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Jabari the Magician: Nikki and Trey in Crackland
by Devon Pitlor
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
---Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944)
I. The arrest of Nikki BarazanAfter our flight from Marstown to the dismal precincts of Steelsboro and theslow police investigation of the death of the influential restauranteur RonanBax by an unexplained automotive explosion and fire on the driveway of Nikki's mother's house in the quiet subdivision where Nikki and I, conjoinedin unshakeable friendship and unwavering love since birth, had grown intoyoung adults, events forced us once again to relocate another five hundredmiles northeast to the drab and dying mill town of Ungorona Falls, a townthat had been nearly depopulated with the failure of the copper miningindustry in the late 1990s. Like the horrid Freyburg, West Virginia, where Ihad once retreated in despair to extinguish the final hours of my Earthlyframe, Ungorona was in the final stages of its urban death throes. Populatedmostly by vacant, staring corpses who stumbled along its cracked anddislocated streets in pointless circuits by both day and night, Ungorona was aplace of jeopardy, where anything of value was immediately understood to bethe property of anyone who could seize it by whatever means possible. Thisdecrepit element of poverty-driven desperation had been the factor that hadonce brought me to the treacherous streets of Freyburg, and for a time, itappeared that Nikki and I were about to retrace the dramas I had once knownon the most sinister streets on Earth, but Nikki, resourceful as ever andpossessed of mostly all of the sixty-two thousand dollar cash price that hadbeen paid by Ronan Bax to possess her body and soul, a sum paid to hermother but absconded upon our hasty egress by Nikki from a public storage
locker, would have nothing to do with either sleeping in cardboard box or tentvillages, metal clothing collections containers, or even extended-stay motels.Instead, she opted for the late Victorian and crumbling Neo-Gothic edificesthat a grander century in a more prosperous era had erected as temples andstables to the armies of traveling merchants that navigated across America asthe horse gradually receded behind the gasoline engine and loud obstreperousvehicles belched the foulness of black smoke down barely paved ribbons of freshly laid bricks and tar chips which served as the early avenues and arteriesof cities that held actual promise for a future that was deemed ever-improvingand highly Utopian in all aspects, a pleasant fantasy which has sinceevaporated.By 2012, we had found ourselves living in these concrete mausoleums, as theirscarcely maintained and cracked cornerstone, colonnades, false balconies,mullions, overhangs, minarets, once-towering columns and once-flowering roof courts lay in scarcely disguised ruin, and their only residents were those whofor some fleeting days, weeks, months and sometimes years were able to escapethe savage hullabaloo and uproar of the human wolf packs which ranged infrenzied desperation on the streets around them. In every town, in everyforgotten inner city slum, these towering and frightfully crumbling vestiges of bygone times still rise from the weeds and wreckage around them and manageto remain the graying residences of the lowest and often oddest sort of people.This was the life that Nikki Barazan and I, Trey Agremont, decided on becauseit seemed not only stirring and variegated, but pulsating with intrigues relativeto lives that were being conducted often among the cobwebs in the invisibleshadows which fringe the false vibrancy of the middle class world that we hadleft behind. Life at its strangest and rawest could often be found here, andabove all there was anonymity. Our final resting place was up five sets of creaking stairs and down a dangerously slanting hallway to an enclosedwooden pavilion where our only fresh water source came from a straight pipesticking up through the linoleum floor. Our main toilet was a large pail of
water standing next to the broken ceramic remains of what had once been amaster crapper but now was only a rusty hole in the floor wherethrough ourwaste needed to be flushed manually with buckets full of water. Our secondarytoilet was through the crumbling banister supports giving out onto a deadbrownfield strewn with the carcasses of automobiles that hadn't been new oreven mobile since the Great Depression. Being endowed sufficiently to stretchmy penis beyond the banister supports, I was able to urinate in an arc whichmissed the sides of the building and splashed silently into the mud five storiesbelow. In time, Nikki herself, always being lissom and nimble. learned likewisethe trick of upright peeing and projected her own urine nearly as far as mine.In this way, we congratulated ourselves on having a double bathroom. With ahot plate and some leftover dishes from the era when the building...called theFontaine...had also housed a quality restaurant, we concocted rather elaboratemeals. Our heating consisted of one single coil from a boiler pipe running upthrough each of the "apartments" in our wing. We were able to heat water ona tray placed over this heating coil, and we would revel in our bi-weekly jointbathing rituals which usually erupted into volcanic moments of uncontrolledpassion at their conclusion. Nikki and I, as ever, lived totally for one another'smind, soul and, yes, body.The other occupants of our huge concrete temple buried themselves down thedark, unlighted hallways in similar billets carved into the once-magnificent butnow disintegrating luxury quarters of a faded epoch. At first, we hardly knewthem or wanted to, but after a time, faces of all sorts started to emerge fromthe gloom. A bald lady named Jessamyn, a former burlesque queen, camefirst. Jessamyn was as old as mold and claimed to have once been a dancingRockette at the Radio City Music Hall as well as a regular performer in theZiegfield Follies. Wherever she crept through the ancient labyrinth of hallways and staircases she carried a cracked leather strap purse whichcontained a very dirty white mouse. She fed the mouse scraps of every sort of waste she could find in the uncleaned corners of the cracking edifice which wasthe Fontaine. Like a line of dominoes, others fell into our acquaintance
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Jabari the Magician- Nikki and Trey in Crackland
Nikki and Trey experience the power of magic over logic.
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