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] #