I'm Happy to Have Fiction in the Current Issue of Clavmag

I love the way this magazine is opening a new frontier of fiction and other genres, hybrid genres, informed by LGBTQIA inventiveness.

I also love their name and logo. Visit the magazine to read about why the clavicle was chosen as the objective correlative. It's rather fascinating.

Thanks much to editors Freya and Gabrielle for including my short story. 

Here is a Short Story

I wrote about phrogging.

The Dropouts

The county is as rural as rural gets. Its population is exceedingly small, 328 people according to the census-derived info on the internet. But there’s actually just under sixty more, hidden away where even the drones don’t fly.

Og was screaming. Several of his tribe were trying to remove a spear from his leg. This was tricky work. The only halfway appropriate tool the half-naked medics who were treating Og’s leg had was a rusty old saw. Just then, the busy saw teeth made it through the shaft of the weapon penetrating the old man’s leg.

“Got it, Og!” Daryl crowed.

Others rushed in to clean the wound and apply healing herbs.

“Any whisky left?” Og begged.

“No, they got our still last week, old man. Remember?”

Indeed, the two tribes were often stealing from each other. Raiding each other for women. And, of course, killing each other. Cops were never called. Nobody ever went to a hospital. Everything was off the grid and off the record.

It had started as a dare between two rival factions of survivalists who knew each other on the internet. It was a couple of extended families of survivalists from the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. It was going to be a long weekend survivalist challenge, a contest between two tribes. Many of them were fans of the grittier reality shows, like Survivor and Naked and Afraid. But those shows never went far enough, everyone agreed.

Things soon got out of hand. Someone died in an honest accident a few days before the thing was to end, but the other tribe didn’t see it that way. They thought one of their own had been murdered. This triggered a blood feud. Harsh insults were lobbed. Group pride was injured. Another gauntlet was thrown down. All the members of both tribes swore a pact to stay on. They sent their last text messages to family, giving their bogus excuses for their staying on, and then the phones were switched off and locked up again. They went back to their respective caves and huddled around their fires. Somebody was pregnant. It would be the first baby born in the new Stone Age.

It had been two months and change out of civilization by this time.

The spearing of Og was a really dirty thing. Og was the oldest member of the Red Ford Explorer Tribe. He wasn’t harming anyone. True, he had sticky fingers and was making night raids over there around their stores and animal pens. But they could have just thrown a rock. There were revenge grumbles going around the cave.

Nobody in the Red Ford Explorer Tribe knew that Og had killed a twenty-four-year-old man the previous night when he had tried to stop the old codger from stealing some coyote steaks. Og wasn’t offering that part up.

So over at the Pabst Blue Ribbon Tribe they were planning a massacre. One of the woman suggested they return to their (forbidden) vehicles and retrieve their (forbidden) modern world weaponry. This was roundly shouted down. There was to be honor among caveman. There might be a massacre, but it would be done with the correct tools.

While Og was being treated, Jeremiah was being buried in a very private grave alongside a creek where he loved to catch crayfish the tribe all enjoyed together in an improvised broth. His young widow (stolen from the other tribe) cursed her own parents in the enemy tribe as the young man’s body was placed in the hole which had been dug with a shovel secretly retrieved from the Vehicle Field (totally cheating).

Two men from the Pabst tribe were nearly a hundred miles away in a small town, watching a suburban street. It was early morning. They were watching students walking to high school. The man on the passenger side beckoned a boy with a blue backpack to come over to their S.U.V. He was holding a road map out the window, waving his bait. All the other kids were gone now. The blue backpack was the last walker on the street.

“Yeah, he’s got nice muscles. A nice solid build. Probably a wrestler. He’ll do,” the driver mumbled, while smiling at the boy the whole time through the windshield.

Once the tall young man reached the S.U.V., it was over in a minute. Bound on the floor in the back, tears soaked his face.

The guy on the passenger side rifled the kid’s phone, caught up briefly on the news in the outside world, then took the battery out and chucked the phone.

The kid was pleading by now through the duct tape across his mouth, but those weren’t words coming out. The shot he had been given was starting to take effect. It would soon be lights out.

“Don’t worry, kid. We ain’t a couple of perverts. We’re taking you to a great place. You have a destiny to fulfill. You’re gonna be a warrior. Old school warr-i-or! Much better than whatever shit you were going to do when you went to school today. Trust me.”

It was true that the tribe had a 100% success rate so far with abductees. They adjusted after a short period of rebellion. Usually only a few days, really.

Of course, if you wanted to leave, you had to go for a walk in the woods with Psychopath. He was the least nice member of the Pabst tribe. Psychopath would always come back from that walk alone, and the other members of the tribe would be told that the member who went with him was “restored to civilization.” Everyone knew what that meant. So people didn’t ask to leave. The Ford tribe also had an enforcer. Her name was Margaret.

So MISSING posters continued to go up on telephone poles and in storefronts in the small towns around the state. But never any too close to the caves. Always they drove far out to find the young men and women they needed.

The tribes had initially numbered only 51 people combined. A net increase of eight bodies had been realized by the time of the second casualty. There had been three whiners taken out between the two enforcers from the separate tribes. There had been some wife swapping and some agreed contractual hunting for additional warriors on both sides, both male and female. It kept the contest interesting.

“You want to stop at Mickey D’s?” the driver asked the rider. “Before heading back and drawing up them battle plans? That boy’s totally out cold.”

“Shit, that’s cheatin’ and you know it, Sam. But alright. Don’t tell a soul and get rid of all the trash, for sure. Fast food is capital punishment now, remember?”

“Don’t fucking burp or fart around any of the tribe, either. Get us both killed. But I’d like to hunt them son’a’bitches on something more solid than plant roots. And that coyote gone bad tasted like shit. I think I got Lyme Disease or some shit like that.”

“Tell me about it. We’re going to have to go on more of these people runs, ya know. After we take out as many as Sondra is planning. I don’t want to wipe ’em out completely though. Would ruin the fun, know what I mean?”

“No, I totally agree. We can seed the other tribe with newbies after it all goes down. Man, I really don’t miss my job back home. Not one fuckin’ bit!”

He laughed.

The other man laughed too.

“Me neither, man. Me fuckin’ neither.”

“We have a special on the new egg sandwich today,” the nerdy female voice coming out of the menu board offered.

“Give me ten,” said the driver. “And two milkshakes as cold as you can make ’em, sweetheart.”

I Am Brian

Sometimes the proliferating cells of my absence, the online articles about me, use the present tense, sometimes the past tense. The flicker between the present tense and the past is where I, where you, where everyone with an aching memory exists. I have a hold over certain people, almost all strangers, who come looking for me. Beloveds.

The thought of me is cast like a lure on a silken spider thread out on the water. The Olentangy River flashes in the sun, then darkens under pregnant clouds. The riverfront has changed so much since the spring I vanished. Stand on the waterfront and look out where the water was shallow that spring, only two or three feet deep, when my father and his brother waded everywhere in the flow, forded the river, hyper-vigilant for my body. My father slipped and almost drowned. He was rescued by the arms of his own brother. These moments roil in time as water roils everywhere tonight and forever.

Did you guess that when my apartment was finally broken up there would be a word carved in the wall behind my bed? How long do you pay the rent on an empty apartment when someone is gone without explanation? How long do you stand and stare and fear to touch anything? To lift a sweater and breathe in the essence of love. It was just a lonely word. A word without its sentence. I was a young man. I hid a word. Behind my bed where I slept alone, I hid a word.

You study my face. You study my face with the intensity that you study a lover’s face. You memorize the curve of my dark eyebrows. You study how my eyebrows arch, how they bend down to the inner canthus of each eye. How my smile is half-given in most photographs. You might meet me on the street, might see my face, aged ten or twenty or thirty years, on the internet. Some of you study the faces of dead young men in online repositories of images. Networks of Does. Late into the night. Looking at faces harvested years ago from woods, from water, from snow. Looking to return me where I belong. Thank you for your care.

You study how I stand. In some photos, I wear the white coat of the medical student. I assume the stance. The way you can pick out a policeman in plain clothes by the way he stands, you can see this care growing in me. Some of you notice the sign language in my hands in these photos. The hidden message: “I love you.” Some see it as a secret message to some particular someone. Others say it is to anyone in the world. You believe I planted these messages in photographs as Hansel dropped breadcrumbs in the woods. Are we not beautiful in our fairy tales and our wandering?

How we search for one another. Even when we are only images in a story.

It was April 1st, the night I disappeared. Two hours into April Fool’s Day. You watch the grainy security video tape of me in the night. Standing outside the restaurant that no longer exists. From video to video, my disappearance is grafted. The cells of my absence grafted in your body. April 1st. You make of that what you will, depending on who you are.

Some point out how much my appearance changes from photo to photo. It’s hard to connect some of the faces, the different young men, together. Some who knew me in the flesh say that I changed like the wind from season to season. Potential pro-athlete. Party boy with a D.U.I.. Straight arrow medical student who doesn’t touch drink or drugs. Budding songwriter who wants to live with his bare feet in the sand.

You listen to my last recorded words, the voice mail I left for my fiancee. All her life she will have those words. “You are amazing…” You listen for any shadings in the small handful of words that follow, searching for any hint that it is a goodbye. But the words are bright and clean. Two more nights’ sleep and we would have been sitting side by side on the plane to Miami. Through the years, as her hair silvers, as she sleeps next to another, the image will return. The two young bodies side by side on the plane. On their way to the city of bodies, of constant flux, color and danger, dance and bright reflections.

My mother’s death by debilitation was just weeks before I vanished. My father was killed by a windstorm two and a half years after I vanished. Only my brother remains to remember the most of me. The things he will tell his children. The good memories. Two boys, two bodies in the ocean together. Fighting the waves.

My father is where I am or he is not. A large branch crashed improbably down and felled him, as he stood in the backyard, like a scene out of an opera written several centuries ago. An opera you would call “overwritten” and then smile for the sake of it. Because operas have no real bloodshed. And because our weird smiles are catharsis.

First, I am in a mist. I am a mist. Amiss. Missing. Then, slowly, you start to see in me a myth. Mything.

My fiancee calls my phone every night. For many months. Each night it goes to voicemail. One night, it rings. It rings several times. She feels a sort of terror that is awe of hope coursing through her body. She shares the words of this feeling online. The cell phone pinged off a tower only fourteen miles north of where I disappeared. The service provider says it might have been a glitch. It might mean nothing. Or it might mean everything.

Someone goes back and rereads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” The small, perfect story of a man who casually moves a short distance away from his home and changes his appearance, who watches the space where his life was to have been. Unable to re-enter it.

Until, many years later, a lifetime unspent, he does.

Return. He does return.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see me going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time. Maybe I take something that nobody notices missing. Something insignificant in the eyes of others. But everything to me.

A month gone, someone breaks into my apartment. You see my murderer going through my things in your mind’s eye. One last time, a visit where we sat together and smiled eye to eye.

The detective points out that I had the key to my apartment. If I was still alive. Why break into what was mine? But if my life was no longer my own, the only way in would be that way. To break in. I could never walk through the front door again.

Either way, the rooms were cold by then.

The place where I slept. Where I washed my face, looking at it.

Whoever came in, felt the cold.

The Peasants

The peasants drank.

The peasants drank and talked. They pantomimed. Mostly, they pantomimed the war which had consumed them. The war had been over for years. The small tavern of shadows where they congregated, a collective shambles, was like the intermediate stomach of a ruminant where things that should not have been consumed are somehow digested.

They drank beer. They drank mostly in the evening in their village which had been destroyed by the war. They drank the alcohol made from plums. They drank alcohol made from the beautiful rye grass. They drank herbed alcohol made from the fermented juice of fruits with the bodily forms of young girls and women. They drank mead. They drank to the cemetery. They drank to the brave. They drank to the worms. They drank to the fire and the fire’s children.

They got insanely drunk and talked about the village war dead. Someone would talk about A. An old man would get drunk and would act out A.’s death for the rest of the bar. A. had not answered a certain officer of the occupying army correctly. He had stood before an officer of the army which had owned their village for the duration of the war and answered incorrectly. He had answered as if it was a performance. He figured the officer was giving a performance in that funny costume of his. A. had wanted to perform too. He had been very young, the village comedian. He had all the playfulness and natural comic instincts of a puppy. He had been promptly taken to a nearby barn and shot. The entire village had watched.

A’s pantomimer would tell the story of A. over and over, night after night, year after year. Was the story a joke? It was told in the tone one tells a joke, with broad smiles all around. The smiles of the drunks remembered the fate of A. and his comical words spoken into the face of the officer. Certainly, the shooting of A. was told as a sort of punchline. The voice telling the story got louder during this part and then everyone guffawed. “Shot dead in that barn.” “What was he, seventeen? Eighteen?” “Sixteen, I think,” an old woman chimes in. Laughter follows.

But what sort of laughter is it? Could it be compared to the laughter of schoolchildren on the playground? Or is it a rarer sort of laughter? The story would not change. Only the storyteller would change, his face becoming wizened like a dried apple, his teeth less, his teeth uglier each year. And the faces of those who listened to this story would deteriorate along with the storyteller’s face, as if in a secret sympathy.

So the bar collected drunks that would pantomime the various war dead of the village. Each dead person had a stand-in. The stories of very young children who had been murdered by the war were not told. Their stories must have gone somewhere else to be told, somewhere even darker.

The old lush who told B.’s story down the years droned on and on. She would sit in a dark corner of the bar where she could see everyone. She knew who everyone was, what everyone was. People no longer talked about who had been good in the war, who had been bad. It was the stories that needed to be pantomimed, not morality. People are story magnets. And drunks are the most magnetic old story collectors. When you’re drunk, you need a rope. And stories are like ropes you can pull yourself along. Any old story with a barb in it will do for thinking, will do the thinking for an old drunk.

The old lush would tell how B., a simple mender of shoes, had made bombs. He was attempting heroism. But he blew himself up before he had a chance to place those bombs under the occupiers’ vehicles. He blew himself up in his own barn. He blew himself up, but also a pregnant horse. That was the sockdologer for B.’s story. The drunks had even named a cocktail after B. It was called “The Pregnant Horse.”

It was drunk on the darkest nights, on the heels of the tragedies with the most teeth. Maybe it was an amulet. The younger citizens who frequented the bar, who were born after the war, had no idea what the nightmarish denizens were talking about when they toasted each other with the memory of this horse exploded in time immemorial.

And so on and so on. C.’s pantomimer recalled that young woman who had slept with the enemy for favors and was later found hanging from a large branch over the river with an ill-gotten couture bag around her neck.

D.’s story was that of an old woman who had been forced to kneel on her family’s soil with a pistol pressed to her head. She had been given the choice to spare her beloved pig or herself. She had chosen to save the pig, so the trigger was pulled. The pig was shot immediately afterwards, of course.

E. had been an educated man, the villager with the most books, who had tried to lecture the occupiers in front of his fellow villagers. He had been tied to a chair in his study and burned with his books. The drunk assigned to tell E.’s story would make the flames with his hands and his arms. He would become the flames as he laughed uproariously, a strange glitter in his eyes. The alcohol would feed the story, down at the roots, would feed all the stories.

The young people were trying to reclaim the tavern for their generation. It became easier with the years, as the bodies of those who remembered the war, its pantomimers, drifted off to the village cemetery. The stories went quiet, the stories went dark. Rain and snow fell on the cemetery. The names on the tombstones became fainter.

These young ones, who were interested in making love and making money, had no interest in these old stories. They would be polite. But they could not laugh at these stories. They would stare stony-eyed at the punchlines. You had to have been there to get it. They understood that these wizened creatures had become these stories and that this tavern was their home. They mostly tolerated them.

On the rare occasion that one of the younger drunks would go after one of the older drunks, the older drunks would form a posse and grab bottles. The young man would usually back down once he saw all the missing teeth of his adversaries and how even the old women were ready to draw blood.

The one all the old-timers wondered about was M. He had lived just outside the village. Nobody knew what happened to him or how he had behaved during the war. He just disappeared. His little house was still there but empty after the war. Nobody had even thought to check on him. Was he young? Some said yes, some no. Was he old? Some said yes, some no. Was he crazy? A monk? Did he have a family? Certainly, he did not or they would have been remembered. He must have been solitary.

But what was he? The only people who might have known were dead. If anyone had ever known. The best people could do was a story of a story of a story about M. that was usually soon discounted as hearsay.

M.’s story was the one story that changed constantly. All the other stories remained the same. M. was a community project, the one story in which the storytellers (and they all took turns telling M.’s story) could use their imaginations. They could embroider, they could reinvent. Some nights everyone was sure M. was a villain. He must have been in the enemy pay, in the enemy headquarters, “giving them information on all of us.”

Other times, he was off doing something heroic to save the village. Certainly he existed. He wasn’t fictional. Though he existed now as a series of permutating fictions. He had been real.

You could still see his house at the edge of the village, decaying. Its little roof had turned to moss long ago and had begun to cave in. All of the furniture had been taken by scavengers. Birds liked this little house now. It had become a bird hostel, a come-and-go-as-you-please aviary. The drunks were mystified. The tongues returned and returned to the missing story the way a tongue returns and returns to a missing tooth.

Maybe M. had been a saint and preached to the birds like Asisi. Maybe the birds were the souls of the dead villagers and M. had left this rainy house to them, that they might perch in its windows and watch the wild grasses and wildflowers of the summer fields nod in the wind outside their beloved village.

So the old-timers prattled on, such nonsense that rankled the ears of the young lovers and businessmen sharing the tavern with them. So long after the war, everyone still had magical hopes. And magical hopes are only chatter, the young men and women thought.

When the last old drunk found himself the only person in the bar who remembered the war, to whom could he tell his story?

He was like the last exemplar of a lumbering species now going extinct, trapped in a zoo. The others were outside his cage, looking in. Look at those strange eyes in the creature‘’s head.’“Do you think it guesses it’s the very last one?” a young woman would whisper to a young man. “And the smell!” a student would intone, elbowing his buddy and shaking his head.
In the corner, the old man faced outwards, drinking himself deeper and deeper into the only story left to him, since he could no longer speak, the conundrum that burned inside him almost as ardently as youth itself: “But what really happened to M.?”

Brainbox

The latest big threat to humankind’s existence, the johnny-come-lately of epidemics, had first entered the country’s social life in an innocent form. It all began with a popular marital aid sold in most big box stores, the DuoDex. Many considered it a novelty toy when it debuted. Early reviews were chirpily optimistic. Here was a new toy aimed at adults. Better yet, it was a bedroom toy you could actually talk about in polite company.


At the product’s first media flush of success, once it was clear the product would be huge, it became, of course, a target. Some reviewers turned cynical, just because being cynical is lucrative and eye-catching work. And then the expected negative reviews and invidious comparisons were made by would-be competitors. The device was sometimes lumped in with the Ouija board or fortunetelling apps by detractors looking to debunk for likes.


But husbands and wives, husbands and husbands, and wives and wives, or a significant number of them anyway, became closer through using the DuoDex. Sex lives improved. (The device was often nicknamed the DuoSex.) The divorce rate actually moved in the opposite direction, towards matrimonial cohesion, for the first time in several generations.


The unhappy couples who had tried this therapy and still got divorced would sometimes disparage the device. Of course, the manufacturers inserted a CYA block of legalese in the enclosed instructions indicating that the DuoDex was intended to be used “for recreational purposes only” and that under no circumstances could the manufacturer be held accountable for the fate of any relationship. In other words, your results may vary. Soon it was the number one Christmas gift for adults. For several years running.


The DuoDex consisted of two linked neural network “head sleeves” meant to be worn only when two individuals intended to sleep next to one another. Each sleeve was a bunch of plastic cords hanging, octopoid-style, from a plastic disc which sat on the top of the head. The electrodes at the end of each cord attached to various points on the human skull effortlessly, without adhesive material. Only a handful of people outside of the manufacturing company (and few within it) knew how this aspect of the device worked. Like much else relating to the DuoDex, this strange adhesiveness was a proprietary secret.


However, the DuoDex had been approved by the Department of Homeland Security for use by mentally well-adjusted adults. The FDA had once been the arbiter of what was safe for the human brain. But with the advent of new technologies capable of affecting neurochemistry and human thought, and potentially affecting national security, there had been a restructuring of such oversight within the government.


The device did not function when worn by waking brains. Attempting to neuro-link during waking hours could result in tremendous migraine-like headaches lasting for days. The device had not been approved for use by children. Of course, kids would get into their parents’ privacy drawers and dabble. That misuse alone had sparked a firestorm of talk show arguments between the proponents of civil liberties and the proponents of governmental parenting.


The device worked by setting up a neural circuit between two brains. The device was most active during R.E.M. dream states. The most the manufacturer, Elkcogito, would say about how the device worked its magic was that the DuoDex could siphon fear from one human brain and then circulate this fear through the linked brain, which largely dissipated it. Joy, the company explained, could also be redistributed, shared. If one partner or spouse was unhappy, the happier partner could share his or her happiness effortlessly. Some psychologists decried this process as a “cheat,” but then some psychologists were losing a lot of money. Empty chairs sat in offices where marriage counseling and relationship counseling had been a booming business, a fatted cash cow.


The speculation was that Duodex worked by controlling the neurochemistry of the brain by triggering neurotransmitters. Clearly EEG, brainwave-reading functionality was also present in the device. But this is stating the obvious. It was the particulars of the design that resisted analysis, that was the uncrackable code. There were endless websites and videos purporting to show how the device actually worked. But the nanotechnology of the DuoDex was of a new order. Few individuals or even firms had the technology needed to really break down the design. Patent wars loomed on the horizon for the manufacturer. Several Japanese companies had alleged blatant theft. That much had already leaked into the news cycles.


People shared their DuoDex experiences with friends, family, clergy, talk shows, everywhere people normally talked about relationships. But there was a mystification factor in this talk. People couldn’t articulate how they felt changed by using the device. They could only say that things were better, that they got along better with their spouses or partners. It used to take a second honeymoon to Acapulco or Paris to achieve the magic the Duodex could work, inexpensively, in usually under a month. And it could be repeated endlessly, without additional expense, unlike a third or fourth honeymoon. Couples would talk about feeling happier, more hopeful, less full of fear. Younger, recharged, erotically nimble again. So much energy, positive and negative, lurked in dreams. That much was clear. And it could be harnessed and redistributed. Hurrah for the tech gods.


And then the nightmares started.


Hackers began toying with the device, reverse-engineering it and changing its capabilities. Junkies were soon carrying these retooled Dexes around from motel to motel. They were getting high off captive brains. Seriously damaged people were being found tied down to motel beds all across the world. These victims were sometimes unfixable. These individuals were referred to as iced or icees. Their brains were now dangerous places. They were invariably violent to themselves or others. Complete sedation followed by institutionalization was the only option. Sometimes they recovered. Sometimes. The divorce rate had gone down, true, but now the homicide rate went through the roof. The DuoDex was recalled. The lawsuits began.


But it’s not so easy to recall a technology that has become a pandemic. In fact, it’s nearly impossible. It’s like closing Pandora’s box after the dragons have flown.


Sykes was a detective in the era of the Dexes. He rolled with the punches but he found himself single after enough of those punches. Even his kids rarely wanted to powwow with dad. Maybe it was the long silences. Sykes had started living deep in his head. He was nearly always turning the gruesome facts of some Dex case over and over in his head like so many worry stones.


You can only be called out to so many crime scenes in the middle of the night before even a DuoDex won’t fix your marriage. And, apparently, Sykes’ brain was now too dark from his work. The first time they tried it, his wife refused to neuro-link with him ever again after a month. She said his brain gave hers the heebie-jeebies. Big fat surprise, he thought. She was happily remarried to a bearded guy who taught high school French and looked like a model who was aging very well.


Sykes was used by now to being called out at 3 a.m. to stand on a windy highway bridge where one of the iced had plummeted into the dark bay below. Sometimes he would look down into that black water and think of the sleepless sharks under that choppy surface as his brothers. Weren’t they “on-call” all the time too? Sykes figured it was his spirit-animal.


It took years of the job to make Sykes into Sykes. But the undoing of Sykes didn’t take long. It took less than a week.


Sykes had been allowed to sleep all night for once. The call came in as he was driving to the office. He was told to divert to the Sunrise Motel down along the bay. He pulled into the lot when the sky was all pink and coral and yellow behind the cheap motel. What a great day to wake up dead in a motel, te detective thought. It was a dive. Tourists were warned to stay away. The reviews of the motel online frequently alluded to bloodstains, strange smells, and more than one mentioned finding a body. Sykes had read these before. One pithy review said it best: “Dex Trap, Death Trap!!!”


It was a girl. Lying in the motel room. It just had to be a young girl, didn’t it? He had a daughter about that age. She had, like slightly more than half of the iced do, killed herself. Someone had tied her to the motel bed, drained all the positive feelings from her brain, and left her there, a screaming wilderness of psychic pain. A fried egg. She had broken out of the restraints, smashed the large mirror over the bedraggled bureau, and gone to town on herself with the shards.


The girl had been pronounced dead on the scene. But just as Sykes was commenting on how the bureau appeared to have been attacked by a posse of beavers, the body on the bed began moving its limbs in the most unearthly fashion.


“Coroner’s flubbed it again!” Sykes shouted as he and several officers who had been milling about the room threw themselves on the body, which had begun to thrash.


She was awake now and fully iced. Her pitiful screams began. Like one of the worst scenes in The Exorcist.


“Brainbox!” Sykes bellowed towards the open door of the motel room.


A few officers came running in, one of them holding what looked like a crash test dummy’s head with wires dangling from it. Sykes and several other young men and one middle-aged woman held the girl down and talked to her as Officer Lopez deftly connected the wires from the brainbox to the girl’s skull. Sykes himself threw the switch on the brainbox and the flat pseudo-eyes on the device glowed red. The brainbox was draining the woman’s fear. Within minutes, she began to thrash much less and the E.M.T.s on the scene began tending her wounds. She had, miraculously, missed the major arteries. The blood around the motel room was mostly body and hand transfer.


The young woman left by ambulance. In time, everyone left. Off to other nightmare calls before most citizens had finished their breakfast. Sykes was the last one left on the scene. He was guarding the scene until the techs arrived. The girl would survive. Today was a “win.” Quotes necessary. Where was the bastard who did this to her?


After speaking the evidentiary notes he needed for his report into his phone, and while he was waiting for the evidence techs to arrive, Sykes noted that the disconnected brainbox had been left on the carpet next to the bed. He used one gloved hand to pick it up by the handle and carried it to his car, where he deposited it in a sterile bag. All it takes is a moment’s inattention, and that thing could be boosted and end up on the black market. There’s no telling what sort of misuse the evil bastards could find for that.


There was no doubt the brainboxes could be reverse-engineered to kill. But mostly they were used to achieve unprecedented highs. Sometimes this produced happiness zombies who would walk obliviously into busy traffic. Sometimes the hapzombs would step off the upper floors of parking garages, sure they could walk on air. Or at least that’s what people speculated they were thinking, who knows. They’d often be found, the corpses, with big smiles on their faces. They were called leerers too. For this reason.


Sykes would never have guessed that this day was the day of his undoing. Because, so far, it had been business as usual. As bloody as it was.


Sykes was returning to the precinct when he got the inkling that he had left his stove top on after making eggs just before leaving for work. Why didn’t he have a remote system control for this appliance? He chastised himself. He had failed to log the stove on when he had set up his apartment network. So he decided he would make a quick stop back at his apartment.


He decided to err on the side of caution and carried the brainbox up the small flight of stairs to his front door. There really wasn’t a mess in the bag. There was only a smudge of blood on the head. If the brainbox was stolen out of his vehicle, the repercussions would be enormous, there would be hell and then some to pay.


The oven had been off, after all.


Sykes was preparing to leave his apartment, he was almost out the door, when he got the call that flattened him. His wife’s voice, softer than he had heard it in years. The tears in her voice. Their son had been found dead two hours earlier. It was an icing incident. Sykes talked less than five minutes with her. She worried when he wanted to hang up. She knew he was alone. He told her it would be alright.


He called the office and told them he would not be in. He shot his notes from the Sunrise Motel over to his colleague. He looked up the number of the coroner who would have jurisdiction. He imagined his voice coming out of a speaker in the same building where his son’s body must be lying on a cold gurney. He called, talked to several of the administrative staff who put him on hold several times, and then eventually he spoke with the coroner, who was kind but reminded Sykes of her professional obligations.


She didn’t want to give him the details of his son’s death. He pushed. She pushed, gently, back. She begged him to surround himself with family or friends. She really had to go. He thanked her and hung up.


Sykes called the police department with jurisdiction next. The detective he ended up speaking with hadn’t even seen the paperwork yet. He didn’t want to be a hard ass, since he felt he was talking with a brother of sorts, but again there was nothing to share. Not yet. And again, professionalism dictated discretion. He knew Sykes knew that. But he reminded him. He, too, urged Sykes to seek out someone he could talk with.


Sykes did what he would never ordinarily do. He drank the rest of the day and popped a handful of pills. OTC, yeah, but still crazy stupid, he knew. He lay in bed and looked at photos of Rowan on his phone. All ages of Rowan.


It was so much worse because they hadn’t spoken in over a year. He replayed that conversation and reminded himself that his kid didn’t hate him. He never hated his dad. He just couldn’t have any good conversations with his father. And now Sykes went into the dark sting of realizing that it was his fault. He was the one who could have changed that. But he had always figured there would be time. Why wouldn’t there be? And then he remembered what he did for a living, what he saw every day, and he felt stupid. He was the stupidest P.O.S. on the planet.


Q: How drunk does a detective have to be to illegally neuro-link with one of the department’s brainboxes?


A: Very fucking drunk, indeed.


He set the crash test dummy head on the pillow next to him, where nobody ever slept. Maybe a head with an interesting face would rest there for a few hours and show him its ecstasy, eyes rolling back into the head, now and again, for which he was always hugely grateful.


But nobody slept there all night. Ever.


Not since the divorce.


Sykes put the head sleeve on, he flipped the switch on the brainbox, and the red featureless eyes lit up. The whiskey and pills synergistically did their work, and Sykes was gone in minutes.


He was dreaming. He was with his son at the beach, lifting him over higher and higher waves. His boy was eight. His wife sat on a towel on the sand, her lovely legs shining. It was all good. It was alright. It was all good.


And then he heard a woman’s voice calling him. Terrified voice. Behind him. Even as Sykes held his son up above the roaring waves of the surf, he felt the boy turn into white static, dissolve. He was holding nothing. Empty air. He turned back to the beach and all the bodies were dissolving, like a filmstrip image melting on a superheated projector.


He sat on dream sand and listened as the woman told him how she was trapped. Inside the brainbox. She whimpered her story. Sykes sat on the sand in a dark night now. Each fist held a fistful of sand. Tightly. The voice told him she had made mistakes. She had run away from home, she had fallen in with icers. She had been used as a dupe to lure young men into motels where their thoughts had been drained into bootleg brainboxes. Now she found herself in the worst sort of hell. She existed. But only in the brainbox.


“This is just a nightmare,” Sykes intoned. He was clearly having a bad trip. Even in his dream, he was partially awake. Sykes was a lucid dreamer.


But she gave him her name. She begged him to look it up. She begged him to release him, to destroy the brainbox. If there was no way to come back. Sykes woke up yanking the wires from his skull.


He had no idea how long he had been out. But night was in the window.


He went online and researched the name she had given him, Samantha Radic. There were several newspapers in New Jersey which had covered the Dex bust. It was reported that Radic had been discovered dead in a Motel 6 in Atlantic City. Several icers had been taken into custody.


Her name also came up in an article in a fringe, underground newspaper that alleged that Samantha Radic was one of a number of “allegedly dead” individuals who had been reported as having contacted living people while they were hooked up to resuscitation brainboxes. Sometimes the brainboxes were circulated around between police departments, after receiving the regular servicing, for example.


There was an editorial in this largely anti-government online rag stating that there was evidence “out there” indicating that living human brains were actually encased in the brainboxes. Or else, they were AI simulations of actual human brains. The editorialist hedged his bet.


This bothered Sykes tremendously.


Everyone knew that the brainboxes were impervious to x-rays and impossible to open. If you tampered too much with them, they were designed to undergo a sort of meltdown which destroyed the contents. Intense heat was generated within. Sykes had seen underground types with terrible burns on their hands from monkeying around with a brainbox that had hotboxed on them. Word on the street was that hackers had recruited specialists who could crack the code and open the things.


Sykes called his ex after scanning several messages that had come in while he slept, and they wept into the abyss of the past in a longer conversation this time. Funeral details were already set. Sykes told her he would fly out the day before. He begged her to have his daughter call him as soon as possible. She promised. They hung up.


Sykes was showering and crying into the noise of the shower. He cried so long his throat began to hurt.


While he was toweling off, he smelled something burning.


He jogged down the padded carpet to his bedroom and saw his bed was scorched. A smoldering glow in the darkness came from his quilt. The brainbox, which he had placed back in its plastic bag, had superheated and burned through it plastic, producing the acrid smell which had brought him running. He was able to extinguish the burgeoning quilt fire with just his wet towel. He carried the entire quilt, rolled-up, into the bathroom, and threw it into the shower which he turned on full. He didn’t need his fire extinguisher, after all.


He had rolled the brainbox onto the sheets below the quilt where it was busy starting a new scorch. He knew he had to roll the still superheated brainbox onto something that wasn’t flammable. He grabbed a pan from his kitchen and used the wet towel to push it onto that, down on the floor next to the bed.


Sykes knew this wasn’t a coincidence.


Someone knew he had made certain queries. They had to know.


They had remotely triggered the brainbox to self-destruct.


He wondered darkly about the fate of Samantha Radic.


Her true fate. Not the one the newspapers had assigned her.


He intended to find out.

Opercula

The teachers made a strong effort to create a respectful silence around me. They knew my classmates would talk. Would whisper. These teachers, the braver ones anyway, gave little speeches occasionally. They talked about “delayed development” and “transgenic differences.” How not everyone’s body will bloom at the same pace. They would talk about famous late-bloomers. Great, inspirational success stories. Sometimes though, they confessed, and they would always admit this last part almost under their breath, a strong voice collapsing into a whisper, a person just doesn’t bloom at all.

They were trying to ward off meanness. I get it. But meanness (and trust me, I’ve encountered it) happens outside of the gaze and earshot of teachers. Publicly, everyone at school’s a perfect angel, nodding along with the sermon. The worst offenders usually applaud the preacher.

I used to sit in class and daydream. Instead of focusing on what numerical identity the mysterious Secret Agent x had decided to assume today in algebra class, I would steal peeks at my blossoming classmates. I would notice Oleanna’s branches, the recent growth spurts on both sides of her body. They were long and luxurious, to her knees. Once again, she would be in season. She would bring forth the loveliest fruit. Just look at our yearbook if you don’t believe me.

She was probably the most fertile girl in our school. And I always ended up sitting near her. She wasn’t mean at all. Not publicly anyway. But still. Some days I hated her. Those were usually the days when I would catch a peripheral glimpse of her picking one of her juicy dark berries and tossing it back through her perfectly glossed lips. She knew how many guys and girls were transfixed in those moments when she would taste herself and then smile her mysterious Mona Lisa smile. Other days, I didn’t hate her at all. I admitted the truth to myself. I just wanted what she had.

Of course, my parents had taken me to the usual specialists. My siblings, my younger brother, my older sister, were both branched, and my older sister had never had any problem bear fruit. I was happy for them. My older sister wasn’t nasty about it at all. She’s even tried to help me, massaging my opercula. And my mother gave me the usual liquid supplements which are supposed to help the growth-challenged. We tried everything on the market.

The specialist doctors did all the usual scans. They said everything was in the right place. They did some exploratory visualization with fiber optics and newer technologies and then even gave me a dose of nano-bots to assist in my germination. They didn’t help at all. They told my parents it could come right at any time. Nobody knew why I hadn’t even been able to bring forth one branch from a single one of the many gill-like openings on either side of my body. I was a barren waste. My mother and father both promised they would never put me through the agony of transplantation. You could always tell when someone had transplants. There were horrible stories about what happened when the body rejected the branches. Sometimes they grew in the wrong direction, into the body instead of the world. Rumors abounded that those branches came from cadavers. Those were the fruits of the dead. Yuck. In the end, the medical consensus, the recommended course of action? Home schooling. Hide her.

I began to stay in the house all the time. I joined some support groups but this was on my phone, not in real life. I became close with some of those kids and even a few of the adults. Half would preach that were would be a cure soon. And about half would say we’re okay just the way we are. A few were just as silent as me. Being fertile isn’t everything, they would say. Food can be grown anywhere. We don’t even need the transgenic fruit to survive. For the vast majority of human history, people were not half-trees. Great minds and spirits of the past did not produce fruit. Well, not literally. Not on a single day of their lives.

True, there was that recent argument that Jesus had been the way we are now. “I am the vine and you are the branches.” And other quotes like that. “Eat of my body and drink of my blood.” I think it’s funny that today Jesus is always portrayed in visual art as a total fruiter, and yet when you look at the art of the distant past, he was just like any other human.

There are still countries, I would tell myself, that have resisted the transgenic revolution. These were usually smaller countries, many of them dominated by some of the newer religions that were catching on. I can’t tell you how many times in my fantasies I saw myself moving to one of those countries, perhaps finding my great love there looked exactly like me. I knew that when I was older I could always fall back on visiting one of those dating sites exclusively for the non-germinating. But I didn’t look forward to the experience. I tried to imagine myself falling in love with someone just like me. It made me feel so weird. It made me want to just float out of my body.

Actually, if I emigrated to one of those non-transgenic countries, my foreign love wouldn’t even have opercula. He would be a “skinflint,” to use the horrible term the fruiting use to insult the fruitless. Would I be as accepted as I am? Would my love want me to undergo painful surgeries to remove my opercula, so my body would look like the cultural norm? Wouldn’t my lover want my body to look like a body he grew up fantasizing about?

Things all sped up when my sister had gone from being engaged to actively planning her wedding. I can still see my mother and her sitting before that glowing screen, oohing and aahing at the various wedding dresses with their golden and silver body trellises. There were nectar supplements to assure a bride had a bountiful harvest on her body for her wedding night. Some brides-to-be grew their branches very long in the back in preparation for the big day, so they could be woven into the train of the wedding dress. The groom would then harvest these on the honeymoon. Some guys got so hot for that ritual. They would trade stories. I hated overhearing those conversations.

I remember the day I left. I had been watching a scene in a movie in which a very beautiful young man was sunning himself on a dock. He was about my age. He was famous. He was absorbing the light he needed to complete his natural fruition. His branches were strong and wiry, like a second musculature outside his already chiseled body. He had gone through his latest seasonal flowering and now he was bearing fruit. Some sort of miniature pear-hybrid all over him. I had to turn it off. Because I imagined the look he would give me after seeing my body. And then how quickly his gaze would avert itself, knowing where not to look ever again.

I went into the river on a summer night. It was warm water, or warm enough anyway, and I had no fear of drowning. Like virtually all non-germinaters, my malfunctioning opercula hid functional gills. True, these were vestigial, but I could submerge for extended periods. This is why people like me had even been banned from the Olympics. Our unfair advantage.

I had swim googles on. And a strong waterproof flashlight I had only recently purchased. I wondered what my family would make of that, when they saw the last purchase I had made. I hoped they would not follow me, not create embarrassing MISSING notices. I wasn’t missing. I was gone.

I swam towards the Deadlands. The area of no video cameras, the area we are forbidden to inhabit. The area which the last great war had destroyed. It had once been a metropolis swarming with life. It was a long journey, but I made it. I didn’t really care what happened to me then, the night I swam away, but that has changed now.

I had to leave the river and walk the last fifty miles or so. Down the dead highways. I thought they were pretty. The desolation. The wildflowers everywhere taking back the roads. The animals come to look at you. They’re no longer afraid.

I don’t want to go back. This is home now. My problem now seems small in comparison to those faced by the war survivors here and those crazy enough to come live here. I’m able to help people here. People with greater challenges than me. Skinflints abound, but so do variant transgenic beings of all stripes. We have a loose form of government that’s almost no government at all. We are blocked from receiving news from the outside world. Our technology only operates within the Deadlands. The outside world doesn’t want us to know anything.

I hope my sister had a beautiful wedding. I hope she has a lovely marriage. I hope her children bear fruit and their children bear fruit. “Long vines to you!” as the wedding toast goes.

One night the jamming of signals they do out there must have gone down. Because an iffy signal bled over onto my screen and we were suddenly watching their t.v. for a short while. Instead of our home grown programs. It was a beauty pageant. A glittery affair. Vines everywhere. Some of my friends were over, and their children, and we all gathered around to watch the girls strut and flounce to show off their fruits.

Many of those in the room had never even seen fruiting bodies. There were squeals of laughter and disgust from the kids. Parents chided them. These older ones looked at my opercula in the flickering light from the screen and deeper lines formed in the brows of some of my friends. “You okay?” they asked, as true friends do.

“Of course I’m okay, stupid!”

We all laughed.

Later that night, after they had all left, I went into my bedroom at the rear of my house, and sat on the edge of my bed facing a pier mirror. That mirror which had just always been here in this house that we found, that was ours for the taking. That mirror which had probably belonged to someone who died a hundred years ago. I like that mirror.

I no longer wear the clothing they wear in the outside world, with openings for branches. I wear whole garments now. But I was naked.

I held a pair of pruning shears in my right hand, and as I looked in the mirror, I clipped each branch that had begun to grow from each operculum.

I felt good doing it. And then my lover came into the room. He was monstrous. He was beautiful. He was the sun in the night.

“Do my back, darling…please?”

He smiled as he took the shears tenderly from my hand.

People Talking in Their Sleep

"The diamonds and emeralds, the rubies! That little dog is not your dog, that dog was always mine, he loved me more and you hated me for it!" an eighty-five-year-old man in pineapple-pattern pajama bottoms growls and punches his pillow, which this moment is a brother who has been dead since 1969.

"I'm the Queen of Snow Peas!" a four-year-old girl exults, so proud to be handed the crystal scepter and see those countless green minions, who stretch to the horizon now, jumping up and down and cheering her, just before she rolls out of the top bunk and crashes to the floor, waking up crying and screaming for her parents, from the pain, but mostly from the sudden revocation of royalty.

"I always will, Essie, I always did love you…your brother is a liar and I killed him cuz he poisoned you against me….put 'em in a garbage pile….like a carrot!"mutters  someone in New Jersey who thrashes under a blanket, as a dark nurse stands in the dark doorway, half watching a CSI rerun on a television in a room across the hall.

A woman who has become her long-dead Yorkshire terrier in a series of dreams chases the sled on which she (as a six-year-old girl) flies so joyfully down a snowy hill in a cemetery near her former home, long-razed, where a strip mall now stands, barking merrily all the way down.

"Yes, I used the toothpaste to masturbate," an astronaut-in-training reverted to his eleven-year-old self abjectly confesses to his father, who is a mouse twice his size, standing before him, next to his mother, who is now younger than he ever remembered her, platinum blonde and dangerously alluring in a way that he knows only from photographs in a family album that was rarely brought out.

An eleven-year-old girl who has recently studied the history of American slavery is shouting out numbers, bidding at a slave auction on all her classmates, white children who have become African-Americans, but still look exactly like themselves, had they been born black, in another century, and not ten or eleven years ago in a Connecticut city with the highest per capita income in the state.

"Be quiet, I am punishing you," a thirteen-year-old boy tells his little sister's favorite stuffed animal, a pink rabbit, in a dream, but the lagomorph fights back, and soon he is on his back and the pleasure is everywhere until he is woken by something like a bee sting and the thrashing of his necklace, its crucifix, so tired he had been last night that he had forgotten to remove it, and now his fingers discover (his eyes with the girlish lashes are still closed) it is wet with something he is sure must be blood and probably the blood of weeping Jesus his grandmother in the mental hospital warned him about.

A homeless man wrapped in several blankets on a park bench that overlooks a river whose hard surface deer now cross, going from blue forested island to blue forested island, freezes to death in the night, but not before reciting The Gettysburg Address to perfection in the presence of his parents, who keep nodding approvingly and smiling, though he murdered them seventeen years before for drug money.

Stop Me, Oh Oh Oh Stop Me, Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before

Gary was driving home from a Friday night poker game with old friends which beer and b.s., mostly b.s. of the sports variety, had prolonged into the wee small hours.

He wasn’t drunk, but he was tired and tapped out and saw by his dash that it was after 2 a.m. This was just as he was driving along the seemingly endless expanse of the large Elysian Fields cemetery.

As he looked away from the digital clock and back to the road, a young woman in white came rushing out of the darkness of the cemetery and ran right in front of his car. Barefoot, no less. And in a long gown. Gary swerved and hollered the expletive-laced name of a messiah at her.

His car braked to a stop less than fifteen feet from the woman, whom he could see now was more of a girl. She was standing stock-still, facing directly away from Gary’s Hyundai. He thought about blowing his horn, but he figured something was wrong with the girl. Seriously wrong. Maybe something horrible had just happened to her. Maybe she was the victim of an assault or worse. She certainly appeared to be in an altered state. She was holding a small bouquet of flowers upside down in her right hand. He watched as she tossed it off towards the cemetery bushes without even looking that direction.

“Are you alright? I’m sorry, but you just came out of nowhere. You know?”

He was talking loudly out the driver’s side window, hoping she could hear him.

The night was very still, so she had.

“I know,” the girl said. She still wouldn’t turn to face him. It unnerved him.

“Listen, I would normally offer to make a call for you, if you need a ride. You’re probably not going to believe this, but I don’t have my phone on me. I can offer you a ride if you need one, but I understand if that’s not something you’d be comfortable with. I mean with a stranger out here in the middle of nowhere…”

But before he could finish his sentence, she shocked him by turning and walking directly to his driver’s side window. She leaned her arm there, her slender white arm, and smiled with little trace of fear. A big smile on a small, pretty face.

“How about this? You move over and let me drive. I’d be much less afraid that way.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You seem to be missing your shoes. Where did you come from, anyway? Is that a prom dress? It seems an odd time of year for….”

“Do we have a deal?” She was still smiling.

Gary reluctantly slid over and she opened the door and took the wheel.

“I’ve never driven one like this. All these new-fangled doodads!”

But already she had them in motion, headlights picking out their way down that long street otherwise deserted. Everyone in the small town had found their beds already.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to ask: you haven’t been drinking, I hope?” Gary realized it was a slightly ironic question to pose.

“No, Buzz and Joey were the ones drinking. Drinking like hogs. I told them to slow down. That punch bowl stunk to high heaven. But they don’t listen to anyone but each other. Egging each other on like idiots!”

“Where exactly are we going?”

“Why, of course, I’m going home.”

“It isn’t far?”

“No, not far at all. You’re very kind to help me out.”

By now, she had already taken some dozen turns and they were in a part of town with no streetlights. Gary was not familiar with these rural areas at all. He began to wonder if this might not be a set-up. Was there some guy waiting with a gun out in the countryside to roll him where no one would even hear his cries for help? And the one time he didn’t bring his phone. He slipped his wallet under his seat surreptitiously. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m gonna need to use my g.p.s. to get back out of here. I don’t know all these backroads. I can see we’re getting higher. Could you do me a favor and keep a few feet more to the right of that barrier? That looks like a hell of a drop off.”

“What the heck is g.p.s.?” she laughed. “You know, it was just terrible what happened to Joey and Buzz. Some say they deserved it. But did the others?”

“What happened to them?”

“They went off the cliff on River View Road. They were picking up pieces of them in the ravine for days. Them and all their passengers. That car was just crammed with kids who had come from the dance.”

She shook her head, crying then.

“I’m so sorry,” he commiserated. “Listen, you seem pretty upset. Why don’t you pull over and we can switch seats.”

She began to accelerate then. It really scared Gary.

“No point,” she said. “We’re almost home.”

“What do you mean we’re almost home?” Gary asked. “And you’ve gotta slow down, this road is getting narrower and narrower. Where the hell are we, anyway?”

And then the headlights picked out an old street sign that read “River View Road.”

The car was going about seventy at that point and he began to scream at her to stop the car, hit the brakes, this isn’t funny at all.

But she was laughing now through her tears.

As the car left the road and Gary felt his stomach, his ass, everything, try to float, the girl turned to him and said, “This is the part where you hope, but it doesn’t come true.”

If

                 


If you understand that most things that exist do not have names. If you understand that the unbounded is not susceptible to names. Some believe it is worthless to say "most things that exist" because they believe that things only exist if named, if partitioned. If they are ascribed existence. Ascribed.  This word means that they are written into existence. But they, the things, exist in the field of potentiality. Unspoken things are still things. Unenacted things are still things.

If we think about the weight of the dark mouth. The dark mouth is the things you almost said but did not. I do not mean the things you spoke to yourself but did not allow into the world. I mean the things, the dark matter of thought, you did not speak or act because fate did not allow you to speak or enact it. Much of your life will be in opposition to the dark mouth. Much of your life will dwell on the dark mouth and the dark hand. Nobody can tell you why this is so.

If I could believe in the structuralism of paragraphs. If I could believe in the sequencing of the DNA of prose. If one believes in this simple islanding of thought in a sea of hidden, "greater" intent. Then one believes in a book. The paragraphs are real, concrete entities. But the book itself is something more. The book is the gestalt of all the pages. It includes the invisible threads you must spin between paragraphs and then the way the ocean itself lies on the earth. The river of reading is the river Meander. There is no true, direct path through any book on earth. Only liars say that. The promise of the book is the promise of wandering.

If you enter the room or I enter the room. Doesn't it make a difference? Depending on our mood. Depending on love. Depending on skill. Who enters the room first? With what intent?  Some tiresome people enter rooms constantly. They are assailers of rooms. Some tiresome people are reticent about entering any room. They hang back. They need exhausting coaxing. The idea of the room itself is exhausting! Who is in the room presently? We can't always be sure. The room might be beyond our capabilities to visualize or represent it correctly. We might have to ask others in the room if a certain personage is actually in the room or not. They might be able to see and say with certainty that the person is indeed in the room, whereas you doubted. But then you might insist that some particular person is in the room and several others might vociferously argue with you, correct you, au contraire, that person is not in the room.  Then what did you see? A phantom? You saw an actual body. He or she was there. Obviously, this means you do not know the room's true boundaries. Or the room's boundaries have shifted since you last reckoned them. The room is much more phantasmal than the people who may or may not occupy it at any given moment. While you may not acknowledge this fact to yourself, you almost certainly spend many hours of your day focusing on this problem of The Room. Possibly humans are categorical creatures even more than they are emotional creatures. It may very well be that emotions are all, at bottom, issues of categories. A recategorization can often correct even a very horrible emotion.

If the Room of People Whom I Love Who Love Me Back has a door to enter and exit does that make me a healthier person? But what if there is no door? No exit. No entrance. Does that thought scare you? Or does it weirdly comfort you, the way that tyrants may be easily comforted?

If the dark hand slips around your throat when you sleep, when you're dreaming, then you are like everybody else. If the dark mouth sings to you then, how lucky you are. Because there are lost people on this earth whose dark mouth can reach them even in waking hours. They go about the earth strangled by the dark hand. Their real hands cannot pull it away from their throat.

If you can understand that the dark mouth, the dark hand, do not exist in the sense of good or evil. They are capable of either. Their existence points to the provisionality of all existence. Time surely passes differently in their universe. Time may be arrested in the dark mouth, in the dark hand.

If the space of this sentence was sufficient to itself.

If color enters a window in a pronounced way, you are called upon to respond. The window frames something, a sky, which seems to possess a sort of self-knowledge in the form of color. This is an emotional construct. Windows are emotional constructs.

If the dark hand slips around your throat when you sleep, you do not exist in the sense of good or evil. Something is recycling you inside you. That is one way to understand it. There must be a door for even the worst emotions to enter and exit. Even your throat has a door, admittedly a pitiful one. When have you ever seen a truly well-defended mouth?  This is why so many resort to dropping the portculis of silence.

If we consider what the dark mouth and the dark hand do when they are not engaging us from that great distance of theirs, a distance which can close instantly to zero, what answer can we give? It is an answer given in the mystical tense. It is the mystical tense of the otherness of being which is not present, past or future tense, nor any of the variations of those tenses.

If we do not understand that we are creating a dark matter self throughout all the days of our existence, we do not acknowledge what it is to be human.

If someone would be temerarious enough to write an autobiography of his or her dark matter-self rather than the one that lived out its days in ordinary matter, what would this sound like? Impossible you say? If justice were done, would it not be nearly infinite in length? The only acts subtracted would be those of the biography proper.

Plus

      For honesty's sake, it is better to tell your life story when you are tired.

      For the ultimate in honesty, it is best to tell your life story when you are dead.

                                                 *

      Leon was finishing up in hospice. He was not afraid to die, for he was tired beyond fear. He was obscenely old. He was alone in the world. He had, in fact, detached himself from the existence of his large, globous body entirely, except for when this corpus-soon-to-be-corpse managed to sneak a pointlessly punitive message of pain, a sort of ridiculous holler, an idiotic yahoo, through his pharmacological defense shields, which were tended not quite assiduously enough  by the not quite beneficent but nevertheless smiling and amiable nurses. The chief weapon in that arsenal, the one which deployed the shield, which protected  floating being from actually being here, was morphine. Morphine, that king of drugs, the king of no fucks given today, Ma'am.

      Leon stared at a little bouquet of flowers that had appeared while he was sleeping, which had suddenly materialized on what he liked to think of as the "floating table," that little service station on casters. The table floated like a ballerina. It was Ginger Rogers to any nurse's Fred Astaire. This bouquet came from nobody he knew. It wasn't for Leon. Rather it had been purloined, Leon intuited, from a nearby room in the hospice where someone had just checked out in that final way. Someone had checked out to go check into that dark hotel below our feet. The hotel of infinite capacity.  Some nurse, probably Jim, had rehomed these flowers. Probably the nurse thought he had repurposed kindness. But the flowers had merely moved from a room of the dead to a room of the dying. To say what, really? What is it that we imagine a gift of flowers says to the moribund or the dead? Leon remembered archeologists giving accounts of finding flowers (ancient pollen) in Paleolithic graves. So when we brought flowers into hospice rooms, when we decorated our funerals with them, we were being Neanderthals? We had come so far? Not at all in these moments. We had put no distance at all between us and that aporia the Neanderthals felt in the face of death. You might as well shoot Silly String as place a bouquet on a grave. It made Leon smile, despite his muzzy hopelessness.

      The man tried to hump himself up a little on his pillows and told himself he knew who it was that went this time. That silver-haired little smiling gamine across the hall. It must have been. He seemed to remember hearing a quiet commotion across the way in her room that morning. Asleep, he had known what it was and had known it was not worth rousing himself up into full consciousness. But now the memory returned. The sounds which had tweaked his consciousness. It had been nothing as loud as a resuscitation. What was her name? Oh yes, Barbara. How he hated when she hummed her way down the hall with her walker. And hummed her way back. But she was a nice little woman. No use denying that. He was sure he could remember the exact moment when she received the flowers, that cooing and excitement. A grandson had brought those, Leon knew, because the oversize adolescent had turned into his room by mistake at first, with the little bouquet in its vase palmed in one if his huge hands. He had redirected the peach-fuzz giant across the hall.

      Leon knew he was missing a clue here about the fragile woman. But it was irretrievable. It was meant to be irretrievable. Something about empathy, something about grieving even strangers. The morphine put the kibosh to that. Good.  It was good it was that way. Sleep in being awake and the sort of jigsaw sort of holds together.

      Leon stared at the flowers. Merciless beings. They were merciless because they were a puzzle. They were merciless because they were ferociously alive and determined to give meaning to color and form. In this late hour. Their own color and form. Or so they thought. Bother, bother, bother.. But they had already been snipped. They were in a plastic vase drinking water. They were in a hospice themselves. There were orange cups and cusps, pink labials and little dry white antennae. What a load of shit, to feel the vibrance and the engagement these things wanted with the man lying in the bed, waiting his turn. The vibrations they gave off.  But they wanted that engagement with anyone. They needed attention. They wanted a painter to see them. Obnoxious things. As bad as people, Leon thought. Or as good as them. Same difference. Bloom, attention.

       They were careful about  mirrors in the hospice. The staff discreetly hid them. There had to be full length ones, but they hung and hid on the dark sides of doors turned to walls. Leon knew the patients, clients, inmates--whatever the polite term was these days, he had forgotten--usually wanted to control the reckoning of their own reflection and all that it implied. One hobbled, one fell, one was often stooped if one was ambulatory at all. But then there were the funny cases. The ones who could have danced a jitterbug right up to the moment they went dark. Some were even young. Better not touch that with the mind. Isn't it funny how a thing like than can happen, Leon wondered. That sudden precipice. How you can think you're fine but be moments away? Then Leon giggled and suddenly died.

     A cerebral event. The nurse actually did nothing. She watched quietly from the doorway, calling no one. Though the machines were sounding a surprisingly polite alarm. There was no family to summon. No real alarm. She bit her thumb. At the nail.

      Leon didn't know she was there. She saw the man rolling over into it. She did the human thing then, approached and took his hand. His big hand covered in seborrheic keratoses, glued-down disgusting chocolate chips. Did he know she took his hand?

       No.

     

                                                                    *

     Suddenly, all the time in the world was there. It emerged from a beatific doorway that was somehow insanely wet.

      Leon lay on a large bed in a high-ceiling bedroom. A shadowy room protecting itself from a sunny afternoon. Dark blankets over long curtains over the tall windows. A vague insinuation of a city out there. So vague.

     Leon lay back and admired his voluptuous breasts.

     I am this way forever, Leon knew. He was right.

      His lover entered the room then. It was the male corollary of the tigress Leon had become. Everything was to be given. There was fruit in the bed.

       He entered the lovemaking from the other side. He realized instantly he had missed out his entire life. That he could not be entered in this way. It was criminal but he had not known.  But now it was here. Searing pleasure.

         The man making love to him did not look like him. But he knew it was him inside there. They must be the same.

          Here, here, here, his body said. Her body said. There, there, yes there, his body said.

          They were enfolded in a swath of light, for that is what this sort of living is.

            The tongue of flame is what he would remember and remembering, Leon knew, was now forever.

                                    *

         He was a dog in the night. Leon was on all fours, a black dog, trotting through the darkness, drinking from puddles. He drank the moon from puddles. It tasted so good.

        What is there in a dog's mind that is wrong?

        Well, there were shadows that teased, and the smells were infinite! There were threats and promises and worries. He noticed he still had his breasts. His voluptuous human breasts somehow seemed natural on the underside of his dog body.

           He would deliver them somewhere.

          His lover was far behind him now, Leon knew, down at the end of the longest street ever. It was the man in the apartment who had just taught him everything there is within his body, the power of surrender.

           Leon ran forward. The man would remain forever at the end of the long street, running towards the black dog. The distance between them would elongate infinitely. It was a beautiful thing. It was like a violin string that could go around the circumference of the world while being played. No worries.

           Leon arrived at an opening in the earth. It was like a cave but it went down.

            He wagged his thick black tail.

             He went down.

     
                                   *

        Going down the slope of the cave, Leon realized how much smaller he had become. He had six legs, not four. He was small but he was immense within himself. He was still the exact size of the universe, whether he was a voluptuous woman, a black dog or the thing he was now.  He was inside the mind of an ant. It was all armor, that head. He had mandibles and a skull of some strange shell. But it was comfortable. Designed for comfort. Ergonomic. Home.  It was like waking up as the moon and knowing you were the moon.

             Leon was slowing down. His body had antifreeze in it. Some ants behind him were closing the entrance to the cave (or anthill) now. Closing the cold out. They were doing such a great job. He felt the tender ministrations as if they were hands touching his body, setting it aright. As if it were a mother tucking him in.

              He approached a group of brethren ants. They were all touching their antennae to each other, slowly. They were closing in a circle. The antifreeze was doing its work. The bodies were sealing up from the inside. Winter was moving over the anthill. He knew he was safe though he heard the wind. He felt so lucky.

             What if some of us were left outside, Leon worried. He asked the other ants in ant language (he was quite fluent) whether they should form a rescue party, unseal the cave, the anthill, and search for any stragglers.

           Stragglers will be fine, the other ants said in ant unison.

           This could be translated, Leon knew, as ant death is not real; only ant language is real. Do not betray this moment.

             Leon had to agree with this sentiment. He realized his empathy for the earth outside and the stragglers left for the winter blades of ice to shear away was a primitive holdover from the time before ant-consciousness had made everything all right again. Evolution had been running backwards all this time. It was the higher-ups, the ones who stepped on us, who had it all wrong. To pity them, Leon thought, is useless.

      So he slept instead in the bosom of his siblings, who had been waiting for him.

She was embarrassed to have to go into the street with the three boys who had all known her. Well, they hadn't known her, but they had known her. The crazy way her mother talked.

She thought of the movie Carrie.

So she stood around in the street while her mother watched from the picture window. The girl was picking some peeling rubber off her mint Converse she had drawn on with a pen, running her fingers through her...stop watching me, she grimaced at the window. The curtains banged shut like an impossible old maid, muted.

Rach smelled two of his fingers and then crossed himself nervously, not even realizing he did it.

"What food do you smell?" Nial asked. He didn't wait for her to answer. "Bananas? Do you smell bananas?"

"No," she said.

He had been practicing to be a hypnotist using YouTube. Which she figured meant he was practicing to be a rapist.

(He had to be buying those ugly clothes for something.)

"Barbush barbush barbush barbush barbush" practically hummed someone in stoner monotone.

What she had been doing before her mother chased her from the house:

She had been dissolving various colored dyes in glasses of water in the kitchen. Peering at them like a Russian scientist. She was conscious of the soft fact that she liked the high ceiling in that room and how it was always deserted in there since her mother was useless. Psychic. Useless. The sound of colors dissolving in water was no sound at all. The air was cleared of some sort of static by this process.

It was as though she were holding the hand of water like a mermaid.

She had been watching the colors plume out into phantasmagoria, vivid arabesques and serpentines. Sea serpents and orgasms. She was a girl, after all. She was these essences, she knew. Was she any good? If she just listened, she knew it would be the way she wanted in life somehow. If she just listened. So she stood on the street with the three boys who had all known her and wanted to know her again and she wondered. Was she really any good? And what good were these boys with her mother behind the curtains she was holding in both  hands now, unsubtle. Her so-called psychic mother who fought and pleaded and fought again with banks like lovers. Her bankrupt psychic mother. Who could not cook or suck a man's cock to save her life. And that was the woe of both of them, wasn't it?

She chased off a perfectly good trucker, a perfectly good idiot, this summer. And he worked ridiculous overtime. Solvent and invisible. What an idiot her mother was.

If she could just haul off and hit her in the face. She knew the feeling but couldn't quite own it, tame it. Punch her. But through that iron curtain. While she cowered in her pusher manners behind the walls of the house they would eventually lose. Let it just happen. Let them ride the wind. Maybe she could pare off from her then. On the wind of shared failure, the way people do. The way people divorce reasons. Or promises. There is beauty in such errors. Such fuck-ups.

"What do you smell now?"

It was Andy, mocking the august mannerisms of the junior rapist-hypnotist.

She was inside the color blue. It could not touch her if she remained inside the walls of the color blue This was an actual place like a prison, the color blue, but with this difference: the rest of the world was looked out and that externality was the prison. Blue means within. This shade of blue was a vivid sapphire. It was a roaming spirit condensed in a still person. It was what gave water its sexual prowess. The sexual powers that water has at night, all night. Wild water. Even the water in a night bathtub has a shade of this.

Neon has nothing on water, except when neon reflects in it. Then it might win. Like a serpent against a mongoose. The mongoose has nasty powers. You know Riki Tiki Tavi. She let the smoke out slowly from her nostrils. She did it right under her mother's glass nose. Let her press behind the curtains into the glass of street looking. Fairy pimp-mother. Let her fuck off, let her hear this thought, psychic bitch.

So her mind wondered and the boys touched each other. Their hands covered each other's hands like lovers. They pushed. They walked backwards. Their language skipped beats like hearts will do when the closeness is all anticipation. The boys. Nervous coiled springs in them like you see in hunting dogs. She noticed how they were doing this over and over. Unconscious, since they were boys. Boys are unconsciousness, she thought. She figured there must be exceptions. But they were lovers in this way. These three in the street. Dancing into each other. Giddy not awkward. They were like Three Graces. Maybe a little homely but still.

Three Graces. With a basketball under the arm of one.

"That must smell like your body odor," she said. But she said it soft, so friendly. So that it was a tease. A sexual poke. A sexual poke given out of boredom, acedia. The sexiest kind of flirtation. The insincere kind with nuance.

She wondered if she would be sentenced to be the insincere flirt (the word is cocktease, she knew) all her life?

Why was it a question? Why was she sentenced to asking questions instead of making declarative statements like the idiots do?

"Do you want to play basketball?"

"No. Kerry." She had to make it clear she understood the real beg there.

"Behind the 7-11..."

"I know behind the 7-11, Kerry." She was forced to be stern with this horny boy nostalgic already for what had happened over and over in his mind.

Did he really not wash his hand for days? You hear the thing.

The dog on the carpet with his belly upturned. (Look at my yummy, well-behaved balls.)

Just imagine the power, she thought. Why am I not abusing the power? She thought she must be crazy like her mother. Was she merely "psychic" too? To call oneself a psychic was to confess one saw oneself as passive before and within the universe. It was not a magical power. It was a form of usual victimhood. There was a sisterhood. A weakness. It was to believe in feeling over knowledge over feeling. Folding over knowledge over feeling. Like laundry.  How did she know this when she was just fifteen? She just did. A puppet. If you sit on playground swings alone, you will eventually become a philosopher. Everything's eventual. She was a girl philosopher. She had spilled her essence but not her thoughts all over the crooks of these boys who believed that brown longnecks behind the 7-11 were magic talismans on a road somewhere.

She was told that she was prettier than the prettiest girl in the best magazine inside the 7-11..With her legs pinned back like a Japanese butterfly.

She should know.