I.
After the election steal, they take me to the presidential palace. There’s gold trim in the lavatory and cheap champagne on tap in every antechamber. A butler with white cotton gloves promises he’ll never let me sober up again. ‘Am I not my brother’s keeper, sir?’ he says, all snooty. Like a slave. At midnight, after the adrenochrome has run its course, and the journalists are sent to their jungle nests, my wife comes into the bedroom with a warm face towel in one hand and a snub-nosed revolver in the other. She shaves the white whiskers from my face with a razor and then speaks a prayer in Aramaic that makes my blue eyes bleed. ‘Your tiny tears are testimonies to a sad soul,’ she says and dabs at my reddened cheeks. She stands up, admiring her handiwork, and then fires all six blanks into my brain. Hidden behind a portrait of Abe Lincoln is our mistress, weeping. She’ll be dressed in widow’s rags and tattooed with Old Testament prophecy come the dawn. ‘There’s a misunderstanding between me and the American people,’ I explain to a teleprompter machine in the morning, holding my bandaged head at the press conference, and then settle in early to watch some Albanian Romcom while my head bones heal. Just as the plot begins to thicken, my mistress erupts through the Lincoln and cracks a paperweight Reagan over the First Lady’s skull. Blood slanders the oval office carpets for the fourth time in this republic’s history. ‘We the People’, repeats over the intercom like a curse. All this is televised and foretold in some press secretary’s run sheet pentagram. On the front lawn, as the reporters assemble like organs in an abattoir grate, I introduce the threat of a radioactive nazi menace to flashing cameras, grinning and high in my methamphetamine pursuit of happiness.
II.
Christopher Hitchens takes the stage at Eden Gardens. Behold the adoration of countless West Bengalis, roaring evangels plagiarised directly from a forbidden chapter in ‘God’s Not So Great’, which I remember reading with a microscope in the days before internet influencers with alphabet connections were arbiters of the all-exclusive discourse dividends. These fanatics only have themselves to blame, I decide, ascending the stairs of the eastern floodlight tower with my Mark 13 slung over dislocated shoulders. The evening sun is catching like a garnished margarita spilling through the cantilevered ribs of Howrah Bridge, a scenic constellation that only lofty hitmen get to see. Richie Benaud’s AI avatar stalks the crowd with holographic legs and declares a million people in attendance when the first shot passes through his insubstantial air. It ricochets round the stadium as hollow point brittle takes the Australian captain’s cap off with a fistful of brainy mush. Christopher, too, is mortally wounded, his combover has flipped towards eternity to reveal a second shooter. His final words are not recorded in the obits. In the mirror of a hotel room next morning, with cash stacks strapped to every limb, I listen to the rifle beg and pray as though every bullet that’s passed through its twisted barrel were doggerel from an overworld. One hotdog merchant out in the street, pushing a collapsing cart, has words for what has come to pass. He calls it ‘jouissance in vicarious suicide,’ while waving the morning papers above his head. And the next flight out of Kolkata lifts into a sunset snaked with oscillating ink, thick and fluid enough to blot flocks of cardinals out of bloodied sky.
III.
My art teacher was a beautiful woman whose hands would find their way onto my shoulders when I asked, ‘Do you think this work is any good?’ My imaginary friend records this confession in a little red book, while he listens to a band called ‘Norman Blackmailer’. The singer has a voice like an upturned tomb, and I am searching frantic through our DVD collections. All six seasons of LOST must be around here somewhere. My estranged wife, an evangelical with fake lashes and red-letter appointments etched under her fingernails is scooping up our son’s Lego in a yellow bucket. She asks my brother to help her fling some demons from her palm. ‘What rot,’ I say, but then I spy the bloody thorns teething through her pale skin, along the wrist like thornbush jaw. ‘Break it up!’ I scream into a pillowcase someone shoves over my head. ‘It’s fine,’ my brother replies in Ancient Greek, applying pressures round my throat. In short, I am unable to breathe. All fades to fever black, but an iPhone with a crash-course in Kabbalah magic brings me back to life as an App, and I live on the dresser, plugged into the wall. Late in the evening, a floating orb of lightning enters the room, like a phantom thought. It swears profusely, in its static charges. My ex-wife offers this force of nature a gin and tonic. What happens next is blood and cocktails lined with lethal shocks. God looks on from his lamp-lit treehouse, and then he fits in horror like an epileptic earthworm some rough shoveling has split in two. He falls amidst long grasses, waiting like a promise to be born.