Sitting at the dinner table, Trent's dad is telling us how God wants his children to join 4H, a government sponsored agricultural society. We're in a tiny town called Hayfork, California, at least a four hour drive from civilization. This is Trent's house and it's his last dinner with his family before moving to the big-bad city of Seattle, where according to his father, heathens live. Since Trent is abandoning the family, his little brother and sister will have to work harder. They will have to be better. They will have to replace the smart, talented, copiously potential filled boy who's abandoning the life he was given by God. Before all this, my friends and I had argued that Trent might be too young and immature to live with us, spared only in our eyes by the fact that he was a clever kid. Now, those worries are completely nullified by my desire to get him out of here. His mother remains silent, letting the man of the house speak. She too wishes all her children would remain in the middle of nowhere for the rest of their Puritan lives, never experiencing anything potentially harmful or ideologically threatening. I try not to laugh, not about the ideology of farming, the will of God or any of that. I can appreciate the sentiment. What makes me want to laugh is that Trent's father is sporting a mustache straight from 1973, which having no access to the outside world, he has not realized is far out of fashion, just like Hayfork. I would laugh if he hadn't shown me his gun collection just before dinner. Nobody wants to be here.

Barely days after moving in with us, Trent dyes his hair black and wants to taste the world and everything in it. He's been caged up too long and his curiosity is feeding my other housemate's desire for rebellion. A week later, Trent comes home tickled as a pickle that he scored some weed on the local transit system. He feels like a dope when everyone in the house confirms that it's just oregano. We make some pasta and tell him we can get the real stuff, if he wants it. He does.

Next month, Trent's in the kitchen, dressed all in black, looking skinny as ever, slumped over an empty shot glass and what's left of a bottle of cinnamon schnapps. He's complaining about his pathetic existence to everyone hiding behind the kitchen counter. As usual, he's biting what's left of his nails, a word here defined only by the nubs of calcium extending less than a quarter centimeter out of his fingers-just enough for teeth to nibble. "God has turned his back on me." *Nibble*, "my life is shit! I was sitting here and thought about killing myself." Nobody knows what to say. We're all taken aback by the too real affront to everything we share in common with him. The only difference with Trent is that the rest of us all have jobs and can afford more bottles of cinnamon schnapps.

I'm about to leave for work without saying anything but I can't stop myself. "Trent, you have everything." He stops nibbling. "You aren't trapped like the rest of your family, in Podunk nowhere. Unlike your father, you can do something with your life. If you think God turned his back on you, what do you think about the starving, half-dead things living in Ebola huts?" No answer. "If you'd stop sucking down shots for a minute, you might realize you do nothing but downers in your spare time."

I'm making myself a sandwich and have to move aside several layers of weeks-old dirty dishes to find a knife. The horror of the filth is only overpowered by the smell. A breeze of rotting meat comes from one of the masses on the stove. What was once a promising and nutritious steak is now a festering pulp for the flies. Yes, somehow, in the dead of winter, flies are living in our house. They migrate from the blood soaked kitchen counters to Trent's room, where last week I laid some of his old plates of food. There they remain, covered up by his clothes and half of his dismantled computer, only out of reach of the doorway swing path.

Trent is at the table gnawing at his fingernails like it's his purpose in life. There's nothing left of them to chew but he's desperately searching. He looks at me, his eyes like bumble-bees. I'm not afraid of the sting but the sound makes me wish I were someplace else. I hear the buzz of a junkie. "Dude!" He stares at the wall like he's addressing it. "I've been reading about methamphetamines." Now he looks at me. "Crystal-Meth really isn't bad for you. It does all these great things for you body, speeds up your thinking and gives you energy and it doesn't have any drawbacks, people just say that it does because the government doesn't want people to have it. You should try it with me…" He pauses the stuttered garbled shit spewing from his chapped face and stares at me like he's sure I'm going to say something akin to, sure man, when can we score some. He doesn't seem to understand the words I actually say and later denies that the conversation ever took place.

"Trent, I'm moving out."

      "This is it", I thought, "I'm in Seattle."

      Opening the pages of Today's Careers, I vehemently searched for anything that could supply $300 a month for rent and leave something for food. The existence of a career paper was spark enough to give me hope in this new economy, leaving the small college town of Arcata, California to take a chance where a degree might prove worth more than fifty-cents over minimum wage. I didn't have a degree. I needed money for school and that meant work. Being a white, middle-class, male I wasn't eligible for much aid then, and even now--almost 22 years old--the federal government still considers me a dependent of my mother, biased only against my age. Sometimes I wish to have generations of oppression behind me, or the wealthy father that is expected of my classification, but then I remember all I've gained from earning a living with no support--things many people demand but comparatively few actually earn; things like respect.

      I hadn't realized, at that point, that the best jobs don't need to advertise in Today's Careers and I settled for what was obviously--to the untrained eye--the most lucrative endeavor, telemarketing. The company that appealed to me most, with the biggest ad and the largest promise for hourly wage, was DialAmerica Marketing.

      We called them 'benefit packages for your [name of bank] issued Visa/MasterCard'. We called them a 'convenience' or a 'deal' but never a luxury lest we imply that it was not 'a need'. The offer was for a discount card, to save on every dollar you spend at some of the leaders in global economic power. Yes, Sir/Ma'am companies like Disney and Anheuser-Busch will give even you, the lowest of the hierarchy, a great discount--never mind that all of the participating companies are owned by only one or two of the biggest. Never-mind because, of course, you always receive the information to claim your two 'free' airline tickets in the benefit package*. Never mind that you must stay some arbitrary number of nights in a specific hotel/resort and choose from forty specific places to visit with these tickets. After all, they're free*. It seemed that we could cover up the truth about an inept program with extensive use of words like 'free', 'benefit', and 'yes!'.

      I began to exclaim asterisks instead of exclamation marks when talking to my friends. I began to degrade the English language with subterfuge and obfuscation. Then DialAmerica made me a Supervisor of a sales team. It was not three into the fifteen months which I spent working for the damned, and already I was a leader of intrusion into the home's of the naive. The job perked up--a fifty cent raise pushed me up to $8.50 an hour (no commission but only 2 of 40 in the office made any commission, anyway). Now I could claim upper-low-class, and with less dreary hate to look forward to during my workday, I lost inspiration; I stopped doodling; I stopped writing stories; I started making paperclip people.

      One month before I worked up the ambition to quit, we recieved a few samples of the 'trial benefit packages', which the corporate office had been highly reluctant to let us see. We read the fine print. We read the truth. We found out that for years no one had been telling the whole truth. Telemarketers, on tape, had said that all you needed to do to cancel was call the 1-800 number. We never told them that in order to not be charged the $59, $69, or $79 annual fee they must also reply by mail* and, of course, read the special instructions of what must be sent back and not--against common appearance--be thrown away. "Nobody told us," we wailed, "We can't be blamed!". I calculated the amount of money I made for Bank of America, Capitol One, Wells Fargo, First National Bank, all by telling their customers that they could trust their banks. Our office made at least 100 sales per day. That makes 26,000 per year. Multiplied by an average of $69 makes $1,794,000 a year--from our one branch, out of dozens. I stress the word 'makes' because this money was not earned, it was created out of deception.

      I just recently finished reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. This would have been a great book to have read before my time as a telemarketer. The outline of the book is simple: it's the battle between those who trade the value of ones own production for the value of other's, and those who seek to gain power over the producers by threatening them with moral obligations. At DialAmerica, we desired benefit for abstinence in production. We expected more than we gave in return, only because with the mindset in place, we were unable to do any better. 'We can't help it. Nobody can blame us. We aren't strong like them. It's society's duty to help me because I am weak. I don't contribute because I am unable. I'm still Human!"

      Are you? Are you, really?

      As a child, amidst the cheerfully poverty-stricken children I called friends, I had made myself a rebel of this world, which to me had not yet existed: the insatiable, tiring, coffee-guzzled world of the grown-ups. This was a life, which upon entering, destroys boys and creates men. As children we had not seen that we were not immortal and so we believed that we were.

      And we were.

      Daily frolicking through the car-lacking, unstripened streets and around the strong-armed trees which fruitfully held our midnight bunkers, we chased until the chased became caught and tagged by one friendly paper-rock-scissors losing hand, and became the chaser. Then nightly in our summer rest, we embraced eachother into our houses, rolled sleeping-bags in hand, ready to stay the night awake. Inside these warm-lit bedrooms, before the summers end, beneath the green-sheet-hung forts which lay strewn across beds, dressers and shelves—protectively covering each side of our armies—with pillows flying as wielding axes and hand grenades, we were gods of our realms, fighting for survival in a world soon to turn atheist. We had not known that responsibility would change our favored care-free-horse-playing lives until, alas, we had become merely mortal men.

      The air was restless, drowning in the noise of the ocean's waves. It carried salt to Byron's lips. He licked them, tasting more than the ocean, and caught a hint of rust. This is a bleak place, Byron thought, eyes fixed on the endless blue, ignoring all the life it contained.

      His pen moved across the page like the waves washed the shore, taking the time to moisten the sand and let a few crabs wrangle out before withdrawing back into itself—a dark lonely void. The writer was diligent in his execution, leaving a trail of dry, sand-dune squiggles so precise that you might think he had no idea that the implosion of the Universe was reaching critical mass and would soon destroy him.

      He wrote as though he could summon eternity with a few magic words if only he chose them slowly enough.

      Byron looked up from the page and stared at the seemingly endless ocean that lay so far from his feet. Half expecting this inconceivably vast body of life to dry up and vanish before his eyes, he drifted back to the page and resumed his writing with a hint of disappointment—the ocean's destruction would have been so inspiring. Byron stumbled in his efforts toward creativity, reflecting on some discarded childhood fantasy of becoming a writer.

      There was no real life in fiction any more. The only profitable publications were "Aesthetic Imitations" released by various Metanational Corporations, written by artificially intelligent machines that expunged beautiful word combinations with interpositions of commercial adversity; sexy romances <She'll love it!> and dashing adventure stories <Buy two!> that make one, for some strange reason, want to go out and purchase some grotesquely frivolous piece of merchandise. <For a limited time only!> Byron referred to this as rubbish, rabbit food, fake literature—but as the Metanational Corporations discovered, it suited the masses most profitably.

      No, Byron the Writer would never exist. He would never write the epic saga that would release his race from its own enslavement. No one would dream of Byron the Humanitarian, for the shiny eyes of Fortuna would never ask Byron to create fate.

      The prestigious Former Aristotelian University of Socratic Thought graduated Byron as an Isometrician and sold his highly marketable skills to the Isometric division of the Department of Physical and Metaphysical Reality, to which, for some division everyone's pronounced skills were enslaved. The only truly free souls belonged to the Metanational families, having no pronouced skills other than passing more power with each generation.

      Byron was not a free man; he was an Isometrician. Bound to the DPMR, he worked with the luster of an unpolished rock. The current project in Byron's division, as in many others, was the study of and preparation for various means of Universal collapse.

      "Why do we take the time, Quigley?" Byron bellowed in complaint to his isometric colleague. "If we find that the universe is collapsing, how can we stop it? All we will establish is 'Yes! We are going to die now!'"

      "What a silly question to ask! Look, Byron," Quigley gestured his hands as if he were cradling something of unquantifiable importance. "It would be the greatest discovery since Multi-vision. We'd be famous!" Byron looked at Quigley like a child would stare at a slightly younger child. Quigley looked down sheepishly, then down and curled his arms up with the sly shrug of a jester. "Well, famous for a little while, anyway."

      "With my luck," Byron thought, "the end of everything will be isometric in design and, having no way to stop it, I will be responsible for telling the world! No more Multi-vision. No more alcohol. No more cigarettes. No more nitrous. No more seductive vices of any kind that would have thrust my life into perilous danger if I'd expected to live beyond the big crunch."

      As usual, Byron was unhappily correct.

      "I wish I hadn't known like the people of the symmetric division or even the division of rectangles. I could have been one of them! I work very well with rectangles. I could have been happily ignorant for my last day of existence. I could have finished a satisfying day of finding nothing universally wrong with rectangles, gone home to my nitrous, reclined in my bed with my Vibrauto-Stimulator™, and fallen peacefully to sleep with my little regulation Multi-vision (tonight's program sounded most promising: 'Antisocial Development and How to Stop People From Reading in the Park'). I could have fallen asleep expecting tomorrow to follow today exactly how today followed yesterday. I could have spent my last slumber a happy man. But of course I'd been assigned to the Isometric division. My mother will be furious."

      When the DPMR confirmed the Isometric findings, after years of calculations and recalculations, that the Universe was indeed collapsing, Byron's office took the news rather well.

      "Dear God, we're all going to die!" Quigley was a bit surprised but he still managed to find satisfaction. "And we're going down in history!"

      The master Isometrician announced that the general public would not know of its fate, "When you all clock out tonight, remember that a frightened public is a chaotic public. Tell only who you must and, for the love of God, stay away from the press."

      Quigley was alone in his disappointment.

      A group of Isometricians gathered pensively in the break room, "Will it be painful, do you think?" one woman asked, her eyes unable to focus on matter as though it were already gone.

      "If there is any pain," another answered, "it will be brief and fleeting. Nothing a good preparatory dose of nitrous can't prevent."

      With that worry nullified, they prepared for the end. Some chose to make peace with God or friends while others indulged in Vibrauto-Stimulator™ orgies. Byron decided not to discuss this with his mother. After all, once it's all over there would be no critics to scorn his decision to spend the last few minutes of his life in the absence of his mothers angry face, avoiding the abusive words of contempt and disappointment, excommunicating Byron from the family for bringing them the news of their final dismissal. "Christ, she would, too. Just because I couldn't stop the Universe from imploding." No, Byron would rather spend those moments by the ocean.

      He sat on the edge of a cliff—just not far enough to fall off. "How embarrassing," he thought, "that would be". The cliff overhung the ocean like a snapshot of a hand reaching out for answers. Green grass grew in clumps. Two flowers sprouted defiantly by Byron's rested legs. He sniffed a Tulip. It smelled like diesel, the oceans last memory of earth. Byron coughed and snorted in ridicule, "Huh! flowers shouldn't be growing here anyway." He looked over the cliff at the harsh bottom and mumbled, "it's just the edge of nothing." Settling back, nose clear of the flowers scent, Byron produced a pen with which he had only used to sign his name and a new red notebook in which he had never written and as he gazed over the lacquered blue of the sea, the pen moved across the page like the waves washed the sandy shore.

      Once upon the end of time, there was a man named Byron. He was born into sterility and lived amongst it as well. Byron died in the chaos, sitting by the ocean, watching a sparrow, and wondering if somehow it knew that the Universe was coming to an end and if it too had come this far to witness the end of life. Perhaps, he thought, there is some sort of natural current that flows through the Universe, pulsing with information.

      'What is your name?' He asked the sparrow.

      "What's your name, little fella?" Byron said aloud.

      The sparrow didn't answer because he didn't have a name.

      Byron wondered at the sparrow's grace as he watched the bird flutter through the cloudless sky. The sparrow dove and tumbled, like it had failed to catch the breeze but at the last minute it flapped its wings and soared high above the cliff and out over the sea.

      Byron wrote obsessively about the bird.

      A sparrow is pure. A sparrow is sorrow's end. It brings joy upon the viewer. A sparrow is a being ultimately untainted by mankind, elusive to slavery with its tiny wings. Those wings, that smell so sweet.

      The sparrow fluttered quickly in front of Byron's nose, which repelled from a brief whiff of diesel. Byron looked sternly past everything, into nothing, while ripping the tulips from their most difficultly placed position, flinging them relentlessly off the edge of the cliff. They drifted slowly as if still defying logic, as if the diesel in their roots had given them gaseous wings. Byron waited until the tide carried the flowers away and then continued to write as if uninterrupted.

      Those wings, which split through the air, taunt the earth. They flaunt power over man. They gave man dreams.

      When Byron finished writing about the sparrow's free and enlightened life above the baseness of man, he reflected:

      Byron was a sparrow in the days of yore, before he became a man. Byron is a sparrow; upon deaths door, he has risen once again. What is Good? What is Pure? The sparrow may not know, but in its simplicity it dances circles around the madness of questions. "Why?", you ask, and the sparrow only flutters. It is nothing but madness to ask why sparrows fly, when it is plainly obvious that, regardless, they fly and fly, and here, regardless, we both die today. The sparrow was pure. Byron was pure in the days of yore.

      The pen started making shapes that were not letters. At first Byron didn't understand what it was supposed to say. Then he saw the eyes, the small subtle beak, and he finalized the wings. He labeled the image "Byron", not as a signature but as a title. After spending many strokes adjusting the face, he scribbled it out. It looked nothing like him. Having given up on illustration, he began to chant.

      Byron the sparrow. Byron the pure. Byron the sparrow. And Byron, and Byron, and Byron, and Byron, and Byron the pure.

      As a sudden whim of madness, Byron wondered why no one ever did improvisational Techno music. "Why not, damn it?" The sparrow flew back to him and perched by his legs, covering the murder grounds of the tulips and looking up at Byron as if to say that it understood an intrinsic value of music, that he wanted to encourage the act. Looking at the bird, Byron imagined tugging on a motor engine, listening to the rhythmic gasoline revolutions, and clanging a wrench against its exoskeleton. He looked around with a desperate hope to find an old jalopy laying nearby. He returned his gaze to the sparrow, bringing back no engine with them. He would have to use the tools present; he would have to rely on the engine of human ingenuity. Lowering his voice, until he could feel each breath ripping apart his throat, he screamed like a rusty lawn mower:

      Byron By-ron byron by-ron BYRON byron BY-ron-by ron

      BYron by-RON byron by-RON BYRON byron BY-ron-BY ron

      Screaming with tears running down his face, he allowed the moment to envelope him. All care for salvation had fled with the wind, with the smell of diesel. His voice crackled and broke, came back and pushed forth with savage intent.

      As the sparrow bobbed its head with the rhythm, Byron continued to write until the ink became as white as the paper, until the pen skewed and his body stretched, until the earth had wrapped around the sun and burned the pages in his hands. His voice contorted until the chant was no longer "Byron" but instead "sparrow", and it twisted and curled into the bird, until it came from the beak of the sparrow, while silence came out of Byron's moving lips. His mind melted in his hands and through the skewed pen, distilled into the ocean surrounding him, it became absolute and yet tainted everything with the screams of his psyche. His thoughts became universal and, for a brief and fleeting moment, all of existence reflected the sparrow.