I walked away from the piano and approached them.  They were dressed like dime store novel goons.

                “Can I help you gentlemen?” I asked them, putting myself between them and the bar.

                They weren’t pleased that I paid them any mind.  No one else did.  “We’re looking for someone,” one of them told me.

                “Found someone, you have!” I said merrily.  They were trying to walk around me, but to their annoyance I moved to block them.  “Why don’t you tell me what you’re after?  Maybe I can help.”.

                “It’s none of your concern,” the other grumbled, and tried to break away from his partner.

                I moved in his direction, putting my hand on his chest to stay him.  Wow, was his chest firm.  He stopped, but only by choice.  What the hell was I doing?  “Look, buddy, no one could agree with that more than me, but here I am just the same.  Now, I’m still having trouble seeing the good guys from the bad guys in this, if there are any of either at all, but you’re either here to stop the Leviathan from being summoned, in which case you’re too late, or you’re here to tie up loose ends, in which case I can’t let that happen until I find out what I need to know.  So back off, will ya?  This seat’s taken.”

                They looked me over with a shock that overcame their outrage.  This is the benefit of boldness; if you stand up to a clearly superior opponent, it takes them a minute to work out if you’re stronger than you look or just stupid.  The trick is to press that advantage before they make up their mind, which is what I intended to do.

                I took a step back and bumped into one of the other patrons, a violin-shaped girl with a dress so tight it was practically sewn-on.  She had her back to me, and in a crowd like that just getting bumped wasn’t enough draw your attention.  So I grabbed her ass and gave it a long deliberate squeeze.

                This, of course, will get anyone’s attention.  She whirled around like a clockwork contrivance, her flat palm outstretched to strike.  The whole bar was a machine I’d set in motion now, and she was just one of the spinning cogs.  I stepped out of the way before she could see who did it and her hand swung towards the first hunter’s cheek.  His reflexes were way better than mine, and he caught her wrist before she could connect.  I disappeared into the crowd as the next piston fired.  Her boyfriend, seeing the altercation, stepped in to defend her with a heavy right hook.  The second hunter deflected the blow and the boyfriend’s fist flew into the back of someone else’s head.  Except in this particular situation, this is why you should never start a fight in a crowd.  The other bystander, who had been standing behind the hunters, turned around to confront them.  He drew his fist back to return the blow and accidentally clocked his own girlfriend with his elbow.  I wanted to keep watching, but it doesn’t do to get caught up in your own diversion.  The bar was a symphony of cause and effect, what looked like chaos was actually an act of perfect precision.  Ever play Mouse Trap?  That’s what it looked like, with the hunters caught in the middle.

                I ran up to the bar, power sliding like a rock star under the trapdoor countertop that gave the bartenders access and pushing past them behind the bar.  One of them tried to detain me.  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

                “A duck walks into a bar,” I told her, snatched up a bottle of Southern Comfort and pouring it along the counter as I walked.  “He says to the bartender, ‘give me a bottle of whiskey.’” Lilith was a the other end of the bar.  I put my arm around her waist and dragged her with me as I went.  “The bartender says ‘how do you plan to pay for it?’” I recited, even though the girl who asked the question was no longer listening.  I kicked up the trapdoor counter at the other side so we could walk past it (even on a night like this I wasn’t willing to attempt a two-person power slide) and took the invisible man’s lighter out of my pocket.  “And the duck says…”

                “’Just put it on my bill’,” Lilith finished, then I lit the spilled whiskey.  The bar lit up like a barbecue and everyone that had jumped clear when I was spilling liquor in front of them hopped out of their seats and into the growing fray I’d created to stall the hunters.

                I picked the whiskey bottle back up, dragging Lilith in front of the bar with me and looking at Barry.  “Time to go.”

                Barry’s plastic body was burning underneath him and he floated away from it to follow.  There wasn’t any point in keeping a low profile now.  We went out back onto a catwalk patio that opened up under the night sky.  In good weather it was a pleasant place to have a drink, but under these circumstances it was our best chance of escape. 

                “We need to get to the roof, Barry,” I cried to him, looking back to make sure we weren’t being chased by, well, pretty much everyone.

                “How?” he insisted. 

                As he asked this I picked Lilith up in my arms and stepped up on the railing.  “Figure it out!”.

                “This is the plan?” Lilith asked, wrapping her arms around my neck.

                “Oh shit,” Barry whispered, swooping in towards us as I jumped over the rail.

                We started to fall at first, and the wisdom of the idea  suddenly failed to impress me.  But then, with a clumsy but successful effort, he managed to grab hold of us and shot us up over the gutters and onto the roof.  Slinging us onto the roof took all his strength, though, and we landed heavy, like we just bounced off a trampoline into a wall.

                “That was the big plan?” Lilith demanded, rolling clear of me.  “Burning my bar and jumping off the balcony?”

                “Plan might be too strong a word,” I admitted.  “But this’ll do.”  We made sure we were far enough out of sight that anyone who made it out onto the patio would see no sign of us and, with any luck, figure we’d just magically disappeared.  That’s the secret of magic, folks:  you bust your ass behind the scenes to make it look like you didn’t do anything at all.

                “How do you know they won’t follow us?” she asked.

                “Who?” said Barry, who was pretty much oblivious.

                “The narwhal hunters,” I told him, explaining nothing.

                “What?”

                “I don’t think they can follow us,” I told Lilith.  “I get the feeling they’re a little out of their element here.”

                Barry laughed, and it caught me by surprise.  “And we’re not?”

                “Like the man said, we don’t belong anywhere right now.”  From the rooftop you could see across all of downtown to the river.  “Why ....Savannah....?  Why does the end of the world start here?”

                “....Savannah.... is the world,” Barry said dramatically.  I gave him a weird look and he decided to elaborate:  “At least to us it is.  Whether this affects the world or just us, it doesn’t really matter.”

                I took out one of the nightmare man’s cigarettes and lit it.  “Then I guess it’s up to us.”

                “Us?” Lilith repeated.  “I’m not part of us.”

                “You are now,” I told her.  “Whatever went down between you and the monkey man put this thing in play, and I can’t spend the whole time looking over my shoulder to see what you might be doing.  So until this thing is through you’re with me.  Congratulations, honey:  You just got drafted by the good guys.”

                “I’ve missed a lot,”  Barry complained.  “So we’re the good guys?”

                “Best I know,” I told him, which wasn’t saying much.  “Until we know what’s going on, we’re the only good guys in this.  Which means it’s up to us to fix it before everything goes to Hell.”

                “Wow,” Barry mused.  “This is all pretty badass!”

                “All in a day’s work for a Goddamn superhero,” I agreed.

                “Great,” said Lilith.  “So what do we do next?”

                “Give me a minute, will ya?  I’m still takin’ it all in.”  To be honest, I usually just let things happen.  I didn’t have much experience making them happen.  But Barry was right:  ....Savannah.... was my world, and I wasn’t about to let it go tits-up on my watch, not if I had anything to do about it. 

                That meant finding the connection between the weird things I’d been seeing lately, tracking down the people responsible, and setting the whole thing right before it was too late.

                “First thing we need to do is get off this roof, I guess,” I said to them, beginning with the obvious because it’s all I had to work with.

                “It’s a start,” Lilith chuckled.  “Any ideas?”

                “Don’t look at me!” Barry told us, tilting back like he might if he had hands to throw in the air.

                “I wasn’t gonna, so don’t worry,” I said.  “But you did good getting us up here.”

                “So how do we get down?” he asked.

                I took another drag of my cigarette.  “I’m workin’ on it.”

                The sirens would be coming soon, either cops or the fire department or both, but this was only the beginning of our trouble.  For now all I could hear were the sounds of the city, and somewhere underneath it all I swear I could still hear the piano playing.

                The piano player was right out of my childhood nightmares.  He was a top hat floating with white gloves working the keys.  A cartoon classic Claude Rains; a fully invisible man.  No one else regarded him at all, or me once I’d walked over to him.  That’s real invisibility, by the way, when people don’t know they should be seeing you.  The floating hat trick was just for my benefit.

                “Don’t we know each other?” he asked, still playing a happy tune.

                “You don’t look familiar.”

                He laughed loudly.  “Ah, but I do.  You know me just the same, my boy.”

                And I did.  “Yeah.  You’re Mr. Invisible, you’re the man in the moon.  The boogeyman, right?”

                “Thou speakst aright.  I am that merry wanderer of the night,” he answered theatrically.  Shakespeare is its own language just like bad jokes, but thankfully I can speak it well enough.  “But I think you have not captured me exact.”

                “You don’t scare me anymore anyway,” I assured him.  “Look at you.  You’re the David Copperfield of nightmare monsters.”

                He kept playing with one hand and took out a cigarette with the other.  There was a pack on top of the piano with a lighter lying next to it.  He placed the cigarette in his unseen mouth about three inches under the brim of his hat and lit it.  The smoke didn’t travel through him like in that movie where ..Chevy Chase.. was invisible, it just disappeared until he exhaled.  There was nothing in him at all.

                “I am what you make of me,” he said.  “Most people don’t see me at all.”

                I picked up his cigarettes and took one, pocketing the pack.  I took his lighter too, lit my smoke and stuck it in my pocket.  “I dreamed you killed my sister.”

                “And woke to a happy world in which she was still alive,” he argued.  “These are not cruel dreams.  Cruel are the dreams that resurrect our dead loved ones only to return us to a world without them.  But I don’t deal in broken promises.  As you so succinctly pointed out, I am far too traditional an archetype for such things.”

                I was starting to put it all together.  In a weird way, it made sense.  “The lighthouse, the 606… you can only go places we leave behind.  No one ever plays the piano, no one is ever really tending that bar…”

                “You are a sharp one, my boy, I’ll give you that.”

                But I didn’t like it.  “So why can I see you?  Any of you?  No one really does, do they?”

                He chuckled.  “Have you ever felt unappreciated or ignored?  Like you didn’t belong?  Have you not sat at that bar and not been served?  And didn’t it feel like they never saw you at all?  Nothing is proprietary to this world.  Not even you.”

                “And because I have trouble getting served in some emo wine bar I should gush at the idea of getting drafted by the Monster Squad?”

                “You’re not so different now.  You can’t stand people, yet you insist on frequenting establishments that are full of them.  That’s why you like bars so much.  People everywhere, but no real chance of interaction.  Nothing more than the anonymous, anyway.”  I just smoked and scowled.  He wasn’t really wrong.  “It’s the noise you need, isn’t it?  You sleep with the TV on, yes?”

                “Mm-hmm…”

                “Yes, and you always run the air conditioning even when it’s not warm.  Because you’ve tapped into something, an ambient room tone hiss just under the surface, and you’ll do anything to drown it out.”

                “What is it?” I asked him.

                “That’s the White Noise, my boy.  The reason you don’t belong in your own life anymore.  It’s not just a low hum under the static; it’s a harmonic frequency.  And until you understand what it is you’re hearing, you’re not going to fit in anywhere.”

                “Spare me the Lecter, will ya?  I’m here to talk about the missing monkey heart, not my feelings.”

                He was smiling somewhere under that hat, I could tell.  “How refreshing, the man’s a movie buff.  So tell me then, Clarisse, before we get back to the business, what is it you hear on those nights the lights go out?  When the power fails and there isn’t time to take out your MP3 player or crank up the hurricane radio?  What do you hear in the darkness when there’s nothing there to drown out the silence?”

                He was still playing.  “Not lamb screams, I can tell you that,” I said.  I looked the bar over.  She wasn’t anywhere I could see her.  Barry was making a mess of himself trying to finish his drink.  Everyone else looked generic and out of focus, like background scenery.  I hated the whole place.  “Music,” I whispered to him.  “Sometimes I think I hear music.”

                But I didn’t get the chance to ask him about the monkey heart.  In my peripheral I caught two guys coming into the bar.  I was getting to the point where I could see them right away.  Normal people were starting to seem more out of place.

                “Uninvited party guests,” I grumbled. He never stopped playing though.  “Friends of yours?”

                “If I were the type to have friends, they wouldn’t be the type to come calling uninvited,” he assured me.

                It made sense.  Their skin was dark, that same deep gray hue the sea princess had.  They wore necklaces made of sharp teeth.  Some of them could have been shark teeth, or orca.  Some of them might have been human.  It suddenly seemed to me that they were probably the narwhal hunters.  “Do you think they see us?” I asked him.

                “Only if they want to.  More than likely it isn’t us they’ve come looking for.  Your girl is becoming quite popular these days.”

                “Freelancing’s got her in over her head.”

                “No doubt someone’s come to illuminate that observation for her,” he said grimly.

                I dropped my cigarette and lit up another.  “Don’t sweat it, Topper,” I told him.  “I think I’m getting the knack of this.”

TO BE CONTINUED...

            All these kids with their kegstands, funneling, shotgunning beer cans and all that bullshit, it kind of just makes me laugh.  As a seasoned old drunk I’ve come to realize that drinking is not a sprint event but a marathon.  It’s not about who can drink the fastest, but who can stay standing the longest.  In this respect, holding your liquor is not much different from surviving an apocalypse:  It’s a matter of forbearance.  This last adventure I’d like to impart to you is an exploration of that thesis...

            New Year’s, like most holidays, is a challenging time for me.  I like it because it signifies not just the end of the year but the end of the holiday season, and that’s cause enough for celebration.  I also like it because it’s one of those holidays where I get to celebrate the way I want, which is to actually go out and have a good time.

            The challenge comes not from the constant parade of obligation other holidays impose, but from simple logistics.  A lot of places charge for entry.  Kris and I brought in 2008 with a $50 a ticket “party” at the Hyatt where the average age of the guests turned out to be about 65.  It not only elevates the night to the standard of an event, it also elevates the amount of money you have to shell out.  We actually ended up meeting Tracy and Dane at the Rail anyway, so why bother with all the pretense of a big fancy shindig?

            Cabs are hard to come by on holidays too, which is something you really have to think about.  We brought in 2007 at the Rail, one last hoorah before Alicia and subsequently half the gang left Savannah in the care of Tracy, Dane and myself.  I’m not sure what Dane did, perhaps he was just too drunk, but I was instructed to take him out of the bar immediately.  Without coordinating with the others I took him out to the street where we were ushered into a cab before we even knew what was going on.  It went about ten feet before ejecting us (presumably for fear that the interior of the cab would fall victim to vomitting), and the two of us staggered around downtown trying to convince a cab to take us, until finally half passed-out and out of options, I took $40 out of Dane’s wallet and gave it to a stranger on the sidewalk who assured me his cousin would take us home.  When they started to take a way I wasn’t familiar with, I suddenly became gripped with the certain fear that we were going to die.  I whispered a quick apology to Dane (who was, by then, passed out) for getting us both killed, but then shortly after we were dropped off at my apartment safe and sound.  Although he still remembers very little of this side adventure, it was instrumental in forming our friendship.

            Because of the Hell’s ransom of hullabaloo drinking holidays bring to the downtown scene, most regulars just stay home and have private parties instead.  This makes the regular places not our regular places unless we bring everyone we know with us, so there’s not as much appeal to going there either.  This year I suggested having a private party of our own, but mindful of the conservative turnout we’d had for our St. Patrick’s Day party, Tracy held to the idea of going out.  I left it to Kris to plan the excursion, because I defer to her every year (and to a lesser degree every outing) to mastermind such things.  But then, at the last minute, she decided not to go out for New Year's.

            It wasn’t until New Year’s Eve that I realized I didn’t have any actual plans at all.  I’ve become so dependent on other people to plan my social life for me that I hadn’t even considered securing any arrangements on my own.  Now, with Kris out I realized that if I didn’t get hold of Tracy and Dane I was completely on my own.  And this, my friends, is not a thing to be considered.  I am not to be trusted to my own devices.  It suddenly occurred to me that my friend Dave had moved to Savannah following his graduation, but I hadn’t had the opportunity to call him and hang out.  It is usually customary to give someone more than a few hours notice, but what are friends for?

            Dave informed me that they were going to the beach to watch the fireworks, which was a new one for me.  After that I called Dane and he said he and Tracy were going to be having dinner out that way, so I arranged to hook up with them after.  I rode out with Dave and his crew and we all managed to meet up at Spanky’s somewhere around 11:00. 

            By midnight we were on the beach watching the fireworks.  It was a beautiful scene, but man was it cold!  The ocean breeze hit the winter night and turned everything between the sea and the sky into a wind tunnel.  But I have to tell you, I love fireworks.  They’re one of the chiefest of all simple pleasures in this world.  I liked in Land of the Dead how they distracted the zombies with fireworks.  It made sense to me that the fascination with fireworks was so hardwired into our brains that even when only the primal urges remained, it would still be a part of us.  Fireworks make you feel like the world is happening, like there are things in life worthy of wonder.  And always under the soft neon glow of roman candles I find myself in the company of people that I love, thinking strangely:  this is a thing to remember...

            But setting the sky on fire didn’t warm the ground any, and as soon as it was over we adjourned to the Wind Rose Cafe,  which is a fun hole in the wall bar I’d visited years before and found to my liking.  It’s strange how Tybee Island is devoid of tourism on New Year’s Eve, in bold contrast to downtown Savannah. The Wind Rose was populated with its regulars, who regarded us with reserved welcome.  I was ridiculously out of place wearing a suit, having planned on the formality of the previous year.  But on Tybee I looked like I’d just come from a wedding or a prom.

            Dave announced that his people had to work the next day and they departed, leaving me with Tracy and Dane.  I’m their bad penny, it seems, because no matter how we get there or what we do they always get stuck with me by the end of the night.  But this, too, is tradition, so we didn’t fight it.  We fell into our usual habits: Tracy got chummy with the locals while Dane and I struck up a pool game.  After months of practicing on my table at home, I’d gotten to the point where playing in public wasn’t an embarrassment. 

            I do enjoy the nature of pool as a gentleman’s game, even though you do not as often find gentlemen playing it (except at the Legion Hall downtown, where we played several games with quite a few good-natured fellows).  In pool you have your ups and downs, wins and losses, but it’s a genuinely fun game to play.  It’s a game where you can talk trash with people you don’t even know and for the most part no one takes offense.  I managed a rather difficult 8 ball shot for a win and in a later game scratched a relatively easy 8 ball shot for a loss, and both times walked away happy.  For better or worse we ended up making our way through all the regulars, not necessarily beating them but running through each of them as they struggled to find a partner to continue playing doubles.  As the night dragged on, we had pretty much run out of people to play except each other.    So I’d call that running the table, even though it was essentially a victory through attrition.

            But there were other challenges to be met.  Here is a call you are likely to hear when hanging out with Tracy and Dane:  “Yeah, well I bet you can’t out-chug my boyfriend!”  In the course of making conversation with the local talent, while they continuously try to hit on her or impress her with their barfly feats of prowess, there is a point where their pitiful efforts reach a threshold and Tracy decides to put them in their place by pitting them against Dane.  The challenge never goes unmet, and no one could be happier to oblige than he.  I know I said chugging wasn’t an important skill, but I might not think so if I had his talent at it.  Many a contender has been sent home humiliated under the sting of Dane’s libatious onslaught.  And this night was no exception.  To keep it interesting the challengers offered up a plastic drinking mug, one of those absurd half-gallon jugs you can get at a convenience store.  Dane offered up nothing to counter this, but they didn’t seem to mind.  It was over instantly, with Dane being declared the winner by the bartender before the challenger had even finished his drink.  Not even close.  So Tracygot the mug, which she then found out was full of rum.  After that the night started to get interesting...

            “That’s my favorite of your powers,” she told him.  That should go without saying, since it was the one she invoked the most often.

            Dane and I played pool on our own a little bit longer, but we were losing steam.  Finally we reached a point where one of us sank the 8 early but we decided to play it out anyway just to clear the table.

            Enter:  Daniel.

            Unbeknownst to us (because to my knowledge he’d made no effort to make it known) Daniel had been watching us play and waiting for his turn.  He didn’t have anyone to play with and he didn’t have a partner, so I can only assume he wanted to play one of us.  Again, I must assume this because Daniel did not make his intentions clear.  What he did do was approach the table with an inexplicable display of indignity and proceed to start putting the unsunk balls into the pockets.  Presumably he felt we should stop playing since our game had technically ended.

            “Who’s this asshole?” I asked of Dane, both of us regarding him with a somewhat amused perplexity.

            Dane shrugged, but Daniel took umbrage.  “You callin’ me an asshole?” he demanded, walking around the table to address me.  He was doing that slight slur of the zombie-drunk who’s still vertical but operating on momentum only.  This sensation is usually accompanied by that unreasoned specter of rage that you see in babies who can’t stop crying because they need sleep but are too tired to know it.  I was not so far behind him, but I tend toward mischief rather than anger when I find myself in this curious humor.

            Words were exchanged between us, finally ending in a bizarre arrangement that Daniel would play us both.  Because of this we gave him the break, which ended in the sinking of a solid.

            “Solids,” I declared, just in case he was too drunk to notice that he’d accomplished something.

            “Open table,” he insisted.  Which is technically true, but typically you’d want to continue shooting for the side you’ve already sunk.

            But Daniel was an untethered spirit and was not to be bound by such conventions.  His second shot was for one of the stripes, probably because it was a ridiculously easy one.  But true to his erratic strategy, this too went in, and he proceeded to stumble around the table looking for his next shot.

            “Stripes,” I said definitively, because at this point he’d chosen a side.  Hearing none of this, Daniel began to line up a third shot.  Back to solids again.  “Still open table, then?” I asked him.  I was starting to wonder if it were Daniel’s intention from the beginning to play against himself.

            “Open table,” he repeated.

            He missed the shot and Dane looked at me with confusion.  “What are we?” he asked me.

            “Open table,” I laughed.  “Everything’s open.  Or are you solids and stripes, Daniel?  Just shoot the cue, Dane.  We’re whites."

            The game progressed in this fashion with everyone just indulging the worst sort of slop play imaginable and me taking every opportunity to break Daniel’s dubious concentration every time he lined up a shot.  An effort that he did not appreciate, I can tell you, a fact he made clear to me each time with increasing emphasis.

            Daniel finally tired of playing me and Dane both, perhaps also overwhelmed at having to play both sides of the table.  It’s also possible he didn’t know I was playing at all and was annoyed by my constant efforts to… well, annoy him.

            At this point it became clear that Daniel needed a partner too, but he didn’t seem to have any friends.  Eventually a dude walked by and Daniel appealed to him.  “Tony!  Help me beat these guys!”  Not sure of the relationship there as far as how well they knew each other, but he knew the guy’s name.  Tony was a kind of tough-lookin’ guy, slightly resembling that MTV VJ Sway Calloway.  He didn’t look like he was friends with Daniel and he didn’t much act like it either.

            “Man,” Tony answered impatiently.  “I’m about to get me some ass.  You don’t wanna put a stick in my hand.  I was in prison, man.  You put a stick in my hand, somebody’s gonna get fucked up."

            Then, without waiting for reply, he walked past us to the bathroom and that was the end of it.  Not that we were inclined to get between him and ass, given the circumstances.

            And so we returned to playing a game that had no defined rules that I could suss out, and everyone involved was getting increasingly frustrated at the prospect of playing forever without a winner ever becoming apparent.  Finally they started playing “Fuck Her Gently” by Tenacious D on the stereo and I backed it up with a horrendously inappropriate pantomime that only I seemed to think was brilliantly funny.

            Daniel did not appreciate my antics in the least, and at this I was beginning to take umbrage because I was putting a lot of effort into them.  I also began to notice that there were some onlookers from his camp, so I decided they must be his friends.  I went up to one of them and asked directly:  “Is he your friend?”

            “Yeah,” the guy said reluctantly.

            “Is he an all right guy?”

            “He’s okay."

            “Help him learn to laugh,” I told his friend.  Even when I’m not drunk I find it inconceivable that there are those among us who don’t find me funny.

            Daniel interceded now, not appreciating that my shenanigans had helped give his rage focus.  “What’s your problem, man?” he demanded of me.  He had demanded this with some frequency throughout the night already.

            “I just want to make you laugh,” I told him, wrapping my asinine behavior in a heavy blanket of altruism.  “It’s a new year, Daniel!  This could be your year!  This is the year of Daniel!"

            “Just leave me alone!” he insisted, not for one moment considering that he had come to us and, by my reckoning, brought this on himself.

            “Come on, Daniel,” his friend said.

            “Yeah,” I agreed, “listen to your friend…”

            “He’s not my friend!” Daniel argued.

            I looked to the other guy with betrayal.  “You said you were his friend!"

            He shrugged.  “I know him…”

            “He’s not my friend!” Daniel repeated.

            “Look,” I told them, taking a step back, “if there’s something going on between you two gentlemen I don’t want to get in the middle of that.”  At this point Dane was just laughing at the idiocy of the entire situation, and everyone’s amusement was just souring Daniel’s disposition further.  “I just want to play some pool.”

            “Then let’s play some pool!” Daniel said emphatically.  “But don’t wanna be playin’ any two on one or two on two or any of that shit, just one on one!”

            “Who do you want to play, then?”

            And he fixed on me with the intensity of a man on fire.  “I want to play you,” he said.  “Let’s settle this!”

            I twisted my moustache dramatically.  “So it’s to be a duel, then.”  But I pronounced it duelle for no reason at all, and also for no reason this enraged him further.

            “Let’s just play!” he barked.

            The balls were racked.  We had sticks in hand.  Since no one had won the previous game I conceded the break to Daniel.  He leaned down to shoot.  The final act of our little drama was about to unfold.

            But the endgame never happened.  Before Daniel could even break, a piercing cry broke through the bar.  “EVERYBODY GET THE FUCK OUT!”

            It was the bartender, he looked very unhappy.  He continued this aggressive malediction until the patrons began to begrudgingly comply.  We seemed to be the only ones surprised by it. 

            “What’s going on?” I asked Dane, but he was equally stumped.

            “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” the bartender continued to scream at the crowd, which was now beginning to disperse.  “It’s closing time!  Everybody get the fuck out!”

            “Fuck you, Shannon!” one of them yelled back, but obeyed nonetheless.  I realized that it was 3:00 in the morning.  Is this how the place always closes? I wondered.  They never heard of last call?

            I looked at Daniel and we both shrugged.  Honor apparently satisfied by this interruption, we shook hands and parted ways.  The place was almost cleaned out, but the bartender was still screaming at the stragglers.  Undeterred by this, we approached the bar.  He could scream all we wanted, but we had to settle our tabs.  He handed me my card and my ticket, still barking at the remaining regulars.

            I will say this for the Wind Rose Café:  I drank there all night and the tab was $12.00.  Despite this I stiffed him on the tip.  I never do that, by the way, but the dude was screaming at me.  That’s piss-poor customer service in my estimation, old sport.

            After a few minutes' discussion with a couple of the disgruntled regulars on the propriety of our ejection, we made our way back home.

            “This could be a new tradition for us,” I told them, “getting thrown out of a different place every year instead of the same old places.  When you think about it, it makes more sense to get tossed from a place you’re not planning to come back to, anyway.”

            Coming to a consensus on this, we headed back to the Southside...

.. ..

                Busy night at the Waterhouse.  I tried to clear a path for Barry so no one knocked his arms off or anything while he squeezed past them.  I didn't feel like I had to go looking for her.  I just needed to get to the bar.  I punched a hole open for us and wedged in so Barry had no leaning room.  He positioned himself so his plastic body was propped against the bar and all he had to concentrate on doing was keeping his head in place...

                I looked from one end of the bar to the other, but didn't see her.  I didn't bother looking at the bartenders because I've never been able to get served here.  Maybe it's my willing personality.

                "Can I get you something?" someone asked on the other side of the bar.  I looked up with surprise, but was only less surprised to see that it was her.  The succubus was tending bar.  And that's what it takes for me to get served in this place, folks.

                "Lilith," I said plainly, which made her frown.

                It wasn't so much a frown as a playful pout that showed off her lips.  It wasn't necessary.  Pouting to show off those lips was like painting a Rolls Royce gold so everyone would know it's expensive.  "I wish you'd call me Lily," she complained.

                "I'd rather not."

                "Because of your sister?"

                I decided to change the subject.  "So, you're tending bar now!  Someone finally make an honest woman of you?"

                She smiled without showing teeth.  "There are no honest women, honey."

                "Not a very progressive attitude."

                "Give me a better setup and I'll give you a better follow-through," she said with a shrug.

                "Okay.  A mushroom walks into a bar and the bartender says 'we don't serve your kind around here!' So the mushroom says..."

                "Why not? I'm a fungi!" She finished the joke without missing a beat.  Perfect timing.  Is it a sin to marry a demon?  Just askin'.

                The bit was not lost on Barry.  He guffawed like Ed McMahan.  She regarded him for the first time, but still only spoke to me:  "Who's your friend?"

                "Barry here is a full-on mystic mojo motherfucker," I told her.  "So no funny business."

                "Wouldn't think of it.  Not with the jokes you tell.  What can I get you boys?"

                "Pina Colada," Barry told her.

                I leaned close to him.  "Barry, your arms don't bend.  You couldn't even hold a glass to your face."

                "Just put it in front of me!  I can drink it through a straw."

                I looked him up and down.  All this and a girl-drink drunk too?  Barry never had a chance in this world.  It's no wonder he sold himself to the next.  "Heineken," I said to the succubus through the side of my mouth.

                She laughed and disappeared.

                "I sense a trap," Barry said ominously.

                "Shut up, Barry," I growled.  I wondered where she went.  If it were a trap, she could just poison our drinks or something.  Under the constant murmur of the crowd I heard a soft melody.  The piano.  Someone was playing the piano near the front entrance.  That was definitely out of place.

                Before I had a chance to wonder about this Lilith returned with the drinks.  She put Barry's big frilly frou-frou drink in front of him, then popped open the Heineken so I could see her do it.  It was a demonstration of nonaggression. 

                "So what brings you here tonight?" she asked.  "I don't want to get my hopes up or anything, but I'd say you're looking for me."

                I took a drink.  A show of good faith or a test of courage.  It wasn't beyond her power to whammy a sealed bottle of beer, but I had to show her I had the stuff.  "Not on my own," I told her.  "We have a friend in common."

                "Only thing we have in common is that we don't have friends," she answered back playfully.

                "Fair enough, but just the same we both know him.  He's holed up in the old 606, but he's had better days."

                "I bet.  I used to know him, but we're not so close anymore.  He had a change of heart."

                I wanted a cigarette, but I wasn't carrying.  "You helped with that one, I think.  He said something about using it to summon the Leviathan?  That can't be good.  He called you something else too."

                "A lot of men call me a lot of things," she said casually.

                "All apt to the situation, no doubt," I quipped, "but this was a word I hadn't heard before:  Anidima."

                "That's a poet's word, but apt to the situation, I guess."

                "So what's your boss want with a monkey heart?  I thought he had his own apocalypse going.  I never read about a Leviathan in the Bible."

                She laughed.  "Jonah might beg to differ.  You should also study your Greek.  They used the word 'dragon' for any monster they didn't already have a name for.  But you're right about him having his own plans.  He's just not my boss anymore."

                "So you're a free agent now?" I asked her.

                She smirked, then shrugged.  I really wanted to kiss her.  "Well, not free..."

                "No doubt of that."  I took another drink.  "So who is that's so keen on bringing back the things from within?  I don't know what that is, but I bet it has a sinister ring to it."

                She looked concerned at that.  "Is that what they're after?  I thought the Vanara was just in the way, but his heart could be the key."

                "To the end of the world?  Nice work, sister.  Maybe you're not cut out for self-employment."

                "Look, your friend was Hanuman's hatchet-man back in the day, but he's been locked in that dusty hole so long that he was half-feral and looking to crack when I got sent to put him down.  I thought the heart was just the proof, but now..."

                "End of the world stuff, I know.  I'm not as seasoned to all this as you guys, but it seems to me you supernatural types are always playing with matches while you're sitting on a powder-keg."

                "Immortality can be boring," she said innocently.  I swear she batted her eyelashes at me.  "And lonely."

                Jesus.  "Yeah, well thanks to you I'll probably never know."

                Barry had been listening quietly like we were one of his TV shows.  He took a long sip of his drink and it instantly poured out of his neck and all over his fake body.

                "Oh God, Barry," I said in annoyance and disgust.  "You are a fucking calamity."

                "Sorry," he gurgled.

                "How does he manage at home?" Lilith asked.

                "I usually stick him in a punch bowl," I told her, taking a step away from him to avoid getting Pina Colada on my shoes.

                "Or the sink," Barry added.

                The piano music was louder now.  I didn't like it.  I didn't like anything out of place anymore, it was all starting to emphasize just how far from normal I'd slipped.  I couldn't see across the crowd to get a look at the piano player. 

                "Who is that?" I asked Lilith, ignoring Barry again.

                "Go ask him."

                So I did.

TO BE CONTINUED

                Going to see the succubus meant a visit to the Waterhouse, which was bad news for a lot of reasons.  First of all, me and Beckett met the devil there once.  It was Beckett he was after, but still… Seeing the succubus was bad enough, because she was after me, which made her more dangerous than the devil (especially since she almost got me).  But worst of all, I hated going there because it was one of those pretentious art student bars where everybody was drinking wine and doing poetry readings and I couldn't even get the bartender to look at me, much less bring me a drink.  And I was going to have to stay drunk for this one...

                I was also going to need back-up, preferably of the mystical variety.  Aquagirl wasn't going to be much help and neither was monkey man, so that only left me with one option.

                God, how I wished I had any other option.

                In the time since I burned his body, Barry the Head had managed to recover some of his telekinetic powers.  It's possible that given time he wouldn't need a physical form at all, but I was making it a goal to keep him from reaching that state of awareness.  I accomplished this in part by keeping him in my junk room with the TV on, a technique that worked surprisingly well.  To augment this I periodically pulled him out of storage and got him shitface drunk.  Somewhere in all this he had still been able to regain limited mobility, mostly floating around to look for snacks he didn't need (since he didn't have a stomach) or to change the channel.  I left it on Scifi most of the time, which suited him, but he liked to watch Heroes and Knight Rider too.  I wasn't fully happy that his powers were returning, but figured I might as well put it to use.

                All this requisite preparation meant that my visit to the succubus would have to wait for the next night.  Luckily that would make it Saturday night, which meant I was pretty likely to find her in play and better able to fit in.  That was going to be key, because Barry and I had never attempted what I had in mind.

                I made a special visit to the Universe Trading Company for necessary supplies.  Unfortunately this required the purchase of a male mannequin, which not only was more expensive than I would have liked but elicited no end of weird looks in the store and all the way home.

                "It's for a project," I told everybody, which is excuse enough in this town for just about anything.  It was, in the strictest sense, also true.

                What followed (after an afternoon's worth of montage-style practice and preparation), was the most awkwardly disturbing physical display I have ever witnessed.  When I had envisioned Barry mounted to the shoulders of the mannequin and using his powers to animate it, the idea seemed so much more brilliant than it would prove to be in execution.  Too many movies, I guess.  It's hard to paint the picture properly because you kind of have to be me to get this, but when I was a kid I used to make stop-motion movies of my GI Joe figures with my parents' video camera.  I know you haven't seen any of those, but with that benchmark in mind try to imagine how bad it is when I tell you that those movies looked more real than Barry's performance.  He bobbed around like a marionette,  his plastic feet barely touching the ground as he floated down the street next to me.  I hoped people would assume he had some kind of palsy or something, but at that moment I'd have an easier time convincing them I'd invented a robot than I was having trying to pass him off as human.

                "Jesus, Barry," I complained.  His legs weren't even taking steps in turns, just lifting up and coming down together.  "Act natural, will ya?"

                "I'm trying," Barry whined, "but one of these legs is attached to the torso and the other one just pops off at the hip!  Neither of them bend!"

                "Best I could do on short notice.  Just try not to hop so much; you look like Team America."

                I tried to put his arm around my shoulders to look like I was helping him keep balance, but it only extended in front of him, which didn't help at all.  For flexibility, I would not recommend clothing store mannequins.  They really aren't designed for the kind of complex articulation moving around requires.

                Barry straightened himself a little too suddenly after my failed effort to readjust him and his head nearly came off.  There's just no good way to secure a living head to a plastic body, but I guess that's a tip you'll never need to incorporate into your everyday lives.  Least I hope not.

                The Waterhouse was posh enough that it was just on the wrong side of MLK, which kept us away from the majority of pedestrians at least.  Crossing the street wasn't fun, though. Another benefit of it being Saturday night was that once we were inside, we'd be too crammed in for anyone to notice Barry's moves.

                We walked inside and passed the piano no one was ever allowed to play.  She would be at the bar looking to score.  Hopefully her boss wasn't around.  Last time I ran into him he spent half the night talking to me about Scooby Doo.  It seemed cause for concern afterward that he hadn't taken any interest in acquiring my soul, just making idle conversation.  Made me think he knew something I didn't.

                But she'd taken an interest, and that's what counts.    Busy night at the Waterhouse.  I tried to clear a path for Barry so no one knocked his arms off or anything while he squeezed past them.  I didn't feel like I had to go looking for her.  I just needed to get to the bar.  I punched a hole open for us and wedged in so Barry had no leaning room.  He positioned himself so his plastic body was propped against the bar and all he had to concentrate on doing was keeping his head in place.

TO BE CONTINUED

                My eyes were well adjusted to the darkness at this point, so I could see around okay.  The bathrooms were on the right.  There used to be a bar on the left with a sign forbidding cigars and clove cigarettes (that was when you could still smoke inside a restaurant).  The bar was still there, but little else that I could recall.  There was a moaning sound on the other side of it.  I sighed.  At this point there was no way to walk out of that place without finding out what was making that sound...

                I walked around the bar to see something lying in the floor behind it.  It could have been a man, but it wasn't.  It was the creature I had encountered before.  Not so strong this time, and not scary at all, it was curled up on the floor like a helpless child...

                It looked up at me with only vague recognition.  There was no room for malice.  Its breathing was heavy, coming in erratic fits.  "You have come…" it rasped.

                I shrugged.  "Yep."

                It's hard to say, but I think it smiled.  It was as pleasant as a crocodile smile, but I think it was baring its needle teeth at me in an effort to be personable.  The effect was not good, considering it wasn't a person.  "The brave one…" it whispered.

                I nodded.  "Cu Chulainn."

                A wheezy cough issued through its teeth.  I think it was trying to laugh.  "I need your help…"

                Then I laughed.  I don't know if I need to quit drinking or drink more, but I've definitely crossed over to new ground here.  "You gotta be kidding."

                But it didn't falter.  "She stole… my heart…"

                "They do that."

                It tried to sit up, but didn't make it.  "The anidima," it said, as if that meant something to me.  Then, seeing that it didn't, it clarified:  "The succubus…"

                Strangely enough, I did know what it meant by that.  I haven't told you that story yet, but I have met the devil in a downtown bar and been tempted by his succubus.  "She stole my heart a little too," I told the monkey man.

                It tried again to sit up, but only managed to pull itself up by its arms.  It pulled itself two steps toward me.  "Listen," it said desperately, then yanked at the skin covering its breast to reveal that it was hollow inside.  "She wants to use it… to summon the Leviathan… to bring back the things… from within.  You have… to stop her…"

                I scowled.  There just wasn't any getting around it.  "Fine.  Sit tight, Monkian.  I'll fix this bitch for you."

                "Take care…" it gasped.  "If they should return…"

                "Yeah yeah yeah, all the worst parts of the Bible.  I got it.  Just hold the fort, keep the faith and I'll back by dinnertime."

                Then I made a cool exit. 

                Suck that, monkey man.

                Tonight was my birthday, so I ended up at the Rail Pub (no surprise there).  I ended up there by myself, which is a little different.  Normally I wouldn't bother to go out by myself, but I've got this rule where I make myself go out on my birthday because birthdays are bad enough without having to be stuck at home alone.  So anyway, I went out even though I didn't feel like it.

                I sat at the bar and made the usual small talk and idle banter that passed for human interaction.  It's the kind of discourse that makes you feel like a serial killer because you're essentially faking all emotional responses.  That's the kind of thing you don't have to worry about in a bar.  We're all phonies here.

                I spent a couple of hours trading bad jokes with homeless Bob, an interesting drifter type (drifter by look; every time I've ever seen him he's always been in the same place) who looked liked kind of like Richard Brautigan or one of those cool Easy Rider type of homeless guys who were free of the world instead of destitute and drug addicted.  Bad jokes are a language all their own, and a hobby I've always enjoyed.

                "A man finds a magic lamp with a Djinni in it," Bob told me.  "The Djinni tells him 'I'll grant you any wish you want.' The guy thinks about it and says 'hey, can you build me a bridge from here to Hawaii?'  The Djinni frowns, he's like, 'man, do you know how complicated that would be?  I'd have to put in pylons down to the ocean floor, build a stable frame work, put in some serious architectural design to build a causeway from here to an island like Hawaii!  No way, dude, that's too hard.  Wish for something else.'

                "So the guys thinks it over, then he says 'okay, then I want to know how women think.'

                "The Djinni sighs, pauses a second, then says to the guy… 'So, do you want that bridge to be a two-lane road or a four-lane?'"

                Bob laughed and so did I.  A few jokes and several beers later we started talking about the importance of oral storytelling and how the telling of jokes is one of the last remnants of it.  He started telling me about old folk heroes and where they got their start.  He told me about Cu Chulainn and how he distinguished himself at the feast of Bricriu, a story unbelievably similar to that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  It was all about how a hero stands by his principles and upholds his honor even in the face of the gravest consequences.

                And somewhere in all that drinking and all that talk about heroes and it being my birthday (this last fact known only to myself) I realized something:  I had to finish what I began.  I had to go back to the old 606 Café and find out why so many weird things had been happening to me lately.  I had to face the monkey man and make him tell me what was going on.  Because that sassy mermaid had been right.  Something was coming, and I was somehow caught in the middle of it.  So I needed to find out what was happening.

                The Rail is just across the street from the old 606, a building that's been abandoned so long that I'm certain we've lost it to another world.  The monkey man suggested quite strongly that if I entered his layer again he'd eat me, but I couldn't let that deter me.  Cu Chulainn and Gawain didn't back down when staring down the barrel of certain death, and in my current state I was prepared to do no less.  I had to know why I had seen the things I'd seen.

                I swear that the iron gate to the old 606 Café courtyard was always locked, but on nights like this I found it wide open.  Maybe I'm drawn to these moments, my Cu Chulainn moments, and that's why opportunity always presented itself so plainly to me in situations like this.  Trouble always leaves the door open for me.  And I usually am more than happy to walk through it.

                I pushed the gate all the way open with a ridiculously dramatic creak of its hinges.  I stepped into the empty courtyard and tried to adjust my eyes to the darkness of if.  I peered through the shadows for the mad charge of some wild creature, but the night was still and silent.  The absence of monsters was somehow more frightening than my first visit to this place.

                A few minutes there bolstered my bravery enough that I decided to head inside.  That last time I'd actually entered this building was when 606 was still open, and the last time I was in the courtyard some surly monkey demon tried to kill me, so believe me when I tell you that I was more than a little apprehensive as I approached the door.

                Like the gate, it was suspiciously unlocked.  I pushed it open and tried to see inside.

                The urge to say "hello?" like they do in stupid movies came to me.  It was accompanied by the realization that this occurs momentarily prior to the character getting killed horribly, so I resisted it.  I didn't even know what I hoped to find in that place.  There was no reason to believe it would be pleasant.

                My eyes were well adjusted to the darkness at this point, so I see around okay.  The bathrooms were on the right.  There used to be a bar on the left with a sign forbidding cigars and clove cigarettes.  The bar was still there, but little else that I could recall.  There was a moaning sound on the other side of the bar.  I sighed.  At this point there was no way to walk out of that place without finding out what was making that sound.

                I walked around the bar to see something lying in the floor behind it.  I could have been a man, but it wasn't.  It was the creature I had encountered before.  Not so strong this time, and not scary at all, it was curled up on the floor like a helpless child.

                It looked up at me with only vague recognition.  There was no room for malice.  Its breathing was heavy, coming in erratic fits.  "You have come…" it rasped.

                I shrugged.  "Yep."

TO BE CONTINUED...

This is probably as close to an actual campaign speech as I'm going to get, America…

You know what made Einstein crazy?  And I don't mean nails-on-a-chalkboard crazy, I'm talking about "these pajamas were a gift from Elvis" crazy (although that's not a direct quote).  It was Unified Field Theory.  The simplest idea in the world, that you could discover a single set of rules that remained true regardless of what you applied them to and regardless of the surrounding circumstances, was too much for the smartest man in the history of the world to grasp.  The world tends to get awfully complicated in an awful hurry when you try to break it down in the simplest terms.  There just aren't that many universal truths, just endless variables and subtle nuances that make every moment its own unique problem to solve.

For the loneliest number, 1 sure does get around a lot.  We're still fixated on having 1 religion with 1 God, 1 world under 1 flag, 1 kind of loving or living or being normal with apparently a single standard that defines with singular consistency which 1 is the right 1 to be.  And if there are more than 1, then we insist on our idea being 1.  If not the first then the best, and if nothing else we'll go out of our way to be the last, so that maybe somehow our ideal will be the only 1 remembered when everything else is ash.

But that's a bit morose.  The truth is I was talking with a friend of mine about the term E pluribus unum, which means "out of many, one".  He took this to mean that the world was coming together from many into one, consolidating the diverse cultures and ideals currently represented in the world into a single homogenized abbreviation of their original ideas.  He thought it meant the gradual dissolution of separate people and ideas into a generalized standard, therefore representing the dissolution of individuality.

I see it, but I don't agree.  I think "out of many, one" doesn't mean we'll be crammed together into a single way of thinking or existing.  It means that no matter how great in number we become, you can always draw a single one from us.  The individual will continue to exist, even in the company of multitudes.  No matter how many of us there are or how many we can become, we are still a group comprised of individuals, each of us capable of introducing new and different ideas to the whole.  And even if the majority were to reject these ideas, the individual is still free to have them.  Democracy isn't everyone agreeing on a single way of thinking, after all.  It's a struggle of ideas in which it is the unabridged responsibility of every individual to contribute.

But as a hard-spoken soothsayer and sometimes proponent of unfounded half-sooths, I have had my share of arguments with a brilliantly broad diversity of people.   I have come in particular to admire the capacity of young people to hold as sacrosanct the singularity of things.  It's a charming self-absorption to believe that the sum of your personal experience mirrors the sum of human experience.  We all do this; if we didn't we wouldn't have any opinions on anything.  And it's actually true in some sense, because all of our experiences have been cumulative to the evolution of the human story.  But it's still funny to hear the arguments:  "I knew a girl who had an abortion, so… I had a friend who's gay… My wife has restless legs syndrome, so it's real…"  These silly strings of hubris that credentialize conceptual ambiguities with individual citations of anecdotal authentication.  As if to cite a single instance of anything is to eradicate any argument to the contrary.  This is the beautifully linear mindset of people who still believe they are moving in a specific direction toward a defined goal. 

My own life has been a constant exercise in humility, still ongoing and not altogether successful.  And it is becoming increasingly formless and complex as I get older.  Even as individuals we are not possessed of an inherent inner compass, and any focus seems to be a temporary means to an unforeseen end.  And even more often there is no actual end.  Credits don't role in real life and chapters don't close on a clever line.  Every day leads into another and we are forced to enforce some structure on them that will give it all meaning to us.

But I do believe in the power of the 1.  I take some pride in believing what I believe in the absence of evidence, because my opinions are gathered from casual observation rather than personal experience.  I believe in the coming of 1 world.  It will be a world without borders (unless otherwise geographically imposed), a world of racial harmony where so many different kinds of people have lived together for so long that they can accept their differences without having to eliminate them.  And yes, a world where nationalism is a bizarre anomaly of the history we will refuse to forget.  Because it will be a world without nations.  Not a world united under a single flag, but a world where flags will no longer be necessary except as nostalgic adornments.

It will begin with the lifting of borders.  With the borders removed the people of connected lands will find a way to share each other's problems and prosperity.  Continental unification will create strong economic powers while marginalizing the threat of military disputes.  It is a difficult thing to annex a territory that is separated from you by an ocean, and damn near impossible when that territory is united with its continental neighbors.

The rise of continental economic superpowers will begin two prevalent political trends.  Corporate competition will replace military warfare as the world becomes a thriving global marketplace.  This will lead to single universal system of currency.  While the rise of a single language will not occur, a single dominant language will be adopted in the global market and as an ancillary measure many cultures will become multi-lingual.  The strongest tool in the global economy will be communication, so being able to speak many languages will be useful and therefore become part of an average education.

Increased trade and communication coupled with a decrease in military hostility will encourage people of all cultures to travel and live abroad, mingling with and eventually becoming a staple of other cultures.  Shared land and language and experience will lead to a stronger understanding of other religions and ethnic cultures, and as this continues the ideals of these cultures will not assimilate into each other, but enrich each other.  The scope of human experience will broaden, and with it personal understanding on an individual level.  Increased education and exposure to new ideas will erode the xenophobia and prejudice that infect and infest today's world, and people will hunger for new horizons and new frontiers.  We will work to build a better world and once this is done we will work to reach, explore, and ultimately inhabit other worlds.  All of this will become possible when we accept that we can become many yet remain 1.

But we will never see this world.  You and I won't, and probably not our children or their children.  It will be a long time coming, this world, and before it can come to be the world we live in now is likely to get a lot worse.  A world like that isn't made overnight, and change doesn't happen without struggle or sacrifice.  We will most likely die in a world that is nothing like the one I just described.  And I'm sorry for that, but it doesn't relieve us of any of the responsibility we have to make that world happen.

I believe this in the absence of evidence.  It is not representative of my experiences.  I have not devised or discovered a unified set of rules that proves it to be true.  But it is true.  And it will happen.  The people of today's world may not be the generation to make it happen, but it has begun with us.  And as it's passed down from this generation to the next, it will build from a low rumble to a roar, until it builds into an undeniable cacophony of many voices crying for change.  And then it will happen.

Because change only happens when the voice of the many demands that it happen.  And that voice is only heard when many cry out as though they are 1.  And this only happens when enough people have shared enough experiences, witnessed enough truths, or lived together long enough to celebrate their differences as much as their similarities.  It happens when enough people know each other well enough that they realize that despite their differences, they are basically the same.  That they can live as many and remain 1.

But  it doesn't begin with many.  No idea does.  It is the promise of the many, this obligatory inheritance I mean to leave behind.  It will become the property as well as the duty of the many to see it done, many who will know better than we ever will how to be heard as 1.

But it doesn't start with the many, not that many at all.  Right now it's not the many who hold this idea to be true or to be theirs.  It isn't the responsibility of the many yet to see it through.  Someday it will be taken by the many and from this they will draw other ideas, and other ideals, and they will learn from each other how break this idea down and build that better world.

But right now all those ideas haven't even been thought of yet.  The people who will think up those ideas haven't been born yet.  Right now all the ideas it will take to make the better world haven't even been imagined.  Someday those ideas will exist and so will the people that can make them happen, but right now they can't.

Right now it's just 1.

On December 17th 1903, two brothers went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, climbed the tallest dune, and set the world record for the shortest single unit of time it takes to change the world.  For all the fanfare that history has afforded the first manned flight of the Wright Brothers, this much sung enterprise lasted only twelve seconds. 

I can't imagine many endeavors we could attempt in our time where twelve seconds would be considered a success, but to them that twelve seconds was the culmination of a dream (and a considerable amount of work).  Twelve seconds in which the last six were probably more a matter of gliding than flying, but that doesn't matter.  I have stood at the top of this hill myself, and I can tell you that if I had fallen it would have taken longer than twelve seconds for me to roll to the bottom.  But that doesn't matter either.  What matters is that in those twelve seconds they proved to the world what they already knew to be true:  It was possible for man to take to the skies.

Those twelve seconds made the world believe in their dream and fired the imagination of a generation to usher in the age of aeronautics.  Sixty Six years later man walked on the moon.  Babies born in the moment of the Wright Brothers' historic flight would live to see man take not only to the skies, but to the stars.  In the century that followed those twelve seconds we have sent spacecraft to other planets and launched probes that travel beyond our solar system.  We live in an age of limitless possibilities because of the Wright Brothers and their twelve second flight.

So I reject any argument that I am incapable of changing the world.  Nothing is broken that isn't fixable, and no problem is so big or so wrong that it can't be put right with faith and hard work.  You just have to think "Twelve Seconds" - the shortest recorded amount of time required to change the world.  If they did that in twelve seconds, what could I do?

Because the world is changing anyway, a little bit every day, whether or not we take part in it.  And all any of us needs is one good moment - just a few seconds - to help change it in a way that makes a difference.