There is no beginning, only continuation. Now, it is raining.

That fucking rain, coming down through the gorge of brick, disappearing upward into swollen clouds. I am in the alley, by the backstage door. Dirty rivulets weave along my exposed arms. It makes my skin itch but not so bad. Sometimes it raises a rash, but this won't. Either it's not as bad as it once was--when it could shear layers of aluminum off these trashcans--or my skin is thickening, like lizard skin, thickening into scales. Another reptilian mutant skulks about acid-wet sidewalks.

The empty places sicken me as do the stragglers clinging to old haunts. So, I find a place at the perimeter, near their haunts, as only a witness to the parody: the lights rigged to a dust-clogged, rust-caked generator, the sound system choking out music—and it’s never new material, always what they can remember of old stuff, the stuff from a mythological before. Inside, I’ve seen them: they even dance.

It’s unbearable, but I linger outside and I close my eyes. I don't want to forget--don't want to pretend to forget, rather. I relish the sour smell of the rain and torture myself with memory. This is my penance for surviving.

I’m watching the long fall of droplets in and out of the horizontal bands of grayish light interrupted by shadows when the door opens. There is a jarring sound that draws my numb attention. I don't move from my perch on the splintered barricade. I watch through the tangles of my wet hair as the door hesitates in its motion, bisecting the shadow with a widening arc of sick orange light, from which you emerge.

I hate you.

An electric emotion, hate. It spurs my pulse that now drums against my skeleton. It's all I can do to keep from bolting. Or killing you. Erasing you with my hands.

You are before.

One glimpse of your cool, slightly-manic eyes and the flood of associations assaults me. I've been snatched up in the vortex of double-think, a new flailing disciple of Then and Now.

You're a corpse painted over like a clown and thrust into my cell, mockery contorted in misery. I’d come to believe that I've steeled myself against it, that nothing in this world of shells could affect me. Yet, the rush of hatred sends blood pounding through my body, to those atrophied areas of my brain, raising the dead.

These places, these material things don't bring it back like this. That’s why I’m safe on my disinterested periphery. The hollow reminders are props, like a movie set version of the old west: no connection with what is or was ever real, but a vague similarity which remains unexplored, unquestioned. It's an alien country. Before can't exist like this. Anonymity and Apathy are the patron saints of the sane. Hail, Entrophy, full of grace, ave, ave, and ever amen...

But you crush me inside a hideous kaleidoscope of crumbling monuments. I hate you the way I hate the specter of the past. I hate you for my weakness. My bones are splintering.

Yes, I remember the musician-you, the "he" of you before—which means I remember the before, that it still has weight, that it can still infect me…

The last time she saw him was at Troy's funeral. How brave she was, standing aside the coffin with nary a tear staining her stoic face. The other half of a long-since-cooled relationship had become her post-mortem soul mate and the only man she’d ever love or loved. Death had painted him with a tragically romantic brush. Then, there was James. James whose appearance threatened to obliterate the painting. She refused to speak to him beyond perfunctory responses. Hello. So sorry. Goodbye.

This is you again, desecrating peace. Not different enough and the thread connecting all prior meetings is pulled taut, the years crowd around each other and I'm standing closer to her, that lobotomized idiot.
And then, somewhere in the midst of the wreckage stirs the rabid desire to consume you. I want to rip out your heart and swallow it before it cools. Oh, I am hungry; every nerve crackles with a hunger more fierce than the one that shattered the dolly in the wilderness.

What do you see? I don't want to know. You speak. It takes me awhile to decipher the word. Do you say my name? The forgotten epithet stuns me; it's like looking into the long-neglected mirror and finding--shock beyond all shock--that I haven't changed at all. Impossible. As chaos has scoured the earth, as I have writhed through the wreckage of it, there should be a monumental change. There has to be. No room left for the old identity. I'm not the same species. How can you recognize that name in me?

My head is spinning, but I'm moving toward you. Almost unconsciously, as I have no legs or will. I merely sense the landscape skid past me, so I assume it's me that advances. You cut the distance in half. We collide into each other with the sound of sheet metal crumpling and peeling back.

These fingers have never touched another human being. A layer of skin is unbearable. I want your blood running in my veins. I want to rip open your chest and lay bare that core, that quivering room where vitality is housed, feast on it, steal the space. It is selfish, I know, as the blind hunger of a starved leopard let loose in a nursery.

But you are hardly an infant. You are every bit the savage I am and as suddenly awakened. Under your skin, scarlet rages. And the soft prey is something in the shared space between flesh and need. We tear at it ruthlessly. It courses like the rain down our skin, like blood. My own heart is beating so viciously it may chew its way out, allowing you to feed. It’s too much, and it’s not enough.

I push you away and lick my lips. There's blood. I can taste its tang, and I see it on your dazed mouth. And I can't keep from grinning, my lips curl back from my teeth. I can taste you. Like pennies on the summer sidewalk, you taste like innocence and steel.

You give me a dark look, through a damp mess of black bangs. I remember longing to seize a handful of that hair as you leaned from the stage to sing directly--No. That wasn't you, that wasn't me… isn't.

This is the space which speech is supposed to fill. When was the last time I strung together a sentence? She used to trade pleasantries on a phone with you. Then there is the option of dragging you into the pit and utterly consuming you. That would annul the compulsion for words. But I think I sabotaged the transition by pushing you away, and now the space is widening between us like an oil spill, and the crazed grin outlasting its effect. I'm lame and alone at the edge of a desperation that infuriates me.

Your gaze stays hard, though, a lance pinning me to my side of the spill. There's oil around my ankles, blackened rainbows coil up my legs. You have eyes like oil spills and I... You are manipulating me. (I kind of like it, I kind of get a charge out of it.) It pisses me off. How dare you orchestrate my mood? This means nothing. You are nothing. You didn't exist before you emerged from the doorway. Troy is dead. James is dead. Cassie is dead.

I shake off the barb of your stare and fill the grin with sound. A low snicker rising in frenzy until it's barking, vomiting hyena laughter. The rain pelts my face. I am laughing and tasting metal rain falling into my open mouth. The walls come up. You almost snuck through when I wasn't ready, but I'm on to you now. You see me. I don't see you. I'm rain and noise. You are invisible eyes witnessing the story that has run on beyond the boundaries of the bindings, going nowhere. This is some weird denouement, an anti-climax to a tale that should have ended when all the others did. Why is the story still going? Why is yours? And how do I define you or me now that the words have run out. You can write hahahahahaha across the page. All in capitals, in boldface, with quotations. Don't forget: she said...

But no one's reading anymore. And I can remove you from my story and make you an involuntary reader. (Ha! Ha! Ha!) I dis-involve myself from you. Maybe when I die (if I die--we're not so sure it's a certainty any longer) THE END will flash, white letters on a black movie screen, and it will be over.

But you don't want to be the reader, because now you are standing over me, your hands are on my shoulders and I can't shrug them off. Why are you gripping me so tightly? Let go (oh, gods, don't let go!) Get the fuck off me…

What? The alley rocks sharply and rights itself. The laughter dies. Did you strike me? I didn't feel it. You look concerned and startled. How sweetly fear sits on your brow, my dear darling one. I will let you believe I am made of calculation and scorn. I will let you believe the laughter was my own. Drown in your uncertainty; perhaps I will throw you a rope before it's too late.

I don't want to prolong this desperate intensity, but here you are, a thumb rubbing my smeared cheek, fingers pushing the wet tangles out of my face (the hair has grown back though my fingernails haven't--or I've never had fingernails). What the hell are you doing? This tenderness is a complete incongruency. And then the dashing stranger slowly unlaces her brocade bodice... right. I'm already in your pants, mister. End this silly fabrication. When will this damn rain stop? Your eyes are darker than I remember. Shit, the comparisons… Close that book.

How did your story go? How did it get here?

Maybe I'm only an event in your tale. Just a character introduced late when everyone else has put down the book, a part of someone else's dream. Thought so. That explains the on-hold feeling, of being crouched unwittingly in the dimness behind a stage backdrop which will sooner or later scroll up and leave me squinting into the track lights. Yeah? Hello, it's me. Thought my part was over, sorry. Did I miss a cue? I must have because you are expecting the next thing to come from me. Stage direction, dialogue the script is in tiny shreds all over the floor.

A gnawing in my throat. I go for your lips—annihilation in a kiss. You aren't prepared for it but you slip right into it anyway. Whispers all around me. The rain on every surface, trashcan lids, soggy cardboard, a crusty refrigerator door, the skeletal fire escape still clinging to the side of the building, the metal shade over a flickering bulb, the crown of my head. Feels like tiny lizards. jamesjamesjames. Are you still attached to your name?

If we define ourselves half by how others perceive us, I am barely half a being. My name’s come unhinged. No one perceives her. I can complacently cease to exist in the wilderness, or become nothing more than a vague wisp outside the haunts of stragglers. You are forcing me into existence. I despise you for this. If I let you, I can't go back to the ghost realm. It terrifies me. What ever I become will be enmeshed in you. What if I like her and you disappear and leave me with shells? I've already surrendered, sacrificed layers of jaded flesh. You've pulled me into the naked light.

I am a lidless eye.

Emerging from the kiss, you speak again in impassioned gasps. Your breath is thick. You are leading me somewhere. A vice grip on my wrist keeps me from dissipating into the haze. You fear that I’ll evaporate like language before your pages have been filled.

I was supposed to die. All of us were. It's no relief surviving. The slow after-deaths passed without intensity. The tension becomes a worn rag, each day torn thread by thread. We know it can't last. No one is supposed to outlive Armageddon. Somehow I slipped through the fist of God, through the teeth of the serpent. And I join the other insects, waiting for a big can of Raid to tilt out of the sky and finish the job. Then, when the rag is threadbare and soiled, living is automatic. The first feigned comfort afforded me: living on auto-pilot.

We are moving into the tired streets which are nothing like the images everyone had of the high-strung and attack-ready anarchists populating Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic landscape. Those images, with all things technicolor, blew apart like shrapnel. It’s just grey. Apathy is so much easier than anarchy. Wandering through the haunts, moving out onto the dancefloor—the stragglers don't have eyes. White eyeballs like cavefish because they have no use for them. There are little scars on my brow and across my cheekbones where I tried impassively to claw my own out during the long winter. There was no violence in it, I remember, and I would have succeeded but then realized I'd be forced into memory and that scares the shit out of me. For awhile, Outside, I stopped thinking in words. All the shelter-hermits do. No use for language. And, like the other shelter-hermits, I avoided the remnants like the plague--most were too doped out of their skulls to observe language beyond its most basic fragments anyway.

The definitions are mutating. All this time waiting, now not to die, but waiting for you. I can't run, but I've escaped death. We got away. Suddenly survival is a gift I can't possibly afford. You make me want to feel now when I've spent forever wallowing in eventuality. You are now, a vibrant shining present tense. I could stumble after you forever through this maze of back streets.

It's corrugated metal. This shelter. And chicken wire serves as a support for brown-black tarps. Haphazard plywood fills in the gaps. It is a house though it looks enough like a pile of junk to be left alone by all but the most zealous hoarders. He has even dubbed it home. I’m bewildered by this masquerade. How could anyone bear to sleep in the same place for more than a couple nights? There is no such thing as home.

But you have salvaged something. You cling to it. This is your shield against the darkness. You pull aside the tarp. We duck inside through the flap. You have a converted car battery feeding a bald light bulb and tape player. You still have music.

Your place.

"Mmhm," you respond and cause me to jump. I didn't realize I'd said anything aloud. Does it sound sarcastic or awed? I can't decide what I'm feeling. My skin itches from the earlier exposure to the rain. I rub my arms with grimy fingers and think of shower stalls. I haven't had a shower and haven't even allowed myself the luxury of wanting one. Frustration creeps thickly between my organs; my stomach feels like it's swallowing itself. I would leave, would abandon you, the mind that recreated awareness and would curl back into the fortress and sleep forever beside the yellow mercury sea. I can't escape. You block that route, but there are other ways of escaping. I stare at you. Something is keeping me here, a part of me that has never known words. You just stand there and wait in the crosshairs of my glare.