I know exactly where it all began. On a Death-Star train ride out of a crowded Helicon blimp station. Russian statues beat heavy tracks through pilfered mud, piercing hearts with cold bayonets and laughing as the rain turned corpses into crocodiles. Somewhere in the distant future, the train lurched into America. Everybody had to jump off, but the Trayne kept on. An ugly kid with no money and a hobo sack was the last to leap. All around, the world's refugees were spun like satin into pearl fools. Everyone clamored, "Where do we go?" as the cars slogged through sand and the wind laughed in jest. Chasing the train, the ugly kid called for the conductor, who appeared at the window, "With the fools, kid. Go with the fools!" But the kid just laughed. He slung his bag of possessions into the conductor's car and watched the train disappear. "I know where I'm going," he said, "and that's all I need to…" But Time swallowed his final thought. Up ahead the sun was rising like a drunken phoenix, lighting a road that he knew other men had gone down.

So he walked that road, singing about a world of semblances. Women with dreams that reek of sunken ships. Persian slumlords who speak the language of distortion through iron windows. Canyons where ancient sandstone walls come crumbling down and Orion plucks giant owls from the sacred skies of an innocent night. Bear Mountain traffic jams—the 4th of July—the songs of War in Central Park. Flooded Mississippi towns where blues legends come in plaques and catfish cling to outlaw gambling boats. Hideaways in Blue Sky Vegas Motels with ferrets stolen from Tobacco Road jail houses. Circus hounds on Ferris wheels and Sixty Three Steady Degrees of a desert's Blue Hole. Black Star Bill, pistol in one hand, Tony's blood on the other, holdin' up a Trayne and cordially offerin’ drinks to El Pedro the Blue Ridge Bandit, sidetracked from his way to buy milk for Hazel with money from the Mexican War. Sidebusted. (Meanwhile, Wild Bill finds a fish bone among the olive trees and carves, "He kill'd El Rey, but Blakstar's stille a Sessy" into the tombstone steel of a water-tower.) Jumbo and his Clown friends who don't have a room to call their own. The Bearded Woman and her Siamese smiling-dogs. The Needle Painted man. Ophelia taking tips in a Tin Pan Alley donut shop while her lover's legacy stays cuffed to a Tinsel Town parking meter. And all the other things Shakespeare couldn't have dreamed.

All songs that no one was around to hear…until now.

The conductor eases back in his plastic leather throne and tells the crazy Baltic fireman to "Shovel on a little more coal." He sifts through the handkerchief sack. There's a bottle of thorazine, an Afro comb, a warped cassette. He throws the tape into a recorder and wonders. A stray guitar riff. A ghetto poem by A. Alfred Fine. The sexton-steady rhythms of The Duke and the Drums of Abacus. From the caboose of the train, the Brakeman they call Burton sends a blue yodel jigging through the midnight, hoping for something, one thing, all things—noThing—that will unravel the maze of Today. A long pause. Then, a man named Theodore Goode, M.D. is heard above the muffled sound of junkyard acetate. "Alias Means? Yeah, I know him. I spent six years looking for him in New York City. Beware of those high-plains coyote eyes."

The conductor was dead. He died long ago.