The Journal of Speculative Disease

Thu, 19 May 2005

Putting Your Life In Someone Else’s Hands
The thing we most remember, obviously, was the plane crash just up the road. We were out playing, watching, listening to the long tear in the sky reach a zero up in Feldman’s fields, the crack of the trees and steel. We were on our bikes and heading down county road V5G within seconds, all eager to witness, to be of some help. A wake in the corn starting back on the road spread as the fuselage came apart, the left wing split, the grove around the small empty pond bent left, the path of a small piloted tornado. There were police there before we had a chance to properly enter the cornfield, and contented ourselves with watching trucks rush along the culverts, twilight fading, eventually riding home after the roadway grew too crowded for comfortable observation of other people’s tragedies.

Later, after the work had been done, we went out to the field, stooping under the tape and beng careful nto to knock over the wooden stakes, looking for clues, for a reason such a crash would occur here, where nothing ever happened. We thought of stealing something, but nothing left seemed to carry the center of what had happened, so we kept coming back each weekend until all the pieces had been stolen away from us, all the traces of recall and strategy pulled away, nothing left but the scars in the earth. We started pulling pieces from the abandoned pile of Studebakers down by the burial pond and dragging them out to the crash-site, trying to redefine what we had seen with the limited means available to us. There was a scrapyard over in Washburn, and with the help of an older friend with a car and no friends his own age we snuck over the sheet-metal fencing, pulling whatever looked under the moonlight like controls, like flaps and spoilers, like shreds of fuselage stuck in the earth.

A year later survivors of the original crash came out to the site to remember, or to put it behind them, or maybe just to match up their memories to the place. Feldman was so spooked he had abandoned this whole square from the road to the grove, a second lighter crop poking up from leftover seed, grass and foxtail between the rows catching at their feet as they wandered onto the site, all the kids laying out and soaking up sun on a timeless pointless early-summer day stuck somewhere between missions and sugar-laden intrigues. Trains out on the Great Western, just barely within range, filled the quiet around the passengers, staring at us, speechless. Eventually we realized we were being watched, and looked up.

Later they turned the empty field into a bar, the only bar within walking distance when I was twenty-nine and decided to take my hermiting to its logical conclusion, retreating to the woods. When one retreats to the woods, one should not hang around in crash victim bars (or any bars, for that matter), as it makes the whole notion of retreat kinda laughable, but there I was, sucking down small bottles of off-market vodka with my new peer group, photographs of our mock site next to newspaper clippings and a polariod of Duane Berryberry, who once accidentally played there when his Amphouse gig was cancelled due to arson and curses. People had forgotten me, unsuprisingly, and I looked in vain for a small me staring back out of the pictures. I knew these people would never come into contact with my friends, my family, the people who were looking for me. Only it’s Iowa, and Iowa is a small world.

Most of my friends were gone. Josef had gone up to Minnesota and killed himself. Seth was gone, gone away, nobody knew where. Ana was sick and not seeing anyone, her hair gone, the promise of the benign faded. the circus had disbanded, Harold and Lawrence reunited and no longer in fear of the Cult of the Yellow Sign. Everybody else was grown up or in jail or dead. Almost everybody. There were still two associates still unaccounted for, as of my last day in the world. I should have known.

“YOU! How utterly fitting that you’ve cocooned in the nest of other people’s pain, so like you, swiping their stories in their sleep and imagining the maudlin applause fo those who wonder where you are. Shaaaaaame!”

“Tell him, Rissa! Shaaaaaaaaaame!”

“You’re not even drinking real booze! What kind of alcoholic nose-dive is this? William Holden wouldn’t drink sippy-cup size vodka bottles! Dylan Thomas could get drunk faster on his own piss than this swill-ale the infirm and forgotten have made their house brand!”

I barely mumbled something about crash survivors and respect then Rissa, who I always had a crush on (and yeah, you can get plenty of miles of psychoanalysis out of that), rapped me across the forehead with her cane (she had started carrying a cane as the best possible legal weapon, though the nails she had pounded through the base weren’t quite cricket) and screamed “That was twenty years ago! Enough is enough, you sad sodden sorry sacs of sympathy-sick…”

“Scallywags, Rissa?”

“Owen, please. I’m building to a secondary crescendo here. I can’t very well use that Bluebeard action at this point; something more striking is called for.”

“Violence ahoy! I got the gas!”

“No no no! I still have another ten minutes of material!”

Long before there was any cance to properly build, however, Owen had poured gas and kicked over candles and screamed [Owen would like me to inform the audience that he did not really pour any gas or kick over any candles and is only said to do such a thing in order to wrap up what is obviously a poorly thought out conclusion; he has better and more noble things to do with his time than set bars on fire without a decent reason] while we ran out, attempting to destroy history-roots, to free people to the present.

Only that moment, that present, fades. There is no holding on.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Rissa: Vomit
The body is confused, it doesn’t understand food. the acid taste sticks in my throat. dry heaves, the bucket and towels, arms wrapped around, getting it out, hidden poisons. i’ll never drink seven up again. i am so tired. cleaning up, fighting the want to fall down, the cool of the tile beneath my knees. i know this. this is how my body has acted for years and years. it’s strange, how comfortable this feels, how much sending cereal into a brown streak into the water feels like home.

She’s driving circles out on the highway, business routes in orbits around the outskirts, she’s making calls to people she barely remembers asking for bits of shared memory. she’s not looking for anything. she’s just scared, now that she has nothing to do, no way to fill up her time.

Rissa was trying to teach me how to play gigantic on the bass, which is an easy thing to learn, but i couldn’t pay any attention, and after a while she told me that’s it, that’s enough, you need something to get all this crap out of your head, all these bad ideas, all these fears, and soon enough i was throwing up again, and it felt all right to me.

“Now you’re gonna start all over again.”

“but that’s all i ever do is start all over again! i never get anywhere!”

“aw, don’t get snippity with me. here, have a ham sammich.”

“rissa, fuck off! nobody pukes and eats ham sammiches!”

“you’ll be the first! that was always such a big deal for you.”

“nooo! i’m having a popsicle. you eat whatever you want.”

“how is eating a popsicle doing something new?”

“it’s not. i’m done doing the new thing. i’m done starting over.”

“you don’t say.”

“i do say!”

“what are you doing, then?”

“i’m being careful. this is a time for being careful.”

“i don’t know anything about being careful, tho.”

“i know. that’s why you’re my friend.”

“get your popsicle and get in the car. there’s something you should see.”

We went out on the interstate to the edge of town, where orange barriers had been erected over the road, giant signs reading NO EXIT taller than we were.

“huh.”

“yeah, so there’s no going away.”

“that’s fine. as you may have heard, i have shit to do here.”

“yeah, that’s what god said. you should be less rude.”

“i was all in a snit. i’ll have to write an apology note.”

“so what are you gonna do, then?”

“getting together a new army out of insects and wind.”

“you’re still on that?”

“mostly it’s just backup. i’ll be needing backup.”

“whyfor, fair prince?”

“i have a big project coming up. and i need to finish old projects.”

“so you’re back on the job.”

“yeah. not writing made me feel creepy and evil.”

“really?”

“yeah. it was no good. i had to spend too much time with myself.”

“wasn’t that the plan?”

“yeah. but it was stupid. i need to stick with the work.”

“obviously, i’m glad to hear that.”

“obviously.”

“so i’ve been reading richter-goldberg and i don’t get it.”

“yeah. i been really slack.”

“can you maybe give me a plotline or something?”

“um…maaaaaaybe. but you can’t tell anybody.”

“like anybody cares. sheeesh.”

“a’ight, here’s year zero:

Josef Ephraim, born in 1972, lived a fairly uninteresting life through his high-school years. Spent time with friends from his neighborhood: Seth, Jackson, Jay-Jay. Had a short-lived senior year relationship with Loyola Jehovah. Spent two years at university, where he met and became non-romantically entangled with Ana Skyfish, we think, though it’s hard to tell. Flunked out of school, spent next few years working at the burial pond, at the rest stop, doing some industrial work out of town. Came back into contact with Seth, who had connections to a company called Shock Zero via his involvment with the World’s Most Depressing Circus; Seth used their equipment as part of his Retro-Futuro Fortune Telling Booth. Seth had a new device, a sort of strange machine, which he and Josef experimented with, altering local weather patterns, instigating a flood. Josef later believed this device brought people back from the dead, including Josef, who attempted to take his own life during this time. Seth went into hiding while Josef investigated the cause of his apparent resurrection. Ana Skyfish, suffering from domestic troubles and chemotherapy treatments at Bethany Medical, moved in with Josef, during which time their relationship was ambiguous. Josef believed certain displaced or homeless persons were actually re-rises, who could not return to their prior identities and thus became hidden people. We do know that the Sewage Priest, whose actual name was Marshall Einseideln, backs up this story, claiming he is a part of an “underground railroad” for the re-rises. Josef also speaks to people at Methusela’s Empire nursing home, who verify this story as well, though they report there are others attemting to contact these re-risen people, a group which is called The Cult of the Yellow Sign. Josef identifies two of these agents as Abel and Baker and from them recieves information about chemical testing on him and his associates through an agent named “Frank Sinatra”, who sold them certain chemicals durig their college years, primarily Eidetamine. They also reveal these chemicals come from the same source as the Shock Zero technology, and that the connection is not accidental, Shock Zero intentionally sending Seth the machine for zero-liability testing purposes. It shoudl be noted here that Abel and Baker are not entirely to be believed. Fearing for his life, Josef abandons his life to flee to a small town called Tamrack Minnesota. He is visited there by Seth, who has obtained information about the technologies through an ex-employee named Paul Apostrophes. Seth has stolen additional technology from a warehouse operated by persons calling themselves the Endless Mechanics. Through their experiments with this technology, Josef learns how much he has thrown away for a fool’s errand, betrayed by his own inability to see what is in front of him. Seth disappears again, and Josef is left scrawing a strange text explaining what he has learned, a text left incomplete by his death.

“that’s a bit bleak, isn’t it, boss?”

“yeah, but josef was a dick anyway.”

“this is true. so where’s seth?”

“back with the circus, last i heard.”

“and ana?”

“ana becomes the big cheese from this point on.”

“excellent. i always liked her.”

“yeah, me too. here’s the scoop for year one:

Ana’s sickness becomes operatable and is removed. She spends recovery-time trying to make sense of what has been going on in her life; having come back to town looking for a bit of calm and ending up with the events of year zero has left her none too pleased. Throuch this process she comes into closer orbit with her old friend and bandmate Rissa —

“hey, that’s me!”

“yes indeed.”

“well now i don’t wanna get written into this. some horrible thing will happen to me, i just know it.”

“no no, i promise, nothing horrible will happen.”

“you know, if ana starts hanging around, though, she’ll have to bump into owen.”

“yeah, i was just getting to that.”

— and Ana’s long-time ex-boyfriend Owen, whom she asks to return all her old letters to assist in life-inventorying, but Owen being Owen decides he needs to annotate all letters before returning them. Ana attempts to track down Seth by following the circus, enlisting her younger brother Merle and his questionable friend Ed Satan to attempt to infiltrate the circus via soundtracking by their band, Fuck The Beatles. Before this can happen, however, Owen and Rissa have to rescue Ed from summerlong detention at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata, which goes questionably. Merle and Ed then hunt down the circus under the pretext of a statewide tour, with disasterous results. Ana discovers additional information about Seth’s involvement with the Endless Mechanics and a place called Richter-Goldberg, seemingly a pharmaceutical testing facility or asylum (depending on who you ask) right across from the university hospital. Recovered and working at Rent N Putt and part-timing at Midwest Death Cult Studios, Ana attempts to piece together this information with what she’s learned of Josef’s end, provided mostly by old drug-buddy Jackson Demerol and two particularly strange individuals known as Jimmy Cheerios and Seven Dogeater, who were incarcerated within Richter-Goldberg witin a simulated satellite and fed on accelerated doses of the same sorts of chemicals Frank Sinatra sold. Ana thus learns of the strange experiments at R-G, who also experimented on Seth during his psychiatric stay after his bout with alcoholism and his girlfriends Jezebel Decibel’s miscarriage. Also a member of that original test group was one of the Endless Mechanics named Qu’ael, or Qua’el, or Qu’al. Jimmy escapes the building though the same underground tunnel hive where the Sewage Priest hunted the Wurm, where reports of the Lost and Found Girls have become legendary, while Seven is still on board the fake satellite, utilizing a system entitled Squareone to correlate information. Seven and Jimmy bring Ana into the fold of a collective of researchers called the Tracer-Guild, through which infomation is exchanged as to the history of Richter-Goldberg as well as its biomorphic abstraction, the Kilvan’s Block. Seven makes contact with others inside the building, including K. Carrington, the “false historian” whom Seven know from their Alchemical Warfare days. During this time, his Squareone database is infected with something called the Infernal Salt Codex, which rearranges information into new patterns, as well as re-meeting a young person named V. Serin, who originally (accidentally) let Dogeater and Cheerios know the satellite was a fake, and Serin reports of other things deeper in the tunnel-nest, strange surgeons working in an underground theatre code-named the Abandoed Hospital Ship haunt the R-G members, while outside Ana and Jimmy keep hidden from the Yellow Sign killers Abel and Baker. The Tracer-Guild reports that the software Seven has been using mirrors a strange AI nicknamed Bluebucket which was similarly corrupted by the Infernal Salt Codex after the introduction of an online data dump called Scrytch. Owen and Rissa introduce Ana to their other employer Ben-Jakob, a dealer in hidden texts, whose secret bookshop is tucked away next to R-G, a corner-shop atop the flood-evacuee hotel where V. Serin once worked, before going underground. Ben-Jakob provides information as to the Kilvan’s Block, an area where he claims to have been made one from two, and where refugees have been hidden, wherein he once met a man named Azrael, who claimed to represent the forces of death. Ben-Jakob also seems to know V. Serin, but cannot find his current location.

“good lord. that’s a lot of shit.”

“there’s also the story of meth-addled hunting flood-crazed animals which leads to the discovery of a field of seemingly abandoned trailers out in the middle of the floodplains, the legend of the lost and found girls, the final visions of the sewage priest, the abduction of qu’ael from a kansas holding facility by a team outfitted in jumpsuits, the discovery that the the re-rise machine is one in a network with others in the basement of r-g, on some uncharted desert aisle, and at the top level of the shiniest building on london, the disappearance of cowby james, the ballad of sarah mossiman, dr. arthur brisbane and rachel aven’s discovery of the cascading moeboid tarot and hidden worlds within the AI system, the hidden raids by infinitek agents, the grue identities of frank sinatra and gerald huyssens, what actually took place on comsat ahimsa, the great satan transmissions, the connection between the infernal salt codex and someone within a vat of goo as discovered by late tracer-guild agent luxo maglite, visions of stange futures in denver colorado, serin’s discovery that the abandoned hospital ship and the cult of the yellow sign are the same, and various other visions that i can’t quite remember right now.”

“and that’s year one.”

“yep.”

“and you haven’t even really gotten it written yet, right?”

“no ma’am.”

“good lord. needless to say, you can’t leave.”

“hell no. too much to do.”

“is this it?”

“fuck no. there’s a beeday present coming up that i need to finish, and plans for a second book that i can’t talk about yet.”

“it’s good you have a hobby.”

“my name is darren. sometimes i come out of my room.”

“(giggles)”

“you wanna get some lunch?”

“sure, but we gotta pick up owen from KB first.”

“can do. on and on and on.”

“admit it, you’re jazzed.”

“i am, i totally am. this whole set-up rocks.”

“can i turn the tape off?”

“sure, just hit the-”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen: Saints
On Sundays, after confession, Owen would receive a Saint Card, which was something like a baseball card with a portrait of a given saint on the front and information on the saint’s life (including a list of relevant Biblical verses) on the back. While this was generally seen as a smart way to use a child’s compulsion to collecting as a means of both assuaging fears about confession and strengthening Sunday School lessons, Owen and his friends generally collected these cards in order to play extensive games of Saint Fight, where two children would put their cards head-to-head and determine (with a third child as moderator) which Saint would persevere in combat. On some weekends there was a theme, during which time a particular situation (such as if it was that saint’s feast day, or if the battle was set in town, where masters of disguise like Hildegund could pull a sneak attack, or in a forrest, where a goofball like Simeon the Stylite could sit atop a tall oak and wait out any opponents) would affect the outcome of the fight. Owen had a secret weapon in the form of a stash of older-edition saint cards handed down from his sister Rissa, including a Saint Christopher card from 1965, four years prior to his removal from the Roman Catholic hagiography. While considered both rare and impressive by his friends, Brent declared the card void and unusable in play. This pissed Owen off to no end, as Christopher was not only his secret weapon and the core of his deck, he was also a general badass as saints go, bested only by hired killers like John of God and little crippled builder of hiding places Nicholas Owen (a card which our Owen always regretted not finding), whose powers could easily wipe out lesser saints with ease. Brent and Darin refused to play so long as Saint Christopher was allowed, which they felt was both blasphemous and corrosive to the inner logic of the game; were any schmoe allowed within the arena the saints wouldn’t stand a chance, and as such, the designation of sainthood as overseen by the papacy was critical. Owen picked up his cards and walked away. Years later, over Christmas at their parent’s house, Owen and Rissa sat up drinking a sugary holiday sherry and playing Saint Fight, all cards legal, which pleased Owen until Rissa brought out a pack of Tibetan devata cards, including Kali as Lha-mo, who ran rampant over Boniface of Mainz and Shenouda the Archimandrite, Philomena and, yes, Saint Christopher. A rematch is currently pending.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Rissa’s Old Job
Rissa used to have the punk-rock problem. This was back after she graduated from college, not long after her band, Buddy Holly’s Drummer, went the way of so many collegiate bands and parted ways, with Ana wanting to concentrate more on school and sleeping with Rissa’s little brother Owen and Trenchcoat Larry itchin’ to join underground luminaries Biomorphic Feedback Performance. Thus it was that Rissa moved across town, got really into sedatives and found work as a busdriver, the worst part of which was the monotony. There was no getting off the bus whenever you felt like it, like all the guests could; you were stuck on the bus until the end of your shift, with occasional breaks at the main station, nothing more than blank gaps. After months of this Rissa knew more than she ever wanted to know about the migratory patterns of construction crews, drifting along the highways like nomads who had forgotten they ever had a homeland. The ebb and flow of traffic throughout the day, pulsing past increasinly-tempting traffic accidents. The regular guests, running to and from work, the confused and lost, the sleeping, the daytripping students, the buisnessmenchen with eyes scrubbed so bright the predatory glimmer used to baffle their fiscal prey shines through, a crazy poet guy who would give out copies of his chapbook called The Mellonberry Cantos during the cab strike, the secret performers waiting for drama and constantly switching seats in order to find a perfect alignment like some lysergically-damaged story problem, the blind and their dogs, the children with notes pinned to their sweaters and money growing clammy in their tight fists, endless numbers of people who took the seat right behind hers, right up next to the yellow line, and asked Rissa about her increasingly-elaborate mohawk. It could, and did, drive a person to drink, the promise of nightly reward of a few fingers of the cheapest scotch Layne the grocer could obtain legally, each day the drinking hour moving a few minutes closer to dawn, roaming within the veins of the city, looking for an edge to fall upon. Rissa hadn’t been sick for months, but kept taking the medication, which helped to blur the faces of the passengers and swallow up the hours, blotted out of her memory, the days a haze of browns and greys. Tival must have noticed the filling up with emptiness, the rings around the eyes, as he moved her to a route without bridges. The last thing she wanted was attention, was someone watching, wondering. Alas, it wasn’t one day on the new route before she met Mrs. Patricia Martin and her grandchildren.

“Excuse me, ma’am? The children, they have a little song, if you don’t mind them singing it or anything.”

“Honestly, I’d really prefer if they —”

“OOOH, we all love to ride the bus

There’s no seatbelts to harness us

The people smell like piss and rust

And soon they’ll go to join the dust

The bus takes us all over town

From libraries to the playground

Over the lake where kids are drowned

And sink beneath without a sound.”

“That’s, that’s super, kids, that’s just—”

“Do you want to see my doll? My mom says it’s okay that if you find most of an aborted fetus and you love it enough it will come back to life because God loves fetuses. I put mine in a jar!”

“What?”

“Jamie’s messing with you, dear. She’s like that. Jamie, tell the bus lady you’re sorry.”

“I’m not sorry! Death to tyrants!”

“Jamie, you want the ice cream?”

“I cannot be bought! Nobody understand me but my half-baby and zombie Jesus!”

“Jesus was not a zombie! Just because you come back from the dead does not make you a zombie!”

“Sure it does! He even left a ghost to do his dirty work after he went back to heaven! I had to explain this three times to the half-baby, because most of its brain is missing. It needs extra love!”

“Is this your stop?”

“Oh…um, no, we’re still a ways off.”

Only Patricia Martin and her creepy charges never got off the bus until my shift ended, and soon as I took over for Rick on Monday morning, there they were again, waiting for me.”

“Hooray, buswoman! We have a new song for you!”

“Your little brother doesn’t seem to sing. He’s a nice boy.”

“His organs are deformed. He can only sing through his eyes.”

“Sing through his eyes.”

“Yeah, listen. Joey, sing that one song.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“When you remember today, the singing will be in your memory. Joey is a remembersinger.”

“Stay behind the yellow line. And no talking to the driver.”

“Listen, ma’am, I’m sorry about the kids. They’ve been through a lot lately.”

“I’ve got polaroids I took of my dad after he killed himself. You wanna see?”

“She’s making that up. Her dad is in Evansdale.”

“A fate worse than death.”

A guy in a Meet This Year’s Evil t-shirt spit in “Hey, I’m from Evansdale, and people talk a lot of shit, y’know, but it’s not bad like people say. And besides the CDC says it’s nearly 90% habitable now.”

“Motherfucker, get behind the contanment barrier NOW!”

“But I still have some hair and teeth! Look at my teeth!” “NOW! NOW! GET BACK NOW! NOW! NOW!”

“Fuck you anyway,” he muttered, staring down at his lesions and fading back from the conversation.

“Now I’m going to have to ask you creepy evil chldren to be quiet or I’ll drive us right into that wall.”

“Do it! Do it! Joey, tell her to do it!”

“Quit it!”

“Kids be quiet for a while and I’ll give you honey-pollen. You want the honey-pollen, right?”

“YAAAAAAAAAAY!”

This went on for nearly two weeks, during which Patricia told Rissa about her plan for a sitcom called Nostalgia-Man, with a superhero who moves in and out of cancelled sitcoms tying up loose ends and messing with the plotlines, bringing together the casts from shows which haven’t been on for ages and setting them up in lookalike sets, which creepy Jamie said would lead to plots of sitcom limbos where washed-up has-been characters sat around Beckettlike playing the laugh-track tapes over and over and over, at which point Patricia thwacked Jamie on the back of the head. Joey stared blankly at the other passengers until they’d get up and move to the back seat, eventually creating a ten-foot vibe zone around the front of the bus, adding to the confidential nature of Patricia’s endless family revelations.

“And Pammy, well, Pammy’s jealous because her sister Shiela had cervical cancer. I mean, is that just the stupidest thing or what? It’s like she’d get the cancer herself just to have the attention and feel like she’s been through something, like she’s proven herself by being in pain or something and not even have to have any scars because you know how vain she is, but she’d just look like a copycat if she did that, which she is, you know, I mean it kills me to say it but it’s true.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do! And what with Shiela, I mean, she’s still taking the medication they gave her even though it’s been a year since she was done with the surgery, but who’s going to say anything, right? She just sits there, and then when the family gets together, I mean I love those girls but they just can’t leave each other alone, they just pick and pick and pick at each other, I mean it’s Pammy’s this, Shiela’s that, Shiela’s a junkie, Pammy’s a lesbo, I mean — I didn’t mean to, If you’re one of…”

“I’m not offended, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I mean, people can do what they want, that’s what I’ve always said, but it’s just that people are so *touchy* these days!”

“You should probably tell Jamie not to eat things off the floor.”

“Jamie! Spit, spit it out, here in this kleenex, just, that’s right, here, have a mint, sweetie…”

After two weeks of this the phone calls began. Calls asking for advice with what cd’s young people like, what the lastest dish on Jerry’s new maybe-Jewish girlfriend is, maybe she’d like some of the banana bread left over from the holidays, did she happen to see any of Joey’s buttons because when they got off yesterday there weren’t any on the sweater and maybe if they’re not on the bus they got swallowed so maybe they should call the hospital. Meanwhile, Jamie had taken to cutting out pictures from 18th century autopsy manuals and making collages to get sent as postcards, the organ block removed, the cavity filled with unborn birds curled beneath each other, their eyes like well-bottom silver. The phone unplugged, the mail refused, and all her remaining sick days used up in one eight-day stretch, Rissa hoped the Martins would forget her, go off to bother some other poor sap, but thermoses of soup and homemade cookies left at her doorstep with instructions for battling flu, cold, hypothermia, diphtheria, malaria and nerves made it clear that no quick-change escape act was going to sway away Patricia et al. A high-noon showdown was inevitable, and the morning commuters heading to the office-banks along Kienholz Blvd. were treated to every last comment, wondering if the windows would open wide enough to squeeze through, wondering how long they had before CNN reporters were reading their names over live feed from overhead helicopters.

“Patricia. Jamie. Joey. I expected to see you here.”

“Are you over your sick, dear? Did the mandrake root help?”

“Listen; I know you’re a witch. I know these children are not really children at all, they’re your flask-formed homunculi, your dirty-faced Golems, abominations Eleazar of Worms never dreamed in his most demon-driven hours. And yet you can be so foolish to enter my lair!”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Rissa, but you’re scaring the children…”

“HA! Double-HA! Scare your irreal undead necrotech servants, I think not! But you, sorceress-hag, you know the fear you feel in your hollowed uterus is the fear of your destruction, for I am Rissa, Engineer of Hidden Mirrors and the Universes Carried Therein, which includes the Endless Hallway of Two Facing Mirrors! Step into my circle, devil-enchantress! Stay you behind the yellow line!”

“Enchantress? How do you figure I’m an enchantress? I just capture people’s irritations and uncomfortableness and nervous energy for my…aw, shit.”

“AHA! And now that you have revealed your evil plan to me you are powerless! Right? Isn’t that how it works?”

“It…we haven’t gotten that far…Jamie, what’s the verdict on that?”

“If you have to ask, Grammie, the gig’s up.”

“You’re not a black-boned witch at all, are you?”

“Sure I am, hon! Watch as I call up powers beyond your comprehension!”

“Grammie, Joey says the triple goddess duesn’t really have time for this kinda nonsense.”

“This is perfect, this just figures, I’m gonna flunk the class and get kicked out and the kids, I mean Susan has to be wondering, I think maybe I should sit down.”

“So what, then, am I like your semester project? Aren’t you a bit old for schooling?”

“It’s at the home. At Methusela’s Empire Retirement Home. I’ve been taking this Grey Witchery class, oh, I’ll be all the talk around the circle when this gets out.”

“Your coven is all octogenarian Wiccans? Isn’t fucking with public transportation employees kinda heavy for that scene?”

“That’s what I kept telling myself, but I saw you, and you just had all this negative energy, and it seemed such a shame to just let it hang in the bus, I thought maybe if I could, oh, I don’t even know anymore…”

“Listen, it’s okay, don’t cry, Jamie, get your grandmother some kleenex out of her handbag—”

“—mind the satchets, sweetie—”

“—there, now just relax, I won’t tell anybody anything—”

“—only I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I thought maybe if I brought the kids along, because you look like one of those girls who gets nervous around kids, I mean, no offense or anything, you were just so mad at everything all the time, expecialy when you were drunk, so, I’m sorry, I’m terribly…”

And so, while the bus was parked underneath the I-218 overpass, Rissa and Patricia and her grandchildren (who were initially thrilled to get that much time off school but after so long on the bus they were pretty fed up with the whole gig, even with getting to be weird to people in public) worked out a backup project involving some of Rissa’s abnormal Islamic optics, Angelica mash and faux-foetal tissue (which, in all truth, was really a carved and dyed potato in a jar of mouthwash and mosses), which apparently got high marks and a key spot in the macrame’ knotwork project which gave aid to coven member Kingsuk Nevi, who was battling hyperthyroidism at the time. Rissa, obviously, was fired, and moved back in with her brother Owen, who by this time had been dumped by Ana (who dropped out of school and moved away to ‘get herself together’, or something, Owen said, but he’s not really a trustworthy source on this subject), leaving the two plenty of spare time to think about saving the world.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Save Their Pennies
It was a gradual but unmistakable process, the cartooning of the park, in which trees which had held their ground since before electric light now were potted in striped pots with handles smooth and well-formed as refrozen ice, which meant you could lift the trees and move them to aid in shading, or all to one corner for epic weekend-long games of wiggley-poo (of which more will be elaborated on later). Beneath the trees one often found eggs as large as your head which never seemed to hatch, but would hum when you held your ear to them, and should you be wise enough to be in the lying-down position while listening to such egg-humming, a drowsy sort of stupor would find you like a puppy in the snow, and you’d pull up the grass as a blanket and the leaves would move in such a way as to make puppet-shows from phosphenes across your eyelids. It was little suprise the park became a frequent place for lounging and pontificating, which is why Owen and Rissa were there, as their plans to save the world had not yet made it out of research and development. The notion of whether or not the world even needed saving came up and was quickly dismissed as irrelevant; a quest, being a quest, needs no such validation. Equally dismissable were notions that they weren’t cut out for such efforts, for although they had no superpowers per se, they had an admirable collection of non-super powers, summed up by Rissa’s quoting Drunken Master II: “A little drinking to help in crime-fighting is okay.” Plus, the gradual cartooning had assisted them with a super-idea, on which nearly all of cartoon physics is based: the notion of compressed space, or c-space. It’s with c-space that you can fit all of a tree’s roots into a teakettle without difficulty.

Here’s an example: here comes Paul Apostrophes, his head in a jar, which seems awfully improbable, until you consider that the jar is chock-a-block fulla c-space, where all his innards are stuffed. It’s c-space where your car keys went that one time, where the rabbit fits when the hat’s smashed, where all those bullets fired in late-night steroid-action movies go instead of hitting the leading mensch. It’s another discovery that would have made the front pages, had it not been for the control of all media from global networks to apartment complex newsletters by Sarah and Karen, secret rulers of the universe and owners of Rent ‘N Putt Video and Mini-Golf, whose courses have become world-renouned in mini-golf circles due to their use of c-space (which is why you can never make that fucking eighteenth hole waterfall shot). But how, you ponder, will the deus ex codex of c-space help our young heroes fufil their superheroic destinies? By use of what may possibly be the quintisential c-space embodiment: the portable hole, which are literally a dime a dozen across the swings and past the jungle gym at claude’s improbable mechanical delights, of which we take a slight digression to speak at some length of subjects pertaining to. Claude sells balloons to chilren ready to run from home, for which they give him stones they’ve held in their shoes all these years, stretched out in kid-time like a sweater you’ve outgrown. the kids take the balloons and go up, into the sky, out and away, until you can’t even see them by squinting. I’d tell you where they go, but that comes later in this story, and there’s no need to blow my whole proverbial verbial wad here.

Anyhows, so Owen and Rissa have this portable hole, which they’ve gotten no end of yucks out of by tossing it in front of passerby on the street, who fall all the way to China before being slingshotted back to where they were, the hole yanked away on yarn, leaving them a bit jetlagged but no worse for wear, mostly. Owen, giddy with power, tried to wear the hole on his stomach as a way of passing the middleman of his mouth in the eating process, but decided it felt “creepy”, at which point the two decided to get serious as to the potentials of the hole, which mostly brings us to now.

“Well, there’s no point in overshooting our abilities, so mayhaps we should start with saving something smaller than the world. Like oatmeal, say. Or Tenessee Ernie Ford! He could use some saving!”

“No no and no. Better we save somebody who really *needs* saving. And somebody close by, because we’ve got an eight dollar expense budget until that Macarthur grant comes through. Think locally.”

“Oakeley-dokeley.”

“You’re this close from being off the universe-saving team, Owen.”

The logical solution, certainly, was right across town, where no less a county-wide superstar than Fast Eddie Satan was serving an extended summer-school sentence for skipping 87 days last year while on tour. His partner, Merle Skyfish, got his mom to write him a note, explaining how he had “the nerves”, which was plenty suitable for his school, the Cedar Valley Learning Collective, a freedom-intensive program for autonomous self-generative processing teams. Ed, however, was doing an extended stint at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata, which is essentially a holding-pen for pre-teen visionaries and other problem cases. The missed days being problematic enough, Ed then compounded his woes via a run-in with his Consumer Responsibility instructor and a baseball bat, leading to his all-weekend “study sessions” with Mater Tenebrarum, the most vicious of the sisters. The school was positively impregnable from the street; the only way in at all was through the head office, which was only open to outside entrance during special events, such as dances. Saint Jude’s day was fast approaching, and so it was that Owen and Rissa spent the remainder of the day in the park, misdirecting children into hile Rissa backed him up on a bass Merle had lent her for the occasion, with percussion supplied by a bus fed on sugar and cooking oil trying to backfire the poison out of its fuel line. Aware there wasn’t much time before the unholy terror this spectacle induced wore off, she led the dazed sisters (and their first echelon of toadies, the Bown-Shorts) on a conga line directly inot the Enclosed Infinite Space, kicking the door closed behind thed running back to the gym in order to find Ed and ditch this creepy-ass school. Ed, unsuprisingly, had set out the dance by claiming religious practices forbade him to come within thirty feet of girls, opting instead to hide out in his room and play endless games of Devil Pig. Springing Ed, thus, was as simple as opening the door and leading him out through the pandemonium, despite Ed’s pleas to let him finish the End of Assyrians.

There is no end to the tests and demands on modern superheroes.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen: School
There are people who come in and out of our lives who aren’t friends, who we may not even really know, but who do or say something at a time when nothing could be more perfect and fitting and right and then leave us better than before. It could be something as simple as someone letting you into traffic, or giving you change for the phone, or giving up a seat on the bus. They may not even remember it ever happened, once it’s over. For reasons we may not understand, however, it becomes a model for the way we look at ourselves, at each other, an example of how strangers can care about each other in the most fleeting and permanent ways.

Owen was always terrified of the lunchroom. Ever since beginning middle school, seing his friends fall away into castes and cliques he knew no entry for, he constantly felt out of place without anywhere to go. Because his family lived out in the sticks, there was never the aukwardness of having to share a seat on the bus, of being turned away, as there were more than enough seats to keep him safe from the spitters, at least until he had to get off the bus and walk past the windows. During breaks between classes, he found he could walk the hallways, looking determined, drifting from drinking fountain to drinking fountain without being a still target or entering his next class too early. He spent his recess breaks in the library, where no one thought to look for him. For a time, he spent his lunch breaks in there as well, until the librarians informed him they would not let him miss lunch no matter how much studying he said he had to do. Owen thoguh maybe he could just get milk and drink it in one of the empty hallways, or out on the bleachers, but until the bell rang no one was allowed out of the cafeteria. Maybe he could hide in the bathroom down on the annex floor where nobody goes. Maybe he could just go home. But now he was in line, and monitors were watching, and it was too late to do anything but hope for a flu epidemic which would leave large blocks of valuable cafeteria real estate open. Owen remembers there was a casserole in the menu. They were out of chocolate milk. There was no place open to sit at all, unless someone was saving you a seat. Owen wandered up and down the tables, looking for the most inncouous place to hide himself, starting to sweat under his arms and down his back, turnign red in the face, feeling everyone stare, when he heard a voice say “Why don’t you sit here?”.

That was how Owen met Sarah Mossiman. He thought about inviting her to his birthday party, which was still two months away, but felt all shy and knotted up inside and thought it best to wait. He was certain there was plenty of time. Owen tries hard not to think about it now, but sometimes there’s no getting away.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen Covers His Books
When Owen was in middle school, it was mandatory that in the first week of classes all the students put bookcovers on all their textbooks. Some kids went to the store and bought bookcovers with pictures of horses or stock cars or Jack Calamity on the front. These were the kids who were generally involved in the quiet escalation of school supplies, incresingly ornate trapper keepers and pens which wrote in thirty different colors. Owen was always struck with the school supply fetish, which would come back to haunt him during his brief visits to the offices where Rissa would temp, but storebought bookcovers were generally weak, and had to be constantly replaced. Instead, Owen made his bookcovers from grocery bags, the Food King logo with “We Are The Meat People” turned inside, facing the cover, leaving a brown canvas with the name of the book on the cover and spine. This left Owen plenty of room for drawing little crucified stick-figures, or figuring out nested BASIC goto loops. When Ana was in the hospital, and Owen couldn’t get any sleep, he made bookcovers for every book he owned, and they’re all still on to this day.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen Gets A Cold
So not only did Owen get fired from Carpet Market, he also owed them two hundred for the missing carpet which was now cut all to shit and moved to his ex-girlfriend’s floor. Knowing full well Lou (this is the guy you see in the Carpet Market ads, with the crown and the creepy VHS special-effects) wasn’t above dragging this thing to court, so Owen set out to find a way of coming up with two hundred dollars as quickly as possible. The solution was obvious. Medical Testing Services down by campus wa hiring people with the flu to try an experimental vaccine; two days at a hundred dollars a day including meals and board. The only problem with this plan was that Owen wasn’t currently sick, but that was only a minor setback; this was March, after all, a season of cold and frost and disease. Owen got dressed after his shower without toweling off his head, heading out without coat or hat or scarf or mittens. The best way to do this, Owen thought, would be to find a sick girl and get some serious disease-ridden love action goin’ on. Marching through the snowdrifts in his Chuck Taylors, no longer able to feel his toes, Owen felt for the first time in a long time that his life, at least for now, made some kind of sense.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa
Owen’s mom has been really weird lately because she thinks maybe she’s getting into bondage, but Owen thinks really she just wants to become an escape artist. He was telling her about Houdini and how there’s no way what Houdini did was a sin against God, no way. This settled her quite a bit and the two of them worked on the harnessing designs until I came in and tried to explain to Owen my idea that the cross was really a means of preventing the bodily ascension of Christ, only the Roman guards who placed him on the cross really were Christians at heart and this is why he was crucified through the palms and feet instead of the wrists and ankles, as was standard operating procedure, and thus all the religious iconography and tales of bleeding stigmata are perfectly accurate, and then Owen’s mom got all freaked out again.

Speaking of Jesus, this was November First, which three years ago became Angel Day, where the spawn of Cedar Valley Conglomerated Church dressed their children in tinfoil haloes and old worn linens and marched them door to door to sing hymns and hand out toothbrushes. Vermin. Three of these mewling rugrats were at the door, singing a self-scripted hymn entitled "Proper Dental Attitude" when Owen invited them in and hacked them to little bits.

Owen wants me to tell you that’s not really true; he didn’t really hack any children up. We did slip them some Pixie-Stix and Mexican Skull Candy, though, and I’d like to think they’re currently bouncing around their minivans, tweaking on their belated sugar rush.

Owen was double-fisting cans of Original Scent today; there were special guests on their way, and the entire building had to be antiseptic’d for fear of the “musical entertainment and guests” coming down with some foul sickness. Kids in short-pants were standing around the entryway, sucking on lollipops handed out by a orange-vested and befez’d Shriner, and the employees were meddling just outside, smoking and debating over the day’s entertainments. An off-duty checked closets and supply rooms for threat and suspicious activity; finding none, he blew a wolf-whistle and the roadies entered, pushing flat black amps like monoliths. The preparations went on until just past lunch, at which point a large hairy man wearing as much gold as clothing (I’ll leave it to you to decide which way that scale sways) sweeps the area with a beeping box. The large hairy man decides, after listening to the beeping for ten minutes that the room doesn’t have “proper geometry” and that the sheer sonic force of a Cthulhu’s Fishermen show would destroy the building and everyone in it. The roadies, apparently used to this, begin to haul the equipment back out to the parking lot, the Shriner sighs and gives the remaining box of lollipops to a little boy in lederhosen, and we’re all subjected to the “backup entertainment” — Kathy from Rent N Putt (across the street, in Dowager Park) belting out Karen Carpenter emo-faves, all broken on her need to scream the high notes. Owen started thinking about maybe finding room in his schedule for that heroin habit he’s been planning for a year and shooed the kids away, back to the park, the entertainment over.

It’s Saturday, which means Owen has to baby-sit his cousin Shelly’s new baby. Well, *has to* isn’t necessarily accurate: it’s more his being less opposed to child-cleaning than the other potential applicants and the Gordon situation (that’s his nephew’s name, well, not Gordon Situation, which is a bit too nuevo-wavo for a three month old) neatly absolves him of looking for Saturday night entertainment. Getting to kick back in the deviously comfortable recliner, whip up formula and watch hours of satellite-delivered schlock films, unfortunately, eventually leads to self-introspection of the sort that wakes owen up at three am later that night, all itchy to fix his life and right all his wrongs. Gordon provides a solid and trustworthy oracle for future-plotting questions, a talcum powder and spit-up smelling magic eight ball.

“So Gordo, Beastmaster or Prom Night II?”

“agaph.”

“Beastmaster it is. The babies…I can see through their eyes…Okay, real question. This thing with me and school. So I’m trying to figure out what I’m gonna do after I grow up, which I was thinking I was gonna try to Section Eight out of in my basement but I’m kinda bored with that and it’s not getting me any chicks. And I don’t wanna clean up people’s shit forever. And I don’t think anybody’s gonna pay me to hang out and be cool, so I have to do this stupid school thing again. And It’s gonna eat up more of my life, and I’m gonna be here that much longer, and it means I have to go out and be a human. Which I’m kinda so-so at. I think that’s what’s bugging me. So you’ve been human for a few months now; is it cool or overrated?”

“apf. aaaaaaaaaa ah phft.”

“Yeah, maybe. But you still get to shit in your pants, so I’m gonna take that with…man, Mark Singer rules.”

“aialpff.”

Owen can skip rocks off the surface of the lake back behind his farm like a motherfucker. He hasn’t done it for a couple years, since the night he came back here, drunk, looking to find the place where his child-years fort was. There’s been no wind all day; earlier in the week there were terrible thunderstorms which pulled up trees down the road, but that front’s blown itself out, and now the lake is broken only by algae clusters and lillypads. Owen can hit the far shore, given the right-shaped rock, but all he’s found today is pebbles. Three skips is the best you can get with pebbles like this. Owen wishes he had a reason for feeling like he does. Some great catastrophe, some infinite loss. It’s essentially just another day, nothing particularly wrong, actually fairly good, as these things go. Most of the life things are taken care of, the papers signed, the i’s dotted, the t’s crossed. Everybody seems pretty well taken care of. Even the biologicals seem well, no vomiting all week, no illness, good food. Maybe these things don’t have reasons, answers. Maybe there’s no explaining b by means of a. Back during the drought, Miller put up barbed-wire across the diameter of the lake to keep his cows out of the access. Miller doesn’t bring his cows down this way anymore, not with the lake, not now that he can set them to graze out by the highway, but that fence is still there, sinking down about twenty feet out, coming back up about twenty feet from the far shore. Owen can hit the posts on the far fence with the small stones, three skips, every time. Every single time.

Owen’s family was so poor when they were young that his mother used to bind her children’s feet with duct tape so as to squeeze a couple more months of use from their shoes. That’s why he walks like that. Never would have guessed, huh?

There’s freighters leaving every two hours from the harbor, down the Mississippi, you can stow for ten bucks or a bottle of cheap bourbon, get down to St. Louis, where Owen has a couple friends farming pot and salvaging scrap from foreclosed farms. From there it’d be a two-day all-night burn straight across, over the mountains, to the ocean. Easiest thing in the world.

There were a gaggle of children in angel’s costumes today, tinfoil haloes and gossamer wings. Like it was supposed to mean something, or something.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

owen and rissa start an alternative rock ensemble
“Guess what it’s called? Go on, guess!”

“They don’t deserve to guess, Rissa. Fuck them squares.”

“No really, guess!”

“Give up, sqares? GIVE UP, because we’re called—”

“MY BUTT ITCHES!”

“Which is easily the greatest band name since the Pee-Pees.”

“Also because it’s true, which gives us a kinda Bruce Springsteen earnest quality to our alternative rock ensemble.”

“And ensemble is right, as we were originally going to be called Chas Feston’s Hot Jazz Trio, only Chas quit the band moments after answering our ad for an and I quote tormentedly handsome Chet Baker-like jazzbo with plenty of reefer.”

“We didn’t actually put the reefer part in the ad.”

“It was implied! Charley Beatnik has to blow his mind on the reefer for our Behind The Music expose to work.”

“See, we’re planning the whole thing out in advance. Owen’s gonna be the midwest kid with stars in his eyes and no real talent to speak of, I was going to be the aging punkrocker with dreams of one last shot at the big time, and fucking Chas Feston was going to be the hipster who gets lost along the way in the itchy sweater-like underworld of reefer addiction, but he ended up being just nowhere, man, just a big zero.”

“Chas Fenton! Rebel without a dick!”

“But don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it, because now we’re a duo. Duo of power!”

“Set your receivers for rock! Pants optional!”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Do Some Quick Surgery, Six
“Rissa, I accidentally snorted a worm and it’s in my brain!”

“Is it a superintelligent worm that will boost your mental powers to that of a god?”

“I don’t think so! I think it’s just a worm!”

“Hold on, I’m gonna go unbend a coat hanger. Just sit still.”

“It’s biting my parietal lobe! I’m gonna end up like Chekov when Khan put that thing in his ear! I MUST KILL KIRK!”

“Okay, settle down, tilt your head back, and whatever you do, don’t sneeze.”

“Hey hey hey! Are you not gonna sterilize that?”

“You’ve got a worm in your brain. I think we’ve already gone past the point of proper hygene. Stop squirming!”

“I can’t help it! You’re triggering motor responses!”

“I’m gonna trigger a moron response if you don’t…hey! I think I got it! Now to just yank really hard and…blamo! Iiiiiiis *this* your worm?”

“YES! Thank you thank you thank you!”

“This means you don’t get to take that sick day now, tho.”

“Oh, yeah, about that, I got fired and before you even say anything it wasn’t my fault.”

“Oh good lord.”

“Well, okay, so I’m supposed to read to children, right? And so, I mean, who wants to hear about some little goofy-ass talking dinosaur, so I go off about this kid who takes a dump so big he can ride it like a raft, which he does, down into the magic sewer.”

“You know this means you now have to go crawling back to Isaac Hauer.”

“Yeaaaaaaah, I know. Which is fine. Hey, can I borrow ten bucks?”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Clock Motherfuckers In The Head, Five
“So you ingrates probably don’t know it, and will probably never know it, but we saved the world.”

“And you weren’t even paying attention! Can you even fathom the ammount of hair-raising calamities we faced and conquered like a playground game of dodgeball!”

“Yes suh, while you were fixing a microwave burrito or talking to your mom on the phone we were insuring the safety of you and everyone you know for the remainder of the century, at least!”

“And how did we do it, Rissa?”

“Oh, you know how we do it.”

“We do it —”

“—by clocking motherfuckers in the head is how we do it!”

“That’s right, Earth, go on with your little lives and melodramas, we *allow* you to snuggle in the dryer-toasty comfort of nonchalance and self-importance, luxuries you can revel in because we made it so!”

“All of human history owes its continued existence to us!”

“And what do we ask these clowns for in return?”

“Not a god-damn thing. Their gratitude would sully our victory.”

“Besides which, we’ve still got work to do here. Every good saving of the world deserves a party to match, and you *know* we’re gonna fufil that end of the bargain, just as soon as somebody can come spring us from the pokey.”

“As my man Fidel said, history will absolve us. The US Government, on the other hand, has no vision or appreciation. The screws.”

“I regret nothing! I am not resisting arrest!”

“Eh, forget this. You make a bomb out of the toilet and some chalk and I’ll rig us a hanglider from the sheets. Punk as Houdini.”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Have A Bake Sale, Four
“Yeah!”

“Yeah!”

“Double-yeah, motherfuckers!”

“We cannot be stopped, for there is no stopping us! Public apathy and lack of funds may have spelled curtains for Nicolae Ceaucescu—”

“Well, that and the firing squad—”

“—it will not stay our path! We’re going hearts and minds on this one with the one thing which brings all people together!”

“And what would that be, Rissa?”

“Sugary treats! With handy history lessons on each napkin!”

“My, but this is a delicious brownie! And I didn’t know Warren Beatty was a Pinochet speechwriter!”

“It’s all true, and none of it is at all good for you, so you *know* it’s good! And at the Marinas-low cost of fifty dollars American for each hand-made treat, how can you afford not to stock up immediately?”

“Quantities limited! Order today!”

“Makes for great gifts! All funds go directly to the Owen And Rissa Travel and Defense Fund!”

“Do it today! We have places to be and soon!”

“Silence! Don’t tell them the plan! You’ll doom us before we even begin!”

“But they are weak and stupid, Rissa! They are only good for buying our tasty treats! They can do nothing to foil our plan!”

“Remember the ‘Dueling Breakdance Electro-Moles’ plan? Do you? Money in the bank until you squealed to those people from Mattel! Use your forebrain!”

“TASTY TREATS!”

“People of Earth! Do not fear the concoctions we have prepared for your entertainment and stimulation! Buy your salvation at cut-rate prices! Indulgences with each dozen!”

“Yeah!”

“Yeaaaaaaaaah!”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Lollygag Around And Really Don’t Say Much Of Anything, Three
“Good evening; Rissa here. I…am a genius.”

“And I’m Owen. I’m a boy.”

“And now that we’ve got our nod to our imporbable histories out of the way, we have a few points to make as to our not yet saving the world.”

“I mean, I don’t see *you* going out and doing it. So just settle down, already, with your ‘step up with the action!’ malarkey.”

“Hey, screw you, we’ve been busy, and not any of your candy-ass ‘I had to go to the library AND the post office today’ busy, I mean seriously busy, like we had to hire Paul Apostrophes to be our schedule-taskmaster and designer financier.”

“Which is super-easy to do, since he’s a head in a jar and thus not to be lured by the ways of the world, though he can be tortured with fish and ice cubes and little kids with loogies, but so can we, so.”

“All of which is simply to say that we’re on the go and living large and not just fiddlefucking around. Most people don’t realize how much preparation saving the world entails. The world is big!”

“And full of shit, too!”

“Here’s just one example. We know this girl who likes to climb up into trees and shine mirrors into the eyes of pilots in order to make them crash their planes. If we’re gonna save the world, like, the *whole world*, we’ll have to do something about her. Right?”

“It’s a god-damn shiteating moral quagmire, the world is.”

“So not only are we doing all this studying, we’re also getting into shape, because we’re gonna have to kick some ass, probably.”

“My shape’s an oval. I’m almost there.”

“We also need to start having better conversations. My speech is flabby lately, and Owen’s practically retarded.”

“It’s true! I’m just barely sure of what we’re talking about!”

“So don’t you pay no nevermind to all this hype about how we’re off the case, because we’re still here, getting our kung-fu correct. Not to mention my thirty hours a week at Rent N Putt, and Owen’s freelance modelling career. Next week we’ll save the world. Promise.”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen And Rissa Save The Universe, Two
“The weekend, according to the tyrrany of Objective Codified Time, extends from friday evening to monday morning, roughly. We defy Objective Codified Time!”

“Preach on, Rissa!”

“So with our Subjective Weekend, we did some looking at a few things when we weren’t up to no good and we came to a couple conclusions. First off, we learned that the problem with saying things and having people read them later is that if you keep whining like a crybaby anbout stupid shit you don’t actually care that much about, people eventually get upset with you, because they care about you, and unless you’re looking for attention or something it’s just a mess. So we’ve decided enough with that ‘first thought best thought’ prattle. From here on out, we actualy *say* things.”

“Yeah!”

“And that cuts both ways, as lately we’ve been really namby-pamby about saying things and believing in them, backing them up. Like we’re afraid to be wrong, or worse, afraid to not be wrong in the same way as the people we care about. But being that kinda noncommittal inoffensive friend is just lame and a big suck, so we’re done with that, too.”

“Yeah!”

“So none of this is of any great consequence. It’s just some shit we gotta get straight before we save the universe. We’d speak on, but we gotta get down to the mall to pick up our super universe-saving duds., and man, these things are so cool, it’s like some Al Green shit.”

“Personally, I think it’s more an early Isley Bros-via-Sly look, but you’ll see what I’m saying in a bit. Mall is go!”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

owen and rissa save the universe (one)
“Deny all you want, but deep in your colon you know perfectly well that there’s something unsightly, unhygenic, and pitiful about writing. Antisocial to the point that roadkill scavengers look like therapists, bitter enough to make south american nazis in hiding seem cordial, and generally as depressing as a visitation by leperous angels, writing essentially is the province of those who never did in life, thouse who think they can fool history and memory by stacking words the way rehab patients string beads. Say what you want about the intrinsic joy of creation, but you know perfectly well, looking back, that it’s about as satisfying as painting with spit.”

“Yeah!”

“Thus, Owen and I have taken matters into our own hands and declared this weekend the first annual Weekend Without Writing on the World Wide Web, or WWWWWW for short—”

“That’s pronounced ‘wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh’, by the by.”

“Good point, O. Get in touch with your legs! Skip out on a few hours of sitting in your room and scribbling like a dumbass!”

“Yeah!”

“We’ll be back to actually saving the universe next week. In the meanwhile, there’s a baggie fulla pills and three boxes fo shells with my name on it, and Owen’s got a double-shift at Food Jesus that’ll keep him busy all Saturday.”

“Yeah, but what the bossman don’t know is I’ll actually be spending those sixteen hours watching the complete works of Gary Busey back in the break-debriefing room, thanks to the new autoscrubber robot me and Josef rigged up. Fight the power!”

“So it’s up to you, kid, to get something equally depraved by Monday. Or we’ll bust some ass.”

“And don’t think we won’t do it. We’ve been eating this box of free ‘Steak In A Cup’ samples I stole from work and we’re all unsure just what kinda ‘flavour chemicals’ make up the ‘meat flavour’.”

“And get a job, you putz!”
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

An Introduction From Rissa
Hi, my name is Rissa and I’m a friend of Darren’s, and he and I talked a while back about writing and he told me about scrytch and though I don’t have an account or anything h’es been printing me out some. so anyway I’ve been reading some of the stuff of his he sent me and I wanted to write something so here it goes.

Here in Iowa there are these people called “weather spotters” who call into the tv center and report when the weather is bad. Iowa is big so it works out that people can keep an eye on these things. Only people would get bored or maybe just be sad and so they’d call in and report weather that was worse than it really was even if there was no bad weather at all, sometimes. sometimes they were just crazy and called in like grapefruit-sized hail but sometimes it was just enough to get interest up but not exactly be the truth, just a little exaggeration. So now all the tv centers have “official weather spotters” who apparently have to take this test or something or maybe be related to people who work there (I don’t know) so the weather people don’t pass along bad weather. But they still let the other “weather spotters” call and they just say it’s an unofficial report.

That’s what those stories made me think of.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen: Golf
Owen was sitting on the axe-modified couch, drinking cough syrup and wondering at his life’s smaller failings, when The Channel Channel informed him of a show he’d never heard of was soon starting on The Conglomerate Channel called, cryptically, Senior Golf [sic]. The Conglomerate Channel was the same channel Sebastian Hex was on, which led Owen to assume this mysterious Senior Golf aforementioned in the title was some sort of undercover detective, perhaps a spin-off character from an episode he hadn’t seen — or maybe seen and just not noticed, so undercover was this character! This Hispanic crimefighter who could disguise himself as anyone, anyone at all, infiltrating any organization or event in order to bring the villains to justice. “No one is above the law of Senior Golf!” Owen mumbled, grinning, waiting impatiently for the District Seven Sub-annex Extreme Horseshoe Quarter-finals to wrap up (Clete Tango, as always, had the whole thing in his back pocket; the long and sordid history of graft and corruption the District Seven Extreme Horseshoe division had become notorious for made the televised broadcast more a collective last known photo gallery than any sort of sporting event), wondering if he’d have time to call Jackson, resident expert on all things Hex-related, in order to get the scoop on this Golf character. Fortunately horseshoes was called on account of a bomb threat, cutting right into the first act of Senior Golf, which meant Owen had to guess at the missed introductory material — apparently the Senior was on the third green at St. Charles, disguised as one of the forty-eight golfers — or was he a caddy? Or was he a spectator? There was no way to tell at this point, the ingeniousness of the Senior’s disguise being undetectable. Owen instead looked for the ne’er-do-well who would be slowly pulled into the binding web of justice. With all the special guest stars, adding immensely to the feeling of realism which made the show so riveting (how could you not truly in your heart believe this man was out balancing the scale of justice?) the potential suspect could be anyone…but what is the crime? Will one of the pros end up face-down in a water hazard on the back nine? So far the only crimes committed have been those of good taste (one of the golfers has been kneeling and praying to one of the new gods before each drive) and diplomacy (one of the announcers has refereed to Latvian phenom B. Iarkho as being Estonian), neither of which need the Senior’s help. But are these clues, Owen wondered? Is there a subtle message being sent to the attentive viewer? Prayer…Latvia…Owen searched the crowd for Catholic dignitaries, and sure enough found a very casual-looking Cardinal Beseniata, flanked by equally casual-looking bodyguards, standing just behind the top at the seventh hole. One of the golf pros was going to kill the Cardinal! The leader had just played through the fifth hole, leaving precious little time for the Senior to act before the terminus had been reached. But who, and how?
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen and Rissa and Dwayne the Necromancer
The next time humanity has a need for absolute evil, Dwayne thought, they’ll have to come to me, as I have the one and only Brain of Hitler in a jar down in the root cellar, and with some Popular Mechanics-style fripjiggery I can make that thing talk and give orders and generally be loathsome and evil. Only it was much later after Jim hit that deer and ended up in the hospital that Dwayne actually found out that the pickled brain he swapped for a half-broken table saw is actually not the brain of Hitler at all, which (as we all know) was burned up in the Reich Chancellery after being splattered via application of gun to mouth, which left Dwayne feeling somewhat less important in a cosmic sense but prodded his interest as to whose brain he was caretaking, which (as you can’t very well go around asking in polite company) led him to the unarguable conclusion (unarguable from someone who hasn’t yet learned the horrible downsides to necromancy)that he would have to resurect the brain and find a way to ask its identity, because what other use does a brain in a jar actually have besides freaking out the grandkids?

Lou and Carla down at Supply Depot set Dwayne up with a line of credit and free use of the forklift, realizing that being able to add their byline to Dwayne’s possible cracking of the metaphysical wall would make them the one-stop source for every do-it-yourselfer. Dwayne was trying ot explain to Julie’s kids how a brain could a) get itself out of a sealed jar and b) eat off the fingers of children without a mouth when Carla called to tell him the Feds were asking her why they needed to order two metric tons of lawn fertilizer. Fortunately Dwayne had a plan and told Carla to hold them off long enough for him to get his shotgun loaded and the truck running. The kids, who thought this was all terribly exciting, started running around the house screaming and waving their hands, which freaked out the Feds, which led to a lengthy standoff while Dwayne drove out to the barn to get the Revitalizing Tonic, which tastes an awful lot like lime vodka and sweetarts. With the brain under one arm and the tonic under the other, Dwayne only had two people he could call for the kind of help he’d need.

“Yeah!”

“Triple-yeah, motherfucker! This is Rissa the benificent!”

“And this is Owen the hydroephalytic!”

“What you need, Dwayne?”

At which pont Dwayne unloaded the scoop on our heroes, hipping them to the potential miraculous breakthroughs science had in store if only he could find a safe house for a couple hours where the fuzz wouldn’t find him.

“It should go without saying that coming here is out of the question. However, for a small cut of the profits arranged through your resurrection trick, we can arrange for you to stay with an associate for up to three days.”

“Perfect. Perrrrrfect. Where to go?”

“We’re going to put you in Dave(1)’s basement. He will object. Do not worry.

But Dwayne did worry, worry and take hits off the bottle of Revitalizing Tonic.

There is a house in a row of houses which all look the same. It makes buying furniture easier, as the move from one house to the next requires the most marginal of rearrangements. This is the appeal of these houses; what they lack in personality and warmth they gain in simplicity and an instant-home feeling of great comfort to people who move often. More hotels than homes, the cheapness of the contracting and supplies are nowhere reflected in the rental price, bolstered by the nearness of schools and churches and grocers with the same interchangable demeanor and layout. While we can argue all night over the sort of psychic effects such a non-place can have on its inhabitants, there is no question of it being an ideal place to hide mad scientists, as our old friends at The Museum for Questionable History will attest. Dwayne, neither being that mad nor that scientify, didn’t need flight out to Columbia or Brazil; anonymous suburbs were much closer at hand for Owen and Rissa.

Dave(1) was on very thin ice with his wife, at this time; not long hence they would be divorced after his genetic failure to keep the children’s wear buisness out at the mall open. He would then move back in with Dave(2) and Seth in the trailer in the hills. But this is all in the future, and of marginal interest to the narrative; it is mentioned only insofar as to explain the dialogue between husband and wife upcoming.

“No. This man is not staying here. Not even in the basement.”

Listen, it’s just a day or two, it’s not even.”

“You don’t even know him!”

“Oh, that’s not true, Dwayne and I met that one time at Sheyllah’s party back in ‘89 when Eco-Safe Lobotomy played, only they weren’t called that then, they were, like, Tissue Damage Monthly, or something, because that’s when.”

“Shut up about you and your fucking high school friends. It’s been nearly a decade and you’re still talking the same stupid shit about you and your old sories and expecting me to care. And even more than care, to say it’s okay for people you don’t know to come in here and do God only knows what and pray he doesn’t leave any stains. What the fuck, Dave?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t about Dwayne at all, is it? This is about me fucking up being assistant manager, that’s just, that’s fucking great, I can’t do anything.”

This went on for the better part of an hour, when Dave finally realized the simple way out, and told dwayne he could stay in the minivan for a couple days, which placated his wife and gave dwayne enough space to bring the brain back to life. So score one for yuppie compromise. There was no way for the brain to communicate without a mouth, or at least an appendage of some sort, so the hunt was now on around campus to see if anybody had a skull they could borrow. This took all of two hours, including an extended break at the bookstore for necessary medical texts and ephedrine on Rissa’s u-bill. Dr. Sela, who at the best of times can be said to have rather shaky ground from which to practice medicine, not only had a skull for use, but an entire debrained head available from the Scott Moore Cloning Project (‘97), which was pretty creepy but certainly perfect for the evening’s needs. I have been advised not to speak overmuch of the actual rebraining and reanimating process which took place in the back of Dave(1)’s minivan, due to the dicey legal attributes and due to the just general ickines of the process and also due to the fact that no reader worth their eyes could suspend the kind of disbelief this process instils in even the most angelbelieving alien-worshipping audience. So we’ll just say it happened, and go on to the big reveal, wherein -

“IT LIVES!”

“No, that’s just me, I’ve got my fingers in there.”

“Put it down! You’ll infect it with your fecal fingers!”

“Illness is the last thing this poor bastard has to worry about. Turn the pump on.”

“Is this an aquarium pump? Did you get this from my house?”

“What I steal of yours is none of your business! Give me the hose!”

“Is it supposed to bubble likethat?”

“Stop touching it! Leave it alone!”

At which point, the head says “Could you please stop touching me, please?”, and that’s how Owen, Rissa and Dwayne the Necromancer first met Paul Apostrophes.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #

Owen: Comix
When Owen was in middle school he had a foolproof system for stealing Conan comics from The Iowa Distribution Center, which was a generic dispensary of generic drugs, generic foodstuffs and bulk grains, which wasn’t yet a hip thing to do, store-wise, stuck somewhere between the advent and the proliferation of the local yupified whole-grain all-natural neighborhood grocer. IDC was just across from Ben-Jakob’s junk dealership, where next to a rack of ten-cent paperbacks where Owen picked up the bulk of his education Ben-Jakob wrote a monthly newsletters to his notions of current fiction; always unreadable and crammed with minute schematics for “fictive strategies” by which nearly any book would reveal a hidden meaning — generally the impossibility of mediated communication, which struck Owen as gypish in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. That didn’t keep him from picking up a copy each month, as when folded in half it provided an optimal carrier for stolen comics. Owen always picked up Sophisticated Gadabout Comix, which later corroded into an abysmal corporate shill after Infernal Press was bought out and bulk-replaced with graphic design BAs guaranteed to draw Jephed Manyana in that month’s ad-heavy fashions and write Mashed Potatoes as “really super into” the twenty-hour work week the House tried to slip into the ass-end of…I’m rambling. The point is Owen grabbed Sophisticated Gadabout and the Conan comix, when they had either particularly weird-looking demons or scantily-clad warrioresses, which was generally the case. Owen snuck out the back door, never well-guarded; who’s gonna steal wheat? Owen would walk slow and steady over to the playground at Our Lady of the Clotting Stigmata, always empty on the weekends, pleased as punch to sit on the merry-go-round (well, it wasn’t a merry-go-round according to the nuns, who called it the Wheel of Fortune and tried to make certain questionable moral lessons stick through visual and visceral example) and try to make his brain a more interesting place to live.

One of the odder things about buying books at Ben-Jakob’s is that Ben-Jakob not only read all the books before selling them, but made extensive notes in the margins and end-pages as to the validity and quality of the statements made; many people didn’t care for this at all but Owen was fascinated, as the notes added a second palimpsetic level of interpretation, which invariably made absolutely no sense. This was ignoble with interesting books and made uninteresting books suggest a level of interestingness so insidious it could not be stated directly, or even indirectly. This was all fine and good until Owen had to write book reports, in which Billy and Susie were actually personifications of Clara and Pascuel Rosas, once-married human cannonballs who dueled over the heads of rapt and terrified audiences, slashing at each other with each pass with rapiers, until a miscalculation by Pascuel the two collided mid-air, the bodies and swords falling into the scattering crowd below, leading to an outlawing of shooting people out of cannons (but not, Owen gleefully noted, shooting people *with* cannons), which made both strict cannon-based and variant catapult and rocket-strapped projections quite the rage with the young people for the next few seasons, which is how it was that the only Rosas offspring, Manuel, came to the states and took up the familial occupation with the World’s Most Depressing Circus, utilizing his profession in order to tell the story of his parents’ deaths, bringing him into tightening romantic spirals with his assistant Kristin, who played the role of Manuel’s mother in their re-enactment. This essay, like most of Owen’s others, got solid failing marks until Owen stopped telling the secret histories of the Scholastic Book Club series and just copied information off the back.

Owen kept the real reports for himself. He still has them in a series of spiral notebooks in a box in his closet. Sometimes he cribs details from them when he tells stories today.
(12:09.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #