On the Monday before Katrina Plowhurst was shot dead in the streets, Aya and I were waiting for her with Edward Gershwin in the front hall of her small one-bedroom apartment. Aya stood perched underneath a frail arch of hallway shadows. Her hair half up in the dreary low lights, done in the way of which I am most fond, that, to me, suits her most perfectly. She had a distressing mock-grin on her face; the one that tends to show itself in times of most anxious inner stirring. I recall this vividly, for it always leaves me shaken; the apparent beginnings of an emotional transposition. Aya can be chilling. Edward was listening distantly, as if for sounds in the street, signs of life. We were waiting for Kat to find her purse. The not topical typical. She had been off in some unseen room trudging about for a long time. There was the resonant sound of fluttering plastic, moving objects, the occasional spattering of blasphemy—the rhythms of her frenetic, double-thinking footsteps betrayed a mounting anxiety. We began to doubt that any damn purse was going to be found anytime soon. Edward took a moment to glance grudgingly at his watch. I lit a cigarette. Texas Lights. Small red and white package. My favourite brand in those days. Some sort of a natty pastiche about them. They had a whole kind of a thing I was into. Edward began talking about the war again. His voice seemed to hold for a discontented moment in the air of the tight hallway space; it quavered and shook—he was saying Now—I mean, anymore—you can assume so very little. What we are told no longer carries any weight—you know?—We have been conditioned by all of the—the intellectual periphery—against mass medias—and companies—corporations particularly—and governments. Our government could be doing really great, significant work out there—they could be improving global conditions and they could tell us about it and—and—and we would doubt them—we would assume it was lies—or at least severe manipulations of the truth. Even if it was true. You know? And we’d be right to doubt. I mean: that’s just the thing. Now we’d be right to doubt. I was half listening, eyes fixed on Aya, her pale face muted by the blackness of the shadows. I was wondering what Edward thought he meant by “global conditions.” Settled on the taut curvature of Aya’s composed and obsequious body, watched her wait, not without a familiar longing—unifying continuity of blah. Desire in the last muffled muzzle flash of the last screaming half of this century has become a significantly difficult swallow for us chaps, I reckon. We’ve been taught by all teachers, within institutions and beyond them, to fear the gaze and its brink, to loathe our own lusts and carnalities; all remotely dominant-replicable desire, associated with the father and his doubles, becomes corrupted somehow. We have been left so hopeless because we understand this to be abstractly veritable, better you believe. There is a sickness and a violence behind the auspicious eyes, the wandering ones, Edward and myself, gambolling their sly appropriations, our eyes, fruit fly fay on the intangible recognition of certain inherited hungers, beastly tactics believed to be on mothballs, closeted away. We hate our sex. We cannot, however, stop ourselves from looking. Especially not in an apartment hallway wallpapered with discussions of War. And Katrina comes barreling distractedly into the dark sans purse, over the cheap rugs covered in cigarette burns, passing the tacky Dali and Klimt prints hung slanted on the wall, her red dress wrinkled and gaudy bohème. Our dizzy dimple-cheeked dish-o betrays a wistful girlishness. Her eyes beat her voice to an apology: ’can’t find it…somebody will have to cover for me.’ What does Edward study? What is it that he knows about war, about whoop whoop? The Japanese always saw desire as the root of all suffering. You are grasping for right conduct, right intent, right speech, right knowledge, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation. That’s where they dropped the fat man and the little boy, like blimpoid acid-raindrops of hex. Japan. Japanarama. I focus on the glowing embers of my cigarette. Red-dressed and red-headed-Kat is putting on white shoes over white stockings. She is the colour of my cigarette package, the Japanese flag, too, and I take fleeting notice of this, classifying it as a kind of flyby irony. Edward and Aya are sidestepping toward the front door. Edward is not talking about the war, he is complementing Kat on the quality of her dress. Kat thanks Edward distantly. And then we are out in the anemic white fourth floor hallway, moving quickly toward the stairwell. The elevator is out of order—it is always this way. Each of us knows this and nobody has to be reminded. Entering the stairwell, I shuffle thoughtlessly through my pocket for car keys. It takes a moment for the memories and cottony abstractions to settle and register within the glazed disconnection of my forebrain; my car is still parked outside Edward’s apartment, we are walking to dinner. I forgo my rummaging. Time and time again: I catch myself drifting—I think back and cannot remember making choices. There in the stairwell I make a promise to improve this ethical deficiency; but this is a promise I have already broken beyond imagination, over and over. Edward half-kicks, half-nudges with his shoulder the door to the lobby, hands in his pockets, sort of scrimmage-style. We all filter through in an absurdly linear procession, one after the other, our assortments of nice clothes and night-out-on-the-town faces, each individually documenting the space upon which they be encroaching. There is an old man using the telephone at the eastern most end of the lobby. He is wearing an old grey suit and a dismayed you-think-you-know-who-your-friends-are-and-then-suddenly look on his shapeless putty face. I do not ever want to be this man, slumped over, aging, in some cheap apartment building with rugs being pulled out from underneath me over a pay telephone. Outside it is just that time early in the night when the streetlights begin to make white dress-shirts and passing sports cars magically phosphorescent. There is an intangible urban electricity in the air. I am meditating on the innumerable occasions when scatterings of harried human rise from underground to behold bomb-ravaged cities and all but nothing where there was once their whole world. Unknown faces reduced to newsprint hysteria aerosol. I feel Edward's darkness and he feels me feeling, bobs on his loafers uncomfortably. Where are we going to eat|? How the fuck have we not yet reached anything like consensus? We're literally on the sidewalk and walking to dinner! So where are we walking?! We know that this is a difficult question, one that might take hours to answer if treated in a certain way, each person holding out for a workable proposition from one of the other presiding abstemious. Everyone is afraid to choose, or even offer a suggestion, when it is on behalf of the collective, nobody wants to seem in control. For me, I feel like to be eager or to care would be like having a learning disability. I tell everybody we're going to Spagliano's. So there. These chumps smile they chump smiles and it's all up to me. We head off south, down the storefront coil of Grande Street, in the direction of the market. Lights everywhere. Aya and Katrina begin discussing wedding dresses they see in a shop’s front window showcase. Edward and I exchange knowing grins, cognizant of the fact that the women are mostly teasing us. I cannot for the life of me remember the specifics of the relationship between Edward and Katrina. Aya has explained it to me, but I did a poor job of storing it—I wonder if they are friends or coworkers—I wonder if he could be fucking her. I look at Kat. She’s involved in voluble, highly expressive discussion, arms flailing about freely, face grown girlishly animated, the red of her dress flooding her roundish cheeks. I look away and look back and Kat and Aya are suddenly giggling like younger versions of themselves caught in a tame transgression. I turn my eyes to my feet and count my steps on the pavement. I avoid treading on the cracks, forming a child’s game of it, concerting considerable effort such that I am able to make it between each block of cement with no more than two steps. One step is a triumph! Soon I am caught up in this, and am unknowingly far ahead of the others. I am playing in my mind, over and over, a section from Honnegger’s 3rd symphony as rendered by the Berliner Philharmoniker. I am gloriously absent. Suddenly there is the sound of twisting and colliding metal. Shouts of anguish and alertness.
...
The street has come raging to life, grown a new face, more fierce and vital. I turn to see two cars practically grafted together in the middle of Grande Street. The occupants are quickly abandoning their mutual vehicles and approaching one another head-on. I look back to Edward, whose face has gone to ice. He is fervently awaiting the first punch. Kat and Aya are still, all but illegible. A large barrel-chested Italian in some kind of funky oversized suit, coming fresh from a smashed-up, sporty, red number, is hollering You fuck! You fuck! Do you have any fucking clue how, what? This is a motherfucking new fucking car, motherfucker! The English is far beyond broken and the Italian comes on flailing his tree-trunk arms like proper weapons, sweat poring down off a wadded brow. The other fella has a less flashy car and is young, white as whole milk, and significantly less built, but something in this kid’s eyes suggests danger, a ragged disregard for others, physio-criminality. He just watches the Italian coming at him. He appears to be unmoved. A blustery showing from the Italian will clearly not alone cut it. All of us in the street are huddling together in tight, silent groups, preparing ourselves for a coitus, a cathartic explosion, release from the street and evening. This fight is for all of us! I look around and it seems that there are hundreds more here than a minute ago. They have come from adjacent vestibules, places of shelter, from bellow ground, why not? Bordering neighbourhoods! Who the hell knows?! We are converging on the scene! It has commanded our manifold attention! The bestial approach of the Italian ceases suddenly. He’s confused, perhaps dismayed by the conspicuous indifference of his sketchy adversary, and, no doubt, by the escalating scene of which he is suddenly an unwitting focal point. The big guy gives the smaller man a peculiar look, eyes then darting briefly about at his growing audience on the sidewalks and in the street. We all inch back upon being noticed. Big guy fixes his attention back on the kid, who remains in the same spot. The Italian gives him a look that says, you know, Well? The smaller man is weighing out his options. He seems altogether snugly at home in this situation, entirely business-like, used to stuff going wonky.Well? He finally opens his mouth and says, with a gloriously plainspoken delivery: If you touch me, you will not walk away, pausing a second before adding calculatedly, you will not walk away. It is difficult for many of us watching not to be impressed. I even find myself grinning. My goodness, why?! There is an indefinable wonder here. It takes the form of an invisible aurora and it finds a complementary phantasmal interior colour in the fantasies of each witness, each newly present man, woman, and child. We are secretly rooting for the crazier littler guy, whether or not each of us has had time to notice this about ourself, whether or not we have had time to compute the incoming stream. A few women gasp and gush. They are impressed by the coolness of the man’s words, the way he rolls it out and rolls with it, and, hey, look, it is impressive! The Italian senses that he is loosing the audience’s favour. His eyes tighten and his fists clench. He resumes his charge. The smaller man has been expecting this and shuffles backward around the front of his car with his left hand anchored to the hood, then, making a quick fake pivot, backs up directly onto the sidewalk, audience parting to permit his impetuous burst of movement. The Italian is disoriented by the smaller man’s footwork and succeeds in ending up flat on his back, half on the sidewalk and half in the street. There are actual bursts of laughter from within the audience, plus a few jeers. Many of us turn to exchange good-humoured glances and smirks. The smaller man knows that when the Italian gets up he will be super angry, so he looks around for some surrogate tool of assault, something to defend himself with, latching himself ultimately onto a large half-wood and half-metal garbage receptacle, bending at the knees as he hoists the hulking thing up above his gawky, shivering form. The Italian sees the kid with this large, ponderous object of considerable mass and, for a second, appears genuinely terrified. He inches backward on his knees, possibly frightened, as is much of the audience, that the smaller fella’s about to crush his skull like a walnut. But instead of crushing any skulls or indulging in any nutcrackings whatsoever, the smaller man has a sudden flash of brilliance. He carries the metal can—or rather lets it carry him, dizzily, crazily—in the direction of the Italian’s flash red sports car. There is a brilliant slow-mo instant where we all realize what is about to happen. Oh, man. The young punk arches his entire spine and, snapping himself forward, allows an unearthly force of inertia to send the garbage bin straight through the shiny, reflective windshield of the ostentatious red vehicle. As a massive crash comes descending through the urban night, the Italian’s wife somersaults wildly from the passenger door of the red car, wailing, totally incomprehensible, her face hidden by a mask of black, silken hair. None of us in this flurry of mad activity had even noticed her there in the car, and now any pity we harbour toward her, or might be inclined to harbour, is wholly eclipsed by our near-erotic awe; it is the kind of thing you have to wait for later to get to letting it start to kind of bother you, you know—it will have to wait for all of us here on the street later—in our solitude—our focus right now entirely on the spectacle of the exploding glass, the crescendo of noise, the sleek and slender red sports car, hollowed and despoiled, strewn with garbage and remnants of what was once a windshield. We are fascinated by the Italian’s high-pitched wailing. It were as though he’d rather it had been his head smashed, just not this, to be so publicly dehumanized, humiliated well above and beyond, to have such a superb piece of machinery soiled along with his whole sense of himself and probably his world too. He crouches in the road with his hands over his eyes. There’s a chilling noise emanating from somewhere deep inside him. Never was there such a hopeless sound, so empty and unrelenting. Yikes! The smaller man steps up to the vanquished foe and looks on with an air of bemused conquest. The whole thing was your fault, he says. Then he walks back to his car, gets in, tries to start it. The engine fails three times before he gets back out. He stops a second, then turns and gives his car a walloping boot with his right foot. Before anyone has due time to respond, the crazy young punk is already sauntering off down the street, looking back only once to be sure the Italian hasn't decided to follow along. The Italian, frankly, cannot move. He is still on his knees, whimpering, face cupped in massive, frightening hands. This man is nearly broken, friend, in no condition to follow his adversary off into crushing darkness, into the dimly lit and all-of-a-sudden-unknowable corridors of the city.
...
It took some diplomacy of sorts on my part, I suppose you could say, but I ultimately prevailed, persuading the other three to forget about the whole crazy assault-and-battery thing and continue on with our walk to the restaurant. The other three were convinced that something had to be done, but were unsure as to what that should be, what with their being busybody dolts. Aya was positively sure that we were obligated to explain what we had seen to the police, presumably to facilitate in their investigation. She continued along these lines for a bit, saying that such things are ‘integral to being a good citizen,’ or whatever, to which I flippantly reacted, for better or worse, by asking why now (then) was the time to become a good citizen, to which she had no audible response. I secretly realized that my friends were driven to remain by nothing more than a love of this colossal titillation. They were kidding themselves, fabricating stories about false responsibility, Aya especially. She always gives it up for the wavering ambiance of a consuming energy. She wants to be lost in ordered madness. The other two were simply transfixed, I suppose. They wanted to hold onto their tenuous kiddie kicks, the vibrations of the what-had-happened as emanation of an emanation or a contact with a phantom contact, to forever have the setup of the street and participants etched into their minds and available for glitchy replay, perfect material for some Weïrd Sisters barroom bromide in the distant future, an anecdote to relate to the grandchildren or simply one to just echo in the general weave and sway of amassed incidentals. They were drunk on the fallout of the whole thing, the street was flooded with like-minded mill-abouts, wounded ants, trying desperately to gather up their sundry minced bits for distro, retelling the the thing like a game of telephone gone haywire, cleaning up the fray and making more fray out of the clean-up. All that Edward and Katrina needed was a Come on! I am hungry or two to land them back in the reality of the task at hand. If they seem partially drunk, in a way, it was I, alas, who really needed to get good and obliterated, presently, no tolerance for further obstruction. Back off down Grande Street again, fuck’s sake, southwards, we walk in silence, our faces bemused but more stunned than we can know they show. There is us. We have just seen something liberating, or whatever, and it lingers as a mild intoxication as we beat our course for the market. We’ve grown more appreciative of our position within the grinding urban potentiality of the evening. Our eyes dart up and down the street. Are we waiting for the aftershock? the sequel? Edward is suddenly not so comfortable, not that he isn’t naturally very nervous and fidgety with the wet eyes of a puppy. He begins talking the whole thing out, the street fiasco, insulting the two participants for their loutish inhumanity, glancing around distractedly like they might be there and primed to smack him upside the head. A war going on, he is saying, and these two irremediable heathens are tossing fucking rubbish through windshields—they should be soldered to US bombing targets—or something. Enough, Edward. I will put on you on the pavement and fuck your silly ass up, Edward. University students are like tacks in your shoes. I tell Kat about Spagliano's because she's never been there, and then we're there. As we are entering I sing the words I am the very model of a modern major general a little too off-key. I screech, to be honest. Kat says she has a bone to pick with the municipality. Aya is feigning interest and presence, so like her, always the crisp placating collaborator with faraway eyes, the safe harbour, agreeing, nodding her head, tossing back the occasional lazy question or rote opinion. The walls are trimmed with traditional tapestries and paintings of Italian migrant workers, Tuscan farmers, photographs of colourless Rome cityscapes. The predominant colour scheme involves the reds and blacks of Monsieur Stendhal. The waiters are all decked out in cheap tuxedos. It’s the same Spagliano’s. Maybe that weeping guy from the accident will come in later, says Kat. That's funny, I say. You're funny. I don't put out the cigarette I'm asked to put out. Because it's Aya who is asking and fucker her. We follow this grinning maître d' into the remote recesses of the restaurant to a circular table for four in back, the protracted passage availing me ample time, sufficient to sum up the rest of this evening’s clientele, or those currently to be directly accounted for, all superbly typical of such a place, nobody standing out. I do, however, recognize a table of fellow law students from the Uni to whom I submit a polite nod as I sit down next to Aya at our table. The Sicilian lights our candles and I take off my black sport coat, draping it over the chair. Edward likewise unburdens himself of jacket. We are brought bread and water and asked if we would like some wine. I grab hold of a bun, ripping it in half, smothering its sectioned halves with indiscriminate globs of very yellow butter. It is at this moment that I notice, with an appropriate mixture of terror and abhorrence, that we have been seated next to a ghastly family of four. The two children, one male and one female, are significantly overweight and seem to live in a perpetual state of obstreperous bickering. I first catch them out of the corner of my eye as they send spoon-catapulted volleys of pasta and sauce flying over the table at one another, squawking up something awful, plain-faced mother turning to sonny and issuing a hair-raising, atonal, Dwiiiiiight. We all cringe. The waiter takes our drink orders. I ask for a litre of the house red and a gin martini, lots of olives, for starters. Everyone wants the same except for Kat. I’ll have a glass of—let’s see...well, a nice—a nice dry white.’ Perfect, says the waiter, graciously disappearing. I hear, from beside me, Dwight, for Christ’s sake, do you want to wait in the car, hunh? It’s the mother. Pa pipes in next: Go out to the car, and I’ll be there in a minute to sort you out. Would you like that?’ Dwight doesn’t budge, but clearly he don’t like it one bit. I turn to see him give his sister a familiar look-what-you-gone-and-did-now look, brimful with intimations of future violence. I put out my cigarette on something or other and cram a mouthful of bread down my throat. Look what your Sicilian friend did, Aya, I tease, mouth filled to excess with bread, stuck us back here with the flip-flappin’ livestock. She laughs at this but gives me a look suggesting it’s not struck her as charming. I playfully distress her hair with my hand, which is very much not helping, and the waiter reappears with my martini, bless him. I’ll be right back with the wine and to take your appetizer oysters, err, orders, he says. I pick out a few olives with a miniature blue sabre, consuming them theatrically. There is nothing I have found on this earth like a martini olive! Then I hit the martini itself. It spins and interlaces warm webs throughout my head and around the base of my spine. Even my testicles are a little impressed with the martini. Edward’s been reading Mishima. He pipes in about isolation and honour, ‘ruptures' in the ‘social body,’ the sequestration of the ‘imperial soul.’ Annoying dreck! At any rate, Aya is nodding and Kat appears to have no idea why anybody would want to talk about or listen to any of this malarkey. Edward’s reading of the oeuvre of Mishima does not sit well with me. I lay into him and am being a little crazy about it, I admit. I am speaking freely and far too loudly about public acts of self-murder. The waiter has reappeared and is filling our glasses with wine, but truly because I don’t care and am only ever bumbling through any encounter anyway, especially this one, right now, because I guess I am feeling especially impatient...well, I have a bad feeling that at some point tonight I am going to say something nasty and devastating to Aya. We all sit back, looking at, in, and through our wineglasses like they were somehow suspect. Edward picks up a bottle and examines the labels. I tell him that the best poetry is written on the back of wine bottles and I can see for sure from the look on his face that he's growing to hate my guts. We order our appetizers. I want the lobster bisque. It came down to the bisque or the tiger prawns and I went with the bisque. The others all want the Caesar salad. I finish my martini and have some of the wine, which I am just positively crazy for. I sit there savouring it for a minute. Edward is explaining to Kat just who Mishima is. She don't care, dude. This could not be more clear, Edward. I am thinking about what the word wine sounds like rattling around forever in a single human skull and about my dad and his love of the stuff. Perhaps it is wine-appreciation itself which is the horror of my existence. Yikes! One of the law students from the other table comes bumbling drunkenly across the restaurant toward us, a stocky guy, suit all displaced and worn into the ground; at some point this motherfucker has seen fit to undo his tie and let it drape over him like the day’s kill. In his eyes can be detected something fierce. It’s in the eyes but really it’s in his blood. He is very far gone. A series of unrefined movements find our legal beagle inebriate half-draped over our four’s table as he barks incoherent gibberish from somewhere in a badly-done-by gut. Aya’s mortified, jaw agape, as she struggles for words, raises fretful hands of hapless condolence, faint dismissal or defence that fails to make any impression on the large legal student, or at least nothing recognizable as such. Katrina and Edward have dropped Mishima and both look properly dumbfounded, which I suspect is their resting state. Ha ha. I can see that the family at the next table has turned to watch as well, and I almost feel bad for them as I realize that they would have to have missed out when that whole fucking insane Grande Street fracas was going down. Mostly I’m trying to remember the name of this psychotic boor who is launching lava language like burbling Luciferian contagion. I can’t fucking grasp any of these clucked utterances. Even the isolated syllables feel like jagged outer space stuff. Roswell, New Mexico. What is any of this? No. Nothing makes any kind of a sense. Then, in a flash, there it sort of is, like a broadcast made through the static over an appallingly bad feed—I’m picking certain things out of the fray. It starts with my name. I hear him say Curtis, my name and possibly my cipher into the basic logic of this drollery. Something to start with, at any rate. Surely it don’t get more familiar than the given name. Then I realize he’s saying the same thing over and over, like some demented broken record, though he puts a little variety to the English on it each go-round. Then it's perfectly clear. This nice man who can no longer talk is, in a gracious and hospitable fashion, offering me powerful drugs. No shit. He laughs and teeters, everything a total lark, daffy as shit. Sweat beads amass on his face, snot drips as he snorts. Pulling a piece of foil from his jacket pocket, he proceeds to open it up and empty it of a thick glob of blue-white powder, which spills all over the red tablecloth. Snort this! Snort this! he cajoles, this man whose name I cannot at all recall. I know I know him. I think. What in God’s name is it?! Edward shrieks. Guess! answers Aya abruptly, and I cannot look her way, because whoever does is going to get a death stare, I damn well know it. She looks around the restaurant conspicuously, and I know it, though I do not confirm this by redirecting my own gaze, as that could prove the end of me, of us all. The family at the next table looks away, collectively, as a unit. Ha ha. They don’t want to be accessory to any drug crime. Duck out of all responsibility, skirt all eye contact: a fine motto. They resume their discussion of Florida vacations, tennis lessons, who’s hosting Sunday bridge. The kids are only interested in the noise, but they turn away also, sensing, it’s clear, that they are being made privy to some sick, adult secret. Which is not wrong. Probably. What am I about to do? I am staring at the powder on the table, thinking that snorting it just might be the only way to get rid of this boisterous dummy. He’s explaining, as far as I can gather, that it’s a mixture of coke and mescaline. And maybe, uh, cayenne. I did plenty of coke and hallucinogens late in high school, when I was living with my dad, and I’m assuming I can handle them now. Frankly, I’m still a guy who likes to get high at this point. Too much so, if you ask Aya. The last thing I need is to be outdone by this lummox. Look at this beastly abomination! He reeks of total collapse! Besides, this is a night-on-the-town! Is it fucking not? I ask you. Lord T'underin' Jesus are these not the free and heedless days of blithe can-do-no-wrong youth? I roll up a twenty dollar bill sitting loose in the pockets of my best pair of quality pants and cut up a line with a salad fork. Heh heh. As I am snorting the long, incredibly thick line of curious blue-white powder, Kat is asking this law student oaf ponderous questions he’s in no shape to answer. Where are you from? elicits no motor response of any detectable kind. I figure I've made this guy's day. He's making a kind of cheerful noise and rubbing his hands together vigorously. I’m sniffing crazily, rubbing the residue on my gums. I want to get up and move around but I know that’s a bad idea under present circumstances. Turning to Aya, I find her staring at me in disbelief, jaw stiff but hanging, kind of, a harsh hinge, disgust, anger, general wretchedness, and morbid stupefaction writ upon the whole of her mooning face. We're all going to die I say philosophically. I don't give any of us more than eighty-five years. Let's order. A man out of nowhere and nothing sets down my fucking bisque. Perfect timing I say you piece of shit. We would like to d’odeur.’ He looks at me like he knows all about it, and so I let my mind drift back to the house red, which has been waiting patiently, a wine over which I’m just going plum mad. God, glorious. The main course arrives. Fuck all of you. Hilarious. All sound has concentrated itself within a small block of my mind and spine and my god-knows. There is little time, so little, I love it, shit, just look: so, so little, co cute. I feel a ghost-clock ticking away at the base of my, uh, my, what’s the word? I sense a coldness in my other thing. It’s more like this, now it’s more like that, evolving, maybe, I guess, changing, certainly, maybe. Decorating the entire restaurant is: gastric neon sludge. I am running out of what little resolve I have towards the being nice to people and looking like I do normally, which, you know, fuck’s sake, has always been too exhausting to fathom, and I really couldn’t even tell you how the hell I manage. Man, dude. Looking down at my pasta, my plasma, red plasma pasta, gelatinous like human insides, my gag reflex haunts me, or maybe it’s hers. Who are you? Why are you looking at me like that? Dolphins. The one at San Francisco, the dolphin, would never. I tell you: Never! Off to my side, from the family’s table, I swear I hear someone say Dwight, you ululating mutant-fuck. Either my repressed whatsit returning or the other peoples’. I am praying for the latter with increasingly limited hope. Edward and Idloo have decided to ignoo me. I look at them but have trouble making out their words and faces together. Something inside me is scrambling the codes, and then I can’t put the word to the face without smearing the words all over the faces, which is, admittedly, kind of funny. There is some talk of youth, summer cottages, real or imagined: it’s hideous. I think they might be talking about Rashomon, an old samurai story about iron and metal twisted into infinity on Grande Street. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, wineglass, this precise wine glass at this pretty nice moment. I take a sip from it. Nothing, it’s not working. I am hearing unfathomable horrors from the family next to us.
Very, very, very messed up. I was super duper messed up. Dig it or don’t. The next morning, as I awoke in Katrina Plowhurst’s bed, I knew everything had to change in my life. I mean, look, it didn’t, not at all, but still. She was sitting funny on the edge of the mattress. I was certainly going to be hungover, the room was spinning. The television was on in the corner, glaring green and blue, flashing images of fighter-planes, horror-stricken faces of half-real victims, folks left in the rubble or having arrived somewhere once familiar to be met only by rubble, simple and very personal worlds wrecked; children in video purgatory, make-shift field hospitals. Cathode-ray tube, sententious news correspondent voices, stats and lists bleakly impersonal. The discouraging thing about all of this was that I had in no way the previous night attained blackout. Recall was good, too good. I played it back over, serially. You’ve got to—brain basically does it on its own. A table overturned, a fistfight in a gin-smelling nightclub, bad dustup with Aya. Oh yeah, it was all there. I could walk that walk of indiscretion the exact same way again, and God knows I probably would. I had only been living with Aya for a few months, no more. I can’t say that I felt all that bad about ending the relationship by fucking her best friend or anything. It’s just that I, you know, couldn’t believe at that moment, lying next to exceedingly capricious Kat in her own damn bed, how little control I had over myself and how fucking susceptible I was to screwy paths nobody of sense would take but which I’m somehow unable to avoid. It’s not like Aya was all that innocent, in this affair or peripheral affairs or whatever else. She played various parts and played them good, really. Our contemporaries in that horrible goddamn Canadian shithole could be expected to give this comely cutthroat a pass, pretty much always! No tenterhooks for this naturally quiet, careful fiend, too smart to ever have to spend much time feeling especially miffed. That night I went and fucked Kat after we duked it out at Club Zero over the whole drugs thing and the whole having my hand on Kat’s thigh thing, Ida just went back to Edward’s studio apartment and boffed him anyway, didn’t she? But it’s easier to judge me, isn’t it? Oh, he’s such a dick, hey? Aya skips and I get the chair. Fuck that. Same old human comedy, more or less pathetic. They fall into bed, as the idiom would have it. I don’t really know, I don’t really care. To each their blessed own and leave me be, please, I beg of you. Somebody killed Kat soon thereafter. Shot her in the face in traffic in broad daylight. Very weird. I know one thing: that Aya, she was a freak and she was fucking craven. I cannot say for certain she’s a killer, but, shit, you know, I might be a very lucky man, you know? Hard to say with a crazy bitch. And between you and me: that pussy weren't no good.
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