by Lee, Edward
“It sucks, though,” Carl continued, simultaneously preparing oyster shooters and pouring several drafts. “Lehrling was in here all the time, almost every night—”
“He was part of the place.”
“And now he’s in the morgue.”
Locke’s mind went silent. In the morgue, yes, but not exactly complete. In the morgue…with parts missing… Parts consumed…
A flash in his mind’s vision tried to comprehend the scene: Lehrling’s body convulsing, blood blooming forth from his groin, his abdominal cavity converted to a psychopath’s warehouse of delicacies, organs plucked out as if by voracious melon-pickers, evacuated with glee.
What kind of a world was this? Not a world, he decided. A hock-wad of the gods. Cosmic phlegm…
The beer, ordinarily a sweet bitter ale, turned sour with the cogitations. Drunks generally turned to their poison for solace but, just as generally, solace was the last thing they collected.
“When’s the funeral?” Carl asked, snapping the images. He triple-flipped pint glasses onto the rubber-lined shelf, expert as a Pike’s Place juggler.
“There isn’t going to be one. Lehrling was an atheist, didn’t believe in funerals.” More beerside recollections trailed home. “He’d always joke about dying. Said he wants his friends to pay their respects to him here.”
“Then I guess you’re ready to pay more respect.”
Locke glanced in a half-shock at his empty pint glass—he’d downed it in minutes. But just as he would raise his finger for another, the two policemen were standing at either shoulder.
“Can I get another beer before you cuff me?”
“We’re leaving now, Mr. Locke,” Cordesman announced. “Just wanted to know if you’d like a ride home.”
“Thanks for the thought, Captain, but after so many hours in your polite company, please don’t be offended when I say that yours is not a face I prefer to look at anymore.”
“No offense taken, Mr. Locke.”
“You definitely beat the clichés,” Locke pointed out. “A police captain who talks about abstraction in human dynamics and has hair longer than a heavy metal roadie.”
“It’s true that basic ethical concepts are essentially indefinable, but they do seem to denote intrinsic, objective qualities apprehended intuitively.” Then Cordesman made a gesture that was the closest thing to a smile Locke had seen. “How’s this for cliché, Mr. Locke? Don’t leave town anytime soon.”
««—»»
Locke meandered home, up the steps, and next found himself sitting statuesque before the window, trying to make sense of it all—this busted puzzle that was his existence…
First Clare leaving him inexplicably, now Lehrling dead—his best friend—gone… And who was the blonde girl? She couldn’t have done this, could she? No, only some kind of monster did this thing, so what had happened to her?
Had the killer taken her?
Questions with no answers trickled on him—like the rain—as he cracked open another beer, this one from his own refrigerator—Hamm’s, the Poet’s Beer. $3.98 per twelve-pack. The gray early-evening drizzle had started, more of a mist actually, a clammy and cloying wetness that gradually soaked through everything. Locke was agitated, confused; what to do… Call Lehrling?
No, Lehrling was dead.
He glanced at the dresser, paused midsip on his beer. There it was, like a beacon calling to him from across a dangerous and rocky harbor, the business card lying neatly where he’d left it.
Lethe… He’d call Lethe. The man’s offer had seemed sincere, and getting out of town, even a short distance, would be good. To hell with Cordesman, he thought of the detective’s order. This ain’t Iraq. Suddenly it didn’t matter anymore, considerations he’d once dwelled upon.
Writing for money. Writing poetry, which he viewed as the ultimate art form, in return for financial compensation. Somehow, though, he felt that he was making the right move. Why not engage his skills to keep afloat? Poe had. Blake and Shakespeare and Stevenson and Faulkner had. Perhaps financial solvency would accelerate his muse, lessening day to day worries so that he could climb out of his recent block.
Perhaps it would make him a better poet.
Yeah…
And if this were the case, then he owed it to his art to do it.
Locke never even suspected that he might be rationalizing…
He snatched up the business card, quickly punched in the numbers.
“Ja?” a female voice answered on the third ring.
(iii)
I smell it in the air, I breathe it out of the glint in your eyes. Fear and reason. Sin and redemption.
Relativity.
Human truth and the crudest clichés are all the same in a way. When you’re fucking your girlfriend, striving for that “nut,” what do you see when you haphazardly notice the moving shadow on the wall?
Do you see love or lust? Do you see proof of the human species as a higher order of life?
Or do you see another animal racing to dump primordial sperm into another available receptacle?
I don’t know.
Do you?
They say that existence precedes essence.
I don’t want to believe “they” are right.
Because I am not the only one who can breathe it out of the glint in your eyes.
There’s someone else.
Someone who does it far better than I do.
(iv)
“Is Mr. Lethe available? It’s Richard Locke, the poet,” Locke replied, hoping he hadn’t misdialed in his haste.
“Ja, chust und minute,” the voice replied. A throaty purr conjured up a vision of Dyanne Thorne in Ilsa She-wolf of the S.S. Or maybe a fiesty Hans Holbein peasant girl. Locke shook his head at the unwitting imagery. This was probably Lethe’s housekeeper, and more than likely some obese, middle-aged German woman.
“Lethe here,” came the quiet voice with its hint of accent.
“Mr. Lethe, this is—”
“Ah, Mr. Locke. How wonderful to hear from you so soon.”
“I’m calling regarding your offer; I think I’d like to accept.”
There, it was out— He’d agreed to write a book solely for money… Was this hackwork? Was it a setting aside of what was real, what was true? Locke didn’t know anymore, all he knew was that he was alone, his best friend was dead, Clare was gone, and anything that was different had to be an improvement. It was time for a change.
“Mr. Locke, your timing couldn’t be better. I’m having a small get-together here tomorrow evening and we’d be delighted to have your company. Why, there’s even a small guest-house that you could stay in for the weekend if you like.”
“That’s very kind of you, I’d be glad to get away from the city for a few days,” Locke went on. “A break in my routine may be just the stimulus I need to get started on this project.”
“Bring whatever luggage you like, you can stay at the cottage as long as you wish. I’ll send my driver round for you about six if that’s satisfactory. I think that this will be a most rewarding weekend. You’ve much potential Mr. Locke, perhaps much more than you realize.”
Without waiting for a response Lethe hung up, leaving Locke’s eyes to query the phone. What to do now? How about writing? he suggested to himself. I just got a $10,000 book deal, I can’t sit on my ass forever. But he found the mood, and the motivation, displaced. Lehrling wasn’t even cold yet.
Something nearly subconscious took him to his desk. I know…
Exorcism. Lehrling had talked about it all the time—
“Catharsis,” the novelist had advised only nights ago. “Exorcism. Turn your feelings into art. Write the best poem you’ve ever written. Then you’ll be free.”
Catharsis, the displacement of despair via his creative energy. But Locke had dismissed it as a pop psychology, liberal rhetoric. He’d never really bought all of that but he saw the link.
Tomorrow, for the first time in my life, I’m going to accept m
oney for my work. So tonight…
An unheeding glance to the dresser, to a picture of Clare. She seemed to smile back at him through the dead memory.
Tonight I will write the best poem of my life. And then…
Like the prelude of a pianist before the ivory keys, Locke flexed his fingers before the manual typewriter.
He began to type.
««—»»
Eleven lines, and how many rewrites? Thirty-five, forty? Locke never thought in terms of drafts or output; it was irrelevant. The final creation was the only thing that mattered.
It was full dark now. Hours has passed in his creation of the simple eleven-liner in his pocket. What else could he do? It felt like some inkling of closure, or at least self-cognizance. The last act of the artist before his welcome permutation into hack. Locke didn’t care anymore how he felt about any of that.
The poem was the thing, and that was all.
Well, not quite all.
More of his cryptic poet’s empathies suffused into the mix of what he feared might be the final dribbles of his concept of truth. The poem itself was fine—it was as good as he could make it, and it had been a long time since he’d felt that way. But it’s not real.
Not yet.
Until the conveyance of his muse had been finalized, the poem could never be real. He hadn’t created it for an audience, nor had he created it for himself.
There was only one person in the world he’d created it for, and until that person read it, the poem would never be anything more than meaningless black marks on bleached woodpulp.
It will never be real until she reads it.
A numb trek through oblivion—that’s how his journey seemed to him—with truth at the end of the line. Clouds like dark mountains crept overhead; moonlight through their valleys, steeped by the atmosphere’s ash-gray sky, painted ghost-light about their billows and edges. Locke thought of luminous, warped bones. Bereft of their leaves, the trees on either side of the dead street seemed to extend their branches—skeleton hands clutching for Locke’s soul.
Closer, now…
His footsteps, like his resolve, plodded on.
Closer…
The anticipation—and more than a prick of fear—distorted his vision. He began to see Roosevelt Street in rhythms, in skiagraphs, in weaveworks of textures, as though the force of his determination had tinted his blood with some psychedelic. Colors hummed, unreal yet painfully intense. Pots of some otherworldly phosphor seemed to hover at the fringes of his vision, but when he focused…they were streetlights. Truly, this was a poet’s night, a fictile darkness of steeped dimensions and hidden heights.
A few more steps through this strange realm, and he was there.
Reality reattained. Locke stood with hunched shoulders at the apartment building’s darkest corner. A loiterer, a hoodlum. He dare not look up at the second-story unit—What if she’s standing on her balcony? Christ! What if she sees me? These very real considerations did not occur to him until this very moment. A neighbor might dismiss him as a peeping tom, call the police. Wouldn’t that be lovely? She’ll look out her window to see a couple of city beat cops stuffing her ex-boyfriend into the back of a prowl car.
But he would not be thwarted. Cowards die a thousand times, he thought. He’d come out here with the summit of all his truth in his breast pocket—he sure as shit wasn’t going to turn around now.
But where to put it? Where must he leave his truth?
Easy! There was Clare’s car—the Nissan Sentra—parked cold at the curbside. He could just stick the poem under a wiper and leave. In the morning when she went to work, she’d see it, take it off, read it.
Locke smirked. Yeah, but if you had any real balls, you’d go inside, walk your ass up the steps, and stick it in her door…
Suddenly his teeth were chattering. It was cold, yes, but not that cold. He was afraid—afraid of being seen, afraid of humiliating himself.
But didn’t that really mean he was afraid of the truth?
His hand trembled when he reached into his jacket and withdrew the single sheet of paper, trembled more when he unfolded it. Paled by moonlight, his face looked down at the truth.
THIS, MY VERITY, I PROFESS
by Richard Locke
Glyphs, like signs, like cenotes and ziggurats,
remnants of ruby revelations—they’re symbols.
Welcome to my castle in the air; its walls are
muses with garrets through which I peer for
errant truths.
You can’t see it, but it’s always there.
Providence, infinity, terra incognito? They’re all
the same in a way. So up into the ziggurat I go,
through the rive in the interstice, jubilant and
dressed in raiments black.
Swaying the fragrant thurible for you.
Yeah, he thought in a mental sound like a death rattle, or the keen of a rusted mausoleum gate.
Here was his eulogy, and all that he professed. Here was his exorcism, and—
Here was his love.
Solemn as a pall-bearer, and in graven silence, Locke opened the door to the apartment lobby and began to ascend the steps.
(v)
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Kerr said.
Cordesman, slouched at his desk, glanced up. He has been ruminating over the dichotomy of epistemological theory and its subtexts involving pure phenomenalism. It made sense but it didn’t. If it made sense then, conversely, it couldn’t make sense. If it was real, then it could only exist in the acknowledgment that most of reality was unreal. The tenets of the so-called Knower-Known pretext (that an object of knowledge is not a construction of the mind but an independent act of knowing) seemed to clearly contradict the functionalism of the theory’s major moving part, that being is subjectivism, or the assertion that physical bodies are only complexes of sense-qualities. In other words, matter does not exist.
“You ever read Descartes, or Moore?” Cordesman asked, exhaling Camel smoke.
Kerr popped him a mugshot. “Uh, Clancy sometimes. And a little Grisham. But I’ve never heard of—”
“It’s just philosophy,” Cordesman admitted. “It could be nothing but a rooker full of egghead bullshit, but—goddamn—if you look at it closely enough… None of it makes sense, and that fact is what authenticates the sense of it. See what I mean?”
Kerr walked slowly across the smoke-rank office, side-glancing his boss with a concerned tip of an eyebrow. He poured coffee from the little burner on the room’s only file cabinet. The stuff in the pot bubbled like radioactive sludge. “Well, no, Captain, I don’t know what you mean.”
Cordesman winced, aggravated. “We’re cops, Kerr. Jesus Christ, who is more in the middle of the human condition than us? Our job is to enforce an ideal of civility in a primal scape. Right?”
Kerr glanced over his coffee cup, paused. “Whatever you say, Captain.”
“Don’t you see? It’s functional altruism versus emotive and approbative indefinability. The only way we can be real is for both of these values to be fact.”
“Yeah?”
“And if they’re both fact then, functionally, they cancel each other out.”
Kerr at last took a sip of the coffee, smirked, then spat it out into the waste basket. “Hey, this coffee tastes like paint.”
“By now, it probably is paint. It’s been cooking on that burner since this morning.”
Kerr, disgusted, dropped the entire cup in the trash. “And speaking of this morning, that was the point of my comment when I first entered your charming and very fragrant office. You know, the comment that you immediately ignored?”
Cordesman leaned back in his Office Depot chair, drew hard on his cigarette. “Oh, something about sleep.”
“Yeah. You picked me up for the prelim site exam at, what? Five this morning? Now it’s past two a.m. And this ain’t the first time.”
“Well, you’re obviously not sawing any logs yourself.�
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“It’s all that crystal-meth I’ve been stealing from the property vault. You ever been down there? Actually I couldn’t sleep because of the pending Cone trade.”
“Yankees will never trade him, especially to Seattle. If they do, I guess I’ll just have to cut my throat. Why go on living? I came close when that shit-for-brains Steinbrenner got rid of Key and Wetland. What’d they ever do for him except win the World Series?” Cordesman, in spite of his conviction record, had only been here since ‘91; he’d come from a county department in Maryland, where he’d lived all his life. But, even more to the contrary, he was and always would be a Yankees fan. “I see, so you couldn’t sleep because you’ve got steel in your shorts over this trade that’ll never happen, so you come here?”
“Not exactly. I decide to pour myself a bottle of Adam’s since this week it’s on sale at Safeway for $4.49 per six—hint, I can only buy it on sale because I’m two years overdue for a step-raise—”
“Oh, shit, I didn’t know that. I’ll put you in for one,” Cordesman said. Kerr was a good cop. He deserved his Adam’s. Cordesman remembered the day when he’d drunk it himself—always to excess.