It’s getting more fun to write, I’m less uptight about posting unedited AI, not worried anymore about wrong impressions readers might formabout the story, or things evil minions of the entertainment industry will say about it. So this is a first attempt from weeks ago to address the issue of unconsciousness. It won’t be the final form but what the hell. I finally feel free to post any version of the story online I want.
One of my first memories had no morning.
That was the strange thing about it. There was no cereal, no school shoes, no cartoon voices from the den, no cold hallway under my feet. There was no beginning at all. I simply arrived in the afternoon, as if I had been delivered there by mistake, dropped into my own bed by some bored angel with a cigarette dangling from its mouth.
The curtains were closed, but not well. My mother had never learned to close curtains all the way. She always left a slit, a thin diplomatic opening through which the world could continue negotiations. A blade of yellow light lay across the carpet, bright as a ruler. Dust moved in it. Slow, golden, self-important dust, the way dust moves when adults have decided something and children are expected to live inside the decision.
My head hurt.
Not the ordinary hurt of fever, not the cottony misery of flu. It was a deep metallic pain, as if a bell had been rung somewhere inside my skull and the sound had become trapped there, traveling in circles. My mouth tasted like pennies. One side of my face felt too large. I remember touching my cheek and discovering tenderness without yet knowing what tenderness meant when it belonged to injury instead of affection.
My mother was sitting beside the bed in a dress and stockings, which struck me as wrong. She should have been in slacks if she was home with a sick child. She should have been soft, provisional, domestic. Instead she looked arranged. Her hair was done. Her lipstick was on. She had the posture of a woman waiting to be photographed beside a swimming pool she did not intend to enter.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, and leaned forward with too much brightness. “You’re awake.”
I asked what time it was.
“Afternoon,” she said.
That was all. Afternoon. As if afternoon were a country and I had been away on business.
I asked why I wasn’t at school.
“You were sick,” she said instantly. Too instantly. The answer came out like something rehearsed in another room. “You had a terrible spell this morning. You don’t remember?”
I did not remember. That was the trap, of course. The trap was shaped exactly like my ignorance.
She put her hand on my forehead, not to feel for fever but to confirm ownership of the scene. Her hand was cool and smelled faintly of perfume, face powder, and cigarettes she pretended not to smoke. “You were burning up. You scared me half to death.”
This was my mother’s gift, her great domestic talent: she could make her fear the central fact of your suffering. You could be the one in bed, the one with the wound, the one who had lost a chunk of the day, but somehow she had been frightened, she had been brave, she had endured. It was not cruelty exactly. Cruelty would have had a cleaner edge. This was more like theater with a velvet curtain dropped over a crime.
I believed her. Children believe the weather reports issued by their mothers. If she said fever, then fever had come. If she said I had moaned and thrashed and begged not to go to school, then some small stranger wearing my pajamas must have done so. I accepted the existence of that other boy. He was convenient. He could have all the parts of my life I couldn’t account for.
She gave me orange juice with a straw. I remember the straw had red stripes. I remember thinking it looked festive, and that seemed wrong too. My room smelled of aspirin and clean sheets, but beneath it there was another smell, sharper and masculine, like aftershave and anger. My father had a way of leaving anger behind him in the air. It clung to doorframes. It hid in ashtrays. It sat in the leather chair downstairs with its legs crossed.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“At work,” she said.
But she looked toward the door when she said it.
That glance remained in me longer than the pain. For years it floated there unattached, a little scrap of film with no projector. My mother’s eyes moving to the door. Not fear, quite. Calculation. The quick animal mathematics of a woman deciding how much reality a child can be permitted to have.
Later, much later, I would understand that he had not gone to work that morning, not at first. He had been home. There had been shouting. There had been one of his lessons. Men like my father loved lessons. They believed existence was a military academy designed for their private convenience. They believed fear was discipline, discipline was love, and love was whatever remained after they had exhausted themselves.
I must have crossed him somehow. I must have stood in the wrong place, answered in the wrong tone, failed to become invisible quickly enough. There was always some law I had broken without being informed of its passage. The laws changed according to his blood pressure, his bourbon, his humiliation at whatever office or agency or secret little fraternity of dead-eyed patriots had failed to recognize his genius that week.
Years afterward, a memory returned in fragments: the kitchen floor shining under me; the white cabinet door open; my father’s belt buckle at the level of the sun; my mother saying his name, not as a protest but as a plea for moderation, as if violence were acceptable so long as it did not leave paperwork.
Rick.
That was all.
Rick.
Not stop.
Not don’t.
Not he’s a child.
Just his name, softly fired across the room like a warning shot at a dog.
And dog he was. Not a wolf, not a lion, not the dark emperor he imagined when he tightened his tie in the mirror and went off to do mysterious errands for mysterious men. A dog. A ridiculous dog of a husband, snarling at the furniture, pissing on the rug of the American Dream, then waiting to be praised for guarding the house.
My mother protected him from the truth the way some women protect antique silver from tarnish. She wrapped him in excuses. He was tired. He was under pressure. He had responsibilities no one understood. He loved us in his way. That was her favorite phrase, his way, as if love were a foreign country where assault and silence were local customs.
That afternoon, though, I knew none of this. I only knew the room was too still. I knew my mother was smiling with her mouth and not her eyes. I knew I had missed school and should have been happy, but instead felt as if school had continued somewhere without me, arithmetic, spelling, recess, all of it marching forward while I had fallen through a trapdoor.
“Will I go tomorrow?” I asked.
“We’ll see,” she said.
Another perfect adult answer. A door that looked open and led nowhere.
She stroked my hair. I let her. I loved her then with the helpless, devotional love of a child for the person who explains the world. Her hand moved slowly across my forehead, and for a moment I felt soothed. That is the worst part to remember. Not the injury. The comfort. The fact that the same hand that concealed the truth could feel like mercy.
She told me to sleep. She said sleep would make me better.
So I slept.
For many years that was the whole memory: afternoon, curtains, orange juice, my mother’s cool hand, the strange holiday of not going to school. I kept it in the wrong drawer, among ordinary childhood illnesses, chicken pox, sore throats, the sweet boredom of daytime television. Only later did the drawer begin to stink.
The body knew before I did. The body kept better records than the family. A flinch when a man raised his arm too quickly. A nausea at certain aftershaves. A hatred of closed curtains. The feeling, whenever I woke from a nap, that something had happened and everyone else had agreed not to mention it.
That was the real inheritance my parents gave me: not money, not manners, not the good schools, not the polished shoes lined up by the door like obedient little coffins. They gave me discontinuity. They gave me the sense that consciousness itself could be edited by committee. They gave me a childhood with missing reels, and then acted offended when I became obsessed with narrative.
Of course I became a writer. What else was I supposed to do? The official story had tried to murder the actual story in its crib. Someone had to go back into the afternoon and open the curtains.
When I think of that boy now, waking up alone in the yellow slit of light, I do not pity him exactly. Pity is too small. I want to sit beside him before she comes in. I want to say: You are not sick. You are injured. You are not confused. You have been confused by experts. The pain in your head is not proof of weakness. It is evidence.
But no one said that.
Instead my mother entered with orange juice and lipstick and a lie polished smooth enough for a child to swallow.
And I did swallow it.
That was the first magic trick I remember: a man knocks his son unconscious, a woman changes the name of the event, and by afternoon the house is respectable again.
I need a brief and entertaining blog post about a Buffynicity, which is a synchronicity involving entertainment. last night I was listening to Bang-A-Boomerang by ABBA for the first time in years, or perhaps decades. BANG means “Guardian” in Enochian and I was enjoying the occult thrill of the lyrics. Then today at work my boss referred to someone as a “boomerang”, which I’ve never heard before – it’s a term for someone who leaves the company, works elsewhere for a while, and then comes back.
Buffynicity #1: The Boomerang Effect
One of my favorite kinds of synchronicity is what I call a Buffynicity—a meaningful coincidence that arrives through the world of entertainment.
Last night I listened to ABBA’s Bang-A-Boomerang for the first time in years, perhaps even decades. What especially caught my attention was the word “Bang.” In Enochian, BANG means “Guardian,” so the song suddenly took on an unexpected occult shimmer. Instead of hearing it as a cheerful pop tune, I found myself imagining it as a playful magical formula, with the “guardian” returning again and again like the song’s own boomerang.
Then today, at work, something delightfully improbable happened.
My boss referred to a former employee as a “boomerang.” I had never heard the term before. Apparently, in corporate slang, a “boomerang employee” is someone who leaves a company, works elsewhere for a while, and eventually returns.
There it was again: Boomerang.
By itself, either event would have been forgettable. Together, they formed one of those curious little bridges between the imagination and everyday life that always make me smile. Entertainment plants a symbolic seed, and ordinary conversation unexpectedly waters it the next day.
Whether you see these moments as psychological pattern recognition, the unconscious making connections, or something more mysterious, they have a peculiar charm. They remind me that popular culture doesn’t merely entertain us. Sometimes it quietly prepares us to notice a conversation that hasn’t happened yet.
I’m running into a problem with having so much great stuff from AI that I never get around to correcting. It gives me great ideas but it gets the story details wrong, and of course the style is very stilted and melodramatic. But because of that I don’t move forward so now I’m just going to post this and correct it later because it’s awesome.
I leaned into the series’ critique of spectacle and manufactured reality, plus Drake and Angela’s existing past-life architecture, so this feels like a deep hinge in the Sickies’ mythos.
The Pyramid Room was supposed to be for detoxification, which made it funny that everyone had brought in a separate poison.
Chuck had his bourbon in a paper coffee cup, because even in the apocalypse he preferred a prop. Dustin had a vape pen and the glow of a laptop balanced on his bare knees. Graylyn had silence, the most potent thing in the room. Trish had a paperback she had not turned the page of in forty minutes. Angela had her legs folded under her like she was still capable of springing into a sprint, even though the whole world had been told to sit still and wait.
Outside the spa, the summer lay over Wisconsin like wet gauze. No traffic, no school, no stores except the nervous fluorescent ones. Just the private kingdom of Alvin Albrecht’s family: tiled pools, cedar rooms, steam chambers, mineral baths, massage tables, locked vending machines, and all of them hiding there as though history had finally stopped chasing them and decided to wait in the parking lot.
Drake was on the heated stone floor with his back against the wall, sweating through an old Ravenswood Academy T-shirt.
Nobody had asked him anything.
That was why he said it.
“I hate my parents.”
The words landed without drama. No thunderclap, no violin. Just the soft mechanical hum of the spa, the ancient hiss of pipes behind the walls, the thick pandemic hush of people who had been living too long with their own nervous systems.
Chuck looked down into his coffee cup. “Well. That’s breakfast.”
Angela’s eyes moved to Drake, sharply but not unkindly.
Graylyn did not move at all.
Dustin shut his laptop halfway. “Define hate.”
“Oh, thank God,” Drake said. “A philosopher with no pants.”
“I’m wearing a towel.”
“You’re wearing the collapsed dream of civilization.”
Dustin accepted that, as he accepted most accurate descriptions of himself, with a small nod.
Drake wiped sweat from his upper lip. “I don’t mean I’m angry. Anger is clean. Anger is when somebody cuts you off in traffic or steals your girl or tells you Genesis was better after Peter Gabriel left.”
“They were not,” Trish said, automatically.
“Thank you.” Drake pointed at her, then let his hand fall. “I mean I hate them in the way you hate a weather system. A law of physics. A house you were born inside that keeps rebuilding itself in your blood.”
The room went stiller.
Alvin, who had been sitting nearest the door in a white robe with the solemnity of a minor hotel deity, spoke softly. “That is not nothing.”
“No,” Drake said. “It’s the opposite of nothing. It’s too much something.”
He stared across the room at the blue mosaic wall, where the tiles made a sunburst that looked almost Egyptian if you were exhausted enough.
“All my life I’ve tried to turn them into material,” he said. “Fictionalize it. Make my father into a CIA warlord, make my mother into a tragic screen goddess, make the house into a palace of American damage. Give it lighting. Give it dialogue. Give it a soundtrack. That’s what I do. I take pain and I put a cigarette in its hand and make it charming.”
Chuck gave a low laugh, but it died quickly.
Drake went on. “But this summer, locked in here with all of you, with the plague outside and the steam rooms off-limits half the time because even steam has become political, I can feel the machinery under the myth. And I hate them. I hate what they installed in me. I hate that I have to dig myself out of their marriage every morning like a man buried alive in a suburb.”
Graylyn finally looked at him.
It was not pity. Drake could have survived pity by turning it into a joke. This was worse. She looked at him as if she could see the architecture.
Angela said, “Do you want us to argue with you?”
“No.”
“Do you want us to forgive them for you?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I’m not in the mood.”
That made him smile for half a second.
Trish closed her book and placed it beside her on the tile. “Then what do you want?”
Drake leaned his head back against the wall. The heated stone had become almost unbearable, but he did not move.
“I want it to be true without becoming the whole truth,” he said. “I want to be allowed to hate them and still become something larger than the hate. I don’t want my soul to be a revenge project.”
Dustin opened the laptop again, then shut it, as if even the machine had been asked to show respect.
Graylyn rose and crossed the room. Her bare feet made no sound on the tile. She sat beside Drake, not touching him, but close enough that the distance changed meaning.
“My sadness tried to do that,” she said. “Become the whole truth.”
Drake looked at her.
“It was very persuasive,” she said.
He laughed once, quietly. “Your sadness went to better schools than mine.”
“Yes,” she said. “But yours has better jokes.”
From the doorway, Alvin looked at them with wet eyes and tried to pretend he was only sweating. “This spa,” he said, “was built by my grandfather because he believed heat drove poison from the body.”
“Did it?” Chuck asked.
“No,” Alvin said. “But sometimes people confessed things while sweating, and that was close enough.”
The spell loosened. Trish smiled. Angela stretched her legs. Dustin opened the laptop for real this time, but did not type.
Drake closed his eyes.
Beyond the sealed glass doors, the summer of COVID pressed its strange face against the world. Sirens in distant cities. Empty airports. Refrigerated trucks on the news. Everyone speaking through masks, screens, fear, statistics. America had become a haunted house with Wi-Fi.
But inside the Pyramid Room, the Sickies sat in their ridiculous robes and towels, halfway between monastery and high school sleepover, letting one sentence burn without extinguishing it.
“I hate my parents,” Drake said again, softer.
Graylyn’s shoulder touched his.
“This time,” she said, “let it be a door.”
The spa had become their monastery because the rest of America had become an emergency room with commercials.
All through July, the Sickies lived in Alvin’s family’s closed wellness resort on the edge of the Wisconsin woods, moving from room to room like decadent monks in exile: the Pyramid Room, the Oxygen Room, the cedar sauna, the tiled mineral pools that nobody was technically supposed to use after midnight. The parking lot outside stayed empty except for their cars, spaced out like abandoned offerings to an angry god. The vending machines hummed in the hall. The news muttered from somebody’s laptop. Death counts rose each evening in the blue light.
That night, rain beat softly on the skylights above the Roman Bath.
“That’s what I can’t stand,” Drake said.
He was sitting waist-deep in the mineral pool, hair wet, eyes black in the steam. Graylyn floated near the far wall with only her face above water, pale and watchful. Angela sat on the stone ledge with her legs in the pool, arms folded, her posture still athletic even in exhaustion. Trish had wrapped herself in a white robe and looked like some aristocratic ghost who had chosen not to haunt Versailles because the towels were better here. Chuck was drinking Gatorade from a wineglass. Dustin had brought his laptop dangerously close to the water, because Dustin believed mortality was a design flaw.
Alvin, presiding in a robe embroidered with the spa logo, said, “What can’t you stand? The plague, the politics, the fact that Chuck keeps using the eucalyptus mist setting as a personal fog machine?”
“I am creating ambiance,” Chuck said.
“The spectacle,” Drake said.
The word changed the room.
Even the steam seemed to hesitate.
Dustin looked up from the laptop. “That’s been your word all week.”
“It’s been my word all life,” Drake said. “But now it has teeth.”
On the laptop screen was a silent documentary Dustin had paused by accident or by fate. The frame showed the Colosseum at sunset, its arches honeyed and bruised, beautiful as an imperial skull.
Trish looked at it and went cold.
“Oh,” she said.
Angela turned. “What?”
Trish shook her head, but her face had already left Wisconsin.
Graylyn whispered, “Not this again.”
Drake looked at her.
The pool jets pulsed under the water, a low mechanical heartbeat.
“What do you mean, again?” Alvin asked softly.
Graylyn closed her eyes. “I remember the heat.”
No one laughed.
They had all been having dreams that summer, but the dreams had not felt like dreams. They had arrived with smells attached. Wool soaked with sweat. Wine turning sour in the cup. Dust. Laurel. Copper. Human breath in vast numbers. The old world had been coming through the walls of sleep like smoke through a cracked door.
Angela’s hands tightened around the stone ledge. “I remember the crowd before I remember the arena.”
“Yes,” Drake said.
Dustin shut the laptop.
The screen went black, and in that blackness, Rome opened.
Not as a movie. Not as scholarship. Not as one of Alvin’s expensive coffee-table books about ruins and civilization. Rome came back as a physical insult: sun pressing on the skull, tunics clinging to the spine, perfume failing against sweat and animal musk, the roar of tens of thousands rising and falling like surf against stone.
They were not themselves and they were entirely themselves.
Drake was a young Roman with a narrow face and a senator’s education but not a senator’s courage. He wore a ring he had not earned and sandals too fine for the soul inside them. He had come because everyone came. Because to refuse was to declare yourself strange. Because the emperor had given Rome a season of blood so enormous that even disgust had to buy a ticket.
Graylyn sat beside him in white, veiled against the sun, a woman of rank with eyes already full of exile.
Angela stood behind them, not sitting, never really sitting in any life, her body trained to respond to danger even when danger had been turned into entertainment.
Trish had jewels at her throat and misery in her mouth. Chuck was there too, younger, softer, laughing too loudly before the first death and not laughing after. Dustin, thin and precise, counted exits and shadows and the mechanisms beneath the floor. Alvin, older than the others in that life, wore the expression of a physician who had mistaken civilization for healing.
“The hundred and twenty-three days,” Dustin said in the spa, his voice dry and far away. “Trajan’s games.”
Chuck swallowed. “I thought it would be fun.”
No one mocked him.
That was the awful thing. They all had.
Not fun exactly, not in the stupid modern sense. But necessary. Grand. Unmissable. The empire had made a sacrament of attendance. To stay away would have been a kind of treason against joy, against Rome, against the colossal agreement that power was beautiful if arranged properly in tiers.
“I remember thinking,” Trish said, “that the awnings were pretty.”
Her voice broke on the last word.
Angela looked at her. “They were.”
The memory brightened horribly: great colored awnings stretched above the crowd, rippling like sails. Vendors called out. Children begged for sweets. Women shaded their faces with carved fans. Men argued about odds. The wealthy smelled of rose oil and ambition. Somewhere below, hidden machinery lifted doomed creatures and doomed men toward the light.
Then the gate opened.
Graylyn put both hands over her mouth in the Roman Bath.
“I knew before it happened,” she said. “I knew the whole shape of it. The crowd wanted release, but there was no release in it. It only made the hunger larger.”
Drake stared at the black laptop screen. In it he could see his modern reflection superimposed on the remembered arena, his pandemic face floating over Rome.
“I felt my soul step backward,” he said.
Angela nodded once. “Yes.”
That had been the first true movement.
Not leaving. Not yet. At first it was only an interior recoil, a refusal so deep it did not know language. The crowd surged to its feet, roaring approval, and something inside the seven of them remained seated. Something ancient and quiet refused the order to be thrilled.
Chuck’s Roman self had turned gray. He had been a man who loved feasts, jokes, horses, gossip, women, dice, sunlight on wine—everything the Earth offered in baskets and cups and beds. But the arena showed him appetite without love, appetite stripped down to its machinery. He remembered looking at Trish, who was not yet Trish, and seeing tears slide beneath her veil.
“I said I was sick,” Chuck murmured.
“You were sick,” Alvin said.
“No. I mean, yes, physically, but I said it like an excuse. Like I needed a socially acceptable reason to get out of hell.”
“That may be the most Chuck thing you have ever done in any incarnation,” Angela said.
He almost smiled. “Thank you.”
Dustin leaned back against the tile. “I corrected you.”
Everyone turned to him.
“In the passage,” he said. “When we were leaving. You said, ‘I have to get out through the vomitorium before I vomit,’ and I said the word referred to the exit, not the act.”
Despite everything, Drake laughed.
“You pedantic bastard,” Angela said fondly.
Dustin looked pleased and ashamed. “Apparently my soul has been irritating since at least the second century.”
The laughter passed through them gently, like a clean breeze through ruins.
Then Rome returned.
They remembered leaving together.
That was the part that mattered.
Not the games. Not the emperor. Not the architecture. Not the terrible genius of a civilization that could turn death into a civic festival and then sell figs in the aisles. The hinge of the memory was the seven of them pressing through the packed exit, away from the roar, down stone corridors where the air smelled of dust and panic and spilled wine.
Outside the Colosseum, Rome blazed.
The sky was pitilessly blue. Statues watched from pedestals. Vendors continued selling lunch. A boy ran past them with a garland. The city did not know it had revealed itself. The city thought it had entertained them.
Graylyn’s Roman self walked to a fountain and washed her hands though nothing was on them.
Angela stood guard beside her.
Trish removed her jewels one by one and dropped them into Drake’s hands as if they burned her skin.
Chuck vomited behind a column.
Dustin, pale and furious, kept saying, “This is not an error. This is the system functioning.”
Alvin wept openly, which embarrassed everyone except Angela, who touched his shoulder with the grave tenderness of a soldier too tired to pretend.
“And you,” Graylyn said to Drake in the spa. “You said it.”
Drake’s throat tightened.
He remembered.
His Roman mouth had been dry. He had still been young, still vain, still attached to the privileges that had carried him into the arena and would carry him home again if he let them. He remembered the ring on his finger. He remembered wanting to tear it off and not being able to. He remembered looking at his friends in the white noon of Rome and understanding that love, if it was real, had to become stronger than civilization.
“I said we had to leave,” Drake whispered.
“No,” Trish said. “You said we had to learn how to leave.”
The rain intensified over the skylights.
In the Roman memory, they walked away from the Colosseum together, not dramatically, not like saints in a painting, but like sick people searching for air. They passed beneath an arch and entered a narrow street where the noise of the games dulled behind them. A woman was singing somewhere above. Laundry stirred from a balcony. A dog slept in a stripe of shade.
There, in that ordinary street, the Path of Return began.
Not with incense. Not with a priest. Not with a thunderbolt.
With nausea.
With seven privileged Romans realizing that the Earth, beloved and terrible, could trap the soul not only through pain, but through beauty, appetite, status, friendship, art, sex, victory, applause, nostalgia, even the golden afternoon itself.
Alvin spoke in the spa, but his voice carried the cadence of the older man he had been.
“We made a vow.”
Angela nodded. “Not to abandon each other.”
“More than that,” Graylyn said.
Dustin’s eyes were wet now, which made him look startled, as if his body had executed an unauthorized command. “To reincarnate together until none of us mistook the arena for the world.”
Chuck closed his eyes.
Trish said, “Until we could love the Earth without needing to stay.”
The words entered the room and stayed there.
Outside, the summer of COVID pressed its masked face against the glass. America raged and counted and broadcast itself. The dead became numbers. The numbers became arguments. The arguments became entertainment. The old empire had found electricity, advertising, cable news, social media, private schools, luxury spas, defense contracts, streaming platforms, and still the same hunger moved beneath the floor, waiting to be lifted into view.
Drake looked around the Roman Bath at his friends: Angela with her disciplined fire, Graylyn with her wounded royalty, Trish with her impossible sweetness, Chuck with his frightened appetite for life, Dustin with his merciless intelligence, Alvin with his priestly hospitality. They were ridiculous. They were beautiful. They were trapped. They were leaving.
“Do you think we failed?” Chuck asked.
No one answered quickly.
Then Graylyn said, “No. We came back.”
“That sounds like failure.”
“No,” she said. “Failure would be forgetting why.”
Angela slipped into the pool at last. The water rose around her shoulders. “Every life gave us another attachment to release.”
“Families,” Drake said.
“Power,” Angela said.
“Beauty,” Trish said.
“Money,” Chuck said.
“Certainty,” Dustin said.
“Service,” Alvin said.
Graylyn looked at the dark water. “Sadness.”
The word sank.
Drake moved toward the center of the pool. One by one, without discussing it, the others did too, until they stood in a loose circle in the mineral water, grown older than their bodies, older than their biographies, older than Ravenswood, older than Rome.
Alvin lifted his hands, palms open. “The Path of Return is not hatred of the Earth.”
“No,” Trish said. “It’s gratitude without clinging.”
“It’s disgust without contempt,” Dustin said.
“It’s love without possession,” Angela said.
“It’s finally leaving the show,” Chuck said, “even if the tickets were expensive.”
That got another laugh, softer than before.
Drake looked up at the skylight. Rain streaked the glass, turning the spa lights into trembling stars. For a second he could hear the Colosseum again, the impossible roar of appetite calling them back to their seats. Then beneath it, quieter but more real, he heard sandals on stone, seven sets of footsteps turning away.
“We left together,” he said.
Graylyn touched his hand under the water.
“We leave together,” she corrected.
The pool jets shut off.
The silence afterward was immense and clean.
No one moved for a long time. They stood in the warm mineral water while rain washed the roof and the plague year rolled on outside, and somewhere far behind them, in the imperial sunlight of another life, the arena kept roaring for souls who no longer answered.
The good guy stabbed the rock journalist, which was widely agreed to be a regrettable development, particularly by the rock journalist, who had not expected the evening to contain anything as definite as consequences.
The rock journalist’s name was Crispin Vole, though this was not the name he had been born with. He had been born Jeremy, but had changed it upon discovering that nobody named Jeremy had ever successfully described a bassline as “apocalyptic” while wearing snakeskin trousers.
Crispin had spent twenty-seven years writing about music without ever forming a clear opinion about it. This was not because he was stupid. Stupid people often have very strong opinions about music. Crispin’s problem was worse: he understood, dimly but accurately, that music was a serious human activity, involving time, suffering, mathematics, lust, memory, and the mysterious ability of three chords to make a person forgive their father for nearly twelve seconds.
Naturally, he wanted nothing to do with it.
What Crispin liked was being near music. He liked the smoke, the dressing rooms, the free drinks, the terrible sofas, the sense that something important had just happened in another room and might be explained to him by someone attractive. He liked walking past queues. He liked saying, “They’re finished,” about bands who had not yet begun.
The record companies adored him.
Record companies, contrary to popular belief, do not hate music. They are simply suspicious of it. Music is unpredictable, emotionally contagious, and occasionally made by people who mean it. This makes it a poor commodity unless surrounded by sufficient adjectives.
Crispin supplied the adjectives.
If an album was boring, he called it “austere.” If it was incompetently played, he called it “urgent.” If nobody involved had any idea what they were doing, he called it “the sound of a generation refusing to explain itself,” which was especially useful because it meant he didn’t have to explain it either.
On the night in question, Crispin was backstage at the Lyceum of Electrical Regret, sitting on a road case and wearing sunglasses indoors, which is the closest a human being can come to declaring moral bankruptcy without filing paperwork.
The good guy stood opposite him.
The good guy was a guitarist named Niles Mercy, and he had made the tragic mistake of believing that songs mattered. He believed, for example, that a song could rescue three minutes from the general collapse of civilization and hand them back to the listener, glowing faintly. He believed that a drumbeat could remember what the body had forgotten. He believed that a voice, when pushed through fear into truth, could become a small illegal radio station broadcasting from the soul.
This made him almost impossible to market.
“You don’t even listen,” Niles said.
Crispin smiled the thin, damp smile of a man who has just found a way to be superior to sincerity.
“My dear boy,” he said, though Niles was thirty-four and had recently developed a mortgage, “listening is terribly middle-period. One absorbs. One detects the cultural vapor.”
Behind Crispin, three record executives nodded. They had no idea what cultural vapor was, but they were confident it could be invoiced.
“You told them that album meant something,” Niles said. “You told them it was a revolution.”
“It had a very compelling sleeve.”
“It was garbage.”
“Yes,” Crispin said brightly. “But important garbage.”
This was the sort of phrase that had made Crispin famous. It sounded as though it had passed through an expensive education on its way to betraying everyone.
Niles looked at the catering table. There were lemons, beer bottles, a collapsing bowl of ice, and a small knife whose previous ambitions had involved garnish.
It should be said that Niles did not decide to pick up the knife.
Human beings rarely decide the important things. They drift toward them in a series of tiny permissions, each one signed by a different version of themselves.
Crispin continued.
“Look, nobody wants music. Not really. They want evidence that they have not missed the party. They want permission to feel clever in groups. They want a jacket, a haircut, a paragraph. Music is just the noise the costume makes while entering the room.”
There was a silence.
It was not a noble silence. It had gum on the floor and a broken amplifier humming in B-flat.
“You poor bastard,” Niles said.
Crispin frowned. He disliked pity. Pity had no obvious resale value.
Then Niles stabbed him.
It was a small stab, as stabbings go, though this is not a phrase recommended for use in court. It was not operatic. Nobody’s childhood flashed before anyone’s eyes, except possibly Crispin’s, and even then it appeared to have been badly reviewed.
Crispin looked down at himself with professional disappointment.
“This is very derivative,” he said.
Then his sunglasses slipped.
For the first time all evening, perhaps for the first time in years, he looked less like a critic and more like a man. Not a good man. Not even an especially interesting one. Just a man who had discovered, at an inconveniently late stage, that irony was not a shelter but a very small umbrella in a meteor storm.
The record executives fled, pausing only to check whether the situation had documentary potential.
Later, everyone explained the event.
The police explained it as violence.
The magazine explained it as tragedy.
The record company explained it as an exciting opportunity to revisit Crispin Vole’s legacy across multiple formats.
Niles, from his cell, explained nothing.
He simply sat very still and remembered the look in Crispin’s eyes when the sunglasses fell. The vacancy there. The terrible emptiness of a man who had spent his life standing near amplifiers and never once been changed by sound.
A month later, Crispin’s final column was published under the headline:
HE HEARD THE FUTURE.
Niles read it twice.
Then he began to laugh.
He laughed because Crispin had not heard the future.
Crispin had heard the cash register.
And, like most professional fools, he had mistaken it for thunder.
That was how they told it later, because nobody wanted the longer version. Nobody wanted to say that the good guy had waited three full seconds before doing it, or that the bad guy had smiled during those three seconds, as if he had finally succeeded in teaching him something.
The knife was not heroic. It was a kitchen knife with a cracked black handle, taken from the sink where someone had left it after cutting lemons. There was still a bitter yellow rind stuck to the blade.
The room smelled of rain, old cigarettes, and electrical dust from the broken television. Outside, the city kept blinking in its windows, indifferent as a machine pretending to be heaven.
“You won’t do it,” the bad guy said.
The good guy hated him for being right.
Then hated him more for being wrong.
The stab itself was small. Almost disappointing. Not like the movies. No thunder, no clean music of justice, no white fire pouring down through the ceiling. Just the dull entrance of metal into cloth, flesh, fate.
The bad guy made a sound like surprise pretending not to be surprise. He looked down. Then he looked up.
And for one terrible second the good guy saw him not as evil, not as the monster, not as the thing that had to be stopped, but as a boy who had once believed he would be loved.
That was the wound that never healed.
Later, when the police came, when the witnesses spoke, when everyone agreed the good guy had saved them, he nodded. He let them put the blanket over his shoulders. He let them call it courage.
But he kept seeing the bad guy’s eyes.
Not accusing him.
Recognizing him.
Rewrite this to be about stabbing a rock journalist, who is a bad guy because he knows he has nothing meaningful to say about music, and he knows nothing about the art of music, he just wants to stay stoned and hang around bands so he bullshits the public that something is going on that isn’t. Record companies know this and they use him to sell lousy music.
Yes. Here’s the seed bent toward that specific corruption: the fake priest of rock, selling counterfeit revelation.
The good guy stabbed the rock journalist.
That was how the story got told later, though nobody said it that simply in print. In print it became an incident, a backstage altercation, a tragic misunderstanding between an artist and a critic. The magazines used black-and-white photographs and verbs like erupted and spiraled, because even afterward they were still trying to make it sound like music.
But the good guy knew what he had done.
The rock journalist was sitting on a road case with his sunglasses on indoors, talking into a tape recorder that wasn’t even running. He had not listened to the album. He had not listened to any album in years. Music came to him now as weather, as access, as free drinks, as a couch in the hotel room where the pretty people were too tired to ask who had invited him.
He knew he had nothing to say.
That was the worst part. Not ignorance. Ignorance can still kneel. Ignorance can still be astonished. But he knew. He knew he could not hear the difference between a wound and a marketing plan, between a chord struck from the center of a man’s life and a riff stitched together to sell jackets. He knew the holy fire had gone out of him, if it had ever been there, and he had decided to make a career warming his hands over the fake smoke.
The record companies knew it too.
That was why they liked him.
They sent him advance copies, backstage passes, little envelopes, little powders, little girls with laminate badges and exhausted eyes. They knew he would call anything dangerous if it arrived with the correct haircut. They knew he would call anything raw if the mix sounded unfinished. They knew he would tell the public that something was happening, that some great underground weather was gathering, when really it was only a committee of cowards selling lousy music to lonely kids.
And the kids believed him.
That was why the good guy stabbed him.
Not because of a bad review. That would have been petty, almost clean. He stabbed him because the man had stood between the living current and the people who needed it. Because he had taken the hunger of teenagers, the beautiful hunger, the need to find one sound that proved the world was not entirely made of offices and lies, and he had fed it sawdust.
“You don’t even like music,” the good guy said.
The journalist smiled. His mouth was glossy. His eyes were ancient and empty behind the tinted glass.
“Nobody likes music,” he said. “They like belonging to something.”
Then he laughed, because he thought that was wisdom.
The knife was small. A catering knife, taken from a tray of lemons and sweating beer bottles. The good guy had picked it up without deciding to pick it up. For three seconds he held it at his side while the journalist kept talking, kept explaining the world, kept reducing every miracle to appetite.
“You people are so easy,” the journalist said.
That was when the good guy stepped forward.
The stab was not cinematic. It did not redeem the room. It did not make the guitars in their cases ring out like angels. It was ugly and close and human. The journalist made a small sound, more offended than afraid, as if the universe had committed a breach of etiquette.
Then, for one second, his sunglasses slipped.
The good guy saw his eyes.
Not evil. Worse.
Vacant.
A man who had built a throne out of adjectives and sat on it so long that he had forgotten there was ever supposed to be a kingdom.
Later, everyone called the good guy dangerous. Then brave. Then ruined. Then legendary. The record company released a statement. The magazine ran a tribute. The journalist’s final unpublished notes were printed in a memorial issue under the headline He Heard the Future.
The good guy read that line in jail.
He laughed until the guard told him to stop.
Because the rock journalist had not heard the future.
Tonight we’re beginning our David Foster Wallace diary. I’ve decided that Drake Marshall is going to use the COVID epidemic as an opportunity to catch up on some reading, specifically Infinite Jest. So we’re going to have a dialogue with David Foster Wallace. Please limit your replies to 250 words.
Yes. We begin the David Foster Wallace diary as a COVID chamber: Drake in the spa-less pause of history, trapped indoors with the big brick of Infinite Jest, discovering that quarantine is not merely isolation, but a giant footnote in the American soul.
The key is that Drake should not “study” Wallace like homework. He should wrestle with him as a living ghost: funny, wounded, hyper-intelligent, morally allergic to bullshit, yet trapped inside the very maze he maps. Drake reads him during COVID because the world has become Wallacean: screens, addiction, entertainment, loneliness, sincerity trying to crawl out from under irony.
This fits your larger mission of reading entertainment as a clue-system for lost awareness and spiritual return.
Diary principle:
Wallace is not Drake’s master. Wallace is Drake’s diagnostic instrument.
First entry seed:
During the epidemic, Drake Marshall began Infinite Jest not because he had time, but because time had finally become obscene. The old world had stopped making demands, and in the silence he could hear the entertainment machine still humming, like a refrigerator in a motel room where someone had once tried very hard to be saved. Wallace was there, not as a saint, not as a suicide, not as a genius-brand, but as a nervous angel of American recursion, asking: what if the joke was the cage?
Apocalypse Now II: Home Burial is a chamber-drama sequel set in a small Wisconsin town in the 1990s and early 2000s, where the Vietnam War has curdled into local silence, family damage, and the returning machinery of American empire.
Decades after Colonel Kurtz’s death, a legendary investigative reporter has documented Kurtz’s secret kingdom in almost unbearable detail—but the central mystery remains untouched: no one knows what happened to him. Into that absence comes a young female journalist, following the trail of the PBR Streetgang and the buried afterlife of the mission. Her search leads her to Willard, now hiding in plain sight as a high school history teacher in his hometown.
The town resists her immediately. Willard is protected by habit, fear, and the Midwestern religion of not saying anything. But she meets his elder son, played by Emilio Estevez, and their affair opens a passage into the family’s sealed room. Through him, she finally gains access to Willard—not as a mythic assassin, but as a weary father trying to teach teenagers about wars he cannot explain without incriminating himself.
The film is intimate, low-budget, and claustrophobic: kitchens, classrooms, motel rooms, bars, football fields, church basements. Instead of jungle hallucinations, it is intercut with the journalist’s interviews—fragments of testimony from veterans, widows, villagers, bureaucrats, and former intelligence men, all circling the same unspeakable center.
The younger son, played by Charlie Sheen, is the town’s dark inheritance: charming, violent, criminal, and furious that his father’s buried history may destroy the family name. As the journalist gets closer to the truth, he sabotages her investigation and turns the town against her.
Against the background of the Iraq wars, Home Burial becomes a story about how America never left the river. Kurtz did not die in Vietnam; he became a method. Willard did not come home; he became a silence. And the journalist’s real discovery is that the mission never ended—it merely changed uniforms, moved indoors, and started teaching history.
The sixth-year girls’ dormitory in Ravenclaw Tower had been transformed over the summer by house-elves who seemed to understand, instinctively, that its three remaining occupants had outgrown the standard arrangements. Where once there had been five identical four-poster beds arranged in a neat semicircle, now there were three larger beds positioned to create a kind of conversation triangle, with a shared sitting area in the center featuring mismatched armchairs that somehow complemented each other perfectly—one deep blue velvet, one silver-grey linen, one patchwork of fabric scraps that shifted color depending on the light.
Hermione suspected Flitwick’s influence. The Head of House had always shown a particular fondness for their unlikely trio.
Luna Lovegood was currently upside-down on her bed, her bare feet propped against the headboard and her silvery-blonde hair cascading off the edge like a waterfall, pooling on the stone floor. She was gesticulating wildly as she spoke, her radish earrings swinging in chaotic arcs. She was telling them about attending summer school at Cambridge.
“—and the libraries, Hermione, you would simply die. They have a copy of the Venerable Bede’s original manuscript of the Ecclesiastical History and the librarians just let me touch it. With gloves, obviously, but still. I touched something that a saint touched. Or possibly a very scholarly demon pretending to be a saint, which would explain some of his more questionable theological positions, but either way—”
“Luna,” Cho interrupted gently, looking up from the trunk she was unpacking with methodical precision, “you’re going to pass out if you keep talking upside-down like that.”
“Nonsense. The blood rushing to my head improves cognitive function. The ancient Druids knew this. Why do you think they spent so much time hanging from oak trees?”
“I thought that was a mistletoe-harvesting technique,” Hermione offered, settling cross-legged on her own bed with Schroedinger immediately claiming her lap. The ginger cat had been agitated all day—the train ride always unsettled him—but now he was purring with fierce contentment, his eyes half-closed as Hermione scratched behind his ears.
“Mistletoe harvesting, cognitive enhancement, communion with the spirit world—the Druids were very efficient. They multitasked.” Luna finally swung herself upright, her face flushed pink and her eyes bright with that particular intensity that meant she was about to say something either profound or completely mad. With Luna, the distinction was often academic.
“But that’s not the point. The point is that Cambridge is everything I ever dreamed of and more, and I’ve decided that I absolutely must go there after Hogwarts, and I’ve narrowed my future career down to two possibilities.”
She held up two fingers triumphantly.
“Only two?” Cho asked, raising an eyebrow. “Last year you were considering seventeen different paths, including Niffler rehabilitation specialist and professional cloud interpreter.”
“I’ve matured,” Luna said with dignity. “Also, I learned that cloud interpretation doesn’t pay well and Nifflers bite. No, I’ve thought about this very seriously, and I’ve decided that after Cambridge I’m either going to become a teacher—”
“That would be wonderful,” Hermione said warmly. “You’d be brilliant at it. Remember when you explained the theory of magical resonance to those third-years? They finally understood it after you compared it to the way songs get stuck in your head.”
“—or I’m going to seclude myself in a cabin on the shores of Loch Ness and write mystery novels.”
“Those are… very different options,” Cho replied.
“Are they?” Luna seemed genuinely puzzled. She sat up, crossing her legs beneath her and tilting her head at an angle that made her look like a curious bird. “They both involve language. Shaping it, sharing it. Making meaning out of chaos. That’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do.”
She began braiding a strand of her hair, her silver eyes thoughtful.
“Teaching would be lovely. Watching someone suddenly understand something is beautiful. I helped a first-year with her Charms essay last spring and when she finally grasped the theory of intentional magic, she actually gasped. Gasped, like understanding was a physical sensation. Which of course it is. The brain releases dopamine during moments of insight. Muggles have studied this extensively.”
“But teaching means being seen. Being public, and I don’t know if I can handle it. Having students and colleagues and responsibilities and schedules. Having to be Luna Lovegood in a particular way, consistently, day after day.” She wound the braid around her finger, unwound it, wound it again. “Writing mysteries in a cabin, I could be invisible. I could use a pen name. Something very ordinary. Margaret Smith. Dorothy Wells. No one would ever know that the author of the Enchanted Tea Cozy mysteries was a strange witch who talks to lake monsters.”
“You’re not strange,” Cho said automatically.
“I am, though. Delightfully so. But sometimes strange is exhausting to perform. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to disappear completely, the question is really about how visible I want my life to be. I haven’t decided yet. Cambridge will help me figure it out, I think. Three years of being intensely academic—after that, I’ll know whether I want more of it or whether I want to vanish into the mist with Nessie and my typewriter.”
“Typewriter?” Hermione raised an eyebrow. “A muggle typewriter?”
“Typewriters are deeply romantic. All that mechanical clicking. Very Agatha Christie.” Luna flopped back onto her bed again, satisfied with her explanation. “Besides, I’ve heard that the rhythm of typing helps with prose. Something about the physical repetition syncing with the cadence of sentences. Daddy wrote an article about it once—The Percussive Theory of Literary Composition. It was mostly wrong, but interestingly wrong.”
“Either I spend my life surrounded by young minds, watching understanding dawn in their eyes like little sunrises—or I spend my life in solitude, with only Nessie for company, crafting intricate puzzles for readers to solve.”
“You’ll never know solitude while you know me, darling,” Hermione scolded. “What do you think you’d talk to the Loch Ness Monster about?”
” I think she’s very wise but terribly lonely. All those Muggle tourists with their cameras, looking for her, never actually seeing her. It must be exhausting to be searched for so intently and understood so poorly.” Luna’s voice softened. “I think she’d appreciate someone who just wanted to have tea and discuss narrative structure.”
Cho had finished unpacking and settled into the silver-grey armchair, tucking her feet beneath her. “What kind of mysteries would you write?”
Luna’s face lit up with such pure joy that Hermione felt her own heart lift in response. There was something about Luna’s enthusiasm that was infectious—a reminder that the world still contained wonder, even in dark times.
“Cozy mysteries,” Luna said decisively. “Set in small magical villages where everyone knows everyone and the murders are almost polite. The detective would be an elderly witch who runs a shop selling enchanted tea cozies—that’s the ‘cozy’ part, you see—and she solves crimes by reading the leaves at the bottom of her customers’ cups. But the leaves don’t show her the future. They show her the truth, which is much more useful and much more dangerous.”
“I’d read that,” Hermione said honestly.
“The first book would be called A Stitch in Time Saves Nine Lives,” Luna continued, warming to her subject. “Because someone is murdering cats in the village, only the cats aren’t really dead, they’re being trapped in a temporal pocket by a witch who’s trying to harvest their nine lives for her own immortality scheme. Very dark when you think about it, but there would also be a charming romance subplot involving the witch and the local wandmaker, who’s been secretly in love with her for forty years but never said anything because he’s too shy and also slightly cursed.”
Schroedinger, apparently sensing that cats were being discussed, opened one eye and fixed Luna with a penetrating stare.
“Don’t worry,” Luna told him serenely. “The cats are all rescued in the end. I’m not a monster.”
Cho laughed—a genuine, delighted sound that had become rarer over the past year. Hermione noticed that her friend looked tired, thinner than she’d been in June, with shadows under her eyes that spoke of sleepless nights. Whatever Cho had done over the summer, it hadn’t been restful.
But this moment—this silly, wonderful conversation about mystery novels and lake monsters and teaching careers—seemed to be exactly what she needed. The tension in her shoulders was easing. The careful watchfulness that had become her default expression was softening into something more like the Cho that Hermione remembered from before Cedric’s death, before the war became inescapable.
“What about you?” Luna asked suddenly, rolling onto her stomach and propping her chin on her hands to look at Hermione. “What are you going to do after Hogwarts? Besides revolutionize magical theory and probably accidentally save the world?”
Hermione stroked Schroedinger’s fur, considering. “I used to think I wanted to work for the Ministry. Change things from the inside. House-elf rights, werewolf integration, Muggle-born protections—there’s so much that needs fixing.”
“But?” Cho prompted.
“But the Ministry is…” Hermione paused, searching for the right word. “Compromised. The Dark Lord may not have taken it over completely, but his influence is everywhere. The people who want change either get pushed out or… corrupted. I’ve been reading about it all summer. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement used to be independent, but now half the senior Aurors have ties to families that support him. The Wizengamot hasn’t passed a pro-Muggle-born law in three years. Even the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures—which should be pushing for creature rights—is mostly focused on ‘containment’ and ‘monitoring.’ As if werewolves and centaurs and house-elves are problems to be managed rather than people to be liberated.”
“So what will you do instead?” Luna asked.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe teach, like you said. Maybe research—there’s so much we don’t understand about the intersection of magical theory and Muggle physics.”
“Quantum superposition,” Cho said softly. “The observer affecting the observed.”
“Exactly. Except in quantum physics, observation is supposed to be passive—you’re just measuring what’s already there. But what if that’s wrong? What if consciousness isn’t just observing reality, it’s choosing it? What if every time we make a decision, we’re collapsing wave functions, selecting one timeline out of infinite possibilities?”
“That,” Luna said, “is either the most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard or complete nonsense. I can’t decide which, which means it’s probably both simultaneously. Superposition of ideas.”
Hermione laughed. “That’s exactly what I mean. The universe might work like that—holding contradictions together until something forces a resolution. And magic might be the force that does the forcing. Willful, intentional collapse of probability into certainty.”
“Is that what the Department of Mysteries studies?” Cho asked. There was something careful in her voice, something Hermione couldn’t quite identify.
“I think so. But they’re so secretive—no one really knows what the Unspeakables do. Just rumors. The Time Room, the Death Chamber, the Hall of Prophecy…” Hermione shook her head and frowned. “It’s scary.”
She stopped. Something had shifted in the room—a subtle tension, a held breath. Luna was looking at Cho with an expression of unusual sharpness, and Cho was very carefully not looking at either of them, her eyes fixed on her own hands.
“What?” Hermione asked.
“Nothing. Just thinking that the Department of Mysteries might be exactly where you end up someday. You’d fit right in with the Unspeakables. All those secrets and equations.”
The moment passed. Luna began chattering about the specific properties of Loch Ness water (apparently excellent for brewing inks that revealed hidden text), and Cho relaxed back into her chair, and the three of them fell into the comfortable rhythm of old friendship—finishing each other’s sentences, sharing sweets from their trunks, speculating about what the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher would be like (the position seemed cursed, with a new professor every year).
But Hermione couldn’t shake the feeling that something important had just happened. Some communication had passed between her friends that she had missed, some significance in Cho’s reaction to the mention of the Department of Mysteries.
She filed it away, as she filed away all the things she didn’t yet understand. Eventually, she would have enough pieces to see the pattern. Eventually, the wave function would collapse, and she would know.
Until then, there was this: her friends, her cat, the familiar stone walls of Ravenclaw Tower, the stars wheeling overhead like a promise of infinite possibility. There was Luna planning her hermit-novelist future with infectious delight. There was Cho’s quiet watchfulness, her fierce loyalty, her secrets kept close to protect them all.
And there was tomorrow, when classes would begin and she would see Draco again for the first time since that last dinner at her parents’ house, when he had kissed her in the garden under the willow tree and whispered something into her hair that she hadn’t quite heard but that had made her heart feel like it was trying to escape her chest.
This year, she thought. This year will change everything.
