Tanya sat at the keyboard, facing the screen, fingers laid softly upon the home row. She could think of nothing.

What had been her last thought? How was she going to connect Nadioch and The Coming of the Dark days?

Her index fingers skated lightly in minute circles over the nubs on the F and J keys as she hung, poised on the edge of action.

Suddenly she sat up straight, arms moving to her lower back. It ached. She massaged the muscles. It felt good.

She let out a long breath. Leaned back to the keyboard. Typed.

Too many people confuse Narcissism with simple self-centeredness.

Smiling, she leaned into the thought. That’s it. It was just the kind of thing he’d say.

Self-centeredness is the peasant’s brew. Clear, of basic recipe, and cheap. Narcissism is mottled, perhaps, yet bestowed with a rare spice. Self-centeredness lurches into a corner and can go no further; Narcissism veers in elegant, mad loops toward an undeclared and distant vector. Self-centeredness is unambitious and dull and requires immediate attention; Narcissism is complex, fascinating, deranged…and of surprisingly patient temperament.

She laughed out loud. So perfect. A paean to Narcissism! Who would dare? Only Lord Nadioch, who was living—perhaps—somewhere in the late 1800s, and who only deigned to lift his nose when Tanya saw fit to type him into motion.

She had the thread again.

Tanya stood up and circled the room happily. Smiling, her eyes glinted and she squinted as she let the image of Nadioch fill her mind. She saw his hard-etched scowl. His leathery, rouge eyelids. She smelled the acrid flask. She squinted, finding a dangerous gleam flashing from a black hatband. She assumed Nadioch’s shape; sunk her head between her shoulders and scowled. She strode to the door and reached for her jacket, performing for the empty room.

“A self-centered person thinks: A truly good woman would attend my back before I dip my pen and begin. A Narcissist—” and here she used Nadioch’s voice, which allowed the word no “r” sound and instead substituted about eight Hs instead, “A Nahhhhhcissist will think: A truly good woman would rub my back and be overwhelmed with gratitude that she should be allowed to trace her small hands over my exquisite and rare physique.”

Tanya tilted her head up and laughed out loud. She loved this crazy jackass. It was liberating to sketch out the extreme ends of the human condition. It helped you fill in the map. And learn to love your street.

She was still chuckling as she shut the front door, put her hands into her sweatshirt pockets and started walking. She did need a damn backrub. And she needed to walk around a little. Spin out the thread. Nadioch’s thoughts justifying Narcissism—and later, the most extreme and amoral shapes of greed—were not a tangent, it was a central problem that had been plaguing her novel for almost a week.

—

Lord Nadioch was—unbeknownst to himself—on the verge of penning what would be a reknowned political canon in his world, The End of A P(l)easant Delusion: Meditations Upon A Proper Society. The tome would break with other scribes at the time, who often attempted a condescending but necessary view of the poor as charges of their betters, and insisted upon some sort of token obligation to the peasant class. Nadioch was having none of that, and his work would spell out and trumpet a perverse morality which was in all respects, class division bereft of pangs of conscience. The book would become a fixture of reverence in the well-kept homes of the rich, and would in time be used by the King himself to institute horrific measures that protected the ruling classes while the poor suffered in poverty, disease and death. Nadioch was the intellectual force upon whose work would be used to usher in a class of laws which would be known as “The Iron Five” and sometimes simply as “The Gate.”

Lord Nadioch was a driven and smart, but wicked man. He was lost to the forces of evil, there was no doubt about that. But Tanya was smiling as she constructed his particular brand of madness. It was good to be flowing again, to have the mind turned on and working. This bad man would help the hungry writer with the aching back make a good point. She hoped.

Tanya pushed open the glass door to the local bakery. Stood in line behind a large man in a rust-colored jacket. Found her attention fixed on the tantalizing baked goods behind the glass. Hell with it, I’m getting something with lots of Yum in it, she thought. I deserve it. I’m writing!

“I’ll take the last Cheese Danish then,” a man with a well-waxed white mustache said at the front of the line. “And…I’ll bring Kat the cruller.”

Deep in the story again, Tanya’s eyes were soon as glazed as some of the rolls behind the glass. What happens once Nadioch’s book takes off? Will Nadioch be rewarded by the King? Of course. Nadioch would be a celebrity to the ruling classes. He’d be their savior. Saving them from their own conscience. His voice is the symphony that will drown out the wailing of babies and the screaming of new widows. His elegant prose will be to the hard hearts of the aristocrats as satin sheets are to their soft bodies.

“Oh! Don’t be selfish, now, Karl!” said the red-haired woman at the counter, softly. Smiling. “Give Katherine the Cheese Danish…and tell her I said hi.”

Tanya flicked her eyes up briefly at the words being spoken around her, but only to quickly gauge if the line was going to move in any dramatic fashion.

“No…she doesn’t mind,” said Karl, letting a bill slip from his fingers to float down into the tip jar. He slid his money clip back into his pocket as he made his way to the door, past the elderly family, past the tall man in the rust-colored jacket, past the short woman with tight curls under her sweatshirt hood with a face deep in thought.

With one foot on the sidewalk, the man named Karl swung his head back into the bakery and spoke with enough bass for his voice to carry over the heads of the people in line, and settle, perhaps, into the tip jar, too.

“Selfishness is a peasant’s brew, Mina. My specific thirst requires a bit more spice, yes?” and then he was on the street, the door swinging shut.

Tanya felt her heart lurch in her chest at the words.

She moved her head around the Man in the Rust Colored Jacket and looked at Mina, the counter worker. Her face was perhaps a bit flushed, but…otherwise, nothing seemed out of place as she took the order of an elderly woman standing next to what looked like her husband.

“Did he…” said Tanya, turning back to the closed door.

The Man in the Rust Colored Jacket was still looking quizzically in the same direction.

“Weirdo,” he muttered. He swung his head back toward the counter, down to his newspaper.

Tanya left her place in line (there were now three people behind her) and walked to the front door. She put her face nearly against the glass surface, scanning the outside world, but saw no sign of the man who had spoken words, nearly verbatim, that she had typed less than 15 minutes ago.

She pushed the door open, feeling as if in a dream. Standing on the sidewalk, she spoke to herself.

“Did I just read that somewhere? Did someone else write that phrase?”

No…she was sure she had made that up herself. Didn’t she?

She sunk, slowly to a crouched position, leaning her back against the bakery. She looked up and down the street again.

It was confusing. In a sense, she felt like everything she wrote was stolen. She’d always felt that way, on some level. The most creative person in her family, maybe…and always juggling a fear that really she was no more than a clever thief and reassembler. It was her worst nightmare that one day she’d find she had done nothing more than reproduce a book already written. Or worse yet, that everything she had ever written was a copy of something else. Granted, ‘there were no new stories,’ and so on. But that line the man had spoken…it was pretty specific.

She stood up, and dusted off her back. Abrubtly, she laughed. Shook her head to herself, smiling.

“This is silly. I must have read it somewhere else…” she looked back into the bakery, but her appetite was gone. “I mean…what are the alternatives?”

She stood still for one more moment, thinking. She didn’t have an answer for herself. But she needed to write. She knew that.

Tanya’s walk became a jog, and she was home in less than five minutes.

Standing next to the large man, her eyes pointed up at his back.

Ding, sang the elevator car, descending.

The Big Man With the Little Giggle was not laughing. He was sweating. He was counting millions in his mind. He was close to home free. He was still ignoring the little brown-faced brat, whose name he did not know; whom he thought of only as the last delivery.

The elevator hummed, moving earthward at the pace of falling dust.

He glanced down to his sleeve and flicked a particularly offensive piece of lint from the charcoal gray fabric. Tapped his foot one time. Slid his eyes to the glowing buttons on the wall next to him. Nineteen floors and one block to go.

Nineteen floors and one block, and he was golden.

Ding.

He glanced at his Cartier. It was close.

The Little Girl With the Spider Tattoo on her forehead stood by his side and slightly behind him. Her deep-set eyes would meet his anytime he was forced to look at her. Which he tried not to do.

He was trying not to focus on it, he wasn’t big on kicking stupid shit around his head. She just kept getting weirder and weirder and he didn’t need this right now. It’s not that he liked this gig but…a person should act certain ways. It wasn’t natural, the way this kid had been looking at him and talking to him since the pickup. It was working on his nerves. It was throwing him off-stride, and he wasn’t used to that.

Fuck it. He was gonna be fucking God in under ten minutes.  Richer than any other poor fuck in this entire building, that’s for sure. Hell, he’d have  more money than the goddamn mayor by the end of the hour. The last  year’s work was gonna pay off, finally.

He looked down to his hands. The nails were trimmed to the skin, which was as bright and blank and crumb-less as hands that have been scrubbed with iron wool and bleached clean.

“Greed,” said the small voice behind him.

Ding. Eleventh floor.

He straightened up and shoved his hands back into his pockets. Lifted his head up and gazed through the glass wall of the elevator. He drew a deep breath and refocused on the good feeling.

Couldn’t find it.

Nothing comes for free. Deal. Deal. Almost there. Just a little walk across the street, and up to 11th. Home free, man. Home free!

That made him smile a little, finally.

He looked ahead to his reflection in the glass door. Opened his smile wider so he could inspect his teeth. Clean, good.

“Yeah. Deal with it,” he said to nobody.

He jammed the “L” button with his thumb. Hard. He held it in the wall until his nail turned white. He did not release it.

Ding, chirped the elevator, finally, as the car reached the lobby.

—

He was walking as fast as a grown man can drag a small girl along with him without arousing any suspicion, which was still pretty fast. She said nothing, just tried to keep up with his large strides, but fell to the curb and crumpled up clutching her knee.

“Okay, come on, let’s go.” he snapped as she crouched there, holding her knee, face wrinkling up.

It made him feel good to see her unblinking front shattered by pain and emotion. Good. She wasn’t so weird or scary. Just another creepy street rat. As anxious as he was about being so close to finished, he felt his lungs fill with a sigh of relief as he looked down at her tears.

Inside of 1226 11th street, they stood again in an elevator. This time there was no gold and red rug, no smell of fine scents and clean floors . In the tiny metal box of an elevator were the odors only of lysol, caked-on cigarette smoke, and hints of urine. A single, bluish bulb lit the interior of the small enclosure.

The Little Girl With the Spider Tattoo on Her Forehead stood silent next to him, her face again calm and smooth.

“So,” the Big Man With the Little Giggle said, still staring ahead at the crack between the two elevator doors. “This is it. This is where you’ll live now. You’ll…make…friends…” But he couldn’t finish the little ramble of bullshit he typically delivered at this point, and his voice faded out.

Truth is, what happened to her now didn’t concern him at all. He just needed to get the fuck out of this place for good, these walls painted with decades of paint, these tiny, dank passages in this old building. He needed sun, yeah. He needed a vacation. And he’d take one. Maybe Thailand or something. He’d heard good things. He deserved a little R&R after this last year.

“You got that laminated thing, right?” he said as the doors opened. Sub-basement level. “I gave it to you in the car. Right after I…picked you up?  You still got that?”

She said nothing. She followed him when he walked and stopped walking when he did. They were at an elbow in the basement passage, which was lined with dusty pipes snaking overhead, and shadows damply stuck to the walls. He stopped and finally looked down to her.

“Listen,  you’ll need that here.” Angrily. “ I’m helping you out. If you don’t have that, you’ll…you’ll start from the lowest rung. I’m tryin’ to help you.”

The Little Girl With the Spider Tattoo on Her Forehead lifted her eyes to meet his. The oily bulb in the corner of the passage glinted from her shadowed eyes.

“You didn’t pick me up, Big Man,” she said, softly. “That was someone else.”

He felt the hairs stand up all over his scalp and arms at the sound.

“What are you talkin’, about? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he spat out, holding his voice steady.

“I’m talking about what you’ve done,” she hissed. “You picked up a little girl with a spider tattoo on her forehead.”

In the basement gloom, he squinted hard at the spidery design that looked almost…embossed on the skin between her eyes. He leaned closer to her.

“Yeah, so…isn’t it a spider? What the hell is it, then?” he grunted, only inches from her head.

“It’s not a tattoo,” she whispered, and darkness leapt up and flew into the big man’s shrieking face.

Mictli could never understand why it was that people didn’t seem to want to take the time to know one another. Sometimes he wondered if they heard each other at all, or if they were mostly terrified to listen, terrified to hear the stories that the world has been trying to tell itself since it began. Afraid of having to rebuild, to destroy, to question, to become something new. Or maybe the constant rush and mumble was a self-comforting behavior, like rocking yourself to sleep under your blanket on your knees.

Sometimes when he entered society, he felt as if he were moving on a different temporal plane, as if he couldn’t catch up with people. Probably why they had put him in all the advanced classes as a child. They mistook his utter inability to make sense of how one was supposed to do things with originality.

He needed time to look things over. Things change shape even when you notice them. The world talks back to you at all times. But you have to be listening for it, watching for it. Were people really so brilliant that they got everything about everything so very fast? To Mictli, it seemed that before he could make up his own mind about a moment, others had ruled on it. He learned to move with them, lift his eyebrows properly and then offer his own similar thoughts. He became very good at this. Sometimes he’d completely forget that he was playing along. Sometimes he mistook himself for the reflections cast by his earthly form. Sometimes he lost the boundary between his own aching arms and that of the silhouette of the televised conductor.

The man had stopped talking about Brown University, or the seismic sensors in the shed, and was plucking tines now with someone else. Mictli felt the sun fall on his cheek as he turned to walk back home. He felt the blue of morning roaring through his bones. Holding his paper bag close to his side, he stepped through the automatic door.

The air from outside washed over him with a faint pear scent that he could not place. The world is always a garden, too, he thought. He imagined his smile as a tiny hawk, soaring through the sky of his mind.