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May 31, 2009

A Death by the Sea

A number of you, especially among those who took part in Clusterflockstock, have read my story “Stop Your Caterwauling”, published in the newest issue of New York Tyrant. Some of you, Deron tells me, have expressed an interest in knowing more about the novel it is excerpted from.

A Death by the Sea (a tentative title–would you prefer The Wolf Hunts the Butterfly?) is a literary thriller, of sorts, set in Malta. The narrator is an American editor and writer who is researching Coleridge’s time in Malta for a novel. He stumbles into a group of elderly men, who had been ‘freedom fighters’ for Maltese independence from Britain, but who seem to be hiding something else as well. I’d rather say too little than too much.

The Anemone Sidecar, Chapter 4 has a section of the novel which precedes the clipping below and begins on page 78 of the pdf.

Anyway, here is another brief segment (and here is a link to one of the “Lykos” drawings if you like.) I appreciate your interest.

from A Death by the Sea:

 

Fifteen minutes later, after I could not begin to count how many flights of stairs, left turns and right turns, and at least three bangs of the skull into overhead beams–I think Officer Andrews deliberately failed to warn me–we exited a steel, not wooden, door and came out on the back side of the Siege Memorial. I could hear the wind whirring around and inside the Great Bell above us in the darkness.

“Now,” Andrews said to Frank, “you take him around to the fish market. I’ve got a date with the morgue.”

“Another change of clothes?” I asked.

“You’re not as slow as you look,” he said. “My uniform gets you clear. Your clothes take care of the rest.” He gripped my hand quickly, then Frank’s. “Is he worth all the trouble, Frank?”

“Yeah, Porky, I think he is.”

“Nobody’s called me Porky in a couple of years.” He patted his flat stomach, then pushed Frank away. “Go.” He re-entered the passage, and the door thumped shut.

“This way,” Frank said, cocking his head to the left.

The waves lapped the concrete abutments not too far below us as we descended the road outside the walls. From time to time laughter floated across the water, an indistinct voice, the thrum of a diesel engine. The beating of the engines–once nothing more than another workaday sound I rarely noticed–was now rather an insistent pounding, an actual force against my eardrums, as strong as the beat, the call to action, of a tribe’s drum corps. I would have to learn, like Frank, how to cushion the blow. The breeze too carried its own assaults–here not the abdominal enticement of a woman’s flow–but instead a dozen different aromas of food, being cooked perhaps a half dozen miles away, the salted richness of the spray when a wave crashed harder than its companions against the concrete or the rocks below it, the more human odor of Frank’s sweat and my own. The detergent in Andrews’s shirt.

And now that the intensity of the dark flight was somewhat relieved, there was also the rasp of his starched trousers against my thighs and knees, the pressure at the back of my armpits where the jacket was cut more snugly than I was accustomed to, the swag of my genitals in the looser military fashion of the boxers.

I wanted to be naked. It came to me suddenly. I wanted to feel the wind all over my skin, the water, and then the wind’s insensate but eminently sensible web, every one of its strands intertwining with my fur, burrowing into my nostrils, caressing my tongue.

Without intending to, I fell to all four and loped past Frank along the edge of the road nearest the uprearing wall, in the densest of the shadows, eyes pivoting, nose to the air, ready for the slightest indication that anything human was nearby. Frank bowled into me from behind, coming up under my ribcage and arrowing between my front legs. We tumbled like puppies in a pet store, and I changed, laughing quietly with unmitigated delight as Frank rolled up to his feet, then knelt in a crouch in front of me.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he whispered. “Aren’t you in enough danger already?”

But I laughed at his worry and boxed at his ears. “Relax, little brother,” I said without thinking. Embarrassed then, I hurried on. “I’m about to be dead, remember?”

“Yeah, if you live long enough. Idiot.” Then the tension drained from his shoulders. “Fine. Be an imbecile. But the fish market is right past that pump station.”

I sat up. “Sure, boss. Let’s go get me killed.”

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