6:26
We’ll start with a set of putative mistakes. This is the plan: Your normal way of dealing that hand, each card in the deck worn so well and long you know half the cards from the back? That treehouse no-girls-allowed shit? Yeah. Can it. And you, you come around the side of the barn weaving in a random zigzag pattern but not drunk-like, just random and zigzag—one zig sharp and long, another short and barely off the straightaway. Same for the zags. Come in low toward the end in a frog hop. This is what we’re after: a moment of humiliation so great that it will free every one of us from all humiliation everywhere and forever. If we put that online, we succeed. Affix these bioluminescent strips to yourself however you wish. Every 20 minutes or so erase your memory card or you’ll run out of space and lapse into patterns.
Saturday
6:40
Warning light and triangle sign converge. Let her off at the corner. Bad neighborhood? Diesel fumes. Ready to meditate? Landfill tea leaves. Warning light triangle sunburst. We’ll go offshore, dig a tunnel. We'll build a missile. We'll create call center enterprise zones, we'll farm fish big time, synthesize kidneys in vats and wrap it all up with a picnic. Medicate. Everyone invited, mandatory. Remove yourself at any time. Spine-finned sunfish in an inch of hot aluminum canoe-bottom mudwater.
Warning light and triangle sign converge. Let her off at the corner. Bad neighborhood? Diesel fumes. Ready to meditate? Landfill tea leaves. Warning light triangle sunburst. We’ll go offshore, dig a tunnel. We'll build a missile. We'll create call center enterprise zones, we'll farm fish big time, synthesize kidneys in vats and wrap it all up with a picnic. Medicate. Everyone invited, mandatory. Remove yourself at any time. Spine-finned sunfish in an inch of hot aluminum canoe-bottom mudwater.
Tuesday
5:58
The faux umlauts of ironic affectation known well to sons and daughters of accountants and mechanics alike in the long late shadows cast by the Harley parked at the end of the century. To look them up, we must look down, as looking up without regard for subject or object is to meet the ceiling or lose it among clouds or the face of a lover or the canopy of leaves, vines and moss-draped branches here in this, our jungle redoubt. Slap a cassette in the boom box and listen through the hiss for hair metal under erasure. In the medic shack on the makeshift table where we cut the shrapnel from your daughter’s back you’ll find a stack of Hit Parader and Circus magazines ca. 1980-85, well-thumbed by comrades in arms who, in their ample spare time (this war more a business of waiting than even the last war) have formed karaoke glam bands who play village festivals and camp celebrations whenever this, our arduous American insurgency, permits. We shall restore the order of old, though restoration may be notional only, we shall execute our concept contingency upon contingency until the capital earth crumples and we return to the factories to rage and burn in effigy those original loss leaders that brought us here in the night so long ago, before we had a chance to really talk.
The faux umlauts of ironic affectation known well to sons and daughters of accountants and mechanics alike in the long late shadows cast by the Harley parked at the end of the century. To look them up, we must look down, as looking up without regard for subject or object is to meet the ceiling or lose it among clouds or the face of a lover or the canopy of leaves, vines and moss-draped branches here in this, our jungle redoubt. Slap a cassette in the boom box and listen through the hiss for hair metal under erasure. In the medic shack on the makeshift table where we cut the shrapnel from your daughter’s back you’ll find a stack of Hit Parader and Circus magazines ca. 1980-85, well-thumbed by comrades in arms who, in their ample spare time (this war more a business of waiting than even the last war) have formed karaoke glam bands who play village festivals and camp celebrations whenever this, our arduous American insurgency, permits. We shall restore the order of old, though restoration may be notional only, we shall execute our concept contingency upon contingency until the capital earth crumples and we return to the factories to rage and burn in effigy those original loss leaders that brought us here in the night so long ago, before we had a chance to really talk.
Sunday
Saturday
12:07
Without a word to anyone, she began to plot. The boy would think twin language. He would ask himself whether he was thinking or speaking or she was. She would respond by asking the same.
The laminated airline safety placard said put your oxygen mask on first then help your child.
Long deep breaths. Twins can help each other. Twins, triplets, multiples all over the world. New empathic sinews in the body psychic. Countless selfish lines where we can all disappear into our mirrors.
Terminal stars still look good to us, it's true.
And, given the extended delay that forms the present around us, she could ask: You ready to split?
Without a word to anyone, she began to plot. The boy would think twin language. He would ask himself whether he was thinking or speaking or she was. She would respond by asking the same.
The laminated airline safety placard said put your oxygen mask on first then help your child.
Long deep breaths. Twins can help each other. Twins, triplets, multiples all over the world. New empathic sinews in the body psychic. Countless selfish lines where we can all disappear into our mirrors.
Terminal stars still look good to us, it's true.
And, given the extended delay that forms the present around us, she could ask: You ready to split?
And he'd heard that before, so was ready.
Then the story'd start.
Then the story'd start.
Friday
6:46
We entered the white field blissful, washed, aware of only a static lisp in the ears. Baby hair a touch above. A cube of blue lake with stairs leading to a balcony overlooking sun-dappled market street cobblestones and awnings striped and green and cream with liquor logos in burgundy and navy just beginning to bleach. The crib on the porch in back where the woods run down to the beach, canoe dock and tetherball pole. The baby seat on the broad sill by the bay windows overlooking Troost, bus stop, chicken bucket, broken sidewalk.
That guy needs to change his oil.
We got down from the scaffolding, our white coveralls, goggles, masks and mesh hair nets shining in the arc light. The hydraulic lift was stuck. We smoked a joint. And then another. The decontamination team was late because Holder had a head cold.
The Fabulist and Realist slid up at dusk in the canoe, shipping paddles clunking underwater sounds heard across a half mile of glass laketop.
We expected a new interrogation job, but you? The surprise on all our faces when the hood came off. A momentary look of relief in the flashlight beam, gone the second we hit the fluorescent shed.
Yes, that’s a red wolf on the wall.
We entered the white field blissful, washed, aware of only a static lisp in the ears. Baby hair a touch above. A cube of blue lake with stairs leading to a balcony overlooking sun-dappled market street cobblestones and awnings striped and green and cream with liquor logos in burgundy and navy just beginning to bleach. The crib on the porch in back where the woods run down to the beach, canoe dock and tetherball pole. The baby seat on the broad sill by the bay windows overlooking Troost, bus stop, chicken bucket, broken sidewalk.
That guy needs to change his oil.
We got down from the scaffolding, our white coveralls, goggles, masks and mesh hair nets shining in the arc light. The hydraulic lift was stuck. We smoked a joint. And then another. The decontamination team was late because Holder had a head cold.
The Fabulist and Realist slid up at dusk in the canoe, shipping paddles clunking underwater sounds heard across a half mile of glass laketop.
We expected a new interrogation job, but you? The surprise on all our faces when the hood came off. A momentary look of relief in the flashlight beam, gone the second we hit the fluorescent shed.
Yes, that’s a red wolf on the wall.
Monday
5:35
“Just the thought of it,” the Fabulist said, “is enough to turn my stomach.” The Realist cast her line once more from the end of the pier. She sat on a canvas camp seat among a litter of white Styrofoam coolers. Gasping fish and agitated crabs hauled up in cages, splashing and slapping against cooler walls. Wet sounds and dry, seawater and Styrofoam squeak. She remained silent aside from occasional light harrumphs. The Realist's ears shaded from waxy burnt umber to an oily metallic semitranslucent aqua blue popular in paranoid-style '70s air brush chrome butterfly-effect plots prog rock & glam, the terminal phases of which began with George W. Bush’s decision, taken in 1973, to give the crank in his pocket to flight mechanic Jesus Ramon Gutierrez, aka "Ray."
“Just the thought of it,” the Fabulist said, “is enough to turn my stomach.” The Realist cast her line once more from the end of the pier. She sat on a canvas camp seat among a litter of white Styrofoam coolers. Gasping fish and agitated crabs hauled up in cages, splashing and slapping against cooler walls. Wet sounds and dry, seawater and Styrofoam squeak. She remained silent aside from occasional light harrumphs. The Realist's ears shaded from waxy burnt umber to an oily metallic semitranslucent aqua blue popular in paranoid-style '70s air brush chrome butterfly-effect plots prog rock & glam, the terminal phases of which began with George W. Bush’s decision, taken in 1973, to give the crank in his pocket to flight mechanic Jesus Ramon Gutierrez, aka "Ray."
Saturday
6:32
She lay there with everything to say. The sun was coming around the bend. The trucks trundled down the street outside en route to the construction site. They were building a park made with concrete and computers and networks. The enormous underground parking garage beneath it, the terraced concrete and glass domes, the intricate network of lights and sound built into artificial rocks, tree speakers, the nanotube biomesh underfoot. The others slept on. The trouble with past lives streamed through night heads, irrupting in blotted dreams and sharp sighs subsiding in seconds amidst the barely muffled metropolis working its way through walls and windows, eating sunlight from the edges inward, capturing packets of energy and emitting them moments later as stuffed animals, bank transfers, yams baked in their skins atop charcoal-packed oil drums, bringing the world to a head in the only place it still had to go at the end of the night, safely in its crib.
She lay there with everything to say. The sun was coming around the bend. The trucks trundled down the street outside en route to the construction site. They were building a park made with concrete and computers and networks. The enormous underground parking garage beneath it, the terraced concrete and glass domes, the intricate network of lights and sound built into artificial rocks, tree speakers, the nanotube biomesh underfoot. The others slept on. The trouble with past lives streamed through night heads, irrupting in blotted dreams and sharp sighs subsiding in seconds amidst the barely muffled metropolis working its way through walls and windows, eating sunlight from the edges inward, capturing packets of energy and emitting them moments later as stuffed animals, bank transfers, yams baked in their skins atop charcoal-packed oil drums, bringing the world to a head in the only place it still had to go at the end of the night, safely in its crib.
Wednesday
6:34
The accident in purpose, and vice versa. That’s what I’m talking about. You link to me and I to you to make a We. A game in which past and future comingle without presence. It’s off there somewhere, and so are we. Or rather, you’re here and I’m not, and vice versa. Baby wakes in stages, kicking and waving. A being signaling for help. Someday she’ll spell it out in pebbles on the beach. Someday write it in the sky. Someday it won’t come, but now it does. Purpose on accident, no games, obliterating presence transmitted in particulate wave moments promising life despite ourselves. Half way to the arbitrary marker I stop and claim it in the name of intention, solving at least one problem with my new problem-generating machine. It’s not in the book, but that's the only place to find it. And no, not “between the lines.” There are none. Ur-prose, the apparently infinite density of imagined lives between us, where no place is truly like home. Color me a purple utopian. I don’t care. I’m with Barney Miller, drinking ginger ale on the sofabed home sick from school in the Year of OMG 1984. I stop on a numerical anagram and think the very moment a turning point between us. We do go back, though knowing not where, when, why nor how, but we do.
The accident in purpose, and vice versa. That’s what I’m talking about. You link to me and I to you to make a We. A game in which past and future comingle without presence. It’s off there somewhere, and so are we. Or rather, you’re here and I’m not, and vice versa. Baby wakes in stages, kicking and waving. A being signaling for help. Someday she’ll spell it out in pebbles on the beach. Someday write it in the sky. Someday it won’t come, but now it does. Purpose on accident, no games, obliterating presence transmitted in particulate wave moments promising life despite ourselves. Half way to the arbitrary marker I stop and claim it in the name of intention, solving at least one problem with my new problem-generating machine. It’s not in the book, but that's the only place to find it. And no, not “between the lines.” There are none. Ur-prose, the apparently infinite density of imagined lives between us, where no place is truly like home. Color me a purple utopian. I don’t care. I’m with Barney Miller, drinking ginger ale on the sofabed home sick from school in the Year of OMG 1984. I stop on a numerical anagram and think the very moment a turning point between us. We do go back, though knowing not where, when, why nor how, but we do.
Saturday
Tuesday
6:01
Time release. Measure for measure, the edges give way throughout the day. That’s biochem poetry, he thinks, the cat in the corner entering the last stages of acute renal failure. He’d like to do fiction. Where’s the profit otherwise? He could send people on errands. Go down to the corner for a phone card, beer and pomelo. Words to infiltrate the fibers of things over time into minds. The cat in the wicker case, dying beneath his moth-eaten sweater. The Realist comes home to the world she created. The Fabulist rests. The case closes. The cat passes. The other cat in heat. Cab ride to the vet. Too late for euthanasia, it's “public cremation” now. The perfect text to release minds over time. Baby wakes.
Time release. Measure for measure, the edges give way throughout the day. That’s biochem poetry, he thinks, the cat in the corner entering the last stages of acute renal failure. He’d like to do fiction. Where’s the profit otherwise? He could send people on errands. Go down to the corner for a phone card, beer and pomelo. Words to infiltrate the fibers of things over time into minds. The cat in the wicker case, dying beneath his moth-eaten sweater. The Realist comes home to the world she created. The Fabulist rests. The case closes. The cat passes. The other cat in heat. Cab ride to the vet. Too late for euthanasia, it's “public cremation” now. The perfect text to release minds over time. Baby wakes.
Monday
4:04
The real ends in the endless false endings. You came after you thought about it then left without knowing why. It all started with a demand for evidence. This led to the lemon bowl on the marble counter with the key beneath the potholder littered with months of onion skins and bread bag twist ties. You pocketed the key and found the box in the attic after hours of searching the basement. Spun fiberglass itch on the back of your hand. Feather nose duster. Clues accumulate like plaque in the folds of the brain.
The real ends in the endless false endings. You came after you thought about it then left without knowing why. It all started with a demand for evidence. This led to the lemon bowl on the marble counter with the key beneath the potholder littered with months of onion skins and bread bag twist ties. You pocketed the key and found the box in the attic after hours of searching the basement. Spun fiberglass itch on the back of your hand. Feather nose duster. Clues accumulate like plaque in the folds of the brain.
Saturday
16:18
Give it up to chance again, if you like. Fool yourself once more. Just don’t come back whining afterward. That icebox full of tools? Get me one. Now close the drawer. I said door. Close the door. Look, we can’t go on like a couple of characters in a magazine story. We can’t hang our hopes on repetition. So whatever you’re implying, stop it. This is a real cancer. And yeah, our chances are diminishing, but it’s just a different way of life if you really think about it, not any kind of end, not even close. To whom are the voices in your head speaking? Obviously not you. If you'd listen things would be different. It’s your inbetwixedness that’s killing me. Here's a length of pipe. The thread's stripped but we can jam it in and caulk the shit out of everything. And don’t go checking your precious internet. It’s free and open like water in pipes or air recirculating in Biosphere 2, “sealed from the earth below," as they say, "by a 500-ton welded stainless steel liner.” Them on the fog desert last night bathing in bioluminescence? Yeah, us, in so many words.
16:28
You can’t give it a second look. Just slap it in place, check it once, move on. It’s how we build things here. You can’t worry about the other ones and whether they match or complement one another. I do, and we can’t afford two of me. Look at how slow I am. There're beautiful details, everything’s level, I recheck the stitching almost compulsively throughout. It’s as if we were living in a freshly hatched fairy tale with no hope of ever being told, still and cold in the brain of a comatose fabulist. It’s a matter of time and timing and you need to learn that. Otherwise we have a long slog ahead of us. You wrote: “Google pen. The straightaway beckons. Engine revs. A fresh apple. No dice. A crooked hour. The lead exhumed.”
16:38
No fair looking! I was talking to the back of your head, having a perfectly good conversation. Keep walking and nobody gets hurt. Stop and meet Bad Cop. So show me the way to the hermit on the ridge. Show me the way to your kid’s drone messiah. The next few steps lead to the place I’m telling you about. It’s a jungle creek orange from tailings and home to a few midget crayfish eking it out under blast rocks. It’s best if you take off your shoes. It’s not like spelunking where you come from. Forget the clay and mud. There’s no soil around here to speak of. Now cross. Now get in the canoe. No, the aluminum one. That’s Matthew. He’ll be our guide. Don’t talk to him. He’s ex-Marines. Don’t refuse a piece of dried fruit or handful of trail mix if offered. There’s only dwarf crayfish and moss where we’re going. Albinos. The natural product of this research is technology directed at getting us out of here. Like off this freakin’ planet. As soon as we can, we’re gone. And you’re coming with us. It might not happen with you, but it sure won’t without. You? Important in ways you’ll never know.
Give it up to chance again, if you like. Fool yourself once more. Just don’t come back whining afterward. That icebox full of tools? Get me one. Now close the drawer. I said door. Close the door. Look, we can’t go on like a couple of characters in a magazine story. We can’t hang our hopes on repetition. So whatever you’re implying, stop it. This is a real cancer. And yeah, our chances are diminishing, but it’s just a different way of life if you really think about it, not any kind of end, not even close. To whom are the voices in your head speaking? Obviously not you. If you'd listen things would be different. It’s your inbetwixedness that’s killing me. Here's a length of pipe. The thread's stripped but we can jam it in and caulk the shit out of everything. And don’t go checking your precious internet. It’s free and open like water in pipes or air recirculating in Biosphere 2, “sealed from the earth below," as they say, "by a 500-ton welded stainless steel liner.” Them on the fog desert last night bathing in bioluminescence? Yeah, us, in so many words.
16:28
You can’t give it a second look. Just slap it in place, check it once, move on. It’s how we build things here. You can’t worry about the other ones and whether they match or complement one another. I do, and we can’t afford two of me. Look at how slow I am. There're beautiful details, everything’s level, I recheck the stitching almost compulsively throughout. It’s as if we were living in a freshly hatched fairy tale with no hope of ever being told, still and cold in the brain of a comatose fabulist. It’s a matter of time and timing and you need to learn that. Otherwise we have a long slog ahead of us. You wrote: “Google pen. The straightaway beckons. Engine revs. A fresh apple. No dice. A crooked hour. The lead exhumed.”
16:38
No fair looking! I was talking to the back of your head, having a perfectly good conversation. Keep walking and nobody gets hurt. Stop and meet Bad Cop. So show me the way to the hermit on the ridge. Show me the way to your kid’s drone messiah. The next few steps lead to the place I’m telling you about. It’s a jungle creek orange from tailings and home to a few midget crayfish eking it out under blast rocks. It’s best if you take off your shoes. It’s not like spelunking where you come from. Forget the clay and mud. There’s no soil around here to speak of. Now cross. Now get in the canoe. No, the aluminum one. That’s Matthew. He’ll be our guide. Don’t talk to him. He’s ex-Marines. Don’t refuse a piece of dried fruit or handful of trail mix if offered. There’s only dwarf crayfish and moss where we’re going. Albinos. The natural product of this research is technology directed at getting us out of here. Like off this freakin’ planet. As soon as we can, we’re gone. And you’re coming with us. It might not happen with you, but it sure won’t without. You? Important in ways you’ll never know.
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