a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 6

(Ersnt Kirchner, "Self-portrait with a Cat" - 1920)

The phony poet didn’t understand. This was no mere tampering with his investigation, this was obsession. Whoever did this went to great lengths to return the room to its former chaos and cover every determined footprint the poet had left.

He stood there, sent back into the meaninglessness of disorder, and tried to figure out how to add this piece to the puzzle he’d been asked to put together. All the progress he’d made had been lost, systematically wiped away, but something more important had been gained. For the first time in his brief literary career the phony poet felt validated. In fact, he decided, he was no longer a phony poet at all, but now a genuine artist who had been read, analyzed, and ultimately covered up. Someone had gone to the trouble of censoring the body of his work and that could only mean that it had meant something. He felt persecuted, misjudged, misinterpreted, stung, wounded, unappreciated; he felt like a real life poet. He spent the night re-ordering the loose pages, re-tracing his notes in the margins and rewriting his poems on the wall. He was possessed by a new found faith in the necessity of his calling. It was as if Quintin Rhodes were there, urging him on from the depths of his unfinished work.

The poet worked tirelessly, noted, cross-referenced, analyzed, over-analyzed, discovered illusions and allusions and subliminal signs that suggested an entire interconnected web of strange new symbols. The room was covered in language, and somewhere in that mess of meanings was the unquestionable truth. And as he continued to map the room, ever so faint he saw it, the portrait of a man that wanted Quintin dead.