Rendez-vous

The room has that old photograph look from cracks of dawn sun through closed blinds: of paper stained in tea to look aged, of smoking room walls – burnt orange, apricot, khaki, russet and burgundy, coalesced with shadow. Her back’s to the carpet, legs wrapped around my waist, I am inside of her. There is confusion here – I’ve stirred into her thighs firm stomach and breasts, visible in lines of dim light, her hands are on my chest, her face is shrouded by dark, but I know who she is. There is an essence of dry southern air; her breaths, deep and wet with promise. A third is in the room, I can feel his presence but it’s not important.

My first attention is paid to how the shadows remain set on top as her body moves with quickening rhythm underneath them, (how did we get here -) then I look straight down to a bay of fluid that’s gathered where we merge, (this is hers) it trickles down our thighs and onto the carpet, we change positions. Her jeans, thrown across the couch; it’s as casual as when we met, our personalities are carried electrical through the air, like then there’s something metaphysical about this too (another spot on the carpet).

A sense that this is happening,

if not physically, through an empathetic bond,

if not directly, somewhere else.

We’ve left a trail where we’ve been,

it doesn’t matter much now,

heading for the end

(two thousand miles elapsed in and for this moment).

For a second there’s snow crash static, the picture drops and only pixled shades of grey, white and black dance across the channel. Now I’m sitting on the couch, and she’s nowhere to be found, evaporated, gone in a fixed instant. A handsome man in a tuxedo vest sits on the window sill, holding a burning cigarette between his fingers – he doesn’t look at me, he just stares out through the blinds. Our stains are still on the floor, “I need to clean up this mess” I say to him. The man sticks his head out to look at me, he has no face, just thin black scribbles that move like a cloud of flies buzzing around carrion. His no-face takes a drag on his cigarette and exhales through the blinds.

(Did I find her, or did she find me?)

Métrovision

You shouldn’t drink that shit; it congeals in your throat”, Wynd: puffing through an unmarked filter. You shouldn’t smoke that shit; it congeals in your cells. The fuse burned through, Cig Arrêt, trash can, and the next stop down below.

Papineau–

He’s got a shiny round vulture-top, brown sideburns that meet his handlebar moustache at the corners of his jaw. The closer he gets his lack of teeth becomes more and more of a distraction. His mad eyes meet anyone who dares to look his way. “REPENTEZ-VOUS!”he howls, darting his spear-tongue out after every piece of his mantra. “REPENTEZ-VOUS!” he screams, and bits of spittle make contact with my face. I pretend he’s the adjacent advertisement until he turns away from me. I notice the back of his brown jacket says NASCAR. Beaudry–

This dark guy’s wearing a throwback denim jacket, tight black jeans and he has frizzy high top hair straight from 1990. He’s chewing his nails tenaciously, getting right underneath them with his teeth. His animal intensity is obscene and alienating. I bite my nails. Berri-UQAM–

A beautiful girl sits beside her boyfriend. They communicate with a rich system of hand signs and expressions; not a word is exchanged between them. I feel a pang of envy. Saint-Laurent–

An androgynous negro is elegantly dressed in black: canvas long-coat, tailored pants, smithed shoes, hair pulled back. I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman, no matter how hard I try. I’ve got an attraction. I want to talk to it. Place-Des-Arts–

A young boy and a young girl suck the skins of each other’s lips, groping for palpable tumors in malleable fat. They feel our disgusted marks on their hides; they have something to prove to us. McGill–

Everyone reads, Peel–

and every car has a perfect French girl. Guy-Concordia–

A middle aged man is riding the circuit with an open bottle of Colt .45. He fights off the myriad of disapproving looks with a broad toothed smile. He catches me smirking and roars with his belly. Atwater–

An old woman moves pitifully slow towards the car. I take a brief measure of her speed versus the train delay – she’ll never make it on before the doors close. I avert my gaze to avoid feeling guilty for her life. Lionel-Groulx–

I have a flashback from work.
“Where are you going to move?”

“Somewhere around Lionel-Groulx metro, with any luck.”

“Ah, Lionel. What a reliable old chap he was.”

“Didn’t I hear somewhere that he was a notorious racist who wanted Quebec to find some strong leadership like one of the men he admired, like Mussolini?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Don’t quote me there; I’m just a wiki-box.” Place-Saint-Henri–

A five year old kid gets on alone. Dirty blonde hair, carries a clumsy blue plastic lunch box, it looks worn and used. Maybe his clothes come from the Salvation Army, maybe they’re hand-me-downs. He looks fiercely independent, and I see my uncle in his eyes. Vendôme–

Here’s this weathered Chinawoman across from me, wrapped in a red shawl. She whispers prayers with her eyes closed, counting off the beads on her Rosary. Villa-Maria–

My head is bobbing. I know that once I get off the metro my fatigue will drown in the air and the rain; I fight to keep my eyes open. The lights are pulsating, and I’m in the mezzanine between consciousness and dream. In the dirty yellow light, the commuters’ faces change – they are wood-carved African masks. They look my way. Snowdon–

I don’t see her face; just a clean black ponytail, a fit malachite jacket hugs her slender frame, hung with a lazy cargo napsack that falls across her lower back, obscures her hips and casts shadow on the behind of her navy blue jeans. For a moment she is lucid, phosphorescent with importance, like a National Geographic photograph spliced into a disposable slide-show. As we board the next train she fades into the ordinary men and women. Côte-de-Neiges–

The car refills in a white and blue collar whirlwind, Université-de-Montréal–

Word Virus

(It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex lifeform. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another–the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.)

william seward burroughs, Naked Lunch

2:10 AM
“When she came into the room after you talked to her in the hall and said, ‘We can’t see each other anymore’, her face just searching for some sympathy, I just gave her a thumbs up and smile. Such an awful fucking gesture–”

“One of those moments when you’re forced to think ‘just what is the other person thinking…’”

“You know those insincere gestures that you make when you didn’t understand what someone said to you but you feel like you should know what it was, or you need to acknowledge them without saying ‘Fuck off, I’m not interested’–”

“‘We can’t see each other anymore.’”

“and I’m like all ear-to-ear and waving my thumb at the ceiling! And this didn’t seem anywhere near as absurd at the time.”

“I’m telling you, you exhale your mind clouds.”

“That’s a good way to put it.”

“Big gust of smoke rolls out of your mouth, only a little’s from the pipe, the rest is all the pollution that needs to be got rid of – now you breathe clarity.”

2:33 AM

“I told you about hers, right?”

“Her last one? Yeah. The dose changes everything.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Between three and five grams everything is expressed in metaphors, you kind of dance around this-”

“-divine unity, like everything is converging into one.”

“Yeah, like that.”

“Then there’s six and seven grams–”

“Oh fuck.”

“things break down, it’s difficult to express the difference between in and out, words can’t get anywhere near it. Something to think about: do things get weird on the inside because of how you see the outside, or do things change on the outside because of how weird you get on the inside?”

“I don’t think I follow you.”

“I was trying to explore this thought for years, and here I am reading Burroughs and he sums it up perfectly in two sentences, which is perfect because now I can work to build on it with Paramnesia. ‘The inner/outer worlds are a false dichotomy. You breathe the life into the outside world from within.’”

“What do you mean ‘breathe life’?”

“O.K. like, take this chair: we interact with this chair based on experiences that we’ve had with this chair, and experiences that we are having with this chair. Without those experiences, this chair, or chairs in general, would not have the associations that we place on them. So your external environment is always being determined by internal associations and your internal associations are always being determined by your external environment.”

“So you’re sending waves and picking them up based on what frequency you’re on…”

“Exactly – you project and receive, but they’re part of the same process.”

“That makes sense! So like, if I view this chair in a different mind-frame it’s not the same chair, or it is, I’m just picking it up on a different frequency. If every thing has got these sort of scary overtones for me, the objects and the things I see are sort of scary. If I were to see that chair with The Fear–”

“–oh fuck, not The Fear! But yeah, that’s what Burroughs was expressing with the Word Virus. You know how in the talking asshole bit he says that a virus was once capable of independent life? Words are used to describe experiences, but the experiences are their original state; we create words to communicate experiences, so each word has the association of an experience. Language is infectious, if we put it out someone else will take it in and the words’ associations will influence. We end up with associations that aren’t ours that modify our world. Set up a way to just send and it’s ideal for control.”

“Oh shit, that’s terrifying!”

“That’s super terrifying! But it’s as he says, you can’t just have a one way link, it goes both ways. You’re always sending and you’re always receiving–”

“Cut associations lines; take responsibility for your associations! Severe association lines and the words will atrophy!”

“That’s what he meant.”

“I’ve got this diagram in my head: words come out of a man’s mouth but loop back and hook him by the lip.”

3 AM
Wynd climbs off of his bed, and circles the room with the book he was reading in his left hand, being lead mouth first by a hook he holds in his right. “I read words and they leave impressions on me. This is how books work.” He takes another spin on the hook, “This is what Huysmans is doing to me right now” Wynd sits cross-legged on his bed and reads again.

I’m not a decent person.

“It’s, well, it’s technically good and the voice has all of the reflection and authority…”

“But?”

“You’re too lewd; in it you hardly come off as a decent person.”

I’m reminded of a vindictive old man. Beautiful artist, wonderful philosopher, but he had his critics. “MAKE IT DECENT!” the authorities demanded of his masterpiece; mean old assistant to the man in charge had all kinds of problems with being reminded about those realities it took a lifetime of discipline to forget. “These people, they’re all… shamefully exposed,” that is, the hundreds of characters had other things on their mind more important than donning garb to hide their more animal of parts that flop about. In the censorship scandal that followed they were more concerned with all the bodies flailing around in the nude than the message behind the work – at The Final Judgment, nobody is saved. But I suppose for that they needed look no further than the waves of doughy flesh, flaccid penis, lolling breasts clashing in a chaotic orgy of shared damnation. “MAKE IT DECENT!” protested the next Big Hat. “Make the world a decent place and the painters will follow,” they say was Michelangelo’s retort.

I hear someone tear four or five sheets of paper towel and proceed to open a stall door. He must have laid the paper down as a germaphobic shield, a single layer defense against the lasting touch of tainted flesh (although I once heard that the buttocks are the cleanest part of the body). Wrenching visceral sighs fill the bathroom, preceding the echoes of plunks into the water. Myself, I don’t excrete – I’m a poet, I channel everything that comes in to the stars – the lurking in bathroom stalls is merely my malicious intent to gather blackmail against all the decent people. While I wash my hands, the stall door opens and Raul – the child in the suit, established salary and a preteen maturity – stumbles out still adjusting his pants. Immediately he rambles on in the shock of being caught: “Uh, hi Michael.” How’re you? “Busy, I’m always busy. Important position – you know, high up in the company. I wear suits. Decent person, father had a good job got me started right, keeps me busy. Now, uh, let’s just pretend that this whole digestion thing didn’t happen – it could be bad for my image.” But it did, and now I has a secret.

Further from relevance.

Innards of a shelled serpent, that’s what I’ve become. Eight AM, wake up, brush my teeth, eat a slice of birthday cake, it’s got 479 calories in a slice, which I’m convinced means it’s good breakfast material, maybe shave maybe not (a beard, a beard, it’s a thought, it’s a thought), have a shower if I didn’t spend 15 minutes observing the fish aquarium, if not leave to ride the dross dragon around the mountain. Some days I work at noon; that hour is more manageable on all accounts, it gives my head time to establish equilibrium from the nighttime poison, sometimes, it also gives time for the beast to do the same. At nine she vomits tsunamis of multicultural refuse: students, businessfolk – well, mostly just students and businessfolk, nobody in their left mind rises pre-ten without commitment (us in our right mind ponder commitment’s nature); by noon the coffee and aspirin’s calmed her stomach and she can keep down a decent meal. I find it easier to deal with large, singular chunks of bread than all of those goddamn potato chips, so many little chunks of salty starch, get all caught in your teeth hard as fuck to pick out. Without us, that unsavory sustenance processed in whatever form to either vomit or shit somewhere else, the plated body of that mythical lizard wouldn’t breathe with life – none of this city would.

…

Isn’t it how it goes? This year my favourite birthday gift was a belt, closely followed by tobacco. I was wearing the belt and smoking the tobacco when our boy from the K-hole lost his nut. J’ai finis la Fin Du Monde. Suivant! Eggstré drinks too much. It’s a fact like Wynd writes a bunch, and F.’s an unrepentant pervert, except neither of them hurts nobody much. I’m not a moralist, far from it in fact. It doesn’t particularly concern me when the Egg breaks, spilling his yolk onto the hardwood floors – that’s his idea of a good time, fine, they’re not my hardwood floors – but when he’s in my town, on my favourite roof, nearly getting my ass arrested you can be damn sure I’ll come down on him hard and sharp, hatchet to a chicken’s neck. Like I said, here I am enjoying a good smoke on some A-grade public space (baby, it’s public if you keep it private) when Eggstré starts barking and pissing in the open. You know, I like cats: cats are chill, you only catch a cat when a cat wants affection or food, you rarely know they’re there unless they’ve made themselves seen, they don’t shit where they eat, they’re all around clean, responsible animals. Wynd and I, we’re cats, and here’s this dog making all kinds of noise, breaking things, pissing on the god damn floor, lubricating his ego with driblets of loose saliva. Cats run from dogs, not because they’re afraid but because dogs smell, are loud and draw attention of the things they should be afraid of.

“Car 2, I’ve got the three suspects, come around to pick them up. You know there are cameras up there – it’s private property, we have detailed pictures of you. What were you guys doing on the roof? ”

“It’s a nice spot to look at the sky…”

“I WAS PARKING MY CAR!”

“…line…”

“You were parking your car?”

“THAT’S RIGHT I WAS PARKING MY CAR!”

“I’m so sorry about…”

“You know that being up there is a felony, right?”

“…him, you won’t see us again.”

“Are any of you students here?”

“No.”
“No.”

“HE IS!”

“Can I see your student I.D. number?”

“I’m really not a student here.”

“Why did he say you were?”

“I don’t…”

“BECAUSE YOU’RE A PUNK-ASS!”

“…know.”

“Listen, I’m really sorry about our friend. We didn’t know it was private property, you won’t see us here again.”

“It’s a roof. You didn’t know it was private property?”

“Why are there stairs there?”

“Fire-escape.”

“Oh. Well, you won’t see us again. Sorry again.”

“If we catch you up here again, you’ll be charged with trespassing. I’ll let you guys go this time. Make sure your friend gets home.”

Rivulets of drool, the Ganges of a drunk man’s shirt. The challenge is getting him home alive. Without regard, Eggstré cuts a light at a busy street, nearly gets his ass flattened by the Saturday night cabbie cavalcade, and takes off into the only area where danger can come to him by another man’s hands, leaving us cut off by the frantic last-call traffic of St. Kat’s. “Eggstré! Eggstré!” we call after him, but he wanders on at a quickened pace. We run, “Eggstré!” we yell again to no avail. “Humpty Dumpty!” I shout, remembering an old nickname. The Egg stops in his tracks, and slowly pivots toward us: gone, his goofy look of gentile boyhood have whisked away, empty hole alcoholic eyes, a bloated face of pale loose dough, the colour of dead flesh – the most horrifying transformation I’ve ever seen in a man. “Hey man, that’s not the way to home.” His mutated visage communicated belligerent confusion more clearly than his words ever could. After some coaxing he followed us home, stopping once to throw his body weight against a Second Cup fence – uncross his legs to help him up, that was me last year – and finally passing out on Wynd’s apartment floor, endlessly muttering, “I’ll kill him, kill him, kill him…” to himself. We left the room for a smoke once we heard his snores roll on ellipsis.

“I need a cigarette”, one cat hissed to another and two packs of Peter Jackson Red combusted.