We’re alive and breathing, aren’t we? he murmurs, his unclasped Seiko glistening, spotting red and digits across rubber o-seal, across khaki and peroxide-eaten twill. Shimmy close, enough to transmit warmth. Chain of command all gone. What’s the urgency? Do you remember the taste of souring honey? Breaking camp over pits of lye? The last glob of solder between the diodes—the outcome of our nights spent, devoid of melatonin—flitting across penthouse balconies with a fountain pen, a steak knife, a chessboard, queens and rooks deposed—lying face down in trails of satay-flecked vermicelli and chai? Doesn't matter, comes the reply. Shut the blinds and don’t speak, don't speak…mon cherie. The radio-set to Paris crackles: wavelengths to Orion and St. Etienne and foxholes in the Klepper Belt screaming, caving, oozing sucrose, lipids, melamine fat. Why can't you help it? No. Let it go. Go. No need to fetch a clean glass. Fermented breath twists. When he doubles over, sinking to the mattress as manhunt holograms and half-rendered nighthawks strobe, flitter on the windowsill—my custard-splotched spoon turns, tips forward. Forget. Forget the Makarov’s safety lever. Forget the red poppies. Forget Walter Ulbricht. Forget these calloused, half-bent fingertips. Forget the petrol fanatics, run aground in a shoal past Nelvana in the Tetse Maru. Forget their stiletto knives, the edges lunging and sinking into flesh, exposing marrow, degenerating nerve—wading knee deep with carbines and submachine guns through rooms immolated with polyester and kerosene as the floor and bulkheads warped with ash, human rind, stars asphyxiated underfoot. Forget making landfall in the city. Prostrating to the Buddhist shrine across the hallway—touching bronze lilypads and swans creased from paper francs, wings and crumpled beaks fluttering atop a ventilation grate. Forget his tattoo of Robespierre, branded underneath the collarbone. Forget lower Centauri, its seas of ether and tethered starbelts burning, licking the path of the muzzle and hardened steel and grimace, ponder…wishing—wishing the cleaning lady and plainclothesmen beyond the peephole would dissolve and his cognac-slick sternum would twitch no more, no more.
~Fabienne Kuhasz-Castell
Shenzhen II