CCTV 1 :
When I showed up on Franklin Street he grabbed the number 7 off of my jersey and asked me about the Marlboros, his hand rock-cold and carrot-thin fingers rubbing blue lemonade lighting into my optic nerve, I couldn’t remember the fire, much less the smoking we did to get used to it. The rolled up blueprint, pavement-hot, pulled out of the broken zig-zag of my parachute pant UCLA duffel bag; slapped against the north east wind currents onto the woodworking desk lodged with injuries – I showed him our future under my fingers and he said it back in the same northern accent, the truck-rumble of my vowels reflected back at me through his dehydrated vaseline lips, the slumping column of his peach-red throat, the notches along the adam’s apple hyperventilating in the cold mango-shower post climax twilight; powered by the faceless billboards of starlight.
For the first time, I am at the bottom of the see-saw, pulling us both down.
The electric saw quiet in the corner watches as he picks through the damp chinese-lantern yellow pocket of his linen shirt. I stare at his echoing hands. He pulls out the rolex that had left a plum silhouette on my wrists and turns the Milgauss over in the blue-steely haze of the mosquito zapping machine that overlooks my desk from the bookshelf. The joints of the watch click together in a tap dance. He tilts his head and looks up at me. I nod, the back face of the watch has nothing but its model number.
“Your own?” He continues to try and find some sign that it doesn’t belong to the recently-sober business graduate in the oversized coat that stands before him.
He has not changed despite the cheeks canyoning in, the stucco stubble on his sand-tan chin. “Yes.” I hold out my hand, trying not to grin in his fucking face. He puts it back into his pocket, then nods at the blueprint.
“Tell me more.”
*
CCTV 2 :
Wali catapulted himself over the lurching fence in a parabola. The top rail shined like a sliver of the moon under the bug-hived street light that was looking away from us. I ran a come-up for a good fifty meters before my legs became parallel and I squatted, arms pulled back to give me the maximum of power as I launched myself into the air. My legs did a cartoon-character spin mid-air, bent 90 degree at the knees, face comically wide open like a freeway at night. I grabbed my forehead with both my arms, knitting over each other and then the top rail knocked against my shins like a hammer pulverizing stone. The other leg didn’t stop moving, arching forwards in an accidental split. He grabbed my shoe and pulled me by laces, balls skittering against chain-links like the serrated edge of a birthday cake plastic knife.
We walk to the door of the Ramada Inn Bar and watch the camouflage-green fighter jets make constellations, weaving between the stars, sprouting out of the gray plaster roof. He pointed to a line of thin smoky exhaust, like the tail of a lizard, curving into oblivion before grabbing the gunmetal handles and rushing us into the hennessy smiles and mid life crises throb resonating through the air like a palpable thing. He was wearing the UNIQLO soil red shirt which left a V cut out of his chest bare, shaved clean. A straw hat was perched on the top of his hat, and he wore wine-deep square sunglasses over the twin lightning-white gashes running down the length of his eyelids, squinting in the depressed rainforest green of the fixtures.
I nodded towards him once, he confirmed back with the same curtness. We forked through the crowd, our hands pincer grasping thin-necked martini glasses refilled with water and black tinned olives every few minutes. I saw hunger quicker than he did. It flashed in their eyes like a reflection of fire through the sclera, flickering with sparks. Their hands were like cuts of a fish tender off a bone, no fat dripping off for lard; just quick slices.
I finished my sour-water martini again, tipping the triangular glass over into the plastic lining of the dustbin, rainwater tap guzzling down the black garbage bag. There was another man at the water fountain, sticky mustache strung with whipped cream, face angled to let the water curl into his mouth by itself. He was bald except for the occasional outgrowth on the circumference, a scraggly white bunching of thorns. A stack of shot glasses placed next to him recreated the leaning tower of Pisa.
He closed his mouth on seeing me, gargled the water, then spit out a submerging mass of chewed up food, the most prominent of which were gummy bear heads, ripped off and disfigured. Then, he gave his belly a tap and sat down angled next to the wall, the plaster catching onto the back of his leather jacket. I remember this like it was yesterday, he grabbed the topmost shot glass and spat a stream of water into it. It crashed, then rested pond-still. I remember this because Wali has made me play the sad drunk man more times than I care to admit now, referencing this bit of ‘picture-perfect’ acting like it was gospel.
Wali then looked at me and smirked, one corner of his mouth tailing up against the other.
*
CCTV 3 :
Both me and the life cycle of a frog were named for fate grappling with us as its glinting gloves. We stood under the big ribboned banner with the Toy’s Duncan Chest flowing across the front in red block canva sans – me, Wali, Das and Lara.
The animatronic Santa Claus stared into Lara’s pupils, its beard brushing past the tied-up bun with the No. 2 pencil stabbed through it. She was like a thick piling of snow; piled on top of every plan to make it difficult to dig through. I remember her near-midget height with the basketball boys’ shorts under her camouflage t-shirt; the toolbox removed and strapped to the side of her thighs with velcro and scotch tape; screwdriver poking coldly against her shins.
She picked at the vent of a Gutter Manhole with her chewed up nails and pulled it out, triceps flushing against the spandex sleeves, jumping in like a full stop.
Wali stayed back in the telecom communications van with the radio dish strapped haphazardly to it’s roof with red glute workout resistance bands and thick reams of jute rope, the antenna pointing towards the ground.
Das, the wasted philosophy graduate turned anarchist, noam chomsky shoplifted from Waterstones, cover to cover bathed in MUJI tangerine,had hands sharper than a scalpel even through the layers of mesh and moonlight.
I only smiled and thought of a list of names that was furthest from my own. Ligne I said and he added a Monsieur to the beginning. I’ve gotten used to it. French men kiss your hands and talk about their children calling them papa. In this case I am the estranged father buying every single glass-eyed white-skinned doll in the building.
Ferris, Das said, flask of apple juice whiskey sloshing in hand at 3 AM in the dim lit room like a rucksack of rotten epithelium. That was brilliant; like the fireworks in the sky threatening the stars. He was touching everything like a simple exhalation; they are only atoms in his hands, deforming away from their owners. She is below, arms sweeping through the drainage coolant pipes.
All of it was set slightly to the left; the direction of time. She crept through the plumbing to grab the damp green that grows in her arms like interest or a crypto stock. My eardrum cowbell-ed by him telling me I am not yet in the blind spot. Two more feet to the left and now I am back here in the present. No, sorry. I’ve never been a rocket; always the midrib wire made of copper. Four people lying about their intentions; this could be a Dell office with overwork bonuses or a highschool drug bust but we never thought of ourselves as anything but thieves.
No, I have never been more than a crucible hidden under prada sunglasses and accents reproduced from pulp horror and legally blonde. We were only a clumping of clouds floating across the sky like an unstable promise. Even drunk; he warmed my tea to little less than a boil. I remember her laugh because I knew it was the finale after which we bowed and went home to our own dreams and aspirations where she sent her daughter to an elite school with the horse riding academy and he married his girlfriend in a church with candelabras made of silver and I am supposed to leave the part out where I am other men, my real name stitched with money. We robbed them because they were rich but on christmas day I just wish I was four years old again and playing with the ashes in my backyard, anything was a toy, tangibility only an abstract notion in a metal toolbox. I will wear my plaid two-set with the hot french crew cut on his wedding day again; talking about horses with her daughter; catching the flowers.
CCTV 4 :
I am bulldoze-sink-typhooned by the mask shrink-wrapped in the drawer of my Cartier dressing table. The wood peeling off like a deer’s old horns like outgrowth, like my nails with the black paint for the Vietnamese Gay Man and then the hasty alcohol – final year architecture student at UWaterloo with the garbage can overfilled with the red bulls, like my eyes, unaccustomed to familiarity. All I mean is, I was born premature; had to be taught lethargy like a glacier running out of bounds; listless grease anti-fertilizer in the caked mud.
Listen; I have craved the ending too; the meaning set in stone by overworked mica mine elementary dropouts, like the end of a road crashing into the arms of a wall; but this is the dust on the floor that we can’t lick off in romanticism. Interlocking bricks sighing when the factory burns down; knowing deep down that there are only so many of themselves that fit like this; God; I bought all of those dolls to this fucking bonfire and the glass was smelted to become just a vase.
I returned the money; cash balance at equilibrium; ceteris paribus on a flying helicopter where we are just spinning around. I could never be Brad Pitt, George Clooney or anyone nearly as independently existent.
CCTV 1 :
A group of Indian American drunkards at the local pub worked part time as guards for the local museum with the shifting displays of 18th century archaeology to renaissance paintings. I told him all the ways we could avoid tripping up the alarms, jumping through red night lasers and sliding wads of money out of capitalist hands into our own.
He smiled, the corners of his lips no longer radiant red, only a tremble left to the movement. Then he opened his palms and showed me the shiver rampant through them. I listened for the seismic interval, something to indicate this would stop. The light above me kept being blue even after I closed my eyes and rolled them in their sockets like a masticating animal.
“Who are you, Ferris?” He grabbed the ends of my hair, then snapped me closer to his forehead. I didn’t dare say it. I was only myself.