Milt wandered on. 

      Dusk long had settled among the bugs and birds, the blathering cloudswirl gathering oh so high above the hunched-over streetlamps lining Semolean Blvd. From a foam-lapped boulder on the bend of Oak St. Beach Milt found himself only an hour ago facing the great lake. There he contemplated the sun and the moon, the vastitudes, mumbling to the cigarette in his mouth about illiterate constancies: love, meaning, hope. He observed the faint orange and purple sky haze darken and then with a psychedelic burst plunge wondrously into the deep black nothingness of what was shaping up to be another starless night in Chicago. 

      Milt wandered on from the water down a winding red dirt trail, away away. He tracked in helical silence against the city sprawl through West Town and through his old neighborhood, beyond the lakeside mansions, beyond that infamous but nondescript tomb (a mere penned-in scabland at this point) that marked the superposition of where his childhood home once stood. Soon Milt came across streets he did not know. He trudged past open, broken lots and through alleys touched by nary a sole.

      Young Milt was troubled—not normal. On the young man's mind there spun the hateful interior monologue so typical of the new millenium’s university grad; a devil-and-angel schtick filled with a lifetime’s depiction of wasted loves and infinite boredoms, calculated hopes and chalkboard dreams. But on this night, he believed, for once, that a new promise might blossome, ye, blossome like the delicate groan of an olde lyre laid upon the wind. Tomorrow, Milt considered, grounding himself, Tomorrow could make all the future. And what’s more, he mulled, culling inspiration, HE decided that HE would rise to defeat it. Tomorrow, HE must be enough. Yes, HE had to be enough. 

      Milt paused beside the obsidian pedestal of an obscured statue and flung a long gaze towards the haggard bust (the likeness of Dorian Grey?—No, the statue-man wielded a straighter sword), swaying dangerously back and then forth again in his boots. He stole a stroke of his chin, the wannabe stoic, before calculating his next best move, extrapolating upon a vast matrix of branching logic and possible outcomes constrained to the instant, boundless flash it takes for a human to make a truly human decision. 

      With his preambles satisfied Milt felt obliged to carry on. He lurched forth like a mad locomotive into the greythickiness, aimless in destination, bit by the mental racket. Indeed, a certain largeness consumed Milt, had been raging away at his guts during this sordid walkabout—during what should have been a peaceable summer jaunt through the urban wood. Brownstones, he passed. Churches and temples, he passed. And yet, still, neither vista nor fruit fly stuck meaningfully to his skin. Nonfeelingnisity. Even the whine of the cicadas Milt pushed beyond hearing, beyond all physical freakiness. 

     While traversing the mezzanine at Ashland and Lake Milt narrowed his tread. A gentle awareness had been creeping into his mind—wordless—and in his mind’s eye, he saw a baby brandishing a binky as he saw a quilt that depicted the profound and persistent vice of his young life, being, his wont, no, his deep and natural inclination to push the world away . . .  far, far away from what’s traditional (he was a noted aviary of the imaginarium, after all); far away the auspices of real Miltonian recognition—out to the peripheries, where this phylum of suspiciously earthly things dare not depend for very long, or otherwise beface the death of all sense alongside such “dulleries” as the thrash of train tracks and the whirlwind of magnetrons and the taciturn advice of old men and women of whom, Milt thought, the greater many must be chow for the maggoty thrum, by now.  

     Ah, but where was he going . . . 

     Milt, to his own astonishment, had blacked out at some inadvertent stride, a chronic condition. Ever since he was little Milt had been blacking out and waking up in pits of leaves or at the bottom brooks of ravines. This time, however, he stumbled on his wits atop a landfill hill. MURRAY’S HEAP, read the rusted placard dangling loosely, perhaps by a single nail, from the façade of the foreman’s trailer erected across from Milt, who was kneading with the backs of his fists the espiritus back into his blinking eyes.

     All of this, before the cats had surrounded him.  

     Milt hated cats. 

    The throng swarmed on Milt faster than ink takes to water, paw-lickin’ and all. Up flew cries of “mee-ow!”. Down were cast injudicious mentions of “brrra-ooomp!”. Milt damn near was swallowed up by the lot of ‘em all, struggling in his own mighty way to discern feline from francophone, maw from malarkey. He hated cats. And among the brushing of all these awful, creepy, borderline-monstrous creatures going a-limping across his legs there was diffused in Milt a most terrible and specific kind of torture: isotonic agony; formless-seeming as they were. A question thereafter sprang to the young man’s mind. A question about origins and destinations. And like the mutant he was, so Milt asked Milt: How ever have these cats swamped this curséd current of waste against which I [Milt] wade?

    He would have liked to have been a good schoolboy and answer his own question, but alas, Milt knew there was little time to entertain the hypotheticals (as is the unfortunate and usual reality for most folks in most cases). Milt could see he had wandered on, yes, only it was just then that he realized he had wandered too far. 

    Drowning on dead air Milt let out a throaty roar, the sort consummate of the day’s hard metal frontman. The cat storm froze and a thousand stiff tails suddenly were pointed up towards the heavens. Without breaking a beat Milt crashed ahead through the junk pile. He flung cats in every cardinal direction, hacking at with flapping forearms all the cadaverous computers and hingeless microwaves and bisected brooms of the heap; all the trash that even trash throws away: metals and trinkets of scarce precious value, shattered glass and spray-painted gems, disposables, “nouns”, invariably, which stood in the path that trickled out of Murray’s Hell and which lead to the more civilized of paths. 

    Zoom, zip, slip—Milt reconciled his shortwave anxieties with shorted waves of action—the most bountiful of distractions—and pressed onward, onward. Pipper were his steps, for he could see he would be free as a cloud in the sky in short order. Milt had no doubt that the cats would be reduced to distant chittering soon. No doubt, Milt whispered to himself. 

      Feeling his way through the darkness, Milt stumbled upon CLANK! and then slipped through FWHAP! a tear among the viscera of a chainlink fence, lifting its serrated edges overhead and ducking underneath it with care and cool so as not to invite the wrath of the iron-clad recoil. There, finally outside the confines of MURRAY’S HEAP he took a breath. Dusted himself off. But before beginning his trek homeward Milt peeled over and had a sit on a nearby curb, leaning into his knees in parallel with the willows that were draped over the road and over his tired body. He was tired, very. Needed sleep. Tomorrow held too much promise in her to boot. Tomorrow . . . 

 

    Another unexpected black out, a dagger. Milt awoke to the sound of birds chirruping in the oak canopies which framed the ruins of a clandestine meatpacking warehouse across the way. Deposed still to a state of lucid solemnity the young man slowly looked up and, once he saw what he saw, he sat up, startled by the blueness of the sky. Pinching his nose, he blew. One snot rocket, two. With a hard huff, and after administering with a benign hand to the vile shudder that rolled through his gut the way a frothing wave rolls upon the shore, he shooed away a scrum of rats which had been gnawing at the grease-soaked stuffings of an abandoned ottoman that lay beside him. Milt palmed the asphalt while he shuffled to find the two feet in his boots, surveying the area allthewhile. The road before Milt stretched way way deep towards the horizon; a crimped stroke of nature’s mature besom extending east, west. A glance to the watch on his wrist meanwise revealed the hour: 7am. 

    The panic began to set in shortly thereafter.

    Tomorrow, Milt realized, breaking into a serious sweat, Tomorrow was now today. And, much to Milt’s utter vexation, today was off to a sore start.  

     Milt dug a clammy hand into his pocket. Blarney and biscuits, he swore under his breath. His mobile phone was dead as a twig. There would be no hailing a friend or leveraging a digitized compass for guidance, after all. 

Nevertheless, and with Milt being Milt, he pivoted. The young man filched a crocheted walking stick from a vine-infested phone booth and started to march, poking at for amusement the gravelly underbellies of every pothole he passed. Shaking the hazy dazies out of his eyes he set off in the opposite direction of the rising sun, feeling the summer heat bang on with a SIZZLE! SIZZLE! the back of his neck. 

     His big meeting, the one he was so concerned about the evening before, was scheduled to start at 10a. Uf. No showers, today, Milt thought and sniffed. 

    No, not until Tomorrow.

     

Chapter 1

 

    Milt celebrated on. And on and on and on . . . 

    The young man had miraculously and somewhat surprisingly won the contest. Ha! Not against all odds, certainly. Tho, to be fair, it ought to be said that he won this ditty of a stake against quite a strong sum of odds—primary of all, the nearly 30,000 applicants who like he had submitted compositions for a chance at glory.

     A full week had passed since Milt awoke on the dumphill surrounded by cats at MURRAY’S HEAP. A week had passed since he faced the great lake and shouldered the burden of the guru, pondering the imponderables of the world in its myriad languages. 

     Tomorrow, for there was always another Tomorrow, Milt would stuff the last of his life-stock into the old man’s jalopy alongside the rest of his road trip essentials:

 

1. Sunflower seeds [in the cupholder]

2. The equivalent of an IV drip’s worth of coffee [in the thermos]

3. Cigarettes and loose leaf [vacuum-sealed]

4. (2) Aux cords, (2) USB cords, (11) notepads, green cover

 

      Tomorrow, he would leave Illinois for the first time of his fledgling existence, would leave so that he might slither and twist and terrorize his way on down to southern LA: Tinseltown, Little Mexico, Hollywood, The Land Below the Vine. 

    A bungalow awaited him there, with an address, grounds, on Ocean Avenue. Maybe, so Milt allowed his mind to race, Maybe ‘twas a concrete fort, this bungalow, dredged out of the cold Pacific reef. Maybe, ‘twas an unremarkable 50’s ranch house; something ripped straight out of Tolkien’s realm, something Shire-esque. Maybe . . . 

      The estate belonged to The Director. That’s all Milt knew about. However, according to the signed contract, and in alignment with the terms of the contest, Milt was to consider the place his home while he fluttered about and fulfilled his prescribed duties; some of which seemed to Milt amusing, others of which seemed overwhelming (or in the worst case, went dreadfully unnamed), and one which included tending to The Director’s pets—cats. 

     Milt, of course, hated cats.