ides of march

what jack party didn't realize as he left the hotel was that everything was already over. The grand finale just hadn't happened yet. But all the events surrounding these last three hateful weeks had conspired, silently and balefully, to set him up for this very end. For tonight.

It would take another month or so for him to completely bury it, but his plans and hopes were already as dead as God. The last faint beats of possibility softly accompanying his slow steps down the spiral staircase of the Binh Tran Hotel. A metronome to squandered promise.

He slipped into the heavy night, angling through the moto hordes across the close streets. Everywhere horns and barking bells demanding passage, stares and turns appraising his foreign appearance. He loved Hanoi. It was the Left Bank and the Village, but wilder and dingier. He loved how he stood out in the city. Like he never managed to back home. It confirmed to him his belief that juxtaposition was the best.

No one knows what's coming next. So there was no way when Jack woke up that morning and sat on the can, moving out his Pho Bo from the night before, that he could have imagined himself the perpetrator of seven murders by the next day's dawn. Maybe he would have decided to make the flight to Vancouver; instead, like a sap, he let himself on more look at their favourite places. And so, as he saw her seated at their table in Cafe Tung with the meddling French attache, just this destiny crept inside his soul.