So I was asked this morning to
organise a meeting between four of the five members of the band.
Play this music
while you read the rest:
(Read it
as me with a kind of gruff voice, waking up in my Spiderman bedsheets wearing a
coat and hat and smoking a cigarillo. Just a normal day, in OTHER WORDS.)
The phone
called out like a lost child…lost on the streets of loser-ville. I’d lost her/it.
I was lost. The sense of loss weighed on me like one of those fruit hats. Lost.
Unfindable. This was a game of cat and sheriff, and I’d already lost. My
favourite television show was Lost, but that’s over now. Misplaced.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello.’
I was at a loss
to place the voice. (I was blind.)
‘Who’s this?’
The caller was
Nancy Smithington – someone broad I once met down on the four corners of 4th
and 4th. I was a perfect square, and she offered to look at me, dead, in
the eye for a couple-a bucks. I didn’t take the deal. I saved her life that
night. Since then she’d always called me, looking for a date. I sent fruit
baskets.
‘Johnny, honey,
you never cawwl me anymawer.’
That bit is to
give you a clue as to how stereotypical her accent is/was/she dies at the end
of this story. Oh shit now I’ve given it away. Well, as they say, people always die.
She read me a
list of names. She told me what it was
fawer.
‘Jawnny, baby,
we need these guys. We got shit to do, honey. Get in touch wit ‘em. Call me
back. I have diarrhea so I can’t dial the telephone.’
Damn. Three
names and a whole lot o’ nuthin.
‘Oh, and baby…’
she said, ‘come round soon. I miss ya.’
I threw the
phone out of the window. I wouldn’t be needing that again, unless someone
needed to get hold of me, or I them.
I swam down the
rotten stairs of the building to retrieve the telephone. ‘If I’m going to call
these people to get them together for a meeting,’ I said to myself, which brings
into question the ontology of the ‘words’ I was using, ‘I’m going to need the
telephone so that I can talk to them on that.’
I called the
telephone company to check that the phone was still working. They said they
couldn’t tell, but that they’d send a guy round. I told them not to bother –
Johnny Macintosh will figure these things out if it takes him all month.
I called the
first guy on the list. No reply. Typical. I called the second. I think he answered, but it sounded like he was just pumping air rhythmically through his lips. A secret
code, eh? Nobody gets Johnny Macintosh like that. I slammed the handset against
the table as hard as I could, and put it to my ear. He was talking, now. A
little rough stuff from me never hurt anybody.
‘Little man in
the phone?’ I said.
‘Hey Tim.’ It
was Ed. I should have known.
‘Johnny
Macintosh.’ I said.
‘…sigh. What do
you want, Tim?’ Still talking in code. It was difficult to crack his nuts.
‘A meeting,
little man. A meeting. Today. Skype.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Dominoes. Life
is dominoes. You knock one over, but if you set the dominoes up properly i.e.
glue each one to the table so that it can’t go anywhere, then you’ve got to
remove each one by hand, individually. It’s the only way to keep things tidy in
this work-one-day world, and I was a tidy little man.
‘Seryn.’ I
gargled.
‘Hey Tim.’
I spat, and
rinsed.
‘Seryn, we got
a meeting. Nancy wants us.’
I heard the
sound of gunfire.
‘I’m a little
tied up here, dude. What time?’
‘One-ish? Two?’
‘That gives me
something to live for.’
The sound of
death filled my ear. The screams, the gunshots, the burst of explosions. ‘Secure
the bunker!’ ‘Get the bastard!’ ‘You’ll never get your secrets back, Dr.
Inchera!’ ‘Burden?! I thought you were…’ ‘…dead? Heh…dream on, Doctor…IN HELL!
DREAM ON IN HELL YOU BASTARD!’ Bang bang bang boom. 'Oh Seryn, my hero!' 'That's right, Dad.'
I sent Jeb a
telegram. He replied and said it was fine he was just making some beans
alongside toast.
So, my job
done, I had breakfast. Eggs over-easy, and a difficult cup of coffee. I
squeezed myself in between the two panes of glass in my double glazed window,
and wondered how I got into this shape. One woman, a list of names...
One name was
missing, I knew that. He’s on the upper-South side, trying to conceive of opposites to left. Maybe he’s got the right idea.
After all, as Nancy
said: We got shit to do, honey.
P.S. Nancy dies
of skydiving poisoning.
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