A blog with one entry, the chapter of a novel that does not exist. Written 9/06-5/07. Eleven revisions since. (185+ ms. pgs.)
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"Bored in the Arboretum: Picking Bio-Mass from Wool and Tweed," Chapter 3 of _Shepherdson’s Dolly_.
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Days of insipid weather crept by or sidled up to me almost fiercely then disappeared as though they had never been but for the fatty residue they left on all the shards of my existence until I heard from Colonel Faircloth again. I got the call mid-morning just as I was beginning to doze, . . . floating up and over yon hill’s nod into my first REM sleep, feet on desk, sliding into dream like a drugged short stop into third while lining up with lulling molls on the buggery hump of a chorus line and smiling sultrily from porcelain stairs in pearly panty wear while searching the operant mirrors with mimes on their faces which were not always quite nearly the same except as they keep changing all the time like a warehouse of differential machines goosing freaks and groping opera queens with bats sprat squat squalid screech spat: an eternal blast of temporal wings as a dragonfly or helicopter beneath which I waded through windy waters, yellowed with spirit-presence (_twink sauce?_), whereupon a tropic clime in sudden light appeared and He whom I’d waited so long at last floated through cerulean skies on a golden ostrich feather down, his white gown catching my eye like a brassy hook against the ocular intensity of the electric blue sky (_at last!_), and slowly opening his cherried lips to speak, said . . . _DAMN!_, I remember thinking, as the phone exploded into tsunamis packed with avalanches erupting beneath tombs of landscape's fastest racket featuring two of the most noxious sounds in the human memory: one the cross between a jackhammer’s cement street-smacking staccato, a rumble of bastardly shats smashing moments to shards, consciousness to fazed dust; the other the mindlessly repeated bashing of an eight-pound cast iron skillet with a crowbar forged in midmost mind of anger’s cranium: BLANG BANG BLANG SMAT SLACKER SLASH BANG BLASHER SMAT BANG THat that that that rattled the straddled spine of my continuum. I was sweating bad, and suddenly had a hard time controlling my bladder. I accidently kicked a few papers off my desk when I tried to sit up and reach for the phone at the same time, . . . to save the wits of my mind.
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When the room set into jellowy cement and my body stopped rocking with a sea of uncomprehensible arguments, I stammered something into the mouthpiece about being a familiar to the first secrets of the unknown universe, an inhabiting mango-genie in a whirlpool of galaxies that out-shone even the constellations of my own psyche with _their_ swirl of numinous realities, an umbilicus to a world from which neon children peek thru pearly portals while fruit-like beings hang with wings from transparent from hairless trees as though the mind was indigenous to its own occasion (_at last!_). . . . A barely querulous grunt came from the other end. "Whatever," I said. "This is Max."
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It sounded like the Colonel’s ex-jockey, ninety-three pound Philippino houseboy, but as though someone big was sitting on his mid-section or tattooing his nutsack with vista out of the Hudson River School. Between grunts and grasping pants, he said the Colonel wanted to see me behind the deserted arboretum at Olde Harbor, our usual place, soon as I could make it. He said something to the effect that zero might turn up missing; that this time the Colonel thought the chatter could be for real; and that his calibration boys were pissing fits and brick shitting. But my bladder’s buoy of was riding a wave so insanely high I just mumbled something to the effect that zero never meant much of anything to me, not really, but that I was open minded. "Maybe I’m cheap _and_ easy," I said. (_Maxine was probably right_.) I told him I’d be there as soon as I could.
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I flung the receiver down in the general direction of the phone’s cradle, and squeezing my nuts, hop hobbled to the head in a series broken lopes, a chaotic clutter riding an interior series of shuddering rumps that could freeze the spine of an jellyfish. _Spastic mime signing_, I thought, _worse than sports talk._ With my hours, two pots of Italian espresso couldn’t hoped to have kept me awake, but they sure as hell could stick me a swifty where it counted, kidneyward, while tossing my leaky torso like a bouquet of flesh to feeding sharks. When I finally reached the can, my nuts in the vice of my left fist, I unzipped, fumbled and tugged with my right while trying to brace my gnarly spine, other hand against wall, and biting the inside of my cheek til it bled just as I loosed the bloated, screaming dragon’s plosive strain. In another quarter second all I could hear was an almost howl, low down, guttural and miscreant, coming from my throat, while a fiercely determinate metallic splashing spread in slashing sheets like water blasting mountains down to core ("mining" in the Old West), as spray was sent smashingly porcelain-ward. _Old Lazarus!_ I thought with an inner sigh, reaching the crest of crimping pain’s release then turning a corner in inner-cranial space to find myself floating above an infinitude of nothing outside the consideration of time, suspended over mountain foothills plain prairie river in a Thomas Cole landscape, say, flowing in domains of sky and hawk and cloud, lit and unlit, somber and loud, fickle and gray, where it rained in torrents, where it suggested rain, glowering, and where rained not; like a being forged before gravity I swayed weightless, wings wound of light, _swift spine of mind!_, where time became nothing and weight had not yet been conceived . . . but slightly after a soft updraft, I veered a bit off, shuddered, then felt the soft tug of a child at the pantleg of my consciousness, whereupon I gradually resembled matter again and it all came suddenly back in hushed rush like memory’s last remains, as I fell landing rather ungainly on the bathroom floor, holding onto the yellow tiled wall with one hand, seven inches of dripping man meat in the other. _Whew! Moments to live for._ I shook it off, somewhat ungracefully, then reigned in the withering worm and zipped before splashing my face at the sink.
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When I returned to the office, Dolly was standing in the middle of the floor. Lamb’s wool never so fine, bovine eyelashes doing butterfly castanets, a wad of soft clover in chaw. "Come on, babe," I said, "We gotta date with the Colonel." In my rush, I grabbed Shepherdson’s sport coat off the rack instead of mine. Dolly didn’t blink so what did I care? _Hell, it don’t matter. He’s rich_, I said to myself, putting it on. _ Sinking his great-granddaddy’s fortune into iDex, was a stroke of old money luck or genius. I didn’t know which, but it sure put the zap on the operant conditions of so-called normal life from that day to this. The Change came when identity cloning fully stood in the midst of our existence like a wet boot in the middle of a dying man’s cranium. Even the run-down Olde Arboretum used to be a place of gaiety and light, a world of mind nearly native to its occasion, music color and motion, the scatterings of sun in beams as the soft dance of the sexes perfumed aire of spirit’s entrance, pheremones riding updrafts, lifting over verdant plain of skin frond leaf feather fur and petal, the trembling of every vine, rising at finger’s quick, climbing aloft, then casting themselves adrift, levitating, ablaze with air as florets of flame, dome lit with light and human laughter, the gaiety of existence, uprising melody of joy amid the vast glancing of eyes, the benign exhalation of deciduous trees woven with sweet breath of cedar, cypress, pine, lightness of mind in strands of light and breath that curled both branch and beam, danced amid forelock and hallop, trailed up and off and into the continuum, the heights beneath dome’s arcing architecture bright with such joyous presence, and yet ringing in memory’s sensorium, echoing in my tenderest mind . . . and not seven years later no one on the City Council would even call for a vote to budget its demolition. _The shits!_
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David’s coat felt a bit strange on me. _Patches and tweed. The whole tuna_, I thought as I reached for the knob. The mincing, sexy staccato of Dolly’s little hooves on linoleum followed me out the door, then down three flights of stairs. Not the take-off of twenty doves’ wings nor the side trot of a stumbling chorus line, her rhythm trafficked in herself and herself only; hoof beats tapping down ancient halls, immaculation of presence leaking through walls widely woven of silk scarfs, her beats echoed with the first sounding of my name beneath the moon, ancient stone in full lactation, then bore a quarter-inch hole through my temporal bone, that she might pour despair into all my being. I was a goner and knew it.
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As we crossed the street to my heap, an explosion clashed high above. Our senses dashed, both Dolly and I looked up to see a meteor slash across the sky, rending north from south, sharply, heading due west. After it had broken the sound barrier's tight cherry, I could hear the buckling and snapping about it and see its inner rock held fierce in fire rocket outward and over the ocean. The retinal burn of a knife slashing my visual cortex, the meteor became a tight flame before it disappeared, as though a single word, letter, line, dot. _So high it might strike a thousand miles out_, I thought. _Maybe it could reach the outer edge of the Pacific Rim._Indelible, each way I looked its afterimage seemed to scorch all my tenderest conceptions with dialectical insistence, rending them to dithered shreds. _Probably not a good sign_, I thought.
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It seemed to take forever to get to the other side of town. Even though it was the Sunday of a holiday weekend and there was hardly any traffic, we hit almost every other light and enough of those patrol types were about to give anyone pause, especially if _that anyone_ had his name on a few outstanding warrants, one a felony. But I wasn’t in a hurry, I wanted time to think, and driving was the site of one of my most sustained meditative states, just this side of porch rocking at a cabin mid-island with the water on one side running in deep and silent, concave roar swallowed by the dark walled interior of a few massive rocks, and on the other a scherzo of light and life, dace bright in its shallows, glitter warped white over weave of water, and me between, deep in thought.
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_Everybody said zero was nothing, but its loss (or theft)_, I realized, _might have an impact that, combined with the cortical "hyperventilation" of identity cloning, could dissolve all remaining distinctions of resemblance, similarity, and the same actual thing, not to mention copy, replication, shadow, echo, memory, and whatever simulacra might attempt a sense of duplication, words not withstanding. It could lead to an evagination of the actual, "like" for identity, "resemble" for the same. All existence crowding itself out of a non-extant frame that swirls in caducean coil about its primed doubleness (brain/thing mind/nothing thing/mind nothing/brain etc.) down the drain which will, itself, no longer, finally, exist, not that it ever did, then "itself" dissolving, and at last dissolving dissolv–– . . ._ My head was hurting. _The iDex Revolution was bad enough, blasting a hole in the past big enough for a drunken asteroid to zip through, taking us, for instance, from the yuppie gentrification of an up-scale Olde Harbor only eight years ago, an ambient postmodern backdrop for a panoply of artists, lovers, young professionals, designer druggists, and upscale bohemians, who in turn drew tourists in flocks of warbling waves, often coming from "the less fortunate states" to admire its grace, frequent its shimmering boutiques, organic markets, origami mines, amputation huts, and at night dine at the best seafood restaurants along Lower Coast Highway, and now in the space of less than a dozen years it’s just another site of abandoned civic architecture, a blip on the urban screen, the flat-line of decaying civic life while every suburban yap’s existence is made almost tolerable in the shiny pods hovering just beyond the outskirts, tucked into iDex’s "ChromOzones," lacking even a notion that anything of consequence might be beyond their glaze, "pud life," call it, such that they need never consider their own existence again, or if so only on a whim, in a game. . . . But if zero gets hijacked, no_thing _could not exist, at least not in the same way. And without such _absence_ could_ any_thing exist as well? . . . The resultant loss of differentiation while the human stew of podheads is already nearly reduced to "nothing in remission," the "occlusion of what does not exist"? All guesses lead to the same blank head-numbing wall. There was no way to even begin to know, no way to imagine what the loss of _zero_ could mean. . ._ .
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At least that’s what the Colonel thought. I remember how his face had lost all elasticity when he considered its disappearance the last time we met. _Over three months ago_, I realized. After uttering his final"zero" he seemed to drift into a negative state, neither quite here, fully there, nor in our normal muddle in-between, but elsewhere, here and absent as well, at least as far as I could discern, as I was concerned in turn. It took maybe two-and-a-half minutes for the fish to swim back into the gaze of his eyes, then catch a steady stream. "If something happens to nothing, the next stage of evolution might be . . . starting all over again," he muttered with a shudder that seemed to ride the fatalistic shrug of his shoulders, soft and sweet, then looking down, gave final punctuation to his confusion and fear with a soft emptying of lungs. _Sometimes there’s_ too much _to remember_.
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Turning south onto Olde Harbor Trace, it was a straight shot. I was there before I knew it. (_As always_.) I pulled into Neo-PayDay’s front lot, just across from what was left of The Olde Arboretum after The Change had torn it several new ones. I wanted to look the place over but didn’t want to alarm Dolly. "I’m just going in to grab some smokes," I said, stepping out of the ragtop in what I felt to be the tweedest of conditions. (An academic barge, a slobbering Yale professor who divorces his department thirty years ago all over again and again almost every time he opens his fat yap, a plump nude pledge serving drinks at a frat party, a joke in tortured human flesh.)
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It being Sunday, Neo-PayDay’s door was shut, bolted, and locked away. I pretended to search for something in Shepherdson’s coat so I could look about. _Wonder what’s in the pockets?_ I stalled on hover. After a hand fumble at the end of arm’s wrangle, I felt over a half pack of cigarettes. _A leftie? Hmmm._ A pack of Tailor Menthols as it turned out. And I hadn’t even known he smoked. _It shows you something sometimes_, I thought. _Other times it doesn’t mean a damned thing._ I found a Bic™ in the pocket as well so I tried to light one up. Remembering how the crack of nicotine used to strike me like a bolt to the tender root, my hand threatened to fly off into spastic ruts, a mime’s epileptic fits, or a poisoned rat making its nut, as I attempted to appear casual while looking toward the broken glass towers of The Olde Arboretum’s main building. I held my right hand steady with the left and stoked up.
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Everything looked normal. No sign of movement. Another deserted morning. _All the bums must be out on the job_, I thought, _whatever _job_ that is, it being mid-holiday_. I choked over what sounded like smothered laugh, a bit more than a evangelist ’s hiccup. (_God’s speed bump_.) I waited a minute then took another drag and slowly exhaled, spelling out the nature of my existence in the smoke that curled into shimmering torsos, phantom plasmic ropes entwined in feminine grace of line, spliced flesh and hair, hip curving to buttock, cheek smoothed against pudenda, til it slid across and slowly off into broken arcs and curves, slices of scimitars, cutlasses, swords, fangs, shards of tits and ass, dragon wings, feathertips of finger’s reach at earth’s remove, until finally they disappeared into only air and light, to which I gave my mind, freely at last, _One molecule to all others_. It had been a long time since I’d had a straight jolt of nicotine. _Not since the night I woke up beside the kid’s nude body, wet in the predawn. ("Dew or death sweat?"_ I remembered wondering.) Steeple upside down.
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I shook involuntarily, then began to raise the cigarette for another hit when a shining swan swam across the limbic stream of my vision to the right of The Old Arboretum’s main building. Something that resembled a shadow of light. I located it in my visual cortex and slowly turned my head to look, trying to seem casual. On one of the arboretum’s sagging chrome buttresses to the east, a milky yellow in diminishing mid-morning’s light, I saw what I thought was a faintly luminous flashing, almost as though it wasn’t there, soft as a reflection lost in ocean’s canyon, wandering meagerly within. _Nothing could do that, at least while nothing lasts as such_, I thought _, except the reflection from a ‘17 PodCaster’s windshield, the kind iDex requisitioned for their undercover clones. That means some of their thugs are probably behind the brick Toole Shede._ If they stayed still, I realized, there wasn’t a problem, _But if they pull through and spot us. . ._ . I needed to think, so I took another pull. . . ._ Damn! The second jolt’s almost as good as the first_. Only this time after a quick trip to oblivion, I found myself jet skiing through the bloody slush of Mars through hot winds, stitching flowers in my wake for sweet anvil’s sake. "You could get addicted," I almost said.
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Just then the slight flash on the buttress was joined by another above it and to the right over the forever-falling east tower. I knew someone had opened the car’s door to get in or get out unless I’d seen an afterimage of the first flash as I shifted my eyes to avoid the smoke of the third puff that tried to blow back in my face. _Shit. This stuff is pretty damned all right. That’s what I say_.
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[Writing stands up and gives us the butter finger.]
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Stillness turned to a breeze which quickly became wind and a deep shadow swiftly swallowed all flashings as cloud’s gauze was thickly cast across the sun like a curtain, or a blanket over the face of a dead man. I looked up. Sin was never so deep as clouds’ cast then. _Shit_, I thought, _It’s gonna rain and the top won’t go up. I better duck under what’s left of the awning over at The Olde Arboretum’s entrance or we’ll get spritzed good_. I hobbled to car, needlessly cupping the Tailor in my palm. The wind at earth’s surface wasn’t yet high enough to disturb it much less tangle with its tip but some things just seemed like they needed done.
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When I got to the door of my heap, I saw a highschool girl, mall goth, leaning over the passenger’s side of the back seat and holding a baseball hat out to Dolly with a small pen. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, I thought, as she gushed on about Dolly’s "bitchin’-wicked chromo-strands and deox-dupes," gabbing about how the difference of absence was "almost nearly" a presence itself after "utter" phantom foregrounding, golly-existential-gee all but clothing her theory-babble from pod-vision to phantom prosthetics where reference disappears in a metaphor no longer bearing across like replication’s reflection, Neo-Christ, in a protean calibration of differentials, a black room filled with mirrors, the dream of stumps, and so on. She was wearing a black dress ringed with ruffles of dark gray lace, snapping in sudden winds against her back and neck’s short nape. Her fingernails were painted a hypnotic emerald green as backdrop, each flaunting a different Hebrew letter, maybe a half-inch high in a mars black, font, surly gothic. _Probably from the Kabbalah_, came to mind as I reached for the handle. _I wonder what they spell. Maybe "golem rights."_ I took another toke.
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Bam! Alacrity’s edge etched my brain with the presence of what’s to come under cypher’s unerring strain with terrifying registration for over three spirit-draining seconds. Moles dying in fetal shock. Sanctity slumming in troughs of Nanny’s witch-sauce. Naughty, naughty. Planets the size of billiard balls passing through a van’s cab. A star-scope studded geodesic dome blossoming with memories the size of rhizomes breeding restlessly on the horizon. Hardon in first waters. Suicides of monoliths clotting the sacred way, fleshy coagulants. A motel boiling in flames. Mitochondrial names. Sheen over memory. Wall of intimate articulations. But the meaning of which . . .?
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I stopped and shook my head. The goth was still achatter. _Christ, she’s iDex skin-and-bones_, I realized. _I can pick up on ‘em in nanoseconds, especially when they’re decked out like this, smarmy snot-chic with a sophomoric angst paraded in designer derelict apparel chic, sneakers dyed a miscreant’s idea of bile-green. Probably from the division that specializes in 90's replicants. A poser posing as a poser. Good_, I thought. _ Damned freakin’ good._
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While Dolly signed her baseball cap, I tried to make small talk with the "girl" to throw her off, even though I knew iDex probably already had us cold, damned near frozen. "Hey, kid," I said, "You know where’s a convenience store? I’m almost running out of these," holding up the remainder of my Tailor. The wind, rising, kicked the ashes off its tip and sent them over windshield’s glass to scatter in a clashing sheet that broke above the hood. Pooft. _Flecks cut to sheer . . . no longer even discernibly particles_.
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[what world retains its heft, weight of radiant gist, torque of its inception, finding elements in the primacies of their extent (where phrase laps stone’s shore in linguistic welter, I mean ballistic weather) that advance our principle to wit's last stand after undergoing a mind-rending escape, death, and/or torture session only to face an amorphously ominous future while waiting for the hidden cause of whatever might reveal itself (what might "might" portend?) while trying to foil those who would rid the world of distinction, say the radical fringe that shot off the spinning rim of iDex's Aught Division and would "set the click" by cipher-seizing the calibration codes of chromomachines in order to mathematically eliminate "that which does not exist," yaka, yaka, all the while Max would be waiting at The Olde Arboretum for the Colonel to show, picking leaves and small twigs off their coats–brownish tweed, worn wool–while they face the deadening vibrance of sinister potentiality before the story wends its way woodward into deeper doom, until in the last lost cabin Max bends to check a false clue’s truth when he sees the arm of a shadow rise above him on the wall and trying to straighten watches it swiftly descend as everything goes sudden pitch in a pinch, lost coma of night, story left in shards, luminous holes perhaps opening their eyes in a linguistic corpse alive like a carcass of beef writhing with maggots, flies in time’s vat feasting on the melodies of lyric slickness, the sweet songs of fetal blue fly on the richly spoiled meat from which their tiny heads emerge briefly to see what they might of the world without and catch a breath of rancid air, yet blind to all but need they turn and bury their heads once again in meadow's sweet flesh to feed, words melting in their mouths, mouths as mind's measure, the mind indelible, . . . for a brevity]
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When the girl took back her hat and pen with, I thought, a rather arch pretense of gratitude, pursing her back in lieu of a bow while smartly snapping her neck fifteen degrees to the right, I started up the car and put it in gear. As I began pulling away, I saw her wave the hat. I turned right on Olde Trace, took the first left onto Royal, then checked the rearview. Dolly was waving back.
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The clone was right. An iMat was open about eight blocks down. _They must have loaded her with the full GeoPack_, I thought. _They must mean business. More than somebody’s cookies could get spilt_.
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I got out. There was a kid playing marbles in a clear patch of weedly lawn in front of an abandoned house across the way. A thick trail of snot beneath his nose caught what was left of the quickly waning light. _Bugger_. It hit me. _Keeps means for keeps. Sons-a-bitches!_ Inside, a Polynesian clerk was straightening cans of canary relish on the second-to-last aisle. He looked up, unsurprised to see me, or more accurately, like everything was just too shockingly normal and dull for the registration of his mind much less the comment of his eyes. Splay of life’s limb in everyday delirium, he gleamed with the dull burnish that one associates with those just before caught in the thrust of a great, life-changing surprise. _Perfect. It’s getting to be a bit much_.
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I bought two packs of Tailors just in case (not menthol, I didn’t want the nicotine blast riding waves of a tired lounge act with a Lemony Pledge™ back) and two more Bics™. Somehow I knew I’d need them. I let the clerk keep the change. _It probably won’t do either of us any good anyway_, I remember thinking as I pulled my tired carcass behind the wheel. "We’re just going to go uptown," I said over my shoulder as I headed east, "toward The Projects," and flipping my neck, gave her a wink, "Gotta see a horse about a pig."
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All the way up Royal to Simulacrum I sang broadly to the sky just to give the snoops at iDex a thrill:
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Gotta see a filly
About a silly sow,
Milk a juicy Arab
Squeeze a cumquat cow,
Gonna seek a filly’s argo-
Nought now, but not now, or
Naught now?, then whenever
while?, yet if now, as ever
Rides the winds, when then?
O sing o, then’s when-o . . .
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And so forth, to the tune of Lil' Qua's "Cypha Fly." I had to make up the words because I could only remember a few snipets of the lyrics, and the melody kept slipping out of my mind as well: small phrasings of notes disappeared from their melodic interstices and cobblings fell through folds of air’s crepitating fabric. I looked up. The sky had turned a deeper shade of darkness and the wind poked holes in all my hopes for stability, fluttering at the marges of my consciousness like curtains in broken window’s winds over shutters or the manes of a horse over its neck, running ripe with frenzy and slashing at its rider’s nonexistent face. The next moment the wind would die for a minute until it spasmed in gusts all over again, and I felt, at the boundaries of my being, a wavering of the portals, and heard the hush of rubble from outlandish terrains lying beyond. On, off, on, off. Dioramic tilt, tat-for-a-tit-clit. (_What if we get stuck with "off" forever on?_ I wondered.) Or like coughing within. Or was it more like sick barks as a down beat for a spasming series of alternate feeding and purging behaviors? _Damn_, I thought, _better get to the bottom of this fast, before the very concept of zero disappears beneath sheer’s edge where everything else, walls of flowers, afternoons of rain, the webbing of dimensional branes, disappear as though they’d never been. Then we’ll be really lost, without even the idea of here, or anywhere for that matter, much less everywhere other. Today's PodBurg could look like a Miltonian paradise. His hell but a spell in an irritation habitation, flip and fictional_.
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The rain began half way.
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[The strangely intense sincerity of a man in a world "borrowed," it seems, from a distinctly inferior imagination, yet one which forcibly occupies all his so-called lesser sensibilities like an conquering army camped across the countryside of his psychological domain, as though he woke up one day to find himself in an actuality that made what he had previously considered banal seem like bright gaiety and relief from a state in thrall to such operant conditions which should not, he would have thought if he had considered the matter in the least, present a world that might hope to meet the simplest test of credible reality without a hilariously high entertainment value, and then to realize that in such a world, blunt as a chasm, reality is preparing the ground for the telling of what might come to be, almost, as elements on the page, torsos or portions of presences in every patch of words, an instance of world or mind in phrases proceeding to a place like wind, immediately prior to, before, and somewhat after, the firstness of beginning. Air into air. Frog chords in chorus. Spring.]
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I finished singing by belting out a last round of gnarled knots into the blazing froth of a world whipped with rain’s randy cat-tails which seemed to slash at us from all directions as I pulled into iTel’s NodVille about a half mile before The Projects: A Living Museum. We were soaked. The sky was blacker than I can ever remember before mid-day since I was stationed in The Aleutians, and the storm was having us for an extended brunch, popping about us as though it was jacked-up on PCPs and mace, a rapacity wielding billy clubs in furious pommeling bursts while beneath my tinnitus it sounded as though radios were calling, cracking frantically for more cars. I probably should have pulled under the office’s overhang, but we were already wet and miserable and I wanted to see Maxine as soon as I could, so I drove straight to her place, down the line of identical doors, each a vertical withering green seeming to waver in the air as I passed.
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Two-thirds down the lot I stopped, opened the driver’s door against elements’ overripe insistence, and face stinging, went around to the passenger's door, tipping back the seat for Dolly while all the while the world kept "tearing us a new one," as they say. She got out backward and slow, her wool thick, matted, wet, whipping at her sides and back. _Like an elderly ewe! . . . She’s really not well_, I thought. _I’ll bet it was those pills she took to bring it off_.
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Dolly and I walked slowly over to HU #13 and stood under the small awning. I rang the bell while Dolly started to shake beside me. It seemed she couldn’t stop. Her nervous tremor turned into a series adolescent sexual shutters then seemed headed into a battery of fevered quakes or even paroxysm's ruptured muddle before body’s final shakes.
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I rang the bell again. No answer. And again. After a pause, I thought I heard a faint tinkling from deep within, the slight but unmistakably bright-edged sound of glass snapping. I pushed the bell again and waited about twenty seconds before I tried the knob. I barely touched it and the door swung open several inches on its own as a slight heaving pulse seemed to wave beneath phenomenal existence. I figured iDex’s Aught renegades were running quanta-ciphers through ideationally cloned nanobranes in preparation for a major assault on zero but there wasn’t enough time to consider that when Maxine might be in peril. I pushed the door open and stepped into the dark room. The lights didn’t work. The switch made a broken omen sound as though a finger snapping on the fat pad of a palm in an empty warehouse. Muffled clucks. Denial’s mistress. I reached into my back pocket and grabbed a handkerchief to mop my brow, hair and face (I was already standing in a puddle), then pulled out a new Bic, tore open a pack of Tailor Straights and after I lit one, held the lighter up to look about the room. Sweet smackety clack of neuronal collapse, swack, slack, spack, athwackety-smack. Seconds wandered down lost hours in halls surrounded by aisles of cars hovering miles above oblivion’s secret children. Blue glue. Toe-job. Doggerel plastering culture’s _causis via_. After another heart-stopping half minute of this, I came down fast and hard, gnawing on my tongue.
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The room looked like a battalion of podhead rejects had spent the night turning the place over while searching for an identity fix. In every corner and on every surface lay the rubble of what had been in prudent order only the afternoon before. I had stopped by to tell Maxine that the Colonel wanted her to become "increasingly insistent" in harvesting information from her presumptive squeeze, Aught’s Head Outlier, a cipher freak and geek savant. (He was even going bald and he laughed like a girl.) She’d been cleaning half the day, she said. (I didn’t want to know what she’d been doing the other half.) When I left a little later, we briefly hugged. All night and so far this morning, even after the storm, I could sense the smell and feel the open freshness of her presence on my neck and cheek. _Last time I saw her. Maybe forever. . . . Shit!_ Room dense in bright bramble, litter scrabbled. Every little thing had reverted to anything otherwise else while "here" was no longer a simple proposition. I took another bolt. Barn-crazy bats’ skullduggery ripped me stern from stem, babies with flamethrowers and criminal dexterity, a deft sense of the comedic systemic to spastic proctology, pathogens whipped into bright frenzied mourning, and thirty more series of scenes begging to be ignored, ideas wishing they’d never been born, and hallucinations in suicidal squalor, until I came back to my senses and the room’s dire wounds lay open before me. Empty picture frames in visual plain’ ripe disarray. A thousand broken items cracked, bashed and smashed reflected from a thousand faces of broken mirrors, shards in shards compounded and collected, (_All life is glass_, I thought, _emblem emptied of all but emptiness_), and her "implements" scattered all over the place.
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Boy, that tobacco’s got a handsome bolt!_ I thought as I took another toke and wish’s steamy wet hot load boiled over the mise-en-scene of a barracks with a dozen soldiers at attention; subsequently dismissed, they turned and ran out barking into the midnight of a weekend leave, headlessly foreword. I smacked my noggin fast and sweet on a cast iron pan then watched a little man turn blue while swinging and rocking from rope’s end by his neck as he wacked off into the emptiness of my cranial vault, his noose an umbilicus turned loose, before the nicotine crested and I floated down to settle on something that resembled the form of what I remembered as the ground. Still . . . rocking. . . .
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[_What chord from story’s portal if not "apparatus," "motif," "sub-genre," type," "nodal chime afloat in a reticulating system of matrices, thick with eyes," or whatever else the glazed pedant might tell us? How are they otherwise?_ Complexities. Beyond apprehension. Or despite the conscious attention by which we cannot hope to locate, much less name with precision, damn near _any_thing. _Why not "essences"?_ Because "essence" is usually thought inert or static and enthraled to a particular metaphysic but _these_ are articulate and bloom, and are rooted in the ground of our being including our possibility of change which appears to be a necessary condition for their continued vibrance. Form into form flowing. Fingers, lips and eyes move about a torso, along with arms and legs as over the page of their existence (where we passed through a story with our corporeal being, one in which in which a duck carried a canvas of sky on a blue day into an _other_ consideration of words. When he came to a lake, the water asked him if he’d like to set the canvas down and wash his feet, and when he did, its little waves curled up into a giggling rush then hopped about as the wind whipped them bubbling up higher and snatched the painting, flinging it into depth of sky’s distance as though there was a sanctuary at the end of us all, but of course there isn’t, which is why the sky no longer perches on our shoulders and tells us long stories wearing robes). More than a coordination of "elements" except as a thing might be thought to be coordinate with itself, its parts "of a part," each separate echo of identity prior to and yet succeeding the primary, as though indigenous to its own occasion. As though as though. From one, many. Bearing across. _What of the body and the brain?_ It is _of_ the body, where "of-ness" precludes the concept of ownership, accumulation, and value for anything other than itself. (Sky pouring with voices like hot milk; shore running with tears of duck; echoes of who we were when we were roaming through this life.) Words filled with body’s air.]
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I heard something that sounded like a muffled woman’s screeching come from the back of the apartment and stumbled though the living room’s debris holding the lighter out before me until it got so hot I dropped it. I glanced back and saw the dark silhouette of Dolly against the shiny dimness of the lot outside. She was slumped in the doorway, but as I looked her legs gave way and she slid, then finally fell into a heap, breathing heavily, still shaking, half in and half out of the room. I wanted to turn and grab her and run (_If she’s a goner, I want to be there._) but the screaming began again. _Maxine?_ I wondered. So I half fell, half staggered forward til I made the hall.
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With hands on either wall I followed the woman’s cries until I felt the bathroom door’s frame on the right. It had been left open and when I poked my head in a gust of wet air hit me like a fish, smack, flat on my fat of my face. _The screaming’s in the wind beyond_, I realized, so I kicked some bottles and gnarled lumps of stuff out of the way and staggered in while taking another hit off the Tailor. The coal at its end blazed and spit in the gusts but it also lit up part of a wall and the toilet tank’s top. On it, I could see what looked like a folded page, blank but for a large, hastily scrawled "M" on the top (_Lipstick?_), so I grabbed it and shoved it quickly into Shepperdson’s coat pocket with the cigarettes, while I waited for the nicotine bolt to hit like a sledge between my eyes, riveted to place that I might ride the raw cusp of its monoxide bulge like a bucking bronc on a punk’s payday. It didn’t disappoint.
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For three minutes I hovered over the final punctuation mark of a coma, fully apprised of life’s futility, silence ringing like the phantom sigh of a stillborn; a slippery undertow beneath the existence of all things, real, imagined, and beyond comprehension; ears filled with the unceremonious laughter above a shallow grave amid drunken, obscene toasts and brutal mockery; slush of roadkill in thrust of dipping beak; the pop of a child’s skull beneath a boot, etc. _This is some shit!_ I thought. _You bet._
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A minute later, barely ambulatory, I went to window where I could make out its broken pane. _Where the wind’s coming from_. . ., I thought slowly, _alley . . . , trying to gather whatever wits I might yet entertain, _down which it channeled. . . . Building up steam, screaming in mind_. I shook my head to clear the bramble patch of monoxides as though branch and twig were choked with web and weed) then stuck it out into the alley where the rain whipped at my face like a furnace fast in first blast. I was planning on pulling it back to take another hit, but I noticed the screaming was louder, even though muffled by another sound, a soggy scruff, or the broad muffled scraping of heavy rumpled crud. _Like dragging a rolled-up livingroom rug_, I thought, _over wet asphalt . . . amid some sloshing. Constant but fading away, slightly, with the screaming_, I realized, flicking the Tailor alleyward. It was drenched before it left my finger tips.
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When I pulled my head back in, my eye caught an orangish flicker of flame on a shard stuck in window’s frame. I turned and saw a soft shadow-like glow in the doorway coming from down the hall, brightest to the left. _The lighter I dropped must have started it_, flashed through my mind as the glowing grew larger and more immediately insistent, its imprecation rising with the crackling volume of each moment. I was cooked. _It must have caught on all the stuff laying about . . . . I gotta escape out the window, into the alley_, I realized, _Besides, . . . the screaming . . . maybe it’s Maxine_. All the while the thought of Dolly, her blown body’s quickly sinking, lying sick or swiftly dying, in the entrance of the door, with a pathos past all pleasure, mindful mark of thought’s lost treasure, past any flight of meaning’s measure, or most baleful note of reason’s lore, torched me cold in panic’s freezing, tore my mind with sorrow’s lesions, then rose and turned in thought’s sad season, down all the halls of mind’s sick treasons, as I leapt with vast misgivings onto alley’s doleful floor, fraught with sadness in my darkly core, crushed ‘neath sickness I could not ignore, but as a comet before me ever bore the great and greater more, the verbal flame, her clonéd name (_Dolly! Most lithesome livestock! Heartsick ode!_), then slowly stood to face my fate while sorrow's features rose and glowed, and tore another hole into my frontal lobe.
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_Sure could use one_.
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_Zero’s more than a state of mind, and less_, I told myself as I hit the bricks. _Without it, there’d probably be none of this. No more fires. No rain or cigarette bolts. No more dying and no more hope of being "at home" with what I can never know except that it seems like it’s always more than I could’ve guessed_. So I knew I had to fight. _The loss of zero could make a nihilist’s ashheap seem like the most vapid bubble in Milton’s paradise_, I thought. _We could be left with less than half of ever-the-less, nothing else, no reason to speak without belief, nor purpose for life, knowing no relief much the less the sweet rhyme of mind and body, and no reason to go anywhere, ever, never again_.
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The welter of my way, finger of my fate, I knew, pointed to a place just beyond the alley’s mouth where the screaming had stopped with the slamming of a car’s trunk. Time tangled in my hair with wind-and-rain worry as I ran in the sound’s direction, slipping fore and aft on nearly every third step. Several times I was forced to plant my foot in alley’s center splashing in its gutter several times due to the placement of waste bins and a parked delivery van. _Someone left its lights on_, I noticed as I ran past, catching a glimpse of what looked like keys dangling from the dash, a swaying glint caught in sight-stream. A small creature, some diminutive varment, ran along the wall in the opposite direction, making a series of splashy squeaks in quick chattering bursts as water slapped its face. _Not a favorable omen_, I thought while still running._Hmm. Maybe it’s a good thing I _can’t_ understand what he’s saying_. At that moment I heard an engine start up fast and hard and the screech of mushy tires–rubber, asphalt and water’s slushy collision bouncing off walls of moment’s canyon–as a car sped off north toward The Projects. _Probably with Maxine_, I realized.
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[a cloud, a man, and a mule, three halves to every story, narrative triage after a series of brutal trepanations in the desert, four days out, water almost gone, the holes he counted on had dried long since, probably when he was in the pen, he hadn’t figured on dying but who does?, what he’d buried was five days out, with two water holes he’d have "made it easy," with one, he thought he might get into "a bit of a pinch," but with none. . . . Yet even then he felt, based solely on personal experience that there was almost certainly another side to the continuity he currently enjoyed, albeit in misery; he could feel it in his mind ("As there has always been"). Now four days trudging beside the mule with harness, pack, pick, and empty canteens, had brought this to him, to dine on his just desert where day’s moments are measured in quarter-hours wearing sun in mind, tripping over thoughts thinner than air, as the barest syllable, death, almost caught in his throat . . . just then a small dark cloud rose over the horizon . . . a mirage? . . . a buzzard? . . . . a phrase?]
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I realized the car would get away if I took the time to fetch my heap from the front lot so I struck my left leg to post, stuck a pivot, foot in rushing breech, and quickly turned into a mad splashing dash back to the truck, slashing moments to wet shreds, and climbed in. _Damn!_ I could barely breath. _Need one bad_. I turned the key. _With any luck. . . ._. It started after only a few seconds of grinding its entropic way into the basement of my considerations. _It must’ve just been left. . . . Weird. . . . Delivery truck . . . middle of such a morning . . . wildly inclement . . . interior lights on. . . . hmmm. . . . Maybe he lit them to find something in the cab . . . and when he left he thought he’d be right back. . . . On Sunday? . . . mid-holiday?_ But I didn’t have time to more than crack the think tank much less grab another smoke. I was driving slam-fisted fast as I could, smashing into sides of bins and walls and who knows what indiscriminate else in my metal-gnashing career down alley. In the side mirror I saw cloudy streaks of sparks behind the careening van, sailing into its dim recesses, extinction and beyond, while all while before me I could hardly see though rain’s insistence, yet felt the imprecation of walls to either side, and peering sensed a hint of space before the hood, using the van’s breaks only when I reached the street.
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_Royal_.
I looked out the driver’s side, back toward the lot, and spotted my soggy ragtop drooping outside Maxine’s opened doorway, bright streams of orange swirling behind. The back half of the building was caught in a mad riot of flames. _My God!_ I could see the silhouette of Dolly on her side, unmoving, lying over the door’s threshold. My heart sank to its feet. The actual gone under. Logos without purchase. Dire apprehensions danced a miscreant jig in the wings of my attentiveness. And then something filled my conception gallery with the terror of a ripe namelessness. (I didn't know why; at the time I couldn’t have guessed.) _Something blurry_. I wiped my eyes and looked again. A large human-like figure slowly rose above Dolly in silhouette, then reached down as though to lift her, but at that moment the room behind was devoured in flames, and smoke shot billowing out in cannon-like wads from every broken pane, poured and blasted through each missing door or broken window frame in fractured gusts with fat slaps of flame between, precluding further sight.
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When I turned to my right, north down Royal, I could see the low riding trunk of a ‘17 PodCaster, dark green, or so it looked in the wavering light of rain, _Morning barreling down midnight’s street_.
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I turned the wheel and followed.
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The wipers didn’t work so I cracked the dash a few times before giving over. I shot up Royal as rain slashed the cab’s windows following the jerking red lights that kept pulling further away while trying not to hit any parked cars or stray pets, madly thinking one thing, _Maxine_, woven with one other, _Dolly_.
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We were scat-blasted in chase, mind’s stand and release each second, rolling blades down squalling streets with fractured turns and lots of sharp, heavy lifting at the wheel. (_Good shoulder workout_.) In a couple of minutes, which seemed like an unspecified duration of horror, the PodCaster turned back onto Royal and made an immediate right into the main entrance of The Projects, past its half-fallen A Living Museum sign. _Its lights are out_, I thought, as I turned in only a few seconds behind, rocked outward by the van’s caterwaltering turn, back wheels whipping street mush into mash, splashing, then snapping into drunken alignment and following the car up and onto the main drag, a hulk beneath the downpour. I stopped. The PodCaster was nowhere to be seen. So I drove slowly, went all the way to the end, looking both ways down each side street. It seemed like a deserted city. _Even the replicant thugs must be underground to beat the rain_, I thought, _along with the generic crowd of cloned hookers, wantabes, dopers, groupies, and leftovers_. Then I began to drive slowly around the high-rises on the smaller roads, lights off, looking for any movement through the downpour and checking out all the cars I could while looking hard for the PodCaster. No sign of it anywhere. All I could see were burnt out hulls. _Freakin’ tourist trap_.
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After five minutes I was ready to give up, drive back, and find what was left of Dolly, but something told me to wait, at least a bit longer. A little hum of almost pain throbbed in my mid-right side, a presence leaned into my torso, or anticipation’s pleasure became manifest in moment’s flesh, passing through and by. "Just wait," it seemed to say, but I misunderstood its meaning.
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So on a side street I pulled the van over, put it in park, and reached into Shepherdson’s coat pocket for a smoke. _Hmm, . . . the folded page_, then, _such muscle is memory_ , and pulled it out along with the open pack of Tailor Straights. I turned the cab lights on and pushed in the van’s lighter nearly at the same time. As I waited for its cherry to pop with a healthy red knob so I could "catch my train," I turned the page over. The "M" on top _was_ in lipstick. The concept of "shaky" would have barely covered its calligraphic eccentricity. More like a wound than a letter, dressing ripped off and the ripe mess sliced open again with edges sharp as electric pain, torn with searing ferret teeth, the alphabet aflame.
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I lit a cigarette and unfolded the page while holding onto the van’s door-arm. As the rain drummed windows and roof, five million diamonds suddenly burst into the cab hot from grazing the ambient fields of Olympus and crowded into my cranial dome like a run on the bank in a silent film where the sheriff never ran out of ammo as he blasted his way through a crowd of nature’s "most brilliant minerals," who flailed as they careened out and off into time’s rapture with rupturing faces shuttling between fractured facets into the furthest recesses of unconscious space, balanced precariously above interior’s delirium as a continental shelf might hover high atop moment’s thinnest strand over a waterfall’s abyss pouring into a vertigo of sea whose massive canyons defy origins of understanding beneath unbounding waves . . . rolling . . . rocking. . . , _Again, the ulteriors_, I bowed my head beneath the weight of _what wasn’t_ in _whatever was_ or _might never be the case_, wondering _what will or not_ in _then_’s remains (_future causes past?_), and if not _then_, _when_ and _why the hell not_?, til such a _why_ became _never mind_, a stump in the woods, death’s prosthetic as I with effort managed to lift its tolling head again on neck as if it was an unsturdy wall and my spine a rolling noodle, then turned it slowly, side to side, trying to open the cauterized wounds of its eyes. Gradually the bustling mind of all unintelligible things, the chaotic diorama of what’s going in mind’s cluster-rut riding backward on each terrifying moment as on a buckling dolphin, became a screen which slowly began to fade, and what had been a slight pinprick of light dilated to the size of a coin, then of a fist, a volleyball (_the actual world!_), then as large as a NASCAR driver’s cardboard display, and eager to get to the other side, I stepped through too early, catching the tip of mind’s shoe on its lip, falling forward, and finally back into the cab where I landed suddenly on its seat in a warping series of wolfs, screeching hollers, amid the smack of bumblebees, space-time stuttering through time-space, cycling into regions of nothing until eye’s light of mind found the world again, there and here, entire, rain hammering on van’s roof, whipping across windshield in lordly gusts.
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[the fact of what is, what ws added, what wasn’t left out, rearranged and revised, whatever, in the face of all this about talk about "a disembodied absence on the cusp of existence" set amid "the swarming particularity of text," stone without a tongue as a bushing for time's abyss, seems like dicking around the quick peripheries of what was just thrown up in haste like nearly anything else (bridges, towering monuments to waste, fountains of firework displays, etc.) into the midst of what already is, may come to be, or had been like a late nineteenth-century world’s fair, the void shakes before the inception of an idea unrealized until we are with word (is _that_ it? or is there an entity before that, a _presence_ or a node of radical existence, nearly sentient, in what existed before words drained meaning of the silence: _You write I read, / Eye’s light you bleed, / I write you read, / Bright red in seed_), provinces of such presences, mountains, valleys, lakes and harbors, markets, castles, railroad stations, miles of apple and grape, orchards stretching to the far mountains, history shot through with a bright procreant urge conceiving itself over and ever forward, other than here, words turned to world into words again turning then incessantly, incestuously, intermarrying, molesting, cloning, swapping, pimping, raping, snuffing . . . on the screen, a blur, the shuttling of magic’s image above the shimmering of nearly sentient in the vortex of what exists prior to entrance, that is immediately "before" the coming and going of all things at once, in and out of being, over the bright falls of existence, caught in which spray we . . . , who is anyone anyway if not a wonder, what is it to know anything of what is or isn’t compared to the fairly limited value of pondering an identity in words (as authorship), as though we had a hold, that its conceptions (answers on their way to further questions) could match the rapturous madness of moment’s multiplicities, beyond word and illusion, mind’s dress, who I am (who _am_ I? never fully here or realized), suffocating beneath vocabularies, sluggish thinking, tailored shirts, belts and aftershave, poetry readings and corduroy coats (_Cloth of kings or man, / The common bred / With book in hand, / Learning not to read / / –Consonants cradling vowels / Vowels like the crying of children– / Least lashings of line / Bringing sickness to mind_), whose questions of authorship _are_ these anyway, by its own admission that which_isn’t_ in disquisition on what _cannot_ exist (_Fields of oblivion / Sown with words / Moments into eons / Blossom to birds_), a vast forgetting that we might conceive a self that may fill its time, simply, instead of hiding beneath confusion that knows not its name, others provisional but alive in whatever lights they (or you?, or I?) might bring to a world randy with distinctions, flora and fauna alive, multiplicities alight in mind’s eye. One, one, one, one. A world without distance, detachment, lacking the indifference of word, nothing except infinite envelopes–which envelop everything but the unity of your own "design," that no one is left behind, just sun and air, or on walls, in the cab of a car while driving into town, you wonder if the obsessive questionings of whatever one is, in any sense, animated by body and mind’s articulation in a space that words shall not erase, might yet draw from us "the living end" to where leaf and light do meet, torso sways to ancient melody, and mind sprouts florets of light at fingertip in which line, shape, and phrase pour upon the page, trees turn brown in autumn, and you drive into work as though no one ever existed (_Nothing persists / In mind of man / Where whatever exists / Bares hard on the land_ ) only in words as though finding it all over again the first time each the same]
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I let go of the van’s armrest with a heavy sigh and tried to make sense of the text which slowly began to come into focus on the rumpled page. If sight was breath, it was like trying to breath through three inches of phlegm, but gradually I could make out the beginnings and endings of sentences, then words, caps, a few particularities of letters, until finally I could distinguish "r’s" from "e’s" and "s’s" from "c’s" and saw the consonants were charged with vowels and the vowels began to fly with their cousins across the page like startled fowl from brush, and I realized I could read.
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In the upper right hand corner: "Page 4 of 32." _It must be from The Olde Web off Maxine’s ancient printer_, I thought as I began:
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had committed his last indiscretion. General Von Stueben set down his spoon, firmly but without emphasis, and stood. We could still hear his glass ringing off the furthest reaches of the hall as Tutwiler, totally white, blinking, opened and closed his mouth several times, though no sound came forth save for a whispered rasping whimper down in his throat. He looked like a bag of wet cement with a face of sweating lard. His suit dripped around his body. When the General walked to the podium, he brushed him aside with a glance, then turned and spoke sharply into the mike,"The question is _not_ ‘how man could treat his fellows so reprehensibly in the camps,’" shooting Tutwiler a look over his shoulder, then turning back, "but how he can treat them so benignly, even _well_, in what we currently consider ‘normal circumstances.’" No rattle of plate-and-fork, soft scraping of cup over saucer. No one coughed or even moved, nor shifted in his seat. The only sound was that of Tutwiler, the shameful stain of incontinence radiating from his crotch as he stumbled, nearly pushing himself through a suddenly viscid present on his way through the hall and out the side door, never to be seen again. The audience’s attentiveness was honed to a shimmering edge, one I had witnessed previously but only in the presence of The General in the few weeks leading up to the onset of The Change, never since.
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After Tutwiler’s residue had drained from the hall, Von Stueben launched into his famous _disquisiton extemporare_, "Zero Prime," giving us the philosophical ground and mathematical base for our current theories (see section five: "Lost Furtherance in Camel’s Eye"), his ideas riding the surge of his late thinking’s full potency a month-and-a-half prior to the release of _Mein Funk_. He must have just finished proofing because he was ravishingly thorough even for The General, and that night as we now know, transcendent, first covering his major points in turn, and then with astonishing detail, locating each within the dynamic matrix of its fellows, all aglow in a web of wavering nodules, each series delineating a migrating flock of reticulating interrelationships of say, Melody’s Dark Poise Against the Abyss, or Pornography of Self and the Cult of Identity, or Rapacity of Kind exquisitely balanced upon his delicate Zero, No Less anti-ideology, each in turn systemic to our theoretical presence, intrinsic, until finally it was as though his mind let loose a system of miniature planets reified in visual space, traversing circuitries in harmonic equipoise, orbiting throughout the hall, just above or as _through_ us, our minds more deeply enhanced with every pass, and then from each planet wavering tendrils of plasma-like light reached forth from their soaring odes and flowed into its fellows’ arms til node-to-node became conversant and merged, and we were thrust into an ocean of protean interconnections as the last excretions of omission were discovered aglow in _potentia_, their distinctions absent in the abyss, forgotten abscess of thought, migrations to a land which no longer existed, oblivion’s own, and the sacred charge of our division, No Zero, No Difference. Everything one and the same. (Aught Naught Ought?, as the stickers say.)
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[A sell-out Zeno zealot and the last faggot’s Georgia peach. A fictive sun and what you meant to think about what you lost in dream before you forgot you were no longer the same and please don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.]
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But of course The General gave us far more than the development of Aught Division’s ideational and scientific foundation with its radical assault on all preconceptions based on nonexistence, blowing them away like dust before the lusty harvest winds of his late thought. The last thirty minutes proved to be the very nadir of his overarching achievement, coming just days before his final disappearance. The last half hour of "Zero Prime," which he titled enticingly "_nihil obstat_," poured straight from his genius into our minds bypassing all filtrations: concepts of zero in rapid energetic growth and spurt of metamorphic development between the existent and that "which lacks name," ontological Althezeimer’s, the malignant abyss, how what doesn’t finally _exist_ corresponds precisely to _what it is_ in relation to _what_ it is _not_ less than _what never will be_, given the "nixed null" notion of "exactly," as he proved to our glowing satisfaction. No one without the many, no less than many but one, as if all we had left was a question beyond understanding our existence in any sense of entirety, even in part, through which we were added on, each to another, together, its resultant understandings would out-strip our conceptual frame, and the possibility of presence itself would be lost. Then the General in a few soft words raised the entire to mind within a towering vortex winged with stars of thought aswirl in fundamental’s empty top, especially emphasizing
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_Bottom of page. Damn_. Only then did I realize that the rain had nearly stopped. The text had so held me the downpour’s slowing occurred only a reduced crackling at the outposts of my attention. Now, the world dripped only on its own. Relative silence, present’s air pocket. I needed a cigarette, but my mind was reeling so wildly that a toke, I thought, might prove fatal to any hope for continuity of consciousness. I saw that the page had been hurriedly stapled, _Too close to the corner and without any sense of geometrical surety. Rules out Maxine. Unless she’d been in a hell of a hurry . . ._, I thought, then felt what seemed like the ghost of a ripple shutter across the liminal breech at the edge of the ambient frame. _They must be trying another run on zero_, I guessed. __Probably probing defenses. . . . iDex never sleeps. . . . Just like the bumpersticker. In Baskerville Piquant, across a bloodshot eye. . . . Damned spooky sign_.
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I had been feeling tremors, mainly of the lower grades, for several days. But at the beginning of the previous week I had hit a warp wherein zero was lost to me entire, I couldn’t remember whether it was odd or even, definite or indefinite, light or dark, for most of five minutes. It had taken the steady cacophonous honking behind my car to finally wake me up. I had no conception of it. I couldn’t think of anything. It was as though the presence was within pressed against the skin of my brain’s eye, everything flowing through mindstem, even the same in difference of identity wherein each thing was conceived as similar to identical, then all the sounds about me began to shake like leaves and vibrate, and rhyme with each other, and light and time harmonized and danced in the ecstacy of the extant, and the beneficence of consciousness given to all things equally (though to none the same), the melodic intensities of diminution and increase riding light's scales, with no mean reason, none, which I realized at once, as though upon an ancient wall a moving finger began to write on the nature of what is given to man when . . . I became conscious of the intemperate honking behind.
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My thoughts dripped with the reek of the world as the van steamed beneath the rain’s residue on a side street. Just as I was reaching for a smoke I spotted a movement in the corner of my right eye. _Furtive never lacked clarity so much as this_, flashed through my mind. It was as though darkness was wrapped in a shade, and the shade in obscurity; that is, through the windshield I saw a waving warble pass like a plasma lens through sight’s field or rather gathered a nearly phenomenal impression of its "temperament" engraved on the backdrop of brick and concrete as it seeming ran past a tenement and darted into the alley behind.
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"Too many alleys, seems to me," I said aloud as I got out and crossed the street, following the patch of fuzziness into alley’s mouth. There was no sign of anything. No sound but the dripping above gutters’ rush and a bass growling from the sewer beyond, down in the mix, with my tinnitus. A few basement windows about four feet high appeared to be lit. I could see that the alley opened onto the next street, so I figured I’d chance it and check out the lights. After all, they were the first signs of life I’d seen since driving passed the A Living Museum sign askew at the entrance.
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The echo of my leather soles on wet pavement mingled with the dripping and the running of gutters while sewer’s growl faded somewhat from mind. Deep alley.
.
I knelt beside the first lit window, careful to stay out of sight, and tried to look through the dingy glass. A daubed and smeary mixture of dirt, soot, grime, smoke residue, and the caked crust of god knows whatever else obscured my sight, but I could make out what looked to be a laundry area, its floor about a four foot drop from alley’s height, but it had been converted into a small meat-processing room with wooden block tables, mallets, bonesaws, meat hooks, . . . the works. _Maybe some ghetto Mom-and-Pop oper– ._, but my thoughts slammed to a bounding wall when I looked again. At the bottom of one sink, in a watery pan, lay a crudely severed wrist attached to a human hand. Then I noticed the restraints, a table of hoods and pincers, the wall of leather, a few sinister instruments and ball gags left out on the shelf of what looked to be an old fashioned dentist’s cabinet, but with larger drawers below, and bloody pincer bolts scattered all about. _Fuckin’ A! . . . A torture room! . . . After, they must butcher ‘em. . . . Ghetto Burgers™. . . . God_, I remember thinking, _Maybe it’d be better if zero didn’t exist, along with everything else_.
.
I heard a door open. No one appeared in the room I was looking into so I slipped over to the next window and peered through _its_ grit. I could see maybe twenty people, middle aged and older, mostly a filthy milk white, half clothed, all tied, some sitting and some lying, beaten and torn on a befouled cement floor, trying to avoid its central drain, stripped of everything but indignity itself. _Tourists!_ I remembered the reports of mysterious disappearances of people who had visited The Projects. _Maybe they lingered behind their groups and had been jacked off the streets_, I thought, _Or lured into an alley with a snappy line and the glint off a gold tooth, . . . a cloned brother, lugged up and neo-fly. . ._. But there wasn’t time to think. The room’s door began to open. As I watched, two replicant thugs carried a soggy, rolled up carpet over their left shoulders. It seemed to sag with a fairly large weight which, I realized, was moving within, barely. _My God!_, I cried inwardly as they tossed it down into the center of the room, then stood around laughing and casually kicking crud and raw sewage at those sitting huddled or lying in despair on the cement floor.
.
After a few seconds, a thug who must have been sitting beneath my window, stood and entered the scene. Fully strapped with a chrome gat in shoulder harness and a bullwhip in his hand before tossing it back toward what must have been his seat, he walked over and grabbed one side of the rug with both hands and pulled upward and back in one abrupt, violent motion, a fat slippery snap, until it rolled out of itself, clean, spitting its damaged flesh across the floor and over the filthy drain.
.
_Maxine!_ Naked was never so nude.
.
[what of interstices?, absences between presence, or between presence and . . . what?, one vast emptiness, or many? less than less yet forever waking in the hush of mind’s forgottenness, finding life the occlusion of what does not exist, what is simply _here_, shade beneath attic door, infant’s convulsive scream, sheathe or pod of wavering portals to elsewhere, nowhere, oblivion sought in orgasm, drink and drug, the echo of nothing beneath sound, and in the mind a silent scream bobbing in the wake of moment’s pollution almost prior to time’s existence, never again, ever, the rub, soup in the fly, as though a knowledge of absence briefly hovered above a group of proto-presences murmuring in the all-but-empty seats of mind’s balcony as a _rush_ jumped across the upper reaches, ceiling's caul of almost sound, before an idea enters, breathless and regal, eye before I, silence lost in the harmonics of consonant and vowel, articulation’s torque where word rolls up to mind, blades still spinnin’ as a diamond tooth shines from a leather pocked interior, then as at a signal, a blast of pheremones, a turning of the eye within its wheel, they attack at once, phalanxes of words strike and walls fall as panicked crowds take thought by its throat and shake it until it’s peeing while the possibility of meaning flees into the babbling silence from which it came, speaking into nothing of what seems to be the actual thing, clothed in the flesh of words mounting present's presence so-must-it-ever-be as it was in dreams wherein they speak direct or did they set us fast adrift in an ocean of neither beginning nor end but as suspension in the element of unknown sense, afloat in time and space, their endearing sponsorship withheld, and as the gods each morning they once again abandon us to language, that we might languish in it]
.
Her skin was a blown rose, blasted silk, softest flesh billowing across youth’s lost sky, eye’s naked kite, a fragile pulsing paradise tinged baby pink now flung against the fecal stained gush of liquid madness, foul crud, and a masticated mess of crust mid the welter of bruised limb and torso, broken and exhausted, heads bent beneath the weight of anguish, all strewn across the cement floor where she rolled twice before ending on her back. _Loveliness prior to collapse,_ I thought, _before _what
- lapses into_ what is not.
.
I could feel a slight wavering in the peripheries and figured that Aught’s renegades were running code, riding line, humping the perimeters and maybe closing in on the environs of loss inhabiting the concept of zero, which can’t of course exist, yet always must. I shook my head. To no avail. The world wavered still. _As though it stretches, I thought, and then _Boy, I need a smoke!_ Since the brothers were clone-jiving, shooting replicant signs, sporting jibes, and psych-goofing on each other, and since Maxine wasn’t moving much, I sat, back to the wall, knees up, legs half out, propped to either side, and fired up another Tailor Straight.
.
As I watched world wavering in wall and window across the way and wondered how to tell when and where I was and whether the wall would tighten hard and straight, or become as permeable as the zone between sleeping and waking when just on the other side of dream, I felt certain of surety at last, no matter my worry, until I realized I was lost, zoned, as they say, already, thinking _I need to cum so bad it hurts!_ while watching a black strobe in fungal darkness stuttering in mind between visions of parrot fins, chicken fingers, angel stumps, buffalo wings, coral fawns, whale knuckles, and so forth, then the strobe opened on a scene of fourteen mules in harness plunging from a cliff in the Rockies into the swift river several hundred insane feet below where they had been only a few previous seconds and in the madness and wreckage of dying, carnage of plunging into wave and rock, tangled with harness, strangled by moment’s craze for breath, twisting leather in line and strap with inhuman cries midst throngs of apprehensions, fatal bashings against canyon wall and frantic drownings, none of them thought much about anything, anything at all. _God, I love it!_ I thought, as the dead mules flowed slowly out of sight, leaving no trace behind, and the world slowly returned to its faint wobbling, then gradually that too died out, and the alley became its quiet lonesome self again, steady and silent save for late rain's dripping like a bright afterthought riding the flow of gutter and the soft bass of sewer always in the background beneath my tinnitus.
.
Maxine's scream shattered whatever balmy aires had briefly graced the alley of my separate peace, sending a shrapnel of splinters, tufts and stringy wads into centuries long past. _"It is ever the nature of the pastoral to regret,"_ I remembered one of my professors saying as I raised myself into a unsteady crouch and looked into the window again. _TUTWILER!_ I was shocked. I recognized him from his pictures in the paper years before. His disappearance had been such that his sweaty horn-rimmed eyes once seemed to stare out at me from above-the-fold for weeks. And sodomizing my shock, I saw that he was naked save for a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, pink flip-flops and the wisp of a silken scarf, translucent milkbone white tinged with pearly pink, wrapped loosely about his waist so that it flowed with an almost cloud-like motion in slo-mo bundle and release (_wraith wisp_), whenever he shifted his feet while his little prong, scoring a naughty melody on airy staves, bobbed obscenely beneath. _He must have come in the door while I was taking the toke_, I thought as I tossed the cigarette. A drop hit it midships as I flicked it up and out. Even though the rain had stopped, the world was still so wet it was out almost before it hit the asphalt. So dark was the world above, beyond, below, it seemed night’s clone.
.
[Out of sentence a creature crawls as from mind. (Presence we are in, or are allowed to join?) Wound tight in bands of loathing and hysteria, steals beneath leaden caul of sky. (Beside a lake?) An ambulance of limbs lost in midnight’s day. (Clarity of line and mind.) Flame in the eye of a dragon, cry in tiger’s dream, blade in the mind of a child. (Architectural beauty of crustaceans, amphibians, lizards.) Beast to come, its face a mirror. (Morning thrown up in fluted song.) With such as were children? What names in their faces are they saying? (I don’t recall.) We sat and ate our lunch in the wind and were delighted. Something ran with us downhill as we spread our arms and hands as wings and smelled the scent of pine permeating a sky washed blue by northern lakes as though our day had never ended in its beginning but stood still almost in the fact of its magnificent sway, as it sways us still, as I am swayed. (Where were we planning to go?) And everywhere we looked, we looked upon it.]
.
Tutwiler held one handle of a telephone lineman’s crimper in his right hand. Its business end hung midway down his juicy right calf. When he moved, I could see that he was aroused, peaked, beginning the trip into light fantastic, even in front of the brothers who stood back laughing while watching him lean over Maxine and slide the crimper’s metal tips, closed but hard like a blunt urban stump, an idiotic prosthetic, over the hip and thigh of her bare body as it lay quivering on the fouled floor. I watched transfixed. _Must have been what made her scream_, I thought. _He could have rubbed it over her pulsing belly, on the purse of her shaved pudenda, or across a naked tit, even teasing the nipple where the crimper might take a bite in just a little bit. . . . a little bit. . . . by bit . . . by . . . Yikes!_ I thought. I was breathing heavy and I wanted a smoke bad but it had gotten so dark in the alley, and in the world at large), that someone from inside might look up and see the lighter’s flame or the smoke’s glowing tip no matter how I tried to cup it. Besides, I knew I had to think. And fast.
.
_Maxine!_ I inwardly cried. _And Dolly! . . . Jesus shit!_
.
I pulled back from the window and leaned, half crouching, against the wet brick. I was shaking like a sissy’s twig, so I grabbed the open pack of smokes not thinking. It hit me hard. _Maxine’s just an appetizer to _these_ creeps. She’s doesn’t stand a chance_. My lungs were no longer steady. Nor my legs. I carefully stood and backed up amid the rollicking universe of heart’s sudden rearing, squeezing its muscle beneath the spinning cosmic wheel, and tried to catch the breath that kept lunging out of me, sharply returning in sudden and sporadically vacant gasps. Like a spastic cyclone, but silent unless you count the havoc of the airline disasters every that exploded into silent Andean peaks of my consciousness every half second. _A toke would be the echo of redundancy’s mirror image, a secondhand shadow of my rattled self_. I put the pack back in the pocket, making sure the lighter was still there. It was.
.
After a few minutes, when I thought I could move with some certainty, I backed up to the window of the first room and peeked in. It was still empty. But as I looked its doorknob began to turn. _Quick_, I thought and as fast as I could slipped passed. Even as I did I could see the door opening. But I was in luck. Whoever was coming in was coming in back-assward, having bumped the door with his rump, and wasn’t in a position to look up. Hiding, I crouched and watched. Amid guffaws, the two replicant thugs hauled Maxine into the room like a fleshy feedsack, the first one with his forearms under her armpits, her white tits in hands, shuffling backward, while the second held her by her naked ankles, and walked forward. She was too light to give them much strain. She looked drugged on terror, beaten but conscious, limp and aquiver. (_Quiet quim, still._) Behind them Tutwiler entered. When she was on the table, he walked over to her, crimpers swinging obscenely like a ten pound hammer from his fat hand, claw iron against pink flab of calf flesh.
.
I crept backward down the alley to the next dark window. There was no sound inside. It was locked. I was just about to try another when by happenstance I stepped upon the broken hasp of a screwdriver. I looked around and in the darkening light, spotted its dull shank. _I can try to pry the window open_, I thought, picking it up. The hinges were in the middle, attached to the upper frame, so I tried the top. After one small twisting crank, its lock popped and the frame fell suddenly down. If I wouldn’t have caught it with my left shoulder, it would have crashed loudly enough to catch the entire building’s attention. I eased the frame down the rest of the way then holding it with one hand unclasped its chains, letting it hang, and leaving a two foot wide opening a few feet up. I knew I could get in easily enough but wondered about the four foot drop from the ledge to the floor.
.
I leaned over, stuck my right leg through, stepped onto the window’s narrow ledge, and leaving one foot on alley’s asphalt, half swung, half pulled my body through. Inside it was black. Except for a vague bluish blush which seemed to emanate from a side wall, I could see nothing. Still straddling the frame I pulled Shepardson’s lighter out of my right pocket and flicked its flame into startled existence. I couldn’t see much but when I looked down I saw the rim of a laundry sink about eighteen inches below my right foot. _Must have a lot of cleaning up_, I thought. Then in darkness I stepped onto it and eased down, while holding the ledge, until I finally reached the floor. Standing in a slight crouch, I flicked the lighter again and looked quickly about. It was a meat-packing-torture-&-butcher room just like the room before. I looked closer and saw what seemed to be an shrouded terrarium along the entire far wall. _Where I’d seen the bluish blush_, I realized, but took my thumb off the lighter and let the room find lostness again. I couldn’t risk it heating up and my dropping another one, so I put it back in Shepherdson's pocket with the smokes and went cautiously over to the terrarium, feeling my way across the room by tables and walls as the blush appeared gradually greater, almost a glow before I pulled back the shroud of what I realized was a curtain and looked in.
.
[before conception, actualizing murmurs, lines and curves of letters teasing space ripe with air’s caress, florets, flower tips, fingers, lips, flames in tongue’s consideration, florescent urge in procreant melos, itself of florescence, sentience in stud, readiness in rut, the rasp of emptiness sharpening a pregnant edge which opens like an eye or mouth aware that life shall ever overcome the dead, airfoils rise, light seek light, love its letters, words that may come in marriage of tongue and world, certain and sudden, even as it waits patiently, without expectation, within the gates of attention, mind set to rest as a palm on the shoulder of what _might become_]
.
I was stunned. A crop of toadstools and prickly ferns mixed with squatty leaved plants seethed beneath an ultra-violet glow. In the corner, I saw one I recognized immediately, thought only legendary (_The actual plant before me!_), _Asphodaemonus_ ! It had illustrated an ancient manuscript which graced the opening chapter's first page of _Intermediate Toxicology_, the text from the last course I took in Forensic Science before changing my major to Medieval Lit. (To my eternal regret; after all, it eventually lead to Ann Arbor, my teaching job in Laramie, shit-out-of-love romance with Maxine, internment at the zoo, then the stint as a sheriff in a shitty little fishing village on the East Coast, before this: a private eye trying to save the concept of what cannot exist in a world made only of words, as though a fiction in which the world without is otherwise without world, _Or are we all just nothing in disguise?_, I wondered, while fighting to save Maxine and recover what was left of Dolly while crushed beneath the weight of at least two unpardonable sins.)
.
Under the picture of _Asphodaemonus_ with its fat, flat-faced leaves, tumescent with toxins and with a leprous-bluish glow as though from within, and a stem which looked like the lumbar vertebrae of fetal pig cast by an ancient hand, was the medieval addition of an anonymous alchemical taxonomist, the only one known to have seen the ancient text, words I have never forgetton:
.
_Asphodaemonus_. Location: Doge of Deade, third pouch, plains aglow in river’s dreade furnace. Essence: Calamitous pains thrugheout torso and limb alltogether, a sharp eye to one's own life. Sulphurous. No relief forthecoming, deathes spittle agonizing slow, blind certain.
.
Followed by a poem presumptively written by our alchemist and centered on the page in the shape of a double-chambered alembic (in the original, these are centered on the page to form that shape):
.
Beckon forth no sweetness more
Of life if cousinized bee to this foule
Plant guised as Nature's breede, yet
Insteade of growth, wealth, &
Increase of their kind, hath
Come a sprawle so squallid,
Creeping into noxious being,
Alchemies of paines unuttered,
Damned. Asphodaemonus. Dread
Plant of the dead, living only in this,
Others sorrowful distress & sure demise,
And that whosoever witness such torturous
Egress will forever after when they ponder,
Searching for sure release, or caught adrift in
Habit’s snare, would come then to consider
In their lost living, deathe the only peace.
.
I can’t remember the toxicology text’s commentary except for the fact that _Asphodaemonus_ had been thought to have been drawn only once in the ancient world, then copied into a medieval manuscript, which itself was destroyed save for a few pages, the original, of course, lost. My textbook had suggested that a drawing of "this most unlikely plant" may have graced a scroll from Parmenides’s lost _Of Nature_ wherein he is reputed to have proclaimed himself Prime Emperor of Zero, the Extant Nonexistent which can be neither thought of nor spoken about without misapprehension, while maintaining that its drooping but engorged bean-like berries were the only effective defense against the loss of _peiras skotos_, "dark unmeasure," or to imaginatively translated by my morbid mentor as "actual’s deliverance" ("The ‘lost blanket’ beneath which nothing exists nor ever did," he explained). The textbook claimed that the medieval author believed its berries would, under heat, set a forth a froth from their scalding acid broth, which when descended in an alembic as shown in the lexical-drawing above, with a wide base to still the volcanos within, combined with the secret "code of sheep" (or "coat," the accounts were unclear, literally "wool of virgin resemblance") which when subjected to a series of alchemical processes would yield a broth blistering with mathematical formulae based on their relative dimensional infrequencies which might result in calculations that could "fry the balls off anyone who would attempt to obliterate the abyss" (my translation). The text also mentioned that on contact with flesh, the berry would burn like "a faggot forged in blistering rut," whereas a touch to human eye, nostril, or tongue would result in a lengthy and most painful death, beyond any known to man, which "noe amen maye avail" the text concluded.
.
I wrote my seminar paper on it.
.
And there it grew before me in the actual universe. _If you can call _that_ growing_, I thought , _and _this_ a universe_. Its leaves spread beneath the blue glow of the lamps above like a stain on three-dimensional space, an indelible after-image, the taste of creosote deep in your throat, the reverse of _what is_, turgid but mushy as though albino sludge had been pumped into fibrous flesh with an off-white, faintly fecal cast and an aggressively blue tinge, a bitter rhyme, leprous, and from the fork of branches, arrayed about its corrosive center, hung its poisoned berries (_Yes both "drooping" and "nut-like"_) as strands or strings of phlegm lace an idiot’s conversation, or strung like drowned porn stars washing up south of the border engorged with drugs, laced with toxins. I blinked. I could almost see in sheens of air above the plant phantom waves which when I exhaled seemed flutter almost chaotically for a moment. _I really need a smoke_.
.
But there wasn’t even time to think, much less for a quick trip to oblivion. I heard someone step to the door and, with neither a sense of occasion nor nonchalance, turn the knob. I dropped the shroud and fell to the floor. I remembered seeing and feeling two torture beds whose shapes might serve as a temporary blind. I hoped they could give me a few seconds to hide. Though I remembered the terrarium sat on a long bench, I couldn’t recall what was beneath it. _It’s all or nothing_, I thought inwardly cringing, _depending on what happens_.
.
[what world without zero?, nothing hidden in a universe which nothing obscures; to find what is not is impossible yet probable, to seek it certain; textual latency of absence uncodifiable; completion in what is partial only, no wholeness but loss, stillness a metaphor for absent presence (bearing across); mind streeling out the other end of letter's sprawl clutches shell or crust of sound to wrap around his howling emptiness (did the author of language birth oblivion as well), trapped in fundament’s crawlspace, it sobs within night’s depth, mumbles down blind alleys, and whines like a pup above a shallow grave beside a landfill; when we wonder why, do we wonder where as well; awaits one who might listen (words wound round cranium, engraved on concave surface, binding circularity with blinding currency, we say we levitate, bottom line the horizon, equals equals the same, one way only, literacy) as we balance on zero; but sound’s echo can also be heard, object’s shadow is object as well, as words might sound the author’s absence: everything present is partial, each part in turn a whole, that we might go from one womb to another burnished by oblivions through which we pass, find words as leaves or buttons, glorious ephemerata on our way, seeds of liquescent fulfillment as petals on a shady path leading to where evening finds us looking straight into night; not the polished gold of banal pleasures, nor the want-to-hand-to-mouth-to word-to-want that might stretch across a life, easily, in a narrative of killing time; but that we might find ourselves amid the essences adrift, restored once more as flesh like words rise from husks even at end of summer’s season and beyond which, where we make of "it" what we might; fog on the road each morning, October’s hush, words as light pass over pond’s screen, dace bright, dancing in the breeze, disappearing when it dies; was the first word we heard our calling]
.
At first, I couldn’t feel anything beneath the terrarium, but then my hand touched a metal leg. I felt quickly around but except for a few pincers and a skinning knife it was empty beneath. Just then Maxine’s scream came from the other room through the open door. I saw Tutwiler’s naked legs and teeny pouch beneath one torture table in silhouette and could hear his flip-flops stop when he turned on the lights. The legs of the two thugs followed him in as I tried to crawl below the terrarium in silence.
.
Beneath, I huddled in a tweedy ball and tried to slow the stampede in my flailing chest to a lobbing gait. Then I heard Tutwiler chuckle as though to himself before he said in feigned surprise, "Well, if it isn’t the loverboy P.I., ol’ Max. I see you decided to drop in, eh, sweetheart?" Another slight chuckle. Then, garnished with mockery, "Ready to 'saddle up?’"
.
_Fuck! He must have seen the open window_, I realized. _But how did he know it was _me_?
.
"Your expectations proceed you," he said as though hearing my thoughts, and paused slightly, laughing again, "and by more than definition." His tumescence seemed to rise a notch with the value of his stock.
.
_What the hell is _that_ supposed to mean?_, I wondered, while trying to still my tweedy bundle ever more. _Maybe he’ll think it’s a mistake . . . or get called away_, I thought, not believing it for a moment. Deep in confusion and mortal terror, I thought of nothing and everything at once, imagination without realms flying through change itself, yet my mind’s eye ever returned to the torture table that hovered before it in brute fact. I was lost, beyond succor. Never had I known such despair.
.
I saw the legs of the two thugs separate and begin to circle the torture beds so they could come at me from either direction. And I noticed Tutwiler’s teensy turgidity jiggle a provocation, dainty but toned, beneath his gossamer sash from clouds of vividly pink flesh, where poked the head of his little red pecker above its minuscule "ballast," a baby’s ballsack.
.
"When we start in on you," he said, "you won’t even be able to _dream_ about oblivion. No salvation, just pain, Max. Then more pain on top of _that_. We get a bit redundant around here. I guess we’re too laid back," he chuckled. "You’ve got a couple of the roughest days in human history all set out before you. The _groaning board_, as they say. And a feast to the likes of me. Hey, maybe we’ll go for a record. What say?" When he paused, the thugs were already along the wall, coming at me from both sides. "Come on," he continued, "You don’t want to keep the General waiting."
.
Just then another piercing scream came from down the hall. _Maxine!_ I realized, before she scalded the already blazing present with another at an even higher pitch, crassly amplified. And another, higher yet. Agonizing, tortured, barely human, and beyond all discretion prolonged.
.
The thugs kept coming.
.
_I wish I could have just one puff_, I thought before I noticed that the linoleum appeared to be slightly wavering, moving in wild warps as though a plasma lens floated beneath water flowing like glass on glass wherein delineations were redefined, recalibrated, until the world began to whip and harshly twist, nearly buckle. Then dead quiet._They must be closing on zero_, I thought.
.
"It would be amazingly tough," the Colonel had told me. "First they’d have to mathematically create a dimension, if they can’t find one, and I _know_ they can’t," giving me a wink, "where they can keep low while charting the inordinate’s approach to the existential rim where it hovers just above the event horizon’s lip, surfing the "still breeze" of its calculus, _potentia_ in suspension, in order to conceive a way of mathematically being in a state where all numbers, formulae, calculations long and close, and each value manipulation of whatsoeverkind, become the opposite of zero, prime's prime." And that was the simplest step, he said, though somewhat more difficult than cracking the chromo-codes calibrating the dizzying sweep of diversity through all of notion's stations, even those unrealized, from bare sentience to über-cognisance. And there were over a dozen steps after that before dragging in nano-machines and identity-cleaving, though one should think of them more as stages, the Colonel had said, each, except for the last, harder than the one before. Buffers on calculations’ every angle and immutable redistributions of tolerance after that.
.
My little tweed ball began to waver and amorphously swell as well while the ground and wall and all that surrounded me gradually dissipated, and suddenly it seemed as though I had succumbed without the consideration of that which apparently overcame me, nothingness, disappearance’s final clause, long drafts of absence, _nada über alles_, imbibing loss in a forsaken life as though consumed by that which I had discarded. _Endemic algorithms_, I remembered thinking, _rising to literal currents warping the actual_. I couldn’t hear a thing. Not even the tinnitus ringing in my ears that I’d had as long as I could remember. Not the running of gutters . . . , only silence. . .
.
The world was mute, without boundary. "Everything is one thing, and nothing is moving," Zeno had concluded using his student's logic, then confronting the young rationalist, "You are basically a block." At that point, I began to see what "block" might actually come to mean. The walls wavered again as transparencies of existence began to peel away until there was only the lingering gleam from a flash on the cusp of consciousness, bare sentience centuries after that until time fell away into what no longer existed outside the abyss, not even the fringes of nothingness, and I was neither dead nor alive, but as though beyond being . . .
.
Something like time seemed to have passed.
.
Next thing I knew I heard what had been a soft buzz climb down from the slightest electric screech on a high wire pole in mind’s sky, where air is alive with the spines of eels, sharp and writhing filaments of flame, then waded across marges of the limbic and swam its river of forgottenness to the primary shores of barest perceptual awareness to tread its trail which lead to a house, a town and country, kingdom, realm, a continent, the edge of space where mind goes blank, when as though suddenly (but _there_ all along) I felt two chubby hands caressing my chest, their fingers occasionally pinching my nipples, and heard my tinnitus again send up its thin electric whine which ever seemed to wire my mind to conscious existence.
.
I woke up naked, on my back. Strapped down by my ankles and wrists on the table nearest the door, arms above my head, legs spread, and a locked belt around my mid-section holding me tight to the wooden surface, I felt hysterically naked. Tutwiler was stroking my chest and pinching me with his stubby nubs while the two thugs stood to either side, bareassed and greased up as best as I could make out (and I could make out _a lot_). One started roughly massaging my dick, while the other slid a hand deftly over my calves and knees, his palm slick with oil and probably his own hot juices, while rubbing the insides of my thighs and teasing my bunghole with the butterfinger of his left hand. _It’s turning into quite a day_.
.
The two thugs began to take turns giving me a blow job. The first had grabbed my tender prong and smartly slapped my balls til I began to get hard, and when I grew up (fast, as they say), they both dove in at the same time, licking while squeezing my balls and pumping me hard, fists slicked up with fat oily wads of saliva on palms and muscular fingers pulling me up and over into hillbilly's sillyland, then would plunge their sucking mouths over knob, tongue slathering its apple-red head while rolling my balls around with the palm of his hand. _Maybe they do this to all the tourists_, I thought, _but I’d liked to think I'm special_. They hadn’t shaved for days.
.
It got hot in there fast. I was sweating and writhing in my bonds while screaming for release from every orifice, pore, and crevice as Maxine’s heaving sobs poured through the door in several ragged screaming series, but I had begun to come into my own, if you know what I mean, and the replicant thugs started laughing more and slathering me up faster, sometimes gripping my cock and balls so hard my brain rode a spine of juicy pain over a swamp of stumps, the root impossibility of being, plump with desire (_old man with hardon_), while they set about pumping and sucking even more, harder and faster. Lathered up by thick wet sheathes of mouth meat, I could only give over. The thug who was really cut, a diamond ring on his left pinkie, had a tongue like a throbbing wet slab of bacon and would take me in deep and gargle with my bulbous nub bringing me ever higher, spiraling toward the turning-top's tipping point so to speak, almost to the end of the last slope before crest’s beginning, to find my center balancing on a twisted needle that was rollicking, crocked and rude, high above canyons aflame with desire, ripe with fountains and pools of spooge. Just as I was about to slide onto then immediately over peak’s nadir, the thug who had been sucking me off into wild blue wonderlands pulled quickly back and winked to the other, and as I heard Maxine’s gargled screams begin again, the other slammed the electric cattle prod hard against my rod and fleshy sack, while flipping on the current with an exaggerated flourish of his thumb. THWACKst!!
.
[world’s ghost in swirl of words?, shards of spectral presences then in letters lines and sentences stanzas paragraphs all volumes of existence like roaming filaments of an intelligence aloose none may know in whole nor few dare guess even in substantial part (what few? who?), word of worlds like an individual’s ripe multiplicities of zero, the nothing in _each_, upon which _every_ is predicated, one of many, of many one, as such was said for the sun that shone upon the duck, rebounding from his canvas above blue back into sky even after set it against a tree-trunk on lake's shore, and wept into its shimmering dance of waves which gradually died as the wind fell to a breeze beneath the shuddering stillness above treeline booming with morning's summer silence save for the duck’s soft sobs below, miming the tragedy of clouds on waves’ surface, his mind mirroring sky (which he no longer saw), enlarging his spirit, thinking there is always more than the horizon, we bed down with words in mind’s loss and dream of our absence where canvas and sky are again one in the togetherness of perception, then what’s nothing in that compared to the fact that the news of the author’s demise exceeded him in life, he supervised the silence at his funeral then, bored, took a long walk, when he at last came to the lake, the duck was on its side, dehydrated, it had rather die than drink, its sorrows bled into tears, and now was but _nothing with wings_, he thought, then sat beside its corpse and considered, _disappearance is woven into what appears; it sings in the axe handle; hums beneath broken heaps of machinery; despairs in museum artifacts; seeks itself in orgasm, music, color, light and word; and is always (always) ready to greet us_]
.
snap jolt smacked outta screaming self rains meat of identity's worms carving into and chattering my name shredding my attentions chittering through life’s fleshy core while boring my inner frame with a powerdrill thrust up my spine industrial strength like sodomy on landmines which burst thru the slab of brain’s cement floor wherein all my tender circuitry quivered and gleamed til the bolt ripped through any remaining semblance of consciousness and brought me to pain's ripest and most insistent of states, undiluted, pure as the desire that likely bore me, pleading for immediate extinction
.
The second thug thumbed off the switch at last and laughed deeply, pulling the prod back. My chugging sobs rhythmically entwined with the lunging slopes of Maxine’s beyond. _If someone was in the hall between doors, he’d probably get good stereo_, I briefly thought through the hysteria that captured the terrain of my attentiveness as with a clash of swords and hearts and screams of a thousand soldiers flailing away through centuries prior to my notion of horrific now. I was racked to the babbling quick, strapped, tied, locked, cramped and shattered, but beyond my heaving chest, I saw someone tall and broad shouldered, a black pinstriped suit, icy white face and hands, enter the room behind the thugs. I couldn’t think long enough to attempt hearing him much less see who he might be. The staccato battering rams of receding pain rode a freight car whipping my mental body into the rock face of a mountain it had flung itself around, now off its heaving its tracks, over a half-mile high over an unforgiving range dragging behind a chain of freight, stupidly dreaming of a soft landing, then smashed onto hardship after hardship.
.
I finally calmed down enough to begin considering what kind of horrific life I might have left in the short time that lay before me as I tried to focus my eyes. _Damn! General Von Stueben!!!_, I realized, _About ten years older, but with the same fire in his eyes flaming from a mind that made him the intellectual fury of his time. Impossible this side of consciousness not to recognize_. (Something seemed unsteady beside my ears, buckling in the peripheries.)
.
He slowly walked around the table to the side where I lay, wacked with sobs, my body yet quaking, a rickety upheaval dolor thrashing through my torso as a primal malignancy gripped my soul by the nuts and juiced me clean to quivering pulp. Immaculately dressed, there was no sign of the military on him except the crisp marshaling of his overt alpha-bearing, nor any insignia save for his trademark "No-Zero Zone" lapel pin, a golden zero with a silver line through it ( ), nothing outside to contain the line (_cancelling the nothing within?_) I saw that he was smoking one of my cigarettes. _Unless he smokes Tailors too_, I thought, then slowly but surely realized, _The air's heavy enough I could probably get a teeny whiff that might send a squad of nicotine midges into the forward crevices of my brain. It wouldn't be much relief_, I realized with an inward sigh, _but it would be something_.
.
"Is _this_ the zip?" The General asked Tutwiler who stood behind me.
.
Tutwiler muttered a bundle of proto-words tripping over a hair-lipped syllabic jumble while croaking out a few random quaverings of sound to flavor the soggy interstices. I could just see part of his body over my unquiet shoulder. _He_ was quaking as well.
.
The general pierced me with the iron stake of one eye, cocked, "It may look like ‘playing doctor’ to you, Mutt, but it looks like ‘playing house’ to me." He took a healthy drag, held it smartly, then let loose its leaf-like clouds to roll so softly fulsome out and down they seemed as shadow’s silken drapery floating. (The wall seemed to slightly waver.) A few smoke feathers began to descend in my direction. "Is he a _guest_?," he briefly paused, "Why are you using that old thing, . . . the ‘bottle warmer’?," with a dismissive half turn of his head. I saw him nod at the cattle prod which now hung from the cut thug’s hand, his pinkie ring aflair sweaty light, and a broad stupid grin. Both still sported handsome boners. Tutwiler’s weenie was flaccid, dripping with weakness. (The walls wavered as though, beneath water, one floating liquid lens flowed across another, folds unto folds over folds, ply over ply.)
.
As I was watching, two decent-sized wafts of smoke fell in soft decent. I tried to wash my face in the first by moving left and turning it beneath the sliding mass. It worked. I could sense a slight sparkling beneath my hairline and even a brief glow at epidermal’s limbus. _The gypsies are restless tonight_, I thought, and breathed out fast so I could turn my head to the right and get the benefit of the second, a cloud larger and denser than the first. I did. Castles mounted chargers, chargers mounted stallions, and stallions mounted a silver chariot pulled by sparrows through burning blue skies until flying away into the reticulating fishnet of what is, what was, what had been, and what will never be again. _Wow_.
.
[if there’s no name for it, can it exist even in the imagination, in what way might a thing exist differently without a name, what’s zero but thought of nothing yet take something away and there’s still something, take everything away save for its concept, or the residue of its repute (nearly mute), echo of its slight stain crossing a garden wall at night luxuriantly backlit by the next glistening moment always rolling over this, the richest element (immutable, without electrons), a vortex of neuronal swirl that sails upon the broad back of the extant, the _what is_ beyond ideology, belief, or even a place beyond anticipation’s boundaries, where words come to one at last, unmoving and empty, filled with world's many, flashing as above a plain over which comets and planets round the rude discordance of life and all creation glows beneath zero, without even the notion of what cannot come into being, not even a reference wherein sign is always less than anything it might come to represent]
.
"Hey stud," the General said to the cut thug, "Go get The Deal Breaker."
.
The thug’s dick seemed to pulse two degrees northward (_No Limbo for you._ ) as he set the prod down and walked to the terrarium, picking up a silvery pouch and a pair of thongs from a cabinet shelf on the way. _Jesus! . . . looks like they were all laid out_. (The lights appeared to increase and then dim while sight shuttered and my bonds slightly shifted, then tightened.) When he got to the terrarium and pulled back the curtain, his deep black face glowed with a nightmare-harbor-back-lit hue, a faintly blue intensity but intense nonetheless, as a smile rode the contours of his face like a hawk on cliffs of air. (Maxine began another series of heart-breaking screams.) He reached in with the thongs and pulled out a sprig of _Asphodaemonus_ the size of a baby's foot, a twig with a few puffy fat white leaves and a dozen seed-like berries, black burning balls, toxic as hell in a world where "literally" means what it actually says for once, and dropped it into the open metallic-looking sack with a rustling "ploth," to which his chuckle may have been in response, as his dick ratcheted up another notch. _Northward ho!_ I thought, the nicotine still scat-blasting my outlying regions.
.
When the thug returned, grinning over bouncing fat knob, the general took the pouch and held it before his gaze. I’ve never seen a film or picture where the General smiled though I'd seen thousands of photos and clips on the news even years after he had disappeared, nor had he given the hint of a smile since he’d entered the room, but when he looked at that pouch then at me, seeming to weighing it in hand, rigid back beneath black suit, pinstriped a subtle blue, something like the suggestion of amusement briefly entertained the borders of his visage as a nearly humorous _phase_ crossed the lower reaches of his face, and danced in an intimate association with his mouth as his eyes seemed to catch a broken beam of light. (The wall wavered, buckled and sidled off without moving, then shivered as though in response to an unknown other, a sexual shudder, or tertiary quake.) He took another toke of his cigarette, let the pouch drop to his side in hand, then crisply blew the smoke out over my bound body. This cloud was faster to dissipate, though a clump of brushy stubble drifted down toward my face.
.
Maxine buried herself beneath a rubble of sobs.
.
(The walls budged. Wavered.)
.
Noting my interest, Von Stuben looked thoughtfully at his cigarette. Another shadow of near-amusement appeared to cross his face as he slowly turned it in his fingers until he held it like a pen, a spear metal nibbed, pointing its glowing tip toward my left eye. Steely sighting with both of his, he brought the burning brand slowly down, pushing its spitting ember through the remarkably unresistant air toward my quivering orb. I wondered if I could catch a tiny nip from one of its little wafts as it descended before he burnt a hole through all my future questionings. I decided to try my best, turning my head slightly to the right and breathing sharply in as the smoke came close. A midget danced on soul’s my icy perimeter for a moment, then collapsed, drunkenly holding onto a lampost. _Christ! Pathos-on-a-stick_, I thought. _Daddy's little meat puppet_, as the glowing coal continued in its descent toward my left eye as I felt another tremor in sight and mind’s surroundings while inwardly remarking upon the mute stoic pride that stood ever rigid and ready in The General’s guise as his cigarette's tip, now within a inches, still descended. . . .
.
Just then Maxine began screaming again, and as though riding a warped warble of lenses floating in waves across sightstream, the General’s head was momentarily squashed then stretched oblong, a trapped air pocket skating beneath pond's icy surface, and I could hear sounds coming from the wavering hole that had been his mouth sounding something like "We’ll have to see what seeing means" but trailing off abruptly into drunken barrels spinning in basement’s thought, "we . . . what pussies!. . . but can . . . bodies . . . mere malevolence . . . without jewels . . . disdain . . . bloated complacence . . . sticky bulb . . . final kindness . . . spineless grubs. . . . _There_!" before his voice became so jumbled and indistinct to make it out, then I could not make out much of anything, nor sight, nor taste, nor touch, nor smell (not even of myself). And no tinnitus to interrupt what no longer seemed to be, or I wondered, _What is it?_
.
_Are Aught’s mathematical outriders calibrating another trap to confine zero in their zonal frieze?_ I wondered in my whirling as a torn hole seared in screaming pain through the fleshy core of all my being and blasted to flaming shards whatever consciousness remained. What _was not_ occluded _what was_. Beginning as a seemingly provisional remission of time’s insistence, the largest "wave" led to my dazed wanderment trapped fast in a coma freezing in the furthest reaches of the undiscovered, a shelf of ice where days stretched into years and years crammed themselves into every moment; even those which normally were marginal were now freighted with the historical "weight" of a 10,000 year republic cast to sea in a thimble, lost in a suspension of dark matter, turning on a withered dime, awaiting a little cough from a near corner in the middle of the night, the plundered jolt of a biopsy report ringing in the phone, or the memory of waking next to the nude body of a child, yet warm but dead, freshly fucked, seeming to sweat (_It be the dew_). More than can ever be said.
.
[less than nothing, before what never was, where loss lacked more than any part, absent notion of pre-existent "when" wherein identity and resemblance were, beyond seeming, similar and set before oblivion wherein zero rests, or is it an autistic imp in nothing’s rafters making nonsensical signs (what’s between the surface and the outer edge of mirror?), kicking its legs like a child on a swing or an epileptic mime signing everything at once (similar only in difference) in deference to what is not, something less than what is available to perception, even conceivably, nor perceptible in conception, minus whisper's wasp in walnut shadow (the back of a coin) no wonder lost in vault of mind (where abyss resides), or frozen stars that "equal the same" before which nothing fails to occur, over and again, only purpose in loss, or so the author thought, sitting beside the duck’s corpse through the sunny afternoon, thinking many other things as well, registering none but which came of their own, and often had come before in slightly different garb, always various and pleasing to mind’s eye, their faces and demeanor slightly altered (as all faces are, moment to moment), to further frequent and thus inhabit places such as they had found previously in his thinking, others entered from familiar stables down trodden trails and returned, perhaps a new one announced itself in the robes of _its_ hour, none resembling the same, all individual and different in his lengthy considerations, yet as though entwined in the arms of all the others, the reticulations new every time and changing as each came from nothing to meaning’s one and out the other end dispersed to mere aether (imagine!) and from such thinking, as though asleep, he woke in early evening and found the canvas of the dimming sky where it lay, picked it up, and went home to enter the house of his aging with its multitudes and the gradual dissolution of one]
.
Something like time seemed to have passed. Wanderers wondered into view, hogshead hills roiled, thickening with the squawk of chicken-fried chocolate balls, glass beams stabbing blackly into interstellar space, mind’s spine sharply caught on uncomprehending pain (walls warping), while crystalline notes flung themselves over-board, a prick in the side of my face became a monolith that began running to catch up to a comet screaming my name with the insistence of a branding-iron in my brain, a bore-hole (wavering world) bright with horror poured over a plain afire with reptilian anger, a crater spewing clotted bolts of ooze, burning rain, . . .
.
. . . when as of sudden, I found myself hopping about, staggering in the hall outside the basement room I had been in, as the world abruptly "dawned on me," bouncing off walls with pants on, no underwear or socks but shoes and Sheperdson’s wet tweed coat over my right shoulder and arm, bare (_Where’s my short-sleeve shirt with the gator ?_ I remembered wondering), while struggling with the other arm, trying to hold up unfastened pants like some replicant hip-hopper in discombobulated rut, on the outs with every in, up-bounding groin endlessly repeating pain, left eye fat as fruit in mind's horror, hobbling crazed outside the torture room door, into which I looked in briefly, saw the thugs dazed, walking as though on a raft caught in mid-ocean’s hurricane, grabbing onto torture beds to hold themselves up aloft, dicks beginning to droop like heartsick sailors. Behind them, Tutwiler, waggled limp as he stumbled, still leaking.
.
I managed to stuff the other arm into Shepherdson's sport coat and button my pants amid the continual eruption of left eye’s hot lava anguish. On the cheek I felt a hot, chunky stream of liquid running down as I hobbled to the doorway of Maxine’s torture room. _No one inside_. The heavy-duty lineman’s crimpers kicked, cast, or flung, wide open onto floor, smatters of blood and pieces of flesh about one table in a loose pattern; a dishcloth size of skin with small cobs of meat. _Almost discernable chunks_, I thought. _My God!_ The table’s leather waist straps and both ankle cuffs were soaked black in blood’s dull shine. _Like the old days, not playing_.
.
_Maxine!_, I cried from my center’s core through the ever-dilating orifice of mind’s tormented brain, left socket a coal burning with cyclopean pain greater than any I might formerly have imagined. I buttoned the sports coat over my bare chest, shivered slightly as I zipped my pants while trying to stand still, stepped fully into my left shoe, then began to run in a humped stumble through my anguish down the long hall toward an exit and the street where I realized the van should be. I had known nothing of "severe" until that day, or night, whatever it was, as I ran through spasms of boiling anguish, falling then climbing up the stations of fleshy identity again, always onward, bouncing off walls, grabbing doorjams, fully torqued and "fit" into my moment at last, turned and twisted then brought to a presence I had never realized pressing against the primal "weight" of surface existence, hung on a spine of continuous and torturous doubt of continuance, an _if_ against the crushing sum of _is_, frail light dancing mid gnashing of the real, all primary, the brute actual, absolute's final zero, nothing shimmering beneath.
.
Some doors opened onto lit rooms. In one a barred pen of tourists half starving, too weak it seemed to moan though several saw me, and I saw myself in them. In the vision of their botched eyes and broken fames, I felt we shared in our passing the sacred fellowship of creature suffering: of those having suffered, those in the business of suffering, and those about to suffer. There was no time to help but I saw a zoomaster-sized ring thick with keys on a wall at hand, so I grabbed them and pitched the set to what appeared to be the most animate of the barely human lot, a male redhead, barely a bone with ribs, roadkill thin. _Maybe he can find the key that opens the cell_, I thought and hoarsely croaked through my pain, "Get everybody out," then ran, rump-pumping, past a room filled with snarling, separately-caged dogs, a burning nozzle in the center of my mind, pain ever-erupting, driving me franticward, beyond perplexity, bewilderment, forgetting all entanglement with questions, including those of existence, barely minding black or white, up or down, stable or moving, adrift or flying apart, flinging myself into the fresh abyss, an almost final end of knowing, as I tried to run beyond boldest comprehension ever faster amid the serial rape of consciousness, for my pain was excessive.
.
Through an open door, I saw a dim blue shine coming from a dark room. Caring for nothing (though desiring it dearly), I staggered in and flipped the light. I was in a cloning salon, just like the ones I’d seen on the tube in the old days, with torso forms set with titanium braces into pod harbors, a row of gynothermistors, nape widgets, etc., and on the back wall a pharmaceutical station: a large cabinet next to a sink and mirror. The interior of a small refrigerated medicine unit sitting on the cabinet’s only shelf was lit, I could make out through its frosted glass door, though now with a far fainter blue light than had drawn me in, washed as it was in the unnatural clarity of fluorescent glare. I staggered across the floor, skirting pod casts and bio-stabilizing frames, hauling my sad ass over to the cabinet with refrigerator and autoclave on shelf, howling silently through the dislocation of my being, desiring death above all things, and the end of knowing. Inside the unit, I could see that the temperature was less than four degrees centigrade. The two wire racks filled the frozen vault with three stepped rows of stoppered vials, about twenty in each, half-a-dozen deep in places, laying dormant beneath a blue, hibernating glaze, their fluid sluggish, wired to zone.
.
Through the frosted haze of the window, I could see that the vials had iDex’s oDdoZ™ logo. I knew, with good reason, that it was the best anaesthetic ever known our species, yet highly addictive and often garnished with hilariously horrific side-effects. I pulled open a few bottom drawers frantically. Finding in the fourth a set of syringes, I unwrapped one, opened the refrigerated-unit’s door and grabbed the nearest vial, over 2/3rds full. After holding it under my bare armpit inside Shepherdson's sport jacket for four dozen agonizing seconds (I could hardly feel its frozen nub, but the pain in my eye scaled new rungs of scalded being each moment I remained alive), then shaking it, I pulled the syringe’s stopper back three milliliters, poked it through the vial’s rubber stopper, pushed the plunger down, expelling air bubbles into the vial’s translucent greenish liquid, still somewhat dozed, a viscus toxic froth, and drawing the same measure up into its hushed chamber, withdrew the needle and slipped the vial with the rest of its magic sauce into Shepherdson's left pocket, checking to see if the smokes were still there. They were.
.
I staggered over to the sink, and holding on, sought my face in mirror’s horror. My left eye was gone, the lid sunk in its socket such that if I could have thought through my pain I could never have conceived how to open it, what commands might yet apply to its crater, two strips of tattered membrane hanging like narrow shreds of cloth on my left cheek. That which had been my eye now lay limp as rags of flesh, a string of ooze and clots of biomass, warm and marbled red. _My God_, I thought, _Now I _really_ need a smoke_. But I had the syringe loaded and knew the face’s musculature intimately (learned it the hard way), so I took the hypo in my left hand, palmed it needle-down, thumb on plunger, raised it to my left side, temple height, and with hardly any hesitation pulled it swiftly down, plunging the needle just beneath mid-cheekbone, then squeezed a short but healthy shot into the buccinator, pulled it back and plunged it first above my socket into the upper ocular muscle, gave it in a full milliliter or so, then did the same to the lower, needle into fleshy hammock of screaming panicked pain where late my left eye had sweetly hung, and gave it the same. Before I had even pulled the needle out the third time, I realized the torment was beginning to retreat; the tide of agony that had hovered like a rush of soldiers on battle’s cusp of life’s defeat, stalled, then gradually began to turn back the way they had come, sinking back into hell's oblivion. I looked at the syringe. There was still a third of a milliliter. _What the hell!_, I thought, took it in my right hand, stabbed the needle through the right temporal bone and squeezed the rest of its frosty sauce into my hippocampus.
.
_Hot damn_. It worked quickly, spreading small feathery flames of leaf-shaped, numbing clouds through seas of flesh, up and around bone, curling over sinew, brushing seductively against ligaments, hushing bundles of nerves braying from some three dozen facial muscles, freshly zoned, then circling half my skull where it finally slowed to stop, the entire left side of my face and portions of my head a wall of crumbling numbness, a soft sponge, an old shed in a child's song, a parched night’s cliff-side bank, and in the shrill silence following my pain I gradually returned to a constancy of mind. Within less than a minute, in fact, I realized I was thinking with a clarity I had never previously known, . . . Had not even dared guess. (Nietzsche seemed a bum-on-the-make, Wittgenstein a loose stool, and Derrida the cord of a soggy Tampon™ .) I threw the empty syringe into the sink and, looking closely into the mirror with my good eye, gripped the remaining strands of flesh between the second knuckle of my first finger and thumb’s pad, right hand, and jerked down three times, pulling quickly and firmly with half-bitter, half-hilarious resolve mixed with an odd barking laughter, and managed to rip out the cup of my former eye’s retinal caul. I opened the autoclave, found a scalpel, cut the soft pocket from the remaining cord, sawing off the end of the optical nerve, then shoved the leftover mess back into my empty socket, and closed it with my thumb before wiping my cheek dry and looking curiously at the fleshy mess dripping in my hand . _I didn’t feel a thing_, I thought as the sick wad hit the sink with a discernable plop, _beyond the tugging and jerking that pulled my head . . . downward, to the right_.
.
[what’s subject to sentence?, predicate to answer’s question?, he might never have written another thing but for carrying the canvas of evening's sky the short way home to day’s late clause, table and chair, beginnings of another phrasing, while moon’s wonder rose in the doorway behind him and the canvas, propped against wall, deepened in the fading light and yet was lit as though a mind aware of itself, far and sure inside, no longer with an insistence or display of urgency, yet alive as the ripe wonders of the universe swirl beneath our fingers, strain upward and out, and funnel back into the depths of his thinking, that language yet blossoms which he might touch, alight with the glow of satisfaction at savanna’s edge at night, deep in the thalamus, or on a simple page, though there be nothing under it but the closing of books, loss of words, extinctions of species, absence the foundation of every moment mixed with that which hasn’t yet ended, but lingers as pollution, life the residue, while he settled into his aging, sitting through the evening into night surrounded by considerations unknown to the great majority of his kind, that he did not in fact exist in many respects became increasingly manifest, apparent in their absence, which came to him as though to a watering hole and bowed their heads and drank, then larger animals approached when night finally deepened in his consideration, the concept of mortality lacked the panicked edge it seemed to have for others and his sense of beginning was always ripe, like the beginning of his death. He had propped the canvas sky against the far wall to reflect the blooming darkness surrounding stars in the east like glowing eyes beyond the doorway. He lit a kerosene lamp and looked around, as though expecting to find a presence beside his own, but emptiness was his only companion, thereafter he sat quietly in his chair, not seeming to see the open book on the table, looking at _what was_ and _what was not_ as best he might, as well as _what appeared to be_, while the moon rose even higher in door’s slot (cranium’s keyhole) til it disappeared altogether but for the phantom flame that slid across night’s terrain, bathing cabin, trees, lake, and dead duck, set as a jewel in midnight’s clock, and beyond, into what will and will never be regardless thought. Considering what ways such differences might be conceived, he sat until the moon disappeared from the sky entirely, then in the dark began to read.]
.
I needed a smoke but thought the hall could be crawling with replicant thugs any moment if they got their bearings, so after pocketing two more syringes with the vial and taking another from the fridge, I looked out the door. _Nobody_. Or rather, the nothing that was there a few minutes previously, yet the moment seemed to shine with a eerie significance I had never experienced. _The interconnectivity of all existence is as apparent_, I remember thinking, _as the fact that the conscious mind cannot truly study its existence through a non-sentient lens, nor might it be apprehend with the fleshed knowing of a nothingness beyond or beneath, to its deep delight and constant grief_. It was all clear. The hall glowed with a delicate though durable understanding, as just before a lucid dream, or disaster.
.
I took off my shoes and holding them in my left hand, started running down the hall as quickly and quietly as I could, a loose spook squirting forth into time’s chamber pot, looking in a few open doors quickly as I passed, mostly torture and cloning rooms interspersed with pens stocked with a variety of human and beast, sometimes nearly indistinguishable, or seemingly manifest in insane combinations, all boundaries lost in an orgy of distinction’s abdication. _If that redhead manages to get his cage open_, my mind swam through the most limpid of waters, _he might open these as well. . . . Damn! Fucked up. . . . Again._ Occasionally I noticed the walls began to waver, almost shudder, but each time they stopped shortly after. _They’re closing in_, I thought. _Can zero prevail? How long? . . What springs behind?_
.
When I reached the end of the hall after it seemed as though I’d run for blocks, I double-stepped up the short stairway to the exit door and pushed. It didn’t budge. I tried again. Nothing. Barely a squeak after the thud. (_Would that mind were so firm in frame_). I tried again with my shoulder and full torso’s intent. _E puis nada_.
.
Just then, I heard a distant rustling come from down the hall. _Replicant thugs, starving humanity, or miscreant concoctions?. . . Damn!_ I hopped into my loafers and instead of running further up the stairs, tried a door to the left. _God knows where. _I thought,_ Maybe into the blind world of my future_.
.
It opened.
.
A dimly lit interior. In the botchy light I could make out a set of stairs about five feet wide plunging into the darkness below. The deeper I looked, the light was less, then lessened more. _An old subway entrance?_ I remember wondering. _But we never _had_ a subway_. I stepped in. I couldn’t see much. The door had a deadbolt on the inside. Turning the lock quietly but fast, I thought, _Maybe they’ll think I ran up to the first floor_.
.
There was nothing else for it, so I descended the stairs only able to see a few steps before me sloping into the pit from which my fortune seemed to beckon as though from an open maw but with air’s singeing sound of at edge of blade’s descent. The lights were uncertain, dim, seeming to waver as they dissipated in darkest register’s ever deepest reaches. _Even low for emergency_, I thought as they flickered, falling in my descent great with uncertainty of foot and mind, fast as I was able, but the dim light and occasional detritus–scattered boards and bottles, mats and tufts of hairy stuff, and indistinguishable clots of urban refuse–seemed to grab at my feet, and hampered my flight.
.
At the bottom I realized I was in an old subway station. Against the far wall I could make out what looked to be the remains of pod pallets, plasma stained, and toward the tracks, several old loading ramps with chains like dead snakes draped from overhead cranes. _Whoever used to run this place was serious. . . . Looks like a clone distribution point. . . . Wonder if it was licenced?_ To my right was what appeared to be another staircase going down even deeper, to where the light was too faint, deathly dim, to see anything but a cavernous maw of black wavering in obscurity before what was left of sight’s last season, but my lucidity of thought (as though I could see without sight) rendered clearly discerned spaces, surfaces, and shapes beyond my perceptual limits, at least those I had previously considered "normal." _That shot of oDdoZ™ to the hippocampus_, I realized, _has jazzed my perceptual lot_. It seemed as though something as thin and clear as light flooded the cathedral of my apprehensions, as naves of knowing flowed with presences from "beneath" the elemental. (_Chthonic bop_.) I discerned a platform on the next level with tunnels and tracks running in different directions. It too had pod remains and broken loading equipment. _And a level beneath that! . . . with stairs askew, it seemed, and hanging over Esher’ s inner space._ Still as stone, I held the rail in fast amaze.
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Through my lucidity, or "sanctum vision," as I came to think of it, I soon realized, as though a screen suddenly lifted from deep in mind’s innerspace, a multi-dimensional memory map of spatial location composed of every place I’d ever inhabited or heard of, coordinated to my current position, so I apprehended at once that the train tunnels on my current level ran perpendicular to Royal and knew I was 243 feet distant and 3 degrees below the van as well as 4.2 miles north of Nodville, Maxine’s burnt motel, and nearly another 5 miles to the Olde Arboretum, at 1.7 degrees south.
.
I had to find Dolly (_Maybe only her remains_, I thought with sunken heart. _Damn!_) so I hobbled along holding the handrail for 14.7 yards, shoes cutting into sockless feet, ankles brazed, bandaged with pain, wrappt in torment, balls on slow-burn, until the rail ended in a tile wall. A few feet further loomed a huge elevator door, closed, mute as an Easter Island stone. _For moving freight_, I thought. The doors wouldn’t budge. As I stood there I heard someone (_or something?_) shoving at the locked door in the darkness 45.3 feet above.
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_There must be stairs down_, I thought and ran along the wall.
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["Two objects cannot simultaneously exist in identical coordinates of time and space unless they are the same thing and no other. The absolute criterion for existence is to be nothing else, as truly only nothing is. You are only, in fact, what is otherwise, in a ‘place’ separate from all other existence in the woven ‘fabric’ of what’s known as continuity, a sash, an ancient narrative of non-existence written on the sky, _what isn’t_ creating out of itself _what is_, carrying it forth, as an engine, an umbilicus, a welling out of nada, iron horse, blissful remissions. Each thing is separate, sharing nearly total lack, thus each almost equals that even-most of numbers, zero, given the asytomic manner in which _what is_ approaches _what isn’t_ constitutes the ever narrowing distance we call 'identity,'" he said looking into the middle distance, then slowly bowed his head to chest. He could have been dreaming. Or thinking. His students, all male, watched him, making no noise. Not even shuffing the mats on which they sat, as he did, in full lotus. The soft breeze that entered through the two windows to the east left through the open door westward, where they watched, at the side of their collective consciousness, the sun slowly descend. Yet their eyes and minds were on _him_; there was no distraction, ultimately, even in the passage of time. After the sun touched the distant mountains, a sharply golden light poured through the doorway etching his silhouette onto the wall opposite as the concept ot the abyss brushed their shoulders on distant wings. A breath. "But," he said as he slowly raised his head, "that was the old way. Now we know _everything_, including ourselves, inhabits the _same_ place and time as everything else. Separateness an illusion, a festival for the senses. With fear and confusion we turned from our singleness of manner. Yet in matter here, there, everywhere we sit in what does not exist, burnished by the nothing which does, a jewel in time’s socket," he seemed to pause, then stopped and bowed his head once more. His silhouette for a time intensified, etching an obsidian edge into the wall’s ever deepening reds, then seemed to ascend as the colors gradually drained in sunset’s falling light and his form flew from view into darkness and beyond. The breeze died away, rustling only in garments’ memory, and stars rose in the eastern windows. No moon. No one to imagine otherwise. _What isn’t encompasses existence, overcomes it, as one prepares a place of poised indifference, levitation beyond thinking, and as such elemental, prime, pure absence, even while it seems as though there’s only always more, until there so abruptly isn’t_, he thought.]
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Thirty-two-and-a-forth feet beyond the elevator door, the wall fell away to a narrow set of stairs going down into an even deeper darkness. I grabbed the rail and held it firmly as I tried to negotiate the steps, hobbled by hinderments, lugstructions, and impedistiles: scraps of board, bottle shards, pieces of clothing, and a few piles of an undistinguishable pulpy mass strung together in tangled clumps. About half-way down I heard the door burst open far above me, so I, stumbling, threw myself forward into the ungainly rush of my descent, deeper into the despair of nearly utter darkness. _Almost sheer, virtually in person, faintly certain, and so forth clogged my freaked and scrambled thinking.
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When I reached the bottom, I could see nothing, but I seemed, increasingly in the waning light, to be aware of actuality entire, as though I had at mind’s hand the display of a muti-dimensional computer "screen" diagraming the hollow interiors of the exterior world, filling my cranium and pouringback, blindly sure as a mirror, its dark calculus projected upon the underworld, or as though the presence of absence beneath everything emanated the ripeness of its non-existence occluded by an existential "glow," a "light" which provided a semblance of shapes and surfaces and the vast plains beyond became more discernable to my sight-like reception ("über-vision," my other name for it) such that walls and stairs and rails and platforms stood still in a world with tracks going somewhere I would as well, toward Nodville, Maxine’s motel, to find Dolly, and all became presently apparent to my mind in whatever time and space yet existed, _It must have been the shot to the hippocampus_, I thought. _My favorite squeeze_. But there was no time for thought. I heard noises of smashing metal and wood before a shouting and the bumbling, then broken moans of voices in broiling discord coming from the light-leavened vaults above.
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_No time to waste_, I thought, already running across the platform, and in a leap of faith, jumped down to where the subway’s tracks registered upon my mental screen, cushioning the fall with knees. _Just right_. I straightened up and began running toward the tunnel and then a dozen yards into that gaping maw where whatever scrap of light that survived was swallowed up and lost, and I had only the _eyes of mind_ to guide me.
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I needed a smoke, bad.
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I reached into Sheppardson’s coat pocket, but instead of cigarettes, I found something smooth with a distant softness like the sheen beneath metal or leather. _Hmmm._ In übervision it looked like a bag. I held it in my left hand and reach back into the pocket. _Sure enough: lighter and cigarettes_. I propped myself up against the tunnel wall, feet 22.5 inches apart, torquing myself into moment’s physical presence while nesting a smoke between my lips, then flicked the Bic™. A multi-ton explosion of light erupted before my right eye. _Bonzi bombfire! Conflagrations enraged! Angels aflame with rape rupturing through existence!_ I could not look to see . . . and let the lighter drop. So dimmed was I in my condition, the flame had seemed a roaring sun in my night livingroom of eyes. A meteor blaring through my visual cortex. Torch inscribing its insistence where memory had been. I took a breath, stooped and found the lighter where it had fallen, then stood and propped myself once more into the solidities, and flicked it, right eye closed. Then I slowly let it open upon the brilliant dawn of dawns, cigarette wagging in my lips, but before I touched its torch to tube, I glanced at what I held in my hand.
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_The General’s pouch! My God!_ I was stunned. _I wonder if it still has the sprig of _Asphodaemonus_ in it?_ I opened it carefully, prying open its throat with two fingers of my left hand, right hand’s thumb yet on the lighter, and looked in. _Sweet creamin' Jesus! It does_. I let the light go out and crimped the pouch by pulling its string tight with teeth and fingers and dropped in the coat’s pocket, then screwed myself back into the wall as a massive brace and tried to light the cigarette and send my curious missive into space: Where am I going? What for?
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But before I could get the flame to smoke’s tip, the wall began to spasm behind me as it had in the torture room before, and then jerked such that my cigarette and right hand with lighter began to wander in crooked and increasingly wide arcs like drunken planets hopped up on asteroids. I knew that Aught's nichts Meisters were chewing up real mathematical terrain on their way to nothing fast. It seemed I could feel creation's terror tremor in my gut. _So what the hell_, I thought, _It can’t get any worse than this_, and held onto the cigarette with my left while steadying my lighter’s right, bringing them to mind’s conjunction, took a deep, meaningful hit, and held it in. _It can’t get any worse_, rang in my head (as now it rings in foolish memory).
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Barrels of phantasmagoric gel fell in plasmic belly rolls from rafter’s post onto the bulbous hilarity of a company in the claws of a rebellious host sucking them off and spitting them out into wells of tunnel’s spells flush with war whoops and French toupees aflame ‘mid sparkling laughter and the beginning of the begatting of names, _The überground railway indeed! . . .Where was I ever washed beneath such shores as these, on what shingle’s plain was the lawn I longed to lie upon but this, quit of life’s long last and lack of laughter, released unto no other, final matter_, while grotesqueries rose on the horizon to toy with the widdle-prong of my sobering innocence, gave it a toe-job while suffering hats madder than bloody-wig dervishes whirling on stumps down insanity’s streets, crutches in craw, a rumbling, bundling amorphous mass of need, our horrid reeking breed strangling innocence in cribs after licking it all over, little nibs of bit and tongues in wee ones, then loosening our trousers we make known our approach . . . . All thanks to that hit. _Maybe I held it too long?_ I wondered.
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When I returned to whatever state of normalcy might be conceived in circumstances such as these after a headlong trip into the ripe abyss, the dying bite of a suicide’s scree, cranium littered with decapitated angels, I realized the walls seemed to crawl in rapid shuttering fits and my right hand with upheld smoke broke into spasms of epileptic signing mad zoo escape, bioforms running at panicked once down all runnels’ ways, the rising staccatoed tip of a siren’s pitch ripping the bladder of seem to piercing orgasm’s scream, blasts of melee on parade, phenomena be damned, ducats be decoded, pilgrims après frieze or so it seemed to me. I flicked my Bic™ in time to watch the paroxysms launch into greatest gyrations of wall in bloody rut. The subway tracks bound to ground seemed to heave as mountainous seas ‘neath seasons’s final regret, seething with impending doom and all that was left, then even less. I was utterly at loss.
.
_Not a good sign_, I thought. So I took another hit.
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Plain’s toxic remains spread ‘cross life’s domain, crocked rockstaff in tow, two ax bones, apes and a skin wandered the svelte in mindless dream, their beards lost in a bowl of translucent drinks. No longer an opening act, the forsaken band crossed harrowing boundaries without care, woke on a train going from terminus to nowhere, no longer biding its time, losing all hands in the shuffle. Decks of words tossed over avenues of "seeing," as rockstars and train cars fall from tracks’ mental precipices, filling mountain passes with metal and mashed man until my mind returned some 31.3 seconds after exhalation, but the walls and ground and tracks and limbs, head, and torso flung into irrational paroxysms of an even higher order as the siren hit its stuttering heights mixed with the wails of children in sudden death syndrome, sobs over the higher peaks of madness mixed with the lost scream of what might become of us were we bereft of nothing.
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I endured he most horrific eight-and-a-quarter minutes of my life as I stood there propped against the tunnel’s wall which bucked like a bull with its big balls in a vice; interstellar space seem to wail higher and ever greater, each time more shrill in its distress when I would come down from another hit before the next would send me off into whatever stretch of the universe the burlesque was on fresh display and there was no communion further, nor telegraphs, nor semaphore, nor movie trailers. Thoughts broke like clay pigeons wacking off into a knot of fried shards, little orgasmic suicide bombers. After the second-to-last drag, the bucking and the wailing tapered quickly off and relaxed, falling to a garnished hum after which was only silence, and my tinnitis. _These Tailors really crack my nut_, I remember thinking. Then, _Sounds like a commercial_.
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After the last long drag’s carnivalesque horrors receded, snapping, back into the hell from which they’d come, I heard a buzzing hush gradually rise from the batch of nothingness that entered its vacuum and climbed into the aural mix with voices coming from the direction I had entered a short time previously, of course seeming centuries since. The nearest shouts, for now there were many, came from 97.8 feet beyond the tunnel’s rim. The furthest poured in yet through the upper door, over 110 yards away. _My god!_
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I needed an edge and I knew it, so I grabbed the vial of oDdoZ™, unwrapped a fresh syringe, filled it to the three-quarters milliliter mark, raised it on high, then stabbed it directly into my hippocampus once more. Only a brief thought (_Hmm. . . _)before plunging its now warmed sauce into the juicy center of mind’s marrow. BANG! BAM! BONG! BAT! WONG! WANG! Polliwogs in fronds. Moles bathed in bat light. Fringed glimmer. Rhinos with lampshades in disquisition on watering holes’ wonder. Suppers of uppers. Wraith wreathe of consciousness no longer woven of meat only, now strung on air, embracing ether, feathered consciousness flowing in air, a marbling with mind of none other than what was in all the texts of worlds as dusk became deepest night of knowing, transience a minuscule dynamo within the extant engendering the propulsive thrust of sentience, one of a myriad, ten-thousand-thousand-thousand states of elated consciousness, primed.
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But even as I paused in thought, I could hear the volume of voices rise as they drew closer so I unsteady stood and gamely tried to stand then run on legs that folded like fumbling tongues. Rather, I wobbled forward on wayward knees, having apparently lost control of whatever wires ran from mind to limb, until I found them, tangled in knots, tried to separate them on the dizzying fly, then giving the most unambiguous directives I might, pushed forward as my legs found their movements more-or-less conducive to my intention, practical if without grace. Following the wall to my left with sanctum vision, I drove my body diving foremost ever deeper into further darkness, fronted with being only, future's face a vast unboundness, steeply black, alive in mystery, seeped in what may never have been known had I not persisted in my journey.
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[anarchies of formalists burnishing discontinuities between thing and think in the batter of moment’s hypothesis; rupture of experience into desire, spillage eating fleshy holes, lacing mind’s marges with unforgivable pleasures; fringe of fiction, menses parading down summer avenues as response hovers over chasms of brightening tongues; the exit ramp from simulacra's seemingly unendless procession jumps into headlight's view too quickly, no brakes, skidding into whatever over where?; on the outskirts, roof signage and wraith-light under a new moon illumine fortune’s scale, from untimely possible to ultimate aptness of inevitability; what might be discovered here?, the personal eclipsed, purling in the mix, fit for an _ordained inquiry_, ambidextrous intuition?; The Goddess of Eastern Gates sang of meadows through which our warriors returned, a conquering army in their wake initiating decades of sorrowful considerations, a banquet of privations; illegible doubt and interrogative sterility caught on the barbs of nude thought’s contortions amid thunderous surrounding phrases, insinuating final quiescence; ah, Liberty!; the tattooed ballsack of a saint (Felix) lying on the reliquary; annihilation of disbelief hovering above the pink squirt of euphoria, of pigs who leaven crepuscular mist with chortling laughter as a ghostly preface to inaudible instructions which are murmured all night in eaves, like elves in trees, mind without ease; the bracketed ordure of metaphor; fading wail of obsolescence in stilled air; cheeks bloated with inflection’s riddance diluted with the deluge of orchestral cathedrals, mouse as aperitif, spongy and light; manifold cellular gaps in implication’s proclamation (_may_ well as_ be_); vulture dancing in lynx light corresponding to the clutch in a méditant’s brow; incompleteness of silence fragments clotting melancholy’s caesural stew; fulminations float down rivers of memories remiss, stream across the lost address of _no_, the occlusion of the nonextant no longer exists, disappears into itself, thus _is_, _not is_, _is not_, _was_ and _will maybe_ twist in funereal draperies as he flung his share of netherwear mirror’s way, missing its fat, slapping shores with the sweet nostalgic wave of life, only to die otherwise, without wisdom, bathed in a tepid brew of bare consciousness, exhausted before he began, coupons in hand; the angel of infinite silence minding contiguities of text and idea’s light; what can and cannot exist interpolating punctuation’s portents, where he was lost to another wilderness of thought; bioforms beneath pink clouds writhing with rhubarb epiphanies; what weight of words?]
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Deeper on and inward forth, I gave my tender torso, head, and limbs onward into the dark certainty of my fate, rushing forward into a blind crevasse to meet that which would come of itself all too quickly, and in all my life remain. But run as I might, sometimes stumbling on track’s sleepers, then wobbling along the edge of the lower bed, tripping on snags or scraps of whatever, discarded, collects and sags, enlarging itself in my passage as I crossed the terrified marges of previous experience, beyond the peripheries of my heretofore present absence, yet I heard the cacophony of voices rise, drawing ever closer, flailing more loudly forth, and more. The closer they came the more distinct their spewed hatreds and the more clearly I could hear a high trumpet-like unending series of screams, as clarion calls riding above the cacophonous fray of an attacking Arabian hoard, the sky bright with scimitars, and the more I could appreciate the bass vibrato down in the mix, throats engorged with rage.
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_Could really use a smoke_.
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_What the fuck am I supposed to do now?_ I asked myself hopelessly, beginning to panic four-fifths of a mile down the tunnel’s shaft. The forward voices crested slightly less than 52 feet behind me, yet I could hear their number yelling back in the station, anger rising even there, and more voices pouring down the stairs and through The Projects’ open door the broken door so far above. My hearing was prodigious yet significantly less insistent at that moment than my rising bolt fear. _Their name is Legion_, I thought, and calculated that in slightly under nine-and-a-half seconds they would be at my heels, overcoming me under eleven. There was nothing to do but stop and hide as best I could. I lunged to the side and tried to tuck myself behind a column along the tunnel, holding as closely to the wall’s surface as I might though I knew a portion of me could not be concealed. _Mind of stone. Marrying mortar marrying brick_, I thought, feeling my hopes far less than futile.
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To my surprise the wall moved a quarter inch as I pushed against it in my panicked nuptials. _No time for a smoke_, I thought as I put all the weight and force of intent behind legs and drove it’s beam through my torso torqued into wall, pushing heavily, meaningfully, straining with all my being. (_What?!!_) It opened inwardly, slowly, a luggish swinging wall as door. I slipped inside as soon as I was able and pushed its massive weight until it closed (_Just in time!_), not knowing where I was, or where I might be going, or even how I could endure the next few minutes much less the remainder of what yet appeared to be the same day which had found me nearly dozing, shoes on desk, adrift in mid-morning’s lassitude of mindless existence and nap’s opening glow, holiday weekend.
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I sat, back against wall, listening to the streaming bellicosity on the other side, a rancid sewage of shrill cries, cacophonous bleats, furor choking on its own intensity, a river of insanity unending, seemingly beyond remission. When I caught my breath and was no longer hyper-conscious of every fiber's thread in each pulsating cell, I stood in the utter darkness which surrounded me and walked to my right along the wall, still slightly in shock, and almost bumped my head against the stone interior where the wall, my übervision told me, ended and what appeared to be the side of a cavern began. Gradually, the place "cleared" in my head. It was the same in the opposite direction. After 20.3 feet of wall, the irregular sides of a cave, unevenly convex, began then circled out expansively to enlarge into the cavern then I found myself, almost thirty yards over half-a-mile across, containing a multitude of passages, I realized, that lead to interiors beyond, with tunnels and caverns beyond those, most likely. There was only one entrance. _Numb lucker_ I thought, then _Maybe there’s a way out _. I could see none, but my "sight" was limited, extending only 412.36 yards through cavern’s rock.
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_My god! They’ll never stop!_ I waited seven minutes without noticing a sign of their abatement, voices running in spate on wall’s exterior. In fact, I could still hear them pouring through both stations and beyond, even yet entering the smashed door far above. _Damn!_ There was nothing else for it. I decided to explore the cavernous maw in which my fortunes found me. _At least it can’t get any worse than getting caught out there_, I thought, listening to the intoxicated rapacity beyond. (Little did I know then what now I know so well, and thoroughly.)
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But I needed a smoke. _Something to take the furious bite off the edge_. Where the cave began, I pressed my back against the smooth wall with my side to cavern’s irregular surface and, wedging myself as best I could, lit up.
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The Tailor dragged my nasty ass across extravaganzas of wreckage glowing in toxic morning's early rays spread across a wandering terrain fragrant with fuselages, mountains of prosthetics with cherry red frills and coconut falls, tulips in tutus lit from beneath by chimney’s currency, pastorales in pop detritus neoned over urban reaches, and a band (as the streaming voices I could yet hear) of air became (or were) dervishes of leaves in air, dire whirring tomes on the _types_ of yearning's instability, in that desire is precarious in the first place, and in the second, though it engenders all, it destroys with equal passion and without compunction; that intent is an enigma wrapped in bacon (tastes like human); that rivulets of anomalies bind the ordinary such that they seem to precede their own existence, ubiquitous as that black cat club with a bludgeoning ruby-throated knob throbbing at the portals of gravity’s cunt, cast iron; paradise fisted with Ür-light; and so forth.
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After I found unbounding ground beneath my feet and finished coughing, I picked the lighter up that I had dropped during mind’s melee, stood straight, unsteady from the assault, and began to walk wobbling with wonder into this new world, dark save for the grace of whatever "sight" was afforded me, more inside than out, more rhythm than melody, ear than eye, mind than cortex, heart than any. _What finds me here? What abandons me?_
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Forward I went, cautiously, slowly, with short steps while shivering in Sheppardson’s coat, wet tweed rasping chest and hair, scraping tender skin, my lonely hide forelorn. Armpits scored, parched. Ankles chewed raw. The temp was only 67.2 degrees in the cavern, but it had been _a long day_ for some time and I was tired, vulnerable as a newborn vole on the Trojan plain. Shivering as I walked, I "scanned" the walls of the cavern’s irregular maw as well as its various ceilings, then "looked" into the middle distance, interweaving these with a series of "glances" at the next two yards before my feet, in service of my most pragmatic ponderables. Each movement of foot fraught with attentiveness. Slow but surely going. Surely coming as well, to whatever the future so surely held, and which it would (_All too soon!_) provide.
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[what wonders the word) if nothing can touch it what can’t? (unclouded by desire) what _can_? (individual stripped of self) what might _come_ of nothing? (identity lacking conception, mute presence) for the full measure of which emptiness cannot exist (or _filled_ with desire, unclouded by thought) utter impoverishment beneath each moment (devoid of identity, a puppet strung with peeves) it’s not for _anything_ as well (where the slightest bud that blossoms against leafy green is struck as jewel’s cold gem set in sky’s genius, or in the brambles, a floret at sea in an ocean of indeterminacies, alight with eyes) as nothing vibrates in absence’s disturbance (life framed beneath miles of sky) go with nothing (scanned by eye) _nada por dios_ (burnished by body) nothing touching nothing (all morning a liveliness of ear and thought) even less than far from the all it’s cracked up to be (trees wound in soft airs), otherwise the set of everything which is not in any case (all afternoon birdsong, punctuated by evening), the abyss dissimilar to itself (riding the silence in her inflection) disappears into resemblance (where nothing survives) relieved only of day’s disparities (_por nada_) since identity is everything that is not otherwise the case (milking a cow, utter calm) race of referent and sign (woodstove and lantern light), a billowing in the interstices (tying the naught) nothing's never enough (or ever the same) an epithelium for one (words only?]
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For the next seven-and-a-quarter hours I made my way slowly through a series of caverns, often climbing or descending abruptly, sometimes negotiating tunnels into other chambers that looked as though they had openings through which I might further find my way and return to the world of space, light and cityscape, always pressing forth into the direction of Maxine’s burnt motel and whatever was left of Dolly, my internal compass unwavering in that intention though my "sight" restricted in conception. Arms with marble weariness, wet coat rasping sides and chest, tearing and re-tearing into armpits’ tender flesh, my groin a torched grave, and ankles deep-fried, without socks. My mouth an ashpit on the High Plains, a pit of dry cement and potter’s waste, a sandbox with a child’s remains. I trudged along the walls, occasionally on firm stone, sometimes through a goo-ish substance, once over a house-high mound of talus rubble. I was tired and afraid, both hemispheres dazed. Several times an arduous trip down what appeared to be an artery of some significance would end with the sudden crashing halt of factual solidity, the martial bearing of brute stone, my ears and mind ajangle with the real. ("One cannot argue with the actual," I remembered one of my Medieval lit profs saying, "but one should _never_ try to argue without it.") Each time I faced an end, I retraced my tedious journey. Now and then the walls wavered slightly (_. . . closing in on zero?_) and tremors from the earth followed far below, riding rolling humps of aftershocks like a startled pod of dolphins. Many dead ends. Once a promising tunnel ended in a tight corridor, narrowing to crevice, then slightly more than a hairline crack through which I seemed to sense the fine feathery breath of fresh air, the phantom wisp of a whiff, a ghost, there and not there, and nothing I could do, the wall otherwise solid, but turn back once more in despair.
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Occasionally I'd stop for a smoke. Afterward, when I returned to a state in which a sensible universe, at least such as it had become, could be perceived with some degree of accuracy as semi-stable, I would look about with my bleared right eye, flicking the lighter in a series of bursts, each fourteen seconds, and follow where sight would draw me, stunned by what I saw. For the next several hours, I witnessed the wonders of a mute underground universe in geological splendor: small crystalline domains, chambers off caverns or down stone alleys in sore amaze; speleothem galore, humped stalagmites ringed monk-like and just as dark, circled above by stalactites, milkfish white and slowly dripping their chemical stew, coned tips humped like ancient memory; a polyp-like protuberance of polished red granite the size of a schoolbus; an anthracitic basilica at the end of a hall fringed with an aragonitic lace of crystals; a obsidian intrusion bulging like a tumor from the ceiling of one small cavern, dark as malignancy, appearing to pulsate in the wavering light; a nave of smooth lava large enough for a choir of five; on the wall of one cavern, a huge stone in bas relief nearly the form of a mastodon thirty-seven-and-a-half hands tall, as though it had been rudimentarily but expertly shaped; and dozens more wonders in the chthonic treasure trove of whatever gods had come this way, heading through earth in their journey to surface fortune, finally written on the firmament; as well as three caverns with lakes over which I could see but a few miserable feet in the guttering light of my diminutive torch, one of which, I realized through übervision, was a third-of-a-mile to the other side, with several hundred feet beyond that to the sloping cavern wall. Slowly and cautiously I wended my way, weary, while more than a few Tailor butts told my trail, a sign of nothing, perhaps, except the meagerness of my passing existence. _"Max came this way"_, I could imagine no one saying. Meanwhile the cavern walls swayed on occasion, followed by a soft rumbling from below. Its "fits" came gradually, but insistently, closer together.
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When I returned to one cavern–which I came to think of as Mother Node since it radiated passages as a yet unfertilized egg might be radiant with the incisive attentive of hundreds of jostling, self-important sperm before one slips from the herd and rides his intention home through a coating which becomes resistant to all others, and proceeds into the sanctum of holy continuance (for a time) while "giving his all away" in the process (a squirming orgasmic bulb), even as the rest fall back into the nonexistence from which they so recently came (a dance, the splicing and unsplicing of consciousness), all histories like hair left behind, returning to what they never were in the first place (as you will, and I)–having traveled several corridors in their extent, to the brute final McCoy of naked stone three bitterly disappointing times, I realized my spectrum vision had sensed a slight "glaze" or burnishment on the furthest wall (_"As though a moving finger wrote. . ."_), across the cavern from where’d I’d been, a bit under half-a-mile away. Though it had certainly "buzzed" in my mind, this phenomenon of the wall had fallen beneath the horizon of conscious realization due to more immediate concerns as well as the geological splendors that had unhinged my mental frame. This "sheen" (to what else might it be compared? a slight thing, an ache, the memory of a voice perhaps, or the lapse between broken thoughts) was different than anything I’d seen during my several aborted journeys (_"and having writ . . ."_), more delineated even in its distant "appearance," sharper somehow and more insistent than simply the spectral "shine" of a chemical brew leeching through the cavern's ceiling to paint a rock wall in widening downward swaths, but as though a presence passed beneath it (_"moved on."_).
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I headed across the canyon’s inconstant floor, over rubble then a patchy glazed surface, sometimes wet and slick as glass, that became a corduroy ripple of solid stone before turning into over four hundred yards of sharp rock pointing upward, some nearly honed as blades, in paralleled array. When the distance between them became over two-and-a-half inches, the edges cut through my loafers’ thin leather soles as they rubbed and tore at my ankles, my heels deep-fried, until I thought I’d have to return for the mounting pain when the ground came suddenly to a gentle flow of solid stone, molded as lava cooled in flow, occasionally bulging into cloud-like forms the size of large sofas or restaurant refrigerators between dun-white obelisks of vaguely biomorphic shapes (_tapeworms?_) reaching sometimes over eighty-seven feet upward into the cavern’s vault beneath its arching, cranial dome, almost seven every two acres, and sometimes I had to proceed on hands and knees, while avoiding other abutments and crevasses–one stretching over one-hundred-and-fifty yards, thirty-two at its widest, in the form of a massive opened wound (_as in mind?_), an abyss several leviathans wide for the whale of this world to lose itself in perhaps and never return (_fissured heart of the San Andreas?_), and from within the crevasse, smelling faintly sulphurous, I could hear something like the almost impossibly distant clamor and sobbing of multitudes, as though wrapped in flames of sorrow far below, cubic miles beneath–as well as cautiously skirting small chemical ponds, one with a toxic froth fringed in a crystalized webwork of small, rodent-like bones of ossified minerals while the pond itself was covered with a dusky yellow fume that curled about and hugged its surface, as vaporous viper seemingly to glow from within, _ Luminous rapacity. . . . Good time for a smoke_, I thought.
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Almost precisely 4.8 seconds after my first toke I was _THERE!_ Bonged by the battering ram of the present, swept and swooned beneath the intrusion of all things at once, I gave myself over to the monster of moment’s merriment, its stretched and cheery maw, quivering with anticipation, all optimism and bright knives; the unwavering actuality of _what is not_ within _what is_, pushing through its every crevice; the present saturated with the extant, ripe and steaming yet draped beneath the caul of absence; mind reeling, claustrophobia and vertigo at once; being scalped and sodomized at the same time, as the toke, flipping me avast and casting me windward while dashing my life up and back, bucking my chops, fucking my craw, and snapping my chaps, kept me pretty well fully occupied. _Home again_, I thought propped against an obelisk, then, _Strangely smooth to touch. Faux skin. But with melos of rock beneath. The musculature of a chthonic giant_. The jolt kept stammering in my head as cohesion went scat-blasting by til it died like a mad dog yammering into the distant streets of its disease, or as a siren late at night careens into the bowels of a torn city. _Wow. A full 27.7 seconds!_
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That was the best head-smashing jolt on the entire smoke. _I’d have to ‘hot-box’ half the rest if I want it any smarter_, I realized, but by the time I thought to try, it was already too late. _Almost done. Damn_. I took the last toke, searing the filter, and rode its waves of homicidal intensity through acidic pools into insanity's wilderness and back through noxious clouds, then fell beneath them once again as I tossed the butt through the frothy yellow snake that drifted above the pond’s toxic brew. I could hear nothing when the butt breeched the surface. The first lighter had been dimming, then flickered to its final close, so I tossed it in too. With the same result.
.
[)inflamation of the forlorn phrased in moon’s lost syllables spread across the tongue like a plague, like photon’s borrowed flame casting phantom firelight cross countryside to night sounds spiraling round spine with the supinely resolute appeal of an aspirant, deaf caterers whistling down halls washed white, the plaintive dismissed with barely a nod, appending its testimony to erasure’s wished for the residual flux of each moment’s brilliant confusions, bringing premonitions of themselves wrestling in somnambular kitsch like siamese-twins miming Trapped In Seizure before a sophistic morass that opens wound-like into the somersaulting praxis of a present unknown, luminous, without (yet) identity, blossoming in the unutterable domain of existence like morning perched in its "heart-like condition" on a window's branch, a harbinger of what will disappear and be forever lost at last(]
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It took me slightly over 43 minutes of walking, crawling, sliding, pulling myself forth among organ-shaped growths of rock, climbing and descending, and trudging generally forward to reach the canyon’s other side, that I might look at the wall which then loomed before me between thirty-five and eighty-four feet in height and stretched some five-hundred-and-twenty-three yards wide, then nearly thirty-two feet before me. Next to it, over the solid rock floor, a thin layer of sludge extended from the wall at times up to four feet out. The wall's strange gleam was more pronounced and its spectral shine was made of individual lines and forms unlike those I had "seen" from a distance. Where waves had been, now wavering lines of dots; where a slight curl of forms rippled across the wall, now sharpened they migrated over rock face with the force of desire’s thrust, and each seemed to be, if unmoving, strangely vibrant, not including the occasional wanderings of the world and rock tremors while Aught’s renegades were probably breathing down zero’s virtual neck, almost heaving sheens and forms quavering in the shadows of my peripheries, as though these shapes might pull away and fly into cavern's maw or fall off to scamper over its rocky floor.
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I cracked out my last lighter. _Knew I’d need this_ dropped like as walnut of words into the livingroom of my consciousness, _but I never would have guessed why_. I walked to the closest, the left, side of the wall, at times stepping inches deep through sticky sludge, sometimes nearly as hard as rubber, at others like the crystalizing muck of chemical crud, a tar-like coagulant. The wall was covered with shimmering disks and lizard-like lines which began anywhere from six to eight feet up and often reached nearly to the bottom.
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I stood back to see better. The left side of my face was beginning to lurch toward crippling pain and I knew I’d need another shot of oDdoZ™ soon if I wanted to avoid rehanging from the higher rungs of human agony, but first thought I’d get a peek at the wall and then suck down another smoke to ride its gnarly wonders through uppity-blunderland. But when I snapped the flame to life and looked at the wall before me. The cigarette that hung from my mouth dropped to cavern's floor, hitting with a paper thud. Nothing I’d ever seen compared to what flickered then before my eye. The stone’s wall was alive with mind in sight's hand, a splash of intelligence like a beacon drew me forth: biomorphic shapes and vistas entwined with slashes and curves of widening paint; red trees on a savanna savaged in deepening yellows and greens in which, tucked in bushy green, a man-eating feline slumbered away its waning contentment; herds of bison turned prairies into streams of stampeding articulations which spread in a conflagration with fiery hooves beneath the uproaring silence of cloud and sky, lapis blue; sullen evacuations loosening valley nights; organs torn from worldly frame and woven into the tundra of interstellar mind; paintings of what first appeared to be proto-alphabets but rose in my comprehension into texts of profound proportions, colossal and wild; grunts as slashes and curves formed on idea’s lip almost rendered into a world of representation, recording _what is_, _what it might in fact be_, or _will_, to man's despair, _become_; neurons heedlessly passing through nightmare junctures of circumstance and intention; pictures and signs informed with curves and daubs, and upwending lines of paint, all in the small space illuminated by my lighter. A _tableau vivant_ of vast consciousness and history wrapped and held in vision by nascent linguistic forms which "spoke" to me direct, in ear's mind, as though a fat shot of adrenaline with a cortical cocktail back grabbed me by mind's throat, then shook, hard and true. _Damn!_
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That’s all I saw with the first flick of my Bic™. But I had to inject (_Quick!_) some leavening sauce into my face for fear that flame's first pain would fiery lick and then devour all my living brain. I got out the syringe and vial of oDdoZ™ in the dark, flicked the lighter, clasped in left hand with vial, filled the syringe first with three milliliters of air then, after submerging the needle’s tip into the diminutive Lethian lake (_peace of bubble, globe lit in mind_), drew in as much fluid, let the flame go out, changed hands, then plunged the needle downward into the left portions of my face as I had previously. The holy fuselage still far from exhausted, I took it again in my right hand and shot the rest of the sweet bolt into my hippocampus. I guess I’m a sucker for tradition.
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_BAM! SLAM! BUFO’S ON THE LAMB! MACINTYRE’S SMOTHERED IN SMELLY SWEATERS! PERCEPTS OF INEVITABLY CROWDING INTO THE CAB OF THE SO-CALLED MOMENT. PROXIMITY CRAMMED WITH NUANCE PARADES. PLETHORIC PANDEMONIUM. PONDEROUS PACHYDERMS. LATEST TROLL UNEARTHED_. And much more of the same, as the bright cone of a swirling vortex rose over my fevered horizon, then lowered its "neck" like a domesticated tornado extending a bow, as though asking would I ride, and I would, of course, and so climbed onto the lip of its rotating portal–which it had dropped as a sauropod might dip its head to munch on bushes steaming at swamp's edge, tail yet rooted in earth’s further side from which such lengthening began as I could not conceive, its life extending a thousandfold beyond its body, yet firmly rooted therein–to ride. Marrow song, indeed.
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Newly charged, justified and kryptonized, I dropped the syringe. I was honed to a shimmering edge, directed as though by a lodestone beyond fields of awareness, with mind in such world where the directives that continued to explode in the midst of possibilities (including those undrempt) constituted the _presence_ of my endeavor. . . . _There can be no other_. Enwrapped with such intention, everything in my encounter made sense in otherwise manner, differently than I’d known or guessed. Emptiness flowed through _what was_ while actuality polluted the void’s _exstans_, which in turn "contained" all as it was thus "bound" therein with nothing that it did not bind it in turn, as though each were indigenous to each, every life filled with death, every absence with presence, comedy with its dark twin, a glance in every crevasse, emptiness of time studded with bodies, and so on. In memory, each line on every face; every turn of phrase; each twig with all its knobs, gnarls, and angles' edges, peeling bark, gray to touch; my flesh and all its bright and sordid memories (how many imagined?); every color of every leaf; each shadowed movement playing over mountain branch or cloud, no matter how nuanced, meagre to former mind, was monumental, standing for itself and all things else in the brilliant light of first apprehension, _Eden's dawn_, deep recognition and joy, apprehension of self in other, ultimate futility of endeavor, all adding to one and the same as the reification of what is _coming to be_ lights the cavity of its entrance into the abyss of each moment, sheer, articulate, and in its ever unfinal meaning, a transient glory.
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_Hits the spot_, I thought, and flicked the lighter once again, found the cigarette, prepared to light it, but first looked once more toward the wall . . . and once more the Tailor slipped from my lips. I could only see the shapes within a wavering illuminated circle five-and-a-quarter feet in diameter, thereafter the figures and forms became too dim in the layering morass of cavern’s darkness, shades rumbling into death’s shadow save for their glow in spectral vision. But when I actually looked at the shapes after that last shot of oDdoZ™ , it was as though I could "read" them; the wall was fiercely articulate. Herds of buffalo stood still yet seemed animate as well, jerking waves across plains, going everywhere and nowhere at once; cats prowled about the perimeters of their grazing gleam, ears honed to laser intent; light vibrant in its seasons and distinctive red or orange or black rippling beneath the figures’ very shapes; shafts of men at prey leapt in their trajectories, fell deep into savanna’s feast; men and women and children traveled distances, bathed, then approached cave and cliff to discover what might uphold their life of observance. A hardon for proto-language, some might call it, but I could instantly understand and even translate the wall's linguistic welter, shapes shifting, fish flowing into birds, birds swimming into waves as signs like words skim silent gardens, roofs of village, and tombstones of semantical exhaustion, soar up castles of syntax, and fly deep into chambers of first resonance, caves where memory and sound dance on the shore of a lake beneath the dark vault of the diencephalon, as they crossed my visual cortex and poured into sentences like words strung across my brain, quivering on the cusp of literacy: flocks in season flooding frozen sky with torso and wing; humped back of sudden mastodon in bulging relief and rank immediacy like a mountain bearing down on its attackers, meagre hominids, puny sticks brandishing twigs; bear rearing full intensity of its intention for all to see, another sleeping; a child luminous with grief; and much more, each clause articulate in heart’s core, every idea a burning coal in the wind. Whatever presence there was for me now resided in color, form, and shape. The stone spoke with a mute serenity, and attending was like witnessing one's death in a dream, slippery but with a surety beyond question. Holding my hand still, I read the entire text of one illuminated circle:
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. . . hand on teeming world by fern . . .
. . . being, wings, hibernating bear, a bull. . .
. . . cloven, palm of mind holds heart, shorn. . .
. . . crossed membrane of night into sieve of eyes . . .
. . . birds, their patterns, released ourselves, migrants . . .
. . . great herds racing, nothing gains but time, diaspora. . .
. . . watering hole, ripe with slaughter, blood bound . . .
. . . redundant sleeves of birds, deerskin, old-hung guy . . .
. . . gold sleeps in cavern’s dream, bone with feather . . .
. . . tribe scattered, haunted in head, hunted by . . .
. . . sob resounding in unremitting darkness . . .
. . . came at blood’s behest, paint, urine. . .
. . . toxic nut of Asphodaemonus_. . .
.
"_Asphodaemonus_!!!" I cried aloud, getting fall the lighter, its flame dipping into darkness at my feet as my voice shattered moment’s placid mirror, morphemes smashing like shattered silverware on cavern wall, then returning to slash hearing’s flesh with consonantal edges, unmitigated, raw. But sort of toney. I shuddered, waiting the return of silence, save for the electronic missive always warming in my ear. _My God!_, I thought, when my mind found a clearing in which to stand, _They knew the devil’s own! His fave foliage! Tamerlane toxicity!_ I wasn’t thinking straight, but I could _see_ everything. (_Typical fate_.)
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[what breezes rise from words or winds from phrases lift into sentences that fly through paragraphs narratives epics occasionally entire systems engulfing the surface of one five-thousandth of a medium sized planet beneath a storm as a poem or a chapter or a text might rise into the massive and magnificent brows of clouds aroused, font looming over twenty miles skyward (where black begins), sprawling across borders, sweeping geographies, mauling desolate terrains articulate with insects black beatles forms half mental and half organic scrabbling over marshlands while hurricanes of words dying and renewing themselves dash against seawalls flow over levees in uproarious gusts blasting lexical madness into urban backwaters where letters lift at last (again) to living pictures of speech waking to morning wavering as water spouts vaporous filaments in shining dawn threads wandering before mind’s eye-welter rising (again) into words on wings to return as sheer being which waits where we might receive in its beneficence such delight as love and the merry virtues of thought like wives of sanguine simplicity yet enlivened with lantern light not yet captive to comfortable morbidities of public entertainment (again) . . . what worlds in words when worlds would be less than what they might otherwise might with word (diasporic in dimension’s diorama) self in its precisions coming forth (flush to _place_) finding ideas nearly contiguous with reality (desire for continuity shudders) world and mind (or narrative of identity’s dissolution in heteroglossic fray) what wounds within words (_always_ inflected by emptiness) what weariness (the road flows, going nowhere) wonderings (emptying text of what worry) but with what sweetness of mind (preliterate conceptions falling over a hushed reservoir like first snow despite the glossed len of referential excess) in what languor might we rise (_certainly possible_ to _probably certain_ in sudden lapse of moment, as in an accident) how are these held (mind losing grasp like holding carp) with what concealment (Alzheimer’s in air pockets) by what self (apposition of a word to its echo standing beneath lintels of resemblance) embodied in wordflesh (languag’s ravenous appetite for tongue as mind fades) or a bone whose marrow is absence (text alive in rupture where confusion halts, momentary _place_) presence merely predicated on what is not otherwise in evidence (identity knows no forgiveness) worlds from words of worlds swirl (resemblance never the same) forms spilling out of sentences (the giddiness of reference) more words buoyed by worm’s excess (semantical hemorrhage) surf of extinction (the insistence of what does not exist) holes in wave’s architecture (collapse inherent, failure systemic to the condition) a conflagration of words feeding on houses shards forms lawn ornaments all the furniture of our lives like sea and sky (with what) mind’s flame licking rubble until there _is no more_ becomes apparent in the operant clime beneath all thought of pattern as though the transparency of _what is_ began to disappear again (remember?) while _what is not_ rose into the middle distance trembling]
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_Asphodaemonus!!_ It was like being bitch-slapped by the devil himself first thing in the morning. _Silly Kafir. Racing stripes on coconuts. Candied colonnades. Lost coordinates of Zoo_. My mind wasn't right I realized vaguely. _Maybe the nicotine is coming back to squeeze my frontal lobe’s nuts, or some mathematician's trying to nix the non-extant, or the oDdoZ™'s humping the leg of my perceptual apparatus, its ruby-headed knob aglow, but why are walls warping even in spectrum vision? Maybe we're having a few tremors prior to a quake (The San Andreas??). Or several of these demons in combination or all of them now and forever rutting amuck amid the last skitterings of man's cogency? A clusterfuck spouging-off into words, lost. . ._. Thinking straight was like trying to tie off an artery in the back of a run-away jeep, spurts of steaming Valentines lacing the air, or like trying to orient yourself in a gyroscope created deep in an insane child's nightmare. _A pickle in puzzle_, I thought and lit another cigarette. _After all, I really need it_.
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[insert a taproot tooth-drilling paragraph amid mind’s racket blasting cranium to crickety splinters as his liquifying spine, stool silly, quakes beneath skies shaken and fried in excrement’s fundamental ingredient, the evacuation of _then_ in the abandonment of _now_, never again a moment without realization of experience’s most dire extremities, a continual re-calibration of pain’s debilitation accompanied by the evacuation of his sanity, in short, a paragraph well to be gotten out of with any residual sense of conscious continuity]
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_Damn!_
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When I at last returned to what senses I yet owned, the cavern stood still and, but for my tinnitus, silent. I breathed for several minutes, just to get used to it. Then picked the lighter up to look at the wall again. There it was, right where I remembered, a picture of the demon plant, or rather what I immediately recognized as its stylized representation, a burning brand tearing through a rusty-orange eye, I read around it, at first making no more sense than before, but I gradually realized–with my new oDdoZ™ powers, cognition and perception co-inhabiting the same mental terrain so thoroughly were they as were wives in wonder’s oneness–the wall was a panorama of articulate forms flowing with the pregnant multiplicities of human occasion, tragedy and sorrow, joy and indifference, lust and remorse. Within five minutes, the lighter off eight seconds for every fourteen it was on, I scanned histories, mythologies, cosmologies, followed human endeavor from its meagre beginnings, toasting bats in cave mouth, freezing within, tales burning with the fiery hearts of gods and beasts, heroes hurrying to certain doom, sacrificial burials, trails of sadness through lower regions, shifting shapes, man to beast to rockface to beast again, beneficent and noxious leaves and roots, floods and the cleaving of continents, men attacking mastodons from multiple directions, tribes dying in deserts, and so forth. It was as though the script was written _by_ the world as well as _on_ it, each sign articulate, its lines and forms realized in mind’s concordance, thought and world, same resembling same not in name only, the phenomena of ideas glossing my inner cranium, itself capable of realizing, as I then did, a presence wavering beneath the syntax of color and line, forest pond and mountain, weed and stone, brand and burning eye..
I read around the symbol of the plant and gathered enough to realize that _Asphodaemonus_ was considered a condiment of the gods, recipe man in state of transient existence with brain in continual motion, never at ease, over a bed of burgeoning greens, existent within a divinely inspired choice of dimensions, each predicated on the fact that _what is_ exists within _what is not_, _what is no longer_, and _what is not yet_, the differential delineations highly problematic though Jesus-fucking real, that when sweet consciousness rises through the surface to breathe in the awareness of an apprehensible universe, the struggle for comprehension will begin again and again, rise to the comedy of individual suffering, and when that condition proves intractable, not just for the individual or culture, but for the _race_, his boot on the neck of all others, without the levitation of either imagination, empathy, _or_ reason, the self forever caught between the definite and an indefinite, surely at loss . . . brought helpless to the feast of his own existence, beneath a guillotine of nothingness in the end, our final fortune unless one might be found to to restore fortune’s weed to ocean’s floor, monkey cry and light shuttling through trees richly leaved.
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_These guys are deep_, I thought, and reached for another smoke.
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[between _a_ definite and _the_ indefinite, _everything_ and _any_, or _nothing_ as the space between letters which cross a page stampeding into living pictures of speech, a jungle of shapes, jangle of jibes, cluff of clots between thought and its discovery in mind’s rude tannery, life quavering like a membrane at a border between contiguities, glimmering at universal edge, both lit and lightless as zero, a god whose center is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, as though two objects could only be absent in "an identically similar" time and place, self predicated on nothing the same, not even resemblance, wheeling about the relative in a continual mophing of forms; conjunction within the ablative; in glossolalia a single tongue; the heady choir of one]
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After being blown to fiery shards, each blossoming, snapping in a basket like fries raised from boiling fat, dicey as youth to onion's eyes, inept as a counter-boy with myopic lies, swelling like a brat when he find his McPrize, fervently hiding in miscreant disguise (_the human_) beneath florescent skies, etc, I finally landed back into the semi-sensible world, sitting down hard, on my can. Well excavated.
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_As advertised_.
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I knew I had to read the wall, realizing somehow that thereon lie an answer to a question I could not, at the time, have guessed. If I employed the 14/8 second differential with lighter on, then off, I knew, it would take days to read all of it and I didn't have the time. When I flicked the light after each spell of blackness, haunted by its ultimate slippage, the colors had to realign and forms hold themselves firmly forth again in eye’s mind that I might rediscover their coordinates and reticulating relations before I might continue. I knew that if I had a steady source of light, my mind could crawl upon, then _onto_ and maybe _into_ the wall itself to sense the presence those humans had recognized so long before, leaving the trace of their meeting in ancient forms that seemed to wave as fronds beneath an ancient sea, flickering through their manifestations, seeing what they had seen when the wall's world entered their dreams, as now it entered mine.
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In lieu of a plan, I felt the pockets of Shepardson’s sport coat, inner and outer, while searching my mind. _The syringe, two vials (one almost gone), nearly a full pack of Tailors, lighter, and . . . the silver pouch in which lay that spray of Asphodaemonus complete with balls, . . . I mean seeds_, thinking, _dreaming their necrotic dreams_. And as I fingered the pouch the plan nearly announced itself, it was so suddenly prominent in the sparkling air of consciousness, stilling its chaotic swirls and panicked wanking, _the_ idea, jumbled in time but fully there . . . : _ torch pound . . . pour lighter in . . . break first. . . dump _Asphodaemonus_ . . . keep flint, serrated fly-wheel . . . put plant on stone . . . tighten neck of pouch . . . just enough for thin throat . . .light jet of gas above its puckered mouth . . . with remains of flint and wheel, . . . adjust flame_. (Would that I with such a mind I’d foreseen what fortune held in store for me.)
.
[what is it to say anything? from where does it come? why? how? does coming or going constitute significant difference? what _were_ we anyway, but the momentary recombinance of a handful of elements caught astray from the vast scattering swirl in a world on the border of real consciousness? merely an eddy before the inevitable plunge, above which all histories shimmer, ephemeral and light, the extant but the momentary occlusion of _what does not exist_?, _what never was_ in stud?, the dust of holes beneath this firmament on which creatures are made quick and glad, despondent and sad, salted with sorrows, stilted with pleasures?, the quicksilver wash of cognition and reaction flowing across the _typos_ of sentience, recognitions and variants of the same, with little brain and less purpose, until their star’s played out at last, which nothing reclaims / since from nothing it came / nor will come of it?]
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In another four-and-a-third minutes it was done and I could control the light by tightening and tilting the encircled thumb and forefinger of my left hand which grasped the pouch by its throat. By carefully tipping and relaxing or tightening tension I could not only control the height of the flame but direct its spread. Thus I made my way along the wall, leaving that dread plant behind, high and dry on a stone the size of child's shopping cart, and filled my head, to a vast levitation of eye’s being, with the ancient signs of my kind in the considerations of their living and dying, bearing their unresolvable conundrums and befuddlements, clarities and misunderstandings, lusts and reverence. The real became animate, and the animate a living tale, I felt, as old as the planet when it first appeared to us fresh as a broken egg, then outracing our understanding, always, worlds in each stroke, and the universe of ideas on which it floats haunting every picture, symbol and sign, within which a presence folds and refolds in the flame of an idea in mind's time or in a silence, as though cast across silent battlefields like skulls or seeds.1 The odDoZ had so washed the tissues of my mind that each fiber of sense or from that time, down to a remarkable registration (breath of sound, whine of light), was thereafter immediately available to me. Everything where and when I wanted, . . . as well as what I didn’t.
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_Ego lego_ :
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Memories of initial conditions, huddled in tree, bundled leaves, rain, cave cloak, raised on savanna, enflamed, close gatherings that blossomed outward, traveled in all directions, familiar of mountain and sea, long stretches of desert, swamps, frozen hip deep in crossings, over volcanic ash, death flying through the maw of their existence, riddled with swollen light, locked in night’s vault, mind strung across song of heroic quest and capricious god, a spectral presence haunting the interstices between life and death; sharp wonderments of passage; ditties to morning’s light after long trials of dark and illness; skies prophetic with eternal fare: the aplomb of matter, irrevocable loss of all things, shavings of genetic variance adrift in geode, time’s canker burnished by the soft ebony of decay; etc., . . . but the motif, the root, tendril, and vine woven through the entire, an umbilicus running from the wall’s first few feet to its conclusion, where it ended abruptly some quarter-mile beyond, hanging over an underground river, deeply flowing, was a profound concern for the delicate symbiosis of the dimensions we currently inhabit (conceived as "ghost wombs"), predicated on the notion that what does not exist permeates the moment like a dying monkey, howling, attempts to fill its consciousness with the drug of absence by emptying lungs into mind of sky, as they searched within the world of clashing elements for the verities as though at the appearance of _what was not_ when they first took minds in hand and found signs which like words, were theirs yet none to any one as birdsong yet pierced their frame, vacuity beneath identity emptying its heart, clearly woven through all, a trill in wall's great melody, stunned always by mind’s closure, leading to its grand alchemic missive, that _Asphodaemonus_ , is necessary for the preservation of identity's singular ability to "mind" the continuities between _what is_ and _what is not_, while wildy at apparent variance suspended "above" the dissonant cosmic container of _what had been going on before us_, which involved us completely since _Asphodaemonus_ brought out the "flavor" of sharp eyes and ready discernments not manacled by classification, nor thought bound by the brutal banality of a dialectic, nor subsumed by the melancholic or simplistically ideal, but amused, and with the adequate ambition of our limbs, that we might restore eventually, if not preserve at last, our order of existence by periodically re-implanting _Asphodaemonus_ every few millennia ("as stars begin to fall from sky and rock resounds with chthonic fury, bestial paunch in muscular spasms from beneath all living") deep in the waters from which it came, then might they inform those who would follow, as I, how to find completion within the temporal span in which we exist torqued into the actual while poised over the same desolation which saturates us all. At the end, the wall’s epic of epics composed over 13,000 years concluded with a singular "amen," a sacrificial babe (_sacrum id_) in lieu of a ram sobbing inconsolably above the deep current of the almost soundless river echoing with the silent cries of a dying colobus woven in the figural pitch, deep in the mix, even beneath my tinnitus.
.
There passed the richest five hours of my life which couldn't be prosecuted anywhere, as well as most of the pack of smokes. At the end, the infant's adjacency to nothing and the monkey's wail merged in a profound, nearly visceral, apprehension of life's fleshy pathos. I only had two left, but by then I really needed one.
.
Reach, snatch, flick and sip, then lovingly, pull . . . within fifteen seconds the toxic pores of indeterminacy opened beneath me bellowing out a burning, rancid froth into the vapor that contained all that I knew of immediate experience which tightened as fist of substance that held me, sneer with such homicidal fervor I flushed panic blank before being shot theatrically netherward, a floret of flame cast leagues into the mouth of an impossibly black flue, mounted and crowned with chains, torn by piranhas, scrubbed with wire brushes, tenderized with mallets and canes, staked face down bleeding on a snarling plain, then set naked running over a world of burning landfills with Cerebus at heel snapping at my nasty ass. And that was only the first toke. Before I was finished, I had been further even than torn asunder, crushed beneath a cove of cave-ins, lost, collapsed in X’s crevasse, an eruption that shot out a seed releasing fumes running thick and rancid with the darkest products of human imagination.
.
_Damn_, I thought, _Only one left_.
.
The small flame from my pouch was beginning to falter, then flickered a bit, but held. I knew it was running low so I stood slowly, weaving somewhat as oxygen gradually blew off the monoxides before disappearing finally as wisps of smoke in midst of nowhere’s hurricane. A few residual "air pockets" though (_Entertaining_). As my head cleared, I realized that the "waters flowing from world’s rupture" were yet running beneath wall’s end, beneath the picture of the primed infant weeping, and knew with dead certainty that I had to retrieve the toxic sprig of _Asphodaemonus_ and, as the text instructed, "seed the bed of flow's first flood dividing the infinite by what is not in The Sea of Eternities while jazzing nada with the finite in turn, garnished with the desire for what’s beyond, always" in order to reignite the fire in man’s mind, such that each might again recognize our stake in the meanings and find purpose in the desire to reach for that which we cannot yet know, can only guess in certainty’s loss, passing it thus through ourselves, as an umbilicus, into the land which does not exist in its becoming. _Without _nothing_, could _anything_ be?_ So I started walking the quarter mile back along the wall occasionally glancing at its surface, confirming my textual memory, which proved to be both precise and durable, while thoughts of mortality’s certainty and utter loss mingled with its mute articulations while I rehearsed the syntax that flexed across the surface of its being.
.
As I walked, I wondered about the patches of slush, sludge, or gluey substance on the cavern floor; I almost slipped three times. I’d encountered the same type of slim or gunk, since I had begun exploring the caverns, always along walls, varying from a faintly viscid liquid to a thickly sucking gel, a rutting muck, sometimes over an inch-and-a-half deep. I could tell by the added weight, although light at first, that my shoes carried an ever-increasing build-up of its crust, and occasionally I could feel something faintly cracking beneath my feet, like swamp-soaked bark. I decided to try and look directly downward despite having to peer beneath my light’s splayed hood, hoping that its beams, which shone upward and out, might shed a bit of light beneath. That I might see what I would see, I stooped and strained.
.
_Gelatinous substance. Thick._ I thrust the first two fingers of my right hand a half-inch into the muck then held them to the light, caressing them with thumb’s pad, rolling it over the sticky sludge. _Slimy . . . some grit_. I dabbed a swatch on my quivering tongue. _Hmmm . . . like drying sperm but saltier. Basically acidic . . . first burning . . . but a cool aftertaste . . . like a breeze over an open grave_.
.
Holding the pouch’s flickering light at arm’s length and dipping my head further below its light struts, then wobbling above me, I could just manage to see, as though I only thought I saw, a few shards of solidities floating in the mineral goop. I gripped one and pulled it free, gently tugging it up from the surface sludge with a muted slurp. _Part of a bowl_, I first thought then, _ . . . Skull shard! . . . My GOD! . . . Upper third of occipital protuberance._ Then spotted and picked up three vertebrae of a female child’s spine, still loosely in conjunction (_upper thorasic_), then a outer scarp from a lamb's cervix, and more and more bones . . . mostly human. The "stew," I realized, was composed of the remains of hundreds of individuals, a crystalizing human goop that ran beside many walls through many of the caverns I had been. _Probably "buried" by their fellows_, I thought. _Or did they lie down to die among their ancestors as though fathered into death by wall? . . What was _that_ like? _ Then, _Jesus! . . . I’d tasted them!!! . . ._ "Christ!" I cried aloud. I was so near the wall that my voice smashed against it flat and loud, like slapping the face of a dying child. Only metallic. My mouth was numb at first in weedy shock, or in deference to the business of my ears, before a passing panoply of repulsive tastes crossed tongue’s recent memory humping my tenderest flesh with the essence of bloated rot, roadkill dipped in creosote, a relative’s phlegm, distempered dog vomit, Mom’s tongue, etc.
.

[the author rises from his pitch of ash to sow the reader’s dreams with maggots (the set of your fetch as he brushes past, clarity of maniacal giddiness lighting a torn swatch of his face while giving you _the eye_ , a glint beneath hat brim boring deep into brainpan, angle of fan in twisted lilt, broken gleam off glimpse as in an ever-fading photograph, before he turns and walks into the night beyond, . . . but inside the jukebox is cresting over a bundle of broken sighs and the lit leer of lights are singing life’s praises in a mad cacophony only somewhat this side of hysteria, it’s Friday and the place is buckling beneath fat waves of pheromones as the blade of earth’s original edge seems to shimmer, lens thin, about the upper reaches of the room wherein world’s strobe once again jumps into sightsteam with delineations rarely realized yet remembered somehow though so swiftly passing there’s nothing for it but to get drunk, high, laid, brought low, bucking your chaps and making your nut at once, but even then _the eye_ lingers, and the hat, and the fan. What’s all _this noise_ about our passing?, you wonder), what can be found in the emptiness of what _remains_ that might provide a sense of _having to achieve_, previously systemic to his condition, made bold and otherwise (he seems to say in fan-glance over eye’s opening, pupil blackset in golden retina unfolding beneath the choreography of what is passing) by what pulses within, simply, compass cupped in hand (instead of dick), embracing the torso, recognizing verities (provisional but sure), form riding the precise moment (which outlasts it, always), standing alone amid the vast coming and going, its shadows thrown on mind’s screen filtered the candelabra of blood reaching into the furthest domains of flesh, as the rapture of non-existence wells into brute carnality before us and beneath (the yearning of nonexistence for substance in thousands of ways similar), or that substance, having achieved the loss of what is never full but in its moment’s seeming, shimmers in the vacancy of each moment, its being, the pupil itself backset by what doesn’t exit, a black screen woven with invisible florets of black flame (dancing before the non-extant, beneath its stars, he buried the grave), when he looked into the mirror, there was nothing there (not even its opposite) then pulled a book from his coat and began reading the burnt page]
.
_My god_, I thought, _I really need one!_ But that was all that was left, the pack at its last gasp. Another wink from the nearly defunct, carp on midnight’s shore, loss of functioning like the soft hush before a plane explodes. Getting up, unsteady with the weight of wall’s directive, I tried to hold myself aright, caught a clutch of breath and pushed off, stumbling forth into cavern’s maw, finally straightened somewhat, and trudged, then walked over the last two-hundred yards to where I’d left _Asphodaemonus_ on its stone hours past. As warriors rush to battles lost, madmen race to riot and salmon run to rot, I entered the plush nut my directive, filled with despair.
.
Moments after I arrived my thin flame went guttering, bumbling, rolling over a series of Liliputian speed-bumps on its way to nowhere fast, florets to flickering flecks of light tapped at the bowl of darkened interstices which grew enormous until the last thin slip was extinguished by pitch, and a mars-black enormity without gloss, beyond all qualification or comment, covered my life, and I at utter loss in cavern’s blind socket. _No matter_, I thought, _I need the pouch anyway to carry the plant. . . . But how can I get it in?__
.
Converting the pouch into a mitten was the logical answer. After its mouth cooled, I carefully began interiorizing its exteriors, turning its outside _in_ , its inside _out_, like unpacking a lost life before it’s begun. But the material proved too thin (_made fragile by fluid perhaps_). Little more than touching it would initiate a rip that I could see with übervision and hear as a slight tearing. It came apart like unpeeling a wet bandana, almost just by thinking about touching it. The first tear ran almost 3.6 inches from the sack’s mouth toward its belly. More tears would bloom beneath my every movement. I realized that I could no longer put the plant in it, not because the weight of _Asphodaemonus_’s mass might strain it, slight as it was, nor even for the density of its berries’ intentions which ever earthward urged, seeking an abode beneath all creation, engendering nothing, with a force out of all proportion to their relatively meagre heft, but simply because the pouch qua pouch was worthless. I _had_ to pick up the foul plant in my hand (_Damn!_) and carry it back (_All the freakin’ way!_) then plant it deep in the water of world’s first mind. If I didn’t, I realized, I couldn’t head off the pillage and rape of whatever emptiness yet underlies existence, the smiling abyss of nothing could become a stare I didn’t care to imagine. _And the walls would wildly waver out, perhaps, and the quakes of quakes commence_, I thought, then, _Good thing I got one left_. I might as well count my blessings, I figured, and yet I was in a quandry: I _had_ to pick up the plant and carry it back. _But how? . . . Impossible._
.
I knew that the pain would be unbearable if I tried to touch it, but my hippocampus, jazzed on oDdoZ™, sparked and riled, bucked and spat, and my brain’s electromagnetic field, trembling in a series of chemical baths that washed across both hemispheres, was charged with signs and shapes riotously morphing lines, curves, and circles which set into a knot with two protruding nooses, then an octagon set like a jewel in the bushings of clock's mortality, or like an illustrated letter at the opening of a story ending anywhere, the certain within sure. I was lit! The plan, I knew, would doubtlessly work and if my way prevailed the plant would reign as queen again in the loom of the earliest brain from whence it had come, a fan for the denizens of necropolis, boiling balls of death beneath wan foliage, demonic vagina always open for dying, 24-7, Cunt Death, where I would wedge it if I could, freeing me to further seek again the upper reaches of this curséd homily, and with a stretch of luck, harvest a few more hours of life, no matter how miserable. _And maybe find some smokes_.
.
In utter darkness, I tore the pouch into strips and laid them on the stone before me. Übervision allowed me to "see" _Asphodaemonus_ as a smoldering stain on the black screen of my otherwise useless visual cortex. I made a note in muscle’s memory where my hand left the last strip (_a measure_), then grabbed the syringe and the full vial of oDdoZ™ from Shepherdson’s pocket, and pulled back the plunger til I feared it would fall out, then stabbed it through the rubber stopper. Inverting the works, I pulled the plunger back once more (a full 9.6 cc's), released, then softly palmed the vial and its remaining sanctum into Shepardson’s pocket, and shot up the left side of my face with the first 2 milliliters. _That ought ta hold them off_, I thought. (Pain's screeching demons had recently been prowling about the perimeters of my attentions.) Then I gave my hippocampus a healthy 2 cc’s, grabbed the syringe in my left hand and shot my right forearm with the remainder of its blunt obtundent. _Over three-and-a-half cc's of numb luck_, I thought as oblivion’s surf stroked ball's turf of my fleshly existence along right arm and hand, then gradually overcame the limb with an amnesia of flesh, vacant as when the moon sweeps across sun’s midday path, noonday devils in its wake. _High tide_.
.
I grabbed the plant and wrapped my fingers about it, feeling nothing yet almost nauseous with the knowledge of the inexorable path my life had once again taken, sacrificing my hand, if not lower arm, to prolong what little stable dimensionality living and unliving alike yet enjoyed, grounded in the impossible bed of what existed before time, river’s source. I clasped my fingers about the devil’s brand, and heard a scorching sound rise above my tinnitus as I squeezed its seedy nuts. Tightening my grip on the sick wad, I tied the bundle together with the pouch’s strips, cinching the final slip-knot with my left hand's fingers and the teeth of my right jaw. (_Two nooses indeed_.) I could smell the searing of flesh just below, and in my right ear could hear the sizzling of all the tender circuitry beneath, portals, conduits, tender stalks branching into capillaries, leafy fingers reaching into the edges of my extent, blasted all. _Fate at hand_, I thought, as though the words came from beyond. _The sick fortune I no longer wait but rush to find is rubbing my nose in it_, I thought, _as well as my good eye_. In mind’s cradling light of sanctum vision, I seemed to see the flesh of my hand between strips of swaddling begin to effect a dull sheen, almost as though glowing from within, like the glaze of plastic just before it discernibly begins melting. The bulging of boiled eggs, puffed ‘round strips’ sides. _Bacon on the grill . . . I’ve only got so long_, I thought. Then, _Damn! . . . No left eye and now this. . . . Numb Lucker, indeed . . . Memory destitute . . . Philippino with all the brains anyway . . . Erasure of concordance insinuating rains . . . If enemas complain, can colonoscopy reign? . . . Sheppardson in chains . . . An intelligent President . . . or wife . . .or. . ._. That zap of oDdoZ™ to the head blasted shards of the absurd at my thinking from a place beneath airs centuries past, attitudes and memories of the dead and the not-yet quite living, torque of ten-thousand thousand sentient beings caught in moment’s glare, croaking the indefensible pleas of their kind, their one excuse, how each is "screwed" into its time and place, where nothing other might reside, only one of each and each "preoccupied with itself," a song mingling with millions of other such singings in a vortex that tried to pull me forward into a ripe jibbering madness, I suppose, if I would have let it.
_Almost good as smoke_, I thought, but responsibilities that might encompass the fate of all the living globe directed me to face the brute elements of my condition, my directive binding even amid storms circumnavigating mind in the chaos of knowing with all their elaborate interweavings, alluring to contemplation in the extreme, yet circumstance bade me turn from all metaphysical inquiry not directly related to my situation and leave "the rare steak of the mind" for later, more favorable occasions, if there were to be any, which surely I did not then suppose. Thus, a sense of duty and the propulsive hard-bitten sorrows of love (set against the rapacity of time’s glistening maw) bade me stand, then straighten in body as in mind, stabilize spectrum vision, and amid the occasional waverings and wanderings of walls and rattled shakings of ground which seemed to come with increasing rapidity, set me lurching forward, slowly moving, following the wall (the contents of which I by then knew full well) to my sacred goal, a grail-like-jewel imbedded in my intentions, my way the nose of a galloping horse down a dark trail, primary, saliently stung, leaping over all barriers, greater in mind than desire, more magnificent still than even the art of continuance. Within ten yards I was nearly walking, then hurried in a quickening pace, ever further, though sometimes stumbling, _into future to face what feature of my fate?_ I ran wondering. "Maxine," I cried aloud, . . . and "Dolly!"
.
[what scent of sense in _non_sense?, parsed with whatever precision, be it ever so fine, no matter how many times shaved, how subtracted, redacted, _sublet!_, how infinitesimal it becomes, is yet becoming, ever less than what it ever was, significantly smaller than what yet is, less than whatever’s left of whatever’s left beneath little's least, a shaving of minim crumb, . . . it wakes and lumbers forth like a fat god in clouds of bilious flesh towering over trees and water towers of small towns; snoozes like an overweight Dutch charwoman turned porn-star, a hairy swamp pulsing in black and white; bloats like roadkill drowning flowers with insane scents to the riotous rolling of heads; rises like the sweet smell of gasoline that gilts your edge with soft mist just before you hear the fat crack of a match; weaves into your world like corpses blossoming in craniums, caskets riding airways, embolisms clogging the open roads and the wide lanes of this corporeal nation; shines with the florescence of decaying flesh; bears the nausea of the actual; sings of the oblivion nested in desire; insists upon the perceptual; and gives form to one more steaming odiousity: that the claustrophobia of what _is_ is not different in kind than of that which _is not_, nor is it _of_ a kind . . . what _kind_ is kind, then, and what does nonsense mean?, wings of the abyss flapping about our ears]
.
At wall’s end, just before the river, I sat down, reeling adaze beneath the weight of unfolding fate, and leaned back against the wall. Beneath the mix of memory's wailing colobus and my ever present tinnitus, I thought I could heard the infant sob, slight as memory’s sigh, the echo of a closing casket, all else over, sounded and unsounded, or as the shadow of one's last breath sends waves over a sunlit wall, a warping lens soon gone, lost, as sight is lost in sound, ears cradling the insistent hush of the deeply moving current beyond (_from where the world rose in its dying_), the edge of its horrible depths within hand’s reach.
.
_Damn!_ I thought, _ Need one bad_, remembering the sole savior I had left. _But no lighter._ Then I remembered how my hand, yet bound to plant’s necrotic glower, had heated, even seemed to smoulder during my journey, as though on the cusp of a molten state. In fact, I had to hold it away from my right thigh as I stumbled and ran because of its increasingly uncomfortable warmth. As I sat against the wall, it lay it at ninety degrees to my body, its slight searing smell having deepened to the thick order of gravely burning flesh as the smoldering increased. Once, I'd gotten a punk's rush just by getting a whiff. But now I realized, _I can probably use it to light my last smoke. Sweet Balls of Jesus!_
.
Fumbling, I managed to carefully tear open the almost depleted pack of Tailors with teeth and left hand, then drew forth the soft surviving tube of bliss, seeming to glow even in sanctum vision, cradled it softly in the nest of my quivering lips, and slightly pressing its tip against the molten mass of my right hand, . . . I took a series of quick breath-sips until it nearly caught, . . . then a slightly longer suck, . . . a few soft tugs, . . . and at last a long, steady pull, inhaling fully as it finally took. I had only a few seconds before I was launched, but in that interval I could distinctly sense, deep in the taste of burning tobacco, the distinct and unmistakable deep-fried fungus of human flesh. _Musta pulled off a glob with the tip. . . My god! Smoking myself!_, I thought, but then tilted smartly to the indefinite . . . sheer . . . sharply right . . .
.
Maggots infested the dreamy suddenness of life, a sucking chorus in lone socket, pain rockets igniting in spires of recognition's flame, the grief, the grave, and the standard share the same for every sentient being, preoccupation with self AND the cloying sheen of mortality’s grin locked in marrow-vault (EVERY genus of EVERY species _KNOWS_ it will die JUST AS CERTAINLY as it _KNOWS_ it will LIVE FOREVER, though the proportions vary for each and every nearly all of the time, "the same in difference," as they say, yet as unlike "identity" as is "the similar," when _like_'s in a corner, mouth insect dry, chewing a rat, gumming cement), while I climbed between the rungs of life and the not yet quite entirely given to death with nothing beneath, flying out and over our central despair, that we might die, or worse, that there never be an end to it, only discontinuance . . .
.
For more than six-and-a-half minutes I drug my mental frame over the hills and plains of ever-ripening anguish, piles of dung and ponds leeching fecal stew, ashpits with shards of human bone, as I despaired of all I’d ever thought and dreamed, lost all hope for man’s pitiful condition, seeing a blank at every end, all of our construction nought, built to nothing, touching only loss, ceremonies draped over the abyss, the final reach of our best thoughts a stump, hearing only loss, death, madness, and pathos bellowing in the heart of each drop that fell from every pen, . . . wading through the text of a life woven with tears and open wounds. Then, _Getting rid of zero would eliminate mortality_, I realized, _without anything to replace it. Not even that which doesn’t exist. Would that it were _not_ so?_
.
It was the last smoke.
.
Then my fate slapped me hard. _My god. I’ve REALLY got to dive in and wedge this plant in bottom’s surface, sink its roots in the bed of being, return this knot of what is noxious to existence to its unwholesome home so that nothing might persist a bit longer, . . . with any luck until the Colonel’s crew of eggheads has had a chance to fortify the algorithmic fencing for that most fertile cow of all ciphers, zero primed._
.
_And yet the cost . . ._, I thought, _could not be greater_, . . . at least from my perspective. But I _knew_ a directive when I saw one, and this was clear as the glass in the face of my sister’s lobotomy. A burning finger seemed to scorch its intent across the wall of my consciousness, compelling me forth, its brand broaching no qualification, not the slightest bloom of a question, not even a bud. _The writing’s on the wall_, I thought, and right now the wall was my only friend, its ancient text shooting me out and into my fate like out of a cannon with a force built up over millennia, the "continental rub" broaching my consciousness, the crushing mass of eons past forced through the thrust of plates’ weight into the sudden presentness of my consideration (_Vertical stroke!_) , a vast mashing of quakes beneath volcanos spewing hot salsa made flesh eaten by word again (_Krakatoa!_), language erupting into world.
.
_The wall of man’s mind_, I thought, and I its lonely syllable, _my_ cavern’s interiors resonating with its ancient imperative as though it was inscribed on the interior walls of _my_ skull echoing its insistence from human to human down long ages past, now into now and thus, perhaps, to a future only as yet superficially realized, artists’ hearts and hands in the eyes, each stroke of every sign on cavern’s skin a mind, tongues of dream unfolding deep within, and a presence beneath that, dimly sensed but surely recognized, all "speaking" with a single voice (if only we know how to listen, as I then seemed to know) in concordant waves woven through warp’s vast array: of thought’s first nature prone before the abyss wherein resides _the actual_ , of comic negotiations between mind's joke and the sobriety of mountain’s height, of what loss might truly come to mean in one's life or in the history of a tribe, the pathos of punchlines, and finally of what I might find reserved "for the likes of me," as they say, and of what I was commanded thus to do in order to affect the continuance of our species. They were _with_ me. Ancient artist-sage, shaman slave, color savant, Neanderthal in awe, and all the others. Their minds and lives twined about my spine like vipers about a staff from which fortune’s roots grip, tap, and suck the marrow dry, throwing the host-body away, without consideration, or even a thought. _Symbiotic, indeed_. And yet I bowed to wall’s deep wisdom, recognizing _the utter_ when it faced me in a stare. I could not blink or look away. Trapped, as by the frosted gleam in the gem of a snake.
.
The world occasionally shook, then wavered. In my empty socket a throb had begun its dire march, and my right arm seemed to inflate on the peripheries of awareness as it began to waken from its delirium while my knees on rock floor had hardened into ancient knots of bonepain, and my shoes were heavy, slow, slogged with the gooey sludge through which I’d trudged, so weighted was I with man’s remains. And though I could no longer see it, the wall continued to live in all its shapes and colors. In my memory its every nuance was incandescent, yet fulgurant, laving all the corners of my mind and crevices of my existence with contemplative waves of light, bright flashes, meditative tones, streaks and colors massaging rock, palm's light stroking mind with life's core, all this I "saw" everywhere I turned. _Like a bj on reverb_.Yet it pointed in one direction, always, with deepest human concern, to strive beyond all pretense of existence (and most likely body), finding any foreboding for my person merely a canker of self indulgence, in order to preserve whatever might yet recommend itself of the species, albeit meagre at its most grand.
.
I didn’t want to die, _But I’d already lost a hand and an eye_, I thought, _and besides, the pack is shot, so why not?_
.
[shore’s spell spent in seaside bars, man leaps, tea tents laced with rosey tips, critical sails at sunset, all in honor, sacrificial child as ram, what cooks beneath pot’s rim, long Arabian nights, eyes alight, deft with seasonings, beneath what skies, death a kindness steeped in life’s crevices, staining the globe whereon we build mountains into momument of our confusions, tall and blunt, filled with the blather of self importance, tongue pouring ever forth at its service, a piglet howling in its pen , pouring its insides out at peak of castration, tense without conjugation, human phrasal drift, verb beyond sentence, where nothing need do until disacquisition, divestment to our bottomless beginnings wherein resides such star stuff immediately prior to the first nano-moment, negativity primed, a system without conception, nothing before form previous to pattern and time to drift away, the gentleness of a brute source, inexorable, nowhere to go but down, not even there, nowhere, river beneath river, wavering sense a ribbon on fringe’s edge of what?, pressure, forever sinking]
.
After a couple more shots of oDdoZ™ all ‘round, nursing the last wet splash from the final vial, I relaxed and listened to the current's muted swirl a foot-and-a-half beyond, laced with my tinnitus. Such power seemed almost gentle, the still point beyond contemplation at the center of life’s storm. _My last reprieve_ and by the look of it, it wouldn’t be for long, I thought, no matter what. "It’s now or never," I said aloud, hearing the echo return garbled from cavern’s interior: "It knows I’m neither." _Possibly prophetic_, I realized, standing, _Depending on how you read it and,_ I added _on what happens from here on_. I checked the bandages on my right hand, making sure I could pull on the bow's end with my teeth and remaining hand in order to release the plant when I reached bottom (_if it hasn’t already fused with flesh_). I pitched the works, crumpled and tossed away the empty pack (_Fuck it_), and dove in, feet first.
.
The water was smothered beneath a darkness deeper even than canyon's, in its depths I sounded an absence such as I have never fathomed, even than myself. Despite übervision I could not make out the underwater walls or see a bottom, and the surface was quickly swallowed by the indistinct as I further sank. It was as though I couldn’t even _guess_ how to look in several directions. _Nothing_ . . . the world under water, in midst of water only, water falling in deeper chasms down water cliffs to canyons swallowed in water's lost oblivion, absence’s abscess,_nada, e puis nada_. I tightened my breath as the weight of the sludge on my shoes pulled me downward as the current tugged at my limbs and clothes, willing me otherwhere, _cognito ergo nada_, the world discernibly warping in waves and quaking with shakes that came between ever shorter intervals, _sheer nada_. _Sic nada_, I thought. My lungs began screaming for the slightest sip of oxygen, the tattered edge of a torn thread or even its thinnest molecular string. _Microbubbles of sweet O²_, I dreamed, then _Boy, I_ really_ need one now_, but knew all that was behind me. _With probably everything else . . . and nothing before_. Head ringing, lungs spasming, dazed with blaze, tendons tightened into gnarled knots, sinews screamingly taut, my heart sank as the world wavered and shook in a series of renewed intensities, rising to the father of all crescendos, the present climbing its own umbilicus back into Mother Chronos. Just before it seemed I would black out and breathe in the fatality of _everywhere_, which I would then become, I realized nearly all that was left of me was the tinnitic whine from which I would be free only once, . . . and then it was a song came to me, something from the far recesses of childhood, eerily echoing down the long deserted halls of junior high:
.
We Happy, Happy Dead
.
Mid rows of bones
We make our homes.
Our eyes are scarlet red.
Our teeth we sow
In moon's new glow.
We happy, happy dead.
.
Our beds are made
On cloud and wave,
Our dreams are solid lead.
Our streets are paved
With lemonade,
We happy, happy, happy dead
.
The world wavered.
.
With drapes of doom
We clothe our rooms.
With nightmares hang our beds.
Where widows weep
We wake to sleep,
We happy, happy, happy, happy, dead.
.
We dance all night,
Our bones alight,
Candles in our hollow heads.
We cast our lots,
In chimney pots,
We happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, dead.
.
The world shook.
.
Who makes his life
With fork and knife
On nothing shall be fed.
Who loves each day
Shall slip away.
We happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy dead
.
We race to go,
Our home's below
Where anyone has said.
Who sees but naught
Will know our lot,
We happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy dead.
.
Of nothing boasts
Our absent host,
Where nothing with nothing wed.
Who needs naught else,
Might know himself.
We happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy dead.
.
The world wavered and shook.
.
Our poem is made
In shallow grave,
Where penny unto penny led.
We've but one song,
Which we’ll prolong,
We happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy dead.
.
Etc.
.
Everything was running together even as it seemed to tear itself apart, skittering sideways, changing, then losing itself, to begin all over again, mercurial. My mind was cracking in the jaws of a monstrous rat snapping in rabid-rut. The lack of oxygen almost knocked me out, but I clamped my jaws tighter and slammed the breaks on my screaming lungs while grabbing my nuts with my left hand and squeezing them in my grip’s vice to stay awake and thus alive in full resolve. But water began to leak in through the edges of my mouth as my lips quavered and began to cave. It was no use. In another moment, I knew I’d crack and _have to start trying to learn to breath underwater fast. . . . At least I still have my sense of humor_, I thought, even though I knew I’d probably never make it to the bottom, unable to return _Asphodaemonus_ to its place, thereby preserving the concept of zero a bit longer and prolonging a modicum of the present’s dimensional stability. Suddenly water in through both heaving nostrils. Quickly. Fast flooding. _Shit_, I thought, both Dolly and Maxine are probably already dead, and I’ve already lost a hand and an eye, and I don’t even have a butt left, so. . . . The hell with it! . . . Fuck_, and gave over.
.
Just as I was about to open completely and let water rush forth to take its fatal course, finding my final place as a morsel in the mouth of god’s first current, my heavy shoes pulling me in death further down, to be drug across the bottom for ages slowly, caught in the original current that flows from the source of both living and not-living, forever alist, leaning into a world without future and a lost past, the way of all things, unable to fight the final flow, the world wavered and shook so horribly, so sharply, that even leagues under water it seemed to blast consciousness itself out of whatever in the universe cradles it . . .
.
.
fuse a mind water club tincture of
.
vanilla wond kest rond gin
.
saf de dou wpa hhhz gaa
savg brest ppal x k pzt e
.
r
o
.
.
Something like time must have passed. I came to my tattered senses without having breathed in, or perhaps having done so, survived. I couldn’t tell. _A miracle! . . . Maybe my system is buoyed on oDdoZ? Or I've managed to live beyond the grave? Or have attacks on zero opened a mortal wound in time, its "temporal swell" deflated? Did they succeed? Is it over for our kind? Are we _all_ dead? There was much to think about, but no time. _What am I breathing?_, I wondered. No answer came forth. In my descent a cold layer of water had engulfed me and the current like a glacier of ice grasped my mind in golden grip. I strained to maintain my earthly coil then finally felt my feet touch the soft bottom. The world continued to shake and waver. I thought I’d never see the surface again, but I realized I could at least _plant my charge_. So I bent down and lowered _Aspodaemonus_ in what was left of my right hand and shoved it into earth’s murky beginnings. The bottom, ribbed by the current, felt like muddy-clay with a septic sludge. And even as a violent shaking began again climbing a stairway to the stars, ascending into a supernovean staccato of crescendos, I bend down that I might untie the plant with left hand and teeth, hold it firm in the thick muck of the bottom, and while placing feet on either side of its stem, push with legs to bury my weighted loafers in the loam below, wedging its taproot in, firmly shoving it down till it might find its place, take root, and thrive in necrotic splendor. Then I wiggled my feet, loosening them from loafers, and began to slowly float upward, freed, feeling life reversed, released of cause and all concern, bare moments from what I thought was certain demise. _At least I did my part_, I felt, thinking that it was over, naively.
.
[rainbow death gar ear owl unicorns tapeworms forbidden plots pilots blossoming over frozen terrain beneath midnight’s airfoil arctic cross to end of alley’s mind glowering above nothing gem’s deep green in sky or opal that drifts behind or flies astride hot rifts of blood’s crevasse scaling updrafts within the melee of the actual where existence yet thrives despite the harpooning of constellated figures winding through time's slow release in the forward motion of memory into mind's present at last breaking the surface without identity like coming to first consciousness subtle even as the next moment accessorized with body and a luminous pair of wings flying through death into halo’s lost head in astral gleam whereon everything gloatingly rides into time and thereby a career of chaotic acentrality freed from nowhere that flies or glides or floats falling to sheens of wonder’s water while suspended in air by spout sustaining heft beyond concern neither right nor left remembering but a hair caught in dark swirl before mind’s disseminations careening through the vast jar of a planet’s oceans roiling rose-white with petals whose toxins crack the surface of a yearling’s last autumn in at the edge of a woods deeper than night’s winter strung across extremities woven of weeds and webs and widow’s words lacing the screen sequestered from what is not unless a board collapses wacks sod’s surface and corpses stung with wormy meat that sprouts in the memories of what was dream hidden while corruptions writhe above a shallow grave and waking in my sleep a little man grabs me by the nuts squeezes tight and holds long and hard after the high-pitched screaming in the closet subsides]
.
Awareness. I was floating next to my body, as a fellow swimmer might float near his companion, yet there was only one of me, and _I_ wasn’t it. Total silence. _How odd_, I remember thinking, _even to be even_. I felt at home although displaced, small, without the tinnitic whine of background sanity. Only silence. _E puis nada_. As I looked (or rather, as the attentiveness with I formerly associated with exterior awareness opened to the possibility of reception), I could see my mouth agape, stilled in its song of death, eyes open–the good one empty as stone, looking nowhere, the other an abyssal emptiness staring back from man’s first horror: bottom without bottom, beyond hope or despair, _what is_ and _what is not_ finally without distinction. Indissolvable vacancy wandering the ways of this world. Abs of existence ablaze with absence's absurdity. Nothing mattered. _At last_, thought, _something like peace_.
.
I was brother to no other and to all unfettered, a free range soul ripe with the surprise of simple continuance, and in anticipation, searching for a portal through which it might make its certain egress, the final nod after all finalities are over, forms released into whatever there was, or is, or might be, or wasn’t, . . . _Wasn’t? . . . was never? . . . not ever never? . . . yet never ever?_ I was confused. Mind swirling. Gorge rising in non-existent throat from absent gut. No chance for escape. Beyond all reason, but with much fear, I clung to my body as a girl might cling to the side of a burning building rather than release herself, falling toward firemen’s nets a thousand swirling feet below. I could not alter my will. No thought of otherwise. _Utter loss_, my deepest realization, truth of heart's core as I floated in the cold current, a river without life. _Before or beyond?_ I vaguely wondered, wavering in mind. Confused, trapped by mortal pangs unutterable, witless, minus corpse and without tobacco, I despaired of all but oblivion itself.
.
[what’s never missing is the notion of what's not, a hole in the wholeness of the extant, a cold toe in any world of wholeness without the proverbial word, where all is one is all, no part outside of part, each everywhere no other but center, precisely wedged into the condition of its own existence as though absence does not inhabit the heart of each angle, difference in every turn of mind, even the slightest, an abscess where _what_ had been, or seemed to have been, was no longer, ineffable nothing, riding the inexorable pull, the thirst of thingness for its source, searching its founding waters wherein it might be released, cured of identity, as though shedding massy mountains of flesh we might lapse once more into star rupture, joy and grief indistinguishable, done with memory and all things else, loss beyond what isn’t, merest zip, past the last conception, so that we might realize when we wake, if ever, that with everything ventured, nothing is gained, and nothing’s impossible]
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All that what was left of me was a shivering mite, a pinworm trying to cling onto a body that had grown large as a barge, a bloated whale while floating slowly up, mouth and eyes opened in the horror of its kind, the terror of what is with us, always and foremost, would we acknowledge it: the nothing inside that will out, zero in blossom, oblivion's florescence; or sounded by the nothing beyond, resounding in turn with the nothing within, hands dumb, hanging from my enormous hunched corpse, and arms tugged by current, as my right hand slowly rose and sank, its bandage flowing forth in first flood’s current, as though a finger pointing the end of forms beyond water's source where worlds before thought were spawned, in the frozen ocean beneath words where my body floated with such ease, a tweedy corpse with bare feet, bloated as a goat, and I clung to follow. __What succulence of limbs was that?__
.
[Imagine the next page blank, it doesn’t blink or blush, a hush not so much as anything less than a blast of bad gas. What of memory's gush? The next page filled with zeros (bright ooze of 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0's) save at the very end, bottom right where "less the square root of minus impossible one" rides on a small gazelle-like font leaping into the margin, no terminal punctuation. The next page with zeros of multiple sizes and fonts inscribed, as it were, on air, a page of three-dimensional space, turning (imagine them moving as well, . . . each zero plunging, roosting or rising amid its fellows, then one in slow motion down, swooping to bottom right, as others ride updrafts as up cliffs to circle between left margin and center top, etc. Then out of the _nowhere that is always about us_ (what’s between zero and the first? between the surface and mirror's back is such glass that. . . .), hooked, arm-like appendages gradually appear, rise to gracefully swinging diagonal lines topped with tiny arcs, floating on what airs there are, and when one touches a zero, it hooks and hang, as other arms appear out of nowhere, grip more zeros, and more arms and so forth. Like the appendages of a spider monkey colony braced in the canopy, but without the monkeys, limbs of lines curving, in and out of appearance, grasping, flexed and unflexed, tendons loosely strung, holding onto nothing's ciphered 0's, swinging in mind’s garden, like the beginning of letters at the incipience of words.]
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As I feared yet knew I would, I slipped from my body at last. I had become less than a wisp, then lacked all substance, much less arms to hold, legs to wrap, or teeth to bite. . . . I had clung to the roughness of Sheppardson's tweed coat with the force of will alone. Its soaked fibrous nature seemed to provide some traction for the clasp of my disembodied intention, but it wasn't enough. Gradually I began to slide from the jacket’s left shoulder, down its back until, at its tail, I could no longer "hold" and so slipped into the blind abyss. _Zero primed_, flickered on the flecked edge of thought. My despair was excessive.
.
I was a speck in a world of water watching my corpse, huge as an oil tanker, slip from me as it rose ever farther into the upper reaches, the improvised bandage on my right hand a cord that seemingly pulled my body, now large as the Hindenburg, into current’s oldest waters as it gradually disappeared. Not even a gleam in the eye of the dead. I was nothing amid an abyss of cancelled erasures, evacuated oblivions, extinction migrations. Poof. Nada. Pure. Undiluted. Nothing more. Nevertheless . . .
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The world whispered one last waver, a deep sigh from its fiery bowels, and I seemed to part with existence altogether as though the extant slipped from its bounds at the same time I lost mine. Unbounded boundlessness. Was it calm? Calm's tremulous, tumultuous heart? Was there nothing less than least beyond? From which nothing came and will return in its final going? As though it had never been? . . . What? . . . What _could_ it have been? . . . There was no way to remember. . . . Perhaps there was no longer a me _with which_ to remember. . . . Nothing inside of nothing, for nothing’s sake.
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[a blank page, as the rest of the book is a blankness in the blindness of words a blizzard of phrases sentences stanzas chapters volumes texts libraries as the rest of your life is a blankness, as is _mine_ . . . yet]
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_Wait!_ I thought, . . . or something like me seemed to think, _There had been light! . . . Had I not _seen_ my body slip away? Had not the bandage succeeded it in sight? What might _I_ be trailing, I wondered, _if not a concept of a self hung on the notational predicates of what? . . . complex existence? . . . Love? . . . Duty? Fullness? Or simply given to that which had to be done in order to maintain whatever type of life I might? . . . Betrothed to the nothingness in everything._ The allure of such thinking was virulent, more potent than the bong hits that drove me to Medieval Studies decades before. Scant signs of a design beneath what I thought had been the chaotic patterns of my life began to reveal themselves to me, then grew suddenly apparent, intricate, solid, and cold at the point of my uttermost diminishment, at peak of _fatal dissolve_, or just after, and of a sudden I "grew empires," as they say, and terrains of the previously unimagined became themselves to me pawns in my knowing, and I considered them deeply, was servant to them as well in the world of our going, since then we were one. I was a roaring head of a honey bull (_There had been light!_) soaring over green provinces, mane enflamed, claws capped with dazzling brightness, wings pliant over hemispheres, enmeshed sky and flight woven of light, a series of _harmonica organicus_. In short, I appeared to skip several stages of evolution (_real light!_) and land in the condition where now the state and its people find me, though they refuse to see. ("Simiolus" yet ringing in my ears)
.
[Origin of Beginnings, Sweet Mother of Inception, Acrimony and Disguise, _Entremetteuse des cultures_–a swing in the background always, and the rusty wind of youth–Bloated on Lives Whose Number Lies Just This Side of Infinity, Bright Quester in Jest, Limitations’ Illumination at the Edges of Possibility (Are they the same? In what ways?), a single note in The Ever Growing Complexity of Radical Progeny, Eternal Soup in the Fly, Antoinette of First Urges, Inception’s Very Darling, grant us somewhat more than sufficiency, and that we might in its disparity feel life entire, or nearly so, in whatever’s left of time's gratuities.]
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As I looked, or rather opened myself to receptive possibility, reduced as I was to what little was left, as though glancing back over the shoulder I no longer possessed, just before crossing through the portal of absolute extinction, I noticed the light seemed to spread gently above "me." And I, attracted to it, somehow willed myself forward, or perhaps I had no will, simply nowhere else to go. At any rate I floated up, slowly, only a bit faster than if I were weightless, like waking in a dream only to find myself falling asleep in another, or hearing a voice from the back room in a coma, murmuring down alleys’ fogged cobblestones, then gradually speaking clearer, more gracefully (_dream of a book_), song of words rolling on into the distance about the passing strangeness of all things, the complexities in every moment, and ascensions of the mortal, shattering betrayal.
.
Somehow released from the icy grip of the lower currents, I gradually rose. Light welcomed me with its melody of life. Rising to ever greater brightness, my peripheries seemed saturated with light and my center laved in its warm glow. After what seemed hours, rising through ever lighter waters, I spied a speck far above (_Avast!_), and as I came closer, as though from down ancient hallways, I saw how light broke in seabeams about it that came wavering from above as though to probe the depths from which I rose, floating so ever slowly, then, upward. _My body!_, I gradually realized. I could see its legs beneath the torso, arms hanging outward like useless wings, and the bandage idly drifting in the nearly stilled waters about it, torso unmoving yet, because of the rails of light, also seeming to shimmer, nearly shudder. I floated upward as though my former body was a magnet inexorably drawing me forward, like a migrating bird to the northern light and love, or as once I sought my father, night after night, deep in patricidal dreams.
.
I strained toward the light, or did it reach to me?, at any rate, a leavening gradually came to inhabit whatever of myself yet remained, beyond which I seemed to expand. Light fed light, harmony harmony, voice and echo merged as one, twin of my twain, each thought twined about its companion, from which the other had been born, and which it in turn conceived, _As life might be_, I thought, then instantly remembered the iconography on a shard of an Etruscan jar: two pterodactyls with serpentine tails entwined about a phallus in an upward caducean swirl. _Garished by the bestial? . . . The demonic nature of life’s interiors ever spiraling upward? . . . Or ascendancy of idea’s order? . . . The nature of natural confounding? . . . Have my fortunes reversed?_, I wondered as my corpse hovered before me, still some twenty-three feet beneath the surface, unmoving save for the occasional shudder at liquid edge, or slight flutter of the gracefully hanging bandage, a out-stretched "M" with the second peak somewhat lower, the last stroke heading slightly upward and out.
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When I finally reached it, I hovered near as best I could (mind’s energy in phantom arms) to see it, as I orbited about, from all angles, from beneath where, beams of tracking light burst from silhouette mingled with memories of the light’s pathos that spread over its balding head, from above, and fell mute on its tweed shoulders. My corpse, hung as though pierced though upper chest by bar or beam, with forearms draped over from behind, suspended above the abyss, and seemed to slump forward as from a tilt cross. Sorrowful as I was, I felt a deep, abiding bond. _Most dearly held of anything_. I slowly danced about it, . . . with it. _Connection before connections. Bound as to no other. Native therewith. . . . Indigenous. . . . As in the beginning . . ._, I thought, then . . .
.
[Daughter of Accretions (could you stay in few, settle ever?) without anticipation (beyond or near) down silence of corridors ("Was there ever mark on her face?") dodging authorities, prison (escape) eating waste (gained passage) long delays ("Was there ever, or who did never?") went west (law in wake) woke to rustle of feather mid nesting others, loon light (companion fruited) all New France (deep skins, lost summer) voyageur parsing portage and lake, prickled on summer’s edge, freed in autumn's last flames, bacon sizzling (vines threading upward, entwined with leaves and lake's sky) rolling muscles of her shoulders, digging deep for days into the fleshy depths along her lower back, glides into body of distance (waterworld, spinning with sounds and clouds, pregnant swirls of life in light stream) birds overhead (southward) moose’s neck bowed to shoreside's rushes (_a god!_) rodents scatter for shelter (deep autumn rain) the corporeal flowing past (wonder whose lives?) given back (might return]
.
. . . the draw of my body on what remained of being seemed to grow in proportion to the passage of time and our proximity, each to each. My corpse was a gigantic planet, and I caught in its gravity, was pulled inexorably forth, til plastered to its back, was drawn in. It seemed that I had other arms and legs that sank through tweed and skin, airy limbs through flaccid flesh, mute veins past to sinew’s loss until the registration was exact, precisely similar to identical for a sweet flash, twined and twinned (_Home at last!_), then with a reflex action, as though the flash of a blind mirror deep in coma, I strained upward while feeling as though my corpse was being pulled, hands beneath armpits, toward the water’s surface, some eighteen feet above, with its _air, life, luminescence, Maxine and Dolly, the Colonel, the precarious dimensional sanctity of our continuance . . . and maybe a fresh pack of smokes_.
.
As though in control, I strained with all my strength, pure intellection of intention and blind faith to draw my body upward. Slowly I ascended to life’s light once more, though with gilded list, toward earth’s surface, but ever so slowly, as a dullard’s fog is sometimes breached or a tree breaches dense canopy, I rose to greet the light, and light rose in the growing of me.
.
[minims flashing, from nowhere to absence of nothing flat, "factors to the power of zero," the poet wrote,1 a Beethoven Octet unspooling beneath rain on roof and cars over canted highway alive in their wake wondering if it has always been such each moment given in succession makes sense of everything at once though it be a toad or universe caught in the multi-dimensional matrix _through_ which we exist running with cars and days of rain and loves and melodies ever streeling out beneath our lives to reduce us again and again to the bare seed of existence, shimmering idiocy, a blank screen, the stammer of the sheer extant, understanding everything, how _what is_ is as it _just was_, except that it _isn’t_ any more, nor was ever it but residue’s after, as here, where all beginnings end, moment swallowed by moment, and what is lost is all there is, finally, seeds swept into darkness, and though with a few discernable compensations, no hope for it at last, at least none in any condition to which I’ve been privy, except as now]
.
Just somewhat after _forever_, so it seemed, or at least well beyond _at last_, we/I finally broached the surface, and when we/I struck live air, a shudder climbed the ladder of our/my grasping within the ratted tangle of being while we/I heard a longing for substance howling down corridor’s first consciousness, not to be ignored. Then it was as though I grasped my corpse and turned its outside in while slipping its outsides’ on again, as a lover in fullness of address might approach summit of heart's completion (_Mine own!_), sheathe within sheathe set deep in neural weave (_STDs indeed!_), turning on its lights, starting its vast multiplicity of tiny motors, cells, fingers, brain, systems of breath, blood beating, sweet flesh at last the chalice of existence,. _Again_. Driven forward to my august occasion, flushed, I/he brushed then rubbed my/his secret alcoves with the rush of lust’s intentions, tugged on his/my cock, mouthed its knob, jiggled every nub and knob, jot and gob, cupped his/my cob to conclusion (a point just beyond geometry), riding into the sweetened hush of orgastic joy's full relish, meat meeting meat, bowing to its sole directive, giving my utmost all and leaving none save for the nothing within, until I found myself as now I might be found, by most opinions unsound yet of single mind and body. . . . Following the moment over which I crested, I could hear once more the faint electric whir of my continuance. _Tinnitus!_ I thought, and for one giddy second believed that all might be made well once again.
.
Writhing in spasms accompanying the renewal of fleshy existence like a drunk chunking spunk, I brushed, then bumped against a solid form, rocklike, that extended to the surface. I grasped at it and tried to grapple forward in my confused state. Mind like an almost drowned dog, barely alive, with newly operant hands and arms and panicked brain; more animal than man, and less than half alive, I clung to the cement's surface as though the slab was an extension of my being. From a few feet beneath it rose in a gradual slope through water’s surface to the firmness of whatever was left of the world beyond. Amid my paroxysms–as though a new born left on the beach of a frozen continent, naked, facing the stark wilderness of wood, wind and wave, a node, _pictora infantia_, crying at the approach of winter, unaware of the bone-crushing despair to come, when battered by wind and ice, it would writhe bare continuance–I grasped the surface and pulled myself, flopping and twisting onto its canted slab, swallowing oxygen, water and sputum with equal abandon in pregnant gulps while spewing forth the same between ragged gaspings. Feeling as though I had been born beneath the caul of dangers unimagined, I hugged my gut and pulled myself to my knees, hammering air's tiny ears with bursts of breath, pregnant gusts_ . . . edged necks . . . cleaning knife . . . heft bereft . . . nothing . . . plant below . . . wretched reckoning . . . nada . . .burning balls . . . infant’s corpse . . . lost solo . . . cry of colobus. . . aft sweet air . . . wool and tweed_
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I passed out. Sinking into dream-trama’s sewer with fever enfettered, lost in darkness, vomiting, eye and hand luminous in pain, glowing as winged souls sail out of Erebus with voices decapitated from sense flying about me, and around them bats the size of school buses as I lay sprawled, torso and limb on cement, leavened only by dying, days buckling under sorrow, years collapsed beneath regret, guilt, and sorrow, saturated with persistence's stew, a smoldering hunk, yet such at that time I was.
.
Maybe I was only out for a few minutes, not hours or days; if so, they were the longest minutes in the history of twilight’s consciousness, each moment a coma-for-life, a noxious node goosing present's vacuity, the nictating eyebulb of none, . . . yet at long last I managed to ride one coughing fit into a world resembling that which still term "daily." _The, the. Now! The fruit of medieval philosophy, jewel of thought, crown of existence, the what in what’s not, world's empty flesh in word’s mirror, shimmering in chimeric actuality_. I was in a poetic swoon, _Wherein the literal is made actual, and the actual is what literally holds us in the bedding and clothes of civilization as air and heat, mind with a silver foot stepping down into the cortex of what occurs before me, as though falling into a golden portal that rises like thought, florescent, into the darkness, rides beyond or slides beneath overarching cumulus, a wisp of life that vanishes like perfume in late evening's air_. Somehow my years of reading cheap Asian poetry had seeped into the fever of my imaginings.
.
_Damn, I need a smoke_, the thought was a drug, a dead body pulled by its boots over the buckled wooden floor of my awareness. I was barely alive and wondering (with all my heart) whether _that_ was fortuitous in any sense I’d care to acknowledge. I’d lost my left eye and, effectively, my right hand, which looked like a fused clump, a bloated wormy mass (dead) at the end of a stump; two ravishing creatures whose lives had graced mine (_I _lived_ through them!_), making mine the greater in occasionally wondrous and often horrific ways, were most likely gone, even dramatically extinguished; mankind’s need for dimensional stability was currently, though only temporarily, I felt, satisfied, while the pains of my eye and hand were beginning to land on Normandy, air thick with bullets. _Damn! Omaha_. Yet, _Boy, . . . just one Tailor sure’d be okay about now. . . . You bet_.
.
[gossamer tapeworms wound round / a wound as he swooned in silken / nightmare’s scream bound by cliff glare of the actual / magnificent before a choir of darkness rose / as though upon a vast staircase / wherewith an iris unveiled its valves above us / with the simple will of living’s reach / advancing slowly but certainly / as the memory of two children outside a cottage beside a lake bats squeezing from between cabin logs their bodies defenseless and vulnerable but when released into the black clarities of sky they flung themselves into wavering matrices each with an articulate node that rolled across unscrolling air in and around and through dozens and hundreds of others woven in melodic harmony of their kind while the children watched beyond wonder]
.
The text of the next several hours comprised a chronicle of mad haste in barefoot brattling crashes no illustrated letter dare grace, a unending journey through the excruciating pain of a nightmare unfolding in slow motion forever on, seeming never to end seeming to end never seeming to never end never seeming . . . but proceeds, hesitatingly at first, permeating all our waking hours, our every living thought, until we became the toxin we had feared and poison, the self entire. I realized my first duty in this new life would be to salvage what I could of the old. Like a shipwrecked survivor (only the island was a slab beneath the winged fury of pain) facing a new world, I planned to focus on what might remain. First, I had to see what had become of Dolly. _My God!_ The thought of her smoldering cadaver in the burnt threshold or partially of a motel room made the searing pains of socket and hand seem like sweet mercy, at least briefly. Within me I heard a cry that sounded like my own, yet as though from a raft lost in a ocean of despair. But I _had_ to know. _Maybe then I can try to find out what happened to the Colonel at the Olde Arboritum_, I thought, _or Maxine. . . . And on the way I bet I might find some smokes_.
.
Prodded, pulled, then pushed as much by pain as sense of duty, I rose to the task, ready to face whatever fates might have stocked in their shed of dirty tricks for me, but I first had to find my way out of the city’s overflow drainage system, designed to avoid massive flooding during our rare torrential rainfalls. There were still several inches of water running over the bottom. My spectrum vision was only working shabbily, in fits and blips, coming only in comically pregnant splashes. Yet I could tell I was within a hundred yards of Maxine's motel, NodVille, _which last I saw in flame_. As soon as I found a side ramp, I lumbered up and back onto the world's surface, gray and graying. Trying to pull in a medium breath, my pain rose to siren pitch, my lungs failed, and I fell to my knees in darkness, coughing.
.
Between hacking fits, carnivals of slapping frantic blats over teasing snatches of almost peace, which gradually faded like sirens rocketing down long avenues into the gray mist of a city, I could see that the world had changed profoundly. Buildings, streets, and signs were no longer straight; they curved in ways no eye had seen, warped where no bend had been, slightly and apparently in several dimensions (edges always "fuzzy"). _There are no straight lines in nature_, I remember thinking, as though that explained anything. When I could breathe again, I saw that the world’s directions were also askew: one way went directly otherwise, a road was exhausted before it was through, "north" was backward and to the left, "here" had nearly been co-opted by "otherwise," and "whatever" stripped of its beloved non-particular. Light was no longer of a piece, but scattered weakly in beams from a indeterminate source though the prismatic euphorics of time-space. _Night between landscapes, life absent bloom, city devoid of living sign, air unsearched by breeze, only a limp moisture echoing emptiness in the far eaves, the forgotten diorama of _now_ discarded, turned on its side, perhaps, by a giant hand, gonzo physics maybe, and the little patter of brain batter frying in my limbic terrains, probably sticking to the pan_, I thought unrationally. The pain was taking me leeward fast. _Probably not a good sign_, I thought, coming to myself.
.
I stood, ran and stumbled though the nightmarish simulacrum of my former city that unrolled in fiery scrolls of pain before me into a time which seemed to no longer and extension of now’s then, as past lacked all precedent, and present all presumption. Everything was gray and cocked on its side, elbow-akilter, freak-kneed, over cooked and camel jizzed, while African drums beat an ever more insistently rhythmic pain (_rupturing lava!_), as I ran, tripped and faltered forward, in two blocks finally seeing the burnt shape of what had been NodVille before me now oddly crushed beneath the defeat of its fiery conqueror, long since absent (_not even smouldering_). I quickly stumbled around the side to the parking lot where I could see my heap, and finally spotted a bundle laying beyond like a bag dropped in a refugee’s flight, a limp form lying less than a dozen yards from the rubble. _Dolly!. . . My God! . . . What if . . .?_, I thought. A soft glimmer in the darkened mirror of that moment shone into the basement window of my despair. Then, _Maybe there are smokes in the manager’s office if it wasn’t totally burnt._ But, hey, I’m Max, and I did what I had do first thing, like always, _it’s just that "the thing" keeps getting increasingly difficult . . . and costly_. The pain was tearing me sternward from stem, rending my better nature a tattered rag and tearing all my higher offices to writhing shreds. I tried to control my thoughts, but it was like driving a herd of pigs out of a barn in disaster’s conflagration, rafters crashing, smoke exploding with scalped fury. Birdsong not even a memory.
.
Barefoot, disheveled, torn apart then spot welded together, beneath roaring swarms of pain, alive but in dying, I ran to Dolly, and falling, knelt by her side, mid flames of pain and grief. Two patches on her torso were soaked with blood and her wool was matted and singed over much of her body, half dried and tangled in clumps. Her eyes were propped open, but unseeing seemed. Neither did her ears twitch when I cried her name, "Dolly! . . . Dolly!"_ That which was most precious is now gone, _I thought_, . . . utterly_. I sobbed, coughing out the two lost syllables of her sweet name. Over and over. Inconsolable, shocked, I fell into my mind as though in an implosion of cognitive evacuation, stroking her neck as I cried, oblivion my only hope, salvation in destruction, all hope denied, for my grief was excessive.
.
Gazing into her empty eyes from the vacancy of my life, seemingly for hours, I suddenly rose from sorrow’s slumber when I thought I saw a tuft of wool near her nose dawdle and softly drift in the stilled air. Barely. Then I realized it had occasionally been moving, slightly, hesitatingly, back and forth. _My God! . . . She’s alive!_
.
My darkly sweet, unique, neither
Of culture nor of nature born, young
Jewel set in sky beyond dialectic's
Shambles on earth, pristine, pure, first
Of your bleating kind whose seeming
_Is_ and being _seems_, identical
Simulacrum, an _a_ in every _thee_,
the _tho_ of any _a_ , no sauce so sweet
as that which rides your saucy needs, . . . etc.
.
The opening of my "bouquet of sonnets" love-epic (over five thousand lines) written to Dolly that glorious spring we first met had jumped into my head, splashed through my mind like sparkling white over a chilled crest, erupted with emotion’s thought into fountains of silken flames shooting up and out. _My almost always love! . . . My dew-heart, sloe-eyed lobe, life's belief, she whose presence lights cognisance and brings me thus to consequence, as when the finger of the prime first touched Adam’s frontal lobe deep in dervished sleep, . . . now lies dying in my arms, . . . yet remains alive. . . . Oh, lamby dove!_
.
But there she was, a heap, like a bag of wet laundry barely breathing on the sooty asphalt before me. Her wool was singed, fouled in places, matted and half-dried in tangled clumps. _Wondrous wool! Softest lamb!_ There was a patchy circle of blood beneath her left foreleg and one on her torso above her lovely shank. The second was small but the first appeared to be a deep puncture wound. I could see its pucker beneath her leg appear to open slightly, angrily, then close, a mouth in fevered sleep. The blood had stopped, yet her wound seemed to gum the air when she breathed out. _Looks like she’s low on blood. . . . But who can save the universal donor?_.
.
The next hour-and-a-half raced by and I, pain shooting through a slow-motion nightmare, raced with it straddling broken frames tangled in beams, distraught and fatigued, jangled in pain’s original being (though such conditions proved forever after an apt site for my most robust interrogations). Every second of either motion or stasis erupted like the bursting boils in a crater of burning rock, hot projectile lava rupturing the plain of my consciousness and covering my all sensibilities beneath its hot vomit. If it hadn't been for the smokes, I might not have made it.
.
I carried Dolly to my heap and carefully laid her on the passenger seat, but even before I got in to the driver’s side, I knew it wouldn't start. My old rag top looked like a piece of soggy pasta beneath a coat of new paint in a View-Master, and when I turned the key it reacted in kind. So I took a break, went and rummaged through NodVille's nearly full-standing office. _Deserted_. On the counter, next to a stack of Jughead comics, a book of poems by Maya Angelou, and a three-inch pile of torn lottery tickets, lay a nearly depleted pack of Courtier Menthol Longs. _Three smokes!_, I realized, then looked around through my scalping pain, spotted a lighter on the floor, picked it up, and . . .
.
BAM! Eye-bolt tore through cranium’s stadium like a bull, just castrated, ripe with rage through a wet Girl Scout slumber party, wet, wet, wet, wet, I’m telling you, wet, squishing fleshy shrimps like squeegies. BAM! The world went on vacation, a wee weak squandering her mindless bearings with baleful daring, eye patch wafer drone mobile faucet crankshaft in an enormous marble hand, SPLAT! BAM!, behind her eye a dry hatch presaged the clack of immaculate scissors to music in time to dine on her master’s ashes before he crept up the road with a gnarly load-on to re-enlist, hop the Ol’ Spooge-Cruise, BAM!, donkety air pockets packed with pollinated dreams: echo of flower’s fragrance laced with what was inextricably lost to memory’s tongue, bye bye, BAM!, angelbackfuckedbabyblackribs burnt to a crisp slanted over starboard, mind abeam, man landing in a crash after dashing off to just, breakfast of razorwire looped over sky while crazed on BAM! a target rich environment like a sleeping cancer ward deep in dreams of what-it-might-be-like-to-be-normal-again and only a flame thrower to wake them up while a mantis hides in a crevice, dreaming of chocolates, BAM!, What difference in the same?, BAM, Nan’s on the lam while the lamppost is slamming infants onto the cement until the visual cortex runs with the soft stuff of torso and noggin, BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! (hot boxing it), a howling babe left on wood’s floor then torn apart to sounds pleasing to raptor’s ear, ripe writhing flesh, the melodious rapacity of beasts softly growling beneath life’s feast floating in the mix amid a bobbing in the melody of cries and screams, . . . then silence . . . BAM! . . . and so on to the last dread toke, a residual menthol fringe lacing my nasal cavities with a chemical chill, like a fringe around the enormous insistence of my pain, or the lace of synthetic flowers, pale as grace.
.
_What the doctor ordered!_
.
I picked up Dolly carefully from the car seat and held her broken body in my arms (_Nighest one. Nesting dove!_), then turned, and carrying her, walked barefoot through the empty lot, across Simulacrum, and down Royal toward Old Harbor. _It’s a straight shot about a half-dozen miles, maybe more_. My hippocampus was no longer the bright and bustling site of mental mapping. Sanctum vision had sputtered out unnoticed as the pain of my left socket and right hand had risen to terrifying extremes. Through the haze, I remember thinking, _Lots of others would be on their knees, slopping about in their squirt, crying for momma_.
.
I wanted to get there as quickly as possible but could only manage a trot without jarring Dolly, so I began a slow canter down street’s center. Not a soul in sight, not even a clone. Just Dolly, me, and the pain (blasting consciousness to shards, each moment the thrust of a thousand fiery spears, etc.), and whatever might lie in time’s ambush before us. No light seemed to come from the sky–the canopy a dim pewter stained with dark, malignant blotches which oozed across various quadrants of what had been the heavens _only hours, or days, or . . . before_, I thought, watching these black, tumorous blotches as they meandered about the liminal abyss–yet the streetlights hadn’t yet come on. In fact, what light there was seemed to seep from below or from within the cement of road and walks and warped buildings on Royal’s interminable series of strip malls relieved only with the half-mile stretch of Estates for the Metabolically Challenged, on the west side of the street, and iDex’s clone industrial complex, The Human Kind, with its massive outlet store on what had been the east.
.
If light can be perceived as the absence of darkness, what absence there was weighted in on waning side of weak, debilitated, diseased. Time appeared indeterminate, neither day nor night, and revealed only a murky crepuscular terrain on which "before" and "after" made little sense in the face of the sordidly distorted present clotted with a pandemonium of definite articles, each askew, the wacked furniture of my nightmare threading its course toward Olde Harbore through the deserted city, now gleaming with the sheen of hallucinatory squall while smelling vaguely like the fried rubber of circuitry. Thus, solar eruptions in hand and eye nearly constituting the whole of my fleshy existence, mind in sheer despair, with chaos and dread lacing each thought, barefoot and wanting another smoke (_straight-away_), I accepted once more my duty, acquiescing again to my unknown fate, if by my forward motion only.
.
[pearly portal inscribed with vine scrolling about fluted throat in first florescence, the deep upholding of flowers, convex gems in mind’s clockwork, bushings of oblivion's blossom, each dilated to the size of a small planet through which a dark luster studded with stars, as from a desert sky at night, beckons as with eyes of flora and the petals of small animals, opens to vast, unknown interiors, from which an instrument makes ancient complaint of human confusions, obscurities beyond comprehension, inscrutable lives lost in each turn of the head, the utterness of others, and the inevitable wilting of pleasure mixed with melodies of passing splendor: eye gleam, wink of glass, fast fellows fading as music inexorably slips into the silence from which it came, jeweled portal yet waving in the breezes of consummation's harmony, a floret in flame, wave after wave, both seriousness and gay, mournful and bright, woven on the fly and disappearing into life’s matrices, nets of secret wisdom, certain sadness, not fully realized, yet never lost in the fabric of what exists, . . . what might be manifest?]
.
Through street’s glazed accommodations, frozen mind swamp, light’s joint welded to mind, spine to spine, pain the ground, the sky, and the in-between, a diorama of a diabolical paroxysms frozen mid-scream, all hells unbarred, I jogged down Royal, toward the Olde Arboretum, the sacred charge of Dolly nested in my arms. _My crest. Lamb on a bed of torment. Shield with wool afield_. Forward. No bird in sky. No tree-roach nor stand-and-bolt node of rodent jolt. Pain the sole companion of my compulsion, propulsion’s bosom friend, forward always forward, sobbing in despair having lost all hope for even the most simple and mundane of existences, yet even so, forward, ever, as though racing to my home below, as the old song goes. (_Happy, happy, indeed_.)
.
Twice in the first mile I seemed to catch a glimpse of a shadowy form one block to the east (_what had at least been the east_) down deserted streets paralleling (_following?_) my journey. The third time the form looked like a man trotting along with two bundles of dry cleaning held aloft in silhouette, but with knee-length arms. (_The silverback?_) Still slightly behind me, a block away. When I saw it down the street at the following intersection, it reminded me of the humanoid shape which (_Who? What?_) had probably saved Dolly from the collapsing doorway and exterior brick wall of Maxine’s burning room. _A cloning mistake? Golem special? Trans-specific humanoid?_, I wondered deep in the burning barrel of my anguish, caught in its fiery bowels.
.
I saw the replicant paralleling my motion at four more intersections before I reached Olde Harbor. Through my pain I noticed that it moved, even trotted, in the lost shambling way I, myself, seemed to move, and paused, and held itself like me, at least when seen from a distance (_all those surveillance films!_), screwed as I am into the world. Sometimes its movements even seemed to shadow my own, yet reminded me as well of a simian under the brutal beating of being. Perhaps that’s how I looked then.
.
_Two lost vowels careening to the end of life's final sentence. . . . The only other living thing_, I thought, _besides Dolly_, as I knelt next to the small private entrance on The Olde Arboretum’s landward side and laid her down on the parched grass. What once was plush with verdant growth as though a text fresh from the first intelligence, was now a neglected patch of hardpan and scratch. Dolly was barely breathing. As though she no longer had the energy or desire to move her lungs. I hated to leave her, but I needed to go in alone first. It seemed deserted, even more than normally, but I wanted to look it over before I made another move. _No sign of my loping double_.
.
I pushed open the door and walked in. My bare feet were bleeding, but I could barely feel them beneath the pain that erupted from eye and hand. The door’s top hinge must have been missing its pin because I heard the door creak twice before the whole mass crashed to the floor behind me. _So much for silence_, I thought as I leaned against the wall knee deep in a cloud of dust, looking at the portraits of past directors, and lighting a smoke.
.
_Crapolasmackloacreepysaucemangocuntjuicecocksnotdowndollydownmaxinesintownforthefairandthefarmerslosthiswaybutheytheresnoplacetogotodayanywaythedioramasonstuckonjamthejigsinflamesandtheresonlyonewayoutbutitsurelyaintthroughtheremainederofsocalledpeacefulexistenceanarrativeoflighttothesweetlandattimesendbutintheuncertainherewheretheresonlyonethingtowearnothingbutitsnoteverthesamenonotevenonce_and so on for eight minutes like riding a linguistic roller coaster designed by a homicidal savant wacking off in a nightmare. _Tokes for Tots_. On fire and without breaks, its tracks parted sideways in suddenly sickening ways. _Stroke-flicks for pre-schoolers_. Un-lickety-zipped. Mortal terror and mute despair in every puff, fuck the Marlboro man, cancer's for sissies. _Whatever it is, _that_’s at the heart of it_, I thought as I caught my bearings and found myself leaning against the wall in midst of an animate discussion with the directors' faces who seem to look at me with the horror of recognition, our crime the same, living through that of which we knew nothing, thinking we knew everything, losing ourselves in dishonest disquisition, smothering the possibility of meaning alight, until they slowly seemed to leave off their underwater warbling and finally "fix" back in their frames. _That’s what if must feel like_, I thought through my pain, _for a ghost to make its nut._
.
I walked through the cloakroom and the meeting chambers, then cautiously poked my head through the towering double doors into Atrium Core, The Olde Arboretum’s main cathedral, now seeped in unlight, funereal, with thick sentinels of trunks standing at death’s attention, webbed with shadows from broken limb and branch above. _Where once the sweet birds sang_, I thought. _Blasted canopies. Dolor. A claustrophobic nothingness. Nausea ad nauseam in a lost land. Final fortune of fossils’ sleep. . . . Damn_. The tyrant of my pain lorded over a cheap series of contemplations like a besotted lord over his hated rabble, _Les pauvres_!
.
Hearing nothing but the thin tinnitic stream in my head, I returned to get Dolly. I needed another smoke but I wanted her inside first. The Colonel was our only chance, such as it was, and I realized he could be there at any minute of whatever was left of time. _Or maybe it just _seems_ safer inside_, I remember foolishly thinking. Dolly looked terrible, a bag of wet cement beneath the caul of water-and-blood-matted crud. What had once been wool (_softest down!_), was now as empty as a plate after dinner with congealing scrapes and bones, lost as an unknown suicide in the girls’ shower, broken as sodomized roadkill, etc. She was barely breathing. "Dolly! . . . My love," I whispered, falling with heart to knees. The lid of her left eye opened, slowly, barely, and seemed to look at a blank world through pain, baked and glazed, then she slowly rolled her eye my way and seemed to focus, or tried to focus. Through the tears of my remaining eye, I looked as though through her retina into the core of her mind and therein seemed read a tale of love enduring, beyond all architectures and histories, barriers of kind and type, resemblance and identity, despite the utter absence in which all things are born, live their rounds, and finally die, that they might remain apulse with world’s purpose, a tale of love enduring, mind’s heart forever aflame, though usually exiled.
.
As I picked her up, a shadow like a broken raven's wing moved across my peripherical stream to the left, where the replicant might have been. Nothing, when I looked, but the gray world of twisted metal, glass, cement, and brick.
.
Pain sandblasting all my tender tendrils, I carried her inside and laid her on a bench skirting a crossroad's trunk about twenty feet into Atrium Core where I could watch both main entrances, as well as the doors to the meeting room and clubhouse. I’d have to rely upon my hearing to pick up the service door in the vender’s lobby or the entrance from the ballroom. I sat and leaned back against the trunk’s peeling bark, and felt her side. A few brittle leaves fell on us from the dead branches above. _Probably when I leaned back_. Idly, I picked at them with my good hand, then brushed the others off, without thinking (little did I know what _thinking_ would come to mean), then reached for the cigarettes and lighter while softly petting my dying dear with the stump if what had been my right hand roasting in pain’s flames. I could tell she was struggling as her left eye barely opened, then as wings of morning's light nearly rise before they falter as a cloud of fog descends, it closed again. _Finally?_ A bubble of blood at her left nostril filled and failed three times before it burst. _God_, I thought, _I sure need this._
.
Moment’s Mercury Malleted on Marbled Floor, Turkish cannibals blabbling of crustacean’s dolor, all manner of meaning wandering through the folds of oblivion found hanging from ceiling’s neverwhere like drapery, _une Japonaise_ dancing through darkened rooms hung with painted silks that nearly brush the ground, the hush of her bare feet in tempo as she passes, sliding, adrift while whatever yet lurks upside the head with leering dread, pocket of fire, dire heart, an equation for nowhere, the diaspora of thought, exiled hope, juddering whatnots in pisspots over the jizz-bedazzled terrain swept by storied hoards, conical Conans squeezing their rut juice over every other page, locksure and full of cocksnot, sneezing up the world's blind twat, twinkola galore, harvests rolling in ordure, genitals twisted and torn by a feather-light machine, a glint in the edge’s eye while it’s goosing you with a chainsaw (it slows when it bears a load). _All those wasted years. . . ,_ I thought, carefully crushing the butt out on bench. (_Don't wanna catch the leaves on fire or this whole place could . . ._.)
.
Just as I was rocking the shell of my being closed, once again loosely set like Jello™ into time and space, and after nicotine’s jackhammer ceased battering my mind's interior closets, I thought I heard the slightest brush of a chuckle (_Was it?_) coming from the arboretum's eastern wing where The Black Forest used to reside in old world splendor. But what had been, a few years previous, towering green empires, a bustling commerce of cells in interplay with light and air pouring though leaves, living systems woven into greater systems, and systems beyond that to the heart of universal joy, was now ignored, spiked and spired with broken skeleton of trunk and limb, mute as death standing funeral in what once had been a cathedral to the memory of the stateliest beings our world had ever known, daily sentinels, meditative and resolute, in whose bright airs we rode through life with breath and mind, whose swaying draped skyline in melodic seas, who laced our time with the stuff of life, whose staff was stuck in the earthly real, and in whose midst we existed, while they, silent, aloft, rode as monuments above our mortal lives, heads in the dream of gods. _Maybe it was just the foot of a rat over dead leaves, a feral cat, a falling twig, or the least stirring of a breeze through thick air._ But I knew better. _Maybe it’s the Colonel_, I hoped beyond belief. (_There’s so much to tell!_)
.
Still blind in pain, I checked Dolly (_Last light left in lonely lamb, . . ._), smoothed her haunch with my good hand, whispered in her ear (soft cascade of sobriquets), then set out, circling Atrium Core so I could approach The Black Forest from its southern side. I knew I’d be concealed by an information booth and a picnic kiosk for all but the last twenty yards. I could check out its desolate domain from there.
.
My eye socket and hand were firing continuous bursts of maddog sky-jamming flame through the bowels of what was left of my sanity as though I was continuously sodomized with black lightning as I crouched behind the once toney hut and listened. Twice I heard what I thought might have been whispers, but could not tell for certain. I could see nothing inside.
.
_The Black Forest_, I thought as I scanned the trunks beyond the entrance. _The original building, the oldest and most in disrepair. Over twelve benighted acres of densely packed trees towering like dead monoliths above a few dark roads, more nearly trails or traces, clogged with detritus, confused corridors leading nowhere, down the barrel in which nothing survives (in the beginning as in the end) and lostness constitutes man’s final condition, lack of light and life his only given_.
.
Beneath my tinnitus, through piercing pain, I thought heard the rustling again. _Down in the mix. Totally_. I knew I had to go in. _What if the Colonel’s in there and needs help? . . . Maybe they’re closing in on zero again. . . . The Colonel could tell me if Asphodaemonus worked . . . and if I can help Dolly . . . . Maybe it’s Maxine? . . . No chance of _that_ . Damn. . . . Or Tutwiler. . . . Or . . . the replicant, the humanoid that followed me. . . . I’ve seen no other signs of life for hours_. I couldn’t stand the pain any longer and I was almost out of smokes so I bit down hard on the bullet of my intention, set its directive between my teeth, nd stood wobbling despite ever-flaring pain and fears unutterable, and walked the last twenty yards, all the while thinking _The Colonel. . . . Dolly. . . . Maxine. . . . Only one left_.
.
A dozen steps in I could barely see my own pale, bleeding feet. A veil of ominous depravations swallowed what light there had been as an utter sense of desolation, gnarled and misshapen, seemed to enter through my pores to embolize my spirit with uncertainties that swam in the glustering nothingness before me, the barest suggestion of a trail, sheer hint of forward way. _It’s done_, I thought, but walked on. Suffering hammered itself, a dread staccato, into my weary heart with each step, trudge after bloody trudge: _corporeal desolation, fibrous jugheads, filtching branch and webwork, cast iron gloom, nightmare’s rusty knightware, frilly bungalow filtching everywhere’s underwear, naked torso squirms on fork, prongs siring putrifucation’s irreducible message: a mash at life's end, light's umbilicus snipped while brain gags on famished maggots, the wasted life, a clown in a snuff flick, life to loss in moment’s flicker, such world as ever was_.
.
Tree bound in tree, bough by bough contained, encumbered in the wild webwork of branches beneath a dense matrix of limb, what had been lush canopy, now in woody desolation silent as though to witness the small knot of my going as I groped forth beneath, deep in eye pain, lost hand, bleeding feet tripping over roots, batting at branches, riding ripples of pain over waves of panic, shortly leaving the path I could no longer see, losing it, then thinking I had found it again, but immediately running into more trees, bludgeoned by bough, by dense-webbed world, head on bark in blood rush, hardly feeling it through my pain, pushing on, ever forward, in gnarled frenzy. Deep in silent wood, the world rang with my conveyance only, stumbling on, craving an end, the child inside screaming for mind's breath, _Need one bad_.
.
[he read the book without opening his eyes as though a mirror shone into his life with words he would understand as he came to them riding upon what rose from things themselves, as though elementals inhabited the interstices about him, cars and convenience stores, motels and mushrooms, and taking flight became lines, curves, strokes and arcs, thickening and thinning staffs and scythes, curves that don a letter, wear words, or ride upon a story, saddling its arterial pulse, mounting its systolic and diastolic semantics which rise and fall in bounding waves as though of an understanding cloven to/from the world, spliced with breath and feet and hands, sliced with signs, letters galloping back into the words from worlds where they once occurred, mute presences, alive, as _I_ first felt them when my mother read to me and my sister in the maternal glow of youth, as we knew it then, and as we did not know (we thought she’d begun dying this summer . . . shines back like a mirror), each sentence saying a thousand things apiece–the angle of a cheek, torque of laugh, the missing center we forever seek–while silent on others as a furrow wherein new stories are born through the _availability_ of an author, his or her ardor, a host hearing a simple voice, as I did, the portal to words alive in the world where the heart resides, acquiescent to all things, even its demise]
.
_A light!_ I realized, _or at least a leavening of the utter_. To my right amid dead trunks. Stumbling a few yards in its direction I sdoon a diagonal beam, then another, and more, a splay of five, until I found myself standing on a trail beside a cabin, light coming from its single window. _The Woodchopper’s Digs_, came to my head, remembering a song I had forgotten long ago. Inside, I saw a fireplace, a chair beneath a table, on it, an open book bathed in the warm glow of a kerosene lamp. (_Strange._) I went around to the front, lifted the door’s latch and walked in. Something (_a presence?_) gave forth a slightly acrid scent. _Needles in nostrils_, I thought, _not spikes_, but enough to cut through my pain with a certain registration. _Like eating a few tablespoons of cordite mixed with cement. Or sucking down a teaspoon of honey drowned in a dram of creosote_.
.
Only one window. One door. Not even a sink. _Damned empty_, I thought, _as though whatever was missing was nearly present, though the present’s a hole in the heart_. The chair, I noticed, was crooked, but when I went to straighten it, it bent in other directions. _Pliable but firm_. Then I realized the table and walls were likewise bent, their welter out of wack. (_Like the world without_ .) Yet the room seemed warped as well in waves of utter recognition. I had never been there before, yet _there_ I had _always_ been. _From before the beginning_. Only such emptiness could resemble so fully what had not been seen. Anything could happen, I realized, but what _would_ would no longer be considered the occlusion of _what wouldn’t_ since _lack_ lacked _am_, and _am_ could not account for _a same_, much less for _an identical similarity in the indefinitely finite_. I was all messed up. _Geez. Need one bad_. My head aswirl. The leering window stared at me, black and lopsided. In itI thought I saw a looping shape dully gleamed. I squinted. _An umbilicus . . . shaped like a noose . . . around the reflection of my head . . . Damn. Probably not a good sign._
.
I held onto the table and reached for my last cigarette, but when I looked at the open book bathed in lamp’s certain glow, the smoke hung unheeded from my fingers. After I could focus through the sweat, tears, and pain with my one eye, I could make out an illustration on the swimming page and gradually, _. . . a woodcut . . . came into focus . . . a plant! . . . a . . . a . . ._
.
[negation of what so brightly _is_ or _might be_ were it not for that which I haven’t yet begun to realize in any sense of satisfaction proceeding as it seems in the same direction from which I’d come so simple is it compared to the current wolfish gleam blunt instrument of mind rapacity confusions before which I wonder how such as these _want to believe_ what they so willingly _will_ and _do_ that they would tear the fabric of their lives to shreds before their children’s eyes to prove their misconceptions give flesh to their existence as their minds implode with decades or why don’t they wander into a stop somewhere or do they and is one of the great hiddens that everybody wonders but only those who _would_ will sense what lies beyond (here) as though a wavering constancy that shifts in its acceptance varies vertically like the self which must in turn weather the desperations and foul worlds created by those who _wouldn’t_ but would rather wallow than wonder in such meagerness of life they realize as their own, reach what heights they might without effort, and stuff their throats and minds with paucity’s dirty panties until they are stuffed with nothing and they might never bring themselves to pause or wonder more in rotting fear that such wandering might desert them in midnight’s desert bereft where with others they roam headless even as a few realize the trail ended in darkness each night while every morning bursts into walnuts of light and found or seemed to find or sensed beyond in its wonder where _they_ wandered a presence indigenous and concerned even beneath the yoke of those who would impress their nothings upon all others crushing viability of continuance in whatever fullness of joy they may have discovered breaking all but its spirit everything needlessly lost in the midst, but not without comment, ever, no end but despair and laughter]
.
_Asphodaemonus!_ The Tailor hit the floor with a soft thwup. Drops of blood had welled into a few small pools on the alembic shaped verse below, still slightly wet. I gasped, gulping down three quick-risen bolts of gore's successive insistences in a staccato of convulsions which shook my unmanned frame, _My god! . . . What’s happening?_ Beside the book was a gold and silver lapel pin with the sign of a cancelled 0 ( ). I recognized it immediately as the "No-Zero Zone" logo of iDex’s Von Stuben Institute. _What brought me here? . . . What's with me now? . . . or abandoned me ever?_
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Then in the table's shadow on the floor I saw what I first thought was an albino caterpillar. _Weird. . . Or maybe one of Maxine’s "devices"? . ._ . I stooped through my blazing pain, and while loosening my physical spirit to pick it up, _"Curiosity’s cat"_ crossed my mind, as well as _while I’m down here I'll get the smoke_, then as I looked more closely, _Why . . . I looks just like the Colonel's mustache . . . What???? . . ._ while in the corner of my eye I saw, rising on the wall beside me, the shadow of a figure looming large, _My god!. . . The biomorph?. . . Tutwiler? . . . The Colonel?_, I thought, then _What of Dolly?? . . . Maxine??_, . . and as I slowly raised my head to look, electric wailing high in mind, the shadow’s arm began in swift descent . . . _all just a setup? . . . end’s final dead end?_ . . . its hand fell forward fast and hard . . ._damn, really need one bad_ , . . . and then the windows failed . . . _fucked up again_ . . . and as I turned . . . _nothing left_ . . . the lights . . . _oblivion overflowing with oblivion_ . . . went out . . . _e puis nada_, . . . and my tinnitic whine faded into the distance that surrounds . . .