16 Sept. c. 310: Eel-and-Prawn Stew
The office is a moving frost cloud of data entry and exit and so drafts up every now again. Kory’s townie visitors in their skullcaps and subdued flannel shirts are fawning in-congregation over the androgynously stubbled blanched-white face in the wall at the annex’ s West cubicle cul-de-sac; first inhabited by Flake Manage, Prof. Stitt, and Cooler Burner in early Autumn of last year, now only Stitt uses the cul-de-sac, what with the irksomely beneficent dahlia face having appeared seemingly overnight (though Stitt says it was for sure incremental: patches of face like topographical bird’s-eye blueprint rising up slowly from the wall over time, shaping, bulging, sinking isobathically into the orifices of the nose, the eyes, ears…) and the face’s truistic lectures, often tailing off into discursive diatribe from a subject which will be forgotten by the time the face’s lecture is over, it is more than understandable—their standing there with Kory (Stitt is on lunch break) and poking at the face with their dirt-encrusted fingers, palming its stubbly jawline. “PLEASE DON’T!” the face shouts, white tears welling up in its gray eyes. The townie named Ruff N. Tuff is actually licking the tears from the face’s eyes, exclaiming: “Hey y’all these tears taste lahk milk!” No one believes him, and so the entire coterie is licking the thing’s eyeballs as lurid screams escape its mouth. ¶ “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IN JEAVEN HESUS ALMIGHTY PLEASE STOP…!” ¶ Someone is brewing fine Italian espresso in the break room; its smell transmogrifies into an aura which floats about, a gas of greenish tincture and whirring golden flakes. It floats through the annex into the Telephonic Sales suboffice system, which is shaped like a donut on a stem that is the longish hallway leading there, telephone- and computer-equipped glass-partitioned suboffice rooms and large call center (the donut’s hole) and break room (constituting ¼ of the donut’s mass), passing Lamron’s shoulder for a moment, slowly, wafting back around toward the donut’s break room’s kitchenette. He is filing, doing the Bulk, managing a lurid K12 whose large black exclamation point on red file sheath sort of glows around its borders a little, white, then yellow, then white again. The K12 pertains to a B14-K7, a ghost, which was meant to delay the K12 initially, although after a time the client became irate enough to look into his online acct.-exchange status and find the exact sub-subfile of which the ghost K7 was a part, thus his calling to speak with Roger Beirfoust, Regional Mgr., thus his hit-one status and elevated-import system augment driving up the file rate of another twelve accounts he (Lamron) will be quota-responsible for at the end of this month due to something like an algorithm’s being sent haywire somewhere in the System, which IT will be responsible for, although Blaze and Skunk have yet to respond to any of Lamron’s four emails to both of them respectively. So but then the necessary voids are being filled with the ink of the Rollermaster XGH .07 gripped inhand, right hand, with the index finger bowed preaxially so as to ensure a firm written steez. “Acct. Revisionary Delay (in lunar cycles)”; “Genesis-File’s conception mode”; “BVWX Form initiated? (Y/N)”; “If No, refer to K12 Article 41 Table 6 concerning the necessary modification variable for Accts. not verging wonted xericness in relation to their GF’s conception mode.” The K12 Articles of Reference is stapled as photocopy to the K12 Acct.’s gray subsheath, which itself contains the necessary data to be mined. Initial Filer reads: Mombani Shuut-Bac. The name is familiar. Alien light wafts down from the green discosphere[i] above, which for whatever reason was installed by Roger last winter, when Xenobruh Doclar, the albino feather-haired Cueballian, began working in the mailroom. The K12 AoR is damp for whatever reason, sodden from what smells to be perspiration, thorough perspiration, as of the likes of one having a glandular deficiency. More to the point, the articles themselves are a blur; the ink is smudged, from the sweat. This puts a sort of chink in things. He will have to find a K12 AoR from another file, which is impossible, as bald Korey and the Temp Boys have been refiling the entire Cabinet Room and making a real semantic mess of things. All Prime-File AoRs are being recalled and supplanted by a laminated pamphlet which is going to be installed next quarter, is the word, due to the ruined state of most of these oft-consulted AoR booklets. The green lighting makes it difficult to read. His eyes are bulging over dark bags, half-there. Someone on the phone in the near-empty call center is talking about Blue Chip Properties’ investments with a shiny diamond… named?... Gloriously! Sunshine Estates, located in… East Tremscen… on the peninsula. There is the urge to at once melt away from it all and yet blaze as one great fire, taking it all down. You get the sense this is what they want you to feel: numbness, the everpresent state of things, waste. The numbers come in in torrents, on receipt paper in long strips of digitized computer programming and abbreviated paper-cup-business-conversative argot—sometimes scrolls, sometimes long iterations of strips clipped into sections so as to fit flatly into the file sheath’s folder with the aid of a single horizontal staple.—black symbolic combinations living-dead on the thin white plane; they are unbreathing unthinking variable vampires: numbers: infinitesimals: words: the stubby penis drawn in graphite around a Client Estimated Ordering Capacity matrix, bracketed off in islands of columns of numbers across the receipt paper’s bottom. These vampires are essentially useless, now, the radix changed, shifted, throttled into oblivion by the stiff hands of Kory and Nosebleed and Bowlcut and Shivery, is the thing. He now has the townies doing his calls for him, acting as, for examplur, “Tweedy Tittybanks, assistant to previous-telephonic-op’rator-but-now-file-‘rrangement-specialist Korey A. Lamhart uv Tremscen, CO.” or “Quan Zeel Go-Fuck-Yourself, assistant to Korey L., of JEPCC Trems’n, CO. branch, which also if you need some mega-loud weed I’ve got a friend in SouthTown who can get you an ounce for $215.00 USD…” etc., all of which individual Acct.-Assurance-Mode-oriented calls are audible throughout the annex. It is during these small pockets of irritable bliss that Lamron sort of zones out, as they say, hands formless reaching out through the space before him over desk where air is cool and odorous Italia-espresso gas pungent and the rift opens up, facing him, overflowing premined data vessels pouring out the deluge he feels only he can see, right now: a causation tree for… Kyler Holler-Stein’s death: {(1) The unspeakable GOLDEN-TREE MEMO #4 [currently in Phillip’s possession]; (2) The death of Leembill Treitre, a Gridle-&-Son’s cost accountant whose body was found a block away from the Mills & Potbelly Bdlg. in a rainsoaked alley two nights prior—unrelated(?); (3) Easter Johnny’s phone call to either Roger or Roger’s nephew, Dennis (it isn’t clear which), which has been recorded on a tape L keeps in a shoebox under his bed; (4) The jimmied lock on Lamron’s desk’s top drawer which at one time stored his Corporate Jumptexts—no leads on the dexterous thief, and of company property no less.} The rift’s wind courses freely along Lamron’s face, blowing back his dirtyblonde hair. No one seems to notice it; the majority of JEPCC employees are on lunch break so as to avoid the oncoming paper-rush. The office is feeling slack in toto; Roger has decreed it a Catch-Up Day, all time interoffice ordinanced for overloaded acct. files and Corp.-mandated homologous-account reform, an enfilade of unabated paperwork. The slow-turning saw of sun as seen through one annex window’s set of angled blinds (105˚ clockwise off the vertical axis of the blinds’ parallel string-linkage) comes in as what appear to be striated gradient-bright parallelograms of sol—pale orange slips of light ondesk spread white-black with de-spined paperwork in the green tint. Lamron is sitting quietly, breathing, opening blue eyes to get back to doing the thing—the bulk—a particularly harried VH66 looking up at him from the to-do stack of Monthly-Quota files, almost reaching, spotted with vaguely sensual smiley-face stickers, a clear sign of Stacey, and loaded with rough-edged paperwork which itself seems to contain and subcontain a series of subK7s, etc. These will most likely never be red-scratched or approved, is what it seems like. It shrieks at him silently, stilly, from beneath the salt-infused K12 AoR, awaiting completion. This as the pain of a wobbly agnail under pressure of its adjacenting digit stings and recedes, the kind of sore atavistic pain he recalls from early childhood, back before his father sat him down with a pair of nail clippers to teach him proper precautionary nail-cutting procedure and the what’s-what of nail-/cuticle-grooming, of preparing the perfect nail soak (: water-, lemon-, orange-juice-, baking-soda-, garlic-clove-subfused, a totally pungent and acerbic formula for one’s nails’ better health.) and filing away the sharp edges of the protrusive digital talons, “talons” being what Paw would call them, the younger self’s nails, before his disappearance and reappearance, after which he would say nothing and lounge about on couch in the aurally vacant home, alone, watching TV specials all day until the expanding contusions along his lower back were too painful to bear sitting on any longer, at which point he’d lay himself down on the floor supine and guzzle the remaining vodka in its large frozen glass bottle. Every now and again the West wall’s androgynous face will spout a half-intelligible axiom and vomit blue into the sterilized-plastic wide-bodied bucket beneath its chin; the townies have sent it into a puking fit. Stacey Milktooth is audibly slurping pink yogurt at her desk near the annex’s fore, speaking with Vitti in mutable chattertalk. Phillip’s frogform JumpText leaps around the office, evasive programming for whatever reason glitched-out and thus rabidly quick, lissome, balletic in its evasion is the consensus, ribbeting robotically and reading in holographic stencil-lettering above lumpy back’s membranous projector MESSAGE OF GREAT URGENCE—LOP IBLANCA, DARKVALE, CO. JEPCC BRANCH. It has been five weeks, and still Phillip cannot catch the JT; it has become a running joke around the office, that Phillip has been promoted to the status of Regional Mgr. at a city-neighboring branch, a position he will never fill as the JT has yet to be caught, and who knows how much an effective bonus-blessing it would’ve been for Phillip to have gotten the position while he could, to be free of the shackles of lower-level employment, of filing and sore-eyed nights spent before the livingspace’s HD monitor smoking granulized pot trying to work out in his head the best reactionary route to take in facing a super-busted Rusted Nannie (: Which is best: to head straight for red felt-marker?; to pop out a fresh Twiddle?; to give up entirely and just read the whole damn wall of unscalable text?). The frog ribbits, sitting, taunting Phillip in the middle aisle of the Annex’s partially furnished lounge section, eyeing the man for whom his digitally inscribed holographic message is meant, who (Phillip) is sleeping open-eyed in his cubicle, hand propped beneath chin, a fragile tower of carefully reposed contingent body postures. Fallible data-rep. Stuporous “Stupor” Seaweedson trudges in from the telephonic center wearing a muslin cone-tie, whistling a tune nobody thinks really derives from anything other than his mood, which now after working together for a solid six quarters Lamron has learned to recognize them, the tunes, this one in particular being: the Jolly tune: high-pitched piercing whistles emulating stuttering trumpet blasts, used as a sort of good-natured entrance ditty or what have you whenever he’s entering a new interoffice section. Stupor has a thing for Stacey, it is clear. Lamron pretends not to notice his slinking in to converse with Stacey and Vitti, who it’s apparent don’t really require the company of a third person in their private chatspeak right now, which now their voices’ timbres have returned from falsetto whisper to a loud deadpanned pseudo-exclamatory “Hi, Stupor” in unison as the guy’s face lights up several thousand kilowatts before their eyes. “Hiya, ladies. How’s the day been?” “Good,” Vitti says; Stacey is occupying herself with the plastic yogurt cup, which is already empty but which she is pretending to still be consuming with her spoon, denecessitating the social compulsion for friendly banter Stupor has afforded them in explicitly walking up. Stupor scratches his head in a flattered way, mock-stretching, bending an imaginary crowbar behind his head while Stacey looks to Vitti who looks to Stacey, back to Stupor, down to her specially prepared Indian bouillon. They make two-dimensional conversation, Vitti and Stupor. He is trying to make eye-contact with Stacey, who is all but licking the plastic yogurt-cup clean with a thoroughly pink tongue, which is her next-step-in-consideration as of right now under his woeful glare. He has erupted subject-matter-wise into a discursive braggadocio’s sonnet concerning a child he once saved from vehicular collision while at the same time tending medically to a wounded puppy he found on the side of the road, which goes largely unheard by everyone most proximal to him. ¶ Yes, he says, I am doing well. No one hears or otherwise notices. Out past the dangling stoplights on the streets down below through the windows facing West, out, out there in the violent wind, in the cold burrs, someone is playing innocuously in the snow, throwing snowballs, fashioning a false home in the ice and patches of vast white, spending time. The snowflakes will die on your garments, melt into your socks, weigh down your walking imprinting footsteps so detailed you can see the bottom of your shoes’ brand’s tractive rubberized pattern, knee-high, in the trenches of fine crystalized ice. ¶ Phillip would’ve resorted to his habitual malingering on a day like this—the sort of groggy half-intoned phone-call-initiated malingerer-type trick he’s pulled so many times before in order to stay home and smoke pot—under normal circumstances, though today he’s opted to sleep covertly in his cubicle; he’s even taken the time to half-read a tight C90, mark it up, and leave it unfinished at his desk should Roger or Dennis or anyone remotely managerially related pop in for a question or, worse, light conversation. His dreams are vivified whirlpools of sweat while he’s dreaming them, which after he awakes he’s too sweaty and visually slopped to even partially repair the nebulous plot of it or whatever, plot not really mattering, his holding onto particular dream scenes which float up into his conscious memory something like what a clinical psychologist would call “a most definite psychic motive to access repressed emotion” or something along those lines, he figures. Here now in his chair, propped, he is faraway battling chimpanzees on a tall rock face with a rotisserie chicken; he is making love to the goddess Aphrodite; he is digging a grave for his doppelgänger. By the time he awakens, of course, he will remember none of it, except for the fragments which juncture at arbitrary points along the dreams’ 4D-film-strip cut up and obfuscated somewhere in his mind: a rotisserie chicken inhand before sky’s affronting blue; the soft cadent chit of a shovel’s round-point blade’s cutting edge making way through fecund soil. This is what is left: the office: 1700 hrs. How did we get here? Phillip is putting away his things. Everything is empty, except for maybe the stock men’s-room, which the bilious Eurich Ilethe is known to inhabit the largest stall of, even after-hours most weeknights (well into 2100 hrs.), Phillip used to be able to notice, perpetually working on files which never get done, is the word. None of his business. There is a stain on his polka-dot tie from what looks to be either an Energy-Supplement Beverage or piss. The thing about Phillip’s short-term memory modality is that whenever he forgets something, he forgets that he forgot it—shoves it way back into the distant thrush of his mind’s eye’s purview so as to maintain the illusion that everything is OK when in fact he has no idea what it is. When he exits the annex, he cuts the lights off, leaving the face in total blackness, as is custom. ¶ ⸙ Ssssssss goes the skillet on which runny eggs cook and harden in the solar saw’s beneficent radiation, on which skillet the bacon’s fat-grease melts simmering into a self-preparing flambé Phil and L will ignite with dark liquors. There is no recipe. They are doing the thing with maximal effortlessness, L idly turning slips of pig meat as he watches the Denver Druids game on Phillip’s 60” UltraHFHD televisual set. The Druids are playing the NY Monothoids (42-39 Dever) at the former’s home stadium, in which NBA fans are painted their favored team’s colors—green and gold for NY; purple and black for Denver—some of them shirtless, most of them projecting some kind of food or beverage into their mouths, some screaming loud enough to incite violence in their neighboring spectators regardless of sport-team affiliation, some slow mapless wandering the vertical/horizontal aisles for their seat among tens of thousands of seats in order to continue the screaming laudation which so justifies their appearance in this large overlit air-conditioned room, today. All this evident from a mere few seconds of camera’s steady-panning crowd surveillance. The bacon smells nice—Macroy-Beautiful-brand nice. Phillip is nursing his third PBR Tall Can, somewhat whipped, dizzied in the shade of his patio’s large multicolor umbrella. The cookout is somewhat rare for both of them; it isn’t often they’re not working or smoking dope. The weed hiatus was Phillip’s idea, though L is biting his knuckle inside trying to think of anything but dope. Freshman point guard Zeus Lemongrass of the NY Monothoids is an inertial blur onscreen. This as he takes the ball through complicated dribbles about and around his person, weaving, juking a nearly-as-massive small forward with what looks to have been a reverse pivot, as he performs a layup that is itself at once a long true moment of flight and an instant of barbarian aggression. There is commotion oncourt, after the basket is scored: Denver’s starting center Hermon Bweed has injured his nose from what the referees have determined to be a blocking foul. The static crowd boos and throws popcorn oncourt at the medically attended Bweed, who cries himself a saltwater trail in route to the Gatorade dispenser, then through the East locker-room entrance offcourt. A somnolent newscaster says “Gee, Todd. It seems like everyone hates Hermon Bweed tonight.” / “He’s a real dick, Jack. Fucked my wife.” ¶ ⸙ ⸚ The first three sets rang off at night in the streetlight as Cinderella Von Blue-Berd stalked candent homelessly erected rustedyellowbrowngreen barrels of hearth-fire blazing walking down the street in a tight huddle with gorilla-hirsute legs, plodding, setting a tone, she would follow and follow street after street to discover the origins of. And not a single moonshattered flakelit speck of glass could ruin the ruinous moment as it fell from streetlamp overhead and shattered vacantly upon the lot. Bad omens often come in the form of Uckle-Buckle-Beanstock, those redundant symbols and objects which evade attention through the mere higher value of the other objects and symbols surrounding them. This all well and good for a moment, as the flaming barrels trek aloof to their stalker until, somewhere in the sidewalk’s gittered diamondchalk rough or crag in a line from a nearby alleyway so dark and tomblike it seems veiled by a black curtain passes into view a hammerhead slug, oily, long, slinky in modal slither, oddly fast and lissome and vaguely reptilian in terms of simple brain-input to –output to -effect. And then another. And then another. And before she notices it she’s stepped on one. The squirt, a violent wriggling catarrhal death on the dark stone, bioluminescent-green plasma spurting out of its membranous tube form, to Cindy’s horror. Her face in the darkness is a crystalized white powder openmouthed -eyed fully agawk at the shining plasma on her shoe and the still-alive wriggling entity below and the two others flanking her foot. At first it is a step back; the hammerhead slugs persist, resulting in a brisk walk. They continue to follow at equal speed. Cindy is now perspiring heavily as the thrush and shoosh of her deepest nightmares stalk her at speed, those slime-trailing monstrous creatures, mementos of the Dark. The walk accelerates to a full-out sprint, inheels, wind-splayed frozen struts of sprint’s stride extravagantly overperformed and stunt-double inspired. The song of an asphyxiated schoolgirl plays hypnotically on a stereo on the kitchen table of the dollhouse in her headspace: Come with me, come with me / to the place where no one stays / to the harps that rust and twang / to the darkest alleyways… Camera’s steady pan leaves her suddenly as she falls and suffers an instant compound fracture which bone there blood-spurting soaking leg jutting through fishnets will not seem to stop spurting even as the two slimy slithering Shadows approach. “The scream plays heavily on and on and on in the recording on the table before us. Do you hear it still? Yes? I’ve stopped the recording a whole two minutes ago. It never stops. Even when you leave the room and walk out into that sterile hallway and get out of here into yer car and drive home through sunexposed roads and lie down in bed and sleep. It never stops. You hear it in your dreams every night, and the second you realize you can’t hear it anymore, that’s when it’ll start again.” Someone has fractured the story’s primary line. But who? All suspects have been cross-examined, but none can speak. They clutch their privates, which were removed for… case file doesn’t say. Five of them. Utter bums. Wild men. Dying in cages now castrated with no history in any paper/digital form or words to communicate whatever is going on inside their heads. “Harry says it’s something to do with the symptom.” Somewhere in a darkly veiled alleyway Uranium Fudgecake is recapping a large soil-filled tupperware container inscribed in neonblue marker with Bipallium strubelli, knelt down there between the oilyslick alleywalls. Further on the reel when it clicks to a stop on the amplifier there is a police file beneath the silver gurney holding aloft Cindy’s wan body. Even further along, when it stops, is that same file being held by someone out of frame, being tossed into a raging fireplace after the file’s Routing Number has been focused on, recorded visually. This was sent to us by your previous employers. Do you not know anything? Do you not know anything? Our collective eyeballs bounce on to a later scene. ⸚ ¶ ⸙ Lamron flips a particularly noncompliant slice of pig-meat. The griddle pops and simmers as a boiling oil swamp. There is a general hiss to everything for one moment as of static finally landing its hiccup on the anvil of the inner ear, grass spectacularly green through the dome lenses of the prescription glasses he bought ten weeks ago, HD-visible augments of the refracted light’s magnification revealing even the sunglittering dew on the grass below him, at his feet, when he smells the sensation which draws his eyes from the grass to Phillip: he is rolling a blunt there in the reticulate rubbermesh chair, a ¼ gallon mason jar at his feet overflowing with ganja. The glands below L’s tongue begin salivating at an increased rate. “I’ve been thinking,” Phillip says. L sips the vanillabean Sugur Cola on the grille’s sidetray. “Fuck a tolerance break.” L immediately spews out the SC on full-blast before he can swallow. “No, man. I’m up-there totally serious.” He is licking the blunt now in the shade askew a bit by the sun’s disposition. A crow in a tree far off ca-caws. “I’ve fallen in love with you,” L jests. “I spent my entire paycheck on weed, Lam. No shit. Plus Stacey chipped in a bit; some of this is for her. I can loan you a few Gs if you want.” / “Are you kidding?” / “Yeah and this right here is nothing to play around with, believe me.” / “Where’d you get it?” / “That Ford guy.” / “The one with the bike?” / “Yeah. Exercise freak.” / “Hmm.” Phillip lights the blunt and puffs twice, performing a draconic exhale. L laughs; it is his turn. This greenwrapped doozie of a wannnnnnd all lit and fully embered at the suckage: lips on inhaling end: smoke. It is white going in, white coming out. Phillip shushes a yapping unattended Pomeranian two domicile-segments over on a neighboring patio. GloLand Towers Apts. Juts upward in a square of connected columnlike buildings, all of which are for the most part identical—a pallid cream-vanilla brick barrister lining facades of same with patches of red naked brick where the building’s paint has worn and the omnipresent odor of wet dog everywhere you can imagine—with jutting rusted fire-escapes and a solar garden patch and greenhouse on the NE tower’s roof. L is high off the stuff already, after two hits, and it’s showing in his facial focal pts.: “Got damn you blush like a drunk Popeye when you’re high, L.” L coughs smoke into his fist. The Pomeranian continues yapping through the railing of its bourne designated roamingspace. Seven aliens on the West horizon are staking up a real-estate sign in silhouette-form, moving, angling preaxially astutely with long appendages which sag like dead fruit from their midsections. Cueballians. Phillip fingers the blunt like a deft card-dealer. His fingers wrap and pinch and curl and displace ash from a crater of ember which will evaporate into smoke and ash as the reel winds on. It is lit for now is all he knows. It seems as if from everywhere a stimulus is twanged into resonation, all around, in the colors of the grass and the smell of the blunt and the wind on his face as his hair flaps flaglike behind his skull. (ssc[ii]) He can feel the weight of his cheekbones and the skin wrapping them tightly; he can feel the jazz from Phillip’s livingroom booming chopping through the walls in his fingers now splayed around the blunt. The dilatory frost of smoke in lungs filled to capacity hits the head like a tiny ballpeen hammer, and all the glass shattering out of an extended field of view falls silently into the dewcaked summer earth, gleaming, yellow light in green floral bedding, and the breath of white slick smoke—initially just a single inhale, then a second, then a fourth, then a seventh until…—spun into his capillaries’ ramose bloodstreams, like an inner wolf fighting to get out, void, exasperated, starved of the mango-juice of life, creeping through the boards and planks of the hardwood floor you are walking on to get to Phillip’s bathroom, barefoot, somehow shirtless (is it really that hot? Was it too hot?), booming bicephalic dialogues playing out incontinently in the innards of your mind’s wasteful unclosing eye; there will be the half-moaning scream and visible shattered glass scree powdering up at our film’s lens’s borders like ice flakes in a snow storm, where piercing horn of something like music plays in slow-motion, at the falling of it all, while the eggs burn in a scorching black sun Phil has learned to guise deftly in the smell of ganja prima such that there is enough smoke that not even the black sun of pan is visible; and soon there will be fireworks in the waking sunsinking sky, where purple cloudbellies radiate pink- and golden-hues, the effervescent blastoff and grand explosion of a green fizzing firework projectile shaping the digital Peace Sign with space-filled fingers in the soft waining light; and eventually, when they have both laid out on the porch to watch the official show, one of which show’s segments consists of three different primary-colored firework projectiles bending through the air to blast into the shimmery bubble-molded words: Booreblonk & Swillthwattle Prime Realty Group: Tremscen, CO, layering themselves in various strata, darkening points of light fading in descent such that the blue and red and yellow are all stacked in rows and the wan scar of sun’s last drop of freshlight dies curling inward to itself as the space about it is displaced into another momentum—the lack of brightly smiling angels in the sky: the presence of fire-effulgent demons; serpentine-lipped ghouls; junkie-hungry corpse goblins; trout: the smell of lilac in the saltwindy air ebbing back in from the AC’d hovel of couch and bong turned opaque with the brown-yellow smog of ganja smoke, resolute on the glass counter beside an unlabeled orange pill bottle (It had become well-known between the two that Phil was on a benzo binge, thoroughly lost, really just slapped silly by the syrupy capsular shit; he is partially recovering from the long empty sleep within skull which ends in his waking to the image of a large monstrous multiferous moth openwinged flying into the mouth of a black antlered creature with silver eyes and a dark crotchless ectomorphic figure’s midsection, legs all the way up to its asshole—they will be all too far-gone to do anything but lie there in reticulate rubbermesh blue-green as the ‘works die out, eventually, such that, when the vision fades and he can see sky clearly again, he will forget it entirely: the bong’s bowl is lit and smoking and pluming white fog into an ice-filled shaft as he milks it for every last drop of non-butane inhalation as the bowl was wick-lit, flamed into transcendent candent-red brightness at the diaphragm’s hiccupish retroflexure; the Cueballians are gone now, and night is upon the visible world: Phil flips open an zippo which features moving surveying eyeball and whole flammable yellow powder which thus erupts the flame into new heights as the cig [read as: “square.”] between his plosive lips enters the flame and lights and the zippo is closed with a clink, flame gone like that, nothing there but cool air as he passes to L the Kamel Viridian 100 after a couple slow exhalant puffs into the starry subterfuge way up above at a mesospheric distance of proportional clearness—green-red mothblood plasmic-viscous dripping from its lips from which vampiric fangs protrude and draw open the darkened maw as a portcullis into the depths of the throat) L will not ask about or otherwise mention to anyone; Phil’s off on some stoned tangent concerning the venerable “plot-of-spirtual/-psychic-land-way-down-inside-to-the-symbolic-soul’s-bedrock-depthless-limbo”-conversative theoretical discussion they had conversed about to no evident conclusion for the past four times they’ve smoked together, each time the theory’s interpolation getting somehow more convolved and baroque in its handle on Lamron’s fragile little spinal column, on a psychic level: which it went: that just about every sentient able to communicate his or her feelings and/or vivid real-life experience via language has his or her own inner plot of “psychic land” or what have you; that they, the humanz, have on this plot of land assembled all their most valuable idols, furnished with Karma their own mind’s inner voice’s second-self affords itself for the cost of total conscious awareness of one’s plot and that plot’s effect on the palpable realm, problem arising being: L knowns—he knows that he knows—that his own plot is utterly void, rendered a dark vacant lot of deadyellowed grass which cuts bare feet like razorwire whenever they (the feet) are exposed to it, and but that so whenever it was that L finally awoke at 0309 hrs. the next morning they had been talking about the whole theoretical thing all night; and it occurred suddenly Phil had disclosed his whole plot’s context and furnishings and symbolic signifiers without even so much as a hiccup below his salient rasp of vocal sonarlike speech, which L rather enjoyed, but which he couldn’t remember the slightest bit of—too brain-weary, demobilized by an ossified gait which makes you look like a really bad stunt-double attempting to imitate like a baby learning to walk for the first time ever, and reaccessed moments later again after the nodding has receded into headwarming cherry-on-top diadematic alertness thanks especially to the caffeine but also the globus-cruciger-flask from which he sips his liquór and coughs phlegm into his fist along with the granulized enchimed ersatz sugar with which his alcoholically spiked coffee has taken on its jarring glucotart malolfactic flavor, which has been poured beyond-limitations into this mug’s porcelain body here—and so resorts to friendly enthused nodding whenever it is Phillip finally says “if you… know what I mean,” to which L really has no idea what’s been said; Phil has the ability to amp up his aloofness all the way to mind-numbing 11, utterly completely unaware, ignorant of whatever reality the vast majority has abetted his participation in, somehow solipsistically self-contained, hermetically isolated from the data flux before and about his person whenever it is he’s high enough to unconsciously light his cigarettes backwards, which L often has to stop him before he actually flicks the flintwheel; and so as crisp bacon slices rise from their swamp onspatula and drip there in-suspension above the griddle drops of fatty oil which hiss when they land and sizzle and pop, Phil is already rolling another one, licking the ‘gar-wrap with a scarred tongue and adjusting the ratio of weed-to-cigarillo accordingly as the thickening blunt forms or seems to form itself in his hands, independently, filled to max. capacity, pungent, demoisturized by the thin Bic flame he runs along its side, ready for inhalation. (ssc)
[i] The Discosphere™ by Hana Mura Tech. Inc. is a green-light-emanating disco ball essentially, which helps to assimilate Cueballians to earth’s natural and artificial lighting such that they won’t have to wear green shades inside (the cueballians). American workplaces are required to have discospheres installed and regularly attended to and rebulbed by executive order in c. 64: KSASB.
[ii] Superficies solo credit: “The surface yields to the ground.”