"From  chaos      comes  everything."

Dempsy - out. Tilden - defeated! Houdini -dead. Discordant Wozzeck - croaked Deiner muttie ist tot!. Bleeding from the ears as art. Europe's gray wreckage spawned fearful apparitions - robotic Metropolis - cold, aloof. So many omens - warnings. Ends without rebirth. 1926 writhed in decline.

The New World was now nibbling on the same poison that killed the old one, power. Few over many. Some of the people all of the time. Lineage. If you didn't have it? You came here, and maybe you found the North Ward, if all you spoke was Italian. But hope's light was dim, school out of reach, uncertainty as comfort.

And behold! The new god - one radiating vacuum. Sweat shop temples offering children up to product. Shoulders pressed in procession. Flesh in lock step to vats of steaming acid dye. Women, men, children. Self determination, voice, free will - not here, genuflected before choicelessness. A theocracy of currency. Faith means don't ask questions - high preists taking their tribute, anything that could be taken.

Whatever it is, that obscure ever iterating force which inflicted Attila on the ancients, now spewed robber barons. Tailored suits. Progress!

Expropriation beats a steady drum. You need the stick, power - and a permit. Politicians swaggered in silken robes loomed by children, poisoned of purple, deafened to the racket of the mills.

Through this wall of steam and noise came Jazz Man - and Momma. From the docks, festering garbage nurtured toxic vapors of humanity and an orphan of the nil, child of killer chaos and hellish intuition - Nino - the last man you never heard coming. One promise, death. One purpose, family. One tear, Zora.

Recall, in eddies, fed on exhaustion. Flashes. Blurs. Hand-me-down stories of long ago in snippets of inconsistency spun as odd fallen leaves on vortices trapped at the edge of the mind stream, stuck, not wanting to go away. And somehow, they belonged.

Doctor Macaluso, motionless in the sullen dim, not allowing sleep though not committed to quickness, conjured these fleeting visions. Shadows of realization, Nino, Jazz Man, the burning scar - reflections - of the pool welling over and drowning children - they were his.

The cast of shadow emanated from him. In that slow heavy ebb which pressed him deeper than sleep, he entered the cave of the beast. It was time to set it free. Come. I know who you are, he said with his eyes.

Death's aged child, in the flowing robes of darkness, bowed before him, offering an out held sleeve of stark bones. "I have been watching over you."

The doctor whispered, "I know. May I embrace you?"