- XXVIII -

* * * * *
         To Tristian's left a window peeks out into the gradually rising morning.
         To his right a couple keeps holding hands across the booth table instead of eating.
         Tristian isn't sure which he'd rather watch.
         He's holding his coffee cup in both hands, the gentle warmth seeming to transfer itself into his body through the ceramic bowl. His jacket still lies draped on his body, but he's not warm at all. Tristian isn't feeling the heat. If he thought of it he'd have zippered the damn thing up a long time ago. He wants to tell himself that it's a new thing but he's been practicing that habit for years. When going to peoples' houses, it would be hours before he'd finally remember to take his damn jacket off. It just wasn't something he would think of, in the scheme of things it just wasn't important to him. Even now temperature doesn't bother him, if he's not paying attention to it, it could be the searing desert or the screaming Arctic winds, or some odd vacillation between the two, and it would make no difference to him.
         These days Tristian wonders if he was always like that simply because he was a weird child or for another, more expansive reason. How would he have turned out if . . . they hadn't chosen him? He'll never know, if they're not lying to him, the decision was made the instant of his birth, he was born the second the last one died. Just his luck, the only sense of timing he ever managed and this is where it gets him. Sitting in this diner, having what tastes and feels like his eightieth cup of coffee, the flavor now having a papery burnt quality when it flows across his overly maligned tongue.
         But he keeps sitting here, even though his back's gone stiff and his ass has gone numb, like when you ride in a car for too long, it feels like someone replaced all the muscle with starched cotton. Tristian keeps sitting here because right now he doesn't know what else to do. And frankly he's scared. This is the first time he's been alone all night and even though he knew it was coming eventually, he doesn't want to be here. Alone with himself. With his thoughts. The bruised trauma of his brain isn't what he wants to face right now.
         And yet every time he glances to his right he keeps seeing two hands opposite each other, touching, one gently laid on the other, fingers delicately in the early stages of intertwining. The hands are all he's really seen, he can't bring himself to see the faces, it would be too much like staring. Which is what he's doing anyway, he might as well face up to it. But when you don't make eye contact it doesn't feel so much like an invasion of privacy. He couldn't even say which hands are whose, the smaller hand with fairer skin and a simple silver band gracing a finger probably is the girl's but you can never be sure. Perhaps Tristian just likes to make all aspects of his life difficult for himself. It wouldn't be the first time.
         Tristian's been playing a little game with himself, although game is a relative term since generally one plays game because they're fun. When actually he's only really doing it to pass the time. And that's not fun at all.
         What Tristian's been trying to do is pick the couple's voices out of the swirling strains of voices peppering his ears. But it's hard to even focus on one person talking, the dynamics of the scene change too quickly, people come and go too fast. Waitresses saunter past, coffee swirling haphazardly in pots at his eye level, trying to reach the top and escape. The table behind him gets up, the five people sitting there laughing together at some joke that Tristian will never know, the sound washing over him like white noise, television tuned to a late night channel. We've signed off for our broadcasting day. In front of him four people, two girls and two guys slide into the booth, barely even giving him a glance. One guy alone in a booth. That's him. Tristian thinks he makes eye contact with one of the guys, who seems to hesitate before he slips into the booth, but it's too transient a look for it to have any meaning. The guy winds up tucking himself into the corner anyway and all Tristian can see is the back of his head. But immediately the other guy starts chatting in a loud voice about some sport game that must have just finished. The two girls exchange silent looks that Tristian knows too well, and for a second the three of them share something, even if the girls don't know that Tristian has elbowed his way into the moment. That's right. Live vicariously, siphoning off the feelings of others. The only way you can live right? The only way to bring fire into your barren body. Isn't that the way it's done.
         Even though he's only been here for a few hours, Tristian feels like he's the lone pillar of consistency in a ceaselessly changing world. People come and go and come and go again, faces shifting before he can even commit them to memory. Tristian never realized how many textures of voices there are, how so many people can talk so similar and yet you can tell them apart. Some words emitted rub against him like rough gauze, others glide right past him. But it's only words, adrift in a sea of orphans. Without context there can't be any meaning, without meaning why bother talking? But people do it everyday even if the end the talking means nothing. Tristian hears a million simultaneous conversations, everyone talking at each other, never listening, getting their words and thoughts out into the air like they're radio waves, like they're desperate to leave any sort of legacy behind, even if it's an abstraction destined to forever pollute the depths of space, waiting for some random traveller to stumble upon the lost waves centuries later and bring that person to disembodied life for just one more second. That's all anyone really desires, in the end. Just one more second they don't deserve. Eternity is what you make of it, a second folded into itself can lock into a pattern that can pulse forever. Tristian's a fractal pattern constantly unfolding to reveal more complexity at first glance, but on second glance it's just more of the same.
         The nails of her fingers are softly caressing the top of his hand, like's she climbing sideways up a mountain, trying to dig in. It's an affection gesture that makes Tristian's hand itch, ants tracking microscopic dirt over his skin. In his mind he conjures endearing terms and familiar phrases, sketching on a mile wide canvass with only a toothpick and a half full jar. Why is he still staring at them like this, goddamn the least he could do is go over and introduce himself. Maybe then he won't feel like so much of a freak, prying his way like a sideways razor blade into their lives, spinning stories based on his idealized reflection of reality.
         Perhaps the apparent happy couple doesn't even live up to his distinction, after all it's early in the morning and they're meeting here in this diner. Perhaps one of them is cheating on a girlfriend or boyfriend and this is stolen time, affection lanced from another to feed a relationship that has no right to exist. You never can tell anymore. But nothing is ever simply defined or processed down to one or two words. Part of Tristian's problem is that he can never accept wavery fragility in his life, especially not from himself. If something is wrong, you fix it. You don't try to figure out ways to live with the wrongness and come to grips with it, you find ways so that it won't exist anymore. Too many people settle for too little. Tristian doesn't want to settle at all. And all he wants is to make his little corner of the world right. Like the movies, when the end credits roll and the hero walks down the street arm in arm with the girl as the house lights go back on, you leave with that completely warm feeling. If there's a life for movie characters beyond the movie itself, you want to feel that it's a good one.
         When you come down to it, Tristian wants to see himself as a romantic, drawn to the simple pleasures of life. But he keeps staring deeper and deeper until he threads of complexity threaten to choke him off and swallow him up. He doesn't know when to pull back. But really all he wants is the quiet details, the passed glance, the closeness of a body, the familiar touch of a hand. Perhaps the reason he keeps staring is because Tristian finds himself wishing that he's stumbled onto some diner out of time, and that the hands he's staring at so intently are his own, from some point in the future. And the girl's hand . . . he wishes there was someone sitting across from him, he very much does. Just to feel that pressure, to give the reassurance back, to draw on it and make it something better, purer.
         But she can't be here. With him. Or with anyone. Time and circumstances ripped a gulf in the air between them. Tristian did the rest. No choice. Or the tremors in himself would have rendered him impotent, even more useless than he already was. He's picked a strange time to develop empathy but for the first time emotion became almost like a physical pain to him, a spear sprouting inside his chest, the point scraping against his sternum, trying to burrow its way free.
         Tearing his gaze away from their magnetic hands Tristian regards his own floating reflection. The eyes that stare back at him are nearly opaque, he can't even read his own thoughts. No point in even drinking the coffee, no doubt it's cold by now, all the heat having fled to the higher countries, out the land bridge of his hands and to the thermodynamic nirvana that perhaps awaits them somewhere. His hand twitches suddenly and his image seems to open up. For a second his thoughts are neon.
         Lena.
         But the shutters close on that too swiftly. Can't even think her name. Tristian wants to see her again, madly, desperately, he'd take the sword and cut his way into the hospital itself if they wouldn't let him in, proudly begging them to just try, to just and stop him, while the whole time a laser slice of red would rip the air over his head. Wave it around like a goddamn baton. Make it useful for once. But his exile into this diner is self imposed, Tristian can't bear experiencing a relapse of his last image of her, silently still, her voice wordlessly calling out for something nobody can give her at the moment. And now, in the hospital, with tubes hooked up to her, leeches regurgitating the life back into her, machines monitoring her like she's some kind of test subject, that's not the Lena he knows. It'd be nothing more than a shell, a paperdoll reminder that people like that exist, suitable only to ignite the feelings that simmer angrily dormant in his chest, but there'd be no welcoming signal. Just darkness. That's not Lena. That will never be Lena.
         Damn you-
         His hands are tightening on the cup, he can feel the internal structure of the object resisting him. But he can't break it, he doesn't have the strength. As much as he'd like to delude himself, he's no superman, merely a man who's seen both the awesome and the horrific and lived to tell about both. And lived to let it haunt him. But sometimes the events that most hit home are the ones that strike your doorstep. Wisdom and intelligence and grace under the hardest of pressures aren't powers that can be granted to him, beings coming down from on high to touch glowing hands to his forehead, imbuing with strength and resilience beyond that of the common man. If anything, life has battered him sore. But he keeps going on. Why is that?
         Tristian almost killed a man tonight. He was so ready to do it, he could nearly feel phantom drops of blood striking his face like warm summer rain. The ghost of violence to come. A violence only barely averted. But not a violence he's unfamiliar with. Tristian looks at his hands, seeing the man he beat to death using only those two hands. It's not like the movies at all, your hands hurt like hell with each blow and after a while it feels like punching a half inflated basketball, there's no satisfying television crack to signify the striking of your fist, just the pathetic gruntings as the two of you grapple and see who can do the other guy in first.
         And yet that was self defense, Tristian honestly was in danger of being killed. Before, that danger wasn't in evidence at all, if anything Tristian had the situation under control the moment he had stepped into the room. But he still would have done it. Softly shuddering, he makes himself relive those emotions again. Anger. Frustration. Rage. Impotency. Like he was trying to take revenge on Carl, screaming howdareyou at the man, how dare you prove how useless I am, how random life can be? And Tristian almost killed him for that, for daring to tell him what he should have already known. Goddamn. There was no need. Lena was safe already, he had removed the threat. But he kept going, until he almost went too far. This wasn't war, this wasn't about saving the Universe, it was about some bastard's fun taken way beyond the step it should have gone.
         Tristian ventures a glance around the diner, doing his best to keep the faces of the couple next to him a motion blur. Let his illusions lie quietly. Maybe one day that kind of happiness will be a route he'll be allowed to take. But not now. Now he's looking around, taking in faces, taking in sights. And surrounding him on all sides are people, a slice of the entire planet, a core of ice taken from a glacier, trying to speak for the whole world. Tristian keeps trying to separate himself as the Alien, as something that isn't quite human anymore but he's no different from any of these tired people milling around in the diner, going about their lives without the slightest idea of what he represents. Nor would they care. He goes out and saves the world and who notices? That's the problem, he realizes. Nobody notices and he keeps expecting them to. Like he's going to come back to a planetary epiphany, everyone's eyes torn open wide at the possibilities of life on other worlds, at the forces that affect them even through their ignorance. Tristian thinks of all the events that must have happened while he was totally unaware, going through life, going through school, all the while taking fumbling steps toward a destiny that was nothing more than a square dance in a dark room, he was swinging with partners he could barely see or feel. Head down to the sky your whole life, when you finally get the strength to look up, you wonder how the hell all that got up there. And who snuck it past you.
         The week before it all happened, he had gone out with a bunch of friends for someone's birthday. Jina had kidded him about how he was never going to get out of college at the rate he was going. Tristian remembers replying that if he had his way, he'd never leave. That was the week before. The night before he practiced a speech he was going to give the next day. Twenty four hours later he was fighting for his life, his entire world changed into an absurdist painting, someone's sick joke with the punchline only read as alien blood smeared all over stone tunnel walls and a tight feeling in his stomach that told him nothing was ever going to be the same again. It's scary. It's damn scary. Life changes so damn fast that you can't even keep track, racecars coming out of nowhere to try and run you off the road. A half hour before he found Lena, the two of them were sitting on the steps and it was nearly the happiest moment of his short life. Thirty minutes. A second. That's all. All it takes is time. And you can't stop time, it changes everything regardless of what you think of it. Irreversibly and immutably. That's the whole problem, if you don't want to change there's nothing you can do about it. Change or die. He remembers reading about people dying in car accidents, men going to work, women getting ready to go food shopping, teenagers out for a good time. They kissed wives goodbye, hugged girlfriends, said a kind word to their children, hung up from a friend and off they went. They never saw. They never see. Nobody ever does. It's frightening beyond anything a masked killer with a knife can ever do, thinking about it just paralyzes you, all your muscles just lock up. Thoughts seize and refuse to go any farther. Any step could be your last, any word could be the last, nobody gets a chance to have a dignified end, we're struck down by a world that has to whittle us down to a quivering useless lump before finishing us off. Tristian knows. It's quick, so goddamn quick.
         He's woken up at night to hear the laser blast that nearly blew off his head. The exploding debris that nearly pulped his body. The hands that nearly crushed his throat. Nearly. Each time that word. Almost. Almost. Almost. So close. He's seen the big picture and the Universe is his world written on a scale vastly more chaotic. The world could end right now, and nobody would ever know why. There are battles being fought in space to rival the best motion picture special effects and yet these people order their coffee, flirt with their girlfriends, argue with each other, cry, sleep, make love, eat, and they never know. Tristian can't imagine his life being otherwise now, the awareness is all consuming. Dammit, he wants to see his friends safe, is that so much to ask? Just to ask that ten or fifteen people out of the countless numbers scrawled across creation get to live their lives without fear, without uncertainty, without the pain that renders us all bent and broken before our time is even up. There's no such animal as being ready to die. It's a fallacy they teach the good soldiers and the zealots and the ordinary people who just want to have some dignity. We always go kicking and screaming, we're hardwired down to the base pairs encoding our genes. Never give up. Never surrender. Drag in that breath for as long as your tortured lungs will accept it and force them to do so if you have to. That's what people do. But we spend so much time making preparations, being careful that there's no time for life. That's all Tristian wanted for his friends, to give them that.
         But it's not possible. He can't ask that, it's not his right. So people like Lena get hurt for no reason. And it never ends there. Jina is probably devastated, blaming herself just as Tristian is sitting here now. He should go to Jina, find her and Brown and all the others and they should get together and get through this. It's possible. It's painful and hard but it can be done. But nobody knows how anymore, the previous closeness of their lives is nearly evaporated, they get together now only to get drunk. To get drunk or say goodbye. Sometimes both. So they sit in the opposite corners of a room nursing bleeding consciences, weeping dry tears and wishing they had someone to share this pain with. If Tristian could break this cup with his hand and drive the jagged pieces into his palm, he'd do it. Because it'd be a distraction. It would take away from these thoughts, give him real honest pain that he can do something about. This other pain, it's a deceiver, it tries to drown you and then swallow you, until there's nothing left but ripples where you used to be. Three times and you're gone. A single hand grasping cold air, hoping to find the warmth of a friendly grip. But it doesn't happen. He'd hurt himself, and Lena would still be hurt. He'd kill Carl, and Lena would still be hurt. There's nothing he can affect anymore. A featureless white room, and he's standing in the center wondering where the hell they hid the door this time.
         God, please, I want her to be okay.
         He's cursing life, he's cursing Carl, he's cursing fate, railing at one target until he's hoarse before catching his breath and whirling on another. But they're impassive entities, standing there with arms folded boldly over their chests, daring him to take a shot at them. Just try it. Go ahead. Just one shot. That's all the opening we need. Tonight Tristian opened the drawers where he kept those pieces of his private thoughts that he never imagined he'd ever speak outloud. But they did, even as he hardly believed what he was saying. And not only were those thoughts not ridiculed, they were even welcomed. He tries to hold the look in her eyes, knowing that simple memory can never capture the detail needed. It has to be there, be real. Or else it's just a blind man trying to paint the color red. A night's promise, relegated to nothing more than an aberrant blip on a lifetime of constantly descending slopes.
         Selfish. That's what he's being. Tristian's angry because so very rarely does he ever consider himself happy and tonight was one of those rare occasions that he might approach that distant plateau. And now it's been vandalized by base instinct and clumsy cunning. Carl got lucky because everyone else was stupid. He got lucky and he got hurt and so did everyone else. Everybody goddamned lost. It makes him want to smash his fist right through the window, reach out and pull the sun back down and banish the approaching dawn, plunge it all back into darkness. Reverse time, make her better. But it's all cosmetic, time still has to lurch forward again and you'll just have to reexperience the hurt all over. That's no solution. The only way out is forward, step by step, until the maze opens up and you breath fresh air again. But it's a path strewn with hidden thorns, all out to pierce your tender feet, blood trails marking the passage of others who. Bodies marking those who never made it. Not even time for a prayer, or to even see if you know them. Just have to keep going, even when it makes no sense.
         Maybe that's the whole plan. Maybe that's what they've been trying to tell him all night. His stereo spectres, clashing voices, varying personalities, different dialects dancing around the same topic, trying to point out the hidden flag so he can find it for himself. Nothing ever makes sense but you keep plodding forward in the hopes that some small part of it will fall into place. It all works out. Not neatly or kindly or for the best, but one way or another, life works itself out.
         Perhaps that has to be enough.
         Tristian's not sure about that, it feels too much like settling for the lesser product because you think you'll never be able to afford anything greater. Doesn't trying count? Can't you strive and still be content with a lack of success anyway?
         Dammit, if he weren't so out of touch with his own feelings, his own emotions, these are like radio signals being broadcast from a pirate station, ghostly crackles picked up through his teeth. He's traded the crowded bustle of the party for the anarchic containment of this diner and it's still like he's the only man in the world. These people are just figments from his dream, to remind him that he does this to himself, that in the end the warped portrait sketched by light on the flickering surface of his beverage is the face of the criminal on his mental wanted poster that he can never bring himself to turn in.
         Trying to look anywhere but at his own face, Tristian figures he'll sneak another glance at the couple on his right, reassure himself that in a world hollowed out and teetering on collapse, happiness is still a known quantity. It's not an art he's mastered but it's there, hovering just out of reach, pulsing faintly like the nebulous beast it is. But one day he'll find the strength to stretch his trembling fingers that one last inch and he'll know then.
         Until then, sometimes he just needs the reminder.
         Surreptitiously peeking to the side, Tristian finds himself suddenly staring at someone's shirt at stomach level.
         "What's my secret, you ask? Eating right and hard work, my friend," a familiar voice quips, though there's a masked edge to it Tristian can't identify. Still, a tiny flutter of excitement runs through him, even as his face remains impassive. Surprise replaced by a cold wash of relief. Right now he's not alone. It's more of a help than he even realizes.
         "A man does those," the newcomer continues, tapping the table with one finger before crossing over and sliding into the booth across from Tristian, "and he's almost guaranteed a long life.
         "Why, who knows," Brown grins at him, "he might just even live forever."
         Pushing his coffee to the side, Tristian leans back and returns the grin with his own tempered smile. There's really nothing on the table between them but two other mostly filled cups, one still steaming a little, assorted napkins and some discarded packages of sugar and milk. He got rid of the extra menus a while ago, though the waitress was at a loss to explain how he got so many. He had a small laugh over that after she was gone. It really was pretty funny.
         "Hey, you even got me coffee, that's just so kind of . . ." Brown continues, sliding one of the other cups in front of him with one hand on the saucer, looking down into the cup as he does so and suddenly stopping. "Ah," he says, frowning a little and glancing up at Tristian. "You know there's a smiley face made out of foam floating on top of this coffee? That's just disturbing." His eyes flicker down to it again. "And I swear it just winked at me. Okay," he whistles softly, sliding the cup as far away from him as the length of his arm will allow. "Don't know why I didn't expect that but . . ." he doesn't bother finishing the sentence just shakes in his head in what might be frustrated amusement or simple exasperation. It's been a long night for everyone.
         "So you found me," Tristian tells him, his voice quieter than he expects. He's not sure what he means by that, his own thoughts are still sealed away from him, his emotions barricading himself behind a steel door, gathering all the guns together and getting ready for a siege. Like he can't be trusted with them. Can't be trusted to do the right thing, the obvious thing.
         "I did," Brown needlessly confirms, leaning back and draping his arm over the seat of the booth, crossing his leg and resting his ankle on the knee. "Would have been here sooner but I had to stop for gas," he explains casually and for some reason Tristian gets the feeling that Brown is trying very hard to keep a straight face. Instinct tells him to just let the comment slide.
         Then the mask drops from his face and seriousness churns over his features. "How are you holding up?" Brown asks suddenly, his eyes narrowing a little, as if trying to pierce the fog Tristian has surrounded himself with. Tristian expected the shift, as well as the question. Still, foresight means nothing in the end. The act catches him offguard.
         But still gives him time to dodge.
         "How is she?" Tristian counters. His feelings are nothing, his thoughts are nothing, his opinions are nothing. The only way Tristian can cause himself to exist safely in a world where the winds are laced with knives and every speech is a gun placed to your head is to become what he fears most. Nothing. Then life just slides around you, pays you no mind at all.
          "As well as can be expected," Brown answers, his voice low, as if someone might be listening in. "I found her room and poked my head in, because . . ." he takes a deep breath, glances down at his lap, looks back up, "She was still sleeping, she looked okay, it was . . ." he breaks off, as if about to admit something he doesn't have the proper words for. "I didn't ask anybody about her, I wasn't even really supposed to be there." A smirk enlivens his face, the cocky spirit of the Brown of old regaining possession for just a second. "Amazing what happens when you act like you know where you're going, people think you belong there. If I had a white coat I could have been diagnosing patients."
         "That would have been something," Tristian admits awkwardly, swirling the coffee around in his cup a little with small circular motions of his hand. After a second he looks back up at Brown, like the display bores him and asks, "And how's Jina?"
         To his credit, Brown doesn't even ask how Tristian knew Jina was at the hospital. Tristian can only assume that he ran into at least one of the beings that was sharing a table with him until not too long ago. Or, more appropriately, they ran into him. He'll have to owe Brown for that one, they've been trying everyone's patience tonight. Like all this scrambling around just amuses them and they're trying very hard not to show it. Like unruly children who outgrew acting their age a long time ago. Children who can snuff out the sun like a man squashes an insect.
         Brown appears about to answer but then stops himself. Tristian can almost hear tires skidding as he changes direction. A sly smile crosses his face. "Cute," he says. "But I think protocol dictates that you have to answer one of my questions before you get to ask another."
         "I was never one for rules," comes Tristian's uneasy reply.
         "Pity, I'm a stickler for them," Brown responds offhandedly, his face elastic and then intent. "Answer the question. How are you holding up?"
         Tristian doesn't say anything at first, just places his palms flat on the table, hooks his thumbs over the edge, like he's about to shove the entire table right at Brown. Violence is just another way of talking. Shooting you to say hello. His entire body seems to stiffen and Tristian finds himself taking and then discarding a deep breath. Answers don't come easy, a breech birth through hips not used to the agonies of labor. He doesn't know what to say, there's nothing he can say.
         "Fine, I'm fine," he nearly gasps out. His body relaxes almost as a convulsion, a spasm that nearly shakes the table. To hide it, he leans forward suddenly, both forearms flat on the table, using it to support the insidious weight he can't help but feel.
         "You're fine," Brown says in a deadened tone of voice. Tristian's not sure whether the man believes him or not. He's not really sure how much he cares about matters like that anymore.
         Massaging the back of his neck, Brown casts a neutral glance skyward. "Funny," he says, still looking up, "I'm not fine. I'm worried and I'm uneasy and more than a little nervous about what's going to happen." Folding his hands together he places them neatly on the table, lowering his face and looking under his eyebrows at Tristian. The effect is meant to be unsettling probably but it's all nonsense gestures to Tristian. Woke up one morning and body language stopped making sense. Just like that. It creeps up on you, if you're not careful. "I only met Lena tonight and I really, really want her to be okay," Brown continues somberly.
         Tristian says nothing. Words only serve to commit treason, in the end. Trust nothing.
         "It scares me to think of what all this might do to her, in the long run. I've seen it before, it can really mess you up . . ." Brown states, giving an involuntary shiver. "It really can. Tonight . . . it's going to be one large blur to her, you know," Brown mentions, staring Tristian right in the eyes. There's a message hidden there but he's not about to go diving for it. Let Brown unravel it from his own mind, if he desires to give a sermon that much. "The stuff she got, it'll take the last six, eight hours of your memory and it's gone . . ." he snaps his fingers, the stark noise swiftly lost in the bubbling murmur of the diner, "just like that. And maybe . . . it's for the best, you know, with everything that happened but . . ." he shakes his head sadly, slowly. "It's just not fair."
         He lets out a soft sigh, strangely morose and inconclusive. "And, here you've known her for a lot longer than I have, you . . ." his eyes regard him with sparkling clarity, "she's the reason you came to the party, tonight, right? It was her, wasn't it?" He pauses for a second, waiting for some confirmation or denial, getting neither. Tristian isn't throwing him any rope. Brown blinks and forges onward, ignoring the implied conversational snub, "With all that . . . you've been through all I've been through and more . . . and you're fine," a ghostly sneer rises, flitting across too his words too quickly to be pinned down. Shaking his head in a quiet form of disbelief, a protest without overt action, he says, "Tristian, that's either fatalism or a form of confidence that I'll never hope to attain."
         Then his eyes become hard, almost crystalline. "And I don't believe any of it for a goddamn second."
         Tristian's throat goes suddenly dry. Brown's words seem to arc across an oddly quiet diner, shoving all the other phrases out of the way, the bully of sentences.
         "I . . ." he begins, but his beginning is no more than that, a beginning. From there he has no idea where to go. Nobody bothered to mark the path.
         "Dammit, Tristian, we've . . . we've been through too much," Brown's voice is almost shaking, the pressures of the night finally causing some cracks. "We've fought together, bled for each other, hell I've died for you . . ." and he doesn't even bother to temper his voice, taper it down for the unready crowd buzzing within earshot, his voice is only escalating, "and you shut me, shut everyone else out. And maybe it's not my business, not my right, but how the hell can you trust me with your life but shove me away when you need friends most? I don't get it, Tristian," and his admission is brutally honest, no sarcasm is apparent, it's simply a man expressing his abject puzzlement at his friend's actions, trying to understand them even as they defy his own experience. "I just don't get it at all."
         Tristian doesn't get it either, even when he thinks he's starting to, the whole scene changes and he finds himself adrift again, lost in an unforgiving sea where the waves are only there to batter him down into numbed submission, the water is there to choke out his emotions. Because there's no place for them here. In this life, there's no reason to get all upset. We've got everything under control. Just let the motion carry you away. Shadows casting doubt on his previous suppositions, rendering it all useless. Just stare placidly at the sun and smile vapidly while it burns out your eyes.
         "What do you want me to say, Joe?" Tristian replies, and his own voice startles him, rough and bristling with too much weariness. He doesn't have the strength to fight anymore and yet he knows he'll keep doing so, even while he claims he won't let himself be bothered. It's the paradox that drives him, chained tightly in the center of his soul. "I'm worried, all right," he almost spits the words out like a challenge, daring Brown to try and prove him wrong, make him feel something, "I'm scared and I wish to God none of this had happened but . . . if I . . ." and he closes his hands slowly before opening them again, the lifespan of a flower run into a slow motion filter, "if I let myself . . . feel any of that, if I let it come any closer than the nice, safe distance I've put it, I . . ." his voice drops into a near whisper, barely audible, "I'll just go to pieces."
         "That's what we're here for," Brown tells him equally softly. "To make sure that you don't."
         "Where the hell were you when I almost killed Carl?" Tristian almost snarls, the words skidding the edge between forceful statement and outright accusation. Brown doesn't even blink, like he's got the entire conversation figured out. Darting around Tristian's dinosaur stompings, finding spaces between the words to deliver all the meaning he has time to say. Tristian finds himself shuddering as the memory assaults him, a mugging in reverse. "When I walked into the room, I thought . . . my God, Joe I thought she was dying, I've seen too much death that . . ." words flee his faltering ship and he has to gather them back in before he loses the ability altogether, "I almost did it. Like it was . . . reflex, like catching a ball or . . . brushing your teeth, I . . ." he tightens inwardly again, tendons stretched taut by a will that outstrips the body it was built for, "and now I sit here and I don't . . . I'm doing my damndest not to feel anything because . . . two extremes," he holds up a hand weakly, fingers indicating the number, "that's all I have are the two extremes. I feel it all too . . . too intensely or I feel . . . nothing at all. And if I let myself feel, I . . . won't be of use to anybody and so . . . this is the only way, Joe. I'm sorry. I'm no use to anyone this way either, I guess but-"
         "Tristian, I almost did it too," Brown slips in calmly, his face the spring rain you see while curled up by your window, a steady unchanging drumbeat with the promise of brightness to come.
         His queued up thoughts halt in midstep, the teller window closing for lunch. Next to them two guys bump into each other and apologize profusely. Even randomness has a pattern when you extrapolate it out far enough. "What?" Tristian asks, a hollow echo of surprise in his voice.
         "Carl," Brown explains. "I almost killed him too." If any police are in here listening to their conversation, both of them are dead men. The added absurd complication of that possible future strikes Tristian as bizarrely funny. Wouldn't be startling at all really, just one more volley of arrows fired right at their heads. Even if you get up and walk away that just gives them another target, something else for motivation. You're the only one allowed the option of surrendering. "In the hospital, I was in his room . . . I don't even know why," he continues, shrugging, trying to fit the memory somewhere that makes sense, "but I looked down at him and I thought of Lena and I thought . . . no one will miss this poor bastard . . . and I almost did it." He holds a thumb and forefinger a scant distance apart. "This close, Tristian." He lets the hand drop back to the table, the fingers twitching ever so slightly. "So, I'm no better than you are, Tristian. We have the ability to make life miserable for lots of people . . . but we don't do that. Why?"
         "I think I'll have to disagree with you on that one, Joe," Tristian replies with a wan smile.
         "Disagree away," Brown answers, waving a hand like it's no big deal to him, scattering arguments like so much loose confetti. "But the fact doesn't change that we're both decent people who want to do the right thing. And killing people who don't deserve to die isn't the right thing here. Believe me, it was damn tempting," Brown gives a ragged laugh, and Tristian wonders how much he really had to fight to stop himself, "for both of us. But it's not the way. We're better than that, we'd rather let the bad guy live and sit here and feel guilty about it than just make life easier for ourselves. What can I say, we're nutty like that."
         "I . . . know what you're saying, Joe," Tristian tells his friend after a minute, taking a sip of cold coffee if only so he can have something to do with his hands. "I can hear the words but they're not . . . reaching me." His face twists into something confused, like he's hearing his own speech as a sort of fragmented babble, overgrown baby talk. "And it's not you, everyone's been telling me things that I already know but I can't make myself believe any of it . . ."
         Brown's staring at him with a sideways expression, his head cocked slightly to the side and his eyes narrowed just a little. There are pistons pumping in his head, steadily, efficiently, trying to process it all. But his friend is no psychologist and this is no therapy session, Tristian could scrawl his thoughts down in a million journals, number them all in sequence and line them up on the shelf in neat patterns full of repressed meaning and let an army of therapists have at them and it would tell him nothing. The things that go on inside his head are written in the most cryptic tongue he can manage but only because it's so simple. There's a simple reason for all of this. Everyone looks for the complicated reasons, Tristian wants to tell himself that it's about gradual detachment from his friends, from his home, that he feels lost among the stars, his own feeble light nothing against that ancient stellar brilliance. But it's none of that. This night started on a note that can be played in one chord and the final wavering notes will be sounded just the same.
         "Well," Brown says slowly in reply, "call this trite but it seems to me that the only person who can make you believe anything is yourself." He raises his eyebrows, as if daring Tristian to try just that. Go on, make yourself believe the truth, see if you can manage that. Drill the hole in your head and pour the viscous liquid right in, have it dribble down your face and over your lips, the bitter flaky texture that's numbing and exhilarating. "I don't know what else to say, I mean, I want to help you, Tristian, you think I like seeing you like this?" and his question is infused with frustrated anger, battering down walls that keep putting themselves back up, making a mockery of his supposed progress. "You're unsettled because you almost killed Carl, believe me, I didn't like the feeling either. It's the only thing you can think of to do and at the same time you know it's wrong and it won't solve anything. And you still want to do it." Brown gives a faint sigh, tapping his fingernail on the table, his eyes going vacantly distant, and Tristian gets the feeling that his friend wouldn't mind too much going back to the hospital and having another go at it.
         Tristian realizes he wouldn't mind either. It's a strangely intense feeling, almost a compulsion, tiny feet kicking him in the back and trying to get him to move. He finds his hand gently touching the slightly warm device at his belt, just checking to see if it's still there. Like the damn thing might walk off to perform it's own vengeance. And who could blame it? Not Tristian, it would only be carrying out the barely suppressed fantasies of more than a few people tonight. March right in and cut the bastard's heart right out. Crimson death by remote control. Safe and exacting. No messy emotionalism to gum up the works. When death becomes too distant, men pushing buttons in bunkers and explosions ripping people to pieces like rag dolls, that's when it becomes slaughter. Just a matter of policy.
         Suddenly it seems very warm in the diner. Like the sword has began to heat up and it's affecting the thermostat. Tristian tears his hand away from it, feeling like he's leaving portions of his skin behind with it, and draws his coat around himself, hiding the sword from his own view. He tells himself it's for Brown's benefit, since his friend isn't too fond of it to begin with. But he's not fooling himself at all.
         Brown notices the motion and offers him a frank expression of sympathy, trying to tell him silently that he's not alone, that his feelings aren't unique in the history of humankind. But that's not the problem. "Having second thoughts?"
         Tristian offers a grim laugh. "We went through second thoughts a long time ago." Vocalizing his thoughts takes so much effort, he has to press each word through a membrane stretched tautly between his brain and throat. They just don't want to go. It's a cold and unforgiving world out there, who can blame them for not wanting to take their chances. The brain is warm and they're surrounded by friends. Who'd want to leave that? But Tristian increases the rate of exile, overpopulation is building too much pressure, his head is a bone balloon, fighting to balance forces that he can't even see. "At least I can take pleasure in never forgiving him for it, I guess." The laugh that follows that statement is an echo in a bent cathedral, trying to smash a window and find a way out, unable to reach substance enough to spot the exit. It's a sign. He's ignoring all the signs.
         "Yeah, that's the great thing about being human," Brown jokes darkly, "we don't have to do stuff like that. Let God forgive him, I sure as hell don't have to." A lipless smile pays a visit to his face. "And of course I can always look him up later, you know, when I want to see how he's doing, what he's been up to. Power is such the wonderful thing sometimes."
         Glancing over Brown's head, Tristian notices that the foursome at the booth behind them have gone. He wonders if they overheard the conversation going on here and decided to leave before they had to tangle with two maniacs about to fly off the handle. He'll never know, but it'll certainly give them something to talk about. Tristian wishes his life seemed less weird to him but everything about it strikes him as commonplace now, to the point where he can sit in a diner and discuss this with somebody and it all feels as normal as having a conversation about the weather or sports or a fight with your girlfriend. He never thought he'd get to that point but here he is, neck deep in the madness, all his predispositions falling off like winter clothing he longer has a need for. In the end it all becomes clearer, before the final curtain call it all gets explained. The sand is settling from the air now and Tristian finds all his staggering has actually managed to gain himself some distance. Not much, but some. And the root of his problems hovers there in the center, a glistening diamond streaked with his own blood and a darkness he can never really escape from. If he could break it, he'd know then. As shards slice up his face, he'd know how to solve it all, plunge right to the heart of his soul and rework the gears until it all meshed smoothly. But that'll never happen, everyone's a work in progress. Tristian can see some of the facets but never the clouded center, the ultimate cause is the mystery he can never penetrate. We all carry our own around inside us, but we can never smash it and find out what it is. The effort, the very sight would burn out our eyes and unravel us into bloody strips.
         Tristian's caught glimpses of his diamond demon, glittering teeth ducking out of the corner of his eyes, claws tearing through him without any resistance at all, parting the still water of his mind. It reminds him that he's got it all wrong. It's so simple. Why he can't he just admit it? Does someone have to drag it out of him? Probably. Tristian's been blaming it all on death, on unhappy circumstances when that's not his real problem, it's just the opposite that lies curled around his head, the hands that he has keep to keep fighting to keep away from his throat. And it's eating him up inside, one demon fighting it way out while the other tries to claw its way in. Caught in the vice, there's nowhere left to curl into, he's compressed himself as far as he can go. The room is stifling. He needs to get out. But he can't. Because he can't face the future. He can't face what's coming. Even though he knows he has to.
         There's a blind spot in his head that he can't remove himself, cataracts in the brain. So he has to do it vicariously and hope that's enough.
         "Joe, how does she look?" Tristian gasps suddenly, unaware that his chest was being squeezed so much. Iron wraps around his lungs. The question comes out of nowhere even for him. But he can't talk about Carl anymore, he's wasted too much on the man as it is, he was never worth the effort, just trash that you kick out of the way and then forget about.
         "Who do you mean?" Brown asks sharply, his entire body straightening, seemingly about to spring.
         "Lena, what does she look like?" Tristian nearly growls out. Even now spirals of color are entwining into an image in his head. But he doesn't want that image because it'll be of something he can't bring himself to see. He has to see the truth, the truth as it stands now.
         "Tristian, I don't think that's a good-"
         "I can't go in there blind, Joe, I have to know, I have to know what I'm in for . . ." the feather light touch of her hand on his keeps flaring in and out, old wounds returning when the weather stops being so nice. It keeps switching hands, running up his arm, burning a spot gently on his neck. Droplets are falling into each other in his vision. Her laugh is contained in each one. Good God, he can't take this.
         "Maybe I don't want to do it . . ." Brown's voice is an easy challenge, the fence erected in your path to stop you. There's nobody in the diner but the two of them, their willpower has crowded everyone out, causing the windows to bulge outwards. Gathered in the parking lot, the putout patrons marvel at the clash. Bets are placed, wagers are made. It could go either way.
         "Who are you protecting?" Tristian barks out, somehow managing to keep his voice at a decent level while cramming all his power into it. For a second it feels like it used to be, the idealistic confidence before the millstone of the world reduced it to so much dust. "Me? I can take it, I've saved the world I can certainly stomach this, right?" His laugh is too ragged, he's remembering the way her eyes were almost moist when seen in the shadows, how she never looked more beautiful than when she didn't know anybody was looking at her. Only then did Lena ever let herself go, stepped out of her body and opened the shutters. Tristian saw, he knows. For a second, she let him in tonight. For a second, his world made perfect sense to her. And she's not here. And so wants her here so much.
         "No, Tristian," Brown replies calmly, immobile steel throwing up girders in his voice. "I won't do it. Come to the hospital and you can see her but I'm not going to do this to you or me. It's sick. It's not what you want."
         "Joe, dammit, I have to know!" It's not his voice. It's not.
         Pull back the camera. Blurred dots resolve into a mouth. Her smile. Her smile is the most effortless thing in the world. It reaches all the way to her eyes. He can see her making a joke and laughing, covering her mouth a little in embarrassment, but there's no sound. It's all in slow motion. The film is starched of color. Tristian can't remember if this ever happened or not. He's having trouble remembering the sound of her laugh. Oh God. It's tearing him apart, this incessant fusillade, breaking off chips of him bit by bit. And this isn't the way to end the imagined torment. It's not.
         But he can't help but force the ending. If it won't come naturally, he'll fabricate his own, honest or not, actual intentions be damned. The eye of this psychic hurricane won't rest here forever and when the storm arrives again, all the damage control in the world won't put all his houses back together again. Just debris. That's all your life is, just someone else's mess.
         "And you will," Brown says softly. "But not this way." Nearly throwing himself across the table, he leans closer to Tristian, whispering intently, his words coming out almost as one sure sentence, "I know you care about her, Tristian, but dammit, so do I and this isn't-"
         "Her . . . she . . ." words are abandoning ship, getting lost in his head and bumping into the furniture, knocking it over and raising havoc, spilling out into his speech. He can't talk right, his tongue is numb, a fleshy muscle robbed of usefulness by memories that refuse to do the right thing and lie low. Instead they keep popping up, not abiding by the expiration date. It shouldn't be this intense, not after all these hours, all this rugged time. He presses his hands against his eyebrows, trying to scare them all into silence, shaking them into submission but it's not working. Earthquakes in the brain but nobody has anything to lose anymore. Possessions scattered, families separated by gaping faults, and nobody cares. Nothing works. "Joe, she . . ."
         Brown, taken suddenly aback by this, retreats a little, but not resting in his seat all the way, ready to leap back into action again if he's needed. His friend must appear to be like one of those worms that burst from the can, all tension and stored kinetics with the lid sealed, nothing but a limp string when the dam is finally removed. "Tristian," he says clearly, his words taking a machete to the reckless jungle sprouting up in his mind, hiding all the important landmarks from civilization, "what are you trying to say?"
         "She cared about me, too . . ." he expels the words as one foul phrase, the effort nearly throwing him back against his seat, the unyielding molded plastic supporting him in a way none of his friends can, keeping him from falling. But it's only a feint, the chair could care less either way, it only keeps him up because that's what it's supposed to do. It has no choice, it holds up the peaceful and the tyrants all the same, impartially.
         Brown looks confused by this outburst, like Tristian has suddenly curled into a fetal position and put on a red clown nose and has started spraying the other diners with his trick flower. Desolation and absurdity all mingling freely. That's his life. That's what it means to be him. "I'm sure she cared about you," he says, putting his right side forward, his forearm resting on the the table. "You two are friends, Tristian, come on what makes you think that she wouldn't-"
         "No, Joe that's not . . ." and Tristian is foolishly shaking his head, scattering the dented marbles in his head even more, muted clackings, "It was . . . it was more than that you see . . . you see . . . she . . ." he feels oddly constrained by his jacket, no, by his life, there's no room in it for him to grow anymore. But he's stuck with it, you can't go out and buy another. Find new outlets in the same small space. There's always room for change, we're never complete sculptures. Probably could do to take a little off the nose. But fumbling for words isn't his way, he used to give speeches dammit, this isn't right. Inwardly, Tristian grimaces and braces himself, grabbing two handfuls of words, stuffing them down the chute, screaming at the top of his lungs for order, a semblance of sanity to the lunacy that passes for his life, his mind.
         "Joe," he states, and his voice rings out with the rigidly flexible intensity he hasn't heard for a long time. Even Brown blinks in surprise, leaning microscopically closer, as if the distance might make a difference. "Lena has feelings for me. She likes me," but even that word can't properly describe it. A gradeschool term, when the half smile of a girl in your general direction could make your cheeks burn and a stolen kiss at lunch behind the playground gates was both rite of passage and a victory all the same.
         "Tristian . . . what?" He gives a laugh on the last word, Brown can't quite believe what he's hearing. "Are you serious?" But there's a shine in Tristian's eyes that's halfway content and the memories are almost playing nonstop there, a marathon that won't quit, Tristian keeps examining it himself, looking for insincerity, a misinterpretation, implants by beings from beyond this world. But there's nothing to find. Just two humans finding each other, slowly, dragging themselves over the jagged mountain from opposite sides, coming face to face at the summit and realizing that it wasn't a journey they had to make alone. From there the moments click one after the other, and the path downhill is just that, an inevitable progression that always leads to the same place. If their lives hadn't detoured, if they didn't have to shift sideways to find new routes, it would have happened sooner. But something like that can't be belittled by time, it occurs when it's ready.
         "You are serious, aren't you?" Brown continues, lowering his head a little to stare Tristian right in the eyes, searching for fallacies and finding nothing but memories radiating with a clarity Brown can only envy. A grin spreads across his face. "I thought you two were out there for a while."
         "I told her . . ." Tristian tells Brown, looking down at his hands, the fingertips lightly touching each other, the faint pressure a tingle keeping him aware. "A weak moment," he shrugs dismissively, even as Brown gives him a look Tristian can only sense, "but I didn't expect anything to come out of it, I just felt . . ." he laughs briefly, a firework trying to keep up with the rest, "honestly I don't know why I did it. But I did and we talked and she . . ." with agonizing slowness he raises his head to stare at Brown, wonderment in his eyes, waiting any second for the lovely dream to end, "she felt the same way, Joe. All this time and she felt the same way."
         "I know, isn't life great?" Brown grins at him, slapping the table lightly, drumming his fingers to the beat of a forced march. With a straight face garnered from much practice and a sigh just a tiny step beyond dramatic exaggeration, he states, "Well, I guess there's hope for me after all then."
         "I'd say there is," Tristian replies, casting a sardonic look at Brown, a raised eyebrow between two friends saying more than any flowery speech or longwinded monologue ever could. Tristian glances to his left, watching the gentle light of dawn airbrushing the sky. The sun will be coming up soon, the attendants are already marking the way. Night turns into day, just the same as it always does. There's nothing special about this night, other than the importance you choose to brand it with. But these people in the diner, the weary waitresses, the bored looking guy at the cash register, the three college students waiting to get a table, the person behind him smoking a cigarette that keeps smearing with its acrid stench, none of them know. It's all murmurs. Murmurs and rumors.
         "Is that what's bothering you about all of this?" Brown asks soberly, returning them back to reality with the ease of a magician. Step into my hat and walk into a different time. You first.
         Tristian rests his two fists together, fingers touching, his elbows on the table, his arms angled toward Brown. We clutch at air hoping to catch the magic that we see all around but it's not that easy. "We talked . . . for a while," he says after a moment, staring at his hands. "Just the two of us, I . . . you think about stuff like that happening, right, you think about it and sometimes it happens but it never . . . it never happens like you think, like you imagine." A soft smile drifts like a wispy cloud over his face. His eyes aren't really focused on his hands, there are reflections of people in his corneas, performing their silent plays to limited audiences. "This did. Not, not exactly, but close enough so that . . . I thought I was dreaming and . . . I wasn't." Innocence trying to be born again flashes in his eyes as he lifts up his head to regard Brown, who has been watching him silently, intently, letting him speak. "It pays, Joe. Honesty, decency, all that stuff, I mean you watch everyone else getting away with less and you start to think, oh maybe I can compromise, maybe but . . . it paid off. For a while there, it was right."
         "Oh don't tell me that, I'll have to admit to my parents that they were right," Brown quips, but it's gentle humor, tinged with knowing sadness. "I was getting quite used to my decadent way of living. I don't want to give that up."
         "Yeah, that's you, our little hedonist," Tristian laughs, trying to be hearty but winding up feeble, his emotions aren't geared up for it. He leans back again, resting one arm on the table, the other resting on the back of the seat, fingers spreading out to support his tilted head. Suddenly he looks very tired, like every word he's speaking is draining his vitality. Wrinkles forming as his body falls into itself. But he can't stop, there's no sealing the breach once you've let them all out. You just have to hope they leave something for you to work with. "God, Joe, you know, I hate being paranoid, but sometimes I really do think the world is out to get me . . ." his face is asking honest questions from a Universe that writes its cryptic answers in events that we never notice. The pattern of traffic lights, the dewdrop songs of the morning, the exhaust stink of passing cars, the way a streetlight highlights your face when you pass under it, those are the only answers we'll ever get, that we'll ever need. You just have to be able to decode the signs. Modern times call for modern symbols, a mythology built around the mundane and the everyday. "Why her? Why tonight?" He's been over these questions a thousand times in his head, tire tracks wearing dirt ruts along the neurons of his brain, but each time he comes up with nothing.
         "I can see where you'd think that," Brown tells him, shrugging a little, "hell, some days I sit there and wonder how much out there is chance and how much is part of some plan. I don't know why anything happens, Tristian, I wish I did. And even if I did I don't think it'd make any difference anyway." He laughs a little, "You know, when I joined up with . . . the organization," he raises his eyebrows comically as he says that, causing Tristian to just shake his head in amusement, "I had all these ideas about it, I thought, oh great now I'm finally going to start understanding why everything happens, it's all going to start making sense now." He holds his hands out, indicating all he's learned. "Five years now and I'm still waiting for revelation. It's not going to happen, the people who write the world aren't consulting us when they pen the chapters and even if they did . . ." folding his hands together he says simply, "between you and me, Tristian, I'd rather be paranoid every once in a while and delude myself into thinking I'm just being paranoid, rather than knowing for sure that there's something up. Because then I wouldn't be able to think about anything else."
         "And you call me fatalistic," Tristian comments.
         "Yeah, but it's the fun kind," Brown smirks back, sticking his thumb in the air.
         "I guess but . . . I don't know, it's all so . . . I keep thinking of her," Tristian tells Brown, glancing at him with open eyes, "and what happened to her and . . . you're right, I've heard the same thing about what . . . what the drug does, about . . . memory and . . ." he rubs his forehead with thumb and middle finger, as if he expects his head to be missing, "I tried so goddamn hard, Joe, I really did, I gave it my all and for it to mean nothing . . ."
         "Tristian," Brown says softly, "understand something. The stuff that Lena told you, it just didn't spring up out of nowhere, she was just expressing what she already felt. Tonight was a catalyst."
         "I can't go back to square one," Tristian confesses. And that's it right there, the words he hasn't been able to express all night. Hearing them, Tristian's struck by how pained they sound, a man without any possessions curled up on the floor afraid to move for fear of what else they might steal away. "I just can't."
         "You won't have to," Brown says. "You've won the battle already, all you have to do is remind her. Lena's been hurt, but she hasn't changed. You have to know that."
         And Tristian does. But he's afraid to hope. That's what it boils down to, all the structures and buttresses are in place but that one crucial piece is missing. And Tristian's afraid if he erects the tower, that one piece will bring it all tumbling down. He can't be caught in his own wreckage again. He's through with strolling through ruins, filling in the faded grandeur with his own imagination, wiping dust off monuments and rubbing it all over his fingers, taking in the age, the weight of time. There has to be a point where you can cry enough and the world listens, when it parts for you and lets you pass without obstacle, without effort.
         Now Brown is touching his arm, reaching across the table to grasp a man who keeps threatening to slip back into the ghostworld, letting it all carry him away. "Listen, Tristian, I've been here a while and Jina's at the hospital all by himself . . . she's going to be wondering what happened to me . . ." he gives a lopsided grin at that.
         Tristian withdraws his arm slowly, watching at Brown's fingers drape liquid shadows over his arm. "Then go," he remarks simply. "I don't want to keep you here."
         Brown ducks his head, grinning a little, muttering, "Oh God help Lena . . ." before gazing back at Tristian, humor radiating even through the murk of the faded night, "I meant come with me, Tristian. Jina's getting sick of me as it is and . . ." the two men hold each other's stare for a long while before Brown finally just expels a sharp breath and sits back heavily, saying, "God, you don't take hints very well, knew I should have just been blunt . . ." his stare narrows to a point, trying to pin Tristian down, "Just come back with me, Tristian. Sitting here all night accomplishes nothing. And you know that."
         Tristian says nothing for a long time. He keeps staring out the window, trying to turn back the night in his head. But you can't stop the motion, the world keeps turning and there's nothing we can do about it. Her words still resound in his head a ball thundering down a hill, gathering mass as it falls. Blotting out the sky. He's spent the whole night examining the past, trying to find fault with himself when it has nothing to do with him. Events march on, fate won't stop to kick you along if you refuse to move. But nor does it stop moving either. Beauty struggled for life tonight and Tristian had a hand in its birth. But now it's threatened to wilt stillborn, sink back into the ground before it even drinks in the spring. Light and darkness cancel each other out without even realizing it sometimes. All part of the natural process, a battle going on since the void failed to suppress the onset of the first and brightest day. Tristian played a role, and said his lines with all the feeling he could muster, but he can't be responsible for everything that happens on stage, there are too many scripts being passed around, too many extras in the wings fighting for presence, struggling to get their voices heard.
         Guilt is an ember threatening to spark back into life, sizzling in his rational rain, but he can't let it burn him. He's not blameless, but nor is he culpable. If foresight was possible, nothing would ever get done, because everyone would look out too far into the future. And we'd all see the same thing. And it would paralyze us to the core. So he tried, in his stupid, ridiculous human way, to make it better. And maybe all he can honestly say is he didn't make the situation worse. Which has to count for something. It has to make some sort of difference.
         In the end they're just muddling through. All of them, him and Brown and Lena and Jina and even Carl and Will and Brian and Jack, all of them play their roles, step onto the stage but the trajectories can't be tracked, influence settles like fog, you can cut through it to see clearer but there's not a damn thing you can do to make it go away. And it's not about to. All you can see are each other, human shadow droplets, heavy with promise but blind in their movements, shuffling around, hands patting the air, trying not to hit the wall. Alone you'll always falter, and maybe even in a group, but if you stick together, when the fall does come, slavering teeth rocketing out of the night, tuned to the frequency of your suffering, there might just be someone to catch you. Someone to defend.
         He cares about Lena. Whether she knows that or not anymore is irrelevant, he can't stop caring. But you can't keep her safe forever, it'd be trying to stop a subway car with your bare hands, even once the brakes lock momentum just carries you along anyway. Lock all your friends into a room, filter the air, formulate a shield, let them sit in a circle and stare at each other until the end of their days. That's not living. That's not life. It's the risk that makes it so sweet, we get kicked facedown into the dank pool of oil but when we finally get to lift our heads and breathe in that misted air, it makes it all worth it. Somehow, the reward always finds us.
         And Tristian could lapse into immobility here until moss grew on him, until people started to pass by and dust him off, but life wouldn't cease. You can stop yourself but you can't make the world go backwards. Our legs don't bend that way. Lena is hurt, all the power in the world can't stop that, but she'll get better. You go forward and the day brightens. We start in darkness but the sun always comes back. It can't do anything else. It's a slave as much as we are.
         "Tristian . . ." Brown's voice whispers, muffled questions embedded in his name, a call to arms. He could ignore it, tell Brown that he'll join him later, that he doesn't feel like it, a million excuses in the breadline, all patiently waiting their turn, slips of paper in hand, resumes all ready. Just say the word, sir. Just say the word and we'll get right to work. Ain't no status quo gonna be changing while we're around. You can bet on that.
         Except Tristian's not interested in stagnation anymore.
         It never suited him right anyway.
         In a liquid motion, he slides out of the booth, all his previous aches forgotten, the hours melting off like so much oil, pooling in a thick puddle around his feet.
         Brown just flashes a grin at him before moving to get up himself.
         Tristian reaches into his pocket and flips a bill onto the table, something given to him a hour or so before. Brown glances down at it, following its fluttering passage, raising an eyebrow when he sees what it is.
         "This isn't the Ritz, you know," he comments.
         "Believe me, she earned every bit of it."
         Brown blinks and then shakes his head, nodding knowingly. "Oh yeah, I forgot who your tablemates were. I ran into one of them at the hospital, actually."
         "I'm so sorry," Tristian mutters as the two of them start to exit the diner. People glance at the pair of them as they pass the booths but their passages leaves no wake, insubstantial ripples, nothing to remember them by. Just two guys leaving a diner after a night of coffee. They could be anyone. Even their footsteps are muted, walking on silk.
         "Yeah, believe me I'm looking very forward to going back to seeing them like once every few years," Brown notes, racing forward a step to open the door for Tristian. The cold morning air is a relief from the smoke saturated air of the diner. Even his hair smells like cigarettes. "Age before beauty," he grins.
         Tristian only gives him a look and steps gracefully through the door, almost appearing to be a blur. He pivots as he exits, turning to see the interior of the diner. So many faces, young, old, how many of them look up the stars at night and wonder? How many of them would want to know just what is out there, that they've been sharing a room with beings beyond their conception, with two men who could tell them everything they ever wanted to know, but nothing they really needed to know. You can have it all without leaving your planet, Tristian knows that. Everything else is just extra.
         As Brown joins him, Tristian says, "That was pretty good, what you said about the writers not consulting with us . . . you make that up?"
         The two of them start walking down the ramp to the parking lot. Brown swings his arms over his head and stretches, taking deep breath of the icy air, his breath forming billowing clouds, ghost volcanoes boiling into the material world. "Ah, you've found me out, I'm afraid," he states, putting some bounce into his step as he travels down the ramp. Light uncovers glistening patches of ice. "It's a rough translation of something some priest told me that once . . . there's a funny story behind it actually . . ."
         "Joe," Tristian says suddenly, almost stopping, his shoes squeaking piercingly on the concrete. Brown hits a patch of ice and skids a bit, just barely resisting the urge to grab onto to Tristian for support. Something in the other man's voice causes him to glance up.
         In the shadows at the end of the ramp, someone is standing there. Hands clasped behind his back, the highlights reveal a familiar face. Wraithlike, it almost appears to be a mirage, lamps betraying its translucent quality.
         "Oh," is all Brown says, regaining his footing.
         Eyes that seem to shimmer in the dark regard them.
         "Ready, gentlemen?" is all it says, a cool calm to rival the air itself evident.
         The two of them glance at each other, brief experience inflating their silent language. Tristian feels a chill passing through him. The diner was safe and warm and now he's out here, ready to plunge into events where the waves can throw you anywhere it wants, where being alert is all you can do, all you really have time for. Emotionally, it's been a trying night and part of him trembles, shrinks away from the chance that another blow might arise. A familiar hand can turn into a fist all too easily.
         But in the end, it's like going downhill, you don't pursue the path because it's easier, but because it gets you there as quickly as you can.
         "You ready?" Tristian asks Brown. A cool breeze is pushing his hair in front of his eyes, just tickling the tops. He doesn't dare touch it.
         "I'm not the one you should be asking that question," Brown tells him, his gaze level.
         "Just checking," Tristian says with a slim smile. That smile fades like so much wind driven mist as he turns to face the man at the end of the ramp. His stance seems to suggest that he's waiting for an answer but that he'd wait forever if necessary. Until he hears what he needs to hear.
         "Okay," Tristian sighs, taking a deep breath. Then, louder, as he takes the first step down the ramp, he calls out, "We're ready." His voice seems to echo, invisible waves saturating the night, in the empty parking lot. Newly born sunlight glints off a lazy puddle. He lets his vision flicker over to Brown, who's right in step with him. Good. He hopes that's the way it will always be.
         "Let's go."
         The man just smiles.