I) Into the Lion's Den

Fade to white. Stripes of yellow passing on a surface of tarnished blurred black tar. An unregimented forest had given way to a strange kind of symmetry, some sort of pre-planted planned grove stretching mile upon lonely peninsular mile. Two girls in the back seat reading. One scans pictures of a thick book with thin pages currently evidencing geologic time in the Great Lakes region, the other reads Dinosaur Comics. Jacket photo Ryan North has a bright light around him. On our way up north so that Jack Darren may put a knife to his throat.

DMM: Tell me again why we are going to Canada to kill Ryan North?
Roz: My little brother had one of those 'put it in water and it'll grow' things when we were kids, like a frog or a salamander. I don't recall, but either way it was kinda slimy when it got done growing.

Jack: I grew out of that.
Roz: What the mold, or the stage of life in which growing something in water is interesting?
Jack: Yes.

Jack pulled a snifter from its pouch alongside the driverseat. It was filled with Armenian cognac. Terrible, terrible stuff. I knew it was filled with terrible Armenian cognac because I was present when my friend and Jack’s amanuensis Vitaly gave him a crate of the stuff as a going away present, and we drank the first bottle together that night discussing hope and plans and the meaning of it all. A conversation that somehow directly led Jack conclude the imperative of killing Ryan North.

DMM Why are we killing Ryan North?

Jack: What’s a word that means how old are you?

Roz: Age.

Jack: Yes, Age. But the question yeah? Age? Here’s a question for you man, how old did you say you were?

Roz: He’s, he’s almost thirty now I think. Right?

Jack: Wrong. The question wasn’t how old are you the question was how old did he Say he was. And if I think back on it, he never said. Right? So the answer is nothing! But in any case, since that would end our little conversation I’ll keep going fresh by saying that however old he is, it’s too old because he’s not doing a friggin thing with his life. He hasn’t and he won’t. It’s too late now. Almost thirty? Pah! You were ancient at 19! Might as well be dead compared to me, I’m living. You have to go all the way, you know. Like, sometimes you just have to go all the way. You remember Grindhouse? That movie Tarantino made with Robert Rodriguez, where they just did things all out, all the way, because they felt like it? You have to live your life like that.

Jill: You and your stupid Grindhouse. Why not Saw Four?

Jack: I’m not talking about Gruesome I’m talking about going all the way. If I meant Saw Four I would’ve said Saw Four. What’s a word for going all the way?

DMM: Home Run.

Roz: Bituminous.
Jack: Bituminous! Now there's a good word. What's that mean? Something to do with rocks?
Jill: No, something to do with rocks.

Jack: Right. That’s what I said. I’m so smart.

Jill: You have me.

Jack: I have you.

They kiss and the word I write down in my notebook is predacity. Jack, though he is a very good friend of mine, can be a true and utter dick. He has the tendency to look me straight in the eye when I’m talking to him and at the same time tilt his head as if I am a thoroughly mystifying abstraction. Aberrantly uninteresting. Which I am not, but I hold no resentment. His rude habit is tolerable because I myself often reduce my thoughts of him to that of an uninteresting aberration. Well, an aberration anyway. For instance; his unmuted affection for that persistently attendant stinky dog of his, Thor. Or Jill, the other stinky dog in the car with us, whom he first asked on a date while she was on a date with me. Whilst she… Whom? I’m reading too much of this damn book I picked up at the airport. (I’ve started reading again.) That’s where predacity comes from. Predacity the word, not the esurient noun.

Roz: See and it says here a hornbill will nest in a hollow tree, and lay three or four eggs. While she is keeping the eggs warm her lovely husband will come and feed her, and then also feed the chicks when they hatch. Aren't they pretty with their spots and yellow beaks? Hello Hornbills!

Jill: Personally, my favorite bird is a parakeet.

Jack: Because they are small but have a big ego.

Jill: I prefer to think of it as personality.

Roz: He likes to munch on little insects, fruit and froglets. Yum yum!

DMM: I’m hungry.
Jill: We’ve got peanut butter crackers and beer.

Jack pulled over so we could eat and I reached under the seat where I had stashed a two liter bottle of Sprite, half full when we left and capped off with another half empty bottle of potato vodka, the only thing I had lying around, waiting for the right occasion. Bringing it along was my idea of inspired preparation. The dog hurdled out of the car once Jack popped the trunk open, Jill carried a thick blanket and a green picnic basket to a half-shaded clearing, and Roz wrestled into her overcoat and squeezed herself out of the back seat with a groan. I trudged along behind, tired of them already. In the morning, as the sun had daubed its subtle lights through the trees into the car lending an agency of hazy irrationality to the scene, everyone was calm, all sounds inaudible, and the happy couple both smiled with their eyes closed. Smiling without looking at anything, they slept and I smiled too, the rider, looking straight ahead while Roz drove, maintaining a détente between the voices in her head, Thor the animal snoring peaceably, his head inclined slightly against my crammed feet. The tops of Roz’s fat and stubby fingers squeezing into the steering wheel. They go well with her manish wrists, she’s a powerful girl. A big girl. She’s got a big head and big lips, big copper eyes and a little nose that, in a way, is beautiful to me. I guess I was staring at her, she turned eloquently toward me and smiled.

Roz: I do a great job at hiding my real true feelings in front of your face.
DMM: You mean… wait?
Roz: You heard me.
DMM: Don’t take this the wrong way but I like you better when you’re quiet.

She smiled again, demurely, a genuine honest little kid kind of smile that compulsorily had me smiling back. Soon my eyes closed and I dreamed of the night before we left. Fireflies blinked their bottoms in the pines, Jack was singing “cut us down again” behind the smoking hot clashes of timbered coals, Jill there near him, the rest of us at a slight distance, miniscule beneath the great berth of speckled star. How many times had I sat under the stars, subjecting myself to their pulsing radiology? Gut Busting, Butt Gusting I wrote in my notebook, knowing later much later I would look back on it and maybe laugh, rub my face quizzically, which I’ve been told I need to do more because it makes me look like that guy from Supernatural. What does it all mean? Not the notebook, everything. A night, a memory, and almost five hundred miles away the stars laughed, our only heaven, now faded into blue. The sun is out, but the air is cold.

Low B flat. The sound of momentum. A plane in the high distance, humming like a subtle string quartet, hear now the viola in D, mezzo forte engino. The snow pocked underbrush leading to azure fields blemished with shadows of grazing white cows in an unending pasture of oh-so-blue sky. Twin violins emerge, F and F sharp. Now the song should begin in force. The entire orchestra should emerge, and a rock drummer. The singer struts to his microphone… and… nothing.

The sun disappears. Reappears. Light winces our eyes until the sun, loses its game with the pearled clouds and becomes entrapped behind their darkened walls. The future is the sun, the present is the clouds, and there is no getting from one to the other. So this is the U.P. The Upper Peninsula. Thor blustering in the berry bushes, Vitaly had gone home, and Roz and I sitting on the raised curb drinking warm Dos Equis, waiting for angry Jill to come back. We had eaten and Jack said something wrong so she left, and stayed gone long enough that even I could piece together she was waiting for him to go after her.

Jack: You go after her smartass. She’s your girlfriend.
DMM: Was. I mean— no she wasn’t she— Hey. Anyone ever tell you that you look like Steve Gutenberg, only younger, and dumber, and angrier, and ugly?
Jack: No— except you. You tell me that all the time.

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and shuffled off down a path through the trees. Soon we heard loud arguing and tried to drink our beers more loudly. A silent toast to the ignorance of noise.

Roz: You don’t need someone else to make yourself a complete person. Make yourself complete first, then share. But only if you want to. You can’t truly love until you are complete yourself... when you try to hold onto another to make yourself complete, that’s not love. That’s not love.
DMM: Are you talking to me?
Roz: Sometimes you just have to let go, be yourself. I’m me. Be you.
DMM: Who else would I be?
Roz: I have always thought you would make a great sort of young Robert Downie Jr. impersonator.
DMM: Back before he was clean and sober? I have to continue to consume this much alcohol, by the way. My brother doesn’t drink so it’s vital that I make up the deficit for him.
Roz: You’re brother the Doctor?
DMM: He’s really n—

Jill barged brusquely back into sight, the dog hopping backwards, pawing at her torso while she slapped him away yelling behind her “Well you better be, because wisdom begins with fear!" and Jack emerged next, chasing after her frowning, his pants splattered in mud, muttering loudly “kill kill kill kill kill” as he followed her to the car. She got in shotgun and screamed a string of unintelligible profanities when he tried to get in to drive so he slammed the door and went around to sit in back. Roz hopped up and I rose groaning, we exchanged a look signifying that neither of us really desired to drive.

Flipped a bottlecap for it. That’s how I ended up driving the next shift.

Jill: Arg! Is it too much to ask for good music on the radio? Bet you forgot to bring any of my CDs didncha dingus?
Jack: Glove compartment.

It started to rain. Hard and then quickly and steadily harder. Jill’s face was red and her posture was taut. She vaguely leafed through the CD booklet, chose one and turned the volume louder and louder to compete with the pounding rain. Two and a half songs in, out of the trepid corner of my eye I gauged her temperament at tolerable.

DMM: Do we have to listen to this?
Jill: Yes. It’s my car.
DMM: Seriously though! Jonas brothers? How can you listen to this stuff? They’re pre-pubescent, out of key, and they probably don’t even write their own songs.
Roz: One day I found Radio Disney by accident and I didn’t change it for a month.
Jill: They’re good right? I think they’re really cute, and a lot better than some of the other Top Forty hit groups.
DMM: Spare me. Top Forty! Does that even exist any more? Don’t torture us all just because you’re mad, it isn’t fair.
Jill: I treat people how they SHOULD be treated, not how they want to be.

Gradually the forest gave way to swampland without our attention to hold it steadfastly into place. The wipers swished back and forth, changing the scene one swipe at a time. The swamps became a sort of river of grass, a vast network of wide rivers making their way towards the lake, taking the easy way out, which water does expertly and some humans do better than others. Jack, for example. Rather than quietly despise the saint Ryan North because of his close relation to divinity, Jack had taken it upon himself to seal the imminent deal irreparably. One could let time run its course and spend years deriding an apparent lack of conviction on the part of the universe, or you could manifest the change yourself, much faster.

DMM: Why Ryan North?

I asked quietly, once the CD had played through twice and Jill had gone to sleep beside me. Her head leaning against the rainstreaked windowpane, so it looked like the streaks of water were disappearing into her hair. Found something operatic low on the dial, Roz and Jack were sharing a pipe in the backseat.

Jack: Did I show you the skyscraper Vitaly and I built out of papier-mâché? I did the construction and he did the design and detail. We even had an observation deck filled with little Lego people, and one of them I put up there was holding a golf club mid-swing. We eventually made a kind of project board diorama around the whole thing, complete with blue sky and wavy W seagulls against a setting sun. I told him, haha, I imagined the little Lego guy was hitting golf balls at the gulls. Pop! Hahah! Just whacking balls at them until they exploded midflight man I really gotta take a leak.

Roz: Sure its not just the dog sniffing at your crotch?

Jack: Hey look, a river. Rivers in the spring always make me feel all warm inside.

Roz: Better than warm and tingly outside?
Jack: Ok, Pull over pull over pull over pull over!

Pulled the car alongside a modest faded green sign denoting the Carp River and turned off the engine. Jack jumped out and slammed the door, waking Jill. She yawned, scrunched her face and stretched her arms out like a cat, then curled back into herself in a fetal position.

Jill: He have to go pee?
DMM: Yes ma’am.
Jill: I was having a dream. I was making a painting of the moon, under the moon. A woman with a vase over her head who had just stabbed her husband for running off all the time and was walking over to the moon to fill up the vase. But once she filled it up, the vase became the moon, it was made of the moon, and her hips swayed like the tide. The man, her husband was in a tiny black box and his eyes were enormous, he wasn’t dead but he was crying and I came up to him and knelt down. He was so small, he was like a little seahorse made of diamonds, and he smiled. We were on an island, and he was drowning from the air, he needed help moving to the water so I picked him up and he said “I’m so happy now. Happiness is only unbearable when it doesn’t last. As unbearable as the fear and the dread and the anxiety from which it is sprung.” He dissolved through my fingers into a gleam of white sand, and I was trapped, alone on the island with the woman, who was a palm tree, the moon in her branches, and I was cold.

She pressed her nose to the window as fat wet drops came down against the glass and I wondered why she had agreed to this trip. Why had any of us? Roz of course was friends with them both and had nothing better to do than take road trips , unless you count dusting the curtains your grandmother hung forty years ago in the window of the basement where you stay rent free and go to work waiting tables two nights a week as something better to do. Jill went where Jack went and Jack, presumably peeved over some ill-begotten grudge, had decided murdering Ryan North was the only way to go. But what was my purpose?

Roz bummed a cigarette and unbuckled her seat belt. She held the smoke like she was afraid of it, balanced between the very tips of her fingers, and didn’t look like she enjoyed the taste of each waspish inhalation. I got out and joined her. It’s hard not to talk, once no one has talked for a while. Momentum. But something she had said earlier was bothering me. I watched her breathe the smoke and pace.

DMM: I’m a complete person.

Roz: You can’t even be honest with yourself.

DMM: Sure I can.

Roz: But you lie to yourself all the time so you can get away with believing your lies to everyone else.

DMM: What does that mean?

The ground was sodden. We walked slowly, carefully. In the car the animal barked. He simultaneously empathized with and loathed us. Thor’s dark eyes tracking our progress he barks and scratches the window, whining. Finally Jill opened the door and he uncoils in a bound, sniffing around and around for some indication of precisely which of the innumerable directions we had walked. Littled curlicues of trailed scents that he dances around with serious conviction.

Under a shadowed oak we saw Jack, and he stared at the ground, and we saw that he looked sick. Bushwacked through the brushwood and helped him back to the car.

Jill: Well I guess I’m driving. It’s my turn.

I moved my book and Sprite bottle to the backseat. They all got settled. Stalled at open door and called for the animal. Jill accelerated, pulled the car away and sped off down the road, opened door closing with inertia, I thought I saw Roz, her neck craned around to look back at me, before they were around the bend and gone. Thor emerged from his quest at a mad dash and took off after them until he too had disappeared. Little birds peeped, their song hypnotic. The forest was quiet, like some great cavern after its mouth has collapsed. The only road lay straight in front so I soldiered forward.