Their names are G____ and C____, and their ugliness is mythic. G has a face like everything you’ve ever known put into a meat-grinder. His lips are a tube sock and the Sinclair dinosaur and the first woman you ever slept with put into a meat grinder and then reformed into the shape of a pair of lips. C has high cheek bones and blond hair with a lot of product in it. His left ear has been stabbed and a piece of metal now dangles from the wound.

            Black and Blue understand the literary truth of it: these are monsters.

            “I’ll put $15 down on the game,” says Blue. He withdraws his wallet and takes out three crumpled, oily-looking singles and a twenty. He asks Black for a ten, which Black provides, and replaces his twenty in his wallet.

            “Thirteen dollars to win,” says Blue. “I hope you guys are fucking good. For your sake.”

?

            Blue breaks, but the balls don’t break. He misses every single one of them.

            Then it’s G. He breaks. They scatter, one falls; that means they’re stripes. A song comes on about Arms Being Wide Open. It’s a horrible song, and Black and Blue feel sad, knowing how they share the planet with the song’s author.

            “I love this song,” says G, singing along to it. A bounce comes to his step, he grips the pool stick with a certain panache.

            He will make his next two shots.

?

            But something amazing happens to Black as he walks to the table: it is beyond knowing, beyond description, but it is something with a substance beyond time. If held between the fingers, this thing that happens to Black would feel like camphor oil; it would smell like a shampoo that needs to only be used once in a person’s lifetime; this something that happens to Black would have the power to teleport if it were a superhero.

            As he takes his stick, Black begins to see the table: not to perceive it, but to see it, to understand its possibilities. The entire thing becomes a series of angles on a flawless piece of white paper. The cue ball, his stick, the chalk all become extensions of him. He sinks two solids on his first shot—another is on the edge of a corner pocket, it just needs a nudge—after that, two more in a row, and a third in another corner pocket. His body contorts in ways like old dance steps; the motherfuckers at the next table over stop their game to watch him. He sinks another.

            “Jesus,” says G.

            “Jesus,” says Blue. Black stands up and looks at the table—it is a practically empty table. They will win the game if he can sink the eight ball.

?

It’s an easy shot. There is nothing in the way. The 9 ball is in the corner opposite the one he should put the 8 ball into, the 14 and the 11 are huddled together by a side pocket. It’s an easy shot.

This means that it will be impossible to make this shot.

As he gazes at the 8 ball, the night itself becomes a series of angles, of ascent and descent and probability. The night itself becomes speed and trajectory and spin.

Things will end on a sour note at the bar and Black and Blue will take a cab to the Aloha Inn and Blue will take out a little baggy and in the baggy there will be a few grams and they will cook up together and then they will put the thing in them and then they will be awake and then it will smell like camphor oil, and it will be like the first woman you ever kissed and then it will be a shampoo that one uses exactly once and it’s a cross-section of infinity.

That will be the night.

He not only misses the eight ball but he scratches, that’s how hard the shot was. He looks at the thing in his hands and realizes that it isn’t a pool stick but the deadly Black Mamba.

            C hasn’t even shot yet.

?

            The two monsters are $13 richer. They don’t bother shaking hands with Black and Blue, rather they just walk away, grinning and grabbing each others’ balls.

            “I can’t believe you missed that shot,” says Blue.

            “I can,” says Black.

            “I believed in you so much,” says Blue.

            “Really?” says Black.

            “No.”

?

Black’s scream is terrifying and horrible and primordial. It is something that has crumbled from the vast ceiling of the night itself and fallen into him and fermented and swirled in him and then leaped from him like a shaft of light. His scream is so horrible that Blue thinks that the dead will arise, that the earth will split open and reclaim him. His skin crawls and the back of his throat becomes suddenly as dry as a grinning skull.

            “AmyAmyAmyJesusAmywhereareyouAmy?!” That’s what Black calls, again and again.

            Black runs away, past the bouncer, through the double doors, and to the faintly flickering, quick street, where a cab slows, stops, rolls down its window.

            The Man From the Bottom of the Sea is driving. He looks at Black; he smiles.

            “I’ve been expecting you,” he says. As he speaks his teeth look like gunmetal and his teeth look like swords and his teeth look like they were meant to devour the meek from the earth.

He unlocks the door so that Black can get into his cab.