A Case of Fiction

Walking through Prague just as the chapel eclipsed the sun, I was humming a riff and enjoying both a full belly and a casual saunter before home and vodka. Being particularly interested in trivial sidewalk details I stopped to observe a coughing father in a black robe standing by a brother crisscrossing his sternum and frontal lobe. He was bald with a speck of luster on the back of his crown, and the backs of his hands were a leathery texture that reflected gobs of light like a dirty looking glass. This kindly gentleman spoke profoundly (while pausing to juggle something caught in his throat) though meandering through old English to impress his audience with ancient liminality, and that only entertained my curiosity for a moment till I resumed my walk, bored with the archaic nonsense and vain appeals to my damned eternal soul. Wait, reverse those roles: vodka then home, lobe then stern�continue with the stroll though be attentive, more backwardness perhaps.

It was mid evening, but still with fair light and a purple sunset netting over the tops of the buildings to outline a fractured staircase horizon, and I enjoyed the artists glow of separating each pigment into a palate in my imagination�inspecting each individual color more closely. There is something I think spiritual in noticing the details of reality. Things like the fading shade of green in the street lamps, the white winged butterfly fanning its wings over a cracked coffee mug, Rut Kerakyrots rushing home with his arm up and his watch cocked. Perfect evening, I felt completely at bliss.

Not far from the flat I was renting I stopped to sit on a bench and look out at the graveyard, squinting at the rows of dates chiseled into each marble slab mediated by an uninteresting little dash. Across from me sitting on another bench a young woman sat gaping at a door down along the road further as if enchanted by some imaginary fantasy. She was pretty, pink in the cheeks with very attractive curly hair, beaming bright yellow, and cut at the neck. Sitting with her head tilted a little she resembled quite perfectly an actress in a film I had seen weeks prior, but though a physical twin I knew she was independent of her famous double. Days ago I had read that the actress was in London shooting another film, her second, and though the false duality of themes in everything seemed compulsive to the point of crossing the street and insisting on an autograph, I tried to ignore those small patterns I noticed. She was beautiful though, immensely so. I also noticed her left hand was hidden between some pages of a cheap romance novel�something I imagine with cruel and erotic mediocrity, and the spine was buried in her lap. The cover was glossed out by one of the streetlamps, and having my observation pried uncomfortably far I decided to ponder something more meaningful.

Twenty or so minutes passed and it had gotten dark enough to suggest my turning back, when the smiling priest with a sore throat I had only seen briefly before stepped up to one of the doors across the street and knocked twice. The man turned once so I could get a look at his face, and to my horror it matched in my mind the face in something I had read somewhere about a rapist. A match, a perfect match, he was that perpetrator that had been arrested but then escaped! He had the same sad eyebrows and tiny hook like nose, everything was identical.

Very few details about the crime I can remember except the sparkling highlights, and that it had also made for a horrible account of cruelty. Like something you might have read out of a story but I swear it was marked in my mind as 'non-fiction'. The beast found his woman, a stickling blond with a pretty chest and twining locks, and played a salesman who seduced her into buying a house, which he used her in. A horrible story�cruelty of the worst kind.

The priest was invited inside, it was the Kerakyrots house which everyone knew to be a perfectly upstanding and righteous one (righteous may be an awkward word to use but it is appropriate I think) and I shuddered. It had gotten a little chilly too, but merely to fulfill but personal ideas of justice and responsibility, I followed the priest into the Kerakyrots home.

Somehow I had not been noticed walking in�odd, and the first several rooms were dimly lit and vacant (I could only even see one small detail in any of those rooms, a copy of The Death of a Salesman glossed over by a glare coming from a bedroom). At the end of the hall there was an open bedroom where the whole bunch were standing around a bed while the priest leaned over what I supposed to be the daughter, obviously ailed by something, and softly recited his saucy lyric. Something about the whole thing, even my thoughtlessness into sneaking into the house, seemed a bit much. Suspiciously unconvincing. Like a fiction, one of those smoldering novelties that dies with the trends. This aside, everyone looked earnestly at the priest as he commence his ritualizing, faithfully wishing for those rare miracles.

"My daughter," he uttered. "The Lord will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing: thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness. I said Lord, be merciful unto me: heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee."

The girl on the bed sort of shivered her lips into a smile, her age something about half mine and three years less (do not assume this is accurate, I'm merely fidgeting with numbers and words for sport), and opened her eyes for only a moment to look at her father, then closed them again. I did not know the Kerakyrots intimately, they were shy acquaintances that sometimes made noise, five word sentences over trivial boring subjects. They were a very nice family though and generous, everyone in the community admired them as citizens.

The priest leaned over the daughter, feeling his string of beads, and mumbled something I couldn't discern. I decided the daughter must have had typhus. At that moment I decided to barge in and expose this cruel fake, what do they call it? A wolf in sheep's clothing is the expression I believe, but I spoke up.

"Rut? Don't you recognize that abominable man?"

They all stood, frozen, ignoring me and staring at the priest and the daughter as he said his prayers.
"He's that rapist, they only had caught him last week. He's escaped and that is him. Listen to me�"
Nothing. The whole group seemed completely oblivious, or perhaps it was too great a tolerance of everything that made me invisible, but I couldn't stand it. Something was beyond odd, pukingly off about the scene. I jumped into the room and grabbed at the priest, trying to level myself to knock him off of his balance to collapse under me, but nothing�my fingers and what else was attached went right through him. I tried, again and again, to hit him, kick him, stab, punch, beat, any sort of harm at all but I was as helpless as air. Am I a ghost? A character from some surrealist joke? An imaginary assassin? I have no answer.