a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. II - The Murderer and the Accomplice

(Ersnt Kirchner, "Self-portrait as a sick man" - 1918/20)

The poet had shut himself in Quintin’s apartment for the better part of four days. He was reminded of university, and especially of those nights barricaded in the computer lab of the 24h library. He had studied comparative literature for two years, and it was one of those last-minute writing sessions had caused him to snap and burn down the porter’s office. It was a fiery morning that one of his final paper’s was due. No one was injured, but over two hundred undergraduate essays were lost, up in flames, and the poet was expelled for life. He still remembered what it was like, shut-up in the same four walls, staring at the same lines of text and overdosing on ritalin and Tim Horton’s coffee.

The presures of textual analysis – confronted with someone else’s poetry and being expected not only to write something worthy and unique, but also something true. The poet shivered. It would be different this time. Only good coffee, he promised himself. Ease up on the ritalin and other random drugs. And no matter how desperate things would get, no matter how tense, he would not revert to purging by fire.

In the course of his analysis the poet had made many tiny breakthroughs, the most noteworthy of which was that Quintin Rhodes was not only a journalist recording the scandalous confessions of a dark city, he was also in the midst of writing a novel. This had been obscured by the fact that Quintin’s fiction took on many of the characteristics of his reporting, but it became apparent to the poet that there were dialogues that were not journalism, but rather attempts at story-telling in a journalistic style. Character types kept reappearing, themes were being developped, and there was the slow revelation of a symbolic layer which the pure reporting could not claim.

By the end of those ritalin and Red-bull inspired four days, the poet had suceeded in establishing which dialogues belonged to fact and which possessed the added allures and contrived subtleties of fiction. The poet became convinced that his task lay in finding the link between the two. Somewhere in that pile of conversations that could get you killed was a real life murderer. And somewhere in Quintin’s fiction lay the key to discovering his hidden identity.

Chapters 2-17 of part II can be acquired by contacting spcmnspff. Also, keep your eyes out for the claymation movie!