Joshua Willey is shopping a novel about hitch hiking and preparing a project about small town libraries of America.

It's Always There in the Morning (January 20, 2012. Issue 34.)

I got off work at dawn. Only two incidences called for my attention all shift. At one, a cab pulled up and two jet-lagged Sheiks got out and checked in. They were here all the way from Amritsar, on business. Then at three a stoned troika came back from a club, laughing. First they passed me by with theatrical gestures of good evening, of ambient goodwill and merriment, but then returned, as their key cards had been decoded in their tight pockets by cell phones. Five minutes later one of them emerged from the elevator with his ice bucket, and I directed him accordingly. The rest of the night I was able to focus on my studies (Arabic, Heidegger, and the History of Medicine). By the time Thursday showed up I was just drinking coffee and listening to The Blackhawk Sessions. I rode my Bianchi to the pool and stretched out in the shower. The statistics professor (who was also a national juggling champion) was crawling up and down one lane but otherwise the place was empty, save for the lifeguard, Heidi, who had the news on one of those little orange wind-up radios.

"How do you swim after working all night?" she asked.

"How do you work after sleeping all night?"

"Force," she said. I had my workout and took a sauna, shit, shower, and shave; along with the swim it's my constitutional quintet. Then I rode the few flat blocks to the cafeteria and filled my thermos and bought fruit and hard-boiled eggs which I ate looking over my notes until it was time for classes.

After classes I went to the library. It being Friday afternoon at this point it wasn't so busy, but Blue was sitting at my desk reading Žižek.

"Crawling from the wreckage," he said.

"Wreckage yourself, I've got miles to go…"

"Before I sleep. Heard it once, heard it a thousand times. What are you doing tonight?"

"Closing this place down that's for sure. They'll never say we feared the bookwork baby." The library closed at midnight on Friday and Saturday, at two on other nights, and never during exam weeks.

"So after that lets go party."

"What, you mean get some Mountain Dew?"

"Come on."

"Where?"

"The Smack Shack."

"OK, I'll check you at the digi later on."

"I thought we might pregame a little, for the sake of creative edge."

"Capital idea old boy."

"How about ten?"

"I'll be out front, as usual." At ten the coffee shop across the street closed and gave away all they had left in their carafes free of charge, and a big cigarette smoky treat party usually followed street side. Blue took off and I got to work again, doing the more difficult, left brain stuff first and moving toward what was (for me anyway) easier, more creative, right brain work. In a sense it wasn't easier, just different. I had to move around for it. I packed a lip and traveled to north reference where I could keep half an eye on the twilight out the big city Ivy League windows. The joint really emptied out then and by dark even the computer pit only contained a couple seniors chasing their deadlines, or people like me who just didn't care much for the world in four dimensions. Who needs four when you can have five at half the price? I went up to the thesis tower and looked across the front lawn, where under classmen were having the ritual Friday night kegger in front of the old dorm block. That's where Thursday caught me from behind with a hand over my eyes.

"You eat anything?"

"Negative."

"Pho?"

"Sho nuff."

"Meet you out front." We rode up the hill to a cheap Vietnamese joint and joined a big table of students and ordered pho and coffees. Thursday put so much chili in hers she was crying by the end of it. The rest of the group left before us to walk up to the Smack Shack and around eight we rode back down to the library. Thursday disappeared into the physics building and I went back to my desk.

At quarter to ten I wandered aimlessly around a bit, pulling books off the shelf, The Spirit of Utopia and God Interrupted. Then I got my big green mug and went over to the Paradox, where they already had the chairs up and were mopping and blasting Neutral Milk Hotel. Jasper was doing the bank and I went up to him.

"Are you going to the Smack Shack tonight?" I asked.

"Surely you jest? I live there."

"I know."

"Well I'll see you in the VIP room then." He winked. He had the most beautiful green eyes. Blue came up on his skateboard and filled his thermos and we went back to the front of the library and sat on the broad concrete benches beneath the gingko trees. The streetlight was very beautiful, dappled through the leaves. Blue took out a matchbox and removed a tablet of buprenorphine which he broke into six pieces, and we each put one under our tongue.

"My precious," he said. We let the drug dissolve and sit in our saliva for fifteen minutes before spitting it out and lighting American Spirits. "The first cigarette," he said.

"Glory. I'm flowing already."

"Mmm whatcha say?"

"Flowing."

He skated back up to the digi and I went inside. There wasn't even anyone at the circulation desk. I went down to the IMC where Cassidy worked and started watching The Human Condition for a paper I was writing on epic film, but Cassidy came in and gave me the fifteen-minute warning before I was even through the section, which is set in Manchuria. I went to my desk and got my bag. Half the lights were already off. I put a cigarette in my mouth. I loved leaving the library this way, with the cigarette there. The anticipation was the best part. Two girls from Mexico City came out and just after me and smoked until they caught a cab. "What time is it?" one asked the other, who looked at her watch.

"Three in the morning."

"It's not three in the morning."

"It's always three in the morning. Know what I mean?" They were always taking cabs. We found it puzzling. Nobody took cabs in this city. You rarely even saw a cab. They were twins. One studied math and the other French. The math sister wore sweat pants and flat hats and old Reeboks. The French sister wore fancy vintage dresses and heels and sometimes big hats garnished with feathers which looked straight out of the Kentucky Derby. I walked up to the digi.

Blue was in the thick of it, editing photos. He was actually just blurring images of supermarkets and subway stations. I sat down in one of the big comfortable swivel chairs and read the Internet news for a few moments until he turned The Red Balloon on the projector and we realized we were really high. Afterwards we went outside to smoke and then rode our bikes up to the party.

You could hear the faint din of revelry a block away. We rode our bikes around into the side yard and locked them together. There must have been thirty bikes back there in all. Stepping through the front door we were greeted with a whoop. Blue had put his shades on. I still had a pencil behind my ear. Bitches Brew was on the stereo in the front room. The television was on but muted, a vintage porno flick. Wyatt, Spruce, Fawn, and the Mexican twins were playing strip poker at the big dining room table with the turquoise linoleum top. Fawn had just revealed a tattooed pistol an inch above her shaved vagina. Wyatt was talking about Robert Mapplethorpe with the twins.

"I see what's going on here," Blue said. Thursday came up and handed us each a drink which she claimed was genuine absinthe. It tasted a little like bleach. People were dancing. Someone was passed out in the corner. We went into the back yard which was full of people talking. Cassidy was walking around with a big tray shaped like an owl giving people shots of Jaeger glasses of Rockstar. I took two and handed one to Blue as he lit two cigarettes and handed one to me. Thursday ran up and pulled me away.

"I have to borrow him."

"It's a free country," said Blue, lifting his shades as he said it. I realized I hadn't even noticed he was wearing sunglasses at all, and thought of the song ("I wear my sunglasses at night"). We went into a bedroom where another girl I'd never seen before was naked in bed.

"You've got to try this stuff," Thursday said, and produced a tin with a Tiger Balm sort of jelly in it. "You rub it on and it's supposed to make it last really long, or something, we're not sure, you gotta try."

"Where did you get it?"

"It's Pablo's."

"Isn't this Pablo's room?"

"Sure is, and this is Pablo's girlfriend." The naked girl smiled.

"Well were the fuck is Pablo?"

"He went back to Bogotá."

"For good?"

"For as long as he can stand the traffic. The traffic there is, literally, the worst on the planet." We started kissing and Pablo's girlfriend took off my pants and put the stuff on. It felt like icy hot. We started having sex, first Thursday and I and then the other girl, but the stuff started burning to the point where I couldn't keep it up, and finally fled to the bathroom to try to wash it off. This failed initially, because the bathroom was occupied (as bathrooms always are at big house parties thrown in little houses), so I dashed upstairs to check the other bathroom, which was also locked. Next I made a run at the kitchen, but it had been turned into a sort of black-light dance party, and I couldn't even identify the sink for sure. Finally, it was the spigot beside the front lawn which saved me. There was no hose attached and it was only about half a foot off the ground, so I had to literally push my pelvis into the dirt to get under the stream. Thursday immediately set out to relate this story to everyone she knew. Actually I never learned the name of Pablo's girlfriend, but Pablo did come back from Bogotá, and they moved to Houston, last I heard. I went downstairs to Jasper's room where they were listening to Coltrane at the Vanguard at top volume and the big mirror coffee table was littered with cocaine and ashes. Blue was there, chewing gum, engaged in some sort of wordless séance with Omar, who was an assistant professor.

"I heard things have been heating up for you," Jasper said.

"You have no idea."

"This'll put the snap back in your whip." He cut me two lines and I took one in each nostril.

"Snap's the last thing I need right now, but thank you very much." The VIPs were passing a bottle of Ouzo.

"What time is it?" someone asked. Someone else answered.

"Three in the morning."

It was so foggy when we left we could barely see the ground in front of us. Blue and I rode down the hill side-by-side and parted ways at the fork. I got to my place and walked the bike around back and locked it to the fence. Before descending the stairs to my basement room I noticed the eastern horizon was beginning to turn that cold shade of blue, harbinger of day. I didn't turn on my lamp, but felt my way passed the piles of books to the mattress on which I lay face up. The radiator hummed. It was a beautiful sound, though a little ironic, because though the radiator was in my room, the room wasn't heated, as the upstairs was. It was no less beautiful for the vulgarity of its source. In that moment it could have been a babbling brook, whispering pines, the roar of ocean waves. I fell asleep at dawn.