Birth Chapter 1     In the dark pit of his mother's stomach, the unnamed boy hummed softly to himself. It was a tuneless melody, unidentifiable yet all too familiar, the kind of thing one hears on a crowded city bus. As he hummed, the boy twisted and spun, tangling himself on his umbilical cord. It tickled.     His mother's heartbeat was his timepiece, his sun and moon, the one constant in an environment of pure growth and change. It was a reassurance that things ran as they should, well-oiled and on time. A world without the soft, rhythmic pumping was unknown to him, and because of this, he took it for granted. He was, after all, a human being, despite his lack of a name. On occasion he would try to reach for the source of his comfort, the tiny drum that never stopped, clawing upward with his inept little fists, through the soft tissue of his mother's womb. He never punctured his balloon, of course, but it was a quest he often took upon himself to complete, frivolous or not.     Stimulation was rare and much- appreciated by the boy. On occasion he would be jostled, slammed against the fleshy wall, his developing parts yielding under the pressure. These events were always brief and inconsequential, but he viewed them as proof of some great force in the universe, an unforgiving and vengeful God that liked to prove his powers at every given opportunity. Sometimes his God would visit him in his dreams. He was large, much larger than anything the boy had experienced before, and came in many different forms, all strange and foreign to the boy. At one time, a towering pink rose with rotating petals. Another, a flightless seagull with hollow white eyes. The oddest was a thin orange ribbon of color that collapsed in on itself again and again, an endless loop of self-destruction and rebirth.     His God never spoke. He simply entered the boy's dreams, never hiding, always making his presence known, circling and staring with deep, unblinking eyes. He always kept a safe distance from the shivering boy, never advancing too close as to be threatening, but remaining near enough to make his power over the boy clear. These dreams filled the unnamed boy with awe and terror.     His waking hours were calming, the gentle sloshing of his mother's daily activity a soothing and pleasant thing. He could say with complete confidence that he loved it. Before his heart had fully developed he was filled with love. His very first cell, that fluffy round egg from his mother's loins, was a little ball of white-hot love. As it multiplied, so did the love, filling his entire structure, poured into his rebar-frame like sloppy concrete. He was immersed in love, breathed it through his new lungs, let it seep into the pores on the bottoms of his feet. He loved the things he knew, wanted to know as much as possible about each of them. Each toe on his feet he loved. He grasped them each in turn, exploring their roundness, their flexibility. His umbilical cord was a friend to be interviewed, teased, and coiled around his paper-thin wrist. The seamless wall of his world was the thing he loved the most. It represented his mother, the fortress built around him to house and protect his fragile, developing body. It was the source of his love, and he channeled it back towards it, fueling the cycle he originated from.     It wasn't until the third year of his womb-tenure that the boy began to wonder if there was more to be explored outside his cozy home. It was a brief, burning desire to know everything at once, blazing hot like a comet. The flame surged through his body, seared the lining of his veins, fusing the chambers of his heart. It lasted no more than half a minute, then it was over. His slid back easily into his fat contentment - it was still warm, waiting for him like a scorned pup.     For the next 20 years the unnamed boy remained tethered to his life-giving umbilical cord, now a thick, ropy trunk permanently wrapped around his left leg, embedded into his soft, wrinkled skin. Hair covered most of his body - wispy transparent hairs that swayed in the current of his amniotic fluid. His entire face was covered in this downy fluff, sashaying its way down his torso until it reached his fully developed genitals. His skin, pulled taut in places, hanging loose in others, was covered with a dusting of chalky white powder. Still the boy turned, kicking his right leg against the wall of his mother's womb, slowly twirling through his well-known space. Of his kingdom he was now God. The dreams had been reduced to weekly occurrences, now odd curiosities rather than life-shattering revelations. His old God had not grown with the boy. He had lost control.     Then, all at once, it ended. The ever-pink walls that wrapped around him crusted over, turning hard and black. The syrup that swam in and out of his body turned milky and foul. As he screamed for the first time in his life the cloudy sludge filled his lungs. Light invaded his home, kicked down the door, attacked him full-on without hesitation or mercy, wrapped its sinewy arms around his frail body and pulled, tearing him from his world. He clung at his mother's womb, desperately struggling, kicking at his white-hot assailant. The walls tore away like wrapping paper, flaky and black. Twelve thousand sounds screamed into his ears, each demanding attention. Howling, the boy pleaded with his lost God, tears of the beloved fluid streaming down his hairy cheek.     Then it was black, and there was a great emptiness. Chapter 2     The waves sounded close, coyly slapping at the wet sand with weak wrists. High above, stuck on pillars of rising air, seagulls fought for attention, each honking his screed into the wind. The wind itself was an aggressive competitor for airtime, pushing the air molecules around without grace or courtesy. First west, then north, then somewhere inbetween. With power like the wind's one is allowed to act on whim.     When a person sees nothing, there is a sixty-two percent chance that a soothing seagull/wave seaside blend is what he will hear. Fifteen percent of the time he will hear Cat Stevens' 'Oh Very Young.' There's a thirteen percent chance that a warm voice will be heard, perhaps Germanic in accent, saying, "The rhinoplasty was a success. Unfortunately, these scalpels get slippery..." A horrifying one and a half percent of the time a person will hear his own eulogy filtered down through several feet of dirt. Of course, this study, done at Columbia in 1972, did not apply to the blind. That just wouldn't be fair.     Far be it for the unnamed boy to stray from the national average. He lay in the damp sand, the moisture sucking at his puckered body, a thick black molasses covering his vision. Brine ran down his face, pooling in his nostrils, sending his olfaction into fits. He could feel the mist being skimmed from the ocean, scooped up and dropped over his body with a dull plop. It was a gentle mist. If he didn't know better, and he didn't, he might even call it a fog. A fog with a big sloppy grin on its face. Rain hinted that it might show up, if its schedule cleared up soon. The air was grey and chilled. It had long since grown accustomed to the wind's constant bullying, and now slouched around, shoulders drooping dangerously low to the ground, expending the least possible amount of resistance to his oppressive cousin from the west. This was an environment that groaned whenever the sun broke through its ample defenses, scrambling to patch up the hole with the deployment of a nimbostrati armada or a well-aimed miasma of sucking fog. The sun represented another world, a world resented by the blue-grey tones of this seaside atmosphere, envied even, its jolly invasion painting the air with a dripping green venom, scalding the fog and rain with Vitamin D and skin cancer statistics. The solar system's superstar was unwelcome here, to say the least.     The boy, always thinking on his feet, quickly ran through his list of options. Topping the list, right above "fall asleep" and "will self to combust", was "open eyes." He had done crazier things before.     Light seeped into the exposed crack between his fluttering lids and began painting itself on his eyeballs. It stung, in a fuzzy back-of-the-brain sort of way. Slowly the scene was filled in, first the large blocks of color, then the shadows and highlights, and eventually the fine details painted in over the rest with a wispy thin sable brush.     The unnamed boy liked what he saw. His field of vision was crowded with clouds of all sizes - thick grey ones, waif-like blue-white ones curled around them, and splotchy red-grey ones that looked moth-eaten and ready to fall to tatters, all served upon a wide expanse of dusty white fog. They swirled into each other, piling on top of one another, filling and exploding together, a cacophony of mass and volume only the heavens could contain. They were soggy, wet sponges floating in the sea of ether, absorbing the air around them, collecting little bits of dust and water until they reach bursting point.     His eye caught ahold of a sloppy blue cloud, sliding its way leftward through the sky. It creeped farther, his eye rolling with it, until a hazy stretch of grey beach was revealed. The white waves, thin and unoffensive, ran to meet the shore, but quickly grew tired and rolled back into the sea, exhausted.     The boy wondered if the beach went on forever, or if it eventually ended. If it did, what could possibly be beyond it? Squinting as hard as he could, he tried to see through the layers of mist and come to some sort of conclusion. Just as his eyelids were about to break from the pressure, a small figure appeared some several hundred yards from where the boy lay. Its stride was steady, confident, with the air of a person anxious to get his work done so he can take his lunchbreak. Behind him, other, smaller figures revealed themselves. Together they formed a kind of sloppy, loping parade.     Inside the boy's head the scenarios played themselves out in rapid secession, a barrage of reenactments and flowcharts, from the mundane to the life-threatening to the downright ridiculous. Should he get up and run? Should he pretend to be dead, another salty soul cast from the sea's cruel bed? Should he embrace the man - he was close enough now to tell that much - and plead with him, beg him to explain why he was walking towards him? The simple fact was this was the boy's first social interaction with another human being, and he was grossly unqualified for the job. He decided to close his eyes.     The man stopped at the boy's head. Several slight nudges with his foot convinced the boy's eyes to flutter open.     "Stop it," said the boy, annoyed for the first time in his life.     "Come on, get up." The man was not enthusiastic.     "I don't think I should... too many things could happen."     "Jesus, there's a lotta loony ones today," the man sighed to himself. "Alright, you either let me help you up, or you lay here and in two hours let the tide do my job for me and clean up the trash."     This was the most convincing argument the boy had ever heard. He grabbed the man's offered hand and, with a loud grunt, allowed himself to be hoisted to his feet.     "Alright, back of the line."     He shuffled his bare feet past a half dozen frail, mumbling and generally disoriented individuals. He found himself behind a large woman with a mane of black hair, her eyes rolling back into her head as the parade began to trudge down the beach.     In the distance ahead lay a twiggy looking person rolling back and forth in the surf. Back