SUSPECTED TERRORIST: Our morality fends off strangers with each club-footed stride towards high ideals, in the abstract.
BECK: But I want concrete things. Things of matter.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: What’s the matter with things of matter is that things of matter do not always matter.
BECK: That’s shit, and you know it.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: So what? I pray to the same whores that menace the rest of society, and it gets me the same distance as the bank robbers or the file clerks.
BECK: Isn’t America filled with file clerks who’ve read the Harvard Classics, or something?
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: Shut up. Shut up. I know. The blackbirds are rough today.
BECK: You better believe it. And that’s a matter for another day’s indecision. Let’s make hips out of pockets. Let’s scratch out our voices with needles. Let’s invent devil’s to take our women away. Let’s hurt before we harm. Let’s get our vim back.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: We might need a detective to solve the troubles in our minds.
BECK: Don’t bore me with horror.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: We have helmets. Hammers serve our needs like drapes. Wince. The pain’ll snap through grief like an olive pit.
BECK: Basically we have nothing but ourselves.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: Basically.
BECK: When I die will you be my hangman?
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: If that is necessary. If that is a task I must perform. If I glide on through screaming matches. If scuttling is an acceptable way of moving through cemeteries.
BECK: Trips to the bathroom become more frequent with trips to the barroom.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: Lightweight.
BECK: Sucker.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: Punch back and we’ll mistake our way through the music of the headlamps. I have a tail that tattles.
BECK: It varies, by chance, with all the effort we waste on our own petty doings.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: A lessoning of self-importance. It is a looming thing that hangs in the balance of tipped scales.
BECK: We smash alarm clocks before we wake.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: Yes. It’s a happening that keeps for at least a day. We go away feeling the things we do. Sometimes broken things mend in the wrong places. There is not controlling substance, matter, the lesser parts of the disunified whole. There is only chance in the bottoms of well-to-do pennies. We have both done some grieving.
BECK: The rippling fronds on the palm trees in the sunny courtyard of my life are roaring like animal-cracker lions, but the flowers are just homicide victims and squatters. I will blow my nose and save the world.
SUSPECTED TERRORIST: You’d make a mighty good…
BECK: Shut up.
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