Intrepid megalo journalist-at-large, yellow pocket notepad-laden, brown pennyloafers and crumpled corduroy sports jacket, Ernest Logan Mitchell, had a face the color and approximate geometry of a rough-hewn slab of New England mountain-range granite. His broad, important nose and striking, dramatic forehead set off a face of angles and slopes, line segments, points and crests; a very geometric face that hid a circular mind and a raging fear of spiders.

Ernest, not Ernie, not Ern, but Ernest, as he, or I, prefers to be referred to as, engages himself fully in his dinner (my dinner, if I may dispense with the formalities of third-person narration, the mood of the story having been firmly set by now so that I may move along.) I dine every night, replenishing much-needed carbon and electrolytes and minerals, nutrients, calories, all the little particles in my body that prevent my skin from atrophying and falling off like some God damn leper or something foul and unclean like that. Particles are good for digestion, I always tell everyone within earshot that will care to listen.

Food is not just my méthode de vie, nor my vice, nor my albatross, nor my bete noire, as it is to many. Food is my job; I am a self-employed food critic, a rouge taste-tester for the diners and luncheonettes of the world. I am not published; my work is too important to bother with editing, deadlines, the press, the papers, anything. Aside from my notebooks and my own delicious recollections, the memoirs assembled inside my head, nobody has ever heard any of what I am sure will one day be the fulfillment of a life’s work. To not only sample, but to catalogue and define the culinary orbital of the greasy-spoon universe that is Long Island, New York, that is my goal.

The road ahead of me is unclear, but it is paved in French Toast.

The coffee is on the table; it is adequate. I love swirling the coffee in the cup as I lift it to my lips, like a liquor connoisseur with a big giant snifter of deep, deep amber cognac. I sniff it cautiously, testing it, tasting it with all the olfactory omnipresence of an elephant. I feel the radiant heat on my palate. I sip, but carefully, engaging myself in the warmth like wrapping a big comfortable blanket around my brain. I am immersed in the coffee.

And from across the marble countertop, do I detect the staring, probing brown eyes of the lonely damsel with the sleepy demeanor and dreamy, half-engaged expression of the new late-night disaffected beat generation? She’s looking this way - her eyes are, at least. Her mind could be anywhere else; the half-eaten and mostly discarded omelet in front of her seems to be the least of her concerns. Her fork is twirling absently through her fingers, moving on its own, spiraling intricately between forefinger and middle, then around behind the thumb, a perfectly executed pirouette, and it stops, in mid-twirl, pinned between two fingers, trapped, imprisoned, defenseless.

But her mind is elsewhere. She - I’ll call her Arroyo for now, since a face needs a name in order to progress in a narrative. Arroyo’s eyes are as distant as she is, all the way across the counter, unreachable. And yet, unavoidable, both her gaze and herself.

I pick up my coffee cup tenderly, gently, as if I were caressing a turtle dove with a broken wing, and I slide a few stools over. Not a difficult task to accomplish; at twelve seventeen in the morning, this diner is as empty as the coffee cup sloshing around in my hand. There’s a trail of spilled brown liquid following the trajectory of my arm across the countertop, and my forearm is burning terribly. My hand shakes. My fingers don’t quite curl around enough to keep more than a cursory hold on the cup’s handle.

I shrug. Arroyo grins, I think. I hope. Is she grinning at me? Is she grinning at all? I smile back, a broad, toothy smile, the patented Ernest Logan Mitchell flashy movie star grin. I’m still sliding down the counter, glacial-like, slowly, all calculated motions and casual shoulder rotations as I go.

She slides me a napkin, which I take, thanking her, and proceed to fold it neatly between my fingers. She motions towards her wrist, meaning, of course, my wrist, since she’s motioning at me, at the hot coffee dripping off my knuckles. I follow her motions, wipe the coffee off my hands, and wring the napkin out in the cup.

Now it’s my turn. I motion towards the door. I imagine us leaving together, getting into my Volvo, and driving off together forever, touring the world as a gypsy heiress and a wealthy and much-sought-after journalistic trailblazer.

I am not afraid that I will accidentally ingest something unhealthy or mind-altering or solid, in fact, I quite enjoy the mystery of it all, like a game of Wheel of Fortune, where the numbers on the wheel are replaced with various digestive disorders and other wildcards; "Your brain is now broadcasting radio signals to the FBI", "you can only use your left foot to walk backwards", "the robot nanoreceptors in your bloodstream are multiplying at an alarming and hazardous rate", and "you are turning into an ancient Mongol raider". The letters in the puzzle fill in for themselves as you watch. You can see the words form sentences, crossing and crisscrossing across your field of vision, warning you that there are harmful biotoxins and technocircuits, electrons and electrolytes and radioactive particles, additives, preservatives, coagulants, polymers, and parasites in your drinking water.

This is one hell of a crossword puzzle, I think. Most of these clues aren’t even words. What in the hell is a coagulant? I check my handy pocket thesaurus (I don’t believe in dictionaries, I don’t want any multinational publishing magnate figuring out what words I don’t know so they can use it against me, issuing new television commercials with products that claim to be "opalescent", "duplicitous" and "nefarious" and I, unknowingly, will pick this new product up during one of my bi-weekly trips to the local shopping center, and that’s how they get you.) There are no synonyms.

I tuck the thesaurus back into the inside front pocket of my shabby, though adequate, leather coat. I like the feeling of having a thick, dog-eared paperback covering my heart, protecting me from gunfire in case that ice cream man slowing down next to me is really an agent of the Yakuza, sent to eliminate me, stuffing my limp body into the empty ice cream freezer in the back of the truck so that I may be preserved for the long road trip back to his boss, probably an elderly Japanese man with a respectably dull grey suit and a thin handlebar moustache spreading across his short, squat, fat face.

I’m still watching the ice cream man cautiously, prepared to run, frozen with fear in case I have to. He’s slowing down, isn’t he? His eyes are laughing. His face is blank, lifeless, effortless in its assessment of the street in front of him. A bustling city street, children running around a broken fire hydrant, spraying its pressurized cargo into the air, glistening in the sunlight, each drop of water dispersing in a fine mist in the stale summer breeze, settling in a dew on the smoldering remains of a 1960’s-era Chevrolet something-or-other which had recently jumped the curb, slammed headlong into the aforementioned fire hydrant, flipped clear over onto its roof, taking out a score of allegedly innocent pedestrians with a scream, then settling into silence, then taking out its final assault on the street at large when it exploded in a giant fireball, probably visible from space, and the carnage surrounding it is breathtaking.

The ice cream truck picks up and turns a corner. I think I am safe.

Laughing, I pick up a shiny green apple from the outside wooden apple bin of a local fresh produce market that I am currently walking past. This apple can’t possibly be carrying any sort of secret communiqué-interceptor that I will unwittingly swallow and digest, absorbing it into the tissue of my body where it can turn my brain waves into a conduit for secret neo-Soviet transmissions and memorandums. It just can’t be. How would they know what apple I was going to pick? Unless they’ve bugged every single apple in the damn orchard, which is unlikely, though you really can’t put anything past these people.

Still, I’ll take my chances. I’m only four blocks from home, and I’m sure the security metal detector machine in the lobby of the apartment building would alert me if I were carrying any unwanted parasitic microchips in my digestive tract. I just need to get home before my body is able to metabolize the silicon and metal into organic body tissue. That takes at least fifteen minutes, as I am sure you’re all well aware.

All the same, I’d better run. Just in case. You really can’t put anything past these people, and for all I know, their top-secret underground bunker-esque science labs have managed, at long last and at great expense, to produce some sort of new silicon-derivative substance for microchips, one that can be metabolized in only four minutes, or maybe three, or maybe, maybe, they are bypassing the whole digestion mess and are branding their confounded circuitry directly onto human tissue, tissue that is genetically predisposed to attaching itself to the nearest convenient internal organ where it grows, leech-like, feeding off of body heat.

And this tissue is also programmed, right down to the genetic code of its DNA, to taste like apples.

Now I am running.

The stars all look like the headlights of cars, except, like, flying cars, and I guess stationary cars, too. So more like a parking lot full of poor airborne suckers with dead car batteries.

When I was a kid, I used to think that the future would be full of flying cars. And it is. Kind of. They don’t really fly, like, little tiny personal airplanes or something like that. They kind of hover over the streets, the new magnet-paved city streets that are a real pain for any kind of car other than those fitted with magnet-propulsion hovering engines. Or, for that matter, anyone with belt buckles, pocket change, zippers, backpacks, hair pins, and even certain brands of eyeliner. But that’s life in the big city, I guess.

I’m on Sixth Avenue, or, more succinctly, Avenue 6.11. It’s been like that ever since the Postal Service digitized mail delivery and thus eliminated the need for addresses, preferring instead to section off each individual street into decimals determined by distance traveled by an individual, so wherever you start on the street, it’s 6.0, and then it becomes 6.1 after a block, and 6.2, 6.3, sequentially, breaking into the hundredths place with each passing building. The new system makes it absolutely impossible for anyone to find a given building except by recognizing the façade or architecture. They’ve adapted. Each building is completely unique, picturesque, designed by the finest architects and artists in the world. Each building, for the sake of being recognizable, must have its own gimmick. For example, I’m standing in front of The National Rocket Ship Insurance Co. building right now, which is shaped like a giant, fifty-story aquarium. Business men in SCUBA suits and ties, carrying floating briefcases and waterproof memorandums. Or the apartment building next door that hovers six inches above the ground. You have to jump to reach the front door.

But that’s life in the big city. Things move too fast to get caught up in knowing where you’re going, or what you want to do, or where you are, or anything like that. Living in the city is a perpetual state of having no idea what you’re doing or where you’re going, and yet somehow managing.

I’m on Sixth Avenue, the big market street in this city. This is where you’ll find all of the merchants, storefronts, shops, and everything commercial and consumerist and wonderful like that. These buildings are the most creative of all. Sidewalk carts, sixty foot neon billboards, costumed mascots patrolling the street, fireworks, searchlights, the most elaborate and costly buildings and courtyards and sculptures imaginable. There’s a hot pink elephant, easily sixteen stories tall, trunk raised triumphantly in the air, giant cylindrical front foot raised slightly off the ground, seemingly crushing a small fashionable clothing boutique. I don’t know why the elephant is there. I think maybe the clothing store bought the building from a former peanut merchant or a tavern or an exotic pet store or something. It’s a nice statue, though. It fits. The store underneath its foot is one of those hipper-than-thou yuppie polo shirt and hundred-dollar-jeans stores, like the Gap except more expensive and snottier and incredibly uncomfortable. But hey, fashion hurts.

But I’m not on Sixth for any of those stores. I like the atmosphere here, and I like the free samples and giveaways you can snag on certain press days, but that is not what brings me here today. I’m heading for the smallest and most nondescript building on the strip. The one-story gray brick shack, the almost-completely-invisible little shanty, sandwiched between a thirty-foot fiberglass ice cream cone and a rather impressive medieval castle turret. That’s what I’m here for.

I skip up the front steps and stroll purposefully into the unassuming headquarters of the most powerful business in the world, more powerful than the government, the UN, the Justice League of America, the League of Nations, the New USSR, and McDonalds combined. Those simple brick walls, almost invisible amidst the glitz and glamour and occasional explosions of the shopping district, lead into a small, conservatively decorated reception area, all potted plants and straight-backed sofas, out-of-date magazine tables and some trashy drama on the television bolted into the upper corner of the room. The receptionist at the desk behind the thick bullet-proof, explosion-proof, impenetrable and impermeable glass window smiles as I enter. She looks like she could be a Janet, or a Janice, or a Susan.

"Susan," I say, "how’s things?" She looks up from her crossword puzzle through horn-rimmed glasses and doesn’t respond. She knows better than to respond.

Instead, she slides a keycard to me across her desk through a small opening in the plate glass that clearly could not have been there a second ago, and on closer inspection, isn’t there now. Anymore, at least. I’ve always wondered how that works. But I know better than to ask questions.

I pocket the card and quickly surmise the empty reception room. There’s a Monet on the wall. Blurry water lilies or something. I never understood impressionism. Why not just paint what things actually look like?

Underneath the Monet, framed in silver, is a gleaming steel sliding door. An elevator. But no call button. Another one of the great mysteries of this place, that elevator. It just senses you and the doors open. But it only works if it recognizes you. One day, I came in wearing a new polo shirt from the Spotted Elephant, the tragically-hip boutique out on Sixth with the giant elephant statue, and the elevator refused to let me ride for over an hour. It threw a tantrum and hid down at the bottom of the shaft. We could hear it sniffing and moaning the whole time. And there is nothing sadder than a depressed elevator.

The steel door slides open and I step in. The whole interior is done up in mirrors. The ceiling, the floor, the walls, even the door in front of me, all mirrors, all polished sixteen times a day by an elderly cleaning woman, Patrice, who scolds us when we track mud on her nice clean mirrored floor and who puts bi-weekly memos in the corporate newsletter reminding us to keep out grubby little fingers off the walls, that we had no reason to be touching the elevator walls, that the elevator can damn well get where it’s going without us groping around for a ‘door close’ button or a ‘down’ button or somesuch buttons that don’t exist. You should’ve seen her the day she caught two junior executives sneaking in a quickie one afternoon when they thought the elevator had jammed itself in the shaft and was consigned to stay there for the rest of the day because it had heard someone, a visitor, some exhibitor or customer from Salt Lake City, criticize the mirrors as being "really creepy." He was also heard to have exclaimed "what the hell kind of psychotic company is this?" upon being subjected to the standard pre-entrance retina scan, fingerprint check, skin biopsy, biometric test, voice recognition test, blood sample check, urine test, and the unexplained three-day isolation and observation period, the "kidnapping" as he called it. After hearing this, the president of the company, the enigmatic and eccentric multi-billionaire Walter X. X, was reported to have spent an afternoon mimicking the elevator, handcuffing himself to the doorway to the employee cafeteria, refusing to move until maintenance came to remove the doorway with high-emission laser guns.

The elevator descends on its own. This elevator only goes down, and it can only take you to the bottom floor, the negative sixtieth floor. This sixty-story office building is built entirely underground, save for the reception room above and above that, a small studio apartment, completely unrelated to the office, whose residents, a young couple with a small brown sheepdog, are completely ignorant of what goes on below their home.

The building is laid out, for security purposes, in the most curious and enigmatic way. The sixty floors are accessible by thirteen different elevators and forty stairwells, though not every elevator can access every floor. It often becomes necessary to carry a map of the elevator system with you in order to get around the office. A timetable, too, because the elevators sometimes change their routes throughout the day. The average trip from the bottom of the building to the executive suites on the negative first floor encompasses eight elevator transfers, six flights of stairs, and can take as long as thirty minutes. My record is eight minutes and sixteen seconds, which was for the longest time the office high score until some upstart college boy from the programming department calculated a five-minute route, and succeeded in running the course all the way to the executive suite, where he was met by the vice president of personnel, who promptly fired him for "knowing too much."

The elevator door slides open and I step out into the main entrance foyer. The walls are made of faux granite, rough and pebbly to look at, but also soft and absorbent like that space-age mattress foam that conforms to the shape of your body. The hallway extends about thirty dimly-lit feet ahead, and is wide enough for two or three people walking shoulder-to-shoulder. In the left wall is engraved in gigantic gothic letters, four feet tall and two feet deep each, the name of the company: Mono Corp.

The hallway ends with a glass door, with a scanner to read my keycard. The door hisses open with the familiar sound of disengaging electromagnets, and the treadmill welcome mat below my feet kicks into action, hastily depositing me inside the office as the door slams definitively behind me.

Mono Corp. We do things. Big things. Important things. Unimportant things. Stupid things. All kinds of things. To list everything that Mono Corp. does is as impossible as it is unnecessary. What doesn’t Mono Corp. do, is the real question.

I begin the trek to my modest office on the negative thirty-ninth floor, the publishing wing. I was recently moved into publishing from the research department, where I was involved in a project involving a lot of scale-model submarines and this incredible diamond filament duct tape that was completely unbreakable. The move from scientific research to publishing is not uncommon within the company; cross-departmental "promotions" and "employee exchanges" are the normal modus operandi here. It keeps people from becoming too ingrained in the work of any one department. It’s a safety concern. Keep people moving around to prevent anyone from getting too far ahead.

I hop on the double-wide -8th floor express elevator. The trip is brief and usually sparsely populated at this time in the evening. The -8th floor is comprised of mostly clerical workers, temps, and the occasional company veteran under a strict relocation period for being involved with some top secret project gone awry, and they all usually file out as soon as the clock hits five. My shift doesn’t begin until 9:30.

From the -8th floor foyer, I hop down the left stairwell for a few floors, and emerge, paradoxically, on the -30th. I don’t quite understand that stairwell, but I have never thought to challenge it, since it cuts a good ten minutes off of my intra-office commute. Now I just have one elevator transfer and a couple of circular hallways left to traverse.

The -30th floor elevator bay is the largest in the building. Nearly every elevator makes a stop here at some point in the day. Due to the spread of the elevator shafts across the building, the room is as large as Grand Central station. The center of the giant concourse, in an effort to maximize usable office space, features a twenty-foot fountain, both a conduit for the building’s centralized plumbing system and an occasional test pool for those ever-present scale-model submarines.

Due to the fantastic size of the elevator bay, the transportation department of the company must employ full-time traffic controllers to direct scurrying employees to the right elevator. In the two months that I have been passing through the bay on my way to my office, I’ve determined that their directions are right almost a full sixty percent of the time.

I prefer to navigate by intuition. I’ve always figured that since the elevators are able to detect who their passengers are and where they’re going, then I should be able to detect the right elevator. I’ve only been wrong twice, both times after downing one too many chocolate syrup and candy cane martinis at the corporate Christmas party, the epic three-day celebration of all things Yuletide that actually manages to shut down most of the daily operations of the company, often with tragic and grandiose consequences. Six years ago, for example, the former Soviet Union was able to regain power while the entire staff of the top secret Department of Mysteries and Issues of Universal Security (DoMIUS), was engaged in a furious Eggnog-induced Christmas carol karaoke contest.

I descended to floor negative thirty-nine without much ado, and hung a left towards the journalism wing of the publishing department. This floor is designed, I imagine, like a series of concentric circles. Every corridor has a noticeable curve. Some are curved so sharply that you can’t see what’s ahead of you until you accidentally slam face-first into the open drawer of a filing cabinet.

My office is on the convex side of one of the middle rings. I step in and sling my leather satchel carelessly onto the modest, disused wooden chair on the far side of the room. My largish mahogany desk sits in the exact center of the room, and I mean exact center. Twice a year, surveyors from the Department of Intra-Office Conventions and Standards position it with an intricate laser-sighted positioning unit. I have yet to hear a definitive explanation why the position of my desk is so important. The theory around the office is that the desks are all linked together in a wireless, electromagnetic power grid that helps to generate electricity for the rest of the building. When the desks are too misaligned, computers start shutting off downstairs in accounting.

On top of my desk, right in the middle, though not the exact center, more like slightly askew, sits a blue spiral-bound booklet. The rest of the desk is bare, save for the ugly brown ring of two accumulated months of not using a coaster for my coffee cup. I sit down and get to work on the booklet. I pick it up by one corner and shake it, expecting to see post-its or other notes flutter out. Nothing. I flip through the pages and observe thick lines of text, occasional diagrams, charts, maps, graphs, illustrations, and curious ink stains.

I am going to need some more coffee.

Arroyo is not Spanish, though. Dark-skinned, brown-eyed, black-haired Arroyo, the frame of a goddess, speaks with the voice of an excited young girl, though she herself must be thirty. I call her Arroyo, address her aloud, "Arroyo." She looks Spanish, at least. She looks like someone famous. Or at least someone I read about.

Arroyo and I are driving wordlessly. But I want to tell her all about my plans, my hopes, my dreams, my goals. I want to confide in her everything. I want to tell her about my life’s work and I want her to really understand. I think she would. She looked so comfortable in that diner, like it was her home. She probably understands the late-night diner culture just as well as I do. Maybe better. I mean, me, an outside observer, a silent witness to the blue plate cult. She, a participant, a constituent. She knows what it’s like.

We drive wordlessly and without a destination. We are already far from the lights and streets of anywhere I know, and we’re moving even quicker towards whatever oblivion awaits.

It’s been almost an hour on the road, and now I start looking, watching the road, reading traffic signs and wondering where in the hell we are. Long Island is an island stretched out lengthwise, and it’s very possible to lose yourself somewhere inside its belly. Once the town names cease to be immediately pronounceable, then it’s time to start figuring out where you are.

We are somewhere in the middle of East Guttural-Consonant-Sound, something that ends in ‘quogue’ and begins with the pound symbol. Maybe it’s just too dark out to read the street signs. Maybe I should stop driving. So I do.

I pull off the big road onto a little road. That’s how I navigate. I don’t know street names, parkways, highways, anything like that. There’s big roads, little roads, and that’s all I need to know in order to get anywhere I’m trying to go. It’s intuitive. It’s especially easy to get around when your destination is wherever you feel like stopping. Whatever looks interesting or whenever I am too tired to continue. Maybe that’s why I am always attracted to diners. Shiny chrome façades, neon lights, abundant coffee. The restless traveler’s oasis.

I don’t see any diners here. Shocking, considering there are more diners than people back in the more civilized parts of the island. I’ll survive for a while, though. I’ve eaten. Arroyo’s eaten. She’s asleep right now, curled up in a ball in the passenger seat. And the streetlights are playing all kinds of wonderful tricks on the soft curve of her cheek, throwing demon blue shadows across her face, making her glow, radiate, shine.

I’m faced with options. Either stay here in a town named after some dead Indian tribe leader, former dreaded tyrant of the land and forest, or I can go home, back home to my one bedroom apartment far west of here, back towards the beady eye socket of the great fish that is Long Island. I am tempted to the latter, to "go west young man" and all that, back home, where my unmade and untidy bed will suffice for two for tonight. I don’t see any reason to stay out here, out on the east nowhere plains where you can actually see the stars, the unsettling stars, like eyes watching you in the darkness, blinking and unblinking simultaneously, staring, probing, ever vigilant and never ever changing.

But still, to turn around now would be anticlimactic. I’ve come so far tonight for no reason, and why would I want to give that up, to exchange purposelessness for reason?

So we lay out on the grass and watched the stars, we saw them watching us, and we gave them something to look at.

We awoke the next morning shivering and covered in dew, wearing nothing but my frayed corduroy sports jacket as a shield and each other as a blanket. Still wordless and silent, we made the trek back west, to a small square apartment in a row with a hundred thousand small square brown apartments, with a well-worn welcome mat and a perpetually unwatered planter of some red flower whose care and well-being I don’t take much stock in.

The living room of my apartment, so named because it’s the only room other than the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchenette, is adorned unceremoniously with a brown shag carpet that stops just two inches short of being wall-to-wall. The walls are plastered end-to-end with framed magazine clippings, clippings of nothing in particular. Usually just interesting typefaces, catchy headlines, unusual journalists’ names, and photographs of people whom I’ve never met. I am interested in journalism, though strictly for the aesthetics. I am a freelance journalism association, all on my own, Interrobang! LTD, though we’ve (I’ve) yet to produce anything other than gibberish and Latin pieced together in calculated geometric patterns. One day, I’m sure, I’ll be out there. For now, I’m sure the anonymous contributions I’ve mailed out to random agencies across the world will one day form a legacy. The envelopes full of ideas I’ve stuffed and left lying on park benches will one day find their way into fruition, I am sure. I will be fulfilled.

Arroyo heads straight for the bathroom. I wonder for a moment how she knew where it was. Then I realize that there are only two rooms in the hallway, and the bedroom door is open. So process of elimination, I guess.

I start tidying up the living room. Not a difficult task, since the only furniture I have is an overstuffed brown sofa with a missing cushion and a sewn-up scar on the left arm, a coffee table with a three-day old New York Times on it, and a lamp I bought at Goodwill for probably more than it’s worth. The lamp is on the table, and the table is on the shag carpet. The carpet is on a cement-slab floor, which is on the foundation of the building, which is dug into the earth. I don’t know what happens below that. I’ve never investigated further than the topsoil.

The only light in the room right now is streaming in from the front window, the window next to the door, just like every other apartment in the strip. I’m pretty sure they’re designed to allow the neighborhood "watch" to watch us all, make sure we’re not doing anything against the regulations of the apartment complex. I don’t know exactly what those rules are. I had to sign a big packet of contracts and agreements when I moved in. Must have been one of those. I don’t really care, though. They haven’t kicked me out yet, so I imagine I haven’t done anything wrong. Or else they’re just not fast enough to catch me.

Arroyo’s back. I lead her over to the sofa and she follows, diligently. She looks tired, lost, perhaps scared of something. She hasn’t spoken a single word in well over ten hours. In fact, I’ve only heard her speak once since we met last night. In the car, leaving the diner, she leaned over to me and whispered to me, so sweetly, the voice of an angel singing a never-ending hymn in my ear; she said, "Did you forget to pay your bill?"

Indeed I had, but that’s history now. A man of the diner world like I scarcely has to stop and think about things like that. I’m sure in the grand scale of things, the wheels will keep on turning and the clocks will keep on running and everyone will be better off. At least, in my verbose, circular thinking it will.

Arroyo coughs, politely, and purses her lips, as if to speak. The goose bumps behind my ear prick up and my skin tingles with the dizzying buzz of excited electrons as the angel voice fills her lungs for another sonata.

"...hi," she exhales, pronouncing her ellipsis as fluently as the subsequent word. She smiles in greeting and continues. "So who are you anyway?"

I want to tell her everything about me, everything there’s ever been about me, everything I’ve thought since meeting her. I want to explain the mysteries of Ernest Logan Mitchell, and before I can contain myself, I burst out with such a sudden exclamation that even I was startled:

"Hi."

This is going to be one of those days.

The metal detector in the lobby of Avenue Fourteen Luxury Arms Apartments always makes the fillings in my back teeth stand anxiously on end, as if waiting for the signal to switch into "receive" mode and flood my lower jaw with enough electric energy to seize control of my central nervous system, turning me unwittingly into a remote-controlled assassin or the instigator of a robot riot that will invariably leave hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders dead and vaporized. I pass through it every day, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen or thirty times a day. Every time, I fully expect the shock of having the marrow of my bones scanned and shocked for some hidden tracking bug or satellite receptor, and every time the shock still manages to take me by unsettling surprise.

But if it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly, you know. Just push through and get it over with. I don’t like the idea of radio waves probing through my fragile body, but it’s better than not knowing exactly what sort of unpleasant espionage tactics are being performed on my veins and capillaries.

What I don’t get, though, is why I seem to be the only person in the building who shudders every time I feel the warming metal-detecting microwaves pass through my epidermis. Don’t they all feel it? Don’t they realize what’s going on behind the scenes and under the ground of this Brave New World to which we have become unwilling and unknowing slaves? Sometimes I think that maybe they’re all in on it, like this whole building is just a front and all of the other identical apartments are really scientific labs and observation facilities where they watch and track and catalogue my every move, my every thought, everything I buy and everything I consume, everything I see and everything I don’t. They could be watching me through the walls and I’d never ever know. They could be watching me right now; the elevator bellboy could really be one of them, disguised as a rough-shaven college boy in a smart lavender suit trying to make ends meet by endlessly pressing the elevator buttons, but really he could be a trained martial artist, keeping me always under the watchful surveillance of his ever-vigilant eye, waiting for me to step out of line or to figure out the truth, and then BAM! One chop to the back of the neck with his conditioned hand, hard as a rock from years and years of endurance training in the Andes, and off goes my head.

My apartment is on the sixth floor. I always try to catch a sideways glance at the space between the elevator and the shaft. One time, I’m positive I caught a glimpse of a faded white sans-serif number seven. I don’t know what that means yet. I have a working theory, but I’m afraid if I ever speak it out loud, or even think about it too clearly, they’ll find out and send one of their robotic machine gun drones into my bedroom to take me out with a heroic spray of electromagnetically-enhanced cyber-bullets, eventually building up enough of an electric charge on my dead bullet-riddled body to cause an impressive display of ball lightning. And I imagine the press would remain silent on the story, because who would believe that a streak of lightning escaped from the sixth-story window of an apartment building? Nobody. There’d be some story in the police blotter about a window broken by some punk kids with a pellet gun, or a gang shootout, or carbon trioxide or something crazy like that. But it would all be a farce! An absolute lie! The truth will never be free, you know.

My apartment number is 616. Do you realize what that is? A palindrome. No matter which way you read it, as long as you read it forwards or backwards, it’s the exact same number. That is entirely too similar to be a coincidence. It’s a part of this whole thing, it must be. The room itself even looks like a palindrome. One single white-walled room, perfectly square, with doorways on either side, symmetrical in every way. A black sofa in the center, above a black throw rug, in front of a near-black coffee table and a black television. The only non-monochromatic non-symmetrical item in the entire room, the real focal point of the apartment, the only thing special about the entire room is the back wall. The beautiful picture window, taller than I am and almost exactly as wide as the sofa. It looks out on the patchwork streets of the beautifully terrifying metropolis that is New York City, the spider web of headlights and street lights, the silent cacophony, the hustle and bustle of life and death right below my feet. I stand here sometimes and look out as far as I can, past the buildings and the electricity, over the horizon and out to anywhere, anywhere, somewhere I know exists out there somewhere, where every question has an answer and every problem has a solution, where good and bad are words that carry real tangible definitions, and the only thing there is to fear is whatever’s out there, here, since from there, if you look out to the horizon, you’re looking here.

But this is the city, and nobody gets out of the city. Nobody can even see out of the city. How do I know that whatever’s out there just past my vision isn’t just another city like this, just another place where people look out and wonder where else there is to go. But there has to be something else out there, there has to be. It’s what keeps us going, the idea of something out there, the unknowable, unreachable "it" that everyone dreams of and nobody knows how to find.

Dinner’s in the freezer. I can only eat frozen meals, in case any sentient superbacteria are waiting inside the chicken breast for me to unwittingly ingest and metabolize them. That’s how they get you. The really ingenious ones, that’s what they do. Anyone can fry your brain with enough electrons and microwaves to turn it into a silly putty microchip, but the really good ones can get inside you and control you from within. That’s how they get you. They wait until you’re really hungry, but when you turn to the freezer, you’re all out of food and you’re so desperate that you’ll actually try something unfrozen, unprocessed, unclean, like a hamburger from the place down the block. And that’s how they get you.

But I’m not worried right now. I have enough food. Unless they’ve somehow managed to cultivate a species of bacteria that can withstand the negative-degree chill of the freezer, like some Artic microbe that managed to migrate southward inside an ice floe that was picked up by an Atlantic trawler, merging the frosty microbes with the payload of mackerel, then delivering the fish along into the grocery stores of America.

But I doubt that. That would be an even bigger coincidence than the 616. Though you really can’t put anything past these people.

"What’s so bad about pyramid schemes? I mean, as long as you’re on the top. Like me. The top. I’m always on the top. I even sleep on top. On top of a big pile of crumpled hundred-dollar bills. With my face taped on top of Franklin’s face. On top, that’s right.

"I have more money than even I know what to do with. That’s probably why I sleep on it. You know. Just in case that’s something that really really rich people do with their money. Like Scrooge McDuck, he used to swim in gold coins. Swim. A whole swimming pool full of gold doubloons. Imagine the health risks. Choking hazards. The crushing pressure of precious metal on those brittle old hollow duck bones. Also, what if you sink? Can you struggle against the weight of the coins, trying to surface, as they pull you down, down, down, like the quicksand in an old adventure film or Super Mario game? But, you know, whatever. I’m too rich to worry about my health and well-being.

"But, dear friends, investors, customers, Romans, countrymen, enough about me. We’re not here today to talk about me. We’re here to talk about you. Your money, to be specific. Every single precious person in attendance here tonight, as I’m sure you’re all well aware, can claim one special distinction as their own. You are all proud owners of some small share of the newest division of the greatest thing to hit the earth since the meteor that killed those damn dinosaurs: that’s right, I am talking about the organization of which I consider myself to be the father, big brother, mentor, and owner of, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Mono Corp!

"We do things. Big things. Massive things. Things of the most ridiculously grandiose scale. We are the world’s foremost authority on the subject of the world. We are constantly expanding the horizons of scientific research. Our most recent study, testing the laws and limitations of plate tectonics by both raising and razing an entire new continent, expanded all knowledge and thinking on the subject of the composition of the planet. It was written about in magazines, you know. Important magazines. Scientific ones. Not the kind of periodicals you might pick up at the newsstand for some light reading on the subway. I’m talking about real big publications that use big fancy words and diagrams. The kind of magazine that you need a PhD to even subscribe to.

"But I’m not here to flaunt our achievements, grand though they may be. Tonight, we are gathered here to once again make history. It is my pleasure to introduce to you, the new Director of Marketing for Mono Corp., Doctor James N. Monroe!"

"Thank you! A big hand for our esteemed president, Mister Walter X, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, thank you.

"Now, to business. Folks, we are right on the brink of a new revolution, and I am here to tell you, direct from the front line, the future has never been brighter..."

I hate gala events like this. Speaking obligations, people, lights, podiums, all of it. This is not why I got into the mogul business. I want to be behind a desk, in a big leather chair, in front of a wall of diplomas and degrees and newspaper clippings about how rich and successful and crazy I really am. I didn’t change my last name to ‘X’ to become a people person. I want to be mysterious, enigmatic, unstable, much-sought-after and oft-rumored-about.

I’m attending a gala ball celebrating the opening of a brand new division within the Department of Marketing at Mono Corp. It’s a new system, and a brilliant one, engineered by yours truly, and it will soon be put into motion in five test cities across the country. What is it, you ask? To put it bluntly, and I am not often blunt, so bear with me, but basically, it is a pyramid scheme.

But it’s a pyramid scheme with class. It’s a scheme that works. For Mono Corp, at least, and for the investors, and for a few lucky people within the organization. It’s not a pyramid made up of individuals, though. Those never work. People become disinterested too easily. Impatience. They drop out as soon as they realize that it takes effort to get to the top of anything.

No, this pyramid isn’t made up of people. It’s made up of pyramids. Regional pyramids, made up of state pyramids, made up of cities. And the big Lego at the top, the capstone through which all the revenue will inevitably flow? Mono Corp, of course.

How exactly does it work, you might wonder. Quite simply, it doesn’t. It’s not designed to. It’s a front, a scam, a get-rich-quick scheme for the already fabulously wealthy. It’s basically a big giant tip jar spread out across the whole country, a tip jar that empties right into our pockets. It’s one of those fountains in the center of a shopping mall, with those grossly disproportionate goldfish angrily sloshing about amidst a battery of pocket change, hard candies, pretzel nubs, straw wrappers, wadded-up tissues, and chewed gum. It’s a simple depository for people with money to deposit their money. We take it. We use it. And that’s the end.

It’s such a brilliantly simple system that I can’t believe I was the first person to implement it on such a large scale. A guaranteed source of vast revenue, and all we have to do is offer the average suckers at the bottom the assurance that once enough of them buy into the system, it’ll turn around and deliver rich profits to them. Of course, by the time enough people buy into the system to make it profitable for all, we’ll have already taken enough of our keep to call the whole experiment off, call it a failure, and write off the bad press with a good old fashioned "management shift." Give some tenured executives a nice vacation downstairs in a cushy desk job, bring in some college kids from marketing to try their hand at management, and suddenly Mono Corp. is new, dynamic, going new places, doing new things, we’re young and fresh and loved again. Maybe we’ll sponsor another World’s Fair, just for the hell of it. Keep the people happy, and they’ll keep feeding our goldfish fountain.

Monroe is still on stage, trying to explain the brilliantly vague specifics of the "Community Chest" program. The investors have already bought it. They bought it months ago, when they sent their RSVP checks in. They don’t care what we’re doing. They’re mostly hammered on free cocktails and cheap hors d'oeuvres, anyway. As long as they get a return, and they know that we always give them a return. What’s a drop in the bucket when the bucket is full to the brim and overflowing onto my expensive Italian shoes?

Still, Monroe’s giving a hell of a speech. The guy’s got a knack for knowing exactly what to say to keep people totally clueless as to what he's actually saying. He’s one of the only members of the elite upper-management inner circle that I can trust. He’s one of the only ones who I could never trade away for some college intern in a Macy’s suit with uncrushed spirits and all kinds of notions of "doing the right thing" and "customer loyalty" and "corporate responsibility."

Doctor James Monroe. The only man in the entire organization who I have left to fear.

To Whom It May Concern:

This report has been delivered to you with the strictest confidentiality.

The materials contained herein have been collected by the Department of Investigations of Mono Corporation, US Division, over a period of several years. Only recently have we been able to draw any correlation among their subject matter and their proposed origin. Most of these documents have been kept filed away in various databases and filing rooms until recently, when a formal investigation was opened with regards to what we now believe may be an imminent threat to our continued viability in the fields of journalism and publishing.

This investigation is being conducted jointly between the Department of Investigations and the Division of Publishing.

Please carefully analyze the following documents. You will be expected to present your findings at an as-yet-unspecified time to superiors involved in this investigation. You will be contacted further.

Best,

Central Operations

I pored over the enigmatic message all night. I read it from every angle, in every way, with every possible mindset. I don’t know what it all means, and I don’t like it. I mean, I understand, at least, what the memo is telling me to do. Document analysis is a pretty common task around here. On slow news days and overstaffed afternoons, Central Ops often sends down packets of documents for us to analyze for other departments who have more important things to do than read. They figure that journalism basically boils down to reading, gathering information, and then interpreting it. So, why not put us on the job when nothing else is going on?

I guess they’re right. I mean, I don’t have anything better to do tonight. No pressing issues to investigate, no cutting exposés to pen. The only thing on my docket right now is proofreading some interns’ work and figuring out which one of them to fire. Boring old business as usual.

But still, there’s something about this case that scares me. Confuses me, at least. I don’t know. Something about this little blue booklet doesn’t sit right. What’s so "top secret" about it? Can a public institution as big as Mono Corp. actually carry out covert operations? I don’t usually doubt the inner workings of the company, but now I am worried that there is some kind of dark underbelly to the place that I was not aware of. And now I am being asked to take my first big step into the darkness, to associate myself with something more than the daily grind of "business as usual." I’m scared.

And then there’s the question of the actual documents I am being asked to analyze. Most of them are barely legible. Pieces of torn notebook paper, scrawled with random sentence fragments and incomprehensible declarations. Cocktail napkins with drawings of hierarchical structures and flowcharts with preposterous non sequitur connections. Unaddressed envelopes filled with newspaper clippings of capital letters and punctuation. I don’t see any connections between anything contained in this binder. None of it makes sense, within or without the context sketched by the inscrutable cover page memo. Nothing fits together.

I can hear the reverberations of a voice from the grand corporate ballroom a few floors above me. I know there’s some fancy event going on up there tonight, something big enough to draw President X and Dr. Monroe out to deliver speeches. Those are the bigwigs behind the scenes of Mono Corp. They call most of the shots around here. Especially Monroe. His omnipresence in the office can be downright scary at times. He’s always there, always has his hand in everything, always finds his way into anything important going on.

When I worked in the research department, I could count on Monroe paying a visit to my humble office at least once a week, always with something good to say, something bad to say, and something new and surprising to say. That’s how he works. He comes up to you, sidles up like a terrifying ghostly apparition, and hooks his eyes into your skin. He initiates every conversation the same way: "I’ve got some good news, some bad news, and something that might come as a bit of a surprise to you." Usually, the good news comes first. "I read your report on mechanical perfusion, and I say you did a bang-up job on page sixteen," or "I hear there are plans in the works to get you a grant for some more work on that new plastic compound you’ve been developing," or if all else fails, he’ll say something about himself, like "I just had the most fantastic latte from that new bistro on Avenue Nineteen," or "I saw a great new program on public television last night." But he always has to have something positive to say. Then he’ll continue: "Though I am disheartened to report that you’re going to have to work a few extra hours for a while to clean up the research lab you accidentally burned to the ground last week," or "the company is being sued by some Swedish research firm for accidentally infringing on some patent or something foolish like that, and I’m afraid we’ll have to dock your salary to defray the legal fees." He’ll then inevitably end with something like "In either case, we’re going to have to shut down your entire operation, effective immediately, because the company has decided to downplay its tremendous capacity to build and propagate massive-scale explosives" or "we’re converting this wing into an additional manufacturing facility for our children’s toys manufacturing department to increase output for the Christmas season, and your office is sitting right where the teddy bear stuffing machine has to go," or "I’m going to have to transfer you to the janitorial department for a few months, just until this whole ‘indictment’ thing sorts itself out." I haven’t run afoul of Monroe since my transfer to journalism. I suppose it’s all for the better. Sure, I don’t get any sort of high-profile, career-furthering work anymore, but at least I don’t have to worry about anything "that may come as a bit of a surprise" to me anymore. I’m content to sit here in my perfectly-white office and pore over incongruous documents all night if it means I can avoid Doctor James Monroe.

I kick my feet up on my desk, careful not to move it from its rest in the exact center of the room, and select one scrap of paper at random from the blue booklet. I read it aloud, "I think the great thing about publishing is that any fact immediately becomes manifest once it is printed and once enough people subscribe to a belief in it." I have to analyze this. I feel like I’m stuck in high school English class, being fed incomprehensible Shakespeare soliloquies and having to present my interpretation of Hamlet’s madness to the class. I stutter, I clear my throat. "I, uhm... well, I think that the thing that he’s trying to say is the fact that..." my voice trails off. I’ve got nothing to say.

"The fact that people have an obligation to believe anything they see in credible print, that the human mind requires some freedom from having to reason for itself, that the ability to rely on others to tell us what to think is completely essential to preventing our minds to shut down from complete sensory overload?" comes a voice from behind me. I turn, surprised, shocked, and see the looming frame of Dr. Monroe standing in the silhouette of the office door.

"Hey, how’s things been? I see you got my memo."

"Your memo, sir? Are you the one behind this investigation?" I stammer, still reeling from the shock.

"Well, not exactly. I’m not in charge here. But I take a great interest in everything that goes on around here. Now, listen. I’ve got some great news. Our investor’s ball upstairs is going so well, I predict we’ll have a few extra million dollars to kick around in your department by the end of the quarter."

"That’s fantastic..." I reply, disassociated, cursing my good luck of once again crossing paths with the Chief Instigator, the Catalyst of all things strange and mysterious in Mono Corp.

"Yeah, isn’t it? But unfortunately, we’re going to have to cut your operating budget by almost thirty-five percent next year. You know how it is. We’ve got some big things coming up in a few other departments and those are going to be big strains on our bank account." Monroe has a peculiar way of slowly shaking his head as he delivers bad news, almost like he’s trying to elicit his own sympathy for something he probably couldn’t care less about.

"But anyway, I doubt you’ll have to worry too much about that. This investigation you’ve got in front of you is going to be so engrossing, I think a promotion to the Department of Investigations might be in order. Nothing permanent, of course. But I think after you’ve gotten to the bottom of this case, we might be able to find an opening in the junior executive wing. What do you think?" Monroe often asks questions without expecting or waiting for an answer. "Well, fantastic! I’m glad we had this little chat. Good luck with the investigation. You’ll be in touch." Monroe concludes ominously, then disappears as silently as he had entered.

I am still speechless.

There was a note pinned to my door. I didn’t read it; I don’t have time to go around reading everything that everyone pins to my door all day.

I am in my kitchen. There is someone else in my kitchen. I don’t know who it is. This guy has a moustache. I don’t know anybody who has one of those.

This man also has a knife.

I wonder what he is doing here.