“So. What’s it like?” I mumbled as I leaned against the kitchen sink in Greg’s hot, narrow house, staring out the flyspecked window over it, staring at the filthy grey sky above. Dawn was soaking into the concrete sky above the Bronx, a flat plane of cloud like wet tarmac sweating a greasy rain onto the city. The grass in the postage-stamp of backyard hadn’t been mowed in years; a rusted grill and several other unrecognizable lumps of corroding metal were swallowed up by the weeds and the greenblack ivy that hung loose on the fence. The alley beyond was full of garbage. Nothing moved. Not a bird or even a rat in sight, and the air was still and grey and heavy, pressing down the lackluster grass. It already looked hot and sloppy outside: the perfect kind of day for tramping around the ruins of a murdered city.

I’d forgotten how goddamned ugly East Coast weather could be. Ugly as the weather inside my hungover head.

“What’s what like?” Greg asked over his mug of bourbon-spiked coffee. He tilted back in his chair at the table, the legs whining beneath his weight. He was wearing an expensive suit of some shimmery lightbrown material that had clearly been tailored for him when he was much thinner, and with his hair slicked back across his balding pate he looked more like a Fish Market goomba than ever. In front of him sat a steaming coffeepot, a bottle of Jim Beam, and a newly-opened pack of Marlboros. Breakfast of champions.

“Here. Living here, still,” I finally managed.

He was silent for a bit, then shrugged. “Different, man. Way different.”

He slurped his coffee and lit up a cigarette. I watched him, expecting more to follow, but Greg only sat there watching the smoke curl up toward the cracked ceiling, looking uncomfortable. I’d hoped for a more substantial answer, especially considering Greg’s proximity to the very heart of that difference itself.

Manhattan was just a mile or two away from Greg’s house, “down the street and around the corner” as we used to say. For some insane reason, Greg lived close enough to the Line of Demarcation and No Man’s Land that we could’ve walked to Manhattan that morning if we really wanted to…though the Military Police guarding the Line would probably have something to say about that. When he’d told me how close to the ruins he lived, I’d almost asked him to take me to a hotel—in Queens, in Jersey, in Long Fucking Island…anywhere as long as it was as far away from that blank black spot in the City as possible. But, ultimately, I hadn’t bothered. I could feel the Pull in every cell of my brain and body: what would a mile or ten miles matter now that I was back in New York City, on the rim of the abyss? All night long—well, throughout the three-and-a-half hours of night left between the time we got home from the bar and when we had to be up for the day’s “festivities”—I’d lain weary and drunk but unsleeping on Greg’s sofa, listening to his old house’s painful creaking (all buildings this close to Manhattan had suffered some damage from the earthquaking blasts of the final bombing), feeling the terrible presence of the ruins just a short walk away and struggling, fighting, to keep myself awake. A few times I’d drifted and I’d heard words whispered from the sky, the whirlpool in the earth. We were so close I could feel it grinding in my half-dreams, but rationalized the sensation away as the distant rumble of the subway after I surfaced again.

We were close enough, too, that you could always smell the everpresent cloying stink of compacted ash and suppurating poisons saturating the air. It was a thousand times worse than the stench of putrefying garbage that had befouled the City for several weeks when the sanitation workers had gone on strike during my junior year of college. This was a horrible, strange odor—a thoroughly unnatural stench that stung the sinuses and clotted like blood. During the summer after 9/11, I remembered, a high-pressure front had stalled over the City for two weeks and nearly closed down Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx because the stewing reek had been enough to make a maggot vomit. The Great Sickness, they’d called it, earning the City another new negative nickname: “The Rotten Apple.” It hadn’t been noticeable in Queens, but as we’d driven home last night, the smell had grown from a faint sourness on the back of the tongue to an overwhelming opprobrium that literally made me dizzy.

“How in the hell can you stand this?” I’d asked. Greg had smirked and pulled out his pack of Marlboros. So that’s why he’d learned to smoke like a crematorium: the smell of cigarette smoke was infinitely preferable to—and did a great job of masking—the noisome funk of the dead zone. According to Greg, the number of smokers in the City had tripled since 9/11 simply because cigarette smoke killed your taste buds and deadened your sense of smell. “Anytime you want one, help yourself,” he’d said. Now, just catching the faintest whiff of it seeping through the loose windowframe, I was close to reaching for his Marlboros, starting a habit of my own…something new and deleterious to distract me from the churning in my gut, the febrile sensation of absolute dread that suffused me.

I sat down at the table, but reached only for the coffeepot and poured a mug. It was some savage Starbucks espresso roast that tasted like burnt bile. When Greg saw me wince he pushed the bottle of Jim Beam toward me. “Here, add a little hair of the dog,” he suggested. “Takes away some of the nastiness and gives you a little extra motivation, too.” I poured in a finger of bourbon and took another sip. Huh. The liquor actually made the coffee more palatable.

Silence stretched until it grew uncomfortable. To say something, I asked: “So. What’re the chances of me finally getting to kick Solana Mitchell’s teeth down her throat today? ”

“Slim to fucking none. Chances are we won’t even see the bitch if she’s gonna be riding with her little boyfriend General Wiesy and the VIPs—but that’s who you need to be watching for, y’know? Who she’s skeezing on, whose asscrack she’s got her nose wedged in now. You wanna get something on her, you don’t waste your time looking at her, you look at everyone around her. Especially with that entourage she’s got these days. Christ. Like fucking Madonna. Keep your eyes and ears on them people and—trust me here—I guarantee one of them’s gonna shit out something you can throw back in her face.”

Well, that’s why I’m here, I thought. Isn’t it? Maybe. Sixthirty in the morning, September 11, 2009, and I was still asking myself every five minutes what I was doing here on the wrong side of America. And every time the answer was something different. The patent ridiculousness of my situation was more bitter than the acrid coffee. I felt alternately petty and hormonal as some teenage idiot nursing schemes of righteous retribution, then as confused as an old man who’s just run off from the rest home and doesn’t know where he is or why he’s there. Then terrified. Then angry. Lather, rinse, repeat—over and over again. I was pretty certain now that Greg only wanted me here to help with his eternal crusade against the US military. Maybe he intended to use my presence as a tool to get a rise out of Mitchell and her camp. After all, she was the only common element we shared.

Last night, Greg had taken me to some faux-Irish pub in Queens after we’d left the airport and we’d closed the place down, slumped over pints of Guinness and shots of Jameson’s at the bar, awkwardly trying to reconnect. Reminiscing about The Times, our college years at NYU…carefully steering clear of any mention of the today until we literally had nothing more to talk about, and then saying only what we absolutely had to say: what time do we have to be there, what are we allowed to bring, etcetera. Even after the booze began to work on both of us the conversation never became less than awkward. Greg was more stranger than friend now. Had I really expected anything else? The last eight years had changed him—and me—to the point that we were now like two vague acquaintances that had inherited some other guys’ memories of their idealized past. I was suspicious of his motives and a little uneasy at the constant anger in him; he didn’t know how to take my reticence when I dodged around questions about life Out West. I couldn’t tell if I was trying to protect the sanctity of my California cocoon or just ashamed to admit how shallow my life had become. The only thing we really shared anymore were our various scars from September 11. I wanted nothing more than to ignore mine. Greg wore his like badges of authority: they were the mandates that validated his rage at “the fucking wound-licking bastards who live off the blood of this City.” It just so happened that Solana Mitchell was one of them—one of the worst, in fact—so we’d ended up talking about her more than anything else. At least our mutual hatred for that bitch gave us some kind of common ground.

Still, I was desperately uneasy talking about her. Until the furor over the press junket began in July, I hadn’t heard Solana Mitchell’s name mentioned since late 2004, when she had been one of the last witnesses to testify in President Bush’s trial. Her statement had only been a minor tack in that bastard’s coffin—one of several thousand that the Weismann-Paul Committee had collected—but once her name came up in relation to the trial, her Manhattan Memorial Project, which had been largely underwritten by the Bush administration, had briefly drawn some media scrutiny. Fortunately, I had been too “busy” collecting stories about Lindsay Lohan’s latest drug-trafficking charge to seethe at how expertly she’d sweet-talked everyone into believing her to be just another poor, gullible victim of the Cabal. I’ll admit, regardless of everything I thought of her, I had to admire her spin skills. She was a magical liar. Half the asshole PR agents in Hollywood would give their firstborn sons to have her ability to lie down with the devil on the steps of the Capitol Building and, years later, convince the rest of the world that she was still as pure as a goddamned bonafide angel. She was tricky, allright. I had firsthand knowledge of it.

According to Greg, she’d spent the last four years flitting back and forth between New York and the Capitol, kissing asses in City Hall and the Beltway to ensure her foundation’s future under Kennedy’s pro-tem Presidency and now the Obama administration. She’d shucked-n‘-jived her way through the chaos by always remaining in the shadows of the Big Time Players, the ones whose back pockets contained the healthiest donations to her little foundation for “preserving the memories of all those whom 9/11 had touched.” She’d even cozied up to the Pentagon, as well, joining in with the chorus of former Bush lackeys who’d managed to save face by denouncing their former sugardaddy once the War on Terror had turned into the Unending Occupation. The Manhattan Memorial Project now had a list of Big Name Donors a mile long, collected over eleven million dollars a year tax free, and their book, City of Pillars, was coming up on its fifth, newly-expanded, reprint. Solana Mitchell had weathered the political Katrina that was the Interim Administration and come out even better than she’d been before the Cabal had imploded…all because she had found a way to make the loathsome horror of 9/11 pay by marketing the slogan “Never Forget” and using it as an unassailable bargaining chip when dealing with politicos.

Oh, how she’d grown from being the scared, horse-faced freshman journalism major who’d begged Greg and I to help her survive Montague Summers’ Intro to Media Ethics class….From crying to me that she’d never had a boyfriend to “being seen” all over the Capitol with General Anthony Wiesenthaller.

Who was I kidding? What could I possibly do to sully the reputation of someone who’d clearly proved herself a thousand times more fit to the Fame Game than I could ever be? I wasn’t even fit to drop her name in a mudslinging gossip column.

Well, then, why was Greg encouraging me—much like he used to encourage me all those years ago—to go after her? He was the professional, the notorious “Big Dog Barking,” the people’s champion or what-the-fuck-ever. The thought made me feel even more like I was just his pawn. Sullen anger cramped my guts and I swallowed hard to force the taste of espresso and whiskey back into my stomach, where they were sizzling painfully.

Greg looked up at the clock on the stove. “Well, c’mon, shithead,” he said. “Gotta get moving. We’re due at LaGuardia at 8 sharp and one thing hasn’t changed about this fucking place: rush hour still sucks the big bone.”

Allright. I could feel a little of the tension leave me as my body clicked into autopilot again. I grabbed my camera and my handheld digital recorder and followed Greg out the door to the streetcorner where he’d parked his rusty little Dodge Neon. The muggy air, slimy with the stink of the ruins, gagged me. It pressed against my face like a fever. I was dizzy and sick by the time I reached the car. Greg held the door for me and I collapsed into the shotgun seat. My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a freshly-fired brick and to keep it from revolting I fixed my eye on a picture taped to the dash in front of me that I hadn’t even noticed the night before: an old Hello From The Big Apple! postcard depicting of one of the lions outside the New York Public Library, pigeons dancing on its insensate stone head. Greg had a thing for old postcards depicting Manhattan landmarks, I noticed: there were at least ten of them stuck to his fridge with magnets. He had never been much of a memorabilia collector before (except for his Steelers jacket, which had been a gift from his mom who’d moved to Pittsburgh after she’d left his father), but so much of Greg’s life—like everything in this goddamned City—had come to revolve around the void at its heart. He probably collected the postcards as reminders of a happier world that, in retrospect, was just as flimsy and throw-away as those cards.

Greg sat down with a grunt and started the engine. He stared at me for a moments. “Last chance to bail,” he said, then shrugged when my thousand-yard stare never changed and I never said anything. I kept my eye on that stalwart stone lion and Greg pulled out onto the buckled street.

Greg was right: life in the City was totally different. Even the morning Rush Hour traffic had changed—for the worse, which I could hardly believe was even possible. But with the absence of Manhattan and the re-establishment of many businesses in the remaining Four Boroughs, traffic patterns had suffered severe upheavals that the Metropolitan Transit Authority and the City Planners were still struggling to deal with. Luckily, Greg told me, last year the city had finally reopened all the streets in the Bronx that had been blocked by collapsed buildings or sinkholes. “Otherwise,” he said, “we’d have to leave at five in the fucking morning just to get to Queens.”

As we inched our way Queensward through the Bronx morning traffic, Greg got me to chat aimlessly about random crap we’d heard about in the news, but neither of us were really paying attention to one another. Oddly, my stomach had calmed down once we were moving, and I let my attention wonder from the faded postcard to the streets creeping by a car-length at a time outside the rainflecked windows.

People were milling about as always, hugging wives/children/parents goodbye as they went to work or school, standing at bus-stops talking to each other or their cellphones, crowding benches, reading newspapers or paperbacks or magazines until the buses came, descending into subway entrances. There were faces everywhere, laughing, babbling, wearing monolithic grimaces of tedium or annoyance, blank, blind, or animated. Undoubtably alive. An old man at his newsstand was tossing free bags of freshly-roasted peanuts to passersby. A group of young black girls on their way to school sang a Beyonce tune as they danced together down the sidewalk. Three times loopy streetwalkers with grimy rags offered to wipe down Greg’s windshield. There were a lot of African-Americans and Hispanic and even Asian folk in the crowds—more than I’d ever seen in the Bronx. Evacuees from Harlem, which had been bulldozed to make the Line of Demarcation. You couldn’t easily tell that these people had been only a handful of minutes away from being devoured by monsters from a thoroughly-insane otherworld. They were going about their lower-income lives like always. The famed resilience of New Yorkers was never more visible. At least that hadn’t changed.

But I could tell that beneath the veneer of everyday living lay a taut unease. You could see it occasionally in the tight grimace of an old man passing by a crowd of black teenagers lounging on a streetcorner, the glare of a young Asian woman who stood at a busstop with a bunch of loudmouthed factory workers. I had always steered clear of the Bronx when I’d lived in Manhattan: it was one of those neighborhoods most people tried to avoid. Even Greg hadn’t liked going back, though I’d gone with him once or twice to visit his dad and stepmother (who were still living in the broken-down brownstone his old man had owned since the early ‘70s). A lot of refugees from Manhattan and Harlem had been Resettled in the Bronx, and after six years there was still considerable tension between them and Bronx natives. The Bronx was even rougher, more dangerous today thanks to the magnified poverty and overpopulation brought on by packing a hundred thousand exiled people into an already-overcrowded dump. The crime rate had soared, outstripping the capacity of the NYPD even as they hired more and more officers every year. At his father’s suggestion, Greg had gotten a concealed-carry permit and usually had a snubnosed .357 under his jacket (though he’d left it at home today) and his house was outfitted with a state-of-the-art security system—even though he didn’t own anything worth stealing.

But I could almost see why he chose to live here, nonetheless. For all its stink and squalor and anger, it was clear that life had gone on here as it always had despite the horrors that had happened only a few miles away. The buildings were all lopsided, darker, dirtier, permanently smokestained. Many showed signs of having been hurriedly expanded. Many roofs had wooden shacks built upon them and even abandoned, condemned buildings were clearly still inhabited by squatters. There were a lot of abandoned storefronts, many of them with broken windows and jimmied doors.

Despite all that, nothing appeared that much different than I’d remembered. The Borough may be dirtier and more crowded than ever, but it didn’t look wounded. People still lived. They worked, they scavenged, they survived. The streets were alive just like they’d always been.

Of course, I couldn’t see the cancers growing in these people’s lungs, planted there by the toxic smoke they’d breathed day in and day out while Manhattan was burning. The frequency of mesothelioma and related lung cancers had quadrupled in the Bronx and Queens thanks to all the carcinogenic shit that had been in that smoke. The death rate was supposedly just a few percentage points higher, but the hospitals were overflowing just the same. A year or two ago, Greg said, he’d done an exposé on the real mortality figures that the City and the US Government didn’t want to be public knowledge. Not pretty. And he hadn’t even mentioned Manhattan Syndrome.

No one talked about Manhattan Syndrome.

In fact, hadn’t I just seen a man curled up in a plastic-tarped refrigerator box in the mouth of an alley, his belly bulging out from beneath a grimy New York Mets t-shirt, a long grey limb looped ‘round his waist like a swollen belt? People would sooner walk in the street that get close to the man. For all I could tell, he might be dead. Above him, spraypainted in neon green on one side of the alley, a diagonal stick with three branches on one side and two on the other.

Now I noticed the graffiti. Graffiti everywhere—more than I’d ever seen. Almost every building had something spraypainted on it: tags, gang signs, strangely beautiful cartoons and murals…and weird sketches that made me feel antsy. My stomach knotted when I spied the stick-like device again. “Greg?” I asked, pointing. “What is that?”

“What—the graffiti? Idaknow. I think it’s somekinda new gang sign. You see it in Queens, too, and Staten Island, for that matter. Ever since half of Harlem got dumped into the Bronx we’ve had gang trouble like you wouldn’t believe. We even got some genuine homegrown Cthulhu cultists, can you believe that?”

Of course I could: they were everywhere these days. Even San Diego. Every year in early March the lunatics gathered at beaches up and down the West Coast to wade into the chilly waters and sing praises to their comatose god beyond the horizon. Since 9/11 their gathering had drawn mockers and increasing violence, to the point that police had to be called in to guard their ridiculous ceremonies. I could only imagine them doing the same here, gathering on shores facing the ruins of Manhattan….“How many?” I wondered.

Greg shrugged. “A few, here and there. Not as many as you’d think. Right after 9/11 they were fucking everyplace, but the police ran most of them out of town. The Church of the Great Old Ones had a little storefront on Whateley Street for a little while but the neighborhood, they didn’t take too kindly to them, for obvious reasons. Someone torched the place. I’ve got it on good authority that it was the FDNY themselves did it. The fire only destroyed the cultists building; didn’t damage anything else.”

“That symbol has something to do with them,” I muttered under my breath.

Greg still heard me. “Probably. Who knows. All kinds of whackjobs in this City these days.”

As we passed a building standing all alone between two vacant lots, I saw that the entire base of the building had been spraypainted with weird, jagged designs that almost looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs and, on one side there was a tall white blot where something had been sprayed over in white paint. You could still recognize the outline, though: the huge, cephalopod head, the wings, the bulbous body. One each side of the blob, an eight-pointed star had been painted. In the center of each star, an eyes with a tripartite pupil.

Feeling sick again, I turned away and looked straight ahead at the line of traffic creeping toward the onramp and said nothing. Greg fiddled with the radio until he settled on a classical station playing an odd, frantic violin piece. I closed my eyes, pretending that I hadn’t seen the coils of light writhing sickly in the weeds and brickpiles beneath that malevolent white stain.

Once we got onto 678, the Hutchison River Parkway, we actually began to move. Greg and I rolled down our windows to get some “fresh air”—the stink of Manhattan was barely noticeable, overwhelmed by the cold, wet odor of the East River as we crossed the Bronx Whitestone Bridge. As Greg weaved through traffic on the Bridge, I finally looked west toward Manhattan. I couldn’t help it. After the claustrophobic confines of the Bronx, it felt liberating to be free of beetling buildings and honking congestion. There was no skyline anymore in the distance: just mist and sweaty grey clouds. Nothing to see…only a flat emptiness beyond Rikers Island and the spiky wreckage of the TriBorough Bridge. A charcoal smear along the shore of the Hudson River, and beyond that, above it, the shimmering—

I felt a surge of acid in my chest.

“Pull over,” I told Greg.

“Huh? What, we’re on the bridge—”

“Pull the fuck over unless you want your car to smell like puke.”

“Aw, for fuck’s sake,” he grumbled, but he did put on his flashers and maneuvered over onto the thin verge so I could roll down the window, lean out, and finally vomit up all the coffee I’d drunk. I didn’t heave, I didn’t even feel nauseous: the brick in my belly had just dissolved into a nasty sludge that my body wanted rid of, so I hung my head out the window and the coffee just spilled out of me. When I was done, I leaned my face on the door and spat the taste of bourbon and scorched beans out of my mouth, breathing heavily, still staring at that strip of emptiness beyond Brooklyn….

The clouds were dimpled above the Island, scraped and swirled. Everything, whirling down the toilet.

“You didn’t get anything on the car, did you?” Greg griped. Traffic roared past, honking, missing Greg’s car by inches.

I hawked the last of the espresso taste out of my throat and dug in my jacket pocket for some Rolaids or breath mints, found a stiff old stick of Wrigleys gum to chew. “No. Go on, drive. I’m done.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Let’s go. Get this over with.”

Greg stomped the gas pedal and screeched back out into traffic. The disaster certainly hadn’t changed New Yorkers’ driving habits. I was slammed back into the seat and my heart sputtered. Christ, I’d forgotten just how bad New York driving was. No wonder I’d never gotten a driver’s license.

Since the TriBorough Bridge was gone, to get to LaGuardia we took the Whitestone Expressway past College Point and Flushing and again, I was amazed again to see that the City around us was cruddier than ever, yes, but just as active as it had ever been. The highways were choked with the usual traffic as millions of commuters entered the City for work or drove from one Borough to another. Queens and Staten Island were booming since many of the businesses whose main offices or headquarters had been destroyed in Manhattan had resurrected themselves in the surviving Boroughs. The new Times office was in Staten Island, for instance, almost all high financing had moved to Queens, and Brooklyn was experiencing an honest-to-god economic Renaissance thanks to all the shipping coming in through its expanded docks. I saw license plates from every state in the Union, hundreds of old MTA buses farting clouds of diesel fumes, and a few brandnew electric models that were supposed to replace all MTA buses by 2010. The City might have been cored, but it was clear that however much it had suffered, it had survived. It was still the economic capitol of the East, regardless of the miseries, hatreds, and fears that writhed in its myriad slums.

When we exited onto the Grand Central Parkway toward North Queens, for the first time I saw military vehicles mixed in with the everyday commuters: greenpainted trailers hauling construction equipment, green and tan Hummers ducking in and out of traffic. Going the other way, flatbeds and dumptrucks piled high with wreckage tied down beneath tightly-drawn tarps, tails of ash and dust puffing from beneath the billowing shrouds. The clean-up effort was kicking back into high gear, but I still wondered: each of those trucks can only be carting away…what? A couple tons of wreckage, smashed cars, shattered stone and asphalt, dirt baked into a blackish glass? And the ruins of Manhattan covered how many square miles?

In 2002, I remembered, General Albert Cunningham, the poor shit the US Army Corps of Engineers had put in charge of the original clean-up effort, announced it would take more than twelve years to scrape the Island clean, and who knew how many more before anyone could safely begin rebuilding there. By ’03 there was even a lot of talk about abandoning the Island entirely and designating it a national monument, but the New York City Council fought vehemently against that option—and rightly so—citing that nobody in the surrounding Burroughs wanted to have a mouldering toxic junkyard lying there in the heart of the City, a constant reminder of the unimaginable loss of life and destruction of one single day. Luckily, now that Obama was in office and the sheer chaos of the Interim Administration was finally contained, a new wind of hope was supposedly blowing through the City and, along with the restructuring of the military clean-up effort, there were supposedly investors by the thousand jostling to be the first to lay the cornerstone of New Manhattan. So Greg had told me last night, anyway. What the New Manhattan would be—a whole new cityscape, a giant memorial park, miles upon miles of low-rent housing, manufacturing space, and warehouses, or all of the above—was a hot topic to bet on. Nothing was certain. There was a war of words and dollars going on between City Council, the Army Corps of Engineers, and damn near every real-estate developer on the East Coast concerning how the land was going to be parceled out once it was cleared.

“And if you can believe this shit,” Greg had said, “there’re motherfuckers already selling property on the Island based on survey records from the 1870s—and people are honest-to-goddamn-god giving them money. Plus, half the businesses who actually owned property in Manhattan are claiming that their holdings still belong to them. Council’s got their heads so far up their asses they can’t tell what’s legal or not. Gerv’s gonna be batshit crazy by the time he’s done being Mayor just from dealing with all the goddamn real estate disputes. And dear god, don’t even ask about the insurance battles. I tried to write an article on that once but gave up. That shit’s enough to make Nyarlathotep himself dizzy.”

Greg kept ranting on about the financial chaos and I tuned him out—he’d forgotten that money-talk made my brain shut off. So much of it was already dimmed or dampened, just by defense mechanisms I hadn’t needed since those horrible, horrible days immediately after 9/11, days spent…somewhere my mind could no longer go. Days of blood and fire.

I cocked and arm out the window and lay my head on it, face catching the buffeting wind, and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the structures in the clouds over Manhattan, or in my mind, the scaffolding of shadows that only I could see once more….

I am positively obsessed with the movie Ghostbusters. So, naturally, when the movie eventually became the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters, I was glued to the television every damn Saturday when it came on.

And then one day…out of nowhere…what the hell is THIS? I had just turned on the cartoon and…did that guy named “Clark Ashton” just say “Necronomicon”? He sure as hell did! And thus begins “The Collect Call of Cathulhu,” truly the best episode of The Real Ghostbusters EVER for its metric tonne of Lovecraftian references.

Below you’ll find the entire episode split into three separate YouTube videos. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for shoggoths, spawn of Cthulhu, Weird Tales, the Book of Dzyan (mispronounced as “The Book of DYzan”), the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and many other HPL/”Cthulhu Mythos” references. The episode was written by Michael Reaves, who may be familiar to Lovecraft afficionados for his work co-editing the HPL-meets-Sherlock-Holmes anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, a generally sub-par collection which every cephalophile must nonetheless have in his/her/its library for Neil Gaiman’s amazing story “A Study in Emerald” (available as a downloadable PDF at the preceding link).

Anyway, on with the Ghostbusters VS. Cthulhu action!

Needless to say, this episode of The Real Ghostbusters has been lurking in the back of my mind as I’ve been writing “City of Pillars.” Particularly perceptive readers may spot quite a few references to this cartoon in the story…especially the next two chapters, which I’ll have online this Friday. In the meantime, I hope this bit of eldritch humour has whetted your appetite for Lovecraftian monsters destroying New York (or, well, attempting to) while I’m still beating these goddamned words together!

Hey, folks—sorry it’s taken so long for me to crank out the next installment in “City of Pillars,” but I’ve been rather busy of late searching for a job. It’s prettymuch a futile quest as 1) I absolutely will not relocate for reasons I won’t even bother to explain and 2) who wants to hire an English teacher with a Master’s Degree in horror lit? More and more options dry up everyday….

But check it out: Chapters 3 and 4 are coming up shortly—I’m proofreading them now.

In the meantime, Footnotes to the Human Species has a new, intriguing feature: chapter soundtracks courtesy of a nifty li’l plugin called WordPress Audio Player! At the head of each chapter of “City of Pillars” is now a Flash-based streaming mp3 player that, at the click of a button, plays a particular track that I’ve found to be an apropos piece of musical accompaniment to that chapter. For example, Chapter 1 has The Tear Garden’s tense and foreboding “The Strong and Whining Toad,” and Chapter 2 has a particular minimalistic audiosculpture of my own, simply title “told.” Don’t worry: none of the audio tracks start playing automatically; there is very little in the world that I hate more than pages that open their own audio as soon as they load (*ahem*, MySpace). Nothing’s more irritating that loading up a page in a tab to look at later only to discover some strange dissonance creeping mysteriously into the Abba song you’ve already got blasting. But, hey, the tracks are there if you want to listen.

I’ve also started a changelog on the site to record any alterations to published material. I made a few minor edits to Chapter 1 the other day (just changed the name of Dave’s newspaper to the Sensation, since the San Diego City Paper just didn’t sound tabloid-y enough, and cleaned up some typos that I missed), and it’s duly noted in the changelog. The changelog only concerns textual edits, not site revamps or additions of extra cool stuff like, you know, music and—also coming this week—a gallery of Footnoteish artwork.

So give the chapter soundtracks a listen, even if you’ve already read the texts. And feel free to suggest music that you would consider good “background noise” for “City of Pillars” or any materials on this site—but I’ve already got a nice stock of incidental music, both by myself and others, ready to go: some Forma Tadre, Skinny Puppy (a must), Gary Numan, Synaesthesia, Download, Otto von Schirach, and many other pitch-black or sickeningly-lurid jams to ensure the subliminal messages from the Other Gods present in my work penetrate your cerebral cortices!

(No Technorati tags for this’n—who needs blogosphere links to other reclusive horror-writers/electronic-musicians talking about the new stuff they’ve added to their own sites, right?)

You may wonder why I’m posting a link to a video of Henry Miller, author Tropic of Cancer, The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy, et. al. on a site dedicated to science fiction and horror. Though they were practically contemporaries (Miller was a year younger than HPL), H. P. Lovecraft would’ve utterly hated Henry Miller—he would’ve loathed Miller’s writing, and would’ve thought him nothing more than a louche, unlettered lout.

But Henry Miller’s writing has, oddly enough, had a big impact on mine. The unrepentant bitterness of his words, as well as their venomous humor, suits my pallet just fine. In fact, I don’t think I could ever match Henry Miller’s above description of that seething hell that is New York City. I’m sure were Mr. Miller alive today, he’d be rooting for the Other Gods as he’s reading “City of Pillars.”

[Excerpts from The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Authorized First Edition. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.]

The Hijacking of American 11

United Airlines Flight 11 provided nonstop service from Boston to Los Angeles. On September 11, Captain Michael Loesky and First Officer Reginald Hong were piloting the Boeing 767. It carried its full capacity of nine flight attendants and eighty-one passengers (including the five Azifist cultists).

The plane took off at 7:59. Just before 8:14, it had climbed to 26,000 feet, not quite its usual assigned cruising altitude of 29,000, because of the aerospace alert announced three days prior for the states of Massachussetts and Vermont. An empty ATK transorbital ore hauler (USSTC Des. AT933) was being maneuvered down from LEO (Low Earth Orbit) to the Yuggothian mining facilities at Bald Mountain, Vermont, and had been given priority clearance. All communications and flight profile data for Flight 11 were normal. About this time the “Fasten Seatbelt” sign would normally have been switched off and flight attendants would have begun preparing for cabin service.

At the same time, American 11 had its last routine communications with the ground when it acknowledged navigational instructions from the FAA’s air traffic control (ATC) center in Boston. The ore hauler had begun its descent and would be entering the atmosphere in several minutes. Sixteen seconds after that transmission, ATC updated the flight’s pilots with the ore hauler’s descent path and instructed them to maintain altitude at 26,000 feet. That message and all but one subsequent attempts to contact the flight were unacknowledged. From this an other evidence, we believe the hijacking began at apprixmately 8:14.

Reports from two flight attendants in the coach cabin, Christina Bi and Clark Duranty, give us most of the information we have concerning how the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 11 took place. Because of its detailed nature, this information would later prove vital to the military response during the subsequent Manhattan crisis.

The hijacking began when three of the cultists—Satam al Suqami, Wail al Shehri and Waleed al Shehri, all of whom were seated in the second row of the first class section—leaped up and stabbed two unarmed flight attendants preparing for in-flight service. Christina Bi, who was preparing flight service at the attendants’ station in coach, from which she had a clear view of the first class section, witnessed the attack. According to her description, she initially thought the men were attacking with disposable plastic cutlery, but when she got a better look at the men she saw that the blades “were either strapped to their wrists or were coming out of their wrists or the palms of their hands.”

It is uncertain how the hijackers then got access to the cockpit. FAA rules require that cockpit doors remain closed and locked during a flight. Bi said that they “broke down the door,” but it’s also possible that the terrorists had gotten a cockpit key from one of the attendants they’d stabbed, or had persuaded the pilots to open the door with threats of further violence. As soon as the cockpit door was opened, Muhammud al Quthuli—the only Azifist on board who was trained to fly a jet—and Abdulhazred al Omari entered the cockpit to take control of the plane. The three remaining hijackers released Mace, pepper spray, or some other form of aerosol irritant in the first class cabin to force the flight attendants and passengers toward the rear of the section. Though Bi did not witness this event, she later reported what a first class passenger had told her. One of the terrorists had appeared to vomit at the front of the plane, and the fumes from the vomit had been extremely noxious to everyone but, apparently, the terrorists themselves. All the while they taunted the frightened passengers, claiming they had a bomb or weapon they were going to use that would “break a hole in the sky” which would swallow them all.

Many passengers from first class fled into the coach section, but the majority of them took cover behind the seats in the rear of first class since the terrorists did not seem intent on leaving the very front of the plane. There has been some popular speculation that the passengers who remained in the first class cabin were following the orders of fellow passenger Michael Guilder, a former career officer in the Israeli military, who is believed to have been attempting to organize resistance against the hijackers. However, there is no evidence to support this. Though Guilder was listed as a first class passenger on the plane, neither Bi nor Duranty ever mentioned him or a “counterattack” in any context.

Of those passengers that did enter coach, several immediately commandeered drink and food carts to blockade the door between coach and first class. Flight attendant Clark Duranty was among them, and remained at the blockade, watching through the window in the door as events further unfolded in first class.

Shortly after she’d witnessed the attendants’ stabbing, Christina Bi ran to the back of coach and contacted the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in Cary, North Carolina, via the AT&T airphone at the rearmost attendant’s station to report an emergency aboard the flight. This emergency call lasted 30 minutes, as first Bi and then Duranty frantically relayed information about the events taking place aboard the airplane to authorities on the ground. Bi’s first words were, “We’re being hijacked—some people were just killed in first class—I don’t know what’s going on but I don’t think they’re Human.”

Christina Bi’s statements were proven true at 8:20, when al Omari emerged from the cockpit with the two pilots in tow. Duranty was watching, and described everything taking place in first class to a fellow flight attendant, who shouted the details back to Bi; Bi, in turn, repeated the information as calmly as she could to authorities on the ground.

Al Omari was naked, and according to Duranty, his skin looked bruised, as if he’d been severely beaten, and “he had weird symbols all over him.” Duranty could not describe the symbols, but did say that they looked like they’d been cut or burnt into his flesh. Duranty also said that the cultist had looped belts or possibly “some kind of ropes” around the pilots’ necks, but when al-Omari forced them to their knees, Duranty corrected his description: the restraints were “growing from his belly…big thick purple tentacles…that he was choking them [the pilots] with.”

As soon as al Omari left the cockpit, the Azifists in the first class cabin began chanting loudly in a language that Duranty (incorrectly) identified as Arabic. As soon as the pilots were kneeling, two of the armed men came up and slit the pilots’ throats. Al Omari immediately threw himself down on top of their bodies and began to smear their blood all over himself.

The passengers remaining in first class immediately began to panic and many tried to force the door to the coach section. Duranty wanted to let them in, but the terrified passengers who had blocked the door in the first place refused to remove the carts. An altercation broke out among them and the carts were eventually moved out of the way by other passengers, but only a handful from first class made it through into coach before the armed terrorists began assaulting the knot of people that had formed on the first class side of the door. A foul gas was used again to subdue the passengers, many of whom were immobilized by its nauseating effects. Though sickened by the fumes, too, Duranty and the passengers he’d been struggling with managed to pull a few more first class passengers into coach before shoving the carts back into place to keep the Azifists from entering.

Duranty was experiencing severe respiratory and gastric distress from the hijackers’ chemical agent, but he remained at the door to observe the horrors being enacted in first class because “someone on the ground has to be told what was happening up here.” An unidentified passenger now ran between him and Christina Bi.

At 8:21, one of the employees monitoring the call from Flight 11 alerted the American Airlines operations center in Fort Worth, Texas. Manager on duty Cyril Kilborn quickly realized this was an emergency completely unlike anything in his or his company’s experience. He instructed the airline’s dispatcher responsible for the flight to contact the cockpit immediately. At 8:23 the dispatcher received this brief statement from al Quthuli: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh fhtagn a’tquan.” (“In his city at R’Lyeh dead Cthulhu waits no longer.”) There would be no further communication with the cockpit of Flight 11. Moments later, an air traffic control specialist at the operations center contacted the FAA’s Boston Air Traffic Control Center about the flight. The center was already aware of the problem.

At 8:25, Duranty replaced Bi on the airphone and related the following details for the remainder of the call. He was almost incoherent with terror, and it wasn’t until several hours later, after the recording of the call had been analyzed thoroughly, that a reasonably clear transcript of his portion of the call was released to civil and military authorities.

Duranty had watched the wholesale slaughter of the passengers remaining in first class. The sickening fumes had overcome many of the passengers, who were blinded and vomiting. The three armed Azifists had dragged them one by one toward the front of the plane, where they were routinely dismembered. By now, all of the terrorists had begun to exhibit very noticeable signs of physical alteration. The torsos of the armed men were twisted and deformed, and their arms now ended in long, serrated blades which they were using like cleavers to literally butcher the passengers. Al Omari’s body had almost completely dissolved into a shapeless mass of “purple worms or tentacles” that were devouring the pieces of the passengers’ bodies that the other cultists fed to it. The “thing” was swelling in size much faster than could be accounted for by consumption of the bodies, and had begun making a loud, distinctive “cricket” sound clearly audible on portions of the recorded call.

When the last passenger remaining in first class was murdered and given to the entity, the other three Azifists tried to wrench open the door to coach. Despite the blockade of carts and the efforts of the passengers holding the door shut, the terrorists still managed to pry open a corner of the door and spray another cloud of disabling gas into the attendants station. The passengers collapsed, but the cultists’ attempt to open the door ceased. According to a voice later isolated from the cacophony, one of the entity’s tentacles or pseudopods had snatched the terrorists from the doors. The growing entity consumed the other hijackers just as it had consumed the passengers.

At 8:41, the entity breached the blockade. A tremendous explosion can be heard on the airphone recording as the entity threw aside the carts and came pouring into the coach cabin. Duranty’s last words were: “Somebody shoot us down—please—kill this thing!” The remainder of the recording is nothing but screaming, sounds of intense violence, and the continuous warbling of the entity itself. The call ended at 8:44.

At 8:46:40, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. It is generally accepted that, by the time of impact, all passengers and crew (possibly even pilot al Quthuli) had been consumed by the First-Stage (Gateway) Entity evolving aboard the plane.

Okay. We’re back! Weird Server Problems are gone and everything’s working again, or so it seems.

Distance is often the only thing that saves us from the cancerous growth of our lives’ darkest moments. The greater the distance in time, in space, in understanding-or, even better, willful ignorance-we put between ourselves and those events, the safer we are. To do otherwise is to risk a terminal glioma of Utter Despair, which will grow and grow and grow in the pith of your mind like the grandaddy of all tumors, the Cthulhu of all tumors…blooming and ballooning until one day or another, one way or another, you burst. And then some poor fucker from a crime scene clean-up crew will have the dubious honor of scrubbing your dessicated brains off your bedroom wall. There’s no shame in running from something you just can’t overcome.

After the monstrous chaos of 9/11, too sickened by everything I’d already endured to face the malignant aftermath, I’d fled to the other side of America, putting three thousand miles and, eventually, eight years between myself and the horrors (and betrayals) of Manhattan. A few dizzy months seeking refuge up and down the West Coast-and a couple pleading calls to the few People in High Places who would still vouch for me, or, for that matter, speak to me-had led at last to a position as an “arts-and-leisure writer” for the San Diego Sensation. I quickly cocooned myself in a safe, if not particularly sane, new life of Hollywood gossip and glamourspotting and did my best to forget about the World At Large as America went to war, the Middle East seethed and bled through the darkness of Oil Night, and the President of the United States himself was exposed-then promptly deposed-by the Cabal of K’n-yanese and Human right-wing oligarchs that had snuck him into office in the first place. While monsters walked the radioactive wastelands of the Rub al-Khali, I learned to spend my days immersed in the sunlit minutiae of my new hometown. The US government imploded, but I refused to think about anything more than this week’s premiers, openings, club nights, and the famous faces that frequented them. In the chaotic years after September 11, I learned all the tricks of tabloid journalism and mastered the art of cranking out at least two hundred words for every rumour, no matter how ridiculously exaggerated.   My motto, taken from a postcard I bought the day I landed at LAX: There are no shadows in sunny California. Surrounded by so many people who literally glowed with health and money and fame and power, there wasn’t a dark spot I couldn’t find some way to illuminate.

Of course, I was never completely unaware of the Major Events happening around the world….I still worked for a newspaper, after all, however superficial its content. You can’t just clap your hands over your ears and chant “La la la, I can’t hear you!” when the U.S. President is on every single television channel and front page facing execution for Highest of All High Treason. But after a while I did develop a real talent for keeping reality at a distance, busy as I was buying paparazzi photos and filling columns with star-studded stuff and nonsense. Oh, I knew I was “wasting my life and talent,” as so many people (even my own damn editor) told me, but all that mattered to me was that I had something, however meaningless, to distract me from the constant threat of my own memories. I’d tried to develop a serious drinking habit to drown them out, but that lasted less than a year; booze did nothing but give me acid reflux and eat up all my spending money. Besides, there were better methods than the bottle out here in the Kingdom of Zoloft and Alternative Healing. A fortune in pills and therapy, yoga, tai-chi, a vegan diet (that did nothing but make me shit five times a day), and lessons in feng shui and Yithian “transtemporal meditation” eventually made it possible for me to sleep through the night again, despite the everpresent dreams and all I endured in them.

In my first days as a San Diegan, I made the expected half-assed, obligatory attempt to stay in contact with the handful of friends Back East who hadn’t ostracized me. But 9/11 had utterly saturated their lives, even those who didn’t live anywhere near New York City. Every phonecall, every email had something to do with That Day. The Bronx and Queens were choking on the smoke from Manhattan, there were riots in the streets and the refugee camps, martial law had been declared, the mayor was literally on the run and my gods, the price of gas…! I couldn’t bare to hear or read their litanies of misery-or to be told, for the thousandth time, how “lucky” I was to have escaped. Most of all, though, I couldn’t bare to hear them mention again and again that one fucking name, now synonymous with September 11, that made my mouth flood with bile. Solana Mitchell. Every time someone asked me “how I felt” about her soaring career, I wanted to put my fist through a wall. So I changed my phone number, and conveniently “lost” theirs. I set up a filter that sent their emails straight to the trash. To hell with them. I didn’t need the distraction. The reminders. I had a life to rebuild.

No matter what was going on beyond the ocean or over the Rockies, in San Diego I was safe, bunkered in the West Coast’s relentless banality. Even with R’lyeh itself lurking somewhere below the western horizon, rising more and more every year, Mission Beaches was always packed and no one was afraid to go into the water.

I made money. I bought new friends, a Segway to ride to work, and a condo in Oak Park. I even adopted a cat. I was here to stay.

After eight years, Manhattan’s shadow had all but faded from my mind.

So why, in all the Other Gods’ names, did I go back?

The invitation came from my old friend and fellow journalist Greg Lillard-the one soul from the City with whom I’d never lost touch. Meaning: I didn’t completely cut him out of my life, though our “contact” was limited to him emailing me every couple of weeks.

Greg was now an infamous muckraker at the Bronx Post-”The Voice of the City’s People”-who occasionally graced my inbox with news of his latest stories and investigations, but never expected me to read them or write back. He understood my need for escape: writing to me was just his method of beta-testing ideas and sketching out articles before he committed them to print, a vestigial reminder of the close friendship we’d once shared. I did read some of the emails he sent me, and a few-a very few-I even replied to… just to let Greg know I was still alive and doing okay. Despite the carefully-planned and -executed implosion of my life, I had to acknowledge that he and I shared a bond that not even my own desperate need for self-isolation could unravel.

In New York, we’d been inseparable. We’d gone to school at NYU together, roomed together, and, after we’d both graduated, even worked together: first at The Village Voice, and then the New York Times itself. Our editor at the Voice used to call us Goose and Maverick. We’d always assumed he was making a snide reference to the guys in Top Gun, but no: it turned out that crass old queen had never even seen the movie. He loathed Tom Cruise long before loathing Tom Cruise became fashionable enough for me to write about in the Sensation. Waldrick just called me Goose because of my gawky, awkward frame; Greg was Maverick because he was always standing up to Waldie’s tinpot tyranny of the stringers’ pool. But we were still each other’s wingmen, regardless. We rarely wrote articles without one another’s assistance or support-hence the reason he still sent me draft after draft of his stories, even though I rarely read them anymore. I vetted his dates; he vetted mine. Friends used to joke that we should just give in and become butt-buddies; we would joke back that doing so would be tantamount to incest. We had both come from only-child households, and had found something like siblings in each other. Greg liked to say he was my “brother from another mother.”

After I’d come out, my family-with whom I’d never had a particularly good relationship-prettymuch disowned me. Strangely enough, even some of my “friends” in the City pulled away from me. Greg and I, though, became closer. “It’s ‘cause I don’t have to worry about you sniping my women now,” Greg liked to say, but I think he felt some kind of fraternal, big-brother need to look out for me. Yes, we lived in Manhattan and, yes, it was the mid-‘90s…but Greg came from the shittiest backstreets of the Bronx, and had seen more than one faggot beaten down in the street simply for having the gall to glance at a “real” man. Like me, Greg, too, had fled to Manhattan to free himself from his natal surroundings. Plus, I was rather frail from too much time spent playing Doom on my computer and loathed real-world conflict of any kind, whereas Greg was built like a damn brownstone and never stepped down from any confrontation, whether or not he had anything to do with it. Greg was belligerent and quarrelsome even as a student: a hard guy to like, honestly. But once you earned his trust (and I don’t remember how I managed to do so), he would automatically place himself between you and any threat. He may not have gotten along with his equally-hot-tempered dad very well, but growing up the son of a twenty-five year veteran of the New York City Police Department had most certainly molded his character.

God, how I missed him sometimes.

But as much as I missed him, he was still part of the events I wanted to-had to-put behind me. He’d made an entire career out of riding That Day’s everlasting ripples, and all I wanted was smooth, still waters. Pseudo-brother or not, I had to keep even him well at arm’s length in order to keep myself safe. And he respected that.

When I received an email from him on July 1st, 2009-at my work address oddly enough-I hadn’t heard from him in months…not since he’d wrote me a note in March describing his latest offensive against the U.S. Army, National Guard, NYPD, and even the Marines for “human rights violations” regarding the policing of the Harlem No Man’s Land. The subject line read: STRIKE, THIS IS GHOSTRIDER: WE’LL TAKE MANHATTAN. What the hell? With a subject like that-mentioning our old Top Gun “call signs”-I simply had to give it a glance…even though I figured it would just be a ten-thousand-word summary of the progress he’d made on his new crusade. Worth a glance, but destined for the trash.

Instead, I read that the Army Corps of Engineers had just finished a complete top-to-bottom reorganization of their restoration activities on the Island of Manhattan,  and now the military was going to conduct, this coming September 11-the eighth anniversary of the catastrophe-an exclusive press junket to the Island to publicize the new administration’s “renewed commitment to restoring the heart of New York City.” After more than half a decade of mismanagement, overextended budgets, missing millions, lawsuits, and, finally, a Congressional investigation into the ubiquitous fraud among the independent contractors hired to do the actual work, the new-and-improved Revised Manhattan Rebirth Initiative had just been launched. President Obama had toured the Island himself and had given the renewed effort an enthusiastic thumbs-up-and his administration wanted the whole world to know. This junket would mark the first time any media representatives had been allowed to enter Manhattan since the military locked down the entire Island in the turbulent wake of September 11.

“And you better believe this is going to be a Big Deal,” Greg wrote. “People all over the Eastern Seaboard, not just the Four Burroughs, are already talking about the restoration for the first time in years and the uniforms just released the info this morning. Obama’s visit and this press exclusive have gotten everyone hyped up. It’s on every TV station and website I click on. Every media outlet from CNN to the Post are going to be lining up for the invites-they’re calling them the Golden Tickets-but check this out: your boy has already managed to get two invites to the show (never mind how), and here’s the kicker: one of them’s for you if you want it. And I’d better hear you say you want it. Seriously, I know this won’t be easy for you, Dave, but you need to be here for this. Time to pull your head out of the sand. It’ll be a real positive step for you, and the old town. Lot of ”

I was immediately suspicious, of course. Something underhanded had to be going on for Greg to get two of the highly-coveted invitations, let alone one, apparently before the Pentagon even began handing them out. After all he’d said about the military, the City government, and the Federal government over the past years, I would’ve thought he’d be blacklisted from any government-sponsored function. Greg had made quite a name for himself at the Bronx Post, after the Times booted him for being “too confrontational,” by writing about the lingering subterfuge, disinformation, judicial manhandling, and the endless trauma that had haunted his benighted City since 9/11. Greg Lillard never wrote positively about anything. Hell, I couldn’t recall him ever using the word “positive” before now. No one could count the number of run-ins with the City Council, the Mayor’s Office, the NYPD, the FDNY, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, National Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, and the New York state government that Greg bragged about….He loved to make enemies in high places and did not care who he pissed off. He was the “Big Dog Barking”-that was the name he’d given his weekly fingerpointing column in the Bronx Post. For years now, I’d been waiting for the day that his body would be fished out of the Harlem River. But as good as he was at making enemies, Greg was just as good at making friends, too. The New York City Council hated him, yet he was close friends with the new Mayor, Gervais Thompson, whom Greg had met when Thompson was just another exiled Manhattanite living in a Roosevelt Island tent city. He even had the backing of the former state governor, John Riddick, who had been a vehement opponent of the Bush and Interim Administrations and was now Director of Interspecies Affairs under Obama thanks to his close ties with the Yuggothians. Greg must have pulled some major strings to get those invitations, and that meant that either he, or the people at the other ends of those strings, had to have some kind of agenda involving getting him into Manhattan.

But why the hell did he want me to come along? I had barely spoken to him in eight years, and I was little more than a glorified gossip columnist these days. Why did he even think to ask when I’d once told him I’d sooner die than to ever cross the Rockies again?

Strange, but…it didn’t matter. Agendas always meant trouble, and I wanted none of that in my life. So I ignored him.

But you can’t ignore Greg. I don’t know why I even tried.

I should have just sent him a simple reply: “No.” That might have shut him down. But…as soon as the news that the government was opening up Manhattan to the media really broke and the feeding frenzy began, I discovered that I simply could not give him a flat, unequivocal denial. I mean, I would have to be crazy to turn down flat an invitation to the media event of 2009, wouldn’t I? Every TV anchor, every newspaper columnist, every bigtime blogger and every Tom, Dick, and Harry with media credentials in the United States was fighting for one of the six-hundred-some Golden Tickets. Anyone who landed a Ticket more or less had his or her career instantly validated: “One of the first media reps to set foot in Manhattan” would glow like a neon banner on anyone’s resumé. Was I so perfectly content writing about who was screwing whom in Hollywood for a piss-ant local weekender that I could refuse such an opportunity, regardless of the motives behind it? I was and I wasn’t surprised that there was a long-buried, long-starved chunk of my mind that still lusted after real recognition-fame or infamy, as long as it outshined the hateful cunt who’d squelched my ambition in the first place, but….

This was a decision I could not make. So I refused to decide. I refused to reply.

He began emailing every day. Over the next few weeks I received nothing less than fifty emails from him. I didn’t reply to any of them. I set up filters on my work and personal accounts to immediately trash anything from any of his hundredsome address. After a week or two, he started calling me: at home, at work, on my cellphone. My work phone number was easy enough to get-but my home and cellphone were both unlisted, restricted numbers. He still got them. Any time an unfamiliar number showed on my CallerID, I wouldn’t answer. Anytime he left a voicemail (which was every time), I erased the message. I didn’t reply. Even when Benny Benco, the City Paper’s Editor in Chief, discovered that I, of all people, had an honest-to-god Golden Ticket waiting for me, and threatened to skin me alive if I didn’t go to Manhattan and bring him back a goddamn glorious cover story, I still didn’t reply. I told myself again and again that I wanted no part of Greg’s anti-everything schemes. Ignore him and he will, eventually, get the message.

He didn’t. But, subconsciously, I did. It only sank into me, where it curdled in my mind like black milk.

Dreams began to poison my sleep again. Klonopin, Xanax, Valium, Guiness, Cuervo, Jim Bean, a pound of my neighbor lady’s fantastically-potent weed-taken separately or all together-did nothing to keep me from waking up screaming, standing on my bed, in my kitchen, or on my back porch, soaked in the predawn damp or an awful gummy sweat that stank like gasoline…always facing east. I didn’t bother with yoga or any of the other pathetic placebos I’d used to trick myself into calm all those years ago: I knew they wouldn’t work now, or ever again. I took up doing club reviews just so I had an excuse to be out drinking all night, hoping to pass out in a dreamless, drunken stupor when I got home-only to wake up an hour or two after I laid down with the taste of blood and vomit in my mouth and the vile constriction of soft, syrupy flesh fading from my skin. I dreamt there were lines in the sky, hot white wires arching from one horizon to the other, scintillant worms of force spiraling along them, west to east…always west to east. And the sparks that the worms scraped from the wires were words, symbols, a diagonal stick with three branches on one side and two on the other, a sevensided shape with a threequartered eye inside.

I let a friend take me away on a weekend vacation to Tijuana, thinking a break from the office and Benco’s nonstop bitching would help. By Saturday morning he was so freaked out by something I’d sobbed in my sleep that he bought me a bus ticket home. Never saw him again….

I bought enough ephedrine diet pills to keep me awake for a year, but the longest I managed was fiftysome hours-after which I fell into a stupor so profound that, no matter how hard I fought to wake myself from the dreams as they were literally drilling deeper into my brain, I could not escape. When I finally did wake, after seventeen hours of tortured “sleep,” I was so wasted I couldn’t leave my house for three days. I nearly drowned taking an ice-cold bath to cool the fever that was boiling under my skin. I just…spaced out. I came to my senses when the frigid water closed over my face and surged up my nose, dispelling febrile visions of treeferns bleeding sap in the post-monsoon dusk.

Greg kept emailing, kept calling. I kept avoiding him, though I knew how this was going to end. Either the dreams or the nagging had filled me with a sickening sense of predestination. I spent many a free evening sitting in my darkening livingroom, hugging Stubbs, my cat, to my chest and waiting for something inevitable to finally happen.

And that’s how July and August passed.

By the time September began, the national media was frothing with excitement over the Big Day coming. Benco called me into his office and said, in no uncertain terms, that he would fire me and tell the editors of every publishing concern from San Diego to Seattle about my “problems” Back East if I didn’t get my ass to New York City and bring him home a three-page cover story-with pictures. “Then fire me, motherfucker,” I told him coldly. He just sat there staring at me until I got up and left. I had a big-time surfing competition down at Mission Beach to cover.

“How the fuck can you stand to write about surf Nazis when you could be going to Manhattan?” one of my coworkers asked as I gathered up my gear from my desk.

I shouted, loud enough for everyone in the Sensation’s cubicle farm to hear: “All of you: shut up and let me do my goddamned job, okay?” I left the office to its chilly silence and stepped out into the blinding, carefree sunshine to do my goddamned job.

But “doing my job” was no longer possible. When I sat down at a Boardwalk bistro to “interview” two of the biggest names in pro surfing, all I did was set my little digital recorder in front of them and let them talk until they shut up. I could not possibly have cared less what they said. One guy stopped halfway through telling a story about being spiked in the ass by a manta ray to ask me, “Dude, are you okay? Were you, like, in a bar fight or something last night? You look like you took beating…like, with the black eyes and everything?”

“Nah, I’m fine. Just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. Sorry. So anyway, the stinger went through your gluteus maximus, and then-”

Suddenly-it was the second week of September. September 10, to be exact. The world snapped back into hard, sharpedged detail. Tomorrow was Friday, September 11. All those “lucky” bitches and bastards who’d received Golden Tickets would be loaded onto helicopters at LaGuardia Airport and shuttled over to the ruins of Manhattan to witness the new effort to resurrect “the Core of the Big Apple” from twenty square miles of toxic ash and ruins. I worked all day on my feature story for the Surf’s Up! special edition. Benny cursed me for a coward but I just sat there at my desk, doing my goddamned pathetic-ass job…and praying that the next day would just be over already. Somehow during this I covered an entire page of my notebook with doodles: sticks with five branches, three to one side, two to the other.

Tonight it would happen.

That afternoon, just as I got home from work, Greg called my cell again. As I’d know he would. I stood there in my living room, staring at the little vibrating chunk of plastic. With a sigh of utter exhaustion, I flipped it open.

I didn’t even get to say “I’ll be there.” The second the phone reached my ear, Greg’s old familiar voice said, “Solana’s here, Dave. Well, yeah, obviously, you probably already knew that-but listen: She’s supposed to be here on the Foundation’s ticket, right? You’d think. But-get this-she’s now officially listed on the roster as ’special guest’ of General Anthony Baden Wiesenthaller himself.”

I said nothing, but I’m sure he could hear me grinding my teeth. Of course I’d known all along that she would be there. That was no surprise. The co-founder of the Manhattan Memorial Project? The Darling of City Council? Miss 9/11 Herself? She’d probably gotten the very first Golden Ticket. But now she was a “special guest” of the new director of the Rebirth Initiative? That could only mean-

Greg said, “Uh-huh, exactly. Okay. So. It’s, uhh, fivethirty p.m., your time, right? I got Orbitz on my laptop here, and it says if you catch Southwestern Flight 6201 to JFK that leaves San Diego International at seven this evening you’ll be here by eleven or twelve o’clock Eastern. How ‘bout I meet you at the airport and you can crash at my place?”

I stood there in the airconditioned dark, little grey Stubbs curling around my ankles and yowling. I sat down on the couch and he leapt up into my lap, purring viciously.

Finally, I stammered, “Wait-okay, but-shit, man, I never even RSVPed-my ticket-”

“Is confirmed, dude. All taken care of. I took the, uhh, liberty to register you last week, actually. I knew I’d get you out here one fucking way or another and, yeah, I’m sorry I had to play the Solana card, but something had to get through your thick fucking gay-wad head.” When he would get wound up about something, the Bronx boyhood really came out in Greg’s voice: he turned into Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

“Okay,” I growled. “The flight number-what was it again?”

I had an hour to kill. I spent the most of it fidgeting around the house, unable to sit still, unable to think in straight lines, fuming but…resigned. Goddamn Greg. Goddamn Solana Mitchell. I found a half-bottle of Cuervo somebody had brought over in the remote past and paced from my kitchen to my living room with it clutched in my hand like a weapon, sucking down searing gulps. Stubbs just sat on the sofa with a confused glare in his golden eyes, watching me wander back and forth. I sat on my front porch for a while, debating aloud with the Cuervo bottle on the step next to me whether I should get that flight or not.

The Cuervo won, as it always did.

Feeling just tipsy enough, I sat down at my computer and purchased a ticket for Southwestern Airlines Flight 6201 to New York City. Then I called Benco and told him I was going. “Oh my god Dave I knew you’d come through for me I knew it because you are my number one Dave you hear me?” he squeaked and squealed like an overexcited piglet until I hung up on him. Then I hurriedly arranged for my neighbor to look after Stubbs for a few days.

“Where you going so sudden?” the old Mexican lady asked me, sucking on a joint of her own hydroponically-grown product as fat as her finger.

“Uhhh. Home,” I said. “For a little while.” She passed the spliff; I took a long, scorching hit and coughed and coughed until my eyes watered. The smoke had tasted like burning rubber and metal and flesh both human and not-hot as the smoke from a burning city.

“Death in the family?”

“There may be,” I croaked.

I stuffed some changes of clothes into a suitcase and called a cab to take me to the airport. While I waiting for the cab to show up, I sat hugging Stubbs and whispering to him as if he were a child, telling him that dad was just going to be gone a few days because he just had to do something out of town and would be back on Saturday or Sunday. Stubbs stopped purring and stared at me with sad, slitted eyes, until the cab honked for me outside.

He knew. I’d read once about a study done by Miskatonic University that proved cats to be mildly precognitive. My little grey boy knew I wouldn’t be back. I carried him over to Rosa’s and placed him in her ample, caring arms. He meowed so painfully I almost started crying.

On the way to the airport I kept thinking about that damn emptied Cuervo bottle. I’d left it sitting on the front porch steps where it caught the weakening sunlight like a cenotaph.

At the airport I checked my luggage and passed through the interminable queues at the security checkpoints without my usual impatience with the tedious insanity of post-9/11 airport security. I was like a plane on autopilot, course set, flying along without will or concern-emptying my pockets at the checkpoints, passing through the new Yuggothian bioscanners that frisked me down to the molecular level for weapons or teratogens, handing over my boarding pass to the guy at the terminal…all in a mechanistic state of Zen-like mindlessness.

It wasn’t until the jet was in the air, with the setting sun and the ocean and my new life at my back, that the reality of what I was doing crashed into me.

As soon as the pilot switched off the seatbelt sign I ran for the nearest restroom and spent the next fifteen minutes heaving up my guts. The tequila stung even worse coming up. After I was empty, I slouched back to my seat, pale and sweaty. A concerned flight attendant brought me some Dramamine, which I washed down with a glass of watered-down airplane bourbon. Dramamine always made me sleepy, and I couldn’t imagine being awake for the entire four-hour flight through the darkness just below the starsick void, trapped in a pressurized can with only a hundred strangers and my panic and that fucking movie Titanic-oh, wow, how apropos-to occupy my attention.

But even with the Dramamine and the booze making me drowsy, my seething mind would not let me drift off until I finally overpowered it with two Benadryl capsules. Then I gratefully slumped into unconsciousness…but not deep enough to bypass the dreams that were, as always, waiting for me as

I am standing again on the street outside the 24-hour Kinko’s, crowd of gawkers all around, a random sampling of people frozen in that where-were-you-when-it-happened moment, all gazing up into the bright morning sunlight with their hands shading their brows as if they’re saluting the sky-men and women in hundred-thousand-dollar business suits, cellphones glued to their faces, each one repeating that morning’s mantra: “I’m okay, no, I’m fine but jesus god do you see this?” Next to me there is a scrawny bike messenger in bright orange Spandex and an Indian woman in a dirty blue sari wearing a bulky set of AM/FM headphones that make her look just like a B-movie Martian and a young Asian girl holding her shivering chihuahua tight to her chest like it’s a baby and one of the boys from the Kinkos is standing in the door wiping inkstained fingers on his apron, chanting his own mantra, over and over and over again: “Oh my fucking god, look at that. Look at that, look at

the Twin Towers rising over the rooftops across the street. Just a few blocks away. Turn right at the next intersection, walk straight to Vesey and the World Trade Center Plaza would be on your left, packed with police cars, fire trucks, people running or standing still, frozen, looking up at the great black plumes of smoke boiling from the gashes in the Towers’ peaks. Black filth smeared across the flawless morning sky and tiny batlike shapes swarm around the towers: Yuggs, fungs, braving the savage thermals above the blazing floors to snatch Humans trapped above the impact sites and fly them to safety. Tiny black specks fall through the milling fungi. Somebody says people are jumping from the North Tower to escape the flames or something(-hold on, what did he say?-) in the flames but there are hundreds of people up there, trapped, and only fungi on the wing, helicopters pinned to the sky in the distance, doing nothing because the upwelling thermals are so severe they can’t even approach the roofs and

fire engines roar down the streets, sirens screaming.

Policeman on the opposite corner, pointing, shouting, “Just keep moving, you’re okay now but you gotta keep moving” as

across the street, a man stumbles out of an alleyway, bleeding (Go go GO! Watch out, don’t) and coughing, “It’s coming down you gotta run! move! don’t just fucking stand there, it’s-oh my god it’s coming after us!”

Misser. Misser? What he say?

A rumble, like constipated thunder

followed by a grinding screech

and a collective gasp rises from the crowd. Fingers point (”ohmygodlook“) at the flank of the South Tower, where I look and see

below the fuming wound where the airplane struck, the side of the tower is bulging: diamond panes explodes into clouds of scintillant razors, concrete buckling, cracking, falling, the structure visibly swelling with a long shattering crackle and sprays of glass and diamond, office furniture, cubicle walls, splints of metal, concrete, clouds of pulverized drywall falling, billowing, the flapping swirling Yuggothians diving away in fear or death-

and in the heart of that blossom of blackened debris and white dust and grey smoke and bilious flame something writhes, something churns (what is that oh my god do you see that), limbs unfolding in an origami of flesh, limbs with a million joints or none at all, flailing, whipping back to flog(ood god, what is tha)the crumbling sides of the Tower as the vast bulk at the center coruscates in( )directions, no, dimensions, that make anyone staring straight into it like I am feel sick and my knees wobble with vertigo as

a writhing, churning throat o(h god!)f impossible shapes flowers open and it says only one immense bass howl of words that I can feel humming like a curse or a command in my bones

as the South Tower, g(iving birth)utted, shudders and sags and beg(iven birth)ins to collapse with a rolling rumble into streamers and scads of dust, the upper floors unfurling into falling spears of white dust as the shape is slammed shut and disappears into the roaring tumbling

and the businessmen and women in their hundred-thousand-dollar suits are screaming like children and they’re turning to run and the Indian woman in the sari elbows me aside as she ducks into the Kinkos and the ground beneath my shiny black just-for-interviews dress shoes just polished last night so I can see “my” gawking face which is not my face at all

up and

beneath my feet and everyone in the street is in motion, stampedinget awayou gotta move now go run stop stop some body hel

as down the street a stony grey cloud of ash and dust and vaporized concrete billows around and over and through the office buildings and we running scream(fall)in(bleedin)g people are all swallowed by the clouds that-

When the flight landed at John F. Kennedy Airport, I staggered off the plane and into the terminal on legs cramped with the futile urge to run, turn around and get back on the plane and go home to my cat and my surfer boys article and everything spangled and stupid and simple.

Thankfully, the over-the-counter drugs and the alcohol had sedated me enough that I’d woken up to the sound of the pilot announcing our landing instead of my own bloody-tongued screaming.

I’d awakened as the plane was descending. I made myself look out the window next to me. There, below, I saw New York City and nearby Jersey City, for the first time in eight years, still stretching from horizon to horizon, as far as I could see: a sea of lights and lines-the “constellations of civilization” as I’d written once, so many years before, in an article about an artist friend’s aerial photography exhibition. There was Queens and Brooklyn, that complicated spill of lights with John F. Kennedy Airport at its base and its lips lined with the bright sparkle of the newly-expanded docks. That sprawl of sodium-vapor-orange was the Bronx, where Greg still lived and worked even though he could afford much better. Long Island and the long slice of New Jersey, curving north, blurring away to the west.

Almost exactly as I remembered it…but for the black, unlit emptiness at its center. The blank spot on the map. Here and there along the fringes of that blackness were flares of intense, bright white lights: the spotlights of recovery operations or military outposts, I guessed. But otherwise, the space once occupied by the most-brilliant-of-all lightstorm of Manhattan was blacker than the spaces between the stars.

Some of the other passengers were looking too, whispering amongst themselves. “Shit. You can’t see nothing,” someone sneered. But that’s all there was to see: Nothing. And I couldn’t pull my eyes away from it. As the plane circled into the landing pattern for JFK Airport, it began to look like the bloodshot insomniac lights of the remaining City below were all suds swirling down that vast black drain of Nothing….

Greg was waiting in the terminal when I disembarked. It took me a moment to find him among the departing passengers and the people who’d come to meet them. When I finally spotted him leaning against a trash can my heart hiccupped. After eight years, he looked so much smaller than I remembered…short and fat and balding-Joe Pesci in appearance now as well as sound. All that beef he used to carry had slumped into a rotung gut and jowls sagging like a sad bulldog’s. He was only my age-almost a year younger than me, in fact-but he looked at least ten years older than he should, worn down to a nub by the brutal pace he’d been keeping for so long. He’d confessed once in an email that his life was burning him out, and he literally looked burnt: dry and grey and dessicated. Unlike many New Yorkers who’d lived in the City through the smoky months after September 11, Greg did not have a lung problem-but he sure was trying to develop one. When we were in college, he’d been completely indifferent cigarettes, but by the time I left town he’d taken quite a liking to them. In the years since last I’d seen him, he’d taken on that dull, ashen, perpetually grimy look that anyone who smokes three packs of cigarettes a day inevitably develops. He was twirling an unopened pack of Marlboros between two fingers even now. He still wore the old Steelers windbreaker he’d had since college, though now it wrapped rather tightly around his expanded paunch, and the embroidered logo had lost almost all of its color.

That was my onetime best friend?

I shuffled slowly behind the others, trying to hide from his searching eyes, delaying-but he spotted me in the sparse crowd, and waved me over with a big, slanted smile.

“Hooooooooly shit. Look at this punk,” he laughed uneasily when I approached. “How many years in California and you’re still pale as a sheet?”

I punched him in the stomach as hard as I could.

“Urhh!-shit-fucker,” Greg choked, doubling over. I stood aghast. If I’d done something like that back in the day, I would’ve broken my knuckles on Greg’s abs-but now…it was like slugging a couch pillow.

A passing security guard stumbled comically in his tracks and came toward us with a scowl, but Greg stood up, face tight and red, sucking in a hoarse, phlegmy breath, waving the guard away. “It’s alright, man-I deserved that. It’s all good. No, really. It’s okay.”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” I added. “He did deserve that.” The guard stared at us for a moment then walked away. He’d never said a word.

“Jesus fuck, Striker,” Greg wheezed, “you punch hard for a Left Coast fruit. God, you look like shit, though.”

“Yeah, I know. So do you. Come on-let’s get my bag.”

When we’d collected my single suitcase from the rotisserie in the corner of the lonely, almost-empty terminal, Greg asked, “So. Alright. Home, then? You probably wanna catch a little sleep for tomorrow.”

I shook my head. “No. I slept on the plane. Take me to the nearest bar.”

Much like R’lyeh itself, or Joan Crawford, Footnotes to the Human Species is slowly, painfully, rising from the grave.

What happened to the site? Well…I’m not sure. Immediately after I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1, I started running into problems editing posted content and, even worse, posting new content. A number of chapters from “City of Pillars” were posted truncated, with half the damn text missing! I contacted my web hosting company, 1and1.com, and they couldn’t find anything wrong with their MySQL databases or with my hosting platform.

So, I simply decided to wipe the site and rebuild it. After all, I’ve kept voluminous backups of the site’s database. All I’d need to do is reinstall wordpress, do some tweaking here and there, and everything would be hunky-dory again, right?

Nope. Nyet. Nein.

Let’s just say that this is the fifth time I’ve created a new MySQL database and reinstalled WP 2.5.1 in the past two/three days. I’ll spare you the exceedingly strange details, but…suffice to say, I believe we are now back on track, and I promise each and every one of you loyal readers that this won’t happen again. Unless, of course, a shoggoth gets loose in 1and1.com’s server farm again. *Shrug*

At any rate, please be patient: it’s going to take a little while to get everything back to where it was…so as new versions of “City of Pillars” chapters reappear, please take the time to read them again, as many of them have been HEAVILY edited to add much needed characterization, a little more eldritch detail, and more obscure allusions to elements in American history, Lovecraft’s fiction, and even John Carpenter’s The Thing! I’m thinking of launching a Footnotes to the Human Species Guess That Allusion contest: the person who correctly identifies the most obscure textual allusions in each chapter of “City of Pillars” will win an autographed doodle of one of the giant transdimensional monsters that destroy Manhattan! (No, really, I’m serious here.)

Furthermore, in times to come, look for Footnotes to begin hosting “gallery exhibits” of contemporary Lovecraftian art in conjunction with DeviantArt and various other online portfolios. I figure hey, after reading a giant chunk of my text, what’s better to massage away the eyestrain than some awesome pictures of tentacles and ruined cities and surreal alien landscapes?

I want to personally thank each and every one of y’all who emailed me asking about the site—I think I’ve replied to yinz, but if I didn’t, it’s just because I’ve really been juggling a lot of stuff this week. Damned futile jobsearch. If it weren’t for writing this Lovecraftian claptrap, I’d be going absolutely mad with boredom and defeatism….

So, that’s enough for now. It’s 0420 EST, so even my nocturnal ass needs to get to bed. I’ll keep you posted on how the site rebuild is going, and should probably have everything back up and running by tomorrow evening!

Take care and, as always, Iä!

NOTE: 6-8-2008: Still having posting problems.