delirifacient (13 page)
The day was malodorously past its use by date at this point, and yet the human effluvia sweeping down the street would not abate. Garrulous neighbours and discontented tradesmen crawled onto the sidewalk to trade outraged anecdotes and declining sales numbers, seasonally tweaked to give the speaker the right to appear that extra bit more indignant and vicissitudally mistreated than his interlocutor.
Hundreds of bacterial concerns vied for attention behind every window pane, and it furnished the former browncoat with indelible satisfaction to stroll through this onslaying sea of worries and tribulations that could neither touch nor infect him, obligated to part before his careless step and make way for his hydrophobic laziness.
Sometimes though he was curious what it would be like to drown in such quotidian preoccupations, to have life itself perform the thankless labour of supplying him with pressing topics for thought and conversation instead of his normal modus operandi, which consisted in his probing the profundities of futile quirk and aberrant ipsissimosity for matters to occupy the ingrate mind. All those extraneous people had life itself to fret about and, for the most part, could afford to cede the faculty of creativity-against-boredom to the idle rich and the self-palsifying members of the intelligentsia; they had but to disjoin their eyelids in the morning and without any conscious effort on their part they would be presented, nay, flooded with myriad trivial tasks to perform and minuscule goals to achieve and prosaic dreams to prostitute. As for the browncoat, he had long since excised a solid majority of his lifeitself-attuned organs.
He reached the end of the street, which subtly narrowed into the main alley of an articulate if unremarkable little park. He had no wish to enter it, he did not want to turn either left or right and he was rather certain it would not agree with his desires to go back. In fact he grew slightly suspicious, because he had no recollection of his initial reasons for exiting his flat and adopting this particular direction down this particular street. He then tried to coax himself into entering the park and admiring the charming little birds, but he failed, promptly and unspectacularly. Resigned to the infelicities of his consciential divagations, he aligned his back against the right half of the main gate and climbed onto it by sliding his arms and legs in between the ornate railings. The metallic leaves and avian structures in frozen overflight scratched him if he attempted too ambitious a movement, but otherwise his position was stable. The two halves of the gate were unsecured and opened away from the green, forming a straight angle with the rest of the fence that enclosed the park. The maximum arc of each described a 180 degree angle, from parallel coincidence with the fence to the default closed position which enjoined them. So the browncoat leaned outwards, swung his unremarkable bulk to the best of his ability and tried to imbue his half of the gate with a leftward movement – normally this would have pushed the gate against the fence, leaving the half of the unfenced space it was meant to administer completely open. He negotiated his attempts as adroitly as his unformed instincts would allow, but could not impress upon the half of the gate he was perched on any motion more impressive than an half-dozen centimetres, and even these advances were saccadic and mutually sabotaging: whenever he tried to push on and prolong his meagre progress before the gate had come to an halt, it and he along with it were somehow sent screechingly backwards. Stranded and impuissant, he finally cheated by planting his left foot on the ground some ten or fifteen centimetres ahead of the rest of his person and using it to propel the entirety of his under-oiled alliance with the skeletal machine forward. Three such grappling motions were sufficient to gain the momentum required of the gate to make its way to the awaiting fence. Mere milliseconds before contact, the browncoat extended his left leg fully so that his sole came up against the fence a good half meter before the now impetuous gate, bent his leg slightly so as to minimise resistance, and when his sole was firmly and fully supported by the fence, pushed himself backward as hard as he could. This sent the gate flying toward the open space it had left behind at the other end at an alarming if nonlethal velocity; as it reached its ‘closed’ position it negotiated – badly – a violent stop that left it clanging and vibrating, the savage attack on the rusty hinges resonating wildly in all directions. The intrepid rider failed to safeguard his head properly, so the force of the impact not only produced a not wholly painless encounter with the gate bars he was holding onto, but also wedged his head securely between two such inhospitable bars. All efforts to dislodge this his least prized possession were resolutely insolvent, and rather unpleasant on his temples to boot; pushing the metal rods laterally outwards was of course beyond his mortal powers.
Thankfully he still had the proper use of his limbs, so he once again applied his left foot to achieve forward motion. The gate was long enough that he had sufficient manœuvring space to give it a more than adequate speed; this time he did not cushion and ultimately subvert the gate’s tackling of the fence with his left foot but let nature take its sadistic course. His torso and mildly protruding stomach, sandwiched between the gate and the inexpugnable fence, suffered the full brunt of the collision, which deprived him of breath for a good five seconds, but also freed his head from between the bars.
As soon as he could ascertain the continuing performance by his bodily functions of their many rightful duties, he mounted the gate once again and, careful to position the centre of the back of his skull against a single bar so that it would absorb fully the shock of the abrupt stop without depriving him of immediate mobility, proceeded to repeat the exercise. This he ultimately did again and again and again, for five hours on end. Every once in a while his left foot failed to find the fence railings as it sought to reverse the gate’s movement from closed to lined against the fence; it would slip between the rods and the browncoat would have to deaden the metal’s crunch using his own modestly fleshsewn appurtenances. One may have expected him to laugh maniacally upon completion of a cycle but he was utterly silent, issuing only the occasional grunt of the body automaton if a landing was clumsily addressed and inconvenienced his head or chest more than could be reasonably expected of an onrushing multiple-tonne mass of steel that employed him as a willing cushion. It did not even occur to the browncoat in his reverie how strange it was that there were no visitors to a popular centrally located park in the breezy vespertine hours of a pleasant latesummer day, or that none had been attracted by the expansively impatient clangour he produced without fail every two minutes. but both the browncoat and i knew that all gates are holy.
It was almost eleven o’clock when he finally realized that he was now free to enter the park. He vacillated awhile but ponderousness never quite suited him so he walked in and headed for its geometrical centre, the focal point whence all alleys and treelines sprung. He found there a large statue of boris godunov. Its æsthetic merits were naturally risible, but it had at least to recommend it the good sense of not being an equestrian depiction. The sovereign was instead immortalised in the midst of a lively conversation with a chamber pot; he was holding it to eye level and unleashing what appeared to be a fuming, vitriolic argument against some unsatisfactory aspect or another of the chamber pot’s performance. It was unclear whether the latter was making any attempt to defend itself; however, as a general principle one does not argue with an enraged tsar. It was equally unclear whether the chamber pot had been voided of its contents or indeed whether it had at any recent point been made to operate qua chamber pot; unless one intended to mount the shoulders of the ten-foot statue and find out, even a regular passer-by with above mediocre alpinist abilities could only speculate as to the history of the chamber pot and the nature of its conflict with the despot. The browncoat surrounded the statue thrice, at a leisurely pace and without overly focusing on the details of the craftwork. He then paused behind it and gave the centre of the pedestal a stalwart push. This opened up a narrow and musky tunnel the browncoat did not hesitate to conquer. The unlit passageway spiralled downwards for a few minutes and led him to a series of linearly arranged underground chambers. The second of these was illuminated by multiple candles; in it he saw a man and a woman. Both were respectably and expensively dressed, though a couple of seasons behind the latest fashion. The woman lay supine, her hands and feet completely tied up: there seemed to be more rope than limb coiling around her. She was intermittently shaken by a succession of decidedly inæsthetic convulsions; they became progressively shier in both intensity and recurrence. The browncoat could only conclude that she had been recently sedated and these were the last remnants of her rather endearing resistance to the paralysis.
The man seemed in no hurry as he waited for the convulsions to die out completely.
As soon as the convulsions finally complied, he flipped the woman over so her deadened gaze would point upwards and produced a single ak-47 bullet from his coat pocket and rested it, sharp end downwards, on the centre of the woman’s forehead.
He persisted in pushing and slapping and beating the bullet in with his palm until it had made a minor, wholly negligible indentation but by this time his palm was bleeding all over the bullet and the woman’s forehead, immixing itself with the more modest crimson rivulets spawned by the battered forehead and generally making it harder to ascertain the extent of the wound he was apparently trying to inflict on her.
As the hole in the forehead was still not big enough for the bullet to be lodged safely in and remain balanced, the man then placed his foot on the bullet and applied the full force of his metal-heeled boot. Violently. Repeatedly. When an approximate three fifths of the bullet’s length had entered the woman’s skull, the man produced an hammer and struck at the bullet’s flat base as hard as he seemingly could (although he had been sweating heavily for some time now, so perhaps the browncoat’s impressions were mendacious); the fleshmuted impact did not fail to produce a minor deflagration. The browncoat left the tunnels at this point and reëmerged in the middle of the park. He decided he had no interest in returning home so off he went, foraging for a new home to abandon unfailingly the very next day. Also he would have liked to purchase a loaf of bread but was afraid few of his customary bakeries would serve him at this highly original time of night.
And then the young man shrugged off his withering indecisiveness and marched on, up the stairs, to his fifth storey apartment.
Vulgarians, he heard a shrill someone yell, vulgarians the whole sodding lot of them.
He paid these wronged words no heed. The shrill someone may have been a dog barking and suffering the distance for the night’s amusement.
Diaphana. He had a tapestry of argentate diaphana to cleave through on his way up to his fifth storey apartment, and they slowed him down and sped him up and played him up and down and made it generally difficult to situate and adapt oneself spatially. He was confused and his breast heaved and unintentionally he may have been breaking the rules of some of the diaphana, but he was not in pain. The browncoat did not interrupt his ascent and still swerved ably past the doors and the railings lining his passage, avoiding catastrophe with his third eye alone, until that wasn’t enough and a dark rude boy on the corridor took advantage of the browncoat’s politeness to unleash a savage tackleblow to his chest.
The eruption of violence scared him and woke him up and, quivered by ungentle instinct, he ran up the stairs as fast as he could and locked himself up in his fifth storey apartment. These unorthodox athletic exertions demanded their toll on him immediately, and the browncoat slid halfway to the floor, his back against the bolted door, breathing heavily and slowly regaining control against the diaphana and the violence. Then his breath came back and he stood up laboriously and undressed. It had been an hard day. Browncoat then turned around and laughed at the old man, gurgling and coughing up cooking oil out of his mouth and nostrils as he laughed. The old man sighed resignedly at this signature of petulance steadily inking browncoat’s oily body and, tired of his little notebook that was tiring his old hands, slipped it into a random thick dusty tome off his recently unpeopled bookshelf (the old woman had taken many of his favourite volumes when she left him). Browncoat was stung by the insect suspicion that the notebook did not actually belong to the old man, not in natural right, but this feeling, as always, was too slippery and his position far too tenuous to articulate into forceful, logical argument. The old man naturally took note of browncoat’s noetical acrobatics and, airing his uncombed mane in disapproval, seemed to change his mind about the notebook; he walked back to the bookshelf and extracted the notebook with unhurried dignity from its transitory book-lined sarcophagus. He scribbled a few casual words inside, taking his time and fully absorbed by the calligraphic challenge he had set himself. When he was done, he looked up to browncoat, who saw that something was expected of him and reluctantly poured a voluminous bottle of oil all over his head and inside his shirt and inside his pants. He did not omit his back or his two-sizes-too-large shoes and ensured a uniform distribution of oil across his lean body. The old man smiled at this and wrote inside the notebook more words. In defiant reply browncoat dropped to the floor and rolled across the entirety of the very spacious living room; the floor was so filthy that when he got up he had acquired a thick crust of aggregated dust and variegated refuse, close in species to cigarette butts and parts of soiled napkins and sunflower seeds and the ancient contents of carelessly overturned spittoons. He then lit a match and attempted to set fire to his person, but curiously his new coat of dust was dense enough to render him immune to the deathdrive attractions of the tiny greedy flame; even his hair resisted the match’s overtures. He tried more matches but none could burst through. The old man smiled once more and added a few more words to the notebook’s silent vault; browncoat wasted no time in ripping out an healthy couple of fistfuls of hair that previously had been endorsing his left temple.
