Only One

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

I had Danny Valdez on the case, and he was bringing returns. He spent hours online for me, checking auction sites, fanzines, surplus stores, you name it, a bounty hunter employed by me to retrieve what could be described as a personal/cultural artifact of unlimited worth.

I found him through Christina Bowser, a friend who had just put a start-up in the stream, five million invested and not a dime to show for it yet. Sports something. Anyway, she lived half her life on the Net so you could say she knew her way around. Danny was a Surfer in Christina's fledgling enterprise, wooed away from some multinational which I can't remember the name of, and that was fine by me. I had a firsthand look at such environments, imprisoned by one such organization populated with parrots that woke up each day at the crack of dawn, only to, in unison and usually accompanied by cramp-inducing calisthenics, chant the company song like a revelatory mantra. Singing to the coal sky at dawn, waiting to head to their various work-related injuries.

I was scraping dried mucus from the corners of my eyes when he called. Digital readout blinking 1:13 am, the blinking being a signal that a power surge the previous night had frozen my clock time. The sun was trying to peek through an oppressive wall of clouds, creeping over the hills like brush fires in waiting.

"Yup."
"Coop, that you?"
"You dialed my number, didn't you, Danny?"
"Man, every time I call you sound different. You live alone?" He entertained various paranoias, a predictable symptom of nights spent in the electronic avenues of mystery and rote formatting the Net had to offer. That and drugs. Danny took a lot of drugs.
"You know I don't, man, I'm married. Do you have something for me or not? Any leads?"

I was already getting sleepy again, though he had just awakened me. Still, I was irritated enough to worry that the longer this conversation went on, the more of a chance there was that my wife, Sheshie, who was drooling steadily down her pillow next to me, would wake up and begin the haranguing. For now, the guilt kept my eyelids up and my voice down, but I would probably head back to my mouth-breathing slumber, disappointed once again, after Danny and I disconnected.

"Hold on, I'm gonna check something," he said as he ran a self-constructed program to check my line for bugs. This routine was getting old. I heard a distant beep as my number checked out clean. He dropped something onto something as he breathed heavily into the phone: I visualized him cradling the receiver between his left cheek and his left shoulder, his neck getting sore.

"OK, here's the deal," he added, finally returning.
"Man, I ain't paying you by the minute, thank god."
"Quit interruptin', bitch, here's the deal. Last night, I jumped on EHot and found something that might look like your baby. They're a new site but they gotta lotta shit, watches, TVs, cars, even books."
"Who's buying the books?"
"You got me. Anyway, they've got a memorabilia page under construction, and I couldn't wait on it, so I just dialed up the corporate headquarters and got the email of their site coordinator. We chatted and shared some tips, so he let me get a preview of the inventory. He's faxing the list over tonight."
"What's the holdup? Why tonight?" I was getting anxious for the circle in my life to close.

Ever been addicted? The greatest thing about addictions is that they never cease. Inside the loop of these dependencies is a teleological grasping toward singular essence. Every addict looks for the ultimate high. My substance was the past, and I was trying to retrieve its materials. And 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.
"We're not talking about the Hope Diamond here, Danny. It's not important to anybody but me."
"Everybody thinks that, until some comic-book creator pays millions for it, or will, if he can't get it on the cheap. You never know, dude."
"OK, call me tonight as soon as you get the list."
"Um, Coop?"
Oh shit, here it comes. I planned on nipping this in the bud before it got rolling. "I'll pay you after you get me that list, Danny, not before," I growled, getting sleepier and more irritated.
"Aw come on, man, I was gonna buy a couple of sheets today. Stockin' up, you know?"

I didn't want to know sheets of what, but it probably was acid. Or something else bizarre they're creating in labs dug deeply beneath ancient forests in South America, or in the Indonesian Metro. Or Boise. Where they suck the secrets of culture out and distill them into easily portable, pocket-snug commodities, waiting calmly by the phone for buyers. You can smell the sweat of the underpaid, abused laborers on every piece. What did that movie say, the smell of . . . victory. Conventional ironies. Whatever. I wasn't sending him a dime until I got the loot.

"Forget it. We've got mutual friends so you know where to find me, if I decided to run out on your ass. Forget it. Not until tonight."
"punk," which sounded lowercase because he said it as he put the phone down. There were better words to hear receding from your senses, but ones ending in hard consonants were always worth a kick or two. Danny was OK with me; anyone willing to spend all night in cyberspace for someone else's cracked fantasies was always OK with me.

Speaking of drugs, Danny once told me a story that had me laughing until dawn, even though he told it to me around 3:30am between puffs on a bong. A Berkeley friend, named Cyrus and majoring in Chemical Engineering, had a side job selling hallucinogens, to put himself through grad school. He and Danny went way back, far enough to grade school in Boulder, CO, where they use to snort Binaca for laughs in the school quad. At the time, they were the only Latinos in the area, so whiteboys from every block would demand this type of lunacy from them or simply and aggressively acquire their lunch money. It's a sick game children of all ages play. When they arrived at college together, Danny basically became Cy's delivery boy, filling orders for everyone from the frat boys to the reconstructed hippies on the Southside.

In a drug-addled version of Who's Minding the Store?, Cyrus left Danny in charge of a sheetstack of acid they kept refrigerated in a garage behind their house and Danny, being full of beer after a night of heavy partying, dipped into the stash for a couple of tabs. Problem, and the point of this rambling story, is: he left the refrigerator door open. While he was in his room tripping off of Daydream Nation, their dog, Cracker, a clueless white Lab, ate about four sheets off the stack while foraging for food. When Danny awoke around 3pm the next day, he found the dog, supine and frozen in hallucinogenic rapture, rigid across the backyard grass. When Danny lowered himself to get a closer look at the dog, its eyes were wide open, its mouth baring teeth layered in foam, staring up at the sky.

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 (with its eyes open) and left it there. For six days. What dreams of fantastical felines must have leapt from lobe to lobe inside that poor canine's head. Every sixth or seventh hour, a smothered whelp would shoot out of its mouth, then silence. It must have had lucid dreams of chase and capture where every bird or cat it had moronically pursued in play or in seriousness returned, eyes red with determined vengeance. Every street must have been soaked with rain, dog scents dissipating into the moist air.

This all serves as a particularly humorous reminder of the Order of Things: some appetites carry heavy prices. At times, one needs to prioritize, to take a 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 the case of my missing artifact, it is those two things mixed with a third. That would be immortality. Why? Simply: tangible evidence plucked from the past forges an association between time and place. If I retrieved my desire, my artifact, I would be able to retrieve my other self and its purity of perspective, my necessary connection to the world yawning ahead of me. The gun was already in the house. Right now, I was scouring the earth and my life for reasons not to use it. I found one.

Only one.

Scott Thill is a gainfully employed dotcom editor currently finishing his first novel, The Dangerous Perhaps, of which this story is an excerpt.