A Confederacy of Augustin
WARNING: EROTIC IMAGERY & LANGUAGE
A little story I wrote back when—a clear homage to John Kennedy Toole. It’s also interesting because Gordo (my cat who passed away yesterday) is one of the supporting characters. Weird that I stumbled upon this today.
A Confederacy of Augustin
Augustin Macker made a promise to write a new short story every single day, in the hopes that he would one day be published, joining the ranks of his favourite childhood writers: Hank Chinaski, Merseault, and the irrepressible Kilgore Trout.
Every day he woke and brewed himself a pot of strong, Nelson-British-Columbia-roasted coffee and stare, dreamy-eyed, at his lap-top screen. For weeks, nothing at all came. He grew despondent very quickly, as his life had very little content, apart from the incessant reek of his two pet cats, Brecht and Gordo The Fat.
Then one day a story poured out. Augustin was inspired with the notion of a beautiful woman. He had had very little contact with members of the opposite sex, with the exception of his mother, so his notion wasn’t a fully formed idea; it was simply a notion. Notwithstanding, he let his imagination run amok, smashing his index fingers into the keyboard. Word after word gushed from his creative centre, and by the time he was through he was utterly exhausted.
Here was the story he wrote:
On a blustery, foul winter’s eve, I first made the acquaintance of Cameron Porphyra-Jones. She was a milky, ursine maiden with giant clams for hands and lips that could turn all the salmon out. She accosted me at the local Esposito’s as I was pondering the selection of porks.
“Looks like the chops are on special today,” she asserted. I eyed her.
“I know this is going to sound weird,” I slickly replied. “Would you like to go out on a date with me?”
She hesitated demurely, biting her lower lip. I noticed something dark lodged in her upper teeth.
“All right,” she said.
“Great,” I oozed. “How about tonight at the Jolly Dodger Donut Café?”
She agreed, and hours later, there we were, staring into each other’s eyes at the back of the JDDC as the crude coffee and crullers disappeared down our dry throats.
Before long, I had her in my arms and was whisking her back to my basement lodgings. My cats looked at Cameron with seeming disgust as I wedged her between the sheets of my rusty single bed.
“Oh,” squeaked Cameron, as I thrust my wicked sword of a manhood into her. She was clearly delighted, because she started to cry. I had been with a lot of women— virgins, ladies and whores— but none of them had ever cried on me. I was disgusted.
“What’s this all about?” I shouted, still throbbing inside her.
“It’s just... it has been a long time,” she whimpered.
“That’s no concern of mine,” I ejaculated. I ejaculated.
The next morning, Cameron had departed. She left me a note, which I destroyed without reading.
It had been an ordinary Wednesday night.
Augustin looked over his completed work, chuffed. He printed it and held up the manuscript admiringly.
“Now the world will cringe,” he boasted to Gordo The Fat, who reacted sleepily. “Now the world will fall at my feet and beg for clemency!”
Augustin skipped into the kitchen to concoct a popcorn dinner for himself. Typically on Wednesdays he would pop a bowl of popcorn and douse it with curry paste and mint jelly. He thoroughly enjoyed the way the spices spanked him on the tongue, prompting him to reveries of faraway places with exotic, Indian names, like Rangoon and Mesopotamia.
Returning to his “office” (which happened to be whatever room his laptop was in) Augustin marvelled once again at his literary masterpiece.
“Now the world will call me master,” Augustin repeated.
There was a knock at the door.
Augustin recoiled at the sound and stared at the door in horror. Another knock came. Now Augustin began to sweat. He tried to recall which of his enemies might be there to collect their judgement, but Augustin could not think of anyone he had wronged in his full thirty-seven years of life.
Taking no chances, he lifted the closest weapon he had at hand: a piece of green twine used to secure his curtain to the wall. He stretched out the flimsy cord to employ as a garrotte on the intruder, who had undoubtedly come to steal his manuscript.
The door knocked once more.
“Who is it?” Augustin’s cracked voice pleaded.
“FedEx,” said the dark marauder.
“Oh yeah?” said Augustin. “That’s what all murderers say. That’s what they say before they kill and loot.”
Augustin was frothing at the mouth with fear.
“Listen Sir,” implored the murderer. “It’s FedEx here. Either I get you to sign for this package or I bring it back to the post office. Makes no difference to me.”
After a long, agonizing consideration of the détente, Augustin moved to open the door.
There stood a FedEx delivery man. In his hands there was a large package addressed to Augustin. Upon signing the man’s electronic register, Augustin launched into a vexatious verbal assault.
“How dare you throttle my door with your meaty, filthy ham hocks?” he bellowed. “Don’t you know WHO I am? I am the great writer Augustin P. Macker. Next time you knock on my door, do so with REVERENCE!”
Having stated his case so plainly, he triumphantly slammed the door, only he did it so hard that a hinge broke and the door fell back toward him, leaving the delivery man in a state of utter, mirthful astonishment.
Augustin felt waves of ignominy wash over his face as he struggled to replace the broken portal whilst clutching to his newly acquired mystery package.
When the door situation had been rectified and all was quiet again (the delivery man having left in tears of joy) Augustin sat down in his comfiest chair (the one that could support his weight) and began to scrutinize the delivery.
“It must be a bomb,” he rationalized, as he gingerly rotated the lightweight box. Gently he shook it. Nothing moved inside.
With a disdainful glance at Brecht, who was sniffing the parcel, Augustin allowed his curiosity to get the better of him; he stumbled to the kitchen to retrieve a rather large and unwieldy Haitian machete, which he used on occasion for chopping melons.
“The accursed swine will rue the day,” he uttered, as he slowly made his way back to where the silent package lay.
Brecht leaped three feet in the air and Gordo The Fat howled miserably as Augustin let his machete come crashing down on the FedEx box. Blow after blow he delivered, and in seconds the box, and the coffee table underneath, were completely decimated.
Pleased with the savagery of his onslaught, Augustin now crouched to inspect the contents of the carnage.
A small piece of pale blue, wool fabric peeked out through one of the machete holes, and instantly Augustin knew what he had done.
“Oh wretched Fortune,” he whispered dramatically, as he kneeled before the severed remains of the package.
A few weeks earlier, Augustin had complained to his mother about the slight chill he had been feeling in his basement apartment. She had set to work immediately.
Now, he had chopped his mother’s blanket to pieces.
“Oh wretched Dame Fortune,” he repeated tragically. “That it should come to this.”
©Adam Kelly Morton, 2009
Vietnam
A short story written some time ago:
When I first arrived in Vietnam, it was by hovercraft. Across the gulf of Da Nang stood the low, jungle hills of Pho Luk, where so many of the great battles between Americans and Communists had taken place. There seemed to be a mist hovering over the mounds in the sunshine, like great breasts of despair, mammary glands full of agent orange. My imagination reeled with the possibilities of clearing the mountain way, by jet-induced fire, to access the poppy fields, the lost papaver, the secret reason behind the wars, including the one in Afghanistan.
Canada couldn’t be further away, and yet, my Rogers cell was still receiving text messages. A girl who went by the stage name of Kandi back in Montreal had been pestering me for weeks to see her new show: a comedy epic called Betrayal in the Outlying Regions.
“ARE YOU GONNA COME SEE MY SHOW PLEEEZE” her earnest communiqué read. There had been no solid commitment on my part, particularly because, of late, my time in Montreal had been rather preoccupied by my trip to Vietnam. But Kandi was unrelenting:
“PRETTY PLEEEEEEEEEEEZE.”
As an ambassador to the great regime, I was shocked to discover that Vietnam was currently being run with the same severe restrictions and violations of amnesty as in North Korea and Stalinist Russia. There were almost no legal means for crossing the border, except in the role of “Official”, which I was: as Second Chief Undersecretary to Gao Nguyen, Canada’s de facto Vietnamese Delegation Chairperson. In addition to normal ingress/egress being prohibited, it was also unlawful to speak out against the current government, to access the internet, or to shake hands. So, one can imagine my surprise at the continued reception of Kandi’s unremitting texts (“COME OOOOOOOOOOON”); her devotion in very real danger of becoming pretext for my immediate arrest and indefinite imprisonment.
The sun was hot and the air was wet at the outdoor banquet prepared for Chairperson Gao and his entourage. The food was acutely bland, and distinctly lacking in the colours one would expect from jungle fare. Notwithstanding, we politely put piece after flavourless, grey piece into our gooey mouths, eager for the luscious taste of anything that might resemble a pineapple or a guava.
Another text came in:
“WHYYYYYY WON’T YOU COOOOOOOOOME????”
Fortunately, my phone was set to vibrate, sending electrical surges through my thigh and up my spine. I mused on the rumour that, apparently, there were still prisons in the hills where men were being shock-tortured.
A sumptuous, Maltese-looking woman passed by the table and looked at herself in one of the shiny, large water pitchers sitting at its edge. Her hair was long, straight and dark, and her chest was full, with ribcage nibbling out above her radiant, floral tunic. She went away, and the next few hours disappeared from my memory.
It is worth mentioning that I have a terrible memory. My friends back in Montreal would rib me constantly for my shameless inability to remember the most significant of events. In desperation they would attempt to cow and coo my defective brain back into recollection, but to little avail. The fact that I remember some of my South Asian experience is a testament to how consequential it was.
Call it malaria: it was hardly forgettable to find myself, all of a sudden, lost in Vietnam and in need of lodging for the night. The Canadian Delegation had left without me. It had surreptitiously become my objective to quietly clear up this diplomatic blunder and get the hell back home. In disbelief, I accosted one of the banquet stewards: a swarthy, East Indian looking fellow who certainly had tattoos beneath his flimsy, white, formal dress. I covertly explained my situation to him.
“You must understand,” he said solemnly. “You can’t just leave Vietnam.”
I understood, but that did nothing to alleviate my predicament. It was one thing to be left behind by your comrades and confederates, it was quite another to be stranded in a ruthless, totalitarian state with nowhere to sleep, with sickness, and with food that tastes like a rifle-hole. Undaunted by his dismissal of my plight, I re-accosted the Indian steward, and—an expert smuggler of persons—he took me under his protective, brown wing and led me away from the feasting area.
Through the town of Da Trung my companion (appropriately named Kankhar) led me; through alleyways and underground passages; through filthy parks and decrepit dens; and through a deplorable maze of rickshaw ridden, human-detritus-doused shanty boroughs until, finally, we arrived at his ramshackle dwelling. At one point, I asked Kankhar if the autocratic Vietnamese government understood the difference between Canadians and Americans, hoping to glean some advantage by my Canuck heritage. Glassy-eyed, he chose not to answer my question, and instead chose to look at my vibrating pocket, where another text had come in:
“HELLLOOOOOO?”
Inside his home there were a million cats, both living and dead. He kicked them aside like stacks of old newspapers as he made his way over to a large closet. This, he opened, revealing a vast collection of giant, empty fish tanks. He took a careful look at several of the aquaria, tossing out various rock and scuba-man decorations, until he found a suitable tank. It was clearly one of his old favourites, as it had his name, Kankhar, in black, sticker letters emblazoned on the front.
“Here,” he said to me, handing over the aquarium. “You will sleep in this.” From my reaction, he was compelled to proffer an explanation. “You must understand,” he said resignedly. “This will protect you from the scorpions and the malaria bugs.”
I understood; at which point, Kankhar went to another cupboard where he retrieved a not unsubstantial quantity of what I knew to be opium. He went over to one wall, where hung a number of large, colourful shisha pipes. He opted for the teal one, and sat down in the corner to smoke it. As he did, a number of his feline co-habitants approached the shisha mural and took down the remainder of the smoking implements. In a matter of moments, everyone was languorously inhaling the rich, blue fumes.
Now I understood it all: the likeness of Vietnam to Afghanistan, the beautiful woman who made my memories vanish, and Kankhar’s muted reaction to my query about Canada versus America. The fish tanks, the cats—all of it made perfect sense. There was finally some peace in my universe.
An obscene vibration shook my pant leg. Looking down, I reached to where the foul reverberations were coming from. I extracted the offending fiend and looked hard on it. It was my Rogers cell phone. There was one new message in my inbox.
“ARE YOU COMING TO MY SHOW YES OR NO?”
I took some time to consider my options, and looked about the room, to where Kankhar and his indolent friends lay back in sedate ecstasy. “You must understand,” I texted Kandi. “I just can’t.”
And some time later, as Kankhar prepared us for another voyage, I received her modest reply.
“YOU’RE A BIG LOOOOOOOOSER.”
© Adam Kelly Morton, 2009