Walking from the party, drunk on the stars, the moon, and the
crisp winter air, a mood more of distant clarity and permeated by
vaporous darkness than one effected by alcohol, a man made his way
home under the procession of twinkling streetlights which lent scant
texture to failing buildings with peeling paint, cables dangling
without connection, and carved snowdrifts that twisted the path he
walked.

Soon after he turned from the side street on to the crossway it ran
into, the man was approached from behind. The interloper he could not
fix for appearance. Out of one eye, he was garbed in strangely flowing
clothes of black, red, yellow, as if a modern parody of mideastern
dress costume. But out of the other, he appeared to wear slick hip hop street fashion
unbounded by the restraints of convention.

"You coming from a party?" the interloper asked with excited
familiarity.  He fell into walking beside the man, mimicing his long
speedy strides.

"I'm just coming from some friends," said the man as they traversed
the ice covered drag. Store windows dimmed, the passers by seeming
each further intoxicated in the spirit of the evening as they walked
almost desperately on. The home-goer felt pressed on all sides by the
limpet who walked next to him, and had hoped that his manic pace
would serve as a deterrent to his companion.

"Did you do any drugs at the party?" asked the stranger.  Then the man
knew that the black vaporous ink had seeped from his mind in
telepathic beats and spilled onto the page  for the interloper to see
that he was drunk off the stars.

"No, no drugs," said the man, keeping his voice steady.  The stranger
inquired again, pressing for truth, but the man kept to his answer,
insisting on composure.

For some time they walked in silence.  The people thinned and they
passed the last mark of civilization, a plastic overstyled restaurant
that on weekend nights turned in to a dance club with a floor no
larger than two dinner tables packed with people busy pretending to be
something. 

"Out of curiousity," said the stranger, the street accent dropped from
his voice and replaced by piercing clarity, "How much do you value
your life?"

Deeply the man considered the question.  He thought of his fiance,
whose illusions she carried apart from him.  He thought of his
friends, who would sacrifice him without hesitation if a chance of true worth presented
itself.  He thought of his family, with whom he could not speak
without all falling into play-acting.  Lastly, he thought of himself, and
how little love he bore himself, the face in the mirror staring back
at him, reminding him of the promise of an existence untethered to
meaningless attachments and the bitter shame of failure of his not
having realized it:  through fear, through weakness, through all of
those qualities that as an intellectual bully he stood so proudly on
casting aimless at others to assert, through his denial of that which
meant something to them, the inpenetrable aspect of his nihilism.  He
thought of all of this, the stranger at his side staring at him with the
countenance of a wolf through the silence.

"Not much," the man finally uttered.

They turned down a last street, a sad street, static and colorless in the cold light
and empty sky.  Silent again was their passage.  Descending from the
heights to touchable firmament, the man considered the possibility
that his companions words were not meant as a philosophic query, but
as a threat against his body.  It did not change the answer.  Nor did
he care, then, at such petty corporeal dangers. 

At last the man stopped next to a building, and the interloper stopped
with him. "This is where I live," said the man.

"I hope I didn't scare you," said the stranger, looking abashed, "At
what I said earlier.

"No problem," said the man, "Some people consider me scary for some reason."

The stranger walked on.
The man scaled the steps that would take him to the filament-lit box
of linoleum and rotted lumber, to that pretense of safety that would
hide his thoughts from passers by.