‍I’m building a team.

We’ve got John Mershower. John puts the tips of guns in his mouth just because he likes how they taste. He’s fucked two separate brown bears in the ass. No condoms. He uses sulfuric acid as suntan lotion. He once cut off his own arm to use as a blunt weapon and then reattached it with a soldering iron.

Sandy Carleena. Also known as The Pittsfield Pistol. Also known as the Demon of New Hampshire. Assassin. Started at the age of three. Can toss a deck of cards and put a hole through each one before they touch the floor. Can shoot a peregrine falcon while blindfolded and earplugged, based on nothing but air movement. Can hit a spinning quarter on its edge at a range of 800 meters. Experienced and masterful with every firearm developed since the Chinese fire lance. Gun of choice: Smith & Wesson Model 14. At the age of twenty-one, she murdered a town of 5,567 before anyone noticed and then refused the client’s payment. Said it was for the love of the game.

Muhammad Abed Al-Saeed. The sneakiest man alive. Boy can he sneak. If he sneaked into your house, you would say, “Surely there is not a man in my house.” Began his career sneaking prized jewels for Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Nayef Salman Al Saud. When Al Waleed was arrested in 2019, Muhammad snuck himself into Cedarburg, Wisconsin, USA. Walked into Area 51 in 2022 and enjoyed a bologna sandwich with Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard in Base Supply and Administrative Building #1. Has a nasty habit of peeping on well-bosomed starlets, often getting his eyes mere inches from nipple.

Alexander M. Levich specializes in formal verse. He has created new, never-before-seen forms. Rhyme structures so complex that even typing them here would put you at risk. One of his latest poems created a bird in our physical reality. Similar to the golden eagle in appearance, but much more deft and significantly larger. Preferred writing utensil: Bic Classic. In 2018, he killed five men.

Annie Kaldebrant. Shapeshifter. Can shapeshift into and only into the seven members of BTS. So the police will finally think they have her cornered, trapped in an inescapable dead-end alley, and then BAM, they’re standing face to face with teenage heartthrob J-Hope.

Craig. Very assertive homosexual man. Great at planning. Loves to plan.

Sabrina Givens. Eleven years old. Bona fide whiz-kid. Ask her what the capital of Tuvalu is and she’ll answer before the first word leaves your mouth. Her mother is very proud of her.

Gargoopen. The ice master. Searched for years to locate. Eventually found him nestled halfway up the east face of K2. Sat cross-legged and with his eyes closed. Wearing nothing but a rag over his genitals. A spinning ball of snow levitated in front of him. It transformed into a dragon, a spear, a mountain, a thousand needles. I made him the same offer I made everyone else. He let the ball drop to the ground. He laughed. His eyes remained closed. He said, “I do not know of you. I have not heard of you. If you wish for me to join, prove your worth. Eat all the snow off the South Face of the mountain. If you eat all the snow off the South Face of the mountain, I will join the entity you describe.” Again he laughed. He resumed spinning his ball. Two months later, he was with us.

Nazebi Masamba. The swordsman. While in Baghdad, I was tipped off by a blind, elderly watchmaker that he (that is, Masamba) was staying in the Rub’ al Khali (Empty Quarter) of the Arabian Desert. I spent thirty-six months on foot, climbing the Rub’ al Khali’s massive dunes in the dizzying, pounding, oppressive heat until coming upon a teenage boy, an adventurer, with the skin of a child and the eyes of a man three times his age, who told me Masamba was now in the Nafud, that he had been so for the better part of a decade. I immediately changed course, crossed through the Dahna, and began again. In the Nafud, the smaller, reddish dunes seemed to shift constantly; where I had previously known there to be a dune was now just a dusty plain, where previously a plain, a dune. Rock formations appeared or disappeared overnight. Resting in the shadow of the Devil’s Thumb—that isolated stone jutting out of the barren southeast corner of the desert—I found a camel. Named Sammad. Sammad allowed me to ride him and then I was no longer on foot. Time became uncertain. The thought that all of humanity may have perished during our travels in the desert crossed our minds. Finally we saw a decrepit, old man. A handful of teeth in his mouth. A face composed primarily of wrinkles. When I climbed down from Sammad, the man squinted at me. His jaw opened, slack. “Orance?” he said. “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. T. E. Lawrence has been dead for some eighty-nine years.” The man began to cry. I told him we were looking for Masamba, that we had been looking for Masamba, that we have always been looking for Masamba. The man pointed us in the direction (Sammad flipped him a gold piece for his help) and we found our swordsman before nightfall. Masamba was lying on his side in the middle of a flat dune. He held his head in his hand. His body was covered in snakes. Saw-scaled vipers. A deathstalker scorpion dangled from his upper lip. His flesh appeared as if carved from obsidian. He said he’d been waiting for us. He said what took us so long. He moved his eyebrows up and down. When I thought they would be up, they were down, when down, up. I pulled the blade from my waist. He expelled one from his mouth. We clashed. Playing at first, we then took it quite seriously, our sweat evaporating in the desert wind. After many hours of evenly matched swordplay, Masamba relaxed his arm. He marked an X in the sand. He took a few paces and marked another X. He cracked his shoulder. “Only one way to decide this one,” he said. “Sand Tomb Death Duel.” The snakes and scorpions looked at each other in anxious shock, whispered the phrase back and forth. Sammad tilted his head toward the sky. “Yes,” I said. “Yes.” We buried ourselves up to our chests; able to reach our blades just past the other’s neck at full extension. I launched the first blow and he countered. We swung for one hour, two, five, nine, twenty, forty. He tossed his weapon to the side. “The greatest swordsman needs no sword at all,” he said. He parried my blade with his palms, his fingers. Moved his head left and right. With the sun setting on the eighth day, I could no longer grip the blade’s handle and my sword fell inert and useless at my side. Within a moment, Masamba’s hands were around my neck. He shouldn’t have been close enough but somehow he was. “You may give any last words,” he said. Then his head tremored and his eyes widened. “What is this?” He was astonished to find that it was not as it appeared or as he had imagined. It was I who had my hands around his neck. “What sorcery?… Impossible…” I released him. Pulled myself out of the sand. He bowed his head. “Finish me off,” he said, without sadness or fear. “No, my friend,” I responded. “There is work for you yet.”

Our cat. Named “Meowwwwwwwww” because she named herself. Has our complete respect. Coat as gray as dusk. One blue eye, one half-amber half-green. Scratches things we need scratching.

Ozzo. Made of forgotten and no longer relevant dreams. Like a middle-aged man’s hope to be invited to more than two and a half high school graduation parties. Like a grandmother’s wish to sleep over her best friend in the entire kindergarten Carol’s house on New Year’s Eve. She is like the dreamer who dreamed the dreamer of dreams. She has the face of either three elephants or one man; a body of leather or gas or rock. These are just approximations.

Sammad. Camel. The most loyal companion. Lived in the Nafud for most of its life, now lives in my living room. Does not need to eat or drink or sleep, though sometimes will do so for pleasure or out of boredom. Smells like nascent fire. Was born on the outskirts of the Taklamakan in northwest China. Locals claim that on his birth, the sun stayed still for seven days.

Brian Collins. Nineteen years old. Has worked at Best Buy for two years. Helps us with computers.

Aednachiya. Sea specialist. Humanoid creature/demi-god/mythical being. 686 years old. Resides in the oceans. Arms as large and wide as sails. Skin of placoid denticles. Teeth of coarse diamond. Has sunk ships since the 1730s. Some say they control the weather. Non-binary.

Bob Hill AKA The Toad, whose reputation precedes him.

The Riddleman. Has been alive since at least the First Agricultural Revolution. His riddles have stumped Xerxes and Narmer, Sun Tzu and Achilles. His greatest riddles are like labyrinths. A man begins and gets lost in a maze of thought he can never pull out from. With each turn, the labyrinth multiples in intricacy, exponentially branches. Victims are found starving, eyes wide, immobile, vultures pecking at their flesh while they’re still alive. The fate of Naram-Sin. The fate of Vercingetorix. The fate of Pyrrhus. The fate of Alexander. The fate of Cortés. The fate of Edward V. The fate of Guevara.

Sateesha Caldessa Nieve Abedgia Claritap O’Brien Mevy. Super sassy and super quick.

Jacob deGrom. Thirty-seven-year-old pitcher for the Texas Rangers.

Gorilla Girl. The offspring of legendary 1990s supermodel Kasey Pellers and a silverback gorilla. Either very attractive or very ugly depending on which angle you look at her. Instead of being born with half the power of a mountain gorilla, the genetic recombination resulted in a strength-level orders of magnitude beyond her father. She can hold a Grade 350 Maraging Steel rod at each end and pull it apart like playdough, toss aircraft carriers around as if they were pool toys, punch chasms through granite cliffs. Due to her origin, she is in constant, immense physical pain. This has led to a short temper; she is known to palm the skulls of jeering men and squeeze them into goop. My sometimes lover. To me, she is always beautiful. Has a heart of gold.

Bip. A being older than time. But not really older than time because that presupposes time. A being beyond time. We cannot contact it directly.

14-time Grammy Award nominee and 4-time Country Music Association “Female Vocalist of the Year,” Martina McBride. Has maintained her angelic vocal range into her late fifties. Able to inspire girls worldwide just by opening her mouth and making sounds out of it.

The Skeleton King. Skeleton. Specialty: frights.

Those are just a few of our members. We are a team. A crew. A collective. We go by many names: Sausages Delight AKA the Organization AKA the Many Hands of God (or sometimes God is replaced by Lucifer, or sometimes replaced by Azrael) AKA the Department of Dudes AKA People of the Way of Shiva AKA the Ghosts of the Flaming Murk AKA the Fairies of the Invisible Fog AKA Global Horror AKA Moses Mutts AKA Lou Reed’s Last Sunglasses AKA the Infinitely-Headed Serpent of Kur AKA the First Heracliteans AKA Kalabar's Revenge AKA the Myriad Tears of Saint Alena AKA the Brethren of the Drunken Gourd (sometimes shortened to just “Brethren of the Gourd”) AKA the Drascenes AKA the Hermetic Order of the Unmoving Wind AKA the “         ” AKA Amanda AKA Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.C. AKA the Diligent Disciples of Sekhmet (or Tezcatlipoca or Surtr or Apophis or Ra or Po or Tinky-Winky) AKA How Bob Dylan Said “A Happening” on December 3, 1965 AKA the Pismire He-He Haw-Haw Tickle Tickle Club AKA the Wiggles AKA the Soundless Sound AKA Charli’s Brats AKA the Naught AKA the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Cadmus and of the Temple of Harmonia.

Our goals have continuously been misunderstood and misrepresented. We care not for glitter, even less for gold. We are in search of something much more elusive. Something ineffable. Something Plotinus fumbled in the dark for. Something the Tao Te Ching confuses, distorts. Something William James gestured at (terribly and completely inadequately, and only with respect to its experiential quality, not a real attempt to get at the thing itself) in lectures XVI and XVII of his “Varieties of Religious Experience.” Something that the Hindus believed could be arrived at via samadhi, the Buddhists via dhyana, the Sufis via Fanaa and Baqaa—all of which have been fruitless, time-wasting failures. Something that even our great Alexander M. Levich could not point to with all his words and all his meter. Something that has been at turns mistakenly referred to as Ein Sof, the Godhead, the Over-soul, Brahman, Nature, the Great Spirit, the Absolute, the Unified Field, Cosmic Consciousness, the Monad, Allah, Tianren Heyi, the Observable Universe. Something Dorothy (RIP Judy, member in absentia) reached toward when she said, “If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.”

Dionysius the Areopagite tried to refer to it through negation, but it is also the subject of negation. It is Oneness but it is not Oneness, it is Subsumption but it is not Subsumption, it is Supra-Consciousness but it is not Supra nor is it Consciousness, it is Material but it is without Material, it is Pneuma but it is without Pneuma, it is Everything but it is Something, it is not Nothing but it contains the concept of Nothing, it is Life but it is Death, yet it is neither Life nor Death.

We believe we will attain/control/grasp it within the year.

If you wish to join us, it is possible, but that is not up to you.

We have a pot boiling and the sauce is red. There are more roofs than are touched.

When we succeed, you will know.

Tyler Plofker is a writer in NYC.