Adios, Scheherazade

Well, these are serious questions, and at the moment I have absolutely no answers for any of them, and if I am to find any of the answers it seems to me I’m going to have to have calm and quiet for a while. I can’t just keep running around with everybody chasing me or giving me a bad time, one way or the other. I have to work things out, and I can’t do it if I have to worry about talking to the police, and being put in jail, and having meetings with lawyers, and going to court, and all the rest of it. So that’s why I think I’ll probably mail this letter and take off for terra incognita, so I can figure things out about myself and my future in calm and quiet and leisure.

But on the other hand I get to thinking about ritual, about ceremony, about being put in a cell and moving slowly and majestically through the stately dance of judicial procedure, and sometimes that seems like the way to get leisure and the opportunity for calm and quiet self-appraisal. So maybe I won’t mail this letter, maybe when I leave here — I’m writing this in the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Club — I’ll just take the train out to Long Island and give myself up.

I wish I knew what to do. If I give myself up, of course, I won’t really have to worry about anything, at least not for a while. The authorities, you people, will decide what I’m going to do and where I’m going to be. You’ll take over all my decisions for me, and that might be very nice.

Of course, that wouldn’t do me much good either, would it? I mean, I’d have all that leisure to think things out, I could hand the reins over to you guys to run things while I got matters straight between me and my mind, but what about when leisure time was done? What about when I was ready to take the reins back in my own hands? Would you give them back? Or once you had me would it be your decision when I could go again?

No. You people are just people, the same as me, screwed up and trying to work out your lives and full of your own problems. You’ll process me like a green bean at Bird’s Eye, and who I am or what my disasters might have been won’t matter to you in the slightest.

I think you’re going to have to catch me.

     Sincerely,

     Edwin Topliss

Dear Samuel,

Enclosed please find the final chapter of the November book, in on schedule after all. The seven chapters preceding this one are currently in the hands of the cops, having been confiscated I’m sure in their raid on my lair in the YMCA last night. I suppose I have you to thank for tipping them to Dirk Smuff.

Anyway, that makes eight chapters. There were four more, but they’ve been destroyed. However, I believe you can find them engraved in my wife’s brain. Perhaps hypnosis would bring them out intact. If so, you’ll have a book two chapters longer than usual. If not, two chapters shorter. You win a few, you lose a few.

The manager of this movie theater gave me permission to use the typewriter in his office, but now he tells me the sound is waking his customers — it’s four in the morning, and there’s nobody in the building but the manager, a dozen winos, and me — so I’ve got to cut this short. Besides, it’s my fifteenth page.

Personal considerations make it necessary, Mr. President, for me to tender my resignation at this time. I want you to know I have been proud and pleased to be a member of the team and will forever treasure the memory of our association. Your warmth and understanding have been a constant help to me in moments of stress.

     Adios, motherfucker,

     Ed Topliss