I was not sent by God to help you.

It was like this: The first time we met, you became convinced that I was sent by God to help you. This was your idea, and not my fault. I just happened to accidentally say the exact things you needed to hear, at a time when you were quite receptive to earnestness. What can I say? I'm a relatively nice person with a handy repertoire of earnestness. Our numbers just came up that night.

We parted. Inspired, you wrote me a letter explaining how much our chance meeting meant to you. You explained your theory that I was sent by God to help you. I was not prepared for such a letter, and I fled like a pheasant from the jaws of the hound. This came as no surprise to God. I don't really know how to describe what you went through as a result of my actions, but the phrase "high and dry" does suggest itself. Forget your own humiliation for a moment and savor the rotting-meat flavor of mine.

Where was your knight in shining earnestness? You sent me a post-card asking, and received no response save for the beating of wings and a speck disappearing behind some trees. I can't really apologize with any expectation of forgiveness. I can't really apologize because it doesn't seem fair to make the gesture.

In his cloud, God chuckles.

We met a year later, in the same place. You were still heart-pressingly beautiful, and sad like a concrete goose. We got a chance to talk, and I said the most horrible things imaginable. What can I say? I'm a relatively nice person with a handy repertoire of earnestness. It just happened to be the exactly wrong kind of earnestness that night. I could smell your let-down like ozone, and the laughter of God buzzed around us like the mosquitoes.

Make no mistake: The mosquitoes were fucking annoying.

We disappeared to our respective haunts, never to cross paths again. I sometimes wonder what became of you, with your mass of curly, dark-brown hair and liquid midnight eyes. I did not save you. Were you ever saved? Or did you retreat and disappear? Or did you simply cease to be a teenager, and things got better as a natural consequence? God knows. As for me, the squishy aspects of my life turned into a sort of train wreck, and my failures in your case are something I've only recently started to get over.

Recovery began with the realization that God was never there.

They taught you to be afraid. They showed you the way to make everything just right, such that you could never find peace. And they couched their explanations in language that implied entitlement, correctitude, serenity.

That is why, when you sit in your padded room, you look around yourself and see that everything is how they said it should be, and yet you are without peace, bereft of contentment.

And you assume it is because of you that your peace is stillborn. You're not doing it right. You don't deserve it. You're too weak.

I want to pluck out the eyes of the dream and watch it stumble into traffic. I want to string together a sequence of sentences and have it matter. I want to help. With these hands, I want to shape the vessel of your deliverance. I want to fold, spindle, and mutilate the poisons that were fucked into your ear. I want to take something dirty and polish it until it shines the light of truth to shame the daylight. I want to insinuate myself gently into the uterus of toil and draw forth the birth of freedom.

But I'd settle for a hug.

I can smell the Opposition.

The Opposition is petty, always ready to give a nickel or a dime, acting like being the victim is the crime.

The Opposition rolls its eyes.

The Opposition is dangerously misled, superiority god complex voodoo on a good china plate with butter and beans.

The Opposition doesn't dance as well as we do.

The Opposition doesn't know how things really are on the street, or the mansion front hall, or the corridors of power, or the power lines that criss-cross the skies of this land.

The Opposition flaunts its dead-eye jacket, wearing the sweat and blood of millions as though it were finest silk. And it is.

The Opposition uses big words just to sound smart.

The Opposition cannot be bothered to wipe the smirk off its face while wiping its ass with the sacred principles of mediocrity.

There is no Opposition. I command the Lord God Almighty at this time to wipe the Opposition from the pocked face of creation. (God hates the Opposition.)

With these hands, I will crush the larynx of the Opposition, I will wring the screams from its throat like blood from a rag, and leave a crumbled corpse in a heap on the floor of the marketplace.

I will plant a sign in the guts that reads, "You must be as tall as this sign to ride the Opposition."

The other day I was reading the paper when suddenly the ink began to move. It started near the center of the page; the ink seemed to liquefy and then slither and ripple in all directions to the edges of the page. It made a sort of gurgly swishing noise as it moved, and the paper trembled slightly in my hands as if the ink were moving throughout the entire paper.

After a few seconds, the movement stopped. In my hands was a sheaf of blank newsprint. I began to page through it.

I found the ink congregated on what I believe used to be page C-3. There it was, an inky, impossibly black miasma about the size of a CD, shimmering faintly and pulsating disturbingly. When I put my face closer to study it, I heard a low murmur almost as though the ink were conversing softly with itself.

I sat there for a few moments, trying to decide what to do. I came to the conclusion that I should find somewhere to lay the paper flat. I folded it carefully, carried it into the dining room, cleared a place on the table, and set the paper down, opened to the page formerly known as C-3. The ink was still congregated there. I regarded it for a while, and I had the unpleasant impression that it was regarding me back.

Finally, I decided that I had to know. "Are you good, or evil?" I asked, my voice quavering slightly.

"Ee-vill," the ink answered in an exaggerated English accent. For me, the accent was the real tip-off that I was dealing with something truly malevolent.

I knew I had to act fast. I went and got a mason jar from the basement. Then I rolled up the newspaper, held it over the open mouth of the jar, and shook vigorously. After a few moments, the ink blob oozed out of the end of the roll and plopped into the jar. Quick as lightning, I closed the lid.

Satisfied with this temporary measure, I took a trip to the hardware store and came home with some quick-setting cement and a five-gallon plastic bucket. I mixed up the cement and filled in the five gallon bucket with the jar in the middle. Then I buried the bucket about three feet down in my back yard.

Thus did I save the world.

I touch you on the shoulder in greeting. You don't take note of me beyond a cursory nod.

Photons bounce off of me. You look through me.

With the folds of mucous membrane in my throat I vibrate the air. You don't hear me, not that you'd listen.

When I sit down beside you, you move to another bench.

When I tentatively reach out my hand, you roll up the window.

When I sneeze, you don't say, "Bless you."

The things that interest me do not interest you.

You don't return my calls.

When I eat, you wonder where the last slice of bread has gotten to.

When I go on trips, I come back from them. You stay here for the duration. You don't notice that I'm gone and you aren't surprised when I return.

When I die, you change the channel.

I will stop playing your games.

I want to go to Radio City and participate in the Radio Rodeo. I want to strap on my cyber-chaps, climb to the top of that horse, and let it buck. I know that I would win the Radio Rodeo, and be the envy of everyone and everything that is influenced by electromagnetic radiation.

The only question is, what would I do with my newfound power and influence? Would I have streets named after me? Would I tell her that she was pretty again? Would I reveal too much personal information? Would I have a public, painful, alcohol-fueled meltdown? Would I sit at the end of the bar and drink quietly to myself, and deny when people asked that I was the winner of the Radio Rodeo? Would I sit by the jukebox and drop electronic dimes to play the same song over and over again forever?

No one would complain, as I played the song for the twentieth time that hour. "He won the Radio Rodeo," they would say to each other, and this would serve as adequate explanation.

The only thing that is bothering me is, what song would I play? And, having decided, what if I discovered that the jukebox in question did not have that song?

You know the answer as well as I do: full-scale universal shutdown.

This is why, when I climb to the top of that horse, I feel something is wrong. I can't put my finger on it, though, and then the gate opens. The second I am out, the saddle ejects, my horse explodes, and I am disqualified.

Later that night, I am dejected, sitting at the end of the bar drinking quietly to myself. The jukebox sits sullenly silent behind me. A woman slides into the stool next to mine. She is wearing sunglasses. I don't tell her she is pretty. When I spare her a conversational glance, she says, "Hey, don't take it so hard, cowboy."

I shake my head. "I had plans, you know."

"It's for the best," she says, laying a hand gently on my arm.

I shake it off. "What do you know about it?" I growl.

"This jukebox doesn't have 'Pompton Turnpike,'" she says quietly.

I thought this would make you feel better, this turning back of the vice a scant millimeter so that 499 psi of pressure to your temples would be made to feel good, soothing even, after all of those hours at 500. Perception bows in service to context, you know.

So I wasn't prepared for you to lash out at me like you did. I understand, of course, that you weren't genuinely angry at me. You were really lashing out at those other people that put you in your current place– they were the ones who wheeled your cart into position and then slowly, almost gently, twisted the mechanism. I knew that you were addressing them and not me. But to have you talk to me like that, it still hurt a little bit, like a grain of sand in the eye, quickly swept away by automatic plumbing.

I just backed off, explaining that I was only trying to be helpful. When your only reply was to snarl, I washed my hands and walked away, leaving you in your shackles. Ungrateful fucker.

I've ducked a peach; I've sung the story.

I want to tell you. I mustn't tell you, even though I believe you would understand that it would only be me telling you. Telling you. Whispers crawling through my brains like tiny horses through pasta, I got to wondering if the horses are always like that, or if this is a special case.

If I tell you, it changes everything. I like how things are, but I like how they could be just as absolutely well. I don't like how things might be if you didn't understand that it was only me telling you. Telling you throbs like an artery. Telling you sings like wind. Telling you breathes deeply of the spring air in the early morning. Telling you takes the afternoon off and washes the car.

Telling you like a lie or a promise. Telling you like a swan gliding through the shallows of the pond in the park. Telling you like a confession, waiting to see what penance will be offered. Telling you like roses tell the air of their presence, so that when you're walking down the sidewalk, you can smell the roses before you see them. Telling you like you'd tell someone a celebrity has died: resignation and interest and loss and sordid pleasure all squished up in a meatball of distant dying. Telling you like you'd tell someone about a dream you had that they were in: careful not to say the wrong thing, careful not to give the wrong impression.

Thinking back on other times in my life, I notice a trend of the world not ending. Yet telling you brings me into the tawdry boudoir of fear, where there are no pajamas.

My entire life has been leading up to this. I was born to tell you here, in this room, with its pentagonal windows draped in fine linen. I was born to tell you now, at this time, using the air I just inhaled to power my recitation.

I will not tell you, because of harm. Because of the things they showed me when I was in the special room. Because I don't want to detain you from whatever it is you're doing. Because I've never met you. Because you don't exist. Because I don't exist. Because there is no sun. Because there are no potato chips. Because swimming here weeps a custard of foam into the sky.

I like that you were there to spark the urge to tell you. I like that I was there to take up that spark and hold it in my hands until I was burned away to ash.

I took your poison. I ate your biscuits. Mine was the tribulation of the denim saw-blade. Mine the unfurled majesty of this kick in the crotch. I spit at your train droppings. I claw out my eyes as a gesture of contempt. I know that I will have the last laugh, except that you'll laugh after I have it. Or so I imagine.

Why won't you be nice to me? Won't you please like me? I never wronged you, never lipped you, never gathered you into a pile for the derision of flea collars. Wasps are feasting on my brains, wondering. What could I have done to earn your favor? Mine was the least cooked of deals. You ripped my life away from me, but not because you wanted it.

I swim in garbage, floating detritus of a Machiavellian glove attendant, and oh, the parties that ensue! It's a real elbow-rubbing kind of thing, and I am topical celebrities lined up in a row like cornstalks, planted. Planted. Can I get you a drink? An hors d'oeuvre, perhaps? Your picture on the wall, painted by the Italian masters? What do I have to do in this sweaty vise of a grizzled mystery to get a decent fucking beer?

With this brain, I am. With this brain, I rebuild the ashes of resurrected charlatans. With this brain, I toil under the sun of a thousand clawing indignities. With this brain, I cannot forget. With this brain, I shoot hamsters with a gumball machine and grind their pestilential little skeletons into a powdery substance that is used in the finest beauty creams, the hundreds-of-dollars-for-a-dinky-little-jar kind. With this brain, I will engage you for a time, and perhaps get you to do favors for me. With this brain, I cannot fly. With this brain, I am imprisoned, fastened, carried, butchered, held, forgotten, licked, hung.

When did I ever get the notion that I could be like you? How did you convince me that being like you was what I wanted? I'm biting concrete slabs over here, and you're asking me where I got my sweater. There's a disconnect. I must try to leave behind my pleasant notions of a life untroubled. I clutch at them as though they were a teddy bear.

We ate lunch at a cafe. I ordered from the menu, and he had brought his own food in the brown paper sack of fate. It was time for an adventure. Or possibly a romance. Perhaps both.

There is no polite way to ask someone to accompany you to a public restroom stall, so I didn't bother to try. I took his hand, stood up. He waited. "Come," I said. He did.

Later, in the hotel room, I contemplated our pairing. He had the body of an Adonis, and I had the body of a patent lawyer.

We took off our armor without speaking, stacking the plates on the bed. It seemed like a silly place to put them, since I assumed we were going to be using the bed in a very short while. Perhaps the clanking clatter as they were pushed out of the way is what we were looking for. Or perhaps not. When we were naked, he fixed me with an intense stare. There was no shame. We knew what was going to happen. He turned his back to me and leaned against the wall, waiting. He was mind-shatteringly attractive. We did it. We took turns. It was good. We did eventually get around to using the bed, and the plates of armor did indeed clatter and mix as they were swept aside.

Afterwards, we sat against the wall side by side as I discussed the fermented intricacies of patent law in a dull monotone until he dropped off. Then I stole his kidneys and left him in a bathtub full of urban legends. The sweet smell of purposeful illusion stayed with me for weeks after.

While it was happening, it seemed timeless. I had no idea how it was going to end. It wasn't until a long time after that I realized it sort of didn't matter how it ended. In many ways, the moment is all, and the moment is moving. Sometimes, I hold onto the rope and try to stop it or at least slow it down. I am always unsuccessful, and I walk away with bleeding palms. Other times, as with the Adonis, I hold onto the rope and go water skiing.

I didn't really steal his kidneys.