Kip Manley's Blog, page 10

Surveilling (Act II)

Three men standing around an upturned oil barrel, a weathered grey plank laid across the top. All of them their dark hair tightly curled and closely cropped, all of them wearing dull grey coveralls with short sleeves and lots of pockets. One of them’s holding a tool of some sort, a toothed wheel, a crank, edges blurry with rust, and he’s saying something to the others but it’s drowned out by the voice of an unseen narrator, by the dissident socialists of New Britain, retains a peculiar brand of socialism that is about as inefficient as socialism has ever been, yet Moambans seem to like it and feel a strong sense of attachment to their community and their island. One of the others takes the thing and points to where the wheel joins the crank, and they all laugh. His coveralls unzipped to the waist, underneath a T-shirt printed with an enormous stylized smiling man, the eyes squeezed to joyous slits. Mr. Charlock sitting at the edge of the bed isn’t watching the television. He’s watching Mr. Keightlinger’s back. Mr. Keightlinger his half-eaten sandwich still by his elbow watches the letters on the map. There’s a glass of water by the sandwich.

“Okay,” says Mr. Charlock. “What. So you think I’m a total amateur, is that it?”

The water inside the glass is trembling. The glass itself is buzzing faintly. Without looking up from the map, Mr. Keightlinger puts a hand on it to still it.

“John knows how I work, okay? He knows the drill. So him and me go out tomorrow watching the Bride, you stay here and tinker with your map and keep half an eye on that thing in the chair.” Leaning hands on his knees glaring at Mr. Keightlinger’s broad back. “End of the day you have what we need to get this Agravante thing off our backs, the Bride won’t have upped and run off to Seattle while we weren’t looking, and we’ll help out an old buddy of mine.”

Surveilling (Act I)

Sunlight softly drifts from skylights through the atrium pale, brighter though and whiter than the sconces warming shadows about the outer walls. Wooden doors under a sign that says Council Chambers swing wide and a robot steps through, a man in a robot suit made of blue and grey plastic shells articulated about knees and elbows, a grey grill of a mask on his blue crash helmet. A woman in a broad-brimmed bonnet and a black-and-white striped swimming costume takes his arm, smiles coquettishly into a hand mirror as someone snaps a photo, then tucks the mirror away, reaching for a green rainshell held out to her by a man in a grey flannel suit and an elaborate red-and-purple headdress. A bald man in a white vest leans on a cricket bat, speaking animatedly to a man in a red striped shirt with white collar and cuffs. Flash and flash again, more photos. A little guy in a black suit and a skinny black tie pushes free of the crowd and heads toward an office across the atrium. What hair he has is lankly grey, clumped about his ears and struggling to launch a curl between his brow and the top of his skull. He’s taking off his sunglasses, careful of the twirling owl’s feather tied to one side. Glaring sourly at the man in the red striped shirt walking towards him. “The fuck was that about?” says the little guy, tucking his sunglasses away in a jacket pocket.

“Comics Month,” says the man in the red striped shirt. His tie is much the same red as the stripes. “They do charity work.” Behind him the man in the robot suit’s shuffling into an elevator.

“Which means fuck-all to me,” says the little guy. “And has zilch to do with riverfront condos.”

“Schedules change,” says the man in the red striped shirt. “You’re not exactly the easiest people to get hold of.”

Surveilling (Opening)

Whistling tunelessly he crosses the street hands in the pockets of his black leather jacket. Jogging the last few steps before the light changes his pinkish-orange hair bobbing. The sky above is dark and starless, heavy and low where it isn’t lost in the streetlight glare. The little corner parking lot is crammed with a half-dozen food carts shoulder-to-shoulder with signs that say El Brasero and Potato Champion and Whiffies Fried Pies. He squeezes between a couple careful of power cords and a water line wrapped in insulating foam and knocks on the back door of a silvery cart trimmed in purple and green and gold. The cart lurches. “Fuck off,” calls someone from inside. He knocks again. The door’s wrenched open enough for a man to peer out. “It’s five o’clock in the fucking,” he says. “Jesus, Ray.” Wrapped in a shapeless brown corduroy coat. Tuft of beard leaning sideways off his chin. “I don’t do breakfast. You know that.”

“Like I could pay if you did.”

“Don’t do charity neither,” says the man in the corduroy coat.

“Relax.” The man in the black leather jacket pulls his other hand from a pocket. “Just need some water and a pot.” He’s holding three eggs still speckled with bits of feather and chicken shit.

Giust (Closing)

“What were you thinking?”

Ysabel stands on the sidewalk arms akimboed, face hidden in the shadows under the streetlights. A thin mist not quite rain seeps slowly out of the air to sheen the pavement and the cars parked up and down the street. Jo still in her long grey dress barefoot sheathed sword in her hand comes down the steps from the porch of the big white ramshackle house on the corner, its windows behind her all lit up with candles and Christmas lights. “I was thinking,” she says, “we’d take a taxi. Borrowed a phone from the drummer. I mean even if I was ready to walk home like this, you wouldn’t make it in those heels.”

Her beaded gown clattering Ysabel folds her arms together as Jo steps onto the sidewalk. “How are we going to pay for a taxi?” she says.

“That’s supposed to be my line,” says Jo, holding up the gold credit card. “So maybe I’ll cop yours and say don’t worry about it.”

“Where did you get that?” says Ysabel, taking the card slowly from Jo, turning it over and over again.

“The Duke gave it to me. Said it was one of the–”

“The Duke?” says Ysabel, sharply. “The Hawk was here? Tonight?”

“Yeah,” says Jo. “I was talking to him, in the library. Which is where I was I guess when the whole thing happened, which, I mean, I’m sorry, but–”

“This is a big deal,” says Ysabel. She isn’t looking at the card. She’s looking away across the intersection at a darkened green house on the opposite corner behind a low stone wall.

Giust (Act IV)

Bare branches toss and clatter, dead leaves patter down the street before sudden gusts of wind. Candles and Christmas lights wink and flicker from every window of the big white ramshackle house on the corner. A thin young man pushes open one of the two front doors and staggers onto the porch, letting out a burst of music, a fiddle, sharp popping drums. Rings glitter from his fingers as he beckons to someone inside. His black T-shirt says Bobu Magurasu in white letters. “See,” he’s saying loudly and then he shushes himself. “I think I know.”

“What?” says the woman following him onto the porch. Her serape striped in browns and yellows. On her head a confetti-colored patchwork cap.

“Why it was three. Why it was only three.” Guthrie leans close and whispers, “I think I’m just like you.”

“There’s an easy way to find out,” she says.

Inside the big front room the drum kit set up between the fireplace and the keg. The drummer’s head sweating as he works furiously over a snare drum, throwing off parade-ground fusillades. A red-headed man kneels before him swaying, sawing a soaring theme from his fiddle. Behind him on a stool a kid clutching a big-bellied acoustic guitar taps his foot. A woman with short dark hair one hand on the neck of a bass guitar the other on Marfisa’s shoulder leaning close together singing into the same microphone, “Suntower, asking– cover, lover– June cast, moon fast– as one changes–” Marfisa swallowing a laugh as she fumbles a couplet.

Giust (Act III)

The office painted an indecisive cream just big enough for a desk and a couple of chairs. Neither of them sitting. Jo’s leaning against one of the closed doors still in her careworn jacket, army-surplus green. Over her shoulder a poster, a photo of the full moon that says Shoot for the moon… Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. “You can’t do this to us,” she says.

Becker shrugs in his big flannel shirt, half-sitting on the edge of the desk. “My hands are tied. Client pulled the survey early. Tartt’s as pissed as any of you and now Sales is out there scrambling,” he jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the other closed door behind him, “because there’s nothing in the hopper till Pet Depot comes back online in a couple of weeks.”

“Come on, Becker! You got three people out there dialing a bee-to-bee right now. Give us a couple of phones. You know me and Ysabel can rack up completes like nobody else.” Becker shrugs again, runs a hand through what little of his hair is left. “Becker, come on! You need the numbers.”

“I need reliable people is what I need,” says Becker. “You and her, you knock off early, you don’t show up–”

“I call! I give you notice!”

“You play by the rules, yeah,” says Becker. “And I can cut you slack on a night shift. But for the commercial stuff I need people in seats I know will be there. I mean, are you ever even conscious at six in the morning?”

“Fuck you, Becker,” says Jo. “You know the shit we have to deal with.”

“I know the what now?” says Becker.

Giust (Act II)

Raw green peas at the bottom of a teacup set to one side of the scarred linoleum counter. A fat red candle slumped in on itself guttering in a pool of melted wax, a couple of blue-tipped matches scattered before it. A blackened matchstick smoking in a shot glass blazoned with a Tlingit eagle. An old key blurred by rust, a splintery chopstick, a damp bus transfer in a plastic pot that says Oxygen Bleach Cleanser. A threadbare little rabbit on a leash of string nibbles at a page ripped from a pornographic magazine. More pages spread across the linoleum, lozenges of skin like brushed suede, like toasted caramel, like slick beige plastic. Gauze like drying sea-foam, lace like rotten ice, black vinyl shining tight. “Salt,” says the woman sitting at the counter. The rabbit-string tied about her wrist. She flicks her head from side to side and wrinkles her nose. “Dried sweat.” Hunched inside a sweater the color of flour, a floppy black hat pulled low over her yellow hair. Under the brim her eyes squint milkily.

“Okay,” says the man sitting on the stool across from her. His coat is long and camel-colored. A derby reddish brown in one gloved hand, his other on a soft brown briefcase flat on the counter, buckles undone. A wooden cane leans against the counter, its handle a stern, rough-hewn hawk.

“Sea air,” she says, “and bleach, and. Jelly?” That head-flick again, annoyed. “Old socks. Corn chips.”

“Suggestive,” he says. “First question, then?” She nods once, sharply. “How old are they?”

She shrugs, hat-brim dipping to meet her shoulder. “Old and old, Leo. Twenty-two days? Twenty-three?”

Walpurgistag, or, 48 days later

No. 46 has been cracked, but it's slow going, at the moment, with occasional bursts of activity interspersed with occasional sloughs of, well, not despond, no, not exactly, but not exactly exuberant, either, and all the while the draft of no. 45 ferments in its fallow. —No. 45, which, as I've noted elsewhere, is or was or will end up having been a much more straightforward tale, a take on that basic plot-kernel in which a stranger comes to town; no. 46 is intended to be or at least it will maybe have been a rather more relaxed and (seemingly) shapeless affair, a hang-out, I believe, is the term of art—an aimless stroll through thirty-two short films, though, in retrospect, it might well turn out our flâneur was rather more slyly pointed that perhaps, at first, it had seemed.

Giust (Act I)

He’s stepping out of the elevator before the doors have fully opened, ducking his white-hatted head and lifting a white and ivory brogue over the inner doors opening vertically, swinging his shoulders draped in a long white coat to sweep through the outer doors opening side to side. Behind him a big guy and a little guy in black suits and skinny black ties, the little guy on his heels, thinned hair vainly trying to launch a curl between his brow and the top of his skull, a fiendish little basket-box in his hands carved from a single chunk of dark red wood. The big guy gives the chain that opens the doors one last tug and follows them. His beard’s the color of mahogany and bushy enough to bury the knot of his tie.

The floor about them wide open and dark, plastic sheeting hung here and there lofting and popping in occasional gusts of wind. Bright light from caged lamps leaves deep pools of shadow in corners and along the white-patched drywall. On a folding chair sits a man in a soft blue suit his arms folded, his white hair touched with gold in dreadlocks hanging down about his face, brushing his shoulders, “Leir,” he says.

“Viscount Pinabel,” says Mr. Leir, doffing his hat. His face quite young beneath all that white unruly hair. “I hope the season finds you well? Above us ascends a woman of good face and habit; two men strike at her, and their blows bring about comeliness, beauty, but also all manner of strife and treachery, deceit, detractation, and perdition.”

“Charles. Wentworth. Leir,” says Agravante, and plastic sheeting rustles in a sudden gust.

Giust (Opening)

Marfisa falls sprawling greaves striking sparks from the bricks sword bouncing from her hand clattering away as she clambers after it sandal-soles slapping for purchase when the kick catches her in the gut lifting rolling her arms tucking about her head tumbling after the blade that skitters down the slight slope toward the glass doors away across the plaza. Cries from the crowds on the great sweep of steps, the low walls to either side of the brick-paved plaza, the balconies hung with banners slack in the still night air, the hawk and the hound and shining above them both in the harsh white light the bee. On her side Marfisa her head cradled one curled arm eyes swollen shut yellowing lip split the ravages of a blow. Leaves of her armored skirt askewed a dent bashed into the edge of her breastplate crimping broken links of torn mail beneath dug into ripped silk and an ugly, milky wound. Groaning rolling her free arm over she plants her hand by her face. Names are cut into the bricks beneath her fingers, James Elkins and Michael Lynn Tinnin and Marie Equi. The crowd gone quiet again. The footsteps nearing echo starkly, sharp metallic clacks. Muscles clench under a darkening bruise she pushes herself up hissing armor chiming to her hands and knees and stooping into loping strides arms back and wide for balance footsteps ringing faster now behind her and louder, closer, there the sword her hand on the hilt lifting turning swinging to catch the blade sliced at her knocked to one side ducking her shoulders beneath the slice her arm slipping up under the massive gauntlet driving her sword inside to stop suddenly screeching blade-tip caught against the greened bronze disk strapped to his bare chest.