Virgil

[kulla]

Oh! You can lie down like that, because today you are the daily dose of my new and modern addiction, moderated into satiating sugar. Because when you touch elsewhere like that, you are nothing but a common fùck. The bitch. And though your killing actions don’t concur with my words, I can always play the gentleman and simply reply, “As you wish”.
Have you ever shut your eyes for a second, and for only that simple second, totally oblivious towards the dimension you happened to be in, believed so much that you were blind that when you opened your eyes you really couldn’t see? Total darkness, you have switched off. The lines in the wall, the pattern of flowers on the dirty carpet underneath you, the coloured glass of a church you might have walked into sometime in the past and the funny way the shadows bend over the surface it falls on never have existed and the memory of them is erased. I move my hands around to see where I am and fortunately I don’t break the glass in front of me. I grab it with the trembling hand. As the juice goes down, the light doesn’t come in as a flash, but slowly fills me in. Everything is cool. I put the pint down.
I’ve always wanted to go to Ireland. Its culture, its music and its tradition always fascinated me: a bread of survivors so far. I wanted to see for myself. I can’t say that I was over-enthusiastic about it, on contraire, I had come here to be filled and slowly I was getting there. Jumping from a certain cycle of events into another was just as reassuring as having a pair of eyes.
Finally I managed to be here when luck, or rather FIFA brought by a football match between Ireland and Albania. Naturally, the question arises: What the fùck is an Englishman doing in Ireland, watching a football match that England doesn’t play in? That question is not rhetorical; believe me! I simply didn’t know the answer at the time. I was hopping I would find it along the way. In a certain sense, I was indulging.
TWITCH, BITCH, TWITCH!
It was in my trip to Ireland that I met another lunatic. All I knew was the name. Virgil. He was supposed to take me to my Beatrice but I had to track him down first and it wasn’t so easy, as I didn’t have a clue of how to. As a start, I had only one way to work with; Jonathan, but he wasn’t able to get through, since he had lost his phone and all the numbers he had stored. I was confident that I would find him by some grotesque shot of luck at the end of the day, because I couldn’t place too much hopes on Dante either. Jealous about his indulgence? Thankful for the borrowed forest, I just feel two humble to ask for more.
So I got up from the table we were sitting and the Guinness was standing and went for the bar to ask for Virgil. Who knows, maybe I could be as ridiculously lucky as to find out that he drinks every night in the pub I was drinking in. The landlord, a cheerful old man who had bought the pub for a good price some twenty years ago, must surely know quite a share of people, I merely thought out loud and the man went through four phone calls. First he called his brother.
“He knows the devil’s arse better then his own”, he said, his left ear twitching in a funny way.
“Your brother will do”, I said. “If he knows the devil’s arse, he’s just as good as Virgil”.
“But my brother is not called Virgil; my memory is not very good, but I can assure you on that. And you, my lad, you have to be sure who you ask for. Do you want to get in touch with a Virgil who knows the devil’s arse, or anyone who has such knowledge will do”?
The old man was right; of course his name had to be Virgil. One has to be very careful when one exploits an idea that is not his own. I might start losing sight of the idea itself, or by the time I’ve indulged in as much black stuff as I wanted to, I might start believing that even Dante is part of my collection of lunatics.
Virgil had gone to have a closer look at the devil’s arse, two months ago and for eternity, is what the landlord’s brother reported. The poor bastard had passed away after his second heart attack. Apparently he’s always suffered from a bad heart and that had thrown him to his grave at the tender age of 83. He had left a widow, two sons, one daughter and eight grandchildren behind. One thing was for sure: he was old enough to be anybody’s Virgil. Or had he completely lost it before dying, in which case even if my arrival were timed a little better, his mental state would have been beyond any comprehensible lunacy and I wouldn’t have any need of him anyway?
The landlord looked at his watch, as if saying that there were no need to waste time with the dead, no need to give too much thought to the impossible. It seemed as if he knew what kind of Virgil I was after better than I.
“He surely isn’t your guy if he is dead and even if he is your guy, he won’t be able to help you, unless you’re dead too. Let me call a couple of people who will surely help you”.
Now, here is a genuine man, I thought, ready to help anyone who is in no position to help himself. And that was exactly the position I was in. I was in a foreign country, looking for someone I didn’t even know might exist, a character born out of my lunatic quest to collect as many of my kind as possible. Collect them and throw them all in my castle, leave them in their indulgence, in their individual and/or collective lunacy: have my own big brother show, for my own entertainment.
“You’re right”, I said. “This Virgil I’m after was never married”.
“Don’t worry”, the old landlord said. “You sit down with your friends, and when I’m through I’ll give you a shout. Go on, drink to Ireland. It’s on me”.
Every second passing, I felt that he knew everything about what I was after, the qualities that Virgil must have, and the qualities that I needn’t worry about if he didn’t have them. I wasn’t even surprised that he didn’t ask about the surname, the age or that he dismissed my claim that Virgil was never married. For a second I wanted to ask him why he wanted to help me, but thought better of it and only managed to thank him. I would have probably offended him. No. That remark is not right. A great soul can never be offended, a great soul is like a piece of glorious history; no matter how much dirt you throw on it, it will always stand tall in that void of our souls where legends and heroes are stored. He’d probably just wave it off, replying that I reminded him of his younger self, the one that needs a Virgil to answer his questions, though I honestly believed I didn’t have any questions.
It was the most unbearable sight to see his energies being crashed under the weight of not being able to do much even after his fourth phone call. You could see the hope of those cheerful blue eyes fading towards the inabilities that age pulls along together with the crests on the forehead. Even his glasses hanging on his nose, suddenly grew old.
If he was a bit younger I would have taken him with me to find Virgil, I wouldn’t even have to ask, he would have come with me, full stop. I left him my phone number just in case he would find him while I was in Dublin. You never know if you are returning to a place when you are travelling-one becomes a goose always following the sun-and I’d rather never go back, even if Virgil were waiting in there.






I walked on the grass with bare feet.
I felt the pain, the bruises and the broken bones,
The weight of the earth shouted and groaned
With all its creaking trees and birds.

There is a lot of grass in my castle,
A lot of worms in it, but never a snake.
On your breasts I want to put one,
And the rest of the world, on my head.

The grass is burning in the darkness,
The fire dances and the night is painted orange.

Looking for the man with no face, moving from one bar to another, always with the same question- is Virgil around? -I started to lose my peace. All of them said they didn’t know any Virgil, each of them, a potential Virgil. One word, one question, one action to trigger a chain of reactions that takes you through hell and back, to paradise and back. What word? What action?
I wrote the little poem on the back of a receipt for five Guinness, I put my phone number underneath it and handed it to a girl whose boyfriend had just gone to the toilet. My mates all looked at me in a distrustful way. They were right. I could feel my blood boiling up, my nerves ticking, my flesh twitching. I could smell and feel the future, and right down to my throat it smelled of blood, and it heated my swollen knuckles with the skin ripped on somebody’s teeth. I was about to explode.
I left it on her hands and walked back. She just read it and put it in her bag without even throwing a glance my way. Is she planning to call me at a later time, I thought, when she’s ditched the boyfriend, when she thinks she might be alone with me and whatever devil made me write the poem? I didn’t want that. All I wanted was to pick up a fight. I was hoping she would show it to the boyfriend when he got back.
But she didn’t. None of her gestures suggested that the boyfriend might suddenly become aware of my existence. He was calm, I wasn’t.
I needed to release whatever energy I had in me, I needed to free myself from the chains that hold the words from erupting, that keep them tied to the rhythm beating in my veins, twisting them in my bowels, swinging the words in circular movements and stopping them from finding whatever freedom they find in their crystallized black form in the white paper, the form that makes more damage, that helps action take place. Or was it the other way round? Was I making waves while looking for those words, for another lunatic?
Only when he had settled in the seat once again, did she start throwing glances at me. The first one was as if from a high peak: she looked downward with disdain. Then came a shy smile and after a while, her black eyes turned into the eyes of a wild hungry animal, which has spotted the prey and is only waiting for the right moment to jump into action (the same action I was trying to invoke too). Unaware of the sweet eyes she was throwing at me, the boyfriend seemed happy in his indulgence: drinking the Guinness and her neck with a gentle harmony, he was the only existence my eruption could hit, wanted to hit, in order for me to calm down again.
I got up. Oh those eyes, may they never rot! Fear and excitement had never reflected so powerfully and engaged in each other through a couple of human eyes from any soul. That kind of vulnerability made me want to rip her flesh open and pour the sweat-the fruit of freedom from morals-into her veins, into her blood (oh fùck it) into her arsehole. As I calmly walked toward them, containing myself from losing the strength on my knees, the black eyes lost their splendour, they became daring. What could I offer? What was I going to ask?
Cold, someone might think, calculating, an evil machine. There is one tiny moment before the action is undertaken, before the change starts, one tiny moment completely inconsiderable in the eternal flow of time when the rhythm (that changes into words that change into action) is as similar to the rhythm that made god blow life into Adam, as to make us feel immortal, too. It is that rhythm we always try to hold on to, try to prolong. We never want to let that rhythm go, for if we do, we die, peace prevails and all hope, faced with the reality, is lost. This is the rhythm of indulgence.
Finally, when the first word is freed, when death becomes inevitable, the rhythm changes too. It calms down. The momentum you gain from travelling tangent on the edge of the abyss pushes you calmly to whatever direction it has chosen to throw you and you don’t stop, until you find that rhythm again.
“It will cost you” he said, “and, of course, you have to consider that there might be a queue. There are a lot of people who are trying to get in touch with Virgil.”
There’s that rhythm again, its loud bass shoving me, pushing me, shouting: “head butt this worm, break his skull. Just fucking hit him and run away, glorious, with Helen wrapped tight underneath your armpit. He deserves to die. He is exploiting an ideal, which is so dear to you, and not only you, apparently. It’s as if he is trying to sell a walking stick to someone in need and that can’t afford one. This worm is a disgrace even to worms. And if you let him flourish, he will turn into a snake. He will bite you and the poison will kill you, slowly, painfully. Kill him. Don’t let him commercialise this. He is a cancer in your garden. Kill him. Squash that worm. Kill him, kill him”.
But what about Virgil? This worm was the answer to my search; he could lead me to what I was looking for, to my lunatic, to the next ornament of my indulgence, the next pillar of my kingdom. I needed this worm and it was perfectly clear that he wasn’t lying. He couldn’t be bluffing, for I never challenged him but his girlfriend. And whatever he was after was fully justified by what he was offering, so how could I not ignore the rhythm for one second, how could I not turn human and try to exploit whatever compromise was being laid in my way, how could I not let him live?
Let me place that question better: how could one not feel the need of a snake in the garden? There must be the evil for the good to exist. Why, bollocks. Just another stupid game of words! It is simply a matter of give and take, buy and sell, ask and offer. If we don’t get what we expected out of a deal, if the compromise doesn’t work our way, then we add another misfortune to our poor negotiating skills, we fall into another compromise, this time to cure our egos hurt by the loss, or rather, because of the inability to gain what we were after, we compromise with ourselves and whoever or whatever existence gets in the way of that gain, we call evil and let it live, in order for our goodness to shine stronger.
“Kill him, kill him”! hang on a second. I could take charge of that rhythm and beat the drums myself instead of simply dancing to it.
“Do you know the story of the rock who wanted to buy its own soul?” I asked him. He shook his head in silence and I took it as a sign to continue, but the girl started to giggle:
“Rocks don’t have a soul”, she said.
She destroyed whatever artistic image I had of her: whatever beautiful image reaching my highest aesthetic perception of a woman was fully ruined by those words of truth, for it is only truth that can kill beauty, no matter who stands higher in our way to immortality.
“Well, baby”, he said, “that’s why this rock wanted to buy a soul, because it realised it didn’t have one, ain’t that right”?
“Almost”, I said. “This rock had been standing on top of a mountain by the sea for as long as it could remember. Every night, when the sun went down, the rock would look at it and its reflection on the ocean and never grew tired of its beauty. A family of seagulls used to have their nest in the rock: it had seen them coming out of the egg and dying, right there, in its surface. Sometimes the wind would hit the rock with great force, it would pick the sea up and throw it on the rocks face, it would try to change it, and it did, just a little, but it did. And then the sun would come up and it would dry it up. And the sun too changed the face of the rock a little. One time, for a thousand years the sea got so mad that it covered the rock. But the rock wasn’t scared. In the sea there were so many fish, all very beautiful and though the rock missed the sunsets it was still happy. It had seen everything, and everything was either too beautiful, or it wasn’t able to destroy the rock. Every thing could only change the rock’s face just a little. But nothing was as beautiful as what the man showed to the rock. Yes, the man. He came one day and started talking to the rock. He started telling it how beautiful the rock was. The rock would wonder if it was as beautiful as the sun, the fish, the sea or the seagulls that had changed its face. So the man showed to the rock. He put a mirror in front of the rock, so the rock could see for itself. Oh how beautiful the rock thought it was. A twitch of pleasure came over its face. The rock wanted to have a mirror in front all the time, but the man had a better idea. The man wanted to paint the rock and have the painting hung in the national gallery, so the beauty of the rock would live forever and a lot of people would see it. Yes, yes, it was a very good idea, thought the rock. The man had only one condition. He wanted to use the minerals that were in the rock. No problem: as long as its painting would live forever and its beauty would live forever and every one could see how beautiful the rock was, let the man take some minerals. So the man painted by night and mined by day till the painting was finished and there were no more minerals to take. When it was finished the man showed to the rock the painting. Oh how beautiful it all was, but the rock had to see one more time in the mirror, to make the comparison. Oh, what a horror. The painting looked nothing like the rock. The image in the mirror was ugly: there were holes in the face of the rock where the man had dug. It was all a lie. The rock cracked with pain and was crashed, but the painting is still in the national gallery”.
“It’s very beautiful”, said the girl after a pause.
“Thanks”, I said.
“Yes, it is very beautiful. With this little story you have paid your way to meet Virgil, but I have to ask you something. I have to know what do you want from him”.
“It’s a bit hard to explain”, I started saying, my heart completely changed about this guy. After all he might not be the worm I thought. He didn’t ask for much and I felt to be a winner in a deal that didn’t even exist.
“I am the king of my scribbles. Sometimes, it is difficult to be even that, but mainly I manage, usually with the power of reason, and when that doesn’t work I take my sword from the wall and start slaughtering images, feelings, legends, ideas, events, perceptions of people and places, no matter if these people and places are alive and at some point in their life they cross roads with me, or completely imaginary, living only in my kingdom. I am building a collection and Virgil has a piece for me, or so I believe. So I am going to see him for that reason”.
“What kind of collection is that”, asked the girl.
“You have very beautiful eyes”, I said. “It is a collection of lunatics. Virgil is supposed to be my next piece”.
It is very dangerous to flirt with madness. I only realised it when I saw those beautiful black eyes changing as I said the last sentences. I have no words to describe them; my sword can’t cut the feeling expressed by those eyes. The invisible bar of expectations went scarily high and the unconventional means of lunacy that would help me jump that bar in the eyes of this girl could at any point of time turn and haunt me. I had to build a higher momentum to be able to jump it. “Have you ever met him”, I asked the boy?
“Yes”.
“What’s he like”?
“There is a story going on, told by old ladies in the bingo halls, that he is related to the devil”.
“Interesting”.
“They say that, the earth opened when your rock was crashed (you like that don’t you, the way everything fits together, as if it belongs to one never ending story, always growing from itself, into itself, even if for no reason at all) and from its deep and hot womb the devil finally came to its surface. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t born normal; he had a Siamese twin. Or maybe that was the way it was intended to be from the beginning, for the light of the sun was too strong for him to endure but not for the twin. In the light that gives us life, the devil died as soon as he was born. He evaporated; he burst like a bubble of soap when it hits a dirty surface. The only thing left to prove that he ever crossed the line that he wasn’t meant to cross was his twin. They say that this guy is Virgil. Have you ever heard that story before”?
“Not exactly like that”, I lied. I was glad he gave me the momentum I needed. Incredible story: definitely working on my favour. Yet, I didn’t like his cheek. I didn’t like the way he was presuming whatever little cliché I might have slipped in the conversation. “Do you believe it”?
“You don’t know what to believe with Virgil. Anything is possible. But I definitely do not believe he is the antichrist”.
“Would you say he is a worthy piece for a collection of lunatics”?
“That you have to judge by yourself. You’ve come so far looking for him; what I think is irrelevant, or that’s the way it should be. Let’s go, I’ll take you to him”.
The house was massive. It was standing alone in the middle of a group of flats: it seemed like the flats were built on purpose, either to hide its view from outside of them, or to emphasize its unique structure and mediaeval style. The hostility that one might feel when one enters an unknown suburban neighbourhood disappears as soon as you see this house. There is a warm air surrounding it and compared to the yellow lights of the streets, shining coldly in the dying minutes of daylight, the candle light penetrating from the blinds on the large windows seemed as sweet as closing your eyes after a long tiring day and feeling the ticklish rhythm of the peaceful sleep to come. It was surrounded by a wall around three metres high on top of which the trees inside the garden -whatever kind they were, for I could not tell in that darkness- were resting their branches. The front door seemed heavy and the people queuing in front of it looked more like shadows than people.
Brian; that was my guide’s name, said that we didn’t have to queue because he knew a passage from the back of the garden, only that it would be difficult for us to find Virgil’s room if we took that way: “In this hour of the day the house becomes a maze and every corridor, every staircase, every room looks the same”.
As we entered the back door into the garden, the barks of a dog not too far got me worried, but as the girl silently put her hand into mine, I forgot about the dog and was once more reminded of her presence: I let the rhythm of indulgence take control. Her hand was cold and so was the smell of lemons in the garden, which seemed to be a bit of a maze too. I had trusted Brian so far into taking me here, so why shouldn’t I trust him in this garden? Because I was sure he would get me too close to the dog.
As she stood on top of a staircase that lead to the back door of the house, her white shirt shinning under a ray of moon that had penetrated through the orange leaves and the roof, I remembered that I was as powerful as to collect any rope in the sky left by jet engines and strangle her before I got too bored. And you know what…? She played. She played and I span and knitted.
“What do you want from Virgil, tell me again”? she asked as Brian lead the way in the darkness of a long corridor, away from the fading echoes of the barks of a dog beyond a shut door.
“I want to find the egg”.
“What egg”?
“The egg that is going to help me live another cycle. I don’t want to get too much into the details, but the way I figure it, we are nothing but ejaculations of a higher being. It doesn’t really matter if it stands on higher moral grounds or not (those I can built up to my own purposes as I go along) but that it is eternally higher. I honestly believe that Jesus Christ, for example, found the egg. The rest about him, it’s simply bureaucracy, or rather contractions of a tired womb”.
“So you’re saying that you will be the brother of Christ. You are mad”.
“Maybe, but even as dark as that is I can see how beautiful your tits are”.
She squeezed my hand in her playfully punishing fingers and as we followed Brian in that very same darkness, walking by doors that allowed the shadows to pass through their cracks but never a sound that might suggest the activities within, the thought of him petrified me again but not in a menacing way this time. I felt surrounded by pimps. Since I started my collection of lunatics everybody seemed to be one, or know one, lunatic that is. They were all playing the rhythm of indulgence all around me, and that needed to be danced or conducted away.
“After all, even if I am only a wank that my father is tossing away”, I continued the thought to her, “I am grateful for the cold and refreshing water on the porcelain of a toilet awaiting my arrival in another higher dimension”.
“You have to be very lucky”.
“I like how warm your hand feels in mine, but luck has nothing to do with it. Luck is how one makes it. Say, if I wanted to get lucky with you tonight, wouldn’t it be less lucky if I asked”?
“Ask”.
“Stop. It will be ages before he realises we are not following. By that time I would have licked all your eggs, tasted all your insides with all my tongues, and if you want, I’ll even leave a mark on you”. While hissing that, smelling her hair and almost touching her wet parts, I rested her on the wall and sucked her lips. Her open palm was moving on the wall, probably leaving a sweat mark, her fingers looking for something. When she found the knob, she twisted it, opened the door and she pulled me inside.

When consciousness hit me again it was daytime. The heavy blinds that were shut during the night were now open and the sun, reflected from a mirror hung on the wall and that was vibrating under a cold breeze, was playing with my eyes. A voice, like a distant memory, was shouting my name and someone was banging the door. For a moment I thought it was my father waking me up to go to school, but a rush of more recent events filling all my doubts with the anxiety that this voice was going to kill me over the pleasant incident of last night, made me jump to my feet.
The room was a dump. There was no carpet on the floor and the wooden floor looked like it was going to give way to my weight, any second now. There was no bed either, just a dirty mattress lying on the floor by the window, without any sheets and with the stink that only the reoccurrence of last night over a long period of time could give. The furniture was completely out of order, too, with the polish eaten away by whatever element that had invaded that room. The bottom drawers of a tall cupboard from which seemed to come the voice and the bangs were half open. Instead of the heavy blinds, light and transparent, but torn and ripped curtains were dancing away from the window, though this looked shut and one couldn’t tell where the breeze was coming from. There was no door and she was nowhere to be seen.
Was I inside the egg? Fair enough, it wasn’t what I expected, but I never expected it to be like anything and the wanker that had managed to get as far as inside the cupboard was proof enough that I might not be alone in this new cycle. The red painted 666 on the ceiling was another sign of the prophecy to be fulfilled.
“Is that you Brian”?
“Yes, open the fucking door”!
“Do you have a middle name, Brian”?
“What the fùck? Yes, but please open the door first”.
“What’s your middle name, Brian”?
“It’s Virgil, alright. Now open the door, I’m losing my patience. That was quite a disappearing act you pulled yesterday. You fucking owe me one”.
“Where’s Helen”?
“Who”?
“The girl, your girl, where is she”?
“She’s in there, with you, giving you your morning blow job. Open the fucking door you fucking prick, I swear I am not angry with neither of you. I just want to go and get some breakfast before we go to the football. I have your ticket”.
“Bullshit”.
“Hey! Don’t forget who I am. It was you who came to me”. He said the last sentence banging the door again and then he started shouting my name and ordering for the door to be opened.
“Ok, ok! Hang on”! I went to open the cupboard door, but to my surprise it was empty. There was only a TV set in it, but no Virgil. “You’re not in the cupboard”? I said.
“What? What cupboard you moron, I’m outside the door. Fucking open it”!
“There is no door”, I shouted frustrated at his impatience. It seemed impossible that she had gone out of the room and the cupboard was covering the door from inside. I don’t remember putting it there. It was heavy. I had to get down on my knees to pull it away because the short wobbly legs could break on the rough wooden surface if I didn’t pull it up a bit, too. There was a sign of teeth, a bite on the edge of the frame and the door, just above the lower fringe. I wondered if that was done pulling it, or pushing it and the fringe was rusty, too, it must have been dangerous biting in that particular place, -I didn’t want a tetanus shot, I wasn’t going to go down that way. I gave it another pull, but without much result; the cupboard must have been made out of some very heavy wood. I could almost feel my skin getting bruised on my knees. I got up, opened both doors and picked up the telly. The electrical cord followed it with a hissing noise and then it got stuck somewhere on the shelves; though I tried to pull it free, I couldn’t. It made a banging noise when it hit the place where it was stuck, and no more. I put the telly down and tried to release the cord, but I realised that I would need either pincers or a screwdriver to do that. I looked around the room to see if I could find a toolbox or something similar, but I didn’t have too much hopes on it. There was a porn magazine lying by the mattress, a used syringe on a corner of the room, the leftovers of a Chinese takeaway and a condom by them. I opened the drawers of the chest standing in the middle of the room. Books, magazines, clothes, more syringes, soap, wires, old CDs, a broken watch, a calendar, the poster of a naked blonde. Not a screwdriver to be seen, not a pincer. Then I went checking the drawers of the cupboard. The same things over and over, until I finally found the toolbox on the bottom of the bottom drawer. Ok, I was lucky. What are the chances of finding something like that in a place like this? But then again, real people at some point in the past must have inhabited this room, people who had the need of a toolbox, which I gladly inherited. I cut the cord as if that was the only weight that was stopping me from moving the cupboard and I tried to move it again from a different position thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so heavy, this time with all my might, ignoring the splinters that were cutting more then my skin. Nothing. It only creaked.
“What the hell are you doing? What have you locked the door with”?
“I don’t know. There’s a cupboard on its way that I can’t move”.
“You chicken-shit yellow coward. What did you think I was going to come with, a fucking army? How did you put it there”?
“I don’t know. I don’t remember putting it there”.
“If you haven’t put it there then she has. Tell her to move it”.
“She’s not with me, I told you”.
“If she’s not in there, then how the fùck did she put it from outside”?
“You think I haven’t asked those questions to myself, too? Now, shut up and let me work. I don’t want to stay here any longer either. This place is a shit-hole”.
“What are you going to do”?
“I’ll try to undo the whole fucking thing. I found a toolbox. It’s not going to take me any more then 10 minutes. Have a smoke”.
“I am”.
The doors came out easily for they were already loose. Then away flew the drawers, one of them breaking as I was throwing it, making a horrible noise when it fell on the floor, almost breaking my foot, and then, I started working on the shelves with the screwdriver. Inside of the cupboard was just as dirty as the room itself, maybe more. Even if you only wiped away the dust on and in it, the cupboard would be much lighter to move. One of the screws was covered in chewing gum, which took away almost all my patience to remove and about three minutes too. I tried to see it from a futuristic point of view and laugh about the irony of it all. I was but a breath away from my lunatic, the second encounter (and the one I felt was more important) with which was probably going to leave me with a black eye, yet, I had to unscrew a fucking cupboard first. I’ve never been good with this kind of handy work. My hands are too clean for that. I know how to punch, no matter if it’s faces or typing keys, but I don’t know how to build things and I figure un-building something is just the reverse order of building it, which means, it is just as difficult. Yes I could break it, but what else was I going to break as well. After all if I really was in the egg, I didn’t want to come out of it unfit for the world outside. I know that kind of logic smells a bit of the yesterday’s Guinness, but the fact remained that if I tried to break the cupboard without the proper tools, I would be the one left broken out of such battle, or even if I won it would come with great loss. I didn’t mind a blow from Virgil, but one from the cupboard was one too many.
Can you imagine a world without cupboards? Maybe people wouldn’t even use clothes for lack of storage, then. The world would be a much better place, believe me. I, for once, wouldn’t fucking be here. I’d probably be down the pub, drinking the gorgeous black stuff where one is supposed to drink it. Some nutcase might say that this is my way of dealing with my insecurities. I take it out on the cupboard instead of confronting Virgil like I had planned to do. Maybe even build momentum while spending my time on it. “Out of the closet”, or god knows what other fucking theories. Fùck them! The only momentum building was that if I ever got out of this room, that Virgil would be the one taking my punches and not the other way round, even if this might prove them right. Back again to square one, I suppose. This cupboard was something I was indulging in more then I wanted, and the only way to shake the rhythm after I was done in here, was some good old-fashioned punching away.
After I removed the shelves I tried again to move it. And I did. A little bit at first, the legs sliding with great rumble on the floor and the whole thing shaking like a scared giant and as I pulled it a little harder, one of the legs broke, the one on the corner that I was pulling, releasing its weight towards the floor, letting it fall as if it was the statue of some horrible dictator being pulled down by the people it had under for a long time, or by some other greater force. Strange how politics, or rather media induced images get involved with the last moments of a standing cupboard!
That wasn’t the last I would see of that cupboard by a long way. Two floors: 30 feet, that is, I had to travel with it towards the centre of the earth. It fell on top of the drawers with a big bang and I guess the weak floor couldn’t handle the weight anymore on that spot. It opened apart and it pulled down everything on the room, including me. Just a moment before that, when I realised that I was going to go down too, also trying to avoid being crashed by the cupboard, I jumped across the room and luckily landed on the mattress. The instant loss of equilibrium must have made me lose consciousness, for when I came to, I was lying on top of the mattress that somehow was lying on top of the cupboard, Virgil was standing on top of me and above him I could see the red painted 666 through the massive holes of two floors. His face was still full of disbelief, which he didn’t even try to hide.
“I cannot believe what you would go through to avoid me, even after all the way you took to find me. First you block the door with a cupboard, and then you break the floor with it. One thing is for sure, you will never forget this flight”.
“I’ve already forgotten coming out of one egg, what makes you think I will not forget this one”.
“Either the fall hasn’t shaken you much and you still haven’t lost your stupidity, or it has made you as stupid as to give me this kind of fever talk”.
“Whatever! Help me get up”.
“Are you sure you’re ok? That’s a hell of a flight there Tom. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve broken something”.
“I don’t feel a thing”.
“That’s not good news”.
“The fall didn’t kill me. Aren’t you happy? Cause, you can do that now”.
“Is that guilt I smell”?
“Why didn’t you tell me you were Virgil”?
“I’m a very popular guy in the wrong circles. I didn’t know who you were, so though I didn’t tell you straight away, I let you figure it out yourself. Unlucky for me you had the whore on your side”.
“She didn’t tell me a thing”.
“Then how did you know”?
“If you see what I see from where I am, you’d understand”.
“What the fùck do you see, I haven’t got it written on my forehead, have I”?
“No, but you have a 666 hanging on top of your head”.
“What”?
“Look up”.
His face was still puzzled. Through some lucky shot of paranoia, or even heavenly glory, I could talk with signs and omens, but how was I to explain it to him? Unless he was a woman I was trying to **** how could I make sense?
I got up on my feet with his help, -the pile shaking a bit underneath us, till it fell to a steady place- and to my enjoyment I realised I didn’t even have a bruise on me. I looked like a miner though, covered in dust, which was quite hard to shake. Everything had fallen on top of everything and we were standing on top of the mattress, which was the highest point of this rumble made of old and broken furniture, our heads almost at level with the point where the ceiling should have been. Small pieces of wood from the broken floors were still hanging on top of our heads, some of them hanging only by a thread, making our stay on that spot all the more dangerous. The TV was hanging on one of the edges of the top floor by the cord and it hadn’t settled yet. Serving as a reminder that the whole house might at any minute crumble on top of us, it looked like the pendulum of a ticking bomb. On the lower hole, standing by the edge with two wheels out, was a baby wheelchair. Worried, I pointed it out, but Virgil reassured me that there was nobody in the house at this hour of the day. He usually kicked his guests out by 10 o’clock and it was already past midday. Anyway, that was an old wheelchair and there hadn’t been any children in the building for the past two years.
We didn’t speak a word until we were out of the house. Though I did fly down two floors, I still didn’t land on the ground floor. The corridors were just as messy as the rooms. There were rolled up carpets standing on the walls, old sofas with historical stains of coffee and beer and god knows what else, chests with no drawers, one of them upside down, the body of a bicycle with no wheels and no chain resting on a corner by a staircase. On one of the walls there was a painting of the house as seen from outside, probably made a long time ago, when the block of flats around wasn’t built yet. We had to go down another three floors. The corridors were all very long and there was only one staircase on each corridor: the staircase connecting the third floor with the second was on one side of the house, then you had to walk the whole corridor of the second floor to the other side of the house to get to the staircase that descended to the first floor. The same thing was repeated between the first floor and the ground floor, then again you had to walk to the other side of the house to be able to get out in the garden, where the first thing we encountered was the fresh air of a beautiful day in the shadows of orange trees. It seemed a bit out of order to me for oranges to be growing in Dublin, but I didn’t complain. I inhaled as much as I could.
“What the fùck do you expect out of Virgil now”? he asked in all honesty as we got out of the front door where I saw the people queuing. They were dummies taken from a clothes shop resting on the wall: -their seconds ticking to a different rhythm then ours but towards the same egg- some of them were even sitting on stones with an old newspaper laying between them, as if they were ready to start a game of domino. On the darkness of the night, I believed them to be real people. Quite simply he hadn’t sold anything else but himself, and I could finally see that he couldn’t possibly be related to the devil, at least morally speaking. He was simply what he was meant to be, making me think once again that maybe it wasn’t pimps I was surrounded by, but that I saw lunatics where and when I wanted since I started collecting them.
“Do you believe in clichés? Aren’t they like buttons of an old keyboard, the more you press them, the harder it is to read the button that is pressed most, until eventually they are all going to turn black from their own paint and the dirt of your hands. Do you think there is any egg left not licked, cause if not, I don’t know what to say, what to expect. As simple as that! And if you really want my opinion all I can say, is that you’ve served your purpose”.
“You’re a cunt”!
Fùck him. We owe each other a pint and that’s that on that tale.
As for her, she called me the next day. She too, I thought feels that she owes me a pint, so I went. But she had left when I arrived at the bar we were meant to meet. She had left a message:

I think you know what this was.

Your Helen!

And as I looked at the bartender asking for more with all the animals I could master, he produced an ashtray from behind the bar. In it, there was a burnt piece of paper and from one of the corners left untouched by the dancing fire, I realised it was a receipt for five Guinness.

[VETRIOLI]

o nipce

[Fiori]

Me pelqen shume menyra si shprehesh, aq me teper ne nje gjuhe te huaj. Nuk e mbarova dot leximin, por do rrikthehem.

Me kishte marre vertet malli te lexoja dicka...