Dead on Leave

        Dead on Leave
        
        “I’m a dead person on leave,” he responds, “with a little too shy of good money.”
        She then asked if his condition gave him much trouble. The ulcers on the bottom of his feet, seen through the whiteness of his socks.
        “So I need somewhere to be, primarily because something is going to be sent to me, by the royal mail, in two days. And secondary to that, because I have no house. This sanctuary is addressed, has an address, right it does.”
        Her third question was lost in the air between the three of them on the bottommost floor: her, him, and the young intern behind the sunglasses. Through the whining in his head they was unable to catch exactly what it was that she said, in what manner – to what discrepancy it was owed that she refused to follow up to his ensuing response evaporated, and feeling a sudden sublimation the intern stowed away its typewriter and made for the back door.
        Her fourth question came as the sun broke its wings on the window. Delirious, “Do you know what you’re going to get?”
        “Of course.” He thought she must be mad. Both his legs, bowed neither inwards nor outwards, shifted off the coffee table. “It’s going to be a used copy of a book, the book’s called La Belle Sauvage, was written a very long time ago now. And it’s coming with some other bits too, here and there.” His lips polarised. It was the universal symbol for surprise.
        “You remembered something?” she thought. He nodded, closing his mouth.
       
        *

        By midnight black holes had come to the yellow seaville. One surrounded a metal table skirting a dairy stall: milk, cheese, yoghurt, ice creams. In its centre, having been engulfed headfirst and wholly, sat the man with his extra-soft sandals. He figured: cigarettes are problematic when there are no other problems to be confronted, and figured with further daring, that the black hole was not on its way out, and was indeed proposing a large, vicious problem. The smoke wouldn’t have even been able to make it out; no one, not the families on either side of his conundrum, nor the gulls in the roof, none, could be harmed.
        He sat for a long time until she came down to meet him as arranged.
        “Okay, my father’s just gone to- to the mainland. Look, he’s in that one there.” She pointed at a handsome skiff on the distant water. “Moment looks fast but it’s a fairly large ocean between us and them over there, so you can spend the night without a doubt. And then you can go. But maybe your package will have come, maybe it will come tonight and be waiting for you in the front room tomorrow morning.”
        “I have a new issue.” She took a seat dutifully.
        “It’s likely that you can’t see it, but I’m surrounded on all sides at the moment. I expected this to happen but not quite so soon, and now that it’s happened I’m realising that it was a mistake to have the package ordered so damn late.”
        “Why?”
        “The book would tell me how to escape, that’s why.”
        “But how would it get to you in the first place, if you’re surrounded, on all sides?”
        Their names were C— and N—, they saw each other a few times succeeding the transaction of La Belle Sauvage, and then remembered nothing of each other even when miles apart. Even from the edge of the world C— could have waited some more and forgotten her. Even here at the edge of the world, with nothing to be done and nothing but pure oxygen in the air, there were no up-dwellings of remorse, incredulity, bewilderment, mirth, silence. Most inexplicable, that he could not yet recall the sourceless whining on the morning of his long-deceased instrumental day, how she had lathered over it with her discomforted words. He only thought of the several lingering repercussions involving his study of the book, which in its many pages addressed only the absolute details of its dogma. And as somewhat an afterthought, he renewed his study of a question asked of him last decade. He remembered what it was precisely, spoke it, spoke it aloud, spoke each word in turn, rearranged it into a form that still made sense, tossed and turned it over. With the reserve of fortune he had built up for himself he remembered the shape and feel of his answer – certain that his answer was still alive, surviving somewhere in the world at that very instance on its own two haunches — knew that the answer had been wrong, wrong, wrong.