Did I miss something?
	I awoke to hear my roommate, the contortionist, shouting in pain.
He was on the carpet in the sitting room, one leg bent up behind him so 
his foot could stem the bleeding while he rummaged for bandages with both
hands. The front door was still shaking from when, I assume, whoever
stabbed Edgar had bolted out.
	Outside I saw a car receding, already too far away for me to get
the plates. I turned to Nora, who I asked, by phone, "What do you know?"
She told me to find her fifteen minutes from then in the back pew of the
church.
	I saw down next to her quietly, not wanting to disturb the litany.
Other back-row stragglers might have been distracted by my appalling looks,
but if so they had the correct proportion of fear to curiousity, and said
nothing.
	Nora passed me a piece of paper with her right hand, than another
with her left. I rose, sliding each note into the corresponding pants
pocket. No more than six steps from the church exit a man dressed as a cop
approached me, his gun ostentatious and sickening in one hand. "We won't
catch any perpetrators," he said, drooling a little, "unless you co, op,
er, ate." I looked as scared as possible (actually the expression that
comes to my face naturally when a fine meal is set in front of me, but he
would have no way of knowing my face's quirks) and handed him the paper
in my left pocket. He left, on foot, without opening it.

	My real, right-pocket information led me to Dominic Old's office.
He invested heavily in my parents' business but asked not to be named on
any documents. He hinted that he knew they would rather not think of it as
charity. His infrequent suggestions about the business itself steered them
around what could have been a few disastrous patches.
	Not understanding, but trusting Nora, I went inside. Old sat in
the foyer talking to Edgar. I could see from Edgar's position -- hands
clasped in front of him, feet touching behind his head, like a pretzel --
that he was skeptical. "Hello, gentlemen," I said.
	Old started.
	"Forget it," Edgar said, and went for the door. He did a sort of 
cartwheel, unfolding as he turned and landing on his feet. Old had re-
gained his composure but still said nothing.
	Suspicious of being pursued, we went down to the beach instead of
home. Some veterans were finishing up a clambake. The food smelled
delicious, but they wouldn't have welcomed us. Gloomily we leaned against
a bluff.
	The fake cop wandered up. "I've got the goods on you, the real,
solid stuff. Places, dates, names. Hard evidence to get you hard time. What
do you say to that?"
	Edgar bent most of his fingers back from the third knuckle.
	He dropped a photo envelope at our feet. "I've got the negatives.
Stay out of trouble." The pictures were of Edgar and I, all over the world,
having a good time. We'd never been to most of those places, let alone
together, and what if we had? We went home and studied the photos for
hours, looking for criminal acts, faces in the background... anything that
could provoke envy, revenge, fear. Nothing.

	After long enough, I found the aged man kissing Edgar's bald head
in Venice oddly familiar, but I am prone to flights of fancy.

written for Tim Walters in my bedroom 4/4/02

This turned out to be a muddle, sadly. The idea, from the beginning, was that someone acting carefully (in that espionage-y "you know what to do next" way) would receive carefully-documented but totally inaccurate information about themselves and just be peacefully confused. Unfortunately, the writing is clunky, the level of oddness is inconsistent, and there's some backstory going on about why two sideshow freaks are living together that never gets a breath of air.

On re-reading it, I thought that if I were looking at it without having written it, I would conclude that the narrator was male, Edgar was his partner, and the cop was trying to blackmail them about that. This wasn't really my intention (the narrator's gender is unspecified, beyond the fact that, if female, she's not too girly to wear pants) but I can't vouch for my subconscious. That would make the bit about studying the photos into a sort of lame protesting-too-much, when I intended simple bafflement.

A host of technical flaws also jumped out at me on re-reading, but I'll mention only that the paragraph on Dominic Old should have all been in the past perfect (i.e. he HAD DONE these things involving the family business long before the story) but that's easily fixed, and maybe not too serious an obstacle to the reader. Actually, the scene in his office needs revising too; it's not clear who Edgar is telling to "forget it". (I meant it to be Old, who's presumably inviting Edgar to betray the narrator somehow.)

Well, not every clown can be in the circus.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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