"Stokely Carmichael was a Righter, 'til he changed his name to Ride the Tetrahedron an' grew wings."

Old Suh sipped heroin tea as he spoke. A melancholy sun shone through multitudinous clouds high above, letting light trick-iluminate the zillion dustmote wannabes hovering in and out of small town America. None of this fazed Old Suh. He was in the moment, remembrancing, telling Challie what things were like before the Big Break. The Stillness. Man's Dead End. National No Gun Day.

Call it what you will.

Challie would need to know. He wanted to be a Righter, long desired it, but only today did it begin to sink in deep. To be Right meant knowing what 'right' was supposed to do. Can it be defined? Or, like existence, did it ebb and flow as mercury along the sharp baleen beaches of a New England fantasy?

"What does that mean?" Challie rubbed a head shaved close with lightning bolts carved into it, latest fad for the fadless. Do it to do it. No protest or statement to make there. Feet in orange slip-on polyurethane high tops twitched under a circular glass table.

Heroin tea being stirred, sipped, bringing peace of mind to this old mentor. Old Suh looked at him with two glass eyes and a herd of white stallions roving hair to pick apart the question.

"Meaning is tough these days, boy. You best watch yo'self."

Young eyes squinted. Challie's jaw hung, inaudible words, so he looked around to clear his mind. Hard act to attain. The air, new yet humid, gave the day a pungent age. Summer here had been six years long but it snowed before he had left the house. He remembered it clearly because snow that giggles is hard to forget, even 'these days' as grown ups say. Challie wanted to be a Righter since he turned eight, when Grandpa gave him the stirrups to ride a horse Challie never owned, right before he wandered down the street to talk to the Cookie Cutters. Grandpa. Grandpa did Right long ago. Challie wanted to as well.

"This about your Grand?" Old Suh caught the memory, sugar on the tip of the tongue, and came to life.

"Yes, sir." Grandpa. Dad's attention span. Hip hop. Mom. Those that came and left.

"Hmm..." A few of the stallion strands leaped off the scalp of Old Suh, kicked up on the shoulder before joining the dustmotes in glitter limbo. "Things come and go in the world, even existence. That's how it's been since the Big Break. Now, before it, people had a set of what was right. Not everybody agreed on the what, but it was there. Buildings went up, folks went to jobs. Shoes were put on your feet after the pants. Dancing on the weekend. Wars. Yeah, I remember the war. Viet-whatcha-call-it. It's a place. Was a place. It never was. Who can say? Nobody's seen what was since the Break. We're living dead, no motivation, wandering. Now you only see caustic blisters, hear the sound of visible light crunching under your feet."

"I wear shoes," said Challie. Best to stick to one point. Old Suh talked like everyone else, puzzle words from a hundred separate logic games spat out on an invisible chessboard. Challie didn't get it. But he wasn't like the rest, didn't take the coke, heroin or alcohol the government handed out to keep people passive since the Break. He had eyes open, in order to see whatever it was from one day to the next that lay out there. Seeing truth is right. Right? The Righter has to perceive with unblurred vision. Most days, to be fair, Challie's eyes wax melted from the truth.

A woman in a perky red dress walked her caravan of dogs down a pavement made of horizontal, rotating obelisks. Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania clothed itself in the dust sun. Birds flew about, some changing shape, others dying, more being birds. A few real, live birds? Nice change of pace.

"Shoes? Good for you. Asphalt cuts the toes. Seen it happen. Once. Not sure if it was an accident or your Grandma made the streets angry. When was I? Oh. It's about ladders, Challie. Ladders and Concepts. Our thinking didn't turn real when I was your age. That part ain't changed, 'cept for who's got the rungs to climb an' how conceptualization works. See that cow over there?"

The cow in question laid sprawled out in front of the factory across the street. Living. Mooing. Eating a stop sign. They both saw it, so there it was. What more was there to say, except that it wasn't?

"Yes, sir. She's got a big...?"

"Udder. Well now, used to be an udder. But that's only if she's a real cow an' not a Concept. See what I mean? Real and unreal, if we even know what it ever was. Hard to say. Some of the things you see get solid, stay so. Others? Mirages. Saw me a young man running towards a circus of camel missiles three days back. Ran clear through 'em into a busted Volkswagen, throat ruptured. Darn shame. Once we split, couldn't call it no more."

The head nodded yes as the brain shook absoultely no. Classic childhood.

"Ain't been no cows here, not even when I was your age. I been in the Hook since I was three. Mostly white folks then, blue collar, factory wage slave union cowboys. Streets an' bars, country music an' hot jazz. Motown. Ever heard a Motown, Challie?"

"My Mom played it, when she had her head on. I liked Marvin Gaye." Soft voice as Challie watched the cow udder smile at him as it gave birth to a beehive of gooey, iridescent tree limbs. His head throbbed. A hand caressed the bottle of Anacin in his pocket Dad gave him for the hurts, but Challie wasn't ready for that just yet. Too much to see, and drugs made things worse by making them better. But he refused to close his eyes to it.

"Shame about her, your Momma. She coulda been ubuntu, but maybe she'll come back. Lotta folks in need of comin' back, an' she oughtta be first in line. If we ever find out where they went." Old Suh looked at the back of Challie's lightning bolt scalp and grinned a toothless grin. "You coulda been ubuntu. Should be. Righter? Mm, mm, mm! Why'd you wanna pick that? That's too hard these days, boy. Climbin' too high a mountain."

"I'm old enough to know what I want. I want Right. I came to you to tell me about it. So? What's the script?" Challie fumed a bit. Old people were tough to handle. Every area had an Old Suh. Same name or title, whatever it was supposed to be. Same age range of seventy to Who Knows. Wisdom swaddled in madness, the ones who were normal back then but just as much flabbergasted by the Break. A foot in each world and three hands on ten.

Heh.

"Boy, you got some nerve. Reminds me of them brothas from back then, straight up, no shuck an' jive nonsense. Martin Luther Righteous an' X-Man who motivated us outta the sharecropping ghettoes an' into havin' a backbone. Literary brothas, throwin' out them words from the Good Books, the Constitution, dead writers ain't nobody cared for since. Yeah, boy, those was good times of suits an' greasy spoons, young boys singin' like girls on the corner up in Philly. I had goals then..." He drifted off as old folks do during storytime, as if the subconscious knows the perfect spot in the tale to induce nostalgic dementia. Silence bloomed. Old Suh cried and smiled at once. "But here's all you gonna need to know before you get to walkin'. Them hippies, young people like you but on a drug we don't make no more, wrapped their heads around the Pentagon an' made it go bye-bye. Took War and weaponry with it. Half the white men in America with their gunny-gun guns, too, an' a good deal of brothas. Bang! Well, more like quiet, 'cuz it happened so slick it took three years to figure it out. All we knew after was War was dead like it had been a person all along what God shot down in a parachute back alley. No government, well, not like it was with voting an' whatnot. Cheers went up. I remember a parade over it. But, sky split like a broke zipper. Suicide, sweet suicide for months! Love won out."

Old Suh sipped heroin tea. "Yeah. Won."

Challie strained to understand. "What's a Pentagon?"

"See? You done answered your own question. If you wasn't around back when, you don't know. Can't know. It vanished from the ground, other countries, books, photographs even. Only the Old Suhs an' a few teachers is hep to it nowadays. Memory is godsend but hellbent. Only we Old Suhs know how it used to be. Old. When we all gone, then what? Then who?"

"So, I can't find it?"

"Whatchu wanna find it for?" Almost threatening, one eye huge, the other dialed down to a venomous slit. Miniature hair horses whinnied.

"Bring back the War, I guess. So we can be happy? I dunno. But first I wanna get the bible my Mom read me. The good one."

"Yeah, you a Righter. Righter's always got big ideas. Go on, get lost. I had about enough of you. You don't know what it was like to see folks getting killed. To see us gettin' killed, killin' ourselves 'cuz things changed too much, too fast! Hate. Power. Better to be here in the Break than back with strife, coloreds only signs an' animosity, boy."

"Now get!"

MUSIC SWEAT...

Walk anywhere in hit-and-run America and see the mundane trying to ignore the Break. A crib city made from Sanskrit plastics is driting down the Delaware River, biding its time, while most of the struggling masses ran to State Aid to get the vaunted heroin so such a placid Concept might go unseen. True freedom! Thoughts become tangible. You could fly, see yourself backward, turn your insides out and live just fine, peachy keen! Reality had been factory built, stepped on, recycled and given to the people for you, dear consumer, to toy with, because you never demanded it.

But it isn't called the Big Break for nothing. Society lost War, boxing, firearms, kitchen knives for the first time in Ever.

We snapped because of it. New LSD took us to the next level, shattered bubbly ambitions and kept going up and out until starlight bent and Xeroxed souls swung from windowsills to marimba rhythms.

So said the rumor mill.

The inside of your head. The inside of their heads. Outside. No control. Subconscious stereo surround sound for the eternal partyhouse of the New World. Peace on Earth and Ill Will towards men. No fighting. Combat free. Act on violent thoughts, even one, and the Cookie Cutters arrive to talk to you. They speak an obfuscated language no one gets, but to hear it is to vanish. A nation formed by violence with its heart cut out, transplanted three-prong cabbage to replace it.

Carry on.

Challie, on the hunt for what was Right, caught the Cookie Cutters, four by four, down by the corner, conversing. All they ever did when not taking someone away was talk. What were they saying? How did they say it without mouths or voice boxes, only a flat C-clamp mouth going up and down, these crayon marionettes lacking strings? They moved weird, stilted, pointed triangle caps on chickenscratch box heads, slit Googie eyes moving independent of each other. Challie heard there were once things called cartoons, two-dimensional drawings that moved on the television and made people laugh. But the Cutters were two-dimensional, jagged, geometric human-not-humans and the TV only showed static to keep people mentally sound. Are they one and the same? Dad was probably home right now getting in his daily ten-hour dose of the static love. Good for him. Stay off the streets. It's not safe out here. The cows and cookies will end you.

But Challie had the goal. Righter. Right meant going on the journey. Mom once told him so, showed him in books of people called heroes who performed brave feats most now said were too plain to ever bother with. Two-fisted chaps holding dear to bizarre short stories called morals. The best heroes in his opinion never had powers or the tremulous backing of pre-pubescent deities, but cared about the person next to them as much as they did their pressed and prim apparel. Power without force. Wisdom words. Language! Thousands who changed a nation by taking a walk across town, choosing where to sit in a diner or on a bus. Such potency. And best of all? They were real. Once. From their tales, their history, he learned his favorite term, synonymous in his head with salvation.

Nonviolent direct action.

The Break stole violence. They weren't like that, the Righters. So, why didn't anyone keep it going? Where did the Movement go?

Across the way, paper mannequins were working in a factory, bending metal into new automobiles for anyone who needed to drive on vacation or off a cliff. Challie admired their dedication while wondering what it must have been like when humanity was on the up and up. A human foreman kept yelling out for the mannequins to lax harder.

People filled this place up, Old Suh said. They worked. Got money, whatever that is. Why'd they end it all? Were they tired of the work? What's a President look like in public instead of hiding in the bunker under Fort David? What were guns for? What happened to men, and why did they leave their women behind? What's 'crazy', and why was it only certain people had it back in the day but everybody's got it now? I got too many questions. I can maybe draw up a fist but can't throw a punch because if I do I go away forever, but then, why can my hand make them? Why? Why?

Right. The hunt.

Down the street, music blared, a jagged sonic silk that pushed back a hundred cracked realities and forged them on the Cosmic Anvil into a single, congealed lucidity. Punk, some said. Hot trash from a cold mind served off sizzling taste buds. Challie headed for it, knowing the riffs and chords, the angry voice of the lead singer, informed him his friend had reached the zenith of her performance. Perhaps, just perhaps, she would finally agree to help him on his hero's quest. If he could get her to stop the hate. She knew music, art. Books.

Challie rounded the corner where people of every type and oblivious fashion sense were mime moshing, screaming, staring at the backs of their hands for signs from the future. But the majority were feeling the aggressive focus of the artist on the makeshift stage of overturned shopping carts under plywood boards. Lights, prismatic javelins, launched from the singer's acrid tongue as she belted out lyrics from yesterday and across the Pond as some say...

This sound does not subscribe

To the international plan

In the psycho shadow of the white right hand

Then that see ghettology as an urban Vietnam

Giving deadly exhibitions of murder by napalm!

Challie stayed at the back, near the school bus his friend lived in between gigs. The crowd frothed, and it frightened him. Was this humanity? Every step forward is nine to the basement.

He thumbed a handwritten leaflet showing all songs played were written by some group known as the Clash. Challie tossed it back to the pavement.

The song died, and the singer, a lean, tall dark-skinned girl a few years Challie's senior jumped off the stage in radiant beams of I Hate You All. She wore tight jeans and a ripped T-shirt with STRANGLEOCRACY written across it in red lipstick. This crass artist snarled and drooled as she blessed the crowd with chastisements. She patted lightly a royal purple Afro mohawk while straining every muscle her neck owned.

"Stop pissing your brains down the sink, you pigs! We've been broken fifty years! Doping up and sleeping all day won't save us! See the truth! See the truth! Be free to be low!"

She chanted the final phrase over and over, until she provoked them into chanting it back at her. Loud. Louder. Animated rage. As they did so, prism sunshine bolts in vertical stances appeared around the singer, over the heads of spectators, blinding the daylight, scaring Challie, who hid under the school bus.

The singer hopped off the stage, mime punched a random man in the arm. She flexed, spat, kicked over an imaginary cart and then stormed into her camoflaged, militant school bus house. Microphone slammed onto the dirty floor, she turned down the blinds on each window. Then, she began a desperate search through pillows, piles of clothing and crumbled papers.

Until Challie came knocking.

"What?!" Ripples of deep salmon illumination streaked the bus blinds and seats.

Challie pushed the door in and peeked. "Who you yelling at, Carlotta?"

She growled. "Gutter Wealth! How many times do I have to tell you? My stage name is my real name!"

Challie winced. "Calm down, girl. You ain't gotta focus your Concept at me. 'Sides, all that anger makes me uncomfortable." He regarded stacks of T-shirts, albums, books and leopard print pants.

"Uncomforta--- boy, you got some nerve. Talking that Righter bull everyday but you can't see anger is the one true motivator we have left since the Oldheads ruined the country." Gutter picked up random articles of her belongings, a clean up, only to deposit them onto another pile. "...and our heads. What brings you around? You hate my music."

Challie scratched his scalp. "Yeah. I been thinking about that. A lot. Not music, sorry, but heads. The bible I told you about. You ever find it?"

Irritated side eye met Challie's questioning gaze.

"Boy, that ain't a bible you want. It's just a book. A book about a failed movement. I mean, it was great in its day, but they fell off, you know what I'm saying? After the sky split and half the patriarchy popped off, what they fought for stopped mattering. Thought you was seeing Old Suh to get you up to speed?"

"I don't think so. What they did matters. I know."

"You're fourteen! Your thinking ain't so grand, hotshot."

Challie shrugged. "You're only three years older than me."

Gutter pissed a fit and kicked a collection of Janko Nilovic and Soul Searchers albums from the 1970s, sublime tracks from artistic consciences who, temporarily, fought back the mind blight. She was Kaleider, one who funneled their rawest emotion into dazzling displays. Gutter's calling card? Sucker punch hatred. A dangerous tightrope to walk these days, but she loved the view.

"Two years plus well read, unlike your storybook behind! You wanna save America but don't know a thing about politics, gender studies, how art affects society--"

"I know what we need to be," Challie stated, plain as day.

"Oh yeah? I heard precious little about your secret 'knowing' for what? Six years?! Must be real good since you never mention it to nobody!"

"Can't. I need to know for right now. Later I can tell the rest. I don't know why, only that I, I have to wait. Feeling? A deep feeling, I guess is what it is. But I also need to know when to do it, and for that, well...I don't know enough. When Mom read to me, I just, knew I was like them. You feel me? I need to know Right first before I can say it."

"Hmph! Teen artist and bookworm sounding off like a prophet. Fine. Only because I love you and I remember how you spoke the truth to the Milligan boys and made them sit up straight will I dirty myself diggin through the Yesterday with you. I went to college! What'd you do?"

"You sat in a rundown building that used to be a college with some wannabes and a hundred cats," said Challie.

"It's the same thing!"

"Whatever, yo. Hold on. The Yesterday? You think it's in there?" Challie's eyes widened, the childlike broadening of hope dilated. Hope with terror at its heels, for the Yesterday's hills of forgottens were filled with all manner of insanity. And worse perhaps, sanity itself.

"I did some digging. You ask me, singing, focusing these mentally ill misfits into a codified unit, even if only for a day, is the best way to go. Just need a truck, and bigger speakers for better results." Gutter reached into a mound of shirts and wrinkled flags to find a small microwave. "Finally! Hungry? I scored a pizza two days ago after I helped Mario and Chiara get woke."

"I guess. We eat, then we can go?" Challie rummaged through the books, mementos from tragic decades. He ignored the titles, instead curious about the authors. Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut. Insubstantial giants whose masterpieces never stretched real life as far as one epically tragic protest had. Typewriter geniuses who tried to pull Americans back to sacred earth, though the call of Illusion proved too strong. After the Break, the economy caught cancer and keeled over. Stores were raided. Books were semiprecious trinkets fit for the fireplace, save for the few who knew their worth.

"Yeah, yeah--hey! Stop touching those before you catch a Concept and turn us into bugs or something!"

Another whizzbang of stiletto illumination flew at Challie's head, but he ducked just in time.

"I can't make Concepts. My stuff doesn't come true. You know that." It hurt to say it, a vulnerability. The dumbest loush on the street could generate an amusing solid image to pass the day. Not Challie. No, not ever.

"Oh. Right." Gutter pushed a clumsy stack of pizza into the microwave, slammed the door shut and plugged the microwave into a juryrigged generator at the back of the bus, hidden under camoflage netting and an array of uncombed wigs..

A minute later, they had pizza, soft seats on layers of dirty clothes and the vinegar sounds of people smashing glass all across the neighborhood. Gutter Wealth sang hard truths. Focused anger reminded the locals the government's legalization of hardline narcotics and free methodone was a placebo, not a solution. She had riled them up but good. Busted glass made Gutter happier than a lark in a straightjacket.

"We wait until By the Books ride through, Challie, okay? Can't find your bible if we get tossed in a padded cell. Pizza good?" Gutter ate with fork and knife, slicing pizza as if it were haute couture cake. A leftover from better days, when a wee girl in denim skirts had been raised by parents who refused to shatter, until they detonated.

"It's okay." Pizza held all the palatable eccentricity of whitewashed cardboard on Challie's tongue as he looked through slits in the blinds. He saw the American diaspora out there, the one that moved as a mountain of serpents over a molten black tea sea.. What was the United States? Why were black people in abundance, these solidified phantoms books said were nobodies in the Land of the Free. How did white protestors, feverish for change and peace, snuff out so many like candle wicks in a hurricane, and all by wanting to share good vibes? What was race? What was racism, class, the middle class? Why had it mattered so much, and how did it work?

By the Book rolled up on the smash-and-grab woke public. The old timers in the alleys, not too drunk yet, yelled out, "Pig!" Others cried, "It's the cops! Feeble duct tape!"

In simpler times, the cops were men and women trained to enforce the law. But in the Break, even the Law shivered. But not everyone snapped, lost it, or had their dreams become bellicose jelly forms rumbling into their next door neighbor's psyche. The Senate! House! As politicians fell, or gave up because no one heard their pleas/promises/putrescence, a savvy few ran the numbers.

Find the ones unaffected, the most egotistical, narrowminded, self assured persons. New training program! White biker helmets and electronic backpacks, continual video feed! American suburban life in the 1950s, home videos to remind them what they're fighting for. And for the fight. Relive. Relive. Relieve...

"In the veins, boys!" By the Books tapped wristbands by Seiko, the needle beneath flushing a cool-hot cocktail of adrenaline and Dexedrine into the bloodstream. Books rushed out of blocky vans painted navy blue, rollbars front and back, bars on the windshield. Pulsating nightstick in hand. Not for force! They're watching, you know. Hold them out, let the thought of aggression rework the crowd over.

Captive cattle humans on the asphalt, some so convinced of pain their bodies formed bruises, welts, a rib here and there snapped. Some fell, busting their chins on the street, losing teeth. Blood on the glass flakes.

Challie made his eyes look on. Gutter joined him, laughing, slapping the back of the seat.

"Hah! He knocked the piss outta that guy!"

"You hate Book." Challie judged her with his eyes as if they wore Supreme Court robes.

"Yeah. So?"

"So why're you happy they're hitting people you riled up? I mean, not really hitting, but...same thing, I guess." He scratched that head. Life was vivid in its unanswerable questions. Gutter Wealth, even moreso. Why don't the Cutters ever take the Books?

A hard shrug almost hit Challie in the cheek. "What can I say? I like fights, and this is the only way to see one without...so sue me. Besides, maybe the beating will keep the angst in them, and they'll keep up the fight when they get out, if they get out. I saw it happen once. It's dying down. You ready?"

Challie nodded as he bore witness to the streets and people cracking, fighting, over, what? She got them angry over the drugs, but what were broken windows in the scheme of things?

"This place is a desert full of everything nobody can grab," he murmured.

"Yeah," Gutter replied as she hopped into the driver seat and beat the ignition to rescucitate the old bus. "Someday it'll get in shape." She sounded unconvinced.

Her tone carried the same disbelief as Challie's heart, though his thoughts so badly needed it to rise to the challenge.

Outside, By the Book had the dogs out for a minute. But one citizen, so convinced that dogs weren't real, figments of a pelican's dying wish, screamed and the dogs of Book ran off, sizzling away, so much cooked memory, leaving the hyped up white helmets flummoxed. The shoowdown, anticlimactic. They boxed up the non-protestors in their sanity vans where a constant white light stills the brains from clear Conceptualization, and whisked Marcus Hook residents off to the sanitarium. Garden walls for some. Induced coma for the rest.

The Gutter Wealth tour bus drove over blood glass as Challie, scared of life, cried in a clothing mound.

FIDGETING IN THE WHATSIT...

The public library in Marcus Hook had a queer, quiet charm to it, if someone bothered to notice it. Small, blockish and Grecian, it stood on Green Street and 10th, doleful sentinel, almost swallowed whole by the sacrificial rubbish of modern consumer farewells. Sneakers. Wrecked cars from a terrrible pileup on 95 South. Rodents, living and dead. Bicycles. Board games from family game night.

Concepts so real they outlasted whatever tormented mind had made them dwelled here as well. Hollow origami constructs like wheeled centaurs, pigeon musketeers and the puppet survivors of a children's show that since grew up into dejected capitalists, trading junk for bottlecaps within pygmy tunnels they dug out over the years.

Welcome to the Yesterday. Material comfort failed us. Americans tossed it out in favor of playing with their minds. Smile. The movies, television shows, record companies, pornography. As the decades moved on, these fancies died out. Who needs them when creative Johnny across the street can think up a naked chess game in the park with himself, a white dwark star, the Harvard Class of '41 and a hermaphroditic robot with an oral fixation? All good until the inevitable madness creeps in as vines up an old trellis.

Challie smelled rotten bananas, motor oil and roadkill as he stepped out of the bus. He admired Yesterday for what it was, despite the perfume.

"A library. It's a library!" He moved to it, only to stop as one rat chased another right in front of him. "Mom talked about them, but I didn't know it was, under, all this. And so close."

"Uh, yeah. It was a library. Now it's where everybody dumps their trash. Come to think of it, I had a professor, psych guy, so cute, say the Yesterday was a subconscious desire by everybody here to hide collective knowledge in order to keep us safe."

Challie looked at this hidden effigy of wonder, and then to Gutter. "Huh? How's dumping trash keep us safe? By stopping me and breeding rats?"

She plucked his forehead. "No, dummy. Think! You wanna figure out how the Righters got theirs off, it's all politics and social psychology, Challie."

He had mouthed the last several of her words, as he knew the speech so well.

"Fine! How is it, oh great Gutter Wealth who hates the name her Mom gave her?" If hearing herself talk got Challie one bronzed shoe step farther down the road to Right, then fine. He would feed Gutter's noxious fire.

"Hippies and intellectuals, elitists who turned us from factories and greatness to universities and demands for degrees. Yeah, nice thinking. But it robbed us of what we had instead of building upon it, kinda like how you say. The young numbnuts of the Sixties decided to take black ops New LSD and march on the Pentagon, make it float in the air. Flowers in rifle barrels, the whole shebang. It's all propaganda, no matter whose side you're on. Anyway, New LSD was a CIA plant to bring the hippie 'menace' to a close by making them violent. But! No, no, said the unbathed college crowd. They were too focused that day, from the potheads to the religionistas who joined in to the average dipwad looking from the sidelines so they'd have something to talk about the next day. See? It was started as an intellectual war against War, using knowledge old and new to sway the public. So many wanted it over. Well, they got over."

"I heard this earlier, but not so detailed. But, how did that get rid of guns? Of men? How was owning a gun being violent, or was it? And the thing, nearly emptying out the, what was it again?"

"Prisons."

"Yeah, those things. And the Pentagon whatsit. How did drugs do so much? Everybody takes drugs now and they aren't making the world fall apart."

Gutter laughed. "Yeah, says you. Pacification of the People is old as the hills. Beat us over the head, then soothe us with the dope of the day. Buying! Alcohol! Ads! Discotechs! Avant garde film! Oh, come to think of it, I'd better not come across a dead body in this heap!" By now she had ascended the Yesterday stump mountain and found it to be a good soapbox for her aggressive tirade. She did, until she froze.

Across the way, the corner. Flat Cookie Cutters, versicolor digits ever moving by a hill of rubber tires. Big teeth, little teeth, one-sided figurines of Please Don't Hurt Me Forever. Newspapers blew right throught their existential forms.

"C'mon, Challie," Gutter swallowed hard, hands trembled. "Let's find a way inside."

INSIDE?

Tunnels dug by strung out puppets have their uses. Challie and Gutter made the most of it, while ignoring a polyester, one-armed lamb's pleas for them to buy decomposed milk cartons. Trash fell on them. Old liquid reeking of death dripped down the back of their necks. All along the way, Gutter swore, cussed Challie out.

"This book better be good! No! It better cure the Break!"

"I dunno..." Challie knew he had it in him, even though It never saw fit to show him a license, much less offer up a blueprint for waking the country, something better than angry singalongs or creepy cutouts on corners. All it gave him, for most of his days, was the knowing that it must be him. But try selling that product on the streets at one a.m when the curtain squawks.

Gutter found a way out. She had to. Her perfectly cropped mohawk was losing its bright purple flare and the scent was ostentatious murder. Centering all her rage into the abdomen, Gutter let it out in a concentrated scream. Not so much the vocal variety, but a phrenic fractal, it making a second, mirror Gutter Wealth made of psychedelic Colorforms, silently twitching until she/it burst in a frenzy of youthful frustration, her own personal anxieties expressed as social bastard bomb.

The Yesterday exploded in dead rats and soaked pom poms, playing cards without faces. She cracked a library column and wearily felt powerful for having done so.

Challie and Gutter stood in the open window. He looked at her with awe. For a second. Garbage and fetid rot rained down. Puppet funeral on Sunday.

"I wish I could do that." He gasped.

Gutter held her head back to stop the inevitable nosebleed. "Why?! Agh! Fudging migraine!" She leaned on the windowsill as residuals of her Concept bomb, in the form of feathery eyeballs, drifted down and away, sensory soap bubbles.

"You gonna make it?" He brought out the Anacin.

"Challie...ah! I'm stronger than steel, baby boy...grrrrrrrr...! No drugs!" Her eyes watered. Toothpick light shards came and went about her shaved temples and pugnose. Gutter stumbled off the sill and onto a stack of books, records and splintery fun loading palettes. "We're in." Gag. Spew! She christened aworn out carpet in pizza vomit.

Challie sidstepped the puke and patted his friend on the back. Four seconds later, his eyes pulled him in the direction of the goods.

"This is it. This. Is. It! Books, everywhere! Why didn't I break in here a long time ago?"

"You never knew it existed. Urk! Too scared to do it alone." Gutter swooned in a bad way.

"I am not!" Challie snapped. But then he quickly forgot Gutter and her hands-on-the-knees prayer to X-Ray Specs and moved deeper into the literary sepulchre. Tatterdemalion yellowed pages fluttered in the first breeze this antechamber had experienced in some time. Paperbacks. Hardcovers. Things of musty beauty whispered to him. "You hear that?"

"No." Gutter regained her warrior stance and inhaled. "Hear what?"

"I--" Challie stopped. Could books whisper sweet nothings? Did a long lost librarian leave a permanent Conceptual imprint in a set of encyclopedias, every volume of The Boxcar Children? He didn't know, but his ears were pinpricked by subtle swish cymbal sound effects around him, interrupted only by the audible musings of a million sayings. "It's...not books. I think..I think it's things people said once, still hanging around." He grew an awkward smile. "Dope."

"Well, I can't hear a thing except this ringing! So, PLEASE, make it fast!"

He gave her a sharp nod. Right. Business. Challie began a fevered search for the book, hearing-not-hearing the lip services from the Good Old Days Choir. Is this why it's called Yesterday? Did someone else hear what I'm hearing? If so, I'd love to meet them! Oh. Bible. This place has to have at least one copy!

His hunt began in careful earnestness, fragile paper jewels picked up as babes and gently sat down elsewhere. But as Gutter moaned, though she did pitch in, A concerned Challie accelerated the pace.

Haley, Heinlein, Heller! Phyllis Wheatley, Zora Neal Hurston, Neitsche, Asimov, Douglass! Folios from The Souls of Black Folk as paper airplanes, machinegun strafing an elderly carpet with endless commas. Samuel R. Delany stared aloof at him from a back cover image. As Challie searched, Gutter saw the pages turn and bend, shift and disorganize as Nothing does when a person dreams or imagines or thinks too hard and makes a Concept.

"Challie, you can't make Concepts." She felt a chill in her spine. Gutter began eyeing the library, suspect.

But he was too busy, too lost, in the House of Knowledge. He could really, truly, down to the soles of his feet come to know everything in this palace. But, focus! He needed the one, true Calling, his bible, Mom's love. Awareness on the America of that day, any day, everyday, a litany of reality to teach him. Hero talk. Morality plays. Gold rush.

To help him, he quoted aloud what of the beloved tome he recalled, words as airy, as succulent as cotton candy by the salty sea in the pudgy hands of whimsical children.

"'Fortunately, history does not pose problems without eventually providing solutions'..." He was throwing books now. Old thrillers, mysteries, romance novels. Almanacs.

"Challie," Gutter stated. She had the watch, but her migraine put her every thought on lockdown.

Challie listened to the voice choir and his own memory, bedtime stories of real life coming back tenfold. "'Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon, um, unique in history, which cuts without wounding and...ennobles the man who wields it.' Yeah. Oh, yeah! I hear y'all! Keep talking, Oldheads! I hear it!" He shed a tear, mind full of imagery. Stories, Mom blanketed in light, a strong Dad who knew his son, called him Challie-X-Function when a young eight-year old boy tried out hip hop because he loved, not the beat, but the intelligent playing with language. In the dust library coffin, Challie had feelings good and bad, old, new, days before the Storm. Everyone had a Day Before the Storm, even Challie. Only he survived his intact.

The Break gets everyone in time. Here, however, he found what might equate to a means by which he could bend the Break, if not give it a taste of its own medicine.

I love everybody I meet, but I know they'll lose their minds, or disappear. I can't fight you, or I get taken away. But, I can fight you. Can't is can. Won't is will. Watch me.

"Challie..." The voice of Gutter Wealth went faint.

Challie gasped. Almost choked on the rising dustmotes.

"Got it! I got it!" He held one hand high, gold medal, the long sought, frayed edges, scarred binding book gripped hard.

"Challie!" A cry of warning, not attention.

His head snapped to the right. No Gutter. Left. No Gutter. Challie jumped over a sliding tower of jazz records and ran, best he could, across the roller rink minefield of collegiate garbage. He rounded a bookshelf and found his friend, clutched at the throat by a robust middle-aged man. A well dressed man in pinstriped pants, brown tweed jacket, white Tando hat and gloves. He wore nineteen necklaces, all of them cheap and gaudy, figures of Mickey, Bugs, plastic water guns hanging. He had Gutter and whispered in her ear artistic phrases that made the fierce band songstress grow a shade paler.

"Run, Challie! He's a Rush! Get out!" Every word uttered lost ten decibels.

Challie forgot all the strength he had from the voices, the past. He regained the wide-eyed paranoia unique to the child trapped between the Unknown Action and Flight. He wiped off tears. Gutter struggled, but knew her limits. No physical violence in the world. Peace, or else. The rule of the day.

Rush was taking chances.

"Hello. Challie, did she say? Cute name. I'm Antonio Fevers, and yes, a Rush. I get my high from my art, passion. Well, okay, full disclosure, other people's passions, but why split hairs? We have a bad rep, I admit, but nobody's perfect. Don't be afraid, Challie, my lad. This is my home, my Real. Feel free to browse, read, but you won't mind if I exact a toll, huh?" His sickly whispers were paling Gutter more and more.

Challie wanted to hyperventilate. He wanted to be crazy as the wildest imagineer, whip up his consciousness into a Concept tht would wipe up the floor with this guy. No physical violence, but mentally charged hurt was a card you could play and get away with every now and then. Stab this fool in the hippocampus with a stray dream about freestyle picnic tables formed into a moonshine icepick.

Better! Focusing one emotion into raw power, a Kaleider move, like Gutter.

But Challie. Wasn't. He was Righter, the one who sees things as they are and suffers little for it. Truth is power, or so he heard. But he rarely found the trigger on truth to pull in order to release that one, perfect bullet.

"You look like a good kid, Challie. My house is your casa, 'kay? Read it all. Just let me get inspired, huh? I deserve it. Life is a void. We all know it. I'm older than you two, a lot older. It's so devoid out there. Just give me ten...fifteen! Fifteen precious minutes with this Spawn of Anger Lust, and she's yours again. Promise not to suck her dry." Antonio had the calmest demeanor one might envision, lax even. Yet the eyes. The eyes were powder blue denizens of a teaspoon of hypocrisy, two tablespoons bitterness, boring into poor Challie, getting closer to the teenage gray matter.

Challie stiffened. Nerve. Where was nerve at now? He huffed. Puffed. Stared back at this man-monster with envy/fear/hate and wanted to punch him but--

Push it down!

He went for what he knew. He held out the bible in front of him, a shield made from the highest tier of civilization against the savage frontier of six billion variant realizations, a new dimension every house number. Feet frozen in place. Head shook. But, he stared this man down.

"Whatcha got there? Oh. Good one. Outmoded, but good. You broke in here for that, or is it just a random grab? You kids. No rhyme or reason to what you do."

Gutter started slipping. She summoned a tucked away vial of social hate to keep herself going, made a fist...

"Gutter, stop!"

Antonio gripped her tighter. He grew mightier. Gutter would soon snap in all the wrong ways. Challie, desperate to a bold degree, cracked open the book, and read aloud:

"'Like his predecessors, the Negro was willing to to risk martyrdom in order to move and stir the social conscience of his community and the nation--'"

"What?" Antonio laughed haughty, but Gutter relaxed her fingers. Good thing. There were enigmatic sentences bubbling up outside the Yesterday.

"'Acceptance of nonviolent direct action was a proof of a certain kind of sophistication on the part of the Negro masses; for it showed that they dared to break with the old, ingrained Concepts of society. The eye-for-an-eye philosophy, the impulse to defend oneself when attacked--'"

"Hey..." Antonio twitched. "Hey! I don't like whatever it is you're doing. Stop it." His neck got heated.

Gutter, weak, grinned. "Read it!" She winced as Antonio twisted her arm.

"'...has always been the highest measure of American manhood. We are a nation that worships the frontier tradition, and our heroes are those who champion justice through violent retaliation against injustice.'" A boy's voice adopted the tone of a nimble orator.

"Stop it! What're you--? This ain't funny!" Antonio screamed. Now he let Gutter go and he made fists, fists that punched each other with knuckles crunching.

The Yesterday filled with words behind Challie that no one comprehended, sprinkles of gunmetal fog shaken out of a starry saltshaker. Gutter lost her vengeful humor and crawled under the nearest table.

"Challie, get under here!"

Antonio hunch-lunged after young Challie, but he slid under the table with Gutter, the words of the Movement flowing nonstop from his lips.

"'It is not simple to adopt the credo that moral force has as much strength and virtue as the capacity to return a physical blow--'" He didn't know what he was doing, or if it was even him. But he kept it up.

"Shutup! Shutup! What are you--!" Antonio, flush with Gutter animosity, lost the key to his kingdom. He rammed fists down on the table. Once. Thrice. Rapid fire scrape-the-shellac blows. Kicking bare feet went under the table, just missing the tucked away teenagers.

Yesterday hummed, grasshopper sparrows tweeting in reverse. Fickle colors wafted around as Challie hugged a Gutter who began crying.

"No, no, no, why did you do it? How?! Did you call them, Challie?"

But Challie could only hold her, whisper, "Shh, it's gonna be okay. Shh."

Antonio, on the ninth punch, stopped at once. Colors and backward lyrics from an animal kingdom that never was filtered in. He knew. Everyone knew those symptoms. Diagnosis came easy. You got War in you, and doctors make house calls.

The Rush turned around, slow as a change of seasons. Three thing-men, Hannah Hoch four-color collage greedy gutluckers, eyed Antonio. Hinged jaws up and down said nothing in need of knowing without paying the ultimate price.

"Cookies..." Antonio mumbled, a tear down the left cheek asteroid plummeted and ended all life on a faded February 1976 issue of Ms. magazine.

The Cutter in the center of the quartet roved to the Rush first, legs sliding back and forth as if they were connected by a brass pin from an adolescent art class. It moved the hinge jaw with the horse drawn teethy teeth as thing-words came out of it. Some of the words were visible next generation prehistoric petroglyphs in ballerina cyclones until they whittled down to dust.

Antonio, try as he might, understood. For the first time, he got what the world desired so much to learn, playing with fire even though no one wants to burn. Yet we all scrape the matches along the strip with glee.

"Yes," he whispered back to it, crying in happy fits. "Lamps are after us when X crosses unto the navigate. Mm-hmm, but forth, forth..firth! I cannae eat queues for Taharqa now......five."

As he spoke back, the other three Cookie Cutters moved, dropping cylindrical webs of translucent paper people chains chanting stuttered Cole Porter standards. Whether the whistles or chains enveloped Antonio, Challie couldn't determine. But as Gutter hid her eyes, the event too much a reminder of her childhood, Challie looked on. He was Righter. You can't spread truths you've never seen. To be Right, you had to see everything. Right. Wrong. Whatever this would be called.

"Okay, we can sumnambulize, bee zzzzzaw quellash hype." Antonio wrote destiny on a grave wall. Brain rewritten, he walked into the center of the four Cutters, thrilled to disappear, terrified to go. As one until they walked away, whispering the Good talk of the Heaven Hell Highway. Every step taken brought each closer to obfuscation, paper people chains floating around the Yesterday as Victorian Era bedtime story confetti.

Challie, feeling a new buzz, touched one of the chains. It sighed in his palm and then hissy fit-smoked itself into oblivion.

Queerily, the young Righter did not vanish.

RIDE THE TETRAHEDRON

"...Carlotta was scared 'cuz her Mom got taken by the Cookie Cutters after she broke a dish and slapped her Dad. But she calmed down fast. Well, her version of calm." Challie sat across from Old Suh once again. He passed on the tea flavored with halucinogenic mushrooms and smiled peacefully at the old man. "I think maybe she's, scared of me now?" Doubtful pondering.

"Uh-huh. So, you tellin' me you made the anger that fool took from your girl, and turned it on him?" Old Suh had a magnificent mane this streaky day of transcendental maroon, A tall sister without eyes or nose straightened this healthy bounty with a massive comb of green worms that spewed more locks onto the seer's head.

Challie scratched his head. "Um, I think I, the book...one of us just, brought out his true self? I dunno. I'm guessing."

Old Suh puffed the chest out. He had girth, signs of someone who once pressed lots of weight back in the day. "Ubuntu. Remember I told you about them? Pure peace. Rare, young man, oh-so rare. Gotta be born with it. They get to feeling themelves an' anyone near them gets a similar sensation. Seen it myself, many a time. Yes. No talk, no action, don't break a sweat! That's why they're so infrequent, though. Ain't too many that peaceful, even after we lost War. We're a vile species, Challie."

The Righter hung his head. He would never be ubuntu. He wanted nonviolence. But peace from birth? Unfathomable.

Old Suh leaned over the table. A thick finger-picked Challie's head up from the sticky guilt pit.

"But even an ubuntu never talked to, or witnessed, the Cutters doing their thing without paying for it. And none of 'em ever touched their after effects, boy. Keep that chin up."

Challie smiled, awkward. Sneakered feet swung happily under the glass table.

"So whatchu gonna do next, Righter? Got a bible. Got a backbone."

"Yeah..." Challie thought. He gazed out at Marcus Hook. A couple walked their toddler down the sidewalk. Spiders were in webs. People drove on the right side of the road for the most part. Ten days ago, chaos city. Since he got the bible, Challie read it in the streets, vocalized the words with the fervor of a master debater on the world stage. He saw the changes. Men and women began to get up, clean up, brush long rotten teeth. Play with their kids without mumbling nonsense. Concepts made by this person or that were beneficial, party streamers, a heartfelt touch that stayed in someone all day long. Words were moving across the land like triumphal millipedes. His heart lightened. People were being humane, in that way all want and love but drop off on showing, for one reason or another.

"Me and Gutter are gonna drive down to Alabama. I heard voices of the past in the Yesterday. They guided me. It helped. This morning my Dad turned from the TV and noticed me. He called me his joy." A boy's head turned away as the sobbing tried to rise up in him.

"Stranger things have happened," Old Suh coughed out "Every thought we ever had's energy, diluted over the planet, mixed into the psyhic ecology. It's there to be heard, everybody from LBJ to Abel. Ain't never had ears for it. Seems you do."

"I, I wanna walk the Birmingham stretch. You know? Where the Movement marched on that bridge. Yeah. I figure, maybe I'll hear what they knew, what he knew, and can use it to get others walking."

Old Suh gulped the tea, eyes rolled back into his brain. "Walkin'?"

"Yeah. Inspire an army. A peace army, to march on DC. I mean, we can't drug away the Break. It never worked. The Righters knew. The human race doesn't kill problems, not really, anyway. We have to talk it out, deal with it, the good and ugly bits, wash our hands in the water. Face the issues. We're shattered, Old Suh. If we do that, people will straighten up, and the country with it."

"You got balls, boy. All this from a book."

Challie nodded. He pulled out the bible and put it on the table as if it had the weight of the heaviest anchor.

Why We Can't Wait. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I, remember that, Challie. Good times in hard weather. " Old Suh's chest heaved. He shed tears.

"I don't," said Challie, "but I'm gonna make sure America does. What I got looks like it's just about black struggle. It's so much more. Have you read it? It's a manual for how to upgrade humanity, to get us to stop being mean to each other. Maybe that's why we got what we got. Cutters. Concepts. Crazy. Maybe we didn't get what we wanted, but what we needed. One big wake up call to rewrite the board. No violence ain't the end, it's just the start. I gotta know. I gotta push and find out."

"You're in good hands, boy."

Challie nodded. "Tomorrow, we ride."

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