fddvd

--
Markus Nystrom
Tel: +1 715 203 4901
Skype: mezoroaster
http://nystromtranslation.com/

Looking for a good hospital to deliver my baby

It is in fashion among those with a grubby finger on the pulse of the times to engage in a ritual tipping of the cap to the bestial aspect of human nature. They greet news of murder, torture and plunder with a wry grin and say it has always been so. And so it has--although popular acquiescence to evil does exhibit ebb and flow, as if in sympathy with the phases of the moon. Given that their vision may have been dazzled by the particularly martian phase we now are in, I will not condescend to call them liars. But it seems to me that they are entirely too satisfied with the possession of their grimy little truth. They like it. It excuses them from making any attempt to fathom tragedy or conceive of suffering. It excuses them from reconnoitering the better half of their dual natures. Poor philistines, tawdry prophets of inherent vice!

Without knowing it, these savvy folks, pleased as peacocks to don the tribally tailored mantles of “progressivism” or “conservatism” or "libertarianism" are very dangerous people. They can be made to countenance anything, do anything. They, who never took stock of Enlightenment or Renaissance, who never sought light, these dim souls are squandering a heritage born out of herculean struggle against darkness, a heritage bequeathed to us by the heroes of the race. These people--and there are millions upon millions of them--do not know where we come from or what we have gone through or what we are losing. They content themselves with a doddering acknowledgment of the hell we’re headed for and esteem themselves so very savvy as they wink at evil and get on with business. I’m happy to say I’m not even slightly acquainted with the very cream of the elite, or their groveling enablers, for whom the outlook remains unclouded, those diabolical parasites who, if we credit their statements with earnestness, have absolutely no idea of the blight their gorging has wrought. I would like to single out an utterance of recent vintage by the great wunderkind Condoleezza Rice, who offered her best impression of Eichmann in response to heckling about her complicity in war crimes at a public event, quipping that “The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God.”

Would she could hear Dylan in Masters of War:

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy

And yet the criminal imbecility of a Condoleezza Rice cannot shield me from my own complicity. It’s true I may be predisposed by my excellent Nordic heritage to wallow in the dismal swamps of guilt--swamps that no amount of expiation can ever drain if one goes in for that despondent cycle. But today I have decided to throw my guilt up on a lift and realign it to run true. There is a self-flagellating bias in my guilt’s drivetrain. Why should I be feeling guilty about peccadilloes like wasting time, disappointing others, lacking the strength of my convictions, lacking self-respect, lacking the fortitude to transmute difficulty into achievement--why should I worry about a single personal failing when there is something unspeakably more urgent to feel abysmally, eternally guilty about: The very grim fact of my being an American? Why indeed? It leads me to a thought nearly impossible to conceive: The image of my strictly personal guilt weighed out on a scale against the towering mountain range of collective guilt. It is as if my very personhood is obliterated by the staggering criminality of my nationality. Unless I personally cross the threshold and commit acts of murder, rape, torture, property destruction and expropriation, none of my own little transgressions can rise to the level of the evil unequivocally represented by my American citizenship, and most of all, by my tax contributions to the American war machine. Every dollar I pay into Uncle Sam’s blood-spattered treasury represents my complicity in the supreme international crime of aggressive war, and in all the excruciating subsidiary crimes: The teratogenic destruction of Falluja using depleted uranium artillery; the everyday roboticized murder of villagers who may or may not have been rumored by a snitch to be possessed of the dignity to resist the invader; the water torture; the bullets in the back of the head; the gratuitous missiles fired at anything that moves from unanswerable death machines groaning in the sky; the abduction of bystanders to our concentration camp in the Caribbean; the destruction of families, childhoods, maternities, paternities, retirements, homes, shrines, hospitals, schools, universities, faith, hope, love--past, present, future, everything alike ground into nihilistic shards of irreparable loss by the insatiable machinery of domination. These next may rate a dim second morally, but as an American the crimes of America against herself do concern me some: The grinning destruction of my liberties, the squandering of my resources, the irreparable damage done to my name. To the extent that I am obliged to enrich the regime on the Potomac each fraction of a second devoted to earning my bread, it is hardly a stretch to say that every time I use my computer in a professional capacity I too am guiding drones from Creech Air Force Base to slay perfect strangers in their homes; or that every time I draw up an invoice I create a debit note to be settled in blood by our swarms of hired assassins and thugs--the pride of every red-blooded American, if I’ve understood the latest news cycle correctly.

Is it a stretch to say that every time I make an extorted remittance to the war chest I am injecting my peace-loving veins with the venom of murder?

As what you might call a rube, i.e. a man who is not the full sovereign of any portion of his economic existence and who in his rubehood is obliged to pay fealty to the state, it is also my dubious privilege to enhance the likelihood of my own destruction at the hands of the avenging whirlwind sown by America’s prolific crimes each time I engage in economic production, each time I consume, each time I enjoy myself, and especially each time I travel in an aircraft. One word that occurs when confronted with this guilt is “unbearable.” Maybe so. But when my sad eye looks out on the myriads of Americans in whom time and circumstance have cultivated a taste for vicarious murder--or is it that something essential has failed to germinate in them?--it would seem to be a guilt all too easily borne. Certainly, history teaches that the first will one day be last, and cautions us there will come a day of reckoning for all the smug little Pontius Pilates in Middle America.

Where things get tricky is in the heat of this historical moment, on the downswing of our shabby imperial parabola, when someone comes along and decides he will not silently bear the guilt any longer, but determines to bring it out into the light of day. This is what creates friction, discomfort, gnashing of teeth. We do not wish to be reminded of the little monsters our nation has sired upon us through what I will not shrink from calling moral rape. Such a delivery is bound to be messy. One has trouble finding a willing obstetrician or midwife. True, there are certain abortionists of varying quality available to help us periodically get shut of the growing guilt through the purgatives of charity, good deeds, and organized shows of human feeling. Save Darfur. The mutant fetus thus purged is flushed clean down the sewer. We are relieved for a time. But only until we start to feel the guilt again gnawing away, growing, laying claim to our vitality, reminding us that we have been and continue to be violated at the very core of our humanity.

What cannot be countenanced is a clean delivery. The spawn of our complicity is too awful to look at. And yet perhaps a good regimen of obstetrics and neonatal care is the only thing for us now. My question is, how long could we go on as we have if all these monsters were brought out and held up to scrutiny? How much longer could the war machine continue to siphon off our vitality to feed its diabolical schemes? There must be a threshold past which, were we to cross it, the merry-go-round of permanent war would inevitably grind to a halt.

Some will hasten to add that any form of resistance to the masters of war will be purchased dearly. But is it preferable to go on living as unrepentant parasites on the blood of people who have done us no harm (even though rubes like myself hardly benefit from the blood-drenched farce of Pax Americana)? Everyone must answer this question for himself, and must go on answering it every day for as long as the illegitimate war machine continues to tear through its victims--of whom the loss of each is irreplaceable, and unforgivable.

I would not be displeased if I were to return to America one day and find that others had carried the intolerable monsters of their compulsory guilt to term, and that the groans and shrieks of these creatures had become, at long last, impossible to ignore. But I would be surprised. Even the Olympian gods resisted liberating their monsters--until the day came that they were undone by them. Not that I would stoop to compare the sickening spectacle of life in today’s America to the high times in the Pantheon. It’s coming more and more to resemble the murky regions where Ares preferred to hold court.

There. Am I absolved? Of course not. Just as I thought I had delivered my own personal creature of the dark I feel another one clamoring to get out. Could it be that it’s the same monster, that it managed to fuck itself into the spot where my soul should be in the space of how long it takes to write a sentence? Could it be that our national existence is a perpetual motion machine for the destruction of the human spirit? An ourobouo that has outgrown itself and turned not only on the wider world, but on the idea of life itself, which it is now preparing to devour in a final orgy of parasitism?

To get away from these uncontrollable metaphors for a moment: It occurs to me that the guilt can have no end. It really isn’t possible to atone for a murder, is it? You can never restore life to him whom you robbed of it. The crime does not vanish just because you feel contrite. It is the stain that can never be washed away, the evil that can never be amended. And as Americans, each of us is millions deep into that ledger of infamy. You will spare me your clamor to dispute the numbers when you recall--as if reliving a quaint dream you once saw in your childhood--that the murder of a single human being is an unpardonable crime.

The Revenant

Today I woke to the memory of an encounter I had on a train from Potsdam to Berlin over ten years ago. A rangy man of noble countenance who wore his balding hair in a long silver ponytail came in through the button-operated doors separating my car from the one to the west. He wore a red jacket and carried a binder crammed with papers. He sat down across from me. What I was reading I do not remember. Maybe something by Heinrich Böll. After a moment the man excused himself and asked me whether I would like to buy a book of poems. I said I was broke, pleite, which wasn't strictly true. He said surely I had enough change to make a token contribution in exchange for his humbly printed but well-conceived cycle of poems. I fidgeted and said I really wasn't interested. I wished he'd leave me be. He insisted the poetry was good, and that he needed readers. And money, if only just a little. I channeled my best philistine miser and told him I would not buy it under any circumstances. Nor, cutting off his modified offer, would I consent to read it for free. I do not remember how long his earnest rap and my flinty reception of it went on before he raised himself indignantly and said that he was a learned man, a cultured man, and it was only because of the anti-humanist values held passively by fools like me that his gift to the world, born of magnanimity, had to suffer the indignity of being reduced to an act of abject beggary. He huffed down the aisle and I tried to put him out of my mind with an obliviate soak in the pool of mass-produced text resting in my lap. It worked until this very morning, when he came rushing back. The revenant wreck of a poet. I would like to say that I have not yet shed all the rational sandbags conferred by my Rockwell-meets-Descartes upbringing on the leaky levee of what is really a mysterious and torrential existence; at least not to the point of easily crediting noumena like curses, omens or clear fault lines of destiny, but as an author my task is to find meaning. Either that or to manufacture it out of whole cloth when it is found scarce, threadbare or demure. I did not have to go searching for the revenant poet; he came to me very soon after I published my first book, as I was setting out to find an audience for it. Yet it is still with a certain self-conscious and modestly guilty sensation that have begun to wonder whether one day I’ll find myself filling that old phantom's shoes. It may not be on a train in Germany. I may not be addressing a foreign student of my own language. But I may by then have committed completely to the hazards of a creative existence freed from the blind toil that passes for life in our depraved civilization--the internal logic of my chosen path will one day force me to choose between seizing the sword with two hands or letting it go from the one that holds it now. I may well be in the position of having to bring my wares directly to my envisioned readership, hat in hand. But what am I saying? That's what I'm doing already! My efforts may run aground on the same loathing, the same narrowness of mind, the same miserly philistinism I showed on that long ago afternoon in my exchange with the old poet. I'll be he and my old self at once, if you like, authentic author and faithless reader both. And while I may not deserve that rejection generically, as an author, I will deserve it specifically for the cold shoulder I turned when once I had the chance to help a worthy man along the twisting path of his art.

This tentative parallel assumes that we both were/are worthy of readership and recognition, which may or may not be the case. The real question is, how can you ever know if you reject a personal appeal to open the cover and turn the page? How can you ever know if you lack the curiosity (and maybe even the courage) to read a piece of samizdat when it lands in your lap? Of course, it may not be as elegant or simple as all that. What am I saying? Of course it isn't. I have left out consideration of the relative strength of the appeal. Consider Henry Miller, back when he was patrolling the Lower East Side with boxes of candy to finance his abortive literary efforts. His entreaties provoked the mockery of a table of well-heeled merrymakers, but their mockery only made him blow his stack and launch into a torrent of rebuke. So powerfully indignant was he that they relented in shame and invited him to share their board of mussels and champagne, buying his wares down to a man. Miller did this with candy; books would have been a cinch. Suppose the Berliner poet had been more insistent or more gifted/charismatic? Would not our speculative destinies have taken a different turn?

Maybe. But I want to return to the notion of telos touched on above. The more I think about it, the more I believe that there was some reason for my encounter with that man, and that there is meaning in reflecting on him now. Not long ago I read something in a Canadian periodical about encounters of this kind. The writer claimed that every man, at the moment marking the end of his youth, has an encounter, whether real, imagined, phantasmal or remembered, with another man who makes him the person he will be until he dies. The writer referred to this other man as a magician. The image I came away with was the proverbial ‘tap on the steering wheel’. I am not ready to concede the end of my youth just yet, nor am I ready to admit that this man half-met will be the one to perform the final calibrations on my life's trajectory. What I will allow is that these expiatory reflections can be of some use in improving my own receptiveness to chance encounters of the literary kind, and perhaps also in smoothing the way for myself and others who are trying to persuade a hesitant readership to open the cover. My revenant in mind, I will board a bus, train or ship with a box of freshly printed books. My appeal will be direct and without shame or equivocation: Buy my book, please. Currents of my heart and soul and bile undulate through its pages. It's good, I'll say. And if enough people just like you buy it and enjoy it, you will have laid track for a literary locomotive raring to bring more and more books to the salubrious light of day. And, I'll ad with a wicked grin, if by failing to heed my entreaty you perpetuate the scorn and suspicion that hang like a miasma over the badlands of independent artistic production, who knows what parched watershed of personal destiny you will have crossed into.

Mists of Ararat

A tale by Gunnar Holiday
Dedicated to the memory of the Republic of Ararat, which haunts us still

This little cycle of Istanbul vignettes wouldn't be complete without mentioning the obscene yet inadvertent act of terrorism I committed while in Istanbul. Now it is true that I laud those who propose to resist state power in creative ways, ans it is also true that destruction is a form of creation, but please do not make the mistake of thinking that I find my own actions in this affair praiseworthy, for quite apart from their horrific and senseless consequences, serendipitous as they may have been for some, they amounted to little more than a sequence carried out by a biological automaton. You see, one stormy night in March I had a pair of Kurds over to dinner in my little ship's cabin on Lime Hill. Ristem was a sharp-looking fellow whose acute and somewhat diabolical goatee contrasted sharply with his tonsured head and downright cadaverous complexion. I'd met him at the Beyoğlu bookshop with the best selection of English titles, where he worked. It was there, for instance, that I'd bought Marshall Berman's magisterial 'All that is Solid Melts into Air,' not to mention my highly economical Penguin edition of 'Crime and Punishment,' the blank expanse of whose cover had tempted me to inscribe my own name under the title--which act may have been my greatest contribution to letters during the brief time I spent haunting the great city of the Turks, notwithstanding any of the other writing I did there. The bookstore had a bar whose sulfurous stainless drum wine I'd had frequent resort to while thumbing my titles. I also remember the bathroom well for its sink, an oblong, shallow porcelain vessel situated in the middle of a vast well of polished granite, above which the porcelain rose like a baptismal fount. The ample margin between the two was laid out with a bed of time-smoothed gray and slate river stones, the kind perfect for skipping, and whose apparently random arrangement was so harmonious and inviting that it must have been the result of cunning artifice. Who expects to encounter elegance, artistry, even perfection in a public washroom? And yet there it was. A sink to remember.
There were a lot of well-heeled semi-literate pseudoliterati at this bookstore, Ava I think it was called--their beaks mostly bobbing within a few meters of the zinc bartop, as if their orbits were tethered by the pull of whiskey and wine--but I preferred to keep company with my Berman, my Dostoevsky, my Comte de Suedenbourg-Nicolet, and by and by with Ristem, dispenser of the sulfurous Anatolian wine I'd come to associate with the intoxication of the written word. In any case, Ristem had introduced me to his friend Merwan who wore his hair long and whose beard masked the greater part of his face behind an anarchic snarl. Now both were berthed at my house, having called and tied off at the humble cove below. Nice guys both, students with visions vague and vast, with minds wide open to all the disastrous notions of youth. Their company was congenial to me, if somewhat esoteric. It was as if they were able to converse in perfect silence by virtue of having known each other for so long. As to what this silent conversing concerned, I recall several times that evening getting the feeling as the ships stalked the wind-vexed strait below that they were referring to something that was there but not fully so, something just beyond my grasp, some tempting morsel of knowledge for initiates seeming both to confer on them the unapproachable and repugnant dignity of social superiority and to coax me down an unseen path which they had laid out for me, a path along which lay my final acceptance into a circle of friendship that promised to sunder the barrier of language that stood between thinking and being understood. Looking at them, I thought that these would be the kinds of guys I'd like to hang out with if I were about five years younger and Turkish, but their aura of exclusivity might have been too solid to conquer--that is, being "one of them," I could never have become one of them. But there we were, with circumstance having ordained that they should find my company interesting, worthy of pursuit whether because I was older or foreign or seemingly unaffiliated with anything or anyone. In the final reckoning it may be that we had come together in friendship because they found my existence anomalous and had determined to investigate it.

We ordered İskender kebap and lsolacun and three beers from a delivery joint in my neighborhood, along with a wonderful rice pudding dessert called sütlaç. Their jackets dripped rainwater onto the floor as we looked out over the sea lane from my vestibule and waited. Merwan said the ships' lights moving through the darkness made him think of the candle-freighted turtles that had graced and navigated the Sultan's gardens in Ottoman times. When the food arrived I astounded my friends by tipping the delivery guy. Americans may be at the controls of the greatest killing machine in history, but we always leave a tip!

Over dinner the conversation grazed a number of literary and artistic trends, all of them bleak: The lack of good books being published in English or in Turkish; the lack of good translations of good books that had been published in the past; the lack of stature suffered by writing and art generally; the parasitical interface between cultural production and cultural consumption; the want of community tormenting those who would create but lack the social leavening that has been sublimated into the fantasy of inspiration; the generalized and all but consummated deadening of the mind and coarsening of life that had allowed these things to come to pass in both our cultures, and which were hastening us to the brink of a darkness to which there would be no bottom. The three of us gamesomely agreed to diagnose the problem as the worldwide murder-suicide of civilization itself before settling on what must always come to the fore among strong spirits whom the myriad lacks and deficiencies among which we are adrift have failed to annihilate: The political. As Kurds, both were bitterly opposed to the injustice machine of the Turkish state, but Ristem's espousal of nonviolence and civil disobedience was sharply contradicted by Merwan's refractory revolutionary bloodlust. A Stalinist with an unabashed fondness for Sayyid Qutb, the frequency with which he proposed to liquidate people, classes of people, or entire communities and nations of people might have brought on a spell of indigestion in a more squeamish dinner partner, but I went with the flow and humored him. And as a sometime adherent of the 5 Noble Contempts, and in my very capacity as an American, I found it difficult to reject the doctrine of selective liquidation out of hand. His face twitched with rage when the topic of America came up, but Ristem quickly stepped in and navigated us to safer waters.

But the persistent fact that he'd been treated to dinner by a bona fide American must have stuck in Merwan's craw. As we were wrapping up the meal, he began to denigrate what he referred to as my "glamorous lifestyle of writers." But nothing could have been sillier. Where was the glamor, where was the style, I asked him, in a tortuous, solitary pursuit that nobody gives a damn about, least of all those who profess to be enamored of the life of the mind? I made a sweeping gesture to encompass my dingy digs. Glamor? He responded that the writer's lifestyle relied on a false secession from the grim realities that bind the great mass of people, calling the dissociate stance that enables Dichtung ineffectual, soft, pointless, even effeminate. He on the other hand was of sterner stuff, stuff that could absorb and integrate the grimness of reality. He was pure, strong ore cast in the mold of the savvy businessman, the modern man with no illusions and no inhibitions, no hangups or kinks or quirks or obsessions to prevent him from occurring in the world as it was, endowed by life with the ability to ask of it no more than it gave. All this was said while wearing an outfit whose blockish drabness reminded me of a Mao suit. But the real problem with his self-presentation went beyond his dress, beyond the fact that had no business interests, no holdings, no ventures to speak of, no job. It was that he, as Ristem had put it before we'd been introduced, was pretty much the only young Turkish poet of note, at least according to some old Turkish poets who had once been of note. And yet there was an element of play in all of this, as if he were begging me to call his bluff. Not so that he could come off the hobby horse and have a laugh, but so that he could have an excuse to dig in deeper. An artist in occultation, a poetic double agent, a Kurdish Ezra Pound who took pathological pleasure in his cynical refuge in fascism's shallow pool. I did not hesitate to point out these inconsistencies, but Merwan was disdainful. "The pitiable wailings of the wretched, the abandoned, the weak," he said, "do not concern me. Power is our only hope of redemption."

"On the contrary," said Ristem, noticing my mounting annoyance. "Our hope is coded into prophecy."
"Prophecy?"
Exactly 100 years ago, Ristem maintained, a great Kurdish poet had prophesied that in 100 years, the Kurdish people would enjoy a momentary victory over their tormentors by drowning the city of the Turks neck-deep in shit. He said that the episode would reverberate through the Kurdish nation in an epidemic of unquenchable laughter that would circle the globe before it had spent itself "This poet," said Ristem, "said that as long as they had not been exterminated, all these laughing Kurds would plunge the land of the Turks into paralytic chaos. If there were Kurds on the roads, the roads would be blocked. If there were Kurds in the factories, production would cease. If Kurds were fighting, the laughter would lead to their slaughter, but new waves of fighters would rise up implacably behind the fallen, powerfully inspired by the example of the soldiers who had met their fate with those unforgettable peals of mocking laughter."
"Inspiring, is it not?" said Merwan. "The problem is that this poet may not have existed. There are hundreds of references to his prophecy by other Kurdish poets, and even a number of references to his work, but there is no hard evidence of that work. Not one poem. Is it possible to be a poet on the strength of a single prophecy?"
"Huh," I said between greedy spoonfuls of sütlaç. "That's interesting stuff. Do you guys believe the prophecy?"
Both laughed anxiously at this, looking at each other as if my question were an embarrassment.
"Whether we believe in it or not is beside the point," said Merwan.
"What he means is that we look on all prophecies as an inspiration to act, and not as a divine script for the course of things to follow. Prophets do not believe in God," said Ristem.
"They play Him," said Merwan. "So yes. In that limited sense, we do believe in it."
"The question is whether you believe in it." Ristem had stopped eating and was regarding me very calmly.
"Believe in it? But I don't know anything about it."
"What Ristem means to ask is whether you believe in the justice of the Kurdish cause?"
"Sure, I believe that all people should breathe free."
"I think what Merwan really means to ask is whether you would be willing to, well, assist us in realizing the justice of the Turk--, I mean the Turd--"
"Damn it!"
"--I mean the Kurdish vision."
"Well, whatever I can do guys, I'd be happy too, really, I mean, you know, within reason. My goodness, this sütlaç sure is delicious." I looked up. "What are you talking about exactly?"
"I think what Ristem here means --" Merwan was looking ruefully at his friend, "-- I think what Ristem means is that you sound like you could be a great friend to the Kurdish nation. And I think we might profitably discuss the modalities of your involvement tomorrow. At the bookstore. Would you like some more sütlaç, Gunnar my friend?"
"Why, yes. Yes I would. Damn that's good stuff. But I thought we only ordered the three."
Ristem was smiling broadly. "My friend, a Kurd who does not move around the city with extra sütlaç is not a true Kurd. Please have this, my friend." At this he reached into his bag and withdrew a cylindrical cooler of brushed stainless steel. Air rushed forth when he undid the clamps.
"This is my mother's special recipe, from Diyarbakir. Shall I replenish your bowl?" I handed him the plastic container I'd eaten the restaurant's sütlaç from. He upended the bright cylinder and we watched in silence as a vaporous mass of the tasty pudding oozed forth. He sprinkled it with cinnamon from a shaker that he apparently also kept in readiness in his dinner coat's inside pocket. "Enjoy!" Vapor was rising off the bowl as if the contents were boiling. I put a spoonful in my mouth and tasted it. It was the coldest thing I'd put on my tongue since losing a patch of it to a galvanized Minneapolis fencepost in a distant childhood midwinter. Neither sütlaç nor spoon stuck, luckily. The temperature and consistency reminded me of gelled gasoline.
"Gah. Thith ith abtholutely fucking freething," I said, barely able to dribble the words across my stunned tongue. "What the hell ith thith thit?"
"Not shit, my friend. A family tradition. It represents the original sütlaç enjoyed by the beleaguered Kurds on Mount Ararat over 500 years ago. Turkish cavalry were hounding us, and we been forced to take refuge on the steepest faces of the highest slopes. Night fell, and we couldn't risk lighting a cooking fire for fear of being seen and slaughtered, so we mixed together we had: Milk, sugar and leftover rice, all freezing cold. That was the original Kurdish sütlaç. We serve it crackling cold to this day to commemorate that brave band of warriors."
"Wow," I said. "Ithakyawy pree goo if you wet your mouf go numb. But howeth your mom gedjit thith cold without freething it?"
"That, my friend, is a family secret. There is literally nothing you could do to make me tell you."
"Nothig?"
"Not by invitation, not by threat, not by torture. Islam Karimov himself could not make me tell, nor your General McChrushitall."
"McCrystal."
"Sorry. Not even McCrystal could get me to tell. Nor will I tell my grave when you're through with me. You see, I only know one part of the formula. We have chopped the secret up into 1000 pieces, which we carry like precious gems within our bowels."
I continued to eat the stuff as he spoke, dimly aware that the numb frisson of the first bite had transited my esophagus and was now radiating in insensate waves from the pit of my stomach.
Merwan gave me a hearty clap on the back once I'd finished.
"There we have it," he said. "A nice, healthy American appetite. Rapacious, you might say. Would you like some more?" Something about the cast of his face -- the set of his mouth -- bespoke the greed of zealotry. An odd, vicarious greed I supposed, a sort of mutant hospitality.
"Oh no," I said. "I'd better save room for the beers I'm going to be having later."
Merwan looked alarmed, but Ristem put a steadying hand on his associate's shoulder before he could speak.
"I think what my friend wants to say is that beer has been known to interfere with the digestive process when the subject has eaten this particular kind of sütlaç. It might even be hazardous. Due to the cold reagents."
"Yes," said Merwan with a solemn nod. "The cold reagents."
"The subject?"
"Well. In a manner of speaking." At least they didn't nod their heads in unison and say 'Yes. The subject.'
"Damn it, guys! I was looking forward to having a beer. To having, I don't know, two, three, four, five beers. Why didn't you guys tell me about this before feeding me that Arctic shit?"
"Don't call it shit," said Merwan. "That was Kurdish hospitality. More than that, it was the very currency of Kurdish pride."
"What he's trying to say, Gunnar, is that there is no reason to be sore. We were just trying to germinate the seeds of cross-cultural friendship, in your gut so to say, and with them our deliverance from the Turkish chains that have bound us through these long centuries. Everything we do, we do for a reason. There is no need to get sore."
"All right, I get it. Cross-cultural harmony, birth of a new era, no need to get sore. But I have to say that you guys are treading on some cultural toes here by denying a Swedish-American his beer. I mean, I need a beer."
My two friends looked at each other with a profundity of seriousness and understanding.
"All right, said Ristem. "One beer. Can he have one beer?"
"Oh, I suppose. But only one. And only as long as he doesn't blame us when his stomach swells up. I never heard of one beer causing any serious complications. There's no need to get swollen, but it's his prerogative."
"Complications?"
"Yes," Merwan said. "Complications. You know, an upset tummy."
Ristem cracked an Efes and handed it to me. Each of my friends also took a brew from the bag. We drank our beers in gloomy silence. Mine seemed to have the initial effect of reversing the numbness that had gathered in the pit of my stomach, but the reversal of this spreading nullity revealed a discomfort, a swelling, a chill, a pain -- as if the kenomatic effect of the gelid sütlaç contained within it another, paradoxically pleromatic effect. I soon set my beer down and doubled over with the sudden fullness. I heard my friends whisper among themselves in Kurdish. I began to quaver, to moan; the pain spread to my head and guttered there like a cold electric fire before swelling and shooting from skull to spleen and back again within the space of a split second. The site of it was impossible to fix. Soon everything was in pain, each part of my body communicating with every other with the monomaniac message of PAIN. It was as if my head were hurting inside my stomach, or as if my stomach had a headache, which to soothe I rubbed the temples of my belly, or groaned and pawed at the top of my dome with a palliative circular motion, taken aback by its hardness, can't think with this petrified convex six-pack dammit, which reminded me to curse my Kurdish friends roundly, but for whom I'd surely be on my way to the enjoyment of a six-pack and then some, with the outraged and excruciating regret serving me for a prism through which I could see, clearly, that by tomorrow I would be laughing and drinking with my friends the Kurds, that all of the Kurds would be laughing and drinking and congratulating me on a job well done. But what job?

Looking back, I think I can specify quite clearly that this was the hallucinatory vacuum in which I acceded to terrorism. Impassioned salvos of Kurdish erupted in the background. I thought I could understand that they would remain by my side until they could be sure all the stores had closed and that I could buy no more beer, because one drop more would put the kibosh on everything, their years of planning, a century of waiting, all the bloodsoaked generations of the yearning marching back clear to the mystic Ararat icemists in which that first frozen progenitor sütlaç had taken form, frozen to symbolize the tenacity of their national dream in the face of history's glacial passage, yes by God, they'd stay with me, and I felt that they were good friends as my stomach gave a convulsive rumble announcing my unwilling passage into the vacuous purgatory of unconsciousness, where dreams fail to form even to the point of miscarriage. No, no dreams in this noiseless nocturne, no visions, scenes or revelations -- only the inchoate conviction that my destiny was now bound up with that of the Kurds, and theirs with mine, and that I'd better bind myself by them if I would be well.

I felt a crinkle when I woke up. It was a note whose text my cheek had printed onto my pillow as I'd slept. "Come see us at the bookstore at four o'clock. Do not be late. Do not drink beer, and whatever you do, do not attempt to pass a stool. In faith, Ristem and Merwan."
I followed their instructions to a T. Let no one say that I am not capable of following instructions in time of need. My abstention from beer did involve a bit of grumbling, as it was my custom to enjoy a beer with breakfast in those days, a la Polonaise if you like, but the injunction to boycott the stooly stool was achieved with perfect equanimity. Although I was no longer in pain, my stomach was so swollen that I expected any appointment with the porcelain pedestal would be disastrous, and that it really would be better to, ahem, send forth, away from the house. I left at two, allowing plenty of cushion to reach the center from my relatively distant outskirt.
Truly, my stomach had grown very large overnight. The fellow I studied in the mirror had a potbellied, even a pregnant look. Not particularly fetching, but that was me now. I will level with you and admit that no amount of leaning or bobbing or neck-craning could bring me into visual contact with the penis I knew still dwelt beneath this new protuberance. I hope that my forthrightness does not stun you. But let's not be squeamish: After all, we have come here to talk about terrorism.

The bus driver had to suppress a chortle a when he saw me step aboard his creaking sootbox and thumbed my Akbil magnet into the validator. I suppose the contrast between my slight frame and my abdominal massif was funny, but it put me on notice that I now cut a ridiculous figure--and now I was hounded by the thought that everyone whose eye grazed me was experiencing a paroxysm of surreptitious hilarity. The guard with the bomb wand on the way into the Metro also snickered at the sight of me. He let the paddle graze and prod my belly with a diligence that, though exemplary, failed to establish that anything was amiss. And that something was amiss is precisely what I shall endeavor to demonstrate. Having slipped the State's tattered dragnet, I bored inexorably toward the center of the city and my appointment with prophecy.
Ristem was there to greet me as I staggered into the bookstore's glass door, hobbled not so much by the weight as by the sheer girth of the bloat. "My friend. You have come." He smiled like a sun and seated me with the spontaneous gallantry inspired by pregnancy wherever it goes. Unable to sit straight in the chair, I had to extend my legs to give my belly more swellroom. It had gotten even bigger--and still I was in no pain at all. Herbert Walker Fucking Christ, I thought. There would be stretch marks. Stretch marks--the humiliation!
Ristem bent over me and surveyed the groundcover stretched over my abdominal landscape with some alarm. "You will be wanting to, ahem, relieve yourself, no? I mean, you waited until now, yes?"
"Yes, for God's sake. Look at me! Do I look relieved? Does it look like I relieved myself? Does this look like relief to you?"
"Well, very good then. I'll get you a glass of something that should help you feel better."
"No Ristem. I asked you a question. Does this look like relief to you?" I pulled my shirt up to reveal the vast bedrock beneath the groundcover. Lord! There they were. The stretch marks, along with great blooming bruises where my vasculature had been stretched to rupture. It was a wonder I felt no pain.
"Shit," he said. "No! Please, put it away. They'll take you to a hospital, man. All will be for naught."
I pounded my fist onto the table. "Dammit Ristem! I want to know what this looks like to you. Does it look like relief? Because it sure as shit doesn't look that way to me."
"All right. No. No!" he hissed. "It doesn't look like relief. Thank you for holding it. Now please cover yourself. You don't realize what kind of danger you'd be in if they took you to a hospital. All of us would, but you especially. They wouldn't be able to help you there, Gunnar. Only we have what it'll take for you to be able to relieve yourself."
I complied by stretching my shirt down over the obscene formation.
"Good. Now Gunnar. Let me get you something to drink. It's what you need. Just sit there and try to look normal."
Ristem sailed away and came breezing back on a cushion of air. He had trimmed his goatee and waxed it so that it tapered into a perfect geometrical point set off by the extreme pallor of his face. He had black eyes like gleaming coals; these and the goatee seemed to be floating in a pale cloud. He placed a glass of red liquid on the table. It was a shade of deep, dull burgundy. I scowled at it. "Is this going to freeze me down like that shit last night?"
"No, no chance of that. And please don't call it shit, Gunnar. Go on, drink it. Şerefe."
I put it to my lips and drew a small sip off the top. It tasted like a slurry of charcoal and sugar and salt. There was no alcohol.
"This shit better be on the house," I said. Ristem stood over me with his arms crossed, saying nothing. I sighed and put the potion back to my lips. I caught a glimpse of Merwan looking at us from the other side of the street as I turned the glass up and threw my head back to drain it.
"Tebrikler!" said Ristem. "Now let me show you the way to a first-rate toilet facility."
"Yes," I said, suddenly feeling quite euphoric. "You really do have first-rate facilities here. Especially that remarkable sink."
"Ah. Yes, you're right, Gunnar." Ristem was leading me by the hand. We were headed for the door. "They are very nice. But I'm taking you to a different toilet now, one designed to withstand even the largest, shall we say, disturbances. I am sure you will find it entirely to your liking." Ristem undid his waiter's smock with one hand as we wove up İstiklal through the crowd. Once off, he bunched it up and flung it into the gutter in mockery of whatever tips or receipts may have been inside. I became aware of an urgency lacing my euphoria. I would have to drop this thing off soon, or else lose it in the street.
"Are we there yet?" I barely managed to get the words out.
"Yes, Gunnar. Here we are." We came to a stop in front of a very slender building that rose a full six stories off the street. Merwan produced a card key from his wallet and let us in. I hadn't been aware that he was with us until then. The inside of this building consisted of a narrow foyer with a checkerboard floor that led straight to a slim, closed door with a stairwell that coiled up and down off to the right.
"Ugh. Thank God," I moaned. "Where's the shitter?"
Ristem leveled a frank gaze at me. "It's on the top floor. Think you'll make it?"
"Gyegh."
As if on cue, my two friends stripped my lower half bare. Before I could say a word, one of them had stoppered me with a buttplug. I don't know who did the honors, but the honors were done. I guess they kept just about everything handy. The proud Kurdish nationalists then bent down and took hold of my legs beneath the knees, bearing me up like some obese chieftain. Hardly pausing for breath, they hustled me up the stairs, all six flights, and with a coordinate strength I could not help but find noteworthy, other circumstances notwithstanding. A really fine young pair of Kurds in spite of everything. Each story the same as the first: Floors of black and white tile, a narrow foyer flowing to the same narrow door, stairs leading up and stairs leading down. Soon we were there. They set me on my feet. Merwan indicated the door directly in front of me. "You'll find everything you need in there. Take your time, don't be afraid, and good luck. We'll be waiting in the street."
"But what if it's the drizzling shits and I..."
"Long live the Kurdish nation!" Ristem intoned. At this my two friends turned on their heels and sprinted down the stairs. There was nothing left for me to do but wobble gingerly toward the door. It opened inward to reveal a toilet. The bowl rose about as high off the floor as normal toilets do, but it was a great deal wider; the size perhaps, of an old village well, the seat astride which resembled a gigantic slab with an ass-sized cavity taken out of the middle forward part of it. I approached, reaching around for the stopper. Looking inside, I saw that the bottom of the bowl sank a good foot below the level of the floor, and that the siphon tube that received the waste was as long around as the neck of a bull. The flushing mechanism was controlled by a slender cord directly aft of the toilet. Another feature was a handlebar that rose from the floor before the toilet, which I was immediately glad for. Some shits ride Cadillac-smooth and call for suede and Scotch; others buck like Broncos and call for something to hold on to. Panting, I turned around, eased the plug out, and sat down. There was a grayish material sticking to the plug. I sniffed it, but it did not smell like shit. More like a slightly adulterated version of that frigid Ararat sütlaç. I threw it against the door in disgust. Something rumbled inside me; I seized the handlebar and leaned into my task. Such a mundane activity--and yet I knew it was steeped in higher meaning. It started coming out. And how it came! By the yard I paid it out, almost of its own accord really. Imagine: All that swelling, and yet there was nothing particularly laborious about getting it out. If you must know, I hardly had to squeeze at all. In consistency, in assfeel--a qualitative metric that is to stool appraisal as mouthfeel is to beer appraisal--it was rather like Jell-O, only firmer, like something halfway between Jell-O and silicone and uniform throughout, never bulging or tapering, never gloopy or runny or bumpy or peppered by gas. I held on and the stuff kept coming. I could both see and feel my stomach deflating as I paid it out. In the space of a minute, it went from a bursting gibbosity to a sad sack, spent and bruised. And then it was over. The last of it exited with a reluctant sucking noise, as if it had been trying to pull my entrails along with it, and then the whole narrow chamber smelled like sütlaç that had gone off; I could feel my asshole gaping and puckering in shameful solidarity with a certain widely disseminated genre of film. Weak in the knees, I dragged myself up to look at what I had wrought. I was surprised to see that practically none of it had accumulated in the bowl. Instead, it appeared to have snaked its way out the back, over the hump in the siphon tube, and God knew how many yards down the plumbing. It was dim looking down at it through the seat aperture, but on the tail end of it, bobbing just above the water line, I thought I could see some of what had to be blood. I suppose this was only natural given the somatic expansion I had just been through. But was it natural, I wondered, that it should appear to be not so much flecking the matter as webbing it, networking it? Also -- and again I couldn't be sure -- I had the disquieting impression that the stuff was expanding against the exit pipe even as I watched.

Shuttering in revulsion, I reached for the cord and pulled. At first there was a rumble from somewhere far below; then came the rushing, the whooshing--a hurtling, roaring, sucking sound that culminated in such an access of water howling through the toilet that I thought the pipes must surely explode and inundate the whole building. But they held, and by and by the tremendous flush gave way to the vacuous tranquility left in the wake of a violent storm. I lurched forward and across the threshold, leaving the buttplug where it was as I closed the door.
Depleted and spent as I was, I had a time of it getting down the stairs. But down them I got, and Ristem and Merwan were in the street waiting for me when I emerged. Both had their arms crossed, above which they were smiling taut, grim smiles.
"And so it is done," said Ristem.
"Now all we must do is wait."
I leaned on them for support and watched people pass as we waited. People passed: Beggars, bakers, tourists, peons, cops, shoemakers, pipe fitters, hustlers of every stripe. There were shouts, sales pitches, oohs, aahs, oaths, insults, come-ons, shoot-downs, everything. Then it happened. Somewhere in the middle distance, there was a sound between a pop and a boom. Then came another, this one closer. Then a manhole cover no more than 50 feet from where we stood burst its casing, born on a tide of burbling excrement. Pop! Pop! Boom! The entire sewer system gave out as we leaned against the building and looked on easily.
But then the shit coalesced and began to move things. Slowly at first, gently. Just moving nutshells and assorted scraps. But then with increased speed and augmented flow, the throughout of cubic meters of shit per second mounting and swelling until İstiklal began to resemble a swift, rain-swollen river, roaring now, sweeping away all the nut vendors and lotto salesmen and tourists and touts and cops indiscriminately, bowling them over, submerging them, knocking them senseless, drowning them, killing them as we looked on, no longer easily, but holding on for dear life in the relative refuge of a building portico fitted with stout railings on either side. I could hear howls and screams through the churn and roar of this unholy cloacal river. Over these, in either ear, I could hear my Kurdish friends' maniacal laughter. "We did it!" Ristem yelled. "You have unleashed the waters of Ararat!"
"What he means to say," said Merwan, "is that you are now a hero of the Kurdish people, and no longer just a degenerate writer!"
I cast my gaze up the torrent that the city's main pedestrian thoroughfare had become. I inclined my head and heard ghostly licks of uproarious upstream laughter carrying on the current like fish schooling to sea.

Asphodel

I've been meaning these last months to write a story in which my character's life is destroyed as the indirect result of a decision to take three foundling kittens into his home. Here goes. The setting is Williamsburg, Brooklyn--birthplace of Henry Miller--in our paranoid-psychotic infrahuman modern times. The character is a sympathetic sort of guy. Will. Let's say he works in a bar, eight to four, a couple-three days a week. He has perhaps a bit of a drinking problem, maybe laced with a bit of a cocaine habit to see him through the witching hours and the after hours and the wherehavetheygone hours in between. But he's straight with the till--a good thing when you have a boss who is vigilant and absolutely ruthless--and customers like him as much for his touch with the telling of a story as for the attentive set of his face whenever he lends an ear, which is often. One sweaty morning in the summertime he comes stumbling down his bleak block after a shift and the perfunctory revel, his face a pasty setting for black-rimmed sockets and the scorched eyes they englobe. It's about six in the morning, give or take. Things are starting to come into view, and they don't look too appealing. Just the usual motley walls of blank-eyed hopelessness on either side, the usual buildings sagging under the multi-generational burden of petty failures and abnegation and stunted greed. A sunbleached Puerto Rican flag in a window here, a swank new tower carved out of the block and posted to a vacant destiny among the warrens. Just a modern cut out, a modern city setting where everything is incoherent from the bottom up, and where nothing, as Henry Miller might have put it, has ever happened. A couple doors short of his own he hears a cry for help and stops. There is a little rustle from the trash cove. This battered little building is the Pentecostal Church of Nuestro Creador y Salvador, and the thin yowling is coming from a bag of kittens put out to meet their destiny among last night's stubbed butts and fallen soldiers. Our hero knows they are before opening the bag. He hesitates in deference to habitual thoughts of sleep preceded by a quick wank, but soon resolves on a course of stooping and scooping. When he looks inside there are four kittens, four empty bottles of Old English 800, and too many cigarette butts to count. One kitten is already dead, and this one he removes. After staring at it for a long second he squats down and squeezes it through the choked ribs of a storm drain. He stands up and sees his super standing two houses down on his buildings stoop, more than slightly drunk.
Our hero makes for the house with the bag.
What you got there, jefe.
Kittens. Gatitos.
Shit. What you want with them fucks for? Nothing but trouble, you ask me. Louder than a motherfucker too. You want I'll call animal control right now. 311 that shit. Maybe sit down and have a drink while we wait. I know you like to knock back a few--I seen it in your trash.
Just let me by Joe. I've got to see to them.
A long whistle as our hero mounts the creaking stairs.
Ay ay ay, el tipo tiene problemas.
Upstairs he manages to warm the cats up on a litter of rags heated from beneath by a hot bottle. He manages to get some milk into them through the applicator of a caulking gun he'd bought only yesterday and which his boss wants him to seal some cracks with at the bar. The gun works well for this feline application. A couple rounds each and their cries fade into an adorable snooze.
It's a renewed bout of cries for more milk, more warmth, more touches, more, that brings his downstairs neighbor to the door at around one in the afternoon. She is a single woman on the far side of a slow and desperate fade to 50 and fading fast and without much of a silver lining to the looming menopausal thunderhead, in our hero's humble opinion. At first he ignores the knocking. But the kittens keep up their chorus, and the knocking goes on.
Will! What is going on up here? Will!
He comes to the door as is, that is to say in boxers filled out with a half-leavened morning baguette. He opens, and for a moment they just stand there. The kittens have cut their mewling, and his baguette has collapsed under her stony stare. A spirit or force seems to be grappling with an opposed spirit or force on the threshold, which is a threshold in name only, that is, it doesn't exist, because everything in this building is of the shoddiest, most slovenly workmanship, and what a word to use for what it was, for everything that it really was, because if there had been a threshold, if only there had been one, just the most nominal of unfinished planks or tacked down rubber runners, then the grappling of forces on that threshold might have taken a different turn or been resolved right there, which would have altered the outcome of our hero's fresh feline paternity, so that in fact we may not have settled on this particular hero or purlieu in the first place. Will in his patch of threshold-barren Williamsburg. In a sense this threshold, this void in place of a brink, is the very fulcrum of our narration.
What is it? What do you want?
I don't want anything. I just came to see about the commotion.
Commotion? I don't know what you're talking about Lynn. I've been sleeping up here.
Sleeping away the best part of the day, that's great. You have cats up here don't you?
Huh?
Cats. Where did you get them? What are they doing here?
Okay. Sure. You heard right. I found some kittens in the garbage. They were out there like any old bagful of eggshells or banana peels. Actually they had been thrown away with the aftermath of some asshole's good time. So I brought them up here to bring them around. Set them on the right path so to speak.
Huh. Her head gave a little equine toss meant to convey resolute cunning and savoir-assassiner, but which communicated little more than dumb animal opposition. Our hero knew it had to be countered with the blunt force of contempt, he knew it deep down, but he was also a superficially nice guy whose instincts had been pummeled into submission.
You sure they weren't yours in the first place?
What?
I mean if you found them with a bunch of beer bottles in the garbage, maybe you're the one who them out.
I found them a little ways down the street.
Snooping around in other people's business I see. This keeps getting better and better. You know you can't have cats in the apartment building. You know that, right? It says in the contract.
Yeah, Lynn, I know. I know. But someone had thrown them away, you know? They were out there in a garbage bag like they were, I don't know, somebody's friggin pizza crusts. One of them was already dead. But they...a cat's a cat. I mean they're alive. Do you know what I mean?
Oh sure. I heard about the dead one. All Joe saw was you shoving a cat through the sewer grate. Says he doesn't know what happened before that.
What do you mean happened before that? You better watch what you're saying Lynn. That's a lie, and it's not one that Joe would make up.
Her eyes louvered down to slits that admitted nothing but fodder for her prejudice and gave off nothing but her vile animal loathing.
What I mean, Will, is that you have to get rid of them. I mean they have to go. All of them. I'm not going to share a building with a contract breaker. I don't care how you do it. You can go ahead and do whatever kind of sick shit you had planned for them in the first place for all I care. But I don't want to hear them after tomorrow, you hear.
Our hero is speechless. The hateful cunning in his neighbor's eyes has stunned him like a blow. She remains standing there as he closes the door, very slowly.
Sanctity of contracts, Will, she says from the other side of the waferboard door. We'd all be living like animals without contracts.
He engages the cheap lock, also very slowly, and then hears no more. He must shake himself free of the notion that there is a miasma escaping her person and working its tendrilous way in tendrils across his floor. The cats strike up a howl to beat the band again.
He places a can of tuna and a splash each of cream and milk in the smoothie blender.
The electric pulse and yowl of the motor quiets them momentarily. They are also quiet, each in its turn, as they suckle their impromptu slurry through the applicator tip of the caulking gun. Now they pass out a heap after guzzling down as much as they can. Each is a furry, heaving ball no bigger than his fist. They are very warm, and very lovable, and the thought of abandoning them to the indifferent course of nature's terrorized and all but mechanized remnant makes his stomach writhe. Sanctity of contracts--phooey.

~

It's the next morning at roughly the same hour as we joined Will to begin with. He's ambling down his blighted street with a yowling box in his grip. He's got a head full of stars and exclamation marks and bubbles and scorched visions of profligacy that are burning themselves out even as they form; his wallet is larded with over $400 in tips, and his stride is the sprightlier for the minor bulge of a tight bag of the sweet white stuff he puts up his nose to feel interestedly exhilarated and interestingly exhilarating. The yowling box is where the kittens are. He'd stashed them under the bar on his shift. It wasn't ideal, but he'd been able to keep them cozy by replenishing the warming bottle from time to time. J-Bone would never have allowed it. Or he may have charged our hero a docking fee. But the risk of discovery was not great. If the cats had cried, neither he nor anyone else would have heard it. It was that kind of night.
Joe is on the stoop when Will steps up. He smells as malty as a midsummer's Milwaukee day stewing inside an isobar of stagnant brewery fumes. His eyes are red, cracked, incoherent. There are two finished 40s at his feet, pertly arranged in fact, their labels standing jauntily at attention -- the building superintendent requires everything to be in its place -- and he is begging Will for enough pesos to go buy another.
To round me out, Will. Can't stand the fucking dawn. You give me two dolla and I'll bring the darkness back. You wait and see. And what the fuck you doing with them cats for. Ain't no good going to come of it. That Lynn saying all sort of shit about you and them gatitos. I don't know nothin about that, but I do know they's, what you blancitos call it, a liability. A fucking liability is what they are. Come on, we'll get us a couple beers and I'll set you straight son.
Will gives him a two dollar bill and a pat on the shoulder.
Vaya con suerte, amigo. And to all a good night.
Will stops short on his way through the door. Hey Joe. His blotto superintendent looks up with entropic resignation the guttering goodwill of the wasted.
Yeah?
You might want to pack it in. Cops will nail you for all kinds of shit the way you're looking. And you've got all the darkness you could want down there anyway.
Joe lives in the basement in what amounts to little more than a hutch between the boiler and the caged storage area. Will has seen it, the squalor of it fit to summon memories of fictional Hindu servants who asked nothing of the world and got it. But it is his place to lay his head, and since it is offered in exchange for little more than keeping the trash bay tidy and making noises about rent around the turn of the month, it leaves him free to pursue his enthusiasm for drink with the ardor it deserves.
Upstairs Will prepares a warm welcome home slurry for the kittens. All three are variations on the common theme of creamed coffee and creosote. One is coffee-splotched creosote. Another is coffee flecked with creosote. The third is a segmented animal with alternating ringlets of coffee and creosote. This one has a brown head and a black eye. Piratical. He beds them down, whispers that they must be quiet to keep out of trouble, pops three OutSmarted's® and goes to bed. He must sleep. There are many surplus beers in his system, and his pseudo girlfriend is coming over at noon to cook him lunch.

~

Boom boom boom. The door. Noon. Time to wake up. Boom boom boom. Noon already? Shit. But why is Tricia knocking so hard?
Animal Control!
Animal Con...the dogcatcher? What do you want?
Animal Control! It's a woman. The voice is labored and brutal, as if the sound waves were having trouble getting around a glistening set of fangs.
Boom boom boom.
Animal Control! Open up in there. I'm here on a complaint.
Boom boom boom.
Come on pal. Nobody hides from a complaint to the ACU in this town. Let's go on and get this over with.
Our hero rolls out of bed with his head pickled and his reproductive apparatus shriveled. He checks the kittens on the way to the door, the cheap building rattling in its frame under his footfall. The cats are sleeping still, but their crib is thoroughly soiled by the aftermath of the tuna slurry they'd been scroffling down so greedily. The cloudsoaked day is filtering in weakly through the skylight and giving the creamy little turds a dull sheen like stage props.
Boom boom boom.
Will looks from the cats to the door and back to the cats. In a flash he's placed kits and caboodle in the oven and tottered over to open the door.
Can I help you?
I see you just woke up. The Animal Control official is built on the model of a sparkplug or a fire hydrant, with vague female traits. She is rippling with enforcement zeal. To look at her is to dread the boundless energy she will lavish on shoveling the dung of her dignified office entitles her to dish out. She is wearing thick rubber gloves and a clunky single-piece uniform. She carries an electronic dictation pad, a GPS map, a cell phone, a flashlight, riot cuffs, and a tranquilizer gun. Will can feel his balls creeping up toward some further rebate of abdominal refuge.
Yes, thanks to you. Not that you're asking. Can I help you?
You know what buddy? You better wake up to the reality of the situation you're in.
Will looks at her in consternation, then begins to rub his eyes with luxurious apathy. Okay. What might that be?
Don't get smart with me now buddy. I've had a complaint about unlicensed felines up here. That makes them a health hazard, and potentially rabid. The city takes violations of the animal code very seriously. I'm going to need to have a look around. And put a shirt on for Chrissake.
A look around? What is this? You can't just barge in here like that. Like some kind of cop. And even cops need warrants.
The official crosses the threshold and sidesteps her way into the apartment.
It's a brave new town buddy. And this isn't your fucking granddaddy's animal control unit. We've got an enhanced mandate. Power of arrest, animal or human. It's a matter of public safety. Or so I'm told.
An I-am-become-death-by-bylaw smile plays across her unrelenting face: And trust me. You don't want to get written up for getting smart with a city official. Not in today's day and age. You'd be lucky to get off on a humble. And if you don't get a shirt on soon I'll hit you with failure to comply. I don't need to be staring up at some pasty marshmallow ass man tits.
Our hero stands speechless. He simply stands there, shriveled and paralyzed by the fateful feeling that he would have done better to stay in bed. The official begins her stocktaking by rummaging through his cupboard. He looks on as though it were someone else's dignity that were being stepped over and across, unable to summon in his heart the wherewithal that dwells in a badge. Why is she looking through his cupboard?
Gotta make sure you're not running a cat factory out of this dump. A lot of litter or feed could mean a date with a commercial felony charge for being a breeder. And I hear he don't take no for an answer.
The reality of the situation is dawning on his mind like a throbbing pustule. A mounting, looming, gathering, brimful to bursting pustule, so tender, outrageous and humiliating that it impedes any willful action or movement and is waiting only for its own cathartic explosion in obedience to immutable natural laws. Will thinks and feels nothing. It is his destiny that is undergoing a mutation while groping about in the void of a world that is beyond all redemption.
The foulmouthed sparkplug is carrying a taser. The little bitch in the city's employ is prodding the pillows on his couch, her mouth writhing in mock disgust. She is dumping a box of printer paper on the laminate floor. She is inspecting his freezer and flinging his TV dinners across the room. Moving on to the refrigerator, she takes his jug of milk and pours it down the sink.

This vitamin D shit’s no good for you. This here is why you’ve got them love handles.

Behind where the milk was she finds the applicator tip of the silicone gun.

Jesus. I’m not even gonna ask.

She manages to spew forth a few more insults before chancing on the oven and pulling out the squirreled boodle with a cadaverous leer.
Why you sick fuck. I knew you were a sick fuck. You're a, what do they call it, a degenerate. Yeah, that's what you are. A fucking degenerate. What's this you've got here? A little kitten stew with shit sauce? I bet you were about to turn the dial when I showed up. I have seen a lot of stuff on this job, believe me you. But this here just takes the cake pal. You know what? I'm really glad I picked up this call this morning. It makes my day whenever I can prevent a sick fuck from acting out on whatever goes on in his perverted little head. You know what happens now asshole? Now we’re gonna take a ride down to Riker’s and…
Will stops hearing the words when he becomes aware of Trisha's delicate steps mounting the grimy flight up to the first floor landing. Before he knows what he is doing, the pustule has exploded, and Will’s destiny has mutated. He has the sparkplug functionary by the throat and the wrist of her tazing hand. The cat box squails on to the floor in an anguished flurry of writhing fur and shit.
Our hero says not a word as he marches the intruder out the door and onto the squalid landing.
Uh, what’s going on here? Is everything all right?
What the fuck?
Come on up, Trisha. Don't worry. I'll explain in a sec. There you go. Just slip past me now. All right.
Once Trisha is clear, Will flings the animal control beast down the stairs. She tumbles onto the landing with a squeal before springing to her feet and crow-hopping down the next flight and out of the building as fast as her wrenched feet will take her. From the street he can hear her yelling: You know what you just did, you sick fuck? You brought the law down on your head. Assaulting a city official, unlicensed feline ownership, preparation of banned foodstuffs, felony conspiracy to prevent the discharge of sworn duty. It'll land on you a thousand ways. And you'll never get it off.
Will says nothing. He is shaking from the exertion of his restraint. The kittens are howling, clawing in abjection at the floor and trailing a fecal slime. Trisha's is frozen in a bloodless question. For a time she says nothing. The door is closed, but our hero knows the waferboard will keep nothing out.
Will moves to pick up the kittens. Two of the three have cracked open a eyelid each. Some first mug for you to see. Taking them to the bathroom he draws warm water into the slimed sink and begins the telling. He talks as he washes.
...and that's just when you came up the stairs.
I just...wow. I can't believe you did that. I mean, I understand that you would have wanted to. But to a sworn dogcatcher...
Neither can I.
Now what? Our plan for me to cook you lunch is pretty much out the window. She's on her way to get backup right now. And she's right. You won't be able to throw those cops down the stairs. Or the charges they’ll bring.
You don’t think I can explain this to them and make them see the truth? I mean she had no right coming in like that.
Well. That's what I used to hear people say. I'm not so sure that means much unless you have a fancy lawyer. Have you been sleeping for the last 15 years, Will? Cops don’t need your truth—they’re armed with cop truth.
The cats have been soaped up and dunked and agitated and rinsed and are howling for all they're worth. Will is patting them dry slowly and methodically.
Maybe you're right at that, Tricia. But what am I to do? Run away? Come on. I'll stand these bastards down right here, once and for all. I don't fucking care what happens. It’s not right. These cats are life. Everything else -- Will is speaking woodenly, his tongue caught in indignation’s vice, and his nose has drained to reveal the waxen pallor of bridge and cartilage -- everything else is death. I’m not going to take it. A world that would take these cats away from me is not worth living in. If you want to get out of here, I don't blame you. By all means. But if not, I want you to make me lunch like you mean it. You'll been my Bonnie, and together we can go out in the hail of glory we glimpse in between dreams.
Will is smiling the rueful smile of the only-half-joking, his generation's sardonic detachment suddenly electrifies by an unlawful allegiance to life.
You can't be serious. But a look convinces her that he is. Perfectly so. Her smile shatters, she shakes her head. But there are other ways… She is backing toward the brinkless door.
It'd be good to have a witness, Trisha. Whether for the trial or to get the word out to my friends if I, you know, can't. And there is no other way. This moment will come, sooner or later, for us all. It's how we live now. My moment has come, and I'm determined exist as a free and whole man, if only in that fraction of a second between announcing my freedom and being destroyed.
She stammers that she can’t. No. Don’t tell me you really think this is going to help the cats?
I don't. They've been posted to a greater battle now, grunts in the trenches of the one truly just and truly hopeless war...look here Trisha, you don't have to be my accomplice or anything -- just squirrel yourself away in the cabinet under the sink and peek through the crack at me. It'll be your private screening.
Uh-ugh, she says, squirming at the thought of being down among the molds and the dust bunnies and the rinds and the scraps and the crumbs and the grim harvest of mouse droppings. You've lost your mind, Will. You can't stand off the law over a few kittens you found in the street. She throws up her arms. Why do I always get involved with these fanatics? Screw this. I'm going.
She picks up her groceries and goes.
Will slumps into the wall and slides down onto his heels as he watches the last of her hair trail out of view. She leaves the door open behind her. After a moment, he puts a goodly portion of the powder from the comforting knot in his jeans up his nose. The better to await what's coming. The kittens are fast asleep in his lap as he wipes his nose clean and stares at the blank beyond his open door with the lucidity of a savage.
His hackles are standing on end. His hands have seized into atavistic claws -- the better to eviscerate the words and justifications coined by the anarchic machine of law scorned -- and his heart is pumping a cold electric fire that shimmers through in the animal sweat on his skin. He wonders if they'll come by knocking or by SWATing his door in. He wonders if they'll zip through his window like commandos. He wonders if he'll be facing dogcatcher cops, or catcatcher warfighters, or mancatcher robots. He wonders if he'll get to make his eloquent and impassioned entreaty before catching one. He wonders if he'll be questioned or read his rights, hogtied or full nelsoned, cuffed, gutpunched, tasered, shot or brought to heel by God knew what other technology in the toolkit of domination. Will they be accompanied by Lynn, or by the animal control beast, or by Joe, or by all three? He wonders if he can count on J-Bone to bail him out if his nerve fails him, or if it might be more reasonable to expect the man to act on the call as a tip to loot his apartment. The man is ruthless. He wonders what his dead mother would think, or his drunk father. He wonders what his grandfather or his father before him would make of the town and the country and the time he lived in, or this cookie-cutter production and wholesale destruction of bodies and souls. Cat, dog, man, inframan, all born to be surveilled, fined, neutered, taxed or executed as the occasion warranted. He wonders if he should go quietly or if he should feign going quietly before murdering them all with the feline alacrity of the screen hero. He wonders whether to receive them in the three-point stance or the suckerpunch slouch. He wonders if he’ll see Trisha again, and under what circumstances. He wonders what she will tell people if he doesn't have a chance to speak for himself. He wonders if he is special or normal, silly or heroic, vain or insane. What does he want to be? Slippage of tense: He wondered. All these things and more he wondered, all the livelong day, the questions and wonderment and the hopped up caustic loathing by and by giving way to a blankness, a numbness, then sleep. Still they do not come. He is awoken toward evening by a scrabbling and a tripartite bout of the drizzling shits playing out on his lap.
Shit! His shift is coming up soon. He jumps up, straightens himself out, cleans and feeds the kittens, takes a shower, hops into some clothes without the stench of shit on them, bad shit, has a bump of cocaine off the bridge of his hand, good shit, and leaves for the bar, kitten crib disguised as a toolbox in tow.
Nightfall in the big city. Huge pleasure trucks pass by pumping reggaeton and raw hatred as he goes. The sewers belch and burble with unseen excrescences as he goes. The cars and people and dogs all stop and go, as he goes, according to the mechanical rhythm of the maniac. Sunset like a closing door. The day's dying rays wash the brick building a melancholy shade of tar-flecked crimson.
A few steps more and he ducks his head into the refugium of The Gamboling Stag. Only his boss is there so far. J-Bone, absolutely ruthless. Will nods his head, cuts the boss man a berth that is wide, but not too wide, and takes the toolbox down to the basement. He's long in tucking them in, making sure they’re all straddling the warming bottle and at least partially camouflaged by a ratchet set and a spool of twine. The process takes nearly 10 minutes. In his current state everything must be just so; this is the thing that makes him a good bartender. He's right with the measure, right with the crush and the drizzle, right with the foam and right with the till, as we have mentioned. The trouble of course is that if he wants to keep these qualities from tailing off, he needs to keep stoking his precision, so to speak, all night long. Which is not so much trouble so long as he can access the bathroom from time to time, in fact it adds an element of intrigue, and even on the packed nights when he cannot our hero has his ways, he sure does, he can line up a nice snorting gallery along the well, little bumps of snow on the caps of the bottles that line the speed rack, it's just a matter of taking another second or two to get the caps off, leaning in for a more intimate inspection, as it were.
The evening starts off slow, but starts gathering momentum fast. After-work whistle wetters drifting in and out, idiot kids whose faces go slacker and stupider after two beers that send them caroming off the bar to their next stochastic destination in life, a weasel-eyed kid from the hood who nurses a water as he cases the place, a couple of regulars who sail in and moor at their stools, pilgrims on the alcoholic seas tying off to tie one on, this night no different than the last. One of them has lost his job at the hard-on factory. Good old Dick Pill Bill. He orders a frugal rye, giving Will a chance to bend over and knock off the first duck in his little gallery of bumps to be. Dick Pill Bill wants to talk about the limp corporate fucks engorging themselves on his flagging pension; Will considers sharing his own drama, but there's no point airing his laundry just yet. No -- Will serves the rye and takes the money with a nod and a confidential smile. Will pours and polishes, soaks and scrubs, crushes and grates, mixes the tracks, cards the kids and shepherds all the lost souls with the same precision he lavishes on the drinks. An attentive mixologist, he cruises up and down the counter with the regularity of a pendulum, or drunks to their cups, replenishing the fount of merriment just as it begins to run dry, neglecting none, pleasing all, lending an ear when needed but with an eye cocked toward the far side of the bar just in case, rattling off the esoteric cockamamie specials as if they'd been the words to a fairytale heard in the cradle. Yes. Will is a born bartender, and the tips flow to him like drool from the mouth of an imbecile. Then he sees Trisha walk in. She's with another guy. A galootish Poindexter type in a woodblock suit that would make him look out of place at his own wake.
It takes Trisha some time to notice he's tending bar tonight. Now she sees him and flashes a broken smile and navigates the shoals between the barstools and the open alcoholic sea.
What are you doing this side of central booking? Did you gun down the entire force?
Ha. You know, I sat there for hours, and no one had the civic decency to show up. Maybe that dogcatcher was just some kind of freelancer working an angle. Maybe she's a friend of Lynn’s. They seem to be in about the same league. I don't know. The thing is, even if she wasn't the law, she could still law me. Either way, I was ready for whatever was coming. Drink?
Sure. A gin twist for me, and a Bartleby for my friend.
A Bartleby?
He'd prefer not to wet his whistle.
Good one. So why bother sidling up to the Stag? Who is that rube?
Tricia does not flinch. Can't you tell? He's an admirer.
That was quick. Thought you might have stayed in for a night or two. You know, to commemorate my blaze of glory.
A quaint thought, Will. I thought I might stay competitive as long as I was going to be on the market. Feminine charm does have a way of going into abeyance unless exercised. And hey, there was no blaze of glory. Here you are.
Here I am, yes. And here you are with that tall order of milquetoast.
Well. This little word was not uttered in challenge or under cloak of irony or as a fledgling overture of contrition. Just a bald corroboration, a neutral marker, a tick in the yes column of the world's infinite ledger of meaningless fact.
Will reaches down for a whiskey along the speed rack without moving his eyes off her perfectly frank and shameless mien. He needs a drink badly and doesn't care that he won't feel it.
And you know what Trisha? he says between two shots thrown down with mechanical efficiency. I didn't get any lunch today. I ate nothing.
But I bet you had plenty of that rhino sweetmeat to keep you going, didn't you?
Will hands her the fizz, lovingly garnished with a spiral of lemon worked into a heart.

Now it’s his turn to tick the ledger. Well.
She takes her drink and walks away.
Hey! he calls after her. That'll be eight fifty. She sits down with her piece of lumber and ignores our hero.
Try as he might, Will usually finds it difficult as hell to get drunk when he's skiing, as chasing the cocaine high is known in the mock-imaginative parlance of his times. But not tonight. Tonight he takes to the whusk with the inverted vengeance of the antihero betrayed, and on an empty stomach is able not only to overtake the giddy crystalline rush of his good time friend the rhino sweetmeat, but to leave it churning it in the wake of the incremental paralysis that comes with the rapture of deepest alcoholic inundation. Chasing the rapture, he hangs tight with regulars and casuals alike for five rounds, eight rounds, ten rounds, twelve, his tongue forming numb and muddled maledictions at the empty world from drink to drink for failing, even in this moment of ultimate betrayal, to accord him the standing of a man to be reckoned with.

He drinks with everyone and the sheer pace of it—every time he knocks one back he has another as the deputized representative of the house—is posting his beak to an inevitable appointment with the battle-scarred bartop. Tricia and her lump of cheese scamper off somewhere in that centrifugal blur. And good fucking riddance. Someone get me another drink. I mean pour yourself another drink you piece of shit. When beak slams into oak, a watchful J-Bone is there to drag him across the floor and fling him into a slime-covered booth. After some time he returns with a cold glass of water and splashes it in our hero's face, determined to suck Will's tips back into the till to make up for lost pours. J-Bone, as we know, is absolutely ruthless.
Soon Will is revived. Beak bobbing and back to guzzling with the lushest, he's telling jokes and feeling fine, spinning yarns and feeling tits, grinding up on whatever female flotsam drifts by close enough to starboard. Why starboard? Because port's out of the question the way he's listing now. All hands to starboard. Loose the nets and ready the harpoon!
The fervid gambit to defeat time by dissolving it into spirit does work in a sense. Will retreats into the furthest refuge of himself and becomes someone else. Some thing else, a pure meat machine pledged to the monomaniac desire to transcend all the perfidy of the world, if only for a moment, even if it's fake -- shit -- even if he can't remember a damn thing about it. And so the hours of the night slide into the abyss. Will does tell a dozen people about the cats and how the law intends to crush him for the audacity of his illicit feline paternity. His account is very lucid, and yet there isn’t a person in the bar who believes him. The tale inspires uproarious laughter, rounds of drinks, shots on the house, tits in his face. When he stands up on a barstool and cries that this is the last time they'll all be drinking together, and he means it, he is sprayed with beer and curses, cheers and kisses. The largest of his drinking companions pull him down, hoist him horizontal and parade him through the grimy reaches of the bar. By dawn he is looking at a tufted crack whose gate his floppy noodle is failing abjectly to crash. J-Bone is at the other end, working her head up and down, his face drawn into a blank mask. Even now he is asking Will to pay for his drinks. Ruthless. This scene is the only one that lodges in his head firmly enough for him to salvage amid the paroxysms of torment that wrack his head when he is awoken the following morning.
Boom boom boom. Police!
This is the much anticipated sound to which our poisoned hero and his floppy noodle are compelled to withdraw from the drunkard’s sodden deadwood dreams.
Boom boom boom. Open up in there you sick fuck!
But our hero prefers to stay in bed. He lays on his back, prone to his destiny. Just his luck that his final stand should be playing out in the excruciating crucible of a brutal hangover. He lodges a bottle of pepper spray under the sheets with a parched croak.
Boom boom BAM. The door belts out a hollow thunder in its skewed frame.
Last chance before we bust it down numbnuts. Open up if you know what's good for you.
Will responds from bed, his voice hoarse and brutal under the burden of Lethe’s offices discharged. Come in if you must, but I will not open for you. No, my good gathered ladies and gents, I will not rise from this bed. But it will comfort you to know, he concludes with a mountainous sigh, that there is no threshold you'd risk stubbing your toes on as you come in.
From beyond the waferboard drumskin of his front door Will can hear first the hushed shadows of words—he’s aggressive—then a guttural atavistic roar which he knows for a fact partakes of language, but whose meaning is as remote to him as if it were coming from the howling depths of the earth. The demolition of his door is hardly audible in the wake of this roar.
Soon they are over him, milling beside and at the base of his bed -- alongside and abase and around owing to the lack of space in overpriced warrens such as the one where our hero lays his head. But we digress. There are four of them. One is brandishing a greasy leaf of paper authorizing his conduct--a carte blanche graisseuse, like.
You're some kind of joker, aren't you pal? Our hero’s interrogator is pumping the stained warrant up and down like a censer.
Officer?
Don't get cute with me pal. What kind of fucking name is Rusty Krustersson?
Will clears his throat. Is that what you dropped by to ask me, officer? In that case, I would've been happy to oblige you over the phone. Could have saved you the ride out here, not to mention the bruise you're going to have on your shoulder for laying into my door like that. That's going to feel a bit tender by the time you get off your shift. Drop by my work if you want. I'll see if I can’t mix something up to take the edge off.
Eyes narrow now, nostrils flare. You smartass piece of shit -- I said what kind of a name is Rusty Krustersson?
Er, well, begging your pardon officer, I don't see what that has to do with me. I don't know what kind of name that is. I guess it sounds like a name and an emcee might use at a country fair full of old hippies. What do you think?
Brooklyn’s finest leans in real close now. Our hero's nostrils are fucked by coffee-scented malice while his eyes fix on a shred of what must be bacon wedged between teeth stained by years of Beechnut Chew.
That name, asshole, was the one stenciled on the mailbox to this dump downstairs. So if your name isn't Rusty Krustersson, then we're looking at postal felony. Right boys?
Will is considering giving in to his negative preference. He is considering rolling over and burying himself in a pillow to give these vile hangover goblins a chance to return to the denatured ethers whence they came before doing what he must. A fiendish but lazy smile is playing on his lips when it hits him. The kittens. His coffee and creosote charges were still at the fucking bar.
Mr. Krustersson -- the hateful reek was still full in his face. It was seeping into his lungs, where the exchange of opposed essences was making his blood boil -- we've had a report that you're harboring unlicensed and potentially rabid felines. Can you confirm or deny that report?
Will looks hard at the burly lads ranged round the bed. Little chance he'll get through that wall of bebadged flesh.
Sure, he says. I deny it. I deny everything, including your right to sanction or forbid life.
What's that? Then I guess you won't mind if we have a look around?
No, he thinks. Not the wall of badges and service weapons. Can’t make it through that. The wall running along his bed, on the other hand, is just a flimsy screen of gypsum, with a single stud somewhere in the middle he remembers from an abortive attempt at shelving. Our hero replies as if from the depths of a dream, his eyes glassing unseen eternities: Yeah. Look around. Go ahead boys. Just do what you have to. But I think I'll have to skip out. At this point he takes a deep breath and plunges his hand into the sheets and between his legs to withdraw the pepper spray, bear spray in fact, the good capsicum shit for the burliest of predators, and he uses it to cloud his accusers' personal atmospheres before they can say snarl a single command, and as they choke he springs out of his proneness, takes a bounce off the mattress and sails through the wall in a hail of stone dust. The bebadged burlies are gibbering and writhing. Our hero bursts up protean and apotheotic from the shards, tottering and yawing for a second before righting his course, then surges across the shabbiness that has hitherto contained him with the spray still chugging before gliding stubless across his non-stub threshold. He bounds down the stairs in fours and in sixes and emerges wild into the day. The canister still hasn't run out, it's still clouding the way of any parasite who’d dare approach as he tears down the block to recover his neglected foundlings. Lots of damns and shits and whatthefucks from the good citizenry follow him as he steams barward under power of capsicum—a does a bullet from a heroic badge-bear who has somehow cried that good anti-bear capsicum stuff out of his eyes to the point where he can lean out the window and draw a bead on our chugging hero and drop him cold, faltering memories and forking destinies and floppy noodles and forestalled feline paternity and visions of heroic opposition all.
The bullet hits him in the neck; he falls to the ground with a sound like a door slamming onto a cushion of escaping air. Whoosh. J-Bone happens to turn the corner and catch our hero expiring. He leans down and says I'll be damned. Will clutches at his boss’s sleeve with his last ounce of strength as he is having his pockets emptied. The cats, he says. The cats--
As the sibylant ‘s’ in cats trails into the death rattle, J-Bone looks our hero square in his fluttering eye. The only thing I know about those talking cats is they’re unauthorized.

Once she can be sure that our hero has no hope of recovery, his neighbor Lynn draws her curtains and pronounces the words: Good riddance.