IN MEMORY OF
                                       
                                        
                                   PART ONE
                                       
                                       
                                       
                                "Trust a murderer for a fancy prose style." V.
Nabukov, Despair
                                       
                                       
                                                                             
                                  Cluck-Cluck

    For a long time we have abandoned the pathetic cheaters, terrified
psychopaths, erratic dropouts, prey of compulsions  -- carnal, saintly, martial,
sordid -- , familial maids, good husbands, good sons, ordinary executioners who
are huge red flags, the fanfares and furor of benefaction, the murderer.
 
    We must now audaciously wade into the muck where criminal negligence lies
mutilated, to perhaps extract it again palpitating from within the vile
multitude of good intentions where it stagnates and putrefies. Such monotonous,
crawling reduplication! Should humanity rest upon its own waste and content
itself with ancient urges to ceaselessly commit new crimes? Who's to blame,
design or destiny? Is our soul not bold enough? But why have rape, poison, the
dagger, fire not yet embroidered their potent motifs upon the fraying cavass of
pitifully stiff designs.

    Gaps in the sparkling stone of an old façade, the glazed panes of large
windows dazzle in the oblique sun. The sky appears as twin rectangles placed
upon the glass through the window frames' enclosures, there making certain
crosses within its outline, a monochrome of a deeper blue than its own. Blue
which darkens toward black, stone which is grey, dazzle which goes out with
evening's fall. Windowpanes with mysteriously opaque silvering which reflects
orbiting fragments upon the opposite façade: small pops of yellow wall, mirrored
shards of crosses. Oriented South, an exposition of a hundred geometrically
ordered abstract images around the single closed Parisian window.

    I am standing on the opposite corner, encircling me are these street
children, the order of crosses and dreams. During the muted day, among all the
lifeless windows at the heart of which leak and drop as ashes the last amber of
dusk, I look up among the shutters through which flesh appears, first pale then
ever more golden, between the oblique slats, each segmented as parallel bars of
gold, of warm translucent matter, of light. 

    If outside of fiction there can be no perfect crime, it is only because
criminals do not know how to apply themselves and design their own principles.
Are we surprised? They leave to a bit of luck and their own mediocre misfortune
their choice of victim and the method of their contempt. Interest and chance
dispute in the government of their enterprises... There they go wherever they
are taken or not taken, by chance or by simple logic, which come and go across
the obscenity of their inspiration. They become criminals as though falling in
love, with the force of the occasion, the weakness of invention, and the force
of gravity which regulate the orbits of our passions, they imagine encounters
there where there will never be a place for the explosive conjunction of two
bodies propelled blindly along according to uniform laws and indifferent
mechanisms, an incredible attraction, a singular, exceptional sense, the sign of
predestination.

    A bicycle passes in the street through the lifeless fire. Eyes rise to the
window and its luminous golden grill, I pause there to watch the shadow which
appears behind, which the crosses open up and, leaning as support for the parted
shutters, against the light a corpse appears. 

    The air of inevitability which encircles habits, which bands the heart of
man and unwinds itself immovably, lively balances passions where the machinery
of our acts are ensconced, which in falling spur us on to become the
executioner. At the first strike of the knife, of midnight or of lightening, the
criminal and lover impale or hit themselves as assuredly as the kitsch
profundities which spurt forth from a grandfather clock as grotesque coocoo.

    Better yet, those sarcastic hearts exchange their coocoo for cluck-cluck and
go, carefully blindfolded (blindness, without a doubt, removes all fear),
revolver in hand, to push pendulous cries into the darkness of a closed room and
to shoot with judgement, striving to exchange with another ironically blinded at
the stroke of contingent midnight. 

    What extreme mass or density must we ever reach, us whose hearts are
indefinitely hollow, to curve from our place, to bend if not imperceptibly the
uniform determination which govern our disorders? What grain of sand will halt
the route of this inexorable steel spiral which encircles our heart, and put an
end to these atrocious tics, to this comic teasing which enshells our ego? 

    We must conceive exorbitant crimes. 

    The light from inside runs down the façade, unrolling a carpet down to its
base at the centre of which is a figure in the golden depths, the reaching
shadow of a divided silhouette high up in the frame. 

    Lift the arm, align the eye, gunsight and dark body interpose in the light,
all at the point of squeezing the trigger near the dog's resting place -- time
to adjust the aim one more time -- suspended at the brink of falling behind the
last, then lightly contract the index finger dispatching a crash. Then leave
this shot in the dark like torn silk. 

    The authentic murder will be that which, knowing to differentiate between
crime and its detestable little public persona, will manage to free their work
from impulsions; will renounce expression within their murders, escaping the
ruts of mortified desire, the orbits of resentment which dictate and sign such
manifestation of shapeless carnage by hasty butchers which end inevitably with
betrayal. I, however, support the persona which is fenced off, skimmed cleanly
from civil society, to finally erase its concurrence with the persona which
manifests every day in our social life, our habits and our vices.

    Aspirated by its shadow which it goes on to rejoin, filling the break, the
body hangs in the light. The shutters which it pushes away beat against the wall
and come back creaking, immobilized, half-closed. Between the arms of their
shadow projected in the sun, the body lies. And as I walk by in passing, rolling
my head to the side, it will not present me the face devastated by bullet and
fall: streaked oblique light, the indecipherable mask of glowing blood and dull
darkness, eyes distended, of Swann.