Tweedle Dee, Esq.

The electric blue light flickers, again. The old man is humming a tune, probably one he learned back up from the business class lounge in the south side of Hell, where he goes to decompress. Everything is wrong here, and no one says a thing. Consign, by reason, and all consuming they slide alongside each other threadbare across the lowest level of sky. Packed in tight in their sardine canister lives.

People, like these, at the end of the day, don’t want to be free.

There is person who sits behind my back all day. He is the most desperate person I have ever come in contact with in all my life. A friend of mine said that. I agree. His face is not handsome, not by a long shot. He is, politely what one might term a dweeb back in the day, but he’s not smart enough, doesn’t read enough and doesn’t seek enough knowledge to fall into that category. No, he is a normal, and more than one. He is a barnacle on a sinking ship. Every day of his life here in this place, the last one like this I’ve ever know, is filled up fully and continually with fear. You can read it behind his eyes, around the low hanging corners of his dull, oversized mouth. His face looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and there is always a hand or two shoved up his backside which he needs in order to speak. He’ll say anything to keep his place here, as its unimportance diminishes into true uselessness before his shaking, cowering eyes. At any point in the day, if you turn round to look at him, whether on the telephone, sitting and staring into his computer screen, reading or looking at a piece of paper, he looks like he is crying. And he is.

And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care that he chose this two bit, dinner theatre matinee showing of awful drama, comprised of endless free rides on the sycophant street car stacked up many tall buildings high. I don’t care that he has to feed and clothe his children. Learning to live without all comforts and possessions isn’t so bad as knowing your father is a dead creature, lacking of the light and substance of a man. Some people are made this way, but this dressed down dummy was born into it. He is quick with what energy he has, and he needs. He wants attention, and any single moment, memory or fact that goes above his head (which granted, isn’t hard at all to do) upsets his quaky balance. He would try and talk his way out of the guillotine, if his time came, and would bad mouth anyone to save his precious little place off and to the side of the greatest ship there ever was. He is mommy’s little wimp, who still wears tightly bound suspenders and a leash which keeps him well under control (not that he would ever note its presence, or have want to remove it….after all, he put it there himself and replaces it fresh and anew every single quarter). He has no sexuality (thank god), he has no intellectual self, and those two ideas wouldn’t ever come together in any knowable form that he’d recognize, that’s for sure.

He had a counterpart too. The Italian who worked across the hall from him. This guy gave the impression of being male, but was more officially low class and without scope or dynamic. He pretended he was a great caregiver to all who needed him, but of course only the very weak and wounded needed him. Women, real women, scare him to pieces. He liked to talk about tits, but he wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a pair of them if they came with a request for pleasure. He cannot connect, and lives happily in the ignorance of his familial bonds. They make a dynamic duo that surely beats any other round here.  The Italian looks at me like I’m dangerous. I like that. I want him to know, I am very dangerous because I am made up of truth, I eat purity even when it destroys my joys and my illusions of greatness, I am fully realized in my implicity towards what he might consider illicit, and I want without need. Stupid to state these things. They don’t actually go Over the heads of these two or the rest of them. They seep down to the ground, where average joes like them walk (not even with the fervor of a stomp) over my ideals, my better natures, and the rest, mucking them up into dust which has no sounds that they can hear from their tiny, fenced in ears.

He’s on the phone again. He’s making the face. I have a feeling it’s been stuck that way for some time, and the banal, average angels who clamor around his buck toothed head, they’re not leaving him alone any time soon. He has to call his wife again now, to make sure she tells him everything he has to pick up from the store, cause what woman wouldn’t want a houseboy to run errands for you, and come home to you with his empty head of old parlour tricks and jingles, ready to occupy your bed every night with the voracity of an 80 year old man suffering from a bad back and incontinence?  He’s picking up the thing at the sporting good store, yes….yes, he is. He will!

You know, they say that the best people talk about ideas, the average person talks about things, and the worst people talk about other people…….well, I guess I’m just not that advanced yet.

M Lucia