Free Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje Page A

shut they can slice the dog’s body in half knowing the jaws will still not let go.
    All the time I hate what I am doing and want the other. In a room full of people I get frantic in their air and their shout and when I’m alone I sniff the smell of their bodies against my clothes. I’m scared Webb, don’t think I will find one person who will be the right audience. All you’ve done is cut me in half, pointing me here. Where I don’t want these answers.

I go outside and piss in your garden. When I get back onto the porch the dog is licking at the waterbowl trying to avoid the yellow leaves floating in it. With all the time in the world he moves his body into perfect manoeuvring position so he can get his tongue between the yellow and reach the invisible water. His tongue curls and captures it. He enters the house with me, the last mouthful pouring out of his jaws. Once inside he rushes around so the cold night air caught in his hair falls off his body.
    The dog follows me wherever I go now. If I am slow walking he runs ahead and waits looking back. If I piss outside he comes to the area, investigates, and pisses in the same place, then scratches earth over it. Once he even came over to the wet spot and covered it up without doing anything himself. Today I watched him carefully and returned the compliment. After he had leaked against a tree I went over, pissed there too, and scuffed my shoe against the earth so he would know I had his system. He was delighted. He barked loud and ran round me excited for a few minutes. He must have felt there had been a major breakthrough in the spread of hound civilization and who knows he may be right. How about that Webb, a little sensa humour to show you.

Tired. Sulphur. When you’re tired, the body thick, you smell sulphur. Bellocq did that. Always. Two in the morning three in the morning against the window of the street restaurant he’d rub a match on the counter and sniff it in. Ammonia ripping into his brain. Jarring out the tiredness. And then back to his conversations about everything except music, the friend who scorned all the giraffes of fame. I said, You don’t think much of this music do you? Not yet, he said. Him watching me waste myself and wanting me to step back into my body as if into a black room and stumble against whatever was there. Unable then to be watched by others. More and more I said he was wrong and more and more I spent whole evenings with him.
    The small tired man sitting on the restaurant bench or the barber chair never saying his scorn but just his boredom at what I was trying to do. And me in my vanity accusing him at first of being tone deaf! He was offering me black empty spaces. Revived himself with matches once an hour, wanted me to become blind to everything but the owned pain in myself. And so yes there is a need to come home Webb with that casual desert blackness.

Whatever I say about him you will interpret as the working of an enemy and what I loved Webb were the possibilities in his silence. He was just there , like a small noon shadow. Dear Bellocq, he was so short he was the only one who could stretch up in the barber shop and not get hit by the fan. He didn’t rely on anything. He trusted nothing, not even me. I can’t summarize him for you, he tempted me out of the world of audiences where I had tried to catch everything thrown at me. He offered mole comfort, mole deceit. Come with me Webb I want to show you something, no come with me I want to show you something. You come too. Put your hand through this window.

You didn’t know me for instance when I was with the Brewitts, without Nora. Three of us played cards all evening and then Jaelin would stay downstairs and Robin and I would go to bed, me with his wife. He would be alone and silent downstairs. Then eventually he would sit down and press into the teeth of the piano. His practice reached us upstairs, each note a finger on our flesh. The unheard tap of his calloused fingers