Jackdaw, page 12
Pain, undiluted, is a great motivator and I wanted to capture that unsoiled reality before it leached away.
I noticed that my Volvo wasn’t in the driveway. I didn’t know if Elise had it towed or if someone had stolen it. Not in my neigh-bourhood. But I was bringing the place down by just existing. Whoremonger and sodomite, as the holy book says.
I burst into uncontrollable tears without warning. Fucking use a segue, Thompson. Non-sequiturs don’t work. This is not Goddard.
I sat in the cage in my living room, sobbing. I wasn’t even sad. It made no sense at all to me, and emotions are my day job. I dry swallowed some opioids and climbed into the attic.
I couldn’t smell anything because my nostrils were dressed and I was mouth-breathing. The flesh sculpture had grown, and rose and fell like bellows. It looked like a giant’s scrotum. That was probably one of those To a Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail things.
I got a cleaver and knives from the kitchen, returned and went into a frenzied stabbing spree.
17
I once had a book plagiarised.
Not passages from the book, the entire book. Some guy in Latvia or some other Baltic state slapped his name on one of my science fiction novels and passed it off as his own. Did book tours and shit, got lauded for being able to write the authentic black African experience. How did he do that, interviewers asked. How did he, a lily-white Baltic-state dude with that soft, silky hair they have, how did he get into the mind of an African.
There are these gatherings called science fiction conventions, where guys like me and people from all over the world come together to celebrate all our nerdiness. Ever since Hollywood decided to use our books as source material the gatherings have been big, expensive affairs with corporate sponsorship.
Conventions have a particular and replicated anthropology. You have the convention hotel, which is either the same building as the convention, connected to the convention centre or close to the convention centre, so that attendees can just walk over to the activities. Rooms at the hotel go fast because people usually come from different countries and daily transport costs can add to your expenses and reduce the amount of time you have to hang out. Cinderella pumpkin rules. You have your convention committee, a bunch of dedicated volunteers who care about science fiction more than you ever will. They usually staff the registration desk where you will be recognised, stamped, ID’d, handed a goody bag and directed to your first activity.
To a stranger it will seem like a shit ton of people just milling about in an open space, but it’s highly organised if you know what to look for. Those people in outlandish or landish costumes? They’re the cosplayers. Do not touch them. Do not take photographs of them without permission. Do say hello and ask them questions.
There’s a map to tell you where to go for each activity.
And there’s a dealer’s room, where artists, writers, gamers and other purveyors of geeky stuff are allowed to display and sell their wares.
That’s how I found out about this motherfucker. He’d brought with him a shit ton of copies of the book so he could sign and sell them. He had posters and flyers, which is one of the reasons I was angry: he had more cool stuff than my publishers would shell out for, the fuckers.
We recognised each other immediately, him from my face, me from watching him exchange a book with my title on it for money.
‘Motherfucker!’ I yelled, charging him. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got to his stall. Rugby tackle him? I had no plan.
He leapt up and rabbited. My momentum propelled me right into his corner and I took a spill along with all his cool merch and the plagiarised books. I scrambled up and went after him.
‘Stop!’
He ran out of the convention centre on to the streets of… I still want to say Latvia, but who the fuck knows? I gave chase. Again, I had no idea why. I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t know the streets, I was just angry.
I chased him across a playground, through some graffiti-decorated alleyway, past a pharmacy where he changed direction and ran across the road, weaving his way through oncoming traffic. Which I also did and almost got pureed by Latvian vehicles. I’m pretty sure I got racially abused by drivers, but I might just be imagining it.
By this time my body complained. I hadn’t run for months. My heart was the most vocal. Why the fuck are you running, Thompson? Are you hunting? Gathering? Didn’t we evolve to run on soft surfaces, and not concrete? Stop running right now!
Luckily, Yanuz Yeltsin, which is the nom de plume this motherfucker chose, was about as fit as I was. That is to say, as fit as a typical writer. Which is to say, not fit at all. The job requires sitting on your arse all day and exercising by making pots of tea. Conducive to middle-age spread.
Yanuz stopped on a park bench, bent over, wheezing, hands dangling near his feet. He had a bald spot on the crown of his head. I plopped down next to him, gasping, trying to catch my breath which I left a mile behind me.
We caught each other’s eyes and got the giggles. You can never tell what that electricity between humans will do from one moment to the next. We laughed as if we were at an unfunny comedy club but needed to get our money’s worth. He laughed until he cried. I laughed until I started coughing.
‘Let me buy you a coffee,’ said Yanuz.
‘Lay on, Macduff,’ I said, muscles aquiver.
‘What does this mean, lay on?’
‘Let’s go.’
We sat down across from each other. Every single person seemed to be blonde. Not even a smattering of black folks for me to nod to.
Yanuz was an amiable fellow, I found. Well known about town too. He knew a lot of the people in the coffee shop by name.
‘I come here to write,’ he said. ‘It’s nice.’
‘Where is your own writing? Why did you steal my book?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he sounded and looked genuine. ‘Listen. If I take you to a bookshop you will see in the science fiction section Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin, Robert Heinlein. You know these, yes.’
‘Of course.’
‘These will be in English or translation. Do you know how many local authors get science fiction book deals?’
‘No.’
‘None. Not one. The best you can hope for is to self-publish. And no budget for publicity.’
‘I see.’
‘I don’t think you do. I have wanted to be a writer since I was five. I have never wanted to be anything else, and I have never wanted to write anything else except science fiction. I know my work is good, and I have put in the hours and the training. Why should that disadvantage me in my own fucking country, eh, Thompson?’
‘Call me Tade.’
‘So I translated your book and called it my own, and translated it back to English for the “international edition”. In a limited sense, I get to live my dream. In a limited sense.’
I went home with him and met his partner. I read some of his short stories, which were quite good. I missed my activities at the convention when Yanuz and I went drinking that night. I met some of his other writer friends who were in the same plight.
I have a copy of the plagiarised book, signed by Yanuz Yeltsin. I framed it and if I look up and to the left from where I’m writing this, I can see it clearly.
Yanuz’s story made me maudlin, but he and I still correspond. I didn’t report him to my publishers because, like I said, amiable guy. How can you grass on someone you’ve shared beers with? Someone whose partner made you coffee? And, holy of holies, who shared an unedited manuscript with you? Nah, Yanuz was okay.
One of the topics Yanuz and I chopped around was how to dispose of a body. Writers talk about this kind of thing all the time, and not because we’re morbid assholes, which we certainly can be if you look at our search history. We have to write believable stories about murder sometimes, though it can’t be so realistic that the book becomes a manual for potential murderers. I seem to recall Chuck Palahniuk including the recipes for bombs in his books but changing one or two ingredients. You have to have verisimilitude, though. The reader has to believe that in the world you create, it would work.
Yanuz said the key ingredient was patience. You have your dead guy or gal, and you have your deep freezer. You calm the fuck down, you remove all the food from your freezer. You chop the body up and freeze the bits. You wait twenty-four hours. While waiting you use a random number generator to put pins in the map, as many pins as you have body parts. You travel to those spots over days, and drop the parts. Easy.
And so, following my Latvian plagiarist’s advice, I chopped the flesh sculpture up into sixteen pieces. It wasn’t hard after my earlier stabbing spree. Each piece throbbed and pulsed. It didn’t bleed a lot, but there was slime everywhere, making it difficult to grip the hatchet. Like when you chop up a snail to cook. In Nigeria you use a flocculant to clean off the slime, usually alum or aluminium sulphate. I didn’t have any of that. It was a slippery, smelly job.
I discarded all the food and froze the parts of the sculpture.
The smell lingered in the study, but my olfaction wasn’t yet back to normal, so it was fine. I wrote and transcribed and determined a calendar for dropping bits of the flesh. I sent my words to Wisconsin. I needed a nap so I lay in the middle of the nest, where the sculpture had been, and I curled up, floating on a codeine haze. I dreamt of mechanical dragonflies and sticky viscous sweat-rain.
I took the first chunk of flesh sculpture, wrapped it up, dropped it in my bag and left the house for my first destination. It was far away, so I took the tube. I sat with it on the floor between my legs, muscles rigid with tension. Everybody seemed to be staring at me. Sweat tracked down from my armpits.
The train shuddered to a stop between stations. The lights flickered.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be staying here for some time. There is a fault. I’ll inform you when I know more. I do apologise.’
I thought it would probably be for a few minutes, but we were there for an hour during which time the carriage got hotter, and that which was frozen became warm and went soft again.
This fucking thing. Didn’t bleed much when I cut it, started gushing blood now. The floor between my legs was a red puddle and even I, with my broken nose, got that abattoir smell.
People were definitely staring this time.
I would probably have got away with it, but I had a sense of guilt. Why, though? I had stabbed and dismembered a product of my own imagination. At most, I had broken some social convention around the transportation of meat in public places. It wasn’t human. True, I made a mess, but is that any different from vomiting on the tube after a night on the piss?
When the train started moving again I stood up, blood dripping from my bag, eyes following me everywhere. I waited at the door and when we arrived at a station I couldn’t mind the gap fast enough. I clutched the bag to my chest like a sick child, earning more looks and being so deranged that crowds parted for me like the Red Sea for Moses, although I may be mixing both plagues and metaphors.
Transport police were waiting at the top of the escalator. They were polite, so there was that. They whisked me away, although they did not arrest me or read me my rights.
Gaddamn Babylon. Don’t talk to them.
‘What’s in the bag?’
The inevitable question. At least I still had my wits about me, or enough wits to remember my own advice: shut the fuck up.
‘What’s your name, sir?’
‘What’s in the bag?’
‘Are you all right? You look a little banged up.’
‘What’s your name, sir?’
‘You know we’ll test the contents of the bag?’
‘Do you need medical attention?’
‘What’s your name, sir?’
Shut the fuck up, Thompson.
‘The bag’s in the lab. You’ll put yourself in a position of advantage if you just tell us what it is, sir. Get ahead of this thing. It counts towards leniency.’
‘What’s your name, sir?’
‘You know, I looked at it before we sent it to the pathology lab. It looked cut. Had it been cut?’
Pathology lab. I did some pathology. I did it for about a month before I decided I would rather work with living human beings. For one thing, pathologists, I mean medical pathologists now, are the single most boring group of medical specialists there are. At least psychiatrists have the reputation of being crazy. Pathologists are in black and white, although a few are in greyscale. I struggled to stay awake in the team meetings.
And you’d never believe the shit people brought to us. One guy found a finger buried in his garden. Three fingers were brought in during my time there. It seems this is not unusual, although by the time I catalogued the third I thought the universe was sending me a rude gesture. We had a drowned boy of ten who turned out to be alive, which was shocking, but good for the boy, right? We had a scandal where we ran out of space and had to lay bodies outside on the fucking floor while we tried to catch up with the post-mortems. Some enterprising gal or guy took photos of the cadavers and sold them to a daily and it became a scandal. I promise I was already leaving by then, but having your unit in a news cycle for something like that… well, let’s just say it wasn’t hard.
Did I mention the first time I worked myself out of a job? Hilarious, I—
‘Sir, are you paying attention?’ The cop snapped his fingers in front of my eyes.
‘Get your hands out of my face. I am an artist. How dare you contaminate my process? I am going about my business, the business of art, something which you, with your shock-troop mentality, cannot comprehend. I am making myself into something new, a living sculpture, a breathing installation, work after a master of the form. I am living slime, living excrescence from the moist junction of living beings. I am life itself, or the residue of life that is left after my passing. That is what I’m trying to do, to accomplish, don’t you see? I don’t know why I’m talking to you. This is not the kind of digestible creation you ingest, is it? You like potboiler paperbacks, coffee adverts and car commercials, don’t you? Reality-style shows? When were you last in a museum or gallery? When did you last read a book that wasn’t fiction? Do you see why it is futile to stop me, to interrogate me? I am floating above all this. I made all this, but not in my own image. If I click my heels, I’ll be home. You’ll be left trying to explain to your supervisor what you did with the guy on the tube with the blood and the meat. I have done it, copper. I have achieved what I wanted to and you cannot hold me for I have done nothing wrong.’
I finally took a breath. Whatever happened to shutting up?
The door swung open and a guy brandished a sheet of paper. ‘It’s not human. It’s pork.’
‘It looks like you’re free to go, sir,’ said the cop. ‘In future, wrap your meat better.’
‘Can I have it back?’
‘I’m afraid we incinerated it, sir.’
I nodded.
I clicked my heels, and I was at home, lickety-split.
18
Unlike my normal practice of writing in longhand, I sat at a keyboard and typed, words just pouring out of me. Drops of blood kept appearing between the keys, and there was a hiss between my ears, but I didn’t stop writing. I heard the doorbell a few times, but ignored it. I did not eat or drink.
The smell of rot suffused the house because of the pork chops I left in the kitchen outside the freezer. The fleshy statue was pig. I added a bit about Pigmeat Markham, probably the first ‘rapper’ in hip-hop history. Hip hop is important to my personal history. You know how people in secondary school have ‘things’ that make them stand out? Well mine was hip hop and breakdancing. Maybe five other people had this interest at the time, that is, in performing, not consuming. I was young, and songs were long. It wasn’t unusual for a rap song to have five verses, and there was no Google. We had to start and stop the song to get the lyrics.
I had a good memory and wicked delivery. I had original songs. I was in a band with five other people called the Krazy Krew, which worked well until our lead singer and drummer both got done for drunkenness.
Illegal parties were a big thing when we were in school. We were constantly looking for ways to breach lights-out and indulge in youthful shenanigans. We would dance, we would smoke (cigarettes, not weed), and we would drink alcohol. In fact, I got suspended once in what we dubbed the Johnnie Walker Incident, but that’s for another memoir.
On this occasion, one of us, I don’t remember who, had the brilliant idea of throwing a party in the centre of the football field. It was unlit at night and nobody would suspect because nobody looked in that direction. One feature of these parties was to keep the music ultra-low volume; not like the silent discos that the young folk have these days with headphones and streaming playlists, but a forerunner.
Anyway. Night in question, I got malaria. Bad. Nothing I could do to rouse myself. My girlfriend even snuck into the boys’ hostel to see me, but it was of no consequence. I was out for the proverbial count. I could hear the party from the open window in my room, carried on the wind, but I fell asleep. Turns out they got drunk.
I don’t know. I’m just glad I was ill, because if not for plasmodium falciparum, I’d have been there for the music. I didn’t drink back then, so I wouldn’t have got drunk, but because my girlfriend came to the hostel after lights out, there were rumours that I was at the party and just didn’t get caught.
With my other Krazy Krew members in the equivalent of social jail, I became a solo act, which I parleyed into what passes for popularity in secondary school. I was learning about people and what they respect.
My mother visited me at school, found out I was consorting with drunkards and was… displeased. But then someone, one of the teachers, told her I was a genius. I wasn’t. I just knew how to take standardised examinations, which, no matter what anyone tells you, is a separate skill, distinct from intelligence.
