Inspector Inspector (first draft done)
Inspector Inspector
The Goldfish Bowl
Supposedly a show of support for medical workers, the banging on pots and pans at exactly 5 pm every day is to scare off the demons. Listen to the hysteria detonating like Chinese firecrackers just beneath the grimness. You can hear it also on the liberal Internet. It has the sadness of dead goldfish floating to the top of the goldfish bowl, or bodies in body bags stacked into refrigerated trucks outside the hospital. Mask up, one health inspector says to another. I can’t breathe, says the Black man locked down by a beast with six knees and hands. I should take to the streets, I say, but what if I catch the virus? I will write instead, in the privacy of 5 am, banging my pot against my pan in this way.
The Zoom Background
The missing person poster was sent to all households in the year of the Great Election. The picture was of my dead father. His face, racked with pain, became the most popular Zoom background, downloaded over a million times around the world. I wrote to the Internet safety bureau every day to ask them to scrub the web clean of the image. I did not wish to share my father with the world. In any case, he was not missing, he was dead. I saw his body pushed into the fire. I dropped his ashes into the sea. Finally, annoyed by my harassment, the Inspector General rained fingers on his keyboard and changed the poster from missing to wanted. The pain on my father’s face then looked sinister. It was downloaded faster than ever, reaching a billion times in China alone.
The Cartoon Tavern
Cheap shots. Surgical strikes. Under the nose of the inner inspector, I have been drinking too much to make up for missed drinks and dinners with friends, book launches and readings, my 50th birthday celebration. Extraordinary measures for extraordinary times. I have been visiting the cartoon tavern run by Sir Melodias, the Dragon Sin of Wrath, to drink with all the other Sins. I have been associating with a pig called Hawk. I have been hell-bent to revive a dead fairy called Elaine. I have been fighting an incredibly beautiful Holy Knight by the name of Hendrickson, who has grown enormously powerful by ingesting demon blood. And after beating him down with my Sacred Treasure, I have returned to the tavern and called for another dram of druid fluid.
The Quaker Sunflower
Everyone on the show is paranoid, except for the Quaker, who is plain creepy. I have located her creepiness in her calm. While the detective inspectors are dashing all about Dusseldorf, hunting down clues and connections, she gardens at home, pausing to listen to your woes and dispense wise advice. She is a friend to everyone. Her face is round as a sunflower. She reminds me of a certain civil servant in Singapore, met at a roundtable on arts diplomacy. After flashing his PowerPoint slides at us, he took me aside to tell me that he did not understand my unfriendliness towards the National Arts Council. Surely it was better for everyone to have their knives chained to the wall and identified by QR codes? He did not say this, but he could have.
The Harlem Harem
I think I am collecting a harem of birds in Harlem. I am not sure. I must be the most unsure Shah in Persian history. Some days, the birds thrash in the luxurious appointments of my head. Other days, the screechy gulls wheel away, each taking a scrap of me in his beak, and barrel in so many different directions that I despair of ever piecing myself back together, even with the help of the inspector of public hygiene. I used to pass by two elderly Black men in Marcus Garvey Park, who scattered breadcrumbs to the pigeons, and I used to wonder if they were lovers. Then there was only one of them. He said his friend had died, was taken away by the ambulance in the middle of the night. I guessed he was taken away at 3 am, for what else could the middle be. Contact tracing had quarantined their building, but the building was not staying in.
The Beard Video
My friends are growing beards on Instagram as if they are not afraid of being mistaken for Muslims. They post pictures of the different stages of their growth. They even post time-lapse videos as they are working from home. Finally the man whom I have been stalking since we met at my reading in Kinokuniya also gets into the act. When I watch his video while lying in bed, the cotton sheets rattle quietly and pass their thread count into me, as if I am a curtain of hanging beads easily parted. My body becomes indistinguishable from the Alice blue bed sheet. My face is masked efficiently by the pillowslip. To the facial recognition software and the DNA test, I may as well not be there. When my boyfriend reports me missing, how will the great detective inspector find me? Will he know how to read my phone dropped by my side of the bed?
The Inauguration Poet
According to the regulations, only eight people are allowed in the KTV room. A conspiracy of young foreign women is in attendance. The TV menu presents the following options: a gunman snipes at the President-elect and kills him; a gunman snipes at the President-elect and misses him; the FBI disarms the gunman before he can take up his position on WhatsApp; the gunman is from the FBI. A conspiracy of critics takes down the inauguration poet. They wish to control the narrative. They release a statement that their target is cancel culture, nothing personal. But who is the ninth person in the room? After inspecting his nails, from the left corner he moves to the front, and he sings “Unchained Melody.”
The Mechanical Dog
The mechanical dog does not wish to be mistaken for a real dog. Its long-legged purpose is to scare the citizens of this purpose-built park into wearing their masks. Its eyes, two video cameras, hunt down offenders tirelessly. Its yellow body is always on the go. The citizens are, however, unafraid of the dog. They whisk near to the dog and wish to take selfies with it. Look, the citizens say, if you abide by the law, what do you have to be afraid of? The mechanical dog wags its tail in agreement, activated by the inspector looking through its eyes. In a distant galaxy, called Shannara or Harlem, the salt scattered on the icy sidewalk is slowly eating up the concrete. Munch, munch, what’s for lunch?
The Picnic Mat
When they left, the hospital tents in the park had imprinted neat rectangles of dead grass. A paraphrase of what happened. A Morse message, all dashes, no dots. Horizontal smoke signals. QR code. It also reminded me of the AIDS quilt. Then it was rolled up and put away. The area of possible infection had been fenced off. The strollers and their nannies had been careful to keep their distance. The grass had grown back in a center-left conspiracy. If you again hover in your helicopter, like an angel on a wire in a Christmas pageant or a police inspector, you will say, behold. The picnickers have returned to their usual spots, with their hampers, books, and dogs, sitting on the black picnic mats.
The Body Camera
“You cannot bring the body camera with you to the grave,” says the kitchen inspector. He dips his finger into the batter and tastes it. It is grainy. We are, after all, in the quarterfinals of the Great British Baking Show, where the judgment will be more severe than ever. For the technical challenge, Paul and Mary would like you to bake an anti-terrorism sword. It is a Chinese app and everyone will be required to download it onto their phone. You have two-and-a-half hours. You may remove the gingham covering now. The camera is rolling. The anus remembers.
The search in my underwear is unwarranted. I have not had a nocturnal emission since I was fifteen, dreaming that my scout leader was pulling off his shirt and advancing on my vibrating form. Before he could touch me, I was all wet and warm below. But now, whenever I write about the dream, and I am always writing about the dream even when I am not, the beautiful scout leader wears the air of an inspector who has a master’s degree in detecting signs of child abuse. His right hand pulses with an ultraviolet light. No matter how hard I write, I cannot change him back. You know him too. The undeniable UFO that blots out sun and rain.
The Bad Prompt
The inspector came to me while I was writing with my writing students because none of them had submitted a poem for workshop. They were a good bunch, but school knocked the stuffing out of them that week. For a prompt, I told them to let one word lead to another. I know. It was not much of a prompt. I had given better prompts in the past. I thought this bad prompt would open the door to our wintry room for different kinds of visitors from beyond. I did not ask my students who came to them, but for me, the inspector came, stamping his boots free of snow, his hands holding my head by my big ears. In a normal voice my head said, write me.
The Bagel Door
The man behind the counter had a bad night. He banged the brown paper bag of bagels in front of the customer in front of me. I did not know that bagels could make such a smart tap, as if a building inspector was at the door of my apartment. What could I say to the unsmiling caller? My bathroom faucet was leaky? I had no permits for the double-glazed windows? The fire escape had rusted shut before I moved in? No explanation would satisfy the inspector, not even the two dollars that the customer stuffed into the little metal basket between them before waving a cheerful goodbye, which authenticity was hard to ascertain.
The Ghost Bus
The bus goes past us, and then stops a full length ahead. An inspector, blue-uniformed, hops off, and the bus takes off. It is not our bus. The next bus stops for us, but also stops a full-length before my bus-stop. There is no reason for it, as the bus lane in front of it is blank, as blank as the white spaces between words. There is no reason for my bus to stop there. I walk down the length of my morning bus, and I walk down the length of the ghost bus, wondering how many ghost people are riding it to a ghost destination that I know nothing of. The lights change just in time for me to cross the road, and I look down the full length of the ghost bus, seeing no one, but my morning driver who is looking, I imagine, back at me. It is the first year of the pandemic.
The Uninterrupted Story
“The depicted world is one of waiting and sadness; a world of heavy eroticism, almost a world of the voyeur. A distant world in which communication seems impossible, or futile; besides, human beings have become painted things in this world, colour events in view of obtaining light on the painting’s surface—they are dispossessed of all but their chromatic lives. The world of these first years in Nice is a world behind glass—the world in a fishbowl, the world infinitely repeated in a kind of insistent, existential loss. As if the light one had to obtain resulted in nothing but solitude, and demanded a fatal renunciation.”
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