BANG I think I BANG I think I must have Music blared. Horns, a garish fanfare of black and yellow. I must have drifted off in front of the television. The book was still sprawled across me and on the large and dull seat that housed my now perhaps excessive bulk. The television was wavering opposite me, in the darkness that had descended in what can have been no more than 44 minutes since sleep, father of dreams, slaughterer of reason, came to claim me, when the lights in the room seemed sufficient not only for the purpose of watching, or in my particular case ignoring, the local news of dockers, weather reports and oriental food outlets, but also for perusing the volume which, as I have said, had so to speak fallen with me, into its own proper abyss, that of the oblivion of the unread. A long face looked solemnly out from the screen. Capitals flashed, excess of bright yellow. FORSTER The music was fading. A street scene. Sirens in the distance. From the television, not from out of my rented window; or vice versa. Either one or the other was probable: indeed both were probable, which is not necessarily to call it probable that both were occurring simultaneously. No, a dog, says Emperor Hylzu-Li IV in his Book of Dogs, may come from East or come from West, but not both compass points at once. It is not a known fact that the Chinese invented the compass. Reflecting on it now, I am no longer even sure that I know it to be a fact at all. Since those days in Warsaw so much of what I took to be knowledge has flown, no, rather has dissipated, like the blown ashes of a burnt library. The television. A street scene. Sirens. The 'protagonist' was now talking to his reluctant 'sidekick'. I gathered that it belonged to the police 'procedural' drama - the irony slaps me now, as I write the words, for 'procedure' is one of the less dramatic words in the language. It has a notably undramatic root whose story I may make ready to tell at some other point in my narration, space permitting, time befitting. In any case, the police were proceeding, the drama concerned these proceedings. This, I gathered as the pair drove up what looked like a San Francisco street - reminding me for an instant of an older police drama whose name escaped me, set, where by San Francisco itself? - this was no ordinary way of proceeding: no, the Inspector, who was clearly the brains behind the joint, the tool of the operation - the language is escaping me also, I shall start again: the head honcho, the man with the man, I mean, the plan - this Inspector, I say, was an enforcer with a special mission all his own. He was on the trail, it emerged, not of criminals in the ordinary sense, but of what he had defined as *crimes against music*: crimes, in point of fact, against the Spartanism, the harshness, the grating uncompromise, that he saw as proper to music. Inspector Forster was a new Schoenberg, no less, or so, at least, I remember chuckling to myself, I would have said to Teddie, had he been here, had he lived to drink martinis with me in Manhattan rather than that foul-smelling tea he favoured the last time I saw him in Los Angeles, 1969, I believe. The year is 1969. No, the Inspector, the music: the Inspector, as I was saying, was a Stockhausen de ses jours, a Rothko of the acoustic, one committed to pain and punishment. And he had made it his vocation - observe with what swiftness television's purportedly feeble narratives tell their tales, make plain their concerns and triffer our understandings! - to pursue in particular those aspects of the musical he most deplored, those fresh trickers whose collective name was MELODY. Each week, it became plain, Forster and his sidekick would at some stage in the narrative screech across town, up hill and down valley, across red lights and down alleyways, in search of some instance of this dastardly class. An earlier episode, I felt sure, must have explained in full the very personal animus which Inspector Forster carried against the Melody class; or perhaps, I felt less sure, perhaps all would be revealed at the denouement of the serial, save that a serial like this had no denouement but simply rolled on, season after season. - Got a live one, Bob. The car radio crackled. The streets flashed past in unconvincing background. - Spill it, Bruce. - Hold on to your ear-plugs, mate. This one's H-O-T. - Don't wear me out, cobber - I'm warning you, I want the facts yesterday. - You asked for it, mate. It's "The Long And Winding Road". I jerked involuntarily in my seat as the camera cut to the car screeching up on to the pavement at an urban corner. The noise of blackboards. - Strewth! Forster and his unprepossessing sidekick looked at each other a long second. The sidekick spoke at last. - Bob- - ROBERT! - Sorry, Robert - are y' sure about this one? Maybe we should just let it go? The Inspector looked ahead, seen through the front windscreen of the car. Seconds passed, centuries. Fate rumbled by in a garbage truck. Raindrops trickled down the glass. - No can do. The car pulled out into the street again. I - I, who had never owned a television set in all those years in Blakeney and Cromer, who had glanced furtively at Herbert's monochrome set in 1968, who had booked the room disdaining to specify the manner of 'media services required' - I was enraptured, in something of the way that Albert Dockenplatz had hypothesized in his Theory Of The Moving-media-image-screen, as long ago as 1927. Music. The two maverick policemen were climbing out of the car. I noticed that the red light which spun and flashed atop it had been placed there on a temporary basis by the Inspector's sidekick. Close-up, from behind, a drawn pistol. We look down the alley. Rain is falling. The sound of rain. BANG There was a BANG There was someone banging on the door. My very heart seemed to strain with the interruption, an interruption like that described by Diderot in Notebook Y (15) on Les Principes de 'Communiquer'. I sighed, rose, stepped on groaning calves towards the door, where I thought was the door's location, knocking a knee against a table, a table bearing all the hallmarks, I would later think, of 1974. - It's over! - It's never over, Bob. I reached the door and pulled it open with my right hand, reaching down at the same moment to clasp my knee and realizing that I had transferred the forgotten book to this hand. The door came open in one hand as I dropped the book with the other and bent to pick it up. BANG I looked up at my visitor. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+