-You’re up bright and early, Miss Peaches.
-As are you, Dr. Mumbly.
-No rest for the wicked, hey.
Gwendolyn’s next door neighbor indicates with a tremble that a jaunty lift of his cane might follow.
He’s on his way to the end of the block, where he will pause and gaze left and right at the beginnings of traffic, while forgetting what errand he was about, whereupon he will return slowly up the street to repeat the operation with hopes of fairer success. With any luck, Gwendolyn will be safely within her house when he passes back by.
As old fools go, Mumbly isn’t the worst, and even within the four thick walls of her misanthropy, Gwendolyn knows this to be true. He thinks he shocks her (mildly) with his teasing, his drooly hints (so subtle, so pre-Weimar) that she gets up to la vie boheme with the young men she tutors at all hours, rain or shine. His pluralizing of her name might or might not be a private joke, her use of ‘Doctor’ is a tropical kindness, for she knows he was only ever a pharmacist before this last long golden phase.
-Mind the weeds and biscuits, he mumbles, moving away, dabbing at the discharge from a perpetual sty.
-Same to you, Gwendolyn smiles, although he can’t hear her.
A long Tuesday lies ahead, her first lover not scheduled to arrive till four, for his regular quick bolt and away. Perhaps she can avoid changing the now-fresh sheets twice in a single day, induce him in his eagerness to have her up against the kitchen wall or on the garden lawn chair in the shady corner where no neighbor’s eye can pry.
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Jocko poses at the filing cabinet. His thumb rests on a black ‘case-closed’ label: O’Leary, Josephus. Some victim of a Pleistocene mugging. Or perhaps the mugger himself?
Jocko could care less. Not his case. Before, during, after. His fingers taper among the ‘p’s and ‘q’s.
Querelle, Adelaide. The most verbal of their paraded witnesses. A positive windbag of false leads. Gypsy recipe dead-ends. As, meanwhile, the body count rises. At last tally, eight stiffs.
Jocko’s stomach is in shreds. 1 stale Danish. 1 hard-as-rock bagel. 5 cups of lousy coffee. Deep-sea rotaries churn his intestines from rancid to riot.
Across the room, like some postmodern Bernadette lourded in artificial light, Emma Glass gives allergies a sexy spin. She sneezes like a kitten. Flushed with fever her bright cheeks beg for despoliation.
Jocko’s got the blues. He’s dreaming of the Fisher King. A phantom icepick butterflies his balls. A harpy’s shishkabob.
Emma looks up from her desk. Her rheumy eyes blink something almost friendly, distant cousin to a smile. But not for him. She’s looking over his shoulder at the wall clock. They’ve a luncheon appointment uptown.
Jocko’s guts cry for kindness. His lonely suppers for ten nights running. Cottage cheese, yogurt, vitamin E.
The day will surely come. He’ll backhand files and stapler, pencil sharpener and folders from her desk. He’ll have her on her finishing school back. He’ll spread her in a trice. In his fantasy she’ll be mad for it, loving each degrading thrust. He’ll splash his liquid initials on the bucking cleft of the Glass ass. ‘Pitt Bull was here.’
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Like a horsefly roasting on the bluebright tube of a halogen lamp, Emma’s hope reduces to a miniscule ash-heap.
In its brief life, what joy!
For just a moment.
A glimpse.
And then the possibility, so wild, so quick, so round-the-hellish-bend as to make absolute Council of Niceaen sense, and then …
Rolls over and sins no more.
She can feel her promotion oozing away like something sweet going nasty.
Emma sneezes and sees stars.
The tissue comes away foxed with blood.
She is allergic to failure.
The reek singes her nostrils.
Wolf-spoor, and waiting.
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Fiona counts her teeth with the tip of her tongue. A nervous habit, souvenir of a nervous childhood. She pips a fennel seedlet, scalds a fever blister’s promise of blood, loses count. Starts over. Reaches the curb. Teeters. Turns. And starts back down the block for the sixth time since leaving the restaurant.
Puss’s brilliant notion.
He haunts her peripheral vision. Stalking parallel to the casual fraud of her aimlessness. From across the street she listens for the insect stutter of his camera. ‘Don’t wave, remember? You don’t know I’m there, here, there. Act ….. natural.’
Three rolls gone and one to go. Ninety-six exposures and that’s just for starters. Puss projects a panorama. Petals on the dry white stone.
Together in his darkroom they’ll flush him, her, them, the enemy … out out out.
Sun Fucks Vampires, Study Shows. Ant beneath a magnifying glass. An act of high-tech love. To allay her fears. Or confirm his own.
Fiona’s slightly seasick. She wishes she’d kept her trap shut.
She stops before the display window of a pharmacy. In the sunspot mirror Puss keeps moving. Acting naturally. Acting naturally, Fiona treats herself to a deep examination of her reflection. A woman’s look. Complicitous. All-knowing. Brooking no borzoi’s golden piddle. Harboring no shame. Undressing herself with her eyes.
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Puss’s dilemma is not a rarity among the amateurs of his acquaintance.
Twenty-twenty vision in the red closet of his darkroom. Homerically blind with the camera at his squinted eye.
He feels like a hit man with the palsy. The crowded sidewalks are a creepy, slow motion swirl of ghosts. Innocence, among these faces, would be as lost as a mewling kitten in a slaughterhouse.
Puss’s slightly seasick. He needs to reach her. She’s under watchful eyes and no neutrality. The pulse of sick vitality. Thirty yards and closing. Puss bellows through the throng. Weighed down, ankles chained, a fat man jogging in a cripple’s nightmare. He reaches the middle of the street. A taxi brakes so close that Puss can read the pigeon-drops on the hood. The driver’s annoyance is eloquent and filthy.
-Drown in vomit, cockroach, Puss smilingly disengages, reaching the safety of Fiona’s side of the street.
-Let’s go! he cries, his hands on her waist.
Fiona, on the verge of dropping her mental knickers, jumps electric in his arms.
A block further on is it Puss’s imagination? The sound of applause? Performance most masterly? Come clean, his conscience lisps. Puss nods to himself.
Take the pledge. Take a chance. A future of locusts and honey, and nostalgia’s suitcase of mementos. Masturbator’s fetish. Fiona links her arm through his. Her fingers moving along her throat.
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The telephone burbles warm above the crunch of crystal.
Adelaide feathers over broken glass, picks her way as one might, barefoot among slugs.
-Hello? Yes? Hello?
-Miss Querelle. I’m so glad I caught you.
-You again.
-I’m afraid it’ll always be me again.
Adelaide stands in the darkness of her wrecked apartment. She’ll need a good strong drink before she turns on the lights. Beholds the damage she inflicted the night before.
-I’m still here, she breathes, swinging her hips lightly in place, sudden need to pee tickling her from knees to ribcage.
-I trust you got the last donation?
-Without a hitch, just like you said.
-Good, good. I’ll be needing two more of the same and that means a double for you, Miss Querelle.
-All business, more’s the pity. No inquiries as to my health, general well being, inspecific whatnot?
-I’m sorry. But the nature of my work is sometimes inconsistent with courtesy.
-Fine. And no prying questions, as we agreed.
-Excellent decision. Now, shall I hold the line or call back?
-Give me half an hour?
-It’s yours. Half an hour or thirty minutes, whichever gets there first.
Half an hour, in its thirty-minute cape, swept upstairs via elevator, all dark and showbiz in its swish to Adelaide’s apartment.
-Hello.
-Ready?
-Yes. You?
-Shoot.
Adelaide, with two whiskies inside and a fresh one close to hand, perched on the edge of the chair. The light of the table lamp warmed round her like autumn twilight. The residential phonebook lay open on her knees. She closed her eyes, flipped forward, backward, forward, backward, then a smaller backward and stop. Eyes still closed she ran the nail of her pointing index down the left hand page about midway the middle then tap tap slide to the margin. Open your eyes.
‘Greene, Albert.’
-Okay. Albert Greene, green with an e.
-Got it. Address?
-Three-seven-zero Porteus …. sorry, Proteus Lane, District Five.
-Got it. Okay, one more and make it past the Ns.
-Right.
Slow sip, tongue batting ice cube but not so loud it clicks against glass. This time she keeps her eyes open, stirring clear of the Qs.
-Prieto, Sandy. Let me spell ….
-No. Do it again.
-Again?
-Yes, I was actually hoping for an S.
-You should have said so.
-Don’t make me apologize. You do have your eyes closed, don’t you?
-If you could see me right now I wouldn’t know you were watching.
-Good girl. Go on.
Adelaide ruffles the pages and begins a slide through the Ss.
-Here. Cupaleith Snook. Shall I spell it for you?
-You’d better not be making this one up.
-Even my imagination has limits.
-Okay, I’ll buy it.
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Dardanelle rust turns clockwork music, rich as Venice and stranger than Byzantium at its gaudy weirdest. Bright eyes make their entrance. To be coshed by goodwill, emerging dilated at the vaselined exit. A louche, presumptive mythology. Raped girls who turn into swallows and buzz the pirates, befouled in their Bosporus hidey-holes.
The cartridge leaks magenta. Roger dusts baby powder on the ruined sheet. Candleflame trembles, huge shadows billow on curtains.
Something chimeric out of Huysmans. Or Oz. The curtains: still, or billowing? Don’t look behind them.
Roger sits back, lets words run naked to daisychain the orgy of a phrase. He sucks, exhales, sips. Strong tobacco, cause and effect beer. Tukeh cigarettes : Paatani Huimaa ale. A recent Baltic affectation.
Marina, Osip, Anna, and Boris. Roger’s ignorance of Cyrillic is utter. But he loves those guys, prizes their black and white martyrdoms above all others.
He is not so pleased with his own latest poem. Baby Frankenstein needs juice.
Poetry’s only rival to his heart’s pumping misery, his moist dreaming Mimi, asleep in the farthest, safest shadows of the room.
She had disapproved his affectation in mild Mimi manner.
-It’s not the proper thing to do. It’s …….. rude. Reading Russians and smoking Finnish cigarettes, drinking Finnish beer!
He was not sure however, which nation he had offended in the exchange. So best to slum and pawn a pretender’s expertise, thereby insuring that all shall be equal in receiving injury and its added insult.
Roger exhales a trail of smoke, its bitterness touched now with a soft trace of autumn, leaves falling with a cancerous burn upon patched pools of imagined Slavic sunlight.
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Mimi steps lightly. Fairy, rampant on a field of unnatural flowers. Ice-blue. Janissary-teal. Menstrual-scarlet. As miraculous and impossible as the wardrobe of a Klimt acid queen. The hammered, cruel mosaic of Theodora’s plotting eyes.
Beside her a goat keeps pensive pace. It feeds from her hand. Capers and cloves of silver and gold. Its runny nose snots the darkness of her thin dress, where the breeze presses fabric to skin. Its hooves are flecked with blood. And the juice of crushed, decapitated flowers. Around its neck the gorget of a twisted garland. Thorns, nettles, corkscrewed flagella of barbed wire. Its voice pipes to Mimi’s ear. Angelic monotone of a toy windchime. Paradoxes, proverbs, riddles, runes, and conundra. Its wit is anagrammatic.
Beneath the thin bodice Mimi’s nipples are hard as jewels, breezepricked.
She touches herself in her sleep and stirs. She slides her arms back into the opposite sleeves of her bathrobe. A la Chine, Mimi mandarin. Her lips are slightly parted, as though an emerald word sits on her tongue, poised to leap. One white, gymsocked foot obtrudes from beneath the quilt. Hanging off the edge of the sofa it paws the air intermittently. Kitty-cat dreaming of murder.
The flowers at her feet are overcome by shade. In the middle of the field a solitary tree.
-What strange, what lovely fruit …
It is the voice of her companion goat, warming the knocking of her knees.
Above them the thick branches groan. A ship of death’s becalmed and doleful creaking. Twenty feet above the ground, the symmetrical bloated harvest of a dozen hanged men. Blackened tongues loll down like a lechers’ choir. The nearest corpse opens its eyes, looks down at Mimi, licks its lips and begins to sing:
-Baa-baa black sheep, have you any wool? …………..
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A winter’s tale of ill-used children.
Of Churl.
And Anisette.
Force-fed the forbidden. Brought low by the collapse of artifice, he submits, redfaced and swooning, to his own coronation. His beautiful, defective sister, the wretched Infanta, makes ape-faces at him from behind her fan. Until led away by her keeper, Villegas the castrato of Jesuit schooling, who senses that even this sideshow must have limits.
Churl watches her go.
In mourning for the banished, illegal embraces of their impoverished, royal childhood. Before the great pawning to opposing factions, bent on dynasties, spawners only of ghosts.
The age demands a stripping of the king: each ejaculation, emission, evacuation. Tallied, registered, loosed to the void of a public domain.
The sun burns bandages from Undine’s eyes. Lake Constance is a sacrament of girls, flashed with spray. Trees kick overhead in wind and clattering branches set the pace like drowning swimmers, lost in a whale rush of storming leaves. As loud as locust-clouds or rising souls, after a weekend’s sloppy genocide. The stench of mossblood and dung blows upward from the surface of the ancient lake, its crystal opaque with cataract. Picnickers and gamekeepers soothe their affronted nostrils, lifted kerchiefs soaked with orange pulp. Young women roll back white eyes, fainting under warm dark skies. Are jumped in their comas. Mounted by beefy provincials up for the weekend. By prim seminary students chatting as they queue. By the occasional shifty-eyed ragpicker. The sacklike bodies of the royal swans clog the underside of Columbine’s Bridge, to suffer through the nightmares of a generation of wee toddling bastards. Birds with glazed ivory talons, eyes bright and hard as opals … Papa’s talons, sister’s eyes. The court is divided on the role of the incestuous nursery. They turn the judgment over to God, who is, as usual, away on business.
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(Postcard V)
A dozen distinct hues, dimming.
Hours of awe await you.
Hours somber with philosophical content.
Consequential Q & A.
Far too much detail, nuance, drama, whimsy, to be taken in at a single glance.
Never has the human condition been more definitively adumbrated than in this tableau of donkeys pissing diamonds.
Dear Puzzled in Peshawar,
if you can link the following words
in a single coherent sentence ….
I’ll do you good & nasty & no payback.
mollycot: one unduly concerned with housekeeping
lothario: a gay deceiver or seducer
clisere: the succession of ecological communities
that results from climatic changes
embonpoint: plumpness of person
Pestiferous Pen Pal Proteus