Mat and his girlfriend, unfortunately, lived in the most isolated, god-fucked little university town I'd ever ended up in. I mean you could go out on the street and feel energy drifting off you like steam from an ice cube.

Mat said he worried his 'straight but not narrow' pink triangle sticker would get his rear window smashed in. There weren't any people in that town, no worker zombies even, so the taco chain started you at seven dollars an hour, the cops stared through walls, motorcycles required no helmets, and trucks notoriously ran bikes and joggers off the road. So it maybe wasn't the place I should have gone with my last hundred dollars, no way to get out of the midwest, and winter coming.

The second night I climbed the stairs to the very top of a parking garage, higher than the concrete even, right up onto the dry tar of the stairwell roof. I regretted briefly that I had no pipe, and then stood like a south american icon on a mountainside, whirling around with my feet together and my arms spread to the distance, gazing over trees sheltering the houses emerging from lit concrete on three sides, while to the distant south a factory's lights glowed out of a black puddle, its clustered insect eyes twinkling malevolent. Only the factory's faint rattle and hiss carried through the air, broken by small flutters of voice or engine rumble. The air smelled colder six stories up where I laid and thought of faraway friends wishing me well. I liked them better than I liked myself. Why, I would have liked to know, did I always have to feel that way?

I walked to the doors of the library the next night, but they were locked. I walked back across campus, by a bar featuring a moose on its sign, and 'come as you are' played while I waited in line. I proved that I was twenty-one at the door behind which lurked a shabbily surfaced disco floor where university students, manufactured out of disused mannequins, in old converted missle silos, showed me what people who resented their bodies looked like, and I recognized what I'd been.

One guy, swerving unsteadily through his thirties, his hair slicked down to go with his black vest, black pants and sharp collared button-down. He tried to rub up against me, intrusively yet timidly, looking down at himself in an unpleasant manner, and I backed away feeling pity, that he had to go on, blindly, that way.

I ended up next to a circle of six people actually dancing to the song that was playing. A few songs later one of them, this blond kid, was talking to me, next to the railing around the dance floor. He looked like Binkley from Bloom County. From the things he said, he and his friends might have been considered normal elsewhere, even ordinary, but here, they were raging freaks. Because they wore a turtleneck, and not a letter sweater. Maybe they had arrived from a different state, too. I walked across the street with them and we sat in a diner whose brightness and quietness made an average late-night restaurant look like a dimly lit cesspool of depravity. The blond kid talked about photography, to which everyone made comments, and before leaving managed to give me his phone number, which amused me.

I hung out with him twice that week. In the diner he had asked if he could take photographs of me for a class, and I was expecting handcuffs and leather strips and such, but when it came to it he was afraid even to ask me to take my shirt off, so finally I told him he could. It was cold outside, but not that cold. He chose strange, overwrought poses: in my jeans in a parking lot against a painted wall, curled inside a concrete construction cylinder, sitting on a concrete fountain post gushing through my legs like a fire hydrant.

He drove me to his aunt and uncle's house, the factory, or electrical plant, whatever, lurking nearby, smoke drifting through its arc-weld eyespots into empty dark. In his room, he showed me something I hadn't seen yet, a photo book featuring an overwrought pop singer whom he worshipped. I thought about the pictures he'd taken, and I smiled to myself. I didn't tell him what I thought of it. I wished instead I could show him gods of earth and heaven. I wished I was suddenly far away. I wished I knew what the tattooed short-haired girls posed with the pop star, what they were thinking. Something like, I am not on display for you, you straight white bastards. Unless you've got fifty bucks, of course.

A plastic slinky squatted on a shelf, bands of rainbow color that blurred together from hand to hand. I said, 'How much was this? I'll buy it from you.'

"Take it, it's okay."

The next night, I surfed on the car roof above him as he drove around an empty hospital parking lot with his lights off. My fingers curled around the edges of the roof and my toes pointed against the back window. The brake lights spread shifting pools of red light around us yet the air smelled amazingly cold.

Later, as he drove us through the woods, two blurs of white light moving sideways across the trees as the gray ribbon wound through them, he told me he was in love with his best friend. Nothing about which way either of us were oriented had been said, except that this friend was a boy. This friend who was a boy was sixteen, almost. The blond photographer was eighteen.

I said, 'Well, you don't want to do anything he'll change his mind about.' I wondered if he knew what I meant.

He said, "I know. I've never tried it." He punched idly at the radio buttons. "I don't know, I'm not sure it's what I want."

At some point he conjured a six pack of beer, Corona even, and drove us to this field the school of agriculture had leveled down to pale stubble out to the horizon. The stars hung dimly against the electrical reflection against the sky.

I didn't especially want to anymore, but I had tempted him and did not wish to be cruel so we got in the back seat and went down on each other. Suddenly he wasn't so nervous. He was shaped like a mushroom and felt warm. There was no condom, but we were in the cornfields of Indiana, I thought, stupidly. I pulled out of his mouth because I knew he was going to come and I wasn't.

Yes, it tasted raw and bitter, and too thick. I opened the back door and spit past the glow of the red and white courtesy light and spit, and spit and I said out into the dusky fields, 'Tell me there's another Corona.' Which I knew there was. I felt amused, and affectionate towards this poor confused being. It hadn't even taken too long, and he, at the very least, had needed something like that. I hadn't the faintest idea whether I felt pride or shame.

As if to reassure me, his spoke in glowing terms of the girls he'd played with in Arizona. I don't know if I succeeded in convincing him that it didn't matter.

As his car rolled away from the parking lot of Mat's apartment building I watched the red glow of his brake lights through the wooden slats of the staircase while I walked up to the second floor. I never did write to him, but I kept the slinky.

Mat's girlfriend called herself Joe, like a boy. Joe told me about sly ways to travel, explaining courier flights and drive-away cars. It took me three days on the couch listening to their CD collection before I actually called the drive-away office in Chicago, which did indeed have a car going to Los Angeles. I then did an unsavory and regressive thing, like asking my parents for the deposit I'd need, because I didn't have it. I knew Chloe would have despised me, but I was leaving.

Joe had some strange impulses. Her pet amphibians seemed to speak for her from their aquatic tanks as they floated eerily off the glass surfaces. In the apartment lived two other engineering students, both antisocial and shy, both of whom Joe had kissed, and would flirt with occasionally, out of pity or malevolence or something.

I was drinking orange juice in the kitchen, unprepared, with Mat right there in the living room, and Joe sitting across the table from me said, "Couples are so boring."

I thought either she's joking, or that's kind of fucked, but then I've been her before-- maybe right now.

Somehow I veered the streams of words elsewhere. The last concert they'd attended, I asked if they'd played 'closer' and they said they didn't know because no one paid attention to singing the words. I couldn't pick on them for not knowing from the music alone, since I'd never bothered to go myself, and I didn't know if I would. I felt sad for us, for all of us, that our lives lay there like that.

One of these two other roommates played flying simulators as a passion, and shrank from all other stimuli. The other roommate, who I liked, had exactly two posters up in his room, one a furry, sardonic, lovable cartoon character, the other a vivid orange photo of a mushroom cloud. Which made sense, given that his brother had committed suicide that year, and still bleeding all over everything. In the car on the way up to the Chicago aquarium, he surprised me by passing my morbid humor test with flying colors.

'What if you could speed evolution up,' I said, 'like feed birth control to everyone who hit their kids, or everyone who wanted to dump radioactive sludge into the ocean.'

"Or shoot them."

'Or that.'

"You mean figure out each person's psychological make-up, and only let people reproduce who weren't violent, or thought further ahead than their own lifetime? It wouldn't work. The people who did the deciding and the shooting would just take over, make themselves exempt from the tests."

'Sure, okay. But hypothetically, these people who did the deciding would agree to be sterilized first. To keep it impartial.'

"But then, anyway, just by random genetic chance, each generation would have people who wanted to fuck things up again."

'Yeah, I thought about that.'

"Well, there you go."

He'd been honest with me through his pain, and so for that moment, right then, I felt glad we were both still breathing.

Mat kept following the freeway for miles in a straight line, which almost made me dizzy by itself, until the blue evening light sneaked around the car and elevated trains were racing us through the traffic.