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[Stuart at the Cultural Center parking ramp.]

It was a mild afternoon. Nigel had said that the parking ramp and stairwell had been painted, that none of my poetry had been spared, but I had to see for myself.

The Chevy Caprice was one of the most conspicuous vehicles on the East Side for all of the wrong reasons, especially around the Cultural Center: trimmed with rust, muffler-less roar, the dimensions of a military sea-to-land vehicle patched with duct tape.

“They can’t bust my ass for passing through,” I thought, fumbling with the radio stations, choosing classical music over classic rock. My nerves needed steadying. Was I placing a knight on the edge of the chessboard instead of a square that attacked the center? Another flying squirrel move? Discipline was a distant memory. I’d given up running; tried to drop out of school; blown my emergency money on a Thompson Twins t-shirt.

The lameness added up.

The stairwell was hushed. I surveyed the phone numbers, lewd cartoons and affordable deals on blow jobs. Who was Tammy? I was in the eye of the storm. Misty made a cameo in my imagination, sprinting lights out to nowhere on her exercise wheel, the embodiment of my racing thoughts. Somewhere on the Cultural Center’s campus, red lights glowed on hidden security cameras that were capturing live footage of me while I processed the potential of all of this fresh white space which the local vandals had yet to completely deface. (I was an artist!) I was sure that in some soulless wing of the nearby community college, security guards were being dispatched like Cylons from Battlestar Gallactica. I gauged how afternoon sounds were different from the ones J Dog and the crew and I kept track of at three in the morning while bombing trains and underpasses with graffiti.

“Think long, move wrong.”

Adrenaline raged along the expressways winding through my limbs and chest, created a mosh pit in the basement of my mind where the past, present and future met for secret meetings I wasn’t invited to. I could feel my heart thumping like an Alpine subwoofer: Killing Joke’s tune, ‘Eighties,’ with its intense guitars and percussions, the lead singer barking the vocals. I extracted the Sharpie from my sock (it was a dream, it was happening, it was real, it had already happened) and quickly wrote to The Wayward Child near the place where we had formerly left our messages.

[artifact no. 2]

Dear Wayward Child,//Risk everything,/every day. Don’t/abandon me. You/are like air.//Jim Nightshade

“Lame.” But it was there, now. I had touched the knight. “Touch it, move it.”

My shitty handwriting annoyed me.