I Will Find Gray ASPHYX

A sad state, a stack of overlapping identities, layered, compressed, and now melting down. He's standing after sunset at twentieth and Massachusetts in DC and watching Ytara's ride drive off, leaving him holding a brain full of forebodings and embryonic faceless questions. The questions are without voice or form but kick at his insides, making him queasy. The taillights of the red Lotus Europa fade rapidly westbound down Mass. Avenue seem to get sucked into the traffic on the next circle, and then she is gone. He's feeling a nameless craving as he replays his last half-second of eye contact with her.

"A--hole!" he silently berates himself "do you think she's thinking about you right now?"

Probably not, but he's still thinking about her, and just what can you say to a Femme Fatale anyway?

"She could easily kill you...or be the death of you anyway..."

Now is not the time for this kind of nonsense, and he decides to start walking to stay awake, heading back up the hill, away from Dupont Circle, northbound, up to the house, clutching a sealed manila envelope containing God only knows what kind of unholy information and instructions.

"It's Melmore again, I believe you know him."

That's all she had to say about the project before she dropped him off on the corner. Of course he knows that annoying person. But why Melmore would be a concern to anyone at this late stage of history baffled him. Melmore's antics seemed trivial after 9-11.

"He must know something, that's all it could be."

He hasn't seen Melmore in ages of course, but who has? He's around somewhere. He realizes that he is talking to himself, to the slight discomfort of well-dressed restaurant goers along Connecticut Avenue. He glares, switching his gaze from the sidewalk to a middle-aged couple walking by and they both quickly stop their staring.

"Yeah I'm crazy, got a problem with that? Yeah, keep on looking at me, I'll show you crazy." But he's mumbling this at a sub-audible level, moving on.

"You'd have to be crazy, completely out of your mind to get mixed up in this kind of crap..."

Shrugging off the fog of denial, he indulges in a moment of numinous objectivity. Insanity, insignificance, overall undesirability is the basis of his employment.

"I will not be missed. If I spill my guts to anyone, no one of any importance will believe me. They have affirmed the necessity of doing business with persons of questionable moral character, like me..."

He's still wondering how Melmore could be a problem, and how to solve him. He's walking up the hill westbound, Connecticut to Columbia, to Mount Pleasant, further north up 16^th, to Newton Street hang a right and he's back, unlocking the steel-barred gate of the door to his basement apartment.

It's cool and moldy-wet inside, bare-pipes clanking and hissing to some set of instructions only know to them. He flips on a desk lamp and bounces its beam off of the south wall under the tiny window, sending a platoon of roaches into a forced retreat.

"Goddamn little Nazi M.F.s, just when you think you've won the war, there they are again, a whole new generation of them." It's true, the struggle is never really over. He builds a fire in a Franklin Stove and takes a seat in the big chair. "Oh well, better look at this ..."

He opens the envelope, and starts reviewing the contents. There's money (of course, there had better be...) a few photo and a single computer printout, spewed forth from some unknown, possibly governmental source...he's thinking "Maybe the DOA, The Department of Abominations...abominations, you find them in the Himalayas, snowmen perhaps...certainly a snow-job here...come on, pull it together, focus..."

He's looking, the photos are of Melmore, and he's not sure why he even needed to look at them. "I know Melmore, that's why this needs to be done I suppose."

He's looking at the pictures, a more recent view of the man for sure, but it's unmistakably him, hair uncharacteristically long and dyed black, a couple of teeth now missing in the front, face twisted into a trademark perpetual grimace. He turns on the radio to DC 101 and some obnoxious DJ is running his mouth.

If you're caller number twenty...DC three pack...free entertainment booklet opens the door to a wonderful world of freebase!"

"What the....?" He couldn't have really said that. "He must have said rebates or something."

He turns his attention to the task at hand again. "Melmore, Darrel 'Stanky' Melmore, AKA "Trashcan" and a number of other names too filthy to consider for very long.

"Known for instability, alcoholism, violence against women, blowing things up, suspected of tossing a hand grenade into a crowded Georgetown bistro on a summer night, known to be cruel to cats, dogs, babies and anarchists."

"Yeah I know all that, so what, why does it matter?"

Suddenly, with authority, the radio states "Know your pedophiles!"

He yells back aloud this time "Goddammit I already know my pedophiles!"

"They were my neighbors, in prison."