"Alison!"
"No, Mac. Not anymore."
"What do you think this is, huh? You think you're alone in this, Al? You're not. And I've been in this longer."
"Not harder."
"I lost my sister. I lost everything."
"You don't get it, Mac! You never got it because you never knew the truth. You were always running after the wrong one! You still are."
"You're still blaming yourself on Margaret. It was the Knight. Not you. You know Zeus. He doesn't take place holders."
"God damn it, Mac! There's no such thing as the god damned Black Knight. You chopped off her leg that night and I know it. She watched Athena jump and she could've saved her but she didn't. She shot the fucking Minister even though she knew the history behind it. It was a ploy. And I was a part of it."
"How? How were you a part of it, Alison? The Knight is a rival."
"No, Mac. Zeus made all of us. There are no rivals. Just us and NOCs that no one knows about. We play double. That's what he did with the Second Generation. And this'll be our whole life. And mine. Caught up in it because even though we hate it we can't live without it. We don't know anything else."
"You're going crazy like Margaret."
"It was me, James!" she screamed. "It was me!"
"What was you? What!"
"The Black Knight is your little Alison. I worked against you my whole life. My right leg from the knee down is bionic. And the Black Knight is as much a legend as Sarah Hughes. A multitude of names for one person, all conjuring up a difference sense in the scattered subjects. You're out to kill me and I'm telling you now there's no way you'll succeed unless I let you. But the moment I pull that mask off and you believe me, that knife will be in your chest, not mine. Only you're the one who'll have to live with it, while you turn me into ashes and go on in Olympus. It's all lie. And you might've been in longer. But I think faster. And I only speak the truth."

"Sarah Hughes?"
"Yes?"
The young man looked at her, an undefinable look in his eyes.
"You're called Sarah Hughes?"
"That's my name. Yes."
He gave a curt nod and a scrutinizing stare.
Sarah looked back at him with her arms crossed across her chest, her right foot tapping impatiently on the cement.
"Look, buddy, I don't know who you are or what you want from me but I know you've been following me for three months. And now is not a very good time to be stalking me because everything's already so bloody fucked up in the first place."
The man laughed.
"What the hell are you laughing at?" she said.
His face grew somber again and he swallowed.
"Sarah?"
"How do you know my name?"
He held her eyes and said, "I knew Susan."
Sarah gasped. "Susan?"
"Susan Leight. Yes."
"How?"
"It's a long story."
"Longer than the last year?"
He looked around and Sarah noticed the left corner of his moth curl up in a semi-grin.
"Much."
"Ok. Who are you? And how do you know who I am?"
He took her arm just above the elbow and started leading her down the street.
"I'll tell you but we have to get out of the open. Just walk with me, A--Sarah."
"Ok...I'm starting to get used to strange occurances and I'll just follow you because for some reason I trust you."
"Oh, really? You trust me, aah, Sarah?"
"Well, now you're making me doubt a little."
He led them around a corner and crossed a street Sarah had never been on before.
"I'm called Louis Alan. I know who you are because Jill--I mean, Susan...Susan told me about you and what she told you."
"What the hell do you mean, what she told me? And why did you call her Jill?"
Louis jerked her arm and pulled her down an alley.
"Jesus! Don't say that so loud. Pretend I didn't say it and don't mention it again until we're inside. All right?"
She looked at him wide-eyed and began to doubt having let him lead her away into this unknown section of town.
"Are we almost there?"
"Yeah. Just a few more minutes. Don't speak until then."
"How long is this going to take? My boyfriend is expecting me."
Louis kept walking quickly, pulling her along but she noticed an ever so slight change in his gait when she spoke her last sentence.
"Ok. We're here."
He pulled out a key and opened a black door that was hardly noticeable from the street and pulled her inside.
"It's not much but I've ended up better than the rest of them," he said as if she knew what he was referencing.
"What?"
"Sarah?" he said quietly. "Tell me what she told you. I want to hear it from you."
"She didn't tell me anything. All I know is that there was some crazy bullshit going on with nutcases having heart attacks over my stories and Susan knew about it and told me I was my fucking main character. And then next time I heard from her, it was the police department calling me to identify her body. She didn't tell me anything."
"But she did. You just told me. Jesus Christ!" he hissed and ran his hands through his straight, dirty-blonde hair. "She told you."
"What are you talking about? I'm so confused. What the hell is going on? I publish that goddamned story and the whole work collapses. And Susan...Susan tells me the craziest thing in the world. I get abducted by nut cases in suits interrogating me for hours about how I know about something called New Co or something..."
"NOUCO," he cut in.
"Whatever."
"It's an acronym, but keep going."
"Fine. I don't know anything about New Co or whatever it's called and then I don't remember what happened. I woke up in my bed and maybe I dreamed it all but then Susan went crazy when I told her about it. I mean, I told her I had a crazy nightmare and she looked like she'd seen a ghost."
"Jesus. The inhibitor is malfunctioning."
"What inhibitor? They kept saying that in my dream...or whatever it was."
"It's still malfunctioning. That's why you remembered it at all. Even as a dream."
"Can you explain your rambling here, please, because I think I've had enough perplexion to last the rest of my life."
The man called Louis snorted and turned around quickly, then without warning flipped over and landed across the room and smashed the wall with his fist.
Sarah backed away and calculated the distance between her position, the man's and the door.
Suddenly, he whirled around, panting hard, a distraught expression on his face, ran up to her and grabbed her shoulders.
"Alison! Don't you remember?"

Dreams alone won't get you far. I guess that's the way things work out. I wrote a whole stinking novel about it. "All is futile and pursuit of wind." All is windall is windall is wind.

I took my own advice and decided not to be Sibyl Freid. I walked in a door and closed it; I blocked out the wind. I held onto what was tangible and took is as far as I could, farther. I tried to prove myself, not to anyone, but to myself. But I fail. Still, I'm doubted, and still, that gives the people who should have the most faith the reason to screw me over. Usually, I'm not one to give up, but it's too tiring now. The plan has changed. I'll get a job and work and instead of making it a reality, I'll remember the vigor of academia and the ecstasy that enraptures me when I learn anything. I'll remember it and leave it behind.

No, I don't blame anyone. The buck still stops here, Harry. Still. And always will. I'll just never understand why it wasn't ever enough, no matter what. Maybe it's stupid, but I can't swallow my pride here. I tried and I'm changing my mind. I can't. I'm sorry. I just can't swallow it and more blows come and the dominos fall.

It wouldn't have made any difference. I wonder how some people can keep on putting faith and love or whatever it is into something or someone who only goes through the motions, who pretends to care and sympathize but doesn't give a damn at all. Not to say that I'm not selfish, but I take others into account. My last intention in the world is to hurt someone. But some people don't care and that's all right. I've always moved myself, taken care of myself, and have been by far happier for it.

If this doesn't work out, though, the path will change. It's back to the heat, back to the South, back to the only focus I ever should have had: words and what they say. No more people. I tried there, too. And no more trying to regain what might have been.

I should have stayed in Europe.

"Angel, cover me."
And he does.
"Angel..."
"Do not speak, my dear." It is not Uriel, but Micha'el. I turn my head under the weight of Uriel's wings. "Do not speak."

I nod and look at the angel. He reads my mind, so I don't have to speak.
"No, do not give up. There is time, yet. And there is life. You have said yourself that it is more imaginative in itself than any make-believe. Here is your living proof. And do not listen to a foolish Seraph filled with human notions of hearts and death. Listen to me. Listen to the message a true angel has to convey to you, a message not from his own mind, but from the Heavens."
"I will, Micha'el. But I'll still love the other."
"Certainly. You find his time will be most like yours."
"What do you mean?"
"Your time will tell you."
He calls Uriel away and I am released and there is nothing but my own reality surrounding me. I shut my eyes to it and press my face into the bed.
Suddenly, my own words whisper in my ears, a reminder: "There will always be blank pages and full pens. And if there aren't, there's always dust."

When I was fifteen I started gaining this little thing called confidence...not just the sappy self kind but confidence in everything, myself and the world around me. Yes, I'm still a cynic, but that takes confidence, too, to trust the world to be a stone cold bitch to you and itself and everything involved in it or around it. But when I was fifteen, I still didn't really believe it. I had that notion, the little itching voice in the back of my head saying "Hey, this is real, believe it. You want to believe it." Yeah, yeah. I pretended to but never really got there until recently.

So now power isn't a dream, it's a reality and I know it. There's a huge difference between knowing and believing and I have learned that believing is only the first step. Move beyond belief. See it realized and touch it, and know it.

This is why I don't believe in God. And why I don't take anyone seriously who does. I know one thing, and I won't say either way here. But only a few people know one way or the other, and both ends of the spectrum are true.

I never got to Paris, but I did make it back to America. That's a feat, I think, when everything in me was working against it. Like the last time, I felt more free where the paper didn't say it, but life actually gave it. We can have a law suit all we want over here, but it won't give us more liberty.

The last time I was in Italy. I didn't make it there this time, just like I never made it to Paris, but the effect on me was the same. The air was freer and I was alone but not lonely. That makes all the difference. I always love the idea of something but face the facts (I'm a realist after all) that sometimes wishes can never come true. Or if they do, it's always a different interpretation, because this wasn't just my wish and it wasn't just my life, but a wish logically thought out and presented to the world in a miracle in Philadelphia in 1789. Here we are, 218 years later, and that wish has been battered and twisted and misconstrued.
Has it ever been granted? Yes. But not in full.

But when it comes to wishes, although I believe them unfulfillable, I never cease to hope that I may just be wrong. It's not only the wish of a country, but of millions of individuals. It's funny because we all work for the same dream, and that dream means something different to each and every one of us. That makes us a miracle and a tragedy, it makes us tolerant and bigoted and lovely and grotesque all at once.

So I work to fulfill what I interpret that dream of the Founding Fathers to be for myself. I work for an ideal. Call me a fool, but nothing great was ever achieved by anyone less. I keep myself in check like this, playing the fool against myself as well as the logician. I see from a wider perspective if I am farther away. In this way I become closer. I can't stand being around the places I love, because I'm closer to them in my head. I fight for them from a distance. And so I would like to return to Europe, to be far from the Land of the Free, so that I can see it from every angle, so that I can work to keep it alive and to mold it and to hold it and to live it as I have always dreamed.

I cannot be a demagogue. But I can be the force behind one.

"Did you find him?" he asked.
"Who?" I said.
"The boy."
"Oh," I laughed. "No. He doesn't exist."
He smiled.
I smiled back.
"Take me home," I said.
"Sure."
I learned something today. There is only one kiss in Belgium. But I learned it French, so I went for two. But going for two while he's going for one makes for a different kind of formula.
I like that.

"Whachoo runnin from, boy?"
William quit running and bent over, his sweaty hair dripping, and his hands on his knees.
"Aaah..." he panted and pointed behind his shoulder.
The man craned his neck to see over the boy and laughed dryly.
"You's runnin from life, boy? Ain't nothin' back yonder."
William turned his head up to look at the man, still bent over with his hands on his knees, and grimaced.
Finally, he caught his breath.
"Boys. Boys are coming."
The old man squinted at him.
"You ain't from roun' here, is you?"
William wiped the sweat from his upper lip and looked behind him nervously.
"Hide me," he whispered desperately.
The old man looked around, then swung open the screen door.
"Git in. Quick now."
William ducked under the man's arm and ran inside.
The hut smelled of moss and damp wood, was bare but for a chair, table, and cot in the corner with layers of blankets strewn across it that seemed to be about fifty years old.
He backed up into a far corner of the room and slid to the floor, pulling himself into the smallest bundle possible.
Outside, the sound of pounding footsteps echoed into the hut.
He heard voices but couldn't decipher the words.
"Go on now," he heard the old man saying as the screen door was pushed open. "Git!"
The voices rose up angrily and soon faded into the distance along with the footsteps.
William breathed a sigh of relief.
"Whatchoo doin, boy, trine to git yo'self killed?"
William shook his head and looked up at the man.
"No," he said.
"Then what? White boy from up north trumpin roun' these parts. Sho 'nuff you's gonna git yo' ass kicked."
"That's all it's about here, isn't it?"
"What's what 'bout?"
"White. Black. Whatever."
"Well, whatchoo expect, boy? Whey you from?"
"Above the Mason-Dixon line, that's for sure."
The old man chuckled.
"You'sa gittin use ta that, now? They's not payin' 'tention ta that one up they, is they?"
"It's all one country...At least I thought so."
"All's one country but you's got them states here."
"And race. You let me in, though."
"You a yankee. You free me."
"I didn't do anything. That was a million years ago."
"No more'n one-hundred-fiffy."
"Whatever. Forever ago."
"Not here, boy."
"I'm realizing. Only on paper. Nobody really won, did they?"
The old man laughed again, exposing a nearly toothless mouth.
"What's your name?" William asked.
"They call me Lamar Coal. Like them rocks put soot all ovuh you."
"William."
They shook hands.
"Thanks," William said.
"You git on now. An' I don' wan' hear 'bout no hangin' o' you, boy."
"Yeah. I'll stay clear."