It wasn't the start.

It was the end.  In a hot as car reading Dandilion Wine with the Aggrolites playing on the stereo.  They were making the car ride to the courthouse to finalize our divorce.  She had left him without leaving him.  Telling him over and over again how there was nothing that he could do or be that would ever fulfill her needs.  She wanted freedom, she felt robbed of her youth by me and the kids, she wanted out.  The one night instead of coming home, she stayed out.  The fighting never seemed like it was going to end that morning.  Instead of keeping his head and his cool he lost it.  They were violent to each other and that was the end.  

Jails and court and tragedy.  This never ending litany of shit and hassle that no person could ever remain sane though.  That morning would be the very end of things and he was gone.  All he could feel was the heat, the smooth music and the words of the book digging their way into his mind.  He knew that he was lost.  A decade of life gone, maybe even to be forgotten.  It was a hollow, pointless feeling that he seemed to only be able to fill with the words of fiction.  Oh, to get lost in space and time with Bradbury one day, Asimov the next, or Tolkein on the weekends.  There was only one place left for him to retreat.  His mind, and his fictions.

There were nights when the heat would seemingly roll into the studio he had rented out.  He would sit half naked listening to blues albums and reading his books.  Books that just skimmed the surface of science fiction and fantasy at first, but we slowly getting more and more esoteric.  Authors and subjects that most people hadn't really heard of before.  He would read his books and he would sleep.  The sleep would come over him quick, and with the sleep the most vivid and wonderful dreams.  Dreams torn form the books and the music.  Some times dark, but always exciting and full of adventure.  The dreams of  imaginative children.  

This was his escape.

His only escape from the reality of scraping by and solitude.  It was a new way of life that seemed to be taking some small bits of him away every day.  His escape was becoming his reason for being.  The end of work, the end of this marriage, the end of all things, just excuses to read and run to his escape.  He was falling deeper and deeper in and he knew it.  Today was important though, today was the end. 

No matter how he tried to look at it he just couldn't seem to think of it as a start.  To many years of fighting.  To much time spent trying to make someone that refused to be happy, happy.  To much financial mayhem.  To many years spent being the only one that wanted to try.  At least that is how it all seemed to him.  A black hole that he had spent all of his energy trying to escape, only to find that the real way to escape was to just stop fighting and let the singularity run its course.  Everyone's true nature comes out in the end.

Her true nature would tell him, "Only I will ever know what I want.  You will never be able to emotionally satisfy me.  I have an education.  You never bothered, you are beneath me.  I deserve better than you."  His true nature told him, "She is better than you, give up."  So he did.  Eventually if someone tells you enough times, you believe them.  Truth or lie they are all the same given enough time and lip service. 

Today was terminal velocity.  It was the day that they would both spin helplessly out of each others' orbit.  To fade in to the obscurity of each others' minds.  A time of happiness deferred come full circle, their years of making each other miserable gone.  Horrible freedom.  He wasn't quite sure what he was going to do with it.  So far he had just spent his time quietly with his books.  Digging ever deeper into the worlds that they sought to unfold before his mind's eye.  He was unsure if that was where he would keep going, he wasn't sure if he would ever remove himself from these new worlds.  They were quickly becoming a type of security blanket that he no longer wanted to get out from under.  Even now there was a book held open before him.

He wasn't concentrating on it though.  He was lost in his thoughts on this ending.  He was lost in the silence of the car.  Her body sitting next to him, rigid and cold in the sweltering heat. Her face the mask of anger and spite that it seemed to have molded itself into several years ago.  Her body language saying that she craved something deeper than silence, like she craved even the demise of thought, and his very essence.  Saying that somehow even this wouldn't be enough, that if there were some way to erase him wholly from her past that she would jump at the chance.  For her this was a beginning, this was what she had been clamoring for.  What she had said over and over she wanted.  Somehow it still didn't bring her pleasure.  All those new nights out, all the new chances to interact with people that she felt she had been missing out on all those nights she had been conned into staying home.  All the new experiences that she had prophesied had come to fruition, and yet her lack of fulfillment was palpable.   He dare not say anything though.  He didn't want to rise to the occasion, he didn't want to fight anymore, he just wanted to be done.  So he was, so said his silence, so said his solitude.

The car slid along the strip of highway from what used to be their shared house on the outskirts of the city, into town.  The street itself lending its scent to the air in the heat.  The air conditioning on the car had broken so the windows were down.  Music and the air flowing past his face, lost in thought, he closed the book and just looked.  Looked as the foreground rushed by and the background crept.  The illusion of speed and distance that this place played on the eyes.  When you can see forever into the distance you always seemed to be crawling along.  These open plains spreading out on all sides, save forward.  The land full of golden stalked grains ready to be cut for the harvest, ahead of them the city.  Waves of heat rising up to meet the black buildings of the Center.  Plain dark angles rising up from what seemed nowhere, surrounded by the smaller rows of houses and businesses.  This close to the city the Center rose like an iron tower, trapping in light and emanating heat.

The architect that felt obsidian walls rising up in the heat of this arid place was right had a much keener sense of humor about such things than he did.  It was an imposing place, and one to be avoided at all costs if possible.  It was the heart of the city, but one that could often be as black as its walls.  Stories of the injustice that happened in its halls hung in the back of every person's mind when business had to be done in the Center.  This was a simple matter with a simple solution though.  Two people that should never have been paired, wished to uncouple.  It happened everyday, today was their day.

As the buildings of the city began to materialize our of the waves of heat, the background he had been fixated on disappeared.  All that could be seen was the facades of worn down shops and homes zipped by.  The city was old now, all in bricks and browns.  Even the trees seemed devoid of the hope for leaves.  The place felt dry and hollow, emulating the autumn leaves that scattered the sidewalks.  During their marriage she had moved them out of the city proper.  It wasn't a place that she could feel alive in she had said.  It was a place that was empty of vitality.  Yet she had always run from him into the arms of that same city.  Always seeking something that she couldn't seem to find when she was with him.  

The city and his new home had become his escape too.  The confining walls of what could be termed a cell fit him just fine.  The heat, and the air from open windows paired with each other to bring him pleasure.  Their fingers moving over his skin while music and words filled his heart and mind with any notion that he wanted to turn his mind too.  When they were done at the Center he could walk to that home and be free of her once and for all.  He could be free of her desire for something, anything, other than him.  He could be free to find out what he loved, not just how to try and satisfy a black hole.  He would be free to pursue his own desires.  That moment of freedom was moments away.

The buildings of the Center loomed before them.  Each an edifice to the branch that it serviced.  Devoid of windows made of smooth seamless obsidian they were stunning in their monolithic imposing beauty.  They exuded menacing oppression, they made a person feel as though just by approaching them you were putting yourself at risk.  This had been the intention of The Founders.  Those men who in the past reworked society to make it safe for all.  Here in the Center you knew that they were always watching.  That these structures were built to withstand the worst that humanity had to offer.  No slings or arrows would ever penetrate the hallowed halls of The Center, just as miles away nothing could ever hope to tear down the edifice of The Cathedral.   As she drove they entered the dead zone, a strip of land between where the city ended and and the towers rose up from slabs of concrete and steel.

There were no checkpoints or guards.  Just a barren space two miles wide that separated the edge of the city surrounding the Center, and the tunnels that led to where vehicles could be parked.  Within this space no radio signals went in and out.  The very air itself was charged in such a way that to exit your vehicle could be dangerous to your health.  Not to mention the turrets that could slide out of the walls of The Center at the slightest hint of an impending attack.  The space was so dead that even the birds would fly around the space surrounding The Center.  No living thing wanted to be a part of it.

But in they drove.  She parked the car that used to be theirs but was now just hers and they silently got out of the car and walked towards the elevators that would lead them to their appointment with the end of their marriage.  As they walked the pure white LEDs that shone on her reminded him of all those little blemishes that he had come the despise her for.  Not because of their physical nature, but because of what they represented.  The way her makeup was a different color than the skin on her neck, they way it seemed layered and caked on next to her eyes in a not so subtle effort to hid the slight crow's feet that she refused to embrace.  The way her mouth was always a rictus grin of bared teeth, how the smoldering anger inside of her was always at the surface ready to explode from her mouth in a litany of insults and hate.  She was a product of the Sprawl.

The city they lived in that surrounded The Center had become a place where all of the overblown idealism and hyperbole of spirituality of The Cathedral came to die.  It was a place trapped between nihilism and hedonism, this constant orchestral movement between over indulgence and self destruction.  The people of the sprawl craved only experience and eternal youth.  So often they would ravage their own bodies just to be more thin or to look ten years younger.  She was falling down that hole.  Her nights out weren't about freedom from him, but indulgence for her.  He was satisfied, she wasn't.  He was comfortable, she wanted it all.  In many ways he couldn't find it in himself to judge her to harshly.  Wouldn't it be wonderful to run with the young gods of the Sprawl.  Money and women at his side, indulging every lust he could conceive.  there was a cost to that life though, one that he didn't want to give up.  Control.

The more you bought into the lifestyle of the Sprawl the less control you had.  The Center dictated more and more to you.  It was the price of a society where nothing was hidden or forbidden.  You just had to understand that there was a time and place for everything and that The Center knew all of those times, and all of those places and that if you wanted to be a part of that thing, The Center would tell you how.  The Center would also tell you the where and when of all of your life, if the cost of what you wanted was high enough.  He couldn't give up that control.  The closer you got to the heart of The Cathedral, the closer it seemed to The Center.  It also wanted to exert its control over lives.

He couldn't live that way.  So he had tried to find a place where there was a happy medium.  The edges of both cities, a small place where people just scraped by, but they felt free.  He didn't liked being told what to do and where to be, but she had wanted things.  Finery that life on the edges couldn't afford them.  Jewelry, new cars, new clothes, more and more than they could ever enjoy.  Just there to collect and gather and show off.  She had grown tired of the life he had thought they both wanted.  She had grown tired of simple life.  He saw now, that she had always wanted more.