Dango fell to his knees beneath a streetlight and cried

''it's not god but it'll do''

then he spat into a bush and thumbed a ride home.

Evening; dinner, and a knocking sound behind me has been revealed not to be my father returning home - instead, a seven foot tall spindly creature lopes through the entrance to the dining area. It is not of this world; an impossibly thin body rises from two thinner still legs, the arms are curved at strange angles that don’t seem to exist and the head has no face save for two red, glowing eyes. It reminds me of a stick figure, if a stick figure could be so three dimensional. It has a purpose, and that purpose is malevolent. This malevolence is not made apparent by any threatening action or movement and yet it is more tangible than the food I was eating moments before. The creature is obviously evil, there is no question about it, but I do not feel threatened. The harm it will do is not personal, it is simply the way that the future will unfold. The creature seems embarrassed that it has been caught and quickly ducks back into the hallway. I am briefly aware that things like this happen all the time. The whole incident takes two seconds.

I forget all about it.

So I fled the scene of the crime, caught trains and buses, hitch-hiked and even rode stolen horses; eventually I found the place where no more roads. I was on the edge of a desert made of glass and without hesitation I began to walk. As the sun rose and fell I walked across the desert and found that sometimes found my reflection walking off of its own accord in a different direction. Eventually my legs gave way and I was forced to crawl, because to even consider the idea of not moving was impossible. Days later my heart stopped beating and I could crawl no more, think no more; it was there, in the middle of a desert made of broken glass, that I found an old man looking at the stars. I told him that I had come a very long way to be here, and he said he understood.

Dango

His alias is Dango, and so Dango sits at his desk. Lying in his chair with his head tilted back, he dreams of Africa – a place that he has never been and knows very little about in the way of facts and truth but has been the topic of many thoughts of his, so much so that he has begun to consider himself almost an expert. He dreams of Africa because to him it is still a vast, dark and unexplored continent, a place in which he could make Dango into someone new, someone worth being. His colonial views clash occasionally with some snippet of post-colonial news that finds its way to Dango’s brain but he has managed to reconcile the two admirably; in his head he tracks vicious caricatures of diamond smugglers through Sierra Leone and brings them to justice before international court. Never once is he shot in the jungle and left to rot. Wearing a pith helmet, he stalks mysterious gorillas through dense jungle and tags them for scientific research. Civil war is brutal and bloody and fought in bright uniforms with muskets.

Smoke trails up from the cigarette in Dango’s mouth. Dango’s mouth is never without a cigarette; he lets the ash fall onto his clothes and the floor rather than take the time to knock the burnt tobacco into an ashtray and he is happy to let the smoke from the burning stub curl up into his permanently squinting, red eyes. He always lights another one slightly before the last is extinguished, though he never touches the cigarette with his hands. Rather, to transfer the object from packet to mouth, he uses a set of small tongs that he keeps about him at all times and some suspect he had specially made for the purpose at great personal expense.

‘I just don’t want to stain my fingers with nicotine,’ he explains to his few acquaintances. His acquaintances are few because he rarely goes out. He rarely goes out because there are few places that will permit smoking, and Dango smokes so excessively that even some of those that do have asked him to stop or go somewhere else. Dango is well aware of the dangers posed by smoking in bed, and applies a nicotine patch every night so that he doesn’t wake up ten minutes after falling asleep craving cigarettes. Dango breathes more smoke than air.

Dango always dreams of Africa. Ever since he was a boy and had a different name and a different life, something about what it was supposed to be has fascinated him. Dango used to take drugs recreationally but quit after a bad case of the horrors took three days to go away. He recalls it vividly: three days of non-stop paranoid madness. Enemies, he had a terrible enemy, and they had placed agents at every corner, everyone was trying to kill him (he tried to run off to a farm in order to source fresh produce himself, so convinced was Dango that all the food was poisoned), he was certainly about to be arrested even though he had committed no crime; stressful, because he was sure everyone was a policeman. After forty-eight hours it occurred to him that he might be going mad, and so to find out he resorted to asking everyone if they thought him insane or not. They hauled him off to the nuthouse, and he was satisfied with the finality of that answer. During his year in the asylum - which Dango spent quite convinced he was insane until they let him out and told him he wasn’t – he was first contacted by what he assumed were voices in his head. Knowing that if he spoke directly back to them people would assume he was talking to himself and thus even more insane, Dango learned to communicate telepathically with himself, and having found someone to talk to that he more or less understood, his mood and demeanor improved so much that they let him out of the asylum.

‘You’re cured!’ they exclaimed.

“Am I?” he asked.

They said yes, but prescribed him a heavy regime of anti-psychotics and other mystery pills, just in case.

The voices in Dango’s head told him to take an alias, and although Dango knows that they are just voices in his head that he himself created out of boredom, he listens to them anyway, for the recently sane Dango has nothing better to do with his time. Dango inherits a massive amount of money at a young age; all his relatives die when the house burns down at a family Christmas. Dango is outside having an argument with his father at the time (it seems that Dango’s father was again caught being unfaithful to Dango’s mother). His father runs into the house to save something indiscriminate – a person, some money or jewelry, old documents, it hardly matters – and dies as well. Dango receives the entire inheritance of his extended family and collects nicely on all of their life insurance policies. Dango is sixteen. He has the precisely calculated monetary worth of his family in several high interest bank accounts, he doesn’t need anybody to help him any more.

Dango, alias Dango, sits at his desk. His name is also the name of a small, sweet Japanese food, he doesn’t consider that particularly important. Dango, possibly, knows everything, and considers none of it particularly important. Dango used to gamble – not much, just smalls sums that he could easily afford to lose – but quit after he began to develop a habit. He started because the illegal gambling rackets were one of the few places that didn’t care if he smoked, and he supposed it was nice to get out of the house every now and then. He stuck to smaller tables, ten dollar bet minimum, not much at all, and kept that up for about a year. He was a decent blackjack player, and only lost slightly more than he won. He began shooting craps, and that was when the trouble started. So much more tension and immediacy in that game; after a while he began to live for the throw of the dice and they knew it. They could tell he was hooked. 

They moved him to higher stakes tables, and the rush of adrenalin grew with the amount of money he stood to lose, and did lose many times. The adrenalin had nothing to do with whether he won or lost, the adrenalin was in the moments where the dice stood spinning on the table, and all time seemed to stand still to get a better look. Losing was only slightly less pleasurable than winning; both results were merely the by-product of what Dango considered the more crucial moment when it could be either. They could smell the addiction on him, the croupiers and thugs and gangsters who ran that place, smell it like dogs or sharks. Something in his sweat, perhaps, stank of easy money. They would walk around him and sniff. Sniff. Sniiiiff. Then smile, put an arm around his shoulder maybe, and say, “I can see you’re a man who plays this game for real. Say, how about I show you a table that you’ll perhaps find yourself more comfortable at,” or something to that effect. It didn’t matter, the result was always the same: they would lead him to another table, one that he hadn’t seen before or had no intention of playing at, where the minimum bet was always a little higher and the other players always a little more expensive.

He realized he was an addict after his regular joint banned smoking and he found himself weeping at the door and begging them to let him in. Even though they knew that they could probably take Dango for a thousand bucks a night, the criminals that ran the operation refused to allow him entry.

‘It’s a fire hazard,” one said.

‘And what about all our customers who don’t smoke? It’s not fair to give them cancer too.” said another. Dango wept, and in the morning vowed never to gamble again. 

He has not touched cards or dice since.

Dango stopped going out entirely. Dango wasn’t seen for years. Dango learned to exist in the spaces between moments, the amount of time between now and now. Time, like space and matter, is not continuous. It is made up of moments, seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, picoseconds and so on, just as matter is made up of meters and centimeters and atoms and subatomic particles. Nothing is continuous. Time runs like a film, one frame flickering after the next at such speed as to give the illusion of continuous movement and between these frames lives Dango. Dango is only there if you look at him with your eyes perfectly still; in movement he is invisible because he does not exist. Even when you look at him while you’re as still as possible, bits of him keep disappearing as he breaths or moves his mouth to talk. His voice is strange and distant and the words seem to happen all at once. Most people get used to his ghostly appearance and voice. He shows up well in photographs and used to be able to walk through walls. Lately he has lost the knack.