Concerning the Music

   Out of the midst of nowhere Taylor remembered Eric. He looked about desperately. Eric. There he was, by the cairn. Taylor could see his brother had been wounded, moving waving like a fish trapped on the bank. He had to reach him, had to help him He pulled himself to his feet.
  Taylor stumbled, fell on a picnic table. He tried to drag himself across it, leaving a crimson painting. Eric was dying, he knew it. What he had wanted just an hour ago, and yet all the hatred he’d felt was washed away like so many times before in a wave of feeling beyond explanation. They were closer than brothers, and that transcended rules and where the rules fractured. Taylor tried to save him. But he was tired, his own time running. So tired. He made it to the cairn, and collapsed.

  Funnily, the Music cleared.



copyright 2011 BPLtd.

Concerning the Rest Stop, pt2

   Taylor looked at him a moment, then rubbed his nose. “Ride the dead horse,” he said.
  The haircut sighed. “What I was afraid of. Reeve?”
  Reeve went to grab him. Taylor jerked the knife from him pocket, slinging it open by the blade, twirling it through his fingers and slashing backwards. He caught Reeve cross the chest, just a shallow laceration, before someone else grabbed his arm. He kicked out wildly, hitting something that grunted in pain, then twisted his wrist back, gouging the knife into the hand that held him. The haircut drove a fist into his solar plexus. Gasping, the knife pulled from his hand, kicking forward again, shoving himself and Reeve backwards off the haircut’s chest, trying to pull away, and then another gut punch, and hot white lightning scorched through the bottom of his mouth like he’d just bitten a high voltage wire. The knife had gone through his bottom palate, the base of his throat.
  Reeve let him go. Taylor opened and closed his mouth, choking on the blood flowing down his throat. His glasses -- it seemed such a startlingly mundane thing to notice -- hand come loose in the scuffle, and dangled over one ear. He took a step back, tried to fix his eyewear.
  Sky. Focus. Trees, green. Reeve, now in vision. Focus. Reeve pulling a gun from his jacket, now cut open and red staining his shirt. Focus. Muzzle flash, a roar. Pain. Focus. Gunshot. Pieces of his own chest flying into his vision, splatter on his lenses. Focus. He dropped to his knees in the grass.
  Aware, still aware, of Reeve putting away the gun, the haircut considering him dispassionately, and the trio left, left him there, vanishing from sight.

Concerning The Rest Stop

   Shadows falling, rising, bobbing to footfalls. Three men overtook him. “Hey man, long time no see!”
  Taylor stopped, looked at them blankly.
  The cheerful one had ratty brown hair, that I-don’t-care-about-much-never-mind-my-hundred-dollar-haircut look. “Where you going, man?”
  “Salvation,” Taylor said.
  “Listen, Eric, we need to talk, man.”
  “Fuck Eric.”
  The orthadontal smile fell. “What?”
  “I’m not Eric. We just look alike, and Eric can fucking take care of his own shit now.”
  “Excuse me?”
  “No Eric. Just me.”
  The haircut turned to one of the others. “Reeve. Is this who you dealt with or not?”
  “Yeah. Little scruffier now, maybe.”
  “So what’s your game, mister?”
  Taylor sighed. “Look, I don’t care if Brutus here believes I’m Santa Claus, alright? We just look alike, and I’m not here to clean up after him.”
  “Heart-rending. We, however, are, so if you’d be kind enough to either produce my money or my merchandise, I’ve other things to do today, right?”
  “Told you. Not Eric. Don’t have your junk, man.”
  The hair swished as the head bent toward the ground. “Look, this is a serious career, okay? I can’t let any exceptions, else the whole thing crumbles, you understand? So what’s it gonna be?”

Concerning the Exit

  He stopped his telic hike only for a diner somewhere off of Highway 7, where three-fifty was too much for a dismal hero. It was the first food he’d eaten in an indeterminable while, and he promptly threw it up. He guessed that’s what happened to people with Problems. Either way, it seemed the only exit the sandwich deserved.




  Trudging on. Gravel beneath his boots, asphalt crumbles, valiant grass stalks, glass and garbage. Vehicles whizzing past with the sound of a cough. The shoulder widened out to a grassy roadside rest, small pavilion with a picnic table and cairn with a plaque honoring someone obscure. Taylor unconsciously moved from the ditch and into the grass, staring at his feet, staring at nothing. Trudging on. Leaving. Escape. Salvation. Redemption. The gravel-meets-rubber sound of a car pulling to a stop. Oblivious. Kept walking.
  “Eric!”
  To hell with Eric.
  “Eric!!”
  Eric lied, severed the bond, the sacred seal that bound, tied beyond temporal understanding for something as ephemeral as money.
  “Hey! Eric!”
  Eric was on his own now.

Concerning the Blind Man

  The sempiternal blind man was on the steps, once again in tune to some clock independent of the sun. Taylor stopped. “Do you know daylight and shadow?” he asked. “I mean, how do you know it’s day?”
  The musician quit playing, and stared in the direction of the voice. “They say that people with no eyes can see things from another sense,” he said after a moment. “It’s a crock of shit, kid, makes ‘em feel better ‘bout themselves. But my grandmother, she always said that Love and Hate were twin babies, sep’rated at birth, and yet still sometimes blendin’ together as they can’t deny the truth of their union. And they know each other as you know ‘em. Daylight’s about like that.”
  “Oh.” Digested that. “I wondered.”
  “How did you know it, kid? Light refracting on the retina all there is to it, man? Or is it deeper? What is light?”
  Taylor considered. “Twin babes,” he said. “Recognition.”
  The blind man grinned like the sun, and began to play again. Taylor walked on, toward the end of the city.

Concerning the Apartment

  When Taylor awoke, back in the apartment, the light was the sort of hazy amber dimness that contributes both to somnolence and bad movie sex scenes. Indistinguishable whether dawn or dusk.
  He also found another placid envelope.
  He kept reciting to himself how he really didn’t give a shit what Eric thought or wanted anymore, kept chanting it the entire time he slit it open with the matte knife.
  “There’s been a slight mistake with some vendibles,” it read, “but not one beyond restitution. Unfortunately I am indisposed, and thus I am in need of you to cover for me, much as I regret doing so. But you are my brother, more than my brother, and one who I can trust.”
  Bastard. Well Taylor was tired of covering for him. Brothers. If he thought Taylor would apologize for Eric’s consumer screw-ups, tried to plead recompense, he could go swimming in Sheol.
  He was sick. Sick of Eric, sick of the apartment, sick of the city, sick of his life. It was like a room full of oppressive bacteria, hundreds of poisoned people coughing and sneezing and vomiting, and he frantically trying to find pockets of clean air, pockets which did not exist. The only way to keep from joining them was to leave the room.
  And let Eric take care of his own problems for once. They may have had a tie, but it was in sore repair now.
  He didn’t even bother to pack what little he owned, just threw some things into his coat pockets, locked the door, and walked out.

Concerning the Tombstone

  Wet footprints absorbing rainwater, pooling in from the marred sod. Taylor’s sprint-gouged puddles in the moist cemetery grass, marking his path back to the grave-site. Fittingly, it had begun to rain again, not in the contumelious volume of before, but the patient, dogmatic drizzle intent on saturation.
  Hunting, dodging amongst the headstones, a revenant on some desperate haunt, finally coming to one where the ground was still muddy clay, bullet-marks of splattered mud staining the lower half. Taylor wiped a mass of streaming hair from his eyes with a film of water, squatting by the granite. He felt he knew something coming he couldn’t catch, like Scrooge’s apprehension in the cemetery of Christmas Future. He tried to brush the defacing muddy water from a simple inscription, two dates and a name, and then he knew.
  There was Russell’s name.
  His name. Taylor’s name. Seldom used, seldom required, as it was just a connotation to something that no longer existed for him, a universe as completely foreign as bucolic Americana.
  Apart from Russell.
  And here was Russell.
  He had wondered why everyone kept bringing up their remorse like it mattered to him, and now he remembered why.
  His brother. How was it he could have forgotten? Easily enough, but only through Eric. And suddenly it hit him, like he had been trying to hold shut the bulging closet door and it overcame. Eric lied. He had betrayed Russell, and then lied about its relevance. Eric deceived him, took advantage of his problems, kept him emotionless for personal gain. Used him. He had transgressed the spiritual bond, severed the link in selfishness. Closer than brothers, he said. Family didn’t lie, cheat or steal. Eric was a bastard.
  Hatred, hot and argent, flowed through him, following by an deluge of childish bewilderment, confusion, a feeling of hurt isolation. The bond, the line was gone, like a mooring snapping from the ship, and Taylor knew he was alone. Everything he knew was a lie, faced alone.
  He fell into the tombstone, crushing the few burdened flowers, and cried, when he wasn’t laughing.

Concerning the Revelation

  “It is tragic, you know, how selfish this business has become. This sort of activity seems to be happening more frequently. The system is deteriorating. Somebody actually threatened an associate of mine for his supply. That’s a breach of etiquette! Amateurs flood the business, one would think. Either way, someone will eventually find HIM. One day. And, it will catch up with our dear Renfield. Maybe he’ll even be the third party. You know how that works.”
  “What?”
  “Double-crossed on a deal, left to take the fall.”
  “I was just hit. On the head.”
  “Yes, but your own supply dealt one of those, did he not? And thus the funeral.”
  Taylor started to speak, but his mind gave a sort of mechanical whir, hovering just above an actual click. He remembered something Eric had said he felt disconcerting at the time, and then he had the kid raised by his shirt, slammed against the refrigerator. Something glass fell over inside.
  “What?” he demanded.
  There was a gurgle.
  “What the hell are you talking about?”
  The kid coughed. “Russell, of course. Of all people you should know. He got set up for a sale, and left to take them blame. No merchandise. Your supply collected.”
  Eric. Personal is not the same as important. Russell created his own fate. Eric had fucked him, been directly responsible. Said it didn’t matter, it was Russell’s doing and shouldn’t concern them. But something else had yet to fall into place. . . .
  He was so close he was almost frantic, didn’t feel himself pressing the kid into the door, tilting the refrigerator back. “What do you mean I should know?” he snapped. “ ‘Of all people,’ why me? I don’t even know MYSELF half the time! Why?!”
  “Go. . . .where. . .you’ll. . .music. . . “
  Screaming. “Where!!”
  The kid desperately trying to pull himself away. “Ask. . . Grave. . .she . . . Knows . . . .all. . .”

Concerning the Asian

  “It was. . . . Unfortunate about Russell,” he said, head vanished within a cabinet.
  Taylor silently helped himself to a kitchen chair. He brought it up, let him finish it.
  “I hope I conveyed my sympathies at the funeral.”
  Taylor was mute. He had no recollection of the scene, but didn’t let it bother him.
  “I also hope my advice was considered?” He shut the cabinet with a scowl, and after a pause went to another.
  “Which was that?” Taylor asked, unable to play along anymore.
  The kid found whatever he was looking for with a crow of moderate accomplishment. “This should be what you need. We’ll send someone after your material; no doubt it has changed many hands by now.”
  He began to pour a glass of water while Taylor examined his parcel.

Concerning the Sunlight

  The rain had ceased, which was a boon. The sky was bright and gravid, dark spaces with bullet-holes of streaming sunlight and recumbent water still dripping and pooled about the ragged concrete. A chill breeze sauntered auspiciously, a tawdry phantom of something unworldly.
  Taylor tried to save his eyes from the glare as he followed the paper scrap, each sparkling tear of former rain dancing a mariachi on his tender optic nerves. He was provoked at the back of his mind by a sense of familiarity, but was unable to capture. The sensation in itself was familiar, and when he focused on it he realized he had no memory of the journey in progress. He knew he had the memory -- it was just inaccessible for now.
  The feeling was only alleviated when he knocked on the chosen door, and faced the Asian kid who lived downstairs.

Concerning the Music

  The outer room was unchanged when Taylor stumbled back into it; empty, overbearing in shades and an inattentive bartender. The music was still somewhere at the edge of hearing, but Taylor didn’t recognize what it was. Upon request the man with the paperback managed to scry out some Advil from behind the counter, at no charge. Never able to take pills dry, Taylor bought a drink.
  He toyed with the glass a bit, watching the liquid swirl, trying to join thoughts. It wasn’t such a weighted matter, the loss of the Walkman and the manila envelope, Eric had left him with an address to call upon if ever something like this happened. It was sort of ineluctable really, human nature and the golden-egg-laying goose. No, now it was more trying to analyze the jagged edges of his existence and find a point where they formed a decent hole. The thing with bathrooms still bothered him. He could chalk it up to repeatedly bad experience, but it was the Music that drove him to further attention, and there was where his train of thought met with bandits.
  Sometimes he almost thought he could hear it, he thought he knew that elusive thought or knowledge that he though -- or he knew he thought -- no, thought he almost knew what he was thinking, had the key to that locked room, like the radio signal only needed to get just a bit closer. Just on the tip of his tongue, metaphorically speaking. Had to keep at it.
  And once more he felt his resolve to ride it out, stay abreast, be overwhelmed by the proportion of the wave, felt he had toppled off the board and went under.
  With a sigh, he changed the thought-line. It was best to strike the task at hand while it was still hot, or whatever the simile was. He scoured his coat pockets for the scrap of paper holding the address -- the instructions thereof had long ago been shorn off and incinerated.
  He left some money on the counter and exited.

Concerning the Bathroom, Again

  Mary. It is unquestionably Mary. A slight loving smile on her Mona Lisa lips like affectionate amusement in her errant child, forgiving him for all the times he has screwed up and welcoming home despite. Unconditional. She is too good for him, and in the emotional rush he felt like crying.
  And then something scratched along his synpase like fingers on a chalkboard. His head. Head. His. That was right. Somehow it had been disconnected from his neck, left just sitting on the stump like a pumpkin from Washington Irving. He forced his eyes open to bleak, uninteresting white with a shotgun pattern of black holes. Cold pedestal, cold white tile.
  The bathroom, he realized gloomily. The cenotaph. They had left him in one of the stalls. “Build a summer home here,” he mumbled around the size of his tongue. His body had become liquescent; tried to stand, couldn’t remember how. Tried again, failed, and ended up pulling himself out of the stall and to the basin counter. A look in the mirror didn’t help; vertical motion seemed to fracture his brain like a kaleidoscope. “Sorry my ass,” he told the dismal, ravaged reflection. He ran some water, let it cool and tried to bathe his face and neck.

Concering the Bathroom, cont.

  “I’m sorry about Russ, man,” Renfeild continued. “We all heard. Sucks.”
  “Yeah,” Taylor said flatly. Eric had told him about it. The whole thing had been so beyond a set up it was almost karma. Russell had been a would-be dealer who succumbed to the city’s dark ecology, making the wrong mistakes in an anthropocentric business. What had happened was not their fault or concern. “A point of reality is determined by the perception of the consciousness,” Eric had inscribed in one of his bland envelopes. “As the consciousness is responsible for that which makes it into pronouns, so the reality, de facto, is subject to the point of perception. Therefore there are truths and matters whose fundamental worth is important only in the personal scale. Personal is not the same as important, the same as true reality is more empyreal due to tainted perception. However, we determine choices according to that perception, as Russell did. And his choice was flawed.”
  There was something, Taylor seemed to recall, dealing with . . . . the past, or maybe it was about Taylor’s own search for completing, catching the rest of the Music. He couldn’t remember. It was connected somehow, but in a way that Eric seemed to think would be . . . . something good. . . .now, and it shouldn’t concern.
  Whatever. Nevermind. Taylor thrust it aside with irritation. He trusted Eric, strange as he might be -- he had to. After all, Eric and he had a connection. They were closer than brothers.

Concerning the Bathroom

  The part of Taylor’s mind that wasn’t trying to reconcile the past few seconds was struck by the clinical feel of the bathroom again, the sparkling, antiseptic blues and whites and a lingering scent of cheap chemical floor-cleaner. He felt dizzy, and concentrated on not blacking out. He detoured at a sink, splashed some cold water into his eyes.
  The third stall had a white “Out Of Order” sign. Taylor nudged it open to see merely an uninspiring toilet nestled in its generic corner. Renfield shouldered past him, motioning Taylor to follow.
  Fighting that inevitable rush of claustrophobic nausea, he acquiesced and stepped into the stall. The clinical atmosphere of the bathroom was still excortiating his mind and nerves like a doomed fish, making him even more tense than usual. It coalesced with his dogmatic headache. Stanley and the Glock were little reassurance, and then something about a Renfield with more authority and initiative than his typical neophyte-courier aura. . . .
  He tried to shove it beneath a mental carpet. Eric would just laugh, he knew, and the thought of that laughter wasn’t any more subtle than if it were vocal. Eric always said that just because change was uncomfortable and a complication didn’t mean it was an evil thing. Usually it was just sort of an ambivalence. And Taylor of all people should respect someone’s hidden evolution.
  Eric was an ass when he climbed his philosophical horse.
  He instinctively moved with his back to a wall. Renfield was grinning expansively like he’d just had the greatest moment of his life, a ridiculous urban scarecrow in the jacket too large for him and hair clutching at his face like a nightmare about dead tree branches.
  “Sorry ‘bout that, man,” he said. “Security measures.” He giggled slightly.
  Taylor didn’t feel it worth the effort to answer. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. The bathroom was stuffy and hot, and the day outside had not inspired him to dress for it. His headache was making him jumpy, fueled with the sundry of mental dust-bunnies trying to escape their carpet imprisonment. Paranoia was starting to creep up the back of his neck; he tried to nonchalantly press his back further into the wall.

Concerning the Funeral

“Night, the shadow of Light,
“and Life, the shadow of Death.” -- Algernon Charles Swineburne



   It began, as so many things do, with a funeral.
  There was nothing memorable about it, or noteworthy, or a burgeoning fractal entrance deserving Dickens’ “best of times, worst of times” bit. It wasn’t even raining. Taylor wasn’t exactly sure why he was there, but he stood stoic in the gravesite sun because this feeling was nothing foreign.
  He had been told, in the past, that he had a Problem. It was one of those terse psycho-terms he had become accustomed to and eventually learned to block out, not let affect him. People were always trying to tell him he had some issue or another. He seldom paid attention. He disagreed on the whole anyway. There were empty places in his memory, and sometimes he woke in place he didn’t remember falling asleep. He had read about that, so that was all right, and anyway that kind of thing rarely happened anymore.
  The sky was bright and brittle, a teasing Monet sun dangling where it should warm but letting the chill seep through insufficient clothing. Taylor absently searched for a reason to convince him he should still be standing here.
  Across the small gathering of faceless mourners, his eyes met those of that Asian kid who lived downstairs. The kid’s blank, halcyon eyes flickering briefly in silent remorse, and then visibly froze again. Taylor moved away, strolling among the tombstones.
  Eventually he noticed the eulogy had ended, and the black forms were coalescing like some soiled watercolor. He felt a soft tug at his sleeve, looked to see the Asian kid. He tried to think of what he should say, then realized the kid was talking.