"My sister went in these pipes," I say. "I want to go after her."

Butterfly looks at me, her eyes blue, though one is a grayish shade lighter than the other. "At the age of 13, some doctors and my parents mixed my imagination with illness and I spent a year in a mental asylum. Now they think I have wisdom. It's made it easy for me to hook up with evil, you know, the advertisers, the commodifiers, the hunters of cool, they try to figure me out, figure out all of us kids, but they're all specializing in channel idents and image. I don't mind whoring myself out as a trend scout, they get it wrong even when I tell them the truth."

She squeezes my hand. "I'll take you. You are a Lucifer kind of devil. Bringer of light and carrier of darkness... Trying too hard to dance."

Sometimes I think we like the abandon. Or we love desire. Deep within her eyes I could tell she was aware of the game, this reality around us we'd created to communicate, but too often everyone sleeps at the controls, passive, like in a movie or a television show.

We leave her room, her with a small pack on her back, stuffed animals hanging on key chains from the zippers, sewn on patches of mushrooms and eyes and Om symbols and an owl, the inked words magic and truth, and a tiny spiral of love. We head further into the building, down a long corridor of steel and flaking drywall, into a big open room, a single curving gray wall with no corners and just covered with names, hundreds of scribbled or painted names.

"Write yours," she says. She's kneeling, her pack before her, and from a pocket she pulls forth a silver marker.

"I gave up my name long ago," I say. "I'm no one."

"Better invent one then, one you can hold onto," she grins as she swirls her 'B's and 'u's and 't's and finally the spiral of 'y'. "It's the only way back."

Something was manufactured here once, it still smells of grease and sweat, though the room is empty of any machinery. There's only old sleeping bags and more kids and a bonfire where they are roasting frogs. We're offered some, and I eat, but they are dingy and listless. On the bite of my third I stop to spit its poor body into my hand, and toss it into the fire. I never like to eat amphibians, they seem to know too well that the world is fragile--they are beautiful and kind, patient, yet are decimated the quickest by pollution and ignorance. The smoke of the bonfire and its sparks, they just go up, into darkness. I see no opening or stars but somehow the smoke must chimney out for the air tastes clear and I have a feeling these frogs are weakened by whatever was here before, not what is here now.

It is usually good to disturb the shaman. I am feeling that Butterfly is like one for these warehouse squatters. They all watch her, rever her with their eyes, their waves of hello and quick jokes. I know I have startled her, and she is trying hard to grasp what I am without letting on that she is wondering.

I tug a half burned stick from the fire, tap the orange coals of its tip on the concrete, scattering heat and sparks, one bright hot piece of wood skittering close to a bare foot of one of the kids, who jumps.

Satisfied, I take my smoking stick to the wall and write, "Lightbringer", accepting the name she's given me.