Sometimes, in the night, he shivers in his makeshift cardbord castle. Nobody was ever told what dreams are projected behind his beating eyelashes.
His body is large and exposed. His beard huge, his hair long and filthy. He seats nexts to his cardbord castle all day watching the people walking to work, walking home, walking to see a movie, walking to a lovers meeting, walking to a work-out, walking to a funeral service, walking to church. Always they walk.
And always he seats. When he needs to make he makes his bussiness in a loo outside a Pizza place. The owner sometimes goes to see him. A Chinese man comes once a day with a greasy cardbord box with flaming red Chinese letters printed outside of it. Different letters every day. Once the letters meant: "
Why?" In a dialect of a Chinese City that no longer exists.
The living deck went to the Chinese man's car and stayed there for half an hour. Then left the car and went back to his cardboard castle.
The following day the Chinese man returned with a box that said "
Courage" in a Chinese urban slang that will be spoken one day on Mars by people who are too young to be up to what they're up to.
The living deck also has letters on his castle. They also posses a great deal of magic. But since they were spoken in the West for so long the letters seem communplace to most people.
"Co A LA"
" E SI"
"RA AN"
The letters change as the castle sheds its old skin and grows new organs when needed. The cops never hassale him.
The living deck now has a young woman coming to him. She throws him a coin, he grunts and lends her an ear. She whispers to his big hairy fleshy noise-pore when traffic goes by with a "
VHOOOSH" and the people walking walking.
She glances around nerveously. The living deck is somewhat of a joke, somewhat of a myth, among people who went to college. Up there with the man with twenty women who all bear his name tattoed on their necks or hands. "
Sam Savoir" in pale blue ink.
Oh I've seen them. Sitting around their man Sam holding babes and children and watching the man eat a salad under a tree in the City park.
The young woman was taken from one of these women by the women's mother. Which is why she can now read and write and pay the living deck.
She wants to find her mother.
The living deck closes it's eyes and a pattern begins to emerage on his skin. Tiny motors spray ink from the inside of his flabby flesh. Following a design selected randomly by a tiny computer inside the living decks brain. No two living decks have ever given the same reading to the same person asking the same quiestion. There are currently only three living decks in the world. One is dying in a hospital bed far far away.
The living deck now has a naked, chubby woman with pale skin painted from the inside of his skin. The young woman sees the colors added quickly. The blue water around the woman. The green bucket she holds. The light-blue water she pours from her bucket to the lake. A black bird next to her watching but not being watched. Yellow and Red stars gleaming above her head, between the nippels of the living deck.
The woman gasps. Tears roll down her eyes, she's thinking of someone. Can you guess who?
She thanks the living deck and leaves. Tommarow she will see a black bird being fed by an old woman. If she's paying attention she'll stop.
Paying attention is what this is all about.
Somewhere far away tiny out-dated motors spray more and more black and yellow ink on the inner side of an old man's skin. The pattern of the card which is of the number 13 grows larger and larger. The point of the cropping tool is now on the old man's cheek. Touching his lips.
No one remembers how the living decks got started. Some say it's a relic of a tatoo culture that went high-tech in the recent past with some mojo added for flavour. Some think there was a cult of the living deck once. But nobody knows for sure. There was a book containing interviows with twenty living decks (17 were straight men, one was gay, the two women were siamese twins trying to cash in since their circus act was losing it's appeal). But the book is no longer available even in the oldest, vastest libraries in your head.
No new people are joining the living decks. Why bother with it when there's so much to see and do in the city? Isn't it all much more fun when you
don't know?
The old man on the bed in a place far far away is gasping for his last breath. After he dies. The motors will do one last thing. They will adorn every skin cell in his body with the design of all the decks that ever were. The Fools and the Devils and the Magicians and The Hanged Men and The World always dancing dancing dancing it's crazy dance.
If you try to remove the skin of a dead deck to keep the paintings you will be very, very, sorry before you pass away.
