Someone else winning in his Kyiv? He doesn’t like it and he’s not having it… not one bit…
It’s sunny and peaceful in Shevchenko Park. The monument to the great Ukrainian bard the park is named after looms up through its center directly across from the eponymously named state university of Kyiv, red-colored by tradition, and because it looks damn good.
On a park bench, the wrinkled old man Josh Davies says to himself:
Here I am in the park feeding the pigeons after vigorously fucking my beautiful long-legged blonde-haired archaeologist wife. Heh – I wonder how ol’ Soiree is getting along without those ears. Dum-dee-dum-dum… Here you go, you stupid pigeons…
Down one end of the park old timers and sunbaked drunks engage in battles of presumed intellect, playing chess. Down another, the lovers of dogs congregate to shoot the breeze, having imagined the park to be the premier site for their stupid canine breeds to take a shit. Here and there, young lovers sit on benches sticking their tongues into each other’s mouths and squeezing their secondary sexual traits and engorged genitals.
On the bench, Josh Davies seemingly has the world at his feet. As he fondles a large greasy paper bag filled with moldy bread crumbs he’s throwing to the pigeons, he calmly feels his power surge through him, by now taking it for granted.
Hmm, I’d fuck that, he says, watching a 13-year-old with big tits skip by.
Hey, little girl, come here and help me feed the pigeons – hee, hee, hee… I wonder if that piece’d be better than raping Jim Kickshitz’s wife up in the balcony between acts after The Ferret told me where he had her tied up. At least that twisted little freak is good for something. Say, Josh, do you think there’s going to be a little Josh running around living at the expense of that pear-shaped oaf Kickshitz – who’ll think it’s his kid? Dum-dee-dee-dum dee-dee-dee-dum…
While Josh Davies throws his moldy bread crumbs to the pigeons, an unusually large crow has transfixed its gaze on Davies from a tree. At first, Davies feels bothered by the piercing glare as he sits there, reluctantly half-conscious of the crow and doing his best to ignore it. But he feels his energy drain off, and his hands fall off to the sides of the paper bag in his lap, as he slowly, and then helplessly gives the crow his eyes through his granny glasses.
There is a sudden vacuum whoosh and kaleidoscopic walls of iridescent color rush past him on either side as he is drawn up, up between them, into the crow’s eye.
As he breaks the force of the tunnel around him, leaving it behind, he floats toward a mountain of old broken and obsolete media junk and debris – old desktop computer monitors, typewriters, Dictaphones, microphones, camcorders, radios, gramophones, cathode ray tube and analog TVs, aerial antennas, reel-to-reel tape machines, satellite dishes, mixing consoles, multi-track recorders, keyboards, synthesizers, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, mixed in with tons of yellowed screenplays, rejected book manuscripts and newspapers whirled about by a dead wind of no provenance but the mountain itself, measureless stacks of old torn magazines and crumbling books, wound around by endless miles of audio and video tape.
As Davies approaches the mountain, he espies a small, depleted figure at its base, and as he gets closer, he sees it is Boss Bo Lard, with his arms raised feebly and imploringly in the air and his head thrown back emitting an embittered weak cry – No, Welsh, no!!! This is all wrong!!! Welsh, Welsh… nooooo!!!
As Davies is lifted up the mountain, the wind blowing the paper around it grows stronger and stronger, and he begins to hear a gravelly but robust voice laughing with lusty and fanatic self-confidence through the wind, and as he reaches the top Davies sees the shiny black shoes and pants cuffs of a dark granite-blue suit, a snakeskin belt around no inordinately large, but almost trim, belly, an esoteric pastel-striped Madison Avenue shirt with rolled-up sleeves and the latest style of chic, steely, sharkskin-pattern tie (instead of the heretofore pathetically out-of-date paisley) emitting seductive virility, raw power and indomitable will. Two defiant pudgy fists are raised above shoulders that have somehow been broadened, as by a camera trick, toward the sky, and between the cement-mixer laughs Welsh Losser shouts – It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine!!! The thick metal band of an expensive-looking watch shakes crazily off one hand.
Davies is nonplussed but unimpressed.
But then Davies is lifted higher, over Losser and his maniacal media maelstrom into a bright, clear, calm climate, where his rise is violently halted, jarring the old man into a state of indignant shock, and then a bright light breaks the sky open before him and a figure emerges, so white, Davies is nearly blinded. Davies snarls his old man’s mouth and covers his eyes, trying to get a straight-on glimpse of the figure, who stands far from, and above him.
He cannot see the figure, which Davies senses is smiling, and though he denies it, he cannot bring himself to even try to look, for fear, and keeps his head bowed, as if being forced against his will to pray.
Now from the figure, which seems so far away, a left hand comes down, stretching somehow over the great distance, and a forefinger points in Josh Davies’s turkey-wrinkled face. Whatever force has bent his head in supplication is now allowing Davies to look at the finger, just under his nose. He sees the nail, the color and texture of the skin, the lines and knuckle ridges, and then the pores and fine light-brown hairs sprinkled gently across the third digit before the finger joins the hand – and he suddenly knows; the finger is…
Stephan’s!!!
The vision breaks violently asunder and Davies feels his saggy ass’s tailbone thump down hard and back into the Kyiv park bench.
As he opens his eyes and looks up, he sees the back of a huge crow lumbering away. The flapping of its wings stirs a dry wind into his cracking face.
As Josh Davies shakes and rages on the bench, people come up and stare concernedly at the old man, who’s fuming away. Obviously a foreigner, they think to themselves, even without the fact that he’s not raving in Russian or Ukrainian; and with those physical features, the odd, nightmare fairytale troll physiognomy, the deformed phrenology with the extra-large forehead, and particularly the super-aged and wrinkled skin, so uncommon around here as to be non-existent, and of course the saggy-ass farmer jeans. Who dresses like that, they think. Only a foreigner. They shake their heads at the inferior, probably inbred, genetics, and tsk-tsk their tongues.
The oversized head wobbles as if about to fly off the shuddering dwarflike upper body.
I put Stephan away – years ago… years ago! And I put him away for good! I finished him off!!! Had I been misled by crank advice? Was the whole idea of making The Ferret a cruel hoax… played on me?!?
Josh Davies fumbles for his black outsized old-model mobile phone, his fingers trembling, panicking to find the numbers of Boris and Heinrich – it’s no use, the numbers seem to have disappeared from the data console.
And then a voice from above pronounces – That’s Saint Stephan to you, Davies! The people surrounding Davies hear it too and begin to cross themselves.
In furious minutes, Josh Davies is at Saint Volodymyr’s Cathedral, just down from the park, on Shevchenko Boulevard.
He waddles into the sacred house and begins swinging his fists out to the sides, knocking down the donation boxes and the candles out of their holders, frothing spittle and shouting unspeakable things in his old man’s voice and accursed foreign tongue, but is wrestled to the floor by custodian ladies, who hold him down and pray. He is raving up at them – raving…
Filed by Jack Step, August 18, 2013