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defrogI am in a bookstore, and I come across a small hardback book – no jacket, but the title is embossed on the clothbound cover. It looks like a short story dressed up as a limited edition printing. As I start to read it, the cinematic version plays in my head – it looks like a Wes Anderson movie.
The story starts with a woman (played by Scarlet Johansson) spotting a man riding in a hansom cab. He stops and they begin to talk. He says he is a student at Nanyang University in Singapore, and that he intends to kill himself. She asks why. He tells her a story about how his parents once made him butcher a pig (or something along those lines) – anyway, the result is he’s a pacifist who feels out of place in a violent world, and he doesn’t really want to live in it anymore.
Scarlet invites him to dinner to talk him out of it. The restaurant is lit exclusively by candlelight, and the tables are so tall you have to climb a ladder to reach them.
The man and Scarlet have dinner, and she tells him that suicide is just another form of violence. So if he kills himself, he will become part of the violent culture he abhors. He realizes she’s right, but apparently he takes this to mean if he has to live in a culture of violence, he might as well go ahead and embrace that culture, because in the next scene, he is chasing a waitress with a meat cleaver.
He kills the waitress, and then realizing what he’s done, he takes the cleaver and cuts his face off before slitting his throat.
The final scene takes place in a large mansion, where Scarlet works as a maid. She is preparing a meal of chopped roasted pig (head, hooves and all) and the man from Nanyang U. As she takes it to her master, the final line of the book reads:
“She was mildly amused to discover that the man and the pig took the same length of time to cook.”
Scene shift: It is nighttime, and I am reading the book in a hotel suite, which I am sharing with another man, though he’s not in the room at the moment. Outside a storm is brewing – wind starts to pound rain onto the windows. I can also hear/see Ronnie James Dio out by the pool singing opera in the rain. I don’t like opera, but he makes it sound bad-ass.
I look at the book for the author’s name – I don't see it, though I see that Neil Gaiman is quoted as liking the story. As I get up to stretch, I notice that my roommate’s side of the suite hasn’t been tidied up by housekeeping. The bed is unmade, and empty coffee cups are everywhere. However, my side of the room has been cleaned. I wonder if it’s because his side of the room has its own door, so the staff treat the rooms as separate. I start to wonder where he is.
The room has a sliding glass door that opens onto a large patio surrounded by trees. I watch the storm, and something suddenly occurs to me. I open the door and look outside. There’s no ambient light and the rain is heavy, so it’s hard to see, but when lightning flashes, I think I can see something in the branches of one of the trees – it looks like it might be a body of a man who hung himself.
I can’t see who it is, but it’s just then that I realize my roommate was the author of the book I just read.
And then I woke up.
Turn the page,
This is dF
The story starts with a woman (played by Scarlet Johansson) spotting a man riding in a hansom cab. He stops and they begin to talk. He says he is a student at Nanyang University in Singapore, and that he intends to kill himself. She asks why. He tells her a story about how his parents once made him butcher a pig (or something along those lines) – anyway, the result is he’s a pacifist who feels out of place in a violent world, and he doesn’t really want to live in it anymore.
Scarlet invites him to dinner to talk him out of it. The restaurant is lit exclusively by candlelight, and the tables are so tall you have to climb a ladder to reach them.
The man and Scarlet have dinner, and she tells him that suicide is just another form of violence. So if he kills himself, he will become part of the violent culture he abhors. He realizes she’s right, but apparently he takes this to mean if he has to live in a culture of violence, he might as well go ahead and embrace that culture, because in the next scene, he is chasing a waitress with a meat cleaver.
He kills the waitress, and then realizing what he’s done, he takes the cleaver and cuts his face off before slitting his throat.
The final scene takes place in a large mansion, where Scarlet works as a maid. She is preparing a meal of chopped roasted pig (head, hooves and all) and the man from Nanyang U. As she takes it to her master, the final line of the book reads:
“She was mildly amused to discover that the man and the pig took the same length of time to cook.”
Scene shift: It is nighttime, and I am reading the book in a hotel suite, which I am sharing with another man, though he’s not in the room at the moment. Outside a storm is brewing – wind starts to pound rain onto the windows. I can also hear/see Ronnie James Dio out by the pool singing opera in the rain. I don’t like opera, but he makes it sound bad-ass.
I look at the book for the author’s name – I don't see it, though I see that Neil Gaiman is quoted as liking the story. As I get up to stretch, I notice that my roommate’s side of the suite hasn’t been tidied up by housekeeping. The bed is unmade, and empty coffee cups are everywhere. However, my side of the room has been cleaned. I wonder if it’s because his side of the room has its own door, so the staff treat the rooms as separate. I start to wonder where he is.
The room has a sliding glass door that opens onto a large patio surrounded by trees. I watch the storm, and something suddenly occurs to me. I open the door and look outside. There’s no ambient light and the rain is heavy, so it’s hard to see, but when lightning flashes, I think I can see something in the branches of one of the trees – it looks like it might be a body of a man who hung himself.
I can’t see who it is, but it’s just then that I realize my roommate was the author of the book I just read.
And then I woke up.
Turn the page,
This is dF
