My God, I couldn’t find the guy.

Circular discs of light hung over the dancers' pit like UFOs, the bodies thrumming under the ice blue, the ghoulish green. As I approached, I bumped into a young man but stood my ground, and there from the pit’s high edge I saw them: their daytime slavery measured opposite their nighttime abandon. Women’s long legs in laced-up heels, wearing Versace blazers. Men's bodies sleek in the silk of the designer brand Kenzo. They spilled from their taxis, dropping at the bar, dancing and grinding, grunting and glossing in the bathroom—every one of them exuding pharmaceutics. But the man I looked for? He’d be dead sober.

“I want you to do your work, Petr,” said Ric, the lead private eye, back in the railway office. “Go and do your work.”

My work?

Master of depositions.

I hate the stage. Every stage but the room where there’s an individual to put the question to. But what I didn’t know now was how I was going to get my mark.

He was a Habsburg, for starters. I couldn’t just pin him down here among his friends and begin the interrogation. But then, I never knew.

I am a conduit only, the eyes, ears and mouth for another. A shadowed self—some inner genius—twisting my mistakes back to benedictions in the long form.

A grapefruit-colored drink spilled on my Hawaiian-themed button up and denim-blue trench coat.

“—Move,” said the man holding it. Glaring, I did what the big guy said.

I closed my eyes in frustration.

God, had you only made me an actor! Instead, all my acting was done in a windowless room—running errands, without audience, for Ric and his ceaseless inquisitions.

If I was an actor, then everyone could see my brilliance. If I was an actor, then I would make a living during daylight hours—hell, if I was an actor, I wouldn’t be with these schmucks.

I’d be with the VIPs.

Of course.

How could I be so thick? The basal hypnotics of the club music—thundering in my chest as if beating from my own heart—had gripped me.

I craned my neck and saw Alejandro Habsburg on the tiered platform above, sitting in concaved white leather and surrounded by a gang of people, and so I was to do my next favorite thing:

I waited.

Oh God, I waited.

Leaning against a platform, I sank into an opioid contentment.

I thought on the time I went to Africa and ate at a McDonald’s. I thought of all the abnormal rain we’d been having, of how India’s smokestacks plumed prismatic vapors and how soon after, ours did, too. Then I thought of the difference between true form and reality. Of love and justice as something we can see, all of us, but isn’t always so easy to live up to, of how the present always falls short of the idea—forever the cognitive dissonance of what life is and what life... is.

I thought also of what I called my ‘moss-covered stone.’

A core memory of my own, revealing itself symbolically in my mind as an ancient cairn.

I had the teratoma—an aberrant tumor of teeth—residing in an outcropping of some hidden malignancy outside my cranial stem. And she took a kitchen knife to it, my mother. She went at those abominations growing out of my head, unable to wait a moment longer, there on the kitchen floor of our home—poking, prodding—violently popping them out. Until finally we both lay on the laminate, gasping in crimson and mutually terrified.

It was the kind of strange fact so early in life one was to take it being true for granted. But lately, I kept coming back to it—the moment hallowed by the sheer horror—and detected a hidden significance, for my thoughts had lately returned to it, again and again. My parents never talked of it. So I wrote them. I wrote them all the way out there to their west Kansas farm, in confrontation. And now everything was a distraction as I awaited my answer.

I looked up from my reverie.

Alejandro Habsburg had made to stand.

I turned and trundled down into the dancer’s pit. With a shove and a nod, I conscripted several college kids to take the glowsticks I smuggled in and tossed them to the crowd, the dye exploding under the dancers’ feet with violent sprays of kaleidoscopic neon.

The DJ, picking up the signal, amplified the music.

And the primordial, dark-blue shadows of the night club ran into the pit. They came from the bars and the bathrooms, they came from the private floors. And I went opposite. In the chaos, I broke a bottle to his head.

Afterwards, when the club ran in panic from the fire alarm I set off, I dragged him upstairs, onto the roof and out into the open air. The stars, their lights varied like the festival-colored eyes of demented creatures, glimmered in appreciation of the offering.

I set Alejandro upright and stepped out of the light.

"I hope you’re more forthcoming than my last crossword puzzle,” I said.

The interrogation had begun.

—What are you doing? I would say.

—Where do you think you come from? Where do you think you’re going?

—Why, why, why? I would say, gripping him by the collar. Why do you care about life at all, when you know it’s all a stupid, fucking lie?

***

I had to report the details of the interrogation to Ric after but, under the train overpass on Railway Road, I passed my PO Box. I checked for mail from my parents, but only found overdue bills.

The avenue of Railway Road was both shadowed and synchronized with the rickety train track six stories overhead. The inhospitable overhang—to me, at least—somehow gave the place a homier touch, as type of shelter from the city’s technicolor madness. Five blocks down the road I walked, then up the six flights of the building, to Ric’s office.  

“—Habsburg doesn’t know anything,” I said.

Ric turned from the window, eyes sunken and in a black vest suit, cigarette dangling from his lip.

“Saw to his soul again, did you Petr?”

I scoffed. “It just showed itself after I stripped away the bullshit.”

“Ah, that’s right,” he said. “You Chechens always think you have an in on the truth.”

"And what other Chechens do you know?”

He chuckled. “Working with you, Petr, I’ve learned there’s a little Chechen in all of us.”

Before I could ask, he tapped his cigarette ash and walked out from behind his desk.

“Let’s retrace our case, shall we? Mr. John Opel, an SVP of the billion-dollar tech firm, Abacus, doesn’t know who stole his identity, and he’s hired us to get to the bottom of it. Whoever stole it, they’re leaking the internal studies of the company’s still-developing ‘Simulacra’ in his name. Mr. Opel is on the cusp of being promoted to the company’s Cabinet, but if those big wigs believe our guy is the source of the leaks, he can kiss any chance at a promotion goodbye—and we could do the same for any future business we would get with him.” He tightened his tie. “Our initial investigation showed that Mr. Opel’s has some unusual contacts. High-caliber criminals, all of them, with the first being Habsburg, who, if I’m hearing this right now, knows nothing about the leak?”

“Correct.”

He scratched his stubbled chin. “If Alejandro is in the state I think he’s in after working with you, we’re done with the Habsburgs. I want you on someone else now.”

“Who?”

“The only Kensington-area rapper worth knowing about, Petr. I need you to check up on him. Tonight. I’ve got it on good intel he’s connected to Mr. Opel’s case.”

“Not on any intel I know.”

Ric waved his hand through the air. “God himself has us on a need-to-know basis, so it would follow it would be as much elsewhere.”

“Damn it then,” I said. “You’re working some new angle you’re not telling me about, Ric. I’ll do it for you, but when I’m done, I want my pay, I want in on the gig in full.”

“Do this for me, and you got yourself a deal.” He snubbed out his cigarette. “Ah, don’t give me that look, Petr. It will happen for you, it will!"

I turned and left.

Kensington.

Its complete charmlessness was a charm in itself. This night, only the moon illuminated its dark, flat-roofed rowhouses, long abandoned of people and the city’s circus lights. The rowhouse’s paper-thin walls were perforated with decay, turning all the buildings into a single urban catacomb.

The mark was a lean six-foot-five, an African-American drug dealer whose real name was long lost to his rapper alias. No doubt it was his height, but also the corn rows lining his skull, flipping out at his neck like a certain black helmet, that he rightly earned his stage name of Darth Vader: “These things I despise are these virgin suicides / sheer kindness is something that the wind cries.”

On the edge of Kensington I entered a vacant and went to the backroom. I ran my hand through my black, greasy hair, then took off my denim-blue trench coat, fished out my rig and shot up.

One syringe, one cigarette filter; cocaine in white vinegar—dissolved.

MY GOD, my God.

I listened for the faint hum of the intelligent devilry for which Vader’s will quietly spread like an infection unique to the city. I found him in a center rowhouse on the second floor—deep inside the catacombs.

The glow of a single lightbulb, swinging. Grown men, shuffling cards.

I stood quiet for a time on the bottom floor, listening.

It took me eight long minutes to soundlessly crawl the stairs, heart pounding like a drummer on a frenzied solo. My body moved beyond my brain, and I set my devices—dark, trickery crawling out of my soul to my hands.

...Standing now, I looked at my watch.

Four-sixteen a.m.

I stepped into the light. The shadow stretched long, my trench coat billowing from the turn—big enough to hide a sawed-off.

They’re street smart, and they stood.

The timed nail bombs I set up exploded. The lightbulb popped out from the nails, the room went dark, ochre gunfire erupting in flashes from the blinding shooting as casings rattled on the floor, the poker chips spinning to a stop.

I listened to all this behind those paper-thin walls. The shooting stopped, and the perfect dark was silent but for a heavy breathing.

I figured they were all dead, when I heard it.

The rustle of cold cash.

Was it being picked up—?!—off the floor?

A deep sniggering, a booming laughter—peaking around the corner—a shadow, rising from the darkness, higher, higher, HIGHER.

Without thinking, I tucked and rolled.

Star-shaped gunfire discharged from Vader’s Kalashnikov.

I moved swift and low among the detritus. Dodging through the empty rooms, bursting myself through its reedy walls. Gunfire seemingly arrived from multiple directions, and I wondered, had others joined—or did he just move that fast?

On all fours I sprinted up the wood stairway to the top-floor hatch, ejecting alone onto the rowhouse rooftops, the moon high above. I turned around and, gripping the top of the hatch doorway, vaulted myself above and waited.

Oh, I waited.

Darth Vader—inhumanly tall, all dark energy—followed soon after, breathing heavy and bathed in the moonlight. The blast from my nail bomb studded his shoulders with nails like some new monster of Frankenstein’s.

Trusting in that shadowed self—my inner genius—was to be at peace with any outcome.

Steadying myself, I jumped.

***

A man once confessed during deposition—both in desperation and in deep conviction, I believe—that hidden deep in the universe’s core was a selflessness we do not have the imagination for.

But if that’s true, then there are tortures we don’t have the imagination for either. 

“—Who are you?” Vader said, gritting his teeth.

We are near Kensington, but not in Kensington. An apparatus—a metal contraption of my own design—holds him.

Impassively, I watched Vader, my head shadowed beneath a white gambler hat.

I made to speak—but stopped suddenly and thought of my mother. Of the letter in waiting—of the mind-searing pain when, so young and innocent, my maker forever changed me there on that kitchen floor.

“You ain’t Carter.” Vader spit blood out his mouth. “Too much of a coward. You ain’t Barbosa either. No, no.” He paused, breathing out of his nose like a bull, adjusting the metal grating around his neck. “Then who are you, huh? Who do you work for?”

The city lights were far off on the horizon and wild. And beyond them were more cities. More sludge. Junkies with computer cables in their veins, gathering and gathering until they were everything they ever wanted: a fat, fleshy creature, indolent and tubed for every conceivable need. It’s like this everywhere now, and I wondered, as I often did, whether the world would be more rose-colored were it not for my God-given tumors and the torturous memory they gave me.

“You don’t know even know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it—what's driving you. Do you?” Vader laughed. “You’re no better than the rest of us! You’re no better than meeeee!” he said, his last words bubbling with the blood in his mouth.

I didn’t know what information Ric wanted from this villain, but by modus operandi was never specific information—it was everything. The highest secrets of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Paganism have been opened to me by my unorthodox methods. Because my depositions did not last mere hours, they lasted—just as I had on that kitchen floor—’til they cracked.

I took off my hat. I looked at Vader.

My spine, suddenly, shuddered like a dog shaking off water.

That’s when his eyes opened wide—because he was no longer in the hands of impersonal shadow, but worse.

A broken person.

***

I slept most of two days and two nights in my apartment on Railway Road, stoic to the knowledge of Vader’s entire life inside me.

When I woke on the third day, fully rested, I walked to an Italian diner and ordered two twelve-ounce steaks and a pitcher of water and feasted. Afterwards, I went to Ric’s office.

“You get my note?” I said.

“I did,” he said, a sly smile on his face. “Great work.”

“And?”

“And what?”

"Is Mr. Opel’s character shaping out true? What game you playing here, Ric? I want in. I want to finally know all of it.”

I stepped forward.

“Petr, Jesus—Jesus!” he said. “You're slavering. Like a dog, Petr. You say you want in on the game, but you don’t. You don’t really want to know.”

I walked up to him, nose-to-nose, hands shaking. I took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth. I turned, lighting a kerosene lighter by the snap of my fingers, igniting the cigarette.

Maybe he had allied with Mr. Opel, trying to shore up power? Have me knock off their enemies, one by one?

Should I turn the tables on him, make him crack?

A hand laid softly upon my shoulder.

“I know you’re upset, Petr,” Ric said behind me. “It’s the Chechen in ya. It’s the Chechen in all of us, Petr. Those dark eyes entrenched so deep in a melancholy the same way a toad is the mud, but you still feel the heartbeat. The heartbeat of something softer—what you feel, all the out way out there in that impossible dreamland of yours, is the way the world should be.” A gun clicked at my back. “But that’s not the way it is.”

He shoved me forward with his pistol.

“Now get out, Petr, and don’t you never come back.”

***

The city streets in daylight gave the feeling of one gigantic, abandoned circus, jeering me in my spent defeat. Ric would see that I was iced out—or worse, try and kill me; the man always saw me as a black-monolith steam-engine, roiling through the city, and he had apparently ridden it to the last.

It was with small succor that I thought of my parents’ letter—that perhaps its contents could unlock the nucleus at the heart of my dark steam-engine, and the vein of savage melancholy, that strange internal compulsion to make what is inside outside, would lose its spell over me.

Feeling uneasy, I walked the five blocks and broached the precipice of the post office threshold when, far above, a window of the building opened. There was a screaming. Office files, white papers dancing downward in the hundreds, were dumped out of the window and fluttered down, like little white birds, past me.

But then the moment passed.

I went inside and found the letter and opened it.

Dear son, we wished to hear from you under other circumstances, so we will skip over the trivialities and get right to the point.

You are right. There is something your father and I kept from you about the event...

There is no other way to tell you this.

You never had teratoma.

I never took teeth out of your brain on the kitchen floor. I never held you down. You never bled on our poor laminate flooring.

It was all just a dream, sweetie. A nightmare. But you were just three years’ old, and the dream so intense, that you confused it with reality.

Petr, we told you this again and again as a child. There was no malignant cancer inside you, but you insisted it all happened. You insisted so much so that in the end we just went along with your fantasy, your nightmare.

Oh, Petr, your father and I are so sorry.

We pray. We pray for your healing.

I walked to the city beach, beside the empty carousels on the boardwalk, the rusty hot dog stands. I walked out to the pier. Ice wind blew from off the ledge. The sun, millions of miles away, hit the horizon and began to dip from view.

“Then if it wasn’t real,” I say aloud to the wind, “then everything is fine, yes? Everything is fine. It's all in... here.”

I scratched my head.

“But maybe... maybe my dream was curled around the contours of some other, unspoken horror? A horror experienced during the daylight hours—and the dream—the dream was an alarm to it? Yes, an unseen monster. An unacknowledged fact! But then... what was it?”

J.T. Ruiter is a Florida resident and former metropolitan journalist with bylines in the Chicago Tribune and Sun Sentinel. His fiction has appeared in The Metaworker, Dumbo and Idle Ink. He was a member of the marching band in high school and fondly recalls having once played before Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square.