I Come To Bury Caesar

It’s a long string of Polish jokes and first the crowd is hostile, then it’s game, then it’s just bored. The hack is impervious to their heckling, but they’re drunk, they’re horny, they’re a steeltown mob trying to blow off steam at the weirdo burlesque bar and grill and there’s only so long they can put up with this nonsense.

They’re long past the point where simply yelling GET OFF THE STAGE is going to move the needle, so a group of more or less sober welders huddle together for a bit and send their most tactful bruiser up onto the stage. Which, normally that’s verboten, but desperate times, desperate measures; the bartender makes an overt show of turning away to wash some dishes.

“Hey, listen,” the hod says, one meaty, heatscarred hand on the sweaty shoulder of the comedian. “We’re all in your corner here, but don’t you think you should wrap it up?” The comedian doesn’t blink, just rolls right into his joke about the lesbian with a hard-on. The hod shakes him slightly, then harder, but nothing; he doesn’t even make eye contact. With a shrug, he scoops him up in his arms, or tries to, but the hack is boneless as an eel, slips through his arms without missing a beat. One of the other welders, drunker than most, hurls a bottle. It embeds itself dead center in his forehead. “Hey,” says the comedian, smiling mildly. “You shouldn’t oughta do that.”

It’s at this point that they discover the doors are all locked, and the bartender and the waitresses are all gone, but of course by then it’s too late.

Sherlock Holmes Is A-Mouldering In His Grave

The bees are long dead, John and Mary more recently, and his fame, such as it was, is a long-banked fire he warms himself on on short winter days. Time has stolen his height and his appetite, and most days he sits quietly by the southern window watching the sun move across the valley. He boasted once to John that he neither knew nor cared if the sun revolved around the earth or the earth around the sun, as neither case could affect the solution of a crime; now, however, he cannot watch a sunrise without thinking of it.

They must have been young, then, but it was all so long ago he cannot conceive of what youth must have been like. He remembers the anxiety and the desperation of his idle times, but not the pith of the experience—remembers it as a story to be told. How it felt to be so despairingly understimulated that he would rather throw himself from the top of the falls than not eludes him. He is as precise with dates and times and distances as ever, but without the vital interest in humanity that once drove him, those points of data are as sterile and drily pleasing as a railway schedule.

He had not expected to live so long, to so far outlast not only the dead but even himself. He does not begrudge the passing time, but he cannot bring himself to care about it, either.

I Blame The Parents

Two noble houses alike in dignity, which is to say: none.

Look at these dumbasses, pulling knives on each other in the street in front of a cop, and then insulting each other’s virginity when el swine give them the stinkeye. Is this wise? Is it smart? Forget an honest man, Diogenes would starve to death looking for a single Veronese brat with the sense to pour piss out of a boot.

Horny idiots, the lot of them, which would be just about endurable except for the fact that they’ve got more money than god and mostly spend it on booze, caffeine, and an endless supply on knives, daggers, dirks, stilettos, short swords, rapiers, foils, sabres, and epees. One utter maniac has a fucking claymore as tall as he is, it’s a wonder he hasn’t decapitated himself or someone else hauling it around to every pubescent rager in the city.

History Will Judge Them

Consider: William Howard Taft, colonizer, President, Supreme Court Justice, diplomat, reformer, war criminal, and yet most popularly famous for getting stuck in a bathtub, a story neither true nor kind. His political mentor most famous for being a face on a desecrated mountain and a handful of inscrutable references in cartoons now four generations out of date.

Or: Jean-Paul Marat, revolutionary, philosopher, writer, journalist, war criminal, remembered most clearly for his assassination by Charlotte Corday in a bathtub. One of the leading figures of one of the most famous almost-revolutions in the last several centuries, just a dead body slumped over, naked, undignified, moist.

The villains of our parents generations fade into nothing; the villains of their parents are already dust. Professional students of history carry their sins and their virtues in their hearts, or trip into a cross-century romance pursuing them through letters, reports, archival papers, but for most? For us? For the people who live in the long shadow of their legacy? Soap film drifting across the surface of a bath continually draining.

Decompression Sickness

80 floors in under a minute; 13 feet a second.

Petra’s ears pop and she struggles to swallow, dry-mouthed and nervous, even though this is long-familiar. The view, too, is familiar, or should be, but somehow it always catches her off guard. It’s a grey predawn down on the street, but early morning up here; the hallway is bathed in rosy-fingered light, and the terminator sweeping over the valley from the mountains takes her breath away.

Vertigo: she feels the earth dropping away beneath her, curving away from the sun.

The man in the bed is old, with the delicate paper skin they all have, the curled spine. This one is well-fed, comfortingly — yesterday’s was light as a bird, scarely more than a skeleton and memories, disquietingly closer to a wire sculpture than a human. She wheels the bed to the window, and the man smiles up at her, eyes wide and calm, all pupil. They spend a moment looking out at the early morning, crisp and clear before the heat closes in, until their breath settles into a shared rhythm, until her pulse keeps time with the gentle ticking of the monitor.

Later—

Petra pulls the window shut again, and leans her head against the glass. She cranes her head toward the street, listens for an impact that never comes. Where they go, she doesn’t know, but she rides the elevator down alone, as always.