The other one was more of a horror film, late 80’s. Totally different time in cinema history. This one was called The Buffalo Roma, and it was kind of a Western take on the whole Gypsy curse thing. I’m just the skeptical buddy in that movie. The main character and I play two down-on-their-luck cowpokes who decide to turn to horse theft. Except the horse that the main character steals is owned by a Gypsy who buries the horse’s harness and lights a fire on top of it. Which is when bad things start to happen. The fire scene lasts a long time, and it’s actually pretty visually stunning.

When you hear “That’s where the magic happens,” it’s usually a good thing. Like in the movies, you can have a shitty script, and a mediocre director, and a group of actors who are just there to cash a check, and yet a great editor can pull it all together into a good film. The editing room is where the magic happens. But sometimes it’s more like Bill Pullman gets buried alive after being hit in the face with with Haitian zombie dust and all of his life signs shutting down, but the magic happens when he comes back to life. Or something. But it doesn’t have to be a good thing. In Calistoga, it wasn’t.

Douglas Noël Adams came screaming into this world, as most people do, on the 11th of March, 1952, in a state of profound ignorance. This was not considered unusual at the time. Babies generally know almost nothing, with the possible exception of one particular baby in mid-century Luxembourg, born to a Mr. and Mrs. Olivier Zimmer (her parents wanted a boy), who could distinguish between a duck and a goose at twenty-three weeks, though he remained silent on the subject of swans. But for young Douglas, the mere accident of starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations so troglodytic as Oxbridge, all crowding on six-feet five inches of unconscious babyhood, was so queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation near in importance to the problem of why that doctor was approaching him with such a sharp-looking knife, and— But what, then, could become of such a child when his infantile mind should progress to the juvenile form that it would occupy for the rest of his life and find himself required to play the game of the twentieth century? Had he been consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding such cards as he held—Mickey Mantle, a half-filled punch card from the local cafe, and one that said, “I fell in lava with you a long time ago” and which was emblazoned with an image of a hollow space from the final day of Pompeii that seemed indicative of onanism—suspecting that the game was to be one of which neither he nor anyone else back to the beginning of time knew the rules, quite like cricket? He was not consulted and was not responsible, but had he been taken into the confidence of his parents, he would certainly have told them not to bother. Whether life was an honest game of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could not help but say, “I’ll get to it later. Can you play the C-side of Quadrophenia?”

Douglas Adams came screaming into this world, as most people do, in a state of profound ignorance. This was not considered unusual. Babies generally know almost nothing, with the possible exception of one baby in Luxembourg who, according to persistent rumor, could distinguish between a duck and a goose at twenty-three weeks, though not consistently. But the mere accident of starting a twentieth-century career from a nest of associations so troglodytic as Oxbridge, all crowding on six-feet five inches of unconscious babyhood, was so queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby near in importance to the problem of why that doctor was approaching him with such a sharp-looking knife, and— But what, then, could become of such a child when his infantile mind should progress to the juvenile form that would occupy the rest of his life and find himself required to play the game of the twentieth century? Had he been consulted, would he have cared to play the game at all, holding such cards as he held—Mickey Mantle, a half-filled punch card from the local cafe, and one that said, “I fell in lava with you a long time ago” and which was emblazoned with an image of a hollow space from the final day of Pompeii that seemed indicative of onanism—and suspecting that the game was to be one of which neither he nor anyone else back to the beginning of time knew the rules, quite like cricket? He was not consulted and was not responsible, but had he been taken into the confidence of his parents, he would certainly have told them not to bother. Whether life was an honest game of chance, or whether the cards were marked and forced, he could not help but say, “I’ll get to it later. Have you got anything by The Who?”

“I thought you said you hit it on purpose.”

“I did,” Dio replied. “That was my aim.” He meant the pothole. So had I. The Outback’s oil pan had been busted, even through the cheap plastic guard thing. Easy to take care of, but I wanted to keep going wherever we were going, and I didn’t want to put Emily’s car through any more stress than I already had. “But goal doesn’t always meet result.” This was the first time I ever heard him sound unsure of himself.

“How’s that?” Sonny asked.

“You know what I mean, man: It can sometimes gang agley. My aim.”

“Ah, yes, you did say your ‘aim’!” Sonny exclaimed almost before Dio was done speaking. And I know I should just say “said” instead of exclaimed, but he kind of said it so loud that it shook the RV. Metaphorically. “Je t’aime bien! Your aim, your love, your will! I enjoy the way you speak.”

I wouldn’t have spent as much time introducing Sonny Isis in the last chapter if he wasn’t important to the eventual movie. You gotta cast the right guy, though. Jason Momoa would be good, but he’s not quite sumo. I guess you can fudge. For the ladies.

So we had a lot of time to kill. I kind of want to call the RV “the short bus,” but it was just a little slow.

“So which path did we decide on?” Sonny asked.

The Crescent had felt almost like a dream to begin with; now it was feeling more and more like something I’d hallucinated. But back there looking at the map in Dio’s jacket, we had actually considered three different routes we could take to Calistoga. One (double-entendre), cutting west and driving up the PCH. Two, cutting east and up the I-5. Three, suggested by Sonny, threading the needle and heading straight north via byroads. He didn’t know what we were contending with—hell, neither did I at that point—but he seemed to grok the importance of the decision.

“Rationally,” Dio had said, “we head up the coast. Small highway, nobody can follow us without obviously swerving between traffic trying to keep up. But my gut feeling is the I-5. Like, they won’t expect us to take such an obvious route.”

“Who’s they?” I’d asked with my hands by effusively gesturing at the people around us with palms facing me to indicate “who” and then explosively turning them around to indicate “they.”

“Regardless of who they are,” Sonny had interjected, “wouldn’t the best course be to follow a random route? One that no one could predict?”

Somehow we wound up in his RV without having settled anything, him driving and then asking us which way to go.

Dio pulled a compass from his utility belt, looked at it and said, “Huh.”

“Yes?” Sonny asked. “Something interesting?”

“No, the arrow just points straight north. I guessed it would, but I kind of hoped some magnetic anomaly would take us in one of the other directions.”

“My route it is, then!” Sonny said. “Lady Di has aimed her bow, and we shall follow her arrow.”

“Lady died in a car crash, you know,” Dio countered.

“Then we shall have to avoid the paparazzi!”

“That’s actually— Never mind.”

So we took his crazy route north.

Now, some things to consider for when we actually get around to filming this thing: There’s nothing wrong with road movies. I love road movies. The Hitcher, with Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell (I worked with him once, and I would just call him “C”; it annoyed the shit out of him). The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Vanishing Point. Detour. Classics. But they can kind of meander. I don’t want this to be a movie that meanders. I want it to be: “Oh shit, I just want to get my car back and now I’m caught up in this whole thing with loan shark thugs, shady men in offices and suits, some rando guy with a utility belt who seems to know more about what’s going on than I do, and—eventually—the Zooquarium.” So I could precisely detail every road we took and every subject of our conversation along the way. Some of it would make for good road movie material. But it would meander. Which I said I don’t want, but it makes me think that Hero and Meander would be a good name for a road movie if I ever decide to make one. Maybe that will be Volume II, and it will just be about this little interlude that I’m going to leave out of this one. Probably not. But you never know where the Muse is gonna take you.

So we got to Calistoga.

Oh shit, I left something out, kind of consciously, kind of not, because I wasn’t sure how to frame it without giving away the surprise. In the film we need to establish some sort of recognizable car that seems to be following us, like Peter Sellers in Lolita. In real life, it was just a blue Audi 80 Cabriolet with the top closed. I mean, maybe that’s good enough, but it’s not Sellers’s ‘57 Chevy Black Widow. But just have the car quietly driving by when we’re stopped, not even slowing, nothing suspicious, but then a few minutes later it’s somehow behind us again. Don’t linger on it, though.

He was a car guy, Sellers, which is one of many reasons I like him. But that’s not worth getting into here.

Oh, also, we had a pretty good soundtrack in some of the dumpy towns we passed through. Maybe we could incorporate some of it into the movie. Not every song was my thing, but it was interesting to learn what the other guys liked. When “Lovefool,” by the Cardigans, came on the radio, Dio almost gasped. “God, I love this song,” he said. And at some point Sonny played the first three tracks off of Live/Dead. I remember this not only because it lasted forever, but also because right before he put it on, Sonny announced, “This may surprise you, but I’m something of a caput mortuum.” Geez, that guy. I got a little tired of it in real life, but I think it makes for fairly distinctive dialogue.

Oh, and there were also a couple bits where Dio asked Sonny things like where he was going, and Sonny would say something like, “No fixed destination. I’m Australian. We travel.”

“Yeah, but you’re not some kid taking a trip between high school and college. You can’t just say a category explains everything about you. I mean, I generally let people know I’m a freegan, just so they aren’t surprised when I grab a half-eaten apple out of a trash can. But that doesn’t explain everything about me. It’s a pretty minor component of the complexity that is me.”

“Freegan, are you? Fascinating. I wouldn’t have guessed to encounter a freegan in a roadside diner. You must be more than just that, just as I must be more than just Australian, I suppose. But what hidden complexity manifests in such an uncommon pecuniary and culinary decision?”

“None of your damn business.”

“Touché.”

I think we could use some of that.

But anyway, we eventually arrived in Calistoga. And that’s where the magic happened. I’ll tell you what I mean in the next chapter.

I was actually in this made-for-TV knockoff of Postman in the 80’s. It was called called Measure Once, Die Twice, and I played this carpenter/handyman kind of character who works at the diner/gas station. Except this was kind of a chick version, where the main character is this woman who’s been living in the big city but has to come home and take care of the place after her mother dies of a heart attack. But was it really a heart attack? Well, that’s what she has to figure out. At first she suspects the broodingly handsome carpenter/handyman guy that her mother never mentioned, but by the end the two of them fall in love and jointly discover that the real cause of death was… Well, I don’t want to spoil it.

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“Where are we?” I gasped.

“Calm down, compadre. Maybe don’t speak for a minute. We’re momentarily off the Garman, so to speak. Best not to follow the same route too long lest it become a rut. Remember that. Change is stability.”

I lifted my hands and widened my eyes to express. “Yeah, but where the hell are we?”

You know, I actually went to clown college for a minute, but I partied out. And I don’t mean, “Hey, you’re a funny guy, you go to clown college or something?” I mean I really did. A pal of mine from high school, Jimmy, got into UC Santa Barbara, and there was a clown college not too far from there where they taught mime. So I took that class. I got pretty good at it. But me and Jimmy both partied out around the same time. Oh well.

The point is, being good at mime, I can actually communicate very fluently without words. It’s not the exact science of a nonverbal language like ASL, but it’s nonetheless a precise art of a nonverbal language. And I’m bilingual in body language. To be clear, that last bit is just schtick.

So I’m thinking during these scenes we just have my character gesticulating and moving, making faces, but then we have subtitles expressing exactly what he’s saying. We could even make it funny, not slapstick, but maybe some suggestive physical humor.

So I sez…

I’m going to use “sez” for “said” whenever I’m talking about silent body language. Stet that. Kind of like “zey,” “ze,” and “zir” or whatever.

So I sez, “Yeah, but where the hell are we?”

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So I can’t give much advice here on how to shoot it. It should be discombobulating, though. Like maybe even blurry. Or shaky cam. You ever see Irreversible? Don’t.

Anyway, usually, I insist on driving. Not today. Not when the car wouldn’t go in reverse, metaphorically.

You know, though, driving for me is always kind of at a remove anyway. Like there’s the whole clearing the mind on the open road thing, but that’s not exactly what it means to me. I like to remember roads past: stunt routes in dust-blown valleys, chase scenes that stitch together California, Spain, and somewhere outside Rome into a single continuous geography, the edits making it all make sense. I mean, you ever notice how every road trip movie is really about something else?

“No,” says Dio. “But I notice how every road trip is really about snacks.”

He produces: a bruised peach, three mystery olives, and something that used to be bread.

“You do you,” I said.

So I let Jonesy drive, but only after one more gas stop.

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So we were on a road trip. There’s something about road trips that makes for great movies. Vanishing Point. Easy Rider. Hell, I’d even throw in John Wayne’s The Big Trail. I thought of this movie at the time because “Red Lester” made me think of “Red Flack,” the villain of the piece. Tyrone Power (not junior). A pretty virile-looking guy in real life, but they make him kind of portly with this ridiculous mustache. The thing about road movies, though, is that they give you a lot of opportunities for introducing these colorful characters. Self-contained vignettes. Like a picaresque. Getting attacked by Cheyenne Indians played by Jewish guys, for instance. But the best road movies always have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I know history is against me on this, but I love the Oxford Comma.

The Big Trail has a lot of these picaresque moments, though. I call them “unearned increments.” Just little things that exist for themselves without necessarily advancing the main plot, except maybe incrementally. Like Red keeps trying to find ways to make John Wayne die. No particular attempt needs to be there to get to the end, but they provide little bits of tension in what otherwise might be just a bunch of people in wagons getting up every day and going west. There’s also a will they/won’t they love story that parallels the will they/won’t they kill each other question with Red, blah blah blah. But it’s these unearned increments that keep the movie going.

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“The name’s Diogenes Jones, but you can call me Dio.” We were in an alley behind a supermarket, and he was digging through a dumpster. He actually introduced himself earlier, right after the hand on shoulder, but I’m condensing time a little here. I’m gonna try it in this chapter. Also, he started off by telling me that his full name was Diogenes Jones, but then he explained that he never found a good abbreviation for Diogenes and that, as it was a mouthful, he preferred to go by “Dio.” But I think it’s better to just shorten the explanation like that.

He was an oddly-dressed guy, wearing what looked kind of like a grimy Eagle Scout uniform. No neckerchief, though, and instead of a sash with badges he had this bandolier strung with various utensils: a can opener, fork, spoon, knife, pencil, mini-flashlight, lip balm, screwdriver, compass, glue-stick, etc. Some were threaded through the ammo pockets with string—like the pieces of cutlery all had holes drilled in their handles—but the flashlight, lip balm, screwdriver, and glue-stick, for instance, were all just shoved through. He had curly salt-and-pepper hair with a beard to match.

“So what happened in there?” he asked as he poked the plastic of an unopened bread bag over the tip of an open carabiner hanging from one of the ammo pockets on his bandolier.

“Not so fast, Geronimo,” I said. “You think you’re just gonna jump right in like you don’t owe me an explanation of who you are and what’s going on here?”

“I told you: Diogenes Jones. As for what’s going on, I think you have a better handle on that than I do. You just got personally escorted to bad fucker HQ at 9:15 this morning, and I’m assuming you had a meeting with some bad fuckers. If you don’t understand what’s going on, I can try to assist you in your comprehension, but you’re going to have to give me something to go on.” I mean, I may be embellishing the dialogue, but for the screenplay, you know? Tweak it, as needs be.

“Look, no offense,” I said to this Diogenes guy. “I know ‘bum’ isn’t the politically correct word, but you’re a, what: a mendicant?”

“I prefer the term ‘freegan.’”

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So yeah, the next day I woke up early, head a little fuzzed from the late night guzzle, and I tried not to think about what had happened, just focus on my morning routine—pisser, shave, shower, and a crust of toast—but it was there all morning in the periphery of my mind’s eye. So it’s not like I was waiting for nine o’clock, worrying or anticipating, but some part of me just knew when the minute clicked. I was putzing around on the computer, checking my email and whatnot, but my eyes flicked up to the clock on the mantel, nine zero zero, and I got up from my chair to look out the window. Sure enough, a big black car waiting down on the street. So I nodded to myself and walked out.

I mean, I guess some part of me must have been anticipating it, because I was all ready to go. I had my wallet, I had my hook on, and I was dressed and groomed. Like I said before, I’ve never been one to shy away from my problems, even through procrastination. I may not have known what this was all about, but there was only one way to find out. So I go down to the car and by the time I get there the chauffeur is already at the back door to open it for me.

Now that was kind of the biggest surprise of all. I expected some muscle or intimidation, just based on the creep factor of the night before. But nope, none of that. The chauffeur, a young kid, just held the door and told me to help myself to whatever I wanted from the drink cabinet. It was nine in the morning, of course, and besides that I didn’t want to dull my senses for whatever this was that was about to happen. But I appreciated the gesture.

The word “chauffeur,” by the way, comes from the French word for “stoker,” like the guy who shovels coal into a steam engine’s firebox. I guess in the early days of cars that was the closest word they had for “driver.” That’s a fact I learned from one of my favorite books, THEREBY HANGS A TALE, by Charles Earle Funk (as in, “Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls”). Anyway, I wasn’t really thinking about all of this at the time, but it’s something I thought about in retrospect, because it’s also kind of like Bram Stoker, the guy who wrote Dracula, and I don’t know why, but there was just something vampiric about everything that happened next. I don’t know. That’s just the way my mind makes connections.

I don’t recall exactly what I was thinking about on the car ride, but eventually we get there, the car pulls up to the curb, and the chauffeur comes around to open my door for me again. As I said, nice kid. And there’s this big building, black and kind of pyramidical, like the sort of place that would house a hundred different businesses and a mummy, or some gravity-pounded structure from a Phantasm movie, but right away I notice something odd about it: Nobody’s going in or out. It’s still morning, and people should be showing up for work or meetings or whatever, or heading out again to go to meetings somewhere else. But not here. Not today. No signs of life.

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Once, when I was seven years old or so, I woke up in the middle of the night and found my dad sitting at the foot of my bed. I don’t know how long he’d been there—like if his sitting down had been the thing that woke me up or if he’d just been there for a while, waiting for the waking to happen. I’d been having a dream about trying to get to the front door of a house in my neighborhood, hindered by the fact that the front lawn was overgrown with giant tomatoes that would explode with snakes if I got too close to them, and one of the tomatoes had burst just prior to my waking up, so it’s possible I was just startled by that. But it’s also possible that my dad sitting down on my bed was what triggered my mind into having the tomato burst. It’s a tricky issue. Though, as a side note, I’ve always been kind of sad that I don’t live in an era in which it is acceptable to call a woman a tomato.

Anyway, it must have been one or two in the morning, but the reason that my dad woke me up was that he wanted to make crepes with me. I’d never had a crepe before and had to ask what they were, but he was pretty excited about it. He just said they were kind of like pancakes but not to ask so many questions and to get up and come into the kitchen with him. So I did, he made me some crepes with powdered sugar, we ate them together mostly silently—they were tasty—and I went back to bed. That was it. I never knew what that was about. We never talked about it. Maybe he was up late watching TV and stumbled across a cooking show and wanted to give it a try. I don’t know. It’s one of those mysteries in life where you never know exactly what was going on there with another person. At least, I really can’t imagine the impulse that would get someone to wake his kid up in the middle of the night and make crepes together. In my limited experience of fatherhood, you love your kids when they’re awake, but you also kind of wish they could be asleep. Sometimes I think that my inability to imagine waking a kid up to make crepes is part of why I just wasn’t cut out to be a dad.

It’s funny though, because as an actor playing a dad it comes pretty easily for me. Like I was in this sex comedy in the eighties based on Pride and Prejudice. Instead of a mom trying to get all of her daughters married, I played a dad who was trying to get all of his sons laid. But the eldest has this crazy idea about saving himself for marriage or something. I really got into that role, and I actually felt a little paternal about my screen sons. I bonded with them. So you’d think I’d be able to channel that into real life. Make myself a better dad. But I don’t know. I can’t really say much else about that particular film’s merits—sometimes you just take a job because it’s there and you need the money—but I will say that it made me think about what it means to be a dad almost as much as having a kid did. Which, to be fair, probably says something else about why I’m not cut out for the job. My catch phrase in the movie: “Not if I see you first!”

In any case, that night after revising Wikipedia, I woke up and I wasn’t alone. And it sure wasn’t somebody who wanted to make crepes with me.

Now this’ll sound weird, but I didn’t actually see or hear the guy, per se. The lights were off, for one thing. But I just kind of felt him next to me in my lizard brain or whatever. The limbic cortex, I think it’s called. My eyes were open, but I couldn’t turn my neck in his direction or even move a limb. I guess that’s why they call it “limbic.” Still, I knew he was there with his mouth hovering next to my right ear. And he spoke to me, but I didn’t really hear any sounds. The words were more like ideas of whispers that he kind of floated into my head. I told you it would sound weird.

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1. It is no accident that one of the primary modes of Neo-Decadent writing has been the manifesto: anatomies of that which should appear manifest in the Neo-Passeist layer of mulch into which Western culture has largely decayed. The manifestation of new life. In Spanish, incidentally, “manifestación” is the word used to describe mass demonstrations or rallies, often of a political nature. No particular significance should be attached to this linguistic factoid.

2. Neo-Passeism. The pretense of artistic immortality. The afterbirth of the monoculture. Though multiculturalism, conversely, was a stillbirth, almost immediately collapsing into the fetishization of the “exotic.” Serifs have decayed. Fashion has decayed. Pop music has decayed. It’s almost a truism that punk rock, for whatever it was worth, decayed into pure commodity as soon as “Never Mind the Bollocks” was released. As Dick Hebdige argues in “Subculture: The Meaning of Style,” the bricolage of punk was quickly coöpted by the mainstream fashion industry, Sid Vicious giving way to Billy Idol. But decay is neither unfortunate nor is it unnatural. It is the death of the old to make way for the new. What is unnatural is an attempt to keep the corpse walking. This is both tragedy and farce. It is Frankenstein, but it is also “Weekend at Bernie’s.” While Frankenstein may have ushered in the concept of science fiction, it’s no longer new. In practice, modern science fiction too often falls into recombinant strains of familiar tropes, but at its best science fiction tends to imagine futures that might be possible though previously unimagined. Neo-Decadence is a movement that displays an embrace of these best tendencies. Neo-Decadence as laid out in the manifestoes is science fiction in which art and style are the sciences being explored.

3. Take, for example, the manifesto of Men’s Fashion, by Gaurav Monga and Justin Isis, which appears in the Neo-Decadent collection TWELVE MANIFESTOES, edited by Isis. “A typical strategy,” they offer: “recuperation of speculative subcultures.” They go on to imagine “Ulaanbaatar death boys with rum mugs, volcano gloves and synthetic suede boots” or a recasting of the Black Death in Europe from the Middle Ages to the 1970’s, where “Islamic invaders would raid empty discotheques for sequined jumpsuits and flares.” The point is not to produce specific examples of what Neo-Decadent fashion actually looks like, but to show the possibilities, to fuel a star of inspiration within the reader. We are told that the authors of the manifestoes in this first collection “do not have saints, and we consume our idols.” When civilization has collapsed, you do not mourn the fallen monuments of the past; you pick up whatever you can find among the refuse and reveal the remnants of gods lying in the gutter.

4. Neo-Decadence is not practical. “The Neo-Passéist’s concealed, puritan disgust for language implies a prophylactic approach to writing; words must be kept at arm’s length, not given too much importance.” For the Neo-Decadent, language lives most fully as evocative ornamentation rather than as a grey-suited workman’s tool. Neo-Decadent language calls attention to itself and not its referents, the flesh made word. The manner in which Paul Cunningham’s words move across the page in the manifesto of American Poetry, another piece in TWELVE MANIFESTOES, is itself the message. The content of his manifesto is urgent, of course, but the manifesto is in a real way the American Poetry that it describes.

5. This is not to say that Neo-Decadent art is, at this point, purely hypothetical. The Onyx Book of Occult Fiction, edited by Damian Murphy, is a collection of Neo-Decadent work in all but name. The contradiction of the Neo-Decadent manifesto is that “Theory,” the typical ground of a manifesto, is in most ways antithetical to Neo-Decadence. There is no “should,” no single correct aesthetic, no prescribed course of action. The difference between one Neo-Decadent work and another is a suffusion of yellow, just as the resolution of thesis and antithesis is C#. It is in this heterogeneity that The Onyx Book of Occult Fiction is a manifestation of the Neo-Decadent aesthetic, as oxymoronic as that phrase may be.

6. Murphy puts it thusly: “The pieces in this volume were chosen for their singularity, each of them offering a unique approach to the immeasurable variety that constitutes the hidden mysteries.” Though he lists several forms that future works of occult fiction might take, the key word here is “variety.” In Thomas Phillips’s “Alyssa,” a seemingly garden-variety witch is drawn into an uncanny rebirth in which diverse ages of wisdom and insight flow exoterically into the new age following modernity, and with a fresh access to the Source of her magic, she recognizes “the necessity of dismantling the idée fixe, gathering to speak as exercise, maneuvering thought.” Yet while Phillips draws on familiar traditions of witchcraft and reimagines how these might look in the modern age, other authors here abandon familiarity entirely, moving beyond the surreal into the hyperreal: the world as we might see it through the lens of a thoroughly modern hidden and uncanny.

7. Avalon Brantley’s “Under Different Stars” takes as its subject a séance, but the spirits being communed with are not those who have departed but those who might have been and those who might be. The microcosm of the self has often been projected onto the macrocosm of the universe, but the reverse has not as often been attempted. Here, it is not so much an existential crisis as it is an examination of existence. “There is a necessity to feel… not a necessity to live.” “Scribo ergo sum.” The narrator of “Under Different Stars” is ostensibly the spirit of a man looking back at himself attending a séance when he was younger. And the aforementioned subjunctive spirits being communed with are versions of himself, including the narrator who is recalling the experience. This sort of recursion is not unfamiliar to Borges or the metafictionists of the 1960’s (and their imitators), but rather than the pointed “irrealism” of the like described by John Barth in a 1974 interview, Brantley is here exploring the hyperrealism of the heightened awareness of occult practice.

8. An aside: Transgression has decayed. While the culture (itself decayed to the point that the term is nearly obsolete), or at least the literary world, once lionized pederasts such as Allen Ginsberg or at least bent over backwards to ignore the unpleasantries of those deeds attributed to the likes of Jimmy Saville and Roman Polanski, a new morality has asserted itself in which character has at least as much to play as art. I mean “morality” not purely in the sense of whether an artist is “good” or “bad” as a person—though that is parallel—but in the larger sense that conformity with the accepted norms of “good” art is what makes an artist “good.” Minimalism, realism, relatability, sincerity, “truth to life” in a collective sense, etc. have come to be the criteria by which art is judged. Art is confirmed by its digestive quality and the ease with which it may be consumed. Why choose a possibly shocking fashion of one’s own when it’s easier and more acceptable to copy the clothes of a Uniqlo mannequin? While pederasty itself may be reprehensible, the prominence of otherwise artistically interesting pederasts at least makes us question, “Why is pederasty reprehensible, and how does it inform our understanding of this art?”

9. A segue: “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” an anime from the 90’s, is about many things. It is about children in mechs protecting humanity from the threat of “angels.” It is about a pseudo-Gnostic mythology that speaks to the true origin of human life. But at its most fundamental level, it is a psychosexual fever dream of masculine pubescence. The core of the show is always about the protagonist’s Oedipal relationship with his father and his sexual confusion with every major female (and in one case male) character that he has a close relationship with (including a character who is a clone of his own mother, whom—said mother, not the clone—is the spirit inhabiting the mech that he pilots). Taken all together, it’s fertile ground—decayed mulch—for art to place its roots. And yet in the decades since its debut, it has become little more than a cultural signifier. Why ponder life’s complexity when you could be drinking UCC Coffee?

10. NEO-DECADENCE EVANGELION—the name of the most recent collection of Neo-Decadent manifestoes dressed in the fashion of fiction—repurposes this question in its name alone. If Genesis is the beginning, Decadence is the inevitable end. Right? Well, no. Decadence is process. It is not the broken down, it is the breaking down. The first story in the collection—“The Slug,” by Brendan Connell—makes such breakdown explicit. It is composed of short sections, fragments, sometimes not even whole sentences. “Some carnivorous fish; a city on fire.” Images that might be developed as “plot points” in a conventional story—that is, a story built on stale conventions—yet Connell deploys them as imagistic firecrackers set to explode with the charges of meaning developed in the more narrative sections of the piece. “The fact is nothing is more valued in this world than banality.” This might be taken as the cri de cœur of the Neo Decadents in general. “He wiggled his soft, slimy body into a pair of tight jeans” as an entire section unto itself. The accretion of texture and details. The Neo Decadent is Gestalt concatenation rather than an interlacing of performative fictive cogs.

11. Adornment as meaning, surface as depth. The Neo-Decadent is often engaged in matters of fashion. The slimy slug body in tight jeans. Of the stories in NDE, “The Costume,” by Gaurav Monga, is perhaps the most explicit in this regard. The story concerns a man named Feroz—a name only given late in the second paragraph after being relegated to the status of a mere nonentity by the pronoun “he”—who wears the “costume” of a Pathani suit. The story is an analysis of his relationship with this particular costume—“costume,” mind you, not “outfit”—and how it plays out across his early life and in the contexts of the various “spaces” in which he finds himself. (In the age of Artificial Intelligence, even em-dashes have decayed.) Feroz’s mother, who introduced him to the costume, worries late in the story about her complicity in shaping his life by consulting “an astrologer who told her that Feroz, being of a Pusya nakshatra, would always by nature give too much credence to fashion, even dangerously so.” But in the end Feroz is less concerned with how his wearing of Pathani suits is received in the various contexts of the world in which he moves but rather in the world that it creates for him in which to move.

12. A thesis? Sartor Resartus. Style as the world we create for ourselves. An invitation to a bedazzling.

13. Yet, briefly, all of this is not divorced from the trappings of the Kingdom (the world). Golnoosh Nour’s “Sadprince” deals with choices of lifestyle and presentation as mitigated by the trappings of the contexts in which we move. Family, country, subculture, etc. Concerning a young Iranian woman who has a fascination with a dangerously transgressive (in the context of Iranian culture) homosexual blogger who blends violence with sexuality, “Sadprince” does not ignore the consequences of context but illustrates how a liberative idios kosmos may thrive within a hostile koinos kosmos. The narrator observes at one point, “My mother has granted much more freedom to me than a foreign country ever could, ‘Anything you’d like to do is fine, as long as nobody finds out, even me. Go do your thing. I don’t want to know any of it.’ Which liberal country would give me boundless freedom like this?” The point is—it seems to me—that many parallel realities occupy the same space, that the koinos kosmos is not directly accessible apart from the way in which we are able to recognize several other subjective realities as agreeing with our own, and that this is one of the fundamental precepts of Neo-Decadent art. The narrator of “Sadprince” has her reality that exists entirely apart from that of her mother, and her mother is fine as long as the narrator never brings up anything that would disrupt the mother’s point of view on “how the world is.”

14. Perhaps this needn’t be said at this point, but Neo-Decadence is not about “issues.” Nour is not trying to address the hostility toward homosexuality in Iran any more than she is trying to address the hypocrisy of the “freedom” of “liberal countries.” Neo-Decadence is specific, detailed, rococo, particular. What may be drawn from it is inspirational, not programmatic.

15. This review has decayed. It has been trimmed from a prolix six-thousand words to a mere two-thousand words. The other four thousand will stay with me, but may this third of the original provide inspiration if not program.

This post has been updated to include the proper spelling of “Ulaanbaatar.”

I wrote a “paper” in college once where it had all of the textual evidence quoted at the beginning and then the paper itself would read “See quote C.” Not really a paper. It wasn’t well-received. This isn’t really a review.

Charles Portis wrote True Grit. That will always be what he did. Even if it turns out that he was secretly Deep Throat, he’ll still have written True Grit. Now, that’s a mighty thing to have done. True Grit is a terrific book, better than either movie by that name. The movies try, but they can’t quite capture the duality of Mattie as both hard-dealing young lady and bitter old woman. But this ramble isn’t about True Grit. It’s about The Dog of the South.

The Dog of the South is my favorite Portis (though I haven’t read Gringos). It’s about a man who wants to get his car back. That’s also what DEBT is about. In The Dog of the South, the man in question is Ray Midge, a twenty-six year old newspaper man whose wife has run off with his car, his credit cards, and her ex-husband. So, as anyone might, he decides to track them by following their credit card receipts. He just wants his car! He meets a colorful cast of characters along the way and gets into a picaresque adventure that has little to do with car or wife, but that’s essentially what the novel is: things that happen while a man is trying to get his car back.

The Scorpions, by Robert Kelly, is about a man with a magical car. Or at least a car with more tricks in it than Q would put in Bond’s Aston Martin. But he’s also a man on a road trip with a mission: to find out about the secret society known as The Scorpions. He meets a colorful cast of characters along the way and gets into a picaresque adventure that has little to do with his car or the secret society, but that’s essentially what the novel is: things that happen while a man is driving a car to learn about a secret society.

I might have more to say about these two books later, but for now I leave you with your mantra of the day:

Geggy Tah.

You know, before I go on, I have to say: I really don’t know what I’m doing here. I was working on this movie once, The Clipper, in which I played an apprentice hitman. In the movie, “clipper” is supposed to be slang for hitman, though I’ve never heard that term used in real life. And I’ve actually met a hitman or two. We’ll get to that. The director was a good guy, talented—I’ll leave his name out of it, though I know you could probably just Google it—but he had some artsy pretensions. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, either. I mean, he could have been another Kubrick for all I know, and I like some of those artsy films. But the studio wanted a Deathwish, and this guy was trying to make The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Which just wasn’t gonna fly. So one day on the set the producer, Hal Orenstein—remember his name, because he’s gonna pop up again later—explained it to him in very simple terms, right in front of all of us.

“I’ve been working in Hollywood a long time,” Orenstein said. “And I’ve studied what makes a narrative work. There are a lot of big theories, and not all of them are without their merits. But the truth is, narrative is much simpler than any of the big theories make it out to be. The truth is, a good story always comes down to the ‘pillow message.’”

Silence for thirty seconds. And then the director caved. “What’s the ‘pillow message?’” he asked.

“The pillow message is a concept so simple you could embroider it on a pillow,” Orenstein explained. “For example: ‘Home, Sweet Home,’” waving his hands in the air as he spoke.

“Home sweet home,” the director echoed: no pause for comma, no drawing out of words for capitalization.

“Exactly,” Orenstein continued. “The key to a successful narrative is in three parts. First, you start off with a value that your audience believes in. Like ‘Home, Sweet Home.’ Who doesn’t love their home? So you start off with a guy at home, loving it. Maybe he’s fixing a cabinet or something. Maybe he’s putting his kids to bed. Something relatable. Something sweet. Something that says, ‘I love my home.’ But then you have to undermine it right away. Like, ten minutes in. No, five: ‘Shit, these spies are out to get me, I’m on the run, and I have nowhere to go!’ So no more home, right? But then in the end, you have to reestablish the pillow message. The value. ‘Phew, the spies are all dead. Glad that’s over. But now it’s time to go home.’ People love that shit. It tells them that what they already think is true is actually true.”

Which is all just to say, again: Sorry. I want to tell you my story, but I haven’t quite figured out the pillow message yet. I think it has something to do with debt. I mean, debt plays a big role. Like my debt to Little Jack and how I just wanted to get my car back. But also more personal debts to people who helped me out, or the debt you owe to someone just by virtue of having brought him into the world. But I don’t know how to make that into a pillow message. “Debt sucks”? How do you undermine that? The reverse would be something like “Wealth is good,” but that’s not really what I’m talking about. And it doesn’t necessarily apply to the other types of debt. It’s harder to articulate than you might think. If this all ever does get made into a movie, I’m hoping the title can sort of do the work of implying the pillow message. For instance, I’m thinking you could just call the movie “Debt,” and maybe that could imply some sort of pillow message that I haven’t thought of for myself yet.

My other working title is “The Freewheelin’ Van Jackson Michaels Volume One: ‘Incident at the Zooquarium.’” I’m a big Dylan fan.

Anyway, to recap, there I was, facing the business end of Vic Lodato’s lucky steak knife, and he wanted my money and my booze.

“I didn’t have you pegged as a champagne guy,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll tell you what: Lay off the tough guy act a little bit, take me to see Little Jack, and I’ll let you have the bubbly. Call it a gift. I mean, I know a lot of people think champagne is a girly drink, but I’m not one to judge.”

“Maybe you don’t realize that you’re in no position to negotiate, has-been.”

I ignored him and went on. “I mean, for instance, do you know why they use champagne to christen ships?”

“Because the bottle is so hard?”

He kind of caught me off guard by actually engaging with me on that one, but I recovered pretty quickly. “I think that’s actually probably a down-side of the whole affair. Wouldn’t you want the bottle to break easily?”

He kind of shrodded, I guess you’d say. Like shrug-nodded. “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Anyway, that’s not what I meant. Not why champagne in particular, but what the whole ritual’s supposed to mean.”

“What are you talking about?” He had at least lowered the steak knife from ninety to forty-five degrees with the ground.

“I’m talking about the fact that it’s a christening in the literal sense. With an emphasis on Christ, or whatever god you will. I mean, in pagan days they used blood to christen their ships, to appease their gods. The more virginal the better. And later on they used holy water. Well, these days the world’s gotten a lot more secular, so now we use champagne. But it’s all the same thing.”

He squinted and shook his head. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because,” I said. Dramatic pause. “I hereby christen you the S. S. Fuckface!” And then I whacked him upside the head with the bottle. I kind of hoped it would break, but it only made a sort of dull thud, and Vic crumpled to the ground. I don’t think he was completely unconscious. More like gravely dazed. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen firsthand someone get KO’d the way they do when they get hit by a blackjack in a movie. But he was going to be down for a minute, so I hopped in the lezmobile and off I took.

I probably shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know. I mean the whacking him in the head thing, not the taking off. Because of course I had to take off after whacking him in the head. But it’s not like he didn’t know where I lived, and if I wasn’t going to kill him—which, of course I wasn’t—it probably wasn’t a great idea to piss him off. Because I was sure that he’d have far less compunction about killing me than I did about killing him. But the thing was, while I can respect someone like him doing his job and giving me the alternatives and all, he’d sort of violated the rules. He should have just taken me to see Little Jack. And when he said no to that, that’s when I decided that the usual rules had gone out the window.

I kind of like the word “compunction.” I don’t know why, just something about the sound of it.

So in the car I had to think a little. What do I do next? The correct answer should have been going to see Little Jack on my own and trying to set things straight without Vic and his personal agenda. Which, I guess, was what? Him taking the money I had in my wallet along with the bottle of champagne? But something about the whole thing just felt off. Vic angling for himself, Little Jack acquiring the Sicilian’s business and suddenly expecting me to pay when he knew that I didn’t even have the money to get my car back... I don’t know. Something told me Little Jack wouldn’t be any more use to me than Vic had been. So in the end I decided to go to the bar. At least better than home, I figured. I was pretty sure that Vic didn’t know where I liked to drink.

Truth be told, I mostly prefer to drink at home these days. I’m not all that social when I’m not on the make, and it’s cheaper. But the Hotsy Totsy was my usual watering hole when I wanted to watch a big game or whatnot, or if I just felt like I was getting bored of the same old walls. In any case, I hadn’t been there in a while, and I was surprised to find they had a new bartender. An old guy like me. You always hope that they’ll hire some young trim trying to make her way through college, but the Hotsy Totsy wasn’t really that type of joint.

“What’re you having?” he asked me as I sat on my stool.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with a discussion of the finer points of what makes a good beer, but over the next half hour, hour, I drank a couple pints and tried to wind down. Didn’t talk much, tried to make nice with the new guy, but it was hard to get in the conversating mood. It’s funny how even when you think you’ve seen it all, though, someone holding a knife to you can still give you a shake. Anyway, eventually I had to take a piss.

The restroom at the Hotsy Totsy isn’t exactly spacious, so I didn’t waste my time reading any of the graffiti. Clever stuff like “Caution: Foul Balls.” Though one thing that always kind of cracks me up is that some prankster drew a picture of Waldo from the “Where’s Waldo” series on the underside of the toilet seat. Private joke for the gentlemen. But so I did my business, washed my hands, and got out of there, and suddenly everything was different.

I always wash my hands, of course. But to be honest I think it’s more just how I’ve been socialized than anything practical. I mean, if you take a piss and you don’t piss on yourself, what’s the big deal? Your hands have been out in the world touching all kinds of things with who knows what germs on them, but your pecker has been safe in your pants all day. If anything, you should wash your pecker. Or wash your hands before you take a piss. Whatever. The point is, I didn’t take long. But when I went out, as I said, everything was slightly different. Like the light had a different quality to it. Kind of an indoor crepuscular. And the new bartender was gone, replaced by a new new bartender, and this one actually was a swelluva chickstick. Blonde, early thirties maybe, with a pretty good hourglass going for her. Versus the old new bartender, it doesn’t come any more different than that. I didn’t dwell on the changes, though. I just took my seat and waited for the new chick to notice me so I could order another pint.

Now, I’m a patient guy. I don’t mind waiting. I took a lot of car trips as a kid, and I can kind of zone out and just not think about what I’m waiting for. But after five minutes or so of staring into the suds of my last pint, something clicked in me and I decided to pay a little more attention to what was keeping her from taking my order.

The second I looked up, I knew exactly what was going on. She was being bothered by some young buck at the other end of the bar. Judding it up in a fucking jean jacket. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to her, but he had his hand on her wrist. And that didn’t sit right with me. So I don’t know if I was just fired up from the encounter with Vic, but before I even knew what I was doing I walked over to defend the young woman’s honor.

“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up at me, locking his eyes with mine like he couldn’t believe I was interrupting him. I said, real calm-like, “I don’t know if you realize this, but it’s impolite to lay hands on a lady,” and I tapped the hand that was holding her wrist with my prosthetic.

She shook her head—afraid of him, I guess, which only riled me all the more, that he was making her afraid—and said, “It’s okay, really. Thanks, but I’m okay.” Kind of stuttering, though.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I have to disagree. What’s your name, miss?

“Daisy.”

“Well, Daisy, this sort of thing is truly not okay.”

“Why don’t you mind your business, old man.” It wasn’t a question.

“Well now, short and curly, I’m not trying to humiliate you,” I told him. “I just think you should show the young lady proper respect. She does, after all, have a job to do, and she can’t do it if you’re holding her here.” I turned to her. “Not that this is merely about me wanting to place a drink order.”

“Look, this is none of your business,” the kid said. “Now fuck off. Or do you want me to make you fuck off?”

I’ll spare you the rest of the banter. The kid apparently wanted to fight. I just wanted to stop him from bothering a lovely young woman. But you know, some guys only respond to pissing contests. I had no intention of fighting him. Mostly because I’m not a violent sort of person, but also because I didn’t want to turn my favorite bar into a boxing ring. So I challenged him to a game of pool instead.

He just stared at me for a second, looking down at my hand, and then he laughed.

It’s funny, but I never planned on going into acting. I didn’t take any drama classes in high school or act in any plays after elementary school or any of that shit. I didn’t have much of a plan at all, to tell the truth. My senior year of high school, I spent most of my nights hustling pool up and down the 99. It’s one of my natural talents, and nobody ever expected that some young surfer could actually play, so I managed to make a decent amount of money on it. I even won a grand off the Nevada state champion one night. I was getting by. Now, my pops didn’t know what I was up to, but he started to get the idea that something was up when I stopped asking him for a sawbuck every time I went out, and he eventually got it out of me. I didn’t try that hard to hide it, to be honest. I was kind of proud of it, and being the arrogant kid I was, I kind of wanted him to know that I was making more bread than he was even though he had his own hardware store. And besides, I figured, what difference did it make if he knew? It wasn’t like there was anything he could do about it. Boy, was I wrong.

The first thing he said to me was, “Do you value your thumbs? The opposable thumb is what sets us apart as human beings. Not even chimpanzees have true opposition. And yet you are walking a path frequented by men who would like nothing more than to break your thumbs. They would render you less than human. And why? For the money? There are human ways to make money. So is it for the momentary elation of besting an unwitting opponent? If you take pleasure in the guile, then I’m afraid I’ve made a poor show of being a father.”

He talked like that sometimes, but I didn’t care much about what he actually said. I wasn’t afraid of anyone breaking my thumbs. But it was like his voice was music. The rise and fall of his pitch. It hit me in my gut. It made me feel the concern of a father who was afraid of his son getting his thumbs broken. And I didn’t want to be a son who made his father afraid like that. I look back on that conversation sometimes when I think about my own kid.

So I gave up hustling, and that summer I took a job in my dad’s store to save up a little extra ching before college. What happened next was fate or luck. I guess I go with the latter, but the former kind of emphasizes what a big effect it had on my life. But really it all just came down to conveniently broken machinery. First an air conditioner, then a car. Don’t think that just because I was the son of the store’s owner that I had an easy job. I mean, I was basically just a stock boy, but I was the only stock boy, and I had to be there from open to close six days a week (Sunday was my day off).

Side note: this chick I was trying to score with that summer used to call me a “stalk boy” because I’d always be wherever she was on Friday and Saturday nights. I thought that was cute, because I could tell it was only partly a joke. I mean, she put out by mid-July.

But so it’s a Saturday afternoon in August, the air conditioner in the store breaks, and I have boxes to unload from a truck in the back. And it’s pretty hot that day, so I take my shirt off. Then shortly thereafter, this Hollywood talent scout’s car breaks down right outside my dad’s store. He comes in to use the phone to call a tow service, and while he’s waiting he needs to use the bathroom, so my dad sends him to the back, where he sees me, shirtless and sweaty, hoisting boxes onto shelves. On the spot, he asks me if I’ve ever wanted to be in the movies. It had never really occurred to me before, but I’d always really liked watching movies, and it suddenly seemed like a great alternative to sweating to death in the back of a hardware store.

The guy wound up being queer—which is why I’m not naming names—and he asked me at one point if I wanted to do some funny stuff with him, but he was really professional when I told him I wasn’t into that, and he got me my first television gig on a Western within the month. The rest is history.

But anyway, back to the story, the kid in the bar took one look at my hand, laughed, and accepted my offer.

“A game of pool? Whatever you want, Sputnik. I’m happy to wipe the table with your ass.”

“And if I win, you leave this bar and never come back.”

“Yeah, right. And if I win you pay my tab and fuck the fuck off.”

“Fine by me.” Then I turned to Daisy. “Could I trouble you to look in the cabinet beneath the cash register? “ She cocked her head at me and looked cuter than ever. I smiled. “I know you’re new here, and you have no way of knowing this, but I’m something of a regular. There should be an ivory box in there. It belongs to me.”

You see, what the kid didn’t know was that this was the only place I played pool anymore these days, so I keep my pool hand behind the bar. It’s shaped like a bridge, and I feel like it actually gives me a little more of an edge than I had before the car accident.

So yeah, I kicked his ass. If they make this into a movie, it could be a big dramatic scene where the kid is unexpectedly better than I take him for or something, and I win with a trick shot that I learned from my mentor that died in the car on the night when I lost my hand or something. But, again, I don’t really need to give you the blow by blow. Suffice to say he cried, pissed his pants, and ran back to mommy. Me, I grabbed another beer, got Daisy’s number and contemplated my next move.

I liked the way she said “beer,” by the way. Like she was a doer, not just be-er. Or a be-er, not just a doer. I’m not sure which is better.

After a couple more beers of contemplation, though, I headed home. Again, not the smartest move, and I knew it at the time, but the last beer just made me tired, and I didn’t see any other good options, so I figured I’d take whatever break I could get and deal with the rest as it came to me. I’ve never been one to run from my problems, anyway. But neither have I been one to roll over for a punk like Lodato. Nothing dramatic immediately happened, though. I went back to my apartment, drank some wine, put on some music, got on the computer, and waited for Vic or somebody else to show up. But no one did.

Wine: I know scotch and beer are the more traditionally masculine drinks, and I have an appreciation for both, and maybe it wasn’t a good idea on top of the beer, but, say what you will, I’m a wine guy at heart. It’s my speed. I drink too quickly and in too much volume to rely on hard alcohol. And beer is pleasant enough, but the tastiest beer isn’t as tasty as a good wine. Plus it’s harder on the gut. I know I mentioned a Charles Shaw box on my kitchen table earlier, and Chuck is fine for daily consumption, but a really good wine is a great thing.

Music: I said before that I’m a big Dylan fan, and I meant it. The album I listened to that night was the soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It’s an underrated classic. I love how it has four different versions of the same song, really highlighting the idea of performance. Like, a good screenplay is one thing, but it takes a good performance to bring it to life. Dylan acted in the movie, incidentally. I hear that Peckinpah cast him after Dylan brought him to tears with a performance of the title song. He did a pretty all right job acting, too. Better than your average non-professional. As an aside, I gave Dylan’s kid’s music a shot when he put together a band, but holy God was it terrible. I mean, their big single was called “One Headlight,” which as near as I could tell was about having sex with a chick who’d had a mastectomy. Anyway.

Computer: It’s self-indulgent, I know, but one of the ways that I like to wind down some nights is by updating Wikipedia with details of the movies I’ve starred in. That night I focused on this action movie called Kinpatsu II: Double Vision. This ends up being important, by the way.

The original Kinpatsu, which I wasn’t in, tells the story of Jack Slade, a Vietnam vet on vacation with his family in Tokyo who finds himself in trouble when an old war buddy slips him a mysterious roll of microfilm. He’s not quite sure what to do with it, but soon enough his buddy turns up dead, there are men chasing him on the Tokyo Metro, and his life generally seems to be in danger. But then after a fight at the Tsukiji fish market in which Slade knocks out his opponent with a forty-pound tuna, a payphone rings informing him that the Yakuza have kidnapped his wife and young son, and in order to keep them alive he has to jump through a series of increasingly improbable hoops (typical scenes include Slade eating raw fish for the first time and having to participate in a sumo competition despite his comparatively slight frame—the emphasis here being more on his embarrassment at wearing a diaper than on the actual competition—though he wins, of course, with his cunning carrying him through). Then halfway through the movie he learns that his wife is already dead: a giant origami crane sails through the open sliding-glass door of his hotel room balcony carrying her head on its back. He then hears a faint ticking—slowed and amplified for dramatic effect—before he throws the head back out the window moments before it explodes. At this point the movie shifts gears, grinding the clutch: No more jokes, just all-out slaughter until all the bad guys are dead. And so is his son.

But then in the sequel, it’s years later and Slade is called back to Japan to assist with a reopened investigation into his wife’s death, as new evidence has come to light that the Yakuza he defeated in the first movie might actually have been working for a more secretive organization that had been advancing evil causes in Japan for several centuries. Like, they’d been the ones who’d convinced Emperor Hirohito to support Hitler or something. So Slade investigates, starting at this art auction where they’re selling some ancient manuscript called the Clavis Quesadilla or something (OK. It wasn’t really called Clavis Quesadilla, but I think that’s funnier at this point. And I’m going to eventually reveal what it was really called. Actually, what the flip, I’ll reveal it now: Clavis Qixadae. Which sounded to me like “Clavis Quesadilla,”, and that’s what I put on the Wikipedia page. But this is a plot point, so I should probably mention it now. I mean, you’ll see.). Slade knows the bad guys want it, so he shows up to buy it, thinking that at least the bad guys will try to outbid him and thus reveal themselves. But the bad guys being bad guys just try to steal it instead. So he gets in a fight trying to stop them, braining three of them with the auction hammer before the fourth takes off with the book.

This just makes him mad. So he gives chase, clashes with this evil organization while working his way up through the tower that they call their main headquarters, and he seems to have the momentum to stop them... but then he’s confronted by me, his son, all grown up and trained to be a ninja my entire life and also brainwashed to think that my dad killed my mom and then abandoned me. In our first confrontation, he can’t bring himself to fight me, so he almost dies before jumping off the building and landing in Tokyo Bay. By the end of the movie, of course, I realize the truth, and I help my dad defeat the bad guys. But the part of the Wikipedia page that I updated that night was about a relatively minor plot point. Early on, like in the final moments of the first act, there’s this random fishmonger who can tell a fish’s value just by holding it in his hand—and he’s the one who gives Slade his first lead about the villains wanting the Clavis Quesadilla.

What I updated is that the fishmonger claims to be a member of a group calling themselves the Balance, and that they’ve been dedicated to thwarting the bad guys since at least as long as the bad guys have existed, and that keeping the Clavis Quesailla safe is a major part of that. Really just trying to flesh out how complex the plot was. And that was it. I mean, I might have added a line or two about how that movie kick-started my career, but really, that’s pretty much all I put. And by the time I’d finished my edits, I’d also finished my bottle of wine, so despite my worries about unwelcome visitors, I went to bed. I didn’t sleep long, though, and when I woke up I wasn’t alone. 

I don’t know why I brought the squid mask in the first place. I probably should have known it was a bad idea, but it wasn’t something that I gave much thought to in the moment. Like, I didn’t sit down and say to myself, “You know what your six-year-old grandson that you’ve never met before would like? No? Well let me tell you. He’d like a mask you wore in some shitty horror flick thirty-odd years ago.” I didn’t do that. I had other things on my mind. But I was on my way out the door, thinking about how maybe I should have planned ahead and bought some sort of gift for the kid when I saw it on the kitchen table poking out from over the top of a Charles Shaw crate that I’d removed the dividers from and was using to store a bunch of shit that I planned to sell on EBay. DVDs, mostly.

The vast majority of films I’ve starred in haven’t yet been released on DVD, to say nothing of Blu-Ray. But that’s actually worked out pretty well for me. A few years back (if you’re generous with the word “few”) I made digital transfers of all my old video cassettes, and I’ve had a pretty good online business going ever since. Nothing I could live on exclusively, mind, but steady, and you’d be surprised at how much interest there is in some of these. Even The Trench—the movie that the mask came from—has its fans.n j

In case you aren’t familiar with that one, it’s about a team of scientists on a submarine who discover this mutagenic virus or whatever in the Marianas Trench, and it transforms them one by one into various sorts of walking oceanic monstrosities: shark, electric eel, jellyfish, and—me—the squid. It was basically an underwater rip-off of Alien, but it has its charms. So the DVDs were a nice supplement to my other avenues of income. You’d be surprised, but experience has taught me that any movie, no matter how shitty, really is somebody’s favorite movie.

But anyway, I guess I just thought the mask was kind of cool, and I’d recently learned that the kid liked sea life. Plus we were going to the Zooquarium, after all. So I brought it with me. It really was cool, with fully articulated tentacles hanging down like a beard (this was at least twenty, thirty years before that Disney piece of pirate shit with the CGI squid-faced guy. And our squid was better looking anyway. Or at least scarier and more squid-like), and it had nictitating eyelids (that’s a technical term) that could be activated with a hand pump whose tube masqueraded as one of the af Ore mentioned tentacles. Cool, right? But that’s not even the sort of cool I mean. I mean, I thought it would just be a piece of evidence that I’d once done something cool and that I’d even once been cool myself. I say it’s a rip-off of Alien, and I called it shitty before, but The Trench really is a pretty fun movie if you overlook how dumb it is.

Squids don’t actually have nictitating eyelids, by the way. That’s a fact that I learned that day at the Zooquarium, when I met my Theo for the first time. I guess the costume designers just thought that it made the whole thing creepier. Which, I can tell you firsthand: It did.

So I grabbed the mask on my way out the door. Didn’t think. And in retrospect maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. Which is the point of me telling you that I don’t know why I did it in the first place. Sorry to take so long to get to that.

I should note, the Zooquarium wasn’t my first choice, but it was what I had to work with. A week or two before the whole debacle, I met up with my son, Garth, to talk about what we’d be doing. It’d been about five years since I’d seen him in person, and all I told him on the phone was that I thought it would be nice to grab lunch. Or actually I said a beer, and he suggested lunch because his mother attributes our divorce to my “drinking and whoring,” as she puts it. Though I’m proud to say I’ve never paid for it. I do have to fess up about cheating on her a bit, and I suppose she might have been using the term “whore” to describe the women I cheated with, but I’m more of a purist when it comes to the term.

In any case, Garth has this whole weird issue with me and alcohol because of the other half of the “drinking and whoring” thing. Which I guess I should have thought about before I brought along a bottle of champagne to give him as a peace offering or whatever. And maybe I did think about it a little, but I already had the champagne from a party I’d gone to about a year before, and it’s never really been my first choice among beverages, so I thought I might as well pass it off on him. Anyway, he didn’t take it. Which is fine, but I didn’t quite get the reasoning, since I knew he wasn’t champagne-averse himself, and I was the one that he thought had a drinking problem.

But then the first thing out of his mouth when he sat down next to me—this was at one of those diner/lunch-counter places, with the round stools covered in toothpaste-green acrylic; I hadn’t suggested a beer just because I thought it would be nice for a father to be able to share a beer with his son, by the way, but also because I’ve never really liked sitting across from people in restaurants: having to either stare at the other person while they chew or pretend to find something interesting about your own napkin and silverware—the first thing, though, was “What’s this about, Van?”

It always kind of kills me a little that he calls me Van. “Kills me” in the sense of “it cracks me up,” that is. Not like “it wounds me.” Because I’m the one who originally suggested that he call me that, just so he wouldn’t have to feel like he had to call me “Dad” after not seeing me for most of the first eighteen years of his life. And yet here he was, still calling me that after all this time.

“What, no ‘How’s it going, Dad?’” I said. “No ‘Good to see you, Dad?’”

“Sorry. How’s it going, Van?”

“Not so bad,” I said. “How’s Peggy?” Peggy was his wife. I’d seen her on one of his profile pictures on Facebook, and I’d thought that he’d done pretty well for himself. I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed.

“She’s fine.”

Anyway, blah blah blah, I’m not going to bore you with all of the chit chat. Small talk (awkward), food (the diner was pretty good. I had two soft-boiled eggs with toast, bacon, and hash browns. Incidentally, whenever a restaurant offers two eggs any style, I always order them soft-boiled, because I like to be sure I’m getting the whole egg), attractiveness of the waitress (her name-tag said Marge, not bad for an older broad), etc. The point was that I arranged the whole thing to ask him about how I could meet my grandson. He wasn’t immediately keen on the idea, but I could tell it was just because he didn’t think Peggy would go for it, and it didn’t take much to wear him down. So I mentioned the Zooquarium, and he kind of lit up at that.

“Did I tell you Theo loves animals?”

I shook my head, “No, no, not that I recall.”

“I didn’t think so. Especially sea life. I think he’ll like that, Dad.”

So a plan was made, and then we did one of those contact hug things, arms immediately bouncing off of the back, and we were each on our way. I walked him out to his car—a beige Ford Expedition, which I guess is okay—said goodbye again, and then champagne bottle still in hand I made my way across the lot to where I’d parked. I mostly mention the champagne bottle to emphasize that I didn’t have anything else. My wallet was in the back pocket of my jeans, and my keys were in the front pocket, but I don’t carry any sort of man-purse or anything.

I said before that the Zooquarium wasn’t my first choice of venue, but the thing was that if I was going to be paying, the options were kind of limited in a financial sense, and I’d done some commercials for the Zooquarium on the cheap when it opened, so I was pretty sure I could work something out with the owner. The kid liking sea life was a bonus. It kind of made sense, though. I mean, I may have neglected to mention that the kid is mildly retarded. Or “autistic” I guess is the politically correct term for it, but back in my day we just said retarded and didn’t mean it as an insult. But I’d read somewhere about an autistic woman who talked to cows or something, so Theo liking sea life didn’t exactly surprise me. And ironically enough, he ended up becoming a vet when he got older. Or do I mean “appropriately”?

But anyway, my low funds were sort of indirectly related to what happened next, for what it’s worth. A month or so prior to meeting up with my son, I’d taken some money from a loan shark called Little Jack, in order to pay back some gambling debts. For collateral I put up my car, a GT-40 kit car that I’d put together myself. Which meant that in order to get to lunch with my son I’d had to borrow a car from a friend of mine. And that’s why I parked way across the lot, even though it was practically empty. I mean, I didn’t want my son to see that I was driving a Subaru Outback.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got nothing against the whole Lettuce, Gruyere, Bacon, and Tomato crowd. The friend who gave me the car, Jessica Mnemosyne, was a lesbian herself. But I just thought it would be a little weird for a son to see his dad driving a lesbian make of car. And that’s not a stereotype, by the way. Subaru actually marketed themselves to lesbians, and it worked out. You can Google it.

An aside: One good thing I have to say about the Subaru Outback is that it has color. In this case, forest green. These days it’s a rarity to find a car that isn’t black, white, or something in between. Occasionally red. I guess it has something to do with resale value, neutral colors, etc. In the 70’s, though, I tell you: Cars had some color to them. A good friend of mine drove a yellow Ferrari, which I was fine with, but speaking to the whole resale thing, I guess not everyone wants to drive a banana-mobile. Even orange was popular, though. Catch me at the right moment, and I might argue that the 70’s were an orange decade. That or brown, but (fun fact) brown is technically a shade of orange. The point is, color adds character. Just watch Cannonball Run II for a lesson in how color can change the entire character of a car. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I won’t spoil it for you, but you really should check that movie out. It’s not as strong as the original, but it’s still a lot of fun. My GT-40 was powder blue with red racing stripes. So forest green wasn’t great in and of itself, but at least it was a color.

Anyway, the point of all this is that as I was walking up to my car who should I find waiting for me but Vic Lodato.

“This your new ride, Van?”

Vic worked for Little Jack. It would be a stretch to call him muscle, weaselly little guy, with a face that N.A.S.A. could have used for a reference when trying to fake the moon landing, but he knew how to handle a blade. I suddenly wished I’d worn my hook. But I kept my cool.

By the way, I lost my left hand in a car crash several years back. Booze, rain, tree. I should have mentioned that. A lot of people don’t know about it, because the prosthesis I wear when I’m filming anything these days looks pretty good. I guess it was just vanity that made me wear that one to see my son.

“Howdy, Vic. How’s the ventilation business treating you?”

“Can’t complain, can’t complain. It’s actually what brings me in search of you today.”

“Oh? I have to say that comes as something of a surprise. My understanding with your employer was that we were entering into a pawn-type arrangement. If I don’t pay, he still stands to make a profit off the car.”

“Ah, but you see, that’s not the account I’m here to settle.”

We stood silent for a second. I wasn’t going to let him make me ask.

Finally, with a little grin and nod, “Little Jack has been expanding his business lately. You remember Jim the Sicilian, don’t you?”

I stroked my chin. Two o’clock stubble. You know, people talk about five o’clock shadows and they just use “five o’clock” in a sort of general way, but I shit you not, one of my unsung talents is the ability to tell the time within about a quarter of the hour by feeling the amount of stubble on my face. I’m pretty regular in my morning routine, and I always shave right at 7:30, so that makes it easier.

“I might have done some work for him, once upon a time,” I said.

“Interesting that you put it that way, because in point of fact you did precisely no work for him once upon a time, though you did accept payment for said undone work.”

What he was talking about was this time a few years back when I owed some money on another card game and Jim the Sicilian, who was a loan shark among his other business interests, offered me SAG (it was just SAG at the time, no AFTRA) day-performer scale to intimidate a pansy co-star of mine on an episode of a TV show I was doing by showing him my scariest hook and speaking in hypotheticals about what happens to people who don’t repay their loans. He gave me a script and everything. The thing was, though, Jim got thrown in prison along with a few of his lieutenants before I had a chance to get the job done, and it was a relatively small account, so at the time I figured win-win and just let the whole thing be.

I should note that I’ve never done any actual enforcing for a loan shark or any other sort of criminal. And even if I’d done this job, which I didn’t, it wouldn’t have involved hurting anybody. There’s at least a thin line between guys like Vic Lodato and guys like me.

“I know the job you’re talking about,” I told him. “But what was I supposed to do? Collect on the account and convert it all to cigarettes so Jim could have some spending money in prison?”

“That’s not my concern. What is my concern is that Little Jack has recently acquired all of the Sicilian’s business interests, including all of his unbalanced ledgers, and when we came to the account of—”

You know, I’m debating here whether I should name names when it comes to actors. Loan sharks, producers, agents? They can generally go fuck themselves. But on the one hand I kind of feel like there’s a brotherhood, or siblinghood if you want to be PC, of actors. And I want to respect that. On the other hand, a lot of the actors I’ve known are real clowns, to put it politely.

For instance, the biggest movie I ever had a role in was probably this big disaster movie that I’m not going to name. And just for the sake of it, I should probably add something here about how even if I refer to something that sounds familiar, this isn’t meant to be taken as libelous. Or “true” or whatever. Anyway, it was one of those about an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. I just played a random grunt on an oil rig or whatever, but apparently part of the reason I got the job was because the Tragic Lead, father of the main chick, was a fan of some of my work. Anybody is prone to flattery, and him being a fan probably led me to be a little more sympathetic in my appraisal of his character than I otherwise might have been. But let me tell you, this guy was the clown prince. Still, he took a shine to me, and during filming he used to fly a bunch of us out to Vegas on the weekends. Sometimes we’d hit the casinos, but generally we’d end up back in a hotel room playing poker. You know, nothing high stakes considering the paychecks that some of these guys were taking home, but just some cast and maybe one or too legit guys from the crew sitting around and shooting the shit and enjoying a game of cards. Like shooting the shit was more the point.

But so this one night, Tragic is dealing, cigar in one hand, my next card in the other, and he gets this big smile on his face. “Okay, I’ve got one,” he says. “How many abortions have you paid for?” He lays my card down and then there’s silence for about ten seconds. Romantic Lead/beau of the main chick answers first, trying to be the cool one, but in this calculated way. Like you could see it on his face that he’s thinking, “Okay, if I answer first, maybe people will think I’m cool like Tragic and that I don’t give a shit about how fucked up a thing that is to say.” Which, whatever. He’s a clown, too, but not as bad a clown as Tragic. I mean, Tragic is Bozo, while Romantic is the well-intentioned guy who performs at your kid’s birthday party. So Romantic kind of bobs his head around, miming reluctance, and then he says, “Yeah, I paid for one.” And I guess that kind of broke the ice. I mean, after that, it went around the table, most of the guys having to admit that they’d never paid for any, as if that was shameful, but a few of the guys admitting to two or even three. I said “zero” myself, no shame, but then finally it got back around to Tragic, and his grin was like Cesar Romero. Everyone’s sitting there waiting to hear what he has to say, and Bozo doesn’t say anything. He just sits back in his chair and holds up one hand with five fingers splayed and the other in a peace sign. Seven flipping abortions! Like it’s something to be proud of1 And this is just one example of his clownery. I guess it was supposed to prove he’s virile or something.

So yeah, actors. A mixed bag. In this case, though, with my costar that I agreed to intimidate, I don’t think I want to reveal the name. Just because he was a nice kid. He was in over his head, even if he was kind of a pansy, but he was no Tragic or even Romantic. In other places I may not be so considerate.

But to back up to what Vic was saying to me: “That’s not my concern. What is my concern is that Little Jack has recently acquired all of the Sicilian’s business interests, including all of his unbalanced ledgers, and when we came to the account of [the actor], we found your name attached to it.”

“What, so you want me to go find [the actor] and finish the job after all these years?”

He chuckled. “Be serious. We’ve already convinced [the actor] to pay what he owes. I’m here about what you owe.”

I nodded. “Got it. No need to be so dramatic. However many hundred odd bones added to my debt. To be paid before I get my car back, I assume. Tell Little Jack nice work. I’m not going to fight him on this. I’ll have the whole thing. Car, Sicilian, and interest. I’ll have it all to him by the end of next week. Because, trust me, it means something to me. I am going to get my car back.”

“But I’m afraid that’s where we don’t see eye to eye. Because, as you put it, Sicilian and interest are long overdue. So I’m going to give you three choices. One, you can come with me and pay Little Jack what you owe him in those regards. Two, I can give you some physical incentive to have the payment ready the next time we meet. Or three, you can give me whatever you have in your wallet and I’ll pretend I couldn’t find you. For a day. And why don’t you throw in that bottle of champagne?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can’t just spring it on me like this. How am I supposed to instantaneously come up with money I didn’t even know I owed?”

“Again, not my concern.”

“All right, then, I’ll go with you to see Little Jack. I know he’s a more reasonable fellow than this. I can get the money.”

“Ah, but here I was really hoping you’d go for option three.”

And that’s when he pulled out the steak knife. A fancy one. I think it was made out of pewter.

First off, I want to post more.

Second off, I want to make it more varied (I know there was writing and radness but what about reading—mine, not yours?).

Third off, I need money.

Well, no, I’m overstating that. But I am thinking about implementing a new paywall, based on the interactions I’ve had over the past couple years. The majority of the content will be free. This will include all standalone posts. Whether they be book or movie reviews, short stories, random things I find on the internet that I think you might like and might like hearing my opinion on, whatever. And, most exciting of these free posts is…

But wait!

The paywalled posts. I’m going to start serializing my newest novel-in-progress:

The savvy among you may realize that a couple chapters of this novel were posted some years ago. And that’s true. And they’ve only been slight revised. But here’s the deal: I only have about four chapters so far, but I’m going to try to complete a full twenty-something chapter novel of it by December 31, 2026. I’ll repost the revised versions of the first two chapters soon, but subsequent chapters will be paywalled.

Why? Well, part of the reason is that with a long, long book like Pavilion, I started to realize how hard it was to attract new readers, even when the chapters were free, and it led to a certain self-indulgence and laziness at some point. This one will be short and sweet. And the only laziness will be yours if you don’t read what you’ve paid for, capitalist pig!

But also, the other thing I’m aiming for (no promises, because the other stuff will be easier)… Pavilion: Apocrypha. This will be expansions and continuations of plots left unexplored in the main text of Pavilion as published here on Substack. I have hundred of pages of false starts, and the whole chapter at the Autumn Inn, for instance, was written kind of as a third-person exercise for how we might lose Viejito as our narrator for a minute the way we lost Ishmael in MOBY DICK, but I’m also hoping some day this will all collapse into a somewhat unified and more holistically satisfying novel, not only of the main character’s experience, but also a clearer picture of all the stuff that happens. This is vague. But as an idea of what to expect, the first prospective chapter of Pavilion: Apocrypha is “The Tournament at Mt. Tai,” detailing the leading-up-to, the happening-of, and the aftermath of the tournament that led to the theft of the scroll that Foul-Mouthed Phoenix Yang’s father was holding as a prize in his tournament.

But, you know. Gang aft agley.

Though this journey—from waking to find myself prematurely aged to discovering the “secret of eternal youth” as contained in the treatise on tea—may seem meager by itself, consider the idea that it is possible from the segment to infer something of the curve, from the curve the cone, and from the cone the “sphere.” [Editor’s Note: Though Father White tells Quesada that the treatise on tea contains the secret to eternal youth, Quesada is oddly reticent on the subject. But let’s examine this. The lost Gospel of Thomas/Sutra of Damo (which we cannot assume was identical with the text found at Nag Hammadi) was torn into strips and inserted into the rollers of four different scrolls: the tea treatise, the calendar, the Long Life Scroll sex manual, and a Chinese translation of the Gospel of John. Tea, time, sex, and logos. Could some combination of these have been the basis for one of the misguided attempts at eternal life that the Daoists historically pursued? Possibly. But why wouldn’t Quesada say anything on the subject? DL]. And so through such a calculus—or at least synecdoche—I hope to have captured something of reality as a whole. This is the point, then, at which I should stop. But recalling my own disappointment at never learning the end to the tale of Nezha, I’ll trace the curve just a short bit further. But first allow me to back up.

When I returned to the room where I’d spoken with Rodrigo I found him smiling. His eyes held something nervous when he looked at me, but he kept smiling.

“You’re not going to kill me after all, are you?” he asked.

“I wish I could,” I said.

He laughed. Then, suddenly serious: “Good. Actually, I didn’t really want you to.” He paused then. “I want you to read this. It is no papal bull, though it bears the lead bulla of one.” He handed me a document with a lead seal, broken, that once had been the image of a rooster.

The cock crew.

There was much that I wanted to say to him, but I knew that Louis, Marcelle, and I were already late for our appointment with Farmer Gao and Little Whirlwind Tang. I spent a few sentences trying to convince him to come with us, but he only smiled again and said that he still had a great deal of research to do. And so I left without him that night, though later I arranged for his travel back to Europe, where he might recover from his ague. I’ve only seen him once since then, and that for a short time, but I like to think he’ll eventually die with a full white head of hair.

It was nearly morning by the time I emerged from the temple—the dark blue hem of Nyx’s gown still touching the horizon as Eos dug in her rosy fingers—and so at first I didn’t notice Louis lying on the ground, unconscious, as mentioned. But then I noticed that I hadn’t noticed him, or Marcelle for that matter, and panic gripped me as I wondered where they could be. Once I was capable of thought, I rushed over to the burnt out section of wall that he’d been sitting on and found him lying on the ground behind it.

I had little difficulty rousing him, but I was still worried by Marcelle’s absence, and Louis didn’t have much help to offer. He had no memory of being knocked out, though a large bump on his head suggested that this was what had happened, and he had no idea where Marcelle might have gone. After a quick search of the area, I reluctantly agreed that we should head back to town if he was up for it. His wound didn’t seem too serious, and he agreed.

On the first half of the journey back, to fill the void that worry had carved in me, I told Louis of all that had happened within the temple. He expressed surprise and interest—or at least the polite semblance as he worried over the bump on his head—but his strongest reaction was one of disgust at some of the views espoused by Father White.

“Well-reasoned, well-intentioned political action, however ineffective, is always preferable to inaction,” he scoffed. “It’s only self-importance that would tell you otherwise. ‘If I can’t effect a change, then why should I even try?’ So goes the thinking. But the important thing is the change, not the person who effects it. Collective effort rather than individual heroics. Just as a good deed is all the nobler when done anonymously. Of course, he’s right in thinking that any form of social organization has its flaws; there’s no perfect solution to the world’s troubles. There will always be those who take advantage of any system, no matter how well-wrought. But that just makes it all the more important that the right-minded among us work together to create an atmosphere in which advantage is given, so that it need not be taken. And of course you should stop a tiger from eating a monkey.” [Translator’s Note: Mamahuhu. Horse horse tiger tiger. TC].

His diatribe went on to fill the latter half of our trip.

As worried as I was for Marcelle, I still had room in my mind for anxiety about whether or not Gao and Tang would have given up on us. But we found them sitting drinking in the teahouse where they’d left us, seemingly oblivious to our lateness: they’d found two new companions to entertain them in the meanwhile. Foul-Mouthed Phoenix Yang and Southern Mountain Goat Jung sat with them, and though Yang’s pinned sleeve testified to the truth of Father White’s account, she had a smile on her face as we walked through the door. The whole establishment, in fact, was full of laughs and cheers.

It seemed that Yang and Jung were newly betrothed. Cynical, my first thought was that this had mostly to do with the fact that he’d cared for her in the days since the loss of her arm, and I felt a pang of sympathy for Loquacious Yu. But as Louis and I approached the table, I tried to carry nothing but congratulations in my expression.

“There you are!” Tang exclaimed when she saw me, without a hint of her former coolness; she says now that this had nothing to do with the absence of Marcelle. Of course, she also says now that she was never cool to me, and that what I sensed must have stemmed from my own insecurity. “Did you find your girlfriend’s father?”

I confessed that I hadn’t, but noticing the mood of celebration that dominated the teahouse, I said nothing more. As much as I wanted to question her about her relationship to Father White, I sensed that now was not the time. And while the others spent the night in celebration of the impending Yang/Jung nuptials—though rounds were drunk in memory of Loquacious Yu, as well—I sat alone and brooded over what might have become of Marcelle. We must have been followed from Yangzhou, I reasoned. Nothing else could explain the easy disappearance of Zheng Sanlang and his men. So it seemed that the illegal salt trade would be the realm in which I should begin my investigation...

The next day Jung and Yang went north to share the news of their betrothal with the Foul-Mouthed Phoenix’s father, at which point I felt it appropriate to share the news of Marcelle’s plight to Gao and Tang. Neither of them had so much as asked where she was before this and both claimed they hadn’t even thought to wonder where she was. Louis convinced me to give them the benefit of the doubt, and the four of us spent the next few days questioning informants from the Fuzhou underground (though Gao insisted that we take frequent breaks to try new varieties of tea: he was particularly taken with the different types of Black Dragon) [Translator’s Note: Oolong. I should have just written “oolong.” But DL insisted. TC].

Despite my predominating worry, those days were good—primarily for the company. The weather warmed, and Tang and I warmed considerably in our friendship1; Louis and Gao found a bond in their epicurean tendencies; and the more we told Gao of Marcelle, the more interested he became in her case. The city of Fuzhou was our Peach Tree Garden. [Editor’s Note: I guess this is a reference to the Peach Tree Garden Oath of Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, as related in The Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms, but I’m not sure I see the connection. DL]. Yet eventually we had to leave it behind, as it became apparent that Marcelle was no longer there. And so we decided to head back to Yangzhou: to pick up Zheng Sanlang’s trail where we’d lost it. [Editor’s Note: It is with heavy heart that I decided to omit an unlikely sequence here in which Quesada uses his powers of memory to reenact all of the martial arts moves that he has seen over the course of his journey in an epic fight with Edwin Turnbladh’s men, but if Quesada himself did indeed write it, I think it must have been no more than his fancy. I may consider including it one of the addenda to this Qing section of his General History. DL].

It was many months before we managed to find Marcelle (and free her from her father, and reunite her with De Fontaney), and in a distant city, but my friends were by my side the whole way. I was still dressed in Daoist robes, and Marcelle wore the clothes of a pirate. When I first ran into her room, she hardly knew who I was; she looked right into my eyes, and she didn’t even know my face. Yet she was exactly as I remembered her. My memory hadn’t changed at all.

Image:

A cock and a bull.

Translator’s Commentary:

Translation as a spiritual progression. One form passing to another. I don’t know what to make of this anymore. Am I Tomás Quesada? As much as anyone is, I suppose. Margaret was a little whirlwind.

Editor’s Judgment:

Well. There you go, then.