EYE

Private Citizen / Methadone Addict / From Overseas
Lives with Slave in a quiet house on a suburban street, not far from the center of town but by no means in it. Is the subject of much speculation but little actual scrutiny from his neighbors, who confine their theories about his provenance and nature mostly to their own homes. Has a tremendous Private Fortune. Cherishes his creature comforts, the majority of which are briny, vegetal, TV-based, or, after some alien fashion, pornographic. Is said to possess a total of four nerve-endings, each impeccably performing its specific duty.

SLAVE

Abducted by Eye / Before that, Grew Up Watching Eye through his Bedroom Window / Approaching Puberty
Attends to Eye’s every whim as if it were his own. Has long hours of downtime, post-methadone-administration, to wander Eye’s house at will. Explores the wine cellar, attic, storage spaces, and echelons of fantasy - both hormonal and supernatural - that open after dark. Does not know whether these jaunts are encouraged or forbidden ... has, as yet, never been caught. Sometimes even leaves the house, very, very late at night, to wander the neighborhood like a lost cat, always returning before dawn.

BETSY & PHIL

Slave’s Parents / Refinery Manager / Shouldering Full-time Worry
Phil worked his way up from “near the bottom” at the Refinery, to the point where he’s now essentially a fixture, someone whose locker, timecard, and parking spot are all destined for the attention of tourists and historians, if he becomes famous for another reason. Betsy comes from the North, maybe Canada, more likely The Rust Belt. She and Phil met at a Holiday Inn in Sacramento that each had their own never-shared reasons for staying at that night. She never exactly took to life here in town, but things were better before the Disappearance of their Son. Now she spends her days poring over adoption pamphlets, redoing old Mad Libs, and making sweatshirts for no one.

THE INFANTA

Gothic Princess adopted by Slave’s Parents from Medieval Spain / Sleeps in Slave’s old Bed, looking through his old Bedroom Window at Eye’s House next door
Driven mad by their loss, Slave’s parents adopt The Infanta from medieval Spain. She arrives very frail and sickly, pale-skinned and soft-spoken, dressed in silk and linen robes on Easter Sunday. She languishes in Slave’s old bed, sipping broth and nibbling almonds and oranges. Over time, she and Slave develop a silent flirtation, staring through their windows at one another very late at night.

OTTO & TARLETAN

Twin Preachers of Divergent Words
Otto is a bonafide hedonist, the sort of old-school cult leader who expects his followers to service and wait on him in all capacities, at all hours. A real decadent Roman Emperor type, operating in a Rules-Free Zone of his own making. On the other hand, Tarletan, the first-born twin, is fully his younger brother’s opposite: a glutton for punishment, mortifying himself in reenactment of classic feats of privation from The Lives of the Saints and The Desert Fathers. The gruesome latter stages of these feats have grown popular as Pay-per-View Events on the Town’s Cable Access TV station, where a certain demographic bets on whether he’ll die before taking a sip of water or a morsel of bread. There are many who continually bet against him, though they have yet to come out on top. They meet in the  ULTRA MAX Cafe once a month to discuss Doctrine, attempting to agree on who will preach what in the coming weeks. These sessions usually devolve into bickering and light fisticuffs, the result being that each twin devotes most of his pulpit hours to belittling the other, in more or less transcendental terms.

LYNDA

Newscaster / TV Station Admin Chief
Sole newscaster at and administrator of the Town’s Cable Access TV Station (TCATVS), she runs in-house programs and reports on scandalous activity around town, especially the recurring case of the naked man in the ULTRA MAX oil aisle. Her most popular program is the annual Local America’s Most Wanted, in which shut-ins from around town are interviewed about the serial killers they’ve spotted out their windows over the course of the year. Has arguably suffered more from the ravages of plastic surgery than from the ravages of time.

RIB & STACEE

Methadone Dealers / Sole Inhabitants of a Private City
Rib and Stacee are the sole inhabitants of Culvert City, which is made up of the culverts behind ULTRA MAX. They used to make deliveries all over town, but now their business has reached the point where they only deal to those who appear at the lip of the culvert. Rib, a graduate student, views it as his sovereign duty to allow himself to be force-fed all of human literature, the way a foie-gras duck is force-fed food. For lack of dry ground in the culverts, he balances his book collection on the flanks of sleeping dogs, considering those that fall off and float away to be “non-canonical.” Stacee, an amateur psychic who was blindsided by a vast but incomplete vision when she was very young, is forever preparing for that vision’s second part, which she only hopes will arrive before she’s too senile to distinguish it from the rest of whatever reality will have by that point become.

STAN

Town Mayor / Chief of Police
A stereotypically “good man,” though an enigma even to those who know him best. Went through a radical early phase in which he patented the idea of Death and, with an army of commission-workers, sued anyone using his idea in the surrounding counties, until he was finally overruled, a defeat he’s still sore over. He now claims to have been reincarnated in the same body he used in his previous life. “I feel basically the same as last time,” he claims, when he’s feeling articulate, “but my priorities have shifted slightly.”

MAC & CHIARA

Young Couple from A Coast / Cafe and Roastery Managers / Folk Rock Duo
Came to town last fall, with Chiara two months pregnant. The birth of their baby, Esther, coincided with the opening of Dream Project, the cafe and roastery they both saved for many long years in order to one day be able to open in a town something like this one, where the real estate was still cheap but the people ready and willing to have their minds opened by good strong coffee and grounded secular debate. When they find time, they perform together as a folk rock duo, specializing in folk reimaginings of heavy metal songs, believing, as they do, that wood, nylon, and the human voice are material enough to express any emotion worth expressing.

GERB

Liquor Store Manager / One-man Graduate Studies Faculty
While managing Gerb’s Liquor Store (the town’s sole non-ULTRA MAX liquor dealing establishment, “Where prices are higher and vintages finer”) he also works on his tracts and exegeses and administers Graduate Degrees in Semiotics. So far, his only student is Rib. Two of his longterm projects are (1) The Pagan Ulysses, in which he’s reworking Joyce’s masterpiece to avoid all monotheistic references, so as to make the text as spiritually divergent as possible, and (2) the locating of the Local Tributary of The River Styx, which he’s convinced flows beneath the town.

CAROL

Sign Language Expert / Never Reached Full Potential for “Sitting Quietly with Oneself”
Run ragged by life in the refinery -- where her husband Ronnie went deaf on the night he turned 17 -- she retired at 45 to pursue work as a sign-language expert in the ULTRA MAX Hose Department, where the everlasting shriek of pressurized water made it impossible to hear the PA system. Though this hasn’t panned out, she keeps her fingers in shape with a series of exercises designed by Tarleton, despite Otto’s warnings that these motions are apt to rouse a slumbering Evil so vast it could destroy humanity with a single yawn.

DAVID EIDBOFF

Bounty Hunter / Stand-up Comic / Magician / Serving Life Sentence
Once took a shot at Stan, the Town Mayor, during a political rally in the late 80’s, when both men were young. He’s now serving a life sentence for this and a variety of subsequent crimes, but is too in-demand as an entertainer to waste away in his cell, so the deal is this: his home is prison, but whenever a call for a gig comes in, he is free to leave, perform, and return in his own good time, locking himself back in upon his return.

CHESTER

Cannibal King
Cave-dweller, methadone-dealer, well regarded by those close to him. Has ruled the Cannibals for “a generation,” though no outsider, much as plenty have tried, can guess how long a span this term describes in the Cannibals’ self-taught version of English. When asked by a crusading, now deceased, journalist to defend his taste for human flesh, he replied, “It seems grilled.” No further interviews have been conducted, despite his standing offer to “talk to anyone who likes me.”

CLARION MARIA

Haunted by Dreams / Ghost Train Captain
Constantly in motion, never more so than while dreaming, when she is dragged back to the site of an Original Trauma that is at this point more of a parent to her than any mother or father ever was. Though a stranger in a bar once succeeded in granting her access to “the single perfect fixed point in my soul,” every attempt to return here has been met with confusion and paranoia. So now she lives only to drive her ghost train onward, westward, ever in search of relief -- the kind that won’t evaporate in the cruel light of day.