by James Newman
“Not quite, sunshine, not quite. Not for us. The suicide’s uncle is rolling in it. Smells like real lolly, mate. Lyons Maid.”
“Address?”
“An apartment block by the beach named The Sea View. Guest-friendly, good monthly rates, and guess what, you can actually see the...”
“Name?”
“His name is Kurt, rich family... that is all I know.”
“Okay, I’ll be there. And the Fun Police?” The Fun Police were the regimented criminal organization that arbitrarily administered matters of a legal and criminal nature in return for credit incentives. Under credited for the most part, the Fun Police accepted donations of all sizes, provided support to victims, and acted out a sloppy pantomime of controlling law and order sometimes leading to the apprehension of a carefully targeted suspect. This ethical unit wore a tight-fitting uniform armed with Glocks. Mostly, they loved their mothers. The Fun Police rarely smiled. An officer sleeping in his car, once got himself killed by a rich high society lavender-loving soap-star driving a Mercedes Benz E series. She never saw time and neither did he. The FP served the rich and both the police and the rich found it awkwardly embarrassing when they accidently killed one another.
“They’re hovering. They haven’t cleaned it yet.”
“Give me five minutes. I have somebody...”
I thought I had somebody with me.
Vanished.
Rung the phone off.
Well, I admired Trixie’s stamina to get up, shower, dress, and return back to the room with the crazy landlord.
Or perhaps she’d gone back to the husband?
I couldn’t decide which was better or worse.
Then for a crazy scopolamine moment, I wondered if she was hiding under the bed. You know what I did then? I checked. I thought about putting the hard stuff to one side, and maybe spending a few days at a Morphology retreat up in the mountains. Or maybe it was the city. Living here nothing came as a surprise and you began to act in a bizarre fashion in order to counterattack paranoid fantasies that were always on the brink of attack.
Made it to the shower and let out a roar as the icy water hit. Brushed wisdom teeth wishing I could clean or at least clear the head. Shaved quickly and without much in the way of love, splashed on some cologne enjoying the burn, walked out into the main room remembering Trixie and the apartment by the Beach. Last night, she twisted and turned like a crazed witch in a demented tragedy, yes, oh yes, bright red fingernails, cat claws gripping onto mine as she twisted through the early hours as dawn delivered her ugly promise.
That was not love. That, if anything, was the release of pain.
Takes a man to tell the difference.
Was that sexist?
Pulled the door shut as sunlight shone through the corridor , street sellers called out to one another. Somewhere in the distance, the Call to Prayer, an airplane flew overhead. A dog barked and kept on barking as I stepped down the four flights of stairs down to the hotel lobby where two men played chess on a table next to the bar. One was shabby with a cigar between his teeth; the other was young fresh faced, wet behind the ears and just out of college. The family, as they liked to call themselves. A woman, perhaps working, examined her reflection in a compact make-up mirror. I’d seen her somewhere before but the details were hazy. It’s a misty world peopled with characters who are usually nothing but disguised versions of themselves, the lost and lonely looked in the mirror, the chess players played the game, we might have seen some of these people in places we might have never been but we can never be sure of it. Perhaps each person had a double, a doppelganger thrown down onto the game board with no other purpose than to make us realize whom it is we really are. Still we pitied the poor deflowering soul at the bar. Like the psychiatrist, the pariah would not exist outside of a dysfunctional society and societies are naturally dysfunctional by definition. Think about it. The lonely nervous unattractive man or woman required the services of the damaged as much as the abused and anxious woman or man required the services of a therapist. Broke people need fixing. Anybody who tells you they are sane isn’t sane, and anybody who tells you that they are crazy probably knows more than he or she’s letting on to. Stay close to the crazy ones, listen to them, dance with them, drink with them, do it, they have more than the world to give you and without them you are hollow and cold and remember; normality is to be avoided for the mask and the mistake it so evidently is. The normal don’t dance, they don’t wake up in dive bars with nothing but their name.
The crazy ones, you should hate them at your peril and do not belittle them, do not abuse them, as they are the best part of you undiscovered. Down the Penny Black steps we tread. Tip tap tip. The crazy woman who paints her face blue in room 205 and begs for change outside the convenience store knows more about life than you will ever know. The old woman in 106 who hoards trash and collects empty dreams is worth more than the one hundred and three cats that she habitually feeds.
Outside, the sun beats down.
In Fun City day was an interruption of night. Food stands of barbequed meat, a hearty carnivorous odor mixing with bitter exhaust fumes coughed up from passing motorbikes and taxicabs. A motorbike taxi ferried me to Beach Road. Past sickly palm trees and over-turned garbage cans, past the debris of a thousand nights before. Past a group of bums begging for change on the concrete, past cigar butts and used tampons, past the woman who wore men’s shoes and who may or may not have some kind of secret knowledge, and who may or may not be a woman coughing under the polluted City sky.
Past it all, past it all, and into the hot day on the back seat of a motorcycle streaming through the sunlit darkness; that tepid Fun City stew.
One needs to be persecuted by the one he or she cares about most early in life and then that prepares them for the real gig. I figured most suicides hadn’t been dirty babies, they hadn’t crawled around in the soiled Pampers and the used syringes looking for something to eat and that was what had killed them.
A lack of survival instinct.
The motorbike pulled up at The Sea View.
I dismounted and paid, walked over to the courtyard, and took it all in, yes, the dream ended right there on the concrete. The pile of human meat at the base of the hotel was motionless, static, and somehow ordinary. A crowd had gathered. I took out my notebook and pencil and sketched the scene. The drawing of the event helped me enter into it. Discover it. The left arm was angled away from the body and the right tucked inside it. A dress shirt and jeans and a pair of loafers. The head had taken most of the blow. Most jumpers fell feet first. Many were accidents, a slip, and a drunken stumble, but as the Punch had reached out her tentacles wide and far many were going it head first. I’d seen dead women and dead men before. Mostly they had died from violent deaths. High jumps, gunshot wounds, stabbings, hangings, drowning and battering. The more you see the more you realize that the human body is just meat. The hopes and dreams that kept them walking the earth terminating in a dead pile of meat like that in a butcher’s shop. All of us are just flesh, guts, and blood when the lights go out and this is either the most liberating or the most fearful thought that you can have. The Punch played with a person’s mental stability – told them they were more than meat. You were simply not the same person after the program. My gut told me the jumper had been punched, but the Trixie case may have made sure that I was thinking that way.
The body was covered crudely with a blanket that a local had gotten from somewhere and thrown over him. He had fallen from a fifth floor balcony. Perhaps luckily the jump had been fatal on impact. Angle of the landing suggested his crown met the tarmac first. It could be easily explained as a suicide, but if it were, why was I being instructed to investigate?
I decided to keep these observations to myself. With a case like this, you needed to explore the most likely event and eliminate it. He was most likely to have been chewed up, spat out by the City, and decided to end it all. Second most likely event was that he had returned to the apartment drunk and simply
sat down, lit a cigarette and slam...
Hale stood talking to a man that I guessed was pushing seventy and a relative of the jumper. He was an impossibly thin client with hair the color of straw. His skin was almost transparent and his clear blue eyes bulged out slightly. A network of delicately colored veins snaked towards his nose. He had the mark of death about him all right, as if he was in the waiting room, but he hadn’t been called into the office for the diagnosis yet. I gave him six months before cutting it down to four, allowing for the climate. His large blue eyes glared out at the world as if it were somehow new to him. There was something almost child-like about the old man. Like the years had worn the man physically, but they had yet to take his spirit.
I offered some clichéd line about being sorry for his loss without knowing the connection between the suicide and the old man. He may have hated the jumper, you never know, perhaps they were lovers, father and son, rent boy and pimp, tragic enemies. A detective should have facts, but sometimes, you just had to dance to the song playing on the jukebox, work the instinct routine, wherever it takes you. The man nodded and spoke in a voice that rose and fell nervously, like Warhol in the sixties, in New York. “I’m glad you came. I know of your work and hope you can be of help. Shall we go somewhere more private?” He spoke English with an accent perhaps Russian or Eastern European. “I am originally from the Ukraine,” he said, reading my thoughts. “My family immigrated to France, but I stayed. I have lived here,” he said here as if it were a dirty word, “for two years.” I didn’t take him as the barbaric type and figured he’d switched locales to cool off from the violence and the vodka. “My name is Lucas. Not that names matter much, you know, at least not here...”
“Joe Dylan. Pleased to meet you,” Offered the man a hand. Lucas put a talon-like left inside it and shook it gently. Felt as if I’d been handed a ball of parchment, something that was once living but had now died and had been dried by the sun.
“Follow me inside. I think you will find it more comfortable out of this sun,” the old man lifted a hand to both protect his face against it. Or maybe it was the hangover that was doing most of the work. Most days, it felt like my head was locked inside a vice. I could have used a month or two on the detox somewhere. The murmurings of the scopolamine, like the aftershock from an earthquake, were still erupting. Maybe I should have taken the smoothie cure on Turtle Island or the vomit cure in the Ancient City. Maybe I should have rented a bungalow on a beach far away and taken nothing bar the collected works of Proust, a yoga mat, and a liquidizer for fruits and vegetables. Maybe I should have started jogging, tennis, formed a relationship with the kind of woman who had a fitness routine and knew the cure for intestinal worms. Maybe extreme sport was the way forward, hang-gliding, mountain biking, inner city base-jumping...
Looked at Kurt’s busted shape on the ground.
Maybe not.
Up three flights of stairs and into an apartment with bright white walls and a small sofa, two hard chairs, a coffee table. “I like to keep things simple,” Lucas said. “Our people are used to having little in the way of possessions. My generation at least... Please sit,” he motioned a claw towards the hard chair. Sat on the chair and wondered what he meant by my generation. Hale took the sofa. “Look at this,” Lucas handed me a photograph. The kid was fair-haired and handsome in a metrosexual way, early twenties with the kind of pout teenage girls wrote about in blogs. I’d seen the kid somewhere but couldn’t pin it to a time and a place. The thought nagged before I let it go, knowing that bolts of memory didn’t fire when pushed. Instead, they came at the least likely moment. Sipping a coffee at a truck station, playing badminton, losing a round of connect four with a drifter from outta town.
Taking out a notepad and pen, said. “Tell me about the recent, erm, turn of events.”
“First, let’s talk business,” Lucas smiled thinly. “I want you to keep your ear to the ground and find out why my nephew took his own life. If indeed that is what happened here.”
“Bad girlfriend, lack of money. Lucked out on the lottery,” I said looking at the old man directly with a seriousness that belied the comment. Sure. He had heard the story a thousand times and with each telling, it became worn down and hardened into shape the same way a fairy tale or a good joke becomes perfect through the retelling over hundreds of years of repetition. A rough stone is shaped into a smooth pebble by the tides of the sea while the truth is discredited as too obvious.
“If only it were that simple,” the old man sang in a whispery voice.
“Maybe it is. Drug habit, perhaps?”
“Now you are moving closer. You see, Kurt was fond of partying, but the last few days he stayed alone in his room, rarely went out.”
“Perhaps he had reached the final dance?”
“Explain.”
“Well, Lucas, if I can be so direct?”
“Please.”
“Think of using as a career or a profession. The user at first participates in a group before he or she excels him or herself in that group and decides to go it alone as he or she no longer fits the group mold. Usually he or she is helped. One in the group forms a vicious subgroup and pushes the strongest member out. The Buddha went through this bullshit for years. The psychiatrists call this stage, if voluntary, isolation. Or perhaps such people are expelled from their groups and decide that their time is better spent practicing the art of intoxication themselves. He builds a little sanctuary, fixes it up with the things that he likes. Soon he begins to get cabin fever and perhaps looks back at his final few months with a newfound sense of objective understanding. This can go two ways. He can clean up and find a new way, this is rare, but it happens. He can try to re-enter the group. He can find a new group. Or he can jump. The final dance. Jumping is very common in Fun City, Lucas, another day another resident does the dance. I’ve seen jumpers. I’ve seen cutters. I’ve seen women that have hung themselves, their tongues stretching out and down below the neck, flapping in the morning wind. Some drink poisons. Others use guns. One television personality sat in a cupboard and masturbated with a plastic bag over his noodle until the gas ran out. Some run out onto the train tracks screaming blue murder, and some, when their options run out, simply jump, arms open embracing the end of the only world they will ever know. Your nephew is one such case. I’m almost certain.”
“I would like you to explore, other, erm, options.”
“Okay. I can explore anything if the credit is right. But I don’t follow lost causes and I don’t pad bills. This is why I get instructions. I have a reputation.”
“Payment on delivery of information I’m afraid. I’ve been burned too many times in this city. But if you give me the right information, I’ll reward you handsomely.”
“How handsome?”
“Ten thousand credits.”
“That’s cute.”
“I was hoping you would agree. Do we have a deal?”
“Let me chew it over. I will, however, require a retainer.”
“Look, Mr. Dylan, you have been chosen especially for this assignment. All we need to know is why he jumped. Give us the evidence and we give you the money. I’ve done some research on you. I understand you are an honest noble man. A man that is trapped in Fun City yet wants more than anything to escape from this hole. Am I right?”
“The climate kinda grows on you after a while.”
“But when it gets too hot, you have to leave,” Lucas smiled.
“Is that a threat?”
“It is a business opportunity, Mr. Dylan, pure and simple. We will arrange your retainer. A structured payment.”
“Did Kurt ‘ave any enemies?” Hale asked.
Lucas turned to face Hale and considered the question. “Kurt lived a quiet life here. He was sent over by the family to be in my trusted care. I have failed them,” the old man’s face saddened, “I thought the sunshine and the beach would be enough...”
“What was ‘e escaping from?”
“Sorry?”
“Everyone one ‘ere is escaping from something. What was it, work, a woman, family stuff?” Hale squeezed the arms on his chair and exhaled noisily.
“He was taking a break from life, like many here do. He wasn’t escaping from anything.”
“Well,” I said, “he has escaped now. Did Kurt have friends, a girlfriend? Do you have access to his email, social network accounts?”
“I let him live his own life,” Lucas paused at the word life, “He was only twenty-three. He spoke about Gamers, often. I wasn’t sure what he meant by these Gamers.”
“We need that photograph.”
Old man Lucas handed it over. “Find out who did this and why. Here, let me show you outside, now follow me, please Mr. Dylan. Oh, before we leave. When he jumped, he had something in his hand. Maybe it means something?”
“A note?” Hale asked.
“Not quite.” Lucas walked over to a small bureau and opened a drawer. “We found this,” he took out a small metallic object and walking back, held it out in his hand.
The object was about two inches in diameter with eight legs, a circular body, and two glass red eyes embedded into the end of the circular section. I took it from the old man and weighed it in my hand. Felt a bolt of static electricity. “Titanium, maybe. A titanium spider. It means nothing to me, Lucas. Can I take it?”
“It will have to be returned.”
“Of course, I’ll guard it with Hale’s life.”
“You’ll guard it with your bloody own,” Hale said.
Lucas raised a hand to silence us. “Thank you, the family, you see...now if you will please follow me outside.”
Out the room through the corridor and down in the lift and back through the lobby, into the unrelenting sun, the Fun Police had arrived and were busy taking photographs and asking questions. They removed the blanket and replaced it with a plastic sheet. A white line had been sprayed around the body. Television news van had arrived and the team was busy setting up their equipment. A news reporter stood smoking a cigarette and scrolling through some sort of tablet device.