With the Memphis blues again

A dedication

Postgame press conference

Overtime

Q4 Memphis mythologies

Time out from Mike Conley’s 115th dream

Q3 A history of Vince

Q2 Those who are about to die

Time out from Mike Conley’s 115th dream

Q1 Penny on the tracks

Pregame shootaround

for Z-Bo, Mike Conley, the Grindfather, and the Brothers Gasol

There was a logo and a dog this play, each assigned a role in an eternal game of fetch. Two beasts, counting Old Grizz, the bear, and three men, counting Pau and Marc, in whom some of the same blood ran which ran in others too, even though Marc’s was a plebian drop in time and only one of the two proved immovable and unrelenting.

He was thirty-two, nearing that year that makes men feel Christ-like. For fourteen years now he had been a man’s hunter. For fourteen years now he had dreamed possibilities. It was of the wilderness, woods and hills, thicker and older than any remembered documents:—of royal decrees and tribal arrangements, of the mapped world and the world beyond the margins, of the fragments and syllables that were but ciphers of some unfinished thought, of what he pretended and knew not; older than wise tales about Jordan and Russell of whom people knew the cerebral quality of the blood, the fortitude of the joints. And yet young enough to suffer in the golden floods. It was of the victor and the loser, not one man nor a group of men, or even one set of brothers, but that swirling of bodies and that collision of fates in the frothing madness that sometimes drowns the world.

It was the raw, naked matter of the choices men make themselves into and what others, too, have made—the compartmentalizing of the future, the stubbornness to endure, and the dogs and the bear and what have you juxtaposed and reliefed against a sky blue hell above a barbecue rib joint, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting brackets that are the dirt and blood matrices of a league’s history, a contest that according to the ancient and immitigable rules of which voided all shame and offered no respite;— the best game of all, the best of all hunting and forever the best of all seeing everything, the minute details and patterns that unfold from an acorn and crash into those worlds once believed separate, the telling and hearing of what could have been versus what came to be and the opportunity to run it back with a retrospection pumping in vein and limb—in the libraries of not only houses and offices and plantations but in the very memories of the soul–the bones, my man–, for in the heat of the act, when a beast reveals its vulnerable hide and underbelly and the hunter’s finger is on the trigger, there is no time for research, for data or schematics and even grit and grind sounds too slow to describe the yellow floods of Western history washing over each and every moment that might otherwise inhale and exhale a life all its own. The floods came, and the floods will always come.

The men in the camps know this and yet they would not tell you even as the still-warm meat hung in nylon nets. And when those who had slain the prey at the buzzer would sit before burning logs and recall the certainty with which they had played the game and bent its rules into unwritten codes of honor and logic, there was always a bottle present, a jug that hummed in the wind, so that it would seem to anyone listening that those fine wild instances of heart and brain and courage and cunning and speed and force (and luck) were concentrated and distilled into that blue and yellow liquor, not brown, which not women, not boys and not girls (why did Faulkner write boys and children?), but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the loser’s base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of their skill and hard-earned glories but in salute to them and always with the recognition that there is only so much to go around, that the world is built on a limited number of atoms and molecules, that Michael and Charles can only eat so much when gathered within the walls of the same banquet hall, that either Larry or Magic will, at times, go hungry, even in the McDonald’s drive-thru.

Thus, it seemed to him on this October morning not only a forgone conclusion but only fitting to drink deep the whisky and prepare once more for that almighty slumber, that hibernated death before the reawakening (and after the reawakening).

He realized —they all realized— later, when it was too late to shove the ship from the ocean’s ruts, that it had begun long before that. That even new motions felt borrowed and rehearsed, perhaps even plagiarized in the name of a Connor McGregor, a William Faulkner, or even a brother. In short, the story’s Prometheus, Mike Conley, walked from Tony Allen’s disturbed grave and towards the windchimed trees, palming the blue sphere of a heart he had removed from the corpse’s chest, not for the first time, and singing to himself and only for himself:

We are going on a bear hunt

We’re going to catch a big one

I’m not scared

What a beautiful day!

3035 K.D.

Day 5

They had lit out for the territories. They had expected artifacts of truth. Instead they found no rhyme and no reason. Thick clouds gathered on the water. Ghosts emerged in the shapes and the shadows. They were not wrong to see the past tacking a line across the whale gray waters. Despite the mist and a slit of sunlight, everything lay within the kiln of the visible world, its manes and its hunters. The nets did little to delay their travels. The ghastly wraiths minded their progress with a distance bordering on prehistoric weariness, as if time’s fecund larvae might still percolate in the still waters, or a magician’s spinneret. Inside the ken of Old Man Riverwalk, they had approached the River’s former delta, where the flood waters swallowed everything of import within their mightily frothing swell.

The oil-bleached sand sludged through the cracks in the young man’s fist. He squatted under the arc of his unibrow, contemplating this rare hint of un-flooded parchment. A rare gust of samurai wind cut across the dying sandbar, and pellets of sand slashed the slow gathering waters.

The men had left the oil rig where the colony gathered in the flood’s wake. They set out with patience running thin, and on their journey, they had seen no ships as they passed through the Gulf’s ever-expanding Dead Zone, and no ships approached further on, where the River’s mouth had stretched wide like a boa constrictor’s jaws, until the shoreline, its deltas and its swamps, vanished into a vast and haunted harbor.

Like a flickering tongue, the sandbar lapped the air where tides chose to waver. Once upon a time, the tide did not exist at all. The Mississippi had forced everything in its path into the Gulf, shaping the world on the whims of its appetite. Now, however, the bloated River settled in stagnant waters, breeding out the disparity between life and death.      

Inches below the water’s surface rested a marble door. The lid of some lost crypt, it was the relic from a lost empire washed in waters that cared not for human endeavor. The young man without a unibrow squinted into the shallow prism, attempting to read the runes that danced in the gray shallows. Much of the carvings had been smoothed into blank spaces, but some letters remained.

“The name M-A-R-A-V-maybe an I mean anything to you?”

The young man with the unibrow remained in a crouched position, a seven-foot giant curled into a fetus, holding tightly to the silt dripping like wax from his knuckles. He had a world, but no handle.

“Yo, how long we going to camp here, A.D.?”

The young man with the unibrow rose, his arms and legs long and slim, like poles supporting an ancient beach house–the kind nobody builds or lives in anymore. He watched a speck float in the sky’s distant gray tides. He drifted with the sight, his legs scissoring the water like the slow-moving stilts of a heron. The water filled the holes he left behind like a beast grown lazy with its ravenous appetite. In gurgling swills, the empty spaces filled with a flood’s certainty.

The other young man, the one standing over the watery crypt, followed his partner’s stare. “How many are there?”

The man with the unibrow spoke. “The lead one is smaller than the rest. I think it’s a different species of bird.”

The birds drew closer. The shapes of their wings and bodies became more distinct as the dotted line approached. Behind the small speck of the first bird were what appeared to be twenty-three pelicans. Some started to dive into the water with a suddenness that suggested they had been shot. Their dives proved futile, however, and their bills rose empty from the waters. Others glided along the water’s surface, having long ago given up the search for food. The small bird, however, took its time, fluttering in a manner both rapid and patient, before eventually landing on a patch of granite-colored sand. It seemed to both lead and ignore the flock behind it.

“Boogie, I don’t know if you’re going to believe this, but that one at the head of the pod is a passenger pigeon.”

“Like what used to peck bread crumbs on city streets?”

“No, like the species that’s supposedly been extinct for centuries.”

They watched the birds peck and claw in the shallows, while others swam at a distance.

The young man without a unibrow, but who was just as tall, removed a heft of bread from his rucksack.

“Careful,” the other man warned, “we may not have enough as it is.”

The man laughed. “But what else you gonna do with pigeons?” He broke the bread into crumbs and scattered them on the water, as the other man thought to himself: only one’s a pigeon and not even the kind of pigeon known for eating bread crumbs. Of course, the pelicans cared little for either man’s thoughts. They pecked and nibbled at the bread. They tossed crumbs into the air and swallowed them like rainwater. As they did so, the two men climbed into their boat and shoved off from the sandbar eroding into the water. The motor of the boat guzzled on gasoline, breaking the stillness before it and leaving a wide ‘v’ behind it.

Day 6

A day later they noticed the birds flying behind them. Two days later, a storm arrived, and one of the men asked, “When was the last time a human being saw such a thing?” To which the other said, “Probably the last time a human laid eyes on a bird.” A couple more days passed and they spotted the birds once more. “Are they following us?” To which the other said, “Either us or the wraiths.” “How close has anyone ever gotten to a wraith? I mean, how do we know that’s what they are?” They ran out of gas days after that and had to row their way through the bay and into a shape carved like a river. Some six days after entering the River they caged some of the birds. They ate one and then later they ate another. They promised to watch over any eggs the birds laid on the journey, but the birds did not lay any eggs. Soon they were down to one last pelican and the passenger pigeon. They named one Malone and the other Stockton. The names meant little, but sounded good together. They ate the last pelican first. As they picked over the bones and the coals in the fire sparked and spat, the passenger pigeon sneaked through the cage bars, flapped its wings, once, twice, and aimed for a parting in the low clouds, where the moon exposed the skeleton of a man.

“Is that–”

“It might be.”

They both stood and looked at the legend haunting the bluffs. They doused the fire. The hiss transforming into the cool smokiness of moonlight. They climbed into the boat and rowed north once more.

“How long do you think–”

“I don’t know.”

“Did the bird land on his shoulder?”

“It may have.” The man with the unibrow looked back over his own shoulder. The clouds erased the ridge line. He saw nothing.

The dipping of the oars was the only sound throughout the night. In the gray day, that suck and splash and drip was still the only sound. The world curled into the small sounds of repetitive motion. Their bodies became the lonely engine beating inside a dead artifice. They were the last of something, and although they could not speak its name, they felt its weight as they leaned into the motion of rowing their boat in the water’s tide.  

The days and nights rolled over and the men’s bellies shriveled and growled with hunger. “What do you think he wants?” They could still make out the figure, like a scarecrow from a lost and forbidden world, always staked at the periphery of time and meaning, watching them without reason.

In time, as their hunger grew, they imagined the pathway to his hunting place as the only means for their survival. Sometimes they saw themselves being welcomed beside the stranger’s fire. Other times, they envisioned themselves killing him. Whatever it takes, they thought, whatever it takes. But whatever it takes is never clear until whatever it took has already been done.

Too many days to count

The young men approached Old Man Riverwalk, but they did not know him as such. They knew him as a pale shadow haunting the moon’s yellow light. They knew him as frail bone and stalking sinew, and they wondered how he kept pace with them as they rowed against the fading current. They could not fathom the lengths of his strides; the physics of his being. When they approached him, he sat in the archway of an old Spanish mission, except there were no walls to the church, only a doorway and a ruined altar stone behind it, leaning as if the atmosphere had grown too heavy to bear.

Rain and wind had long ago weathered the hinged wood beyond any telltale signs tying it in time to any particular trunk or root. It was a foreign object sitting in the dust of the disintegrated fortress. The thought did not occur to the young men as they crouched on the River’s banks that perhaps they were not approaching the phantom figure so much as he had anticipated their arrival.

From where had he arrived and to what purpose he might serve, they knew not, but they moved towards him in the rush and quiet that accompanies children playing at hide and seek and other such rituals of the night that acquaint youth with the metaphors of searching, with the rules and imagination upon which to found quests and deeds.

Cloaked in an omnipotent gray shroud, he waited in the place where long ago particles had opted to scatter. He waited for them, and they kept their distance behind an ossified oak tree, which, in its prostrate position, lay as a last, lazy reminder that, at one time, the River did flood with unpredictable force, while behind them it now lay motionless and somehow gorged, less a living thing than a timeline following the pathways of what has already come and gone.

Old Man Riverwalk moved a walking stick, scarred by raindropped runes, through a broken ring of smoothed stones, its contents blackened by some forgotten flame. His other hand held his jaw, which did not speak as the two figures departed their hiding place and climbed the crest of the embankment. Below them and to their backs, the watery ribbon unfurled like oil-dipped silk. He poked at the former flame’s ashes and a strand of smoke ascended into the air. When the wanderer exhaled, the smoky spindle frosted over into tiny blue crystals and then vanished in the wind that failed to blow.

“The tracks lead off that way, behind the bluffs.” A second man had stepped forth from behind the stone archway, where shadows lay in unreadable incantations. He was tall, but not as tall, and gaunt. He spoke with an Old World accent. He wore a poncho cut from thick, brown fur that caused his pale yellow hair to flash in sunlit contrast to the other man’s scalp of patchworked gray. He spat away from his partner’s silence. “You think we should follow?”

The gray priest traced circles in the ashen plane between the smooth river stones. He raised his head towards the man in bearskin. He stood. He balanced on one leg and then the other, his gestures much like a heron’s, if said bird were aware of its migration between extinction and the moment. He walked away from the fire pit, abandoning it for at least the second time in its history.

He belched a bird call into the graying dusk. The two men in hiding heard it and thought it sounded much like the caw of a circling hawk, if such creatures still cut labyrinths through the drab skies. Another call escaped the scarecrow’s throat. Then they flew forth in rapid succession and he raced towards the two men who had stalked him from the River. They took aim with their rifles, but he rapped their knuckles with that ancient cane of his, cawing nonsensically all the while. He rapped them again and again over their heads and backs. He forced them towards the broken circle of stones. He corralled them in the moonlight.

And, simply put, he prepared to judge them.

The second man spoke to them in that accent from times long past, “Welcome.” When they saw the pistol in his hand, they feared him more than the old man’s phantom bird calls and wooden cane. They sat on the ground, in the ashen dust. They gathered like schoolchildren before these veterans of the long lost wild.

Old Man Riverwalk crept in a circle around the blackened pit. He moved like an arthritic guru, hobbling. His gray robe had fallen from his shoulders in the scuffle, by that monument of a fallen tree. He stood before them naked and smooth as the stones on the ground, not a wrinkle on him, except for the brace hugging tightly to one knee. He sat. His knees rising like twin peaks below his drooping earlobes. The second man, still aiming the gun, draped a new robe on the old man’s shoulders. This one oil-black in the moonlight, like the River below them.

One of the young men started to speak. The old man flicked his wrist and the cane rapped him hard across the jaw. He pointed the wooden limb at the other man, the one who had not dared to speak.

“We just saw you along the bluffs, about twenty-one nights ago. Then we didn’t see you. Then you reappeared. It stormed between those times. Lots of thunder. We aimed to see who was stalking whom. That’s why we crept up here. Boogie and I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say—“ The old man rapped Boogie across the jaw this time.

The man let silence settle and then spoke for the first time, like a ripple roaming through still waters: “Y’all are headed up the river to the Garnett Trail.”

The two men, mystified, looked at one another.

“You will not find it, at least not together.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything other than what the words mean. You will not find it, at least not together.”

The two men hung their heads.  

The man with the pistol spoke to the old man beneath the robe, “We should be going. We could miss our window if that trail grows cold.”

The old man lifted a wilted dandelion from somewhere in the night’s contents. He pinched it in the moonlight and the two young companions examined it along with the man holding it. Both the flower and the man looked as if they had been pressed in a leather bound book for centuries. They were flat and one-dimensional and, simply put, old. How had he ever bested them?

“You can seek it. The quest is commendable, but remember what I’ve told you: Thou shalt not pass.” He spoke with arcane authority. They looked at the world around them, the silent forests and birdless skies,—they felt the breeze that did not blow—and thought, from where does one find the order to speak with such certainty? How in such disaster can one manage to find a center?

The sound of the man’s cane scratched through the dust.

“All due respect, sir, I’m not sure I believe you.”

The old man breathed on the dry dandelion husk and it turned blue with frost.

“What gives you the right?”

The old man let go of the crystal flower and it spun lazily towards the powdered ash.

“There were once many timelines, but now there are few, maybe even just this one. In my experience, I have seen some of them, but not all.” He paused, as if struck by a lapse in his memory, a rare moment of uncertainty, perhaps a hole in the narrative. “I have seen many of them, and they all end the same, at least for you, if you remain as you are. I have removed myself from the game, but that does not mean I am silent as I ever was.”

The two companions had not noticed the second man’s departure, but he approached now, for a second time, and this time he brought two horses.

“Best be going,” he said.

The older man stood, took the reins, stepped one leg into a stirrup and lifted the other, wrapped in the ragged knee brace, over the saddle. From the side of the horse they could not see, the pale rider lifted a sack as dark as both time and space. He tossed it to them, and they caught it between them.

“What’s in here?” they asked, and he told them: “Pieces from those other times.” They looked in the bag. “Proof,” he told them, and then he and his bear-skinned partner rode off into the darkness.

They slept that night at the foot of the fossilized threshold in all of its antediluvian mystery. When Anthony Davis awoke, he winked one eye at the light slicing the sky from the earth. Dark silhouettes perched like terrible monsters on the tops of the scattered river stones. He blinked a few times before realizing they were not living and in the distance, but carved figurines sitting in close proximity to his resting place. He studied them carefully in the dawn’s infirm light and then said, “They’re chess pieces, aren’t they?”

“No shit,” said Boogie.

“Some of them are missing, I think.”

“Well, yeah, there’s only one side’s pieces here.”

“No, I mean,” and Anthony picked up some of the pieces to inspect them more closely, “there’s no queen.”

“What does it matter? There’s no opposing side either.”

“Why do you think he gave them to us? Is that why he followed us?”

“Why would an old man want us to have half a chess set? Old fucker’s crazy and that’s that.”

“I didn’t even think he was human until he climbed on that horse.”

“Huh, that’s when I became sure he was a ghost.”

The two sat on the edge of the broken circle not saying anything. Then they built a small fire, brewed the last of their coffee, drank the last coffee on earth, put out the fire, and returned to the river and the boat. They would continue the journey north, to the river’s headwaters and the Garnett Trail. They thought about what the man had said: that together they would not find the path they sought. But they did not speak to each other about the man’s prophecy: What did an old wanderer know about such matters? Secretly, though, they sensed he knew all there was to know, even what lay ahead, up the River, in time and without.

Beyond the days when they stopped counting

The motor on the boat did not buzz. No oil combusted. It sat in silence and offered a weak reminder of a world that once roared on gasoline. That world no longer existed. The gray water congealed between the banks, trembling in muted whispers, aping a time before this one. The waters crept towards the poisoned Gulf, slow and numb and without purpose beyond the mechanical. The looming size of the banks spoke to what was once a higher, more powerful tide, or perhaps to the migratory habits of glaciers. The present offered no precise answers, only hunches and a desire to train in the lost arts of knowing. Roots jutted out from the sloping lands, choking on gray dust and even grayer air. The dark trunks and bare branches stood like giant scarecrows, but there were no birds to frighten. The sky lay frozen as the tundra once had. Anthony and Boogie rowed, emerging larger than their efforts primarily due to the fact no else existed. They arched their backs and pulled the oars. They rowed against the tide’s bloat, away from that lost southern land and into the unknown north. The dead-ness of everything spoke of the inevitable. It was only a matter of time.

At night, they camped in between the muddy murk and the dried slopes. Sometimes they slept in the concaved mouths of the old embankments. They discovered artifacts in the silted ruins of the natural world. They pulled up fishhooks and fished out arrowheads. They found old washing machines and dryers, carburetors, and electric fans in search of outlets. Sometimes they found whole cars. Once they found a rusted pickup with a skeleton inside. The bones wore a veil of faded denim. Sometimes the bones wore nothing but a bottle of bleach. They found muskets and shackles. They found the rotted planks of rafts and steamboats. Everything in the world meeting the same end in the same mud of the past and often, although they didn’t speak to it, they didn’t recognize any of it, causing them to wonder what was really lost and what was found was more a matter of debate than actual understanding.

They recalled distant stories about how the northern territories were cold and frostbitten, but as they rowed and the days surrendered before them, they felt no change in the weather. The sun rose and set in stagnation. In fact, other than a trading of light for darkness, it was difficult to assume weather was still a function of the earth’s orbit. The storms that greeted them earlier on their journey had been reduced to anomalies. Variables were now extinct. Constance had been achieved. The year was 3035 K.D., but it could have been any other year. They often heard the old man’s words on the wind that would not blow and wondered if he was right about everything and nothing. They feared they were headed nowhere. On a night as black as any other, they arrived at what they surely believed to be the headwaters, for the River’s banks widened into an oblivion beyond measure.

“Shine a light,” said Anthony and so Boogie did.

He strobed the path before them and what they saw was a field of sludge—an impenetrable marsh. They rowed until they could row no further. That night they slept in the bottom of the boat. In the morning, the sun would reveal in full what the flashlight had only glimpsed: Lake Itasca was no longer a lake, but a marsh full of ten thousand puddles.

Scattered in the mud were horned Viking helmets, as if internet hoaxes had come to life. Swords, battleaxes, and tomahawks. Some of these were embedded in corpses, some skeletal and some like bloated bog men. When the two travelers lifted their heads to the sky, when they looked for someplace to aim their questions, they noticed that beyond the haze and fog were rafters holding up the dawn’s gray veil.

“Can you see that?”

“See what? This graveyard?”

“No, beyond the clouds, can you see the roof?”

Boogie stared at the gray sky.

“It looks like the bottom of a ship.”

“That’s no ship,” said Anthony, pointing to where they had entered the lake in the night. Beyond the tip of his index finger was the pale shape of a wild animal’s jawbone. The marsh’s murk ebbed between the teeth that were large as tree trunks.  

“Does that answer anything for you?”

“This doesn’t answer shit,” said Boogie, noticing a giant pair of spectacles in proportion to the wild animal’s skull.  

This particular story about Memphis takes place in Cancun, the place of snakes, where dinosaurs first tasted of other planets.

The blonde man with crystal azul eyes slumped against the wall, right beside the jungle green door frame. His palms pressed against the ceramic tiles of the open breezeway. The lines denoting his fortune, or lack thereof, attempted to absorb the night’s coolness. All day he had moved through the sunny beach town, speaking poorly in Spanish and sipping tequila from detergent-crusted shot glasses.

He approached his hotel room with caution; he could hear blues chords rattling with infernal imprecision, as if sloppiness and mimicry were the keys to some unholy salvation. He had not left a record spinning, but one was spinning round and round and crackling within that shoe box world nonetheless.

He tilted his head against the wall. He could hear the intersection of the Gulf and the Caribbean lapping at the white beach powder. He could hear that raspy voice rising and repeating in 16-bar melodies and 12-bar sections. He could hear the revival of times long lost and oft-repeated. He could hear it all swirling from inside his room, like a bittersweet cocktail tasted in perpetuity:

Oh, the ragbear turns circles

Up and down Beale Street

I’d ask him what the Gasol was

But I know that he don’t growl

And the ladies treat me grizzly

And they furnish me with ice

But deep inside my cave

I know I can’t escape

Oh, Hubie, can you take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun with the

Memphis Grizz again

He moved so he was on his knees. He winked through the keyhole. He peered into the lit chambers of his room. Who was in there? He would not have lingered so long, except he could not leave his belongings. He would not have lingered so long, except he was drunk and finding it difficult to imagine someplace else to be. He would not have lingered so long, except he needed one thing—that goddamn truck key he had stolen in Tennessee, on a whim, on a mission, in the whirlwind of forces he felt but could not name.

So he perched in the dark doorway, winking into the light.

He looked down the sawed-off barrel of the room’s hallway. He could not see into the bathroom, but he could tell its doorway was open. He could see the foot of the bed beyond the small corridor. He could see the desk with the record player on top of it. He could just make out the edge of a record spinning. Every now and again a shadow flickered between the bed and the record player, as if tugging on those invisible notes, playing an invisible jawline of ebony and ivory.

The shadow moved like a body raising a glass, to toast the future, or celebrate the past. The man peeping into his own room wondered if the interloper was looking for something, and if so, had he already found it? Damn! thought the blonde man, I have to get back inside the room, to the center of this labyrinthine storm.

Beyond the railing of the breezeway, palm tree silhouettes framed all the starlight, and he felt himself noticeably outside the work of art, noticeably between worlds and motives, like an instrument with two distinct owners and always wavering.

The second verse started with a declaration:

Well, Fizzdale, he’s in the alley

With his spectacles and his suit

Speaking to reporters

Who say it’s all the same

And I would send a Harden

To find out if he’s true

But the officials blew the whistles

And boxscore is all Popped

Oh, Hubie, can you take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Grizzly blues again

He pulled away from his keyhole telescope. He stood up slowly. Not knowing what kind of an adversary currently occupied his room, he would have to think on this. Maybe he would order more tequila at the poolside bar. Was the poolside bar still open? Maybe the hotel had simply forgotten his room was occupied. Had he been forgotten? Did he not exist? If so, then the trip to Cancun was actually successful. And yet, without the key, or, more specifically, the contents in the truck the key belonged to, being forgotten had left him without a next step in his evolution. What was it he was supposed to do in order to become something other than what he already was?

Mar’e tried to tell me

To stay away from DeAndre

He said that all the Clipper men

Just drink up jaguars like wine

An’ I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that

But then again, there’s only one I’ve met

An’ he just Dirked my kneecaps

An’ snuffed my cigarette.”

Oh, Hubie, take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Grizzly blues again

When he reached the alley where he had hidden the truck, it was no longer there. He hesitated before pivoting back towards the hotel. He felt sharp pains in his knees as he walked across the brittle Cancun streets. He lowered his head when he reached the hotel. He did not want to be seen; he had been too careless over the last few days. That much was obvious to him. He took to the steps, leaning heavily on the railing. His body heavy and tired as if the alcohol in his veins were evaporating. When he reached the landing midway in the flight, a voice, like a stand-up bass being tuned, fell out of the shadows and stopped him in his tracks, like syrup:

“Where you headed, Chandler?”

The man stepped over the line between moon and shadow and Chandler recognized him in all his lank and, especially, decked in those side view mirrors for ears: “Brandan, what are you doing in Mexico?”

“Not sure, hombre,” said the man with ears like a former president’s, “but I hope to know soon.”

In need of a diversion, Chandler pondered whether to offer this acquaintance of his a drink down at the bar.

“Real soon in fact.” The man flicked a flame from a Bic lighter with his thumb. He lit the cigarette balancing on his lower lip like a seesaw. The flame revealed the powder blue cool of the man’s clothing. “You looking for something.”

“No, I just–”

“Let’s both take a trip upstairs and find an answer to that very question. Where’s my truck full of moonshine, hombre?”

Chandler gestured towards the downward flight of stairs, “But I was just headed out—”

“Really? What’s with the music then? Sounds like a real scene is happening.” The man took Chandler by the arm, like a partner at a square dance, and led him up the stairs and towards that nightmarish concoction of blues and folk swirling inside his room. For the split second of a splitting headache, Chandler thought he might puke the day’s tequila, but the third verse helped him hold his shit together.

Grindpa died last week

And now he’s buried in the clocks

But everybody still grinds about his

ugly duck jump shot

But me, I release faux white swans in flight

I knew I stole his place

When I swam across the river then

And drained his still out back

Oh, Hubie, take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Grizzly blues again

The bald man stood in the room like a fighter in the ring, like a man who had just knocked out his opponent and needed another jaw for his fist to crack. He didn’t even look Chandler’s way and, apparently, he didn’t need to—he stood and spoke like a man who knew all he needed to know.

“You ever been to Dallas, Mr. Parsons?”

“No. Why? Who would ever go to Dallas?”

“I was there once myself. Things ended rather quietly for me. I find that to be a special talent in this world, to leave a place quietly and to show up elsewhere unnoticed, as if you were already a part of the local scenery, is a blessing. It allows for a particular degree of reinvention. You, though, I doubt you ever leave a place quietly. Why when I came into this room I came because the music sounded like an invitation of sorts. Is this a favorite song of yours? Does it follow or lead you? I haven’t been able to figure that one.”

“But I didn’t leave any music playing. That’s not even my record—”

“But isn’t it?” He bobbed his fists in front of him, and Chandler couldn’t decipher whether the man might dance or punch. “It was playing in Memphis as you walked across the floor, as that great dancing bear fell to its knees, as you entered that back office and removed the spare key, as you exited the window, as you drove a truck full of Grindhouse Shine onto a wayward garbage barge.”

Chandler blinked. The man spoke in long sentences.

“And, Brandan, didn’t we hear it playing as we passed through New Orleans, watching that barge flow on out into the Gulf?”

“Sure did, boss. That man sitting on the levee was playing it on a fiddle. He sounded good too.”

“Look,” said Chandler, “if you want the room, you can have it.”

“You think I want this hotel room?” He twisted maliciously on his heel, examining his surroundings. He spoke to the thin man in the room, “Brandan, do I want this hotel room?”

“No, I don’t believe you do.”

“And why wouldn’t I want this hotel room?”

The thin man grinned, “Because it’s too damn conspicuous.”

“And isn’t that the truth,” said the man as he picked an apple from the bowl on the dresser. He tossed the fruit into the air. He caught it. “This place, Mr. Parsons, is a tourist trap, but maybe that’s your gig.” He turned to Chandler. “What was your purpose in Memphis? Did you ever catch a sense that it changed once you arrived there?”

“I haven’t been to Memphis–Dallas either.”

“Huh, that seems strange. I just described everything you did there, and I could just as easily describe Dallas too.” The man bit into the apple.

“Why is it so hard to imagine I’ve never been in Memphis?”

“Brandan, didn’t I just say we saw him leave from Memphis?”

“You did. Reminded him you said it too.”

“He is being unusually dense this go around.”

Brandan nodded.

“Do you want to tell him one more time, Brandan, or should I?”

“You can tell him.”

The man tossed the bitten fruit to Brandan, who caught it with the smooth mechanism of an elongated robot. The bald man leaned over Chandler. He grinned in astonishing fashion, his smooth head hovering over Chandler like a moon haunting the world’s most soulless of landscapes:

“Because we’ve seen you there, motherfucker, because we have seen you there in this life and all the lives that preceded this one. Because we tracked you all the way from Memphis. We’ve seen you make the trip by boat, by train, by automobile, even aboard a goddamn raft. Sometimes you steal an entire shipment of moonshine. Sometimes you rob the safe. Sometimes you wait until everyone’s dead and snatch a briefcase full of money. Sometimes the briefcase you snatch is worthless. No matter what, though, we meet somewhere hereabouts, and at least once, I mean just once, you could have the decency to play your goddamned part right.”

The man’s finger landed on Chandler’s sternum and the tan evaporated from Chandler’s cheeks. Soon he would look as blanched as the Cancun sand. This man’s crescent smile had transformed Chandler into a ghost even prior to his moment of sacrifice.

“We saw you, and we saw you slip out the window the night you left the Grindhouse.”

“But I didn’t see you there. I checked–”

“I still don’t know why you’re always surprised at this juncture. Don’t you ever have the sense that someone is following you? When you reached Greenville in the flood, were you not so blessed the boat was waiting upon your arrival while men with guns held a crop of sharecroppers hostage on the levee? Do you not see how this has all been arranged according to the principles of music, my man? This is a dance. We are stepping in time, my friend.”

Then it dawned on Chandler, like a poison creeping in the vein, almost there, and then exploding in a painful euphoria:

“Oh shit! You’re the piano man!”

“Sure, we can leave it at that, Billy Joel.”

Confused, Chandler started to ask a question, but stopped himself. He glanced around the room. He needed to know whether the truck was nearby or not. Maybe he could wrestle away the key and make a run for it. Was the key even still inside the room? The truck would not start without it. What did he know about hot wiring an automobile? He needed a fix, just a taste. He could not survive without it.

“I’ve seen that look before, my man, and the answer is no. No, it’s not here, and, no, you couldn’t even if it were . . . here. And lastly, that shit’s gonna kill you.”

Chandler needed no help sensing the truth in the man’s statement. He hadn’t bothered hiding the truck or the key to it well enough in the first place. In the line of danger, he saw it clearly : How easily he had found it suggested he was meant to find it, and now he wondered if he was also meant to lose it.

“Well, then, how ‘bout you go your way and I’ll go mine?”

“You hear that, Brandan? If he were wittier, I might say he’s making a joke. Are you making a joke, Chandler?” The bald man grinned, bearing his teeth like a sickle in a wheat field. “I’m gonna need you to have a seat.”

“I’m fine stand—”

A chair struck him from behind and forced his knees to bend. Brandan started tying Chandler’s arms and legs to the chair.

“You would be smart to just let it happen. A lot of people–sometimes even you–would fight it, but that’s not being smart.”

“Who hired you? Are you contract killers? I can pay, just return the truckload. I’m meeting a man–”

“We’re not contract killers. Are we, Brandan?”

“No, I wouldn’t use such a label.”

“And if we wanted money, couldn’t we sell the truck’s contents for ourselves?”

“Easily.”

The bald man continued his lecture:

“I thought at first you might have been a killer this time, back at the Grindhouse, but, having watched you for some time now, I don’t think so. You’re more of a journeyman; a wanderer; maybe even a con man. Either way, it’s time to face facts. You are meant to be on the move, and yet you never change.”

The man reached to the side of the record player, its canvas-clad body prevented Chandler from seeing what the man was doing.

“You should have made the deal en route to New Orleans. You could say we were held up by other matters. Rajon Rondo is a hard man to find after all. Also, did you know Kevin McHale has links to the A.I.N.G.E. Institute? Am I getting ahead of myself? Maybe in this case it would be behind myself. What do you think, Brandan, is it ahead or behind in this composition?”

Chandler’s face twisted in confusion at hearing the black hole to be found in that first name the man had mentioned: “Rondo?”

“Do you remember him, Chandler?” The man shifted his eyes towards Brandan, continuing some previously held conversation between the two men. “I can’t be certain, but I guess it’s fortunate for Brandan and myself you ended up here. Mexico has a long history of martyrs and twins, of creating and destroying worlds. You of all people ought to appreciate that.”

He gestured to the hotel setting.

“I can see more of the map this way. I know now that Kevin McHale may have had a hand in aiding and abetting your story. Did he put you in touch with Rajon? What a poetic name that is? Ra-jon Ron-do. Thing is, poetry often lacks a purpose. And, for a while, when I realized you weren’t a killer, I thought you lacked a purpose too. Then I drew the conclusion that your purpose was for you and I to simply think you had one, but you don’t, not in this particular movement of the story. You could find a way to kill me right now, and I fear we would both be back in this predicament within a matter of days, maybe even tomorrow.”

“Story?” asked Chandler. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Look, just take the truck. I won’t even follow after you.”

“That’s something I think both of us have come to doubt. Besides, I never wanted you to take the truck. I wanted you to be less predictable.”

“I’m serious, man, take it.”

“I already have. It’s waiting in the jungle.”

“Then what do you need me for?”

“I can’t imagine you don’t see other places and versions of yourself in waking moments. I can’t imagine you don’t wonder if they are waiting for you or already behind you. Why did you take the shipment if you weren’t already lost? Do you remember why you felt drawn to Memphis in the first place? To whom are you loyal? Even your own body betrays you.”

“I thought I was supposed to find my way out of the Grindhouse.”

The man’s hand made a cold and calloused decision, behind the record player, in the room’s unseen margins.

“And you did, but it wasn’t the right path. That can be a good thing, I guess. But it could also turn out to be not so good. These are delicate matters. Next time, and there will be one, tread more carefully, my friend.”

The man had decided Chandler’s fate long before this moment, and his hand returned to where Chandler’s crystal azul eyes could see the shape of his long held decision.

The hand brandished a knife, adjusting it in the light as if it were an instrument of fate.

“To help you, Chandler, I’m going to borrow something, but I’m not going to ask for it. I have to take it. I’m sure you will understand, whenever you stop dreaming and start remembering. After all, you did steal the shipment, which is a mistake similar to your other mistakes. As much as we don’t know, we do know you are a thief. We do know that for sure, and we know what happens next. It’s after that where I always lose my way. Have you noticed you can only remember so many of the steps and then you find yourself trapped within a knotted blur? If so, try and remember more this time–it could save your life.”

Chandler stared at the knife blade above his head. His anguished eyes stared up at its sinister shape. He relented: “But how does one even begin to do that?”

“It’s simple. You begin again.”

The record kept spinning. The voice kept singing. The room was all shades of blue.

Now young Chandler came around here

Showing ev’ryone his glock

Handing out triple shots

To the bachelors and the grooms

An’ Conley, pushed his chips forward

An’ called out to lady luck

To be stowed on the next railcar  

And be more money than ol’ Jeff Green

Oh, Hubie, take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Memphis Grizz again

Chandler didn’t know why the man needed his ear, but as Brandan carried him down the stairs, he could feel the blood running into his blond hair. Before the man wrapped the ear in a handkerchief, he told Chandler: “I’m only going to tell you why I’m doing this one time. Are you ready?” Chandler had wanted to scream at the moment, but they had gagged him. The man had then whispered to the bloody ear he held in his hand and Chandler couldn’t hear a damn thing the man said, obviously, but the man didn’t appear to care.

They threw him in the trunk of a car. The engine started. He could tell from all the starts and stops they were maneuvering through the city squares and blocks. Then the car didn’t turn for quite some time. He pressed the ear still attached to his head against the front of the trunk, towards the car’s body. All he could hear were the infernal sounds of that deep fried hymn. How could it still be playing?

Now Marc the mayor looked so cocky

waggling his arms like snakes

and poking out his bear chest

barrel and the gun

But he blinked to see his brother standing

in the doorway looking like Duncan’s ghost

“You see, you’re not quite me,”

he gulped dry the bourbon.

Oh, Hubie, take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Memphis Grizz again

The road eroded into gravel and rocks. Chandler felt every dip and hole. Sometimes the rocks ricocheted like lead bullets off the undercarriage.

Now the Halfman gave me choices,

saying,“Son, shoot your shot.”

The first one was old time magic

The other was just bobcat shine

An’ I drank down the first one

An’ it scratched and clawed my throat

But it healed my joints as I listened

An’ quit shaking hands with clocks

Oh, Hubie, take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Memphis Grizz again

The trunk opened and two arms reached in, grappling with Chandler and forcing him into the beams of open moonlight. He cowered before his captors. He clutched where his ear used to be and begged them to be kind.

“Relax,” said the man. “We’re not here to kill you. That’s not really my thing. I also wish we didn’t have to cut one part of you from the other, but you’re already a man of divided loyalties. This can’t be too different from those experiences. Surely you can hear all those different voices from distant places calling out to you–directing you. Trust me, Chandler, this is the Right Way to play whatever game holds us in these orbits.”

The taller man walked over to a second car. He opened the trunk and removed a briefcase. In his good ear, which was now his only ear, Chandler heard the leather case click open. He had only partaken of its contents that one night–the night Rondo appeared too early at the mouth of the Mississippi River and the record skipped. Of course, Chandler hated recalling such a moment because the moment admitted how so much of what the man recited to him had happened. He could hear the music.

“Have you tried it yet, Chandler?” Then the man laughed. “I guess that’s a silly question. We both know what has and hasn’t happened. I could see those Crying Jordan spots in your eyes as soon as you entered the hotel.” The bald man bent down to look at Chandler’s bum knee. He tugged at Chandler’s board shorts. “I hate to tell you this, but I don’t think it worked. I should also tell you that’s not your fault.” The man spoke to Brandan. “Is it ready?”

Brandan walked towards the two men, and for the first time, Chandler noticed the dark outline of the mammoth truck parked behind the second car.

“Alright, Chandler, today could be your lucky day. At worst, it’s no better than yesterday. You can drink from this one or this one.”

The man held a vial full of blue serum in one hand and a mason jar full of yellow liquid in the other. He swirled the jar clockwise; bubbles ascended in the aquatic moonlight. “This one’s that shit you stole and called your own. It will kill you. The blood in it is poison, even if you think you need it.” He held the jar of yellow liquid to his eye. He winked at it in wonder. “And this . . . ,” he raised the blue vial, “this could be the real thing. Drink it, and you shall be released.”

“How do you know?”

“Experience, my man. That, and I started learning what I needed to remember and what I needed to forget. You should follow my lead and become something other than what you are now.”

“Just kill me then. I know you’re going to kill me. What else could happen?”

The bald man smiled.

“I guess you’re right. It may not heal you. You could join the likes of a Danny Manning or a Harold Miner. There’s also the Grant Hill or Tracy McGrady route. Who knows, maybe you could be Penny Hardaway. Then again, most of these names, the ones we remember, they’re always the great talents that broke or vanished. We don’t really remember all those lesser names. They don’t work as meaningful ciphers within the story, and yet how did you and I arrive here if not for them? That’s what makes playing this game so damn difficult. You’ve gotta make it to the other side and that requires knowing pawns as well as knights and bishops. On second thought, maybe you should sip it. I mean, you could always pour it out. It’s really up to you. But whatever happens I will react to it. Your actions are not isolated, even your absence would require my reaction.”

Chandler laughed. This man had no idea the shape Chandler’s brittle body was in — no idea whatsoever. Then again, the man clearly knew a little about what was and wasn’t true. “Why don’t you just inject me with it?”

“Don’t be such a fatalist.”

Chandler sat on the rocky road in the dark dust. He held the vial in one hand and the jar in the other. He had tasted that Grindfather Gin, as the locals called it, before, and it had burned like gasoline. In fact, he sometimes wondered, as the man had said, if the stuff had made him sicker. The glowing blue contents in the vial, though, they were truly special, even if they were not entirely safe. He believed that with all his heart. And yet, the choice remained a difficult one.

Brandan leaned against the trunk of the first car. The bald man lay in the back seat of the second. He snored in exhales that rose and evaporated in the musical notes of the first car’s radio.

And when ZBo says come see him

In the Pacific goldmines

Where flamingo sunsets happen

’cross the California sky

You tell him, “Aw come on now

You know Memphis is still cookin’ something.”

An’ he’ll say, “Chandler Parsons just knows what you want

But I know what you need.”

Oh, Hubie, take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Memphis Grizz again

“He’s gone,” said Brandan in the swallow of dark wilderness.

“Good,” said the bald man.

Brandan looked at him with an expression that said, how the fuck can that be good?

“The point was never to kill him. He’s necessary . . . far as I can tell.”

The bald man walked over to where Chandler had spent the night cradling his broken body. The man crouched like an old panther come to sniff out the man cub. He picked up the empty vial, which was jagged and broken. After all, Chandler had smashed it against a flat stone in the darkness. With his other hand, the man picked up the mason jar. It still held most of its liquid contents. He swirled them in the darkness. He sipped from the jar. He grimaced and spat.

“Was it ever real?” asked the taller man.

“I don’t know. Who knows what Z-Bo and Tony have been concocting on that farm of theirs?”

“You don’t believe their ghost stories?”

“Wanna be like Mike?” he exhaled. “Yeah, maybe they’re true.” He stood and stared into the graying darkness, puzzling over the pieces on the board, what he could see and what he could only imagine. “But that dream will kill a man.”  

“Should we be after him?”

“Depends on how far he ran. But, yeah, you should be after him.”

The bald man tossed the jar into the waist-high weeds bordering the thick jungle.

“We both leaving?”

“We are, but not together. I need you to burn that car and then I need you to follow our guinea pig. He might need a blood transfusion.”

“In the fucking wilderness?”

“Where else. Also, you’re going to need this,” he tossed the tall man Chandler Parsons’ ear. “Transfusion or not, I don’t trust him. You have to make sure he finds DeAndre. Otherwise, he doesn’t end up leading Pop to the spring beside the house, and if that never happens, then Z-Bo never has to leave.”

“You think we’re running it back.”

“I doubt we got it right.”

Brandan shook his head. He grumbled something about bad television plots and imagined a tighter series of arcs and a stronger sense of continuity.

The older man smiled. “Hurry—sun’s coming up.”

A line between the night and the morning passed over Brandan’s body and moved between the two men. He pulled a necklace from his shirt. He undid it. He ran the metallic thread through the bloody ear. He held the necklace at each end, and it sagged like a hammock with the combined weight of at least a dozen ears, all shriveled in varying degrees of decay. He then tied it back around his neck and started to douse the first car in gasoline.

“You going to tell ol’ Roy?”

“I want you to do just as we discussed.”

“You’re not giving him the briefcase?”

The man continued about his business, preparing to leave.

“What about Dean?”

The bald man didn’t say anything.

“Where you gonna go?”

“Same place I always go.”

“And where the fuck is that?”

“Just follow Chandler and make sure he knows where and when to be.”

Brandan slipped the ears beneath his shirt and patted them against his chest. A flame came to life in his hand; he extended his arm towards the car. When the interior caught fire, he dropped the Bic lighter into the car. The flames rose high above him in memory of extinct gods. He slid his arms through the straps and donned the rucksack the other man laid out for him. He adjusted the straps so they hugged his torso tightly. He gave the bald man a mocking salute. He marched off into the vines and undergrowth, looking for broken twigs and footprints—anything that might resemble a trail that would lead to DeAndre Jordan and eventually Dallas.

Vince watched him go, feeling the flames heat his skin even more than morning’s light. He had grown tired of etching in stone the world’s destruction, but he knew no other way to reinvigorate himself.

Once more he opened the trunk of the second car. He stared Rondo in the eyes. He dragged the man who was almost all bone and sinew from the car and across the clearing. He handcuffed him to the truck Chandler had stolen.

“You just gonna leave me here?”

“I figure a symbiote like yourself should be fine. You are one, right?”

“At least give me something to drink–that sun’s gonna be awful hot come full morning.”

Vince fetched a mason jar of golden liquid from the truck and gave it to the man.

“Looks like piss.”

“Tastes like it too.”

Then Vince returned to the second car and closed the trunk. The dawn light lit the sky blue Crown Victoria like a heliograph. Vince walked around its shimmering body to the driver’s side door. He lowered himself into the car, turned the key in the ignition, and felt the life hum through it.

Out the open window, he said, “When Ray gets here, tell him how it happened.”

He hung his forearm over the door, up to his elbow, as he drove into a terrain where the centuries melted away.

The buzzard sun continued to fly overhead, almost as if it were giving chase to him and his patch of blue automobile. The radio played nothing; there was nothing for it to play. He sang a song he knew quite well. He arrived at the last verse:

Now the last shall be first then

Where the neon jumpmen dig

They all fly there so dreadfully

It all seems convoluted

An’ here I sit on contrivance

Begging for a chance to kill

He slowed his delivery, as if not to trip over the line or its meaning.

or be killed to get out of

facing all these dreams twice told

Oh, Hubie, take that for data

Vince pulled off the road, or whatever remained of a road. He cut the ignition. He walked into the jungle. He counted the tree trunks as he marched. At the forty-fifth, he knelt to dig with a garden spade. Twenty-three inches into the brown earth, the metal spade struck stone. He widened the hole. He removed the round stone bearing the face of an antiquated god, its ornamental tongue hanging from its open mouth that refused to answer any questions. He tossed the stone aside. He reached back into the small cavern he’d dug. He removed a shoe box from it. He dusted off the lid. He opened it and checked the contents. Before returning to the car with the box and its contents, he returned the stone and filled the hole.

The Carolina blue car waited for him under rays of golden light, as if anointed. He climbed once more into the driver’s seat. He placed the shoe box on the passenger side. He reached into the glove compartment and removed a syringe filled with the serum, supposedly derived from jaguar blood. He had taken the blood from the briefcase in Chandler Parsons’ hotel room. He lifted the lid off the shoe box. He held the syringe in one hand and folded back flaps of tissue paper with the other. The small, breathless corpse of a passenger pigeon, that once innumerable species that collapsed under the strain of European expansion, stared up at him. He aimed the syringe at the center of the bird’s delicate chest. He pierced it with the syringe. He forced the serum into the bird’s body. The creature gagged to life. He placed the lid over the box and placed the box in the glove compartment.

He leaned back in the driver’s seat. He inhaled. He exhaled. He reflected on this tiny, yet significant resurrection. Life was, after all, everything, and if this bird could live again, then it could surely die again too. He turned the key and started the engine.

Vince Carter drove into the sunset in a sky blue Crown Victoria, listening to the last passenger pigeon on earth flapping from the glove compartment. Once upon a time in the West, they had roamed the skies like feathered buffalo.

He finished the song on his way to somewhere else, maybe a place called Sacramento:

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Memphis Grizz again

About my time in Memphis, all I can say is that I knew it better with the mountains behind me, when I could look back across the whole state of Tennessee like a man peering through a doorway into the room he has just vacated.

                                            –not really Courtney Lee

The man stood on the edge of the road and woods and dropped the chainsaw into the damp earth. Off a ways, a boat tilled through the pulsing river, not knowing when the flood’s crest would arrive and how reckless the world would become. For now, rain pelted the needles of the tall pines, and then stopped altogether. Standing in the border between storms, the man looked like a bear standing on its hind legs. Diesel and blood swarmed the air around him, driving a few lone horseflies into a feeding frenzy. He followed the road in its tree-lined periphery, dodging from trunk to trunk like a Sasquatch in the blue moonlight. He linked time more than anything, and this was about survival more than evolution, and there is a distinction to be made between the two, even if subtle.

When he arrived at the roadside store, he did not scavenge the aisles or rummage for loot. He held out a blood-speckled hand and asked for the man behind the counter’s car keys. The cashier, open-mouthed and scared to death, kindly obliged.

The man drove with a madness, swerving over the meridian as he made his way for Memphis. Water sprayed in great fans from the spinning motion of his tires. Water had gathered in the margins of the roadways. The lowlands were already flooded. Forests had started to look like swamps, as the rains gathered at the roots, forming mirrors for reflecting the hanging moss of dark canopies and not the sky. The water would soon be everywhere. The man knew that like a prophecy. Pathways were already closing.

When he reached the Grindhouse, he quickly realized that was no longer the place to be. Technicians in white hazmat suits hovered around the broken gambling din like flies around butchered livestock. He recognized his business partners Michael Conley and Marc Gasol sitting on the boardwalk’s wooden edges. Each man sat on an opposite corner of the ol’ Grindhouse. Someone had draped woolen blankets over them. They wore disillusioned expressions, trying to explain something inexplicable, as if their humanity were showing signs of wear and tear, of some malfunction in its internal codings.  

A young man with his hair braided in cornrows and two very large hands snapped picture after picture of the cobble-stoned street. None of the technicians appeared to notice. Needless to say, they also appeared of little interest to the photographer. He was too concerned with death and its likenesses. Then, after flashbulbing corpses, the cornrowed man turned towards Z-Bo and caught him leaning from an adjacent alley. He winked at his subject’s phantom movements, and Z-Bo hobbled away into the shadows. A light rain began to fall, maybe it had already been falling, but no one noticed what had been falling on and off for days. A bubble of light burst one last time as Z-Bo sought refuge in the darkness, and then darkness and Hazmat suits were all that moved outside the Grindhouse.

Something was amiss. Z-Bo had known as much before leaving the lowlands. He had a discovery to share, but no one with whom to share it. That was how the world gave birth to secrets, by making them unsafe to tell, by rendering the truth into one man’s baggage.

Z-Bo limped, mostly through alleyways and backyards, to one of the streets running parallel to Beale. When he arrived there, he noticed more technicians. They had staked out the entire street, and he wondered if the city’s lawmen had adopted a new uniform. They appeared to be locking doors and boarding windows. Some moved furniture out into the street and into the backs of trucks. The rain continued to fall. Z-Bo squinted at the world being unpacked and rearranged around him and among the tables and chairs and bookshelves he took notice of people standing like lamps and lecterns. Had the Bluff City always been so full of mannequins? He made his way back towards the Grindhouse and started devising a plan on how to leave. He checked on his properties. He spied on the few people he could still trust and who weren’t locked up by whatever authority had taken hold of the city during his time on the backwaters. Watching over the old Heisley home, he had lost track of time and been caught napping like some age old superstition.

“Hey, mister, what are you doing?”

Z-Bo blinked. He felt his age. He looked behind him. He put on the face of a man who had yet to lose confidence. He recognized one of the four boys. What was his name? There had been a time when he had known every kid in the neighborhood. They were the river rats and street urchins he had always recruited to be future muscle and eventually drivers for his operation. They were his bread and butter, his grit and his grind.

“Say mister, you look like you’ve been through hell.” The boys were now noticing the vast amounts of blood coating the man’s rain-soaked overalls. What they did not notice was the light bulb that slowly flickered into a strategy over his head. He smirked with confidence from one side of his mouth.

“Y’all interested in helping a man out?”

One of the boys took a step back, while another leaned into the opportunity. He was the one whose name teetered on Z-Bo’s tongue.

“What’s your name?”

“JaMychal.”

That did sound familiar. “JaMychal, you’re one of Joerger’s boys, right?” The boy nodded. “Well, I need you to sneak into that house over yonder. I got some things in the cellar I might need.”

“What’s in it for us?”

“JaMychal, man, just do him the favor or walk away. You know who he is.”

“I know he’s a suspect,” JaMychal spoke in a manner that challenged the boys and the man before him. “Heard it on the radio this morning.”

“I think we should go.”

“Then go.”

Z-Bo intervened in the crevasse of doubt: “How bout you bring me the one thing I need and you keep anything else you find there.”

The boy deferred to the others. They shrugged their shoulders, neither refusing nor accepting the terms. He spat on his palm and extended it towards the man. The man did the same. As the rain washed over them, they mixed the saliva with the flecks of blood on the man’s palm.

JaMychal almost slipped as he lifted one leg at a time over the planks in the wooden fence, but he caught and steadied himself. His feet splashed in the muddy puddles of the row house’s back lot. He found the cellar door barred shut and slicked with rainwater, but just as Z-Bo had promised a window just large enough for him to fit through was waiting, held open by a lone chess piece, carved in the shape of a bear.

He slid his hand under the glass rectangle and opened it slowly against the stubborn rust of its hinges. The wooden bear somersaulted over the window ledge and into the cellar, splashing in the unknown, where the rain had already started to flood the basement stones.

JaMychal poked his head through the window, like a babe returning to the womb, and then thought the better of it and entered the cellar feet first. He landed in inches of gray and brown water. By a sliver of gray moonlight, he saw the wooden bear floating face down in the dark water. He picked up the chess piece and stared at its eyes and could not help noting its resemblance to the man for whom he was doing a favor. He pocketed it and looked around at the cellar, which was full of nothing other than darkness and disappointment. He saw no furniture covered in blankets. He found no tools or fruit. No casks of ale or wine lined the walls. He could hear Jarell’s voice in his head: “There can’t be nothing there. We know they done cleared out the old Heisley home, just like all the others.”

But he also heard Z-Bo’s certainty: “Measure five Odens from the back wall, where the post rises to the floor joists. You measure from there and you’ll find it.”

JaMychal found the post rising through the stones and mortar that formed the back wall. He counted off the steps in the shifting darkness. He bent down in the gathering water and dug his fingers into the packed clay, like a child making mud pies on a river bank. When he scooped away the packed earth, water spiraled as if flowing down a drain, and he cussed Z-Bo with a fury. Then his hands found it —a metal corner. He tugged and pulled. He twisted the tin box this way and that. It budged. It inched. He parted the clay from the metal and slowly the basement floor gave up its secrets. When he lifted the box, water and silt rushed into the hole, and JaMychal caught a glimpse of the coming tides.

He returned to the window. He stood on his tiptoes. He forced the box outside and listened to it clunk on the soft ground, and then he scaled the wall and wiggled his way into the still falling rain, knowing a year or two later he would have grown too large for any of this. He looked back through the small window into the empty cellar and cursed Z-Bo’s name one last time. Then he composed himself and climbed the fence.

“You lied to us,” JaMychal said to Z-Bo, trying to sound as much like a stone cold killer as possible, or at least like an actor playing a stone cold killer. “There wasn’t a damn thing in that cellar.”

“Told y’all,” said Jarell.

“I said after I get what’s mine, then you can have the rest.” The man reached out in the rain. “Now give me what’s mine.”

The boy did not move right away to give the man anything, but then he found his hands moving forward as the man grabbed the tin box by the handle on its lid.

“Now, I need you boys to get me across the River and then you can have whatever’s left.” He raised the box and the raindrops rang like bullets off its metal top. The boys didn’t exactly want to follow in the man’s footsteps, but how could they say no?

A black cat crossed the street in the yellow haze of gaslights trembling in the rain. The funeral parlor stood on an unpaved on the edge of The Pinch and had made a killing during the city’s bout with Laker fever. The property had fallen into Z-Bo’s hands when Javaris Crittenton disappeared under mysterious and never to be named circumstances. The name on the lease, however, was Michael Conley’s. In fact, the name on most of Z-Bo’s properties was Michael Conley. Next to the funeral parlor was an old livery stable, and the old livery stable was full of black hearses.

“You want us to what?”

Z-Bo grinned, being on the move and, more specifically, being doubted made him feel more like his old self: “Drive me across the bridge.”

“But they’re watching the bridges!”

“That’s why I’ll be in here.” Z-Bo lifted the lid of a coffin.

“Don’t you think that’s the first place they’ll search?”

Z-Bo’s grin stretched even wider. “And that’s why we fetch a body.”

“And where we gonna do that?”

One of the boys looked up at the rain that was still falling. “The ground’s probably soft — I bet we could dig one up!”

Z-Bo laughed. “Nah, we don’t have time for that. Go by the Grindhouse. I was there this afternoon. Looked like they had plenty to spare. You fetch me one looks like this.” He handed the boys a photograph.

When they left, Z-Bo sat down by an old cupboard, opened it, and pulled out a mason jar. He unscrewed the lid and raised it towards the watery curtain draped across the stable’s open doorway. “Here’s to you, Grindfather — I owe you one if this works . . . and I sure as hell won’t be the only one.”

One boy peered around the corner and signaled to the others when the alley was clear. Men in white hazmat suits were everywhere. Then the other two, one holding the corpse’s shoulders and the other its legs, shuffled through the mud and cobblestone of the city’s blocks. When they arrived back at the stable, Z-Bo filled the yellow rectangle of a doorway like a mascot and laughed in distant thunder.

They brought the body inside and laid it down with a melon-soft thud. The body’s clothes were soaked and dirty from the number of times they had dropped it in the ever-growing puddles littering the streets. The body’s clothes were torn and bloody at the shoulder. A gunshot wound. If Z-Bo had rolled him over, he would have noticed the man’s back was all sorts of cut up. Like a Roman Emperor’s or a sacrificial lamb. Whatever had happened at the Grindhouse had been a gruesome sight to behold, but Z-Bo didn’t care about any of that. His plan was for him and this particular body to make a run for it. The world depended on such a maneuver.

“You get the right one?”

JaMychal slapped the photograph down next to the corpse’s face. “Did we get the right one?” But Z-Bo didn’t need to look: He would have recognized Tony Allen anywhere, and he was already climbing into the coffin.

“When I’m in here good and tight, you drop him in over me.”

The boys looked from one to the other. They had brought the body, but they hadn’t thought the man crazy enough to do anything with it.

JaMychal sat on top of a phone book in order to see over the steering wheel. The yellow pages leaned forward like an ill-fated tower of blocks and swayed with the centrifugal forces unleashed in every serpentine twist of the road. The windshield wipers could not work fast enough to clear his line of vision. Everything became everything in the falling water of the wide, wet world.

The cantilever bridges ran in parallel across the Big Muddy’s rushing torrents. In total four bridges crossed the watery meridian. The other two, whose purposes were mostly designed for rail traffic, looked abandoned in the shroud of descending rain. The long line of evacuees had dwindled since the initial rush. Only trucks bearing furniture and bodies and men in white Hazmat suits now ventured the steel byways. JaMychal eased the hearse onto the tracks and moved forward on the rocking rhythm of the trusses.

The vibrations of that westward thrust could be felt even inside the wooden box in which Z-Bo lay underneath the Grindfather’s rigid corpse. The syncopation of the crossing caused old memories to erupt like mud lumps in a levee, spewing the present darkness with the past’s mud and debris. The old Beale Street bootlegger recalled the day he ordered Tony to start building pine coffins. The man hadn’t questioned him. He simply set himself to sawing outside the old farmhouse’s windows. He built it on a level, measuring and sawing in between shifts monitoring the stills. Mash and sawdust. Sawdust and mash. He had built one and then another and then another. They had packed each one to the brim with straw and mason jars and commissioned them to the far ends of the earth, until now, in a moment of desperation, their own bodies were packed in one, trusting four untested youths to carry their legacies across the tracks, into the night and days to come. The inside of the coffin’s lid looked as bright and void and limitless as the time before creation’s dark.

He thought about the Grindfather’s arrival in Memphis.   

Tony Allen had grown up in Oklahoma, but arrived to the Bluff City by riding the rails from Boston. Some stories are too long to be mentioned in full as parts of other stories, but Allen had the look of a man so long on the run he didn’t know how else to move through the world.

One night in a house Z-Bo owned under another man’s name, Allen ran up a huge gambling debt. When he refused to pay, the house’s muscle looked to take Allen out back and squeeze him for it. He ended up stabbing one man in the leg and holding the knife to another man’s throat. In this way, Allen began his negotiations with the house on Beale Street. Witnesses to the fray reported him saying: “Whatever ‘shine you got in these here parts, I can do better. Cut me in, and I won’t cut your man here.” Z-Bo clearly didn’t like the tactic, but he also didn’t disapprove of it either. So he laughed. He told one of his drivers to return an overturned card table to its proper setting and said, “How about we play a hand for it.” The rise of Tony Allen suggests who won, and, for nearly a decade, he manned the stills for Z-Bo and collected other men’s debts in place of his own. What Z-Bo liked about him was that he never blinked and never said die, even when the house carried guns and he had held nothing more than a penknife.

Now, when the law at the checkpoint stopped the hearse and opened the coffin, Tony wouldn’t blink either. Such was the glare of the Grindfather.

The boys watched Z-Bo disappear in the hearse’s rearview mirror. He sat on its sanded wood surface as if it were a park bench on the edge of a dirt road in Arkansas. The road followed the levee, a ribbon of Bermuda grass and dirt above the water.

The boys could not reenter the city in the same way they had left it. No one was being permitted a return. Where they were traveling was to an old trestle bridge miles down the river from Memphis. Z-Bo essentially scratched them a map in the rain-soaked soil. They were following his old pathways. They were venturing in a circle. After driving for some time they saw the worn and beaten bridge, as gray and depressing as an archway lacking a rainbow’s spirit. Some of the trestles had already been swept away in the current, and the bridge rippled like some prehistoric ghost.

“You really think that skeleton can hold us?” Tony Wroten asked as the front of the hearse inched onto the bridge’s rotten planks. Halfway across they received an answer when the front left tire fell through the rot and spun in the rabid rain and frothing air with nothing to grab or hold onto. They evacuated the raven black sarcophagus in a panic only the young could survive.

When they collected themselves on the remaining planks, they realized they had to go back — the tin box containing their payment still sat in back of the hearse. They crept towards the vehicle and opened its wide back door. In place of the coffin sat their tiny inheritance. They grabbed it and made a mad dash for the river’s eastern banks. The bridge collapsing behind them like dominoes — like it was never there. They leaped from the busted up bifrost.

Wade Baldwin clung to a tree branch with one hand and Tony with the other. With his other arm Tony reached for the River. JaMychal clung to Tony’s arm with one hand and Z-Bo’s tin box with the other. Jarell pulled them to safety, and they sat on the bank hearing nothing but the river’s roar.

“Should we at least check the box?”

JaMychal held it at eye level. He didn’t expect much from it, so far Z-Bo’s promises had been mostly hollow shells; the residues of lost worlds. Even his promise to pay their water bills sounded more like cruel irony in the falling rain.

“Sure,” said JaMychal. He inserted the key Z-Bo had worn on a chain around his neck before handing it over to JaMychal. He turned the key. The lock clicked, and he opened the lid. Inside the box slumped a sack of deep blue velvet. A braid of yellow rope choked the bag’s opening. As JaMychal lifted the bag from the box, they could see it contained several small items of equal weight and stature. Other than the velvet sack, the only item left in the box was a magazine: Hardwood Paroxysm Quarterly, Vol. 1.3.

“What do you think’s in there?” asked Wade, referring to the bag and not the magazine.

“Gold medallions?”

“Diamonds?”

“Bullets?”

“Keys to the city?”

“The Grindfather’s moonshine recipe!”

Their guesses were wild and varied. Their guesses were tamed and predictable.

“Let’s open it.”

“Let’s wait until we’re closer to the city.”

They walked along the rails, which cut a path atop the highest ground. The rain stopped for the first time all night. Dark clouds parted, and the moon whittled their youthful silhouettes, each standing next to the other in the night sky as the world grew quiet and still. If they could see themselves, they would have been struck by the cinematic scope of it all, but they were young and lost in the moment and standing by one another.

Wade said, “I can’t take it anymore—open it, JaMychal!”

The three stopped midway across the third bridge to pass under their bodies that night. Below it, a swollen tributary flowed back from the mighty Mississippi, reversal of fortune and fate. The result of a mighty flood.

JaMychal carefully untied the yellow ropes, but Wade, growing more and more impatient, yanked the bag from his hands and stabbed his hand and forearm into its dark recesses. When he pulled out his hand, chess pieces, cut like bears, crowned between his knuckles like a litter of dead pups.

“What the fuck! We did all this for chess pieces.”

He dropped the wooden figures back into the bag, yanked the yellow rope tight, orbited the sack around his head like a slingshot, and released it off the bridge and over the rising waters.

They waited for a splash, but heard none. They peered over the wooden rail. A trash barge, pinned against the trestles by the current underneath, had become the bag’s final resting place. In his pocket, JaMychal ran his waterlogged fingertips over the shape of a bear, feeling that something was lost for good, but not knowing what it was. In his back pocket, the magazine was rolled tight as a billy club. He whacked Wade over the head with it and then continued following the train tracks into the darkness and all the way back to Memphis.

The stones he stacked one over the other in a configuration as old as a wandering Hermes. In these parts, the sign signaled to fellow travelers that he, too, was a traveler. He searched for the stones in the early dawn as a line moved over the curve of the earth.

The overcast skies made the differences between light and darkness into hues of subtle gray. Z-Bo sat in a void filled with eerie silences where he should have at least heard the sound of cicadas. guess at his surroundings to being able to guess. He waited for days and nights as shades of gray dissolved in the heavens above him. The rain continued to fall. Livestock floated downriver. Rooftops transformed into islands and then disappeared. He traced that line between order and disorder. He watched it move towards him in the morning and pass him by in the heart of the day. Sometimes he could not see it at all. Then he heard the wagon before he saw it. Pots and kettles and ladles clanked against one another as if some arhythmic widow were calling nonexistent field hands to supper. The mules brayed and snorted. Their hooves did not clop so much as flop in the mud and puddles of the levee’s rain-soaked ridge. The rain was literally restoring the earth to a status of primordial soup.

He heard a whistle. A hum. Words flitted from the creaking ghost ship as it rolled over the earth and into view.

They are roaming the streets with their guns,

Looking for us to shoot.

All we can do is pray to the Lord,

There’s nothing else to do.

Oh me oh my, oh Lord have mercy on me.

A man who looked older in the distance than he did up close pulled the mules to a halt with his deft hands and a muting of the music.

A second man stood up in the back of the wagon and spat through a gap in his teeth. “You lookin’ to bury the body?” he asked.

Z-Bo stood.

“Depending on how fresh it is, we might have use for it.”

Z-Bo turned stone cold and said nothing.

“Take it off your hands is what I’m sayin’.” He spat again. “Or we could make a trade.”

“What do I want to trade for? This flood ain’t leaving anything behind.”

“It left you,” said the man.

“Leave him alone, Otis, can’t you see a man of constant sorrow if there ever was one?” the driver looked Z-Bo up and down with neither concern nor fear, but recognition of a man in midst of surviving, neither special nor defeated, just so and nothing more. “Name’s Tiny. I’m guessing you’ll be wanting a ride. You bringin’ the box or no? If so, keep a lid on it — old Otis here ain’t had nothing to eat or touch for days.” The man chuckled. “Who taught you to stack them rocks over yonder?”

“You ever hear of a man named Joerger? He told me someone was bound to pick me up—called it the Kings Highway.”

“Ah, Otis, you hear that? We have ourselves a believer in the pathways.”

“I’m not a believer, just a man on a road.”

“With a fuckin’ coffin!” blurted Otis, as he hopped off the wagon to help Z-Bo with his load.

“You lookin’ to meet up with this man Joerger of yours?”

“Not exactly . . . why?”

“Well,” continued Tiny, “we found a man just the other day. Said we might find a bona fide grizzly in overalls if we looked hard enough. And low and behold here comes you.”

“Y’all know Vince then?”

“Yeah, we know Vince.” The man grinned. “Was in a motorboat and headed south. Asked if we wanted any souvenirs from Mexico.”

“And Bibby too?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, is he bringin’ y’all any?”

“Any what?”

“Souvenirs.”

“Depends.”

Otis and Z-Bo loaded the pine box into the back of the wagon. After they settled themselves into place, Tiny clicked his teeth and the whole morality play lurched back to life.

“Who’s in the box?”

Z-Bo heard the roar of the chainsaw. He saw the flash of a man’s open chest, but gears churned where a heart should have been. He could hear his own dogged panting as he gave chase through the woods, and then he recalled how he had made it across the river having seen the inner workings of a world not meant for him. He looked down the road, over the ears of the methodical mules. He felt the rain start to fall, if it had ever stopped. He said, “For now, let’s just call him Lazarus and leave it at that.”

And so they did.  

They are roaming the streets with their guns,

Looking for us to shoot.

All we can do is pray to the Lord,

There’s nothing else to do.

Oh me oh my, oh Lord have mercy on me.

The wagon pulled into the wood, which the recent rains had rendered a prehistoric marsh. A village of tents had gathered under the lumbering pines. White canvas sagging with puddles. Poles leaning at wayward angles. The people had strewn boards as best they could to avoid wading into the muddy terrain. A man ducked underneath a tent flap. He held a fiddle in one hand and a bow in the other.

“Welcome!” he said.

Slow in coming, the moment of recognition finally dawned in Z-Bo’s eyes. The man standing before him was Rudy Gay.

“I should have killed you, motherfucker.” The statement was only half of an ill-told joke.

“I hear you have a body to bury,” said the man, lifting the fiddle to his shoulder. “And I can help you with that. I’ve been everywhere, my man.” He tucked the fiddle underneath his chin. He began to play. The camp meeting, or whatever the hell it was, was underway, in the woods, in the rain, at the end of days, and gnawing at the world’s Achilles tendon.

The city was without power, and so JaMychal sat in his room and read by candlelight. The flame didn’t so much dance as it balanced on the wick, behind the glass, holding softly to the rising smoke. A faint twin mimicked its orange navel in an age-speckled mirror. The story the young man read looked something like what’s included here, although it may be nothing more than an approximation. The magazine, after all, is long out of print and its contents unverifiable:

Like a  subtweet, the tree cast shade over the chessboard, which sat on a piece of dull lumber balancing on a gray tree stump; one trunk cut short for the life of another.

The pieces on the board—from the pawns to the bishops to the king and the queen—all resembled bears of various girth and character. The pawns looked like cubs. The bishops resembled bears with human heads or humans with bear heads. The knights rode bears. The rooks provided miniature tree trunks for miniature back rubs. The king wore a crown. The queen wore a gown. They looked ready to waltz or to wrestle, whichever you prefer.

A man, with downcast eyes and aging hands, sat waiting for his rival to arrive from the land of Hou. The bearded man sipped from a chipped mug—its cracks sealed many times over with glue. The coffee cooled on his lips and tongue. The tree’s mighty shadow permitted no change in light throughout the morning. He lost track of time.

He reflected on the ax leaning against the tree’s trunk. It, too, waited. The tree had grown strong and sturdy in the absence of its twin, the stump upon which the chessboard now sat. OJ Mayo looked at the ax—its edge a forceful truth in this realm—and wondered who would swing it.

Before the wolves Durant and Westbrook began to hunt the sun and the moon, the barrenness of Vancouver lay frozen not in forgetfulness, but with nothing to remember. No fog. No fire. No crackling embers. Then, Bryant Reeves, the first giant, shattered the glassy surface, and an ice bear purred at his side. From their movements, a great pit dug into the ice, and they hibernated.

And, in this long slumber, monstrosities grew in the snoring heat of Bryant Reeves’ nostrils. These monstrosities named themselves: Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Antonio Daniels, Mike Bibby, Obinna Ekezie, and Stromile Swift. But none of these beasts were more monstrous than Bryant Reeves.

The bear, however, also produced life. The bear licked the shards of glass that still protruded Reeves’ neck from just after the dawn of time in the creation of the Big Country. The bear licked and licked the ice until the ice became salt, and from the salt and from the water and the mixing of the salt with the water and the water with the salt, the bear’s tongue formed new, more noble creatures. Arms and legs appeared. Then chests and shoulders, until whole bodies formed between the bear’s tongue and the blue ice.

These three brothers named themselves: Pau Gasol, Shane Battier, and Jason Williams.

The ice giant, Bryant Reeves, had always been larger than life, but the melting of the shards weakened him. From the wounds where cold ice once stood now flowed warm blood, his blood, and the giant moved slowly as if his life flowed from him and the brothers attacked.

They slew Bryant Reeves, and with his body—his flesh and his bones—they filled the barren pit of Vancouver, burying the place of their birth and the ghosts of his offspring. And on his skull they erected what would become known as the Grindhouse, but it was not called that yet—it was merely Memphis; a sapling searching for light in the shade of some other tree.

Before the great tree’s roots became severed from the great tree’s branches, Pau Gasol stood in the Painted Area, hungry dogs howled at his feet and darling birds fluttered around his shoulders. During the day, these doves and hummingbirds would fly from Memphis and all through the Big Country. Upon their return, they tweeted rumored secrets into his ears. Nothing was hidden from Pau, the Artisan King. When he stood in the Painted Area, he heard and saw every trade rumor, and he carried these whispers in the vast chambers of his heart.

Bryant Reeves was neither the last nor the most powerful of the Jotuns. When Pau sent out his many birds, they always returned with less plumage. Collecting their feathers were other giants more powerful than Bryant Reeves had ever dreamt of being. These sand giants often shifted their shapes and took on disguises in order to trick humans and referees into rooting for them. At the southern edge of the Big Country perched a giant eagle named Duncan, and in his beak and in his claws was a serpent named Manu, whose head burrowed into the earth near the root of the tree. They were the worst of the Jotuns, but an elk named Dirk and an armadillo named Nash were also evil. Pau could not defeat them, no matter how hard he tried.

But then Hubie Brown came to Pau Gasol as he stood in the Painted Area, losing track of time, waning away his youth, pondering whether or not to shave. In essence, he was lost in essence. Hubie, however, was from a race of giants even older than the sand giants; he belonged to the dust giants, who valued nothing but physical skill. He knew his place because he knew all time, and when he came to Pau in the Painted Area, he brought with him a wooden bucket. In the wooden bucket was water from the Well of Wisdom. The water was magic because the great tree’s roots drank from this Well of Wisdom, connecting it to the fabric of all things.

Pau asked Hubie if he could drink from the bucket. Hubie said of course and handed Pau a green paper cup with an orange lightning bolt. But, before Hubie handed the Lightning Cup to Pau, he made one demand of the Artisan King: When you leave here, and you will leave here, place your left eye in the knot of a tulip poplar. Pau laughed at the old dust giant and told him, “I will never leave Memphis.” Hubie responded, “Well, if you do,” and handed Pau the cup.

Giant armies gathered outside Memphis, the home of the half-bear brethren. In the old days, in the beginning of time, they had been so happy to fill the emptiness that was Vancouver they had forgotten to build defenses. But now the whole kingdom was at stake. A fierce giant from the Farthest West of the farthest west threatened to do great harm, until Pau stepped forward and said he would allow the Black Mamba to take him hostage. The Black Mamba agreed to never touch Memphis if the Artisan King would come to the Farthest West of the farthest west, to stand in the Painted Area.

The night before Pau was to become a hostage, Hubie Brown came to visit him, again with the wooden bucket and its magic waters. Hubie reached out his hand and said, “Remember your word.” Pau pretended that he didn’t remember, so Hubie poured out a puddle on the ground. In the water’s reflection appeared the moment of Pau’s promise. Angry and ashamed, Pau plucked out his eye and placed it in the knot of a poplar tulip. After he did this, with blood dripping down the trunk of the tree, Hubie Brown pressed his lips to the tree’s bark and breathed into it. He turned around and said, “It is done.”

The act was done, but Pau was so angry and in so much pain that he chopped off Hubie’s head and placed it in the wooden bucket. From the wooden bucket, Hubie Brown watched Pau Gasol stand in the Painted Area of the Farthest West of the farthest west, and his wisdom became Pau’s wisdom. While he still heard all the world’s rumors, Hubie’s voice spoke to him of all time and of other times, teaching Pau of the times before time and the times to come. When Pau would speak later on this, he would describe the world in patterns.  And while Pau never returned to Memphis, the tree in which his plucked eye rested and into which Hubie breathed his last breath transformed into a carving of Pau. This carving’s name was Marc, and his destiny was to help build the Grindhouse, but first other things had to happen too.

Before Marc Gasol heard the prophecies of Three 6 Mafia, sometimes called Da Mafia 6ix, another had to make his way through the Big Country into the place of Memphis.

He had been born to a powerful race of Jotuns, all of whom had been fathered by a wandering wizard named Pippen. This wizard spoke to them in the ancient tongue of the Zen Master, but they did not always listen. And perhaps some of them did not understand.

Shawn Kemp gnawed voraciously on boulders as if they were doughnuts, always chomping with his mouth open. Ruben Patterson hated women. Bonzi Wells couldn’t stop laughing, while Damon Stoudamire was always lit. And Rasheed Wallace, the mightiest of the giant children, hurled rocks at everyone, taking great pleasure at how their sensitive skins would break at his mocking. No one learned the Way of the Zen, and the wizard’s spine curved with frustration. Meanwhile, Z-Bo watched and waited, dodging mighty Sheed’s glare in the shadows of the Rose Garden.

In these shadows, in the darkest caverns of the world’s basketball heart, Z-Bo came upon the roots of a mighty tree. To gain greater power, he hanged himself on the Tree of Walton. The Northwest Wind scarred his body and the tree’s, as if the two were one and the same. Z-Bo sacrificed himself to Z-Bo. For seven years of nights and seven years of days, he hung in angry silence, staring at the giants below him. As the tree grew farther from the ground, those below him grew smaller in stature. Giants became goblins, and goblins became rats.

When Z-Bo came down from the Walton Tree, he was the Thunder. He was stronger than all his Jotun brothers combined, so with a hammer fashioned from the Walton Branch of his hanging, he subdued the Northwest’s rodent infestation. After he captured all the rat kings, he scooped them up in his hands and squeezed them into his head and nostrils. Their powers became his powers; their memories became his memories. When he looked angry, which was often, it was because of the rats running round inside his skull. Then, with no reason to stay, for Pippen and the Way of the Zen had perished long ago, Z-Bo wandered eastward over the Big Country’s vastness. He wandered towards the rising sun.

When he reached the ruins of the ancient Knickerbockers, Z-Bo wrote his name in the ashen dust. Then, with no reason to stay, for the Way of the Zen had yet to return, Z-Bo wandered westward over the Big Country’s vastness. He wandered towards the setting sun. But, as Z-Bo wandered, the Watcher of Memphis saw his large, glacial frame carving its way through the Big Country. He looked like a bear to lead all bears, so the Watcher came forth to greet him.

When Marc Gasol called out to Z-Bo, Z-Bo struck him with his hammer. When the hammer landed its heavy blow on Marc’s sternum, Z-Bo was shocked that Marc’s bones did not shatter: Nothing before had ever withstood the strength of his Walton hammer. But, at this time, in the middle of the Big Country, the hammer landed on bone that like it had grown from a sacred tree. The Thunder and the Watcher embraced, and, then, with no words needed, each cut a small vein in his arm and, letting their blood flow together, they became brothers; the Grit and the Grind.

Many people today do not remember the Walton Tree, but you can hear it in the words of Z-Bo: “At the end of the day the paint is where you win.” Or, in the words of the Memphis prophets:

It’s mafia time

Lord infamous’ mind

It just aint stable

My actions are even more shocking and dockin’

Than murder between Kane and Abel

So stick ‘em up

Everybody catch the ground

Cause I come from the city of Memphis

It’s a rowdy town

Before DeAndre, the hound, leapt free from his leash, Blake the wolf shook off his magic fetter, and Lance rose from his exile. Yet all that still had to wait because Grizzlies are Goonies and Goonies never say die.

Blood ran down the tree’s bark, from the knot where sat the plucked eye of Pau Gasol. Seeing Hubie make out with the hardwood had really freaked Pau out, so he commenced to chopping off Hubie’s head and placing it in a wooden bucket before retreating to the Farthest West of the farthest west. Little did Pau or anyone else know, however, that Hubie’s strange passions were indeed magical acts. From the knot where Hubie had kissed the tree, a bearded face took shape. And this face became Marc Gasol, the Watchman of Memphis.

He was called the Watchman because he dreamed that Idris Elba would one day play him in a movie and because he was the keystone in the defense of the Painted Area. And his eyes could see to the ends of the world and back. And his ears heard every blade of grass bending in the Big Country.

He was not called the All-father because he was a tree that devoured its own children. When fruit with faces grew on his branches, he would pluck them down with his arms that used to be branches and ask them their names. A rotten apple might answer, “Javaris Crittenton.” Or a bruised banana might answer, “Kwame Brown.” But, no matter, Marc’s response was always the same—he devoured them. And so, in hindsight, the Crushing had begun.

With each fruit Marc Gasol, the Watchman of Memphis, devoured the more his bark became skin, his leaves hair, and his roots legs. Soon he was as big as a tree, but able to move like a god. And, in kind, he became lonely and therefore longed for companionship; after all, he had been formed by parts—the eye and blood of his brother and the breath of his brother’s sage. These were great gifts, but they also caused him to never feel whole.

His loneliness branched out into invitations to old warriors throughout all the Big Country. He reached far and wide and gathered the truly brave and truly courageous to his ancient and magical cause. Vince Carter rode in on a one-winged pterodactyl. Jordan Farmar stole someone else’s armor. The Birdman changed his name. And P.J. Hairston felt lucky just to be invited. As more and more of these carved up warriors arrived, carrying their missing limbs like swords, the bench in the Grindhouse grew long and white like an old man’s beard. And, at the end of this beard, sat a Marc Gasol hobbled by the all the building and all the searching.

In the end, the only part of the world crushed in The Crushing was a bone in Marc Gasol’s foot, so he sat for a very long time.

Before Lance sailed upon the Grindhouse in a ghost ship, Mike Conley, the golden citizen of the Grindhouse, began to have bad dreams. When he spoke of these dreams, his jaw cracked. The symmetry of a cracked foundation with a cracked face drove fear into the remaining Grizz. To solve this fear, the Grizz sent the eight-legged steed, Tony Allen, beyond the Painted Area and into the vastness of the Big Country for answers. On his back sat one of the most loyal Grizz, Courtney Lee.

Lee rode on Allen’s back all the way to the land of Hou and onto Charlotte. These realms burned in the core of the earth, buried deeper than the Grindhouse’s roots, beyond the dust of Bryant Reeves’ body.  

A voice that no longer needed a body spoke in the darkness: “If it be true that Conley is so beloved by all things, living and lifeless, weep for him, I will let him return to the living. But if there is one thing that will not weep, then he must remain with me.”

Allen prepared to leave, but Lee pulled back on the reins and squinted into the darkness. “Is it?” he asked. “—but it can’t be.” In the darkness emerged a fable long told but seldom understood. What he saw was the Crying Jordan Face, which is the antimatter of the darkness beyond the Big Country.

“We should go back,” neighed Allen, but it was too late. Lee fell from Allen’s back and merged with the unknown. When Allen returned, he delivered the message heard from the voice in the darkness and earned the name Grindfather for having been the only living creature to wander so far and still return to tell the tale.

Marc Gasol and Z-Bo listened, as did Conley, to the Grindfather’s story. They dispersed messengers to hear the world’s weeping. And most of the world did weep.

When Z-Bo heard the news from his brother Marc Gasol, he invented new cusswords and translated them into the common tongue via ancient runes.

Conley tried to ask what was the matter, but the crack in his jaw had grown too wide and all his voice could do was hiss like wind in a canyon.

Marc Gasol told the chief judge of the Grizz, Conley, “It’s Jeff Green. He won’t shed a single tear.”

“Motherfucker,” grunted Z-Bo.

The shapeless breeze in Conley’s throat whistled in pain.

“He says you never did anything for him,” continued Marc Gasol.

“What is it?” asked Z-Bo, watching his brother’s eyes dart to the far end of the Grindhouse.

“It’s Da Mafia 6ix.”

The crack in Conley’s jaw fused, and he spoke in a voice not his own:

Tryin’ to stack some change

Land of the lost full of gangstas n killas

At the end of the rainbow

“Hold on,” interrupted Z-Bo, “I thought the whole, fucking point of bringing Jeff Green to the Grindhouse was so we would know the future before it happened.”

“And we do.”

“This isn’t any future I wanted to be a part of. Ainge set us up.”

“He warned us that Green could only show us one of our possible futures. We also swore not to dispense with him or any of our fellow Grizz.”

“You saying we brought this on ourselves?”

“I’m saying whatever future is upon us is upon us.”

The voices in Conley’s throat swirled ever more towards oblivion:

Picture me in yo dreams when i’m out to fucking getcha

Hit ya fo’ ya dividends and fled from the fuckin case

Dont drop no pieces, so I want catch a case

Make a mistake in dis game and, man, you’ll have to pay

Deep in the jail cell or holy cell never see the day

Z-Bo whispered, “And we ready.” And so Ragnarokk began, not with a bang, but a séance.

Many versions of this story exist. In one, the snake Manu escapes from eagle Duncan’s claw and sheds its skin. From the old skin emerges a new serpent. This one named Kawhi. Where Manu’s fangs were quick, but small, Kawhi’s fangs are the largest in the land. Kawhi bites into the roots of the Grindhouse and depletes of life and water and sunlight. The leaves turn brown, they shrivel and fall. The tree sways and rocks in the wind. In another telling, the snake possesses two heads: one named Duncan and one named Kawhi. Still, in a third version of the death by snake theory, the Big Country’s Serpent goes by the name Draymond. Draymond possesses no poison, but wraps around the circumference of the tree’s trunk and constricts until the tree breaks in half.

Sometimes the death is more mundane. Monsters do not always appear at the apocalypse. Sometimes brothers murder brothers. In these versions, Jeff Green carelessly tosses a brick, and the brick lands on either Michael Conley’s Achilles (not to mix mythologies) or on Marc Gasol’s foot. These events are often referred to in academic circles as The Crushing.

The only solution the Grizz can ever imagine is to assemble a hunting party of broken and busted parts. For them, the answers tend to be old and well-worn, like archetypes caught in the fishing nets of antiquity.

Sometimes in these stories, Jeff Green shapeshifts into Matt Barnes or Lance Stephenson. In these instances, death is often a poison poured into the ear like a kiss. In these renditions, the prophets often rap: At the end of the rainbow, nigga, I thought you knew.  

No matter the difference in the details of all these versions, the Grizz always perish.

Perhaps the best known tale of the Grindhouse’s demise is a story of wolves. Kevin catches up with the sun and swallows it. Then, the light fuses with the confines of his stomach, changing his shape into something brighter and bolder than anything the Grizz can imagine. As this happens to the wolf named Kevin, the wolf named Russell traps the moon in its jaws, and begins to transform, too. From these transfusions of light emerge new creatures—like Conley but more golden. They go by names like Stephen and Klay. They are bright, and they are new. The Grindhouse burns in their presence, melting into nectar.

But this version is an even stranger one, where the end is written not from within the Grindhouse, but by those never set foot in it, or those who only briefly passed through its gates.

A shapeshifter appeared on the horizon. The bearded man saw the old, familiar shadow and smiled with knowing. Today would be ripe with cataclysm after all. The figure drew closer. The figure addressed the bearded man: “OJ.”

“Steve.”

Steve sat in the chair provided, on the opposite side of the stump.

“It’s your move.” OJ lifted the glued together mug to his dry lips, but there was nothing left in it. He sipped and swallowed the air.

“I don’t think it is, OJ.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if I refuse to play?”

“Then the game doesn’t end.”

“Did it ever even start, OJ?”

“Of course it started. We’ve been playing for years.” He gestured towards the board. “They’re only two pieces left.”

“Are they missing or found?”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Steve stared at the board. “Why even bother?”

“Look! Steve! Goddammit! It’s your move! I already went!” OJ picked up his king, carved in the shape of Z-Bo. He slammed the piece on its square with a gavel’s thunderous knock.

“What if we play Chinese checkers instead?” Steve lifted a small wooden case that had gone unnoticed upon his approach.

“Chinese checkers!?!”

“Yeah, it’s a game from the East.”

“The East?!?” Jerry shattered his empty mug, not for the first time, against the tree’s mighty trunk. The Grindhouse quivered in the branches.

“You care too much, OJ.”

“If you won’t play for it, I’m going to do it anyway.” OJ approached the ax leaning against the tree. He lifted it high in the air. “Stevie Francis, I swear—”

“Can’t you see, OJ, it’s a choice. We don’t have to play.”

“We absolutely have to play.” The ax struck wood. The ax struck wood again and again. The tree swayed. The tree quaked. The worlds contained in its branches shook, too. Z-Bo fell into the jaws of Bogut or found himself choked by Draymond. Poison seeped out of Duncan’s fangs and into the flesh of Gasol. Stephen slayed Conley. The wolves and the hunters clashed. Lance arrived with a ship full of ghosts.

That night, Jerry and Steve sat on opposite sides of the fire.

“Why’d you have to do it, OJ?”

“Why wouldn’t you, Steve?”

“I guess we could play again. Maybe next time I’ll be ready.”

OJ stared into the flames. “Maybe.” They rose higher and higher. “But it’ll take time.”

The two sat for a long while listening to the sparks pop and hiss. When the glowing embers whirled into the haze and the smoke, they caught glimpses of a world once familiar. Above their heads swirled an eight-legged horse, the Grindfather, and the wisps of all those who once rode with him.

At dawn, you could see all the stumps cut short in the light. But you could also see a sapling and, beyond that, all the unbroken land of the Big Country. Devoid and shapeless, the line of hope moved on forever. The two men could not be found.

fin.

While he read, clouds rolled through the night sky, and gravity tugged at their underbellies, ripping the rain down in wailing torrents. That constant and writhing wet nurse pulled from the plains and the valleys and the hills and the mountains, from western mining towns and gold creeks to the Cherokee pathways in the east and glacial reservoirs in the north. Gravity grappled, clawed, and bit until the river was so much more water than even a river could hold.

The wind pounded the glass with invisible fists. The roof sounded like it might depart for the great beyond at any moment. The chimney threatened to topple and sagged on the walls like a broken limb stranded in a sling. The water had to go somewhere and somewhere was here. Waves beat against the banks and devoured the levees. The streets lay underneath canals of moving water. There was so much water. An entire continent and the history of that continent’s people— their very efforts to persevere and survive and outlast — trembled in that water like blood and time and memory, and the water, well, the water cared not for any of those things. The dark forests. The flat farmland. The towns for profit. The haunted lowlands. The desperate bottoms. The bustling highways. The abandoned pathways. The domesticated livestock. The wild beasts. The even wilder people. Gravity made love to the water and  birthed a serpent to consume them all. It was both the scales and the bark — the root of every limb and tree, always hungry and, at long last, unleashed!

JaMychal closed the magazine. He thought about the trickles of blood on Beale Street. He looked out his window and saw the failure of sandbags and engineering. He thought, as he pulled the blanket up to his chin, “It ain’t me, babe,” and he wished Columbus and all the world good luck. He wasn’t the one they were looking for, that man had already come and gone, that man’s name had been Zach Randolph, and he had arrived in Memphis under clouds of mystery and gunfire.

The ship was an eight-hundred-ton paddle-wheel steamer, currently employed for the cause of the Confederacy as a blockade-runner. It ran supplies up and down the lower Mississippi, stopping at every port from Memphis to Greenville and New Orleans, dodging all those ironclad Eads-boats.

The ship’s crew watched at a distance a battle between two fleets. One of which was decked out in all the armor of the day, while the other fleet resembled all the world’s bent and rusted nails held together by prayers and ignorance.

A 28-year-old cabin boy watched the flash of fire in the haze and smelled the gunpowder and thought, “Why not now?” Born in Indiana and raised in Michigan, he had cut timber in the greater Northwest, observed both New York’s high society and its petty street artists, and helped fetch water to the dry city of Los Angeles. Up to this point in his life, he had been everywhere and so nowhere mattered more than any other. And yet, all that was about to change.

As the story goes—splash! Like a cannonball he plunged into the Big Muddy’s depths. As he would tell it, he sunk all the way to the bottom and dug his hands into that rich silt—those crumbs of the continent. He baptized himself in the waters and dolphin-tailed his way to shore and built something.

Still, anyone who has felt that mighty current or tasted the thralls of war has to wonder if such certainty could exist in the present, if such confidence were not born from survival’s hindsight. Either way, that was the day Z-Bo forged himself into a building block for folklore, made a home in the narrative, and rose from the glistening waters like a hammer.  

As for that raging river battle, no one remembers who won or lost without referencing the history books, the plaques, and those Civil War statues that shrink in the presence of suburban sprawl and signs for the Waffle House.

Part-god. Part-folk hero. Z-Bo carried the coffin into the tent and preceded to tell Rudy Gay the heart of the matter.

In time, however, Mike Conley will leave the Memphis city limits and find a predetermined site where a coffin will have been buried. He will commence to dig, but the ground will be soft from the rains and the digging will not take long.

On the coffin’s surface, after he dusts the dirt and rock from it, he will see a heart encircling the letter ‘Z’ and a bow-tie scratched into the wood. He will break open the coffin. He will apologize to the longtime friend he finds there. Then he will open his longtime friend’s chest cavity and remove what he hopes to be the bloody truth of the matter. The act will resemble a theft, but the act is something else and more akin to passing a collection plate. The man is dead. The man is only playing possum. Mike Conley wipes the sweat from his brow, leaving a streak of dirt across his forehead. After all their planning, they have never made it this far in the game without having to start over.

I.

Times grew strange, and then, stranger. The future, at least as far as anyone could recognize it, looked very much like the past. And the past felt like a pawnshopped dream.

A man who could not be trusted patrolled the banks and levees between the city and the rivers. He swung an oil lamp in the darkness. He noted the water’s churning, its eagerness to boil. Rarely did a day pass when more rain did not fall than the day before, starting in the north and west and moving south and east. He wore boots and carried a rifle that had many owners before him. He looked for dogs. When he found them, he lowered his lamp and shot them in the full light of a silver moon. He kept the flood of rabies at bay. He listened to the gathering waters and knew a man could only do so much. People called him Lance. He was born ready. He should have been dead many times by now, in Indiana, in Charlotte and Los Angeles, particularly in Miami. He wasn’t dead, though. He had washed ashore in Memphis. He stalked his prey. He laughed in the dead dog’s face. He swung his lamp out wide and remained vigilant. There were storms brewing. Some from without. Others from within. He knew both these fates to be true.

Boys gathered around a dead cow. More and more livestock washed ashore. The boys guessed their origins. Some said Missouri. Others Kentucky and even Kansas. They stabbed the bloated body and lit a match in the hiss of escaping gasses. They torched the night air, even if momentarily. Their names were James Ennis and Ben McLemore. When Lance’s shadow fell over them, they scattered. He poked the cow’s ribs with the nose of his gun. He smelled the revenant smoke.

He asked in the wake of their departure: “Is that you, old Roy?” and if anyone had heard, they would not have known what he had meant. But such questions were not so strange. Rumors and wild takes traveled north and south along the river. A wildness rising to lay claim to the world as it was and would be again. A woman up north gave birth to a wolf pup, not once, but twice in the country’s largest general store. A boy below Memphis was said to be so comfortable with bats they followed him everywhere, even in daylight. A photograph appeared in the Admiral-Constitution with a single bat perched in place of where his eyebrows should have been. People whispered of Viking ships, long buried and filled with ghosts, rising out of the mud and cruising up and down the river in search of their Indian kin. More skeptical listeners said these sightings were nothing more than internet hoaxes. Individuals even more skeptical asked, “What’s the internet?” and no one had an answer for them. The rain transgressed everything. All was dying. All was possible. None of it made any sense.

Lance drew a bead on a shadow. He bit his tongue and fired. He caught the pup in the hindquarters. The pup yelped with childlike pain. And, limping into an alley, the pup found itself crawling in air. A man held it above the muddy street, blood dripping from its leg, by the fur of its neck.

“Not so close to Beale, Lance. There’s still money to be made before the waters arrive,” said Mayor Gasol. “This one’s not even frothing at the mouth.”

“Hard to tell in the dark sometimes.”

The Mayor sat the pup down on its former path into the alley, behind the Grindhouse, where Z-Bo’s trucks often trafficked; bringing the booze into the city that would be dispersed by black hearse and motor boat.

“Well,” ordered the Mayor, “try harder.” He dusted his hands free of dog fur and stepped onto the boardwalk and into the halo of a lit saloon doorway. From inside, he could hear those familiar bars of “Mr. Stern” rising from the piano keys.

Mister Stern don’t low no easy riders here

We don’t care what Mister Stern don’t low.

We gonna bar’l house anyhow

Mister Stern don’t low no easy riders here

He entered the rowdy establishment and took his place at a center table. The waters could only rise so high in so many days and, besides, the city was not so low as others. To let old habits die too soon would be the greatest sin indeed.

Two glasses sat in need of filling. Gasol’s business partner and trusted friend, Mike Conley, had summoned a bottle of Early Times as a way of starting the evening’s ancient and oft-repeated rituals.

The song ended. The player rose and tipped his hat to the room, revealing a bald scalp. No one clapped. They continued to talk of other nights, some with rain and some without. The player sat down on the bench. A new song began.

I went to Sidney Lowe-low’s ‘bout half past nine

Said to Sidney Lowe-low I’ve only got a dime

To get my habits on, to get my habits on

I went to Sidney Lowe-low’s ‘bout half past ten

Said to Sidney Lowe-low I’m back again

To get my habits on, to get my habits on

I went to Sidney Lowe-low ‘bout half past leben

Said to Sidney Lowe-low I’ll never reach the Finals

With my habits on, with my habits on.

Vernacular whores and concession vendors moved through the room. They leaned against the bar and the plaster walls. They talked. They listened. They stood. They left the mounted heads of buffalo and antelope on the walls. They ascended and descended the stairs, rarely, if ever, alone. Entire worlds of meaning unfolded in repeated mannerisms that had but a single following, or follower. Even the dancing bear was barely noticed, except by strangers, who might remark, “I remember when the woods were full of grizzly,” or, “I remember killing a bar when I was only three.”

And so the bear danced and a shadow danced on the wall with it, reminding some in the room of books they’d read and others of hunting parties and camping trips.

“Does it have a name?” someone might ask, and someone else might answer, “Faulkner.” To the tourists, the bear was an artifact. To the citizenry of Beale Street’s neighborhood, it was alive and corporeal, with a heart as strong as the rising river.

One night a man named Thabeet killed the bear. On another night, a man named Rudy lowered a cavalry pistol and made quick, sloppy work of the brown dancing hide. Still, on some other night, two wannabe desperadoes rode down Beale Street’s mud-covered cobblestones, firing guns and raising hell, and the bear collapsed at the impossibility of a stray, yet magical bullet. At least that’s how the conspiracy theory worded it.

However, life for the bear, no matter the details, ended, after a few swaying steps that were both drunken and graceful, in the bear taking the form of a woodland rug across the floorboards.

Someone would then comment on the bear’s collapse — the incidental nature of it all — and then the piano would start to play again, usually “Bringing Sexy Back” by Justin Timberlake.

On the occasion when a blonde man with azul eyes walked across the room and his path intersected with the bear’s path, their journeys would intertwine in an awkward waltz.  In these moments, a shot would fire, the piano player would pause, the bear would roar, its body would tremble, the fall would crush the blonde man in the primal spin of time’s magnetism. And yet, the chance for something new and bold and virginal beckoned from the ritual tissue of chaos and destruction.

Could the bear be saved? The blonde man wondered, thinking, if the bear can be saved, then so can I — in fact, if the bear can be saved, then we all can be saved.

He looked for pathways, and the footsteps led him back into the memories he didn’t know he possessed. He remembered lives previously lived. An explosion in Dallas. An arrival to a spring in the lowlands south of Memphis. When he arrived there, had he done what he set out to do? The answer was no. His motive and his purpose had been reset. He recalled a moment in childhood.

Jeremy Lin and scorpions. A bearded stranger. He looked presently around the bar in Memphis. The same stranger. He moved forward. The bear trapped him. He died. He followed his steps back in time. He devised new plans. He thought he knew almost everything he needed to know. He did not know nearly the half of it. He walked into the bar. He took his rightful place. He waited for the plan, his plan, to unfold.

The man polished the top of the bar with a wet dishrag as he talked.

And as the man talked, his audience, a 28-year-old blonde man from Texas, yawned. The blonde man with eyes of crystal azul did not look the bartender in the eye. Instead, he lifted peanuts from a bowl and dropped them like poker chips. You could say he was counting peanuts, except he wasn’t counting. He watched the bartender’s lips move in the mirror behind the bar. The man said something about dogs. The blonde man didn’t care much for dogs. Loyalty wasn’t exactly his thing. He was after something else.

“See . . . man ain’t like a dog. And when I say ‘man,’ I’m talking about man as in mankind, not man as in men. Because men, well, we a lot like a dog. You know, we like to piss on things. Sniff a bitch when we can. Even get a little pink hard-on the way they do. We territorial as shit, you know, we gonna protect our own. But man, he know about death. Got him a sense of history. Got religion. See . . . a dog, man, a dog don’t know shit about no birthdays or Christmas or Easter bunny, none of that shit. And one day God gonna come calling, so you know, they going through life carefree. But people like you and me, man, we always guessing. Wondering, ‘What if?’ You know what I mean?”

Here Chandler Parsons interrupted the bartender: “Is that supposed to mean something?”                 

The bartender continued as if reading from a script, “We ain’t gonna get no move in this world, lying around in the sun, licking our ass all day. I mean, we man. I mean, you a player and all, but we man. So with this said, you tell me what it is you wanna do with your life.”

Chandler Parsons checked his pocket watch. “I’m going to take a piss, Andrew.”

Finished with his lines, Andrew Harrison’s body retreated into a more automated state. He wiped the bar. He stared into space. He wiped the bar again. He waited for a cue, to deliver his words of wisdom one more time, on an endless loop that is.

Chandler Parsons moved across the room, not so much with stealth, but simply unnoticed. At one table, he saw Mayor Gasol and Mike Conley, the man who financed all of Beale Street. They were drinking the bourbon they always drank and scheming quietly for themselves and the city’s future. A bald man at the piano played on.

Oh, the ragbear turns circles

Up and down Beale Street

I’d ask him what the Gasol was

But I know that he don’t growl

And the ladies treat me grizzly

And they furnish me with ice

But deep inside my cave

I know I can’t escape

Oh, Hubie, can you take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun with the

Memphis Grizz again

Parsons watched the faces of all the men he recognized. Some were playing cards. Some were gathered at the corner of the bar. The women and men working the floor moved with all the freedom of plow horses. Others stood near the front doors. Then the moment arrived as it arrived every night, on an endless loop.

The bear turned to embrace him. The first time he attempted to dance away from the bear his knee buckled, and he had ended the night dead. But, now, in the present, he could feel the ghost of that pain, as if the injury had already happened. He planted a foot. He spun away from the bear. He parted from one path and embarked on another. The moment he spun away, a body was flung through the backdoor that opened to a path leading down to the privy. Chandler Parsons had expected the body at this precise moment, and the bear embraced the body like a kindred sacrifice and swayed to the music.

Well, Fizzdale, he’s in the alley

With his spectacles and his suit

Speaking to reporters

Who say it’s all the same

And I would send a Harden

To find out if he’s true

But the officials blew the whistles

And boxscore is all Popped

Oh, Hubie, can you take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Grizzly blues again

A man yelled in French. A shot fired. A table flipped over and the bear groaned. A sleepy looking man rushed the dancing couple. A steel knife flashed. The man collapsed. The bear collapsed into the bar stools. Andrew Harrison, the bartender, started once more, “See . . . man ain’t like a dog,” but he was talking to a dying bear. Mayor Gasol was pointing at the sleepy looking man. Mike Conley was pointing at the man who yelled in French. The sleepy looking man turned to run. He faced down the barrel of a gun.

A man with a beard told him, “Not so fast, LaMarcus.”

“Ah, Jimmy, you forgot to check behind you,” said an Argentine, who had sailed the Atlantic tracing the Americas in profile. The man with the beard looked behind him. He, too, stared down the barrel of a gun. Meanwhile, the Frenchman collapsed in pain, wincing at the knife inserted like a red hot poker above his knee. His assailant was a man Chandler Parsons recognized as Patrick Beverly. Then a man with three rattails clubbed Beverly over the head with a broken chair leg. The Mayor and Conley looked on, wondering where the muscle was.

Out in the street, a pack of wild dogs rushed by as if sprung from a breaking levee. Lance rushed after them, and individuals in white hazmat suits began to disperse throughout the city, preparing for an unspoken change in the narrative culture. Andrew Harrison continued to compare homo sapiens to canis lupus. No one was listening. A man with corn rows and large hands rushed from a room upstairs and down the wooden staircase. A seven-foot man from Georgia —the country, not the state— stuck out his leg and tripped the dashing hero to be. He crashed to the bottom of the stairs, unconscious or dead. It was difficult to tell. At one of the card tables, two men yelled to the rest of the room that they were robbing the place and that if anyone moved, they would shoot a man named DeAndre. DeAndre cried, “I should have stayed in Dallas.” No one paid any attention. Three other men then burst in through the backdoor. Two of them were tall and wore twin mustaches, but sometimes one of them had two first names and the other wore a black hood. The shortest of the three men always wore Fizzdale’s glasses, or at least that’s what the Mayor claimed. The man in Fizzdale’s glasses unfurled a badge, but sometimes it was a plate full of cupcakes. He told everyone to freeze. The robber who looked like an insurance salesman shot his partner in the foot and struck DeAndre in the head, and out the door dashed a man named Gordon Heyward, yelling about the need for repentance. Off in the darkness, at the end of his rainbow’s escape, a bear trap waited for him.

The piano played on, and Chandler Parsons slipped out the room and down a narrow hallway to an office belonging to a silent backer of the Grindhouse.

Mar’e tried to tell me

To stay away from DeAndre

He said that all the Clipper men

Just drink up jaguars like wine

An’ I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that

But then again, there’s only one I’ve met

An’ he just Dirked my kneecaps

An’ snuffed my cigarette.”

Oh, Hubie, take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Grizzly blues again

The blonde man opened the door slowly, somewhat surprised it wasn’t locked. The curtains swayed in the midnight air. He could hear the rain pelting the slate roof and running down the drainpipe. As he walked past the window, he felt the penetrating mist, but mostly, he basked in the moonlight, taking a seat behind the large wooden desk. He leaned back in the chair and the leather scent mixed sweetly with the rain-woven fabric. He stomped his feet in time with the music, as if still part of a dance he didn’t quite understand, until he heard a hollow sound echo in the floorboards. “Ah,” he smiled, bending down to remove the floorboard.

Now young Chandler came around here

Showing ev’ryone his glock

Handing out triple shots

To the bachelors and the grooms

An’ Conley, pushed his chips forward

An’ called out to lady luck

To be stowed on the next railcar 

And be more money than ol’ Jeff Green

Oh, Hubie, take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Memphis Grizz again

He withdrew a briefcase from the cavity. Tied to the handle was a tag the size of a ticket stub. He fingered its edges. In a light cursive scrawl, he read the initial ‘D.’ followed by the last name ‘West.’ And cursed by a limited hindsight, he misread the clue.

As he climbed out the window and into the storm, he failed to see the piano player lurking in the hallway, just shy of the doorway. He failed to hear the light, maniacal hum on the man’s lips:

To be stuck inside of Cancun

With the Memphis Grizz again

And somehow the piano still played, the keys rising and falling, as if pushed by invisible hands.

II.

Vince Carter had taken to keeping a journal.

He arrived in Memphis by boxcar with a musical instrument case underneath each arm. He boarded in a room above the corner drugstore. During the day, he offered music lessons and scrawled long musical compositions in the tradition of Sousa’s marches. With more time than freedom, he absorbed the blues and wrote song after song: “The Carolina blues,” “The Toronto dinosaur blues,” “The my cousin left me blues,” “The Hoboken blues,” “The Orlando swamp blues,” “The line at Space Mountain is too long blues,” “The Seven seconds or less blues,” “The Big cactus desert blues,” “The coming off the bench in Dallas blues,” “The broken jaw blues,” “The Chandler Parsons blues,” “The life after Boogie blues,” and “The list goes on blues.”

He spent his nights playing up and down Beale Street, occasionally he played in rooftop gardens overlooking the gaslights glowing through the fog rolling off the river. These live performances shifted his aesthetic. In addition to offering music lessons by day, he paid for his rent, sheet music, and instruments via these saloon gigs.

One night playing at one of these upper crust gatherings, he noticed his finger struck the wrong key, not due to an improvised gesture, but as a result of misjudging time and space. And yet, the right note still sounded in his ear. His eye even caught the correct key falling and rising. This discord shook him to his core.

The next day he sat down to write notes on a blank sheet, but in the staff letters appeared, as if his hand moved of its own accord, his body conducted by an author separate from his mind. He felt like an instrument, except he was aware of his condition. He read the letters hanging in the spaces typically reserved for musical notes, between the staff lines.

The letters formed a story. The character in the story had a name. His name was Vince, but Vince did not recognize the story.

However, in the story before him, this fictional Vince ran with outlaws such as Jason the Kidd and quested with the likes of Dirk Nowitzki. He even spent time as an overseas assassin, embroiled in the workings of nationalism and world wars.

Could it be that the events from the fictional Vince’s life could account for the holes in Vince’s own memories? He wondered. More importantly, he started buying notebook paper instead of sheet music.

When he wrote, he became struck by the fact that the Vince he wrote about remembered other Vinces. Sometimes these men were younger, but sometimes they were older. Sometimes a bald Vince remembered a Vince with an afro. Sometimes a Vince with an afro remembered a Vince with a beard. Never did a Vince recall a Vince with both an afro and a beard, but sometimes a bald Vince remembered a Vince with an afro who remembered a bald Vince.  It turned out in all this remembering that an infinite number of Vinces existed. Even if Vince’s body was finite his identities were not. This realization caused Vince to move from journaling to plotting.

In doing so, he started sorting and tracking the individual memories of all the different Vinces in the room above the corner drugstore. The color-coded bits of yarn zigged and zagged on the cork board. He sketched illustrations of himself in different states of Vincedom.

Where holes in the story appeared, he drew question marks, knowing he would have to revisit a particular setting or sequence. He longed to relive particular moments in order to unlock other Vinces that he felt might eventually lead him, stumbling and blind, to the essential Vince. Sometimes he soared with confidence. Other times, he faded away in disappointment. The struggle for truth loomed large with impossibility at each new discovery.

One day, at a local gin joint, he sat behind the piano. The keys moving of their own volition, for he had long given up playing them, opting instead to mimic the motions of a great musician, who just so happened to be himself. While enacting this charade, three men barged into the room. Vince would never know their names, but they were in order of appearance: Latrell Sprewell, Allan Houston, and Allen Iverson. Rumors are Ray Allen waited behind the wheel of the getaway car. They operated as a loosely formed crime syndicate known as The Second Sons of Allen. No one knows who The First Sons of Allen were or why Latrell Sprewell was not called Allen Sprewell or Latrell Allen. They entered the gambling din with their guns drawn.

Pistols and a sawed-off shotgun.

When they yelled, “Everyone drop to the floor!” Vince dropped to the floor, between the piano (that never stopped playing) and the piano bench. His temperature rose in degrees. He could hear their actions, but he could not see them clearly through the legs of tables and chairs. A struggle ensued. Someone lost more than someone won.

A man groaned as if stabbed with a knife. A gun slid across the floor.

Vince picked up the gun and handled it as if it were a trumpet, as if the trigger were as innocent as a spit valve.

In a flash, he dropped two of the gunmen. He did not know if they were dead or merely wounded.  He did not have enough experience in such matters. In fact, even as he did whatever this was, he asked himself: How can I be doing this? But then the dream screeched to a halt. He took aim. He pulled the trigger. He was out of bullets.

His target, tattooed and cornrowed, looked at him, stepped over a body on the floor that later would not admit to being Tyronn Lue, and laughed: “I guess that’s just how these things go.” The man raised his own gun and leveled it at Vince, but before the man could pull the trigger, a chair broke over his shoulder blades and knocked him to the floor.

And that’s how Vince became acquainted with Zach Randolph.

No longer a talented enough musician, Vince still sat at the piano bench often. Sometimes, in doing so, he dreamed of far off places and cattle drives under a clear, blue sky. When violence broke out at the Grindhouse, he would receive either a subtle nod from Gasol or a wink from Conley, bosses of the city he had met through Randolph, and he would rise from the bench, hang his pressed jacket on a hook near the piano, and address the issue with a patient brand of violence, born from age and waiting and the consummation of the two.

This arrangement was reached the night Allen Iverson almost killed him. The way Vince remembered it the chair broke over Iverson’s back in slow-motion, as if years had passed between the one man aiming to kill him and the other man coming to his rescue. When Iverson collapsed, Z-Bo had said: “I think you and I need to have a conversation, Mr. Carter.”

They exited the back of the gambling hall and walked to a livery stable filled with a countless number of freshly constructed coffins. Z-Bo leaned against one of these yellow wood stacks and unscrewed a mason jar’s metal ring and popped its circular lid. He offered Vince a taste of some home-brewed glory. The chemical burned through Vince like wildfire, dimming the light of his memories, distancing his present from all those past Vinces. He had caught a glimpse of the future.

“What’s in this?” he had asked.

“Couldn’t really say, and you wouldn’t want to know.”

Marc Gasol and Mike Conley arrived shortly after and participated in a conversation that, despite the mason jar orbiting the circle, was indeed an interview of sorts. Needless to say, the next time Vince found himself in this situation, he would pass on the moonshine, its scorched earth flavors brewed in sleepiness and smoke. He trusted neither its contents nor its makers, at least not fully.

Shortly after those initial meetings Vince found himself on a train to Florida. He and a man named Jeff Green were conducting business on behalf of Gasol and Conley’s interests. The countryside rose in a pristine blur beyond the window pane. The train swayed over the physics of rails and wheels grinding the metal from one another. Mostly the men slept and drank and strolled the aisle without purpose, but sometimes they talked.

Jeff Green described to Vince a recurring dream. The man told him how he had awoken in a laboratory with his chest cavity open. His heart sat on a table nearby, but it resembled a mechanical bird more than flesh and pulsing tissue. The bird flapped its wings and rose from the table.

“And then flew into your chest,” said Vince.

“How did you know?”

“A man in Chicago once told me the same thing.”

“You from there?”

Vince had learned to not answer such questions directly, and after staring at the passing countryside for a bit, he told his traveling partner: “I was with a man named Oakley, and we were on a similar job as you and I are now. We were cleaning up the mess left by a man named Isiah. Oak told me about the dream and its requirement for blood.”

“And—what happened to him?”

“To Oak?”

“No, to the man who had the dream.”

“Last I heard, he fell off a bridge in New York City.”

“Shit, that ain’t happening to me,” said Green.

“You seeing ghosts?”

“No. Why?”

“He was. The man who fell that is.”

Shook, Green looked away from the other man. After a while, though, he felt the need to confess one more detail: “The letters A-I-N-G-E mean anything to you?”

The letters did not mean anything to Vince at the time, but he wrote them down in his journal regardless. Then he said something that had never occurred to him before, but seemed to make all the difference in the world:

“We were in Toronto, not Chicago.”

The next night, upon their arrival in Florida, Vince Carter, as instructed, buried Jeff Green in a swamp. And before covering the man’s body with dark earth, he followed another instruction: he removed the man’s heart.

As he walked through the Petri dish of mosquitoes and snakes, he stumbled across the charred remains of a burnt car. Beside the car he found a matchbook with a Bird on it. He slipped it into his pocket and hitched a ride to another city, taking the long way on his way to Memphis. Certain orders were becoming harder and harder to live by.

III.

As Vince watched Chandler Parsons climb out the window, he remembered the burnt car from the swamp in Florida. He also thought burning one in Florida (or Mexico) wouldn’t be such a bad detail for his eventual pursuit of Chandler Parsons that would surely lead him to one of those places.

With the world past and the world to come burning in his brain, Vince strolled over to the desk. He rested a hand on its flat surface. He saw the briefcase. He opened a drawer with the other hand. He found it empty. He spoke to himself: “The key again, Chandler? For Christ’s sake, man, learn something!” He looked back at the briefcase on the floor. He lifted it. Empty. He laid it on the desk. He opened it. He pulled the tag loose from its handle. He did not look at the name scrawled on it — D. West. He didn’t need to; he had seen it before. He walked across the room to a picture hanging on a brick wall above the mantle of a closed off fireplace. He removed the picture and its frame from the wall. He did not eye the two brothers. He had seen them before; one in military dress and the other in civilian clothing. He had even come face to face with one of them — he was sure of it. In the catacomb behind where the picture frame had been sat a safe. He looked at the back of the tag he had removed from the briefcase. On the back of it were numbers to a combination written in pencil. He started turning the knob on the safe. He opened the safe.

He removed two items from the safe:

The first item was a rack holding twelve vials of blue liquid in vertical positions. Once upon a time, he would have left eleven of the vials behind, but Vince had long decided to no longer heed every instruction. The destination of the group and the individual may not always be compatible, even if the journeys are intertwined.

He removed the entire rack and positioned the vials in the briefcase. To ensure the rack would not move while traveling, he grabbed five books at random from a shelf. He placed two volumes by Roland Lazenby on the left side of the rack. He placed a third volume by Lazenby and another by Marcus Thompson on the right. On top of the rack holding the vials he sat a volume by Jack McCallum. He closed the briefcase. He lifted it. He swung it back and forth. He returned the briefcase to the desk. He opened it. Nothing had moved. If anyone opened it, they would assume he were a traveling book salesman. He closed the briefcase for a final time and returned to the open safe.

The second item in the safe was a torn piece of paper, brittle and brown, as if a child had dunked it in tea leaves. The map conveyed everything east of the Mississippi River, including Memphis and even parts of Mexico. The western half of the map was missing. In the bottom right hand corner of the map, where a compass rose should have been, was a double set of the alphabet’s twenty-third letter and a white silhouette mimicking a Da Vinci sketch, its arms arranged like hands on a clock and balancing globes on their fingertips.

Vince folded the map and hid it on his person. He closed the safe. He followed Chandler’s path. He climbed out the window and slid down the drainpipe in the pouring rain, hopefully for the last time.

I.

From beyond the thicket of thorn bushes enclosing the spring from the rest of the world, Tony Allen watched the man cupping a palm to his lips and the waterfall trickling from the heel of his hand, where his sleeve failed to reach.

A path, almost invisible to anyone not looking for it, led from the road to the spring. Tony Allen, whose band of friends and associates called Grindfather, inspected the man before him who he was sure qualified as neither a friend nor an associate. The man wore a plain suit, like some ragged preacher in search of a tent. If he wasn’t that cliche, then he was another, perhaps a wino newspaperman long out of ink.

Despite the heat and humidity, the suit suggested a particular degree of either indifference or ignorance in the man. The suit was neither linen nor seersucker. His thinning hair would have spooled in a cobwebbed nest that swayed in the breeze, except for that damn suit causing the pores of his brow to pool sweat, matting the white wisps to the thin curvature of his papery skull. He was not from around here, but had stopped to drink the water nonetheless.

Though everyone wandering these woods came to drink the water, few ever did, so Tony couldn’t help but wonder how this man had found the spring in the first place.

“How’d you get here? You got a car nearby?”

The spring gurgled from the earth at the root of some generic hardwood and slipped away from the roots by way of a sandy ravine held together by cypress and gum and brier. The light overhead; a canopy littered with bullet holes bleeding pale sunlight.  

Birds whistled nearby, of the past or future it was hard to tell, but the cracking tendrils of the notes betrayed the cornerstones of apocalypse besetting both the moment’s beginning and its end.

The man in the weathered suit continued drinking from the spring once the notes evaporated in the dark leaves and holes of light.

“What kind of bird is that?” he asked.

The Grindfather did not answer. What did he know about the goddamn birds?

“I understand. Not big on interviews. That’s alright. I can write silence into the narrative. That’s fine.”

The Grindfather lifted a straw hat from his head and fanned himself. He watched the man’s prophetizing hand crawl towards the lining of his suit jacket. It crept over the tattered white dress shirt like a skin and bone spider.

“I guess you’re reaching for your gun.”

The old man laughed.

“I wish. No . . .  just my pen here.”

The suited man raised the writing instrument in the air as bona fide proof he was up to no good. Then he pulled a pocket-sized notebook from his back pocket.

“A gun would have made your story shorter.”

The man smiled, “That’s probably true.” He swung the pages over the notebook’s metal spiral. He scribbled in the notepad. “You read much, Tony?”

“Tony? I don’t believe I know a Tony. And if you’re writing it, the answer is no.”

The man laughed again. “I like that — the denial adds a certain level of rebellious tension. I guess someone has to play the upstart.”

“You plan on being here long?” asked the Grindfather.

“I do, Tony, I absolutely do.”

Tony rubbed a stone between his thumb and forefinger. He thought about skipping it across the creek.

“Then, you mind givin’ me your name?”

“I’m like you in a sense. That is, I have my name and then my label within the nomenclature. I’m something of a paterfamilias myself. Most, though, just call me Pop. Funny how that all works itself out.”

“You’re a longwinded son of a bitch, ain’t ye?”

“Yes and no. Maybe the proper answer is when I choose to be.”

“You plan on staying long?” the Grindfather asked again.

“Yes and no. I’m simply here to record the action — to state the obvious about what happens here.”

“Well, I’ll be right here, sleeping.”

“And I’ll be over here writing and reading.”

“I bet,” said Tony, laying himself down on the sandy ground. He folded his arm behind his head for a pillow, placing it between his skull and a tree root. He adjusted the straw hat so it covered his eyes. The newspaperman, for surely that’s what he was, either that or a wino lawyer, irritated him, while somehow managing to draw forth a smirk. In other words, he wondered what the fuck the old man was up to out here in the hot woods, just south of Memphis, without a damn automobile in sight.

A squirrel climbed a nearby elm and appeared to hold a conversation with a bird perched at its top. The man described the scene in his notepad. He added the detail of a snake at the root and a chain of dried scales appeared in the sand, near the coils of the gurgling creek.

The morning crested and broke into the afternoon, and the afternoon slumped into a gray dusk before the sleeping man opened his eyes.

“You still here?” he asked.

“I possess a patient diligence.”

“You got a job?”

“I do.”

“Then what you need is a woman.”

The man laughed again. “Apparently, there are rules about such things, but next time — and there will be one — I’ll ask Becky if she wants to make the trip.”

“She your wife?”

“No, just someone smarter than me is all.”

“Well, what is it you doing around here this time? And what makes you think there might be a next time?”

“I need to be in Memphis by tomorrow. That much I can tell you.”

“Well, what you are you doing here then?”

“Just observing the lay of the land.”

“Well, let’s start walking then.” Tony stood up and started leading Pop down a path where ferns growing in the sandy earth brushed their shins and ankles. Pop scribbled all the while in his notepad, and when he lifted his pen, Tony stopped, lifted his hat, scratched his scalp, rested fists on his hips, and looked for directions from the shadows cast by leaves and branches. In one of these pauses, Pop asked the Grindfather: “Why didn’t we make a straight line from the spring to here?”

“You writing in that notepad, but you ain’t in charge of everything last time I checked. Besides, what you know in this here world that travels in straight lines? Ain’t nothing natural shaped like that.”

“Christ!” said Pop, flipping to a blank page in his notebook, “By Duncan, that’s good.”

“Give me a minute now. I seem to have lost the trail.” Tony backtracked. The man started writing again. Tony saw the tree with the hollow trunk. He marked his progress from there and its hidden confines.

Wings, felt but not seen, swooped between the two men.

“Owl?” asked Tony.

“I wrote it down as a bat.”

“An owl would work too. I read once that Indians believe them birds are symbols of death.”

“Where did you read it?”

“Flip through your notebook — maybe you wrote my answer down already.”

The man smiled. “You think so?”

Tony shrugged. To be honest, he didn’t quite care. Whether the creature flying overhead was a bat or an owl, he felt this walk would end the same way. He often viewed his physical surroundings with a mistrust as to their permanence and meaning. When he dreamed, which was more often than he once had, he was in orbit, not on earth, but in space, then —Bang!— he disappeared into the world he now walked. Every time, he recalled, like clockwork.

“You ever wonder where we were before this life?”

The man looked up at Tony from his notebook: “Why? Do you?”

“Can’t say that I don’t. Then again, it’s hard to say that I do either.”

They continued walking; two bodies trapped in a dance without romance.

A house rose from the silhouettes of trees that erupted from the horizon line and devoured much of the sky. The house’s ruined spire and depleted walls lurked in the blue haze like a medieval memory; a discovery awaiting conquistadors or time travelers, whoever arrived first.

In truth, the slack jawed ruins were a plantation house that sometime after the battle of Vicksburg had come to serve no real purpose other than harboring secrets, and even before that fabled fight, the structure had borne nothing but cruel intentions.

The two men approached the porch. Other men sat on rocking chairs at one end. An old rubber rocking horse, resting on rusted springs, sat on the other. The Grindfather started his ascent. The steps creaked under his weight in wide, historic yawns.

“This about the size of the operation?”

The Grindfather looked back at the man jotting in a notebook. He continued up the steps and opened the screen door with a line like a run in a lady’s stocking cutting down the middle. He did not introduce the men on the porch. Pop had expected as much. He studied their eyes and faces. He noted the distant familiarity.

Beyond the screen door, the two men, one a guest and the other a begrudging tour guide, entered into a wide hallway smelling of must and mold and feral urine. To the right, the living room sat like a cave, the floor moist and moving with the breathing of sleeping dogs. To the left sat the dining room, filled with broken and useless furniture. The stairwell took up half the entryway, rising to where it held onto the second floor by a thread. They walked past its steps and into the home’s hindquarters.

A man, in the kitchen, tended to a skillet on the stovetop. Pop could hear and smell the meat changing colors in the heat. That sizzling salt crack of the country’s back wood customs. Pop imagined no meat unfit for such a kitchen, and the shadows invited the mind to imagine everything stained in blood.

“I wasn’t expecting company,” said the large man, his size filling the room like a bear’s. When he rocked back on his heels and away from the stove, the table shifted towards a woodstove on the other side of the room until it could shift no farther.

“He’s a reporter. Seems to be writing a story.”

The man moved from the stove to the sink. He pumped water from an old well handle. He washed his hands with a bar of lye soap and dried them on his apron, keeping them flat as he dragged them across the grease stains like a man sharpening knives in slow motion.

“A story about what? Ain’t no story to tell far as I can tell.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.”

“And I didn’t ask you either — I’m asking him.”

The man, built like a boulder in an apron, did not look Pop’s way when he said this, but Pop also didn’t appear interested in what the man had to say. He studied the room: The broken clock above the wood stove, the missing cabinet doors, the barren shelves, the icebox. He eyeballed all the roach tracks and rattraps like a painter inspecting a canvas. And then as they occurred to him he added the final touches to a work of art he perceived as neither lacking in material nor a finished masterpiece. He hummed to himself: “The authenticity is impeccable, and yet . . . .”

“The authenticity?” asked the Grindfather. “What the fuck are you on about now?”

“Where did you find him?” asked the cook.

“At the spring.”

“Did he come alone this time?”

“I didn’t see no one else.”

The cook considered the lacking ingredient. “Hm,” he said and turned back to the meat frying in the pan.

Pop lifted a fork off the table and tried to catch the day’s last light in the spotted prongs as the faded gold sifted through the window panes and died in the sifting dust.

The cook spoke to him, “Are you a man of thirst?”

Pop returned the fork to the wooden surface. The handle clanked after it fell from his fingertips. “What’s that?”

“I asked are you thirsty.”

“Possibly. What are my options?”

“Well water or ‘shine.”

“Shit!” said Tony, “that ol’ Grindhouse Gin would knock his wine sippin’ ass out! Man looks like a stool pigeon.”

“Then I guess we shouldn’t waste a drop,” and the man everyone called Z-Bo swung the frying pan, with fat back sizzling and sliding, through the air, thumping the metal on the side of Pop’s head. The old man slumped to the ground. Blood trickled like red yolk from the cracked shell of his temple. The notepad lay sprawled and open on the floor as well. The ink barely dry.

“You kill him?”

“I doubt it. Take him to the cellar. Tie him up. When he comes to, let me know.”

Two men rose from the rickety porch chairs. They walked down the steps. The silence between them consisted of habit’s familiarity and despondent resignation. They knew each other’s movements inside and out; there was no need to speak. The storied gestures read the same from end to beginning as they did beginning to end. One paused to search his pockets for a cigarette. He found it tucked behind his ear. The places we find things. The places we left them. The man in front called in the direction of the abused-looking barn: “Z-Bo wants you in on this one.”

A grim-looking fellow — young, but grim nonetheless — placed a large hand in the middle of his chest. The gesture asked the man: “Who? Me?”

“Yeah, you. Don’t be going nowhere. The Grindfather waits for no man.”

The grim fellow grinned as he leaned against the barn’s shoddy boards, in the shade of its faded red walls. He stroked the braids on his head with that other big palm of his and stood up slowly. He didn’t know the name of the man who had just spoken to him. But he knew what the order meant. He scratched his foot in the dirt like some lazy rooster. He strolled wide around the corner of the barn and curled towards the woods. When he reached the tree line, he broke into a mad sprint. An arrow whistling through the universe’s 3-Sphere.

Pop awoke in a damp room. He could feel the earthen floor through the soles of his shoes. He moved his arms and legs and felt the tug of the ropes against them. He was not one of these fools to strain and groan against the objects holding him. Instead, he exercised patience and studied his surroundings, like some pelican landing on a fence post with no ocean in sight.

A large metallic tank sat on the side of the damp catacomb. The still, he thought, and laughed out loud at the daring brilliance to hide the damn thing directly under the house as opposed to in the woods. Then again, he wasn’t surprised at all. He wondered about the smell and the smoke, though, but it looked like quite the ventilation system had been erected in a maze of silver pipes and shining duct-work. Brand new, he thought. Then he noticed an even stranger sight. Across from him was a tank, not made of metal but from glass, holding a large skeleton. In the dark, he thought it might be a cow’s bones, but he wasn’t sure. He turned to the man tied in the chair next to him. After all, he was not a lone prisoner and asked, “Hey, Sam, is that a cow?”

The man responded, “How the hell should I know?”

“I just figured since you’re from north of the Red River you might know. It’s gotta be either a cow or a buffalo. You know it used to be a bobcat, but they all pretended it was a jaguar. Damn fools. And now, well, is it a cow or a buffalo?”

“Do I know you?”

“Sam, you’re younger than me. You should remember these things.”

The younger of the two men studied his fellow captive, his dark suit, his beard like cotton fraying in a tangle of thorns.

“How long have you been here?” asked Pop.                       

“Long enough to stop wondering whether those bones belong to a cow or not.”

“Fair enough.”

A door opened. The sounds available to their closed underworld increased. They felt a weight bearing down on the wooden joists. They held their breaths as the imagined threat began to take physical shape.

II.

Before Kawhi returned to antiquity’s farmhouse, where Wayne or James or Andrew had warned him to be when Tony Allen came looking for him, he found a painted rock at the root of a mighty tree. Pop had described the tree as having a mangled fragment of a wrought-iron gate mutilated by its mighty trunk. And sure enough, when Kawhi found the tree, he found it the vein of twisted metal running through the living wood fibers.

Underneath the painted rock, he found a notebook. The pulp pages were held in place by a metal gyre. They could be turned on its spiral shape heel over head. Inside it were notes upon notes about how the whole operation ran or would run all the way from the spring to Beale Street. He added to the notes. He returned the notebook and flipped the rock over so the side open to the sky was painted black instead of white. Such a simple binary system communicated whose turn it was to write in the notebook and whose turn it was to read it.

He dusted off his huge hands and followed the old fence line in a loop to the worn dirt yard between the dilapidated barn and the dilapidated house. He needed to be on the next truck because the next truck would be the one where all the dominoes would line up according to years of tinkering and adjustments.

As he approached the house, two men rose from the rickety porch chairs. As they walked down the steps, he stepped in line with them.

“This your first run with Z-Bo?”

“Yeah,” said the kid with cornrows who somehow younger now than when he had found the painted rock in the woods. He now hoped that monosyllabic responses would hide just how much he did and did not know about the Memphis operation, the mechanical heart of the matter and all its spiraling corollaries.

“Well, I’ve been doin’ this for two years now. Before this I was in . . . .”

“Courtney, lower your voice ‘fore we get to the trucks. Too much has already gone wrong today.”

The house rose behind them in all the splendor of an eroded empire, and yet it was not as worn as it had been. Breaking through the cedars and oak, the dusty road retreated from it the way men run from the truth in a dream; broken and stumbling; falling and collapsing. The trees that crept over the path did so with branches in the shapes of arthritic shock. The road grew dark even before the day was done.

An owl’s head turned as if by some mechanical crank at the base of its spine. The hoot sounded as if it were born in the shadowy hollows of despondent woods and not in the flash of yellow beak.

“That’s a symbol of death, y’all,” commented Courtney. Tony, the Grindfather, hummed in the affirmative, and the young kid found it best to say nothing at all.

“You scared of Z-Bo?” said Courtney.

“Respecting a man and being scared of him ain’t the exact same, but sometimes it’s better not to know the difference. I also know that before Z-Bo we didn’t ever cross state lines and whatnot. That’s more risk and reward. You can respect that or fear it.”

“But it don’t change it.”

“Exactly.”

“Is it true what he did in Portland?”

“Is it true what you did in Florida? Is it true what happened to me before I arrived in Memphis?”

“I’m just saying he had a pretty bad—”

“Shhhh,” the Grindfather held a finger over his lips, and his eyes gleamed as if it were a candle. “We’re close now.”

The road fell into a flat trajectory and stretched across the blanched sand. Grains sprouted in clouds under the three men’s heels; the dunes of yesterday depleted and felled in a single footfall. The truck waited in the hot aftermath of its last run, ready in a tangle of glistening new cobwebs for another go. A man named Lionel Hollins, wiping a wrench with an oil-stained rag, stood nearby: “She’s ready as she’ll ever be.”

One of the men checked the shipment in back by lifting the corner of a worn canvas to reveal a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle of wooden crates. The other two men started moving the hewn branches hiding the sandy alcove from the main road. Lionel stood by watching like some automaton awaiting new programming. He looked to the sky and commented on the possibility of rain. Anyone could have said it. Drops started to speckle the old tarp, and they prepared to leave.

*****

The oar Russell Westbrook used to steer the rotten canoe was cracked. A body lay slumped between his legs. Somewhere over his shoulder and growing smaller in the distance was the dock where Kevin Durant had shot Westbrook in the leg before disappearing into a doorway etched in light. The sun crept over the horizon, bleeding pink, almost a mirror image of the blood soaking Westbrook’s plant leg.

“Did he buy it?” asked James Harden from the floor of the canoe.

Russell looked at the man on the floor of the canoe. He stayed petty. He stayed paddling.

The man lowered his head to the canoe’s rotten belly again. He felt the tenderness of the soft wood. He knew the vessel wouldn’t last long, but he didn’t say a word about it.

He raised his head again. “Did he buy it, though?”

“We’re not on speaking terms,” said Russ. Still petty. Still paddling.

“Why not? I thought we were in this together.”

“I thought if I shot you, he’d stay.”

“Told you it was a bad plan.” James was sitting up in the canoe now.

Westbrook continued to row with the cracked oar, its shape somewhat reminiscent of the gap between two front teeth and rather useless to the task of moving large quantities of water aside.

“Did he buy it, though?” asked Harden for the third time.

“He shot me in the leg and walked through a fucking doorway made from light?”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t think he bought it.”

“Yeah, doesn’t sound like it, so what’s the plan now? I mean, you can’t exactly track someone who teleports.”

“He didn’t teleport.”

“You said he was here and then he disappeared.”

“I said he walked through a fucking doorway made from light.”

“That was literal?”

“It was a fucking doorway made from light.”

They stopped talking, and after a while Russ stopped rowing. They drifted in the Gulf of Mexico. They waited for a doorway of light to open up. They, too, were in need of magical assistance in the form of a plot’s deus ex machina.

Instead, dark clouds filled the sky, blotting out the dawn’s light. A bolt of lightning split the towering darkness with a varicose vein’s electric webbing. The winds picked up. The thunder boomed. The rain pounded them without mercy.

Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the storm passed.

“That was tough.”

“We’re not on speaking terms.”

Another storm arrived, as wild and vicious as the first, but, because it wasn’t the first, the impression it left was that of an echo.

“That was tough too.”

“We’re not on speaking terms.”

“The boat’s sinking.”

“We’re not on speaking terms.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Feed off your anger.”

“Anger isn’t material.”

“We’re not on speaking terms.”

“What if we figured out a way to catch fish?”

Russ hit James upside the head with the cracked oar, cracking it some more, making the journey all the tougher. And James, of course, was kind enough to make the obvious observation: “That’s tough.”

A third storm arrived, and this one lifted the canoe into the air. As it did so, the wood rot in the bottom of the canoe gave way and Harden started to slide out the bottom. As he did so, he made a motion with his hands that Russ didn’t quite understand. He was either asking Russ to reel him back into the boat or eating from an imaginary cereal bowl. Russ didn’t lift a finger either way, but he did ask: “Does it taste like anger?” As he tumbled through the busted boat and towards the water, Harden might have yelled back: “I thought we weren’t talking.” He may also have fallen in silence. The wind and the rain and the thunder were all very loud and such details grew slippery when wet. Without a doubt, though, the scene was levels of tough on par with King Lear or anything Shakespeare could imagine. When a hush fell over the water once more, Russell Westbrook remained unchanged and armed to the teeth with a busted-ass canoe paddle.

Very little is known about Russell Westbrook after this juncture in time. He was essentially unstuck and left to his own devices. He could have unraveled the fabric of the universe and no one would have been around to stop him. He was a line from a Paul Simon song. He was an island, and the rock of his pettiness his only friend.

The route he took after parting ways with both Harden and Durant (his lost companions) has been a subject of considerable debate by many a historian across the years. Some have speculated that he was not concerned with matters of geography or chronology. And, unlike Durant, who always kept a journal, Westbrook refused to do so. Still, he managed to report as much information as possible concerning the lands he visited and the happenings going on there and the inhabitants he encountered. Some deficiencies and inaccuracies can be attributed to any number of reasons. For one thing, he survived his odyssey by feeding on anger and pettiness. Those were his only nutrients. And they somehow sustained him, but it’s possible they also warped his worldview, that he lost track of any sense of duty or honor. He talked almost no one, and he never left the Gulf’s salty waters, as if he were attempting to return the human condition into something amphibious and less dependent on the laws and customs that so often tie humanity together. He stirred the waters with his paddle, but he did so with destination in mind, like a straw belonging to a drink no one ever ordered or demanded.

When interviewed about the sights and sounds of his journeys, here are some of his more notable answers:

After the first storm, when James’ lame ass was still with me, we saw some fucking dinosaurs. Pretty sure there was a t-rex, a giant bear, and maybe a mastodon. No, I really don’t know if that’s anachronistic or not, but I’m telling this story and that’s how it happened. Oh, and there was a flying pterodactyl. Yeah, I know that’s redundant. Also, its wings were loud as fuck. Like in a literal sense I think the world could have been born this way. Yes, I did make a shirt from a dead pterodactyl’s wings. No, I’m not wearing it now. It’s something I would only wear on a special occasion and talking about time travel to a bunch of reporters who can only talk about the past and get the future wrong is not one of those occasions.

Before the dinosaurs, I’m pretty sure we witnessed the Battle of New Orleans. How do I know? Because there’s no statue in Jackson Square of a triceratops, so I’m pretty sure this shit that went down was after the dinosaurs. Yeah, but I wasn’t traveling in order. I was more Euro-stepping, which, if you know anything about those Enlightenment motherfuckers’ attachment to linear steps and process doesn’t make a heck ton of sense. Anyway, there was a ton of artillery fire, an ample amount of pettiness, and lots of skirmishing, which is also a dumb fucking word because it doesn’t stick. Today we would call these skirmishes mass shootings. Did you know more people died in that church recently than on the first day of the Battle of New Orleans? Are we experiencing random violence or living through a goddamn War of 1812 everyday? See my pettiness doesn’t begin and end with just one thing. I’m petty through all-time and in all places. Shit’s been bad for a while. Shit will be bad for a while. I intend to scowl and survive through it all.

James wasn’t with me when I ended up in Eadsville at the mouth of the Mississippi, but he ended up in Eadsville, only changed somehow. He didn’t seem to remember so much about our past together, but I guess that’s what makes him who he is and me who I am. I remember. He forgets. We see the world accordingly. What was happening in Eadsville, you ask? Well, far as I could tell, a bunch of blue collar blokes were getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of mosquitoes as they tried to tie a bunch of rafts together, do some digging, and seize control of a mighty River? But how you gonna control something as wild and natural as a River? How do you tame something as beautiful as that? I was there, and Huck Finn was too, and we both knew that was some proper bull shit.

The following is a narrative account combined from the recollected memories of Russell Westbrook and James Harden and the time they spent together and apart in Eadsville. As you will see, the narrative holds more tightly to the Westbrook version of the narrative. But it should also be noted that the reason for this perspective is simply because Harden’s accounts of his experience evolved into a set of formulas and equations meant to alter the course of the River and humanity’s relationship to the River. In other words, you’re reading Westbrook’s account because Harden’s is already well-documented. After all, he won and the Westbrooks, as they have throughout history, lost:  

When Russell Westbrook encountered James Harden, he barely recognized the man. For one thing, the man’s beard blended with the times as something less than a rebel’s yell and something more in line with the times. In other words, everyone at the time wore long beards and eccentric mustaches. Doubtful? Simply look at the presidents beyond Lincoln and before Teddy. As humanity carved up the wilderness, they retired from reigning in the wilderness sprouting on their own faces.

The other reason Westbrook almost didn’t recognize Harden was because the latter stood on the deck of a mighty ship barreling down the Mississippi at full throttle. Westbrook, however, was not on the ship. He stood outside a circle of engineers and politicians and men with an interest in the River as currency.

A man named Cliff Paul stood in a crowd at the end of a long pier. He was listing off deductibles and probabilities and risk assessments for whatever event was about to transpire. He read through a brief backstory that to Westbrook sounded a great deal like a historical timeline. You know, point A followed by point B followed by Point so on and so forth. Westbrook could no longer fathom such a rational view of time, at least not as he waded through the shallow Gulf where River, land, and sea were all the same and especially after having witnessed the Battle of New Orleans taking place before the dinosaurs.

Here, the world ended and began as a wasteland of smooth, gray silt. Westbrook could both see and believe in that eternal form.

Prior to standing off the shoulders of businessmen, engineers, and prospectors, Westbrook climbed aboard the wooden platform. He could sense the tension in the crowd of men as they peered into the distance. They looked for something — a sign from the future they had carved from the River’s mouth — as all men in any age do, but he did not know the particulars. He did not know the difference between a gnat’s wing and a speck of modernity dawning.

He didn’t know that in an earlier age, from this very site, a man had described this crossing between land and sea in the following terms:

“The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters, and mingling with the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf. I never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance to of the Mississippi. Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another Bolgia from its horrors.”  

Soon Westbrook gathered that these men were part of the D’Antoni Commission, that they oversaw the construction and maintenance of levees, jetties, and eddies all along the young nation’s waterways. And, today, well, today was going to put their engineering to the test.

Mosquitoes and gnats swarmed, as did concerns about the newly constructed jetties not being deep enough.

Some of the men gathered were buzzing with the notion that this was their last chance. They were holdovers from an older and fading generation. They were financially strapped. They were being pulled in all directions by the demands in which a lifetime becomes tangled with the talents of other men from other places and cannot be separated.

“What is it?” asked the bystander Cliff Paul.

“A telegraph, sir.”

“Well . . . .”

“It asks: Shall we run in slow and steady?”

“Dear God, no, let her go at full speed.”

The man walked away at a brisk pace. He sent the wire.

Hours later a men spotted the oceangoing steamer, but mistakenly referred to it as a clipper ship. They lacked the language to describe the future’s common tools. Still, the modern beast barreled towards the mouth of the river. The ship’s body was 280 feet long and 1,182 tons, and drawing 14 feet, 7 inches.

The ship’s speed continued to surge. The men gathered on the pier worried about whether she might gouge herself open with a violence born from her own power, but Cliff Paul didn’t appear to share such concerns. He smiled a devil’s grin and adjusted his spectacles.

A white line rose under the ship’s black hull, the rising wake etching itself on the ship’s mountainside like a line of white snow.

She went through! The sentiment surged through the group of men, elevating them to something more than mere mortals, at least for the time being.

“Someone wire D’Antoni! Cap’n Harden is through the channel!” yelled a voice Westbrook did not know.

He turned to someone and asked, “What fucking year is it? And why are we all so damn excited about a damn boat?”

And a man with a mustache, who looked not so much born from the frontier but an embodiment of the frontier responded: “I thought you’d never ask, sir.”

“Steven, is that you?”

“Aye, we’ve been a long time looking, Russ.”

“How’d you know I’d be here?”

“We followed the water. We did that and we waited for you to rebound.”

And Westbrook smiled wide and licked his lips. He was hungry for the idea that had always shaped the West. He was hungry for revenge.

“Where do we find Durant?” he asked. And, surprisingly, the man from New Zealand had an answer.

While Russell Westbrook headed up the River in search of Kevin Durant, James Harden and Chris Paul and the rest of the D’Antoni Commission celebrated the construction of the eddies at the River’s mouth by adopting a levees-only approach to the rest of the River’s body, from the Gulf all the way to Minnesota.

While they hailed each levee’s construction and ever-increasing height as a marvel of modern ingenuity, they were also carving out the shape for future floods. The building of taller levees essentially allowed for the River to deepen, which also meant the River continued to carry larger and larger volumes of water. When the rains came, and the rains were always destined to come, the River they attempted to tame thrashed its wild jaws against the cages they had built. In essence, they dared the water to run . . . and run it would. Drop by drop. Splash by splash. Wild Thompson by wild, bruising Thompson.

Eventually, they would head north, to Memphis and the supposed high ground as a means to escape the gathering flood in the years prior to 3035 K.D. Eventually, too, they would be overcome by a great and catastrophic flood.

*****

The truck eased onto the main road. Lionel said something aimless about being wary of the law. The three men all either grunted or nodded in affirmation. Their responses were limited, even if they themselves did not ponder the number of acceptable variables. The truck picked up speed and rattled with the rustic purr of engines kept alive in backyard garages and lawns strewn with zombie car parts.

The truck’s cab felt snug as a rabbit’s womb with all three men curled in the confines of its cracked interior. Tony drove, reliable and without rush. LaMarcus, not Kawhi, sat riding shotgun, packing heat so as to make the position more than figurative. Courtney Lee rode in the middle, maneuvering his legs so Tony could still reach the gearshift, almost as if riding side saddle to a rodeo. The radio played nothing at all. Courtney had ridden with some of Z-Bo’s younger drivers and they sometimes let the radio soak the cab and highway in liquid rhythms, but not Tony. Tony preferred silent droughts — he was, after all, the Grindfather. Every once in a while he handed out plates of wisdom to the young pups Z-Bo found in and around the streets of Memphis, and he did so on this drive as the webbed branches caught the sun at twilight and wrapped it in deep paralysis. The darkness congealed around the outside edges of the road and Tony’s voice became an ember for everything, including the lonely headlights.

He leaned over the steering wheel:  

“See… man ain’t like a dog. And when I say ‘man,’ I’m talking about man as in mankind, not man as in men. Because men, well, we a lot like a dog. You know, we like to piss on things. Sniff a bitch when we can. Even get a little pink hard-on the way they do. We territorial as shit, you know, we gonna protect our own. But man, he know about death. Got him a sense of history. Got religion. See… a dog, man, a dog don’t know shit about no birthdays or Christmas or Easter bunny, none of that shit. And one day God gonna come calling, so you know, they going through life carefree. But people like you and me, man, we always guessing. Wondering, ‘What if?’ You know what I mean? So when you say to me, ‘Hey, I don’t think we should be doing this,’ I gotta say, baby, I don’t think we should be doing this neither, but we ain’t gonna get no move on in this world, lying around in the sun, licking our ass all day. I mean, we man. I mean, you riding bitch and all, but we man. So with this said, you tell me what it is you wanna do with your life.”

When the Grindfather broke into such tangents, he sucked the oxygen from a room. Other individuals never understood whether his visions of how the world works were indecent and true or if they were tokens fit for pawn shop inventories.

On this particular night, LaMarcus, still not Kawhi, bobbed his head and whispered: “That’s beautiful.” Courtney neither confirmed nor denied the monologue’s effectiveness.

They drove on, thinking about dogs and loyalty. They pulled over at a gas station. A crossroad grocery store was tucked away behind the pumps. They wandered its aisles like scavengers in a dream, down aisles of toilet paper and canned goods, down aisles of pencils and other items of household usefulness, down aisles of candy and beer.

When they walked out of the store and the screen door rapped shut on the door frame behind them, Tony turned to Courtney: “Maybe you make the drive this time.”

“You sure?” asked Courtney.

“Yeah, these old hands could use a rest from whipping that wheel around.” He flexed his hands open and shut, the tendons rising on the backs of his hands looked like the wires hidden inside a piano.

The men loaded back in the truck this time with Courtney and Tony having switched places. LaMarcus still rode shotgun and both men watched him as if he might not belong.

Courtney’s foot fell heavy on the gas. They needed to make time. Rumor had it they weren’t just dropping off a shipment, but picking up a shipment. The road bit into the wooded bluff like a curl of barbed wire. Courtney turned the wheel in kind. He barely had time to notice. The brakes strained to halt the truck’s forward momentum, and Courtney could feel through the metal frame all those crates in back itching to collapse on the cab.

The automobile sat sideways in the road, and the trees lining the margins rose like bars to a cage. The truck skidded to a stop.

“Damn!” said Courtney.

“Be ready,” said Tony, peering through the windshield, not trusting the mechanisms of the universe and its highways to coincidence. “Be ready with that shotgun.”

Courtney thought to himself, we’ll find out who’s true now.

“Ease out the door, LaMarcus,” said Tony. “Courtney, when he’s clear, I’m gonna slide over. You watch the left side of the road.”

When LaMarcus opened the door and stepped out, high beams flooded the cab. A gun sounded and then a voice called for all their weapons to be piled in the road on the passenger side of the truck. LaMarcus didn’t take much convincing to lower his shotgun. Tony and Courtney made eye contact, and Tony, the Grindfather, raised a gun in the big fellow’s direction. A shot rang out, glass broke, and Tony gasped as his gun clanked off the truck and into the road, firing a stray bullet into the truck’s front tire. The wound exhaled, and Tony concluded the sequence: “Motherfucker.”

A voice called for Courtney to turn off the truck’s headlights. He responded in kind. Tony wrapped his hand in the tail end of his shirt. Blood permeated the worm denim, turning it a deep shade of purple. The lights preventing the three men from seeing past the truck clicked off, and a squadron of bats flapped over the highway.

“I want you and you to stay near the truck,” the man pointed at LaMarcus and Tony. “And I want you to start walking back down the highway.”

“And why should any of us listen to you?” asked Courtney.

The man reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a wallet and flipped it open. He was a man with a badge. Courtney noticed the two larger men with mustaches who stood behind him on either side. They were definitely cops, or at least men who looked like cops. Courtney grimaced. All of this had to be some sort of set up. He looked at LaMarcus. Then, for a split second, he recalled walking to the truck with a kid named Kawhi. When had the two swapped places? It didn’t make much sense.

Tony spat to the side. “Lookin’ at that badge you’re a bit outside your jurisdiction.”

“We’re part of a US Marshals investigation.”

“Sure, and I guess putting a bullet in me was all a matter of duty.”

“Looked like you were taking aim at that man of yours. I was preventing a homicide.”

“He ain’t no man of mine.”

“Well, all the better for the two of you to ride with us. You,” and he pointed the gun back at Courtney, “get to walking. Your part’s done here.”

Courtney eyed the three barrels aiming in his direction. He shook his head at the mustached men, who were now shorter and clean-shaven. One of them now wore a black hood. The angry-frog-looking-man cued his exit by cocking his gun. With very little he could do, Courtney turned around and started walking back down the road, into the darkness, under a canopy of wooden arches.

As he walked, he heard the man tell Tony and Kawhi — it was Kawhi again, not LaMarcus: “My name’s Russell Westbrook, and I’ll be riding shotgun. Drive as if I was here all along. I believe we’re all headed to the same place.”

About an hour later, Courtney saw a wedge of light hanging in the darkness, and he approached the roadside market for a second time that night. The hooded light illuminated the screen door, draping the entrance in brown moth wings and other vibrations of the nocturnal void.

He crossed the packed earth between the road and the door. The drops of rain caused it to dimple under his heels. Inside the store, he asked the clerk: “How long would it take a man to hitch a ride from here?”

“Depends . . . where you headed?”

“Not far.”

“Well, from here, some go south to Orleans and there’s lots of places between here and there, mostly hidden, so if you ain’t aware of what you’re lookin’ for, you ain’t gonna be findin’ it. Others head northwest. Arkansas is that ways. Ain’t much else. You lookin’ for the King’s Road? It’s just a myth. Hocus pocus and what not. You look like a man aimin’ for Atlanta, maybe Charlotte. Them’s both east of here. You can get to Charlotte if you head for Knoxville. Go up in them hills and come down Asheville side.”

“I ain’t traveling that far,” said Courtney, but hearing the possibilities eroded the confidence in his eyes and voice. He really didn’t know what the future held.

“Say, have I seen you before?”

“I doubt it. You ever been to Florida?”

“I have, but that ain’t it. You was in here earlier. You’re one of Z-Bo’s boys. You were in here with the Grindfather himself.”

“I wouldn’t know nothin’ about all that.”

“Shit, back in the day, I sold White Chocolate out of this here store, but them boys bought me out, even copped my recipe.”

“I doubt that.”

“You can ask around.”

Courtney didn’t place much stock in the man’s claims. This part of the state was filled with such men, their stakes to past glory, and the unverifiable truth sinking deep in the Mississippi mud. The rain picked up. Courtney could hear it pelting the roof and washing away the season’s grime.

“There’s a Frenchman sometimes stops around here. Goes by the name Batum. He’ll be willing to offer you a ride, but there’ll be a price. Always is I’ve found.”

Courtney sat shotgun on his way back to the old house. The man driving hadn’t given him a name. But he spoke with a French accent. He introduced himself with what Courtney assumed must be some sort of tagline greeting. Sometimes the rumors make you, but sometimes you make the rumors. Courtney didn’t quite understand the line without context, almost as if he had arrived in the middle of a story already being told. He debated in his head how to make the man stop near the old house without revealing where Z-Bo and Tony hid the trucks. 

He could tell the Frenchman about the Grindhouse and the maze of back wood stills and holding houses. Sometimes the truth is the best place to hide a secret. He could even offer the man a case of Grindhouse Gin. Of course, all the snooping around by strangers of late and the law stopping a major shipment that very night suggested maybe the truth had already been blown to kingdom come. He looked around the car for something heavy he could handle. Something that could knot the back of a man’s skull.

Then again, he could just roll out the car as they buzzed by on the highway. If he survived the fall, he could run or hide. He could avoid the man tracking him through the woods. But maybe he wouldn’t survive the fall. Maybe he would stand up with a cracked shin bone poking through his skin. Maybe the man would track him down. He was pretty sure this man was named Batum, just as the old store clerk had suggested. What kind of man was Batum? In just a few hours, Courtney’s world had swollen and festered like an overripe melon, and his anxiety now swarmed round it like mad hornets in a hailstorm.

Tangled up in teal, all of Courtney’s worried plotting went up in smoke when the dark countryside’s static nature blew apart.

A smoking pyre of orange blazed above the treetops. The inferno swayed and plumed, fireflies heating the night sky. Where the old plantation should have been, there was a wide mouth spitting fire.

Even the man Courtney figured for Batum, who knew little of the house, if anything, slowed down to watch history burn with some sense of mournful pride. Like a folk song written in blood and smoke, both men sensed the words and understanding in the other’s silence. The air poured into the car’s open windows tasting of long dead leaves crackling in space. The car rolled with little sound or effort. Something out of a projectionist’s prophetic dream. The shadow of what looked to be a man flickered along the reeling ribbon of trees. His limbs erratic and rigid. He resembled a marionette in the moonlit fire.

“Did you see that?” asked the Frenchman, and then something happened that made the question rather obtuse and unnecessary. A body landed on the windshield. Blood smeared the glass. Thick like oil. Stranger still, though, were the wires hanging loose and sparking from the open torso, as if the body were not entirely human. The man’s face flattened on the glass for a brief moment. He had seen the man that afternoon, and then Courtney felt the automobile strain for more speed.

He felt the roots of the woods, of Tony and Z-Bo, pull at his heart and brain and then nothing made sense that night, if ever.

The last time he had seen that old man, the gray old fox had been pouring his guts into a notebook. That made sense. Wires and circuitry did not. As he registered the contrast in the man’s condition between then and now, the body slumped and slid off the car’s hood and rolled into a ditch.

Batum did not stop.

A man holding a bloody chainsaw flashed in the headlights. The car swerved around his overalls and headband. He looked a great deal like Z-Bo. What the fuck was going on? wondered Courtney, but he and Batum were blazing down the highway, towards the east, away from the blood and into the dawn.

Light descended into the dark dampness from the stairwell, and they could see the water beading on the clay brick walls, almost as if the walls were weeping. A weight shifted on the wooden stairs. They could feel it as much as they could hear it. A shadow emerged in the lighted area, growing larger until it eclipsed the light source. The darkness returned. Then they heard a taut string pop and the whole room lit up.

“Definitely not a cow,” said Pop.

“Those are buffalo bones,” said Z-Bo. “We’ve used bobcat blood and formaldehyde, but it’s not close, despite being from the same genus as a jaguar. I expect you two already know that, though, seeing as you both showed up here, sniffing around like dogs after a bitch in heat. Sorry to disappoint, but we’ve moved on.”

“Any idea what he’s on about, Sam?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Sam,” said Z-Bo, “you gonna act brave because Pop’s in the room? You’re the one who told me he was on his way.”

Sam didn’t respond and Pop knew what Z-Bo was saying must be at least partly true. Sam was well aware of Pop’s movements. You can only do a performance so many times and catch the same audience by surprise.

“I’ve learned a lot talking to ol’ Sam here, but I expect I’ll learn more talking to you.” He turned to Pop, resting his hands on his thighs so he could read the other man’s face at eye level.

Pop: “About what? We’re not exactly in the same business you and I.”

“I doubt we’re even the same domain or superkingdom, much less the same species, old man, but we’ll get to that. First, is it true he’s on the move again?”

“Is who on the move again? That buffalo? I should dare to believe he’s not.”

“No, not the buffalo,” said Z-Bo, recalling how the idea for the buffalo came from an old timer named Walton. “No, I’m referring to the Creator — the fucking logo himself.”

“Logo? What’s he on about, Sam?”

“I wouldn’t know, Gregg. Maybe you should look in one of your notebooks. You’ve hidden them all over the damn map.”

Ah, Pop thought, the man is learning. He wondered which of his journals had been lifted from a hiding spot. Did they know all that he knew?

“He told me you would, Pop. He told me if anyone knew, it was you.” Z-Bo grinned and bending down he rolled his pant leg, revealing the handle of a knife. He unsheathed it and flipped it in the air. He caught it. Pop did not recognize the action. This part of the story was either new or beyond his memories. “I thought the game was one thing, but now I’m hearing there’s more to it and I want some answers— that’s all.”

“Answers to what, man?”

“To why some of us live out the same ending every day of every season.”

“Is it really that repetitive?”

“Doesn’t seem fair, my man. Doesn’t seem fair.”

Pop turned to the man tied up next to him. “What exactly did you tell him?”

Z-Bo sat idly by, flipping the knife end over end and catching it.

“Sam, what did you tell him?”

Sam searched the room for reasonable answers, but there was only light and darkness. He wanted something less stark and obvious to say than whatever propositioned him as a possible answer.

Z-Bo grinned. “He said you write the stories.”

Pop glared at Sam.

“Look, he already knew most of it. There wasn’t much left for me to say.”

“I don’t write the stories,” said Pop, “The stories just are. I simply follow them, as if they were breadcrumbs or string winding through a labyrinth.”

Z-Bo held tightly to the knife. “So you’re telling me you didn’t choose to be here?”

“For the most part — yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying, Zach.”

“I don’t hear that often. Just Zach.”

“What were you expecting to learn with us tied up in a fruit cellar?”

Z-Bo walked over to the banister hanging over the steps like an arm from a separated shoulder. He motioned to a series of notches cut into the wood. Too many to count from where Pop sat.

“I was hoping to learn something different than all these other times.”

Pop apparently wasn’t the only one keeping a diary of events.

“Well, Z-Bo, it appears we have something in common. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

Z-Bo laughed. “This guy! Pop, man, do you not remember how this usually ends? Like five times out of six it’s always the same.”

“I just follow the schedule.”

Z-Bo laughed again.

Pop looked at the man with the knife and then back to the one sitting in a coil of nylon ropes. He repeated an earlier question: “What the hell did you tell him, Sam?”

“I told him we only act in response to the stories you write. I said you’re the source.”

“Sam, why the fuck would you say a thing like that? You worked in the office. You know how it works.”

“I don’t remember that, Gregg.”

“Then how the fuck do we know each other?”

“You set my guys up.”

“Set your guys up?”

“You turned them against one another . . . one by one.”

“And how did I do that? That doesn’t even make sense.”

“The stories, Gregg.”

“But, Same, we don’t write them — don’t you remember?”

Sam did not remember. He could not remember a time when he worked for The Admiral-Constitution. He only recalled ever being a US Marshal. Even his childhood was a foreign haze to him.

Z-Bo looked at Sam and then at Gregg, parroting the professions of his captives. “I doubt either of you is telling the truth to be honest. Pop, what’s the script say? Don’t you know what happens next?”

Z-Bo continued: “Normally, one of your boys would bust through that door and rumble down those stairs. He’d be clumsy, but he’d get the job done. It could be a little French man or that quiet kid with braids. It could be a large sulking fellow or a brazen Argentine. Once upon a time, it was that dude with eyes wide like a deer’s. I don’t know, but it ain’t happening this time.”

“It ain’t happening this time?”

“Nah, this time I sent your man on the truck with my Tony, the Grindfather.”

“So you’re in control?”

“Yeah, I’m in control.”

The knife blade bit into the banister.

“Sam,” said Pop, “what’s going to happen with that truck?”

Sweat beaded on Sam’s brow.

“Did you tell him that, Sam?”

“What’s he talking about?” asked Z-Bo.

Sam eyed Pop with one part disgust and the other part desperation. “My man is going to stop that truck.”

“I know,” said Z-Bo, “that’s not why we’re here.”

He walked closer to the two men.

“Assuming we’re in a space we’ve never been before, what’s the script say, Pop?”

Pop hesitated. How much do you tell a person holding a knife when both your arms are tied?

“The script says you cut each of us open. You think we’re robots, or at least one of us is. But you don’t have to do that, Zach. I’m here to say you have a choice.”

“So this is one of them choose your own adventure books?”

“Sure,” said the man, but Z-Bo struggled to believe his nemesis. He opted for a follow up question instead: “Why did you come here, old man? If you knew I was going to slit you like a pig, why did you come?”

“Damn it! I needed to fucking know too.” The old man slumped in the chair, and Z-Bo leaned over him, looking to discover the truth. He pressed the blade to skin. He needed to know as well. They all needed to know.

III.

Somewhere in the mountains between Tennessee, Virginia, the Carolinas, and God knows what else, maybe West Virginia, Batum and Courtney parted ways. Life is like that. Some people and places hold no significance for the others encountered along the way, and Courtney was along the way to somewhere, even if he didn’t know exactly where somewhere might be, or even who it might be.

One of the last conversations the two men shared wasn’t even much of a conversation. In the quiet after seeing one man gutted and another standing tall with a chainsaw, Batum had asked Courtney, “Did you want me to stop?”

Courtney had not answered. What answer would have been both truthful and appropriate? Who stops at such violent scenes? Of course, deep down, one wants to stare at the inner organs and their circuitry, and of course, deep down, no one wants to see any of that at all. The reflection of the inner self is, if at all beautiful, also disturbing. A miracle that bleeds is not everlasting. So, while Courtney wanted to look, he only wanted to stare as long as he was still moving in the opposite direction.

They drove in silence then, in that time after sighting the backwoods massacre, until Batum decided the time was right for a ghost story. He told a tale about his time in Portland. The story did little to make the roaring chainsaw they had just witnessed go quiet, and the story did little to dim the roaring house fire either. All it did was make Courtney realize that such violent tantrums were scattered all across the continent, in its hidden crevices, nooks, and crannies, and maybe one shouldn’t put too much stock in any single sign of the apocalypse, when the world was full of endings.

Batum dropped Courtney off, and Courtney watched the taillights glow until the bend in the road swallowed them inside the dark-throated wilderness. Stripped of all other identities, he was now a pilgrim.

Courtney Lee wrapped himself in a blue tarp and spent the night in the slumped ruins of a roadside ditch. The scattered round stones suggested at one time or another someone had built a wall along its edges, but that wall was no more. He nestled in the leaves, his breathing shallow and indiscreet, as if to avoid the talons of hooting owls. In the bowels of that frosty gray night that passed over him like some archangel and he a blood-marked doorway, he dreamed three versions of his life’s story.

In the first, a saw flew forward and bit back in the groove cut across an ancient oak tree. The sawdust swirled under a workman’s breath like a sandy cyclone in a yellow desert. The saw cut back and forth with great force and rhythm and then slowed with the waning of the dream, trembling, faltering, rusting and growing still. He remembered its warped band sitting dead in the wood without much purpose.

and he answered Shane

A man’s voice called out the name Tayshaun, and Courtney looked up from the useless blade after what appeared to be many years and attempted to respond but he could not recall a language with any particular meaning.

In the second dream, Courtney rode a horse into an unknowable darkness. He searched the darkness for a light he could store in a horn, much like the ones used on Beale Street casting die on green felt lawns, but larger. In the dream, he found no light and the shape of the horn carried the same darkness as the world surrounding it. He rode on blinking and unblinking and unable to tell the difference. Somewhere in that barren womb, a voice called out, asking for his name, and he answered Shane.

In the third dream, he sat at a bar in a bowling alley. A blues song may have been playing. Or maybe it was a folk song. Perhaps something by Stevie Nash. Or maybe a Bob Dylan song covered by Stevie Nash. The only intelligible lyric went something like: It takes a franchise like you to get through to the bear in me.

It was trash, and Courtney knew it. He sat on a stool and leaned into the bar, possibly looking for someone to notice him, to serve him. A man in an olive green suit sat next to him. A cigar sat in his lips and flared orange as Auerbach’s when he exhaled. He told Courtney something wise and true, but Courtney could not remember the advice upon waking. He did, however, remember the rumble of falling pins and the mechanical sound of the machine setting them up time after time. That and the faceless people rolling strikes stuck with him. Oh, and one more thing: the man in the green suit called him Quincy.

In the morning, Courtney removed the tortilla tarp from his body and moved deeper into the woods and higher into the tangled slopes of the mountain range. Like a compass, he felt pulled to the northern edges of the map by invisible waves traversing air and space.

He wandered from the road, the ditch, the fortified tree line. He heard rainwater dripping slow and thick in the needles of pine and cedar. The sound grew heavy like sap, like tar, like time itself, and he felt in the dim light that the world must have found some way to swallow its own body whole in the night. The canopy overhead blotted out the sun, and he traveled like a revenant in the eclipse of one world drafting another.

The woods stayed silent and still. The woods made like stone. The path retreated from attempting a direct assault upon the slope and followed a river’s swollen waters as they meandered in the walls of the world’s embankments, through frontiers long ago forgotten and passed over by pilgrims and progress alike. Finally, the current sounded as more than a murmur as it broke and hissed from a pool of mirrored glass into molten shards taking other shapes on their way to other places. But soon even the melting sounded like white noise in constant mimicry of the old silence.

Sometimes a slit in the forest’s canvas rooftop allowed the man to gauge the direction of falling shadows and, in this way, he knew in what direction the arrowhead of his path should cut through the bone-marrowed hills.

The land gurgled and spat. Roots reached down into swamp-like mud, groping the mystery. He placed a hand on a tree trunk and pulled it away, glistening. He dried his palm on his denim threads. He dried his palm on the blue dampness, the tarp having failed to prevent the groundwater from reaching his body in the night. He shivered and urged his legs to seek higher ground, and climbed upward like some young and rough Billy goat. He walked under a cathedral of branches and watched the birds eyeing him from wet perches. They bowed their heads like old men waiting in depression era soup lines. They narrated his sad story in screaming caws and interrogative hoots. And he had no answer other than his body’s movements through the trees and over the dirt.

As he moved on, the earth again changed its shape, his steps once again finding and tracing the kingdoms come and gone. He clung to the rising walls of revelatory rock and scattered boulders. His hands failed to translate the crags of their testaments. So many fragments without name or origin. He maneuvered through a maze of stone razors. The trees shrank in stature. They hobbled on dry, thirsty roots. The air grew both thin and cloudy, ghostlike and full of mist, like a paper tapestry attempting to soak up the blood of gods and men and children. Squirrels marked him at a distance with idle chatter. He must have stood before them as some wounded and wandering stag, removed from the hunt and yet still haunted by its call. He reflected on the growing barrenness of the terrain and wondered, where all the women at? And then he thought no more and kept moving toward the unknown Minotaur that was sure to greet him whenever he reached the center of his corkscrewed journey.

For some reason, he continued to believe in a kernel of meaning, and perhaps he did so because he could not solve the riddle: if a bootlegger lays down in the woods, does anyone see him? He might as well be talking about trees, he thought.

He reached one peak. Then another. His steps rose. Then they fell. He crossed over a creek running and crashing its way down a grottoed mountainside. He could tell the water was moving faster than normal, carrying more weight and momentum than years past. The rains he had seen near Memphis had been here to. It seemed the whole world might be bursting at the seams with potential floods, and here moss cloaked the rocks and trees in the shades of neon frogs. He pulled at its green tufts and clambered along like some child too lost and hopeless to even wail. He imagined himself appearing like some cat limping with a busted spine at the end of an essay with no meaning. He thought long and hard on those last two words. He thought and arrived at no meaning. The pattern repeated so on and so forth without ever arriving at any distinct moment of truth, only wide-ranging emotions riding on a pendulum.

He arrived at a clearing, or glade. Somewhere in his ancestral lineage were people who remembered such names and labels for things. They knew how to account for the world and its hidden places without ever rendering them unbearable in the transparency of definition.

In the glade or clearing or whatever it was, smoke rose from a shabby cabin, its walls vine-covered and slumped as if the structure might slip back into the world’s navel. The rain clouds and smoke shared the space swallowing the bent chimney in such a way that the fire’s breath and the water’s birth could not be distinguished. There was neither end nor beginning, only shades of distant gray.

A man sat on the porch, drifting forward and back, as if rocking through the paned axis between the real and the unreal. On a joist hung a net of dripping wet catfish, their whiskers protruding the spaces between the roped coils. Courtney strained his ears in an effort to capture the sounds of their wriggling movements; their gills opening and closing on the particles of poisoned air. He heard instead the thin patter of rain pelting the cabin’s tin-sheeted roof.

Always with the rain.

As he walked closer, he noticed three men sat on the porch, not one. The pale light from the cabin’s interior glowed out its jack-o-lantern windows with the angst of a Promethean hillbilly. And the dark gray world swirling around the cabin looked as if it planned to lay siege to such persistence with a vulture’s appetite.

In the smoky mist that enveloped the glade, Courtney recognized one of the men from a story he had once read. The man’s face was now covered with storm cloud’s beard, and his eyes danced like pinwheels in the afterglow of having seen the acidic fire of far off galaxies. Courtney could not remember the book’s title or where he had read it and he could not say for certain whether this man on the porch was OJ Mayo for certain, but if not, he was most certainly a dead ringer for the man Courtney remembered having awaited the arrival of Steve Francis at the foot of some mighty tree ready to be felled by an ax.

The scene burned with detail in Courtney’s mind, and he wondered for a moment whether his trespassing here might be mistaken for this other character, whether someone might at least call out the name Steve as he approached and he might wave haphazardly by mistake. But, instead, no one took notice as each gesture of the leg delivered him closer to the porch’s rickety steps.  

The figure next to OJ, who now didn’t look so much like OJ but someone else Courtney didn’t recognize, was yakkin’ his jaw about one thing or another. Courtney could not quite make out the man’s words, except for one: he kept referring to someone named Zeke. The man in the rocking chair, whose motions Courtney had studied from afar did not look up from his work. His eyes weighing the wooden figure at rest in his hand. In his other, he held a knife, and with each stroke of the blade, he peeled away a layer of pulp revealing the details of a small, wooden bear. Courtney then noticed a whole row of tiny figurines lined up between the porch’s wooden planks and the railing’s bottom rail.

“The man’s expecting you,” said the creator of the chess set, whose name was Chris Wallace.

“What man??”

“Zeke from Cabin Creek,” called the man who had been explaining the ways of the world to the bearded star gazer, who was now neither bearded nor starry-eyed in the slightest. “Zeke has been waiting on your sorry ass, which means so have we. I can’t even count how many nets I’ve sewn waiting on you to come trudging over that damn hill.”

Courtney looked at this older man’s hands and noticed the finely knotted ropes draped over his lap like a blanket full of holes. Courtney did not recognize this man, but he felt a strange kinship with him, as if they had at one time or another held the same position as they chased after the same hopeless dream.

“You say he’s in there?”

“Where else would he be?”

“Be easy on him, Tyreke.”

Without knowing exactly why, Courtney heeded their commands and approached the door, with its pale orange light creeping through its clapboard cracks.

Inside was a roaring hearth. On every flat surface, including the slanted mantle, were scattered rows of clocks and figurines. The crackling spitfire hissed and the second hands ticked. A ruckus of burning modernity, with every crackle calculated and carved.

Beyond the hearth in the far corner of the room sat a man at a piano. Courtney called to him: “Vince? Is that you?”

The man’s head hung over the ebony and ivory keys like a stalactite. Notes like those found in the Grindhouse arose in the vapors of burning wood and swirled round the room like memories stenciled on moth wings.

“No, that’s not right. Goddammit!” muttered a voice speaking to Courtney and yet not. “For fuck’s sake, the entrance should be dour, more businesslike even and not so much old friends being reacquainted.” Courtney could not make out the man’s face as he stumbled through his tantrum with his back to the fire. One side of the cabin’s confines was better lit than the other, and this man stared off into the shadows, unable to watch the action taking place in the room head on. His hand scrawled something in a notebook.

Courtney felt the muscles in his face tighten, his expression grew perplexed. Or was it more perplexed?

“Run it again,” said the man, and Courtney’s body walked backwards out the door.

“Be easy on him, Tyreke.”

Without knowing exactly why, Courtney heeded their commands and approached the door, with its pale orange light creeping through its clapboard cracks.

Inside was a roaring hearth. On every flat surface, including the slanted mantle, were scattered rows of clocks and figurines. The crackling spitfire hissed and the second hands ticked. A ruckus of burning modernity, with every crackle calculated and carved.

“Is that player over yonder not Vince Carter?” he asked, his voice sounding more Victorian and less modern. He made a mental note to strain against the tendency the next time he found it necessary to speak. The man stepped forward from the shadowy corner, his hands clasped behind his back in an effort to compose himself. He sighed, “That’s not it either.”

Courtney shook his head, as if awaking from a dream.

The man continued,“He’s an early model, not quite the verisimilitude achieved with later efforts. In the vernacular, it’s about the process.”

Courtney could not place the voice or the man’s face beside a name. He could not give the presence before him a definition. Still, he believed the nasally twang was something he recognized, as if this encounter were not their first. The man stepped forward, and in the slight lean of his body within the flame-lit room, Courtney saw the shape and stature of an iconic ghost; a white silhouette that hung like a veil in all his dreams. This phantom wiped his hands on a purple and gold towel and returned to looking more human, at least for the moment.

“He’s something of an homage to an earlier time. Then again, aren’t we all?”

To Courtney, the man’s voice sounded strange, as if he too were wrestling with accents and dialects, essentially hiding from some entombed version of himself.

“Even Elgin out there on the porch is not the Elgin I once knew. I had to recreate him from the sparks of my memory. I would not dare say I imagined him. If so, maybe I would have given him something to do besides sewing nets. Perhaps he could cut them too. But, then again, how does one imagine the shapes of justice if he has never sensed them? The laws we make are always in relation to the laws we learned.”

“Do I know you?” asked Courtney.

The man placed the towel on a table cluttered with gears and contraptions that reminded Courtney of a man spilling his guts on the windshield of a passing automobile. The man walked along the edges of the work table, his hand struggling to lay off the gathered springs and hinges. His fingers walked as if strolling over a piano’s keys or a prairie full of wildflowers. They cycled on an invisible plane. Underneath all the clutter were layers of maps. Some torn and coffee-stained. Others crisp and seemingly untouched. Who knew what lay beneath these layers of names and places? What would mountaintop removal do to such a geological hodgepodge?  

“Knowing is a tricky word. Do you know my voice? Maybe as some distant echo, like words to some religious text we are taught in childhood but do not recite as we venture into the dusk. But that seems far-fetched. Maybe I am but the proclamation of half-truths — the rounding of the written word. And yet that’s too poetic to be taken as the truth. Maybe you recognize my mannerisms. Maybe you have seen my movements mimicked in bodies of more adroit design. Maybe you have seen my face watching from afar. I am often there, even if behind the scenes or stenciled on the floor. Did we meet on Beale Street? Was it the old plantation house? Did we ride some transcontinental railroad? The most difficult task I have had in creating this world is preventing the anachronisms from seeping in like unwanted toxins in the groundwater. Sometimes I send Chandler out in board shorts and other times he’s dressed for the times. But it’s hard to know what these times are. I am not a player in this realm, but something more akin to the spirit. Oh Lord, I do grow weary.”

“Sir, I only asked do we know each other.”

“And I’m telling you, Courtney, that we do, but also that we don’t. If you know something, do you ask whether you know it? Or are you asking do I know you? If that’s your answer, then the answer is yes, yes, I do know you, Courtney, just as I know Tyreke out there and Elgin too. Just as I know Tony and Z-Bo and anyone else you care to recall. Greivis? Yes. Beno? Yes. Kosta Koufos? Sure. I know them all. Just as I know Shaquille and Kobe, Vlade and Eddie, Anthony Peeler and George Lynch, I know you too. But those names all belong to the past, you say, so I’ll give you some from the not so distant future: Steph and Klay, Kevin and Draymond, and, oh, wait a second, it will come to me — Blake and DeAndre. There’s not a lot I don’t know, but this isn’t really my story. I am no longer the shape of things to come, but an ideal.”

Courtney listened to the clocks ticking. He watched Vince shuffle behind this man he assumed was the one those men on the porch had referred to as Zeke from Cabin Creek. He found it strange that the piano still played, even as its player crept out of the light and into the shadowy outer realm of the cabin’s nooks and crannies. With all these sounds and broken parts, the cabin’s interior felt both large and small.

“I . . . I don’t know why I’m here,” confessed Courtney, just now, in the words of this stranger’s lost world, realizing the weirdness of not only this encounter but the depths of his own ignorance. He had trespassed, he felt, into something he did not understand, and yet this man spoke these names as if they might all mean something to Courtney. It was like being in a history class and studying a made up country that sounds more real than one’s native land. “I really don’t know why I’ve wandered here,” he said in echo of his earlier confession.

“Do you feel devoid of purpose, or do you feel liberated by the emptiness that comes from living outside expectation?”

“I . . . maybe I should be going.”

“Where to? Charlotte? New York? Whatever lies beyond this moment?”

“I . . . I just don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”

“Courtney, though, where else do you belong?”

The question hung in the air; unsolved for an eternity. In many ways, Courtney was comfortable at calling off the investigation. I should leave, he thought. A log hissed in the bowels of the hearth’s flaming serpents. The clocks recorded the time. Courtney’s gaze returned to the pale man in a black suit before him. The man held up a hand in the manner one might offer an egg to a child.

The discovery dawned on Courtney’s face: “I’ve been here before, haven’t I? You moved the piano.”

“Yes, Courtney, you have and you’re right, I did.”

“You said it wasn’t perfect that the acoustics weren’t quite right. We moved it and then you called cut, like a director would, and then started it all over from the beginning.”

The man nodded.

“But I don’t remember the beginning.”

“You never do,” said the man. “The beginning is something even I have trouble remembering. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I have imagined it.”

“Is it always the same?”

“Sometimes.”

“Your name’s not Zeke. In fact, you hate that name.”

“We don’t always get to choose our nicknames.”

“But you made all this — you’re the Logo.”

“I am.”

“Then why not make your own nicknames.”

“Because I am borrowing from an older world. The real Elgin Baylor did call me that. I can’t change it. It happened.”

“But why not? Who says that’s a rule?”

“If I change it, then this world is not the world I lost.”

“I wasn’t supposed to end up here, was I?”

“You were not. Every time, though, you meet expectation.”

“I will try and do better.”

“Please do, Courtney. It’s really all I ask.”

“Next time, Mr. West, it’ll be perfect.”

“I should hope so, until then, though, we have work to do.”

“As always?”

“As always.”

“I’m all ears.”

“If you can, try and remember some of this conversation. You see, of all my creations, I designed you to be my antithesis. You are not rooted! You are not born with expectation.”

“But you said –”

“Being born without expectation and meeting expectation are not mutually exclusive positions.”

Courtney remained unconvinced.

“You’re an admirable specimen, but you lack the gifts of so many others, and yet here you are, out of habit, or some strange coincidental desire to be like those with talent. Personally, I don’t understand why you just don’t walk away. Is it because no one would question it? Anyway, your inability to make the right decision or act in the right way at the right time means I have not made things as they should be. They are not right, so you and I must return back to the drawing board and find what it is I lost.”

“Who are these others?”

“The list is quite short, but you need to remember it. You need to defy the path you know and find other paths. The sequence must be right. You must alter the fabric of this world’s history. I can’t do it for you, that would be cheating, but you must find Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson and, if possible, and I don’t know how you will manage to do so, you must convince others in a similar position to yourself that your work is their work and give them a list of names as well. Whisper Bill Russell and Bob Cousy to the agents you take under your wing, and only then can we really reverse the tides of time. Don’t you see? This — the world entire — is built on names like yours and not mine, but you have to find them. They are not always  written, at least not yet. Your ploy to send Dwight west was brilliant, but arrived too late. You have to dig deeper into the archives.”

“How will I know the individuals I need to find then?”

“Study the dossiers.” Mr. West dropped a thick tomb in front of Courtney.

“I thought you said the men I needed were not recorded in the histories.”

“This is not a history.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a recording of lived experiences. A web of interviews I have conducted. Each checked against the testimonies of others.”

“Whose experiences then? And how?”

“There are too many involved to even count. Collectively they are all Naismith Mandeville. But, to differentiate between each narrative, each is assigned a number. You have about an hour to study the stories. Here’s a highlighter. Mark it up for all I care. You may even recognize some of your old notes, which you’ve already forgotten on multiple occasions. But you need to be both fast and thorough and then we’ll see if we cannot restore what was lost.”

“But I’m not sure I know what this is. Is it even trustworthy? How do you know all these Naismith Mandevilles aren’t lying?”

“Because every single one of you ends up here.”

“Every time?”

“Every time.”

“Here, let me show you.” The man walked across the room. He stomped his foot until he heard the sound he wanted. He pulled back the rug. He opened the trapdoor. “Bring a lamp over.”

Courtney lifted a lamp off the map table. He held it gingerly in front of him. When he reached Mr. West, the older man took the lamp and started descending a ladder. Courtney followed. At the bottom of the ladder, his feet struck a hard concrete slab. He had expected dirt or mud. He had expected something more akin to the cabin’s rustic nature. He had expected something along the lines of Z-Bo and Tony’s laboratory under the old plantation house. This was similar, but it was also different.

Mr. West swung his arm in a wide, slow arc. The light revealed an army of mannequins. They all stood as if ready to move, but none of them did. They weren’t exactly statues either.

“This is my secret,” said Mr. West. “No one else knows they’re here, not even Elgin. I’m trusting you with this secret.”

Courtney didn’t know what to say. The chasm-sized silence burdened each face in the underground bunker, including his.   

“Find a path to ruin Phil and Michael before they ruin me. Figure out how to rearrange the maps so that all this doesn’t hinge on just you. Make yourself less important by asserting the importance of others.”

“What happens to them?”

“Some are early models that have been decommissioned. For example, the Vince you saw shuffling around upstairs is not the Vince you know. Some of you possess such long memories you require more than one body, at least that’s one way of putting it. Think of the second body as an external hard drive. The problem then becomes what to do with the old hardware once it starts to unravel.”

“But aren’t they human?”

“Come on, Courtney, you saw the mess on the table upstairs, and think about all the other strange sights and sounds you’ve experienced. Do you really think Naismith Mandeville’s stories are human stories?”

“I didn’t know there were other kinds of stories.”

“Start taking notes, Courtney,” West pointed to his own brow. “I don’t want to repeat myself — that means I didn’t get any of this right the first time ad infinitum.”

“What happens when we get it right?”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“But how do I know then?”

With impatience: “I’ll let you know.”

Courtney followed the man back towards the ladder, but Mr. West wasn’t leaving. He pulled a chair from the shadows and sat it down inside the square of light beneath the trapdoor.

“Sit here.”

Courtney did as Mr. West commanded. Then Mr. West walked back towards the ladder for a second time.

“Choose.”

Mr. West extended a blue cord and a yellow cord. Maybe cord isn’t the right word. Hose would be a more apt label, except at the end of each conduit were five prongs, as if the hose could be plugged into an electrical outlet.

“What are those?”

“I think I’ve told you before, Courtney, but it’s difficult to keep this world from growing cluttered with anachronisms. Let’s just say there are things in this world you could neither imagine, nor think possible. The more you remember from this, however, the more likely you won’t go through it again. Now choose.”

“The blue one I guess.”

Mr. West hesitated. “Are you sure?”

“Is that the wrong choice?”

“There is no wrong choice, Courtney. There is simply what’s been done before and what hasn’t.”

“So if I make a choice I’ve made before, then you know how this turns out already?”

“I do.”

Courtney noticed tears welling up in Mr. West’s eyes.

“Do I always choose blue?”

“Can’t say.”

“Well, I guess I’ll stick with blue then.”

Mr. West placed the five prongs on the back of Courtney’s neck. They felt cold and metallic, and then they felt piercing. What he could not see were the thin talons extending from the metal prongs and into his skin.

“What the—”

Mr. West placed a hand on Courtney’s shoulder. “Relax, son, it’ll all be okay. The worst thing that could happen is that we end up back here having this same conversation.”

A hum began and the dark cavern beneath the log cabin began to glow. Blue veins extended throughout the bunker, each one a hose like the one currently fused to Courtney’s spinal column. Each one glowed electric blue and each neon thread led to one of the decommissioned bodies. Their liquid contents all flowed through the conduit anchored to Courtney’s neck. They all flowed into him. The talons extending from the metal prongs glowed blue, too, and then vanished into his skin.

At first, Courtney’s eyes glowed blue also, but then Mr. West snapped his fingers in front of Courtney’s face. The sound caused him to shake as waking from a deep hypnosis.

“Your reading materials, Courtney.”

Mr. West placed the Naismith Mandeville stories before him. They sat on a cart that looked like it belonged in a hospital.

“I thought you gave them to me upstairs.”

“That was the index.”

“How many are there?”

“Ninety-one unabridged acts.”

“And you want me to remember all of it?”

“I want you to try. How else will recognize what is or could be from what was?” And Mr. West turned and climbed back up the ladder. When the trapdoor closed, an incandescent light clicked on in the ceiling above, but it was unnecessary. Courtney could have read by the pulsing blue light that wasn’t so much a pulse as a constant source of energy.

When the blue light faded and all that remained were strange vapors, like a phantom aurora borealis, the trapdoor opened, the talons retreated from Courtney’s skin, and Mr. West’s voice called for Courtney to climb the ladder. He did, and when his head rose above the floorboards, a familiar song welcomed him:

Oh, the ragbear turns circles

Up and down Beale Street

I’d ask him what the Gasol was

But I know that he don’t growl

And the ladies treat me grizzly

And they furnish me with ice

But deep inside my cave

I know I can’t escape

Oh, Hubie, can you take that for data

To be stuck inside of Cancun with the

Memphis Grizz again

Courtney could not afford the time to listen. Mr. West was already headed out the door. Courtney followed, but as he walked by the table full of gears and springs and broken parts, he realized he knew to whom every odd and end had once belonged. And soon he realized he knew not only the stories, but how the stories felt. For example, he remembered the weight of Shaquille’s hammer and the sound of crashing glass in Hakeem’s butcher shop. He also remembered the the taste of a cue ball in Indiana, as if his name were Danny Granger. And his knees and back empathized with Bill Walton. He could describe in detail the experiences of not just one self, but many. But time did not allow Courtney Lee to dwell on all these details in the warm hearth’s embrace. Mr. West waited for no man, so Courtney followed the phantom out the door.

For a brief moment, the outside darkness loomed smaller than the inside of the cabin lit by flames. They walked in the rectangle of light that fell in the shape of an open door on the rain-soaked earth. At the top of its frame, Courtney pivoted and watched Vince mechanically bend and lift a burning log from the fire. The motion made the man look half-human and half-robotic, as if he had been made with two conflicting ideas in mind. For a second, the sight reminded Courtney of an amusement park in Florida. Then he remembered having never been to such a place. Some of the stories he currently experienced as memories — or were they visions? — did not fit so well with the others. He had to question the reliability of his memories’ many narrators.

“Come on, Courtney,” said the man. “Now’s the time.”

Courtney followed Mr. West up the incline, through brambles and rocks. He tripped, but Mr. West did not notice. He was driven. He climbed with purpose. As Courtney followed in his footsteps, he heard the insides of the cabin breaking and shattering. When they reached one of the mountain’s many peaks, they turned to face the burning and broken shell of the building, its size now reduced to a pitiful bonfire.

“What about Vince and those other men? What about all those bodies in the cellar?”

“I can rebuild them. The past is easy.”

The man lifted two axes.

“If you’re going to be of any use, you’ll need this.”

Courtney reached for the rugged object with an air of hesitation that hovered on gentleness.

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to unleash the flood.” He lifted the ax, held it at the ready. “We’ll keep trying until it’s perfect.”

The ax fell, biting timber.

“Is that music?”

Mr. West didn’t respond. He chopped rhythmically at the wooden wall holding back the river. He chopped with such concentrated ease that his actions appeared possessed by a program and not entirely his own.

Far, We’ve been traveling far

Without a home

But not without a star

Free, Only want to be free

We huddle close

Hang on to a dream

On the boats and on the planes

They’re coming to America

Never looking back again

They’re coming to America

Home, don’t it seem so far away

Oh, we’re traveling light today

In the eye of the storm

In the eye of the storm

The sounds caused Courtney to question who was calling the shots. Was it Mr. West? Then Courtney forgot the question and began to chop too. Their axes questioned and answered one another in the wood’s deep darkness. Water began to bead and sweat through the wounded wood.

“We best move along,” said Mr. West.

They each chopped two more times and then rushed to higher ground as the watery maelstrom crashed through the broken dam and ripped through the gully. When it washed over the burning cabin, the flames smoldered in the wake, hissing towards the sky already harboring ghosts.

What the scene lay bare was the end of the world and Courtney wondered if he should hold hands with the man standing next to him, but they were both holding tightly to their ax handles and so he let go of the idea.

“I’m sorry, Courtney,” said the man named Jerry West. He raised the ax one last time, and Courtney did not see where it fell.

The head’s circuitry blinked once, twice, maybe three times and then stayed dark like some moon on the outer edges of a solar system that can barely lay claim to its orbit.

The cut had been clean and no wires hung from the robotic orb. Expertise had swung the blade, and now Jerry West, with tears in his eyes, walked over to where it had rolled down the trail before resting on a rock. He picked it up and whispered to it: “Remember this. You don’t always have to be the donor.” He laid it back down, but the curvature of its surface caused it to roll, until it vanished over the edge of the ravine.

He stood over the body. He rested the axe on the chest cavity. He lifted the axe. He let the axe fall. The sound of metal on metal jarred them hills. The shade of blue that once filled the bunker underneath the cabin leaked forth. West worked his fingers into the cavern he’d cut and pried the chest open as if he were separating iron curtains. The blue ebb shone at high tide filling the space between the body and its killer.

Jerry reached his arm further into the chest, beyond the tangle of wires and tubing. He felt the shape of it and closed his hand around the chambers storing the blue serum—the blood and memories of all those fallen and now, with the floodwaters consuming the valley, drowned bodies.

Jerry rose above the gutted corpse, placed his foot along the ribs, and sent it sailing into the ravine and through the broken gate. The arms and limbs moved atop the water like a floater on the eye.

Jerry turned and moved further into the maze of hillside crags along the ridge. Finally, he arrived at a dead tree, its smooth surfaces showing through the patchwork of bark and reflecting yellow in the moonlight. The tree was immensely tall too, like something uprooted from a Jack Tale. Its highest branches lost themselves in a moonlit canopy of mist and fog. Jerry reached into the hollow gut of the tree and pulled forth a jug of moonshine. He took a swig and started to climb; the orb swinging ever so slightly from the satchel that hung at his side.

The climb was long and the going rough. Several times branches snapped as he pulled or pushed on them, and he littered the ground below with f-bombs and shit, as if his mouth were a crow’s anus. Within reach of the tree’s highest point were two deep holes, spaced evenly apart and polished as if by design. He opened the satchel. He removed the blue orb and placed it in the socket on the right. Then he removed a yellow orb and placed it in the socket on the left. Next he gave each orb a twist, until a mechanical click sounded from behind each one, which meant an optic nerve had inserted itself into the base of each sphere. The click, followed by a suctioned inhale that drained each eye of its color, prompted Jerry to remember the last time he had performed this ritual: the donors had been Kobe and Shaq. The two had been so consumed by vengeance they forgot the game writ large. Kobe had walked into the cabin only a few years after Shaq, but it was too late.

Jerry lowered himself down the tree, branch by branch, memory by memory. Another time performing this task he had arranged for Allen Iverson to die by firing squad. Another time Kobe brought him the heart of Dwight Howard. That was rare, but not unusual for another individual to figure out the game. Robert Horry had contributed his fair share of scalps, as had Michael Jordan, for a time. Then he grew old and slow and forgetful. His eyes went bad. What Jerry couldn’t figure out, however, were the individuals who knew the game’s rules, but chose to play it differently, as if the clock at the center of everything were a figment. Tim Duncan and Kawhi Leonard came to mind, as did these latest incarnations of Vince Carter and Zach Randolph. And there were others still whose movements he could neither recall nor pinpoint. There was a limit to his knowledge and vision. He could only see what was reported in the helix of others’ experiences. He could only understand what the figure in the tree translated from the runes remembered in blood.

The tree trunk split. The giant came to life. He rocked his head from shoulder to shoulder. He scissored his arms across his chest, doing kalestinic. Then, in a maneuver that rendered him part Neanderthal and part professor, the giant placed his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. “Is it over, Jerry?” he asked.

“No, old friend, it’s always just beginning.”

“Then it’s time to account for the missing.”

“It is, George.”

“Then what?”

“You must be getting old, George. Then we return everything and everyone back to the start. We see who can learn from the past and who can’t. We tally and measure. We see who qualifies for what book and who doesn’t.”

“Do you ever grow tired of it, Jerry?”

“I do, but that’s why there are always other worlds to build.”

The giant raised one arm over his head, following the moon.

He raised the other, following the sun.

His motions mechanized by the rhythm of a well-rehearsed drill, the embodiment and hustle of time itself.

Then he placed Mr. West on his shoulder and did what large and small men do after a long slumber: He pissed a mighty stream that frothed into a great river. And Jerry West sat on his shoulder like some cantankerous blue bird watching the asparagus-scented river consume the land notched with unmarked graves. He looked toward the cradled hills where he had left the body of Courtney Lee and imagined the body being swept away in the brewing current, and then he wondered if that had already happened, if he were losing track of moments both catastrophic and creative, if nothing in the story could be considered as being so isolated and distinct as a single frame of reference.

The boxcar floats on the water. Smoke puffs from its thin pipe of a chimney, dotting a clear blue sky. The men inside are quiet and sit around a table. A heart floats in a vat of yellow moonshine. That golden blood of the world. And beside that yellow vat is a blue vat and inside it floats a human head. The men all hold a hand of cards. They are not playing for chips, but for pieces borrowed from a chess game. There is no chessboard, at least not for the moment. They study the cards. They glance at one another’s faces. They note the seriousness. Then one man, a man with a thick head of untamed hair and a beard a razor’s edge beyond stubble, flicks his nose at the grizzly bear gentleman sitting across from him, and the man, whose name is Marc, flicks his nose back in response. The gesture is borrowed, but still silly and strangely intimate. The table breaks out in laughter, and they all raise a glass of the yellow stuff. “To Tony!” they all say, and they throw back the toast for the man whose heart floats in yellow moonshine.

And then the youngest at the table, a kid named Dillon Brooks, asks, “What now?”

And Chandler and Brandan look at one another. And James looks at Tyreke. And JaMychal sees Jarell. And Z-Bo is there too somehow. And Marc looks at Mike, and Mike says, “What now indeed,” and he smiles that wide grin belonging to all the natural-born world-shakers and repeats for no reason at all: “What now indeed.” And they all laugh. And they deal another hand. And the record player spins. And someone jokes, “Hey, they’re playing Chandler’s song.” And Chandler hates the song, but he smiles anyway because he’s here and not somewhere else. And they’re in uncharted territory. And the song is picking up steam and they’re all playing with house money. And the lyrics start rolling out like they always do and then the head floating in the blue vat blinks and says something but the words are gargled because the head’s submerged in liquid. A hand reaches into the container and palms the head to lift it, and the head, which once belonged to Courtney Lee says: “Play a new damn song.”

And so they do, but it’s not that new, whatever is in this world?

But he wasn’t talking about coke and birds

It was more like spoken word

Except he’s really putting it down?

And he explained the story about how blacks came from glory

And what we need to do in the game

Good dude, bad night, right place, wrong time

In the blink of a eye, his whole life changed

If you could feel how my face felt, you would know how Mase felt

Thank God I ain’t too cool for the safe belt!

I swear to God driver two wants to sue

I got a lawyer for the case to keep what’s in my safe safe

My dawgs couldn’t tell if I

Looked like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, it was televised

There’s been an accident like GEICO

They thought I was burnt up like Pepsi did Michael

I must got a angel

‘Cause look how death missed his ass

Unbreakable, what you thought, they’d call me Mr. Glass?

Look back on my life like the Ghost of Christmas Past

Toys “R” Us where I used to spend that Christmas cash

And I still won’t grow up, I’m a grown-ass kid

Swear I should be locked up for stupid shit that I did

But I’m a champion, so I turned tragedy to triumph

Make music that’s fire, spit my soul through the wire

The world is theirs, at least when you measure it in halves, or a story’s broken jaws.

Perched atop the tree, the bird tilted its head and whispered to the squirrel. The squirrel chirped back some cryptic response. The bird adjusted its wings. The bird took flight. The squirrel scurried from the treetop to the root of the problem.

The chain-linked fence broke the waves of light washing over the blacktop before dusk, and the diamond-shaped cobweb crisscrossed the asphalt. The boy’s shape loomed larger than life, like some giant crater of a womb. He stood shooting his shot long after all the other kids had departed for bike rides home and other off the grid places. The shadow’s head grazed the mid-court line. He pulled the ball towards his face and bent his knees. He pushed from his feet and calves and shoved the ball towards the basket. Clank! He ran to retrieve the ball. He repeated the patterned motions. Swish! He ran to retrieve the ball. He repeated the pattern. The shadows grew longer and longer. They consumed the entire court, like shade rooted in graveled kudzu, like monsters lurking in the deep thickets of time.

About this time, in the home awaiting the boy’s return, an older man sits down to watch an even older movie. The film starts in the rain. The film’s photography is in black and white. Headlights appear in the concrete distance, fighting the sheets of thick, quilted water. The truck carries a gang of prisoners. They are all chained together. One of them has the audacity to sing, breaking the pensive silence. The drivers of the truck hate such audacity, recognizing that such actions from a prisoner are off-script. The truck will crash, and when it does, the camera will focus on a wheel spinning slowly in the rain, its black rubber shining in the moonlight. The wheel will slow and slow until its axle finally twists back in the other direction. By then, the man watching will be fast asleep, and his last thought will be something along the lines of: Damn, I’ve already seen this one.

When the boy from the park walked home, his shadow still loomed larger than his frail adolescent form. He dribbled all the way, over the cracked sidewalks and the paraphernalia of substance abuse and past his best friend’s house, the school, and a convenient store. The ball sounded like a drum. The rhythm ancient and full of energy. The breeze wafted over him with the smell of love and fast food grills. He could hear the echoes of children skipping rope. A lawnmower humming in the lulls of street traffic. Music sifting out open car windows. An amp burning in a living room where the curtains waved at the window like ghosts.

A man named Allen Iverson crossed his path. The man looked old and lost and slow. The boy nodded at the man. They often crossed in such a sacred manner.

When he reached home, he placed the ball on the stoop, at the top of the steps. The screen door had not yet snapped against the wood frame when the ball began to roll from the top step down to the next, bouncing, once, twice, and then down to the next and onto the sidewalk.

The phantom boy slipped behind the screen and settled into a wicker chair across from a drab and musty daybed. The wood-paneled television flickered with the images of a black and white movie. His foster parent, a man named Woody Paige, was asleep on the faded blue recliner. The remote lay on his chest, over a stain on his white undershirt. The boy’s eyes shifted from the snoring man to the television, and he wondered how long the black and white film had rolled on without an audience. Existence can be a beam of light, unanswered and unimpeded, lonely without companionship and ignorant of conflict. A tree falling in the forest and no one around to witness the reckoning.

Penny tucked his Air Jordans underneath the chair. He walked to the back corner of the room, towards the kitchen door, where a metal folding table was crammed into a corner with a brass floor lamp.

He paused to watch the film. He recognized neither actors nor plot. He watched anyway, if only for a moment.

A thickset man wearing a headband and a bearded white dude were running through a swamp. They looked as if they were wearing matching pajamas. Penny later realized they were prison uniforms when the two men leaped from a cliff and the chain binding them together swooshed across the sky. They splashed into the water. The current pummeled them against the rocks. They struggled against the torrent. The chain holding them in danger’s way also pulled them to safety.

When they reached the other side, Penny walked into the kitchen and down the hall. He peeled off his clothes and climbed into the shower. He washed the afternoon’s game from his skin.

He dressed in a t-shirt and basketball shorts. He always dressed in a t-shirt and basketball shorts. He stopped by the fridge and grabbed a red Gatorade. He paired the drink with an oatmeal cream pie he unsheathed from a plastic wrapper.

When he returned to the den, which had once been a screened-in-porch, Woody Paige was still snoring from the faded blue recliner.

On the television screen, the two men are no longer chained together. The camera focuses on the world at large, staring through a glass window pane. The slats on the window resemble prison bars, and when the camera tilts down towards the bed frame so too do its brass bars resemble a prison cell. A shirtless man sleeps in the bed. The white dude from earlier. His beard looks more trimmed than when Penny saw him last. He wakes. He stretches. His wrist is wrapped in bandages. He opens his eyes. He leans forward. The other man sleeps in a chair at the cabin’s kitchen table. His body slumps forward. His head rests on a checkered tablecloth.

The man with the bandaged wrist sits up and puts on his boots. He grabs the rifle leaning against the wall and sneaks out the cabin’s front door. But his shadow stalls on the cabin wall as he twists the knob to leave. He is hesitant about the betrayal he is about to perform.

In the yard, which isn’t much of a yard, just dirt, a woman stands beside a well pump. She attends her hair by pulling it back with a headband similar to the one worn by the man still asleep at the kitchen table. Penny can hear chickens squawking in the backyard and somewhere in the actual neighborhood he hears a corporeal bird mimicking a source of entertainment.

As the white man approaches the woman, his shadow falls behind him and lingers on the cabin door, as if trying to steal back into the room as a way of disappearing into something more safe and familiar.

“Good morning,” she says, looking over her shoulder. “You’re up early.”

He mumbles in the affirmative. She mentions something about their conversation the night before, and Penny gathers that they discussed the Mardi Gras festival in New Orleans. She had seen several. He had seen none. She was of the world. The man’s character was not. He was insular.

She hands him a cup of water and tells him she changed the bandages on his wrist. He splashes water on his face and chest. Everything he does is rather belabored.

The two start talking about coming and leaving. Places that need men and places that need women. It all sounds a bit old fashioned to Penny. She hands the man a shirt. By now, Penny knows the man’s name is Marc and the woman’s name is Candace. The shirt once belonged to someone named Pat. Penny’s not sure why he’s watching and eyes the remote rising and falling on Woody’s stained undershirt.

The man and woman head for the barn where a car awaits them. He enters the barn and she says something about how the dusty automobile won’t start. He opens the hood and keeps it open by propping the rifle underneath it. Life has taught him that one thing intended for one purpose can always be intended for another. He has grown used to strange patterns of substitution.

The man runs around the barn. He’s scrambling for parts. She sits behind the wheel. They communicate back and forth. The man rigs up some sort of crank and twists it. The engine and ignition attempt to get on the same page. They cough and spit and choke.

As the man and woman discuss leaving, abandoning the cabin, the land, and the man sleeping at the kitchen table, the man sleeping at the kitchen table reveals himself to no longer be sleeping at the kitchen table. His reflection appears on the car’s windshield, at the bottom of the television screen, framed by the two conspirators. He sees through them. He sees through everything, even the weaknesses in the script.

He grunts. They turn to face him. His eyes communicate he’s aware of the betrayal, that maybe he saw it coming all along, that he doesn’t trust these two and never has. He leans over towards the ignition and says, “Y’all wasting a lot of gas,” and turns the key. The engine falls silent.

The man says, “So that’s how it is.”

“Come on, Z-Bo,” says the white man named Marc. “You got the same chance alone, maybe better.”

Z-Bo gives Marc a look: the fuck I do.

Candace starts to say something, but doesn’t. Perhaps she’s thinking a few moves ahead of these two, and she’s seeing the opportunities they can’t even fathom. “Fix you something to eat,” she says.

Smoke lingers in the air from a burning cigarette. Z-Bo follows the woman out the barn. Marc snatches the rifle from underneath the hood and follows too.

In the kitchen, Z-Bo asks: “How far is that railroad?”

And Candace tells him. Again, she’s pulling the strings, giving the stage directions. She’s already packing. She starts giving directions as if nothing is about to happen, as if this is all routine, and maybe it is.

In the foreground, Marc, the white dude, crosses the screen.

Candace says something about a swamp as Z-Bo pours a cup of coffee. He repeats her, and a look rises on his face like he knows all about swamps and doesn’t ever want to walk through one again. She’s yammering on about dogs and cops and the law, and Z-Bo sighs like his character has seen the end of the movie already (or at least read about it in a book by Percival Everett).

Candace leans on the table with one arm and points with the other as she describes the path through the swamp. The path by the way sounds like all paths. It leads from one place to another and is surrounded by trees. In between it contains forks and choices and routes that loop back on themselves.

Meanwhile, Marc’s puffing away on a cigarette. His expression suggests that he realizes how this scene is working. He won’t have to abandon Z-Bo now because Z-Bo is being talked into abandoning him. He looks like he might doubt the paths they are each about to take. But he is also relieved that the responsibility to end this relationship doesn’t fall on his shoulders. He exhales a cloud of smoke.

Z-Bo opens the door. Candace offers him a pack of cigarettes as a parting gift. He turns. Marc stops him. Marc says something with sentimental intent, but Z-Bo looks at him like: you’re full of shit, man. Then the door closes, and Marc and Candace are alone. Who knows what words pass between them?

She turns back to packing. Marc watches Z-Bo through the window panes of the front door, and that’s the last image he sees for a while as the camera lingers long enough to stir a sense of longing.

The butt of a rifle rams into the back of Marc’s head. He collapses.

Penny says, “Huh, I didn’t expect that,” as she steps over the body and drives out of the film as if she were never there. Needless to say, a huge cloud of dust kicks up and then she isn’t there. She’s somewhere else, maybe at the Mardi Gras or some other town or city where parades frequent and people have something to celebrate.

Penny walks back into the kitchen. He fills the Gatorade bottle with tap water. He drinks it and there’s a slight hint of red flavor, like a residue on the tip of his tongue. He walks back into the den and sits in the wicker chair again.

Marc splashes into a puddle that’s more mosquito larvae than water, and Penny wonders how the man recovered so fast from that blow to the head.

“What happened? She leave you?”

Marc’s face answers in the affirmative.

Z-Bo looks at him: “Well, come on then.”

And Penny can’t believe the size of the man in the headband’s heart. Why is he taking this fucker back?

A train whistle blows, and the film cuts to a pack of yelping dogs invading the swamp’s outer rim. They bark and sniff at the raw air, scratching ravenously at the county’s invisible line. A radio plays out-of-date music. A man with a pockmarked face checks his notebook and barks some orders. People listen and call him Pop.

Penny gulps the watered down red flavor.

Z-Bo and Marc wade through the thick, prehistoric waters. They look tired and beaten. Penny wonders what happened to them in the scenes he didn’t see. How did the film whittle them down into such broken bodies? Birds circle in the sky above them. The end is always near.

The camera cuts back to hounds, and they move so swiftly through the swamp. Like jazz notes they move.

The man named Pop leads an army of patrolmen and civilians behind that barking mass of leashes. Every snapping jaw connected to the hands of the people.

The lawmen start arguing about just what exactly they’re going to do to these two men when they catch them, not if — there is no if. They have names like Blake and Chris and Tim and Tony and Kevin and Russ and every other name you’ve ever heard of. They decide the end result, when it’s reached, will not be good for these convicts on the run.

The camera cuts back to the two fugitives, one white and one black, cutting through the woods. A train whistle blows.

One man falls. The other helps him up. There is no real logic to why they’re sticking together, at least not from what Penny has seen, and he wonders whether they would have been better off separating.

They run through the woods until there is no more woods, and there, low and behold, is the trestle bridge they’ve been seeking.

The camera watches them through the bridge’s interlocking frames. They look small — like ants — in the distance, scrambling over the sand.

One man can’t keep up with the other.

The train barrels down the tracks and over the bridge.

The men start to climb. Time is not on their side.

They’re scrambling over boulders and pulling on tree limbs. The train thrusts into tomorrow.

They give chase. They’re sprinting beside it.

One man grabs on — it’s Z-Bo. He’s climbed aboard the future. He reaches back, his white teeth bared. He reaches back towards the past he’s trying to bring with him. Marc reaches forward. He’s trying to grab that future. Maybe to pull it back into the past. Maybe because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Penny whispers, “This is some dumb shit. It doesn’t make logical sense. Why do these two dudes want to be with one another so badly? When in history would a guy like Z-Bo ever want to be chained to a guy like Gasol?”

No one says it, not even James Baldwin, but the answer has to be love. Z-Bo yells at the white man, “Come on — Marc!” and Marc yells, “Zach!” And then something unexpected happens, the palms meet and then slide away. Gray light creeps in between the fingertips and then the space is as wide as time itself. Z-Bo is on the train, and Marc collapses beside the tracks same as he ever was.

Marc is left singing a song that isn’t quite his own. It belongs to other men. It belongs to Z-Bo. It goes something like:

Long gone

Ain’t he lucky

Long gone

To Kentucky

Long gone

What I mean

Long gone Sam on a bowlin’ green

Bowlin’ green

Sewin’ machine

Sewin’ machine

Sew so fast

Sew eleven stitches

In a little cat’s tail

I left my home in Nashville

A-look a-here what I got, Jack

A-twenty long years on a chain gang

A-sweatin’ and bustin’ rock

A judge, he come from Memphis

A-put me in the pen

If I ever see his face once more

He never get home again

That judge be long gone

To Kentucky

Long gone

Don’t mean maybe

A long gone

What I mean

A long gone judge on a bowlin’ green

Bowlin’ green

A sewin’ machine

A sewin’ machine

The lawman stands before the defeated outlaw: “Where’s Z-Bo? Ain’t he supposed to be here too?”

And Marc just shrugs. He’s all alone and wonders: Can this really be the end, to be stuck in Memphis with the Grizzly blues again?

Woody wakes up with a jolt: “Is it over?”

Outside the sky has grown dark. Penny rises from the wicker chair and walks out the screen door. The basketball he laid on the porch is gone. He walks down the steps and over to a hoop in the driveway. He stares at the net in the glow of a streetlight. He feigns a cross over. He pulls up. He flicks his wrist and imagines the ball’s flight against the dark canvas beyond Memphis.

His legs felt good that day. But little did he know, his knees were made from hollow glass and the grains of calcium were already starting to shift.

Inside the den, Woody watched as a man named Jerry West explained how the film The Grizzly Ones was now a fully developed narrative attraction at the newly refurbished West’s World, where the old animatronics had been replaced with a new and better symbiotic technology. Then Woody flipped the channel, thinking science fiction is the worst, before landing on a show where two grown men yelled scripted talking points at one another.

And, at the end of the street, is a man leaning in ghostly silhouette. He monitors Penny’s progress, his rise and his fall, his merits and his faults, the bend the narrative should take and how to read it. Should he tinker in the subject’s life or permit him a journey free of toil and trouble. How many men of constant sorrow can any world or theme park endure?

*****

Penny is older now, and he has traveled beyond the gates of Memphis for quite some time. He has encountered Shaq-sized riddles and questions small as fissures in the bone. He has lived triumphantly and survived defeats. He is tired and somehow satisfied. On some days, he does not feel the gnawing that he could have been more in this world. On other days the longing devours him. The emotions twist and tunnel through his gut like a river snaking its way through the land.

He is walking now, in the month of May up a hill dotted by trees. At the top of the hill is an iron fence. The metal is black. There is a gate and it whines when he opens it. He walks through, and he notices the cemetery is in need of weeding. He walks slowly by the gray tombstones. On many of them the names are faded and worn. The stones are smooth; the wind having run over them for decades like so much water.

He stops at a certain grave. The name is not worn. He can read it quite clearly, but he doesn’t need to. He sought out this particular spot. He staked it out in his memory.

As he turns to leave, he sees another visitor wandering the aisles of stone teeth. She is an elderly woman. She is blind, or at least walking with her eyes closed, as if she can feel the terrain around her with a familiarity forged in blood. Her cane hits Penny in the leg. She stops. She raises her head and smiles at him.

“Is that you, Penny?” she asks.

And he says, “Yes, mam,” even though he’s not quite sure whether he recognizes her or not.

“Do you not know who I am?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

“That’s alright. I can’t expect the world to remember everything. How have you been?”

“I’ve been good he says.”

“That’s fine. Who’s grave are you standing in front of?”

“Lorenzen’s.”

“Oh, that’s fine. Good and fine. I was looking for him myself. I brought these.” She raises a bouquet of flowers towards Penny’s face. He wishes he had brought some.

“Did you know him?” she asks, and Penny says, “We were almost teammates. If we had been born at different times or . . . .” His voice fades out, and she says, “It’s a small world, isn’t it?”

They stand there in the middle of the cemetery on top of the hill. The wind rides everything, and while some might imagine whispers and voices in that invisible force, Penny does not. This is one of those times when the emptiness thrashes him in its jaws, and he asks, “How did you know him?”

“I may not see as well as I once did, but I remember.” She taps the cane on the ground. The thick, green mixture of weeds and grass mutes the sound. “I can recall a great many names and a great many things to boot. That is, if you got the time.”

She reaches out a hand. He takes it. Her skin is thin in his grasp. He can feel the veins rolling over the bones. He worries that if he grips too hard he might bruise her and so he doesn’t even clasp his fingers so much as let her hold onto him.

“Where should I begin?” she asks, and as a matter of tradition, she offers a simple introduction: “I’m Pat by the way, and this story is about things that have already happened and things that will happen. If you remember it just as I tell it, then the story will serve you well.”

They walk in circles through the cemetery. They walk until they arrive at the black iron gate. When Penny crosses the threshold, her hand disappears and he is left holding only the wind and, sure enough, now he can hear the voices blowing softly over the land and that blesses him with a secret he can pass from one stranger to another in the swirl of a great game he is only beginning to understand.

His smartphone lights up in his pocket. The message is from Grant Hill, and the content is simply the icon of a hawk followed by a question mark.

Penny responds: They’re programmed, but the stories are real.

“Because time does whatever the fuck it wants, you will never understand it.”

–unknown proverb

The orange basketball sits on the front porch, waiting with all the creativity and heat of folkloric fire. The breeze blows. From around the corner of the house, a person can hear wind chimes. A particular magic is born from those southern ornaments. The ball rocks on the arc of its sphere. Its shadow creeps over the edge of that first ledge as it loses contact with the porch post. The ball descends one whole step and bounces. The ball lands on another step and bounces. It bobbles on the sidewalk and rolls. The weeds invading the sidewalk cracks do not stop it. Neither do the ants marching. The ball rolls to the gate in the chain link fence, which, for whatever reason, is open to the world beyond. The ball enters that world and rolls over the curb and into the street’s faded black asphalt, which is, in its own way, gray and milky and reminiscent of a galaxy in spin. The ball rolls across the street, but where a yellow strip of median long washed away, it changes direction, as if the rubber sphere and its imprinted NBA logo possesses its own consciousness. It continues rolling. It dodges traffic. It swerves and pivots. Maybe the movements are directed not by the ball’s consciousness, but by an invisible hand. The ball rolls . . . . . . .  .

The ball splashes into the Mississippi River. It bobs. It floats. It does not spin.It is a melon. It is soon to be waterlogged. It will surely drown.

The sky is blue overhead. The sun is bright. The river is a muddy brown. The water’s current pulls earthy grains away from the shoreline. It rearranges the planet’s surface. This current of silt brushes against the orange globe and scuff marks reside there too. The ball’s surface is a work of art, and it bobs in the river’s snakelike curves, floating like an orb, like the eye of the world, like the sight of a well-worn god who travels in disguise, maybe even as an orange, soon-to-be-waterlogged sphere.      

After days and nights floating beside barges and driftwood, the ball encounters gambling dens along the shore and the wide shadows of cruise ships. Several times the mass and velocity of these large boats deter the ball’s journey. They pluck it from its course and banish it to a dark world below the surface, but the ball resurfaces, winking orange in the sun.

Birds pass overhead. Sometimes the birds shit on the flickering globe. It turns over in the water until its surface is washed cleaned once more. The ball arrives in the reedy waters of the delta. A fisherman pulls the ball up in his nets. He tries to dribble it on the boat’s deck. The ball does not bounce. He palms it over the rail, his thumbprint resting in the black seam. He pulls it towards his waist. He drops it towards the swinging motion of his leg. The ball sails towards the horizon.

Storms arrive. The waves and winds lift the ball into the sky. The ball plummets. The ball sails. The ball is everywhere. When the violence is done, the ball sits in the white sands of a newly discovered continent. It watches the treeline, but also feels as if it, too, were being watched by invisible eyes.  

A naked human being exits the jungle’s trees. As the body approaches with stealth across the sand, the ball notices the body carries a long stick in one arm. The body’s shadow falls over the ball, casting the ball’s entire existence in shades of darkness. The ball cannot tell what the body may or may not be doing. A sharpness penetrates the orange pupil. The ball finds itself impaled on the long stick. The ball finds itself floating above the white sands. The body carrying it and the stick starts rushing over the beach towards the trees, kicking up a miniature sandstorm. The last image the ball sees before it and the human carrying the spear retreat under the jungle’s canopy is a wooden ship with white sails towering over the water. And, in a smaller boat before it, men in blinding armor rowing for the beach.

In the coming days and weeks and months and years, the populations along the beach thin. Some retreat deeper into the jungle. Many perish to disease. Others to the sword. The white sand is, at times, stained red. The body that retrieved the ball from the beach no longer stares at it in wonder. The ball is lost and spends its time in watching and waiting. It is as though the ball never left the front stoop in Memphis.  

Rodents scurry through the tangled underbrush. The ball can sense a climactic event either has occurred or is about to occur. It waits in anticipation of some impending doom. The ball does not know whether it resides before or after and what the difference is.

A flash of the brightest light occurs. A doorway opens, as if from nowhere, and three men exit the portal. They are all tall, but one is much taller than the other two. He is also very lanky. He resembles a praying mantis.They carry weapons that look less like spears and more like what killed the people who carried spears. The ball watches them closely and listens.

One of them looks at his wrist. “Mister Kerr says this is the place.”

“Do you really think this is the one?”

“Mister Kerr says it’s the last of its kind.”

One of the men holds up a hand with his palm towards his two companions. He flicks his wrist so his fingertips cut just under his chin and the other two men fall silent. They fan out along an invisible arc. They bend their knees. They are all ready to shoot.

A roaring rumbles from deep inside the jungle. The ball does not recognize the sound. The earth trembles. Rodents flare by. Some stop and stare. An urgency in their eyes strains to communicate with the ball: “Run, you fucker!” But the ball’s momentum brought it to rest here, at this place, with perhaps this particular moment in mind. For the first time, the ball feels chained to a purpose.

Another roar resounds through the timeless jungle. And then a massive creature without a name explodes from the jungle’s unknown heart. If a modern scientist were present, he would shoult: Artotherium angustidens! Or, more likely: Holy shit! That’s a huge bear!

However, neither of these labels occurs to the ball as the creature rises on two legs and pounds its clawed fists against its chest. Swinging an arm, it clubs one of the crouched men in the head. Then, it swings with the other and sends him flailing into a tree trunk. It turns to the second man, but then a crack like thunder occurs and the creature flails and strains against a current of energy that to the ball looks like a lightning bolt running parallel to the earth’s surface. Given the extra time, the final member of the hunting party locks in on the beast and pulls his trigger. A second rope of energy lassos the creature and it shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, down to the size of a rodent and then down to the size of an insect. All the while, the two men step closer and closer to the shrinking monster. As it decreases in stature, they stand taller and taller. To the watching orange ball, they grow to the size of mighty trees. When they are within arm’s length of the critter, the taller of the two reaches with an arm for the it and lifts it by a spindly leg. He poses in a menacing posture against the jungle as a background. His one arm positions the weapon’s smoking barrel towards the green canopy. The other hoists the diminished mystery above his jaws and drops it into the darkest pit of the human body.

“Slim Reaper, my man,” smiles the tallest man’s companion.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Alright,” he agrees. “But I wish you had let me take a selfie with that grizzly motherfucker before swallowing it—would love to have snapped a pic of it next to my dick! You know, to show scale and all that!”

The tall man rolls his eyes. “Hey, Steph! Open the portal.” The man who was slapped against the tree responds, “Roger that, KD,” before poking the band around his wrist.It beeps in response.

A rectangle of light opens, the three men step through and leave the ball to wait some more. In their absence, the jungle grows taller and darker. Creatures without fur appear. A pterodactyl shreds the skies. The ball does not know it as such, but the ball looks towards the skies, beyond the canopy. It squints into the past and the future and sees beyond that flap of reptilian wing a bright object hurtling towards the earth. A trail of smoke and ash behind it, the trail it casts is vast and unfathomable.

In the moments that transpired before contact, the pterodactyl’s wings whooped the air with a concoction of synapse and sinew, and all the universe’s laws and codes appeared mute at the spectacle. The electric shock of that momentary movement waited for the accompaniment of rough thunder — a booming trick! — before it split the skies once more in a flash of coldblooded beak and bone and then oblivion. The last of Mikan’s disciples. Somewhere in the seas of time.

Considering its largely NBA fan fiction, With the Memphis Blues Again is probably way too pretentious for its own good. If you don’t believe it’s too pretentious for its own good, then consider how you’re now reading “A note from the author” about a long work of NBA fan fiction.

With the Memphis Blues Again begs, borrows, steals, and parrots the words, images, and sentences of several lengthier and more iconic texts of the American South. This note is essentially an effort to name those texts as a means of saying thank you to the authors of these great works and also how I’m sorry With the Memphis Blues Again stole so frequently and without apology from these reservoirs.

Dear John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America runs throughout With the Memphis Blues Again and, most definitely, made me second guess the seriousness with which I approached the Grit ‘n Grind era of the Memphis Grizzlies. I imagine that one day both your book and this work of NBA fan fiction will have both been excerpted by the College Board. If not, we will know what has happened to America’s once mighty education system.

Dear William Faulkner, the section in the table of contents titled “A Dedication” ripped off your story “The Bear,” as it appears inn First Vintage International’s 1994 edition of Go Down, Moses. You don’t know about Memphis having an NBA team, but they do. The team’s mascot is a Grizzly, so I’m sure you can see why your story was ripe for the picking. I also structured certain scenes, sentences, and phrases to mimic your novel Sanctuary, which you yourself essentially described as trash. Thank you for letting me pick through your garbage. I hope With the Memphis Blues Again does not in time overshadow your young career.

Dear Cormac McCarthy, I stole from you too. I’m sure you’re unfamiliar with writing in anyone’s shadow, so I will say that everything I took, I took out of immense feelings of awe and respect. While the writing of “Postgame press conference” is probably influenced by The Road, I found two of your Tennessee novels to be more appropriate farmers’ markets. Elements of both The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark can be found in various chapters of With the Memphis Blues Again. I may have also aped your dancing bear scene from Blood Meridian, but I, too, needed a dancing bear scene because, you know, this is about the Memphis Grizzlies.  

Dear Preston Lauterbach, your book Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis was not only a valuable resource but also a pretty awesome book. Thank you for writing it. I needed its guiding hand. I also needed its lyrical sampling of blues classics.

Dear Roland Lazenby, your book Jerry West: The Life and Legend of a Basketball Icon was another great resource that will continue to be a reference for future You Can’t Eat the Basketball projects. You may or may not be feeling honored at this moment.

Neil Gaiman, I read your book Norse Mythology while working on this project. I also revisited D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths and some other stories that did not overlap whatsoever.

Elements of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood were also helpful, and in the portions of the discombobulated narrative that deal with James Harden and especially Russell Westbrook some readers may find traces of Cabeza de Vaca’s journeys through the heartland of the so-called New World in the sixteenth century.

Films and television shows that With the Memphis Blues Again directly explicitly or implicitly references included the following: Cool Hand Luke, The Defiant Ones, Hustle and Flow, Stand By Me, WestWorld, and probably others I can’t even remember well enough to recall here.

Lyrics written by Three6ixMafia and Kanye West also make appearances in “Q4 Memphis mythologies” and “Time out from Mike Conley’s 115th Dream.”

Bob Dylan’s lyrics and conceptualization of time and history bore no influence whatsoever on the writing of With the Memphis Blues Again.

Bryan Harvey lives and teaches in Virginia. He has written for Fansided and Fansided’s The Step Back, ESPN TrueHoop’s The Baller Ball, Hardwood Paroxysm Quarterly, The Classical, and SI.com’s The Cauldron. He’s published some poetry and fiction in various places, most recently in The Florida Review and Bluestem Magazine. He holds a Master’s in Literature from George Mason University and a Master’s in Teaching from James Madison University. You can follow Bryan on Twitter @Bryan_S_Harvey.

Todd Whitehead has contributed words, graphs, and art on the subject of basketball to numerous online platforms, including: Fansided, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, Hardwood Paroxysm, Nylon Calculus, and VICE Sports. You can follow Todd on Twitter @CrumpledPaperJumper.

Daniel Rowell has worked in the past as an illustrator and writer for Hardwood Paroxysm and Fear the Sword. Daniel’s fourth-grade basketball coach described Daniel as a lounge lizard and Daniel’s all right with that.

A portion of the chapter “Q4 Memphis Mythologies” initially appeared in the Hardwood Paroxysm Quarterly, when Hardwood Paroxysm was under the Fansided umbrella. Many of the tangential moments and fragmented narratives found in With the Memphis Blues Again lead back to Everything That Dunks Must Converge (Act One, Act Two, Act Three). You’re invited but obviously not obligated to check out those convolutions as well.