

Bedouin Dreams of Green:

and Other Nightmares

written by Conor Ross

Dedicated to the memory of Gene Rodman Wolfe

  1. The Game of the Century

  2. Lasich, meaning "idle or languid"

  3. Purty pig

  4. Imp in p

  5. At stop fifty-two

  6. Chrysippus of Soli

  7. Morrisby Predictive Pest

  8. God is a DJ

  9. In defence of Neo-Nazism (and other fantasies)

  10. On food

  11. Karma Schwarma

  12. Slapped Rock

  13. O, sad case it was

  14. Join Us

  15. 200 flat

  16. civil hands unclean

  17. Bespoke patina

  18. War remnant

  19. Involuntary Twoism (i)

  20. Saint Val and I are disappearing (ii)

  21. Onement of the Teleman (iii)

  22. The Passion of Saint Mickey

  23. Up there (Translated from the Torlakian poem "Žali Zare")

The Game of the Century

A man may have two ideas in his head at once, even if they contradict. But when he chooses to speak he must choose to say only one. Except this isn't a story told by a man but by a highly developed chess engine equipped with prose-notation to analyse military engagements from recorded history. In initial testing of the engine we were surprised by two facts; the first, that it was able to fill in historical ambiguities in battles as far back as the Battle of Hastings; and the second, that there is an exact correlation, so it seems, between an obscure Arthurian romance and a 1956 chess match between Bobby Fischer and Donald Byrne. The engine begins this story appropriately with;

Once upon a time on the Isle of Albion and 10th Street NYC, a knight ventured forth. Dressed in black, he mourns the death of his mother. She had loved him from his beginning and he had returned that love to his mother at her end ⁠— now with his love spent, nothing tied him to this land anymore or to life itself. He received a blessing from the bishop, left the castle and walked out into the world alone. Young is he but eager to test his mettle. As is thirteen-year-old chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, who wiped his brow and thought of all he had to prove, the challenges before him unknown and his opponents yet unseen. Such as the Saracen knight, transported by the hand of his lord onto this foreign shore, whose search of mercenaries would tie his fate to the knight in black. Dressed in white robes of Andalusian wool, he walks the shore and finds solace in the familiar sensation of sand underfoot.

Nf3 Nf6

In his wandering, the knight in black found himself at the bottom of a glass of ale. All is vanity and vexation, he thought, I am a man with one gift, a gift to which I am forbidden by the very commandments of the Giver. He takes another swig and tries to ignore the barkeep's daughter screaming for help. There are two other men in the tavern, strangers to Albion, a fat man and a bearded one pulling at the girl. They are foreign, which doesn't annoy him, but the disquiet does. He wished that the girl would simply give up and accept it, or, that they would rape her a little quieter. The knight stood up and looked at them with dull eyes, starved eyes which no longer reflected but only absorbed light. He stepped before the men, his eyes acknowledged and absorbed the gleam of a dagger which he dispatched with a flash of his sword, along with half the bearded one's arm. The fat one ran out. The bar was silent. The girl was panting quietly but the knight was not bothered ⁠— until the bearded one began to moan. The knight rose once more and returned the bar to silence.

Later, the fat one returned with a man dressed in a white robe. The fat one clammered in a language that sounded like the clacking of geese, while the man in white took a moment to observe the room, his maimed countryman, and the girl ⁠— her clothes ripped, her breasts exposed. Then he regarded the knight, who was taken by surprise when the Saracen threw him a bag of gold. "My king needs men like you, and not like this worthless animal." With one hand he grabbed the fat one by the collar, who again began to clammer, and with the other hand unsheathed a curved blade. When the room returned to silence, the knight replied at last, "Put the money in my hand and I will do what you ask me."

Bxc3 Nxe4

Byrne watched Fischer kill his pawn. Losing to a kid, he thought and in looking away to escape the carnage saw that Abe Turner, a fellow player, was observing the game. Turner was one of the rare players to hold a winning record against Fischer, 2 – 0, a fact that was sadly determined by his senseless murder that would occur in less than six months by his _Chess Review_ colleague and protege, Theodore Smith, days after his release from a mental asylum. Smith was arrested walking up and down 84th street, covered in Turner's blood. When asked by NYPD officers why he had stabbed Turner to death and stuffed his body into a safe, the killer replied, "The secret service told me to do it." This news will shock Byrne despite chess and insanity having a historic relationship. The explanation for this in psychological terms is grounded in the pathological condition of monomania, which, although a prerequisite to all genius, can become dangerous if the inner world it produces begins to leak. And unlike the masters of music or art, the inner world of the chess master contains an adversary ⁠— someone else on the board whose sole purpose is to destroy them. Further evidence will convince Byrne of this phenomenon when Fischer later retires from chess and begins to espouse Zionist conspiracies. Once he stopped playing, the man across the board became the Jew, who in Fischer's words was "the anti-human." These words will confuse Byrne because Regina Fischer, Fischer's mother who stood next to Abe Turner also observing the game, was Jewish. Nonetheless, Fischer will not hesitate to rip the Jew out of his own heart with the same vigour that Spain did in the Middle Ages, with its 1492 Alhambra Decree that exiled all Jews. A decree that came after Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon's capture of the last Moorish city of Granada from Abu Abdullah Muhammed XII. But in 1956 this madness was yet to take form when Fischer still had the eyes of a boy genius and not a madman, eyes that shone like emeralds, a jewel which Abu Abdullah, the last king of Granada, had in plenty. What he lacked was fighting men and with no way to recruit from the reconquered Christian lands surrounding him, he had sent envoys to recruit from afar, such as our Saracen who now returned with the knight in black and a company of other hired swords. The journey contained many minor incidents that don't bear mention but which strengthened the two knight's bond into a brotherhood. They travelled two months south through treacherous seas, and one month east through strange cities, until they arrived in Granada, a city whose enormous marble structures dwarfed anything the knight in black had seen before. When summoned by the king, the Saracen brought the knight as proof of his success to the royal palace ⁠— the Alhambra.

Bc4 Nxc3

Intricate passageways, carved in knotted Quranic verse that Abu Abdullah whispered, smuggled him from courtyard to courtyard, where he would watch the sparrows drink from the shallow pools of water. As well as a charity to the birds who Abu admired, these pools had a twofold purpose; reflecting light upon the archways that framed the sky above, and by illusion, doubling the size of his palace in its mirror-like surface. Abu had invented a third purpose for himself, pacing around these pools and conversing with his reflection, his confidante. These courtyards had become portals between the two kings and their two palaces. This double was the only person the last Moorish king of Spain trusted. He fantasised about the life of his reflection, a life not surrounded by treacherous advisors within his walls and Christians without, his impossible enemy who spread like a disease in inaction and but also delighted in being flayed, tortured, and crucified. Abu was sat upon his throne, sketching a more docile queen in his head for his double, when the Saracen entered and embraced the king as he would a father and introduced his companion. Upon seeing the knight was Christian the king ordered to be left alone with his new mercenary.

"Do you know the wisdom of Muhammad?"

"No," said the knight, fearing the worst.

"Or any line of the Quran?"

"No, sire."

The king burst into a smile, "Then come look at this my heathen friend, it won't trouble your conscience," and led the knight over to a table. It was concealed by a cloth, which he lifted to reveal moulded pieces on a tiled board. The knight asked what sort of game it was.

"Here, look; there are two kings but only one kingdom."

"Who stands next to the king?" asked the knight.

"The queen, of course, the most powerful piece."

"So you wouldn't want to lose her, right sire? It would be like if I lost my sword."

"Perhaps, but the king is the most important thing to protect, losing him would be like losing your life," he said with a wink.

At which point, a woman spoke, "Some men wouldn't consider life worth living if they lost their queen."

"And some men are fools," the king said and pulled her toward him by her waist.

"And some men are lucky fools," the woman replied, subdued to his affections.

The knight knelt before the queen.  
"So this is one of the mercenaries, I should assume our own knights have returned then..."

Abu sensed shadows between her words ⁠— but upon looking into her eyes for the truth he saw only his own image imposed upon a chequerboard.

Bc5 Rfe8+

A week from that day, the Christian armies arrived at the gates of Granada and no man, woman, or child was allowed in or out. The king had dubbed the Saracen as his vizier and chief defender of the city, who in turn made the knight in black his second. But even within the Alhambra, the atmosphere was choked. The knights organised the city's rations and other logistics while the king was swallowed in his own mind, his fantasies had soured and he marched around the courtyards arguing with phantoms. The two knights passed their free time at the chequerboard, the Saracen having no qualms to the game as long as there was no bet made, and in passing the queen would ask who was winning, to which the Saracen knight would answer whoever's fortune she would favour. The knight in black merely smiled because it was not a game of chance. Nonetheless, it was a game that was destined to spread via the Spanish Moors to the rest of Europe, becoming particularly popular with the Russians who would consider it their national sport and from whom Bobby Fischer would take the world championship title by beating Boris Spassky in 1972. After his victory against Spassky, Fischer later remarked, "I wasn't thinking so much about how to beat Spassky but more about how to keep beating him for the next thirty years." And the crowd cheered. But Fischer would later refuse to defend his title and soon disappeared from the public eye (though he did not disappear from Spassky's mind, who, during a press conference more than two decades after losing the title, would admit, "Bobby still discusses opening moves with me in my dreams"). It wasn't until 1992 that Fischer landed back in the spotlight by travelling to Yugoslavia for a rematch against Spassky, competiting for a prize pool of $5 million dollar put up by a certain Serbian banker of ill repute. His participation violated US imposed sanctions, as he was aware, and resulted in his citizenship being revoked. From there he began a life as an émigré, chased as Abu Abdullah was by his phantoms, eventually finding refuge in Iceland after fleeing from country to country ⁠— pursued by the US Government, by the Jew, by the man across the board in an end game phase that is referred to as king's chase.

Kf1 Be6

From the balcony where he stood, the Saracen knight looked out over the city and further still, to the armies preparing themselves outside its walls. He felt a hand slide across his torso and the danger faded away for a moment. He turned to her, and felt the familiar sensation of guilt and pleasure by the sight of his lord's queen, his lover. He reflected while dressing that they had been more brazen of late with the king so occupied. Little did they know, but just then the king was creeping by the door listening to his wife talking to someone. In a rage, he burst through the door with a curved blade. The queen drew the sheet to her breasts and the Saracen drew his sword.

"Where did he go? How did you miss him?" Abu addressed the knight.

"...Who sire?" said the Saracen, who could only assume the king had gone blind despite his crazed eyes looking directly at him.

"The devil, the devil who wears my skin!" he exploded, "I heard him seducing my harlot of a wife. Hurry good knight, go search."

The Saracen walked slowly from the room, too confused to feel lucky. As he walked down the stairwell, he slowed to hear the king shouting, "Where? Where is he, you whore?" Silence, then, "There, there he is ⁠— but you can't hide in there brother, I'll smash you out of her." A scream echoed, which ceased as a shadow flew past the window. The Saracen ran back up and the king stood alone in the room, looking out over the city from the balcony.

Bxb6 Bxc4+

Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon called for a parlay. The odds were insurmountable, they said, surrender now and we will spare you. But Abu would not surrender, he was convinced the enemy was within and could not be persuaded by his own knights to save his people from slaughter. The siege would begin at dawn.

Sleep was out of the question so the two knights sat at the chequerboard, moving pieces here and there, not saying a word and listening to the disquiet of their king. He ranted at his mirrors, tearing them from the walls of his royal quarters and smashing them asunder. His advisors had long abandoned him to escape the coming bloodbath, his two knights were the last of his retinue. Black moved a piece, "Check." And White smiled with melancholy, thinking of his lover he had been unable to save, and the families trapped in the city below, who he also was unable to rescue, trapped as he was within a jail constructed of honour and loyalty. Black said again with emphasis, "Check ⁠— on your king." and looked with dull eyes in the direction of the king's quarters. White observed him and, understanding, rose without looking the other knight in the eyes, "We will finish this game one day," and left. The knight sat by the board for a moment more and saw the winning move.

Kc1 Rc2#

Abu stopped in his tracks to see the knight standing in his doorway. The king, enraged, demanded an explanation. To which the knight answered by drawing his sword. Abu took off down a passageway. Heedless of any direction with the knight in pursuit, he stumbled down twists and turns while shouting the carved prayers he had once whispered ⁠— but it was to no avail for his dark shadow could not be shaken. Knotted and betrayed by the intricate pattern of his own design, he was trapped. The knight, looming behind, took a single step and skewered the king through the belly. He fell to the ground clutching his abdomen, no longer Abu Abdullah but as Bobby Fischer, dying of kidney failure in Iceland, alone and scared, fifty-two years after checkmating Donald Byrne in a 1956 chess match, after which; they rose, shook hands, and put the pieces back in the box.
scholia1

The old man heard the nurse rush in, but it was too late ⁠— with a gasp he gave up the ghost. And he had almost flown the coup when he caught a flash, not of his whole life as the misheld belief goes but of a short moment. Back when the world was still big and he was very small. The kindergarten walls tower over him and a teacher catches his attention, "Aleksandr, it's play time now, go have fun."

And so little Alek ran out to join the others to laugh and play, to fall and cry, to love and die.
scholia4

You are granted an afterlife of your own making, and so too is this world but an afterlife for those who have lived before, the rocks under our feet the souls who never wrote poems. And here I am, a boy writing and so I am to be: an oak tree in a new world, and when you visit, come sit under my shade for a while and dream of another life.
Lasich, meaning "languid or idle"

It was a lack of care from the start. When his mother brought all seven stone of him into the world, he yawned. It seemed to Sid that life was a game to which he wasn't committed but felt required to play through, like a game of monopoly coming up on the third hour. Walking away from the board wasn't an option because suicide was too much of a commitment. And so it was the life of a ghost for Sid. On cold winter nights he liked to imagine his foggy breath was his soul floating away, and when he grew up he could imagine it all year round when he picked up smoking. It was smoking and wine for Sid; he tried weed but didn't like the compulsion to eat, he tried acid and didn't like the wisdom, he had tried ecstasy but didn't like the sticky feeling it imbued ⁠— which reminded him too much of something like love. So it was red wine and cigarettes, a combination that became obvious if he ever cared to give you a crimson-stained smile. Sid did not brush his teeth or his hair, because he did not care. He did not care if you told him to. He did not care if you told him to start caring, and he especially didn't care if you gave up and decided to not care either. He liked the idea of being an intellectual, the laziest class of people. In particular he liked the idea of being a flâneur, but in the end couldn't be bothered with the walking. But it wasn't entirely fruitless as he at least picked up writing. He began expressing his disdain and apathy in novels, and then novellas, short stories, parables, and finally aphorisms before settling on his four-word magnum opus, his mantra, his soul poem:

"I do not care," he wrote and flicked the pen out the window.

Something happened. There was a knock at his door, in a figurative and a very real sense. Sid met someone who wouldn't stop caring that he didn't. At first it was because she was annoyed that she had been hit in the head by a pen – but Sid, unlike most people, could see her anger reduced for what it really was: effort and effort for his sake. She shouted and raged and called him a moron and he asked her out to coffee. She agreed.

"I'm Angie."

"Cool, see you tomorrow Angry Angie," shutting the door in her face.

And she actually came, though just to tell him off for shutting a door in her face the day before. Sid was flattered. They went out to get coffee and then a few more times and Angie kept caring about Sid and it looked like she wouldn't ever stop. This was a problem. In a manoeuvre in danger of bordering on effort Sid started pretending to care. Just to appease her and get her off his back. Angie, yeah, she's okay, he often thought as he drifted off to sleep. It was strictly superficial and only to protect himself from becoming bothered and committed to things. He pretended to commit himself to his studies, gave a great show of finding a steady job, and even had that chick going along with it all. He found little things to help string the whole con together, like brushing his hair and teeth. They were all fooled as he walked up the church aisle, though a funny feeling was taking shape. For a confused moment, it felt like he was pretending to not care. He took Angie's veil in his careful hands and moved it from her face. She was beautiful, not that he cared, he told himself. But it had all gone on long enough, he thought, I have to come clean. Pure honesty. My mantra, my soul poem, my four favourite words. Sid shrugged, "I do-" and couldn't be bothered with the rest.
Purty pig

News spread across the county, across barnyards and dinner tables ⁠— McGil's pig liked to sit in his chair. Then they started saying the pig liked to smoke McGil's pipe while it sat in his chair and that sometimes it read from women's magazines. Wasn't long before ears beyond the shadow of their mountain were soon begging to hear more, so naturally the papers sent their best to find the truth to this hogwash. It was Dixie Dartmouth, whose mouth runs almost as fast as she does, who arrived first on the scene.

"About time," was all McGil said and led her out to the pig.

"Now she's a mite bashful so-"

"Why the pink light?" asked Dixie.

"To bring out her purty little eyes, but she's kind of nervous so-"

"Why the pink bow on her head?"

"To show off her purty pink ears, but like I be saying-"

"She's shy."

McGil grinned,"You ain't too slow for a townie. We'll wait behind the door and watch through the hole."

Dixie took a look through the keyhole, which was profoundly low for the profoundly short folk of that particular mountain.

"I can only see the chair's legs through this."

"Listen, I don't have the eagle eyes of my youth like you but there's no confusing the sight of a pig sitting in a chair, lighting a match, smoking a pipe-"

"And reading women's magazines?"

"Don't be silly."

So they waited. Dixie was all the time tapping her feet, biting her finger nails, and sighing due to never having waited for anything ever, despite McGil, who had all but waited his entire life for a small taste of fame, trying to shush her. To which she snapped in reply, "Are you sure you were wearing your glasses the last time, gramps?"

McGil wrung his hat. They waited and they waited and even McGil started to doubt what he had once been sure of. Eventually, like all storms named after womanfolk ⁠— Hurricane Dixie blew out. The rest of the reporters, creeping out of the woods onto McGil's property, howled in dismay when Dixie told them that it was all baloney.

But McGil was a pigfarmer, as his father had been and his father before him, and knew the taste of what was baloney and of what wasn't, no matter his age or eyesight. So he stuck by til the stars were shining bright. Up in the mountains you are a little closer so they shine a little brighter, but the night sky could only console McGil for so long.  
"Old fool..." he said and decided to turn in, but stopped at the sound of a match strike. One last look, he thought. McGil grinned at one, then at two ⁠— would you look at that ⁠— two purty pink feet dangling off a chair.

Written for Phoebe's birthday
Imp in p

Old with a capital O," Ulises said a thousand times on the night of his birthday. And it was true, he was an Old English Scholar. Though the joke was running as thin as his frail body, which was indeed lowercase old. His wife liked to joke too, and would tell him that one day they were going shelve him away with those dusty manuscripts. The dust gave his sinuses trouble but he was quite content in his work, committing himself to the near exact duplication of age-old texts. Well, that was until his last birthday when one of his spawn, whose boyish face looked somewhat like his own, pointed out that the cake looked like a flaming porcupine. He blew out the candles and found himself gripped by terror. His children and grandchildren cheered in slow motion, all flawed, all fragments of himself. Imperfect copies like, as he knew in his heart, his facsimiles were.

At that moment, he was determined to apprehend perfection before it was too late, even if he hadn't yet an idea of how. Ulises kissed his wife for good luck, she was after all the closest thing to perfection he knew, and rushed out the door. On the way to the archive, he questioned why he had endlessly failed. All human endeavours are plagued by imperfection, yes, even those tasks that exist only in the pursuit of perfection. And in this artists have an excuse, they are creating something afresh ⁠— conjuring from the mind or invoking the muse. But what of me, Ulises thought, my humble work is not outside the realm of mortals, why can I not recreate the imperfection of others perfectly? What can another man have done in his circumstance that I cannot do in mine? He felt his mind crack, and then like a drop of ink into water an idea took hold.

Ulises burst into the archive. "This one will be perfect, the poem of Beowulf will have a true facsimile," he said ransacking the archaeological wing for a candlestick, a Franciscan's robe, one large crucifix, a quill and ink. And with them, he meditated into the medieval mindset of an Anglo-Saxon, which was simple: Fear the Dane, love God and forget all European history from now until 999 A.D. the year the poem of Beowulf was written by two English monks. Their transcription of the poem was perfect, much like the poem itself which reconciled a pagan historical myth into the world of Christendom. But any Old English Scholar could tell you that, what no one could explain was why Ulises, with his technological advancement and cultural relativity, had been unable to make a perfect copy. He had always noticed a tiny change ⁠— a wrinkle, a ripple, a curl in the corner.

Too long had he relied upon photostatic scanners, hectographs, and lithographs, the quill was the only necessity. A little immersion is all it takes, Ulises boasted. As he worked, he imagined his table take on the appearance of gnarled oak, the carpet sprout into a pelt and his office, piece by piece, become an abbey workshop. But something was off, two monks had worked on the original and yet Ulises lacked company. Without hesitation he took off the robe, hung it on a chair and propped up the hood with the crucifix.

"There," Ulises greeted his fellow monk.

But the monk answered him not. Ulises was annoyed, and then felt foolish for the monk must have taken a vow of silence. He was impressed to have created such a genuine monk but couldn't help wondering what the monk would say to him had he not taken that vow, like,

"Why are you in your underwear, brother?"

"Why... I don't want to get ink on my garb, brother," replied Ulises."You'll catch your death from a draft and I would be disappointed to spend the eve of the new year with a corpse," said the brother monk.

"When is that again?"

"Less than an hour and we'll be men of the new millennium."

Ulises looked up from his work, "Will there be fireworks?"

"No, no. The king's decree, apparently it doesn't fit with the whole dark ages vibe."

"For the best probably. I am far too busy with this poem."

"You've been quite absorbed, haven't you?"

"But I can never get it right."

The brother monk approached, his face shadowed under the hood, "Astounding work, beautiful lettering. _Almos_ t perfect."

"What am I missing? Please."

The brother monk chuckled, "How should I know if you don't? You made me."

"I was hoping you could counterbalance my faults, that's how they must have done it, the two original monks."

"But I can only be as perfect as you are Ulises."

Ulises put his quill down, "Is perfection even possible?"

"I don't know. What I do know is you should back up that copy, they've been talking non-stop in the ecclesiastical courts about this Y1K virus ⁠— a nasty duplication error." And with that the abbey bell rang out for midnight and the brother monk let down his hood. Ulises stared in horror into his own agèd face, every flaw perceived in its keenest sense. And then all was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep...

A light turned on. Ulises awoke. His wife stood by his side, looking at her husband covered in ink and in his underwear. The facsimile was stained with an ink imprint of his face; unfinished, unperfected, a palimpsest of his wrinkles mingling with dragons and kings. "I told you they were going to shelve you away one day," she began wiping the ink off his face, trying her best to look perturbed but still letting a smile shine through. Just like the first time he had seen her smile it made his heart flutter. Because although Ulises had seen that smile a thousand times before, each time he noticed a tiny change ⁠— a wrinkle, a ripple, a curl in the corner.
At stop fifty-two

While waiting for the train home I spied Lady Guffry blow in ⁠— her frilly dress and curls alive, her orange hair a nest of snakes. She had the aspect of a banshee, which was thanks to this blustery weather, an aspect she whipped up and down the platform until she regarded Douglas Stone standing at the other end. She regarded him but said nothing. And though it was a cool breeze blowing, I somehow felt the temperature drop a few degrees more. Douglas, unaffected by the gusts, said nothing either. Strange, I thought, for Douglas Stone and Lady Guffry had both attended last night's bi-monthly gadmire-gathering by the superior-futurist society (as opposed to the recently renamed superior-superior-futurist society).

It was a wonderful night, where you crowded around various tables of illogical games and talked about topics usually reserved for Peruvian shaman rallies. No really, it's a gas. The ladies dance the aero-waltz attached to their warble-blimps while the men play magnetic croquet on the walls, which they strut up and down with their sticky boots. But I swear mine were planted on the ground when I saw Douglas Stone and Lady Guffry together. I know what you're thinking. How on God's brutiful brown earth did that happen? And how did I get into this party to begin with? And that's the thing, they let anyone in ⁠— even a kid like me, or a brickie like Douglas. So I snuck out when Mam went to sleep and they just opened up the door. See they think in the future everyone'll be equal no matter what, where, or how you are. "Like ants or flatworms," I said ⁠— which I knew cause we had learnt about them in school that week ⁠— but they didn't like when I said that. Anyway, I really did see them together, a lady and a brickie laughing and getting chummy, but that's not all that happened because just as I heard the train coming Lady Guffry marched over to Douglas and violently told him off for:

\- being the biggest brute she's ever seen,

\- cheating at four-dimensional chess,

\- telling other guests that the chocolate fountain was an Amazonian mudbath recommended by dermatologists,

\- overinflating a poor balloon animal, which began to howl in pain and then embarrassing it further when delighting in the flatulence sound it made when squeezing its rubber belly.

In his shoes I would have cowered but Douglas held fast, though he had begun to blush.

"And, and, and," she said, her orange hair reaching for the sky like a candle flame, "You put your hand around the waist of that woman, who you said you had never seen before." The train blew into the station and Douglas moved, at last, reaching out to put his hand around the waist of Lady Guffry. But she turned away and was gone with the wind.
Chrysippus of Soli

Chrysippus of Soli, so bold and clever, walked his bald head out for some sun. The warmth and cool breeze on its vast surface, he thought, would clear his mind of its burden ⁠— the invention of propositional logic ⁠— which he had just achieved. Brilliant as he was, Chrysippus did not consider the full consequences his system would have on those around him, or on the modern world, he enjoyed the fact he was right ⁠— a habit of most brilliant people who hurt us in their brilliance. But here I must ask for compassion from you for have you not seen a child shout with joy at constructing a tower of blocks, so it was with Chrysippus, smug with satisfaction that what he had envisioned in theory, as in a dream, had been hidden in the world by a god long before him. Placed for him to discover perhaps, his mind ventured to imagine, or perhaps instead he had created something out of the materials of this world, something new. He laughed at the thought, the belly laugh of a king. In contrast to Plato, our Chrysippus argued humour did not deride the rational sense but instead found their source in them ⁠— that humour was merely joy at the sudden realization of facts. For this Chrysippus was named as a sophist because his arguments were in apparent defence of own laughter that rang throughout the academies of Athens. But he couldn't help having a sense of humour. He couldn't help improving it either, now seeing in the world via the lens of propositional logic a scene that begged for synthesis, assimilation, and finally, laughter.

This scene emerged from out of the hill on this walk he had undertaken for the sake of his bald head: A donkey, a fig tree ⁠— a donkey is eating figs from the tree at which point Chrysippus of Soli famously bursts out: "Now give the donkey a drink of wine to wash down the figs." My god, there's nothing funny about this but Chrysippus fell in a fit of laughter, laughing until he thought he might die. This joke is either impenetrable to us in our cultural separation of a few thousand years, or was a radically new type of joke that Chrysippus was proposing to the world. I propose it is the case of both;

P = The donkey is eating figs  
Q = One who is eating figs should be given a drink of wine as _[a nuance lost in time x space]_

Chrysippus felt like a god basking in this creation. Sudden revelations could be made of the whole world, with this new type of joke he could laugh at it all ⁠— even his own hardships. But it wasn't to be because a joke of a far older type would soon usurp his when an eagle, flying past in that moment by chance, dropped a tortoise on Chrysippus's shining bald head mistaking it for a rock with which it could break the tortoise's shell ⁠— killing him. But this is the type of joke no one could logically laugh at, Chrysippus's ghost proposed, for only a donkey and a dead man were in witness. At which point Mount Olympus shook with laughter.
The Morrisby Predictive Pest

I am running away. I am a bit old for it, I know, I turn 23 in a month and it's not a landmark I really envisioned myself making. When I was 15 (a year of great maturing, ha) my school bombarded me with career plans and job predictions based on multivariate examinations that measured, among other things, how fast you could draw figure 8's in sixty seconds, how well you could identify emotions on the faces of various cartoon animals whose illustrations slowly devolved into nightmarish cubism, and a final round which involved a timed obstacle course held in a sweat-misted gymnasium.

Up and down wooden ladders, and twisting ankles around fluoro cones all while a cruel digital scoreboard counts down, morphing its unnatural red limbs from 01:35 to nil ⁠— a point of singularity, where all our futures will become known through the wisdom of the Morrisby Predictive Profile™. Finally, our destinies would become absolutely clear, crystalline as an orbuculum under the knead of dependable Roma hands (attached to an undependable gypsy). Not many of us private school lads were worried about falling too far from grace, we were far off from a life rotting away in a caravan park on a clouded hill with only the odd bare-knuckle fight to break up the boredom. The only travellin' we Grammar lads would be making was: to the bank, the stock-market, or for the more 'experiential' among our ranks; to the bar, the pharmacy (homegrown and commercial) and finally to the morgue, where the rest would join not too soon after. Yes, for us life would all be cigars, cars, and big breasted wives that curiously resemble our own mothers, though perhaps tanned a shade darker. The reunions are;

"Yes, funnily enough, we met on a secluded beach in the Bahamas. She was sunbathing in a delicious green swimsuit, I spotted her as I was walking out of the jungle after a skinny dip in the nearby river when we locked eyes, she screamed. Tuuurns out, she thought I was some native tribesman, [looking down at his crotch with a wink] and I thought, in that green swim suit of her's, that she was a mermaid!"

"Because she smelt like fish [looking down at her crotch]? Anyway, it's getting late I ha-"

"Good point, let's ditch this lot get a few drinks with some actual kick to them. Sandra, me, you, and... oh, did you bring a girlfriend or something this year?"

Yes, what a life. And it could all be ours, the only hurdle between us and our dreams was that final obstacle course. It was my turn, I took my place at the starting line; the buzzer screamed and my sneakers screeched in reply as my feet slipped on the vinyl flooring. Every hurdle, every cone was a milestone. Keep going son, there's your dream job, your trophy wife, your beautiful athletic kids, don't trip on this cone or you'll end up like poor Jono ⁠— who is now in roadside construction and working all day with cones, just to go home to punch a few more. Jump this box for a car, swing across these monkey bars and you'll at least get on Centrelink. Then I came to the last segment of the race, it was a sprint to the finish line where the school janitor stood with one hand behind his back and another holding a silver Casio stopwatch. There it was! Just a few haggard breathes away, here comes the part where I get everything I ever could hope for, not just a fantastic career, but multiple careers, a go as Prime Minister for a term or two, a fling as an Astronaut, immeasurable riches would be mine. But they would become nothing to what I would find after this superficial materialist goods; I would find what I truly desired: a forest of belief, a small creek to wash away the tears of past regret, everlasting life sipped from the Holy Grail; to build Jerusalem, among dark satanic mills, on England's green & pleasant pastures.

But there is always a snake in paradise, a hiccup, the unexpected object which was presently behind the janitor's back. In milliseconds I recognised he was holding a tennis ball, and in the next moment ⁠— "Catch!" he shouted with a pained expression. Out flew the ball towards my head, I fumbled once (my beautiful life!), twice (glory fading), and plucked at the empty air while the ball fell to the floor. "Ten second penalty," said the janitor, Mr Jimmlah, with more than a touch of resignation in his voice. Perhaps he owes his current occupation to a fumbled tennis ball, I thought, as I stared at mine rolling across the floor like a wayward crystal ball, seeing in it a similar future to Jimmlah's, a life of scrubbing shit off toilet bowls; a life spent in a one bedroom apartment without a window; and the incessant odour of ammonia, with calloused hands that have long forgotten human contact. The final insult for Jimmlah is being forced to relive his own tragedy year after year, wishing he could change the past, frustrated that his failure wasn't even his fault as when he completed his Morrisby test he hadn't fully mastered the English language. Instead of hearing "Catch!", as shouted by his janitor, he misheard, "!حشا" (pronounced Cae-esch) the word for quilt, which prompted him to think of his grandmother's grand quilt she had been sewing for 40 years, which was composed of 1001 individual patches ⁠— one for each of the Arabian Nights. But she never finished, (getting to 220) though perhaps she weaves of finer threads in the beyond than she could afford as a seamstress here on Earth. This remembrance caused Jimmilah to cry a single tear, which dropped to the floor... as did the tennis ball that had collided against his chest harmlessly while he had been lost in an unspeakable, though only momentary, grief.

In the end, my Morrisby Test suggested a career as an actuary accountant, which would have been sensational except that I had undiagnosed dyslexia. Something the test failed to pick up.
God is a DJ

Faithless's 1998 hit, asserted that God is a DJ ⁠— but does DJ'ing require the attainment of divine power? After all, it is simply moving from one state into another.

This is the illogical and paradoxical manoeuvre that a DJ must undertake every time they pull off a mix. But how could it possibly be illogical when 'mixing' appears infinitely within our world, you can find it in life, in the caterpillar's polka dots that bloom into angry eyes that adorn its wings as a butterfly. In the rain that begins as a feeling in the air that fills with cool moisture, and increases until the heavens open to let down the rain, but soon after the puddles evaporate and fill the air again with cool moisture. Mix in, mix out. Our world is constantly mixing. Within both of these examples, I have been careful make mention of the 'traces' of mixing ⁠— which could be the cool moisture or a 4/4 bassline.

The human mind is designed to handle this everyday mixing we witness, its no wonder that the phenomenon of DJ'ing has arisen and been thrown into such popularity. In nature, we are constantly under the bombardment of our almighty DJ who mixes in elements to our lives, sometimes with almost no regard to us. It can come slowly so that we don't notice the change, like falling in love or developing brain cancer, or he can slam in elements as quick as he feels (i.e. oh look at that my house is on fire) ⁠— all while maintaining the fabric of the set/reality. A house fire or falling in love both change the reality we construct within our minds but in very different ways.

Even time itself is not such a linear experience from the human perspective ⁠— each moment bleeds into the next, as I discovered on a camping trip behind the Dandenong mountains where I took a tab of acid and went into psychosis (or had lost my soul, if you had asked me then). The easiest way that I have come to rationalise and put into words an experience, which can never fully expressed in words, is that my brain perceived an overabundance of traces which led me to believe I had prophetic power allowing me to sense ahead of time that I was either in a quasi-hell where the only demon stirring the pot of lost souls was Boredom or that I was experiencing the hyper-reminiscent death release of DMT squirting out of my hypothalamus.There was no change as I stared into the campfire, the burning of the logs was an infinite loop that played out like a repeating GIF, the only 'progression' was a deepening regret of the way that I had led my life which eventuated into a complete loss of self, ego death. The left and right hemispherical decks of my brain stopped spinning for a second leaving a stillness. I knew at once, it was a stillness that I would never be able to recapture again.

But the music starts again, as it always does. My friend saw I was clearly going through something and so he played a set off a casette he had burned. The DJ began with the initial song, a nice ambient number _Shadow of Blood_ (1997) by Lena Platonos ⁠— who, coincidentally, was born on the same Greek island as the ancient philosopher Zeno of Elea. And then into the second song _Don't Be Cold_ (1984) by Stupid Set, a left-field Italo disco choice that is as iconic as it is underrated ⁠— first played in Naples's famous Club Caro that had been constructed on the birthplace of famed theologian and saint, Thomas Aquinas. Here is the paradox at hand: before the DJ can transition from the first song to the second he must reach a halfway point where approximately the output of the master channel would be made up of a 50/50 mix between the two songs. Before that halfway state, it would be logical to assume, the DJ would have to reach a 75/25 mix of the first and second song respectively. And before that an 87.5/12.5 mix and so on infinitely. It seems illogical that the mix logically exists, if it did it should have a definite starting point in space and time, right?  
"But that's impossible!" I hear you cry, "There was a definite point in time and space AND it was sick."

Let's assume the mix had a linear progression:

Hypothetically the 50/50 sate would fall upon the end of the 16th bar.

Then the 75/25 state would fall on the 8th bar.

Eventually, as we venture further into the minuscule we find bars are an improper unit of measurement, so we must measure the millimetres that the DJs' fingers adjust the levels ⁠— which would be about 0.7mm.

As we continue even the mere tips of fingers become clumsy gargantuan stubs and unsuitable tools of measurement. Nerve impulses are measured, surely now we can grasp the absolute beginning of this transition which we all heard of a pair of F1's and therefore must be literally and logically sound. But even the nerve impulses are mere reactions of NaCl molecules finding receptor cells, in tiny motions. We are still trapped by this paradox, that coincidentally was first composed by the ancient philosopher Zeno of Elea, though he composed it as an arrow finding its mark. And as quick as our nerve impulses are, even quicker than Zeno's arrow, ultimately there is no way to separate effect from the cause.

We can follow this chain as long as we like, cause and effect, cause and effect, down the DJ's life:

Why did he become a DJ?

Low self-confidence, poor musical ability?

What caused his parents to procreate?

Are they happy their son does copious amounts of ket on the weekend to impress underage girls?

Did any of their ancestors also wonder why they had been placed on earth, given life, and then death?

Did they question why anything changes from one state to the other?

To look at it from another angle, Saint Thomas Aquinas would say this of cause and effect:

1. There is an efficient cause for everything; nothing can be the efficient cause of itself.

2. It is not possible to regress to infinity in efficient causes.

3. To take away the cause is to take away the effect.

4. If there be no first cause then there will be no others.

Conclusion: Therefore, a First Cause exists (and this is God).

In other words, and to finish off this almost dead horse, if we believe we heard the last track of a set then logically we have to believe there was one before that and one before that one. Track Z is only true if Track Y is, and track Y only if track X is. But can this go on forever? No, if there was a sum of 0+0+0... etc, and it continued onto infinitely, it was still equal zero no matter the length of the equation. We need a truth value of 1, that can be passed down the set track-by-track to form the world as we know it today, the infinity contained in one. Not a loop ⁠— like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence or an endless cycle of reincarnations as in Hinduism (though you might effectively refute this if you once spent a summer in India by the seemingly infinite times you have brought up how spiritually awakening it was ). The fact is, and I think everyone has a gut feeling about this, is that the Truth is an odd number. The word is singular.

As Faithless' 1998 hit asserts, God is a DJ.
In Defence of Neo-Nazism (and other fantasies)

This may come as a shock to you but this essayist finds the idea of neo-Nazism not only a valid response to modernity but also an enviable one. Of course, the ideology they purport to live by is reprehensible, Nazism being responsible for the oppression of minority groups by displacement, torture and outright extermination in the millions. And though fascism has been rightly quenched there is still ongoing oppression of these same minority groups (gipsies, homosexuals, jews, etc) and it is almost needless to say that oppression in general exists and continues today (take for example this poor essayist who must spend two sentences back-peddling from his original proposition to cover his WMA). And yet I would argue that neo-Nazis, as we can define in their archetypal form, barely contribute to this contemporary oppression which carries on, in fact, we could call this contribution negligible. Think not of swastikas but of countries on the Ivory Coast and, closer to home, in Muslim majority countries in South-East Asia where homosexuality, promiscuity, and generally anything outside of the vanilla conception of sex (i.e. missionary with no eye contact) are often punishable by death. As for anti-Semitism, look to the Middle East itself where sabre-rattling the wholesale nuclear destruction of Israel by holders of public office is not condoned but encouraged. These examples have been selected to make apparent the mainstream and democratically approved status that oppressive force enjoys in other countries compared with the relatively harmless pockets of neo-Nazism that exist in first-world western countries. Antifa and similar groups may refute this and argue that neo-Nazis merely represent an outlying symptom of an overall, wide-spread and sinister shift towards the right (and thus full-blown Nazism) by the mainstream. This is something I might address in a future essay but for now will leave unanswered with the exception of a recommendation to Antifa members (I know you don't consider yourself 'members' but you just look so wicked cool in your little uniforms) that they might enjoy masturbating in the direction of the north pole with their non-dominate hand, a pursuit which brings about as much goodwill and improvement in left-wing politics as their regular activities. With that said the true virtue of Neo-Nazism can now be apprehended, this virtue being the absolute liberation of the human spirit from the modern age.

Neo-Nazis enjoy more liberty and freedom from the regular taxation of daily life – this is irrefutable. With one forehead tattoo ⁠— a swastika planted right between the brows ⁠— an individual has saved himself from ever being the lackey in the neo-slavery cubicle pen of a corporate office or from an ever smiling monkey-on-a-chain-dancing-to-polka-music political role. He is even freed from certain tortuous entry-level positions, for instance, a job as a waiter, which I worked for the majority of my adolescence and into my late teens. At first glance, the oppressive force upon a waiter seems non-existent but that is because we hide it so well, this requisite repression being the crux of our oppression. We must smile, and enthuse, and laugh at unfunny jokes through our days – and these are the good days when you don't have to deal with a narcissistic floor manager or disgruntled customer. On a bad day, you might have a real estate agent sit down to eat with his wife who would divorce him if he began to make under 90k, which he luckily makes if hits all his sale targets, a pursuit that has cost him the entirety of his day prior to sitting down in my section during the dinner rush. Like me he has been smiling until his face muscles are sore, bullshitting until he's in such a holographic state that he's not even sure when he's telling the truth, and castrating his language usage to match a dialect of corporatised PR-speak that turns a run-down house into _a house with room for improvement_ in the same general manner that contemporary leftist discourse has concerned itself with turning poor people into _economically-disadvantaged people_ when, of course, it could have been concerning itself with how to assist those people. The structure of his psyche resembles that of a balloon animal, his entire being at risk of exploding with a pathetic farting whiz at the threat of a single pin. And he knows this. He knows his powerlessness with more intimacy than he knows his wife, who with the years has been gradually morphing her face into the creaseless and unnatural buoyancy of, yet another, balloon animal. And presently, he is exacting a cathartic release of this powerlessness by taking the issue of absent parmesan cheese on his risotto as a personal affront and responding with brutal mobster-like promises of vendetta against my person which I gleefully sit through, imaging the adversity my forebears dragged themselves through to deliver my genes to this humiliating moment. Then I am rescued. From another section I hear – "Shut the fuck up cunt before I drag you outside." You could hear a pin drop. I turned and saw a tall, heavy-set guy standing up, shaved head, SS runes tattooed on one side of his neck and the southern cross on the other, and the rest of tattoos will have to be left to you to imagine due to word count. He was with his own wife who had a shaved sides mullet thing and similar tattoos. The real estate agent does shut the fuck up as per his suggestion, and the reason is this very liberation that I have been communicating to you, which allows the neo-Nazi to truly mean what he says. The real estate agent knows this, that he will be dragged outside if he doesn't comply – seeing in his mind's eye vague images of Edward Norton in his underwear, as do the rest of the customers who I am now, just for a moment, insulated from. I take the moment of silence to escape to the cutlery polishing station. And then I smile, a real smile, to think I am under protection for the next hour or so. I must admit, I am under no illusions that the only favour I carry with the Neo-Nazis is my skin colour and that it was only coincidence that I happen to be white and the real estate agent has a vaguely Greek or Semitic background. It could have easily been the other way round, and I am sure the neo-Nazi would have jeered at me with the real estate agent instead of saving my WMA from a verbal beatdown.

No, I didn't find much to admire in my newfound heroes whose clothes looked like they were ripped from Romper Stomper (I mean literally like they were wearing 80's era film props) and whose faces are the strongest case for the physiogmoical measurement of IQ that I have seen. Nonetheless, I found myself attracted to the female neo-Nazi. There was nothing conventionally attractive about her close-set eyes or pudgy nose but I couldn't help imagine the sheer wild abandonment with which that couple would fuck. Here they were sitting in this upper-middle-class cafe in Mordialloc, not giving a shit about the states they were attracting, their hogs waiting outside to send them hurtling to the next town where the reception of their beings would be same as it was here. It was him and her against the world on their incomprehensible journey to reunify the Third Reich. Every time they had sex it was a battle against the great replacement, each orgasm a victory that pushed past the physical pleasure of the act into the metaphysical realm of ideological and cultural warfare. Take then the real estate agent who would not be having sex that night due to revealing himself as a beta male cuck during dinner. But maybe in a couple weeks and a trip to Tiffany's later and he would get to slip himself into his wife's vacuum seal-like kegelised snatch and have very halal missionary sex sans eye contact for 10 minutes while he fantasies his own incomprehensible dream – a holiday house some place on the coast like Torquay or Phillip Island where he could watch his kids zoom around on jet skis. This dream is possible and it is likely he will achieve it unlike the dream of the neo-Nazis from Country Victoria who imagine themselves at the helm of a turbulent 1930's-esque rise to power. You might think that makes the neo-Nazis pathetic, and it does, but it is this exact quality that is the foundation to their virtue. Their malice is harmless whereas the real estate agent's is actual, his dream will happen and will only contribute to the further deterioration of the our environment by the needless construction of his second home and the general pollutants that will be expressed into the atmosphere by his jetskis (and the two SVU's he already owns) not to mention the reaffirmation of the cultural norm of material consumerism which he will pass onto his spawnlings. This virtue via implausibility is also what puts the neo-Nazi above other delinquents and criminals. The neo-Nazi's freedom is not that of the mafioso made man who enjoys some separation from modern society but only at the price of attaching himself to another autocratic structure ruled by other defacto leaders. The made man has perks in life but before he can enjoy them he must make his collections, hustle, constantly watch his back, deal with disgruntled customers, pay a tax to the 'bosses' and if he fails to do so he will face more serious consequences than the average tax evader in mainstream society who will not have to put on pair of concrete shoes and jump into a lake. You might also compare the neo-Nazi's liberation from society to that of a meth-user or alcoholic but this is only a logically sound comparison in the short term, as before long the individual comes to serve a new master, addiction. There is no chance of this happening in a significant manner to neo-Nazis, who I doubt will receive a knock on the door from ol' Adolf asking if they could up their numbers on how many chinks and heebs they harass on a weekly basis because the bi-annual report is coming up.

The neo-Nazis are the perfect holy fools of this world, the blissful faere folk of modernity, who, unfortunately, you will not be able to join in good conscience. This essayist is prevented, as I imagine many other good people are, on the basis of his book-learning, historical perspective, and not forgetting what I suspect is the main obstacle for the majority of you – a set of morals. The gates of paradise are closed to us alas, alas dear reader, alas.
On Food

I read the other day that the human tongue's receptors have a remarkably low capacity for taste. In fact, this capacity is overwhelmed by the introduction of a single olive. An olive! I found this interesting because I have a variety of stomach issues. I can't digest a lot of things without discomfort that scales from slight pain to doubling over excruciation. This has given me the particular philosophy to food of; the plainer the better. But I am rebuked for this diet, as when I serve myself a breakfast of half a dozen dried wheat biscuits, a bowl of milkless cereal, and two pieces of toast with a dash of olive oil with a cup of tea. And I am encouraged to be embarrassed about this because it's bleak. But those that tell me it is bleak are living in a fantasy. Heston Blumenthal can infuse as many flavours as he likes into his crystallised quail, it is all a placebo effect. And this is the case with the vast majority of fine dining ⁠— all smoke and mirrors, a mere illusion or rather a delusion that you craft yourself as consolation for the fact you just spent half your weekly wage on vaporised mussels that spray a stinging mist into your eyes as you crack open the shells. An olive! An olive, or a teaspoon of honey, or a sip of wine, these are what we can take, these are all you need to satisfy your soul. The rest is vanity and vexation of spirit.

And if all I have said is true, which it is, then why do we continue to indulge in knitted gooseberry lasagna? As is the case in poetry and the visual arts, we, in our post-modern era, have lost sight of the wood for the trees. We are divorced from the traditions that gave birth to these arts, we must now infuse all flavours, Chinese, Italian, French, Indian, grind it up into the grey gruel. And more so, we are losing sight not only of the wood but now the tree entire. It is but bark, and bark is but cells and cells but atoms, and what is a group of atoms, and what is a group of anything within a time that is relative to matter, can we separate anything ⁠— can we draw anything out from the chora? ⁠— can we say there is such a thing as an olive? We are suddenly everything, and also nothing. But we continue on without any faith in our signifiers, hungry for innovation and remix, ravenous still for the signified upon which we subsist like undead ghouls. Brainless, or perhaps all brain and no-body to go with, like the skeleton at the dance, a solipsistic masquerade born out of the clown world where it is impossible to find any lasting relief from the tooth and nail drag of Old Nick into entropy. The consolation that was once religion, that was once the sacred which allowed us to accept life as inevitable defeat has been substituted with the likes of Barnett Newman's artistless art, Joyce's Bababadalgharaghta, and Blumenthal's conversion of an olive into a laser beam that is shot into your mouth at 200dBm. An olive.
Karma Schwarma

I wasn't the type of fella to believe in karma or meditation or what have you, a bit too oriental for my taste. But I heard something the other day which had me thinking. I'm not saying I've shaved my head or grown real fond of flaming orange and ringing gongs. Like I said, I get into the oriental stuff but only as far as my dinner plate on dim sum Sunday, on which I admit I give a little thanks to the Buddha if the tucker is extra good.

It started with a yarn I heard from a passerby at the hotel. Wasn't from Darby that's for sure, dressed as he was like some scrub aristocrat. But it wasn't his dress that caught my attention but his big red drinking nose, which I pointed out to the fellas. We promptly began to conjecture on the kind of tongue lashing we could give him. A few choice words being traded and swapped amongst us: Rudolph will you lead our sleigh tonight, etcetera. But I says, ¨Wait wait wait, we don't know how much of a shit kicker this guy is ⁠— why don't I have a scout?" Their faces dropped but I had the leash of reason pretty tight on them and using my words convincingly, as I do, I convinced them. So I march up to the stranger and we exchange the usual pleasantries ⁠— travelling for work, alright, married and separated, okay, enjoys a cold beer, alright okay. Pretty ordinary stuff, so ordinary I just about sic'd the boys on him to get a bit of entertainment. But I didn't ⁠— for we landed on a topic that was unusual amongst the typical bar banter you hear. The topic was death and the stranger, Rick, was well versed being an old bugger himself. I talked about nearly splitting my skull after being chucked from a brumby, mounting it on a dare, but that wasn't nearly as exciting as the yarn he threw back at me.

"I was flying around the country meeting with associates in various branches (that's branches of a bank for those you 'agriculturally inclined') when I almost came a cropper up in a plane," he began.

"Did you choke on the food?" I said.

"No."

"Did you forget to put the tray up for take-off and landing?"

"Nor that."

"Did you go out for a breath of fresh air?"

"Nor that either."

At this point, I could tell he was so chuffed to talk to someone about this that he didn't notice or care that I was taking the piss ⁠— either way I respected his persistence and decided to shut up.

¨This wasn't a near-death scenario for a mug, this was magnificent, one fitting for a man of my experience and travel. Imagine this; engine failure, we're talking about a free fall from 30,000 feet. Now do you local fellas ever jump off that bridge into the water, the one back there over the reservoir?"

I nodded

"Well, I'd bet it's about 25 feet high. And I'd also bet that 25 feet feels mighty long when you´re in the air ⁠— you even have time to think about some things. Maybe you start thinking about how deep the water is, about rocks and old bicycles, about that piece of driftwood that looks a little bit like a croc. Now if you can think all that in a couple of second imagine how long you have to think from 30,000 feet."

"A lot."

"You´re right."

"What did you think about?"

"Nothing at first. You see, I get nervous on flights during the take-off and landing but once above the clouds it's as if my whole body relaxes. You look out the window and see this great big fluffy blanket and you feel that nothing could go wrong with it separating you and world. So when the lights went off and everything seemed to be pulled towards the roof I was calm, just looking out onto those clouds, the sun was setting and they were glowing. Like a field of barley as far as your eye could see. Next to me, however, my colleague was screaming all sorts of obscenities that I wouldn't repeat even in a place like this. And the next over to him was a Chinese woman also screaming. But I was at peace ⁠— at least until we broke through the clouds. When I saw the ground fast approaching I joined in with the chorus. From Allah to Zoroaster I was praying to them all, mate. Asking for forgiveness for all my sins and saying sorry for pledging myself to the God I was presently negotiating with. I was a mess. But not as much as my colleague next to me, cause he was going through a messy divorce. "Rick," he tells me, "She's taking half the stocks, half the house, half the dog." Not only that but he hadn´t been getting any for a while. So at what must have been about twenty thousand or so feet above the ground. He starts grabbing at the Chinese woman trying to get his mouth on hers. I looked over but I am in too much of a state to care much about any last-minute action, plus I´ve never really been into Chinese birds. At eleven thousand feet I piss myself. And then, of course knowing my luck at about ten thousand feet the lights turn on and the plane pulls up. I give my mate an elbow, who by the looks of it was about to slide into third base. He looks up, straightens up his tie and doesn't say nothing. Neither does she. No one says anything for the rest of the flight, no accusations against my mate and no funny looks at my wet lap. I guess we had all silently agreed that what happened on that plane would stay on that plane. But I always felt sorry for the Chinese bird and felt like maybe that my mate should have gotten a slap. Anyway, it just so happens that thirteen years to the day he dies of a heart attack. So that's karma, I guess."

"Oath," I said, "that is karma."

After that, I called over the boys and we gave old Rick some shit for pissing his pants though he was a good sport about it. But that night got me thinking and on the drive back I decided it would be a good idea to say a little thank you to Buddha whether the Chinese takeaway was good or just okay. After all, I reckon, the big guy probably has some say over how good the next plate'll be.
Slapped Rock

From here, look to the horizon. Across long grassy plains, over several seas ⁠— you'll find the boy of the desert. Crawling, writhing but brave. The boy digs for his living and finds solace looking at the moon while listening to the crackling fire. Finally, he falls asleep to the last lullabies of the old tree he cut down in the day. A river of ice split his dreams in two: revolt and fear. It's winter. Wake up hungry, over the edge feigning for food as the sun drains out from a horizon, and up through the beach horizon sky. Buttered bread or wholemeal toast on cereal plus water and tea. Pulls in the stomach, twisting abdominals: noisy within. Nice sounds from the sky, from the birds; Ambient drones from the road from the cars.

"Cars, cars, yes cars," he judo rolled out from the bush and ran straight out onto the road. Meanwhile, a pig farmer was driving his diesel-guzzling truck down the nearby highway. This pig farmer looked remarkably like his cargo, a short wide head accessorised with aggressive flaring nostrils, the type of look that was very popular in the fifties during the summer Pork Craze of 57'. However his heydey was over, now he was a bitter lonely man whose singular joy was pummelling kangaroos at 120kmh. His wishful thinking caused him not to see the boy of the desert but a misshapen kangaroo ⁠— an easy target for this sad excuse of a killer. He pushed the pedal. The pigs squealed in terror and his eyes rolled back in pure ecstasy.

"Daddy, daddy, yes daddy" ⁠— rolled under the blood laden tires ⁠— were the final cries of a boy drought bred in the desert, flooded in unnatural death. A legacy not known nor cared but by the few who dug to eat and sleep. Ree! Ree! Oink! Blasting Thunderstruck by AC/DC, smoking through a half-finished deck of a true blue Ozzy classic blue collar working man's cigarettes, Longbeach Gold. Powering down the Princess down the way to Adelaide to drop of a fatter than usual load of hogs. The man was a fucking legend and knew it. All day and night, sniffing the goods up his nose and up a lucky sheila. What was missing in his life was a son to love.

He pulled on the brakes and the truck came to a sudden halt. Half a jaw bone dislodged from the radiator grille and skittered over the dirt. But he took no notice of it, he had a long lost son to find. For the first time in his sordid life, he pondered what to do, "Find that of a strumpet ex-wife. Destination, Melbourne. Route, Highway to Hell." He hit next track and launched his foot at the accelerator, kicking right through the floor. The engine roared with fury as Angus Young gave it all for the chorus, but the record started to skip. It looped Young's screeching crescendo and had an identical effect on the man's mind which started skip like a record. He looped a period of two and half seconds of endlessly inhaling a cigarette and squinting his eyes. Inhale, squint, inhale, squint. Without exhaling he finished the entire cigarette and still powered on up the Princess to Melbourne. His vision narrowing, eyes still squinted to a narrow slit, he thought that this was death. In futility, he reflected on his life but his brain had stopped receiving oxygen two minutes ago and was running on Longbeach Gold fumes, thus he began to function through a series of one-word associations:

Get Son. Wife. Rage. Misanthropy. Betrayed. Disappointed. Cruel. Murderous. Manic. Depressed. Anxious. Woman. Eve. Snake. Betrayal. Brutus. Dagger. Nicaragua. Scar. Kings. Hamlet. Consciousness. Bible. Ethics. Karma. Justice. Injustice. Child. Innocent. Lamb. Shepherd. Jesus. Love. Lie. Murder. Drugs. Guilt. Nietzsche. Pathetic. Half-formed. Fetus. Abortion. Hard Truth. PC. Social Justice. Virus. Parasite. Eggs. Breakfast. Essential. Love. No. No. Father. Ghost. Hamlet. Revenge. Death. Sleep. Dream. Imagination. Balance. Dagger. Cut. Mold. Creation. Perfection. Love. No. Yes. Only. Answer. Love. One. Answer. One. Zero. One. One. Zero. 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 ⁠— ad infinitum.

Solutions to celestial questions of life and faith came about and became unstuck when at the wheel in a binary trance, half asleep; half awake: half conscientious; half dreaming. Life like cigarettes, burned out at the bottom end leaving only a tar filled host that support and the whole self. Trucks run road trains out into the desert, temporarily migrating into the hot heart of nature like the smoke from cigarettes migrates in and out the dry desert lungs. Humans if winged and birdlike would soar low to the ground, an instinct natural to a ground-dwelling ape.

No ape hollered here, only a man, a man like Pip of the Pequod. His soul had travelled down that infinite highway while his finite body had been left in its spiritual dust. Travelling down miles of mazelike roads he came up a shining beacon of a road stop, a sign promised food and shelter. He turned off and a tuckshop appeared in front, a tuckshop like no other. Gold-leaf trimmed Roman pillars adorned the entrance, marble walls were engraved with countless myths of adventure, betrayal, and love – among them was a carved advertisement for a $5 deal for coffee and a pie. "This is a trucker's heaven!" he exclaimed – and he wasn't far from the truth. He parked his sins out front and let his ethereal being pass through the front door with a ding.

A man leant against a counter while he spun a yarn and flirted with one of the waitresses.

"G'day, I'm Pete. We've been expecting you for a while now, how's the road been treating you mate?"

The trucker's eyes went soft and he wrung his hat in his hands, "To be honest pal, it's been a long road."

"No point having a sook, you can rest now."

"Suppose so. Something smells good, what's cooking?"

"Oh that's the big guy in the back, he makes everything – have a gander."

Pete swung open the kitchen door. Less of a kitchen and more of an engine room, he saw the back of a powerful man who sat down on a plush chair. All was silent and then from seemingly empty space he opened a window and the universe was cast out in front of him like dice. The workbench became a dashboard, the window was a windshield. The trucker felt months went by in mere moments watching countless worlds and stars rush past. The wipers swining back and forth as they passed through plasma nebulas – which are terrible this time of year.

"What's He doing?" whispered the trucker.

Pete shushed him and pointed to the floor of the workshop.

The trucker saw God's foot upon the pedal of the universe, and spoke it; "Fuck mate how fast does this bad boy go?" A bright flash of something inconceivable reflected in the rear view mirror.

He made no reply and simply pressed his foot down hard. The noise of the whip, the noise of the rattling of the wheel, galloping horses, and bounding chariots! Pete wasn't fazed but the trucker felt the acceleration pulling him backwards. Pete chuckled, "Looks like your roads going to be a little longer mate." The trucker slipped towards the exit and he managed to grip onto a Twenty-twenty Pie Heater but he couldn't hold onto it for long ⁠— those fucking cheap Chinese-made things are hot. With a yelp, he fell from heaven and plunged back to earth in a fiery descent.

Drooling and spitting up green bile: vision after vision. A normal man's life might be changed by an encounter with the mystical and magical, in fact, it might not need speculation to assume that a normal man's life would change. Must change! Must change, be moved by, and raised by an encounter with extreme forces of corporeal and spiritual nature ⁠— to this supreme degree. Must change? O, but what normal nature was the monstrosity which drove and drove? O Fie! And an instant of otherworldliness for a beast! A celestial spirit had possessed the wrong creature. A sex induced, wanting, egoistic, jealous, lazy, malevolent and fat man: cigarette in mouth, sweaty, cum covered and on the road to Melbourne.

Written with Liam Leegal
O, sad case it was

"O, wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

An' foolish notion:

What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,

An' ev'n devotion!"

⁠ — Robert Burns

Aye, likely that ⁠— to happen on a day as it was. Grey skies above and reflected on a flat sea which this character Patrick Fitz looked out on. Aye, a day that a man might go down to the dock to think strange things. And that day, though the morning mist had already disappeared under the muggy sun, Paddy failed to find the horizon.

A veritable mirror, thought Paddy, whose poetic mind seemed at odds with his mouth that could only rise to a, "Bloody hell."

He looked down and nodded approval to the perfect duplication of such an ugly mug. And the sea, as he, nodded back but couldn't hide in his eyes a frown in waiting.

"Patrick Fitz," he introduced himself and added, "Fitzpatrick," which wasn't his name but a common response to it, as if he mistook his own name or wasn't aware that it rolled off the tongue better the other way round. He knew better than to curse them, it was an involuntary response and would be to blame a blethering lamb.

"No, Patrick Fitz," he asserted to the water, trying to stay in good spirits though he couldn't help letting the frown slip out a touch. A man, he mused, will feel inadequate all his life if he tortures himself with what he could be. A thought he uttered aloud as, "Ach...".

Fitz wasn't haunted by impossible dreams of fighting in the highlands of the past or discovering the penicillin of the future, no, it wasn't the name of Wallace or Fleming that rung in his ears ⁠— only Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick as he should have been called, Fitzpatrick as he should have been born ⁠— with a mole on his left jowl and not on the other! But there he stood as Patrick Fitz. There he stood.

And he couldn't turn away. For he knew that under-shadow his reflection would follow him all the way. He imagined the walk home to his sister. His street lined with identical box houses, allstucktogether, and then, by sheer instinct, he turns into the right one. "Patty, that you?" his sister's voice echos through the empty house. He walks into the kitchen. "That's right," he goes to give her a peck on the check but she recoils.

"Can't you see I am busy."

That's rich, he thought, to shy away from my kiss, when I know the dozen or so skippers you've allowed to kiss you all over, on top of the fact I am already resisting the urge to flee away from the rancid smell of your greasy cooking, you hussey, you strumpet, you gorging gargantua. "Ah shut it," he manages. They had always lived together, had only each other, but all he saw in his twin's eyes was the ghost of Fitzpatrick. She was all he had and it was nothing. The loneliness ate at Paddy. And staring at his reflection on this silent dock did nothing good for it.

For some reason, the unwed Paddy had missed the call of love many times and not from a lack of opportunity. There were plenty of girls as ugly as he, he'd explain if you bought him a pint, he just didn't care for it and had let them pass by like a man snug in his bed, who has heard the fog horn announcing the morning ferry and instead of rising, turns over and sleeps some more. Which was unlike his sister, whose lovers upon hearing that morning fog horn would escape quick smart down the stairs with shirt and pants in hand. He would speak all this into the pint you'd bought him as it was rushing down his throat, again his mind and mouth at odds, spluttering through foam and bubbles ⁠— the whole pub a-roar with laughter. And Fitzpatrick looked up at Paddy from the puddle o'beer at his feet. It was a silent look but Paddy knew, he just knew;

that where Patrick Fitz had managed, "Can I?"

Fitzpatrick would have said, "I can."

And when Patrick Fitz jumped into the sea and could only manage to drown, Fitzpatrick seemed to be flying. But would they, his poetic mind mused, print the obituary as a drowned man or a man drowned ⁠— which his mouth pronounced as God knows what.
scholia 7

The food runner is dashing around wiping down tables. But I am the only person eating in the restaurant and she has already cleaned each table several times. I am unable to determine whether she is stuck in this loop without thought or if she truly sees a new smudge or stain with every rotation. The latter is the more torturous for sure. For it would mean she is aware she is in this loop and yet unable to free herself from her own futile attempts at subduing the essential nature of the world; mess. Her mission to reverse entropy one table at a time would cost her her life if the manager didn't eventually tell her to clock off. As I have said I cannot any of determine this. However, I can determine in one glance that this girl has down syndrome. I can determine that someone or something has made a mess of her chromosomes, a mistranslation of genes, a clean up on aisle three. I get up and clean my mouth with the napkin as best I can and hear, as I am leaving, a distant television report that there's been another toxic spill in the bay.
scholia 2

When I was a boy my father gave me a puzzle which had a thousand pieces. And though I never completed it, I still loved it all the same. But contrary to most children as I got older I became more enveloped in childish things like that puzzle. I was a perfectionist. I had every part in its proper place and it brought me a joy that was louder than any shouting or screaming. But then in an equal measure it brought me hate, because one day a piece went missing. I threw the chairs over and shouted at the puzzle that it was an idiot and that it was always the same story. I wished dad was around to help me find that missing piece, which makes me laugh now, as if that was the problem. As if the piece wasn't clenched in my little fist the entire time.
Join Us

Agent Blackwater couldn't keep his eyes off his partner as she attempted to open the compartment which had been hurtling through our solar system only twenty minutes prior. And now, by sheer chance, it had crash-landed on Earth and found its way into the capable hands of Agent Shelley-Cooper, whose left hand now wore the imprint of an absent wedding band. This fact did not escape the attention of Blackwater as he took mental notes about each occultish carved detail of the interstellar capsule that they had isolated within an airtight vacuum sealed polycarbonate pouch. It was about the size of a grapefruit and weighed ten to fifteen ounces, estimated by the amount of strain he observed in the muscle tension of Shelly-Cooper's strong yet supple forearms. Despite her intelligence and his operative capability, they both knew that this anomaly was beyond their expertise and the big guns would have to be called in, back up that came in the form of resident cryptologist Dr Damien Knight. While they waited for his airlift transport to arrive, which would be a long wait due to them being in the middle of the Nevada desert at 3:30AM, they set up a perimeter around the crash site that lay some 200 miles from the closest town in a secluded valley with only San Pedro cacti for company. With the perimeter secured both Blackwater and Shelly-Cooper turned to each other at the same moment, offering each other an open cigarette packet. They both took a cigarette from each other's packet, she taking one of his Lucky Strikes and he one of her Pall Malls, and laughed – this not being the first time this had happened, though of course it was a running joke between them that Blackwater had engineered, whose sharp ear always caught the crinkle of the plaster wrapper, which she left on as habit, as she reached into her pocket the sound of which now by automatic response caused his own hand to shoot down for his own cigarettes like a cowboy on the draw.

This was what Guru Tukush, the so-called Guru of Love, had written of as a moment of 'synchronicity' in his best-selling book "Lady Flower and the Hummingbird: The easy way to love" which Blackwater had been studiously reading for the past year. What the synchronicity achieved was the perceived experience of a shared destiny, a kind of organic symptom of joined fates. But the fate they were to share, delivered by his own orchestration, was yet unknown to Blackwater. By now he knew her rhythms of mood and the kind of reactions he could garner from her and the expected rapport that would be garnered alongside these reactions, as well as the level of intimacy achieved and the further actions they gave permission for which entailed the kind of approach he could then take. He knew when an innuendo or subtle teasing was called for ( _Chapter 4: Girls Just Want To Have Fun_ , pp. 27 – 33, A. Tukush) and when a stoic seriousness was needed in light of certain circumstances ( _Chapter 13: A Shoulder To Cry On_ , pp. 135 – 142, A. Tukush) such as when Shelly-Cooper's tabby-brown cat ran out onto the freeway that passed near her three-bedroom apartment. As the chinook's lights appeared over the moonlit plains, Blackwater was rethinking his initial approach to that 'disaster-portunity' (p. 40, A. Tukush) in which he had driven to her apartment, in the rain, after she had called him in a choked-up voice if he was busy, oh you're not, it's Boots he's not in the apartment and Jays at work I was wondering if we could drive around for like fifteen minutes or so.

For three hours he had driven around – looking in nearby alleys sheltering his head against the rain with a newspaper, while Shelly-Cooper sat behind the fogged windows of his car. Eventually, he found the thing plastered to the asphalt on the freeway, barely mammalian a red shag rug with guts, only recognizable by its collar that wore a single bell. He took the collar back to her and she fell into his arms no longer able to uphold her professional distance that had once appeared to him as an unscaleable obstacle. In that fogged car he stroked her hair and told her that she had to be strong, strong so very strong and you are strong Shelly-Cooper, he said with a curled index finger under her chin. She said that the world was a horribly sad place and rested her head on his shoulder to which Blackwater agreed with a pensive nod feeling happier than he had in years. But perhaps it would have been better, he reassessed, had I driven her back to her apartment and found a similar-looking cat in the pound in the morning, which would have associated himself with joy than tragedy. You've always had a penchant for tragedy, he told himself.

The chinook flew over their heads and Shelly-Cooper squeezed his shoulder, "Showtime."  
The touch lingered on his shoulder like a burn. Intimacy intimidated Blackwater, sex most of all and not just because he had been the recipient of a certain 1950's Midwest style of upbringing. Something disturbed him even beyond the issue of pre-marital sex or the apparent invitation to infidelity which her missing wedding band suggested, it was the mere concept, the breaking down of barriers and the amalgamations of flesh. This fear was coupled with what he knew about Shelly-Cooper in her previous work as a counter-espionage agent of the intelligence branch of ᄃY, that he had discovered by calling in several favours to find out that her work consisted in the extraction of information from suspected Soviet double agents via "pillow talk" or what was informally referred to across the watercooler as "the post-coitus truth serum" – the latter of the phrases making Blackwater wince when he heard it over the phone and tell his contact, the very same Damien Knight who was on his way there, to watch his fucking mouth.

The shrubs bent back as the chinook landed. The cryptologist walked out, holding his hat and wearing a smug grin on his face, he was needed and the blockheads would have to listen to him for once. It was Dr Knight's habit of nonsensically laughing when he greeted people and for whatever reason this nervous tic was now exaggerated. Perhaps it was the fact he hadn't envisioned himself standing in the middle of the Nevada desert as he closed his eyes and fell asleep four hours prior while listening to talk radio and being gently swayed by his queen-sized waterbed.

"Evening Shelly-Cooper. Blackwater. What a romantic moonlit night. Ha-ha!" he said letting his head rock back in a violent motion as he laughed, like, as Blackwater had observed, some kind of vaudeville villain. This was an observation that Blackwater had shared previously with Shelly-Cooper in the confines of their shared office, having asked her if she thought an oiled twisted moustache would suit him. She laughed and he told her to keep it down because Knight might hear her and, in a typical act of revenge, carry her off on his shoulder to tie her to some train tracks grinning and twisting the points of his moustache in wait for the steam locomotive to turn her into mincemeat. "Then it'll be curtains for you, see."  
Shelly-Cooper laughs again and Blackwater joins her ( _Chapter 32: Laughter really is the best medicine!,_ pp. 155 – 164, A. Tukush) also taking joy in his secret defence of her honour against the "post-coitus" comment by deriding Knight.

"So you couldn't crack the case?" Knight said, offering his hand out towards Blackwater who, with a smile stretched over his teeth, replied, "Don't worry, I'm still very capable of cracking many other things," gripping his hand and making it known that he hadn't been employed by ᄃY for his talent in cryptography or a long illustrious academic career but because he was a 6'5 killing machine with a keen understanding of the human body and the various methods in which it could be immobilised, which included the specific knowledge that the carpal and intercarpal joint (e.g. the lower portion of the palm) produced an intense pain when compressed such as in the constricting force of a firm — "Ouch!" Knight pulled back his hand, "I sacrifice my beauty sleep and this is the thanks I get."

"When we get back to the base we'll let you use the cryo chambers for a couple centuries, get you caught up on all that beauty."

In a huff, Knight went to the impact site and began to analyse its details, taking sketches of its octagonal surface and each of its detailed sides. Speaking into his dictaphone, "Though it appears to be artificially constructed, as was mentioned in the initial report, it is in actual fact made of organic material like an exoskeletal or osseous tissue. The details are precise, yes precise and communicative, and present a kind of hieroglyphic language which will take some time to decode and translate. However, what is more significant is that from its compositional quality it appears grown, as if this pattern emerged when the substance was alive, not to rule out the possibility that it could still —"

A green light flashed from the capsule and exposed the entire canyon as it were under an emerald sun. Blackwater had only a moment to react and pulled Shelly-Cooper towards him, turning his back to shield them both, he figured in quick sketches of contemplation that if the light were released as of a result of an explosion then Knight was toast. The light faded and Blackwater looked over his shoulder with a grimace, expecting to find a grizzly scene not unlike the one he had witnessed in the Battle of Bloody Ridge in Korea a decade and a half hence. But instead of a visceral mess, like that left by KPA shelling on the marines he had considered his brothers, he saw Knight standing unharmed. His training kicked him into action ( _Chapter 2: First aid upon arrival_ , pp. 17, SOF Combat Medic Manual / _Chapter 14: Good guys finish first – Show her you care for those around_ , pp. 102 – 107, A. Tukush): "Knight, you good?"

But Knight felt far from good. He had never been hunting but was fond of nature documentaries and remembered a hunter talking about an inexplicable feeling that he was being watched before returning to his car and later, a few hours later, hearing on the radio about a cougar attack in the same area in which another hunter was killed. Knight felt a premonition similar to this but to an even greater extent – as if he was not just being watched but being read, decoded and translated into a language in which he, influent, would lay dissected and at the whim of some far greater being. He shook the feeling off.

"Fine albeit... a little dazed."

"Alright let's pack up this disco light, get back to base and get checked out," Blackwater ordered. His eyes met Shelly-Cooper's, in a moment that seemed to last forever ( _Chapter 22: Trauma expands time: Know when to let go of the past_ , pp. 160 – 167, A. Tukush) as they carried their equipment into the aircraft.

"Thanks for taking the bullet for me but you don't have to do that," she said.

"No need to thank me. Just because it was green doesn't mean it was radioactive, life isn't like the looney tunes."

"I don't know sometimes it feels like I am running on air..."

"And if you look down you'll fall?"

"Yeah."

"Don't look down I guess."

The chinook's journey home was uneventful, that was, until Dr Knight fell out of his seat and went into convulsions. Blackwater rushed over to assist but just as he got to him Knight stopped convulsing and rose up, seemingly taller than he had been before and the skin around his eyes stained bright alien green. Before anyone could react Knight had snatched Blackwater's M1911 semi-automatic from his side-arm holster and with unnatural precision flicked off the safety and fired three shots underneath the DuPont Kevlar vest right into his gut. Blackwater fell backwards and Knight pointed the weapon at Shelly-Cooper who only escaped the barrage of bullets he unleashed by the reaction of Blackwater who made a grab at the gun as he collapsed. Shelly-Cooper drew her own weapon but hesitated to fire as her partner and previously non-homicidal coworker wrestled on the floor – she instead took a taser from her utility belt and jammed its prongs into Knight's neck who collapsed allowing her to incapacitate him with zip ties around his wrists and ankles.

Meanwhile, Blackwater, pale in the face and losing blood at an alarming rate, leant against a seat and watched the efficiency of her movements with a detaching sense of pleasure interrupted now and then by a dull pain in his abdomen, thinking to himself how he should have admitted how he felt to her long before this moment but also how silly and vain his whole attraction to her was. Knight was shouting about becoming one with him, with something called Golgoth, which would make us all very happy apparently. Shelly-Cooper came over her eyes wide with panic and a medical kit and Blackwater tried to say something but found he wasn't able to. Here I am again with the sudden clarity of a near-death experience, he thought – this not being his first. His first he remembered in rapid images of limbs and dirt and jawbones and dirt covering him entirely, whereas in moments before this he had dived into a foxhole after Badger had called for a medic because Cutty had been sliced in the head by a piece of shrapnel from a KPA grenade of which the fragments had to be removed from the wound that then had to be cleaned and disinfected before finally being sutured shut ( _Chapter 7: Projectile Incisions_ , pp. 47, SOF Combat Medic Manual), the correct treatment method which Blackwater knew would give Cutty the greatest chance of survival but which meant absolutely nothing when a mortar strike exploded five metres next to their foxhole. All three of them explode upwards, so it seems to Blackwater who does not lose consciousness as he is buried by a ton of dirt. Blackwater does not know where his body begins and where Cutty or Badger ends, or if he is alive or dead. He is screaming and trying to get away from whoever's dead lips were pressing against his face. He cannot move until he feels something give way underneath his feet, a void below him. At once he knows that he is dead and that he is going to fall down into hell, he knows it more than he has known anything in his life. The terror grabs hold of him and so do the demons he feels pulling him by his feet down below into what he imagines is a grand cathedral of bones of which he will become a part of, just like the one underneath Paris he had seen pictures of. The demons pull and pull and then the terror turns into a strange kind of relief. What a shock it was to feel relief at that moment, it wasn't that he wanted to go to hell but just the thought of the battle being over, the Battle of Bloody Ridge but also the one raging in his heart between good and evil, brought him a great deal of peace. Perhaps this was the devil's greatest temptation, simple certainty, even if all that certainty promised was oblivion. But maybe it was something different altogether, Blackwater later reflected, perhaps this was evidence of a shaded cloister in his soul that had been yet undisclosed and was beyond the shining wisdom of the big-voiced preachers his parents had dragged him to see every Sunday in the run-down community centre. The demons pulled him down and through but Blackwater only found US marines staring at him, and he realised he had been upside down the whole time, flailing his feet around in the air like a fool.

Stay with me, said Shelly-Cooper. And here he was dying again. It wasn't so much terror this time that possessed him but disgust at the tedium that was the business of dying. He felt sick to his stomach at the monotony of his thoughts, nauseous as he held close to his heart the memories he treasured: being held by his mother as a boy, his first kiss, standing by his father on his deathbed – but also recoiling from them as somehow as just as contrived or cliché as his romance with Shelly-Cooper. In attempts to reconquer these moments and fight the increasing detachment Blackwater tried to recall the smaller details to these memories: the way his prom date bit her lip when he asked her to dance, the taste of home-cooking after a year of ration packs and cafeteria slop, the smell of the family car's leather interior as he sat on his mother's lap at the drive-in cinema while she held hands with his father, surrounded by impassioned teens going far further than hand-holding, while they too reminisced about their courting days – posturing and contriving their memories in that Citroen DS just as he was on the floor of a CH-47 Chinook. In the end, it was self-deceit and he knew it. The only memory he could in honesty relate to was of the auction of his grandmother's house after they moved her into a retirement home. It wasn't his own feelings at the time with which he empathised, the farewell nostalgia of his early childhood where he had spent many hours playing with the neighbourhood kids around the plum tree in the backyard, nor his glum father whose face wore the expression of someone coming to the realisation of their mother's mortality and ultimately their own. No, what he empathised with was the house itself which wore the adornments and ornaments of life, as if the games of cowboys and indians and sunday roast dinners could start again at any moment, but was nonetheless untenanted, this being what Blackwater was overcome by – the sensation of having lived a life untenanted. He vomited blood onto himself. Blackwater imagined the auctioneer swinging his gavel left and right while he watched, without comprehending, the green-eyed Knight manage to rise though still confined by zipties and open the side door to the chinook using his mouth. Shelly-Cooper turned but it was too late, he jumped out. She started saying something but Blackwater couldn't hear over the auctioneer rattling off twenty seven hundred yessuh twenty seven and a half great home spacious interior they don't make them like this no more folks nice plum tree round the back but you're always bill and I don't wanna be no apache no more in this beautiful neighbourhood and plus mother's waiting for me at home calling once calling twice, it smells like rains a-coming, and sold.
200 flat

"As delicious as these pralines are, I am assuming you didn't just invite me over for coffee and cake."

"I asked you over to ask about your book, Mr Fowler."

"Please, call me Henry or Hal, and what do you want to know about it?

"All I want to know, Mr Fowler, is why you are writing it?"

"Ah I see..." said Henry Fowler, putting his coffee down, "Is this about the recent news about Callum that's been talked about on TV?"

"You mean the recent news about Callum that _I've_ been talking about."

"Well yes, I -"

"No, it isn't to do with that directly. I simply want to hear in your own words why you are writing a biography on my husband."

"Callum was a well-known figure, NASCAR champion, a man with a terrific career that ended tragically, and now, I suppose, due to actions you've undertaken yourself ⁠— a scandal."

"I'd say it were more his actions, which I am bringing to light, which make him a scandal."

"Of course, of course, that's what I meant. I was talking from a purely marketing perspective, Mrs Garrow."

"It's Ms Fontenot now."

"Apologies I didn't know you had changed it back."

"And now you know. However, I still don't know anything about this book. All you've told me is the blurb, I just want to know why you are writing it."

Henry scratched his head, "Listen I know things weren't so good between you and him in the end, he said as such to me while he was still alive, so I knew before your face start popping up on those 60 minutes promos. But politely, and I emphasise politely, my interpretation of your husband differs from yours but that's not to say you will entirely disagree with it. Let me read you something from my manuscript and show you."

"Please," she replied and sipped from her coffee.

Henry flipped through his notes in a fluster, trying to find a specific segment.

"Here it is, a little introduction ⁠— 'the world was infatuated with Callum Garrow the race car driver and his loud personality off the track, but behind the image was a man who overcame great challenges even before he conquered Talledega in 2017. Black, raised by a single mother, the youngest of five siblings, living on the Bayou as poor as "the dirt his house was sinking into" according to the man himself. None of this prevented him becoming a champion of not only his country but also a role model for his community, never forgetting Lafayette and often talking about the pride he felt to represent his city. Though Callum was a worldly figure in the media, it was clear upon meeting him that this was a man close to his roots. In 1998, he married high school sweetheart Anna Fontenot, moving with her from Layafatte to start a family in Atlanta, though he did admit that he could never stay away from the Bayou for very long."

"I got some thoughts on all that."

"I'd love to hear them."

Ms Fontenot, instead of indulging him right away, picked up his coffee cup and her own and took them into the kitchen.

When she returned and sat down, she told him, "First of all he hated the Bayou, both of us did and that's why we moved. Second, when you start listing off his cirumstances you start with black, then go on being raised by a single mother, etcetera. Is being black the worst attribute a person can be hit with?"  
"I am sorry Ms Fontenot, that's not what I meant but I feel you."  
"Oh, you feel where I am coming from. I hope ya'll feel me when I say that this isn't an ebonics language exchange, so you can quit the white-boy pandering. Plus that wasn't what I was getting at."

Blushing, he replied, "Okay, what were you getting at?"

"That Callum didn't give a damn about race. I know you've probably got a lot of quotes written down somewhere from his after race press talks about the minorities of America, his never-give-up, keep-your-chin-up speeches, but if you could have seen him hustling around Lafayette before he got his hands on those cars. He knew how to play both sides, whatever the situation asked, be the obedient negro to whitey and talk jive with the best of them. The easiest of them all were the bleeding heart liberals. That's what he used to call you, 'I've just been to a museum with that bleedin' heart.' The joke's on me though because I am sure half the time he was seeing one of those girls of his, those ones that were on the news recently you may have seen, or was just whoring or doing Lord knows what."

"I sure am a bleeding heart, guilty as charged, but that's not all true. I think he truly meant a lot of what he said to me, and you can't deny being black is tough especially down in the south. Maybe he embellished things here and there but as a biographer that's par for the course. Especially for a man as accomplished as your husband, a little ego is entailed."

"Ex-husband," she said.

"Ex-husband, right. And here's what I want to know if he really is the sociopath you put him out to be on live television, then why did he marry you, a black woman from his neighbourhood, who had gone through the same things as he did? Wouldn't that suggest he did feel something for all he went through and likewise what you went through?"

"I can tell you easy enough why he married me. On our honeymoon, I asked him the same question. We're sitting in bed, and he turns over and kisses me on the forehead, tells me its 'because you remind me of my cunt of a mother.'"

"And you didn't think about getting out the marriage at that point?" asked Henry.

"Oh trust me, I did and I tried to a few times as well. But Cal always had a way of making you see things differently. See things his way. Which he's done to you too. And done it to such an extent that you don't even know its been done, and that you'd believe his stories over me or any other person out there whose neck he stepped on his way up, many of them that I am sure will come up to you if you choose to publish this book of yours."  
"Well then explain it to me, I am all ears."

"I will but I don't have high hopes, he's clearly got you wrapped up even if he might be a burnt up corpse, black as coal and buried down in New Orleans.

"Try me."

"He knew when you were feeling and thinking you were a person ⁠— or like when you feel you were on the rise."

"Could you elaborate?"

"It's complicated, but... it's like how you feeling as you're coming into shape, into something intended from out of the centre of yourself. Not in a vain way but in a universal or ⁠— I don't know ⁠— cosmic way."

"Coming into shape?"

"Something like that. It's more like when you get the hang of something for the first time. Like, falling in love, or thinking you're in love, you feel like you're in one of those romantic movies, or a fairy tale, walking hand and hand with someone for the first time, imagining where things could go. It can even be before you even get together, it's like you finally understand that part in the movie, two becoming one, and now you're finally part of the bigger picture. Feeling like you are becoming ⁠— and enjoying to knowingly perceive yourself as becoming."

"So Callum could see you had fallen for him?"

"He could see it a mile away, see right through me and all the silly ideas I had about what my life could be with a handsome, funny, ambitious guy like him."

"So he was confident and observant, I don't see anything criminal about that."

"No, but what he did to me over eight years of marriage was a crime. And you're not getting it, Mr Fowler, I don't just mean 'becoming' in love, I mean any sort of becoming. You yourself, I see what you were the moment you stepped in here and why he enjoyed letting you write what you thought was a biography of a man who, in reality, never told you a single true thought he had. I can see you becoming. And what I can see you thinking about yourself becomin' is a great man of letters, the great finder the unlikely humanity in the strangest, weirdest corners of America. I bet he told you about the purr of the engine, the roar of the crowd, the smell of burnt rubber, and all those pretty bits of prose he could throw out on a whim. And you ate it all up because you connect to many dots and put together the pieces of people who aren't really there, and that makes you easy, that makes you another couillon to a guy like Cal. 'Cause sometimes that humanity your searching for isn't to be found, Mr Fowler, sometimes rapists just rape, and killers just like to kill. They have a good home life, a good loving mother and good brothers and good sisters like Callum had, and they just do evil things because it's their nature. There isn't always a tragic backstory you can make a buck off."

Henry rubbed his moustache with his knuckle and let a few seconds of silence pass, contemplating his thoughts, "He wasn't perfect, I'll admit that Ms Fontenot. But he had a soul like everyone else and I didn't want to say this but your impression of Callum is very coloured by your own perspective on the man and not to mention by the trauma of his death. When we visited the High Art Museum or the Oglethorpe museum, you should have seen him then, he was in rapture in the midst of the beauty," Henry searched through his manuscript for the appropriate pages of the scene but gave up and continued, "Of course, he lacked the vocabulary to truly express what he felt ⁠— but his spirit was that of an artist. I saw it with my own eyes, he couldn't spin any lies about that, could he? Looking as he did as a child in wonderment in those galleries. And he had no prejudices about contemporary art. I remember we were standing in front of a Barnett Newman, in front one of those big red sublime canvas, completely abstract, and he turns to me with a smile and tells me this is what it looks like out on the straight, on the big one, the 'dega, going 200/mph, everything blurred to shit. Everything is so simple when you're in that state, he told me, the roads a grey blur, the skies a blue blur, the trees go by in zips, right move and you win, wrong move and you die. Callum Garrow could have been a poet had he lived long enough to put pen to paper."  
Henry fell back into his seat exhausted but Ms Fontenot didn't let up and shot back, "If he lived, yes, if. But he died laughing did you know that? He was careering at 210mph, and when he lost control he was laughing, the crew members heard him laughing through the control. The man was a maniac on the speedway, go ask some other drivers, hell even the ones in his squad. They were all afraid to race with him. He loved the chaos, he didn't give a shit about abstract art, he wanted death he wanted to destroy. He'd come home drunk nearly to death and smelling of pussy and he'd tell me he was making himself into a human bomb, that he was going to end the next race with a twenty car pile-up, that he was a man-shaped absence, a black hole and that he was going to take as many people with him as he could. That was his idea of how to pass a good time. And go figure that when his car flipped he was still laughing when as it rolled and disintegrated into that flaming wreck, I bet he laughed until that fire burned him out. And I am not entirely sure he's not laughing still, cracking up in hell. You know, the last thing he said to me before he got in the car, after shouting at me about some useless thing, was ⁠— this isn't over Anna, things ain't ever going to be over between us. So you tell me if that fucking monster's a poet." She buried her face in her hands regretting something which was inexpressible, even to herself.

Henry collected his things and got up to leave.

"I am sorry Ms Fontenot, I've heard and considered everything you've said but I can't say that I am going to substantially change the direction of the biography. I am still going to publish my book and I am sorry if that goes against the kind of story you've been telling about him on the news and whatnot."

Ms Fontenot looked up with a smile, "You really don't get it, Henry. I didn't invite you over to ask you to stop you writing your book. Write it, publish it. It's more scandal, fan to the flames to keep the brand going, that's more money for me and for you. I got three kids to bring up off the back of the brand, the brand being Callum. He was a brand back then, and he still is now as he knew he would be as he pushed down that accelerator for the last time. He got everything he ever wanted in life and if he didn't see this very conversation turning out as it did I'll be damned."

"I- I don't understand."

"Sure you do. I invited you over because I just wanted you to know you're complicit, that you can't pretend you're a saint anymore. I'm pointing out the strings to the puppet."

"Why?"

"I guess Cal's rubbed off on me more than I thought. You might find that too someday."

Outside the window came a terrific crash, which was followed by a hellish screeching, produced by a belt coming loose off an engine's alternator. He ran to the window and looked out. The screeching continued ⁠— a rinsing machinic scream. "There's been an accident out on the street, wait here," he said to Ms Fontenot. But she didn't reply and sat white-knuckled in her chair, looking as pale as a ghost.
civil hands unclean

If cleanliness is indeed next to godliness, then while praying should I shuffle along the pew and sweep the floor with my knees? For to clean and be in cleanliness is to create joy and be within it. Fresh skin and soft hair after a shower is nice ⁠— yes, but I am talking about a cleanliness found deeper, reaching within the pores, under the skin, and more to the point cleanliness is not about _having_. Cleanliness is reduction, sanding and scraping away at the impurities but also ourselves. The desert is clean and so is laughter – though tears are even cleaner. And one of the cleanest feelings you can experience is found by watching the opposite platform at a train station. Take in each individual person: their mannerisms, gentle and violent; their expressions, of mouth and eye ⁠— the fiery passion casting forth embers across the tracks and beyond, or a pulling glimpse into an empty abyss within an iris that only reflects the void ventured under a crushing train wheel.

Each person has a destination, one in mind and one already written, be it the Pit or the Garden or whatever notion you have of paradise. The train station is not a destination nor is it a very nice place to be, let alone a paradise. Tolerable, yes, but look again to the opposite platform to see the impatience in their eyes, in their taping feet, so many different shoes but it doesn't matter they all tap the same. Moving together, as do their eyes, which scurry down the tracks searching for a phantom train that has been delayed because of a jumper who must be cleaned off the tracks and then mourned, but more importantly be cleaned off the tracks.

Every pair of eyes are searching for that train but one. A pair of eyes you know. Have known rather, but you don't know them any longer, if you ever did. Nor do you know any longer her high crested cheekbones that breach the blonde frame weaved by her hair, those locks that would bounce off her delicate ears to rest on her shoulders. Your eyes can't stand to meet hers, and now you've joined the pack of restless eyes, tacking right and left, searching downtrack. "Look at anything but her," you think, as your feet tap for absent rhythm while you wait for something, for a distant rumble, a horn, a shift in the wind. And as if by looking down the tracks you satisfy some hidden ritual which summons the train on the horizon.

Take in each person, even her. Note all their problems, carried in pockets, suitcases, and bags under eyes. But their burdens seem lighter as the train comes closer, invisible strings lift the presence of smiles into their faces. Motion begins, action stirs in the blood as the passengers walk up and down the platform, getting ready to find the right door, the right seat, though in the end the train will take them all in the same direction. But she doesn't move, which you can only observe in cowardly glances. But you become braver and you try to hold your eyes against hers, and it is like looking into the sun.

The train pulls up to the station. You try to hold your gaze with hers, and you come close, but you look away just as the train consumes the scene on the opposite platform, walling away your heartache. Will she still be standing there when it leaves? You fear it. But as the train begins moving off, that fear evaporates and you realise you fear her disappearing more. It has been what you have always feared. And the train moves off and the platform is empty. Every man, woman, and child has been taken, they are all on their way, riding a wave of purpose in that carriage which for a short time is a safe place, a place no one has to struggle, no one is getting ahead and no one is falling behind. Now the opposite platform is clean, a deep clean, it has been reduced completely. She's gone. The only mote left upon it is your own gaze, and it would prefer to be unobserved and so it sends you a train to somewhere far away. Find a seat by a window, lean your arm on the sill, lean your face on your arm and let the graffiti fly past into annihilation.
Bespoke Patina

"I feel sick, can we draw the blinds?"

"Mil, we're in Switzerland. What's the point of being here if we don't look at this view?"

"I know, but ⁠\- alright I'll face the other way," Milly said, picking up her book and moving from the salon chair to the bed on the other side of their honeymoon suite.

"Are you feeling alright, though?" her husband, Stuart, asked once she had sat down.

"Yeah, fine." She reopened her book, something by Goethe which she had bought in Weimar, but found she was unable to keep her mind focused on it ⁠— a behaviour she chastised herself for on principle but which she now forgave due to the present situation. Give me a break, she had told herself on countless occasions across the past two weeks they had spent travelling across the major cities in western Europe. And now she was conceding to herself once again in Switzerland, which they had arrived in two nights ago at the GSC arrivals terminal where they had bumped into, by apparent coincidence, Stuart's platinum blonde colleague Stephanie, and her equally attractive friend who were on vacation. "What are the chances? So crazy," she said in her Californian twang that had been ringing in Milly's ears since they had had dinner the night before in Geneva. Stephanie and her husband seemed so familiar with each other that it seemed unusual that her name had never come up in conversation or that Milly had not been introduced to her at the several staff parties that she had attended with Stuart. The usual thoughts were running through her mind but she was no stranger to these and gave herself permission to have them before asserting that they were bullshit.

Stuart wouldn't pull something like that, not again and not on their honeymoon. He was a good man and he made her happy, she was happy with him, with their new house in New Jersey (a little far from her friends and family in New York) and with her new job as an interior designer in an adjunct department attached to a large furniture boutique (an occupation which she had come to begrudgingly as a compromise after her career as an artist had failed to take off, her husband telling her nicely that the exploration of her own mind and the value gained from self-expression was _priceless_ , whatever that meant to him ⁠— an investment banker). But she had made peace with the fact that her attempts to break into the art world had gone down in flames, this being the verbatim phrase she gave to her coworkers when she had introduced herself, charming them by exploiting the common disparagement that upstart good-for-nothing artists inspire and which she had been on the wrong side of until now. Nonetheless, she found interior design fascinating and thought of it in positive terms like 'playing dollhouse as an adult'. Even now, as she put her novel down on the timber-framed glass table, she found herself contemplating the design of their suite. The furniture was organised around the huge windows that gave rise to the magnificent mountain view which the chairs and couches were angled towards so that Milly never had to miss out on the vertigo-inducing Swiss Alps that seemed to expand both towards and away from her like an infinitely shifting camera lens. Only the bed remained on its own axis separate from the orbit of the window, it's exceptional quality being its orientation towards the door ⁠— a common enough phenomenon that could be explained in terms of evolutionary psychology or Feng Shui principles, both of which boiled down to being able to spot bedroom intruders. The general decor was made of timber or at least had an artificial timber cladding, it was the typical cottage and cuckoo clock theme which Milly had first adored but was now sick of after finding it in Germany, then Austria and now again in Switzerland. The room smelt of pine-scented air freshener (the cheap kind). The skirting and coving were made of genuine wood as was the shield, itself made of reconstituted woodchip and hanging on the wall adjacent to the window, of the coat of arms adorned with an invented family banner and a woodsman's hatchet (blunted) which formed an X by crisscrossing with a traditional Swiss drinking horn (also ornamental, the mouthpiece filled in to discourage guests from using it as it had been intended to be used). The theme of vestigial ornamentation did not escape her attention but she outright refused to think any further on the subject, smelling, as she had such a knack for, jagged and sharp things at the end of that train of thought. Instead she fiddled with her still unfamiliar wedding band before diverting her attention again, this time onto her belongings to check that everything was there. She was self-conscious enough to know that there was no practicality in this (she already knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was all there), but fortunately being self-aware of this did not sabotage the emotional comfort she got from it. Clothes and shoes, there and there, toiletries, here, emergency money, here, passport, passport? It should have been in the cream coloured satchel but she couldn't find it.

"Stuart, do you have my passport?"

"Oh is that my responsibility now too?" he said, who had been typing what appeared to be a long message on his phone.

"No. No, I don't mean ⁠— I just can't find it. Do you remember seeing it?"

"Yeah... in the safe where you put it _'just to be careful'_ in Vienna."

"It might still be there."

"What?"

She waited for him to say something else but he went back to his phone, very occupied with whatever it was he had been doing on it the whole day. The silence finally breaking him down, he put down his phone so that he could devote his full attention to giving her an exasperated look. She stared at him, her throat taut as if she were going to scream, to scream right in his stupid fucking squinty face. But she didn't.

Conceding, she asked, "Do you have the number to the hotel then?"  
And several long sighs later, she found out that the hotel did, in fact, have her passport and apologised they hadn't called to inform her earlier. Stuart told her that there was a flight back in Vienna in a few hours they could take.

"I can go by myself," said Milly.

"Mil, I am not mad. Shit happens, don't worry. We'll go and then fly onto London. We're only missing out on half a day basically."

"But there's no point us both going, you can enjoy your last night and have dinner with the girls. I'll meet you in London."

"Are you sure it's fine? I want us to be together."

"No it's fine really," and so it continued until Milly had convinced him (and herself) that it was super totally fine. After all, she couldn't force Stuart to come with her because it would be admitting that something was not fine and everything was fine so she would leave, take a taxi to the airport, that non-place where she could dissolve into nothing, leaving her husband in Switzerland (where he more-than-likely would fuck Stephanie's brains out on the bed where Milly was now packing her suitcase, engaging in the kind of wild high impact slapping intercourse that an uptight repressed neurotic like Milly had never been able to give herself over to ⁠— not even on her honeymoon.)

"Bullshit," she whispered to herself and tried to keep her mind off that and on the decor, even though it was beginning to irk her. I mean, the cuckoo clock and cottage aesthetic was such an obvious attempt at recreating a chapter in their history that wasn't associated with Nazism. As if they could cover-up, by some cheap sleight of hand, the terrible power and beauty that fascism brought to the region, as if reverting to lederhosen and homesteads could skip over the traumatic red and black which had caught ablaze here. We'll always choose our fantasies over reality, she thought and, as if to outrun the thought trailing on that one's tail, clambered up with her luggage only to be hit with a wave of vertigo, sending her stumbling and falling apart like her dream: A perfect honeymoon in the alps, which she had given over and over to her Barbie and Ken in their little house where white confetti snow fell past the tiny windows from out of the bottom of her father's shredder.

"Here Mil, let me," said Stuart, picking up her suitcase.

How glad he seemed to get her out the door. She walked ahead of him trying not to cry, trying not to look out the window, convincing her nausea that the mountains were painted on, that it was an ornament, only to find as she reached the door that it too was ornamental. She couldn't turn the handle. She stood looking at the vase that stood next to the door, lost in its bespoke patina surface until she recognised herself in its glossy finish. Her doll eyes looking back at her, her lipstick mouth open as if she was going to scream.
War remnant

Like a Vietcong punji trap, love is easy to fall into but hard to pry your doughy flesh from. The sharpened bamboo smeared with faeces and animal blood, the trip wire strung and waiting for young Americans.

They look pretty, she said to me at the war remnant museum, like wind chimes. And I suppose I should have read more into that comment than it just being another wisecrack that added yet again to the innocent and vivacious identity I had formed around her. Even back then, I was aware that behind her auburn eyes there was an incomprehensible void around which her lovely, observable features orbited. And for a time I was clinging to one and jumping to the next ⁠but always feeling that the tide was drawing me into the centre of some great calamity beyond my perception. Like stars colliding, like the pipe grenade that hung from the doorway of a palm leaf thatched hut and dropped to the floor at Pvt. Brown's feet on July 31, 1969, the last day he would feel Vietnam's fetid sunshine boil the sweat from out his brow. And on that particular morning he had woken with an intense itch around his groin. "That Saigon whore..." he complained with a smirk on his face to the other soldiers in his platoon, who all knew that he was in love with her. In fact, his last thought as he comprehended what lay before him ⁠— the pipe, filled to the brim with black powder ⁠— the fuse, lit and rapidly shrinking ⁠— was a singular question; did that Saigon whore love me back? It was a question that followed with the ultimatum that if she did love him then: glory be to God (the father of love) but if she didn't then, "No way man who cares ⁠— plenty more gooks in the sea." Like almost every question asked in time x space, someone decided to let this one go unanswered unless you count the dull thud that shook the earth around the My Lai village which ejected the insides of Pvt. Brown onto the bamboo walls. A close friend, Pvt. Burkhart, was the first on the scene and couldn't quite believe what he was seeing, his first thought process was a simple reflection that the interior of the hut looked like his kitchen's walls when his baby boy had a tantrum and threw the porridge onto the walls, though this was a different colour... different, he assured himself. And so on, etcetera, things happen for a reason, I feel like we were meant to cross paths, she said to me on more than one occasion. Like stars colliding, like Pvt. Brown, it was inevitable and it was inevitable to end in disaster.

We passed by pictures of grotesque and suffering children that had been mutated by Agent Orange, she lowered her gaze from the horror and I admired her nape and let my eyes glide down her back. But it has all changed now, her pale smooth skin has become translucent and sickly, her small tattoos are tacky and facetious at best, her smile is a lie and her eyes are looking in another direction, tempting another. Everything has changed and so have I. Damn that iteration of myself that worshipped compassion and willingly tied myself to the pyre of love. I have walked from that cinderous heap a creature of charcoal crumbling with frail curses to never again attach myself to that common monster that goes by so many beautiful names but who all share the same damned word; lover.
scholia5

In the library, there reflected in a glass, an apparition, a silhouette at its task that held the shape of a woman. I've had my time with those I suppose, but not with the shadow of a woman ⁠— who may fit more with my dreams and spin my imagination into a fervour. Why not turn around and take her in, in her entirety? Well, I am a very little man and there is barely room in my head for me alone, but maybe I could slip in a shadow under the door, hide it under the carpet or stick it on the wall, on a sheet, by a lamp, as another actor in the theatre of my dreams. It is perfect and I'm happy except from the small fear that the tiny woman in the glass will turn around and regard me in the same surface in which I am regarding her. And as tiny as she, I enormously be ⁠— a whale's eye leering through a porthole, a wolf squeezing through a keyhole.
scholia9

I found myself like a man who constructs a box without ever looking inside, who carves each detail as I cornered each aspect of my essence ⁠— and then with the project complete opens that box and finds nothing therein.
Involuntary Twoism

Bedouin Dreams of Green i

¬

Lonely Planet

Floyd Rd, London SE7 8BL, UK

If Vietnam is the hidden gem of South East Asia, then Sa Pa is its crown jewel. Sitting 5,000 feet high in the shadow of Mount Fansipan and only a four-hour bus ride away from Hanoi, it's a must-see. Why? Well, Sa Pa is simply sensational!

Each successive sight, sound, and smell has left behind an imprint upon my mind. The pleasant green mountains, tipped with white-capped bamboo forests; the icy clear streams, fed by snow shook from high perches by lumbermen wearing Dunlop racquet snowshoes, flowing down into the terraced rice fields of the low land villages; the warm timber homesteads, filled with smiling faces, music, laughter, and the warm breath of an aromatic hearth nourished by recently harvested bamboo, wafting the aroma of delicious authentic home cooking out into the village.

_The Vietnamese dishes are cooked with only the freshest ingredients, in fact everything in Sapa is exceedingly alive. Even the most elderly residents have a youthful glean in their eyes. The Golden Dawn Lodge offers a free breakfast of banana pancakes, which you can enjoy from the balcony that overlooks the valley. Relax, and gaze on the vivacity dancing out of every tributary to the bellowing river down below_ ⁠ _— that spits white foam and sings in celebration of its own transience._

The perfect place for two.

¬

\-- is the copy I sent to you on Monday. I am requesting a redaction, actually no, I demand it. In light of my unintentional extended stay here my original article is now misleading, I have a new perspective, I changed my mind. It has changed me.

Where to begin? With the view, I suppose. When I rode up to the lodge I didn't pay much attention to 'the grand view' that would later occupy my mind for days. My old Honda Wind struggled on the village's only road, which was more pothole than asphalt and a challenge that would have been fun if not for the deadly drop that would take you in a frugal instant, and with a generous change of mind give you a dozen fat seconds of adrenaline inflated time to contemplate the fast approaching ground. So I kept my eyes planted in front of me, lest I accidentally make a sharp Verne-ian downturn Journey to the Center of a Vietnamese Tabloid: "Another idiot tourist bursts his guts over paradise.

As I sighted the hotel, hanging off a cliff side, I was thrown into confusion by two confounding thoughts: the first was of pride, the kind you often feel in the midst of massive engineering marvels or historic monuments; and the second was of sickening disgust at the sheer arrogance it would have taken to conceive ⁠— let alone actually construct! ⁠— this crushed lotus flower, half folded origami, this Escher sketch manifest, this bamboo and concrete castle of anguish that I would be staying a night. "Just a few nights, though maybe they will be my last," I reassured myself ⁠— a few nights, ha!

The H'mong (the Hmong are an indigenous population native to these mountains) receptionist greeted me with a grin, a nod, and a wink ⁠— the last of which I assumed was a tic, but now in retrospect perhaps all three gestures were tics, or to take it further perhaps (less likely) every muscle he moved in the pursuit of this farce of artificial politeness was, in fact, a spasm. He explained in zips and squeaks that the owner was sleeping but that she would welcome me properly tomorrow morning. My bags were promptly taken by this twitching marionette, and off he went to show me my room, all while still in a seizure that coincidentally looked eerily identical to a perfectly coordinated man, putting one foot in front of another to my room. I spent the night haunted by dreams of Hanoi in flames and awoke with only vague details. A war that never was, a 50ft women knocking down red brick monuments, brick hearts and brick cupids, dust and smoke filled my head up until it bursts. I once heard a syllogism that madmen do not dream, the say so of a pair of bouncing spectacles, that visit me on their ride down the ridge of a steep nose only to be pushed back up by the finger of a Sisyphus-inspired fool. I have and always will refute that myth.

Eventually, the sun rose to conceal my frustrations and spread its veil across the valley, casting golden embroidery onto the rice-fields sewn. It was a sight ⁠— all the dew lit up at once, a viridescent explosion, bedouin dreams of green. Enough of the flora and onto the fauna, as I am shortly going to meet my first specimen on my way to breakfast. As I descended the stairs I could hear a woman talking below me, her Latin ah's and eh's echoed up closing followed by a pair of purring trilled rr's,

"Te amo, pero este es el final. Te mereces algo mejor que yo. Adiós."

Beautiful, even without comprehending the meaning. Hola, I mouthed while descending, and after great anticipation, I found myself looking at a gorgeous woman, Spanish and a brunette. She put her phone down. I walked down the stairs, praying I wouldn't tumble and fall to my death, and then in an impulse, surprising to even me in its brazen bravery, asked, "Is this the way to the balcony?"  
She pointed to the window that showed the balcony was below,"Yes it is," she said with a smile and which for a split-second obliterated my every problem and for a second the world's mocking laughter fell silent behind a distant cicada's song, but after that moment my junkie of a prefrontal cortex piped up, "That was nice but when are we gonna get another? And how?"

I nodded and continued moving down the stairs to feign disinterest, although I couldn't help but let my eyes pour over her soft limbs that were as tanned and perfectly sanded as the bannister I held to desperately with my sweaty hand. I took a deep breath of her floral perfume, counted to three and exhaled with a ridiculous about turn like some court jester, "I arrived last night. How is the breakfast?" Her eyes looked in mine briefly and then heavenward (or should I say homeward?) in search of an English phrase to convey delight.  
"Is fine," she managed in her adorable accent, talking quietly in slight trepidation.  
I wanted to guide that precious tongue to the correct intonations and syllables, to have her recite Shakespeare without recalling Blanche of Spain muttering about 'the curthe of Rome.' I would give both arms and legs to play upon that Latin windpipe, to tune a lisp from that organ. But tuning the chick became out of the question as a broad-chested Italian strutted out of the adjoining room and wrapped his large hands around the waist of my fragile battente. He took a moment to look down his Roman nose, and I felt as Michelangelo to a just completed David ⁠— in awe and then suddenly envious. They began laughing at something idiotic, and I took leave to find solace in some pancakes.

So we had an Italian and a Spaniard, and it is important to note these characters as although they seem transitory (and they are) they are also eternal in a way. It became easier to think of them in their platonic form as time went on. While I eating those pancakes I began to feel the contractions of what we'll call the birth of this new perspective, call it anything but those ugly names the assorted psychologists and all other faux-wizards, from Freudian psychoanalysts to Roma gypsy palm readers, would call what happened to me in those hills. I know what happened while I reviewed Sa Pa; I reviewed and I reviewed and I reviewed, ha!

The pancakes were mediocre and also difficult to manoeuvre with the plastic cutlery provided. They were doughy, slightly cold, and I felt peculiar playing around with their fleshy texture, how easy it was to mishandle and tear. I gave up momentarily to enjoy the view. Life grows like dandelions out of every crack and corner, springing from every tributary. Animals graze and roam freely through the village, and almost half the residents seemed to be kids, playing soccer with a tin can or running up and down the steep hills with endless energy. "No television, I suppose," I said to myself, echoing a half-forgotten joke my father used to tell about the Catholic family of nine who lived next door. And past the villages the streams flow into to the great bellowing river at the bottom of the valley "that spits white foam and sings in celebration of its own transience." The river flows around the corner of the valley, where your eyes will again begin to climb up to the pleasant green mountains, tipped with white-bamboo forests ⁠— and you begin the sequence again. Would I begin my sequences again? The pain of the past year ⁠— I could never do it again and I wouldn't be able to do it the first time if I knew what was waiting for me. Those that do not study history are doomed to repeat it, are my dreams coming back to haunt me? Melbourne is so far away but what is this discomfort in my aorta? A German man (it is always obvious) broke my reminiscence as he sat down nearby and began to cut his pancakes into a grid of equal parts. His fork snapped under his rigid hand. "Here," I offered him mine, "I am not using it." I then rolled my pancake into a wrap and took an oversized bit with a grin. He laughed and introduced himself as Jonas, or was it Joseph? I can't recall as I was distracted by that Spanish goddess who walked past, embarrassed as pancake fell out of my mouth. She sat down at the other end of the balcony with her Italian close behind, following her red dress dancing in the wind which taunted every XY chromosome cell in the room like a fearless banderillero.

"Hey, don't get jealous friend," said Jonas with a smirk, though he had meant to say envious. I winked. As the Australian, I was happy to play the role of the larrikin, the descendant of some cheeky convict as we went through the traveller rigmarole. He lived in Bratwurst and worked at a Dusseldorf factory as I recall. Here was a man I knew well. Not that I had ever met him before, but he was the type of man you met everywhere ⁠— in that he was no one at all. His habits and customs served up to him from globalised media with a side of luke-warm soup ladled from the median of his inoffensive multi-culture. And I knew him well because I was like him. We could have been schoolyard chums or just met as we did then either way, we still would act the same. Moving from sea-washed shell to shell we hermit crabs have adapted so much that we have forgotten to find a persona of our own, though even if it occurred to. I was like him to an extent, treating art and culture like fashion accessories, that we professed sacred as we profaned them ⁠— but I was aware of my own vapid nature and despised myself for it. This self-hatred/awareness does not even bestow a uniqueness upon me, it is all an extension of that nothingness. If Jonas held this conscious aspect or if he was a mindless revenant I was yet to see ⁠— though I didn't have to wait long to find out.

A French girl (it is always obvious) sat by us and lit up a cigarette, like some nouvelle vague femme fatale. The smoke hung in the air, the smell lingered. I found her attractive and directed my body towards her as if I was going to ask a question. "What question could it be?" I thought to myself. It had to be sincere, and interesting, and it could be brash or be ironic but it could not be too much of either of these. It wouldn't hurt to be straight forward. And of course, funny, how could I forget funny? But more than all this, more than any other adjective, what I needed was timeliness. I can't sit here all, probing and investigating her like a sweaty Swedish sports masseuse. It had to be now.

"Hi, what's your name?"

"I'm Heloise, nice to meet you." Her eyes were a cold blue and her face seemed frozen in indifference, but the mere possibility of being able to melt that ice into a smile posed an exciting challenge. Brilliant. Fantastic. But shit I was lost, I hadn't thought of the second line. My mental cue cards had become muddled and it was all too much.

"Oh, I'm-"

And then I was interrupted in my semi-autistic hesitancy ⁠— "I'm Jonas."

Jonas, my old pal, with a keen observation of human behaviour like mine had seen my eyes flitter over the French girl. He knew I cared and now his head was rocked back as if he were about to give into a hearty laugh. These are the games that ghosts may play. I smiled in a sad sort of way, he had recognised the only weakness a ghost may have ⁠— a yearning for life. As the hollow-er man he had the advantage, he cared nothing for this girl where I had seen possibility, for which he hated me ⁠— as if I was better than him as if I deserved more than this pointlessness. The French girl's eyes left mine and met his, she unconsciously turned her body to him and pointed her outstretched leg in his direction. Within seconds they were getting along and laughing, I felt like I had been mutinied and was slowly watching my ship drift away in another man's hands. I had been the protagonist and now I had been pushed to the periphery. The battle was lost, bad luck fellas we'll get 'er next time.

Music, film, culture and of course travel, were the topics of conversation to which I was only an observer. Of course, I gave my customary comments, often sardonic always glib, like a ticket to ride it was the price of admission. Though the conversation gave the impression it was progressing, they were really going in circles like an infinite stairwell. But the artist of this illusion was not Escher but Jonas, whose direction of the topics discussed revolved around his tastes, his dislikes, his guilty pleasures, his carefully measured opinions on movements and trends ⁠— all were at once as strongly put as they were effeminately vague, crafting the grandest illusion of all ⁠— that he had an opinion on anything. Artificially constructed, his taste was tailored through careful namedropping and even more carefully observing the response, in order to gauge the next baited namedrop. This simple process is disguised by superficial comments: needlessly mentioning the year of production, referring to the artist by their first name, recalling behind the scenes anecdotes as if he was there, so very close to the creative process, though he couldn't be further away. But Heloise didn't notice or if she did, she didn't care. Apparently, their similar tastes was a sign of synchronicity according to Deepak Chopra's Spontaneous Combustion of Joy said Heloise, and that perhaps they were meant to meet. This made my failure sting all the more, not only had Jonas conspired against me but so had the whole cosmos. I felt indecisive, paralysed by misery and simultaneously inspired to jump up and shatter something into many pieces.

But I wasn't so much of a fool to fall that far into despair (yet), she knew what he was doing on some level. I suppose I can't blame her too much, women fear loneliness more than men though they have don't have to bear it nearly as much. I retreated, hoping they would not see it as such, and took a stroll through the nearby rice fields. I also should note that all of these observations were and still are plagued in doubt. It could be happening or it could all be in my head. After all, the true curse of ghosthood is not the endless death, each day spent plodding along towards entropy, but the endless inwardness. The void within, the echo chamber where nothing is forgotten but everything is distorted. Distorted with a subtle direction towards some profane monument I was building in my heart ⁠— built so slowly in layers of small tragedies like brick and motor. A cathedral of tears where sermons are whispered from a dark corner, spurring me to wonder about the nature of morality and its relationship to the modern man. Is it possible in modernity to get ahead without cutting corners? You can only work as hard as you can push yourself, and what if the extra mile is a mile too far; what if the candle can't be burnt at both ends, because it has so many lit ends it already looks like a spinning Guy Fawkes wheel; buckling down may as well be into an electric chair; and a scoff at any suggestion to pull some more weight than my own. Must we all become self-sacrificial like Saint Giles Corey (pre-canonised)? Who was tried for witchcraft and refused to deny or affirm guilt, who had weights placed upon his chest to crush him slowly lest he confess guilt or innocence, and when on the edge of death uttered the heroic words, "More weight." Now there is a true Christian. Perhaps that's the very key to it all ⁠— more weight.

I'll say no more on Giles Corey, let the dead be dead and save our breath. That is how things are conducted in Vietnam, they chant and sing and shout as I hear from a house nearby going through the funeral rites of a family member. We were instructed by H'mong receptionist to be quiet when sitting outside in the patio, which seemed ridiculous and hypocritical at first due to the racket they were causing ⁠— inhuman shrieks and warping drums. But suddenly all fell silent and so convincing was this silence that I believe no more would be said of the deceased by anyone that knew him or her ⁠— or at least no more eulogies. They worked their entire lives in a field identical to the ones that surrounded me now, and they deserved to rest. In the west our ghosts linger, restless lazy bastards.

"He was a good honest worker," a long-dead coal miner says of a long-er dead coworker who had just passed away finally after a slow and painful battle. Did they, as is due to meek, inherit the earth when they died of black lung in their early 30's? Was their endowment given down there by Mother Earth while they pillaged her bowels in black crusted tunnels of sulphurous drafts? To give Orwell his dues, should we see them as morally superior to the mine owner who sips wine and sups on black caviar without the compulsion to cough his lungs up? The wages of sin is death, but the wage of a Wigan Pier miner is death, and now we're stuck. The middle-class communist would aspire for revolution, crying out to the proletariat to split the mine owner's skull with those pick axes that had been forced into their hands; the Christian would aspire to speak truth to the mine owner, and if unsuccessful to martyrship; while the Vietnamese rice worker would remain silent.

Have you ever considered that martyrs of old may have suffered more but it could have been easier to bear ⁠— the pain while terrible was at least was clear and honest, it seems like God's voice was loud and for all to hear back then while the modern man perks his ear to hear a respite in whispers, precious relief from ailments he is barely conscious he is suffering from; day to day injuries, slights, and minor tragedies until the hour comes when he looks down at himself and in horrors sees he is but tatters and his soul has been mortally wounded by a thousand paper cuts, a ghost already fading into the white noise of rusted cogs grinding out static signals on forgotten analogue televisions, behind which a new anchor shouts at his camera, in the dark, "Where is Gabriel and will he bring his horn?"

¬

I returned. Nobody had moved while I had made my walk so I sat back down with Jonas and Heloise. She was chain smoking and I breathed in the secondary smoke with glee. It isn't a nice smell to the normal nostril, but to a jonesing smoker like myself, it is heaven. I suppose that doesn´t really make it a nice smell, the sadist yearns for the whip and the junkie for the needle but I wouldn´t call it affection. My addiction to cigarettes is a strange multi-faced monster, and each face is reflective and pointed inward in anticipation of that single moment, that first inhale. The only joy after tobacco use becomes habitual is the anticipation, like dread having a far superior power over the human mind than terror, and so likewise I feel my body relax as I retrieve filter, paper, and baccy. My eyes fall under a kind of calm slumber ⁠— but they are open! A cigarette will not put you to sleep, as it is one of those rare activities that occupies your eyes, mouth, nose, fingers, in essence, it captures your mind in a mindful state, leaving only your ears to enjoy that sound of that sweet inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, ah... Breathe deep, dead man.

As I rolled the cigarette, I contemplated the image of myself smoking it, which is just as pleasurable as smoking itself. A transatlantic voice arises, "A cowboy, a businessman, a rockstar, a sexy blonde, the French, the Italians, the Spanish, your friends, and the friends you wish you had ⁠— they´re all smoking, why aren´t you?"

And I´d reply to myself, "For one, the health risks are enormous and it makes your teeth turn ye-"

"You´re not going to look cool with that attitude, no one's going to respect someone not confident enough take a little risk."

"Emphysema is a little risk?"

"Listen, you haven´t figured out what to do instead of having a dart, old boy. I mention this because if you´re going to do nothing..." he would pause, "You´re are going to be stuck listening to me for a long while, and I know some things about you that you would rather not hear. Hmm, where should we begin? We haven´t thought about that girl back home for a while, what was her name again?" _C'est comme ça_. Rub, roll, twist, and stick your head through that cutout standee. Be the cowboy or the femme fatale, enjoy life as your silver screen hero, while your torch of liberty burns it way up to your martyred mouth and an unknownst guillotine presses down on your neck, inch by inch. Death has always relished his approach in small idiocies. She blew huge wafts of smoke that floated out into the dense jungle. Instantly, my mind began to pull memories out of that smoke, maybe because of the smell of cheap viet cigarettes or how napalm bombings left a similar mist in their wake, I was suddenly hit by the hazy memories of a war I had never take part of.

¬

I was just a teenager, eighteen years old, just a kid really, when I saw a strange poster in town. In great bold lettering at the top: WE WANT YOU...  
"For what?" I wondered and looked down through pictures of great battles, adventures in exotic places, beautiful women in the arms of brave heroes and written at the bottom:

...TO JOIN YOUR LOCAL BLOCKBUSTER. It was a disappointing punch line, maybe not as disappointing for the young men promised a heroic vacation by the very same poster and who ended up cold on a beach in Normandy. But this disappointment still rode heavy on my heart, and I decided that a movie would be a good distraction. The Blockbuster was a square blue building, sturdy and reliable as the plastic VHS boxes it housed. I was drawn to the action/adventure aisle and still having that WE WANT YOU slogan pulsating in my propaganda prone mind, grabbed a few war movies. They only seemed to have Vietnam War flicks, so I started with Platoon. And then next week I took another tour of the blue box jungle and came back with the Apocalypse Now. And the next week it was Full Metal Jacket. I was hooked like an opium-addicted GI whose seen too much of 'the shit.' I needed more, but I had run out of the classics so it was time to head further down the aisle, I knew in an objective sense that these movies were average but subjectively I didn't care ⁠— I was in the shit, I was off the boat, and there was no going back. Eventually, I started running low on supplies. The countless Martin Sheen copycats began to wear thin, and I could only be thrilled by a cheap napalm-barbeque, gook-nukem so many times. I tried documentaries but they were a cheap substitute, they didn't have the drama or the intimacy of a marine telling his half-dead buddy, not to god damn die on him. Wartime educational films were a nice novelty, especially the candid interviews with soldiers out in the field, their eyes held that thousand-yard stare that has been so poorly reproduced in cinema.

Only one filmmaker has accurately portrayed that hollow gaze, and it was by the director of the film who played the lead role himself. I found it in a stray pile of VHS that the clerk told me were going to be thrown out. Written on duct tape with a sharpie, Victor's March, a tale of Vietnam by Robert Pope. Imagine my luck coming across the director and lead actor of the film, Robert 'Bob' Pope, who is nothing less than a genius of cinema. It was obvious from Victor's March his debut (which I will describe in detail later), but, as is too common in this world, his genius was to be quashed. The US government banned half of his films for anti-war sentiment and censored much of his remaining releases. You have to understand that many of these films were made not too long after the end of the war when the government was promoting ridiculous John Wayne war films, Wayne then in his late fifties starring in a film based on a war where the average age was twenty-two. This resulted in _The Green Berets_ (1968) which I couldn't stomach even in the height of my jungle fever. Not to mention the public's feelings were still very raw, and so were Pope's films. The American public was not ready to look that thousand-yard stare in the eyes, to see the war for what it was.

I first watched Victor's March when I was eighteen and as a coincidence (there are many coincidences between our lives) eighteen-year-old Bob Pope was conscripted into the war in 1968, the war had been stewing and he was thrown head first into the Tet offensive. He survived to the great benefit of the world of cinema, despite him being a "nice, gentle boy, who wouldn't hurt anybody, always going on about being an actor, wanting to be like Marlon," his mother Angela Lucchineli described him in an unconventional joint interview in 1977.

"That boy isn't here anymore," Pope replied, to his mother, "He got lost in those hills there."

"Oh Robert, don't joke like that," she replied.

Pope leans forward, "No I'm serious, he's still out in 'Nam sweating and wondering why he isn't playing football and sharing a milkshake with Patricia from sociology."  
He laughs and there's a second of silence, "But hey, I'm still a gentle guy." Maybe the ghost of Pope's lost childhood is walking the very hills that I am. The jungle is a beautiful place and so full of life but I wouldn't call it pleasant. Even in my short ride on the ol' Honda Wind through it you could sense the horror, the endless murder out here of which the Americans and VC were merely hobbyists, the experts had been at it far longer, predator and prey interlocked forever as the two backed beast. Everything is out to eat. And as murderous as the jungle is, it is equally as erotic, and I think that is what really disturbed Pope. His films often featured tarnished love, or the perpetration of false love, and ultimately the predation of love. And the foremost example is _Victor's March_ (1979), loosely based on Homer's Odyssey, it is the story of a disturbed Vet's journey home. From the very first scene we are thrust into the titular character's perspective, who on his flight home is obsessing over a display of pinned insects he has bought for his teenage brother; a brother who, as we find out, is wishfully remembered as younger (and more innocent) than he in reality is. Victor stares intensively at a particular beetle, dark green and armoured just like a Patton tank, imagining giant beetles rolling out of the jungle ripping GI's in two ⁠— when an air hostess shocks him out of his trance, "Would you like a drink, honey?" and by a brilliant combination of lighting, makeup, and casting ⁠— her face appears looks grotesque and insectoid, but never bordering on caricature. This scene is iconic of Pope's films, though film academics will say it is his heart-wrenching honesty or wild imagination, these would be nothing without his prime virtue, subtlety ⁠— if you have talent it is so easy to show it off and adorn your work in cheap glitter but it takes strength to let your gifts speak for themselves, not to underestimate the intelligence or heart of your audience, and most importantly to have respect for the truth. Victor did see that air hostess as an insectoid, but not for the sake of the audience to give them a cheap scare, which is why Pope didn't have her coated in green paint or have two antennae glued on her head.

I understood what he meant mindless procreation; the pumping in, the flushing out of wet and fetid matter, I heard screams of terror or ecstasy, who knows? These brushes with the primitive world have their source in your senses, but beyond what you see, hear, or smell is the underground and the minuscule, which is where the bulk of sin is committed. If there is a hell under our feet, I theorise souls bound there will first get a taste for torment in transit passing downward through labyrinths of hives and ant hills; feeling, smelling, and being felt and smelt by the desperate queen seducing drone after drone to her eggs, an activity she relishes, in squeals, screeches and tempting pheromones. You yourself will find yourself drawn in by many eyes and caresses, and the moment you give in ⁠— and you will give in, as you have give in so many times before ⁠— you will be plunge into pleasure, and in the height of that ecstasy her mandibles will crush down on your head but fear not the end- you're body will continue, it no longer needs you and it hasn't for a long time now, what more could you expect from someone who gave in to their body's every whim and fancy, that's what you are, now and forever, a headless body fucking for eternity, knowing only pneumatic agony.

Perhaps this is what Pope suggests by the bug-headed woman ⁠— perhaps not. The film continues onwards and a young lady sits next to him, and an older lady on the other side. He observes them both and we are taken into Victor's mind again, in a flashback (a trope we will soon forgive) he thinks on his Mother and we see various childhood scenes that have no apparent meaning apart from conveying the basic information that this relationship is a fractured one, characterised by what we can assume is domestic violence. And then we are given the key to them through the love interest, whose name I've forgotten but who I'll refer to as cigarette girl and you'll see why. We are introduced to her by a short letter she has sent him in the opening scene, and whose relationship with Victor seems to be composed of a few short dates and nothing more. But Pope doesn't show these moments in any coherent or chronological fashion but merely emphasises and reiterates certain details, the way she sipped her coffee, holding it in both hands, a flick of blond hair, a hug, a hand that lingers on a waist and then there is one word spoken; goodbye. We never even see her face, maybe he can't even remember it properly. Maybe when he tries the proportions are wrong. The implication is that Victor has thought many times about these moments that are very short, mere glimpses into her life, but that shine so brightly in his life in contrast to the otherwise gloom and darkness surrounding him. Threads of these memories lead to other memories, an excellent technique (with which we can give absolution for the use of the cliche), and used in a fashion I'd never seen done before. Victor rubs his eyes, the cigarette girl disappears, he searches out the window through the clouds but suddenly we are no longer on our way to Massachusetts in a 747 but now sitting in a Huey flying over enemy territory. Bullets are flying, and pinging off the exterior but there's not much armour, a few guys have already been hit and are bleeding out. Victor holds onto his seat and then sees sitting across from him a beautiful blond woman in a grey turtleneck, completely unperturbed, with a calm smile that brings down his heart rate. We are back on the plane, the young woman on his side asks if Victor is okay, he loosens his grip on the armrest and takes a deep breath, "I'm alright, just get scared of flying sometimes."

"I bet you're not afraid of much," she grins and glances at his uniform.

"You'd be surprised," said Victor, the man who knows nothing but fear. Similar memories are shown. From napalm strikes bloom orange sunrises that whirl into auburn eyes and laughter. A Vietnamese bar filled to tears with whores finds itself replaced set piece by set piece, prop by prop, with each successive cut into a Californian pool bar, Teddy's Place, where they had spent some time. She asked him for a cigarette and he rolled her one, she didn't usually smoke, which he asked about, and she said dad used to smoke but she guilted him into quitting. So it was hypocritical for her too.

"So why'd he stop?"

"It's kind of weird. My mum got me to make a song about quitting, and I sang it to him."

"And he quit?"

"Yeah, he quit. I guess my singing was that bad, he didn't want to hear it again"

"Do you remember how it went?"

"Not really, hard to imagine what I came up with."

It had been hard for Victor to imagine as well, but he tried all the same. He imagined what she would have sang trekking through the marshes and sang the blues,

"Oh Daddy, please put it out,

before I frown and pout..."

And flying over rice paddies he sang off tune opera to the coolies,

"Burning bright oh Lord, splash the fire with rain and storm met,

I'm losing my dear fatheeerrr, to a cigareeettte,"

in what is very reminiscent of the famous Wagnerian chopper bits of A. Now, proving what I've long held as fact; that Coppola is as talented a filmmaker as he is a damn thief.

Victor sang that improvised song in every style he could think of. From bebop to doowop one hardened GI sang to his Dad about the dangers of smoking whilst coming inches to being brained by bush snipers or losing his manhood to punji traps. His company thought he had snapped, but his malady was much worse, he was in love.

I wonder if I could find love in memories while trekking these hills, as Victor did. The danger was that love turning into an obsession. Like the cultural illnesses that ail society, the symptoms appeared first his songs, the facts became exaggerated, it was no longer ballads just about the Father but about the whole family, Victor simply could help himself to hyperbole. He needs her in his pain, but it was all style and no substance. He talks with her in his head about everything and all things, he confesses to her that he imagines conversations with her in his head in his head in his head. His flashbacks feature the cigarette girl who grows in size, he turns away but she still grows beyond the confines of his mind, physically as a metaphor for his growing dependence on her memory. Her skin turns plastic, a gigantic doll, a counterfeit woman, and he is ashamed that this ever-pleasing pushover of a fantasy he has constructed for the sake of mental pantomime could ever compare to a real person. And now he is more afraid than he ever was in Vietnam, because he's coming back home, and he'll see her. Will she remember him? Perhaps it would be a mercy if she didn't, because what he really fears is not rejection, at least that has some sort of value and can be compartmentalised into some pathetic and private tragedy, but a reaction of mediocrity. A quick conversation about the weather and nothing more. A quick bullet in the head isn't much to be afraid of, but there's a real fear to be found in the much more painful fate of living on a thin sliver love – so thin that it might be imagined.

But surely there was some seed of purity, some truth behind the joke. There is and it is his only option, and so he dives deeper into his memories and through them into reality, deeper than he ever has before and thus the final act of the film and begins his true journey home. Not the rosy coloured home of his memories but the one that has changed without his witness. It is the archetypical journey down from the high mount back to the valley, a great green valley like the one I am in, which by no stretch of the imagination I could see Moses, Zarathustra, or Victor walking down right this very moment.

¬

I was supposed to leave the following day, so I spent my last full day in Sapa climbing the peak of Mount Fansipan. The group stood at the peak of taking selfies. Heloise had her arm playfully draped on Jonas's shoulders as they took photo after photo. I guess it is a testament to the fact that everyone has an artist within themselves, even if the art they create is trash. I understand the appeal of taking pictures on a holiday. But there are photos for memories and there are photos for ego. You would think from my hatred of selfies that I would also despise the Pisa leans and the Sphinx kisses but they are at least a novelty and have a touch of irony to them. But this selfie trend is tragic, the constant need to project yourself across the internet is narcissistic but also illogical. I can guarantee you that your families and friends, no matter their country and culture, will not care anywhere as much as YOU the person actually there ⁠— right now ⁠— in this fantastic moment which you have wasted. But as always this tirade mercifully ends with the conclusion that I should take my own advice, avoid the inward void to enjoy the sight for myself. I took in the scenery and saw a small grove away from the others, I felt at peace here and closed my eyes. When I opened them the H'mong guide was looking at me with curiosity and smiled, I don't know why I felt so friendly at that moment but I waved at her and she came over. I smiled and pointed to her camera, "Pictures?" I asked.  
She nodded, "Pictures," and showed me. And her pictures were great, such attention to detail and a real eye for colour. I pointed to the sun, "Sunset soon," and made the hand sign for taking a picture. Again she mimicked me, "Mhm, Sunset," and was silent for a few seconds till she exclaimed with pride, "Beautiful."

"Beautiful," I said, though I didn't mean the sunset. We laughed and she looked so innocent, almost like a child showing a painting to her parent. The feeling didn't last, as I soon felt the eyes of the group on me, I feared judgement like liars and cowards always shall. I made signs to use her camera and occupied myself zooming the lens and looking to the other side of the valley. The other side was less settled and the foliage was thicker, I looked from left to right hoping to find something, anything, of interest. The sun was setting and it gave the shadowy undergrowth a nice reddish glow.

We trekked back as the sun set and I let my imagination morph Gods and heroes out of the silhouetted canopy above us, which became a glowing red stage for my shadow actors. Unfortunately, the Brit wouldn't shut his gob about the recent world cup where England was bloody well robbed by an incompetent referee, who coincidentally must have been as blind as the Brit was to the breathtaking view he completely missed just like bloody Rooney had missed in the penalty decider. My legs felt like jelly, and my spine was wrung in knots.

"I'll sleep well tonight," I thought, but this was not to be the case at all.

Back in the room, I felt restless so I wrote the review, which even at that point I regretted, and then went out to the balcony to have a cigarette. The wind had dropped dead and nothing stirred in the valley, apart from a lone man, building a house by the river. For reasons that were a mystery to me, I watched the man for hours. At first, I thought it felt enjoyable because of how imagined I looked to him, sitting back in the shadows, solitary, my face lit by a momentarily orange glow. But no the pleasure was something less vain than that. Brick by brick, he laid them side by side. Though he was very old, nothing in the world could rush him for he knew that this house was going to outlast him. This house would be a far greater legacy to his name than any windswept tombstone, a grave affords no shelter from wind or rain and no one would sing songs of joy by candlelight by his grave, but in his house his children and their children would. So slowly and carefully he laid each brick ⁠— his legacy would not be a drafty one.

I was comforted by some other aspect of this sight, but in my fatigue, I couldn't quite figure it. It annoyed me until I retired to bed and slipped into another sleep filled with dreams chasing me to sunrise.

¬

It was time to leave finally, to return back home and leave the Sa Pa and leave Hanoi, leave the cracked infrastructure, the Bah mi and Pho vendors and their hungry kids, the cigarette basket beggers, the whir of scooters and incomprehensible shouting. Goodbye to midnight masseuse parlours, goodbye to boom boom girls, goodbye to Sapa, the crown jewel. I waved goodbye to the urchin children, who unfortunately cannot eat the fawning sympathies of mid-20's girls travelling through SE Asia that are really into Buddhism and eastern philosophy stuff and like yoga, to the rice farmers who live for a month off the change you could find behind your couch. I wave goodbye to the cute poverty, not quite the 'shacks of corrugated iron barely hiding an AIDS epidemic and scenes of domestic violence'-type poverty but the 'oh look at them, they don't have much but they keep on smiling'-type poverty, the poverty that liberal arts students think they're going to stop by spraying their hair purple. And then it's back to the family that'll take an interest for twenty minutes and then talk to you for an hour about how wacky Aunt Lyn adopted another cat, to which you can only sigh in agreement that being a cool wine aunt is cool and not not, definitely not, pathetic. But at least it was going to be a change of scenery, and that brought with it a relief ⁠— I had been in Sapa far too long, the little imps had began to catch up.

But as I was saddling up my Honda Wind to make a break for it the receptionist waved me down. He stumbled one foot in front of the other, convulsing in his quiet orderly way. He let cry an incompressible series of sounds from his mouth, and if one assumed he was a conscious human being and not a stringless marionette they might be able to decipher him saying, "Sir there is an urgent message for you on the phone."  
Before picking up the phone, I regarded him with a cold stare and became convinced of a grand conspiracy that he was not only a peripheral character within my life, but also every single other person's life, and perhaps somehow his own. The phone barked at me and I replied, "Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

A what?

For how long?"

I returned to the lobby and began unsaddling the bike That is when you! Or your reps at Lonely Planet (a torturously ironic name) informed me my flight had been cancelled due to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. I settled in with a sigh. What else was there to do but have the breakfast, have the hike, and have the cigarette by the balcony? Everything repeated itself, the only flux in this green amber hell was that brick house. I adored that precious progress, brick by brick it rose up, for my life had turned into a rerun. The travellers I had met had left and had been replaced by exaggerated variations of the same nationalities, which was repeated with exponential effect every new day. The tourists were beyond parodies of themselves, stereotypes warping in an echo chamber. The painful memories of Jonas and Heloise had been replaced, as it is said of history ⁠— first as tragedy then as farce. Crooked teeth cockneys, misanthropic berets, stiff lederhosen, and a sleepy picador's cape. I wanted to run away from the Golden Dawn Inn. With nothing to occupy me in my isolation, my mind naturally leaned toward my innermost fascinations. Over and over again, I recalled Robert Pope's final film which never made it to the silver screen, you could only find it on bootleg tapes sold on barebones HTML cinephile forums due to the controversy of its last scene. It was the very last scene that Pope filmed or starred in, and captured the last moments anyone saw Robert Pope alive. _Charlie ad portas_ (1982) told the story of a Stars-and-Stripes reporter who refuses to come to the terms with the failure of the Vietnam War and retreat as Saigon falls.

He signed his articles under Raphael Sisto but almost everybody called him Crow, a slur that would have annoyed him had he been Native American (the Crows were a tribe that acted as scouts for the American military and were considered traitors) but as it stood he had only gotten his name due to his crooked nose and cherry nigger skin ⁠— both of which he attributed, if pushed on it, to his Italian descent. It was just a broken Roman nose that had grown back Injun, he explained. He didn't mind the nose, he thought it gave him the air of a streetfighter which suited his prickly personality. He didn't mind the nickname either, just not when Linh, his mama-san, called him by it. I guess it was a rude reminder that he might just be another GI to her despite the said and unsaid promises they had made rolling around in unmade beds, under sheets of rain that leaked through the motel roof and dripped-dripped down like condensation off the beer Crow drank while writing his final articles on "The Myth that is the Fall of Saigon", surmising the inevitable fall as a clever psy-op to psyche up the Americans and lead the VC into a foolhardy assault, and with that assault defended Crow could finally concentrate on the constant assaults on his woman, turning their eyes away with a growl from her long legs constantly negotiating against her tight mini-skirt ⁠— which, as with the negotiations between the US and Charlie, didn't leave much room to move.

His attitude to Linh had evolved since she had demanded to be taken to America with him because she was pregnant. He never once considered practicalities of taking her back, but he enjoyed the fantasy. He had begun to admonish that mini-skirt because it didn't quite express the family values he had been raised with, though he wouldn't have found her attractive if she didn't wear that kind of thing. The climax of this hypocrisy reared itself as a young Vietnamese man in SVA uniform suddenly entered the bar and begun to berat her. Crow doesn't hesitate, Crow grabs his beer by the neck and brings it down on the young man's head. He puts out his cigarette on the counter, and grabs him by the collar with his other fist raised ⁠— but before he can inflict any worse injury Linh holds him back, desperately trying to remember the word for brother. So much for family values. Crow can hardly remember his family, his mother face grows out of proportion as he tries to latch onto singular features, what does her Roman nose look like? The faces he remembers from home are caricatures at best and monsters at worsts. He had a girlfriend back home as well but he doesn't try to remember her face it hurts too much. Though he can't forget her entirely and he still kept her last letter by his bedside. Something about the way she wrote ⁠— I don't know why it didn't work out ⁠— like she didn't know, like she had no idea. Here's a clue it's because you'a whore, he shouts into his pillow, and no one made you a whore or put a gun to your head. He hugs Linh tightly like a child's stuffed animal. She doesn't mind it, she puts up with a lot and this is the least of her problems. For now, the biggest problem facing Linh is her brother, bleeding on the floor of the bar. At last, she remembers the word for brother and Crow can only laugh ⁠— it is a hollow laugh. It isn't funny to him, it is a tragedy but it seems ridiculous and comical that a true tragedy has unfolded here on the floor of this sordid bar, in the life of this sordid man, in sheer contrast to the world and all its happening that has become a tired joke to him.

"What's so funny," said the shadow of a man, standing silhouetted in the doorway.

Crow replied, still in the mood to brawl, "Come here and I'll show you."  
He laughed and stepped forward, "Put 'em up, Sugar Ray."

"My god..." Crow recognised his old friend, "What are you doing here? I thought you shipped out."

"Listen, your CO had a word with me..."

"And now the word's reached me, huh?

"You gotta face facts here bud, Saigon is-"

"Tell him to shove his evac up his ass."

"Alright, alright," he flicked out his zippo, a bullet-ridden heart etched onto its silver casing.

Crow smiles to see it, "Can't believe that's still in one piece, Romeo."

"That's Sergeant Romeo now," he tapped his sergeant's cap and lit his cigarette, "And I can't believe you're still one piece."

"I could say the same about you, we all know how your play ends."

"Come on GI, what's in a name?"

Crow raised his eyebrows.

"Don't look so shocked, you ain't the only sophisticated cretin in this shit hole. But you will be very shortly if you stick around."

"You so sure of that?"

"Yeah, I read the news."

"And I write it. So let me break it down for you Sergeant. This city, with a few alterations to the central districts, can easily be turned into a near-impenetrable urban defence. Now if you can get me ten minutes with Weyand to explain this to him then there's a chance we can win this war."

"Your CO was right you've snapped," Romeo took a deep drag, "All that shit that's running about in your head is propaganda, pro-pah-gan-da. And you've started actually believing in the bullshit."

A dark mist covered Crow's eyes, "If we really are losing it's because of defeatists like you. You know in Rome they used to scare the little kids to bed by telling them Hannibal was at the gate. _Hannibal ad portas_. Do you think Charlie is out there sucking their thumbs talking about whose at the gates, or any what ifs and where hows ⁠— no, their morale is god damn impenetrable because they don't bitch and moan how shit is better at home, this is home!"

"You got me there bud, but where's home for you? It sure as shit ain't here."

Crow brooded, his thoughts condensing to form a singular black cloud, as formidable as a Roman phalanx and worthy of his crooked nose. He shook his head as if to cast lose his ideas of empire, glory, power, an ascent to Mount Olympus after a worthy fight and a stem grapes lowered to his mouth by a nymph. There was a scuffle outside, he heard American voices and a black baton momentarily stuck out from behind the door. He briefly looked over his article, silently asked forgiveness of Caesar and brushed it onto the ground.

"Alright, we'll go you can tell those military police assholes that handcuffs won't be necessary."

"It was only a precaution, I told them I'd be able to talk sense to you. All the same, I'd feel better if you could hand that little sidearm over."

The moment had finally come to return home, he reflected he felt no joy. All at once he recalled those said and unsaid promises. He decided then as much as life had disappointed him it didn't give him the right to disappoint himself ⁠— he would keep his promise.

"Sure, but she's coming," he hesitated and pointed to her brother, still bleeding on the floor, "And him."

"Fine. Luckily I have a few extra seats reserved. I told them that it was only a bit of jungle fever keeping you here." Crow gave him his sidearm and Romeo handed him back two passes.

"Two?" Linh pipped up.

"We'll fit him on the chopper, don't worry honey," he pinched Linh ass and winked at Crow. Violent tendencies rose up like a viper in Crow's heart but he managed to lull them back to sleep, he helped Linh's brother up and walked outside. The MPs stared nervously at him, he flashed them a smile and imitated their bug-eyed expression ⁠— this hadn't been their first attempt at arresting him. Crow got in the back of the jeep with Linh and put her brother in the front with Romeo who began driving towards the US embassy. The streets were full of South Vietnamese collaborators packing carts and grabbing everything they could flee with. He couldn't believe that these were the same streets he dreamed would be the cultural heart of the 51st state, a crucial step into the east- just as the British had colonised India, this would be the start of the empire. The French had been here before us and they had here failed too. The window of a patisserie had been smashed and people were streaming out of it with baguettes and brioche. But there had been others before the French had dreams of colonisation and conquest. First there was Athens, then Rome, then Britain and now it was America's turn. And Crow, well he never expected to take all the credit ⁠— he knew he wasn't an Alexander, or a Temujin, or a Napolean. But he could have been an Orlando to a Charlamagne ⁠— but more likely, he hated to admit, a Goebbels to a Hitler. But at least it would have brought order, it would have toppled the dominos in their favour, that's all the kneed the dough would need for China and Russia to fall ⁠— only then humankind would be freed from that alcoholic German jew's dream. It had already been dreamt and it was over already, now it was his own dream that he had to wake up from.

"It would have been beautiful," Crow said to himself.

"Beautiful?" asked Linh.

"Beautiful," he affirmed and then realised she didn't know what the word meant ⁠— to her it was just something a boom boom girl says when showing a little sugar, "Beautiful means good, it means undeniable. America is beautiful."

She leaned on his shoulder, and for a blessed moment the chaos of the world felt miles away behind the curtains of her hair. Crow looked down at her and saw something strange in her eyes which he hadn't seen before. He scarcely recognised it, for it had been so long, but it looked something like love. He knew what he had to do.

They pulled around the corner and came into view of the embassy. Every window had been broken and there was a huge crowd outside milling about and shouting. A helicopter flew overhead with a man hanging off the landing strut, his legs kicking about in terror trying to climb an invisible ladder.

"We'll try the airfield, it's a bit out of town."

During the drive, Crow took the opportunity to tell her about America. Not the dreamlike America of the founding fathers or the wicked imperial America of the neo-Marxists, but the reality which lay somewhere in between those two impossible visions and which was filled with well-meaning and honest men and women. He told her of lemonade afternoons on well cut lawns where their boys would play and grow into men before their eyes already tearing in hope of daughter to quell and soothe the pain of transience, the pain that would bind them, the pain that would end there on the well cut lawn lined with roses to be cut, wrapped in twine and placed on each other's grave ⁠— however it happened, it didn't matter only that they had. The MP gave him a stern look, "You only got two passes." He was one of the only American soldiers left on the airfield, it was vehicular graveyard. One chopper was left, it began spinning the rotors as it arrived.

Romeo asked in faux pleading, "Come on surely you got space for one more dink."

"If he doesn't have a pass, he isn't coming up."  
Romeo turned to Crow, "That's some tough shit. They'll rip him apart when they find out he was SVA."

Linh began to cry and Crow visualised himself strangling Romeo with his own intestines. Before he could make any moves to bring this fantasy into reality an enormous clap boomed from behind. They hit the floor. Crow rose and to his horror saw Saigon in flames ⁠— the bombing had begun.

"There goes your impenetrable urban defence fantasy, come on let's go."

Romeo pushed past him, gave his pass to the MP and disappeared to the back of the chinook apparently no longer fearing his prisoner would attempt to escape. Linh tried to stand up but was shaking violently in fear.

"Are you really pregnant?" Crow grabbed her by the shoulders, "Is the baby real?"

With tears into her hands, "No no."

She wore a terrified expression, knowing they would shave and spit on her for dating a GI.

"Don't cry honey, you're going to America... him too. I have to let go now."

He freed his hands from her so he could give them the two passes and swiftly walked away. There was nothing left waiting for him in America.

And a brilliant move by Pope was to have him walk away without looking back. It would be too painful for a man who had spent so long in lovelessness to look back at a moment like that. He walks back past through the graveyard of tanks and helicopters, all which were genuine artefacts of the war since _Charlie Ad Portas_ was shot immediately after the newly unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam opened its borders for tourism. Many of his close associates warned him against travelling back so quickly not only for the wellbeing of the project but also for himself ⁠— of course, he got his own way as he did with all his films, never sacrificing creative control. He always seemed so on top of everything which is why no one saw it coming. Though the final scene was a perfect end to the film without even considering what the real-life consequences it would have on the mythos of the film. Film students still argue today whether it was impromptu or if he had planned it from the start.

Crow continued walking away in no apparent direction. It occured that he hasn't heard the helicopter take. At that very moment, Romeo sneaks up behind him and puts him into a choke hold, "Really? You think I was going to let you walk straight into the communist hands with all that intel bouncing around in your head." His face turns purple, the sun is setting and the orange glow of Saigon burns behind them. With a quick motion, Crow flicks a knife out of his boot and slips it into Romeo's belly. A gasp of disbelief releases him from the hold. Crow gets up, catches his breath, puts Romeo's cap on and gives the ok sign to the pilot of the chinook. It takes off but we are not allowed to enjoy this bittersweet victory, Romeo will not stop laughing.

"What's so funny?"

"You should have poisoned me, isn't that how my play ends?"

"I don't have time to watch you die that slow."

"Alright, alright. But I thought you knew, man."

"What's that?"

"That all through history, all through the war and horror and shit, everything happens exactly twice. Didn't you know?" he spits a wad of black blood on the ground, "You should have poisoned me, you fucking hack." Crow walks away back towards the city rubbing his neck with a scowl, not knowing where he was going, the bombing in front and the relics of the war behind. He stops, looks to his left and walks off the past and is swallowed by the jungle.

The end of Raphael Sisto, the end of Crow, the end of Robert Pope, who played him. The film crew thought it was a joke, the ones who knew him well thought he had gone off to be alone for a while as was his custom after the last day on set. Eventually, when night fell a search party was called by the film department but no trace was found. The family and those close to him affirmed the crew's desire to finish editing the film as a tribute to a man as fantastically human as he was unknowable.

¬

My last days were spent like Crow's in complete boredom of the tedium and also in a contrary terror of the unseen disaster approaching. Intuition told me the majority of these fears were delusional, it was the remainder that were giving me hell. I was pouring over my diary looking for signs of things that had only happened once, trying to predict what was going to repeat. There was a pattern to the curse of coincidence, I just had to find it and then it would lead to a way out.

By the second extra day in Sapa, I felt like I was in Ground Hog Day but without the comforting indifference to the laws of time and space. By the third extra day, I felt like I was in Ground Hog Day but without the comforting indifference to the laws of time and space.

The receptionist

The pancakes.

The view.

The dreams.

The Spanish.

The view.

The German.

The pancakes.

The French.

The mirrors!

Repeat aloud seven times for the full effect.

On the seventh day, I couldn't bear talking to any of them, I rushed past holas, hallos, bonjours, and an 'ullo guv'nor. I skipped the pancakes and skipped the hike, I would probably throw myself off the peak, and instead, I sat and waited. I would embrace this stasis, I would not move, I would not say a word. There I stayed sitting in my room, only vaguely aware of the passing of time by the lengthening shadows until finally a darkness that pervaded the room. But even in this state I was uncomfortable. The pattern was perforated all around me yet I could not grasp it. My frustration exhausted me to the point of an artificial comatose state and with my thoughts stilled I disregarded the tendrils and looked to the centre of this conundrum. "Eu-re-ka..." I whispered. Pope was the missing piece and with that key, the doors of perceptions flung wide open. How could a film effect my life in this crucial way ⁠— it was fiction, was it not? Or was I so arrogant to believe that the truth was confined to this reality to which I belong? Did I have the gall to assume, not only that the universe revolved around me, but that I was actually a part of it at all? Is there another being to be found a layer within Crow's world beyond my perception, or, the more terrifying prospect, is there an unseen observer above me now watching my tragedy with glee? And are they as arrogant as I, to read these words and assume themselves free from this terrible revelations?

Emancipation from this cascading mise en abyme became the objective. I became obsessed with the idea that perception and, in particular, vision precipitated change, that whatever I saw I inevitably found myself interacting with. Every pain, every pleasure, all the love and heartbreak had been preceded by vision. It all had to be cast loose if I was to free myself from this spider's web of synchronicity. With my eyes closed the world became a passing shade, I was at once nothing and nowhere.

But then I was in the stairwell. Strange that I couldn't remember how exactly I got to the stairs, strange that I was neither climbing up nor down though I felt my legs moving. I looked to the left, out of a small window and saw myself on the balcony smoking, I looked sad. A sensation of warmth moved up my sleeve, I looked down to see a cigarette in my hand, and in confusion looked back up and found myself on the balcony, looking out at the grand view. The old man was working, it occurred that I should go down and help him. But before that thought was even completed I felt my bare feet stepping across wet grass. I approached tentatively and by miming that I wanted to help him, he eventually relented wearing a confused but genuine smile. I grabbed a brick in my soft hands and laid the mortar down before placing it down. Oh wow, I exclaimed, it has its place ⁠— its place is here. The old man gave a laugh though he couldn't understand a word. I grabbed a second brick and looked to the old man who nodded with a smile. I laid mortar down and placed it beside it. The perfect place for two. They were perfect together and incomplete apart. I went to lay a third brick down next to the second but there was no space, the wall turned at a right angle ⁠— we had reached a corner. I looked behind but the old man grunted and pointed to the position on top of the first and second. Of course, it would be supported by the first two, giving a stronger structure to the whole. I placed the third brick down. How far up were we going to build this? I looked up into the sky, into the infinite. The wind dropped. I turned to thank the old man but he was nowhere and I was everywhere.
**Saint Val and I are disappearing**  
_Bedouin Dreams of Green ii_

"What am I looking for?" I demanded of myself for the nth time. Amongst cobwebs, creaking drawers and dusted mirrors — in which I appeared to myself as a foggy ghost from the blurred periphery of my vision — I rummaged around fervently despite having no idea what exactly I was searching out. I had only a vague aesthetic sense that was pointing me in the right direction and a belief that it be instantly clear I had found it once I had laid mine eye upon it. Down the wooden steps, my heavy feet fell, stressing the exhausted timber in what should have been its golden years of retirement. When it was a tree, it didn't know it was a tree, just as a child is ignorant of its fleeting youth before the felling axes of parents, teacher, peer and society collide at its trunk and down they come, carried to the working world where they will be sanded and sawed by career, family and God until they can find a place of use and worth in the world. All the objects here were in the twilight years, the furniture had now lounged moths far longer than it had people and the chandeliers which once would bend candlelight for gossiping aristocrats and twirling gentry had been abandoned, and its tender refractions left only to entertain the fluttering dust set afloat by a rare draft. An odd place to be presently searching for something precious, but you see the important fact I have left unsaid is that I am not in the present.

I was living, breathing, and searching in the past, in the land of yesterday to be exact. After the sun sets under the western coast and all the animals go to bed, dim their blight lambs, and hush the breeting lamps. The rusted saucepans, candlesticks and dirty dishes are called forth by La Luna to join her in the dance of the dead, upwards and upwards among the souls who have passed away in the day, and here they come to reside for a time of Yesterday. I am not dead (though I may be in some peril), I dreamt my way here to find something incorrectly deposited into history that must be returned, something has been thrown out of the floating thimble of the known universe into the swirling void I now swim. This backwash world, which I have forgotten myself to in search of the unforgettable, appears just as ours does, perhaps this is an afterimage on God's scorched retina. No one lives here as far as I can see, I haven't seen a single sign of life since I awoke in a field surrounded by grass cuttings and dried leaves — the cuttings of the past day which I burst forth from. I was having an ordinary dream (which I now forget) but a sense of urgency came over me, through half-memories and almost-futures I raced in search of an elusive goal until I found a foothold in a mental wall and launched myself atop the labyrinth. A gate lay before me, at full sprint I ran at it, upon the razor edge between lucidity and dramaturgy, and with a hop, skip, and a jump back through time x space; I landed in yesterday.

A mountain of dried leaves crackling like an open fire, a mountain the past autumn built by the rakes of harmless old gents in tweed, a mountain built by those old gents on a so-called lazy Sunday afternoon, only to have it blow away with the westerly wind. These old gents planted these trees long ago when they were young gents so that they could sit in shade in the late afternoon of their lives (and despite the Greek proverb they made great society). Their tangerine coloured mountains would blow away, and eventually, their trees would be cut down as they would be, they could still smile for making the most of life, whether their pipes were packed or inevitably burnt through — they could still have a chuckle at Ozymandias' expense.

But there's no time to talk of retirement and quiet departures just yet. I had been searching since the dawn's red embers had blown over the eastern hills, the hills which I initially had been drawn to. But I could neither find relief under deathly toadstools nor buttercup orchids until I pushed past a field of pennyroyal and found myself entranced by the sight of a common suburb. It was love at first sight, how could I resist? Where some would see the concept of Boredom itself given physical locality, I saw a battleground between generations. The safety of the suburbs — its soft green nature strips and picket fenced gardens would cause protest to the angsty teen and delusional twenty-something- but it was paradise for the young families rearing their children and for the greying baby boomers, paradise until these two opposed factions ran into one another. Experience pitted against innocence, infants appeared to elderly people as cupid winged reapers. The newest generation was no sooner spawned when it began pushing the next generation into their graves, and if you disagree with me I encourage you to closely observe how grandparents tickle their grandchildren. Behind the goo-goo's and gaa-gaa's, there is an unmistakable malevolence going on behind the scenes of this mock battle of life and death.  
"Peekaboo, Peekaboo!" Grandpa chortles as he warps in and out of existence, terrifying the tot who in turn uses his inferior larvae-state body to his advantage, utilising his weak stomach to vomit a mixture of carrots and mashed peas all over the grumbling geriatric. Closely observe how they lock eyes with murderous rage as the middle-aged adults comment on the poor odour which is clearly emitting from one of their diapers (Likely Grandpa's by the whiff of brussel sprouts, concludes a neutral observer). You need only observe the elderly being ignored once their children have children of their own, then comes social isolation, dementia, and death — with their children only taking notice once the inheritance comes into question. And likewise the statistics on unobservant grandparents 'accidentally' backing the family SUV out the driveway where little Tristan was playing on his trike only moments ago, "I wonder what that crunch was?" they rhetorically rattle through dentures, stealing young life like the incompetent toothless vampires they are!

Yes, the suburbs was where I would find my object — which I was beginning to form an image of in my mind's eye. Golden, pure, singular, crystalline — I repeated to myself as a mantra. It was then that I spotted this old mansion, a chandelier by the front window caught my eye and convinced me to search here, which I was currently tearing to shreds in a whirlwind of torn tea dollies and flying kitsch cats that exploded into ceramic fragments against the floral print walls. It was a house undoubtedly owned by a widow or a spinster of some type, I reflected.

Incredibly, unbelievable, there was a rumbling outside. A hot sweat began to grow on my forehead, I had an intuition that this was not a good omen. I ran to the front window and pressed my face against the glass in an attempt to look down the road. My breath misted the window and behind the foggy pane, in the few moments before I wiped away the condensation, it appeared to be a huge beast, a woolly mammoth rampaging down the road that had broken free from its iced antiquity seeking revenge on the present. I wiped the window clean and was pleasantly surprised to see it was just a tram, no driver and one passenger, which I suppose it would have been an equally terrifying as an approaching mammoth to a late-neolithic man, but to a late 21st-century man it was a comforting sight. I felt at ease until the tram stopped directly in front of the house I was ransacking, and with that a hundred questions raced through my mind, with "Where do I hide?" coming in the lead. But all those questions disappeared as the passenger got out of the tram, unlatched the front gate and walked through the front garden, she was a young woman; attractive, pink hair, big brown doe-like eyes, a dancer's posture and a pot smoker's gentle smile. As she walked down the path adorned with silphium flowers, her fake mink coat brushed her knees in bounding steps till she was reached the front door and unlocked it with an old black skeleton key. My heart was racing, and those hundred questions returned — but now, "Where do I hide?" had fallen behind and was in a close second behind, the universal question which viciously anoints a young man's mind at least once in his life: "Who is she?"

Terror drowned my senses. But underneath my erratic pulse, and over the deafening roar of my heartbeat, an inexplicable calm embraced me and kept the hope of hiding afloat. The large wardrobe in the center of the room looked inviting but also obvious – I decided to give it a shot. Soft footsteps pit-a-patted downstairs, she was near. In order to smother my loud movements, I placed my feet with careful progression, toe and heel, toe and heel, silent as a darting cuttlefish. But unlike the cuttle, I couldn't camouflage my skin to the specific tan of the wardrobe's wood; a shade somewhere between olive and cocoa (alas I am of the arabesque persuasion) so I entered and coated myself its inky darkness, like a shadowed coral nook.

But as I opened the door I was met with piles upon piles of fur coats, mink scarfs, and even a pair of ferret mittens among a huge assortment of pelts and fur garments that had been stuffed in the wardrobe. How would I hide here within this moth's banquet among these woodland haunts? I would have to paw my way inside, I started with removing a rabbit fur ushanka, but it seems the pile was highly unstable because as soon as I did, a red fox vest followed after in pursuit of its age-old prey, with a toothed zip open as if in hungry delight to relive some a priori vestige (prior vestage).

A badger pillbox hat followed after the fox, and soon an avalanche of fur fell forth and swallowed my ankles, my legs and then torso, until it finally consumed my flailing arms and swept over my face as I took a last breath, with a mildly amused smile, before being totally submerged. It was a rather comfortable ambush as far as animal attacks go, and it would have been a great spot for a nap if I wasn't faced with the dual predicament of the approaching homeowner, whom I could hear creak up the stairs in deafened tones through the fleecy flood, and my search for the Grail. In attempts to manoeuvre my body I somehow lost track of which direction was up and which was down, everything was topsy-turvy as I swam through this layered labyrinth I found none of its open-mouthed, marble eye residents would give the foreigner – a freakishly hairless monkey – any directions out of this pelted pueblo, and instead pulled alternating expressions of either stunted rage or contrived tranquillity. These beasts have been thieved of their holy gifts: thirst, hunger, the fear of the predator or the thrill of the chase, pain, the animal pleasure of mating – and for payment they have been propped up, sewn into a cheap imitation of life, and denied the sweet relief of death, while having to linger in pathetic caricature of their savage nobility. These echoes that I have been plunged in would make frightful spirits to the hypocritical human race, who feel all these natural sensations as the animals do but pretend we are so much higher and nobler than they. Perhaps in garment they are more human than us, shaped in our figure but lacking all the envy, the pride, the greed. All of these sins I would expect to find in the android, when they invented them, but perhaps the androids are already here – the mannequins draped in furs and dresses and scarfs and shoes, perfect, ideal, ageless, eternally more human than that lipstick slopped ape drooling at it, with its pig nose pressed against the glass.

Finally, I broke the surface, but something wet clung to my legs preventing me from pulling myself out. It moved! I would have jumped three feet in the air if I wasn't swamped by the furs. Whatever it was, it was damp and writhing in between my legs, I pulled one leg away from it but before I could escape from the avalanche of furs the door suddenly opened. I dived back down into the pile. I heard some exhale, a melding between a sigh and a gasp in the same breath, and I held myself still – but the writhing thing swelled and shifted underneath. The material felt like hessian cloth, but I swear I felt a small hand push out and touch my calf, like a babe eager to escape her swollen mother's belly. In tremors and quakes, I sensed the girl was picking apart my hiding place piece by piece, and placing it back into the wardrobe while she whistled a sad and nameless tune to herself. She sighed again and I thought to myself: Perhaps she's had a long day, and what would be a minor chore on any other day is now a tiny hardship – but enough of that, think! think! The Fox is at the burrow, her paws a diggin' and her nose a sniffin' while the poor petrified Rabbit sits scared, his little nose a-twitchin'.

The Rabbit would have to run, but as I flexed my legs make a dash for it, the writhing creature underneath me lashed out with needle-like claws that stabbed at my arse. "Ouch!" I shouted and burst out, causing the furs to explode across the room in all directions. I looked around in amazement but met an expression of a far greater amazement in the girl, who let a pair of woollen mittens fall limply out of her hands as her eyes met mine. Neither of us knew what to say as woodland critters exploded above us like dusty fireworks, but her eyes didn't stay glued to me for long – the dry hessian sack, which appeared to move and breath but also looked so grey and dead, lay at her feet. She looked down and lifted the sack open and to our surprise a kitten walked out with clumsy nervous steps, looking pitiful with its wet fur and desperate mewing, and then another kitten followed, and another, and another, until the hessian lay empty and room was filled with a dozen kittens, drying their wet fur on the scattered furs around the room. The girl began to collect them, which was when I noticed for the first time that she was transparent, I could see the dark outline of the kittens heaped in her arms – even as she turned her back to me. The world shifted behind her curved figure in soft tones and liquid watercolours, but even in asserting that I had my doubts because of the gentle grace and poise with which she moved about the room, rescuing the kittens and putting the room back in order. Perhaps it was the world that was transparent and had been superimposed on her authentic soul.

It was all too much for my giddy heart and I began to laugh, quietly at first and as I began to hate myself for the brutishness of it I couldn't help but laugh louder. She turned to me and her eyes stood opaque against the world – defying the illogical paradise we were stuck in; building by the sheer strength of its gaze a noble logic of their own that would stand against fickle-father-time and pour out wisdom like a sermon on the mount, a Scotsman's shouted speech upon his last hill, a fascist rally held upon an endless and crowded plain. But the history books suddenly close, even for a man like myself, when a young woman opens her delicate lips, and with tender eyes, says,

"What are you doing in my house?"

"For starters, this isn't what it looks like."

"And what exactly does this look like," she looked over the disarrayed room for a moment.

"Probably like I am ransacking your house," I said, "Or something equally ridiculous."

"And you're not?"

"Well..."

"I guess you're just rearranging all my clothes across the room and knocking over my chairs and desk to make things a little more feng-shui?"

"Okay, I was ransacking your house."

I put out my hands as if to receive a pair of cuffs.

"Why is it that criminals are always so relieved once caught?"

"Maybe it's a guilty conscience?" I suggested.

"I think its more like their glad the game is over."  
She finished picking up the kitten and placed them in a woven basket by the door, "You know you talk like an old person, or a ghost or something."

And you talk like you're in a dream, I thought to say but didn't.

"Maybe I am, wouldn't that be scary?"

"Scarier than a home invasion?"

I got up suddenly, "You're right I should be going, I don't think I'll find whatever it is I am looking for here. Sorry to have bothered you."

A few steps out of the room I heard her voice, "Wait!" in a raised pitch as if suppressing panic. I stuck my head back in, she was standing where she had been before but her corporeal form looked so much more delicate from this distance, more faded.

"I'll accept your apology if you help clean up."

"Alright, but it'll have to be quick."

We began stuffing the animal furs back into the wardrobe, with both our hands we pushed them in and the back of my hand accidentally brushed against her thumb, there was a static shock and she flinched back and held her hand to her chest. I shut the doors before it could all come tumbling out again.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

She looked at her hand and her button eyes expanded but her face remained blank.

"Nothing," and as lips sealed into a rosebud around that last syllable, a white flash of lightning erupted outside and thunder shook the house. At once the rain began to pour, drops ran down the window, racing each other to the sill, as I looked outside. The sun shone through the thin covering of clouds and set the mist. I could have sat down with a book in my lap, watching the sepia tone world outside the window while sitting inside with an old book. No time to relax though. I made my way out but a hand caught my shoulder, it was the girl.

"Wait, it's raining."

"I have to go."

"I know, but we can take the tram."

I considered it, but decided, "I'd rather go alone, thanks."

She nodded meekly and I felt rather cruel, but nevertheless, I ventured out into the rain.  
Down the street, I caught sight of a tower, the highest point of some far off city jutting over the horizon. A tower of meaning, or a tower of torture, who knew? But I figured a tower was a mighty thing to have found its way to the land of yesterday, and in case I would have a good view from the top to continue my merry chase. I made off towards it but with every step the rain increased, it was coming in sideways and I could hardly breathe. After a few minutes I gave in and crouched over, I covered my face from the battering wind when I heard a rumbling in the distance. Thunder, I thought to myself, but it was coming from behind rather than above. A light shone through the ghostly veil and out came the tram.  
The girl was standing by the door, she opened it and beckoned me in. My god, I thought, she was barely there at all; an outline, a brief sketch of beauty with a fearful and ghostly white complexion. As I got closer, she looked more vital, her cheeks bloomed and she smiled.  
"I am on my way to the shops," she said sheepishly her eyes skirting around, "So do you want a ride or would you rather drown?"  
Hailstones began to fall, playing a fierce drum roll on the tram's tin roof (not to mention my skull) and I let that answer her question. I jumped aboard.

"Val," she said.

"Sorry?"

"My name."

"Oh sorry, mines, well I am not exactly sure."

"You forgot it?"

"I assume so, or maybe I never had one."

"Well you should think of one now, it's a pretty important thing."

"Where did you get your name from?"

"My Father chose it, he taught me how to speak and how to dance and everything."

"And your mother?"

"I am not exactly sure what went on with that."

"Oh okay, do you think you're Dad could think of a name for me?"

"Think of one yourself."

That last statement came across as a little rude to me, so I looked out the window. We left the suburbs behind and rode through scrubland which became more sparse the further we traveller. The rains cleared and a heavy sun split open the clouds. In the light, I saw standing next to a crumbling monolith, in the shadow of a faceless sphinx, a well-dressed boy. He was wearing some sort of traditional European garb.

"I don't think we should stop," I said.

"He looks nice."

"My stomach feels like its full of worms –"

"Just look at what he´s wearing."

"– and they´re eating me alive."

The tram came to a halt next to a hand of stone that once belonged to the statue of a long forgotten behemoth. All was silent apart from the whistling of the wind that blew sand against the tram´s windows. The boy approached the tram, his newsboy hat spinning on his finger, and Val opened the doors, "Do you want to come on?"

"Don´t be daft," he said with an English accent.

"Daft?"

"Come on? No miss, get off."

I replied, "You´re already off."

"Not me," the boy gave a sly smirk, clearly an imitation of some older person in his life,"You!"

Val and I looked at each other for a moment, and when we looked back he was walking away from us, towards a huge sand dune on the horizon.

"Hey, it too hot out there," I shouted.

"Come on, get off!" he shouted back.

Val laughed, took off her shoes and hopped out. I followed with a smile, even though I felt ill. I should have worn a scowl but my good mood was probably caused by a pre-perception of the terrible climate we were about to enter. If I was by myself I would detest having to cross these dunes in the sweltering heat, but as it stood I was looking forward to sharing this in-hospitability with Val. You´ll understand if you've ever experienced a thunderstorm in a big city, and what great fun it is; the water pouring down and the winds breaking umbrellas to reveal the insane smiles of urbanites hoping the storm has been sent by God to finally shatter open their towers and their cubicled prisons. Catastrophic disaster is, of course, exhilarating in context but so too is the quiet disaster – the artic, the desert, the sea. I will never forget the pictures I saw in the Victorian Arctic Exploration museum of Ernest Shackleton, teeth bared in a frozen smile, a moment of petrified joy forever captured on his stretched face.

But my moment of masochistic joy was cut short, as I took off my shoes and landed in the sand – expecting an oven blast of heat in the face – I instead felt the slight chill of the spring breeze. It was a temperate, comfortable desert and I couldn't have been more disappointed. Val twirled around and her skirt rose up, a whirling dervish in floral print. I refocused on the task at hand and called Val to the trail of little footprints left by the boy of the desert. The footprints led across a mile of flat sand and finally rose up the ridge of the huge dune that was as large as a mountain, upon which I could just barely see a small figure sitting down and waiting for us. I still felt an eerie vibe in the air. It was a tough climb, for every step taken you would slip half a step back, so I took a short break halfway up and watched Val linger behind – throwing up arcs of sand into the air with cartwheels. I observed the ruins that lay scattered across the sands, there was something uncanny about them. All were shattered pieces of a man, a hand here, a leg there – a sword, a book, a broken crown, and a roman nose – and it all seemed strangely familiar.

The boy whistled as he played with a toy in the sand. My heart felt heavier with each step, and the carefree nature of Val and this whistling boy only increased my unease. When I finally reached the summit of the dune, I could see it was a spinning top, that had a different symbol on each of its four sides, but he was struggling to get to spin on the sand.

"You´re wonderin´ what all this rubble is doing out here, then?" said the boy, who smiled without looking up from his toy.

"I was about to ask."

"You've forgotten a lot. You've got a leaky loaf, you have."

"I know I need to find something at least."

"That's a start, but are you sure all these bits of stone don't jog your memory a bit?

"Give me a clue."

He gave a forced laugh, "I will I will, sir! But are you sure that even I don't seem a tad familiar?"

I gave it serious thought and studied his face. There was an unreality surrounding his face, not like Val who was real to me despite her transparent form. His form was entirely solid, but his expressions were artificial – when he talked his mouth moved up and down like a puppet's slack jaw.

"Beautiful long bacons on your missus."

"Excuse me?"

"And even nicer minces."  
He licked his lips.

"What exactly do you want to tell me?"

"I'll have to show you, you know what they say," he took a spinning top from his pocket and spun it upon the sand, "seeing is Adam and Ev'ing."

The top appeared to increase it speed as the sand parted ways as it burrowed deeper. Like an optical illusion, just when I thought it was going to slow down and come to a rest it pushed it again speed up. Down and down it burrowed, I had shuffle backwards so I wouldn't slip down. "So you sure I don't ring a bell?"

"I don't have the foggiest, guv," I grinned, though my thoughts were trembling.  
"Well here's your clue."

The top was spinning at an enormous speed, causing gusts of wind to blow sand up the banks of the newly dug ditch into my face. I spat grit out from my mouth and then, from between my fingers as I held my hand up to protect my eyes, I saw the top come to rest on a stone and as it spun and the sand was cast away I could see that it was an ancient stone face. It was a face I had forgotten; my face.

The top spun upon the forehead of my likeness. And I looked back to the boy, who I suddenly recognised as wearing my face as well. I stood up and looked to Val some distance away, "Val!" I shouted. She looked over and thank god it was her own face that looked over, her cheeks healthy and well versed in smiling and laughter, and her eyes that were tired and showed plainly all the pain she had suffered and smiling and laughing throughout. The boy cackled loudly, but it was cut short by a heart-stopping crack, the top had spun right through the statues face.

"The clue is that I am you. I am your cryin' childhood, I am the Old World, I am the Pinocchio doll you stepped on top of on Christmas mornin'."

His nose morphed into a sharp spike and blood spurted out of his nostrils. My stomach was devouring itself in fear.

"See you later, alligator," he said and jumped into the widening gap. He waved his hat goodbye as the sand sunk over his head.

I started running, "Get back to the tram!"

"Why?" she shouted back, and just then the ground shook and all around the shattered pieces sunk into my ground, my hand, my sceptre, my gilded gauntlet and roman nose. All these pieces built in my honour far longer back than I could remember. The pieces that were further away sunk first, and then the pieces closer and closer to us. I ran down the dune to Val my body flying down almost faster than my legs could run. We were a stone's throw away. Her hand reached out and then, nothing. She sunk right into the ground in front of me, screaming as the sand piled over. I dug down where she was swallowed but I couldn't find a trace, I had no time to mourn or panic because the ground under me evaporated as well. I sunk down saying a prayer and farewell to the sun before darkness enveloped. Tumbling, and turning, drowning but still alive somehow, I came to acknowledge a cool sensation pressing against my face. It was a pane of glass, and I looked out that glass to see a vision of a terrible city alight in orange flame, fluorescent lights flickering in abandoned apartments and at the center of it all a huge white palace, where I saw young woman (could it be?) being pulled violently into a labyrinth of Grecian pillars. The vision passed and darkness returned as I slide down the neck of the hourglass, scratched and bruised by the debris of lost time, past egos and the ruins of a fallen man _que ego sum._

¬

I awoke, was it all over? Had the dream been dreamt? Could I now safely record it in my journal so as to never recall it again? No, I realised, I was in a dumpster. My back was moist with the juices of rotting fruit and meat, I gagged and heaped myself out onto the floor. I landed on more piles of rotting meat, ribs and steaks galore but here and there an eyeball or a tongue. I tried to look for an exit to what I thought, best case scenario, was an abattoir. The stink was so bad that I began to hallucinate that the eyeballs followed me, as if Mona Lisa herself had been gouged in this dusty den. I managed to navigate my way to the door, guided by a sliver of light pouring out from next room. I pushed through the heavy door into a huge kitchen. From over the far side, in the shadows I saw the dark form of a short and muscular man hunched over a table, he was slicing meat with a comically small knife (perhaps it was just relative to his size) his hand rose with machine efficiency and struck down with the the vengeance of an ancient god. He lumbered around, with a peculiar accuracy of movement – at least for someone his size. I ducked behind a cauldron of steaming brew, the scent of which caused me to stifle a cough.

"I smelt you when you came in."

I looked for an exit. He left his table and began pacing the up and down the line, his face in shadow while he looked under enormous pots and pans.

"No hidey holes for you to crawl in, we got no pests in this kitchen."

Though built like a gladiator, he moved like a ballerina and pulled me up by the scruff of my shirt.

"No pests, bad for business," and he raised his tiny, yet razor-sharp knife to my throat.

"W-What if I want a job?" I blurted out.

He hesitated, and his large face moved ever so slightly, the ripple of a significant thought which I hoped was along the lines of: Perhaps, I won´t slice this rat from gullet to flank.

It was a large face, but all the features were in proportion, large brown eyes, unassuming and intelligent, offset by a jaw that would have suited a snapping turtle better than this short dark man. He gave me the impression of a crab or some crustacean that had lost its shell, but whose skin had compensated and grown just as hard.

His underbite protruded into a smile, "A job? In this hole?"

He dropped me down and all of a sudden my hands were under inspection. He held his face a few inches from my palms – scouring them over.

"Now I can see you´re no dishy, but maybe there´s a waiter in you... Stand here."

He disappeared under a counter. A few seconds later he popped back up with a tower of plates that scraped the ceiling. Before I could ask what they were for one was flung at my face.

"What was that for?"

"Reflexes, you got to work on your reflexes because out on the floor you will be dodging more than just plates."

He flung a few more at me

"Smoke breaks?" I asked.

"Sly bastard, smoke while you work,

I caught one of the plates.

"And tips?"

"All tips go towards the restaurant, we don´t like unions here"

Something snapped inside me, I threw the plate back at him and it hit him on the chin. There was a moment of silence before his calloused hands began moving about the plates so fast that they blurred. So too did the plates blur as they flew towards me, and shattered against my shoulder, my hand, my ear; which I lost hearing out temporarily, the side of my head. The whole world was a blur and so was that dark figure that stood over me.

"You´re hired, you got guts," he threw a shabby tweed suit onto my head, I held it up to the light and harsh pholerescent light shone through several bullet holes. I heard footsteps walking away.

"By the way, what time is work?"

"When you can stand up."

I let my head flop down, but the cockroaches began to bother, likely thinking I was just another piece of meat. I got up and picked out shards of crockery from my hair. Thoughts of Val fluttered about the starry-eyed cuckoos doing laps of my head. The woman in my vision must have Val, I thought, and that temple, recalling its white pillars and fearsome aesthetic; a perfect balance between pure function, timeless and absent of any historic period, though also giving the impression that just beyond its minimalistic façade there was Dionysian palace inside with satyrs pouring rich wine into the open lips of supple nymphs.

This restaurant, a crusty hole of a business, was obviously not nearby any sort of palace but perhaps...The black dwarf stuck his head through a large door across the room, "Get your arse out here, union boy, there´s a rush."

I slipped on the tweed, moist and greasy, and walked through the kitchen between pots and pans left in disarray. Most of them hadn´t been cleaned in years, if you felt inclined you could cut through the fat and reveal in the layers of grease, like sedimentary rock, a timeline of cuisine trends, from the neo-napolitana all the way down to the late-paleo. Nonetheless, a job is a job and it has to be done. I needed to find Val, she was the key to my search and yes I admit that I was also attracted to her but you´ll have to take my word that this isn´t a love story, I mean what story doesn´t involve love for something or another? I can tell you for certain though that this isn´t a story of a love for food. I walked out of the kitchen into some sort of foyer covered in drab red velvet. The chef was standing by another set of doors from where an enormous noise was pulsing and growling.

"You look the shape now, good good. Oh and you´ll need this," he handed me a knife with a vicious edge to it.

¨ I am not in the kitchen, I am the waiter, remember?"

"Exactly exactly, and you´re gonna need it especially tonight we got the three tables of fleshcrawlers and a big table of mantismen, one of thems celebrating his spawnday so watch out they´re rowdy."

"Oh right and they´ll eat me if I get the order wrong?" I laughed.

"Good you´re learning fast, I gotta get the kitchen rolling." He whistled with his fingers and the sound of thousands of little feet echoed out from the drywall, all moving to the kitchen.  
With a fluid motion, he tucked the knife into my jacket pocket and pushed me onto the restaurant floor.

Horror, it was hellish gluttonous horror. My hand flailed about for the knife in my pocket. Separate images ambushed and attacked my mind, one by one as if my brain was being sliced and seasoned down the line from cook to cook; a shishkebab skewer chandelier, a fondue of rancid blood, men with pig faces eating pork, tusked women shoving live eels into their mouths, relishing the writhing pressure against their innards. The floor was packed with these scenes and these terrible creatures which masqueraded in the shape of a man but borrowed features from beasts. The sounds they made were as monstrous as their appearance, not a single word was decipherable over the howls of despair, screams of agony, and greats bouts of laughter. A few customers had spotted me. A pig-nosed gentlemen with green eyes waved me over with a smile and a lick of his lips, who I turned away from, choosing to attend to a young woman also waving me over. She had black hair and looked relatively human. But her date, or husband, did not, his skin was tinged green and his jaw was enormous which when I approached flexed to reveal a dozen sharp teeth that twisted into something like a smile. The woman didn't smile, she stared. There was something very strange about her eyes, which I tried my best to ignore, she pointed to a pile of dirty plates. I piled them up, but now what? When she saw I was still standing by the table she pointed, with a vicious movement of her chin, to the center of the room – there was a huge pit filled with scraps and gristle. "Thanks, by the way, do you know where I could find a white temp- " The pupils of her strange eyes contracted into a black slit, she jumped up on the table on all fours and hissed, a pair of fang erupted with a forked tongue dancing in between. I jumped back and plates clattering over me. The woman returned to her seat and then her date chuckled, his alligator jaw clapping open and close. I got up and chucked the plates into the pit. A loud squeak echoed up. What looked like a humanoid frog was panicking among the gristle and bones. His throat expanded and, "Yegotha gitme outta here!" he said as it deflated. He made another a high pitch squeak as a pile of bones fell on his head again, another waiter in tweed stood over the other side, he was something between a morose teenager and a rodent, who simply shrugged and walked away.

"Okay just wait and stop squeaking."

I walked away from a cacophony of squeaks echoing out of the pit. The green-eyed pigman waved me over again, this time he wasn't smiling but nonetheless licked his blistered lips, before looking away in disgust again I noticed on the large platter he shared with his sty mates an enormous string of sausages. Would hold the weight of a small froggish man? I walked over and nodded to the man who pulled me closer with his stubby hand.  
"Listen here squire, I'll tell you something, this food here isn't enough. We'll be p-presently requiring more, more and more and more!" he said with increasing excitement and volume with each 'and more!'.

His tongue waggled in his open mouth, till in pronouncing the last "and more!" his little teeth chomped down on his tongue, blood squirt out, but instead of shouting out in pain, his face transformed into an expression of delight

"Mmmm, my God, what is that taste that hath thus exploded against mine jowls? A heaven-sent morsel of food stuck between molars, fermenting like a fine wine, or perhaps an aged wheel of cheese? I must have more!"

And while he searched his mouth for his own delicious tongue, I snatched the sausages and dashed back to pit. The other pigs screeched in outrage but I was far too quick for their clumsy little hands to grab the tail end of the sausages.

"Here," I shouted to the frogman, the slop was up to his waist.

I sent the string of sausages down and his fingers suctioned onto them in an instant. Heavier than he looked, it took quite a lot of strength to pull him up. When he reached the lip of the pit, he pulled himself up and immediately hugged me with a barrage of thanks, leaving his silhouette printed against my tweed jacket in meat juice.

I noticed he was wearing a tweed suit as well.

"You work here?"

"Not if yee hadn't git me from dat pulvariser, I'd been well wapped."

"Okay, that's fine and all. " He was looking over at a table behind me, "I need to get out of here."

"Whats you wanna go out for? It's just all killing and wars and nobody can na remember whos on whose side and what the wapped sides are and are nut."

"I need to find a white temple, big pillars, it is real clean. You know it?"

"A bidden with big white pillars?"

Without a further word, his eyes opened and his throat inflated as he turned away but I caught his slippery shoulder.

"You know where it is?"

"You're a goner if you wants to git there. This place might be a real mess, okay its pure vomit, and more or less a few these crazies get thrown into that pulva by the end of the night... But that temple you talking about – is nae good."

"I don't want to go, but I need to, there's someone else I need to rescue."

He hesitated, then climbed up my arm and whispered in my ear, "The biddin you's looking for is the Hospital, mark me by my soul, heart and eyes – that place is unnatural."

I felt the fear in his voice. And hearing the word hospital began to ring some bells, perhaps this was where I was suppose to find my Grail, perhaps Val had been mixed up with the whole thing to begin with. I wanted to ask more but I felt someone's breathe on the back of my neck, I spun around to face, only a few inches from my own face, the furious green eyes of the pig man.

"My boy, my boy, m-m-m-y boy!"

He licked his lips.

His green eyes rolled toward the ceiling, vibrating with rage as if gazing on a phantom of inspiration bathed in flame, as he searched for words to convey his outrage that, at that moment, was causing his snoutish mouth to open and shut erratically. He stood like an actor who had forgotten his lines, and all the while (a while which was ten seconds though it felt like an era) he stared intensely at me and then intermittently at Yol as if my froggish companion were a desperate director holding up cue cards. Finally, the silence forced me to produce dialogue, "I am sorry sir, what exactly is the problem?"

His face went red and quivered like a bloodbag, "Sauuu"

Yol asked, "Sauce? The sauce na good?"

"Sahh"

"Saaa-alt?"

"Jeh!" the pig exploded, spittle hanging off his lower lip.

"Jeh?"

"Saauuu-Sahh-"

"Oh, no salt in the sauce."

He smiled, but it wasn't the smile that said, 'That delightful jest has calmed me, dear friend,' but rather, 'You have broken my spirit, and now my rage knows no bounds, your actions have proven what I have always suspected since I left my sow of a mother for the cruel world; that life is an absurd cosmic joke of which the punchline is death, a joke you will see the completion of momentarily.'

When the Pigman came to express this sentiment it came out with a

"Sqeeeeehhhhh!" he screamed, erupting the putrid stench of rancid meat.

I held my ears, Yol held his nose, and the Pigman reached out to take ahold of my neck.

I was naive and had never been part of a murder-in-attempt. But his murderous intent was clear to my savvy pal at least, Yol let one of his incredibly strong legs kick out with lighting speed that hit the pig in the belly, sending flesh ripples across his body and allow me to escape his grasp. We ran for it. We dodged and darted around customers who were becoming more agitated and anxious to have their orders taken, they clawed and scratched out us but we had no time to stop and explain the specials – the pigman was on all fours, his tux in tatters as he charged like a wild hog over chairs, tables, and anyone in the way. There was an exit one way but a fellow pig man stood in our way, Yol pulled my sleeve and we tried another way. Right in front of us, about fifteen feet away, was the kitchen door. I ran, Yol hopped, and the door waited for our arrival. But another pigman stood in our way, his fat pink belly visible under his soiled shirt.

"Not that way – heuheu – back back.. there we go, back back back."

We backed up till our backs were at an empty table, all our escape routes were blocked. Five pigmen approached slowly, sharpening their cutlery, eyeing both of us up and down, and lickings their lips. The other customers paid no attention to the violent scene that was progressing. I clambered up on the empty table, with Yol hiding behind my leg. It was a massive circular table, we crawled over empty platters and bowls, but already the pigs had circled around and were closing in, like a slowly tightening noose. The centre of the table was our last stand, I grabbed my knife and Yol armed himself with a fork and a silver plater as a shield. They licked their lips, putting one trotter in front of another, as they climbed up onto the table and approached. One of the four pigs on the table leapt forward ahead of the others, but the green-eyed one shouted him down, "No, no, take your time good man." He rubbed his belly and continued, "I don´t condone playing with one's food, b-but I do believe in savouring a su-su-succulent meal," His compadres squealed in agreement, and in their frenzy, a small murmuring from behind of pigs went unheard.

"Strip his bones," one of the pigs shouted.

Again the voice murmured.

"Exc-"

"Salt the wounds,"

"Excus-"

"Suck the marrow!"

"Excuse me!"

The green eyed one, turned around in annoyance to face a creature in a bow tie. It had a smooth triangular face, small needle like teeth, huge white eyes but tiny black pupils.

Yol whispered to me, "Mantismen."

"Oh excuse me, this must be your table how rude, listen we´ll finish these two quickly and depart."

"I know you're on our table."

"Well, then its settled."

"- what I want to ask is whether you are the main because I am not sure we ordered pork."

"Oh," the green eyed one stammered, "Oh haha!"

And then he began laughing obscenely, "I am afraid we're not your meal, my dear man."

"Dear!" the creature called out to a similar looking thing who had a pink silken pussybow tied around its slender neck, "Oh dear, the food is here."

This one was clearly a mantiswoman. Dressed in an orchid dress of floral pink and jasmine, she looked as seductive as she did deadly. She sat down, "Hmm, we didn't order pork."

"I know, but the wait times are so horrendous so let's just eat. Are Clarence and Monique still in the bathroom?"

Green Eyes began the mouth flapping routine.

"Yes, you know how finicky she gets about the state of her mandibles."

The mantisman tucked a napkin under his sharp chin, "Oh here they come now. Hey looked at this, the food's late, and it's not what we ordered, but at least they remembered we wanted it fresh."

Green Eyes managed to speak, "Listen, listen there's been a misunderstanding here, we were just taking care of these buffoons, we aren't your meal and we'll be leaving now."

"Are your pigs?"

"Of a kind yes."

"Are you at our table? On our plates? And looking damn delicious?"

"Yes, but this is all circumstance."

"Ah, yes Circumstance, the cruellest mistress of them all (apart from my fiance, but let her hear me tell you that). Circumstance put the fish on the hook, the gazelle in the lion's jaws, the chinaman in the sweatshop, and you on my table; on a silver plater, on my fiance's spawnday."

"Well I am afraid I must change these circumstances sir, come on sweetheart, kids, let's get back to our table."

Green Eyes moved to leave the table. A green blur snapped by his face, a scream was cut short by a gurgle, and half a pig's face, split from ear to chin, landed by my feet – a green eye twitching, a bloody tongue flailing. The squealing began again, two of the other pigs made a run for it. The mantis named Monique, in the lilac blouse, caught one with a snap of her clawed arms and began ripping tiny pieces of flesh from its neck; and Clarence, in the dashing Ralph sweater, swiped sideways at the other pig who slowly came to realise he was missing his legs and began to wail. Yol whimpered and pulled at my jacket but I couldn't tear my eyes away.

The last remaining pig started crying and sat down, his eyes wide in disbelief, the first mantis slipped a plate under his bottom as he sat and then slide it over to himself.  
"Come on now," he caressed the pig, sliding his clothes off, "Shush shush," he wiped his tears away from his face, and then began to rub the salty tears into his pale skin.  
He turned to his partner in the pink dress, "I am telling you, Beatrice, it just adds so much to the taste."

Beatrice wasn't listening, she was staring at Yol and me, still armed with our cutlery –frozen statues holding fighting stances in a bizarre war-memorial.

She spoke, "Dear, are those two left over from the entree?"

"I think they may be."

Yol made a jump for it but I caught his leg and pulled him back, just as a claw flashed and embedded itself in the table where his throat had been a moment before.

"Not an entree," I said, "We just wanted to check how the meals going."

"Oh just great, but it's a little less than we expected, would you mind terribly if we had a little bit of that cuisses de grenouille weeping behind your leg."

"I am afraid he is for another table, was there anything else I could get you?"

Clarence, who that night had coupled that Ralph sweater with a smart pair of navy blue Croix trousers, took a segment out of the legless pig with his pincers, silencing his screams for good, and asked with his mouth full, "Mmm, I'm grd, anyrne want srmthing?"

The mantis in pink, Beatrice, raised an arm, I approached slowly and kept Yol tactically behind me away from her fiance and friends.

"I'll have a glass of water and a greek salad, not to heavy on the dressing, and no cucumber can't stand it. And make sure it's actually a salad, I am a vegetarian."

"So you won't eat me if I get the order wrong?" I grinned. Yol's throat expanded.

She grinned back, but her eyes lacked any joy, "No I won't. But I'll find equal pleasure in cutting off your face and not eating it."

"So was that sparkling or still?"

¬

We walked back to the kitchen, laughing like maniacs from relief ( a points bordering on sobbing), though Yol didn´t follow me in.

"I gotaged back to my section they´re been awain´ for a good tick now. But hey you done me a good one so I´ll do you one, catch me later during a quiet one and I´ll tell ya how you get to that Hospital if you still wantin to get there?"

I nodded and he left me to enter the kitchen alone. The rats chefs were busy at work. I walked past rats frying meat of obscure origin, rats chopping vegetables, one rat foamed at the mouth, clearly suffering from rabies, as he stirred a pot of stew. The rabies afflicted rat stared at me, wide-eyed, his pupils tiny and his sclera bloodshot.

"Go talk to Jorge, he been looking for ye!" he snapped out at me with a vicious bite which I was thankfully out of reach from, "Oh sorry mate, feeling a bit under the weth."

I left him to stir his stew, yellow foam circling the surface, and continued deeper into the kitchen. Jorge spotted me, he stood over a cadaver of a zebra laid across a butchering table.  
"Come look at this, fresh meat"

"Doesn´t look so fresh to me."

Flies buzzed around its noble face, swarming around the eyes and mouth.

"This isn´t the fresh meat, you are," Jorge jabbed a stubby finger at my chest, "So you got some orders for me, chop chop."

He took a vicious slice from the zebra´s thigh.

"Yep, got an order for the mantis table. Greek salad, heavy on the cucumber and no dressing. And a sparkling water."

"A salad for the mantis table?"

"Vegetarian."  
"Alright..." he replied with a raise of his eyebrows, "Take some other dishes with your salad."

It was only a few moments before a half dozen rats swarmed me, shelving different items on different parts of my hand, moving the thumb here and the pinkie there, until I was holding a banquet in two hands — though I had no idea how I was going to put all these dishes down. On the bottom of the mountain of dishes, I held was the Greek Salad, so I guess I had to leave that to the end. With a huge effort, I walked backwards and pushed through the double doors into the floor. And whistled to Yol to come assist. We dashed through the floor, he climbed up on my back and through plates here and there. I was impressed with the speed and accuracy he managed it without spilling a drop despite his reckless movements. The monsters roared and squawked with happiness and gave us their bones in thanks. The only dish that remained was the salad. We took it over to the table.

She smiled.

"Cucumber - oh," was all she said.

The significance hit me, and I ducked and heard the air gasp above my head. We ran for it.

"Oh come back, it's alright I forgive you fleshbag," she shouted, her mouth foaming. I burst through the kitchen doors, an inch ahead of her scythe-like claws that whispered, of a long endless night, as they whizzed behind me. Yol shoved a bone large enough to be Leviathan´s femur through the handles.

The doors bulged and we could hear the mantista screeching outside, hunting other patrons in her rage.

"Come on," he said and fished out a flat, circular tin from his jacket pocket.  
I looked over to where Jorge stood, his hands thundering over a slab of meat — he cast a mean glance our way. Yol made a smoking gesture with his hand.

"Oh, I don´t think I smoke."

"Me neither, no way no way."

He opened the tin container and packed his lip with a brown sludge.

"Ey, was ya name?"

"I don't know,"

"No idea, no cumedegon, no clue in the way of letters, or sounds or numbers."

"No idea,"

"Floored and fie, I never heard such a shing."

We both took a mutual look out beyond the smoker´s cage and down into the alley below, where a homeless dog man, a thin greyhound´s head hung off his thin neck, howled happily as he relieved himself onto a stray pooch too starved to move and not thirsty enough to drink.

"How's being nuthing.

"It feels freeing but also like I am drifting, not quite sure where I stand or where I am moving, but I do need to get to that Hospital. That's all I know."

"Iz alrie being nothing, my mams always told me a story to me bout that while I waz swellzing in the pondsi next to me million brudas and sidas, I think you'd well get from it."

"How does that story go then?"

Yol scratched his chin and began:

"As I got it, it goes like dis..."

And he told a fantastic story, really one of the best little tales I have ever heard, but it isn't something we have the time to indulge in right now.

Yol finished his story and spat a wad of tobacco, we watched it fly down and splatter onto the hopeless dogs below. "Carm on, its about knock off time and that mantiswom probals scared dem all off good. Lets get you paid and pushed out," he said. Jorge gave me my pay without a word, a hand full of coins for the bus, and threw in a disapproving look for free.  
Yol lead me to the back of the kitchen, where I had woken up, and next to the dumpster there was a small doorway, he clicked his fingers and it opened. He pushed me through and when I turned back to thank him for his help, only a mouse hole marked where it had once been.

It was just before dawn, and the city streets where bathed in orange light and the smell of incense and urine. I usually enjoy the quiet at this time in the morning, but for reasons unknown, to me, I was becoming more and more uncomfortable. Chinese letters threw themselves at me, incomprehensible. I tried, in vain, to read the signs and directions – looking for any sign of the twin snakes of a caduceus or a cross within the jungle of lines and symbols that held no meaning to me. Beyond the signs there was movement at the end of the street. I ran over and found a group of Chinese people setting up they're stalls, baskets of old oriental dolls, with long plaid cues and rosey cheeks, old toys, rusted transformers. I picked up a transformer, seemingly in half way point between vehicle and man, but he was so rusted that he was stuck and couldn't change. And in the next store there were implements to harm yourself, baskets of nooses, knives, a deal for a bathtub and razorblade, two for one, an offer for the one time use of a high rise building. I didn't want to look any more. One of the Chinese men accosted me in a Boston accent, "That's enough buddy, this isn't playtime you gonna pay for that or what?"

I put the transformer back. Perfect I thought, I'll ask him where I was, but all what came out of my mouth was, "没吃过人的孩子?"

"I can't understand a fuckin' word buddy, hang on, hey Cheryl come over here, get a load of this guy, say that shit again."

I tried to ask about the hospital or explain that I could understand them, "救救孩子!"

"Speak English, English, that's what we speak here," said the woman.

"救救孩子!"

"Get out you nutcase, go back to where were they shipped you over from, we don't wantcha."

A bus pulled up, the driver looked at me apprehensively, but I got on and gave him the coins that Jorge paid me with. The driver took a close look at them and shook his head, "We don't take gobble-de-gook nonsense money here." And threw them back at me.

I got off and ran on, past more and more Chinese getting up to start their days who stared at me, the wild causoid running through their streets. The smell of incense, the scrape and sizzle of woks being used over open flame - something about all this was familiar. Memories, real memories, threw themselves at my feet. I kicked them away but others replaced them. A wave of memories, I was somebody, I had somebody and now both of these were gone. _A speculum is first used so that the cervix may be accessed easily_. I shook them off the Hospital is what I needed to focus on, Val needed me. I paid no attention to the great monoliths and began to run. One ant hill is like any other, I thought. There! There was the white building at the end of the street. As I ran, breathlessly, I saw a glimmer of a figure on the white marble steps. It was Val but she was so transparent that you could have missed her entirely – only her eyes sparkled against the world. She was crying uncontrollably, and I didn't know what to do. "What happened?" I asked, miraculously able to speak English, and felt like I had asked this before, more and more memories flooded in. _Metal rods called dilators are used in order to open the cervix, and allowing access to the uterus_. She pointed to the back of her head, which I bent forward to get a better look at. _The suction catheter (typically nine inches long) is inserted_. There was a gaping hole in her skull. I wanted to look away but I couldn't, a great breath inhaled me and I fell within it. _In first trimester abortions the fetus is suctioned entirely, however in later abortions further procedures are required to clear the uterus of debris._ Flowers on flowers burnt impressions upon me in vivid slices. I´m flying, or else I´m strapped to the front of speeding train; my cheeks thorn torn and bones bare, inside a rosebush that bursts upon itself into a sudden field of tulips, whose buds fire upwards into the night sky, adorned with floating cypsela stars, to explode like fireworks into brief magnolia flashes _. I know you probably don't want to hear from me but we need to talk about something important, could we meet face to face?_ After which, the night sky waxes, and looks darkly and clean, but look closer, because nothing is nothing — you need only press your nose to it to see — as my nose was pressed to the earth in this mental stumble, closer to the so called peaceful rose, the symbol of love. _She wants to meet me at that restaurant in China town of all places, and I've been there before you always have to repeat your order a thousand times._ A rose, a rose. Approach and regard the young vines struggle and strangle, ignorant they are costing their parents so much, but turn that regard to the elder rose, so proud and beautiful. _Christ, big family of fatties eating next to us, absolute pigs chowing down, how do they slurping up that red mess on their plates_. The flower is the crown of her beauty, red as a dawn sun, petals as soft as a babe´s skin. Did it mean nothing, her head resting on your on shoulder the tram ride home? But just under lies the ugly truth, her red thorns prick and her dark leaves stretch out and steal the sun from her children below. _Her fur mitten hands._ I shout and I scream in protest. _How could you do it? How could you kill your own child?_ After it is done, her inconvenient children starved and dead, she turns her petalled face, a face that would have been weathered but pure if she had taken responsibility for her procreation, to blow perfume in my face _. Lying next to her on the beach, the sands stretching out like an endless desert from your head on the towel_. It is a scent that says hello seductively, and talks, indulgently and at length, of necessity, of the realities of life, of the modern consensus on the matter, of the legality of the issue, of the relativity of truth. I pull back from the vision and held Val, as tiny as a fairy now and so faint – how could I let her go now? - and we walked away from the white walls and pillars. We walk back to the woods, where we can rest and tell ourselves the story of our lives until it brings us to that which we search for, nothing. The human mind can only store 4.7 million books worth of information, so let's be wishful and consider this the 4.7 million and first, let the cup runneth over, let us forget and the gramophone warble out an awkward rhythm for the awkward waltz from our old lives into the new, and one two three, and one two three, and –

And to kill time, as we make our way back to the beginning, which is the end, which is the beginning, we can indulge, at last, in Yol's story. I can see Val nodding, already so faint, a little dew drop in my hands, already dropping off into a great big sleep, so I shall begin now. It started, as I recall:

A mud golem of inconsequence walked up to a larva pod. "Back you wap! You wapped golem, backkkk!" the frogsy screeched, his throat expanding to its outward limit where the green skin warped into a sickly yellow. The golem turned around and looked hurt, like a child who has stubbed his toe — but these creatures cannot feel the pain and the vulnerability of a child [and also as a toadhead told me, 'Let thus wusdom be known, as it was passed down from the very wuse, in fact very very wuse, wuse one: golems do not have toes] though they can feel shame. And the frogsy shamed him with a webbed finger, pointed right at his ugly feet."You! You and your ugly feet, off my carpet, away from my eggos, and out the gurkin' door and o'eryond, golliboy."

He began to move his move in a quivering fashion, looking down at this hideous toeless feet. Muddy tears fell to the floor onto the carpet, "Ah git lord, don't worry wap. As far as gollis go you are a looker," His empty eyes holes morphed into a vague expression of hope, "Now get out m'hov!" The tears began again and his steps thundered out of the house sobbing a mudslide across his drapes. It was cruel, but then again the cleaner's bill was going to be twice as cruel.

The pods shivered with excitement, and he took my pipe and blew smoke across them, "A dash o' herb and any spare dream — can make a frogsi podsi keen in health, biggums in vigour, and mas importantly right up _mean_."

And again peace and quiet fell upon the frogsi household. "These pods need a vell sheen for spring I'd say," said Margrot, just come home from across the lillies. And it was true the house was a mess under Eisenhover's watch, from letting unsupervised golems into the house to simply spreading dirt off his feet, collected in his daily hops and leaps across town. "This whole hov needs a vell sheen, what you git all dat escombro up here for?"

"Well daht golli came down here with his clodded feet of brown feather en dirt and I didn't see him come in.'

'Daht one crying o'eryond, Eisy?'

"Which o'er golli can you gaze out there? O'course daht one. Git youze eyes checked frogam, git lord," Eisenhover packed his pipe a second time.

"Git easy, Eisy, was just asking."

"I'll git easy when these eggs are done swellzing and get done burzting."

"Don be vulgar — they calling it birth these days."

"They be switching round all sorts of wurz — but they'd be better switching round me tongue for a new one while they at it, because my wurz be staying the same..." his tongue shot out the window, and flew back into his mouth with a sullen looking fly in a top hat attached. The fly began, "E-excuse me sir and madam it appea-"

Eisenhover took sickening crunch and swallowed his meal, "Hey dahts an idea, they could get me a longer tongue and a quicker one at daht."

"Oh yee, then you could catch us some o'them quickum nightfleas."

"Not if daht golli iz out there crying out tonight"

Marg licked her lazy eye, "Let me try soothe this boy."

Eisenhover took a puff of his pipe, and said to himself with a chuckle, "M'dear, you couldn't soothe a sod on a sunfloat..."

Marg hopped out to the wept golem, and he not stopping his seepings for a sec, no matter how the frogsi fawned and faunted.

"What's the boffer hun? You don't need no toes, your feetz are fine as they be."

His mudbrick mouth opened but as iz said — all gollies are hollow — so his husk of a voice came out echoing on isself, "I am languid and melancholic - holic - olic - lic - ic - c. In other words, I am sad \- aad - ad - d."

Marg nodded with sympassy, "But dond they putz a note in your mouth and you do what they say. Can't you putz a note in your mouth that says stop crying."

The golly plunged a hand down his gullet, coughed about, and pulled out a sheet o'papy.

"I have here a sheet of paper that I wrote on not two days ago - ago - go - g."

"Den why you wrote 'Be Sad' on it."

"I didn't, I wrote 'Be Happy' and I was, for a day, happy - appy - ppy - py - y. But there's mice in ma belly and fleas on the mice and the fleas pick up the ink and lay down sad where once was happy, good, or nice, and if I don't steal from the cob farmers and feed the mice rice, or take from the cheddar trees and feed the fleas a little cheese, so I'll be unhappy all my life — as unhappy as you please - ease -ees - es - s. "

"Yes - ses - ses \- s," said Marg, "did you thunk of this?" And the frogsi took the papy and tore it in two, and put the first half in his mouth.

"Be?"

"Be."

"Be what?"

"Juz Be, an' worry about happy and good later."

And with that, Marg jumped back into the pondsi — leaving no splish nor splash.
Onement of the Teleman

Bedouin Dreams of Green iii

I've made it this far – you tell yourself as you are telling yourself the story of your life – out on the highway, on the make, with two toasters and twelve knife sets left to sell. Wandering in dustbowls and canyons with rattlesnakes before your feet and the banditos at your spur'd heels. No, no it isn't time to give up because there's still a quart of scotch in the decanter that Weinberg has lent you for the night and a half pack of Chesterfield's that you will send up in smoke, in a great mushroom cloud, past the upper floor windows of the office where Oppenheimer is also working on his numbers long into the night. Maybe your heart feels faint, sire, for we all know that your siege on Antioch thus far has rested on mere providence and that it is not your skill or strength, my lord Bohemond, but only faith that has carried you so far in your crusade. But Jesus Christ on a bike, did you see the way she looked at you, I told you the shirt was a good idea dude, oh she noticed you, wouldn't be surprised if she starts asking around – your friend is telling you on the phone as a cold sweat appears on your forehead. Of course, you would much rather be sipping your coffee looking out on the rain falling down on Rue des Douradores and dreaming of another name to hide your heart behind. However it was too late for questions or even words, they meant nothing to the fox whose instincts have carried him this far and are now carrying you over the ground, ground, ground, and the hare running so fast ahead. You'd like nothing so badly as to sink your fangs into the fair maiden's neck, suck her dry and then let fly among the gothic spires, letting your wings bathe in the moonlight. Instead, you find yourself on your knees before the Madonna with nothing but holy intentions on your lips. She says yes. A warning: If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine, says Obi-Wan and you take the moment to rest your hand on hers, feeling safe in the dark of the cinema and so very very exposed as if a spotlight might appear from above and melt the stupid scared smile off your face like an action figure underneath a magnifying glass. Nonetheless, Zeno of Elea's arrow hits its mark against all logic and Chrysippus dies laughing. But that's just it, isn't it, nothing lasts forever and there's no paradox or kevlar vest to protect you from that kind of high calibre round, fired from a grassy knoll into your heart. Eventually, after running out of hydrogen, the sun will eject a mass of gas and dust into space which can be as much as half the star's mass and reveal the molten core before finally dying. At which point, there are two ways of looking at this: You can accept you are gone and light a candle at the shrine of amnesia, or... light your beard like a cheroot and prepare to board. In the spirit of Blackbeard, you will raid the ships and shores of your sweetest memories, plundering all that can be saved and treasured, only to bury them, in a futile gesture against entropy, on a deserted isle where only you walk the sands. You've left few clues but you know they've sent their best to make you don't skip town and so you sleep with one eye open, the other swollen shut, half a monochrome cigarette in your mouth and your revolver pointing towards the monochrome door underneath which a shadow appears. You deliver the line with gusto – Pop, I'm nothing! I'm nothing, Pop. Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it any more. I'm just what I am, that's all – your voice launches across the theatre and the energy of the crowd is electric, but from the corner of your eye you spot the NY Times critic in the front row who shakes her head and writes something in her notepad. It's over. There's only so much time you can spend in the Tower of London with the rats and severed heads until you put a coin into the hand of your executioner, tell him you forgive him, and rest your head on the block. There's no time to see if Neo-China arrives from the future or if anything of humanity will be left after the singularity. No, there's no stopping it now, thought the field mouse who kept running despite his words before the windhover's pride, plume, here buckle! The curtains close. The lights go out. And they tuck you into bed, where Sleep finds you, at last, the child It lost in the supermarket for just a moment and what a precious moment it was.
The Passion of Saint Mickey

It was the tale I was meant to hear and the tale I was meant to sing. It could only have been I, Ba of Birdsong, to be given this task though I am nothing in the grasp of this – the history of our world. From the beginning I could hear with perfection the birds that flew above my cot, whose song I would make twice, making my mouth into whichever bird I chose. I could make my mouth into the waves crashing, into the rain and thunder, the laughter of the monkeys, the croak of the lizards, all of which my ears only had to hear once. I received my name for my talent and was said to be inflicted with a great fate in service to the world. But my fate was to be in the service of the one who we knew not in those days, those days long ago which I can barely count upon my string of seeds, when the name of Saint Mickey was not known, Saint Mickey whose ears and singing far exceeded mine. It was from the mouth of the great merciful Mickey that we learnt of the silent singing of stone and wood and of the history beyond our horizon. Beyond our horizon, from where Mickey came in the stone ship with the traitor Sean de Walt. Beyond the horizon, where Mickey would banish Sean de Walt, singing to him,

"I'm sorry to do this to you, I know you won't appreciate that I am sorry but you gave me no choice in it, this island is the last hope for all of us and I can't let you be riskin' that."

"You're a fool Mickey, and you'll die a fool amongst these savages."

The stone ship left our world with Sean de Walt and I heard Mickey sing quietly,

"May the road rise up to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face, and the rains fall soft upon your fields, and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand."

Sean de Walt left and then from Mickey we were taught, from Mickey we know. We know of the man who died on the two fingers, we know of the man who died upside down, and the man filled with arrows, we know of the man of sand who made men bow with his singing, we know of the man who stopped singing and sat under a tree, we know of the man who sang to skulls and the man who sang him, we know of the man who sang with numbers, we know of the man of the different and same rivers, and we know of the man who drank death. We know of the woman who gave life to the man who died on the two fingers, of the women who gave life to all of these men, we know of the woman of the river who loved snakes, we know of the woman who lost her head, we know of the woman who never sat, we know of the woman and her monkey groom, we know of the woman who hid from the thunder in the leaves of her hut, we know of the woman who could see small things and through the skin of men, and we know of the men who found the smallest thing and made half of it in the land of grass seeds, twice, for the sake of war, and we know war, yes, we know war. We know the greatest war was fought upon these very sands, the war for the old and the new, fought by my blood.

There were those that were tempted by Sean de Walt, by his promises of wealth, of power, by the intimidation of the thunder in his hand, and by his song, "Mickey is a bloody liar, I am a God, and that eejit has defied a God! The cheek of it. He's unworthy of my paradise, and all those who follow him are likewise and all." And there were those that were loyal to Mickey, those who followed him when he chose to live by himself on the other side of the island in the shadows. First, it was I, Ba of Birdsong, that followed, and then Krak of Caution, Nearest Green, Mud Eyes and later, Tisus the Cough. Slowly, others arrived until the tribe was split. And when Mickey observed that his way had won over many of my people, he sang a song to the traitor, "What's the craic then Sean? Have we had enough of this yet or do you want to continue on with this shite? One of us is going to get hurt and enough of these people have been already by us breathin' on them. You can't continue on like this, you can't make every girl you fancy your mot and then give her man a whipping because he gives you a strange look. We are strange to them, and you took advantage of that and their ignorance. You aren't a God. I can't believe I have to tell you that but you aren't. I know this is why you drove me out with your tantrums and rages because I know the truth of it – you was born in Limerick as I was, a man. I regret having given into that foolish notion that appeared practical at one time. It's gone straight to your head. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, let's give this a rest." And when Mickey sang this Sean de Walt turned red in the face and ordered his warriors, "Take him to my holy ship, where he will face a trial." To which Mickey sang laughing, "The holy ship? You've named something truthfully for once that ship does have plenty of holes." Sean de Walt jumped up and ran to give Mickey his thunder but his people took the thunder meant for him, playing the death price with their bodies. And then the war began. The sand and blood, pink froth on the waves. I remember every song of that war, every shout and scream, but these I do not sing. And when it ended Mickey sang that it was always the same old story, and now we know this story too.

We know of the story of the big lizards and the bigger rock, we know of the story of the stone men and their stone houses, we know of the story of the apple and snake, of the man and the monkey bride, we know of the thunder that came to the land of bread, twice, the same thunder of the hand that Sean de Walt held, and of the evil spirit that took hold of good people, the same spirit which held Sean de Walt. We know of the blood of the big lizards and the thunder it bought, we know of the people of the cloth and the stone birds they sent, twice, and what they suffered, we know of the shells that sang like the windy cliffs, singing from nowhere, of their wisdom and their lies, we know that beyond the horizon the people chose to die, that they put their rocks in the huts of the warrior they wanted as chief, that they chose the chiefs who would send the stone birds flying and that the smallest thing was halved again and again and again. We know that the people beyond the horizon look as Tisus the Cough did, before he fell in the war, his skin weeping and his eyes as the insides of fruit. We know it was the fate of Saint Mickey to come as he did, and not his choice, to flee the foul smelling water. We know that it was by the unknowing hand of Sean de Walt who took the stone ship that he arrived on our world.

And it was my fate, the fate of Ba of Birdsong, to see the moment Mickey stepped onto our island for the first time. With his blessed feet on our sand, the moonlight thick on the waves, he sang, "Sweet Mary, it doesn't look half bad does it, Sean?"

"I'm glad you're happy as larry Mickey because we've got fuck all fuel and I don't know how we'll get any more here," sang Sean de Walt.  
"No need for the effin' and blindin' I am just saying it's a pretty sight ."

"And I am just saying that if you weren't touched in the head you'd know that tropical islands are notoriously hard to survive on and plus we're out of drink and I don't see us finding a pub around here."

"Maybe we can get sloshed on some homemade coconut moonshine,"

"Gobshite — wait, I hear something..."

I stepped backwards to escape the pale figures, who I then thought to be spirits, but fell. And it was Sean de Walt who leapt through the bushes and held me.

"What do we have here?"

They spoke to me with the words I did not know then, remembering them only as sounds. I tried to sing back to them as they had sung to me to them but that only angered Sean de Walt.

"Leader. Lee-duh. Take us," he made a finger to himself and Mickey, "Us."

"Give it a rest, Sean, you'll give him the idea we're aliens."

"Alright, you have a go then. But I am already calling that one as my servent fella."

"Come on now."

"You stay there Mickey, I'm gonna get the rifle just in case but don't let him out of your sight, I don't want to end up with a spear through my neck because you were playing at being Robinson bloody Crusoe."

Mickey gave me his hat, which I gave back to him on his final pyre, and taught me to shake hands, which I have taught to all on the island.

"What are you playing at? Don't give him your hat."

"Sean don't get all bothered now."

"Don't get bothered? We're stuck on an island and our only chance of rescue rests on the chance that the bloody global apocalypse happens to blow over. Don't get bothered!"

"Well, this place looks like Eden to me."

"Gobshite," sang Sean de Walt.

We know this because we know they will come again. Mickey did not sing this to us but we know if the stone ship found its way here, once, and it will find its way, twice. We know that we have to smile and greet them with our hands. We know many will be as Sean de Walt, a spirit, we know that few will be as Saint Mickey, a man.
Up there (Translation from the Torlakian poem "Žali Zare")

Out in the woods, moonlight thick, shivering the rabbit waits as does she in the house and out the windows looking in the shadows in search of the eyes that have found hers, the eyes that are searching through foggy breath, the breath of coming winter she has dreamt about in night terrors, knowing at last that He has come as He always does to demand the leaves take frost and the ground to freeze which will surely kill the last leek of autumn that she has saved and let fatten in her garden so it could be chopped, seasoned, and stewed in the first stew eaten on the night of the first snow, a stew that wouldn't be proper without that leek which she held so dear, as dear as her very name and the one she has taken from her husband, presently sleeping and rattling the thatch roof with his snores, who she has told every year that she would sooner give herself up to the tundra, body-and-soul, than let that last leak be stolen as it was by the rabbit, just now, jumping from the shadows the greenness clenched in its little jaw running out in the woods, moonlight thick, shivering with anger the wife is running and crying for shame, crying for mercy but the rabbit gives no quarter hurtling through the bush and bramble where the moon dare not shine, leaving the wife behind to howl and presently wake her husband who scratches his beard and shakes the dreams out of his head, rubbing his eyes clean of the sands of a fading beach, squeezing out his ears the water of a sea he has never seen or heard except for in stories, and then, making his way round, frees the hunting dogs, numbered one, two, and three, to take chase after the leek that would have been brought out a steaming pot to catch the evening light out their dim windows and bring joy and love to their table which had long been absent of them, instead of in the mouth of a rabbit out in the woods, moonlight thick, shivering and slowing to give rest to its breathless lungs and heaving heart which beckoned her on to the burrow where her kits waited, always fearing the worst as they waited for their mother's return with food, alone, as she had not a hare to rely upon, the kits waited listening and huddling closer to one another at every odd sound – a snake, a fox, a badger, anything or anyone could be creeping out on a night like this to gobble and rip the children she had counted before leaving with a kiss on each ear, one, two, and three, she counted the same as the dogs caught her at last, her legs weak and paws bramble bloodied she gave up before the teeth and paws of the dogs, a fat one, a small one, and a big one, but for the moment they did not devour her and waited like good hunds for their master to arrive, waiting long between the toothed mountains, out in the woods, moonlight thick, shivering to wait so long for their master and not have temptations to take the quarry for themselves before his arrival, waiting so long that their instinct and their beast hood overcame their training and bringing them to discuss the matter amongst themselves upon the method and means with which they would share among themselves this rabbit and her leek, while the rabbit did not dare move, hoping as they talked the snow which had begun to fall would fall faster and swallow her and her white fur, she hoped it would snow forever and over the whole earth so that she and her kits could hop the world without danger, to hop the world that was a beast's jaws to their kind, but the snow would not fall fast enough she lamented while listening to the dogs growl and grumble in their considerate voices that the leek, still clenched in the rabbit's mouth, was to go to Kokoschka, the fat one, who protested but was met with firm reassurance that some meat would go his way but that they first wanted to restrict him for his own health to which they all agreed and then moved on to discuss the matter of the bones and marrow which was quickly resolved to go to Moreau, the smallest of the three, whose sharp small teeth would be able to shave the smallest morsels of meat off the bones and leave nothing to waste, not forgetting the marrow which was a favourite of Moreau's though he didn't have the strength himself to break the bones so Dodi, the biggest of the pack, would break them for him before Dodi himself would tuck into the lion's share of the meat, leaving the choicest bits to Kokoschka for he had the refined palate for such things, and with all this decided and brought to a consensus in the most civil manner they approached the rabbit, who sat shivering, her little ears tucked back and listening to the dogs explain that they were sorry to end her life but that it was their nature to hunt just as it was her's to run and that they hadn't chosen their lot in life but rather had fallen into it just as she had – Moreau adding, with nodding approval from the two other dogs towards their smallest companion who often provided keen insights into their daily lives, that it could easily have been the other way round and that perhaps one day it would be considering the amorphous and ever-shifting nature of the world – concluding that they wished for her to know all this not to draw out this unpleasant business any further, promising they would be as quick as they could manage, but because they wanted her to know that though they were mangy and starving they weren't a bad bunch and hadn't let the cruel tides of life become an excuse upon which to live without virtue, giving further explanation, and taking turns in this explanation, that they had once been the lap dogs of a certain baroness who had loved each of them dearly, at which point Kokoschka's voice trailed off into a mournful howl so that Dodi had to continue that their pack had once been nine in number before the bloody revolution which had put the baroness, her son, and little daughter against a wall, one, two, and three, to be shot by a firing line of sectarian soldiers who proceeded to put the stately home to flames, with two dogs Klara and Remus perishing to those flames behind the locked door of the drawing room, their claws scratching at the wooden panel while the others searched for an escape from the house, finding one blocked by a soldier keeping watch for flame flushed royals only to be met by the heroism of old Heraclitus, taking it upon himself to throw his wiry frame upon the soldier to allow the rest a moment in which they could escape but receiving himself a bayonet in the belly for his bravery as the others scampered across the manicured lawn, through the flames, over the corpses of the family who had loved them dearly, their love meaning nothing in the face of glorious class struggle, the soldiers laughing to see them dash and taking pot shots, one hitting little timid Alexei who could only whimper and kick uselessly at the damp dirt, his cry so faint that only Anastasia, his litter sister, heard it and stopped to push him with her snout but to no avail for she was just a pup and could do nothing but take the second bullet that struck her in the chest leaving the two out on the lawn, the evening dew on the grass catching the orange glow of their burning home, as the surviving dogs ran into the brush with such terror they only realised later they were only four, far from the flame of civilisation, between the toothed mountains, out in the woods, moonlight thick, shivering the rabbit listened to the story which finished abruptly, the dogs closing in for the kill, her eyes shutting to the world as something wrapped itself around her neck, but to her surprise, she felt warmth instead of fangs, her eyes flicking open to perceive the hand of a man dropping her into a wicker cage that hung at his waist, the dogs disappointed in their missed opportunity lost by virtue of their discursiveness, following with downtrodden eyes their master now returning with the leek – still clenched in the mouth of the rabbit – to the wife who grew it and whose rapturous gratitude the husband anticipated, his mind relaxing as it often did, never learning that it was always his relaxed mind that led him into bother, always as such and no exception to be found presently, the husband not paying any attention to the bumps and wallops he gave to the rabbit in her cage, not paying any notice to the thwacks and wacks he struck to the three dogs, careless as he was pushing his belly through the branches until they twanged back into which ever poor fellow stood behind him though all this isn't to say that he didn't have no morals, he had a whole lot of them but sometimes he forgot where he left them last, like in the two winters past when a troop of soldiers had arrived at his door and asked him where the nearby royal quarters were and he, thinking, of his poor wife who he wished to give the life of a princess and of his own pride stuck as he was farming in the dirt and hunting the small amount of game whose furs afforded his wife and he the small amount of pleasures, small brass trinkets that brought a shine to her eyes and jugs of apple cider that brought a fire to his, and then comparing his own destitude he imagined that baroness and her children swimming in china tea cups, bathing in gold dust, drying themselves with silk and said yes I know where they are, follow me, taking the soldiers who he began to talk to and familiarise himself with, knowing little as he did about the sectarian movement or the fact that they were a secondary or corrective group of sectarians who, in actual fact, were possessed by the true spirit of the revolution that had allowed them to bring the previous and false revolutionaries to justice, and, justice meaning arrest and a trial to the husband of the wife who grew the leek who then asked who else they had brought to justice, to which the sectarians answered oh many many wicked people that would seek to hoard the wealth of the land especially from folk like you which made his eyes grow wide with admiration and awe to be in presence of such heroes, he began, involuntarily, to imagine the sounds of waves crashing against rocks and the smell of the ocean as his mind set to thinking about the Voyages of Sindbad, as his mind often relaxed into, which was the only book his family had ever owned and which he still possessed despite his illiteracy holding onto it as a keepsake, or almost a sacred item that he had once watched his mother turn, as if by miracle, into spoken word, calling him over and telling him to listen close as she read and transformed the floor of their hut into rushing waves and the dinner table into a mighty vessel, is this the place asked one and he nodded, his mother picking him up and swinging him from side to side swinging off the high ropes, you stay here or go we don't care and he nodded and followed, swinging up onto her shoulders, climbing up the mast-head, as he desired to see the sectarians deliver the justice they had spoken so much of, his father coming close and taking a lock of his mother's hazelnut hair and planting it like an oriental moustache on his face which was now that of a distraught vizier begging Sindbad to rescue his daughter from a magi that lived on an nearby island and that the magi's hoard of treasure was his if he completed this task to which Sindbad immediately nods his little head, and, my god, the treasure that he saw them carry outside of that house, the glittering hoard of the magi shining in the moonlight, which prompted him to ask what they intended to do with the paintings, furniture, jewellery and other goods of the baroness who had, just then, been apprehended, answering that they were in the process of redistributing it, laughing, as they shoved on as many gold rings as they could onto each finger, but Sindbad paid no attention to the treasure as he crept around the magi's palace and found a way in underneath the legs of the dinner table from where he spotted the gold hoarding villain, who he pointed to and asked about the process of trial that would be given and the kind of suitable punishment to which they laughed again, answering that she would be given a trial, of course, right here on this lawn explaining to their uneducated friend that justice was delivered far quicker with the help of the revolutionary spirit, and his blood boiled to see the maiden in the arms of the magi, the villain who wore the same moustache as the vizier and who had the same eyes as his father, whose eyes suddenly darted to the hero, spotting him, and smiling as he pulled the baroness towards him, stripping off her frills and frocks and paying no heed to her screams, laughing madly the magi grabbed at her with a knife to her throat as he told Sindbad not to take a step further or he would regret it, finally telling her not to scream or they would slit her open at which point he realises something is very wrong, but Sindbad is brave and charges forward knocking the knife from the magi's hand and freeing the princess, he begins to shout at them to stop, it is useless, one sectarian leaves the huddle that has formed around her and gives him one across the mouth, and the princess hides behind the fearless Sindbad as the magi, enraged, casts a spell upon himself, turning himself into a vicious serpent from which they flee, they run down the hallways the serpent at their heels and accidently knock over a candle that sends great flames up the curtains, they hide in the wardrobe, but the smoke gets too much and they run out of the house, a boy and little girl, who the sectarians pounce on, then one man said that was enough, Sindbad tries to shake her awake but she has fainted in fear, so they stand her up against the wall, Sindbad realises they are trapped, please the children let me take the children they are not guilty he says and the baroness holds her son and daughter close to her, the serpent slithering slowly to them, its fangs pointed, his cruel slitted eyes flickering in the flames, its neck arched back ready to strike, a mouthed hand in his mother's stocking, which Sindbad stares down counting to himself with his cutlass ready; one, two, and three – the muskets fire, Sindbad's sword strikes, and the husband of the wife who grew the leek cries out, crying for mercy, crying for shame, and then watches the flames die, watching the darkness reclaim the scene and Sindbad carry the princess, climbing over the serpent's slumped bloodied body, blood spilled all over the lawn, and take her home, the journey home silent as death as the husband's mind tortured him, returning home to riches, to the princess whose hand in marriage he is then given, lamenting to the three dogs and the rabbit in her cage that there weren't any more princesses or kings, a thought which he had lamented on endlessly on that walk home, climbing into bed to be wracked with grief for three days and three nights until when walking in the woods, with plans of giving himself up to the tundra, body-and-soul, he came across four dogs in a clearing, far from the flame of civilisation, between the toothed mountains, out in the woods, moonlight thick, shivering they huddled together, three of them standing around the fourth who was lying down unable to get up, and he decided the moment he saw this scene that this was the redemption which he had been praying for, that he would take care of these dogs, that they would unburden his heart, but as cruel fate dictated this freedom would come at a cost as moments later still he realised despite his vow the fourth dog was not going to survive the night and so he took his knife out, for mercy's sake, but the three other dogs upon seeing the knife leapt forward with growls, forcing him to step back and wait through the long night while Moreau remained silent sitting by the side of frail Scheherazade, dying of exhaustion, as Dodi and Kokoschka talked to her, reminiscing about how their lives had been, how they should have still been, how during the summer months they had been taken to the beach to run and run and run along the sand and play in the water and dance around the baroness laughing under her parasail on days that seemed to last a lifetime, on days that now seemed a lifetime ago, realising as they reminisced that memories were all that they had left, Scheherazade asking them, in rasps and croaks, to remember it, to remember it all, the other dogs giving their word as the husband watched the dog's life extinguish and the candle of dawn rise, there, far off on the horizon, just now, the light of his hut, his wife waiting for the return of the leek, of the three dogs, and of himself, she having spent the night in rapid thoughts of all that could go wrong unable to sleep and so preparing a midnight stew, the dogs at once sniffing that food was being prepared and running ahead to confirm what their noses had detected, while the rabbit also sprung into action and began to chew and chew and chew, the husband paying no notice his thoughts flung upwards and mixing the moonlight with the screams of princesses, the clang of Sindbad's cutlass, the smell of an ever-living fire, kindling itself, which was soon overpowered by the smell of the stew who he was excited to introduce his rabbit to, marching into the hut to the relieved sigh of his wife who would have thrown herself around his neck had he not stopped her with an upraised hand to wait a moment while he fished in the wicker cage but only found his own hand sticking through a hole in the bottom, then cursing himself he slammed the wicker cage onto the table and caused the leek – which the rabbit had had to let go off to chew to her escape, out the cage, across the wood, and safely into the kisses of her children – to fly out and with a swan dive land into the stew, a sight which brought his wife laughter and a smile to his face, relaxing as he watched the leek floating and sailing around the potatoes and carrots as effortlessly as Sindbad had navigated his way home along Bagdad's coast, and with the leek added to the stew, with the stew eaten, with the dogs fed and with one rabbit back in her burrow, all settled down and drifted off to sleep on the eve of winter, husband, wife, dog, and rabbit, far from the flame of civilisation, between the toothed mountains, out in the woods, moonlight thick, shivering.

For more visit:  
www.deathtofanatics.wordpress.com

