Imbroglio

by Andrew McEwan

Driving. All expectations put aside. The world an unfamiliar one, its people wan and grey. His brain wasn’t where he’d left it and it took some finding again. There was a woman in it, an indelible stain. Just one of numerous wounds, he thought, juggling his disappointments, numbering his successes. Difficult to say which was greater, as it depended how they were assessed. By emotional weight, then the disappointments won hands down. By life-defining significance…err…fifty-fifty. By ultimate consequence – if that made sense – he didn’t know. It was open to interpretation; how he chose to see, whether good or ill should come of a given situation, relationship, circumstance. Fates and gods or an indifferent universe. Pick. Traffic-lights were tricky in monochrome and he was grateful for the willingness of other road users to get out of his way.

  But he knew exactly what he wanted out of life…

  Somewhere, somehow, he’d forgotten. Remembering now, the whole gamut like a tidal wave, a multiplicity of events and images, people and places one atop another in some orgy of memory, it was as if he was swamped by someone else’s past, their identity fostered onto him. His own supplanted, lost, drained away to be replaced by …what? How could he argue this existence wasn’t his? That it belonged to…who? No stranger. He knew all there was to know. But himself? It was ridiculous to be suspicious of that, of himself. A peculiar form of paranoia. He dug cigarettes from a door pocket and depressed the lighter. Outside the streets bled past, rows and rows of identical dwellings, even and scrubbed and overhung by a pall of smoke and dust. The sky was low. The clouds flat. Grubby kids in short trousers pointed in awe at his vehicle, the reaching arms of parents dragging them back.

  Passion. Here there was none. Here endured the bereft. Of all the colour inside his borrowed car, in its paintwork, none leaked into the world, not by proximity, neither in reflection. It was a separate universe. He was apart. Not physically, he could run into a brick wall. But would any flakes of paint or chrome retain their hue and gleam once adrift? He imagined not. There was interaction, but no cross-over. They were that side of the windscreen, he was this. It was terrible, what had befallen the Earth; it had sunk below itself. It’s misery was total.

  Despair. It was the opposite of passion and threatened to swallow him. Yet just as his flesh cooled and the colour passed from his cheeks he noticed via the mirror something on the back seat. At first he thought it was his duffel bag, that which he kept under the stairs, primed for midnight expeditions, foraging trips into the woods and the suburbs in search of trinkets, cast-offs, implements ancient and modern, the shed skin of society, its technology, simple and bold – only dirty, like it had been dragged through a ditch. It was larger though, rougher in texture, a hessian sack, the sort of thing coconuts came in. The sack had a presence which unnerved him. It demanded his attention, more so than the road. And he was frightened to stop, to slow down. If anything, he accelerated, eyes fixed more behind than ahead, sweat running, dripping off his nose. He was fearful and the fear excited. He felt a new thirst, an animal lust. His body swelled and trembled. His every muscle tightened, so that he thought he might burst. The steering wheel deformed in his hands and he crushed the throttle pedal through the floor.

  The sack moved. It contained something. Something lost perhaps. Something he might redeem. Had he the courage, the determination…

  He turned, decided. It was fates and gods. Indifference, on whatever scale, was nothing. And he wished something at the end.

  His last act or his first to run down a blonde girl, a child with surprise in her step and ringlets, occupied with a cream tart as she skipped lightly off the curb.

 

  Afterward…

  Herschel picked up the pieces. He had a soft spot for Columbine, information he kept from the committee. Her birth would be soon as these things were reckoned, up there in the land of the living. Then who knew how she’d fair? Pink and naked, she might be loved, she whose exclusion, by a narrow vote, brought both laughter and tears. Her empty keep was a museum, a gallery, on display all her wicked ways, from sodomy with an orthodontist to bestiality with a horse. By insects, large and noisome, her garret was occupied, her larvae hatched from eggs fertilised by every murderer and rapist known through time.

  Who’d tutor them now?

  Byrd shrugged and picked his nose, straightened his tie.

  And…

  She found him at home. It was January, cold but not snowing, frost on the cars, his window. Colours leaked through the white overcoat. She could see through the glass he was making something. What it was she couldn’t tell; but it moved in his hands as if living, tactile and strange, growing and shrinking under his knife, swelling to fill his palm, beginning to find its shape. She had need of him for the first time in months. Her wings were broken beneath her cape. She could think of no other that might straighten them, her pinions torn and bent. But she was afraid to knock. Oddly, she felt warmer in the cold. She thought her wings might heal. In time, perhaps, they would. Her fear though, was that she could lose the gift of flight. They’d mock her then, her pretty pinions, being just useless stumps.

  Inside, what he had made left his hands, circled him twice before coming to rest on the ceiling. It nestled there among others, metallic insects whose presence weighed heavily, and she wondered then if she was mistaken, that he had changed. The ceiling moved, yet was calm. A hum escaped the room, barely audible; like cats purring. He opened a paper envelope and crumbled two sugar cubes into a saucer. An insect floated down, wobbling like a damaged aircraft. It was broken, like her. Here, like her, for repair. She smiled and rapped her nails off the pane. He jumped. Afraid. Of a butterfly?

  She opened her cape to reveal pink underwear.

  ADDENDUM ~ FORMULAE: the scale of events as pondered by, among others, a flushed-cheeked bearded gentleman with a bad back.

  Thirty One: The Anti-Claus