Times don't change even when they did. Or do. It's done.
XCortes carefully removes a grey stick of spearmint chewing
gum from its foil wrapper. He chews, contemplatively, for several minutes. The
motorcade moves slowly, ceremoniously backward, until it is no longer in sight.
Then XCortes breaks down the high-powered rifle into its constituent parts and replaces these parts into the perfect foam cut-outs provided for them in the two halves of the steel weapons case, carefully packing top and bottom, a jigsaw of lightning from the clouds, which he carefully closes and snaps snugly shut, locked, all neat and squared away, like an obedient child putting away his toys.
{Irina spread the pills out on the TV tray}, and, using the
empty orange-brown plastic prescription bottle as a shot glass, washed them
down, one-by-one, with gin and a grin. This is a fitting economy, she thinks,
grinning grimly.
She lies supine on the bed, legs spread, pale, bleached and beached, in a hotel suite in Studio City, uneaten room service meals left wherever she lost interest in them, signposts of her lost appetite for life, vomit in the toilet (hey, I'm giving back, okay?), syringes, clothes everywhere, like a suitcase packed with scarecrows had exploded. She's been here three days already, four days, five...what's a day, anyway, if the hands have fallen off the clock, an audience of faceless heads, is she hallucinating already?
Paid up in advance (of what? that is what Manfred wants to know) and strict instructions left to all and sundry: Do Not Disturb.
A little more than halfway through this perpetual midnight
snack, this tic-tac suicide, she remembers the string hanging out of her pooty,
the itsy-bitsy ripcord of a great red umbrella of sparrow bones and living
tissue, would she to pinch it between her fingernails and pluck it out right
now—oh Christ, what a mess they'd find, what a scarlet humiliation!
Even dead she'll be public property, like a park or parkway,
a playground or an underground parking garage, some sort of monument, maybe,
that people come to gawk at, photograph themselves beside with goofy faces.
Well, what can you do? It's Eve's curse, or whatever. You can't coordinate everything, forget about controlling it, there's always a loose end dangling somewhere—and this string, this little string is her loose end dangling.
Quetzalcoatl exploded in red feathers, shot out of the sky, aborted in the rented sheets.
Everything looks different in the morning; that's nothing to
look forward to, nothing to be grateful for, and nothing to be happy about; in
fact, it's just the problem, exactly why it's so hard to come to any decision
and sticking-to-it.
Like the ominous shadow of a bird of prey circling in ever smaller orbits before it dives, talons extended, the depression that has caught her, heart out, poor bloodied chinchilla, exposed and shivering on a frozen stubble field.
That is what her depression is like. Is that, in fact, Quetzalcoatl? Where would you look to find out, what reference consult, Audubon or PDR?
{I am a Priest of the Underground Waters}, he thinks, quite
apropos of nothing, a kind of free association, associating with what (it must
be something, mustn't it?) he doesn't know, unfolding the paper napkin like the
flag anonymous, letting it settle over his lap where his penis lies in state,
cold and hard as a marble effigy, a Roman-era dildo carved to depict Inanna,
the Sumer goddess of love. He is at the eatery in which he has decided to
celebrate the private ritual that he's come to think of, for equally compelling
if obscure reasons, as His Perpetual Last Supper.
“Pancakes,” he orders, “with a side of baked beans.”
It's customary, he thinks, to be always thinking something,
but it's a grind, it wears at a man. He feels like a tire without a tread. He
opens up the newspaper and spreads it over the table. The headlines this
morning are flaccid, not that he's complaining. Au contraire. No news is good
news.
The waitress rattles down his plate: a pair of fried catfish fillets, like the two, slightly asymmetrical sides of the same peeled face, a few stalks of mushy asparagus, and a mound of mashed potatoes cratered by a stagnant pond of what resembles muddy pus.
He double-checks the waitress. She looks familiar; meaning,
her face is far away. An ex-wife, a forgotten film-star from the days of his
masturbatory youth, a teacher starring in some lost second grade crush, a
babysitter who'd taken liberties, perhaps, a kaleidoscope of features in a
turning tube of memory at the end of which is the last door in the
musty-smelling hall—his mother always behind it, a cackling crone, muttering in
a language of word jumbles, possessed by a demon who called itself Al-zheimer.
“Fried catfish,” he says like an echo of words not spoken,
in a neutral tone, staring down now at the lightly breaded fillets on his
plate.
The waitress gives up nothing. Is she, too, a plant?
He repeats, like an incantation, “Fried catfish.” He could
use a smoke, but smoking is prohibited.
Perhaps it is customary here—the customer is always wrong.
Or irrelevant. Where is “here” anyhow? He glances out the window, across the
shimmering mirage of a parking lot, over which the weathered sign with faded
painted birds presides, a beacon, as it were, drawing in survivors from what he
presumes to be the surrounding, ever-expanding desert—a Death Valley of the
Mind.
Blue Swan Diner. No clue there. Blue swans, that is, not
existing anywhere, and, if they did, certainly not within ten thousand miles of
this waterless waste. Of course there would be many ways to ask where it was
that he now found himself and even some ways that might not unduly rouse
suspicion—I've turned off the wrong exit, for instance, lost my map, always
confuse this place with someplace else, etc. He knows, in other words, how to
paraphrase. But what he really wants to know is “Where is here—not just
whatever it is you call it—but where exactly is here?”
Instead he asks the waitress: “Is there by any chance a
cemetery anywhere in the area?”
{What do you call that device} in painting, the one used by
an artist to render, variously, an illusion of depth, a multiple perspective,
and/or simultaneity by means of a small square inset in the corner of the
picture plane that opens beyond the superficial surface of the main painting
proper into another scene, as if you were looking through a doorway, not just
into another room, but into another painting, into another reality altogether?
Is there actually a term for this sort of thing?
That is the optical function that the television seems to
provide upon entering the hotel room, if one were to stand back, that is,
objectively, and take it all in, as if, indeed one might, if one were looking
at the hotel room in the way one would contemplate a large canvas by a
contemporary master of hyper-realism.
Just so, if we are to understand his disturbing lack of
reaction to this—or, for that matter, anything that follows—it is by this
painterly device that we might understand Manfred's bland attitude of
voyeuristic detachment as he passes his eyes from side to side, and from side
to side again, in broad brushstrokes across the entire scene before
him—specifically as if the world itself were a museum and everything displayed
therein an exhibition for his solemn edification, if not his delectation.
{On TV} the investigation is well underway, if one could
even say it's properly begun or can ever definitively conclude, there always
being a crime to solve, like the daily crossword in the newspaper*, from which,
by the way, XCortes receives, in code of course, his orders, or perhaps he only
thinks he does, which amount to the same thing, after all.
*In other words, if crime were a constant state of infinite
variation, like the weather, then each specific illegality might be regarded as
only a localized aspect of a vast non-conscious yet interrelated
self-compensating system of infraction. Can this be the starting-point that
leads, at last, to a satisfactory explanation of the theological “problem” of
evil?
{When she woke up} she wasn't dead, which was a surprise,
but she turned out to be at least fifteen years older, which was another; look,
it happens.
She recognized herself the way you recognize celebrities on
the street, even without their hieratic make-up, unframed by screens, without
being stretched to poster-size, blown-up to fit on billboards; the way you can
pick them out of a crowd even in the guise and stature of so-called “normal
people,” even though they look considerably different when they’re on the big
screen, even though they are--can we go so far as to say-- “unrecognizable,”
here, off-stage, than they're meant to appear, than you've ever seen them, and
yet you're sure it's them, and the only reason you're so sure it's them is
because you can't explain why or how you are so sure, as if the famous really
might be famous for mystical, transcendent reasons we can't fathom, surrounded,
separated, set-apart, protected, by a kind of force-field, does that make any
sense at all?
Maybe not, but that is how she recognized herself in the
mirror of the bathroom where she staggered, steadied, held up, between two stalwart
secret service men, whose job it was to insist she did not die, not yet,
anyway.
“That isn't in the script, ma'am,” they explained it to her
patiently as they walked her back and forth, back and forth, until she finally
stopped complaining.
“Please leave me alone please go away please just let me go
back to sleep I was dreaming of forever...”
She was so weary, so tired of it all. And now look at
her—graying hair sticking up like a corona of brittle straw, bloodshot eyes
sinking into the west above a pair of blue-black skin bags, bits of puke
between her teeth, and on the rag besides...oh yes, she's glamorous alright, so
desirable it hurts.
{“No matter how many times I'm chosen} no matter how many
people choose me, I still can't get myself to believe that I am the chosen
one,” says Irina, and XCortes says it, too, though at different times and in
vastly different psychic landscapes. A lot of other people might add their
voices to this chorus, if only they were conscious of how unconsciously they
behaved exactly opposite, as if they believed that they're the chosen.
{If the old gods refuse to die,} how can the new ones be
born? Well, sure, but if the new ones refuse to be born, how can the old ones
in good faith and clean conscience die? Manfred considers this puzzle from
every abstruse angle, inventing new geometries, irrational calculi, and so far
all in vain.
The great sheet of drawing paper, which he rolls up like a
scroll inside its cardboard tube and totes from place to place, like an
itinerant cartoonist doodling obsessively at an underground torah, or an
eccentric chess prodigy with Asperger's syndrome who spends his entire life
seeking the solution to an heretofore insoluble problem, is spread out on the
table before him, covered with idiosyncratic ideograms, almost completely
blackened in personal hieroglyphs that are, in fact, channeled, but from
god-knows-where.
This, then, is Manfred, cosmic detective extraordinaire,
following clues way out among the stars, as if the constellations were patterns
made by spilled drops of celestial DNA.
Where did God go, where is he hiding, that quantum serial
killer, sending teasing notes in every leaf and snail shell, a mocking
entelechy no once can see the end of, does it really mean anything or is it a
lot of jabberwocky to throw us off the trail—and even if it is all nonsense, a
lot of portentous-sounding, carefully calculated mumbo-jumbo, perhaps it
provides a vital clue in spite of the intent at misdirection?
Perhaps.
As is well known, the guilty, in showing off their
cleverness, are often too clever for their own good.
It's the uncertainty that's so damned diabolical—a wrestle
with the devil. Does it mean a thing or does it not? For those who have devoted
their entire lives to such pursuits is it any wonder that madness pursues
them—and that it all too often catches up?
Each of us has only so much time. Manfred may be wasting all
of his.
{Plagued with headaches, by assorted manias, by messianic
visions}, the president paces, hand clasping wrist behind his back, the gallery
lined with the stiff-as-a-death-mask portrait of each of his unlucky
predecessors. He knows full well that he shall be hanging there himself one day
all-too-soon, his work undone, another blurred signpost on history's autobahn
to nowhere, another leg of the relay on the downhill side of every empire's
two-part journey: rise and fall.
Yet the golden oratory doesn't fail him, it stays with him,
it grows, the gift that keeps on giving, to the very last. The speeches, the
proclamations, the inspiring consonants now fall ceaselessly from his
spirit-kissed lips; that well-chronicled charismatic shine that lights his
steps even in the dead of night, he can't turn it off, not even alone, not even
if he wished; like every blessing, it's also a curse; he can't sleep, can
hardly eat, like Midas, everything he touches becomes too beautiful, too
valuable merely to use, it’s wine in the bottle, always too good and getting
better, best of all if it goes undrunk.
It's fall by now, fall and falling faster, frost on the
road, the brakes kaput, and they're calling it a tumor, in whispers, all
hush-hush, of course, if the wrong people found out they'd try to topple him,
dig tunnels beneath his administration, introduce worms into his golden dream,
and the wrong people are everywhere. Who are the wrong people? Only later,
during the obligatory autopsy, will the live grenade that is his tumor become
part of the official record, yet remaining classified for decades after that,
it will become the subject of disputed rumors, and even when, at last, a fake
“reveal” is issued it will be in order to conceal the truth—a truth which only
he believes, surrounded as he is by unbelievers. The truth? That it is not a
tumor at all, but an egg he harbors, nestled softly in the fibrous nest of his
cerebellum (that so beautiful word!), inoperable, untreatable, and he's more
certain of it as his behavior grows more careless and erratic, more divinely
inspired by the hour.
He'll be a true believer, of course, it always is, the one
that seeks him out, we mean—and that is the irony. That is always the way,
isn't it? For the idealist no ideal is good enough; around every anointed one
there is always a disgruntled apostle in the gang, always one true believer who
believes too much. Faith is a one-in-a-million shot that even a dozen crack
Marine marksmen can't duplicate in a dozen re-enactments. That entrance wound,
that Judas kiss from a sun-blank window two-and-a-half football fields away...
That is divine intervention.
Selah. It is done.
Sort of.
Because it's never really done, is it? Or maybe we're never
done with it; and maybe we don't want to be.
What would we do if we were, done with it, I mean? There'd
be nothing to believe in, nothing to not believe in, there'd just be nothing,
nothing but boredom, a solitary confinement, like those POWs kept in isolation
cells until they go mad.
{There is a hallowed moment every assassin shares} with
every other, an archetypal instant, a kind of dream-time into which he slips as
he sights down the barrel and locks in upon his target. At that moment, just
before he squeezes the trigger and unleashes the primal chaos, he knows, at the
very apex of control, a bliss that is utterly dependent on the shot being fired
to experience it at all—the very shot that must shatter it forever.
When I was first approached to plot this plot, I thought it
must surely be some sort of absurd joke. I was an unappreciated and poorly
published author of B-list thrillers, but there was apparently something to the
turn of my mind and twist of my pen that caught their attention and appealed to
them—to him, who said he represented “them,” who knows what to make of that,
but the money was huge and the office looked legit enough; after I agreed to
terms I asked him only one question, “Is this for Hollywood?” His answer: “Sort
of.”
His name was Manfred; I never saw him again.
Everyone wants to believe in something; everyone wants to
matter, no one wants to think they're nothing more than a bag of poop to grow
next year's corn. It’s that which makes us tick, and ticking drives the tale.
It's a peculiarity of the human species; when all is said
and done, maybe it's what really sets us off from the animals.
What I mean is that sometimes even when there's no problem
to solve, we invent one, if only to feel useful, to challenge ourselves, to
congratulate ourselves on our own ingenuity: that's how the crossword puzzle
was invented.
One time, during lunch, I asked a colleague at the office, an ex-hack from the TV drama game, “why a stable of hack writers? Don't they have folks much better qualified—spooks, strategists, operatives, analysts out the wazoo? Why a bunch of middling writers of mid-list genre fiction?”
His answer: “How do you think truth got to be stranger than fiction?”
And I got to thinking, preposterous as it sounds, he could
be right.
{Time now to move forward}, to change history once again. Up
to now, just dry runs, dress rehearsals, tomorrow it's the real deal,
show-time. Tomorrow, it’s like that finger on the trigger, tensing, about to
pull—so delicious it can be to anticipate, but “tomorrow” has to come some day,
at least in theory, or we'll lose interest in the dream and what will become of
us then?
In other words, we have to pull the trigger.
Dreams die, people complain, but dreams must die, like
everything else, in order to live at all.
His name in the old mythology is secret; it's so sacred that it's known only to the priests who tear the living hearts out of sacrificial
victims laid out on stone altars covered in hallucinogenic hieroglyphs. And each of them only know two or three syllables of it.
Tezcatecoatl,* the Dream-Eater.
It's a filthy rotten job, no doubt about it, but somebody's
got to do it.
One by one, he carefully replaces the lovingly oiled
components back into the perfectly molded cutouts of the weapon case, snaps it
shut, and heads for the concrete car park. The stars are all in place; he's got
his cue. And now the moment we've all been waiting for is at hand...
*Undoubtedly, this is a deliberate corruption of what
remains a classified, if not entirely imaginary, religious secret.
No comments:
Post a Comment