Smoke Eyes
Part I
I don’t know why I went out today. The air was thicker than ever, and the sun was hot enough to boil the boys in the gutter. I crawled along the walkways that shutter beneath the airways, and struggle to keep themselves aloft above the railways. All ways. Always. Which way? Ahh, that’s right. I found myself in the corner store, drifting back and forth in front of the fridges. Dripping sweat like the condensation on the glass bottles. They brought them back you know. Gone are plastics. It’s all glass now. At least that’s what they call it. Truthfully, it’s closer to the texture of skin. They make it in the mountains to the west of town. A handful of roughriders wandered up there a few decades back, and never came back. Folk started to look for them, but they always came back empty handed. At least, until Jervis Comcarrion did his work. A gentleman by nature, and a sleuth like in the old dime novels my pappy told me about. He found the roughriders, and the abbey they built. The first roughrider monks. Not a drop of wine came from up on high, but plenty of skinglass, as I call it. Don’t know what the recipe looks like, and frankly I couldn’t care less. A vessel. One thing, built for another. Am I just a vessel? Are you? Who am I built for? I bought a sugary drink and two lemons. One swig, one bite. Dubious balance.
I used the walkways to cross centermarket, and found my way to the laughing wall. I remember hearing about the first face painted on the wall. They said a girl barely ten years old scaled the outer frame of the walkways and leapt from the radiation shields to a crack in the wall. With one arm pinned in the crack, she used the other to spray a laughing face on the wall. Since then, one by one, the face is spreading. No one knows if the same girl, a woman now, is still responsible. Hell, no one knows if a person is responsible at all. The face has a look to it. A feeling. No picture of the wall is ever quite the same, as if the faces move on their own. It could be learning. Replicating. Absorbing the nature it observes. If that’s the case, it must be a tangled nightmare of lovestruck tourist rat brain-dead coupled up autociv cloned drones in the wall. Autocivs. Don’t get me started on autocivs. I won’t get myself started. Hmm. I wonder why I went to the wall in the first place. I crawled around between their legs like a cat. They screamed and called for the walkway bulkmen. I’m not welcome there anymore. What a city. Turning their own away.
After the bulkmen cut me loose, I headed home. At least that’s what I’ve been told to call it. Home. There is no place like home. Unless your home is no place. If a home can be no place, what is a home? Is a building a home? A family? A place? A feeling? Is a home just a vessel for the vessel that is me? And if so, is a home just a vessel for the things inside the vessel that is me? I suppose you could say I was bringing my lemons home. The sun had set, and I pulled my moonlight blinds down on each one of my nineteen windows. After the moon injection, it became twice the size, and twice as bright. Damn thing can nearly blind you. I sank deep into the folds of my couch, letting it envelop my being. I was a part of its genetic makeup, and it was a part of mine. We were one mass, black leather, skin, hair, cushions. What a seductive beast. With one hand I fiddled with my TV ring, and with the other, I stroked my Quareen. As the mindless program blared away, screaming at me, I brought the Quareen to my lips and breathed in deep, feeling the smoke pour over my teeth like a waterfall crashing down on the rocks below.
“Are you not a martyr for men!?” The TV shouted. “What is it you think you could become!? When the sun rises each day, how far will you let your shadow stray!? Your life is not yours, it belongs to the man and to the woman and to the self proclaimed unidentifiables!”
I drifted off for hours, before spinning my TV ring to off, and dragging myself to bed. I was once more enveloped. It’s a shame inanimate objects aren’t sexual.
The next morning, sirens blared out two minutes before my alarms were set to go off. A frustrating awakening. I spent my two extra minutes wondering what the sirens were for. An autociv, leaking oil near a hoverbus stop perhaps. Another pack of ostriches getting loose from the feathertops and causing a ruckus with the school children. Maybe a few gutter boys strayed too far above ground and found themselves beneath the heels and shined shoes of local patricians. At least in San Adrian, the money pigs do their own truffle hunting instead of hiding behind their legislation. The only city I’ve ever seen that cowers in fear when the wealthy kids roam the streets. My alarm shook me from my daydream. Daydream? Or was it a dream? If one has a daydream in the morning, still in bed, half asleep, is it not a proper dream? If not, where do we draw the arbitrary line between our subconscious and our conscious acrobatics? Had I been pumped full of numbing juice and lying limp on an operating slab, having the same daydream, would that qualify as a dream contender? If I were asleep, but gained some consciousness in the heart of a dream, enough to feel myself in it, does that become a daydream? Questions for the scholars. I had precious little time to delve deep on such brainy topics. My weekend was quickly and pathetically coming to a close. Another twenty-two hours of freedom before the week began. I gracelessly rolled from bed and wormed my way into the kitchen. I hate a silent breakfast, so I took my therapy rock and tossed it at my therapy radio. The radio screen shattered brilliantly into thousands of crystalline shards, and from them echoed out the voice of Samuel Gall. Of course nothing really shattered. The rock was still next to fridge, resting on its charger, and the radio screen was still hanging on the wall intact. It’s only for the feeling, when things seem to break. A healthy morning release.
Samuel Gall is quite the woman. The child of a pair of brickmakers, she grew up in the mud stained overalls of her father, but they didn’t suit her. She was much too grand for that. After spending years outside of the supreme cities, she came back a different being than when she left. With only a bucket of dollars to her name and not a drop of experience, she talked her way into a late night timeslot on local radio. They paid her for traffic and news updates, the kind of stuff an autociv could handle, but she smiled and agreed. She knew that by the time her show came on, the staticheads at the station would be neck deep in Shirley Temples and Highway Chili and too blitzed to monitor her work. It paid off. Her after hours block of spiritual anti-blood quasi-Georgism speechcrafting interlaced with no name populace interviews became a must listen for everybody who’s nobody in San Adrian. Not long after, the staticheads caught on and cut her loose, but the name Samuel Gall was a station seller by then, and dying radio was tripping over itself to get her on the air. She earned herself a morning slot on the biggest radio broadcast this side of the Charleston Deluge, and I never missed it. Maybe we’ll listen to her together one day. Maybe we already have.
Part II
I am fascinated by my inability to comprehend my own being. A woman complimented my Quareen as we passed each other in front of the Galactic Pot Diner, and I was overwhelmed by love. I turned and thanked her as we shared a smile, and then continued on my way. Will I ever see her again? Would I have felt a lost sensation had I taken a different route to work? Is there even a shred of me remaining in her memory? I doubt my ability to dutifully recreate her appearance, but with an unfaltering certainty, I could illustrate the swelling of my chest. To the very breath, I could detail the fluttering in my lungs. What can cause such a feeling in a person? Is it simply a matter of deep emotional fluctuations that coincide with unexpected personal connections? It stands to reason that the depth of feeling is directly proportional to the state of being, but can one cause prompt the other? Do they each play an equal part, or is one the driver and the other the nail? My biggest fear is not that I will never see her again, but that I will, and I won’t realize it. Should that happen, I would know myself to be nothing but a pale reflection of the complex ballet of feelings performing within me. On the same token, if it were to happen, I wouldn’t know it was happening, and thus, I would feel nothing of the sort. Perhaps I will embrace that pale feeling regardless, just to be safe.
When I meandered into the lobby of Symzonia, I scanned my work ID card and was alerted to my overdue therapy bill. Over the past year, the simple plastic keycards assigned to us have evolved to something far more sinister. In addition to unlocking the doors of Symzonia, they have a tendency to monitor your bank account, unlock your apartment doors before you reach for your keys, order slight adjustments to your prescription medications, and sabotage even the most harmless of irresponsible choices. I once waited a full two hours for an order of noodles before I realized my ID card had canceled it. A blue scrolling message across the card face read ‘Work in the morning, bad to work your digestion that hard. Banana still on the kitchen table. Great for tryptophan! Good Night!’ It seems these days, your work is your life. I suppose they would like your life to be your work. Who am I to say. I’m just a simpleton, clinging to the vines that hang from the branches of middle management. I nodded to the front desk before realizing it was unmanned and then stepped into the empty elevator. I thought about hitting the button for the fifth floor, but thought again, and pressed eighteen. There was nothing for me on the fifth floor anymore. At least, nothing that wanted to see me. No, the eighteenth floor was my nest. The Integral to my D-503, as Eugene Zamyatin would put it. Before the doors had a chance to open, Frank was hopping through them and hounding me with questions. The energy he projects is not that of a human. Somewhere in his ancestral tree, I can see rabbits.
“Good morning Roy.” He says. “How are you Roy?” he says. “Anything new Roy?” he says. “We’ve got a big day coming up Roy,” he says. We move out of the elevator. “A new shipment came in yesterday Roy,” he says. “They’re calling it the haul of the year,” he says. “You think we’ll finally get that golden drill?” he says. “By the way, Tam called out so you’re on feeding duty today,” he says. I stopped dead in my tracks.
“I was on feeding duty twice last week Frank,” I said to him. I knew it wouldn’t matter. He could barely listen long enough for me to finish the sentence. He shrugged and hopped away, leaving me alone in the beige halls. I stood at the ventricular crossroads in the heart of the skyscraper that housed the third largest deep earth drilling company in the western hemisphere. Straight ahead, a hallway to the common area, and the desks assigned to every employee that functionally served no purpose. Even the computers were for show. They were cardboard and wire. Everything we needed was on our Symzonia armband. To the right, a hallway leading to the two dozen rooms of recovered materials deemed too important for the lower floors, but not quite valuable enough for the higher ones. Room 1820, the feeding room, had begrudgingly become my home away from home. But you already know how I feel about homes. To my left was the narrowing hallway that leads to Frank’s office. It twisted to one side, and then to another, and then back again. The result of a rogue dweller, breaking loose and burrowing where one cannot burrow. That happened back when I was on the fifth floor, cradling my innocence. I knew a visit to Frank would do me little good. A visit to the common room seemed much the same. So, with great reluctance, I turned to the right and headed for room 1820.
The halls of Symzonia have an antiquity to them that I find endearing. A step further and they would plunge into the depths of timeless and simultaneously forgettable architecture, but the tightrope they rest upon is squarely where it needs to be. Art deco without the intention or the elegance. As always, hanging on the rusted electric candelabras next to room 1820, was a leather apron and a pair of welding gloves. I never understood the gloves, but I wore them regardless. Verbole seemed patient enough to me. I equipped myself and scanned my ID card to unlock the reinforced iron threaded door. I was surprised to hear silence as I entered the room. Verbole loved to watch television, especially during feeding hours. He was sitting quietly in his iron highchair in the center of the room, propping his furry chin up with one of his crescent-shaped claws.
“No TV today?” I asked, before heading towards the meal dispenser in the corner.
“Nope.” He responded. “They don’t let me watch Alieness Surragota anymore.”
Verbole could say more with a tone than with any words he had picked up amongst us humans. I had an elementary school teacher who sounded just like him. I wonder. No. Couldn’t be.
“You know, they say that show single-handedly saved broadcast television,” I responded, as I slid the shield up on the meal dispenser and pulled out the steaming silver containers.
“Shows don’t have hands,” he responded.
“Oh, I know that,” I said. “It’s an expression. It just means without help from anybody else.”
“Does it also require you to use one hand?” he asked.
“No. I am single-handedly carrying this tray of food, but I’m using both hands.” I said.
“Well, I don’t like it.” He turned his head to the side and blew steam from his long dangling snout, causing droplets of water to form in the fur that hung down like a beard.
I pulled the stairs out from beneath the highchair and climbed them to get myself on the same level as Verbole. Creatures like him feed by opening their mouth as they burrow forward in the dirt, which just so happens to be a difficult feeding method to recreate in an office space. I pulled back the foil on his meal containers and took up his oversized fork and knife. Well oversized for me. Well suited for him.
“What do we have today? Ahh, hot dogs, beans, jerky of...some sort, and...what is that?” I couldn’t identify the last piece of Verbole’s meal. Filling up an entire container were black and tan beans, the size of strawberries. Sprouting out of them were white mucusy stems.
“It looks like a bean,” Verbole said.
“Want to try that first?” I asked him.
He shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth wide. I awkwardly pinned one of the beans with the fork and placed it on Verbole’s tongue. He closed his mouth enough for me to remove the fork before chewing down.
“Tastes bad.”
“Okay, we’ll push those to the side I guess.”
“Why are you feeding me again Roy?” Verbole asked.
I was the only feeder he called by name.
“I’m just filling in. Why? Are you disappointed to see me?” I asked.
“A little,” he responded.
I was caught off guard. We generally had a pleasant time together. As pleasant a time as one can have while feeding hot dogs to an imprisoned creature in a high chair.
“I didn’t want to be nice today.” He said.
I put down the fork and looked up at him. His dark green eyes the size of baseballs were staring right back, and I could see that he had been crying.
“Not a good day?” I asked.
He nodded back.
I felt truly bad for the creature, for the first time. I had brief moments before that of course, but nothing worth noting. Nothing more than the brief pause of a child when their friend falls from the swing. Waiting to see if they’ll start crying and ruin the fun. Perhaps that was only how I felt as a child. Growing up on in the fringe rows outside of San Adrian, I was one of the few kids at school who fought for their lunch. Even before I was born, the schools lost enough funding to cut out the cafeterias entirely. The wealthy kids brought their own lunch, but if your family didn’t have enough that day, or you forgot to grab it on your way out, you had one of two choices. Go hungry, or declare a challenge for another students meal. To add incentive for the target of the challenge, the school awarded bronze leaflets that could be exchanged for a free day off of school. I lost more than I won, but I wasn’t afraid to try. I even challenged the strongest boy at school, a boulder of a child named Martin. We called him Big Mountain Martin. He earned enough leaflets to take his entire final year off. One of the many oversights in the system.
“How about we take a break from eating and just talk?” I asked.
“Talk about what?” he said.
“Well, whatever you would like.”
He shifted in his seat, causing the entire highchair to scrape along the tile floor.
“What do you feel the most, Roy?” he asked.
I had expected him to ask me what had happened in the last episode of Alieness Surragota. Maybe what hot dogs were made out of. Not that.
“I’ve never been asked before Verbole,” I said.
“Is it a bad question?” he asked.
“No, no it’s not a bad question,” I said. “I suppose...I feel loss the most.”
“Loss? What did you lose? Maybe I can help you find it.” he said.
“It’s not a specific thing I’ve lost,” I said. “It’s...hard to describe. I feel like I am losing things. Every day, I’m slowly moving forward, like a boat, but I can feel the wake behind me. I can feel the things I’m passing, that slowly flatten and fade into the water, but I can’t turn back to see them. I know they’re there, and I have lost them, but I can’t even see what they are. Am I making sense?”
For nearly a minute Verbole stared at me without responding, then he said, “I understand. Keep going.”
I felt a rush of something within me. Massive cathedral doors, swinging open to welcome the congregation in my chest.
“Once the feeling settles in you, it sticks,” I said. “Like a flag planted into the wet soil of your past. The more it settles, the more you see the lengths at which you’ve traveled, and the loss begins to add up immeasurably. It reaches a point at which the smallest wake, the simplest bump in the water, can feel like a monumental devastation.”
Verbole clinked his claw against his highchair.
“My boat is making a very big wake,” he said.
At that moment, Samuel Gall’s words rang out clear as a bell in my head. It was loud enough to nearly knock me backward. I stood there, staring back at Verbole, waist-deep in my own freshly unearthed feeling of regret, and all I could hear was her voice. “We are threads, weaving in and out of the same tapestry. The things you do each day, the things you say, they matter. Even in the smallest ways, they matter to someone or something. In turn, that someone or something is changed for it, and the someone’s and somethings around them are changed for it. To turn away from hope and love is to fail yourself, but worse than that, it is a thread being pulled loose from the brocade of our world. We will unravel, and then there will be no beauty left except for the beauty of a failed experiment. Remember, listeners, wherever you are. There is never weakness in love. Only weakness in the lacking. This is Samuel Gall, signing off.”
“Roy?” Vebole shook me from my daydream. “Everything okay?”
“Sorry. Yeah, everything is okay.” I said. With all the determination of a stubborn child and the strength to match, I ripped my Symzonia armband from my arm. “Now, Verbole, what say you and I get outta here?”
Part III
Time is nothing more than the tattered shreds of a cloak. It trails behind us, dipping into our deep footprints and soaking up the muddy waters left in our wake. I can see the stains from my past, some darker than others. If I squint hard enough, I can see that day nearly twenty years ago, when I slid into a rental bike wagon with Verbole and kicked the pedals into gear, hoping to clear the blockade Symzonia would call for. We were two strange creatures, struggling with our own inability to connect to anything outside of our own bulbous heads. A pair of springtails, wiggling free from our feast of dirt and bounding for the nearest breath of air. The day is fuzzy at best, I lose pieces of it here and there, but there is one moment I have never forgotten. I felt like Kupe, paddling furiously in my canoe, my sweat splashing about like the saltwater of the Cook Strait as we edged ever closer to the blockade. We turned the corner on 80th street to see clear roads ahead. The blockade was late. I allowed myself a smile and a laugh, and Verbole spoke for the first time since we busted free from the 18th floor. “I can live now.” he said more to himself than to me. And he did. The two of us did together. As I lay here beneath a cracked moon I want more than anything to fold time back and look at it all once more. I think the few dozen breaths left in my lungs, clinging tight like a murder of crows on the final branch of my family tree, will allow me that respite.
We cleared the city limits and ditched the bike wagon in favor of a truck passing by, looking for able bodied workers. Verbole received his fair share of sideways glances, but we were in good company. No one on that truck was looking for trouble, only a few extra dollars to get them through the week. The rest of our escape is fuzzy in my addled head, but I do remember a distinct feeling of importance in our actions. It was as if we were performing upon the stage of history, and before us a jealous crowd of archivists furiously scribbled down each movement in the hopes of living through the ink. Looking back, I know that I was wrong. Not only were we not idolized for our radical action, we were barely even remembered. If you were to swipe through every San Adrian news feed for years after our escape, you would find less than half a dozen articles detailing our exploits, and only one that described it as anything more than a disgruntled employee stealing company property. I would know, I religiously searched and searched for each and every mention of us. In many ways, I was disappointed, but as time went on, I grew to appreciate it. Verbole and I, two sides of a misshapen coin, can be forgotten entirely. No laments were sung when he breathed his last, save for the monotone drone of a man losing his only partner. As I go into the silence, so it shall be as well. A slight disturbance of air as whatever intangible being that is within me escapes my fragile corpse and flutters off in search of him once more. It is a comfortable fit for the two of us, I think, to go as we lived. Mostly alone. Not lonely, thanks to each other, but alone.
We spent nearly two years in hiding before we realized no one was looking. We crept into the sunlight, like children crawling out from beneath the porch only to discover the boy declared “seeker” had long since moved on in search of more rewarding endeavours. For the next few years, we developed an intricate system of navigation and communication to hide Verbole from the public eye. Then one day, in a back alley of some northwestern town that was known for its pineapples and synthetic “real feel” love bands, an entire busload of catholics stumbled upon Verbole and I. They murmured and shook their heads and pointed a finger or two, but then smiled and nodded as they passed. It was then that we realized it didn’t matter. The sight of a being never before seen had lost its intrigue. The only way I can seem to puzzle it out in my head is that the hundreds of thousands of virtual reality experiences, each one catered to a specific region and each one featuring creatures of baffling realism, had dulled the senses. The sight of an undocumented species had become the norm even back then, even when they weren’t real. But then again, the definition of real is muddled to a comical degree. I’ve seen rusted out autociv prototypes touted as “the real man” and sold to cartoon cowboys who use them to carry books back and forth from the furnace. I’ve seen hand drawn caricatures of extinct animals praised as true to life representations when even I could spot the inaccuracies. A leatherback sea turtle with flaps of actual leather drawn across its shell and the legs of a crab. A pangolin made of fur. A snow leopard with the tusks and trunk of an elephant, which happened to be drawn with the fangs of a tiger and a monkey’s tail. Reality died forty-five years ago and we’ve been living in its exposed ribcage since then. Accuracy and truth were rubber chickens we tossed to the dogs.
Ahhh, I forgot about our dog. Verbole and I had one, for a little while. He wasn’t ever truly ours, but then again, what is? We were living in a small town near the Philbrook ruins, in what they call a “Spanish backdoor” row home. I never understood what it meant, but the rent was cheap. There was a stray that wondered back and forth outside of the ruins who seemed to take a liking to us, and to Verbole especially. He was a mangy thing, with a drooping eye and a missing chunk of fur on his haunches, but he was as sweet a thing as you’ll ever meet. He used to carry around a rolled up romantic era painting, and before laying down for the night, he would unroll it next to him. In it, an elderly woman wears a mantilla in the Spanish fashion, seems to be stricken with syphilis and is eternally asking “how goes it?” to another whose condition is even more frightening. The other peers with inflamed eyes into what remains of a hand mirror, unable to see what looms behind them both, ever closer, prepared to sweep them away. He was only a dog, prone to odd habits, but there was a fascinating reverence with which he would unroll the painting each night, and in the morning, roll it back up with his nose. In my mind, I listened to him explain to me why the human criticism depicted in each delicate brushstroke rang so true to him. That was around the time Verbole asked us to move on. “I don’t think these ruins are healthy for you” he said to me. “You’re...you keep...You’ve gotten very strange my friend.” His speech had drastically improved, but from time to time, words would still escape him if the situation was jarring enough.
After taking our leave of the Philbrook, we bounced from home to home and city to city like moths fluttering from flame to flame. Our only rule was to steer clear of the supreme cities. Symzonia had a presence in nearly every one of them, and regardless of how little they cared about us, they would be obligated to bag us up if we wandered close enough. Many years have faded away into the clouds, but a few I can remember. We spent a year in a sunken down gated community with the servants of the dead fat cats who once called it home. Another two amongst a ragtag bunch of hikers determined to live off of the pitiful natural land that remained after the countrywide restructuring act. After that, we spent six months outside of a laissez-faire town built around the grave of a video game developer, his mausoleum resting on a hill above it all. He must have been quite special to them, as they all had adopted the personalities and identities of the characters he was responsible for creating. Six months felt like an eternity among such a nightmarish crew, but Verbole and I were fascinated by them. Even when they thought they weren’t being watched, they behaved just the same. Clambering up walls with hooks, skittering through alleyways on all fours, and laughing, crying, screaming in anguished delight. In conversation, they spoke through heavy craving breaths and their tone pitched and yawed like a kite in a windstorm. It’s likely we would have stayed even longer had Verbole not taken ill. His claws became gray and spotted, he rasped like an old smoker, and he struggled to walk a straight line. I could barely manage my own well being, so I knew it was beyond my skill. I was able to find a doctor who claimed to be a specialist in treating rare and unusual humanoids. What that typically meant I had not the faintest idea, but it was the best I could do for Verbole. We hitched a ride on the next hoverbus heading towards her clinic.
Dr. Denkmal was the most unique doctor I’d ever met. She was classically trained in the supreme cities, but immediately left them in favor of her own clinic underneath an overpass. In the old days, the building was a gas station. Her scrubs were all black, and one song blared on repeat throughout the clinic, thumping in rhythm with the rattle of the self driving hover trucks above us. I remember asking her what the song was on the first day we met and she, without looking away from Verbole’s claws, said “Thieves, Screamed The Ghost. It’s from the old world.”
She kept the sickness at bay for nearly a year, before we could no longer afford the treatments. Then she kept it at bay for another eight months for free. Finally, she pulled me aside. “I’m sorry. I no longer have the time to give. Make your peace with him, there is nothing more I can do. He knows. He has for some time now.” She brushed my shoulder, and stepped through the swinging door in the back of the clinic. We never saw her again.
I asked Verbole, as we walked along a path outside of the clinic, where he would like to go next. I remember a quiver in my voice. He must have heard it too.
“Roy, it’s okay. You don’t need to make this time any more special than it already is. Without you, I would have died long ago, in the clutches of Symzonia, underneath a microscope, cold, alone, empty. We have done so much more than I could have ever hoped for.”
“But, there is still so much we haven’t done yet.” I said. We stopped walking. I can’t remember his face because I couldn’t look. But I remember the soil at my feet. Each and every granule. I remember the weight of his claw resting on my shoulder.
“We leave those for the next ones.” he said, “No one will ever travel the same path that we have. Walk the same steps. But what you speak of is land beyond us, and it doesn’t belong to us. What we have is enough. Let me rest for now, and I will be ready for whatever journey awaits us.”
And so he did. I buried him deep in the earth, as he asked. He wanted more than anything to return home. I made a home there, alongside his grave. To never stray too far. To make our reunion a bit easier, when it comes. And now, at long last, my number is being called. I think, I will allow myself to embrace a bit of melodrama, if you would allow it. As surely as I know the sun will rise tomorrow, I know that I will not rise with it. I am grateful, for that. To know so precisely when it will be. It has given me time to prepare. I spread a blanket out, and lay beneath the stars recording our last journeys here on earth. To my right, I see nothing but grasslands. Synthetic yes, but just as beautiful as the real thing. I can hear my ramshackle cabin creaking in the wind behind me. It’s the first wind of autumn. I’m shielded from the bite of it by the tombstone to my left. It is a simple one, but the best I could do. Marked, “Verbole, the only one I ever needed.” So then, Verbole, what say you and I get outta of here?