I am fond of paradoxes. They are a freedom for me, and a fortifying prudence like tea and cake. I prune and overwater them. I let some sprawl obscenely while others are starved back to the bone. It’s arbitrary, yes, and unkind. But there’s an elegance to it, the way there is elegance in sabotage.

The ascendancy of a quiet man is more often than not a slight canter. I have never had to work. Contrived, confounding rituals where the joke is only apparent to me are the guiding principle of my days.

The other night I fled the house and walked into the rain, a man with good shoes, winding up near one of those Georgian streets by Covent Garden.

There was a small hotel bar. I entered. At a table in the corner, but facing the bar, I ordered a glass of wine and thought of something sad. The tears came. I blubbed and sat and drank, letting water stream down my face, and watched the manager circle closer and closer, unwilling to be involved but afraid to seem callous by turning a sad wet man out into the rain. You could see the calculus behind his eyes: intervene and risk embarrassment, or do nothing and look like a stupid bastard as this soaking wreck dissolved on company property.

At the end of the evening, I went to the bar and asked for two measures of vodka. Looking into the bartender’s eyes, I shot the first back and exclaimed: ‘To my Svetlana!’, leaving the other on the counter and staring at it a moment before a last cry of gutter anguish. I faked a limp as I exited, hailed a cab, told the driver to take me to my home, and went straight to bed.

In the dark I thought: what must they think of me? A man crying. It must have been intolerable to watch. No-one knew me. They would never see me again, but some small part would remember a pitiful old man, his fading nature, resting for a moment in his grief, unexplainable.

I have no children. No wife. No real friends beyond my bedroom, where I keep a tiny cricket in a tiny cage on the wall, chirping away like a deranged metronome. I employ a small cadre of staff to clean the house and cook my meals before I wake. I hang guns in the hallway (never fired one in my life) and through microphones hidden in the light fixtures I listen to them gossip. The theories they invent about me, orbiting the props, the consant cricket, the crumbs I leave behind, are richer and more nourishing than any honest existence I’ve attempted. Every three days, without fail, I clog the toilet.

There is a place I retreat to, a bright and airy nowhere, when tickling myself with thoughts of the private knots I tie in observers.

So tell me.

Do you know me?

saltwatercowboy

saltwatercowboy