[ DARK SIDE :: rp-versed with ofsunlights HIIIIIII ; new character intro, chau; character intro for dante i think? idr; post snow-breakup-thing; LOLA MENTION!; lore dropping; drug abuse; the past; recurring Ken Kesey/Acid Test References ; in case u were wondering what murphy was doing the whole time. ]

•

|| AND IF YOUR HEAD EXPLODES WITH DARK FOREBODINGS TOO /

I'LL SEE YOU ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON . ||

•

Day Two

Call me back whenevah y' get where y're goin', K.? Um, mostly cause━[Shuffle, overturned glass clinking.]━Snow wan'ed 'a call y', but I said not to. I doan' fuckin' know what happened, but she seems like she wants t'...y' know, fix it.

Day Four

I know your phone's not dead, 'cause it's lettin' me call you. Hate that fuckin' thing. Doan' even call Cas━Snow━I know she woan' like it. She woan' like talkin' 'a you.

Day Seven

Last time 'm callin', Chikato. Tell me where y' are, 'f y' think about it. Be ca'ful. [Sigh.] Uh... Love you, y' piece 'a shit.

Day Ten

MURPHY keeps driving, his cell phone in his backpack is muffled. He sees things in the road, that when he checks for them in the rearview, disappear into the dust.

Day Sixteen ━ Somewhere in Maryland

THE only phone call he makes is at a rest stop at two in the morning, curled over his knees, looking suspicious, thinking out to the cold trees and spots of stars, cars as slashes of light along the highway.

He says into the phone, "Hey. 'S been a while." He asks, "Whe' a' ya now?"

•

HE finds a motel. There's a weird smell that comes from behind the desk downstairs, Murphy can't tell what it is. Not like food, not like anything biological, like mold... He goes through the options in his head. Mold, out. Skunked beer? Nah. Some kind of fruit or cooked vegetable left out? Mm...unlikely. Some kind of illicit substance unfit for human consumption seems the most probable. He might take his chances, depending on what it'd do to him.

Day Eighteen

SHE'S shot━even people like Murphy, who are also shot and still functioning in a way that has enough substance to make others angry, know this. Chau requires gentleness━she has never gotten it, or enough of it━and no-one knows this is exactly what she needs. They all just get a feeling that she is incapable and shattered in many imperceptible and stringent ways, which must've taken very long to catch up to her━no one incident did it to her, it was a long history of many of them━to wear her bones. No-one can tell when they'll appear sudden and vivid like flashes of red stage-lights: she is like a walking horror movie, anticipation at every turn, every slip of her jaw. All the junkies who knew her knew to be cautious of these fissures, but they did so out of taboo, instead of any real unsettlement.

She was littered with those wrongnesses imposed upon her at some time or another, and it was impossible to tell where the cracks were, besides where they came to the surface in physicalities: little lightning-pale slashes, red thin edges, and pinkish scars up and down her arms, legs, hips, sides. Those girls who could get close enough to her said they ran up fine and measured along her inner thighs, and stopped where her bra did.

Though miserable and outwardly sick, perhaps because of it, Chau is very, starkly, pretty. Murphy once said, obsessively attracted to worn things both then and now, while he does not remember saying it, that it was too bad Chau was only into girls.

Chau looks like someone one can speak to, if she doesn't ice one cold first with those stained-glass impenetrable eyes. They are black, solid as inked marbles, like barbed wire: tricky, insatiable. If one can get past those eyes, one can tell her anything. She hardly elaborates when she speaks, she clips adjectives and metaphors and jokes. She sighs wistfully between cherry-wildflower lips, she hides behind satin-black hair, tufts bleached flashingly white like many tiny skunks' tails. They flare out at the collar of her sweater, a dismal rosebud pink in a pattern out of style, twisted thick yarn.

The bus crackles to a stop and she crashes down the steps. She has on battered sneakers with duct tape on the toes.

"McMur-phy, hey!" Her voice is a laugh, a benevolent, addled extrapolation. She likes to call him McMurphy, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Her teeth are small, eaten-at pearls, the color of water if one steeped dandelions in it.

He smiles and adjusts his bag on his shoulder. It is very light, but its position bothers him. "Neva' guess who I saw again."

"Saw? who?" She tilts her head like a stray dog would. "Oh, oh..." She says "Azya," at the same time he says, "Aya, an'..." so that she stops, and her lips come over her teeth, and she thinks and the thoughts shudder behind her eyes in stained, watered memory. "Dan-te," she answers finally, "w' no last name."

No, no last name. It always annoyed her. Maybe she hated him for it. Perhaps she thought that if Dante had one he would not be so important anymore, that he would be like them, in a way. Or because his lack of disclosure brought light on what exactly his purpose was, because he was in a special contract straight from the office at Area-fuckin'-51, which stated that he would perform any sort of paranormal-extinguishing favor for the United States Government given that they in turn did not pursue his identity. Usually, when someone like Chau has no last name, it is because one has stripped it from oneself. Usually, rules don't come into it. Usually, it is a sadder and more lucrative tale than Dante-Who-Is-Wanted-In-Some-Way-Or-Another. Usually, an absent name comes from a place of disgust or guilt or secrecy. He was always intruding on Chau's and Murphy's little agreement that they would never be found, not by the government but by themselves.

Dante would be surprised she's still alive, but he would hide it, his disbelief hidden in something like a woosh of air from the lips.

"Yeah," Murphy says, "yeah."

"Da-amn. You guys were always...all..." She smiles to herself again, thoughtful and lost.

"Where you been?"

She gains a sense of clarity, however manufactured, when she nods. "Oh, I...forget the name. Some li'l place outside Mobile, 'cause━" An abrupt exhalation like the details were dormant in her memory and now suddenly burst forward with new force. "━I fucked up a little. But it's O.K.."

He clicks his tongue, knowing she won't elaborate. "Huh. Cool."

"Whaddabou' you?"

He scratches at the nylon strap of his bag. "Jersey."

"Random place." She lights a cigarette, having done nothing with her hands, then turns around and starts in the direction from which he came. She walks like she doesn't care whether he follows her or not.

"I dunno. Jus' me an' my sister, now, anyway. And..."

"Hm?"

"It's a long story."

"I like long stories," she points out, "but maybe it can wait a minute." She scans the street, looking for something. He just watches the clouds behind her.

•

T

HE inside of the pizzaeria is very red, and very brown, which makes it look like a blurred bloodstain if one squints. Murphy can see that Chau does squint, despite the dim light. She skitters from it like a rabid mouse. She's constantly rabid for something. She pulls at her jacket and whistles through her teeth.

In the right light, Murphy could pass for a butch; in the same light, Chau looks, more truthfully, like a boy. Both of them look at each other, debating, and they silently decide on the women's bathroom because it's cleaner, so he takes off his hat and ruffles his hand through his hair away from his eyes, and uncurls his spine.

Inside, she flips the light on, and the vent hums on with a diseased lisp, encompassing the small, square room in burnt yellow light. She lets her bag fall off her shoulder and sighs to herself. He stays silent in the corner, looking like a dark smudge of an ancillary ghost, fixing his hair back so that he can peer at her through dark bangs. On the edge of the sink she places a small cigar box, hotly fragrant with tobacco. He doesn't look inside, but he knows what's there. He hears the familiar sticky crinkle of a miniature plastic bag under her meticulous concentrated breath as she dumps its contents into a teaspoon. She put her cigarette out somewhere along the way, so she repurposes her lighter from her back pocket, flicking it aflame with her right hand, the shivering utensil in her left.

"What's 'a longest you stayed in one place?" he asks, but her silence makes him believe he hasn't spoken. Her silence makes him believe she's seen everything and been everywhere, when it's really more like the forty-eight continental. Up and down the desert, the mountains, the streets wide and loud.

Chau cracks open a fresh needle and clicks her tongue. "The womb, prob'ly," she says, her thumb carefully easing the plunger upward. She only looks coherent when she's shooting up, everything else is grey sparks and sad, battered relief. She gives the syringe a few flicks of her pointer finger.

Poised, relinquished, curled into her own rotten world, the vent light staining her hair, she looks almost content.

She wears baggy jeans embroidered clumsily with stars and wildflowers, she rolls them up above her knee and trails her fingers up her calf until she's satisfied, finds a vein among the bruises and slashes and needle-marks. She talks like the Southwest, but she could've been born anywhere.

"Really?" he asks.

She doesn't answer, eases the plunger all the way down, he watches her halfway fascinated, the way people watch performers dance. He knows he never looks that nice shooting up.

She looks up and smiles at him, warm red mouth like the inside of a tulip sprinkled with pollen. Four bottom teeth in a row are crooked, the rest are straight.

"Whatcha wanna do?" she asks,

but the same instant comes a pounding on the door of a hard fist: "You junkie fuckin' dykes get outta my store!"

Chau giggles.

"You wanna sneak into a movie?" he asks.

"Yeah."

The Italian doesn't let up. "You hear me? Outta there!"

"We're goin'!" she calls back, giggling some more.

•

THEY buy the popcorn, then they duck into an empty theater. "Ready?" she whispers.

He crunches in the dim light and says, "Sure," licking salt off his thumb and wiping it on his pants. "Whered'y' get it?"

"Some dude 'n Alabama. Fuckin'...see how cool?" She holds the acid up to the light, half the tabs are gone, but he can make out half of the Cheshire Cat's face. "I sold some 'f 'em to some kids comin' up here."

"Oh, wicked. Can I get 'is eye?"

She pops open her plastic bag and snaps the tabs along the perforations, pinching his between her fingers. The ink on the blotter paper glistens with a shiny sludge, the white fllashes of pink around the edges, the Cat's black pupil. "Open," she tells him, bag crunched in her other fist, laughing expression framed by fluffs of black-and-white Oreo hair. He sticks his tongue out at her. His gums, around the edges, are bright red, like a close-up on that balloon from It. They bleed tiny spiderwebs of blood around his teeth. She can't see this detail, in the dark. Her mouth is ugly, too, yellow and grey and battered teeth. She smiles, she drops the Cat's eye flat on his tongue. He tries not to move. He knows this game, he used to play it with Dante. Everyone used to think they were both fags.

"Sick," he says, "now gimme yours."

Her tab is a swish of dingy pink, fine black lines, pieces of the Cat's whiskers. She presses it into his hand and opens her mouth very neatly. If she wasn't a junkie, she could've been a model. If she wasn't a lesbian, she could've been a porn star. If she wasn't gentle and sweet and vile and strange, she could've survived. Her soft lips parted like that, just the searching tip of her tongue, her eyes flutter closed, she waits. He is so, so gentle, dropping her tab on her tongue, the way the Father drops the Host in a child's hands.

"Body 'a Timothy Leary," he says, a prayer, a rough analogy, like she is some angel where it hurts to look at her directly, and he only sees her fragments in flashes of a mirror, a cool lake, or a mirage.

"Far out, man," she laughs in his face. He smells the hard dirty stain on her breath and says, "Furthur."

They go into a movie called Strawberry Estates, which is funny because it should be scary. Found-footage flick with continuity issues, some guy bringing these kids into a locked abandoned asylum. Murphy went to a state school where they taught classes on film, he went for a semester and a half before he got tired of college kids and their adderall and turned to Oxy and coke instead. Nothing scares me anymore, Chau tells him. They're whispering, but it feels like he can hear her voice in his head.

Not even the haun'ed asylum? he asks.

Especially not that. She holds his arm. You think they'd kill us in a place like that?

The ghosts? He laughs, bites hard on his lip because someone in front shuffles and turns to stare at them. Or he thinks it's a person. When he squints in the dark everyone looks less like people.

No, worse, she presses. Doctors. You think we'd be lost fuckin' causes 'r some shit? Right? You believe me, right?

Yeah, totally. They'd kill us for sure.

And in that moment being the prey feels very powerful. Being the only humans in a room full of annoyed shadows feels like playing God, or at least a priest. She holds his hand and he barely feels it, he hears her again in his head, giggling at the angry man behind the door. Behind the screen. He looks back, and the film flickers, the colors like shrapnel, burning fever of a story. He thinks the light and the film is a movie's bones, strawberry ghosts and gore nothing at all with the damnation of a person, and every bit like a beating heart. He thinks he could reach inside himself, inside of both of them, and pull out spools of film. The Movie, he remembers.

Hey. He nudges her foot. Hey. If you were in The Movie, what would ya' characte's name be?

Far out, man. Uhhhhh... Can I copy Mountain Girl? I'd be Desert Girl. Totally.

Wicked.

Whaddabou' you?

Fucking...Skull Guy?

We can't both copy Mountain Girl.

Cheshire Cat Guy.

Cheshire Cat Eye Guy, she confirms.

Onscreen, the dipshit drops the camera, so the frame flips out of focus and a girl runs screaming through the house. Maybe she's the ghost. She's been doing the haunting all along, breaking into the Estates. Like the whole world fell outta place. They both say it, in their heads. But the world feels just right.

•

THEY trip out the back door of the theater into the parking lot, the sky is ablaze with molten sun and there's a humming in the air like a busted light, but there's a musicality to it. Chau asks if he hears it, he says, Yeah, but it's kinda sad. "No, no, stop, don't say that." She jumps in a puddle, splashes rainbow waves up along the sides of her boots. Acid rain. "Don't say that, you'll fuck it up." "I know. I always do that." "Shut up, stop, you're gonna make me regret it." She mumbles words to a song he's never heard, sometimes she slips into Vietnamese. If the dope hadn't eaten at her brain and totalled her memory she could've spoken a dozen languages━as it is, she knows five and speaks all of them badly.

"Kotchida yo, sabaku no shōjo," he tells her, veering right.

"...Dokoheikuno...?"

"Somewhere cool," he promises. "Saw it when I drove in."

"D' you like the South?"

"I'd make y' regret what?" he asks. His brain can't catch up to whatever she just asked him.

She stumbles against the concrete. "I meant it about them killin' us, man."

The fountain is better in the evening, when the sky is fuzzy violet and the lights go on. The bricks are a thousand different colors. He likes the South O.K., he can hide in The Movie for a little while. Her hand feels real like a legend in his own, he feels her gloves. She shakes like a cat does, imperceptibly until he touches her.

Tripping is funny with her, because it's more like her constant state, and it hits her hard. He can almost believe her own weightlessness, the way she walks, he thinks she's right about everything. An angel with a dirty mouth. She digs a penny out of her pocket. This 's your wish, she tells him, but I'm holding it, O.K.? She holds the swirling coin the way she held his tab, now everything is shiny and dark, and the copper glows and flickers in cosmic green. The theater smothered the extra bits out of them and reduced them to their own humanity; but in the evening at the altar of the glistening fountain, full of stage lights, they're people and they're ghosts, aliens, interpreters. I'm granting your wish, she says, exactly, like she is explaining a mathematical concept.

Do I gotta tell you it?

She smiles like he's tricked her. Nooooo...just tell me when y'r done.

He tries to think of a good wish, but the pressure turns up and his mind goes blank. He shoves his hands in the pockets of his jacket, thinking. Staring for a pattern in the lights, or at least a movement. The spotlights are so still, but he sees them ebb and flow like flourishes of paint water. They break apart when he looks too hard, touching mercury with his bare hand. What does he want? Does it matter? He knows he prays for things that make everything hurt less. When the pain comes it rushes in uniquely every time. He guesses he wishes for some kind of soft, cosmic relief. "Uhhhh...I'm ready. I think."

"You're suuuure?" "Yeah." "So hold this." She unfolds his hand and places the coin in his palm. "Now give it to me."

He kisses the coin to his lips, then reaches to hand it back. A sparkling jewel, an emerald on opiates. She tucks her arms behind her back, and parts her lips, and her teeth. So he places it there. She grins like the Cheshire Cat, leans over the wall of the fountain, loosens her jaw, and the little moldy bit of copper drops down.

"Hea'. Lemme do you." He sifts a nickel from his pocket, but she smiles sadly at him over her shoulder, the light stringing bands between her teeth, picking her apart. He wonders how it doesn't seem to hurt her.

"No," she says, "you keep it safe for me."

•

Day Twenty

YOU remember...the time...in Arizona?" she asks. It doesn't sound like a question because her whole voice is smothered in cotton. She's so strung-out he's nervous she might black out and he won't know what to do.

"Which time?" He used his last twenty on M, he's got two fives and a couple singles left. He thinks she's broke, but she won't say. She doesn't say much, but she smiles at him every once in a while. They might sit on opposite corners of the bed, his sketchbook, her novel, and he might look up from erasing and she is looking at him calmly, content, almost forlorn. When they both remember to eat, she breaks apart fries and lets him have the last dumpling at the place on the corner.

"You were there more 'n once?" she mumbles. She's lying on her copy of Exterminator! but she can't feel it. She is lovely and sad, a tiny star glinting in the rain, her head up on the pillow and her body curled beneath her. Murphy knows he never looks that good on H.

"Arizona. Colorado. Then Arizona again," he recounts. He taps his syringe with the side of his finger, cross-legged, half off the bed. "You mean the time w' the snake?"

She laughs into the pillow, heavy eyelids, numb, full of golden light. "Ye-eaaah... I was wonderin' 'f that w's real 'r not. 'F you r'membered 't too." She sighs.

"Yeah, I do... Shit." He had almost forgotten, when the rattlesnake had curled up right in the top-box of Dante's bike. Murphy had poked it out of there with a stick and threw it into the sand like skipping a stone. It was Azya that threw the match, since she was scared, and Chau was usually too gone to be afraid. Murphy just couldn't stop thinking how awful it was, that Azya threw the match, holding the packet between her teeth so she could strike it, at the snake, at the very end of its tail. And even now Murphy winces thinking about how it lit up, how it hissed like the fuse of a bomb, how it seemed to shriek the way a lobster does smothered in a pot of boiling water. It stank, like Hell.

No-one had ever heard Dante yell at a girl before, but when he came outside to see what everyone was freaking about, Azya said she did it and he shouted how could she do that to a living thing, how she could be so sick like that. Everyone at the house that night was high out of their minds, probably everyone on something different, no-one could remember whose house in Arizona it was. Everyone remembered the smell, the flash of horrid light, how Dante, edgy on blow, had yelled at Azya.

"What?" Chau asks, "Shit what?"

He inspects the inside of his arm. "Mm-mm. Do...you got that━?"

She blinks and smiles blearily. "Oh, yeah." She feels for the length of elastic she tore out of a pair of sweatpants that got too big for her last week, and tosses it toward him.

"Sometimes..." she begins, then stops. "I dunno."

"Huh?" He loops the ends of the elastic around his fist to tighten it and feels for the vein. Shoots the plunger down, lets the elastic coil on the bed like a drowned worm. Warmth and slow creeping consolation. Maybe he wished for morphine by accident.

"Sometimes I feel a little like that snake. Sometimes I think it'd be better if it wasn' real, an' it w's jus' a scene in my head. So that it'd be jus' mine."

"Huh." He looks at her, but she won't look at him. She dips her head morosely into her arms. "I'm sorry," she says. "I don' think 'm very good at sharing like that. When I said both 'f us would die, I kinda hoped you'd go free."

He squints at her, a coiled little rose of a girl. He can't say what she's been deprived of, but he understands the shuddering hauntedness in the curve of her spine, and the wary way she carries herself. Always watching because something is always watching her. He tells her, "Well...you should go free, too."

"Almost my whole life's been free. I think I should...be contained."

"Long 's' not detained."

She asks, Uhm...what? and he forgets what he meant to say, he forgets to try and make her understand. That she's part of their own Movie and he still has to keep her wish forever, right? He lays down on his side, feeling confused. He says something, mumbles something like a repetition, that's good enough for her.

Day Twenty-six

THE days melt together. Murphy draws, sometimes he draws Chau, sometimes he draws angels hanged on nooses, among the clouds, over dull dry cacti. Sometimes these subjects are the same. They break into the motel basement and screw around. He steals a bootleg tape. She reads out loud and asks him to draw the parts in the book. They play the tape in the car, it's a piece of shit because it's from a live show that's been recorded so many times over. In the car, he finds a marker and draws her a caricature of the 'Priest', his suitcase full of legs, his needles, there on the passenger side dash. "What's he say?" Murphy asks, "the...'immaculate fix', right?"

"Oh, yeah, totally." She traces her finger over the silver marker on the black dashboard. "So cool you can do that."

"It ain' hard."

"It is," she insists, staring at his cartoon. "You did it so fast. Looks just like how I'd picture 'im..."

He can't tell when she started getting sick, but she sure as hell is now. She used the last of her heroin so he's giving her Codeine, but he sees her fidgeting out of the corner of his eye when they're still. Withdrawing, she gets sort of mean, but he reads her bitter half-insults as puzzles instead of barbs. They're driving to D.C., or close enough to it. She says she knows a guy who'll let her score for free, or at least ten bucks. The car is cold because the windows are open and he's got the heat on anyway, but they're only open because she's been chain smoking for the last half hour.

"Black...shiny...FBI shoes..." she repeats, kicking at the floor. She kicks her shoes off and curls up in her seat, reclines it back.

"Laced-up," he adds, trying to distract her; but she groans, "Fuck, McMurphy!"

"I know, we should be close, K.?"

They're not close. What he means is, he thinks he knows where he's going, so that's closer than being clueless. She's starting to freak him out, pale and shaky and tender. She whispers a reply, but it isn't really for him. She watches with heavy-lidded eyes the rush of earth and rock and trees out the passenger-side window. He doesn't know how to help her. She doesn't complain, but in her wrought silence is a landscape of quiet suffering.

"Fuck close," she says, sniffing. She wipes her nose on her sleeve.

He waits a few minutes, watches the trees and the sparse signage. Slips onto an exit he's not sure about, but he doesn't say anything. She's not paying attention anyway. He rolls up his window, thinks about stopping, his leg's getting tired and every other pill he gives Chau, he pops for himself.

"Chau?" he chances softly, into the silence. The smell of her American Spirit smoke fades, the air rushes in and out like a solid object, like a ghost. Maybe that's why she hated Dante so much, because he could extinguish so easily the very things that have plagued her the way they have plagued Murphy...that Dante's existence seemed to her like a kick in her miserable teeth. Murphy has never seen it like that. Dante does not know more than either of them about the phantasmal, he never said he did. He just controls it, and his head doesn't mess with him.

That is, the ways Murphy and Chau see the ghosts is a million times different than what is truly out there. Sometimes he's sure he feels it. Sometimes he's sure he and Chau feel the same thing, and see the same, the way he can hear her voice in his head when they drop acid, and how he knows exactly what her bones feel like, tired, heavy, how he entrusted his own wish to her, how he listened to her as though she were a unassuming prophet. The things Dante knows are technical, studious, and rigorous, with force and intellect. Murphy looks across the console at Chau and knows just how haunted she is, she murmurs in her uneasy sleep.

When the colors of the trees and the headlights and the dashboard start to run like ink, when he cannot fight the way his joints feel stuck and how his mind wanders, to ghosts and fuzzy rumination, he pulls over. He is very careful not to touch or wake her when he leans over to shuffle through the glove compartment. He does a line of coke, gets out of the car and waits for the world to fall back into place, with tiny clicks and bolts and chains, and he stays focused.

He keeps driving, it's close to midnight when she wakes up.

Day Twenty-seven

THE roads narrow, darting rocks and fault lines and deer. He tries to stay calm and think critically.

"Where're we?" she whispers in the dark.

"I'm not sure."

She coughs into her chest, then uncurls herself and feels for the latch on the glove compartment.

"Whatcha want?"

"Mm-mm." She finds a crumpled brown napkin and blows her nose, sniffs again. "How much...furthur...?" She lies back and, to her credit, stifles a pained whimper.

"Dunno." He sets his jaw hard, angry at himself on her behalf. Angry for everything. He thinks about Dante and the rattlesnake.

"Fuckin'...what the fuck?" She shivers, hides her face from the coolness of the car, the cracked plastic, the fake leather. "Oh, God."

He prompts, "Black...shiny..."

"shoes...w' shoelaces 'n 'm."

"Good."

"Laced-up...FBI shoes...God-fucking-dammit..."

He speeds up so that he doesn't feel real, that only the gas and his foot on the pedal and the floor of the car are real, in that he can feel them. He feels Chau, though, her heartbeat like a skittish dog's, her troubled breath. She can't breathe, she doesn't say it but he knows it's true. She's real, she takes his place. He slows down and stops long enough to do another line. Then he keeps driving. He sniffs at the coke and she sniffs against her sleeve. She's so quiet, but he knows she's not asleep.

•

Tree, signage, rocks, guardrail.

He's not sure how it happens, but it does.

He sees the signs for the highway and speeds up again, hyper focused, computing less than an hour until the city. He doesn't remember how long it's been, or what day it is. The road starts to dissolve, cracked-up pavement, cracked-up bone, cracked-up skull. His heart races, the way it does when someone looks at him twice, or when he tries to fall asleep sometimes. When he can feel his chest tight and lucid.

The engine ticks, then rushes, and jumps, vibration. Never mind the rattlesnakes, he thinks of the Hells Angels, those old shits, the snake stuck in the top-box, the hissing blood and the smell of exhaust, grey clouds. He shuts the heat in the car off. Tree, signage, rocks, guardrail.

The tire catches the pothole, the cracked gorge in the road, but when he looks back there black expanse is unbroken. Not that he has much time to see, because the car skips past the guardrail and collides instead with the massive oak that takes its place.

The noise is such an unnatural screeching of instantly warped metal that he almost thinks it hasn't happened. He doesn't hear Chau scream, but he feels it. The windshield cracks out along the top, glazed blue glass. The car is stuck veering to the right, tattered tire in the grasp of two roots, yanking the passenger side downward.

"Holy shit! Chau?"

Sulphur of the match. Smoke rises steadily from the hood.

"Yeah," she says, "yeah." She tugs at her seatbelt as he jams the drivers' side door open, it gives a hard clank as he forces it out of the frame "Mine won' open," she tells him; "Fuck!"

"Climb ova' this way.━Wait." He kicks shattered glass out of the way, off the seat where she puts her hand down. As she crawls into the cool air he yanks his backpack out limply into his hand as the door slams closed, on the angle.

She crouches on the ground, breathing heavy and disjointed. "What the hell. Was that."

The whole thing's totally smashed. The burning smell gets worse. "Holy fuck. A'y'O.K.?"

"Yeah. Far out, man."

"Seriously?"

"Yes, I said, fucking shit! Goddamn shut up!" Chau drops to sit fully in the road, head dropping between her knees, sobbing and spitting.

Murphy curls his fist, paces the width of the car. Nothing hurts, but that might not mean anything: he's fucking indestructable on coke, though he's seen at least one kid die on it with his own eyes. Some nameless kid in Boston. What the hell is he supposed to do now? He flips open his bag. His cell phone has fresh batteries, a few pills rattling around in a prescription bottle, his basically-empty wallet, new pack of cigarettes and matches.

He tries the driver side door handle again, shakes the plastic, it crackles at the pressure. "No. No, shit!" He punches at the metal, but the door's wedged itself closed and the frame is crushed, sticking it in place. Same for the back seat.

"Whaddya gonna do?" she asks, wiping her eyes.

Azya, back then in Arizona, book of matches in her mouth, had never meant to kill the snake. She just wanted to see something cool. She had not imagined the snake as a cold, trembling thing, poison fangs because that was how it was created. The ghosts have existed for Murphy and Chau as small, fluttering lights in the corners of their lives the whole time. Not to say that they are real souls, spirits and echoes. They are every type of loss simply reverberating back as shards of ash, things to touch. Poison slivers of fireflies.

He could call the police. They show up and find a junk-sick girl, a smoking car full of Codeine and cocaine, and the guy who crashed the thing on blow.

No dice.

He could leave the car. Cops track the plates, find him, arrest him for possession.

Hell no.

He retreats back to the trunk and jerks it open. There lies a crumpled Marlboro blanket and an old sparse toolbox, marked with scratches from being slammed around back there. When he opens it up there's a pack of razor blades three-fourths full, two screwdrivers plus a flathead, a wrench, and a hammer. First he takes the hammer and shoves the claw into the doorframe. He pries at the door. It only cracks at the metal siding, it doesn't open it.

He kicks at it. "Fuck!" he yells. If he can't get the drugs out of the car, he decides on option two.

"...Murphy?" she sighs from the ground, coughing in whatever smoke is still leaking into the air from the engine. "What 'f someone drives up?"

He hasn't seen anyone on the road since the exit. He shakes his head, shifting through the tools again. He hopes the wrench will fit the bolts on the plates. In the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, he tugs them free, they clink to the ground one by one, like silver fillings. But it's the front plate he can't get to. He tries to scratch at it with the hammer too, but he can't see what the hell he's doing.

Option two-point-five. He tosses the hammer, pulls the blanket out of the trunk and hands it to her. He says, "Hey, watch it, get back, K.?"

"What're you doing?" She scrambles to her feet. like a deer startled into motion. "What're you━" The blanket smells like smoke and earth, she holds it tightly at her side. "The trees. The trees, Murphy."

"I know, relax." He lights a match and tosses it into the car. Another along the windshield. "Nah, nah, it's cool."

A mumble dies in her throat, she swallows it.

"Let's go," he says. He lights all the matches, each one he throws with the precision of a bomber.

Azya wanted to see something cool. This is survival, but thinking about it, and the flames, he supposes it's all the same in the end. The warped torn metal, the crushing weight against the trunk of the oak. The smell of sulphur, whoever lights the match.

•

THEY walk down the mountain. She lays the blanket around her shoulders. Murphy tries to come up with a plan, but he can't think without the coke, which he just burned up in a goddamn car fire.

•

New Jersey

LOLA is lying next to Dante in her bra and those little black silk shorts. Her hair is wild cherries along the linen white sheets. Her head on his chest, her parted lips. They don't know how it got so late. Sometime around two. Her lips always taste like cool berries, like summer, like life. They stare at each other in the dark half-asleep, she runs her fingers through his hair. He slowly traces his fingers along her warm thigh, up her shorts, against her lace underwear. Everything about her is soft and strong. She whispers his name under her breath, smiling.

The hotel is quiet and beautiful. His shit is taking up the chair near the mirror. Her clothes, dresses and little flowery tops and tight jeans, take up most of the dresser. He thinks nights like this are what he's been waiting for his whole life. The stars glitter, champagne in obsidian sky.

The phone rings, when he was getting very close to finally slipping his fingers inside of her.

She sighs, turns away from him, presses her legs together. "Who the hell is it callin' at two at night?"

Dejectedly, Dante sits up and reaches for the phone. It could always be Area 51. "Hello?"

"Dante. It's me."

He almost hangs up out of shock, more than anything. Beside him Lola lights a cigarette and collapses against her pillow.

"Murphy, where are you?"

Not into the phone, but with his head turned, he can hear Murphy ask, Where d' y' think...? never mind. "I dunno," he says, "a little outside D.C.."

"...What is it, then?"

"Uhm. I'm with Chau. Somethin' happened."

Dante whistles, but it's so quiet and dejected it just sounds like a woosh of air from his lips. "Really? What happened?"

"...I can' explain it all. Can you, uh, come hea'? She's doin' bad an' I dunno what t' do and I kinda lost my ca'."

"You lost...?" Dante goes quiet. This all sounds like it tracks. "O.K., what's wrong with her?"

"Just..." Murphy gives a skittish, sad, inadvertent noise.

Dante nods, looks at Lola on the pillow, curls of hair and distant expression and long eyelashes. Then he faces the wall. "Right. Did y' figure out where y'all 're?"

"Yeah. Couple miles west 'a D.C.. Hold on." There's a shuffle, the crinkling of a map. His breath through the phone. "Some place called Cobalt. Fuckin'...by a river."

He holds out his left hand, Lola gives him the cigarette and he takes a drag. "I'll figure it out. Do you have an'thin' for 'er?"

"At the house, 's all. In my dresser."

"Gotcha."

"Don' tell Megumi."

"Alright. She won't even know 'm there. Murphy?"

"Uh...Yeah?"

"You O.K.?"

"...I will be."

•

HOW far're we...from New Jersey?"

They're laying on a bus station bench. From afar they look like lovers, close-up he only has his arms around her, and she keeps talking to him: though he could fall asleep, crashing after the come-down; she can't, she keeps twitching under the blanket. He can almost taste the bleach from her hair, she feels like nothing on top of him but a bag of lost, hazy dreams, often spoiled by a despondent reality. She asks him about everything, dazedly, every day is fresh to her, she never remembers anything: she knows everything she does by having learned her lessons, not by remembering their circumstances. Everything she says surprises him, she doesn't stop talking. Though, sickness breeds distraction, and distraction fosters interest. He knows that: he fills the empty space with distraction and junk in just the same way.

"Four...hours, I'd guess," he answers. He closes his eyes and feels like he's falling. She twists and nearly kicks him in the knee, she shivers and sweats onto his shirt. He feels her heartbeat thrumming near his ribs.

"Hey, when you...showed up...d' y' think..." She trails off. Ducks her head and coughs into the blanket. "Đụ má."

"Huh?"

"D' you miss me?"

He lights a cigarette, if only to keep himself awake, and tries not to blow it in her face, holding it out between his fingers over the side of the bench, nearly on the ground. He watches the smoke dull as it fades against the dirty plastic above them. "Totally. Why wouldn' I?" He tries to flick ash away from her.

She sniffs into the blanket, makes a catching noise in her throat, ducks over him and spits at the ground, narrowly missing his cigarette. "I don't know... Everything hurts so bad," she admits, and that's the closest she gets to a complaint.

•

DANTE rides in at almost seven the next morning. There's only one other seat on the bike, but he's pretty sure they'll both fit. Doesn't matter. Chau jumps up and gasps and kisses his cheek. She says he doesn't look different at all. In his brown steady eyes there is a narrow, clawing discomfort not because of her but because he cannot integrate himself into whatever world she designs for herself. He has never noticed, despite all the time he's spent with her, over a year ago, that her own fantastic creation is something he dreads. He cares about her and he is supposed to, and he is not obligated to. He whistles when he looks at her.

They find a diner, Dante and Murphy have a staring contest while Chau shoots up.

"You look like shit," Dante says.

"I lit my fuckin' ca' on fire, man."

"Jesus Christ. Y' couldn't get the front plate off?"

"Nah. It was fuckin' stupid."

"Jesus Christ," Dante says again.

"Tell me about it."

They both smile. They laugh at the same time. It's all so fuckin' stupid they can't not laugh about it. They joked about the rattlesnake, too, the morning after, even if it still made Murphy get all shivery and weird. The sunlight glistens through the fogged window, the coffee and dry lemon there between them, the orange booth cracked, the placemats sticky with saturated ink. "Where'd Chau come from?" "Alabama, she said." "Cool." "Mm-mm."

The bathroom door across the room bangs closed. Chau pushes Murphy inward on the booth, scoots him against the window. She squeezes the wedge of lemon not into a water glass but onto the plate, so that the hard seeds slip out shiny on the ceramic. She plucks at them, like a student with a formaldehyde'd heart. Like she can take the insides out of anything, hold them firmly between her fingers, and apply pressure until they eke out eyes and tongue and liquid and stomach acid. Everyone is quiet. Murphy feels a twinge of prolonged sickness in the air, he can taste dirt: Dante can tell, he stills, he listens. What? she asks, smiling. Nothin', the boys say at the same time, if only to satisfy her.

She inspects the placemat and its advertisements, looking for the awkward local caricatures and faux-professional photos and doodles of icons. It's part of the game, part of the Movie. "...That's you," she says to Murphy, pointing at a cartoon of a yellow cat in what should be a doghouse. It has big eyes, scraggly fur.

"Cute, not bad. Do Dante."

"Uhhh..." She squints at him, leather jacket and windswept mullet and those little silver studs in both ears. He waits, dumps sugar into the nearest coffee cup.

Then she studies the page. Blocks of print, minuscule writing, blurry photos. "This one." She turns the paper around to face him and stabs at the middle, where a poorly-rendered cartoon bat smiles with tiny triangle teeth.

"Aw, sick. He's cool."

"A' cats on top 'a bats in the food chain?" Murphy wonders, "'Cause I think I'd kill 'm. Like a rat."

"Only way you'll ever do it."

He flips Dante off and Chau giggles, chin in her hand, hair in her face, the frazzled light sticking in those four crooked teeth, the rest straight. She's less approachable when she's pleased. She smiles with a complacency that can only come from a very barren and tranquil and pale place inside her heart, that is, from her core completely without disturbance.

"So," Dante says, "you comin' with us?"

"Whaddya mean?"

"Like, back North."

She laughs again, a little sadder. "Oh, no. Sorry."

Murphy dips a finger in the meager puddle of juice from the lemon and licks at it. "Then...where?"

She shrugs. "Wherever I feel like."

The light goes a little dim, sun behind a cloud, smeared grey exhaust in the sky. The roar off the highway, the near-empty diner stills and listens and watches. The taste of sulphur lying like sand under the tongue, the texture of blotter paper, snap of perforation, intimacy in silence, or a silence so full of frantic disaster that it is glaringly more listless.

•

CHAU watches them leave, kicking up dust, thinking she can see a prayer formulating in the brown reddish gaze. She wonders what the hell is true anymore, and envies anyone who cares to know the answer. She has never envied anyone: no matter how dismal and miserable and torn-up her own life is (what a life, wearing herself out to keep herself alive), she never imposes herself in someone else's position. She decides her guilt and terror are stupid, she remains calm. She smiles to herself, thinking how a minute ago, Dante and Murphy were right there, and now they've sped off and she can't see them anymore.

The morning sun settles around her, but never quite on her, so that it's impossible to quite look directly into her eyes, which is more like looking into her soul and the filth there, filth from nothing, the way dust collects in an unused room. Then she boards a train.

She gyps the conductor by hiding in the bathroom, and gets off in four stops before they catch on that she doesn't have a ticket. It's real easy.

The station she gets off at is this big stone monstrosity, eaten by moss and flourished with wildflowers and grime. She doesn't know where she is, she looks at the map but remembers it doesn't matter, she's here all the same. Inside, there's a defunct cigarette machine in the corner, scrawled with graffiti, and long low creaking benches. It's totally empty, a mass of red and white tile and amber lights like oil lamps. The smell of stale coffee and warmth from the radiators. She sniffs and smells mildew. It's kind of a nice place to die.

She paces the length of the room, then the parimeter. A bit of flypaper is long-dry, with no flies in it. The trash can has an old newspaper and a half-eaten apple. The light slants through the tall narrow windows, like a castle.

She dips into the mens' bathroom, which is uninteresting. Then the ladies', which is less so. But the pipes are exposed, bare white, chipped paint. It looks beautiful and vaguely haunted, when no-one remembers a ghost's name. She stomps up onto the toilet seat, balancing with her hand on the wall. She unravels her belt from around her waist and loops it over the pipe.

The leather creaks as it tightens around her throat. She smells leather. And smoke. And mildew.

New Jersey

DANTE'S out on the back deck, smoking, staring at the garden. He would feel badly leaving, but he's starting to feel worse that he's stayed. He can hear the argument through the cracked window. It's less of an argument, more of a fight. And then more like an attack. It embarrasses him to hear it. He chucks his butt into a flower pot and lights another.

"I cannot fucking believe you," Megumi is saying, inside.

There in the dining room near the stairs, staring him down and watching him try to explain, she feels a restrained sense of disgust and satisfaction. She does not want her brother to fail, she does not want him to hurt, but when his actions prove to have consequences what is there to do but tell him, I told you so? For a moment she is back in the apartment in Boston, and they are children, fighting over who broke the kintsugi, breaking something that was already broken. "You are so fucking stupid and I'm honestly not surprised!" she tells him now. "How I could've expected better than this shit? Jesus Christ, you could've been arrested. They could ID that thing. Idiot━"

"They' not gonna FIND anything! We didn't do anything wrong!"

"You had all those goddamn drugs in the car, what the fuck d' y' think they woulda done w' THAT!?"

Murphy knows well. When he closes his eyes he can see the jagged rush of flame, licking the overhanging branches, the smell of burning metal, a contained disaster, the way he tossed the match. He can hear Chau, if he thinks to remember her, saying, The trees. The trees, Murphy, and, vaguely, remember telling her that Nah, it's fine. It's fine, shh, let's go. Let's get outta here. And they'd walked down the road, no, officer, we've been walking this whole time.

He is despicably guilty, but he gets angry anyway. He gets defensive anyway. He swallows the fire and it burns away the oxygen in his lungs. "Jesus Fuckin' Christ, you doan' trust me with shit, if I said no-one's gonna find nothin' they' not gonna━"

Dante feels like he should do something. He lets the screen door slam closed with a cheap smack. Marón, he thinks. Too late to back out now.

Anyway, Megumi isn't done. "Chikato!━ Look at me! I hope the cops do figure it was oboth'a' you just t' teach y' somethin', y'a both goddamn crazy, you go aroun' thinkin' everything'll just work out for y'. The world isn' gonna let y' off LIKE IT HAS BEEN!"

She remembers her anger that July. When the police found their father they never asked where he got all that heroin, the messy clumsy needle. A dead man on the trail along the river, no sign of past drug abuse, with money, a family, and a house; fifty-five years of age, thirty-two of those in the United States, thirty-one of those in Boston. She had wondered if he felt the high before it killed him, if he enjoyed it at all, if he had for a split-second understood his son in a new way. Not that he needed to━he knew about Murphy before even he did, what their mother always refused to indulge. The only time Megumi can remember her ever regarding him as a male━or the one that sticks like a shard of glass buried in her brain━was that day of his overdose that July. Surprised it took this fucking long, she had said, he's always been a fuck-up.

"Yeah?" he snaps now. "Yeah? Let me off?"

"Stop," Dante crosses the kitchen to stand behind her. "Murphy, stop, calm down━." Megumi just sighs, a rush of exasperated hot air. She looks sharply at Dante, unwilling to tell him to screw off, conflicted because she cannot have him defend her. He won't understand.

Murphy presses, "You wish it fucking wouldn't. I know that."

"Right now?" she says, "Yeah, then maybe y'd learn. One day you're gonna be alone and no-one's gonna be there to save you an' the only person y're gonna be able'a blame is yourself."

He rolls his eyes. "Like you doan' think you're so much betta' 'an me? Than everyone? I know you!"

"I don'! I doan', an'━! you're fulla shit, y' know that? It's pathetic, Murphy, sayin' stuff like that 'cause you're wrong, just fuckin' admit it, asshole!"

Murphy: "You are such a bitch!"

Dante: "Man, stop it!"

Megumi: "I am!?" She remembers how to fight, too: she gets up in his face, she stares straight at him so he has no-where else to look━she knows it freaks him out. She's satisfied when the anxiety darts into his expression. "You doan' care about anyone but yourself━"

"━Get the hell off me!━"

"━you haven' said one damn thing about Cassandra, somehow you get Dante t' sneak around in our own goddamn house!"

"Come the fuck on! When I met him 'e was sellin' coke in Easton━"

"An' what've you been doin' all month. huh?"

"Fuck you, shut the fuck up! You think I doan' see how badly you wish I wasn' 'ere t' screw things up for you? You think I doan' want the same thing? You think I wan'ed a' live? like this? FUCK no! God, You'a' the one who's only eva' ca'ed about y'self, all this time. All this time, until━"

"Stop it, Chikato. Stop it!"

"━DON'T call me that!━"

"AN' DOAN'T you say that t' me when you need someone 'a handle your shit EVERY. DAMN. TIME."

"What the fuck, I don' need shit from you!" His anxiety melds back to strung-up resentment, his hand comes hard around her shoulder to push her away from him: off-balance she skirts back stifling a gasp. "God," he says, "you are so fucking pretentious━"

Dante shouts, "Murphy!" and shoves him back in the chest.

"Fuck you too! Get off me!"

"You stupid crazy basta'd!" Megumi yells, "Get the hell out!"

"Jesus fuck," he hisses, pushing past Dante, through the kitchen. He swings his bag from the hook and bangs out the door. The screen slaps closed again and the silence is despicably loud.

•

IT takes him three blocks to realize the backs of his shoes are squished in against the soles, he tugs them out with a finger on the sidewalk. Fucking Dante never would said anything against his sister, which is bullshit. She deserves it as much as he does. He doesn't understand why he has always been the one who is made to change, why no-one has ever thought to understand him. He thinks it is because he is unrecoverable, he cannot expose all of himself at one time. There is always a fragment of a crystal facing the dark, the wall, the ground.

What the hell is her problem, anyway? She was always so silent when it mattered, though not out of incapability. As a child, she was the one with her ear pressed to the vents in their bedroom to hear their parents arguing downstairs. She saw everything because it was easy to forget she was there and had feelings, so one could spill every secret one had and she could piece it together from the shards and the sinew. She could always feel and examine in private, the way he never was able to hold it in. The way he had never learned to grasp his own heart and stop the beating.

Well, fuck that. Fuck all of it.

In his backpack, his cell phone rings.

He's so pissed that he almost takes it out and smashes it to the sidewalk, but he flips it open anyway and huffs, "Hello?"

•

THE time passes, for better or for worse.

•

WHEN it's turning to night, when the evening gets rich and thick, there's a knock on the hotel door. At first Lola doesn't move, she's sitting firmly between Dante's legs. He's painting her nails, has his head over her shoulder, her hand in his left, and in his right the brush of a red polish. "Careful," she warns.

"You're movin'," he argues, trying to keep the lines even.

"I'm not!"

They're drinking straight from the bottle of Chianti from the liquor store across the street. He found a shitty jazz CD for the player, discordant notes trip up from the small speaker.

There's another knock, louder and harder. "Dante?"

"Oh, hell," she says, pulling her hand away. "What the fuck?"

He deposits the cap back into the bottle and sets it on the nightstand. He has a feeling it's important, but he can feel Lola tense as she climbs out of his lap. She slips off the edge of the bed and gives him a look, like it's his fault. Her brown eyes narrow and flick away from him in a style that would really turn him on if she weren't genuinely pissed. He lets his gaze fall to where the hem of her tiny dress rides up as she struts across the room, which he knows is wrong.

She hauls open the door and stands there with her hand on her hip, gazing testingly up into Murphy's face. "Yeah?"

"Um, I'm sorry, Lola, but I..." He moves his head to look past her and meets Dante's eyes. "It's..."

She sighs and picks up her jacket off the back of a chair. "I'll be outside," she announces, her and Murphy trade places,

and then he's standing in the doorway, facing Dante head-on. "'M sorry about b'fore."

"Is that it?" he asks. He's almost never short with any of his friends, but their static and crumbling demeanor pisses him off. "'Cause if it is I dunno why y're━"

"No. No, 's not about any 'a that." His cheeks are pink from cold and stress, his posture is bad, his gaze shakes. "It's about Chau."

Confusion laces across Dante's face. "What?" He shifts on his feet.

"You know anyone named Leticia?"

"...Nah, don' think."

"Me neitha'. Well, I got a call from anyway━I think 't was 'er girlfriend. Said she found my number 'n her stuff. And she said, um, that she died. Earlia' t'day." He swallows, he feels like he might pass out. The words feel wrong, but the terrible part is that they don't. Every junkie who knew her, knew she was so close to dying. They could smell it. It was a sinking feeling one got, like driving by a car crash, witnessing and doing nothing. One could tell. Someone had to die first, anyone's bet was that it would be Chau.

Profoundly, Dante is shocked. All trace of annoyance is depleted from his voice, in fact there is absolutely nothing there but pure intent: "What? How?"

Murphy can picture it clearly, like he could hear her voice in his head in the theater. Her boots and her jeans and her raggedy coat. "She hanged 'rself," he says.

"Ah, Jesus Christ." Dante's fingers search at his neck, under his collar, trace the gold chain until he finds the cross pendant. Runs his thumb over it. His lips move in a prayer.

"A couple towns ova' from...where we left. We were just fuckin' the'a'. We were like, right the'a'. We..."

He crosses himself. "Yeah. Yeah. We were just w' her," he repeats. "And..."

"We shoulda done somethin'," Murphy says, insistently, suddenly. "You asked 'f she was comin' with us. She said no. We shoulda..."

"Man, stop. Stop." Dante closes his eyes and thinks. He retraces their steps, his foot on the pedal, the bike, the diner, the bathroom, the heroin, the light, the placemat, the bus stop, the Marlboros. "Fuck...that's...fuckin'..."

"I know."

"Were we supposed to've...?"

"I doan' know! We shoulda noticed, right? Right?" When Murphy exhales it's forced, terrified, edging on tears. "Dante," he begs.

"We couldn'a known. We wouldnt'a been able to do anythin'."

"We were the'a."

Dante exhales. Of course they were there, seeing her, like staring down a loaded gun. He doesn't know why he's trying not to cry: when Murphy sounds so convicted, paranoid, broken, himself. "We...gotta tell Azya," he says finally, running his hand over his face, up his bangs.

"Yeah," Murphy agrees. His mouth twitches, he wipes his sleeve hard over his eyes. They're both crying and neither know how to say it, or what to say. Did you think it would really happen? Murphy thinks. Haven't I fucked up enough? Didn't we do something wrong?

"Hell, I'm sorry," Dante admits. "This is all..."

"Right."

The moments pass, for better or for worse, into a long, long minute.

Dante ticks his tongue against his teeth. "Do...you wanna smoke a joint?"

"Yeah. Sure."