the beginning proper of this sordid tale

In the end Nick had given an acquaintance a hundred dollar deal to introduce and vouch for him. This acquaintance, actually a customer, had explained that the guy they would meet was a paranoid, gun-toting icehead and that he, the acquaintance, would have to be there too. This was more than fine with Nick, who had moved through a world of criminality for many years without ever seeing anyone use a gun. In general Australia is a bad country for the unauthorised to be discovered with firearms.

The guy had turned out to be large, white, and scary. From the size of his muscles, the amateur ink staining his forearms, his clothes and manner, Nick judged that he had until fairly recently, and for quite a long time, been inside, with nothing to do except workout. And that the muscles, though not being actively maintained, were nonetheless intimidating, even unarmed.

The guy opened the boot of his early eighties Holden and lifted a blanket. “This,” he said, picking up a handgun, “is a Funnel & Gotch .357 revolver.”

Nick looked at it blankly, knowing that he had no way to judge anything about this weapon. “I’m going to name it ‘the Social Worker’,” he declared.

“And this,” the guy continued after a disturbing pause which Nick interpreted as what a fuckwit, “is all I have for the other thing you wanted: a fully automatic La Scala machine pistol.”

Nick stared at the most amazing weapon he had ever seen, and immediately decided that it was ‘the Guidance Counsellor’. He handed over two thousand dollars just as his phone rang, startling everyone.

the meaty smell of your own cooking flesh

Just that morning she had been reading the manuscript of the latest in a series of children’s books written by prisoners in Abu Ghraib…

Life was different in prison than it had been in the rest of his life. Before entering jail he had never walked into a small room and not left it for any reason for weeks at a time, nor had he remained in the one building for years, and it was much less frequently the case that he had had his head held under water until he thought he would die or had been forced to perform oral sex on another man before being photographed being led around the room naked on all fours with a leash around his neck. And this was not in a good way either. Far fewer of the people who had lived in his building had disappeared in ways that made him think that they had died during interrogation. In fact the possibility of death during interrogation had until this point been a prospect restricted to other people. But now he had to get used to a new way of life.

She thought this one may have been better targetted at young adults, and wrote a note in the margin: “Remind the writer the book is educational, ask him to use the word ‘distended’ in a sentence.” Then she considered putting the word educational in inverted commas even though no-one else would ever see it.

The clock on her computer told her it was close enough to lunch even though it was not even ten in the morning, and she picked up the phone to call the mobile phone of her upstairs neighbour. Nick answered with an unidentifiable grunt, a noise designed, she believed, so that no-one would be able to say with any certainty who had produced it, should authorities wish to ascertain this.

They went through their ritual.

“Hi, it’s Juliet?”

“Hey, what can I do for you?”

“I’m about twenty minutes away, can I come see you?”

“What are you after?”

“Just a one.”

“Sure. Just come up. I’ll be there.”

the secret of comedy

Juliet liked Nick more than any dealer she had ever had and almost as much as any neighbour, and having him upstairs was certainly convenient. He was almost always close by, he gave her credit, and also let her use in his living room, but he would then try out bits of his act.

“I’m from a big family,” he said, deadpan, as she mixed up heroin on his coffee table. “I was number four of five kids. We did everything together, but there was always a sort of hierarchy based of age.”

“Uh huh.”

“Once I heard someone say ‘go forth and multiply’ and totally misunderstood what was meant.”

“Uh huh.”

“I asked if I could go third for a change.”

“Uh huh. Does anyone actually say ‘go forth and multiply’?”

“My brothers never understood sarcasm… So Juliet, I’m going away tomorrow, for a few weeks.”

Juliet looked up sharply and asked a question she had asked Nick many times, though for the first time, she feared, it may have been rhetorical: “Are you joking?”

“I’m going camping.”

“Again?”

“If you want you can call Rose while I’m away,” he said, handing her a slip of paper with a mobile phone number written neatly on it.

planning horizon

After she had gone Nick stood in his living room for a minute, holding his knife - ‘the lacanian analyst’ - and thinking about the next few weeks.

Nick had never been camping, had never even considered camping, would no more go camping than he would read a Tom Clancy novel or misuse the word ‘literally’ to communicate emphasis rather than that something was literal.

Only a short eternity later, Frantisek was also gone.

When he awoke, Jihad was gone.

There was a long pause after the guard had wandered away, and then Jihad spoke. “Did you know that some of those soldiers were charged after we all saw those images of what was the term prisoner abuse, and that that woman soldier in those photos was convicted of ‘adultery’? A crime under US military law, it seems. Tomorrow,” he said, “I will tell you my life story in excruciating detail.”

Frantisek slept soundly and long despite the fluorescent hell of their cell.

“Your turn,” noted his new cellmate. “What are you in for?”

“Don’t know. You?”

Frantisek really didn’t know what he was doing in prison, but his old cellmate had informed him that it was ‘languishing’. This same old cellmate had been taken away shortly afterward. A guard had overheard him saying to Frantisek that they could keep his body in prison but not his mind; the guards had led him off explaining that they were going to demonstrate several senses in which this was incorrect. Frantisek was in any case unsure of how true this assertion would turn out to be: he had lived much of the last year in a very small flat, and did not share his upstairs neighbour’s agoraphiliac loved of camping and travel, but the cell was beginning to feel uncomfortably confining.

Before they had taken him away, the guards had attached restraints to the upper body of Frantisek’s first cellmate, restricting head and arm movement and reducing vision to a tiny corridor directly in front, and reminding Frantisek of BDSM fetishwear he had seen on-line. “Don’t worry, we’re very professional,” one had said, seemingly to Frantisek more than to the man they were taking. “We always yell ‘clear’ before we turn on the electrodes.’” The smiles of these guards had suggested to Frantisek that they meant business; more than meaning business, they signified an entire mode of production centred on the industrialisation of suffering and death. They each grabbed an arm and half-directed, half-dragged his first cellmate down the corridor.

“I hate the smell of burning hair,” one said.

“Imagine how Hitler would have felt burning all those jews,” the other replied.

“He would have had to leave the room.”

Islam is the new black

The prison was arranged such that Frantisek never saw a guard take an order from anyone, which, along with the evident emotional investments of most guards in their antagonism to prisoners, or at least to him, may have increased the impression that their actions were their own. But something more than paranoia meant that he regarded any differences in the treatment he got from particular guards as evidence of a conspiracy in which different guards played different roles, directed according to purposes he could only guess, and turning the prison into a theatre of cruelty. Even the comment about electrodes made Frantisek suspicious now, as if what they did to his first cellmate might have been intended to intimidate him.

“Foreigner,” explained his new cellmate, who was young and off-white in colour and shape in those ways Frantisek had been taught, somewhat against his will, to identify as ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ - and so could have been from anywhere. This new cellmate had also invented a complicated game, a cross between a card and board game, with which they attempted to fill some of the potentially endless hours in this ever-lit cage. Frantisek rolled the dice they had manufactured out of paper, and got a six. “Frankly it’s a tribute to the tolerance and openness of this great nation that they let me live at all,” continued his new cellmate. “OK, you’ve landed on ‘resource struggle’ again. ‘Control of your privately-owned water resources is contested by a mass movement. Pick a card to see what happens.’”

Frantisek read the card out: “Your water resources are taken over: roll again to see whether you can limit the damage to a state-controlled takeover with full compensation or if your facilities are occupied by the masses and resources distributed according to need, with no compensation and a spreading revolt.”

“Bummer,” said his new cellmate. “Either way you lose the ongoing revenue, but maybe you can only have them nationalised and get compensated, then have the state buy off and forcibly disperse the movement and later engineer a neoliberalising regime which will give control of water back to you for next to nothing and call it ‘privatisation’. And anyway the compensation will allow you to finance your other operations for a while. It isn’t over yet, baby!”

This game, which his new cellmate had entitled ‘Prevention of Communism’, involved a variety of strategies for the players to attempt to retain elite status by screwing over the proletariat and global population as a whole, while forming a series of temporary alliances with each other to try to become dominant in competition with other elites i.e. other players. “I thought we had special prisons for foreigners. What are they going to do to you?” Frantisek asked.

“Uh oh! Aspiring elites leading what they call a national liberation struggle have diverted the masses of your neo-colony into capitalist state-building projects, but still impose new rental costs on you for continuing to exploit ‘their’ populations and take natural resources under their control… Indeed and of course you have such special prisons, but I am here to be questioned, I think, on suspicion of being connected to people involved with terrorists. I think it might be racial profiling exacerbated by my name. Unless they know something I don’t.”

Frantisek picked up the increasingly out-of-shape paper cube and tossed it lightly onto the stone floor. “And your name is?”

“Jihad.” And Jihad smiled. “I awoke very early one morning in one of your special prisons, on an island of which I had never heard, to the attentions of unpleasant men who brought me here, a rather long journey but only, they informed me, an ordinary rendition. They emphasised a number of times that no-one knows I’m here and hinted at the ease with which a permanent disappearance could be arranged, which I hope was merely encouragement to be forthcoming but fear may not be. Oh dear,” he said, looking at the board scratched into the floor. “Your imperial enforcer is overstretched and you will have to rely on the guile and brutality of local elites. Roll the dice to see if you can get away with retreating from production of commodities into currency speculation.”

Jihad had bad skin but good grammar, whereas Frantisek had bad posture but good manners: it seemed to Frantisek that they both had poor prospects but good intentions. The only reading they had been given was something called Underground by someone called McGahan, which they both agreed was one of the worst books they had ever read. “Are you scared?” Frantisek asked.

Jihad paused and smiled again. “Yes. A long time ago I was very scared, then I became outraged, then cynical, and now I’m back to scared again. And you?”

Now Frantisek paused. “For a while I was just bewildered. Now I’m scared.”

“This,” said Jihad, rolling the dice, “is progress, I think. Do you think inmates at secret political prisons are eligible for conjugal visits?”

Later, during what they had somewhat arbitrarily agreed to call the night, one of the guards sneered that Frantisek’s old cellmate was now “a broken man”. “I don’t mean mentally or spiritually,” he elaborated. “I mean physically. In two large pieces. Broken,” he concluded nastily, “”in half.”

Frantisek left an OCD record of disillusionment with humanity and withdrawal from the world following his unsuccessful effort to learn how to play the triangle.

The latter involved frequent violent tantrums, and once a neighbour felt it necessary to call the authorities. Police eventually broke into his flat, only to find he had straightened his instrument into one long iron bar and was using it as a walking stick in a remarkably unconvincing impersonation of Charlie Chaplin. Aware of Chaplin’s involvement with the Communist Party, police subsequently arrested him on suspicion of having opinions different from those of other people.

Embittered by these experiences, he was never to play an instrument again. In such ways does capitalism oppress the artist.

The project, now: to write a novel on-line, posting and rewriting posts.

These first sections are a prologue entitled “now”, before the section entitled “again”.

The problem with this method is that the chapters appear in reverse order. It may be possible to alter this, but I have no idea how.