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cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
"Pod Rozbrykanym Nazgulem" po raz 473
"A droga wiedzie w przód i w przód, choć zaczęła się tuż za progiem...”
Leniwie nuciłeś starą pieśń i tu przyniosły Cię nogi.
Nie wiesz jak tu dotarłeś, nie wiesz, jaki to czas i kraje,
A karczm się widzi tak wiele, gdy się przez życie wędruje.
Stoły stoją puste, siatkę tworzą w drewnie rys tysiące,
Wiatr w kaganku świszczy, a w kominku leżą drwa stygnące.
Gollum jakiś markotny, okiem w Twą stronę tęsknie błyska,
Zwykle w karczmie o poranku, pustką świeci jego miska.
Pomyślisz - tu nic się nie dzieje, tu nie spotkasz człowieka,
Nim kaptur naciągniesz, wyjdziesz, usiądź przy stole, poczekaj.
Przyjdą inni skoro Anor do horyzontu się zbliży,
Puchar wino wypełni, gwar rozmów powietrze ożywi.
Pusta miska Golluma zadźwięczy, gdy wrzucisz Skarb skromny:
Rybę w srebrzystych łuskach albo suchar niedojedzony.
Rozmowy rozpoczną się różne, włącz się w którą zapragniesz:
O piwie, o smokach, broni, o dziejach Śródziemia również.
Zobaczysz tu wiele dziwadeł, istot wybór szeroki:
Ludzie, Krasnoludy, wampiry i Elfy Pięknookie.
Wędrowców, kapłanów i bardów, mądrali i statsiarzy,
Wybieraj, przebieraj, ktokolwiek tylko Ci się zamarzy.
To FoXXXMagda, w swej elfiej mowie Pellamerethiel zwana,
Która dawno, dawno temu tę karczmę ufundowała,
Historię Śródziemia powie, ma wiedzę swej rasy godną.
A najpiękniejsza kami przywita Cię słowem pogodnym.
Z Vilyą pomówisz o sztuce, ambitne są to tematy,
Inna sprawa - to sztuka parzenia kawy i herbaty.
Miła nam Elfka sarenka rozmyśla o sensie życia,
Zaś niepozorna Cody pierwsza do walki i krwi picia.
Sprytna Półelfka martusi_a i Meeyka – smoków treserka,
To chyba wszystkie bywające w naszej karczmie dziewczęta.
Barman o smoczym imieniu to Drak'kan, miłośnik piwa,
A gofer, ten, który je warzy, w piwniczce się zaszywa.
Cokolwiek blady wampir Spooke przychodzi wkrótce po zmroku,
Błyskając długimi kłami, skupia się na szklance soku.
Bywa, że przyjdzie i mati, Drow małomówny i skryty,
A Looz^, Gondorczyk prawdziwy, nie zadaje głupich pytań.
Iarwain Ben-Adar o wystrój i nastrój karczmy się troszczy,
A topór krasnoluda Jolo raczej przyjaźnie błyszczy.
Arahno mówi, że lubi pająki, człek tajemniczy,
Zapewne w ciemnych lasach Mirkwood nigdy nie był leśniczym.
Wiedźmin - krasnolud Paudyn piwem w kącie się delektuje,
Jednak wkrótce swym ostrzem potworów krwi zasmakuje.
Wpada tu z miną groźną Mysza - szef patrolu orczego,
Ale to Ork po naszej stronie, więc bać się nie ma czego.
Sa i nowe twarze tutaj. Jedne ładne, z drugimi gorzej.
Jest więc cronotrigger co to dwuletnia jego tu
obecność wszystkich cieszy niepojęcie. Szkoły kończy
chłopak dzielnie, wątki też zakłada nieźle.
Pirix wieczny student, rzadko bywa ale jak coś powie
to wszyscy milkna i słuchają. W końcu studenci to przyszłość narodu.
Wpada elemeledudek skromny, co do bliźniaczek się sposobi.
Szanse jego raczej marne, ale kciuki za niego trzymamy.
HolyDeath też tu wpada. Siedzi w cienu, głupio gada
spod jego kosy trup często pada.
I to mniej więcej wszyscy, więc wybór masz chyba dość duży?
Zamów kufel piwa z Bree, odpocznij po trudach podróży,
Rozgość się i rozluźnij, i nie przejmuj się niczym w ogóle:
Miłej uczty życzy ekipa „Pod Rozbrykanym Nazgulem”.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
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Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Tak w zasadzie to czemu nie doczekales do 200 postow ?? Az taki ci spieszno do statsowania ? :/ Sam takze bawie sie w zakladanie watkow dla watku webmasterskiego i jeszcze jakos nigdy nie zdazylo mi sie zalozyc go przed 200... Bo nigdy nie bylo sensu. Nazgula takze nie ma sensu zakladac chyba wczesniej... Ani nie ma tu grafiki, ktora by spowalniala ladnowaie ani nic. A trzeba przyznac ze zalozenie Nazgula to jest jedno wielkie statsiarstwo, czego osobiscie cholernie nie lubie...
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Drak'kan--->spokojnie, Nazgul prawie zawsze jest zakładany w okolicach 200 postów. Najczęściej kilka, kilkanaście przed dwusetnym. Czy to aż taka różnica wielka? Może i faktycznie jakoś długo to Nazgul się nie ładuje i można było poczekać trochę, ale czy jest sens z powodu założenia teraz nowej części się denerwować?
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
Drak'kan --> Hmm???
Nie rozumiem czemu na mnie najeżdżasz? jakiś gorszy dzień miałeś?
Jakoś nie widzę znaczącej róznicy między 187 a 200 postów. Po za tym nie ma chyba jakiejś tradycji, że czeka się do 200 postów. Po trzecie musisz wiedzieć, że kompletnie nie interesuje mnie statsiarstwo i nie wiem czemu mnie o nie posądzasz. Co do 7 postów na początku to dla mnie jest wręcz tradycja i powtórze nie liczą się dla mnie posty, po prostu ładnie to wygląda. I jakoś nikt z tym nigdy nie miał problemów!
Jeśli tak bardzo Cię to irytuje to sam założ następną część po tych swoich 200 postach, i oczywiście zaczynając tylko wstępniakiem.
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-09-15 20:22:08]
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Po pierwsze (do Pirixa) ja sie wcale nie denerwuje :) Jakbym sie denerwowal takimi pierdolami dawno juz lezalbym w grobie po zawale serca...
Po drugie (do crono) - nie czepiam sie ilosci postow przy zakladaniu. Tak juz sie ustalilo ze trzeba te wszystkie obrazko dodac i nic przeciwko temu nie mam (choc akurat sadze ze moze nie wszystkie sa potrzebne, szczegolnie, ze i tak niektore to tylko miniaturki...).
Po trzecie (do crono) - Soul juz dawno temu wprowadzil nakaz zakladania kolejnych czesci watkow cyklicznych po 200 postach (wyjatek stanowia watki z duza iloscia grafiki).
Po czwarte (do crono) - dla mnie jest roznica pomiedzy 187 a 200 i tylko wyrazilem swoja opinie w tej kwestii, jesli komus sie nie podoba - strzyka mnie to... Nie kaze Ci zakladac watkow pozniej, mozesz robic to kiedy chcesz. Ja, jak mowilem, wyrazilem tylko swoje ubolewanie nad tym jakze malo istotnym faktem... Ludzie maja sklonnosc do co raz wiekszego naginania pewnych nakazow, co w koncu spowoduje ze wrocimy znowu do dawnej sytuacji z watkami i tyle... A wiele sie z tego powodu kiedys tutaj dzialo...
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
Dobra nie będe już gadał bo nie ma o czym ja zakładam i będe zakładał wątki jak chce i kiedy uznam to za stosowne.
Co do Wnętrza to rzeczywiście są to miniaturki ale jakoś się tak złożyło, że nie mam na kompie "pełnych wersji"
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-09-15 22:04:05]
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
crono--->na maila z profilu poszły dwa wnętrza w większych rozmiarach.
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
Crono, zrób aferę i juz teraz załóż nowa, będzie niezła jatka. juz widze te "prosby do admina" hyhyhy.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
Pirix --> Dzięki :)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
A tak ogólnie to straszna lipa.. Cały dzień leje..
Beznadzieja
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
Po trzecie musisz wiedzieć, że kompletnie nie interesuje mnie statsiarstwo i nie wiem czemu mnie o nie posądzasz.
Crono, ja też nie wiem czego oni od ciebie chcą ;)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
no właśnie :P
.. ale w sumie mi nie jest do śmiechu.. bo się komp sypie.. wrrrrr
ide dalej go naprawiać..
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-09-16 22:26:47]
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
zczegolnie, ze i tak niektore to tylko miniaturki...)
Nastepną część założę ja, wszystkie obrazki będą we właściwych rozmiarach. Mam wystarczającą średnią i ilość postów do tego, żeby i tak nikt mnie o nabijanie nie posądzał :o)))) Zwisa mi to, po ilu postach założony będzie Nazgul, nasz Wajs tradycyjnie przerywany jest po 300. Z drugiej strony trzeba pomyśleć też o modemowcach, kiedyś były tutaj takie narzekania, teraz nie wiem, jak sprawa się przedstawia.
Tak w ogóle to witam, wysłałem dzisiaj zgłoszenie na piknik :o)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
no wiesz ja jeszcze do niedawna (listopad) miałem modem :D teraz mam neo128 wiec duzo lepiej nie jest...
A 300postów to za dużo... :D
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Lolipop.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
cześć?
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Witom sie.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
mhm
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
"Tak w zasadzie to czemu nie doczekales do 200 postow ?? Az taki ci spieszno do statsowania ? :/ Sam takze bawie sie w zakladanie watkow dla watku webmasterskiego i jeszcze jakos nigdy nie zdazylo mi sie zalozyc go przed 200... Bo nigdy nie bylo sensu. Nazgula takze nie ma sensu zakladac chyba wczesniej... Ani nie ma tu grafiki, ktora by spowalniala ladnowaie ani nic. A trzeba przyznac ze zalozenie Nazgula to jest jedno wielkie statsiarstwo, czego osobiscie cholernie nie lubie..."
I kto to mowi, najwiekszy statsiarz Nazgula :P .
A tak na serio to co Cie az tak wpienilo, przeciez Ty zawsze spokojny czlowiek jestes :) .
I chyba pozdawales wszystkie poprawki.
Chill :) . Poza tym fajnie, ze zauwazyles Nazgula :) .
Poza tym ktos powinien w koncu Hall uaktualnic. Moje zdjecie jest sprzed pieciu czy wiecej lat, a LooZ wyglada jak prosie :) .
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-09-18 01:13:59]
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
Witam z rana.....
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Yisrael => A co, nie wolno mi sie wpienic od czasu do czasu ?? Ja czlowiek regulaminowy (:P) jestem.
Poprawki wszystkie zdalem, ale zaliczen jeszcze nie mam i w ogole...
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
No bosko, znow nie wiem o nowej czesci :)
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Ty regulaminowy ? A kto chodzil nad Wiselke chlac piwska i jabole podczas lekcji ? Wagaray niezgodne sa z regulaminem :) .
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Yisrael => Wiesz, nie powiedzialem przeciez o jaki regulamin mi chodzi :P
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Oo, Nazgul zyje :P
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
cody => A czy on kiedykolwiek umarl ?? :)
Kurde, tyle do roboty i nic mi sie nie chce :| No nic, trzeba sobie w cos zagrac dla rozrywki, robota moze poczekac :P
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Drak> Znam ten bol. Mam do napisania prace na 5 stron na 23, opis filmu na jutro i poprawic prace na temat Fromma, poza tym musze poczytac kilka starogreckich tekstow. A siedze i ogladam komedie. Brrrrr.
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Hehe, no ja to przynajmniej mam jakies glupoty, typu zrobienie szabloniku dla Zalogi G :P
Ech... ciezkie jest to zycie, nie ma co... A tu jeszcze kumpel mnie meczy algorytmami, zebym mu tlumaczyl, grrr...
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
pfff a ja muszę zakuwać...
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Drak'kan --> Nigdy nic nie wiadomo :)
Dobra, zaraz wychodze.
Ide do Kryjówki :)
Na razie i miłego wieczoru zycze :]
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Drak, tyrlaj dropsa :) .
Albo
Dynamizuj slimaka :P .
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-09-19 02:24:24]
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Yis, litosci ;PPPP
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
... kolejny fajny dzień w liceum.. na razie mamy luzy :) i jest ekstra :D
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
a ja mam w czwartek pierwszy test :) . Uuuuuu.
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Yisrael => No i dobrze ci tak :) Mam nadzieje ze z czegos trudnego :P
A ja wreszcie mam wakacje :D Dokladniej 12 dni wakacji no ale coz, liczy sie ze sa :P
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Puknij smerfa w kapelusik :P
A co do testu to raczej latwy, quiz o demokracji w Grecji i republikanskim ustroju w Rzymie. Tez o tem jak kto postrzegal demokracje, inaczej Sokrates, inaczej Arystoteles, Inaczej Perykles, inaczej Tezeusz.
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
A ja w ten weekend jade od Nowego Sacza i jestem szczesliwa :)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
ta...
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Naprawdę :)
Chociaz sam wyjazd to hmm, 40% tego szczescia, ale co tam, nie bede zapeszac ;)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
hyh.... szkola szkola... monotonia O_o
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Wstawac, Nazgule :) .
Jutro kwiz. A ja siedze i browarkuje.
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Yisrael => Alkoholik z ciebie pierwszorzedny jak widze :) Ja juz dawno nic nie pilem :( Ale pocieszam sie piknikiem :P
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Ja chce spac :)
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
O tej godzinei Cody? Toż to środek dnia!
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Dlatego chcialo mi sie spac, teraz juz mi sie nie chce :P
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Kij Ci w oko z tym Piknikiem. Bardzo chcialbym tam byc, pierwszorzedna imprezka, nie ma co.
Wez tego swojego z odslonieta klata na piwko :) .
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
ta ciekawe ile ta czesc miala postow.. 70? 80?
a tu sie o 185 czepiaja :D
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Chyba miala 99 postow. Teraz sie czepiaja bo Soul powiedzial, ze watki seryjne maja miec minimum 200 postow. Skad ten wzrost ? Poprawiona wydajnosc.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
pfff Zasady są po to, aby je łamać.....
Nie uznaje tej zasady :D
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Yisrael => Hmm, jak bedzie chcial to moze go wezme :P Choc i tak nie jest mi on potrzebny do zabawy na pikniku :) Wystarczy mi stare towarzystwo i troche piwa :P Oby im tym razem nie zabraklo...
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
hi all :)
Ide zjesc sniadanie.
+1? Ale mam dziwny humor :P
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
czasem tak miewam :D
A ja mam w sumie dobry humor ;)
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Cody--->jak można jeść śniedanie o 13:30? Toż to już po obiedzie ludzie są:)
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Pirix --> To kiedy Ci ludzie jedza ten obiad? w nocy? :PP
Tak btw, dzis wstałam za wczesnie po zbyt malej ilosci snu, i...ide cos zjesc :)
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Cody--->nie w nocy tylko o godzinie 12:00, czyli w południe.
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
Co tam słychać w "Rozbzykanym Nazgulu"?
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
wieje nudą.
FoXXXMagda [ Pellamerethiel ]
Właśnie widzę, że wieje... ;)
Cody, jak tam wczoraj? Jak imprezka?;D
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Hi all :)
Pelle --> Fajnie bylo, ale dziwnie :) Opowiem Ci na zywo, chociaz nie ma duzo do opowidania :P
Aha - moja komorke ma kumpel, wiec jakbym nie odpowiadała na smsy to sorki ;))
Ta komorka mnie chyba nie lubi :PP
FoXXXMagda [ Pellamerethiel ]
Znowu ją posiałaś... echh, Cody. ;) Będziesz koło 14 w domu? Odpisz na komórkę, bo kompa i tak rano nie włączę.
Miałam dzis pierwszą teorię dot. prawka jazdy. Jest świetnie, a dzięki znajomościom zamiast czasowego będę mieć bezokresowe prawko jazdy, o ile oczywiście zdam... nie pytajcie o szczegóły.;)
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Prawko, mmm, to dopiero nerwowy egzamin :) . Polecam cwiczenie na placu, ja w swojej szkole bylem tylko dwa razy na placy i przez to dwa razy oblalem na placu wlasnie, jak mi sie w koncu udalo stamtad wyjechac miasto bylo betka. Uczylem sie w LUZ-ie.
Nie polecam wierzyc w historie o linijkowych egzaminatorach, przekupstwach etc etc. W moim przypadku byli to normalni ludzie i tyle, wiec nie ma sie co stresowac bez powodu.
A co do bezokresowego - grazt, tez takie mam - zdawalem zanim zrobila mi sie wada wzroku, wiec nie mialem wtedy okularow.
Ucalujcie tez wszystkich na Pikniku ode mnie, a szczegolnie utulcie peeyacka!
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
a dzięki znajomościom zamiast czasowego będę mieć bezokresowe prawko jazdy
Gdybyś trafiła na normalnego lekarza, miałabyś nawet i bez znajomości. Ja zdawałem już w okularach, ale lekarka powiedziała, iż ma nadzieję, że jestem rozsądnym i odpowiedzialnym człowiekiem, bo ma zamiar wystawić mi bezokresówkę. Ja na to, że oczywiście ;oP
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Witam!
W końcu odebrałem indeks z dziekanatu:D
Pelle-->robienie prawka jest proste - egzamin tez. Jak zacznisz jezdzic to pocwicz na placu manewry. A jak Ci dobrze pojdzie to zaczniesz zwiedzac miasto z instruktorem, ktory bedzie mial duzo spraw do zalatwienia. Yisrael ma racje, nei ma co się stresować na zapas. Egzaminatorzy to też ludzie i zazwyczaj są uczciwi - jak będziesz potrafila jeździć to zdasz bez problemu nawet za pierwszym razem.
FoXXXMagda [ Pellamerethiel ]
Ej, kto powiedział, że ja się stresuję?;) Na razie jest swietnie, będę jeździła z najlepszym gościem, 25 lat siedzi w tym biznesie... czasowo miałam mieć prawko do 2010 i przymus noszenia ze sobą okularów (ja bez nich nawet do autobusu bym nie wsiadła!), ale prezeska szkoły, w której sa zajęcia (moje byłe liceum;) poszła coś nagadać i już jest dobrze, hehe... ciekawe, bo Nilc ma taką samą wade i dostała bezokresówkę, dlatego to mnie tak zdziwiło.;) Jazdy będę mieć, jak się skończy teoria, czyli za jakieś dwa tygodnie. :)
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Pelle--->ja nie twierdzę, że Ty się stresujesz. Tylko informuję, że nie warto:)
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Ja tez chce robic prawko :((
To nie fair, obaj moi bracia dostali kase od fatherostwa a mnie nie chca dac :/
Zreszta olac, i tak zmusze :]
Pelle - juz mam komorke :P
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Nazgul umiera? ;)
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Nie ma o czym pisać:(
W dodatku mi się nie chce bo jestem chory:(
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
Pewnie nie zakręciłeś "bocznej klimy" w swoim Lanosie ;oP
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Przecież napisałem, że nie kupie tamtego Lanosa, bo jego stan techniczny okazał się "trochę" gorszy niż przedstawiało ogłoszenie.
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
Wybacz, nie czytałem całego wątku ;o)
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-10-03 21:31:05]
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
spoko:)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
Żyję, choć nie mam komp od tygodnia :( piszę ze szkoły
Trzymajcie Się ;)
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
Ale ja tu dawno nie statsowałem. O czym rozmawiamy??
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
el--->popatrz na daty - ostatnio to o niczym:P
FoXXXMagda [ Pellamerethiel ]
Ech, czemu tu nikogo nie ma?;)
Pozdrawiamy z Angie/Blumschen :)
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Nudy sie znowu jak widac wkradly do nazgula...
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
A mówią ,że inteligentni ludzie się nie nudzą.
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Ja bylam na Rabkonie :)
Jak tylko znajde troszke czasu to napisze cos wiecej. LARPy byly super, poznałam mnostwo swietnych ludzi i w ogole jest pozytywnie :)
Pelle --> Szkoda, ze nie pojechałas, bo okazlo sie, ze z tym ASG to byla pomylka. Owszem, LARPy byly wspolczesne, ale nie strzelalismy. Ale organizatorzy sami sie przyznali, ze dali plamę. Naprawde szkoda, ze Cie nie bylo :(
Lece na uczelnie :)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
żyje al nadal bez kompa i netu
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Cody--->napisz coś więcej o Rabkonie.
crono--->to jak bez kompa i netu się tu wpisałeś?:P
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Na Eru, Pirix, dzis stzreszczałam Rabkon kumpeli i zajeło mi to prawie 4 h, a Ty chcez zebym cos napisała? :P
No dobra :)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
Pirix --> od kolegi :)
ale surprise surprise! MAM WRESZCIE KOMPA :D hahahahaha
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Crono --> Gratuluje :)
Ja siedze na uczelni i korzystam z kompa w bibliotece - koszmar ;) Nie wiedzialam, ze mozna sie AZ tak odzwycaic od zwyklych klawiatur ;)
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Cody--->taka wersje skrotowa. Napisz streszczenie tamtego streszczenia:D
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
No dobra :)
No wiec w piatek pojechalismy do Rabko w skladzie : ja, Padre, Turin, jego kolega - Tomek, i ich jeszcze jeden kolega - Inny. Na miejscu zostawilismy rzeczy w schronisku, zaplacilismy itd :) POgralismy w smieszna gierke strategiczna(jak sobie przypomne jak sie nazywala, to napisze:) Zalapalismy sie na nocnego LARPa; dostalam swietna role Locwy wampirow nie do konca zrownowazonwej psychicznie ;)) Po LARPie bylo ogdnisko, potem impreza pzreniosla sie do pokoju( to byl chyba 5 osobowy pokoj, a spalo tam 9 osob :PP) ogolnie wygladalo troszke jak w czasie zjazdu w MGorzu ;P tyle, ze tu byla przewaga chlopakow (na co ja i jeszcze jedna dziewczyna nie narzekalysmy ;)
brb - przerwa
oki, dalej :)
W sobote musielismy sie zerwac o 8, bo chlopaki jeszcze nie mieli rol, a o 10 zaczynala sie gra głowna. Ostatecznie dostali role ok 10, a zaczelismy grac po 12 ;) gralismy mniej wiecej do 5. Moja ekipa skonczyla dokladnie o 5.04 :P pamietam, bo to mialo znaczenie w grze :)
(Oba LARPY byly wspolczesne, tyle, ze z elementami fantasy :)
Wieczorkiem ognisko, spierwy (nie bede opiwyac dokladnije, co sie tam dzialo, bo zaczne rotflowc i mnie wyrzuca z biblioteki ;PP powiem tylko, ze chlopaki odstawili cos niesamowitego :]] wszystkoe jest na szczescie zarejestrowane na aparacie jeden znajomwej i bede to miala w piatek :)
W niedziele byly finaly jakischs mnejszych rozgrywek, ogolnie pozegnania, gadki o tym co bedzie za rok itd.
(celowo pominelam pakowanie ;P) w naszym wypadku "pakowanie" ;))
Wrocialismy zatloczonym busem sciskajac sie w 6 osob na 5 miejscach (ale ja tam nie narzekam ;) Spelnilam swoj obywatelski obowiazek (znow w ostatniej chwili :P) do domu i spaaaac :)
I zjesc cos porzadnego, bo na Rabkonie zywilismy sie piwem i konserwami :]
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-10-11 16:31:13]
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
ehh. ludzie weekend :D
9000 postów ^^
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
O, a toz to Nazgul zyje :) .
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
...troszke
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Fakt. Co tam slychac?
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Wszystko dobrze :)
Wlasnie nadrabiam zajecia z rabkowego piatku :)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
dobrze w sumie :>
dlugi weekend
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
A coz za zajecia nadrabiasz ?
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Yis --> Musiałam isc na cwiczenia z Biomedyki zeby nie miec nieobecnosci :)
Oki, ide sobie :)
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Witam!
Ostatnio prawie wogóle przed kompem nie siedze - dlatego tak rzadko Nazgula odwiedzam. Ale może w najbliższym czasie to się zmieni.
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
Ja wlasnie za 4 godziny lece z powrotem do kraju... niestety nie nazgulem, a zwyklym samolotem.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
szczesliwej podróży :>
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
Powitajmy Paudyna chlebem i solą.
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
Wolę jajecznicę ;oP
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
I wodka.
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Cody => Bioco ?? Dobra nie czepiam sie, sam moge trafic w przyszlym roku na Bioinformatyke :P To by byla lipa na calego...
Wszedzie gadaja o zarciu i piciu, ten swiat schodzi na psy ... :)
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
To ja tymczasem, miast jeść i pić, zażyję gorącą kąpiel. Ech, miodzio...
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Hehe, zarcie, mniam.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
spać...
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Leczenie kanałowe zęba...Bossko.
NIe dosc, ze cały weekden nało spałam, liczyac, ze wyspie sie dzis to GUZIK!! budze sie w nocy z potwornym bolem zeba. A to dopiero pocatek, bo mozliwe, ze zakazenie jest na dwoch. Grrrrr...
Jestem zmeczona, niewyspana, głodna i ZŁA. NIe chce mi sie isc na zajecia, a z drugiej strony zal mi informatyki.
A olac to, ide tylko na cwiczenia.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
nieciekawie...
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
A ja wlasnie olalem cwiczenia z mechaniki i elektormagnetyzmu... Coz, znowu sie zaczyna wagarowanie na uczelni :P
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-10-17 14:46:31]
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Drak'kan--->jak możesz fizyke olewać - toż to jest wybitnie niewłaściwe:P
Cody--->kanałowe leczenie, brrr*otrząsa się*
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Pirix => Wybitnie niewlasciwym jest dawanie takich pierdol biednym, przyszlym (miejmy nadzieje) informatykom... Z tego co mi kumpel opowiadal to na tych cwiczeniach zrobil im wyklad z takich rzeczy ze moze z jedna osoba (gora dwie) zrozumialo jakies 10% z tego co mowil. Reszta zrobila wielkie oczy i na tym sie skonczylo :) Jutro musze sobie skserowac ten kosmos i jakos to przynajmniej przeczytac, bo o zrozumieniu to nawet nie marze :P
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Drak'kan--->jak skserujesz to powiedz, czy faktycznie to taki kosmos, i napisz co to konkretnie jest. Sadze, ze informatyka niczego czego by nie mogli zrozumie nie wykladaja;)
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Juz mi lepiej :)
Dzis ide na zajecia, grrr, dlaczego musi byc tak cholernie zimno?
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
No wlasnie... cos mi tu wieje w tej robocie ;oP
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Ja siedze na uczelni. Nie ma to jak pech, dojechalam na ucze,nie na czas, zeby sie okazalo, ze...nie wiem gdzie mam zajecia, bo plan zostaw w i nnej kurtce ;PP
Oczywiscie nigdzie nie jest wywieszony. Mozna go zobaczyc w internecie (co wlasnie robie). Zonk polega na tym, ze jest juz za pozno, zeby sie wbic na cwiczenia. Znoe bede musiala isc z inna grupa ;))
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
Cody, ja do dentysty ide w czwartek. Już widze co to bedzie za koszmarny dzień. Za to jaki ja bedę szczęśliwy wieczorem jak od niego wyjdę. Choc coś czuje,że na jednej wizycie się nie skonczy. Mój dentysta nawet mikroskopijną próchnice potrafi wykryć.
Drak'kan [ Thráin Saphireslinger ]
Pirix => Skserowac skserowalem, co nie znaczy ze w ogole zajrzalem do tego :P Jakos narazie mi sie nie chce, mam wystarczajaco na glowie nabiezaco, zeby sie jeszcze przejmowac czyms co mi sie przyda dopiero na przyszly poniedzialek :) A co do wykladanych rzeczy to moim zdaniem polowa tego co mamy na wykladach z przedmiotow nie kierunkowych to sa rzeczy kompletnie zbedne, ale trudno zrobic nam kurs skladajacy sie z trzech wykladow, bo tylko tyle nam bedzie przydatne :P
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
I oto podstawowy problem studiowania. Tracenie czasu i zbetnie wkuwanie czegoś, co i tak nie będzie przydatne.
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Ano właśnie:)
A tak przy okazji to właśnie siedzę na zajęciach:P
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
Co tam słychać w rozbzykanym nazgulu?
Stitch001 [ Witcher ]
Ocho widzę, że parę "Dziadków" się pojawiło w Nazgulu, więc i ja się na chwilkę zamelduję i dołaczam się do pytania Paudynka. ;)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
a ja nie wiem co słychać ;p
u mnie całkiem całkiem.... całkiem do dupy :D
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
El --> i jak było? :)
Ja mam kolejna wizyte we wtorek.
Ech, jutro ta cholerna biomedyka a ja nadal nie mam ksiazki :P
Damnit, powinnam przynajmniej powtorzyc genetyke :)
FoXXXMagda [ Pellamerethiel ]
Hej, witam wszystkich :)
Jak to Shadow stwierdzil, "moze bedzie ze mnie jeszcze dobry student", bo omijal chyba z 4 czy 5 wykladow;PP Na cwiczenia chodze, ale tak mi sie nieee chce... chyba przejde sie w przyszlym tygodniu na wyklad Szyjewskiego "Tolkien, mit, religia". :]
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
do szkoły... mlah blah
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
Cody, nawet mnie nie wnerwiaj .Nic mi nie zrobiła, bo chciałem być dobry i zabrałem ze soba babcię którą wepchnąłem przed siebie bo się bidulka strasznie bała. A że nie była umówiona, gdy przyszła pora na mnie, to sie okazało że juz nie da rady i muszę teraz z takim "odzywajacym sie" zębem przez dwa tygodnie chodzić :( I niech mi ktos powie że jestem niedobrym wnukiem.
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
Pelle :::> Wszystko zalezy od ćwiczeniowca. Generalnie na laborki warto jednak chodzić, natomiast z wykładami bardzo szybko, bo już na pierwszym roku dalem sobie spokój ;oP
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
El --> Ja tez mialam niezla przygode. Siedze sobie w poczekalni umeirajac z bolu, niemal leze na podlodze...Nie bylam umowiona, bo nie planowalam bolu zeba :] koles przede mna jak to zobaczył to mowi do lekarki, ze moze zeby mnie wzieła ierwsza, bo to jednak...a ta cholera, NIE! pan był umowiony to pan idzie! i go normalnie wciagneła do ganinetu. ech...
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Do karczmy wszedl cien. Przemknal przez izbe prosto do baru. Zamowil krew, ktora zawsze tu pijal. Po otrzymaniu jej, bez wlaczania sie w rozmowe poszedl do konta, gdzie skryl sie w cieniu i jedynie sie przysluchiwal.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
kogo me oczy widzą :P Witaj spooke
Twoja kreffff -->
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
Rany, oby od konca dniówki dotrzymać, a potem jak strzała do dentysty. Tym razem nie wyjdę póki mi nie zrobia wszystkiego jak należy, bo ja mówili w reklamie, ból jest uciążliwy i ciagle narasta i narasta.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
pfffff ale męczący tydzień... dzisiaj zwalilem spr z matmy ehhh
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Lezacy w ciemnym rogu mezczyzna zerwala sie nagle i zaczel energicznie rozgladac po izbie. Zwichrzone wlosy zaciagnal do tylu i zwinnie zwiazal. Dostrzegl przed soba kielich z ciemnoczerwona metna ciecza. Chwycił go i wypił duszkiem. Krew nie byla najswiezsza ale tez nienajgorsza.
- Ehh przysneło mi się troche... - zamruczal do siebie zaspanym glosem
Otarl oczy i gdy rozbudzil sie calkiem usiadl spokojnie i poczekal az pojawi sie jakas znajoma mu twarz.
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Właśnie dotarłem na uczelnie, ale tak po prawdzie to nei chce mi się tu siedzieć;P
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Spooke! Witaj :) Gdzie sie podziewales przez te dlugie czesci Nazgula?
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
oj dłuuugie
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Cien podniosl glowe po dosc dlugim czasie...
- Witam! Gdzie sie podziewalem?... Hmmm ... a kiedu tu ostatnio bylem:P
- No to jak sie starasz?? Powinienes sie bardziej przylozyc...
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
spooke--->ta ostatnia wypowiedź w Twoim poście była do mnie? Czy do kogoś innego?
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Prix -----> Nie moja druga wypowiedz byla to crono. Moj blad nie wskazalem adresata:) Z drugiej jednak strony jak przypasowales to do siebie to ty pewnie tez powinienes sie bardziej postarac:P
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
spooke --> no nie umiem.. jutro sprawdzian z historii.. strasznie trudny... :O
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
U mnie zaaamooot jak zwykle :]
Ale milo Cie widziec :))
Teraz lece, spac. Erotycznych Snow, Nazgulu :)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
aha nazgulu.. a o cronie to juz sie nie pamieta co ;p
elemeledudek [ Generaďż˝ ]
Ja nie chcę erotycznych, bo potem muszę posciel zmieniać ;)
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Hehe. A fuj. Witam sie.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
Hi
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Spooke--->przypasowałem do siebie o wcześniej pisałem, że dopiero przyszedłem na zajęcia a już mi się nie chce. I wywnioskowałem, że powinnienem się postarać o chęci do siedzenia na zajęciach:)
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Czolem wszystkim!
Cody ---> Heh moze kiedys uda nam sie zgadac:P
Crono --> Heh a co tam spr. My mamy uklad z babka od histy. Ten kto nie zdaje ma tury ma ocene wystawiona taka jak pierwszy spr czyli w moim wypadku 4... raz sie przylozylem:P
Pirix --- > A takie buty...
Ja dzisiaj wywalczylem miejsce w polonezie i juz po pierwszej probie babka ustawila mnie w pierwszej parze bo stwierdzila ze jestem wyjsciowy. Ogolnie to chyba jej w oko wpadlem (bedac skromnym:P)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
Moje modlitwy zostaly wysluchane i mialem ten sprawdzian i ten rzad do ktorego znalem wszystkie odpowiedzi :D
bedzie 5 :D
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
O! Spooke tutaj? Co za siurprajs ;oP
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Crono ---> Moje gratulacje...
Paudyn --> Co tam panie w polityce??
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
spooke --> Dziekowac Dziekowac :P
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
W polityce to nie wiem, bo generalnie mam ją w rowie ;> Ponoć PiS wygrał wybory, Kaczyński poszedł na przebój, a wszyscy wkoło lamentują o emigracji ;oDDD
U mnie wsio w porządku, w pracy przedłużyli umowę, dali podwyzkę, zyć nie umierać :o) Magisterkę tylko trzeba wreszcie zdać do sprawdzenia :o))))
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Crono ----> Prosze
Paudyn ---> Hehe... Przezylismy trzy zabory przezyjemy i kaczory, a w styczniu moze nastepne wybory beda... No ja najpierw maturke musze zaliczyc ale to dopiero za kilka miesiecy :D
Piwko dla Ciebie =====>
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
A dziękuję, dziękuję. Zdróweczko.
PS. Może u Was w okolicy kręcą się jakieś mulatki? ;o)
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Paudyn ---> Na moim zadupiu??? Raczej nie bardzo... Co najwyzej laske po kilku godzinach w solarce. Niektore wygladaja jak mulatki:P A jesli moge spytac to po co ci mulatka???
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
E tam, solarkowe barbie to ja mam pod blokiem, nie takiej szukam ;o)
Po co? Taki już mój ulubiony typ urody ;oP
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Paudyn ----->To chodzi ci o mulatke w sensie corki czarnoskorego i bialej kobiety czy w sensie ciemnej karnacji? Bo jak w tym drugim to cos tam by sie znalazlo, ale ty pewnie nawet nie wiesz gdzie moje miasto lezy... W ogole weisz gdzie mieszkam??
Ja tam wole slowianki, takie chudziutkie blondyneczki, jednak dziewczyne mam calkiem inna:P
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
spooke ::> Ja już przestałem mówić co wolę, bo zazwyczaj ląduję z czymś innym i wcale nie jest źle ;o)
Jasne, że karnacja, rodzice mnie nie interesują ;oP
PS. Mieszkasz z całą wesołą gromadką (mati,kami,nadhia,sarenka,martusia) w Bełchatowie o ile mnie pamięć nie myli? :o)
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-10-27 21:46:41]
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Hehe z cala wesola gromatka malutkich dzieciaczkow :P Niestety odkad zapuscilem wloski to Kami i Mati mnie nie poznaja. Sarenka nie ma wyboru bo do klasy ze mna chodzi od 11 lat:P Dwie pozostale chodza do jedej klasy. Takie krotkie streszeczenie z Belchatowa bo oni tez chyba juz dawno tu nie zagladali.
A tak w ogole to dobra masz pamiec ... jestem pelen podziwu ... ja od pol godziny mysle i nie mgoe sobie przypomniec gdzie ty mieszkasz:P
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
Spooke :::> Wybiórczą, ale świetną ;o)
PS. Stolicznaja.
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Jak chcesz to pamietasz tak??
Tak przy okazji sie spytam co oznacza jak status jest pogrubiony bo kurde jak bylem ostatnim razem byl normalny a teraz mi przytyl:P
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
przeżyć jutro i jest weekend ^^
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
spooke ::: Ci co są ponad 3 lata na forum, mają grubasa ;oP
Pamiętam pewne rzeczy, o innych zapominam od razu. Na pewno tkwią w mej pamięci wszystkie doznane krzywdy i to od najmłodszych lat :o) Taki dość pamiętliwy sk*** jestem ;o)
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Paudyn ----> Heh, ja tez jestem pamietliwy... Do dzis Pamietam kto mi zabawki w paiskownicy podbieral, pamietam z kim sie w przeczkolu bilem, i wszystkich ktorzy zalezli mi za skore. Wiesz tworze sobie liste jak mnie nie poprzepraszaja do 2027 to ich powystrzelam jednego po drugim:P
Co do statusu to oznacza ze stary jestem tak?? Lo w morde przez te trzy lata napisalem mniej postow niz polowa ludzi tu przez rok ale luz:P
Crono -----> I to dluuuugi weekend:D
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
oj długi :PP
jakoś przeżyłem :D
PS.
musze sie pochwalic 2-tygodniowym GOLMAXem :P
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-10-28 17:53:26]
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Oo jejku, zycie w Nazgulu!! :))
Spooke --> No ja mysle :)
Dluugi weekend, ii, fajnie. Duzo czasu na nauke ;]]
spooke [ Cień optymisty ]
Crono ----> Moje gratulacje :)
Cody -----> No jasne, ze na nauke. W trakcie tygodnia nie ma na to czasu:)
Krewka dla ciebie (i dla mnie:)) =====>
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
To wypijmy za to, zeby moc sie skupic, Spooke :)
Ja sie biore za te nauke i jakos wziac nie moge :P
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
łUP!
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
witam:)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
elo elo
półtora miesiąca się ten wątek ciągnie omg
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-11-03 21:08:22]
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
To do Nazgula niepodobne wręcz.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
ostatnio to róznie bywało
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Wlasnie ostatnio to bardz nazgulowe, niestety. Ale nie ma jak tego zmienic. Samo sie zmieni ...w koncu ;)
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
I znow cisza :)
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Na polnocy cichosza.
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Ciekawe kiedy się Nazgul ożywi?
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
.... ja tam nie wiem.. ja tu tylko sprzątam
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Nie wiem, ale kiepsko idzie.
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Raczej sie nie ozywi.
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
...życie.,.
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Ciekawe opowiadanko:
"Ares couldn’t help himself. He’d be standing in the circle, waiting for big Ernesto and the opposing oversized twelve-year-old center to fight it out for the jump ball, and he’d find himself yelling, “Irritation!” or “Horrible lack of judgment!,” and the boy’s hand would reach into the air a millisecond too late, by which time Ernesto would have slapped the ball halfway down the court with his big paw. Or, when the teams were lined up for a free throw, Ares would repeat the word “shame” in a low hiss until it sounded as though the nearby Salton Sea had broken its bounds and was roaring beneath the basketball court.
After a game during which Ares had flustered another player by screaming “Nightmarish thoughts!” just as the boy was about to dunk the ball and pull his team to a two-point lead, Coach Ortega called him in for a man-to-man sit-down talk. It wasn’t the kind of talk that Ares had seen in after-school movies on TV, the kind where the coach turns a messed-up kid’s life around with one meaningful sentence and a slightly too hard chuck on the shoulder.
“What the hell are you saying out there? What the hell is wrong with you?” Ortega said, and Ares got the feeling that if he had just yelled something about somebody’s mother eating worms he wouldn’t be sitting in the locker room after everyone else had gone home. But then his coach launched into something about respect and sportsmanship and how he had given Ares a chance on the team even though Ares wasn’t particularly good at basketball and how Ares had let him down. How it wasn’t just Ares who had to be embarrassed—Ortega had to be embarrassed as well, because of his horrible lack of judgment.
Ares felt the truth of the words like a river of warm shame coursing through his chest. It was a good feeling. Shame was as familiar and comforting as the pillow on his bed, which was emaciated and full of years of his own smell, and which he could not sleep without.
“Just cut it out, baby,” Laurel said gently that night, after Ares had told her about the coach’s talk. He had a habit of telling his mother all the bad things he did. He was like a dog in this way, showing up at the door with a half-chewed rat in its mouth, asking for approval. “You know what’s right.”
“O.K.,” Ares said, deflated. Something about his mother’s care seemed uncaring. There was too much acceptance in it, a disarming lack of judgment. She was stuffing a raw chicken with lemon halves and rubbing oil on its pimpled skin. Ares watched her hands. They were big, strong, and bumpy with knuckles. They spent their days rubbing and kneading the backs of her massage clients at a spa in Palm Desert. He couldn’t imagine touching all those strangers, patting and slapping them like the chicken she was handling now.
He waited for her to say something more, but her head was tilted to the side as she focussed on the back of a box of couscous. Her reddish hair covered her face. When she tried to pour the grains into a measuring cup, pellets flew across the countertop and onto the floor.
Malcolm let out his weird backward laugh, making the sound on the inhale, so that a stranger might have thought he was choking. He was five and did not talk. Or, as Laurel liked to say, he “chose silence.” He also chose to organize all the videos according to which movie studio made them, and to pile up books in order of size, largest to smallest, then stack them around the main room of the trailer: literary pyramids. Instead of putting the books back on the black metal shelves she had found in a Dumpster a year earlier, Laurel simply used the structures as footstools or side tables for her smelly massage creams and clove-cigarette butts. Ares didn’t know if she left the piles in place as a gesture of support for Malcolm or because she was the kind of person who didn’t kill ants, even when they marched brazenly across the kitchen counter.
Malcolm’s life was a head-bent, shoulders-hunched sidelong glance at the world. The only people he looked in the eye were Ares and Laurel. When Laurel wasn’t around, Ares sometimes showed Malcolm a treasure—half a Mars bar he’d saved from lunch, or a dollar bill—waving it before his brother’s eyes, then quickly hiding it somewhere in the trailer. Malcolm would search frantically while Ares watched, hoping that frustration and desire would compel words out of his brother’s mouth. But Malcolm eventually lost interest in the treasure hunts, or he forgot what he’d been looking for in the first place.
The school had recommended that Malcolm be evaluated by a specialist. The district was obliged to offer the tests to learning-disabled kids. But Laurel had declined. She didn’t want Malcolm to be labelled. “Labels are for boxes,” she said. “So you never have to look inside them. You just say, ‘Oh, I don’t need any more of that.’ ” She wrinkled her nose and waved her hand dismissively, as though whatever that was had a terrible odor. “He’ll talk when he has something to say,” she said sometimes, as if Malcolm’s critical faculties were so sophisticated that by the age of five he had judged the world and found it unworthy of his participation. That he had missed several developmental milestones on his way to being the obtuse, angular kid he was didn’t seem to worry her. Or maybe it did worry her. This was the difficult place Ares lived in: the space between Laurel’s seeming lack of concern, which felt somehow effortful, and his absolute conviction that she blamed everything on him.
“Typical,” she’d say, mimicking the politically correct lingo for normal kids that Malcolm’s special-ed teacher used. “As if being typical were something to strive for.” She liked to hold Malcolm on her lap and stroke the place on the top of his head where he’d fallen. She’d circle the spot until Malcolm’s hair became twisted around her finger. Then she’d extract her hand from the tangle and start over again. Watching her, Ares would become unbearably tense, convinced that one of these days she would come out and say what they were both thinking, what they had both been thinking non-stop for nearly five years. He waited for that moment with the kind of anticipation he felt on the slow ascent to the top of a roller coaster—knowing that what happened on the other side would be both painful and exhilarating, rich with the possibility of utter annihilation.
Two days after the “nightmarish thoughts” incident, Ares took Malcolm out of class early so that the two of them could ride their bikes to the clinic for a dentist’s appointment. The other kids at school cut a wide swath around Room 23, the “ ’tard room,” as if some force inside might reach out and grab them and suck out their otherwise normal brains. Some of the boys made gooney sounds if they heard laughter coming from behind the always closed door, and Ares had more than once heard his brother referred to as a “freak.” He never defended Malcolm—a worse betrayal, he knew, than what he’d done to his brother in the first place.
When he opened the door, the room felt strange. It was too warm, for one thing, and slightly muzzy; Ares felt as if he were looking through a camera lens that had not been adjusted to focus. A boy in a motorized wheelchair hung his head down over his desk in a way that did not resemble either concentration or sleep. In one corner, a teacher led a group of kids in a song that sounded like “Yesterday,” except that the words and the tune were stretched out like Play-Doh, and Ares couldn’t be sure. Malcolm sat at a desk counting paper clips and putting them into piles of twenty.
“He’s smarter than those other kids,” Ares told his mother that night, after the dentist’s appointment. “He’s not learning anything in there.”
“Malcolm is going to learn different things in his life than math or spelling,” she said. “For instance, right now he’s learning forbearance.”
That night, Ares woke up falling. Even when his brain registered that he was secure in his bed, he continued to have the gut-inverting sensation that he had not yet landed, that the worst was yet to come.
Don’t look at the clock. But it was too late. His eyes, those betrayers, shifted to the right and there was the electric-green warning—3:15. Immediately, he felt trapped in the night, and even though his mother and brother slept nearby—Laurel in her own tiny room separated from the main room by a curtain of playing cards stapled together in long strips, and Malcolm on the living-room couch, so close that Ares could have touched them if his fingers could magically pass through the laminated plywood walls of his room—he was alone. The nighttime quiet dulled the sounds of trucks and cars on the nearby highway, and the star-pocked sky obliterated the daytime lustre of golden arches and other neon enticements. Outside, there was only the desert—huge, an impermeable membrane.
Panic flooded his body and he sat up. He slid open the small window. It stuttered along its bent metal runner until it stopped halfway and wouldn’t travel any farther. He inhaled deeply, smelling things he knew: the mesquite in the air, the leftover smoke of the next-door neighbor’s barbecue, the distant chemical odor of the Salton Sea.
And there it was: the memory he woke with each night of his life at precisely this hour. Go away. But it insisted on itself. He lay back, a forearm slung across his eyes, and let it have its way.
It was always the same. Ares is eight. Laurel has pulled off the highway into the SoCo gas station in Niland, because Malcolm has just unloaded into his diaper and something yellow and foul-smelling is leaking out onto his clothes. Even Laurel, who loves everything about this baby from his shit to his snot, can’t imagine making it home with this stench. The faded ducks on Malcolm’s onesie look as if they were swimming in pond scum. Ares slides as far away from his brother as possible in the back seat of the Toyota Corolla hatchback, but it isn’t far enough, and he starts to gag.
“Oh, come on,” Laurel says. “Like you never messed your pants.”
“Not like that,” Ares moans.
The minute Laurel stops the car, Ares bolts and goes to stand on the concrete island between two gas pumps. He quickly scans the surroundings for the possibility of humiliation in the form of someone he knows from school. Laurel holds the baby in one arm. The travel wipes and a fresh diaper hang from her mouth like cat prey as she flips up the hatchback. She lays Malcolm on the ripped upholstery and goes to work.
“He’s sick! What’s wrong with him?” Ares says when he gets a glimpse of Malcolm’s production.
“It’s the heat,” Laurel says. “It’s giving him the runs.”
It is late in the day; the warm air sits in place like a fat man in a lawn chair. Another five minutes, and Ares feels the kind of hot that makes him want to escape his skin. Laurel always tells him that his brown skin can withstand the desert better than her fair, freckled Irish skin, and that he should be grateful to his father for this. But Ares thinks that his skin is one more thing about his father that, as of yet, has no proven value—like his last name, Ramirez, which, along with his first name, serves as an instant invitation to ridicule. He is sure that his father, whoever he is, had no say in choosing the first name, especially since, according to Laurel, he had gone back to Peru by the time Ares was born.
Laurel carries the freshly changed Malcolm toward Ares, holding the befouled diaper before her like a gift.
“Are you kidding me?” Ares says, backing away.
“Can you just help me, please, and throw this out?” She gestures with her chin toward the garbage can that sits on the other side of the island.
“I’ll take him,” Ares says.
“Jesus,” Laurel sighs. “It’s just the body, honey. Everyone poops.” She shifts Malcolm into Ares’s arms and throws the diaper into the can, where it floats above the rim like a small iceberg on the lake of crushed taco wrappers and cellophane torn from cigarette packs. Ares is hoping that they will leave as quickly as possible so that no one will be able to associate them with this embarrassing thing, but to his horror Laurel heads toward the gas station’s convenience store. Ares looks after her, seized with the fear he often has that she is walking away forever. His mother is a conditional concept.
But he is holding the baby, and she loves the baby, who is brown, too, darker than Ares, and looks like a Cahuilla Indian because that’s what his father, whom Malcolm has never met, either, is. She loves this baby, and she stares into his eyes as if she were looking for a secret message in those black-bean irises, something that will tell her what comes next. She smells his skin and licks his hands and trims his fingernails with her teeth. Ares can’t remember if she treated him with the same intensity when he was a baby. He is both horrified at the thought and desperate for it to be true.
Malcolm starts to squirm in Ares’s arms. Ares bounces him up and down, trying to settle him, but Malcolm is getting frantic, looking over Ares’s shoulder, and then twisting himself around so that he can look the other way.
“She’s coming back,” Ares whispers into Malcolm’s sweaty neck. He makes shushing noises and even starts to sing whatever he can remember of the Barney song, looking around to make sure that no one hears him, because he has enough problems in school, with the kids asking him is he, like, a horoscope sign or something? He tells them he is the god of war, which makes them laugh but then grow glum, because they see him reading books in the hallway during recess, and they suspect that he’s playing with their ignorance. That’s when they get angry and start punching.
Malcolm screams, and even though Ares sings louder and switches to the SpongeBob theme song, which Malcolm loves so much that he rocks back and forth in his ExerSaucer like a spaz when the show comes on, the kid isn’t having any comfort. He starts to kick Ares in the stomach. He’s strong, and one kick lands right below Ares’s ribs and, for a second, takes his breath away. Ares tells Malcolm to cut it out or else, and Malcolm puts his fat hands on Ares’s chest and pushes himself away hard, and Ares drops him.
Malcolm goes down like a medicine ball. Ares hears the thud of his body as it hits the concrete before rolling lazily off the lip of the island onto the ed pavement beside the wheels of the car. Next, the most terrifying thing happens: nothing. Malcolm doesn’t move. He doesn’t make a sound. It’s as if someone had pressed the pause button on the universe and everything stood still. Ares can’t hear the cars passing on the highway, or the sounds of the construction equipment going full tilt behind the convenience store. All he hears is the inside of his head, which sounds like water echoing through a pipe.
Then the finger lets go of the button and everything starts up at once—Malcolm screaming, Laurel running and yelling things that don’t sound like words, her arms pushing Ares out of the way, the fat guy from the convenience store running from side to side, his red company vest flapping like useless wings. He screams, “Nine-one-one!,” turns around, and does his jig back to the store while Laurel shouts, “No! No!,” and gets into the car and starts the engine, not even stopping to put Malcolm in his car seat but holding him on her lap, one hand pressing him to her chest, so that a flower of blood appears on her shirt, the other gripping the wheel. She pulls out of the gas station so fast that the door closes on its own, trapping the end of her patterned skirt so that it waves back and forth as if bidding Ares goodbye. And Ares, because he doesn’t yet understand what’s going on, lifts his hand in response and waves to the Corolla as it disappears into its own cloud of desert dust.
Later, Victor, the convenience-store guy, drives Ares to Indio in his white Dodge Ram Charger tricked out with extra-large wheels. Ares knows that it’s wrong to be excited to be in such a truck, but its height makes him giddy with a sense of power and safety that he rarely ever feels down below.
The hospital is the newest, cleanest place for miles. Ares feels like a smudge. Everything is quiet, and the nurses and orderlies move as though they weren’t sure the hospital was theirs to keep. A nurse tells Victor to wait—the doctor will be out soon to talk to him and his son, at which point Victor gets nervous, and he tells the nurse that he doesn’t even know this kid, really, and he’d better get back to work before he gets fired.
“Just”—he says, turning to Ares, his fleshy face settling into a perplexed look as he searches for something important to say—“don’t move.”
In the waiting room, the television hangs like a loose tooth from the ceiling. A Spanish-language soap opera plays without sound. A man and a woman stare silently at the TV. He holds a blood-soaked blue-and-white checked kitchen towel to his head. They look calm, and it occurs to Ares that the woman is the reason for all the blood. It’s something about the way she won’t look the man in the eye when she tends to his wound, and the way he pats her hand, as if to let her off the hook. There is forgiveness in the way they are together.
Ares tries to read one of the wrinkled car magazines that lie on empty chairs around him, but he can’t keep himself from worrying about what his life is going to be like now that he has dropped his brother. Maybe Laurel will try to find his father and hand him over, even though she says she has no idea where the man is, and he was no one special to her anyway. Or maybe she will turn Ares in to the police and he will have to go to juvenile, like Rudolpho from the fifth grade, who set fire to the cactus garden after the whole school had come in on a Saturday to plant it for Pride Day.
After a couple of hours, Laurel comes through the swinging double doors that separate the waiting room from the rest of the hospital. A nurse follows her, carrying something that looks like a huge roll of toilet paper; Ares realizes that it’s Malcolm, bandaged all over like a pathetic attempt at a Halloween mummy costume. When Laurel sees Ares, she bursts into tears and runs over to him. She pulls him out of his chair and wraps herself around him. She says, “I’m sorry. Oh, baby. I’m so, so sorry.”
And, standing there with his head pressed into her soft chest, her hands stroking his head so hard that he thinks his hair may come out, he has the feeling that she is not sorry because she left him at the gas station, or because Malcolm is so banged up you can’t see his face. She is sorry because she knows that, like his skin and his name, this new fact is something that will stick with him for the rest of his life.
Malcolm screamed in the night. Ares waited for the reassuring clump of Laurel’s feet hitting the floor, for the sound of the card curtain fluttering noisily apart, for her groggy, soothing voice to calm Malcolm down. But then Malcolm screamed again.
“Mom!” Ares yelled, stumbling out of his bed and into the living room. His underwear was twisted around his hips, and he tried to straighten it as he felt for Malcolm in the dark. Malcolm was sitting up on his couch, hitting his leg with his hand.
“Spy, spy, spy,” he said.
“Mom!” Ares called. Where was she? Why did he have to be the one to drag his ass out of bed in the middle of the night to take care of Malcolm? He gathered Malcolm in his arms and began to rock him, holding his brother tightly so that he couldn’t scratch or hit himself, as he’d seen Laurel do countless times. When Malcolm’s body began to relax, Ares risked letting go with one hand, and snapped on the light above Malcolm’s bed. The card curtain was open, the sweep of it pulled to one side and caught by a hook, so that it resembled a girl’s hair tucked behind an ear. Laurel was not in her bed. She was having sex with Richard, Ares thought. She’d come home at dawn, creeping into the trailer thinking that Ares had no idea she’d even been gone. This was the only information he had on her, but it was useless information, since he was sure that if he told her he knew about her nighttime journeys she’d simply smile and ruffle his hair and not even get mad. He turned his concentration back to his brother. Malcolm’s eyes were wide open, but he was in a place that was neither sleep nor wakefulness. During these night terrors, Malcolm was somehow more present than he was during the day. He’d look at Ares or Laurel as though he were about to say something, perhaps even explain what he had been thinking about all his life. But Ares knew not to make the mistake of hoping. Hope was only a selfish desire for absolution.
“There’s no spider,” he said, rocking his brother, although he knew it was unlikely that Malcolm was actually talking about a spider. He was used to taking Malcolm’s sounds and gestures and inventing logic around them. That is what he and his mother did: they created Malcolm’s world for him and pretended they were right. “He wants juice,” Laurel would say if Malcolm smacked his lips in the direction of the refrigerator. But what if they were wrong? What if Malcolm wanted the opposite of juice? What if he didn’t want at all? What if the fall had knocked desire right out of him?
When Malcolm’s body was no longer a heavy lump in Ares’s arms but something stiff with the architecture of will, Ares knew that the terror was coming to an end.
“Hey, buddy,” Ares said.
Malcolm looked toward Laurel’s room.
“She’s not here right now,” Ares said.
Malcolm craned his neck and looked back at Ares.
“You had a dream,” Ares said, although he was sure that this was wrong. The terrors were not dreams. They were more like the moment when a cartoon character runs off a cliff—before he starts to fall; the terrors were a seizure of understanding. Ares thought that in these nocturnal moments his brother had periods of recognition, periods in which he realized that he was trapped by silence, by useless fixations, by the need to make the sound pa over and over again, or to count peas. Ares thought that if he were in his brother’s situation he’d be frightened all the time.
By the time Malcolm fell asleep, Ares was fully awake. His body was wired, restless. He lay in his bed, staring at his bookshelf, another castoff that Laurel had picked up in Slab City, the old gunnery range where Richard, along with the other assorted snowbirds and wanderers, stayed every winter. Even in the dark, he could make out the dull, pseudo-gilded letters on the binding of “Gold and Gods of Peru,” a stalwart hardback among the shorter, stubbier paperbacks in his collection. It was a library book, long overdue. Two years overdue, he reminded himself, and felt the familiar pinch of guilt he experienced whenever he caught sight of the book. He had checked it out of the school library in the fourth grade in order to write a report on Peru. Somehow, he had never returned it. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten; he had thought about returning the book many times. But each time he did the idea seemed overwhelming, exhausting, as if the book weighed a hundred pounds and he would be required to carry it by himself. The book’s absence had escaped the notice of Mrs. Pearl, the school librarian, and he had so far got away without paying a fine. But this made him feel even worse. Getting away with something was worse than suffering the consequences. He was too embarrassed to go into the library anymore. He had become a reader of Dumpster literature—books that other people didn’t think were good enough to keep. In this way, he had read “Dianetics,” a biography of Dolly Parton, some pretty good espionage books, and “East of Eden,” minus twenty pages in the middle, which had been ripped out.
He had thought that Laurel might say something about the Peru book, but she didn’t make a habit of engaging in Ares’s school life, and it was unlikely that she would notice the book unless Ares pointed it out to her. He reached over and took it from the shelf. A month ago, he had found out from other kids at school that Mrs. Pearl’s son had been arrested for murder. His own crime now seemed pathetic. He was an accidental book thief. Mrs. Pearl was the mother of a killer.
The sound of tires crunching over the rubble driveway swelled and then stopped. The car engine cut out, and Ares heard the gentle ticking of the motor as the door squeaked open and slammed shut. He could barely hear Laurel’s entrance into the trailer. He thought about calling out, letting his mother know that he was onto her. But what if that made her stop going out? Then he would never be able to experience the relief of her return. The card curtain made a noise like a thousand tumbling dominoes as she let it fall from its hook.
He carried “Gold and Gods of Peru” to school the next day, but when he approached Mrs. Pearl’s desk he couldn’t bring himself to take it out of his backpack. She looked up at him expectantly. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but one strand had broken loose and she repeatedly tucked it back in, looking embarrassed, as though something more private than a lock of hair had escaped confinement. She had a round face and thin lips, and freckles spilling across the bridge of her nose. He thought she was too pretty to have a murderer for a son. She had no eyebrows, but she drew little arches above her eyes with a dark pencil, which made her look as though everything astonished her. Her nails had grown out beyond their pink polish, and little half-moons of natural color showed where the nail met the skin. Ares felt as if he were seeing a part of her that he wasn’t supposed to see.
“Do you need help?” she asked.
“No.”
A framed picture sat on her desk. It was of a boy, smiling. He had dark hair like Mrs. Pearl, and real eyebrows. Acne had made a rutted landscape of his face. He sat in front of the familiar blue sheet that the school photographers hung on the gym wall when they came for photo day. He was looking off to the side and up, as if trying to think of something. The name of the photographer was embossed in gold across the bottom of the photo. You could get the photo without the name on it, but that cost extra. Like his mother, he supposed, Mrs. Pearl had just kept the proof copy and thrown out the order form.
Ares had heard the talk about Mrs. Pearl’s son, but there were many different stories: he had murdered someone in a botched holdup at a convenience store; or he was part of the gang that had been terrorizing towns around the Salton Sea. No one really knew what was true, but each kid pronounced his version of events with grave certainty, thrilled, for a moment, to be the one everyone else looked to for the truth. The photo on Mrs. Pearl’s desk was in a heavy brown frame decorated with painted flowers. The words “For Mom” were stencilled on one of the petals. Ares knew that inmates made license plates, and he wondered if they made picture frames, too.
Mrs. Pearl saw where Ares’s gaze had fallen. “There’s a sign-up sheet for the computer,” she said, pointing to an adjacent wall.
“I don’t need a computer,” he said.
She waited for him to state his purpose. When he remained silent, she sighed and looked mildly annoyed: another kid ruining her day. He left the library.
That afternoon, Ares’s team played a team from Indio. Ares ran past the best player on the team and whispered “Typical” three times. The shooter missed, but Ares’s team lost anyway.
Malcolm and Ares biked past the Gunnery Range checkpoint station. It was abandoned, but a beer can stood on the window ledge. Teen-agers came out here to drink and get high. Every so often, the cops would do a sweep, and then there would be an assembly about “Just say no.” Ares and Malcolm rode past the station and on into Slab City, past the bar and an advertisement for a community talent show that was to take place in three weeks. Ares knew that Slab City had an unofficial mayor, and that it even had its own shortwave radio broadcast. But you had to bring in your own water and get rid of your own sewage, because Slab City wasn’t really an official city. Laurel said that none of the people there paid for the land they lived on. There were people in Slab City who had big, expensive trailers and who could afford to pay taxes and live in a place with sewage pipes and fences, but they chose not to because, she said, they were also the kind of people who liked to get away with things.
The day was hot, and nobody lingered outside the trailers. Ares banged on the door of Richard’s Airstream, an aluminum tube, shaped like a cigar, its surface a patchwork of cast-off material that he cobbled together whenever the trailer needed repairs. Richard had to stoop to fit his long, narrow body inside the frame. He shaved his head, and Ares could see two thick blue veins running behind his temples. He looked out at the boys through round wire-rimmed glasses.
Malcolm squawked happily. “You yell like that, someone’s liable to come out of their trailer and shoot you,” Richard said, though Ares could tell that he enjoyed Malcolm’s enthusiasm. One of Richard’s pant legs was tucked into a scuffed motorcycle boot; the other was hitched undecidedly halfway up the shank of its boot. A Chinese symbol hung from a leather thong at his neck. Richard claimed that he had once worked in Asia. He also said that he had fought, but not in a war. He was never specific about which country he had worked in or whom he had fought for, and whenever Ares tried to pin him down Richard was evasive. When Ares learned about the C.I.A., he decided that Richard must be an agent. But Laurel said that Richard wasn’t good at keeping secrets—this was how she knew that he didn’t really love her. She said she didn’t think that he was someone the government would trust.
Malcolm couldn’t contain his excitement. He reached for Richard’s shirt, trying to pull him out of the trailer.
“O.K., O.K.,” Richard said. “But I’m not paying this time. Business is bad.”
“No fair,” Ares said.
“That’s my deal,” Richard said, his voice so low it sounded as though it were rumbling from the back of a cavern. “Take it or leave it.”
Malcolm loved the bumpy ride over the rock dunes. The jeep lurched forward and back and from side to side all at the same time, so that it didn’t seem as if they were actually getting anywhere. Richard huffed and groaned, his cigarette bobbing between his lips. He made a big show of effort as he shifted gears with his right hand. The long fingers of his left hand gripped the frayed plastic cover of the steering wheel. If the wheel were a person’s neck, Ares thought, that person would be dead by now. He wondered if Richard had ever killed a person with his bare hands.
A few minutes later, Richard stopped the jeep, and Malcolm and Ares scrambled out and ran off into the rocky foothills. “What’s yours is mine!” Richard called after them.
When Malcolm and Ares went scrapping with Richard, Richard rewarded their finds: a nickel for small scraps; a quarter for something big. Richard said that in previous years he had found bombs, and that he’d pay five dollars if the boys came up with one, but Ares had never seen a bomb, and he wasn’t sure what it would look like. Richard sold the scrap to a junker, who then sold it to a foundry in Mexico. At one time, he had been able to make a certain living off his finds—enough to carry him through a winter in the desert. But the Mexicans weren’t doing much business these days, and scrapping had become more of a way to pass time than an actual job.
Richard threw a beat-up cowboy hat over his bald head, took his Geiger counter out of the jeep, and began to walk slowly. The machine gave off a soft hum that Malcolm tried to match with his own voice as he walked around in crazy eights. Ares was never sure that Malcolm understood what they were looking for; he presented rocks and pieces of metal to Richard with the same zeal. And sometimes he just wandered, head bent toward the ground, and Ares knew that he wasn’t looking for anything at all.
Ares dragged his feet so that they displaced the top layer of soil. He was disappointed that Richard wasn’t going to pay them for their discoveries, and he considered blowing off the whole search. But the truth was, even without the incentive of a reward, he loved studying the ground like this, directing his gaze and his entire mind onto minute bits of earth as they passed below him. When he was with Richard, Ares didn’t think about Malcolm, or what he had done to make Malcolm the way he was. He didn’t think about his mother, his library book, or Coach Ortega. He thought about dirt. The desert ceased to be the impervious, dry expanse that it usually was. It became the world writ small, miniature valleys and mountains, square inches of variegated detail. It became a place where you could see that you were not always right about what a thing was. It gave him hope.
Twenty yards from the jeep, the counter sent up a strong, insistent beep. Ares and Malcolm ran over to Richard, who stooped down, studying something on the ground. When Ares reached him, Richard held up a magazine clip. “This is a surprise,” he said. “Thought things were pretty well picked over. Unless this is new. Meth addicts killing each other with machine guns now.” He shook his head and handed the clip to Malcolm. “Put it in the box.” Malcolm held the magazine to his chest like a treasured doll and ran to the jeep.
“He thinks it’s something to love,” Ares said.
“He wouldn’t be the first person to love a gun, that’s for sure.”
“Mom says it’s O.K., the weird stuff that he does.”
“Well, the way I see it, when you’re in a place you forget what it looks like from the outside. It’s like how you never see yourself grow taller or older. You need other people to tell you the truth. That’s how we all end up living the lives we do. Nobody ever tells us what we really look like.”
Ares wondered if his mother had ever told Richard about Malcolm’s fall. If Richard had been at the gas station that day, he might have caught Malcolm with his big, powerful hands. He might have saved him.
An hour later, Malcolm and Ares had found nothing. Richard had found an alloy bullet casing and some random pieces of metal. After throwing his finds into the box, Richard squatted down by the back wheel of the jeep and lit another cigarette. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his head with his palm. Malcolm picked up the Geiger counter and walked with it, waving it over the ground. It was turned off, but Malcolm made the sound of the motor, and then such a perfect replication of the beep of discovery that Richard and Ares both looked up expectantly.
“Should put that talent to good use,” Richard said, exhaling smoke.
“How?” Ares said.
Richard shrugged. “Decoy. Could make a person think something was there that wasn’t. You’d be shooting at a ghost.”
Ares tried to figure out how this comment fit into his growing picture of Richard. Maybe he was a bounty hunter. Maybe he was a hired killer. Maybe he was a criminal, too.
Malcolm ran back to the jeep grinning. Richard reached into his pocket and pulled out two dollar bills. He gave one to each boy.
“You said you weren’t paying,” Ares said.
“For keeping me company,” Richard said.
As Ares turned his bicycle into the parking lot of the store in front of the date farm, he looked back over his shoulder to make sure that Malcolm was following him. Only a few cars were still there at the end of the day—tourists collecting their prepackaged dates for the trip home.
Inside, Ares ordered two date shakes from the girl behind the deli counter; she looked like a drawing in the sex book that his mother used to keep by the side of her bed, but which was now the foundation layer of one of Malcolm’s pyramids. The girl had dark eyes rimmed with black pencil, and her mouth was full and turned up at the ends, so that even though she wasn’t smiling at Ares, even though she barely seemed to register him as she blended the shakes and yelled above the sound to the other, fatter girl behind the counter, he imagined her as one of those drawings, the outlines of her body formed from repeated strokes of a pencil.
Malcolm waited outside at a picnic table, patiently ripping a paper napkin into small bits. Ares handed him the shake and, to Malcolm’s delight, blew the paper off the straw. After a few sips, Ares was sick of the oversweet shake, but Malcolm was stunned into pleasure by the drink. He didn’t take his mouth from the straw the entire time he drank, not even to breathe. Malcolm was this way with everything he did; it was as if a given activity wiped out all thought of anything else. His entire existence narrowed in on the time and the physical space of one second. And then another. Ares knew that his brother’s problem was exactly this disconcerting habit of fixating on one single, often meaningless thing to the exclusion of all other, more relevant information. But he sometimes wondered whether it would be a relief to be like Malcolm, and not have the whole army of your impulses and contradictory desires trying to crash the gates of your consciousness at once.
Malcolm reached the bottom of his shake with a wet slurp. He finally took his mouth off the straw and inhaled a laugh. He peeled the plastic lid off the shake and licked the underside.
“I guess you liked that,” Ares said.
“Ma, ma, ma, ma,” Malcolm said.
“No more.” There was no end to Malcolm’s appetite. He ate whenever food was offered to him, even if he had just had a huge meal. Laurel and Ares had learned to tell him when he was finished eating, and they were expert at distracting him so that his mind could tear itself away from the idea of food and land on a new obsession for a while. Of all Malcolm’s traits, it was this hunger that upset Ares the most. It filled him with a great nostalgic sadness for lost things, the way a rich person might feel if he had to live as a pauper, always remembering the fancy cars and clothes of a bygone life.
Ares took Malcolm’s cup, replaced the top, and tossed it into the nearby garbage can. Malcolm let out a piercing scream and raced to retrieve the cup. Gently, he wiped it off. “Pop, pop, pop,” he chanted over and over. Ares knew that he would bring the cup home and add it to his menagerie of inanimate objects—rocks, sticks, empty envelopes, and soda-can pull tabs that he collected and often spoke to in strange murmurs and squeaks.
On the way home, Malcolm and Ares pedalled side by side. When they saw a flock of white pelicans making their low flight toward the sea, Malcolm looked at Ares with a huge grin.
“Do it, man,” Ares said, encouragingly. “Go ahead and do it.”
And Malcolm let out a caw that was so exact, so piercingly beautiful, that Ares felt his heart contract.
“What did he eat?” Laurel said, as she watched Malcolm bound up the trailer steps, screeching his uncanny pelican caw. Once inside, Malcolm spun around the living room, his arms spread on either side of him.
“A shake,” Ares said. He knew that sugar, for Malcolm, was like a friend who was always urging you to do things that would get you into trouble. He waited for Laurel’s admonition, but it didn’t come. She simply stood, hands on hips, head tilted to one side. She watched Malcolm intently, waiting for the right moment to step in and grab him the way girls in the school playground waited to leap into the path of a swinging jump rope at exactly the right second, so that they wouldn’t trip. When she did move in, she quickly wrapped Malcolm in her arms, holding him to her body. He laughed and continued trying to flap his arms, but she had him trapped.
“Let’s have a bath, baby,” she said into his hair as she moved him awkwardly toward the bathroom. “Help me with his clothes,” she called back to Ares.
Ares reluctantly followed behind, reaching for Malcolm as his mother bent down to run the bath water. He grabbed Malcolm’s T-shirt. “Arms up,” he said. Malcolm didn’t obey, and instead squirmed inside Ares’s hold, grinning and laughing. “Arms up, dude,” Ares said more forcefully, frustrated by his brother, and by the obviousness of his own unmentioned mistake.
“Don’t yell,” Laurel said over the sound of water slapping against the plastic-lined tub. “It doesn’t help.”
Ares got the shirt up and over Malcolm’s head, then started on his jeans. He leaned down, and Malcolm draped his body over Ares’s bent back, making it nearly impossible for Ares to move or to push the pants down Malcolm’s hips. When he finally got Malcolm’s pants to his ankles, Ares sat on the floor to untie his shoes. Malcolm sat, too, and then lay back on the bathroom floor, thrilled by his nakedness. His hands went to his penis.
“Cut it out, man,” Ares said.
“That’s why it’s there,” Laurel said, reaching under Malcolm’s arms and lifting him up and into the tub.
“Fuck!” Ares exclaimed when the splash hit his shirt and pants.
“Lovely,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“That word coming out of those beautiful lips,” she said. “O.K., baby.” Laurel turned to Malcolm, sighing. “Want bubbles?” She showed Malcolm the nearly empty bottle capped with a plastic elephant head.
Ares left the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Still, he could hear the sound of Laurel struggling to quiet Malcolm. She sang “Hush Little Baby,” and Malcolm droned along. Ares headed out of the trailer and walked to the edge of town, toward the beach. He found a fallen palm frond and dragged it close to the water. The Salton Sea, or the “sinkhole,” as he referred to it, moved listlessly in the windless early evening. A few birds alighted on its surface, floated around in the water, then took off again, like people at a drive-through. Ares remembered when he was six, a time before Malcolm, when his own arms and legs were as thin and rubbery as licorice rope. He had pleaded with Laurel to take him for a swim in “my ocean.” Then, the sinkhole had been his biggest treasure, a jewel as huge as he could imagine the world to be, its distant shore his unreachable horizon. Laurel had let him swim, although even then there were reports of fish dying, poisoned by the polluted runoff from farm irrigation that fed the sea.
Ares thought that Mrs. Pearl must really love her son—to keep his high-school picture on her desk like that, where everyone could see it. Maybe she didn’t believe he was really a killer. Maybe she thought that if she took down the picture people would think that she had given up on him. Ares hoped that he wouldn’t get acne when he was older. But probably he would, since he was a thief and also a trash-talker and there had to be some kind of payback.
He walked home, past the wood-frame houses and trailers, some derelict, some enlivened by cactus gardens and tangles of sagging flowers and date palms that resembled girls with long torsos and tiny heads. He passed the general store that sold cans of chili and sauerkraut, frozen dinners, emergency flashlights, and lengths of garden hose. The school bus stopped in front of the store each morning, carrying the young children to Niland and the older ones to the high school in Calipatria. By the time the bus returned each afternoon, there were only five or six kids on it.
He often wondered why he and Malcolm and their mother didn’t live in Palm Springs or Palm Desert, someplace closer to his mother’s work. Laurel said it was because they owned their trailer, and she could never afford to buy property in those rich-people places. But Ares thought there were other reasons, too. The sea, that repository of crippled nature, comforted Laurel. Sometimes he saw her there in the evenings, staring out at the flat plane of water while Malcolm wandered around the shore, stooping to inspect garbage. The Salton Sea needed its champions the way stray dogs needed rescuers, people who turned up their noses at the purchase of purebreds when there were so many abandoned frightened mongrels lurking beneath underpasses and beside freeways.
He wondered if his family would be able to survive anywhere else. Bombay Beach, like all the half attempts at towns nearby, was a place for people who had a provisional relationship to the world. Mecca, Niland—these towns were full of migrant laborers, drug dealers, snowbirds in their patched-together homes, like Richard. Daily, Ares watched Border Patrol cars speeding south along the highway, lights flashing self-importantly like some backward version of a police escort. Kids were pulled out of school all the time, and you never saw them again.
By the time Ares got home, Malcolm was asleep. Laurel was sitting at the kitchen table, knitting a hat.
“Sorry about the shake,” Ares said.
“Maybe sugar isn’t such a good idea unless we’re really prepared for the consequences.”
“You told me that before.”
“You probably forgot.”
“I didn’t forget. I remembered it the whole time.”
She looked up from her knitting. “Then why’d you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Everyone messes up,” she said. “Look at me.” She held her knitting out in front of her. “I messed up this whole row. I think I dropped a stitch. There’s a big hole.” She put the knitting to her face so that her eye lined up with the gap. “I see you,” she said in a singsong voice.
“Is Richard leaving soon?”
She put down the knitting. “It’s almost June. Pretty late for him to be hanging around, isn’t it?”
“Maybe he’s going to stay.”
“Richard?” she said, laughing lightly. “No, no, no. He’s not a stayer.”
“Like you?”
“Me? Where would I go?”
He shrugged. “Nowhere.”
“Nowhere that doesn’t include my guys,” she said, beginning to unravel a row of knitting. “Don’t talk. I have to concentrate now.”
That night, he woke up to the sound of a siren. He listened until its notes had been swallowed up by the desert. Someone was about to get caught. Perhaps it was someone from Mexico, or even Peru. Or perhaps it was someone who had killed someone else, like Mrs. Pearl’s son. He looked at the clock. 3:15. He lay back. And there they were again at the gas station, on that hot, hot day.
His cheeks were filled with words. His skin felt tight, his muscles ached with the desire to release them. The players ran up and down the court. He told himself, Don’t do it. But he couldn’t hold it in. “Murder!” he yelled as an opponent lined up for an outside shot.
He was thrown out of the game. Ortega didn’t even bother to yell at him. He just gestured with his head toward the locker room and Ares knew that he was finished. There was a can of soda sitting on a bench in the locker room. Ares shook it, popped the top, and let Coke spray all over the walls.
Ortega arrived in the locker room and surveyed the mess. “You’re out of here, Ramirez,” he said calmly. “You’re off the team.” He stood there for another minute, his hands on his hips, staring at his shoes as if he were trying to think of some final words he could offer. Ares wanted to tell him not to bother. It wasn’t like in the movies. It wouldn’t make a difference.
Mrs. Pearl was in the stacks, reshelving books from a small rolling cart.
“You know the Dewey decimal system?” Ares asked. He was still wearing his basketball uniform, stained now with Coke spray.
“Yes,” she said, looking up. “You have to in order to be a librarian.”
“That’s cool,” he said.
“Are you interested in becoming a librarian?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a satisfying job.”
“Do you have to go to college?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know, then.”
“You don’t want to go to college?”
Ares shrugged.
“You have a lot of years yet to decide.”
Ares wondered whether her son would ever get out of jail and go to college. Maybe they had college in jail. But what would be the point? If you were in for murder, you were never going to get out, and, even if you did, who would ever trust you again? Even a librarian had to be trusted not to steal the books.
Ares followed Mrs. Pearl back to her desk. As she sat down, she caught him looking at the photograph of her son.
“Do you want to ask me about him?” she said.
“No,” he lied.
“Kids are curious. They hear things.”
“Not me,” Ares said.
“We’re getting money for his defense,” she said. “We sold our house.”
“So he didn’t do it?” Ares said.
“He was set up,” she said.
He couldn’t tell if she believed this or not. She absent-mindedly rubbed her thumb across the glass, cleaning off a fine layer of dust. Ares could almost feel her touch on his own face. It felt like his mother’s touch, when she bent down to kiss him good night, brushing her lips against his cheek, then pushing his hair back off his forehead with her palm, as if clearing the way for him to see his dreams.
Wypowiedź została zmodyfikowana przez jej autora [2005-11-07 03:21:16]
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Moze mi ktos strescic? :)
Paudyn [ Kwisatz Haderach ]
Najlepiej w formie obazkowej...
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
eghm...
nie za krótkie?
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Crono --> Zaraz Ci cos dokleje :PPP
Pirix [ ! KB ! Góry górą ]
Ja poproszę streszczenie - najlepiej tak nie dłuższe niż dwie linijki;)
cronotrigger [ Rape Me ]
Dobra :D
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
No i co z tym streszczeniem? :)
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Opowiesc o chlopaku, co mam mame i brata ktory nie mowi, byc moze dlatego, ze chlopak upuscil brata kilka lat wczesniej. Czytajcie, jak rany, przeciez to nie Anna Karenina tudziez Wojna i Pokoj.
X-Cody [ Zabójca z Liberty City ]
Co chcesz od Anny Kareniny? :)
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Mowie ze dluga.
Yisrael [ Pod Mocnym Aniołem ]
Hop do nowej czesci.