Cat Alone - 10 -

May 2











The epic beginning as soon as the man leaves his house. And the fat matron goddess-like at the top of the narrow long stairs, telling me: “Roy Marimon, you are certainly more than the best. You are, Marimon, the optimal.”



–Here! Don this, she said, tossing me a white cloth. Pitchkettled, I still stepped lively, went all the way up with the rag hanging from one of my hands. Here, let me, she said, and agape I remained as she imposed let’s say her will, invested me with the teeshirt, that was white all over except for the big caption in black block letters in front. It said: “I Am Marimon, the Optimal.”



No use laughing at the joke, she was calmly serious. Now she said: “You are one in ten million; walk proudly, my son; swim forth on the waves of ovation, for you are uniquely optimal. In your early teens you were the chief athlete of your nation; soon in your twenties you were the paramount novelist of your nation. And now? Now you’ve earned it, disproportionately even. Here, start her off, she’s all yours, my hero; the youngest, tenderest, newest, prettiest little whore; vas-y mon petit, vas-y mon enfant, vas-y mon marquis, vas-y!”



And then? Then Roy Marimon had his fun with the little devil.








Indeed, and it’s awkward to acknowledge but a rift appeared in the mob attending after the shipwreck the crematory. Acquaintances now in conflict with each other – how do you call it – hideous entanglements, contemptible brawls going on all around me. Bruised offal the hips of my neighbor. Turned into pulp the goat nipples of the old widows.



From the ceiling an unnerving fickleness – cinders or snowflakes, and recently seared runny pieces of gore now afloat, getting into people’s throats, gagging the formerly civil inhabitant, bugging, worst, buggering the retired lieutenant colonel, the wives losing their cachet, their eyes and ear-holes and nostrils and cunts and anuses recklessly obturated, a fog inside and tarrying in the vestibules, and a noise of foghorns, and the dulcimers and fiddles, the psalteries and lutes, and the timbrels and tabrets and sackbuts and mandolas baying most discordantly.



I was turning into a smelly fish – my hands all scaly. And from the hellish adits and fangs of the furnaces where the remains of the wretches burned in neglect a fishy smell fled and enveloped the public. The swimming ashes beckoning, spectral, pledging maybe some sort of collective action if only all of the present teamed up, pitched in. But they, everybody, were a trifle to excited, elbowing each other, with hatred, or a yen for survival. I heard hectic groans. With apprehension I approached the faulty appliance. A syrup of corruption invaded my integuments. A rattled jingle sounded then. The entrance of the soft-bodied ex-machinas. In servitude the prostitutes, their attitude the epitome of oaths and mercies, had the common courtesy to rescue me from such squalor.



I borrowed a fiver from one of the philanthropic anesthetists. Now I had the mammoth task to stop the bleeding. I didn’t want to read next morning in a shifty tabloid the headline: “Mm, mm! She bled as she scampered into the melting horizon where the Sun drowsed in style... And you wouldn’t have guessed who bled the harder, she or the kingly aster.”



In the slammer, despite currying favor from every thug uniformed and not, the scoundrel the noose he tasted most chokingly. The smell it is, I said, that makes each of us wax wod. As the feeble-minded are yoked to welfare we the breathers are so to a ludicrous look of burning intelligence. Too pretty to resist, ah woe. And then nobody discovers that the eye has a cunt of its own until it is too late, and the mating is consummated and the consequences, my fond compatriots, alas, who can tell.