5 Comments

1. chrisbabcock
   Posted January 20, 2007 at 03:03 am | Permalink

   Milling about under falling paint chips he discovered and promptly threw crumpled articles of clothing across the room, the trajectory haphazardly approximated so as to leave them molded in new voids between a particle-board bedside table and the room’s single electric-gilled wall heater. An up-tempo Celtic jig was playing in the Victorian apartment upstairs where small-town single-moms and junkies went to get high and reminisce on unfulfilled adolescent dreams that so slightly and so regularly transport them furthest from minimum wage psychological torture, soggy midnight walks after spousal abuse and/or the now basic need for a fix.

   Born in Hungary, schooled and raised in London, he was made into a killer by the lechery of a Japanese venture-capitalist by 25, and comes to this country with a taste for drive-thru dining, high stakes organ theft, and a healthy habit of short-term kidnapping; he’s precise and well paid, some may even say, successful. He moved in days ago on promise of two-hundred in payment he never intended to fulfill, and the sixty-grand a new supply of Thai snake blood would make him today.

   Off the plane not 36 hours, his ticket to partial ownership of a rust-bent gas station turned organ donor ‘workshop’ outside Tucson is held in just over a hundred glass two-ounce corked bottles, and being his principle investment for the year, the prized lives delicately under the floorboards. “Its a room dipped in shit” he’d been known to say. A rarely used sleeping nook rarely comforted his asthematic insomnia and relentless paranoia, the Night Dying. With snake-blood being on the person of his last “companion”, but not really his thing, rumors of hundreds of dollars an ounce have forced him to look at making a quick sale to some yet unknown and surely unsuspecting Hungarians. Once when talking about unloading a stolen shipment of labratory instruments, confirming that in fact, “Those Hungarians would buy anything.”

   Curry-stained styrofoam containers litter the room like motionless iodine-swabbed forms wheezing under crisp sheets in his shallow morning recollections; he thought, ‘why wasn’t my visual memory more porous, styrofoam more throwable in a rage?’ Luck was obvious he thought and for years now, through early morning rendezvous with corrupt undercover cops and savory conversations with tight olive skinned brunettes at bars he chose not to remember, the Matchbox delorian, Back to the Future edition, once thrown at him as a child by a ‘friend’, now gouged by years of key coin rumblings from trunk-slam contortions resting duct-taped heads and squirming torsos, remained as much a piece of him as the fingers and toes he so often removed remained worthy of a collection. The toy car and the scribbled address tumble in his left leather-trim jacket pocket in a dance not yet known to be so necessary.

   Because of the late night demands of his now flaking leather bound weekly-planner, he found himself humming Bach in damp parking lots confronted all too often, lowlifes threatening with knives and cowering in slight vocal hints of sexual inadequacy picked up during the few seconds of exchange. He thought about how many noses he’d broken then, and during other early-morning walks along unnamed rivers, how many old homeless he’d given bottles of Old Granddad to and then flicked half-smoked cigarettes at, only to watch them delightedly brush away the burning embers and salvage those few remaining drags; he didn’t talk much, just enjoyed his god-damned curs-ed job.

   What a career; he’d never paid any, but he knew every nuance of income tax code in no less than sixteen countries. Hang-gliding a favorite daydream, in his head at least a brief removal from attending his menu of nefarious state-sponsored and not always so surgical back-alley accomplishments; the flight almost always ended in a crash, a kind of decadence only junkie whores and corporate executives truly know.

   The dust now hovered curling in a surge of the slim incandescent, bathing the apartment in a chalk clinical yellow. The music having stopped upstairs, yelling seething down the walls like satire, he sat on the only stool, squat, getting together cigarettes, a spare flashlight bulb, and 32-caliber rounds for his suppressed berretta while thinking of the desert oasis. He drank some water and stood up the bottles of rye in their crate. Those junkie moms upstairs read from the same barren book, he thought.

   They had stumbled down the side stairs, lights off and the sun was up. “What the fuck am I going to say to unload this snake blood” he thought, catching a short glance through the side window above his bead at the smudged mascara and blue morning landing in the empty bedside floor board compartment. Bum-city in the muddy parking lot; he gave them all morning whiskey and locked the apartment to protect space he didn’t even want to call his own.

   For a moment he noticed April perfumes, gardenias maybe, during five o’clock hour, probably making sleeping children smile, the elderly question everything in a memory slowly failing to be restless; those in between grow more restless.; he was probably going to shoot someone in the back of the head before breakfast.

   The tin case of corked viles on the passenger seat of his two-door, he rolled slowly out of his gravel retreat to the static voice of a woman describing the next concerto and into a warm psychosis, whispering lost gentilities through his unlit cigarette breakfast, nodding slightly to sidestair mistresses, and responsibly turning onto the rural highway, laying down a supervisor’s squint at the sunlight, content.

2. Kyle
   Posted January 21, 2007 at 12:37 pm | Permalink

   Um…Chris…if you want to write on the site, man, all you gots to do is ask :-)

   I’ll be in touch.

3. justin
   Posted January 21, 2007 at 02:44 pm | Permalink

   http://xrez.com/gallery/tahoe/xRez_tahoe.html

   Kyle speaking of perpective check out what you can do with a gigapixel camera. The boston one is pretty cool.

4. justin
   Posted January 21, 2007 at 02:44 pm | Permalink

   http://xrez.com/gallery/urban/xRez_urban.html

   Sorry here is the boston one

5. Kyle
   Posted January 21, 2007 at 03:26 pm | Permalink

   Holy shit. That’s crazy. I want one.

   My birthday is June 7th.