fluctuations of
a cocktail party. Do people still have cocktail parties? Do they go to bars and tell lies face
to face through the scented air of alcohol and aftershave and perfume? Or is it all on the
Internet? It doesn't matter. I was never very good in bar rooms and never went to parties.
No one invited me.
Having created this story, it began a life of its own.
It wasn't just me. It wasn't just my imagination that wouldn't leave it alone. Or my ego. I
enjoyed the attention, the cyber friendship where I seemed to be somebody, to be known
with respect. I admit that. Then my car was searched. It wasn't broken into. There was no
damage and nothing was taken. But it was entered and searched. I'm certain of it. Things
were moved slightly, the tissue box, a book, some papers. The book was 'Steppenwolf'. I
know. I'm old to be reading 'Steppenwolf'. I'm not an angry, questing young man
anymore. Frankly, I never was. The point is, it was turned. It was moved. Then my house,
though I was less certain. Perhaps the car had stirred a latent paranoia in me. I became
uneasy. I began looking for people who might be following me or watching me although
I never saw anyone. And my house, my own house, became strange, almost alien to me.
That may be why I wasn't sleeping well, as if the house, violated, had warned me, had
finally, that night, saved my life.
Of course I incorporated this into my drama. I told my friends that I was being
followed, that my house had been searched, with the definite implication that it was the
result of my discoveries. 'They' were watching me, 'they' wanted to know what I knew
and 'they' were out to get me and stop me from revealing their secrets. This added reality
and fear to my work. It enhanced me. A true hero needs danger. How else to be heroic?
But the scribed rock was proving difficult. I had no point of reference. I had only my
mind and the marks on the black rock. I had, though, protected my work, the image of the
stone, my notes. I hid them well or carried them with me. Whoever had been through my
house and car had found nothing. I asked for help with the deciphering, things to look for,
and then would-be forensic linguists came bounding through cyberspace. To involve
others seemed to increase the heat and tension. I was asked to publish the surface of the
stone so that others might attempt it. I feigned fear and was accused of selfishness and
egotism and finally megalomania. I had broadcast my paranoia, certainly. It was part of
the story, even though it was real. How easily that had happened. How quickly my story
and this sudden reality had overlapped. I told myself it wasn't so. It was all imagination
and by spinning my fear into the story I began to believe that it must be story, only that,
and not a genuine feeling worthy of thought or consideration. I deceived myself. I
watched for followers still and felt unsafe, unprotected in the house, but I didn't believe
myself. Until somehow I began to believe the story.
Finally I announced on the Internet that I had deciphered the stone, or thought that
I had. I was prepared to give a loose translation of what was indeed a language and to
publish the photo I had of the stone, the etched surface, from which I had worked, in
order that others might confirm or deny my findings. That is the scientific way, the
testable hypothesis, the repeatable results. Of course I had no photo. There was no stone.
I admit I hadn't thought ahead to this point but the story was rolling, I thought, the story
will take care of itself. And it has, really, rolling right over me as if I were a minor detail
who had got in the way.
In my last posting before I was to publish the results I intentionally created an
atmosphere of deep fear, with images of shadowy, powerful people following me,
watching me every moment of the day, tampering with my mail, tapping my landline,
listening to my cell, always there, becoming ever more obvious and therefore more
threatening, the scrutiny revealing itself as a warning, desist, leave this alone, walk away
while you are still able. And it was true, do you see, it was true. I was heightening the
affect, yes, yes I was, a good dramatist, but I felt that I was being followed, I felt that I
was watched, my mail opened, my phones listened to, though in truth I received nothing
but junk mail and no one ever called me. I don't know why I even bothered having a
telephone, cell or landline. It was a waste of money, but I didn't consider that. I was
afraid and claiming that I was afraid. And it wasn't a lie, was it? My cyber family warned
me. I was inundated with messages, postings, offers of shelter and protection and most
adamantly, demands that I share my findings, the stone's surface, the photo I had and my
translation lest they be lost if anything happened to me. I was not important, only the
circumstance, the event, the story. It had grown beyond me and like any large object with
inertia, it would go as it would go and I could hang on or get off but I couldn't stop it.
That night, yesterday night, I sat in the dark by the window and someone shot at
me thinking I was asleep in bed and I ran naked into the dark and rain. I had run through
the blocks, over fences, through yards, keeping off the streets, terror giving me speed, my
lungs frothing, my naked flesh steaming with fear. I collapsed against a doghouse in a
backyard strewn with children's toys, bicycles, wagons, balls of every size and shape. A
small black dog the size of a fox but without a tail came out of the doghouse and looked
at me.
It didn't seem to mind the rain, or me for that matter. It didn't bark, for which I was
grateful. I held my hand out to it, a gesture of friendship, but it shied away and stood in
the mud watching me. I heard the movement of a car approaching, the tires hissing on the
wet street, and the distant noise of other dogs barking, but the car passed and the dogs
became quiet.

I slept in the doghouse wrapped in a foul smelling blanket, the small dog,
reconciled, beside me. In the morning a woman fed the dog and children clattered
through the yard, two cars left and everything was quiet. The sunlight was bright and the
yard smelled of warmth and dampness. I broke into the house, showered and dressed
myself in the clothes of a man not too much larger than I was. I stole some money I found
in the kitchen, nearly a hundred dollars, and ate a breakfast of sweetened dry cereal and
soymilk. I wiped the place down, just a thief would in a television drama, and left with a
passing thank you to the small dog who seemed uninterested.
It wasn't until I was walking down the street in the morning sunlight, wearing
clothes I has stolen, not twenty blocks from my own house, that the fear seized me like a
hand of ice twisting my bowels. What had I done? Dear god, what had I done? I had
wanted attention, regard, a few friends, a touch of respect, love, a little love, that's all.
Where is the harm in that? Don't we all need love? Don't we? And respect, or maybe
respect alone would do, a decent counterfeit for love. It didn't matter as I thought of it. I
hadn't time for the parsing of human emotions. Whatever I had needed or wanted I now
had people trying to kill me. I didn't deserve that, no matter what I had done. I know it's
common as dirt, humans killing humans, alone or collectively, the human condition, but
no one deserves it. There is no excuse. Even if the story were true, even if I had great
secrets to tell. And I had none. I had nothing. I laughed at the absurdity of myself, the
pathetic nonsense of who I was. Then I became angry. They had no right to kill me,
whoever 'they' were, a they not unlike the 'they' I had created. They had no right, even if
the story were true.
And that's when the obvious slapped me in the face. In some way the story was
true. I hadn't even written it. I was never going to write it, not really, not as a story, one of
those carefully crafted creations of the language that once, a long time ago, had appeared
in books and magazines. I'd read them. I said I was well read and it's true. Shall I
catalogue them? Shall I run a list, Hemingway to Carter to Bowen, ad nauseum, or start
with Boccacio, add O'Conner, Flannery and Frank, unrelated by chance, and O'Faolin. I
know the list. I have it. And I know I'm not on it. It doesn't matter. I was playing out a
drama, not writing a story. What I fancied had little to do with what had happened. What
had happened; there was the problem, there was the drama, begun by m and now
spinning out of control, bullets flying and I had become a burglar and a fugitive. Because
the story was true, or someone believed it was true enough, close enough that I needed to
be silenced. Yet I was blind. I didn't know what 'they' believed. I didn't know who 'they'
were. We never do, do we, in the stories? Just a generalized fount of conspiracy, the
government or a part of the government within the government, or the illuminati, the
Masons, Rosicrucians, Montessori teachers and Waldorf dance instructors. I didn't know
and the only clue was my own imagination. The drama had drawn this to me. It wasn't
my pathetic need for attention. The story not written had done this and my advertising on
the Internet had done its work, bringing me an audience. The only clue I had was the
drama.
I found a quiet coffee shop on the riverfront and drank coffee and ate stale pastry
and waited for something to occur, something to turn over in my brain that would tell me
what to do. I could finish the drama, go to the library and begin chatting on the net, tell
my many new friends the solution, what I had intended to say. But why? To see how
close to the truth I was. I was close enough now that I had been shot at and chased from
my house. I had intended, in this drama, to report that the black stone found on the
surface of Venus was the last monument of a dead civilization, the self-conscious artifact
of a culture that by being, by evolving, by becoming, had destroyed itself. And in self
awareness the stone admitted the culture's failure, that in furthering itself, becoming their
equivalent of industrialized, using fossil fuels, carbon fuels that abounded on their well
watered planet, they had polluted the air and begun a warming that had quickened beyond
their control, beyond their will to change the way they lived and stop the corruption of
the air and the sky, until even had they done so it was too late, the warming was self
sustaining, the temperature rising until they knew they were doomed. They hadn't the
wherewithal to leave. They would all die, every last one of them, as the air became hotter
and hotter, until the water boiled and the once livable planet became unceasing rock and
sand with a surface temperature of 900 degrees. As a last gesture of hope they had sent
artifacts of themselves and their culture into the void of space, hoping without real hope
that their rudiments of knowledge and the complex molecules from which they had risen
would find a place to live, to continue. That was my story, the drama, a fearful Ellison, a
current warning, crying wolf because the wolf is really here, at the door, I wanted love, I
wanted attention, but the wolf is truly at the door and we are it. That is what I had
intended to say. And I was being attacked because someone, the eternal 'they', thought it
was true. They knew, didn't they? They had more knowledge than I had.
 So it was true. Somehow, in some manner, it was true.
The coffee steamed and the windows misted and the river was brown with mud, fat and
swollen, silent on its way to the sea.
I suppose I lost heart. Isn't that the expression, and it means so much. For what is left? Is
there anything left that is worth having? Or was I going soggy with easy romanticism in
the damp air that seemed to carry the river in it, the dark clouds, the steam of coffee, the
water boiling and my breath and the breath of all living things, boiling softly into the air.
I left and walked beside the river and listened to the soft sound of the water against the
embankment. I was frightened when I thought of it, when I considered. I was being
pursued. I would be killed if I was caught. It seemed such a minor thing, my death, in the
face of what these people thought they knew. Was I being fanciful? How was I to know?
No one had offered to discuss the issues with me. A town hall meeting perhaps. They
have been so popular lately, so carefully contrived. Tonight's topic- Global Warming!
What Must We Do? Our panelists, a self-aggrandizing charlatan, would be hacker if only
he knew how, and a darkly shrouded panel of intelligence operatives with guns and one
imperative, silence, silence, silence forever, lest the poor, ignorant souls of the earth
discover what they have done and what is to become of them. Shall we then too launch
the complex molecules into space and hope they catch somewhere, another planet with
water not too far from a star, good light, a few clouds, rainfall and rivers and life. A
universal chain letter into the vastness of space in the hope that somewhere in the
distance and time, for they are the same, are they not, all the same, something will evolve
with the awareness and sense to protect what has occurred. It didn't seem to matter. Being
chased and shot at didn't seem to matter.
I walked to the library and wrote my last postings on the Internet. I gave my name
and address and told he truth, that
I had created this story as a drama, and I told them what had followed. Go to my house, I
said. There are bullet holes in the walls. But maybe there aren’t. Maybe that has been
corrected. The bed has been made and the screen on the window replaced. It is all part of
the story and there is no story, really. A story about a story that might have been or might
be or never was.
I didn't stay to chat. I might have.
It seemed superfluous, like Horatio standing on the stage amidst the fallen bodies,
refusing to leave, refusing to let the curtain drop. Any questions? What shall we talk of
now? How about those Mets, Cubs, Cardinals and did she really say that to him and who
was he seen with and where did he say he had gone? Oh, my! I bought a notebook at a
convenience store that smelled of hotdogs and disinfectant and am writing this in another
cafe, more steam, a deeper, darker scent of coffee, the breath of life, the final breath,
bread just baked, the sea, new mown hay, the skin of a woman I might have loved. The
romance of my soul washes over me. I don't know who I'll give this to, if anyone.
Perhaps a reporter for the local newspaper. How fitting. No one reads the newspaper
anymore.
This manuscript was found scattered through the mail slot at the front door of the
'Oregonian', a dying daily newspaper in Portland, Oregon. It was not published by them
since, as a work of fiction, it is not news. The author is undetermined.