The morning after the Usuals-Billets Doux show Dion woke himself up talking into the pillow.
-Sex and violence.
Alas, it was his own bed, there was only his hangover to keep him company.
Alastair, nodded out on the sofa, was a vision of serenity. Dion switched off the tiny TV, banishing Mighty Mouse to the flickering empyrean of oblivion. Wrapping the spoon and syringe in a pale blue handkerchief he placed them carefully on Alastair’s cracked Japanese tray and carried them into the kitchen.
Winter light streamed in, a glacier of honey that was lovely, if a little too rich. Grabbing a bottle of Guinness stout from the case under the sink Dion set it on the windowsill to warm in the sunlight.
He peered at the odd bits of writing pinned to the wall above the kitchen table. Since his ensconcing at Alastair’s he had accepted the dubious task of molding him into a rough semblance of a responsible man, keeping him ahead of the deadlines which trailed him like a permanent penance. He had not yet considered, or not with any great acuity, whether Alastair was salvageable.
Alastair was a dear friend but was also the most perverse, most instinctively degenerate human being Dion had ever known. In a world filled with private codes and ethics, or with the cool pretense of pristine amorality, Alastair was that rare thing: the truly immoral man, possessed of passions, scruples, obsessions, and weaknesses. All the wrong ones.
Whether it was young girls (or, with staggered frequency, wee little matchstick girls), fraudulent deception of elderly widowers and widows, robbery of church poor boxes, treachery, betrayal, adultery compounded with his father’s second wife (o bless the soapy details), whatever it was, Alastair could be depended on for slobbering enthusiasm.
Dion was looking for Alastair’s calendar of debts to Der G. He found it shivering beneath a postcard of Carmelita Carnita, the notorious sex kitten of Asuncion, her manacled voluptuousness disfigured by a circular stain left by a sweating cognac bottle. Dion slid a fingernail along the curve of the warming stout. Alastair was feeling, if not like Jesus’s son, then sufficiently ethereal to be useless all day. The story Dion would have to compose over his anesthesized signature was one he must have proposed in a moment of appalling ambition: ‘Frantz Fanon and the bass-drum theorem of Motown.’
Der Gesellschaftnuze was a bit like ancient Kells. There was no center or else all was central, borders intersecting and twinning to repeat themselves in parallel, only now no longer themselves and yet the same as always, a forever of constant morphing. Was it such an absurd analogy to compare Der G with the Irish monastery that had kept civilization pulsing along during the Dark Ages?
Maybe not. Houston was a dead zone, a barren landscape lit here and there by a ferocity of individual flames which were made to seem smaller than they were by the vastness of the desolation around them. And if Houston was the Wasteland, who was its Fisher King, presiding over the sterility of his dead kingdom, his queen lamenting the slenderness of her beauty, testament to a tragic lack of conception? Who, for that matter, was Houston’s Galahad? Who would come to repair the brokenness of the city, who would free the waters? But Dionysius already knew the answer to that.
Artorius Finch was the owner and publisher of Der Gesellschaftnuze. The intensity of his belief in individual action was, to those with whom he was in contact, alternately contagious and repellent. He was less a catalyst than a spur in the tender flanks of Houston’s lethargic artistic community and opinion was sore divided as to whether Der G., and Artorius himself, was a tiger or a gnat. Artorius’s style of Realpolitik engendered alliances and enmities which fluctuated and overlapped with as much diversity as had the street-gangs of Dante’s Florence. As for Artorius, he believed in making what was latent visibly flagrant and Houston’s ‘scene’ would be prodded and ripped caesarean-like into the sunlight of his critical eyes. If he had his way.
For the present moment all was stillness in his rooms, nestled like a cloister above the turbulence of Der G’s offices. Artorius sat, watching the shadows lengthening through the opened windows, eating a pomegranate and trying to think of a rhyme for the word ‘orange’.
Most certainly an imaginary scene. But fiction, for all its evasiveness is only this: a compendium of truths disguised as falsehood.