Shifters (19 page)

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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Shifters
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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
un
real. 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.”
“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.
“—and then my phone rings. It’s one in the goddamn morning and my goddamn phone rings and you know who it was?”
Cordesman stalled. “David Cone?”
“No, it was Jill Brock, you know, the field chief for Evidence Section. And you know what she says?”
Cordesman held up his hand in dismay. “I don’t know. Maybe she told you to forget about the trade because the Yankees are the only team that matter?”
“No, she said, and I quote, ‘Doesn’t goddamn Cordesman ever read his office intranet?’”
Puzzled, Cordesman stroked an imaginary beard. He’d tried to grow one once but, for whatever reason, the right half of his mustache came out blonde. “Office intra—”
Kerr pointed to the Hewlett-Packard P-6 on the captain’s desk. The monitor was off. “Do you ever turn that on?”
“What, the computer?”
“No,” Kerr said. “The pencil cup. For the most decorated senior officer in the department’s history, and for a guy who could’ve made deputy chief the day he walked in here but
didn’t
 because, so he says, he didn’t feel that his ‘Kantian opportunities’ could be ‘maximized’ in a desk job—and rejected an eleven-grand pay-hike as a result—you sure don’t know much, do you?”
“Hey, fuck computers,” Cordesman said outright. He lit another Camel off the lit end of the last butt. “I don’t fuck with any of that fuckin’ computer shit. I’ve told you that. That fuckin’ thing sitting on my desk there—” Cordesman pointed to the beautiful Magnavox .26 17-inch monitor—“is the eye of hell.”
Kerr nodded. “Eye of hell or not, sir, you might want to take a quick peek at it every so often. There’s a little icon on it that says ‘Weekly Multi-Precinct Homicide Blotter.’ Then you’ll be aware of related homicide evidence among the other three city homicide zones.”
Cordesman had profane language on the brain tonight. “I don’t give a fuck about the other fuckin’ precincts, Kerr. I only worry about fuckin’
North
 Precinct.”
“I understand that, sir. But when fuckin’ evidence in the fuckin’ East, West, and South fuckin’ precincts directly fuckin’ relate to an ongoing homicide fuckin’ investigation in the fuckin’ North Precinct don’t you give a fuck about
that?
”
“Watch your language, Kerr, and yes, I do give a fuck about that. But I don’t generally worry about it, for two reasons. One, Ann Arundel County, Maryland, has more homicides in three or four weeks than this entire candyass city has in a year.”

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