31 October 2017

I want to write an honest sentence. Each clause begins, “In furtherance of their scheme,” then concludes with what money was laundered where. Room after room disgorges its towels and sheets for Filipino maids to spirit away. But the scheme involves money, a lot of it, and off-shore accounts have nothing to do with reefs or wave patterns, rather with Company A and Company B, with carpets and Range Rovers, with condos and lawn services. Where every transaction is a cover story, there can be no depth. This ocean is flat as the stage set for an opera: two women on a boat lose their cell phone and get lost in the Pacific. Four months later they're found, funnily enough, alive. Not every sentence matters but they're all material, like the scarlet yarn that emerges from a chicken's entrails, turning butchery into narrative, as per always. To tell a story is to lose it like a lock or to hide beneath it. To pick the story is to indict its tellers, draw them out of their Virginia mansions. One taxi driver said houses had nothing in them, were shells set in the grass to impress the neighbors. The flag of our disposition is a deposition. Fake news is true insofar as someone calls it false, and false is true when it leads us down long corridors past room service and into the gunman's suite, now set off with police tape. He killed so many people because he didn't get into a good school. He killed them because his father was a psychopath. He killed them because his girlfriend was in the Philippines. He killed them because he killed them. What are these tender buttons but triggers we curl our fingers around, like a baby's hand our own. Tender is not the word, unless we consider the offer a good one. I pay my kids' tuition with the money I have taken from you. We will pull the lid off a bleached reef and watch it stare through the water's crust. No one to see the Range Rover, or the condo. He's driven off, face hidden by a sun visor, though one angle shows him smiling.

--31 October 2017