The New Death and others (15 page)

In the center of the plaza was a 'dragon':
one of those costumes worn by a team of men in festivals such as
Chinese New Year. It was very realistic, if I may use that word.
The men under it must have been wearing shorts despite the cold
weather, for their legs and feet were bare. I wondered if this was
the traditional practice. There was a large crowd. Almost everyone
wore medieval Asian dress, or a sort of fairy tale version of
it.

The dragon writhed and capered while
musicians played, loud and dissonant. The air throbbed with gongs
and drums and the clapping and chanting of the audience. Soon a
group of men entered the scene with fireworks. They set then off,
and the dragon jumped with every explosion.

On some signal that I did not notice the
clapping and chanting and music all became faster. I covered my
ears with my hands. The men under the dragon leapt into the air as
if the creature was trying to fly. They had the grace and
athleticism of dancers, and moved as if controlled by a single
mind. Each pair of legs left the earth a precise fraction of a
second after the one before it, so that the beast rippled like a
wave on the ocean. Parents urged their children to join in with the
clapping and a new chant arose. It was a single word repeated, or
perhaps a wordless shout. The chant grew in speed and volume. It
was unbearable, like the beating of a fist against my skull. Then,
all at once, the men in the dragon lay on the ground, the noise
stopped, and the dragon closed its eyes.

Everyone gave a great cheer. I waited to see
what would happen next. But it seemed that there was nothing to
follow. The crowd quickly dispersed. I waited for the men in the
dragon to get up so that I could congratulate them. I also wanted
to ask whether they were professional performers or local people. I
waited for a few minutes but they stayed down. I wondered if this
was another custom that I was unaware of. The plaza was now empty
except for me and the men. At last I went over to the costume. I
knelt down. I excused myself but received no answer. Then I reached
out to touch the costume, as you might touch someone on the
shoulder to attract their attention. It felt strangely solid, and
warm. There were no men. It was, or rather it had been, a living
creature.

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++++

I Heard the Mermaids
Singing

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to
each.

I do not think that they will sing to
me.

T. S. Eliot.

I heard the mermaids singing

and wished I had not heard.

I heard the mermaids singing

a song that has no words.

I heard the mermaids singing

"Come, walk into the sea,"

and all the waves that break are like

white horses sent for me.

I heard the mermaids singing

and wished I could forget.

I heard the mermaids singing

and walked away, and yet

I heard the mermaids singing

and hear them singing still.

As water to a wall of sand

their singing to my will.

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Singles
Bar

No one said anything about his new shirt.
Well, no one other than the pretzels. But they had to. They were
complimentary snacks.

He hadn't seen a naked woman in so long, he
was considering suing the producers of
Snatch
for false
advertising.

It wasn't his performance in bed. If sex was
a sport, he'd be an Olympic athlete. Specifically, a sprinter.

When his last girlfriend left, she told
him

"I can't stand your pedanticness." How could
she say that? The word was 'pedantry'.

Maybe, he thought, he should get a better
job. He worked for a company that processed the leftover parts from
sex-change operations. It was a terrible place to work. But he did
get free Big Macs.

He'd already tried going into business, but
he went broke. He went around to people's houses and shat in a box
in their kitchen. It was for people who missed their cats.

His friend claimed he could get any woman at
his work into bed. To be fair, he did work in a brothel.

He hated singles bars. But what other options
did he have? The last time he tried internet dating he met a woman
who was really a transvestite who was really a spambot. He was
prepared to give the relationship a chance, but it turned out she
was seeing ten million other guys. Then they deleted his profile.
They looked at his pictures, and there wasn't one of his erect
penis.

He hit the dancefloor. Dance: the universal
language. Unfortunately he only knew one phrase in it: 'Hello. I
can't dance.' He bumped into a midget whose face spoke of years of
alcohol abuse.

"Sorry about that," the midget said. "I'm a
little drunk."

He approached a young lady sitting by
herself. Let's face it: he couldn't talk to women. He tried mime.
He told her he was trapped in the invisible box of single life,
walking against the wind of approaching middle age. She took a
flashlight from her handbag, and flashed 'no thanks' in Morse
code.

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++++

The
Auto-Pope

In the year 20__ the College of Cardinals
elected the first robot Pope.

They chose it out of desperation. All the
other candidates had something horribly wrong with them. Some were
child abusers. Others were members of the Mafia. Still others were
women.

Sadly it exploded when someone asked it
whether married gay couples should get divorced.

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Todd

After Todd's mother saw his body, I'm pretty
sure she told a lie.

I'm reading a copy of the local paper from
that day. My hometown calls itself a city, but it's small enough
that a dead kid would automatically be front-page news. According
to staff writers, after she identified his body she broke down in
tears and told reporters

"I wish I could have died instead."

I'm sorry for your loss and all Mrs. Westman,
but the only people I can see you sacrificing yourself for are the
shareholders of Phillip Morris. Were you misquoted maybe? Did you
say 'Mexicans' instead of 'I'?

On the other hand, maybe she did say it. It's
easy to say you'd die to bring someone else back to life. Who's
going to hold you to it?

Poor kid. Put it this way, Todd wasn't
burdened by the crushing weight of everyone's high expectations.
His Dad had a hard time in the war. He spent a bit of time in
'hospital', then got released into the custody of the liquor store.
His Mom got bitter, which is fair enough. But she got bitter at the
wrong people. Todd used to come out with that stuff about lining
them up against the wall. But everyone could tell he was just
repeating what his Mom had said, so it was 'poor kid' and not
'creepy little freak'. Thinking about it now, the jails are
probably full of guys who beat someone to death because of what
their parents told them, so I don't know how smart it was to ignore
him. Maybe it was because we didn't have any Klan or skinheads for
Todd to join. There wasn't any internet in those days.

One big city feature we had was a world-class
system of storm-water drains. We weren't supposed to go down there.
Rain could come without warning, and you'd be drowned. It totally
happened to a kid who used to go to our school. Just like a kid at
our school had sex with the art teacher after the prom, and a kid
got caught pulling himself in the bathroom. Maybe it was all the
same kid. A kid who went to every school, leaving each time he had
sex with the art teacher and got caught pulling himself in the
bathroom thinking about it, finally drowning himself in despair
after running out of schools. A tragic hero of our times.

At the time we did believe in this drowned
kid. But we went down there anyway, to explore, and smoke, and talk
about the things that being in a tunnel under the ground made boys
think of in those days. A lot of the time that was either nuclear
war or Dungeons & Dragons (for those of you under about
thirty-five, Dungeons & Dragons is like World of Warcraft
played with pen and paper and dice instead of a computer). We
talked about girls too, but that wasn't because of the storm water
drains. We talked about girls everywhere, and I don't think
anything we said was true.

Todd really took to the drains. He did
something no one else did, which is go down by himself. With all
his friends, as I said at the time. And if you're thinking I sound
like an obnoxious little shit...well, I got worse when I went to
college. Anyway, like the Phantom of the Opera without an opera,
like a troll in one of our games of Dungeons & Dragons, Todd
went down there all the time. I don't think I could have gone in by
myself. Not that anyone said he was brave. It just proved he was a
freak.

Anyway it was in the summer, and I was riding
around on my bike, doing nothing in particular, when I saw Todd
making his way into the drains. Through an opening under a bridge,
appropriately enough. He had his back to me, and I locked up my
bike and followed him. Why? I was worried he might get stuck and
drown. I heard he had a little house down there and I wanted to see
it. Both those things were in my head at the time. But you do a lot
of pointless things at that age. After you work out that you want
to talk to girls, but before you work out how, you're just filling
in time. Maybe I wanted to track a troll to his lair.

The walls of the tunnel were covered in slime
and filth, like the inside of a smoker's lungs. Todd had a torch,
so I could follow him pretty easily. I tried to tiptoe. I probably
didn't do a very good job, but it's surprisingly noisy down there:
rushing water, and the echoes of traffic. Though the traffic
doesn't sound like traffic. It gets bounced around and changed
until it's more like a low roar, or like breathing. After a while
you don't notice it, and when you come out again the quiet hits
you.

I followed him to a place where the tunnel
widened into a room. Some light came from the world above. I stayed
in the dark and watched him. He really did have a little house. Or
at least he'd found or brought an inflatable mattress and a
blanket, a thick scratchy one like the blankets you get in jail,
and he had a little box next to it. A clubhouse for one kid. On the
box he had a stack of magazines. Without seeing the covers, I knew
they were pornography. Precious finds in the days before the
internet. The combination of glossy paper and sperm is the smell of
boyhood for men my age. You used to find them hidden in bushes. I
guess kids stole them from the shops and then were too scared to
take them home. Sometimes they'd be damaged by rain or fire
(masturbation and setting fire to things: the two great impulses of
boyhood), the paper as brittle as an old man's skin. Meanwhile, as
I found out years later, girls were reading 'romance novels' in the
comfort of their bedrooms. Men, have you ever read those things?
Damn. Anyway Todd had quite a hoard.

What was he going to do? I hoped he wasn't
going to pull himself.

He knelt down, but not on the mattress, on
the concrete. He faced away from me. He knelt on all fours, and
started to sing. Or at first I thought he was singing. It was like
singing, but also like talking. There were words that were
repeated, but I couldn't make out what they were. This went on for-
well, it seemed like at least half an hour, but it was probably
only a few minutes. Then someone talked back.

It was a man's voice, not a boy's. The voice
was familiar, and I couldn't think where I'd heard it. I worked it
out a week or so later, lying awake at night. It was Todd's, but
different. Deeper. More confident. Better. It was a beautiful
voice, an actor's voice. And the few words I could hear sounded
like a play. Like Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare was supposed to
sound, rather than the sound I knew, of kids in class taking turns
to read lines they don't understand. Todd nodded several times,
said 'yeah' or 'yes' or something. The nodding and the eagerness to
please reminded me of a dog wagging its tail. The voice replied,
urgently. I couldn't hear the words, but then Todd spoke, very
loudly and clearly, but awkwardly, like he was repeating words that
he didn't fully understand.

"This. I pledge. To thee."

In those days there wasn't as much talk about
pedophiles as there is today. We were told not to talk to
strangers, but the implication was that they wanted us for murder
rather than for sex. So I didn't come to the conclusion you might
have come to, if you saw an outcast kid in a secret place on his
hands and knees, and heard the voice of an older man telling him
what to do. But I knew whatever was happening was wrong. I felt
like I'd been punched in the stomach. I would have run, but I was
scared the man would hear my footsteps. I just assumed he'd catch
me if he wanted to. Then Todd spoke again.

"Kimberly Williams."

"Kimberly Williams," the man replied.

Then the man was gone. I don't mean he
stopped talking (although that too), or that I heard him walking
away (I didn't). Even though I couldn't see him, I was sure that he
was no longer there. My stomach relaxed a little. I was even able
to sneak away, although I dearly wanted to run.

---

A few of you might be wondering where you've
heard the name Kimberly Williams. Or maybe you're wondering whether
it's the same Kimberly Williams. It is. So now you can find out
where I'm from. Not that that means so much these days when
everyone's details are a google search away and every pen-name is
on Wikipedia.