Thu, 19 May 2005

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] #