GOING NOWHERE I always expected some kind of bright lights, at least. I always pictured a long stairwell rising into some sort of brilliant transcendence, and angels, I always pictured angels, dancing, maybe, but definitely beautiful, and heavenly. But there wasn’t so much as a cloud. No harps. No music at all. Nothing. I never thought the void was real but there it was, and there I was, a part of it, after everything I’ve said, seen and done, I was in the void. In the darkness. Alone. It al...

GOING NOWHERE I always expected some kind of bright lights, at least. I always pictured a long stairwell rising into some sort of brilliant transcendence, and angels, I always pictures angels, dancing, maybe, but definitely beautiful, and heavenly. But there wasn’t so much as a cloud. No harps. No music at all. Nothing. I never thought the void was real but there it was, and there I was, a part of it, after everything I’ve said, seen and done, I was in the void. In the darkness. Alone. It al...

Alex walked into the Cardinale building and the relentless August heat stopped at the door where he was greeted by a gust of cold, everything inside silver, metal, and clean. The information secretary, a middle aged woman with bright red hair cut at an angle down to her chin and the palest complexion Alex had ever seen was sitting behind an immaculate stainless-steel desk in the middle of the lobby. “Fill out these forms,” she told him as she retrieved a stack of papers from the bottom drawe...

1. The strange thing was that I wasn’t sleeping when Meter called. I was awake and watching a storm illuminate the mountain sky because sometime around midnight I had that dream about wolves and decided not to go to bed again. The storm was a great diversion. I had the television on a morning news report about the war. There was a man in a white beard and a black bowtie peering into the camera’s lens telling us that we had taken another city, we were winning, and that there was hope in the wh...

“This is life,” Paz told me, pointing into a room with an old black man in his hospital bed with his head tilted back, his nose to the ceiling, frozen still, his eyes closed, his mouth open, like a piece of troubling art. “That’s not life,” I said. “It’s death.” If I had known Paz better, maybe I would have been able to properly identify the look he gave me, like he was ashamed by my response but expected it, and because he expected it and I gave it to him, his look was of shame and, I don’t ...

There was a crowd gathered outside room 738 at Westchester Medical Center to witness the angel as he stood over the bed of Jonas Redden Misebi. As many as fifteen people at once would pack the small waiting area just outside the room as they stared, one at a time, past the small rectangular glass in the center of the hospital door for a peak inside. Another seventy-five people waited in the hallway on the now infamous seventh floor, moving in shifts as yet another thousand-plus people waited...

THE OPENING...Wake up ole sleeping creature to a life that hasn’t meant a thing. Wake up to a pop culture (boom) in the middle of everything’s descent from the top. Wake up and college is done and the diploma is neatly hung on your wall and nothing else. Wake up and realize the virtue of boredom when everywhere else seems so far away and out of reach. Wake up in these patterns of stifling routine and find out that nothing brilliant waits for you in the distance, because there is no distance, ...

1. There was a crowd. Mostly business suits on smoke breaks, or on cell phones, too afraid or uninterested to go to him, or talk to him, or even call for help. They all just stared, like paparazzi amateurs, making sure to keep their distance of ten feet while Alex lay there on the concrete, unconscious, the center of a dark circle formed by the apathetic and the deranged, the highly motivated, the angels of downtown New York City. He woke up on his back to whispers and watched the tops of th...