The appointment was set for 4:00 PM today. Brizzle came in with a Cup o’ Jo steaming through the mouth hole of its collared paper container’s plastic lid to confabulate with the idle dawdling subjects in their wheelchairs awaiting Dr. Lite’s experimental counsel. Brizzle’s eyebrows were bushy-black, as subject M. Wender would later describe them to subject P. Nine, set at a sort symmetric incline to the forehead’s middle expressive of like the necessary ingredient for an aspect’s disgust or anger due to the resultant facial hypertrophy of what is rumored to have been a botched acupunctural session under the direction of one medical “professional” purportedly described by Brizzle himself as the inept Dr. Who Shan’t Be Named, ergo this feeling the uninitiated get whenever in conversation with B that maybe he’s harried or enraged or both, and that this seems always to affect their understanding of the conversation’s undertones such that a simple “good day” is forcedly sarcastic and a more intricate like “how are you doing?” is an obliquely passive-aggressive way of prepping for a shit-storm he’s going to unleash upon them via physical abuse of some kind, thus the often hurried quality to his and strangers’ conversations mostly truncated by their admission to having to be somewhere or do something in a hurry. Nevertheless but still the strolling Brizzle enters the waiting room and greets the paraplegic subjects, most of whom are by now familiar with the context of the eyebrows, shakes a few of their hands, and proceeds through the back entrance of the front desk at which Mila Sufjan is entering New-Patient Data and preparing to microwave a cup of Nogu-Naga’s Soy-Chicken ramen simultaneously. / “’Lo, Dr. Gooblerdash. Good Morning.” Mila’s left hand is stirring and clasticizing the lumped cube of submerged noodles with a plastic spoon; the right is filling in a line on an NPD form with deft cursive: it is rumored she is ambidextrous. / “Morning, Mila.” Brizzle sets down his coffee to pull a ring of keys from his pocket with which he unlocks and opens a file drawer labeled Dr. Gooblerdash PhD all in one motion. He finger-walks along the file series until they (the fingers) reach the New-Patient Query tab at which the fingers split and open the tab’s folder that he can lean forward and peer in at a single white envelope. There is no label on the envelope. He takes it, closes and locks the metallic drawer, and exits the front desk’s opposite side’s door with coffee inhand to enter the hall of offices to enter his own whose mahogany door’s golden-lettered plaque reads Dr. B. Gooblerdash PhD: Literary Affairs. There is the chilled quiet of the muted outer-office as he closes the door behind him, breathes in solemn air, places coffee and unlabeled envelope onto his desk in their own unique quadrants, and reclines into his wheely leather armchair. Much time spent parsing the sun through the window’s blinds’ striated plane. The owl clock on the wall behind him coos at the hour mark: 1:00 PM.
.x.
How to begin. The annex’s large deficient copier makes digital burps and scansound as its perforated scroll churns out slowly. Outside, eleven floors down, on the Surface, a blank-faced young man approaches the turning doors of the Mills & Potbelly bldg., adjusting his tie and checking his breath with a cupped palm. The clouds are low, swollen-gray, and emit a light rain he is sure to avoid with the aid of a newspaper held overhead until he is finally inside. He throws the soggy organ into a nearby receptacle as he enters. The building’s lobby is largely minimal, with a marble floor of white and gray that seems to expand onward for its floor’s entirety and a long central elliptical desk at which four women in blue pantsuits are answering calls and relaying them to their necessary floors, supposedly. Behind this desk a large analog clock displays the time. Time will pass through him: the time in the elevator, which is faster than expected; the time spent walking up to the eleventh floor’s clerk, whose nametag he won’t remember but whose face he will: a custard-yellow face, her lips painted beige whose emanating voice portrays a kind if reserved personage; the time finding his way as directed to the office doors of the Jubal Early Paper Cup Corp.’s Tremscen, CO branch; the time preparing to open said doors during which he watches his hand reach for the silver knob; the time speaking with the receptionist named Hilda about his supposed metriculative interview with one R. Beirfoust, Sr. District Mgr.; the time waiting in the near-empty reception area, which is lit by six standing lamps all of the same make/model, during which he more like observes than reads the pages of a lush issue of some business-diagnostic-type magazine he assumes he’d be thought well of being seen reading in this context; the time this rather flimsy-seeming Sr. Mgr. spends walking over to him, half of which (time) he pretends to be too engrossed to afford himself the peripheral awareness of this man’s presence, until…; the time they spend shaking hands and introducing each other to themselves; the time during which he is brought into and through what is presented to him as the Call-Room area, where numerous employees in attire not dissimilar to his are cradling phones with their shoulders and jowls, speaking into the phones’ plastic transmitters as they go about their paperwork with multiple colors of pen, and finally into the office of this Mr. Beirfoust who in the privacy of the small windowed room opines he’d rather just be referred to as Roger if he (the blank-faced young man) doesn’t mind; the time of the few seconds this young man with the blank face spends formulating an appropriate response which occurs as “Nice to formally meet you, Roger. I’m Lamron Cinevax.”
.x.
The segment for which all our readers have gone the alleged goo-ga and sidewise-sane is the one wherein our dear Alucard appoints himself with the necessary materials for a mind-body transfer with his sleetheart Deidre Antlerst, who apparently (it is revealed in later chapters) doesn’t survive the spiritual exegesis; her soul’s integrity is entirely diminished. The sign and ever-waking indication of our reader’s sidewise-sanity is the reported presence of what they’ve referred to as the floating heads, that our counterpart spirits have assumed a floating effigial form visible only to the readers of this particular segment, loyally trailing and accompanying the viewers of the manuscript’s words on whatever nonjourney it is their red strings have led them. It is supposedly notable that the number of heads is not strict or as-it-were set in stone, but that this variable exists as a respective demarcation of the allure these respective readers have for the heads themselves. Some readers will only ever have a single floating head, for example. Seia Lagoontongue, for instance, now has six.
.x.
The dragoons in their hollowed caves have horded competing accruals of gold and rich treasure for to make known their dominance within the dragoon salary world known. A bristle-backed green dragoon known only as Bedrock has even within his dank Danish cave an entire pirate ship purloined from the days of yore he uses as a vault, equipped with intricate booby traps and means of capturing any poor heroic souls that might venture inward…
.x.
L drives at high speed through the night. His corolla’s insulated air is suffused with the smoke of the pearled blunt between his lips. The road’s yellow onrush of lane demarcation resembles to him lines with instruction to cut here. All he can think of are the lines, car’s headlights as the twin blades of scissors made to cut through the night’s long pitch-dark. He plays through an imaginary conversation he might be having with Phillip, if he were here in the car, with him. The talking goes like it used to go, with Phil making the usual idle similes L finds so substantive.
“My brain’s buzzing like…”
“Like a bee?”
“Like a bee.”
“Does that.”
“So much lately man. It’s been like some kind of experimental film.”
“In what way?”
“In that like if it were this particular kind…—”
“Of film.”
“Of film, this kind where the director or what you like calling them the ‘auteur’ or whatever were to be interested in like camera movement, like the camera’s position in relation to the subject matter or something—”
“Mm.”
“And like if that were the case in this totally experimental film I’d imagine this particular scene where the camera’s filming like a bee on a flower, you know, doing its thing—”
“Like pollenating.”
“Like pollenating, then like when the bee takes off or whatever the camera follows but like buzzes, like begins shaking, moving, shaking all fast up-and-down as like an imitation of the bee’s wings or something,”
“Is like…”
“Is like what it feels like. Like that sort of experimental-type buzzz, y’know?”
This sad song on the low-volume radio begins playing now, after the ecstatic adverts, and so (playing) the melody over which a soft female voice croons becomes louder as he turns the leftmost knob on the dashboard’s glowing interface clockwise, as he in the smoke-filled car puffs rings that obscure the road he is cutting through, woman’s voice falling and rising in tandem with the melody so loud now he feels it piping through his chest. He feels the individual nerve-bundle-traduction, the brief spasms of intermuscular warmth which radiate in syncopation with the stereo’s bass’s rhythm, which shakes the car slightly each vocal peak. (Louie L’amore / Give me the score / I got a handful / The doc’s in the moor // I made me a cocktail to give me summore / and the salt was a bit overbearing // So Louie was loosing his handles / His hair was so littered with brambles // I think of it well / that you couldn’t tell / of pitiful Louie L’amore.) and as well the brief manic breaths of the crooner onradio incar at once arrest him the way seeing a beautiful fragile maltese pup waddle along at the end of a leash would arrest him, that pure sudden flash of light synesthetically warm and pleasing—the freshness of an animal soul. He and Phil (if Phil were here) would be maybe practicing through possible scenarios involving their being stopped by a Pol. O., the possible ways through which they would divert the officer from suspicions they were on anything, going even more extraneously through possible subscenarios involving them perhaps convinving the hypothetical officer at hand that perhaps he was maybe himself—on something. Maybe more as a kind of joke. Phil would always play the Pol. O. himself with for whatever reason a particularly po-dunk southern accent qua the courtroom judge from My Cousin Vinny, a film they often quoted. The past images and thoughts flooding his head in this moment atwheel incar in a cloud of Ganja smoke passes almost too slow for the road’s cut-here line’s own good: he with pearled wand in lips making a whole mess of the cerebral snowball forming inhead while still regulating foot pressure on the gas pedal. He sees things. He sees almost protovisually in the amphitheater of his thoughts’ capsular bubbles large red advertorial retail signs being erected on a grassy hill under sun by Cueballian workers in orange vests. He sees Teego the Fish scrambling on an acid trip for the remote control he will never find to lower the volume of the Television’s voices to more clearly differentiate between them and the ones inside his head. He sees a rubber-banded watermelon burst on the monitor of Jackson Ofolatica’s computer. He sees Stacey crying in her Woltsvagen bug, the rain coming down on her windshield. All this and more in his head jogging on like a light runner whose BMI does not correspond to his or her effortful regimen. He sees the protracted halation of streetlight passing over the glass windows of his car, from multiple angles, and sighs his last little bit of PureJoy from the Back Woods smoking in his hand now, in-motion-at-rest, emitting the cloud. Phil would undoubtedly at this juncture have rolled down the passenger window to stick his head out into the undulant airspeed of Lam’s high RPM to make an echoic yawp with the pale bricks passing as a blur behind him to sort of in some way sanctify and/or christen the road-trip experience. He (L) imagines orally the probable things he would say to him (Phil), like: “You silly goose.” / “Let’s stop by an Arby’s someplace.” / and “Come on man, get your head out your ass.”