Thu, 19 May 2005

everyone vanished
As he walked toward the cube-building, the faces of the people he passed gradually changed, losing definition, as though the muscles beneath the skin had atrophied or grown numb; the myriad details of each person’s expression grew flat and empty. The mouths of the street people were slightly open, and from them came a hum like the rustling of dry cornstalks occasionally interrupted by sticky cottomnouthed swallows. He has seen this before, on days of harvest, and knew not to interrupt the street people; each depended on the others for direction and task definition, and to confuse any of them with questions would send ripples through the neighborhood, drones stepping in front of traffic, botched copulations, organ trading, things which were frowned upon in the cube building.

The keys to the front enterance were a series of thin metal rods which he kept hidden in the now-useless veins of his arms. He pressed against the wrist with his sharpened fingernail and unsheathed the keys, inserting them into the line of holes, until the door vanished, dropping the rods onto the ground. He picked up the keys and returned them to his arms while stepping into the sniffing room, where his skin and clothing was examined for contaminants. This was not necessary, as there was no longer anything inside the building which could be further contaminated (in a fit of drunken rage he had smashed each of the third-level windows, killing off every hothouse strain unable to acclimate to the outside world), but he kept the system in place in order to know exactly what he had on and in him, now that he was the only person in the building.

Maria only stayed with him for two years before she couldn’t listen to him anymore, couldn’t find any meaning or logic behind his rants and weepy bouts of self-pity, but two years was all he needed. He captured every image, every sound. Microphones in the phones, the intercom, the air vents. Cameras behind the mirror, behind the television screen. Keyboard sniffers on the USB port, rootkit backups of her email to his account. To live with her, constantly in the moment, was to waste away all the details of her, to gorge on her presence. With her gone, living with her mother in a duplex somewhere on the west coast, he had time to savor each word, each image, zooming in until the pixels pulled apart. He diagrammed her sentences, made maps of her movement from room to room, built elaborate databases of her eating habits. He chemically sifted the components of the hair she left in the drain trap. Each detail seemed to open a new world, infinite strategms for study and contemplation. He became an alchemist of her detritus, the aura of her binding to his skin, his skeleton. He became a king of infinite space, an infinite space named Maria.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #