<>3^rd PERSON OMNISCIENT
 

CHAPTER I: JAMISON’S END

Millicent de la Boiserie strode manfully into the garden house where her butler, Jamison, had spent the better part of Wednesday night in furtive coitus with one of the town girls. Lady de la Boiserie was unaware of exactly the extent of his success, but she did know that something remiss had transpired, and was determined to eradicate any latent evidence before the others of her luncheon group were to meet there in fifteen minutes.

Millicent was a handsome woman, tall, with long grey hair caught up in an intricate bun as befitting the wife of a peer. Her refinement and attention to detail had been a subject of admiration and imitation by the impressionable women of her circle, she did not wish to falter in their esteem because of the indiscretions of a mere servant. Jamison would be dealt with later. For now, damage control was top priority.

The attendees of this luncheon would, as always, take careful note of every domestic detail, from the current fashion in gloves to this week’s new DVDs by the television. She bustled about, artfully adjusting the flower arrangements, re-aligning the gilt picture frames on the ancient walls. Her present state of fluster prevented her from noticing the wadded panties that were stuffed into the cushions of a Louis XIII armchair, the one by the window where Dame Edwinda of Corinth would be seated in twelve minutes and seventeen seconds.

The reason that Lady B’s stride was of a masculine nature had always been ascribed by her husband to her American origins, but what Lord Hubert de la Boiserie did not know was that his wife, refined yet so seductively liberated, had actually been born Milton Jones, the result of a temporary liaison between a traveling salesman and a prostitute in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District just before the science of trans-gender surgery had reached its pinnacle.

Millicent completed the illusion by feigning pregnancy not once but twice, and to Hubie’s delight two sons had been provided to him by his bewitching wife who had in both cases surprised everyone by managing to regain her virginal figure within mere days of giving birth.

The boys, Hubert III and William Charles Byron, both now teenagers, were already bearing a remarkable likeness to their father, a surprise to no one despite the no small effort required on the part of their titular mother, involving as it did a very expensive medical specimen freezer disguised as Hubie’s bathroom wastebasket—recipient of his used condoms—and then, not long after, large payments to Millicent’s sister Betty, who had been secretly flown to London to serve as surrogate mother.

Subsequent to his capture of the town girl’s panties and ensuing discovery by the vigilant Millicent, the butler Jamison had suffered from cardiac arrest, to be sent at three in the morning to the emergency ward at the Order of Nightingale Hospital, where, although almost fifty years old and terribly stout, he was expected to fully recover, for it was not yet known that he was already in the intermediate stages of premature Alzheimer’s, and that within two years he would be sent to an asylum for inappropriate tendencies, especially a particularly raucous Ethel Merman imitation during the Lord’s fox hunting party. Lord Hubert, astride a Morgan and in possession of his war pistol, had shot and very nearly killed the man, so it was generally acknowledged that Jamison’s commitment to the asylum was for his own good.

Meanwhile, halfway across the globe where it was approaching midnight in the ancient town of Surabaya, Hubert III and W.C. forcibly undressed a native girl in a grass hut by the side of a tropical river. They had just begun filming the main orgy scene in their third counter-cultural, real-time podcast movie, the preferred pasttime of English Peers-to-be. Their naked bodies having been rubbed down with overripe guyabana by the rest of the carefully chosen coterie, seven tiny and dark teenagers who wore nothing but enormous tropical flowers braided through their flowing black hair. The movie streamed across the web to appear on the screen of their father’s laptop, as Lord Hubert had moments ago launched an Internet search for his sons, based on an anonymous Email from WC’s extremely jealous girlfriend Eustacia, a horsey young Englishwoman who had long known that the de la Boiserie boys were AWOL from their school’s annual jaunt to Hongkong. This news would prove to have disasterous effects on the Lord’s gastrointestinal system, already stressed by the recent arrival of a letter from the British Ministry of Domestic Taxation. He had spent the better part of the morning seated on the john, his gut squealing plaintively as his intestinal flora lost another battle with the dark forces of acidophilic bacteria.

 

CHAPTER II: A CLOSER LOOK.

     In Millicent’s left cranial lobe, an imbalance of hormones had precipitated her gender preference. In Lord Hubert’s family background, the societal flaw of sending pubescent English boys to all-male private schools colored his idealized physiological preference and motivated his attraction to his curiously masculine wife. With Hubie III and W.C. the propensity for sexual deviancy, an enigma even to the best therapists Lord Hubert’s money could buy, in fact involved not only gene damage to their mother’s family, but also a homosexual-tendency gene inheirited from their father, as well as the environmental issues of having been taken from their biological mother after only one day of breast-feeding to be put into the arms of a man. These two boys harbored vile, black desires that no doctor would ever expose to the healthful light of awareness.

 

CHAPTER III: DENOUEMENT

“Egad,” exclaimed Dame Edwina.

“Aoh, baby!” gasped Hubert III.

“BEEeeooweeep!” grunted the intestine of Hubert II.

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<>3^rd PERSON ANTI-SUBJECTIVE 

As Anthony James neared the Evincia’s Gallery, just off the trendy section of Fillmore steet, a spontaneous applause burst from the throngs milling at the entrance. His olive hand-tailored Peruvian silk suit screamed “cutting edge,” and several of the men and women in attendance, especially the fellow artists, experienced the flush of chagrin that comes of realizing you have been out-classed. Even Aristide Belaire, that immaculate Frenchman who was riding the current artworld crest, felt hopelessly behind the curve in his relatively staid Hilfiger gauze pantsuit with the lace crotch.

James’ languid gait belied the importance of the appearance, as this was his first showing on his home turf after spectacular successes in both Sohos. Russian mafiosos and Taiwanese exploitationists were snapping up his larger tableaux for record prices, but the flash of publicity was already dying down and it was generally understood that soon enough his marketability would eventually belong to the more rational elements of the art world. Hence tonight’s show: if his work continued to hold the affection of the locals, conventional wisdom said he had might still be able to make a living from his art. His wife, two mistresses, and the new boy, a Sudanese intaglio, were all inside, shaking hands, pouring wine, and anxiously glancing at each other to see which of them knew the master’s whereabouts.

The first to greet James was a very soused Jill Bates, VIP of a software company from the valley. “Great stuff, fantastic,” she effused. But as she took his hand and looked him squarely in his evanescent hazel eyes, she experienced a flicker of fear that James was laughing at her corporate stuffiness. The ubiquitous anxiety among art patrons is that the artist despises them even as he sells them his soul.

James smiled and continued forward, to be clapped next on the back simultaneously by Jules and Jim, twin gay lovers, the hot performance artists of the moment, both of whom noticed the sensuous feel of the raw silk along the painter’s famously insubstantial shoulder blades. He smiled shyly to Regan O’Malley, art reporter for the New York Times, who happened to be out reviewing the latest exhibit at the De Young Museum and stopped in to test for an expiration date on a man she assumed was a flash in the pan. O’Malley slugged the rest of her Glen Mitchel single malt as she suppressed the certain knowledge that everyone in attendance could see that she was only a critic by dint of her inability to create Anything of Value herself, having failed ignominously at the Rhode Island School of Design some seventeen years ago, the daughter of undisciplined hippies who had committed the sin of encouraging artistic endeavor indiscriminately. They had once lavished several minutes of praise upon her seventeen year-old head for an inking that was in reality a piece of paper she had been using as the blotter.

“Ah, there you are at last!” cried Bill Evincia, the frustrated owner of the gallery, who had been popping Tums like an addict for the past two hours as he waited for his star to arrive. Evincia, fifty-seven years old, balding with a shaved head, two point three million in debt, was a hypochondriac of nearly religious proportions who had just that afternoon added Cranial Feng Shui treatment to his plethora of unpayable bills.

James was led to the chardonnay table where he was poured a small volume into an enormous glass, actually intended for red wine but employed for the occasion due to its outlandish dimension. He nodded and raised a grateful eyebrow to the lissome young man who had poured the drink, Alfonso, an exchange student from Italy.

“Rats,” thought Alfonso as he turned and bent down to fetch another bottle from the stock on the floor, “does he think I’m attracted to him? What if he tries to charm me into bed with him, and me with no girlfriend or any proof that I’m solidly heterosexual? Am I really gay?” When he straightened and turned around again, Alfonso could see that James had not stayed to admire his butt. Alfonso decided that he was relieved.

Anthony James was conspicuously ignored by most of the crowd, artsy trend-setters who recognized him but who knew that their peers also recognized him, and with the finely honed skill of the urbane, they competed in that game of one-upmanship which in our culture consists of appearing the most bored. Their aloofness was counterpointed by Mike Stebbins, a lawyer from Houston of no small self-importance, who rushed up to James and proudly effused.

“Tony! Hey, look, it’s Tony James, Honey! The artist himself is here.” By-standers smirked derisive smirks and turned back to their conversations about the stock market while Stebbin’s wife Iselda sashayed up to James.

“Tony James,” Stebbins said, ignorant of the artist’s well-known aversion to diminutives of his given name, “this is my wife Selda. Selda, look, this is the guy who did the blue one we’ve got over the couch!”

“Darling, you’re not supposed to call him Tony, everyone knows that,” she said, running her wet red tongue over her collagen-injected lips in her interpretation of ‘seductress about to devour a man alive.’

“Aw, hell, we’re all friends here. Friends of art, anyway, right, Tony?” Stebbins, of all the room’s occupants, was perhaps the closest to the bliss of ignorance: ignorant of his perceived boorishness among the rest of the room and ignorant of his wife’s disdain for everything about him except his money... and ignorant of her numerous infidelities as well.

Anthony James spent the next five minutes in the unique company of Stebbins, which his wife interpreted as the testimony of James’ sudden and undying lust for her, and which Evincia interpreted as James' clever attempt to ingratiate himself to one of the richest tort lawyers in the country, which was reinforced for Evincia later by the sale of nearly a million in lithographs to Stebbins (“They’re for my pee dater in Paris” he explained, Iselda hissing “that’s pied-à-terre”).

Nearly all others in the room fell in line with Regan O’malley’s interpretation of James’ curious behavior, which she expounded in her Times column the following week:

“...or the impressive turnout at the latest James showing in San Francisco’s Evincia gallery, where the supremely confident artist turned out in a shocking post-modern chartreuse tweed ensemble, demonstrating once more his virtuosity in the decontruction of the Performance Art World; he and a cohort produced an amazing contrast of the suave urbanity of the Artist with the apalling buffoonery of the Investor.”

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2^ND FIDDLE SUBJECTIVE

     “Fffrrrgh! Hmmmmngh! Rrrrr, rrr!” Sr. Lucas glares at me as I put the duct tape on his mouth. I stand up to look at him, and he keeps pointing his ugly face up at me, glaring with nasty dark eyeballs. So I take one last long piece of duct tape off the roll and slap it over his eyes. When he yanks it off, it’s going to tear the shit out of his eyebrows. If he tears it off.

     I sit back down on the couch and turn the game back up. I don’t know why I had to be the one to babysit this pansy, but he sure is a pain in the ass. Duke’s the one that grabbed him. Duke—the Kidnap King of Caracas.

I don’t even remember how I got caught in all this shit. Two years ago I was living in the garbage dump with my sister Lauzi and about a hundred other kids. Then one day Duke’s gang picked up the cash from a drop but it was a set up for the cops and there was a big car chase up to the dump and a big shoot-out. The cops were shooting everybody, not just the bad guys but us kids too, so when I saw Duke’s gang sneaking out to their real getaway car I jumped in too and here I am. Now I sleep on a real bed and eat cooked food.

Lauzi—she got her head blown off by the cops. That’s why I hate the cops. I also hate the rich porcos, Duke calls them, the guys who run everything and pay all the cops to shoot us and stuff like that. That’s why Duke kidnaps them.

The futbol game is almost over; it looks like we’re going to beat Mexico. Sr. Lucas is crying or something. Like I care! Duke’s going to pick up the money now. If he doesn’t come back, I’m supposed to shoot this guy in the head. I don’t know if I’d do it, though. If he’s not even from here, I don’t see how he could be paying cops to shoot kids.

I used to think Duke was like some kind of god or something. I mean, he let me stay here and gave me food and his friends even taught me how to read and shit. Now I write all his ransom notes for him. I also do a lot of the other work, like taking care of these losers. Shut up, Sr. Lucas! Can’t you just shut up?

I helped with the grab—I ran out in front of Sr. Lucas’ car and pretended that they hit me, his driver didn’t want to stop because he knew it was a trick but I could hear Sr. Lucas yell at him and when he got out to take a look at me, that’s when they grabbed him. I busted my arm when the car hit me but Chico used to work as a nurse so he took care of it. That’s why I've got this cast.

Anyway I figured out a while back that Duke wasn’t some kind of guardian angel or anything, he makes me run out in the gunfire for the money bag, he makes me jump in front of the pigeon’s car, shit like that, so I was already thinking he wasn’t so great, even before that thing Sr. Lucas said to me.

One time he even thought I was killed and I wasn’t, I was just knocked out when something hit my head in a shoot out, but when I came to in the middle of the night and finally made my way home he had already given my bed away to some new kid.

The shoot-out was with this cop, Valdaras, who’s been after Duke for a while. Maybe he’s even out there waiting for Duke right now. He’s got a super rifle team and they shoot anybody who even looks like Duke, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they get him tonight.

So this guy Senor Lucas is a big American and he’s supposed to be worth a million million. He made the mistake of coming down here for some kind of business deal, and Duke grabs him. It was really slick. Grabbed him from under the noses of twenty armed guards, right outside his hotel. No wonder Valdaras wants to get him so bad.

Senor Lucas only said one sentence to me, but now I can’t get it out of my head. I try to watch the stupid futbol game and I try to talk to you but it’s still swimming around in their, driving me crazy. I think I’m going to give Sr. Lucas the knife. Duke should have been back here by now anyway, he never takes this long for a pick-up. I think Hijas ratted on him, I think Valdaras got him. He’s probably on his way up here to shoot me too.

“Why did Duke lead them to the dump?” That’s all Sr. Lucas said. That’s when I slapped the tape over his mouth. But now I can’t shut up that voice.

Duke’s a bastard but he’s not as bad as the cops, that’s what I used to tell myself. But I’m just a damned kid and he almost got me killed twice, and he didn’t even look like he cared. Goddamn Sr. Lucas cared more than Duke did when I broke my arm. But if Duke lead them up to the dump just to give them someone else to shoot at, then he’s as much the reason Lauzi’s dead as Valdaras is.

So here’s the knife, Sr. Lucas. Cut yourself loose. I’m outta here. The gun’s in the next room. And if Duke comes back, do me a favor: shoot him.