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STEAMER
Edward Drobinski
Copyright © 2026 by Edward Drobinski
All rights reserved
Table of Contents
4 - The Survivalists at the Perimeter
5 – A Needed Brief Non-Political Musical Interlude
6 – A Retrospective View From the North
9 - Flashbacks Within a Flashback
1 – Out of Jail
There are those who seek answers to be reassured, the certainty soothing. There are those who seek to find that there are no answers in order to feel vindicated. Everything else is elaboration. Here’s some more.
These are the people for whom an answer; any answer, functions like a stabilizing beam. They're not necessarily naïve; though they seem to be doing their best to appear as such. They just experience ambiguity as a kind of annoying static. A clear explanation, a rule, a cause, a mechanism which gives them a sense of footing, a reduction in cognitive noise, a feeling that the world is navigable, and gives them a permission to stop scanning for danger. For them, an answer is a closure device. It seals the gap, something like gorilla glue.
Then there are the people who feel most at home when the world refuses to resolve, some recognizing that the lack of answers is just another answer. They don't want answers they say, while simultaneously in search of the un-namable. They want confirmation that the structure is unknowable, that the ambiguity they feel internally is mirrored externally. They believe in a God and miracles; Christianity the only religion or mechanism capable of offering that. The rest is bleakness and stultifying boredom.
For them, "there are no answers" is not despair; it's relief. It means no one else has privileged access, no one can claim authority over them, their skepticism is justified, and the world's messiness matches their own internal map Where the first group wants closure, this group wants exposure; the exposure of the other’s false certainty.
Both groups are doing the same thing; seeking emotional equilibrium through epistemology. One stabilizes by reducing uncertainty. The other stabilizes by embracing it. One says; "Give me something to hold." The other says; "Show me that nothing can be held." It's the same impulse wearing opposite costumes, like the kitten and the skeleton.
Most people think they belong to one camp or the other, when in practice, they oscillate. When life feels chaotic, they crave answers. When life feels overdetermined or constrained, they crave the freedom of no answers. The real distinction isn't the person; it's the moment.
Circles
Ten Years After
Life is going around in circles
Wonder will it ever end
If I die, baby, will you miss me
Or just find another friend
Does it matter what I do
Live life right or bear a grudge?
Does it matter what I do
Is there anyone to judge?
I have been to many places
I have journeyed through the mind
Though I've found some different faces
Another answer I can't find
Does it matter what I do
Is there anyone to say?
Does it matter what I do
Is there any other way?
I have got what I once dreamed of
As a child, so long ago
But my life just goes in circles
'Cause one answer I don't know
Does it matter what I do
Who will hear me if I cry?
Does it matter what I do
Does it matter if I die?
Written by Alvin Lee
He was ushered to the gate by two guards, hands cuffed behind his back. He limped on his left leg, and was pushed along, one of the captors saying; “Come on, come on. You want to get out or don’t you? We can put you back in if you’re too slow.”
It wasn’t a question that elicited or required a response. It was one of those showings of power performed by a flunky with a lust for and delusions of power.
The gate creaked open and the sun blinded the eyes which had become accustomed to darkness for three years. Suddenly he saw that the years he spent as “punishment” in solitary, was in fact a blessing. He didn’t have to share a cell with any annoying darkies, fags, and/or child molesters. Unimpeded, the sun waves rolled in with a replenishing spray which defied duplication.
A guard removed the cuffs, saying; “Keep walking. ....... And don’t come back. We can make it a lot worse.”
He stepped past the threshold and the gate clanged shut behind him, the sound too final for something he hadn't asked for.
The facility has the architecture of a place built for control, and to maximize discomfort. Everything about it is squared, heavy, and without ornament; an environment designed to strip away any sense of softness or ambiguity.
The most dominant feature is the concrete watchtower rising above the perimeter. It’s tall, blocky, and windowed only near the top, where narrow slits give guards a commanding 360 degree view while revealing almost nothing of the interior. The tower’s proportions make it feel more like a sentry post from a Cold War border than a modern administrative structure; thick walls, minimal openings, and a sense of permanence that borders on indifference.
The outer wall is equally unforgiving. Tall poured concrete panels topped with coils of razor wire. The wire isn’t decorative or symbolic; it’s dense, layered, and clearly meant to stop anyone who even thinks about climbing. The wall’s surface is blank and unbroken, giving no hint of what lies inside except for the faint silhouettes of additional fencing behind it.
Beyond the wall sits a multi-story building with small, evenly spaced windows; too small to be generous, too regular to be anything but institutional. The structure is utilitarian to the point of anonymity. No color variation, no architectural flourishes, no attempt at disguise. It’s a building that exists solely to contain.
The overcast sky amplifies the mood. The whole scene feels suspended in a gray, heavy quiet. No movement, no people, no vehicles; just the architecture of surveillance and confinement. It’s the kind of place where time doesn’t pass so much as accumulate.
Hotel California
Eagles
On a dark desert highway,
cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas
rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance,
I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim,
I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway,
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinkin' to myself,
"This could be heaven or this could be hell"
Then she lit up a candle
and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say
"Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the Hotel California
Any time of year (any time of year)
You can find it here"
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted,
she got the Mercedes-Benz, uh
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys
that she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard,
sweet summer sweat
Some dance to remember,
some dance to forget
So I called up the Captain,
"Please bring me my wine"
He said, "We haven't had
that spirit here since 1969"
And still, those voices
are calling from far away
Wake you up in the middle of the night
just to hear them say
"Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They're livin' it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
Bring your alibis"
Mirrors on the ceiling,
the pink champagne on ice
And she said, "We are all just prisoners here
of our own device"
And in the master's chambers,
they gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
but they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember,
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back
to the place I was before
"Relax," said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like,
but you can never leave"
Written by Glenn Lewis Frey, Don Felder, and Donald Hugh Henley
Freedom felt like a clerical error. He stood there a moment, blinking at the gravel road that hadn't existed in his memory, or maybe had existed but in a different decade. The limp announced itself again; an old injury, or a new one, or something that had simply grown in the dark without supervision. Every step sent a small, private jolt up his side, like a reminder that the body keeps its own score whether a man wants it to or not.
He looks like a man who never quite left the last good summer of his twenties behind; probably early thirties, but carrying that loose, sun warmed ease that makes age feel like an optional detail. His hair is long, not styled so much as allowed, the kind of length that suggests he personally trims it only when it starts to bother him. It falls around his face in soft, uneven waves, giving him that hippy-ish, half feral, half gentle look of someone who spends more time outdoors than in mirrors, though he has recently spent time with neither. Some memories never fade.
His clothes follow the same logic. Denim jeans worn to a pale softness at the knees, a work shirt with two buttoned pockets that look like they’ve held everything from screws to cigarette papers, and over it all a denim jacket that he’s only bothered to fasten at the bottom two buttons. The open top half gives him a casual, wind through the chest freedom, like he’s always on his way somewhere but never in a hurry.
There’s a coherence to him. Nothing seems curated, nothing seems ironic. Just a man who dresses the way he lives; lightly, comfortably, and without the slightest concern for whether anyone thinks he’s trying too hard.
No one waited for him. No bus. No family. No lawyer. Just a strip of road that sloped downward into a valley he didn't recognize. He had imagined this moment once or twice in the early months of prison solitary, before he learned not to imagine anything. In those fantasies he walked out tall, shoulders back, a man wronged but unbroken. Instead he hunched slightly, as if the sun itself were too heavy after so long without it.
He started walking because there was nothing else to do. The guards didn't watch him go; they had already turned away, the way men do when they've completed a task that means nothing to them. His shoes; state issued, stiff, half a size too small-scraped the dirt in a rhythm that didn't match the cadence of his old life. He tried to remember how far the nearest town had been when they brought him in. It felt like a memory belonging to someone else, maybe an ancient turtle named Jonathan.
Turtle: “Hey! What are you doing on my front path? You don’t look like you live around here.”
Him: “Long story. I just got out of jail and I’m walking home. Didn’t expect to run into a turtle with a house.”
Turtle: “Everyone’s got a house if they work hard enough. One of mine just happens to be portable. Yours looks ...... less portable.”
Him: “Aren’t you being foolish to live here and meet criminals? Some are crazy turtle haters.”
Turtle: “See that house. My family and I built it a long, long time ago; before they built the prison. And we’re not leaving. Not after two hundred years and all that work.”
Him: “American, huh.”
Turtle: “Now, yes. Family used to be British by way of the Seychelles Islands, Saint Helena.”
Him: “Now that you mention it, I can see those influences in your fine house. ...... And yeah, mine’s about three miles that way. And it doesn’t come with a built in roof. Honestly, I’m still getting used to the idea of being outside again.”
Turtle: “Outside is underrated. People rush through it. You should try slowing down. I recommend my pace.”
Him: “If I moved at your pace, I’d get home next month.”
Turtle: “And what’s the rush? You just got out. You’re free. Freedom tastes better when you don’t sprint past it.”
Him: “You’re surprisingly philosophical for someone who’s basically a walking rock.”
Turtle: “Rocks have time to think. Anyway, you look like you could use a breather. Want to sit for a minute? My porch is technically everywhere I stand. By the way, my name is Jonathan, and I’m the oldest turtle.”
Him: “Steamer. Pleased to meet you, Jonathan. Sure. Why not. It’s been a weird day already.”
The turtle must have done something as Steamer didn’t, and music played.
Accidents Never Happen
Blondie
No I don't believe in luck
No I don't believe in circumstance no more
Accidents never happen in a perfect world
So I won't believe in luck
I saw you walking in the dark
So I slipped behind your footsteps for a while
Caught you turning round the block
Fancy meeting in a smaller world, after all
Accidents never happen, could have planned it all
Precognition in my ears
Accidents never happen in a perfect world
Complications disappear
Now you love me
I, yeah, I can tell
I never lied, I never cried
And you, you knew so well
Like the Magi on the hill
I can divinate your presence from afar
And I'll follow you until
I can bring you to a perfect world
Accidents never happen, could have planned it all
Precognition in my ears
Accidents never happen in a perfect world
Complications disappear
Accidents never happen in a perfect world
Accidents never happen
Accidents never happen in a perfect world
Accidents never happen
Written by Jimmy Destri
Turtle: “As you can see ..... hear, weird days are my specialty. Now tell me; what did you learn in there?”
Steamer: “That I don’t want to go back. And that the world feels different when you step into it again.”
Turtle: “Good. Then walk home slow. Let the world reintroduce itself. And if you ever need advice from someone who’s seen a lot without going very far, you know where to find me.”
Steamer: “Right here in front of your house.”
Turtle: “Exactly.”
The air smelled wrong. Too clean. Too open. He'd spent three years breathing recycled bitterness and disinfectant, and now the world had the nerve to smell like pine and cold water. He didn't trust it. He didn't trust any of it. Release wasn't mercy; it was a shift in strategy. Someone had decided he was no longer worth the cost of keeping.
He paused at a bend in the road, testing the weight on his bad leg. It held, barely. He looked back once, not out of sentiment but calculation. The gate was already out of sight. Good. Let it vanish. Let the whole place sink into the ground.
He kept walking, alone, the sun warming the side of his face. He didn't know where he was going. He didn't know who he was supposed to be now. But the road didn't care, and for the first time in three years, neither did he.
The road looks polite at first glance; predominately straight, orderly, tree lined, almost serene, but the longer you sit with it, the more it reveals its indifference.
It’s too wide for comfort, the kind of width that makes you feel exposed. The trees don’t offer shade so much as they form a corridor, tall and watchful, their branches held just high enough to deny shelter. The pavement stretches ahead without a curve or a gesture of welcome, a strip of intention that doesn’t care whether you follow it or not. Even the cars in the distance seem to be fleeing rather than traveling, their smallness a reminder of how easily this road swallows scale.
There’s a faint hostility in its symmetry; an engineered certainty that leaves no room for wandering or improvisation. It’s the sort of road that doesn’t meet you halfway. You have to commit to it, step onto it knowing it won’t soften, won’t bend, won’t offer reassurance.
And yet, for all its coldness, it’s the one that leads you back.
Not because it wants to, but because it’s the only one that remembers the way. Its severity becomes a kind of guidance; follow the line, endure the distance, trust the unyielding surface. The trees, aloof as they are, still mark the margins. The horizon, however stark, still points you forward.
It’s an unfriendly road, but it’s honest. And sometimes the path home is exactly that; unadorned, unwelcoming, but unmistakably yours.
He noted the posted sign; “DO NOT STOP FOR HITCHIKERS – PRISON ESCAPEES ON THE ROAD.” He laughed as he wasn’t hitching. No thumbs up. Cars stopped and he grimaced and waved them on. He shunned the obligatory conversation which would be required.
Ol' 55
Eagles
Well, my time went so quickly
I went lickety-splitly
Out to my Ol' 55
As I pulled away slowly
Feelin' so holy
God knows I was feelin' alive
And now the sun's coming up
I'm ridin' with Lady Luck
Freeway cars and trucks
Stars beginning to fade
And I lead the parade
Just a-wishin' I'd stayed a little longer
Lord, don't you know the feelin's gettin' stronger
Six in the morning
Gave me no warnin'
I had to be on my way
Now the cars are all passin' me
Trucks are all flashin' me
I'm headed home from your place
And now the sun's comin' up
I'm ridin' with Lady Luck
Freeway cars and trucks
Stars beginning to fade
And I lead the parade
Just a-wishin' I'd stayed a little longer
Lord, don't you know, the feelin's gettin' stronger
Well, my time went so quickly
I went lickety-splitly
Out to my Ol' 55
As I pulled away slowly
Feelin' so holy
God knows I was feelin' alive
And now the sun's comin' up (yes, it is)
I'm ridin' with Lady Luck
Freeway cars and trucks
Freeway cars and trucks
Ridin' with Lady Luck
Freeway cars and trucks
Ridin' with Lady Luck
Freeway cars and trucks
Ridin' with Lady Luck
Written by Tom Waits.
He walked as if the road were uneven, though it wasn't. The limp had a rhythm now, a kind of off-beat counter to the steady crunch of gravel under his other foot. He didn't try to correct it. Correction would imply intention, and intention would imply he remembered how he used to walk before the cell, before the incident he never replayed in his mind. He had learned in solitary that the body forgets what the mind refuses to revisit.
The sun warmed his shoulders, but the warmth didn't reach the place where the limp lived. That part stayed cold, sealed off, like a room in a house he no longer entered. Every few steps the pain flickered; sharp, then dull, then gone. A warning, or a reminder, or maybe just the body's way of keeping score when a man won't.
He kept his eyes on the road ahead, not because there was anything to see but because looking down meant watching the limp happen. He didn't want to witness it. He preferred the illusion that he was choosing this pace, this angle, this slight tilt of the torso. Pride was a stubborn thing; it survived even when everything else had been stripped away.
The unexpected release gnawed at him more than the pain. Men didn't just walk out of places like that. Not without paperwork, hearings, signatures, explanations. He had received none. They had opened the door, shoved him into the light, and told him to keep walking. As if he were a problem being relocated rather than resolved.
He stopped once to catch his breath, though he wasn't winded. The leg had locked up again. He pressed his palm against his thigh, not to soothe it but to test it, the way a man tests a faulty beam before stepping onto it. It held. It always held. That was the problem. If it had failed outright, he could have named it. A break, a tear, a wound. Something clean.
Instead it was this; an old, unspoken thing, that damned serial memory, perhaps false, that had grown roots in the dark, swirling, steaming, rising to the sky, as if there was a wind.
He resumed walking, slower now, the limp more pronounced. The road stretched ahead in a long, indifferent line. He didn't know where it led. He didn't care. Movement was enough. Movement meant he didn't have to think about the moment three years ago when the limp began, or the man involved, or the vengeful choice he made that he still insisted wasn't a choice; his rage resulting in a crippled bum who was already crippled before the attack; no real change in anything.
Behind him, the prison was already swallowed by distance and heat shimmer. Ahead of him, nothing waited. But nothing was better than the cell. Nothing didn't ask questions. Nothing didn't demand explanations.
He walked toward it, the limp marking time like a metronome he didn’t start, and couldn't shut off.
2 - Going Home
He kept walking, and the nothing ahead of him settled into a kind of comfort. Not hope; he didn’t deal in that anymore, but a clean absence of demands. The road narrowed, then widened, then bent in ways he didn’t remember. Or maybe he had never paid attention before. Three years in a box teaches a man to see the world as a series of thresholds; door, gate, road, horizon. Everything else is meaningless noise; signifying nothing.
The limp again grew more insistent as he approached the outskirts of town. It wasn’t pain exactly. Pain would have been simpler. This was more like a tug from behind, as if something in the past refused to release its grip. He didn’t look down. He didn’t adjust his stride. He let the body argue with itself while he kept his eyes forward.
The town appeared slowly, as if reluctant to reveal itself. Same water tower. Same sagging telephone lines. Same houses that looked like they’d been built by men who expected to die in them. He felt no nostalgia. Nostalgia required a softness he no longer possessed; an elusive corporal that comes and goes.
When he reached his street, he paused. Not because of the limp; though it flared again, sharp enough to make him clench his jaw, but because the house looked smaller and more run down than he remembered. Or maybe he had grown larger and more immaculate in confinement, not in stature but in density, like something compressed under a pressure which flattened out the irregularities.
He walked up the path. The grass was overgrown and the trees were bare. The porch light was dead. The mailbox leaned at an angle that suggested no one had bothered to fix it after the car winged it. He knocked once, lightly. Habit. Then he opened the door without waiting.
His wife was in the kitchen, back turned, stirring something on the stove. She looked older than when he last saw her; not just three years worth of age, but more like what happens when one is plagued by a chronic, nagging illness. When she heard the door, she didn’t gasp or drop the spoon. She just stiffened, as if bracing for a draft.
She turned slowly. Her eyes widened; not with joy, not with fear, but with the dull surprise of someone seeing a ghost they had already learned to live without.
“You’re ..... home,” she said, the words landing flat, like she was testing them for the accuracy of mild disappointment rather than emotion.
He nodded. He didn’t step closer. The limp anchored him where he stood.
“They let me out,” he said.
“Why?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t know. Or he knew too well and refused to articulate it.
She looked past him, toward the open door, as if expecting someone else to follow. A guard. A lawyer. A shadow. When no one appeared, she exhaled; not relief, not dread, just resignation.
“You should sit,” she said.
He didn’t move. Sitting meant acknowledging the leg. Acknowledging the leg meant acknowledging the moment it began. He wasn’t ready for that. He prided himself as being as silly as other over-thinkers; an attribute embedded in a tolerance, disguised as an appreciation, of commonality.
Instead he said, “I walked.”
She nodded, as if that explained everything. Maybe it did.
The house felt smaller than the cell. More crowded. More fragile. He stood in the doorway, the sunlight behind him, the dim kitchen ahead, and the limp pulsing like a second heartbeat.
He realized then that the nothing on the road had been easier than this. Cleaner. More honest.
Inside the house, everything had weight. Memory. Expectation. The unspoken.
He stepped forward anyway, the limp dragging behind him like a shadow that refused to detach, and then he flashed back to his first trip to the Zone. He and Ledbetter were taken there by Crocker, and he had put up no objections; not even a little niggle.
Steamer’s memory doesn’t come back as an immaculate reel. It arrives the way it always does for him; like a temperature shift in the room, a pressure change behind the eyes, a sudden sense that the kitchen floor is not the kitchen floor but the packed soil of the Zone.
He’s standing by the counter, one paw on the tile, when the smell hits him first; cold iron, wet moss, and something faintly electrical, like the storm that will give life to Frankenstein; though it never quite arrives. Then the memory opens.
He had been young then when he took his first trip; young enough to think the world was still negotiable. Crocker had shown up at the safe house door at dawn, boots muddy, coat unbuttoned, eyes bright with the kind of excitement that meant trouble.
“Steamer,” Crocker said, “you’re coming with us. Ledbetter needs a runner.”
Steamer didn’t know Ledbetter yet. He only knew the old stories; an etherealist who could read the folds between places, who walked through the world as if it were a thin curtain he might accidentally tear. People said he was brilliant. People also said he was barely here.
Ledbetter was waiting outside, leaning on a fence post, staring at a patch of air as though it were whispering to him. He didn’t look up when Steamer approached.
Crocker clapped Steamer on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. He’s harmless. ..... Mostly.”
Ledbetter finally blinked, turned, and regarded Steamer with a soft, distracted curiosity.
“You’re the one who hears the hum,” Ledbetter murmured. “Good. The Zone likes listeners.”
Steamer didn’t know what that meant at the time. More or less, he still doesn’t.
Crocker led them through the old industrial district, past the rusted out cranes and the abandoned rail lines. Ledbetter walked a few steps behind, humming tunelessly, occasionally stopping to touch a wall or a pipe as if checking its pulse.
They reached the breach just after sunrise.
It wasn’t dramatic. No swirling vortex, no glowing portal. Just a place where the air felt wrong; too thick, too still, as if holding its breath, building for a gale. Crocker stepped through first, without hesitation. Ledbetter followed, drifting like a man walking into a dream.
Steamer paused.
The hum was real now. Not imagined. Not metaphor. A low, resonant vibration under the skin, like the world had a heartbeat and he was standing on its chest.
He stepped forward.
The Zone accepted him.
Inside, the light was different; flat, silvery, without source or direction. The ground was soft and granular, like ash mixed with sand. Trees grew in impossible angles, their branches bending toward sounds Steamer couldn’t hear.
Ledbetter inhaled deeply, as if savoring the air.
“Do you feel it?” he asked.
Steamer nodded, though he didn’t have words for what he felt. A presence. A watching. A sense that the Zone was aware of them, curious about them, maybe even amused.
Crocker pointed toward a ridge. “We get in, we get the sample, we get out. No wandering. No touching anything that looks like it wants to be touched.”
Ledbetter smiled faintly. “Everything here wants to be touched.”
That didn’t help.
The moment they reached a clearing where the ground dipped into a shallow basin they stopped. At the center was the anomaly; a cluster of crystalline structures growing out of the soil like frost caught mid-bloom. They pulsed gently, as if breathing.
Crocker knelt to take readings.
Ledbetter crouched beside Steamer. “You hear it more clearly now, don’t you?”
Steamer did. The hum had become a chord; layered, shifting, almost melodic. It wasn’t sound exactly. More like intention.
Ledbetter whispered, “It’s speaking to you.”
Steamer whispered back, “What is it saying?”
Ledbetter’s eyes softened. “That depends on who you are.”
Before Steamer could ask more, the crystals flared; just once, a brief pulse of light like a camera flash. Crocker swore and yanked the sample free.
Crocker said; “Empathy becomes misdirected into a type of benevolently intended altruism that prioritizes the perceived feelings and needs of 'marginalized' or external groups at the expense of the survival, security, and interests of one's own group and its values. The outcome is the weakening, and ultimately the destruction, of the very civilization that expressed this emotion. ...... Time to go.”
The hum rose sharply, almost alarmed.
The Zone didn’t want them to leave.
The return path wasn’t the same as the one they came in on. It never is. The Zone rearranges itself when it feels like it; that being constantly. Trees shifted. Shadows lengthened. The air thickened.
Ledbetter guided them, murmuring to himself, tracing invisible lines with his fingers. This was the first time that Steamer saw part of that water/steam vision; God or demon.
At one point Steamer felt something brush his leg; something cold, something curious. He didn’t look down. He didn’t want to know what it was.
They crossed back into the industrial district just as the sun dipped behind the warehouses. Crocker exhaled hard, clutching the sample case.
Ledbetter looked at Steamer with a kind of gentle pride. “You survived your first conversation with the Zone,” he said. “It remembers you now.”
Steamer didn’t know whether that was a blessing or a warning. ..... He still doesn’t.
The flashback ended. The kitchen returned. The hum faded. Steamer blinks, tail flicking once. He remembers Ledbetter’s final words on that first trip: “The Zone never forgets its listeners.”
And Steamer, standing by the counter, realizes he can still hear the faintest echo of that impossible chord.