I set forth the surfeit of malcontent pricks who’ve with sun-blistered shoulders sat down at office desks on an obscure Florida beach to transcribe the speaker’s thoughts on old manual typewriters they take out of sleek black dust-covers while wearing only bathing boxers and ties of varying floral pattern and color. These few brave shoulder-blistered pricks who’ve taken it upon themselves to accept the duties necessary to transcribe the speaker’s words. So his words, then. The speaker’s. They come through the earpieces the pricks wear as they type, straight from an analog-to-digital audio converter plugged into a tape deck which plays the speaker’s tapes he’s pre-recorded on vintage celluloid for the men to transcribe. Thing or whatever being that basically what’s really going on about the multiple pricks is that really this whole time he (the speaker) has been using a voice-modulator to slur his words that the transcribing pricks can each fish out only whatever it is their respective ears’ heads’ minds can interpret from the slur-spree, which is itself not unreminiscent of the mumble-rap hip-hop collective Drum Throat’s lead-singer Cory Benz’s iterative mumbly deep-voiced crooning as of the choruses he (Mr. Benz) produced in the early 2010s. Thus the variation not only in ties’ floral pattern but also the actual transcriptions of the pricks themselves. We have no way of knowing what the unmodulated Voice-Recordings might’ve sounded like, nor any reason to believe that the speaker made any of it intelligible to begin with. Only the pricks can listen; only the pricks can determine what is truly being said. Thus far it seems that their popular interpersonal opinions have lead us to believe the speaker is duly harried. And that is all that has been told to us. When the channel changes and the prolonged jukebox switches gears, all our somnolent hearts wake up with a terrifying start.
Abstract Wall Excerpt X
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.”
Excerpt from the Thing which Grew
The Dresser is pulled at an angle, ajar between the wall and door through which Mary is entering with a silver tray of fruit kababs. HALT! Castillo’s mind is racing like at the speed of what he imagines is described by a fig tree in time-laps: the brown-furred syconia glistening wet at the eyes of the stalked scale-membranes, all blooming milk. Several feet in front of him: Mary, with that specious grin—lavender labium caked in cherry by tons of what Donald would no doubt describe as quote an enormatively large metal case of facial applications unquote (i.e. like for instance an excess of something like upward of sixty-two different sizes and styles of unique and specifically designated brushes, each bought from some reputedly facially superior cosmetic entity, or organization [neither of which is clear as of the time being as Mary’s social life hasn’t exactly arisen from the murk of her boyfriend Chad’s recent suicide.], tethered to an individual set of powdered clam-shell wells of cream foundation and slight bronze and rose blush which blooms sheetlike across the segments of sectioned toner applied to her cheeks, which without said applications are white as freshly fallen snow.)—is doing a petit waltz, juggling her heels from side-to-side and swaying her hips rhythmically as if to describe the radial movement necessary to keep midsection an invisible hula-hoop: this thing she often does, this petit waltz, which so engenders the connection he feels the both of them have, a type of memento significant to the abstract relationship they have formed together and constituted with time and the intricate little whereabouts of their cohesive unitary whole: two nights of sleeping and brandy-sipping and televisual snow aboard a burning cruise ship; the time Rictor Bastion stole Mary’s psychotropic medication under the impression they were capsules of the benzo variety, and so then Castillo had to beat the crummy goon’s map to a pulp in order to retrieve the non-benzos and return them to her on her and Chad’s apartment’s balcony, which he climbed so as not to stir their landlord’s premises’ sleeping guard dogs; Chad’s funeral, during which Chad’s casket rose high above the platform designed to plant it six feet underground, where everyone began looking up in awe as their dearly remembered friend’s sleek black coffin ascended into the mouth of a spinning blue-green UFO which the US government’s CIA has yet to comment on. Beautiful moment, that one. Castillo remembers Mary was the only one crying. So then but here she is, now, proffering her silver platter, entreating him to a “fruit-skewer.” / “My lady,” he indulges: [chomp:] off with a slice of pineapple and watermelon, which he can feel the juice of seeping through lips’ edges, down his chin. / Mary giggles: “And the dresser? Why is the dresser pulled like that? Nearly knocked into it.” / “Oh.” Castillo pops his knuckles. “Been working on a little project.” Thum-thum, thum-thum. HALT! Was it Peterson in High-Class Documents whose invoice, concerning a sneaking suspicion the Agency wasn’t going to let the whole Situation go, remained on his phone? Or was it Carlyle? The broad flannel-checked tie of Peterson’s weekly Agent ensemble ostensibly has what the big goofs in Dept. 9 are calling a Micro Camera. Really churning the old mental stew. Mary is curious, in these few seconds, he can tell—the eyes, which glow green whenever it is she has a cat-killing level of curiosity wafting about her head like an invisible halo, reveal in glowing all too much. ⁋ And then there is the envelope within the dresser’s lowest drawer, under layers of paired socks rolled so as to consume each other, which, when the envelope itself is opened, he knows all too well will release the inward eye to its own vacant silver-screen room, where it can watch amid the dark emptiness of unattended seats all things unfold from overhead. McDaniels would have him refer to the experience as a nonexistent one, which is to say that he’d rather Castillo didn’t refer to the experience at all. Fine crystalized milk pooling out over the hirsute scale-membrane. Not now, he tells himself: Kick it into third gear, man! She’s watching. She knows something is wrong. By the time he swallows the two fruit morsels, all of this has just passed through his mind in tangent vectors all too interconnected and wound to be pulled apart and distinguished from one another and dissected for data concerning these individual parts. It is all one gray smear. Just so, with little heads-up, Maxine Duntlerst rings the rotary phone in the kitchen downstairs. Mary knows it is Maxine; she has been notified Maxine would call. There is a fleeting moment between them, before she turns with her platter of fruit-skewers and exits down the stairs to pick up the rotary’s handset and end the trill of its hellish bell, which seems to last for a longer time than it is: Mary’s cream face, a bit curious. She is not fooled for a second. Castillo closes the door, when she leaves, in order to configure the radial sonar device he’s been commissioned by Gordon and the higher-ups. He does this to listen in on the frogs outside, which are possibly Animatronic Soviet Bugs according to G and the higher-ups, although Mary and Maxine’s conversation does seep through whenever his drunken hand slips idly Southward along the house’s interior: “Oh, you’re bringing Simon, yes?” / “Why of course, dear.” / “You and he are doing well?” / “Better than ever, dear.” / “Oh?” / “Why, dear, don’t you know? Simon’s been promoted to Head of Subsequence Cryptography. They’ve given him an office.” / “Well I’ll be shaken loose of all the change in my pockets, that is fantastic, Maxine!” / “Yes dear, yes…” until the sound of their telephonic chit-chat is overshadowed by a baritone ribbet… hands adjusting now, preparing an audio vector for the garden and outlying trees. Another and another: ribbet, ribbet. But are they robotic at all? Is the audio itself canned-sounding? Would you put it past them to be watching? Recording? What on earth was he meant to be looking for, exactly?... Wiping fruit juice away from his chin, idly, trying to think, until: there is a shadow walking past, up the street, along the sidewalk. It is bulky, substantial, yet foglike the way it moves smoothly without footstep. Readjusting the radial sonar’s audio vector, getting in full the man or woman, whomever it may be, walking closer to the edge of the street along which Castillo’s room overlooks and surveys, in darkness, through telescopic lens. Sure enough there is a voice, breathing. It breathes hoarsely, in the cold, under several layers of white cigar-smoke which dissipate through stagnant clouds of brightening gray, in the oncoming streetlight, toward the corner above which their home is structurally situated. ⁋ Up to a certain point, one eyeball and set of ears can only do so much. It is indistinguishable, the thing, clad in dark trench coat and fur-padded Ushanka and somehow yet waning in the street’s vacant moon-paled silver seeming to be wearing a kind of flesh-tone mask whose mouth is badly askew at the right jaw, in a pink circled lips’ O through which the man or woman is smoking a Baroque cigar, label and all, green-scaled dragon snarling, visible through the telescopic lens’s third magnification mode. Crisp and jaunt walks usually occur along this street, nothing of the sort this stranger is putting up. Its gait is frightened, suspended on wobbly heels as of the orange embryonic eyes of egg yolks. Look away quick as the flesh-masked man peers up at you. You can tell now, from his voice: “What?” he is a man. But that is all you will hear before the lens is dismantled and our here radial sonar is put back in its black foam-padded case at the sound of Mary’s calling up to alert Cas that the candles need to be lit: there is dinner to prepare. How would any conscious thing go about accurately reflecting on their muddled courtship? Their secret rendezvouses? Their lasting partnership, as bunkmates, in this squalid apartmentage? Slowly the narrative would begin to seep out unto a point at which the whole thing from overhead is one simple knot of complex relations and shared experiences. What hurts his head is the idea that the knot is tied by him, or maybe rather his awareness of it, that people can and will confer and communicate and relay data in such a way as to monetize the very use of his time. And furthermore the great silent gash of unwritten programming which dictates the computational rationale of the equator itself, washing widely over silent skin the sound of waves and breaking tides as a bright red scar from where zizzing lightning struck him, as a child, along his right shoulder. The question he remembers at that moment when the lightning struck as if it were yesterday being Why must I feel anything? And he still asks himself the same question from time to time, when it really starts to hurt—his head—and the pressure along his temples boils up to a point of such amplitude that all he can see or feel are dark circles, spatial distortion. He knows it must be the chip. He is not permitted to say anything about the chip to anyone, or to think much about the chip as a means by which to evade a deathly cognitive-loop coma which is redolent these days as the surveying ELF towers surrounding send out Empathy charges and great emotive energies which can in tandem with self-aware cognition cause an agent loaf of the G- to X-class operatives to become a drooling vegetable, w/h/y. Point of course being not to dwell on the lurid chip. A slight suspension to the rules occurs: ...
AWE VI: Typical Nothing (Act 5 Scene 38)
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.”
AWE V: Party to End in Rain (Act 9 Scene 88)
2 July c. Froggy’s Deliciously Snack Waffles [sic.]
Doreen Antlerst sips gracefully on a Bloody Mary (in-tall-perfectly-cylindrical-glass whose rim is topped with lemon and coated in salt) from the balcony overhead some guests’ idle conversations, smoking a short Kamel Viridian, blowing Os of varying near-perfection while Jim Antlerst and Dotty Pride engage in violent coitus on the bed in the room to which the balcony is connected. This is the plan. Things go this way every time they host this party, it seems. She will sip and smoke in silence as the origin-points of conversations of varying intensities reach an echoic terminus somewhere in the convolved middle below. The pool’s body is filled with guests, some topless—Kitti Maud, for instance, topless in F. H. Dreidel’s submerged lap as he makes a real show of trying to fully cup his hands around her boobs, which is impossible. Dempsey and the other two smashed low-brain-wavelength fraternity alumni jump in with a splash, holding two beers each, fully clothed. Wanda Xod is here somewhere, in a bathroom doing who-knows-what with who-knows-whom is the word, wearing a kitten mask. Coke is the big ticket tonight. The extravagantly dressed houseparty’s guests are all webbed up, caught in the in-/outflux of their own kind’s overlapping vectors, in the reception’s motional web, which now it’s apparent the house-party’s locus has shifted to the pool area, at which a fully staffed and attended Pookah bar alcoholizes bloodstreams responsible for the reception’s web’s energy or what-have-you: a fête champêtre of the wildest sort. The white nosecandy gets underhanded in little clear baggies mid-exchange, hands releasing baggy to receive cash between the cumbersome handshakes which doesn’t elude Doreen for a second; she never misses a beat. It had begun to occur to her at the percussive spout of (y = m(x) + Bitchhhh) cum her husband’s scepter’s fountain had erupted that there were also dark birds attending in the trees on the lawn’s great fore. A Rossignol picayune tune swept loosely barbarous over shrouds of people of bodies in the pool’s chlorinated body would crane trees in their eyes with refined snow-white powder such that when the drinking had really begun they were too far gone down the mental ski-slope to realize that the mountain had a cliff. And that tumbling comes in three segments: (a) Dempsey vomits in the pool. This causes somewhat of a commotion. Women are screaming—topless amply-busted-boisterous Kitti sprinting elbows-at-right-angles through water as if she were walking on it. There is a foul moan when Bunfed Cruelgas—clad in the technicolor tie-dye Hawaiian-shirt whose design pattern so thoroughly disturbs the eye to view—rises from the pool, because (b) Demon Whitaker and his little leather-born fiat are leaving without Sherise Flour (a known member of the gang, girlfriend to DW,) who is emotionally distraught and so really downing the tequilas from which little toothpick-umbrellas arise due to something like an argument which took place early on at the party, between Sher and Demon, when Demon accused Sher of being lascivious toward a man she claimed to have accidentally slipped on and someone named Roy T. Zoomout had to break it up and mellow it out because Demon had actually become quite upset, actuating premonitions of adulterous paranoia which subconsciously latched to his inner membranous gooshy burgeoning conscious thought by knocking over a porcelain lamp whose body and bulb shatter visually dark and then blaming the shattered lamp on bystander Cool Breeze, whom it is apparently no fun to look at for too long; there were no more ghouls from which to hide, and so therefore all things prior faded into a kind of milk of light before the eye of the hour in its glass encasement within the silver pocket watch he kept in his black leather-jacket’s pocket at all times suddenly jolts and reopens and fixes its gaze on the rainsoaked clouds darkening above. And Sher would be left on the little in-between point of light: moments to appear publicly with Demon’s boys; moments to be sincere and honest with De; moments to move entirely on one’s own without having to feel—to really feel at all—or be controlled by the joystick of his erect Rectitude (for little-he was so named) whenever it was he wanted to use her as a liquid bag of flesh he could put himself inside without affording her the necessity to consent to anything. She thought: oh, this is love; she thought: oh, what a journey. And the truth was the journey hadn’t even begun. It was the state of the lurid protasis in which her first real lover would leave her downing tequilas in entire gulps at the Antlersts’ pool, to… (c) vomit onto Bunfed’s shoulder as of having tasted the scent and seen the splurge of Dempsey’s projectile sick. So the hourglass is turned over once more on the little glass table on the balcony on which she sat, looking through branches to dark Rossignol[i] ¶ The thoroughly upbraided and hollowed-out Dempsey is sent elsewhere, into the house’s heart. No one is swimming anymore. Relations have, for the most part, died down. Surfboard Vinny is carrying a surfboard over his head; there is no apparent putative explanation for this other than the obvious moniker’s relation. Everyone high-fives him as prompted whenever he walks past. Sélan De La Alal sips a lime daiquiri down below through some lionesque topiary recession in the garden’s unlit path beside the home’s eaves’ descending foliage, watching Doreen watch the people below, making a real private show of her shimmering blue dress, which would morph furiously into avian-form, blue-bird sent into flight at the moon’s sharp spellcraft, should she feel the urge to suddenly arch backward and drop daiquiri glass in shadowed weeds and shrink suddenly and fly upward through dense tree(s) into the pod of some blessed personal-spatial-bubble the transparency of which makes everything viewed from within somehow more purplish in tincture. There would be massive ridges of glasses’ lenses’ bright sphericoyellow light rays reflecting an Extended Field of View to which the viewer is exposed via some river-Styx-type random phenomenon you hear about and experience every once in a great while, where it’s like you’re dead for a moment, effectively, to the world: dead: no luminous passage: on the journey with Death itself, in-boat, listening to the wrinkling water as consequence of Death’s long oar now treading, treading water. There are no more Edens. Her correspondent, one large watermelon-bellied Rossignol named Elyth Spool (with whom she has established a firm network of avian relations spanning the entire North-American West Coast), is beaking a smaller less cognitively present Rossignol on the noggin, overaudible clunk echoing each peck, such that by the time the less significant bird actually comes-to from its virulent nightmarish paralysis—the type for which all sensation are densely numbed—it squawks, preens, looks over to Elyth wide-eyed open-beaked staring, and flies off to another tree at which some more congenially skull-to-body-proportioned Rossignols take turns projectile-shitting into the drinks of the attendees below. Little deforming plips of smoke-ring exit her mouth, enframing Doreen’s own plosive smoke-rings above, in clear view of unclear view, obstructed by smoke. Skeletons within closets of the home’s bedrooms crawl inbed with the fervent lovers sanctifying the space odorously salt-infused and sink into the mattress beside them, four skeletons in total, in four bedrooms of two-to-three-to-four lovers each per bedroom. It is at the exact moment of the first strike of lightning some hundred meters off the trees shudder birdless and flocks of Rossignol ascend blurrily through sudden rainfall and cloudcovered-moon-darkness the whole contingent below becomes suddenly shifty about. A few errant dateless partygoers take shelter beneath Surfboard’s surfboard—something like seven, though some of them scatter to various other islands of cover: beneath the bar’s eaves’ imbricated palm fronds; in the rubber bouncyhouse left over from Gutrimond Antlerst’s ninth birthday-party; through the small wooden door in the larger of the Antlersts’ lawn’s trees’ trunks, which houses a exercised squirrel family mid-scruffle, at the zenith of the bout of its sociofamilial prollems, etc. Dern and Cynthia Blowhole raise Sher’s discarded leather jacket above their heads, shivering beneath it, trying to get into their car. Really good party, he is saying. Really nice to see the Deckles again. Cynthia finally enters the car with a shrug. The two part ways when they step inside together and close their respective doors: a departure from the conversational medium: Cynthia examines her mobile phone and Dern speaks via Bluetooth headset with Owen Hodston of Eco Press about the “market recession” occurring on every level of the real-estate-tangent paper business. Cynthia is communication with Fabio: How are you? / I’m well. / You ready for the bomb tonight? / Give it to me baby. / Oh I’ll give it to you. / Give it give it. / Oh I’ll give it to you. / O yea I wan it. / Oh… I’ll give it to you. ¶ When suddenly the incoherence had reached its climax and Rachel and Numskull and Lamron and Phillip were finished toking their private communal spliff in the screened-in deck’s fuzzy yellowlight, there is the dispersant call to home which dear falling rain invokes in the hearer of drops of accelerating water in the night. There is the totally pancaked buzz-countenanced facial expression Rachel takes on such that her orange braided hair looks like yarn on the zygomatically limited effigy of a facially overblown hand puppet. Numskull repeatedly says “Ya yaa” in response to every immediate question, including those not directed at him. “You all leaving?” / “Yeah.” / “Ya yaa.” / “Oh alright. We’re prolly gonna hit the hay soon anyways, maybe lay out Settlers of Catan or…” / “Ya yaa.” / “… something like that.” / “Heard.” / “Ya yaa.” / “Have a good night, guys.” / “Ya yaa.” / “You too, Lam. Bye, Phil.” / “Bye.” / “Ya yaa.” / “Bye.” ¶ When everyone has for the most part left as of Kitti’s sing-song exclamation that everyone is going to choke on their own vomit and die, the real party begins: Dotty Pride assumes the position as Doreen ashes her cigarette and enters unwet beneath-umbrella from the rain into the pungent bodily-fluid miasma of the pink room that is her and Jim’s laboratory of human-capacity-for-sexual-zenith. It is her turn. Far away, her self’s true soul is bathing in a vast lake on the moon, whose lunar face lights bathingmilk from below such that like ensnared insect she rises graceful- nakedly from its depthless still body. All covered in milk, dark hair radiant sticking wetly to her nape as hands cover face which peeks out boldly and stares through the lens of the page. Far away, through double-helix spirals, Lamron’s spiritual plot is widening and sprouting a small sweat lodge of red Indian fabric as his body undergoes static night terrors and the earth of its limited horizon crinkles up at the far bourn. ¶ ⸙ I can remember very little; I can remember being very little: swirls of ice flakes falling lit from all sides at Anduey Park, with Cinderblock, who would run and fetch things at relative-high speed, through the miniscule frosted mirrors of light dancing rhythmically down and through piles of (dry) snow so high she would be wading through the slush with large skyward white ears serving the same essential function as a shark’s emergent dorsal fin in blackening water. I remember now a very still moment in some arbitrary high school classroom of looking out through the wire-plated window to see the snow once more, except that apparently this was some time after Cindy had died, and but yet to see the snow once more and reconfigure mentally the whole puzzle of which I was a part: through footsteps: the astral eye looking over its sleeping self: nightmares. I can remember very clearly the evening I lay out on the beach in the rain with whomever—someone, a girl—and sank slowly into the sand. I can remember the shush of the tide’s plumed white rush as it crashed over massive rocks some fifty yards out, and the eerie birdcall of no known origin as the shush and the rain and the wind carrying the rain Eastward in great diagonal vectors faded out into some parasite’s composite stomach outside of time, and all that was left was the murmur of her words and the birdcall far off as if over some static thrush in the ear’s bass drum, constant, white-noise. I remember the cool water’s lisping tendrils reaching out via seawater’s ebb and flow to chill my toes there and swim up the backs of my legs and liniment-like soak the motorcycle wound on my right calf before receding again back into the flow. I remember hot-‘n’-heavy intercourse and beach-related privacy problems and running nude from an irate patrolman and the susurrant rustlecoo of the wind and great whorls of Spanish-gray cumulonimbi and farther-off paled rinds of stratocumulus forming sin-waves moving rapidly through the tears in the façade of rainbearing-blurred underbelly-dark. And these patches of nondark I say to myself intermittently which unveil windowlike the moving canyon of gray farther above, up with the quarreling angels, almost seem even to serve the critical function of… [miss?... Miss?...] somehow affording candid lovers that one purest holy moment of Vitamin-D spotlight and salivary masticatory “face-chewing,” whatnot. We did that. We were picking apples in Anduey park, naked as newborns, Adam-and-Evelike sharing fragile moments of deep corneal superintrospection, vicariously, through the eyes of another person whose reflections are you, your own eyes, whose reflections are the eyes of the eyes who are… ¶ I remember they couldn’t find us because we were excellent hiders and we knew every prominent trail of Anduey Park’s backlot, wherein the dark recesses of which Moondog and Slive Flung-Mason would share queer anecdotes while sitting atop stoops and accompanying a warm green-candent trashbarrel fire, and the eminent summoner ghosts joining in too then, as we ran past youthfully, into the conch-versation being had pre-discursus—concerning the nature of plants’ will to “live” before said pre-disc. was brutally usurped by a shitfest of the politicodogmatic mode when one of the stone busts, serving to actuate in-surrogate in surrogate form (palpable: rough: substantial) the communicative presence of the summoner ghosts themselves, breaks in very quickly on Moondog’s plant-perspective musigngs to mention that Right-Wing Spiritual Politician Kwon Leen, Jr. hates plant and the environment in general, which sure-enough sends tapering off the recurring deluge of counter-comments and reverse-counter-comments all the while snarling increasingly (only audibly, of course; the seated stone busts just sit there, molded expressionless, as their enraged exhortations toward the Salvation Perspective[ii] emanate loudly.) and causing the two corporeal bums to retreat back into their Matryoshka-doll-selves’ inner spaces, silent-broad and dried of all moisture, before finally Slive nods off and falls face-first against the flaming barrel’s rim and but then the Shadows sort of move in, unnoticeable at first, always silent, causing alarm: silence, slow and then slower into view: old women in black dresses whose necks are permanently craned downward such that their long locks of black hair sway and obscure their faces as they inch up to the junk shed in which everyone is convened., emerging in dark spots through the windowlight—before a knock is heard at the junk shed’s plywood door and the single bulb illuminating flickers and the busts go silent. Knock knock, a river of wind whistling, and the match Moondog strikes a light a broken lantern. Knock, knock. The six some-odd iterations of what occurred next fell on distracted ears, and so now there are only two: that in which (1) Moondog opens the door and the shadow knocking eats his face, and that in which (2) Slive reanimates drunkenly and casts Dancing Lights with a duct-taped wand and the Shadows disperse. The first iteration is obviously less popular, though most scholars of the context would say it was truest, self-affording contextual factor being of course that Moondog is still a missing person fourteen years hence. I said goodbye to the girl whose name escapes me and walked up cement steps to an overhead subway platform. I rode in a silver tube through cityscapes submerged in bright fog, and when the voice over the intercom said, “There is a storm coming for all of us—for all of us,” I could not then remember where my stop was. “Like a nightmare you cannot awake from.” And the silver tube moved cleanly as all outside visual stimuli swirled past indistinguishable. I remember I sat there for a very long time. When the tube finally slowed to a halt at an isolated platform somewhere overhead, at the instant of the rail’s sharp screech, I would wake up in bed alone, covered in sweat, clutching a blanket whose material wrapping my person was now soaked. The ghastine memories filed subconsciously under synaptic-ordinance headings seem to creep up in codified patterns, seem to afford themselves textually semantic interactions with other files and sub- written in binary on the frontal lobe’s mesh screen. The resulting effect being something like that of cameos appearing between dreams: the creeping tornado spinning closer like a godly top set loose upon the earth; the faceless sentient feeding me a bottle my tiny phalanges can’t seem to posture themselves to hold properly; the patches of drywall behind my childhood bedroom’s peeling green wallpaper revealing insect-life observable through a magnifying-glass. Sometimes the moon would peek out through percolating clouds and say “Hi” in a low baritone. And I remember walking the street home from the platform in dungaree ‘ralls I can’t seem to remember how I obtained. I remember the crunch of snow in every step and the way the cool air tasted against my lips. Flecks of ice slowly forming snowflake through increments of ascending intricacy, fragile hexasymmetric patterns. There would be men taking individual bullions of goldbrick out of Ft. Knox in leather-padded-interior briefcases which were handcuffed to their person. This was the vision Johnny Trumaine gave us at his parking garage later that night. We could not properly confer with our associates on the matter of Johnny’s soothsaying legitimacy or whatever value any of his portentous white-eyed murmurs might have, and so we believed him. The truth was put into a white envelope and the envelope was burned; all we have left now are facsimiles of his notes. Johnny killed himself two winters later and, according to the lipstick note he left on his tummy—which lipstick note was photographed by blue bats on-scene at various angles—there was no real way of finding out the answer to his puzzle now, since he was dead. These facsimiles were not easy to come by; I only ever got to read one. It said: Fall back through the rabbit hole: initiation word: coconut. I haven’t really thought about it since. According to the Inner Voice, it probably has something to do with identifying who gave Johnny the ampule of noxious liquid cyanide he used to kill himself. The dust made eminent in the light of the setting saw floats on either side of a segment of a stone buttress along the West façade of the Art Wing such that all things floating suspend and distance themselves choreographically there in the mixing wanlight, and at the behest of who-knows-whom, because apparently, as the narrative foretells the goings-on of what numerous steps were taken in order to get a message to me in the first place, three goons scheduled an appointment with me, at which they arrived brandishing mace and short-sword and apparently yes it has been confirmed one of them did indeed ready shurikens; Goon 1 told me that if I ever needed to, I could call on Papa Smurf at any time. Then he gave me a little envelope with a slickly laminated business card inside which glinted sunbeamyellow-white when I lifted it out and exposed it to the mesosphere of that wonderful coordinate now lost. One of the three goons—the one speaking—gave me a hug as some kind of otherworldly gesture. The other two played rock-paper-scissors. “You are friend, now.” Goon 1 says. Goon 2 symbolically snips at Goon 3’s hand of paper with a pair of phalangeal scissors, to which some overblown physical acts incur negative invisible spiritual vibes which float around gaseously. Not Anduey: not anywhere anymore. And awake wetly into your carapace of sweat. The dark tremulous night-terror effects begin to kick in. At first, it’s a gentle paralysis. Listen. Listen briefly. There is a voice somewhere out there in the darkness of the room. Look up: china-doll staring at you with blue porcelain eyes. On the shelf. Unmoving. Unmoving. You are matched alone against your opponent’s King, on the board, stranded eternally in this moment in the darkness. And even as the eyes begin to move and seemingly corneageographically adjust, how you are still unmoving: still. Thus as your eyes well up and mouth creases wide a grimace which strains zygomatic operation in proportion to however long the grimace is held, taking note that your face is now a mask of sweat of an expression acupunctural in its stillness, the sweat carapace itself begins to emulsify white-pellucid, glowing dimly from inside. This is you as you as me. Take my hand. In the dark space we as gods shucked thunder from its lightning, soundless, striking down at various points on Earth such that from the false camera’s box-lens the sphere is shrouded by inspirited fireflies. Somewhere beyond the white gelatinous cocoon there is my face in that death-mask of horror. When you wake up, it’s like being watched. Something lurking around the corners of your apartment, quiet, casting covert gazes as the lightning storm goes off through the blinds’ drawn panels. This is true, you think: something like the aesthetic of the world. There are dogs howling wretchedly outside, in the soundless storm, which, just as a precaution, you have flipped the tube on and clicked the whirring mechanical vortex button which initiates the MonCentral Viewing Deck, and so but they both turn on: Channel Variety Select: News: NBC. Two female anchors in near-glowing attire, with hair sprayed—texturized—it can be told, argue respectively about the young pop model Vulva Rumford’s impressive foray from Barney the Dinosaur’s educational crew into a career path more congenial to her quote enlightened state of mind unquote, including erotic voice-acting and some prurient hypersecular inter-music-video dancing and even supposedly a bit part in La Rosa Blanca Productions’ Slutventures IV: Anal Pirates Want Booty, which was said to have been disseminated all throughout the Americas on some subnetwork within MonCentral VD’s Adult Entertainment genre web, connected and accessible through some esoteric porno-viewing permutation subweb one must correctly reorder and –arrange to view. They (the anchors) are arguing with specific hand gesticulations which, for the most part, gives the general impression that a kind of invisible swordfight may actually be occurring on some level between the two: that Mandyy Mitherslaw is not going to take any of Konny Zezgold’s inarticulate shit any longer. That that is what is probably generally being discussed among viewers: what is possibly being said beneath their voices. They argue smilingly, mid-gesticulation, as they construct counterpoints to their counterpart’s theses, palam, while the monitor’s own monitor in-studio behind the women plays a roll of patriotic Norman-Rockwellian pictures slightly out of focus: a golden retriever mid-jump for airborne frisby; a young child giving another child a hug, both of the children wearing blue miniature dungarees with red-and-white striped undershirts; a wind-rippling US-of-A flag spangled gladly almost so clear you could tell it had a face; a young soldier holding the severed head of a deer, antlers and all, empirically an 11-pt. buck; a young whipper-snapper tuning the various intricacies of a rusted bike in a large wholesome garage beside a shiny red Ford Sedan; isolated rosin candent floating in light. Mandyy gesticulates disapprovingly to a full-service shot-to-ego when Konny brings up her recent divorce, which now as the receding gesticulations play out and out and out into the void it is apparent that finally the mango’s ripe flesh may be bitten into. This will become the zone, as you pack another hit, reach for the remote and turn up the volume; it will actually become apparent to you that it has begun: the whole vicious cycle. Like a mummy you will rise ensapped in sweat and mucosa of all kinds. It will riddle your head: a dim green Projection-Dismantled symbol onscreen where sunlight’s lost and blank rays shine through faulty white curtains to obscure the purity of the Sony© UHDHF[iii] 60” plasma screen TV.
[i] Rossignol: nightingales: African-Eurasian birds donning reddish-brown plumes of inlaid feathers they unfurl and stretch and tend to the flexure of in brief flight from limb to limb, having been transferred to the Americas in c. 933. To the thorough viewer the bird’s real personality begins to manifest in its movement: they even speak, these Rossignol, although it is of course Romanian: a real hoot, and mostly in whispers. Rossignol: emissaries at the behest of the moon, soft blur-winged darkangels sent shushing past into the trees. This is what we all think we see, no? I have you in my grip now. You cannot get out when you have seen the inside of the labyrinth. The famille habitué have all gathered into a tender moment around you: bunny rabbit, plastic flyswatter, Ulysses: paperback. There is a tune playing somewhere in the background, and an actress’s exacerbated diminuendo from some high-strung final note, too high to hear, too soft and gentle there in that minute the rat walked into its guillotine. And we all expected it. No one could surmise that by the time her voice had gone completely there would be no more light in the maze: no more space around you: just black, absorbed by the dark, sent into union with the minotaur and your eminent death. Have you seen my wand? I left it somewhere. I’m too high now, I think. All these recollections; they come to me like butterflies that die where they land: symmetrically beautiful, encased in glass frames and set on display in an office no one enters.
[ii] The Salavation Perspective being a PoV endemic to the ideological brainstem of the Political Dogmatic which posits its own personal beliefs/preferences as those of the superior mode, in essence saying: the Salvation Perspective is every political dogmatic’s own beliefs, as opposed to any one belief in particular.
[iii] Ultra-High-Definition-High-Fidelity.
AWE IV: VR Butterflies (Act 5 Scene 46)
27 January c. 706: 40mg Pomegranate Quaalude
Our man is locked in now at ~200 hp. Here we have him, on-monitor, in forest, observing the High-Def. butterflies. He can't believe it, is the consensus. In the tank, in his chair, with headset glowing over eyes and wired glove onhand reaching outward (which in turn registers on the room's massive display screen's first-person PoV as his own digitized hand reaching outward before him toward the winged things), he is engrossed. Here he is opening the satchel in-program onscreen and removing a golden revolver. This can be a little tricky. Designer Marty Pools is operating Distending Landscape on his own tiny monitor in the programming aisle closest to the room's massive display screen, where a group of entry-level virtual technicians is scrawling and cross-checking notes on the Subject’s physical vital signs’ correlation to his in-program vital signs, which thus far it seems there is none. Des. Ham Dickey and Des. Rudolf Pence confer privately via telephone with their hands cupped around the receivers from opposite sides of the room. Something to do with determining who’s responsible for putting a golden revolver in the satchel, apparently. This as onscreen the Subject begins aiming down-sights at various floating flapping butterflies. The room’s tone is weary. Several of the Designers from Des. Pool’s team are scrambling around over at Programming, trying to calculate the accurate amount of xp the act of shooting a butterfly affords the Subject after it’s been confirmed the butterflies’ Class-Ranking has not been allotted in the code. Someone says “damn” rather loudly as a loud flash issues onscreen at room’s fore and a small blue butterfly wilts downward in two separate pieces like glossy paper. The SPoV follows their descent into the grass. Des. Dickey slams the phone’s handset down and marches out of the room. Someone says “damn” again: the Subject is holding a magnifying glass from the satchel to observe the detail of the butterfly-specimen’s bullet bisection. Some of the operators typing stop typing and emit glazed stares at the screen at fore. The operators over at Subject Stability are glad-handing, passing around advertorial brown-paper-bags of Taco Bell™, extricating burritos and hard-shell tacos in advertorial wax-paper-wrapping and gorging themselves audibly: all vital-signs read NORMAL on the wellness monitor. Des. Pools wrings his hands as a white square begins strobing onscreen from the far-East quadrant. Every time the Subject’s radar reaches the square, the radar buzzes red for a moment. According to the Ref. Key on p. 148 of the Distending Landscape binder, the white square designates DANGER, and nothing more is said about it. Marty pulls his headset down to his neck and looks over to Des. Pence at the aisles’ rear, whose pink martini glass is now void of everything but two impaled green olives on a single toothpick. They make eye-contact. Marty drips facially. Pence belches loudly and walks down past Flora and Fauna to Distending Landscape, where the white square on red-blinking monitor inches closer and closer to the subject’s green-circle designation. “’S that?” / “You don’t know?” / “Shut—[hiccup]—the fuck up and tell me.” / “DANGER, is what the binder said.” Pence slides the olives off the toothpick with his teeth and chews and swallows all in one motion. “Probly just a bug. These sorts of radar glitches happen from time to time.” Then comes the rumbling. The SPoV turns from the butterfly, still in-mag.-glass, to look up at a magnified series of trees which quiver and tumble, indications of an approaching thing. Everyone goes silent. The subject does a 360° survey, inchair intank onscreen, stopping once more on the trees (which now it’s become apparent from their increasingly proximal tumbling the thing or what-have-you has gotten very close, such that while the Subject carefully replaces the mag. glass and pulls the revolver back out of the satchel and looks up, there it is: … the Clam Queen. A nacreous open clam-shell with four hirsute legs holds aloft on a pink bed a pearl-garlanded blond maiden whose floating stringlets of hair glint in the HD UV-rays of the program’s blinking Graphics-Processing-Units whose inbuilt fans hum tirelessly and echo white-noisomely at by the tank’s motherboard. A pencil falls audibly from the drooling lips of an eye-bulging open-jawed Des. Nathaniel Lanath, over in Fauna. “O shit,” someone says. Code Junkies M and S and now madly typing, attempting to locate a misplaced integer in the vast stream of stochastic code trickling down-monitor. A petite MGMT Des. with black-label lanyard keels over as the wellness monitor at Subject Stability goes black and then reads: SUBNORMAL (-35% SURVIVAL RATE). For a time the monitor’s indication doesn’t register—people with crumbs of beef and lettuce smeared around their lips attempting to hold the MGMT Des. up whilst an overtired beta-coder pours 96 °C coffee onto his groin and exclaims “FUCK!” and falls out of his wheely-chair onto an off-clock beta-coder’s small Lego™ township just as said BC is placing a plastic clapper into the final bell of an intricate miniature carillon operated by small steam-powered organ (in buttressed township’s church’s ornately decorated vestibule) and thin fishing wires and pulleys), delineating two loci of attention and urgency—until, after a shrieking pointing Program Operator indicates the fore screen, all eyes look to what manifests on the screen as a bubbly purple vignette and the Clam Queen’s singing onmic inclam and the Subject’s hand’s gun's slow 180° rotation inward, bullet-vector to skull. “What the fuck’s going on?!” Pence says. The off-clock BC grasps at the fragments of his little Lego™ world and heaves and bawls as a group of four or five medical attendees begins attending to the injured BC and then reordinancing themselves such that two of them are sent to deal with the keeled MGMT Des., who’s now been laid opine upon someone’s dismantled workstation in Flora; why it had to be Flora is what most of the Flora designers are so exercised about having answered. Some of them actually pull at their hair and make broad gestures with their arms in confused exclamation at the Subject Stability designers who’ve come over and laid her down, something along the lines of intercompany political bullshit and the albatross of the overworked Des. groups who have to pick up the slack of the lazier ostensibly less-competent ass-kissers of Subject Stability. This resolves as a brief fistfight broken up by a burly unarmed Security staffer who inadvertently slugs a whining Flora Des. amid all the bustling, which evokes cheer from the SSDs on their side of the split upper aisles, which in turn causes the incursion of several retaliatory blows from the FDs such that now it is an all-out brawl—Flora Des. peons at Security staffer; Security staffer at the FDs (à la Ali’s uppercut modality); SSDs at FDs; FDs at nearby SSDs; a small Mohican janitor at some of the more redolent SSDs in the SS quadrant for no apparent reason; etc.—all while the golden sun-sheening revolver onscreen continues to turn: 90°, 130°, 150°, 170°… BANG! Everyone is silent again. The screen’s bloodied background is overlaid with bulging 3D text which reads GAME OVER in neon pink. The wellness monitor is a flat-lining drone. The Subject in his tank is reclined angelically with a halo of blood pooling from his skull in drops down the chair’s cushioned midsection. The medical attendees freeze; two of them drop the unconscious MGMT Des. with a thud. Pence issues the word “fuck” at least twelve times in succession, with varying intonations. The audio is pulled and the Clam Queen’s dreamy song begins piping through the room’s wall’s inbuilt speakers: Lalala, lala / Lalalalalala, lala / LALALALALALA, lala, lala… This as CJ M begins explaining to Pence in personal-space-delimiting-proximity a line of code S located which apparently a coder involved in the beta-stage put there, which is headed CLAM QUEEN and which materializes a mythical monster—the one onscreen, still, singing—whose music causes the in-game listener’s PC to turn its attack on itself should it attempt to harm it. The room is evacuated and the Authorities are called and most everyone takes a cigarette break. Des. Pools can be seen with his head in his elbows outside by the FDs, who’ve formed a huddle concealing whispers of departmental strike and company treason. Some of them speak with visible conviction: fist-in-palm, deliberate, urgent. Most of the SSDs have gone on lunch-break to get company-paid drinks at a slimy bar uptown. Pence undergoes a verbal surfeit of expletive-suffused castigatory diatribe which manifests as wa-waa, wa-wa-waa-wa, wa-wa wa through his handset’s transmitter; he can no longer even hear the words. Then the lens begins rising, floating up, way up, above it all, such that the sirens and dense whispers and wa-waa wa-waa and D. Pool’s quiet void selfspeak and idle shattering pink martini glass onstreet all shrink into pale blue dots of sensation: smaller, smaller still, until finally: windsound: floating light.