I hurry up another flight of steps and sidle back into my seat on the back row, unseen from the stage. People are talking, standing, texting. “But, no, I don’t really agree poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Richard Cheeseman is ruminating. “Only a third-rate poet like Shelley would believe such wishful thinking.”
Soon the symposium ends and I make my way up to the stage. “Richard, you were the voice of reason, from beginning to end.”
EVENING. ON NARROW streets laid out by Dutchmen and built by their slaves four centuries ago, grandmothers water geraniums. I climb steep stone steps onto the old city wall. Its stones radiate the day’s heat through my thin soles and the rhubarb-pink sun’s fattening nicely as it sinks into the Caribbean. Why do I live in my rainy bitchy anal country again? If Zoë and I go the whole divorce hog, why not up sticks and live somewhere warm? Here would do. Down below, between four lanes of traffic and the sea, boys are playing football on a dirt pitch: One team wears T-shirts, the other goes topless. Up ahead, I find a vacant bench. So. A last-minute stay of execution?
No sodding way. I spent four years on Echo Must Die, and that pube-bearded Cheeseman murdered it in eight hundred words. He elevated his own reputation at the expense of mine. This is called theft. Justice demands that thieves be punished.
I load up my mouth with five Mint Imperials, take out the pay-as-you-go phone Editor Miguel supplied, and, digit by digit, I enter the phone number I copied down from the poster at Heathrow airport. The noise of traffic and seabirds and the footballers fades away. I press Call.
A woman answers straight away: “Heathrow Customs Agency Confidential Line?” I speak in my crappest Sean Connery accent, the Mint Imperials jangling my voice further. “Listen to me. There’s this character, Richard Cheeseman, flying into London from Colombia on BA713, tomorrow night. BA713, tomorrow. You getting all this?”
“BA713, sir. Yes, I’m recording it.” That jolts me. Of course, they’d have to. “And the name was what again?”
“Richard Cheeseman. ‘Cheese’ and ‘man.’ He’s got cocaine in his suitcase. Let a sniffer dog sniff. Watch what happens.”
“I understand,” says the woman. “Sir, may I ask if—”
CALL ENDED, say the chunky pixels on the tiny screen. The sounds of evening return. I spit out the Mint Imperials. They shatter on the stones and lie there, like bits of teeth after a fight. Richard Cheeseman committed the action: I am the reaction. Ethics are Newtonian. Maybe what I just said was sufficient to trigger a bag inspection. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he’ll be let off with a private caution, or maybe get his bum spanked in public. Maybe the embarrassment will cause Cheeseman to lose his column in the Telegraph. Maybe it won’t. I’ve done my bit, now it’s up to Fate. I go back down the stone steps, and pretend to tie my shoelace. Surreptitiously I slip the phone into a storm drain. Plop! By the time its remains are disinterred, if indeed they ever are, everybody alive on this glorious evening will have been dead for centuries.
You, dear reader, me, Richard Cheeseman, all of us.
February 21, 2017
APHRA BOOTH BEGINS the next page of her Position Paper, entitled Pale, Male and Stale: The De(CON?)struction of Post-Post-Feminist Straw Dolls in the New Phallic Fiction. I top up my sparkling water, Glug-splush-glig-sploshglugsplshssssss … To my right, Event Moderator sits with his professorial eyes half shut in a display of worshipful concentration, but I suspect he’s napping. The glass wall behind the audience offers a view down to the Swan River, shimmering silver-blue through Perth, Western Australia. How long has Aphra been droning? This is worse than church. Either our moderator really is asleep, or he’s too scared to interrupt Ms. Booth in mid-position. What am I missing? “When held up to the mirror of gender, masculine metaparadigms of the female psyche refract the whole subtext of an assymetric opacity; or to paraphrase myself, when Venus depicts Mars, she paints from below; from the laundry room and the baby-changing mat. Yet when Mars depicts Venus, he cannot but paint from above; from the imam’s throne, the archbishop’s pulpit or via the pornographer’s lens …” I pandiculate, and Aphra Booth swivels around. “Can’t keep up without a PowerPoint show, Crispin?”
“Just a touch of deep-vein thrombosis, Aphra.” I win a few nervous giggles, and the prospect of a fight injects a little life into the sun-leathered citizens of Perth. “You’ve been going on for hours. And isn’t this panel supposed to be about the soul?”
“This festival does not yit practice censorship.” She glares at Event Moderator. “Am I correct?”
“Oh, totally,” he blinks, “no censorship in Australia. Definitely.”
“Then perhaps Crispin would pay me the courtesy,” Aphra Booth sweeps her death ray back my way, “of letting me finish. As is clear to anyone out of his intellectual nappies, the soul is a pre-Cartesian avatar. If that’s too taxing a concept, suck a gobstopper and wait quietly in the corner.”
“I’d rather suck on a cyanide tooth,” I mutter.
“Crispin wants a cyanide tooth! Can anyone oblige? Please.”
Oh, how the rehydrated mummies wheezed and tittered!
BY THE TIME Aphra Booth is finished, only fifteen of our ninety minutes remain. Event Moderator tries to lasso the runaway theme and asks me whether I believe in the soul, and if so, what the soul may be. I riff on notions of the soul as a karmic report card; as a spiritual memory stick in search of a corporeal hard drive; and as a placebo we generate to cure our dread of mortality. Aphra Booth suggests that I’ve fudged the question because I’m a classic commitmentphobe—“as we all know.” Clearly this is a reference to my recent, well-publicized divorce from Zoë, so I suggest she stop making cowardly insinuations and say what she wants to say, straight up. She accuses me of Hersheycentricism and paranoia. I accuse her of making accusations she’s too gutless to stand by, emphasizing “gut” with everything I’ve got. Tempers fray. “The tragic paradox of Crispin Hershey,” Aphra Booth tells the venue, “is that while he poses as the scourge of cliché, his whole Johnny Rotten of Literature schtick is the tiredest stereotype in the male zoo. But even that posturing is lethally undermined by his recent advocacy of a convicted drug smuggler.”