Did you know that if I wanted to I could explain to you the mathematics of your recent Pandemic? This is but only one of the ridiculous little shrapnels that can embed itself. I wouldn’t even want to talk about it really, but you would. Of that I have no doubt. Not just something to wile away our short little jaunt, you would go on and on with endless goadings for more of this and that. Do you see? How much I know of everything I don’t even want to?

Let’s just drop it. Let’s pretend for a moment that we have an endless here and now to be sincere and meaningful. Tell me then about the ones you lost, the ones most closest to you. Your mother, your siblings. Better even, tell me did you lose someone that you really loved? I think I can relate to that believe it or not. But you really must begin Conjuring or else the image goes fleeting. Wait, oh yes then, here it comes, hold your thought because I have it just now coming back to me. But it’s running a bit backwards.

Oh the terrible fright! There’s the cup falling from his youthful hands, a solemn drivel lolling off the rim and soaking into the slate floor, already dank and grimy from all the shuffling of our long Dark Work. All backwards. He drinks with lips chapped from, from, from what? Canting. That’s right. Canting for hours on end. Now a hymn. Good Lord it’s beautiful. Something we wrote together in the Goddamn blasphemous vain notion that it would do that one thing for which there is no math to bridge the void.

Aargh, break it off! It is more than I can stomach right now that failure. What was it you were going to mutter. Oh, uh-huh. Yes, I see. By God that would have been right around the time I first met Garreth. Could you almost see it leave her like I saw it leave him? The Ghost exiting? The spirit just bursting right forth in total hopelessness and despair? Jesus Christ can we stop for moment and rest? I don’t like this euphoria at all. We have to find something different to talk about.

Okay fine, about that. Yes. We’re almost there anyhow. You have to promise me that you won’t find this sad or compulsive. These tomes, now scattered to the awful winds. I did not write them. All I did was read them is all. They came from strange corridors of used London bookshelves. Or crates tucked under makeshift street-vendor tables. One I remember finding in an absolute drunken rage flinging through the rot of a landfill -suddenly betwixt at it’s cyclopean stare. The Hurting Game. Yes that one indeed.

Here let me show you. Just up the stairs. It’s where we’re going now. Watch your step. Let me introduce you to a real Son of a Bitch.

“I recall without any fog of mind the very first day that I fell in love, and I can never forget the moment I woke up from that strange spell, against all of my will, clawing against its dark dawn everything.  I am now in despair.  Where are the ridiculous innocent fictions that I seem to have never gotten quite so good at?  What has become of my coy and playful ruses?

The first day I fell in love she was nothing but a child, and she moved across the market square like a slow wraith.  Grimy from the city’s ramshackle steam project of rocketing into Tommorrowland against the day and all common sense.  A street child and nothing more, but floating with an abandonment that comes with being an orphan at the age of seven in an Atomic Wonderland such as this.  A dignity born out of depravity.  I watched her grin to herself mildly (O’ be still my heart) and then take a sudden but choreographed tumble into the mud and piss of the gutter.

Shuddering, I almost failed to catch my sense and nearly hurled myself irresponsibly into the makeshift stage-play.  I might have ruined an otherwise brilliant production (or become victim of it).  But I caught myself, retracted, and stared on from across the river of jostling Patronairres peddling and seeking their daily wares.  Like a vortex she plucked two then three of these hapless Materialists out of that coursing torrent – specimens of fine accoutrement and given to swoons of conscience they were.  As they bent to show the girl concern, dark crevices and cracks in the surroundings suddenly gave off further little Gremlins that set silently to work and with impressive motion removed these pompous pieces of Charitable Meat of the wealth that weighed them down.  I swear to you, it was such a subtle piece of street art, that I remain convinced I be the only witness of that stupendous performance.

I hung back briefly at the Newsstand as the act came to a musical close, but I followed that young dirty dripping thing with my gaze as she vanished into the mist that roils thickly at either end of the thoroughfare on these cool, humid Autumn morns.  My imagination and intellect began to crescendo upon her eloquent and nuanced exit into obscurity.  All of the petty cheating and squirming that had become my stock in trade as a young spoiled Privileged, winding my way aimlessly through Law School, not to mention the endless charades of smiling and complimenting customers at the Mercantile at which I worked, these all served a demon seed for something grander and insidious now in the proximity of her inspiration.  The child, in her graceful bitch quality, had just educated my boredom with this world on how to Live in the face of so much meaninglessness!

And O’ how I did throw myself thereafter into the romance of the Con!

But how could I have known how deadly my subsequent plays of fiction could be?  What possessed me to eventually turn to such Dark Arts for my newfound trade in the Steal?  What possessed me indeed.  I speak to you now my good audience of strangers and perhaps no one at all in this Void which sprawls before me.  I tell you that it would have been better for me to cling to the facades and motions that shield us from the deadly Mystery that groans behind the curtains of this vicious comedy.  Yes, the Quasigentsia certainly has its fair share of dark alleyways.  I am but a shell of a man now for flirting with its shimmering Mirage.

And I ask now where is my innocent love?  Where is that child-thing?  Did she happen to fare as bad as I in the end? Or did she happen to turn to me before entering the fog?  Did she turn and caution the limits,  caution my sloughing off of any such station in this ‘Real World’ so completely?  I tell myself there may be a way back from the bizarre paths that my posturing led me down, but as the days roll on I fear there is not.  And so I can only remain to whisper backward from this haunted existence that I now occupy.

Only you remain to take heed to the many tales I have to tell of scampering off the precipice of all Sense that followed that fateful morning of regretful inspiration.  Yes, I have many boundaries to chart for you good friends.  But these talons that are now firmly in my side have reduced my stamina like the burden of the ages, and we must tread slowly at any rate, for there are many eyes and ears in this Dark Wood that I have brought back with me from the Nether Regions into our midst.  It will be best if we go forward now in very small chapters.

Best for you and I both.”