Eclipse

Nothing exemplifies the modern and efficient industrial society more than the institution of the workplace lunchroom; they occupy space, by the hundreds of thousands, not centrally to their establishments and not peripherally such as in separate architectural units, but rather emplaced as a nexus wherein the social and the business symbiate. These liminal habitations are the natural destinations for the birthday, the anniversary, the retirement; aesthetically they aren't much to write about, being as they are almost perfectly functional in their arrangements of Formica tables surrounded by metal and wood chairs, with mimeographed or photocopied bulletins tacked to their boards. It is in one such space that I begin my tale.

One day, never mind which, a middle-aged man with a slight stoop and a distracted air went into his workplace lunchroom and scanned the vista in a searching way. Seemingly not seeing what he was looking to see, he accommodated himself with a chair at a table near the window which afforded a view of the cracked and miserable parking lot. He clenched his hands to and fro and muttered the odd untranslatable signifier from a lexicon inscrutable though familiar to anyone who (provided with the key of a clear referent) has found him- or herself in the selfsame condition. He even muttered a groan before standing up and hurrying to the sink, only to return to the table and chair almost immediately. Finally his eyes lit up as another man, a slightly older man, came into the lunch room and spied the former fellow, and thereupon went to the table and sat down with a smile on his face to greet the careworn and excited visage opposite.

The elder spoke first, to begin the process of revelation that he seemed expected to pay attention to. He said: "So, Bob," then looked out at the parking lot. "We're not going to get many more nice days like this this year."

Bob (for so our central character is called) said: "What? Yes, it's nice out." Bob looked around the lunchroom, and noted that they were a safe distance from the nearby table of scientists employed by the data centre.

The elder--whose name was Mark--said: "So we're here, you and me, and I am frankly quite worried. What's up? What's happened? Does it have to do with Anne?"

Bob appeared to choke on something. "In a way. Yes. Quite. Indirectly."

"Well? What is it? Get it out, for God's sake!"

His fellow was quiet for a moment, then: "There's a woman who works here, and I can't stop thinking about her. I wake up thinking of her, or I wake up feeling guilty because I haven't yet thought of her. At night she keeps me awake.... I can't get my bloody balance back!"

Mark leaned back. "It's not a physical thing, is it?" thinking about his friendship with Bob's wife Anne.

"No, nothing's happened. Nothing really, nothing physical. It's just that I'm, like, in love with her and I think I'm going to do something crazy, destructive, and I don't want that to happen, but I'm right on the edge. When I'm at home I stay away from the Internet because I'm afraid I'll send her some squeegee note in the wee hours of a Saturday night."

Mark almost laughed. "Ah, man, I can remember that feeling. Being in love; that madness; the juices flow." Mark thought this the proper discourse, but:

Bob slapped his hands palm-down on the Formica, three times in rapid succession, bang-bang-bang. (It was a habit of his.) "Can't you have some sympathy with me? Is it just a joke to you? I'm demented, Mark. I can't function. Nothing I eat tastes like food. What am I going to do?"

"If you got it that bad, then: You're avoiding whoever this woman is?"

"Yes, which could be making it worse. I'm carrying around this internal image of her, and it's like it talks to me."

Mark raised a drama-school eyebrow. "Like a terrible and grave spectre?"

"No, not like that, I'm speaking metaphorically."

They were quiet for a bit. Then, Mark, evenly: "Should we cut her down to size in your eyes, this mystery woman? Find out what she really thinks about something, which would be no doubt stupid?"

"No."

"Should I talk to her, explain things?"

"No! It's too embarrassing. It's shameful. I'm old enough to be her father."

"Yikes. That's perv territory. You didn't mention that." Mark spread his hands as if to throttle something. Angrily: "What is wrong with you?"

Bob moved his chair back a little and scanned the room for interference. "It just happened. Fate, or destiny, or the constellations."

Rotely: "And now it's time to say goodbye to fate and destiny and all those phony constellations and get back to being married and dull."

"That's what I want to do. Mostly. Oh, what am I saying? Completely!"

"This is ridiculous. Just ridiculous." Mark mulled the problem seriously. "You're obsessed. It's like you're in some Chinese handcuffs.... I don't know if this will work in your case, but ... years ago ... serious years ago ... I wanted something that I couldn't have. So I drew pictures of it, lots of pictures of it, how I imagined it, in all its glory. There was no way I could have it, so I made my own version. And believe it or not, that satisfied me. I think you should do something like that."

"You want me to take up fine arts?"

Mark nodded aggressively to convince himself. "Yes. Yes! Or something like that. Maybe you could write it all down, and then you can in a sense exorcise this little harlot home-wrecker out of your life. You'll be seeing things objectively again in no time."

Bob stared off for a moment. "What about writing songs?"

Mark shook his head. "Too dangerous. You might end up serenading her at the staff picnic near the keg."

"Yeah, I guess you're right. I think the writing would be good." Bob was thinking it seriously through here. "Painting would be dangerous like music, not so dangerous but still I'd have to explain it to Anne. If I wrote it out then I could hide the file. Call it 'Memo 6' or something like that. It's all coming together. It'd be just words, I guess. What harm could there be in words? Wow, I feel better already! She'd be just words on a page.... Thanks, I got to say, really, Mark, thank you for this. I feel like I have control over the situation again."

"Good! And take this advice for real life: Avoid her if you can."

"What?"

"She no longer exists. She's in your head, and only in your head."

After a brief internal struggle Bob said: "Right. Only in my head."

They basked in their true friendship for a while, then things got back to normal. They re-committed to meeting for snooker on Friday, and went back to work.

Some nine hours later, some three-and-a-half miles away, in a kitchen on the fourteenth floor of a one-bedroom apartment in a thirty-storey building, said kitchen being accoutred with only the most modern appliances (LG® refrigerator and toaster, Samsung® range, Sharp® microwave, Bunn® coffee-maker), tidy and painted and neat, a woman was busy at work with a mortar and pestle. Adjoining the kitchen was this woman's living room, whose décor matched the fastness of the kitchen, that is to say, all was tasteful and well-ordered and dustless, with a deep comfortable pleather sofa and big-screen television, some plants domestic, exotic, or arcane, an orderly cedar desk (from Ikea®) with a closed solid-state laptop upon it, plus pillows, abstract prints, blinds on silent runners and a view of the lake; and around the corner, past the entranceway, was her bedroom, in which the bed was made every morning and tucked tightly, in which the closet door was always closed upon its WD-40®'d hinges, and in which the dresser-top was always ordered and geometrical with nothing diagonally placed; and through whose window nothing could be ever heard except for the odd siren in the middle of the night; all being all-in-all the perfect apartment for the modern sophisticated cosmopolite wise woman.

The mortar and pestle, of exquisite marble mined from Michelangelo's source, she was using there in the kitchen she had purchased at an Italian design store. The air smelled of the hair (her own) she had burned within it, and she was carefully grinding the ashes into a fine aerable dust. She was humming as she ground, a little ancient thing her familiar had taught her many moon cycles ago. "There," she said, satisfied with her grind. She poured the burned dust into a glass beaker made by Kimax® and proceeded to add three millilitres of the secretions of her secret garden to it, and topped it off with fifty millilitres of water that had been distilled through her very expensive imported Vevor® stainless steel water distiller. She the took a pipette and stirred up the mixture two hundred and fifty times. She carefully poured the contents into an atomizer, humming away merrily, and capped the tip.

She felt something in the air lightly brush her. What was it? Someone somewhere was thinking very hard about her, somewhere within five miles or so. She smiled, and responded quickly. She could feel it coming in the air all right, she smiled again; the resistance she could feel was lessening daily.

In the morning she took the atomizer to work and kept it in her desk. Before she left for the day, she took it out of her desk, to allow it to reach room temperature. (She hid it behind her cheap Samsung® screen.)

Bob was already knocking the billiard balls around when Mark got to the Brunswicks on Brunswick billiard hall, a place where they had met some scores of times since the latter part of the previous century. The hall had twelve snooker tables plus eight eight-ball tables in the back. Bob and Mark had started with regular eight-ball but had quickly moved onto the more challenging game to find their more proper level of difficulty, and they could go through three racks in two hours if the wind was going the right way. The purple carpet passed under Mike's feet as he came up to the table to observe Bob making a total killing of things. Balls were going in every which way, off one bank or, twice, two. Bob suddenly noticed Mike's presence and called: "Hey! Buddy! Rack em up!" Bob reached in all the pockets one after another and glided all the red balls close to the mark and the coloureds to their appropriate sites while Mike slowly pulled down the triangle.

Mike across the table said: "So, Bob, been busy?" meaning: "Been drinking?"

Bob thought for a second and said: "Nope! Nothing so far. Want one now? I feel like one or three. I'll pay." He came back in a moment with two bottles of beer.

Mike looked at him very seriously and asked: "Are you bi-polar or something? What's changed since I saw you Tuesday?"

In response, sing-song: "All has been solved, all has been solved, all has been solved, all has been solved."

Bob cleaned up in the first and second racks, in little more than an hour. The third took a bit more doing; at one point he was losing! However, as you can guess, he righted his galleon in the end and clobbered his poor friend who was frankly amazed at the skill and luck of his friend.

Repairing to a local tavern afterwards--the Sheek, a fine palace of oak and bronze, sometimes too noisy but not so that particular peculiar Friday evening--Mark, after getting a couple pints and clinking, said to the effervescent Bob, looking perfectly perfect: "So what's the explanation? Are you 'on' something?"

Bob leaned back like Henry VIII. "I took your advice, and it totally killed it. I am now free again, free at last, my God, my God, so free at last."

"I'm not sure you should be that free."

Bob banged his pint glass down, and Mark jumped. "I have control again! She's no longer a bother. I'm back in my proper prison of domesticity: a Club Fed, with rolling grassy putt ranges and massages every other day."

Mark, surprised to the utmost that a piece of his advice had been worthwhile, asked: "So you're saying that you ideated her, sublimated her, reified her, into a bit of writing?"

"Exactly what I did!" Bob put his experience into, more or less, words. "First thing I wrote was a poem. I pulled the girl apart piece by piece. I wrote about how I loved her hair and how it smelled once, that's to say the one time I smelled her hair, I wrote about. 'As amber scented,' I wrote. Her mouth and kissing it, the softness. Her breasts like pomegranates, and since I couldn't say anything about down there, about how her ass was an inverted heart. I liked the whole thing, it was a kind of a sonnet, and I felt better. But I tossed that out and started again, this time it was about how she was a witch who'd enchanted me, like she was in a kitchen cooking up a spell with her burnt hair and pussy juices and water, but I stopped there because it was all in my head and she wasn't to blame and I was being, quite frankly, misogynistic. At that point I changed tack again, and I got gentle and romantic, with this thing about, you know, a fantasy about she and me. She became the daughter of a religious zealot and a schizophrenic, and I was some ordinary guy from the suburbs and I loved her and--I'm going fast, I know--I had to save her from all of that, and she was almost lost. It's now an epic journey with her in some place in the distance and me, or the fictional me, I'm going in to save her. It's pretty intense stuff, and all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons weren't lost on me, boy. And guess what happened yesterday."

"Yesterday, what?"

"No, I want you to guess."

"I really have no idea."

"Come on, guess."

"I don't know."

"I'm not going to tell you. Guess."

"She got struck by lightning."

"Yesterday was a pleasant day, weather-wise."

"I held up my end. I guessed. So, what happened?"

Bob spread out his hands palm up as if receiving a blessing. "There was no-one at her desk."

"What do you mean?"

"Her desk is cleaned out. She's not there anymore."

"What happened to her?"

"I don't know; and I don't care."

Mark nodded, and wondered what to say for a moment. "So you're free of her. And you don't miss her." Mark nodded to himself because he knew the ways of the world. "I think you're going to miss her."

"Nope! Nope! She's out of my life."

They ordered a couple more pints but before they wetly hit the table Bob went stiff. Mark looked around, suspecting there'd been some interference in the atmosphere. At a nearby table a young filly was studying the menu. She had every right to be there, so why was she so remarkable? She looked like a mouse more than anything else. Ninety pounds wet. Attractive, yes, for those who'd been smitten by Sandy Dennis a way back. She was entirely absorbed in the menu, and Bob hadn't looked in her direction. The air pressure seemed to drop, and Bob slowly said, like a man who had stepped onto a bouncing betty:

"I'm not going to turn to look. I know it's her, there behind me. I can smell her entire body, I can smell all her hair. Pussy. Do you think she's here on purpose? Do you think this whole thing was planned?"

"I don't know," said Mark weakly. "You think it's her?"

"It's her. Unmistakable. I think I'm losing it here."

The woman sipped on her glass of white wine. She seemed entirely oblivious to them. It looked like just some woman out having dinner alone. She reached down for something, and came up with a paperback book. She opened it harshly, folding it in half disgracefully, and drank some more wine.

Bob said: "I've got to get out of here. There's more I'm going to have to write. I've made some mistake in it; I have to ex out the last couple paragraphs; I'm on the wrong track. Do you remember where I left off? I can't. There's got to be a back door to this place. Can you settle up? I'll pay you back."

"You're going to leave, just like that?"

"She's burning me. She's burning my back. I'll ignite soon if I don't get away."

"I think you're making all this up. I think you're in your cups."

"No. That's it. I'll see you later." Bob slowly, unobtrusively, got to his feet and walked past Mark, who turned to watch him going deeper into the bar without looking back, and then he was gone. Mark kept a-drinking, Friday night after all, and he looked at the woman who continued to peacefully read her paperback. She didn't even come close as a mile to looking back at him.

He finished his pint, considered and dismissed the idea of drinking Bob's near-full pint, and paid up. He was on his way out when he turned around to walk up to the woman. "Hey," he said.

She didn't look up. "Buzz off, creep."

Mark, sensing some, oh I don't know--malice--left quickly. Out on the street, in the night, he found himself worrying about Bob. Perhaps he needed some talking down from his great height. So naturally he got on the subway and went over to Bob and Anne's place.

Bob and Anne lived in a row-house unit on a nice street with everyone having a dog or kid or both. They had neither, but still they got along with everyone. Mark knocked on the door and Anne came. Anne was a quite good-looking woman with long black hair and a cute little turned-up nose. She opened the door and said: "What happened?"

"It's hard to explain. Is Bob here?"

"He came in, grabbed his laptop and left. He said there was something he wanted to show to you."

"Oh, golly, we must have passed each other. If he comes back, can you get him to phone me?"

"Yes, certainly. Take care!"

Mark walked down the street. Perhaps Bob was looking for him. It was really his only lead, so he went back to the bar for a peek. There was no sign of Bob--and the "creep" bitch wasn't there either. Mark, thinking that perhaps Bob (diminished probability) had gone to his own (Mark's) house, travelled across streets and avenues only to arrive at his own apartment whereat he found no signs, nor hides nor hairs, that Bob had been there. Since he found himself at his own home, Mark decided to call it a night.

Three days later, a woman arrived at her place of work. She carried a box of knick-knacks sufficient to populate her new office in a personal style cribbed from O. She dispersed her store-bought factory-made mementoes tastefully, and then got down to work. She woke her computer and checked some mails and feeds, and among the 'CONGRADULATIONS!' and 'WELCOME TO THE TEAM!'s, she noticed a request--WANTED--for fresh and new idea for a Blue Sky session Thursday afternoon. She chose to ACCEPT the invitation and began to wonder in what direction the organization should go; or rather she began to wonder how to express what she envisioned in some properly Latinate, clerical, commonplace, language. They had to be edgy. Sharks die when they stop moving. Something devilish. Let's do some thinking outside the box. Something satanic.

Meanwhile, Mark was also at work, (in the same building at the same company remember,) but he was not working at that moment. Rather, he was at Bob's cubicle, alone, for Bob was not there, which was rather unusual for Bob. He asked the guy in the next cubicle. Hadn't seen him. In fact, no-one had seen him that day, in the entire building and company. Mark went back to his desk and phoned Bob's house, at which there was no answer. He called an hour later, and there was still no answer. He tried to remember if they'd told him they were going to go away for a holiday, but the memory simply wasn't there.

He called again that night, after work, and still there was no answer. Now Mark couldn't rest. He went over to their house and knocked at their darkened door but it was obvious that no-one was home. He didn't know what to do. Should he call the police? He decided to wait till morning, and so he took a sleeping pill and managed to shut his eyes and forget all about Bob and Anne (and the "Buzz off, creep" woman) for something on the order of seven hours.

At noon the next day it did not seem to the world in general that anything had changed; the rubbish flow of 99% useless information and 99% futile activity continued to course through its voluminous veins. Mark went over to ask Bob's neighbours if they'd seen anything; no-one could recall seeing either of them--it was long ago, three whole days--on Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday. Having nowhere else to turn, Mark called the police and explained it all and after more explaining plus some self-abasement and masochism he convinced the police to investigate.

He made a full statement to police two days later. He was told that everything was still under investigation, all leads were being followed, they were ruling nothing out, the Mounties always get their man, murder will out, and crime doesn't pay.

Everything fades; even grief, and even love. Informational entropy takes hold, concrete memories beget gossamer moods, and most of the chiseled beloved husband, wife, father, daughter ofs become erodedly unreadable. Mark's slipping interest in the disappearance was logarithmic, and could have been precisely modelled and functioned on a $1.99 slide ruler; after six months (during which each yesterday was twice as important as each yesterday's yesterday), he spent an entire day without thinking once about his friend: though he didn't know it. Bob and Anne were nobodies, possibly by choice, and that's precisely how their essences had come to be treated.

On that day, when Mark got to the office he noticed immediately there was something up and it was only a matter of time before he found out--and started to join the gossip--there'd been a massive re-structuring of the whole corporation. Some forty executives had been frog-marched out and none knew exactly where in the Great Chain of Being they lay. Tales of horror and broken hearts got exchanged for some time before the announcement was made there would be a corp-wide announcement at 10:30. So, at 10:30, the auditorium was packed, while everyone who couldn't get a seat watched video screens situated in common areas. The CEO, un-applauded, laid out for everyone the new corporate structure, with a new scientifically-proven hierarchy based on the duodecimal system, 'as is found in nature'. Thus, every employee would have to speak to their boss's boss for fifteen minutes apiece, said meetings paced at three per hour for six hours per day two weeks' duration, the whole synergetic synthesis starting thereafter. And then a carefully selected quartet of questions were asked of the CEO.

Mark and the rest stumbled back to their cubicles and offices in a state much like excitement. Up in the emails popped what fragments of the interview schedule concerned each individual, and Mark read he was scheduled to be cross-interviewed at 3:20 by one CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE, executive in charge of N- and E-, Department of W-, H-, and L-. He asked around his closest colleagues to find that each (mostly) was now under the ling of personages unbeknownst to all.

Let us now join, as if we are not already there, Mark at 3:19 as he finds the meeting room in which he will become acquainted with CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE. He sees a young woman sitting within. She has bobbed hair, a pointy nose, and rouged lips. She looks up and smiles when he lightly knocks, says, "Come in!" as she stands and offers her hand. Mark sits down in the warm chair and stares at this stranger who opens a standard folder and passes her eyes over whatever is within.

The questions begin. They are getting to know one another. Though it is quite unlikely they will ever meet again, the procedure is the procedure. Mark opens up and describes his home life, lonely though it may be. They both seem to be making the best of it. CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE talks well-worn sentences about who she is really. This is how things are supposed to operate. Mark knows he will neither willfully recall the interview nor tell anyone that it even occurred. Time passes of its own volition. The counts of their hearts' beats signify to their brains that twelve minutes have passed and they will have to wrap things up.

She says: "Do you have any additional questions?"

He says: "None that I can think of."

"If you do, you can always mail me. Well!" She slaps her hands down on the desk, three times, bang-bang-bang. "I've heard good things about you, and I hope you'll continue to be ... good, Mark."

"Well, okay, see you around."

Mark leaves the meeting room, wondering if his eyes had or had not deceived him when they told his brain that she had winked at him at the parting moment. It seemed unlikely, like an early guess at a puzzle's solution before you'd gotten even what you believe to be a fifth of the way through, when there's still seven hundred pieces on the table. He walks back to his cubicle and he can still see her enough to focus on details. His computer is on, so he consults the charts of the new hierarchy. He clicks on CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE and there's her photograph. She's smiling and confident in the picture. He goes down the tree to his own name and clicks. There's no picture there ... so he finds the one and only picture of himself on the Internet, downloads it to his desktop and uploads it into the corporate directory. Now his picture is just two steps away from hers, which gives him a feeling of ... satisfaction? Incipient satisfaction, hopeful satisfaction? At any rate, TOUCHETTE can't be a terribly common name, especially paired with CASSANDRA. He searches the Internet for "CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE" and all the results on the results page look to possibly about her. He clicks on the top result, and begins to read.

Do You Follow Me

So, how did the nuclear blast happen?

It was an ordinary day. Nothing much was happening geopolitically. And why in the suburbs?

Well. Since you're here, and listening, I will tell you.

Michael Jackson was all the rage of outrage then. His records were being smashed left, right, and centre. However, Mark didn't have any Michael Jackson records. He felt left out, lacking an acting outlet.

He one day happened upon an article about Werner Heisenberg, the notable and notorious (cf. Notorious!) physicist and Nazi collaborator. It was all there: the nature cult, the boy-scouting, the walk through the Himalayas. As Mark read on, he grew more and more outraged. What an asshole! He wanted to build the Nazis a nuclear bomb! And he was as much of a genius as Michael Jackson to boot!

He went to his suburban apartment that night, determined to make a difference. He smashed all the atoms he could get his hands on, and one of them had a trace of uranium in it, and so--

This is all just surmise, of course. It seems likely though. There was a nuclear blast, and there was a person named Mark. File this under: cautionary tales.

 

*

 

Alpegum tossed a map in front of me. "There's a corpse missing."

I raised an eyebrow. "Is that a criminal case?"

"It's high-profile, so. Remember that culty guy we crucified this week?"

"Jesus."

"Beg par.... Ah, mention-use distinction. So it seems someone scarfed his bloody body."

"I should check it out?"

"Well, duh."

 

We'd put a big boulder in front of the cave in which we'd put him, to keep his followers from making keychains out of his teeth and stuff, but the boulder had been rolled away. A couple flatfeet were nearby, gawping at me.

"Who rolled the boulder?"

"We did."

"Why?"

"We ... dozed off last night. Sorry."

The other one said: "So we had to check. We rolled the rock away, and he was gone."

I went into the cave. Blood on the ground where the body had been laid. No signs of a struggle. I said, "The boulder got moved forth and back last night, is that it?"

"No. Terranum had this idea, so we put sticks all around the boulder."

"Sticks."

"Yeah. And none were broken."

"So you believe the rock wasn't moved."

"We're pretty sure of it."

And yet he was gone. A mystery.

 

*

 

What If I Made a Mistake?

 

What if I made a mistake somewhere in all this text? Does repeating myself count as a mistake? What if I committed a typographical error? Is that the right word--does one commit a typographical error--or am I making an error?

The Shakespearean sonnet is a linguistic string in which the 10th syllable rhymes with the 30th, the 20th with the 40th, the 50th with the 70th, the 60th with the 80th, the 90th with the 110th, the 100th with the 120th, and the 130th with the 140th.

I made no mistake there. I am still sharp. I don't know why I'm worrying so much about this. (Perhaps even thinking it possible I could make a mistake may in itself be a mistake.)

What would happen if I made a mistake, and it was discovered? Would the world as we know it alter suddenly, or rather slowly? Word would get out and rumours would spread. The world would wonder: Was it an intentional mistake? Perhaps there's some deeper meaning to it. In the end, the altered world would carry on despite its newly-made possession of a newly-born fact; and I'll still be here.

 

*

 

Outside in German

 

The girls--Trude, Gert, Sam, Brünhilde, the English girl Vi, and Max--painted the junkyard bus, windows included, all the colours of the rainbow. They parked it under the 2, hidden from above. Sam jacked hydro from a nearby transformer, Vi and Max stole a couple cots for their guests, Trude got the Internet livestreams running, and they were in business.

And oh it was a good summer that summer. The clients came and came and went. It was a genuine start-up, with hundreds of customers in person and thousands on the streams. They bought more paint and really went to town on the bus, copying images from the tattoos they had. All late afternoon and all night long, the vehicle was rocking and rolling. The girls even got bank accounts and went almost daily to the ATMs.

Gert, Brünhilde, Vi, and Max all arrived together one late afternoon. Before they could go in, Sam came out. She was pale.

"Don't go in," she said. "Trude's inside. She'd been mutilated and murdered. Chopped up. There's blood everywhere."

The five girls stood, looking at the bus.

Vi said: "It all looks so normal from the outside," in German.

 

*

 

You're at the end of the slim detective novel, at the epilogue. Everything gets explained here. Here's where you discover who did it; here's where you find out you could not ever in a million years have figured out the mystery on your own. You feel cheated, for you've wasted so much time paying close attention to the comings and goings of everyone you met, and you almost made charts and lists concerning where each murder object was, and when. You'd looked up the small British town in which it was set, on Wikipedia, to see if there was anything peculiar about the place that might influence the general sweep of the book's geography. Now on the third last paragraph you yawn and recall someone someplace telling of ripping out the last few pages of every mystery novel before starting to read it, since the conclusions are always disappointing. Let the characters be left to their innocence. Why does it matter in the end if it was the politician or the maid what done 'em in? They was done in right, right? If only the rest was left up to non-paper; if only books could stop before they deathlily finish.

 

*

 

"It is a place.

"It is called Grace's Rest.

"You'll see it in brass.

"Cross the bridge and go upstream.

"There will be stones in a circle.

"Twenty paces past the stones.

"There it will be.

"That is all you need to know."

With that, my grandmother died.

After the funeral was over, I set out.

The bridge was near her childhood home.

I had been there before, and went again.

I crossed the bridge over Dobb Creek.

The water sparkled, on a lovely day.

I went upstream from there.

I saw four stones, in an arc.

I moved away the undergrowth nearby.

It was a circle of black and grey stones.

I counted my paces, all to twenty.

A giant oak was there, strong and tall.

I thought it was a knot at first.

Rather, the tree had grown around something.

Grown around a brass plate nailed to it.

On one side I could see G and R and A.

The other side saw E and S and T.

I leaned against the tree and wondered.

The sky was blue and motionless.

This was all of a serious nature.

I chose to rest, and wait, for anything to happen.

 

*

 

SILENT SCENARIO

 

Jack is in an unknown town ... in an unknown room ...

Jack is in bed, eyes open.

Clink, clang, clong.

He puts a pillow over his head.

Clang, clink, clong.

He throws off the blanket, jumps out of bed, pulls his hair. His wife sits up.

What is the matter?

He is still pulling at his hair.

Can't you hear it?

She inclines her head for a moment, then shrugs innocently. Jack pulls on pants and shirt and leaves the hotel room.

Out on the street he looks up and locates his window. Then he hears it again.

Clong, clang, clink.

He sees it and points. It's the rope of a flagpole hitting the pole.

Clink, clang, clong!

He sees a ladder and drags it over. Climbs the ladder high and wrestles with the rigging.

Two other guys in livery came by. One points.

You didn't put away the ladder!

The ladder is pulled out from underneath Jack who is left clinging to the pole. He can't hold on much longer! A truck pulls up to the curb. Jack falls into the bed. The truck pulls away. On the back of the truck is written: ENLIST TODAY!

 

*

 

Photo Phonies

 

"Here is a photograph of my cat."

"It's phony. Your cat doesn't look like that."

"Sure she does."

"You're saying she is holding one position for all eternity?"

"No, of course not. She's not stuffed."

"Even if she was 'stuffed' she would change over time. Time destroys all things, you know."

"It's just a photograph."

"Yes, and all photographs are complete phonies. People, places, and things are never frozen in time. That's not how time works, you boob."

"Wha? Okay, look, the photographic plate, it's real, right?"

"Sure--but the array of print it subsequently creates isn't."

"How can it not be real? Isn't my picture of Mitts real?"

"No, it's only partial. Some photons hit a plate. Which photons? It's probabilistic. There's no way to know if any particular dot on the image is correct, you pinhead you. So the whole thing--of Mitts--is only a possibility of a representation. It is not the representation."

"I like it anyway."

"So you like falsehoods, fine."

"What would be more real?"

"This would be.

"mm/\___/\

" |mmmmmmm|

"_mm*mmm*mm_

"-mmm/_\mmm-

"mmmm---

"That's more real."

"Why is that?"

"Because it's got soul."

 

*

 

The game had gotten down to the last pitch of the fourth inning before it had to be ended, on account of the streetlights which were about to come on. I was fielding, near the three tall trees that had existed there forever-like on the uneven ground down in the valley behind Dennis's house. James threw the ball at Ellen and she swung but was off a lot. "I was warming up!" she yelled and though Kim and Doug and I griped and groaned James nodded and said: "Kay, one more." She hit it this time and the ball went high, in my direction. I put up my hands to catch it, thinking This is going to sting my hands. I was looking between the triangle of my thumbs and pointers at the ball getting nearer and nearer while everyone was stone quiet for two seconds. I closed my eyes in fear and the ball went between my hands and clonged me right in the forehead. Though it hurt something awful, I decided to stagger around comically with my tongue hanging out, and everyone laughed.

This was years before our machines took over and killed everyone who couldn't be enslaved.

 

*

 

You're on a vacation with some four or five other people, and though she is 'seeing' him it doesn't appear to be so serious considering how she looks for guidance to you instead of him.

The motel's outdoor desert swimming-pool is above average but you're all wearing tees and shorts that don't want to get wet. The lounge chairs were designed by the Rat Pack and she's reclining in one of them. She smiles at you, so you recline between her legs, the crown of your head warmed by her.

She laughs, lifts her shirt, and leans over you. She pulls up your shirt and leans over. Her breasts press against your belly and you could put your tongue in her navel if you wanted to. This only lasts a minute before she pulls down shirts and returns to a casual recline. It had been the most normal thing in the world.

Later it's night and you're still at the pool. You stand up and strip. You stand on the diving board in silence. It's like you're the only two people in the world.

There's only one life you're allowed to live and only one dream you're allowed to have.

 

*

 

I turned the dial counter to clockwise again and again. 1900, 1899, 1898, again and again, 1400, 1000, 600, again, 100, 0, -300, more, -1,900, -4,000, wishing I'd used a logarithm, -6,000, -11,000, again, -19,000, -26,000, still again, -39,000, and finally -40,000, and there I stopped. I pulled the wooden lever, waited thirty seconds, and opened the door.

The Dawn of Man! or near enough. I moved through a grove primeval, in search of my distant ur-English relatives. Believing I was still near Lydney, I proceeded to the fresh waters of the Bristol Channel. The birds were chirping in ugly voices and small ill-shaped quadrupeds scuttled away in avoidance. I half-expected to see a grassy village on the channelbank, but alas there was nothing to be seen.

Disappointed I was, but hungry too. The sun was getting low so I made my way back to the time machine. Tomorrow, I figured, would be a more successful day.

I built a fire and went to get some salted pork from my stores and that was when I noticed: someone had stolen my toolbox! Fearing being trapped in 40,000 BC without proper tools, I entered my machine and turn the dial clockwise.

 

*

 

NEW

 

At this supermar

Ket, we promise to

Bring you new things ev

Ery day. Sure, you were

Here yesterday, and

You bought what we had

Yesterday, but come

Back today and you'll

Find something we did

N't have before! Don't

Ask us how we do

It. Frankly we don't

Know how we do it.

 

But we do it an

Yway! Yesterday

You may have purchased

(At an appropri

Ate price) the latest

Thing, but today you're

Bored with that. It's so

Yesterday! Been there,

Done that. Maybe it

Was a book yester

Day. I'm not you, the

Customer, and I

Don't know the date where

You are now, though it

Has to be in the

Future. Supermar

Kets are notori

Ously known to have

The same stuff again

And again. Frankly,

If we had anoth

Er word to describe

Our place of busi

Ness everyone would

Be better off. But

We have to pour

Our new clay into

An old mold because

Otherwise no-one

Would understand what

We were. We're expand

Ing. We're breaking down

A wall to make room

For more inventor

Y. This stuff is for

Complete adults. It's

The phármakon. It's

A poison and the

Cure.

 

*

 

She'd brought all the stolen tools with her. "Where should we start?"

I said: "Can we start with the right hand? I'm left-handed, so."

She nodded. "Okay then. Lie down on the floor and stick out your right arm so I can put my foot on your radius and ulna."

I lay down on the floor and put my arm out. She put her bare foot down on my forearm. "Ready?" she asked.

I nodded quickly.

She knelt down, raised the hatchet over her head, and chopped into my wrist, cracking through some of the bones I had in there. She raised it again and down it went: the crack of bones sounded much like the first chop. She said: "Sorry. Missed."

"That's okay!"

Up and down went the hatchet three more times, then she sawed through some bridging flesh. She picked up my hand to show it to me. "There!"

"Good, good," I groaned. "Let me rest a bit here."

She put my hand down on a nearby table. "Very well."

After about a half-hour I told her: "It's stopped hurting. Can we do a foot next?"

She looked down at me. "You'll have to pay for another hour."

 

*

 

The individual is forced to create a unique password to enable his individual account, whereupon he is ordered to include at least one capital letter, at least one number, at least one character of punctuation, and at least one hand gesture or gang sign.

The citizen has been seen seemingly communicating by telephone with his Civic Department of Playgrounds, Fisheries, and Culture. He appears to be considering hanging up the telephone. The last words he'd heard over the device were: This call is being monitored. Your metadata has been logged.

The socialite is using a network of networks one early morning via his personalized titanium silver rectangle edged with green plastic made in Shaanxi. He swipes left, and left, and left again. He is making very individual choices, and the shape of his mouth is cruelty personified.

New colours have been appearing in the sky for the last fortnight. Not one journalist has been brave enough to write about that which everyone has seen. The children alone have been discussing it, but not in any ordinary languages. They look down at the ground, and then they look up at the sky. To the ground, and to the sky. Soon. Again.

 

*

 

No traces of it remain, but all can trace it as a happening, as in it happened then ceased to happen. Time ate away at it from all sides, it can be inferred, although there are no witnesses and even if there had been witnesses time ate away at the witnesses from all sides too. On the other hand, it is possible that the idea of the trace itself is a later creation, perhaps a much later creation, that had come about perhaps in the last fifteen years or perhaps even the last month. Within the idea of the trace though we may see the idea of the trace can be traced itself back much further, back to the creation of the concept of time with its power to decay. We trace along the idea of the trace that leads back to the place in which time and hence the idea of the trace originated and it perhaps or probably or certainly started the start of the something to which we are tracefully led to consider as the start of the something that we called the trace or tracing. It's as certain as yesterday, if you can trace to yesterday.

 

*

 

A Memory of Big Rich

 

"Me and Big Rich went out on a fishing trip off Manitoulin one summer. We stripped down this old 1940s ferry--dumping the seats and the conveniences and all--and off we went. Big Rich took out his fishing pole--it was a telephone pole, with a rail tie for stability--and cast his loaf of a lure a couple miles off. Something big got aholt and wouldn't you know it he got pulled in the drink, all 3,000 pounds of him. He wrassled and wrassled, calling for help, so I tossed out a chain and hauled him aboard with nineteen winches. He'd swallowed a ton of water. I turned him over and he coughed up the stuff, along with a couple thousand minnows. Was more, though: out came a mess of bass, then a dozen sturgeon, some big pike, and finally the biggest muskie I'd ever seen. Thing must've been fourteen foot long. Big Rich rolled over and said, 'Looks like we got some us good eatin' here.'

"He fried up the muskie ashore, but I was too queasy about eating something that had been inside another man to tuck in. Got drunk instead."

 

*

 

Well now!

Are you gathered?

Think of it. Can it be so? Have your childhood homes been destroyed? If they have not, are other people--strangers--now living there?

Imagine if you will the pile of precious objects that once mattered to you that ... are ... no ... more? about which you find yourself sleeplessly pondering on hot summer nights? Whatever happened to that 45 of popular music you once cherished? How did it come unstuck from your self? You were practically married to it!

Now think, all you, of yourselves dead! Of the things that matter, that will matter no more! (Who on earth could care about your possessions as much as you do?) Should you not rather take the leading rôle in your demise?

Do it by fire, or do it by explosives. As the fellow said, Let us have a mighty bon this midsummer's eve!

Who does not like a good wholesale slaughter, holocaust, and apocalypse?

Melt, along with your cherished possessions. Let your matter, in fire, mingle with your matter. Wood, paper, plastic, flesh: organic chemistry! Agni will consume it all, no questions asked.

The world as crumbles of dead carbon: the sun will do.

 

*

 

travelogue

 

we got on the train on thursday and started northwest and all the time I was falling in and out of consciousness for no real good reason on monday I noticed we weren't in a train anymore but rather a kind of a stagecoach just the four of us and that we were going into a valley with giant snow-covered mountains in the near distance the road we were on was all wet probably from the spring thaw but it wasn't much of a road anyway more like a path dug through use into mud and grasses.

the coach stopped and my three friends got out and went down into a little building not far off but not close either some five dirty little kids menacing looking kids gathered around the coach I saw the ladies come out of the building and go off laterally to another building I was stuck in the coach with all our stuff I couldn't go anyplace I felt totally abandoned nearly forgotten but I had to stay awake I couldn't doze in my usual way. It was then I know how things had turned out this way I'm telling you don't doze off.

 

*

 

Weather

 

Monday. A storm will blow in from the north. Don't expect any break in it. After the snow, there will be rain. It won't let up.

Tuesday. Forget your plans, because this isn't the day for them. The rain will continue, though it'll be coming from the west. There'll be no respite. Things will simply continue on.

Wednesday. Snow will return in the early morning hours. So much for love. The rain will be especially heavy around noon, when the sun is alleged to be directly overhead.

Thursday. Snow starting two in the morning, followed by rain. For about a half hour, around four in the afternoon, the sky will clear and everything will almost dry up, but not quite, before the rains begin again.

Friday. Heaven help the fool who is expecting nice weather. Today is not his day. Snow, then rain, then snow, and then rain. Everything will freeze overnight.

Saturday. Car crashes everywhere. A blizzard, with zero visibility. Keep your heads down, because it's going to be like this all day.

Sunday. Rain all day and into the evening, followed by a flurry from the south. We'd be blessed with an apocalyptic deluge.

Monday. See above.

 

*

 

Another Tale of Big Rich, this time narrated by himself

 

I was in my dwarf incarnation at the time, meaning I was just about as big as you, yes, I was just that dwarfish. Down at the banks of the Ganga I spotted some fish having an argument about everything, i.e. about what they should do to leave the river and come up onto land. One fish said they should simply storm the bank and start walking; the second said they should die if they did that, and rather they should strategically mate with the most leggy fish they could seduce; and the third said they and their descendants would have to do that for a million years before land was reached due to how slow natural selection occurred and should rather follow Brahma, practice austerities, and make steady gains on Karma.

I laughed at the fishes, sang a song to the fishes, and danced a dance for the fishes. I let them know they knew nothing of dharma, and everything of dharma. They swam about in wonder, seeing themselves visited without warning by Vishnu himself. They controlled their emotions then and there, and I said: "You've understood me finally."

 

*

 

--I, let me show you some photographs, Castello del Ongelino, I couldn't believe the deal we got on the place, it had four hundred and nine bedrooms and it only cost us fifty euros, heaven must have sent--

--you know--

--I said, "What do you expect us to do?, it's my heritage, inheritance, should it be taken from me simply because that's what the will says?", I mean really, he was an old man and crazy too, so we're all supposed to--

--if I--

--I was there, I was young, admittedly, but when a Baron since 1483 offers to graciously rape you, how could a girl tenderly of fourteen refuse?, we all have our pacts and morals, but still 1483--

--in my family--

--I know that the scientists, the ones from all around the world, I know they've shown me what I intuited from the start, that nothing really happens unless I myself am aware of it--

--we didn't know there was a gas leak--

--I, dogs are so darling, she comes when I call, Numous, come!, come to mamma!, there's got to be a treat for you--

--and fire--

 

*

 

You cannot cook a poem when a woman is around

You're best off in the prairie with the heifers and the hounds;

Example One I'm seated down to write of all those woes

But my machine is failing when I'm choosing 'thus' or 'those'--

'Cause Mabel pulled the pluggings when she moved the 'puter where

She though it would be easier to hear the M Lou Hair;

Irrationally, natching, sans the sense of power flow--

And ain't that just the way my sexist story always goes?

So Mahler, so I understand, a hut apart he built,

A man-cave meant to work his math so musicaliate,

With nothing but some walls of wood to endisturb his mind

As he created all those singing symphonies sublime;

But he was special, probably Bach had something likenwise:

A church, no doubt, in which he could abstractly harmonize,

Creating tonic canons which The Beatles use this day

As if they're nature's bounty in they way they weel and wey;

Yet meanwhile I'm in Halifax determined to produce

A something-something-something folks will find to be of use--

A gang of lang for which you should feel bound to sympathize:

All women are a burden: and that's wise meat to the wise.

 

*

 

I Think You Know This

 

To go to the foundation is to go to the root.

Go to the child is to go to the origin.

Go to the particle is: go to the principle.

To the cause is: go to the nut.

To beginnings is: go to the heart.

To principle is to the bedrock.

To bottom: to the combustion.

To sole, to stand.

Start, to element.

Source: provenance.

Provenance, destiny.

Combustion, to final.

To particle, to future.

To nut, to the tree.

To child is to the teleologue.

To beginnings is: go to the adult.

To the bottom is: go to the endpoint.

Go to the bedrock is: go to the completion.

Go to the root is to go to the finality.

To go to the foundation is to go to the limits.

To go to the teleologue is to go to the end.

Go to the conclusion is to go to the finality.

Go to the endpoint is: go to the close.

To the result is: go to the consequence.

To termination is: go to the adult.

To future is to the finale.

To death: to the limits.

To extremity, to terminal.

Terminus, to destiny.

Spire: neb.

 

*

 

Say say drama, or fortitude, with downstairs (in me the house) some says/saws saying 'all is well,' but allus knowing maybe no;

Mother seemed to have fall'n to sleeep, in a chair, and snoring deeep; yet I listened to her breaths wanting them to not stop. Never've I known snorin' to be so reliefing.

Poor Helen was here, who wanted to say something to me about my mother's death, but I didn't allow her the chance. It is mean (on my part) to not let her have an opportunity to touch me--but so it goes.

I showed my mother-in-law a picture of an AMZ, one of which was being sold around the corner, at Village Green motorworks.

Looking it up, I said: "They were built between 1968 and 1970."

She looked at the picture and said: "That looks old. When were they?"

I found another picture. "Look at this. AMX."

She looked and said: "Oh. When was that built?"

Thirty years ago, I met her for the first time, on the new boardwalk at Port Hood. She asked me if I had a perm. A perm!

She's upstairs, healthy, indefatigable, headstrong: but not knowing mostly who we are: mostly.

 

*

 

Spaces for Holes.

 

I am re-arranging my life since I have recently discovered that I have many more holes than I thought I did. They are scattered about the place, with rational collections of them in labelled boxes in the attic and the basement, and irrational makeshift gatherings otherwise scattered about the living space and in some places merely piled on top of one another on, say, the living room coffee table and in the hallway among the broken umbrellas.

I've acquired some liquor boxes from the liquor store and I am sorting them room-by-room. I'm finding that I can fit smaller holes inside larger holes, which is convenient as a space-saving technique, and since I know that the holes in the attic are earlier than the holes in the basement and that both sets pre-date the newer ones in the living space I can soon put the newer holes (which are as a matter of course the smallest) into the ones in the basement (medium-sized) and thence into the ones in the attic (largest-sized).

Soon I will have a reasonable number of holes ready to store away. I find it odd that my whole house seems to be shrinking....

 

*

 

"The way it is, is: intelligence tests. Intelligence tests are the most analysed tests there are. And they all agree some groups do better than others on them. Yet there's a huge industry devoted to denying this fact. They're not using reason or evidence, so the question is: Why aren't they reasoning or using evidence?"

"Yeah, I see your point."

"I know, I know. Oddly enough, these people are the same people who think there's solid scientific evidence that humans are warming the atmosphere. So they are dismissing oft-replicated science about intelligence yet buying into these shaky ideas about this thing--the climate--when there really isn't anything to measure against. Barometers weren't there in 1 A.D."

"How do you mean?"

"All I mean is that the evidence is very shaky all the way down. Considering that all these tree-huggers are relying on authorities--usually plutocratic authorities--that are using the issue to control others, that are greedy, nasty, nasty people, it's hard to know why they ignore reason and follow the pack instead. Are they all that insecure? What say you?"

"I'm beginning to understand Leo Strauss's argument that the only way to philosophize under authoritarian regimes is ironically."

 

*

 

I'm sitting and staring. The objects out there are fuzzy these days, and the sounds they make are heard through cotton gauze. If anything is about to happen, I will appear to take my time responding, like I'm thinking deeply, when really I'm merely trying to pull apart the phenomena so that I can respond with a kind of accuracy, and I don't know afterwards of I was really that accurate or not. It is hard to know what to do.

My hands as I look at them: they look the same as yesterday, but I know they used to look differently. They had some spring to them, when moving them wasn't so difficult. (I turn me head to see a dog passing by. He takes no notice of me.) I make a fist and notice it's a feeble fist. It seems to be barely there at all.

Soon I'll push myself up off this bench. I know how to get home from here, and I'll go that way as fast as I can, getting passed by everyone and their dog. I'll unlock my door and I'll go inside where it's peaceful and quiet, not knowing what happened at all.

 

*

 

Enigma Variation

 

Let's drop the note in her mailbox

And run away

We'll pretend it didn't happen

When we meet her next Sunday in the valley by the creek

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya-da

When we all met at the dance

In the sixth-grade gym

We walked right past her

Cause our shyness made us so weak in all our knees

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya-da

At a party on Harmony

Smoking cigarettes

We all talked like we knew

What the others were thinking that was never said out loud

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya-da

And in the early nineties

Drunk one night

We called up an old friend

Of we and she, and asked what had happened to her

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya-da

And we figured so rightly

That you'd wed a one

Who would worship you

In person and not from a relative wealth of distance

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya-da

And so we never heard

About your death

From ovarian cancer

Until two years and seven months had passed

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya-da

And that note that we'd sent

Was it ever kept

Or was it thrown away

Like a thing nothing, like a message never sent

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya

Da-di-ya-da

 

*

 

-Ellen it is finished!

-Oh Charles do you predict another best-seller?

-Only time will tell. Ask me in a year. Until that time I shall bask in the glow of success.

-How wonderful!

-You know Ellen the glow I so described can only come about after a hard labour unencumbered by stress and strain. I can but imagine the lives led by those with troubles.

-Please elaborate.

-It requires a calmness of mind to allow oneself the cunning to be free of emotional excess. If I was perturbed or worried how could I properly judge my script? Fortunately you Ellen kept the wolves of worry far from the doors of my perception.

-I am proud to be such to you Charles.

-This evening I am a Hercules! Let us fuck.

-Oh Charles I am feeling out of sorts this evening. Besides I must tell you that I believe I am pregnant.

-How can that be? We have not fucked in months!

-Oh Charles.

-I have been recently habitually pulling out to come in your mouth.

-You know so little of mammalian biology.

-True. A baby yes?

-Yes.

-Fetch me my quills.

-Charles?

-Come midsummer I shall be too agitated. Onward!

 

*

 

It's another lovely day in London town. The river's mists have parted, and the sun is shining down on the east, the west, the Admiralty Arch, Shepperton, et cetera. The costermongers and the knife-sharpeners have begun their routes, and the tuned clangs of their tocsins sound off walls of stone and steel. Sleepy dreams of Peter Pan fly from a thousand beds only to alight in Kensington Park. The underground is going strong, with only one delay reported so far, that one being due to an amber signal failure east of Stamford Brook. There's nary a dull day in this ancient Metrop, and today will undoubtedly prove to be no exception to this rule. In expensive hotels foreign visitors navigate the fats and starches and sugars that with funny names are encased. Ships flying the flags of South America are slowly moving in or out of position, cargoing native or Andean goods and foodstuffs hither or yon. The dry wit comes on display in Piccadilly, as two taxi drivers amicably compete for a dapper gent in a bowler. And let us not fail to mention the birds, the avian birds, whose voices make the leaves buzz. I've never been there.

 

*

 

Big Rich

 

When you go out looking for love, naturally you're going to look for the man with the biggest stuff.

Big Rich owns a Boeing 7107 that accommodates seventeen thousand people and their pets. You should see that beast arrive over the horizon. It's so exciting, the sound and the vibes, you could easily drown in your own juices.

He designed himself a mechanical stallion. He scavenged all the scrap from the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower to make it. When it comes at you across the plains of your imagination in the middle of the night when you're sound asleep your hands can't help themselves.

There could be an orderly queue outside the inner sanctum of his hugest castle but of course there isn't. Constantly negotiations and catty remarks slerve through the air as we battle officers and one another for access that may come one day but that hasn't come yet.

We can but imagine what it is like to be so outsize as Big Rich. His voice is so deep no-one can make out what he is ever saying.

A poet has inferred Big Rich secretly weeps inundations, "reaching out / Monstrous, grotesque".

 

*

 

Nietzsche was out for a walk and allatime hating what he could see on the surfaces of things. The degraded cheapness was everywhere. He sat down on a park bench, pulled out his notebook, and wrote: "Even philosophers can begin to hate what they have become. Clean and clear thought is a vanity in itself." He got up and rushed on to the next street, looking for peace. He was sick and in pain but still he hurried, looking for silence. He was outside a café so he went in. He got in line. He was behind a businessman making a real estate deal. The amounts discussed were beyond recognition. Nietzsche got to the counter and ordered an ordinary coffee: "One coffee." "You want foam?" "No." "Cinnamon maybe?" "No thank you. Ordinary coffee." "Name?" "Nietzsche." "Um."

"Neeshy!" came the call a couple minutes later. Nietzsche took the coffee and sat down in a window spot beside a pimp. He pulled out his notebook and pondered. He wrote: "Sadly, even philosophers appear to require food and drink." The pimp looked over and said: "What's wrong, Mac, lost your phone?" Nietzsche took a sip and threw the remainder in his own face.

 

*

 

"Jesus fucking Christ! Hey, guy, got a smoke?"

I was standing outside the Rodeway Inn when I heard her voice coming. I offered her a cigarette. She said: "Thanks. Shitty fucking place!"

"Is it?" I asked.

"Yes! We were here last year and I forgot something, something very special. It was a picture of my mom! I called up, they said they'd hold onto it. So now we're back, all the way down from Wichita Falls, and the fat fuck runs the place takes me into a room: lost and found he called it. It was a room full of junk! 'So where is it?' The slob pointed to a wall of boxes. 'Somewhere in there, I guess.' 'Well, which box?' "Dunno. A year is a long time. Good luck.' Then he walked off. Christ! So now I gotta go through other people's junk to find my precious photograph. This is going to take me all night!"

I said: "That's too bad."

She said: "People should know the difference between what's important and what's not!"

I tossed down my cigarette and walked off, muttering a quote from someone: "Give it up!": half to myself, half to my idea of her.

 

*

 

I found Her standing outside, smoking. I went over and said: "Here You are! All day long I've been looking!"

She looked at me like we'd never met. "Pardon?"

"It is You once again! How have You been since yesterday?"

"I've never met you, buster."

"Yesterday You wore green when we got onto that bus together! I must say, Your attitude is much the same, though Your hair is styled and coloured differently!"

She tossed down Her cigarette butt. "I still don't get it."

I said: "You are the Eternal Feminine! Every day for my entire life I have sought You out, and have found You!"

"You're making a big mistake, man. You should back off. I'm not the Eternal Feminine." She twiddled Her lighter and stuffed it back in Her pocket.

"But of course You are! I have recognized You in smoky bars, in banks, on airplanes! Oh my Eternal Feminine, I'm with You once more!"

"I'm telling you, you're making a big mistake!"

"I've never once been mistaken recognizing You! And You deny it just as You always have!"

"I'm not the Eternal Feminine," she said, pulling a knife and stabbing me with it.

"I'm the Monstrous Feminine!"

 

*

 

List of Ingredients

 

q, w, e, r, t, y, u, I, o, p, a, s, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, z, x, c, v, b, n, m, Q, W, E, R, T, Y, U, I, O, P, A, S, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, Z, X, C, V, B, N, M, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, !, @, #, $, %, &, *, (, ), -, =, +, [, ], {, }, ;, ", ;, ', <, >, ?, ,, ., /, á, æ, ç, è, é, ê, ë, ì, í, ï, ñ, ò, ó, ü, ǂ, Γ, Δ, Λ, Π, Σ, Φ, Ψ, Ω, ά, έ, λ, μ, π, ψ, ω, †, ‡, •, €, ™, ≠, ∞, ≈, ¡, ¢, £, ¥, §, ©, ®, °, ±, may contain ¼, ¾, ß, Þ, Đ, Ę, Ĝ, ŕ, ā, Ħ, ĩ, ŋ, Ŝ, Ţ, ť, ŷ, Ƙ, ƹ, NJ, nj, Ǖ, Ǩ, ǫ, Ǯ, DZ, ǵ, Ƿ, ǻ, ǽ, Ǿ, Ȃ, Ȇ, Ȝ, ȣ, ȥ, ȩ, ȴ, ȹ, Ȼ, Ⱦ, Ɂ, Ʉ, ɇ, Ɋ, ɍ, ɏ, ɓ, ɥ, ɨ, ɪ, ʘ, ʬ, ʭ, ʯ, ʲ, ʵ, ʷ, ʸ, ˀ, nuts.