072818 He can hardly be the only person for whom the reality is a little less glamorous than the songs amd swashbuckling conversation; let’s not hold that against him. There’s plenty of other stuff to hold against him, after all. We are going to need someone else, she had said to a room full of a very few people, the only ones who knew there was anything wrong. Someone who can get the job done. She plays back this conversation in her mind, while whistling over the countryside in a high sleek train. Out the windows, weeds and crops and shaggy dusty trees slowly, slow as the first few imperceptible drops of rain, begin to be punctuated by tenements, abandoned factories, hasty piles of lumber by the tracks, rusty water tanks, and then before you know it, everything, every dirty, graffiti-encrusted thing about the city is suddenly there, whipping past the window like spin art. Sometimes if you swivel your eyes long enough you can see a moment, see right into a moment, as clearly as looking down into a deep still pool in a trout stream the morning after a thunderstorm. In one of them, a pair of mothers plays with their waddling infants in a sand pit. The one nearest you smiles too much and has too much lipstick for the reality of this town, or so the befuddled country visitor thinks. How can she be so oblivious to the certain death that lurks around every lead-painted, rusty-nailed blind alley in this hive of miscreants? Cut to the one particular miscreant, the one who was muttering and singing to himself. Cut, then, to the hotel. He and his partner used to work in one of these hotels. A few of them, actually, meaning, legitimately work, for the owner, and get paid a few soggy bills a week. That didn’t work out very well, temperamentally or philosophically. So let’s just say they, uh, didn’t get asked to come back at the end of last season. Now, they work in all of the hotels. Cut to room 211. You put your money in a mattress! (he sings) And somebody takes it out! His partner shushes him with a smile that’s only just barely not as annoyed as he is. What? I’m just singin a song! It’s a working song about a workable situation. They’ve already slashed both mattresses and come up with—nothing, dammit. But then our guy notices (finally; he’s not exactly a private eye) a chair with metal tubing for legs, and says to himself, hmm, do ya think? Picks up the chair while partner’s still doing something with the dresser drawers, with his back to him, and worries the rubber cap off the bottom of one of the legs, and—voila! Angels sing. The angels whose faces are printed on the bank notes sing out the chorus of a dirty drinking song, in perfect angelic harmony. Yes! he shouts, prompting another agitated shushing. He continues with the other three legs, then starts rummaging around in his duffle bag for a pair of needle nosed pliers. When he turns back around and picks back up the chair, though, the tubes are empty. Literally am I going fucking crazy? he asks himself, an instant before he gets white-hot mad. Dude what the fuck. I thought we weren’t going to play this. We share everything, remember? Relax, his partner says, look in the dresser. With a grin that’s considerably more self-satisfied than the puerile playground prank deserves. Ha ha very funny. Well it turns out there’s not a ton there, but hey. There’s some fives and a few tens, a couple of official documents of some sort, and two bonds that they’ll have to figure out how to cash in. Not great, not bad. Some days are like that. Why is there so much money in these old flophouses? Why is it always good fishing in this part of town? Well, you know what people had said: If you make cash illegal, only outlaws will have cash! Ha ha, turns out they were kind of right. Vive la revolution, eh buddy? Yeah, whatever, his partner grumbles. They’re getting their things together, and contemplating which method of egress would be the most efficacious at this time. There’s obvious advantages to the window, with its tapeworm-segmented downspout leading to dumpster, and then the alley, but then again there’s a certain appeal to the old walk-down-the-hallway-and-stroll-right-out-the-fucking-door technique. Ultimately, they decide on the former, because this happens to be one of the hotels they used to work in—work for—and there’s a pretty good chance that the bloke working the front desk is going to be someone who will recognize them, and then a pretty good chance that if he does, he’s not going to be overjoyed to see them, and then if he’s not, there’s a pretty good chance that he’s going to get an itching to do what *he’s* good at, which involves, unfortunately, a lot of tattoos sretched over hypertrophied muscles, aggressive motions performed much too quickly, and a lot of unpleasant pounding of certain miscreants’ faces. Yeah, let’s take the elevator, shall we? They work the rusty latch on the window and have a look down. Meanwhile the train skates ever closer to the (aptly named) Terminal. The sun’s going down; how anything could voluntarily go down into the dilapidated mess that is this city’s skyline I can’t fathom, but there it is.