Two good shots

They didn't believe me, even though I'd said nothing. I gambled that they were greasy cops, out of town, on hard pay. They'd not have the appetite for a proper fight. I took up a point at the back of the car and fired two shots. One hit the prowler and the back end puffed up and exploded in an orange and blue ball. The force surprised me and I was knocked backwards, it surprised them more and they ran back to the manager's office, the most substantial building in the area. The second shot took a ricochet from the prowler's front end and hit a gas tank over by the pound. This time the blast was too big, I was carried away my chest thumping and starved of air. Three or four policemen just fell flat, two others rolled like rag dolls. That was the end of their fighting.

A cloud of dust and noise was everywhere, this was confusion. A few people were shouting or crying, a radio splattered tones and words from some vehicle. I headed that way. There it was, an empty prowler, keyed up and alight. In seconds I was moving, through the debris and dust, one stray shot cracking a mirror, another bouncing from the front grill. It was too late now, I was gone. Headed somewhere.

We don't believe

"Christ, this awkward," said Banner, "there wasn't a body here when we closed up." The policeman's corpse had been there behind the door for sometime, it had desiccated in the dry heat, the air was pungent with a heavy scent of death that was almost pleasant, but both of us shivered as we breathed it in. Banner clambered across the wreckage inside the room, there had obviously been a scuffle before the fatal fight, desks were turned over, papers and files strewn across the floor, cracked electronics, wires and splinters. Banner picked up a communicator and handed it to me, "Police issue."

I switched it on, immediately I realised my mistake, it glowed red and gave out a sharp beep. "It's homing!" shouted Banner, "this is a set up!" We both ran back to the vehicle, somewhere in the distance I heard an air-skimmer's engine start up. "They're very close!"

There were two orange flashes in front of us, in the hundred yards we'd travelled they'd caught us. I felt the shock and vibration, my chest heavy with the pressure of the blast, I looked across and Banner was slumped across the controls, eyes empty and we were still and suddenly sideways in a ditch. "Agents!" I cried out through the com mike, "It's Rick, City-Pass 231-678A!"

"Stand by the vehicle for processing. We don't believe you!" Screamed the metallic reply.

Some sequences shortened

I was walking away from the noise, walking from the steam, from the steady drumming of the rain, processing the day my head. The neon flickered like some passing affair, the traffic had thinned and I had lost track of time. A bar doorway opened up on my right and I wheeled in without a thought, automatic transmission. I ordered a bottle and sat in a deep pool of artificial light. I drank for some time, there seemed to be no effect, nothing to reach until I arrived at tired level of numb self parody and unawareness. I felt safe here but my fingers were rubbing on the but of the gun it was an unconscious action, it was a part of who I had become.

I watched the other customers, all quietly unfamiliar and bland, all in hiding, all in plain sight. I took in the faces one by one, at least the features I could make out. An older man sat across the bar, he reading something from a dull screen, his lips were moving, forming unspoken words. His mouth curled at the corner as if every other word carried some amusing message. I looked at his eyes, they were on me already. I touched my nose, he nodded, picked up his drink and his screen and walked over to join me.

“I'm Banner. There are many things in this life I find difficult to understand, I've lived sixty five years, been loved and spurned, been hunted, found and set free. Now I'm here, sitting across from you, a fugitive and a conundrum. You know that they'll put a bounty on your head, you know that they wont let you go. You know all this?” I just grinned and took a sharp slug of the whisky. The old man continued, “I think we can help each other out, I think we both have something the other needs, I think we can make an arrangement...the police are about ten minutes from barging through that door, they have a new charge sheet, new evidence, same old story. They're dealing with some minority activity in Teasel, then they'll come over...for you.” I was again aware of the gun butt and safety against my finger, the cold metal was warm.

There are moments when time stands still, you wish something would happen, a lightning strike to clear the air, a line to cross, rivets popping in the steel core of your brain. I was tense and counting and it was now nine minutes, he was looking at me. “We need to go very soon.” We both stood up, he nodded to the barman, my eyes were on the door and the traffic flashes. “I do have transport,” he said. He clicked the fob and the gull wing opened, I lowered myself in, he was surprisingly nimble and behind the wheel in seconds. I turned and saw the blue and red of police lights. We were gone as they pulled up. We were gone.

I thought how small a part of my life this moment was, riding in this car, stilted conversation, headed out into some other part of the night. Escaping from shadows and flashing lights, while all the other events, the deaths, lives, warnings and crimes all orbited around in my head in a scattered and disorderly jumble. The car sped on, the rain lashed and daylight and sunshine seemed foreign concepts now impossible to believe in. That was where she lived, in some warm sunny place where colour was natural and the edges of reality were clear beyond any traffic buzz and blur. That was where she was. In harbour, I was still at sea.

An hour's driving without conversation took us past the city limits and into the Quarry Area. I may have slept. We moved between great chunks of rock, broken landscapes and scattered boulder fields. Raw materials had been gathered from here when the first cities were put together, the concrete and plastic mix that now stood in a rain lashed pattern, stolen rocks that were clad with the shards of millions of years of geological action and modern shame. The time of development had been relatively brief, now we were running down the clock and large parts of this landscape were desolate and in places returning to some wilder past. He turned up a dirt road and pulled up at a battered prefabricated site office building. As grey as the rock, weather beaten and forlorn. Signs warned and vehicles rusted, materials stood unsold, uncollected in piles. I imagined the scattered papers, worn clothing, dusty dirty cups and plates and other skeletons that must be inside.

Banner fumbled with a key and key-code and the door moved but there was a resistance, he pushed on it with his shoulder, I imagined a body stooped behind. My eyes were playing and scanning everywhere, dry blood was pumping, the wide open spaces were hemming me in, I was uneasy. The door gave way and opened. Inside wasn't as bad as I'd expected, someone had been here recently and it was clearer and a bit more clean than I'd expected, well clean apart from a fine layer of dust that seemed to cover everything. “We're safe here, you're safe here,” that was all he said.

In life it can take quite an effort to make a thing happen. You have to start, you have to move yourself, you have to break through that stubborn barrier that says “I'm staying here, I'm not moving.” Of course that can happen quite quickly and with little warning but it's when you stop, lose the momentum gained in the chase, it's hard to make up that speed again, hard to restart and get running. Now here I was, melting away into the conspiracy and game set against me and hiding, doing what they'd expect. I knew deep down none of this was going to work and I had to know what it was Banner wanted from me. There were still overdue and outstanding conversations.

No custodial sentence

I was almost happy, this time, unexpectedly I'd avoided a custodial sentence. The judge had summed up, he'd summed me up, he got to the point and held back, he was that sharp. They handed my gun back to me at the check out, I hadn't expected that either. "We'll see you again soon enough Deckard", said the bulldog faced cop on the door as he chewed a cigar and spat as he spoke. I didn't even bother answering, I just looked out into the gloom to see if any taxi lights were approaching. The traffic was thin, no yellow glow so I just took up the rhythm of the rain and walked along the running, splashing gutter. Somehow that seemed appropriate. Today might be Tuesday or Thursday, it might even be my birthday if ever I'd had such a thing, whatever day it was there were grounds for celebration, all I had to do was find a warm bar.

98 years ago

This what Europe used to look like, tough, angry, intolerant, industrious, divided and made of cast iron. Over the years a few things have changed but the overall shape and the glowering, ugly faces remain and Britain is very much an island.

Get down from that cross, we could use the wood

My head was spinning slowly and there was the dim beginning of physical pain, just about everywhere. I decided to go out for a walk about, fill the time creatively with something, maybe take photographs and avoid the weather. Soon I was wandering on a stony, muddy beach but the dimmed pain was getting stronger and I felt panicky, coming up like a tropical storm on the horizon. Quivering as if in anti-gravity boots I stumbled, there was a warm flush, physical pain gives way to physical weakness. I have been in a car crash, it happened a few days ago but it was real, only now, much later am I beginning to feel the shock. Is that me? So desensitised, so uncoupled from feeling that I take a punch like a dinosaur. The punch is landed, the blow presses the flesh and triggers the nerves but the scream and electricity and pain travels so slowly from the source on the long and winding distance to the centre a huge portion of time elapses before anything registers. How can that be? I conclude that I'm wired up in a way that lends it's self towards the dysfunctional, perhaps it's a gift. It may have been drugs or witnessed family trauma, years of religion and cod philosophy, or being nurtured in the best working class hopelessly emotionally stunted traditions, maybe read too few or the wrong books, now I'm lost inside myself.  

Naturally I contemplated some kind of inner suicide, a easy way to run away that, in the plan, always has some pleasurable activity factored in there as a prelude to the final awful ending. A pleasant golden frame into which the unspeakable act is conveniently placed. These are generally complex, warm and foreign activities, like a holiday but with an end that's the end. They've been rolled around and developed over years, thumbed like some business contingency plan written when there was a staff surplus and a big box had to be ticked. They follow the “Star is Born” model (the black and white version) and promise the dreamer a suitable and almost dignified conclusion, “shaking off futility or just punishing somebody”, so that's about it for that. The experience is like visiting a parking lot but not being able to find your car so you have to shuffle to the exit and rely on public transport or make a quick phone call to be rescued by a family member. It's an embarrassing audition and rehearsal sequence that will not lead to a performance but the script remains familiar and well thumbed over before it's finally filed away.

Once I'd stopped trembling from the most likely age related stumble I felt better, strangely the sun came out and I started taking badly composed flimsy photographs and fiddling with the phone. It was a useful distraction but I still felt that illicit urge to run, like I was walking around with a target across my chest. I responded as per normal, turned my back on sunny highways and ideal quiet airports and went home. I self harmed with a packet of plain crisps in the kitchen, they seemed extra oily and greasy. This helped my inner loathing just a bit. Then I flopped, the couch conveniently caught me.

I don't know where stuff comes from. Perhaps I should make honest lists or fill notebooks. Here I am and I've no idea where I'm going. Life's directions has become caught up in flotsam and jetsam theories and methodology. Like yellow bath ducks or ping pong balls thrown onto the tides and now circulating around the globe, probably in the Pacific Ocean by now.

A day ahead

I’m fairly satisfied that the things going on in my head are not quite normal, however that doesn't make them uncommon, there are numbers and statistics, anecdotes and description, explanations and quite a bit of scientific and medical study out there. It's all documented. In some places the legislation has changed, moved on, taken into account the wider world of political imperatives, human rights, values and that most fickle and awkward part of this to capture and define, public opinion and taste. I'll ignore religion in this as that tends to be of little help, it's like a dam built against progress, resisting the Zeitgeist with a purpose and determination that is of course divine and beligerant. It will never help (unless the divine nature changes).

So being myself again, I'm in some supermarket, picking up things, putting them down, reading labels, putting them in the cart, feigning interest. It's all vague and embarrassing but it goes with the job, the need for constant pretence defended by a robust presentation. The hard, unspeakable part of a living out an elaborate lie. Maybe now if I'm driving a car, alone, not part of a group, a bunch, no brothers or sisters, no companions. The feel the intrusive lens remains on me, be it truth or imagined, I'm outside of my body all the time, floating and capturing the moment and feeding it all back in so that it can be dissected, judged and marked, commented on, perhaps even approved of before it sinks and drowns in that other morass. Remorse.

Back in my head there's a cacophony, unrelenting, options screaming for decisions, jousting for attention and a slice of peace. Reflection. It all passes understanding and falls backwards into misunderstanding. That's the normal, serial misunderstanding. The words I say are muzzled and muted, squeezed, coupled up saxophone notes in dim jazz clubs, a lazy tinkling cymbal or a dull economic bass thump, a foreign music that even as it's stretching ears and brain cells defies understanding. That word again, that intoxicating word spun into the interpretation in that song and that music and melody, in a bucket at the bottom of the well. In the water at the bottom of the well, deep and drowned.

I'm still making this unscripted documentary, for myself, for the sake of some superstitious drive to touch the wood at the root of the tree, for luck and vague shit, for old times sake, for a better hallucination. The ongoing delusion, the ongoing and elaborate self serving fiction. It keeps me alive, smiling, confused and lit up from within with some green ray. I will not deny myself any twinkle in my eye, I will not deny that thought, the one that came from nowhere like some lost migrating bird and as it so happens landed on my head and then in a quasi religious way, as a part of some mystical process it got inside and decided to settle there. That was the story of that thought.

I am indeed a full day ahead of myself. A privileged position that may turn out to be very useful.

Social media explained

Non-driving robot week

Odd and varied behaviour: On today's random journey I was following a Fiat Punto travelling across the Forth Bridge, suddenly a sandwich flew out of the driver's window and bounced on the road in front of me. I took the driver's action to be deliberate and I wondered quite what had led up to that action. As the sandwich sped by me I noticed that it was brown and triangular, I couldn't however distinguish the filling though I strongly suspected that it had not been to the driver's taste. Why had he thrown it out and why was he eating a sandwich whilst driving across the bridge? Of course it may be that his female copilot had been eating the sandwich and either on impulse, opportunity or as a result of some in car altercation had decided to throw it through the open driver's window and onto the wet road surface. I imagined that in the car an emergency had occurred, the sandwich, though labeled as egg and cress had, due to in factory contamination, contained traces of nuts. The driver, on his long journey from Broxburn to Inverkeithing had become hungry and requested that his companion open up the £2.50 Lite Bite Tesco sandwich and hand it over to him as he drove. She complied and handed the crumby snack over. He bit into it but within a few seconds felt a strange tightening in his throat and quickly deduced that he was on the verge of anaphalacitic shock and there and then decided to ditch the offending sandwich before it killed him. The sandwich hit the road, he however now had a small trace of nutty debris coursing through his sensitive blood stream.

That trace amount slowly closed his throat and airways and he slumped into unconsciousness across the steering wheel. The female passenger quickly grabbed the wheel and steered a straight course across the bridge to the northern lay-by where she parked up. She then had the presence of mind to give the driver a good slap and he then came round complaining of a sore throat, face and head and feeling hungry. “There's another one of those sandwiches that you like left in the packet,” she said.

More on robots

Good advice from our metal friend.

The ten golden laws of robotic diplomacy.

If you ever meet up with a wise robot please choose your words carefully. Conversations with wise mechanical men are notoriously tricky and you ensure you follow the following things that follow the final use of the word follow in this sentence, follow?

Eye contact is good, steely wrist to fleshy neck is not.

Speak clearly, avoid saliva spray, robots dislike excessive human moisture and bodily fluids, (sweaty palms can produce mild electrical shocks).

Don't put on a funny voice.

Don't do a funny 80's dance or adopt a comedy robot gait.

Don't offer up a can of oil as if it was some kind of acceptable beverage.

Just act as normally as you can if you are any kind of slightly ill at ease middle-aged person who's never quite come to terms with the hand of cards that life has dealt you.

Try no to speak in mathematical formulae or binary code.

Most robots consider Japanese to be their mother tongue, learn it.

Don't try to plug any mobile appliances you may be carrying into any of the robot's ports. This can cause serious offence.

Robots aren’t stupid, don't address them as if they are washing machines or other white goods (and why are you talking to washing machines in the first place?).

Gossip about Bender and any of the cast of Futurama is a good icebreaker.

A warm room does soothe the circuits, check out the environment and get the ambiance right first time.

If the robot offers you a snack made up mostly of iron filings then he/she is only having a laugh.

In robot etiquette it is quite acceptable to leave a slightly greasy stain on a chair or carpet.

That's about all I know.

Ensure you insure

Late in the day we explore the possibility of once again getting it all straight and legal, always a tough call. Words that seem to be just a shade short of right and appropriate, but we must keep within an inch or less of the law and the ideas that pour forth from that idea. After all we are respectable, reliable and up to a point safe and bankable. That can't be said for everybody. So there is no point obsessing about it, you make your call or click or whatever and choose one of a million options, the one that somehow covers your basic needs, has a nice name or a pleasant logo and fits with that number you thought of when there was still time left in which to think. You can just about remember it. Enter the magic numbers and the security code and you're in and gone. Two months later you get a cuddly toy in the post. Simple.

Stay in shape

Things have changed. It was a huge shop window, brightly lit in a headache inducing way, whites, bright pinks, wild oranges and hot purples circled and bounced into the corners, lights pooled and swam, it was a show, even empty, bereft of product. It was all daring, distracting and hypnotic but my gaze and attention wouldn't hold. I was far to hungry to be entertained or enticed. Food was my current preoccupation, not the joy of art or design and filling spaces. Food was becoming a background obsession, playing on my consciousness like that stupid light show, I was feeling hungry, in and out of shapes.

Shapes are everywhere, here, there, all around, the universe is full of shapes, made up of shapes, I am a shape and I must maintain that shape or at least control it. With shape and self awareness comes responsibility, what actual shape to aspire to? Which one to choose and maintain?

I looked away from those hungry windows and their vapid but tantalising colours, across great paved areas, blank spaces set for vehicles and traffic, green lines for pedestrians, signs and awkward bollards, trees blocked in by regulation, more shapes and boundaries and definitions. I observed my own shape fitting in with the others, my shadow stepping across the surfaces, my eyes measuring and grading spaces and dimensions. Sizing up and taking account of the space, sensing as if through giant whiskers that touched the far walls, the concrete and the road noise that rose from behind the masked barriers. I am here, this shape in space.

And then she comes in to my outside space, talking, talking already without any invitation, telling me things and insisting, a threatening and enticing shape, a shape that pulls me out of shape, automatically. I decide to just stay in this orbit, to fix my reference points, to focus on myself and ignore but the joints and linkages are weak and things seep through. I stay in my orbit, tainted but revolving and with no small effort retained my shape.