WWE SmackDown Live - 9/3/19 - Live from the Norfolk Scope Arena in Norfolk, VA!

Match Results

Winner	Loser	Finish
Elias	Ali	Pinfall via Drift Away
Fire & Desire	Alexa Bliss & Nikki Cross	Pinfall via a Bicycle Knee/Legsweep combo
Chad Gable	Andrade	Pinfall via Roll-Up(?)
Aleister Black	Shelton Benjamin	Pinfall via Black Mass
Shinsuke Nakamura	Andrew Howard	Pinfall via Kinshasa

Show Summary

Courtesy of F4WOnline.org
SmackDown Woman’s Champion Bayley made her way down to the ring. She got a mixed reaction. There was a good amount of boos but also some cheers. She said nothing has changed and she was siding with her best friend. She’s just trying to lift people with her heart and hugs.
She called herself a hero and role model. She’s trying to show the kids what it means to be loyal. Bayley couldn’t turn her back on her friend. She’s trying to put SmackDown on the map and wants to prove that she’s a deserving champion.
Bayley promised to beat the most selfish person on the roster, Charlotte Flair. Flair’s music hit and she made her way to the ring. Flair noted what you see is what you get. She said there is no blindsiding and no hugging. She told Bayley to hold the belt real tight because she’s coming for it.
Sasha Banks music hit, and she walked down the aisle. Flair attacked Bayley and rocked her with a boot. Banks jumped in the ring, but Flair cut her off. Bayley attacked Flair from behind with the chair.
The fans chanted “One more time.” Bayley handed the chair to Banks, and she attacked Flair. The fans broke into a loud “Becky” chant.
Elias defeated Ali in a King of The Ring Quarterfinal match
This was a good match. Ali had the early advantage and sent Elias to the floor. He attempted a dive, but Elias caught him and slammed him on the ramp. Elias threw Ali around ringside and press slammed him into the timekeeper’s area.
Back from the break, Ali rocked Elias with a dropkick. He rocked Elias with hard chops and followed up with the rolling X factor for a near fall.
Ali hit a suicide dive and sent Elias into the barricade. Elias injured his arm, but Ali injured his knee.
Ali climbed to the top, but Elias cut him off. Ali fought back and hit a 450 to Elias’s arm. Ali locked on the cross face, but Elias made the ropes. Elias fought back and hit a sit-out powerbomb for a close near fall.
Elias worked over the injured knee and hit it against the post. They fought on the top rope, but Elias pushed Ali off. Ali moonsaulted to the floor and landed on his feet. Elias attempted a dive, but Ali hit a superkick.
Ali attempted the 450, but Elias moved. Elias fought back and hit the drift away for the win. Elias advances to the semi-finals and faces the winner of Chad Gable vs. Andrade later tonight.
Kayla Braxton interviewed Samoa Joe backstage. He discussed facing Ricochet and Baron Corbin in the semi-finals. He’s here scouting the competition and promises to become king.
Fire & Desire defeated Women’s Tag Team Champions Alexa Bliss & Nikki Cross in a non-title match
Cross attacked Mandy Rose with forearms to start the match. Sonya Deville distracted Cross and Rose attacked her from behind. Cross hit a cross body from the top to the floor.
Back from the break, the heels were firmly in control. Bliss got the hot tag and ran wild. Cross took out Rose with a crossbody.
Bliss caught Deville with a DDT and climbed to the top for Twisted Bliss.
Cross applied the sleeper on Rose on the floor. Rose sent Cross into the apron. Bliss was distracted and then attempted Twisted Bliss, but Deville got her knees up. Rose hit a knee on Bliss for the win.
Samoa Joe ran into Chad Gable in the back. Joe mocked Gable for being short and called him Bilbo. He told Gable’s he’s mentally weak. Joe walked away, but Gable seemed bothered by the comments.
Randy Orton made his way down to the ring. The fans broke into a loud “Randy” chant. Orton promised to win the WWE Championship at Clash of Champions and called Kofi Kingston a fraud. He discussed injuring Kingston last week.
The fans broke into a loud “Kofi” chant. He showed footage of Orton attacking The New Day over the last few weeks. Orton promised no more traps and challenged Kingston to come down to the ring.
Kingston’s music hit but The Revival attacked him as he came out. Big E and Xavier Woods are injured an unable to help Kingston. Kingston fought back against The Revival, but Orton jumped Kingston.
Orton repeatedly called Kingston stupid as he stomped on him. Kingston fought back again, but he couldn’t overcome the odds. Orton and The Revival then gave Kingston a super RKO.
They recapped the Roman Reigns mystery attacker angle.
Chad Gable defeated Andrade (w/Zelina Vega) in a King of the Ring Quarterfinal match
On commentary, Corey Graves continued to make short jokes throughout the match. Zelina Vega mocked Gable for being short as well.
This was another good match. Andrade attempted a moonsault, but Gable rolled out of the way. Andrade landed on his feet and tried a standing moonsault, but Gable got the knees up.
Gable hit a moonsault for a very close near fall. The fans broke into a “Gable” chant.
Andrade fought back but missed the double knees in the corner.
Gable hit a German suplex, but Vega distracted the referee. Andrade caught Gable with a back elbow and attempted the hammerlock DDT, but Gable rolled through and pinned Andrade to advance to the semi-finals. The fans popped huge for Gable’s win. Gable takes on Elias in the semi-finals.
Aleister Black defeated Shelton Benjamin
Black had the early advantage, but Benjamin took over. Black fought back with kicks. Benjamin caught Black with a knee, but Black hit a series of strikes. Benjamin missed a kick, and Black hit Black Mass for the win.
In the back, Drake Maverick fought off The Singh Brothers and Curtis Axel to retain the 24/7 title. Bo Dallas snuck up from behind and rolled up Maverick to win the title.
*Intercontinental Champions Shinsuke Nakamura defeated “Andrew Howard” *
Nakamura and Sami Zayn made their way down to the ring. Zayn mocked the fans. He asked Nakamura’s opponent if his name is Andrew Howard. He shook his head no. Zayn said it doesn’t matter since he’s named The Miz tonight.
Zayn did commentary on the live mic during the match. This was a total squash and ended when Nakamura hit the Kinshasa.
Bo Dallas rolled into the ring trying to get away from a bunch of guys. Maverick rolled up Dallas to regain the title.
R-Truth was disguised as a lamp next to the King of the Ring throne. Truth rolled up Maverick to win the title.
Daniel Bryan made his way down to the ring. The fans broke into a loud “Daniel Bryan” chant. He said it’s nice to around people that believe him. He said he hates liars and demands an apology from Roman Reigns.
Reigns made his way down to the ring. Rowan attacked Reigns from behind and threw him into the ring steps. Bryan tried to stop Rowan, but he shoved Bryan to the floor.
Rowan gave Reigns a powerbomb into the ring post. Rowan then gave Reigns the Iron Claw in the ring. He grabbed the mic and pointed out that Reigns thinks Bryan was behind the attack, but it was Rowan. He mocked Reigns and challenged Bryan to come in the ring and slap him. Rowan is nobody’s puppet.
The fans broke into a loud “Yes” chant. Rowan’s admits he was behind the attacks. He hit Reigns with the steps and cleared the announce table.
Bryan got in Rowan’s face and slapped him. Rowan snapped and gave Bryan the Iron Claw through the table. Rowan yelled that nobody tells him what to do.

You ever sit around all day don’t know what to do? So bored of yourself that you just look at anything until you feel the rot creep up on you trying to drag you down. Well if you’re reading this, you must have some time on your hands. The name is Don Kowalski by the way.
My uncle used to say ,Gotta get out boy’ he said, ,You’re in a dark spot some time and when you’re in it keep going. Take it all, breath it in. Keep going. Always keep going.’ – ironic since he killed himself in a hunting accident out somewhere in woodland. I suppose he didn’t want to miss his prey and kept going after it. Kept going.
It started to work. For a few days you fight, and you struggle as sailors in a dry ditch or on a dry glass and you keep going, push forward and nothing comes from it until you know nothing will come from it. Such was time for me at the outbreak of our lovely new friend Covid. My one-part-off-part girlfriend Alessandra was with her family in Florida and so I shared the sunriddled apartment only with booze and screens.
Time was the enemy although it hadn’t been so from on early. It didn’t have to be this way. In the beginning, I was thrilled staying put, living only at home, downing a bottle here a bottle there took me months to realize that getting drunk wasn’t much exciting when you could do it every day. Lifting was no fun at home without the showoff.
The thrill wasn’t there without the mirrors and the others and I would not give empty testament. So I was stuck, down deep in my black chair with my greying hair clinging greasy to my head and the stubble on my face growing thicker and thicker like hedges and forests of dry metallic wires drilling themselves deep in my naked skin.
I sat on the chair, blue light penetrated me and I watched into it like someone getting lost in the sun to see caleidoscopic patterns afterwards for minutes and some stare in the dark ponds in gardens and across them and I stared into the unknown abbeys of the internet until I found something that hooked me. Interest was reborn, the cherubim and thrones sang, and I was again digging for knowledge on the riddle.
It was the case of Nathan, not Lessing’s I mind you. You got to know I’m, and I know this sounds like the start of a bad pulpy novel, I’m a PI or what the cool cats call it now. Private Investigation, looking at lives for a fuck of money but better than to slither up buttholes at the ordinary stational sedentary life I once had and was led in. I was called up, by a Mrs. Anderson, whose voice sounded like a whisky drowned chimney.
Carry Ann Anderson had called about a friend who was now dead meat. The case was solved she said but somehow it was not, not for her. There was rot on the inside of fresh timber. A fair warning here – there won’t be no solution, cause certainly me didn’t solve it. I told her so, when she called again. I hadn’t been to LA and going there was a waste, I knew as much already. For her sake I called the department over there and talked to the detective. She wasn’t going to be happy with my findings.
Gluing a mask of false politeness to my voice I asked, “So what’s the matter hm?”
“They say it’s all real simple: kid snapped and did it. But something ain’t right. You see I knew her back from the day, from Sacramento. I can tell you, this boy was no of these Columbines or Sandy Hooks, he would never hurt them.”
“That’s what the parents of those kids said too,” I said, uncomfortable silence on the other end.
“Something’s just off about this. You saw the files already?”
“Mhm. Didn’t do much good.”
“Tell you this: the officers said the same. Said it’s all there orderly and not like some coverup or some shit they tell you like the conspiracy theories on TV you know? Like they had to dig for it you know? Not too difficult and not too easy but also not in between not your textbook stuff either. Not odd he said. But said that it all around made it odd. Made it seem odd, still, somehow. Seems like not the type to do it. You know he said type? He spat them words out on me,” she said.
There I was. I made some calls asked about the kid that chopped down his family, sat his flat up like a Christmas tree and coaled it down to the ground, all in a cozy night. One day to the other and a bunch of people gone.
I find a pal of his, named Erica Cremonte. She was willing to talk. Told me when it happened and went down and all the other stuff. Other guys didn’t talk or told me how shitty they feel about it all. I dug a bit deeper inside Erica since she was the only source of water in the land of dry lands, she told me a bit more, opened up like an old lady to the cashier or waiter or the poor sod at the bus. Told me about Nathan and his family and his brother and his girlfriend her few idle feel-good weeks in Africa and the funeral. And that it didn’t make sense to her either.
And the days go by and I start to forget about the whole thing since there’s no leads and none won’t talk and I give up. Call Mrs. Anderson and tell her there is nothing and she doesn’t understand the whys in my words but she knows them and we agree to part ways and wish each other a nice day and she’s gone.
Days and weeks and months go by and I forget. Then I am locked here in front of the monitor and it all comes back and something in me stirs and after hours I stare at the profile of one Margaret Suarez and see the condolences on her Facebook profile.
I write to her and days pass me by, drinking lifting reading and boredom, the old familiar gent from around the corner walks up again until there’s a response. Asks me how I found her, what I wanted. Calls me and tells me all about the disfigured creep that slashed her mother in the office. Digs deeper and finds all the glory all the madness in the last mail, sent from her mother’s account.
He left something for us and I will share it with you. Keep in mind it’s all ludicrous but it will help pass some hours. So, the following is the written word of Nathan Cohen, brought to paper after he killed his therapist while locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.
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Sometimes I look up at the sky, at night. I wonder, is the lightning of the stars hidden by the vast dark, or is the darkness a shield? A shield that keeps us safe and calm from countless eyes that stare at us?
Back then I didn’t care for the night. The air was on fire from the red morning sun, every time the same, from grad school to that day when those good Fast Times at Ridgemont High started. In the beginning it was only dark shades of purple and crimson until the firmament turned to face blood.
A line of mystic clouds was in the sky, creeping forward like a white river. The street came alive minute by minute, looming trashmen came to empty our waste in the stark dust flying around. It was better in the hills with the cooling breeze before the onset of dawn.
Back then life was soft and kind and sometimes the only touch of madness was a killed hedgehog on the street or two poisoned cats in the neighborhood. Now, the sky is blue and white and partly covered in striped clouds standing static on the package of my pills. My name is Nate Cohen. Or was. A sitting corpse though I might sit and breath and eat and drink but I don't laugh or sing or cry. The laid out actions of others, that brought me here, might seem untrue for they can’t be proven, but I assure you they are true.
All of them. I don't know what will happen after I hit the "send" button but you all need to know there is a shade of acid in the world you don't taste or smell, but it burns your face like brimstone like flame-gas scorching your eyes like the sun was just the backside of a black hole. You'll see.
I was born Nathaniel Cohen in 1991 in the glory land of sunshine, to Ira and Susan. We lived down in Sacramento, my father running flocks of cars from behind a stuffed desk, and my mother gave pottery classes every Tuesday and Thursday night, taught a few friends how to make halfskilled molds of clay. Dad was a bold man always chasing dreams of living without a mortgage, and Mum supported but was like a happy young girl and bathed in the sounds of Sunday lawnmowers and plastic pools, water from the hose filtered the rays of solar bronze.
I guess in their own ways both were not real, maybe that was what tied them together. We weren't rich but not poor.
Playful on weekends I built forts and donjons between California sycamores and gray pine and hunted and ran with classmates and friends and neighbor's kids that grew grizzled worker’s brown over their small shapes.
I was happy before and afterwards, but loss is like a sharp pin in the foot, long lost by a sewing woman, too lazy to pick up her needles. Until then, when I was under or over 11 and my progenitor decided he needed to be home faster or sooner or was just hungry, and crashed into 2 men and 1 woman and one dog. Insurance and my grandparents (now long dead) kept us from sinking in the shelters of the homeless ones, but my mother needed work or we faced to lose the house.
The first months she worked as waitress at Ear’s, a rundown bar I wasn’t allowed to enter and so sat for hours on the warm sidewalks, gleaming red in the drowning sunlight and grey and sad under the smile of Mother Selene. Some days Mrs. Anderson watched me and I watched her, sipping slowly but frequent on cheap Chadonay. This went until some better showed up, and the months turned to over a year until that happened. My mother had studied contemporary art spending hours devouring Roy Lichtenstein and the likes and to find paying employment had never been on her mind, until some time as now.
Finally, after two years my mother got an offer from a small magazine in Los Angeles and we moved to this strange new world. Surprisingly, moving at the age of 13 was no fun but new friends found me as I slowly settled, when something changed.
Robert Berkowitz came into our life and took us in. He was a bald man with blonde eyebrows and eyes like glowing azures, he was no stranger to money and art, which was the way he’d gotten involved with Mum. They hit it right at each other and after some months or weeks, might it was just some weeks, he took us to his house in Beverly Hills, not far from where Foothill Road hits Park Way.
Beverly Palm Plaza was soon my second living room. Later, in the foul age of 16, I used all chances to leave the house into the mass of the 30.000 inhabitants living there, crossing the invisible line south of the tracks, where Pacific Electric had once worked streetcars on the Red Line. Eons ago in another world.
I did everything to leave home, my newborn half-brother Seth a crying shitting mess, stomping out silent thoughts with such vigor, that I agreed to join my mother on her monthly expeditions to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, near the buzzing Wilshire Boulevard. It was well worth the laughter from the beauties in blonde and black, and the cute Valley Girl that lived across from me. Life was good.
Robert tried to be a father, but in the end we formed a bond. He was there for me when I wanted and offered counsel and paid for my life while I enrolled in college, even helped my shallow dream to join in true Hollywood. After college I enrolled in the UCLA TFT program and, with help from my stepfather, finally landed a job at a production company, Reality TV. I started out as trainee and clawed my way finally to second assistant of the executive director of scripted TV development at Geronimo Grande Productions.
It wasn’t what I had dreamt of but at last I sustained myself, though Robert insisted to help with the rent for my flat on Kelton Avenue, where I still lived after graduating. Life was good back then, without the staring stars that tried to break through the night, away, far far away, Racing with the Moon.
I was 28 when the shades and clouds came over me. I was out with friends, a steamed night in the cool warm air’s vibrations around us.
We found a small restaurant near my place. Pitfire Artisan Pizza on 2018 Westwood Boulevard had brilliant Pesto Chicken and a damn fine Field Mushroom. I was there with Jules and Erica, enjoying dinner outside to the left of the entrance, a silent small tree our only companion, until she walked by. Inside there was a meeting of some charity organization, The Cotton Club or something.
Hair like ironed black jasper and ascetic nude makeup, she strolled by in a white tank top and black yoga pants, the matt casually under her arm. I didn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t. Some birds in some nearby trees seemed to whistle after her and she turned around, just for a second, as if to say come after me Birdy.
“You in love Naty?” asked Erica, the flower from the valley with the flaxen mob on her head, sitting across from me.
“No,” I stuttered “Just caught my eye. Nothing.”
“Sure,” grinned Jules between his teeth, “Mine too.” he said, folding his tattooed arms in front of his chest, tongue shoved in the corner of his mouth smiling like a bobcat dressed in jeans and shirt of the same fabric, The Boy in Blue.
“Why don’t ask for her number? She’s just down the corner.”
“Isn’t that kinda creepy?”
“Most women like a bit of creeps, ” Jules howled up at his own joke, his hat nearly falling from the back of his head as he raised it up and slapped his left knee.
“Oh, shut up predator,” I waved off, before I turned to Erica “You don’t think that’s awkward?”
“Not if a guy like you asked. I remember a friend of mine met her husband like that, now Peggy Sue Got Married,” she smiled and put her head to the side. Too perfect white Hollywooddream teeth.
I had seen the Girl turning left and jogged away from the Pitfire, still hearing Jules laughing, when I saw her near La Grange Ave. She cut another corner up right so I ran after her, praying to find her. Yet to the grace of my bad luck, she was gone. The street in front of me was not crowded but the vixen from my dreams was vanished. Hands empty and defeated I returned to the table.
“Vae victis,” announced Jules, as he saw my hollow eyes. I never had a poker face until now. With half your face in mashed up molten scartissue it’s difficult to show emotion and I wonder, so far from home will the sun ever show herself again, will it fill anyone out her, raise itself, Raising Arizona?
“Did she say no?” blonde Erica asked with true empathy.
“Seems I lost her,” I said, trying to hide my disappoint. Just a few seconds more decisiveness and my life might have changed.
“Well let’s go, search a new one,” Jules sprang up and clapped.
Let’s go. The words rang, as I tumbled out of the cab up to my flat, the Girl long forgotten for the next few months until another fateful day, when I went to my gym. Workout and work kept me focused for a time and it was mostly night when I came home.
I admit I was a glutton. I had to work out at least three times a week, gym rats they call them. Muscled sweat pouring gales of raw testosterone into the halls. The Equinox Gym was my favorite in Westwood and I had been a paying patron for years now and knew more faces there than in the streets around my neighborhood. I had just left after a session of pumping my brains out, when I saw her crossing me by.
“Hey,” I blurted out in reflex.
She tilted her hand. Black hair, a shimmer of brown in the dusky sunlight, dark eyes and a friendly smile took me right home. Right where I belonged.
“Hey yourself,” she said, raising one eyebrow.
“Do I know you?” she asked, without arrogance, her black-brown hair gently thrown over the left shoulder. Love leaking out of every pore I muttered a plain “Yes”. Before she had a chance to pass me by.
“Sorry. I meet a lot of people lately,” she smiled “Are you in one of my courses?”
“Courses?”
“Well, here,” she grinned. Small white teeth and a thick red snail that crouched behind them, giving them shelter and backup, all the same.
“Ah no. I think, you passed by a pizza palor couple of weeks ago?” I stuttered in embarrassment, trying to suppress redness swelling on my cheek.
“Yes, that’s on my way. So, you’re my new stalker?” She laughed.
“Well, don’t I feel honored,” I extended my hand “My name’s Nate, by the way.”
“Amy. Amy Gallagher,” she raised a slim white wrist in the shade of the California sundown.
This was the day I really met Amy Gallagher for the first time. I rue it every moment in the coffin of my sterile being with the stars laughing at me and the disc in the sky calling my name making me all Moonstruck.
We set a date for the Saturday to come. I thought it fitting to go for Italian and led her to Sammy’s down at Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t too expensive (I didn’t want to come across as one of those guys) but stylish enough to show her I had some taste stored in me. She wore a stunning babyblue dress just touching the tips of her knees, and her black mane was straightened in a long tail crowning her right pale shoulder. When she saw me, she licked her lips as if to prepare me for her Vampire’s Kiss. Sammy was a first gen from Palermo, old now he longed for his home and always liked to impress with native extravaganza.
“Ciao ragazzi!” he said as I walked my stunning Kypris down the cheap red carpet between trashy fake Roman plastic pillars.
“Come stai?” Amy replied, took his arm and left me somber.
They chatted a bit in Italian, what they said I do not know, but I knew the small thing in my belly, the knot of discomfort in my stomach. Laughs and eyes on me. Cheers swallow the jokes.
“You’re full of surprises,” I tried to gain control of the tilting ship, unnecessarily clawing my black hair back.
“You got no idea,” she pressed her tongue between a marble row of perfect teeth, a small red viper watched out from the cave of her mouth.
We talked of hard work, of idle time, of family the usual first-date-topics broken up by a hand of awkward pauses in between, like flashes in the storm.
“My family’s not from around here.”
“Neither’s mine.”
“So whose Italian? Mom or Dad? I bet your Dad.”
“None of them,” she grinned “I picked it up couple years ago.”
Movies, theater, literature, antipasti, strange people, more hobbies, main dish, skipping desert and I rolled from over her in my half of the bed (thank god I had cleaned up before I left).
Time flew like night owls and bats and the days were filled with wet noises. I visited some of her Yoga classes, though it didn’t suit me. She visited me on my work. I showed her around the crappy little rooms we sat in and all awed at her body and face.
The nights were like Sunday afternoons with her and all ungood became stored noise in the corner, so became my dead father and her dead family and my aspirations in Hollywood and her degree from John Hopkins and my love for seafood and her fishnet dress and here working Never on Tuesday. Three months and there was the big day.
“So you’re the famous Amy!” mother opened her arms to greet her, eager to impress. Hard embarrassment as Robert did the same, while Seth waved at her and whispered a shy “Hi”, acting so often like young male teens, caught in the web of a child’s mind and a growing body.
Mother had insisted to cook and so we all chowed away on something resembling orange Lasagna, chowing away with the Time to Kill until it was all over. Robert tried to save grace by filling up after each bite and putting on some of his favorite tunes. Wine spilled on the tablecloth like the face of Christ.
“Nothing better than the master,” he prophesized while laying on a small fortune in the body of an old vinyl version of “Sweet Home Chicago”, his second most favorite behind “Fire Birds”.
“You like to make deals yourself Nate told me,” Amy teased with a smile, Wild at Heart but calm and in control.
“Oh, we got an expert over here!” he teased back.
“I knew some devils myself,” she curled her pink lips, deviously looking from my chest to my eyes.
“I bet you still do,” Robert winked and tucked away as my mother gave him a noticeable kick under the table with a smile on her face.
“So, you’re a Yoga-instructor?” asked the former waitress, sucking out the air of the room.
“Amy is actually a doctor,” I deflected as she took my forearm softly, clinging for support.
“A doctor? That sounds nearly like what Zandalee did! Remember Zandalee? She was the girl down the street who had that accident a few years ago?” asked Robert, ignored by the rest.
“Why not work in a hospital or a clinic?” asked my mother.
“You must know, Western medicine is very limiting. There are many ways to keep oneself healthy, but you got to be open minded and have the stomach for it,” she laughed.
“You mean like this Eastern stuff?”
“Well there’s many older tricks to keep oneself in good shape,” she said before switching the topic “Nate says you two are art enthusiasts?”
“I don’t want to brag but I know my way around,” said Mum.
“Well me certainly not,” said Seth annoyed, a bored sigh escaped his lips, barely noticeable the runt of the egomaniac litter.
“Who made that wristband?” Amy inquired “It looks really cool!”, prompting a hidden prideful smile from my little brother who had put a small plastic pearl on a leather band knotted around his wrist.
“I did,” Seth said, as he stared awkwardly at the table.
“Don’t be shy baby,” said my mother “he’s usually not like that.”
“Just not interested in girls yet.”
“Are you famous?” asked the child, his cheeks bright red.
“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” said my love, giggling like an imbecile on her Honeymoon in Vegas.
“You sure? Aren’t you from the poor family?” asked the child again.
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw you on TV. You’re in that show about it.”
“Seth what are you talking? Stop that nonsense!” insisted my mother.
“It’s not nonsense,” said the child
“Enough now!” said mother.
“Ready for some games?” asked Robert as we dropped Seth’s fantasy.
“As ready as Amos & Andrew,” answered my Mum.
We spent the rest of the eve with talk and drink and spilled chips and even attempted to gamble on a bit of Ma-Jong before everyone sighed in boredom and we drove back to Amy’s place at Red Rock West with the Deadfall of the evening behind us. Usually, I had no trouble sleeping somewhere else and I had been to her little house at the fringes of the city’s civilization more often than not and when I woke at 03:00 a.m. the room smelled like gasoline. The TV was dead. We had watched something didn’t we? I thought “Guarding Tess” or “It Could Happen to You” was just starting when we dropped in. The things I knew were all so useless, I thought, what did it all do me good to know A Century of Cinema?
The bed was empty except for my own sweaty body, the smell like tiny razors in my nose, and when I called out, the only response was nothing from the hallway. I made my way outside on the corridor when I heard the whispers. At first I thought they came from the dirty bathroom but the closer I came towards the stairway the clearer it was.
Some voice was talking in the kitchen. Hiding my presence, I gazed through the open door and saw my girlfriend stare up at the moon, her voice barely a sound in it’s dead light. I didn’t hear what she said but for a while it seemed like there was someone else with us, someone who saw me and pointed a finger, led to her turning around, her eyes open and wide locking on my face. I jumped back at the swift surprise, as she called my name.
“Nate?” she asked me with a hunted voice, as if ready to give me the Kiss of Death.
“Y-Yeah. Everything all right Babe?”
“Sure. What you doing down here?”
“You were talking.”
“Did I wake you up?” she opened her arms to hug and we embraced another. Something wasn’t right.
“What you doing here? It’s after 4 in the morning and you here in the kitchen.” I left the words hanging in the air.
“You never noticed? I sleepwalk, always have. You really never woke up to this before? Did it since I was a baby when we were Leaving Las Vegas.”
I had no idea what she said. She told me it had happened to her since she was a child and that she had strange dreams of the moon and would wake up in the kitchen or the living room, mouth dry which meant she talked for long times, though to whom or what, she never said. Said it happened when she fell with the head right on the top of The Rock. We went back to bed but something was off. There was a noise. Or was there? I tried to turn around, roll over, Amy’s soft snoring next to me. Still a noise. Or not? Yes, yes definitely a noise. Or not?
A crackling sound, I jumped up. Slowly I crept outside the bed. Maybe just a bird had hit a window, had happened before. I crouched into the hallway, it came from the door. There was someone outside. Someone whistling. Slowly I made my way towards it, careful not to make the outsider aware of my presence.
I heard him breath or something that seemed like breathing. Half-breathing. Through the peephole I saw the void outside. There was nothing, just darkness and that whistling noise, soft and barley hearable.
It changed. Like light but not light, maybe orange or red. Did someone make a fire? Who would make fire in a building? It was like a bright red ring surrounding the black void. Then it blinked and I fainted.
Weeks came about and went by and work took me up as our next big project came, on my side always dutiful two new interns who often filled the whole office with the smell of fries they brought with them. We were in one of the smaller conference rooms, clean metal filled with flecks from cheap food, taking short breaks in between the longing working hours.
Sometimes I would use the breaks to talk some things through with my boss, always eager to show him how dedicated and thankful I was. His office had his name on the door but every time I couldn’t suppress the image of Very Important Pennis: Uncut on it. My tow fellow working drones were out to grab some snacks and I enjoyed the insularity of the room and took deep breaths, breathing through, Con Air from its powerful oxygen.
In my hand, a cup of coffee laying my eyes on the window, down on the people who passed another on the concrete between the pavements, when at the corner a man stood still. He was not ordinary. He just stood there. Had he stood here before? I don’t know but he stood and watched and then waved. Did he wave his hand at me? I came closer and tried to see what he was doing.
He raised his arm up in 45 degrees, and a single finger pointed at me like a spear as I gasped. Was this man mad? Was he seriously looking at me? There was something odd with him, I knew. There was something with his grimace, his Face/Off like he didn’t belong here.
Not on the street, but right here right that he was wrong in the City of Angles with his staring and unblinking Snake Eyes. As if he licked the thoughts in my head he violently shook his face up and down, loosening his slicked back brown hair and he smiled like a kid until for a moment his skin shook looked like a loosened mask. Then he hopped from one leg to the other, passers just ignored him, one to the other one to the other one to the other and bang he had fallen flat on the street crushing his head on the ground.
He lifted himself, blood tripling down on his brown suit and his white shirt and he did the same again. With full force he cracked his face on the hot concrete, again and again, sputtering teeth in all directions, still everyone ignored him and laughed at the sunfilled day.
As sudden as before he stood up, waved at me and ran away around the corner. In disbelief I kept standing and saw him look around the corner, staring at me until he produced an 8mm camera he pointed downwards. Then he started to spit around, all over the place as if that would have some effect like melting the stone or Bringing Out the Dead (which of course it didn’t).
Then he was gone in no time, Gone in 60 Seconds. Unbelievable what I had seen. When the interns returned, I pointed the spot out but the blood wasn’t there and the street so dirty clean like ever, and they thought I joked at them and turned their pimpled faces into smiles. Maybe it had just been bizarre performance, stranger things happened.
I told Amy of it and she agreed that it was nothing but an act or maybe really just a party clown or maybe someone who wanted to perform for his kids like The Family Man that he might be. I snugged up to her and pulled her close. I was happy and lucky and had to suppress that crunching emotion of bliss for a single time in my life only to accept the beauty in it with my shortloved heart.
I didn’t think about the man until a month later, it was weekend and Amy had her courses to give so I decided to grab my brother for a time at the beach. The hot sand around us we were lain out in the sun, talked about girls our mother and that his encroaching puberty started to cause tidal waves in the house. He was a good child and I tried to be as much a brother as I was. We were out in the water and then dried in the sun, palyed volleyball and disturbed elder people with it, when the sun tingled away.
Time had flown and I was glad I took the day to spend it with him. On our route home I filled up the car at the next gas station. There I met the Man again. Seth had taken time to make a visit to the toilet as I waited in the car. I was on my phone and scrolled through reviews for the coming movie night. I made a selection, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” it was and “Christmas Carol: The Movie” and “Windtalkers” but a newer Adaptation, I looked up and saw the Man in the front of the car. His blue eyes examined my face, brown suit brown hair, and he hopped back in one jump and picked something up.
It was a little beagle and he pulled the puppy tight to his chest and scratched him gently behind the ears, whispering something into them that sounded like Sonny, but I’m not sure. He looked again at my eyes and he smiled. I didn’t know how to react, so I smiled back at him and showed him my thumb up and prayed he may go away. He did not.
He dropped the puppy to the ground and kicked it and jumped on it.
I heard the yelp and whimpering from outside but was too shocked to do something. He jumped up and down time after time my mouth opened in terror as I saw the blood on his black shoes. Through all this he had this relaxed smile and looked at me.
The howls of the puppy stopped and he picked up the furry meat, the head a mess of bone shards and brain, one eyeball broken out, dangled down form the rest of the defiled carcass. The Man pulled the puppy tight to his chest and lifted his thumb, cradling his face in the red stew. He let it fell down to the ground again and kicked it again and again until it was bloods-and-bones-stew.
I opened the car door when Seth shouted, “Where are you going?” I turned around to see he poked his head in the rustic car and as I nudged to the front, I saw the Man was gone.
Headfirst I sprang out the car and nosedived on the street, my face nearly touched the asphalt. He was gone and so was the blood. Seth shouted out but I was inside the shop already and begged the young cashier for aid, asked her if she hadn’t seen the Man outside. Headlight eyes looked at me in fear as I tried to grab her shoulders over the counter. Dirt blew up all around me as I touched the dusty bins and shelves. After a babbling tirade I looked at the hand that clenched my arm. Seth looked bewildered at me, his eyes asked if I gone maniac.
I had scared him but it brought me back to reality, for a short time. We sat silent in the car until angry hoops of late afternoon commuters called for banishment. I turned around and parked on the lot, then called police. They weren’t skeptical like in the films, especially when I told them that I had seen the man before. An understanding face took notes and went inside to consult with the cashier. I called Mum.
“What you guys up to? What’s going on?”
“Mum,” I said. “There was this guy.”
“Did something happen with Seth? What did he do?”
“Nothing,” I said and watched from the frame of my sight how my brother curled up in the passenger seat. “It was just odd.”
“What’s the matter with you? You scared me to death,” she said. I couldn’t scare her with this. Had I really imagined it all? I called Amy but she didn’t answer.
There was nothing on the video, they said. Just me in the car staring bewildered then stumbling out like drunk. They gave me various explanations from dehydration to stress and left me and my brother there on the road.
I opened the door and fell on the couch. I told him about my encounters with the man and tried to find reasons for the strange behavior until he asked if I couldn’t file against a stalker. Was this Man stalking me? From one second to the other things made sense and didn’t seem as bad, or bad in a different way. I pulled over a stoic mask on my mad face and cheered him up as I felt his angst. I called Mum and told her everything was fine, just a misunderstanding, and she accepted my explanation with weary ease.
I ditched my list and let Seth choose a film and slumped on the couch with dry eyelids covering my headache.
I woke up from a noise at the door, Seth crouched on my shoulder in sleep. I was scared and turned around to see my Amy standing in front of me, trying to plug in her dead phone. We embraced and sat down in the bedroom far off from troubling my brother with my disturbing tale. Amy didn’t doubt me but seemed more skeptic crafting mighty fine tales of pranksters and jokers wandering around town scaring people to practice their grotesqueries.
After a half slice of pizza and a cold shower we sat down with Seth on the couch, he somewhat checking out my girlfriend’s body under the green summer dress, a piece of cloth befitting a city not in tune with itself but always in fake summer. We lied in bed afterwards, she behind me, pressed against my back. I drifted away with a headache and the blazing last sunrays shone behind my eyelids again, a flash of a smile of the Man and his rat teeth and his chopstick-dress and he all set on fire, just standing and smiling. I woke and stared in darkness, the moon smirking at my anguish. Night bathed the room and I heard the deep snoring sound of Amy, still behind me.
The pillow was hot and cooked my ear and brought back memories of a headache as to command to turn over my headrest to the cooling side of the equator, to hopefully fall fast back asleep but as I lifted up there in the split of the halfclosed door to the dark of the halls behind I saw the blazing eyes. Red glowing in the dark for a lifetime and a second, staring and blinking and a soft tickle of laughter. I crouched myself at Amy’s side and shook her softly, she mumbling as her eyes opened awake.
I told her there was a thing at the door in the apartment. Sober from sleep her grogginess fell in an instant, and stiff like a white candle, she was up in the bed next to me. Her hands turned on the light and I moved a finger to the mouth and slowly crawled out from the bed, scared and slow steps I leaped forward looking behind me to see her face. She got up after me and held a hand on my back, a sign of watchful reassurance.
The rest of my home was dark and silent but for the breathing of Seth on the couch who woke as I switched on the lightbulbs tingling above his hair. Questioning eyes, he asked what was going on, Amy sat down with him as I went through all rooms again.
Then in the bedroom I looked under the bed and there was nothing. Back in the darkness of the hallway, Amy whispered to me of talking to someone a therapist or a psychiatrist, as I just stared at the shadow of a Man that was next to me, his face inches away from mine.

You ever sit around all day don’t know what to do? So bored of yourself that you just look at anything until you feel the rot creep up on you trying to drag you down. Well if you’re reading this, you must have some time on your hands. The name is Don Kowalski by the way.
Time was the enemy although it hadn’t been so from on early. It didn’t have to be this way. In the beginning, I was thrilled staying put, living only at home, downing a bottle here a bottle there took me months to realize that getting drunk wasn’t much exciting when you could do it every day. Lifting was no fun at home without the showoff.
The thrill wasn’t there without the mirrors and the others and I would not give empty testament. So I was stuck, down deep in my black chair with my greying hair clinging greasy to my head and the stubble on my face growing thicker and thicker like hedges and forests of dry metallic wires drilling themselves deep in my naked skin.
I sat on the chair, blue light penetrated me and I watched into it like someone getting lost in the sun to see caleidoscopic patterns afterwards for minutes and some stare in the dark ponds in gardens and across them and I stared into the unknown abbeys of the internet until I found something that hooked me. Interest was reborn, the cherubim and thrones sang, and I was again digging for knowledge on the riddle.
It was the case of Nathan, not Lessing’s I mind you. You got to know I’m, and I know this sounds like the start of a bad pulpy novel, I’m a PI or what the cool cats call it now. Private Investigation, looking at lives for a fuck of money but better than to slither up buttholes at the ordinary stational sedentary life I once had and was led in. I was called up, by a Mrs. Anderson, whose voice sounded like a whisky drowned chimney.
Carry Ann Anderson had called about a friend who was now dead meat. The case was solved she said but somehow it was not, not for her. There was rot on the inside of fresh timber. A fair warning here – there won’t be no solution, cause certainly me didn’t solve it. I told her so, when she called again. I hadn’t been to LA and going there was a waste, I knew as much already. For her sake I called the department over there and talked to the detective. She wasn’t going to be happy with my findings.
Gluing a mask of false politeness to my voice I asked, “So what’s the matter hm?”
“They say it’s all real simple: kid snapped and did it. But something ain’t right. You see I knew her back from the day, from Sacramento. I can tell you, this boy was no of these Columbines or Sandy Hooks, he would never hurt them.”
“That’s what the parents of those kids said too,” I said, uncomfortable silence on the other end.
“Something’s just off about this. You saw the files already?”
“Mhm. Didn’t do much good.”
“Tell you this: the officers said the same. Said it’s all there orderly and not like some coverup or some shit they tell you like the conspiracy theories on TV you know? Like they had to dig for it you know? Not too difficult and not too easy but also not in between not your textbook stuff either. Not odd he said. But said that it all around made it odd. Made it seem odd, still, somehow. Seems like not the type to do it. You know he said type? He spat them words out on me,” she said.
There I was. I made some calls asked about the kid that chopped down his family, sat his flat up like a Christmas tree and coaled it down to the ground, all in a cozy night. One day to the other and a bunch of people gone.
I find a pal of his, named Erica Cremonte. She was willing to talk. Told me when it happened and went down and all the other stuff. Other guys didn’t talk or told me how shitty they feel about it all. I dug a bit deeper inside Erica since she was the only source of water in the land of dry lands, she told me a bit more, opened up like an old lady to the cashier or waiter or the poor sod at the bus. Told me about Nathan and his family and his brother and his girlfriend her few idle feel-good weeks in Africa and the funeral. And that it didn’t make sense to her either.
And the days go by and I start to forget about the whole thing since there’s no leads and none won’t talk and I give up. Call Mrs. Anderson and tell her there is nothing and she doesn’t understand the whys in my words but she knows them and we agree to part ways and wish each other a nice day and she’s gone.
Days and weeks and months go by and I forget. Then I am locked here in front of the monitor and it all comes back and something in me stirs and after hours I stare at the profile of one Margaret Suarez and see the condolences on her Facebook profile.
I write to her and days pass me by, drinking lifting reading and boredom, the old familiar gent from around the corner walks up again until there’s a response. Asks me how I found her, what I wanted. Calls me and tells me all about the disfigured creep that slashed her mother in the office. Digs deeper and finds all the glory all the madness in the last mail, sent from her mother’s account.
He left something for us and I will share it with you. Keep in mind it’s all ludicrous but it will help pass some hours. So, the following is the written word of Nathan Cohen, brought to paper after he killed his therapist while locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.
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Sometimes I look up at the sky, at night. I wonder, is the lightning of the stars hidden by the vast dark, or is the darkness a shield? A shield that keeps us safe and calm from countless eyes that stare at us?
Back then I didn’t care for the night. The air was on fire from the red morning sun, every time the same, from grad school to that day when those good Fast Times at Ridgemont High started. In the beginning it was only dark shades of purple and crimson until the firmament turned to face blood.
A line of mystic clouds was in the sky, creeping forward like a white river. The street came alive minute by minute, looming trashmen came to empty our waste in the stark dust flying around. It was better in the hills with the cooling breeze before the onset of dawn.
Back then life was soft and kind and sometimes the only touch of madness was a killed hedgehog on the street or two poisoned cats in the neighborhood. Now, the sky is blue and white and partly covered in striped clouds standing static on the package of my pills. My name is Nate Cohen. Or was. A sitting corpse though I might sit and breath and eat and drink but I don't laugh or sing or cry. The laid out actions of others, that brought me here, might seem untrue for they can’t be proven, but I assure you they are true.
All of them. I don't know what will happen after I hit the "send" button but you all need to know there is a shade of acid in the world you don't taste or smell, but it burns your face like brimstone like flame-gas scorching your eyes like the sun was just the backside of a black hole. You'll see.
I was born Nathaniel Cohen in 1991 in the glory land of sunshine, to Ira and Susan. We lived down in Sacramento, my father running flocks of cars from behind a stuffed desk, and my mother gave pottery classes every Tuesday and Thursday night, taught a few friends how to make halfskilled molds of clay. Dad was a bold man always chasing dreams of living without a mortgage, and Mum supported but was like a happy young girl and bathed in the sounds of Sunday lawnmowers and plastic pools, water from the hose filtered the rays of solar bronze.
I guess in their own ways both were not real, maybe that was what tied them together. We weren't rich but not poor.
Playful on weekends I built forts and donjons between California sycamores and gray pine and hunted and ran with classmates and friends and neighbor's kids that grew grizzled worker’s brown over their small shapes.
I was happy before and afterwards, but loss is like a sharp pin in the foot, long lost by a sewing woman, too lazy to pick up her needles. Until then, when I was under or over 11 and my progenitor decided he needed to be home faster or sooner or was just hungry, and crashed into 2 men and 1 woman and one dog. Insurance and my grandparents (now long dead) kept us from sinking in the shelters of the homeless ones, but my mother needed work or we faced to lose the house.
The first months she worked as waitress at Ear’s, a rundown bar I wasn’t allowed to enter and so sat for hours on the warm sidewalks, gleaming red in the drowning sunlight and grey and sad under the smile of Mother Selene. Some days Mrs. Anderson watched me and I watched her, sipping slowly but frequent on cheap Chadonay. This went until some better showed up, and the months turned to over a year until that happened. My mother had studied contemporary art spending hours devouring Roy Lichtenstein and the likes and to find paying employment had never been on her mind, until some time as now.
Finally, after two years my mother got an offer from a small magazine in Los Angeles and we moved to this strange new world. Surprisingly, moving at the age of 13 was no fun but new friends found me as I slowly settled, when something changed.
Robert Berkowitz came into our life and took us in. He was a bald man with blonde eyebrows and eyes like glowing azures, he was no stranger to money and art, which was the way he’d gotten involved with Mum. They hit it right at each other and after some months or weeks, might it was just some weeks, he took us to his house in Beverly Hills, not far from where Foothill Road hits Park Way.
Beverly Palm Plaza was soon my second living room. Later, in the foul age of 16, I used all chances to leave the house into the mass of the 30.000 inhabitants living there, crossing the invisible line south of the tracks, where Pacific Electric had once worked streetcars on the Red Line. Eons ago in another world.
Robert tried to be a father, but in the end we formed a bond. He was there for me when I wanted and offered counsel and paid for my life while I enrolled in college, even helped my shallow dream to join in true Hollywood. After college I enrolled in the UCLA TFT program and, with help from my stepfather, finally landed a job at a production company, Reality TV. I started out as trainee and clawed my way finally to second assistant of the executive director of scripted TV development at Geronimo Grande Productions.
It wasn’t what I had dreamt of but at last I sustained myself, though Robert insisted to help with the rent for my flat on Kelton Avenue, where I still lived after graduating. Life was good back then, without the staring stars that tried to break through the night, away, far far away, Racing with the Moon.
I was 28 when the shades and clouds came over me. I was out with friends, a steamed night in the cool warm air’s vibrations around us.
We found a small restaurant near my place. Pitfire Artisan Pizza on 2018 Westwood Boulevard had brilliant Pesto Chicken and a damn fine Field Mushroom. I was there with Jules and Erica, enjoying dinner outside to the left of the entrance, a silent small tree our only companion, until she walked by. Inside there was a meeting of some charity organization, The Cotton Club or something.
Hair like ironed black jasper and ascetic nude makeup, she strolled by in a white tank top and black yoga pants, the matt casually under her arm. I didn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t. Some birds in some nearby trees seemed to whistle after her and she turned around, just for a second, as if to say come after me Birdy.
“You in love Naty?” asked Erica, the flower from the valley with the flaxen mob on her head, sitting across from me.
“No,” I stuttered “Just caught my eye. Nothing.”
“Sure,” grinned Jules between his teeth, “Mine too.” he said, folding his tattooed arms in front of his chest, tongue shoved in the corner of his mouth smiling like a bobcat dressed in jeans and shirt of the same fabric, The Boy in Blue.
“Why don’t ask for her number? She’s just down the corner.”
“Isn’t that kinda creepy?”
“Most women like a bit of creeps, ” Jules howled up at his own joke, his hat nearly falling from the back of his head as he raised it up and slapped his left knee.
“Oh, shut up predator,” I waved off, before I turned to Erica “You don’t think that’s awkward?”
“Not if a guy like you asked. I remember a friend of mine met her husband like that, now Peggy Sue Got Married,” she smiled and put her head to the side. Too perfect white Hollywooddream teeth.
I had seen the Girl turning left and jogged away from the Pitfire, still hearing Jules laughing, when I saw her near La Grange Ave. She cut another corner up right so I ran after her, praying to find her. Yet to the grace of my bad luck, she was gone. The street in front of me was not crowded but the vixen from my dreams was vanished. Hands empty and defeated I returned to the table.
“Vae victis,” announced Jules, as he saw my hollow eyes. I never had a poker face until now. With half your face in mashed up molten scartissue it’s difficult to show emotion and I wonder, so far from home will the sun ever show herself again, will it fill anyone out her, raise itself, Raising Arizona?
“Did she say no?” blonde Erica asked with true empathy.
“Seems I lost her,” I said, trying to hide my disappoint. Just a few seconds more decisiveness and my life might have changed.
“Well let’s go, search a new one,” Jules sprang up and clapped.
Let’s go. The words rang, as I tumbled out of the cab up to my flat, the Girl long forgotten for the next few months until another fateful day, when I went to my gym. Workout and work kept me focused for a time and it was mostly night when I came home.
I admit I was a glutton. I had to work out at least three times a week, gym rats they call them. Muscled sweat pouring gales of raw testosterone into the halls. The Equinox Gym was my favorite in Westwood and I had been a paying patron for years now and knew more faces there than in the streets around my neighborhood. I had just left after a session of pumping my brains out, when I saw her crossing me by.
“Hey,” I blurted out in reflex.
She tilted her hand. Black hair, a shimmer of brown in the dusky sunlight, dark eyes and a friendly smile took me right home. Right where I belonged.
“Hey yourself,” she said, raising one eyebrow.
“Do I know you?” she asked, without arrogance, her black-brown hair gently thrown over the left shoulder. Love leaking out of every pore I muttered a plain “Yes”. Before she had a chance to pass me by.
“Sorry. I meet a lot of people lately,” she smiled “Are you in one of my courses?”
“Courses?”
“Well, here,” she grinned. Small white teeth and a thick red snail that crouched behind them, giving them shelter and backup, all the same.
“Ah no. I think, you passed by a pizza palor couple of weeks ago?” I stuttered in embarrassment, trying to suppress redness swelling on my cheek.
“Yes, that’s on my way. So, you’re my new stalker?” She laughed.
“Well, don’t I feel honored,” I extended my hand “My name’s Nate, by the way.”
“Amy. Amy Gallagher,” she raised a slim white wrist in the shade of the California sundown.
This was the day I really met Amy Gallagher for the first time. I rue it every moment in the coffin of my sterile being with the stars laughing at me and the disc in the sky calling my name making me all Moonstruck.
We set a date for the Saturday to come. I thought it fitting to go for Italian and led her to Sammy’s down at Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t too expensive (I didn’t want to come across as one of those guys) but stylish enough to show her I had some taste stored in me. She wore a stunning babyblue dress just touching the tips of her knees, and her black mane was straightened in a long tail crowning her right pale shoulder. When she saw me, she licked her lips as if to prepare me for her Vampire’s Kiss. Sammy was a first gen from Palermo, old now he longed for his home and always liked to impress with native extravaganza.
“Ciao ragazzi!” he said as I walked my stunning Kypris down the cheap red carpet between trashy fake Roman plastic pillars.
“Come stai?” Amy replied, took his arm and left me somber.
They chatted a bit in Italian, what they said I do not know, but I knew the small thing in my belly, the knot of discomfort in my stomach. Laughs and eyes on me. Cheers swallow the jokes.
“You’re full of surprises,” I tried to gain control of the tilting ship, unnecessarily clawing my black hair back.
“You got no idea,” she pressed her tongue between a marble row of perfect teeth, a small red viper watched out from the cave of her mouth.
We talked of hard work, of idle time, of family the usual first-date-topics broken up by a hand of awkward pauses in between, like flashes in the storm.
“My family’s not from around here.”
“Neither’s mine.”
“So whose Italian? Mom or Dad? I bet your Dad.”
“None of them,” she grinned “I picked it up couple years ago.”
Movies, theater, literature, antipasti, strange people, more hobbies, main dish, skipping desert and I rolled from over her in my half of the bed (thank god I had cleaned up before I left).
Time flew like night owls and bats and the days were filled with wet noises. I visited some of her Yoga classes, though it didn’t suit me. She visited me on my work. I showed her around the crappy little rooms we sat in and all awed at her body and face.
The nights were like Sunday afternoons with her and all ungood became stored noise in the corner, so became my dead father and her dead family and my aspirations in Hollywood and her degree from John Hopkins and my love for seafood and her fishnet dress and here working Never on Tuesday. Three months and there was the big day.
“So you’re the famous Amy!” mother opened her arms to greet her, eager to impress. Hard embarrassment as Robert did the same, while Seth waved at her and whispered a shy “Hi”, acting so often like young male teens, caught in the web of a child’s mind and a growing body.
Mother had insisted to cook and so we all chowed away on something resembling orange Lasagna, chowing away with the Time to Kill until it was all over. Robert tried to save grace by filling up after each bite and putting on some of his favorite tunes. Wine spilled on the tablecloth like the face of Christ.
“Nothing better than the master,” he prophesized while laying on a small fortune in the body of an old vinyl version of “Sweet Home Chicago”, his second most favorite behind “Fire Birds”.
“You like to make deals yourself Nate told me,” Amy teased with a smile, Wild at Heart but calm and in control.
“Oh, we got an expert over here!” he teased back.
“I knew some devils myself,” she curled her pink lips, deviously looking from my chest to my eyes.
“I bet you still do,” Robert winked and tucked away as my mother gave him a noticeable kick under the table with a smile on her face.
“So, you’re a Yoga-instructor?” asked the former waitress, sucking out the air of the room.
“Amy is actually a doctor,” I deflected as she took my forearm softly, clinging for support.
“A doctor? That sounds nearly like what Zandalee did! Remember Zandalee? She was the girl down the street who had that accident a few years ago?” asked Robert, ignored by the rest.
“Why not work in a hospital or a clinic?” asked my mother.
“You must know, Western medicine is very limiting. There are many ways to keep oneself healthy, but you got to be open minded and have the stomach for it,” she laughed.
“You mean like this Eastern stuff?”
“Well there’s many older tricks to keep oneself in good shape,” she said before switching the topic “Nate says you two are art enthusiasts?”
“I don’t want to brag but I know my way around,” said Mum.
“Well me certainly not,” said Seth annoyed, a bored sigh escaped his lips, barely noticeable the runt of the egomaniac litter.
“Who made that wristband?” Amy inquired “It looks really cool!”, prompting a hidden prideful smile from my little brother who had put a small plastic pearl on a leather band knotted around his wrist.
“I did,” Seth said, as he stared awkwardly at the table.
“Don’t be shy baby,” said my mother “he’s usually not like that.”
“Just not interested in girls yet.”
“Are you famous?” asked the child, his cheeks bright red.
“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” said my love, giggling like an imbecile on her Honeymoon in Vegas.
“You sure? Aren’t you from the poor family?” asked the child again.
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw you on TV. You’re in that show about it.”
“Seth what are you talking? Stop that nonsense!” insisted my mother.
“It’s not nonsense,” said the child
“Enough now!” said mother.
“Ready for some games?” asked Robert as we dropped Seth’s fantasy.
“As ready as Amos & Andrew,” answered my Mum.
We spent the rest of the eve with talk and drink and spilled chips and even attempted to gamble on a bit of Ma-Jong before everyone sighed in boredom and we drove back to Amy’s place at Red Rock West with the Deadfall of the evening behind us. Usually, I had no trouble sleeping somewhere else and I had been to her little house at the fringes of the city’s civilization more often than not and when I woke at 03:00 a.m. the room smelled like gasoline. The TV was dead. We had watched something didn’t we? I thought “Guarding Tess” or “It Could Happen to You” was just starting when we dropped in. The things I knew were all so useless, I thought, what did it all do me good to know A Century of Cinema?
The bed was empty except for my own sweaty body, the smell like tiny razors in my nose, and when I called out, the only response was nothing from the hallway. I made my way outside on the corridor when I heard the whispers. At first I thought they came from the dirty bathroom but the closer I came towards the stairway the clearer it was.
Some voice was talking in the kitchen. Hiding my presence, I gazed through the open door and saw my girlfriend stare up at the moon, her voice barely a sound in it’s dead light. I didn’t hear what she said but for a while it seemed like there was someone else with us, someone who saw me and pointed a finger, led to her turning around, her eyes open and wide locking on my face. I jumped back at the swift surprise, as she called my name.
“Nate?” she asked me with a hunted voice, as if ready to give me the Kiss of Death.
“Y-Yeah. Everything all right Babe?”
“Sure. What you doing down here?”
“You were talking.”
“Did I wake you up?” she opened her arms to hug and we embraced another. Something wasn’t right.
“What you doing here? It’s after 4 in the morning and you here in the kitchen.” I left the words hanging in the air.
“You never noticed? I sleepwalk, always have. You really never woke up to this before? Did it since I was a baby when we were Leaving Las Vegas.”
I had no idea what she said. She told me it had happened to her since she was a child and that she had strange dreams of the moon and would wake up in the kitchen or the living room, mouth dry which meant she talked for long times, though to whom or what, she never said. Said it happened when she fell with the head right on the top of The Rock. We went back to bed but something was off. There was a noise. Or was there? I tried to turn around, roll over, Amy’s soft snoring next to me. Still a noise. Or not? Yes, yes definitely a noise. Or not?
A crackling sound, I jumped up. Slowly I crept outside the bed. Maybe just a bird had hit a window, had happened before. I crouched into the hallway, it came from the door. There was someone outside. Someone whistling. Slowly I made my way towards it, careful not to make the outsider aware of my presence.
I heard him breath or something that seemed like breathing. Half-breathing. Through the peephole I saw the void outside. There was nothing, just darkness and that whistling noise, soft and barley hearable.
It changed. Like light but not light, maybe orange or red. Did someone make a fire? Who would make fire in a building? It was like a bright red ring surrounding the black void. Then it blinked and I fainted.
Weeks came about and went by and work took me up as our next big project came, on my side always dutiful two new interns who often filled the whole office with the smell of fries they brought with them. We were in one of the smaller conference rooms, clean metal filled with flecks from cheap food, taking short breaks in between the longing working hours.
Sometimes I would use the breaks to talk some things through with my boss, always eager to show him how dedicated and thankful I was. His office had his name on the door but every time I couldn’t suppress the image of Very Important Pennis: Uncut on it. My tow fellow working drones were out to grab some snacks and I enjoyed the insularity of the room and took deep breaths, breathing through, Con Air from its powerful oxygen.
In my hand, a cup of coffee laying my eyes on the window, down on the people who passed another on the concrete between the pavements, when at the corner a man stood still. He was not ordinary. He just stood there. Had he stood here before? I don’t know but he stood and watched and then waved. Did he wave his hand at me? I came closer and tried to see what he was doing.
He raised his arm up in 45 degrees, and a single finger pointed at me like a spear as I gasped. Was this man mad? Was he seriously looking at me? There was something odd with him, I knew. There was something with his grimace, his Face/Off like he didn’t belong here.
Not on the street, but right here right that he was wrong in the City of Angles with his staring and unblinking Snake Eyes. As if he licked the thoughts in my head he violently shook his face up and down, loosening his slicked back brown hair and he smiled like a kid until for a moment his skin shook looked like a loosened mask. Then he hopped from one leg to the other, passers just ignored him, one to the other one to the other one to the other and bang he had fallen flat on the street crushing his head on the ground.
He lifted himself, blood tripling down on his brown suit and his white shirt and he did the same again. With full force he cracked his face on the hot concrete, again and again, sputtering teeth in all directions, still everyone ignored him and laughed at the sunfilled day.
As sudden as before he stood up, waved at me and ran away around the corner. In disbelief I kept standing and saw him look around the corner, staring at me until he produced an 8mm camera he pointed downwards. Then he started to spit around, all over the place as if that would have some effect like melting the stone or Bringing Out the Dead (which of course it didn’t).
Then he was gone in no time, Gone in 60 Seconds. Unbelievable what I had seen. When the interns returned, I pointed the spot out but the blood wasn’t there and the street so dirty clean like ever, and they thought I joked at them and turned their pimpled faces into smiles. Maybe it had just been bizarre performance, stranger things happened.
I told Amy of it and she agreed that it was nothing but an act or maybe really just a party clown or maybe someone who wanted to perform for his kids like The Family Man that he might be. I snugged up to her and pulled her close. I was happy and lucky and had to suppress that crunching emotion of bliss for a single time in my life only to accept the beauty in it with my shortloved heart.
I didn’t think about the man until a month later, it was weekend and Amy had her courses to give so I decided to grab my brother for a time at the beach. The hot sand around us we were lain out in the sun, talked about girls our mother and that his encroaching puberty started to cause tidal waves in the house. He was a good child and I tried to be as much a brother as I was. We were out in the water and then dried in the sun, palyed volleyball and disturbed elder people with it, when the sun tingled away.
Time had flown and I was glad I took the day to spend it with him. On our route home I filled up the car at the next gas station. There I met the Man again. Seth had taken time to make a visit to the toilet as I waited in the car. I was on my phone and scrolled through reviews for the coming movie night. I made a selection, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” it was and “Christmas Carol: The Movie” and “Windtalkers” but a newer Adaptation, I looked up and saw the Man in the front of the car. His blue eyes examined my face, brown suit brown hair, and he hopped back in one jump and picked something up.
It was a little beagle and he pulled the puppy tight to his chest and scratched him gently behind the ears, whispering something into them that sounded like Sonny, but I’m not sure. He looked again at my eyes and he smiled. I didn’t know how to react, so I smiled back at him and showed him my thumb up and prayed he may go away. He did not.
He dropped the puppy to the ground and kicked it and jumped on it.
I heard the yelp and whimpering from outside but was too shocked to do something. He jumped up and down time after time my mouth opened in terror as I saw the blood on his black shoes. Through all this he had this relaxed smile and looked at me.
The howls of the puppy stopped and he picked up the furry meat, the head a mess of bone shards and brain, one eyeball broken out, dangled down form the rest of the defiled carcass. The Man pulled the puppy tight to his chest and lifted his thumb, cradling his face in the red stew. He let it fell down to the ground again and kicked it again and again until it was bloods-and-bones-stew.
I opened the car door when Seth shouted, “Where are you going?” I turned around to see he poked his head in the rustic car and as I nudged to the front, I saw the Man was gone.
Headfirst I sprang out the car and nosedived on the street, my face nearly touched the asphalt. He was gone and so was the blood. Seth shouted out but I was inside the shop already and begged the young cashier for aid, asked her if she hadn’t seen the Man outside. Headlight eyes looked at me in fear as I tried to grab her shoulders over the counter. Dirt blew up all around me as I touched the dusty bins and shelves. After a babbling tirade I looked at the hand that clenched my arm. Seth looked bewildered at me, his eyes asked if I gone maniac.
I had scared him but it brought me back to reality, for a short time. We sat silent in the car until angry hoops of late afternoon commuters called for banishment. I turned around and parked on the lot, then called police. They weren’t skeptical like in the films, especially when I told them that I had seen the man before. An understanding face took notes and went inside to consult with the cashier. I called Mum.
“What you guys up to? What’s going on?”
“Mum,” I said. “There was this guy.”
“Did something happen with Seth? What did he do?”
“Nothing,” I said and watched from the frame of my sight how my brother curled up in the passenger seat. “It was just odd.”
“What’s the matter with you? You scared me to death,” she said. I couldn’t scare her with this. Had I really imagined it all? I called Amy but she didn’t answer.
There was nothing on the video, they said. Just me in the car staring bewildered then stumbling out like drunk. They gave me various explanations from dehydration to stress and left me and my brother there on the road.
I opened the door and fell on the couch. I told him about my encounters with the man and tried to find reasons for the strange behavior until he asked if I couldn’t file against a stalker. Was this Man stalking me? From one second to the other things made sense and didn’t seem as bad, or bad in a different way. I pulled over a stoic mask on my mad face and cheered him up as I felt his angst. I called Mum and told her everything was fine, just a misunderstanding, and she accepted my explanation with weary ease.
I ditched my list and let Seth choose a film and slumped on the couch with dry eyelids covering my headache.
I woke up from a noise at the door, Seth crouched on my shoulder in sleep. I was scared and turned around to see my Amy standing in front of me, trying to plug in her dead phone. We embraced and sat down in the bedroom far off from troubling my brother with my disturbing tale. Amy didn’t doubt me but seemed more skeptic crafting mighty fine tales of pranksters and jokers wandering around town scaring people to practice their grotesqueries.
We lied in bed afterwards, she behind me, pressed against my back. I drifted away with a headache and the blazing last sunrays shone behind my eyelids again, a flash of a smile of the Man and his rat teeth and his chopstick-dress and he all set on fire, just standing and smiling. I woke and stared in darkness, the moon smirking at my anguish. Night bathed the room and I heard the deep snoring sound of Amy, still behind me.
The pillow was hot and cooked my ear and brought back memories of a headache as to command to turn over my headrest to the cooling side of the equator, to hopefully fall fast back asleep but as I lifted up there in the split of the halfclosed door to the dark of the halls behind I saw the blazing eyes. Red glowing in the dark for a lifetime and a second, staring and blinking and a soft tickle of laughter. I crouched myself at Amy’s side and shook her softly, she mumbling as her eyes opened awake.
I told her there was a thing at the door in the apartment. Sober from sleep her grogginess fell in an instant, and stiff like a white candle, she was up in the bed next to me. Her hands turned on the light and I moved a finger to the mouth and slowly crawled out from the bed, scared and slow steps I leaped forward looking behind me to see her face. She got up after me and held a hand on my back, a sign of watchful reassurance.
The rest of my home was dark and silent but for the breathing of Seth on the couch who woke as I switched on the lightbulbs tingling above his hair. Questioning eyes, he asked what was going on, Amy sat down with him as I went through all rooms again.
Then in the bedroom I looked under the bed and there was nothing. Back in the darkness of the hallway, Amy whispered to me of talking to someone a therapist or a psychiatrist, as I just stared at the shadow of a Man that was next to me, his face inches away from mine.
Part 2

You ever sit around all day don’t know what to do? So bored of yourself that you just look at anything until you feel the rot creep up on you trying to drag you down. Well if you’re reading this, you must have some time on your hands. The name is Don Kowalski by the way.
My uncle used to say ,Gotta get out boy’ he said, ,You’re in a dark spot some time and when you’re in it keep going. Take it all, breath it in. Keep going. Always keep going.’ – ironic since he killed himself in a hunting accident out somewhere in woodland. I suppose he didn’t want to miss his prey and kept going after it. Kept going.
It started to work. For a few days you fight, and you struggle as sailors in a dry ditch or on a dry glass and you keep going, push forward and nothing comes from it until you know nothing will come from it. Such was time for me at the outbreak of our lovely new friend Covid. My one-part-off-part girlfriend Alessandra was with her family in Florida and so I shared the sunriddled apartment only with booze and screens.
Time was the enemy although it hadn’t been so from on early. It didn’t have to be this way. In the beginning, I was thrilled staying put, living only at home, downing a bottle here a bottle there took me months to realize that getting drunk wasn’t much exciting when you could do it every day. Lifting was no fun at home without the showoff.
The thrill wasn’t there without the mirrors and the others and I would not give empty testament. So I was stuck, down deep in my black chair with my greying hair clinging greasy to my head and the stubble on my face growing thicker and thicker like hedges and forests of dry metallic wires drilling themselves deep in my naked skin.
I sat on the chair, blue light penetrated me and I watched into it like someone getting lost in the sun to see caleidoscopic patterns afterwards for minutes and some stare in the dark ponds in gardens and across them and I stared into the unknown abbeys of the internet until I found something that hooked me. Interest was reborn, the cherubim and thrones sang, and I was again digging for knowledge on the riddle.
It was the case of Nathan, not Lessing’s I mind you. You got to know I’m, and I know this sounds like the start of a bad pulpy novel, I’m a PI or what the cool cats call it now. Private Investigation, looking at lives for a fuck of money but better than to slither up buttholes at the ordinary stational sedentary life I once had and was led in. I was called up, by a Mrs. Anderson, whose voice sounded like a whisky drowned chimney.
Carry Ann Anderson had called about a friend who was now dead meat. The case was solved she said but somehow it was not, not for her. There was rot on the inside of fresh timber. A fair warning here – there won’t be no solution, cause certainly me didn’t solve it. I told her so, when she called again. I hadn’t been to LA and going there was a waste, I knew as much already. For her sake I called the department over there and talked to the detective. She wasn’t going to be happy with my findings.
Gluing a mask of false politeness to my voice I asked, “So what’s the matter hm?”
“They say it’s all real simple: kid snapped and did it. But something ain’t right. You see I knew her back from the day, from Sacramento. I can tell you, this boy was no of these Columbines or Sandy Hooks, he would never hurt them.”
“That’s what the parents of those kids said too,” I said, uncomfortable silence on the other end.
“Something’s just off about this. You saw the files already?”
“Mhm. Didn’t do much good.”
“Tell you this: the officers said the same. Said it’s all there orderly and not like some coverup or some shit they tell you like the conspiracy theories on TV you know? Like they had to dig for it you know? Not too difficult and not too easy but also not in between not your textbook stuff either. Not odd he said. But said that it all around made it odd. Made it seem odd, still, somehow. Seems like not the type to do it. You know he said type? He spat them words out on me,” she said.
There I was. I made some calls asked about the kid that chopped down his family, sat his flat up like a Christmas tree and coaled it down to the ground, all in a cozy night. One day to the other and a bunch of people gone.
I find a pal of his, named Erica Cremonte. She was willing to talk. Told me when it happened and went down and all the other stuff. Other guys didn’t talk or told me how shitty they feel about it all. I dug a bit deeper inside Erica since she was the only source of water in the land of dry lands, she told me a bit more, opened up like an old lady to the cashier or waiter or the poor sod at the bus. Told me about Nathan and his family and his brother and his girlfriend her few idle feel-good weeks in Africa and the funeral. And that it didn’t make sense to her either.
And the days go by and I start to forget about the whole thing since there’s no leads and none won’t talk and I give up. Call Mrs. Anderson and tell her there is nothing and she doesn’t understand the whys in my words but she knows them and we agree to part ways and wish each other a nice day and she’s gone.
Days and weeks and months go by and I forget. Then I am locked here in front of the monitor and it all comes back and something in me stirs and after hours I stare at the profile of one Margaret Suarez and see the condolences on her Facebook profile.
I write to her and days pass me by, drinking lifting reading and boredom, the old familiar gent from around the corner walks up again until there’s a response. Asks me how I found her, what I wanted. Calls me and tells me all about the disfigured creep that slashed her mother in the office. Digs deeper and finds all the glory all the madness in the last mail, sent from her mother’s account.
He left something for us and I will share it with you. Keep in mind it’s all ludicrous but it will help pass some hours. So, the following is the written word of Nathan Cohen, brought to paper after he killed his therapist while locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.
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Sometimes I look up at the sky, at night. I wonder, is the lightning of the stars hidden by the vast dark, or is the darkness a shield? A shield that keeps us safe and calm from countless eyes that stare at us?
Back then I didn’t care for the night. The air was on fire from the red morning sun, every time the same, from grad school to that day when those good Fast Times at Ridgemont High started. In the beginning it was only dark shades of purple and crimson until the firmament turned to face blood.
A line of mystic clouds was in the sky, creeping forward like a white river. The street came alive minute by minute, looming trashmen came to empty our waste in the stark dust flying around. It was better in the hills with the cooling breeze before the onset of dawn.
Back then life was soft and kind and sometimes the only touch of madness was a killed hedgehog on the street or two poisoned cats in the neighborhood. Now, the sky is blue and white and partly covered in striped clouds standing static on the package of my pills. My name is Nate Cohen. Or was. A sitting corpse though I might sit and breath and eat and drink but I don't laugh or sing or cry. The laid out actions of others, that brought me here, might seem untrue for they can’t be proven, but I assure you they are true.
All of them. I don't know what will happen after I hit the "send" button but you all need to know there is a shade of acid in the world you don't taste or smell, but it burns your face like brimstone like flame-gas scorching your eyes like the sun was just the backside of a black hole. You'll see.
I was born Nathaniel Cohen in 1991 in the glory land of sunshine, to Ira and Susan. We lived down in Sacramento, my father running flocks of cars from behind a stuffed desk, and my mother gave pottery classes every Tuesday and Thursday night, taught a few friends how to make halfskilled molds of clay. Dad was a bold man always chasing dreams of living without a mortgage, and Mum supported but was like a happy young girl and bathed in the sounds of Sunday lawnmowers and plastic pools, water from the hose filtered the rays of solar bronze.
I guess in their own ways both were not real, maybe that was what tied them together. We weren't rich but not poor.
Playful on weekends I built forts and donjons between California sycamores and gray pine and hunted and ran with classmates and friends and neighbor's kids that grew grizzled worker’s brown over their small shapes.
I was happy before and afterwards, but loss is like a sharp pin in the foot, long lost by a sewing woman, too lazy to pick up her needles. Until then, when I was under or over 11 and my progenitor decided he needed to be home faster or sooner or was just hungry, and crashed into 2 men and 1 woman and one dog. Insurance and my grandparents (now long dead) kept us from sinking in the shelters of the homeless ones, but my mother needed work or we faced to lose the house.
The first months she worked as waitress at Ear’s, a rundown bar I wasn’t allowed to enter and so sat for hours on the warm sidewalks, gleaming red in the drowning sunlight and grey and sad under the smile of Mother Selene. Some days Mrs. Anderson watched me and I watched her, sipping slowly but frequent on cheap Chadonay. This went until some better showed up, and the months turned to over a year until that happened. My mother had studied contemporary art spending hours devouring Roy Lichtenstein and the likes and to find paying employment had never been on her mind, until some time as now.
Finally, after two years my mother got an offer from a small magazine in Los Angeles and we moved to this strange new world. Surprisingly, moving at the age of 13 was no fun but new friends found me as I slowly settled, when something changed.
Robert Berkowitz came into our life and took us in. He was a bald man with blonde eyebrows and eyes like glowing azures, he was no stranger to money and art, which was the way he’d gotten involved with Mum. They hit it right at each other and after some months or weeks, might it was just some weeks, he took us to his house in Beverly Hills, not far from where Foothill Road hits Park Way.
Beverly Palm Plaza was soon my second living room. Later, in the foul age of 16, I used all chances to leave the house into the mass of the 30.000 inhabitants living there, crossing the invisible line south of the tracks, where Pacific Electric had once worked streetcars on the Red Line. Eons ago in another world.
I did everything to leave home, my newborn half-brother Seth a crying shitting mess, stomping out silent thoughts with such vigor, that I agreed to join my mother on her monthly expeditions to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, near the buzzing Wilshire Boulevard. It was well worth the laughter from the beauties in blonde and black, and the cute Valley Girl that lived across from me. Life was good.
Robert tried to be a father, but in the end we formed a bond. He was there for me when I wanted and offered counsel and paid for my life while I enrolled in college, even helped my shallow dream to join in true Hollywood. After college I enrolled in the UCLA TFT program and, with help from my stepfather, finally landed a job at a production company, Reality TV. I started out as trainee and clawed my way finally to second assistant of the executive director of scripted TV development at Geronimo Grande Productions.
It wasn’t what I had dreamt of but at last I sustained myself, though Robert insisted to help with the rent for my flat on Kelton Avenue, where I still lived after graduating. Life was good back then, without the staring stars that tried to break through the night, away, far far away, Racing with the Moon.
I was 28 when the shades and clouds came over me. I was out with friends, a steamed night in the cool warm air’s vibrations around us.
We found a small restaurant near my place. Pitfire Artisan Pizza on 2018 Westwood Boulevard had brilliant Pesto Chicken and a damn fine Field Mushroom. I was there with Jules and Erica, enjoying dinner outside to the left of the entrance, a silent small tree our only companion, until she walked by. Inside there was a meeting of some charity organization, The Cotton Club or something.
Hair like ironed black jasper and ascetic nude makeup, she strolled by in a white tank top and black yoga pants, the matt casually under her arm. I didn’t stop staring at her. I couldn’t. Some birds in some nearby trees seemed to whistle after her and she turned around, just for a second, as if to say come after me Birdy.
“You in love Naty?” asked Erica, the flower from the valley with the flaxen mob on her head, sitting across from me.
“No,” I stuttered “Just caught my eye. Nothing.”
“Sure,” grinned Jules between his teeth, “Mine too.” he said, folding his tattooed arms in front of his chest, tongue shoved in the corner of his mouth smiling like a bobcat dressed in jeans and shirt of the same fabric, The Boy in Blue.
“Why don’t ask for her number? She’s just down the corner.”
“Isn’t that kinda creepy?”
“Most women like a bit of creeps, ” Jules howled up at his own joke, his hat nearly falling from the back of his head as he raised it up and slapped his left knee.
“Oh, shut up predator,” I waved off, before I turned to Erica “You don’t think that’s awkward?”
“Not if a guy like you asked. I remember a friend of mine met her husband like that, now Peggy Sue Got Married,” she smiled and put her head to the side. Too perfect white Hollywooddream teeth.
I had seen the Girl turning left and jogged away from the Pitfire, still hearing Jules laughing, when I saw her near La Grange Ave. She cut another corner up right so I ran after her, praying to find her. Yet to the grace of my bad luck, she was gone. The street in front of me was not crowded but the vixen from my dreams was vanished. Hands empty and defeated I returned to the table.
“Vae victis,” announced Jules, as he saw my hollow eyes. I never had a poker face until now. With half your face in mashed up molten scartissue it’s difficult to show emotion and I wonder, so far from home will the sun ever show herself again, will it fill anyone out her, raise itself, Raising Arizona?
“Did she say no?” blonde Erica asked with true empathy.
“Seems I lost her,” I said, trying to hide my disappoint. Just a few seconds more decisiveness and my life might have changed.
“Well let’s go, search a new one,” Jules sprang up and clapped.
Let’s go. The words rang, as I tumbled out of the cab up to my flat, the Girl long forgotten for the next few months until another fateful day, when I went to my gym. Workout and work kept me focused for a time and it was mostly night when I came home.
I admit I was a glutton. I had to work out at least three times a week, gym rats they call them. Muscled sweat pouring gales of raw testosterone into the halls. The Equinox Gym was my favorite in Westwood and I had been a paying patron for years now and knew more faces there than in the streets around my neighborhood. I had just left after a session of pumping my brains out, when I saw her crossing me by.
“Hey,” I blurted out in reflex.
She tilted her hand. Black hair, a shimmer of brown in the dusky sunlight, dark eyes and a friendly smile took me right home. Right where I belonged.
“Hey yourself,” she said, raising one eyebrow.
“Do I know you?” she asked, without arrogance, her black-brown hair gently thrown over the left shoulder. Love leaking out of every pore I muttered a plain “Yes”. Before she had a chance to pass me by.
“Sorry. I meet a lot of people lately,” she smiled “Are you in one of my courses?”
“Courses?”
“Well, here,” she grinned. Small white teeth and a thick red snail that crouched behind them, giving them shelter and backup, all the same.
“Ah no. I think, you passed by a pizza palor couple of weeks ago?” I stuttered in embarrassment, trying to suppress redness swelling on my cheek.
“Yes, that’s on my way. So, you’re my new stalker?” She laughed.
“Well, don’t I feel honored,” I extended my hand “My name’s Nate, by the way.”
“Amy. Amy Gallagher,” she raised a slim white wrist in the shade of the California sundown.
This was the day I really met Amy Gallagher for the first time. I rue it every moment in the coffin of my sterile being with the stars laughing at me and the disc in the sky calling my name making me all Moonstruck.
We set a date for the Saturday to come. I thought it fitting to go for Italian and led her to Sammy’s down at Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t too expensive (I didn’t want to come across as one of those guys) but stylish enough to show her I had some taste stored in me. She wore a stunning babyblue dress just touching the tips of her knees, and her black mane was straightened in a long tail crowning her right pale shoulder. When she saw me, she licked her lips as if to prepare me for her Vampire’s Kiss. Sammy was a first gen from Palermo, old now he longed for his home and always liked to impress with native extravaganza.
“Ciao ragazzi!” he said as I walked my stunning Kypris down the cheap red carpet between trashy fake Roman plastic pillars.
“Come stai?” Amy replied, took his arm and left me somber.
They chatted a bit in Italian, what they said I do not know, but I knew the small thing in my belly, the knot of discomfort in my stomach. Laughs and eyes on me. Cheers swallow the jokes.
“You’re full of surprises,” I tried to gain control of the tilting ship, unnecessarily clawing my black hair back.
“You got no idea,” she pressed her tongue between a marble row of perfect teeth, a small red viper watched out from the cave of her mouth.
We talked of hard work, of idle time, of family the usual first-date-topics broken up by a hand of awkward pauses in between, like flashes in the storm.
“My family’s not from around here.”
“Neither’s mine.”
“So whose Italian? Mom or Dad? I bet your Dad.”
“None of them,” she grinned “I picked it up couple years ago.”
Movies, theater, literature, antipasti, strange people, more hobbies, main dish, skipping desert and I rolled from over her in my half of the bed (thank god I had cleaned up before I left).
Time flew like night owls and bats and the days were filled with wet noises. I visited some of her Yoga classes, though it didn’t suit me. She visited me on my work. I showed her around the crappy little rooms we sat in and all awed at her body and face.
The nights were like Sunday afternoons with her and all ungood became stored noise in the corner, so became my dead father and her dead family and my aspirations in Hollywood and her degree from John Hopkins and my love for seafood and her fishnet dress and here working Never on Tuesday. Three months and there was the big day.
“So you’re the famous Amy!” mother opened her arms to greet her, eager to impress. Hard embarrassment as Robert did the same, while Seth waved at her and whispered a shy “Hi”, acting so often like young male teens, caught in the web of a child’s mind and a growing body.
Mother had insisted to cook and so we all chowed away on something resembling orange Lasagna, chowing away with the Time to Kill until it was all over. Robert tried to save grace by filling up after each bite and putting on some of his favorite tunes. Wine spilled on the tablecloth like the face of Christ.
“Nothing better than the master,” he prophesized while laying on a small fortune in the body of an old vinyl version of “Sweet Home Chicago”, his second most favorite behind “Fire Birds”.
“You like to make deals yourself Nate told me,” Amy teased with a smile, Wild at Heart but calm and in control.
“Oh, we got an expert over here!” he teased back.
“I knew some devils myself,” she curled her pink lips, deviously looking from my chest to my eyes.
“I bet you still do,” Robert winked and tucked away as my mother gave him a noticeable kick under the table with a smile on her face.
“So, you’re a Yoga-instructor?” asked the former waitress, sucking out the air of the room.
“Amy is actually a doctor,” I deflected as she took my forearm softly, clinging for support.
“A doctor? That sounds nearly like what Zandalee did! Remember Zandalee? She was the girl down the street who had that accident a few years ago?” asked Robert, ignored by the rest.
“Why not work in a hospital or a clinic?” asked my mother.
“You must know, Western medicine is very limiting. There are many ways to keep oneself healthy, but you got to be open minded and have the stomach for it,” she laughed.
“You mean like this Eastern stuff?”
“Well there’s many older tricks to keep oneself in good shape,” she said before switching the topic “Nate says you two are art enthusiasts?”
“I don’t want to brag but I know my way around,” said Mum.
“Well me certainly not,” said Seth annoyed, a bored sigh escaped his lips, barely noticeable the runt of the egomaniac litter.
“Who made that wristband?” Amy inquired “It looks really cool!”, prompting a hidden prideful smile from my little brother who had put a small plastic pearl on a leather band knotted around his wrist.
“I did,” Seth said, as he stared awkwardly at the table.
“Don’t be shy baby,” said my mother “he’s usually not like that.”
“Just not interested in girls yet.”
“Are you famous?” asked the child, his cheeks bright red.
“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” said my love, giggling like an imbecile on her Honeymoon in Vegas.
“You sure? Aren’t you from the poor family?” asked the child again.
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw you on TV. You’re in that show about it.”
“Seth what are you talking? Stop that nonsense!” insisted my mother.
“It’s not nonsense,” said the child
“Enough now!” said mother.
“Ready for some games?” asked Robert as we dropped Seth’s fantasy.
“As ready as Amos & Andrew,” answered my Mum.
We spent the rest of the eve with talk and drink and spilled chips and even attempted to gamble on a bit of Ma-Jong before everyone sighed in boredom and we drove back to Amy’s place at Red Rock West with the Deadfall of the evening behind us. Usually, I had no trouble sleeping somewhere else and I had been to her little house at the fringes of the city’s civilization more often than not and when I woke at 03:00 a.m. the room smelled like gasoline. The TV was dead. We had watched something didn’t we? I thought “Guarding Tess” or “It Could Happen to You” was just starting when we dropped in. The things I knew were all so useless, I thought, what did it all do me good to know A Century of Cinema?
The bed was empty except for my own sweaty body, the smell like tiny razors in my nose, and when I called out, the only response was nothing from the hallway. I made my way outside on the corridor when I heard the whispers. At first I thought they came from the dirty bathroom but the closer I came towards the stairway the clearer it was.
Some voice was talking in the kitchen. Hiding my presence, I gazed through the open door and saw my girlfriend stare up at the moon, her voice barely a sound in it’s dead light. I didn’t hear what she said but for a while it seemed like there was someone else with us, someone who saw me and pointed a finger, led to her turning around, her eyes open and wide locking on my face. I jumped back at the swift surprise, as she called my name.
“Nate?” she asked me with a hunted voice, as if ready to give me the Kiss of Death.
“Y-Yeah. Everything all right Babe?”
“Sure. What you doing down here?”
“You were talking.”
“Did I wake you up?” she opened her arms to hug and we embraced another. Something wasn’t right.
“What you doing here? It’s after 4 in the morning and you here in the kitchen.” I left the words hanging in the air.
“You never noticed? I sleepwalk, always have. You really never woke up to this before? Did it since I was a baby when we were Leaving Las Vegas.”
I had no idea what she said. She told me it had happened to her since she was a child and that she had strange dreams of the moon and would wake up in the kitchen or the living room, mouth dry which meant she talked for long times, though to whom or what, she never said. Said it happened when she fell with the head right on the top of The Rock. We went back to bed but something was off. There was a noise. Or was there? I tried to turn around, roll over, Amy’s soft snoring next to me. Still a noise. Or not? Yes, yes definitely a noise. Or not?
A crackling sound, I jumped up. Slowly I crept outside the bed. Maybe just a bird had hit a window, had happened before. I crouched into the hallway, it came from the door. There was someone outside. Someone whistling. Slowly I made my way towards it, careful not to make the outsider aware of my presence.
I heard him breath or something that seemed like breathing. Half-breathing. Through the peephole I saw the void outside. There was nothing, just darkness and that whistling noise, soft and barley hearable.
It changed. Like light but not light, maybe orange or red. Did someone make a fire? Who would make fire in a building? It was like a bright red ring surrounding the black void. Then it blinked and I fainted.
Weeks came about and went by and work took me up as our next big project came, on my side always dutiful two new interns who often filled the whole office with the smell of fries they brought with them. We were in one of the smaller conference rooms, clean metal filled with flecks from cheap food, taking short breaks in between the longing working hours.
Sometimes I would use the breaks to talk some things through with my boss, always eager to show him how dedicated and thankful I was. His office had his name on the door but every time I couldn’t suppress the image of Very Important Pennis: Uncut on it. My tow fellow working drones were out to grab some snacks and I enjoyed the insularity of the room and took deep breaths, breathing through, Con Air from its powerful oxygen.
In my hand, a cup of coffee laying my eyes on the window, down on the people who passed another on the concrete between the pavements, when at the corner a man stood still. He was not ordinary. He just stood there. Had he stood here before? I don’t know but he stood and watched and then waved. Did he wave his hand at me? I came closer and tried to see what he was doing.
He raised his arm up in 45 degrees, and a single finger pointed at me like a spear as I gasped. Was this man mad? Was he seriously looking at me? There was something odd with him, I knew. There was something with his grimace, his Face/Off like he didn’t belong here.
Not on the street, but right here right that he was wrong in the City of Angles with his staring and unblinking Snake Eyes. As if he licked the thoughts in my head he violently shook his face up and down, loosening his slicked back brown hair and he smiled like a kid until for a moment his skin shook looked like a loosened mask. Then he hopped from one leg to the other, passers just ignored him, one to the other one to the other one to the other and bang he had fallen flat on the street crushing his head on the ground.
He lifted himself, blood tripling down on his brown suit and his white shirt and he did the same again. With full force he cracked his face on the hot concrete, again and again, sputtering teeth in all directions, still everyone ignored him and laughed at the sunfilled day.
As sudden as before he stood up, waved at me and ran away around the corner. In disbelief I kept standing and saw him look around the corner, staring at me until he produced an 8mm camera he pointed downwards. Then he started to spit around, all over the place as if that would have some effect like melting the stone or Bringing Out the Dead (which of course it didn’t).
Then he was gone in no time, Gone in 60 Seconds. Unbelievable what I had seen. When the interns returned, I pointed the spot out but the blood wasn’t there and the street so dirty clean like ever, and they thought I joked at them and turned their pimpled faces into smiles. Maybe it had just been bizarre performance, stranger things happened.
I told Amy of it and she agreed that it was nothing but an act or maybe really just a party clown or maybe someone who wanted to perform for his kids like The Family Man that he might be. I snugged up to her and pulled her close. I was happy and lucky and had to suppress that crunching emotion of bliss for a single time in my life only to accept the beauty in it with my shortloved heart.
I didn’t think about the man until a month later, it was weekend and Amy had her courses to give so I decided to grab my brother for a time at the beach. The hot sand around us we were lain out in the sun, talked about girls our mother and that his encroaching puberty started to cause tidal waves in the house. He was a good child and I tried to be as much a brother as I was. We were out in the water and then dried in the sun, palyed volleyball and disturbed elder people with it, when the sun tingled away.
Time had flown and I was glad I took the day to spend it with him. On our route home I filled up the car at the next gas station. There I met the Man again. Seth had taken time to make a visit to the toilet as I waited in the car. I was on my phone and scrolled through reviews for the coming movie night. I made a selection, “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” it was and “Christmas Carol: The Movie” and “Windtalkers” but a newer Adaptation, I looked up and saw the Man in the front of the car. His blue eyes examined my face, brown suit brown hair, and he hopped back in one jump and picked something up.
It was a little beagle and he pulled the puppy tight to his chest and scratched him gently behind the ears, whispering something into them that sounded like Sonny, but I’m not sure. He looked again at my eyes and he smiled. I didn’t know how to react, so I smiled back at him and showed him my thumb up and prayed he may go away. He did not.
He dropped the puppy to the ground and kicked it and jumped on it.
I heard the yelp and whimpering from outside but was too shocked to do something. He jumped up and down time after time my mouth opened in terror as I saw the blood on his black shoes. Through all this he had this relaxed smile and looked at me.
The howls of the puppy stopped and he picked up the furry meat, the head a mess of bone shards and brain, one eyeball broken out, dangled down form the rest of the defiled carcass. The Man pulled the puppy tight to his chest and lifted his thumb, cradling his face in the red stew. He let it fell down to the ground again and kicked it again and again until it was bloods-and-bones-stew.
I opened the car door when Seth shouted, “Where are you going?” I turned around to see he poked his head in the rustic car and as I nudged to the front, I saw the Man was gone.
Headfirst I sprang out the car and nosedived on the street, my face nearly touched the asphalt. He was gone and so was the blood. Seth shouted out but I was inside the shop already and begged the young cashier for aid, asked her if she hadn’t seen the Man outside. Headlight eyes looked at me in fear as I tried to grab her shoulders over the counter. Dirt blew up all around me as I touched the dusty bins and shelves. After a babbling tirade I looked at the hand that clenched my arm. Seth looked bewildered at me, his eyes asked if I gone maniac.
I had scared him but it brought me back to reality, for a short time. We sat silent in the car until angry hoops of late afternoon commuters called for banishment. I turned around and parked on the lot, then called police. They weren’t skeptical like in the films, especially when I told them that I had seen the man before. An understanding face took notes and went inside to consult with the cashier. I called Mum.
“What you guys up to? What’s going on?”
“Mum,” I said. “There was this guy.”
“Did something happen with Seth? What did he do?”
“Nothing,” I said and watched from the frame of my sight how my brother curled up in the passenger seat. “It was just odd.”
“What’s the matter with you? You scared me to death,” she said. I couldn’t scare her with this. Had I really imagined it all? I called Amy but she didn’t answer.
There was nothing on the video, they said. Just me in the car staring bewildered then stumbling out like drunk. They gave me various explanations from dehydration to stress and left me and my brother there on the road.
I opened the door and fell on the couch. I told him about my encounters with the man and tried to find reasons for the strange behavior until he asked if I couldn’t file against a stalker. Was this Man stalking me? From one second to the other things made sense and didn’t seem as bad, or bad in a different way. I pulled over a stoic mask on my mad face and cheered him up as I felt his angst. I called Mum and told her everything was fine, just a misunderstanding, and she accepted my explanation with weary ease.
I ditched my list and let Seth choose a film and slumped on the couch with dry eyelids covering my headache.
I woke up from a noise at the door, Seth crouched on my shoulder in sleep. I was scared and turned around to see my Amy standing in front of me, trying to plug in her dead phone. We embraced and sat down in the bedroom far off from troubling my brother with my disturbing tale. Amy didn’t doubt me but seemed more skeptic crafting mighty fine tales of pranksters and jokers wandering around town scaring people to practice their grotesqueries.
After a half slice of pizza and a cold shower we sat down with Seth on the couch, he somewhat checking out my girlfriend’s body under the green summer dress, a piece of cloth befitting a city not in tune with itself but always in fake summer. We lied in bed afterwards, she behind me, pressed against my back. I drifted away with a headache and the blazing last sunrays shone behind my eyelids again, a flash of a smile of the Man and his rat teeth and his chopstick-dress and he all set on fire, just standing and smiling. I woke and stared in darkness, the moon smirking at my anguish. Night bathed the room and I heard the deep snoring sound of Amy, still behind me.
The pillow was hot and cooked my ear and brought back memories of a headache as to command to turn over my headrest to the cooling side of the equator, to hopefully fall fast back asleep but as I lifted up there in the split of the halfclosed door to the dark of the halls behind I saw the blazing eyes. Red glowing in the dark for a lifetime and a second, staring and blinking and a soft tickle of laughter. I crouched myself at Amy’s side and shook her softly, she mumbling as her eyes opened awake.
I told her there was a thing at the door in the apartment. Sober from sleep her grogginess fell in an instant, and stiff like a white candle, she was up in the bed next to me. Her hands turned on the light and I moved a finger to the mouth and slowly crawled out from the bed, scared and slow steps I leaped forward looking behind me to see her face. She got up after me and held a hand on my back, a sign of watchful reassurance.
The rest of my home was dark and silent but for the breathing of Seth on the couch who woke as I switched on the lightbulbs tingling above his hair. Questioning eyes, he asked what was going on, Amy sat down with him as I went through all rooms again.
Then in the bedroom I looked under the bed and there was nothing. Back in the darkness of the hallway, Amy whispered to me of talking to someone a therapist or a psychiatrist, as I just stared at the shadow of a Man that was next to me, his face inches away from mine.

So, I was just listening to Bill Simmons podcast and he had on the two people who run the Binge Mode podcast. Both are very knowledgable in both show and book notes.
They broke down the odds of Who Will Sit the Iron Throne (according to Vegas):

• Bran is the leader right now at +150
  
• Jon at 2/1
  
• Dany at 3/1
  
• Sansa at 7/1
  
• NK at 7/1
  
• Tyrion at 8/1
  
• Arya at 16/1
  
• Cersei at 16/1
  
• Jaime at 16/1
  
• Gendry 16/1
  
• Sam 25/1
  

Pretty interesting they have Bran right now as the leader, but maybe because people are banking on the Bran=NK theory?
Probably most safe bet is Jon or Dany, but the long shot I like is actually Arya....heres why (i have no real evidence just my thought):
Jaime will vanquish quite early on, in turn, Arya will sacrifice his face to The Faceless God, thus making his identity usable to TFM. She will use that face, to infiltrate Kings Landing, and assassinate Cersei, fulfilling the Valonqar prophecy and completing her List, and killing the Mad Queen. She will sit the Iron Throne, just as Jaime did when Ned found him after he killed The Mad King.

I just read an about how Las Vegas has Bran as the favorite to sit on the Iron Throne at the end of the final season. So if you had to bet, who would you put money on? I've had Daenerys picked since the beginning of the show, but I'm pretty sure George is going to make me pay for that this season.
​
Source: Game of Thrones: Las Vegas' Pick to Win the Iron Throne Is Interesting

Game of Thrones Fantasy League Game Screenshots
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We used real Vegas odds and asked some of the major questions that we all hope will be answered this season, such as who will sit on the Iron Throne and who will die first. We created the game in Excel and automated it so that the scores update each week therefore we can quickly see who is in the lead after each episode. The only job left is to pick out a wine chalice for my league's winner for he or she who drinks and knows things!
​
For those who are curious in playing the game for themselves, here is a link to the game materials: GOT Game Materials

I'm not saying there's a decent chance this will happen, but if Vegas gave me 1,000-1 odds, I'd bet a few bucks on Sweetrobin sitting on the Iron Throne at the end of the series. Why? He's very likely going to survive the war with the Night's King, and he might have the best family name left after the war is over.
Why do you think he'll survive the war with the Night's King? In short, he lives in a nearly impenetrable castle that has (relatively) little geographical significance. According to the World of Ice & Fire, the "Eyrie has never fallen by force." And, more importantly, there's no real reason for the Night's King to spend significant resources to overtake it due to it's location. He'll probably send a small portion of his army to lay siege and starve it out, but otherwise send the brunt of his army south to face the vast majority of humanity. If humanity wins, Robert Arryn is probably still alive, holed up in his castle. (There's also some small chance he recalls all his troops, which are probably the strongest Westerosi army left, but I doubt it, and I don't think I need it for the theory to work; it's really hard to take the Eyrie even if they just have a small portion of their army to defend it.)
Edit: More informed posters than I pointed out that the Eyrie is uninhabitable in winter. Nevertheless, (1) the Gates of the Moon are also hard to conquer; and (2) I still don't think it makes sense for the Night's King to divert a large force to conquer it. The point about the Eyrie makes my implausible theory even less plausible, but I still think Robin Arryn still has a good shot of living through the war.
Why might he have the best family name left after the war with the Night's King? In all likelihood, he won't; Dany, or Jon, or their kids, or a Stark will probably survive. But what if they don't? GRRM has said that the ending will be bittersweet. What if Dany and the Starks die repelling the Night King's invasion. Who's left? The Lannisters will likely die out fighting Dany. Houses Baratheon, Frey, Bolton, and Tyrell are definitely extinct in the show, and it seems House Martell is as well (and the Dornish would be unlikely to unite the realm in any event). Where does that leave us? I guess there's a Tully left. The Tarlys could survive, and I guess the Greyojoys too, but the realm hates the Iron Islanders. The Arryns can trace their lineage all the way back to the original Andals, and Jon Arryn was beloved by the realm. If the Targaryens, Starks, and Lannisters are wiped out, Robin Arryn has the best family name left in Westeros.
Ok, but he's a clutz and the least inspiring person ever. True, but by the end of the fighting, he might be in his late teens, could possibly have matured, and may not need to fight--folks outside the Vale probably don't know just how pathetic he is.
Wouldn't the other families in the Vale just tell everyone what a loser he is? No, they'd be incentivized to do the opposite. If their liege lord takes the Iron Throne, their influence both in the Vale and throughout Westeros would grow. They'd support his claim. And you know who else might help him consolidate power? Littlefinger. I could totally see him fleeing the war with the Night's King to wait to propel Sweetrobin to the throne in its aftermath. He did have that whole speech about profiting from chaos. He has Robin Arryn in his pocket, and would totally do something cowardly to get more power.
Would GRRM really do that? Would he not? It would be poetic that the death of Jon Arryn--a good, respected man--started the series in motion, and at the end his weak, loser son sits as King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men solely due to his dad's good name. It would be just like GRRM to put somebody uninspiring and undeserving in charge at the end of the series while sacrificing all the story's true heroes. Also, D&D said there were one or two plot twists that really surprised them; maybe this was one of them.
This is dumb and I'm going to downvote you. Fair in a sense, but I am just saying that this is a long shot possibility. The smart money is on Dany, Jon, or their progeny sitting on the Iron Throne. Or the Night's King. Or Hot Pie. (Hot Pie would definitely win the popular election, but Robin Arryn may have the electoral votes.)

Will Arya Wear Littlefinger’s Face?
No: -300 Yes: +200
Will Cersei Give Birth?
No: -260 Yes: +175
Does Tyrion Have a Secret Plot with Cersei?
No: -200 Yes: +150
Who Will Win Cleganebowl?
Sandor “The Hound” Clegane: -480 Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane: +300 Both Die Or Are Destroyed: +350
How Many Living People Will Arya Kill In Season 8?
Over 3.5: -115 Under 3.5: -115
Will Quaithe Be Shown Again In The Final Season?
No: -400 Yes: +300
What Will Bran Warg Into Next?
Raven: +125 Dragon: +300 Human: +300 Wolf: +300 Other: +400
Who Will Die First?
Euron Greyjoy: +200 Theon Greyjoy: +200 Cersei Lannister: +500 Jaime Lannister: +500 Yara Greyjoy: +1,000 Arya Stark: +1,500 Tyrion Lannister: +1,500 Daenerys Targaryen: +2,500 Jon Snow: +2,500 Sansa Stark: +2,500
Who Will Kill Cersei?
Jaime Lannister: +130 Arya Stark: +150 Does Not Die: +550 Tyrion Lannister: +550 Sansa Stark: +1,000 Daenerys Targaryen: +2,000 Jon Snow: +2,000 The Night King: +2,000 Euron Greyjoy: +2,500 Qyburn: +2,500 Ellaria Sand: +4,000 The Mountain: +4,000 Jorah Mormont: +6,600
Who Will Rule Westeros?
Jon Snow: +225 Bran Stark: +275 Sansa Stark: +500 Daenerys Targaryen: +550 Gendry: +650 Petyr Baelish: +1,250 The Night King: +1,500 Tyrion Lannister: +1,500 Arya Stark: +2,000 Samwell Tarly: +2,000 Cersei Lannister: +2,500 Jon and Daenerys’ baby: +2,500 Jaime Lannister: +4,000 Varys: +7,000 Davos Seaworth: +7,000 Bronn: +10,000 Euron Greyjoy: +10,000 Brienne of Tarth: +10,000 Jaqen H’ghar: +10,000 Jorah Mormont: +10,000 Melisandre: +10,000 Daario Naharis: +12,500 Beric Dondarrion: +12,500 The Hound: +12,500 Gilly: +15,000 Theon Greyjoy: +15,000 Yara Greyjoy: +15,000 Tormund Giantsbane: +15,000 The Mountain: +15,000
According to the odds, Jon Snow is the most likely to sit on the Iron Throne, assuming his rightful status as the true Targaryen heir. He’s followed closely behind by Bran Stark, who used his creepy greensight power to reveal the truth about his brother, er, cousin. Sansa, the current leader of Winterfell and serious doubter of Daenerys, edges out the Targaryen princess, who’s may have been building up her army all these past eight seasons for nothing. It’s interesting to note that Petyr Baelish a.k.a. Littlefinger, who seemingly had his throat slit in the Season 7 finale, still has a chance to take the Iron Throne. Some fans believe he may have faked his death and is still out there.
The Greyjoy family, especially Euron and Theon, doesn’t get much love. The three remaining members are in the top five characters most likely to die first this season.
Jaime is the most favored character to kill off his sistelover this season, beating out Arya, who has the Mad Queen on her list of targets to kill.
Finally, most fans think that Cersei is lying about being pregnant, and that she doesn’t have a secret plan with her brother Tyrion to break her alliance with Jon and Daenerys’ army, but only time will tell.
Via with betting odds from Bovada.lv

So, here’s a glimpse at the world map for my superhero setting, Paladin, specifically focusing on the Middle East.
Much of the history of the Middle East went as we know it in our timeline, even with the addition of Metahumans and advanced technologies since 1945. Israel was established, and Metahuman soldiers fought on both sides, with the Israelis emerging victorious each time; European powers withdrew from the region, etc. A few things go differently, though; for instance, Dubai blossoms into a metropolis much sooner than in our timeline. In general, though, everything went as we might expect, until 1980. That was when World War III (1980-1984) broke out, and the villainous forces of the New Order fell upon the Middle East.
Spearheading the New Order’s efforts in the Arabian Peninsula was the S-rank supervillain, Set. A sociopath with the ability to control sand, Set made his base of operations in the shining city of Dubai, and created a massive sand storm that threatened to swallow the entire region.
Ultimately, Set was defeated by the combined forces of two unlikely heroes: an Israeli superhero named Golem and a Palestinian superheroine named Simurgh. The former had the ability to create automatons out of clay, mud and dirt, whilst the latter could take the form of a fiery six-winged bird, as well as transfer her energy into others to enhance their own abilities. They both did their best to fight Set, but in the end the situation required them to not only to work together, but to sacrifice their lives in order to save the Middle East. Simurgh transferred 100% of her power into Golem, who then poured everything he had into a ten-mile-tall colossus of mud and sea water, which he directed to destroy Set. Set, along with the entire city of Dubai, was crushed and buried under half a mile of earth. The Middle East was saved. The war would still rage on for two and a half more years, but without Set, the forces of the New Order were far, far easier to fight.
The lasting legacy of Golem and Simurgh’s sacrifice was a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the creation of the Federal Union of Israel and Palestine, a secular, bi-national confederation of two peoples united by the sacrifices of each other’s children. Between 1995 and 2006, a colossal bridge covered in solar panels was constructed, connecting the West Bank to Gaza. Today, almost a million people live on the Shalam Bridge.
Riyadh was destroyed by Set, killing most of the Saudi Royal Family. When the sand settled, the Saudi Civil War began, and didn’t end until 1999, with the Treaty of Kuwait City. The former territory of Saudi Arabia was broken up, with the oil-rich region of Nejd going to the Gulf Alliance, a confederation of Persian Gulf states, which had occupied Nejd for almost all of the Saudi Civil War. The last remnants of the Saudi Royal Family were put in charge of a revived Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, based in Jeddah. The Jordanians donated a member of their royal family to sit on the throne of the Kingdom of Hashemite Arabia, based in Tabuk. And lastly, all involved officially recognized the Free Territory of the Holy Cities, which was established during World War III by an international group of Muslim superheroes to protect Mecca and Medina first from Set, and then from the Saudi Civil War.
The Gulf Alliance is surprisingly progressive and forward thinking in its own way. As the region hardest-hit by Set’s rampage, it made sense for the governments of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the UAE to pool their resources in order to rebuild. Though most of the Middle East has been surprisingly welcoming to alien refugees from the moon (long story), due to the massive regional drop in population brought on by Set’s Storm, the Gulf Alliance has welcomed in the most. Though the Alliance itself is mostly secular, the locals have been rather successful at converting the alien newcomers to Islam. Work is still underway to dig up many of the destroyed oil wells, even as the world is moving towards more and more renewable energy.
As for Saudi Arabia and Hashemite Arabia, the latter is a moderate Arab constitutional monarchy, the former…isn’t. The degree to which it isn’t is kinda shocking, actually. Hashemite Arabia lets their women run for positions in parliament; Saudi Arabia 2.0 doesn’t permit women to leave their homes. Hashemite Arabia is debating abolishing the death penalty; Saudi Arabia doesn’t even have prisons – they have a waiting list for the guy with the scimitar who beheads people for anything from theft to lying about one’s virginity. Saudi Arabia is also backing North Yemen’s now-radicalized Royal Army (more on that clusterfuck later).
Moving across the Red Sea, we have the Arab Republic of Egypt, which…well, let’s just say, they have some interesting residents these days. During World War III, Egypt came under siege by the New Order, with the Nile Delta the site of some of the war’s most intense fighting. On one side, the New Order – supervillains, Taurus Group ground and air forces, robots, dinosaurs, African mercenaries, and thousands of undead Nazi soldiers. On the other side, the Allied forces – the Egyptian Army and local Egyptian superheroes, plus some unlikely back-up from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Israeli Air Force. However, the Allies were losing. Badly. So badly that the Egyptian government activated its covert “Osiris Plan”.
See, Taurus Group was able to resurrect the entire Wehrmacht by activating what’s known as a “Charnel Womb” (another long story), which the Nazis created in 1938 through their use of arcane science and mysticism. However, top secret archeological discoveries revealed that the Ancient Egyptians created their own, much more advanced Charnel Womb. Which Egyptian government agents activated. They were then greeted by an undead Metahuman pharaoh by the name of Neherkamun. Surprisingly reasonable, Neherkamun agreed to aid the Egyptian government. In exchange for some concessions later.
Five days later, hundreds of thousands of skeletons, mummies and zombies rode towards the Cairo war zone, astride skeletal and mummified horses, clad in bronze/crocodile leather armor, wielding swords, spears, axes, AK’s, RPK’s, RPG’s and PKM’s, backed up by lich-sorcerers and animated statues armed with massive clubs and scythes – this undead horde charged into Cairo, Alexandria and Giza, to liberate their once and forever homeland from the forces of evil. The forces of the dead were enough to turn the tide in favor of the Allies. With the New Order defeated in Egypt, the Egyptian Army and their new undead comrades then moved to assist Gaddafi in neighboring Libya.
The Egyptian government held up their end of the bargain with Neherkamun and created the Autonomous Region of the Dead in 1990, as an autonomous domain for Egypt’s new undead citizenry. The living are permitted to live in the ARD, though at this point, the dead outnumber them in cities like Luxor (renamed Waset), Edfu (Behdet) and Aswan (Swenett). Neherkamun visited Las Vegas in 1996 (when the city was rebuilt following the devastation it suffered during WW3), and was very much impressed; today, the nightlife in Waset, Behdet and Swenett is a strange Ancient Egyptian-themed neon rainforest with very friendly dead people walking around the gentrified necropolis, with street signs in both Arabic and hieroglyphics. In 1999, another autonomous region for the undead was created in the north of the country – the Autonomous Region of Giza, which has become even more of a tourist-y place than before, now that you can have a friendly conversation with the people who actually built the pyramids. Both autonomous regions have Neherkamun as their constitutional monarch, and all residents of the undead autonomous regions are members of the Egyptian republic.
What are the attitudes of living Egyptians towards their undead countrymen? Surprisingly positive, actually. Sure, some fundamentalists regard them as “spawn of Iblis”, but the undead have been a fairly…secularizing influence on Egypt. Being able to talk with your oldest ancestors brought about a revival of cultural interest in Ancient Egyptian history amongst the Egyptian youth, which pervades. Many undead are still waking up to this day, and they tend to be very, very curious about this new world that they find themselves in – familiar and yet so very strange. It’s not uncommon to see Undead Egyptians visiting Paris, New York, Rio, Tokyo or Moscow, though since most were peasants when they died, most simply remain in Egypt. Some Undead Egyptians have converted to Islam, but the overwhelming majority continue to worship the old gods of the Nile. 2015’s Miss Egypt is the very well-preserved Nefertiti, who became the first undead individual to win such a title.
To the south of Egypt, one can see two grey-ish territories. Before World War III, these were the disputed territories of Bir Tawil and the Hala’ib Triangle. During the war, the New Order made extensive use of combat robots during their invasion of Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti and Ethiopia. However, during the massacre of a village in Sudan in 1983, a simple infantry robot with the designation T9X1109 spontaneously developed sentience and led an uprising within Taurus Group’s mechanical legions in northwest Africa, establishing connections with other “enlightened autonomatons” and “uplifting” those who were not so “enlightened”. T9X1109’s mutiny was mostly successful, and he made an offer to the UN’s Joint Allied Command; in exchange for withdrawing from the conflict, T9X1109 and his “people” would be allowed to settle these disputed territories as a “homeland” for sentient machines. A neutral “machine homeland”, the Republic of 01001001 (binary for “I”; commonly called “01” or “Zero-One”), was created in 1984. In the years since the end of WW3, many machine intelligences have immigrated to this harsh and bitter desert nation, which is covered in solar panels to provide vital electricity for its approximately ~41,233 intelligences. Increasingly, cyborg transhumanist types have made their “pilgrimage” to Zero-One as well, where they evangelize their strange techno-religion to the human refugees from neighboring war-torn Sudan who’ve been permitted to seek refuge in the mechanical country (this is one reason why Cairo likes Zero-One: it’s a convenient Sudanese refugee sponge of sorts). Zero-One has a strictly pacifistic constitution and possesses no military. Its economy is based mostly on production of batteries.
Saddam Hussein’s regime performed impressively during WW3, and he was able to win over much of the public as a result. But he over-played his hand, and thought he could go back to his old ways. He was wrong, and an idealistic, Western-educated superhero by the name of Ninurta (real name: Mohammed Al-Doori) led the uprising against Saddam in 2002. His parents fled Iraq for Canada shortly after the Ba’athists came to power in Iraq in 1968, and young Mohammed longed to return to free his homeland. After deposing Saddam, the eagle-headed superhero abolished the Ba’athist regime and replaced it with a secular, democratic government – the Mesopotamian Confederation of Iraq, with himself as its wise and benevolent dictator. Every office and position in the new Iraq is elected through a multi-party democratic system, with the exception of Ninurta’s position as President. The Federation is divided into six autonomous republics, plus the independent capital district of Baghdad. The six “Mesopotamian Republics” are Babylonia (Sunni Arab majority), Sumeria (Shiite Arab majority), Kurdistan (Kurdish majority), Assyria (Christian Assyrian majority), Sinjar (Yazidi majority) and Akkad (Turkman majority). Under Ninurta’s rule, much has been done to mitigate the country’s historical ethnic tensions and to modernize Iraq. Though most of the time, Ninurta is busy helping to build infrastructure, or assisting the Iraqi Defense Forces with rooting out Islamist or Ba’athist terrorists; there are fundamentalist Muslims who disapprove of Ninurta’s love affair with ancient Mesopotamia or take issue with his atheism, and the Ba’athists are salty that he overthrew Saddam.
To the east of Iraq is the Persian Technate. In 1979-1980, Iran was a country on the verge of revolution, and between despotic monarchs and totalitarians of both the Islamist and Marxist variety, a low-level Metahuman supergenius by the name of Hamid Mousavi created a fourth option for his beloved Iranian homeland – a secular, scientifically-minded brand of populist technocracy. World War III began shortly after the Iranian Revolution, and amid the chaos, with loyalist and revolutionary forces and third and fourth parties fighting each other and the New Order, the Iranian Technocratic Revolutionary Army managed to fight its way to be top dog in the Iran Theatre. When all was said and done, Mousavi effectively controlled the country, thanks to his brilliant grasp of strategy and his charismatic brand of “scientific populism”. In 1986, the Iranian Revolution ended, and the Persian Technate was officially recognized by the US and USSR. Today, the Persian Technate is a rationalist, secular regime governed by scientists, engineers, mathematicians. The Technate’s not very democratic, and though they have a lot of fancy doo-dads, the planned economy is kinda mediocre. Following the death of Mousavi in 2010, his successor’s lack of charisma isn’t helping the growing sense of dissatisfaction with the eggheads ruling Iran.
Turkey has not had a fun time. During World War III, the country was invaded by Taurus Group, backed by Reticulan tripods. Immediately prior to the start of the war, Turkey’s military government was devastated by a string of assassinations carried out by ninjas sent by the Red Hand. To add fuel to the fire, a very young Metahuman in the province of Bayburt experienced a panic attack, unleashing all of its power at once. That glowing blue orb and the “Gulf of Trabzon” you see? That’s the result. The shockwaves resulted in earthquakes across Turkey and tsunamis along the Soviet coastline in the eastern Black Sea, killing upwards of a million people.
Despite all this chaos, the splintered and factionalized Turkish armed forces were able to liberate their homeland from the New Order. Following the end of hostilities in 1984, the National Transitional Council of Turkey was formed, bringing the three main factions of the Turkish Army together – a secular republican faction, a “theodemocratic” Islamist faction, and a Neo-Ottmanist faction advocating for a constitutional monarchy. Negotiations were tense, with militias and paramilitaries clashing in the streets across Turkey, Turkish and Armenian separatists making their moves, and the Syrians expanding their sphere of influence into Hatay. The Turkish national election of 1995 ended badly, with violence raging across the country and the military factions breaking away from the NTCT to back their political allies in the streets. The Turkish Civil War (1995-2001) had begun.
When the dust settled in 2001, a NATO intervention in Turkey resulted in a negotiated ceasefire brokered by the Sentinel Coalition (which still occupies the Bosporus Straits). The country was now divided into the Republic of Turkey (“Republican Turkey”, Istanbul), the Islamic Republic of Turkey (“Islamic Turkey”, Ankara) and the Sultanate of Turkey (“Ottoman Turkey”, Adana). That last one is a mostly-secular constitutional monarchy headed by Dündar Ali Osman, the last heir of the old House of Osman. Relations between the “Three Turkeys” have been tense at times, with Islamic Turkey currently in the midst of a military build-up, fearing the growing ties between Republican and Ottoman Turkey.
Istanbul, Ankara and Adana were all forced to recognize the independence of Kurdistan, as well as, more controversially, the Free State of Izmir.
Allow me to explain Izmir. At the start of the Turkish Civil War, a giant, tentacled Kaiju by the name of Atlas took advantage of the chaos in Turkey to take over Izmir and the surrounding area from the Republican and Islamist forces fighting there. A fan of Ayn Rand, Atlas decided to turn Izmir into his own little capitalist utopia. And the people living there decided to go along with the 300-foot beast’s plan. Today, Izmir is a city in the vein of Las Vegas, Singapore and Bangkok – a free market wonderland of Ottoman and Art Deco architecture with its dictator spending most of his time along the bottom of the Gulf of Izmir.
The People’s Republic of Kurdistan started out as a socialist republic ruled by the PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party). Backed by the USSR, Kurdistan made the transition to a multi-party social democracy in 2004.
Meanwhile, in Republican Turkey’s far-eastern provinces the unrecognized and widely-hated “Armenian Republic of Tačkahayastan” claims authority there. The ART is headed by a pyrokinetic Metahuman and Armenian ultra-nationalist by the name of Azhdahak, who is overseeing a rather ironic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the local Turks. Republican Turkey keeps asking Armenia to do something about the flow of arms that’s obviously coming across their border, to which Armenia shrugs and plays stupid every time. Increasingly, however, more and more Armenians are deciding to agitate in favor of ending the madness, and the Soviets are getting around to tapping Yerevan on the shoulder.
North Yemen is…yeah, pretty much a clusterfuck.
The Mutawakkilite Kingdom (North Yemen) and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen) put their differences aside to fight against the New Order, and more or less reached a state of détente with the war’s conclusion. This lasted about 30 years.
Around 2010, the failing Mutawakkilite monarchy began experiencing major uprisings by left-wing protestors backed by South Yemen. On the brink of civil war, and with much of the kingdom’s military siding with the protestors, the Yemeni monarchy made the very, very questionable decision to ally with a supervillain by the name of The Claw. For a while, The Claw was able to keep things under control, though on his watch, North Yemen increasingly became a police state. At the same time, The Claw started to gain his share of odd supporters from the populace. Believing that they could take over the security infrastructure The Claw had built, the Mutawakkilites tried and failed to assassinate him in 2013. Almost immediately afterwards, The Claw staged a coup, backed by his private army of cyborg mercenaries and his following of Yemeni supporters. The Mutawakkilites fled to Saudi Arabia while the Royal Army remained to fight against The Claw’s army, and the left-wing North Yemen Democratic Forces rose up. The North Yemen Civil War had begun. South Yemen continued to back the NYDF, but stopped short of committing their forces to the three-way conflict, believing that the Royalists (backed by Saudi Arabia) and The Claw’s forces (backed by nobody) could be easily defeated. South Yemen’s military was actually busy assisting the Soviets and Ethiopians in Somalia during most of the North Yemen Civil War.
Then, in 2014, half of Aden was ripped a series of explosions in the early morning hours. Suicide bombers, whose explosives were traced back to The Claw’s growing transhumanist cult of cyborgs. Though The Claw himself denounced the attack as the actions of a rogue henchmen acting against his orders, South Yemen announced that it would be withdrawing its forces from Somalia to “rectify a previous error in judgement” and invade North Yemen. The Soviet Union and Egypt have both agreed to back South Yemen’s move and have committed troops to backing the NYDF.
So, conclusion? Middle East is a bit of a mixed bag. Some good, some bad, lots of interesting, I suppose.