A/N: This is odd, in that it felt like a complete story in itself to me, and yet it has ended up becoming the beginning of something bigger, of which I've written more but not finished. Still, I post it here with the intention that it be read as a complete story, because I think that's where it's best. The style may seem odd, but I think it's necessary. Feel free to review if you wish.

It was 5:30 a.m. and I was sitting Indian-style on a hard concrete floor facing a hard concrete wall, feeling the dull, persistent throb build from the back of my neck and across the top of my skull, soon to rest squarely behind my eyes. I hadn't even been to sleep yet, and I was already hung over.

The sun was rising, but the room was still mostly dark, sheltered by a thick velvet blanket strewn in front of the two windows along one wall, keeping the large and relatively empty square in a state of near-darkness even in mid-day. Although I couldn't see them well, I knew three others were sprawled on thin blankets on the hard floor, asleep, limbs entwined, blissfully ignorant of each other and the room's dank smell of booze and sick and dim containment. I was aware of the smell; it made the impending headache even worse, and I tried to ignore it, tried not to see the remnants of the room's occupants from the night before, tried not to see the assortment of cans and bottles and trash and puddles.

For the last hour, I had kept an almost empty mind. It was a trick I taught myself two years ago. I would sit on my bed, Indian-style as I was now, and imagine myself as a Buddhist monk atop a mountain on the other side of the world - I had no worries of bills or assignments or deadlines or family or girlfriends or anything, and I would shut my monkeyes and breathe deep monkbreaths and close my monkmind. I would spend entire nights that way, sometimes, sitting cross-legged and breathing slow, deep breaths and wide awake see or think virtually nothing. Sometimes I imagined that I was meditating, seeking some form of enlightenment even if I believed in no such thing. But most of the time I knew I was delaying, blocking, shielding my mind from the things that kept me awake night after night, that sent me out into the street with not a minute of sleep and red, bleary eyes and weak limbs and damp palms.

When I practiced this shutting down, shutting out, it was because it would be the only way I could survive the nights. I tried dealing with my inability to sleep. I took medicine for a while and suffered tremendous nightmares of hell and pain and violent death; I read books both intriguing and dull; I watched television and drank warm milk and jogged five miles in moonlight through slums and empty basketball courts. It would pass the time, but my mind would flood, and I would see my mother in her hospital bed, blank eyes staring up at blank ceiling, unresponsive to my tears as I held her hand, and I would see my brother driving me to and from the hospital and saying all the right things until we arrived, when he would reach out to grab my arm and look at me with desperate gaze and ask me if I had money - it was for his daughter, he'd say, not him, not his wife, not his habit of drinking up the money I gave him last week - and I would see my bills mounting and my job looming and my dreams dying. But when I sat on the bed and closed my mind and thought of nothing at all, I would pass hours awake but unfeeling, aware but uncaring.

I could do it at will, almost, and while we drove for endless hours of straight flat road and billboards and anonymous town after town, I would often close my mind even with my eyes open, staring as my mother had at nothing and thankful for it. It would freak Dino out, and he would shake me sometimes, swearing at me, telling me not to go away like that because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to get me back sometimes. I told him I didn't go anywhere, the same way the car went nowhere when you turned it off, but he didn't believe me.

"I don't see you there when you do that," he said in all seriousness, his dark Italian features pained in the empathic way Dino had of looking at his closest friends. 'I'm all alone when you do that, when you go there, and it scares me, man. I don't like being alone."

Dino hated to be alone. Despite his massive frame, his swarthy if worn good looks, his domineering presence that occupied any room he was in, Dino was the most insecure person I knew, and he was perfectly aware of his own shortcomings, also making him, perhaps, the most comfortable person with his own insecurities I had ever known. Dino was one of those on the floor, near the corner, his arm wrapped around the girl I was hitting on the night before, full of whiskey and coke, trying to pretend I didn't have to pee so bad my stomach hurt so that I could talk to her more and look into her eyes and imagine running my hand through her long, thick hair. Dino's hand had run through her hair, and had gone further than that after I left. Now his prone body was curled with hers, and I sat facing away from both of them, mind blank but not quite shut down, trying to push aside the headache that built and kept me from going away, as Dino would call it.

The fourth person in the room was Marko, supposedly the man who owned the house we were in, although I wasn't totally clear on the concept. Marko was drunk when we got there two days ago, was drunk when the party started last night, and would surely be drunk when he roused his lanky form hours from now to stumble to the claustrophobic kitchen for a breakfast of vodka, straight, in a grimy glass someone had swigged beer from the night before. Marko had never spoken in my presence, although others had told me they carried on deep, personal, amazingly insightful conversations with the man. I had trouble believing them, because to me Marko seemed dull, dim, as if years of constant drinking had turned the intelligent, insightful man inside down, somehow, lowering his personality, his intellect, his self. When he looked at me, I felt like he looked through me, as if Marko didn't really believe anyone else was really there and didn't really care. Dino had known Marko, he had gone to college with the man, another fact that seemed unlikely to me since Dino was two years younger than me and Marko seemed at least a decade older. But then, some people aged faster than others. People who knew me said I never seemed to age at all, lost in an indistinct blur between 21 and 35, possessing neither the wisdom of age, the willingness of youth, and the experience of either.

The two days we had spent here left me unclear as to where exactly here was. I knew little more than the dark concrete room at the back of a sloping house with a putrid bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a room with a closed, locked door no one entered and no one left. Outside was unimportant; we went outside to breathe, a few minutes now, a half-hour then, and outside only reinforced what was inside, the comfort and contagion of drink and pot and conversation. The four of us there now were the fewest in the house since we arrived at half past noon two days before; the most had been likely upwards of thirty people, crammed in tight spaces so limbs were locked with limbs like lovers unaware of each other. You would talk to your neighbor because you had no ability to push through the mass to find someone you knew, and by the end of the night your neighbor was your deepest friend until they left and took their bottle with them and the darkness was absolute when the bulb overhead flickered off and those remaining would sleep where they lay.

I wouldn't sleep, of course. In the course of our trip, I likely had slept no more than four hours, two of which were one glorious afternoon almost five days ago when Dino had stopped at the summit of a hill two states removed from the pit in which Marko's house lay. There was really no reason to stop - despite promising each other when we started some time before (two weeks? a month?) that we would stop when we saw beauty and when we saw the harsh reality of life and when we saw anything worth stopping to see, we hadn't really stopped for other than food and gas and makeshift bathrooms and a house or an apartment or a basement here or there or somewhere where someone had pot and booze and where women gathered to meet people they didn't know and where the night was kept outside by a blanked and a haze of smoke and the mass of strangers and lovers interchangeable. But he had stopped there, at the summit of a short hill, on the side of a virtually empty two-lane road, perhaps just to clear his own mind, and I got out and walked through the unmowed grass beside the road to a spot that seemed almost flat, and I lay on my back in the soft earth and stared at an almost endless blue sky and slept for two full hours. Afterward, Dino teased me about it, saying I was meant to be a part of the great outdoors, to live amongst the earth and away from the realities of society and people, and I told him he should sleep himself as I drove the rest of the way to the next house, the next basement, the next stop we found the same way we always found them, by accident.

It was a strange trip, a completely unplanned trip by which I mean it was planned to the point it would never happen if we didn't at one moment of one day like every other day look at each other and say we were going, right then in Dino's 1987 Chevrolet and work and family and girlfriends be damned. Dino's girlfriends, of course, were those forgotten; I had no girlfriend, even as I pined for the latest girl Dino would bring back to tease with completely invented stories and booze and fuck loudly while I sat awake, cross-legged, trying but unable to shut out the lust in my own body and unable to close off my mind until in a haze of pot-paranoia I would jerk off into my shirt and close my mind off in a kind of post- climactic bliss.

The trip had been, at one time, my idea, one of countless ideas raised when we were almost completely sober yet not at work and not prone in front of the television and not casting for girlfriends (Dino) or pot (me) or someone to bring both to Dino's basement that night. We were sitting on Dino's sloped roof, as we would when the weather was warm and we were comfortably sober and eager with anticipation for some movement, some development in our stagnant life. Dino had said something about stopping the drinking, stopping the smoking, stopping the sex and the food and the television and everything else, of adapting the monklife he thought I left. They called me a monk because of my habit of shutting down, mostly, even in the midst of a group of people when I lost interest or lost energy completely, but also because I was always single and always telling people why drinking and smoking and talking until hours and days have passed was a holy, wonderful thing, even though I was merely trying to convince myself of the fact and I knew it. I told Dino he was unable to stop anything, unable to do anything, and he took offense. So I proposed the trip, a way to push everything else aside and get out to the world we never seemed to acknowledge, to see the stars and the grass and the city streets and the strangers going about real, meaningful lives we admired and loathed. I proposed it almost in jest yet with a hint of desperation Dino seized upon immediately, because he would always see the minute within me and past the veiled obviousness.

"Yes!" he had shouted and stood up with a kind of grace that made me jealous again for his nature, for I would have been flung off the roof if I stood up so quickly and recklessly. "Yes! Dino and Daniel on the open road, driving, seeing, being! That's what we shall do." It was a proclamation, the kind I was more likely to make than he. Usually I would proclaim some vast, important change that would become a part of his soul or mine, and he would agree with the sort of loyal assurance that I craved and he knew it. He would agree, and it would be canon, until each forgot it or another proclamation, this one more important than the last, would be made. But this was a Dino proclamation, and these carried more weight, because he never forgot the assertions that he made, and neither would he let me forget them.

The trip became our rallying cry. When my brother called, sobbing that his wife had left him again and he needed money or a ride or validation or something, Dino would shout from across the room, "We're leaving, Daniel! We're leaving this all behind and we're going to live it all out there!" And when Dino was prowling, pushing through anonymous crowds with a glimmer of a goal in mind - usually a goal with a tight shirt and a short skirt and wide, wet lips - I would get behind him and put my arms on his wide shoulders and say in his ear, "There's a world out there, man, and we're going there." And he would break into his great grin and grab me and lift me into the air and everyone around us would laugh at Dino and even though I had dissuaded him for a minute from his immediate goal - a fact that caused me guilt and pleasure at once - it was okay, because the trip was our real goal and nothing else would matter once the subject had been raised.

The fact that we finally, at last, left surprised us both, I think. But it was as if neither of us made the decision and instead found ourselves in his car on the outskirts of town, cups of soda between our knees and arms loose out the window, eyes strained on something beyond the cracked windshield as if we could see where we were going even if neither of us knew the destination or cared regardless. Dino was a ball of energy, more alive than I had ever seen him, barely able to keep one hand on the wheel and foot steady on the gas, and I remember thinking that this was probably what Dino was like when he took his girls to bed, and it thrilled me a little to see him this way. His excitement was contagious, spreading through me too until I was tapping my foot on the floorboards and hand on the outside of the door and trying not to grin too wide for Dino was grinning wide enough for both of us. As we drove - thirteen hours that first day alone and all through the night - we talked about great things, the things that usually required midnight and smoke and haze and desperation. At the time, that first day on the road, there was no more familiar fall-back, no more confining world of Dino's home or my home or odd jobs or countless visits from the same people. There was no more of that and plenty of this, this excitement and eagerness and anticipation and potential.

Of course, potential only carries you so far, and when we were tired, Dino said he knew someone who lived an hour down that road, and soon he was fucking a gorgeous girl who was the sister of a gorgeous girl ignoring me as I stared past her in awkward silence, waiting for everyone to go away so I could sit and shut myself down and try not to think about the fact that tomorrow we would drive again and I could only hope it would be in a direction that didn't lead us back. And there was no back, really, and Dino knew that, and so the next day we did drive on. But ahead of us turned out to be the same thing as behind us, until now, at dawn in Marko's ridiculous home in some state I had forgotten from days of drinking and smoking and talking and pretending (because that is all it is).

"Hey." The sound was hushed but seemed loud, harsh, and it was accompanied by the sound of a body moving, slipping to a cross-legged spot on the concrete floor beside me. I allowed my eyes to focus, my mind to return and the pounding throb behind my eyes to take its spot, as I turned to see Marko, staring ahead at the blank concrete wall as I was, as if it contained the answers we thought we had found the brilliant night before but lost in the sick of the morning. I nodded acknowledgement of his hushed word.

"Don't worry, man," he said quietly, and I think I was surprised by the simple, sweet quality of his voice, a voice that seemed to say this lean, unwashed, shadow of a man was a man after all, at least in memory. "Don't worry," he said, a few times, I think, but I'm not sure. I may have heard it repeatedly in my own head. It seemed important, him saying it, even if the words themselves were worthless nothings.

And as bits of sun trickled around the blanket, turning the room into something resembling day, and as the girl I had wanted so badly the night before but Dino had had got sick in the corner where she had gotten sick the night before, and as Dino slumbered on, the great sleep of someone who had everything and didn't particularly want any of it - Marko stared at the wall with the emptiness I had been staring at the wall, and I stared at Marko and saw myself there in his gray, destroyed body. And for a moment I imagined taking the keys to Dino's car and driving away from Marko and Dino and the girl whose name I remembered idly was Gina and driving away straight and as fast as humanly possible until I found that hill or another like it so that I could lay on the soft earth and stare at the endless sky and sleep again. I thought, then, that maybe I could sleep without dreaming of my mother or my brother or my disease and my loneliness. And maybe I wouldn't even wake up, and how different would that be from shutting down, anyway. Except that I couldn't do it, and I wouldn't do it, and when Dino stirred and got to his feet and clapped his hand on my shoulder harshly, I climbed to numb feet beside him, and we walked outside for great breaths of morning air.

"Daniel," he said, as if intoning my name meant anything at all, and I smiled at him, because it's impossible not to smile at Dino, and I nodded to say that, yes, I was there, still.