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Western idea of self. He noticed a remarkable change when the further his patients embraced mindfulness; the less they became attached to what Taylor had called The Story . The Story was the story everyone had of their own lives, fraught with danger, and the characters intent on the protagonist’s destruction. The story never had a happy ending. It was one disaster after another. Taylor had taught his subjects to remove themselves from the story, however, he found himself sinking deeper and deeper into the story the longer he wallowed in Fun City.
    Lost in his own story , perhaps?
    Happy ending impossible.
    “My father doesn’t love me?” A slow thirty-year-old sales clerk once said.
    “ Well, what can you do about it?” Taylor responded.
    “My father doesn’t love me.”
    “Well, if that is a fact, we cannot change it. And what does it matter if he doesn’t love you? How does that fact affect how you are in the present moment?”
    “But…”
    “Thank him for not loving you. Without it, you are free. You have somewhere to sleep, you have food, and that is the most that any of us can ever need to be happy. Love, is an abstract idea that is not to be recommended,” Taylor smiled. “Love is a disease.”
    His years counselling lasted six .
    Until he took it too far.
    Jerry, a teenager with abusive foster parents and a paranoid disposition had, following an intense session, disappeared from his clinical practice and vanished from the lives of his friends and family. The incident, while not at all isolated in the profession, had caused Taylor to consider a career change.
    A change he took.
    Embraced, even.
    A change he implemented with a houseboat, his wife, son, and the dream of writing a book that would sell.
    Well, be careful of what you wish for.
    The book sold.
    He took to writing short stories at first. His manuscripts grew as his confidence blossomed, and after the tragic loss of his family, he sat down for an intense period of six months and wrote what was to become the best seller of that year.
    The Boy in the Window , about a child whose mother suffered from a rare mental illness, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, sold six hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first year. The boy’s mother would make him ill in order to garner the sympathy from doctors and health care workers. The child grew up sick and resentful, an outsider, who later became a brilliant thinker. The Boy in the Window was based on his own childhood.
    The fame brought with it invitations to functions and it brought wealth. After the death of his family, he attended award functions and champagne brunches until his ego had been overwhelmed. The Story had backfired. The money he used to free himself to the other side of the world where he was to write a novel. A novel that would make him enough money to fly back home again.
    Right.
          
     
     
    EIGHT
     
    THE DETECTIVE walked along the seventh road scanning the road for The Blue Rose . The last shot was creeping up his back like a hungry lizard. He would need another shot, not eventually, but within the next few hours. He felt a loss, a tragic, nostalgic loss, the loss of somebody he had yet to meet in a place he had yet to go. Sometimes, he felt that time travel was not only possible in theory, but that it was happening all the time. Nobody was in the present moment, they were busy walking toward somewhere they wanted to be, or painfully living in the past; a past which can only be worth thinking about if the present was considered unbearable.
    Everybody needed something.
    Even the holy men.
    Evening had fallen in Fun City.
    Broken.
    Timeworn hookers patrolled the streets like zombies in some post-apocalyptic B-movie; slow, predatory, evil, self-respect abandoned in some short-time hotel torn down in 1994. Only the shell remained. The human being had long since departed. An angry tenant last seen in a rice field upcountry. He walked past a pawnshop and looked inside at all the old