delirifacient (14 page)

The disciplined, short black hairs naturally stuck to browncoat’s oily hands in ways that tickled him and made his palms and the small, well stretched platforms of skin between his fingers feel uncomfortable and unclean and quite uncleanable, at least for the time being. His hands had been the cleanest part of him, since when he had rolled around the floor he had kept them neatly stuck to his sides; thus they had not accumulated any of the detritus the rest of his self had uprooted from the floor. The old man stubborned on, determined to remain unimpressed, and inducted his shortest entry yet into his little notebook. The browncoat reacted almost instinctively by slapping himself as hard as he could. The oil on his left palm caressed his cheek and it seemed as though the only points of resistance between the two were the little hairs still stuck to his palm; he felt them bend and coil and etch their little microscopic scratches into the skin of both his palm and his left cheek. Browncoat proceeded to rub the left part of his neck while the old man appeared to cross out furiously everything he had written and replace it with a new text. The new scribbling was dense and explosive and the old man carried on with verve and visible steaming passion. Then he fullstopped just as suddenly as he had begun and replaced the little notebook in one of his jacket’s many inner pockets. Rabid over the cessation of the actofwriting, browncoat tried to slap the old man as hard as he had just slapped himself, but immediately discovered he was unable to lift his arm against the old man. At this the old man shrugged and said

‘if you had a fuckin brain youd be dangerous.’

‘if you had a fuckin brain youd be dangerous,’ the browncoat wittily retorted and immediately started chuckling at the irrepressible vim of his quick parry. The chuckle gradually cataracted into a full-throated laugh that seemed to require what pathetic little was left of his unassuming vital forces. This went on for a good couple of minutes, but he ultimately interrupted his Olympian laughter to inform the old man that he, the old man, doesn’t understand anything, that he never understands anything, but that he used to, back when the brownback was innocent. Awaiting the old man’s answer he even forgot to resume laughing.

The old man asked him:

‘you love these bottom-feeder bitches dont you.’

The brownback was impassive for a few moments, and only afterwards did he laugh heartily, passing gall stones as he laughed. This laughter was a delayed, retarded reaction, but not to the old man’s remark but to the old woman’s death. The old woman had died.

The old woman had died, the old man explains, precisely because of

‘her decadent lifestyle of doing lines of mash [actual mashed potatoes, mind] and also that pointless cunt consumed four and not 5 helpings of fruit per day.’

Browncoat thought this was funny, but he did not think this was funny immediately upon hearing it. Immediately upon hearing it said he thought nothing of it, he thought it was nothing. The old man had an exquisite coprophagic rictus surgically imprinted on his otherwise blandenough physiognomy as he said this. As he pointed out that the old woman’s death had been a fitting conclusion to her ‘decadent lifestyle’.

The old man and the old woman had been fighting on Œdipal matters.

And the woman died in the old man’s eyes also, and in her eyes no more words were written, and in his eyes no more words were written also.

The old woman stopped screaming and patiently she threw herself out of the window, the window to her fifth storey apartment, and she landed on a cardboard police car, with cardboard police officers around it, and the cardboard police car had been waiting for the old woman and the cardboard police officers got in and the cardboard police car drove off, the old woman still splattered onto the hood. An half-empty syringe protruded from the small of her marble back.

The old woman was old but she had been much younger than the old man, who had been still screaming at her when she jumps out of the window. It had been a fierce ancient argument with the old woman, who was younger than he but nevertheless looked more ancient than even the old man.

The old man stood tall and tremulous before the browncoat, his flowing gray beard writhing quietly like a satisfied serpent around the breathless Laocoön. His face was like a dark stab. A face like a stabbing.

The old man and brownback had desired the old woman both. But now – or
then
–

the old woman was dead, the old man rejoiced and smiled using everything from his navel to his Adam’s apple to the wrinkles on his ponderous forehead. The brownback had witnessed a primal scene but preferred not to think of it in those terms. He wanted to slit the old man’s throat so the old man would smile with his neck also, but as usual he didn’t.

The old woman had died many times before. She was often found dead – and quite drunk – in two places at the same time. But this was different. The old man had never smiled after the old woman died before. He knew, and brownback trusted his judging.

Brownback could talk to the old woman easily, he never had trouble expressing his doubts and annoyances to her, and felt she had always understood him even when he failed to express himself in a cogent manner. And he failed to express himself with great regularity. He could never really talk to the old man, because he was scared of the little notebook; although the old man would normally tuck and slide the little notebook away when browncoat came near him, browncoat always felt the little notebook, and he always knew it was there. The little notebook did not understand him like the old woman did, or perhaps it understood him so much better than the old woman – or anyone else browncoat knew, and he did not all in all know so many anyone elses. Regardless, he did not like the little notebook, and he often thought of asking the old woman to hide it or burn it or throw it down the black tubes or make a gift of it to another old man or old woman (there were always many, many old ones around brownback). But he just as often thought the old woman did not even know of the little notebook’s existence, or that she did not even know what it was for. This persuaded him to keep quiet and respect the old ones’ silence.

And then the old man talked to him

‘reality is and always will be simply a minor hobby of mine.

‘you yourself may be reality, or you may not. i know not.

‘so know that truly i am tremulous, and ticklish, with anticipation. astound me.’

But browncoat did not answer. He didn’t know what he could have said, or what was expected of him. He was quite certain that in fact, nothing whatever was expected of him, as always.

The old man paused awhile, systematically effacing the dribbling smile off his face.

But the old woman’s death would not wear off him so quickly, so the mutilated smile survived in the darker knots and whiter cruds and drier crevices of his old, cruel lips, the ones his speared tongue could not reach or scratch so easily.

‘you cuntish, anosognosic insect. i hope you perish in a burst of miasma and pisspuddles.

‘but yours is also an intelligent, thoughtful beauty. it is languorous and softly intelligent, like a calculated violence bred of flame and the whore rationality.

‘i flatter you, i deceive you, there are very few rational things going on about you.

‘i have known ye for many years, known ye well but not like i know Him.

‘but his rod hath made god in my belly, his rod be made god in my (secret) cunt.

‘fertile and black like the nile, i respond to the gods prayer, and this brings black ink to my eyes and lips.

‘ink for the notebook, or notebook for the ink.

‘inkdrips sometimes, but this is good since (even) it is art.

‘but you freefloat, and refuse to think because it is vulgar, and your concepts answer only to the contingencies of your unbroken whim.

‘you artless becunted factotum. you cannot speak, you cannot do, you cannot destroy, you do nothing.

‘float and observe, float and observe, ‘tis all you ever do. float around yourself, crawling with lovely young thoughtlets, yet you abort them all and settle on burning their corpses and inspiring the ashes.

‘i have a parable of ash for your ashthoughts. think on it.

‘a man scattering urn of ashes of friendwife into sea or off high cliff. wind blowing against him, breath of the sea carrying long-forgotten curses, daring him.

‘he opens the urn and tosses the ashes

free against the wind. they fly back and hurricaneengulf him speeding around him and snaking as if

the ash were one, snaking into his mouth and pockets and ears and creaks and grinding his biological clock to a ruminative halt. like sand wedged between the teeth, like a sandslap trapped on his face.

‘he eats and

spits his friendwife and his coat is chameleon gray and the wind is not even laughing. hidden, he escapes in an envelope of gray and writes himself into an undelivered letter. (in) wet ash. he writes in wet ash. never delivered. ashwet.

‘he coughs his friendwife and tears him out of his sockets and drops the urn with the clear white label on it and drives home.’

At this the old man ceased his clawing, and hissed himself into a comfortable silence.

Brownback hadn’t an inkling of the old man’s intentions or reproaches, but he realized he was not needed in the fifth storey apartment anymore. He only thought about the phrase ‘drive home’ and laughed at its pointed futility. He laughed at the pointed futility of something or other most days, unlike the old man, who only ever laughed when the old woman became a mermaid to the cardboard of the police car, and that had come into being but once.

No he did not. The browncoat hardly laughed at in truth anything in all times and one.

So the brownback exited the tunnels of his former fifth storey apartment and emerged into the day and forgot to be blinded by it and forgot the word home. He had never known how to use it properly, so it did not strike him as the gravest loss he could incur at this point in this young, brown life.

And so no one would offer the mendicant pair the humblest shelter, and the villagers would either ignore them or dart an angry apology of not having enough room or food. And only when they walked to the outskirts of the settlement, to the smallest and unpretentiousmost of huts, did they find a bed to spend the night and some bread and cheese to sate their inexistent hunger. The hut belonged to an exceedingly old couple whose antediluvian faces stored equally antediluvian smiles, stomped onto their faces like a soldier’s boot; the old man and the old woman were animated by altruism and propped upright solely by the will to kindness. And so they offered the vagrants their best wine and toiled to catch their only chicken, a faithful cockerel almost as old as they, in order to serve the guests some fresh meat, and bent their not-so-ductile-anymore backs to wash the visitors’ feet and gave them the best beds in the hut, whereas the hosts would spend the night on the floor, wrapped in a disintegrating goat skin. And upon this display of inhuman hospitality the two peregrines revealed themselves toward the mourning and said unto the old couple And then he suddenly and violently choked on a blessed wafer and one of the other patrons of the trattoria called him a shallow puddle of invertebrate nullity for no reason whatever and tossed an earthen jug at the head of the browncoat’s companion and it missed but only by a few inches and that was only because the attempts to dislodge the wafer had contorted his the companion’s body into unusually plastic and morbidly variant dispositions which did not favour contact with the airborne jug. The browncoat himself wondered where his companion had gotten a sacramental wafer this time of hell, but suppressed the rising question in a gurgle of wine deep in his throat because he knew it wasn’t interesting enough to waste his ineptly inebriated and incurious breath on.

And the companion told the browncoat that he knew the browncoat did not like to drink at all and that he particularly execrated wine so it was his honest companion’s conversational and moral duty to ask brownback why he was at present drinking good vigorous peasant wine so vigorously. Browncoat hesitated over whether he should confide in his companion but he couldn’t remember whether he had known his companion for a year or for an hour and this struck him as illuminatingly amusing since he wasn’t in effect at all drunk. In the end he tossed a mental coin and could visualise it spinning in the mental air perfectly but could not for the life of him the browncoat’s or companion’s it didn’t much matter get the coin to remain the same self-coherent coin and effect a continuous motion with a beginning and a clearly identifiable end and land properly on one single mental side or the other and reveal which side it had landed on so brownback could use the mental coin toss to settle the delicate matter of confiding in his either newfound or severely long-run companion.

And the mental formulation of the decision had now been obscured as a process to such an extravagant extent that brownback decided to eschew the whole irritating matter and instead picked a leisurely fight with the companion over his companion’s use of the ambiguous term ‘conversational and moral duty’. Companion tried to whisk the fight away by explaining patiently that he was merely speechifying and being bombastic but brownback would have none of it and engaged the companion in endless dialectical arm wrestling, which immediately bored companion so cadaverous that he discourteously told browncoat to shut the fuck up and proceeded to tell another story so as to waft away the hungry rot of ethics. He was apparently directing the story at brownback but hadn’t positioned his disorganized length so as to meet the brownback face to face and a neutral observer of neutral sobriety would have been forgiven for thinking companion was telling the story for the benefit of all the patrons of the trattoria.