Ironisait lays sprawled the wrong way across a foreign bed, all beds being foreign to him.
His patched trousers and simple, ever-ready coat seem out of place crumpled amongst surrounding fineries on the floor.
He inhales the flowery scent of Jeneviève’s hair, her head nestled snug beneath his chin.
Her peace and stillness are to him, as almost everything, evidence of something grand. Something worth celebrating. Something worth holding to and setting free, and both so that it might continue.
“A cigarette,” he whispers. “I’ll step out…”
She slips from his arms and collapses, as unwillful as a newborn soul.
His gait is loose, his bare feet cool on stone where penthouse-suite steps stoop to meet the quiet street.
The night air feels as close as blood. His smile spans to match the life that courses through and all around, painted into everything along this particular stretch of world this simple night. With passions spent, their fruits remain to sense and carry with him.
You could say Ironisait’s life flashes then before his eyes, but should you? Would that not imply some reversed sequence of temporal distances traversed? Ironisait sees only now, as always.
And he sees the fancy dame set like a geometric tripwire at just the right or wrong point in his path.
All he sees makes similar sense. And secrets from lives come to be laid bare in that single forever quip, both universally shared and wordless, and as beautiful and unspecial as…
But there is one difference to how life flashes before him now.
Ironisait reaches the dame dressed all in shiny black. Her skin appears as pale as fog. “Sure,” he begins, as though midway through a conversation, “I have money, here in my coat. Why don’t you take it? It will save you all the trouble of…” He gestures to shadows where several figures crouch hidden and ready in wait. “Just enjoy it,” he concludes. “Whatever you want to do.”
The dame’s face slips from still and pleasant to quizzical, which Ironisait notes as being of the purest delights he has ever witnessed.
One of the shadows becomes a man, large and balancing a hammer between both hands. “Give us the money, then, or we’ll kill you,” hammer man gruffs, perhaps forcing his voice down low as far as it goes toward deep and menacing.
“Sure,” repeats Ironisait, grinning. He reaches to the inner chest pocket of his coat so smoothly that the next two assailants fail to even flinch as they emerge into the light.
Ironisait tosses the dame a neat role of bills. His smile never dims.
“Are you . . . happy?” manages the dame, still frozen in her ready stance in place.
The remaining shadows become more men who casually circle to surround Ironisait.
“No,” says Ironisait, but then hesitates. “Yes and no.”
“What makes you think we won’t kill you?” hammer man asks, now sporting a wicked grin of his own. The hammer itself seems almost bored to not yet be swinging in arcs as either precise or chaotic as can be.
“I hope you don’t,” responds Ironisait, tilting his head slightly in thought, “Though it would be funnier than anything if you were to kill me now. For I just saw something I’ve never seen, right before I met you. It wasn’t . . . an idea . . . but it’s the first thing I’ve ever thought I should really like to stay alive to . . . to make…?”
“You’ve seen us,” offers another shadow man. “Sorry, but you have to die now.”
“I’ll join you,” suggests Ironisait, almost chuckling. “I’ll have you change nothing of what you do, and you’ll make a lot more money.”
Mention of money, or maybe the giddy audacity carrying the suggestion, silences the gang for a spell. Each appears as a statue deep in thought.
“How?” asks the dame. “Are you . . . magic?”
“I can make everything you do . . . how do you say . . . legitimate.”
“But how could breaking the law be made legitimate?”
“Watch.”
I don't know anything 