In Interruption...

Due a family matter on the part of our producers, we regret there will be no broadcast this week. Enjoy the silence, contemplate, and stay tuned for next week

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.

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.