Excerpt 110:
The Mayoral Chains
Leo DiNapoli wanted to oppose the truth; paint stuff on its face; a false beard, glasses; and make it look like another truth, similar in demeanour but with a more favourable story to tell; a narrative to sweep DiNapoli along in a melodic, sliding motion unlike the true truth’s grabby, dragging frictional, off-grey, fiction.
Leo DiNapoli was the property of his invisible owners who required him to divert all his resources to the machine driven overthink power uppage that was hotspot-flaring in the Russet Valley area.
‘We want you at Little-Russet-On-The-HooHa by twelve tomorrow…you are booked into a twin for two nights at the Ball & Socket and you’ll be sharing the room with Tim, Tom, Bob, Harris whatever. We need you to cling to him like a limpet shell on a drifting row boat. He has information we can only process into viability if he spills it inadvertently.’
Those were Leo’s orders and that was what he was going to have to do, but he wasn’t happy with it and operationally he was feeling used; he was the gunky manipulated goo hiding from a quantum assisted semi-intelligent goopolice force that would not take no for an answer unless the question expressly demanded it…
Misery was his friend but he was not going to let his new friend take him out of the joy pool and dry him off without a fight.
Leo embarked on a fantasy voyage along a route his life might otherwise have taken, leaving Mr and Mrs Misery on the dockside waving their snotty, sodden kerchiefs with lacklustre farewells. Only to find out several knots worth of steaming into the metaphorical adventure that they had stowed away; meaning there would be icebergs ahead; drifting…like early, deadly arcade video games.’
‘Hi, my name is Harris, I’m not changing it…you must be Leo?’
Alerts loudened as the iceberg got too close for cushioning; turned into a row boat, which DiNapoli clung to the bottom of with limpet like alacrity…pursued by a sense of forced duty.
‘Mr Harris…DiNapoli, pleased to make your acquaintance.’
Harris had looked up Leo DiNapoli despite him being told that everything about him was entirely false because he was in reality one of those hybrids that science accidentally produced by pushing boundaries into minefields and setting light to the touch paper.
DiNapoli wasn’t a person as much as he was an idea that had been forged by the melding of a mad creator with that mad creator’s mad creating creation, which makes sense but not necessarily at a timely readpace…
Who DiNapoli was before he became DiNapoli was still a mystery. He would be less so once they’d worked out who this person had been, what people, what program, before the DiNapolification of himself.
Harris decided to ride the carriage of Acceptance through the crowds of Confusion on the way to the promised place where everything would be made clear and he would drown in a barrage of aha moments. His assumption at that point was that he needed to get to the sanctuary of any of an increasing selection of Stockholm Munchauses, but the logistics seemed equi-difficult to equi-impossible and now he had this mysterious Leo DiNapoli clinging to his case like a gym junkie leech with a tranfusionary intent translated from Transylvanian folklore…
DiNapoli had been tired and slept without what Harris was telling him being a barrier to the wonderful world of sleep. He’d slipped out with a focused silence that made him proud and walked around the village centre reconfirming that it was a place he’d never normally go to. The cafe was open and people were visible in the back. He shouted out his order to them and chose a seat at a table for two. After an hour or so it became apparent that he was either not welcome or the staff were insane.
As he got up to leave, having had no response from shouting and entering the ‘no entrance’ area noisily and finding no one there…an elderly woman, supported by a young woman shuffled in like separated twins who decided to get back together again.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Are you open?’
‘Your best bet is the hotel.’
‘Hotel?’
‘Yes, the Ball and Socket.’
Leo did a little more wandering and noticed that the village was carless; transportless…he had not even seen as much as a pair of roller-skates, let alone a bicycle.
Leo found himself back at the Ball and Socket and the concierges from the night before positions him with jovial hastiness in the only chair left available in the crowded yet eerily silent breakfast room.
The person opposite him at the small table was inevitably the row boat, Harris, who seemed overly nonchalant, like he was deliberately trying to downplay DiNapoli’s importance.
DiNapoli couldn’t understand why no one in the godforsaken hole could see the VIP in him….he took those appreciations apart and upon examination…neither could he; see any importance in the workings out or the sum of what constituted the individual: Leo DiNapoli. He had one of two forward progressions accessible to him. One: carrying on whining. Two: adapt to the situation, adopt the role of a meagre persona’d bit part player. Inevitably, though, he started with One and built a tunnel into Two as the day unfolded.
DiNapoli knew Harris knew more than he was letting on and he knew Harris knew DiNapoli knew more than he was letting on, but neither of them knew what the other was not letting on about. This seemed like the conundrum they were there for. And seemed like a worthy challenge that once fathomed could be cheerio’d and forgotten about.
‘Have you heard of a place called Great Sudlow-On-Russet?’ Harris suddenly blurted out.
‘No.’
‘Neither have I,’ he said, rather improbably.
‘Excuse me! I hope you don’t mind me asking but have any of you heard of a place called Great Sudlow-On-Russet?’ Harris asked the fellow breakfast goers.
There was a staggered but unified, ’No!’ Times everyone. With one bright sparkle adding, with irony or unironically it was unclear, ‘ I’ve heard of Little Sudlow-On-Russet,’ which was obvious due to everyone in the room being in Little Sudlow-On-Russet.
‘That’s where we are headed.’
‘No one has heard of it and that’s where we are heading?’
‘Are there any buses?’
‘There is a bus, in a shed, but it never goes anywhere.’
‘Why not?’
‘It doesn’t have a route.’
‘Or an engine. It’s a 1956, Commer Cob. A minx of the show circuit back in the day.’
‘All routes were expunged by decree after communal autonomy was declared.’
‘Communal autonomy has solved a whole bucketload of problems but caused a few thimbles of lacking. Hole plugged, dam leak fixed…The government have sent a mayor.’
‘The government have sent a mayor? Here?’
‘They have legislated for a new liaison central, or central liaison, parochial homologation scheme that comes with an imposed mayor.
The community will not be happy. They have worked hard at being self-sufficient and acting like adults.’
Harris was saying it so loudly so the other breakfasteers couldn’t avoid hearing it; Leo wondered why; a multitude of red flags flapped in the choppy air blasts. Until the pregnant room’s held breath expired and exhaled…
‘It’s you!’ Harris said, as if he were a press striking a coin.
‘Who? me?’
‘Mr mayor…you are the new mayor.’
‘Wait…’ Leo felt a shudder from beneath the hotel; a shudder with his name on it, being delivered from the heart of nature; a natural occurrence to widen the pupils of the most eventful eye balls.
‘Unwanted, perhaps, but nevertheless, not without power and influence,’ Harris continued.
Everybody turned toward the new mayor, raising cups and mugs and glasses of local apple juice or oat milk. Body languaging their nebulous breakfasteering blobbiness into defined mayoral dutification.’
‘And these people, Mr Mayor,’ Harris said, unfurling and introductory arm, ’are your lieutenants [Eng., Eng.]…or…lieutenants [U.S., Eng.].’ A hubbub of salutary congeniality burst into ‘God Blessings for the mayor and hurrah!’ and a ‘hoorah hey! full of godspeedings’.
Mayor DiNapoli thanked his assembled staff, with something approaching the best angle available from the position he found himself in. Proud of what he was becoming; he didn’t dip into floundering, he took up the mantle and stuck his head up in the necessaries. All the while thinking to himself that things were picking up; this wasn’t his destiny by a long way, but it was a start. He saw a honeymoon period of polite diplomacy that needed to be gotten through, but out the other side…a place where he could throw his weight around, unhindered by the straight-jacket of being reasonable, which beckoned like an old friend sharing old tales of youth marooned in memory banks…
The town hall had been selected as a gathering place and the Mayor’s staff dispersed into the village population to deliver invitations to ‘An enlightening evening of communal information exchange and guidance for a safe and secure environ’, which would disguise the actual draconian directive, to the seven hundred and thirty-six inhabitants of the newly formed Republic of LSR.
Meanwhile Harris was needed back at Great Sudlow-On-Russet and he left… ‘Read the manual, I call it the Sudlow bible, and memorise everything, don’t deviate or improvise. In a world bytes, rules and regs are kings and we are but courtiers…’ It made sense going forward, but Mayor Draco was left clinging to a row boat’s hull whose ship had sailed.
Several incidents were brought to the intro of the new Mayor and dismissed as: those things that Fate controlled and can’t be dwelt upon: IE tough shit!
Like…
A local knocked on the hotel doors; front, back and side. He, or she, then goes away, but returns with two more locals, he’s and/or she’s, intent on accessing what was going on in the building; getting a running commentary on who and what was going on at the hotel from whoever was commentating. Three people, one small but persistent headache: three missing persons whose files are buried under Hear no, See no, Speak no Apps.
Security was ramped up. The highly selected staff. Sorted themselves into factions and faction within factions. The broadest being ‘Physical Handiness’.
AKA the Krav Maga lot and the Capoeira bunch.
Another situation, a protest of sorts, labelled a Mayoral hatred-fest, occurred on the junction of Chapel Street and Park Road… One Krav and one Cap surrounded them; escorted them to the mayoral blacked out Hummer and whisked them away for further whisking.
‘Mayoring,’ came the advice, ‘a small village is all about conveniencing yourself, paving a smooth, dilemma busting decisionway through the cacky, pisspeopled, demos…’
Mayor Draco’s power and influence seemed to be leaking out everywhere leaving him with overinflated sense of deflation. He had been gifted with a Small Village Mayoral Duty Advisor (SVMDA) who was twenty-four/seven in his earpiece and up his ring-piece, simultuously.
The hotel was closed but reopened and run by his staff so there was nothing to pay. It made for a perfect headquarters with a to die for accounts disposition. Leo moved into the honeymoon suite alone, but Harris would tap on the wall in code should any information exchange be required.
Later that month…
It was the mayor’s grim task to select people for transportation from Little Sudlow-On-Russet to Great Sudlow-On-Russet. Leo did not understand why and the Mayor was not going to tell him.
The constant supply of village population units was dwindling, which made governance less administratively labyrinthine, but led to valid snippets of doubt-mongering town crieresque interference. A point came, a barb on a slender summit with a member of the grit family in one of its sneakers. The Sent People, Mayor Draco signed off, never returned. Were they even returnable? Questions on safety and security and wellbeing and fairness slowly got buried in the conglomeration of unique snowflakes forming a snowy dampening of ethic consideration…time was timing-everonwards and the sea-level-seated ground wasn’t going to meet itself…’
The door to the mayoral chambers-cum-honeymoon suite burst inwards and a modified cake-trolly clanked in like bumper cars were go, ‘Tea, mein fuhrer?’
Leo came off the slopes of Moot Point Mountain and donned his mayoral chain, ‘Ah, tea, lovely!’ he said, which sounded so snowflakey-summit-lite, he added, ‘Get me a biscuit! And make it mayoral in shape and flavour!… and…um….crumbfree…’
