I. Ordinal Utilities

Returning from my second break, I ran into Deftone, the pickup court's most reputable point guard. Deftone and I were only slightly acquainted. Sure, we ran together more often than not, exchanging only the briefest of words that the male ritual of hoops allows. But that didn't make us close, especially since lengthy conversations were looked down upon by all players.

For this reason, he made me nervous. He always wanted to talk, especially since he was pious to the point of infuriation. No one at the court had ever heard him so much as utter a single profanity. Which usually meant one thing only, and no one we played with ever seemed to be in the mood for a conversion, battlfield or otherwise. Including me. But that didn't mean I wasn't lost.

Especially when I had to talk. And since I never knew exactly how to delicately derail conversation, I was never able to avoid Deftone's messianic ramblings. That went for the entire court, mostly because at 6-8 he towered over everyone. That stature allowed him access to the most impenetrable of aggregates, no matter the game or the players. It didn't hurt that he had the smoothest handles on the court, an emergent Magic doppleganger. But no matter how many times he dished me a pass or cornered me with his born-again hard-sell, I still kept mostly to myself. The gradual destruction of my body was the only point I even showed up anymore. No woman wants to marry a pickup artist.

But it was the life I had chosen, for now. We were all ballers, born and bred on a steady diet of interactive mechanics. We locked into planes that intersected violently and exhaustively, creating physical poetry in the cardiovascular process. Chess, with inner-city pawns and protected kings crammed onto a hardwood grid that left socioeconomic advantage behind in favor of purity and skill.

And Deftone was one of our best, which is why we overlooked his monologues, even when he thought we were locked in dialogue. It was all we could do in payment for watching him annihilate defenses with an arsenal of crossovers, stutter-steps, steals and dialed-in shooting. Especially when he emasculated the new jacks, only to sermonize at length to them after the game while they crouched surly against the walls, towels draped over their frustrated heads.

But there was nowhere to go when Deftone got his claws into you. Which is why he grabbed my arm and stopped me from walking past him, my pretense to surprise at his presence as superficial as his motives for stopping me.

"Hey there, my man! What's the word?" he shouted, simultaneously rifling through a gym bag the size of a Sherman tank.
"Just got off my break, Deftone," I answered, twisting lightly out of his grip. "Heading back to work."
"Word, man. Check it, I've been down at the center all day, helping out some of our less fortunate brothers and sisters."
"That's nice of you, man, real nice," I answered, moving around him to give him the hint, which of course he would never get. I wasn't going anywhere.
"Know what, man?"
"Gotta go, Deftone. Work, man."
"You look like you could use some guidance, homeboy. Here, take this." He placed a crudely printed pamphlet into my palm and moved past me, down the hill. "I gotta go, my brother," he called over his shoulder as he walked. "Duty calls. I'll see your butt at the court. Get in shape. Fool."

A head-bob and he was gone. After watching his form fade into the distance, I looked down at the pamphlet he gave me. On its cover in rigid black and white was a veined hand reaching out from a planet towards the streaming light of a distant star, one bearing no distnguishing feature other than an ominous plus sign. That or the sign of the cross. The difference between the two escaped me. Beneath the graphic in bold capitalization were the followng two words:

Forbidden Knowledge.

A cracked ideogram. Multiple meanings. A combination of terms that together canceled the energies of each other. I looked back down the hill at the vibrant microchip of the city. But Deftone was gone, leaving only swirling heat rising from the battered pavement.

Back at work, I opened Deftone's pamphlet and read some while my computer droned to life. Superior Jane, my immediate supervisor, marched into the cube the minute my CPU made a noise, and jerked her head silently in my workmate’s direction. He was a nondescript fortysomething named Jensen, and spent the majority of his days lost in a pair of high-end headphones. He rarely spoke to anyone, especially me, but everyone at the office neverthlesss knew all about his data leaks. Yet he was crafty enough to avoid any managerial interference, so he must have been doing something right, and since he and I shared a cubicle, Superior Jane made it her business to be my best friend. She peered now over the five-foot wall at his back, spying on his terminal, as if he would be dumb enough to leave anything incriminating for her to catch. I took the opportunity of her nosy interruption to insert Deftone's pamphlet into my intelligence brief.

What I read was inconclusive enough to be superfluous.

It is forbidden in the classroom, not allowed in most homes, prohibited in government, and considered offensive in the public square. At the movies, it is virtually censored. For the most part, it is either ridiculed, ignored, misrepresented, or selfishly used as a tool for making money. The most defiant attacks are reserved for the weekend nights where it is dragged through the mud by the masters of the house, who also exorcize the people of any trace of openness to the forbidden knowledge. In fact, our very own minds often forbid it, not daring to face the potential consequences of being socially ostracized.

Driving home through the streetlit fog that night, I coasted into a traffic jam. The Twins wafted ephemerally from my stereo, while I sat and waited, fingers rolling along the steering wheel. Looking through my open sunroof, I saw a hole appear in the cloud layer overhead. A multicolored flash of light flew from one end of the absence to the other, leaving only the November Betelgeuse in its wake.

We were going nowhere. The slowly increasing blare of car horns littered the evening like the ululation of forgotten souls.

To attack the boredom, I crawled out of the car through the sunroof and peered into the linear glow of homeward-bound automobiles. Far in the distance at the head of the halted exodus, a series of red lights swirled violently. People began to shout, frustrated and immobilized in their synthetic shells.

I abandoned the car and walked casually, hands in pockets, towards the front of the conundrum. Two city blocks later, I moved to the center of inaction, where eight police cars, two fire trucks, one ambulance, an overturned automobile replete with shattered glass, a limp hand dangling uselessly from the driver's side window provided context for the motionless form in the middle of the street.

It was Deftone, his head a full-bloomed flower of blood and flesh.

At the end of his twisted arm, a mashed hand, like a waiter's tray, supported two pamphlets. Two yellow-suited ambulance drivers spread a white sheet over him like a picnic blanket.

II. Cardinal Utilities

At home, my mind knotted and sore, I stared at the ceiling and thought of sports. Of war, direction and misdirection, hide and seek. I imagined a mirror on my ceiling where my opponent crouched in readiness, ready to engage a game of deceit and desire. What was I trying to obscure? What did he want from me? Was it what he really asked for?

I decided that it would be a long time until I went back to the court.

Preferences. The pamphlet triggering the precise window in the course of events. The next move made. Pickup, capture, scrutiny, signification. The clock ticked audibly in the corner, its second hand marking time in annoying, discrete clicks. The plasma reverberated throughout my flat, voices without bodies bouncing from wall to wall and falling to dust in the corners. Later, while I slept, the bedroom rotated 180 degrees. At least it felt like it.

I dreamt of the time that a wide-eyed straggler hopped our back fence to escape a gang of bangers that had chased him down the alley. My sister screamed when she saw him from the bedroom window cowering in our backyard like a beaten dog. As I followed my father, who had armed himself with a shovel and moved cautiously in toward the exhausted transient, the truth of his calculation impressed me to no determined degree. At the time, I was amazed that he was able to clear the fence, which my father had fortified with nails whose sharp ends pointed toward the godless sky. I found the bum's thought process to be the diamond-sharp result of a massively gifted critical apparatus.

It spoke of refined survival. The only endgame in town.

My father eventually calmed him down and offered to drive him back to his homeless shelter. As the only son in the family, I begged to go along for the ride. But as the passenger left our van, he violently grabbed me, and whispered with ferocity into my ears.

"First, you need to know the rules of the game because they will tell you what actions are permitted at any time."

Then he bit me on the arm as hard as I have ever been bitten.

Another dream found me patiently waiting in my car caught in the eye of a hurricane. Trees ripped from nurturing soils, houses crushed like cracked leaves. With a heave, the maelstrom lifted my car from the street and slammed it against an invisible wall. The gravitational force sunk into my solar plexus and pushed out of my back and into the wall. Shattered into pieces, I fused again into a whole. On my knees, I found my mirrored opponent once more. His irises had disappeared.

Screaming, of course, I awoke. Clearing the fog from my mind, I searched the floor of the bedroom for my neatly folded clothes. Shaking hands found the pamphlet in my jeans' back pocket, while my eyes scanned for where I left off.

Contrary to the misinformation routinely presented in your schools, the forbidden knowledge is not a literary work or the mere mixture of myths with history. It has withstood all unbiased historical, archaeological and other tests. Most of the evidence confirming this has been intentionally and unintentionally censored from your classrooms.

"It's all right," whispered a voice from beneath my bed.

III. Expected Utilities

At work, Superior Jane felt like confiding. Again.

"I think Jensen is illegally transferring intelligence," she spoke lowly into my ear, her perfume overwhelming me. My nose started to itch, but I stifled a sneeze. "I caught him hacking into the main board. He left his trail visible this time, as if he wants us to catch him. Maybe it's a trap. What do you think?"
I didn't answer, deciding to nod instead.
"Yes, it's definitely a trap. He's setting us up. I'm going to have to call National on this one. It could be big. Are you coming to the Company dinner?"
"No. Yes."
"Great!"

She strutted out of my cube as if stalking the city beat, stopping only to wink conspiraorially when she passed behind Jensen. He typed forward furiously, lost in interiority. Jane added a tacky thumbs-up as a parodic chaser, before moving onward, eyes peering into each cubicle she passed. Her stiff company suit deflected the buzzing artificial light into the eyes of the entire division, a holy Madonna made flesh in middle managment purgatory. I shook my head and turned over my shoulder to peer at poor Jensen.

I found him staring back into my eyes. The incongruity stopped my heart dead on its truncated beat.

We locked gazes for what seemed an eternity until he raised his straightened arm in my direction, palm up. In that gesture, it was impossible to ignore the tattooed plus sign eternally embedded into his upturned skin.

I lowered my head and kept my eyes to the ground. In minutes, I was powering out of the parking garage, reevaluating the thought of never returning to work again. First the court, now the office. I was running out of places to hide.

Heading home, I decided to detour through Stepson Beach, a difficult sinew outside of the city that passes through a suggestive National Park forest before reaching the roiling, repetitious surf. I parked in the mostly vacant lot and turned off the hybrid, hesitating in my seat for a moment. The amulet I picked up while in China still hung from my rearview window, its melancholy visage offering no duty-free consultation.

I left the car behind and wandered aimlessly onto the dusky beach, squeezing sand between my toes until I reached the water. Breathing in the sea air rejuvenated my senses, but the cold nevertheless began to creep into my blood. There was no fighting the thermodynamic constants that forced bodies like mine to lose heat, to wither into obsolescence. It was the nature of the contest. We always lose. Always.

I spotted another figure out of the corner of my eye, and turned in its direction. It was a woman, staring out into the stars, her right arm extended skyward. She chanted something loudly into the night, as if imploring the skies to open and throw down their secrets like so many severed puppet strings. On autopilot, I fished Deftone's pamphlet out of my backpack.

"Hey!" I shouted in her direction, an utterance that made her start awkwardly into motion away from me. A shadowy figure on a darkening beach. She turned and began to run the opposite direction, sprays of sand landing behind her with each vigorous footfall.

I was transfixed by the reflective material of her jogging ensemble. Unity of appearance. What's beneath it all? That's what I wondered as I strolled over the spot where she had stood, blinking up at the brightening stars for a sign. Sign of what, I had no clue. But clues were hard to come by in the vertigo of information in which I lived, so you can forgive me for my anachronism. People hang on. What can I say?

"You should know better," a low voice growled behind me.
I turned around. It was Jensen, a pistol in his fist pointed at my midsection. Finally.
"Give me the pamphlet," he demanded in what barely could be called a whisper.
"What?" I asked, prolonging the inevitable.
"Stop fucking around. Give it to me."
" What for?"
"You know exactly what for."
"I do? You're going to have to remind me, because I don't remember anything. Except you leaking data. But then everyone remembers that, don't they? You left a trail."

He kept his eyes attached to the receding figure I had chased away, before glancing at me and then shifting his gaze upward to the stars. The nameless woman drifted off the right of my shoulder and into the mist issued from the collapse of descending waves. I pressed on.

"Jensen, I have questions. I need answers."
"You're out here. You know too much already."
"Only what the stars tell me. Everyone seems to be talking to them."
"You failed math. Thugs like you do that. Ghetto trash."
"Put down the gun."
"I'm putting you down. You never know, smartass. Maybe the stars will speak to you, and then the whole world will know everything. Big fucking mouth."
"What will they know?"
"The forbidden. That you are dead man."

That jab stuck. But you have to pull back from a punch with your arm intact. I planned on making that hard to do. I juked left and surged into Jensen's chest, aiming my skull for his larynx, praying for collapse. It worked. Jensen emptied himself of air, my shoulder firmly embedded in his sternum for pure punctuation. I grinned, lost in the violence of the moment. A video game come to life.

But Jensen's gun had ideas of its own. Unpredictably, its bullets scattered into my stomach, against program. Perhaps we did not speak the same language. It didn't seem to matter anymore. That is the only thing that made any sense as I fell hard to the sand. The collision carried permanence, my weight to the earth's dampened shore. Ignoring Jensen out of pure payback, I squinted in the direction of the woman I had scared away, now a blip on the radar of an evening that would never end. The spreading pain caused me to tighten my lids until my vision blurred with imaginary doubles.

"She's almost gone now. She probably didn't hear it," Jensen wheezed, picking his ragged husk up from the sand.

I cracked a last grin at his fractured voice, knowing his throat would never be the same.

"You can watch her fade, as you will fade. And perhaps meet the master."
"You killed him," I whispered.
"We will all die soon. One less nigger to play basketball with."

He shot me again, this time in the neck. There was much less noise than I expected. He must have chosen a weapon suited for the occasion. Hackers. Clever fuckers. I found that I had lost my voice.

Turning my head, I saw the pamphlet that had flown from my hands during the anticlimactic scrap, its paper wings settling into the beach. Jensen was ready to leave now, but perceived my intent. He dragged himself over to me and snatched the pamphlet into the sky. Next year's new territory. He walked nonchalantly to his car as if he had just bought a bag of groceries.

In the cinematic fashion of the dying antihero, I expired while reading the stars. Orion's belt. Dippers large and small. Coordinates on a grid of contested terrain. But also secret theories, labyrinthine diagrams of possibility. But the ends were always the same, littered with bodies. Collateral. Debris like me, until we were all simply the sum of words too saturated with sand to rise.

The body was of no more use, so I left it. Then the sky opened, as I knew it would, to the page I never read. On the back was crucial information that I missed, too drenched in my own whatever.

We are all confronted with a choice. There is no neutral ground in this matter. We will have to answer for the way we live and pay the stiff price of rebellion ourselves. Come learn at our regular meetings. Call 845-1804 and find out where we meet.