“Late night coming home from a temp job for some automotive corporation.

I was expecting the usual greeting and shaking of the hands with every graveyard shift hustler and loiterer that happened to be outside earning cash or just hanging out into the weekend. But, it was oddly quiet for mid August. Probably because there were three black & white patrol cars parked in front of my building. 

“Great, what now?”

The lobby of building 545 had smelled foul for almost a week. A really shitty smell; like dead rats behind a bodega wall. That stench reached a new level when I left for work, this morning. A Rancid, sweet, wet scent, almost inedible. A dozen pussy plugs in a sweaty soiled toilet kind of smell. And the summer humidity only exasperated that aroma. But, that was this morning?  It’s after midnight. What’s going on?

My cross-eyed superintendent had the front door and the side entrance to the dumpsters open.  The smell was so bad you could smell it from the lobby entrance.

I walked in and was like, “Shit?!?”. The Super told me that someone subletting apartment 1B couldn’t take the odor any longer and knocked on a roommates bedroom door to confront them about the smell. Knocking and knocking before opening the door to find the corpse of said roommate.

The people on the lease never bothered to complain bout the smell beforehand because, they were illegally renting out rooms for a profit. So discreet, they were about things, that even the people renting in the apartment barely knew anything about or bothered each other. 

Shit tends to break the fan when you find the naked bloated body of your housemate in bed still watching infomercials; slowly decomposing on his sheets during a hot August heatwave with high humidity in the nineties. 

I’m not sure if I knew the deceased but my hunch is – it was this forty year old guy that rented there for years. If it was, he was a pervert. I knew this because he at one time offered a kid I once knew a few dollars for “Favors” once. …The kid said No. However, the youngbol and his older brother did grift the guy by luring him to our rooftop promising some “handoverfist” with “happy-endings”, and robbed the vic for whatever money they could shake from him. Then extorted him for a few weeks after that with threats of bodily harm and criminal charges.

If it was him rotting in the building, Good Riddance. 

I sat on the staircase listening to Gang Starr’s Mass Appeal album, smoking a few cigarettes, and watching the PIGS and EMT’s rub ointment under their noses and burn some incense to weaken the stench of rot in the air. I even watched our simpleminded super almost kill us all by mopping our hallway with a strong mixture of bleach n water. The chemicals were the worst. I could stomach dead body odor. After all it wasn’t my first time being near a dead body before tonight. 

I stayed there and just watched. I watched neighbors walk into the building and cover their noses in repulsion. I watched a few of them almost vomit where they stood. I listened in on the police taking statements from the roommates and the Super. I always liked recording witness statements when I worked for a private investigator a few years ago. So, I was kind of imagining myself interview all of them. 

The whole thing went on for a few hours. I saw the crime scene detectives arrive on the scene and the meat wagon pickup the body. But, all I kept thinking was –
What was he watching on television.?”

FISH SCALE PART 1 : https://newretrowave.com/2018/11/20/fishscale-a-retro-flash-of-fiction-part-1/

Natural City, the album is still available only at www.samhaine.bandcamp.com
A collection of short monologues and flash fictions highlighting some of the individuals that call Hainesville “Home”. These are stories about people who live outside the margins that define civility and exist in the moment on the edge of a razor-blade. This is a pulp future-present inspired by neo-noir, retro nostalgia and some cyberpunk aesthetics. 

There is no denying that I would enter a vapid land of infertile thought and mundane repetitiveness, were I to elaborate on a well-known fact that out of a countless plethora of books, some are considered rare because of their bewildering exactitude and profundity, while some others, also being an infrequent treat, are like kids playing hopscotch – flawlessly carefree and genuinely unpretentious. However, this obviousness ends rather abruptly when the profundity breeds cement shoes of repulsion and the unpretentiousness gets lost in a distorted mirror image of itself – naivety. Nevertheless, we should not feel abused by these truly disheartening phenomena whatsoever simply because a third, very intermediate type of book might always come in handy as a ‘savior’, who casts off a whiff of disappointment reeking from the previous two. The transitional state of such ‘redeeming’ novels comes from a specific quality which makes them invulnerable to the aforesaid corrosion. Galápagos is surely one of them. But how did it acquire its exceptional ‘stainlessness’ and what are its traits – answering these questions is a quest which awaits the following text.

Galápagos can be regarded, with a slight overuse of oxymora, as a stoic outcry of calm exasperation, how typical of Vonnegut and other authors being thoroughly disillusioned yet somehow still deeply stirred up by a questionable moral constitution of humanity and its probable as well as unforeseeable transformation in the near or far future. Being a twisted blend of dystopian fiction and a clear-cut satire, the book presents a story of an impending end of human race as we know it. Narrated from an incredibly amusing, subjectively omnipresent point of view, which provides another delivery of paradoxical expressions to our humble collection, it follows the retrospective vivisection of accidental events, which resulted in stranding a totally mismatched menagerie of characters on a fictional, northernmost island of the titular Galápagos archipelago – Santa Rosalia. We find among them: an admiral in the Ecuadorian Naval Reserve, who is an all-fingers-and-thumbs socialite of German descent and a sheer figurehead as regards even basic sailing skills, a recently widowed, middle-aged, high school teacher of biology, a blind daughter of a well-off financier – a genuine cross-breed between Gordon Gekko and Steve Fossett, a pregnant wife of a Japanese IT genius and six girls of a cannibalistic Kanka-bono tribe from the Ecuadorian rainforest. By the utterly contingent chain of events, the above motley crew sets sail from Guayaquil’s waterfront amidst the freshly erupted mayhem of the imminent apocalypse.

I am having this dubious sensation right now that Vonnegut – one of the most effortless evokers of the severely depleted supply of common sense ‘stored’ inside the homo sapiens species – might have actually written a perfectly distorted parable. As we are being amused by author’s bitter-sweet, fact-like prose loaded with some gallows humor of the most exquisite quality, we suddenly realize that the funky bunch of our modern Robinsons-to-be, gathered on the “Bahía de Darwin” passenger ship, cannot be actually treated as, in this particular case, the aggregate protagonist at all. It simply could not be one, due to the overbearing power of fatalism sticking out its impish head from behind the text itself. Its influence on the reader seems to be irrevocable to such a great extent, that we are barely able to see the embodiment of the ‘antagonist’ too, namely “the big brains of humans”, ‘whose’ destructive force, an unfortunate result of a superfluous intellectual flexibility homo sapiens has been cursed with, has the earmarks of something absolutely detached from the humans themselves, a thing exterior, almost alien and, what is even more puzzling, completely marginal. This perplexing impression of the ultimate fatalism (maybe the term “catastrophism” would do even better here), emerging as an eerie toss-up between blind chance and fate, is the only element of parable left in the strictly ‘anti-parable-ish’ microcosm of Galápagos. Or is it?

As a matter of fact, it is not. There is another factor, which could be deemed not only an ‘elongated’ moral, appearing gradually as an antithesis of the mischievously predetermined ‘fabric’ of the book, but also something which calls into question my sudden supposition (maybe Galápagos hasn’t been soaking in a marinade of antiparable for that long after all?…). Sprouting probably straight from Vonnegut’s bona fide steadfastness against mindlessness and hopelessness the earthlings have been following and causing throughout their career as the Rulers of the World, it may have something in common with an… optimism! Yes, indeed, the optimism – however ridiculous it may sound, for the prose of our Pall Mall-loving author does not necessarily leave you grinning from ear to ear in a straightforward manner; it’s more like a laughter through tears – which is being hinted along the tale and quite often reassures us that a certain type of redemption always awaits the human race. And it doesn’t matter, whether it turns out to be a result of tossing a coin called “Fate” (another oxymoron to our catalog!) or if it comes from the law of natural selection, which finally does justice and straightens things out a little for the remainder of humanity or, better yet, streamlines it here and there. I cannot restrain myself from listening to the promptings of my oversized brain, which keeps telling me to give my own proposition of the moral. So I say: thank goodness for a devolution! Wait a minute!? Do I hear a squawk of a great frigate bird resembling a laughter?…

In the first paragraph I stated that Galápagos belongs to the intermediate group of novels, which are immune to ‘genetic’ deformations and mutations of those overly thorough(bred) as well as mongrel-ishly happy-go-lucky. I suppose the secret of Vonnegut’s ‘stainlessness’ lies in the qualities of the crooked parable pinned down on an ad hoc basis: the anti-exemplary protagonist, the distilled, almost nominal antagonist, the overgrown, highly imperative fatalism and the moral, which is definitely present, although mercilessly elusive. After all what can one possibly say or write when there has already been said and written almost everything about the self-destructive force of human stupidity? Quoth Beckett: The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle. That’s probably why Vonnegut, I presume, is e.g. dropping sloppy hints of what will the typical specimen of homo (still?) sapiens look like in one million years. Nonetheless, all of this can always be proven wrong (another caprice of the oversized human brain – doubts). Therefore I am leaving the task of dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s up to you and your much less misleading gut instinct. Just remember not to trust your oversized brains too much! They tend to get rusty and, after all, little do we know about how they really work, don’t we?

Amonne Purity