TURTLES

The road was a straight line, with rows of coffee growing on both sides, and dirt, dry and red, flickering behind the slats of the railing, as if inside of a spinning zoetrope. Gavin twisted the plastic bottle cap off of his water with his thumb and forefinger while steering with is other hand. He looked over at Marla and saw that she was dozing off. Her fine brown hair hung lightly against her cheek. Her head was turned away but he could see that her lashes were turned downward. As he took a sip from his bottle, a large roar tore the space above them. He wasn’t sure how far or close or how truly loud it really was. It  simply engulfed the entire road and rumbled along it, sudden, as if the sky was torn open and then resealed. It was as if the clouds had parted and a portal had opened and something fell out, exploding into existence, creating a hot crater into the metal and shattering the windshield. An explosion of white smoke and steam spew against the glass, little plumes of it shooting into the cabin. He hit the breaks and the car skidded and jerked, smoldering, onto the shoulder of the road.

A turtle had fallen from the sky, crushing the hood of his toyota, and was now bleeding into the tesselations of broken glass.

Ironically, they had been talking about the different things that had fallen from the sky in history. Jellyfish in New Jersey, 1833. Fish in Maryland 1828. Pastilles in California, 1857. Flesh in Kentucky 1876.

Recently, the sky had rained tadpoles in Japan. And now, the road leaving Haleiwa, 2009 after a short 3 day sleepover, a turtle. It’s legs shivered and drew inward toward it’s bloody chassis. It’s shell was halved. It’s head trembled. A tiny geyser of blood, as if shot from a water pistol, erupted once from it’s wrinkled neck and then the majestic, ruined creature expired.

Far off there was an empty parachute flitting downward and a plume of smoke bleeding darkness into the sky a few miles beyond. If a plane had crashed, it would explain everything, yet nothing.

They fell out of the car. Gavin, ran to the passenger side door, and helped Marla out. She had not screamed. She hadn’t made a sound.

••••

Gavin and Marla got married in the Summer of 2009. They decided to hold off on an the official honeymoon, but decided to take a week long staycation on the north shore of the island. It had been the norm on the weekends, to drive out along the coast to sample Kahuku sweet corn, or farmed shrimp from Giovanni’s. Sometimes, during the winter they drove out to Sunset beach to watch the big wave surfers ride waves as tall as three story houses - waves collapsing like the giant ice sheets in the Antarctic. In the spring they ventured out to the local markets and  learned about macrobiotic cuisine.

As the wedding approached, they had become too busy to enjoy their usual outings. Weekends were filled with planning as well as an overload of work, which they had taken as a blessing, given the economic downturn that had left many unemployed. He worked from home as project manager for translations for a small company in Honolulu, working on projects that ranged in medium from legal, to commercial to medical, he himself being fluent in Japanese, Spanish and Hawaiian. Occasionally, he translated entire books, magazine articles and essays into Japanese. He had met Marla on the job over a year ago, and worked with her on creating a series of multilingual eco-tourism brochures for the Nature Conservancy. Once, when she asked him why it was that he translated with a pen and note pad, instead of on a computer where the information would be stored anyway, he answered “because I like feeling as if my body is a conduit. I write because it’s a tactile and more expressive way to work. I can feel the words, each letter, line and shape, coming out of me through my hand. One language goes in, is transformed, and comes out right here through my fingertips.” They had dated for a year and a half, and he proposed on the evening of an annual Earth Day festival, where he presented her with a platinum white sapphire and watched it glint in the moonlight along with her eyes.

The wedding itself was entirely eco-friendly, and Marla kept a close eye on all of the details to ensure that the event’s carbon footprint remained the size of a small seagull’s. From the invitations which were made up of recycled paper and sustainable fibers; to the all natural center pieces; to the vegan, organic menu; to the dress itself, which was made of organic cotton, hemp and silk. All of the items on the registry consisted of green products from smaller local boutiques, and they received gifts ranging from sheets, towels and tablecloths woven with sustainable fibers, to organic herb sets, to organic wines and bath and spa products, all manufactured locally. The ceremony was held on the lawn of a friend’s home fronting the Maunalua Bay and the reception was held in the front yard under candlelight and tiki torches.

The home they rented out was fitted with solar panels and they replaced all of their bulbs with LED bulbs. And they continuously set aside portions of their paychecks for their next planned improvement, such as a set of solar attic fans, to keep their home cool during the oppressive summer doldrums, or a series of compost boxes for their food scraps.

What Gavin feared, was that he would be discovered. That despite all of his minute gestures toward the environment, being as eco-friendly as was possible without having to move into a commune as a philanthropist to the world, he questioned his altruism. The truth of the matter was that he didn’t care, really, and his newfound environmentalism was for Marla's benefit. At times, this made him feel hollow. And although he loved her dearly, for her kind hearted patience toward the world, her optimistic, intimate manner of working with people she coordinated and collaborated with in her own quietly heroic way, making their immediate world a better place for all, himself included, he was not sure he that could become the kind of person that she was. When no one was watching, he would find himself guilty of an absentmindedly crass gesture. He would toss scraps of paper out of his car window, or he would heave a  full trash bag full of recyclables down the trash chute. He enjoyed red meat, despite Marla’s insistence on a more humane diet, he found ways of supplementing her White bean and Kale soup with a midnight burger. He logged onto the Hummer website and drooled into the keyboard, wishing that one day they would own one of their own. Wishing thinking, of course. He was all for puncturing holes into Alaska and opening up previously restricted areas of the world for speculative oil drilling. In keeping up with world events he had the secret conviction that all threats to global stability and peace should simply be nuked and rid of. The entire country, if necessary, like one swollen, gone-to-seed, gangrenous limb. He was selfish. He knew it. He was petulant. At heart, he was crude. And he feared that given a chance to exact an act of politically incorrect crudeness, that he would obliviously take it up with aplomb. Maybe he would take up a secret hunting trip with some buddies. He would shoot game, skin and gut-roast it over an open flame. He was an animal. But did that make him as bad as that football player for Atlanta, who was arrested for ramping up a dog fighting ring? What if he found himself face to face with the last Iberian lynx, just him and the spotted cat on an open plain, no one else around, just the two of them, a bottle of whiskey and a trusty rifle? What would he do? Bang! He would need a taxidermist! He would stuff and mount the creature. Or he would wear it on his feet at night. Maybe he would sell it in an underground market and make hundreds of thousands! Or maybe he would bury it out of guilt. Yes. No! Was he that bad? Was he suppressing his own secret imperialistic view toward nature? He would imagine the heartbreak on Marla’s face, love draining from her eyes upon discovery, and feel smaller than ever. So Marla was his only saving grace, then. The only one who could change him. It made him feel false and weak, for not having the true wherewithal within to be able to take these self redefining measures; at having to observe another person’s goodness in order to create a template for his own.

Yet, at times, he felt himself growing cooler and cooler to her virtues. He would watch her in the morning, inserting little clips into her hair. “She can practically can that imagined halo over her head like a CFL bulb,” he would think to himself, and then regret it almost immediately. “What kind of person thinks that way?” he would ask himself reproachfully. Then he would ask “how can someone be this good? It’s not fair!” But how could he possible have any complaints in that arena? And so he reproached himself again and soldiered on. At the market he let Marla lead the cart, pulling only all natural and organic products. She avoided any foods that were owned by the monolithic Monsatto corporation for their unethical and immoral methods in the global marketplace. No junk food. No Processed food. Mostly local. And he nodded and went along while giving longing glances at the facade of glowing teri-style frozen hamburger patties enclosed in a penumbra of frost behind the freezer doors. “Do you know how they process these foods? The inhumane living conditions these animals are forced to live in?” She once told him when he suggested they try Bubbas Big Boy Burgers and realized that inserting his own items onto the grocery list was writing a list to Santa. And when he was given the opportunity to scout out a new product for himself, he felt like a confused puppy that had just fetched the wrong stick. She would always be more informed than he was, and there would always be some flaw with the goods he plucked off the shelves. Once, he returned to the cart carrying a 4 pack of vegetarian burgers. There couldn’t be anything wrong with these, he thought. Of course there was! She scrutinized the package, flipped it over, her lower jaw extended, molars grinding each other and said “This is chock full of GMO’s. We can’t eat this. I know it’s a non meat product and all, but it’s filled with genetically modified soy and altered corn. It still has ingredients derived from dairy and eggs that have been taken from poor animals bred in the most awful living conditions. I mean. Can’t we just go with the brand we normally go with?”

As the months passed on, they realized that both of their jobs offered up a slow period during the month of June. Although they had been planning a trip to Australia, they decided on leaving their little savings in tact, opting instead to use a certificate a three night stay at the Turtle Bay Hotel on the North Shore, an extravagant luxury that they would have never thought of had it not been given to them on the occasion of their wedding. It was the only gift not listed in the registry.

It was on that short stay in that lap of luxury that Marla had begun to grow detached from their surroundings. They were enjoying breakfast, sipping virgin bloody marys at the Palm Terrace, when Marla grew perturbed.

“Oh no,” she said. “I’ve completely forgotten about the donor list.”

“Donor list?” Asked Gavin.

“Cynthia must be going nuts. She must be pulling her hair out.”

“No big deal. They’ll sort it out.”

“No, you don’t understand. For me to have done it would have been a simple formatting measure. She'd have to start from scratch.”

“She’ll figure it out.”

“No, it’ll be a nightmare. Things are so fragmented and disorganized. It’ll look as if I’m not doing anything. As if, I’m a sloppy worker.”

"She'll live."

“She’ll be livid!”

“It’s not like they’ll fire you or anything. Relax. Look, if things were that bad, they would have called.”

“My phone is in the room...”

“Leave it. I’m sure they have things under control.”

“God. I can’t believe I just let that slip.”

“Mar, it’s okay.”

“Would you mind excusing me? I’ll be right back. I just need to go check my phone messages.”

Gavin drew back in his seat. He felt sullen. Angry. Marla’s plate of pineapples and strawberries remained untouched. She had made a fuss over their origins and the waitress assured her that they were grown locally and without any pesticides. Although they could not attest to the fruits being certified organic, they merely stated that the farm that they had come from had forgone the cost of such an evaluation, but they were indeed, all natural. This seemed to quell her anxiety, but she had not touched any of her food.

A soft breeze blew through the palms, lazy and rested and playful – free range wind, unfettered by the Byzantine structures of their world. The ocean was a teal color and the sky matched it wavelength for wavelength.

When Marla returned, she sat slowly and quietly. Remembering her food, she ate a chunk of pineapple. “There’s a protest in Iran over a rigged election,” she said, looking out at the vast blue cloud-smeared horizon. “There are people rioting in the streets. I saw it on my iphone.”

Gavin sighed. “Maybe we should go home.”

Marla stirred a small droplet of pineapple juice with the tine of her fork. She looked at him. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“Everything okay at work?” Gavin asked. He rested his elbows on the table and tapped his fingers against his forearm.

“It’s fine. I overreacted. I’m sorry.”

The waitress came along and refilled their glasses with water. She was tall and thin with a small birthmark just under her left eye. “Is everything okay here? Can I get you two anything else?”

“No, we’re fine. Thank you,” said Marla.

They finished their meal and walked down to the beach. Gavin rubbed sunblock over Marla’s back and shoulders. There was a scar on her left deltoid that she had gotten when she was 30, learning how to surf with a friend who had left her alone. She drifted imperceptibly toward the reef and her board suddenly lodged itself over the rocks. Wave after wave, washed over her, pushing her over the rocks, into urchins, buried n pockets along the reefs tough, porous volcanic surface. She had never tried surfing since.

“Tell me,” Gavin said. “What’s bothering you?”

Marla leaned back on her elbows. She dug her feet into the sand and let her toes emerge. There was a group of kids building a fort out of a red pale, digging up bucketfuls and turning them over in a circle. Other couples lounged about, stumbling in and out of the water with goggles and snorkels wrapped tightly around their foreheads.

“You know. The earth is 70 percent water. All of us, just really occupying such a small space on a large planet. An unknowable ocean on all sides of us, really. With animals we may have yet to encounter. Vast. With depths difficult to fathom. There are little lakes that form on the bottom, like separate lakes because the water is so dense. I had always thought of it as a humbling entity. Violent, with storms and oceanic uprisings. It was there long before we came and will be there long after we’re gone, and it’s waves will wash over us, flood our coastal lands, take what it wants and erase our existence as time goes on. And, yet, there’s a garbage patch floating in the North Pacific. Miles and miles of it, larger than Hawaii. Maybe larger than all of California. A collection of debris, trapped and clustered together in the center of a circular current. A dump.”

Gavin nodded. “I read about that, too.” He surveyed he beach and saw a another child throw sand at his parents with a small yellow plastic shovel. Another shovel washed in gently with a wave and as sucked out again when the water receded. He could see it floating, obscured momentarily by the chum of loose sand when a little wave lifted itself as if to curtsey and then collapsed again.

“Someone had better claim that shovel before it becomes a part of that waterworld.”

Marla stood up immediately and walked to the water’s edge. She caught the shovel before it withdrew back into the break and walked over the child. “Is this your shovel?” she asked. “Better make sure to keep it safe. You don’t want to lose it do you?”

The boy took the shovel and threw it into his pale and ran off.

When she returned Gavin said “I didn’t mean you.”

She returned to her spot in the sand and continued. “Some animals are so charismatic they eclipse the extinction of other species. No one cares that certain unsightly species of slugs are disappearing from the earth. Nor frogs nor snails or any anthropoid deep in the boreal forest. Those lamentations are saved for the Pandas. The whales. The bees. Tigers. A lot of them are over hunted.”

“Every loss is felt, Mar, yet some cultures rely on these endangered animals for their livelihood. It would be easy for an outsider to frown upon the human impact on certain species, but when it’s a part of your culture and a part of your living, well, that’s another aspect of things...” Gavin realized that Marla’s condition may have always been one of quiet sadness. Of looking off, her focus dissolving into some distant tragedy. He tried to perk up. “The sun is out. We’re on a beautiful beach. We’ll snorkel and have a nice lunch. We’ll check out the market and take home everything we can carry and have a nice meal tomorrow night. And we’ll get back to doing our very best. No matter what happens.”

“Whales” Marla interrupted. “One might never even see a whale once in their entire lifetime. Yet they have these awe inspiring memories of them. They stare into a monitor and can picture touching the sides of this giant. One day people will be watching these whales on television, not realizing that they are gone from the world.”

“What’s really bothering you?” asked Gavin. “First it’s the food. Then the ocean, then the bees and now whales. We’ve been living in this same world for a while. We drove out here for crying out loud. Polluting the environment. Everything we do leaves a tangible trail. But what can anyone do? We do our best. Are you feeling a little guilty about all this? The sun-kissed, philanthropist in you? The environmentalist. The happy, honeymooner about to go snorkeling in the increasingly depleted sea?”

She fell silent.

“What are you so worried about? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I suppose, I just have these spells sometimes. That’s all,” she said and turned away.

The ocean continued its peaceful rhythm of breathing in and out, inhaling then exhaling itself onto the sand.

****

Eventually they went snorkeling. Once, the waters were bejeweled with fish of every color. There were parrot fish and angel fish — undersea butterflies. Colors were everywhere. Now, if clouds could descend and rain within the ocean, it would have looked like this, an underwater sahara. They were giant beings surveying a grave.

They swam, side by side, letting the ebb and flow of the water push their bodies closer then away from each other. The sandy bottom always appeared closer than it actually appeared, and when Marla reached for it, to caress it’s loose untouched grains with her fingers, the bottom proved farther than she could have imagined.

In the grey gloom, a few manini darted by. Nothing impressive. A stick fish swam under them and dissolved in the distance. Young puffer fish hovered like tiny zeppelin’s below them. And then a new shape appeared in the distance. It was a blur that wavered and then darkened. A few details filled in. One shape, then two.

Turtles.

••••

Gavin once told her a story about turtles. It was a fable he had been told as a child. It was the story of a tortoise and an eagle. He had been told many as a child. “These are the stories I would tell our kids, when we decide to have them, of course. No pressure!” he laughed. “But when we do, I have these memories of my dad telling me these stories. And they were good. Kind of sad. I always questioned them and he would have to explain to me why he told me those stories. Anyway. So, the story with the tortoise and the eagle starts off with them living peacefully in their own habitats. One in the lush vegetation of the land and the other high up in the clouds and treetops. Word had gotten around about what a kind and generous fellow this tortoise was, and the eagle had gotten tired of having to hunt and swoop down on prey, sometimes not getting anything at all. I mean, how embarrassing, right? So he paid a visit to the tortoise and befriended him. Being as kind and generous as always, the tortoise offered the eagle food and the eagle ate his fill and said goodbye. He would return time and time again, being fed and entertained... now I don’t know how a tortoise would entertain an eagle, maybe he would bob his head or something. Or tell really long jokes and took forever to reach the punchline. Who knows? But that became the pattern of their visits. Each time the eagle would return home laughing. He would soar high above the treetops and laugh about how the tortoise would never be able to visit him, being stuck on land. He would never have to host or feed the tortoise. Would never have to reciprocate anything. And so after each visit, the eagle would say goodbye and scream cha-hoo! as he flew home, having eaten all of the tortoise’s food and having never offered anything in return. Word of this got around with the other animals. It was a gossipy ecosystem, you see. There was this meddling frog. And he told the tortoise that he heard the eagle laughing as he flew away about how he was taking advantage of his generosity. He’s using you! said the frog. So unfair! This is what you do, said the frog, and offered the tortoise a plan. The next time the eagle visited, the tortoise fed him and asked that the eagle bring a gourd with him on his next visit. That way, the tortoise could provide him with some extras to take home to his nest. So the next time the eagle visited, he brought the gourd. I don’t have anything for you today, said the tortoise. Actually, I have to go foraging for more food. If you come back tomorrow, I’ll leave the gourd here with whatever I find. If I’m not here, I’m probably out looking for more things to eat. But there’ll be some food in the gourd. I promise, I’ll fill that first. So don’t wait for me, I move very slowly and you’ll be waiting forever. The eagle went home, and the next day, the gourd was there waiting for him. The eagle picked up the gourd and flew high into the treetops to his nest. When he set the gourd down, the tortoise crawled out. Surprise! he said. Whats up, bird! I wanted to surprise you with a visit, being a land dweller I knew there would be no way for me to visit you where you live. The eagle got very angry. Trick me, will you?! he yelled and began pecking at the tortoise but his beak couldn’t penetrate the hard shell. I’ll throw you over the edge. I’ll pick you up and fly high into the clouds and drop you. The tortoise bit down on the eagle’s skinny leg, and the eagle shook and shook but he couldn’t shake the tortoise’s grip. He then flew out of the nest and flew high about treetops but the tortoise hung on. Eventually the eagle grew tired of flying and set the tortoise down on the ground. You’re no longer welcome to my home, said the tortoise and the eagle never returned. Isn’t that such a sad story? Eagle didn’t even apologize!” Gavin said. “It’s a good story about friendship. Not sure why it stuck with me so much. And I think there’s another one like it about a turtle.”

In the water, Marla let Gavin swim away from her toward the turtles. They swam to avoid him and parted ways toward the deep. She had never seen two together before.

“The other story,” he had continued, “was about a turtle who wanted to fly. He was always complaining about having to be stuck on the earth. He wanted to know what it was like to soar above the land at a speed that was physically impossible for his body to achieve. So he enlisted the help of an eagle. Yes, another eagle. I’m not sure why they’re always being paired in these stories. The turtle asks the eagle to fly him up into the clouds and send him off into the wind. In return, he would give the eagle all the riches in the sea. “Hey! Eagle! I’ll give you everything int he ocean if you can make me fly!” "Got any wings?" asked the eagle. "No," answered the turtle. "Any feathers?" asked the eagle. "No," said the turtle. "So why would you want to do this? How are you going to fly?" The turtle answered, "I'm tired of being stuck on the ground. I can't see anything. I can't move fast enough to keep up with my curiosity. I just want to see the world!" So the eagle deliberates and agrees. "Okay. I'll do my very best. But you must remain very still." The eagle picked up the turtle, and lifts him high into the sky. “That’s it , Eagle! Now this is what I’m talkin’ about! Now, Eagle,’ said the tutle, ‘race along the clouds. Pick up some speed. So the eagle picks up speed, but because he is so focused on flapping his wings, he loses his grip. The turtle realizes that things aren’t going to work out for him after all. What business does he have in the sky anyhow? Such short sighted thinking! Before hitting the ground, the turtle thinks to himself, yes, this is an appropriate fate. Our ruin often comes from us attaining everything we want without thinking beyond that. And then he hits the ground. Now that, to me was a dark story. I didn’t get the point of it as a kid, but I think it’s an important fable. There are lot’s of turtle stories, aren’t there?”

In the water, Marla watched as these two turtles swam away. She floated face down, motionlessly and put her hands on her stomach. You may have to tell those bedtime stories sooner than you think, she thought to herself and smiled for the first time all day.

*****

Gavin’s  silhouette towered above the road. The blue lights of the police cars twirled and swathed his sides. The police men were gawking at the shattered animal on the hood of the car. Gavin held his hands up to shade his eyes, as if peering through a pair of invisible binoculars. The sun was setting and the sky above was streaked with stratus clouds, looking like the ocean’s waves from beneath the surface of the water, as if the entire world was now submerged, and he was standing there, suddenly able to breathe water into his lungs, looking at the surface.

He searched the skies for any clues or signs. He looked back at his car and at the carcass on the hood. He was crying. He looked back up. “How did this happen?”

An ambulance pulled up. This shook Gavin out of his stupor and he immediately ran over to Marla, who was sitting on a small rock. He knelt to her.  “Are you alright, let’s get you to the ambulance so we can get you checked out,” he said, sniffling.

“I’m okay, she said. No harm physically. Just rattled.”

Gavin stood again and looked up at the clouds. He surveyed the horizon. There was a plume of dark smoke at the base of a mountain. The policeman was on the radio.

“What the hell just happened?” Then Gavin screamed. “A god dammed turtle drops from the sky!” He was breathing hard. He dragged his fist across his eyes. "What kind of world are we living in here?"

Marla stood up and went to him. She held him. She wiped away his tears and felt surprisingly calm. Perhaps the shock had not worn off. “Hey, “she said and put her hands on his cheeks and held him there. “We’re okay,” she said. “We’re safe.” She took his hand gently and placed it flatly on her stomach. “That’s the important thing. You and I are safe.” Gavin looked at her and then at his hand on the soft pouch of her stomach and understood immediately. Her strange mood. Her uncertainty. His confused anger subsided. His features softened again. “All we can do,” Marla said repeating his sentiment from earlier, “is to try our best, no matter what happens. Right?”

The Breeze Will Blow Us All Away

Sandra sat at her desk and let her eyes travel along the rivers of woodgrain. It was a monday version of her desk — immaculate. Rested. Refreshed. Se walked her fingers to her keyboard. One. Two. Three steps. Four. Five steps. Unusual, she thought to herself. There are normally 4 finger steps to my keyboard when my elbow is planted at the cliff's edge of the desk. She nudged her mouse and the monitor lit up, hazy at first, and focused itself. She pushed her chair back and it's backrest squeaked. There were 3 people in the workspace with her, all hidden behind their cubicle walls, hunched over their smart phones. "Has anyone been at my desk? My computer is still on, and my keyboard has been moved by an inch," she asked. Her co-workers look up wearily. Groggy meerkats. Dan — who she had known for weeks had harbored a light, blushing crush on her, but who was a tad too overweight for her tastes — answered "It was my intention that by doing that, things would go a bit differently for you today. There is nothing wrong with having a ritual. But some deviation would be nice. A different starting point. Or a new fissure to flow along. And then maybe, just maybe, you'd finally agree to have lunch with me." Sandra narrowed her eyes at him. Maybe he was right. "Fine" she said. But first…" She took her keyboard and threw it against the wall. She picked up her monitor and threw it to the floor. "You have to realize that everything was in its place for a reason. And now that this small thing has changed, a small butterfly effect, is now in effect." With that, she quietly and slowly trashed the entire office, overturning desks and tables, knocking over file cabinets and shelves. "There," she said. "That's better. Now that we got that out of the way... are you still hungry?" Outside, the wind was pressing on.

THE SURVIVALIST

Every Friday night it was a routine for Reid to go to the supermarket, stock up on food, go home and cook schizophrenic and undisciplined meals with no sense of restraint. If he wanted to roast 3 turkeys, he would roast 3 turkeys, and what was left on Sunday night would be dumped into the trash. Leftover cakes, stews, roasts, soups would all be wasted by Monday's arrival. It was therapeutic, Reid felt, to cook and cook to one's content. Alone, or with an imaginary dining table with 10 witty guests enjoying themselves. It didn't matter. So Reid cooked, and ate, and felt a good measure of love for himself. "Consolation cooking for the lonely," he once called it. These days he referred to the ritual quite simply as "me time". It was 7pm on the last Friday of October when he had first seen the program. He had turned on the television to fill the silence as he prepped a mirepoix. The show boasted no original concept, but there was something askew about it that sucked him in. A man was surviving out in the desert, foraging for scorpions and water. His nights were spent resting near a small fire and playing a small harmonica. At first, he addressed the camera, and outlined his strategy for surviving alone in the desert. But as time had passed, he had grown weary and pessimistic, and barely addressed the camera at all. It was at this point that Reid began paying attention. There were no commercial breaks or tricks of editing. There was no narrative structure, or even a reference point for a beginning or an end. There was only the solitude and hunger. Eventually, the man's hair grew longer, and his clothes grew dirtier and more tattered. The camera continued rolling, but there were some spells where the footage seemed to be fast forwarding, as the man rocked back and forth, growing more and more grizzled within a matter of minutes. Reid checked the network guide and scoured the web for any information on the show. He called the cable company and they told him that channel 934 did not exist. Strange, he thought, and resumed stirring his venison stew. By midnight on Saturday, most of the stew was gone, and Reid had begun cooking a pot roast. The television had remained on all day and night, and the man withered and hummed and rocked and shivered and crawled and scavenged and whimpered and prayed and drank and slept and defecated and scavenged some more. Then finally, on Sunday night, as Reid had been dumping the contents of his pyrex tray down the food disposal, he heard someone calling his name. When he turned around it was the uncouth man in the television. He had been leaning against a rock for most of the evening, humming to himself, but now he was on all fours and was crawling toward the camera. "Reid," he said softly. He had the voice of an owl, with a depth as cold and infinite as the desert night. "Reid," he said, and looked directly through the screen to Reid himself. "Are you still there?" he asked. "Are you still watching? Are you surviving? Are you happy?"

DEUS EX MACHINA

There was a bit of peach drying on his cheek, big enough to cast a shadow, and Keira pinched it off with her fingers.

Adam pulled away and raised his fingers to his cheek bone. “I think you took off some skin.”

“You’re a mess.”

Adam stopped walking and set the tail of his surfboard down onto the soft cushion on the toe of his slipper. “Something wrong?”

Was something wrong? Keira struggled within the backlog of rhetorical quips she had been saving for this moment. For she had been having this argument in her head for quite some time, unbeknownst to Adam, whose obliviousness was beginning to wear thin. “You're, a mess,” she repeated. “Did you eat all the peaches?”

“Yes... I ate them,” Adam answered rudimentarily as if reading through a children’s book. “Mahalo.” He pushed a thumb over his jawbone and began walking again. They were strolling along Ala Moana Boulevard, and Adam had just crawled out of the ocean, his 6’2” tucked under his arm, and had just met Keira at the end of her 6 mile run. It was three in the afternoon. Above them the sky opened up and bled its most honest blue, then closed up again like a grey fist wringing out a drizzle. Droplets paraglided downward. One drop, faint, kissed her forearm. Then another. Cloud cover bloomed. A giant gray storm cloud slid over the mountain like a slug – a thick tongue of it. Slowly, the rain heartened. Waned. Heartened again.

“The peaches. Gone in sixty.” He flatlined. "I'd take a California peach over a georgia peach anyday. But it looks like the latter lost the battle this year. Due colder temperatures, won't be ready till mid may."

Aware that he was watching for a reaction, Keira turned her head away from him and scanned the series of bright, color-coded shopping bags cheerfully swinging in the hands of the Japanese tourists they were passing. “How was the surf?” she asked finally.

“Off. But a sign of better times.” Weeks ago, he and his colleagues had forecasted a long fetch and long southern swell.

“Better times” she repeated flavorlessly.

Her calves ached. It was her first training day on the cusp of summer. The Marathon awaited at the end of what she hoped would be a 9 month burn of determination and willpower, a hope that had begun to evaporate like the perspiration off her skin. Her knees hurt. She felt like a drum barrel with stilts for legs.

“What was that?” Adam asked again.

“At least there was some sun today,” said Keira. She turned her head and surveyed the park and bit down hard on her molars.

Adam cast her a sidelong look, then looked upward. The air was cool. His skin felt alive. He was starving. He was craving a hot dog. He wanted to grill something, to stand over open flame in Neolithic mode, picking off bits of charred flesh with his fingers and chasing them with mugfulls of Wailua Wheats. “There was some sun for a while,” he began. “But now it seems dark and foreboding.” He looked down at Keira and noticed that she was biting her lip. “Seems as though all of the sunshine from this morning disappeared. I'm sensing a shift in barometric pressure here. So what gives?”

Keira paused and thought about this for a second. Adam’s, smug condescension was something she was forced to endure from time to time, but not today. Today, there was only one thread of patience left in her. Somehow, it had been keeping all of her moving parts in harmony; a single thread keeping the facade of complacency intact. She had always remained reticent in the midst of her own personal turmoil. She had always let things flutter about and settle on their own. She had always abhorred the outburst, having witnessed so many between her parents where each had a temper that lay as dormant as a room filled to the edges with land mines. This, however, was unacceptable.

Hours ago, in that Zen moment of clarity in the sixth mile of her run, she had come to the conclusion that Adam had been cheating on her, and rather than going home and burying her head into a heap of 9th grade English papers, she had decided to end things.

In the latter days of the relationship, Keira had become schooled on the art of lying and pattern recognition. In a casual line of questioning, she noticed Adam’s tabletop haphazardness would reverse itself into a mannered fastidiousness — setting items at precise right angles, aligning forks and spoons perfectly parallel from top to bottom, smoothing out napkins or turning the salt and pepper shakers so the top-most holes lined up to the west.

In any case of deception, Adam fidgeted, looked down to the left side of the feet, avoided eye contact, and found things to occupy his hands.

Any inquisition in which Adam would begin “making himself useful” around the house — rousing himself from the sofa to the kitchen, clearing out the refrigerator, washing the dishes, or engaging in the simple act of picking up after himself — all the while answering Keira’s conversational interrogation with an almost picaresque offhandedness was suspect.

It was on this day that her most lurid suspicions had been stirred when she found a bracelet in the trunk of his car right before her run. It was a little jeweled charm bracelet with three thin bands and four little hearts – something that she would never possess. It was a thing from another world so far outside of her own that she would never had thought its owner so near a threat. “Sharks are always closer than you think,” Adam once said of the ocean. “They just stay just outside of the break. But they’re usually there.” And here it was. How long had it been there on the outskirts of her awareness?

The little charm bracelet belonged to Nyoko, a petite Japanese, 25 year old, who gave Keira the impression of someone stealing from the world though her eyes. She had a voracious, vacuous stare that seemed to pull her forward through life — a creature with a skull that contained a black hole.

“I think it’s Nyoko he’s been spending most of his time with,” said her friend Stacey who taught in the classroom next to hers one evening over a glass of shiraz and plate of crostini’s and fois gras. “That Japanese, redhead from San Diego. Who lost her parents in a car accident a few years ago. She went back home for a while but now she’s back. Remember her?” Keira admitted that she had. There was a brief friendship between Adam and Nyoko that she had been uncomfortable with, and an easy comradeship that extended itself to a flurry of phone calls at — according to the monthly statements that Adam was too lazy to sort through and discard — questionable hours. Although Keira had expressed her sympathies for her loss, secretly, she was relieved when she left. Nyoko feigned timidity but her actions were of a person self-assured. She knew what she wanted and did as she pleased, as if for her, time was not as dilated as it was for others.

Keira had only learned of her return to Oahu after Adam had returned from his surf trip to the Mentawai Islands — a trip that he had been planning with his friends for months. Only, Nyoko was never listed as one of them and during their long distance phone calls. She was never mentioned. At the airport upon their return, it was a surprise to see her there. Adam had claimed that she had been a last minute addition to the crew of travelers; that she had been back for some time, but he had only found out about it on the trip when she rendezvoused with Miles K. on the fourth day. He knew her as the cousin of someone’s sister, or as the friend of a cousin, who had never surfed before but begged and begged to be included because she needed it. Yes. “Needed to get away. Needed to feel alive again,” he had said. Her words, or his? Keira wondered at the time. Adam had shrugged it off as if her presence had barely registered.

When she had seen her at the airport however, although Keira could not have been positive, it seemed as if Nyoko had adapted to all of Adam’s mannerisms, diction and inflections. She used his sayings, and her voice followed the cadences of his own vernacular. Although it might had been a projection, there was something about their body language that troubled her. They ignored each other, but they never seemed oblivious. She saw it in the way Nyoko handed Adam his suitcase — he accepted it without once regarding her, eyes averted as if he were a sprinter accepting a baton. And when Nyoko turned away, Keira had seen a faint, furtive smile spread dreamily across her lips.

She was tanned and fulfilled, glowing, with stories of her own growth and oceanic awakening. At the airport, she hadn’t said much to Adam. There wasn’t even a goodbye between the two, but Keira had noticed the shimmering charm bracelet. It seemed incongruous to the rest of her earthy attire, and hung precariously off her wrist; either the last bit of an older self to be shed, or something new and tacked on. And, before she picked up her bags and threw them into the back seat of a Charlie’s cab, she threw a final glance at him, as if with her eyes alone she could ensnare whatever she wanted.

* * *

“Hello?” Adam asked again. “How was the jog?”

The bus roared by.

“What do you care? A jog is a jog.”

Adam stopped walking. “Whoa,” he said. “Please,” It was his way of halting an argument that he was anticipating but realized he was still ill prepared for. “Your mood’s changed since this morning.”

“Well, I just don’t have the energy right now, I spent it all training,” she said and walked on. He hung back, head lowered and cocked to one side.

He would pace about for a while, Keira thought, and he’ll try to regain footing. Don’t over react, he was probably thinking. Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe it’s something else. Like the mess I left behind at home. Or some stupid comment I made about her that made its way back. They would get home and he would start vacumming the floor, the busy idiot. Anything to avoid conversation.

He would stall, she knew, and he would take a deep breath and start walking slowly, deliberating, she thought, composing stories, creating alternate fabrications with parallel plotlines and interchangeable friends that he would contort and fit into any line of questioning. He would employ the always miraculous deus ex machina just when the story’s situation was becoming too impossible to resolve from a creative standpoint, when there would be too many loose ends flitting about. Something contrived and miraculous would always happen. “And then... you won’t believe this,” he would say. “We found the car returned right where it was before... ” or “We saw this turtle walking along the grass dragging that exact necklace” or “This white dog appeared out of the darkness and led us to the house...” or “A bird flew right into the guy’s face...”

These were a few of the more fanciful machinations he had deployed, and at first Keira had been taken in by these shimmering stories, wishing that she had been there to witness such whimsy, such life, but as time had passed, she began to realize that the people involved were never his close friends, never anyone she would encounter socially. They were called out from a deep bench of reserve players, cousins of friends, coworkers and old classmates. These stories served to distract rather than inform, and there was no way she could ever confirm such happenings. When she realized this, a quiet sadness crept in and continued burrowing inward, triggering a gravitational collapse, as Adam would have put it, and she kept falling and falling inward.

* * *

An ambulance wailed along Piikoi, blasting its high mechanical croon and punctuating it with the hand-hit horn, blaring at the vehicles slow to kiss the sidewalk. She walked for half an hour before she reached Alohi Way. Her neighbor was taking a chainsaw to the splintering branches of dead, greying trunk of the tree in his yard. He nodded as she walked by and she managed a small smile. She walked up to her driveway and swatted at a black carpenter bee. Another two buzzed by her ears and she ducked to avoid them. They flew up, wove through the air and disappeared over the garage rooftop. She looked back at her neighbor and wondered of their nests were in that dying trunk.

Adam came running up the driveway, sooner than expected. “Hey. I can’t figure it out,” he said, panting. “Have I done? Something? What’s wrong?” He was breathing hard and set his surfboard onto the zoysia grass. He immediately turned on the hose and started rinsing his board, making himself busy.

“Wrong? What could be wrong?” she asked and unlocked the front door. In the middle of their small, single story house sat a car engine, gutted out of it’s chassis. It sat in front of the cappuccino-colored theater sofa, as if begging for a pane of glass to lay over it, making it into a dadaist coffee table for gear heads. An oil stain spread along the carpet like blood from a giant, mechanical, cronenbergian insect. The air was hot, and the smell of oil swirled in the eddy where the cool outside air met with warmth.

“Is that a car engine?” Adam stepping up behind her.

“Brilliant,” said Keira. She ran her hands through her hair and threw them back at her sides and said under breath “Who are you, Arthur Conrad Doyle?”

“Did someone break in?”

Keira whipped her eyes at him. “Oh why do you ask?” She pushed past Adam and stepped outside. She began breathing slowly, with deep and controlled breaths. Her hands were shaking.

“Did we leave the door unlocked?” Adam asked.

Keira clenched her eyelids and pressed her hands over them so hard they trembled and the darkness within them fluttered. Her heartbeat sent loud pulses to her eardrums. “I locked it before we left,” she said quietly. “And you just saw me unlock the door to get in.”

The engine was old. Dirt and oil congealed along its rivets. Other loose wires and tubing lay splayed out, as if the engine had been plucked out of a car and just set down. Oil seeped deep into the carpeting.

“Well fine. I’m asking all the obvious questions. Let your woman’s intuition figure this out.”

“Woman’s intuition?” Keira asked. Her eyebrows arched. She leaned in carefully, “Now what in the world would a woman’s intuition have to do with this? Why would you bring that into play?” she asked, rounding out the words “woman’s intuition”, inflating their vowels.

“Nothing,” Adam said. “All I can do is take things at face value. It's you who possesses the knack to see beyond the data.”

“So what do we have here, at face value?” She looked at him dead on. She was referring to herself. “Tell me,” she said calmly.

“It’s...” he began running his hand through his hair as if suddenly aware of the sand and salt drying against his scalp. “Some kind of joke,” he speculated.

“No,” said Keira, and sighed weakly. She turned back to the engine. “It’s some kind of Honda.”

* * *

When the police arrived, Officer Morales asked all the questions and Officer Shinseki walked the perimeter and examined the doors and the locks. They took note of everything in the house and walked the grounds outside. They asked the neighbor with the chainsaw if there had been any suspicious activities and asked about any suspicious characters that had been seen lingering around the premises more than once. They checked their belongings and one of the officers had his notepad ready for a list of missing items, but there were none. Another officer drew a schematic of the home and drew an enigmatic tangle of lines to represent the engine right there in the middle of the living room. Another checked the windows. There was no sign of a break in.

It took a small crew to get the engine out of the house. Before it was removed they took photographs and checked for any kind of finger prints and were flummoxed by the fact that there were no prints anywhere in the home or on hardware. Even if the perpetrators were wearing latex gloves, there should have been little smudges and markings, finger-sized smears in the oil or oily footprints on the carpet. But there were none. The officers all hoisted the engine, covered it with thick canvas as if it were an expired victim, and loaded it into the police van. They left their names and report number and left.

On the brand new grey carpet was a slick oily indentation. The entire house was filling with the sweet sour mechanical stench of it.

Keira was in the bedroom, folding her clothes, stuffing them into a small suitcase. She had knocked down all of the little framed photos of the two of them off the champaign chest that they had been handed down from Adam’s grandmother and packed only the photo of herself and her parents.

“What are you doing?” Adam asked from the doorway. “Talk to me. What's with the cold low?”

Keira hoisted the suitcase up and pushed past him toward the living room. “Excuse me, please.”

“We’ll buy new locks. We’ll buy bars for the windows. Or we can move. You don’t have to leave.”

“I’m making things easier for you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Oh you must be joking,” she said to herself.

Adam was picking up photographs of himself – shirtless, younger and potbellied under an ironwood – off the floor and set them back onto the dresser. Jesus, was that him? He picked up a 4X6 of Keira in a knit cap overlooking the Pali and placed in on the dresser next to his. “Seriously,” he continued, moving slowly and predictably toward the kitchen. “I don’t know what you could be so angry about, and this break in may be compounding the situation, but...” Adam paused and then let out a gasp. “ Keira?”

She walked out to the living room. The engine was back. It sat there in precisely the same location as it had been previously, fitting perfectly over the oil-soaked indentation it had made on the carpet earlier, old and oxidized. The clamps were nearly eaten through. More wiring and tubes. More oil.

Adam ran outside and scanned the streets. He scanned the sidewalks for oil spots. “Did you hear anything? Did you see anything?” he asked Keira from outside.

Keira stood in the hallway and leaned against the wall. “I always seem to miss these things when they happen,” she said with not a bit of wonderment.

* * *

There was nothing more that she had wanted to do this weekend than to reorganize, reshuffle and redecorate their apartment. She had been looking forward to it. Opening up a new bottle of Pinesol was like uncorking a bottle of sauvignon blanc. She wanted to scrub the bathtub with Ajax, vacuum the dark subterranean dwellings under the sofa, swiff the uppermost plateaus the cupboards and refrigerator, happily making the edges and surfaces of her periphery gleam with harmonious domesticity, as she had every other weekend prior. It was a routine, an itch, a quiet pleasure. She took such pleasure in the act of it that she had considered it nearly sociopathic. It was a gift that such a productive and efficient act should stem from boredome. Many would have resorted to more destructive resources, but she had always preferred cleaning.

After a long week of work, there was nothing more settling than quietly perfecting the hidden corners and pockets of the apartment. In better times, she would have preferred sinking back into the sofa with a glass of wine with Adam amongst the clutter of their living room, flipping through various furniture catalogs, discussing the possibilities for an Eames elephant, or the merits of a new Mondrian wall mirror for the bedroom. She wanted to rest her head in his lap and finally decide on the proper lighting for the right-side corner that sat darkened across the sofa, as if she were an anxious interior decorator confiding to her intimate therapist – maybe a tripod floor lamp, or a wall sconce would complete the picture and fill that emptiness. She wanted to go about alphabetizing her bookshelf, her pantry, her closet, her music collection, her spice rack. But all of that was over now. She wanted out. A home without dark corners and hidden secrets, is like a mind without darks corners and hidden secrets, she had once read. Uninhabitable. That might have been true when she was younger, but now she was in the basement, and it was too much to bear.

When police returned, there was an air of skepticism and some halfheartedness to their procedure. Keira, resigned, let Adam do all the talking. “So you say you went into the bedroom for about 5 minutes and then came back and there it was. Identical. We still have the other one, it’s in the back of the van.” A long crease appeared in his brow. His skin was dirty, his pores large and oily. He was scarred along his forearm. When he looked up with his eyes, he revealed a large nevus on his left sclera.

The, younger officer added “You know it took about 4 or 5 of us to get that thing out of here. Lot of lifting and directing, yeah? It’s not the most... stealthy process.”

Their police radios shredded the tension with apoplectic bursts of urgent static and code.

“You say you heard nothing?” asked the third officer, who had been walking the perimeter outside.

“Nothing,” answered Adam.

The officer sighed wearily. Another police car rolled up outside and parked along the sidewalk — a superfluous clone. The day was filled with clones, Keira thought. Clone engines and clone officers being spit out of the ether. Soon there would be a hundred officers walking in and out with car engines. “Okay. We’ll take it out of here," said the officer. "We’ll run it through, although this ones on the previous engine are exactly the same. You’re in trouble if this is some joke,” he said and looked Adam directly in the eyes to show him he wasn’t to be toyed with. “Call us if anything happens.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Just sit tight. I can recommend some home security companies. Call if there are any other disturbances.”

The officers hoisted and grunted, and instructed those with their backs to the door where to go and what to watch out for. They lifted the engine into the back of the van and they were gone.

Outside, a dog was barking. Birds twittered. A car drove past. The mango tree rustled and someone was beating a carpet.

Adam looked at Keira, the fury in her eyes had somewhat abated, but he could tell it was more from shock and bafflement than anything else. She knew. She knew everything that had been happening, and it was over. The engine was incidental.

“You okay?” Adam asked.

She looked up at him, turned and walked toward the bedroom.

* * *

Life was good. Was. They had just moved in together, and almost immediately fell into a favorable routine. They went to bed at midnight and woke up at six. They went for morning runs. They ate healthily — only organic. They went swimming on Thursdays and went to dinners and movies on Fridays. They had begun a collection of monographs from famous photographers. Keira was learning how to use a camera. Adam was teaching her how to surf. She had just gotten a job as an English Teacher at Henry J. Kaiser High School. Adam had been working as a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They had just gotten a new flatscreen television but rarely tunred it on. As weeks passed, they began purging their home of the old to replace with the new. They replaced their old dining table with a new walnut veneered round top and an entirely new dinnerware set. Things were heading in a good direction.

The day before this was just like the day before that, like two mirrors facing each other with their recursive reflections receding into the past. Keira would go for a run while Adam took his shortboard out. They would both met up at the harbor, at the terminus of her circuit and drove along the shore, through Waikiki, right up to Diamond head to watch the wind surfers from a distance, crisscrossing along the water as if indifferent to the ocean. They flew in spite of the churning sea’s sluggish waves, and rode right over them, through the break and through that foamy whitewash straight toward the horizon. A few paragliders circled overhead. Parasurfers bounded out of the water like bungee jumpers, and road the wind before coming back down. Close to the horizon the melee of windsurfers and surfers looked like the gleaming iridescent wings of giant, post modern insects preying on slow moving ants.

“I’d want to try that someday,” she had said, watching the parasurfer ride up the face of the wave, and with a gust of wind, take off into the sky. Adam made her promises “I know someone. I can get it for us and we can give it a shot next weekend.”

And things were good.

In the bedroom, now, she felt like vomiting as uncertainty swept over her.

“ Keira?” Adam said from the doorway. She was crouched on the floor, reaching under the bed.

“I don’t want to talk to you. There’s nothing you can say.” She pulled out a small suitcase and began packing her items. Adam slumped onto the sofa and buried his thumbs into his temples.

“And what would I say? You haven’t even told me what it is that’s upsetting you. Is a simple discussion that out of bounds? I think I deserve at least that.”

“Don’t talk to me about what you deserve,” she said. “Look. I know, alright. I know everything. Your life is a lottery of easy way outs and quick fixes. Not this time.” She found the yellow flats she had been looking for and threw them into the suitcase. “It’s a good thing this happened early, before we got any deeper. Before we got too entrenched in any kind of life that would demand a discussion out of consideration for anything else beyond us. No. Thank god. Right now, as it is, it’s just you and me and I say no words are necessary. Here, I don’t feel any need to navigate through any sort of bullshit.”

“You still haven’t told me what’s bothering you,” Adam said angrily.

Keira snapped her suitcase shut. “I need your other suitcase.” She began digging into her dresser. “With all the shit going on in the world. The quakes — geological, political, religious, the least one could do to is be a decent human being.”

“Please, Keira,” Adam crooked his head back and stared at the ceiling. “You haven’t actually accused me of anything. You’re just packing. This morning, you were fine. I mean, where's the gradient here? Could you tell me what changed?”

“You sound like a cliche. You’ve become a cliche.”

“ Keira. Come on. You’re not making sense.”

“You’re run by a pathology I don’t want to play with.”

“Fine. There’s no talking to you. This is a frog storm. A disturbance. It is what it is then.”

“And stop talking to me in weather speak. If you say this is just a doldrum or emotional shift via katabatic wind, or some other flawed metaphor I'm going to stab you int he eye with a hydrometer.”

“Plain english then... What is it?”

“You’ve ruined us!”

Adam held his hands out as if he were pleading to the heavens for rain “How so?”

“That surfing trip!” Keira went hypothermic, as if emotionally, all human warmth had left her body. She shook. Her hands trembled and her teeth chattered.

“Yes. Yes. Yes. But nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened with who? I haven’t even mentioned any names.”

“Because there’s no one!”

Keira could not decide whether to cry or to laugh so she turned away and did both.

* * *

When the entire Honda appeared in the living room, it had taken up all of the floor space. He had closed his eyes for a second and listened to Keira quietly pack. He was waiting for an outburst. Tears. Anything. But she remained closed off. She would give him no emotion, he realized, and would simply leave, perhaps to her best friend, Sandra’s place. When he opened his eyes the car was there. “Oh my God!” he shouted. It was a 1995 Honda Accord, painted silver with a large dent on the bumper and along the driver’s side. A seashell necklace hung from it’s rear view mirror. The interior was black, although at one point it had been tan. The entire interior, dashboard and all was replaced. The front driver side window would slide down with the push of a hand, and Adam knew this. He placed his hand flat onto the glass and with slight pressure, slid the window downward. He pulled the lock up and opened the door and examined the flooring. Sand. Dried leaves. An empty beer can.

“That’s my old car,” he muttered to himself. “My old, junked heap.”

“The hell it is,” said Keira. She was looking at it from the hallway. She looked defeated. Weary. Resigned. She kicked a large duffle bag along the floor feeling like a bit player in one of his long, protracted stories.

“No,” said Adam. “It is my car. You remember this. We were dating for two months when I shat this scrap into the junk yards. Actually, this is the state of my car exactly one day before it broke down for good. You know how I can tell? This dent right under the door handle. I was at Costco and this guy with a old red Mazda next to mine swung his door open. The next day, it broke down.”

“It’s not your car,” Keira said. Her voice was raspy. She had quietly cried herself out.

“Well explain the plates,” Adam said. His voice a self-assured beacon of rationality.

“It’s a simulacrum.”

“Great. What's the depreciation on something like that?”

“Quite a story,” she sniffled. “The story of our demise. There's you. There’s the car. I’m taking the phantom car.” Keira squeezed in between the car and the wall and inched along to the driver’s side to tug on the latch that opened the trunk. She got out and collected her suitcase and duffle bag. She lifted the trunk and took a look inside. “Jesus. Are you serious?”

“Don’t tell me there’s a dead body in there,” said Adam, trying desperately to grasp the situation.

Keira sifted through a stash of used old plastic bags with trash. In them, there were empty plastic bottles, some old paper cups, empty rum bottles a bikini, wet underwear, which Keira had never owned, and a charm bracelet. It was the same charm bracelet that Nyoko had worn off the plane. It was wrapped in a purple tissue that smelled of lavender. “For Nyoko. A year ago. Before she even left. She wore it coming back.” She said, lifting the bracelet out of its wrapping. “Two months into our relationship...” she said.

“No. Not Nyoko’s. Why? Why would you ask that?”

“I saw her wear this. I saw her wear this off the plane at the airport. She was wearing it then. This car was junked before you went on the trip, so you gave this to her before the trip. You were seeing way back when. This is your car, like you said.” She placed the bracelet back into its tissue, folded it up and placed it back into the trunk. “It’s nice. Not something I would wear.”

Keira got into the driver seat and sat there. Adam stammered on about the contents in the trunk. “They’re not mine! How could it be? Maybe this isn’t really my car! I junked it a year ago. It’s not. This isn’t real. Not in reality. God. I feel like I’m dreaming. Wake up. Gotta wake up. Keira! Look at what’s happening here. Be rational.”

“Yeah. I’m taking the car,” she said, wrapping her hands around the steering wheel. She adjusted the rear view mirror and slid the seat forward, like she always did when driving his car. She took a breath, as if bracing herself for a fall. In her fist, she felt something materialize. A single teardrop made it’s way down her cheek and she wiped it away immediately. She opened her hand and saw the gleam of the keys resting on the crossroad of creases in her palm. She turned its little surfboard key chain and light rippled across its imperfect silver. “Ha! I don’t believe this,” she said, and inserted the key into the ignition. “I don’t know what this is. But I feel really lucky,” she said. The car was facing the wall next to the front door. The flatscreen Sony was positioned between its headlights. She would drive right out of the living room, into the wide blue world.

“That car isn’t going to start,” said Adam, placing both hands onto the sun-cracked rooftop. “Even if it does. Metaphysically, It’s not safe. I’m talking metaphysics here. Too many variables. You don’t know what this will do.”

Keira looked up at him and gently put her hand to her chest. “It’s done enough.”

“It can't start,” said Adam. “It won’t.”

She twisted the key and the car roared dutifully to life. “Purrs like a Kitten. What a fuckin’ day!”

“Keira!” Adam stepped back and fell onto the sofa. Exhaust filled the house. The walls rattled and a large framed photograph of the ocean fell onto the floor. “ Keira,” he called out. “Wait! How can I possibly offer you any evidence to the contrary? What do I need to do?”

She knew he wanted to offer her things. More than just words. But he was lazy. Too lazy to fix things beyond words. He was never any good at forging ahead on a promise. He was never one to weave in and out of any conflict honestly. His imagination was less a virtue than a symptom of limitation. Keira saw him close his eyes and pressed his hands over his face, panicking. She wondered, what promise could he make that would convince her to stay? Which statements would renew the stasis of trust? Her head was pounding. There was a glimmer of doubt. There was a whir behind her ears. The house was filling up with gas. It was now or never.

As Keira pushed her toes deep into the gas pedal, the car jolted forward, breaking through the wall, tires whirling, the wall bucking up and splintering into fragments, picture frames and the flatscreen falling onto the hood. She felt herself going faint, slipping out of consciousness, as if ceasing to exist, just like a bit player in one of Adam’s tall tales.

She tore out onto the driveway, squinting through the webbing of the shattered windshield. She could hear him screaming her name. This was her story now, she decided, and she would resume full authorship. She looked back and saw the house demolished. She eased forward down the street, and saw Adam in the rear view mirror, his image trembling as the mirror glass itself trembled. And, as she turned the wheel and hit the gas, she saw him flicker for a moment before sliding out of the frame completely.

THUNDERBOLT

Stan is drinking alone in an empty bar after work. Unwinding, he rationalizes, although he has been drinking daily for weeks. Just eating some smelt with grated turnip, and sashimi he narrates internally. He dips a piece of sashimi in soy sauce, one side, then the next, and savors it. He closes his eyes to amplify it’s flavor. Savory. Buttery. Rich and delicate. And when he opens his eyes a man in gold and yellow tiger mask is sitting opposite him at his table.

“Excuse me?” says Stan. The man’s tiger mask is made of some gold and yellow polyester mesh. He looks like the old Japanese wrestler Sataru Sayama. “Ahem” says Stan, “There are a lot of empty tables here. See? The entire bar is empty.”

The man in the yellow mask waves his hand and the young asian woman behind the bar quickly and diligently sets a glass down onto a square napkin and pours out a sliver of sake. Her hair is short and straight, with bleached tips. “Thank you,” says the man, staring intently at Stan and his plate of sashimi and smelt and daikon.

"Mm hmm," she musters, The two stare at each other for a minute as the bartender returns to her station and resumes quietly watching the both of them.

"Just passing through for a drink. Some idle conversation. And I will be on me way," says the man in the mask. “Happy Halloween,” he says, raising his glass.

“Yeah,” says Stan, deciding to be polite. After all, it would have been more awkward to turn him away. How would it look if two people sat in an empty bar in complete silence? “Kampai,” he says and raises his own drink. They engage in small talk, making comments about the food and decor of the dive bar. The atmosphere is dim and hollow. They talk abstractly about work. Stan is an accountant, and the man in the Tiger mask — although he does not offer his name — says that he is a social media expert. They talk about business and the economy. They discuss the recent APEC Conference. They talk about technology, and about culture. The man who is from Hokkaido speaks with a mild accent and has a tendency to pry in personal matters, but becomes secretive when asked about his own affairs. Stan realizes this and stops divulging facts about his own life, leaving the two of them sitting in silence.

“Did you know,” the man starts up again. “I once knew a woman who had no sense of herself?”

“Now how would I knew something like that? This is the first conversation between us—” Stan laughs, affably now. The booze is beginning to take hold.

“Ha. Yes. Chicago, I think. I don’t mean she had no sense of identity,” continued the tiger. “Simply, she could not sense her own body. It was... a curious condition,” he said, then continued drinking from his glass right through the slit in his mask where his mouth was revealed. At this point, Stan is regarding the mask as he would any other face. The man continued, “She couldn’t tell her legs from her arms. And most of the time, she crawled and flopped about. Most times, she used a level, the kind that carpenters use, to move about so that she could tell if she was properly balanced. But overall, she had no sense of her body. Didn’t know where her foot ended and her shoe began.”

“That’s a strange story,” said Stan. “Kind of an odd thing to—”

“There was this other friend, back in Japan,” The man continued. “Who began to have this other condition, funny, how I’m remembering these people,” said the tiger. There was a lining of glitter around his ears, sparkling as he titled his head in recollection. “He could only see one thing at a time. His entire world was stitched together with little parts. He would never see a face, he could only recognize an eye, or an ear, one thing at a time, but never the entire face. Once, he mistook his wife’s head for a hat, and tried to put it on. Funny, isn’t it? Ha ha!” The tiger erupts into laughter.

Stan notes that the conversation has turned a corner into darker territory and decides to call for the check. When he raises his hand to the bartender, she averts her eyes and ignores him. She turns around and starts cleaning glasses.

“You see, beneath all of this is a illusion,” says the man. “There’s nothing. Just a void,” he trails off. “Our bodies mean nothing.”

“Check please” he calls out to the bartender again.

The bartender remains inert and ignores him.

“Check please!” shouts Stan.

The tiger leans in and whispers. “Hey, you like her? Yes?”

“No.” Stan leans back in his chair. “Just want my check. I have to work early tomorrow,” he slurs.

“Ah, come one. One more!” chides the man. He lifts his hand and the woman quickly and efficiently delivers over another round of sake.

Stan shakes his head in frustration. “Fine. Last one. I swear she likes you more than me. She won’t even look in my direction, even in this empty bar,” He laughs in resignation. “My luck with women has been lousy,” he confides.

Donna Summers sings through a portal from the 80's, and spreads out softy along the bar counter.

The man nods. “Ah. I see. You want to see something?” the man asks, briefly scratching the white fringe of faux fur along his cheeks. He reaches into his pocket and extracts a phone. “Look at this,” he says and holds the face of the phone up for Stan to see.

Stan squints and looks closer. The man’s hands are shaky and uncoordinated, so Stan steadies the phone with his hand. When the blurred square comes into focus, he sees that it is a picture of the bartender without any clothes on. She is smiling at the camera. Stan pulls back, blushing.

“Yeow!” The tiger erupts in triumphant laughter and raises his fist into the air. “You see! Not so difficult is it! Very easy!”

Stan smiles and nods. “Good job” he says.

“I have hundred of pictures on this phone!” says the tiger.

“Nice work,” Stan says, not knowing how to proceed. He is too embarrassed to ask for the check again. He is wondering if his facial expression is betraying every thought he is having about the woman behind the bar, that if she were to look at him, she would know that he had just seen her naked because of his lingering I-just-saw-you-naked-on-someone's-iphone face if ever there were such a thing. He is suddenly too shy to look at her and he begins folding his chopstick wrapper into a small crane.

“What if I told you that entire back room behind the kitchen is filled with girl just waiting for action?” The tiger asks.

“I wouldn’t believe you,” answers Stan. Somehow, he feels like he is being tested. “But one can always dream,” he adds plainly.

“Yeow!” the tiger erupts again and drums the table with his hands. He adjusts his mask, and pulls it down tightly around his head. He then motions to the woman behind the bar, and she quickly disappears behind the aluminum impact doors to the kitchen. Minutes later, the doors swing open and two other women emerge from in a nimbus of steam.

Presto.

Earlier, the kitchen had been occupied by a single, middle-aged cook. Japanese. Sweaty and grimy, with a face that looked like flesh hanging off a makeshift meat smoker. Everytime the door had swung open, Stan had gotten a glimpse of that old cook slaving away, chopping green onions and stirring dark foreboding sauces. Where did these well-dressed, made up, pretty, young girls come from? What were they doing back there?

The women smile and set two dishes of kappa maki out, and then slips between the doors and back into the kitchen. Strange that they were back there, thinks Stan. They obviously didn’t belong in some hot greasy, steamy kitchen where an oily mist saturated the air. Not dressed that way. “Look, I think I see what’s happening,” says Stan. “But I’m not interested?” he ends awkwardly, as if phrasing a question. “What you’re selling, I’m not buying,” he confirms.

The man picks up a roll, pops it into his mouth and chews thoughtfully. When he is finished, he says “There was this other person who could never remember anything past 1960. Some sort of accident. All his life after that, he think he is in his 20’s. For a time, it looks so, but as he get older, everytime he sees into a mirror, he would see an old man, and he would be shocked and confused and he would just panic. Can you imagine? And then he would forget, and smile and go back to his life and think that he was a kid again. What blessing. What a curse.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” says Stan. “I don’t get this line of conversation,” he says and calls again for the check. The woman is nowhere to be found, but then the kitchen doors swing open. He sees three naked girls chopping an onion. Their knives appear sharpened and their knife skills appear expert until one of them cuts herself. There is a small slice on her finger. Another girl walks over, takes her hand and starts sucking on her finger. As she locks eyes with Stan, the doors swing shut.

“Hey, what the...?”

“This other man,” continues the tiger, “when he closed his eyes felt like he was swaying wildly, like seaweed swaying in a current. When he closed his eyes he wouldn’t even know where his hands were! If he were sitting at a table, and he could not see his feet, he would not know where his feet were. Rational thought would say to him, under the table of course! But he would feel his feel were extending farther than the floor, to the bowels of the earth. So disembodied, that when he closed his eyes, he would feel that he had no body. And when he opened his eyes, he would be surprised to find himself in seated position. Or lying down. Or just there. Strange!” He held up a finger in emphasis "But I always say, where there is a will, there is a body..."

“I’m leaving. Nice meeting you,” says Stan rising from his seat.

Suddenly, the front doors open and more girls walk into the bar. They all say hello. The tiger motions to them. They surround Stan's table. One of them whispers into another girl’s ear, and that whisper travels around the room, from lips to ear, lips to ear. Suddenly the bar is filled with girls whispering secrets. Then it stops, and most of them begin staring at him.

“I’m not buying,” says Stan. "No money."

“Nothing is for sale. You don’t need to be insulting,” laughs the man.

Stan is looking around for some hidden camera when one of the women lowers herself, nibbles on his earlobe and exhales slowly, sending a shiver down Stan’s spine. He momentarily closes his eyes and when he opens them most of the women have removed their clothing.

The man in the tiger mask asks “This what you wanted? Yes?”

The bar is still. The radio has been turned off.

“I never asked for any of this,” says Stan. “But.... yes. What will it cost me?”

“No charge,” says the man waving him off, but Stan is already kissing one of the girls. He removes his wallet and tosses it onto the table. It spins through the air and lands loudly on a plate, knocking over a bottle of soy sauce. The women converge.

“Another man I knew,” continues the tiger, rising now. “Had undergone such a pleasurable experience, that all of his senses went out of whack days later. It's like being struck by lightning. Too much at once. So... be careful!” the tiger laughs and leaves.

* * *

The next day, Stan wakes up in his own bed but can’t shake the previous night. At first he is elated. What the hell happened? he askes himself in disbelief. He gets up out of bed. Examines all the hickeys and scratches all over his body, and begins to feels strange. When he steps out into the living room, a feeling of dread creeps over him. He surveys the room. Everything looks the same, but nothing is. It is as if a switch had flipped in his mind. His surroundings feel like a stage set that kept revealing itself to be larger and larger, and just as accurate as reality. He repeats the joke, “someone broke into my home and swapped everything with an exact replica.” He showers, gets dressed and has a small breakfast. The food is tasteless. When he opens the front door he realizes that the entire world has been swapped out with this replica, he begins to feel dizzy. Then again, he wonders, was this world anything but how we perceived it to be? he thinks, realizing that there is no way back to the way things were before last night. He remembers a portion of the evening, embroiled in a tangle of limbs, losing the arrow of gravity, and the distintion of his own body. He remembers waking up last night, thinking that someone else was in bed with him, and when he threw this person out of bed, he fell to the floor as well. He chased this person in the darkness, running into the wall and knocking things over. Every time he grabbed ahold of this person, this person would grab ahold of him, and throw him to the ground at precisely the same moment that Stan would attempt to do so. When he finally scrambled to his feet, felt his way through the darkness and flicked on the lights, he realized that he was alone; that it was his own body he had been chasing.

This slow creeping displacement begins to bloom steadily. He was struck by a thunderbolt, he realizes, and the next time it may not be so good. He feels possessed and abandoned at the same time. From his doorway, he takes a step outside, his foot never touching the ground.