Doing sit-ups, eating healthy, taking vigorous walks, sitting alone in the hospital dusk, filling and refilling the blank spaces in my settlement package…where was I? Well, the hearts of the Congolese people are calling for postcards from Vietnam. And yes, the dark, continental heart of man is ravaged with good intentions. And I’m all attention, pumping iron, regulating my breathing, getting fit for the big reveal. My doctor, Brenda, comes to light. She tells me, not unreasonably, “No more can’t be done.” Then leans closer, “What I do do, tends to expand the storage capacity of the human heart." She's leaning very close, "Everything does its part, but I can’t help expediting the process, taking the bit, so to speak, ticking this thing into hyper-drive—into art.” She hands me a colour postcard from poignant Indonesia. She says, “Are my methods unsound?” She thinks I can’t see she’s knocked up. I tell her, “I see no method at all.” And then the bleeping machine beside my bed leaps me inside the thumping left ventricle of Francis Coppolla, in the director’s chair, c. 1974 watching his expensive method actor pretend to understand the end of Heart of Darkness, which he hasn’t read. Maybe he can’t, because of the speed. As in life, and in the original, the long awaited conclusion comes as a let-down. The end does not work. And though spring hurricanes may destroy my sets, I welcome the ancient Marlon Brenda in me, calling-up from the depths, somehow, a more realistic pain. “The work does not end,” Marlon Brenda says slowly, Sicilian-shy, like the friend of a friend. And I dare not reply, “No-one expects the fat assassin, spouting epithets from the shadows, sporting a large black t-shirt to distract us from his pregnancy.”
