He came from Ohio and had sparkling fingernails and his feet didn’t touch the ground when he walked. He built a boat out of old keyboards and got arrested for trying to sail it across the Internet. To save money the state had him locked up in the past, where space is cheaper and ones and zeros are less of a nuisance. His cell was directly below Culture Club’s, who had handed themselves in after becoming unable to bear the guilt of a career spent forgetting to tell people they’d been joking all along. Four or five times a week they’d make a bleary electric racket that despite being very loud was not at all heavy, and it would remind Brothertiger how much he missed his sister and how undefinable all his yearnings were. Under these circumstances he produced Golden Years.
Dissatisfied as a solo artist, he put an advert in the back of the prison gossip magazine asking if anyone wanted to form a group, but never got to see the response. The authorities deemed his situation exceptional. He had suffered enough - so much, in fact, that he may never recover - from the noise upstairs and from his temporal dislocation, and he was awarded an early release.
They gave him back his boat and he appeared in it at house parties, briefly forming a double-act called Bleak Cheese with a mute girl who had a few very large remote controls which she matter-of-factly waved around during their performances, hoping to find the button that would make their crowds less cataleptic. This never happened and she left after only five shows, saying in an email that she had to find more powerful batteries, believing this to be the sole cause of Bleak Cheese’s failure to “lick the ears of the audience until waxy bitter joy lay puddled on the floor like puke”, which had been the only pledge in their manifesto.
Brothertiger’s grief was soothed by the money from obscure corporations who paid him to soundtrack their internal training videos. These short films and montages would teach new staff how to get drinking water from drizzle by catching it in vintage crisp packets, and what sort of trainers to wear to a moomin’s funeral.
They loved his work and their increasing demands on his time left him with very few spare moments in which to work out what it was he actually wanted to do. He wasn’t happy. - Kemptation |
