Hey guys... Anyone remember me? :P This forum's rather dead so I thought I'd show you something I've been working on, and admittedly am rather proud of.
The concept of this crime fiction short story has been appropriated from my favourite poem, also called "An Open Window on Chicago" by Allen Ginsberg. The story also includes references taken from Sin City, Law & Order: SVU, Criss Angel, even a line from V For Vendetta is adapted and thrown in there. A hint as to what this story is overarchingly about: the title is a metaphor for its purpose.
Warning: Does contain very mild coarse language.
The story is approximately 1500 words so I don't expect you, if you've gotten this far, to actually read it. If you do though, please leave a comment to let me know what you think (constructive criticism is fine).
Without further ado, I present..
An Open Window on Chicago
An appropriation of Allen Ginsberg’s poem An Open Window on Chicago
For Her
There was no going back. A decision had to be made.
One, two, three, four hiding spots.
He could shoot perhaps two before he would be shot. One in four he would live. One in four both would die. Ironic, that the magician now relied on luck.
A shot rang out; one body hit the floor.
* * *
Midwinter night; it was cold, and damp, and dull.
The large overhanging sign read “CLARK AND HALSTEAD”, brushed with day-old snow. Downtown in my home, the windy metropolis felt like Batman’s Gotham City, battleshipped with lights. Suffering personified lifted a hand palsied by Parkinson’s Disease to beg for a cigarette. Under the corner of the blue-lamped boulevard, a magician drew a small crowd of cheering spectators.
A scream of pain, and blood spurted from his bare chest as he stood, arrow protruding from torso, chained to a wooden crucifix.
His scantily dressed assistant threw a black piece of cloth over him, covering him entirely. Only the shape of him remained, lit underneath the winking towers of the city. One could’ve been forgiven for mistaking the air, misted with fine soot, for smoke effects.
Bleep bleep dit dat dit.
The murmuring of the city punctured the silence, meditating on this ‘great’ civilisation. Suddenly, the cloth visibly changed shape, as if sighing, not unlike the black smoke stacks of the tiny reptilian towers, an organism in itself.
The cloth was lifted; the magician had vanished.
From the watertower behind them, a shout of glee. The crowd turned and gasped in astonishment as they saw the magician, without a wound in sight, pumping his fist in the air in front of the old Connor’s insurance sign fading on brick building side - once a corporation so proud of their executives they had to erect a monument to advertise and pay homage. How pitiful.
The magician bowed, a cruel smile on his mad face, and disappeared into the darkness.
It was then, and only then that the crowd noticed the assistant - with the distraction of the apparition, she was laying on the ground, murdered. Blood trickled from her mouth and onto the ground as she lay there, frozen in her final moments, an arrow sticking profusely from her proud chest.
Bleep bleep dit dat dit.
“911, what is your emergency?”
A few minutes later, police cars blinked past on nearby avenues, patrolling the streets, shooting through red lights past the crawling lines of ordinary private skins, exuding white winter smoke.
At the corner grill, a police car turned around from patrol to take its load of bum to jail, leaving behind black uniforms in their place, searching for the magician.
Sergeant Hartigan was one of those men; an experienced cop of almost 40 years in the force. But his kind was dying he knew. He had just been relieved from duty. Eat, eat, said the sign, so he entered the Spanish diner. Inside, the girl at the counter, whose yellow Bouffant roots grew black over her face, spooned him his coffee with puncture marked knuckles, midnight wrists perforated with needle track scars.
“Wanna go get a hotel room with me?”
A typical heroine whore, he knew her type. For thirty years they had been around, thirty years in the making. And this girl, who couldn’t have been more than early 20s, was wasting her life. Eighteen years at least of raising, schooling and studying and nurturing and for what, for this? This semblance of a life?
He sighed. Not everyone could be saved, not nearly everyone. Though he had been around for 40 years, he had always felt that he could’ve done so much more.
The radio was playing overhead and a television murmured in the corner - for whom?
The wastage of life had always angered him; he had even seen a psychiatrist once. “Where does the anger come from?” Outside! The same radio messages, the same television programs, the electric networks spread drugs and alcohol worldwide and into every private home in the country - “Communications media” inflicting war and anxiety and paranoia on every private skin. The Dakini hibernates while “social” news flashes through the aether.
More shouts at street corners as bums were rounded up.
Hartigan unbuckled his weapon, placing it on the table, and sipped his coffee, lost in his thoughts, when a familiar figure entered his peripheral vision. The man was young, well built, and perhaps would even have been handsome in the daylight. But this man wore no shirt.
Instantly, his senses were aware and his muscles tensed. His heart sped up considerably, and ached. He was due to retire. He could leave the man. Call in back up. The magician was, after all, considered dangerous. L
eave him to the younger men, he thought.
Almost telepathically, as though sensing his tension, the magician turned, and saw him, and saw the gun on the table. Mind reading manifest, he bolted without a word, and Hartigan, without a choice, followed, even as he pulled out his phone.
Within minutes the police station downtown was alive with the very same communications media he hated. Within minutes he was breathless.
Come on old man, show them you’re not completely worthless!
Just keeping the younger man in sight, Hartigan followed the magician.
He ran past a tiny church in roughly the middle of Chicago, with its black spike thrusting into the black air.
And then there were the new Utensil Towers round on horizon.
And there was also the red glow of neon on freshly painted walls at 4AM as the two city travellers desperately dashed through dirty dusty tracks.
My dear reader, I sat and observed these events, staring out of a hotel room window under Heaven.
Past deserted roofs and parking lots, the magician ran into a circus tent.
Hartigan reached the entrance, and stopped. He grasped at his heart, and clumsily shoved two pills down his throat. In front of him stood a veritable maw, a dark entrance to the unknown. Gun drawn, he walked inside.
There was just one simple room in the tent. The suspect was cornered. He would not escape now, regardless - even at that moment, backup was on the way, screeching police cars releasing screeching fumes running past the commercialised everything Chicago had to offer - hog butchers of the world.
“Why’d you do it, Mr. Magic Man?”
“Why not?”
He listened, but the voice echoed strangely in this tent. It was a high-pitched voice, odd, mechanical in its maliciousness.
“Who cares?” It continued. “I was bored… I’m a magician after all, am I not? I’m bored with my show - but the show must go on. Theatre and film please their audiences and from that, the actors must gain their pleasure. The same, alas, is true for me. So allow me, for once, some selfish indulgence - I did this for me, for my own amusement, for I am not like others. Am I?”
“You’re mad.” Hartigan slowed his breathing, calmed his ageing body.
A few more minutes and it’d all be alright. Just a few more minutes, keep him talking, and then he couldn’t do any more to anyone.
“My turn. What are you doing over there Mr. Policeman?”
“I have a gun. Come out unarmed and nobody will get hurt.”
“No, what you have are bullets, and a hope that you can hit me with them first, because if you cannot, you will be dead from my gun.”
For the first time, Hartigan examined his surroundings.
One, two, three, four hiding spots.
He could shoot perhaps two before he would be shot. One in four he would live. One in four both would die. Ironic, that the magician now relied on luck.
There was no going back. A decision had to be made.
“Stalling, Mr. Policeman? Naughty. I’ll even be kind to you. You have three seconds to decide where to shoot before I do.”
“Three.”
Hartigan’s eyes darted. He considered withdrawing.
“Two.”
No.
Not after 40 years.
“One.”
Hell of a way to end a career.
A shot rang out; one body hit the floor.
* * *
Elbow on windowsill, I sit and muse, taller than any building here. Harmonious modernity grows rusty-old: the prettiness of existence! I sit and muse, moaning over Chicago’s stone and brick harshly lifting itself vertical. Thoughts rise like steam from my head, joining the blackened smog. Elevators run up and down my leg, carrying copulating couples towards their hotel rooms in my belly, bearing children in my heart.
Close your eyes, my dear reader, and
be God; all Chicago is, is what you see.
Throughout the night, bullets crash on flesh - his flesh, my flesh, all the same.
The row of lights on the Finance building.
The watchman gently stirring.
The paper coffee cups by bronzed glass doors.
Is this tiny city the best we can do?!
And under the bridge, brown water floats great turds of ice beside buildings’ feet, in windy metropolis, waiting for the gunshot, waiting for the morning news, waiting to see who is still alive.
Fin.
An Open Window on Chicago
Linear Mode
