The place was technically known as Thompson’s Pass. It woulda been on maps and things, maybe still is. Protected scenic lookout, just off of State Route 8. About eight cars, nine cars could park up there. Nowadays you could probably get ten sedans across parked comfortably with enough room to open their doors and not hit each other, but remember, cars was bigger. Kids called it Lovers’ Lane. Or I guess it was, grown-ups called it Lovers’ Lane when they were talkin' about kids going up there to neck. I don’t know what the kids called it. One time, talkin’ to this kid about this unrelated thing, a vandalism thing, I mentioned it. Lovers’ Lane, I said, and he laughed himself stupid there sitting on the curb. I dunno if it was from hearing a grown-up say it or because they didn’t call it that. I think it’s cause they didn’t call it that. I don’t know what they called it. You know sometimes when you’re a kid you’ll have something and you never say its name out loud and that kinda makes it more special. I think that’s what it was.

Anyways, that was the job. Go up there and break ‘em up and send ‘em home. That wasn’t the whole job, obviously, that wasn’t even one tenth of one Friday night, even in a small town like it was then. Some guys liked pullin’ that detail, liked it way too much and out loud at roll call. Some other guys you could tell hated it, were scared they were gonna run into their daughter or something up there, their wife up there, God forbid. You heard stories. I tried to be real even-keeled about it, like I tried to be about everything, especially early on. You remember when you were real small and the first couple teachers you had, you were pretty sure they were angels? I mean it helps that the girls they get to teach kindergarten and on up is oftentimes young and pretty and they ain’t lost the spark for it yet, but those first few teachers, boy, you thought the sun rose and set at their command, and it wasn’t until you got a real bad teacher, you realized they were all just people, some good, some bad, but even the good ones you’d had were just people, you realized? That’s the kind of cop I wanted to be, the kind from when you first knew what a cop was.

So I didn’t whistle at roll call and I didn’t whistle when we were up there going from car to car, and I didn’t shine my flashlight anyplace I didn’t have cause to, and I didn’t let it linger any longer than absolutely necessary. I’m not just inventin’ things I didn’t do up there, that was pretty much standard for a lot of guys. Kids knew the routine so as soon as you all pulled up they’d start getting themselves together to get outta there, so some guys would either creep up, no lights no sirens, and try to surprise ‘em, or else they would hot-dog in and race outta the car to try to get looks in, have a laugh. Again, this is just what they did, not me makin’ up stories.

I was real sure not to do any of that, not to even joke about it in the car on the way up there or the way back, but what I would do, and this is silly, but I always tried to look nice. I mean, I tried to look nice anyway, you wanted to have a certain pride in your appearance as an officer of the law, but this was different, like, get the assignment then take a comb to the squadroom bathroom, wet it, run it through my hair a few times, make sure I didn’t have nothin’ in my teeth.

I want to say…Well, hell, I want to say it wasn’t, and then say a thing that it wasn’t, me doin’ that, because I can’t tell you what it was or why I did it, but the more I think about the reason I thought of that it definitely wasn’t the more I think that’s the thing that it was. And it’s silly. But I think, gosh it’s silly, but I think, and this is not to say I thought I was just going to get to jump in or anything like that, or that that’s even something I wanted, but I think I thought some night, gosh, listen to me…I think I thought some night I was gonna go up there, and I don’t know where my partner is in all of this but for some reason when I think about it it’s just me, and I’m up there, and I don’t sneak in and I don’t come hot-dogging in either, just by the book, so everyone starts takin’ off at their own pace, guys peelin’ out around me, dust flyin’ up, knowin’ I’m really just interested in them getting outta there and I’m not gonna chase ‘em or anything. I see me at that age, in the dark, dust going everywhere and headlights going every which way while everybody hightails it outta there, and my red and blue lights are there too, of course, I had ‘em on like I was supposed to. And there’s one car left and the guy in it, he just jumps out the back window, rolls in the dirt, and starts off down the mountain. I mean, runnin’. And there’s a girl still in there.

I’d kinda have to be in her mind, know what she was like, know that the fella had been giving her no end of trouble, that he was real pushy and mean when it was just him and a defenseless girl but a coward when other men entered into it, know that she wasn’t just… I mean, let’s say we were to do what I think we end up doin', it wouldn’t be something she did all the time, with just anybody. And maybe it isn’t even that we do that. Better that it isn’t. Better we just talk, Evenin’ miss, Evenin’ officer, You alright? That kind of thing. But it ain’t the standard chat, it’s special. It ain’t indecent, but it’s special. No matter what we end up doing or not doing, it ain’t indecent, even if it is. You know what I mean?

Anyway, the whole thing’s ridiculous, and even the parts of it are ridiculous. The guy jumpin’ out of the car. It’s probably his car! His or his fathers or his buddy’s. He ain’t leavin’. And there wasn’t a kid up there who hadn’t been there before, or hadn’t had an older brother or something tell ‘em how it went, so they knew we were just gonna send ‘em on home. The guy just plain chickenshit and the girl happy he’s gone, happy to see me. Not on your life. But I think that’s what it was.

In the Limbo-mists before him, a frame appeared, and through it, he could see his two employees, and his own body draped limply between their shoulders as they maneuvered it around a fancy party. They had dressed it in a Hawaiian shirt and dark sunglasses. In life, he had been known for his short temper, especially in regards to these two and their antics. Now, despite the fact that he was watching them manipulate his body like a crude puppet in a manner he assumed would be unconvincing to anyone paying even remotely close attention, he could not summon up that old anger, or anything like it. Anger was an emotion felt in response to something that had happened, and things happened only in relation to a fixed temporal structure, and here, he was beyond time. He watched as the employees, while reaching out to grab hors d’oeuvres off a passing waiter’s tray, let his body fall forward. The head dropped straight into the ample cleavage of a wealthy female party guest. Realizing their mistake, they dropped the deviled eggs and pulled his corpse back up.

“Sorry, lady,” the fatter of the two employees said.

“He’s had a lot to drink,” said the skinnier.

“You always were a cad,” she said playfully, looking into his body’s face, attempting to make eye contact with the lifeless eyes behind the dark frames. “See that he gets to bed, boys,” she said to the employees, and swished away into the party.

So I always could have done that, he thought, and with the barest implication that I’d had too much to drink, it would have been fine with her. A good thing, even. He thought with amusement about the fear with which he had conducted his life, the unthinking adherence to social norms. It all might have been different with some darker glasses and a louder-patterned shirt. He felt nothing like regret, though. Regret, like anger, was temporal, and he could feel himself slipping further and further away from a human idea of time.

He watched his employees leave his body seated on a white leather couch while they flirted with attractive women. The skinnier of the two employees went on and on about heady topics he didn’t know anything about just because he saw that the girl he was talking to was wearing glasses, while the fatter one took cocktail weenies speared on toothpicks from his girl’s snack plate and attempted the old silent-film trick of making his head look like it was dancing with the weenies as its feet. A third woman appeared, even more attractive than the other two, and sat down next to his body. She tucked her legs underneath her and started playing with his hair. She talked at length, laughing occasionally as though his body was somehow alive, responsive, and saying humorous things.

“You’re such a good listener,” he heard her say after a long while. “I find that’s the most important thing in a lover, don’t you?”

His body could not move or form words, so there was no answer to this question. He knew what would happen next, she would become offended or frightened by this silence and wander away.

On Earth, a second passed. She said, “I’m sorry, was that too forward? Here. Let me make it up to you.”

She leaned in and begin passionately kissing his corpse. The skinner of the two employees finally took notice and came to pull her off, making lots of excuses and alerting the fatter of the two, who threw down the cocktail weenies and came over to assist him. Their boss tuned out of the resulting fracas. Instead, he was thinking: that was all I ever needed to do. All I ever needed to do was sit, inert, on a couch, and it, whatever it was, would have come to me. The whole complicated decision-tree of human interaction, the choosing to act one way or the other from moment to moment and then having it not work out the way you had wanted so you cursed yourself and swore to do the other thing next time only to have that not work out either, it was all entirely unnecessary. I could have just been sitting quietly, in resolute silence, and I would have gotten as kissed and paid and acclaimed as I ever wanted to be. Trying to figure it out had been his cardinal sin. You could logic it out all you wanted but logic clearly did not apply. She had apologized for being too forward, and before he’d even had a chance to respond, had leapt right to kissing him, which was obviously more forward than anything she ever could have said. In his life on Earth he had envied the sort of effortless it-will-work-out-ness certain men and women seemed to have. He had wondered what the secret was, and then eventually decided there was no secret, it was just that some guys had it and some guys didn’t. Now he knew: It was not that there was no secret, it was just that the secret was nothing.

In witnessing, at a distance beyond mere spatial relationship, his body be kissed by a woman, his thoughts drifted to his estranged ex-wife, and from her to the child he had not seen in some time, and now, would never see again. He asked the realm’s master, or the realm itself, if there was any way to see things on Earth besides what he was seeing of the party and his body and the two employees, and immediately received an answer: No. His field of view was limited to his manipulated body and its environs. He fleetingly hoped their shenanigans would somehow bring his employees and his body in view of his ex-wife and daughter so that he might see them one last time, but then he decided this was the opposite of what he wanted. He knew that his reminiscing over them was only habit, a by-product of the residual humanity that was draining from him by the second. Seeing them would only cause him to regret not having the capacity to feel anything but the vague bemusement of the near-eternal.

Someone had given his corpse a boombox. Brassy Latin music was pouring from it, and his sunglasses jumped up and on his face ever-so-slightly along with the bass of the music. This seemed improbable, given what he knew about physical laws, but by now he knew better to question what he saw happening. By now he knew he had been living under a million misconceptions. The music provided the soundtrack for a bunch of party guests doing the limbo underneath a bamboo pole that had somehow appeared. The irony of people doing the limbo, and chanting the word “limbo” as they did so, while he watched from his own very specific Limbo, was not lost on him. In fact, all life from this distance looked like a latticework of ironies he had never noticed when he was alive, intricate and criss-crossing and hammered out by the conscious, living mind into something like a narrative, a journey from one thing into the next, instead of what it looked like from up here, which was a constant collision of oppositional everything, a constantly exploding firework that you only thought was a series of fireworks because you had to blink every so often.

In an Earth-minute, Mafia henchmen with guns descended upon the house. It had something to do with why he was dead and why his two former employees had thought they needed to pretend he was alive. Soon, he thought, if the bullets start flying, a lot more people might join me here. Then he realized that, unless through some bizarre circumstance THEIR employees ended up putting sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts on their corpses, they would just streak on by him here in this Limbo on the way to their ultimate destination.

As soon as they became aware of what was happening, people at the party threw glasses and screamed and ran away. He saw a spiked red heel dig into the white leather of the couch as a female guest vaulted the furniture on her way out. The house was empty in seconds, including his two employees. As shadowy figures came in through the sliding glass patio doors, he saw his body, alone, the music still playing, his sunglasses still jumping. If he had just been passed out drunk instead of actually dead, it would have been up to him to get out alive.

They left him there.

Up here, well away from that, because the ceilings were so high but the furniture was also low, you felt awkward, but in a way where you knew as soon as you got used to that feeling, it would mean you were a new, better version of yourself.




So far they’d been having sex at odd times. For instance, ten in the morning, four times right in a row, and then not at all for days and days. The way intensity and boredom refused to be rhythmic was very off-putting, and very dissatisfying, but it was a nice kind of dissatisfaction. It was the kind that made you wonder if there was something wrong with you instead of the kind that made you wonder what was wrong with the other person, and then subsequently, why you weren’t more tolerant of this thing you were sure was wrong with this other person. It was romantic, in the way she was pretty sure that word could mean “adventurous” instead of what we had come to think of as romantic, like, "love."




Where is all this money coming from, she wondered one time about everyone around her and everyone she’d met since coming up here, before scolding herself that absolutely no one around her and no one she’d met thought that, ever, and that mutual refusal to think it or speak it aloud is probably what created the effect, and the effect just managed to become reality. She hated herself for violating the code they never spoke aloud regarding the thing they never thought about, and from then on, whenever she thought something she wished she hadn’t, she would try to hear it in her head in HIS voice, the old boyfriend with the average-sized apartment, which in her memory was warm but not in a cozy way and full of flies and street noise and was basically entirely too life-y, in the sense that real life, really real life, was too imperfect, and in it, you were always tired and annoyed at everyone, and you were just too IN IT, basically. Conversations never went how you thought they would go or ended when they should. In life-life, no one seemed to know how to close a door the right way or when it was the right time to do so.

She would try to hear things the old her (the her she was before she came up here) might have thought in his voice. Then, in her head, in what she hoped was her new voice, without any Kansas in it, she would tell him to shut the fuck up.




There’d been maybe two parties at the house in the time she’d been up here and they’d been to lots more. There was one night at one party where, by the end of it, she knew she’d talked a lot, because though she was drunk, she remembered saying certain things, and her voice was raw and she hadn’t even been smoking or shouting over the music that much, but as she thought back on all the stuff she said, she was pretty sure she had gone the entire evening without making a statement or asking a question.




She thought about him, down there, thinking about how she probably never thought about him, and she thought about how, except for this thought that she was having at this moment, he was right.

She thought about how little he knew about where she was or who she was with, but she knew that he knew enough to extrapolate, and knew that if he knew how close what she imagined him extrapolating was to how it actually was and who she was actually with and what she was actually doing, he would kill himself. Or rather, he would think about killing himself, at various times, with varying degrees of intensity, in between doing normal stuff like feeding the cats or putting DVDs that had been left out, shiny side up, on the coffee table, back into their cases. He would never actually do it. If she was honest with herself, that was kind of his main problem, was that he would just keep living, no poetry to it at all. She knew she was supposed to think there was nothing really wrong with that, the default position of just being alive in the actual world, the basic nobility of just being around. She knew if you tried to articulate to most people just what it was that was so distasteful about it, about him, and her sense of relief about being away from it all, they would think you were shallow. She knew she wasn’t shallow. It really was not about purses or clothes or even about him, and here by “him” she meant the new guy with the high-ceilinged house. It was about actually living the kind of life she had always had to believe existed somewhere, for someone, or else she could not understand anyone wanting to exist at all.




There was a Monday where she fully forgot it was a Monday until she saw a school bus dropping kids off at 3:30 in the afternoon when they were parked outside of his friend’s art-space in the barrio waiting for his friend to come outside with a sack full of sunglasses.

He realized he could get the voicemails from his phone downloaded as mp3s.

All last night he killed mutant bugs and ghosts and zombies to the sound of your voice and he told me not to tell you.

The waiter had just cleared their plates and she was halfway through a story about an always-naked roommate when his phone started ringing, one of those ringtones that imitates the kind of old-fashioned phone that probably had an actual bell inside of it. He took the phone out of his pocket. "Sorry," he said, "Sorry," and pressed a button that hung up on the call without answering.

"Are you sure you don't want to get that?" she asked.

He said: "Yep!"

So they based their lives on music videos until they realized:
in the world, you had to constantly be choosing where to look,
your view was not dictated by a director
with a background in fashion photography.

What medium could they imitate
wherein one had to constantly choose one’s own perspective?

They thought about basing their lives on video games,
but no:

I was visiting her while she was working on the show you were on in that town that none of us are from. It was her night off. We were drunk at a club she swore she didn’t know the cast members were also at, though she’d later admit she knew. We made a stupid, employment-risking game of dodging the cast and the cameras. I told her someone from production was sure to spot her, and she threw a cocktail umbrella at me and told me not to worry, “they know me.” I started to tell her that that WAS my concern, that they knew her, but then I realized what she meant was they KNEW her, as in, she was the crazy girl who could not be controlled, on or off the clock, and you either went with that or you didn’t, or something. I got up to go to the bathroom, more as something to do than anything, and that’s when I ran into you, John from Boston, and it was not until thirty minutes later and a lot of prodding that you revealed you were on the show, and even then, I didn’t believe you, because you were not at all vapid, and you were actually really nice, and you seemed, I guess, multi-dimensional. I know that’s a dumb thing to presume about someone based on a cursory conversation in a club named after a perfume, but I’ll say this in my defense, even though it makes me a total hypocrite in light of everything I said about reality television stripping people of nuance, but: I can tell. Even when someone’s eyes are locked right on mine I can tell when they’re listening past me, and I have learned that sometimes, even when we’re finishing each other’s sentences and that first rush of comparisons, music taste and backstory, reveals that we’re practically twins, we haven’t shown anything, really, but an aptitude for loudly advertising ourselves in close proximity to someone else while they do the same. I guess what I’m saying is, I make snap judgments. Not about anyone’s upbringing or sexuality or moral fiber, but just about whether or not they are present. If there is a fundamental not-there-ness I wonder if anyone else notices about anyone else. If your insides are, and I’ve never spoken this phrase aloud to anyone or written it down so it might be impossibly trite or lame or something, but if your insides are a dead lake. I can usually tell right away and I’m always right. I’m desperate for a lot of things, as I’m sure Ilana would so willingly tell you even with me standing right there, but I’m most desperate to be proven wrong just one time. I am waiting for the math of someone to match up with how I actually end up feeling around or about them. You seemed great and I felt great around you. You mentioned you had a girlfriend but I already knew nothing could ever happen between us so that, that night while the A, B, and C cameras were all trained on Nicéne basically going down on a random girl in the middle of the dancefloor, didn’t bother me all that much. I had four drinks in me. I was getting on a train in six hours. I was not thinking about having to watch you every day at work, about having to introduce the world to your girlfriend via a little squiggly arrow pointing at a phone nestled in the crook of your shoulder.

I am not going to tell you the things I think are great about you. There was barely anything you told me in that brief exchange you wouldn’t end up revealing in the final edited-together version of the show, and taking into account all of the raw tapes that I have been sneaking into the edit bays to watch on Thursday and Friday nights after everyone’s gone home, you covered it all. It’s not like you showed me some hidden persona, and to sit here and list off the things I find attractive about the man you seemed to be to me and seemed to be on the show, I would not be painting anything but the kind of two-dimensional portrait I was decrying above, and besides, legions of John-From-Boston fangirls will soon do that on the Internet anyway. The only thing I can say about you that I don’t think they will, and the thing I’m pretty sure Kara has never told you, though admittedly I’m only working from the phone conversations the two of you have on the show and the things you say about her and the way you say them, is this: YOU ARE THERE. There is a person-ness to you. And I want to do all the things anyone would want to do to someone they were infatuated with, but more than anything I want to clap my hands to either side of you and hold you there, the three-dimensional person you are, and not let any part of it slip away, not let them flatten you out, not let them or life or any of it convince you to do it to yourself.

I think about what I would do if I were Ilana, or better yet, Ilana’s boss Wendy, and when the show was shooting I was right there behind a wall with an ear-piece in my ear, and I was shaping your experience. I could do my damndest to throw things in the way of you and Kara. I know they did, and I know the way you remained loyal will drive the inevitable John-From-Boston fan-girls crazy, and it did a number on me, even though I feel the way about Kara that I feel. But say I was in Wendy’s seat and I tried harder, threw more female cast-members your way, more forcefully: it’s not like I would ever be in the story. For all that, I could only push you away from where you are, I could not pull you toward me.

I think about writing bitchy stuff in the parenthetical description of who Kara is. I try out some permutations, and I smirk at them for a minute before deleting them and writing what I’m supposed to. I animate. It takes a little while. Then, while it’s rendering and I have a minute of nothing to do, I fantasize about undoing my work, stretching the arrow out so it no longer points at the phone, stretching it below the bottom of the frame, stretching it off the monitor and out into actual space. Replacing the words “KARA (John’s Girlfriend)” with the words “MARCY (That Girl From The Club).” I think about hitting play, watching the letters and their shadows wiggle, watching the arrow dance in three actual dimensions. You look up and say, “Hi.”

I say, “Hi.”

You tell Kara you’ll call her back.

The clip finishes rendering. I watch it through. It works. I drag it into a bin and open up a different clip, where I’m supposed to add a caption below a guy’s face, telling the audience that his name is Corey, and that he’s your boss at the juice bar.