Thread by @JuliusGoat

DEEP

Boyd prefers the burglary.

High-end merchandise, highly technical thefts, no tracks left, no evidence created. In quick, out quick. The occasional picking of a particular prosperous pocket.

The job at the cannery keeps the authorities from sniffing out the secret job, while the secret job keeps him flush.
But his third occupation keeps him sane, sets him apart.

Occupation number three is writer

Yes, the litterateur of Loony Island, the keeper of its flame, the immortalizer of its story, air father, the artistic sheen of the word made real in the flesh of the cranium, ah! It’s occupation number three he lives for. It’s his inner glory. It’s his secret strength.

He’s shit at it.

The whistle sounds, ending the night shift. Boyd hits the locker room, exchanges fish-sloppy dungarees for civvies—aged jeans, white tee, leather jacket—and piles out the back exit with all the other cats, pondering rhyme schemes...

—Iambic? Iambic is classic; it has its appeal, but iambic is so military in its cadence, so rigid, so daDAdaDAdaDAdaDA-yadda-yadda-yadda.

Iambic is railroad tracks, the speed limit, the Farmer’s Almanac, poetry’s good citizen. Iambic pays its bills on time. Iambic turns all the clocks back for Daylight Saving Time.

Iambic will make a solid husband, but it ain’t going to get laid on spring break. You may as well go with rhymed couplets while you’re at it.

Boyd preens a moment, fires up a smoke. Cutting across shuttered factory yards, ducking through the well-known gaps in fences, working through acrobatic rhyme schemes, trapezoidal metaphors....

—Come on now, Boyd, let’s grab this poem by the balls, do it in an ABBCBAACBCABDDDDDCDDDDA, something like that. They’ll never see it coming.

Pulls out a battered notebook, jots:

rhyme scheme; grab balls.

Ahead in the dim of dawn the dingy lights of Domino City twinkle, but for now he’s enshrouded, a counterculture prophet, the Poet Unknown yet to be revealed.

He pauses, savoring the romanticism, wondering if any of the lights spread before him glow from a room fated to be the next he’ll break into, and what he’ll take from that place.

"Things I Have Stolen." That’d be a good title for your memoirs, Boyd thinks, reclining into the comforting habit of imagining his as-yet-nonexistent career in retrospect.

Suddenly it strikes him—iambic rhymed couplets, hmm…might they not be…perfect? So jejune, so out-of-fashion, might they not have come back around to be considered avant? The least-expected thing? Sui generis? Yes!

Hoe. Lee. Shit.

Wheatgrass Tea won’t know what to daDAdaDAdaDAdaDAdaDO with itself!

He claps his hands together once, Eureka!—pulls out the notebook, jots:

*couplets; hoe lee shit*

—then freezes.

Someone is standing nearby, staring at him.

It’s still too dim to perceive features, but the interloper’s tall and thin, and male, wearing a suit that shows up powder blue in the spots where the light reaches.

Though his face isn’t visible, Boyd knows the stranger’s looking right at him.

Seeing him.

A little red coal dot dances up near the stranger’s head. Boyd waits for this figure to move, but the stranger just stands, takes a leisurely drag of his cigarette.

Professionally stealthy, Boyd is unused to being seen, and certainly unused to being seen *first,* in the creeping morning dark no less.

The stranger makes no movement, no sound, no acknowledgment; he simply stands and watches Boyd and blows smoke.

Unnerving as hell; Boyd’s nape hair stands up.

How to proceed? Run? Saunter past? Say “Howdy”?

The stranger speaks, very clearly.

“Boyd,” he says.

“Do I know you?” Boyd asks—and oh mama, are his hackles prickly now. Something in this fellow’s voice is…deep. Not low, but *deep.* It holds more secrets than an ocean trench.

“Do you know me?” the stranger replies. “Interesting question. No. I’d have to say you don’t. But clearly I know you.”

“Are you looking for a hire?” Boyd asks.

The time to scamper is near. It’s occurring to him—This might be one of the people you’ve burgled recently, Boyd. Somebody with fancy security who caught you on camera and has decided revenge is a dish best served right now.

If you don’t scurry, you may find yourself duct-taped to this guy’s basement pipes, listening to the unmistakable sound of a bone saw being sharpened.

“I’m just checking in.” He puffs, expels a wreath of smoke. “I’ve been ‘checking in’ on all sorts of people. But I haven’t yet stopped by to see you, old friend. I’ve mainly been dealing with Gordy, and believe me, Gordy’s a handful. An *armful.*

It’s kind of odd for me to see you like this—here, now—though I don’t expect you to understand.”

“I don’t understand anything you’ve said so far, to be honest with you,” Boyd says, edging back, getting ready to run.

“You’re not going to run,” the stranger remarks.

“Of course not,” Boyd freezes again, gives what he hopes is a devil-may-care-and-not-at-all-hysterical laugh. “Why would I run?”

“Because you think I might hurt you. But I won’t.”

“I’d feel more confident about that if I knew your business.”

The stranger says nothing for a while, then: “Curiosity. The itch of ages, the prime addiction, the killer of…” He stops and chuckles. “Hm. Probably the wrong idiom. I suppose I’d better tell you some things that might help.

First, tell Julius he’s got to make his move soon with the flickering man. He’s got hours, not days. Second, you really ought to come check out what I’m standing on. You won’t be sorry.”

“Who *are* you?”

The stranger says what might be a word, or might be a name, and then, as if from a vertical crease running from the top of his head to his pelvis, the Deep Man folds himself in half, then again, then again, reducing himself by halves until there’s nothing there anymore.

A.R. Moxon, THE REVISIONARIES

bookshop.org/books/the-revi…

Out in paperback 12/1.

Preorder now. bookshop.org/books/the-revi…