b_t_e__epilogue__up_to_a_point_in_time birdmad [[last piece and then it's really done]] 041126 ... birdmad You manage to land an evening position as a technician for the more general industrial branch of a company notorious for being one of the largest deefense contractors in the country, at the same time, after a number of false starts and missed connections. you actually manage to land something of a date with Amber. The first time you two go out together, both your late hours and her late hours combine to limit your options on a weeknight, so your first stop ends up being a trip back to her house where her mom is in a dead exhausted sleep from another day as a nurse a the Lincoln Trauma center up Central Avenue. Her stepfather is crashed in the living room, apparently either coming off a lengthy tweak or having drank himself to sleep. Walking right by him, you follow amber's lead going into her room where she has recently painted the walls grey with red and black trim. She rummages around in a box that she has pulled from a spot behind her dresser and pulls out a fairly healthy sized joint. As Jason and Carolyn are letting you occasionally crash on their couch, they've lent you a copy of the key to their apartment and sid just not to make too much noise coming in or leaving. Fair enough. Amber puts a CD by a band called Rudimentary Peni in her stereo and then shows you the cover art, which is one of those "see-some-freaky-shit-no-matter-which-way-you-turn-it" sorr of covers. Even though you are barely high when she shows it to you, it is so disturbingly funny that have laughed yourself nearly silent. Amber seems puzzled by your reaction and at first seems to think you're upset by something. "No...not upset...damn cd cover is so weird i just laughed myself out of breath" "Oh yeah," she says, with a small giggle, "it kinda did that to me the first time i looked at it high." not wanting to spend the rest of the evening just sitting inside, you remark that even though it's still september, it seems to be getting cooler faster this year and maybe a walk might be cool. "I know a pretty good place for it, and i know those boots you wear can handle it." For all the times you played chauffeur on her dates with Derek, Amber has said that she has no problem driving since she finally got her license back and you just lost yours, especially if you are going to be staying mostly at Jason and Carolyn's. You get in the ar and she drives up to a spot a couple of blocks or so north of her house and pulls into the parking lot of a small city park. "Follow me," she tells you, and you follow. it ends up being less of a walk than a hike, but in addition to being pleasantly high, you are in the most enviable cf company, climbing along the sides of this not-quite-montain and peering down into the place where a road will eventually be built once the site is quarried and blasted some more You both make the same remark that one of the giant excavators looks like some sort of sleeping giant lizard, which is parobably a side effect of the weed, but it's funny to think you were both sharing the same thought. the two of you climb down the hillside into the pit where the sleeping machines and structures are sitting and mess about like little kids on playground equipment. The moon, nearly fullserves as a pretty good light source and though the sky is clear and completely cloudless, you are both started by a flash of what seemed just like lightning illuminating the whole sky for a fraction of a second. When you are thoroughly worn out from horsing around on the machinery, you climb back up to a rocky flat just off the top of the hillside and sit there having a series of long and meandering conversations about seemingly everything and nothing at all. Night begins to give way to the first blue-grey traces of dawn and you both start back down the hill and around toward the park. When you get there, Amber stops and sits in the one swing that isn't some sort of toddler bucket and drifts lazily back and forth in the spot. Sitting in the sand at her feet, you can't help but be struck by how pretty she seems, her slightly stoned grin lending her a mysterious quality like the smile on the Mona Lisa. "Oh cool!" she exclaims, pointing just over and behind you. You turn around and as the first brighter traces of sunrise start creeping over the eastern horizon, you notice a swarm of bats cutting to and fro as they come closer, apparently returning to their roost to sleep away the day. It is seven AM by the time she drops you off back at the apartment. You invite her in for a second, but she has to run so you say a sort of goodnight and then surprise her by taking her hand and kissing it lightly just before you step out of the car. She smiles and says "call me tonight from work, we might not be able to do anything tonight but since we've both got tomorrow night off, i think we could plan something." "Yeah, that would be cool." "see you later." You feel an electricity running through you that everyone from Jason on down to the people at work seem to notice. It's a fact that you would be hard pressed to remember the last time you felt quite this good, even with your oddly retentive memory. Over the next couple of months, even though have made no sexually motivated moves, you are in no hurry to bring up the subject or even really consider it at this stage, you start to notice that for some reason, she regards you with the same wariness that a cat regards a dog lying in its path. You are taking things slowly as much because of something she has said as for your own reasons, but you are unsure as to what is fueling her seeming suspicion of you. While, by your own admission, you may not be the best guy in the world for her - you can suppose that, based on what she's said about the quality of some of her past relationships, Derek included - you are also nowhere near the worst. To your added chagrin, further proof of her distrust is her insistence on bringing along her girlfriends, Layla, who is nice enough, Shayna, who seems to be jealous of whatever is or isn't going on between you and Amber, and Tiffany, an underaaged alcoholic and pretentious little snot who has become a friend of Amber's as a result of having been Derek's most recently discarded fling. (Secretly, you laugh to yourself thinking about Derek's involvement with Tiffany, after Derek had burst into fits of uproarious laughter when a childhood buddy of his named Wade Woodson - a rat-faced weirdo if you ever saw one - got busted after trying to molest a pair of 8-year old girls in the bathroom of a grade school. You can remember his laughably pathetic mewling to the judge during the news footage of his arraignment..."I love life, i love music...(pregnant pause)...i love my cat" and you start to wonder with a secret evil grin that never shows outwardly how long will it be before Derek goes from trolling for high-school girls to becoming another ridiculous dipshit crying to the judge as if being fond of cats is going to lessen anyone's disgust) (...) 041130 ... birdmad Over the next few weeks, though, Amber ends up proving the adage that people who aren't very trusting aren't generally very trustworthy. She suddenly starts standing you up when you make plans together, when she does show up, she shows up late and you almost think you can smell the faint after-traces of sex on her, which, on one hand excites you to no end, but on the other, makes a liar out of her because of the remarks she made once during one of your chaperoned dates where Layla tagged along and instigated a conversation about sex. A couple of months later, even in spite of your increasing suspicion of where she seems to be coming from, when you finally manage to get an evening alone with Amber and after choking on the words for weeks looking for the right place and time to say it, you admit to her that you are in love with her and have been for some time now. You are left to interpret that she doesn't share your feelings by the awkward silence which spends the rest of the evening blossoming into a pronouncedly nervous tension. It's the same reaction you got all those years ago in high-school when you first told Tina. Unlike Tina, however, there are still times when Amber comes to see you and even after you lose the technician position after the night-shift gets cut she still comes around while you sink into a stesdy despair. Your house has been robbed while you've been crashing at Jason and Carolyn's and the thieves weren't content to simply steal, they had to completely trash the place. You do a million little favors to try and stay on their good sidfe, but Carolyn is becoming increaqsinly tired of having you around and you don't really blame her, since this is a complication nobody bargsinerd for. you take bus and cab rides with what little money you have left to do job interviews and put in applications, and each time you get back to the apartment, you are exhausted, but even though Jason is trying to be cool about it, Carolyn is becoming more and more unhinged just over things like catching you falling asleep where you sit. Tired of it, you sneak out a number of nights and crash under some well concealed hedges in a park a coupleof blocks south of the apartment. While most of the city is laid out in a rather fastidious network of square and rectangular blocks, thus place is slightly newer, built in the early 80's and is vaguely circular in shape. Because of the winding path to get from the center of the neighborhood, the cops and park rangers don't come down very often which suits you just fine. Around this same time, amber stops coming and stops returning your calls. She took you to the place a few miles further north where they were going to be moving and gave you the new phone number, but it alwys comes up as being out of service. You shower and change clothes at the house, you do your own laundry late at night in the complex washroom. when you are around the apartment, you put up with Carolyn's ignorant lecturing about your lack of effort to find a job in spite of the fact that since you lost your tech job, you've put in over fifty applications for even the worst shit jobs you could find so long as you could find something and have been on nearly twenty interviews only to find yourself coming up just short enough in your qualifications to not get the jobs you're after. After six weeks of not hearing from her, Amber shows up at the apartment on a day whwen you have decided to take a break from the grind of the futility circuit you call the job market. When Carolyn opens the door and lets her in, your heart skips a number of beats. You remembered her birthday and sold some of your remaining CD's over at Zia for just enough cash to buy her a copy of a particular book on Tarot in which she had mentioned being interested. Of the 500 or so CD's that once made up your collection, you are now down to about 40 with 300 of them having been stolen and the rest sold to the Used CD desk at Zia for whatever cash you could get for them to pay your share of the expenses in the aprtment and to get around and hunt for jobs as well as the present. "I know it's a couple of weeks late," you say, handing her the neatly wrapped boo, "but since i hadn't heard from you, here it is... happy birthday Amber" She opens the wrapping paper and her face lights up in a smile that sends that warm sensation running through your chest again. "Oh, cool! How did you know?" She asks. "You told me, remember?" "Oh yeah...I'm headed downtown to the art museum now that they've re-opened it. I've got to do a couple of quick papers for my art history class, wanna come with me?" In Amber's car, which is now a rolling wreck, you tell her that you missed her and that after so long without hearing anything from her, you were, at the very least, worried about her. "I don't know if i should tell you about what happened, Alex." "You know how i feel about you, Amber, you can tell me anything." Oh, you just asked for this one, Alex. You just walked right in front of the goddamn firing aquad, man. "Well the guy i was seeing- (say what?) got me pregnant - ( Oh Jesus H Tapdancing christ) and i didn't want to keep it, but he wouldn't help me get rid of it so once i got that done, i've spent the last few weeks just not talking to anybody after it happened and i'm not really fond of men just now... but we're still cool, right?" Alex, if you had a half an ounce of sense in you, you would just jump out of the car right now, rolling down the freeway or not. "If you like." WHAT?! Alex, come on! You've been (as unobtrusively as possible) worshipping the ground she walks on and she's just gone and handed you back your heart with a big gooey helping of some other dude's man-gravy and shoe-prints worked into it, and you're just going to sit there and take it? What the fuck is wrong with you, man? As spring rolls into summer and you ditch the apartment to move into the guest apartment on the back of your grandmother's house you go through a cycle of better paying but short lived jobs and things actually start to look like an actual relationship is forming between the two of you. Moving into the back house after your brother, his wife and their kids move into the main house (after an unsucessful attempt at moving back to Texas and trying to make a decent living in a place that has become mostly a tourist economy) you find that your sisters have packed what little there was salvageable of yours from the house in some boxes. Among the things you find in the boxes, you come across the manuscript for your novel project and decide that maybe you should give it another chance. You land a position as a data entry operator and receptionist in a small department down at City Hall. The office's computer use policy is pretty lax and you make fantastic headway re-writing your old novel. The return of the novel ends up being about the only bit of particularly good news as, without admitting anything, and in spite of how much closer things seemed to be becoming between the two of you, Amber starts acting sketchy again and then just stops coming or calling altogether, waiting several months before sending you a letter that tells you as politely as possible and without explicitly or directly saying so, that her preference is pretty much anyone but you. You should have jumped, Alex. 041201 ... birdmad Because it seems that good news can't ever go without being followed by bad, Amber's letter comes to you exactly one week to the day that the city hires you from the temp pool. The money you had been saving do something special to celebrate her birthday (which was a week before yours, two months earlier during the period where she just stopped talking to you altogether) immediately gets redirected into a copious quantity of liquor, mostly Southern Comfort. You put on a brave face and fool everyone at your new job into thinking everything is fine, immersing yourself in your work and building a solid reputation as someone who "Gets Things Done" ... you manage to pass the background checks in spite of your past, which makes sense considering you used three different names depending on whom you were dealing with and made sure that little if any of those things from that time could be brought home to you... no one even notices how often you come to work hung over. Ultimately, you end up doing so well at your job that before your initial probation is completed, your managers break procedure and promote you to fill a vacancy when a lady a couple of notches up the food chain leaves for a better offer. You move up the ladder a couple of more times before reaching the limits of your ambition, becoming comfortable and somewhat complacent. During your first few months you find yourself attracted to Irina, the other temp who got hired on with you, but since she is ridiculously beautiful and can take her pick of the cluster of admirers around her, she never takes you particularly seriously. When her boyfriend turns out to be a crazy jackass, she starts to reconsider you as an option, but then family issues come up and she suddenly moves back to Las Cruces to take care of her grandmother. You make a few other half-hearted stabs at serious relationships, but your track record is such that between your fear and neuroses that have become deeply set since the whole Amber debacle, you either manage to fuck it all up or you find someone with whom you only manage mutual antagonism. Eventually you go back to random, furtive sport_fucking , though you are still essentially bored by it. You become diabetic, not discovering this until the symptoms are so bad that you end up in intensive care for nearly ten days. Apparently, when your blood sugar levels get too high (and we know a thing or two about being too high, now, don't we, Alex) your blood becomes highly acidic and your body goes into a hard downward spiral where it starts metabolizing muscle and fat and everything it can in a futile attempt to flush all the glucose out of your system, stressing your liver and kidneys in the process. After all the weight you gained from the months of heavy drinking, you top out at three-hundred-and-five pounds by your thirtieth birthday. Three months later when you are admitted to the hospital, you have dropped nearly sixty pounds in a very sudden and disturbing fashion. As is typical of the junkie you have always been, it is after you are diagnosed as diabetic that you begin to manifest a raging sweet-tooth. After all, self-destruction should be as enjoyable as possible, no? Andrew and his family move to a house in a new section of town nearer to where he works and nearer to the old neighborhood where you grew up. The property is old and unsustainable, so you move to an apartment just off the bus line from where you work. On the day you finishing your preparations for the move, you find Amber's letter - bloodstained from the time shortly after receiving it when you got incredibly drunk and sliced yourself in several places with a dull knife - and burn it along with your stub from the Bauhaus concert you attended with her. Meanwhile, you work your way up from being a data-entry monkey to a position where your talent for talking and explaining things to people gets you put in a position where you do nothing else but explain things to people, some of whom seem resistant to learning anything You do a halfway decent job of trying to forget about Amber until a woman who looks almost exactly the way she did when you saw her last begins riding the same bus you ride to work. Her hair color is a little lighter, more blonde, but her face is almost identical and her sense of style is very similar. Everything comes flooding back and you are paralyzed by it. When you finally work up the nerve to ask, she stops riding the bus and you are suddenly as fixated on all the unresolved feelings and questions you had when Amber left. At your twenty-year high school Reunion, Tina is still married to the same guy and has two or three kids. She is happy, you are happy for her, but in conversation you come to realize that she is every bit the boring housewife that the young, naive romantic you were when you were in love with her never wanted to see her become. You don't do anything about it or say anything about it, but you find your eye drifting towards a classmate whom you kind of disliked back in your school days. She's now a mid level suit for one of the tech companies you were working for during that whole unstable period after your mom died. Why didn't you make a move, man? Oh, yeah some of those jobs you took to take your mind off of Amber, like the bouncer gig that your promoter friend KK got you at one of his functions where the crowd got out of control and some jackass wrestling fan swung a steel chair at your face and knocked out most of your teeth before you kicked the holy, everlasting and ever-living shit out of him...that have anything to do with it? In what is the most stable thing outside of your family, you work for the same office for twelve years until you experience a minor_setback and find yourself laid off of your job due to budget cuts. You occasionally run into Dana, with whom your relationship has grown oddly contentious. Sometimes she needs a favor, occasionally -but decreasingly so over time- she wants sex, but anytime she comes around, it can be assured that some form of trouble will follow. After several months without hearing from her after the last time you argued, she sends you an e-mail the same day you land a new job. As if to piss on your parade (which she's sometimes fond of doing,) Dana decides to e-mail you the link to Amber's old Myspace page. It is no coincidence that the day you got the call from your new employer is also the same date on the calendar as that little hike that you and Amber took up the hillside. It was a blind link disguised with a "tinyURL" and since the time Dana sent you a mixture of bad music videos along with something godawful image called the "Goatse," you have never opened a disguised link again. A friend with a better security set up on his computer follows the link for you and tells you what it is. "It looks like an old Myspace page," Vincent says over the phone, "nothing awful or harmful here, None of Dana's usual tricks like the Goatse...just some chick named Amber. Looks like she hasn't updated it in a couple of years or so. Does it mean anything to you?" "It shouldn't," you tell him "It really shouldn't, but i hate to say it does." Delete the message, don't follow the link...Alex, for fuck's sake, it's been twelve years, let it go, man. Let it go. It should be obvious to you now that she never cared, in spite of what she said. Get used to it... it's just you, a few good friends, the cats and me, the voice in your head you've never quite managed to listen to. That's probably how it's always gonna be 111009 what's it to you? who go blather from