Sundog Rising!
Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog
A Special Halloween Presentation:
Nosferatunes
by
John H. Baillie
(copyright May, 2005)
… a dream-structured, jazz-fusion horror story …
Part One
Playlist
1. My name isn’t really Benny Dredful
2. At the end of the path
3. This certainly isn’t my story
4. The house band in a vampire’s jazz bar
5. Her system couldn’t take it anymore
6. The tattooed lady
7. Certainly no answers to worry about
8. Space for Rent
9. The most common error made by those who study philosophy
10. A hard-won but short freedom
11. This is how they move
12. It’s a hard life, pushing Info
13. The rise of the A-Pod
14. The sermon on the table
15. Listening, but not really hearing
16. Bad vibes
17. We are resolved
18. A broken wild life
19. House policy
20. Lou Moon plays the scene cool
21. How long have you and your bozo been a couple
22. Tell me one truly amazing thing
23. Psst. Pretend he’s not really there and just do your best to keep up
24. Luckily, my training kicked in
25. The Karla Maneuver
26. True and legitimate moments of triumph
27. The Goth Moth speaks
28. Dreams of you dreaming of me dreaming of you dreaming of ...
29. One of those subjects better for everyone if they don’t come up
30. What might have been but probably wasn’t
31. Women in tight costumes
32. What does the blonde think?
33. Other fish to fry
34. Memories of Moonbeam McSwine
35. But I probably won’t
36. They’d never believe we’d actually say that
37. All the really important women’s magazines
38. It’s just magic!
39. Fully indulgent
40. Send me a sign
41. The purple colour
42. Derailing boB’s creative rivers
43. Doing it in the Mysterian Position
44. Not your average lycanthrope
45. How the Goth Moth came to be
46. So the frenzy begins
47. That strange heaviness is back
48. I remain uncursed
49. Assuming that last phrase was part of the general enquiry
50. Who’s rocking the boat?
51. Dance of the seventh tee towel
52. The shadow of your beauty
53. “Gettin’ the Hell Outta Here”
54. Cornered at a round table in the middle of the room
55. Moment of crisis
56. The death of Hanley the Info Pusher
57. Never to be seen again
58. The Pearl Wolf attacks
59. The Jazz Waltz
60. The Joker rides out
Our Ensemble:
Adam: A middle aged male
Agent Only: A secret operative for the U.S. Government
Audrey Always: Knuckle Biter’s niece
Gully Bechet: Bass player for the Ptolemy Ptrio
boB the Poet: Self explanatory
Crazy May: An Info Junky
Luna Damsel: An observer
Miles Davis: A ghost
Benny Dredful: An observer
The Evil Sneed: Violin player for the Ptolemy Ptrio
Touchy Forceful: An Info Junky
Galloping Gertie: A ghost
Joni Godiva: A secret operative for the Canadian Government
The Goth Moth: An insect girl
Hanley: An Info Pusher
Phoebe Hush: Vocalist for the the Ptolemy Ptrio
Davis Jade: Guitar player for the Ptolemy Ptrio
Knuckle Biter: A Brain Drainer
Lydia: A middle aged female
Kirsten Brandi Marinara: An Info Junkie
Lou Moon: Terran representative for Sector 32 of the Lou Moon
Intergalactic Fraternity of Hotel Detectives, Inc.
Mordecai: The waiter
The Mulroney Throttler: A convicted killer, recently released
The Pearl Wolf: An unearthly, sensually powerful lycanthrope
Plus various unidentified male and female Info Junkies, sex dogs, and spirits
“You were not there for The Beginning.
You will not be there for The End …
Your knowledge of what is going on
can only be superficial and relative.”
William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch
Beginning.
Black.
Just Black.
My voice: I am tired. My head nodding. I close my eyes because I cannot keep them open – cannot keep them out.
From behind. Three figures approach my bed. Bodies, arms.
Surrounding me. Faceless. Discussing me quietly, as if I can’t hear,
as if it doesn’t matter if I do hear, my consciousness is irrelevant
to the experiment at hand –
needles – in one arm, than the other, painfully into the
large veins on the backs of my hands, searching out an
artery astoundingly bright red blood two wires and a
large tube inserted into my neck
“if this test works then we’ll –"
I jerk awake.
But every time my eyes droop closed, the scene repeats itself, endlessly. Each time my heart beats arhythmically more quickly, panic threatening to completely overwhelm me.
This is not a nightmare, I say to myself,
this is not a nightmare …
Now, a single, wavery, long-sustained violin note …
My voice blends with another male voice …
“This is not a nightmare.
This is not a nightmare,”
until only the second male voice speaks.
“This is not a nightmare.
This is not a nightmare.
This is NOT a nightmare.”
Grey light rises on the centre of the scene, illuminating a twice-as-large-as-lifesize black and white poster of a presently indistinct figure.
“THIS IS NOT A NIGHTMARE!”
The light comes up full.
The giant poster is of the aptly named Max Schreck, playing Graf Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s German Expressionist classic from 1922, Nosferatu. The vampire looms forward from the shadows beneath an arched doorway, impractically long, sharp, white fingernails rising to clutch his victim’s throat to his rat-like fangs.
“But then again. Maybe it is.”
My name isn’t really Benny Dredful
Darkness.
The waiter’s slightly grinning, thin, bald head is abruptly illuminated as he lights a tall white candle on a small table to the front left of the scene. His name is Mordecai. As he leans back from the flickering wick, a similar moving, waxy dim light lifts over the entire bar. The band begins to elaborate on the simple violin note that has sustained the anxiety to this moment. They play throughout the unfolding of the evening, the giant poster of Max at the centre of the small stage always looming frightfully over the action.
The setting is the Nosferatunes Jazz Bar, an exceedingly seedy underground establishment beneath a nameless alley. One has to know someone one detests to get into this club.
The décor is ragged, ripped black drapery, the illusion of bats and large crawling insects, rats always scuttling by just on the periphery of vision, crumbling grey stonework. The dirt and spiderwebs are real.
The entrance to the club is at the rear left, the band plays on the stage at the rear right, yet the giant poster of Max the vampire remains dead centre in every table’s view. There are thirteen wobbly, round tables crowded closely together on the grimy club’s floor, a varying number of spindly and unsteady chairs appearing around each as needed.
Mordecai strides elegantly spider-like through the tables, bringing drinks, removing glasses and bottles with prescient apprehension. Few orders are actually articulated. Many info junkies, male and female, already deeply absorbed in their latest fix, occupy a scattered pattern across the room.
Openly indulging in the narcotic of your choice or even committing murder are not considered social peccadilloes in Nosferatunes.
A curtained alcove, suitable for two, sits slightly higher than the rest of the club, to the front left. On the same level as the bar floor, to the front right, down a short hallway and just out of sight, there is a deceptive room that is actually an interdimensional, interspatial gateway, where individual patrons may travel simultaneously to other places and times in other forms while still never leaving the bar. Not everyone knows this room is there, or its implications.
The band is the Ptolemy Ptrio, a uniquely subversive jazz improvisational combo that never dares to stop playing. Their repertoire consists of jazz standards from any era, a healthy dose of Django Reinhardt-influenced gypsy dance numbers, and Gully Bechet originals, which tend on the whole to be sexually disturbing.
Benny Dredful, whose voice we heard overtaking mine at the beginning of the scene, sits alone at the table farthest to the rear right, his back to the band, watching everyone else, staring directly out of the scene, away from Max.
“My name isn’t really Benny Dredful,” he observes to himself. The music finally coalesces into a particularly stirring opening number, not unlike Corelli’s La Folia.
“Where does delerium lead that we would not follow? Pitch us a night so black, give us this pleasure so high, give us our completely unimaginable minds’ needful amazement …”
Silent, Mordecai brings Benny a second tall bottle, as his first is now empty.
“My name isn’t really Benny Dredful …”
Not content with his reason for being in the bar tonight, Benny muses uncertainly on the real reason he feels he is taking part. The feeling that he is just not getting it threatens to tip him into despair. There is so much he is certain he is missing out on … Yet the reluctance to do more than watch completely immobilizes him from doing more than drinking to the matter.
“Forevermore, completely at ease, I’d like to think Calliope is content with my approach, that in her own way, my own way, she will show me her love. Satisfied with a glimpse of beauty briefly revealed, the occasional flash of pure, pearly flesh anyone would drink or pay to see. But never … never … actually wanting to touch.”
The conviction that this is a failing in his philosophy still does not stir him to do more than pour himself another drink.
“My name isn’t really Benny Dredful.”
He surveys the scene, with bleary eyes. Forces himself to smile, to rise falsely to the occasion.
“With drugs, with music, with dancing, call it a start; under red, green and turquoise lights everyone has a beautiful body … I must never, ever forget … this isn’t good nor bad in itself. We just are.
“My name isn’t really Benny Dredful.
“Give us women and men of amazing abilities against a canvas of black. Memory has made us all games at a carnival.”
He stares into his glass, and sighs sadly.
He’s not making a hell of a lot of sense, either to himself or to anyone else, and he knows it.
At the end of the path
Activity broils in the mind of the vampire at the centre of the stage. A gathering of images sorting themselves into the clearest, most effective paths towards predation. Awareness of every insect, rat, spider, every heart pumping blood in the room, beneath a contented high-pitched chuckle. Determining the pattern that will follow, logically or illogically to his content. Impressions from the pinnacle of the food chain.
He whispers, but no one hears him over the band, except Gully Bechet, who has learned it’s better to just concentrate on his music.
“At the end of the path waits the King of the Gravediggers, the last card to be turned, and we would do well not to tempt fate when falling before his wise-eyed gaze.
“Ten killers will walk through this room before the night is over, and two corpses; one pretending to be a third will be carried away; while two ghosts also influence the unfolding, one on the psychic and one on the physical plane so few spirits actually ever touch again. Certainly not the spirits of the two who will die here tonight.
“They will all dream of sex, but only three men and four women will experience it, although one couple will enter the time stream between the dreamings and never cease having it again.”
All of this will happen beneath the watchful eyes of the vampire, who understands what he sees so differently than those who enact the scene. And know this: while he watches, he is choosing his victim – a third corpse, whose blood will keep the grey dawn from reoccurring and allow the deathless stalker to prey upon the willing living again and
yet again. And we will never know for certain which one of us the vampire has chosen until it is too late … If this test works …
At the end of the path waits the King of the Gravediggers.
This certainly isn’t my story
Mordecai sweeps in with a third bottle for Benny Dredful, deftly depositing and moving to lift away the empty second in one smooth motion. But Benny shoots out an unexpectedly steady hand and grabs Mordecai by the wrist.
“Leave it.”
Mordecai shrugs his eyebrows and glides away.
His hand still outstretched, Benny contemplates the empty bottle.
Nothing.
Then … a stirring. The murky green glass itself seems to ripple. No … something inside. Slowly, working its way to the top.
It emerges feelingly, cautiously, one appendage at a time. A mottled orange and olive green body slowly pulled up afterwards. It halts, once emerged, trying to sense the environment.
Seven legs, Benny thinks. A new life form. Just as he’d suspected. Primarily insect, but not … quite.
Benny is certain the tiny thing is just as aware of him as he is of it. They are mutually suspicious. His hand is still outstretched. If he brought it down quickly enough …
No. Suppose it stings.
Still not moving quickly, the thing cautiously lowers itself down the side of the bottle. It stops again when it reaches the table, seeming to glance back at Benny, but Benny isn’t certain it has eyes.
It goes over the edge, away from him. No contact desired by either party.
Benny slowly nods as he pours himself a drink from the third bottle. Doesn’t drink it though. He holds the glass in one hand. His eyes slightly glaze over, as he goes into a Lip-ROM trance. He doesn’t have to speak out loud – just move his lips as if he were, no sound actually emerging. The report will store itself holographically in various easy-access sectors in his brain, for private retrieval at a future time.
This is his personal record, from which he will later edit an official report. So he is free to speculate.
“Hello. My name isn’t really Benny Dredful.
“And this certainly isn’t my story. But it’s the only way you’re ever going to hear the truth. I’m an Observer – I state what occurs. Nothing more, nothing less.
“I work as a strong-armed pigeon for the Rollo Shindy Gang. It was never my choice. I’m an Observer. Observers never get to choose.
“My job tonight is to keep an eye out for someone pushing Alien Info, because an Alien Info pusher has an infinite advantage over normal pushers pushing any other kind of Info. And the Shindy Mob is in cahoots with some people in very high places in this city – some people who are very particular about exactly what sort of Info is pushed in their town. And by exactly who …
“But looking out for Alien Info is dangerous on more levels than the obvious. If the Shindy Gang doesn’t want Alien Info on the street, that’s one thing. That’s shall we say … a Provincial matter. But another thing entirely is that the Federal Government, thanks to an agreement with our U.S. masters to the south, believe themselves to have a monopoly on the amount and control over the source of the Alien Info that’s pushed in this country. If black market junk is on the street that they didn’t authorize or otherwise know about, measures are going to be taken and taken quickly to shut that source down permanently. And those who are lurking about in the background happening to witness this sort of elimination have been known to disappear themselves, just as silently, just as quickly. Just as completely.
“The Feds are in the position where they have to act on this issue before the U.S. acts for them. The Feds certainly do not want to lose yet another city to a so-called ‘nuclear misjudgement’. So there will be Federal Agents here tonight. And there may be Americans. Dangerous crossfire. Not safe for ‘innocent’ witnesses.
“However, there is an even greater danger than being ‘accidentally’ removed from the scene by deranged Government operatives. Especially for such an experienced Observer as myself.
“You have to look deeply, when you’re searching for Alien Info. On many levels.
“And you see and hear things you wouldn’t otherwise.
“Time has no meaning. Events will read as a book written out of order. And you’re not always looking in the right direction because you’re too busy seeing everything.
“The philosophical implications of gaining new knowledge. Perceiving Alien Info. Encountering concepts we have no words for. Something so absolutely other and apart from our experience, it is presently unrepresentable. New imagery demands new signifiers …
“But I have to look. And I have to report. And that is far as I am going to take it.
“It’s not my job to make sense of it all.
“But there is one more thing …
“I am passive by nature. I am an Observer. But I still maintain a personal consciousness. And since I don’t like putting that in danger, I’ve decided I will act – I will do whatever is necessary to get myself out of danger as soon as I can. If that means eliminating the source of the Alien Info myself, then I will. I’m packing a knife, and I am very nervously anticipating the prospect of having to do something more this time than just sitting around with my eyes peeled.”
Benny Dredful knocked back his drink.
Sitting in a chair leaned against the wall half hidden in the rotting black draperies in the one exact spot in the room Benny himself could not see, sat a young woman, named Luna Damsel, observing Benny Dredful. Her eyes followed his every twitchy movement, not paying any attention at all to whatever else was happening in the room. She could read lips perfectly.
She smiled.
The house band in a vampire’s jazz bar
And the band played on.
The Ptolemy Ptrio has the famous distinction of being the only four person jazz trio in creation, because their vocalist is, of course, that madcap prima donna in her own mind, Phoebe Hush, the silent P in Ptrio.
The rest of the band tolerate Phoebe for her mesmerizing ways, having allowed her to stay after she simply materialized on stage one night with them singing old Noel Coward show tunes – which was weird as they were playing Django Reinhardt at the time.
The guitarist, Davis Jade, a taciturn oriental on the outside, has the burning soul of a gypsy within. Davis has roamed the world searching for a venue just such as Nosferatunes to let his inner demons flow out his fingers into his playing, rather than in the generally more socially unacceptable mannerisms and habits he has unhealthy tendencies towards.
The violinist is a force of nature unto himself, encapsulated only by the unlikely title of the Evil Sneed – because Davis and Gully the bass player knew a Sneed when they saw one. Even more so once they heard him play. Besides, the Sneed dresses so neat, in purple, orange and scarlet silks, scarves fluttering madly in an imaginary wind when he oh so vigorously bows even the tenderest love tunes. The rest of the band has an unspoken agreement not to mention his drug habits.
And finally of course there is the leader of the band and composer of all their original material, the aforementioned bass player, Gully Bechet. Gully is a devilishly handsome bad boy utterly incapable of expressing any human emotion through normal speech or gesture. He is able only to express himself on the falsely-theorized least expressive of all instruments, the stand up bass. An instrument with which he has been known to make entire roomsful of young women sway simultaneously to sensations below the equator they had never known physically possible.
Yet – Gully himself remains remote and unapproachable. To this day, he has no idea what all the fuss about sex could possibly signify.
Her system couldn’t take it anymore
Luna Damsel slid unnoticed into the bar behind a small crowd of three unconnected patrons all arriving at the same time. Benny Dredful was absorbed in his bottle climbing alien insect at the moment. Luna assessed the scene, grabbed her chair, and placed herself in Benny’s blind spot in the time it took for a shadow to fall.
Crazy May and Kirsten Brandi Marinara were both Info Junkies. Crazy May, fat, frizzy-haired, and loud, joined an old cohort already established at his usual table, Touchy Forceful. Touchy was already plugged in and receiving. May joined him without a word, Mordecai sidling by a moment later to slide her a Schreck’s Caress cocktail – the first one was always on the house, as they were insanely addictive.
Crazy May flipped open her laptop and plugged herself in with one hand, the other already knocking back the first noisy gulp from her drink with practiced ease. May was obsessed with gathering obscure nuggets of information regarding cultural anthropology. She loved to share with others, occasionally shrieking out “You’ll never believe what these crazy buggers get up to!” Touchy tolerated her stoically.
Brandi pretended to look for her false i.d., while Mordecai pretended to wait. She then pretended that she couldn’t find it, and Mordecai pretended to frown. Then he served her anyway, pretending not to remember that she was two years underage. Brandi found a seat with a good view of the band, shuddered at the sight of the vampire behind them, and then stared yearningly at Gully Bechet for five minutes before her system couldn’t take it anymore, and she had to plug herself in.
Brandi was a confirmed Sex in the City addict, with an unhealthy fixation on Kim Cattral. She manipulated the video on her system so whenever Kim appeared, everything else in the picture slightly dimmed and a golden, shining aura enveloped Kim and her every movement. At the same time, Brandi ran a second, sound-only line directly into her left ear feeding her endless Kim Cattral celebrity factoids. She especially enjoyed the stories about Kim wandering around nude in health clubs.
The third person who arrived with Luna, the only male, didn’t know why he was in the club that night or what he was looking for. He felt as if he hadn’t existed before he walked in the door. He had sprung into reality as a fifty-two year old, badly shaven, slightly shabby, overweight ex-insurance agent who deluded himself he had secret bohemian instincts. But actually he hated jazz, and he rarely drank.
He sat down at a table already occupied by a heavy, overly made up woman approximately his own age, and glared at the band. Mordecai flashed up to him, went to lift a drink from his tray, then stopped in mid-gesture. Mordecai stared at Adam. Adam stared back. They assessed each other.
Three times, Mordecai almost spoke, but always stopped at the last moment, bewildered.
“ … Beer?” he finally asked, uncertain.
“Canadian.”
“Draft?”
“Whatever makes me piss harder.”
The tattooed lady
Lydia, oh, Lydia, oh have you seen Lydia, Lydia the ta-ah-too’d lay-dee …
For her fiftieth birthday, Lydia got a tattoo of a vulture on her right butt-cheek, for two good reasons she thought at the time.
One, should she ever collapse while walking across the desert one day there was so much of her down there now that was probably where the real bird would land and start his feast first, and two, because that was how Lydia felt when she looked at men these days. Especially younger men. And most men were younger men, these days.
Lydia dressed in a high personal style, in demi-goth blacks and laces; she dyed her hair black and kept it short and well shaped around her skull so it didn’t make her look heavier and she had taken up ridiculous shit like reading poetry and hanging out in jazz bars drinking weirdly named cocktails, just to keep herself interesting.
But Lydia truly, truly felt the modern woman’s dilemma to be real. If she took off her make up and fancy clothes, she was just a dumpy, middle aged doll no man wanted to look at anymore. Not even the man or two in her past she had once really loved until the rest of that garbage called Life got in the way, leaving her living all alone with her television set now at this age – and she had never expected that would be something she really wouldn’t like at all.
Then it came to her, like a voice out of the void, as it tends to do in this kind of a scene: “You need someone who can appreciate you for every moment in your life at once, not someone who only sees you in the now.”
The now’s so frigging ephemeral anyway, Lydia thought, who can say what’s more important or even happening any given moment, the now, the then, or the yet-to-be? It’s all observation, memory, dreaming and a sense of loss, and each one of those four is just as important as the other three. But I’m stuck in observation mode these days, and I need a man who isn’t. Where the hell am I supposed to find a guy like that?
Adam came back from the Men’s Room. “You know what? I was thinking as I was pissing because it takes so damn long, and I thought – I remember you. I know you. You’re Lydia. I’m Adam. We used to be an item, like, three decades ago. And then this weird voice came to me out of the void and said: ‘You and I have got to stop acting like a couple of natural-born observers pretending to be taking part in life and start really taking part in life.’ What the hell’s in this beer?”
Lydia sat back in her chair, disgruntled.
“You always were such a romantic, you stupid son of a bitch.”
Certainly no answers to worry about
Operating undercover in a deeply covert manner, Agent Only, from the Yew-nited States of America, made certain absolutely everyone in the bar knew he had arrived, especially the women.
“All right, Ladies! Who wants some of this!”
He stopped on the edge of the table area, spread-eagled his legs, and made a slashing movement with both hands towards his thighs.
Gully was doing a short bass solo at the time. No one even noticed Only arrive, despite his canary-yellow leisure suit.
His huge, slavering grin began to falter when he realized no one was really paying attention to him. “Ladies … “ he cautioned. Still no reaction. “Fine. Be that way,” he muttered, and snagged a drink from Mordecai’s passing tray, knocking it back in one throw. His face turned bright red, but he managed not to choke. He sat down at the table in the exact centre of the room, and Mordecai slid two more glasses in front of him. “Keep ‘em comin’, barkeep,” Only ordered. “Only the hard stuff. That’s my name.” And he laughed like hell. However, he didn’t go for his second glass quite so quickly as he had the first.
Agent Only surveyed the scene casually, not really taking much in. He felt perfectly confident about his mission here tonight. These were Canadians, for chrissake, how hard could it be? He was obviously the only one who really knew anything about anything that was going on, having come from south of the border. He snickered arrogantly to himself. Everyone here probably thought that was genuine alien information circulating through the airwaves tonight. The ‘Merican guvmint held close control over every single known-to-humankind source of genuine alien information, and these Eskimos weren’t getting any of it.
He abruptly remembered that bogus Alien Info wasn’t the only reason he was in the bar tonight, certainly not the main reason he was in town. There was the deeper call for his mission to be covered as well, and that sobered him involuntarily. He wanted to check his gun again and those special bullets for that call, but even he didn’t think that would be quite discreet, while sitting here at the table in the middle of the room, with everyone … apparently still not watching him. Still.
But what the hell, he thought, grinning again, he loved the sound of flying bullets. He knocked back another drink without thinking about it, and couldn’t stop himself from choking this time.
Agent Only loved his job. It was the perfect way for a self-centred, egomaniacal abnormally short man to compensate for his lack of presence. Lots of big guns. Plus Agent Only truly adored military thinking. When investigating a matter, the military insisted on arriving at conclusions that only accorded with their preconceptions. For Agent Only, that generally meant being told you will shoot this person, this person, and that person, and then matters will be exactly as we knew they had to be all along. No questions for Agent Only to ask, and certainly no answers to worry about. Agent Only loved his job.
Benny Dredful made a new Lip-ROM note. “Arrived on the premises: one short American Idiot with a big gun. Beware.”
Only’s eyes flitted from woman to woman in the bar. Alien Info, my ass, he thought. What does a stud have to do to get laid around here?
Space for Rent
Joni Godiva’s going all hazy.
She came in looking completely out of place, dressed in a tailor-perfect dark blue suit complete with tie, wearing black-rimmed glasses she doesn’t really need and with her long blonde hair nuclearly impacted in a bun apparently soldered onto the back of her scalp.
Agent Only took one look and thought Jesus, the amateur, she’ll louse it up for the rest of us. In a place like this she’s dressed like a killer, Hanley’ll run first good look he gets at her.
So he slips an organic orgasmic hallucinogen in her pink lady first chance he gets, the bastard, just to loosen her up.
She sees him grin and wave at her as Mordecai delivers her drink. “It’s okay. I got it,” he calls to her, meaning he’s paid for the drink, although what he’s really saying is don’t worry about taking the pusher out. I’ll kill him for both of us.
She lowers her eyelashes demurely and gives a small nod, letting a hint of a shy smile arc her lips.
Fucking American, she thinks to herself. What a moron. He’ll louse it up for the rest of us. In a place like this he’s dressed like that, Hanley’ll run first good look he gets at him. Good thing I’m on the job tonight.
Joni leans back and sips at her drink through the straw. She feels the pressure of her Canadian Government issue sniper pistol lashed to her inner left thigh. She sighs slightly. She doesn’t know if she loves her job with the Canadian military or not, but she does know it excites her.
Now she’s drunk half her spiked cocktail and is convinced she’s seeing the ghost of Miles Davis up there on the stage jamming with the boys from the Ptrio. The emptiness she relies on carrying around inside her is taking on rosy and greenish hues around the edges, even as it seems to visibly expand within her limited consciousness. She isn’t even aware Luna Damsel has joined her until she’s asked a question.
“Doesn’t it seem like there’s a particular imagination directing this dream sometimes?”
Joni doesn’t feel good. She isn’t certain whether the question has come from inside or outside of herself. “I don’t even think there’s a particular imagination directing me sometimes.”
“Everything’s kind of pointless?”
“Kind of? The only time I feel alive is when I’m doing my job. How pathetic is that? I have a reputation around the office, you know.” Suddenly she feels rather proud of herself. “The Ice Queen. Want someone killed? Get Joni Godiva to do it.” Oh oh. Ooops. What is she saying? Mama raised her not to brag. “She won’t bat an eyelash. But you know what? If they only knew … I’m not unemotional at all. That’s just an act. About killing. The only time I’m hot, the only time I’m physically here, the only thing that really gets me wet … is killing.” Now she’s certain she’s said something she wasn’t supposed to. Usually it’s the sex she’s concerned about hiding but tonight wasn’t she supposed to … oh yeah. Nobody was supposed to know she was in the bar as an assassin.
Oh well. Too late now.
“The rest of the time, nothing.” Who is this woman, anyway, and what does she want to know all about this sex and violence for, what is she, some kind of pervert? “Just empty. Completely free … completely free …”
Her eyes go completely vacant, like a sign shooting up “Space for Rent”. A passing spirit come to the club to hear Miles notes the opportunity, and marks Joni down for later, after she’s had a few drinks and enjoyed a few tunes.
The most common error made by those who study philosophy
boB the Poet and Lou Moon entered the bar together but not really. They didn’t know each other, but because they were both laughing, anyone who bothered to notice assumed they were sharing the same joke. This is the most common error made by those who study philosophy.
boB was short, fat, gay, bearded and entirely content with himself. He was in fact, laughing at the thought of his beard. boB loved his beard. “boB the beardeD poeT,” he had decided just that moment to think of himself as. The concept entirely delighted him.
Lou was laughing at the memory of a Far Side cartoon he’d read sixteen years previously and only just now got the punchline of. He’d always wondered why the image of that frog had stayed with him so clearly.
Knuckle Biter the Brain Drainer was perhaps the only person who did not perceive boB and Lou as a “couple”. She had been lurking in the many shadows in the alley just outside the unmarked entrance to Nosferatunes when the pair passed by, instructing her niece, Audrey Always, on just when she should make her entrance. “Remember,” she told Audrey, “we are striving for maximum impact.”
boB and Lou had walked right by them, oblivious to their presence in the darkness. Brain Drainers were like that. Lou would see the two of them when Knuckle Biter wanted him to … boB, she didn’t care about. boB had his own visions to deal with tonight.
Which only left two more players presently not in the bar.
“I wonder what’s so funny?” Audrey wanted to know.
A hard-won but short freedom
The Mulroney Throttler reflects:
Right out of prison it’s impossible to get a date.
Fourteen years in the hole after those unfortunate events of the late eighties; couldn’t hear Brian Mulroney’s voice on the radio or TV without going into a mindless trance, grabbing the person nearest to me by his or her throat and throttling them to death. A Tory Judge gave me life because Brian strategically voted against the death penalty, but the sentence was later reduced for obvious mitigating circumstances by the Liberals when they came to power.
Now the only girl who’ll go out with me to the Nosferatunes Jazz Bar is the Goth Moth, and I’ve got to be careful not to put the moves on her because she still has that insect tendency to rip her lover’s head off and devour him not in a good way.
They are the last to arrive. Hanley the Info Pusher runs his twitchy eyes up and down the Throttler, but pegs him immediately as a man who no longer reads a newspaper, doesn’t own a TV, and who radio news probably makes vomit, especially the CBC. Hanley bets the Throttler wouldn’t even consider owning a computer. Hardly a prime candidate for his wares, regular or otherwise. Probably someone best kept away from Info of any kind, Hanley decides, microscopically analyzing the peculiar calluses on the Throttler’s hands and the unique development of his wrist muscles.
The Goth Moth, of course, doesn’t even bear consideration. Hanley shudders.
But there’s no lack of heavy users in the club tonight, desperate for their latest hit, microchips implanted in their eardrums feeding them the hottest breaking stories twenty-four/seven.
And Hanley has it all, downers for the news junkies, uppers for the entertainment fiends, and everything in between for every peculiar obsession, from home design to cooking to perverse conspiracy theory to racing results to raving paranoiac manic obsession, whatever, but most of all, tonight, Hanley is packing the motherlode, Hanley the Info Pusher is about to get into the game of Pushing. Alien. Info.
The Throttler pushes Hanley out of his way as he heads for a comfortable seat with a good view of the band and a lot of beer – a lot of beer. Goth Moth abandons the Throttler immediately and klicks off to find anyone she thinks she can have a conversation with. The Throttler settles in, knocking back his first beer of many. He watches the band. The Ptolemy Ptrio, tplaying "Ptenderly", their theme song, with Phoebe Hush on vocals.
“The evening bree-eeze,
caressed the trees,
puh-tender-lee-e …
the trembling trees,
embraced the breeze,
puh-tender-lee-e …”
And the Mulroney Throttler realizes as he sits there and that strange, ethereal voice which somehow deadens all the noise around it so it arrives always unhurried and never too loud perfectly in his ears, that’s all he’s really dreamed of in life for the last fourteen years, up there on the stage in front of him.
The Throttler knows before the song is even half over, he is brainlessly in love with Phoebe Hush.
to be continued ...
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