chapter seven

And there he was now walking the streets of Bankok, looking for flower vendors that may steer him in the proper direction. To say that the streets were littered with flowers would be an ironic, but apt statement. To say that flowers ‘littered’ the streets would be to assume that they took the place of trash on the streets and this would be so, but it would be an ironic picture. Garlands, bouquets, single stemmed and bunches of flowers from pinks to yellows, it was an overwhelmingly gaudy and powerfully sensuous sight. Mixing in with the scents of perfumes were the fish and the body odor and wildly running boys and girls who also perfumed the streets. It was a powerful absolution of infinites, Orville mused.
Vendors called to him, the only occidental walking this street at this hour when the heat seemed to be ready able and willing to pick you up off your feet and throw you into the air and into the nearest bar for a cool beer. “Here, here, here!” they called, “Mr. tourist!” and yet, he walked on, repulsed and delighted simultaneously with the mingling cross-currents of rot and life, dirt and colours.
From out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a child, a tall child though, walking from out of the red rosed depths of an alleyway. Like a strange topiary salesman, he appeared from between a mass of red roses and Texas bluebells seeming to part them with the slightest shrugging of his shoulders, it is seamless and that makes Orville take notice. Orville Newton Leone knows that he is a tall man and that tall people, men and women alike are usually not the coolest of cats and nowhere nearly as smooth and lithe as their namesakes. But he knows this also. He knows that God or someone some good, benevolent or indifferent force or being even taller than himself has graced him with the poise and dexterity that it takes for him to say.... oh, have walked along the highrise ledge overlooking a Detroit skyline and slip into the twenty- third floor of the Highmoon Hotel and strangled an astigmatitic biker gang leader with a purple sash of the silk curtain pull before he could even turn around from investigating the newly opened window in his room that hadn’t been opened a moment ago when he checked in ready to begin his ascension as the chaotic leader of the union of the motor city sanitation union breakers. Orville Newton Leone knows this and knows that he can jump like a cat and swim like a fish and fly like a bee, if only for a few moments at a time. But, Orville is now only thinking of the boy with a twelve o clock shadow across his cheeks who is following him through the markets and ducking behind the wicker baskets of tulips as soon as ONL gives the slightest glance back over his sholder, the faint whiff of Brut 33 seeming out of place in that market of so many good scents.

chapter six

The search for the seed had come just as Orville had finished the mission for the cunning scotsman who had disappeared in the bagpipe factory. That was a long one, he reflected. He had plugged his ears for weeks after trying to dislodge the squeals of bagpipes that he had in his head for three weeks. For days afterward, he walked around with the same squeals still locked in his head, rubbing his knuckles against his ears trying to free them and let them tumble out. But they were there as much a Scottish reminder of where he had been as much as if he were participating in a caber toss in a kilt in Glasgow.
Orville among his other, (many people who tried to put it delicately termed them eccentricities,) had a talent or curse, depending upon how he looked at it on any given day, for memorising and then repeating music in his head, whistling it out in a careful, a tuneful and exact reproduction, octave for octave and note for note. He had once Handel’s Hymn For the Messiah in his head for nearly two and a half months after the xmas season. Grocery stores were the worst for him, he often had two or three of four tunes simultaneously warring for the aural space in his head and the satisfaction of being hummed aloud. He tried to stay away from muzac when he could.
Orville Newton Leone’s mother tried to send him to music lessons when he was young, sensing a certain aptness for music, piano, violin and one disastrous meeting with a piccolo solidified his faith that he wasn’t cut out to be a musician, much as though his mother wanted him to be and he had tried. He had the raw talent, but within his musical mind, too many tunes were waiting in a rowdy queue to be played and played long. It was worse than a soup line when everyone who had a bowl began to throw it around and curse and then soon noone had eaten the soup, but it was everywhere just the same. On the walls, the floor, on the ceiling fan, behind the cupboards and worst of all, between his ears.