Thu, 19 May 2005

Revisitation Seven: Everything Burned Away
(original version by allida. not complete.)

1. in which the limits of severity relationships are tested and disproven

The last time I saw her before I left for Minnesota she was in the corner of the living room she had made into a sort of open-ended bedroom, sitting on a large throw-pillow in front of my old typewriter I had given her after I got the first computer, propped up on a slab of pine she had pulled out of some neighbor’s garbage and painted black-purple with small calligraphic symbols in silver paint, up on cinderblocks over her collection of books on VLF analysis, piano-tuning, abstract taxidermy. For months now we had some sort of unspoken connection above and beyond the strange late-night conversation level we’d been at all year, so a final conversation was obviously fraught with promise, and a delicate thing. Unfortunately, while taking a deep breath to steel my nerves, I inhaled too deeply and now had a booger caught in my throat.

“I have some things of yours still. I, if you want ‘em back, I put ‘em in that bag over there.”

“That’s okay, you can haaaaaaaaach. Haaaaaaaaaaaach.”

“What are you doing?”

“I have a haaaaaaaaach. In my throat. Haaaaaaaach.”

“Uh. You want a glass of water or something?”

“No, I’m fine, it’s no big haaaaaaaaaach.”

Certainly there were graceful ways out of this situation, but something in my brain flipped on and all the long-standing tense energies of this mess between us reverted me to age seven.

“It’s a booger, is the thing. Throat-boogers are the worst. Haaaaaaaaach.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“It could be worse!”

“You know, I have some wine Sarah left over here, maybe we should—”

“Like a dingleberry, but in your throat, is what it’s like. Poop-booger in my throat! I could fish for it with some dental floss and gum! Help, help, I’m trapped in the thoat and only you can save me!”

“What?”

“You must rescue the poop-booger from the icy depth of my throat! Diver down! Diver down!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Lo, the fool to go looking for mouth-treasure! You never should have left the safety of the sinus, where your snot-bride waits for you and pines and turns her engagement band around her ringfinger! The old booger seamen told you to never go over the horn, but you were brash, and now you must be saved or else haaaaaaaaaaaaaaach!”

“You should probably go now. And take your shit with you.”

“Can I borrow a pipe cleaner, or some string, or just anything?”

“Out! Out the door now!”

I didn’t see her again for two years, by which time she was married.

2. in which a feast of the green milk takes place in the root cellar

Upon the walls, where the twin mathematicians had used twigs and coal to devise this gallery of missteps, brought up on skeletal wings, clustered like emptied ships on a nodal tide, wherein graven images of Rv. Emersohn depicted scenes of his rerisen wife, led back to her love via a series of olafactory hints, yet there is no means of escape from the forrest, maps tattooed in his wrinkled palms, endless paths circling upon themselves, and the snow thickens outside the kitchen window, where the darkness swallows up the moon and hides all transgressions against the fallen god in the colliseums where rebuilt men fight against horses and dogs with briars caught in their coats while the villagers listen outside the gates, drunk on apple wine and rancid pudding, waiting for the light.

Surgery was an invention by an alien race whose genitals were formed inside their bodies, like any other internal organ, requiring a steady and swift learning of surgical strategy in order to, if nothing else, hold off blood loss for long enough to mate and spawn. They later taught this skill to a race of aliens whose children were too large to leave the body vaginally, and thus had to split the belly of the mother like an egg in order to escape the womb. They were all very pleased with the new technology, but not nearly as pleased as they were when they started letting the humans have their babies for them. That was a glorious day across the galaxy, indeed.

He took his breath from out of his body and put it into his child.

I am the creator, and the creator is to put breath into the bodes of the dead, put form to the lost and missing.

3. in which a number of diabolical schemes are related to the reader

Seth sat at tne far end of the drafting table on the raised platform, possibly once a stage, just in front of the entryway to Kara-Bakos, when a new girl walked in, pushing back the pneumatic door with both hands, a small bag hanging off her left shoulder.

“Is Ben-Jakob here?” she said, staring up into the rafters, where the third floor was cantilevered off the back wall, rope ladders hanging from its black underbelly, lights flickering somewhere inside. “I thought this was the place.”

“This is the place, but he’s gone. I don’t know when he’ll be back. You looking for something?”

“Yeah. I’m not sure what yet, though.”

“You can look around. You need any help, just ask. If you don’t know how something works, don’t pick it up.”

“Like that thing hanging off your neck? What is that?” she said, reaching across the table to take the strands of aerogel fiber wound around Seth’s neck between her fingers, suprised at how soft soft and how heavy it was.

“This is prototype for mutable jewelry, is my guess. It uses precise body temperature as a random number generator seed, which gets sent as expansion distance for each cluster. So it gets bigger or smaller depending on body heat. They’re quite fashionable around here. I don’t know what they’re originally for, these buggers, and they are damned heavy, but hey…it looks rockin’, don’t it?”

(Jesus God, Seth thought to himself, I can’t beleve I just said “rockin’”.)

The new one looked across at him, her eyes aglow with amusement. “Not really, but hey…convention is as it will be, eh? Hey, what is that one there, kinda ‘L’ shaped one on your right hip?”

“Don’t know. I like the way it fits in my hand though, must have once been some whosibob to massage your hands with, maybe for astronauts or something. See this little buttony thing here? If you push it, it vibrates and blows…”

“Vibrates and blows?” she quered skeptically. “Let me see it, it could be useful, if you get my drift?”

The aerogel necklace around Seth’s neck pulsed madly.

“I don’t mean like that, I mean, well.” He paused and debated internally, as if it were a huge decision. This was the first time Ben-Jakob left him in charge of the store, and while he took a small thrill in playing his records over the PA and taking calls from weird cryptic booksellers, he was still nervous as hell something would get broken. “Fuck it, here you go, maybe you can get it to work.”

She took it in her hand and looked at it. As the button depressed the pointy metal part rotated with its castelations whirring around. The part in her hand vibrated, and the part behind with the bars on it pushed some air out at her. She looked more closely and a strand of her hair landed square against the screen and broke off. It was suctioning in not out. She turned it over again and looked at the pointy part. There were holes in it a half-inch above the castellations, with three nubs along the top. Looking at the bottom again she noticed a round bulge mirroring the castellations on the top, which she pulled at with her other hand. A hidden door opened, revealing several long twisted rods and a foursided angular doohicky, all of which fell out of the compartment and onto the floor.

“Awwwwww, fuck, just give it back to me,” Seth moaned.

“No, wait, I think I figured something out…”

She took the castellated thing and put the tip of it into the hole at the pointy end of the larger object and turned it left. The three nubs moved outward. She turned it right and they moved inward. She picked up the long rods from the floor and put one into the pointy tip of the ‘L’ object. She tightened the nubs using the castellated object and pushed the button under her hand. The rod spun, emitting a low tone they could feel in their muscles.

She purred in counterpoint to the hum and announed “This is perfect, this is just the sort of weird fetishy object I was looking for, you could really do some amazing work with this thing. How much you want for it?”

Seth unconsciously touched his necklace, feeling it swell beneath his fingers. “Tell you what. You take it, and when you feel like you have something that would be a fair trade, bring it in and we’ll call it even.”

“I’ve gotta give you something now, though, I don’t want to just walk out with it.”

“You can give me fifteen cents, to be returned to you on payment.”

The new one smiled, and Seth barely noticed when one of the back bookshelves collapsed.

In the back of the train, where unemployable superheroes perform mutant tricks for spare change, she sat turning the item over in her hands, the beginnings of ideas gathering in her head as to potential uses, unthinkable options. Across the aisle a touseled girl with white skin that almost glows either with joy or pain keeps looking at the new girl, her eyes unwavering, sparkling with reflected light from the glass of the window as the night pours out past them, streetlights and neon like bioluminescent gills atop some giant deep-ocean manta. Someone she should know. Some courer from some other life, sent to give a signal, a notice. Maybe. The girl looks away, out the window, at some vague point in space, just like everyone else does. The new girl removes and inserts the rods into the end of the device, without looking, learning it in the muscles of her hands.

“Password?” the door asked the new girl, in a soft ring-modulated hum.

“White ghost white ghost white ghost”, she whispered, just loud enough so the clicking noises she made in the back of her throat, the real password, were audible for the security system. The door opened with a click, and hummed slightly, the sound she had replaced all the door system’s vocabulary with. Talking houses made her lonely. She made tea and sat in the bay window, watching the self-cleaning glass chase smudges across the surface, until the sun went down.

While holding the object in her hands, she had a dream of large ships out on the ocean, where long stone pillars came up out of the water at disjointed angles and reached up into the cloud-cover. The pillars were covered in small hooks, upon which prior sailors had tossed rope-nets which held things she couldn’t quite identify. She saw the ships were without crew, drifting between the pillars. She tried to bring herself in closer, close enough to identify the ships, or the nets, but she was caught in something, held midway between the clouds and the ocean.

When she woke it was almost eleven, and the device was warm in her hands, emitting a chordal tone, and a light, white to yellow warm on her face, reflected light making the room golden, the floor coppery wood glistening, and she became mesmerized, just for a moment, as she realized the device was shining a light directly upon her eyelids.

She thought of something he told her, before he decided he really wasn’t as into her as he originally thought, before she stepped into an endless recursion of stupid stupid stupid stupid like an endless loop that tastes of copper and vomit in her memory, before something got lost in her and she forgot what it meant when he said this is as far as this is going to go, she thought of something else, something he said, he said, he said the things that you touch are the things you become.

She closed her eyes again, and saw the light come shining, come shining all around.

4. in which hollowed eggs are used as models for improbable fruits

“One of the levitation machines got stuck in the tree, and so, so it tried to release itself, only its depth-sense must have been damaged, because it pulled off its own antennae, and then the back-servos kicked in and now there’s fucking levitation debris all over the backyard, and I really don’t need this today, I just, why can’t I have a day where I don’t always have to keep dealing with things all the time, where I can just get—”

“It’s just hard, because there’s always this, you know how it—-“

“It’s not hard for you! Everything is so easy for you all the time!”

“You’re still there, you get to, like, schedule and do what on your time but I’m in the car all day, okay? I mean all day I’m in the car driving to Carmel and back because they can’t get the prints to take, three times today and it’s just not even…it’s…what time is it?”

“I don’t know what—”

“Whatever time it is! And I need to keep doing it! Every single day!”

“Okay, so, nobody is any better than anybody, I’m not even saying it’s you, I’m just I just want to not always do this. You know?”

“I know. Oh God, I could write a book on how I know.”

“Yeah. It’s just so.”

“So, it’s all over the backyard?”

“Well, mostly just by the corner which is where it hit and then some around there, where the garden was.”

“Is it on fire, or just?”

“No, no, there’s like this foam it’s filled with that expands when, but the foam, it’s blue, right? And now that it’s getting to be noon it’s getting warm and, so parts of it are flaking off, so there’s all these blue flakes all over the place.”

“Like snow?”

“(laughs) Yeah! Exactly like snow! Only it smells like bleach!”

“Don’t eat it!”

“Are you mental? Like I’m going to eat blue crud that came out of some camera thing that crashed in the tree.”

“Is there somebody to call?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I called you.”

“Yeaaaaaah, of course it was.”

“It was! There was—”

“Oh, you know? I bet Seth would come over and clean all that up if you let him haul the debris off, he’s always scrounging for that kind of thing.”

“Is that legal?”

“Well, that’s not really our problem, I mean, I doubt they want to even say anything about their super-secret levitation machines.”

“Not very secret.”

“Fuck no, they’re not.”

“Heh.”

“So. So I’m pulling up to the building.”

“So I should let you go, and also what’s Seth’s number?”

“It’s on the thing. The fridge thing.”

“Okay. So. So I’ll see you on Thursday?”

“Yeah, Thursday night. Maybe we can do something, or something.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay, I’m gonna go now.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitaion Six: The Highway Of Mirrors
(original list of ten statements by k. johansen)

One: A woman opens a frozen dinner and finds inside the perfectly preserved hand of a six month old baby.

Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was considered by many to be the greatest anatomist of his time. Developing a personal method for the preparation and preservation of anatomical specimens, he was often used as a mortician for Dutch heads of state. The multitalented and just plain weird Peter the Great, who had been a fetishistic collector of strange items since childhood, was assembling the first museum in Russia, the Kunstkammer at St. Petersburg, wherein the European cabinets of wonders (Wunderkammern) collections of strange artifacts of nature were displayed side-by-side with current and classic artworks. These museums, with their bizarre anatomical displays, became the model for the “secret museums” of the next century, the precursors of current pornography collections. Peter invited Ruysch to assemble a collection for the museum’s Round Hall, consisting of his now-famous glass jar prepared infants, decorated in lace and beads, preserved according to his private specifications. Also on display were Ruysch’s tableaux made from the skeletons of deformed infants upon a bed of coral, shells and preserved organs, often posed as moral fables, playing bone-sculpted instruments. None of these still exist, having been destroyed in the siege on St. Petersburg, though drawings of the collections by Adrian Backer and Jan van Neck do still remain. After his death at the incredibly advanced age of 94, Ruysch’s daughter took over his profession, having learned his methods and aesthetics, completing a series of preparations for the King of Poland. Later her work would be passed from museum to museum, wunderkammern to wunderkammern, a piece eventually ending up in the Microsoft of oddity-displays, PT Barnum’s circus. History loses track of the Ruysch lineage at this point, but research I’ve been doing in the third floor at Kara-Bakos leads me to believe the tradition of anatomists in this bloodline continued, doing less publicized work, spending time collecting specimens in the Siberian city of Inkutsk, considered by many historians the most crime and violence-prone city of the past five hundred years. With the advent of recording media, the Ruysch bloodline was able to make temporary displays preserved via modified ferrotype images with a positive image cast on tar-blackened iron sheets. While others in this century would utilize the Ruysch material as inspiration such as Joel-Peter Witkin, Anderes Serrano, and Max Aguilera-Hellweg (as well as false imitators who make infant models from plastics, whose names do not deserve to be mentioned), I believe there has been a secret monitoring of what are now called “dead areas”, places which are no longer inhabitable, with documentation of those who live on the outskirts of such areas collected and shown to private collectors, the ghost-memory of Bhopal, the socketless skulls of those who still live near the “elephant’s foot” of radioactive material at Chernobyl. The outcry of safety and decency which caught up with Damien Hirst’s leaking bisected cow display obviously cancel out legality of work such as this, and so the team of assembler-anatomists must pass materials surrepeticiously, hidden inside packaging. Josef, whose skeletons of unreal animals seems a wan shadow of this work, had been hunting for proof of this thesis for years, up to the day of his death. Alas, he was not the one who recieved the mislabeled hand-part, sent to Susan Hinds, now convinced the fetus she aborted years ago is coming back to her, one piece at a time.

Two: Anna May Coulter, age 19, believes that God has been speaking to her on her cellular telephone. He is telling her that he has great plans for her, and she must listen carefully.

“Resurgat: it will rise again. Nested wheels above the horizon, yurei no zu, an apparition, stray fate, einfall. VISION FINAL death’s head moth [acherontia atropus] elohim [diamond] 24:00:00 corpus incorruptible complete union — love is an engine of unfulfilled desires by which all things continue in motion as opposed to stasis of completion. The state of everlasting frission, conduits, cells, balances.

  1. It is difficult for us to gauge the health and mental state of the Final Goddess, as her steps precede ours, wind-quickened, beyond us;
  2. and we did set out across the city, the electric cable ley-lines, the terror of the little animals in the trees whose frozen postures mark her wake;
  3. and there was the left glimmering of her beauty in the shimmer of shopwindows, and the forgottenfulnessing of the Unknowing, the crack in their thoughts where the missing time gaps;
  4. and we utilized the God Tracking System scanning out into the aether, a tracing of her area, from whence the Spirit manifests its Will through the Final Goddess.

“Cell-digita geistesblitzen. To visit your earth as ten carrier-angels in ten forms of carrier-moths, disguised in plain sight. Sic I tur ad astra: vision first luna moth [actais maenas] zilm [talc] 22:14:03 [a gift of dust-pollen on the front window, pupil follow flightpath wherein transfer-shape imprinting closes inside hinterbrain] within the amass of clouds. Spiralcirclestairway, a tunnel in time. A warning, a kunstwollen, a shrieking of sightless cave-birds.”

  1. Step forward, against the automotive tide, against the mass of the mob and the pox of their Voices, and with a cleansing of one’s sight the traces of her messages will linger, a traceable trail;
  2. and so it will pass that the strata of blood on which this daemonic false earth is fed will open out, and the Light will reach into you;
  3. as you are not a Holy or proper thing for simply possessing skin and breath;
  4. you are a bowl, a scrim, a dish for sifting transmissions;
  5. you are a vessel for the signal.

“Mansur al-Hallaj, “Kitab al-Tawasin”: moth to lamp to retell to others (visions, star-bound incidents/true faith within flame. Caught between sky and earth, vision second new Mexico owl-eyed moth [antheraea polyphemus olivacea] arelim [zinc] 22:21:02 purification of base materials: the pearl, the ambergris, the heart.”

  1. And so it is now that we obtained confirmed Vision of the Final Goddess, at the place where the Fourty-Fifth and the Vojtech streets meet,and did approach with much caution;
  2. as she continued to listen to the Voice, and was informed;
  3. and she saw us, and reached out with her free hand, as to touch,
  4. and through a hole in the firmament there came a storm of roses, and snow, and the circular wing-strategies of a million million moths.

Three: An old man has been waiting patiently to die for three years now, eating nothing, drinking nothing. He does not know that he has died every morning, to be resurrected after dinnertime through the prayers of a Navajo woman he does not know.

There is, in this world, a series of invisible knotted connections between all things, and should one follow any strand long enough, they will come across everything which has ever lived, has ever been formed, has ever held together against decay and time. The character of any single thing is echoed in others, distant in space and intention, connected only by the most hidden of shared traits. The failing of the alchemists comes from a generalization of Platonic forms, of recurring attributes sharing certain celestial energies, and it is only as time staggers forward that we see the reverberations not in standard forms such as the foot, or the datura plant, or the black and yellow humors, but in specific elements which cannot be generalized. This sort of web is so expansive that the encyclopedic notion of the Renaissance is thwarted by a Pataphysical schema of the unrepeatable experiment, of the singularity present in all things, blurring into other forms before our small water-damaged brains have time to hold down the image, the memory. Thus it is only through an appeal to a crystalline intelligence beyond our abilities to do the sort of processing necessary to discover these connections, the scaffold of support around each of us we only sense through what masks as chance. The flat expanses of desert in the American Southwest, a means of accessing information through physical location, the consciousness altered by the shape and sound of the earth, provides a sort of echo-chamber, a method of shifting outwards in order to view processes, spot connections in a paranoiac-critical manner, and attempt to use certain technologies in order to affect secondary objects and therefore affect sympathetically, along these arteries of light-thought, the primary object. In this case, there have been, since the beginning of our presence here, a series of beings who (knowing or not) are designated as barometers of the continuation of life on this planet. There has been rumor of this collective before: the council of the birds and Farid al-Din Attar’s Simurgh mentioned in Lives of the Poets, Balzac’s “Thirteen” mentioned (and then, strangely, dropped) in Histoire des treize, through the increasingly paranoid theories of the masters of the world. This, of course, is all foolishness. There is no direct control, there is only the unknown echo, and the hung corpses of all those who attempted to seize direct control should be cleaned and displayed so the practitioner does not forget. In this desert, amid the white sand and the geologic attention-traps, Parsons’ gates, Oppenheimer’s spiralpsychosis, the skeletons of lost bankrobbers and scrubbed traces of disappeared civilizations and skylights, a woman keeps bringing a small wizened man back from the dead, making him one of the re-rises, the eroded memory, the trap of the spirit between worlds. Each of us is presented, at some point in our lives, with a decision, a choice of actions, and it is this solitary moment which decides our fate, the fate of those we share the connection with, a circuit of sorts. This man’s defining moment has not yet come, three years too late, and with his connection to the earth as a whole comes a necessity for proper action on his part. Years the desert woman has spent attempting to guide him toward the right choice, speeding up the process, but time has moved too slow and his body had been moved to a place where the passage station of heaven has not been able to find him, the infernal doktors who drain the skulls of nursing-home patients hiding their depraved laboratories beneath displacement rooms and secondary curse-prayer generators. It took the Navajo woman so long to find him again, held at the end of his life, bringing him back and trying to whisper consolation into his ears, that the cost will be worth the gift, that soon the bardos will welcome him, and his work will be completed. He hears these words like fractured transmissions, and believes them, but sometimes he forgets, as the brain comes undone, and he is afraid.

Four: She puts her hand into the bathtub, and fourteen thousand tiny black eels burrow into her skin. She smiles, my babies, I love you all.

So get this. Those goth kids who had taken to imitating gargoyles up on the corners of the building, the ones everybody thought were an omen of mass-goth suicide cultism but were actually content to stare at passerby and make goof-scary faces for hours on end, anyway one of the littler ones fell off and landed on my fire escape, breaking his fool leg, so I’m trying to carry him out only he’s wearing this weird fake-leather thing all slick from the rain so I keep dropping him on his arm, which leads to terrible screaming attracting my landlady who starts pounding on the door while I’m trying to drag this stupid kid inside leaving a trail of white base back to the window, and by the time the ambulance showed up it was all I could do not to get arrested, though the crazy landlady is still all like how I fucked up and she should kick me out and how I owe her, now. So she tells me she needs a ride out to the docks by the old prison, and, y’know, whatever, fine. So she’s in the car, and she’s rubbing this salve into her arms, her hands, she says it’s moisturizer, it opens up her pores, and I try to listen to the Homeless Gladiator matches, only there’s some kinda low-end nature broadcast about moths that keeps cutting in, so I fiddle with the knob until she starts screaming “Stop! This is it! My babies want the water!” and runs out of the car, up to the edge of the dock, and starts moaning and carrying on. So I go up to see if she’s throwing up, or whatever, and there’s, okay, there’s eels coming out of her skin, falling down into the river. “Run free, my babies! I will be back for you tomorrow to take you home! I love you forever!” she screams, and I just got back in the car and drove away fast as I could.

I get a call from her again, the next night, and I tell her I don’t want any part of it, but she threatens me with being out on my ass, and being between careers I realize I’m not far off from fighting genetically fortified floam-eating sewer rats and disfigured children with canine teeth, so I go up and visit her in her tiny rooftop room. She asked me to watch the bath drain, making sure things are okay while she goes out to check the stupid goth kid out of the hospital. So I hang around and drink her coffee and talk to a couple of the remaining gargoyle kids, who mostly want to know if I can score them some ibogaine, when the roof-room begins shaking and I run back to see thousands and thousands of eels begin to flood up through the bath drain, up through the toilet, up through the sink. I start bringing in water and pouring it on them so they don’t suffocate, but there’s so many that I yell for the gargoyle kids to help, only they’ve been posing for so long they fall down screaming about pins and needles, while I’m getting out bowls and glasses to put eels in, until they stop, settle, and I dump them all in the bathtub, closing the drain and filling it up near the top, just as she comes storming in, screaming, putting her arms in the water, and the eels crawl back inside her skin, nesting in her organs, and the gargoyle kid she brought back from the hospital and the others from the roof and I just stand there, amazed, while she coos to her babies that it’ll be okay, the bad man is gone, they’re safe now.

I still live in that building, and I still talk to the gargoyle kids who hang out on my porch and buy my drugs, and I’m even starting to get less weirded out with helping my landlady and her eel-babies, now that she’s agreed to pay for my help in bottled water.

Five: While he is moving, he knocks over the urn bearing the ashes of his uncle Ray. When he bends over to clean it up he discovers it is actually full of cocaine and a note with a scribbled telephone number.

(Aspen Colorado, August, 1975)

“You need to get over here, I think I just made us rich, my man.”

“Rich like how rich? Like big score rich or like we can party this weekend rich?”

“Rich like we’ll never have to pay for coke again.”

“I’m hearing you, man. Keep going.”

“So my bitch of a girlfriend threw up all over the back seat of Juliette again, and I’m telling her I’m done taking her home, she can walk for all I care, and I spend half the day scrubbing at the leather, trying to get that fruity-drink bile smell out, but nothing doing, is what I’m saying.”

“Sure man. Puke in the car. I’m with you.”

“So I’m like the motherfuckin’ master chemist though, mixing shit in the garage, some Borax and some turpentine and stuff because all this might really fuck up the leather I thought about later but at the time I’m just super mad, so it’s like anything, right.”

“Sure.”

“And so I spill some of this shit onto my sleeve and when it hits it just eats through, and I move my arm quick, and there on the ground where the goop fell off is this flaky shit. So I’m cleaning it up, and I must have gotten some of it on my fingers or something and wiped off my face, because soon enough I’m good, I’m feeling no pain. If you see what I’m getting at.”

“No. You’re losing me, man.,”

“This shit I made, it’s like some Midas shit, everything it touches turns to primo untouched coke. Snow white, I’m telling you, I’ve got a mound sitting right here.”

“You sample this shit? This fuckin’ homemade synthetic coke?”

“All day, motherfucker! Help your fucking self!”

“So everything it touches, huh. How come the bucket you got it in ain’t turned to coke? Or the floor?”

“Not totally everything, just like organic shit. Like it ate through the cotton shirt I got in Vancouver but those stupid polyester that bitch of a girlfriend got me stopped it cold. So you gotta be, like, superfucking careful with it.”

“Wait, fucking, what if there’s still some of that fucking shit in the coke! It’ll eat at my, oh shit! Shit, man, I can feel it getting, fucking sinuses, Jesus man!”

“I’m sorry, dude. Really for real. But I’m all out of cotton shirts, man.”

Six: A sentient but invisible lifeform, desperate to breed, finds its mate in a 92 year old woman who lives only because her family cannot bring themselves to disconnect her life support.

What do you love, when you love someone from a distance? Is it the way you feel wrong and misfooted and dizzy in your genitals, the sweat on your neck and dripping down your chest, the way all your dreams change course to swirl around your new center, the reefs of beliefs you branch out, convinced they’re like you, they know, they’d love you if only. The sort of structure you first feel when you start a new job, only jittery, unsure, balloons dancing with streetlights. Feeling completed, feeling emptied, feeling the phantom tongue centering spirals across your thighs. Perhaps too effete to spackle semantics atop the want to fuck.

The Immortal, who had been here for three years, stared out the window-frost, off in a place farther than measurements permit, completely outside her comascope, the dim halos of energy spinning in slow-time, and as the memory of her body fades she enters into new forms. In the dreaming place where she lives she had taken on the lupus sickness, running along the hallways, sniffing out the half-forms of the other ward-patients, the tribe-forms of her early dreams, when Ernst called her a paroxysm of beauty, where Aragon wrote feigned-fictional accounts of his obsession over her cunt, where she filled phonographs with the automatic writing of the “spirits” which she acted out, the silly Surrealists only willing to listen to voices clad in subconscious magick. So many years later she’d smile over a pirate-broadcast girl called Strawberry Shortwave, playing her fractured prose-poems, dreams of the return of angels in the form of  a shower of moths, the chain of held hands of women walking out into their strangeness sent forward. She took to teaching, so much wanting to help these self-conscious priggish conservative children, trying so hard, walks across the quad telling them of Dorothea Tanning, of Leonora Carrington, the slight smile of water-flavors apparent to all. Even then, in the cloistered academy, she knew she was a lycanthrope, flows beneath the skin. She ran from nothing in life, and embraced being a wolf-girl as anything else, keeping her secrets into her retirement, into her coma, where she felt the half-life stripped from her, the shock of her senses unbound, the notice of something always unseen but always watching, waiting, observing from a distance, seeing she’s a wolf, a wolverine, a hunter of missing things, following the warmth.

The Immortal hears her sighs, her pants, down the hall. She begs release. He envies her, to be able to step out of this world with just the pull of an iv, the flicking of switches. He walks the hallway, quiet and alone, sidestepping pools of disinfectant and flaking pea-green paint. He knows he hasn’t much time between hall-checks. Her face lit with monitor-light, the metronome and hiss of her extended immune system, the cloud-speech of her guttural growl, so close to something she’s been wanting so long, and he turns back once, looks behind him, almost sees something in the corner, noticing the absence of sound, the complete removal of ambient noise within which it is hidden, and stares, waiting for it to reveal itself.

Seven: Every night, a screenwriter dreams a new movie which, if produced, will be the largest-grossing movie of all time, winning 12 academy awards. Every time he wakes up, the dream slips from his memory.

Like a vision in neon: TITTY NINJAS, the greatest film of all time, haunts his speed-shrunken dreams, elaborate footage of full-frontal kung-fu like a smutified ballet dancing around his cerebellum —

JACQUELINE: No time to ask how robotic assasins got into the showers, girls: it’s time for action! Beware their vibrating finger-attachments!

— an army of sculpted extras writhing in The Grand Inquisitor’s sadistic scented oil trap! Recursion upon recursion as our heroes are embedded in the infinite Porn Shop of Babel! Serious foot action of the likes not seen since Nezami’s Le sette principesse (The seven princesses)!

CHRYSTALLINE: It appears I’ve spilled all of the antidote all over my lap! Thank God that in addition to being a demolitions expert, a supermodel, and an expert in tensor calculus, I’m also a gymnast, and incredibly flexible!

The critically-applauded Zero Gravity Showdown scene! The heart(etc.)touching training sequences, in which the Russian master parallels the development of barkovscina and the spinning-fire school of stick-fighting! The Drunken Fuck Monkeys!

ANGHELLHYNE: How could I forget a four-foot prehensile cock?

Devious CGI-enhanced vagina dentata duels! The whirling pleasure touch of ten thousand fingers! Dr. Hanherholden’s alternate genitalia! The simps at the Vatican will beg for a copy for the Index Expurgatorius, the prissy prudes at the Bibliotheque Nationale’s Collection de l’Enfer will plead for first-run footage, the private case of the British Library will whine and cry for stills, but only the Academy will be gifted with original reels in thanks for their complete sweep of every Oscar category! Just imagine the “Best Musical Number” production! It would…it…

No, he thinks, sitting up from the couch and looking for his pills. That can’t be the way it was in the dream. There’s no way that’d sell. I’d get arrested. I should get back to work on that hospital fire miniseries; I got meds to buy.

Eight: A child is lost in a crowd, carrying a stuffed bear loaded with plastic explosives.

CIA operatives training Afghani rebels to fight Soviet troops in the eighties discovered quickly that the common tactic of car-bombing simply wasn’t effective as there weren’t enough cars to go around. There were, however, a great number of camels, and thus it was that CIA director William Casey can put “inventor of camel-bombing” on his resume. Unfortunately, camels are not indigenous to all areas, although one cannot step out into any corner of this world without tripping over a malnourished whelp looking for a life-purpose. These children would once be utilized by the comprachicos as models for monsters, mutilated and displayed in subbasement freakshows, but that was a barbarous age; we now have global media networks and the skeletal platform of political atrocity from which to display the return of all the sins of the father. She tells the guard she’s visiting her mommy. The guard doesn’t check the list. When she was at The Colony, all her favorite cartoons were about exploding girls. The movies all seamed different than she saw in the city. You’ll come back having owned the city, to stand on your own terms. Say what you want, you stupid idiots, but I own this place and if you want to deny it we’ll see how mart you sound when they’re scraping your scalp out of the rubble. There are colored lines on the floor you’re supposed to follow, green for maternity and blue for rehab and white for ICU, but the lines are hard to read when the power goes out. If you ever think you don’t matter, you should spend the way with plastic explosives in your hands, wondering at the blast radius. She has never known fear, she will weep no more tears. Childhood is not a given. She has to put the bear down to push through the door to the stairwell. The space is as much yours as anyone. Step into it. She talks to her bear in her head, because when she talks to her bear with her voice people look at her, people want to take back her space. No one can do the work for you. She counts down in her head as the room numbers recede. She remembers the people at The Colony taking about The Company, which made her laugh, she had puppets named Colony and Company and she’d do puppet shows for her bear in the closet, Company telling Colony secrets, Colony telling the babies they’d soon have to leave, as things were about to end, but they were not afraid. Why be afraid? She was unsure, when his bed was empty, but she turned to see him enter the room, turned and handed him the bear, the relief in his eyes, skipping out and down the hallway, her mission completed and the whole vast world spread out before her, saying goodbye to the bear, proud of it finishing its time here, the note reading PULL MY STRING pinned to its chest.

Nine: A psychic runs over a man in an intersection with her Cadillac because she sees that he will someday rape and murder her sister.

There was once two sisters, one with the second sight and one with an empty place in her mind where the other children developed the small skirmishes and mimicking of adults in their formative years. Simple, the teachers would parrot to each other, just as the nuns would call her blessed, for the meek and the damaged and the retarded will always have a place in God’s kingdom. Her sister, however, was at war against this world, against the flood of sin and perversion which clawed at her night-dreams, telling her of her insanity, of her sinfulness, of her willful turning away. Years spilled away and the sighted sister ran as far from the cattle and carrion of her tiny snowglobe city as the bus line would take her, while her simple sister made windows in paper with fingerpaint, the vanishing spires of Tir-na-nog lost to her ever since the aide who smelled like rancid aftershave and night-sweats began stealing her underwear. The sighted sister made her living blocking and moving the flow of commerce, routing money by conduits clear to her as the midday sun, watching over her sister back in the ward, the joy of fresh strawberries with meals on Mondays, the annoyances of being forbidden the paints for a week after an incident with the day room walls, the tightening fear of the aide. The sighted sister saw the future, saw what was to be, and abandoned her life of profits and powers for a sleepless drive back east, white-blurred signs counting down the miles, resolving herself to what she must do. On the corner, just after dawn, she split him in three pieces under the wheels of the Cadillac, his severed fingers caught in the axle, the breath emptying from him as the police pulled her from the wheel. From the window of her room, the simple sister can see her sighted sister, whom she loves, having saved her from the Tamlin with her magic powers, keeping her maidenhood safe beneath her white cotton institute gown, and is now trapped by the faeries (having offended the queen) in the dark of the castle across the river, and she knows the only person left to save the sighted sister, which means an escape off the ward floor. What adventure! Sad to tell, however, the guards and nuns were on the strictest of watches, even in the evenings, and the ward door was kept all locked. Who would have thought all this would be thrown into disarray as the sound of something exploding tore through the walls, sending everyone scurrying, up from their beds and demanded the doors open, and the simple sister snuck quick-like into the main hall, down the laundry chute, across the sub-basement (where the whispers of all the dead people clung to her hair, changing their shapes in the corners of her eyes, finally squeezing out the window, across the street, out to the river, and how surprising! to see her sister, eyes rolling in her skull and blood all across her hands, and just barely visible in the spinning light of fire engines and emergency lighting, the sisters returned to the Marrows, Melusine, mer-girls, in the holes of the river, a story as true as its closing is sweet, and I wish nothing but as kind an end for you.

Ten: He has just dropped the last vial of true love in the world on the floor of the men’s room in Grand Central Station.

The vial has shattered and liquid has begun to trickle toward the drain. Many people on this earth are convinced there is one other person who completes them, makes them part of a larger whole, cures them of the dreaded loneliness disease. It’s quite fortunate that for most people, this one other person lives so close to them, or shares the same employer, or the same circle of friends. Some are still left unconvinced, however, certain the other still waits for them. It is for them the vial of true love exists. This is not a love potion in the strictest of senses, as it does not induce love in another; there is no damiana, no mandrake, no witch hazel in its makeup. Nor is this a pheromone derivative, an umwelt stimulant, none of the base powder methylenedioxy-n-methylamphetamine. The vial of true love is a means of focusing on an end-goal to the removal of all other aspects from one’s life, to strip one’s consciousness to a streamlined essence of intent. I was to learn this lesson myself, due to my vanity, my ignorance, and the magicians Abel and Baker.

Amanda had been gone for about a month by this time, time I mostly spent staring blankly at the wall, eating take-out and masturbating. In fact, I was reaching my seventh ejaculation of the day when I heard a knock on the door. Thinking it was her, I rushed to wipe myself off and make myself somewhat presentable, having gone to shit hygienically since she left. Hurdling mounds of trash in the hallway and scattered books across the living room floor, I was out of breath by the time I got to the door, where two men in suits were waiting for me.

“If this is about the water bill, I’ve got the check here, just give me a second to—”

“No. This is something entirely different. May we come in?”

“What do you want?”

“We’re here to help you get Amanda back.”

I was stunned at this, paying little notice as the taller of the two pushed beside me, taking a seat on the couch, while the other stood near the door. The taller one introduced himself as Abel, and his associate as Baker, and they offered me a foolproof method of regaining my girlfriend’s affections, or so he said.

“I assure you, this is no scam. We offer only what we claim, and no more. We simply have material you may find of use.”

“How do you know me?”

“We don’t know you. Your situation, however, is not uncommon.”

“Are you detectives? Or something?”

“Perhaps. Of a sort. Mostly we learn things and try to put that knowledge to use, for a nominal fee and all necessary expenses. This is the proposition we offer you: our fee, our expenses, in exchange for the discovery of your lifelong love, always and forever. We only require that once this contract is agreed upon that you follow our instructions to the letter, without hesitation. If you do not do this, our contract is immediately broken, with the prearranged fee remaining with us. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Perfect. We’ll start from there.”

I had met Amanda in college, where a friend of hers knew a friend of mine, and eventually the genital-called square dance of intersocial coupling brought her and I together. I was pretending to be an artist at this point, taking Kline’s monochromatic brushwork as my start. I only found the slightest bit of acclaim within the university due to a kind-hearted and overly indulgent professor who spoke well of my thesis project, removing the paint from the earlier canvases with a battery of solvents and exhibiting the scarred, blank canvases; she claimed transformation possessed power exemplified by a return to original form, which was nice, but Amanda though the pieces were shit. She did approve of the process, however, seeing a need for updating what was basically a onanistic version of Rauschenberg’s subtraction piece. Amanda suggested exhibiting not the canvases but the paint, the solvent, in a base of oil and collected in glass vases she was making. The idea left me with questions, unconvinced the new version was significantly different, but the opportunity for long night of discussing the structural balance of the fluid, back and forth, I think you’re right, it’s getting late, maybe you should just stay here tonight…the process seemed more than worthwhile. It’s not like I had any better ideas; I had basically blown my high art load on my first public showing.

The solvent show, as we jokingly called it, never happened, and we both eventually graduated and got grown-up jobs, y’know, just until we could get enough money together to get our gallery plan up and running. Three years later we were married, reveling in every kitchy bourgeois cliché we could remember, giggling together at the head table after eating mescaline in the limo. At some point we had to move into a bigger place out in the upscale suburbs, still close enough to downtown to have coffee shops and hippie grocers, meeting neighbors with noserings and elaborate investment portfolios, our old projects tucked in attic-corners of our secondhand two-story out by the hospital. I laugh about it a little now, how easy it all seemed, but it was wonderful. For the first time in years there was no more feeling scared of the future, no more wondering where I’d be in a year. Everything was set. It was all revealing itself in the slow ebb of time.

I can’t tell you honestly why she left me. I doubt it was that one defining moment like you see in the movies, but maybe it was, I just don’t know. I knew she hadn’t been happy, and I knew I wasn’t as okay as I kept wanting to be, pretending I was, knowing how absurdly lucky I’d been to get to this place and holding on as tightly as I possibly could before it could fall away. I came home on a Wednesday night to find all her stuff was gone. My first thought was a desperate fleeing from this life, from the place, from a solid and certain world where I knew I did not belong. That’s the definition which comes the easiest, that it was all a question of reevaluating priorities and seeing hers lacking, very clever, very guilt-free, equations in a personal calculus. This was the logic I tossed out over margaritas with my coworkers, handed to my family when they’d call, asking over and over if I was okay. An old school friend suggested self-inventorying, a sort of inspection of one’s faults, but after staring at myself in the mirror she and I got from her mother I felt stupid and self-conscious and finally did the sensible thing and started drinking. Part of me still says it’s a senseless tragedy, nothing to be done about it, the sort of strategy I was fond of when I was fucking chunky Linda from Accounting in the back of her Volvo, wondering how many more times I’d have to wipe my cock with her all-cotton panties before my heart would stop being broken. I even started painting again, thinking I could somehow telepathically summon her back through the sophomoric ball-and-cup routine I’d used the first time, only to remember why it was I gave up this idiocy in the first place. I tried driving around all night, hoping highway zen would clear my head. Eventually I stopped trying pretty much everything. That was my state when Abel and Baker came to my door.

I know, poor me, no one understands me. And you’re right. I should have stared at the wall for a few days, taken a shower, and started over again, but that would have been the obvious thing, and there’s no point in telling stories about doing the obvious thing.

By morning they had gone through the house, removing the trash and the broken plates, wiping the windows and mirrors, mopping the stains off the floor. They made me shave and shower and start in again on the habit of being human. Three days of this and I was beginning to feel at home in my skin, the ends of my nerves covered over.

“Perfect,” Abel said. “Now we can begin.”

Baker reached into a duffel bag and pulled out two videotapes, putting the first into the vcr before going to the kitchen to make popcorn.

“The first tape is probably what you expect. You’ve been waiting for this ever since we showed up, so we might as well have at it. This is your ex-wife—”

“Separated. We’re not divorced.”

“Your separated wife? My, isn’t that telling. This is your split wife fucking James. You remember James? You met him at the neighborhood block party once.”

It was a grainy shot, but unmistakable: Amanda and James, Amanda on top doing that weird dog-pant thing she always thought was sexy. Baker came in and took the seat next to me while Abel looked for the remote to turn up the volume.

“You must have thought it would be different. Some sort of outrageous paradigm-shattering sex. All ball gags whip handles, wrists and ankles, needles and enemas. I imagine this is something of a letdown. I mean, even you could do this. Not anything like what you played over and over in your mind while staining your sheets every half-hour.”

“Fuck you.”

“She had plans for girl-girl, like back in college. Changing your life and truly understands and whatever people think when they’re alone. She even wrote an ad, but she just didn’t have it in her to meet someone new, to do the whole introduction process. Fortunately she had her supportive male friend James there to pick up the slack, in a plain-jane vanilla sort of way. And it pretty much goes on like this for another four minutes. Let’s switch over to tape two, where we see…hey, check it out. It’s Amanda and James shopping for furniture. What’s with you people and all that fake Tudor shit? You ever have to move that stuff?”

“How did you get this?”

“And see here? See how she’s watching him? She’s over you. She’s not in love with you, and never will be again. She’s better off. So the question you have to ask yourself is if you’re willing to find the thing you love.”

“The extent of your resolve,” Baker said, the first thing I heard him say.

“How far are you willing to follow, to fall, to fail, to swing out of your orbit to make this discovery?”

As soon as he finished the sentence, Abel pulled out a vial of some strange fluid.

“Yours is a love with a skeleton of comfort. You ended up with Amanda from inertia. It was what was expected, what was easy, what you knew you could handle and control. Only you couldn’t, of course. Your skin splits at the weakest of hungers. I don’t even know why we’re bothering with you."

“There is nothing I would not do.”

“Say that again.”

“There is nothing I would not do.”

“Well then. That’s quite the drastic statement.”

“The boy’s practically a martyr for the cause, Abel.”

“It warms the heart, it truly does.”

Abel and Baker removed the tape from the VCR and left. When they returned with two large bags I was relieved. I thought maybe they could actually help me. I didn’t know any better.

“People find true love in the weirdest of places. We’ve been doing this ever since we left the lab and hit the road, and you’d be amazed.”

“This one poor inhuman fuck fell in love with an old woman. Shit you not.”

“This other woman was in love with the Earth, so she kept this other poor fuck alive against his will, torturing him with consciousness. You know something about that, though, don’t you?”

“This girl was in love with god, so we set her phone to pick up broadcasts, which we figured would solve that, but now there’s this gaggle of people in love with the girl in love with god. They even started a cult called the Colony. But they’re all dead now.”

“That girl’s not dead. She did a good job for us, actually. We’ll have to keep an eye on her in the future.”

“And those sisters! the ones who loved each other and couldn’t love themselves. They’re staring face-down in the river-sludge now.”

“The eel-woman nesting her babies in their skulls.”

“Lots of people love things. That guy who loved coke. He was a fucking liability.”

“Ended up converting his legs, his arms. We eventually dumped his ass in a tub of the solvent. Though chances are whoever goes sniffing at his remains will want to do the same. We left a voice-mail number, just in case.”

“So you think deep on that before you open your mouth and close your eyes, kid. You think about what it is you really want.”

I was fed up with this two-bit sideshow. I wanted it, I wanted to know, and so I picked up the vial, touched it to my tongue. That was three months ago.

[Litany of detestable acts removed for brevity — db]

I hear from Dave, the only person left who will talk to me after the hideous degrading things I’ve done, and apparently Amanda and James are over with; she’s thinking of moving upcoast, changing jobs. I had to sell the house for bail money, and because of my current mental state she had no problem getting an annulment cleared. My friends and family don’t talk about me anymore, not even the tense jokes shared at reunions. My old life is over. I am now horribly in love with the second urinal from the left in men’s bathroom #8 at Grand Central Station. I run my tongue along the inner rim, the cool wet porcelain, the sweet sloping curve of the bowl. Having found the one thing left in this veil of tears which makes me happy, I dropped the rest of the vial on the floor, near the drain. The cops chase me out twice a day, and sometimes kids come in and kick me around, so if you should happen to find the place empty, just lick around the drainpipe and you will find the one thing which your soul truly desires.

I guarantee it.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitation Five: River City Sutras
Not so much a hiding-place as a surrogate light, containing from all directions, the breath frozen in you as luminous things hunt out your time-pulse. Gratitude springs up and forth once the lights stop. Story had planted his journals out in the fields, not staying long enough to see what sprouted up, struggling for sunlight, new words meshed from the old. airbourne harvesters sifted the grain, the pages, the clouds, utilizing these components as one of the engineers would. The automated pilots would wave to Story, and he would wave back, and smile. The earth was filled with portals, in those days.

the pulse was moving into different time-signatures, capitulating and recapitulating with the train-sounds, the oxidized cardiovascular system of the grain-plains. There was no wind at this time, and thus no pathway. So difficult to gauge action, all teh mapmakers died and their children have no interest in carrying on the lineage, poisoned with the inner critic, never good enough, content to hang from bridgebottoms and suck on river-mist.

There are times when Story is in the bright place, where the Aliens speak to him, ask him his Path. “Which is your door?” they question. This is not a place from whence one can find the King, although the Aliens seem to know where to set him, hidden assignments he fufils despite intent. The Aliens have left him here, on the edge of town; this is not a place they can enter. The scents are stripped from his dreams, as he sleeps in an emptied gas station, feeding on leftover candy bars from a machine no one ever thought to reclaim.

The train-paths, Story thinks. They were not laid out by capital or by travel-want. They serve the same King as I, and are forever and immortal until such a time as their service is completed. He stalks the streets for tracks, for trains, for a sign, but in the houses the families were casting out dreams of displacement and ensnarment; the signal was lost. There were no lights to be seen in the sky.

There was a small luminous boy in the garb of a preacher. He told Story a parable of revenge and loss. He told Story a parable of ache and love and how all these hungers will be satisfied. He told Story a parable of DNA sequences, of the star-maps along the zodiac, of the misguiding direction of gravity. “Do you believe there is a secret road?” the luminous boy asked Story. “The road is not secret; I can hear it even when I am asleep.” The luminous boy smiled. “I grant you safe passage into River City, as an envoy of the King. You will need to find a second passage out.” Story nodded, and faded.

Lines of travel (roads, tracks, the cropduster-airport on the edge of town). Lines of utility (sewers, steam tunnels, water manes, electrical cables, refineries, generators, sewage plants). Lines of commerce (store-clusters, banking-clusters, light industrial clusters, heavy industrial clusters, warehouses, and failed versions of the above). The city is a nest of grids. It is a difficult place to find the pulse, should one not be able to find the center, the magic, the heart-line of a city, at which point all becomes clear. Story has not found River City’s heart-line yet, and fears for his likelihood of ever finding it. Seeker-logic.

Dampeners in the tiles of the ceiling along the hallways of the city council absorb faith and radiate blistered fear. Story is protected, but knows to pay attention to such foul omens. Children smile at him, and he whistles short themes they will remember and whistle themselves, in quiet times, for the rest of their lives. Orange voices. Hope can manifest anywhere.

At a certain length, tone-sequences begain to fold on themselves, algorhythms coded in the first few sequences in order to map the unfolding of the entire piece, frequency limiters and repetition hues, cerulean in this light, a milk-white hum as the interoffice spiral tightens and Story closes in on this place’s heart, tucked away, stored in a jar of bleach and gooseberries to repel stray dreams. “You, you are a key,” Story whispers, and tucks the jar beneath his colored coat.

From Kornley and Voss Story can hear the train-whistle. His time here is ending. The out-gate is outside his sight. Desperate and lost. All fives and sevens.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitation Three: The Exploding Girl
(original version by my esteemed colleague kyra)

“Okay, you need to just settle down, you’re overexcited. Start at the beginning.”

“She FUCKING EXPLODED! Jesus Creeping Christ, Rissa!”

“So, so wait, so you mean to tell me you’re just out there doing your Sensitive Macho routine and she just blew up!”

“That’s *exactly* what I mean to tell you. What the *fuck*, man? What the *fuck*?”

“So she exploded like a baby in the microwave, you’re trying to tell me? Like you’re slathered in innards?”

“First off this is no time to be flippant. I called you for help. If help is not forthcoming I will pursue other avenues of helpdom.”

“Fine fine fine. But it does beg the question.”

“And second, no, she didn’t go all Troma on us or anything. It was like there was this massive bright white light and she was gone.”

“So more Akira, then.”

“Precisely.”

“So explain to me what brought you to this point.”

“So I’m just minding my own business.”

“Owen, never in your life have you ever just been minding your own business. You’re a goddamn walking liability.”

“See, that’s what was so weird about it, because I actually was minding my own business, so I shoulda known something really serious was about to happen, because I got all jittery for not acting a fool all day, so the bus pulls up and allofasudden, just wham, I heard this voice in my head.”

“We have a rule about listening to the voices in our heads, don’t we?”

“Yes. But this voice was really only one word.”

“It wasn’t ‘kill’, was it?”

“Good lord no!”

“What was it, then?”

“Sup-a-flyyyyyy.”

“Superfly. That’s what the voice in your head said.”

“No no no. Sup-a-fly. Like Curtis would say it.”

“The voice in your head is Curtis Mayfield.”

“Yeah! And like I’m not gonna listen to Curtis Mayfield!”

“So what did you do?”

“I turned around to the woman behind me, did a little dance, and said ‘Ladies first, because I am a feminist gentleman, baby!’”

“Oh you did not.”

“So she laughs and gets on and I give her a little ‘Ow!’ as she climbs up the steps. Like a James Brown thing.”

“Just stop it.”

“And suddenly I realize what I just did and I get to feeling *really* conspicuous and I can’t get on the bus now because everybody’s looking at me so I head down to the bus station down by the river and play pinball until my ears stop burning.”

“Can you snap this story up a bit? I haven’t done any saving the universe yet today, and you’ve obviously gotten nothing productive done.”

“So I see the bus woman later, and we get to talking, and it turns out she used to know Ana from a long time ago, and we go get all freaked out on pixie-stix and we end up walking out on the tracks back by the small forest and so I think to myself ‘What would Curtis do?’, so we started smooching and — ”

“Okay, you’re going to have to stop now, because I so don’t want to hear about it.”

“No, but then, okay she fainted.”

“Well well well, let’s hear it for Tom Jones.”

“So I’m kinda freaking out a little, right? Because it’s like she started to, I dunno, almost *glow*…”

“You really do think a lot of yourself, y’know.”

“No! I’m not even being like that! I’m just saying!”

“Fine, whatever, so how is it she exploded?”

“So I’m talking to her, pulling the leaves from her hair, and we talk some, and then she put my hand on her chest and then it was like being in another place but also there still. Maybe. I’m still pretty confused.”

“And that was it?”

“That’s the story, true as anything.”

“So what are you gonna do?”

“Do?”

“Well, consider this. You, brother Owen, you’re a mess, and here you’ve got this excellent girl you actually totally hit it off with and then she disappears into the light. That’s gotta, y’know, *mean* something.”

“No! It’s just a freak accident resulting from all that jumping out of the car I did last summer!”

“Foolishness! You, for reasons completely beyond me, you’ve been Visited.”

“Like a blessing?”

“I’d say. And those aren’t the sort of things which last.”

“So she’s gone.”

“I dunno. Maybe. Maybe not. She’s certainly not here, and that’s the key-point. I think you should consider yourself lucky, keep your eyes peeled, and lay off the sugar.”

“Well of course I’m lucky! I’m Owen! My lifestyle would kill an army of vat-bred supermen!”

“No, I’m meaning — ”

“Saved only by my inability to recognize oncoming catastrophe and lightning!”

“You need to pay — ”

“Fueled on an endless supply of cornball situations and misunderstood metaphysical dilemmas! So what are you saying?”

“Nothing, Owen. Nevermind. Let’s go see what’s happening at the temple.”
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitaion Two: All That Is Is Less
original version by c. flink

I was hanging out at the coffee shop downtown, decked out in my “I’m an independent filmmaker — show me your tits” T-shirt, sitting at the piano, trying to remember how to do Schwartz’s second etude when this guy came along and hit a key at the low end, one note, like a misplaced thought. I stopped paying and stared out after him as he walked away, followed by a second guy (more a boy, really) scribbling something down in his notebook, and it suddenly struck me like a rope passed through my body and pulled taut that I had to get the fuck out of Lawrence.

Oh mothers, where have your dumb boys gone?

I awoke this morning from a dream of fleeing. Alone, this is nothing new to me, but the man who pursued me in this dream was armed to his fingertips in cutting tools twisted and bent like they’d spent years at the bottom of a blast furnace. These blades leapt from his fingers, cutting through the shrubbery and fallen branches, tearing through treetrunks and swinging back to his hand, invisible guidewires tied around his wrists. The animals of the forest dropped stones to stop him, slow his progress, landing in my hands so as to carry me down through the river-water, sunk down to the floor where the two rivers become one. The river takes me to be one of the drowned dead and I am allowed to walk to the opposite bank through the shimmering green light lamentations, the splintered remains of bed-caskets all twined in algae and baby dolls. Here there was the skull of Susan Christmas, who I knew from playground tragedies, who lent me a lock of her hair on Saint Valentine’s Day, so young as to not know what it meant. Over yonder the still-whole body of Ehm Whaelk, who taught me the way of the second skin, his arms now mirroring the current. I knew a song for to sing to bring them surface-side, but the water filled my mouth and the air all rushed out and the hunter’s knives had found me too soon.

I awoke knowing just what it meant to dream of walking underwater, and drew the day’s first breath.

The body of Ben I saw there as well, but he hadn’t stopped twitching, and I knew he was hiding, as was I, looking for components to build a method of escape. In the real world Ben kept calling the cops on himself, his contraptions to mutilate and kill oiled and primed, a secret door out of this world. The first time he had built what looked like a large metal pig from the body of a holding tank, a vulvic slit along its belly lined with sharpened gear leading to a crank like a tail out of its far end. The problem with this creation was the inability to work it without at least two people — one to work the crank and one to crawl up inside the tank. Ben had duct-taped himself into its maw, leaving himself a mouth-hole to ask the police to please assist him in his last exit. They confiscated the metal pig and gave him a stern lecture as to bothering the poor people at the junkyard.

One time, not long after, he waited for the storm which brought the flood-rains down on us for so long, then stripped himself to his skin and attached a long metal rod to his penis, apparently inspired by a copy of Crad Kilodney’s underground classic “Lightening Struck My Dick”. He then jumped from rooftop to rooftop around town, like some deranged roof-goblin, searching for the ideal spot to lay down anchor and lift his antenna aloft. Alas, he went through a skylight and landed ass-over-ankles in the middle of a Rerisers Anonymous meeting, skewering the bunt-cake, destroying about six bucks worth of rehab art and prompting several relapses and one conversion to Satanism.

Yet another attempt involved his reading that the fungus which grows in bowling shoes could be fatal if inhaled over extended periods of time. Ben spent the next week at Der Bowlingplatz, stealing dozens of heavily-worn bowling shoes (at a loss of his two dollar shoe deposit each time) in order to build the Black Chamber, which he lined with the innards of the shoes, keeping it perfectly airtight until he finally entered on the fifteenth day, prepared to leave this earth. Alas, Georg Beschmutzer had come to the house to retrieve his missing shoes, deposit or no, as there were currently only three remaining pairs of size tens left in stock. He kicked open the Black Chamber, drug Ben out, and ripped the shoe-remains out in order to try a restitching job. It was at that point Ben decided to try more grandiose methods.

“Every day of his life, Ben has played one note on the piano in the coffee shop downtown. He walks by, and he strikes a single key without pause or break of stride.”

“And you’re writing down the notation, huh.”

“Yeah. I can see the notes he’s played, a glow above the keyboard.”

“Maybe it’s not a song. Maybe it’s a code.”

“Y’think? Like for what?”

“Well, show me whatcha got, up to this point.”

“Okay, fuck, it’s….okay, here.”

“See here? if we loop twenty-six letters three times we get three number-sets, for a total of seventy-eight, with ten keys left over. If we letter the keys we get…here…”

“stoptryingtostealmyshitbenny”

“Well. That’s just curious.”

“Or maybe just an unhappy accident.”

“Maybe.”

My friend gave me the laptop he bought when he went to college. I tried to thank him once for giving me the computer.

“I don’t want it, I don’t want to own it, I don’t want to think about it ever again.”

“Then why did you keep it?”

“In case I needed it again. Which I won’t. But I might.”

I took a look on the hard drive and found dozens of encrypted files without any sort of key. I thought about trying to hunt something up, but I’m beginning to suspect I’d rather not know.

Oh mother, what have your dumb boys done?

I lived, then, in a small apartment block behind a refinery whose owner had decided the profits coming in wouldn’t be sufficient to make continuing business worthwhile. Indeed, the only means of extracting profit from the refinery would be to torch it. The employees, knowing full well what shallow prospects for work Lawrence held for them, actively prevented the owner’s brothers and cousins, who had been promised a cut of the insurance settlement, from burning down the refinery. At night, the employees would take shifts watching the streets for suspicious vans, whose passengers would be pulled out into the street, beaten, and tossed off the North Second Street bridge. For months this went on, and I didn’t get one solid night’s sleep the whole time. I ask you to keep this in mind as I relate who I was, then.

“But if you break the eighty-eight keys down going the other way, you get findnohiddenmessage. How’s about them apples?”

The use of knives and blades, a weak attempt at a joke (it’s ‘violence with a point’, geddit) blurred into horrid puke scenes weaved into halfassed prattling as to “really deep thoughts”. Then again, we’ve always taken a backhanded pride in our violence, our depravity. It’s hard-core, being from here, we tell ourselves, suddenly made important by the increasing transitoriness of life in the here and now. All your years nothing but a smear of black fluid at the bottom of a porcelain bowl. He used to pretend at an awkwardness in order to meet women. It was ideal. A cry for a kind of lifting-up into the light that comes from her body as she sleeps, rumpled and fuzzy, curled beside you. To look down at your body and know the places it has been, the points of contact, to know it is a part of the continuum of physical forms which meet and mate and fall away. A vision of crossed thresholds and calls from somewhere far away from someone who wants more than anything to pull you as close as the skin allows.

Oh mother, what will your dumb boys become?

Nothing: they are this, and nothing more.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #

Revisitation One: My Take On My Take On All This
(this is based on deb’s “my take on all this”, available at www.neuron.net/~snow/mytake.html. thanks to kyra, who gave me the idea in a sideways kinda way.)

No one could be certain whether or not the ship was sinking. There was no reason to think it was. No water was coming up over the side. No abrupt shift in the balance of the deck, no lurching, no portholes in view of nothing but breaking waves. Yet the animals were pacing in their cages, crying out for something no one seemed able to identify, and the captain was nowhere to be seen, spending yet another night in his cabin, with her, soon to be forced to put rigor and structure to his notions of love.

Constantinople did not like parties, but tonight he was restless and didnot want to be alone. He ended up along with the rushing tide of hisfriends at an unknown compartment. The music was blaring from unseen speakers hidden in the edges of the room, practically unseeable, and it irritated him not to have a face with which to connect the music. Constantinople played his music only for himself, and a few friends, of whom none of the throng who had led him here could truly be counted. He cursed himself for having so little discipline and in the same instant cursed his cursing; he knew he didn’t like parties and yet had come anyway. He started making his way toward the exit: an excruciatingly slow process through a sea of unfamiliar jackets, earrings, beer bottles and outlined lips. He then saw her, and he stopped, and did not know what to do.

If you, the reader, are with me, imagine if you will she is sitting in a corner, hands clasped together, legs crossed, eyes staring far off. Perhaps across the water, to a sea-port town — do not look too closely, for if she senses our attention she may discontinue her fantasies. “To begin: all writing is an act of love. But this is saying nothing, so I must continue.”

She had no need to look at him as he said this, for they had been telepathic for two months before they spoke to each other. They quickly discovered that they each had a different native tongue:

-mis palabras no puerden espressar lo mucho ce te amo.

-what does that mean?

-words cannot express how much i love you in spanish.

-oh. shalom, ya hachoo omlette de frommage.

-what does that mean?

-hello, i’d like a cheese omlette in hebrew, russian and french.

-french, bah. je conchie la langue francaise.

-what does that mean?

-i shit on the french language. in french.

-ah. no se sabe lo que quiere decir.

-we don’t know what that means. in spanish.

-in any language, even.

This seemed not to be a problem, until those fateful words:

-so you only love me in spanish, then?

-no, you misunderstand. the sentence was in spanish.

-so what language is your love in, then?

-um…i, i don’t…

At which point their still-budding affair was in desperate need of a translator.

—-

Constantinople was ok. He had good friends, a good ship, and a place to hang his circus for a time. He had chosen these. There is no need to look too far, he thought, to make myself happy. At times, impatience would creep its way into his otherwise slow and purposeful movements, particularly when he thought of her, as paradoxical as your favorite paradox or woman, which may well be one and the same. He would then go to the main deck, which looked out not upon the ocean (which would have certianly been a safer and more reasonable use of the room) but upon a model he had made by one of his crew, a perfect model of the view from Constantinople’s left rear balcony, the one which juts out from his bedroom over the city, both his love and his nemesis. He thrived and died alone, in the city, each model scaled to show the change and cycle of time in his town by the crewman who recieved news of Constantinople’s town by sealed and coded messages sent from townsfolk in his employ — at least until the town was overrun by devils who emptied them of their organs and salted the earth where the town once stood. The crewmember, whose name is best not said (according to the impotent author), modifies the vast model of the town as though this never happened, imagining wht changes would have taken place, should the lives of townspeople have never been stopped, or had they been made to stand and breathe again.

Such acts are not unheard of in the town where Constantinople is from.

—-

What happens is, she says we’re going to run away, off to the ocean, and you say no, you don’t want to anymore, those were in our younger days, now you stay, and you think of how she hasn’t really laughed since you called her crazy, not crazy like you thought was so romantic when you were spending your schoolnights with your panties around your ankles dreaming of getting out of whatever town your story contains and so ready to fling yourself screaming into the gaping maw of lunacy where all passions snarl and claw and fuck out of the unadulterated knowledge of what it means to be alive, no, you called her crazy like the women who count spilled beans on the dirty tile of the grocer’s floor, the crazy that makes you sad and sick and more than anything embarassed to watch, pissing in your pants and sucking on sores crazy, the playtime romance as dead as the light in your one good eye. You want her to stay and you want her to leave and you can’t tell where you’re going. You want her to stay and keep an eye out so you can get away with the {secret} when all the time she’s trying to whisper{it} in your ear:

want you to get down on your belly
want you to get down on your knees
want you to put your tongue inside of me
before we speak any more of your loyalties

but you won’t fuck her anymore, you say, and she gets very cranky.

Of course, we all knew who would give in the end, now, didn’t we.

—-

It seems so silly, now, to look back on the first wave of private practice geneticists and their creations, so sure they had solved all disease and malformation by rooting it out at the source code. So many supposedly perfect superbabies designed by questionaire and sequence splicing unable to stave off even the most meager of diseases, so many collapsed skulls, so many eyes gone sightless but such a movie-star quality of blue. It was soon a disreputale thing to be a geneticist, at least one who left academics for the big bucks of baby farming, and soon all the strip-mall labs went up for grabs again, the once-proud doctors sifting downward into the lower bardos of Aryan Nation backroom “repurifications”, third-world gender modifications, and the once-again prolific freakshow, of which no circus is complete without one.

A young old man resembling a lion brings all of his cubs out of the closet and sets them on the ground throughout the room. Their legs, which have never been used, have no strength, and need time to get used to the sway of the ship which the majority of the passengers scarecely even notice now. He watches them struggle to get from one unbouded section of carpet and sees that it is good. he begins to purr, one long deep purr rumbling contentedly, as if from the depths of an extinct volcano. He returned the cubs to his closet; he was to meet the captain tonight for reasons still unknown. This seems only fair to the geneticist, who is well-versed in the flux and shift of the merketplace; he has been many things before he was a geneticist, and will most likely be many things after.

The man talks to the cubs in their language, telling them he loves them, and they understand.

—-

Follow the waiters once they’ve left the table down to the bowels of the ship’s stern side. Follow them down and past to the kitchen where the staff runs from the butcher and hides. Watch him dance pas de deux, pulling cleavers from his boots as he hacks at the men and the walls. The chefs get him unarmed without a hint of alarm and lock him in the back bathroom stall. Through a crack in the door you can listen to him roar and bellow at whoever goes past. Were you to ask why he’d just sputter and sigh and swear that this time was the last. “I don’t know what I’ve done ‘til lucidity comes and wipes all this blood from my sight. I just want my knives, and to dance side to side, and to slash all your eyes by tonight.” Now the meat’s gone bad in the store. And the chefs are all tired and sore. And the butcher who dances in violent trances is cutting a hole in the floor.

—-

so, beardslee, you’re in love again. how beardslee of you.

you don’t understand. this is different. i have to think this out.

think this out?

she’s demanding proof of my love being a portable expression.

extricable from the terms you’ve fallen back on.

precisely.

are you at all familiar with the rules of logic?

—-

She liked good conversation. She only got a chance to have it when she was taking a break from her job, which was to be locked up with tiny scraps of paper and put on display down in the hold, performances every hour on the hour. Actually, this was only one of her jobs as a Certified Metaprogrammer (BM, Portstown MetaTechnical Institute and Grill, class of Kali Yuga). Nobody seemed to know what exactly a Metaprogrammer was, least of all an actual Metaprogrammer, who was either whacked to the gills on whatever chemical Consumer Responsibility magazine said the kids were doing that week or laying around in a stupor, but they were being sought for council by crisis-striken Post-Metaprogrammers, who used to be Metaprogrammers until the bills got to be too much of a hassle and really, let’s face it, laying around convinced you know the secrets of the universe won’t get you any closer to getting laid.

One of the ways Metaprogrammers occupy themselves, according to her instructor Gibreel Macadamia (who had a doctorate in Metaism, which is accomplished by suggesting the concept of Metaism without any of the core elements of Metaism through use of all concepts learned in Cheap Irony 205 and Pointless Cleverness 380), is to take all of the energy which would normally be used in torturing others and use it to torture themselves instead. This, which was always a sure crowd-pleaser, is known as the Small Knot, or Loop in the technical jargon. But nevermind that. Remember, what may seem obvious to the reader may not be as obvious to the author.

She spent lots of time below decks when not working, terrified of the sky,which seemed to suggest that the porthole view from her display case was not entirely accurate. To silence such fears she spent her time in the eddies and whorls of the seemingly endless party which passed from compartment to compartment, oblivious of time or lack of necessary mission equipment. Through this process she became shacked up with another Metaprogrammer, who explained his job as “enlightenment through captaining”, a tried and true Metaprogrammer’s trick. She had her doubts of his affections, despite his pleas, and all was nearly lost until a Translator showed up. She invited the translator in. His presence was a gift, of sorts — she had good reason to believe that they did need him, though perhaps not in the way he expected. This good reason is called Intuition, in the technical jargon.

When Constantinople, which was her partner’s name, got back from whatever he did atop the ship, he was pleased as Kool-Aid to see the translator because they were old friends and everything was simply complicatedly marvelous. He informed both of them that their difficulty in expressing their love was bound with their use of multiple languages, and would have to be stripped clean with the burning blade of symbolic logic.

“you see,” the translator said, “all writing *is* an act of love, if we are to equate some essential quality as being present both in writing and in love. discuss amongt yourselves and present me with a validation of that statement by 2200 hours. in the interim, i must check on my closet.”

—-

Maggie was a doll, primarily, except when she was bad, during which times she was a menace to society. Maggie was not the sort to do evil herself, no. She would suggest evil to others, evil which would occasionally take root and find a willing participant in the heart of whoever heard her voice. Being a doll, and a circus-doll at that, she came across many who would follow her hinted orders, which has made the cargo hold where the circus is staged a place sticky with salt and blood. Her hair was red, and she made songs with her hands, like any puppetmaster.

In college Maggie had studied theatre until somebody of consequence told her she was a bad actress. At that point being a bad actress was generally a synonym for someone who wouldn’t put out, so Maggie put out like nobody’s business and was still called a bad actress, so she burned down the theater and hitched a ride to the coast. Many people do not know this about her. They do know, however, that Maggie like to get into situations, primarily out of boredom, like someone trying to run from their shadow.

She once wrote research articles for a polygamous Hindu-Italian slumlord who wanted to marry her. She once crashed a wedding party and sang Ted “The Nuge” Nugent’s “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” in front of three hundred hokey-pokeying relatives of an unknown couple. She once took a fourteen year old suicidal genius hom with her to make sculpey-beads and, well, you get the picture.

Today she took out a slice of paper and began a letter to our woman, who lived on the other side of the ship:

“been having too much fun. sick to stomach. making friends
with an upstanding young man with strong hands and a solid
understanding of musculature. he’ll be crazy soon enough,
and we’ll be home soon enough. drugs and kisses.”

—-

It should be of no suprise that the translator/geneticist/gadabout, whosename is none other than Theodore J. Krabdovik, was once a Metaprogrammer too, until he was disbarred for certain unseemly incidents involving hope and patience. During that time he had written “The Translator’s Theories”, a seminal work in the Ted Krabdovik canon, portions of which survive against enormous odds.

“There are some metaprogrammers who think that torture is wrong. I have a hunch that there might be interesting results were our normal ‘Iadic’ loops opened up to a slightly larger controlled loop called, for my purposes, a ‘Diad’. Following this might be ‘Triad’ and ‘Quatrad’. For a more complicated understanding please see Figure 31-B [ed: these notes have been lost], which demonstrate how this theory holds to the Metaprogrammer’s Credo that if it feels wrong, do more of it, you wuss. Since developing this theory I have found some willing parties, who have been willing to experiment, and I have published my findings below, demonstrating the Metaprogrammer’s Credo that all problems can be solved via a quick fix, which generally consists of putting something in your mouth. [ed: this fragment is here cut off.]”

Ted looked at this fragment and wondered if there was something here he should remember, while he brought the cubs back out and watched them take their first steps.

—-

One of the chefs went to check on the butcher, hearing nothing from inside the stall, afraid to hold his ear to the door. The chef noticed water coming from the crack in the door and nearly realized what was happening by the time the hinges burst and the door slammed him into the far wall, shattering his bones, flooding the hall.

—-

There were once two people in the story and we have, you and I, experienced our first near-miss together. It’ll be nothing but from this point on. The party is over, the band has disbanded, and someone has started screaming. By day she dances alone, as if the steps could bring back what once was, and ancient battle in which she is the victor. Her jaw is clenched almost by habit. She is visible and vulnerable and has left a trail of clues, followed by you and I, after the fact, so sure of our notions.

—-

In the tide a weathered piece of looseleaf paper finds itself before us. It hopes we set it loose when we’re done.

Professor Hinkle, my love:

I have set upon the task as has been laid out and have run into some unexpected difficulties. I am as sure of ever of my convictions but have not been as able to solidify these notions structurally. I have no doubt that I am closing in on the solution in due time. This note is simply to keep you updated on oour progress:

x = writing, which is operantly defined as “a grammatically-ruled means of communicating information”. You may disagree with me on the grammar aspect, as you’ve explained your displeasure at the notion of still-living languages being encumbered with artificial rules of conduct; however, it is my argument that it is only due to a grammatical and syntactical skeleton that exceptions and variants on its rules can be said to exist at all. As such, the intent of communicating information belies the use of language, and thus if one is serious as to this definition one will take great pains to clarify the communicative process as much as possible. Is that not why we are doing this in the first place?

y = love. There is no proof of love, just as there is no definition of love. If it is not expressly manifest in the situation it is not there. The mention of an unprovable statement invalidates the compound statement ~x -> y. Since we cannot prove that y -> anything at all, we cannot even set up a transitive proof of the equivalence of x and y to a third statement z, not even if z = futility, operantly defined as the inherent inability to achieve set goals — we don’t know what the goals of love are, or why it makes people do the stupid things they do.

I can’t prove anything. It’s there or it isn’t.

yrs,

Constantinople Beardslee

—-

For nearly a century sailors have reported seeing strange animals off the coast of a small country which will change names and presidents and graves in the next few weeks, one more time. The animals are the size of large dolphins, but built differently, and despite swimming at high speed they seem to be furry mammals, but no one has ever seen one close enough to verify this. At night, while the crew sleeps, it is alleged these animals use their claws to climb aboard and feed off the storage lockers below deck, able somehow to bypass locks and doors. In the morning all that remains are paw-shaped prints on the deck, leading back to the ocean.

—-

She has been on a ship in the middle of the ocean without wind, and she is a crybaby but she laughs instead because it looks better on her resume, but when she is not laughing she thinks about exploding and how the stars don’t care at all whether we return, and how this thing has all been done before but she still reads it. I still read it. And you are to me everything I can’t have, I reach out, I want. That’s what I do I reach out

my hand

[which is very very very small]

the day the dream is turned off is the day she dies. it is not real. it is a dream. we are far. far. far.

in the morning our skin is sensitive and it feels good to touch you.
(12:11.05.19.2005) [/alpha/revisitations] #