My dancing goddess of wisdom

My radiant scarlet beauty

My perfect counterpart of joy and love

My inspiration

My obstacle and my mirror

My transformation

You who question what I hold dear

You who reinforce my passion and inspiration

You who clean out my thoughts and consume my mind

You who sing through my body

And dance through my heart.

Hello my lover,

My shared passion

My touch which touches back

My heated breath shared between two

My ever ecstasy mirrored

My equal and opposite reaction

My twist of limbs and sheets and minds

You who share my intimacy

You who turn my every thought to fire

You who are the only one who can quench me

You who show me sensations far beyond everything I know

And show me what is past that.

Hello my partner,

My counterpart

My best friend

My support

My mischievous collaborator in crime and in life

My companion

My dinner partner

You who question me and support me

You who join me in things I love

You who bring me along in the things you love

You who understand me – from deepest fears to deepest desires

And love me for them.

Hello You,

Who I have never met

Who I’ve looked for in every woman I’ve ever met

Who lurks just beyond the edges of reality

Who I can see in the farthest reaches of my mind in dreams I can never remember

Who I know so deeply in feelings I can’t understand

Who has never thought me mad for looking for you.

Hello,  Hello, Hello.

I wish I could find you.

I wish we would never part.

Not for any length of time, mind you, but for just a moment, the thought wandered across my mind and I gave it my focus.  And then I let it go, cast off.  I didn’t want to think about it.  I didn’t want to think about the nature of it.  Even moreso, I didn’t want to think about the possibility that somewhere on the deep, dark corners of the Internet, such a thing actually exists.  The horrifying idea that someone had the same thought before me, but liked it and decided to put their time, energy, and imagination into making it come into being.  I choose not to think about it.  We all choose not to think about it.

That’s really the crux of it.  We love the Internet.  We use it all the time.  We extol its awesomeness, its freedom, its free-flowing cat pictures, web comics, worktime time wasters, and multiple ways to buy movie tickets.  Yet all of us above average users know without saying it that for every shining part of the internet we love, there are those places.  Places where people are exercising their freedom to talk, create, and build a community over things we’d rather not think of.

Of course, some of its subjective.  What you might not want to think about might be different than mine; we might be disturbed by different examples of Rule 34.  But the web still contains so much that is just uncharacteristically strange that it’s hard to fathom.  It may not be actually disturbing to us, more the strangeness that someone thought of, created, and conveyed it to others in good faith is mind blowing.  This ranges from the more common, such as Cookie Monster depicted as a drug addict (for cookies) to the exceedingly rare sorts, such as Harry Potter slash fiction where the author was inspired by the Legend of the Overfiend so that Harry is a hundred feet tall with multiple fifty-foot long dongs destroying the city to find the place where Malfoy has kidnapped Ginny and turned her into a demonic sex slave cyborg Mary Sue.  No matter how odd, strange, perverse, or disturbing you find some internet mashup of things, you can be sure that somewhere there’s something worse.  Those of us smart enough stop when we are wide-eyed in WTF moments.  Those unwise enough continue will find themselves sleepless and exclaiming that they don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

And such is the dual nature of the Internet.  There is the Internet we know and love, helpful in actual practicality or in its ease of wasting time with.  And then there is the dark side, never out of reach.  Only a few clicks or a typed URL away.  We are using the same internet that has this deep dark strangeness, but we look away.   It’s always there, waiting in parts of the internet we refuse to look at or explore.  Our browsers might as well be stamped with Here Be Dragons.  But only in the strangest moods do we look or click on links from that whacked out friend.  And what we see may make us laugh, confuse us, or downright disturb us.  But that is humanity.  Ladies and gentlemen, that is your internet, in all its glory.  That is the thing you use every day.  And on it, there are Dragons.

Also, slashfic of dragons.

Generations ago, settlers colonized a new planet. Of the technology they brought to the planet is the ability to create a new body to transfer consciousness to, giving them a functional version of reincarnation. Over the generations as the population has increased, technology was withheld from the people. The world entered a dark age, and the ever-reincarnating First members of the original crew have hoarded the technology and set themselves up as gods, named and modeled after the Hindu pantheon. They have reintroduced that religion to the world, using mind probes to “judge” people at their 60th birthday to determine what kind of body they should reincarnate into. They say they will slowly reintroduce technology “as people are ready”, but instead, they have consolidated their power, destroying new technologies such as the printing press as soon as they are invented. They have also manipulated the reincarnation system, so that those who are dissidents find themselves in an unfavorable body or prevented from reincarnation at all.
Enter Sam, one of the original crew, who has ruled as a prince in a far off kingdom after leaving the world’s counsel in disgust after the first talk of godhood. He is appalled by what he sees of the new system, calling it a fascist oligarchy. He starts a movement to oppose the gods, taking on the name and persona of the Buddha to set the wheels turning on revolution. What follows is a war among “gods” and men, bringing in “demons” bound generations ago: the original energy-based inhabitants of the planet.

Overall this is a great read and it has many interesting ideas. It plays fast and loose with Buddhism and Hinduism, so those with strict conceptions of those might find this a little blasphemous. It is also very related in the “60s scifi” tone and writing style. In addition, it feels anachronistic at times, when both gods in men both in heavenly palaces or in dark age villages just light up cigarettes and begin smoking in the middle of the conversation. In the 60s, when smoking was much more accepted, this may have seemed normal, but reading it today it’s very jarring.

There are a few pervasive rumors about the UT Campus.  Three in particular come to mind.

First, there is a small population of albino squirrels around the campus.  This part is not rumor, that’s fact.  The rumor or folklore is that if you see one of these rare but twitchily cute beasties right before an exam, you will get an A.  This rumor is more wishful thinking than anything else, but when stressed and freaked about an upcoming exam, you too might find yourself crouching by some bushes with some bread crusts from your sandwich making cooing noises for the rarest of all squirrels.

The second rumor is that there is a catacomb of steam tunnels running under and connecting the entire campus.  At first hearing, this doesn’t sound unreasonable.  Most large facilities have steam tunnels running under them which may connect two adjacent buildings so they can share boilers, waste channels, etc.  However, upon the realization that the UT Austin campus is 423 acres large, this moves from “obviously likely” to the “maybe plausible” category.

The third rumor was always an odd one for me.  According to this piece of folklore shopped around parties and side conversations as truth, there is a secret nuclear reactor under the RLM building.  The Robert Lee Memorial building was always one of the strangest buildings on campus.  Home to all the hardcore full frontal science courses, it was a tall behemoth, rising above any other building at that time.  A veritable tower of science, it was the place of indentured servitude for science students and a confusing maze of boredom for other students.  The first few floors of the building had escalators which you had to take to get up them.  The higher floors required an elevator that did not stop on the earlier floors.  The building went up to the sky and deep into the ground.  With the foreboding sciency way the building looked and the wily, laconic nature of most professors who had offices within, the idea that there was a secret nuclear reactor below wasn’t that much of a stress.  Why they kept it in the heart of a populous city made no sense, though.

These are all the rumors that many UT students learn.  Whether we accept them or not is up to us.  None of them are really verifiable nor do they really affect your UT career (unless you have a phobia of nuclear meltdown, in which case, sorry, they already have your tuition check). But they were always around and always made you wonder.  What was happening on this particular night was that I was learning some rumors that not every UT student hears.

“So, like, you guys might not know this unless you’re really in with a prof or go to grad school, but the departments are all at war with each other.  All their secret projects are in competition with each other.  Of course, the nature of the projects just might get us all killed.”

It was a strange way to start a new conversation.  It was a strange confession.  But if we put it into the context of someone seeking attention, it wasn’t quite strange.  Either way, I was glad the conversation happened.

It was Rachel that was telling us all this.  Rachel was the dark-haired girl that Zero met downtown.  She was a few years older than us, so she knew more of what went on around campus.  Since our trip downtown, she had been upgraded from girl-hooked-up-with to girlfriend.  She and Zero were joined at the hip.  Whether we liked her or not, we were stuck with her if we wanted to see Zero.  She was actually pretty smart, and Zero was… well, he was cute and girls liked that.  I guess he was the trophy boyfriend.

We were at someone’s apartment.  I can’t remember whose, but we were all hanging out, having a few beers.  The apartment owner and a few others retreated to a bedroom to smoke weed, but the rest of us alcohol-only folks had stayed in the living room to shoot the shit.  Trent was aimlessly plucking on his guitar as we talked.  Rachel was regaling us with her privileged knowledge.  Some of it was a little hard to swallow.

“What do you mean it could get us killed?” asked Other Mike.

“Well, just the nature of the projects,” said Rachel.  “Physics is building a death ray.  Electrical Engineering is building robots.  I think Philosophy is working on like these weird mind powers.  But with violent application.”

“Like in Scanners?” asked Becky.

“Exactly like in Scanners,” said Rachel, “but no one’s head has exploded.”  Her face turned thoughtful.  “Yet.  I think.”

“Why are they building such things?” I asked.

“Supposedly it’s some new competition or edict from the Dean.  Or that’s what I heard,” said Rachel.

“What, is our Dean some sort of super villain?” I asked.

“It sure sounds like it,” said Becky.  “But if so, I hope he uses those projects for some grand scheme to steal something valuable and lower our tuition.”

“Unless he’s stealing directly from the budget,” said Mike.

“Petty embezzlement is beneath a proper super villain,” said Becky, causing Mike to shrug.

“So do all departments have one of these secret projects?” asked Other Mike.

“Most,” said Rachel, pausing to ask Zero to get her a beer.  “There are a lot of them, in various stages.  But they all are trying to do something related to their department’s specialty.”

“What’s Classics doing?” asked Trent as he idly strummed.  The Classics department specialized in dead languages, Latin, Greek, Egyptian.

“I hear conflicting reports,” said Rachel.  “Classics is being much more secretive.  One person said they’re researching Pythagorian equations to change the nature of reality.  Another said they have a mummy.”

“Wouldn’t a mummy be more archaeology?” asked Other Mike.

“I know, I thought that too!” said Rachel.  “But that’s what I heard.”  She accepted her beer as Zero sat back down.

“So Biology is doing some sort of plague, right?” asked Becky.  “That would seem to be the most dangerous to us.”

“I would still say death ray as most dangerous,” said Other Mike.

“Biology is a strange department for this competition,” said Rachel.  “They’ve made it clear that the entire department must work on the same thing, no exceptions.  So the department party line is that they’re working on chimeras.  But I know from a friend that Professor Nemerson is purposely violating this to work on his own project.”

“What are chimeras?” asked Mike.

“A chimera is a monster from Greek mythology,” answered Trent.  “It is the combination of a lion, a snake, and a goat.”

“In modern biology, a chimera is a creature that is formed from combining the genetics of two others,” said Rachel.

“So abominations against God and Man?” suggested Other Mike.

“Exactly!” said Rachel with a laugh.

“But what’s this rebel Professor Nimrod doing?” asked Becky.

“Professor Nemerson,” corrected Rachel.  “He’s conducting even more secret experiments.  I hear it’s the reanimation of dead tissue.  But…”

“But what?” asked Mike.

“But that’s really just a stereotype,” she continued.  “’Someone in biology doing something weird? Oh no! Let’s toss the Frankenstein stereotype on them!’  You see what I mean?  I have no idea if it’s true.”

“I could see that,” I said.

“So what other strange projects are there?” asked Other Mike.

“Hmm, let me think,” said Rachel, now obviously a little tipsy.  “God, what can I remember.  Oh!  Folklore!”

“Folklore?  Like fairy tales and shit?” said Becky.

“That and the social groups and practices associated with them,” said Rachel.  “But yeah, fairy tales.  It’s a small department, but Professor Lichtenstein has one of the farthest along projects of the University.”

“What’s he doing?” asked Other Mike.

“It’s some sort of ritual magic,” said Rachel.  “I’m not really sure on the details, but I know his grad students have been setting up all sorts of things on Jester Dorm.  I think something big is going down with his project at Jester on Halloween.  Ritual sacrifice?  Summoning?  Fuck if I know.  Sucks for Jester inhabitants, though.”  She finished with a laugh and took a long drink from her beer.

There was a chilled silence as we all looked at each other, except for Rachel, who was a little drunk and still quite amused.

“But,” I said almost meekly, speaking words to what everyone else thought, “we all live in Jester…”

What if the Pied Piper of Hamelin was a homicidal madman with magic powers that had long ago swore to kill Peter Piper? What if long ago when they last met, the Pied Piper was responsible for crippling Peter Piper’s wife, Bo Peep?  These are the sort of questions answered in Peter and Max: A Fables Novel.

Peter and Max is a prose novel set in the universe of the long running Fables comic book.  While an excellent comic in its own right, no knowledge of the comic is required to enjoy this novel.  What new readers need to know about that universe is breezily explained at the beginning of this novel.  Essentially, the characters from our oldest myths, fables, and stories were real in other worlds.  As those worlds were taken over by dark armies, they fled to our world, living as immortals in a hidden community.  There are more details, but that’s most of what the reader needs to know.

Peter Piper and his wife Bo Peep live alone in the wilderness, away from even other Fables.  A long time ago, Bo Peep’s legs were twisted by dark magic.  Due to her condition, they have kept themselves aloof, settling into a stable but codependent existence for the past few decades.  Their stable but sad existence is shaken up when word comes that Peter’s brother Max has come to this world.  Peter knows this is their eventual showdown that he had been dreading for many years.  Despite his dread, he knows that he must go face Max.   Unfortunately, Peter and everyone else knows he can’t win such a showdown; they warn him, but no one stops him.

This novel weaves back and forth between the past and the present.  The vehicle for the novel is the present day, where Peter is learning that Max has returned and his travelling to face against him, but the bulk of the novel is the past.  In another world that resembled the Bavarian Black Forest, Peter and Max were brothers, young children and travelling minstrels.  Max was growing into his troubled teen years and Peter was but ten years old.  Things were good.  But jealousy and dark armies changed all that.  Peter was a more gifted musician, and so was the recipient of their father’s family treasure, something Max believed was his birthright as the elder son.  From that erupted a profound jealousy, but jealousy alone would not have caused all this.  The dark armies invaded, and everything they knew fell to ruin.  They fled into the dark forest of monsters and witches to escape the armies.  But in the forest, Max’s jealousy explodes and transforms him into something so much darker…

This novel is written in a very magical storytelling style, but not in the sparkling style of Disney.  This is a tale more in the style that readers may be familiar from Neil Gaiman or Diana Wynne Jones.  It is like a fairy tale and magical, but there is darkness and pain.  Max’s descent from a good person into a violent madman fits this style, seeing a man corrupted by dire straights, evil witches, and fatal flaws.  The story of how their lives fell apart would be an interesting story of its own, but attaching it to the modern day story of Max’s return and Peter’s final confrontation adds a depth and foreshadowing to their childhood that makes it even more interesting.

If you’re a fan of Fables and enjoy novels, without question you should read this book.  If you enjoy whimsical fantasy, dark fairy tales, the work of Gaiman or Diana Wynne Jones, then you should also read this.  For the remaining few reading that don’t qualify in the above: if you enjoy stories and storytelling, some magic, some conflict, and are willing to suspend disbelief, you will enjoy this book.

Before us was Toy Joy, bathed in a holy light, the destination of our pilgrimage.  We three wise men had traveled across streets and realities far and wide, traversing a multitude of trying situations that our drug addled brains made far worse.  Before us lay our goal, our destination, our holy land, the song, the sign, the alpha and omega of our desires.  With only an endless moment spent gawking at its exterior, we rushed inside, like air sucked in through an open door.  The door dinged as we made our entry.

Inside the toys very nearly jumped off the walls at us.  Stuffed animals lined some of the shelves, so packed that taking just one down would start an avalanche of fake fur and plush that would bury lesser men.  Even a dexterous step to the side would be a failure; the pile of stuffed animals next to you would provoke embarrassment as you mumbled something to the other patrons and staff as you fumbled to somehow try to get the animals back onto the shelf, effectively resetting the trap for some other unfortunate victim.

“I pity the fool!” came Mr. T’s iconic voice from behind me.  I turned and saw Other Mike with a Mr. T sound box.  With a small picture of the T himself on it, there were 8 buttons of different quotes from Mr. T.  Unfortunately, he ignored the other 7 buttons and continued jamming on that one button.

“I pity the fool!”

“I pity the fool!”

“I pity the fool!”

I clutched my head and groaned in anguish like Chewbacca being tortured in Cloud City.  I slapped the sound box out of his hands.  He turned and gave me a dude-what-the-fuck look.  I cocked my head and threw up my hands at his idiocy.

Basquiat came around the corner.  “Hey guys, look at this, I just found a Mr. T toy!  It has all of his popular sayings…”

Other Mike and I scattered to the winds.  I found myself in the Japanese room of Toy Joy.  While there were little strange Japanese things here and there, they seemed to concentrate most of it in one room.  You walked in and you were bombarded and enclosed in pure Japanese cuteness.  It was as if there was a little Japanese girl in the corner eternally squealing, “KAWAI!”

One entire wall was taken up by Hello Kitty merchandising.  HK was interspersed throughout the whole room, but one entire wall had Hello Kitty-branded objects.  Backpacks, dresses, hats, ears, lunchboxes, decorative flowers, dog leashes, cat leashes, surface-to-air missiles, ritual implements, sex toys, poker visors, hash pipes, soccer balls, blue balls, chainsaws, black books of diabolical import – you name it, it was branded with Hello Kitty or one of the associated characters.  I saw what must have been a homemade green sculpture of Cthulhu that someone had replaced the Old One’s ugly mug with the mouthless cuteness of Hello Kitty.  The stars were indeed right.

While most Hello Kitty-aware individuals are aware there are other Sanrio characters in the Hello Kitty universe, they are not as often seen in-the-flesh as merchandise.  But at Toy Joy, they were all represented.  If you wanted anything of Chococat, from a backpack to bondage gear, you could find it here.  If you wanted some gloomy object with Badtz-Maru’s frowning face stamped on it, you could find it, from anti-depressants to goth kid razor blades that would be a best seller in Hot Topic a few years hence.

But it was Keroppi that really struck me.  The green frog friend of Hello Kitty, the love child of Super Mario Bros’s Hammer Brothers and a gigantic set of eyeballs that the underground knew merely as “Sally the Wonder Eyes”, Keroppi is cute to sober people and frightening to a drug soaked mind.  A whole section of the wall was covered in his not-occurring-in-nature shade of green, his gigantic googly eyes staring into the souls of man, judging and damning all that he saw within.  While the other merchandise had images of the characters, the Keroppi merchandise was Keroppi – from backpacks to lunchboxes, they were all the shape of Keroppi, his gigantic eyes staring their vacant stare.  A whole army of Keroppi stared at me from that wall, not even the soothing white of mouthless Hello Kitty able to calm me.  Unnerved, I left the Japanese room.

I found Other Mike and Basquiat in the main part of the store playing with toys.  Other Mike held a Boxing Nun while Basquiat was using a Boxing Godzilla.  Their little arms kept bopping each other in the face (snout for Godzilla), but there was no clear victor.  In my mind I wondered what sort of world it was where one badass nun could take on Godzilla and fight him to a stalemate.  I rummaged through the bin of toys next to them and put on my own boxing puppet, Boxing Abraham Lincoln.  Joining in the fray, Boxing Lincoln began distributing punches to both the black-clad nun and the severely non-proportionate Godzilla.  I wondered whether Godzilla had reduced in size or if through some Atomica-era procedure the badass nun and Abraham Lincoln had grown to Godzilla size to take on the green reptilian menace.  I wondered how much more awesome a world it was where a fifty-foot Lincoln saved the world from Godzilla while dealing with the conflicted loyalties of a kungfu nun.

Somewhere during our play I noticed I was battling the Nun exclusively.  I looked over and saw Godzilla and the controlling hand limp at Basquiat’s side.  He was staring intently at the register area.  I followed his glance and asked what’s up.

“She’s on the phone,” he said ominously.

“So?” I said.  Behind me, I vaguely noticed Other Mike wandering off.

“Remember the Three Cookie story,” he said.

The Three Cookie story was part of our circle of friends folklore.  It was a funny story when told by the right person.  It involved two friends drugged out on acid that visited a Subway Restaurant for, among other things, three cookies.  They were extremely fucked up and crazed, with hilarious results.  However, there was a moral to this story: when you’re fucked up on drugs, retail/service industry workers are told to call the cops so they can come take you away.  This was, of course, a completely false fact.  Unless you are dangerous or refuse to leave, they’re not going to call the cops.  They will just do their best to get you out of their store where you will then be not their problem.  Calling the cops is a hassle for them and the cops.  Everyone wants drugged out kids to just go somewhere else.  But we were dumb college students and we didn’t know how the world worked, we just knew this story and thought it was true.

By mentioning the story, Basquiat was indicating that he thought the employee on the phone was calling the cops about us.  I looked over to the girl on the phone.  She was talking on the phone, but there was nothing suspicious about it.  Of course, there was not anything not-suspicious about it, which would be exactly how I would act if I was trying to not be suspicious about calling the cops.  She was also twenty feet away, so I’m not sure if she needed to be suspicious.  I squinted and tried to look at her better, but then I wondered if I was now being suspicious, so I turned away.

“See?” said Basquiat, as if my reaction proved it all.  “She’s calling about us.  We need to get out of here.”

“She might not be calling about us,” I suggested.

“What else is she doing on the phone at… what the fuck time is it?  At this time.  In the dark.  Who makes calls from a toy store at night?  Shit, what is a toy store even doing open at this time?  It’s a trap!  A goddamn trap!  It’s Them!  They set this up to trap us!”

I quickly put a hand over his mouth to shut him up, which got me the uncomfortable spittle from his frothing ranting.  I looked back and forth quickly to see how much of a disturbance he made.  Right or not, he might be causing enough trouble that would get someone’s attention, and not the attention we might want.

“Be quiet,” I hissed.  “We don’t know yet what’s going on.  Maybe something, maybe not.  Are you willing to be quiet?”

He nodded and I removed my hand.

“Whether I’m right or not, we should get out of here,” he said.  He noticed my expression and then continued.  “If I’m right, things are going to get bad real soon.  If I’m wrong, nothing happens.  You get to tell me I was wrong.  But if it’s bad, it’s really bad.  Is that a gamble you want?”

I admitted it was not a worthwhile gamble.  I looked longingly over to the four foot wide replica of the Millennium Falcon in one corner of the store I hadn’t gotten to play with yet.  One day, my friend, One day.

The next step was to find where Other Mike had disappeared off to.  I suggested Basquiat check the Japanese room, because I’d be damned if I was going to encounter Keroppi again.  I kept looking over my shoulder at the girl on the phone as I looked.  Maybe she was just talking to her boyfriend or making plans after work.  She kept making eye contact with me, which worried me.  Of course, I kept looking at her as I stumbled around her store, so perhaps her attention was warranted.

It was I who found Other Mike.  He was wearing a green frizzy clown wig, googley eyes, a fake nose, and a fake beard.  I rolled my eyes.

“Take that crap off, we gotta go!” I said.

He looked at me and cocked his head, as if he didn’t recognize me or the words I’m saying.

“We have to go,” I said more slowly and firmly.

“Why?” he finally managed.

“Basquiat says Three Cookies.”

“Oh shit!” he said, quickly tearing off all the gear he was wearing and tossing it haphazardly in a bin.  We walked to the front of the store and met up with Basquiat, who had just finished looking in the Japanese room.  We nodded to each other, took a quick paranoid look at the cashier girl (still on the phone), and went out the door with the ringing of the bell.

We didn’t stop until we were half a block away in front of a pizza place.  We caught our breath, unaware that we were running.

“That should be good enough,” said Basquiat, seemingly satisfied with half a block.  I could still see Toy Joy and could walk back over there within a minute.

A car slowed to a halt next to us.  Basquiat freaked out and stepped back a few.  I quickly wondered if he was right to paranoid.  The window lowered and a cute blonde girl with a blue streak in her hair stuck her head out.

“Hey, Other Mike!  Is that you?”

“Yes?” said Other Mike, almost confused by his own answer.  I marveled about the fact that it wasn’t just our circle of friends who called him Other Mike.  Maybe it had caught on.

“We’re going to the lake tonight,” she said.  “We’re going to just drink and party and then come back early tomorrow morning.”  She paused and smiled to someone in the car, almost conspiratorially.  “We have more girls than guys going and wouldn’t mind another guy coming.”  She smiled broadly again and fanned her lashes.  “Would you like to come?”

“Fuck yeah,” said Other Mike without even a pause.  The back door opened for him immediately and he jumped in.  The car sped away without a goodbye from Other Mike or the girl.

Basquiat and I stood there dumbfoundedly.  “What just happened?” I asked.

“They know where we are!” decided Basquiat.  “They’re picking us off one by one!  They’ve got him now, we’re next!”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.  “He’s probably going to get drunk and laid.”

“That’s what they want you to think!”  He paused suddenly, his eyes widening in shock.  He looked me up and down.  “Wait, you’re with them, aren’t you?  You’ve been with them since the start.  Whenever I get close to knowing, you keep suggesting it’s not real.  I can’t tell if you’re really my friend and just with me, or you’re a clever undercover agent!”

“What?” I said.  It was less a question rather than a statement of complete and utter incredulous confusion.

“No, no more of it!  Fuck you, you won’t find me!”  He turned and ran off down an alley.

I stared at the alley for a long moment.  “Goddamn it,” I finally said to myself.

It took a minute of standing there to realize my situation.  I was alone standing in front of a pizza restaurant, nowhere near my dorm room and flying high on acid.  I didn’t even want pizza.

This is where reality fell apart, this is where the story took an ugly turn.  This is where everything went to shit.  With two friends, I had some continuity to it all.  While I strained to discern real things with them, I always had them and their reactions to test against.  They stabilized me and my trip.  If I were in a familiar and safe place, that would have also stabilized me.  But I was suddenly far from home, alone, at night, on foot, with an onrush of cars and calamity.

I made my way towards my dorm, but I took a different route than we had taken here.  Once we had actually reached our destination, another way back seemed quicker and more convenient.  This took me down a few blocks, and eventually through campus.  This route was not as well-lit and not as well travelled.  I recall making my way through a dark forest of stone and wood, buildings and stairs.  It wasn’t just this empty realm of darkness.  A tripping mind abhors a vacuum, so I filled it with nightmare shapes and fears.  Behind every bush lurked some malevolent darkness, in every vague whisper that carried over from some area I heard plots to hurt me.

Somehow I stumbled upon a strange scene.  Three grad students were picking up a limp body and putting it in a van.  Each of them wore surgical masks.  Otherwise they were dressed in tee shirts like most students, but they were a few years older.  Two went along their work, while the third paused and looked at me.    He had his mask on the top of his head and was chewing gum.  He watched me as I watched him.  When they were done he gave me a wink and they drove off.

I somehow reached my dorm, but I don’t know how.  I was not well versed in astronomy, so I could not navigate via the stars that streaked across the sky in dazzling patterns that I tried to watch even while avoiding the nightmares lurking behind every corner and avenue.  I looked for my friends when I got back to the dorm, but found none.  Later I found out they had gone to a club, but all I saw was a desolate emptiness of all my friends and full of nameless people I did not know, their vacant stares and meaningless conversations doing more to alienate me from the world.

I got in the elevator and waited twice the lifespan of the universe before it reached my floor.  In every moment I was convinced that the elevator cable was going to collapse, sending me to my doom.  A hopeful side had an idea that a second before that doom, I would be transported to a magical world that needed me to be their champion.  That would be better than death, but all I wanted to do was climb into bed.

My roommate was not home so I climbed in bed without having to explain or engage in inane chatter, something my roommate excelled in on a daily basis.  Sleep did not come.  I tried putting on music, but I took no enjoyment from it.  It was as if every note was discordant and uncomfortable, though intellectually I knew the songs sounded exactly the same as they had been every other time I listened to the album.  The music brought me no comfort, nor did the bed.  My shoulders were stiff, the music was sharp and the bed was rough.

I found myself staring at the walls, which was one of the worst parts of the experience.  The longer I stared the more I saw hidden details I had never seen before.  Written in glowing neon writing of blue, yellow, and pink, I saw dirty graffiti drawn in the style of Cracked or Mad Magazine.  Caricatures of men and women doing nasty things to each other with speech bubbles of words I could not discern no matter how long I stared at them.  I tried looking elsewhere.  The graffiti was also on the other wall.  I looked at my desk and discovered that in the wood grain pattern there was also hidden this graffiti.

I closed my eyes but found my mind couldn’t rest, my mind couldn’t stop.  It ping-ponged around in my head, leaping from this to that, never rested, never safe.  I begged for sleep, which my mind agreed to, but neither my mind could rest nor my body.  I knew these were the effects of coming down from acid, but they had never been this bad, it had never been this terrible.

I tried putting on the most soothing music possible.  Then I hid under the blankets, doing my best to block out the outside world and prevent me from looking at anything I shouldn’t.  It was hours before sleep finally came.  Agonizing hours.  But I took to heart the thing I said as I shivered under the blankets, muttering to myself.

“Never do acid again, never do acid again, never acid again…”

Mr. Chesney operates a yearly tour where he takes tourists from our world into a magical world where they embark on the full hero experience: a wizard guide, monster attacks, thwarting an evil army, and finally defeating the Dark Lord.  The problem is the residents of that magical world hate these tours; the tours deplete food, ruin farmland, kill locals, destroy towns, , and otherwise disrupt the world.  Unfortunately, Mr. Chesney has a very powerful demon he is more than willing to unleash on any of the world’s inhabitants who try to disobey him.  This year, the most powerful wizards, thieves, priests, and nobility have called a meeting to do something about it.  They consult with the Oracles, who give them one instruction: if they want the tours to stop, they need to appoint the first person they see as Dark Lord this year.  That person ends up to be Derk, a middling mage who would rather be creating new creatures than pretending to be a Dark Lord.

Thus begins The Dark Lord of Derkholm, Diana Wynne Jones’s satire of fantasy novels.  While a fully featured story in its own right, it pokes a great deal of fun at the fantasy novel genre.  The popular clichés of the genre are taken on: prideful dragons, aloof elves, greedy dwarves, bard colleges, and of course wizards.  Showing them as fully fleshed out people rather than one-sidedcharacters shows their strengths and flaws.  Seeing them stumble over themselves to make sure planning for well-staged and totally faked tours across their realms shows more of the lunacy of some of the more common fantasy tropes.  What Jones does effectively is give a certain loveable humanity to the characters, even while poking holes on our favorite cliches and illusions.

Derk is not a hermit wizard.  He has a large family: a beautiful wife who is also a wizard, a son who is beginning to learn magic, a daughter about to go to Bard College, and five griffin children.  The griffins tend to be the most interesting aspect.  Each griffin was born and grew up as another child in the household.  So while they may have cat bodies and feathers, they talk and have fully-fleshed out personalities like another other character.  They are so much more people than pets, unlike Derk’s other inventions: talking dogs, a winged horse, carnivorous sheep, and sarcastic geese.  Derk’s family and menagerie alone could carry this book even if the plot was uninteresting.

Luckily, the plot is quite interesting.  The nature of Jones’s style is that her stories are dense.  She can pack so much more into three hundred or so pages than the typical writer, as she doesn’t dwell on small events, simply saying they happened and moving on to other things.  Rather than making the reader feel like they missed out, this gives a greater breadth to the characters involved.  The reader really begins to know the characters and know who they are; something that can happen in other novels, particularly ones with as large a cast as this one.

If there are any criticisms to be made of the novel it is that certain themes and plot points seem undeveloped.  The ending seems to come quick.  Events lead up to the end, but the actual climax feels like there was no warning or build up; it almost feels like the characters got lucky.  There are some reveals of things near the end, while clearly bad, don’t seem to feed back into the events of the ending.  Granted this novel is intended for a YA audience, so things can’t be too complex, it still feels like those ends were somehow important and should have been tied up.

Criticisms aside, fans of the late Jones’s work will love this novel, as it brings many of the things they enjoy her novels for, as well as a few new things.  Those who have never read her work may find this a good starting point, particularly if they are coming from the traditional fantasy story background, even moreso if they’re coming from the Modern Person Stuck in Fantasy World trope.  I’d say this novel pales compared to her Chrestomanci work or Howl’s Moving Castle, but it is still a very worthwhile and enjoyable read.

The Drag, covered in lights and sound, hipsters and Drag rats, students and slackers, was a cornucopia for enhanced and garbled senses.  However, it was not unknown or unfamiliar to us.  As students, we spent a fair amount of our time on the Drag.  It was dangerously off-campus, but at the same time close enough for a short walk.  Things happened there, and even if they were the same old things for the Drag, they were new to us.  Consequentially, a walk down the drag on drugs was a revisiting of familiar places.

After the church and the homeless, the next place we passed was the Church of Scientology.  I’m not sure if it was by design that Scientology was right next to a Christian church.  The Scientologists just had a store front and offices, so they paled next to the stone edifice of Christianity.  In their favor, they were actually trying to recruit while the church stayed silent.  Typically the Scientologists had a folding table in front of their storefront and offered personality tests.  You took the test outside, but if you wanted results, they took you into the building, up an elevator, and sat you in a windowless room.  More than a few adventurous friends who tried the test found themselves uncomfortable by the results process.  After the test, there was explanation of Scientology, donations that could be made, etc.  There was nothing untoward about the whole process, just everyone who had tried it always felt uncomfortable.

Next up was Insomnia.  In college I spent far too big a chunk of my life in that place, especially freshman year.  Insomnia was an aptly named twenty-four hour coffeehouse.  There were others near campus, but Insomnia was one of the closest and the always-open quality was a huge draw for students.  Its minimalist décor was not a draw.  The walls were brown brick, the ceiling exposed beams and metal fans.  The tables were simple glass and the chairs were profoundly uncomfortable metal chairs probably designed by some famous German designer we had never heard of.  Many times we mused that the chairs were like that just so we wouldn’t spend many hours there.  It didn’t work; having a place to hangout for many hours just for the price of a single coffee far outweighed the numbness of our butts.

As we approached Insomnia, I had the presence of mind to pickup the pace and usher my friends forward.  We knew too many people that frequented Insomnia.  Bumping into one of them in front of it could trap us in a time sink vortex without end – as we finished up talking to someone, another would appear entering or leaving, which would tie us up longer until someone else showed up.  Hours later, we’d find ourselves sobering, the sun rising, and still there would be someone Basquiat knew that he swore he would need to talk to.  And if we were sucked into the building itself, it would be Game Over.  Insomnia was a whirlpool of lackadaisical slacking and impassivity that would destroy even the most active and eager.  One did not leave Insomnia; no, you excused yourself to use the bathroom and ran… you ran until its claws got you and dragged you back in.

Next up was the first of the two arcades on the Drag, Le Fun.  No one really know why someone needed to Frenchify “fun”, as the actual French word for fun is not “fun”.  I guess someone might have decided that “Le” would make it sound classy and avant, but it was a video arcade – no one needed the place they played Street Fighter to be avant or classy, in fact typically those would work against it.  Regardless, I stared at Le Fun with a certain longing.  I could hear the sound of space aliens being attacked and the shouts of various Yoga Flames, my eyes saw the flash of lights, the dance of the words Game Over, and the dull grey of quarters put up against the screen.  I heard the sound of Ms Pac Man, for some reason always the loudest and most recognizable sound of any arcade.  Through the help of my friends I was yanked past, saving myself from endless hours watching other people play and the drug-fueled disappointed of me getting my ass kicked by some dude who always plays Akuma.  Why did I pick Dan?  Why must drugs make me pick Dan?

The drugs were kicking in overdrive by this point, and the rest of the drag was a whirlwind gloss of colors and trails, as we dodged around people like a river.  I’m not sure if we walked too quickly or too slowly.  I’m sure drunk or drugged students were no new phenomenon for the Drag.  Our paranoia had left us for a time, and now we just rolled along like bubbles in a rambling stream.  Our conversation wound down as the world roared around us, every sight a feast, every sound a discordant cacophony.  Part of the experience was enjoying and examining the mutations on perceived reality that came up.  A different part of the experience was trying to scrub off the additional reality to get down to what was really happening.  This was important: we were out and about, and grasping the underlying reality below everything was important.  When crossing the street, our lives depended on our ability to separate fact and fantasy.

Somehow we ended up at Burger King.  I’m not sure how we had decided we were hungry or if we actually were, but we had entered Burger King.  The Dark Lord of Stroganoff had faded from our minds under the weight of an acid-soaked reality thick with sweat, radiance, and cold fish-like limbs.  I remember the grey blue décor lit by banks of yellowish lights.  The Burger King was mostly empty; it must have been late evening by the time we had finally made it there.

We walked through the winding corral of dividers intended for organizing long lines even though there was nobody on line.  I ran the flat of my hand along the tops of the dividers as I moved, enjoying the sensation.  The cashier chuckled at the silliness of us doing this, clearly knowing we were on drugs even as we thought that was a secret.  We got up to the front, stopping and staring up at the gigantic imposing board of the menu.  There were so many… options.  How could we know what to order?

My gaze drifted down to the cashier and I had a frantic moment where I couldn’t tell what was real and what was my crazy mind.  I kept staring trying to differentiate.  Though dressed in the requisite blue Burger King branded shirt and hat, the cashier was wearing makeup and painted nails.  This was confusing, because everything else told me that our cashier was definitely male.  The face, the proportions, everything said male.  But I was also seeing eyeliner, lipstick, painted nails, large gaudy earrings.  I blinked a few times, trying as I always did when I felt I was looking at augmented reality, as if mere disbelief and will would cause whatever I was hallucinating to fade away to leave cold, harsh reality.  It didn’t work.

The cashier smiled back at me.  I couldn’t tell if he understood my discomfort and was bold about his life choice or what.  I considered asking my friends, but to talk about it in front of the cashier would be rude.  I stayed quiet, but I had a profound disorientation to my reality.

Friends later confirmed that a transvestite worked at that Burger King, one even saying she knew him.  I saw that cashier one other time at that Burger King, but I was also on drugs at the same time.  Why did I only see him when on drugs?  I went to that Burger King dozens of other times, but never saw him.  But when on drugs, the most confusing possible cashier was always there.  There’s nothing wrong with his life choice, it’s just disorienting when you’re already distrustful of what you’re seeing.

“What do we want?” said Other Mike out loud.  It was met with silence and the rubbing of our chins as we looked at the menu.

The smiling cashier must have known what was up with us, or at least had an idea that we were somehow intoxicated.

“How about chicken fingers?” he suggested.

We three all turned and looked at each other, nodding.  The idea had taken quick root.  “Yeah, yeah, we want chicken fingers,” we said.

“Chicken fingers, please,” I said decisively.

“Three orders of chicken fingers?” asked the cashier.

I looked to Basquiat and Other Mike.  Basquiat shook his head and Other Mike winced at the idea.  This confirmed what I already thought.

“Nope, just one order,” I said.

“For the three of you?” asked the cashier.

“Yes,” I said, like it was the most natural thing in the world for three men to walk into a Burger King and order one small appetizer.

The cashier shook his head with a grin and we paid the bill.  It was almost a comedy of errors as we searched our pockets for crumpled bills and coins.  I’m sure one of us had a wallet with crisp bills, but none of that occurred to us as we scavenged among our pockets for three dollars and twenty seven cents in change.  Triumphantly we put it down on the counter and our order was in.  Instead of sitting down, we stood stupidly at the counter until our order was up.

We took our tray and walked to the far end of the restaurant by the windows.  With clumsy, shaky hands we opened the cardboard container to reveal the chicken fingers and the bbq sauce container.  Basquiat peeled the lid on the sauce container and the sweet, acrid smell of bbq sauce overwhelmed our senses.

We each grabbed one of the chicken fingers because we all knew that we wanted one –intellectually.  Once that intellectual idea encountered reality, however, there was some confusion.  We each held the chicken finger in two of our own non-chickeny fingers.  We held it up in the air, examining it.  Intellectual ideas aside, we weren’t sure what to do with the chicken fingers.  We had the idea of hunger, but for the most part our stomachs were shut off due to the drugs.  We wanted the experience of eating without any actual eating going on.

I took a tentative bite of the chicken.  It was a small nibble.  Have you ever given something to a cat that they never had before?  They will take it from you, but then lay it on the floor.  They’ll sniff for a moment, then take a very shallow bite to nibble and discover if they like it.  This is the relationship the chicken finger and I had.  I took a nibble.  The taste of fried chicken was weird, dazzling my taste buds in the way something more like Skittles candy would.  But then I swallowed.  I could trace my entire alimentary canal from that one bite of chicken.  Once it hit my stomach, I felt the awakening of something horrible, like the birth of some Eldar God that was writhing among my stomach acids until the stars were right.

Somehow I kept it under control and looked to my compatriots.  By the expression on Other Mike’s face, he clearly had also tried eating a bite.  No matter the sensations going on in the kettle of my stomach, they did not feel as bad as the discomfort I was reading on Other Mike’s face.  Basquiat was still staring at his chicken finger, a combination of fascination and scientific curiosity on his face.  I quickly advised him to put the chicken finger down and step away from the bbq sauce.  He complied and so I felt I did not have to draw my gun and shoot him.  It was only fifteen minutes later when we were back on the street that I realized I had no gun and chuckle at the impossibility of it.

On the street, Other Mike suddenly doubled over and threw up.  Since he had nothing but a nibble of chicken finger in his stomach, he mostly just wretched for a moment.  I persuaded my own stomach to stay where it was by looking to the sky.  A dark night of purple clouds rolling across the sky grabbed my attention until Basquiat had helped Other Mike up.

We walked for a while longer through the dark night and a haze of strip malls and soon to be apocalyptia, a world falling apart as we watched it.  People walked back and forth like soulless automatons, streaks of color and light piercing the world at strange angles.  We walked like refugees who had escaped some dire literary prison through the fourth wall, now just seeking and searching for something we can’t recall why we ever wanted.

As if to answer the unasked question, the fog of confusion and darkness parted in front of us.  As if illuminated in a ray of light, we saw it in front of us.  Sketched out in lines of garish colors and kitchy words, Toy Joy was in front of us.  I saw the name spelled out as if using tinker toys.  I saw stickers of Hello Kitty, Japanese robots, wigs and Elvis.  I saw the promise of weirdness and goofiness.  I saw a place the crazy could go to make friends with insanity, standing in a place so weird that both sanity and insanity were warded off into a dead space where mind could just be.  We were up to our gills in acid and tripping balls, but we had reached our destination.

If only it all hadn’t fallen to shit afterwards.

Most apocalyptic novels deal either with the apocalypse itself, the survivors just after, or the skeletons of society centuries after – scavengers, bandits, and backwards tribes.  A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller is different.  This book tells the story of the dark age of mankind after the apocalypse and humanity’s slow movement back towards knowledge, civilization, and society.  It is not surprising that the message is also much about humanity’s resistance to knowledge and its tendency to repeat its ignorance and war over and over again.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is three stories separated by centuries.  All stories center around the monastery of Blessed Leibowitz, a technician that lived when the bombs dropped.  After society fell apart, the populace turned against knowledge, science, and religion, preferring to burn themselves back to an ignorance that would last for centuries.  Leibowitz recognized this and became a priest who spent his time collecting books and having his followers memorize them.  The monastery became the biggest collection of this hidden knowledge, but that knowledge was fragmentary and often not understood by the monks.  The monks cared for the knowledge and copied it over and over as religious texts, but instead of using it, they were storing mankind’s previous advancements for the far future date when humanity will be ready for it again.

The first story is about a young monk who stumbles on an amazing find.  The second is a scholar from a warring country who seeks to bring about a new renaissance.  The third story is about mankind’s renewed ascendance and how it reacts when on the verge of destroying it all again.  These are the basic plots of the stories, but they are all about humanity, knowledge, ignorance, faith, and war.  In each, there is a pervasive conflict between the progress of knowledge and those who either think it is too soon or refuse knowledge.  In each case we see the barbarism and warlike nature of mankind, both in the dark age of humanity and at the height of civilization.  Sourly, the author shows us what has come before will come again; no matter what humanity has gone through, there are always those willing to fight for the last few scraps or press the button to drop the bombs for political pissing matches.

The novel is not all doom and gloom.  Though written in 1959 at the height of the Cold War, where we’d expect a nuclear apocalypse to be taken more seriously, there’s a humor that pervades the work.  It is not absurdist or outlandish; the plots and events are quite serious.  However, there’s a sardonic cast to the reactions and interactions between characters.  The absurdity is not the story but humanity itself.  It is the strange humor of the all-too-human fear, nervousness, and unwillingness to see the other’s view.  The humor is wry, the crack of a smile rather than the guffaw of a laugh.  At times that’s what keeps you reading, at other times it’s what reminds you of the characters’ humanity.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is considered one of the classics of science fiction, however, I think that title has been tarnished in the modern day.  For example, I myself grew up immersed in scifi, both old and new, but did not hear of this novel until a few years ago.  Likewise with many others I know.  Why this novel hasn’t maintained its familiarity to the newer generations the same way Philip Dick, Frank Herbert, Heinlein, and others have is unknown.  Perhaps it is because the science fiction takes a backseat to everything else.  Perhaps it is the end of the Cold War that makes nuclear annihilation more kitschy than serious.  That is unknown.  A Canticle for Leibowitz is worth a read.  It will not be the best novel you’ve read.  At the same time, the breadth of the novel’s centuries and what it is trying to convey are things I haven’t seen in novels for a long time, if ever.  It’s worth working through this novel – there are no answers here, no solution to humanity – just questions.

When we last left our intrepid heroes, there were three of us just beginning to trip balls.  We had inadvertently discovered the destination for our quest:  Toy Joy, the kitchy toy store not far from campus.  Our next step became getting there.

Toy Joy was theoretically within walking distance, but it was not an idle walk.  Twenty to thirty minutes for a normal person, depending on the speed you walked and how urgent you were to get there.  For drug users, such a time estimate was impossible; it would be a feat worth talking about if we even arrived at our destination.  There was a route we could have taken through the heart of campus which perhaps would have been more direct.  This would have taken us across campus, through looping paths, steps up and down, either plunging through or circumventing campus buildings.  That could have been quicker, but it was a less interesting walk.  We particularly did not want to walk through any buildings we had classes in while on acid, just for the poor associations in our drug-addled minds.

The route we took was more L shaped.  Five blocks to the west, then about ten north.  The north trip would take us along the Drag, a long stretch of lights and sound.  This would be far more interesting than plowing through campus, especially when said light and sound would be augmented by our current mental states.

We set out the west exit of Jester dorm, walking down the steps with a sense of purpose.  It was still dinner time, so there were a fair amount of people on the street and the sun was setting.  This again was different from previous trips, all taken at night time where pedestrian density was less and far more used to nighttime revelers.  We each did our best to not look suspicious, to look like stupid college students rather than stupid college students on drugs.  In retrospect, I’m not sure anyone would have been able to tell the difference.

We walked past the Perry Castaneda Library (PCL), one of the biggest libraries I had ever encountered.  Six massive floors of books made it a dream for bibliophiles and a horror for anyone to find anything in unless they learned to brave the antiquated computer index system that crashed on you more often than not.  Out of their lobby collection of twenty terminals, typically about six were occupied by other students, ten were froze from a crash.  This meant learning where a book was became a game of “find the two uncrashed terminals before another student does.”  Now in my heightened state, I looked at the building as if I could stare through the stone walls of the outer shell to the books inside and feel them pulsate with knowledge.  We walked on past it.

It was past the PCL that paranoia struck.  Paranoia always strikes.  No matter what drug they are doing, if you get a group of people together on drugs, at some point paranoia is going to hit.  This is especially true if they are out and about rather than sequestered in a safe place.  When you mix the implicit illegality of every drug experience with minds made unstable by the drugs themselves, paranoia will come up.  The source will vary, but once it is added to a group, it is an insidious virus that infects all minds.

“I think we’re being followed,” said Basquiat.

“We’re being followed?” asked Other Mike.

“Why would we be followed?” I asked, looking around nervously.  There were students walking around, moving to and fro on whatever robotic paths their lives took them upon.  None of them looked suspicious.  No, strike that.  They all looked suspicious.  The ones to watch out for were the ones that looked measurably less suspicious than all the rest – those were the ones trained so well to hide their suspiciousness by whatever agency needed them to expertly fail to arouse suspicion.

“Maybe someone heard us at dinner,” said Basquiat.  “I told Zero we were doing liquid at dinner.  Just in case he wanted something for later.”

“Wait, why did you tell someone we were doing that?” Other Mike asked.  “If we had liquid, we have enough to sell.  Intent to sell.  Fuck.”  He paused, and raised his voice a little.  “Ahem.  I mean, theoretically.  If you had such a thing, it might be enough for you to sell.  I am not involved.  I don’t really know you.  We are not friends.  In fact, who are you?  I think I have an appointment to get to.”

Both Basquiat and I frantically shushed him.  I hit him on the back of the head for good measure.  My hand felt cold and fishlike.

“If they weren’t after us before, they would be after us now,” Basquiat said.  He narrowed his eyes at Other Mike.  “They heard you, man.”

“They?  Who’s they?” I said.

“They,” said Basquiat, “Captial T, They.  The ones who are after us.  They’re following.”

“Why do they get a capital T?” said Other Mike.  “I want a capital T.”

“There’s no T in your name,” I said, then to Basquiat: “But who are They?”

“Does it matter right now?” said Basquiat.  “We have to move.  Change our route.  Something.”

Quickly I pointed to the Dobie mall which was coming up on the left.  “Quick, let’s duck in there.”

The Dobie Mall was a strange amalgam of building.  I’m not sure I’ve quite seen anything like it.  The mall itself was small and two floors.  The bottom was a quiet labyrinth of stores including a comic book store, a travel agent, and a coffee house, none of which was widely frequented.  The second level was the more popular level.  The main part of the second floor was a wide open food court with far more tables that would be needed for the handful of fast food kiosks.  Around the food court were a record store, an arcade, and a very small movie theater that played mostly indie and cult films.  The movie theater itself wasn’t small, but in an effort to provide as many different movies at once, each individual theater room was small.  Not more than 40-50 people could be in one at a time, and the floor was not inclined.  With many movies this was not a problem, but if you watched anything with subtitles and someone was in the row in front of you, you had to crane your neck to see anything.  I watched an entire showing of subbed Akira with my neck stretched like some awkward bird that had extreme neck pain.

The mall part is not what made Dobie weird.  Rising to the sky from on top of the mall was an eight floor tower.  The tower was narrow and tall while the mall below was much wider and shorter, giving the impression of a gigantic dong of steel, concrete, and glass when viewed from a good vantage point.  The tower was a private dorm for students.  Only with a key card could you use the elevator to get to tower floors, but that elevator stopped on the food court as well.  For the students there was also a pool on top of the mall (also keycarded) and an attached covered parking garage.  As I said, I’ve never seen anything like it.

We entered the mall through stairs that went directly to the second floor food court.  We walked briskly, taking a few turns.  I suggested we turn down a long awkward and twisting corridor that led to the mall’s dirty bathrooms, but Basquiat stopped me.

“No, it’s a dead end!  Don’t you see!  We’d be cornered!”

“Cornered by who?” I asked.

“Them!” he said.

“Is that they same as They?” I asked.

“It’s another arm of their organization!” said Basquiat without even the tiniest sense of irony.

We turned away from that bathrooms and took a brisk walk through the food court.

“Do we want to grab something to eat?  I like the teriyaki stand here,” said Other Mike.

“Stroganoff!” I said.

He clutched his stomach as a wave of nausea washed over him.  “Thanks for reminding me,” he said.

I smiled.

We took the escalator down to the bottom floor and passed the comic book store.  I noted a standee of the Scarlet Spider staring at me.  Without stopping, we immediately got into the elevator and took it one floor up, putting us back on the food court.

“There,” I said, “that should stop anyone from following us, if they did follow us into the building, which we didn’t know for sure they did in the first place.  But if they did, and they followed us down, this should have shook them, unless we go back downstairs immediately or wait too long up here, in which case we may need to shake the persons who may or may not be following us again.  This is unless they have us under surveillance by a few people, in which case it doesn’t matter what we are going to do, because they’ll see us.”

Basquiat and Other Mike stared at me, each giving their own particular version of the what-the-fuck look.  I simply shrugged and stared at the teriyaki stand.  I always hated their teriyaki.

“Where to now?” I asked, forgetting that I was the only one who got things moving.  I received blank looks and continued.  “Well, whether we’re being followed or not it doesn’t matter at this point, since the result is the same, so we should get out of here.”

They shrugged and nodded, following me out a different door than the one we entered the mall with.  This put us directly onto the Drag, though a block or two south of where we had originally planned to hit it.  The sun was almost down, the sky almost dark and a few rays of light striking buildings.  We walked over to the crosswalk and I punched the button to cross.  We stood their trying to look nonchalant, but we were all jumpy.  I was impatient, as I just wanted to get where we were going, being done with all this waiting.  The other two were still paranoid, looking around for someone following us without making it too obvious they were looking around for someone following us.  Of course, that suspicious looking might just make someone follow us.

Paranoia, man.

The light changed and we clumsily walked across the street.  On the other side we admired a strange and familiar Austin sight.  On the side of the Sound Exchange record store someone had painted a large line drawing of an alien.  Ten feet tall and twenty feet wide, it was not a serious depiction of an alien – as compared to more literal interpretations of grey aliens by people who had never seen them.  This alien had a goofy smile and antenna that drooped to either side, each antenna ended with a playful ball.  We all stared at it for a long moment, engrossed in its art but also approving before we realized we were being suspicious again.  We started walking down the Drag.

The Drag is formally named Guadalupe Street.  No one pronounces it the right way in Austin.  If you hear “Guad-a-lup-ay”, you know it’s an out of towner.  Austinites call it Guad-a-loop, or more commonly the Drag when they’re talking to the part near campus.  The Drag was one long strip of stores on one side.  Places to buy school books, university paraphernalia priced to gouge, restaurants, a few bars, a church, a few coffeehouses, two arcades, a bead shop, clothing stores, and more.  For the main stretch these are all on one side of the street, the other side was officially campus and just was trees, stone dividers, and occasionally a building.  There was much to see on the store side of the Drag, especially as it grew dark and the lights grew brighter and the night crowd came out.

We walked a block, just marveling at everything in silence.  At the next intersection was a lone stone church.  I’m not sure if I ever saw it open for mass, but I was also aware there was a back entrance near parking where the congregation might enter and leave from.  The front of the church was almost always occupied by a group of homeless people, known as Drag Rats.  These often differed from normal homeless people in a few ways.  For one, their hair tended to range from the multicolored to the randomly shaven.  Many had piercings.  Their clothes weren’t always dirty and disused.  They tended to be younger than most homeless people.  They were also the rudest homeless people I had ever seen, constantly yelling insults at those who would not give them change or donate their leftovers if holding a box from a restaurant they just exited.

There was a reason for this.  It wasn’t some ugly rumor perpetuated by those who wanted to absolve guilt about not helping the homeless.  This came from people I knew who befriended the homeless.  There were some actual homeless mixed in: runaways, transients, homeless from other parts of town.  But many of the Drag Rats were not homeless; they were in fact the children of some of Austin’s richest families.  They went down to the Drag to be act homeless and hangout, whether due to rebellion against parents or just to pretend to be something they were not.  This made sense; how many homeless people had the money to spare or the facilities to dye their hair red and purple without getting their neck and body covered with it?  How many would prefer a shiny piercing compared to a hot meal or something to drink?  The hobos I had known would be mortified if they knew this was going on.

We stopped among the Drag Rats.  Since he sold drugs, Basquiat seemed to know someone wherever we went.  I’m not sure if he was gregarious because he was a drug dealer or a drug dealer because he was gregarious, but he was always chatty, always making friends, even if he wasn’t selling now.  Maybe that person would remember the friendship and buy later.  So we paused as he sat down with the Drag Rats for a while.  They were talking about friends who had gone missing recently or something like that.

Other Mike and I had no connection to the Drag Rats nor any interest in developing one, so we stood by Basquiat awkwardly, looking off to either direction.  I took a step or two back from a mottled mutt of a dog that one Rat had.  It didn’t appear to be the one I had seen downtown (it wasn’t quite so ugly), but it seemed cut from the same mold (it was still fucking ugly) so I kept my distance.

It felt like fifteen minutes that we stood there, but because of drugs, I know it was probably much less.  Eventually Other Mike and I were impatient.

“We want to go,” I said to Basquiat, patting him on the shoulder.  And then I kept patting for a full minute before he finally turned around.

He looked at me then blinked in surprise, as if seeing me for the first time.  I’m pretty sure he had forgotten we were there.

“Oh, hi,” he said with a smile and a hyena laugh.

“Look,” I said, turning to take a quick look at Other Mike, who seemed to have discovered that his face was really interesting and so was rubbing his hand up and down it, exploring the contours.  “We’re bored here.  We have a place to go.  A quest.  We can go on without you if you’re enjoying yourself here.”

“No, no, no, I’m with you,” he said, putting out his hand as if that would calm me.  He smiled to his Rat friends and stood up.  “Ladies and gentlemen, we have to depart.  We are due somewhere else.  We have a quest.”

“A quest?” said a blue haired girl who seemed to have more metal on her face than flesh.  “Where are you going?”

Fully standing, Basquiat pumped his fist in the air and shouted.  “We’re going to Toy Joy!”

I rolled my eyes, Other Mike explored his face.  A few laughs went up among the Drag Rats.  A few actually responded with huzzahs.  But now we were at least on track.

I grabbed Other Mike and dragged Basquait with me.  As I pulled him away, he turned back to the Drag Rats.  He pumped his fist in the air again as I pulled him away.

“Toy Joy!” he shouted to the Drag Rats.