Rationality (Blackoutproof)

“In every megrim or vertigo, there is an obtenebration
joined with a semblance of turning round.”
–Bacon

                I was staring at a smudge on his bicep.  “What— what is that?” 
                “It's a Persian Magpie, the seal of Persian Royal Family.”  He flexed, obligingly.

                “That's very chic,” said Mr. two-chins.

                “Sheik?  Or chic?”

                “Chic.”

                He was right.  Sheik is not chic.  The guy was short and angry about it, lounging beside me on the leather sofa while his white wine perspired in a way that allowed me to feel a sort of kinship with it.  I wanted to be elsewhere, to move on, but I was trapped here, with her.  I kept looking around the room for some sort of escape which never came.

                “So I bought a new camera the other day,” said the blonde girl.  She wasn't a natural blonde.  Her eyes were bulbous and crooked like one of those Sims3 characters that look mildly retarded.  “A Rebel T31.  Eight-hundred and nine some-odd dollars.  It was a great deal.”

                I couldn't figure out who she was talking to as the rest of the party plopped around the sparse-deco sitting room were eyeing the door, where Dav Brun had just come in and was removing his girlfriend's coat.

                “Are you a photographer?” I asked.

                “No. It's just a hobbiest camera.  18 megapixels though.”  She swiped her red veiny hand across her pasty speckled cheek to remove a thin errant strand of fake blonde hair that had stubbornly broken ranks and lodged itself in her wan and petulant mouth.

                “Wow.” I said, trying to smile.  Failing to smile.
                They were friends of friends.  Friends of friends of friends.  The only one I really knew was Pad.  Who names their kid Pad anyway?  It's short for something ancient and sacred I think.  I forgot.  Caro told me once.

                Caro's my girlfriend.  She was in the kitchen with Pad and Dav Brun.  I watched her nodding as she listened to Dav Brun's girlfriend yap about traffic in the tunnel while preparing hors d'oeuvres— little green and yellow garlic spinach puffs with nondairy cheese sprinklets— still deciding if and how I was going to break up with her tonight.

                Caro, smiling, turned to see if I was watching her.  I turned quickly away.  Perched there not watching her, my back hunched, shoulders suspended, a pose meant to indicate how unreceptive I felt.

                “Are you sure you won't have any wine?”  Pad asked me, coming in from the kitchen with the tray of nasty treats between her long marble fingers.  This was Pad's get-together.  Pad's place.  Pad's pad.

                “No,” I said shyly, imagining her hands sliding down the soft curve of my abdomen, the way she would laugh with those dark painted lips pulled back to bare her shiny teeth as she tugged my beltline, “I'm fine.”

                “How about some tea then?  We have tea going.  IS THE TEA READY CARO?”

                I agreed to have some tea so she would go away.  The conversation had moved into money matters, as it inevitably does at these things, and I stared across the hardwood floor at the two teenage linguists from Columbia sitting wrinkled in the corner discussing ablative inflections and taxonomic Latin.  One had dark curly hair and I took him to be a Jew.  The other boy looked like Jack Benny if Jack Benny had ever been young and worn snap-pocket cargo pants.

                When Caro came with the tea came it was filled to the brim and I had to sit up and take the mug delicately in both hands, stretching out my neck to sip without tilting and spilling.  I set it down and Caro put her hand atop my head affectionately, as if to show me the least committal form of intimacy and, thus, keep me here placated while she has fun with her friends, and I suffer, indefinitely.

                I wished McIntyre were here.  He's my best friend in the city, although he's not in the city tonight since he is a lobbyist and his boss makes him split his time between here and Albany.  McIntyre would be just what this place needs.  That guys is wild, superfluous in both vivacity and vigor, although you wouldn't know it to look at him.  He likes to walk with his grandfather's silver-tipped cane, and he walks really really slow because he has a bad leg.  And he'll twirl the cane around in front of him like a spinning top while he tells smug and dissatisfying stories, the silver tip glinting mischief as it goes around and around and you wait patiently for him to get to the point of his story, which he never does, and he talks so low and slow you want to strangle yourself it's so frustrating, and then when he gets almost to the end of the story he'll get distracted and jump up and walk away leaving everyone angry and feeling stupid and used.  It's hilarious!

                We've been friends for years but it was pure circumstance that landed us both in the city together again.  Caro and I moved here last April from Chicago when she finished graduate school.  I hadn't spoken to McIntyre in over a year, nor seen him in five, but I ran into him last summer on a weekend roadtrip upstate.  It was my first trip alone since I'd been dating Caro.  It was a trip home.  Home for me is down one of those cracked and winding asphalt roads in the middle of nowhere, I always seem to innately know exactly where I am when I am there driving those old roads, and I always seem to get there just after dark when I go now, which is not often.  We reconnected late on the fourth of July, and spent an hour late into the night throwing classic works of literature out the window of my Uncle's blue Mustang while we drove down those twilit back roads  where we both come from.   I found not only that we were both living in the city, but that we were living there within walking distance of each other, and it was just like old times again.  I always know exactly where I am when I am there.  Home feels like home.  So different from here in the city.  I get lost going for the corner newspaper. 

                McIntyre takes me out for breakfast uptown once a week, scooping quick steaming mouthfuls of gristle into his face while the sun shines in coldly at odd angles through frosty windows and I tell him lies about how terrible things are with Caro, who pays for us to be here and so I resent her heavily and portray her as the cruel villainess to my lost and helpless hopeless sensitive hero self.  Or sometimes McIntyre's in a good mood and he'll talk while I prop my elbows and listen to glib and practiced snippets of his one night stands with girls with names like Jennie who was Czech, or Orelia who was Dominican, or Fanny who “had one of the nicest tails I'd ever seen.  Fine, Mmm. Fine, Fanny,  I could understand why her parents named her that...”

                “Joni Mitchell.”

                “Hm?”

                “I always thought I would end up with someone who likes Joni Mitchell,” I said, “and we could listen to it together and she could explain to me what's so great about her and it'd be great.”

                “So?” 

                “So Caro doesn't even know who Joni Mitchell is.   So I tried buying her a CD and she hated it.  So I have to listen to her alone.”  The malnourished double-shift waitress refills our coffee warily and slips the bill right in the middle of the sticky red plastic table where McIntyre picks it up to examine it whilst telling me again that I shouldn't be so hard on myself.  I'm a good writer, he tells me.

                But am I a good writer?  I wrote a story about a Penguin who lives in a frat house.  One story.  Eight months ago.  And, yes, yes, it got picked up by a second-rate art mag called Pumped, where my friend Adam works and he got them to ask me for another but I hadn't been able to finish it all year and then it was New Years and their new issue came out already and I told myself I'd finish it six months ago and meanwhile Caro comes home every night successful and happy to see me and asks me how it's coming and it's driving me crazy.  I'll have to break up with her soon if I'm going to do it.  Otherwise I'll drag this thing out through Valentine's Day and then what's the point?

               

                Everything depressed me.  The thin girl next to me grazed my side with her elbow and I recognized her as the model Pad introduced me to when we came in.  I looked at her elbow and then up the sleeve of her white cashmere sweater to where it drooped off over her perfect bony shoulder, with the gold moon goddess earrings slinking down.  Her long, center-parted hair with bangs that brushed her sculpted eyebrows.  I wonder what her heritage is?  It's so hard to tell with models these days.  They're all racial heterogeneity, a single skinny race of genetically perfected clothes hangers. I appreciated her with my eyes, until she opened her mouth, laughing gauchely at Dav Brun who had made some unfunny joke about mortgage fraud that even he didn't think was funny, but he laughed at as well, because she was laughing, then others strained to join in.  I fixed them with a look of slightly aimless defiance, all of them except Caro, who I did not look at at all.

                If McIntyre were here I could tell him all about the new Pynchon novel I read this afternoon.  I didn't really read it, but I was hoping he'd be here to ask me to boast about it.  In fact I read only the first chapter, but it was pretty good so I wikipedia'd the rest so I could sound impressive.  I spent most of the day playing Xbox and sitting in the window watching life pass by on the street below our apartment.  A lot of people pass by our window because it's between the Blimpie's and the KFC on E 148^th street, by the Metro.  I watch people pass and imagine what jerks they all are.  Sometimes I go out to join the jerk ranks.  Another whore in the horde.  It's a good icebreaker in the writing process when things get incapably dire to get up and take a walk to the park, a copy of Letters to Rollins in my overcoat pocket, downing mini-whiskeys and watching the aristocratic supermoms and nannies spin and twirl their robustly entitled children around nauseatingly bright playground equipment.  Mostly I just watch them all out my window, headed to the Metro.  When that gets tiring I play Xbox until about an hour before Caro gets home, then I do the dishes and get dressed and sit front of my penguin story and try my best to look miserable, which isn't that hard to do.  I have no gumption, I have no presumption.  Every day depresses me lately.

                The other day the model did a photo-shoot with some children, she told us.  “I was their mother and it was absolutely adorable.  I decided right then and there that I wanted to have kids.”  Her voice went up when she said this, “right then and there!” as if by being more shrill we would understand the depth of her desire for impregnation.  “Not someday!  Right now!  But when I went home to tell Derrick you'll never guess what he had waiting for me!”

                No one guessed so I interjected.  “A baby?”

                She didn't hear me.  “A puppy!  A brand new baby puppy, with big ears and big eyes and oh oh it's absolutely adorable!  I call him Sugar!  Here's a picture”

                Just then the lights went out.  Everyone shouted in a flutter of panic and then they grew real  quiet with their myriadic reassurances.  Sure that the power would come back on.  But it did not and the silence deepened.  The distant traffic sounds flared up from outside.  Somewhere, the whirr of a backup powersource groaned to life and cellphones emerged to illuminate the immediate darknesses.  The fan had turned off and the place promptly began to smell like armpit.  Out of the blackness Caro grabbed my arm.  I am reminded...  If you tell yourself not to think about it, it means you're thinking about it already.

                She sat with me.  Pad rummaged in bureau drawers for candles or a flashlight, cursing.  “Nothing is where it is supposed to be.”  I got up and moved to the floor.  We huddled in the eerie half-light like insomniatic bats.  Eventually she found some candles and one of the foolish young Columbia linguists gave an ignorant and monotonous speech while I sat listening to the floorboards creak in the floors above us contemplating suicide or perhaps a drink.  Voices moved in the hallways.  Pad asked if we all wanted to play a game, two truths and a lie, and no one objected and so they started to play.  The model went first.  I wished someone would shoot me through the brain while the lights were still off.  Right now.  Not someday.  Right then and there.

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                It was an exercise in abeyance.  I thought to whisper this to Caro, who had rested her head demurely on my shoulder, “this is an exercise in abeyance,” I would say, but did not, afraid she wouldn't understand.  Her command of the English language is passable but the hidden obstacles of larger words like 'abeyance' still lurk, menacingly.  Plus my utilization of the secondary definition of 'exercise' — mental exertion rather than the more commonly intended physical variety, might translate misleadingly in her brain into a nuanced indication that I wished to lead her out on a midnight run around the river.  I waited for death to come.  When it did not, I got up and started drinking the wine in the kitchen.  I hated to admit it was really good so I took the whole bottle and stood in a dark corner watching the candle-lit boredom cloud of their game.  Pad had taken my spot on the couch next to the guy with the Persian Magpie tattoo.  Turns out he was her boyfriend.  They were an odd couple, with an air of quiet desperation to them.  The not-blonde girl said she had been to every country in South America except Brazil and Jack Benny called “Lie!”  Mr. two-chins came in from the fire escape to report that from what he could at present ascertain the power was out across 30 square blocks.  I took a big swig on the wine to finish it off, and was starting to pleasantly feel its irresistible warmth in my head and then there was a knock at the door.

                Since I was closest I moved to answer, but Pad leaped up and beat me there, jumping back gasping as we both reached the knob at the same time.

                “FUCK!  I didn't know you were over here!  You scared me in the dark like that.”

                “Sorry,” I said, timidly, having a sudden vision of my step-mother, coming out of the bathroom of our old house by the dump wearing a red, white & blue corset from Stars & Straps Forever, her chest heaving as she saw me in the dark and I, squeezing around past her to lock the door, too scared to say anything at all except “sorry.  Sorry.”

                The guy at the door was Jeff.  One of the few people in the city who I knew and liked.  What he was doing here I had no idea.  He certainly wasn't dressed for this party, purple windpants and a black glow-in-the-dark T-Shirt for The Sex Organs.  With him was another guy I did not recognize who looked like he was levitating a foot above the floor, rather wobbly.

                “Hey I'm Jeff from downstayahs,”  Pad gave him an abhorrent look and pulled her green blouse up a little over her breasts.  “We'yah jus' goin' around lettin' everbody know that theyah's gunna be a potty in da basement tonight.  Ta celebrate the blackout.  You should come.”

                “Okay thanks” said Pad already closing the door.  I held it open.

                “Jeff!  Remember me?  From Pumped!”  Jeff's face contorted as he squinted to recognize some weak semblance of my face in the darkness.  “You remember: the penguin guy!  Do you live here man?  Here?”

                “Man, you gave me a rush!  I thawt you was dat othah guy I know who looks jes like you, from Brooklyn.  That fuckah's an asshole.  I'm glad you-ah not him man.”

                “So you're having a party?”

                “Yeah.  This is my friend Sabre, like the tiger.” 

                He pronounced it 'Sabe uh.  Like the Tie-guh' 

                Sabre said “hmph” obligingly, like someone had woken him from a not unpleasant dream.  Jeff continued, “His buddy Trog lives heeya, downstayahs.  We'yah jus goin' around tellin' everbody to come to dis blackout party in dey basement tonight.  You know?  Sawda makeshift.  It's a great space.  We know a guy from Steeans with some speakahs and Trog's a DJ so he'll be all spinning an' shit.  Theyah's even some Bawnad goils coming later on man, you should stop by.”  The light behind me flickered and he peered over my shoulder at the pompous indignants, clustered around their spinach puffs and candlelight and lies.  “Bringya friends man.  Everyone's invited.  Well, best be gettin' along.”

                “Nice to see you Jeff.  Maybe see you later.”  He was gone.

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                The party at Pad's pad, if you can call it that, lasted another two hours.  The power still had not come back on and I'd found and polished off another three bottles of wine, one by myself, the rest I shared some of, retreating to the solitude of the kitchen counter, waiting for the burden of their conversation to break rhythm and then pretending I was watching a TV, changing channels with an imaginary remote.  They were seeping fat garlic-ooze mosquitoes, buzzing white noise to me, the honeysuckle moth.  They were a glassed-in bulb and I was aflutter translucent.  My thoughts suddenly drifting around, illuminating the air, a girl I wished I'd dated from Ponoka Wisconsin, of all places, her earnest face embarrassed, then irritated, the shards I cut into her, and vise versa, and then Caro handed me my coat. It was time to go.

                “Good luck finding your way out,” Pad whispered escorting us out of one tomb and into another, making no secret of the fact that she was done with us all and ready for bed.  “The elevator will be out I suspect.  Call me if you need anything.”  They all said their goodbyes and I murmered something about a great time and the next thing I knew we were alone, marching down a winding black staircase by the light of Caro's phone, listening to the creak and clop of our shoes reverberate against the walls.  We sounded like a stampede.  Caro stopped to lace her boots and catch her breath.  I stepped past her and then handed her the bottle of wine.

                “Where did...?”

                “I swiped it.”

                “Dios mio!”

                “What?  I was ready to cit off my thumb in there!”  She said nothing, huffing and puffing.  I jammed the bottle at her again and laughed as she swatted at me.  “We're going to the party in the basement.”

                She said nothing.

                Pretty much I just drank.  We found two other people in the lower floors who were going to the basement as well, and followed them through the network of catacombs.  Jeff was right about the space.  It was perfect.  About 60 feet long and 25 feet across, everything made of cement except a small patch in the front where there were wet brown flattened cardboard boxes on the floor in front of a group of guys was huddled around a generator with a few lights and a stage where the DJ stood setting up.  Just in time.  A tall bald black man stopped us at the door, asking for ID and twenty dollars.  We all paid.  And by 'we all' I mean Caro.  She paid for both of us.  I didn't look back to see if she was mad.  I didn't even turn around.

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                She asked if I was a poet.  I had no idea what the hell she was talking about.  She wore a camel hair overcoat, red felt vest, white tank top and jeans.  Her hair was a hippie gnarl.  I remembered only that her name was Katherine.  I was sweating and holding an empty bottle of beer. 

                “Should I be a poet?”

                “Yes!”

                “Okay, then I am a poet.” She clapped and hugged me.  I smiled and looked around. “I dabble.”  The basement had filled with a torrent of young people in the last hour, wearing the kinds of clothes one wore to loud, young, crowded places— tight jeans and lots of skin.  Caro and I were steering clear of each other, doing our best at conversation with other people.  She was four feet and two dozen or more people away, looking beautiful, fragile, proud and so completely out of place it made me sick.  She could have said no to coming.  She could take care of herself.

                “She owes me.”

                “WHAT?”

                “Let's go get another drink,” I said to Katherine.

                “OKAY!” She bit my shoulder.  “That's for looking at other girls.”

                “I like other girls!” 

                She bit my shoulder again.  Harder.

                “You're quite the little domino aren't you?” 

                Katherine blushed, looking a decade younger in her innocent erubescence, grabbing us a jug of punch.  We were suffocating in a hot sea bodies. 

                I turned to a chubby girl in a glasses floating beside me.  “She bit my shoulder!  See?”

                I showed her my shoulder.  We all three started dancing.

                We were killing our dreams, drinking in draughts of unfamiliar spirits.  I made no sense of the clattering sound-bytes, the riddling bass thumps, the digital strings of bright laser lights strung out like a nuclear spider's web across the ceiling.

                “We all have our magics,”  said my new friend Tran who was born in a car in a junkyard in Orlando and told me he wants to create, through selective cross-breeding, a domesticated species of miniature elephant.  He had a thick accent, plus it was hard to hear him over the music.  The chubby girl suggested we go out to the fire escape for cigarettes.  It sounded good to me.  Tran lived up on the fourth floor.  “Follow Tran!”  We struck for the stairs.

                It had started to snow outside.  It was colder than death.  The air massaged our bodies, needled our skin.  There were people there smoking already.  Some were moving in time to the music playing inside, music they could not hear.  Most were back-slapping guys, barking obscenities at each other.  I envied them.

                Chubby handed me a cigarette and looked into my eyes for a long white delicate moment that I wanted to stretch out even longer.  We had to stop, we were shivering.

                “How are you?” she asked.

                “Good as gold.”  This one was pretty in a little kid kind of way.  “How are you?”

                “I feel like jumping.” She gazed confidently over the rail, out across the pitch black towers of this tenebrous city.

                A few guys starting shouting: Jump! Jump!  I looked down into the abyss.  “There is nothing to jump into,” I said.

                “Don't you have any trust?”

                “I trust people.”

                “Do you?”

                I had to think about it.  I listened to the suck of her lips pulling smoke in through her filter and pushing it back into the night.  A vision started, my Ponoka girl carrying an armload of plump wet white towels across the bright green lawn behind the church, she proceeded to wring them out over the rosebushes on the lawn before her cousin's wedding.  Memories are what's left when you don't want to remember anything ——

                “How old are you,” I asked suddenly.

                “Twenty-one.”

                “When you're 21 nowadays it's almost like you're middle age.  All the re-evaluating life after school, thinking you can't act like a idiot anymore.  And that's a sad realization.  And then before you know it you turn 22 and nothing has changed and so you get moody and gloomy and then you turn 23 and start acting unpredictable because you're a sad 24 and you realize by 25 that nothing is going to change and we all get old and its hard because no one wants to be an adult."

                She looked at me like she wanted to laugh.  It was not quite funny enough to laugh.  I realized that I was starting to sound like McIntyre, telling one of his stories.  What Would McIntyre Do?  He would be at work.

                “How old are you,” she asks.

                “How old do you think I am?”

                “Thirty maybe, I'd guess.”

                “I'm twenty-six.”

                “I'm sorry.”

                “It's okay.”
                I loomed over her.  I put her chubby hand in mine and pulled her close, leaning down close to her pretty little kid face.  So close I could taste her breath which smelled of tequila.  I kissed her on the lips and she didn't push me away.  I put my arm around her smoothness and followed the notches of her spine through her hoodie down the length of her back.  A manly gesture.  She brushed her hair behind her ear.  We stood there breathing in each others warmth

                “Did you know there are 50,000 emus currently in the United States,” said Tran, interrupting.

                We went back inside.

                There was a girl on Tran's couch sipping at a several-hours-old iced coffee while whispering trivialities to a lover in her iPhone, hoping, I imagined, that by stacking up minutes of emptiness she would find her — deep-breathing late-night-rejection-riddled — heart full.  I know the feeling. 

                Or maybe it was a parfait in there hours ago.  Who knows?

                She was the only light source in the room.  I watched her for the minute while Chubby went to the bathroom.   Some men came in with what looked like an armload of fireworks and bee-lined it for the window to the fire escape. 

                A dark guy came up to me and complemented my shoes.  He handed me a drink.  He reaked of menthols and fried fish.  He said that he had twice today encountered “haunting ghost selves.  Twice!  Twice today!  Same day!  See my ex-girlfriend los her phone, only I no know that cuz I didnwanna talk at her but then thiss guy founit an apparently he call me twice that day—today!  He call me to find her!  Twice!  Apparently I wass t'only save contact that seem worth askng!  The guy say I was saved under 'My Boy' in contacts.  An' we was broke up 8 month ago!  If you tell yo'self not to think about her, it mean you thinkin' about her already.”

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                Alone in the crowd, I looked for Chubby, or Katherine.  Or Caro.  The basement was getting out of hand.  It was near breaking point.  So was I.  All around me kids dancing all schizophrenic, like bombs popping in explosive nightmare waves.  There was probably a kind of grace in their collective fluidity but I couldn't make it out.  A hand on my shoulder and I jerked thinking of that girl that got away.  It was Jeff.

                “Disco Proskynesis!” he said.

                “WHAT?”

                “DISCO PROSKYNESIS!”

                “Disco Proskynesis would be a good band name!”  He licked the skin between thumb and pointer and sprinkled it with salt, then motioned me to follow.

                Some people want nothing to do with ambiguity.  Jeff is not one of these people.  He wants nothing to do with dignity.  His pants off, he made hoary thrusts against the bemused and disgusted, as we wheedled our way through the crowd to a table down the hall where he stopped and cackled “heh heh heh,” swaying slightly as he handed out shots to everyone he could reach.

                “What is it?”

                “Don worry ma man.  It's blackoutproof!”

                I noticed Katherine was there, and gave my shot to her.  She looked terrible.  My eyes hurt.  Jeff immediately handed me another.

                “Heays spit in ya eye!” he toasted and they all took it back.  I set mine on the table.  Jeff coughed.

                “Come on man, I found yoah girl.”  He grabbed my right arm and Katherine slipped her arm through my left.

                Caro was in a twin cement cell quietly tolerating a speech from an old drunk homeless man with a shock of graying piss-yellow hair who had her cornered.  “Around the magic cadences, uh, the twin eternities of the Hebrew faith in uh, the, uh, Hellenic burial rites have, um, inextricably...”

                “I must go now” said Caro, spying us. The power had come back on.  We hadn't noticed.  “Good meeting you sir.”

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                With a light snow filtering down through the streetlights and the moonlight everything seemed a little dreamy.  My forehead was burning.  I heard a cat yowl from a distant alley, where a man collected bottles from a trashcan, the tinkling sound of glassware rattling like jewelry through the sewage steam street mists.  Those shots acted fast and Katherine, clutched tight to my arm, declared “I don't feel too  good.”

                “Let's get you a cab,” said Caro.

                Jeff, still struggling to put on his windpants, stumbled around a bit and then frowned.  He swung an abrupt arm up from the shoulder, indicating some obscure intention to penetrate, something— an otherwise obscene gesture out of its context— and then disappeared, following some secret inner moonlight calling.  Serenade?  Lemonade?

                Katherine bowed at the corner curb and started lurching.  Caro knelt beside her and held her hair and I announced to no one in particular that I was going for a walk. 

                Pretty much I just stared at the stars.  We all fool ourselves don't we, and we know all along that the lies we tell ourselves are merely enticements that keep us buying, buying, buying it, while the real price is writ in the small print, faint but legible up in the night stars, dangling cold truth over our heads.  My neck hurt.

                In a block or two I found my way to a park where a pond was sheathed in ice.  The sun started coming up.  A runner passed me in the other direction, yellow reflective stripes of his jacket bouncing with each broad stride, woolen gloves and hat on.  I thought of what I'd like to say.  What I was going to say.  I started to write the story of it in my mind.  How it would end.  How it would begin.
                When I came back around the block I found Caro still nursing Katherine.  Who doesn't want to to protect someone worth protecting?  Who doesn't want to love someone who is lovely.  She'd be alright.  The sunrise, the city, the early morning taxi cabs.  The street below, the future forward, the snow slowly shining as it fell at odd angles and our cab pulled up, to take us home.