The Late Great Creature by Brock Brower

Author:Brock Brower [BROWER, BROCK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, FIC015000
ISBN: 9781468301144
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2011-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

QUERY AND LOVE’S ANSWER

Then talk not of more inquiry,

Sharp quips, and questions sly;

If she, with practised ecstasy,

Kept mind on him while mouth round me,

How could she make reply?

When I boarded my flight around noon next day, when I emplaned for New York City with a light head, a louche heart, and a limp cock, specifically, when I crawled through the First-Class seraglio to the cheap, two-dollar stewardesses back in Tourist—going rapidly downhill, ruined by intemperance and a whoreson, Babylonian blow job—when I lifted myself from the lint and filthy scuff of that horrid TWA aisle and struggled into Seat 13C, there was M. Right next to me, in 13B.

Both of us surprised, in fact, downright dislocated by this juxtaposition, proximity, propinquity, et cetera, et cetera. Lit. mind continued to work even if biz. tongue fixed fast by ichor of liquor. M. didn’t say much either at first. Always awkward, any accidental meeting of interviewer and subject after exploited personality has yielded up its last tailings of good copy, lies exhausted, played out … cuckolded? That’s at least my side of what ensued after takeoff but before dinner and in-flight movie, Mary Poppins (1964), sci-fi psyche-Disnic fam. com. (“Just a cube full of acid makes the musical go down, the musical go down …”), over airline’s rum ration of two bourbons: Our Last Conversation Together.

M.’s general demeanor: relaxed, elegant, Viennois, Old Worldly-Other Worldly. But thoroughly undisplaced person, a preternaturalized American, you might say. Work had done him good. Now travel? Going to see his hallucinatory family?

No, not exactly. “Your Mr. Joseph Papp,” M. explained, “has asked me to come to Central Park, to play Caliban.”

“Perfect.”

“Yes, I think.” Obviously delighted. “Central Park, at night … you expect Caliban.”

“As a mugger.”

“My thoughts tend that way.”

“Keeping the same ending this time?”

M. smiled low, but said nothing.

“I liked what you managed yesterday.”

“Did you? We’ll see.”

Then he launched into that heady discussion of analogues for his ending, H. let, H. back, cf. above, got very technical when I asked him about lighting, lens length—“I had the cameraman with me”—and how exactly he’d smuggled that skeleton into the coffin. “Wore it around my waist. Like a money belt. Simple enough to pull up my skirts, tuck them back down inside the bones.”

“Pretty small bones.”

“Skeletons are smaller than you realize.”

“Brittle.”

“Slight, really.”

“Girlish?”

M. ignored that. “Do you know Mr. Papp?”

“No.”

“I had in mind suggesting Hazel to him for Miranda.” So he could have her near him? Cement their monster-mistress-parent-child decrepit December-matronly May relationship? What ho: a horror Tempest? Not so far-fetched, cf. M-G-M’s Forbidden Planet (1956), Cyril Hume’s rewrite of Prospero’s Island as Altair-4 in the year 2200, why not base play on movie?

“Also considered suggesting Quincy for Prospero,” he went on.

“Or an aging Ariel,” I said.

But generous of M., considering. Too generous, I sensed.

“However,” he added, with a slight edge, “I find now that Quincy will be occupied these coming few weeks. Another Poe film.” Saluted me with a squeeze of his plastic tumbler, since no way to clink it.

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