Le Town Empire

By James Ashton

Rambling, unfocused, convoluted, and wildly entertaining, Le Town Empire is at once a work of experimental fiction, a love letter, a satire of the avant garde, and a literary scrapbook. It's narrator welcomes his reader to the city of Toronto, Ontario, a town overcome by self-righteousness, self-importance, and private self-loathing, with which - as with it's inhabitants - he maintains the strictest of love/hate relationships. But never more so than with himself... He is constantly in conflicting views of himself, due to his philosophy of individuality, but also to his remorse for his lost love. The novel explores it's narrator's desire to change his identity and escape his surroundings, while simultaneously being made undeniably aware of the impossibility of doing so. He is forever tied and bound to his identity and to those around, by a network of tired memories, experiences, and personal connotations. Le Town Empire is a grandiose celebration of meaninglessness and redundancy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475937909

James Ashton

James Ashton lives in Toronto, Ontario and enjoys rockabilly music. He has a taste for black coffee, dark beer, American cigarettes, and... other things... When not writing or pursuing other projects, James enjoys shooting pool.

Book preview

LE TOWN 

 EMPIRE

James Ashton

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Le Town Empire

Copyright © 2012 by James Ashton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3789-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3790-9 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012912462

iUniverse rev. date: 07/10/2012

Contents

I

II

III

I

Vibrant, invigorated illuminations of celestial gold, crimson, and tangerine invade and overwhelm my senses; I feel weightless. And levitating, I drift beyond horizons, above an endless ocean of velvet incandescence, and inspiring incredible sensations of euphoria—of universal harmony. A state of being I’d long ago disregarded as being in existence as nothing more than sheer mythology. And upon the recollection of my predilection toward the consideration of this state of being as such, the entirety of my being is induced into a state of metamorphosis, a sudden and uncontrollable inflation. I am a giant. I’m towering over the city of Hong Kong, crushing dwellings with each step. I’m a behemoth, but have never before had any trace amount of experience as such and, consequently, panic. Positively the absolute worst moment in history to discover the true meaning of the word vertigo. I lose my senses, freak out. I lose my mind. In a perilous abyss of mass confusion, my eyes open wide, and to their fullest extent, but see nothing. I am enveloped in darkness… Jesus fucking Christ, I’m blind!—I panic further. I sometimes feel as though, from the moment I’d left the womb, the span of my existence has been consistent of nothing more than one continuous and prolonged panic attack. The form of panic that I’m experiencing at present, though, is different. I’d know it anywhere. This is the self-same panic I’d felt, at the moment of my awakening in hospital. And amidst these terrifying, bewildered nightmare thoughts, a sonic, high-pitched droning siren sounds and resonates within my spine and nervous system, severing nerves and brain tissue, mercilessly, as it sounds. I’m dying!

At great length, I regain control of my body and awareness of my actual surroundings, and thrash about, in any and all directions, simultaneously. Head splitting, I tear the quilt cover off from over-top of me and rip the alarm-clock from the wall socket by its cord…

That’s what I’ve always liked about you, man, says Laughin’ McGee, leaning contentedly back into the cushioned seat of his café bar stool chair, you sure know how to listen to a guy…

A simple matter of giving a shit, I tell him, thinking of how half-heartedly—if any heartedly—I really do give a shit. Thinking of the formulaic, calculated degree of tact required in the navigation of, and the stealthy appearance of interest in the talk, talk, talk… The dance of words adagio, enrosque, ballon, two-step, ecarte, I am Nijinsky. The dance of words, and twisting, and turning, careening through a cloudy haze of anecdotes and gossip, unnecessary stories, regurgitated facts and not very interesting, can you believe the weather and what time is it???

Conversation is a holographic lip-sync.

He asks me, So we’ll see you there, tonight, for sure?

Shit.

Oh most definitely, I tell him, without a fucking clue as to what it is that he’s referring to. He won’t see me again until the next time that my good luck decides to take a turn for the worse, you’ll see me there tonight, for sure. This sufficiently pleases him, and affords me the opportunity to leave the table gracefully, But for now I gotta run, McGee. I have to go and see a man about a horse, and I leave the table, walking to the doorway.

Safe journeys, he shouts.

See ya, And I step inside, informing the waitress that the kind gentleman who’d joined my table will be attending to the bill and she tells me that that’ll be fine and compliments my suit. I slip a fiver in her jeans’ back pocket and return the sunglasses to their home, as I walk out of the front door and back out into the streets.

I’ll go home and shower now, satisfied, having done away with my hunger, though the hunger never really leaves. Not really. Hunger for nutrients, for sustenance, for rehydration, dehydration—for the drink and for the drunk. Hunger for action and reaction, for lust and sex and fucking, wild on the floor like animals, and for the drug, the drug, and hunger for life. But it’s tolerable enough for now and so I’ll go and take a shower—back into the projects, into the apartment, under real hot water, scrubbing all of the familiar places, the hair, rinse, spin, repeat, etcetera, shave and brush and don’t forget to floss every day, and cleanliness is next to godliness… But who’s God?

When I’ve cut the water, dried myself off, greased and groomed the hair, combing it up into the pomp, and deodorized, I pull the closet doors and grab a clean suit, everything deliberated. I get dressed and take a look in the mirror—Goddamn, I’m one handsome lookin’ man.

Abstractedly, I’m sauntering toward the door, maneuvering my fingers with the aim of turning the knob, when I’m struck suddenly with the realization that the apartment is still empty. Hesitation… No, there is an opportunity presenting itself before me here, and one which does so rarely at that. The streets, the sidewalks, people, street-cars, buildings, cafes, people, life, what have you. All of it can take a number and wait in line. I’m going to enjoy this.

I return myself to what I estimate to be the dead center of the room and remain standing here for several minutes, not exactly certain of what it is that I’m enjoying but I’m enjoying it nonetheless, and I sit, forcing my fingers into the grain of the carpet and inhale deeply. When I exhale, my body responds without having been told to do so by any conscious thought or command, simply lying down of its own accord, I shut my eyes. When the lids once more are brought to open, my gaze is directed toward the glare of the ceiling light, but they do not falter. They remain fixed upon the bare bulb. I’m forcing them to stillness. I stare intently upon the white glow of the light bulb, until everything else has been erased from visibility. And I stare, my mind considering this the sun, I’m imagining myself as a seed. And I’ve heard this before. I’m buried beneath the ground; there is only darkness and the warmth. I feel the sun’s warmth through the soil, extracting nutrients from within, and moisture seeping through with the rain, replenishing. My roots begin to sprout and dig, searching for more and more, my plant-body beginning to stand. I reach the surface and continue growing, a shrub at first, my trunk solidifying gradually. I watch the sun rise and set as though it were a passing of minutes, seconds. I’m growing taller. My limbs extend and leaves begin to form, falling from my branches and returning routinely. My life is only a cycle of life and death. I’m growing taller. I feel the sun, the rain, the earth, and the air all strengthening me, giving me my life and death. And upon the next life—the returning of the leaves, with them comes the appearance of a multitude of buds. They’re beads at start but grow rapidly until they are enormous bulbs, bursting with life. And one blooms. And another, and another, and another, until my entire body is covered with a barrage of orchid-esque flowers of the most beautiful and resplendent shapes and colors and forms and hues and shades. And life is beautiful like this. And when the death returns, the flowers fall, a single bloom being intercepted from its crash collision course with the ground, by the hand of a man. And this is futile, only a force of habit, a shadow of a former self, still attempting to have itself cast as a silhouette of my own body, but it is not. This shadow is no longer mine. No, no. It’s been too long since then, and maybe it wasn’t only placebo affect, naivety, blind faith, what have you, convincing myself of improvement in well being. No, no, just get through this. If even only for nostalgia’s sake… This man, like all men—by very nature of their existence—travels the world. He walks, and runs, and rides, traversing his planet. His planet which traverses, in orbit, the sun, and is, itself, orbited by its moon. The sun, which orbits the super massive black hole center of its galaxy, the galaxy itself, orbiting the axis of the Universe. I imagine the center of the Universe orbiting the smallest atom, nuclei, electron—whatever, in the blood cells of my body. And I feel the seed, the tree, the flower, the earth, air, sun, water, the man, the planet, moon, sun, galaxy, and Universe. Everything is in chaotic, simultaneous existence within the most microscopic constituency of myself.

And there’s a knock at the door.

It’s a bunch of Zen trash, anyway! I say to myself Only ever made a difference when I wanted it to! and it just hit me that this is probably true for just about anything and rise back to my feet, feeling better already, for having reaffirmed the permanence of my killing off of that shadow that is not mine. And it really does not matter, not a single solitary second of it had ever emotionally and/or otherwisely effectively affected my overall temperament at the time wherein I had been accustomed to convincing myself of this particular brand of tomfoolery. Yeah, perfect! Tomfoolery. And there had been an abundance of it, at a time. But the time is now and that time is gone. The only shadow here is revealed to me, peering through the lens of the apartment’s front-door peephole.

Distinguishing a short, sprite-like silhouette obscuring the light from in the hall, I step back, hesitating for a moment before allowing my fingers to grasp and slide the metal clasp of the door’s lock, letting it drop, hanging on its chain like a condemned man in his noose. Come on in, Chloe! I shout at the door and within seconds it opens.

Hello, Mister! she says, before the front door is even afforded opportunity to return to its standard position. Best sex ever, last night!

But possibly, I am already beyond visibility range ahead of myself…

At great length, I regain control of my body and awareness of my actual surroundings, and thrash about, in any and all directions, simultaneously. Head splitting, I tear the quilt cover off from over-top of me and rip the alarm-clock from the wall socket by its cord…

Dawn’s arrived and the sun casts its rays violently into my hollow. Maybe today I’ll die, I think to myself. A smile crosses my face. This same thought brings the same smile to my face, every morning; an overly optimistic and entirely falsified grin. And I assure you that it is most certainly out of optimism that I should grin at such a thought. Every day I wake up hoping to die and instead, every day I live. And the grin vanishes as quickly as it had appeared. Some people want more than anything to live forever but only die. I want nothing more than to die but only live. Ironic, isn’t it? It’s fucking hilarious…

But I’m being melodramatic. I don’t mean any of that. Not in any sort of sob-story after-school special extreme, anyway—only that there is a form of suffering much worse than death. I’m staring vacantly out at the autumn sunrise’s orange and pink azures, resilient in their dew-dropped illumination, and I’m thinking of death. Most people say they want to pass away silently and peacefully in their sleep. But most people are fucked. When I go, I want to feel it. I want to suffer excruciating torture enduring for hours, even days. And I want to know that at the end of it all there will be only death. When I die, I want to know that I am dying. People sleep away their entire lives for lack of anything better to do, why sleep through death as well? Why read the book, only to burn its pages before the final chapter? I’m staring vacantly out at the autumn sunrise, thinking of death, and you’re thinking that I’m a suicidal… But you’ve read only two chapters, so what the fuck do you know?

I’m a demon. A madman, monstrosity, a son of a bitch. Suicidal? No. Worse—I’m a lover. I am self-destructive because I’m a hopeless romantic. Because there is nothing more deadly, ominous, sinister than falling in love… Love is the slow and gradual process by which a person convinces himself of being thoroughly hated and despised by another.

I’m living in fear and in anonymity, in the St. James Town projects; at the very least, having the good taste and common sense to have acted with all due avoidance and aversion to the stylish affordable communities. We are already situated within the city at the geographical focal point of cultural endeavor and expression. But creativity is vanished. Inspiration’s gone and the Muse is dead. Everyone is self-satisfied with their brilliance and their originality. Everyone is unique and consequently everyone is the same. The avant-garde is suffering from abundance of Self and culture is committing suicide. And oh hell, the last remaining option is to strive for as high a level of unoriginality as is humanly and/or otherwisely possible. Just you watch…

Loki has left the apartment in my care for the day. He has departed on a six-hour journey of self-discovery, as it had recently been brought to our attention that he is a flake. We’d spent the entirety of yesterday’s evening drawing up memos and reminders, from Loki to Loki, prioritizing today’s plans and scheduled dates. An enthralling method of unwinding, following our respective work weeks. I’d made it a point to pocket three or four of them, which should cost him at least an hour—an hour and a half’s delay and myself, a decent rest in solitude. But how could anybody forget themselves in a place like this, in the first place? I’ve yet to locate his stash of liquor, reefer, or tobacco, all of which are almost undoubtedly locked away in a safety deposit box, downtown, along with everything else which he does not trust to be left in my care. But then, I suppose that I would not have known that anything occupied Loki’s mind, aside from his hoarding greed, had it not been for his flakiness.

The supermodel dame, of whom he has been bragging now, for months, had been under the