ONLY ONE

Message read on the bathroom wall
Says: "I don't feel at all like I fall"
And we're losing all touch
Building a desert.
-- Modest Mouse, "Custom Concern"

I had Danny on the case, and he was bringing returns. He spent hours online, dragging the nets, whatever. Black hats, red pills. On and on. These days, when you need a bounty hunter, you need a skinny smartass more acquainted with the physics of waves and currents than you. So I suckered him into searching and retrieving what could be described as an artifact of unlimited worth. For me anyway.

Keeping it short, he logged more time surfing in multinational dumpsters, real and otherwise, than I care to relate. We kept it business, and that was fine by me. I had a firsthand look at multinationals anyway, imprisoned as I was by the largest media agglomerate in the world. But I was on the invisible end of the food chain, a content pusher continually running afoul of those who awoke at dawn to chant the company mantra in unison. Cramp-inducing calisthenics, optional. Singing to the coal sky before heading to various work-related injuries. I probably didn't even show up on the surveillance network, a blur dully throbbing past people of consequence. Hence, my search.

Speaking of, I spent Danny's morning annoyance scraping the sleep from my eyes. The sun spent it trying to peek through an oppressive wall of cumulus. Both were giving me a migraine.

"What."
"Coop, that you?"
"You called me."
"Every time I call you sound different. You live alone?"
"Danny, I got married last month. What the fuck do you want?"

His paranoias were reliable, predictable symptoms. Nights spent in the wireless mystery and formatting had broken something in him. Not that he wasn't broken already, just in different places. That's usually how it happens. That and drugs. Danny took a lot of drugs, designer stuff the quants and pols took, far above the piddling crowd of pot and cokeheads.

"Hold on, I'm gonna check something," he dodged, scanning my line for patriots. I heard a distant beep. Must be clean. Again. He dropped something onto something. This routine was getting old.

"Good thing I'm not paying you by the minute, you slow bastard."
"Quit interruptin', Coop," he said. "Here's the deal. Last night, I found something that might look like your baby. They got a lot of shit. Which is how I describe what your looking for. But they also have art, deeds, ponzis and numbers you don't really want."
"Who's buying?"
"No one. It's sitting there, all by it's little lonesome. It's great unwashed collector crap. But it is off-market, so you must not be total loser. I actually had to infiltrate corporate. But I made friends with a coder or two and should preview the stash tomorrow. One of them is going with me to seed some clouds."
"What's the holdup? Why couldn't you just get me the inventory list?"

Addictions never end. They feed back into the loop, grasping for singularity. I was losing patience like a hothead would.

"Man, larceny takes time, Coop. You can't just expect people to steal in plain sight." He sounded genuinely surprised.
"It's not important to anyone but me, Danny."
"Everybody thinks that, right? Until some kingpin pays a cool billion for the same thing and creates a hypermarket. Then you're sitting on a goldmine, if you're lucky. Or a landmine, if you aren't. You never know, punk."
"OK. Call me as soon as you get the list."
"Want to hack some clouds with us? We're going to make red rain."
"What?"
"You're an idiot, Coop. You know that? Hey, can you pay me today?"
"I'll hit you off you after you get me that list," I growled, no longer sleepy. "Not before."
"Come on, man. After the cloud seeding, I'm heading to the desert. We're building this fucking intense recreation of Antigone's execution. Then we're going to set it all on fire. Prescriptions, man."
"I'll call my brother when you get me what I want. And don't think about going around me. They're already looking for you."
"Punk," he bitched in lowercase, cutting the line. There were better names to hear receding from your senses, but ones ending in hard consonants were always worth a kick or two. Danny was cool. Anyone willing to spend all night online for someone else's cracked fantasies was always cool with me.

Plus, what was the difference? He's no worse than the death-row stooges slaving away in labs dug beneath the drying forests of South America, or those sweating off viruses in Indonesia. We all sucking out our secrets and distill them into portable commodities, then wait calmly by the phone for buyers.

Now I'm tired again. I wasn't doing shit for Danny until I got my past back.

Speaking of pasts and drugs, Danny once told me a story about a friend of his named Cyrus, a chem engineer with a side gig selling hallucinogens. He and Danny went way back, far enough to grade school in Boulder, where they use to snort Binaca for laughs in the school quad. They were the only Latinos in the neighborhood, and wanted to both befriend then kill all the whiteboys they suffered through. But knowing Danny like I do, he and Cyrus no doubt got off on that lunacy. It's a sick game, but someone has to play it. Children of all ages.

Anyway, in a drug-addled version of Who's Minding the Store?, Cyrus left Danny in charge of a sheetstack of acid kept refrigerated in a garage behind their house. Danny, full of beer after a night of heavy partying, dipped in and left the fridge open. And while he was in his room tripping off of Daydream Nation, their clueless dog Cracker ate about four sheets while foraging for food. When Danny woke around three in the afternoon the next day, he found the dog, supine and frozen in hallucinogenic rapture, rigid across the backyard grass. Its wide eyes staring at the sky, mouth baring teeth layered with foam.

It took Danny awhile to figure out what happened, but when he did, the vet was out of the question. He figured the dog would sleep it off. How it would with its eyes open was anyone's guess. But Danny, ever the sentimental type, left it there for six days.

What dreams of fantastical felines must have leapt from lobe to lobe inside that poor canine's head. Danny told me that every sixth or seventh hour, a smothered whelp would shoot out of its mouth. Then silence. It must have endured more lucid dreams of chase and capture than any creature in history. And every moronic bird or cat it had pursued in play or in seriousness must have returned in his nightmares, eyes red with vengeance. The streets soaked with rain, orienting scents dissipating into the air.

All of which serves as a humorous reminder of the Order of Things. Some appetites carry a heavy price.

So you prioritize. Step back from the rabid consumption and reassess what is necessary and what is simply a matter of desire. When the two converge, it's beautiful music. In my case, it is those two things mixed with a third, and that would be a matter of record. Which is to say, immortality. Evidence plucked from the past forging a public bond between time and space. I'm looking for myself and its purity of perspective, the necessary, desired and recorded connection to the world yawning ahead.

The gun was already in the house. And I was scouring the earth and my life every day for reasons not to use it. So far, I found one.

Only one.

Sheshie.