God cradled me in one burly arm, my cheek pressed to His nipple. It was the size of a satellite dish. Blown by a gentle breeze, the downy blonde hair on his forearm tickled me. Endless blue sky stretched out around us. Fluffy oblong clouds gently bobbed upward, inevitably drawn by some divine magnetism into formation around God’s face, preventing me from gazing directly upon Him.  READ MORE

Paul Fennel was waiting in front of the motel room door when his soul mate and I pulled up, his face flushed the color of brake-lights from forehead to chin. I watched as Paul auditioned a variety of places for his hands – in-pocket, out-of-pocket, thumbs through belt loops – before hiding his overactive digits in a tangle behind his back. Darlene, The Virtue, watched this too, and sighed. READ MORE

I poked my head out of a room that smelled of casual sex into a hallway where the prevailing odor was casual violence. It was the smell of spent adrenaline, the kind of butt-puckering pheromone warning that sent small animals scurrying back into the brush for cover. The top floor of the Unfettered Souls’ Wellness Center had witnessed the kind of primal discharge that Chief Motivationalist Wayne Maker dedicated books to suppressing. None of these men had paused to take a deep breath and count backwards from five. READ MORE

My Joining lasted about eight minutes. I didn’t take my time. READ MORE

Disappointed children shuffled away from the entrance to The Rudy, their fuming tourist parents trying to cheer them with brochure read taglines of lesser Times Square attractions. Above, the dormant Rudy hung empty midway through its second loop, the ride closed for garbage related damage to the tracks. Childlike wonder derailed by the stinking detritus of the adult world, it was an image that suited my mood, and it sent waves of inappropriately sadistic cheer through me, as if I was the one responsible for the roller-coaster’s breakdown. READ MORE

Wayne Maker had inspired me. I’d calmed down, centered myself with an entirely improvised breathing exercise, and had choked back the overwhelming desire to flee New York. When the diner ceiling had collapsed above Paul Fennel and I, it’d been the second time in as many days that the sky had opened at the will of God and dumped trash at an uncomfortable proximity to my person. I’d argue that I had good reason to be a little shaken; that maybe my instincts were as blunted as Dot had warned, that I wasn’t up to juggling homicidal marines, ingratiating self-help gurus, and a variety of supernatural warnings that two days ago I would have brushed off, but that now seemed like existential bullets aimed at a soul I wouldn’t admit to having. I needed to keep it together. Fennel was right, I was the knot that inexplicably bound this case and so, after wandering only three blocks from where Wayne Maker had dropped me, I’d already sharpened the edges of a plan to cut myself loose. READ MORE

Even gently cradled in the contoured backseat of Wayne Maker’s town car, my back howled in protest. Boxed in by tinted windows, an architect of self improvement beside me, I felt vulnerable. Paul Fennel, my former client, had opened up too many cracks, and now I rubbed shoulders with a man who had built an empire out of probing fissures of the spirit with benevolent tentacles. READ MORE

“You’re angry,” said Paul Fennel.

“You’re observant.”

In a back booth at a LES greasy-spoon renowned for the historic amount of orange Department of Health stickers scraped off its windows, I stared at Paul. He stared down at his pancakes, refusing to make eye contact, making like another motley patch on the upholstery. Yesterday morning, Paul asked me to infiltrate the Walmart of self-help to rescue his soul-mate, a girl he’d never actually seen but that’d almost literally burned her way to his heart. By nightfall, I had an unhinged marine waving my own gun in my face, conscripting me into a murder plot against the seemingly harmless misfit who sat across from me now, daintily nudging a syrup-free lightly-buttered short stack as if it might object to his eating it.

“Are you sure you won’t have more than coffee, Mr. Mullins?”

“Yes.”

“It’s on me.”

“The man upstairs not picking up this tab?”

Paul sighed, took a small bite.

It was a new day. Outside the diner, intrepid New Yorkers shoved their way to work, ignoring the piles of Chinese garbage that crowded the sidewalks like snow drifts. I hadn’t slept well. I’d dreamt of a towering shirtless white man with the doctored features of a certain self-help guru clutching me to his muscular bosom. I’d woken before sunrise feeling breathless and violated. A man in my profession finds it useful to cultivate a controlled paranoia, but the pins and needles of an unwanted gaze between my shoulder blades had become overwhelming.

I’d circled Alphabet City before meeting with Paul, doubled and tripled back, making sure I wasn’t followed. I still couldn’t shake the feeling, a hollow ache in my spine that couldn’t be blamed on my futon.

“Your friends from the service visited me,” I told Paul.

“I know.”

“Told me a story about you.”

“Do you believe them?”

I watched Paul fight back a tremor and tried to reconcile my idea of him, as dangerous as a kitten in a microwave, with the bomb spotting military clairvoyant that Yossarian had described.

“They say you killed a man.”

“That part is true.”

“That’s the part I find unbelievable.”

Paul pushed his delinquent glasses back up his nose with the back of his hand. I think he flicked a glance at my face from between his fingers.

“Why not?”

“You couldn’t have known. You couldn’t have known where the bombs were.”

“But I did know.”

“How?”

“I can see His plan, Mr. Mullins,” said Paul, with a quiet sincerity that sent a renewed throbbing through my vertebrae.

“Whose plan?”

“His.”

“Oh, I see. Capital H.”

“Yes.”

“Capital B. Capital S.”

I thought back to what Dot had said about my instincts, how they were slipping, how I was over my head. Down the rabbit hole was more like it. Living in the city my entire life, I had no shortage of encounters with wide-eyed soothsayers claiming a direct line to a higher power. Typically, they later asked for a quarter toward a cup of coffee, or cleared a subway car with furious masturbation. I usually ponied up the quarter, but I never let these derelicts send me off on a case. Yet here I was, getting jerked off. Dot was right.

“Maybe instead of buying my coffee, you could slip me some lottery numbers. Give me a tip on the horses.”

Paul’s busy hands picked at the front of his cardigan, worrying a loose thread.

“That’s not how it works.”

“Pray tell.”

Paul pursed his lips. His hands steadied, began tracing a careful path across the front of his sweater.

“We are all part of His intricate design. I can see the pattern. Occasionally, I can alter its direction.”

His fingers returned to the loose thread. He yanked it free.

“Sometimes, like in the case of Derek May, I can snip a string.”

“Your metaphor is played. And you sound like a lunatic.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok,” I said. “I quit.”

Paul looked up at me for the first time, his eyes watery. Immediately, a blush spread across his face.

“You can’t quit,” he said.

“I can. I just did. Apologize to your invisible friend for me, tell him I’m sorry for reneging. If he’s real sore about it, I look forward to the lightning bolt.”

“No,” said Paul, shaking his head. “I don’t mean it like that. You can say you quit. That’s fine. But you actually cannot. I’ve seen your place in the design, Mr. Mullins.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You’re a knot.”

I nodded. Stood up.

“Go fuck yourself, Fennel,” I said.

From above us came a tearing sound. The ceiling tile cracked and caved, a recently constructed nest of garbage spilled onto the table, along with the family of rats that called it home. A waitress screamed. The vermin scattered, running for cover, leaving Fennel’s half-eaten pancakes buried in plaster and plundered rot.

Paul laughed, slow at first, and then hysterical.

“Behold,” howled Fennel. “A sign from on high.”

I fled the diner while Paul was still catching his breath and wiping tears from his cheeks.

I had no destination in mind as I shouldered my way through the morning commuters. I planned to just keep walking until I was out of New York. Something in Fennel’s laugh had shaken loose the feeling of detachment necessary to keep living in this city. It wasn’t so much what I was feeling—a mix of dread and humiliation I’d need a thesaurus to put a name to—but the fact that I was feeling anything at all. I needed to escape. With every step, the ache in my spine intensified.

I didn’t notice the black Lincoln until it had swung into my path, its tinted back window hissing down to freeze me in the spotlight of Wayne Maker’s beatific smile. There he was, the self-help guru torn free from his book jackets, rendered all the more handsome in three dimensions. Here was the ostensible cause of all my current problems, appraising me with revolting sympathy.

“Hello, Mr. Mullins,” he said. “You look like you could use somebody to talk to.”

“Deus ex machina,” I replied.

“I’ve been called worse.”

Maker swung open the back door of his car, mightily tugged on the metaphysical string attached inexplicably to my stubborn knot, and reeled me in.

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Let me tell you a little story about your client. I know by looking at you, not to mention by the way you throw a punch, that you've never served. You city boys never have to. Too many opportunities for you, too much life to live. Even a guy living like you are, like a real dirtbag by the look of this place, even you probably think you got it too good to hump around the dunes and light up some Arabs, am I right? READ MORE