conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book about Black, Rock, White entitled Black Rock White City?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Black Rock White City: In the late 1990s Jovan, a writer and academic in Serbia, is now a refugee living in Melbourne and working as a cleaner at a hospital.\nHe is tasked with cleaning up some graffiti which is followed by more vandalism that becomes ever more weird and threatening.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first four paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Black Rock White City
  Outside, on the university grounds, Jovan would find the four bodies of these young men a few hours afterwards while Suzana slept under sedation. Shot down by Serb militia. Not because they were rapists. Because they were armed Muslims. And Jovan did not feel relief. Did not feel the hatred for them consummated in this violence. Maybe it was because they looked young. Young enough to still be his students. Young enough to be anything they wanted to be. No longer young. They had no age now. Hate would have been easier. Jovan searched for hate, and wanted to find it. Easier than the obliteration he actually felt.
  The demolishment he still feels, even here in Melbourne, Australia. A different world altogether in which what happened in Bosnia was some kind of horror show where monsters killed other monsters. A place with no heroes, and therefore of little interest to anyone he talked to, except as far as they looked at him and wondered whether he was possibly another one of those Balkan monsters. Jovan smiles at people in the hospital, blokes like Bill, and assures them all he's not to be feared. He's just a cleaner in this world. No problems. There are no problems here that can't be cleaned away.
  He walks down the hallway, away from the change room and the noise of Bill kicking in metal lockers. Jovan moves down the busy hospital halls, patients making their way along to rooms for examinations or rest, with doctors and their purposeful faces and others, similar to himself, heads full of directions, moving here and there, looking to keep it all running. Everything going on as it should in this fully functioning moral economy. The hum of a healthy hive, audible through every wall, at least to Jovan's ears.
  That hum had been harder to hear ever since Doctor Graffito had emerged, his mind breaking out across the walls, a rare, exotic disease that was yet deeply familiar as well. As common as a cold. The cough and the frustration. As basic as hate. The venom from a wound, sucked up, spat out. Had Jovan been fooling himself about his own hatred? Enough of that poison and a man becomes toxic, the walking wounded, more dead than alive.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know four more paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'He thought he was a good man'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He thought he was a good man. He thought he was right. He didn't want the devil to win, yet the devil always gets in and takes what he wants. Where was the safety he should have given Suzana? Where was the protection? The simple foresight of a caveman would have been enough. He should have taken them away from death. It should have been easy to run. He could have taken them to safety. He didn't protect his daughter. He didn't protect his son. And now what can Ana and Dejan mean? Did he let them go so they could be dragged down to hell as well?
  Utterly useless. He'd proved that. The most basic task given to him by God, the simplest function in this world, the only thing that mattered to his heart, mind, and soul, was the preservation of family. He should be washed down as well. If he wasn't a coward he would have already found a way to slide down to the devil.
  The water roared around them and he thought she would never speak to him again. That they would hold each other and she would simply walk away and that'd be the end of everything. She whispered words he couldn't make out into his ear, long senseless fragments of words without pauses to separate their syllables, and continued to tell him this endless story filled with nothing he could understand until he picked her up and carried her back to that Cotton Tree bed.
  There is a bag of seed in the garage. He takes a cupful and walks to the back fence and drops some down in the flat dry grass for the birds. One of the planks of unpainted wood is coming loose. The nail has leaked rust in a brief streak. He pushes the plank back into position and uses his callused thumb to press the nail back into the wood.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last four paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'No one's around other than a thin man in the water near the edge'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: No one's around other than a thin man in the water near the edge. Jovan blinks and realises he recognises him from the hospital. One of the surgeons he never had a reason to talk with. As soon as the doctor lifts his head there's a different kind of recognition. The man has tattoos across his torso, and every word is familiar to Jovan—he has obliterated most of them from the hospital's walls. **INSPIRATION** down the centre of his chest. Words pushing in, crossing over each other. Obliteration. Oblivion. Self-made tattoos, letters cut into the flesh as deep as they would go. A God of Small Knives. A Devil of Deep Cuts. And in red letters, set within three skulls lined up across the man's heart, The Trojan Flea.
  She closes her eyes, still coughing, listening, and waiting for a movement. Nothing else can happen now. Wait for a kick or a punch. Wait. Wait. Wait. There it is. That faint tingle as an elbow nudges her spine.
  When she opens her eyes there's a man bleeding from his face, his nose, his ears, and a mouth missing most of its teeth. Teeth being washed down the grates by the side of the pool. The blood dripping down his face and cleaned away by the filters. The water would still be deep blue. She can't see it. All she can see is the blood. Pacific. What a lovely word that is. Dead. The man can't be alive.
  Her colossus is bringing down one rock-crushing fist after another into the man's body and then into his face again. Another tooth comes loose. Kicking within her. Alive and as deep as the Pacific. Safe and sound in those words. Her husband. How good. The only thing she can think is how powerful and great, how strong and noble. Jovan's Pacific eyes. His mouth set—a storm swallowed. As expressionless as a god's face as he does his work. Obliterating every other word. And how good she thinks, how good. Her Jovan. Her husband. Her good man. How very good. As expressionless as a god remaking the world.