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.

Finally, we stopped, and she turned to face me. Her dark eyes glimmered with the intensity of spirit for which she was known so well.

“Do you remember why we are here?” she asked me.

I did. I said so.

“Yes,” she replied when I had finished. She seemed relieved to hear the answer. Then, she shifted into a softer posture. “And now…we part ways again.”

She looked to the window for a moment. The ocean was an amazing sight in the near-dark, waxily reflecting the huge moon above. “And we will go on.” Quietly, then. To the sea.

“Will I see you again?” I said.

“Yes.” She turned to me and smiled. “Of course. As you always do. But you won’t know me. Nor I, you. Not in words.”

There was a moment, then, of nothing but the distant roar of the waves falling onto the beach below.

“I may even be your schoolteacher next time! Or maybe I’ll beat you up at recess,” she said, grinning.

We both laughed, then. It was good, there. In that safe, joyous space we’ve shared for so long. And then, suddenly, I felt my face began to wrinkle into tears. It surprised me.

“I’m afraid,” I blurted out, feeling utterly ashamed of myself and my tears. What was wrong with me? I wiped my face with the soft, satiny sleeve of my robe.

“So,” I said, feeling irritated. “I’m an old, weak, fear-filled fool at the end of it all, is that it?”

She hushed me. ”No, my love.” Put her hands gently on my cheeks, looking into my eyes and making me look into hers. “You are as wise now as the day you were born.”

Her laugh was gentle, and she pulled me close in an embrace. Her long, black hair was smooth and cool against my face, which I realized suddenly felt very hot. Feverish, almost.

“You are playing one of your characters, silly,” she said into the side of my neck. “Stop pretending you aren’t a boastful, successful and famous playwright. False modesty is so…not you!”

“That’s not funny,” I said. The odd feeling persisted that I had no idea of what I was about to say, and when I did, that it wasn’t my voice at all.

She drew back from me slowly.

“You don’t remember the celebration, then?” she whispered, her question ending a little flat.

“Where did the moon go?” I heard myself say, sounding a bit frantic. Over her shoulder the sky had grown darker. I couldn’t see past her, now.

“It is beginning,” you said,  your face growing smaller. “Oh, dear Emil. Be at peace. You have done good for many in this world, my darling. I will remember you well. And I will see you again.”

“What is beginning?” he asked the nurse, his voice rising now to a high pitch. “What’s beginning?”

He tried to sit up but could barely move his body, and slumped back into the scarred, metal headboard with a sigh. The streetlight glared dully against the window, its weave of shatter-proof wires and dried, yellowy, spackle deflecting the weak rays.

“Where is the damn moon? It was just there!” Ed Hernandez yelled from the only bed in E3.

“Shhh, it’s gonna be fine, Mister Hernandez,” said Sharon, who was exhausted and couldn’t wait to get out of CCU and back into Public Health and doing home visits. “Let me open the curtain a little for you, okay, darlin’?”

“…the ocean…” he said, in a whisper.

“Hmm?” Sharon asked over her shoulder, tugging on the curtain.

And he was gone.

relationships…devices people use to control love, and other people. does anyone love freely anymore? to love? and to celebrate a spirit in our lives? or that we can share time with someone? does anyone give love away because they love loving? and want to help you grow? or does everyone come with a bottom line, a codicil, a demand. people…we don’t even know what love is. to many, it is something in there somewhere, behind all the other attachments that guarantee us nutrients and objects and situational leverage. we forget that in love is freedom. and removed from it, love dies….we use our feelings as a volley, we send them out expecting a return. often when we don’t get it the way we want, we bare our teeth. is this, love, then? are lovers people we would bite to death if our kisses were denied?

-

for weeks i’ve been taking her and the kids out to dinner. or having them over here. i’ve pedaled up to her house more than a couple times to see them, or to help her move furniture when i was asked for help. i’ve been slowly growing despondent—before i was even aware i was—that i’ll be watching yet two more of my children grow up from a distance. not teaching them daily. not having them in my home. finding strange places in their personality that i do not recognize, and cannot account for. gradually knowing who they are less than i did once.

-

my first son is now 21, and we are not talking at the moment, i guess. he has taken on his mother’s anger over my $3000 arrears that i am whittling away monthly. he had taken to writing me snide messages over it when the check was late. it was not fun to watch her complaint become his. it was dispiriting.

life is so weird. when he was 15 and found out his mother was preventing me from seeing him because of money, he became angry at her. and said he didn’t care about that, he wanted to see me. see, he hadn’t known that she was interfering for that reason, and had been for years. just as how my eldest daughter’s mother dresses up a lack of contact after intercepting and throwing away my mails, my eldest son’s mother presented the story to him as if our not seeing each other much was only because i was irresponsible and unwilling to see him. she sort of left out the times i wanted to see him but was stopped by the Toll Gate of her financial demands. that all faded. but she got pregnant again recently and re-focused her anger on me and what i owe her. my son was drawn into this…i don’t blame him for that. i’m sure she talks to him about it and he is still living with her, so he is sort of bound to feel it as pressure. in his life, at 21 he has been taught to blame me when there is not enough food in the cabinet, i take it. in my life, i was out trying to figure out the world at 15, on the street, on the road by then. not saying it was a good life or the right one. but i don’t even know how to dealwith that gap in worldview sometimes. it makes me sad though.

and my eldest daughter…whom i love so very much. and miss, every day. she is 16 now, but her four-year old face gazes achingly at me from a poster on my wall. a mask she made hangs above my bed, a big orange cat mask. but she is not in my life so much anymore. in 2001, her grandmother appealed to me for help in wresting her away from her own mother due to her mother’s unstable marriage and her mother’s mental instability, but it was a trick. once i helped her do that, she then cut me off from my daughter. and now that is the family game. change the phone number when i find it, steal my mail, and tell my daughter stories about how ugly and deviant i am. luckily, my daughter has nothing but loving memories of me. i’ve never been anything but kind to my children. it still keeps us apart, though.

-

the grinding experience of everyone in the world having more control and access to my own children than me, of arrogant dimwitted stepfathers calling my phone to tell me they are the Real Dad Now and also what a fuckup i am, of knowing my kids are being lied to, and having my own children used as legal weapons against me time and time and time again weighs on me more than i can communicate. these injustices have marked me deeper than anything else in this world, perhaps. i normally do not talk about them. they are not realities to be tossed about in the tempestuous and splinter-witted tides of the internet or even casual conversation.

and there’s no one to complain to about how these things turn out, you know. it’s just life. it’s…love.

update:
should i make clear that this is my emotional experience? my diaries are my reality, based on my remembrance of the facts. i try to be fair to others when i write reality-centered prose, but it is meant to convey my experience of what happened, not to be an almanac of every instance that played out, not to be impartial, but very subjective. please always understand that about this collection of writing.

“Nezua:

It was so humid in Atlanta.

I grew up in ________, born and raised, and so perhaps there is something about that weather that speaks to my skin. Just before the awards dinner, I was walking from the train to my hotel and the sky was tangled with clouds and there was so much drama in the sky, a drama that the fluid ______ Area winds always erase. It makes it easier here to breathe, to take thoughts that rise up and let them go. When I left my hotel again to walk the two blocks, the sky had burst open and the rain fell so hard it almost seemed to be splashing up from the ground. I shared an umbrella with an old colleague and we both got half-soaked, so the rest of the night in that banquet hall the skin of my back was chilled until we left again.

Atlanta in June has that sweat-drip, that hair-curl.

I guess I’m trying to figure out why I am thinking about what it would be like to kiss you. I guess I’m trying to blame it on the rain. I didn’t think clearly about it until I was on the elevator back up to my room: that I should have walked you out, that we should have spent the night talking more, touching each other perhaps, because why not?

Yet, this feels silly, immature, email flirtations are such mental masturbation. I fancy myself a writer so it’s easy to sit here at my desk and write off your clothes, write my teeth against your nipples, your cock grazing the top of my mouth, sliding into the tight of my throat.

It feels good to write about this because I am in the middle of trying to figure out how to articulate my position on monogamy. So, I hope you forgive me this diatribe … but as the object of my desire, somehow you seem the most likely candidate for being my sounding board. Highly inappropriate really.

The truth is I’m not sure what to think about monogamy. If I had kissed you, I would probably still be writing this email … still using the spark as a catalyst for this thought process. Even though we barely shared a hug or two, I still thought of you when making love to my partner the other day.

I am finding the line incredibly inconsistent in my mind. Liminality. Boundary crossing. It’s hard to give it up. …

And now, I – too – am getting married. So, my quest over the next few months is to figure out how to stand up in front of my friends and family and articulate myself: all the complexities of myself. Or perhaps that is not the point at all.

I’ve suddenly lost the thread. There’s cool air blowing again.

This was just a first attempt, but it’s past midnight now and I want to crawl into bed, try to get straight in my head all the tasks I have for tomorrow and maybe save that levitating space before the fall to imagine back into a sultry night I could have had….”