*Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks.* –Friedrich Holderlin



 



 



I



In the early morning hours of January 12, 1963, a coup took place on the island of Zanzibar. It was a small, relatively silent uprising; those over whom the hand of government had switched in the middle of the night awoke none the wiser. As day broke, insubstantial rumors began to trickle in. The sun climbed in the sky like a fiery balloon, and with it rose the tide of hearsay.



A name began to circulate. It hummed in the narrow, shaded streets, along the brilliant beaches and quays where bobbed the boats of ragged fishermen. It ran through the fields of corn and cassava, beneath the coconut palms and clove trees. Soon a message, freshly composed by the revolutionaries, quaked over the radio.



John Okello, a warrior, had apparently given Zanzibar, until so recently ruled by a minority population of Arabs, back to the Afri- cans. He cut a magnificent figure, the listeners were led to believe and until quite recently had been a high-ranking officer in Kenya. He could construct, with his own two hands, 500 guns in a single day, 100 grenades in an hour, and a bomb with a blast radius of three miles—and he had been planning the liberation of Zanzibar for months.



But very little of this, as it would later emerge, was true. Seizing the opportunity to reinvent himself, Okello had disseminated a stream of fictions so rich and vermiculate that it would be months in the disentangling. The madness, turmoil, and attendant void of information associated with the revolt provided an exceptionally fertile launch pad for this reformation.



The man who post-revolution would pompously deem himself “Field Marshal” of the military was, in reality, a semi-literate laborer—variously a bricklayer, a housepainter, a stonecutter—who had raised himself after being orphaned at ten. Furthermore, he was a spiritual man, in his own mind a prophet. God spoke to him of the righteousness of the revolution, whispered at his ear in the dark night hours. Sometimes he was so bowled over by these inspirations that he retreated to the forest to contemplate his dreams in silence.



He had had no hand in planning the revolution but had merely been the firebrand, the instigator. At first a rank-and-file rebel, it was during the actual fighting that he had distinguished himself, his singular confidence and viciousness exalting him to the position of military hero and, eventually, to figurehead of the revolution.



Immediately following the revolution, Okello held great sway in Zanzibar. What followed was a confusing period of about two months. Though he had no formal position in the new government, Okello was essentially running the country, while more legitimate leaders—those who had actually planned the revolution Okello had usurped—tried to mitigate his power.



Okello made daily radio broadcasts during this period, claiming, outrageously, that 11,995 people had died during the revolt. He made strange threats, such as:



“We, the army, have the strength of 99 million, 99 thousand...Should anyone be stubborn and disobey orders, then I will take very strong measures, 88 times stronger than at present.”



He would cut, drown, burn, and shoot dissidents. The foreign press was banned, and he began to make insane demands. Off the radio, he strutted about, gussied up and armed to the teeth with pistols, knives, and a Sten gun. He burst in on private meetings and proceeded to act the buffo. He posed for an endless number of photographs.



In short, he was an embarrassment. Fortunately for his opponents, Okello’s violent Christian rhetoric, combined with the ravenous looting his armada of ruffians undertook in regular waves, was beginning to alienate his less zealous supporters. On March 8, on returning from a trip to Uganda, Okello was met at the airport by a host of guards. Unfortunately, they explained, he would not be allowed back into Zanzibar.



He was set to wandering. He still felt the desire to liberate; he still retained his taste for grandeur. With only a handful of loyal men, he halfheartedly stomped around East Africa, dreamily plotting uprisings in Rhodesia, Mozambique, even South Africa.



In 1971, he dropped off the map entirely. Speculation has it he was assassinated by a president or warlord who felt vaguely threatened by his high volatility. Regardless, his misbegotten plans, his synthetic past, the tentative grandeur of his future all disappeared, swept briskly under the rug of history. The magnificence of his illusions dissipated, their energy spreading ineffectually across the whole geography of his wanderings. He burst forth like a flame and petered out, underfed



 



II



It was during his exile of the late 1960s—before his disappearance—that Okello began a correspondence with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, then a relatively unknown director. Okello wanted Herzog to translate a book he’d written on the Zanzibar Revolution into German, while Herzog simply wanted a chance to film Okello, whose grandiose antics he’d followed closely as they’d trickled into the western media. The two never managed to meet, however; Okello, having learned little from his ostracization and still inclined to boil over with vitriolic language, had landed himself in jail.



Even a cursory understanding of Herzog’s filmog- raphy would seem to justify his interest in Okello. As Dana Benelli notes in his essay “The Cosmos and its Discontents,” Herzog’s films, particularly the early efforts, tend to focus on “central characters out of synch with, if not in open rebellion against, the societies within which they live” (89). The “re- bellious response” subsumes the individual, and the revolt escalates, self-augmenting, until the characters are revolting against the universe itself: Stroszek in Signs of Life (1968) demands that the sun cease its constant rising; The President in Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) runs into the desert and orders a branch to quit pointing at him.



These Herzogian protagonists tend to be characterized by their mythopoeic strivings, by the attempt at self-reinvention through a reckless and mad grab for power—elements found abundantly in Okello that no doubt attracted the director. Okello’s absurd and unsustainable demagoguery, marked by a penchant for flagrantly impossible threats, was in itself a bid for transcendence. As Herzog recalled in a 1971 interview:



Okello delivered these incredible speeches from an airplane. He circled around Zanzibar...and before he landed, he had the aircraft’s radio switched to the local radio station and delivered a short speech: “I, your Field Marshall, am about to land. Anyone who steals so much as a bar of soap will be thrown in prison for two hundred and sixteen years!”



The figure of John Okello—mad revolutionary, boastful weaver of absurd fictions—would come to influence not only Herzog’s style of filmmaking, but also the themes he undertook to excavate, most prominently in his 1972 feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a film which includes a character named after Okello and which marked Herzog’s first collaboration with another mad, transcendent person- ality: Klaus Kinski.



The wonderfully strange, frequently violent, and wildly germinative relationship between Herzog and Kinski has become a bit of a commonplace in cinema history. Herzog himself has emerged as a weird wizard of cinema, with various anecdotes attesting to his eccentricity; Kinski, the blonde powder keg, has always remained a larger than life figure, renowned for the shortness of his temper, the force of his outbursts.



At the time of filming, Kinski, in his mid-forties, had a respectful though stunted career. He could act, all agreed, but his frequent and vociferous tantrums—which often bled into the physical realm— had garnered him a foreboding reputation. Many directors were afraid to touch him, but it was precisely this volatility that attracted Herzog. He was intent on making a film about revolt—who better than a revolting actor to play the lead?



The film, which follows a doomed expedition down a mid-16th century Amazon River to find the mythic golden city of El Dorado, was filmed in Peru. The jungle was hot, unbearably hot, and Herzog, hoping to draw real performances out of his actors, allegedly kept them hungry and thirsty for most of the shoot. It was nearly impossible to drag the large crew and cast through the often perilously thin mountain paths, through the webs of viridescent foliage that sprung from the soupy ground. Sickness and fever were a perennial threat; the nearest large city was often dangerously distant and only sometimes in communication.



Early in the filming, Kinski, per his wont, began to act up. “His behavior was impossible, and he raved like a lunatic at least once a day,” Herzog later recalled in an interview. “He also wanted to leave the set—he wanted to go home.” Accounts differ as to how Herzog confronted this last issue; the most frequently circulated rumor is that he forced Kinski to act at gunpoint. Herzog denies this, however. He claims, rather, to have simply threatened to kill Kinski, and then himself: “From then on, every- thing went very smoothly.”



As filming progressed, so, too, did Kinski’s antics. At one point, an extra, waiting off-screen in a hut constructed for the filming, spoke while Kinski was filming a scene. Kinski, who carried a functional Winchester rifle with him at all times, “got so worked up that he took his Winchester and shot a hole through the roof.” (Some accounts have Kinski taking off three of the extra’s fingers with his shot.) Herzog—operating on a hunch, a nugget of inspira- tion—encouraged these tantrums; he egged Kinski on, working him into a lather and watching as Kinski’s rage bled into his acting. All of which, it goes without saying, he captured on film. The environ- ment that Herzog fostered was essentially hostile: the actors should feel uncomfortable and Kinski himself should feel transgressed upon, singled out. This displacement—the alienation engendered by being treated cruelly in a foreign land—would ideally result in a purer, distilled form of acting.



Miraculously, the shoot wrapped up, and the film proved a massive success, catapulting Herzog into the spotlight of European art cinema while simultaneously reinvigorating Kinski’s career. Herzog and Kinski, battered by the process though pleased with its results, would go on to collaborate on several more critically acclaimed films, entangling themselves in a relationship that produced marvelous fictions while at the same time being, in a sense, another fiction.



In his 1988 autobiography, Kinski, who had most recently worked with Herzog in 1987’s Cobra Verde, viciously derided his partner, claiming that Herzog was an execrable, self-obsessed filmmaker—a dabbler, a dilettante. Herzog, for his part, later claimed that much of Kinski’s autobiography was pure fiction, crafted retroactively, and that he had even assisted Kinski in penning some of the more acerbic insults on his own person.



It seems fitting that Kinski’s last say on his relationship with Herzog should be undecipherable, an unresolvable entangling of the virile threads of rage and fiction.



III



Aguirre, the Wrath of God plays fast and loose with historical figures. It follows an expedition led by Gonzalo Pizarro in late 1560 and early 1561, despite the fact that the historical Pizarro died in 1548. Herzog places the historical figures on expeditions they never attended, displacing them temporally. They are pawns in an aesthetic game, their very shifts and anachronistic arrangements contributing to the film’s sense of compositeness, of incompleteness.



Early in the film, the official expedition is stalled. A small party, led by Don Pedro Ursua with Don Lope de Aguirre (our hero, so to speak) as second-in-command, is sent down the river on a fleet of rickety skiffs to scout for food or help.



Throughout this developing drama, Kinski, who has donned the armor of his character, a shabby suit of leather with oversized pauldrons, is preoccupied with delivering the most menacing performance he can manage. He fully utilizes his diseased-looking habitus and the thick, Cro-Magnon ossature of his skull; Aguirre struts about vampirically, brooding and scowling and blaring with his wild, sunken eyes. Before long, his treachery is out in the open. Ursua is deposed, and Aguirre establishes the overweight and simpleminded Don Fernando de Guz- man as the expedition’s new leader—while he, of course, retains his position as second-in-command.



From then on, the film charts a general decline in sanity. The doomed party drifts down the river on a large raft that begins to resemble, with its various small additions and substructures, the barest bones of a theatrical stage. No minor significance to this, in fact. In a 1973 interview, Herzog discussed his understanding of the relation between history and theater:



[A]s a theme, this horde of imperialistic ad- venturers performing a great historical failure, this failure of imperialism, of the conquerors, the theme is really quite modern. The meth- od by which history was then made is actually one that can still be found today in many Latin American countries. History there is staged as theater, with theatrical coups.



To echo this sentiment, Aguirre claims in the film’s final moments that he “will stage history, like others stage plays.” And, of course, the platform on which he crafts his fictions is fundamentally destabilized, a portable stage that bucks and trips and in its disturbance agitates its occupants’ minds, their thoughts, and the fictions that trend from those thoughts.



Herzog indeed is interested in the essence of revolt, of rebellion, but he is even more interested in the relationship between revolution and the crafting of fictions. In his early work, he has limned a triumvirate of madness, associating these two propensities with his “out of synch” characters, snipped cleanly from their contexts, historical or other. As John Okello emerged from a dim personal past and found himself suddenly at the head of a revolution, Aguirre was transported into the tropical wilds of South America, torn from his comfortable lands in Spain—and it is no minor joke that Herzog like- wise tore Kinski, a stunningly German actor, out of Germany and thrust him into the unlikely role of a Spanish conquistador. While the other actors display the fine Spanish features so often associated with the conquistadors, Kinski stands out, his lanky blond hair and brutal features purposely inhibiting the authenticity of his role.



For Herzog, the displaced man’s propensity for revolt is irrevocably connected to his greater-than-av- erage ability (or opportunity) to remake himself— that is, his ability to craft fictions. Without a proper social context, the displaced man will expand indefinitely, revolting and creating fictions of grandeur, of power. The revolt begins to feed the fiction, while the fiction in turn feeds the revolt. It this recursive loop that becomes the madness that leads the displaced Herzog protagonist to “rebel against the universe.”



The last 15 minutes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God constitute a subtle phantasmagoria. The crew of the raft, merely a handful of tatterdemalion survivors struck with hunger, thirst, and fever, begin to hallucinate freely. They spot a complete boat—its sails billowing fluidly, dreamily—suspended in the uppermost branches of a tree and declare that it is merely an illusion. The line between fiction and reality, enervated by the crew’s physical weakness, begins to blur. Aguirre, for his part, claims the boat is real; he makes plans to retrieve the boat and use it to reach the Atlantic.



The slave Okello—so named because Herzog owed the revolutionary’s “craze, hysteria, [and] atrocious fantasies quite a bit for [the] film”—lies crumpled on the raft’s floor. With a skyward glance, he whispers, “That is no ship. That is no forest.” In a stunning moment, an arrow sinks quickly and forcefully into his thigh. He reacts calmly, continuing his delirious ruminations: “That is no arrow. We just imagine the arrows, because we fear them.” Meanwhile, Aguirre hurries about the raft as arrows and spears bombard the remnants of his crew; he fires off rifles and makes noise, insisting with supreme confidence that the arrows are real, that the danger exists.



It is then that Flores, Aguirre’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who has been carried preposterously in a sedan-chair through all these rough environs, is killed by an arrow. Aguirre cradles her, staring menacingly off into the jungle whence the missile came. We might expect reality to rush in now like a torrent, to bring Aguirre to his knees and cleanse his mind of any illusions. But, as it happens, Aguirre sets the corpse of his daughter down. He proclaims that he will marry her and in so doing found “the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen.” A procre- ative loop is established; the father will feed off the daughter, just as the fictions will feed off the revolt, the revolt the fictions.



The raft twirls and yaws down the river. It might be going to the sea. 

Someone smashed last



week through the neighbor’s



glass back door



and stole his electric guitar.



 



Or the mouse in the trap:



Sweet crumb still sweetening



between its teeth, and the whole



history of its species, in



attics, in grain sacks, in



 



the golden ideal of the golden field.



 



The way the sad child returns to his



sad seat



after sharpening his pencil.



 



Or the newlyweds’ rowboat



at the bottom of an ocean.



 



And the woman on the front porch



who keeps discarding things from her heart:



 



The deathbed.  The divorce.  The friend



in the restaurant



in the booth near the window. The glass.



The glare.  The impatience



 



on her friend’s face as the friendship ended.



 



Somewhere tonight a thief



is attempting to play



an electric guitar.



The wolves have already worn



a dark path in the grass around his house.



They’ve



 



not yet



begun to howl.



But they will howl:



 



These great ambitions, slinking



back one day



through the mess they’ve made



to return



the infernal thing.

It is a hot day in the city on the edge of summer, the sun shining clear and crisp like a giant overhead lamp. Two boys sit on a bench. The first is tall and thin, with masculine shoulders and hair made of the straw he used to roll in and that his mother eventually gave up trying to remove. His face would be almost perfectly formed were it not for his nose which hasn’t been even since an older boy smashed it in grade school. He leans with elbows jutting outward and hands cupped over kneecaps, his eyes idly following the motion of the street but not focused on anything in particular. Later that night he will meet up with his girlfriend from the state college across town because someone cut her bike lock the previous weekend, which means for going all the way out to see her he should be able to expect at least a blowjob. He exhales and runs his hand through his hair. These thoughts occupy his mind as he turns to his roommate who is busy watching people on the street. He has narrow shoulders and wears khakis even during the summer because he’s embarrassed of his thin legs. His frame is slight, his height concealed by a mild hunch. He breathes loudly, as if he thinks his brain needs more oxygen than other brains. Later that night he will go for a long walk across town and through the park, alone, hoping to find a way to clean out his insides before returning to the apartment where he will lie in bed all night, trying to stare through the ceiling into the room above him. He taps his fingers against the table.

‘Hey, Davey.’

He turns. ‘Jake?’

‘You hear about those two dudes and that nun got run over by the state college?’

‘What?’

‘Swear to God. Girlfriend told me this morning. These two dudes were walking this old nun across the street when this big U-Haul with no driver’s side door and a dinosaur on the side shot out the dorms and run them over at a crosswalk. Saying it was a drug deal gone bad but they didn’t find nothing on the bodies.’ He pauses to let this information settle, but in the thick spring air the words just hang uncomfortably in front of them, so he adds: ‘Seems stupid, though, go to the effort of dressing one up like a nun then doing the exchange in the middle of the street and all.’

‘They catch the guy who was driving the truck?’

‘It wasn’t a man. Heard it was this woman with a crazy beehive and sunglasses. At two in the morning. Girlfriend told me she’d seen her driving that U-Haul around campus a couple times before so it must have been going on for weeks, but she figured it was just someone’s mom helping move out early. You never think someone’s mom’s going to be in on distributing but I guess anything’s easier if you can turn it into a family business.’

‘You think they’re going to find who did it?’

‘Doubtful. I imagine now they’ve run afoul on one deal they’ll change cities and start over. Lay low for a while. Maybe find a new school, repaint the truck. That’s how these things usually go.’

‘Huh.’

Weird shit, Davey.’

They pause for a moment, let Jake’s words linger. Davey goes back to watching people on the street. He squints his eyes, trying to imagine the terrible things going on in the minds of others.

‘Hey, Davey.’

‘Yeah?’

‘When did Phil get a bike?'

‘Phil doesn’t have a bike.’

‘Well he’s got one now.’

Davey turns to see their roommate Phil, with his fixed grin, bouncing down the sidewalk on a cherry red bicycle. The bike screeches, halts in front of the bench. Davey can’t help but stare at the chrome fenders which reflect little suns straight onto his retinas. He looks down, closes his eyes. When he looks up again, a pulsating purple blob hovers where Phil’s head should be.

‘How you boys doing?’

Jake slides off the bench and moves toward Phil. ‘Mind if I take a look?’

‘Be my guest.’

Davey’s eyes clear and he turns to Jake, who proceeds to examine Phil’s find with a mechanical scrutiny particular to boys from the state’s far-flung counties. Davey attributes a certain mythic quality to this phenomenon which, he observes, touches boys of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. He envisions the eastern state as a sepia-toned expanse of dirt and uncut grass, dotted by the rusted remains of Fords and John Deeres, around which county boys congregate daily, as if observing an unspoken — perhaps unspeakable — ritual. They scour their machines with the reverence of scribes, contemplating the subtleties of rust spreading over an engine block, or picking at the meaning behind a piece of leather flapping in the wind with their pocket knives. Surely, they posit, some secret waits anxiously beneath infinite layers of minutia. Their efforts do not go to waste. When they emerge from their ancestral homes, the boys of Pike, Bourbon, and Hazard counties possess the arcana of the mechanical that well-dressed city boys, foppish dandies by comparison, secretly covet. Jake finishes his assessment. The first hints of rust begin to creep outward from behind the fenders. The chain needs oil. The back tire sags a little too much.  ‘Still,’ Jake says, ‘it’s nice. Where you find it?’

Phil’s grin widens. ‘You know Jefferson Street?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, there’s this guy there, sitting in front of a house, completely crazy, but he’s got all these bikes, you know? Just sitting out in his yard. So, I’m going by there earlier today, you know, and I stop by and ask him how much he wants for one and I pick up this little honey for twenty-five dollars.’

Jake’s eyebrow rises. ‘Where’s he get them?’

‘Well, man, here’s the thing,’ Phil lowers his voice, ‘I hear he gets them around the neighborhood.’

Jake looks skeptical. ‘That for real?’

‘Yeah, man. Old woman at the convenience store told me he and his brother and wife or girlfriend or something get them from kids. Like I hear they wait until it gets dark and go out wearing big heavy work boots and animal masks. They walk up and down the street shoulder-to-shoulder. Barn animals with baseball bats, like they’re on patrol. You know? When they walk abreast like that kids can’t get around them. They just sweep the neighborhood, up and down every street, real methodical, like a pattern. And if that doesn’t work, I hear they crouch in bushes or hide in trees and then come down on kids when they ride by. That’s how they get the bikes. Think about that. You’re just riding home with some milk from the gas station and then this guy with a cow’s head jumps down from a tree and goes to town on your legs with a baseball bat.’

Davey keeps his eyes trained on the ground, hears heavy boots pounding pavement, the sound of bones snapping like dry tree limbs after a storm, the sound of a sack of flour hitting the floor hard. Then human sounds, moans, while the whirr of bicycle wheels and the tenor tremble of a little bell fades with distance.

‘That’s fucked up.’

‘I know, man.’

‘Wait. How does that even make sense? Why they got to break the kids’ legs? Why don’t they just take the bikes?’

‘I don’t know, man. They’re crazy, you know? Maybe they don’t even care about the bikes that much, maybe they just do it for kicks. Or maybe they got crutches for them or something.’

‘That story don’t make any sense, Phil. Does everyone in the neighborhood know these guys are doing this shit? Why don’t they call the cops? Or why don’t they just go over to the house with a shotgun and get all the bikes back if all these guys got is some baseball bats? Where do you hear this shit, man?’

‘Shit, man. You know. Sometimes there are just stories. You find them somewhere and then you tell them.’

‘So what happens when the neighborhood runs out of bikes?’

Davey jumps in. ‘Or they run out of crutches.’

Phil only addresses Jake. ‘Come on, Jake. Who knows? Who cares? Maybe they go to different neighborhoods, I don’t know. I was just telling you this thing I heard because I thought you might be interested.'

Jake pauses. ‘Girlfriend just got her bike stolen.’

‘You do anything dumb lately you should make up for?’

‘Not that I can think of, but it might be good to give her something just in case I did something I didn’t know about.’

‘That’s fair.’

‘You think he’s got anymore like that?’

‘Probably. You ought to go out and take a look. Maybe find something for yourself, too.’

Jake stares ahead for a moment, his eyes blank, making calculations and value judgments in rapid succession. He nods, slow and slight at first, then more emphatically. He turns to Davey ‘You in, man?’

Davey pauses, looks down. He doesn’t like the feel of wind against his face and besides that can’t will away the onslaught of images: men with animal heads carrying bats, children with limbs twisted in unnatural directions, a single bicycle lying on its side in the grass, the front wheel still spinning and clicking softly. He shivers and the hair on his arm stands up. In his brain he feels like he shouldn’t go which is how he knows he should. He raises his head and nods slightly to Jake.

Jake returns the nod and turns to Phil. ‘Good. You going to show us where this place is?’


‘Down on Jefferson a few blocks north. I’ll take you over there.’

Jake rises and Davey follows a moment behind. They cut across the park, through the buzz of inane conversation and neglected burgers sizzling on grills and country music playing from blown Jeep speakers, to the sidewalk along Fourth Street. Phil follows behind at his leisure. Fourth Street is lined on the side opposite the park by a series of apartments, urban jungle trees forming a dense canopy of satellite dishes, antennae, and rainbow umbrellas. Revolutionaries and rock stars fill the window frames. As the boys move away from the major roads, buildings slowly decrease in height, reduced to empty lots of cracked concrete punctured by patches of grass and chain link fences which terminate at the corner, unmistakable for its stop sign mangled by years of impaired driving. The boys pause at the corner. A black child in an enormous leg cast hobbles across the street. The rubber thud of crutches followed by the sound of plaster grinding across the concrete makes Davey wince. Jake and Phil politely avert their eyes. After the thudding and grinding fades into the background, they cross the street.

Jefferson Street looks like a permanent yard sale. Families spend entire days in empty houses, watching their furniture and appliances on the lawn. They patiently await the arrival of their creator in the form of an ethereal auctioneer, big mustached, who will come in checkered suit and tie with golden gavel in hand to relieve the men and women of Jefferson Street of their worldly burden, allowing them to rise, their cornrows and nightgowns fluttering gently, into the soft and breaking clouds. For now, however, their earthly goods, subject to earthly elements, fade and mildew and rust, while they creep behind windows of empty houses. Houses, themselves in various stages of dilapidation, the most distinguished among them adorned by small pink placards like prize-winning produce, awarded not by the ethereal auctioneer, but the county building inspector, who recognizes distinguished entrants based on a bureaucratic calculus of many variables: number of broken windows, crooked door frames, missing shingles, dead grass, dead dogs, live dogs, dogs tied to fences, children, children tied to fences, missing house numbers, rusted lawn furniture, 40 oz cans on lawn, etc., etc. As he passes by, Davey keeps his head down; he knows what the neighborhood looks like and doesn’t need to be reminded. He hears Phil pull up alongside him and Jake and sees him gesture toward a house that looks at least an Honorable Mention.

On the sidewalk, Davey sees four young black boys flicking bottle caps on the pavement. One sits in a wheelchair, too high to participate, leaning over the other boys sitting Indian-style. They play without joy, their expressions blank, detached from the movements of the game. A pair of rusty bicycles lean against the chain link fence. Davey attempts to wave at them, but his arm refuses to rise above his shoulder, and the gesture comes off as somewhat aborted.

‘Davey, we’re here.’

Davey stops, finds himself standing in front of a house overrun by bicycles. They spill out into the yard of tall grass, dozens, chained together against the house, lying sideways in the grass, or propped up by unreliable kickstands. Many lack chains, others look like cannibalized pastiches on dry-rotted tires, rust the only consistent feature among them. Amidst these, the owner of the house, Phil’s man, scours the boys through jaundiced eyes, the only clearly delineated features on an otherwise dark and bald head. His skin is a deep black, almost purple to the boys, and he wears a white t-shirt plastered by sweat to his chest. On the porch directly behind him sits a woman, hunched forward in a kitchen chair, her features largely obscured by the shade from her towering hair. She keeps her knitting in her lap, turning the needles over in a methodical way perfected through countless afternoons like this. A discarded car door, white with a red stripe, leans against the porch, the rearview mirror cracked in the grass around it. The man rubs his raised chin with his thumb and middle finger, stroking outwards, as if indicating the direction he plans to speak. For a moment, the boys remain in front of the man, hands in pockets, stiff with the awkwardness of a first date. Finally, Phil cocks his head back and says ‘How you doing, man?’

The man doesn’t turn to face Phil specifically, instead addressing the boys’ general direction. ‘Good.’

‘Brought a couple of friends of mine to look at your bikes.’

‘Tell them go ahead.’

Jake glances at Phil and then advances toward the bikes. Davey looks the man over, head to toe, once, twice, before heading to the closest bike. Phil lays his bike down on the sidewalk and comes up alongside Jake. Davey sticks close to the boys, partly because he fears being caught alone in the man’s field of vision, and partly because he doesn’t know a thing about bikes. Jake runs his hand over frames, trying to detect subtle defects in welding or alignment, squeezes handbrakes with his ear between the handlebars, his eyes sliding side to side each time he applies pressure. Phil squats and examines tires for punctures or signs of dry rot. This ritual continues for several minutes. One bids the other to come, look here, waiting for the other to find a defect noticed by the first, which when discovered, prompts the other to confirm, yeah, he saw that, too. They find most in need of repair before riding can begin, and all too small for Jake or Davey. The man stands to one side with his arms folded, watching the boys sift through the tangle of metal and rust. He tosses a question among them: ‘Y’all boys from the state college?’

Jake turns. ‘No, man. We just live nearby.’

‘Ah. I figured y’all for college boys. At least that one,’ he indicates Davey, ‘You met my wife?’ he gestures to the woman on the porch, still enmeshed in her knitting, ‘She spend lots of time at the state college nowadays. She likes to check out books from the library. I tell her she keep it up one day they going to make her pay tuition!’

‘That’s cool.’

Jake tosses another wreck to the side. He turns to Davey, who is still looking thoughtfully at a flat tire. Then, visibly dissatisfied, scratches his head and says, ‘Hey man, this all you got?’

‘You looking for something else?’

The man’s response makes Jake pause. From his angle, Davey can see Jake’s eyes shift quickly, as if searching for support in the eyes of his friends. ‘Just a bike. But something that my girlfriend can ride.’

‘These is all twenty-five dollars. But I got some other ones if you’re interested.’

Jake and Phil exchange curt nods. ‘Yeah, we’d like to see those.’

‘A’right. Come on, then.’


The man uproots himself from the center of the yard and walks to the house next door, a two story house the color of old mustard with a partially collapsed roof and boarded up windows. On the porch next to the padlocked door rests a faded pink placard, which reads: ‘This house has been declared UNFIT for human habitation by the Magnolia County Housing Commission’ followed by an illegible date and signature. Davey turns to Jake, whose eyebrow hangs high on his forehead. Phil gives them a quick nod and motions with his hand that everything is cool. The man stops on the porch and reaches between his shoe and sock, producing a small key which unlocks the door. He tugs at the door a moment, one hand gripping the handle and the other the decaying frame, prying it loose with a creak that releases a gust of cool, musty air into the faces of everyone trying to look in. The man steps from the doorway, his stony hand resting on the frame.

‘OK. Go in.’

They go in. On the wall facing the entrance hangs a stuffed boar’s head that Davey almost stumbles into upon entering. It has begun to peel around the snout and looks short several tufts of fur which have drifted down and collected in a neat pile on the floor below. The man pulls Davey by the shoulder and directs him further back in the house, where the other boys move through a narrow hall lined with nails where portraits of dour matriarchs once hung. On the floor lay discarded rims, bike locks, and fenders which groan and crack as they walk over them single file. The hall spills into a larger room — perhaps a former dining room or kitchen where the dour matriarchs received their dour guests — which houses four pristine machines resting as if on permanent display. Jake and Phil’s expressions brighten.

‘These is all forty dollars if you’re interested,’ the man says, then, indicating a solid black bike in the corner nearest the door, ‘except this one. Y’all boys can’t have my Harley.’

The man erupts in laughter, his teeth the same color as his eyes, gesturing toward the letters h-a-r-l-y scrawled in white across the bicycle’s frame. Jake and Phil manage weak chuckles, and the man exits without sound. The boys move toward the bikes. Jake mounts the white one along the back wall, gets a feel for it. The joints might need a little oiling, but everything else feels nice and smooth. It’s a little big for his girlfriend but it fits him just fine. Phil looks over and whistles his approval. There’s a mount on the back where they envision a boombox fitting snugly, spilling punk rock anthems with bass-boost all over the sidewalk on trips to wherever they feel like going. With these bikes, they will become marauders and highwaymen. They will descend without warning. They will ride in formation all around the park and to the record store everyday. They will ride while listening to ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ They will ride shirtless. They will ride to the park near Third Street and get high in secret places. They will ride circles around friends who are trying to get someplace on time. They will write rude things on the sides of restaurants that ask them to keep the noise down. They will ride at night, and challenge other established bicycle gangs that rise up against them. They will do battle in the parks and in the streets, in abandoned churches where the moonlight spills through fragments of stained glass, bathing the combatants in rich blues and reds and greens like court jesters while they pummel one another with arm rests from broken pews. They will become renowned for their prowess with the stretch of pipe and broken bottle. They will establish territory, and it will stretch from Fourth Street to the Walgreen’s on Broadway and west to the park. They will collect tribute from defeated gangs and the police, whom they will allow to continue operating only in designated areas and at designated hours.

While Jake runs his fingers along the spokes of his find, Davey realizes that he has no business here, in this house, around stolen bicycles, with the boys. He stands up and walks back through the narrow hallway. He hears the faint buzz of a television in another room. He waits a while longer for Jake and Phil, sure now that he will never be the kind of boy that can ride a bike and look cool or make girls want to sleep with him based on force of personality. He imagines himself the conscience of his generation, the one who will list the evils he observes on a long roll of paper that unfurls from where he writes and forms a huge pile in the corner of his room, where he will meditate on them in his room, in hopes that his creator will notice Davey in his quiet vigilance and tell him that he is his faithful servant and seat him at his right-hand side, where they will meditate on the failings of man together, forever.

Then from the other side of the house, wafting in from the open window, comes a sound like metal clanging over men’s voices. The buzz of the television increases. Davey moves back down the hallway, careful to avoid the broken fenders and bike locks, and past the ancient boar’s head. He follows the lingering clanging like a scent hanging in the stale air. He becomes a tangle of contradictions. He becomes aware of the inside of his body for the first time. Outside he remains still, cool, motions steady while his organs revolt. His stomach coils and twists, attempting to swallow itself like a suicidal snake while his brain screams and pounds and throws itself against the inside of his skull. He sweats anticipation and dread, secretly fearing and hoping that someone is watching and taking note.

As he turns a corner he nearly trips over a heavy pair of wire cutters. The sound leads him to a room stripped bare except for two metal folding chairs and an old television tuned to a dead channel, the source of the buzzing, paneled in fake wood, sitting on the floor among piles of dust and cigarette butts. On the wall hangs a large map of the city with supplementary maps of the sprawling suburbs tacked onto the corners. Portions of the map are exed out or circled in hasty black marker. Dotted arrows turn off major roads into labyrinthine back alleys all the way back to Jefferson Street. The room is dim save for two windows, open but with blinds drawn. The clanging comes from just outside. Davey walks over to the map, traces his finger around the thick black circle that lassoes the state college across town. He can’t help but feel disappointed, can’t help but feel that the heart of this house should be something more, something less empty. He moves to the first window and pulls the blinds apart and on the other side the enormous yellow eye of an allosaurus stares back at him. For an instant his insides fill with terror, in full-view of something much greater than himself. His stern resolve turns to something like cold oatmeal and he pulls back from the window. Before he can collapse, however, he pauses. The moment’s hesitation makes him reconsider the eye, framed by a high, pastel colored ridge, given texture by a row of rivets. The rest of the face is a single shade of peeling green, locked in a permanent roar, between its jaws a hunk of ketchup-stained brontosaurus meat and below that the words ‘UTAH: The Fossil State.’ The scene feels crudely excised from its natural position, as if set apart for closer examination. It is silent except for the sound of men breathing and rubber rolling across sheet metal which appears to come from somewhere beyond the Jurassic period. The background is lab coat white, except for a red stripe which runs horizontal behind the allosaurus’s head. Davey tilts his head to one side, absorbs what he thinks should be a lesson from the scene in front of him, though not sure what to do with it. After a moment he hears the definitive slam of retractable steel and the sound of a diesel engine revving. The allosaurus and his meal begin to tremble, perhaps with fear of academic scrutiny, perhaps with anticipation at the approach of a meteor they know to be arriving a geologic period too early.

Davey closes the blinds and retreats back down the hall, knocking the side of his face against the boar as he passes it, afraid that evil might just be an empty room in an old house where someone left the TV on. Clambering out the door, he finds himself in the burning clarity of afternoon light. After a moment, the softly focused mass in front of him solidifies into Jake, his back to the door and clutching the white bike by its frame, standing near Phil and the man, who has removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head like a turban. An Arab merchant in the middle of Jefferson Street. Jake flails his arms, first toward the man, then the bike.

‘You said all those bikes in there was forty dollars.’

‘This bike’s different. It’s a hundred.’

‘What’s so different about it?’

‘It’s an import. I get it from Europe.’

Jake turns to Phil, who looks immaculately composed. He says: ‘Hold on, Jake. Now, man, it’s a nice bike, but that don’t make it worth a hundred dollars, surely.’

The man doesn’t budge. ‘It’s a good bike. It’s the only one like it in this country. I get it from a little Spanish kid with one arm. He know the king of Spain. He save the king’s life and the king give him the bike. This bike a king’s bike, boy. How am I going to sell this for less than a hundred? Look, it even got his seal on it.’

The man points to a chipped white decal of a five-pointed crown, below which reads: ‘Royal Bicycle Co., Cincinnati, OH.’ Phil scratches his head. ‘Well, yeah, man, that’s nice and all, but he don’t have a hundred dollars to spend on a bike.’

‘It’s got a rack on the back for your boombox, too.’

‘Yeah, but he ain’t got a hundred dollars, man.’

For a moment this settles the issue. The man remains as he has the entire time, his arms folded, statuesque. Jake turns to Phil, nervous, and then notices Davey for the first time. He looks him up and down.

‘Where you been?’

Davey responds with a look like the sounds that just came out of Jake’s mouth were in some ancient pagan tongue, if not from some darker, subhuman source. The heat rising off the street makes the intersection look underwater. Davey thinks and sees in slow motion. By the time he forms something resembling an answer, Jake has turned away. The woman on the porch continues to turn her knitting over and over and over in her hands, the sunlight collected in the jewelry on her towering hair, now a papal tiara on a pagan priestess. She could be a tarot card. Her dominion is the front porch, where she reposes after conducting her sorcery, oblivious or ambivalent toward the events unfolding in the yard, which belongs to the Arab merchant. He stands, legs slightly splayed, and flexes his jaw. ‘Make me an offer.’

Phil says: ‘He’ll give you forty for it.’

‘Eighty-five.’

‘No way.’

The man’s eyes narrow, but Jake and Phil can spot the tiny spark that let’s them know this man’s a haggler at heart and from then on they know the bike is theirs.

‘Eighty.’

‘You said all those bikes was forty.’

‘Seventy.’

‘Forty-five.’

Pretense of strategy and subtlety evaporate in the day’s heat. ‘Sixty-five.’

‘Forty-five’s all I got.’

‘That’s an awful good bike and I don’t want to sell it for no forty-five dollars.’

‘It’s what I got.’

‘It’s from Europe.’

‘I’ll give you forty-five dollars for it. That’s all I got and I’m offering it.’

The man works his jaw for a moment, biding his time, as if hoping more money will appear in Jake’s pocket to be laid on the table. After a moment he concedes. Jake and Phil exchange satisfied glances. Davey stands apart, hunched over and pale like a sick thing. Jake digs in his pocket and produces a few wadded up bills. Money changes hands. The man unfolds each bill meticulously and softly counts them, pausing to adjust the t-shirt wrapped around his head, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead with the excess cloth.


The transaction concludes without words. The man’s face returns to its normal configuration and he moves back toward the center of the yard where he folds his arms, satisfied with the day’s trading. Phil takes his bike from the ground while Jake mounts his. They begin to pedal. Davey takes one more glance at the Arab Merchant and his Pagan Priestess and begins walking a few feet behind his friends. As soon as they’re out of earshot, Jake and Phil congratulate one another on their shrewd dealing. Riding high on their shining mounts, they are crusader kings, returning from the Holy Land with treasure liberated from heathen peoples. The buildings along Jefferson Street are the ransacked Constantinople. The whirr of their spokes lingers in the air and follows them as they roll around the corner and disappear onto Fourth Street.

Farther back, Davey walks through the ruins with his head down, without haste or even an awareness of it. The air is still heavy and sticky and he feels almost too tired to continue, but he can’t stop here. Up and down Jefferson, the children flicking bottle caps stop and watch Davey. With every step his feet seem to cement themselves more fully to the pavement. Nervous sweat runs in his eyes.

High above, a laboratory demonstration is taking place in a brilliant white room proffered by the creator. Principalities and dominions fill the lecture hall, every seat occupied for hundreds of rows, the seraphim in the choicest seats near the front, taking meticulous notes as the creator indicates Davey with a pointer and glides the overhead lamp into position as needed. On the dry erase board, he scribbles an elaborate diagram with equations and flow-charts that lead nowhere. Nervous sweat runs in Davey’s eyes. He looks up, but there’s only bright, clear sky. He staggers to the intersection and turns, not wholly in one piece, but alive enough, and disappears behind the fence, hoping to evaporate and rise above the hot and heavy air, drifting up and dispersing into the atmosphere.