idiotic investigation the 11th

0

Poet abruptly pulled off to the left side of the road. A car came from behind him blaring its horn at the sudden decision, then its taillights could be seen shrinking away; its sound also, like an expiring instrument, decreased, as Poet sliced across the second lane.

His car moved delicately onto the gravel; its tires, inching, sounded the slow crack of an expansive skull.
The headlights washed over the diminishing path. At its end, Poet finally parked.

He turned off the engine, and considered the view from the secluded cliff side.

Then Poet slept.

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Poet opened his eyes and exited the car, moving toward a large stone positioned neatly beneath a tree.

Arriving, he sat familiarly on it, his eyes trained on the horizon. There, he lit a cigarette and immediately extinguished it. Then he lit a second one, this time smoking it.

Lunar silence approached like a fat drop, and Poet’s fragile heart beat like thin paper.

1

The city lay beneath its virginal smog, curling lustily for Poet.

Extinguishing his cigarette, he extracted a bit of paper and a frisked his pockets for a pencil.
Then Poet began to note the things he saw:

                           Its tallest buildings speak in accents,
                           and its vehicles hum, bleeping glitched permutations
                           of a microchip.

                           The city is all sound and motion, but it never moves,
                           never, as the sun comes down swiftly beyond it:
                           descending to its watery seat,

                           once more as it always, always does. 

Poet stopped writing for a moment, and observed the city from his elevated position.
Then Poet began to note the things he saw once more:

                           Lights igniting, one at a time, then lighting up in groups: circuitry,                             glinting and exploding. In minutes the city will be wholly lit, buzzing,                             with its  vehicles multiplying, rodent-like and enchanting, grinding to                                 an imperceptible throb, like ink-black bubbles glittering at the lips of a                            deep,deep mouth––all of it so nearly swallowed.

He began to write more quickly, flitting his gaze from the surface of the crumpled page spread out on his knee, to the broad landscape beneath him. For each shift of his eyes, several symbols were inscribed. He sat writing for a while longer.

                           Lights are beaming skyward and bulbs are blinking down from passing                            airplanes. All wired.

                           Everything is excess, like dividing cells. The whole body is now                             endless spasm. Ceaseless eroticism. The city is lighting into life: a                            spray of molten bullets appear in a train across the night sky.

                           Flash.

                           All of it is luminous body, a trillion bulbs hissing electrically on the lip of                            a deep, deep mouth. Inviting: come. Breathing in its observers.                            Breathing them up to the electric blackness of its surrounding                            mountains ofabandoned caves and hollow trees. Aluminum mountains                            where cold wind flies off snow and ice, howling paindown ––

He fell asleep.

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A while later, he opened his eyes and read over what he had written before. His eyes shifted from line to line, at times going over the same set of words, at times skipping back and forth over the page. He chewed his lip. Then he began to erase his words.

One by one, the words were removed, leaving behind faint yet resistant traces.

After a long look at the pencil, he finally turned back to view the city once more.

It lay there, still decorous beneath its putrid smog.
He began to write once more.

                            Its longest coast littered with lost messages,
                            and its people nervous, perpetually chattering,
                            the mathematical din of crickets.

                            The city is all symbols and meaning,
                            but it never expresses, never,
                            as the moon shows forth above it: rising to its peak of evil

                            once more, as it always, always does.

Poet stopped writing for a moment, and observed the city from his elevated position.
Then he began to write once more:

                            Words are dribbling, drop-by-drop, then washing away: currents,                             twirling and destroying. In minutes the city will be drowned, bloated,                             and its people will be turned, fish-like and mesmerized, suspended in                             a black net of light, like the shocks flying out of a cut fuse atop a high,                              high tower––none of it with any meaning at all. 

He began to write more quickly, flitting his gaze from the surface of the crumpled page spread out on his knee, to the broad landscape beneath him. For each shift of his eyes, several symbols were inscribed.
He sat writing for a while longer.

                            Currents are swirling up to the surface and bodies are falling from                              passing ships. All inscribed.

                            For a stated term all will remain moist, at first just the edges, then the                              middles, like scrunched sponges. The whole body will be drunk.                                Perpetual intake. The city will choke fluid: every vampire drinking and                             drinking and drunk.

                            Waves.

                            All of it is aquatic luxury, a trillion molecules melting into one, all                             dancing like the scales of a netted fish. Imposing: captured. Tying fish.                             Tying them to each other with their 15,000 hearts beating cold blood                             sent like some prehistoric kiss. From a prehistory that was and will                              always be cold, frigid, careless and indifferent.

He stopped and went to sleep once more.

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A while later, he opened his eyes and read over what he had written. His eyes shifted from line to line, at times going over the same set of words, at times skipping back and forth over the page.

He chewed his lip. Then he began to erase his words.

One by one, the words were removed, leaving behind faint yet resistant traces.

Dusting off its residue from the face of the crumpled sheet, Poet saw that the eraser was finally spent.
After a long look at the pencil, he finally turned back to view the city once more.

2

Poet was unable to sleep, yet his eyes remained closed.

Behind his eyelids, on the inner side of his skull, he could see the city, stretched endlessly before him. Its different aspects coming together in shapes, shapes that concealed the city, animating it, characterising it, making it a place Poet could know, a place built for his unending look.

But his look was even hungrier than this. With his imagination he tore these shapes off the city’s body and rearranged them: placing what was once there, here, and what was here, there.

Then, as he continued his work, he allowed small figures to drift down onto the face from on high; down onto the city, in their miniature parachutes, the figures crept. Little black figures shaped like small arches, little knife-cuts coming down a curtain, like question marks harassing.

Little black figures with needle legs, legs that cut. They came down onto the city, the city that was being rearranged like a pretty girl’s face. He committed this violence to the face of the city, as though rearranging the features and parts of a face. Like slicing the face of a young girl. Beautifying it. Cutting faces out of a face.

The surgery was in full swing by then. The face was to be remade entirely. It was, in its current form, to be destroyed.

All the figures had finally touched down; they dispersed and were hidden soon after that.
Poet remained unmoved on his stone, beneath his tree, focusing his imagination as it set to its task of dissection. His mind followed the figures as they spread across the city, fulfilling their tasks.

Her small girl’s eye – beside the other one – brought forth a difficult face for Poet to look at, a face ambiguous for Poet to question. This face:

“How does it dissolve into a head? Do the eyes close and curl like ears? Do the ears come forth into a clap? Do they pinch a nose out of breath? Does the mouth open wide over the forehead and swallow her hair? Strands floating up like an underwater plant, its tentacles spreading eyeball pupils and eye lashes and small hairs sprouting; all this just to fall into the wind spreading all over the smoggy sky?”

Poet hardly stirred as these thoughts cluttered over each other in his mind.

“They were like lashes on her cheeks; lashes turning into lips, turning into eyelids, peeling back over an open mouth screaming between inhalations that other black figures could slide down. To slide down in order to find their place back at the tip of her tongue that is holding up a single eye, a hard and watery eye that casts a blindness out onto the languishing horizon. What is this face that is so many faces? It only disfigures and reconfigures so to disfigure again.”

These things Poet thought about obsessively.

Then Poet cut off. It was difficult to persist.
For a time he no longer directed the figures.
He sat silently observing.

Then he slept, and in his sleep the figures persisted.

–––––––––––––––– i

There: black steel is roaring quick on a highway; a car faster than a scream.
It came around like a knife travelling from her eye to the corner of her mouth.

Inside the driver is tapping his thumb, and the steering wheel is shaking. A stubbed cigarette hissed. Beside him was a skeleton clutching a purse, its transparent hair tied up in a padlock and its eye sockets flickering a film deep within. The film was of gunshots and collapsing buildings, shattering glass and bullets.

Rat-tat-tah.
Rat-tat-tah.
Rat-tat-tah.
tah-tah-tah

Drops of violence were smeared all over her skull, a shot of potent death smeared over its eye sockets.
No words, just a beat and speed, just like that, a car faster than a scream, then it smashed off the road.

Blood. Blood. Blood and dripping fuel.
The little black figure had escaped the explosion was running.

–––––––––––––––– ii

There: two men on motorcycles snipping the a street in half.
The face’s tears coming down like twinning defeat.

For each there was a leather jacket and a weapon. They rode up to a building dozing on a quiet street. Motorcycles hushed, they leaped off like horsemen. Through the gate and up three floors like rats, then through the door and down the corridor:

Rat-tat-tah!

A spray of blood on the bed, wall, ceiling and rug. Screams in the house.

Bang. Bang. Bloody bed sheets. Bang Bang.
The high-pitched drone of motorcycles erases everything.

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There: Three girls opens the doors of three different cars and into each a black figure slips in as well.
Like a blinking from fear, but the threat has already slipped under he eyelids. There is no scream for that.

They drop their bodies into their cars and each finds a figure. Deserted parking lots, and cut waistbands.

Snip. Snip. Bloody car seats. Snip snip, while the windows muffled three curdling screams.

4

Poet stood up from his rock and walked away from the cliff. It was now very late at night and the city beneath him had begun to slow down, to relax its tempo.

All of this had happened a 1000 times already. Every night, poet did this.

Having walked to a point far back enough in order to see not only the city below but also the tree and the rock framing it, Poet extracted scissors from his bag. He held the scissors up, and staring at the city, the tree, the rock, he pushed the blades of the scissors into his own eyes, pressing deep before opening them inside his skull.

Snip. Snip.

Ø

The city purred vigorously from within its virginal smog, glowing like a fog-light beneath its mantle or like a smile pushed into a pillow. A skeleton smiling at the door, beckoning with its long, long, finger.

Sprawl. Drone. No end.

idiotic investigation the 10th (Part II)

[The following is the second half of an investigation that was begun last week.]

15

With a single eye, he spied clouds pass over the sickle moon, its lunar radiance dripping over him intermittently.

Unable to remember all of what led to that moment, he closed his eyes. He tried to gather his memories and thoughts, to examine them in the light of the moon, but they kept scattering, dispersing as though they were marbles; they went tumbling off the cliff of a cloudy mountainside.

Then the moon itself was finally concealed and he thought of his roses:

Where had they gone?

16

He heard his name being called and did not respond.

The silence grew louder, and his eyes remained closed: countless roses began to engrave themselves in the blackness of his eyelids.

Then once more, his name was called, barely piercing the shell of quiet that had encased him, hardly interrupting the petals that were etching themselves into his eyelids in deep cuts. Silence enwombed him and his name came again––and again; each time more muted, each time carving a petal, each time more strained and distant.

Then for a time he did not hear his name being called anymore. He did not hear.

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In time the silence subsided.

Gradually, he began to hear the noise of the adjacent street, of the alley cats and rats, of talk and music from the bar, of his heart beating, of the wind pushing tarps and towels high above him on abandoned balconies.

The roses, as though from the wind and surging noise, dispersed on his eyelids, moving in all directions, away, leaving behind purple trails and glowing dots.
He swallowed the blood that had filled his mouth.

Then he heard his name once more.

“Anis.” He opened his eyes.

17

Tarek was bleeding from many places and even as he called to Anis, he did not seem to be aware of himself doing so.

Anis struggled to pick him up, to wipe away the mud and blood from his face, to force him to sit down; but Tarek kept slipping out of his grip.

“Anis,” he would whisper as he slipped to the ground over and over again.

Once more he thought of his flowers: where had they gone?

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Eventually he stood him up, supporting all his weight, and walked slowly toward the door of the bar that stood at the end of the alley.
A steady beat and a watery melody dripped out in a dim red ray of light.

18

As they approached the door of the bar, Anis began to have doubts. Yet each time he halted, he would look at Tarek’s unmoving and bloodied face then push further on.

Like a snail and its shell.

Suddenly the door of the bar swung open and a man came out amidst a flood of music holding a bag of trash. He set the massive bag on the ground.
The door shut behind him and the music instantly gave way to the sound of bouncing glass and aluminum as the man dragged the bag toward the dumpsters at the top of the alley

Anis stopped moving and was unable to say anything to the man as he approached. He stood in his place, Tarek’s weight on him, observing the bag of trash being dragged. It was ripping and stretching in different places.

He watched the black plastic mass get dragged on the rough asphalt, filled with trash, leaking from all sides.
He saw the trail it left behind it, glistening in the light from the street.

Then the man, who at first paid no attention to the boys, came close enough to see their faces in the dark.

“What happened to him?” he asked Anis.

Anis didn’t answer. The man stood facing him for a moment before picking up the bag of trash and hurrying with it to the dumpster, trickling fluid as he went. The bag landed like thunder, spraying an arch of fluid onto the wall of a building, as he hurried back to the boys.

“Come,” he said.

He helped Anis carry Tarek, closing the door behind them once inside.

19

The room was red, suffocating, and filled with more people than Anis expected.

Music blared and the voice of the woman singing seemed to slither out of the bodies of the people seated and standing around the bar; with their eyes, and through the smoke and talk, the music beat a nail through Anis, pinning him like an incised worm, cut open, but still breathing.

“Get these kids out!” a man screamed through a woman’s curly head.
He had his hairy hands holding her.

Anis suddenly realized that Tarek was not beside him anymore, that he was placed on a stool at the bar and that the man who brought them in was wiping his face with wet napkins; yet each time the man let go of Tarek, he would slump down onto the bar.

Then two women stood up from a nearby table and Anis forgot Tarek for a moment, struck by how much he could see of their legs and their saggy bellies. He even forgot about the man that screamed to have him and Tarek sent out, to whom the two women were now saying:

“They’re only children, what are you scared of? One of them is hurt, poor baby.”

“He looks dead,” a voice said from a darker part of the bar

Anis allowed his eyes to watch the women move toward the bar. Arriving, they stood behind Tarek with their backs to Anis. They were talking quickly and touching Tarek, their bushy hair – one blonde and the other black – bouncing each time they spoke.

Anis could not hear their words and he could no longer see Tarek. He could not even see the man that was cleaning him up.

He allowed his eyes to settle on the four ovals beneath the waists of the women.

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The music was relentless and Anis could not tell whether they were helping Tarek or not, and he suddenly felt very dizzy again. He remembered what he had drunk earlier and he realized that his stomach was still glowing with it.

“Get these fucking kids out of here now!” the voice came again.

Some men came in and other went out, brushing past Anis without heeding him.

Anis, peering through the smoky air, wanted to get closer to see what they were doing to Tarek, but he was reluctant to leave the entrance area of the bar.

“Get them the fuck out of here now!”

The man finally stood up, pushing aside the woman that had placed herself on him. Anis saw that her breasts were exposed, but he quickly looked away.

The women that were standing behind Tarek suddenly turned toward Anis. They walked toward him, their legs quivering with every step, their bellies swaying from side to side. Anis saw their breasts bulge, veiny and pulsing.

“You have to go outside.” They said this softly over the sound of the music.

Anis saw, off the left, a woman stand up and dance before a seated gentleman. The gentleman was drinking from a glass filled with ice. He was slapping the woman’s bare thighs with a stick.
An old man walked around on the other side of the room singing to the music.

“Kick the dead one out as well,” the voice yelled jokingly. “Filthy kids! They only came in here to look at tits and ass, you whores. Kick them out before I come and give them a beating.”

Arms and breasts closed in on Anis.

20

A moment later he was standing outside in a daze. It began to rain.

The door opened behind him and the music flooded out again.
Tarek was being carried out.

“He should be okay, he is just drunk,” said the man over the music. “Maybe the rain will wake him up.”

Anis found this hard to believe but he nodded his head. The man then went back inside and the music was muffled once more.

The rain gradually increased.

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“Tarek …” Nothing.

What’s wrong with him?

“Tarek?”

21

He managed to drag him to the top of the alley.
Panting under his weight, he finally dropped him against the wall of a building on the sidewalk of the main road.

Three cars sped by, filled with people, blasting music. A fourth drove by more slowly with a single person in it; he cruised past Anis and Tarek, inspecting them closely as he passed. His eyes mainly settling on Tarek.

Anis tried not to look at him as his car passed.

Then Anis heard the bar door open and close. He didn’t turn around to see.

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“Come with me, to my car,” a voice said behind Anis. “I know a doctor. I’ll take you there.”

Anis remained quiet and slowly turned to face the person that was speaking to him. He saw a fat old man smiling oddly at him in the rain.

Anis could hear music coming from down the street in both directions.

“Where?” Anis asked, but he was already following the fat old man to his car. Tarek was thrown over one shoulder, his face oozing blood and wet with rain.

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The man laid Tarek in the back seat, covering him. Anis stood by the front passenger seat door, but did not get in. After placing Tarek, he pulled himself out of the backseat and he looked over the top of the car at Anis, raining falling on his face.

“Get in.”

Anis didn’t look at the man. He simply reached for the door handle. Once inside the car, the man opened his door and swung into his seat.

He turned the ignition and the engine roared.
Rain pattered on the windshield.

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A memory of the last time Anis was in car like this, in the front seat, suddenly came to him as the car sped off.

22

“What happened to Tarek?”

How does he know Tarek?

“I surprised you, Anis.”

Shoes.

“You don’t remember me? Shame on you.”

3,000 liras.

“You are a terrible shoeshine. Maybe you should find something else to do.”

One, two, three.

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“Don’t you speak?”

The sound of the rain on the windshield doubled in volume just then.

“You didn’t even talk while you shined my shoes.”

He turned on the radio.

“Maybe it’s is better that way. If you don’t talk.”

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“Do you go to school?”

School.

“You should. It’s not good not to go to school.”

“I used to go to school …”

“––But now you have to make money?”

Anis nodded his head, looking out of his window at the passing lights and street signs. He saw some people walking in twos and threes, some people in or out of cars. He saw other cars. He saw a police station. He felt that he had already seen it during this car ride.

“Do you want money?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, do what I tell you.”

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Anis was shoved out of the car at the same place where he was picked up.
The rain was ceaseless.

He had a black eye.
His clothes were torn.

The car sped off with Tarek still in the backseat; he had not moved once.

23

He remembered his flowers.

He began searching for them in the dark, but his left eye was throbbing and almost entirely closed. He could hardly see, but he kept searching.
He needed those flowers; he needed to smell their damp and cold smell.

The rain came down like led.

He was stumbling on the ground, cutting himself on shards of glass, his hands covered in filth, digging through trash. Anis was frantic for the roses. He needed to find them. He was  thrashing around in the trash and the filth, in the dark, with the bar blasting its music in the distance.

He was trying to remember how many there were. Why couldn’t he find them anywhere, not a single one. He searched the entire alley, every inch. He prowled, coming and going. He began to obsess. He needed them.
He got into the dumpster. It was filled with fetid liquid. He tore open the bag that came from the bar. He smashed grass bottles and crushed cans with his feet. He couldn’t find his flowers. He climbed back out.

The flowers are gone. He screamed at the thought.

He got on his knees and held onto the wheel of the dumpster. He stuck his head under it, squinting through one eye as rain and filth splashed up onto his face. He couldn’t see whether they were there or not. Anis kept squinting until finally, he saw a flower. He saw a flower. He saw a flower. He found it. He tried to move the dumpster but the wheels were locked. He grew impatient. He tried knocking it over but he was too weak. He finally got on his belly and slid his body underneath the dumpster. He finally reached the flowers. His grasped the bouquet. He curled his body underneath the dumpster.

And it rained until morning’s acidic light.