Concerning the Note

  Renfield didn’t appear to hurt at the snub, and anyway was still beaming like a pained clown. He moved to another topic. “So,” he said cheerfully, “you got the stuff?”
  Renfield and his talents of subtlety were almost as depressing as Eric and his ideas of cloak-and-dagger.
  Taylor affirmed, but kept his hand in his pocket. The scent of coriander floated as he moved.
  Renfield pulled from the ample space in his bulky jacket a crumpled manila envelope. Only then did Taylor pass over the Walkman. He peered inside, absently noted the correct currency as he thumbed through it.
  “Oh.” Renfield tugged something else from his pocket. “He also said to give you this.”
  It was a folded note, trying to act as though it contained all the secrets of the universe that a man might agonize over, yet failing horribly. Taylor feared it would be more of Eric’s pseudo-philosophical crap. The man could be exhausting at times. What was it the poet had said? “To lose thee were to lose myself?” Some other literature but Eric found scintillating. Taylor thought it was Milton.
  His paranoid senses screaming, he took the proffered note and unfolded it.
  Simplicity seemed the tacit rule for underworld correspondence. It was almost depressing. A tersely scrawled “Sorry.”
  Sorry? For what? Taylor started to protest.
  And Renfield was smiling, and Taylor remembered Stanley, but couldn’t move fast enough, and then he was hurling like Lucifer into darkness, into harsh oblivion.

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 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.