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    Pirouette
    Pirouette
    Pirouette
    Ebook136 pages2 hours

    Pirouette

    By D H Weiss

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Alex Anders works for a company that doesn't exist. Neither does Alex. Discovering the incredible truth, Alex is pulled into a wind tunnel of sex and metaphysical dread in which he questions the very nature of his own existence and the future of the human race while he hunts down a box that he’s not allowed to open. Pirouette is a tense, poignant, and often hilarious ride through the world’s cultural Cuisinart.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherD H Weiss
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781311720603
    Pirouette
    Author

    D H Weiss

    Possibly the world's longest living survivor of HIV, D.H. Weiss (David Herbert Weiss) is an expat New Yorker who has been living and traveling in Southeast Asia and Sweden since 2008. After contracting the virus in 1979 or 1980, he went on to practice law in the U.S. District courts in Manhattan and the Eastern Districts of New York, where he won the only acquittal at trial of an extradited foreign national in the history of the United States. He published his first novel, "From Seven Till Dawn" in 2011, followed by "Faradise", in 2014. His most recent work, a novella, entitled " Pirouette", was published in 2016.

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      Book preview

      Pirouette - D H Weiss

      D. H. Weiss

      Pirouette

      Smashwords edition

      ISBN: 9781311720603

      Copyright © 2016 by D.H.Weiss

      Yellow Brick PUBLICATIONS

      Ängelholm, Sweden

      Please visit www.yellowbrickpress.org

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used here fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons or events is entirely coincidental.

      Contents

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

      Five

      Six

      Seven

      Eight

      Nine

      Ten

      Eleven

      Twelve

      In Memory of Ralph John Dominic Pacifico, Jr., who in his perfectly singular way always understood what was important in life and what was not.

      Some years ago, when I was yet unprepared to truly understand the world, I learned of two brothers – the Collyers, Homer and Langley. Known simply as the Collyer brothers, the two were two American brothers who became infamous for their bizarre natures and compulsive hoarding. For decades, the pair lived in seclusion in their Harlem brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street) where they obsessively collected books, furniture, musical instruments, and myriad other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to ensnare intruders. In March 1947, both were found dead in their home surrounded by over 140 tons of collected items that they had amassed over several decades. To this day, no one knows whether they set off their own booby traps or were simply smothered by their impenetrable collection of trash. When I started to write this novella I was afraid that readers would find it too absurd and completely unbelievable. As it turns out, however, I no longer believe that to be true; current events and our acceptance of tabloid political theatre and ‘reality’ shows that are anything but real have nurtured far stranger absurdities than the Collyers…

      I

      ∞∞∞∞∞∞

      8 June, 2016, New York City

      It’s all about perception, Professor Samuels said to me. You can’t put life in a box. You can’t reduce it to numbers, or theorems, or equations. You have to be there. You have to feel it. You have to feel the wind on your skin, in your hair, on your face. Nothing else is real. It signifies nothing.

      But as I look out from my office window, it’s Samuels’ face that I remember most. His face, carved in the fine beginnings of age, void of expression, content and certain of the absolute truth in his words.

      The office tower is on the southeast corner of Madison and 25th. Looking down from above, its narrow, rectangular shape stands apart from the stately, late Victorian granite of the New York State Appellate Division courthouse below and adjacent to the south side of the tower. The wider side glass facades of the tower face south and north. My office is high up in the building, on the seventeenth floor. The doors into the suite are unmarked, imported teak, with heavy brushed stainless steel handles that project an image of importance. On the wall next to the doors the engraved metal plaque says ‘Alpha Trading, Ltd’. The office is the southeast corner office on the southeast corner of the tower.

      Samuels’ face, and the simple indisputable clarity of his distillate are what put me here. This is my portal. My ticket to the real world, to the warmth of the sun, the feel of the wind, the world as I want it to be. And my job? Retrieving boxes.

      I take my place behind the desk in my office. My name isn’t on the door. If it were, it would read `Alex Anders´. You might think of Alexanders, the department store chain they used to have here in New York.

      My desk is a thick slab of clear glass, supported by a brace of I-shaped, chromed stainless legs. The only objects on the desktop are a wireless desk speaker, a closed leather folder, and two pens. I line them all up in one row. It disturbs me to have them out of place. The feng shui, if there is such a thing, must be correct. The company doesn’t care how my office looks, what it holds, or what it says about me. The company only cares that I do what they tell me I’m there for.

      The company I work for isn’t Alpha Trading. I work for an outfit called The Agency. As far as I know, The Agency has no affiliation with the Government; I am an ‘agent’ only in the literal sense of the word. An agent for The Agency. The Agency is in the box business. We retrieve boxes. I have no idea what is in the boxes. I assume that it isn’t something good.

      I wear the same suits everyday. Standard black three-button cut merino wool, a white shirt, and a dark blue cotton-silk blend necktie. It is The Agency standard.

      From the windows in my office I can see Madison Square park and the Flatiron building to the south. It is exactly half past one. It has been exactly half past one on each of my last four assignments. It is always half past one.

      I stand again, tired of waiting in the chair, and look out the windows at the office workers standing in line at the Shake Shack in the park. The early birds who’ve already been served sit at tables, or on the grass, soaking in the early spring warmth as they wash down their cheeseburgers and fries with the milkshakes they’ve bought. Their manna, paid for in cash, MasterCard or Visa.

      Before the assignment to the latest box I spent my time between trips for boxes reading about boxes. The Agency used to send me for boxes all over Southeast Asia. Before I fell into the loop anyway. Now the boxes are always in Thailand. Bangkok, to be precise.

      At precisely one-forty, the red LED on the speaker lights up. I return to the desk, sit in my chair, and press the button next to the light. It is, as always, Marjorie.

      I’ve never seen Marjorie. Marjorie may not even be her name. All I know is that she calls herself Marjorie. If I had to guess, then I would guess that Marjorie is from somewhere in the Midwest, that she wears her hair cut in a proper, short professional cut, and that she dresses in a proper, dark grey or black professional skirt and white shirt - not unlike a woman’s variation of the suit I’m wearing now. My suit, but without the necktie.

      There is a box, Alex, Marjorie says. It is in Thailand.

      Good news for me. I’ve been getting a little bored since the last call. And when I get bored, the question of exactly what it was that made me decide to work at The Agency is always there, an itch that I have to scratch but can’t. Was it my choice or my destiny? No. Boredom will never do. I need to work, to stay disciplined. And so I am. I’m impeccably, consummately disciplined. You might say that I’m too disciplined; I’ve been told that I suffer from something the shrinks call `alexithymia´ (hah!) - that I lack the ability to identify and describe emotions in myself, that I have issues with social attachments. Alexithymia, Asperbergers - we throw these terms around, make them sound less foreign to us. In my case, I’ve been told that my obsession with discipline is a symptom of this so-called `dimensional personality trait´. Maybe they’re right. So what? Discipline works for me, and if it works, why change it?

      This is not to say that I don’t have any of the common human vices. Sex, of course. A glass of wine from time to time. A decent head of smoke (for medicinal purposes only, of course) sometimes helps burn off just enough of my emotional fog so that I can function almost as well as anyone else can. I think of a line that I read somewhere: I need discipline. I’m an alcoholic. An addict. I don’t need bliss, or love, or light. That stuff gets me in trouble, because I want more of it than exists in the world. Whoever said it was obviously very unhappy about something.

      As I said, when I went for a box before the loop began, the box was most often in Southeast Asia – Thailand was just one of the places they’d send me to. A few others had to be retrieved in remote hills and jungles of Cambodia and Laos. Places defined by the dead more than the living. Places that people don’t like to talk about. Places that people don’t like to think about. But the names of those places have no significant relevance to the loop or the last four boxes. And it’s been the last four boxes that have been exactly the same.

      We aren’t positive exactly where in Thailand, but there is a contact person in Bangkok who will help you find it, Marjorie says.

      Marjorie has said those exact words, in that exact same, detached, correct tone of voice, for the last four boxes, in the same, remote location in Thailand.

      There’s always a contact person in Bangkok. There’s been a contact in Thailand for the last four boxes.

      Where in Bangkok?

      Alex, you know where, she says as impatiently as the upper limit of proper detachment permits.

      What does the box look like? How big is it?

      Black, she says. It is always black. It is always a cube. It is always twelve point zero one centimeters on each side. You know that too, Alex.

      Thank you Marjorie, I say politely. I release the button. The light goes off.

      Twelve, point zero one. Twelve oh one. That the box happens to measure exactly the same digits as the time shown on my birth certificate is undoubtedly a coincidence. At least I thought it was. It’s been my curse, this number. I see it everywhere. Twelve oh fucking one.

      This is the fifth time that I’ve done this job. The job is always the same: I am to retrieve a box. Like all of the boxes The Agency sends me for, the box is black. The box is always a cube. It has only been the last four trips (now five, including this one) that the contact is always supposed to be in the same bar, at the same time, waiting for me in the seediest neighborhood in Bangkok.

      I stand up from behind my

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