Morning, mid-July 2014
At some point along the way, during which Ketch had been blankly, blindly staring out the car window, yellow-green lines of scrub grass gave way to split-rail fence posts, fence posts gave way to street signs, street signs gave way to buildings, and the city proper rose up from the countryside on a shimmering spine of hot asphalt.
Nine a.m. on a July Friday and the heat was already a heavy, damp hand on the neck of WestEnd, squeezing out viscous moisture that fogged a quarter of the windowpanes on buildings and cars, the air itself like an overripe tangerine coating everything in a cloudy glaze. In the Buick idling at the curb, the A/C whined through the vents, stuttered to a stop, and then started up again with a wet, reluctant hiss. A shallow bank of clouds on the horizon drifted inward and ground the swelter lower into the pavement.
On the seat next to Ketch lay the coiled skin of one persona, rumpled with the odd mechanics of backseat undressing; silk suit threads soaked up the light of mid-summer sun and the polish of discarded shoes shared shine with the leather seat they were recently placed upon. He was not sorry to leave the suit behind. It was tailored to perfection but a poor fit metaphysically?too much wilderness beneath his skin, in patches over his body like permanent smears of dirt. Blue eyes met a pair dulled by age in the rearview mirror and they carried on a silent conversation punctuated by a scowl that etched dark lines between Ketch?s brows when he finally turned away to look beyond the window again.
New Orleans, L.A., Milan, Mumbai, realms beyond. Anywhere you go there are always the same gutters, and they get full of guys like you. You get full of yourself. Start over. Spin the wheel. Close your eyes and point in any direction. Then just start walking. Any place. It?s a credo that allows missteps to be spaced at such a distance that their latitude is never easily recalled. By these means, Ketch considered himself well-traveled, if not worldly.
You want to find out what you're really made of, go back to the last place that levelled you and dig around in the rubble of your regrets.
Ketch looked around from the questionable comfort of the car?s interior, hooked a nail against a line of stubble on his jaw and tried to get his bearings in a city that had always refused easy directionality. The signposts looked like foreign totems, the cultural bazaar of passersby a language of faces, features, and limbs he no longer fully grasped. In every direction he turned his head there was a dilute sense of familiarity that felt like a word caught on the tip of his tongue, just out of reach. He opened the door. Inhaled.
Scent is memory?s loyal compass, the nose the most finely-calibrated needle. Like snorting a line of blow, a molecule of scent bypasses intermediary carriers, goes straight to the receptors, and explodes outward. This is exactly what happened when Ketch opened the door of the Buick and inhaled a bolt of WestEnd stench carried on a humid breeze that cracked his mind wide open in an instant: halon, sulfur, wet leaves, sweating bodies, and a sickly sweet note of hyacinth beneath. It might have been that the hyacinth wasn?t even there, that it was a phantom scent strung in among the familiarity of the others. That didn?t make it any less potent.
?It?s toxic in large doses, of course. All the best things are,? Mimi?s hands delicately cradle roots and soil; thin, nervous fingers separate hyacinth petals from stem, angle a blade to cut down the center of the bulb. It splits quietly in half and rocks gently on yellowing formica, the rich scent filling the air and fighting the warm steam rising from the coffee pot. She wipes her palms against her hips, the lines of her smile bleached by morning light slicing at an angle through the dingy kitchen window where Ketch sits at a scavenged wrought iron patio table drinking strong coffee. Mimi sits down across from him holding one half of the bulb in the light, tucks her feet up between his knees, wiggles her toes, and reaches for the pencil lying on top of a list of coordinates Ketch has written in tight, neat letters. His fingers wrap around her ankle, run over the protrusion of bone while she flips the napkin over and draws a two-piece horizontal zigzag on the back?lightly so the mesh of the table doesn?t distort the precision of her lines. At the vertex of each conjoined line she adds two tick marks splitting off and labels them with O?s and H?s. ?Oaxalic acid,? she says, and reaches for Ketch?s mug of coffee, skimming fingertips over the brown and maroon scabs dotting his knuckles. His smile is drowsy as he flips the napkin over and taps a pair of coordinates with symmetry loosely congruent to the molecule she?s drawn on the back. Mimi wrinkles her nose and takes a sip from the coffee she?s commandeered before flipping the napkin back over and scrawling a few meaningless loops. ?Not quite the same.?
?But close.?
?Close,? she agrees and slips from the chair, stretching long, arms over her head in a trapezoid slant of sunlight. The t-shirt rises higher on one side than the other and flashes an oblong swatch of her stomach.
Ketch mumbles against the sun-warmed skin when he pulls her in close.
?I saw,? she says and hooks an ankle around his calf. ?Gonna break something bigger next week just to test your capacity.?
?Go ahead. Break everything in this goddamn place, break the entire building.? With a twist of a smile, Ketch turns back to his breakfast of coordinates and coffee while Mimi goes to get dressed. Her head reappears around the doorframe ten minutes later, tight coils of hair piled atop her crown.
?I?ll be in red. Don?t be late.?
Ketch glances up, toasts her with his coffee mug, looks back down at his numbers. He waits until he hears the door close behind Mimi, counts to 47, and looks out the window to watch until her swishing shadow disappears around the corner. Then he stands up and walks to the sink, leaving the napkin and bulb behind on the table like a love note of scientific artifact.
It was a pungent and warm plunge into West End. Ketch?s first steps on the pavement spilled forward as a result and he bent over, hands to knees, while he considered the non-existent repercussions of flooding the asphalt with the gin and tonic he?d had on the ride over. He spat thickly on the pavement beneath a sky the color of locusts and swiped the crook of one arm across his forehead. A flash of yellow in his periphery directed glassy eyes towards an old shopkeeper shuffling with a bucket and mop from beneath a sun-faded awning. Ketch watched as the man gently swabbed beige paint over wide swoops of black graffiti tattooed to crumbling brickwork and listened to the thick buzz sawing the air around an electrical pole.
Three minutes passed before leather work boots that carried their miles in dark, smooth veins of overuse took up the slack in Ketch?s mental fumble and began to shuffle ahead resolutely, his spine straightening in increments. His mind, however, was slower to catch up, and he wished for the 4,587th time that he?d looked at Mimi longer that day. Long enough to remember the color of her nail polish, long enough to number every hair on her head.
At some point along the way, during which Ketch had been blankly, blindly staring out the car window, yellow-green lines of scrub grass gave way to split-rail fence posts, fence posts gave way to street signs, street signs gave way to buildings, and the city proper rose up from the countryside on a shimmering spine of hot asphalt.
Nine a.m. on a July Friday and the heat was already a heavy, damp hand on the neck of WestEnd, squeezing out viscous moisture that fogged a quarter of the windowpanes on buildings and cars, the air itself like an overripe tangerine coating everything in a cloudy glaze. In the Buick idling at the curb, the A/C whined through the vents, stuttered to a stop, and then started up again with a wet, reluctant hiss. A shallow bank of clouds on the horizon drifted inward and ground the swelter lower into the pavement.
On the seat next to Ketch lay the coiled skin of one persona, rumpled with the odd mechanics of backseat undressing; silk suit threads soaked up the light of mid-summer sun and the polish of discarded shoes shared shine with the leather seat they were recently placed upon. He was not sorry to leave the suit behind. It was tailored to perfection but a poor fit metaphysically?too much wilderness beneath his skin, in patches over his body like permanent smears of dirt. Blue eyes met a pair dulled by age in the rearview mirror and they carried on a silent conversation punctuated by a scowl that etched dark lines between Ketch?s brows when he finally turned away to look beyond the window again.
New Orleans, L.A., Milan, Mumbai, realms beyond. Anywhere you go there are always the same gutters, and they get full of guys like you. You get full of yourself. Start over. Spin the wheel. Close your eyes and point in any direction. Then just start walking. Any place. It?s a credo that allows missteps to be spaced at such a distance that their latitude is never easily recalled. By these means, Ketch considered himself well-traveled, if not worldly.
You want to find out what you're really made of, go back to the last place that levelled you and dig around in the rubble of your regrets.
Ketch looked around from the questionable comfort of the car?s interior, hooked a nail against a line of stubble on his jaw and tried to get his bearings in a city that had always refused easy directionality. The signposts looked like foreign totems, the cultural bazaar of passersby a language of faces, features, and limbs he no longer fully grasped. In every direction he turned his head there was a dilute sense of familiarity that felt like a word caught on the tip of his tongue, just out of reach. He opened the door. Inhaled.
Scent is memory?s loyal compass, the nose the most finely-calibrated needle. Like snorting a line of blow, a molecule of scent bypasses intermediary carriers, goes straight to the receptors, and explodes outward. This is exactly what happened when Ketch opened the door of the Buick and inhaled a bolt of WestEnd stench carried on a humid breeze that cracked his mind wide open in an instant: halon, sulfur, wet leaves, sweating bodies, and a sickly sweet note of hyacinth beneath. It might have been that the hyacinth wasn?t even there, that it was a phantom scent strung in among the familiarity of the others. That didn?t make it any less potent.
?It?s toxic in large doses, of course. All the best things are,? Mimi?s hands delicately cradle roots and soil; thin, nervous fingers separate hyacinth petals from stem, angle a blade to cut down the center of the bulb. It splits quietly in half and rocks gently on yellowing formica, the rich scent filling the air and fighting the warm steam rising from the coffee pot. She wipes her palms against her hips, the lines of her smile bleached by morning light slicing at an angle through the dingy kitchen window where Ketch sits at a scavenged wrought iron patio table drinking strong coffee. Mimi sits down across from him holding one half of the bulb in the light, tucks her feet up between his knees, wiggles her toes, and reaches for the pencil lying on top of a list of coordinates Ketch has written in tight, neat letters. His fingers wrap around her ankle, run over the protrusion of bone while she flips the napkin over and draws a two-piece horizontal zigzag on the back?lightly so the mesh of the table doesn?t distort the precision of her lines. At the vertex of each conjoined line she adds two tick marks splitting off and labels them with O?s and H?s. ?Oaxalic acid,? she says, and reaches for Ketch?s mug of coffee, skimming fingertips over the brown and maroon scabs dotting his knuckles. His smile is drowsy as he flips the napkin over and taps a pair of coordinates with symmetry loosely congruent to the molecule she?s drawn on the back. Mimi wrinkles her nose and takes a sip from the coffee she?s commandeered before flipping the napkin back over and scrawling a few meaningless loops. ?Not quite the same.?
?But close.?
?Close,? she agrees and slips from the chair, stretching long, arms over her head in a trapezoid slant of sunlight. The t-shirt rises higher on one side than the other and flashes an oblong swatch of her stomach.
Ketch mumbles against the sun-warmed skin when he pulls her in close.
?I saw,? she says and hooks an ankle around his calf. ?Gonna break something bigger next week just to test your capacity.?
?Go ahead. Break everything in this goddamn place, break the entire building.? With a twist of a smile, Ketch turns back to his breakfast of coordinates and coffee while Mimi goes to get dressed. Her head reappears around the doorframe ten minutes later, tight coils of hair piled atop her crown.
?I?ll be in red. Don?t be late.?
Ketch glances up, toasts her with his coffee mug, looks back down at his numbers. He waits until he hears the door close behind Mimi, counts to 47, and looks out the window to watch until her swishing shadow disappears around the corner. Then he stands up and walks to the sink, leaving the napkin and bulb behind on the table like a love note of scientific artifact.
It was a pungent and warm plunge into West End. Ketch?s first steps on the pavement spilled forward as a result and he bent over, hands to knees, while he considered the non-existent repercussions of flooding the asphalt with the gin and tonic he?d had on the ride over. He spat thickly on the pavement beneath a sky the color of locusts and swiped the crook of one arm across his forehead. A flash of yellow in his periphery directed glassy eyes towards an old shopkeeper shuffling with a bucket and mop from beneath a sun-faded awning. Ketch watched as the man gently swabbed beige paint over wide swoops of black graffiti tattooed to crumbling brickwork and listened to the thick buzz sawing the air around an electrical pole.
Three minutes passed before leather work boots that carried their miles in dark, smooth veins of overuse took up the slack in Ketch?s mental fumble and began to shuffle ahead resolutely, his spine straightening in increments. His mind, however, was slower to catch up, and he wished for the 4,587th time that he?d looked at Mimi longer that day. Long enough to remember the color of her nail polish, long enough to number every hair on her head.