In ancient Rome, a common inscription on sundials reads, "horas non numero nisi serenas." I do not count the hours unless they are sunny. The demon counting down my dark sunless hours awaits me outside.
I write this story for many reasons. One is so that you, dear reader, dear friend, dear brother or sister, would find it and never make the same mistakes I did. I am sure that by the time you read this, I will be forever lost. But for as long as your soul is yours, do not give in to the temptations I gave in to. Do not go down the paths I did. I am a weak, stupid man. I believed that my transgressions would go on unpunished. Now I know that you can never escape your sins, a lesson I learnt much too late.
Another reason why I am writing this story is so that I can distract myself from looking out the window. But it's pointless. It knows I'm here; it has stood there for days just staring back at me with those godless red eyes. Those nightmarish eyes, shining like hellfire out of grotesque, desolate sockets. I do not know what it is, but I know it has been following me for two days, and that it is not human. So please listen, for I fear I do not have much time.
My name is Suffian. I come from a country in South-East Asia called Singapore. I am in Denver on a cocaine-cloud whim to trace the path of Jack Kerouac in his transAmerican pilgrimages to the Basilica of Our Lady of Heroin, the Cocaine Gurdwara, to the Jazz Holy of Holies. His legacy was On The Road. My legacy is this; pieces of parchment, filled with overdue laments and a desperate warning, lost in an old, squalid hotel room made less lonely by an empty bottle of the Jack I was not looking for.
My journey began at New York City, but my sins did not. There, in the concrete madness of the Big Apple, where millions of many different kinds of people are squeezed into the pressure cooker that is the city that never sleeps, I was small, wide-eyed, lost - innocent.
I spent my first night in America roaming the streets of New York, cold and alone, passing old hobos leering at the bulge in my pants. I inhaled the air of dead leaves and wet grass at Central Park, stood alone in the middle of Time Square at three in the morning.
Jet lag got the better of me the next day. One moment the bus was dipping into Holland Tunnel, the next, I had a bleary-eyed, heavy-lidded trudge through Union Station in Chicago. That night, I visited The Joynt, a jazz club in North Dearborn. In between, I caught dragons drunk and made them walk straight white lines.
The next day we reached Davenport, Iowa, and I witnessed, for the first time, the Mississippi River. As a Singaporean boy, you only read about the great river in Mark Twain novels, or you hear it mentioned in American films. It was a plot tool, a mere background. But when its vast expanse filled my vision that day, I was awed by its delectable curves, the muskegs that hide its soul away and fade out for willow-lined banks too heavily invested in the nuances of the river. 'Mississippi' was no longer a spelling problem, it was an elegant word in the Ojibwe language that meant 'Great River', and indeed, the Great River lived up to its implied majesty.
That was perhaps my last good memory as a free human being.
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