He felt cold– a numb cold.
The sepulchre, for he knew that’s what it was even before his eyes opened (and before that? nothing), was lined with padded, red cloth. Satin. Perhaps silk.
He sat up. The room was narrow, and constructed of large weeping stones. A dim light suffused all, but without visible source. It was as if the stones themselves cast it through their viscous sheen.
Other than the stone box that he pushed against, lifting himself up and over the edge, the room was empty. Like his mind, he now noticed. His identity had not asserted itself, that reboot function we all carry had failed.
Notice something. What am I wearing, for instance.
Shoes. For a start.
He glanced down. White sneakers. Unstained by mud or pavement.
Concentrate. But it was difficult, a swim through syrup. The thoughts presented themselves like little islands; but as he laboriously neared them they submerged, unreachable.
He paced the room. There was the coffin (for what else could it be? he thought), and at the far end, a narrow staircase.
He climbed the cold steps, trying not to touch the oozing walls. The room at the top was egg shaped, with two round windows side by side, close enough that, when bending forward, he was able to look through both at once, like giant binoculars.
Now that’s something, he thought.
Outside were dark hills silhouetted against a darker sky. They rolled to the horizon, where a gloriously lit building sat. It appeared to be attached to a carnival of some type, with a ferris wheel static but glowing golden, with red orbs punctuating each spoke.
He heard something. A roar. A growl.
He looked down, close to the base of the structure he was trapped inside. There were tigers. Perhaps a dozen- large, but emaciated. He could see their ribs, and their green eyes peering up at him with avarice.
Hungry tigers.
That meant something. He could feel the hook of vague familiarity, a line he could follow back to something concrete. He repeated the phrase. Hungry tigers, hungry tigers. It was evocative, almost poetic.
That was it. He was a poet.
Suddenly an image. A young woman, in Japan. Short, raven haired. Bright red lips, and a round belly. His child? She was sitting next to him, on a blanket in a garden. There were cherry trees, gnarled and well groomed. But they weren’t in blossom.
Hadn’t she said– or had he– that blossoming cherry trees would be too cliched?
Someone read Basho. Haikus celebrating spring, yes, but more; consciousness itself, the immediacy of experience.
He had been happy, ecstatically so.
Hungry tigers.
That memory, fragmentary as it was, did nothing to answer the question of where he was. Why he was there. And really, still, who he was.
He leaned forward, to look through the windows again.
There was something about that glowing building.
Then he saw two red forms, that resolved into cubes, at least the size of the building itself, hurtling through the sky. They hit the ground, bouncing between the hills. White orbs appeared on them.
Dice! The building was a casino. He was getting closer.
The dice rose back into the sky, resolving anew into… eyes. A woman’s face. Pretty, but not beautiful. His girlfriend?
No.
He felt woozy.
A rent, carnal red, opened in the distant fields. The woman’s hands (appearing out of the spectral mist) reached down and extracted something glistening and meaty.
Her face was clear enough, now, that he could see the clear plastic shield she wore over her face, and the powder blue surgical mask beneath. She had kind eyes, unknowing that this routine autopsy was being conducted on a living man.
Hungry tigers.
He remembered now. Hungry tigers– it was the chinese nickname for the slot machines on the casino island of Macau. A place that couldn’t compete with the likes of Las Vegas for glitz, but beat any American town of any era for graft, corruption, sin.
Somewhere on his body (wherever his real body was) there would be a flash drive, containing the virus that skimmed from the hungry tigers. And the additional code that skimmed a little extra for himself.
He remembered that last dinner, surrounded by gangsters who never took off their narrow black sunglasses. The rare sakes consumed with elaborate ceremony until the room swam, the gorgeous women, nude, covered in elaborately presented sushi and sashimi. Laughter and smiles. He was the happiest of all, thinking that he’d pulled it off.
He was no poet, just a con man who was too smart for his own good. But in these last moments, a haiku formed:
When double crossing the yakuza, don’t eat the fugu.
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©2010 P. Magnifico
