THE SECRET WAR ON SOLITUDE

BY JAAP STIJL

I thought I'd been dreaming.

I opened my eyes to find myself prone in an alleyway between two dumpsters. It was night. It wasn't cold. As my eyes adjusted I could see people walking past the alley, a few scattered, boisterous people.

I stood up slowly. Slow motion is the preferred method of movement I said aloud, hearing my voice raspy, cigarette scarred. Upon standing I immediately fell into a coughing spasm that doubled me over and continued until I'd hacked out a wadge of phlegm and was able to stand straight again.

Once that minor trauma had been overcome I was left to wonder what I was doing there in the alley to begin with.

Or, as I shortly discovered in a disjointed yet unpanicked way, who I was.

I checked my pockets for clues. There was no wallet, no money. There were no keys to anything. There was nothing to identify myself with.

I walked slowly out of the alleyway into the street which was eerily empty of people. The revellers that had squawked past so noisily had disappeared. The street was strewn with litter, lamp-lit, many of its buildings boarded up.

I could sense panic rising in me like a bile.

I had no idea where I was.

******

When I woke again it was light.

I was on the ground, underneath a thick pile of newspapers in a cluster of trees in a park. I stood as calmly as I could, brushing the newspapers and nettles from me and peered through the foliage. A few people passed by on a distant foot path, nannies with strollers, joggers. I emerged cautiously, worried that it was obvious I had no idea who I was or where I was.

What am I to do without money?

I decided to try and figure out where I was deducing despite my state that this was currently the easier of the two options. It was obviously a city, somewhere. Away from the park I could hear the sounds of a city, car horns, the hum of traffic. Was it my city?

I followed signs for the city centre and found myself upon a walk of about 30 minutes, a slow walk because I was entirely uncertain of myself and why I was here and was afraid someone might guess this, that perhaps there was some reason for my current state. Surely there was a reason but if it were criminal I didn't want to alert the authorities before I'd had the chance to discover anything further for myself.

I’m thinking about all this in dire detail as I’m walking the streets going somewhere aimlessly. I pick a street and start walking down it and then when the mood strikes me, I take a different street and all the while with no accurate measure of where I am or where I’m going, just random turns. I need something to visualise it. A familiar mark, a subway station. But I’ve got nothing because I don’t even know where I’m going. Oh wait, yes I do, I just remembered, I’m going to meet with Kimberland, a salesman of some kind. I don’t know what, does it really matter? Do you ever WANT someone to sell you something? This whole moaning culture is a giant vat of selling, shovels full of bullshit they take in their hands and lovingly shove between your lips into your mouth. You can spit it out over and over again but that bullshit taste is still there, long after they leave. It’s their calling card, these punks, these gigantic destroyers of the human soul and champion bullshit feeders.

I met Kimberland on a street corner somewhere. Lost, chum, he asks me as I stand there trying to decide which corner to turn. Fuck off, I said because I don’t like strangers coming up to me unsolicited and talking to me. Not unless they’re fit birds scoffing a light or copping a feel. There now, are you offended? You see, your glass ceiling is fucking low, kid. You’ve gotta raise that glass ceiling really fucking high if you are going to get through all this shit without it getting caked on to you.

Kimberland was used to this kind of street abuse apparently because he was utterly unflustered.

Wanna buy something, he asks.

Like what?

I dunno, what do you want to buy?

I would like to buy a gun and then shoot you with it.

You’d have to buy the bullets too. And probably a hunting license. In fact, if you bought a gun from me and bullets as well and just shot me right here…were you thinking of shooting to kill me or only wound me?….

I haven’t decided yet.

Well, in either scenario, you’d have to buy a lot of influence with the local authorities to get off whatever myriad of charges you’d be facing for shooting someone in broad daylight on a main street corner.

What if I simply said I was religiously intolerant?

Well, firstly, I’m not religious so I’m not sure that’s possible if that’s you’re excuse for shooting me. And secondly, even if shooting in the name of religious intolerance, you won’t be exempted from contempt or conviction. But we’re getting off track. How much money do you have to spend?

None. I don’t use money these days. I used plastic. The plastic symbolises the substance of my need for consumption. How about a goat?

Do you have a goat?

No. But maybe you’ve got one for sale?

******

I meet Kimberlain on another street corner, weeks and weeks later. It’s raining now. I haven’t worn anything in anticipation of getting wet, or prevention of getting wet. So I am soaking when I reach him at the predetermined corner. He’s never tried to sell me anything again since that first meeting, I made him promise. If we were going to hang out again some time.

Kimberlain has a big fucking umbrella with him. A fuck you sort of umbrella that, if you were walking down a street carrying it you’d be poking every fucker you passed in the eye or the mouth or the ear. But because he’s stationary, people just walk around him, muttering or turning back after a few steps to hurl a hideous look of disgust at him. Little daggers of bad karma.

It’s like a fucking tent, I said, as I approach him.

There’s only room for one under here, he warns.

Then we’d better find shelter.

******

It used to be easy to find shelter. Just go into a fucking bar. Nice and warm. Drinks to get you fucked up and forgetting everything that makes you sick to your stomach. Drinks and more drinks. But not any more. I take pills that make me vomit if I drink alcohol. I gits them for free. From Big Bossman Government, all-caring,, yummy mummy father superior big business government who want me off the liquor at all times because otherwise I become a deficit to society rather than a show flower of happiness. On these pills, I drink only when I want to vomit which admittedly, doesn’t happen very often.

We could stand under the bus stop shelter, Kimberlain points out with the sharp tip of his umbrella nearly poking out my eye. Or you could, you miserable git. Look at you, soaking. What the fuck’s wrong with you? Why don’t you buy an umbrella.

What, from you?

No, not from me. But there’s other people around who are selling umbrellas. Especially when it’s raining. Rain is an umbrella salesman’s nirvana. You could have gone to one of them. You could be nearly dry instead of soaking and looking for a fucking bus stop to hide under in this downpour.

I like the rain. It makes me feel human. Why would I want an umbrella getting in the way?

Listen, I’m not standing under the fucking bus stop. If you like the rain so much stand in it out here like a man whilst we have our conversation.

*****

So how is it going? He asks, flicking his butane lighter and torching a roll up in his mouth.

A lot of pains, I said. Mostly in my arse. These people, these televisions, these incessant commercials. Those kinds of searing pain that make me want to dig my eyeballs out of my skull just to distract me.

I thought you didn’t watch television. In fact, didn’t you even say you destroyed your television with the business end of a ball peen hammer?

Nah, that’s just hyperbole. I watch television in the showrooms of electronics stores. I go from one store to another spending like 30 or 40 minutes watching. Sometimes I ask a question to one of the salesmen, like do you have any of these in mauve, or why does the picture look so fuzzy? Just so they won’t hassle me about standing there. There’s a lot of showrooms selling televisions you better believe it. You’d think they were giving away pussy in there but nope. Just a bunch of fucking televisions.

But where would you be without television, Marsaw?

Marsaw?! I hissed under my breath. What did I tell you about using my real name in public?!

Marsaw, Marsaw MARSAW! He shouted which prompted me to stomp on his right foot as hard as I could.

Then he hopped on one foot howling, the umbrella falling to the ground as he tried to grab at his foot and squeeze out the pain and because it was gusting a bit, when it hit the ground, the umbrella went flying off right into the face of a pretty executive bird who was in the middle of some work-related conversation about unrequited love and the latest sitcom being featured on the cultish television magazines.

She too fell to the ground as if she’d been hit by a sniper on the 11th floor.

I rushed over and held out my hand. Jesus, that umbrella could have decapitated you, I said as I pulled her to her feet. She looked at me blankly as though she didn’t understand English or couldn’t hear or read lips. You could have been decapitated I said slowly and loudly to her again.

I heard you the first time, she muttered, wiping the front of her business suit with a nail-bitten hand, Female executive paws, I call them, all of them chewing their nails down to the nub with anxiety about playing man in a man’s world with a female edge but never fully accepted as anything but stupid or butch, depending on how well she was performing.

Well, what about it? Aren’t you glad you weren’t decapitated at least?

And what, you want me to thank YOU for that?

No, it was just an observation…

Well here’s an observation for you to chew on: you’re a pest. And now here’s a command for you: get lost.

Whose the new lady friend, Kimberlain asked cheerily as he approached me, walking her walk past him into the crowd.

Her name is Agneta Millstone, she’s unattached and looking for some female companionship. I spat on the ground, nearly hitting someone’s shoe. Can’t a man even spit without having people getting in the way?

*****

It finally stopped raining.

Kimberlain was sitting on the ground in an alleyway right in the middle of a big puddle.

I stood a few feet away in front of him looking up at the sky trying to discern how much time I’d have to dry.

Where were we anyway, he asks suddenly, poking around in his pockets for a cigarette.

Queen Bastrino Boulevard and Avenue of Eternal Sadness. Right near the fish fry and Laundromat a go-go. It was raining hard and we started walking. You lost consciousness just above this puddle, fell and then woke up again a few seconds ago sitting upright in that same puddle. You really should see someone about that.

Kimberlain had some kind of condition, I don’t know what the fuck it’s called and frankly, what difference does it make? He passes out in the middle of nothing. Like the opposite of somnambulism only falling instead of walking. He’s says he’s been doing it for years. He loses consciousness and wakes up wherever he fell. Certain words he thinks of appears to trigger it. He says he thinks he was hypnotised against his will somewhere once and they even made him forget he’d been hypnotised and this is all some giant joke only a select few who were there to witness it are privy to. A hypnotic baptism. A series of them. That’s what he calls them, hypnotic baptisms.

Listen, I’m tired. I’m going off somewhere alone, he said, making a big effort to stand up again. I can’t believe you made me lose that fucking umbrella…

Ok, I suppose I’ll see you sometime next week?

Weather-willing.

*****

My home is not my castle. I got back to it after that big meeting with Kimberlain and I couldn’t help but think about that stupid phrase. Castle. What kind of fucking castle was this? A single bulb room in a shitty part of town? Cockroaches? A yes, cockroaches. I hated them for the longest time living in this fucking castle of mine. But then I started catching them and killing them in boiling water and believe it or not, with the right kind of sauce, say a marsala or a cream sauce, they taste alright. I started thinking fuck, I could open up a cockroach restaurant and pretend they were a new delicacy. Hard sell that, though. People are usually pretty staunch in their opinions. Especially one like cockroaches are disgusting. But they say cockroaches would survive nuclear war so if I eat enough of them, who knows, maybe I would too.

My castle has a day bed. It had a cheap dresser with the few bits of clothing I own and wear religiously because I have nothing else to wear. I wear them to near rags and then I go out to the cheapest fucking market in the ugliest part of town and buy more clothes to replace the rags.

I stopped shaving about 4 years ago. I look it.

My castle has a lot of books I don’t read or haven’t read more than a page or a sentence or sometimes just a word out of. There are books like this all over the castle. In the bed sheets, under the bed, around the toilet like a mystical ring, overflowing out of milk crates, on the floor, tucked in the closet. On the kitchen counter, above the frig, but not too near the hot plate. God forbid. This place would go up like a fucking firecracker.

And that’s about it. A lot of overflowing ashtrays. Welcome to my castle. The whole place reeks of stale smoke. A few months ago I managed to get a date with this bird I met in the super market and she had a few glasses of wine while I watched her in this run down little café a few streets from my castle and it was going all pretty smoothly and progressing nicely and she asks me why don’t you invite me back to your castle, all shy like…

Sure, I says. I pay the bill, waving off her efforts to split the bill. The least I could do. I sometimes forget I even have a dick. What do I use it for? Just to piss out of. It doesn’t get much action. Not even from me. Even I ignore my dick. How can I expect some bird to love it?

We walk up the dusty, filthy stairway up to my floor, I open the door grandly and wave her in.

She walks in, laughing one minute, gagging the next. Jesus christ, she moans, holding her hand to her mouth. What the fuck do you DO in here?

Needless to say, it put a little damper on the mood. But as she vomited over the toilet, I held her hair back for her and told her little stories I’d seen on the news to take her mind off all the vomiting. Are you sure you don’t just have food poisoning, I asked finally.

We didn’t eat anything you idiot. We only drank wine, remember? No. It’s definitely this fucking flat of yours. You should have it deloused. Really.

And then she puked some more while I held her hair back.

When she was finally done puking, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Fancy a little French kissing, she giggled.

That almost made me puke too but the truth is, if we were both puking, there wouldn’t be much time for sex. And let’s face it, that’s the only reason either of us were here at the moment.

Look, I’m sorry, she says. This place puts me off sex.

We could go to yours…

Nah, let’s just call it a night, shall we?

Great. It’s a night. Now what?

I wake up and go home. Thanks, this was fun. Really.

******

I’m laying on the floor reading and eating a sandwich made of onions and marmite. If I look closely, I sometimes see the words of the book I’m reading. Then I turn the book to read the title. “How To Tell Time”, it says. “Without a Clock.”

I feel lonely. Books are my only friends.

******

A few days later I wake up and wonder where I am. Gradually it all comes into focus. All the grime, all the sadness, all the wasting of time.

I am tempted to break open a bottle of gin and turn on the television but I remember that both make me incredibly ill so I try to find something to distract myself with. I recite a poem to a few of the cockroaches which were captured in my home made cockroach capturing mechanism; like a rat trap only for roaches and a lot smaller. I can’t remember any of the classic poems, or even the anonymous poems, so I make one off the top of my head which has nothing to do with the cockroaches, but I’m sure they’ll listen anyway because they’re trapped, caught and there’s nowhere else for them to go.

SOMETIMES I GROW COLD.

Then I decide maybe it’d be better sung than recited. Maybe to a little Cockroach Castle finger-snappy jazzy sort of tune.

Sometimes I grow cold
My eyes permafrost
My tan a warning to igloos
Everywhere the Eskimos
Are frightened.

I shake my head because that’s what I do when I’ve stumped myself with my own stupidity.

What the fuck am I going to do today I ask the caged cockroaches.

*****

Sometime later, or maybe it was before, it’s really fucking hot and humid outside and inside the flat it’s like a broiler. I can feel my flesh cooking. I drink water out of the rusty tap and think jesus, if I were a dog, I’d be drinking water right out of the toilet. I’m much better off being human. But it’s so fucking hot I can hardly move. I stick my whole head in the sink and then I go back to the mattress and lie down again. I know I called it a day bed before but really, it’s just an old, yellowing mattress on the floor, almost indistinguishable amid the newspapers and dirty clothes and empty glasses and ashtrays and books.

I hate the heat. I prefer the cold. That’s what they say.

And of course there’s the other fuckers, the ones who always have to be different, who say they hate the cold and prefer the heat. How can you staaaaaand the cold these people ask me incredulously when I tell them the cold is my friend. What can I say to that? Ok, I was only kidding, I hate the cold too. Actually, I prefer it somewhere in between. What the fuck can I say, I got it wrong!

I want to play records but no one plays records any more and I don’t have any records or even a record player. I used to have all of that shit. Now it’s all what, I dunno, Cds, DVDs? Have they come up with something else already? Fuck, this perpetual march that humanity is on to progress, it’s just all so fucking tiring. I can’t keep up any more. Why don’t they have like a, B-side to the human experience where nobody does anything or has any fucking ambition. Just sit around, kill something once in a while to eat, or just eat grass or something, fuck, what’s the difference?

Finally, I try and turn the television on. Oh yes, I’ve got a television alright. I don’t tell many people about it because it would seem, you know, hypocritical and all, but man, sometimes I just fucking crave it, you know? Like I couldn’t get through the night without a few hours of inanity.

It’s a political argument show. All these arrogant fuckers shouting each other down with their fucking OPINIONS like anyone is going to give a fuck or even remember in twenty years, all that blustering and self-importance.

I look on the cockroaches. I’m getting hungry. Cockroach and garlic mayonnaise sandwiches. That would just hit the spot. Like those prawn cocktail sandwiches only fresher. Fresh cockroaches. Never thought I’d be thinking about it but once that tv came on, it hit me, I’m fucking hungry and I want some cockroaches.

I used to sit in the dark for hours in the beginning, just so I could jump up, hit the lights and start scooping those little fuckers up in my special cockroach net. It reminds me, or perhaps I’m simply imagining it in my head, of those Planet of the Apes movies where they’re all on horseback catching humans in nets. I’m the Apes and the cockroaches are the humans. It’s a fun little game. I’m trying to think of how to make it into a proper board game, with like electric tweezers and plastic cockroach pieces hidden in little nooks and crannies. Comes with a roach whistle and all. I just blow it and they come scurrying along. Right into daddy’s little sauce pot, I coo to them.

There’s a knock on the door and I freeze. What time is it?

What is it? I demand in a fake deep, angry voice.

Can you please turn that fucking music down? Some people are trying to sleep!

Music? What fucking music? There’s no music in here.

I heard you singing that song to the cockroaches. Don’t try and deny it. And now all the cockroaches in my flat are running all over the place keeping me awake. What the fuck is wrong with you for god’s sake? Where is your compassion?

I open the door and see a fat, balding man in a tee shirt and stained jockey shorts scratching his crotch looking at me.

He must see me as I see myself in the mirror, not how I see myself in my head.

He looks puzzled for a moment. Moves his scratching from his balls to his bald head and looks all around the hallway.

Where the fuck are we anyway?

2006, I said.

You should read this book, I add. How to tell time without a clock. Then you’d know.

Well, I’m trying to sleep anyway so can you keep it down?

I turn back to the room, my castle. Hey you fucking maniacs, can you keep it down for this poor chap?! I shout loud enough to make even my own ears hurt.

Would you like a cup of watery tea? I ask as he heads back down the hall. He ignores me. I close the door and lie back down on the mattress.

******

I read this article, or perhaps I heard it on one of those altruistic radio programmes, about this guy who masturbates on junk mail. Supposedly it’s the latest in sexual faddism. And I think, god, if only I had a sex drive, I could go crazy in here. There’s junk mail from the last six months accumulated all over this flat. More junk mail than books, just how I like it. I never imagined it to be a sexually arousing though. I want to call in to that radio show, yes, definitely a radio show and not a newspaper article because I couldn’t phone into a newspaper article. I wanted to phone in and ask, hey, do women suffer from this too?

But I don’t have a phone, so I just sit there and think about the chances instead.

Later that night I leave my castle to go to this horrible country and western bar at the end of my street, a hideous place with horrible, stupid music, basically the call to idiots everywhere, the Idiot’s Siren and not only that but all the people are fat and ugly and stupid and then they get drunk which only compounds their stupidity and these fat oily fuckers start having sex. Not right there in the bar but they peel off in pairs like jets in a fighter squadron. Fuck Bombs.

I’m sitting there alone while all these idiots are milling around me drinking and saying really stupid stuff that I can’t even repeat because you might go blind reading it it’s so fucking stupid. Some pig-faced woman in a lace top with an inch of visible makeup blotting her bloated jelly roll pig face, sweat pouring out of her, guzzling her cocktail with an umbrella in it, staring at me out of the corner of her eye, pretending to laugh at her friends’ jokes even though she’s not listening, she’s sending me subliminal sex missives, really graphic and disturbing missives so I thought fuck it, why not just come right out and ask her.

I lean in to her, feeling her twitch with anticipation.

Is it true that women masturbate on junk mail too or is it only men?

Holy shit, it all goes bad quickly from there. She screams as though I’ve slashed her with a knife and everyone looks at us. She points at me. This man just asked me if I liked to masturbate on junk mail!

I don’t need to tell you, I got out of there pretty quick. A few people tried to poke or kick at me as I scurried out thinking about a nice cockroach frittata, but generally, I made it out back into the street unscathed. A guy was standing there smoking a cigarette.

Can I interest you in a little junk mail, he says, opening his coat to display the samples.

*******

Nobody visits me any more. Not that they ever did actually. I’ve been alone in this flat for as far back as I can remember. Of course, that’s only a few years ago. All the years before that fell away in a drunken haze I remember absolutely nothing of. Someone wrote me a letter awhile ago, after it was all over. No memories left for you, lad, it said. Written in crayon. I often tried to figure out what it meant but I couldn’t remember.

So this is where I am.

My castle. My cockroaches. My slow pace. My endless time.

I have arrived and stayed. Where or why, no one I ask has any idea. I have an inkling this Kimberlain character holds the key somewhere. I have to find him again.


******((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((***************************


The promise of death is the only promise that gives my life any meaning, any depth. Can you imagine what it would be like not to have this hanging over us? To think we would be sentenced rather than blessed with a life in perpetuity, Shapeless, boring, incessant? The sentence worth than life would be a never-ending life.

Kimberlain counsels me. I am supine on a rug on a concrete floor in a flat with no windows.

You pretended to be people you weren’t.

Foreigners, even. You disguised your voice with a phony accent and most of these people didn’t know the difference, wanted to be enchanted instead of looking down reality’s throat and hearing ahhhh.

I have a thought and a passes.

It’s like this at night most often. It’s all real, waking out of the dream, being in the dream, thinking about the dream. It’s a rash in the head. I can’t get it out and all I want to do is scratch it more and more, thinking and thinking about the same idiotic moment.

Kimberlain doesn’t shush me. He let’s me prattle on a little bit, like a parent humouring a child’s gibberish.

The gibberish exhausts me so I fall silent.

Kimberlain doesn’t swing a pocket watch in front of me. He gives me drugs. It’s ok, he says. These drugs are to help you, not to prolong you.

And I lie there, supine on that

Ok, this guy tried to tell me one afternoon, sitting on a chair on the sidewalk everyone in their beer malt liquor rubbing day chests and getting all, you know. Fuck.

You can’t say you’re any one nationality. You think. They are everywhere. They whisper in my ear over and over: “It’s the lifestyle”.

I always shake my head. Sometimes I even hit myself in the ear, like there’s a malfunction.

Hollywood be thy name, Kimberlain said suddenly, as if he’d woken from a trance himself. Did you just slap yourself in the ear, he asked me.









We were no longer kids.
Dried out, served on a platter with chips on the side sitting underneath some greasy counter heat lamp growing more insipid with each passing day.
It wasn’t the happiest time.
Oh sure, we could see people around us happy but we always had a sneaking suspicion the only reason they were happy was because they were ignorant or simple. Un-evolved, still choking down the bones of their ancestors, revolting and full of mindless banter.
So we weren’t happy and the people around us who were seemed like, well, idiots. Happy like dogs when they see their master. Not happy like cats because the world can fuck off. Happy like dogs. Panting, drooling, slobberingly stupid dogs.
How could we be happy floating in the sea of stupidity around us, the air so damp with stupidity you would enter the indoors with little micro stupidities clinging to you, soaking your clothes. Worse than cigarette smoke, they say. But cigarette smoke was the only real way of drying off the dampness of the stupidity soaking the air around you.

Micky Whitemeat says you shower in stupidity every day. I listen to Micky Whitemeat on the Am radio. It’s distinctly unsatisfying, which is why I do it.

But these people, these who I can’t even fathom I belong with, belong to, wander amid, occasionally copulate with, I can’t shake them. I find little pockets of resistance from city to city but almost never in rural areas. Rural areas make you stupid and slow. And well they should be far from the cities because they look at cities as cynically as cities look at rural areas. Ok, maybe cities look at rural areas with just a little weekend lust in their eyes but you can be certain cities are not going to sit out there gathering dust waiting for the first speck of news to reach you.

Am I alright?

Am I bleeding?

*****

It's too late by then. Everything is over. I've struck her and her face is bleeding so when she asks me for that last delicate moment that she will ever trust me again, I just shake my head. No.

*****

The minute.

This minute that's just passed, this minute now, expiring as I speak, that minute over there being tracked for the future, BANG. It's all just mushroom clouded without any good sound track to remember it by.

*****

PART ONE

We were no longer kids.

Instead we were the ghost of kids.

Dried out, served on a platter with chips on the side sitting underneath some greasy counter heat lamp growing more insipid with each passing day.

It wasn’t the happiest time.

Oh sure, we could see people around us happy but we always had a sneaking suspicion the only reason they were happy was because they were ignorant or simple. Un-evolved, still choking down the bones of their ancestors, revolting and full of mindless banter.

So we weren’t happy and the people around us who were seemed like, well, idiots. Happy like dogs when they see their master. Not happy like cats because the world can fuck off. Happy like dogs. Panting, drooling, slobberingly stupid dogs.

How could we be happy floating in the sea of stupidity around us, the air so damp with stupidity you would enter the indoors with little micro stupidities clinging to you, soaking your clothes. Worse than cigarette smoke, they say. But cigarette smoke was the only real way of drying off the dampness of the stupidity soaking the air around you.

We, of course, is only me. I've inverted the M for convenience. We can evolve any moment "we" feel necessary. That is to say we, the convenient device to trot out when the moment struck me. There is no we at all. Well, nobody else on the outside knows that. As far as they're concerned we means me and someone else or many someone elses. Of course you know now too. So I guess you're not on the outside any more.

Micky Whitemeat says you shower in stupidity every day. I listen to Micky Whitemeat on the Am radio. It’s distinctly unsatisfying, which is why I do it.

But these people, these who I can’t even fathom I belong with, belong to, wander amid, occasionally copulate with, I can’t shake them. I find little pockets of resistance from city to city but almost never in rural areas. Rural areas make you stupid and slow. And well they should be far from the cities because they look at cities as cynically as cities look at rural areas. Ok, maybe cities look at rural areas with just a little weekend lust in their eyes but you can be certain cities are not going to sit out there gathering dust waiting for the first speck of news to reach you.

I’m thinking about all this in dire detail as I’m walking the streets going somewhere aimlessly. I pick a street and start walking down it and then when the mood strikes me, I take a different street and all the while with no accurate measure of where I am or where I’m going, just random turns. I need something to visualise it. A familiar mark, a subway station. But I’ve got nothing because I don’t even know where I’m going. Oh wait, yes I do, I just remembered, I’m going to meet with Kimberland, a salesman of some kind. I don’t know what, does it really matter? Do you ever WANT someone to sell you something? This whole moaning culture is a giant vat of selling, shovels full of bullshit they take in their hands and lovingly shove between your lips into your mouth. You can spit it out over and over again but that bullshit taste is still there, long after they leave. It’s their calling card, these punks, these gigantic destroyers of the human soul and champion bullshit feeders.

I met Kimberland on a street corner somewhere. Lost, chum, he asks me as I stand there trying to decide which corner to turn. Fuck off, I said because I don’t like strangers coming up to me unsolicited and talking to me. Not unless they’re fit birds scoffing a light or copping a feel. There now, are you offended? You see, your glass ceiling is fucking low, kid. You’ve gotta raise that glass ceiling really fucking high if you are going to get through all this shit without it getting caked on to you.

Kimberland was used to this kind of street abuse apparently because he was utterly unflustered.

Wanna buy something, he asks.

Like what?

I dunno, what do you want to buy?

I would like to buy a gun and then shoot you with it.

You’d have to buy the bullets too. And probably a hunting license. In fact, if you bought a gun from me and bullets as well and just shot me right here…were you thinking of shooting to kill me or only wound me?….

I haven’t decided yet.

Well, in either scenario, you’d have to buy a lot of influence with the local authorities to get off whatever myriad of charges you’d be facing for shooting someone in broad daylight on a main street corner.

What if I simply said I was religiously intolerant?

Well, firstly, I’m not religious so I’m not sure that’s possible if that’s you’re excuse for shooting me. And secondly, even if shooting in the name of religious intolerance, you won’t be exempted from contempt or conviction. But we’re getting off track. How much money do you have to spend?

None. I don’t use money these days. I used plastic. The plastic symbolises the substance of my need for consumption. How about a goat?

Do you have a goat?

No. But maybe you’ve got one for sale?

******

I meet Kimberlain on another street corner, weeks and weeks later. It’s raining now. I haven’t worn anything in anticipation of getting wet, or prevention of getting wet. So I am soaking when I reach him at the predetermined corner. He’s never tried to sell me anything again since that first meeting, I made him promise. If we were going to hang out again some time.

Kimberlain has a big fucking umbrella with him. A fuck you sort of umbrella that, if you were walking down a street carrying it you’d be poking every fucker you passed in the eye or the mouth or the ear. But because he’s stationary, people just walk around him, muttering or turning back after a few steps to hurl a hideous look of disgust at him. Little daggers of bad karma.

It’s like a fucking tent, I said, as I approach him.

There’s only room for one under here, he warns.

Then we’d better find shelter.

******

It used to be easy to find shelter. Just go into a fucking bar. Nice and warm. Drinks to get you fucked up and forgetting everything that makes you sick to your stomach. Drinks and more drinks. But not any more. I take pills that make me vomit if I drink alcohol. I gits them for free. From Big Bossman Government, all-caring,, yummy mummy father superior big business government who want me off the liquor at all times because otherwise I become a deficit to society rather than a show flower of happiness. On these pills, I drink only when I want to vomit which admittedly, doesn’t happen very often.

We could stand under the bus stop shelter, Kimberlain points out with the sharp tip of his umbrella nearly poking out my eye. Or you could, you miserable git. Look at you, soaking. What the fuck’s wrong with you? Why don’t you buy an umbrella.

What, from you?

No, not from me. But there’s other people around who are selling umbrellas. Especially when it’s raining. Rain is an umbrella salesman’s nirvana. You could have gone to one of them. You could be nearly dry instead of soaking and looking for a fucking bus stop to hide under in this downpour.

I like the rain. It makes me feel human. Why would I want an umbrella getting in the way?

Listen, I’m not standing under the fucking bus stop. If you like the rain so much stand in it out here like a man whilst we have our conversation.

*****

So how is it going? He asks, flicking his butane lighter and torching a roll up in his mouth.

A lot of pains, I said. Mostly in my arse. These people, these televisions, these incessant commercials. Those kinds of searing pain that make me want to dig my eyeballs out of my skull just to distract me.

I thought you didn’t watch television. In fact, didn’t you even say you destroyed your television with the business end of a ball peen hammer?

Nah, that’s just hyperbole. I watch television in the showrooms of electronics stores. I go from one store to another spending like 30 or 40 minutes watching. Sometimes I ask a question to one of the salesmen, like do you have any of these in mauve, or why does the picture look so fuzzy? Just so they won’t hassle me about standing there. There’s a lot of showrooms selling televisions you better believe it. You’d think they were giving away pussy in there but nope. Just a bunch of fucking televisions.

But where would you be without television, Marsaw?

Marsaw?! I hissed under my breath. What did I tell you about using my real name in public?!

Marsaw, Marsaw MARSAW! He shouted which prompted me to stomp on his right foot as hard as I could.

Then he hopped on one foot howling, the umbrella falling to the ground as he tried to grab at his foot and squeeze out the pain and because it was gusting a bit, when it hit the ground, the umbrella went flying off right into the face of a pretty executive bird who was in the middle of some work-related conversation about unrequited love and the latest sitcom being featured on the cultish television magazines.

She too fell to the ground as if she’d been hit by a sniper on the 11th floor.

I rushed over and held out my hand. Jesus, that umbrella could have decapitated you, I said as I pulled her to her feet. She looked at me blankly as though she didn’t understand English or couldn’t hear or read lips. You could have been decapitated I said slowly and loudly to her again.

I heard you the first time, she muttered, wiping the front of her business suit with a nail-bitten hand, Female executive paws, I call them, all of them chewing their nails down to the nub with anxiety about playing man in a man’s world with a female edge but never fully accepted as anything but stupid or butch, depending on how well she was performing.

Well, what about it? Aren’t you glad you weren’t decapitated at least?

And what, you want me to thank YOU for that?

No, it was just an observation…

Well here’s an observation for you to chew on: you’re a pest. And now here’s a command for you: get lost.

Whose the new lady friend, Kimberlain asked cheerily as he approached me, walking her walk past him into the crowd.

Her name is Agneta Millstone, she’s unattached and looking for some female companionship. I spat on the ground, nearly hitting someone’s shoe. Can’t a man even spit without having people getting in the way?

*****

It finally stopped raining.

Kimberlain was sitting on the ground in an alleyway right in the middle of a big puddle.

I stood a few feet away in front of him looking up at the sky trying to discern how much time I’d have to dry.

Where were we anyway, he asks suddenly, poking around in his pockets for a cigarette.

Queen Bastrino Boulevard and Avenue of Eternal Sadness. Right near the fish fry and Laundromat a go-go. It was raining hard and we started walking. You lost consciousness just above this puddle, fell and then woke up again a few seconds ago sitting upright in that same puddle. You really should see someone about that.

Kimberlain had some kind of condition, I don’t know what the fuck it’s called and frankly, what difference does it make? He passes out in the middle of nothing. Like the opposite of somnambulism only falling instead of walking. He’s says he’s been doing it for years. He loses consciousness and wakes up wherever he fell. Certain words he thinks of appears to trigger it. He says he thinks he was hypnotised against his will somewhere once and they even made him forget he’d been hypnotised and this is all some giant joke only a select few who were there to witness it are privy to. A hypnotic baptism. A series of them. That’s what he calls them, hypnotic baptisms.

Listen, I’m tired. I’m going off somewhere alone, he said, making a big effort to stand up again. I can’t believe you made me lose that fucking umbrella…

Ok, I suppose I’ll see you sometime next week?

Weather-willing.

*****

My home is not my castle. I got back to it after that big meeting with Kimberlain and I couldn’t help but think about that stupid phrase. Castle. What kind of fucking castle was this? A single bulb room in a shitty part of town? Cockroaches? A yes, cockroaches. I hated them for the longest time living in this fucking castle of mine. But then I started catching them and killing them in boiling water and believe it or not, with the right kind of sauce, say a marsala or a cream sauce, they taste alright. I started thinking fuck, I could open up a cockroach restaurant and pretend they were a new delicacy. Hard sell that, though. People are usually pretty staunch in their opinions. Especially one like cockroaches are disgusting. But they say cockroaches would survive nuclear war so if I eat enough of them, who knows, maybe I would too.

My castle has a day bed. It had a cheap dresser with the few bits of clothing I own and wear religiously because I have nothing else to wear. I wear them to near rags and then I go out to the cheapest fucking market in the ugliest part of town and buy more clothes to replace the rags.

I stopped shaving about 4 years ago. I look it.

My castle has a lot of books I don’t read or haven’t read more than a page or a sentence or sometimes just a word out of. There are books like this all over the castle. In the bed sheets, under the bed, around the toilet like a mystical ring, overflowing out of milk crates, on the floor, tucked in the closet. On the kitchen counter, above the frig, but not too near the hot plate. God forbid. This place would go up like a fucking firecracker.

And that’s about it. A lot of overflowing ashtrays. Welcome to my castle. The whole place reeks of stale smoke. A few months ago I managed to get a date with this bird I met in the super market and she had a few glasses of wine while I watched her in this run down little café a few streets from my castle and it was going all pretty smoothly and progressing nicely and she asks me why don’t you invite me back to your castle, all shy like…

Sure, I says. I pay the bill, waving off her efforts to split the bill. The least I could do. I sometimes forget I even have a dick. What do I use it for? Just to piss out of. It doesn’t get much action. Not even from me. Even I ignore my dick. How can I expect some bird to love it?

We walk up the dusty, filthy stairway up to my floor, I open the door grandly and wave her in.

She walks in, laughing one minute, gagging the next. Jesus christ, she moans, holding her hand to her mouth. What the fuck do you DO in here?

Needless to say, it put a little damper on the mood. But as she vomited over the toilet, I held her hair back for her and told her little stories I’d seen on the news to take her mind off all the vomiting. Are you sure you don’t just have food poisoning, I asked finally.

We didn’t eat anything you idiot. We only drank wine, remember? No. It’s definitely this fucking flat of yours. You should have it deloused. Really.

And then she puked some more while I held her hair back.

When she was finally done puking, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Fancy a little French kissing, she giggled.

That almost made me puke too but the truth is, if we were both puking, there wouldn’t be much time for sex. And let’s face it, that’s the only reason either of us were here at the moment.

Look, I’m sorry, she says. This place puts me off sex.

We could go to yours…

Nah, let’s just call it a night, shall we?

Great. It’s a night. Now what?

I wake up and go home. Thanks, this was fun. Really.

******

I’m laying on the floor reading and eating a sandwich made of onions and marmite. If I look closely, I sometimes see the words of the book I’m reading. Then I turn the book to read the title. “How To Tell Time”, it says. “Without a Clock.”

I feel lonely. Books are my only friends.

******

A few days later I wake up and wonder where I am. Gradually it all comes into focus. All the grime, all the sadness, all the wasting of time.

I am tempted to break open a bottle of gin and turn on the television but I remember that both make me incredibly ill so I try to find something to distract myself with. I recite a poem to a few of the cockroaches which were captured in my home made cockroach capturing mechanism; like a rat trap only for roaches and a lot smaller. I can’t remember any of the classic poems, or even the anonymous poems, so I make one off the top of my head which has nothing to do with the cockroaches, but I’m sure they’ll listen anyway because they’re trapped, caught and there’s nowhere else for them to go.

SOMETIMES I GROW COLD.

Then I decide maybe it’d be better sung than recited. Maybe to a little Cockroach Castle finger-snappy jazzy sort of tune.

Sometimes I grow cold
My eyes permafrost
My tan a warning to igloos
Everywhere the Eskimos
Are frightened.

I shake my head because that’s what I do when I’ve stumped myself with my own stupidity.

What the fuck am I going to do today I ask the caged cockroaches.

*****

Sometime later, or maybe it was before, it’s really fucking hot and humid outside and inside the flat it’s like a broiler. I can feel my flesh cooking. I drink water out of the rusty tap and think jesus, if I were a dog, I’d be drinking water right out of the toilet. I’m much better off being human. But it’s so fucking hot I can hardly move. I stick my whole head in the sink and then I go back to the mattress and lie down again. I know I called it a day bed before but really, it’s just an old, yellowing mattress on the floor, almost indistinguishable amid the newspapers and dirty clothes and empty glasses and ashtrays and books.

I hate the heat. I prefer the cold. That’s what they say.

And of course there’s the other fuckers, the ones who always have to be different, who say they hate the cold and prefer the heat. How can you staaaaaand the cold these people ask me incredulously when I tell them the cold is my friend. What can I say to that? Ok, I was only kidding, I hate the cold too. Actually, I prefer it somewhere in between. What the fuck can I say, I got it wrong!

I want to play records but no one plays records any more and I don’t have any records or even a record player. I used to have all of that shit. Now it’s all what, I dunno, Cds, DVDs? Have they come up with something else already? Fuck, this perpetual march that humanity is on to progress, it’s just all so fucking tiring. I can’t keep up any more. Why don’t they have like a, B-side to the human experience where nobody does anything or has any fucking ambition. Just sit around, kill something once in a while to eat, or just eat grass or something, fuck, what’s the difference?

Finally, I try and turn the television on. Oh yes, I’ve got a television alright. I don’t tell many people about it because it would seem, you know, hypocritical and all, but man, sometimes I just fucking crave it, you know? Like I couldn’t get through the night without a few hours of inanity.

It’s a political argument show. All these arrogant fuckers shouting each other down with their fucking OPINIONS like anyone is going to give a fuck or even remember in twenty years, all that blustering and self-importance.

I look on the cockroaches. I’m getting hungry. Cockroach and garlic mayonnaise sandwiches. That would just hit the spot. Like those prawn cocktail sandwiches only fresher. Fresh cockroaches. Never thought I’d be thinking about it but once that tv came on, it hit me, I’m fucking hungry and I want some cockroaches.

I used to sit in the dark for hours in the beginning, just so I could jump up, hit the lights and start scooping those little fuckers up in my special cockroach net. It reminds me, or perhaps I’m simply imagining it in my head, of those Planet of the Apes movies where they’re all on horseback catching humans in nets. I’m the Apes and the cockroaches are the humans. It’s a fun little game. I’m trying to think of how to make it into a proper board game, with like electric tweezers and plastic cockroach pieces hidden in little nooks and crannies. Comes with a roach whistle and all. I just blow it and they come scurrying along. Right into daddy’s little sauce pot, I coo to them.

There’s a knock on the door and I freeze. What time is it?

What is it? I demand in a fake deep, angry voice.

Can you please turn that fucking music down? Some people are trying to sleep!

Music? What fucking music? There’s no music in here.

I heard you singing that song to the cockroaches. Don’t try and deny it. And now all the cockroaches in my flat are running all over the place keeping me awake. What the fuck is wrong with you for god’s sake? Where is your compassion?

I open the door and see a fat, balding man in a tee shirt and stained jockey shorts scratching his crotch looking at me.

He must see me as I see myself in the mirror, not how I see myself in my head.

He looks puzzled for a moment. Moves his scratching from his balls to his bald head and looks all around the hallway.

Where the fuck are we anyway?

2006, I said.

You should read this book, I add. How to tell time without a clock. Then you’d know.

Well, I’m trying to sleep anyway so can you keep it down?

I turn back to the room, my castle. Hey you fucking maniacs, can you keep it down for this poor chap?! I shout loud enough to make even my own ears hurt.

Would you like a cup of watery tea? I ask as he heads back down the hall. He ignores me. I close the door and lie back down on the mattress.

******

I read this article, or perhaps I heard it on one of those altruistic radio programmes, about this guy who masturbates on junk mail. Supposedly it’s the latest in sexual faddism. And I think, god, if only I had a sex drive, I could go crazy in here. There’s junk mail from the last six months accumulated all over this flat. More junk mail than books, just how I like it. I never imagined it to be a sexually arousing though. I want to call in to that radio show, yes, definitely a radio show and not a newspaper article because I couldn’t phone into a newspaper article. I wanted to phone in and ask, hey, do women suffer from this too?

But I don’t have a phone, so I just sit there and think about the chances instead.

Later that night I leave my castle to go to this horrible country and western bar at the end of my street, a hideous place with horrible, stupid music, basically the call to idiots everywhere, the Idiot’s Siren and not only that but all the people are fat and ugly and stupid and then they get drunk which only compounds their stupidity and these fat oily fuckers start having sex. Not right there in the bar but they peel off in pairs like jets in a fighter squadron. Fuck Bombs.

I’m sitting there alone while all these idiots are milling around me drinking and saying really stupid stuff that I can’t even repeat because you might go blind reading it it’s so fucking stupid. Some pig-faced woman in a lace top with an inch of visible makeup blotting her bloated jelly roll pig face, sweat pouring out of her, guzzling her cocktail with an umbrella in it, staring at me out of the corner of her eye, pretending to laugh at her friends’ jokes even though she’s not listening, she’s sending me subliminal sex missives, really graphic and disturbing missives so I thought fuck it, why not just come right out and ask her.

I lean in to her, feeling her twitch with anticipation.

Is it true that women masturbate on junk mail too or is it only men?

Holy shit, it all goes bad quickly from there. She screams as though I’ve slashed her with a knife and everyone looks at us. She points at me. This man just asked me if I liked to masturbate on junk mail!

I don’t need to tell you, I got out of there pretty quick. A few people tried to poke or kick at me as I scurried out thinking about a nice cockroach frittata, but generally, I made it out back into the street unscathed. A guy was standing there smoking a cigarette.

Can I interest you in a little junk mail, he says, opening his coat to display the samples.

*******

Nobody visits me any more. Not that they ever did actually. I’ve been alone in this flat for as far back as I can remember. Of course, that’s only a few years ago. All the years before that fell away in a drunken haze I remember absolutely nothing of. Someone wrote me a letter awhile ago, after it was all over. No memories left for you, lad, it said. Written in crayon. I often tried to figure out what it meant but I couldn’t remember.

So this is where I am.

My castle. My cockroaches. My slow pace. My endless time.

I have arrived and stayed. Where or why, no one I ask has any idea. I have an inkling this Kimberlain character holds the key somewhere. I have to find him again.


******((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((***************************

It's amazing, Kinderton is preaching to me as I move about the flat with the intention of emptying the rubbish bin. It's amazing, isn't it, he asks more forcefully. That you can continue to survive on such crumbs of hope. One message from one person, no matter how strange, unexpected and incomprehensible, is enough to sustain you for days. Not weeks of course. You need a series of these small revelations to sustain you for weeks but you are like a trapeze artist moving from one tiny crumb to the next thinking you are closer to some more bearable truth.

And yet, you realise, even in this exercise that there is no such bearable truth. It is only the hope of finding one that sustains you. What would you do with a bearable truth? Would you embrace it or run away again, like always?

His question hangs in the air like a swarm of gnats. I take inventory of the rubbish bin: coffee grounds, the tiny fag ends of hundreds of cheap roll ups, orange rinds. I wonder vaguely to myself where the orange rinds came from and then remember that only a few days before Kinderton had come bearing a gift of a crate of tangerines. They fell off the back of a delivery truck, he explained. Besides, there's no vitamin C in cockroaches, you should understand that. You need another form of nourishment. You're beginning to look too grey.

*****

Listen, he says, pulling away at the rind of a tangerine, one of the few left, as I light another cigarette in a room already so choked with smoke we can barely make each other out. You are in limbo. It is just like the period before you were born, after you die, that limbo of nothing only somehow, you're still here. You ask yourself that every day, don't you? What are you doing here when you're already dead or not yet born? Isn't that someone who has no memory of the past? Not yet born? And yet you were. There's a whole horrific past that you can't remember, won't remember. Blocked out, blacked out. Limbo. Wake up. Misfortune is not the destiny of others. It is your path. Your only path.

*****

The problem is always too many choices.

Kinderton says we should all be so lucky to live in gulags, not having to take responsibility for our choices any more because there aren't any.

It's hardship, he says knowingly, playing the pipe-toting intelligentsia in one simple motion, hardship but freedom from choice.

People who have too many choices end up spinning their wheels, you mark my words. These future generations are going immune to attention spans. But I'm not telling you anything you can't see for yourself. What is important is that you do not follow their lead.

Why can't I have a female mentor?

You see! Just there. Choice. What makes you think there even ARE female mentors? If this were a gulag you wouldn't be clamouring for a female mentor. You'd be clamouring, with chattering teeth, for a warm fire, a blanket and an eternal sleep.

But you can't negate choice. It's right there. You don't have a choice but to have choice.

It's called mental weakness, Kinderton said, tapping his forehead. Choice is what got you into this mess in the first place. Do you want another relapse? Another period of complete blackness? Isn't that why you're here to begin with? To find out how it happened and avoid in the future?

Well to be honest, I just want to find out how it happened. Once I know that I'll decided whether or not I want to avoid it in the future. Maybe it was a good thing.

Maybe it was a good thing, Kinderton mutters to himself. Maybe it was. So good maybe you should return to that blackness, that nothingness.

Kinderton says big men have alot of urine in them.

He says if a man can't piss for at least 60 seconds straight, he's not a real man, but a half man.

I urinated in an alley, away from spectators.

*****

I played this little game wherein I kidded myself I didn't think about her. Oh, I thought about her, but only in the detached way one reads about a dozen anonymous people dying somewhere in a flash flood. You were aware you should feel bad but somehow the bad feeling couldn't spring forth. It was just caught there in the back of your throat and had remained there so long you barely even noticed it was there any more.

*****

At this hour he begins to write again, polishing the same stone over and over, still a stone.

Kinderton likes the solitude of music on headphones. It drowns out the Thursday night church bells, a persistent drone, a beautiful woman who opens her mouth one too many times and each time, to his disgust, Kinderton sees a little deeper into her.

So he sits near the window of his room overlooking the harbour, lights from the street dancing on the dark night water. He smokes because it relieves an inner restlessness that pacing does not satisfy. He has no where to go but plenty to do. (so he believes anyway but if you observe his sloth-like behaviour you realise that smoking and reading and music are the primary passions, distractions...

When I arrive he clears a stack of books and papers from a chair, dumps it without ceremony on the floor behind the chair and motions with a swinging arm wordless like an ape, for me to take it.

He regrets now that he must remove the headphones and so it is that we both sit around a table beside the window, listening to those church bells which sound lovely to my ears but to him, night after night of it sometimes it seems, it is maddening.

He puts music on, loudly so that we will be a near shout in conversation but he doesn't care. At least it drowns out the church bells. I feel like I'm battling a psychological disease with those bells, he mutters to himself, serving us both a cup of tea and taking his seat again, props arranged.

So, you say that you want to remember, he begins abruptly, even his cigarette betraying an insatiable inner anger, clenched tightly, blown out after barely inhaling, contemptuously, still thinking of the church bells.

May I ask why?

I think a moment before responding. I am not sure if he is attempting to evaluate my sincerity or is simply curious.

I imagine for the same reason any man would want to remember, or to be able to remember at least...the vast emptiness leading up to now is lonely. I'm aware that at birth it was no different but there was also no or little consciousness of history itself, there was nothing needed to build upon. I am like a building erected without blueprints or material. Just simply there one day. No explanation of how or why.

What if what you remember is not particularly pleasant? Once the floodgates are opened, it will difficult to control it. Memories, good, bad, horrible, disfiguring, will come out as if opening a Pandora's box.

I'm aware that most of it is probably unpleasant but at least I'll be aware of it.

Well, they'll be coming for you, soon enough. Don't be so eager. I suggest we take a walk to a cafe I know of a few blocks from here. We can discuss this away from church bells.

He nods his head slowly.

******


The promise of death is the only promise that gives my life any meaning, any depth. Can you imagine what it would be like not to have this hanging over us? To think we would be sentenced rather than blessed with a life in perpetuity, Shapeless, boring, incessant? The sentence worse than life would be a never-ending life.

Kimberlain counsels me. I am supine on a rug on a concrete floor in a flat with no windows. Incense is burning and kyoto music is bleeding through the speakers unintrusively.

You pretended to be people you weren’t.

Foreigners, even. You disguised your voice with a phony accent and most of these people didn’t know the difference, wanted to be enchanted instead of looking down reality’s throat and hearing ahhhh.

I have a thought and a passes.

It’s like this at night most often. It’s all real, waking out of the dream, being in the dream, thinking about the dream. It’s a rash in the head. I can’t get it out and all I want to do is scratch it more and more, thinking and thinking about the same idiotic moment.

Kimberlain doesn’t shush me. He let’s me prattle on a little bit, like a parent humouring a child’s gibberish.

The gibberish exhausts me so I fall silent.

Kimberlain doesn’t swing a pocket watch in front of me. He gives me drugs. It’s ok, he says. These drugs are to help you, not to prolong you.

And I lie there, supine on that sofa trying to think of absolutely nothing.

Ok, this guy tried to tell me one afternoon, sitting on a chair on the sidewalk everyone in their beer malt liquor rubbing day chests and getting all, you know. Fuck.

You can’t say you’re any one nationality. You think. They are everywhere. They whisper in my ear over and over: “It’s the lifestyle”.

I always shake my head. Sometimes I even hit myself in the ear, like there’s a malfunction.

Hollywood be thy name, Kimberlain said suddenly, as if he’d woken from a trance himself. Did you just slap yourself in the ear, he asked me.

No. It’s the meq