Disclaimer: Anything related unto ye Gilmore Girls world be not mine own, but belongeth rather to our lady of the WB, Amy Sherman-Palladino.

Author's Note: I'm sorry if this story has so far not been comprehensible. I've been experimenting with a more vague writing style to set the tone of this tale. Perhaps I've been sacrificing sense for style. My most profound apologies, but this chapter is in the same line. If you're not quite sure who the narrator in the prologue was or who is speaking in this chapter, please remember that I haven't actually come out and said anything concrete. You're meant to draw your own conclusions. I will make sure everything is made clear eventually, just be patient with me. If you want though, you can always e-mail me with questions at undoubtedlygoose@netscape.net. Thanks a lot for all your reviews; I'm enjoying myself very much writing this.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to post for quite some time. Life has become extremely hectic lately. The latest date I promise as an update date is December 30th.

Chapter Two: Conversations in the City of Angels

I met a strange man last night, a silent figure with a bitter mouth and burning eyes. I found him wandering down the street of memories suppressed. He looked familiar, and it took a while to realize that he was me, searching for himself. Which of us, I wonder, was real? Am I imagining him somewhere in the confused jumble of my brain's circuits, or do I dance ghost-like through his mind? It's hard to know anything, but I'll tell you something true: I am lost in the city of Angels, a fallen man.

* * *

Look at this guy. He's been a regular for the past three months, but he only comes on Thursdays. I haven't figured out yet why he comes. He doesn't seem to speak with anyone, or even try to dance. I haven't seen him on the prowl either, though it isn't for a lack of fine game. I, for one, never go home lonely from the Bombay. That's the name of this place, by the way, the one and only Bombay Club. It's a pretty high class place.

Getting back to our guy though, I think he just sits at the bar, blank-faced, and drinks. He must always order the same thing too, because Jack, that's the bartender, doesn't seem to have any trouble remembering him. He sits on the barstool nearest the wall and he's always gone by two am. It's almost sad enough to tempt my better half into going over and saying hello to the little sap. To be honest though, I don't have a better half. I'm just a bored enough tonight to let curiosity take over. After all, I don't get a Vicky and a Paul to entertain me every day. Hmmm...alright, I think I'll go find out what's keeping this loser from his bed. His sob story might be amusing enough to help me make it through the night.

Don't give me that reproving glare. I'll be nice to the guy, at least, to his face. You can listen in if you want, just don't make it obvious. Sit over there, and be quiet.

I look the guy up and down. He's dressed well enough and his shoes are good, if not expensive. He has longer wavy hair, so he probably isn't a suit man. His face is serious at the moment.

"Hello"

He looks up, startled. His turn to size me up.

"Sorry, I'm not interested." His voice identifies him as a northerner. Definitely not a Californian. He's got the NY attitude, curt and impatient. I guess he thinks I'm trying to pick him up.

I chuckle. "I think you've got the wrong idea..." I pause "...I'm the owner of this club."

I forgot to mention that detail to you before, didn't I? Well, now you know too. I moonlight as the owner of the enormously popular Bombay Club.

"Ah." He's embarrassed at his mistake. He'll be politer now, more attentive, until he's sure of himself again. I've already established a certain amount of credibility though. The Bombay is a good place to be owner of, and the guy in front of me knows it. I can choose to be friendly or haughty with him. In this situation, I'll choose friendly. The guy seems to have enough self-confidence to keep from being a pushover. Polite mockery could backfire on me. I'll have to work on breaking him.

It's a sick sort of power game I play, really. The goal is to make one's opponent completely vulnerable. Act like a friend, but poison the brain. Encourage negativity and self-doubt. The victim will keep coming back for more, to be listened to, to be subtly criticised. Then you've got yourself a regular paying customer and a neat little mind to mess with.

To win with this guy, I'll need to gain his trust and liking. Then I can slowly proceed to extract the details of all the most miserable moments in his life. By the end of it he won't be able to look me in the face without comparing his sorry being to my cooler, calmer, smarter self. In the real world his name probably means a lot more than mine, but he'll be trapped in a sort of emotional unreality. He'll have a need to return to my club, my turf, to seek recognition, to elevate himself from nobody-hood. He'll seek my approval, ultimately. He'll want the one guy who knows all about him, to accept him, to give him the go ahead for living. Twisted, isn't it? I told you I wasn't very nice. At least I'm an honest bastard.

I smirk at the guy and commence the onslaught:

"No hard feelings, guy, don't worry. You never know what to expect. I'm actually flattered you considered the idea long enough to refuse." He laughs, politely. Inside he's probably wondering where this is going.

"I just like to introduce myself to all the Bombay's latest additions. You've been pretty faithful these past few weeks, or so Jack tells me,-" I gesture in the bartender's direction "-so I thought I'd come on over."

His forehead smoothes, ever so slightly. His suspicions have been allayed. I hold out my hand and we shake.

"Your drinks are on the house tonight guy, enjoy yourself." He isn't expecting this move on my part. He is pleasantly surprised.

"Hey, thanks man, I'll drink to you." There is genuine goodwill in his voice.

I shake my head.

"Forget you saw me, guy. I'm gone. See you round." I nod to the bartender and slide off the barstool. I feel tired, suddenly. If you don't mind, I'll leave you for now. I think I'll go to my private office.

I hate it when people thank me.

* * *

It's Thursday today. I'm waiting for you-know-who to arrive. I think I'm on the verge of hearing his story. Finally. It's been six weeks since our first meeting. I'm tempted to give up and go torment some other, easier, human prey. I won't though. I've never given up on a challenge before. Besides, last week I think I made a breakthrough. He admitted he'd been feeling down. He's started drinking more heavily too. He says it's hereditary. Maybe tonight I'll finally get the goods and be able to leave this fellow to his misery.

Here he comes. Ten o'clock on the dot. I'll leave him alone for a couple of minutes and then I'll turn up. He always looks glad to see me. I'm a friendly face in a cold world, I guess. How laughable. A dozen of the frozen folk who frequent my club would make better friends than me. Well, he can be disillusioned next week. For now I will ooze kindness and decency. Just as long as he starts talking. I'm getting fed up.

Three minutes have passed. Time to amble on over chez Mr. Cheery. He looks more depressed than usual. He already has an empty glass in hand. I raise my eyebrows at the bartender. Jack only shrugs. I step over to the bar and sink into place. I address my silent companion:

"Troubles you're trying to escape? This is a respectable establishment, guy. Depressed people go to bars. My nightclub is for the suave and sophisticated, not the drunk and disorderly." My voice breaks in on his reverie.

"Hello to you to." He looks at me and smiles wanly "Troubles, man? If only you knew"

A good beginning. Perhaps with a little encouragement, he'll unfold completely.

"So why don't you tell about them, guy? You've been on a downer since I first met you. What's the matter?" I have begun the reeling in process. I hope he won't put up much of a fight.

"Where to start..." he runs a hand through his hair "...well, it began when I got married."

I laugh appreciatively.

"You misunderstand me. I love being married. My wife is the best thing that ever happened to me. The thing is though, that she's my weakness." He stares at me intently. This is it, we are on the verge. I can taste victory. He swallows, and begins to speak:

"My wife gave up a lot of things to be with me. Maybe I was selfish, but when I was younger I thought the world belonged to me. I asked her to leave her family and friends to come and live with me. She adored me back then, almost worshipped me, because... I guess I looked brave, and new, and more experienced.

We had a plan. She was going to attend University and I was going to live with her, but work fulltime. Once she graduated, she'd get a good job and I could go back to school, or try my hand at writing. I wanted to marry her, because I loved her so much, and because I wanted to claim her as my own. Her family objected, naturally. We were both pretty young.

We waited till her second year at University started, and then we got married secretly. When she told her parents, they were furious. They thought I was going to sponge off their daughter; they said I was trouble. I was hurt, and so was she. She made a hard decision, after a final fight with her relatives. She told me that she was cutting herself off from her family. She was giving them up for me.

I can't tell you what it felt like to hear that declaration, to know that she loved me, above all others. It was intoxicating. I felt invulnerable. My wife would never hurt me, I just knew that somehow. I trusted her where I had never trusted anybody else. She was amazing really. She never lost her awe of me. She never stopped thinking of our love as the ideal love.

I started writing as soon as she graduated. We were both twenty-two. We moved to Philadelphia, and I wrote and published my first novel in the record time of six months. It was pretty solid, and it established a nice name for me as new author. I wrote my second novel about my experiences growing up. You might have heard of it, it was called "Lucy's Son." It was a best seller for a while. I was twenty three by the time I finished that one. I had a very promising future. The critics loved my style. My wife loved me. Everything was going well.

Then things changed. Early in May of that year, the first major fight in our marriage occurred. I don't even remember what it was about, but it escalated to a fever pitch. It ended when I grabbed a bunch of my things and walked out. I felt terrible about it, and even now I wish I'd just swallowed my pride and gone back. Of course, I didn't. If I had I wouldn't be here today.

I meant to go to a friend's place, spend a couple of days there and then go back home. The funny thing is though, I spent the whole day wandering around the city. I still don't know what I was thinking. I ended up in a fairly bad part of town, at nightfall, with two bags full of my belongings. In retrospect, I was a total fool.

I was an easy target, a schmuck with his arms full, wandering around without a clue where he was going. I was trying to act like I did, except that it was getting darker and harder to see. Some genius had gone around smashing various streetlights, so some sections of street were pretty dark.

I should have heard them coming. One of them knocked over a garbage can. I though it was a cat. You'd think a kid who grew up in the inner city would have more sense. I guess I'd gotten soft. I didn't really have a chance. Before I knew it, something was connecting with my head, and I was crumpling up. I hit the pavement, I heard a sort of crack, and I didn't remember anything else for a long time.

When I woke up I was in a hospital bed. I found out I'd been unconscious for a week. They weren't sure who I was, as my wallet was gone, and quite frankly, I didn't know either. I was suffering from mild amnesia. I could remember the day to day, and the far past, but I couldn't remember who I was, or what had happened to me. I'd been brought in by two kids who found me the morning after my mugging. I was lucky to be alive. I was very lucky to have suffered minimal brain trauma, though I did need slight speech therapy. The hospital checked with the police to see if I was listed somewhere as a "Missing Person," but I wasn't.

What saved me in the end, after several weeks of rehab and wondering who I was, was the bizarre coincidence of meeting another patient, who had read my book "Lucy's Son," and perused it continuously. She recognized me from a picture of myself included on the flyleaf of the book's dust jacket. My publishers were contacted, and through them, my mother. My wife couldn't be contacted. She wasn't at home. Was she even in the same city?

I couldn't remember why I'd first left her. I couldn't imagine why she'd gone. The one thing that I knew was that a part of me was gone. It was like a sort of numbness took over, all my emotions swept up in a vacuum. I lived with my mom for a while, but in late November I decided to go home. Hundreds of people are left by their spouses every day. I thought I'd try to get over it.

Returning home was an enormous shock. It was like a trigger in my memory. Fragments of conversation, whispered thoughts, the sound of a woman's voice calling "I'm home!", all these things came back to me, sort of sharp and confusing. I became fairly reclusive, spending my time trying to figure out what had happened to my life. The memories of our fight began coming back to me slowly and they hurt immensely. I felt an incredible amount of guilt, and I finally realized: I really loved my wife.

I started having nightmares, where my wife was attacked instead of me, and I was always too late. I started thinking that I'd never find her again. I couldn't work at all. My publishers kept reminding me of my contract with them. My third novel was due in eleven months, and I didn't even have an outline for it. It became apparent that I couldn't function without my wife.

December 19th is a date I'm not likely to forget. It marks the day my life began again. I'd gone to bed the previous night, and I slept quite badly. The first thing I knew when I woke up was that the sun was in my eyes, and then I saw her: Next to the bed, fast asleep in a chair, was my wife. She was holding my hand tightly, as though she would never let go.

I'm not ashamed to say I cried. When she woke up, I didn't waste any time in telling her exactly what she meant to me. It was incredible to me that I could ever have let her doubt my love. We talked for a long time, explaining to each other, both understanding at last.

Her story was relatively short, compared to mine. After our fight, when I'd left and not come back, she'd taken me seriously. She actually thought I was leaving her. Her fears were confirmed when she waited for a week and heard nothing from me. Her first instinct had been to phone her family, but their long estrangement had made things awkward. She was too proud to admit to them that they'd been right, that I was a jerk who would up and leave her. So she quit her job and went to live with a close friend in New York. I don't quite know how it happened, but my mother tracked her down eventually. After she saw what a wreck I was, she did her utmost to find my wife and bring her home. Thank god she succeeded!"

I look at this guy and wonder how a sucker like him could get a devoted wife. He's been telling me this melodramatic story and he's actually feeling emotional about it? It's pathetic. Damn boring too. As far as I'm concerned, I've been wasting my time these past few weeks. I thought this guy would actually have something interesting to tell me. Hell, he hasn't even explained why he's so upset yet. No, wait, I spoke too soon. He's opening his mouth to continue:

"I haven't thought about all of that in a long while. It happened four years ago, and that's enough time to forget. I've had other things on my mind too, our first child, my writing career, our relocation to San Francisco. I've been so busy these past few years that I finally decided to take a break. I was going to take a year off, spend time looking after our daughter. So that's what I've been doing, and it's given me time to realize that my wife is not the same. She's loving, she's faithful, but she isn't the same. There's something about her I can't explain. Something in the way she's always quieter on grey winter days. The way she does odd things, like watching puddles form. Who taught her that?

Is she tired of me? Bored? Have I trapped her in an unfulfilling career? Overshadowed her with my writing? Stifled her? Killed her dreams? All these doubts assail me, and I wonder, how I could have remained oblivious so long? Am I at fault? Does she want to be free of me? I don't know, and I'm too afraid to ask. I'd let her go, if she wanted me too. I'd do anything within my power to make her happy.

I understand now that something happened to her after she moved to New York. We've never been apart otherwise. I knew we'd both changed in the month and a half of our separation, grown apart slightly. I just didn't realize that we'd never closed the gap. It's miniscule of course. She still looks at me as a sort of hero, the poor kid who overcame his roots to find success. She still admires my writing. She tells me that I have the ability to do whatever I want. She thinks I'm brilliant, talented, sure to leave my mark on the literary world. Many people agree with her. And yet...I feel that somehow her heart is not completely mine. I feel jealous and depressed in turn, and the worst of it is the not knowing.

Yesterday I was sorting through our pictures, putting them in order, labelling them, and I happened to find one snapshot in particular which struck me. It's of my wife, laughing. I can't identify it though, and I don't remember taking it. It's a delightful picture, but in many ways I wish I hadn't found it. There's a look in her eyes which I've never seen before, a wild spark of life. That's not to say my wife isn't lively, she's a lot of fun. It's just that she looks so completely free, so utterly happy. I went a little crazy when I saw that picture, or rather, when I saw what was written on the other side,

"Dec. 3, 2007"

because I didn't recognize the handwriting, and because the picture had been taken when I'd been in Philadelphia, depressed and wondering if I'd ever see my wife again.

I don't know what to do anymore. I'm walking close to the edge and I feel afraid that one false step will send me spiralling down. I couldn't handle losing my wife again, but I couldn't handle watching her die inside. I've been coming to LA every Thursday to spend a day at the publishing house headquarters. We're in the middle of negotiating a new contract and I've been flying in with my latest pieces and drafts. I take the three am flight back home every Friday morning.

I didn't know what else to do with my nights, other than come here, and then I got to know you. I felt like you were someone I could talk to, a trustworthy confidant. I felt like maybe there was hope after all. I've been drinking more you know, and I'm beginning to think that if I don't do something I'll just keep walking down the road I'm on, in my father's glorious footsteps. I've never been one to ask for help, but man, I need a friend. Tell me, please, what should I do?"

There. He has finally finished his dreary narrative. He is sitting, silent, holding his head in his hands. He has placed the ball in my court, given me the chance to bring his entire world crashing down around him. I would do it too, except that suddenly I can't breathe. I am staring at the woman who has just entered the room, who is making her way carefully over to us. It's as if I see my life flashing before my eyes. There is perfect clarity, and perfect understanding.