The shadowy second story gray deck overlooked the street. The evening sky was clear, the air crisply cool and bringing with it a feeling of total exhilaration that hung in every grotesquely shaped oak tree and Spanish moss strand. There was still some moisture that the cold front didn't sweep away, but it did little besides cover the cars parked alongside the curbs the with dew and give a no wax shine to the brick and stone streets below.

Dean leaned against the railing on the deck and practiced breathing. Exhale for six seconds, slowly, letting out the air. Exhale for two. He concentrated on the dueling cigarette cherries across the street. Two shadowy shapes were stabbing at the air with their smokes making "S" and "V" shapes under the low hanging moss that pointed down like silvery fingers. They battled until a white pickup truck obscured them from sight before driving away and leaving one glowing ember moving rhythmically up and down.

A silver Honda pulled up in front of the building, coming to a rest behind his battered Celica. She was here. She got out from her side and walked up the path leading to the foot of the stairs of the second story. His chest felt a familiar lighter than air feeling and he forgot all about concentrating on his breathing. She walked into the streetlight, illuminating herself in a blue ethereal tint that followed her up the stairs.

He turned to watch her. Her smile appeared first, and she left the glow for a more vivid apparition. Ivory skin that still experienced an occasional adolescent ourburst, scarlet hair reaching almost to her waist, the most graceful walk and... presence that he had ever experienced in another person. Every time he saw her he felt some Promethian being had tapped his brain and created this person to cross his path four years ago. She walked up to him and hugged him in greeting. She looked flushed to him.

"How was work?"

"Ugh," she rolled her eyes up and grimaced. "I am so tired."

"Are you okay?"

"Um... I feel kind of faint. I don't know. I guess I haven't had anything to eat and that walk up the stairs made me a little dizzy."

He looked at her closely. Something wasn't right. He couldn't tell if it was physical or if she was holding it in. It didn't seem like the right time to have The Talk.

"Why don't you come inside and we'll just chill here. We don't have to go out anywhere."

"Oh, I... I think I'm just going home. I thought I would be able to hang out, but I am tired and I have reading to do. I think I'll go home and read until I go to sleep."

"Yeeahhh."

They stood silent. Dean felt a strong need to take in every detail that lay in his field of vision, discerning every smell and shadow, her scent against the background of autumn jasmine and a glint of light catching in her eyes.

"I don't want you to disappear again, G. Ever since I met you... I see you for a few months and then you vanish."

He felt a cold shudder run up his spine and just did it. He moved forward and kissed her. She smiled and looked surpriseed at the same time. Dean was good at reading people but he could never quite... get... the... whole picture... with Gina.

She finally pulled away and began to walk backwards toward the top of the stairs. He called out to her one last time.

"Are you sure you don't want to come in for awhile?"

"Yeah. Gotta go. I feel kind of..." Gina eyes darted from him to the street. "Hey, why is that person standing across the street?"

"She's a prostitute."

"Oh."

She turned and walked down the stairs, her hair trailing behind her a half step behind. He watched her walk through the blue glow and back into the shadows, staying until she was safe in her car and her taillights faded away, leaving only the now stationary single orange glow.

Dean walked past the motion detector light to his apartment door. The rooms were located over a lawyer's office and were impossible to break into. There was no way to reach the windows and anybody climbing the stairs was easily seen. A fortress of solitude on an island of distractions.

His roommate was inside strewn across the floor in front of the television. He was on his seventh hole of Sega PGA Tour III.

"...licensed to kill gophers... granted by the Government of the United Nations. I see you there mister gopher. You think you can hide but you can't. I'll find you. I am the Cinderella story, having been granted total consciousness by the Dalai Lama himself..."

Sal continued on under his breath in a stream of Caddyshack consciousness monologue that always accompanied his golf swing. He was blissfully ignorant of his surroundings when he chose to be.

"I see no red headed female accompanying you across the threshold. Wassup?"

"She uh, felt tired?" Dean sounded unconvincing but hopeful.

"She didn't want to hang out?"

"No. "

"Mmmmm. might I suggest not calling her tomorrow?"

"You might, and probably will."

"Look Dean. I'm only telling you this once, as a friend, then I'll shut up. You did what you thought was right and expressed how you felt. You can't take it back. I think you did the right thing, but you can't predict or control how she was going to act. Don't call her. Let her call you or she'll disappear and you won't run into her again for another year."

The blissfully unaware roommate words impacted on Dean like a cold shower. He felt alert all of a sudden.

"Besides, I haven't heard a chord strummed or a Macintosh tapped since you ran into her again. You can't have pure expression without the expression."

Pure expression. Sal and Dean were bonded by a commitment to create with no interruption from the idea to the medium. Sal was an artist, a painter. He took on work wherever he could find it, as long as he could do as he pleased. This meant eye-popping club interiors for hundreds of miles, body painting at raves, art shows. billboards. Strange creatures from the pit of his Dali and Maurice Sendek soul came forth and took position in blacklit halls and stage walls.

They met at Lollapalooza where Sal had a huge display set up, paintings sentrying a huge white on black lurid triptych with crazy screaming images and bizarres psychedelic creatures playing with the various Lollapaloozers hallucinatory states. When Dean interviewed Sal for an article in an underground magazine, they found an affinity in the desire to produce works untainted by overambition and pretentiousness, letting the creativity flow.

Dean wound up writing the most evocative journalism piece he ever wrote. He got so fired up by the accolades that writing became an all consuming passion, unprofitable as it was. He would go anywhere, sacrifice work, health, relationships if there was a chance to burn and feel the intensity flow through him again that resulted in an article. Even by this time though, he felt a straight journalist's life too restricting.

They felt like outlaws in a way, creative ascetic samurai. The only thing worth living for was the rush, the final brushstroke, musical note, or adjective that signified the end of a creation. Dean found himself constantly distracted, though, always letting life interfere with work. He was increasingly aware of time, and this began to eat at him until a certain degree of nausea was achieved, a chronic pain in the morning that went away when he really had his shit together.

"I'm trying, man. If I could just find out where this is going to go, one way or the other I could move on. I do not have the amazing positivity yet of young Salvador yet."

The phone rang. "Work on it. Hold that thought," said Sal. He picked up the phone and screamed into it, "Aieeeee!" Anyone who knew us caught Sal's greeting, anyone who didn't hung up.

"Ahmed, what's up. Yes I'm available, how much?" Sal covered the phone and turned to Dean and mouthed "business" to him. Dean retreated to his room. "No you'll have to explain what a buttload of money is. I doubt a buttload is the same for me that it is for you..."

Dean threw himself on his bed and kept his thoughts still. Cardboard boxes and makeshift shelves leaned against the walls and held piles of books. Gina stared at him from her picture over the makeshift computer desk fashioned from an old dresser. He stared back at her. The picture looked dusty. He stood to wipe the picture with a T-shirt when Sal burst in the room.

"It's your brother. There's something wrong with your Dad."

---

The next morning Dean drove to his parents house on the deep in the suburban enclaves of the county. His stomach was raw. and had kept him from making it over as fast as he wanted. He couldn't hold down his coffee and decided not to try eating.

When he pulled up to the house he saw his father examining his Pontiac in front of the garage. The house looked like every other house, coquina shell and tan stucco, four bedrooms three bath. A sign out front declared "Yard of the Month" to nonexistent spectators.

Dean's father was wearing bizarre earphone headgear. Dean walked up to his and stared at him, puzzled. His dad finally recognized him.

"Rush," he said, tapping his right ear before turning pulling off the headset. They finally got him, thought Dean. My father is a dittohead.

Which came as no surprise. Dean slowly watched his father change. The last statement his father made to him that sounded fatherly was during the Gulf War when Mr. Hudson declared in front of his friends that his son was not going to die for oil. Dean was shocked. He had never heard anything remotely seditious emerge from his father's mouth, but the two time Reagan/Bush supporter was now waxing eloquently on the frustration resulting from the Rodney King trial and subsequent riots, defending women's right to choose. It was bizarre. He was one of the last victim's of his company's downsizing and the sixty-two year old nuclear plant designer was tinting pepper into his salt colored beard and grasping in vain at whatever employment straw that he could reach.

"Why aren't you working today?" asked Mr. Hudson.

"I, uh, took the day off." His father looked smaller, like he was losing weight. The dye job on his beard was chestnut, several shades darker than his natural color.

"Can't make money that way, can you? Work isn't like school kid. You can't just drop out."

"I didn't drop out."

"Well, you didn't finish." Dean's dad's words stung enough to make Dean wince. "Go talk to your mother, willya? I gotta finish this up before I have to... finish up. I gotta finish up."

"Okay, Pop."

The elder Hudson surveyed his son from behind his steel rimmed bifocals. Dean stopped himself and stared back. Why did he say that? He never called his dad Pop before. That was what his dad called his grandfather.

Dean hurried inside. He walked down the hall past the family gallery where a young sailor that looked like a black and white ringer for a young Sinatra smiled down at him with youthful impetuousness. His mother was at the kitchen table, ignoring the angry image of Newt Gingrich spewing silent hatred on the television.

"What's up, mom."

"Oh, hi. It's nice to see you," She looked up from her bills and spat Staten Island sarcasm. "Feels like you were just here yesterday." Yestidday. "Your Father's been waiting for you to cawl. Is your phone hooked up yet."

"No." He felt indignation rising and restrained it. "What's wrong with him?"

"Your father went to the doctor last week. They can't find out why but they don't think he has too long."

"Well, what is it."

"Your father is disappearing. "

Dean was taken aback. His father was getting older but he couldn't just see him... disappear. Not yet.

"Is there anything we can do?"

"No. Your father is very frustrated. He doesn't think anyone will hire him now that he's disappearing."

Dean looked puzzled. He mother didn't seem to grasp the reality of the situation. "Mom, if he's disappearing, why is he trying to get work? Shouldn't he try to relax before he vanishes completely. I would think the additional stress would hasten the process."

"I don't know. He's very worried. He keeps sending out resumes and doing chores from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to sleep."

"You know," said Dean. "I think he's been afraid of this for a long time. Look at all his friends from the job that have disappeared. I guess it was inevitable."

His dad emerged from the garage. Dean went to sit on the couch, but was halted by his father's bark. "That's Archie Bunker's seat," was Mr. Hudson's version of territorial pissing. He sat in his space and turned the volume up on the remote as President Clinton replaced Newt on CNN.

"Boooo! This guy is full of shit..." Dean's father continued his wrathful rage against the nearest target. Dean always felt it was funny how fast his dad swallowed the radical Republican party line. He felt it intensely ironic that the political values his family had supported a decade ago were in part responsible for the felling of the breadwinner and the eventual disintegration of the family as a unit. They told him what he wanted to hear, and blamed who he wanted them to blame.

"... I can see right through him."

---

The doctor gave his father a month. It would only be a week before he became noticeably transparent. Dean woke up every morning with acetylene burning in his stomach, and he was eating his first meal later and later in the day.

He tried to call Gina the afternoon he had visited his father's house. She wasn't home but he left a message, polite and no pressure. Her machine sounded funny, like it was underwater.

He kept working. Dean's current occupation was as a freelance promoter. After he followed a muse and staged a benefit with some musician and artist friends, a licensed promoter offered him a weekly booking job. He organized underground concerts, mostly locals, at a blues club in the heart of downtown. Since he made regular rounds to every record store and somewhat subversive cultural establishment, dance club DJ's and rival club promoters requested his services, and soon he was fully occupied. He no longer had time to write, and the constant images and ideas that floated into his head drove him mad. He was deluged with requests from everyone who added his name to their phone lists, and he often found ten phone messages when he got home, requiring two hours to answer. He couldn't hire an assistant, and his pay was dismal enough. He kept going, trying to shape everything he was involved into into a cohesive business that might just provide some support in case his father never got that elusive ninth inning job.

Two more weeks went by. He visited his father as often as possible, allowing the elder Hudson to vent his rage on him for all his shortcomings as his father saw them. He could barely concentrate on work. Recurring thoughts of his childhood occupied his thoughts -- his dad at the beach holding him on Herculean shoulders dipping him just beneath the wave so salt water filled his nostrils before they both leaped out of the water and crashed into the foam, his dad leaping into the air to catch a wildly overthrown baseball courtesy six year old Dean, watching solemnly as Dean knocked his knees in fright as the basketball was thrown to him for the first time in his first game, smacking him down to the ground when Dad thought crying little sister's fingers were a result of Dean's chronic door slamming. Dean felt himself getting weaker every day.

And Gina did not return his calls. He was going to wait it out and give her the chance to call, but after a week went by he gave in and tried again. She picked up the phone and called hello, but her voice was very faint.

"I can hardly hear you."

"I know. We're having trouble with our phone." Her voice was interrupted by static. "I can't really talk long. I'm meeting my mother for dinner soon."

"Am I gonna see you this week? I mean I still don't know if everything is cool."

"We'll talk. Everything's cool. I have to go." She was pleasant. He felt somewhat reassured. Then he realized their conversation was cut short before he was able to tell her about his father. He looked at her picture. She was fading, the backround showing through her smart smile. The jolt of horror went through him like an electrical shock. He realized she was disappearing too. He was saddened more at this thought than the fact that his father was also disappearing. He already expected his father to disappear soon. The man put himself through too much energy sapping stress. This was different. How could she be disappearing now? He felt it hard now, his intestines were tied in a knot and tightening. He couldn't remember the last time he ate. He felt like a raw, exposed nerve.

And he was falling apart on the job. He got friends to handle the route and stopped returning phone calls. He started smoking pot to settle his stomach. He couldn't find anything else that relieved the nausea. He woke up in haze every morning, drank coffee to wake up, and did hits from the bong until he was sure the caffeine would stay down long enough to do its job. The days became more surreal. He began to sleep for five, then four, then three hours a night.

On the last day he saw his father he was delirious from exhaustion. He had called Gina again. Her machine didn't even have a message, just a beep. He left a message anyway, asking her to meet him that night at eleven if she still wanted to see him. He drove to his parents house and trudged to the front door.

His father was sitting in Archie Bunker's seat. There was no reflection in the wall length mirror behind him. Dean could see right through his father's head at his own image. He could see the inside of the back of his father's blue T-shirt. Dean collapsed into the sofa on the other side of the room.

Mr. Hudson was somewhat serene. It was shortly after noon and he was almost finished with his first glass of wine. "Whatsa matter, you tired? I don't see you disappearing."

Dean looked at him, his sunken eyes still hiding behind his shades. "Yeah, I'm exhausted."

"You know, before I go I wanna know something. Why didn't you tell us you had a phone?"

Busted. Either his brother or his sister finally ratted him out. "I needed... some space."

"Space? There's plenty of space. Y'know, all we've done for you, ya still don't appreciate it."

Oh no, Dean thought. Here it comes.

"Yer mother's working her ass off and you don't even want to give us a way to get in touch with you. What if I disappeared already? What if your mother disappeared? Ya could've gone weeks without knowing."

"Look, I'm tired. Can we talk about this later."

"NO!" Mr. Hudson slammed his fist down. "I've got the floor. I'm gonna tell you everything that's bothering me about you godammit!" His eyes were bulging now but it was getting harder for Dean to see him. "You never take my goddamn advice! If you would've done what I told you you'd be a college graduate with a job with security! You didn't even apply for that post office job I set up for you did you?"

And then Dean finally... let go. He felt all the frustration he had held in over the last month welling up inside him and it came out in a blinding roar. "I CAN'T BE WHAT YOU WANT ME TO BE! DO YOU UNDERSTAND! YOU DO NOT SEE ME FOR WHAT I AM! WHAT DO YOU FUCKING WANT FROM ME!?!"

And slowly, like the last spot of wet pavement drying in the sun, sixtysomething Karl Hudson disappeared for good.

---

Dean made it downtown that night... to the club. He was delirious now, feeling responsible for his father's... disappearance. He walked on the sidewalks past familiar drum circles and sleeping bums. There were people hanging like melted mannequins over railings on second story floors and the lights all blurred into one distinct blueish color. He walked directly through traffic as a stampede of red light racers steamed past him brushing against his clothing but not affecting his wobbly gait at all. He made it too the entrance and went inside.

There was a national act in tonight. Dean booked them but he couldn't recall who they were. The doorman said hello, but Dean heard nothing.

"Hey, man!

Dean heard that one.

"Hey, dude!"

Dean was trying to make his way through the crowd when a guy with a shock of black hair and and black fingernails grabbed his arm.

"Hey, man! You don't know me but I'm in a new band. Here's a tape man. I want you to listen to it, man. You'll like it, I swear. You like Nine Inch Nails, right. Well we sound like them, with a little Ministry, but totally original. Hey, can you hear me, dood?"

The death rock guy slipped a tape into Dean's shirt pocket before being shrugged off. Dean kept moving, looking. Nothing looked real to him anymore. He suddenly felt like he didn't exist, like he only existed in other people's perceptions and he could disappear anytime he wanted. The he heard familiar music...

"If I ventured in the slipstream..."

The band on stage had began to play. They were local. The singer was strumming and was singing soulful and melancholy.

"...behind the viaducts of your dreams."

They were covering Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" in a more distorted mantra style. He had seen the guitarist singing on the street before, but had no idea...

It was the song that he would play on the mornings when he woke up and didn't have to work, right after leaving high school when adulthood was dawning and far away at the same time and he could be carefree and wake and bake and listen to the Grateful Dead's American beauty strumming along in a futile effort while the windows fogged with cool moisture. It was a feeling he got but could never describe, something he first experienced when he was a kid and stared at the sun until he saw suns everywhere he looked and it was funny and sad at the same time. The same feeling came back when he was working on something that came out of him in a pure expression, when he was satiated in the belief that he had attained, reached a personal triumph in writing. He was afraid he was losing the ability to get to that place again. Suddenly he knew he had to get there, somehow. Then he realized he had tranced again.

"...To be born again..."

The singer was repeating the last lines of the song.

"...To be born again..."

To be born again. It was possible.

Then he saw her. He couldn't be sure. He saw her unmistakable profile and lustrous hair heading for the exit. She walked out without seeing him. He rushed through the crowd and threw his body against the doors. They burst open and he frantically twisted around to see where she was. He ran a few steps in one direction before realizing she was gone. He turned to walk back to the club. When he got back and re-entered, there wasn't a soul in the club. It was completely empty. Everyone had disappeared.

He got in his car and tore through the streets driving on the right side wrong side doing seventy. He screeched to a halt in front of his apartment and just... ran. He ran through the brick streets past the shadowy sad Spanish moss laden trees, past the patchwork assortment of houses that rose at odd angles and made strange neighbors; an adobe hacienda slept quietly next to a towering Victorian straight from Bram Stoker. It reminded him of the neighborhood he grew up in before the succession of job tranfers that plagued his father. All of the houses had character, none of the assemble line design than each house in his adolescent and teen years had been made. He kept running until he felt his feet lifting up and suddenly he felt like he was soaring through space and there were no worries, no anxieties, no fears. Nothing but a world of pure expression that he knew he was destined to dwell in. He was aware that his feet were touching ground but his soul was elsewhere. Until he stopped.

He stood in front of his house. This was the house he thought of when he thought of home, the house that he lived in until he was ten and that probably still stood a thousand miles away. It was here, now.

He went inside and he knew what he was there to see. His last fear was here. The fear that he wouldn't be able to say what needed to be said before it was too late. he had tried. He made the effort. He had tried to get through to his own father for years because he knew. He knew his father never tried to get through to his grandfather and it changed both of them when Grandpa Karl died. Only Dean's dad never knew of his son's knowledge.

He walked to the hallway where the bedrooms were everything looked the same. He saw a little boy of at least eight crouched down by the master bedroom door. The boy looked worried, like something was about to crash down on him, and suddenly Dean knew the exact date of the scene playing before him. The day Grandpa Karl died. The day his father was no longer a indestructible superhero. Dean listened intensely, both Dean's did. Dean's father was bawling in the bedroom. The younger one wondered when it would be his turn to cry like this. The older one already knew.

He stumbled out the door into the yards and fell to his knees, propping himself up with his knuckles and let himself release. Everything he had ever held in, everything in which he ever found solace through attachment and escape, was let go.

---

He made it back to his house feeling drained and hungry. Sal was waiting, strumming Dean's acoustic.

"Hey, man, I heard. I'm sorry about your dad."

"Yeah." Dean's throat felt dry and cracked. "Thanks."

Sal watched Dean walk into his room and continued to strum a weird minor key chord arrangement. It fit Dean's mood. He felt a weird relief. He looked at the Macintosh long overdue for some use. He looked over at Gina's picture. He had let everything go, including her. Her picture was no longer faded. She was still there.

He walked back into the room.

"What are you playing?"

"Mmm. Nothing," replied Sal "I'm trying to evoke a mood. I was reading this old art magazine about Brazil and it described this style called mournful joy. It's like intense happiness and sadness at the same time."

"Like... when you are leaving someplace for the last time and you"re overwhelmed by all your memories."

"Exactly. I want to put it into practice."

There was a knock at the door, three quick raps. Dean looked at the door and then turned to Sal.

"You expecting anybody?"

"No."

"What time is it?"

"11:00. Exactly."

Dean walked towards the door, ready to open it, unhesitant and ready for whoever or whatever waited on the other side.