Aloysius Tempo Read Free Page A

the water. It makes him look, for the first time, as if he has taken some control of this situation, and I almost feel proud for him.
    I thought he might look at me, watch me watching him, try in some final way to make me remember this end of a life and feel in some way bad about it, his only way to try to impress himself onto my emotions. But, in fact, his eyes are all done with looking at the world.
    Maybe my face is not the last thing he wants to see. Maybe it’s too much to give, too much to allow me to know that he took my image to the darkest, deepest place a man can go.
    Maybe he has a beautiful lover in his mind, an image of a place where he laughed, or of a loving mother, a proud father, a moment in his life he can see and is making him feel safe.
    And, as he goes down, as the bubbles appear, as he starts sucking in the water he paid for, I sing it. I sing a final, gentle, sweet tribute to a man heading off to his fate.
    I go:
    Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,
    From glen to glen, and down the mountainside,
    The summer’s gone and all the leaves are falling,
    Tis you, tis you, must go and I must bide.

Chapter Two
    Kerk Counselling Service
    Amsterdam, The Netherlands
    8 March 2016
     
    IT’S EIGHT months before my night with Danny.
    I’ve got age on my mind.
    Age is the most amount of information in the least amount of space.
    Tell me someone’s nationality and I’ll take a shot at what sports they like or what god they know about. Throw in their sex or race and I start refining the picture.
    But the whole thing unlocks with age. Age is the mileage, the clock, the time, the fact, the base of what a person is.
    Ask any doctor or cop, ask a journalist, ask anyone that needs to get or give hard information about people, about who they really are. They need an age. It says how long they’ve got, what they don’t care about, if they’re a threat.
    A name is a retread of some random word someone else owned. A country is just a sound, just a lump of come-and-go habits. Age is the ID in your bones, the inside-out truth.
    Fuck around with age, what happens? You end up paying someone to stick needles in your face and wearing stuff you can’t wait to get out of. Then everyone starts lying about you looking younger and younger, when you look worse and worse.
    Fuck around with age and sooner or later you become ridiculous, sooner or later you fall asleep or break a bone.
    I’m good at age. I can guess yours fast, and I’ll be close. I won’t be scanning your clothes or refreshed follicles or half-arsed beard or ray-gunned teeth or shapeshifted eyes or asking how you feel, who your heroes are, what music you like. That’s all void.
    I’ll be watching how you move, your limbs, fingers, feet, seeing how they all fit together. I’ll be watching the way you are around people, around the bodies of the old and young, at the way you look at them and the way you don’t.
    Humans have been sussing out age since before we were humans. We’ve been needing to know the age of everything we see, eat, drink or jump off since we were apes. Age tells us what we need to know, and never more than when it’s the age of another person.
    You think you can trick the smartest creatures on the planet with ten minutes in a clinic? The only one getting fooled in that situation is the one paying the bill, the one in the chair.
    So here’s my point. If I say there’s two males talking alone in a room, that means nothing. If I say it was two Irish guys talking in a room, it has no value. Two white guys by themselves and talking to each other, so what? There’s no useful information there.
    What if I tell you one of them was a priest? You’re thinking, Oh right, now we’re getting somewhere – maybe it’s a confession?
    What if I tell you one of them was fifty-two and the other was eleven? Now you’ve got a story. Now you know there’s a different dynamic, now your mind is opening up to other possibilities, things based