Sinister: Skeletons Don't Think

[P F]

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 at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at 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                 +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+