Room 60: Sam Odious – Part One: Dancing Around

He had pictures of her – some obtained over the counter and some obtained by less savoury means. He had a lot of funds and he was willing to spend them in pursuit of her. Still, she didn’t seem to be weakening her resolve after all this time. Was it time to give up? He didn’t believe so. They kept telling him that there were some people that you just couldn’t buy and he had believed them in weaker moments but denied their pernicious ideas a hold when he regained his strength.

He would keep on keeping on – believing in the dream; the dream being that one day she would be lying beside him in his bed and it would be done willingly.

She had to smile for him and she had to dance for him – that was where the money was, and the fact that he threw so much at her meant the management were not particularly interested in any problems she might have with it. The fact that she needed the money from this gig kept there and she supposed it was some kind of consolation to be getting paid a lot better than any of the other girls. Sam knew that some of these things must be playing into what they had but he could put them aside – there were many relationships that started off on a shaky footing and went on to be absolutely wonderful; he knew that this would be such a relationship.

Room 59: Mam Mon – Part One: An Appetite

She swooshed the handkerchief over her greasy lips and wiped away the ketchup that was smeared there like a clown mouth. She knew she would get heartburn ten seconds after this burger plopped into the sea of acid swimming in her cavernous stomach so she chucked a few indigestion pills in after it. Precaution was better than trying to fix something after the fact.

She had been watching the rise and fall of her stocks and shares and it always made her anxious; being anxious made her hungry. Being hungry made her bad tempered. So she fed herself regularly and that dealt with the temper, dealt with the anxiety. It was all a question of check and balances – good accounting.

When this project of hers hit paydirt she would not have to worry about any of this mundane watching of the peaks and troughs of the economy; she would be cut free of all that. She was confident it would work – she was spending a lot of money to make sure that it did.

Room 58: Lucy Fur – Part One: Make Up

Long red nails, red lips, black eyelashes, green eyes and curves that might make you suspect that Betty Page had been resurrected. She really played a good game – a game that she had been playing for god knows how long. Well, she didn’t look any age at all. She knew a lot about the people that were gathered here in this building and the inexplicable youth seemed to be a repeating pattern. She was siphoning the information from somewhere and it seemed to be an accurate source.

She could bamboozle the most resilient of men – all she needed was one hook moment and she had you. If you bit on a single thing that she said then you were infected and you were lost. She had known men fight against their instincts for a long time when it came to her but in the end the primal urges always won out. Damn, that hardwiring was there for a reason; she was that reason.

There were people in her immediate vicinity that she needed to deal with – people that were trying to start a turf war and she couldn’t allow that. This was hers and it would remain hers indefinitely, well, eternally to be precise – all pretenders to the throne had to step off now.

Room 57: Pat – Part One: Best Of Irish

He chuckled – he loved fucking with Catholic priests; they were such miserable bastards sometimes, which he could understand given the amount of stuff they denied themselves. People had suspicions about him – they always had. At least those suspicions didn’t primarily stem from him being Irish anymore and they couldn’t land him in a cell. Terrorist didn’t mean someone from Ireland anymore – it meant someone with dark skin. That was a relief.

The Guinness he had just swallowed was nowhere as good as the stuff that he drank in Dublin – he supposed all that shit about the Liffey waters were true, and wasn’t there something about the pasteurisation process that did something to it to? He didn’t care too much – it got him pissed and it wasn’t unpleasant.

He had been practising reciting passages from James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake for some unknown reason. He supposed it kind of fed into the act he had going where he would play up to people with the whole quintessential Irishman shtick and then act all offended if they mentioned it. He was a big fan of the comedy of awkward situations as put out by Larry David and Ricky Gervais and he thought it was a noble enterprise to bring that kind of thinking to the real world. Perhaps he was something of a performance artist.

He attracted the barman’s attention and ordered himself another pint.

Room 56: Rad – Part One: Walkabout

A day off. A day to go walking in the park; a day to be at large in this place – listening to the sounds of the city that everyone else tuned out. To him it was ambient tunes, the true heartbeat of industrial; he built symphonies out of simple rhythms, found chord progressions where others heard dissonance. He had bumped into people on a fairly regular frequency on this particular walk – becoming absorbed in what he thought may have been an harmonic offshoot of the stream that he had been following his whole life.

When people looked at him they didn’t see what was there – they saw what they wanted to see. He supposed that was true of anyone and everyone if you stopped to consider it, but perhaps he felt it more because he got to see shit that he wouldn’t have been privy to if his skin had been as dark as it might have been if he hadn’t looked more like his mother than his father.

Good job he was self reliant and didn’t really need the opinions of anyone to make him feel good about himself. There was very little anchoring him here apart from the songline; apart from the ragged vestige of the dreaming he had chased all the way out here. It wasn’t as simple as knowing where to look either – he had been forced to go on walkabout several times to find dropped threads and seemingly hidden notes. Whoever it was that wanted him to eventually have this revelation they were making him work damned hard to get anywhere near it.

Still, it wasn’t such a bad way to spend your time – engrossed in things that in the everyday you might have just walked past and never noticed. He was never bored – he always had something that he could be doing and he was sure that because he was looking he saw more beauty than anyone he knew.

Room 55: Yasigi – Part One: Drunken Master

People thought she was a scary motherfucker and she supposed that they could be right – she was after all a pisshead that was obsessed with martial arts. When you went into her living space all that you were likely to see was a mixture of beer and picture from kung-fu movies. You would look at her, listen to the reasoning behind what she was supposedly doing and you would have to ask yourself, is this woman mad?

No, she wasn’t mad. All you had to do was see her move; was see her practice her art, and you knew that she was perfectly sane and that what she was doing was taking a ridiculously high degree of focus. She was in perfect health, a true athlete. A drunk martial artist.

If she were feeling slightly pent up in her place and in need of letting off some steam she would find a rough neighbourhood and she would go and pick fights at the local bar – sure, she lost sometimes through weight of numbers, but she held her ground better than a lot of people twice her size would have managed.

After the Drunken Master films she supposed her favourite was David Carradine as Kane – set to wander the earth fixing wrongs with his hard earned skills. That was what she wanted to do eventually.

Room 54:Waresa – Part One: F-F-F-Fashion

She looked glamorous with a capital G, darling. Cough. Tickle at the back of the throat. Playing 4st 7lbs by The Manic Street Preachers to make it an ironic act – whatever you can use to distance yourself from the act; it was an old device but it worked really well. Well, it did, except for the fact that you forged certain associations between an act and a piece of music that you couldn’t shake for the life of you. She couldn’t listen to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart anymore because of certain associations.

She should have a soundtrack for every moment of her life – it was one of the few pieces of advice that she had ever listened to. Most of the other things that she had done with herself had been as a fuck you to people she perceived as trying to control her. She sensed that if she didn’t control of herself soon then all of the good things that were currently in her life were going to evaporate.

She was lucky. She had been lucky to get picked out of a crowd by that photographer and she had been lucky to get a contract from one of the leading fashion houses. Now she was lucky that the things which she had been doing in her time weren’t impacting upon the thing which helped her get her money – her beauty. Or rather the things that she was doing hadn’t affected her to degree that was detrimental as yet. He health was suffering and it wouldn’t be very long before what festered beneath the surface broke out and scarred her.

A tear escaped the corner of her eye. A rare show of genuine emotion and it was in private. Part of her wished that there had been an audience there for that teardrop and she knew at that thought the emotion shifted and became a forgery. She always did that to herself – self sabotage; stripping out of the essentials and embracing of the transitory and worthless. Wasn’t that what fashion was all about? Fuck. Would these clothes look as good on her when they found passed out from an OD in a puddle of her own puke? She smiled a bitter smile – someone would think it was cool; that it gave their clothes a certain cache to have a dead starlet in them.

Room 53: Tez – Part One: Look

Seriously though, what fucking use was it to be someone’s lookalike? Who wanted to be the flesh equivalent of a quotation mark? He really did like bearing a resemblance to his literary hero but that wasn’t all he wanted – he would have loved to channel the spirit of the man through his work. To be Bukowskiesque was his dream – not to come across like the copyists that modern literature seemed plagued with; that was the equivalent of being a literary karaoke singer. Unfortunately he seemed unable to bring the game he needed to make the leap beyond that definition – it plagued him.

Unfortunately the fact that he looked like CB was obvious to everyone; one of the first things that they noticed – one of the things that they always drew attention to in their reviews. The number of times he had been forced to read: ‘Well, he looks like the guy, but he can’t write for shit’. It tired him out, made him sick.

He’d be sitting in a bar drinking himself stupid because someone had yet again brought to his attention his resemblance and he would be struck by the irony that it had driven him to drink and he would have to stop – it would drain all the comfort out of the glass. What was he going to do? He couldn’t afford plastic surgery and if he looked different he wouldn’t have anything – half the reason he got any reviews was so the writer could say something disparaging and witty about him, their least favourite writer, and Charles B, their favourite.

He stood on the bridge looking down at the river and the intermittently visible reflection which swam up in its surface. Mirrors, fuck, he wished he were a fucking vampire and didn’t have to be bothered by the bloody things.

Room 52: Gir – Part One: Sample And Hold

‘Erm?’

‘Yes, Callow, what is it?’

‘Can I ask why you feel the need to keep jar of urine and stool samples in your home?’

‘You can ask.’

‘But you won’t tell me why?’

‘It’s more that everyone asks the question and it gets tiresome explaining it over and over again.’

‘Well, hey, I don’t want to put you to any trouble, jesus.’

‘Christ, this is going to be a problem isn’t it?

‘Ok, well we all drink an inordinate amount and thy are always telling us how bad it is for us. Well, I am monitoring myself on a daily basis so that I know exactly what my intake is doing to my body.’

‘Interesting. I thought it was just some weird fetish or something – don’t get me wrong; it’s not like it’s normal behaviour by any means, but at least it isn’t quite so freaky.’

‘I am a scientist – it isn’t freaky in the least. A lot of us in the community carry out small empirical experiments in our daily lives– you’d be surprised. It’s not so uncommon, even for non-scientists.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Would you like a beer – I have plenty in the fridge.’

‘As long as you don’t keep it next to the piss.’

‘No, I have separate fridges. I am running an experiment after all and I don’t want contaminated samples.’

‘So, how are you doing at the moment?’

‘Surprisingly well all considered. I thought that I would be pretty badly off. I hate to think what some of the people in our group are suffering from.’

‘Hmm.’

Gir went over to the fridge and pulled out two bottles of Spike and threw one to Callow. He had not been entirely honest about the scope of his project – he had actually been surreptitiously stealing samples from his friends and was building up data on them as well. He seemed to be possessed of a stronger constitution than any of them.

The beer tasted great– from one of the Brooklyn microbreweries, he couldn’t remember which one at the moment and the labels were refreshingly low-fi and lacked that kind of information. Callow was turning the bottle around and Gir knew that was what he was looking for. One question a session was quite enough though – they all knew that Gir was obsessed with privacy to n almost ridiculous degree. Well, ridiculous given that he had jars of urine and fecal matter laying around.

Room 51: Iris – Part One: Eye Of The Storm

She maintained eye contact with someone longer than most people were able. Some people thought it a sign of weirdness and, she supposed, in a way it was. But what it really stemmed from was her overwhelming interest in all things to do with the eye. Wasn’t it an amazing organ? Made from such simple ingredients yet so incredibly complex – how would on go about conceptualising something like that, let alone building one? She believed that if any organ in the body attested to the existence of God then it had to be the eye – because for all that functionality wasn’t it also something so intrinsically beautiful?

Sometimes she wept at the thought of the damage that had been done to her own eyes. That her own eyes were not as beautiful as they might have been, were that accident to have never happened. She would start from the reverie an realise that it was pointless thinking in that way. It didn’t do her any good to dwell on the past. She could see – and that accident had shaped her life so much; had given her so much. She had been gifted with a passion – gifted with an insight. She had crafted that artificial eye – well, at least a major part of it.

She had a meeting with her optometrist later in the week for some tests to see how her vision was doing. They were keeping an eye out for any macular degeneration, which for some reason they suspected of being just around the corner. She tried not to think about it – she wondered often whether thoughts from the brain prepared the ground for diseases – that the thought was an invitation; a psychic shaping of a physical structure.

She didn’t know how she had got there but she was suddenly stood in front of the mirror staring into it, looking herself right in the eyes. She brought all her critical faculties to bear and began to analyse what she saw there.