Stories Archive

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New in the Stories Archive: The opening pages of John Domini's Novel in progress: "The Color Inside a Melon", "This is not a Confession" by Ryan Hart, "An Interview with Dr. Sunil Sharma" by Jaydeep Sarangi and "Uncreated Creatures" by Connor Caddigan. Always and  forever:"I Am The Best Fighter Pilot In The World" by Nathan Thomas D'Annibale. Some Thoughts on "God Loves Rich Kids and We Smoke Off The Same Cigarette" by J de Salvo. "The Nut Tree" by Richard Lutman. "Notes to Bad of Country" by Tadzio Koelb. "Logopoetry" by C.E. Chaffin. "Queer Nerds and Gaymers: A Look at Aspects of Some Online Queer Subcultures" by David Pomerede.
 

 

 

THE COLOR INSIDE A MELON (excerpt)

 

 

 

You reach a certain corner of the city, a certain hour, when you’ve taken a hit and there’s a threat in your face — and it’s something else altogether. It’s not at all the town you know. This when you’ve learned to work its angles, even a street-market in midsummer, the stink and caterwaul and the need to squint, because a fishmonger hosing down his stall seems to cast a halo over the day’s catch. You’ve learned the code in the echo off the stones at 2 AM, too. Could be some lonesome soul out trolling for company, could mean you should double-check the lock. You’ve grown accustomed to the compromises, the lurching after one stubborn aspiration or another and against the short leash of everything else. Yet you reach the right urban cranny, or rather the wrong one, where your head’s burning from someone else’s knuckles, where the guy’s actually got a knife out — then whatever you think you know, it was a fairytale. It could be Sodom, could be Xanadu. If you’ve got a view, a terrazzo, a rooftop, if the blow you took left you facing away from the party and out over the view, then the city first appears rimed or studded with gold, that’s the pain of course, and even after the hallucination fades you’re left with something else entirely. Five stories below (or is it fifteen, for a woozy moment there?), the hubs and spokes wink in and out of sight. You can’t rely on the streetlights. It’s no longer Naples, the place a native Italian would call your "adopted home." That city’s disappeared. It’s gone to join the one you were born in, another place that people were foolish enough to think they knew, the better Mogadishu that your father and mother believed would last.

All of a sudden, all over again, you’re the alien. You’re a fresh pair of arms, un braciolo, ready to wade onshore in an unlit cove. Except this time there’s no boat. Risto stood at the terrazzo wall, pawing his head, wondering if he’d have to fly.

It wasn’t as if he could call a cop. The man who’d swatted him was a cop, or as close to it as Risto was going to find here. This rooftop was part of a club, tonight’s location for the club. His assailant worked as one of the bouncers. Up here at penthouse level, the building had two apartments, and now Risto found himself pinned against the rooftop railing of one apartment by a rawboned creep who, just five minutes earlier, had been standing watch outside the door to the other. The other place still had a door. Behind the door, no doubt, they kept a whore or two. They must’ve had a card game going, too, the crew that ran this dance-and-drinks arrangement, this party that floated from one abandoned building to another. Whores and cards, that’s what brought in the real money. The take would be paltry at what passed for a bar. Likewise, over at what passed for an entrance, the doorway without a door, the club wasn’t going to get the full cover charge from everyone who made it up the building’s stairs. Never mind that this apartment was the larger of the two, the place with a real terrazzo. The roof here might’ve held potted palms, a grape arbor, back before the spring earthquake.

They had a sweet setup, La Fenestrella, tonight. Plenty of dance floor. Still, the bar and the cover wouldn’t bring in enough to keep the cops looking the other way. The club was asking five Euros, but Risto had seen a couple of girls pay no more than a wide smile. His friend Giussi had been waved at the mention of a name. As for this bouncer, he might’ve been paid in Ecstasy. Granted, that Risto should find himself in a place like La Fenestrella was itself a wild hair — but this free-handed "security" had gone off more wildly still. As the man muscled Risto over to the terrazzo wall, he’d kept grinding against Risto’s butt. Looking to tweak his high?

Risto himself may have started tweaking, though he was cold sober and hetero. He choked out a wisecrack, You should try this on my friends. If the tough guy wanted to cop a feel, he should try Risto’s pal Giussi. Giussi, working the dancers, had already made a pickup. Or the bouncer should put the moves on Risto’s so-called "cousin" Eftah. Eftah would’ve welcomed the attention, because in a club like La Fenestrella, the men who liked men tended to prefer his boyfriend. The cousin’s boyfriend was a Moroccan hothouse flower, and here the crowd was mostly mushroom-shaped. Out of the sub-Sahara, like Risto.

Not that he had the chance to explain. The bouncer squelched his little quip — another wild hair, on a mission Risto would’ve sworn was serious. He wound up head and shoulders over the rooftop rail.

Below, the hubs and spokes winked and reeled. Was that the market where they gave good weight on the fish? Or over there: a boulevard you could walk safely till deep into the night? Risto discovered he had a hand free. He pawed his head and, as best he could, shifted his weight back onto his heels.

He’d made an easy target, no question. At his first job in Naples, he’d been the smallest brother working the docks. Tonight, worse, he was a doughboy compared to most of the crowd. These clubgoers picked the local tomatoes and mucked out the buffalo barns; they did the heavy lifting for the cut-rate construction on the city’s periphery. Risto might be as dark as any of them, but he had the fingers of a keyboard jockey. Truth was, he did most of his job with his eye. He ought to be the last person to raise difficult questions, around La Fenestrella. And just now, he ought to try and find some help. Try and see, insofar as he could, if he had any friends out on the terrazzo. Working against the wrist pinned in the center of his back, Risto wormed this way and that against the rail. There, yes, a friend: Eftah. Did Risto actually give a yelp, when he spotted Eftah? The man might not be a cousin, but in La Fenestrella he was the closest thing to family. He was a lot more reassuring than the out-of-joint city below. Risto gave a cry and Eftah loomed up, such a slab of immigrant beef he could’ve worked as a bouncer himself. At the first whiff of Eftah’s scent, an amber musk you’d think he’d have outgrown long ago, Risto’s attacker let go. Both of them got some breathing room.

Risto sized up his adversary. A tall stretch of tarred rope, a Tutsi build. The man’s sharp corners were brought out by his jacket, a narrow-waisted, canary-yellow disco affair worn with the cuffs rolled. Plus a V-cut Afro, another throwback. But then this Papers — that was the name he’d given — wanted people to look. He wanted customers; he had a sideline. Papers ran a business out of a hidden pocket, a custom arrangement sewn inside the back of his coat. That was where the trouble had started.

And it could’ve gotten a lot worse, Risto had to admit. Papers stood head and shoulders over him, and the man’s moves suggested he’d done time in the military. A quick back-of-the-hand smarted as if his middle knuckle were a deadbolt. Worse, Risto was the newbie in the crowd. In his gallery, at the desk where he keyed in his checks and deposits, he might be Citizen Aristofano, a legitimate Italian. Tonight however he’d been the stranger, so slow to catch on that he’d pestered one of the enforcers in an off-the-books club for foreigners who lacked official paperwork. Most of them, like Risto, revealed a lot of melanin in their outer epidermal layers. But they didn’t know him; his legal status had him moving in very different circles. Whereas these two big guys now standing to either side, keeping him boxed in by the rail, they’d often slipped into this "Little Window" (never opened on the same street twice). This probably wasn’t the first time they’d gotten their knives out, either.

*

Workaday knives, and neither man made a show of the weapon. Both kept theirs low, hip-level. A minute ago, a minute and a half, the bouncer had flourished his, menacing Risto. Putting that threat in his face. Now however Papers and Eftah might’ve been back in Mogadishu, boxing in a pig, ready to get on with the butchering. Both blades were serrated towards the tip and Eftah’s was the classic, the tool. A thousand uses, and the cousin liked to boast that his was Finnish, the best. Papers held a switchblade, something that might once have been a showpiece. But by now the handle was badly smudged, the plating nicked. The serrations made you think of cutting wedges from a melon.

And how could anything be a showpiece, here in this brokendown venue? Show, art, the pleasures by which a gallery owner like Risto made his living — what did that have to do with this brute of a corner and hour?

He knew the neighborhood on the map. Like most, it sprawled across one of the Naples highlands, the outcroppings that hemmed in the old center and the bay. Not so bad a neighborhood, in this city you could find far worse, but nevertheless you couldn’t rely on the streetlights. Repairs were still catching up, after the earthquake. Fifteen weeks ago, back in springtime, tremors had wracked the metro area. Italian authorities had rushed in, to be sure, plus international agencies, NATO people, the UN. Since the last big quake, in 1980, they’d made a point of having plans in place for the next. Still, even now, there remained pockets that lacked for infrastructure. Even fifteen weeks later, the sulfur lingered on the air, as if Vesuvius were one of those cookies you cracked open just to drink in the smell. Tonight, the most visible evidence of repair work had been the barricade at the entryway to the palazzo, five floors below. The building was one those that’d been judged too dangerous to live in. PVC pipe blocked the front doors with a rig that suggested a jungle gym, the crossbars x’d with orange tape.

That was it. Naples had organized repair teams, Rome had sent down emergency response units, NATO had put uniforms on the street and the UN had whipped up international coalitions for relief. Still that ramshackle Do-Not-Cross was all that remained of their work. A joint or two had probably come undone during the first aftershock after the thing went up. If there’d been a chain, a lock, anything like that, it was gone now, and the warning tape had pulled from its staples. Strips flapped on the summer night, kaboom! orange. Their flutter caught the light from some rewired block nearby, and Risto thought of his gallery, of Chagall and his fireworks.

His gallery, his business, the whole-cloth construction called law and order — in tatters against the dark.

So, among the outlaws, what’s your best move? Risto drew to full height, though some ratchet in his spine seemed to skip a gear, and he winced too at the mix of cheap perfume and rooftop tar. Out here they kept the bar and DJ. But he squared up, Citizen Aristofano, gallery owner. He palmed his shaved head, a fingertip-massage. He had the impression that his big semi-relation also laid a hand on him, for a moment anyway. Eftah shifted closer, anyway. But he too was watching the other, him with the bat-wing shoulders and the black-market sideline.

Risto made sure he had the man’s eye. "A new world, eh. That’s what you promised, a new world."

Outside the other top-story apartment, the still-intact door, Papers had made a kind of presentation. Heavy-knuckled though he was, he’d shown a light touch, jogging a manila folder just enough to allow contraband documents to slip out partway.

"But look what you show me. I could be back with the thugs in ‘Dishu."

Now those documents were once more tucked out of sight, at the back of the dealer’s flashy coat. The man himself was turning wary, glancing behind him.

"The promises you made," Risto went on, "I was right to push you a little. Find out what kind of a person I was dealing with."

Any other situation, his toughneck pretense would’ve made him laugh. But Papers had shifted to the defensive, unmistakably. When you glanced where he kept glancing, you could see he’d come a long way from where he’d been posted.

"What kind of a person I’m dealing with, that’s what I’ve got to find out — "

"He’s with you?" Papers turned to Eftah, frowning.

The so-called cousin replied with a smile. He could count on the impact, teeth like his in a place like this. The Italian dental plan didn’t include these clubgoers.

"Ef-tah, right? The brother who charges a white man’s rent."

"The black lord," said Efath, "of no-account real estate."

"And this type here, he came with you?"

Even as the bouncer asked, he thought again about his job. He cast his eyes across the terrazzo, once more. No one appeared to have taken an interest. La Fenestrella must’ve had substitutes handy, and besides, trouble like this didn’t make much of a dent in the party. So what if one man wrestled another to the edge of the roof, and then a third stepped in? So what if the knives came out? Most of these brothers and sisters were carrying some weapon or other. Most of them hadn’t needed September 11th to remind them what you can accomplish with a box-cutter.

Anyway this was Sunday, at least till midnight. The main attraction so far was the breeze up here, a relief this late in July. Most folks clustered along the crates-&-coolers bar, though a few couples had begun to bop around the DJ’s setup. Everyone had better things to do than worry about some squabble in one corner, with the exception of the lone white couple. Two kids hardly out of their teens, they’d withdrawn to the far side of the bar, wide-eyed. Their faces had seemed especially white to begin with, in contrast to their black hipster getup, going Goth for La Fenestrella. Now they were pale with worry as well. Among the Africans, though, Risto noticed only one paying special attention. Another rawboned type, this was, his wrists and elbows scuffed with labor, chalky. The guy had been dancing, and the girl looked ready to party. She’d given some thought to that tube top, a mint-green cone serving up chocolate scoops. But her partner was ignoring her, all of a sudden. The way he stopped dancing in order to study the confrontation at the rail, you could see he’d put in years as a hardscrabble field-hand, scowling at the weather. He and Papers might’ve shared a look, as well.

Risto’s thought was: when a man’s dealing in contraband, naturally he’s going to have backup. But Papers was asking a question.

"You want to make an arrangement, truly?" His Italian had that street formality.

"You came to me, isn’t that right? You figured I had the money."

"I did see you have the money. I did see — you were looking for something. A man who came looking, you know? What if I told you I wondered if you were police?"

Eftah gave a snort, keeping it friendly.

"In fact. For him to be police, how does that make sense? Doesn’t make any sense at all, the police going to so much trouble. Besides, they’d never send a little houseboy like this."

The dealer bared a crimped row of teeth, and meantime his backup closed in. This new arrival wanted everyone to notice, too. He got his sandals flopping, punctuating the DJ’s thrum. If he had a weapon he kept it out of sight, but when he and Papers stood together, the sales team, there was no mistaking that they’d made their way across the Mediterranean by tooth and claw.

So it was two against two, and Risto had no better option than to keep pressing. "Then how," he asked, "did you and I ever set off a comedy like this? Two reasonable people, trying to do a bit of business."

"Signore, are you forgetting? You put your hands on me."

"You wouldn’t give me a straight answer. I was trying to ask about our poor murdered brother, and all you had to say…"

"Again with that faggot. Again, the murdered brother."

"But, how else am I to know who I’m dealing with? How else, except — "

"Houseboy, what do you need to know?" Risto’s line had always been a lame excuse, and this time Papers kicked away its cane. "You need a debate, ‘New blacks in old Europe?’"

The way Eftah smiled, you’d think he’d enjoy a debate.

"Blacks like that boy," the dealer went on, "what can I tell you? What, another pair of working arms? Another one who’d never find that next step up, the new world? But then there’s you, a man who came here looking."

*

Aristofano: philosopher of happiness. Giussi had explained, Giussi of course, he never missed an opportunity to show off his education. And these days the gallery owner would’ve taken himself for a happy man. Granted, the name had started out as a convenience. Back when he’d owned little more than the shirt on his back, a teenager new to the Naples accent, he’d accepted this hey-you with a shrug. "Aristofano" was the best that the locals could do, especially the Chinese who ran the docks. Anyway his actual name had a dubious quality, as one of the possible titles for a lizard god out of the Bakool Hills. A bush word, it posed a challenge for Risto himself, even when he was young. His parents had grown up with the colonial languages. Three times they’d been forced into exile, yet Mamma and Papà had never let go of that dream, Mogadishu as the Jewel in the Horn of Africa, the vibrant crossroads where North met South met East met.... Anyway Risto had spoken Italian in the home and gone to the last of the schools run by the Dominican friars. His brother too.

These days, sure he was happy. He was happy in his marriage. He was twice a father, with his kids in that agreeable parenthesis between infant demands and adolescent rancor. He had an Italian passport and, around his adopted city, a winner’s reputation. Yet here he stood, well past the breaking point of law and order. By now they might be into Monday morning, the working week.

Didn’t make sense at all. But then, even a black-market man in a bright yellow coat would have to admit: neither did bloody murder. The ugly business Friday night could’ve been a textbook example of homicidal insanity. On top of that, it tended to bring out the madman in anyone who heard the details. When Risto had suggested, quietly, that La Fenestrella might be the likeliest place to begin looking for answers, to find out who could be responsible for such a slaughter, both the men in on his little secret had agreed at once. Now, granted, out on the club’s rooftop the doubts came on strong. The doubts left spots in his eyes; the scalloped blades to either side seemed to catch some glare. Still, Risto wasn’t here alone. Eftah and Giussi hadn’t come along just for the dancing. They didn’t mind the dancing, God knows. The doormen knew them on sight, the kind-of cousin and the well-read friend, and they must’ve been among the first to learn tonight’s location. Whenever La Fenestrella found a place to set up, the notice went out via text message. A cryptic notice, naturally. That’s how the warlords who ran the joint liked to keep it, and Risto’s two companions had emphasized that he needed to do the same. If the gallery owner intended to get some answers, he needed to put his questions in code. Even the faintest signifier for the law could (Eftah’s boyfriend had been the one to say it) "get a man’s throat cut." They’d been schooling him, sure, the veteran Fenestrellans. Nonetheless, they’d agreed with him. They’d agreed that to visit the club that very night, and to put out a few feelers among its patrons, was more than anyone could expect of the police.

What did the police care about another brother cut to ribbons? Another shadow, a clandestino?

The cops would note the fine bottle-black of the victim’s Shabeeleh Valley skin, and they would ascertain that he’d gone by the name La Cia. They would determine, given the way in which he’d died, that he’d hustled after whatever rough sexual comfort he could find. They might even figure out that he’d preferred men. With that, the authorities would have a report, nicely typed, along with a list of the evidence found at the scene. Throw in a few turn-your-stomach snapshots, and they’d have a file. An official file labeled in block letters and assigned a drawer.

Tonight, back in the building’s stairwell, Eftah had put it this way: "I’ve lived in Naples too long to have illusions about the law."

And Aristofano’s distant relation had lived here far longer. Eftah admitted to 45, though like Giussi he much preferred a nattering game of Pin the Age on the Clubhound. Then too, like La Cia, both Giussi and the cousin had a tenuous standing under Italian law. Eftah had set down an anchor, in this country — he held title on three apartment buildings, somehow — but Giussi was almost as much a clandestino as the victim. He scratched together a living, mostly in film and performance, and so every year brought some fresh wrangle about his work visa. The hoops an immigrant had to jump through, here in Italy, supplied Giussi’s stage shows with some of their wittiest sneering. But a low opinion of the authorities was hardly limited to folks with his or Eftah’s skin-tone. White Italians too, or savvy ones like Aristofano’s wife, could see that the homicide had already become a political football.

Ordinarily a crime like this, smeared with the warpaint of perversion, would’ve been beneath the attention of the mayor and the regional governor. Yet since the discovery of the body, midnight Friday, both these ranking local politicians had given the case a good deal of lip service. They’d thrown around expressions like "the new and welcoming Europe." The city’s mayor complained in particular about where the killing had taken place. The scene of the crime had been another "irregular" dance club, like tonight’s roughhouse venue. La Cia had bled to death in the former back office of a clothing factory, where the lone window was papered over with a notice under the seal of the Regione di Campania, a warning that the building was too dangerous to enter. But then again, if you asked the governor of the Regione, he’d say the setting was incidental. The governor went on a harangue against the immigration agencies. If the agencies had been doing their job, they would’ve had this illegal on a boat back to Africa long ago. The blame for the murder, in other words, lay at the feet of the national government, the party in power up in Rome — the party of the mayor. The opposition to the governor. His Regione had responsibility for condemned buildings, while the mayor’s Commune were supposed to ride herd on the folks who hid out in them. High-sounding charges flew back and forth. In no time, Aristofano’s wife had started to look dubious.

You think a white girl doesn’t know bullshit when she hears it? Paola asked, nodding towards the latest web-broadcast.

Risto tried to match her grin. Born in Naples, his wife had the local cynicism, tangy, as much juice as rind.

You think I can’t tell when they’re playing games?, she asked. Telling stories? There’s blood on the floor, and these two, all they care about is their shoes.

Actually, Risto had come to admire the mayor. In this country she seemed exotic, a woman in high office. After the quake she’d run all over the greater metro area, laying out cash and posting uniforms. She’d arranged for the "Earthquake I.D.," a document essential for many of the homeless. But when La Cia went to pieces, so did whatever benefit of the doubt Risto was willing to give Madame Mayor or anyone else in authority. The victim hadn’t been a friend, but he’d been a friend of friends. He’d been among the circle that came through the gallery. So Saturday morning, after he’d put the RAI news up on the widescreen so that Paola could see what had him devouring the internet so ferociously, Risto was glad to hear her cry bullshit. He tried to match her grin. But he didn’t need to hear it, in fact he knew better than she, and the uptick at the corners of his mouth felt like a mask slipping into place. Beneath, something else entirely was taking shape. He couldn’t share this yet, neither with her nor with anyone else, he’d needed one more day, today, and lunch with a friend, ostensibly a small and comfortable Sunday gathering. Over linguine and octopus Risto had polished off three full glasses of wine. Good country Falanghina, three glasses and then some. After that he’d found a moment alone on his balcony with Giussi.

"I’m going to make some inquiries," he’d told his friend. "I’m going to find out who killed La Cia."

Giussi now, he always wore a mask. The man’s cadaverous build was nothing special, not for an Ethiopian, but in his case the metabolism seemed connected with the wit, the timing. In centuries past he would’ve come to town among a troupe of Players, up on stilts and tooting a fife. He would’ve had a quip about that tube between his lips, too. Today after lunch, Risto had closed the balcony doors behind them. Should his guest erupt in some stage business, Risto hadn’t wanted Paola to notice.

But Giussi too had kept it quiet. "Inquiries, brother, hmm."

Blinking, the host settled against the balcony rail.

"Inquiries, oh la, one thinks of a senator on trial. One thinks of a case that could drag on into infinity. I’d advise against ongoing inquiries."

Risto looked back through the doors, but Paola was in the kitchen. She loved the hostess do-si-do.

"The better part of wisdom might suggest, rather, a brief exploration only."

"But, naturally it needs to happen fast." Risto’s nod was agitated. "An investigation like this, eh."

"If the pieces don’t fall into place in the first, what is it, 60 hours? Isn’t that what they say? If the killer doesn’t turn up in the first two-three days, hmm, I’ve seen enough noir to know..."

"No, no." Shaking his head, more agitated still. "I don’t want to hear it."

Also Giussi’s smile was hard to take, nonchalant, paternal.

"This is no movie. Giussi, this — whatever we find, we take it to the police." Somehow he kept his voice down. "I’m not looking to wind up with a knife at my throat. I wouldn’t even bring up the idea if I didn’t have a deadline in mind."

"By the night of Expo in Città, shall we say, my brother?"

"Expo in Città, Friday? Maybe give everyone something to celebrate?"

"Actually we’d have to finish our business by Thursday night. The Expo’s the next morning. My own performance, down by the Galleria, that’s at lunchtime."

"Sure. Your show, that too. It all comes together. We hand the butcher over to the police and then go out and enjoy the party."

"Oh la. Doesn’t he sound reasonable? Aristofano filosofo."

At some point Risto had begun massaging his eyes. He spoke to the fire-pink creases between his fingers.

"It’s just, the boy deserves better. A brother like La Cia, left in ruins."

"America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

Okay, uncover the eyes. But Giussi gave no explanation, dropping blithely into a chair. "A sweetheart out of New York," was all he said. "Or a former sweetheart, alas, a man no longer with us. You’d recognize the name."

The gallery owner had been working himself up to this for a day and half. His whisper roughened: "Guissi, you don’t understand. The Expo, you think that matters? What matters is Paola. My wife — she’s the time limit."

His guest cocked his narrow head.

"Paola’s out of the picture, this week. Morning after tomorrow she leaves to join the kids, and she’s staying away till the Expo."

"Eftah," Giussi said. "For this adventure we need Eftah. You know he’s game."

Adventure?

"Eftah, oh la yes, the Black Lord of the No-Account." Giussi’s way with a zinger, to be sure, was his strength. The Marxist-Leninists had gone so far as to contract him for a couple of sloganeering rap numbers. "But not your Paola, no, not the Madonna of the Bedtime Fairytale…"

"Madonna? Giussi, you don’t understand. What matters is, what we’re up to now, my Paola, she’s got no part in it. Whatever we get done, it’s got to happen while she’s out of the city."

*

There’d been more to consider, naturally. They’d had a thousand questions, Risto and his Sunday visitor, but they stuck to essentials, in shorthand and sotto voce. The performer was already close to the case, as one of La Cia’s lovers and one of the subterranean cognoscenti. Giussi had known about the warehouse setup where the boy was killed, and today at the end of the meal, as the limoncello went around the table, he’d received the text about La Fenestrella. The Little Window: no greater gap necessary, for a flexible animal.

You did need to be flexible. Eftah appeared to have the wrong body, entirely, for tonight’s location. Wrestling through the tumbledown barricade at the building’s entrance, the former construction crew chief failed to notice one of the staples that held the tattered warning tape. He tore a thumb.

But Risto slid in without a hitch, though he was startled by the bawl of pipe against pipe. The noise recalled the mew of his daughter’s stuffed kitten. Rosa loved to torture that toy. There were times she ordered Tonino to get his sword, an accessory out of Gladiator, and cut off the kitty’s head. They had all the toys they wanted, his little naturalborn citizens. They got to spend the last six weeks of summer in a 300-year-old home above the harbor at Agropoli. Their last name might be Alkair, but their grandfather was a heart specialist, a surgeon who’d scrubbed his hands so hard and often they glowed a Paris white. Nonno liked to joke that he preferred the body’s innards; he couldn’t care less about the color of its integument. Integument! Such cultivated chatter allowed Risto to entertain the notion, tonight, that if his in-laws or his children had known what he was trying to accomplish, they’d see the justice in it. The kids and grandparents would cheer him on. Paola too, if he’d told her.

Naturally he’d been tongue-tied, after he and Giussi came in off the apartment balcony. The performer was the one who’d come up with the alibi. A boys’ night out, Giussi had called it — tonight, in fact. A flimsy line of talk, considering that Risto had spent plenty of time with both Giussi and Eftah that same week. The gallery was taking part in the Expo, the events were city-wide, and both men had pitched in with the arrangements. Still, if the white girl knew bullshit when she heard it, this time it drew out a different sort of smile. While Giussi and Risto set up their appointment, Paola had actually put in a suggestion. Her murmur was like a woodwind flourish, and the husband had no trouble imagining that, if she knew what he was really up to, she would approve. She would understand he had good reason for ending up in a bad fix.

A three-way fix: not only did Risto have the drop behind him and the knives in front, but also he felt soft spots in the roof. Would it give way if they grappled again? At least now, beyond the two bad guys, he spotted a second bouncer.

A buffalo-headed lug, this man settled in alongside the door without a door. He kept his distance (three strides? five?), but he was watching the face-off at the rail. If La Fenestrella had any objection to corpses littering the dance floor, this man was the first indication, and after a long moment Risto remembered him. He remembered the t-shirt, much too tight, decorated in butterflies and flowers in lavender and lime. The guy appeared to have mixed up his clothes with those of a preschool daughter. Still he’d been the gatekeeper for the entire penthouse floor, the Buffalo at the top of the stairs. One pocket of his shorts had bulged with Euros, singles, fives, tens. When Giussi had approached, however, this doorman had merely touched his change-making hand to the Ethiopian’s narrow buttock.

He’d hissed, warmly: Jewws-see.

The gallery owner had watched from a couple steps below, just the place if you wanted to see your friend get fondled. Just the place to take your own measure, in an echoing stairwell full of illegals. Transplantation to the North was built from scratch, a business of instinct and imagination; the hallowed virtues, the sweat of your brow, mattered less than quick thinking and dreaming without letup. Risto had worked up a sweat, sure. He’d worked his goalie’s hands, the kind of grip that came in handy when he was hoisting and sighting, hanging and fitting. But only in the art crowd would he be considered large. His build suggested the broken stub of a brick-brown aqueduct, glimpsed out a train window on the way to Rome. And his look too had profited from constructive dreaming. He’d made himself over as a fireplug designed by Sister Mary Corita. With his head shaved, his earring gold, and his shirt gaudy, he helped create a buzz. No suit and tie for Gallery Wind & Confusion!

Risto’s appearance also owed something to the larger model beside him — the last man standing, out of his original family. The younger "cousin" had spent nearly fifteen years in Naples, and in all that time he’d never seen Eftah go a day without shaving his head. The Black Lord wore an earring too, prompting nervous jokes about Somali pirates. Yet in a dodgy moment, the man’s greatest contribution might be his playfulness. Eftah was a light-fingered arm-breaker. Confronted with rough business in an abandoned building, he thought of West Side Story. Or maybe the west side of Africa, the way he’d decked himself out, in a dazzling wraparound from Senegal. The top’s single lapel left a yawning V that showed off his pecs, scrawled with curls, the more impressive against the melon-green and -crimson slashes of the shirt’s design. The getup was almost as childish as the Buffalo’s.

Childish had often seemed just what Risto needed. Often his own story, the immigrant success, weighed on him. With Eftah he could relax. Just this week, he’d let the overgrown party animal talk him into a dubious favor. Risto had agreed to hold a flash drive for him. Eftah held title on three buildings, including his own five-story palazzo, but for some reason he needed to keep this backup thumbnail at the Gallery Wind & Confusion. On top of that, he preferred to leave the material encrypted. Nonetheless Risto had taken the flash drive and tossed it into his desk. The cousin always had some fringy business going, some "experiment." When Paola had heard about the thumbnail she’d only rolled her eyes.

But in a dodgy moment, was Eftah who you wanted at your back? Him and the Homosexual Mod Squad?

*

The gallery owner had made it as far as the bar, the planks and crates and coolers. A single choice on drinks, either an American vodka concoction, vodka and orange pop, or coffee-and-gold pints of Nastro Azzuro. The options left most people checking out Eftah’s boyfriend instead. The pretty young thing stood hipshot, you might say "smoldering." He spoke so quietly that Risto had to lean in, under the dj’s ambient groove. Eftah’s lover had something to add about the case; he too believed that to find this killer they needed to go around the law.

"Don’t forget," said the boyfriend, "the police are all brothers in homophobia."

A smart mouth, on this golden Moroccan. Giussi, though you’d think he was out of earshot, cracked a smile. These two thought along the same lines; they shared a similar build. Thirty years’ difference between them and either one could fold up comfortably in the back of Eftah’s Smartcar.

"As a general rule," the boyfriend went on, "the police don’t waste time with a child of Sodom."

He preferred a French name, and what a name, Mepris. His accent had a French sibilance. Then there was Giussi’s accent, growly: "But this, no one could ignore it, not this spectacle."

The way La Cia had been cut up, it looked as if the murderer too had preferred men. Yet the first to stumble across the remains had been hetero, and more than that citizens, white folks. The sort of hipsters who got a thrill out of visiting an "irregular venue." This twosome had gone in search of a private nook and, just as they were hit by the smell, they’d stepped into the outer ripples of coagulating blood.

"A spectacle," Giussi continued, "befitting a legend, really."

Risto kept his own whisper businesslike. "People will talk, sure. There’s already a lot of talk, but it doesn’t change anything."

Giussi slid closer, in time with the music.

"Doesn’t change the calendar, you know?" The gallery owner palmed the top of his head. "The last week before August, half the police are at the beach."

"Oh la, and doesn’t this make it more of a legend, that the boy has a guardian?"

Risto massaged his scalp, knuckles and fingertips.

"Think of the occasion for our revels," Giussi went on. "A fairy child, an ugly death, a magic island bespoiled. But then arrives the wizard, who unfolds the truth, who restores the sacred community."

Risto caught the reference, The Tempest. He hadn’t read the Shakespeare, but he’d seen his friend onstage often enough, flavoring his performance with tidbits from the play. Now Giussi found some correlation to this blood and guts? The victim had been found naked. His clothes lay folded against one wall, as if at first he’d gone along with the arrangements. He’d put his hands behind his back for the cuffs and he’d dipped his head so they could strap on the ball-gag. The rig barely fit over his broad and shaggy ‘do, a touch of Superfly. La Cia had loved the blaxploitation stuff, and he’d first come to Italy to enroll in a university film program. That was just the sort of thing the police wouldn’t have a clue about: the boy’s dreams, his temptations.

The white news stations didn’t get it either. The killer had taken La Cia’s cash but left behind his student visa. The permit had expired, to be sure, but you never knew when it might prove useful. Might spring you from a roundup or get you past a landlord, even out-of-date. The I.D. was the first thing anyone in this crowd would’ve snatched — unless, like this man with V-cut and the switchblade, the killer had his own stash of papers. Yet the white folks’ news tended to concentrate on another detail, the serrated blade. Risto had done his research, since yesterday morning. He tracked down first the statement out of Homicide and then a couple of websites run by apassionati of murder. Odd how intense some people got over this stuff.

One site carried the coroner’s report, or so the blogger claimed. The page had arrived as a scan, he claimed, and Risto found the details convincing. He’d never seen, what was it? Three exclamation marks? Five? Never seen so many on a government form. Yet once you confirmed the nature of the wounds, it raised a whole new question. Whoever had done this must’ve ended up covered in blood, and how could such a horror show ever slip away without getting noticed? Under the shell of one mystery, another. Part of the solution appeared obvious, though. Look around, Citizen: it’s obvious. La Fenestrella kept the lighting murky, just as they must’ve at the crime scene, the actual fly-by-night. Likewise, wherever they opened for business, their back rooms offered plenty of places for a change of shirt. Then too, it wasn’t difficult to find patrons with bruises, with unscrubbed stains. One playboy here was making his moves with a bloody wrap around his left hand.

Still, Friday night must’ve left a mess. The killer appeared to have gone first for the carotid; he’d disabled his victim, before he began tearing away the other pieces.

The coroner, once he’d cleaned out the gutted eye-sockets, had turned up the telltale ragged cuts. The fisherman’s tool had also torn away a swath of cheek. The right thumb, though, must’ve presented the greatest difficulty. Sawing that thick digit from the rest of the hand would’ve taken so much time and effort you wondered why the murderer hadn’t wanted the trophy. You wondered about a lot of things, like why he hadn’t taken the scalp or the genitals. Scalp and genitals, either or both, were generally on the menu when a sociopath got out the knife. But this guy had left La Cia intact between the legs and above the eyes. The butcher had preferred a different pound of flesh, and what’s more he’d left it behind. The police had found both the eyes, two deflated glue-sacks, and the thumb. Either the killer or someone with him had shown a certain tidiness, nestling these scraps against the shrunken belly of the victim. La Cia had known how important it was, in the Industry, to keep the weight down.

*

In La Fenestrella the working week itself lost a few pieces. Sunday night looked to be as much of a party as Saturday. Looked to be mostly Ladies’ Night, or so it seemed to Citizen Aristofano, as far outside the law as he’d been in all the fifteen years since his night sea journey from Libya. Long before he spotted the dealer’s accomplice — the second former farmhand now standing dead-eyed before him — Risto had noticed the man’s dance partner. She’d come here to be noticed, brimming out of that candy-colored tube top. The dj was into a slow jam, eye of the hurricane, but that hadn’t stopped her from jigging along. If there were anything you’d call a dance floor, it was mostly about the girls and their gladrags.

Even in a club-space that relied on clamp-lamps and moonlight, Risto could follow the money. He could understand that these girls held decent jobs. They might not work regular hours, but they weren’t whores either, or else they’d have been out along the roadside as soon as the sun went down. During the drive from downtown Risto’s crew had passed one cluster of prostitutes, loitering round bonfires of looted construction materials. The fires weren’t about heat, not in July, but rather backlighting, advertising. The girls in La Fenestrella, on the other hand, must’ve wangled a hotel or restaurant shift that started late. Nevertheless they appeared determined to suffer a full day’s hangover. Most were having a two-fisted good time, the vodka-pop in one hand and a hash-and-tobacco twist in the other. In most cases, one of those arms was slung round a man.

For once the sisters had the advantage on the lone white girl. Not a bad-looking girl, a peroxide bombshell, with money enough to tart up her babyfat. She too had the cleavage working, in a leather vest. But she was frightened. Even before Risto’s trouble started, he’d noticed how the little rabbit clung to her boyfriend. She didn’t realize that the Africans here would never come near her. Not at these prices. The brothers had noted at once that her man also wore designer leather, and besides that he’d brought his own beer, a muddy Irish import for them both. No one was about to mess with the obvious Daddy’s boy (at least, not here under the moon and the clamp-lamps), and no one would touch his punk Britney either. Yet the white kids huddled apart from the crowd, on the far side of the bar. They kept their distance, too, from the other penthouse apartment, the one with a door.

Risto had only a hazy sense of the top-storey layout, each apartment with its own entrance off the stairs and its own roof access. He knew, though, that somewhere the clubowners had set up a generator. Across the tarred roof ran extension cords, industrial orange. Might’ve been a party orange, something to go with the corkscrews of pink crepe overhead. Loose Zs of the paper had been strung back and forth, looping through the city night from the penthouse gutters to a couple of poles latched somehow along the terrazzo rail. Only the dj’s setup appeared fully equipped, up to specs. And, talk about a spectacle, look at the guy on the spins. The dj wore dreadlocks and a silver-striped djellaba, but he was as white as the rabbits in black leather. White enough, anyway: Neapolitan Drab. You’d think the poser had agreed to work the turntables in exchange for a fat spliff or two, except he had a hookah going. A full-dress hookah, thick-hosed and hip-high, and when you caught a whiff of what the dj had in the bowl, it was nothing like hashish, leafy rather. Some apple in the mix.

A strange hire, for such a joint. Stranger still was a certain trick of the light. Risto had to frown at the spins, the records that seemed to ripple in the dj’s cone of light. The reflection created a halo, a winking golden arc.

He had to frown and scrub his face. The scene in the Little Window could’ve set him glowing in the dark, himself. Here he was a stranger, trying to play (okay, Giussi) a wizard. He’d lost whatever connection he’d once felt to the ramshackle streetcorners of Mogadishu, the young men out smoking their dinner. Yet in Naples, on this fifth-storey corner, the only difference was the occasional flash of a high-end item. That guy in the canary-yellow jacket, for instance. A jacket that might’ve been a halo for the upper body, while up on his head the man wore something diabolic. He wore his Afro in a V, twin-spiked. What was he, a pimp vampire-killer?

Then Eftah loomed at Risto’s shoulder, offering a beer. The gallery owner declined, instead waving the other two close as well. Quietly he suggested they each work the room on their own.

"That’s best," he said, "discreet."

"Well," said Mepris, "I can’t promise I won’t act up a bit if I find myself face to face with, ah, you know who."

"Oh, Mepris," Eftah said, "always the drama."

"But, what was that? Quel dommage! I was just beginning to think Daddy might for once recognize the importance of honesty and fair dealing. Listen, lover, honestly: who are you to tell me about drama?"

In fact the older man was the one striking a pose. Eftah had his chest out, his chin up, Mussolini on the balcony.

"Now our kinsman here," continued the boyfriend, "he wanted us in on this for a reason." His voice dropped. "It’s less than perfectly safe, this."

"It’s an experiment," Eftah said. "Try it out for a few days, that’s all, try it and see. Risto will know where to draw the line."

"He knew enough," Giussi put in, "not to mention this to his wife."

Giussi. Rarely did he open his mouth without leaving a wound somewhere. But the performer was right to interrupt; nobody needed a lovers’ quarrel. There’d been enough of that during the ride out, the bickering across the seat-back.

Now Eftah and Mepris gave it one more scowl, before all three made their separate ways across La Fenestrella. Risto, just watching them walk, could see that their hormones carried a different tune from the rest of the crowd’s. The rest was the ladies dancing and the men buying. If the floor ever filled up with boys, if Eftah and Mepris and Giussi might ever seem truly inconspicuous, that would happen late. Towards dawn, maybe, you’d stumble across man-on-man couples in the corners. One such pair was featured in a photo for Risto’s upcoming show. Almost a Mapplethorpe thing, that shot. It did without Tuttavia’s odd new trick, her spot of yellow illumination, but the hand of one man stood out, black as a cuttlefish against the underpants of the other.

Tuttavia was the natural choice for his gallery’s contribution to Expo in Città. Risto had selected 15 of the woman’s latest photographs, all taken at a place like this. A party-pit off the books, bristling with a scavenger’s glamour. As for the exact location, the artist refused to say. She was like that, a woman of mystery. Tuttavia, no other name. And maybe she’d earned the right to a few affectations, as the artist most people would consider the gallery’s star. Risto intended to leave up her latest sequence right through coming month. No August off for Confuso & Vento! The photographer’s way with light and shadow was never less than fascinating, and her latest pieces often set you staring. Two especially — the two that featured a halo. Risto had never seen anything like it, a halo, as clear as the curving reflections along the dj’s records tonight. In each photo the glowing sickle framed a man’s head, the same man. The composition emphasized the head, to be sure; composition was Tuttavia’s secret weapon, the way she sculpted her documentary black and white. Yet the young man in these two shots wore a cowl that hinted of gold. A corona or whatever, it made the head pop, emphasis on emphasis. God knows how she’d pulled it off.

*

Tonight, too, Lovers’ Lane had been arranged. The industrial cable trailed from under the dj’s hookah to the doorway with a door, and it too glinted gold, here and there. But this power line remained earthbound and comprehensible. You knew that, inside the other penthouse apartment, you wouldn’t find things much better lit. Even the sky-boxes of Naples had something of the cave about them. The window might be the latest technology, photo-sensitive, but the view took you back to when Caravaggio was in town. Or further, to when Christ was a carpenter. Tonight, behind the remaining terrazzo door, even a rookie detective knew what he’d find. There’d be a generator, possibly two, plus some extra muscle, "club security." Maybe a Rasta buffalo, maybe a Hollywood V-cut, this enforcer would be posted by the table for poker or scopa. He might be doing double duty, since they’d also have a whore in a farther room. A whore, a mattress, maybe a bottle of sanitizer — but the people who ran the place would want someone else to keep the take. Then beyond her room, deeper within this cavern in the clouds, you’d need to feel your way, perhaps holding up a cigarette lighter.

No furniture, no bed except tufa-dust. Yet the dark and the rough provided an opportunity. You’d have the opportunity, if you were of a mind to cut someone’s throat. If you carried a knife, you’d have the means.

The motive, eh. The motive must’ve been some unlikely shit indeed, considering that his throat wasn’t the only thing cut. Must’ve been as unlikely as a file folder in La Fenestrella. A file folder, you couldn’t help but notice, and Risto was to remember later, with his back to the rooftop rail, how quickly Papers had gotten his attention. Who was this guy, working in office supplies? Most clandestini came looking to score a stick of hash or a sister to smoke it with. But here was someone who not only offered a more portable product, but also could swiftly peg a potential customer. The gallery owner had barely started trolling for someone to ask about La Cia when this dandy beside the other apartment’s doorway, this gatekeeper in dandelion, locked eyes with him. In another moment the stranger had whipped out his folder. God knows where he’d got it, but suddenly the thing was up before Risto’s eyes, its cardboard pale against the other man’s fingers, long fingers yet baggy. The folder could’ve been a mirror, throwing light into Risto’s face. Or no, that was the necklace, thick silver, reflecting flashes off the nearest clamp-lamp. Yet the man’s features were something else, drawn and weathered.

Risto had come to a halt, staring. The stranger drew closer, using his file to gesture off the rooftop, to take in the floating glimmers of better-lit neighborhoods.

"Good evening, brother. Would you call this a city?"

Risto had run into this kind of street formality before. He tried his rusty Arabic: "A’salam alekom."

"Masa’a alkair. Good evening." His friend was louder than the music required. "Italian is better, no? Considering where we find ourselves, in the North."

Again the man waved the folder, this time indicating the hemisphere. Risto figured: first opportunity.

"My brother," he said, "you’re right. Even a terribilità like Friday night is nothing compared to what we’ve left behind."

"Such terribilità." The other was either showing sympathy or making some calculation based on Risto’s command of the language. "It makes us men, no?"

"Most prefer not to think of it. The mutilation, the cold-blooded murder."

"The hardship. It makes us strong, this."

"We’re strong, yet still we have to suffer. Just this weekend, that poor brother was cut to ribbons..."

"Many suffer, yes. But you and I, the struggle makes us stronger. Men such as ourselves, we seize our destiny." Between them the dandy raised his free hand, making a fist. What you could see of his arm revealed a ropy lap of muscle. "We cross oceans and deserts, and we build our own palace and city. No?"

Risto, not quite smiling, cast around for the others. This salesman, whatever his product, must’ve noticed that his mark hadn’t come to the club alone. Giussi, however, was nowhere to be seen; you had to figure he’d found a mark of his own and slipped inside. He was always quick on the trigger. As for Eftah and Mepris, they’d fallen into a fresh squabble, on the far side of the dj stand.

"Don’t you believe we can seize our destiny? Construct our own city?"

The pretty Moroccan, shouting, looked like he might take a bite out of Eftah’s head. Mepris had already lasted longer than most of the cousin’s boyfriends.

But what good did that do La Cia? "Things — are in place for me," Risto replied.

"But certainly. You have some good schooling in that head of yours. You put good food on your table, besides. Anyone can tell that at once."

Aristofano drew up his chest, trying for his own Mussolini.

"And it’s this that makes me ask. Would you call this a city?"

The question was deliberate, no linguistic misfire, and Risto began to wonder about the blazer and the jewelry. The neck-piece had the same broad double-curve, Mayan or Aztec, as the bracelets Risto saw on his star photographer. Plus this clubgoer wore a feminine scent, incongruous with the distressed leather of the face. Jasmine?

"A person," Risto tried, "who likes women. I have a woman, ah, ah, a lover."

"Certainly, a man of your quality." The other’s gaze revealed a hint of amusement. "A lucky man."

So much for that idea.

"Brother," the stranger went on, "call me Papers. Doesn’t that help us understand each other? Doesn’t it help to have a name, when a man comes out of nowhere to ask, for you and your woman too — is this your city? Is it, in fact? You say you make your way, here among the palaces of the North. But in this city the very stones in the streets are laid out for someone else."

Again this Papers was waving towards what you could see of Naples, the humidity-smogged warrens down towards the sea. Meantime, he slipped a finger into his folder, up to the meaty second knuckle. He exposed a fragment of ivory paper. The bond looked rare, heavyweight; there might’ve been a letterhead.

"Just look at this city. This idea of the North’s, so out of date in our century."

A letterhead, yes, black against the ivory.

"This whole idea of walking distance. But why can’t a man construct his city anywhere he wants? A new city for the new world, you know? A brother with a head on his shoulders, you give him a laptop computer, you give him an active account number, he’ll build his own city."

Risto ground a knuckle against an eyebrow.

"A computer, an account, a Kalashnikov — for a man of destiny that’s a city."

"Destiny, eh. It’s more about opportunity, I’d say."

"But isn’t that exactly what I’m talking about? Isn’t this all about opportunity? A good computer, a weapon and ammo. You put those in the right hands, the man will build a whole new world."

"A man like myself, maybe. With things in place, could be. But then there was that poor brother, the night before last. Do you remember…?"

"Oh, everybody remembers him. The things I know about that, that moocher, if you put them all together, they only prove what I’m talking about. A brother such as you needs your own city. Your own palace, for you and your fine sister."

Papers jigged the file folder, its innards flashing. The gesture brought out his height advantage, a mantis over a beetle. But as the salesman launched a new line of talk, something like "here in my hand is your new address," Risto broke the code. It didn’t matter what had clued him, which word or detail of the stationery. Didn’t matter. Wherever you came across documents like this, lately they were as easy to identify as the money-wise gaze with which their owner met Risto’s startled, sudden understanding. The guy had Earthquake I.D.

Papers jerked his head towards the doorway behind him, his necklace flashing again. This gesture too was easy to translate, and couldn’t help but recall the murder. Risto however looked over the document. The dealer had let about an inch of the paper show, out the top of the folder, and this revealed not one but two letterheads. Both were well-known: the seal of a United Nations agency, the umbrella organization for all the quake-recovery efforts, plus the imprimatur of the local NATO base, a compound out in the mozzarella ranchlands. Earthquake I.D., citizenship for sale. In a crowd like tonight’s, it didn’t matter that the documents were temporary.

Following the terremoto, authorities had needed some stopgap certification for a lot of the newly homeless and shirtless who claimed to be citizens. Three thousand folks? Five? They could no longer pull out some sort of government identification. Some had their information zapped by the electro-magnetic pulse, while others lost documents the old-fashioned way, crushed or soaked or torn to bits. Authorities in America had run into the same problem after the hurricanes that hit New Orleans. Across Indonesia, the year before, the Christmas tsunami had ruined tons of paperwork. In those places, the first help on the scene had needed to begin by writing down names. Here between Vesuvius and the Burning Fields, too, lists had been drawn up. Promises had been made, as up in the chambers of Parliament they went hoarse asserting that Italy wasn’t some benighted territory like ghetto Louisiana. In the Bel Paese they had more than enough supporting documentation, somewhere or other. Everyone would get back on the books in no time. Meanwhile the Naples mayor, in one of the moves for which Risto admired her, had worked out an agreement with the UN and NATO. They’d printed up the provisional documents such as these, now brandished in an illegal club by a crook telling lies.

*

Only a magistrate could issue the I.D., and only according to regulation. A quake victim needed a witness and some sort of secondary documentation. Also the papers were intended to serve their purpose for no more than a few months, until census-takers both federal and regional finished their inventory. The official line was, by fall everyone in and around the city would be back to the same birth certificates and wedding licenses as ever. The paper trail they’d never thought twice about.

Sure, this fall. Insh’alla. Here and now, I.D. like this might be worth triple the biggest poker pot on the table behind the door.

Not that Risto didn’t have his doubts. "Those can’t be the good ones."

"But, who says they can’t?"

The gallery owner leaned close, never mind the man’s perfume. The motive — this could be the motive. "The good paper, from NATO? That would be interesting."

"There’s the Signore. Thinking like a rich man."

"Eh. I can see the usefulness."

"There’s the good word. With a head like yours and papers like these, what’s to stop you from ending up like Berlusconi? What’s to stop you from getting your own island? Your own new world."

Some number of the I.D. forms, some unknown number, had made it to the black market printed on NATO watermark bond. Who knows where they’d come from? One story had it that an American spider-woman had gotten her claws into the pass-code of a NATO colonel. Another rumor was that a couple of amateurs had the good luck to take down a key liaison and snatch his briefcase. In any case, if you were looking for legal status in this country and you got your hands on one of these, the original papers, you’d hit the jackpot. You had full vestiture in the very grain of the stationary. As for the signatures needed, anyone could forge those, and who could say how long it might take before some bureaucrat took note of some discrepancy? Who could say how much longer before the cops got involved?

Now, suppose a person had dangled contraband like that in front of La Cia.

"But with a head like yours, my friend, signore, you understand. Materials such as these, how could I ever reveal how I came into their possession?"

Risto might’ve been studying another of those murder websites. He thought of the local mob, the Camorra, then thought again. The original papers, the ones run off at the American facility, needn’t have wound up in the strongbox of some clan chieftain. The bad guys wanted in on the action, naturally. But over the past two-three months, with so many loose cannons rolling across the city’s deck, even a stowaway like this could’ve lucked onto the good I.D.

"Just step inside with me now, get your hands on one. You remember when you got the photo for your work permit, signore? You remember that photo paper, the edge like a blade? These papers, the Americans kept them under guard round the clock."

Edge like a blade, a fine fairytale. Why not, when customers couldn’t tell the genuine paper stock from an imitation? Risto himself didn’t know what to look for. He could’ve used better light and a magnifying glass. He could’ve done without the dj’s bassline, and what he would’ve really liked was to wipe the smile off this con man’s face.

"A fellow with a head like yours," Papers went on, "will realize. You get these and a computer, and anything’s possible."

Once more the gallery owner looked for help. Mepris too had slipped away, now, and Eftah was dancing with the white girl. A laughable match. The way the girl could shimmy, boneless in her leather tubing, you’d think she was the crepe paper. Eftah on the other hand looked solid as a peg. He was a tent-peg, and the tent was battered by high winds. Laughable at first glance, infuriating at the next.

*

Again the dealer jerked his head towards the door behind him. Either V of his hair could’ve been a pointer. "Don’t you want a look?" he asked. "Some place where there’s no one in the way, where — "

"Some place where you’ll have no witnesses?"

Risto’s voice might’ve been a noisy thing hung on a wall.

"Some place," he went on, "where you could cut me to ribbons?"

Papers showed military training, coming to attention. The gallery owner held his gaze, letting the guy see just how great this felt, how satisfying.

"What are you," asked the con man, "some kind of schoolboy? Schoolboy waving his hand in the air?"

Risto blinked and got a fresh perspective. To this stranger he must’ve sounded like a white man. Like an utter clod of a white man, he’d revealed exactly what he’d been thinking.

"Waving your hand in the air. You forgetting I’m from the South? Maybe that’s what I used to do down there, is chop off a nosy boy’s hand."

Still Risto couldn’t lower his voice. "Friday night, Papers. Just Friday night, a boy got himself killed."

Still, this felt delicious. The outburst had undone his head and shoulders, after a long pair of mornings hunched at his computer over less-than-legal websites. It felt as if this was what he’d been looking for. As if earlier today, out on his balcony, he shouldn’t have spoken in code.

"Again about that sorry mutilated faggot?" Papers too sounded closer to honesty. "Don’t try to tell me you’re police."

"Police? My guess is, you’re the one with friends on the police."

The other glowered but moved in time with the music, opening his coat. The pimp-jacket proved to be a custom job, with a wide pocket inside the back.

"That faggot?" said Risto. "He had a name, you know."

"What are you, the Gay Avenger?" The man showed a row of teeth. "You know I recognized a couple of those queens you came in with."

"So you’re a regular, in places like this. You knew La Cia."

"Everyone knew La Freccia."

The boy’s name had nothing to do with the cha-cha. Rather, believing it would somehow help his career, he’d chosen the Italian word for "arrow."

The dealer was turning away. "The asshole liked to think he was Hollywood, but he would go into the back with anybody who had the price of a beer."

When Risto grabbed his elbow, Papers came round with his worst face yet. "Faggot. Putting your hands on me?"

Risto had the sense of losing connection, logic at the end of its rope.

"Schoolboy. Smart as you are, you couldn’t see that piece of shit was in for it?"

"So you know something about it, how he died?"

"Sure I do. That piece of shit, he was looking for trouble — "

"Don’t call him that." He lost connection; he went into a show on flip-cards, a flicker of ragged dancers and dangling bulbs, and among these a Risto-card flashed up, a tough guy who grabbed the crook’s sun-colored lapel and yanked him down face to face. The scene took on dimension and stink only when Risto wound up facing a knife. Papers had a lot of tricks up those sleeves, didn’t he? He was as smooth at whipping out his tiger-striped weapon as he’d been at putting away his contraband. Not that the owner of Gallery Wind & Confusion knew anything about fighting hand to hand. Not that his sudden glimpse of a nightmare from long ago, from another continent, was any help tonight. Tonight might trigger a dread flashback, a head split by a machete, but it was a flicker of the Joker. It could’ve been his own head split open, emptied by a wild mounting thrill: Now we’re getting somewhere. He needed to concentrate just to drop his hand from the other’s lapel. He could barely understand that the man was saying something more about the police, the absence of police.

Likewise difficult was bringing the blade into focus, the serration, the chipping.

"The Avenger," growled the dealer. "Maybe tomorrow night, you’ll be the one who needs the Avenger."

Just like that, Risto was knotting up again. He needed to concentrate.

"You think I wouldn’t?" Papers went on. "You think your money makes one bit of difference?"

This was the first person Risto had met. The first half-hour of his investigation. And as for the guy’s bloody talk, you couldn’t give that much credence. Friday night, the same as tonight, Papers would’ve shown up with his business in his pocket. He would’ve come looking to move inventory. Risto struggled against the flying debris within, the ferocity of release. "What I think," he said, "is you came here to make an arrangement."

"An arrangement?"

Of all the words to put a real fear into him...

"Arrangement, faggot? That what they call it these days?"

The gallery owner had a response, another question about the I.D., but in the next moment he was thoughtless with pain. Stabbed? Had Papers used the knife, or just the knuckles around the knife? He was an enforcer, a gatekeeper, and quick too about yanking his victim’s arm half out of its socket. Risto was almost to the railing before he got the picture: clouted, bent over, in a headlock. Plus there was the grind at his butt, as if a thug on X were trying to tweak his high. There was his choked and feeble attempt at a joke, nothing to do with anything.

...try this on my friends? What friends, where?

The white girl’s dance partner, the tent-peg, was nowhere to be seen. The girl herself looked to be gone as well, along with the other leather-bound rabbit. Yet the rest of crowd — so far as Risto could tell, pinned at the roof’s precipice — revealed little concern. The dancers eased away no more than a step or two. The women did appear defenseless, too much flesh and not enough armor. Yet their shimmy went on uninterrupted, and the men seemed downright oblivious, their brains between their hips. The dj flipped through LP’s as if seeking the best soundtrack. The scene came close to setting Risto off again. Close to whipping around on his attacker, so that one or the other or both would wind up over the rail.

Imagine how the city’s hubs and spokes would start reeling then; imagine the outreach of the orange warning tape, fluttering in the boulevard winds.

But there, yes, a friend: Eftah. The biggest of his friends, displaying his handyman’s favorite, its blade unfolded. Then a minute later the dealer’s accomplice had squared the triangle, and for all Risto knew this backup carried a weapon of his own. He too might saw off a man’s thumb. And a minute later:

"How did you and I ever set off a comedy like this? Two reasonable people, trying to do a bit of business."

"Signore, are you forgetting? You put your hands on me."

"You wouldn’t give me a straight answer. I was trying to ask about our poor murdered brother, and all you had to say…"

"Again with that faggot. Again, the murdered brother."

"But, how else am I to know who I’m dealing with? How else, except — "

"Houseboy, what do you need to know?"

 

 

 

Copyright 2010 by John Domini

 

 

THIS IS NOT A CONFESSION

 

 

 


When I was twenty-two years old I was hit on the head by a cricket ball and knocked unconscious for several days.  Those few days changed my life forever.  When I finally came round it took me some time to realise that I was awake and it took me even longer to work out where I was.  I tried to think of what had happened to me and how I had ended up in hospital  and the only thing I could remember  for sure was that I had been standing on a school cricket pitch near the boundary enjoying the warm spring sun on my neck as I  watched a kestrel hover mid-air in a field across the road.  And the next thing I know I am laying in a hospital bed. 

The ward was silent and gloomy.  I noticed a clock over the door and I could just about work out that the time was almost 6:30. But was that 6:30 in the morning or 6:30 in the evening?  I had no way of knowing.  I didn’t even know what day it was.  More important than that,  I didn’t even know why I was here.  I was a strapping twenty-two year old fit and healthy, full of energy and vigour.  So why was I here?  What had happened?  Whatever it was it must be serious.  Young men like me don’t end up in hospital unless there is something seriously wrong.  And another thing;  Why was it so quiet? Where was everybody?  Where were the doctors and nurses? Where were my mum and dad?  Shouldn’t they be here?  Why was I all alone?  Had they forgotten all about me?  Was my condition that critical? Was there really no hope?  Why was I was  being left alone to die? 

Finally I did hear the sound of some activity outside in the corridor.  I winced in pain as I turned my head towards the sound.  After what seemed a long time the doors into the ward swung open and I could see the fuzzy outline of a nurse. My eyes followed her as she walked over to the windows at the far end of the ward away to my left and I watched her as she yanked the curtains open.  The light poured in and its brightness almost overwhelmed me. But now I could clearly make out the figure of the nurse.  She looked to be in her mid twenties, slim, with short blond hair and really pretty.

“Cor!..just look at the knockers on that one!”

Where the hell had that come from?  That loud harsh voice bursting all over my head. I raised myself up painfully from the pillow and looked round at the patients laying in the beds on either side of me but they seemed to be fast asleep as far as I could make out and  everyone else in the ward looked to be asleep as well.

“I bet that dirty bitch isn’t even wearing any knickers!” That same voice cried out shrilly,  “nurses, eh! They’re all sex mad!” Did someone have a radio on? Had someone switched on a TV?

The nurse noticed that I was awake and walked over to the side of the bed. She looked down at me and gave me a beautiful smile.  “How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” I said mumbled hesitantly,  “I think.”

“I’ll ring your parents,”  the nurse said  “they’ve been very worried about you.”

“What happened? Why am I here?”

“You were hit on the head by a cricket ball” she explained.

“Oh.”

“You’ve been unconscious for days.”

“Oh” I said again.  I found talking difficult.  My mouth felt numb and my words came out at odd angles.

“Just look at that!…I bet she’s an animal in bed!”

I jerked upright in shock and looked at the nurse with a startled expression on my face.

“Are you all right?” the nurse asked me a note of concern in her voice.

“Er…yes, yes”  I said hastily.

“Sure?”

“No…I mean, yes.” 

It was strange but  it seemed to me that  she hadn’t  heard anything.

“You just looked a bit upset about something, that’s all.  Are you in pain?”

“No.  Thanks. I’m fine…honest.”

She flashed me another dazzling smile.

“I just thought I heard something, that’s all.”

“You’re damn right you heard something!…hey?  Give me half a chance and I’d be in like Flynn!  What about you?…eh?”

That voice again. Where on earth was it coming from?

“I’m sorry about that,” I said blushing with embarrassment.

The nurse looked puzzled, “about what?”

Had she really not heard it, that screaming voice? “That er…I just… “  My voice trailed off and my words were left hanging in the air to fend for themselves.

She looked at me with a blank expression on her pretty face.

“Didn’t you hear it?” I asked her again.

“Hear what?”

“I thought…I thought, “ I stumbled and floundered not at all sure where I was going.

“You must be very tired. Why don’t you rest?” the nurse suggested. 

I nodded. Why not.

“And I’ll call your parents,” she added.

“Thanks.”

 

                                                          *

 

We all have a guardian angel.  A small voice in our head that  is barely audible and that we rarely, if ever, listen to.   But ‘my other voice’ was hard to ignore. There was nothing small about ‘my other voice’ and I had no choice but to listen.  And ‘my other voice’ nagged me more than my mother did. 

“What are you doing that for?…why don’t you think?  Where’s your common sense?  If you don’t know what you are doing stay out of it!” 

The trouble was that he liked to give me advice, even when I didn’t want or need it. 

“Watch how you‘re walking man… Jesus!”

“’Scuse me?”

“You’ve stepped on the cracks on the pavement with your right foot twice in a

row…so you better do the same with your left foot now.”

“Why?”

“Just to be on the safe side.”

Or;

I’d be just about to go into a  shop when he’d say, “If you can nip in through that open door without it touching you then you’ll have a  lucky day.”

Have you ever heard such rubbish?  But I’d have to do it,  what choice did I have?

Or;

“If you can get that crumpled piece of paper into the bin from here you will have a brilliant future.”

I missed.

“Best out of three then.”

I missed again.

“Oh for gods sake!…I give up.”

It was all very childish I know but what could I do?

“Why are you always wearing brown shoes?”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“What’s wrong with black shoes?”

“Nothing.”

“So why the fuck don’t you wear them… just for a change?”

Or;

“What are you having today?

“Chicken.”

“Not again!”

“What are you on about? What’s wrong with chicken?”

“You had chicken yesterday  that’s what’s wrong with it!”

“No I didn’t.”                                                    

“No? What about that ‘hamburger’ from that Take-a-Way then?  Wasn’t that a fucking chicken burger?”

“So?…Maybe it was. What’s it got to do with you?”

“I‘ve got to watch you eat that shit,  that’s what its got to do with me.”

Or;

I’d be watching a film on TV and all of a sudden ‘my other voice’ would yell out, “Seen it!”

“Seen it? I havn‘t see it, so how could you have?”

“Trust me you’ve seen it all right but it was such utter shite you’ve just forgotten that you’ve seen it.”

“Well if it’s all the same to you I want to watch it anyway, okay?”

“Fine. Suit yourself?”

“I will.”

“They all get shot in the end by the way.”

“Oh for God’s sake!”

“What?”

“You’ve spoilt it for me now.”

“But you’ve seen it, so what’s the diff?”

I turned over to BBC2 and started watching Newsnight.

“I’m sick of hearing about the war in Iraq. Why do they keep banging on about it? Just  listen to them…’our boys are dying’…And what did they expect? They’re soldiers in a war. That’s what happens in a war!”

‘My other voice’ demanded that I turn over. It didn’t matter that I might want to watch it, he didn’t want to so therefore I couldn’t either.

‘My other voice’ wouldn’t let me read the papers in peace either. I read ‘The Guardian’ and he made it very clear he didn’t approve.

“’The Guardian?…’The Guardian’!”

“So?”

“So?…What do you want to read that leftie rag for?”

“To inform myself about what is going on in the world.”

“Don’t be such a poncy twat. Do you know what I hate about that whiny weepie leftie bleeding heart rag?…Everything is our fault. Look at global warming. That’s all our fault.”

“May be it is.”

“Listen, do you know what causes global warming? Too many people, that’s what. I mean, there are 1.3 billion Chinese in the world. Now I ask you, does the world need that many Chinese? I doubt it.”

“So what do you think I should be reading then? ‘The Daily Sport?’”

“Why not? At least it’s more fun than…’The Guardian‘.  If you keep reading that crap you’ll just end up topping yourself. And anyway, other papers will at least offer you a decent free DVD now and then; one that you might actually want. But what does ‘The Guardian’ offer you? A bloody poster on where you can find:‘The Best Camping Sites in England’ or they tempt you with a poxy little booklet on: ‘The most popular museums in Great Britain.” How fucking boring!” ‘My other voice’ almost screamed in my ear. “Now, if they were to give away a DVD of lets say…’Debbie does Dallas’ then they’d be sold out in 5 minutes.”

“May be ‘The Guardian’ doesn’t think that their readers are interested in porn?”

“Oh, you are joking right?“

“No. Why should I be joking?”

You read ‘The Guardian’ and I know you’re interested in porn.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yeah right!” snorted ‘my other voice’ with a sneer as thick as syrup.

“I’m not! Okay?…Jesus!”

“Okay…calm down. I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t, but I believe you.”

‘My other voice’ could not be quiet for five minutes and whenever he started talking it wouldn’t be long before we got into some stupid and pointless argument.

“Why do they always say, ‘they were full of life and had everything to live for?”

“What do you expect the parents of a murdered child to say?”

“And why do they always start to blub on the box? It’s annoying.”

“They’re heartbroken that’s why!”

“Then they shouldn’t be on the box then.”

“It’s a human interest story.”

“Well I’m not interested.”

So I don’t read the papers very much anymore and for the same reason I watch very little television. I mean, what’s the point? I can’t concentrate on anything with ‘my other voice’ giving me a running commentary on everything. I’ve even had to stop playing my computer chess game because he was always meddling.

“Move that pawn.”

“Which pawn?”

“The one next to the Queen.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

I decided not to. I am not  a Grand Master or anything but I became pretty good at playing against the computer; even when I played ‘black’ and even when I played at the most difficult level. I usually manage to hold my own and I have won my fair share of games. So I ignored him. But after three further moves I was stuck. I tried to think the problem through but in the end I had to admit defeat and so I pressed a button and the computer took back my last three moves and then I pressed another button and watched the computer play my moves for me: its first  move was to move the pawn next to the queen.

“I fuckin’ told yer…didn’t I fuckin’ tell yer!” ‘My other voice’ cackled gleefully.

“Piss off!” I growled.

“You’re shit. You know that, don’t you? You think you are so clever. But you’re not, you’re shit!”

                                                     *

  ‘My other voice’ always had plenty to say and I was constantly subjected to an endless stream of comment and opinion about everything.

“Hey, look at him.  Look at him eat.  He’s putting that food on the end of his fork into his mouth as if he thinks it’s poisoned….Hey! Look at her. No, over there… that                  

biffer by the counter? Her whole body is sagging.  Her flesh looks as if its sliding off her bones.  Look! Look! She walks like a zombie  as if she’s in a trance.  Still, you                                                  

have to feel sorry for the old bitch.”

“Do you?”

“Come off it.  Imagine that you are an ugly duckling when you’re a little kid only to discover  you are  an ugly duck now that you’ve grown up?”

Or I’d be standing in a shop thinking of what to buy and I’d hear him snort.

“That always makes me laugh.”

“What does?”

“When people try to sell you stuff by telling you it’s ‘only’ £14.99 or something.”

“And your point is…?”

“My point is: What do they mean, ’only’ £14.99? That’s not even worth £1.99. never mind £14.99!”

There was no stopping him sometimes.

“Can you tell me why people waste their time jogging? I mean, what‘s that all about?”

“To keep fit and healthy?”

“By jogging in the ‘rush-hour’ and taking in huge lungful of lovely carbon monoxide?”

“Just drop it.”

“And why do people have to walk round all the time fiddling with their mobiles.. That call can wait. It‘s not life and death. So why pretend that it is?”

“Oh give it a rest,” I pleaded.

“And another thing, why people think it’s okay to park on double yellow lines if you leave the hazard lights on ? Can you explain that to me?”

I couldn’t.

“What’s wrong with people? Why do they move so slowly? They’re like old age pensioners. Just look at them!”

“Calm down will you.”

“Christ! We’ve been walking down this road for ten minutes and havn’t seen a single white face.”

“What of it?”

“They’re everywhere! Bloody hell. I bet if you went to the North Pole you’d find a Paki corner shop!”

“Could be very handy if you’re at the North Pole on a Sunday night and you suddenly realise that you have run out of sugar.”

“Funny man. But I’m serious, because you know what your problem is?”

“No, but I’m sure you are going to tell me.”

“You are sleepwalking through life. You are oblivious to everything around you. It‘s time you woke up. You could be walking through a battlefield or burst into the middle of  an orgy  or trip over a bar of gold and you wouldn‘t notice a bloody thing!”

That was the main problem with ‘my other voice‘, it could never stop interfering.  I couldn’t even go to the toilet without him having something to say.

“How long is this going to take?”

“How long is what going to take?”

“You taking a slash?”

“What‘s it got to do with you?”

“Fifteen minutes. That’s how long you’ve been standing there.”

“No I haven’t.”

 “Fucking hell man  if you‘re going to go, then go!”

“Shut up and leave me alone.” But he never did. He never ever left me alone.

“Why are you always reading?”

“I enjoy it.”

“You should get out more.”

“I’m fine as I am.”

“Bullshit!  When was the last time you had a bird?  You don’t even have any friends.  It’s not healthy.  You should get out more and meet people.”

“No thanks.”

“No thanks?  Are you going to spend the whole of your life living like some fucking hermit?”

“Can’t you see that I’m reading a book?”

“I worry about you,” ’my other voice’ said.

“Don’t bother, I’m fine as I am.”

“But I do.  I worry about you.  Have any idea how boring you really are?”

“I like being boring.”

“Don’t be a prick!”

“How I live my life is none of your business.”

“That’s where you’re wrong…it is my business,  you’re my business.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“I know you better than your mother. I know you better than you know yourself…”

“I know what’s best for me,”  I retorted sharply.

“That’s where you’re wrong pal…I know everything about you.  I know what’s really going on in your head. I know about every sordid little thought that you’ve ever had. I can see right down into the deepest and darkest corners of your soul and I can see things than even you don’t  know about  and which will get you put away forever if anyone ever finds out.  And you know what? No one ever will. That’s why I am here…It’s my job to look after you and make sure nothing bad happens to you.”

 

                                                              *

 

The truth is he, this ‘other voice of mine‘, made me nervous.  I tried to ignore him but that was practically impossible;  he was always there. Where had he come from? Why was he in my head? What did he want?  And, how long was he going to stay?  His explanation was simple, he was there to look after me. But as far as far as I was concerned I didn’t need looking after I was fine just the way I was. I didn’t want to be taken care of or be told what to do.  But ‘my other voice’ had other ideas.  And he had plenty of those;  I eat too much crap food, watched too many crap films,  read too many crap books,  I had a crap job.  My life was crap. And I suppose,  I was crap.  I didn’t have any friends,  I didn’t shag birds,  I didn’t get drunk,  smoke dope or doing anything remotely exciting or interesting.  “If you’re not going to do anything with your life…why bother living?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m just saying, you can lie to other people as much as you want just don’t lie to yourself that’s all.”

“Who says that I do?”

“Come off it. You don’t care very much about anything. And you don’t like people I know that much.”

“That’s not true!”

“All I’m saying is be honest with yourself.”

He confused me. He would say things and tell me things, things that I knew weren’t true and then he would try to convince me that it had been  all my idea all along.

                                                              *                                                        

 

Living with ’my other voice’ very soon started to become a real nightmare. And it could be really frightening sometimes too when, without warning, he would suddenly pop into my head.

“Oh fuck!..fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

“What?”

“You didn’t turn the gas off!”

“Yes, I did.”

“Sure?”

“Yes I’m sure.”

“Suppose you’re wrong?”

“But I’m not.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Belt up!”

“Think about it.  The gas is full on.  The house goes up.  Innocent people are killed and injured.  Little kids are orphaned.  And why? Why? Because you couldn’t be fucking arsed to check and just make sure.  How could you live with yourself then, eh?”

“Quite easily.”

“Don’t be a smart arse!  I know what’s going on in your head, remember? And I know for a fact you couldn’t live with yourself.”

“But the gas is fucking off!”

“Really?  Are you really really sure?  You know what you’re like.  Remember that time you left the back door unlocked?

“That was years ago. And it only the once.  And anyway, nothing happened.”

“Oh I get it,  you’re just going to hope that you get lucky again. Is that it?

What could I do? I had no choice but to get off the bus at the next stop and cross the road and wait for the bus going in the opposite direction to take me back home again.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”  ‘my other voice’ screamed.

“What does it look like?”

“Are you fucking crazy. Thanks to you people are dying and you stand there waiting for the bus!”

“No one’s dying.”

“How the fuck do you know?  You’re standing at a bus-stop two miles away,  anything could be happening for all you know!”

So I started running.  He made me do it. I ran as hard and as fast as I could. It was a race against time. It was a matter of life and death.  And it nearly killed me,  I never thought I’d make it.  I was covered in sweat,  my heart was bursting through my chest,  my sides were killing me.  But ‘my other voice’ would not let me slow down or rest,  “hurry!” he urged me frantically,  “before everyone’s dead!”  Finally I got there,  I turned the corner into my street and…there it was, my house just as I’d left it!

“Oh what a relief!“ ” ‘my other voice’ cried happily.

It took me a few minutes to get my breath back and for the pain in my sides to subside before I could speak,  “I told you I’d switched it off…and no one’s died either as far as I can make out.”

I would be in the supermarket doing my shopping and it was  only after I had passed the cashier and paid and it was too late to do anything about it that ‘my other  voice’ reminded me that I had forgotten to buy coffee.

“What about coffee?”

“Shit!”

“Exactly.”

“Why didn’t remind me earlier…now I have to go back and queue all over again.”

“You should have made a list. Why didn’t you make a list?”

That’s what really annoyed about ‘my other voice‘. He always had an answer for everything and you could never tell him anything.                                                             

“Hadn’t you better fill  in  that form?”

“Later.”

“Why later?”

“What’s the rush? It doesn’t need to be sent in for another two weeks.”

“But why wait?”

“I told you, it doesn’t need to be sent off for another two weeks. It can wait.”

“Why wait if you can do it now?”

“I don’t want to do it now, okay.”

“Why, are you busy or something?”

There was nothing I could do about it. There was no point in arguing.  So I filled in the form.

“There you are,  that wasn’t so bad was it?”

And I like to go into bookshops sometimes just to have a look around.  But ‘my other voice’ howled in protest.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m just going to pop into the bookshop.”

“Pop in? What  for?”

“I just want to have a look.”

“You haven’t got the time now you’re late enough as it is.”

“I wont be a minute.”

“You haven’t got a minute.”

And as I wandered around looking at the latest titles on offer   ‘my other voice’ would moan and sigh.

“You sound like a whinny little kid being dragged round the shops by his mum to buy his school uniform.”

“This is so boring! Its so pointless! You’re not even going to buy anything.”

There was no rush, no crisis and no emergency but ‘my other voice’ always acted as if it was.  I’d be standing in the kitchen watching the rice boil when  ‘my other voice’ would suggest that I might as well sort our my packed lunch for tomorrow.

“I’m busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Cooking.”

“Cooking?  You’re watching the rice boil,  that’s not cooking.”

“What the hell do you know about cooking?”

“Come on you little prick stop making such a song and dance about it.  The fridge is right behind you.”

“I told you…I’m busy!”

“Busy doing fuck  all.  And that’s your problem.  You are always busy doing fuck all!”

“I wish I was as clever as you.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it. It’s just that to you everything is a problem.  Every time I say something  and have a suggestion to make you come back with a list of reasons why it wont work.”

 

                                                            *

 

‘My other voice’ hadn’t bothered me too much at first but slowly and surely and without me realising it at first ’my other voice’ began to take over my life and tried to run it for me,  even though I didn’t want him too.  ‘My other voice’ was always getting me into trouble and making a fool of me.  He would be talking to me and I would answer him not realising that I was talking out loud. Imagine how embarrassing that could be for me and how frightening it was for other people when they heard me muttering and mumbling to myself. I noticed that people would give me strange looks when they saw me talking to myself in the street. I tried not to but it was difficult to have a conversation with ‘my other voice’ without talking out loud.  My parents worried about me and my friends,  the one’s ‘my other voice’ said I didn’t have,  kept asking me if I was “all right.”  I knew that they thought I was round the twist or on drugs or something.  They all kept asking me if I needed help or if “there was anything you want to tell us.”  They suggested that maybe I should “take a break from it all” and that maybe I should see a doctor “or something.”  But there was nothing anyone could do, there was no escaping ‘my other voice‘.

Half the time it was impossible to even carry on a conversation without ‘my other voice’ chipping in.

“And how is your mother?”  A neighbour asked who’s name I still didn’t know even though she had lived next door to my parents for over fifteen years. I’d bumped into her on the street by accident and I’d had no choice but to stop and talk to her.

“She is very well thank you.”

“I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“That’s because she is much too busy to have time to poke her bloody nose into other people‘s business, you old boot!”

“Is she still teaching?”

“Yes, but only part-time these days. She has to look after my dad after his accident.”

“Oh yes! Wasn’t that awful? I hope he is he feeling better?”

“Yes, much better thank you.”

“How about minding your own business you nosey old cow. Do I ask you stupid questions about your cats?”

“Anyway, I have to dash to the post office before it closes.”

“Yes. Just go. Please!…just fuck off!”

“But it’s been so nice seeing you again.”

“And its been nice to see you again too.”

“I’m lying by the way.”

“Give my regards to your mother and father wont you?”

“Of-course.”

“Like fuck I will!”

The bloke sitting next to me at work asked me if I’d had a good weekend.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Not bad,” I grunted reluctantly.

“Do anything interesting?” the bloke then asked.

“Yes, actually  I spent the weekend chopping up babies and eating them!”

“Not really. I just chilled out.”

“Cool.”

I thought for a minute the conversation was going to stop there but then, “Hey, did you hear what happened to Colin?” the bloke cried very excited all of a sudden.

“No.”

“Stop talking. Do you really think I look like someone who gives a shit?”

He started to tell anyway me but luckily the phone rang and I had to answer it. By the time I put the phone down again the bloke had just finished telling someone else “what had happened to Colin” and had forgotten all about me: thank God.

I know people don’t mean any harm but all this polite chit-chat is rather pointless. I’m no good at small talk anyway but sometimes you just can’t avoid it.

 

                                                              *

                                     

Every day on my way to work I would be accosted by a beggar under the railway bridge and everyday he would ask me if I had 10p “for a of cup tea.”  ‘My other voice’ took a firm line.

“10p  for a cup of tea?” ‘my other voice’ sneered,  “where the fuck can you buy a cup of anything for 10p?  Ask him where he gets a cuppa for 10p so we can buy one.  Lying bastard.  Tell the lazy fucker to get a job!” A new tactic for trying to get money out of unsuspecting members of the public was for beggars to ask for bus fare so that they could “get home.”  ‘My other voice’ was not sympathetic to their pleadings; “What a cheeky bastard.  Tell him to walk.  If he starts now he’ll be home by seven.” One day I passed a homeless man who asked me if I could “spare some change?”  I walked on by without responding  and I heard him call out after me in a loud voice,  “have a nice day you tight fisted little shit!”  I could feel my face redden and I lowered my head and lengthened by stride.  But ‘my other voice’ went absolutely bloody mad.  “Did you hear that?…did you hear what he just said?”

“Forget it.”

“Forget it! My royal arse I will!”

The next thing I knew I had spun round and was retracing my steps until I was standing practically chin to chin and nose to nose with the homeless man.  “Now you just listen to me, you miserable little reptile,”  I heard myself spit out  “I work for my money. I work for a living.  Because unlike you I chose not to piss my life away on drink and drugs.  You chose your life and if that means living on the street begging for money that is your choice and if I ignore you because I don’t want to waste my hard earned money that I have to work for on lazy bastards like you then that is my choice too…okay?”  I don’t know who was more surprised; me or the homeless bum.  I turned round and quickly walked away.  ‘My other voice’ was crowing in triumph,  “my God! That showed him! That showed him!” I was stunned. What on earth had got into me? That wasn’t me. I didn’t do that.  I didn’t have arguments with crazy smelly dirty beggars and other street riff-raff.  All I wanted was a quiet life.  What on earth had got into me?

‘My other voice’ was,  not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a troublemaker which was annoying to say the least;  but it could also be down right dangerous sometimes. It was all very well for him to have a big mouth but  it would be me who would end up having to face the consequences.  A typical example was that day I was walking down the street with a heavy bag slung over my shoulders when a woman coming towards me walked right into it.  I heard her mutter angrily as we passed and before I knew it I had turned round and heard myself cry out,  “what’s the matter with you? Didn’t you see me?  Didn’t you see the bag? “

“Why didn’t you get out of my way?” the woman complained sourly.

“What me? I should get out of your way?  I’m not the elephant around here!”

The woman let out a loud squawk and hurried on her way while I scurried away in then other direction with the loud course laughter of ‘my other voice’ rattling around in my head., “you tell her my son, that’s the way to do it!”

A man stopped and asked for directions to the railway station.

“Tell him to go left and then at the lights, left again.”

So I did. But I wish  I hadn’t. To get to the station was a left and then the first right at the lights. I thought about running after him and giving him the right directions but ‘my other voice’ told me not to bother.

“Fuck him. If he wants to know the way he should put his hand in his pocket and buy a map.”

And then there was that time I was in a pub and I bumped into a man standing behind me and spilled some of his pint, and mine.

“Oh sorry mate,” I stammered. He was a big bloke, and I mean big. Not fat. Big.

“Watch it, eh?”

“Tell him to go and fuck himself!”

“I can’t do that, are you crazy?”

“Hey friend…who are you calling crazy?”

“Tell him to meet you outside…the fat fucker!”

“Not you,  me.”

“You wimp!”

“What are you drinking?”

“You’re pathetic. You never stand up for yourself.” my other voice screamed in rage.

Then there was that time when I was on holiday in Italy when I was stopped by the police who wanted to see my papers and took me down to the local cop shop while they checked me out. ‘My other voice’ was furious.

“You’re just going to take this shit from them…wop cops! Tell ‘em you’re English. Go on just tell that wop bastard that you are E…n…g…lish!”

“I’m English.” I said to the sergeant lazily leafing through my passport.

“Si, si,” he mumbled without even looking up.

“Assert yourself for Pete’s sake. Bang your fist on the table and tell them what’s what. It’s the only way to treat these people. Tell ‘em if it wasn’t for your dad they would all be eating sauerkraut!”

“Is there a problem?”

The sergeant shock his head.

“So I can go?”

“Non.”

“But if there is no problem,  then there is no reason for me to be kept here.”

The sergeant looked up. “You sit.” He pointed to a wooden bench behind me. I sat down.

“You really enjoy being kicked around don’t you? It must be fun.”

“Fuck you!”

“Hello?” the sergeant was on his feet waving his finger me,  “what you say?”

“What?…oh. Er,” Shit! What had I said? What had I done?

“Don’t apologise for God’s sake. Demand your passport back. Insist. These fuckers always give in if you stand up to them!”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You think you funny. All English not so funny.”

“No…I mean,  I wasn’t talking about you. It wasn’t you. I was just thinking out loud.”

“Don’t cry now will you? I really couldn’t stand that.”

“Sit okay. Wait. Understand?”

“Absolutely. No problem.”

“No problem? Why the hell do you put up with all this shit beats me.”

“Piss off and leave me alone.” I hissed under my breath,  “it’s nothing to do with you. So just for a change mind your own damn business.”

Most irritating of all though ‘my other voice’ was obsessed with girls.  He always had to stare at every girl we passed on the street and he always had something to say.

“Look at the knockers on that one!…hey see that one, what breed of dog is that?…what about the pins on her!”  And if he had to look then so did I and not all women liked being stared at.

“What are you staring at?”

“Sorry my love, but I was thinking about giving you 8 out of 10 but now that I’ve had a proper look at you I’ve decided to give you 6 out of 10 instead.”

You should have seen her face.  I wanted to apologise but my other voice wouldn’t let me.

“Hey look at that one…not her,  the one with the legs. Yeah, her. Why don’t you chat her up.”

“No.”

“Why  not?”

“I don’t know her and she doesn’t know me.”

“And what’s that got to do with the price of tea?”

“Anyway she’ll just take me for a weirdo.”

“No she wont.  Besides she wont realise that until later when it’s too late.”

“Funny!”

“Look its so simple.  Just go up to her right,  and say that you are lost and that you are looking for directions.  You say something like; you are from London or something and that you are looking for, I dunno, a hotel let’s say.  She wont tell you to get lost I promise.  But you apologise for bothering her and give her a ‘puppy dog look’ and say that you asked her only because she looked so friendly.  She’ll love hearing that.  And then you compliment her on her beautiful eyes or her nice smile or her lovely hair and she’ll practically give you a frenchie there and then.  And you tell her that you are only staying up here for a week or so; say you are visiting your mum in hospital, and then you ask her if she can recommend any good places in town to eat, drink or where people go out at night for a good time. And she’ll only be too happy to tell you  and then you say something like;  ‘well I’d love to go out and relax and have a bit of fun while I’m here but I don’t know the place and I’m all on my own maybe I can buy you a drink some time?’ She’ll be flattered  and then you ask her if you could have her number…and away you go!”

“Bob’s your uncle right?”

“Don’t be smart arse, ok. I’m only trying to do you a favour alright.  I mean lets face it your no hit with the ladies are you?  I’ve seen blokes who look like the hunchback of Notre Dame pull more birds than you.”

“Anyway she’s not my type.”

“Oh I know,  Claudia Shiffer is your ‘type’ but guess what,  even if you met Claudia Shiffer you would have absolutely no chance with her or with any woman like her.  So you better start concentrating on real woman that you could actually get.”

“Well I know what I want and I’m prepared to wait.”

This was a topic of conversation that we’d had time and time again.  I got sick of talking about it and I tried to tell him to stop but he wouldn’t listen to me.

“Don’t give me that,  you’re  as interested in birds as I am so you can stop pretending.”

“It’s got nothing to do with pretending.”

“Come off it…listen it’s the simplest thing in the world pulling birds believe me.  All you’ve got to do is go into a decent pub, not too crowded and sit down at the bar.  And when you see a bird on her own that you like the look of just go up to her and ask her what the time is.  Then you give it five minutes and then you ask her again and you apologise for bothering her but you tell her that you are supposed to be meeting your date but she is late and you are worried that she has stood you up. That will get her interested and you just start talking to her and you say to her that you don’t know this girl very well and this is the first time you are going out with her and she is the first girl that you have gone out with since you broke up with your last girlfriend three years ago because she really broke your heart, see. She was a lovely girl and it wasn’t her fault that it all went wrong but its taken you a long time to get over it. By now the girl at the bar will be all ears and sympathy and you then ask her for advice on how to win your imaginary birds heart  and before you know it you’ll have a real bird .”

“That simple is it?”

“Nothing to it.  Try it.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“What’s there to think about?”

“I want to wait until I’m in the mood.”

“You want to wait until you’re in the mood? Jesus! Well, Don’t wait until your knob falls off.”

 

                                                         *

 

  It was thanks to him and his “help” that I got beaten up.  He was always looking for a fight but it was me who suffered. It happened in the city centre on Saturday night while I was waiting for the bus.  These two lads turned up obviously having just rolled out of the pub and clearly fully tanked up.  I stood well away from them and tried to make sure that I avoided eye contact. 

“Low life scum!” ‘my other voice’ bellowed,  “pond life!  Trash like that should be strangled at birth.  No use to anyone,  just a pointless burden on society if you ask me.  Spend their whole life on the dole sponging off society.”  I turned round slightly to look at them,  “ugly little bastards aren’t they…rat faced and ragged arsed  little vermin!”

“What you staring at mate?”

“Pardon me?”

“Posh cunt, eh?” 

“Not really.”

“Not really,  what kind of fucking English is that?”

“It’s the Queen’s English.  And if it’s good enough for the Queen then it’s good enough for you.”

“I’m going to smack you in a minute, pal.”

“Oh, I see: I’ve got a minute then have I?”

“A smart arse as well!” the lout growled menacingly.

“It’s called ‘comic timing’, you’ve either got it or you haven’t.”

They walked off leaving me on the floor with a bloody nose.

“Why didn’t you duck?”

“Oh shut up!”

“No, seriously, why didn’t you?  A swift jab into his kidneys an uppercut to the jaw. Easy peasy!“

“Oh really?  Didn’t you see the size of him?  And what about his mate.  There were two them you remember?”

“His mate wouldn’t have done nothing.”

“Just for once why don’t you just belt up and leave me alone!”

“Stop your whining?

“Hey,  you’re not the one who got the bloody nose.”

“I told you to duck.”

“I case you’ve forgotten it’s thanks to you I got into this trouble in the first place.”

“Are you blaming me?”

“Who should I blame?”

“How about you blame yourself for being a gutless wimp?”

“I don’t remember inviting you into my head or inviting you to run my life!”

“Don’t start being clever with me sunshine. I’ve been in your head all your life…but it’s only now that you are forced to listen to me.”

I saw the bus coming. I got up from the ground wiped my nose and counted my change.  The bus came to a stop, the door opened and I got on, paid my fare and sat down.  We sat in silence as the bus took me home.  I was boiling with rage and shame.

“Look mate,  I’m sorry I yelled. Okay.”

“Forget it.”

“Don‘t bloody sulk.”

“I’m not sulking.”

 “It‘s for your own good, believe me.  I only want what’s best for you.”

“I said forget it.”

The bus came to my stop and I got off and started to walk the short stretch to my house.

“All the same,  you should have bloody ducked.”

Sometimes though he gave me real hell.  I lost my wallet once.  I’d been to the library to do some photo-copying and I remember I had taken my wallet out and put it next to the machine.  Next thing I know,  I’m in the supermarket at the check out when I suddenly realise that my wallet is not in the pocket of my jacket where it should be.

“You haven’t gone and lost it have you?”

“Shit!”

“You arse!”

“Fuck you!”

“No!  Fuck you!”

Meanwhile I had put my bag down and had began to frantically search all the pockets of my clothes and through every crease and seam of my bag for the missing wallet my body bursting out in hot prickly points of sweat as panic and despair seized me.

“You genius!”  ‘my other voice’ sneered,  “How stupid can you get!”

“If you’re not going to help you might as well keep it shut!”

“It’s hard to believe that you are an adult and not some dim-witted little kid.”

“Shut the fuck up for Christ sake and let me think!”

“I leave you alone for just five minutes and look what happens!”

I didn’t understand it,  how could it have happened?  I cast my mind back to the moment when I had been in the library.  I knew I had it on me then because I had taken it out to get my change for the photo-copier but after that my mind was a complete blank.  Shit! Fuck! This was just so unbelievable!

“Not really.”

“Be quiet and let me think.”

The library wasn’t far away so I ran back and asked if anyone had handed in a wallet. But of-course no one had.  So I had to run all the way home and ring Barclaycard to cancel my card  taunted all the way by ‘my other voice‘.

“What a Nob Head!  Loosing your wallet like that fuck me,  you are just so bloody hopeless.  You really are!”

And then there was that time I went on holiday and somehow I managed to arrive at my hotel a day too early.

“I don’t believe this!”  ‘my other voice’ sighed and I could feel him rolling his eyes and shaking his head,  “you have a special talent for fucking things up,  you know that don’t you?

“Calm down. It’s no big deal. It’s just a simple mistake.”

“Oh I see…it’s just a mistake. Well that’s okay then! Lets forget it then shall we.”

“Yes,  lets,”  I said standing at the ‘Check-In’ desk  “its not going to be a problem,  I’ll just have to pay for an extra night that’s all.”

And it wasn’t a problem.  They had a room free and I paid for an extra night.  But ‘my other voice’ just went on and on about it.

“How on earth did that happen? I mean,  don’t you read the itinerary?  Don’t you check the dates and stuff?”

“But I did!  I did!”

“And you still managed to get it wrong.  You’re unbelievable.  Really unbelievable!”

And I remember laying in bed dog tired trying to get some sleep but ‘my other voice’ was not giving me a moments peace. 

“This is a great place to pull birds and even if you can’t manage that then  the prostitutes here are famous for being young, gorgeous and cheap.  Even you could pull one.”

“I’m tired. Leave me alone.”

“Oh yeah, I know you want to visit museums and churches shit like that.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s wrong with having some fun?  Come on…you know you really want to.”

“No I don’t.”

“Don’t lie to me.  I know how desperate you are.”

“No I’m not.”

“Hey…you wont survive just by wanking all the time.  It’s just not healthy man.  All you have to do is pay a tenner…just a tenner!  Don’t you want to  shag some delicious sexy 18 year old blond?”

On and on he went. I don’t think I got to sleep until 3 o’clock.

 

                                                           *

 

  And it was thanks to ‘my other voice’ that I lost my job.  I work, or used to work in a bank.  It wasn’t a great job but it was a job that paid the bills but thanks to ‘my other voice’ and his ‘help’ I lost it.  I spent a lot of time dealing with customers and sorting out their problems.  I didn’t enjoy the job,  partly because working in a bank is dull but mostly because the general public are so incredibly stupid and when something goes wrong it’s always someone else who is at fault: me usually.  They get into debt;  it’s my fault.  Their direct debit doesn’t go through because there is no money in their account: that’s my fault as well.  Their cheque bounced:  my fault again.  They are charged for exceeding their credit limit and making unauthorised withdrawals:  again that’s my fault.

“Ask the silly bitch if she knows what unauthorised means?”

I didn’t of-course which annoyed ‘my other voice‘,  “you’re such a fucking coward.  Stand up to these people and don’t let yourself be pushed around.”

I tried to explain to the woman on the phone that this charge had to be made as she had exceeded her agreed credit limit with the bank and in such cases it was the bank’s policy to charge customers.  This was not a satisfactory explanation as far as she was concerned and  she went on to say that she did not think that was not an acceptable way to treat  someone who has been a loyal customer at our bank for many years.

“Fuck me,  ask her if she went shopping to her local supermarket does she think they would let her walk out with a packet of bacon stuffed under her coat and not pay for it just because she was a “loyal customer”? Who wants  loyal customers like that anyway!”

The woman on the other end of the phone started to get very irate and complained that I was being extremely ‘difficult’ and she complained that I wasn’t ‘listening to her’. Well unfortunately,  I couldn’t listen to her and to ‘my other voice’ at the same time.

 “Jesus H. fucking Christ!”  screamed ‘my other voice‘,  “I don’t believe this woman! What’s wrong with her? Does she think she can tell you what to do? Tell her you work for the bank; and not for her.  Tell her, contrary to what she might have been told; the customer is not always right!“ ‘My other voice’ was very distracting in situations like this,  its hard to concentrate and think when he was yelling advice in my head and I had to be so very careful that I didn’t accidentally blurt out something that I shouldn’t.

The woman on the phone demanded to speak to my supervisor.  I told her that she will have to put her concerns to the bank in writing.  She said that she wanted to speak to my supervisor…now!  I told her that no supervisor was available.  She said that in that case she will stay on hold until he was available.

“Tell her that you wont be there to keep her company and that she will have to sit on hold by herself.”

I didn’t though.  Instead I went to the toilet and then went outside for a smoke.  When I got back to my desk I could see that she was still on hold.  I asked her if she was “okay to stay on hold?”  she said “no” but she warned me that she would call back and “take the matter further…”

“Madam you can do whatever you wish”,  I heard myself say  “and I‘m sorry I couldn‘t be of assistance.” I could sense the woman on the line pause while she wondered if I was being sarcastic or not. But I can be such a good actor sometimes it’s very hard to tell. I fooled her, but I didn’t fool ‘my other voice‘, “you sly dog you.”

My line manager wasn’t impressed though.  He said that they had received a complaint about me from a customer and he added that it wasn’t the first either.  He was looking down at my file as he talked and then slowly lifting his head he removed his glasses and told me that  he didn’t like my attitude.

“What’s wrong with it?”

But instead of answering  he reminded me of bank policy when dealing with customer complaints. I tried to explain what had really happened  but the little prick wasn’t interested in what I had to say. 

“I don’t get it”  I said,  “all I’m going is following bank procedure and when someone complains about it I’m at fault?”

“That’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?”

“I’ve already told you;  your ‘attitude’.  You sometimes can a little…brusque?  Especially recently.”

My manager leaned back in his chair and chewed on one of the arms of his glasses.  He suggested that it might be beneficial if I want on an “action plan” which I wasn’t to interpret as punishment or as any part of a disciplinary procedure but merely a means to help me improve my “customer handling skills.”

“What for?”

“There are training issues here that I think need to be addressed  I think it could be beneficial and help you to improve your job skills.”

“Tell him to shove it!”

So I did, not in those words exactly but I did ask if working in a bank meant I had to give up my civil rights? Apparently it did.  He started to tell me once again all about bank policy and my obligations towards my employer etc, etc.  But in the end we decided to terminate my contract by mutual consent with immediate effect.

I wasn’t that bothered quite frankly,  after all there were other jobs in other towns. The only thing that I  missed about that bank was Natalie.  She looked and acted like a gypsy princess.  I remember the first time I saw her I didn’t think much of her but she definitely grew on me.  She was very lively and loved to flirt and she was loud and cheeky and always had a little teasing smile on her lips when she talked.  We got into the habit of taking our breaks together and sitting at the same table in the canteen for lunch. I really got to like her. She was very lively,  funny and pretty. But above all she had a really fantastic body: a really great arse. 

“I’m a ‘tit’ man myself.”

“You don’t say.”

“Why don’t you ask her out?”

He was always pestering me to take her out.

“I will.”

“When?”

“One day.”

“When hell freezes over?”

“No.”

“She likes you though…I can tell.”

“You sound very sure.”

“Oh for God’s sake…you can be such hard work.  She fancies you.”

“Maybe.”

“She’s a dead cert I promise you.  You really blew  it that time when she asked you out for a drink on her birthday and you said,  what did you say?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well I remember.  Shall I tell you what you said? You said… nothing.  You just ignored her pretending you hadn’t heard. My God what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing is wrong with me.”

“Well you could have fooled me. She fancies you. You fancy her. But you ignore her.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do.”

“Not everyone is obsessed with women like you.”

“Who do you think you are talking too.  I know what’s going on inside your head.  I know every thought, every dream, every fantasy that you have ever had.  And I know for a fact that you are obsessed with women too. Its just that you like to pretend you aren’t and I’m here to tell you that the time for pretending is over.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?  I’m having to listen to this bloody lecture just because I didn’t go out for a drink with Natalie on her birthday?”

“It’s about time you came face to face with reality.”

“Is that a fact.”

“It is. I keep telling you that I’m here to help you. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

 

                                                            *

 

My life changed when I met Elizabeth and I had ‘my other voice’ to thank for that.  When I saw Elizabeth it was love at first sight.  She was my fantasy woman. My dream girl. ‘Miss Perfect’. She was gorgeous and I mean; gorgeous.  I thought about her all day and dreamed about her all night. Whenever I saw her I got scared;  scared to come too close to her,  scared that she would look at me;  scared that she would talk to me. I was afraid.  But what was I afraid of? That she would see through me? ‘My other voice’ sneered at that notion; “don’t be fucking ridiculous. She’s a dumb blond.“  But to me she was an angel, a goddess, a princess out of a fairy story. Looking at her was like looking at the sun; stunning, irresistible  but dangerous. So I tried to protect myself and not give myself away by putting on an air of indifference and reserve whenever I was in her presence. . I had to concentrate on making  a real physical effort not to panic whenever I was near her. At  work I could very easily have sat at a desk facing her so that I could look at her and have a chance to talk to her but I didn’t dare and instead I made the conscious decision  to sit where I couldn’t see her.

Yet she was always friendly to me. I once remember going up to where she was sitting at her desk  in our office and asking her if she had any ‘payment forms’ and she turned to look at me and gave me a brilliant smile. 

“She likes you!”

But I didn’t return the smile and just looked at her with a blank expression on my face patiently waiting for her to hand me some ‘payment forms‘.

“What the hell are you playing at?“ my voice yelled at me in disbelief, “Say something to her!…for God’s sake!”

“How many do you need?”

“A couple will do fine.”

“Don’t bottle it you gutless little shit.  She likes you!”

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.”

“Fuck me!  You haven’t got a clue, have you.  All you had to do was be nice to her,  all you had to do was be sociable.  But what did you do?”

“Oh shut up.  I don’t even know her.”

“Then make it your business to get to know her.”

She was always friendly to me and it seemed to me that she went out of her way to say ‘hello’ whenever she saw me and she never failed to and say ‘bye’ before she left the office at 5 o’clock even when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to slip away unnoticed.  And she would always give me a little wave if she saw me when she walked by  surrounded by her girlfriends or in the company of some bloke who had decided to attach himself to her in the hope of getting  into her knickers.  It made me think that maybe, just maybe she liked me: but I didn’t want to put it to the test.

“You are a complete prat!  A girl like her expects to be chatted up.”

“I‘m not like that.”

“And what good is it doing you? All you are doing is pinning like a love sick puppy with a hard on that you don‘t know what to do with”

“Don‘t be so disgusting.”

“You‘re really hard work, do you know that?”

It was ‘my other voice’s’ idea that I sat down at Elizabeth’s table and joined her for lunch one day.  But I was so nervous. I wanted to talk to her but I had no idea what to say;  “Don’t worry about that,  leave the talking to me.”

“Do you always go out to the supermarket for your sandwiches?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yeah, well I need to get out of the office and stretch my legs.”

“And do you always eat ham.”

“No, not always. I used to have cheese on my sandwiches but after five years I decided to it was time for a change.”

“Wow!” laughed Elizabeth good naturedly,  “you really live life on the edge.”

“And sometimes it can be terrifying.”

Jane and Annie joined us and so did Harold. I had seen Harold many times before hanging around Elizabeth and monopolise her and generally act as if she was his bird, which she wasn’t. He got a chair and forced it between her and Jane and sat down and turned to face Elizabeth and just started to talk her as if the rest of us weren’t there.

“What are you doing on Saturday?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll call you, Okay?”

“I don’t know?”

“What d you mean?”

“I’m going out with my friends, I think.”

“You think?” Harold looked perplexed, “well that’s okay, I’ll come too.” “I’ll call you Okay?”

“She can’t,”  I suddenly said,  “she’s going to the cinema.”

“Really?” asked Harold staring intently at Elizabeth.

“Yeah. Really she is,” I said “she’s going to see ‘Star Wars’.”

“Star Wars?”

“It’s a great film.”

“Who with?” asked Harold anxiously.

“With me of-course,” I told him “who else.”

“You like ‘Star Wars?”  Harold asked Elizabeth in disbelief.

“I don’t know,” giggled Elizabeth.

Harold glared angrily at me. 

“Have you seen ‘Star Wars’?” I asked him,  “you should, it’s a great film.”

Harold got up and giving me an ugly looked, “call me okay?” he practically ordered Elizabeth before leaving.

We all watched him go and join his friends who were sitting at another table.

Later Elizabeth and me were in the lift going back to our office.

“Is ‘Star Wars’ really a great film?” she asked.

“No. It’s crap.”

“Ask her what films she likes!”

“You’re weird,” she said with a smile.

“Oh.”

“No, I mean in a nice way.”

“She’s crazy about you!…ask her out! Go on!”

But I wasn’t sure. So I didn’t.

And yet, on the other hand…well, for example once or twice our department had gone for a night out and Elizabeth had looked round to see where I was and had motioned me to join her group and had made room for me to sit next to her.  We hadn’t talked much but it did seem to me that she liked me.  But I couldn’t get away from the feeling that I was kidding myself.  Because if I was honest she behaved to all the other men that I saw her with in exactly the same way she behaved towards me. I couldn’t escape the feeling that she just wanted to add me to her menagerie of male admirers:  A eunuch in the court of Queen Elizabeth. Well, thanks but no thanks.

We were standing outside smoking while Elizabeth scrolled through the numbers on her mobile.

“Oh” she exclaimed sadly.

“What?”

“I’ve got no friends. No one called me.”

“Well, I tell you what?…you could always ring one of those 0890 numbers.”

Elizabeth chuckled. “You’re funny,” she said.

I realised that this was my chance.  But I didn’t take it. And just then Jane and Annie joined us and the moment was lost. Was it pride? Or was it cowardice? Was it because I was too proud to admit to her that I loved her or was it because I was afraid that she would laugh in my face.  “No!” ‘my other voice’ screamed in fury, “it’s because you’re stupid, that’s what it is. What does it matter if your pride is dented! What does it matter if she turns you down! Jesus. H. fucking Christ!  What do you think is going to happen. You make no effort at all and then you mope because nothing happened! What do you expect to happen? Do you expect her to throw her knickers at you? Do you think she will run through the streets naked shouting your name? Do you think she will beat down your front door begging for a shag?”

“Why the hell not?”  I snapped back,  “I use ‘Lynx’ all the time.”

“There you go again. Instead of action all I get more of your smart mouth. This is no time to be clever pal, this is serious…serious fucking stuff!”

“Oh for Pete’s sake,  get a grip. It’s not a matter of life and death.”

“It is for you my old china, and no mistake.”

One Saturday we had all decided to spend the day at Alton Towers on one of our regular team social events that our company was so keen to promote,  all for the purposes of encouraging  a ‘positive  team spirit’ among the employees in our company.  It was all a big pain in the  bloody backside if you ask me how can you create a ‘positive team spirit’ if you hate your job and you sit in an office surrounded by people that you have nothing in common with? But on this occasion I was really looking forward to it;  Elizabeth would be coming.  I sat on the coach next to a window my heart thumping as I watched  everyone get on.  I could see Elizabeth outside surrounded by her girlfriends and,  in the background there was Harold striving to get her attention as she talked and giggled with her friends.  The coach driver was becoming impatient and told everyone milling about outside on the pavement to hurry up.  I watched everyone get on and glared ferociously at anyone who I thought might be thinking of sitting in the empty seat next to me…I was keeping that free for Elizabeth. But what is it that they say about the best laid plans of mice and men?…well that’s what happened to my plan.  Some fat slob called Geoff who worked in Finance, I think, took the place I had been keeping free for her.  “But that’s because you didn’t tell him to ‘fuck off’ like you should have done and told him that seat was saved.  It’s no use blaming mice, or whatever…”

When Elizabeth finally got onto the coach and made her way past me down the aisle she did acknowledge me with one of her bright smiles and a wave.  It made my heart leap but I fought back the urge to show how delighted  I was by this gesture and it cheered me up even more when I saw  that Harold hadn’t even managed to get a seat anywhere near her either.  The whole journey there I sat and looked out of the window  listening to what was going on behind me;  I could hear Elizabeth talking loudly with her girlfriends and the voice of Harold as he tried to join the conversation and to my pleasure he wasn’t having much luck.  They were talking about some friend that they knew and recounting their adventures on a recent night out.  Yet still Harold tried to throw in his ‘pence’s worth’ into their conversation but they just ignored him.  I couldn’t understand why he just didn’t give it up as a bad job and stopped making a bloody fool of himself. 

After about a 90 minute drive we finally arrived and the first thing we all decided to do was have a big english breakfast.  I sat at one table with some lads from my department and when I looked across to the other side of the restaurant I could see Elizabeth sitting with her girl friends  and there was Harold who had pulled up a chair and had placed it against the end of the table and was still trying to bewitch Elizabeth with his wit and charm;  you couldn’t mistake his loud braying voice and his harsh laugh.  What a creep.  But then I saw her turn to talk to him and laugh and I could literally feel the blood in my veins turn to ice.  What was she doing? Why was she encouraging him?  “Maybe you should be doing what he is doing and letting her know that you like her and are interested in her?”

Eventually everyone finished eating and drifted outside and gathered together in little groups discussing what rides to go on and where to meet for lunch.

“Just go up to her and ask her what rides she is going on? 

“What’s the point of that?”

“Fuck me!  You are hopeless!  Because whatever her answer it will give you an opportunity to strike up a conversation with her and the next thing you know you are walking side by side and arm in arm to the ‘Big Dipper’.”

“That wont fool her.”

“What are you talking about;  she loves attention and she wont turn it down,  even from Harold who she doesn’t even like.”

“If she doesn’t like him why does she let him hang around her.”

“Exactly;  that’s all he is doing. He’s not getting anywhere with her.”

“She laughed at his joke.”

“Christ you’re innocent.  She’s just knows how to behave around men that‘s all. If they tell her a joke she will laugh, even if she doesn‘t find it funny. It doesn‘t mean she fancies him you idiot!”

“How do you know?” I asked gloomily as I watched Elizabeth walk off with her friends with Harold  tagging along faithfully bringing up the rear.

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve got it all figured out.”

So I ended up spending most of  the morning wandering around Alton Towers with Chris, Alan and Dave and some others that I didn’t really know, not even their names. We followed the signs to the rides we had agreed to go on and stood in the long queues waiting our turn drinking the cans of beer that we had brought with us.   Often as we went from one ride to the next we would cross paths with some of the  others from our party and we would exchange notes or make plans to meet up later for a drink.  I saw Elizabeth several times and I became more and more dismayed by what I perceived as the increasing friendship between her and Harold.  I saw her laugh at something Harold said and watched her as she ruffled his hair. The intimacy of that scene burned  a whole in my heart and made me wince in pain.  ‘My other voice’ felt it too.

“I think it’s time for a spot of lunch, how about it?”

The whole group had agreed to  meet up for lunch at pub near the lake.  It was agony.  Harold sat next to Elizabeth and never took his eyes off her though she didn’t seem to be paying him any special attention.  I wanted to speak to Elizabeth but she never gave me an opening.  She was too busy chatting noisily with her other girl friends.  I saw Harold try to join in but it was girls’ talk and they didn’t give him an opening either.

She was sitting right in front of me directly in my line of vision yet I was afraid to look at her scared that I would give myself away.

“Smile at her for God’s sake you miserable bastard.  If you act like a stone she will treat you like one.”

But I was waiting for a sign,  I was waiting for her to make the first move.  But she didn’t. Well if she thought I was going to throw myself at her feet then she was mistaken.  I wasn’t Harold.

“She is ignoring you. Do you know why? Because everything about you is telling her to.” My other voice howled in exasperation.

I went outside and had a quiet smoke waiting and hoping that she would join me.  If she was interested in me then she would take this opportunity to join me for a cigarette.  But she never left the table. I don’t even think she realised that I had gone outside.  I was still standing there smoking when our  party sitting at the tables decided to leave and it was Elizabeth who called out to me and motioned me to join them. 

“You’re always getting left behind.”  she observed.

I felt like a happy child on Christmas day opening the  present that he had hoped and prayed Santa would bring. She had noticed that I left afterall.  She had been watching me. And why had she been watching me?

“Because she fancies you!”

Because she fancied me!

“What ride are you planning to go on now?” I asked

“Don’t know yet.”

“You must try ‘Oblivion‘”

“Oh no!”

“Vomit at 75mph. It’ll be fun!”

Elizabeth laughed,  “I’m not sure about that.”

“If you haven’t been on that then you can’t say that you’ve been to Alton Towers you know.”

“Are you going on it?”

“ of-course!”

 “On a full stomach?”

“I know,  but lets face it,  lunch wasn’t  that great and I wont miss it if I loose it.”

One of her girlfriends yelled out for Elizabeth to join them and she motioned them that she was coming.

“I’ll see you later,” she said.

“She’ll see you later.”

“Yeah sure,”  I said casually  “I’ll see you later.”

I watched her trot away to join her friends who were standing in a cluster waiting for her.  I noticed with glee that Harold was looking daggers at me. As for me I was riding around on the bike that Santa had brought me trying to keep that idiotic smile off my face.

I went on ‘Oblivion’ which wasn’t nearly as frightening as people liked to say it was.  I think it was because the  experience was so brief I didn’t have time to get frightened.  I went on it again just to make sure,  but the 2nd ride was no different than the first.  Besides my mind was on other things.  My head was full of scenarios of what would happen when I met Elizabeth again trying to work out what she would say to me and what I could say to her.

“Just be careful,  if you get too stuck on one scenario you’ll just end up becoming tongue tied and you know what a bad conversationalist you can be.”

“I’ll manage.”

“Don’t run before you can walk.  The last thing you  want to be doing is rushing at her like a redskin waving your tomahawk over your head screaming and whooping at the top of your voice.”

“Oh for god’s sake.”

“I mean it.  One false move could spoil it all.  Just leave everything to me, okay?”

 

                                                                  *

 

I didn’t wear a watch but to judge by the position of the sun in the sky the drop in temperature and pure guesswork I reckoned it had to be around 4pm.  The plan had been that we would all make our way back to the coach at five.  All the other guys in my group that I had been trooping around with all day had all decided to move onto the next attraction after just one ride on ‘Oblivion’ but because I had decided to have another go I was now on my own.  They had told me where to meet them after I was finished and I slowly started to wander to where I thought I would find them.  I thought I knew where I was going  and I decided that I would get there quicker if I took a short cut.  I should have known better since I am so useless with directions and it wasn’t very long before I realised I was lost.  I had decided to make a right turn and  had followed a path  that took  a gentle incline as it went through what looked like a small wood.  It was completely deserted and so secluded I could barely make out the sounds of the crowds  down below.  I walked on along it  until finally I rounded a corner and discovered to my surprise that I had reached the top of the hill where the path I had been following came to a dead end.  I stopped to admire the view while I smoked a cigarette.  It had to be close to five o’clock and so I decided I had better hurry back and make sure I didn’t miss the coach. 

I had reached the bottom of the path where I had made that right turn that had brought me to that dead end when who should I see walking towards me,  but Elizabeth!  I beamed in delight and astonishment and she returned the smile with a blazing smile of her own. 

“See that? Look how pleased she is to see you.  That’s no act.  She is not just being polite!”

“Are you lost?”

She nodded and looked a little sheepish.

“Maybe we should stick together and then  we will be only half as lost and twice as likely to find our way back.”

She looked relieved.

“She wants to be with you.”

I pointed along the path that I had just walked down from.

“I think that is the best way to go now”

“Really?”

“Well we both know that the direction you are going in is wrong since that is where I have just come from because that was wrong too;  so that just leaves that way.”

We walked side by side up the path talking;  about work,  about her,  about me. She seemed impressed that I had been to university and had lived abroad and could speak French.

“I wish I could speak a foreign language.”

“There’s nothing to stop you from learning.” 

“Oh, I’m just a dumb blond.”

“Maybe you are dumb but who cares…you are so fucking gorgeous.”

She asked me if I had a girlfriend,  and I said no.

She asked me if I had ever been married! And again I said no.

What about her,  had she ever been married?

“No!”  she laughed.  But she would like to get married one day.

What about boyfriends? Was she going out with anyone?

No one in particular,  she replied adding that she was taking ‘a rest’ from boys for a little while.

So what kind of men did she like when she wasn’t ‘resting’?

Older men, she replied.

I stopped breathing for a second.  I was ‘older’. Did she mean me?

“I’m telling you the truth man,  she is sizing you up.  She is thinking about it.  She is thinking: ’is he the one for me?’”

I thought so too.  I was getting so excited I could hardly stop myself from jumping up and down and punching the air with joy.  But I started to get a little worried when I knew we were close to reaching the end of the path. What would I do then?

“This is your great chance.” My other voice advised me,  “to use this little crisis to your advantage and bring you closer together. A shared experience like this creates a bond on which a real relationship can be built.”

We turned the final corner and Elizabeth let out a little exclamation of surprise as she realised that we had reached a dead end. We both stood in silence side by side for a moment and stared at the panorama before us.

“Crickey!” I cried trying to sound shocked, “it’s a dead end!”

“What now?” she asked turning  her lovely face towards me.

“What now…you kiss her that’s what!”

“I can’t.”

“What?”  asked Elizabeth looking at me in mild surprise.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Kiss her! Kiss her!. Now. Do it now…fucking hell don’t just stand there like a melon.  Take control of the situation and you take control of her.  Women want to man to lead them and to take charge.  So be a man.  Tell her you will get her out of this.”

“Simple as that, yeah?”

Elizabeth gave a slightly nervous smile,  “what are you talking about?”

“Oh..er, no I mean ‘it’s simple’.  It just came out all wrong.”

“Oh.”

“Will you  please just stop fucking around?  Put your arms around her,  pull her towards you and give her a kiss!”

I took a step towards her and touched her elbow with my fingers,  “it’s not a problem” I assured her, “we’ll just go back the way we came and keep on walking until we reach a sign post…there are sign posts all over the place all we have to do is look for one that says; ‘entrance’  or ‘exit’ or ‘car park’ or something.”

Elizabeth nodded.  “Sounds like a good idea.”

“Now kiss her! “

 

                                                           *

 

I don’t know what went wrong.  I stepped up and stood beside her and tried to put my arm around her and give her a kiss.  I can only think that I must have startled her because she gave a sudden jump and on an impulse jerked her face away. 

“Come on!  Just take her in your arms and kiss her!”

I reached out with my arm and tried to take hold of her.  Elizabeth pulled  away from me.

“What are you doing?”

“It‘s all right” I stammered. “I just want to talk to you.”

“Stop grabbing me then?”

“Just listen to me.” Why was she behaving like this? 

“I just want to go back.”

“So do I. So do I!” I assured her.

“But what are you doing?”

I could feel myself start to panic. And,  if I was honest with myself also a little annoyed.  I was only trying to help and she was becoming hysterical.

“You don’t understand.”  I told her a twinge of impatience in my voice. 

“But what do you want?”

“I just want to talk.”

Elizabeth suddenly turned and started to walk hurriedly down the path and I chased after her.  Why was she making such a scene?  I felt angry and confused and also a little scared.  I had to make her calm down and see reason and make sure she did not do anything stupid.  When I caught up with her I grabbed hold of her arm to make her stop.  She struggled to free herself from my grip.

“Let go! Let go!”

“Just stop and listen will you? I’m not going to do anything to you?  Okay. I just want to help!”

Why wouldn’t she  listen to me?  Why  wont she stop running?  Why was she screaming and shouting?

Everything was getting out of control and there was nothing that I could do to stop it.  I was scared at where this was all going to end. I was afraid that she would get me into a lot of trouble. God only knows what she would tell people and the humiliation and shame would be too much for me to bare.  Who would believe me? What would they think?  I would never be able to leave the house again. I would loose everything and all because some dumb blond had a fit of hysterics and had started to rush around blindly like a deer spooked by a shadow or a snapping twig.  I was determined to stop her and make her listen and make her understand.  But all she did was scream and struggle.  I was terrified that someone would hear and I put a hand over her mouth to stop her attracting attention to us.  All I wanted her to do was shut up and calm down so that I could explain everything to her because then she would understand. 

I don’t know how but I must have slipped and before I knew it we were on the floor sprawling out on the ground under the bushes.

“Help! Help!” screamed Elizabeth at the top of her voice.

“Don’t do that!” I begged her.

“Get away from me you nasty little creep.”

“Are you going to shut her up or shall I?”

I clamped my hand over  her mouth again  and kept a firm grip. And I sat astride her body and pleaded with her to stop screaming and to stop struggling.  But it only spurred her on to resist me even harder. What a bitch!  What the fuck was wrong with her?  Why didn’t she stop?  I was petrified that she would slip away and escape and god only knows what would happen then  god only knows what she would accuse me of and god only knows what would happen to me when  I hadn’t even done anything.  Why was this bloody bitch trying to make a fool of me and get me into trouble when all I wanted to do was tell her that I loved her.

But then finally, finally, she stopped struggling and I felt her body relax. At last she was calming down. I kept my hand over her mouth for a little longer to be sure that she had decided to behave from now on.

Eventually, when I saw that she was completely still I slowly pulled my hand away from her face.

“Will you stop it now?  I don’t know why you have been behaving so foolishly nothing is going to happen to you, I promise. All I want to do is talk. Just let me explain.”

I watched her face and waited for her to say something but she didn’t say anything. Nothing at all. See was looking at me but not talking to me.  “Don’t sulk, come on.”

“Give her a slap, maybe that will do the trick.”

So I did. Nothing.

“Again. But harder this time.”

Still nothing.

“What’s wrong now god damn it.”

“I think she’s dead.”

“What!”

“Just look at her. Can’t you tell.”

I looked closer at Elizabeth’s still face. I grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a hard shake.  Why wasn’t she moving?

“Cos she’s dead.  You killed her dummy.”

“Me? No!”

“Who was it then?”

I fell back and put my head into my hands and started to cry.  Christ!  What a nightmare.  How did it happen? Why did it happen?  This can’t be real?

“Oh yes it is.  She is dead and you killed her.”

“You can‘t blame me. I didn‘t mean it.  Why didn‘t you stop me?  This is all your doing.”

“Mine? How?”

“It was all your idea.”

“I told you to kiss her, not kill her.”

I couldn’t stop crying.  I was shaking.  Sweat was streaming off my face.  I could feel myself burning as if I was having a fever.  Oh God,  please,  if only I could turn the clock back. How I wished  it was five minutes ago. I hadn’t meant it. It was just an accident and if I could do things differently I would; I would.  Oh God to think that this day had started like every other day of my life and had ended like this! How could it have happened? This wasn’t true was it? This wasn’t real was it?

“Well it is real so deal with it. There’s no point in crying over spilt milk.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“What else is there to say?”

I knelt over Elizabeth’s lifeless body and blubbered;  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…please forgive me. I didn’t mean it. I love you so much.  You were the only one I ever wanted.  I didn’t mean it. I’ll never forgive myself.”

“That’s very touching.”

“I will always love you.  I will always keep you in my heart.”

“Why don’t you kiss her now. If only ‘goodbye’?”

I leaned over and kissed her forehead and then on her mouth.

“Nice?”

“It’s not like that at all.”

“Still, you might as well shag her as well.”

“You disgust me!”

“Hey this is what is all about.  You were obsessed with fucking her.  Your bloody head is full of nothing else.  So okay, now is your chance.”

“No!”

“Suit yourself.  But still, it would be a shame to leave without having a proper look at her.”

May be I shouldn’t have done it but I was in such a state of shock and distress that I didn’t know what I was doing,  but I stripped Elizabeth and stood back to admire her.

“There’s no denying it she is well fit.”

I had to agree.  Her figure was perfect.

“Hey look at that. She’s got a shaven fanny. Kinky!”

“Stop it. Show some respect.  She deserves that at least!”

“Hey all I’m doing is tell you the truth.  She’s pure filth.”

“Don’t tell me, don’t tell me anything anymore, okay?  I loved her.”

“Prove it then.  Show her that you love her.  Do you think that is what a real man would do who is not afraid to show his true feelings?  Do you think he would just whine and feel sorry for himself like you do?”

“You don’t understand how I feel.”

“I doesn’t matter what I understand,  but it is important that you make her understand. And there is only one way to show her how you feel and only one way to prove to her that you love her.”

So I unbuckled my belt and dropped my trousers and pulled down my underpants. I got down on my knees by her feet and gently spread her legs open and I crawled between them and I showed her how much I loved her and how much she meant to me.  When I had finished I rose to my feet and slowly did myself up feeling rather embarrassed.

“Come on man cheer up. Admit it,  you enjoyed it. You had fun.”

“But I’ll miss her.”

“Agh!…bullshit man. There’s plenty of other fish in the sea.”

“I suppose so.”

“You suppose so?  I know so.  Now come on, admit it. You feel better in yourself.  You feel calm.  You’re more relaxed. Can’t you feel it?  A great weight has fallen from your shoulders. You’ve got her out of your system. And believe me, if it feels right then it is right.  And I promise you next time it will be better and get easier.  Trust me.”

I sat down and had a smoke.  God, I needed it!

“Come on” said ‘my other voice‘,  “lets get back.”

“What will I say when people ask me if I saw her or know anything?”

“Dunno, but we’ll think of something. Just Relax.”

I stubbed out my cigarette. ‘My other voice’ was right. I was feeling much better. I then knew that ‘my other voice’ would always look after me and that from now on everything would be all right.

 

 

 

Copyright  2010 by Ryan Hart

 




An Interview with SUNIL SHARMA

 

 

Sunil Sharma  is a trend-setter in new  fiction in India and a perceptive bilingual critic. His short stories have already appeared in New Woman (Mumbai), Indian Literature (of Sahitya Akademy, New Delhi), Indian Literary Panorama (Mumbai), Contemporary Vibes (Chandigarh), Seva Bharati Journal of English Studies(Medinipur) and Indian Journal of Post-colonial Literatures (Kerala). Besides that, he is a freelance journalist in English. His areas of strength are Marxism, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies. His book on the Philosophy of the Novel—A Marxist Critique is already published.Minotaur—dealing with dominant ideologies and sociopolitical realities of the 20th century is also recently published from Jaipur (India). The novel has been favourably received and reviewed in India and abroad. Frank Joussen, the noted German poet and scholar , comments,  “…if fiction wishes to regain its former importance in today’s discourse make sure it is politically poignant and artistically brilliant as this astounding debut novel by Sunil Sharma.” Shaleen Singh,the Editor of Creative Saplings calls Sunil Sharma as “a great story teller with lots of promise.”

He is  currently the Vice-principal and Head of the Department, English, Model College—an A-grade college affiliated to the University of Mumbai, Mumbai—MIDC, Dombivli (East) in District Thane, state of Maharashtra.

He can be contacted through email at: drsharma.sunil@gmail.com

 

 JAYDEEP:: How do you want to be  introduced to the reading world?

SUNIL: An extremely ordinary guy--- middle-class, suburban and small-town, not much to look at and heavily out-of-shape; a Bellowian character on a curious search for meaning and personal connectivity in an indifferent universe, often feeling terribly lonely in crowds; an odd man out in an increasingly commercialized culture where bonds are disappearing fast, like rupees/dollars in the recessionary economy. He is a guy who is grounded and often kind, with an extraordinary interest in life, and its deeper aesthetic reflections in historical categories like art, painting, philosophy, theory and literature. These are the various substantial material modes of cognizing the surrounding world.

Sunil tries to make sense of life through art. And, most of the time, he is successful. Life, to this 51-year-old, obese bloke, speaks through great art. The last spiritual enclave left for sensitive minds, in an extremely reified world.

 At a more mundane level, I teach in a suburban college of Mumbai; freelance and do creative stuff. At my avuncular age, that I still continue to produce beautiful objects for contemplation, surrounded by spiritual ugliness, is itself pretty surprising. Most of us become emotionally dead in our early fifties! Nothing surprises them or inspires them. They just think of the afterlife and a possible date with a kind light, at the end of the dark tunnel!

Somehow, nature and God---two important reference points for the New Age guys---have been kind to me. This prolific production---this engagement with ideas in sensuous form---is a compensation given to artists by nature. It makes me survive the grim realities of my social condition via the fruitful employment of aesthetic faculty.

It is like finding poetry in a soulless red-light district!! The way great Sarat Babu did or Baudelaire in the underbelly of a grim Paris

I think all of us carry a bit of Van Gogh and Kafka in us---the modern/post-modern artist. A bit of sadness and morbidity and melancholia that get transmuted into great art. It is a constant  marker of the  sterile age! Early Eliot! Or, like a typical Chekov character with a finer sensibility who is caught in a cruel dross world. His Ward Number Six is a good illustration of this mental state where these sensibilities become a great burden on your sensitive soul. The sad fact is that all the ideals have deserted us. Expressing this mood through art gives lot of cathartic relief and fulfillment. Reading them also does the same function. Art, to me, gives inner balance and a sense of organic completeness, things that otherwise are missing in the real world of commerce and brutal competition.

It is like a pointing signboard on a long hard journey.

It does not mean I live in a vacuum or a bubble. I daily battle different existential odds but tend to find mental refuge in art and literature, as a survival strategy. It is not an escape from realities of life but a conscious seeking/ cultivation of the Beautiful and the Sublime in the works of the great writers, poets, dramatists, painters and musicians. It is like making your castles on the beach that give you creative joy and delight, although next day, you may not find them there, washed away by the sea. These two symbols of transience (castles) and eternity (sea) exemplify the efforts of an artist---big or small---against the powers of an unforgiving Time. Great art---like Homer’s, for example---stands out in this march of relentless time, giving you a sense of history and enduring finer values dear to every age---like democracy and equality.

Great art enriches you spiritually and emotionally, making you whole again. That is art as a therapy for me!

In this conception of art, you may find echoes of George Lucas and Frankfurt School of Marxism. For me, I repeat, classical and contemporary serious, non-commercial, avant-garde art resonates with nobility and beauty and sublimity and finally, restores a sense of wholeness. This is one of the advantages of great art. It firms you up and empowers you via its analysis and positive historical sense of robustness and optimism, even in the face of darkness of spirit. It is a kind of dialogue with the brilliant masters of the world. It gives you strength of character and hope. It shows that things never remain same and change for better. They evolve. Spartacus by Howard Fast and Shakespeare, Balzac and Shelly talk of the same evolutionary world. It resists status quo at every level.

 

 

 

 JAYDEEP:   Hello!! Good morning! Tell me about your childhood and parentage….

SUNIL: Middle-class background; happy childhood; parents, both teachers in Ghaziabad, near Delhi. The most beautiful part of my life spent in the innocent 70s and 80s, when India was young, dreamy and still ideal.

Father was a great scholar and fine human being and a writer who could not publish much; mother, a drawing teacher. Pa was/is a solid influence. Ma is still a fighter and a person who can smile away all her blues---typical powerful female prototype of Portia or Linda Loman, I guess.

 JAYDEEP:Who were the authors you read in childhood?

SUNIL::Dickens , Hardy, the Metaphysical poets, Browning and the Romantics; Gorky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Turgenev and Dostoevsky among the Russian masters; Flaubert and Maupassant, and Hemingway. Premchand, Nirala, Mahasweta Devi, Ismat Chugtai, Qartullin Haider, Manto and Amrita Pritam, among others, are my guiding stars in life.

 JAYDEEP:How did your early reading shape you as a writer?

 SUNIL:Writing initially for me was a pathway to exotic lands and a vicarious pleasure. Victorian England? OK. Go to Dickens or Hardy and you will get transported to a different realm. Stage coaches and inns and all that. With Cervantes, you fight the windmills. With Scot, you relive the old England of knights and tournaments. With Homer, you are with the gods!

 This capacity of art to open magic casements on the distant past and lands is really remarkable. It enriches your plain imagination as a reader in this collaborative process. It uplifts you from the mundane into the sublime and leaves you drenched in ecstasy or, jouissance in the Barthian sense of the term. It is your West Wind uplifting you from the thorns of life and giving you a sense of direction and courage and solidarity.

These writers are the summits of world literature and embody the best humanistic values of every national culture. They talk of finer values like justice, equality, freedom and brotherhood---the “transcendental ideas” (post-structurlist critics, please excuse) --- that have shaped up the world in last five centuries or more. I inherited the same vision from these great writers. Their writings are a protest against the general and prevailing inhumanity of the world and an eternal human desire for a more humane earth where everybody is treated as equal. Very few writers can now equal them. Current Lit. scene is very effete and disappointing! You are left with no giants now---only the arrogant pygmies and manipulartors!

Art has become a commodity that fetches you millions and fame but those early humanistic concerns are missing from this status-quoist art!

The great era of art, after the 80s, is over---at least, for some time!

 

 JAYDEEP:Your schooling? College?

 SUNIL: Vernacular. Typical Victorian system carried forward from the colonial times to produce clerks for the new elites. Dickens makes fun of it in Nicolas Nickleby. The disconnect with reality is still there. The literary giants told me about life more than the textbooks!

An ordinary resume. Not much to talk about. A system that purely promotes rote and conformism; not the creative or lateral thinking. It stifles your curiosity and individuality and innate creativity.

It needs to be radically revamped.

JAYDEEP:Your English is so strong that a reader forgets your linguistic identity as English  the Second Language….How did it happen?

SUNIL: Only a Freud can psychoanalyze the springs of linguistic wealth! Conrad is my favourite who learnt English at 19 or so and mastered the Queen’s English that few natives could write! Nabokov did that.

Kazuo Ishiguro and Michael Ondaatje----are two other recent examples. Raj writes back! Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations, including winning the 1989 prize for his novel The Remains of the Day.

 

At a more personal level, it comes naturally. Having internalized the syntax and the intricate idiom and grammar of felt immediacies and the foreign colonial language now Indianised by us, the crystallized form and the immediacy get dialectically articulated in my works. Objective co-relative? Yes. Of course, lot of hard work goes into these small pieces. Beyond this, I have no idea about the achieved clarity, spontaneity and cadence of my English. It all comes in torrents, those images and startling words, fresh from their morning sleep, tender in your hands---bouncing and hyper… It all comes down to feeling the ribbed, multi-layered words and rendering them in all their crystalline purity, hardness and malleability. Most writers have been doing this task only. Pound, for example. Or, Mallarme, Vallery or much earlier, Browning and Donne.

 JAYDEEP: Your debut novel has a strong historical sense. What is the reason for it?

SUNIL: Grounding in Marxist texts and praxis has provided the much-needed clarity, I guess. They helped in making sense of the real world from a scientific, philosophic and historical perspective. It helps a lot, the illumination. The dark contours suddenly get luminous and even back-lit.

Marxism is nothing but history on the move from lower stages to higher stages of evolution. The novel is strictly written from that historial and dialectical materialist point-of-view only; the beauty is: it is nowhere apparent. The entire philosophy has been artistically transmuted into sensuous images and fast-moving narrative. I like novels written in the first-person narrative style and the narrators often exhibit human failings.

 

 JAYDEEP: What’s about your University education and research?

SUNIL: Research was on Marxist aesthetics. That helped a lot in sorting out and straitening things out in life. Again not much to talk about, thank you!

 JAYDEEP: How did Marxist model help you as a writer?

SUNIL: By making me understand the evolution of society and culture from a historical, humanistic and liberal perspective on life and reality. It equipped me with an artistic vision that is progressive and positive, not fractured, depressive, nihilistic and anti-historical as is the case with the 20th-century artistic vision of life, history and humankind.

 JAYDEEP: What are the major matrix of your short fiction?

SUNIL: Loss of humanistic values; increasing consumerism in urban centers; increasing commodification of relations; the naked dance of power and big money, casteism and communalism. The hardships of rural India and slums are things that dominate my artistic consciousness—kind of Baudlerian vision of the Parisian life.

 JAYDEEP: Do you write flash fiction?

SUNIL: Yes. It is very exciting!

As a freelance journalist, I know words should be used economically.

Flash fiction is for the reader in a hurry.

 JAYDEEP: Can you mention some of your representative short stories published?

SUNIL: Modern Pilgrimage; Eating out with the Kumars; Farewell to Dad; The Twins; The Butterflies; The gourmand Meals and many others that give the real India to the alert readers in English.

 JAYDEEP: How about your debut novel?

SUNIL: Very ambitious. The 20th-century is the backdrop. It examines all the major ideologies of the last century.

 JAYDEEP: What is the source of your inspiration for a mammoth novel like The Minotaur?

SUNIL: Socio-political and economic realities of the last century. It is a political novel that deals with the history of major political and economic ideas. It deals with major political ideologies that have moved millions of people, world-wide.

 JAYDEEP:  K V Dominic, the editor of IJPCL, comments on your novel as “…a  telling comment on dictators and totalitarian regimes.”…Do you agree with this observation?

SUNIL: Yeah. It about a social construct called power and its abuse by men who started as noble but ended up as the mass-murderers! It is about these hollow dictators who thrived in last century in Latin America, the Philippines, Africa and South Asia and the Arab world. Marquez has exposed them so brilliantly!

It is about Socialism as a political theory and its abuse in Russia and the other third-world nations. In a way, it is a universal story going back to Roman times through the figure of Caesar, the hero. It is a study of power as a discourse and its effects on a collective and conscience! It is an out and out political novel. It is also philosophical---Iris Murdoch kind of thing or William Golding or Camus kind of preoccupations with the nature of world and epitomologies.

The notable thing about it is that these tough strands beautifully mesh together in the narrative and seamlessly flow in a fast manner, like a fast-flowing river. It is not heavy read!

The Minotaur is a profound engagement with the history and philosophy of ideas of the last century, in highly polemical way, without making that very obvious to the reader. There can be no innocent reading of this intellectual novel, though. You have to take positions here. The art has to become militant again and provide radical illumination to the recipient’s dulled consciousness. It is like Gorky or Mann revisited. Complacencies are being challenged by this novel that nobody was interested in publishing for more than seven years. That goes for talent scouting. Finally, it got published from a small press, recommended by a young critic. One thing I am sure. It is going to be one of the landmarks of this century.

 

 

 JAYDEEP:: The aim of creative process ,to me,  is to put the age in right perspective by challenging the dominant master narratives or the prevailing political ideologies as the popular view-points of the ruling elites and creatively.  What is the basic structure of The Minotaur?

 

SUNIL: Exactly. My novel examines the rise of political power, democracy and absolute dictatorship, in the name of socialism across the centuries in history of the world and asserts that the people power is the last arbiter in any political system that finally counts. It is a critique of socialistic orthodoxies, Stalinism and third-world despotism. It is a searing critique of all those powerful power discourses of the past that talk of justice and equality of human beings but later come to deny the revolutionary effects of those very master narratives to the people down below. It moves up and down between past, present and future and employs many literary symbols productively. 

 JAYDEEP::What is your next novel?

SUNIL: About middle-class Indian in search of real India of billion people, going back to 5,000-year-old heritage. It is going to be monumental work on our pluralistic nation and its heritage.

 JAYDEEP: What is your opinion about the literary editors and academic canon formation in India?

 

SUNIL: Most of the literary editors are young and extremely talented college teachers and doing a fine job of spreading the word. They could never get the opportunities to enter the hallowed gates of the metropolitan universities here and elsewhere. Yet, they are very devoted and hard-working folks. I hold them in high regards. The University dons are lazy, arrogant and a new aristocracy that won’t allow outsiders at all, merit be damned! Camps flourish everywhere. Aijaj Ahmad has strongly denounced their parasitic relationship with the West. Should I say more?

 

 

 JAYDEEP: Are you satisfied with the so-called literary canon in India?

SUNIL: Not at all. It is university-driven, crony culture. It is snobbish, mostly elitist, and very arrogant. Most of the canonization is, as I just claimed, a pale effect of the Anglo-Saxon and French axis only. It does not recognize new voices originating in the country.  It is a different kind of apartheid here. A new colonialism. Teachers from colleges do not stand any chance here in this bogus academic system. Bookers and the West decide about the major writers here. It is very parochial and stifling process.

JAYDEEP: Do you write critical works/essays?

SUNIL: Occasionally. On Theory and Marxist aesthetics.

 

JAYDEEP: How about your short story collection?

 Sunil: It is being brought out from the USA by a fellow American writer and editor. Next year, it will come out.

 

JAYDEEP: What makes the Indian English short story a neglected genre?

SUNIL: There is no space for it in mass media. It has shrunk. No literary journals for it, either. Successful writers lobby for awards but do not give back or mentor or publish little magazines.

Then writing in a foreign language need a bit of naturalness and spoantenity that are sorely missing from new middle-class writing. English comes across jaded, boring, stifled and dead in these writings. Craft needs to be practiced more carefully. The dialectics of form and content needs to be done more artistically and conscientiously by the writers.

JAYDEEP: What is there in the future of Indian English short story?

SUNIL: For attention-deficit times, it is the only viable literary form for communicating the micro world-vision for micro community of readers.

 

JAYDEEP: Do you read Tagore’s short stories in translation?

SUNIL: Yes. At one point, Tagore has deeply influenced me—as he has done the rest of the thinking India. His metaphysical bent is an offshoot of Kabir who is my favourite saint-poet. His ‘Kabuliwalla’ still brings tears in my eyes! Tagore is a great writer who brings genuine human pathos in textual discourse.

 In this context, I would like to mention Prof. K V Dominic’s fascinating critical book on Tagore’s short stories titled as  “Pathos in the Short Stories of Rbindranath Tagore” published through Sarup and Sons, New Delhi.

 JAYDEEP: What according to you, is a good short story in contemporary time?

SUNIL: Like a fast ad that should catch you from your scruff of neck and deliver the message in your solar plexus!

  JAYDEEP: What is your immediate wish?

SUNIL: To be read and critically dissected by the readers and young critics alike. Thanks for such a lively perceptive interview!

 

 

 

APPENDIX

EPILOGUE    (from  “The Minotaur”)

 

 

 

 The ghosts appeared abruptly at midnight and easily blended with the surrounding shadowy background. Stealthy and fast movements had earned the popular nickname for them. In fact Ghosts were highly-motivated insurgents who struck out swiftly at government targets and then simply evaporated in thin air, leaving no trace.  Their secret lairs in high mountains commanded a panoramic view of the battered and blacked-out capital.  Now, at this unearthly hour, these fierce men in dirty and faded fatigues took up positions at strategic entry points to the bleak city. The cloudy and freezing December night looked sinister.  A harsh shrieking wind had kept blowing from the surrounding mountains for last many days. An unusually wet spell had kept the residents indoors for previous one week. Even otherwise there was not much work. Capital had slowly become deserted. People just fled their homes and migrated to safer South. Fear and desolation prevailed. Bombed-out buildings dotted the skyline, smoke still billowing from the smoldering ruins. A stinking hell-hole for hoards of foreign reporters staying in the Hilton City—the only 5-star surviving hotel-- for last many days. The run-down, rotten old capital was in the grip of severe winter and raging civil war. Death was stalking every corner. Nothing was safe any more. Anaconda was burning. Ghosts were there that night for their decisive contribution to a coming carnage.

 

A winter of discontent had descended rapidly as divine curse on hapless Anaconda—capital of New Land— now being torn apart continuously by the invading forces of the exiled warlord and dissident former general Oscar Wee-Wee. His guerrillas were moving fast towards the barricaded capital through previous fortnight, burning and killing people in their unstoppable victory march. December 25 was the chosen date to smash their way into the palace of Constantine Caesar—the hated Leader of this communist third- world nation convulsed by great civil war for last one year-- an unstable political condition common to these parts of volatile Latin America.

 

 

 
  

 

Uncreated Creatures

 

 

 

-1-

          Three years after his wife abandoned him (left in the early morning hours just before dawn, slid from under the sheets without letting the bedsprings creak, put the car in neutral, pushed it down the driveway and into the street before starting it), Devin Wentworth finally musters the strength to attend a colleague’s party.   Someone has just published a book or received a grant or had a marriage annulled--rarely is there a point to these kinds of things, any excuse to get drunk before the start of a new semester will do--and though he is a little uneasy about leaving the comfortable clutter of his books, the beautiful logic of his coffee-stained papers with their indecipherable marginalia, he is glad for the opportunity to socialize with old friends and to politely laugh at the same banal jokes and stories they’ve been telling for years. 

          With a pensive grin he enters the crowded house at the corner of Breyner and Andersen, but before he can say hello to the other guests or thank the host for inviting him, he is ambushed by a small, sprightly woman with short, boyish hair who lights a cigarette, takes him by the arm and leads him over to the makeshift bar in the corner of the room.  From the dizzying assortment of booze she selects a bottle of “homemade medicinal tea” and demands a quick tutorial on the “ins and outs of monkey sex from a man who knows his stuff.” 

“I’m outlining a new novel,” she explains.  “It’s about high school athletes. But that’s all I’m willing to divulge. I never talk about a current project. I’m superstitious that way. Most writers are. That probably sounds ridiculous to you since you’re a scientist.”

“Not at all” he says. “In fact--”

“Listen. I absolutely must know all the specifics about Bonobo chimps and their sex rituals. Surely our nearest relatives engage in…unusual sexual practices. Apes doing it doggy style. I’ve asked around, and everyone tells me that you can recommend some interesting scientific studies. A sort of Kama Sutra for monkeys maybe?”

Devin stammers and feels his cheeks turn red.  He is a bookish man, awkward, poorly dressed, horribly out of practice when it comes to engaging members of the opposite sex in casual conversation, and he’s not exactly sure how to respond to this outlandish woman.  He feels claustrophobic, short of breath.  There is a constriction in his chest, a painful throbbing behind his eyes.  With a handkerchief that may or may not be clean (he’s not sure how long it’s been in his pocket), he dabs sweat from his brow. 

To clam his nerves he makes a scotch and soda, and as the liquor gradually takes effect he leans against a wall and listens to the woman speak, mesmerized by the way the words cascade over her lips like a waterfall.  She proves to be exceptionally cogent and well-read, and for the next thirty minutes, without pausing to allow anyone to formally introduce them, she talks about the myths and legends of the Whittelsey Indians and their belief in the malevolent spirits who preside over creation, driving all of humanity to the brink of madness with desperation, loneliness and pointless suffering.   

          “Oh, that was very insensitive of me,” she says, raising a hand to her mouth, “to speak of suffering.”  Like the other guests at the party, she knows all about his failed marriage, his schizophrenic wife.  “I’m such a farshikkert chaleria. But I’ve never been one to shirk from the truth, no matter how embarrassing it might be. I’ve personally outed many people. And not just closeted homosexuals. Atheists, too. It’s all for the best, don’t you think? Cathartic. Let the cat out of the bag, I say. Secrets are nasty things, bad for the soul. They’re the ruin of so many men I know. People are going to talk anyway. Sooner or later word gets around.”

          Devin doesn’t agree but smiles the way a man sometimes will when he knows he’s dealing with a beguiling and slightly dangerous woman.  Her eyes are crafty and unwavering, the color of the Mediterranean Sea as viewed from high on a Lisbon hillside, silvery-teal, blue-green, eyes made a little bleary by her medicinal tea.  Devin isn’t sure why he thinks of the Mediterranean, of Lisbon, he’s never been overseas.  In fact, his travels have never taken him far beyond the great lake of his hometown, a body of water that for half the year is a frozen waste that shimmers like an enormous piece of sheet metal under the smallest speck of sunshine.  As he ponders this mystery, the woman says something that so bewilders him that he momentarily abandons his cherished principles of reason and logic and gives credence to the romantic notion of kismet.

          “As you can probably tell, I’m a passionate person. My ancestors came from Portugal, and the Portuguese are a very passionate people--politically, theologically, sexually. I inherited a rapacious appetite for all things Portuguese. Their writing has a noticeable effect on my intellect…and libido.”

By nature and training Devin is a devout skeptic and has learned to doubt his own intuition, but after carefully assessing the situation he arrives at a startling conclusion: this woman is flirting.  When was the last time that happened to him?  College?  Graduate school?  Primatology seems to be the last thing on her mind.  It’s a matter of simple deduction.  He observes the way she moistens her lips, plays with the ends of her hair, lets her blouse sink lower and lower to reveal her surprisingly ample cleavage.

With a haughty smile she touches his hand and, leaning in close so that her breath makes his flesh tingle, she tells him how the work of Luís Vaz de Camões inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write Sonnets from the Portuguese.  “Allow me to give you a little recitation,” she whispers. “‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…’”

 

 

-2-

          As the party winds down and only the seriously inebriated remain, Devin is given some sobering information. 

          “Ah, yes, that’s Batya Pinter,” says Father Mullins.  The old man stumbles along the foyer to the front door, the last of the Jesuits to leave the party and one of the few in attendance who doesn’t attempt to disguise his penchant for whiskey with hypocritical proclamations about the wickedness of drink, the lure of the bottle.  “From the way you two were yammering away I assumed you already knew each other. She’s our newest faculty member. The editor of the literary magazine. We hired her because she has a number of important connections in the world of letters. Interviewed dozens of luminaries--Jose Saramago and Antonio Lobo Antunes. Even the legendary Ricardo Reis. Last month she translated and published several poems by Fernando Pessoa. She’s quite brilliant. But I’m afraid she’s also…”

          Father Mullins coughs into a fist and glances over his shoulder to make sure no one is within earshot.

          “This information is strictly confidential, you understand, but since your son may come into contact with this woman, I feel you have the right to know.”  He tries to enunciate his words, but the consonants are slurred, the syllables protracted and comically musical.  “Some of us think Pinter is a sexual omnivore, bedding men and women as the mood strikes her, and that she may be guilty of, how should I put this delicately, debauching a few of our students, those giggling pimply-faced boys with grand ambitions of becoming the next Nabokov. Of course we can’t prove these allegations, not in the legal sense of the word, but we do have circumstantial evidence. She keeps strange hours, locks herself in that office late at night, requests that certain boys stay after school for reasons that are unclear…” 

          Devin shakes his head and dismisses these allegations as the drunken maunderings of paranoid cleric.  He has never taken seriously the rumors circulating around the school.  The Jesuits are terrible gossips, worse than any cloister of women.

          “I couldn’t help but notice,” says the priest, “that Pinter has taken a sudden liking to you. In fact, she seems rather overly friendly, if I may say so. A most interesting development. Yes, quite interesting.”  He places his hands on Devin’s shoulders.  His breath smells of whiskey and cigarettes.  “Allow me to ask a small favor.  Keep an eye on her for me, would you? Get to know her better. Oh, I don’t expect you to spy on the woman, not exactly. Just find out if things are…kosher, if you get my meaning.”

          Devin nods.  He’s always been a most ingratiating fellow. 

          Father Mullin slaps his back.  “You’re a good man, Wentworth, a good man!”  He steps outside and totters along the sidewalk.  “I know I can trust you with this delicate mission.”   

          Devin offers him a quick salute and then turns to the mirror in the foyer to check his reflection.  He smiles, pinches his chin, cocks an eyebrow.  The booze has made him brash, Bond-like.  He looks as unassuming as a character in a Graham Greene novel--a bit ruffled perhaps but still presentable, guilt-ridden of course, that goes without saying, but also poised, classy.  With a sudden surge of confidence he find Batya and touches her hand.  He suggests she accompany him back to his house a few blocks away in what the students call the Faculty Ghetto.

          “We can ransack my shelves for books about the autoerotic behavior Bonobo chimps. I’m sure we’ll find something that will…satisfy you.” 

          She puts her drink down and extinguishes her cigarette in the empty cup of tea.  “Let me get my coat,” she says.

          As they walk along the midnight streets they listen to the familiar wail of police sirens, the sound of newspapers flapping in the trees, the powerful stream of urine from a gibbering bum in an alley.  Batya leans against Devin for support, she is very drunk indeed (“What kind of tea was that?” he asks her), but once inside his house she lunges at him with animal ferocity, something Devin actually knows a little about and is able assess the following morning by the severity of the scratches on his back and the number of bite marks on his shoulders and neck. 

          That night if he lasts longer than his usual four minutes it’s only because he, too, is cross-eyed drunk and keeps yelping with pain and pleasure whenever Batya, nimble as a gymnast, bends and slides and twists over the bed.  She slaps his ass, tugs on his hair, grinds her thighs against his pelvis and, in a style that can only be described as dictatorial, shouts filthy words in an ancient tongue he does not recognize, demanding that he make her scream with his langer lucksh, that he abuse her with his batampte shmeckle. 

          She yearns for abuse, wants to be dominated, victimized, but it’s all a ruse, she is in total control, Devin knows this perfectly well, and he tries to oblige her until the final moment, the supreme moment, when she groans between clenched teeth, “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach!” 

 

 

-3-

To his credit, Devin has never brought a woman back home for the purposes of copulation (in fact, Batya is the first woman he has taken to bed since his wife left him), but this does not excuse the lurid and passionate caterwauling that keeps his son Tom up half the night.  At first, Devin isn’t too terribly concerned about his naughty behavior.  Surely by now Tom must understand that his father, like all men, has certain needs.  Besides, in this day and age most teenagers are pretty savvy about the ways of the world.  Nearly half the students in this year’s graduating class come from broken homes and have witnessed intrigues and scandals of every sort, things unmentionable, unpardonable, excommunicable.  In any case, the encounter with Batya was an anomaly, a one-night stand, a moment of weakness on his part, nothing more.

But Batya seems interested in more than just a one-night stand and says to him, “Sometimes a man’s weakness can be his best asset. Sin opens a door to the world of possibilities, while virtue only slams it shut.” 

In the days that follow she liberates him from the pitiable consolation of masturbation and converts him to a whole new world of hedonistic pleasure.  Suddenly his lonely nights are filled with delights and enchantments of every kind.  The sex is raw, filthy, probably illegal in several states, and Devin, who has resigned himself to a life of celibacy, nearly weeps at this incredible stroke of good fortune. 

Still, he has a sense of decency and wants to protect Tom’s innocence, so he takes Batya to a decrepit flophouse down the street, the ZanzibarTowers and Gardens, where the landlady rents rooms by the hour.  At first the seediness of the room adds an extra element of eroticism to their coupling, but the novelty quickly wears off.  Domesticity is a force to be reckoned with, it tends to burn its heretics at the stake of public opinion, and while Batya is in many respects the most modern of women, she is also the product of an orthodox upbringing and cannot dispense with tradition altogether. 

“Technically speaking, you’re still a married man,” she reminds him as they lie in bed.  She puts an ashtray on his chest and taps her cigarette.  “You never divorced your wife. And here we are running off to some roach-infested room. What, you don’t think people will talk? The Jesuits? Your students? Your son?”

He doesn’t like the tone of her voice, the sudden seriousness of it, and rather than answer her right away he spends a moment studying the cracks in the ceiling.  He looks for patterns, tries to find the point where the cracks begin.

Batya sighs. “You realize what the real problem is, don’t you? After your wife left, you never took the time to sit down with Tom to discuss his feelings. Has he heard from his mother lately? Do they communicate?”

“Fathers and sons don’t talk about those kinds of things. We internalize our despair, our rage, our angst. It’s only natural. It’s inherent in the genes. It has something to do with evolutionary conflicts, group selection. Complicated stuff. Technical.”

“Dear god, listen to this man!” Batya says in exasperation.  “Your son needs you and all you ever do is talk monkey business.”

The truth is Devin no longer understands his son.  While most kids his age try out for the football team or join the marching band or pilfer a few beers from the fridge to share with their buddies around a bonfire, Tom spends most of his time alone in the stinking lair of his bedroom, poring over his books like a monk in his spartan cell.  What he does in there no one can say, but sleep doesn’t seem to be part of the equation.  Devin has pressed an ear against the door but has been reluctant to trespass on his son’s privacy.  He’s afraid of what he might find inside.    

And so after one wonderful month of bestial rutting, Devin and Batya return to the relative cleanliness of his home where their relationship becomes quite tame, conventional, uninspired.  Though he has never been particularly susceptible to paranoia, Devin finds himself sitting quietly at the edge of the bed, having hardly broken a sweat during their brief roll in the hay, obsessing about the inadequacy of his cocksmanship.  He lists the reasons why an attractive woman like Batya would remain faithful to him, her fumbling and incompetent middle-aged lover. 

He is no sexual dynamo, he’s willing to admit as much, but he believes that all men are inept lovers to some degree, clumsy and insensitive.  On this point most women will surely concur.  Among great apes the sex act is not the stuff of sonnets and flower gardens.  Male chimpanzees climax with quickness and ease; they seem to understand the brute necessity for reproduction and the importance of passing on their genes.  Human males aren’t so different.  On average (and in this regard Devin is quite average) a man orgasms in less than five minutes, a disheartening statistic for any woman hoping to fulfill some erotic fantasy, the details of which may have been carefully worked out weeks, even months, in advance.  It is perhaps for this reason that most women in a committed relationship never bother with infidelity.   

And yet there is a paradox here.  Unlike men who tend to be visual creatures, always sizing up height and weight and firmness of tit, women are much more discriminating, selecting mates who will make for excellent long-term partners; they look for certain qualities in a man: stability, intelligence, sanity.  A tall order to fill, no doubt.  Odds are Batya will find someone or something--man, woman, vibrator--that can pleasure her physically rather than emotionally and spiritually.

 

 

-4-

On a Sunday morning in October as he reads the newspaper, alternately shaking his head at the puerile arguments on the op-ed page and sipping a cup of instant coffee, Devin hears the sound of bare feet slapping against the linoleum floor and looks up to see his son, a skinny, hairy, greasy mess of a boy, trudging toward the refrigerator.  He resembles an obdurate Iron Age patriarch, angular, gaunt, hunched over, staring into space with eyes that are bloodshot and crazed as if trying to calculate the distance between the present moment and the final one, the great mystery of the death, so that the reality all around him is almost nonexistent. 

“Good morning,” Devin says to him.

Tom mumbles something terse.  He drinks straight from the carton of milk.  He smacks his lips and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.  After emitting a low, gurgling belch, he scratches his face and stands beside his father’s chair.

With great reluctance, Devin folds the newspaper and places it on the kitchen table, hoping Tom will take the hint and decide to leave him alone.  Batya is right, of course.  He should probably speak to the boy, ask what’s on his mind, but dealing with teen angst used to be his wife’s forte, not his, and he doesn’t particularly want to hear about his son’s silly social problems.  It’s much too early in the day for that sort of thing.  

          “Is Batya here?” Tom asks.  He glances at the pack of cigarettes on the kitchen counter. 

“Batya? No, she left early this morning. She’s working on her novel. Conducting more research.” 

Though he has never been permitted to read a single page of her book or invited to spend the night at her house in the country, Devin is thrilled to be involved with a creative type, a real bohemian, someone the Jesuits claim to respect and admire but secretly abhor and distrust.  After leading such a boring life, Devin has become a kind of double agent, a man of high adventure.  He relishes the intrigue.

Tom crosses his arms.  “That’s too bad. I was hoping she’d still be here.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I’m going to the chapel. For Sunday services.”

“You’re going where?”

“To church, Dad. It starts in…”  He glances at the clock.  “Less than an hour. I wanted to know if Batya cared to join me.”

“Did she express an interest?”

“Sort of.”

“In attending a Catholic mass?”

He shrugs his shoulders.  “I’d ask you to come, but I know how you feel about these kinds of things.” 

“What kinds of things?”

“Religion. The hereafter. God.”

In this house the topic of religion is taboo.  Devin’s atheism must always be kept secret.  Aside from the occasional wedding and funeral, he does not attend church services and tries to avoid them whenever he can.  Religion, he must admit, is something of a mystery to him.  He can’t comprehend why so many otherwise perfectly rational people take this nonsense so seriously.  It’s only by consulting the dusty tomes written by his colleagues that he can distinguish between the warring factions of Christian denominations that flourish and spread like green muck in the steaming malarial swamps of the American spiritual landscape. 

Devin detests ritual and scripture.  The stodgy, parataxis style of biblical prose fills his mouth with the dust and grit of the Sinai itself, but out of curiosity he has skimmed a few passages from the Old Testament.  He read about King Saul who, despite passing laws strictly prohibiting his subjects from calling upon witches and exorcists and mediums, traveled incognito to the desert oasis of Endor to consult a necromancer from whom he hoped to receive the guidance of the dead.  From this story Devin has devised an axiom upon which he can base all arguments about religious thinking: “The level of devotion among the faithful is in direct proportion to their hypocrisy.” 

Now he pushes aside the newspaper and says, “Let me ask you something, Tom. What kinds of things have the priests been teaching you lately?”

With an impudent smile the boy answers, “Don’t worry, Dad. They haven’t been brainwashing me, if that’s what you want to know.”  

In fact, it is what he wants to know.  He sends Tom to the Jesuit school not for the tiresome tautologies of elderly clergyman but for the rigorous curriculum, the militaristic discipline and, since Devin is a faculty member, because the tuition is free. 

“Indoctrination, Tom, that’s what I’m worried about.  Disinformation. Manipulation.”

“Jesus, Dad, I just want to go to church. The Jesuits have nothing to do with it. I’m leaving in ten minutes.”

Using his spoon, Devin stirs his coffee and watches the cream spiral slowly and naturally into an infinitesimal galaxy.  By adding another drop of cream he transforms the Milky Way into a rapidly expanding crab nebula.  For a long time he stares into his mug, contemplating the far flung stars, and after some consideration he agrees to accompany his son to mass.  He wants to see what the boy is up to, surely he is up to something, all seventeen-year old boys more or less are.  But he is also curious to find out what the priests are up to.  Over the years Devin has become better acquainted with these men, with their values, their ethics, their politics, and though they profess to be well meaning they are in fact always a little too eager to take advantage of a boy who is particularly susceptible to the Jesuitical arts of rhetoric and persuasion.  

 

 

-5-

Intentionally designed to look out of place among the warehouses and factories of this decimated industrial city, the little Romanesque chapel, built of flint and rubble masonry, is a structure one is likely to encounter while traveling through an isolated Irish hamlet.  The curious carvings on its archways seem so ancient, so faded from wind and rain, that they might predate Christianity, the work of recalcitrant pagans or barbarian invaders.  The enormous frescos that dominate the apse depict angels and virgins and Jesuit missionaries, mythological figures meant to instill the requisite fear and awe in the parishioners, and indeed the place seems to echo with the voices of peasant farmers ground to dust by the rigid doctrines of a dying priestdom.

Today the chapel is filled nearly to capacity, but Devin and Tom manage to squeeze into a pew near the creaking wooden door.  A dungeon door, thinks Devin.  As he mentally prepares himself for an excruciatingly boring ritual, he looks around and is a bit surprised to see so many of his rambunctious pupils sitting in silence, their hands resting on their knees.  If only they would behave this way in the classroom.  Eager to record their unusual behavior, Devin reaches for the pencil and scratch pad he keeps handy in his coat pocket (no self-respecting scientist would leave home without these essential tools), but before he can jot down his observations the pipe organ blares an alarming chord.  The congregants jump to their feet, open their hymnals and, with their heads raised high, drone a tuneless dirge. 

Father Mullin emerges from a cloud of incense and marches down the aisle to the tabernacle.  When the lugubrious singing finally ends, the principal raises his arms and recites the opening prayer.  The ceremony moves at a glacial pace, and Devin is forced to cover his mouth and suppress a yawn as he listens to the introductory rites, the act of penitence, the kyrie, a reading from the Acts of the Apostles.  It isn’t until the homily starts that he becomes fully aware of Father Mullin’s voice as it sweeps back and forth across the chapel, an impressive instrument that booms and thunders and startles Devin out of a daydream about Batya’s tight abdominal muscles and muscular ass.

“Whenever we encounter evil in the world,” says the principal, “we must turn the other cheek. The Lord instructs us to do so. He asks us to tolerate and understand our ideological foes, demands that we refrain from casting judgment on our enemies. There is evidence for this in the gospels, indeed there is. But Christ also provides another kind of teaching, one that we must carefully consider in our own day and age.

“A man from Gadarenes was possessed by a legion of demons. Shunned by everyone in his village, the man lived among the tombs near the sea. When Jesus encountered the man he took a swift and immediate course of action.  He didn’t ask anyone’s permission to cast the demons into a herd of swine and didn’t ponder the ethics of slaughtering these innocent creatures. He didn’t discuss the matter with his disciples and didn’t negotiate with the demons.

“This may seem like a distant episode until you realize that demons dwell in the minds and bodies of so many people today. Look no further than the high school classroom where some teachers have fallen prey to the insidious cult of secular humanism and the fanciful theory of natural selection. But I ask you: what is so natural about natural selection?

“Science tells us that Nature isn’t a thing but a process of infinite change, turmoil, confusion. Nature abhors order, and as a result the universe is in a continuous state of flux. Nothing is permanent. There is no ground of being, no definitive order to the cosmos, no guiding hand. There is no grace, no wholeness, no divinity, no fixed intent. Science goes even further and makes the wild and unsubstantiated claim that human beings are not separate from nature but are merely the end result of random processes. Indeed, we are the process, we are nature. Surely this accounts for the insidious belief that humans have evolved from clever chimpanzees with a penchant for sodomy.          

“Why, no less a genius thanPierre Teilhard de Chardin satirized these dangerous ideas with his paleontological hoax Piltdown Man. He understood that we are fundamentally different than the beasts of the field, that we are more than ashes and dust with a primal urge. God created us in His image. He gave us the breath of life. But scientists, by rejecting God and the concept of original sin, gamble with the fate of their eternal souls and with the souls of their students. They commit the most egregious crimes upon their charges, turning respectable, God-fearing children into materialists, religious skeptics, free-thinkers.

“And so we return to the man from Gadarenes, and we must ask ourselves an obvious question: do such demons lurk within the hallowed halls of our own institution, can they dwell among us, unnoticed, unseen, untouched? Have some of our teachers been infected with a sickness that is rapidly spreading through our entire society? Have they been corrupted by deceit and treachery?

Devin feels his heart begin to race, and it takes all of his willpower to keep his eyes focused on Father Mullin.  He desperately wants to look around the chapel to see if anyone is laughing, whispering, pointing in his direction.  Someone has ratted him out, he’s sure of it.  Someone has told the principal that he is an apostate, an unbeliever, an interloper.  But who could it be?  Who would double-cross him?  Batya?  Tom?  One of his students?  And if so, why?  What’s the motive?  Then again, perhaps motive doesn’t matter all that much.  In this world there is no shortage of insidious plots, and behind each one there is a Judas willing to make a moral compromise for a short-term gain. 

Father Mullin grips the sides of the pulpit and cranes his neck past the microphone until his head seems to hover above his flock, and this time when he speaks he sounds not like a man of learning but a crazed apothecary hawking his worthless medicines to a hostile mob on the verge of tarring and feathering him unless he can produce some tangible results.

“The faculty members of this school are committed to the core values and teachings of the Church, I am convinced of this, but let me be clear. Should I find an impostor among us, a trickster, a heresiarch, I will not hesitate.  Like Jesus I will fight the devil. I will banish him from this place. And believe me, believe me all of you, I will win the battle.

“But victory in one battle does not mean victory in war. And that is why I’ve come before you today. Students must take part in the struggle, too. It is up to you to keep your eyes and ears open and to spread the gospel by traveling to those places where the divine Logos has been distorted by this new religion called science. Missionary work, gentlemen, missionary work is what God requires of you. Because a day of reckoning is coming, yes it most surely is!”

 

 

-6-

For the rest of the day Devin tries to understand the meaning of this homily. 

The need to personify evil is deeply ingrained in the minds of today’s congregants, but because modernity has forced them to abandon the old mythological imagery--Beelzebub sharpening his pitchfork and setting aside time in his busy schedule to pose for another Hieronymus Bosch triptych--they demand the Church provide them with a new and improved devil, one so clever and insidious that he might even be sitting next to them in the chapel.  Gone are those innocuous hymns of love and praise that once filled the air.  In their place are the words of an ancient deity who speaks from out of a burning bush and who takes great delight in decimating the minds of credulous churchgoers as though they are a tribe of heathenish Canaanites.

On Monday morning, certain that he’ll find a pink slip pinned to his office door, Devin takes the unprecedented step of altering the content of his lectures and gives them a more faith-based tenor.  After a brief talk on primate spirituality he shows his students a documentary on how chimpanzees display grief at the passing of a loved one.  He points out the look of shock and bewilderment in the eyes of these sorrowful creatures and how they seem to kneel before the dead.  Convinced that his classroom is bugged and has probably been under constant surveillance for weeks now, Devin speaks as clearly as he can.  “It’s almost as though they’re praying.”

At noon he joins Batya in the faculty lunchroom.  Since he doesn’t have much of an appetite, he spends much of his time trying to read the faces of his colleagues, observes their body language, makes a mental note of those who avoid eye contact with him.  Which of them is the professional character assassin?  It’s impossible to say.  They all wear masks of total indifference.  This includes Batya who tosses his name into a hat for the “monthly drawing.”  Everyone is eager for another night of reckless drinking, and as the seasons wheel around, each faculty member takes a turn hosting a party--the obligatory Christmas celebration, the Saint Patrick’s Day bash, the Memorial Day cookout--and now, as luck would have it, Devin is picked to host this year’s Halloween masquerade.

Sensing his trepidation, Batya strokes his knee under the table and says, “Just remember, if it hadn’t been for the party at the beginning of semester we never would have gotten involved.”

Devin gives his grudging consent because, he must admit, without Batya he would have no social life at all.  He has plenty of time to berate himself afterward. 

On the day of the party Batya is nowhere to be found, and Devin, a chronic procrastinator who has never hosted a formal gathering of any kind, is soon overwhelmed by the sheer volume of refuse in his house, the old phone books stacked in dusty corners and the black pyramids of dead flies that have collected on the windowsills.  He vacuums the rugs, sweeps the hardwood floors, wipes the walls, brushes cobwebs from the ceiling.  He can’t remember the last time he changed the sheets on his bed, a thought that troubles him greatly.  What kind of woman would tolerate a man who lives in such filth, such squalor?

He considers asking his son for help but decides he doesn’t want to be left alone with the boy for an extended length of time.  Especially not today.  It’s Tom’s eighteenth birthday, an important milestone, but Devin has never been the sentimental sort, he doesn’t believe in candles and cake and bright balloons.  Small children celebrate birthdays, not grown men.  But before he resumes scrubbing the toilets and sinks Devin creeps along the hallway and slips a card with a ten-dollar bill under his son’s bedroom door.

 

 

-7-

At twilight several figures wearing black cloaks and Venetian masks knock on the door, and Devin, who has completely forgotten about the time as well as his own costume, ushers his guests into the living room.  Despite their obvious dismay at the deplorable conditions inside, they compliment him on the loveliness of his home and waste no time lining up at the folding table to load paper plates with raw vegetables, spinach dip and precooked cocktail sausages wrapped in bacon. 

By eight o’clock, two-dozen people jostle for space inside the tiny house, and at some point, Devin is not sure when, he’s busy opening cases of beer and mixing martinis, he smells cigarette smoke and hears shrill laughter.  From the way her eyes are spinning it’s clear that Batya has already had quite a lot to drink.  She turns the stereo on and twists the dial until the house resounds with a trio of classical guitarists strumming a rhapsodic fado.  Satisfied with the volume and the mournfulness of the tune, she walks into the living room and holds court near the fireplace.  Batya has a way of attracting an audience, and before long a small group of men are laughing at her stories.

“When I was a child of six or seven,” she tells them, “my aunt presented me with the gift of a doll. She felt sorry for me, I think, her strange niece. I had few friends and always avoided the company of children my own age. I spent bright summer afternoons in my bedroom, reading books and acting out plays. After she gave me the doll, I murmured a quick thank you--my parents raised me to be polite---and then I rushed up to my room. I was so excited I almost tripped over my own feet. Using a pair of scissors and a coat hanger, I methodically dissected the doll, taking it apart not in some haphazard fashion, cruelly and stupidly as a boy would, no, but with genuine curiosity, piece by piece, thread by thread, to see how it had been manufactured. I became so engrossed in these labors that I failed to notice my doddering old aunt standing in the doorway. She was a snoop, didn’t believe in knocking, and when she saw the neat piles of arms and legs on the floor and the coat hanger in my hand she cried out in horror. I must have looked like some back alley abortionist.”

The men laugh, they do spit takes, they choke on their cocktail weenies.  Laughing loudest of all, however, is Tom who stands apart from the others.  In the flickering firelight he looks deranged, menacing, unhinged.

“I didn’t see you come in,” says Devin.

“Jews are condemned to burn for all eternity!” the boy shouts.  “Doomed to the agonies of hellfire, every last one. Saul Bellow and Moses Maimonides and Karl Marx.”

Devin doesn’t know what to do, he isn’t very good at handling confrontation and could use some help right now, but when he turns to Batya he sees something in her eyes that alarms him, a look he recognizes from their first night together, the night when she tore the clothes from his pathetic, middle-aged limbs.  Just as a great white shark trolling the high seas reacts to the scent of a wounded fish, so Batya is sent into wild fits of desire when she senses the presence of an emotionally distraught male, and it becomes obvious to Devin that Batya, far from being angry with Tom, has an uncontrollable urge to devour him as she has reputedly devoured so many boys before, those docile, delusional scribes who toil away on the magazine long into the evening hours like children in a sweatshop, gangly and bespectacled copy editors who leaf through insurmountable piles of dog-eared manuscripts and smirk at Devin, the ridiculous cuckold with the thinning hair and noticeable paunch who sometimes shows up at the office to take the editor to lunch.

Devin is about to object to his son’s hateful words when Batya sets her drink down on the coffee table and puts a hand over Devin’s mouth. 

“So Jews are going to burn, are they, sweetie? You forgot to mention George Gershwin and Woody Allen and Groucho Marx.”

This generates more laughter from the happy and sagacious guests, but from Tom there is no laughter.   

“I’m simply giving you the facts,” he says to her, “and the fact is you’ll burn, you’ll burn.”

“My dear boy, you’re not being reasonable.”

“It’s not me, it’s God. And you can’t reason with God. He does what he pleases. He makes the rules and enforces them. And He says that unbelievers will burn!”

Tom marches closer to the fireplace.  In his hand he holds several copies of the school literary magazine, the ones Batya has personalized for Devin with salacious notes and crude drawings.  She is particularly adept at drawing phalluses and women caressing them with their hands and lips.  One by one Tom tosses the magazines into the fire.  The pages blacken and curl and shrivel.  Devin gazes into the fire and is startled to find that the ashes of the journal look no different than the ashes of the newspaper he used earlier to kindle the flames.  In some strange way he feels like he has been deceived, that despite what the experts say, genius and mediocrity meet the same fate and in the end are indistinguishable from one another.

Batya smirks.  “It seems I’ve been invited to an old-fashioned book burning.”

With a wavering voice, Devin says, “Tom, I think you should go straight to your room.”

“My room? Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t disturb you. I’ll leave you two alone tonight so you can fuck each other silly. Fuck your brains out.”

The boy storms out of the house, slamming the door behind him.

To Devin’s surprise the guests don’t check their watches or make excuses or begin to leave; they keep on drinking just as before.  They’re used to unruly behavior from obnoxious boys and don’t seem in the least bit bothered by Tom’s antics.

“I’m so sorry…” Devin says.  

Batya pats his hand.  “Don’t worry. Attend to your guests. I’ll go check on him. He just needs to talk things over with someone.”

Devin is unsure if he should be grateful or suspicious, but he has no time to analyze the situation.  The party rages on.  His guests demand more booze--another case of beer, another carafe of wine, another bottle of whiskey.  “Out of control” is the phrase he would use to describe the situation, and it isn’t until well after midnight, when the final guests spill from the house laughing and dancing and singing some bastardized version of the school’s alma mater, that he realizes Tom and Batya are nowhere to be found.  

 

 

-8-

The next morning Devin considers calling the police to report the boy missing, but Tom is eighteen now, an adult in the eyes of the law, and the police will simply tell him that a man of eighteen can do whatever he damn well pleases.  They will probably suggest he try Tom’s classmates to ask if they have seen him, but this idea is an absurd one since Tom has no friends, no confidantes.  No enemies either.  Hoping to distract himself from the growing sense of unease he feels, Devin wanders through the house, picking up plastic cups and paper plates smeared with bright orange cheese dip, but after an hour he realizes there is no sense in delaying the inevitable.  He picks up the phone and dials Batya’s number.  It rings three times, four times, and when she doesn’t answer he leaves a series of rambling messages that range in tone from anger to despair to outrage.  He sits on the couch and waits all afternoon, but she fails to return his calls.

That evening he drives twenty miles to her house in the country, a place he has been forbidden to visit.  He races up the gravel driveway and hammers on the door until he thinks he might break the damn thing down.  Cupping his hands around his eyes, he looks through the front windows.  The rooms appear dark, empty, uninviting, but Devin, unwilling to accept defeat, creeps through the neglected flowerbeds thick with weeds and ivy and searches the property until he finds a wooden ladder inside an old tool shed.  He props the ladder against the back of the house and climbs to the top window.  There he sees a four-poster bed, neatly made, a nightstand crowded with books, an empty glass, a bottle. 

Satisfied that she is not home, Devin climbs down and does something extraordinarily juvenile but also strangely gratifying.  He gathers a handful of fermenting crabapples that litter the ground and uses them to pelt the house.  He smashes a ceramic mug left on an Adirondack chair, shatters a window.  Then he unzips his pants and, taking his prick in hand, pisses on the hardy mums that grow in big clay pots around the porch. 

On Monday morning he arrives early to school, hoping to confront Batya before the morning bell rings.  Instead he finds a note posted to her office door: “Ms. Pinter will not be in today.”  He walks over to the cafeteria, but Tom is not sitting alone in his usual spot in the corner, staring at the wall, daydreaming, doodling geometric patterns in his notebook. 

Devin tries to stay focused on his work, but as the day wears on his mind begins to drift.  He thinks of all the different people Batya might be with, men and women, boys and girls, fathers and sons, there is never any shortage of willing partners, real or imaginary.  During his final lecture he fervently explains to his pupils how primates experience mental as well as physical pain, that there is no sharp dividing line between human and animal anguish.

“Great apes have been known to combat despair with dance and mock battles and sport. To call this behavior spiritual or ritualistic is no exaggeration. And that is why we have a responsibility to these creatures. The Hebrew word v’yirdu does not mean ‘dominion’ as it is commonly translated in the first chapter of Genesis. The word actually implies ‘rule’, but rule of a very particular kind, rule that is synonymous with stewardship. Like the great biblical kings who ruled over their subjects, Saul and David and Solomon, we are to rule over creation with care and respect and justice. Indeed, we are commanded to do so by the great celestial dictator who rules without mercy. You do see the irony in this, don’t you? Of course you do. You’re perceptive boys.”

The boys do not understand what he is saying, and it occurs to him that he no longer understands either.  They whisper and giggle and nod off while he speaks, and when he dismisses them a voice comes over the public address system.

“Mr. Wentworth, may I please see you in my office?”

For the first time in his long teaching career Devin begins to understand how students must feel when the priests reprimand them--it’s a combination of resentment and humiliation and shame, but most of all shame, and when he enters the principal’s office he instinctively focuses on the tips of shoes, which are old and scuffed and mud splattered, a pauper’s shoes.  Father Mullin leans back in his chair and lights a cigarette.  A hard rain pelts the windows like thumbtacks.  Outside, the boys pull their coats over their heads and battle their way through the gusting wind.

“Ah, Wentworth,” says Father Mullin, indicating a chair, “I’ve been expecting you. By now I’m sure you know why I’ve called you here.” 

Devin nods and like a groveling sinner makes a long confession, tells his superior everything that has transpired since the beginning of the semester, how he has been sleeping with Batya and how he believes she has run off with his son.

When the principal speaks his words are slow and measured

“That’s quite a story, Wentworth. I must say that I had no idea that you and Pinter were seeing each other outside the classroom. There were, as you may have guessed, rumors floating around, but I never pay any attention to that sort of thing. Gossip is the devil’s business, eh? And quite frankly I didn’t think you were capable of…committing such a serious infraction. You are aware, of course, that any kind of romantic involvement between faculty members is strictly forbidden. It complicates things, creates the potential for a sexual harassment lawsuit. And we both know how women can be. They see things differently than we do. I’ll need to give this matter some thought. A committee must convene to discuss the seriousness of the situation.”

Father Mullin points to the ashtray at the corner of his desk and snaps his fingers.

Devin dutifully pushes it toward his superior.

“You’ve obviously been through quite a lot, Wentworth, I want to thank you for your honesty, and I think I may be able to help you locate your son.”  He crushes out the butt of his cigarette and lights another.  “I spoke to Tom on Friday afternoon. He seemed troubled, on the edge of a great precipice. I tried to offer him guidance, suggested he spend some time at the rectory. He seemed appreciative. But just this morning I learned that he left town to do missionary work with a group of his classmates.  Right now he is working in a small town called Gehenna. I only know this, mind you, because his name appears on the list.”

He pushes a piece of paper across the desk to Devin.

“Naturally, I thought he received your permission to go.”

“No,” says Devin. “We never discussed it. Is there a way to call him?”

Father Mullin takes a long drag on his cigarette and exhales loudly.  “I’m afraid we don’t allow missionaries to use of any of the conveniences of modern life, telephones and computers and so forth. We want them to have as little contact with the outside world as possible. But I’m only too happy to show you where the boys are on a map…”

 

 

-9-

It takes Devin the better part of the day to drive to that remote corner of the state.  Deep in the rounded mountains and misty valleys, he sees few signs of civilization and wonders what life is like for the people who inhabit these impoverished villages with names that have been lost to time--Sheol, Tartarus, Megiddo, Moreh, Tabor, Jezreel.  He drives many miles before coming to a crossroads, but this other road--if it can be called a road at all--is just a long, narrow stretch of mud with the deep markings of tractors or combines.  Devin slows down and decides to make the turn.  The grooves and ruts are deep and wide and offer little traction.  His rear tires spin and squeal.  He hits the breaks hard and then pumps the gas.  He is pitched and tossed in the front seat, but eventually the car lurches forward. 

He passes spacious, clapboard farm houses and small tilled fields where wheat or maybe rye once grew.  As the sky turns purple with twilight the road tunnels into a dark wood and skirts the banks of a blackwater river.  A colony of ramshackle trailers teeter like rusty little boxes on the crumbling embankment just above the upper falls as though the inhabitants are simply waiting for the first big rains to sweep them away downstream to a new life.  A group of children stand outside in the thistle and cypress spurge.  There are six of them in all, horribly thin, morbidly obese, their skin pale and green from the onset of some disease long believed to be eradicated from the earth.  In the fading November light they resemble a lost tribe of gnomes, fabled creatures from the worn, wrinkled pages of a storybook but a storybook Devin has never read, he was never in the habit of reading to his son, and so the children appear all the more sinister to him.  He asks for directions.  They hoot and scale a pile of junk, the rusting shells of cars, and point downstream.

A mile further down the road in a steep-sided valley Devin manages to spot a small fire where the missionaries have set up camp.  The boys huddle around the fire, warming their hands, staring intently at the floating embers that cool and fade and turn to ash.  They listen to the nocturnal sounds of the big woods all around, to the calls of sandpipers and mallards on the river.  The place has the feeling of a religious gulag, a rehabilitation camp for non-believers, and Devin gets the sense that Father Mullin has sent him here as a kind of punishment.

In the dark it’s hard to make out their faces, but Devin can tell right away that Tom is not among them.  When he asks about his son’s whereabouts the other boys cast pitying looks in his direction. 

That woman, they tell him, came from the city and told him to get into her car.

Devin nods.  No further explanation is needed.  He is about to walk away when the boys ask if he’d like to join them in their simple meal. The Jesuits do not provide funds, missionaries are expected to go from door to door begging for alms in imitation of the saints and prophets, and while it’s certainly true that Gehenna is one the poorest towns in the state the people here are generous and give whatever they can spare. The boys share a can of beans, a bag of overripe apples, a few ears of corn, some small pieces of gamey meat that they slice into thin strips with bowie knives.  Among the glowing embers are the scattered bones of a large rodent, a rabbit perhaps or a possum, and the boys explain how they hunt for meat. 

After they finish eating they pass around a jug of medicinal tea.

“Did she leave this with you?” Devin asks when the jug reaches him.

Yes, they say. A gift.

“But isn’t it a sin,” he inquires, “to pollute your bodies with this stuff?”

Maybe so, they say, but they do not abide by any rigidly defined dogma, not when they’re so far from school.  The tea induces visions of a mystical nature, the woman assured them of this, and they are eager to look upon the face of god, no matter how questionable the methods.  The tea shocks them into a new awareness of the world, aides them in their efforts to escape the claustrophobic confines of the ego. The Indians of the Peruvian rain forests have their Ayahuasca, the shamans of the American West their peyote, the sub-Saharan Africans their Iboga, the people of Gehenna their white lightning, and the Jesuits their blood of christ. 

Devin has never tried the tea and takes small, hesitant sips.  Its effects are initially quite pleasant--it warms his belly and makes him feel a little light-headed--and during the course of that long night he takes larger sips whenever the jug comes his way.  He sits cross-legged by the fire and learns a great deal about these boys, about their beliefs and practices.

Life, they say, is a feud between humanity and the devil, God takes no part in it, that’s why there is so much suffering in the world.  Suffering is the great answer everyone is seeking, the proverbial meaning of life.  Happiness is a temporary thing, impermanent, as illusory as a dream, and suffering only a prelude to even greater depths of despair; it hints at something far more wretched than the trivial miseries of day-to-day existence.

“What can you possibly know about suffering?” Devin is tempted to ask, but he knows that some of these boys, the unlucky ones, have already seen their fair share of death, divorce, addiction, heart ache.  Disaster heaped upon disaster.  Youth offers no immunity from life’s tragedies. 

At some point the discussion turns ugly, the boys begin to argue among themselves, they wrestle near the flames and exchange blows, a clumsy, sweaty two-step accompanied by clapping hands and laughter.  Devin can do nothing to stop the chaos.  Invisible fingers pin him to the ground.  That evening he is beset by many strange visions.  Nightmare creatures, simian in their visage, small, misshapen, scarcely conscious of anything other than their own hunger, scuttle out of the cerulean shadows to crouch near the blinding firelight.&