[worldinferno]

The Third Way

For ten years, I dreamed only.  I saw in the shapes in the clouds a different world.  The only people who hid, hid for fun.  I saw in the patterns of the wood grain of floors a different reality.  The only ones who were chased wanted secretly to be caught.  I saw in the branches of trees mutual care and responsibility, and I saw in the mist off the grass in the morning the evaporation of the reasons to steal and harm, and I witnessed in the osprey carrying the trout the death of state and gender, the violent but calm overthrow of the racist and the class traitor.  All of this I saw as if before my eyes, knowing it was playing in my head.  This was the wrong kind of knowing.

For ten more years, I fought mostly.  If something seemed wrong, it probably was, because most things were wrong.  Action was always preferred, because if something needed correcting, the chances were better that it would be fixed with swift doing than delayed talk.  Where I was then meant fists and batons, it meant by any means necessary, and it meant force must not only be returned redoubled, but must be anticipated and extinguished.  There is less time for dreaming when wounds are healing, and even less than that when attempting to prevent wounds from opening at all.

For some years now, though, I have attempted a third way.  The lessons of dreaming can seem only to apply to the dreamworld, but this is not the case.  Good dreams, useful dreams, include coded instructions on how to realize the dreamworld.  I shall never want for imagination again.  The lessons of fighting can feel purely physical, tactile, and momentary, as all physical and tactile things are.  This is not quite right either, and the real lessons of fighting are not revealed until the fight has gone out of us.  That is when it becomes clear that whatever measure of resistance we can muster is often all that keeps the crush from compacting us from above.  So the third way is imagining a better world and refusing to rest until it is realized.  If that is unto death, then our last breaths will be drawn in refusal and released in acceptance.  I will bring the fight to my dreams and my dreams to the fight, remembering forward to a world I hope to bring into existence.  I choose this way for myself, my chosen family, and those who need and deserve this better world, which dances in my head and out through the tips of my fingers.  Until then. Until.

[worldinferno]

A Last Knock

Received via post, two weeks after the publication of the last entry, addressed to Dr. Beatrice Alighieri, as requested of any information pertaining to Cat.  Handwriting is deliberate and careful, which generally results in a more trembling, less natural script.  This seems to be written, in short, by someone who does not write freehand with any regularity.  It is undated and in no other way superficially remarkable:

Sir,

I saw the entire thing, and I knew there would be nothing in your box about this.  Because it hadn’t happened yet.  When all the things in the box happened.  This was after all that.  I spend a lot of time on those stairs, I know it’s true.  I’m not really watching out, though.  It’s just where I prefer to be.  So when I left for a minute, it was really only a minute.  It was hot that day, I always remember the hot days because there are fewer people on the street.  So you remember faces because there are less of them.  Especially when they aren’t faces you’re used to seeing.  I had to shut the door because there have been people trying to sneak in, which I don’t mind.  That’s the way it has always been.  But some other people who live here ask me why anyone is getting in when they don’t belong there if I sit there all the time anyway.  They don’t like when I say it’s because I don’t care and no one is getting hurt so why should I care?  So I shut the door, because I had to.  When I came back downstairs to open the door, there was someone there.  She looked like she had already knocked, because her hands were at her sides and she was looking at me like she expected me to open it.  I said hello and asked her if she was looking for someone.  I’m not actually a doorperson, but I didn’t really know what else to do.  I’m not very good at describing people so I’m not going to try.  I would probably have better luck drawing her, but I don’t think I’m going to do that either.  The point is, I could tell by her accent and the fact that she was wearing gloves that she was looking for Cat.  It couldn’t be anybody else, even with all the strange people that pass through here.  She sounded like she knew he wouldn’t be here, but she looked relieved when he wasn’t.  I expected her to be sad, but that just wasn’t how it was, and I know how to read faces.  I see enough of them to learn their language.

So I offered her a drink, which was why I went inside in the first place, and she said she could use something and to get paper and write down what she had to say.  I told her I wasn’t much for taking notes, and she said that would probably be better.  I had a little gin, I don’t know why I thought that would be better.  She gave me some money and had me get some kind of wine from the corner, which I didn’t think they would have, but they did.  And then we started talking.  

She told me to figure out who would tell Kosh’s story, and if no one was, then I had to.  I said I wasn’t much for remembering stories, I always changed the details and got to the exciting parts too fast, but she said that’s why I had to write it down.  Kosh is what she called Cat.  Unless she really wasn’t talking about Cat at all, but I think she must have been.  It sounded like him.  I tried to get the details right as best I could.  She said to take a minute to describe where we were and tell her what I wrote.  So this is what I wrote:

It’s sunny, hotter than yesterday.  I’m sitting on a stone step and the sidewalk is mostly clean because it rained three days ago and there have not been that many people on it.  The trees in the park are green and are almost high enough to block the sun.  I am wearing a sleeveless shirt and shorts, and I am barefoot because I’m not going anywhere.  The woman who came to visit is tall with black hair is wearing a blue collared shirt and a black skirt.  We are drinking gin and wine.  I am nervous because I don’t really like to write.

She said that was fine.  She told me that cities were often safer than the country because there were more places to hide.  She said running in the country was scarier because usually you were either in the woods, where you could hurt yourself running, or you were in the open and could be seen more easily.  I said that seemed like a problem if you were hiding, but if you weren’t running from anything then the country sounded all right.  I didn’t think you would get shot or mugged or hassled by cops in the country.  She said all those things happened, it just depended on the country.  She asked me if I could think of five hiding places nearby that not many people knew about.  Of course I could!  I could name 20 if thought about it for a minute.  She said that was plenty.  We sat there for awhile and didn’t say anything, which I always like.  Sitting with another person without feeling like you have to say something until there is something to say.  I think that is when you learn who a person is.  When they are not talking.  Or not talking much.

Eventually she told me that love is a kind of separation.  You have to separate a part of yourself to show it to someone else.  It was a big risk, but there wasn’t any other choice, so you just did it.  She said that she and Kosh separated their whole lives and it created a lot of trouble, but it was worth it, because there wasn’t anything else to do.  If you had the opportunity to do it, you just had to do it.  And then she said that everything works towards destruction anyway.  I didn’t really want to interrupt her, but I told her that sounded pretty negative to me, and that I didn’t want to work toward destruction.  I didn’t really want to work at all, unless it was for something good.  She laughed, I think it was the only time she laughed while she was here.  She said, that was fine, I could work towards the destruction of something bad.  That was fine.  She asked me if I ever destroyed something bad.  All I could think of was the time we saw those cops smash up a squat because they knew the people weren’t in the country legally, so we went door to door and got all the sugar we could to funnel into their gas tank.  We had to pry it open with a little crowbar.  It was really tough, but that seemed worth destroying.  She said that was a perfect example, and that she did not need to give me any more advice.  

We sat for awhile longer.  I think it was a long time.  This time I felt like I had to say something, just to show her that I was listening.  I asked her if it was important.  I just knew she would ask me what was important, and I wouldn’t know, so I was just come up with something and then she would say something else.  But she didn’t.  She didn’t need to ask what was important, it was like she was waiting for that question.  She said it was important, all of it, but he had left, and that was a choice, and she had come, and that was a choice, but that there weren’t really any other choices to make, so it may as well have not been a choice at all.  I wrote that down.  It May As Well Have Not Been A Choice At All.  She asked for the paper and smiled at that.  That was all she had to say.  I asked her if she would look for him, and she stared off towards the water, she didn’t say anything else.  That was it.  She just drank the rest of her glass and I tried to do the same but it was sharp, it was hard to drink fast.  She saw me coughing and laughed, and turned the glass upside down and set it on the step next to me.  She touched my face and I think she might have whispered goodbye, but it might just be that I wanted her to.  She started walking south, and I said that Cat went north for sure, so she stopped and turned around, but I think she was just doing it for me.

That’s all I know.  I doesn’t make sense to me, but maybe you know more about it than I do.  We probably talked about some other things, but I doubt I’ll remember.  People just drop into my life anyway, this wasn’t that different.  I don’t think I’ll drink gin for awhile.

Thanks.  I guess destroy something bad?

xCSx

[worldinferno]

Cat’s Farewell, Stenographed

After hours of listening to recordings of Cat and his retinue singing, arguing, leaving answering machine messages, and speechifying, I think one more transcription is worthy of inclusion.  The rest of it may constitute a separate project down the road though it may be equally worthy to bury it all in a box near the water, or just send it out to sea.  The tape was marked “Mixed Ape,” which is either phenomenally clever or totally asinine.  In either case, the last of the contents, introduced by a whispered “farewell,” follow as faithfully as I could render them:

“My sisters, it is at an end.  I did not come here out of hope or promise, but I must have come to meet all of you, one way or the other.  We did important things together, things about which we may never speak again.  There will not be songs written about scaling the sides of mansions or spitting into the ocean, because it was all just a means to an end.  My heart has worked harder than any cat’s should have to.  It has been born and loved, been torn out and replaced, pumped one-eighth as much blood as it ought to have before being renewed.  And now it slumps in my chest, protected by my ribs from its desire to leap out onto the floor, because it wants to be closer to you.  If you could throw that bottle up in the air, yes that one, straight up into the air, then I will bat it into the wall.  That crash is the bond we will always share, in two-hundred-fifty tiny pieces of different sizes and description, but it is shattered, for I must go.

“And you, my brothers, you dragged the equipment and watched as the women threw the punches.  You were happy to watch them, it felt right and it was right, this was always their fight.  I left all the rest of the money in my room, you know where it is, and you must divide it up equally and then decide where the rest should go.  You know exactly what I mean.  We threw a party once, and I want you to sound the trumpet again now!  Roll the drum also, let the guitar and bass guitar do what they do, and the strings and the voices, it is time.

“I know what true dark is like.  You see it here, but it is a different sort of dark, it is the dark of oblivion.  Too many people needing too many things and missing too many of them.  The true dark I know is the kind where you cannot make out your five fingers in front of your face.  There could be water nearby, you might take a wrong step and plunge in up to your waist.  It is cold, but you are glad to know you can feel the wet.  It feels human.  You are not as sharp as you think you are, because if you were, you never would have stepped into the water.  It is chilling you and you will want to climb out as quickly as possible, but it is better to find the other side.  You are already wet, after all.

“You know about love and family.  It would be better if you just loved and worried less about family.  Things can change quickly, and I do not mean death.  If we meet in a few years, it will not be by accident, I will make sure of that.  Find the highest point in that city, look down from it to the next highest one which can be reached by skill alone.  That is where I will be, or else I will have left you a sign.  I only ask that you never use me as an example, for my case is not one which suggests any course of action or solution.  There are too many other cats for that.  Celebrate the ones you liberate later, always make sure to light something on fire, as I will again now.  These are all the documents I have from the old country, of my own, of Smart’s, who you met, of Cynical, who you did not, of…

“No, I do not have any other advice.  I tried to write everything down I could think of, but it is incomplete, because everything is incomplete.  It did not matter to you all that I came from far away.  You had no concept of who I was or what I might be capable of.  You let a dangerous tiger who had been stripped of his claws and teeth sleep on your floors, and for me you even had somewhere soft to lay my head.  And we danced and drank together, and you have burdened me with remembering all of your faces when I am far away.  The Support will join me at times, but I will not be surprised if I never see the rest of you again.  There is no need to hide your tears.

“Set a time limit.  If you have not reached our goal by then, blow it up.  Do not drag Polaris over the horizon into the sunset.  We are all going to burn brightly for as long as we possibly can, and we will not burn out, we will find the next wind to stoke our embers, and we are going to ascend, sisters and brothers, and we are going to make the jailers regret they were ever born, one by one!  It is going to be one kicked-in door for every prisoner and one smashed window for every divided soul, until every cat is intact again!”

The tape ends here, which is peculiar, because it certainly sounded to me as if Cat was about to continue the very rousing bit of his speech.  His voice was clearer here, especially towards the end, which leads me to speculate he may have been putting on all that gruffness before, or else he was putting on an oratorial guise at this farewell.  It is as fitting an end to his own words as I could possibly provide.  There is, as I have suggested, much more in the box, but from what I could discern, very little that connected to the events relayed here.  I have the creeping suspicion that I am not meant to possess these scraps any longer, that they themselves ought to be blown up, but obviously I lack the gumption to actually destroy them.  The fact that I cannot solve the puzzle hardly means that someone else should not be given the opportunity.  The one unabashed positive here is that Cat thinks something was accomplished and that no one seems to disagree.  How could you not want that for him?  The other element that sticks with me, which I personally find entirely affirming and hopeful, is that there is another goal which has yet to be surmounted.  In moments when I know there is a great deal to be done and am yet uncertain what exactly to do next, there is a pervasive, though admittedly vague, comfort in this mythological entity asserting the incompleteness of everything, but the desire to make it better anyway.  The order of the day: violent hope and ferocious care in the face of the vice-grip of ignorant hate.

[worldinferno]

A Vignette Concerning Socialists for Good Measure

I like Cat the storyteller.  It may be that the narrative bits are just infrequently enough represented that they seem somehow more vital.  But I think we live in stories to begin with, and it makes me feel better that Cat may think the same.  I’m no more wont now than previously to offer much further comment.  It seems like a corner of this box took on water at some point, leaving the lined stenographer’s paper wrinkled and the lines themselves blown out into thick pinstripes, though the handwritten ink itself is unmarred.  There is no title per se, but like a good executor (how else would you describe my work at this point?), I’ve offered one of my own above.

It could not have been here forever, this cell.  The building is too new, which makes it perfect for hiding old ideas about new problems which are just reborn versions of eternal anxieties and antagonisms.  They come out against HORIZONTAL HOSTILITIES, which must be very serious, but it just makes me think of dirty jokes.  All of my hostilities have been very much vertical.  Pressing down from above, or up from below.  But I understand the idea, I think.  You know where the enemy is if you look upward, and you know who is hurting when you look down.  But if the hostile party is beside you, that is real trouble.  They talk about INTERSECTIONS.  This revolution is to be built at an intersection.  People who do not understand can only think that at the intersection is where you are more likely to be run over.  Which in some cases is true.  But it is also where unstoppable forces might meet immovable objects.  And level them.  You can be immovable, like a bank or a government office or a jail, and still be leveled by an unstoppable force, like hunger.  The point is that the brick seems too clean, but that is a good thing.  They are less likely to break down the door of a nice brick building with a shady overhang.

The place itself could have held an airplane at one point, or many smaller vehicles.  They might call it a bookstore, though there is very little buying or selling going on.  People drink coffee, as you would expect, but they drink other things from jars as well, huddled in twos and threes around various corners and between shelves.  They really seem to have everything one could need, from bomb making to the theory of bomb making to the historical results of bomb making.  There is even a small section against bomb making under the label “JUST FOR BALANCE.”   The drinking people all look like they are doing something important but against the law, which is often the same thing.

After a few minutes inside, I see the first one.  He is a little shorter than me, very skinny, with a beard and a rolled up black working shirt.  It is the kind of shirt the paramilitaries would wear back home, which would have made me uneasy there.  Here it is just strange, and I am probably staring at him because I feel safe here.  He walks down the long aisle, which is wide enough for three men, and does not deviate from his path, which is straight through me.  I am generally ready for confrontation when it is likely, and here it did not seem likely, and so I was not ready and he pushed me aside with his shoulder, barely breaking stride.  I was a bit stunned, I did not have anything to say back to him, and I do not know anything about him, and I did not see where he went.  All of this is fine.  Not everyone needs to be aware of his surroundings, especially at home.  But I turned the opposite direction and the next one tried to do the same thing.  He was my height and could not grow as proper a beard as his friend, but he passed so close by me that I could feel his whiskers against my own.  This I did not care for.  If I am to touch whiskers, I must know why I am doing it.  For him, I had a word.  For me, he had none.  When I felt something brush against my legs around the corner, I was ready to pounce on someone’s child at the offense.  The socialists were unperturbed.  The child was also not bothered.  I know they were socialists, because they told me so when I asked.  But that does not explain the strange behavior of these black shirted men.

I thought it best to get into the center, where it was more open, but I could see another coming right for me.  He at least had an expression on his face, it was smug and certain, which is the way people who look like him, with Lenin cap, groomed mustache, groomed sideburns, pointed nose, act in places like this.  I figured I was swifter than he was and perhaps more imposing as well.  He had a small red star on his shirt, but I do not think it meant anything to him.  But he looked right through me as well!  I hopped out of the way at the last second, only to be blindsided by another!  These are absurd people, and even my desire to strike one of them was being dulled by the onslaught.  I did not want to be run into yet again, and so took the opposite approach, to head all the way to the corner, just past the sign “CLOSET TO COME OUT OF” and the toilet, which was full of travel books and statues of Tito.  Five statues to Tito, to be exact.  Unbelievable.

Around this corner I myself nearly fell upon a young woman in a white dress covered in large blue flower print.  She had a red star also, but this one was tattooed on her exposed shoulder, so I believe it did mean something to her.  She asked if I needed any help, and I told her I needed an escort so that I was not run aground!  She smiled at me, genuinely, it seemed, and said she could safely show me whatever I needed to see.  She was barefoot.  This was a big boast, to show me whatever I needed, but it is always at moments such as these that I am uncertain how best to take advantage.  I did not know what I wanted to see, so I simply said “cats,” and she immediately stood up, walked me through a back door and down cellar steps to an even more labyrinthine basement, this one with arrows painted on the floor to indicate directions of some kind, and will corridors so thin you had to turn sideways to let anyone past.  There were fewer people down here, but this was where the really detailed books were.  And of course, there were books on bomb making for cats, by cats, and with cats, or at least that is what they looked like to me.  The young woman pointed me to the back if I needed something to eat, and reminded me she would be back upstairs if I needed anything else.  I felt a bit out of place in the basement, and the food looked good, but I had no appetite.  I did noticed the person behind the counter moving around a variety of spices and boxes between high shelves in the tiny kitchen.  They told me they were “just organizing the garbage,” and that it was “part of the vegan lifestyle.”  This seemed complicated but neat, and I was satisfied I had seen about all this place had to offer and so walked up another flight of stairs to return to the surface.

Naturally, I was bumped into on the staircase, but this time I was ready, and the long haired socialist simply deflected off of me and continued on his path.  I considered as I reemerged upstairs how much I wanted to discover why these men could not or would not deviate from their paths.  I watched a pair of them shoulder past each other in the more open middle of the place, shake hands, and continue on.  I never stay in one place very long, and this would not be an exception.  I wanted the smug man because I figured he would be honest with me, and so I waited until his path could be discerned and I could get in front of it.  Something about the place, filled with what appeared to be dormant revolutionaries, did not suggest to my instincts that they should stay sharp and I was contacted from behind by the first man, who had gotten quicker and I could not swing around fast enough to make him my quarry.  When I turned back, I had lost sight of the smug man, but now the instincts were piqued, and I darted past two aisles and located him, recognizing his hat and long neck from behind.  But he was approaching a fork, and I guessed he would turn right with the handful of books he carried, which was correct.  He walked right at me down the last aisle, same smug smile painted on his mug, and I gripped both shoulders, thinking he would be awakened from a trance or simply attempt to push through me.  He did neither.  The socialist gripped my left arm with both of his hands, firmly but not aggressively, and told me: “We are having to move soon.”  I looked straight back into his eyes and the smugness seemed to fade away, this was just the way his face looked, and if anything, he seemed to be pleading with me.  He may not have wanted to move, soon or at all.  I myself had to leave so I released him and he me, and he fell forward into my chest, so I held him, like a child, and we walked away, in opposite directions.  The socialists raised their jars as I left, and I bowed to the girl in the white dress.  There was nothing personal in any of these encounters, and I am frustrated now that I did not learn more then.

[worldinferno]

Under Protest

Cat—and this time I am operating with near certainty that the man himself is doing the writing—had his hands on the dirty typewriter long enough to do some more substantial writing. I myself have sifted through and transcribed enough of his work to chart some kind of evolution, some progression, if only in the sense that his English at a certain point sharpened sufficiently so as to constitute a style. It is a style unlike any one author I can call to mind, though someone I interviewed who was interested in such things suggested to me that it read like it had been expertly translated into a foreign language and equally expertly translated back. This was sufficiently obfuscating for me at the time and, like much of what I leave for you here, elicits no further comment from me. Nevertheless, I would have a difficult time forensically proving that this was a later or earlier piece of Cat’s writing, but as we narrow in on a psychomythology of the feline man, it seemed as good a place as any to go next. Recall the few determined facts we know about our hero: he has loved and been separated, he has been born and been exiled, he has been party to a crime which very likely was staged and escaped the certainties of the law, he has raised untold sums in unlawful ways for unknown helps to combat unspeakable harms. When he speaks, certainly people listen. We now can count ourselves among those who have.

Typed with a dirty, vowel-filling typewriter on lined, quarter-sized yellow stenographers paper. Each page is headed with the word “PROTEST” and footed with a number:

There are people in every room of this place, which is how I know we are all safe. Even the people who bring in danger just by virtue of who they are bring it in to cleanse it and to convert it. They bring in danger to make it our own. Diesel Jesus is plotting right now. I cannot hear him, but I know it is the case. He wants to be absolutely brutal, it is always building up inside him. He is shaped like a kettle and when his face gets the right shade of red, he walks away with purpose, to prevent eruption. He knows better. He waited out the clock and now can operate legally, right out in the open. I watched him take apart the entire house Sparkles bought and put it back together. It was half the size from the outside but twice as big within. It looked like a garage with four walls, but inside it was completely round, with a false floor. I want to believe he could hide others in there who were not as lucky as he was, those who could not find freedom in the suggested way. Still, his protest was hiding in plain view. When every last act you undertake is legal, you can be stopped by prejudice alone. When they are all illegal, you must find and use the privilege of invisibility. So in a way, I am no one.

They are not kidding when they say I am a cat. No one who knows to call me that doubts why they should. I made it all the way to the top of the naval warehouse, which is something a few other cats have done. The Support helped, and we only had to smash three rusty locks to scale it. I think I could live there, in my invisibility, but that is not how this works. Smart is one thing, but this is bigger. When I look at the floor plan of a building, the doors are all open. They are gaps in the wall, and I can pass right through them with my finger as I trace a path to wherever I need to go. When I look at a map, it looks exactly the same to me. The gaps are smaller, almost invisible themselves, but those black lines are not scorched into the earth at the limit of each city or country, or each plot of land. I asked the Support to shout it with me, because I know it to be true: if one cat is imprisoned, then no cat is free. I put my arm around each of them and reminded them that many, many cats are behind bars. Bars of iron, bars of gold, bars of black lines on pieces of paper which tell bureaucrats that these cats are allowed to be or not.

So they say I prowl. I walk through walls of buildings with out of date plans and I bridge moats with my friends and their minds. If a door is locked from the outside and opens inward, it ought to be kicked in. If a door is locked from the inside and someone cannot exit through it who needs to, then windows need to be relieved of their bars and carefully cut away. The only other alternative is violence. Claws and teeth.

Who is a liberator in the land of liberty? Who wants to be member of a club that would not have them? I learned what they should call me: secessionist. Abolitionist. Escapee. Illegal. Illegitimate. It trips off their hateful tongues which have never known love or need: Illegal.

We make lists of enemies, but it is not the same as it was where I came from. Here it is a kind of game. The racist down the street. The abusive partner. The far right. The near right. The center left. Xenophobes. The police. The government. Too many enemies. Same most places. We can hide or fight, decide where our homes are or not. Or are not.

If I have nothing here, is it all equally mine? I prowl easily down the street, thinking it is all equally mine, which makes it easy to want to share with the others who also have nothing here. Many of them do not think as I do, because they are not allowed to. I will walk through walls for them too, and they will see me coming. But their captors will not. And a thousand other cats will tread on soft pads with sharp claws tensed and retracted, ready to tear up maps and pick every lock in their paths. Their black lines mean nothing to us, because we could not see them in the first place. There is still a crack in everything. It will be our paws that pull it wide open before the light gets in.

[worldinferno]

Finding Order in the Archive of Tails

I am perplexed, but that has become the norm in the course of this inquiry.  I do in fact feel closer to this man, but my head is foggy from drinking in the dark and staring at the back of an easel, lit in the soft pink glow of a sun-faded neon light outside the window.  If Cat was a painter, I see no evidence of any of his work.  The couch in his old room is not very comfortable for sitting, and I don’t feel much like laying down across it, either.  I’ll drink vodka on the rocks, thanks, as I understand it to be Cat’s drink and we share an appreciation for the honesty of an occasional clear spirit.  He’s complete scum, but Churchill did lend his name to this drink, at least by reputation.  6:1 vodka to vermouth is a dry martini.  6:a spray from an atomizer would be extra dry.  Drinking straight vodka while staring at a bottle of vermouth?  A Winston Churchill Martini.  Without all the racism for garnish, I trust.

There are more “Tails,” as you knew there must be.  I personally love them, perhaps because I feel like the author writes the same way I think, or because I am being fooled into thinking these entries are somehow more honest in their brevity and perfunctory presentation.  Or maybe they simply go better with olives.  Either way, a few more of these might add a little levity for contrast.  Take my mind off of the weight of Cat’s words prior.  I get nervous when I think I’m getting too close to the man beneath the man, as if I don’t really belong there at all.

Written in dark pencil on the back of a colored flyer:

We lost Sparkles again.  Hopefully not for too long, we need him around.  You never really have Sparkles anyway, but you know when you have lost him.  An eerie calm sets in, the edge gets dulled, and then you have to worry about missing something because you are not as sharp.  He will be fine, you never have to worry about that.

FIELD NOTES on the SUPPORT (2 of 2)

They call him the grim reaper, which is not exactly fair.  He is identified by the city from which he hails, but it holds nothing for him.  He is handsome, exudes a nervous calm.  Everything will work out when you are with him, but he is not a fixer.  He can communicate with the general populace, the civilians, but he would prefer not to.  He is safer when he is with us, and we are ultimately safer when he is with us also.

We do a job and he is in a Leonard Cohen t-shirt, making certain everything works out.  Cohen is young on the shirt, though he was never really all that young.  The only album of his that made it East, where I came up, was one at the moment when he was ready to stop being young at all and became instead timeless.  Never old.  I think of Ballad of the Absent Mare when I see him out there.  Grazing away.

He has little reason for fear.  That is important of the support.  There are different levels of what they call entitlement.  The feeling that you deserve something that has already been given.  Like it was simply destiny all along.  He does not have that, it simply seems not to occur to him.  He is generous in an offhand way.  Not showy.  This makes it much easier to trust him.  The civilians should not trust him, but we are forced to, and it is a good thing.  This may prove we are not civilians.

He pulled a rusty knife once, “just to test it.”  I wish I had been there to cheer him on.  I walked through the rooms of his place, one to the next, wondering if it would end.  It was just one after the next, a sitting room, then a library, then a dining room, then when they call a den, a few bathrooms, though never a bedroom, but I never reached the end.  I put my hand on each door frame as I walked through it.  None of it was opulent, but it never stopped.  This is a symbol of great wealth, where the rooms never seem to stop.  But he doesn’t seem to care, and neither do I.  I watched two women pass, and I thought they would kill each other, or else embrace.  They did neither, and the iciness still hangs in the air, watery daggers from the corner of our building in winter.  He did not draw his knife then, but he might have had his hand upon it.

I do not know how far we would get without the support, and I am glad I do not have to find out.

On lined paper, torn from a notebook, yellowed from sun:

I am sitting in a place called “All Saints,” waiting for the next job, which will be modest, but they are each important.  The walls are brick, but I would prefer to sit outside, for as long as I can stand the smell of American cigarette smoke.  It is not that the cigarettes come from here, but that those who smoke them are desperate.  The walls are covered in slogans and black silhouetted birds against a silver-sprayed wall.  “Fight War Not Wars.”  “He Who Fucks Nuns Will Later Join the Church.”  “If You’re Gonna Scream, Scream With Me.”  It all seems to make sense when it is written in the same place at the same time.  Still I wonder if these people would fight if they had to.  I think they might.  That could be enough.

They all talk at the bar.

“Which saint is your favorite?”

“Oh, I could take or leave any of   ‘em.”  

“Archie Manning or Chris Bailey?”

“I don’t think that’s really that clever.”  

“Listen man: I’m in love, you know what that means?”

“Love like L-U-V?”  

“Oh, I like that very much!  I think you know exactly what I mean!”

It will be kids like this who will make the difference.  It will not take that many, not at first.  It is too bad that it always has to fall to them, but they are willing to make decisions where the adults are not.  I will always be accused of being a kid for my decisions.

Cat In The Hat grows sharper in these later Tails.  His observations are more directed, and I read some frustration in what he has to say.  I want him to be all right, which is a silly thing to want for someone you have never met.  The pages in this box seem somehow brittler, as if they will fall apart in my fingers if I sift through them too much further.  I feel it is safe to say that there are no answers at this point, and I am truly uncertain what the questions even are.  The whole crime seems little more than a lark, quickly written out of Cat’s history, and if serving one of his friends is an explanation, that is the explanation I would prefer.  But it isn’t about my preferences, in the end.  It’s about representing faithfully the end of an arc which no one forced me to begin.  So let’s wind down this myth is the style best befitting its subject, that we might portray enough of this person to allow the reader his or her or their opportunity to decipher as they might.

[worldinferno]

Blue

If ever you are so lucky as to be captivated completely by another, take it as your responsibility to tell their stories. I practiced my entire life up until I laid eyes on this creature to even have a chance to summarize what I experienced during and afterwards. It was almost impossible, even with all that rehearsal. I will write these words and I will make certain they are correct, but then I will bury them and hope that I am never apart from their subject for any length of time or at any great distance such that I need to read them again.

Never to be left alone, not even for an instant, for fear that the entire enterprise burst free from its housing: not skin and bones but a mortal life which always feels like equal parts threat and promise. When everything is the least certain, when it all seems like it might crumble beneath us, I catch a glance which is impossible to misinterpret. It says: “We will find a way, together, that will guarantee we can survive even when apart. As long as we never pause but to pause as one, we can never be tracked save by those we allow on our tails.” I pretend not to understand, but I understand perfectly.

I read the twelve things aloud and I was instantly discovered, how I thought I could hide I have no idea. She could be a she if she so desired, and he is a he when he chooses not to be a she. It is an incredibly dangerous proposition, this mutability, wrapped in a package which would never let on. A giant faberge surface, decorated with lace and spikes, translucent to reveal an iron cage lovingly rusted and worn, around a gilded safe which I know holds an expansive heart. Inside that must be a time bomb, but I hope I never learn for certain.

We are best at sunset, as it means another day was eclipsed and we are granted the license to evening breaths, carefully drawn. The goal, liberation, is necessarily abstract, but the means are entirely clear, and I am reminded of them any time I should chance to ask. Let go of anger at the world in general, for it is empty without an object. Pay close attention to what is furthest and blurred on the horizon, for it admits of multiple interpretations, and you need not bend it to your own. Pay close attention to what is nearest, to judge if it matches your preferred vision of what was once so distant. Ignore everything in between.

Every next moment is defined by when we were last together and when we will next be. These are the intervals when life comes into sharp relief, otherwise it is necessarily complicated. I am told not to accept, I submit. I am told to undercut and subvert, so I shall. I am told I am beautiful and worthwhile by the only person from whom it has ever mattered, and so I must be. I am waiting, always, for when I may be again.

Repetition is to be mistrusted. When I am so lucky as to throw an arm around this being, it is never the same being two times, at least not two times in a row. There are instants when the entire enterprise opens before me, and I can make out the horizon, clear as my hand in front of me face, and I know every cause and each result as if I had written them in advance. Except perhaps the very last one. And whether it is wonderful or terrible, I either cannot or choose not to alter the course of events. I instead sit cross-legged on the grass and let the sun dip back behind whatever is lowest on the horizon, wherever I am, and I wonder if love makes me weaker or stronger, which is better, and if it matters either way.

[worldinferno]

The Fight Worth Fighting

I will tell everyone about it, early in the morning. I will walk across the street to the garden and I will mourn the missing tree. They said it would hurt people, but I never believed it. All it did was hold strings of lights and the artwork of children. It had no malicious intent whatsoever. If I was back across the sea or in the farmland in this country, I would wait for the cock to belt out his song. Everywhere there are warnings, and nowhere is there isolation, not outside, not here. It is a city. It may be The City. If I stand at an intersection while the cock is not crowing, I will see someone walking towards me, or away from me, or stationary along the way. And I will tell them if they ask about the war we are fighting.

Someone is going to get it. Probably multiple someones. Because people cannot live like I do anymore, like any of us do. They think we will consume ourselves and fade away. We can only prove them wrong by consuming them first. The pressure is to be original. Not to learn from history but to be certain not to repeat it. To surpass expectation. Or at least to confound it. If you deny art, then you are the enemy. There are many enemies.

She lived a couple of streets west, they both did. I only met him a couple of times, but they all just called her by her last name anyway. Morden. She lived on the top floor and rented the rest of it out for artists, a strange place. The rooms were all too small for bedrooms, but that was because people built walls out of bookcases between them, for a little privacy. A couple of famous artists overdosed on cheap pills there, just never woke up. But some of the ones who lived made some of the most important work. I know what art means to me. It means never being alone, communing with people you will probably never meet. Hopefully never meet, in most cases. She was surrounded by ghosts all the time, they outnumbered the living artists by many. He was away all the time and then just never came back, so she wore black and we called her the widow. She was incredibly beautiful in the old pictures. Somewhere between art and pornography. We should all be so lucky to find that space.

There was music all throughout that house. Loud, soft, aggressive, pastoral. If you could find the right place in the stairwell, you could hear a symphony. Someone said Ives was inspired by knowing her, but that did not make sense.

I think of you as a person who I have never met who will one day receive this art. I will be sorry that we did not have more conversations. I would have wanted to run with you along the water and then collapse in the big room on the top floor of the Widow’s apartments, where you could hear everything all at once. I would want us to fall asleep together, to have the best odds of sharing our dreams. Then you could learn what fear looks like in a faraway land and how it is the artists who will beat that fear back down. In a culture war, the revolutionaries are all artists and aficionados. They make taste because it makes them feel good. Or feel right, which is sometimes not very good at all.

We are friends, you know. We share a common kinship, and with each next word you read, we grow a bit closer. Together we are more handsome than we could have imagined alone. You will finish the war. If we are both lucky, I will be somewhere else, fighting on another front. The only people who do not belong are those who unduly harm. Never forget it. The rest will fall into place. The Widow would say: “Just keep practicing.” We will do that, but we will perform, too.

[worldinferno]

Volumes within a Book within a Book

I am interested in Cat the romantic and the refugee, and I think I have hit on a motherlode in another small journal, sewn into the center of “Tails” by a bookbinder of some skill. On top of that, it’s a folded quarto of the old style, and may even be typeset on a Gutenberg, moveable type machine. It’s a further curiosity, to be sure, though there is not much which surprises me any longer in this melange. At the very least we might label this set of chapters the furthest progression of Cat the thinker, as he would have had to put no small amount of consideration into a document which was to be typeset and properly assembled according to a very old art. It is divided into three sections, as it would appear, and, as with much of these troves of oddities, may admit of its own organizational logic, though I still have very little of my own to add.

The first part is entitled “Glossolalia”

The science of secrets: These bits of knowledge need not always be true. They concern actions or ideas which are deemed worthy of keeping from one specific party, one or multiple groups, or the world at large. In more extreme cases, they can be kept from oneself in acts of self-denial or abnegation, or willful ignorance. If there is a capacity for how many can be kept, it is commensurate only with the capacity of the human memory. This brings up an important question: do secrets maintain if forgotten? The answer is that they become apocrypha until recalled, drifting eventually into the realm of hearsay and easy deniability. They can cause harm and joy in equally likely measure. Living two separate existences would constitute the need for a balanced and varied pool of secrets.

The friend—enemy continuum: It wraps in on itself. The intimacy required of the truest friend is equal in intensity if not identical to that of the truest enemy. The most harm can be inflicted upon those best loved, and the greatest healing applied to those most detested. What makes an enemy detestable is the absence of or affront to what makes a friend beloved. The difficulty comes in whom is to be forgiven. The arguments to forgive the friend are easy: maintenance of a valuable relationship, making oneself feel they are exhibiting positive human behavior, granting license to the recipient of forgiveness to begin forgetting. The arguments to forgive the enemy are fairly easy as well: closure of an open wound to reopen distance, making oneself feel they are exhibiting behavior which renders their moral position higher than the other, writing off a harm as insignificant enough to be forgivable. But there is a great giving of ground in both instances. The unforgiven harm festers into a grudge, and might eventually scar over as a scabrous edge to a personality. It may also foster a kind of compassion in future, analogous situations, which may be desirable.

The triangle of ghosts: There is a third category of entity in every meaningful relationship. The ghosts of the two commingled pasts are of unlimited potentiality. They can flit about and move in and through the smallest fissures. A single word or smell can conjure one of them, and it may require whole sentences or paragraphs to dispel them anew. The ghosts are by definition neither malevolent nor benevolent. Any value judgment placed on their presence or absence is ultimately up to the haunted.

Consequences: Best to maintain a high level of detachment. Truly only possible with the resources necessary to mitigate potential damage. The less one is impacted by material things and lasting relationships, the easier this is to accomplish with consistency.

Scale of insults and benedictions: Independent of duration or intensity of memory. As with anything one person can say, write about, or enact upon another, timing is often the critical factor. Lives change course according to minuscule events when properly directed and at the precise moments of greatest impact.

Speed and motility: The brevity and consistent range of human life is sufficient to mandate restive concern with motion, sometimes confusing it with progress. All movement is not forward. Most movement is in fact sideways, and at least half of it is in some way backwards. Straight ahead at top speed is a rare condition to satisfy.

The metric of being all right: Generally in opposition of the length of the time it is considered. The bad things creep around the fringes, mostly at bay, until thought of for any extended period of contemplation. If the reverse is true, humanity should be questioned. At least until things change significantly.

Game as metaphor: For love, hackneyed. For life, reductive, though most metaphors are. For crime, most accurate. Rules are clear, if sometimes shifting. Winning and losing is much clearer than in the first two cases. So long as there is no requirement for having fun, this metaphor operates. The game worth playing is not the one we win automatically. It is further not the one in which we most vanquish our opponent, or has the most lasting victory. It must be one where those who have the most difficult time playing it can be assisted the most. At that point, balance and fairness must be discarded. Equity is not an idea most games can comprehend in their mechanic.

Changing the world: Meaningless as a large scale project if the smaller scale is overlooked. One of few goals which requires faith in the tiny summing to the great. Most religions began with this as modus operandi. The problem is that they tended to go from the great to the small. Inductive. We will work from the small to the great. If they want to participate, so much the better. The foundational tenet on which we will agree is that it must change. In most ways.

Telling stories: The only way to organize the world. Meaning making. Finding meaning where it apparently is not. Who tells and who hears are the questions according to which we live. Every life is a bundle of stories. It makes us sad when a story is forgotten, it a petit mort of a different kind. Every grand act or useful idea is a story. They defy death. The ghosts love them. Our enemies and friends bend the details to their will. They slip through our fingers one moment and imprison us the next.

Encoding love: The more difficult the code, the longer the love might last. Anyone who declaims the simplicity of love is likely to be a liar, they should be interrogated at length or ignored. Codes allow information to travel great distances essentially undetected and should not be underestimated. If they can be crafted double blind, so much the better. This allows each party to interpret and seek meaning as they see fit. If the code is perfect, they realize there is no base meaning. It is a well of signs and signifiers which tunnels without end.

This is the gloss—This is enough—This is one life

[worldinferno]

Jack’s Testimony, As Far As We Can Tell

Typed on either the same dirty typewriter as above, or at least one possessing the same distinctive affliction regarding filled vowels. Pages were almost certainly missing, based on the holes from removed staples in the top left corners:

-I knew him all right. We had been pen pals for years, we would send each other newspaper clippings concerning dead opera singers and the like. It was all in good fun. When he finally came for a visit, I almost couldn’t believe it was him. I didn’t particularly care for him at that point.

-And why not?

-He wasn’t very personable, he didn’t seem grateful, I guess you would say. But I realized that I wouldn’t be very grateful either. This world has done him wrong.

-Are you referring to Mr. In The Hat’s status as an illegal alien?

-Excuse me, madam. I didn’t think this was to be a political debate. This Cat escaped a regime for which our government has had very little regard to this point. The man nearly died multiple times getting here! Isn’t this country built on strong principles, of theft, prevarication, and permanent vagrancy? Are we not all squatters? To quote Mr. Ott, who was probably quoting someone else: “who owns the land?”

-I think you’re straying from the question, Mr.—

-I’m not your mister anything. I know the question. You want to know about the night when Mr. Smart, another refugee seeking asylum in this grand parade of squatters, disappeared.

-Allegedly murdered, Mr.—

-Don’t you mister me. Is this the first murder trial in American legal history in the absence of a body? Are we here because someone made a mess in the house? I’ve been accused of worse, by better.

-Excuse me!

-Right, right. I’ll tell you what you want to know. One of the things I learned early on about Mr. In The Hat was his deep sentimentality. He was quiet because he was learning how to be sentimental in another tongue. Does that make sense to the court? Another language of sentiment. A cat language! All right all right all right all right. We had thrown Cat a surprise party for the anniversary of his arrival in our great land of robbers and robbed. Dancing, drinks, the usual. He showed us some of the customs of his home, told us stories about the people he had left behind, it was lovely. But we got word that Pogee had gotten into one of his scrapes, and that’s why he wasn’t in attendance—

-Pogee? Scrapes?

-Young Mr. Jung, of course. Always up to something questionable. But that’s why we keep him around. He might have been stuck in a bathtub full of coagulating gelatin, or locked into his performance cage against while rehearsing. It’s hard to say. All we know is that when he pushes the button on that bracelet, something is seriously amiss.

-Are you claiming that you and Mr. In The Hat were attending to Mr. Jung’s “scrape” at the time of the incident?

-I would never claim such a thing. I want no part of that, it would be a full-time job. Let the record reflect: my own life is a full-time job. I do not share the same sort of...magnanimity as Mr. In The Hat. But I did put him in a cab to get there, for which I have produced the receipt, and multiple others including Pogee, who was unconscious at the time, can confirm. Anyway, I saw the whole thing, Smart was never even injured. He just doesn’t appreciate sentiment, he walked away after the game was over!

-Mr. (redacted), I’ve heard enough of this. You have been leading us in circles for nearly two hours with your family history and an incredibly exhaustive list of all the people you have known in New York for the last decade, as well as your least favorite bars and former paramours. As a witness you are manifestly unreliable, and you seem to recall and forget things at a nearly equal rate. You have been no friend of the court’s in the past, and it would frankly shock me if you are not in this facility at some near date for some other decades-past charges. Between your friend Mr. Sparkles and your various other cohorts, you and yours have kept a legion of petty court officials employed. Your interest in the matter at hand is at best tendentious, and the more testimony you offer, the more it appears that it is you who has both initiated and potentially terminated the entire proceedings. Was it not you who called the police? Was it not you who suggested Smart, or whatever this man’s preferred moniker is, was murdered? Were you not the one who suggested that each of the witnesses offer their statements in song? And now you give us reason to believe that Mr. In The Hat was not present during the alleged violence, and neither was Mr. Smart? Counselors, there appears to be neither victim nor perpetrator in this whole business, and the only man in the courtroom who bears any culpability is the witness currently on the stand. Unless there is a strong and immediate objection, I’m going to declare a mistrial and attempt to justify why I should not hold this man in contempt of court.

To summarize what I understand of these scattered, entirely likely falsified “court” documents: Jack, possibly in cahoots with Cat In The Hat and Smart, orchestrated a massive disappearing act, or at the very least obstructed justice for a duration sufficient to throw the authorities off the trail of something or other. It appears he made himself the star witness, chief alibi, and, in the end, criminal perpetrator of a heist of time and resources the likes of which I am not aware. The thing of it is: the more I consider about this case, the clearer it is how little it has to do with Cat and his affairs in this country. I have every reason to believe the money obtained in the robberies was put to some use in conjunction with Smart’s absconding, but I find myself caring less and less. I come at this point full circle: it’s Cat’s own words either written or recorded by him, or directly recalled through his intimates, which move me most. I now take a breath before one last push to discover the heart of this feline man.

[worldinferno]

Even More “Tails,” To Break Up Any Potential Monotony

On a cardboard bar coaster cut in the shape of the United States, in red ballpoint pen:

If someone travels three hours to hear one song and hears only that song, it is either a triumph or a tragedy. It is not longer a concert.

Journal entry:

Today it was Caprese who had to go. These specialists we bring in really live up to the title. They are special. Just watching her limber up for the task is a spectacle, rolling around on a spiked ball that looks like the end of a mace. Either her balance must be incredible or she must be made of armor for it not to pierce her skin. Having another life is dangerous in this business, Jack told me about it once, I recorded it in the audio record. Caprese will return home and wait for Precarious to see this thing through to the end. I do not think she wants to go, but she has been at this long enough to understand when enough is enough. Like many things in life, you get more and more proficient at it, and when you are just about to reach a peak, you stop. If you have any sense. Because the decline is far worse. It grows colder and we have to leave her at a dungeon for debrief. Sex clubs in this country are not identical, but they do mostly have a safehouse component to them. This one is called Hellfire, and I do not think they get many fighters seeking asylum any more. I decided it was best to walk her in, and I was correct in this decision. The one who met us wore platform shoes which rendered them taller than me, which means twice as tall as Caprese. They asked if Caprese liked to play. She gamely answered that it depended on the day. When the worker stroked her hair and told Caprese it was Tuesday, she replied that she still was not sure, that she would have to think about it. This was the right answer. When they went into the depths, I felt certain she was in good hands and would be home soon. This is only right.

This means we need a replacement and we got him: Diesel Jesus is now among us. He comes with the attitude of a craftsman and leaves none of himself behind when he goes into a job. I imagine he spends his time at home thinking of only the next opportunity to do exactly what we do to assemble these resources. But that may only be what he wants me to think.

Tape recording, which sounds like Professor, describing an encounter, perhaps to Cat as the low rumbles of understanding throughout resemble those on other recordings:

He said to me, “What are you doing there, writing a novel?” I didn’t particularly feel like having a conversation so I said, “Something like that.” He went on: “I’m an avid reader myself.” So I asked him what he liked, just out of curiosity at this point. He had certainly been drinking heavily and glancing over at me most of the night. So he says: “Fiction. Non-fiction. Documentorials. And you know what I like best?” He winked at me a little, voice as hard as nails and as unforgiving as falling flat on your face on pavement. “History.” He nodded, as if I knew. I didn’t, and for no real reason I simply said: “Me too.” I wonder if I winked back, I’m not even certain.

On small sheets from a quarter-sized, lined notebook. Labeled in all capital letters:

FIELD NOTES on the SUPPORT (1 of 2)

If we need to access something more difficult, these will be the two to assist. They come heavily equipped, with very few fears, and seem to know when it is important to care and when it is important not to. When it means more not care. When it is more caring to put care aside, if even only briefly.

She is a scout, gathering the lay of the land from high above outside or the back of the room inside. She knows always what is at her back. She rouses the rabble or subtly creates rabble when there is none. It is a good practice for starting a riot to be subtle about it. It is one skill to belt into the megaphone, but it is another to tickle the tiger and rouse it to action as if it had thought of it of its own accord. She will make you think you have met her before when you have not.

Among the fears, in order of severity, which ought to be avoided or at least mitigated for maximum effectiveness:

Water at close proximity. But not at a great distance. If the water is far enough away that she judges she would die upon impact, everything is fine.

Spiders, or anything that could be understood as a spider, at any distance. See also: leaves underwater, seed pods from ground plants, unanticipated feathers, et cetera. She spent a month hiding out in a corn field, during which time every manner was attempted to draw her out. I do not know how often lethal force had to be used, but when they turned the bright lights on her at night, the presence of country spiders was enough to give her up. Escape ability made extended captivity all but impossible, however.

Non-grieving people. Dead people are easiest to deal with, grieving people also easier.

Living people. She works with the dead, but she refuses to raise them. I was asked by Jack, rhetorically, I assume, how many necromancers was enough to know. I know the answer and the language to answer better now than I did then: one is enough if it is the right one. I think he would have liked that answer. She had a panic attack and ran into the crematorium on one occasion. She carries with her thousands of pasts in the particles of ash in the folds of her uniform. I do not think she believes this makes her eternal, but it might.

These are the most important items for now. Notes necessarily incomplete.

[worldinferno]

A (Brief) Manifesto Concerning Citizenship

Scripted on fancy hotel letterhead, redacted other than an address at Very Tip of Brooklyn, Essentially Queens. Written carefully in sweeping calligraphy:

World citizen, not I. The world is not a specific place, it is only as large or as small as one can conceive. My own citizenship is even more abstract than that, and belongs to no place on any map. Any I have had in the past, I renounce; any to which I am entitled in the future, I waive. Citizenship is what gives the government provenance over who you are and where you can go. It is a weapon which ought to be forgone and forgotten. It is colonization and nationalistic pride. It is tied to imaginary borders and born of division.

Corruption is the highest virtue for a municipality, because it proves that the human beating heart has overcome the strangulating sclerosis of the state. If done properly, it renders police ineffectual, impotent soldiers in a long lost, nonviolent war. It sends bureaucrats on endless, circular recovery missions into their own laws. It purifies the killer drugs, makes accessible the useful drugs, clears the vice laws, empties the prisons, tears down the harmful institutions and seeds the earth for communities to grow up in their stead.

It is not currently that time. This world, the one that wealthy people pretend to be citizens of, will end, either in fire or flood. There will trouble, more trouble, and there will be a call, and that call will be answered, and there will be a fight. There is already a fight. In the meantime, we will work to discover the means of our souls, how much beauty they will contain and how much they can produce, and we will live beyond them. We will excavate reservoirs of beauty inside ourselves which outstrip any we have seen outside. We will invent new ways to be beautiful.

This manifesto is not addressed to an anonymous mass. It is addressed to a specific person, one who requires the second-person pronoun “you.” Every aspect of yourself that has felt homogenous because you were told your various citizenships required it is dissolved. If this time feels tenuous, it is because it is. If you feel fragile within this time, it is because you are, or at least this you is. Where “you” becomes “us” is the point at which we fight together. All past lives led inexorably to this one, the one in which we shake off the shackles of state and power over.

One day you might leave this non-citizenship, and you will be missed, but you will not be disbarred. A partnership which requires not passports nor visas, which spring from kinships perhaps forged in but not necessary entailed by blood, this is a community. I have spirits to describe to you, whispers of pasts which know no state and recognize no civic affiliation, and the more you fear them now, the more you will love them later.

No country, no purpose beyond people.

[worldinferno]

The Unavoidable Continuation of Notes Surrounding The Trial

Submitted with no further comment, typed on an analogue typewriter with a dirty ribbon which filled in the “a” and “e” letters throughout, yellow paper:

Trial notes, day 2, Cat’s interview:

-Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, attorneys, magistrate, tribunal, hooded council, paparazzi, executioner, advocates, friends of the court, and so forth, I’d like to offer a few comments before we go any further. This is a deeply phony world we live in, with little to offer the vast majority of people in it, beyond what they can make for themselves and their immediates. I come from a place where even that is difficult, where the government and half the people try to suppress and silence the other half. It is enough to make a person hard, cold, unfeeling, uncaring. For the majority of my life, I had only a vague sense of another world, and even then it was so distant and impossible that it was not worth even my dreams to consider it.

Many of you have attended a circus before? I have an idea of what it is, from a picture book I received as a child, written in a language I did not yet understand. There are giant, striped tents, with stands built for people to sit close next to each other and eat salty or sweet foods. These stands are built for maximum visibility, to see both high and low. The performers up high risk their lives from falling, the performers below risk them from trained animals overcoming their training and casting aside the tiny whip or baton which is meant to command them. The performers are very talented, of course, and serious injuries seem to be rare, at least in picture books. There are exotic beasts from Africa, exotic performers from Europe, immigrant labor or descendants of former slaves to build the entire enterprise, and, more importantly, to tear it down. That is the most unique element of the circus: it must move. It must be moveable. Does this make it fake? I don’t know. I leave that to you to decide.

I came to this circus of a country to avoid dangers which were very real, and because I thought I could not tame them any longer. I lived without a net, and I was sick of performing, either above or below. But I am here because in this courtroom because I did not want to run any longer. My crime is being an illegal person, a net-less performer who had too many close calls. So I ran to a land where the circuses are spectacular, where at least my performances would be appreciated for one night at a time, before moving on to the next. I could tame your lions or swing from your trapeze, and there would always be a place for me. But I see now how they are built, these tents and stands and cage, on the backs of the poor, and they do not appear so spectacular any more. I understand the language in the picture book now. I think it translates to: “Beware the circus, little boy, because it will kill you one way or the other.”

-Sir, you were asked for your name. Are you prepared to answer that question?

-Well, naturally: I’m Cat In The Hat.

-Mr. In The Hat, which would you say is greater: the number of things about which you care or those about which you do not?

-Oh, the latter, without question. But if it is a matter of degree, my answer might change.

-Would you then care to comment on degree?

-I would not.

-Mr. In The Hat, what are “tingly teeth”?

-I think that is a fairly self-explanatory concept, which is my favorite type to explain: they are teeth that tingle.

-Like a chill in one’s spine in winter?

-That sounds about right.

-Based on your preceding, totally unsolicited monologue, I am tempted to ask: why circuses?

-I thought you might. To cause complete and unceasing pain to my enemies. To bury them under a dance floor upon which I will waltz with my friends in our finest rags. You can catch me for a drink afterwards.

-Champagne?

-Why not.

-And growing old?

-Disgracefully, of course. One should look in the mirror and be thoroughly dispirited as their younger self within is forced to contend with the realities of the older self without.

-Wonderful. You know my last question already, but shall I ask it, just for formalities sake?

-You do what you have to, as always.

-Blood or wine, Mr. In The Cat?

-I have spent what feels like a lifetime explaining, and this seems like a natural point to cease that practice. Jack is about to take the stand, surely that will prove more interesting than this twaddle.

[worldinferno]

Another Box of Questions and Answers

I keep flipping through the pages of “Tails,” which are at times entertaining and light, at others weighty and a bit frightening, as with some of the previous entries. There are even a few pages which have been liberally painted over with some sort of dry ink, through which their initial contents cannot be discerned. I cannot shake the feeling this Cat guy is hiding from me in these pages, particularly in the longer entries, which require some perseverance to get through, so dense is his syntax at times. There is very little repetition, which is at once refreshing and at the same time a bit off-putting. It is not a rhythm which lends itself to light reading. When I finally hunted down Jack again, he passed off a box of miniature cassette tapes. He said they were answering machine recordings which would “answer all your questions,” even as we both knew there was no way that could be true. It also did not turn out to be true that these were strictly answering machine tapes; at least a couple were comprised of voice recordings made quite deliberately in what I imagine to be the punk house where Cat first showed up. It was a revelation to hear his voice: sonorous but with a distinct gruffness underlying it. He spoke like he wrote, which sometimes made me wonder if he was reading. I somewhat doubt it, but there’s no way to be absolutely certain without asking others who were in the room.

“Jack has described to me the Ex-Girlfriends Club and it sounded like something I needed to see. We walked all the way to the end of the street where our friends do not usually go. You have to walk through a small apartment, which is actually an art gallery, but it is very unusual art. All of the works were either carved directly into the walls or nailed to the ceiling, hanging down over us. There were three rooms of this, then around a corner, then two more, smaller rooms where they were projecting some kind of experimental film. Then one more corner and down some stairs to a basement. This was the Ex-Girlfriends Club, it had a sign to let us know where we were. Jack introduced me to the Queen, and said they had a thing. There were not that many people for nighttime in the neighborhood, but I believe this was because it was very exclusive. The bar was small and too low for stools. Jack flipped a switch and we could see the bar was made of light boxes with all kinds of items under the glass. One box was all champagne wrappers, another one was scraps of men’s suit materials. Jack said that these were pelts, I do not know exactly what he meant by this.

“Jack told me it was always midnight down here until you left, and then it was always daylight until you came back. He has a very unique sense of time. He tried to tell me about the witches, but I had to tell him that we take those creatures quite seriously where I come from. He snapped at me and said he takes them very seriously too, but I do not know if I believed him. I think he believed himself, however. I think Aunt Sandy probably believed him also, as she had just walked up to us. When he started telling me about moving forward always, she walked back away. She said she had heard that story before, but that he should definitely tell me. He does not believe in regret, which was surprising to me. I told him it was a fundamental human right and he said I was vain. I told him there was a saying in his language about pots and kettles, but he did not want to hear about it. He told me to just enjoy myself, which was easy, because I was enjoying myself. I still do not really understand the name of the club, but it is usually a good thing when likeminded people congregate. On the way out I told him that the Future Ex-Girlfriends Club was probably even smaller. He smiled and told me that was true.”

There were other recordings from the Cat, but I thought a few of the answering machine recordings would be useful to transcribe alongside this one. It turned out many of them were probably Jack or, even more likely, residents of the house, calling to remind themselves of things or leaving coded messages for one another to hear later. I don’t think any of them belonged to Cat himself.

“I’m in LA, it’s warm but not as warm as I wanted it to be. I’m going to sleep in the garage, alone, after this call. If anyone is there, it would be nice if they would pick up. Otherwise I am going to take up some of this tape talking about things no one cares about...fine. There are two women who are furious with me. Another one who doesn’t seem to care at all. Another one who is interested in nothing but sex. Another one who I think has given up altogether. And then there’s you, who is listening to this message, and probably knows who the majority of them are. Any ideas” (long pause) “That’s fine too. Goodnight.”

“I dreamed about us all again last night. I thought that was worth mentioning. It was just a dream about dreaming, I don’t remember anything except that we were all there together. That has to be worth something, right? Maybe a country song. Maybe.”

“Uh, hi. I think I left my earrings there two nights ago. I know there are a lot of people around, but these would be big pink hoops. Pretty hard to mistake. I need to get those back. Please call me? You know what, I’m coming by. I’ll just come by and get them, it’s fine.”

“...I’m the trickster...I play tricks, you know? I think I tricked you, now I’m inside. But my heart is pure, the tricks are tricks of love...have faith!”

“I swear to god. Does anyone even live here? I’m calling to ask that someone get some decent wine in this place before I get back. We’re all gonna die, there’s nothing wrong with that, just for the love of whatever holy things you can think of, get some decent wine back in this house. And keep it there. Keep decent wine there. I’m coming home.”

“This is your standard issue aging punk rocker calling. I know the message says never to leave names, but you can probably figure out who I am anyway. Damn it, that was too clever. I don’t remember why I called, but I’ll bet it was important! You’ll regret making me be clever, you miss important messages!”

A possible follow up to the previous Cat recording:

“I told Sparkles about the Ex-Girlfriends Club. I don’t think he was impressed. He suggested starting a different club for Jack to be president. He called it the “Talking to Inanimate Objects Club.” He could tell I was skeptical, but he explained that there was a great deal of comfort in talking to things that could not respond. Or talking to things that felt no obligation to respond. He found it liberating and thought it would be perfect for Jack, who truly appreciates companionship. I asked him where meetings would be held, and he said they could be just about anywhere. When that man smiles, I think you would join any club he formed.”

Minutes later, on the same tape:

“Claiborne has a club also, which he tried to describe to me a bit. He calls it the Awful People’s Club. I have had about enough of these strange clubs, they do not seem to be particularly active, and they accomplish very little. When he began to describe some elaborate set of criteria for admission, I stopped him and told him it sounded pretty straightforward to me. He told me: not only am I the president, I am also the member.”

I reach the conclusion of another session of sifting, and continue to wonder at it all, but I think we are past the point of being hung up on continuity. Lives aren’t continuous and smooth anyway, don’t let any hack biography give any impressions to the contrary. There should be irruptions and eruptions, fissures and valleys, analepses and projections, cycles and severances, pick-ups and grace notes, and so forth.

[worldinferno]

A Note on the Transcript, “Tails” Continued

I just can’t see a world in which the preceding isn’t complete fabrication. It reads something like how someone who has never been in a courtroom might imagine the proceedings therein. The fact that it is printed on what appears to be some kind of official letterhead is even odder, but the contents themselves are so far-fetched as to make researching said events a waste of effort. The disappearance of Cat during this whole ordeal is a crucial detail, one which his entire legal situation hinged upon and which will absolutely bear further comment down the road. The second piece which requires subsequent elucidation is the blood/wine/mysterious DNA-bearing substance found pooled on the floor. The third is the utter disappearance of Smart. And let’s not consider too deeply—the court certainly didn’t—the metaphysical transmogrification of glass wine bottles.

The thing of it is: I almost don’t care. I find Cat’s cloak-and-dagger absconding from his homeland far more interesting, and this box speaks much more to his personality than to a murder mystery. He may be a killer, that really isn’t for me to say, at least not at this point in the investigation. What remains is a mass of papers and the bulk of “Tails,” another strange piece or two of which is worth reproducing here.

Journal entry:

“We passed the three crosses, I recognized them from before. The center one is larger, but they are all imposing. That religion really requires imposition. I am glad no one here seeks to impose it upon me. We had to drop of Claiborne last night, there was no other option. He had a difficult day. He got spooked during the job and slunk away, it took all of our emotional resources to bring him back around. Such a complicated combination of people are bound up inside him. The darkness is deep, and the lightness is surface. He finished strong, as always, but this will be the end for now. We brought him first to the Snoratorium, one of the few facilities of its kind. I don’t see him as similar to the other convalescents, but that is probably what everyone says when dropping off their associates. He had to check himself in, and I could see they would test him as soon as he walked through the door. Sandleman kept an eye on him, but ultimately he was in better hands. This business will crack anyone a bit. He had begun to split personalities, and I could see he was fighting to keep them in check. I have seen this sort of thing before. One minute he would be cracking wise with Jack and the next he would be weeping in Aunt Sandy’s lap. He will be happy, we will pick him up tomorrow, and then put him on a plane home.

I just thought of the bridges on the way back back. They were beautiful in the daylight as well, more frightening, but equally beautiful. The water was more still at midday, and the sky was slate grey in the winters, which was mirrored in the water. Grey above and grey below, with those same submerged trees and the souls within reaching up to escape. Or to wave. It always reminded me of snow, that is why it was frightening, because it looked like you walk on it. I wanted to climb those trees and speak to them, but they would have no use for me at all. They would have to listen, though.”

On the back of a lengthy hardware store receipt, only the name and address of which can be read through the reverse side:

“Jack went to court, he was fantastic. He knows his way around there, he is much more comfortable than I would have thought. Son of a jurist or something like that. The magistrate said he was in contempt, which I thought was a pretty obvious statement. He said Jack had been in contempt for 27 years. Jack said it had been at least that long, took out some of the money we have made, and asked what three decades would cost just so he could be in contempt for a few more years later, just in case. I love him. We’ll skip into the river together when this is all over.”

Is it starting to make sense yet? Form some kind of a pattern? Still time to decide...

[worldinferno]

Trial, Or An Imagining Thereof

Prosecution: Please state your name for the record.

Witness 1: I’d really rather not.

Defense: Objection. Your honor, this witness is on the stand under great duress. We request they are able to use the pseudonym under which they are most commonly identified, and which they have had pending for a legal change for the better part of a year.

Magistrate: Their name is in the record, counselor. We can call them whatever they want to be called. Unless you think it bears directly on their testimony.

P: No. Please state how you’d like to be addressed for the record.

W1: (redacted)

P: Thank you. Please state your occupation.

W1: (redacted)

P: Thanks. Can you describe your relationship with the defendant for the court?

W1: (redacted)

P: Do you know the defendant’s name?

W1: Yes. He’s Cat in the Hat. I just call him Cat.

P: Can you tell the court where you were on October 30th of this year?

W1: I was at my house. Or where I usually stay?

P: Usually stay?

D: Objection. Your honor, the witness’s living situation has nothing to do with this case.

M: Counselor, do you mind skipping this detail?

P: Fine, fine. Can you please, in your own words, describe the events of that night which included the defendant, Mr. In The Hat?

W1: Who else’s words would I use?

P: Excuse me?

W1: To describe the events?

M: Miss (redacted), please just answer the question.

W1: In that case, it was wonderful.

P: Would you care to elaborate?

W1: We all had to be in green. That was very important, for some reason. I had to borrow a few choice pieces, but I think I pulled it off. It was a normal party, but we cleaned up that basement, I didn’t know the walls were red all along, there was so much soot and dirt staining them. We had a guy down there who would build bonfires for warmth and just open the back door to draw out the smoke. We’ve had every sort of artist down there too. But the walls were red, all along, and we painted the floor a nice dark black with white flecks all over. It looked like a modern painting or something. Cat had got all this wine, but he wouldn’t let us drink any of it. They were these funny small bottles with black and white labels, I can’t imagine where he found such things, but you can get anything here if you know where to look. He had all the bottles set up on the table, but we just went about having a party. This was more like a ball, really, because we danced so many waltzes, but Cat likes Boleros and Polonaises too. Twenty people in green dancing in threes, it really was a beautiful time. After a few hours of dancing and drinking everything but the wine, Cat pulled the tables out to the middle of the floor and put chairs at opposite ends. He told us to stand back and he lined up all the bottles in front of himself and Smart sat at the other end.

P: Smart?

W1: Yes. Mr. Smart, I guess?

P: The jury will note that Mr. Smart is the missing man, we have no record of a legal name, though we have provided a variety of pseudonyms which match the DNA found at the scene. Please go on.

W1: I don’t know anything about any DNA. I guess it was some kind of drinking game, although I couldn’t really tell what the object was. Cat would drink one of the little bottles and then say a couple of sentences in a language I had never heard before. Then he just smashed it.

P: Smashed what?

W1: The bottle. He would throw it against the back wall, real high and hard so that it shattered. I was worried someone would get hurt, but the bottles turned out not to be glass.

P: And how do you know that?

W1: Because they melted.

P: Right. The jury will note that no glass was found at the scene, nor was any residue of any kind.

W1: Well, we do clean up after ourselves!

P: Please let me ask the questions. So tell us what happened next?

W1: Well, the drinking went on for awhile. Cat would finish one, then roll one down to Smart, and he would drink one, and say something, and smash it over his own shoulder. Eventually, Cat led us all outside and told us to write down a fear on a little piece of paper. Then he put them all in a little metal pail and lit them on fire while we jumped over them. He said it was an old ritual to make them disappear.

P: Was Mr. Smart outside with you?

W1: I don’t remember. I don’t think so.

P: Please try.

W1: I don’t think so. I knew everyone there, these were my friends. He wasn’t there.

P: Fine, what happened next?

W1: Cat told us to drink the rest of the wine and that he had to give something to Jack at his place.

P: And where was Mr. Smart?

W1: I assumed he left. He was always coming and going.

P: And did you think anything about the blood on the floor of your home?

W1: I assumed it was wine.

P: You mean to tell me the pool of liquid you can clearly see in these crime scene photographs looks to you like wine?

W1: There was a lot of wine. How would you feel if someone you had come to love was in trouble? I don’t know anything about Smart, really, but I know a lot about Cat. He is no killer. He is no criminal. He left a bad place and came to us, and we tried to help him. Jack met him, and we helped him, and when he gets cleared for this, we’re going to dance again! All in threes! All in threes!

(End transcript)

[worldinferno]

Tracking that Cat, Cat

“Listen, man: the whole thing happened in a flash, just like every other night. How this Smart guy ever got into the States is totally beyond me, but he had been sleeping in the basement on and off for weeks. He made himself a little room out of leftover pieces of the sign from the Luxe Hotel. That’s right, just there by the water. What a place that was! Some of the kindest women I’ve ever met, and a few very nice boys to boot. Hoo, there was something for everyone in that place. Sure, sure, by the hour, probably by the minute if you were in a pinch. I think they had some kind of union or something to keep the cops out. But it could never last...

“Anyway, Smart was a funny kind of name for this character. He was great with his hands, I’ll give him that. But if he couldn’t get a situation between those two big biscuit-grabbers, then there wasn’t much he had to offer. Anyway, we didn’t ask questions, and we definitely were not going to tear down that doghouse he had put together for himself. It was filthy down there, but somehow he always managed to keep himself tidy. Couldn’t have had more than a couple suits, but they were always nice looking even if they didn’t fit him quite right. He might have lost some weight along the way or something.

“Needless to say, he and that cat Cat had some history, they went way back. And I don’t see how they could have met at the house by accident, that seems incredibly unlikely. But I’ve always appreciated coincidences, so who knows, right? In any case, Smart didn’t talk much. He worked at some Slav bar or something, it wasn’t really a place you went into unless you spoke the language. And I don’t just mean you knew what the words meant, you kinda had to be ‘in,’ if you understand. There were a lot of rumors about what went on in there, but that’s probably true of a thousand places here. And at the end of the day, it was hard to argue with what he had to say when he did say something. The anarchists loved him, I think they thought he was authentic or something, and he did come up with cash here and there, so there wasn’t much reason to unload him.

“Boy, when Cat saw him it was one of the strangest things. He hadn’t been with us long before he saw the doghouse in the basement, and I really think he might have known even then. When we described Smart to him, there was no question. So when they finally met in that little doorway, Cat went on the offensive, and I thought there was going to be violence immediately, but it was all some kind of ritual or something. Cat walked right up to Smart and pressed his nose into his cheek. Smart just stood there, looking straight ahead, and then grabbed him by the neck and they hugged each other. But it wasn’t like brothers or friends exactly, it felt more like a test, like who would give first. Or maybe who could squeeze tighter without making it look like they were struggling. Either way, they both took a deep breath and walked inside. Damndest thing I had seen in a while, and honestly we didn’t know who to back. At least I didn’t.

“You know, Jack always talks about how sorry he was not to have been there that day, but it obviously was for the best. I can’t imagine adding one more personality into that mix, and Jack turned out to be Cat’s best shot anyway. He had enough crazy stories at this place anyway. Did I tell you the whole thing about Sly Stone? Man oh man...”

“Anyway, those two spent the whole afternoon talking in the room Cat was sleeping in. That’s right: Billy One-Shoe! You’re learning fast! I gotta say, real fast: I love me some Billy One-Shoe. There’s a bunch of stories there with that one-shoed sonofabitch. Great guy.

“Anyway, anyway: they get done with their talk, and everyone gives them their space, and the conclusion is to have a party. But Cat goes through this whole list of things we need, and we can only invite certain people that he has met, and every one of us has to be there. It was pretty complicated, and we really only had a week. It might have been some kinda anniversary for them or something, but they had a date in mind for sure. I could tell Cat was a nostalgic sorta guy, and I like that about him. So there’s gonna be a big party, and Smart is just sitting there on the bed, with Cat standing in front of him, telling us all about the party plans. He doesn’t say much generally, but he said to all of us: ‘it must go all night.’ It must go all night? He has obviously forgotten what parties are like here, rules or not. Looking back, the whole thing sounds crazy, right? It definitely does not sound like someone is about to get killed, right?

“Yeah, the money. I didn’t take any part in that. But they got the money, I didn’t want to know how. Listen, man, I just clean up in here. I love a lot of these people, but what they did...I know they were trying to help Cat, I know that. And I know what I saw, too. The thing of it is, you should just ask Aunt Sandy. She was front and center for it, right in the thick of things, and she was the star witness anyway, wasn’t she?”

But I couldn’t ask Aunt Sandy, and I didn’t need to anyway. The one event in this whole sordid affair which was about as well-described as anyone could possibly have asked was the party. It was clear someone had thought to write down everything they could recall in the order it happened, as if their life depended upon it. For all I know, it may have. Someone may have died, and someone may have gotten off for it. There was definitely wine, and there may have been blood besides