The Somnambule's Crime
The
Great White Detective (Part 2)
Indian violinists sleep beneath an umbrella in the blue smoke rising from
a woman’s belly but the Great White Detective is investigating a canal between
two vowels in a drunkard’s thank you note. It is Sunday. He
draws a crude picture of his home city upon a wedding dress abandoned in an
ashtray. From behind each desk in each small office there is music rising toward
the utility vents mostly humorous improvisations but some—by a mere slip of
the pencil—colorfully malicious like a countryside prison made from wet
embossed napkins. The various esplanades are lined with chocolate-tinted
lightning rods and there are two or three hostile macadaws irritating the
journalists at a sit-down dinner in honor of the Khymer Rouge who come to more
vivid life in a sentimental novel by the same Great White Detective who has been
genetically engineered to come off as an afterthought an answer in an old
crossword puzzle left unfinished by a busy fireman.
Beyond the weeds a milky distillation of comets an alphabet the birds will eat
and a fat man tickling a cheetah to amuse a naked bride.