I walked alone. I usually do. The Late City rose around me in zeros and ones. I'm like the kid. I wanted to be one of the guys, I wanted to beat the shit out of them all. I acted tough but all I had was a squirt gun. It was the thing between my legs that swung like a pendulum. I was alone. Surrounded. I kept on moving. Like him, like everybody. We are moving towards our own execution.
He gets in the car. He doesn't know where to go. He follows somebody. He is hoping it is someone he hates so he can get back at them but it always turns out to be some vague pedestrian who looks up at him with spooked out eyes.
There is someone behind him, too, following, murderous, full of ancient grievances. He is a thief and a liar, all that his father hated. Perhaps it is his father in the other car.
At the next corner he turns, peels out, thunders. He roars away into the zeros and ones of the city, ancient, ever renewed with piles of light increasing in zeros and ones.
His mother and I are kissing in the doorway. He should kill us but he keeps on driving. He should stop the Hummer in the middle of the road and jump us. Hit me with a shovel. There have been so many he should have hit. Billy Rebar is still with him, even though he is dead. Billy Rebar follows him in the night. It is because of Billy that he does not know who he is, that he is always running and being followed.
I was with his mother, asking about him.
"Why doesn't he go out? Does he have girl friends? Has he ever had one?"
"It's that whole generation," she says. "They don't do that."
"They are ambitious. It's all about grades with them. Power and success. But they never get jobs."
"There aren't any jobs," she tells me.
When I take her home, I kiss her on the mouth. She opens her mouth to me. It is very wet and spacious and I must seek out her tongue which she retracts like a snail's neck. I can just feel it as I swab out her mouth, seeking in the wetness. I have my hands on her ass and I'm pulling her into me, boning her, grinding at her. She pushes and groans. Her tongue comes out. She is breathing in wet gasps. Spit is running down our chins. We'll be in bed soon. We'll be up there, sucking and fucking. It will be clumsy and fine. Clumsy and fine. The zeros and ones will rise and fall around us like a fountain. The zeros and ones are made of spit and sex fluids which leave trails behind them, fragile webs that rise for a while and then break apart into drifting filaments.
Billy Rebar is enjoying the show. He is sitting in his worthless car, chain smoking, waiting for the kid to come out. He likes to appear to the kid at random times. Go where he goes, be there when he is there. The kid is always yelling at him, telling him how all he knows about is maiming, cutting, striking, slugging his fist into soft flesh. He wants to grasp Billy Rebar's greasy hair and yank his head back and then piston his fist into his nose. This act will drive the bone of Billy's nose into his brain and send him into a state just this side of death. The kid will visit him in the hospital for a viewing of the thing plugged into life support. Nobody there but a breathing corpse. Oh, joy. Oh, victory. That was the import of what he had been saying to Billy. Rather than hitting him with a shovel, he was lecturing him. He kept doing that. Every time he saw him he took the moral high ground. Bluckbluckbluck! You a chicken, taunts the little bird inside.
None of this is happening. Marina and I are slowly wending our way back through the neighborhoods. She is laughing at my clever remarks. We have hardly touched at all. Once I put my hand on her thigh reassuringly. I should have rubbed. It would be better that way. A rub can bring up the heat. It can make a woman nasty. She'll say tactless things. She'll promise with her eyes, with a flirtatious smile. Then I could kiss her when we parked in the driveway. Except the kid would be there, waiting. Sitting on the stoop with his chin on his hands. The gun would be resting across his knees. The idea was to come at us when she rolled the window down for the cigarette she always had before we went in. Then he would open fire. Or water. The car would fill with the fire of waters and we would drown.
Brent Powers is the King of the Cowboys.
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