wildcat

[More of an excerpt that doesn't go anywhere. Basically: bits of the Future are crap. Ridley Scott will be coming 'round to my apartment to beat me to death some time this week, I'm sure.]

The bright mineral sputter fired down from above like thick, fast rain that smashed into the sides of buildings and left squelched heaps in the streets. What was the point of smoking, really, when you could have the very same effect by opening your mouth outside? Candy Napoleon hefted the translucent umbrella and balanced it against his shoulder—clumps of blackened space crap hit and slid down in dry torrents. Candy Napoleon hated tomorrow. He hated it all day long. He hated having a rebreather crammed into his mouth just to keep the atmosphere from blackening his insides.

Napoleon wasn't fond of train delays, either. Twenty-five minutes because some uptight stock-broker decided to step out onto the tracks and get the bone-meal makeover? Twenty minutes listening to pointless conversation between strangers on the sealed train once they bothered to take out their earbuds to complain about the situation in the purified air?

This was what you did to be a detective in Candy Napoleon's city: you turned off the soundtrack and slid off the headset, even out in the open air. You put on the goggles because otherwise you couldn't see for shit in the ash-laden world rimmed with neon. You kept your head up when everybody else looked down, baby, watching their feet so they didn't trip over the latest suicide—every hour on the hour, some days. This was Napoleon's job—listen to the city when nobody else would or could. He Q-tipped the shit out of his ears whenever he made it inside.

He didn't have the hundred-millionth Quantum House remix to slide in between him and city. He had to hear people screaming as they dove off of rooftops—whenever the drugs wore off, or kicked in, depending. He actually made it to the point where he was bored of suicide, listening to it, decoding it. Other people walked around the red smears and rumpled bodies. He walked right through. Fuckers wouldn't ever get a proper burial. They'd biodegrade because something has to on the plastic planet.

Goddamn train delays. Where the hell was the mark, anyway?

Probably wandered off into one of the thousands of malls that airlocked the street, stepping through the docks to breathe manufactured oxygen with fewer poisons running through. Not one hundred percent clean. But then, the mark wasn't clean to begin with, if the client was right.

Napoleon hated spousal shit. People didn't trust each other, always convinced the other body's full to the brim with disease and infection that can't quite be seen yet, maybe doesn't show up, maybe they're swapping fluids with someone else, what if things get passed around. People covering themselves with hermetic paints to keep out all the crap—all the colours of the rainbow, holding off the toxins and radiations and boiling heat.

Napoleon, well, he was blue that day. He was blue most days, Kali-blue, mostly because he couldn't afford the high reds or greens. He made do, hell, he did what he could with a detective's salary. Following people around in his squalid spider-coat until he had to grab a new one because the air had eaten through the old.

© 2008 Ben Rawluk

1. I am not dead. This is important.

2. The lock-out concluded, more or less satisfactorily, when both sides met without a mediator and came to an agreement. We got almost everything we wanted, avoided giving up certain things they wanted to take away, and abruptly -- like that, snapping -- it was over. Which is good and bad and weird. I'm still getting used to being back at work, bumbling around a bit, and bored by comparison to what was going on during the lock-out. I mean, I spent a week organizing a bloody week's worth of activities and events with my associate J.G., coordinating a whole group of people to do things -- which was a great experience, for all its ups and downs.

3. Putting together the portfolio for the UBC Masters in Fine Arts program, which should be sent off sometime in September to apply for their next intake after that. I have no expectations, but I'm going to put all my best stories and poems in. I'll be applying for the short-term residency, which means I can do it from anywhere, excluding the intensive weeks spent on campus. This suits my needs for the present.

4. Working on a story. It's unintentionally smutty, but not really.

5. The "workshop" / writing session I did for Christian's first-years out at Pearson went better than I expected, though I was limited by my own innate capacity for anxiety. Next time will be much better, but I feel confident that I can do it again. Possibly backwards, and in high heels.

6. Lucky Number Slevin isn't bad, though it is an imperfect beast. It wears its Hitchcock homage on its sleeve and the gender politics are a bit dodgy, but Lucy Liu's awesome in it and Josh Hartnett stumbles around in argyle for a good deal of it. Also: Stanley Tucci and Ben Kingsley. Too many plot twists start to make the characters seem idiotic or emotionally stunted.

7. I'm going to buy new clothes this week. I've decided. I need to regenerate, and my wardrobe's having a depression at the moment. It needs fabric prozac.

I've finished the second draft of "Sex Doll, Rocket Summer" and I'm more or less happy with it, even if it does feel as though something's missing. I have people reading it and generating feedback. Or dreams, whichever. I suspect the something-missing might be the Murakami Haruki effect, where I prevented narrative climax. Or I tried to. Or it could be the vast emptiness I was trying to put into it.

Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods is good. It isn't great, but it's very good, although you won't like it if you don't already like her work. It's a touch didactic. The pieces don't all fit together into a seamless stream, but it's not supposed to work like that. She's playing with the idea of repeating worlds and stories -- she's a much gentler Kathy Acker. It reminds me of The Powerbook to a large extent and Art & Lies to a smaller. If you're just starting with her, I can not recommend The Passion highly enough, a traipse through Napoleon's Europe and Venice in particular. Everybody raves about Written on the Body but it doesn't feel quite as rich to me.

The Stone Gods starts as science fiction, stops being science fiction in favour of being historical fiction, starts up as a different science fiction story, but actually it's the same one, and maybe they're all pieces of the same thing. The "maybe" is a bit of a waggling eyebrow. The sections in the Seventeenth Century didn't sell themselves to me, which is a bit of a stumble. But I didn't really like the war scenes in McEwan's Atonement either, where he's just showing us his long, thick Hemingway.

Sorry, I'm all strung out from the story and still cranking out silly sex references -- it's cockeyed smutty, and will take a night's sleep to recover.

Ran into the Lonely Novelist the other week.

The Lonely Novelist was someone Joy and I would see often, around town, usually when we were up in the Second Story bookshop/cafe, drinking organic herbal tea and eating enormous cookies while we worked on whatever stories or poems were the centre of our gigantic soul-crushing universes that week. He was tall, but not too tall; he was tall in that way that suggested he'd been too tall at some point in his adolescence, had been very awkward and gangly and was only now -- in his thirties -- getting to be comfortable with it. He had tall hair. He wore secondhand brown buttondowns. The Lonely Novelist spent his time typing away -- we presumed -- at a novel on his laptop. He gazed longingly at us as we nattered while we wrote, read things out to each other, and engaged in serious literary discussion.

And by "serious literary discussion," I mean we talked about boys and lipstick, because we're like teenaged characters in a Margaret Atwood short story. And by "boys and lipstick," I mean we were usually talking about booze and our own inability to function and interact with society in any kind of meaningful way.

And then we stopped going, because we'd graduated, Second Story closed down, and Joy went off into the wild environs of Japan. And the Lonely Novelist receded into the mists, except I saw him on the street one day with some short woman (although perhaps it was merely an issue of scale rather than any innate shortness on her part) that one time. But otherwise he was rendered a footnote.

And we were at the Intelligence Ball, this nerd-themed party at Element the other week. Michael, Christian, Penny, Suzanne and I.

And the Lonely Novelist. He circulated. It was all very shark-infested waters with him, rotating through the club over and over while our group sat at a table, drinking cocktails and reserving judgement (Judgement later occurred on the dance floor, and it was delicious). Over and over, he passed by, looking at us out of the corner of his eye.

It seemed he had, perhaps, taken a bit of a liking to Penny, as is the way of these things.

And he was dancing on one side of the dance floor and we were dancing on the other side (well, the girls and I were dancing -- Michael and Christian maintained appropriate regal posture from the railing beside the dance floor), and he kept getting closer. And Penny said she could tell he was prone to megalomania and neurotic compulsions, which meant she'd probably end up in some kind of disastrous relationship with him. "One day you're going to divorce that man," I said.

And it's true: the Lonely Novelist is the sort of man you divorce one day, in a fit of pique, after an unsettling and unrealistic marriage. Plates would never be smashed on purpose, but they would be smashed. He'd be unsuccessful and you'd grow to hate each other and there would be dinner parties where the comments were never quite veiled enough and eventually you'd leave him. You'd leave him and there would be recriminations and drunken phone calls and stories would turn up in Geist Magazine, stories where the character that stands in for you has the same initials, because he'd have no sense of decorum whatsoever.

So far, the new Portishead album Third is dark and moody and sexy. I'm still fitting all the keys into all the locks and assembling all the pieces in the right sequence, so it hasn't hit the cortex at full speed yet. Not sure if I like the new Madonna album yet, she seems to become more try-hard and soulless with each and every release. Good beat, though. Mostly I'm bopping to Pop Levi, who I discovered the other day. Very kinetic.

Writing a story about radio detectives for the moment. I do not know if it will last the week or fade in favour of something better or more coherent. I am not writing one of those stories about nihilistic young men of questionable character who used to love something pop cultural and have to think in terms of it; I have enough of that outside, in the real world. I do not need to grow up to be Jonathan Lethem. I'm actually writing about radio detectives. But, because I'm terrible at plot and like Paul Auster too much, it'll probably be too existential to be worth anything.