Concerning the Note

  The paper was soggy from the wet jacket, the penciled words smudged. “3rd stall, Mens” it read, the style cramped and laborious. He wouldn’t wonder if a lot of effort had gone into it.
  Taylor let it drop into his pocket, and fighting the irritation of a children’s game left the bar and Mary’s hospitality to the men's room across the floor. The barman barely glanced up as he passed.
  He felt Renfeild’s eyes following as he pushed the door open, releasing the sound of running water, and a semi-automatic abruptly shoved beneath his chin.
  He blinked a few times incomprehensibly, attempting to assimilate just what happened, and then someone bumped into him from behind. “Whoa, shit,” Renfeild said nervously, and yet containing a lilt of almost flippancy.
  “Who’re you?” the gun ordered.
  “It’s cool, man,” Renfeild said.
  “Shut up.”
  Goddamn Eric. “Screw this,” Taylor snapped, shoving the gun away. “I don’t have time for this shit.”
  The next events snapped like a mechanical lock and then froze in a tableau that numbed the mind. Taylor started to shove his way past, and then the gun was pushed into his cheek. He reached to push it away again, and the hammer clicked back, and then suddenly a wicked black knife was behind the gunman’s ear, tilting his head over slightly.
  The scene was held for about two seconds, two seconds that seemed infinitely longer. Then Renfeild softly intoned, “Will you please put down the gun, Stanley? This is Eric, he’s with me. And you do know me, right? I don’t advise nodding.”
  Stanley grinned briefly, then slowly lowered the gun and deliberately slid it beneath his jacket. Only then did Renfeild remove the knife and cause it to disappear into the abysmal reaches of the leather coat. He motioned Taylor to advance, and patted Stanley’s shoulder as he moved past.

Concerning the Virgin and the Tyro

   Out of the rain, and into the gaze of the Virgin Mary. Literally.
  Taylor halted abruptly from pure surprise. The light shifted to show the statue, a very commendable rendition of the Madonna towering six feet tall over the bar, arms extended with palms toward the ceiling as though offering grace to whatever patrons would slough beneath. Which at the moment comprised himself. The proprietor was at a table in the rear, reading a paperback.
  Taylor took a stool between the hands and beneath the affectionate gaze of half-closed eyes. He pulled a bowl of M&Ms closer, and began to absently chew.
  Somewhere, just filtering beyond the range of aural distinction, a radio was playing some early U2. It struck him as ironic; he remembered Eric comparing the confessed random voids in his memory to music. Can’t sing along without the music. Sometimes, he felt he could almost reach the edge, almost get the lightest grip on it before it skittered away. He had never really realized until Eric pointed it out that he occasionally could come closer to grasping it in certain areas. He assumed some connection beyond vagrant de ja vu, similar to moving closer to the radio made the music more clear.
  “Hey, Eric, my man!” The voice had a false cheer to it, turning it almost nasal and obsequious.
  He had been recognized. Taylor turned into the anemic, knife-edge face of Renfeild. Something of an inevitable fixture, Renfeild always gave the impression of being a tag-a-long tyro, someone’s kid brother, his face perpetually a painting of innocence and bewilderment trying to look experienced. His shoulder-length, raven hair had fallen from the truculent tail again, ensconcing his face.
  “Eric,” he repeated. “Didn’t expect to see your face here, man.”
  Taylor hadn’t bothered to correct him, or the myriad of others who mistook his name. Eric told him that they often got confused, and in the end it didn’t matter, so it was easier to avoid more confusion. “Didn’t expect myself to be here,” Taylor said.
  Renfeild grinned, creating a manic image. “Understand that.” He took a stool and reached for the bowl. In transit, a folded slip of paper inexplicably fell from his leather sleeve onto the bar. Taylor brushed it toward him reach back for the bowl himself.

Concerning the Paper Sack

   Taylor stepped back outside, muttering things about Longfellow, Eric’s misconstrued fetish for poetry, and the job in general. It had started to rain, the dedicated, shearing type the imitated blankets both in transit and what it landed on. He paused at the alley’s mouth to glance inside the bag. There was the deceptive Walkman radio, a coriander rangoon wrapped in unimaginative wax paper, and a matchbook, the advertisement kind. He removed the matches and the rangoon, slipping the rest into a pocket.
  The rangoon was soggy but still good, just inimical to his stomach after the diner food. As for the matches, he knew instinctively they were his directions for the drop off, a place downtown.
  First matchbook instructions, then a matchbook to be a map. Was there a god?

Concerning the Restaurant

  Go here. Do this. Like the instructions on a book of matches. Close cover before striking, etcetera, the same taut phrases reminiscent of an ancient Chinese philosopher. The lack of proper grammar only added to the feel, he supposed.
  The address Taylor had followed led to a small Thai restaurant, the sort of side-street diner that offered only a bar-like counter for seating and loquacious immigrants serving in dirty white aprons and paper hats. He entered by the side entrance. The building had a megrim scent of burning coriander, filling his nostrils like a miasma and increasing the dull pain in his skull. His only hope lay in being able to exit quickly.
  He noticed one wall was adorned with photographs, cheap five-by-nine black and whites of celebrities, mostly small time and inconsequential. Each had officiated their likeness with illegible scars of black marker. There was a macabre unreality to the wall, like something not filling decorative space aesthetically but though destiny, as though there were a universal rule toward small oriental restaurants and where the photographs should go. Spatial resonance. It took a few minutes before he realized he was staring at it.
  By that time, someone was shouting at him in what sounded like a high-pitched scream punctuated by tongue rolls. Taylor shook his head slowly, lackluster expression on his face. The cook’s lips moved more deliberately, the thick accent pooling with dense background noise and the acerbic pain filling Taylor’s brain. Somehow it filtered out that he was demanding either identity or exit.
  Taylor reached into his coat and withdrew the envelope. He quoted, “ ‘My life is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the winds are never weary. My thoughts still cling to the moldering past, but hopes of youth fall thick in the blast, and the days are dark and dreary.’ ”
  He hated this part in the game. Longfellow. Eric thought it was clever, instituting a view of what he obviously considered an artistic side into a professional necessity. He had briefed Taylor on the importance well, and every letter after included a quote of classic poetry. Taylor himself thought it was garish, but never said so, just recited reluctantly. He never felt it was his place to protest.
  The cook looked at him skeptically for a fraction of a moment, then spoke. Taylor shook his head again with incomprehension. The cool leaned closer, the smell of curry and ginger almost visible. It stung Taylor’s nose as he tried to keep his eyes from watering.
  Something about dice, with the universal sign for “you know.” Well, if he had them, good for him. Hope his mother was proud. No, of course he didn’t know. But the man was now pointing to a stack of noodle boxes, so Taylor relocated. He hadn’t sat for very long before the cook returned, bequeathing a white paper doggie bag, nodded curtly and disappeared.

Concerning Breakfast

   Sunlight vacillated through dirty windows, staining the blemished veneer of a thousand meals on the countertop.
  “Sorry for the imposition,” the nondescript black pen had abraded the sheet of ruled paper. “Circumstances never what seems, and all.” And, as expected, the snatch of poetry on a separate sliver. Eric apparently had something against completing thoughts. The directions that followed would always be the same: direct, unflattering, what you want is in such-and-such a place, where it goes is here. Eric never elaborated. There had been too many times that Taylor had to make it up as it happened.
  He wished, as he often did, folding and pocketing the envelope in exchange for bitter coffee, that Eric would find a better career. Or perhaps “better” was too confining a word, too sanctimonious when Taylor himself wasn’t much of an improvement. More acceptable. Perhaps just something a little less urbanized corsair. Taylor wouldn’t like to consider himself a glorified errand-boy to a pirate fence. There was just a spiritual bond or connection between he and Eric that few others, including himself, understood. And with that came certain concessions.
  But then, there were the parts in the existence Taylor regarded life that were missing, so to speak. Frustrating emptiness in his mind where scenes and memories should be, and the Problems. And maybe, even if he sometimes saw it all too recalcitrant and apathetically, Focus led Purpose.
  Regardless, he never wondered where he would be without -- that sort of thinking was futile, and too often abused into idolatry. Like someone, he had forgotten who, has said, What you habituate you soon can’t survive without. And in any case Taylor was seldom one for questioning things, especially where something Eric did or said was involved. They were like brothers, Eric had once told him, but had a bond closer than brothers because the lacked the competition experienced in family blood.
  Taylor was never sure how to take certain things, Eric’s quotes or methods of expression. Eric often referred to him as his own Holden Caulfield, and her wasn’t sure what that meant. He was rarely sure when Eric was serious or not -- Eric was just that type of personality. You could only go along, trusting.
  Though, there was one thing he knew:
  If there was a sure thing Eric was serious about, it was Eric.

Concerning the Morning

   Waking up. Forever one of the most unpleasant sensations. Purgatory of the unjust and innocent alike.
  Taylor had worked out a sense of scale for the degrees of disillusioned awakening, but was usually too indecisive per event to determine where one would actually rank. It had become a routine: rise in a panic, reassure that the Worm Dream was still only a dream, and somewhere along staggering across the scarred linoleum toward the lavatory, work out where this new disorientation fit along the scale.
  The focus of the moment was that he was in the apartment. He had at least made it to the couch-slash-bed, if not out of his clothes, which was better than sometimes, but had gravitated to the floor some time during the night. This was distinctly unhealthy, but more than that bemusing. He’d always thought he slept lighter than that.
  Well the important part was that he was here. Once, he had come to consciousness in a public restroom. Now even recalling the blue and white, florescent bathed tile and rows of sinks, stalls and mirrors still put him in contact with a feeling, or sense, or unnamed emotion, some mental buzzing more reminiscent of a color than something he could catch and identify. Or know if there was anything TO identify. Whatever it was it made him sick and frenetic. But he disliked thinking about those things.
  The blind man’s saxophone curls filtered in the derelict flat like a shower of disturbed dust. They were faint, a distinguishable blues riff rising the two stories from his ubiquitous position on the saturnine steps. It was daylight, Taylor surmised. Somehow the blind man still knew the difference and acted on it. Now and then Taylor wondered if someone came and told him when to go home. If he had a home. He went somewhere during dusk.
  Taylor had once asked the blind man to remove his opaque black glasses. He had looked into that pearly mirror of his own sallow face and couldn’t stop the image of his own head holding those waxen eyes. He shivered at the memory.
  Back into the big room. The sax was louder in here, the blind man sitting just beneath the larger window. Taylor pulled his coat from the seldom-used card table, emptying the pockets in hopes of change loose enough to procure coffee and a stale croissant at the café three blocks down. Material clattered on the pressboard surface. Keys to the door. Half empty packet of gum. The knife.
  It was black, matte finished, with a fractal serrated blade and spring release. He could never remember when or where he had acquired it, but always felt it was something important, like a sentimental memento or something. It had a myriad of uses, he gave it that.
  The other pocket had revealed a farrago of coins, and the broken glasses earpiece he’d had to replace and never got rid of.
  And an envelope. Again. He beheld it with a sense of resignation. It was the generic business type, security lined and adorned only with his own name in a fluid, familiar script. No return address. It was almost a gaudy scrawl, one he had once found amusement in the similarities between it and his own. Maybe it was some twisted, distant sense of cosmic irony, because sometimes it was like Eric really could be his brother. Occasionally Taylor would wonder if maybe they were, separate by time and unaware.
  He shoved the envelope back into the overcoat’s pocket. He would read it down the street, while eating what might tentatively, by people unlike he, be called breakfast.

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.