I paced the hallway in circles, thinking up an expression way down in the viscera that would do to dress me in innocence. I’d had two phone calls with the engineer in the last week talking Scriabin, hydraulics, ancient Mongolian proverbs and another half a dozen things I only pretended to understand. I was confident I’d ticked what needed ticking in the short time I could catch him. I made sure not to ask about his daughter or rant too much about any one subject. He’d asked me to come in the evening after ten for a more sheltered meeting. I’d managed a train a bit earlier during the day for a cheap-ish price though I let on that I had been in town already for the last week or so. Here, dished out to me, the last meal ticket I could hope to achieve standing on one leg and flailing about like an adept. Save Face.
Two hinges squeaked behind me, I turned keeping rhythm. He poked his head out shiny from behind a door at the other end of the hall. I hadn’t seen him in a few years so he scavenged out a bottle of wine from the year I last saw him; Bulgarian, a small gesture to the year of near chastity I nearly married his daughter. He leans back after two generous pours and solemnizes a little riddle. ‘Whatever we received, we threw away. What we didn’t receive, we kept. What did we keep?’. Misery, I said. ‘No, Lice!’ He raises his glass. I produce a smirk. ‘I’ll drink to Lice.
He told me the house was having some renovations done so he’d made the nook into a little Bethlehem and had been spending more time there as a result. The office itself was only a couple blocks up from the house but no use bothering his wife over any of this, she’d twist herself flat onto another hernia or some other fatal gymnastic. Fine. Let her sleep. In any case, this arrangement was best left between the two of us. Pleasure beats morality every time, and people know how to sense it – when the fleece is worth the time, the senses tickled enough to derange the mind, greed may part its lips and offer a little spill, enough to make a small profit.
I rubbed my lower back, chasing a crack that wouldn’t come. The engineer snorted.“Still doing that?”Your back never hurt, you just liked making a thing out of it ” He handed me the cash and likely held onto the idea of making my appearances a regular thing at least while the house was being renovated.
As was meant, I washed up on Damstraat for a slow march of death at the behest of the most incomprehensible breed of pedestrian ever assembled.
A DHL truck barreled towards me violently tiltiing with the weight of temu packages. The driver has his dick halfway into a bottle and hasn’t made it to his twenties.
I stood over a blueish kind of puddle with a ringing in my ear.
The truck glided down the street pulling faintly at my chest . As the ringing thinned out, I looked down and recognised the puddle as myself. Half of me shot out of my ear and onto the road. I suppose something in me had melted blue. Likely whatever was festering behind my ear canal.
The faint outline became, and in it I could see the face of something wonderful smiling back at me. Whatever made its pattern knew I was still there. It wanted me to see what gazed back. Whether the reflection was mine – a nuance of a nuance; it looked like her.
Another night, the party was stale. My fingers were stained blue from the puddle. Trying to see what burbled under the surface. The thing was like a spider bite. I could feel a fever growing by the hour.
Amsterdam is most beautiful at night. Without its many contenders you can just about run your fingers through it. I walked home. By koningsplein I noticed ripples all throughout the canal; though nothing on the surface moved with it, it meant nothing. The city remained perfectly still. Ducks and all.
I looked to the library and saw a man that was left to perish quietly on its steps. The water rolled on beneath the surface humming between the bricks. The more I thought about it the more it retreated. A sort of sea-sickness struck me, like a spiritual vertigo, ineradicably sweet. I felt I could taste the thin film of oil off the canal seeping through my teeth. My whole arm had turned blue now. I felt her every quiver, her every jolt shuddering me off the ground, escorting me for alms towards the steps. She might’ve passed by on a little raft, she might just be awake somewhere, on a red-eye back home.
The color wrapped itself round my neck. I could almost make out some words; smears of faces, smells, substances, legs, all squeezed into a waxy blue patch, amassed to meaninglessness, every bit of flesh, every blinding orgasm, wiped sterile.
Could the old man have a lighter? I have a cigarette to trade. He made me lean-in for the flame. All but for his mouth, his face had somewhat sunken into his skull drawing him up like a grin without its cat. “Something’s got hold of your neck, you know that?”
