a few paragraphs

They had stopped getting the newspaper a month or two earlier. Current events weighed on Character. The cost weighed on Antimony’s wallet. Harry never read them enough to even take them lightly. A silent consensus (of sorts; as you might have guessed, this was the only kind of consensus the three ever arrived at) was reached. It stopped coming. They found new ways to occupy their mornings.

Harry slept in more. Character worried more. Antimony went in to school earlier. They were an odd company, the id, the ego and the alter ego. A sittragicom of sorts. None of them had the balls or the time to write a pilot episode, though. Character had half-heartedly tried to make a pilot light joke once or twice, but neither of his roommates had laughed. It happens.

This particular avant-meridian caught the trio sleepily and solemnly unaware of a terrorist attack that had gone on in some far-off corner of the western world the night before. The mourning and patriotism were just rearing their geary heads. There was a television, I suppose, if you could call it that. The only thing they saw on it was dust, and not from very far away, either, so the roots, mixed-dead-language, were both shallow and meaningless here. The radio, too, was silent. They were cut off from the world, awash in an island of silence, lies and liaisons with telescopes and stargazer lilies. They did not function like normal people.

In this spirit of abnormalcy, Antimony went jogging. Whenever he went off wandering and started wondering his mind would go money laundering. His thoughts were easily the most valuable ones the apartment produced. He had a career ahead of him. They lived in Montreal, under the shadow of the very summit of veracity, but he had better places to go. Truth concerned him only so much as it could be used as a means to an end. And so he was a friend to the fiends and did nothing to curb cocaine use. He let the grunge build up when it suited him. And when it didn't, he went jogging. He reminisced, from under his jetset black hair, about Character. A younger, fresher-laced, straighter-faced Character.

As fans tie fantasies, like Hermesian wings, to the ankles of their heroes, so, in his blundering, did this Character tear asunder the sundry tundra of his hundred hungry minds. The stress of his teen years was too much to bare his skinny hips and awkward ribs to the world. His pregnant, penitent, solemnly raging desires went unnoticed. In stations of the metro, in grocery store checkout lines, he was cloistered up inside. His dry split lips spilt no tales, his effusive veins moaned in vain. His walls were unbreakable. He was a fortress, constantly under siege. From the inside. I sincerely wish it had been resolved in a battle. The Battle of Stalingrad rather than Leningrad. I don't know. For his sake — he loves grandeur and artifice — it should have been a crack bang powhatan pow-wow. An explosion of feathers and anti-aircraft guns. Takka takka takka tik tik tik takka takka. Drums and the most intense high you ever hat. It sort of diffused. Like a crowd in a lobby somewhere. The agonizing slowness would have killed him if the siege hadn't starved him, fractionally, to death already. It happens. Noms de plume are too easy to come by these days, anyway, to say nothing of the guns of the never home. Maybe it had been for the better. But he had changed, he had changed, slowly, impurely, he came into his shaky own.

This exercise-as-catharsis conception was not unique to the tallest of the three. Character had a punching bag in his room. As they lived in an apartment, it was not bolted to the ceiling, but lay on the floor in a corner. Every now and then, in fits of rage and self-hatred, he would beat his impertinent and unimportant fists against it uselessly and collapse, panting, on top of it, the way he might ride a pummel-horse, chest heaving and galloping, legs abandoned to the breeze behind him, arms wrapped around a head no doubt left in someone's bed somewhere. In French class once he had meditated on the irony of the horse's head in the capo's bed. Maybe an alternate universe culture mob boss would receive the heart. The head was pretty useless anyway. All that came of it were thoughts and coughs and no days off.

For his part, Harry walked the length of NDG nights, bathed in calmly neon lights. Nocturning of tables meant nothing anymore. The night was practically as bright as the day. Modernity, the future, had, like it did in so many situations, blurred the line between black and white. Defibrillators and such. Inter-racial couples. Ha. He paced like a clock, like a ticking time bomb that will never ever explode through crackedpavement streets and immigrant apartment complexes, rife with inferiorities and gods. He saw no one, and was seen by fewer still.