memory: summer 1992
We had enough components to assemble three scientists, packed there in
the white travel paste, hidden underquilts and golf clubs for fear we
would be pulled over by secret police in dark green minivans and
disappear forever beneath the earth, driving on unmaintained access road
H68, electromagnets mounted in the doors attracting and repelling us
from any other traffic, of which we have seen none since fleeing the
interstate. We each took faith measurements with faithometers built from
gold wire we pulled out of the gated plague community center, PP3
batteries and syringes inserted into veins beneath the tongue, and once
we were all confirmed, we painted a giant white cross on the top of the
car and drove into the antiscience neighborhood, where the assembler was
hiding (who, he asked us on the phone eight days before, would seek out
an assembler in a post-christian backwater?) in the basement of a
storage unit by the Demum Sophia trailer park. We were using IR goggles
and sound dampeners, and there was no moon, and there was a 10pm curfew
since the riots started, so no one could see or hear us until we hit a
deer patrol, the sirens and lights mounted to its shoulders blinding us
until we could rip off the goggles and kill the dampeners and floor it
all the way to the park, where we had to abandon the car in a culvert
across the road and drag the scientist-components to the assembler’s
trailer, their vocal components begging us to piece them together again,
only all the trailers had been moved and covered in light-absorbing
paint, so that we had to field-assemble one of the scientists, the spine
bent and the legs nonfunctional, and follow him as he crawled along the
sidewalk and neurotically-trimmed lawns, sniffing out the assembler,
knowing that finding him was the scientist’s only chance at proper form.
After what seemed like hours, we found the trailer, and went inside, but
the trapdoor was broken off its hinges, and as we stared down into the
hole, we saw the bodies of the assembler and his family, face down,
nails piercing their skulls.
(12:13.05.19.2005) [/ana] #