Sunday, January 10, 2010

lilted Paolo Musagedes

“I think, as far as openings go, that’ll do,” lilted Paolo Musagedes, a language long dormant under his tongue warping vowels with the acetylene heat of its eastern origins; English was his language now, or perhaps had always been, owing to some bucking and rampant Anglophonic imperialism, he belonged to it, and it belonged to him. The accent was thick, but qualified speech of grammatical, syntactical perfection penetrated the equally thick mustache with reedy, meticulous musicality.

Ivorrs searched for something more than approval in this, but none revealed itself and anyway this wasn’t about fishing for compliments. He shuffled the ragged pages from the tabletop and into the beaten notebook, to a folder behind its front cover, the stray gangling spiraltorn edges peeling up and reaching through one another. Vines of ironed pulp still climbing toward sunlight. He lost this notebook not too long afterward; one night, drunk, in a parking lot maybe, behind a girlfriend’s apartment building, but as he was not yet through a significant number of its pages, and he’d already copied out the most pertinent notes, Sam Ivorrs would try not to think about the secrets he had confessed to it, or that they may be floating out there now, untethered in the reading, folded malignantly in some finder-keeper’s hollow stewardship. He hoped the girl had not somehow found it…

Musagedes proceeded in his achieved English: “My suggestion to you would be not to labor over the minutia, the things you might edit out at some point; typos, clichés, even characters, those things can be excised later. What is important is that you progress through this narrative….” They poked at theory for some time, fanning it out and probing its dimensions until either the one or the other had no more to say, and Ivorrs was ready to indulge his growing compulsion for loneliness in exterior regions, paved, cool, and away from what was becoming a fetid gloam in the noiseful coffee shop. Ivorrs wondered if he had at all concealed the nature of his farewell or his handshake: the one foreshortened, the other contracted. He decided no, he did not, but the air was like warm leaden paint and he let his socially transmitted awkwardness bother him only until he chose a direction on the sidewalk, grinding suddenly now underfoot.

Where to? What to follow? I will go where you send me... north/south? The perfect solar ecliptic of the Parkway? the Department of Works' graffitic sidewalk neon scrawl, this way gas, that electric? But never the twain shall meet...he smiled at the thought of a pleasant blossom of fire. Perhaps God would deign to speak to him from between the wavy petals.