To those for whom plot and life are indistinguishable, even when they are not

      Chapter 1

      Somewhere in the bland foothills that crouch dejectedly under the mountains aproning Los Angeles, a man sits at his computer for the fifth straight hour trying to shape story from words. He has had his name legally changed from Tom, which he always blamed, to Thron, which he thinks is stronger, cooler, more mysterious. He rereads his last sentence a few times and then leans on the delete key until the cursor starts its backward trek, erasing letter, then word, then phrase, then sentence. There is a fleeting metaphor in this act. He can’t quite pin it, but he draws a tenuous but real connect between this and his life, which he is certain can be erased moment by moment, the erasure accelerating incrementally in the manner of his cursor, until it is blank and unremembered.

      And no one would really care.

      Thron realizes that this is not a melancholy thought. There is little discomfort in it, really. If anything, it amuses him the way of dark things at which one can only laugh before the bitterness seeps through. All of his moments stretching into minutes and days and years and life; to what end? It has amounted to little of value to him, or almost anyone else, including a mother who had other needs beyond parenting and his father who simply left at first sighting. He wonders if there are others who feel this way. Then why does he not simply end it, he asks himself. Because, like everyone, he is scared of death. Because, like everyone, he inhales the sweet scent of hope. Because he can tilt at the windmills of injustice. Strike back. Set things right, give his life a sense of purpose, just for an instant before … what?

      Before whatever. It really doesn’t matter.

      He exaggerates, he knows. He has a family, such as it is. A wife he doesn’t love, who cowers under his dark moods. Two children, now dispersed, their distaste for him barely concealed. A car. An apartment with a new TV set. He works a bit—construction mainly. And bartending, sometimes. His wife anchors the finances as an administrative manager in a funeral home, arriving home nightly stunned and taciturn.

      He wonders what happened to his life. Why the things he tries seem to stall and sputter. Perhaps he tried the wrong things. Perhaps he should have simply become something useful to society—a plumber, or electrician, even a postal worker. But like almost everyone else in this broken country, he wants fame. He sees it on TV. Fame. Its perks and prizes. It looks deeply satisfying and the women are pretty.

      So he had tried to design videogames, but he could not code, achieving little else but some poorly drawn screen shots and a dumb outline of a dystopian future with cyborgs and dragons and many weapons. And then he bought a video camera and some edit software and watched documentaries on YouTube. A documentary film maker. He could do that. He could maybe get fame and respect—double jackpot. Like that Ken Burns guy. But both subject and discipline eluded him; his camera collected dust. And then there was the blog and then the podcast and the guitar with strings that hurt his hands. And then this book, this novel, this story about a future with cyborgs and dragons and lots of weapons. Some 80,000 words already. And a pile of rejections from agents and publishing houses.

      Thron wonders if he has any talent. He knows that the achievement of the sort of fame he seeks is well lubricated by talent. But it is not a requirement. He sees this daily, yelled and sung and blustered from the big and small screens of his life. Ambition. That is the fuel, they all say so, those finely coiffed people he watches. Enough ambition, and you can achieve anything. He had had such a deep well of it, and now he fears it is running low.

      He likes to read, sometimes, when he is a little drunk, now that he has decided to become a famous novelist, perhaps in order to make up for decades of book-free living, but also to poke around for inspiration. He reads when she is sleeping and he is slumped in the big chair on the porch, another beer in hand, too bored to watch TV. He will open a book, picked up from the library, which he recently joined, and recommended by the sweet young Latina behind the counter. He says—something out of the ordinary. She says—which era. He says—1800s or 1940s or medieval England or the roaring twenties. She says—fiction or non-fiction. She says —crime or love story. She says—comedy or tragedy or rags-to-riches or self-discovery or economics or philosophy or technology or quest or self-help. She knows her stuff, Valeria. He reads a book a week, when he is a little drunk. He does not always understand them; he never graduated from high school. But stuff peeks through. She gives him a book by Henry David Thoreau. Walden. In it he reads that line, the one about men and lives and quiet desperation. He reads the line twice, three times. It causes his heart to race. It does not feel good.

      Through his window in the valley he can see the dull gray side of the little mountain that chooses to present its resident Hollywood sign on its other side, out of sight. He wonders what happened to his life.

      Chapter 2

      On the day Joelle wanted to kill someone (at least in theory) she also lost her job. She wanted to kill somebody (in theory, naturally) because it was that sort of day, when pent-up irritations and long-simmering disappointments and a computer crash and lost hours of careful work all seemed to point in the direction of finding a scapegoat, if only to make her feel better by comparison. But she had lost her job just hours after she decided to kill someone— anyone—which seemed to her to be the wrong order of things. Surely an ordered universe would reverse cause and effect, so that perhaps the tabloid headlines would later have screamed—woman kills after losing job!

      But then the world was not an ordered place, she knew. It was upside down, inside outside, hobbled by lack of reason and buoyed by perversity. The indiscipline of the universe, she rationalized, was reason enough to kill, but the losing of her job had robbed her of the surprise factor. It seemed so common to kill out of humiliation. Financial woes. Hopelessness. Rage. The desperation of unemployment. That sort of thing. Being fired by a boss whose enmity likely stemmed from her refusal to sleep with him. Which she would have done, had he asked, which she was certain he would have done, sooner or later. Maybe sleep with him was too tepid a prospect. Sleep-with-him. Not the moist, viscous and steaming background of her fervid imaginings. Had sex with him? Too antiseptic, phrased like a partaking of a polite meal. Fornicated? A little biblical for her taste, surely foreshadowing a great and public punishment. Copulated? Too rabbity. Hooked up? Too once-off. Shagged? Bonked? Rooted? Done the dirty? Fucked. Fucked. Reliable and descriptive in infinitely flexible ways. Had he tried harder, she would have fucked him. It might have been a mercy fuck, or a career fuck, a furtive fuck or a guilty fuck or a simple old fun fuck. Or maybe even a beginning-of-something fuck. She had rather liked him—other than his annoying name, Buddy. Perhaps, if she cared to admit it, she was a little obsessed with him. Now she would never know.

      Anyway, now there was the small matter of who to kill, a detail she had decided to resolve after a few drinks, perhaps this very evening, alone in her small and neat living room. There were many