026 I have been on the run for four years. I’m used to it now. I spent a few months in a birdcage sort of facility owned by a millionaire in exchange for ghost writing his biography. He became famous overnight thanks to the many lies I wrote, and sorted me out with a plastic surgeon in exchange. I have been a brand new sort of ghost ever since. I kind of look like Wilson, Tom Hanks volleyball and best friend —in another horrible movie with Tom Hanks in it. Nobody seems to figure out my pronoun anymore, so I have decided to just answer yes whenever someone inquires about it. The End, Dublin 23rd of April 2019 NOW HERE, May 2024, Nowhere. He was wearing a bowling hat, had his sleeves rolled up despite the freaking cold, and had a scar like a deep question mark running from his right cheek to his crooked chin. He was anything but a misspelt agent on an X file. He carried a notebook and a pen. As Lydia Davis’s first husband used to say, «you only need a pen to become a writer» (he became Paul Auster). Murder kept drawing like a demented sketch artist all sorts of indecipherable symbols on his notepad. Then he stopped and said: “I will have to get the Interpol on the case due to your nationality.” “What the heck are you talking about?” He said I was a suspect in a murder case, mentioned the embarrassing place where I was born, and asked for my criminal record and my links to Alex. “I was trying to save someone I loved! For fuck sake! I would have done anything to protect Nora!” “Let the judge decide that and the nature of your work with Alex.” “What work? She was holding the deadly body of my favourite person in the world. She knew I would never leave Nora alone. I would have killed Alex if I had known what she was about to do.” Murder looked anything but impressed. On the day we met, Alex told me that she held a MA in Psychology, and that she was using organic drugs, such as iboga and psychedelics to break addiction patterns in long time users. I asked her to keep Nora out of it: she was too young, plus she was making great progress with her writing assignments. If you call me non-binary I say yes, if you call me him or hers, I say yes, and if you call me a sicko I also say yes. And thanks Does it make me pronoun fluid or just polite? Before I became Wilson, my paranoia had been increasing like Wagner on steroids. Life has been much easier ever since, enough at least, to decide to come out and vindicate this journey, the first travel blog ever devoid of locations. I believe that if you read and look at the photos with a little bit of curiosity, you won’t find it difficult to pin me down. I’m ready for Murder. And I will die by the travelling sword, my only home. Welcome to NOWHERE, right now, Now Here. I disposed of the stinky journalist corpse on the closest garbage dump I could find, and moved to Ireland to learn their language and become a literary translator. I was living in Dublin, had the funniest, loving partner, an office in town, a creative writing teaching gig, a book and an Aikido black belt underway, and a promising gallery owner increasingly interested in my homemade videos of rubbish glittering on the stream of the Liffey. Then I met the wrong law enforcer at the wrong time in a place that should not have been wrong. The agent was called Carl Murder, true fuckt. The time was right after the last breath of a very fine and troubled young user that I loved dearly, and whom I failed to resuscitate after a detox session inflicted by a quack. As for the place, it was called Now Here, a free shelter for young, recovering users, where I was teaching Creative Writing to a lovely bunch of orphans like me. Since the rest of the underage residents renamed the centre Nowhere after losing Nora, this will be the name I will subsequently use to refer to it —and to title my escape. I had met Alex, the quack, witch-inhouse-doctor at Nowhere, a couple of times before the end of light. Then I met her one last time on the ghastly day she asked me for help in utter panic, before fleeing the scene of her own crime, leaving me with blue, sweet Nora. I had seen others go before my eyes, but none of them were so young and had survived as much as Nora had. I waylaid my lips to hers and took half of her last breath. She shivered gently, and whispered her last two words: “love” and “Asia.” I waited for the paramedics to arrive. They pronounced her dead at the scene. It felt like someone had cancelled the sun on May Day. The criminal investigators landed right after. Murder was the first to show up. I should have known better: there are people who you must never tell WHAT NOT TO DO. Alex had to prove me wrong for the sake of her god-like ego. When she came asking for help I read fatality on her grimace. I also realised that her calling for help was just a sneaky manoeuvre to pave her way out of the scene. She ran for her pointless life to no avail. I felt like an ambulance on speed, a red and blue siren tumbling down the slope where Yin kills Yan. I rang Selby, my ten-year loving partner, straight away. He was a human rights activist and attorney. I was speechless and then stuttered. It only took him one minute to utter the heart-breaking words: “You must leave the country right after they interrogate you. Buy a burner phone and ring me back once you are done. I’ll arrange everything. Don’t use your credit card. And dear, remember: don’t ever dare coming back home”. Coming morning, when Murder and his agents knocked at the door of our last known home, I was already miles away with a fake passport in my pocket and Marrakech beyond my pale, pale window. Selby welcomed the agents and said that I had left early that morning, and that he was not quite sure if I was off to play a gig in Kerry or West Cork. What was the issue anyway, he asked. Murder smirked. “I know who you are: you won’t fool me”, he said. “If he doesn’t show up at the police station in the next 24 hours he would become the primal suspect in a murder case. So you know, darling”. Carl Murder, true fuckt. [A misspelled agent on an X File]. [Murder’s men on one of their shady undercover assignments]. NORA ENJOYING ONE THE LAST NIGHTS OF HER LIFE.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Mjk4NzM=