But for the present, it’s beyond my control. When it finally happens after yet another 20 minutes, the helplessness underscores the inexorable reel of martyrdom, twirling madly in and out of love, as if the whole universe will now be birthed into another plastic bag, clean as disinfectant. We – all of us sworn witnesses, heart on sleeve – remember everything in a pinhole’s entirety, only that nobody can recall a nation’s shame quite the same way. Deceptive blue sky, those green, green fields, then grey unforgiving rain, these clichés set up the perfect grime. Then what? After all the ready pool of iconography dries up once we need a dip. But the interrogator soldiers on. Ferns and creepers cling to the shlubby ordinariness of it all. Soft barnacles have encrusted the sides. Tinder sticks crack like shards. So vivid are the flashes, no one notices the Velcro hornbill denting the Plexiglas chamber while the kids stand struck, caught in electron crossfire. The abandoned army bunker rebuilt brick by brick from scratch. The bouzouki starts first, the pungent skunk next as a skein of commensals follow suit like pilgrims. In the middle of the red river, the hangman, hunched and ape-like, hops in with lasso, drill and unimaginable tools in his pouch and asks for directions after the deed. The lorikeet’s shriek takes our collective silence. Later at midnight, curled up in his office couch, the bone collector, hard of hearing, is attacked a third time by visions of bugs and bunnies. Intolerable heat eventually melts the ancient steel glacier off the thin joint masonry, the disarray of the portal – tomato ketchup sprayed all over the cubicle, a horse’s head placed beside your sleepyhead, a firing pin stuck – all swept away into the sea in a flush, leaving a white shirt in its pristine condition. “If this is all you are asking, then say so,” says the arsonist as he strikes a match to the composition. Years earlier, a boy discovers it one day, bits and bytes soldered to a heap of flesh, bolts and assorted debris accumulated over crime. The foundry’s door opens and shuts, some jaw snaps. That’s it.

A remora
waits at the wings
polyps inch, by inch