About the same time Zip was getting aquainted with the strange girl at the bar, Joe was in the back of a Car Service car, drunk and seriously coked up, literally sitting in the middle of an escalating catfight between his girlfriend Justeena and her best friend, Nancy Zen.



"You bitch!," screamed Justeena, draping herself across the semi-supine Joe, "I'll kill you!"



Nancy Zen cackled and landed a half-hearted roundhouse with her narrow, angular fist across the dark, maroon-rouged face of her girlfriend.



"YOU FUCKING WHORE, I'LL KILL YOU!," screamed Justeena, going for Nancy's throat.



Joe sat in his laid back state and thought about it all.





Thursday had started out fine. He'd started out the day meeting his uncle Mike for a lunch of Caesar salad and Spanish chicken at a Midtown diner just north of the old underground mall. Mike had delivered the usual complement of organic La La- but had been coy about something else.



"What is it," said Joe. "What you got?"



Mike looked over his pale denim-jacketed right shoulder. The diner was empty.



It was a safe diner, owned and operated by the Sherms, who owned New South City. This fact was known beyond saying to both of them. Joe sat up and said again:



"What you got?"



Mike reached into his tattered red backpack and brought out a toothpaste tube-sized bag jammed to the seams with blue crystalline White Stuff.



He held it enclosed, partially concealed, in his large sepia hand, as Joe gazed, dumbfounded.



Joe sat back and looked down at his salad. He took a bite and looked out the diner window at the bright, golden, October afternoon.



"Where the fuck you get that?"



"You can probably guess. I think so."



Joe reached over the table and took the bag in his own hand. Opened the Scotched taped end, flipped open the flap, dug his index finger end into the hard white powder.



He drew his finger out to suck. And felt the blue crystalline midnight feeling ride up the roof of his mouth.



"OK..." he said. "What am I paying for this?".



And here Mike gave pause, and a critical look.



Joe had a moment of wishing he could separate himself from the culture that'd raised him. It was a DRUG DEAL.



Mike fixed his eyes with his patient gaze, looking over his left shoulder where the heavy glass door had opened and shut and men in white suits had entered.



"Keep your dollars. Do you think I'm stupid? You think I don't know who you run with?"



"What are you trying to say?" said JT.



"Don't patronize me."



Joe paused, looking down on his Caesar salad, hearing the business plan mutely articulating itself in his mind.



"Yeah," he said.



"It's easy," said Mike, exhaling long and slow through his broad, Indian nose. "You got a way out."



The waitress stopped by the table and Joe ordered them 2 more beers.



"Pie in the sky," he said, smiling.



"On the table," said Mike. "On the table........"





The thing about drugs is that, unlikely enough, over the last 20 - 30 years they'd become more or less sanctioned, acceptable. Gone were the days where people got locked up and put away forever for having a key of this or 2 grams. of that.



Well, sort of. The cigaratte manufacturers now uniformly sold tobacco-pot mixed and even wholly marijuana cigarettes. The marijuana wasn't nearly as good as what you might grow in your backyard, but it got the job done.



Cocaine, heroin and other narcotics were now sold with a degree of exclusivity once reserved for Swiss watches, expensive lamps, crystals.



After the 4th big oil war the federal govt. had figured out that if they taxed the sale of formerly illegal, taboo substances and practices, there was money to be made. Black people and other minorities were now just as rountinely jailed for tax evasion as they'd once been for drug misdemeanors.



Anyway, these days it seemed like anyone could be jailed for anything. The Drug Wars had just sort of faded away, a relic of past times little better and little worse, just past.



In fact, a Drug War was still being fought. Dealers like Mike and Joe still fought on the supply and distribution side.

I

n places like New South City, there was heavy money to be made selling to the boutique dealers, and more money to be made selling under the table to whoever else wanted the substances but couldn't afford the boutiques (nearly no average-income person could on a regular basis).



Joe buried the narrow tube of dope in his backpack, first making sure he wasn't being observed. They paid the bill and stepped out onto the street. Joe zipped up quickly and flipped up the round collar of his field jacket.



"Shit," he said. "Cold up in this bitch."



"Get you a liner for that coat," said Mike. Mike was wearing 2 heavy plaid flannel shirts over a heavy knit sweater, and a winter cap.



"I got to get one."



"I'll keep an eye out for you."



"Oh, I can get one," said JT, shivering and looking sidelong down the street.



They shook hands, said they'd see each other in a couple weeks, and parted.



Zip and the tall blonde girl sat at the bar sipping tall Bud bottles. The girl was wearing a loose fitting, worn blue sweat shirt with the cuffs pulled mitten like over her hands. He couldn't stop looking at her long hands.



Where do I know you from?, he wondered.



"I saw you playing with your band a while back," she said.



"It's not really my band," he said. "Where at?"



"Dungeon 8."



The Dungeon 8 episode had happened at the end of the summer. It had been one of the first strange, strong, bad shows. One of the first where occurences had occurred.



"Hah. The Flying Boy," Zip crushed out his smoke and sat drumming his fingers upon the beaten copper surface of the bar. "The Flying Boy."



The girl sat gazing at him with her huge, dark eyes. They were probably brown eyes, but in the dim light they were black gleaming obsidian.



"I saw him," she said.



"Yeah," said Zip.



"I was right near him."



"I'm sorry." He puffed. "I'm going to need some more smokes here in a minute."



The girl produced a black purse from somewhere beneath the bar and took out a pack of Camel Chocolate Thai. The good stuff.



Zip said, "This is a welcome surprise."



She doled smokes out for each of them and they lit. They sat in silence for a while.



"How do you explain something like that?," said the girl.



For a minute he thought she meant the Chocolates. Then her narrow jawline came back into focus, the way her dark blond hair curled slightly beneath the edge of her chin.



"Well, it's like this," he said. "I'm GOD."



The volume of conversation in the bar dipped noticably. Zip noticed the bartender, a dude called Hairy Beef, looking at him closely.



Zip stared at his image in the long mirror behind the bar. He tried it again.



He let the electric guitar riffs twist and amplify in his minds ear, winding arabesques of subconscious sound. He focused on the reflection of his suddenly terribly dark blue eyes in the mirror. He let the arabesques twist and wind, projecting them toward the mirror, winding out and into it. Trying to burst the mirror. Trying to shatter the mirror.



Nothing. He was sitting, stoned, staring at his face in the mirror.



Nothing.



"To be honest," said Zip, "I've basically chalked that thing up to a confluence of magnetic forces. Freak incident."



The tall girl dragged on her smoke, still eyeing him.



He leaned in toward her confidentially. He spoke the words in her ear.



"We had that kid wired to the ceiling. It was a circus thing. Flying trapeze shit. The Flying Boy."



"Bullshit."



"I'm telling you."



"I think you did it to him."



"What's your name?"



"Casey."



"Well, Casey," said Adam "Zip" Stuyvesant. "That would have been a motherfucker. But I am telling you that that was not the case..."



But that night, at Dungeon 8, that had, in fact, been the case.



He was arching into his guitar solo, leaning toward the tightly massed crowed, focusing in for no reason on this young black kid.



Fly, he'd thought, for no reason at all, a dim, low, silent, internal whisper beneath cascading blue incandescent notes issuing from his fingers, from his amplifier. And the kid began to rise, and held, and for more than a minute Zip could feel him in his very hands, and moved him over the green haze of the crowd.