LONG DEAD

     Nice Prague. It was cool, calm, collect, safe, Old Town Square privileged folk walking around doing nothing and me sitting there at an outdoor bar drinking a beer and a pilsner – two beers – and calmly taking in the afternoon sun. The money would not run out anytime soon – there was money flowing in, my editors called it royalties – I called it free money. I did nothing. I wrote guidebooks.

     I drank beer and tried not to think. Ever try not to think? Ever try to ignore everything? I mean everything – all of it. It is nearly impossible, and it may be true that it drives you more insane than actually thinking about everything – that is, trying not to think about anything and ignoring everything is worse than recognizing reality. I suppose I am doing a good job of it, because I have not said anything of significance in my life – which is fine, because there are very few significant things in this world on this true day, and if I say nothing at all, then I am writing a true document that reflects life perfectly – non-importance.

     I sat in the Old Town Square and looked around at the expiring faces surrounding me. They were old – tired – drunk – or sober – and they were young and smiling, strange and attractive and happy and sad (humans are SO attractive). They were not what I wanted to see. I wanted to see active – sober – damned living souls trying to make it, like me. Like me – was anyone really like me? I try not to ask myself questions, because I always hate the answers. Answers to myself come from unknown channels and forever forge the desire to ignore myself and never to forgive myself – impossible.

     The Old Town Square was suddenly – ah, there was my friend Joe.

     "Joe!"

     Joe looked over at me and immediately recognized my idiotic presence. He did not smile. He approached the outdoor café where I was sitting and waiting for something to happen. "What the hell are you doing?" He sat down next to me and ordered a beer from the waitress in an instant.

     "Just came down from St. Petersburg," I said, trying to sound important.

     "What were you up to over there?"

     "The usual: guidebook, hanging with Yelstin, the whole lot of nonsense."

     "How’s Yelstin?"

     "Drunk – unintelligible. Completely moronic – a good guy, really."

     "Sounds like it." Joe looked at the crowd in the Old Town Square. "Damn tourists."

     "What are you gonna do?" I asked.

     "Kill them?" Joe was a former anti-Reagan journalist turned potter who lived in Prague with Marketa’s (my ex-fiancée) mother. They had been dating for nearly a decade – marriage might or might not have been around the corner.

     So long have I been waiting to get away. Damn – straight.

     Joe continued – "You heard from Marketa?"

     "No," I indeed had not heard from the girl that I was supposed to marry. Yes, this was a sensitive point for me – she left me. "You?"

     "We heard she was in South America somewhere," Joe paused, uncertainty rising to his head, "not sure if I should tell you anymore."

     "Give it to me," I said, hoping for the worst.

     "I think she’s living with some sort of finance minister – she won’t say exactly, probably because she knows that we’re friends, and she wants to avoid you, but I gather that she is living with some sort of important government man – Columbia or Brazil – something."

     I said nothing.

     "How does that make you feel?"

     "Everything makes me feel like shit."

     "What about that beer?"

     "This is good. This makes me feel good."

     "So only beer makes you feel good?"

     "Basically."

     "You need to reshape your priorities."

     I ignored this statement. Joe was wrong. My priorities were perfectly in order. "How’s Elena?" Elena was Marketa’s mother.

     "We’re still living together – so that’s a plus." Joe answered with an ironic tone in his voice that led me to believe that he had no idea why he was with Elena in the first place – which I identified with greatly because Elena’s daughter left me in a blind heap of shit in the middle of Diagonal in Barcelona and never even consulted me or informed me that she was going to destroy me. I wish that when people were ready to destroy other people they would inform them of this fact – then the people would be ready for the end of their lives, even if they would never make it to heaven. I will never make it to heaven. Goddamned heaven and disastrous humans and disorganized notebooks filled with notes that describe what I have thought and what I have not thought and maybe things will calm down considerably when I have an idea of what the hell it was that Joe was trying to tell me when he said that he was still living with Elena – and that it was a plus.

     Or not – how can anyone make sense of anything these days? These days – these days of course dominated by conservative idiots and free market analysts and stock option losers – Friedman calls them the Electronic Herd - which is fine, to me – as a man moving from St. Petersburg to Prague, nothing mattered.

     "I guess that’s a plus," I replied – wondering all the while whether it was a plus or not. It would have been a plus were I still living with Marketa.

     It did not matter. We were moving slowly. We were arriving at our target – I was stopping in Prague – The Old Town Square was before me yet again. In the old days when I was young I wrote a guidebook about Prague that resulted in a windfall of cash for me to spend however I pleased and the wind has not stopped blowing. In fact it will be blowing stronger now that I have finished my fourth guidebook and things seem to be going quite well. Guidebooks are an easy occupation – a good gig to get into if you have nothing else to do, though it is important to find your niche. My niche was the drunken guidebook that attempted to makeover any tourist into a well-honed and inebriated local – it was there as a mask to all those travelers who wanted to blend in instead of standing out. By last count, there were four on the market: Barcelona, Malaga, Prague, and the recently released St. Petersburg.

     Damn they rushed that son-of-a-bitch to publication without hardly an editor’s glance. They are gathering so much profit from my gibberish that they don’t even care anymore whether or not it makes sense or is filled with senseless errors.

     Technically, I was in Prague to do some updates for the third edition of The Drunken Non-Tourist Guide to Prague, but, if the first afternoon was any indicator, I was simply going to be drunk with Joe the potter the entire time – which was fine, as far as I was concerned.

     I was not concerned – I was happy. (I was not happy.)

     "So what are you doing back here in Prague?" Joe asked with a stern, almost parental look on his face.

     "Supposed to do an update for the ‘Drunken Non-Tourist’ thing."

     "Is this what you’re going to do with your life?"

     "Look, my fucking Dad died years ago – don’t try and play his role. I hated the bastard – talking about writers didn’t exist." I was not really angry, simply disappointed that Joe took his age so seriously and for the time played the role of a drunken father figure.

     "He said writers don’t exist?"

     "He said writers don’t exist."

     "What did he mean?"

     "He always insisted that the written word was simply a copy of the spoken word, and that writers were simply copying what other people said, not writing anything."

     "Who writes things then?"

     "Nobody, according to my father. People say things, and writers steal the things they say, then write them down."

     "But what if the writers are the ones who said the thing in the first place?"

     "Then the writers are robbing themselves, which is even worse – no self-respect." I looked at the tourists in the Old Town Square and suddenly realized that I was a writer. "According to my father, anyway."

     Joe seemed like he wanted to continue the conversation but decided against it with a sudden shake of his head. "Anyway - I’m not your father – I’m your future father-in-law," Joe said with a grin.

     "Father-in-law?" I laughed. It was an utterly stupid statement, and Joe made it because it was an utterly stupid statement. I did not want to reply to such stupidity, but, well, I did – "Father-in-law? First you have to get Elena to marry you, then I have to find and rescue Marketa from her Colombian drug lords and convince her to actually follow through on her promise to marry me – and then we can start talking about you giving me paternal advice."

     "How about friendly advice?"

     "That’s fine." Nothing wrong with a little friendly advice.

     "Get over Marketa."

     It was difficult to get over Marketa, but I think I achieved said goal, especially when I moved on from Prague and made my way to Barcelona.

     Ah Barcelona in August. Fuck Barcelona in August – goddamned tourists. August is always a terrible time in Barcelona – the Americans flock in and the backpackers from around the world reign supreme. Most of them carry my guidebook, which, in a way, makes me regret that I ever wrote The Drunken Non-Tourist Guide To Barcelona. All of Spain is on vacation and the Barcelona natives flee to the outskirts of the city for a rest because August in Spain means vacation.

     I had a flat in Barcelona – the flat where my Grandma Rosa used to live. She willed it to me because she was nice. Barcelona was the only place in the world where I could find a calm sense of continuity. There was no calamity – at least not in Barcelona. I felt safe, comfortable – and I felt the ghosts. Yes – I felt the ghosts.

     Marketa was gone. I wish not to talk about my ex-fiancée anymore. I keep speaking about her. Perhaps I should bring up the new girl – perhaps not. The next girl – always a next girl.

     Or not – what I did in Barcelona was very simple. I went to every place in the city and worked on updating my Barcelona guidebook - the same as in Prague. I drank a lot - the same as in Prague. I went around to many bars and took many notes – I drank A Lot. It was fun. It was a lucrative job that paid me to do nothing other than drink and take notes on bars in foreign nations. Ah I would never quit a job like that – though I might try.

     Useless – useless. Repetitive gibberish which has very little basis in reality dominates my mind – and so it dominates this text. I am truly sorry. I apologize. I bow down before you and apologize for burning down right in front of your ears.

     What I do not apologize for is my behavior that fateful night in Barceloneta when I might possibly have caused the death of one of my friends. Everyone eventually dies, but I could not have predicted that the bus would have come so quickly and the girl would have been so drunkenly stupid. I suppose I was stupid, but wasn’t the girl stupid as well for following me across the street? Or not following quickly enough? With enough speed? Maybe not – but I still do not apologize for my behavior on that fateful night in Barceloneta –

     She stood there with a grin on her face and her tongue touching her nose. She thought that this was a talent. Now, I was a man coming off a myriad of failed relationships (not to mention failed engagements) and it was quite refreshing to see someone with a sense of humor, so it was not lost upon me that it was not stupid what this girl was doing but instead endearing. She was stretching her tongue to her nose – she was trying to prove her talent. Damn I would have loved to have that tongue put to work in other areas, and it seemed quite likely that this would occur given that she left the bar with me and was following me back to my apartment.

     But, while we were still in the bar, which was a standing-room-only joint in Barceloneta which served cheap Cava, she exhibited a surreal amount of inebriated drunkenness. I could do nothing about this. I could not stop her from being drunk – I did not make her drunk – I did not even want her to be drunk. In fact, I thought that she would be more inclined to sleep with me if she wasn’t drunk, so any blame placed on me is falsely laid. I did not plan on getting the girl drunk. Maybe I wanted to be drunk because I found myself more appealing that way, but I thought she would be much happier sober. Unfortunately, the two-dollar bottles of Cava were so cheap and so good that it was impossible to keep the girl from getting drunk.

     Her name was Kerry and she was, if she was not lying, from Chicago. She left a lasting impression on me, and not only because she was killed on Passeig de Colon only hours after I met her. I met her on the beach (does everyone meet on the beach?) and brought her to the bar in Barceloneta that serves cheap Cava (after I took her out to dinner) and only has room for a standing-room-only crowd. Get drunk and get out, damnit – credo. Which is fine, I suppose, but Kerry was a pure gem – a find.

     Kerry was from Chicago and was spending time in Barcelona while working as a model. She was sick of Paris and sick of Milan and sick of New York and never wanted at all to be an actress in L.A. Ah yes I love to have models under my arms and down below my waist and when they blow I scream and when they scream then it is my turn to blow. Models came easy to me because I was a successful guidebook writer who had nothing better to do than write guidebooks and drink beers in the sun of strange foreign lands which would no further welcome me than they would appreciate me enjoying their sunny models and beaches. But the models enjoyed me if only because I enjoyed them and their sunny smiles and deep, wet personalities and encouraging notions of what the word fun meant. But there were very few models because most of the time I was too drunk to actually convince the model to be with me as when she touched my thigh and then (inevitably) my groin she found nothing there because I was wasted and too stoned to get it up for the model in the short, revealing mini-skirt next to me with her hands on my thighs and my penis in recession due to a deep addiction to alcohol.

     The only time I was successful was when I met these so-called models in the afternoon when my penis was alert and I had not had enough time to drink eighteen beers. There was no stopping my member when the morning was early and the afternoon was dawning and a model sat next to me. Of course they were not all models (I like to think that they were), but they were all supermodel gorgeous – but Kerry was a model and I treated her as such as I took her out to dinner right before we went to the bar that served Cava in Barceloneta.

     "And what do you do?" Kerry asked me over dinner.

     "Jesus not this again," I said, more to myself than to Kerry.

     "Touchy subject?"

     "Why does everyone have to ask everyone that question?"

     "It’s a common conversation starter."

     I was becoming perplexed – "why not ‘what do you think’? Isn’t that a better conversation starter? Isn’t what you think more important than what you do as an occupation?"

     "Maybe I wasn’t talking about occupations – maybe I was talking about what you actually do."

     "Well, that’s slightly better – I drink a lot and smoke a lot of cigarettes. That’s pretty much what I do," I felt satisfied with the latest incarnation of Kerry’s question and even more pleased with my response. "What do you do?"

     "Wouldn’t you rather know what I think?"

     "No – I think I already know what you think, judging by what you’ve said so far, but I would like to know what you do."

     "As an occupation? To make money?"

     "No – haven’t you been listening? You were the one that proposed the question – now answer it. What do you do?" I felt a strange mix of frustration, anger and satisfaction when it came to this girl.

     "I spend most of my days posing."

     "Posing for what – the mirror?"

     "For cameras – mostly in strange places like the North Pole and Paris – runways and location shoots."

     "Now you’re telling me what you do."

     "I know – you asked what I do."

     "Yeah but you’re telling me your occupation; I thought we agreed to ignore occupations for now."

     "But what I do is my occupation – I pose – I look pretty."

     "You’re right, you do look pretty."

     "Thank you."

     "So you’re a model?" I loved models. When a woman or girl was revealed to be a model she was automatically more attractive than before I knew that she was a model. If designers in Paris and Milan thought that she was supermodel gorgeous then who was I to say she wasn’t supermodel gorgeous? On top of that, once I knew that any given girl or woman was actually making her living by being beautiful, I was immediately taken by the notion that she was supermodel gorgeous and was even more gorgeous than I had originally thought. If she was a model, then she deserved, more so than non-models, to be thought of as ‘gorgeous’. My friend once told me that if he ever dated a model, he would immediately pop the big question, because he had always wanted to say – "who’s that? That’s my wife. What does she do? Oh, she’s a model." There is an unbelievable satisfaction that comes form dating a model; it is an incredible ego-boost.

     "Yes, I’m a model. Don’t I look like a model?" Kerry asked mockingly.

     I thought she looked much more like a model once she said that she was a model – it got me excited and I somehow had an erection even after a day in which I had been drinking heavily and smoking continuously. "Yes – of course you look like a model. I would be shocked if you did anything besides modeling."

     At this point the waiter brought the bottle of red wine I had ordered and had me taste it. I immediately sent it back and demanded another. This was a common practice of mine. I loved to taste wine that was perfectly adequate and even quite tasty and then send it right back. The wine was then wasted, and, inevitably, when they brought out another bottle of wine, I tasted it and said it was perfect – which was odd because it would always taste exactly the same as the first bottle of wine. There were three reasons for this behavior (perhaps more, but I can never seem to remember the other reasons): A) when I was on a date, it impressed the girl, and in this case the model; B) I always hated it that no one ever sent back bottles of wine and always said they were fine (why have people taste the wine in this case?); and C) I had this strange feeling that, because I knew that they would have to throw out the first bottle, I was somehow getting two bottles for the price of one.

     "What was wrong with the first bottle?" Kerry the supermodel asked as we toasted to us.

     I bluffed – "that last bottle was too sweet; this is supposed to be a slightly dry wine, perfect for pasta dishes and light veal courses."

     It was difficult for me not to laugh at my own lies – ah, lies.

     And now I was beginning to wonder whether I had ever seen this supermodel before in print – or in Playboy or Maxim or Seventeen. If I had, this would make her even more attractive to me, even though she would not have done a thing and would still be sitting in front of me with a keen smile and beautiful eyes and breasts and flowing blonde hair. She would not have to move a muscle to seem even more beautiful, because I would suddenly remember that I had seen her in a publication that was seen all over the world and made many dirty men, as a result, masturbate.

     It always amuses me that men buy Cosmo or other such women’s fare instead of Playboy because they are too embarrassed to buy Playboy. The clerk immediately knows what you are up to, and furthermore loses respect for you when you don’t buy the Playboy and cave and buy the Cosmo for your pipe-cleaning pleasures. He knows that it will be much more efficient if you were to buy the latest Playboy, and is very amused that you are too afraid to do so.

     "Well, this is good wine," Kerry remarked, lighting up a cigarette.

     I lit up a cigarette too. Why not?

     "Do you like smoking?" Kerry continued.

     "Do I like it?"

     "Do you like it?"

     "Why would I do it if I didn’t like it?"

     "Maybe you would do it because you thought it was super-cool."

     Maybe she had a point. I sent back wine for a variety of reasons, but thinking it was cool was one of them – (ah, that’s one of the points I forgot!).

     "No, I love the feeling of tobacco and nicotine and the tiny high cigarettes give you."

     "I love that it keeps about ten pounds off my frame and takes away a lot of my hunger. It also wins me a few extra jobs on the runways because my body is perfect."

     I looked at her body. It was indeed perfect. When I saw her on the beach this was the first thing I noted. I wanted to find a flaw, but there was none – so I immediately thought that her flaw must be her personality, but it wasn’t. Kerry had no flaws, except for that today she is dead – which is, indeed, a serious flaw for all involved, especially me.

     Once I was young and not necessarily a fan of smoking. I thought, obviously with extreme ignorance, that doing something to your body that would eventually cause it to die was counter-productive. However, I soon came to the conclusion, after watching the news with my parents and seeing my four brothers and one sister pass away, that everything you do contributes to your death.

     I once saw a news report that said that too much exercise could be bad for you because it put your body through too much exerting activities that could eventually erode not only your physical, but also your mental, capabilities. I generally thought this report to be bullshit and never really paid attention to it, but it proved to me that there is nothing that anyone can possibly do that does not cause them undue physical and mental harm.

     If you walk out in the street, the pollution that you breathe and the sun that strikes you quite strongly thanks to the depleted ozone layer immediately overcomes you. If you put on suntan lotion you are probably supporting a company that pollutes the environment with industrial waste and helps harmful chemicals infiltrate the water supply. If you drink bottled water there is a good chance that you are supporting the plastic industry that bottles the ‘pure’ water and puts more toxic chemicals into the environment than I even dare to imagine or quantify. If you drink tap water you inevitably are tapping into a wealth of arsenic and other contaminants. If you don’t smoke, you get second-hand smoke – if you don’t drink, you are at odds with those that say a few alcoholic drinks a day are good for you – if you drink too much, then you are a drunk and are destroying your liver – if you watch too much television (Internet, computers), your eyes will erode, your social skills will become diminished, and you will become reliant on mindless entertainment, and if you don’t, then you are not informed/wired and are damned ignorant. So in a world where you can do nothing I choose to do a few things – for good or ill. Probably for ill, because everything in this world causes cancer, which makes me say – ‘who cares’?

     I suppose I care because I love life and I love models, but I never used to. I never loved models because I always thought they were out of my reach. But once they were within my reach – indeed in my grasp, literally – I was amazed by how beautiful they were, if only because they were called ‘models’ by society.

     Society is another thing that I have never really understood. People describe society as if it were some sort of religion. ‘Society dictates this’, or, ‘society dictates that smoking is seen as a terrible habit’. But who is society? Or, what is society? I would love for someone to define society so that I can adhere to what society dictates. Society, to me anyway, is not anything but a word and when people say ‘society’ I immediately set out to ignore the rest of their words and cross them out of my daily planner for all future meetings. (I don’t even have a daily planner.)

     Society seems to be nothing more than a popularity contest. In other words – when someone says ‘society’, I know at once that they mean to say, ‘the popular vision of the world’. Why should ‘popularity’ be so popular?

     When I was in high school the popular kids were idiots. I, for example, was popular, and I was the biggest idiot of them all. Trying to follow social trends that society dictates only inhibits people from actually being people, or being themselves. Society dictates that people should not be themselves. And society also dictates that everything that you do will eventually make you dead. Society is so fucking presumptuous because everyone will eventually die no matter what they do. Society also claims to have the medical know-how to make people live forever. Yet society was nowhere to be found when Kerry was smashed by bus seventeen – and she did not die because she smoked cigarettes or drank too much red wine.

     Society is a figment of our imagination created by our own imaginations to justify everything we do. Because we have no idea why we do what we do, we use some sort of explanation that makes no sense based on what the norms of society are. Yet we create ‘society’, and we forget that we can manipulate it and do manipulate it daily and yearly and monthly and all the rest. What we fail to realize is that we can do things on our own without blaming it on what we should be doing or what we want to be doing. Society can go fuck itself – and it probably would.

     I wanted to be smoking in that restaurant and so I was – and Kerry was too. At that point, I had no idea whether or not she would eventually die of lung cancer, though I hoped that she would not. I was just taking to liking this girl.

     "Are you hungry?" I asked, because I did not know what else to ask, and not speaking and remaining silent, though acceptable and comfortable to me (especially when I was staring at a girl as beautiful as Kerry – supermodel gorgeous), was not generally accepted by society.

     "Not particularly – you?"

     "Not at all. Do you have any idea how many calories one beer has?"

     "Not a clue."

     "Me neither – but I can tell you for sure that it fills you up and leaves you without any desire to eat."

     "So why did we just order a three-course meal?"

     "That’s what I’m trying to figure out…" I muttered.

     Kerry grinned, smiled and laughed. I lit another cigarette. I preferred to smoke light cigarettes, not because they were better for my health but because – and I can assure you of this – it is extremely difficult to smoke over two packs a day when you are smoking something as harsh as Marlboro Reds – and I liked smoking over two packs a day.

     I also liked drinking beer when I woke up at nine in the morning and running five miles when I was finished with my first beer. And I also liked drinking six beers when I got back from running and, sometimes, when I felt devilishly inspired, I liked smoking a cigarette while I was running, which really pissed people off – if only because society does not necessarily advocate smoking and running at the same time (it could kill you). Actually, I have seen people that have trouble walking and smoking at the same time, which makes me feel particularly proud of running and smoking in one swift motion of athletic grace.

     "So are we going to eat any of this?" Kerry asked as she lit up another cigarette.

     "I’m not sure – I’ll probably eat a couple of bites."

     "You should send it back like you did the wine."

     "Naa," I replied, "I don’t mind paying for food that I don’t eat. I figure I’m paying for the atmosphere of the restaurant and for a good time, not for food. Plus – the wine, this wine is good."

     "Who said you’re paying? I’m paying. I’m the working woman here."

     "Who said I didn’t work?"

     "You said you smoke and drink all day – that’s what you said you do."

     "You didn’t ask what my occupation was," I pointed out.

     "You wouldn’t let me!" Kerry protested.

     "Well, we’re quite friendly now, and given the fact that I know you are a model and now I think you to be even more beautiful, I think you have free reign over any question you want to ask." I could not help but slip and tell her that once I knew she was a model I thought she was even more beautiful than she always was. Descriptions escape me, but believe me, this girl was stunning – and she was a model.

     "So what do you do?"

     "As an occupation?"

     She frowned – it was high time I tell her.

     "I write guidebooks."

     "You write guidebooks? For the blind?"

     "What?" I didn’t understand her joke. "I guess so, for blind tourists that don’t want to stand out. I wrote, for example, The Drunken Non-Tourist Guide to Barcelona."

     "You’re that guy?"

     "What guy?"

     "That, um, Alexander Time guy?"

     "Didn’t I already tell you my name was David Morrissey?"

     "So why are you claiming to have written something Alexander Time wrote?"

     "Penname."

     "That’s clever," Kerry said with a grin.

     "I’m clever," I agreed.

     "You are clever, but you’re not hungry – and here comes our food."

     "Fuck the food."

     "Fuck me."

     "I’ll do that."

     She was not shocked by my comment – wait, I wasn’t shocked by hers – "where do you live?" she continued.

     "In Grandma Rosa’s apartment."

     "Who’s Grandma Rosa?"

     "My grandmother."

     "Why do you live in her apartment?"

     "Because she’s dead."

     "In the apartment?"

     "Are you retarded?"

     "No, I’m thick – I’m a model."

     She looked pretty thin to me. The food had arrived and I immediately set out to not eat it. I was not hungry. I put out my cigarette and poured another glass of red wine for both my model friend and myself. She picked at her food and looked cute while drinking the wine.

     It occurred to me, at that exact moment, that my ex-fiancée, Marketa, never picked at her food. She always ate voraciously and never left anything on her plate, whether she was hungry or not, though she would never admit to not being hungry. I wonder if she was ever hungry – or if she ever loved me. I wonder a lot of times, basically because I am always thinking, unlike other people I do or don’t know, and because thinking is the key to existence, and so I am made to wonder – though I continuously attempt to ignore my thoughts and NOT think.

     "What are you thinking about?" Kerry asked.

     "Wondering."

     "Wondering what?"

     "Whether or not it is worth it to eat this food."

     "Probably not – at least for me."

     "Why?"

     "Because I’m a MODEL and need to watch my weight – plus I’m not hungry."

     "But shouldn’t I be hungry at some point?"

     "You will be."

     "I never am."

     I was never hungry. Eating was a chore to me. It was a disaster when I knew that I had to eat something. I cursed the beer companies for not putting more calories in their beers by somehow increasing the level of hops or sugar or something. I was their best customer, and I deserved some respect.

     "You will be hungry, I promise – after you make love to me you will be so tired and emotionally drained and physically exhausted that you will need food."

     "Or beer," I pointed out, not really thinking about food or beer but of being so tired and emotionally drained and physically exhausted from making love to Kerry that I would actually want to eat something. I picked hesitantly at my food.

     We finished dinner rapidly – we never finished the food – and once the bottle of wine was empty we decided to go to the nearby bar that was standing-room-only and had two-dollar bottles of Cava.

     "This place is a disaster," Kerry said after we arrived. I could not be sure if she was joking.

     "It’s a tight fit – that’s for sure," I replied.

     "At least we’ll be close to each other," Kerry said, right on cue.

     "And drunk," I pointed out thankfully. Unfortunately for us, she would be too drunk – more to the point, unfortunately for her.

     "Damn this is good," Kerry said as she tasted the Cava for the first time.

     "It’s dangerous."

     "I know," she said, demanding, already, her second glass, "that’s why I like it."

     "That’s why it’s dangerous."

     "So what?"

     "‘So what’ what?" I asked.

     "So what if it’s dangerous?"

     "I’m not sure." I wasn’t sure – but I had a sick feeling in my stomach. It was either intuition or disgust or alcohol poisoning. I know, again.

     "Does it really matter? What the hell is going to happen to a beautiful model like me with a strong man like you protecting me?" - she asked me with an eerily humorous disposition. I was not strong, and she did not understand what I screamed to her in Spanish (I told her to ‘corre’), and a bus smashed her over backwards.

     Now I know that you know that I am very broken up about this accident. I try to make a joke of it but it eats up my heart and leaves me gasping for air when I have nightmares and wake up with smoker’s cough and a conscious that makes it difficult for me to breathe. But the rational side of my brain is hugely influenced by my irrational side, and my irrational side does not care about whether or not Kerry was smashed by a bus. What the hell should I care if some girl that I just met was smashed by a bus?

     I was once young and when I was young I was idealistic and believed that the United States was evil and corrupt and corrupting the world and making the world a very evil place. But eventually I realized that it was not my fault and so I ignored the nonsense and decided it was no place for me to try and fuck with Americans or even with American politics. Still, I hated the United States and its vicious, corrupt, sinister attitude towards the world.

     But I am a liar and it must be said, for the sake of truth, that (besides worrying about the American Empire) I was also doing work – at least some of the time. My work consisted of going from bar to bar and taking notes and drinking a mountain of alcohol and smoking a chimney of cigarettes. But it would be false to say that all I did was drink and smoke, because I was working while I was drinking and smoking – obviously. And Marketa left me because this was my job, and she hated me – which is besides the point:

     The point is that I still hate America but no longer have the desire or drive to rally against it; it just seems so futile and juvenile – so pointless. I live in a constant shroud of antagonism that usually leaves me so distressed and depressed that I shudder to think of what I will read when I open the paper the next day, or even the same day – or that very moment. I cannot help but buy the international paper which describes the horrible acts of whatever horrible administration is in power in Washington – not to mention the feeling of disgust which leaves me nearly crippled when I read about what every other nation is doing and the news that dominates their front pages. And so I have adopted a policy in which I really don’t care about any of it anyway, even though I do, and the fact that I ignore the fact that I do drives me even deeper into despair than the original news would have had I just accepted the whole damn thing in the first place.

     But I don’t accept anything and have decided that it is absolutely pointless to try and rally against America, probably because rallying against America is in and of itself already hypocritical considering that the rest of the governments of the world are filled with a slew of bastards that are not necessarily better than their American counterparts – only they do not have as much power and their evil acts do not seem so evil because they do not carry as much weight (strength). In respect to this new light that is shining gingerly on my face and is not always easy to recognize I see that it is worthless to fight anything that exists and is strong because it already exists and is strong and fighting it is futile and childish and will not amount to anything (it takes at least sixty years to build a revolution, and I doubt I will live till thirty-five, much less sixty – or eighty-three). Leading by example is one thing, but fighting a nation that claims to be leading by example seems to be idiotic because the nation can always one-up you as they are 280 million and you are one – and you are weak. I am weak.

     "Where are you from?" I asked Kerry before we left the standing-room-only bar with Cava flowing so cheaply and she was pummeled to her death by bus seventeen.

     "I’m from California," she lied.

     "Were you ‘discovered’ on a beach?"

     "By you?"

     "Don’t you know that I discovered you existed on a beach?"

     "Then what are you talking about?"

     "You know full well what I’m talking about!" I demanded, almost angrily, but realizing, just as I was about to get angry, that she was joking.

     "Why do all models have to be ‘discovered’?"

     "How else will they be discovered?"

     "What?"

     "You HAVE to be discovered."

     "Isn’t there another way to describe how I became successful?" Kerry asked me.

     "I’m not sure," I said confidently and with a slight hint of malice in my voice. I never liked any woman – "I’m not a model."

     "Yes," she said finally, "I was discovered in California on a beach."

     I thanked her and moved on to the next topic, and what the next topic was I can no longer recall though I know for sure that we talked about something. The main problem with my memory when it comes to this very night is that it was quite traumatic and it is very trying for me even now to think about it.

     The police made me think about it. They couldn’t resist. They had to make me think about it – they ‘were just doing their job’.

     What was their job? Their job description is so varied and vague – mind numbing, acceptable, and disastrous, almost too much to take and too little to be deemed respectable.

     I am a writer. I have a respectable job but the only apparent job description for me is that I have to lie. I have to lie. I find it despicable that writing means lying – and sometimes I begin to believe that speaking or talking means lying as well. But I don’t even write (I write guidebooks). What ever possessed me to write guidebooks?

     I should have chosen fiction – THAT would be REAL lying.

     Kerry was dead in the middle of the street; she had no manners; she was dead. Or at least I thought she was dead. I stood over her as if she were my wife or my lover or even my friend and wondered how I could have made it all right. How could I have made it all right?

     Of course I never would have even had to THINK about making it all right had Marketa never left me without even leaving a note. "Dear Alexander Time: You are a jackass and I am leaving you forever." That would have been adequate and much appreciated. "Dear Boyfriend: You suck and I hate you so I am fleeing and not telling you where I am going and we are not getting married." That sort of note on Grandma Rosa’s kitchen table also would have been satisfactory.

     If she didn’t flee without leaving a note then I would not have been dating other girls and taking them to dinner. Kerry paid for the dinner – I swear I did not have a chance to pay – she grabbed the check and fired her credit card at the waiter before I could even begin to figure out which pocket my wallet was in. I wish she was able to have dinner with me now – I would pay for it. I promise:

     And I also promise that if I was still with Marketa or even knew where she was that I would not have been gallivanting around the city with so many different girls – that is if she did not disappear so mysteriously. I guess it was not that mysterious. I was not that surprised, though I pretended to be (I DO have SOME pride – somewhere).

Before she left, I woke up every morning with extreme surprise because she was still with me – I had always expected her to leave in the middle of the night (she eventually left in the middle of the night). Who would want to live with the likes of ME? I am a walking, smoking, drinking disaster and Marketa was right to leave – and then I was right to go find some other fine pieces of ass. I NEEDED to find some models, some fine, actual beauties who could take the pain away from my soul. I really wanted to marry Marketa.

     No girl could take away the pain – maybe Kerry could have, but she died too quickly. Most of them died very quickly within my heart – they were severely unimportant. They did not understand me and the proof that they did not understand me was that they liked me and enjoyed my company. Marketa understood me and she never enjoyed my company but just enjoyed being with me and seeing my mind work, or not work – faulty.

     My mother was also run over by a car – Kerry was not the only one. My mother was the last to die. My father and my three brothers and one sister were all killed in the past decade – they are all dead. My mother finally died and I did not really know what to think. I was not surprised – I was not shocked – I did not really care either way. I hated her because she was always incredibly submissive to my idiotic and conservative father; she did whatever he said, no matter how idiotic he was. She was idiotic.

     I was idiotic and never even told my mother that I loved her. I could have told her but I would never give in and make her happy – she never made ME happy. She was run over by a drunk driver running a red light – she was on her way to visit my father’s grave. This all sounds sad but it isn’t.

     The police made me think about it. Kerry was lying on the street just under a street lamp that illuminated her beautiful face, now disfigured (it was still beautiful).

     "What happened?" The police officer in charge asked me suspiciously in Castellano.

     "Something happened." I replied.

     "What happened?"

     "We were holding hands and then as we neared the street we separated, and I started to cross and screamed after her but she was walking too slowly – she didn’t make it." I was in a state of utter shock; it was all so sad (it wasn’t so sad, really – perhaps annoying).

     "Were you drinking?" The police officer in charge asked me with what, to me, seemed to be a grin.

     "Oh yes," I answered affirmatively. "Heavily."

     "Cava?"

     "What else?"

     "Don’t you think your story sounds a bit ridiculous?"

     "How so?" I wondered aloud.

     "A little funny?"

     "I don’t think that it’s funny at all!" I exclaimed, verging on tears and wanting explicitly to feel tears flowing down my cheeks and cleansing my guilty heart. It was all so sad. It was much sadder than when my mother was run over by that drunk driver in New Jersey on her way to visit my father’s grave. I felt much closer to Kerry than I did to my mother. I actually spoke with Kerry about what was on my mind; whenever I spoke to my mother it was always a give and take dominated by lies, deception, and a continuous search for what the other wanted to hear, not what we wanted to say. "It’s not really a funny story, when you think about it," I told the police officer in charge.

     "But why did she not follow you across the street?"

     "I don’t know because she’s a fucking moron? Because she’s fucking dead? How could you ask me these fucking questions? She wasn’t paying attention so she got run over by bus seventeen!"

     My mother was paying attention and it did not help her in the least. Her slightest notion of control was destroyed when she saw that it was time to cross the street (the WALK sign) and began to do so when a drunk driver barreled through the intersection and ran her over. She arrived at my father’s grave in a coffin and was laid to rest next to him. At least that’s what I heard – I did not go to the funeral – I have not returned to the United States in three years.

     I know that at some point Marketa was a senior at Brown University in Providence and I would have gladly accepted an invitation to visit her, but I never found one in the mail. Maybe it’s because I have not had a mailing address in years – but I would never have returned to the United States just because my mother died, even if she had sent me a personal invitation (that would have been something, a personal invitation to one’s personal funeral – wait, that would be suicide). But Marketa never invited me and I still have not heard from her in over two years.

     I would have gone to Kerry’s funeral had I known where it was. The police told me nothing. They ascertained her identity and then called the United States Consulate in Barcelona. They gave the Consulate my cell phone number to pass on to Kerry’s family so that they could contact me and hear about Kerry’s final moments on Earth (if death really means that you leave Earth), but I never heard from them (I would have liked to, but I always seemed to have my cell phone turned off because I hated getting phone calls).

     I hated getting phone calls and did not even have a telephone in my apartment in Barcelona. I refused to check my email (once every three months at the most), did not have a mailing address (letters were so five minutes ago) (as is saying ‘so five minutes ago’), and hated cell phones because they gave me consistent brain tumors and unbelievable stress. The only way to contact me was to find me physically – all modes of communication were turned OFF. I wasn’t even communicating with myself.

     My publishers never tried to contact me. Every year, on the first of November, I would send them a manuscript for a new guidebook. They never knew which city to expect. I’m thinking of doing Amsterdam next year, but I don’t like to smoke marijuana. I am also thinking of doing a guidebook on Cairo, but I HATE Egypt (though I have never been there). Jerusalem interests me, but I am not Jewish – and in Morocco it is so damn difficult to get a goddamned beer (Arab countries can be very difficult, you know). I might head to South America, but I am a European traveler, not a South American traveler, and though Brazil interests me because of the women (and the possibility that I might find Marketa there), I will probably stay here in Europe.

     I speak Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, French, Provencal, Italian, and English; I write my guidebooks in English because Americans are the only people ignorant enough to buy them. They NEED my guidebooks in order to avoid being IDIOT American Tourists. I want to stay here in Europe. My next stop might possibly be Budapest, won’t they be surprised. My publishers will certainly be surprised.

     My publishers send a check to my bank and it is automatically deposited into my account. I trust them. I don’t need to speak with them and they don’t need to speak with me because they know that I am drinking and smoking and taking notes on bars and that this is my job, and that I am doing it well.

     Perhaps they try to call my cell phone, and perhaps Kerry’s family has tried to call my cell phone, but I have no way of knowing, because I leave the thing turned off at all times and I have forgotten the pin code that allows me to check my voice messages. Who cares if they called, anyway?

     [Maybe Marketa called.]

     I would have liked to have gone to Kerry’s funeral and meet Kerry’s mother, if she was even still alive. All this talk about death sounds morbid, and it is quite odd, because I do not obsess about death at all, it’s just that everyone around me seems to keep dying without any warning whatsoever. My entire family is dead. Does that make me weird? I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m dead too – how would I even know? I am absolutely positive that I am weird, but I cannot say with any amount of certainty that it is due to the tragedy that has struck my family. I shouldn’t even call it ‘tragedy’, most of those bastards deserved to die.

     Kerry did not deserve to die, nor did my mother, though my father did and I was happy the day he died.

     I never heard from the police again and was happy to wash my hands of the whole affair. My hands were clean – but my mind was dirty and depraved and depressed and wanting of clean depression and clean breaks and searching for closure and a spot for diseased rest. I was tired – I still am (I am positive I have had mononucleosis for the past eight years).

     There was no choice but to ignore the entire affair – there was nothing I could do about it. Increasingly, I was feeling as if there was nothing I could do about anything – so I wrote guidebooks.

     I can remember an event that changed my life. I was sitting with Marketa in Prague and wondering whether she would want to be with me forever. She had already agreed to marry me – she was an idiot, a fascist, and a communist liberal (she had the traits of them all) – but now I was wondering whether she meant it. I sat staring at her and her mineral water and could not fathom that she was sitting there across from me. What was she doing? Why was she doing it? Why was she sitting across from me? Was she crazy? Why would I go out with a beautiful girl that was so obviously out of her mind (she was, after all, sitting across from me and claiming to love me and agreeing to marry me)? What had gotten into her? I had always considered her to be a reasonable person, but now I was questioning that initial judgement due to the severe lack of judgement on her part when it came to judging me.

     I sat with her and concentrated on her rolling green eyes and her unbelievable lips, which were trying unsuccessfully to decide whether they were to smile or frown – they were frowning. I was smiling and she was frowning – and then she was smiling. For heaven’s sake pick the Devil or God or at least St. Peter as a mediator and stop somewhere in between the love and the hate – I think that she felt hate on that particular afternoon in Prague, but I could not be sure. I could never tell the difference, mainly because I was too busy trying to assemble my own thoughts. I have no idea what Marketa was thinking when she was sitting across from me in Prague, but I assume she was horrified and shocked that she was somehow in the dreadful position of being my girlfriend and having me as her boyfriend. It was an event that changed my life; she agreed to marry me.

     I am really quite upset with Marketa. I have no idea where she is. But, to be truthful, I must say that I was always upset with her, even when we were dating and in love (are we still?) and in each other’s arms. I am upset with her, really upset, because she left without a word. It is eating me up inside and sometimes I wish that I never even met her – which is an absurd statement because my life would be a joke if I had never met the most beautiful Czech girl on the planet. Marketa is Czech – she was born in the Czech Republic – who cares? The point may be that I care and feel. I am really quite upset with Marketa.

     I don’t think I should have ever trusted women, mainly because I have never trusted myself. I can always trust myself to be faithful, but I can never trust myself to be honest, with my girlfriend or with my own mind. I might look back on a day I spent with a girl (Marketa, for example), and I am shocked to see that I was acting the entire time – playing a role. I was acting because I loved the girl and I wanted the girl and I wanted the girl to be sleeping next to me in all her glory and her delicate embrace surrounding me strongly leaving me weeping with joy in my dreams of desire and angst and wishes left unfulfilled to be with this girl for the rest of my life. I wanted to change, and yet I found it difficult to trust women, because they made me question myself, and forced me to try and change myself. I wanted to change myself.

     I have always assumed that Kerry would have been different. Every time I see the next girl I always assume that they will be different. They smile and they laugh with me (and at me) and they reassure me. They LIKE my insanity and find it charming and loving – at first – but Kerry died.

     There was a time when all of it was new to me and the freedom was worth the pain, but then I found myself wallowing in a self-pity created by an undeserved success. It was fun and depressing and damn inhibiting. There was a certain amount of exhilaration that came from doing nothing and having people pay me for it – at first I even believed that what I was doing (writing guidebooks) was something. It was nothing.

     Oh God clear the pain and release the languishing hounds and loitering thoughts that wish to come out but have no avenue for escape. A long time coming and a long time for desperate genius when nothing centers itself in the middle and the brain falls victim to the world which should not be leading and instead following the waves of destruction which lead to disaster. Thank you.

     Thank you for destroying my life. Thank you for allowing me to self-destruct. I have been looking for an excuse to be myself – my own life. Emotions of my own life stand dancing along the edge of a border that I created in order to define reality and existence and beliefs and disasters. There was nothing that I could logically do to prevent this development of obtuse and dramatic obsession with my faltering life. Maybe it was society’s fault; maybe I created society.

     I was quite successful. I was quite selfish.

     It was an unnecessary ride into the debacle of success. I should have suffered undue pain. I should not have had it so easy. The guidebooks were quite easy to write – easy to read. They helped a lot of people that did not deserve to be helped. But they never really helped me – and I did not deserve to be helped.

     After Kerry was dead I did not have much to live for – although, before Kerry’s death, I did not have much to live for. The stakes were low and the importance was non-existent. After Kerry was dead and Marketa had disappeared, I did not have much to live for.

     Why does that sound so absolutely pathetic to me? I had nothing to live for – horribly pitiable. And I do not particularly wish to enter into a drive for self-pity, because I KNOW that it is going to be extremely difficult to find any sympathy in this world from anyone who may look at or examine my life. A long time coming indeed – all they care about is Alexander Time. Why do I care that they care? Why am I sounding so absolutely pathetic?

     Because I am pathetic – at least until I meet the next girl – wherever she may be. Sitting across from me and smiling and she is then dead because she has cracked a smile and shown her teeth – damn her. It can be that simple. When I get the sign I am there for the kill – kill. I am normally the one who dies – I kill myself. But still I live on.