It occurs to me, at that moment, that some public figures are akin to human sacrifices. Think of JFK, Martin Luther King, John Lennon. Considering that last name, it occurs to me how odd it is that the human sacrifices moved from being politicians and religious leaders to popular celebrities.
But, no matter: Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman: the names of the men who carried out the sacrifices will be forever linked with those of the luminaries they slaughtered. Is it not the same glory?
A mere second after I first see S., I spot the man across from me, on the opposite side of the police barricade. He is an older man, maybe fifty. He wears steel-rimmed glasses and a black baseball cap. I see the deranged look in his eyes. And I think: do I look like that?
I can understand, on some profound but, for me, unknowable level, how one might love S. and, at the same time, want to destroy her. But that is not me. I cannot allow this madman in the cap and glasses to possess the glory of the assassin.
Three seconds have passed since S. emerged from the metal doors at the back exit of the grand hall. She strides confidently into the cold night air. She is absolutely radiant, her smile a beacon, her eyes glowing, her new hairdo bouncing as she walks down the column of admirers. The chant erupts: ‘Say-GO! Say-GO! Say-GO! Say-GO!’
She is approaching me, quite quickly now. I catch a glimpse of the stubblehead twins, one on each side of the aisle formed by the police barricades. One of them, the talkative stubblehead, looks directly at me. I quickly look away and spot, across the lane carved out by metal barriers, the man in the black baseball cap and steel-rimmed glasses. He is reaching into his jacket pocket. I see the gun emerge in his hand.
‘Ségolène!’ I scream.
Her name explodes from my mouth, involuntarily-That is when she turns and looks straight into my eyes. She is no more than six feet away. And she is smiling at me. She knows me. I am sure of it.
All is instinct now. I see the man in the cap and glasses extending his arm, pointing the gun at the presidential candidate’s head.
Surely, you have heard those stories about people being gripped by a superhuman strength, an instinct beyond the realm of actual physical capacity, triggered by an immediate crisis. The mother who lifts a car off a child trapped beneath its weight, that is the classic example.
I don’t know if what I instinctively do fits in the same category. But I leap over the police barricade and lunge in front of Ségolène. The gun fires. Just as Ségolène’s smiling face passes out of my vision, I am nearly blinded by the flash of the pistol. I feel the burning sensation in the centre of my forehead. It is indescribable, the pain of hot metal blasting through bone and into the brain.
As I lie on the ground, flat on my back, several actions register at once. The talkative stubblehead pulls out his gun, fires and kills the man who wanted to shoot Ségolène Royal but shot me instead. Deafening screams. Everyone, it seems, is screaming. Except for the candidate, who is quickly surrounded and whisked away. To safety. People are gathering around me. I hear screams and questions. People screaming questions: What happened? Did he do it? Who is he?
As the blood pours into my eyes and I feel life slipping away, exactly like wakefulness slipping away as you fall asleep – only a trillion times more powerful, the sensation – I think only of S. She was smiling at me. I am sure of it. She looked directly into my eyes. And she was smiling. Right at me. Her destiny.
FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNO by JIM NISBET
Bruce inherited a bunch of paper from his mother’s father.
After he’d shaken off the good-fuck/bad-fuck couplings of Mr Leather World, whose year of ascendancy Bruce had never precisely determined – and, since M. Cuir du Monde dyed the pelt favoured by Pediculosus capitis and depilated all the rest, including that of his legs, pubis, armpits, and back (which might otherwise have been positively ursine), and his neediness, which exceeded even that of Regis Capone, a minor (no pun intended) soap opera star Bruce had dated for a while, occluded all the other factual topics, leaving little room for age determination, although his birthday was very important, etc. – Bruce found himself at the end of a bindle of cocaine with nothing better to do, at four o’clock in the morning, even in New York City, maybe especially in New York City, than to break out and study his legacy.
By the time the sun was well up that July morning, everything had changed.
By the end of the week he’d opened a brokerage account and sold off half his grandfather’s gas leases which, though depreciated over their various lifetimes, left him with approximately the same value in cash as remained in the leases, which, though he’d never before shown the slightest talent or inclination for financial manipulations, arcane ones least of all, he fed straight into a diversified portfolio projected to earn him nine per cent per annum, excepting $40,000 in cash which, however, would itself earn four per cent in the brokerage checking account, so long as he maintained a minimum balance, leaving gas leases sufficient to yield some $5,000 a month for the foreseeable future.
Bruce had always perceived his as a charmed life. While everybody around him was dropping like flies in the eighties, for example, and though he visited the Rude Dude Bathhouse (not six blocks from The Trucks) weekly, he had emerged unscathed. He told people it was genetic, he told people it was because he didn’t eat right, he told people it was because he was carefuclass="underline" he told himself that his was a charmed existence.
The half-million inheritance, out of the blue from a man he barely knew, served to confirm this de factor analysis.
That, and he judged the men he allowed himself to sleep with by their Facial Index. To wit:
as measured in an anterior/posterior vertical plane bisecting the sagital crest through the occiput, and, trust Bruce, it’s much more interesting than a man’s score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The less acute the angle, the wilder the sex, or, as Bruce could also put it, copping W.C. Handy’s line from St Louis Blues, the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. Hence the truth of Virgil’s dictum, facils descensus Averno, the descent to hell is easy – especially if you know the way. Remind me to look up Averno, he would say to whatever bar bait in whatever bait bar he was quoting Virgil, as he dissolved into peals of the histrionic laughter he’d learned from Regis Capone, who in his heyday had the most un-acute facial index to be seen on network television.
In English, one man in one bar, out of the hundreds of men he’d met in dozens of bars, had once helpfully pointed out to him, it’s Avernus.
Bruce didn’t go home and look it up. Are you kidding? He just never went to that bar again.
Cast in the glare of all that money, the Village suddenly looked tawdry, When he pointed this out to some guy in some bar the guy said, if you think this is tawdry, you should visit the Castro District in San Francisco, where they have bars that cater to big fuzzy guys who want to hook up with little sleek ones, and vice versa.
That’s disgusting, Bruce said, scrolling through his cellphone directory for his travel agent’s number. Everybody else books online, but, since Bruce could afford it, he preferred to pay others to do the grunt work. After all, what’s money for?
His acquaintance was right about San Francisco. Bruce was back in a week. He ran into his friend almost immediately.
They’re called bears and otters.
I beg your pardon?
That’s what they call them.
Oh, please, the man said, as he palpated his ascot. Do you think I was born yesterday?