9/27/13
Reynard Descartes sat cross-legged at the bar, silently whispering secrets to strangers thorough subtle gestures of subterfuge. He once sowed seeds of discord among the masses, seducing the self into sabotage. Now, he was tired, unsatisfied with his life, signifying chaos consuming his very being.
I walked in without a prayer for salvation. A burnt out husk, a hollow persona, a dog without a bone. It was the twilight of my despair, robbed of all I believed in, caught fast in the web of venomous destiny, I was alone in the fiercest sense of the word.
A whiskey & beer welcomed me to end. I sipped both in alternating swigs, unable to really piece together thoughts without willing them into banishment. The bartender and clientele didn't bother to acknowledge my existence, which made me finally be able to sit in agreement with them.
Reynard sized up the soldier who sat inside me. He seized me with his attention, seeing past my shimmering insignificance, searing my soul with a semblance of satisfying acceptance. His fingertips danced along the bar sending soundwaves through the veins of wood, amplifying echoes of the dead tree.
I could not be moved, lest it was to raise the pint glass to my face. I had given up the ghost, surrendered the battle to the crushing weight of witchcraft. I was a cursed wolf, unable to howl to my satisfaction, despite the waning full moon that drifted casually in the night sky.
Reynard was a man of many means, who means what he says, yet does nothing overtly, so it surprised even him as he shifted stools down closer to my person. He sat just outside my personal space firing lasers from his eyes that shook me to my core. His clean cut, fancy demeanor dangled in my peripheral.
"'alo, my friend."
"Must have me mistaken," I grumble through the gravel in my throat, "I don't have any friends."
Another sip of whiskey helps choke down that inalienable truth, that cosmic constant. It's been years since I could say I had friends. Long before the End of the World as I knew it. Though I tend to invalidate those as memories of comfort and camaraderie disappear from my timeline.
"Ahhh, but we both know that is not quite the truth, no?" His accent was as slippery as his sentiment.
"I suppose you'd know better than me."
I vaguely recall a roundtable discussion of creativity and inspiration among peers, a collective that came together to preserve the collective unconscious. But that was before. This was now. My life was all but forfeit in the face of the oncoming storm, the final great obliteration of this wayward dimension.
I turned to look at this slick new companion. Hardly your average barfly in my local dive, he had an air of mystic and a charm of the divine. Skinny tie and pea coat, polished boots and glistening wristwatch. It was nearly midnight. Any moment the Fall would be upon us.
He cocked an eyebrow as we made eye contact. "Like what you see?"
"You look...", I didn't want to say familiar but that's how it felt.
"Come, monsieur, sit and drink with me. I could use the company, and I suspect so could you."
He coaxed me into a booth against the far wall with another round. I was all but broke, having blown all material wealth on trivial pursuits that afforded me no purchase in polite society. I'd drink on anyone's tab, especially this ginger ponce.
"What do you want then?" I shot first.
"Is that all there is? An exchange, a transaction, a..."
"Everyone wants something, and nothing is free, but yeah, everything is permitted."
He sat upright, lean and streamlined, legs crossed, cocktail glass perched in his raised fingertips. He was handsome, but so much so that I despised him, thought him privileged and pompous. Fuck him and his pity, though I continued to sip the drink he procured for me.
"So weary, an immense sadness in the eyes. Tell me, it must be a woman who has brought you so low, for only the fairer sex has caused such agony."
"As a matter of fact...", I begin to blurt out, before realizing who I am and what's been done to me. It's not wise to speak as freely as I once did.
"Naturale! I have my own woes in that category." His eyes dropped from my own as he shook his head in an effort to shake something free, to no avail. "To women!"
He raised his glass, expecting me to follow his lead, which I did, clinking to the commonality of man's suffering at the hands of woman. It's a long sung song that's overshadowed by suffrage and sentimentality towards the thousands of years following the end of the Age of Isis, born with Adam's rib being ripped from his side.
As I took a gulp of beer a female caught my eye. She was as gorgeous as any of them, with curly hair bound at the top of her head. Her eyes held smiles, though I knew her heart held lies, for they all did. False emotions that could twist and turn at a moment's notice.
"Ahh..", he licked his lips after a subtle sip, "it's best not to dwell upon the miseries they instill within us."
"Easy for you to say." I almost let more slip from my lips.
A jagged scar adorned my forearm, and my heart, from long lost forlorn love. A childhood friendship that resurfaced with nothing but lies, re-sculpted into romance that was as ill-fitting as betrayal could manage. As much as I tried to hide, it was plain as day in my eyes.
"What can be done, then? Only to be the man we aim to be." He smirked as if I cared what his troubles were and that we shared some commonality in our mutual delirium.
"Our options are then to die a slow death at their hands, or perhaps a quick death at our own?" I sought some manner of respite.
"Perhaps. Alas, all our spirits suffer our passions."
Was that the reality of the modern condition? To suffer indelibly the pains of that which drives us to be more, that which makes life worth living, the basis of inter-sexual relations relegated to being a mathematical equation of no more consequence than the calculations of genetic and societal constrictions?
It's A Man's World came on the jukebox and James Brown sings it better than the rest of us could. It's all for them, one way or another, and you may as well be a gentleman about it. I believed in love, I saw it with my own eyes, born from my own chest. It was the most real thing I'd ever experienced in this or any other lifetime.
"She never loved you." He let it slip from his lips like syrup saturated with venom. He didn't mean to kill me, but he had.
"Defiance was what I was raised to embrace, so fuck that, I will see to another fate..." I wept for untold tales and woes that would not be mine to carry. "Fuck."
"Whyy...sob...why does it have to be this way?"
"They do what I ask, always have, always will." He looked repentant and hollow as he said this. "I only want to love myself."
Fuck that, and suddenly there was a gun pressed against Reynard's skull. It seemed to rest in my grip, cocked and loaded at the end of my fist. My arm somehow complacent in this decision, but really all in alliance with my heart, which had severed all ties to my mind mere moments ago.
"I don't care, I'll love the jagged edge of her until it kills me." There was a method to the madness of love, I will never give up on that belief.
"So, you see her as she is?" He leaned in with anticipation.
"All I see is the woman I love." It was the most honest statement ever uttered by these lips.
"She is not of this plane, an impossible object, too precise a device to exist, certainly not in sympathetic harmony with another. You must know this."
I found myself inhaling the remnants of a cigarette I don't recall lighting, sucking in the poison, reveling in it destroying my throat and lungs. It was calming and familiar. And that was the beginning of the end.
He knew all my moves as he'd made them before. He was no different than me, a classic testing the new model. He was tired, alone, empty. I thought I knew those things but they've only just begun for me. The truth only did one thing, made reality unbearable.
"Jazz Jones is real. There is someone there to redeem, a persona that needs love and TLC beyond what even I know." The idea of her was jumbled, scattered across several dimensions, but it didn't matter. He'd find a way to reach her, all of her, and unite the pieces.
But the only pieces there were him, and me, with a firearm to his head. No one else knew because they couldn't see into fourth dimensional space, but time flowed there as well, so when he slipped my aim and dropped into the stool beside me, well, I couldn't argue with realtime space so he stood there apologetic in his transfer of responsibility.
"You bastard."
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