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Future Flash - Back to the Past

(Chapter One)

"Hey Johnny boy!" Griff yelled over the crowd. "Telephone!"

Griff couldn't remember the last time someone had called Johnny there.

Johnny carefully put down his cards and looked at the bartender, raising his left eyebrow. "It's for me? Crikey! Who the hell is calling me here?.

"Your mobile's been ringing for the last five minutes", Griff said, "and we're all tired of listening to it!"

"Of course," Johnny nodded as Griff handed him his mobile phone. He might be as "mean as a man can come" (a veritable compliment coming from Griff) but he was also a little slow, and next week he would be even slower. Johnny was fat, and getting fatter. Every week.

Big Johnny thought about his old life and the silver service he had been accustomed to and decided he was hungry - he could easily have polished off a five pound steak, but he could no longer afford it. It is true that his adopted pleasure-withholding mantra forced him to make such sacrificial choices, and that he, in fact, garnered some semblance of enjoyment from doing so. But Johnny was bankrupt. That is, he had spent most if not all of his philosophical capital. If he was honest with himself, he might rethink his logic. But it was long since too late for that.

"Sortez de mon lit de fleur aha!," his sensei had told him long ago. Initially, he'd been annoyed with his sensei's random sayings, especially when he only understood ordinary talk, but he seemed now to understand this strange circular logic, especially since he bothered to translate the saying. By withholding pleasures one heightens the enjoyment of that which comes naturally and that which comes naturally is inherently pleasurable. Johnny came from an order of wanna-be wry philosophers who prided themselves on being apologists for circularity.

His thoughts were disturbed by the butt crack of billiards and the voice on the phone acknowledging the order, "ten minutes". Johnny checked his wallet. Ten minutes! He'd be ready! He'd pay exact change of course; no tip, no nothing. Big Johnny was a wry son of a bitch. Everyone knew that. They all knew better than to get in his way. Even Carlo, Johnny reflected. With a wry grin on his face he counted out coins and dug to the place deep in his pocket for the extra penny stuck there.

Carlo had unsuccessfully attempted to queue jump at the grocery store earlier in the day. It was unsuccessful, as the grocery store had been closed. But no one pushed their way in front of Big Johnny, as Carlo had found out to his detriment. Then afterwards there had been the unmercifully filed complaint with the store's cardboard-cut-out of a manager; that had been Johnny down to the ground. He was a stickler for paperwork and bureaucracy, especially when he was the beneficiary.

Johnny knew he'd annoyed Carlo, but even he would have been surprised to see the effect his run-in with his old partner was having right now across town.

Carlo sat alone in the squalid gloom of his shabby apartment, silently contemplating the shot of strychnine he had prepared to numb the pain of his encounter with Johnny, the latest cringe-inducing event in a long line of recent humiliations, lay on the night stand beside him. He carefully handled the works to get his hit. Almost immediately, his skin prickled and his lungs seized up. Strychnine, for those not usually involved in geopolitics, is a hot topic! In small doses, it hurt. In large ones, however--he did not dare to think. It felt like fear itself was trying to claw itself out of each and every pore. Crap! He could only think in mangled clichés, in blanks.

He grabbed the antidote he had prepared and struggled to hold the needle steady. Sensible alternatives had to exist! Already he could feel his mind slipping and the edges of his vision begin to darken.

"No...," he moaned, as everything went black. He waved his hand past his face, but all around was an amalgam of blurred silhouette, consciousness melting into a haze of delirium. Nothing registered - not his electric bill lying unpaid on the kitchen counter, along with the disconnection notice and countless reminders of overdue bills at the doggie parlor. It was not the first time this had happened; it was becoming a regular occurrence. But his concerns were elsewhere on more pressing issues.

When Carlo came to, Inu peered at him, head cocked, pink tongue lolling in good humor. Carlo wondered what time it was.

Time to get a watch he chuckled wryly to himself. The watch chuckled right back. He saw himself reflected in the marble of Inu's intelligent eyes. Staring for what felt like several long minutes, he wondered if Inu understood.

Understood what? he wondered.

"Understood what?" said the evil voice.

He struggled to pick himself back off the floor. Inu wanted to go for a walk. His reading of some book on his computer screen, which he had promised to finish that evening, was not getting very far.

Carlo grabbed a lead and wheeled himself out the door with Inu straggling behind. Their pace picked up - there was a feverish anticipation in the air. Maybe it was just that bit of strychnine that did it, or maybe it was just because it was Friday, but Carlo knew there was no mistaking the wry jazz that was flowing through his veins.

"Scholars and historians most commonly hold postmodernism to be a movement of ideas contrary to modernism. Modernism places a great deal of importance on ideals such as rationality, objectivity, and progress -- as well as other ideas rooted in the Enlightenment, and as positivist and realist movements from the late 19th century. Postmodernism questions whether these ideals can actually exist at all!" Carlo shouted, suddenly aware of how much of his brain was now in the public domain.

(Chapter Two) Mr. Bell sat beside his wife‘s hospital bed at Royal Melbourne, waiting. Her comatose state had taken ten years of dark rings from around her eyes. Mr. Bell was beginning to think he was falling in love, all over again. He also realized he hated his name. 'Today I am no longer known as Mr. Bell', shouted Mr. Bell, 'From now on I shall be known as Senator Jupiter Teetjuc, and I promise death on any who fail to recognize my new name." He had overslept the morning of the Hale Bop mass suicides, and was secretly pleased. Now he could carry forth all the ancient traditions, plus the new ones he dreamed every night. When he wished to travel incognito he used the alias, Charlie Two. Since he already knew a Charlie, and One would be a horrible last name. "Or would it?", he thought to himself. "Good lord this life, why must your questions always have three answers?", he yelled quietly so someone could hear him, but not loud enough that the orderly would come in and utter a catch phrase from some Austin Texas rodeo show. It was all such drivel. His wife was laying in a coma, and damn it Charlie Bell Teetjuc loved her. He was gonna love her no matter what they said.

Three beds along (that's forgetting the two beds whose bodies were near enough transparent, the couch covered in dying cockroaches, and the float pillow), Ms. George lay alone, waiting to bring another Ms. George into the world. John Bell was worried for his wife; Ms. George was worried for herself. She stared blankly through the frosted glass at the deserted streets, caressing her swollen stomach. Although she had been longing to have her body back, she knew she would miss being this close to the baby growing inside of her. This was, she thought, as close as two people could be. She thought of her own mother and how they were once bound together so intimately. That didn't seem possible anymore.

Beside her, the bed creaked rhythmically. She looked at the man who had been admitted yesterday and grimaced. The blanket seethed like a stormy ocean, his hands beneath making waves. Her hands shot up to cover her belly. There was a patient like him coming into the hospital every week.

Then, remembering that the man had lost both of his legs, her fear became revulsion.

"What is wrong with you?" she growled. But the man merely smiled wryly. I like it when patients seem to get on. But I do prefer it when I don't know exactly what they're thinking.

Behind the smile, Runihura Morouse was pondering his recent media coverage. He was not very pleased with his nickname; why should they call him the Tango Poisoner? Tango was not a poisonous dance; quite the opposite, tango was seduction, embrace and Argentinian-style economic meltdown. Tango, a dance born in the brothels of Montevideo and Buenos Aires, where poor, newly arrived European immigrants and old whores dance, waiting for customers or for the time to pass by so they could afford bread the next day.

What the newspaper writers who had coined the moniker had seized upon, however, was Runi's murderous style, for which he had become infamous. Carefully choosing his partners for that sad sort of beauty that comes from loving and losing, he would thrill them with his masterful technique and seduce them with his passion before whisking them away to a quiet end. But, Runi reflected bitterly, perhaps the universe had an innate sense of irony. The loss of both feet in a freak accident the previous week had resulted in his being placed in the ward between Ms. George and Mrs. Bell.

Although his dancing days were done, Runi still knew a trick or two. Hitching himself up on his elbows, he fixed his still-seductive smile on the exhausted Ms. George as he leaned over to her.

"Give me a kiss," he said. "A big wet one for your Ru Ru."

This time words failed her, and Ms.George hissed, a noise of disgust to rebuff this obvious madman.

Runi would not be dissuaded. "C'mon," he cooed. "It takes two to tango. It'll help take your mind off your troubles and make your problems go away. Dance right, and the world doesn't matter any more." He leered at her with his too toothy smile.

"What's going on here?" a nurse bellowed, her heavy footwear pounding across the gleaming tiles. Ms. George exhaled deeply. Foiled for the moment, Runi frowned, realizing that no longer having a pair of feet was, incredibly, one of his lesser worries.

Little did he know, one of Runi's more pressing worries, Julian Keepsake, lay motionless in Ward 4 of the same hospital. He was the victim of a mysterious pants-fitting accident just hours earlier. His twisted and broken body was strapped tightly in a brace, preventing any movement.

Downstairs in the administrator's office, Detective Sergeant Anderson of the Victorian Police Karana Task Force was interviewing the rotund, balding sturgeon who had just saved Keepsake's life.

"What are his chances?" Sergeant Anderson asked.

"I'd give him a 70/30 chance of living, about the same as I'd give Collingwood of winning six matches in 2007," the sturgeon replied, stroking his gills.

Sergeant Anderson shook his head. "Christ, you're kidding," he muttered. "He's our best chance of cracking this case. He's the only one left who knows."

"Knows what?" the sturgeon asked.

"He's the only one who knows where Keepsake is hiding."

"Who's Waldo?"

"Damnit, don't you read children's books?!" Anderson shouted. "We've finally identified Keepsake, aka the Tango Poisoner, and the only information as to his whereabouts is in the mind of that young man. This Keepsake needs to recover and talk again or more people are going to die."

With creased brows, Sergeant Anderson stepped quietly into the corridor to smoke a cigarette, directly beneath the red and white 'no smoking' sign on the wall behind him. "And another monster sees daylight," he said and drew in smoke. There was nothing to do now except wait and pray for the injured man's recovery.

His thoughts suddenly flew off from the matter at hand, and he imagined putting his ear to his wife's belly to hear the tiny heartbeat inside.

He took a full lung's worth of cigarette smoke and wondered what his wife would have said if he had tried to light up around their unborn child. How far away she was. Grimacing, he stubbed out the cigarette on his forehead and slapped another nicotine patch onto his arm.

Keepsake had to pull through. He had to. If he didn't, Waldo would go free, and the St Kilda code could fall into the wrong hands.

Warwick heard the scuffle of footsteps from above through the wooden boards. He strained again to pull his hands free from the rope but the worn skin burned like an iron skillet and humidity under the black pillow on his head made him feel like he couldn't breathe. A door cracked open and voices, harsh voices, started to pierce the blackness. "Get that bag off his head, I wanna talk to the dipshit."

Warwick's chin snapped back when the bag was yanked clean. The harsh light only stopped by the face of a oily business man. "Mr C, Today, my little man, I'm going to do you a favor." A strong arm ripped the silver tape from his lips. The gorillas made laughter about his wax job. Vincent continued "You see, these guys" pulling his tie down "really wanna hurt you. All I want is a name."

"What do you wanna know" Warwick sheepishly asked. Vincent motioned to one of his lackies, who produced a photo graph.

"Who took this photograph?" A blank look came on Warwick's face, and then it dropped to fear.

"I don't know?"

"Gee Mr C, I was kinda hoping that you would know. You know - cuz, arr, if you kinda like don't, well, arr, then these guys are gonna wanna have some fun."

"But I don't know who it is" Warwick pleaded now shuffling his arms.

"Yeah, arrr-that doesn't matter. Boys I'm real sorry but this guy doesn't know anything." Vincent started to circle the chair. He started to shake his head as he spoke. "Its so hard to believe when we know this photo was used in one of your community newletters".

"What - well, don't be stupid - I mean - rash.. I don't approve all photos for publication, I have editors who do that sometimes.. we are a small business."

"No I'm sorry Mr C, see we ain't buying that.. no we ain't. We know you were onto those news reports and found out a few things, we have a friend who fed some bad source to a Journalist here."

"I'm telling you that I would know if someone was going to publish something to do with your family, I'm not out of the circle just yet." Warwick locked eyes with Vincent.

"Yeah arr that too, um seems the circle is now going to not need your services."

"So you're going to kill me?" Warwick was now feeling the pangs of pain in his abdomen but the foul taste in his mouth solidified his resolve.

"No Mr C, I said I'm here to do you a favor."

"Well I don't know who took it, maybe I can find out."

"Well if you don't, Mr C., you're going to be right back here, and the boys will be using our dimple burger machine. We're beginning a new franchise and need to test drive it with some fresh meat."

Ham, he thought, yes it must be ham. The deliciousness of the meat would surely guarantee the success of the franchise. One must be careful though. If the ham turns green, Dr. Suess may turn nasty.

(Chapter Three) "Oh, my , oh, my, oh, my," despaired Madeline, looking up to the colorful blur of the ceiling fan, its noise breaking into her thoughts of something ill-defined but despicable. The three-year-old cocker spaniel she begrudgingly shared with Georgina began to bark in the upstairs bedroom. It was no doubt confused and upm her mind, especially since she'd taken the decision to make a life with her. They had first met in college, and back then Madeline had been attracted to what she had believed was genuine emotional sensitivity. She had viewed Georgina as a dream made flesh, with her bubble gum lipstick and her wry, willowy features. It was a dream from which she was beginning to wish she could wake up from.

Suddenly, Georgina sprang up out of the tub, scented water splashing all over the room.

"Schöne Ferien!!"

"Why, why would you scare me so?" cried Madeline, half relieved and half aghast.

"Because my name is Georgia, not Georgina. All these years you've had it wrong, and I needed to teach you a lesson. Now get out of the bathroom so I can clean up."

But, no, this time it was no joke. Madeline drifted out of the room, and back to their distant past. Back then everyone had called Georgina a "lipstick lesbian". Madeline scoffed at the nickname: it sounded as if lesbians couldn't – or didn't want to – look good. She gladly let Georgina kiss her that first time, kiss her brusquely with those soft pink lips. She looked in the mirror and nearly smiled, delicately curling her fingers to her palm as if she were holding that moment. She knew that together they had had more good times than many people have in a lifetime.

Madeline dragged herself away from the side of the tub, pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket and dialed 911. "I want to report a suicide," she said, her voice tired, monotone and emotionless. "Yes... Thank you... Okay."

Click.

Madeline's main thought was not what to do with their life, but how on earth she would tell their friends and family that Georgina took a knife and slit her own throat, her own beautiful, pure white throat that was the envy of most other women who knew them well. Madeline, often called "Lucky Maddie" because she had been just that, born rich, beautiful, wry and quite talented, had had almost everything going for her. Until she met the, only now so obviously, troubled and tormented Georgina. Dear Georgina - the only girl who could have a mouse tattooed on her bottom, call it art and get away with it.

But more than anything she didn't want to break the news of Georgina's demise to her sister Jenny. The poor, drug-addicted woman was married to that idiot Carlo, who cared only for his dog that had been dead for six years, but whose taxidermist-preserved body still occupied a prominent spot in Carlo's mental landscape (as well as a favored resting place on top of the television set in the spare bedroom). Maddie knew Inu's dead body was taken for walks daily, even though any emissions from his sawdust-stuffed form were mere figments of Carlo's diseased imagination.

Probably the only person on earth who had made Georgina laugh longer and heartier than she herself had was Jenny, often merely by reporting wryly on her husband's exploits. Now Maddie had to break the awful news to Jenny. She breathed out a heavy sigh and with a forced resoluteness clicked Jenny's number on her speed dial list. But as she did so she immediately hung up again. She could not tell Jenny over the phone - it was one thing to lose a sister, but another thing altogether to lose what Madeline suspected was the framework that had kept Jenny upright for the last few years. Theirs had not been a happy family, with accusations to and fro and a pervasive bitterness that had led to the gradual abandonment of annual family gatherings. With every disappointment in their parents' and siblings' conduct it seemed that the bond between Jenny and Georgina had gained fresh, tough strands.

And as she thought about Jenny and Georgina she realised with a shudder what had caused her earlier and seemingly disconnected thought of a house: now there was going to be no stopping Carlo from building the house that had occupied so much of his idle time and rudimentary thought. Without the weight of Georgina's voice it would be all but impossible for Jenny to prevent Carlo from using the money - her and Georgina's money - to set in motion the construction of that catastrophe. The thought made Madeline feel physically ill. She had to act swiftly.

(Chapter Four) Carlo had not thought about the house in years. He never cared about Inu, his father's prints or any of his needs. What kind of wife was she? A lousy one, a no good, scruffy-looking Nerfherder!!! A ho in the kitchen and a slug in bed, turning his world upside-down. He'd tell you that straight away. She always told him he was an insensitive lout who was fortunate to be in a state that would make other people sensitive to him. He ignored her anyway, no matter what she said, what she did. What could she say that could compete with one fuzzy, warm hair on Inu's back? IF only Inu had been feline! Then he might have had a chance to set things right with Kate. Allergies were unpredictable and in the end, created a world full of strange bedfellows. Even his wife's slutty sister Georgina, was more affectionate than Jenny.

"I remember this one." He held to the light the print his father fondly named Lost Paradise and remembered the time he himself was in Paradise with Jenny; it seemed a long time ago, before the meds, before the accident, before the drudgery of their life together, and the print itself seemed insubstantial, ethereal, like the smell of smoked trout left for too long in a wardrobe.

Carlo could smell the stiff ink in its tin. He could feel the roughly ripped cotton rags that took him back to that time he and Jenny lay together on sheets down in thoughts of Jenny scattered. She didn't deserve a pleasant thought. She didn't deserve anything but... anything but... and here Carlo paused. The only thing he could think of to finish that sentence was 'anything but cake'. For the sad truth was, Jenny and Carlo probably deserved each other and the life they had ended up creating.

With the sigh, Carlo looked down at his long-suffering pet. "Was I really as bad as all that, Inu? Did I really deserve all that anger? All those things she said?" And he thought back over the all years and all the promises he had broken. "What?" he said, as Inu gazed back at him with an impassive stare. "Don't look at me like that. I bought her flowers."

Inu barked. Carlo looked up. For a brief second he had seen her again as she used to be. And then a loud bang shattered his thoughts.

"What the hell is he on about? Who's 'Inu'?" the doctor asked the EMT that had brought Carlo in, struggling to keep pace with Carlo's gurney as it plowed through the swinging doors and onwards, deeper into the hospital.

"Search me, doc," the bemused woman replied, keeping the IV drip attached to Carlo's twitching arms aloft. "But I can definitely tell you he's hopped up pretty good on something"

"Something, something, sumpthin, sumptin." The word triggered a reaction in Carlo's mind. Back and forth, in and out, the word ticked away as Carlo laid helplessly listening to his mind bat the word against the pitted wall of his memory, waiting for the relentless echo of it to fade. A glimpse of it flickered in his mind just as the word was fading away to silence. He tried desperately to hold the feeling, hoping against hope that by doing so the memory would come. The word echoed one last time. Then, with it, the feeling of the memory vanished, leaving a crushing sadness in the void.

(Chapter Five) Possessed by mild arousal in the temporal lobe as he basked in the unfiltered sunlight, he worked the cleaning rod through the barrel with patient hands. Reflecting on how esoteric the concept was, he whistled into the blowing dust. Rough, waving grasses veiled a forest of petrified wooden crosses reaching from the edge of the neglected highway back to the tree line.

"Got a thing comin', the both of ya," he muttered across the miles and back through the creaking years. "Got payment to take for what you done." With empty eyes full of fire and a grin full of teeth, he looked up at faces only he could see.

He spoke to himself again. To himself. To God. To the thin, old nurse outside in the white hallway. Where did this leave him? The last lead to the whereabouts of Toni Scolletti had just been wheeled away to the morgue. When in doubt, stick to the book, that was the key. Anderson trudged slowly down the long white corridors towards the morgue, his mind filled with elusive,dark thoughts about what will happen.

Finding the morgue unlocked and deserted he slipped inside and after a quick browse he found the body of Keepsake resting beneath plastic sheeting on an autopsy table. It looked like nothing so much as one of those cheap microwave dinners with the plastic wrap still on. Carefully, he removed the plastic covering from the corpse revealing a body criss-crossed with hieroglyphs. His eyes fastened on one symbol in particular that captured his attention, its inky scrawls high up on the hip. He leaned in closer to get a better look. Very interesting, very interesting. He flipped out his notebook and faithfully replicated what he saw. Keepsake's house might provide him with a lead, and there was no point in hanging around here any longer. As he began to leave the hospital, he again saw the irritating little sturgeon.

"I thought you said his chances of survival were 70/60?" Anderson demanded, the latest setback in his long pursuit firing his anger.

The sturgeon shrugged, "I overestimated your mental powers! 70/60 adds up to 130 percent. I said 70/30. I really thought he might pull through, sergeant, but as I explained earlier, he took an unexpected turn for the worse a while after you stepped out - shortly after his visitors left."

Anderson looked confused.

The sturgeon stared at him. "What? My hair's fine."

"Visitors? What visitors?"

"A stylish woman and in a black mink coat. She mentioned you by name, said you had approved her visit. Is there...sergeant?"

"Funny that" said an evil voice.

Anderson wasn't stopping to listen to the rest of the scaled creature's prattle, however. He was already racing towards the hospital exit. He could feel the urgency of having to take a dump. RIGHT NOW!

The sturgeon began to chase after him. "You haven't paid your bill yet!" he screamed, throwing daggers towards him in slow-mo.

As he sprinted around the corner in time to see the back of a familiar figure with a stuffed schnauzer under her arm slip out the big automatic doors, tailed by a dark-furred mammal with feline attributes (see cats). He hurriedly scribbled detailed notes in his diary. His trained powers of observation were sizzling hot tonight. Just wait until the Chief hears about this!

In the comfort of her chauffeured car, Kate Cafelnakov pulled a cigarette from her purse and placed it on her lips. A lighter followed, and then a photograph. As she exhaled, Kate turned her head from the creased image to the passing cityscape, remembering Carlo. She left when they were too old to be playmates, and too young to be considered a match for life. Times change - older, wiser, and having learned how to stop traffic with a single sultry look, she was ready to create a major disturbance. Destination? Carlo, and with that she lowered the window and gave directions to the driver. Leaning back in her seat, Katie let out a series of smoke rings and smiled. It was so easy. Stroking the head in her lap, she watched the world purr past her window.

• * * * *

Who knew what lay ahead? Maybe some fool would just delete chapter after chapter after chapter - only time would tell...

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