The argument had begun the previous Tuesday at bobi's instigation, and the debate had run square for three weeks, day and night, energy replenished from a plastic bowl of diet pills. The colt python lay between them, the barrel turned carefully towards the wall.

Bobi was in fine form, his eyes wide in the darkness. His fine, angular features seemed to twist around his mouth and his body jerked like a puppet as he spoke, raising nicotine stained fingertips to brush at the air. Bobi was a man convulsing with ideas.

The cellar was lit by the halo of a naked bulb on a bare wire. Damp. A plain wooden stair ran up into the darkness.

Relatively speaking, Bobi was eighteen, but on an absolute level he was ageless. In his benzedrine meditations he remembered a hundred previous lives. Thousands.

When I was a child I held up a mirror to a mirror, and saw reflections of myself reflected.. infinitely.

Satori was a year older than Bobi. His expression was clumsy, deceptively soft, heavy lidded, when he spoke point he would knock on the table steadily, beating time to his thoughts. There was a certain sourness to his mouth  and in the violent green of his eyes; plenty unshed tears. When he laughed, he would throw back his head and cough like a dog.

For four years Bobi and Satori had honed their ideas at this table. The gun was Satoris idea, and it lay like an unspoken promise between them. A sacrament.  

 Only a fool or a maniac would interrupt their games. Yet, events were pressing down upon us and time was short. I cleared my throat.

Bobi grimaced and slapped a hand down on the colt,

stroked the gun, Hubert, you may think were playing games here, but I tell you that we are straining at the abyss. His accent was still touched with native German. I imagined deep rolling blue forest.

straining at the abyss, he repeated.

Satori stared down at the gun, the light reflecting off his eyes. He placed his open palm over bobis hand and shook his head imperceptibly.

the county sheriff is upstairs clearing out our furniture. He has an eviction notice.

Eviction?, Bobi rolled his eyes.

Who gives a fuck? Its a long past time for us to go. Let em take the place. Satori exposed his teeth, stretched his arms above his head. The angels move out, the roaches move in.

Bobi nodded. Maybe so. Maybe so.

He sat up and lifted the gun, pressed the chamber against his nose. But where will we go.

It was more of a statement than a question, I could hear gears shifting.

Satori leaned forward, First. We get the master. Second, We get money. Third, we buy fuel. Its never the where but the how thats important after all, every road leads somewhere.

The master had been everything at one time or another. A priest in cornwall. A tinker in Ireland. As a sailor, he crossed the earth a thousand times, and each time with the wind behind him, or so he said. Satori was his first and oldest disciple.

Two months ago the master had died before his shrine, a blossom of red on his lips. Satori had been reluctant to give up his body. They would do nothing but fill it with poison. Though the spirit is gone, it is sacred, a sacred place.

Satori and Bobi took turns scraping the flesh from the bones. They gathered the meat into bags and fed it to the eagles and buzzards at the zoo during the night, while I beat out time on a tibetan drum.