Haiku!

I haven't been able to write anything but haiku the last few weeks. Even if I begin some elaborate narrative that stretches for pages, ultimately it seems to dwindle down and find its perfect expression in a haiku.

Here's one of my favourite by Issa:

Naked

on a naked horse

in pouring rain!

It's so wonderfully exuberant! Anyway, many of the ones I've been writing seem to be in dialogue with vermin. Here's one:

Kitchen rat,

stay in the kitchen -

my bed is full tonight.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. the Murder and the Poet

(Ernst Kirchner, "Street Scene at Night" - 1926/7)

Montreal was a city stuck in the style of the late sixties and early seventies. Streets filled with salt stained bell-bottoms and polyester shirts. Nameless cafes and dingy diners willing to serve espresso or poutine at any hour of the night. It was the twenty-first century and students in dark-rimmed glasses were still discussing Vietnam like it was something that could be stopped.

Montreal was a cigarette stained city that Quintin Rhodes called home. He’d moved there from Hamilton, Ontario at sixteen, pulled by tales of European women and loose morals. He rented a small, shaby apartment in the Plateau, surrounded by Polish immigrants and existentialists. He found work in the back of an Irish pub on Crescent street. It was a popular place frequented by pool sharks and lonely girls from Boston.

At twenty Quintin began writing for an unread bi-weekly gazette. He’d inherited a column titled “Conversations in Montreal”, a record of random dialogues overheard in the city. Within four months Quintin revolutionized the column. Through his sharp ears and gritty approach “Conversations in Montreal” went from trivial declarations of love and pseudo-philosophical drivel to a hard-hitting column of scandal, criminal intent and murderous confessions. Quintin didn’t just wait for a good conversation to fall into his lap. He spent nights in elevator shafts, he stalked, lingered, placed wire-taps and microphones; whatever it took to catch the brief life of words at their most sinister.

After a year the gazette trippled its publication and Quintin became an underground myth; a ghost that haunted Montreal’s political elite, its hockey stars and minor celebrities. Watch what you say, people would joke, or Quintin Rhodes will get you. He was taken to court only once. An infuriated Minister of Education sued him for libel and slander over the publication of his supposed sex talk with a prostitute named Belle. At the trial Quintin produced everything – photographs, audio-recordings, motel receipts and even a Hungarian janitor named Tomas who testified on his behalf. The minister committed suicide, Belle got her own talk-show, and no one ever went after Quintin Rhodes again.

No one, that is, until October 31st when some oversized tricker-treater entered Quintin’s apartment and smashed his skull with the typewriter on his desk. At twenty-four, all that is left of Quintin Rhodes is a shattered skull, four hundred and sixty published conversations, and over five hundred more, unpublished and strewn like empty condom wrappers across his floor.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 2

(Ernst Kirchner, "Berlin Street Scene" - 1913)

The Montreal Police Department has two major shortcomings. The first is drugs. An intricate web of armed gangs control the traffic industry and the M.P.D. has made a policy of looking away. The second is mysterious anglophone murders. This particular case struck at the heart of the department’s language problem. It featured a kid from Hamilton found dead in a litter of incomprehensible text, who worked days at an anglo-gazette and nights in an Irish pub, and lived in a building full of immigrants and Concordia philosophy students. Anyone who knew anything was anglophone, or dead.

The two detectives, Jean Jacques and Jean Francois, did their best, stretched their English to its limits, but quickly accepted that the language barrier was insurmountable. The only statement they were able to take was from a francophone baker working in the rough vicinity of the crime, and he hadn’t seen or heard a thing. Jean Jacques and Jean Francois realized that if they were going to get anywhere in this English word puzzle, it would have to be by approaching it in a way that had nothing to do with language.

Where a couple of other Quebecois detectives may have hit a dead-end, Jean Jacques and Jean Francois resolved to make of it a challenge and an opportunity. They would distinguish themselves by taking a case that was so indisputably entangled in English verbs and adjectives, and they would turn it into something else, something non-linguistic, something visual, perhaps even mythic.

Jean Jacques dedicated all his energy to the spatial elements of the case – the desk, the angles of the scattered pages, the slant of the building, the shape of the Plateau, Montreal as an island. It was an intense and indepth study of the geography of the crime. In this way, he was convinced, he would come to understand the dynamics of the murder: how the room shifted and stirred in resposne to the bloody final swing, and most importantly, how predator and prey moved in relation to one another.

Jean Francois, on the other hand, decided to buy the subtitled DVD box-sets of C.S.I. – the original, Miami, and even C.S.I. New York. While his partner lay sprawled on the floor measuring distances and sketching diagrams, Jean Francois would step over him ever so carefully to collect and catalogue every strand of hair and skin molecule in the room.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 3

Three weeks into the investigation, without relying on a single strained sylable, Jean Jacques and Jean Francois both made the same startling revelation.

« Un ours! » Jean Jacques declared.

« Que est-ce que tu veux dire? »

« L’homme qui a tue l’ecrivain. Il bouge exactement comme un ours! »

Jean Jacques believed that based on the signs of dynamism in the room, they were looking for a killer who had mimicked the basic gestures and patterns of a bear (“un ours”). The lab results which Jean Francois had obtained that morning confirmed the peculiar theory. The room was covered in a strange synthetic fibre used primarily in the recreation of fur on high-quality black bear-suits. The simultaneous breakthrough was remarkable. It was a validation of their respective techniques, and a reason to keep pushing.

The puzzle pieces that began falling into place suggested a large, burly, possibly very hairy man who rented a bear costume for Halloween, tricked Quintin into opening his door, and then overpowered him in the course of a brutal and grizzly attack.

That night the two francophone detectives went out to a cheap Italian restaurant to celebrate their progress. Though they both got obnoxiously drunk, still they knew, this was only the beginning.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 4

(Ernst Kirchner, "Cafe in Davos" - 1928)

Mrs. Rhodes was unsatisfied. Every inquiry into the progress of the case ended in vague assurances and bad accents. This seemed to her, quite clearly, to be a murder over something that her son had written. Someone was needed to delve deep into Quintin’s body of work and interpret his articles to the point of finding the killer. She decided to hire a poet to discover the exact circumstances of her only son’s death. Only a poet would have the literary know-how to extract the meaning of what Quintin had recorded, and thereby determine who would go as far as murder to cover that meaning up.

The poet was a young man who lied to get the job. He was not really a poet, though he always wanted to be. Mrs. Rhodes hired him on the spot because he was unshaven and seemed desperate (her definition of a writer), and he was fidgety in a way that reminded her of Quintin. He listened to her instructions, accepted the check, put on his reading glasses and boarded an icy train to Montreal.

The phony poet arrived late and found a subteranean city hiding from winter. If he was going to be a poet, he decided, he should be cold and alone, so he walked the empty, snow covered streets heading north to Quintin’s apartment. On the way he took brief refuge in a convenience store to prepare the essential tools of the task at hand – Red Bull, cigarettes, number two pencils, a thick red marker, under the counter ritalin, a couple of lighters and a box of matches. He may not have been the brilliant, accomplished poet Mrs. Rhodes believed, but that did not mean he wouldn’t try. For even though he had never written a single poem in his life, this was not his first encounter with literary analysis.

He stepped into Quintin’s apartment to find the crime-scene still intact. He picked up one of the discarded pages on the floor and read the dialogue of a young couple in a sushi restaurant.
The phony poet spent the night sorting through the accumulated debris of Quintin’s articles. He began to realize the arduous task of discovering motive in the scattered dialogues. As he stood there, in the chaos of loose pages, the phony poet made a choice which he knew to be imperfect. He decided that the killer was somewhere on this floor. He knew this to be a hasty assumption for the following reasons:

1) It was possible that this was a murder of revenge, not a cover-up, and that the killer was actually a figure in one of the articles Quintin had already published.

2) It was possible that the killer had retrieved the paper on which he was implicated after having murdered Quintin.

3) It was possible that this murder had nothing to with anything Quintin had written at all.

Nonetheless, the phony poet made his choice that night.

There was no use wasting time and going mad in the realm of endless possibilities. He decided that after beating Quintin to death with his typewriter, the murderer was unable to sift through all this unpublished work and find that page on which he was implicated. In frustration of not being able to carry all the pages, or perhaps confident that it didn’t really matter (since there were so many!), the killer left them scattered on the floor. It wasn’t a perfect theory, but it was a start.

The phony poet ordered Chinese food and began to categorize the recorded dialogues according to a vague system of threachery. He read each page carefully and then asked himself: could this get you killed? If the answer was no, he placed the page to his left. If the answer was yes, he placed it to his right. And if the answer was maybe, he left the sheet in limbo between the two piles. As he did this he began to reconstruct the sounds of a city built of tiny intimacies. On their own, anywhere else, they would have flickered and died away. But joined together in the confines of Quintin’s bloody room, these forgotten dialogues found a more lasting quality. They achieved survival, if not permanence.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 5

(Ernst Kirchner, "Self-portrait as a Soldier" - 1919)

The next morning, at 7:29 am, Jean Jacques dropped like a soldier shot through the knees at the sight of his precious crime-scene. The mystery hidden in the angles of the scattered sheets had been neatly ordered into three distinct piles. The logic of the dance was gone. He found the furniture moved, strange red writing on the walls, and chinese take-out littered across the floor. Fifteen mintutes later, Jean Francois arrived with coffee and a baguette. He snapped the baguette in two and joined his wounded partner on the floor.

» Pourquoi!? » he demanded.

» Je ne sais pas. »

« Peut-etre que l ‘ours est revenu? »

But they both knew that wasn’t it. The imposed order, the strange red markings, the scent of soy-sauce and marijuana – no, this was not the work of the bear-like man; this was something else.

« Les Polonais? » Jean Francois suggested.

« Surement. »

The francophone detectives spent the entire day recreating the crime-scene and cursing the Polish neighbours. They washed the red writing on the walls, they used white-out to cover the notes etched onto Quintin’s sheets, they threw away the empty take-out boxes. All that was left was to re-un-order the furniture and re-scatter the sheets based on Jean Jacques’ painstaking diagrams. The clever detectives decided to take this opportunity to re-stage the movements of the crime.

A man sits at his desk and another pounds on the door. The door opens and the two men struggle. The intruder is powerful and pushes the other onto the bed. He confronts the stack of papers but the bear paws make it impossible to sift through the sheets. Enraged, he pulls out the chair and growls at Quintin, commands him to sit down. Quintin hunches over the desk. He’s nervous, or he’s stalling. Maybe he even begins to write something. The bear-like man loses patience. He lifts the typewriter and brings it down, quick and hard, onto Quintin’s head. The boy drops, dead on impact. The bear-like man panics, pushes the pages onto the floor. He gets desperate, falls on his paws and knees and searches for the page he needs. He can barely read a word through the makeshift eyes in his suit; but he doesn’t dare take it off. He tries to gather all the sheets into his big furry arms but it’s no use, they slip and they fall. He picks up the typewriter and thinks of taking it, but no, it’s not necessary. There’s no identifying marks, only the blood of a boy who’s dead. Through the walls he hears swearing in Polish, and the depressed shuffling of existentialists coming down the stairs. He takes one final look at what he’s done and races out of the room, out of the building, into the wilderness of the night.

Jean Jacques and Jean Francois re-enacted the scene again and again, at different speeds, switching roles, testing theories and making adjustments each time.

They left the room in the late-afternoon, as near as possible to the way it was the moment the bear-like man swung a typewriter and fled the scene. They knew that the room was all they had. The further the fragile pieces of the room slipped into some other disarray, the further they would find themselves removed from the truth.

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.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 7

(Ernst Kirchner, "Konigstein Railway Station" - 1917)

Jean Jacques decided to move into the woods. He could visualize the steps and gestures of the attack, but it was still vague, obscured by some missing fact. A far more indepth and meticulous study of the movements of bears was needed to bring the shadows to light. He packed his camping gear and told Jean Francois he didn’t know how long he’d be gone. Jean Francois drove his partner to the bus station. They shook hands and nodded at the gate. Jean Francois lit a cigarette, his first in four months, and watched the bus pull away – an empty express to the outer rim of the Canadian wilderness.

Alone, Jean Francois lingered in the filthy corridors of the bus station. He watched the busses pull in and pull away. He ate a stale slice of pizza and smoked another cigarette, his second in four months. He busted a punk kid for jaywalking. Then another. Nothing helped. He drove home, got in his pijamas, and watched reruns of C.S.I. New York – the gloomiest of the three.

a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 8

At the funeral in Hamilton Mrs. Rhodes was disturbed by the amount of unfamiliar faces in the crowd. Quebec and Massachusettes liscence plates lined the streets outside. She had expected an intimate affair, but the funeral parlour was packed and there weren’t enough cheese and crackers in the hall downstairs. Despite his wandering she had clung to the idea that she knew her son. The only thing more painful than losing her only child was the thought that she had already lost him years before.

Was it possible that these strangers dressed in black had come to know her litte Q-tip better than she? She glanced around at the grizzled writers from the gazette, the existentialists in dark-rimmed glasses, the Polish families who had brough her a plastic bag full of pirogies, the girls from Boston in little black dresses, the old Irish bartenders from the pub on Crescent street. Who exactly were these people? Their mocking tears.

She wondered if Q-tip had made love to any of these girls. To all of them? Was he respected by his colleagues? Did the Polish mothers look after him and bake him cake for his birthday? Did the existentialists fill him with anti-Christian doubt? Did he find a father amongst the old Irish bartenders, someone to explain broken hearts and complicated drinks? It had been eight years since she had seen her son. He abandoned her at sixteen and now there was a cold certainty to his never coming back. The procession of strangers filed past her at the open casket. She clung to the bag of frozen pirogies as they offered their hands and bitter words of condolence.

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!

The Visitor's Call

(Marc Chagall, "Violiniste" - 1923/4)

Click, fire, and instant composure. In six years he still hadn't learned to roll his own. But neither of them minded. The yellow roller turned out each joint with assembly-line precision. It was their Friday night ritual to cover the work-week in smoke and ashes, and the little machine was part of it.

He dimmed the light and she lit the candle. They held the chopsticks, half-naked and careful, and took time with each maki piece. Dipping it in soy-sauce and then lifting it to their lips with an awkward grace. When the sushi was gone they struggled with the chopsticks to pick up the fallen bits of caviar. After a few strained minutes she gave in, and they took turns licking one another's fingertips.

"It taste's much better this way," he said.

"I'll never understand how something so small has so much taste," she said. "Where does it carry all that taste?"

He was wondering something similar. How something so small could cost so much.

"The mysteries of caviar," he said.

They left everything in the kitchen and walked through the dark corridor toward the bedroom. Through the walls, the sound of voices and feet shuffling down the hall. He watched them through the eyehole - strangers knocking at someone else's door.

Slow, sensual drum and base was playing on the laptop.

"It's dark out," she said. "It's strange how I never notice the moment it goes dark."

"The mysteries of night," he said.

He sat down at the laptop as raindrops began pitter-pattering at the window. He stroked his thumb gently across the touch-pad and brought the screen to life. An artificial glow filled the room.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I like this song," he said. "I want to see who plays it."

A sound, like the call of some high-pitched digital bird, cut through the drum and base as a messenger-box flashed onto the screen. Then another, and another.

"It's Mindy in Spain," he said. "Mindy's online in Spain."

His fingers danced wildly across the keys and left slight smudges of caviar.

"Do you have to talk to her now?" she asked.

"I'm just responding," he said. "She's all the way in Spain."

"Yes, but does it have to be now? I mean, right now?"

"It's just that she happens to be online right now," he said. "I'd hate for her to think we're ignoring her."

"Yes, I suppose," she said as she slipped on her jeans and t-shirt.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I feel a breeze," she said.

He closed the window and walked over to her in the glowing light.

"Don't be like that," he said. He helped her out of her clothes and they made love slowly, and she felt the night and the rain close in around them.

Then as they lay like autumn leaves strewn across the sheets the phone rang and he stood to answer it.

"It could be anyone," he said.

He returned after seven minutes. There was a half-lit cigarette in an ashtray on the bed, but she was gone. She'd noticed someone, a vague shadow, strolling and splashing in the puddles outside.

The Thursday Thief. Part I

(Roberto Matta, "untitled" - 1961)

A Nigerian ex-boxer named Godswill swings the door open and pushes me into the smoke filled room.

“I found him,” he announces to the two men waiting inside.

I’m still slow coming down from a routine mescaline trip. Godswill came pounding at my door not ten minutes after the snow-white powder had melted into my bloodstream.

Godswill hangs his coat and sits down at a typewriter placed oddly in the centre of the room. He lites a camel cigarette as I stand beside him and suck in that delicious second hand smoke. All the pleasure with none of the guilt. He cracks his knuckles and flexes his fingers as he poises over the keys of a vintage sterling silver. He adjusts the blank sheet of paper and begins to type. Louder than any typewriter I’ve ever heard, than anything I've ever heard, the racket penetrates the cloudy silence of the night.

"Thursday, February 16th, 11:42 pm," it thunders. Godswill pulls aggresively on the metal latch and descends two lines.

"The Thursday Thief," he types.

I guess that’s me.

The other two men in the room I know only by reputation. Jonathan Court. Better known as Pinball Johnny, a seasoned street boxer who also runs his own gambling ring. He’d accumulated a small fortune by betting on himself. The other man is The Shuffler, his number two, handles the accounts, orders the women, that sort of thing. He’s a long, lean, lanky man who always wears pinstripes.

The Shuffler hands Pinball a casino crisp deck of cards.

“So you believe in magic?” The Shuffler asks me.

“Do you know who I am, motherfucker?” I spit out. It’s the white powder talking; they know exactly who I am, and the limits of my influence.

Our dialogue echoes like a sledgehammer as Godswill clobbers away.

... tap tap tap tap ding.

... tap tap tap tap ding.

There’s a slight pause as Pinball Johnny takes stock of my ballsiness. Silence regains her tenuous hold on the night. Melted snow trickles through my system. I’m looking at myself through the eyes of these three men. Awfully calm and collected. Faded green polo-shirt. Neat yet non-chalant. And not a single hint of the past. A young man fully resigned to the seductive spell of the present. Godswill cracks his neck violently and re-assaults the keys. I jump back into my own skin.

The Shuffler hunches over and writes something on a pad of paper. Pinball Johnny reads and his eyeballs dart in my direction. The two of them peek at their watches like synchronized swimmers. The Shuffler nods and slides back to his upright position.

“It’s now 11:55 pm, Thursday night. ” The Shuffler says. “Time to get started.” I suddeny realize I’ve got no chance.

Godswill ashes his cigarette and gets back to work.

... tap tap tap tap tap ding.

“You see, kid,” The Shuffler begins to explain in the full splendour of metallic surround sound. “It’s always worked a certain way in this town. And then you came along and fucked it all up. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it makes us wonder. Forces us to find answers to a few questions.”

... tap tap tap tap ding.

“The cards are clean, the odds are even, and the stakes are real. Those are the basic pre-requisites for Mr. Court’s talent to take full effect, and we assume it’s the same with you, unless you're cheating. So we’re gonna conduct a little test. High-card, two out of three. You against Mr. Court. You win, you walk home. You lose, you don’t. Care to draw first or second?”

... tap tap tap tap tap ding.

“First,” I answer.

The Shuffler strolls on over and holds the deck out in front of me. I pull the top layer from that virgin deck of cards. Jack of Hearts.

... tap tap ding.

The Shuffler returns the deck to Pinball who presses his middle finger against the ominous top card. He cracks his neck and pulls the Four of Clubs.

“Your lucky day, kid.”

The Shuffler reshuffles. .

“First or second. It's after midnight now.”

I glance at my watch and shrug. The tender night has slipped into early Firday morning and the magic in the room is gone, or altered.

Pinball holds the deck and rubs his fingertip across the smooth surface of the top card.

“Your talent poses some problems for us, kid,” The Shuffler says. “But perhaps also possibilities. We are, after all, businessmen.”

Godswill’s puffing ferociously and typing up a storm. Like a bigger, meaner, blacker version of Hemingway. He’s translating every spoken word into machine-gun fire. I’ve never seen a man with such nimble oversized fingers.

... tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap ding.

Pinball begins to tease and slowly peel back an Ace of Diamonds.

“The brutal black magic of chance,” says the Shuffler. "Fucking fascinating how it works.”

... tap tap tap tap ding.

They hand me the deck and I pull a King of Hearts.

“1-1.”

... tap tap ding.

The Shuffler uses his quick hands to restore chaos to the deck. He holds it in front of me for the final round. My stomach sinks as I pull the card.

Five of Spades.

Not only is it low, but it feels like a painful card. Something that once resembled a heart turned black and crooked.

Godswill leans out of his chair and squints through stale smoke before hammering my verdict onto the page. I peek over his shoulder and re-read the past.

"The Thursday Thief pulls a Five of Spades." ding.

Johnny takes the deck and flicks his wrist quick as a knife. King of Clubs. Like there was never any doubt. Amor fati, says Nietzsche. Love of fate. Reconciling oneself to that which is inevitable.

Pinball Johhny stands and cracks his back, neck and knuckles. The Shuffler follows suit. Seems like a bad habit of the people in this room.

The Shuffler approaches and knocks me out with a quick right hand.

“Amor fati,” I think I hear Godswill say. The room fades to black and I hear the pitter-patter of raindrops like silver bullets against the fire-escape.

I listen to the rain and feel myself transported, like through a dream. Weightless, effortless. The raindrops fall harder against the steel railing, yet their melody is soft, and softer, and slowly indiscernible . . .

The Thursday Thief. Part Three

(Roberto Matta, "Eva Valliante" - 1991)

I wake-up hanging in the same place. A little more groggy. A lot more pain. And thirsty as hell. I look down at the bruises tatooed across my body. Holy fuck, I think. As I start to sway that magic African cloud gets kicked back up within me like desert sand on a windy day. I get light-headed and the room begins to spin in strange patterns. I catch a glimpse of Godswill doing situps in the corner. He swings his fists each time he comes up, like a swimmer up for air. I’m suddenly struck by bits and pieces of the days that brought me here. Rumours of a powerful man with a quick left and a sweet tooth for twisted games of chance. And an unrelenting desire to test my luck. I sway deeper into unconsciousness and dream of peanut-butter kisses and poetry.

The Thursday Thief. Part 2

(Roberto Matta, "Violent indefinissable" - 1950)

I wake-up a punching-bag. My wrists are tied as I’m strung up shirtless in the corner of some rundown boxing club. There’s a make-shift ring and a few human punching-bags swaying like raw meat in the shadows. Others who had somehow crossed Pinball Johnny in Red Creek City. His town.

Godswill’s warming up beside me. He’s not wearing gloves.

“Can I bum a smoke before you start,” I ask him.

“Sure, kid.”

He walks over to his stuff and reaches into his coat pocket. He comes back and sticks a red camel between my lips.

“Anything stronger?” I mumble.

“Hehehe,” Godswill’s got a deep, infectious laugh. “I know what you want.”

He plucks a fat juicy joint from his camel pack and lites it up.

“Special made,” he says.

The more I listen to Godswill speak the more I can detect his African accent. It sounds dignified and honest. I’ve always made a habit of never trusting anyone without an accent. Native speakers sound too damn slick for their own good. Godswill holds true to my preconception by taking two quick tokes and leaving the rest for me. The man’s a gentleman.

“Try not to scream like a bitch,” he says, and then he starts hitting.

“Gaah, brrr, ratata fucky tity fuck, brrrrrah,” I cringe and mumble.

I’ve been in situations like this before. Won too much money and payed for it. At least this is dignified and honest hitting. Nothing below the belt, easy on the face. Old school. Or maybe he’s just pacing himself. Godswill’s as nimble on his feet as he was on that typewriter. Quick, hard, and everything in rhythm. Move, stutter step, then BAM! jab jab jabs that feel like bullet trains. I bring the magic cloud deep into my lungs and pass it through every cell of my beaten body. I toke until I’m covered in smoke and bruises. I toke until pain becomes my ritual sacrifice. I toke until I realize this isn’t your average university campus weed. This is African shit. I giggle as consciousness is slipping away. And through my dreams I think I scream.

The Thursday Thief. Part V

(Roberto Matta, "El Ano de los Tres 000" - 2002)

“What day is it?” I ask Godswill.

“Hehehe, that’s the point kid” He holds a bowl of water to my mouth. I drink frantically to sooth the concrete cracking of my lips. He places the empty bowl down on the ground and The Shuffler shoves a little white pill into my mouth.

“Time to swallow, kid,” and he knocks me out with a ferocious hook to the jaw.

Hours or days pass as I wake intermittently to white pills, powders, drops of water, and heavy-metal hitting. I’m loosing track of time as I slip between this world and that of dreams.

“Skippy the Squirrel,” I mumble.

I kiss a young girl in the dark closet and slip into unconsciousness as the dominos come tumbling down.

... tap tap tap tap tap ding.

The Thursday Thief. Part IV

“What day is it?” I manage to breath.

I’m praying for Thursday and I hate the feeling of not knowing when it is.

The Thursday Thief. Part VI

(Roberto Matta, "Vertige du doute" - 1991)

“What day is it?” I stutter through the cracks.

“Time to pull a card.” It’s The Shuffler.

I realize I’m no longer hanging or swaying. I’m sitting in a chair blindfolded but awake. Strangely awake. Like after three bottles of jolt-cola mixed with espresso. Or just crack. My body’s tingling. I can’t feel the days of the week like I used to.

“Pull a card, kid.”

I reach out tentatively in search of a young girl’s shivering hand and feel the cold surface of fate. I pull, get punched, and fall back asleep.

“Red or black, kid?”

I mumble something about Skippy the Squirrel and precious awkward fingertips. I can hear the machine-gun typewriter taking notes.

Like a rat in a maze, the routine repeats itself countless times. How many weeks or months go by? Wake, pull a card, say a number, pick a colour, drink, and get knocked out. I don’t know what I’m on, but I don’t like it. It’s not like the intense focus on the moment of mescaline. The powder that teaches you to love the present. These are drugs that kick the past up into the tranquil air. I can hear the thundering of Godswill’s nimble fingers recording everything. Even my dreams follow the quick rhythms of his sterling silver typewriter.

They were analyzing this thing much more thouroughly than I could ever bare. Blanket-covered reasons were beginning to reveal the shape of a young girl’s tender waist and lollipop lips. One spun bottle and our twisted fates had collided in a closet-room kiss. Boxers don’t know how to ask questions, only how to hit the present hard enough that the past swells to the surface. Forever stuck in their own sadistic ways.

For the thrilling conclusion, feel free to contact spcmnspff (he may or may not agree to give it to you). Also, keep an eye out for the board-game version of this story coming soon!

Click, Fire, Foreshadowing

Outside, raindrops falling like Adam and Eve, and puddles forming of cumulate remorse. Rafter Sousa gathered his things and exited down the hall.

“Time to get wet,” he thought.

He moved deliberately to the elevator, black suitcase swinging at his side. He pressed the button and waited. He dropped the suitcase and sat down, and he waited. He turned the ring on his finger and ...

The metallic doors slid open. Elevator full. Seven other men and seven other black suitcases.

“Guess, I’ll grab the next one,” he said. And so Rafter Sousa waited. Strange hotel, he thought. Convention of dreary single men. He cracked his neck violently and he waited.

“That won’t do you no good,” an echo from down the hall. The maid.
“What won’t?”
“Being impatient,” she said. “It’s 9:30 hon, check out time. There’s fifteen floors above us, about a hundred guests itching to leave , and only one little grey box. The other two are broken.”

Rafter paused in the staircase to light a cigarette. Fifteen above us, but fifteen below, he told his lighter. He sat down. Click, fire, and instant composure. He tilted his head back and looked up into the spiral of capitalist ascent. They only provide a porter on the way up, he thought. Slick fuckers.

A Fringe Suburban Murder

The unidentified body lay hacked in chicken mcnugget pieces on the cold, steel factory floor.

“Count it,” ordered Detective Graff in a cigarette stained voice.
“Pardon me, sir,” asked Officer Blake hesitantly. “But count what, exactly?”
“Her,” he pointed at the shattered pieces of female flesh. “Count how many pieces the bastard left us. It’s a clue.”

Detective Graff turned away and headed toward the open delivery gate, toward the delusive air of sleeping contentment. He stood in midnight solitude and fumbled in his pocket for a black bic lighter.

“Panzy fascist bastard,” he mumbled.

He stood at the edge of suburban reason and lit a filterless cigarette.

“Panzy fascist bastards!” he screamed, suddenly aware of plurality.

Mocking glow of letters obscured the star studded sky. A FEDEx warehouse on the other side of the street from this beaten down old manufacturing plant. Or was it a processing plant? Shipping? Storage? The oversized FEDEx symbol stared down at him.

"You saw it all didn't you?"

He could of sworn the neon letters winked at him.

"Yeah, you saw it all."

Detective Graff spat the tunisian tobacco that stuck to his lips.

“Find out what kind of plant this is," he ordered. "Then find out about that FEDEx warehouse across the street. Maybe someone saw something. And when you’re done counting get some yellow tape up around the scene. We want to keep everything exactly as it is."

Officer Blake knelt down beside the victim and thought of jigsaw puzzles scattered across his apartment floor.

“You have to play with the pieces,” he thought. “If you hope to see the whole.”

Blake was a rookie, first week on the job. Retired poet at the age of twenty-five, gave up and became a cop.

He began counting but stopped suddenly at sixteen – a thumb – to open a thin, yellow notepad tucked in his breast pocket.

Reconciliations with space, he jotted.

Seventeen, nipple. Eighteen, earlobe. Nineteen, index finger. The rookie paused again; he picked up her index finger, dipped it in blood and left its print on the page.

But it’s time that tears us, he added."

Kiwi Mouldy

Detective Graff dropped his shoulders like so many high expectations. A gorgeous wife. A fast car. An easy case.

“Nothing,” he said.

He looked about the fraught little apartment belonging to one Luke Jonathan Drake. He’d inspected every crevice.

“Nothing.”

Officer Blake sat down at the computer. Still on, still warm. He opened the internet browser and clicked on bookmarks. A goldmine of places Drake had visited, traces Drake had left.

A list of sites popped up like a police line-up. He began to interrogate each one in turn.

http://clik.clak.free.fr/film_high.htm

"You got something, rookie?"

Blake closed the site.

"Nope, sir. Notta."

Kiwi mouldy, he thought. Blake still wasn't sure whether this was police work or poetry. He emailed himself Drake's bookmarks and history while Detective Graff was taking a piss.

As they were about to leave Blake took one last lingering look at the apartment. He opened his notepad to a different page.

Kiwi mouldy, he scribbled.

Connecting the Dots

The door swung open and the air-conditioning held its breath.

"Blake!"

Officer Blake searched for a sheet of names upon his crowded desk.

He entered the office and shut the door behind him.

Detective Graff was sitting back in his chair spitting tobacco.

"What do we have?"

"So, there were 67 pieces."

"Hm."

"I referenced them and found that it more or less adds up to a single female body. But there were only two fingers. And, here's the weird part, the two fingers had two different prints. One belonging to a ... miss Nila Jones of San Fracisco.. And an Isabella Sousa. Italian citizen."

"Hm."

"Yeah."

Something's missing, thought Blake.

"And?"

"Well, the DNA lab did the whole DNA thing. The rest of the body belongs to a Krystal Tumano of West Vancouver Island. She died in a car crash two weeks ago. Body was supposedly burried. And then, three other sets of prints all over the body. Johnny "pinball" Court, boyfriend, boxer. Then, a Luke Jonathan Drake, a FEDEx employee from guess which FEDEx?"

"Hm, our FEDEx."

"Our FEDEx," repeated Blake.

"And, finally, a Miss Fae-ling Rhyter. Asian girl who gets high and wears a cape."

"Hm."

Things are out of place.

A Girl Named Fae-ling

Fae-ling donned a silver hooded cape whenever she was alone in her room. And nothing else. She tied a careful knot and let the smooth silk hang at her naked back. So many jedi weapons and so few jedi, she thought. She opened the balcony doors, fifth floor, sat at her typewriter and carefully lit her pet candle Tinker. Her mind was sharp and her fingers poised. Both seldom inspired to action.

Night in and night out she repeated the same routine. Cape. Balcony doors. Typewriter. Tinker. She stared intently at Tinker’s trembling flame and, after a few minutes, her gaze moved like clockwork to the street lamp outside her window, then the red, yellow, green of the traffic-light just beyond, and then the endless row upon row of more streetlamps, more red-yellow-greens, and in the distance the bright dupont colours of twenty-four hour shell and esso gas-stations, golden arches, pizza-huts and ginormous buckets of chicken. The flashing lights of consumer capitalism and midnight hunger pressed against a near forgotten sky.

Night in and night out she stared at the beating heart-cells of suburbia, fingers poised, caped nakedness kept warm by candle-light, and she connected these dots until they led her well beyond, to neighbouring towns and distant galaxies, orange coke and agent orange, african children and suicide teens, General-Major Godswill Tamuno and scratched Joan Baez records. She was determined, fingers poised, to connect all the dots, all the pieces, all the social, geo-political, historical and philosophical elements without leaving anything out or anyone behind. She breathed.

Fae-ling analyzed, fingers poised, she catalogued and scattegorized (she bracketed), fingers poised, she deconstructed and destroyed, reassembled and recovered, all the while fingers ready and fingers poised and fingers twitching as her silver hooded cape fluttered in the wind.

She breathed. Everything, everything in anticipation of that one night, that one glorious moment of one night when the puzzle would fit . . .

A Motel Scene

Though the moonlight was faint and her naked body beautiful she wandered to the window and shut the blinds.

“Because in darkness we’re as one,” she explained as her hands reached toward him.

Pinball Johnny

Today Johnny woke up in a pinball machine. Fast and deteriorated.

To slow down. To stop. To wait. Johnny begged Krystal to relearn these talents impoverished by the death of time. But she didn’t, or couldn’t. Not for him, and not for the traffic lights of Red Creek City. Her red sports car sped out of the driveway and it was the rlast time he saw either her or it in one piece. Her head through the windshield, they said. Pavement smeared with tinted glass and Italian engineering, they said. Parts he used to touch, he told them. The pigs came to his door that same afternoon. Entirely her fault, they said. Entered the busy intersection at over two hundred.

Accelerate a process and determine its efficiency, Officer Blake scribbled in his book. Slow down a process and peer into its heartbreaking beauty.

Today Johnny woke up in a pinball machine. He was left with nothing but speed and shards of alpha romeo.

The Actress and the Writer. Part I

(Joan Miro, "Femme au Miroir" - 1957)

Nila loved the sound of his voice when he left her a message; Joseph preferred her words unspoken. She was a stage actress, by day and by night. He was a sports columnist, and poet of few themes.

“You’re overdramatic,” he whispered when they made love.
“Fuck me like you write,” she demanded, “Long and incomprehensible.”

It was through art that Joseph and Nila struggled to understand themselves and the complexity of their relationship. They were an esoteric couple; he was dangerously introspective and her moods swung like corollaries of April weather. “A couple of failed artists,” they used to joke. But in the waning months of that year she had become vaguely successful, while his sports columns were increasingly opaque and unread.

Joseph enjoyed gin and metaphysics. “The writer as the world’s failed hero” was his favourite theme, made explicit by the tattered black cape he too often wore. He spent sleepless nights on his laptop, writing sentences without endings, peeling through language toward some greater truth. Unsuccessful, he’d tiptoe from the apartment, wander to the local pub and analyze despondent men and their drinks. Nila would wake to the sound of the front door closing, feeling somehow betrayed in the hum and glow of the abandoned laptop. There were parts of Joseph that were always inaccessible, his inclinations and choice of attire dark and unpredictable. She no longer bothered to read the words on the screen.

The Actress and the Writer. Part II

Nila was gifted with language, but she didn’t share Joseph’s faith in the redemptive quality of words. Significance, she believed, lay in the way the mouth moved, not in the things it had to say. The performative aspect of human interaction intrigued her. She would accompany Joseph to his sporting events, and while he struggled to translate gestures into sentences, she sat absorbed for hours in the aesthetics of human aggression.

“Love and football adhere to the law of entropy,” Joseph once wrote. “Those who participate are compelled to a state of disorder and destruction, emotions and limbs tending toward violent collision. Yet beauty finds a seam. Tiny miracles occur, in the midst of chaos splendour breaks through somehow, despite all odds. Johnny Malone carries for 117 yards; Giants win. Final score, New York 28 Jacksonville 17.”

Joseph observed in Nila’s acting a similar compulsion to disaster. Her performances, like his writing, tended toward botched melodrama, as though imperfection were the natural state of her gestures and his words. And yet somehow she managed to accomplish tiny miracles, the achievement of perfect moments that could transcend the stage and send shivers down Joseph’s spine. It was a reaction no other woman could induce, at once a reminder of her beauty and his disappointments as a writer. He adored her radiance, but resented the success it slowly brought.

Nila was quickly becoming the star of her shows. With every particular role a new set of possibilities came into focus. For seven weeks she arrived home from work having suffered rape by a clown.

“I want a more sinister absurdity!” Joseph teased as Nila chopped cantaloupe.

She returned home tipsy after opening night; Joseph waited in bed in a clown suit. During those weeks his sarcasm was unbearable, her sense of infirmity pushed to its limit. Then the script changed and he became an inadequate and naive husband, unaware that she was sleeping with a Spanish matador. Matadors were in short supply in the West Village; she fucked the Argentine mechanic instead.

The Actress and the Writer. Part III

It was easy for Nila to see in Joseph an aspect of every male character she was ever asked to pull near or push away. As a result, Joseph had to adapt to every new role and plot curve. Their home was an extension of the stage, another scene in which to explore the depth and range of the people they played.

“Where’s dinner?” Joseph half-joked, unaware that she was no longer playing a cannibal chef, but a lesbian outcast that month. Nila picked up a plate and threw it at his head.

Joseph could have died. He left the hospital with a concussion and eight stitches. At work he wrote about the role of rage in Olympic women’s discus. He returned home and ducked immediately.
“Very funny. I’m sorry, baby. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I don’t know what happened. You just embodied everything that drives my character to flee society and sail the ocean on her raft of crucifixion wood,” Nila explained.
“You’re not a crucified lesbian, Nila.”
She knew that their relationship was a push and pull dance, and that an errant plate signalled her turn to tug.
“I’m sorry, baby. I’m tormented by patriarchal structures right now. You know how I get caught up in my roles.”

They made dinner together. She prepared a salad; he fried vegetables and heated left-over chicken. They ate abstractedly, small talk penetrated by silence. He cleared the table, carried dirty dishes to the sink.

After dinner she approached him shyly, stretched out her arms and brought his waist tight toward hers.
“Ever fuck a lesbian?”
She tilted her head and smiled apologetically, seductively.
“Look, I can’t promise not to be difficult, but I can promise never to throw a plate at you again,” she said, slipping out of her jeans.
She un-caped him and sat on top of him demurely – ritual of apology. He swung her body below his – ritual of forgiveness. She focused on the pattern of the stitches, shuddered at the physical pain she had inflicted.
“Harder, baby. Go harder.”
She moaned while grasping his forehead, tracing the criss-cross with her hand.

Again, Nila returned home an outcast lesbian. And again, Joseph resorted to his writing, a new piece entitled Forgiveness after War: Shaking Hands in Sport. That night, unable to sleep, he sat at his laptop and typed “Now Is Past” in different combinations across three filled pages. He sat shirtless, black cape fluttering in the winter breeze. Nila pretended not to wake; she observed the dance of his fingers, the guillotine motion of left thumb toward spacebar.