Claudio and the Mysteries of Auxiliary Owen

ed, S. Dot - show 2 for the box (example/estuary)

A stout grey mansion with many floors and a wide view of the Lac-du-Platz at the edge of Wabansia and it’s most grand park is Green's Philanthropic. After years of neglect this stern building is now stuffed with patchwork gallerinas, old paint, and elbow grease. The Tartlette is nestled here into the quiet half story just below the promenade that passes in front. Turpsy tiny pioneers gather here and grumble about their coffee burns and ostrich feathers. It’s late in the year and the bakery feels like it can’t get warm enough ever. Monstre Luza sits on her stool at the back of the long counter with it’s pitted chrome and Formica. She’s well away from the other’s chatter and their mulch.

A union spigot drips onto the treads of a black mat under the stairs beside her. Next to the spigot is a cold mop hiding its mildewed mopping cheek. A little girl jumps for its handle and misses. A little girl jumps for the mop handle and knocks it over with a clack. A fellow in a deep scarf and a tight sweater pulls up a stool. Monstre Luza tidies some crumbs and looks at the clock up above her. She keeps her hair at an appropriate length for fussing. Her robes are well cleaned and they’re brightly creased. Now her tea is done. Her saucer is dry and her day is about to start.

Across the street from the bakery, in the middle of Lac-du-Park is the Chancellor’s Institute. The Dutch as it's called by pioneers auxiliary and Monstre' all is only 5 floors high and only just rises above the sand and the reedy lagoons along Lac-du-Platz.. It might have been built after Thursby's Palace but the Dutch now looks like a humpty row of bricks in a ditch. The southern third of the school is nearly gone at the elbow, buried in a massive drift of sand. The center hall is a ramshackle mess of ramparts and scaffolding that’s abutted with an enormous iron and glass hangar. The Dutch’s north wing stands vacant and nethered beside them.

Deep inside the school is the most grand of the great cafeteria's. In this great granditorium there are 8 hundred trillion blue chairs that are each as different as Claudio is from every Tuesday ever. Every chair was painstakingly designed by Samwell Parch and individually folded, cast, or assembled in his Rocky Mt office. No one ever liked lunch more than Samwell Parch did. It’s said that, No one ever cared so much or more than he.

Luza Thursby's room is just inside the Dutch’s central vestibule on the left. Luza is more appropriately known as Monstre Luza. Her grandfather Thursby was Parch’s design partner. At least he was until Thursby was found dead after a day of excessive voting. The Monstre’s room has a very very tall and narrowly out-sized wooden ladder at it’s center. Inside, along the walls of the room runs an inspired pattern of brown paper that worms all the way around the otherwise empty space. Each one of the sheets has as many as a 150 tacks too an edge and each one of these tack’s has it’s own chipped enameled edges that are like flecks of clear blue along a muddy creek bottom. Among maps, Monstre Luza is known to think like the map on the ground.

At nine thirty Monstre Luza enters and without delay she ascends to the top of the ladder. The young pioneers all gather around and listen to all that the Monstre has to share,

All that we are set upon to do or to say, with reason or without will be undone in time. It is between the acts of invocating and exvocating that ruin slips into the incorporeal. With it's fain dimnity the unseen pall remains unsawn until each of the endless ends be gathered. When the foul foul wall of the floor behidden in absence by all of the gone, when the foul foul wall of the floor bespies the forward frame of reason this subject of mass and it's virtue will know, bah-blah blah…

Meanwhile and elsewhere, in an entirely other room that’s down the hall and behind the grand stairwell there are 4 dead eyed pioneers sagging in their worn folding chairs. Monstre Owen walks into his room as the klaxon is winding down. The fellow in the middle sits up but otherwise not much happens as he shuts the door and checks it’s sturdy lock. So he looks after the deadbolt and finally the crossbar. The Monstre sets his satchel down beside the pedestal and removes a thick clot of curled papers bound with super shiny foil ribbon. He turns to the dry green panel behind him and with a fat stump of chalk he writes out...

Open my room, please to be in this hackered old heart, ribs like a broom. Rags for my April, I see all of these blooms a bonnet a bower a button a tombs in the rear. Curious showers through spring til they clear. a fiddler, a rake, a team at your door left anxious and open seas for the shore-line among the waves there's soil on the graves I'll count all of the days that April's gone away

When he’s done Monstre Owen turns around to his sparsely attended class. Behind me, how do you document this, he asks them. How do you capture all of this sweet and tender honesty? How do you make filmers slow enough for the gravity of this to be measured? We can answer these questions and we will, right here, together. So let’s begin. The silence gets a poke from a round faced mollie-girl in the back row. She's just found her pen. It’s the best ever disposable plastic pen with a chewed end, she sits back satisfied, tapping on the paper in front her.

Monstre Owen continues, Does anyone know the name of 3 Dutch filmers... Don't be shy. They can be old. They can be new. They just need to be Dutch and Filmers. Okay, does anyone know where Dutch is... Can I assume all of you know what a filming looks like...

The registrar's office had let Monstre Owen know that he was on a shaky ground this season. The college was being remagined again as before and his students were being haggled over by the Humble Economies School of Diminishing Needs and the promising but obscure Everything Else Department of Narnia. Later in the office Monstre Owen opens a crisp envelop with the slip of a cleverly inserted pencil under its adhered flap. Inside is a piece of heavy rag paper printed with curvy script in stubbled relief,

monstrare est videre,

M.O.PS.

coffee/teatreats

It might be a pink day yet, Monstre Owen thinks. The envelop he crumples into a sharp ball and drops into a tall silver can by the door. The slip of paper with its embossed note gets tucked into his heavy robe before he heads downstairs.

Claudio come over here. Your tag’s not out. Your tag needs to be out so the other Monstre’s will see it.
But there’s pigeage this morning and I was up all night. I'm late. When Claudio finally arrives his shoes are off and his socks are hanging out of them like bleached tongues.

Monstre Owen glares at the young man with a crystalline line of sharp menace that’s very very unpleasant. Still Claudio can’t help himself from sighing deeply and being astonished by the ease with which Monstre Owen turns up his thought glands, focusing them through his radiant eyeballs and right into him. He suspects that the Monstre can destroy tiny birdlings like this. Not because he must, but because he enjoys the idle crunch of their fragility.

Quiet Claudio, listen now. I want you and your small face to take this pass to the basement. Monstre Frango will see you when he has the time. And keep your tags where they can be seen.

Yes Monstre, I’m going now.
Finally the morning’s groups let out and the other students and pioneers spill out into the corridors. They yawn and rub their eyes. They talk about sex and casual drug use. They stop and call out the pigeons. Claudio sidesteps them easily. He moves swiftly through the hallways and down the stairs to Monstre Owen’s office.
The Auxiliary is the Monstre’ arm of nuisance. Between groups the Auxiliary are arch-busies that the students try to avoid. They keep an office down near the boilers too. It’s no surprise to Claudio that it’s filled with folding chairs. The door is always open and he’s seen them in there walking around without their robes on. Instead the heavy robes will be hanging from giant brass wall hooks. In the front of the room there’s the tall golden painting of Solomon Barbadoon leaning against his long rifle. The reedy pioneer looks off into the important and sensible future of the Platz that’s there beyond the frame.
Claudio sits down on the low wood bench. There's an empty bowl beside him waiting, waiting, waiting. His trouser cuffs are rolled up tight to his calves. He put on his shoes so his socks are hanging from his side pocket now. Behind him is Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow in it’s scrolling frame the color of warm morning piss. While the Kentuckians peer over his left shoulder, dog and squirrel at hand. Claudio’s short cap is muskrat (mostly vole but some lemming too). Dyed royal red at the Herfort near Lac du Platz it smells like damp madder and rancid fat but likely it’s just vinegar rubbed in with some coarse salt and ash. Claudio passes the time humming singing idly,

The candles are burnt and so are the schools the broom in the muffin the broken Spanish furnace missing the shack get spare the horse is gone but the cow is here the weather is coming to follow the saw my mother son mother son down to the river and under the bridge the windows are far away - Kitty & Paty (Claudio’s english to english translation)