An epistle

26Oct06

To the man alone in the overhead gallery the cocktail counter is a blur, a crumpled facsimile of a Saturday night, a hung-over dream-scape of unwashed glasses, overloaded ashtrays and under-exposed desires. He reaches into the breast pocket of his overcoat, takes out a notebook and places it on the table. With sluggish movements, like those of a drunk or a heavily sedated man, a man going through the motions of a task that is necessary but about which he cares nothing, he begins to write.

“I’ve moved on since last we talked and it’s not simply that we’re both older. It’s nothing extraneous like age. The changes are interior. Everything is slowing down. The change in the tone of my voice and the different quality of the dark circles beneath my eyes? The way I looked at you yesterday? That strange blankness in my eyes you commented on? Nothingness pregnant with secrets projected by recondite means onto the gloss of my words?

We go back such a long way and after all that time and all we’ve been through together and apart… Well, it’s tragic, don’t you think, that we have so little to say to each other?

I’ve come to call it the word-fuck. It’s like a clog on the emotions. You can talk it, walk it, remember it or ignore it; but once you know it’s there it’s always a part of you, like your first party dress or the black suit your father bought you to bury your first dead acquaintance. Wearing the word-fuck kills the strength of emotions, prevents their transference, stops them climbing words. They melt away like frightened cats. And even when we’re naked we snuff out those feelings that threaten to become lexical choices until all that remain are passions with no relation to consciousness, qualities that don’t require words at all. Everything then and until forever, which meets itself returning about to be reborn, unclothed and skin-touch burning, to a new beginning, is magic…”

So he’s got the word-fuck. That’s it. So he says nothing. But without it he would have told me about the girl and the gun held  to Gerry’s face, the barrel obscenely close to his mouth, almost touching, another millimeter to part his lips, its metallic and oily intelligence crouching in the chamber, waiting for any sign of submission. Big and black — you can smell the oil on it — with its warm butt in her fist and the trigger like flesh yielding to her finger.

Bang! And the contradiction echoes all the way to hell.

He’s a dagger driving through the lady’s heart; he’s a running man; he’s a bloody tide on a shingle beach; he’s a big red Chevrolet; he’s a metallic black Scorpio; he’s a fleck of pus in a dead dog’s eye; he’s blood and brains in a midnight hallway; he’s a semen stain on a murdered child’s dress; he’s the magic in a speed-zombie’s wasted dreams; he’s an alchemist; he’s a rift between friends in a magic hoodlums’ cabal…

“…And sometimes my head just spins, my mind is a city at night, a totalitarian state whose economy is solid on the currency of human secrets, a dank stairwell, a crumbling landing, an ante-room to a vault in which the proletariat dwell, bursting at its rotting seams with the stench of whispered sin.”

Filed under: Crime Fiction, Gangster stories, original fiction   |  Leave a Comment