You are not who you think you are. You are not what you think you were. You are not your future. You are not a ghost waiting for a corpse. You are not the author of your story. You are not the pilot of your ship.

You are not going to live long enough to accept reality.

You are a message from another world. You are a clue without a mystery. You are the untouchable target. You are the black inside the box. You are a shadow of a shadow.

You are the epic tale in every cloud. You are the legend in every sky. You are the mythology in every phase of the moon.

You are the uncorrected mistake. You are the unknown. You are an eternal fixed point in space and time. You are the nothing that proves there is no such thing as nothing. You are a phantom wisp of the corporeal.

You are the end of the world. ​

You are the beginning.

Kelly was in the squad room as the arresting officers ushered Rocket to a holding cage. Their eyes met and they watched one another moving in opposing paths through the grid of desks, travelling lines destined to intersect again and again. Davies’ reputation had reached every corner of the department by now, notwithstanding Kelly’s task force. The Rocket’s comedic misadventures had found court in the Stygian confines of the basement where Kelly’s comrades couldn’t help but tug at his tail over the sheer volume of incidents. There had even been subtle hints that he might need to remedy the situation. The entanglement, which began when one of the arresting officers mentioned that The Rocket had finally pulled a doozy by assaulting both his wife and a cop, ended with Kelly calling Rocket a nigger and pointing a loaded Beretta between his eyes. A group of loose-tie cops spent several tense minutes watching one of Kelly’s cohorts talk him down and remove him from the room. Both the video and audio tapes associated with that particular room disappeared within an hour.

Abigail would have an argument with Kelly after her surprise lunch date with Sean. She gave her nephew a joking look of disapproval as she rubbed the departing shadows under his eyes, the fading wounds of his fight with the mullet. They talked about the fights and things at home, tempting Sean to recount his father’s assault on Rocket Davies. She asked without camouflage if Kelly had done anything to his mother or Sean or his sister. Sean lied to her. Although he hadn’t seen it happen, he thought his father might have hit or pushed his mother during an argument over Rocket. At the end of the lunch, Abigail unpacked her thoughts on violence, described alternatives for handling conflict, concluding that violence generally came from fear and ignorance. She then had to entertain a lengthy definition of ignorance in hopes of not confusing Sean on the nuance of the pejorative. Later that evening, she agonized over the intrusion and drank coffee all night by her kitchen window, remembering Ned hooked up to tubes and machines when she first met him. She fell in love with him the next day after listening to him embellish his life story. Both had followed convention, landing empty and lost, only to find one another at their lowest points. Their love seemed too natural to deny. She thought of the paths of peoples’ lives and the sheer chance of it all and as the first radiance of sunlight flowered the tops of the trees in her backyard, she heard her own voice compelling her to pray about Sean but the voice wasn’t actually hers, rather a comic impression of her husband, the one she used at social events and Sunday mornings. She chuckled at herself and started breakfast.

​Abigail and Kelly had tolerated one another for years, their few clashes sparked by politics or Kelly’s pessimism. Ned endured long hours with the bedside lamps burning, his reading glasses at the end of his nose as Abigail expressed concerns for his brother’s parenting style or some remark he might have made during a dinner. Their conflicts often threatened the joy of Christmas dinners or birthday parties as Kelly failed to cap his sarcasm, challenging Abigail’s reserve. During drives home, Ned struggled to invent new metaphors for the defense mechanisms operated by every cop he had ever known while Abigail made it clear she understood but insisted a line of tolerance. Sunday morning, while doodling warplanes bombing stick figures on the side of a hill, Sean caught the vagaries of Ned’s sermon on Jesus and the Money Changers. Sean had wanted to sit with Abigail that morning but she stayed home sick with a cold. It was Naomi’s oldest son’s birthday and the entire family, except Abigail and Billy, who was out of town at a VA hospital, met at Naomi’s home for lunch after services. David, turning nineteen, was Naomi’s adopted child whose rebellious antics and punk rock lifestyle had stressed his mother and grandparents the most. Aside from private reprimands of Naomi’s parenting, Ned would sit lock-jawed on the boy’s insubordinations. David and Kelly hadn’t spent any meaningful time around one another due to Billy’s insistence that Kelly steer clear of him. Lunch was cold by the time Kelly arrived, irritated over the news of Ren Banyan’s recent demise. Minutes into the greetings, Kelly slapped David’s lip bloody after he overheard the kid make a disrespectful aside about Billy’s hip. David bolted through the backyard gate, crying and embarrassed, leaving the party in a belligerent argument that took hours to boil down. When Abigail heard the story, against Ned’s wishes, she phoned Kelly Tower. She accused him of losing his humanity. She called him a coward.

The COVID caught me. I’ll avoid all the political land mines and tangents this subject has made nearly impossible for the rest of the planet to ignore. Those discussions are boring and for the most part irrelevant, in my opinion. My focus is something that at the outset seems insignificant in light of the other possible consequences of the virus but the longer I live with the “thing” the more metaphysical this particular symptom has grown.

It was subtle. I had already traversed the extremes of the illness. The sweats, the chills, the striking, straight line pains across my back in the night, the anchor of fatigue. All that had already run its course. A cocktail of wonderful steroids and unnoticeably brilliant antibiotics swimming in my system, I was cooking sausage for my kids for lunch, on this unexpected, not unwelcome, vacation from work, when my son said, “Mmmmm, I can smell my sausage.”

I couldn’t.

Not a hint of searing meat in my olfactory.

I took a bite of buttered toast. Nothing. Alone, the soggy, warm texture elicited an “almost taste” but my imagination could only muscle so much. What I sensed wasn’t flavor. It was a lie. A benevolent attempt by my mind to comfort me in the loss.

At the moment I’m writing this, I still lack my senses of smell and taste. I have just come in from mowing part of our lawn. And I should have a lingering whiff of hot, shorn green in my head but it’s not there. I know the smell. I have a solid memory of the odor. As a teenager, I mowed lawns for eight to ten hours a day. The scent and every variation of it is carved into my mind. It should be there now. It should be but all I have is a memory of it. Have I “lost” it?

What does it mean to “lose” one’s sense of smell or taste—fully aware of how connected the two senses?

If one loses a game, a sporting event, what does the word “loss” actually represent? You lost an opportunity to boast? A trophy? You lost some confidence in yourself as a participant? This seems like what has happened. In some context a loss in confidence means everything. Boxers tend to lose more after one loss than they can record wins after a single win. In the midst of a string of losses, a single win rarely boosts a fighter the way a failure can degrade a fighter’s confidence after an unbroken list of victories. Is it joy? Have you lost the joy of victory? Victory is as fleeting as a sunset. However when one loses in a specific event, that loss is permanent, isn’t it. In this specific moment nothing will ever be the same. The mental state of one’s opponent can never be recreated with exactitude, the weather, the temperature, the light, nothing could be precisely the same as it was when the initial loss occurred so there is no way to replay, redo. No way to ever win again. The loss is permanent.

When people analyze sports at the professional or collegiate level they often invoke “stakes.” Are the stakes of a game really worthy of what “loss” means in the grand tapestry of life. For some, it is. A loss at a certain time could mean a life of mundanity over a life of privilege. A prestigious education over an obscure one. But for most people the loss of a game is equal to simple embarrassment. Embarrassment is overcome once the hot moment has passed. Loss is negligible.

Loss and its relation to the stakes are obviously not unique to sports. The stakes are what we’re always concerned with when we speak about loss.

What are the stakes of losing taste and smell? My wife also contracted COVID. She also lost (and regained) her taste and smell. She grew emotional over the loss, mainly in context with our young kids. She worried she might not smell the smoke of fire. She feared the loss of their scent when she laid with them at night. Any distance from their essence or limit to her ability to protect them raised the stakes far higher than I would have guessed.

She has regained her olfactory and taste senses. At this time, she’s complained of parosmia—strange sweetness in water and other strange things. This is apparently a positive thing, a sign that the cells are rebuilding.

Lost and found.

Misplaced and regained.

As I sip on the bubbles of this Pepsi, I wonder about my memory of the taste of it. I wonder and I worry.

I’ve read about, heard about, listened to discussions about the “hot/cold empathy gap.” When you’re not actually in pain, you might feel faintly confident that you can handle “the pain.” I’ve lost at various times certain sensitivities to specific pains. When I worked in a freezer in my very early twenties, I lost a shade of sensitivity to the pain one feels when dry ice contacts the skin. I could hold dry ice in my naked palm for minutes. Was the absence of this initial pain a loss or a gain? It was at least an adjustment. I’ve been a welder for years now. I can hold my composure and keep a steady hand at the harshest sensation of molten metal that may have dropped through two layers of fire resistant denim to find my thigh. I can without a wince continue a weld as a ball of orange steel sits in the fold of my leather cover, heating the skin on my arm to a blister. Another adjustment? Another loss of sensation? Or another gain in resilience?

Loss has an obvious irony attached to it. In loss we usually gain something either peripheral or even directly related to the event or thing we call lost.

Loss is a strange word when you drill down hard enough, isn’t it?

Do you ever really lose a “religion?” You still retain parts of the structure—substrate—of religion. I will admit that I trust science—I hold some faith in science. Have I not lost my religion at all but simply transferred the irrational—inherited—belief in magic to a different corner of my value scaffolding? Maybe. I can make better arguments for the reasonable assumption that science has a better answer to most questions than mysticism. But have I “lost” the thing that is most troubling about adherence to magic? It seems that even though I can proclaim my loss in adherence to a spirit world or divine driver, I cannot in actual truth say I have lost my “faith.”

Then there is artistic loss. I’ve heard of “losing the muse.” A rather ridiculous callback to another ancient religious trope. I’ve experienced “writer’s block,” though I hate the phrase. I’ve read other writers as their voice changed, usually as they became more concerned with commercial success than artistic expression.

I struggled as a songwriter to produce music. My main failure as a songwriter was to write music I wouldn’t later feel embarrassed to sing on stage. I may have after years of trying actually achieved that goal once. You can see why I stopped trying all together. No one wants to embarrass themselves night after night, three minutes at a stretch, in front of people who instantly sense something is terribly wrong with how you perceive yourself. I spent years actually trying to lose my metaphorical voice when I wrote music. I naively fought my natural tendencies as a songwriter all the while admiring those who had embraced their own styles. The obvious example is Jack White. Here is an artist who has never lost his voice. Decades of strenuous musical exploration has left us with a still ever recognizable Jack White. Jack White never appears embarrassed on stage.

Loss is a spectrum of unimaginable scale. You can lose a game of checkers with a smile. In the days before technology made it almost impossible, I lost a phone on a bus in New York City and grumbled about it for hours, lamented the inconvenience for the rest of the trip. You can lose your composure and sink into a depression. You can lose an arm or a leg and spend the rest of your life wondering either what could have been or who you would have been if you hadn’t lost them. I’ve read surveys that say amputees suffer only a fraction of points on happiness scales when compared to folks who still retain all their appendages. There’s that weird irony again.

We lose loved ones. Everyone loses loved ones. I have a somewhat traditionally stoic view of death within my circle. I rarely visit dying friends. I will talk with them but I would rather not see them. My memory serves me better to think of the ideas of people than some random vision of them. I actually shudder if the thought of losing one of my children ever crosses my mind and I quickly stamp any lingering. No thank you. Yet I do aspire to the ancients here. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. They could go at any time. Love them and embrace their fate with the same love you had for them when they lived. I aspire. But some loss is horrifying at the least.

I just caught a whiff of the pungent hand soap we keep at the kitchen sink. I had to literally insert the spout into my nostril but it’s there, very deep, very distant. Perhaps my loss will soon be regained.

And you and I can continue on without the having to suffer my ramblings... wouldn’t that be a loss?

Loaded guns and babies are like salt on a Twinkie. It makes no sense.​

​Keeping with tradition, Jessica Cooper's birth is brief, a girl they name Diana who somehow favors Doug in her soft features and slow blinking eyes. Scarlet’s pride vibrates like radiation. Her hovering applies visible strain on Doug as they move from the hospital to the house where she has commandeered the guest room and organized the baby paraphernalia into a series of stations. Some of Doug’s anxiety stems from Scarlet’s constant ability to discover the dozens of handguns he has hidden throughout the home.

​Partly due to Doug’s indifferent attitude and partly due to her mother’s joy, Shorty surrenders any notions she had of keeping Scarlet a reasonable distance from the baby. With the first week and the anxiety and the mood swings and the steady march of singular experiences, she realizes that raising babies is one of the few areas Scarlet knows better than her daughter. Shorty encounters the first heartbreaking love of her life in the child she nurses in the amber lamplight near the window where she prays and time travels.

​The beautiful burden of it has shaken her foundations and for several weeks after, she feels imbalanced and she confesses this to Sean when he sees the child for the first time. As she expected, he thinks she should consult an expert but he also points out the self awareness it takes to recognize this sort of problem from her side of the mirror. Many people don’t see this sort of thing coming so he accuses her in jest of practicing Buddhism in secret.

​Nessa says babies stink. She likens them to hamsters. She tells Sean that children are unnecessary and detrimental to actual happiness. Worse yet, their parents’ most infuriating traits live on in the mimicry of their children, a trend she fortifies with anecdotal tales of her youthful rebellion such as the time the female members of her family organized an intervention to persuade Nessa to shave her armpits before her sister’s wedding. She refused of course and her grandmother blamed her mother’s previous defiance, the year she brought her college girlfriend home for Thanksgiving, a phase from which Nessa’s mother has—since her divorce—yet to escape.

​After a prodding over any unfortunate behavior he might have inherited from his father, Sean fails to find any resemblance to him or to his grandfather. He does mention that he and his grandfather’s father found anarchism independent of one another but he cautions that his grandfather was a killer like the Towers that followed him. All but Sean. What follows is an extensive interview over Fox’s life and tribulations along with Sean's experience in searching for Fox’s story. The tale enthralls her. The Russian Revolution. Union activism. Matawan, Tennessee. She insists Sean resembles him in his want to help people. She encourages him to reflect on the other Towers. They must share a thread of charity. Sean reminds her that her complaint is based on deleterious traits. She swears charity can be as deleterious as violence or lies.

The back of the house faces the open expanse beyond the city, the horizon spiked with industrial towers shouldered by a distant hill where the subdivision clings like crystals in a dark geode. The wind encounters little resistance as it races the shape of the land and finds the back door where a whirlwind dances in perpetuity. Sean stands in the spiral, engaged with the sky, struggling to scrub his thoughts.

​He’s toured the house littered with evidence numbers and consumed by the absurd fossilized time inherent in all crime scenes, even the dust in the air seems arrested, set aside. He saw where they found the baby tucked next to the toilet in the downstairs bathroom. They found Shorty’s body over the bathroom threshold. She took two rounds, one to the gut and one through the heart. She had fired several rounds down the hallway that emptied into a living area where Doug Galloway sent return fire and died bent over the arm of a recliner. Doug bled from several wounds but the destruction of his pudendal artery proved fatal.

​Both bodies were found nude. The struggle preceding the firefight started in the bedroom, broken furniture, broken glass, torn clothes, blood. There’s a bullet hole in the wall near the baseboard, the only bullet fired outside the hallway. He’s reminded of how Big Donny Higgins threw him into a wall at juvie. He’s reminded of Shorty’s deceptive physical strength. Sean worries his initial speculations will lead to wondering other things. Did Galloway try to rape her? Did he succeed? Who fired the first shot? Where was the baby? Had he threatened the child?

​His emotions swell. Gravity tightens its grip. He sits on the concrete step, shivering in the wind, faltering under the weight. Memories of his mother’s face throb behind his eyes, the eyes of a grown man, not the headstrong child she struggled to understand. He can’t remember if he cried at her funeral. He arrived too late to join the family in pews directly below the pulpit so he stood at the back, leaning against one of the pillars supporting the church balcony. He never grieved Samantha the way he grieves Shorty. No agony. Just a few trivial regrets. The tonnage of his regrets for Jessica Cooper is too heavy and too tragic. His irrational urge to protect her has backfired and punctured him.

​He sees her. He sees her eyes. They ride the chord across the trajectory of that Philosophy of Law classroom, dollops of earth tone more satisfying than anything he will ever know. They’re gone now and nothing he can do will bring them back.

Buy River of Blood on Amazon in both digital and paperback. www.amazon.com/dp/B087B36ZF2

This brutal, philosophical crime novel spans generations in its examination of family myth, cycles of violence, and corruption and racism among police departments. O’Fuel (That Night Filled Mountain) traces the life of Sean Tower, a restless young man from a family of cops, from a childhood fascinated by violent comic books to years spent hoboing across America to eventual deployment as a police officer in an unnamed American city. Sean slowly develops a moral philosophy that places him at bloody odds with a police department infested with racketeers and white supremacists.

O’Fuel’s ambitious novel is an impressionistic swirl of past and present, especially in its first half, as passages of vivid family lore alternate with present-tense accounts of Sean’s childhood. The prose surges with anger, despair, and invention, but it’s not easily approachable. O’Fuel vaults among timelines and perspectives. Dialogue is scant, and at times the prose loses clarity as it strains for poetic effect: “Spooky details cloned in the repetitive scenes of spontaneous destruction will produce macabre moments of déjà vu.” O’Fuel’s scenes often fall into present-tense summary and focus on characters’ internal experiences, skimming through action that might have had greater impact if dramatized.
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For readers willing to disorient themselves in O’Fuel’s sweeping and outraged narrative, the novel offers accounts of war, policework both bizarre and mundane, life on the road, suicides and cop murders, and, eventually, the pulpy violence readers might expect from a crime thriller. Even then, O’Fuel bucks simple convention by penning the climax as a lengthy, ruminative colloquy, the text stripped of quotation marks, the scene feverish and unsettling. This ambitious exploration of systemic violence and moral philosophy has a lot to offer for fans of dense, cerebral crime fiction.

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