Fists clenched to mime blows given and received.
A face raised to offer bruised evidence. The younger one had a shiner.
Laughter, but reserved, as if they talked on the corner of a major thoroughfare.
Johnny shot them a look over his shades. His eyes darted up and out, then down again. A knuckle glanced his nose. Weight shifted from foot to foot. A string of inaudible, unreadable words. From beneath his sunglasses his lips said, “Give me a fucking break.”
An impassive look from the younger one. “So? “
A sour stretch of Johnny’s lips.
And the sentence I swear that I saw. “She’s dead.. “
Johnny shrugged and spat. The old junkie turned to me and grinned.
A hard knock at the door startled me from my reverie. It was a wet-haired Molly, her freckled face scrubbed of makeup, staring up at me with wide and hungry eyes. Suddenly I understood what it was she wanted from me. She wanted my cynicism, my numbness… She wanted my disease.
Because she thought they would make her strong. Stupid twit.
“I know…” she began, breaking eye contact and hesitating. “I know you said you wanted to… work… or whatever the hell it is you do.”
“Recollect. Remember. I kick back, sort and sift and interpret.”
“If you say so.”
I say so.
I breathed deep. Gawd, how I love the smell of a woman fresh out of the shower.
“Well, I just wanted to thank you, you know, for what happened back there.”
“No thanks necessary. Getting hot young stringers into life-threatening situations is just what I do.”
She laughed, looked at the finger she had raised to pick at her hair. “Yeah? What were you thinking?” she asked, cross-eyed.
“Just doing what I do best, Molls.”
“Which is?”
A strange pang accompanied the question. Hard to explain, actually, like doing a somersault without moving, a kind of figure-field inversion of the soul. I could tell from her eyes that she could see it on my face, all that past crashing in. I reached for her hand, retreated with her into the orange of my room’s tacky light.
“Screwing with people.” Oh, I got laid that night.
Ladies, you can deny it all you want, talk about how violence makes you ill-whatever. Weird as it is, a good number of you like it, not as a spectator sport-more like an Olympic demonstration. For whatever reason, a man’s hands tingle all that much more when they’re scabbed with another man’s blood.
You see, we’re savages together, you and I.
Children of Reverend Nill. Track Ten
FORTY THINGS WE SHARE
Saturday night… One man’s dog is another woman’s pig. I get that. But I like to think that I’m a dog in a deeper sense.
Did you know that the word cynic comes from the ancient Greek for dog?
Apparently the Roman Cynics were actually evangelical-some to the point of burning themselves alive to make their point. They went around preaching virtue and screaming hypocrite everywhere they went-kind of like Jesus. Fuck that. No, give me the ancient Greek version. Give me good old Diogenes, living in a stone tub, tossing the odd load in the agora, and searching, endlessly searching, for a single honest man. The dude that Alexander the Great said he wanted to be were he not Alexander. The guy that Plato called Socrates gone mad.
Even better, give me Diogenes as he should have been. Doglike in every sense of the word. Gnawing on his leash. Chewing up his master’s shoes. Crapping on the neighbour’s putting-green lawn.
And, of course, humping everything that moved.
Rules, brother. That’s the real difference between you and me. Every-fucking-where you turn: admonishments, tickets, citations, not to mention out-and-out convictions. Judgments, endless condemnations, raised on the clay brick of half-baked belief. You can’t see them because you can’t remember, because the million ways you repeat continually topple into the bottomless abyss of five minutes ago. Over and over, the same way, the same time. Even your flaws and foibles-even your sins-follow ironclad commandments. Again and again.
Rules.This is how you remember. Rules are what binds you to your past. The content of your life shrivels into a wicker cage of imperatives, where mine is trucked to the landfill.
It’s a paradox, really. Your inability to remember dooms you to repeat things-and here’s the kicker-for the first time. You are imprisoned and utterly convinced you are free. While here I stand, soaked in an awareness of everything I’ve done, totally able to step sideways, to walk perpendicularly to you and your pantomime world-able at any instant to do something radical, something genuinely new…
And knowing, because you’re so fucking predictable, that I would simply run afoul of your rules. That first you would tag me, lest you lose track of me in the absent-minded scrum, call me “crazy” or “troubled” or “pathologically self-centred.” And then you would bag me, dump me into some Secure Housing Unit, or give me one of those jackets with armholes but no cuffs.
So, I try to be a “good boy,” even if I shit on the carpet from time to time. Begging for treats, barking at strangers, not so much feeling shame as cocking my head and watching it.
Whatever it takes to keep the feed bowl full. Take the Holocaust, for instance. I mean, seriously. How, after the greatest, most thoroughly chronicled tragedy in the history of the human race, could a cadre of Nazis take root and blossom in a town like Ruddick, PA?
Fawk. Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?
This is generally what I do when I can’t sleep-rant to the congregation of me. I usually try to take advantage of my insomnia, use the time to relive the particulars of whatever case I happen to be working on. But for some reason I found myself batted back and forth between Reverend Nill and his surreal God Plays Favourites rap session, and Baars saying, “What if cynicism and self-righteousness were one and the same thing.?”I understood the comment this time around: the self-righteous prick was calling me a self-righteous prick-an irony I could appreciate. Condemning others becomes a trifle when you stand condemned in your own eyes. I got it.
Even still. Fuck. Him.
I stared at Molly in the gloom. She lay on her side facing me, her hand out as though braced against the possibility of the mattress tipping. Her hair had been swept back in some accident of restless sleep so that her face lay bared in the dim illumination. Feminine yet strong in an impish, Julia Roberts kind of way. Full lips that I could still taste on my own. I slowly drew the sheet from her freckled shoulder down the line of her arm and along the curve of her waist. Her brow furrowed in dream perplexity. Her top leg was drawn forward, concealing her pussy like a Renaissance nude. Lines of white etched her horizons, from the arc of her shoulders to the long curve of her buttock.
I could see her breathe.
Sasha Lang, that old philosopher girlfriend I told you about, once claimed I was the kind of guy who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. That was January 20, 2001, another bad day, as it so happened. The description struck me as apt enough. Sasha loved to theorize, and I loved to tease-not a great combination given that teasing is so much easier. She had figured it out-Christ, she had an IQ that would make most physicists blush. She understood that a cynic is just someone who believes nothing to better judge everything.
So was that what I was? Just one more pious prick?
Take Molly, nude and unconscious, her skin pimpling in the air- conditioned cool. I understood what made my gaze so ancient, so lecherous. I understood what made her so ideal, so desirable that whole industries had been raised around her. There was promise in her youth, strength in her morals, glory in her naivete…
I understood all that-even as the hour hand crawled along my belly toward the high noon of my navel.
I could see, even appreciate, the value of things apart from all our tacky self-aggrandizing.
And that’s the point, now, isn’t it, Doctor? Here I was, poised on the threshold of something breathless and profound, peering into the mists, straining to make lucid my epiphany…