Saturday, 9 June 2007

Homework

by Harry Haller at 7:01 pm | Be the first

About 2:00 this afternoon my Internet connection died. And I do mean died. Flatline.

I live in an area where outages are now a rarity, and when the cable modem goes down, it’s usually back up within 15 minutes to an hour. Not to worry. I go for a long walk with the dog, read a Sherlock Holmes story, take a union break and I’m back at work.

Unfortunately, I am one of those journal-keepers who has become completely dependent on the Web for both source and reference materials. When my feed stops, it’s like I’ve been tossed into the Black Hole of Calcutta. There is both no input and no output.

Continued after the jump

Yard Dog

by Harry Haller at 6:57 pm | Be the first

In a pinch put your money on the red dog.

The sturdy red dog in question is built like a Labrador retriever, down to his half-long wavy coat. Only, in an accident of genetics, his fur is neither blond nor chocolate, but of a dark auburn color that makes him ineligible for pedigree. Normally, he is all wags-friendly and nearly quivers with excitement when I call him from across the street. He is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a “pack dog”. He doesn’t much care whether the others in his cadre are canine or human, he wants to be included. If he surfed the Web, the list of friends in his social network would be enormous. He’d know everybody and everybody’d know him.

Continued after the jump

Goldfish

by Harry Haller at 6:26 pm | Be the first

Joel and I sat at the bar in Sade and Dora’s Lounge in the Decatur, Alabama, Holiday Inn; we drank Heinekens from the bottle and wished they were Guinnesses.

It was a bright spring afternoon. Overnight the world had become radically green, and we were a little overwhelmed by it, sitting in a darkened corner of the bar, avoiding the too-blue sky that surrounded us in the glass-and-chrome building. Joel sat with his back to the window; the light shrouded his face in shadows. Occasionally the sun would reflect off passing cars and I’d be temporarily blinded by it.

We made small talk, mostly about Wayne Sides, a photographer we both knew who was finally making a name for himself in New York with a series of black-and-white photographs of the Ku Klux Klan.

Continued after the jump

Sunday, 3 June 2007

Pyramid

by Harry Haller at 5:57 am | Be the first

Because days are brighter in the Great Pyramid of Giza, nights are darker. When one goes there for a midnight picnic, as the Dark Child and I did some months ago, one should carry a very strong flashlight with plenty of batteries. Night has a way of overwhelming electricity in the Great Pyramid, swallowing it in enormous chunks and devouring the light it generates. Absent a number of very powerful batteries, the only illumination penetrating to the Queen’s Chamber originates 8.6 light years past from a star called Sirius, or Alpha Canis Majoris. That lone star, desiring a pack, gazes down into the room like a stray yard dog awaiting the kindness of a stranger.

For our midnight banquet the Dark Child roasted a brace of quail, stole wild strawberries from a merchant’s garden, drew a honeycomb from the carcass of a lion and bartered kisses for Belgian milk chocolate in a seedy alley near our hotel. I purchased two bottles of Clairette de Die, Tradition, a wine made in the Cave de l’Union des Jeunes Viticulteurs Récoltants from a black market wine cellar; its owner, a man whose onyx mustaches curled upward at the ends and lent him the illusion of smiling, also sold me a dozen robust dry cells for my flashlight. “With this wine and these batteries,” he told me, “you need never fear the darkness.”

Continued after the jump

Winston

by Harry Haller at 5:54 am | Be the first

His name was Churchill. Or Winston Churchill. Or Winston. I never really got it straight. For the sake of this story I’ll call him Winston, mainly as a tribute to Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s 1984, a character with whom he had a good deal in common.

I should have learned his name, and shame on me for not knowing it. Because Winston was hopelessly in love with me.

He was a 7-year-old capuchin monkey, a stocky little fellow who looked for all the world like a gorilla if a gorilla was the size of a ten-month-old human child. He was the color of milk chocolate, broad at the shoulders and narrow in the hips, with powerful arms that were twice the length of his stubby, muscular legs. What differentiated him from the average gorilla was his face: It was blanched white and sported two black, liquid, very human eyes under an Eddie Munster widow’s peak. He lived in a cage, a six-foot metal cube containing a dead section of a tree and a female capuchin, much smaller, stoop-shouldered, who looked like a different species of animal, though her face was also white and her hairline equally dramatic. By his ferocious temper and frequent white-fanged, barking displays of testosterone, Winston kept his female companion sufficiently cowed to suit him. He was the absolute master of his too-tiny domain.

Continued after the jump

Salvation

by Harry Haller at 5:51 am | Be the first

jesus of the electric

In a dream I saw Jesus hanging on the cross, bloodied, battered, suffering. But he quickly tired of it and said, “Enough! This is silly.” He pulled a nail completely through one of his wrists, extracted the other, then loosed his feet and hopped to the ground. He took off the crown of thorns, kicked the gambling Romans in the teeth, took back his robe, healed himself of all his wounds and got dressed.

The Pharisees were astonished. “Maybe he really was a son of God,” they whispered to one another. (Funny how a little coming down off the cross will change people’s minds.) The Romans, who had never seen a man leave the gibbet except as a corpse, fled. The howling mob hushed a moment, then became petulant and said, “Hey! What the hell? Who will be our savior now?” Jesus knocked one of them to the ground, stole his shoes and put them on his own feet. He walked a few steps, bounced up and down on his toes and kicked at a bit of dirt. “There,” he mumbled. “Better.” He turned to the mob and said, “Save yourselves. I’m tired of your yammering like ungrateful cats in heat. You won’t listen anyway. Not even if I hang there until I’m blue in the face and am resurrected a million times. None of you gets the love thing. All you want is ticket out of hell. Too bad. Find another scapegoat. I’m done with the lot of you. It’s finished.” Then he walked into town for a shave and a haircut.

Continued after the jump

The Enchanted Syringe, Part 1

by Harry Haller at 5:47 am | Be the first

Everyone knows Renault. Born in 1900, he was among those who, in the Jazz Age, caught the eye of Gertrude Stein and was regularly invited to her salon. He achieved this coup by degrees: First by charming Alice B. Toklas and then by painting a portrait of Miss Stein that was second only to Picasso’s in greatness. He was one of a handful of people who both recognized and celebrated Miss Stein’s homosexuality, something that endeared him to both women. “Il charme très, si mal orienté,” Miss Toklas said of the artist, when she spoke of him at all. In those days he painted small, garish canvases after the Cubist style, but with an eye toward the East that differentiated him from the Picasso-influenced mob.

His reputation among writers and artists of the time carried him well into the McCarthy era, when his sensibilities faltered. He found himself floundering in an ocean of pigment with no destination in mind. The few paintings he made for public consumption during the 1950s were routinely denounced by critics, and the informed public thought of him as over-the-hill. “What a shame,” they said, when they spoke of him at all. “He spent his gift recklessly in his youth. He has nothing left to offer.”

Continued after the jump

Vocal

by Harry Haller at 5:41 am | Be the first

It is late and we should not be talking. Instead we should be drifting in separate carriages toward the edge of sleep: I ought to be solving in my dreams Newtonian gravitational equations and considering the moon’s effect on human tides, and she should be drifting into astronomical declinations, rearranging in her own precise way the order of the universe. But it isn’t happening. Instead, the sound of her voice in my head is addictive, and I feed it with questions and propositions to keep the fix coming.

Outside, storms pound eastern Tennessee. Occasional lightning strobes the room, leaving the afterimage of Gothic shadows on my retinas. Her face is a stroboscopic memory; her hand rests on my shoulder, starting now and then when thunder does not merely grumble but crashes nearby. She talks of weighty, essential matters, and I listen like a cat awaiting the slightest rustle of his quarry.

But it is late, and I glance at the clock.

“Don’t tell me what time it is,” she warns.

“No,” I say. “But it is very late.”

Continued after the jump

Elfin Decimal System

by Harry Haller at 5:32 am | Be the first

In case you hadn’t already figured it out, I am a shape shifter, a person of no definite mass or form, one of only a handful like me, destined, almost certainly, to extinction. I don’t mind it. Now is the hour of rigid things, of scientific structure and technological accuracy. Fascism always brings with it a fetish for precision; it has no room for those who are a hand one day, a wrist another, a tuft of fur clinging to the edge of the carpet, or a mote of dust irritating the corner of one’s eye. That which is my greatest strength has become, in this day of microscopic attention to detail, my most serious liability.

Continued after the jump

Civics 101

by Harry Haller at 4:53 am | Be the first

Let’s take a break from our regularly scheduled program of fiction (proceeding apace, thanks for asking) and have a brief civics lesson. For a number of Whistle & Fish readers, this will simply be a refresher course; the rest should pay careful attention.

We’ll start with a review of the soldiers’ oath, a pledge made by everyone who enters the United States military. It’s pretty simple, really:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

I want to stress a very simple point here: Soldiers agree to support and defend the Constitution. Not the United States themselves, nor their elected officials, nor even the citizens of the nation, but the contract we, the people, have agreed will govern us. I constructed that last phrase quite carefully. We, the people, are not ruled by our elected officials, but by the document that circumscribes even their conduct.

Continued after the jump

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