https://pleasureeditions.com Pleasure Editions Fri, 16 Mar 2018 21:21:52 +0000 https://pleasureeditions.com en https://pleasureeditions.com/THE-LAMP-S-TALES Fri, 16 Mar 2018 21:21:52 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/THE-LAMP-S-TALES <img width="3531" height="3531" width_o="3531" height_o="3531" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b4299c2f31ebfc064eb08f190a17bbb34eb49806aa05787a7462fc03ea09493d/Please_LampsTales_2.jpg" data-mid="13072303" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b4299c2f31ebfc064eb08f190a17bbb34eb49806aa05787a7462fc03ea09493d/Please_LampsTales_2.jpg" /> <img width="2813" height="2813" width_o="2813" height_o="2813" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c973e44c7de1e22908cc9648b3066e168cf4751e3b96da92adb7047e142c04c/Please_LampsTales_1.jpg" data-mid="13072302" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9c973e44c7de1e22908cc9648b3066e168cf4751e3b96da92adb7047e142c04c/Please_LampsTales_1.jpg" /> The poet Paul Colinet (1898–1957) was a primary figure in the Belgian Surrealist group, one of the many productive offshoots of the Paris Surrealists formed in the early part of the 20th century. While remaining allied to the group in Paris, the Belgian Surrealists developed an autonomous style and a concern all their own, and Colinet was one of their shining stars. His poems—rich with the enchanted atmosphere of the folk parable and fairy tale, as well as a generous helping of Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont—are imbued with a dream-like aura, rife with wordplay and contradiction, and suffused with a playful sense of the fantastic. Experimental in both language and narrative, Colinet’s works are a treasure trove, and wholly deserving of a spot beside those of other masters of the French prose-poem like Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Henri Michaux. But despite having been first translated by Paul Bowles in Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s View magazine in 1946, much of Colinet’s work has still never been rendered in English. The Lamp’s Tales, a decades-spanning set of translations by Rochelle Ratner and Michael Kasper, is a small corrective to this oversight, and an estimable introduction to the poet’s fanciful and daring world. The Lamp’s Tales by Paul Colinet Translated by Rochelle Ratner and Michael Kasper Illustrations by Bob Heman 120 pages, perfect bound Edition of 150 $20Rochelle Ratner (1949–2008) wrote four novels, Bobby’s Girl&nbsp;(Coffee House Press, 1986), The Lion’s Share (Coffee House, 1991), Mother and Child (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2009), and Dear Diary (Myrmaid Press, 2015), as well as a collection of short stories, New York Lonely (Myrmaid, 2015) and 16 poetry books, including House and Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003) and Beggars at the Wall&nbsp;(Ikon, 2005). She was Executive Editor of the American Book Review and reviewed regularly for Library Journal. Those of her books published by Marsh Hawk are still available from SPD and Amazon, and as ebooks at http://myrmaidpress.com/. Michael Kasper is a book artist—Plans for the Night (Benzene, 1987),&nbsp;All Cotton Briefs (Benzene, 1992), The Shapes and Spacing of the Letters (highmoonoon, 2004), etc.—and a translator of, among others, Saint Ghetto of the Loans by Gabriel Pomerand (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006). https://pleasureeditions.com/DOMAIN-LATTICE Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:09:18 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/DOMAIN-LATTICE <img width="1000" height="809" width_o="1000" height_o="809" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/30b8ebabac2d94707aefb6f5bb96a364f8e3f6b49a46051240854490cafa26ec/brennacovermonday_3.jpg" data-mid="11082105" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/30b8ebabac2d94707aefb6f5bb96a364f8e3f6b49a46051240854490cafa26ec/brennacovermonday_3.jpg" /> <img width="1422" height="862" width_o="1422" height_o="862" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5e612fe5c0c965e62f2e8df43449448869d50fe6677e0ddaf0bbcf6886f7d9d8/brennaint.jpg" data-mid="11082106" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5e612fe5c0c965e62f2e8df43449448869d50fe6677e0ddaf0bbcf6886f7d9d8/brennaint.jpg" /> DOMAIN~LATTICE by Brenna Murphy The first full-length color monograph by the Portland-based artist and musician. Murphy uses digital imaging, collaged photography and hand-drawn elements to map dizzying patterned landscapes and labyrinthine, glyph-strewn psychic terrains. Her work combines the sleek properties of 3D rendering with the ecstatic and talismanic qualities of folk art and high psychedelia. She has exhibited internationally and been featured in numerous publications. DOMAIN~LATTICE is her first full-color book, and it is a masterpiece. 100 pages, laser-printed, perfect bound, fold-out center and translucent cardstock cover. Edition of 250. SOLD OUT https://pleasureeditions.com/PLEASURE-VIDCHOPS Fri, 02 Jan 2015 18:32:35 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/PLEASURE-VIDCHOPS <img width="2954" height="2954" width_o="2954" height_o="2954" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aba4c92a4e32cfb0424741ffbb38033fba215bcd109221a618aa53e1c99ed512/Please_Vidchops_1.jpg" data-mid="13073294" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aba4c92a4e32cfb0424741ffbb38033fba215bcd109221a618aa53e1c99ed512/Please_Vidchops_1.jpg" /><img width="3093" height="3093" width_o="3093" height_o="3093" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/358ed6d1e2d1d030de39a7febbd67d04d07074afec384bc6da17823881d87140/Please_Vidchops_2.jpg" data-mid="13073295" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/358ed6d1e2d1d030de39a7febbd67d04d07074afec384bc6da17823881d87140/Please_Vidchops_2.jpg" /> 20 page 2 color RISOGRAPH ZINE + DVD combo pack FEATURING: CARLOS GONZALEZ and PLEASURE : Taking It to the Streets MICHAEL CROWE : Kink Konk MAX EILBACHER : Bellson Blues MARALIE : AI.N1.1V BRENNA MURPHY : Fernfacealgorithm SHANA PALMER : Unbinding Charm SIMONE TRABUCCHI : West Coast is Not Forever STEPHANIE BARBER and JENNY GRAF : The Shama Bird in 1889 CF : Rapunzel MARK IOSIFESCU : Georgia ESRA PADGETT and AMINAH SLOR : The Traveling Jingle Sisters NED PAIGE : Slam Dunk MARGARET RORISON : Der Spaziergang M.C. SCHMIDT, NATE BOYCE and J. LESSER : Phase Chancellor TOSHIYA TSUNODA : Sea Sands Sun + Cross Section / Seashore INTRO VIDEO by CAMERON BROWN + MARK IOSIFESCU DOG INTRO by JAMES K. JOYAL MENU MUSIC by ODWALLA 88 https://pleasureeditions.com/ANGUS-MacLISE-POETRY Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:09:16 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/ANGUS-MacLISE-POETRY <img width="2880" height="2332" width_o="2880" height_o="2332" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/778ff0195e5d101247164a706efc884785b6d6520fec4f6d09630603a6b8d3fb/ANGUS-SWIFT.jpg" data-mid="11082108" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/778ff0195e5d101247164a706efc884785b6d6520fec4f6d09630603a6b8d3fb/ANGUS-SWIFT.jpg" /> <img width="1422" height="862" width_o="1422" height_o="862" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bf2e4973030a32fd063a683152169c411668f1b2aa77e292ffe50b4094473ec1/angusintspread_2.jpg" data-mid="11082110" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bf2e4973030a32fd063a683152169c411668f1b2aa77e292ffe50b4094473ec1/angusintspread_2.jpg" /> TRANSLATIONS FROM THE FAR COUNTRY: Selected Poetry and Fragments by Angus MacLise A collection of written work by the poet and countercultural icon, drawn from his vast archive and presented in a classic paperback format. MacLise was a writer, calligrapher, musician and polymath, a dealer in Nepalese rice paper and the first drummer of the Velvet Underground. La Monte Young called him “one of the greatest poets of all time.” He died in Kathmandu in 1979 and was the subject of a career retrospective in 2011; Translations from the Far Country is the first new collection of his poetry in over twenty years. 50 pages, risographed, perfect bound. Edition of 300. SOLD OUT https://pleasureeditions.com/ANGUS-MacLISE-ARTISTS-BOOKS Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:09:19 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/ANGUS-MacLISE-ARTISTS-BOOKS <img width="1422" height="1061" width_o="1422" height_o="1061" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/828ed7c66eb6dfa2b5494be2c0d6f02aa08be37109f6a107df0cfce3f0cbd40b/leaves.jpg" data-mid="11082112" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/828ed7c66eb6dfa2b5494be2c0d6f02aa08be37109f6a107df0cfce3f0cbd40b/leaves.jpg" /> <img width="1422" height="862" width_o="1422" height_o="862" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2a30bd842c0a370797535f3d43a741c9f25920aaa18ea234c39f9dc6bbbd6de8/callig.jpg" data-mid="11082113" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2a30bd842c0a370797535f3d43a741c9f25920aaa18ea234c39f9dc6bbbd6de8/callig.jpg" /> THE 100,000 LEAVES and UNTITLED: Artists books by Angus MacLise MacLise worked unrestrainedly across all genres and media, but his numerous artists books provide the best look at his rabid interdisciplinary practice. From abstract calligraphic journeys to illuminated poetic texts, from plain unmarked pamphlets to books bound by tree bark, MacLise’s short-run publications are a vision of their author’s artistic breadth and unfettered creativity. In recognition, we’re reprinting two of the crown jewels of his archive, one-of-a-kind works that have never seen publication. The 100,000 Leaves: An Iconic Sequence for Ira’s Movie: An abstract storyboard in red and black ink. 28 pages, risographed, staple-bound. Edition of 100. Untitled: Among the finest examples of the inimitable MacLise calligraphic style, an aesthetic excursion to a place somewhere between writing and visual art, a place that transcends language itself. 24 pages, risographed, unbound, beautiful. Edition of 50. SOLD OUT https://pleasureeditions.com/ANGUS-MacLISE-TAPES Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:09:20 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/ANGUS-MacLISE-TAPES <img width="2880" height="1300" width_o="2880" height_o="1300" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9ff35ba9b18552e486770a89be38618cae80dc003908429c143cb37e2418c371/TAPES.jpg" data-mid="11082115" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9ff35ba9b18552e486770a89be38618cae80dc003908429c143cb37e2418c371/TAPES.jpg" /> Pleasure Editions’ first music release, and what a rare honor it is: a 3-cassette compilation of unheard music from MacLise’s vast and wide-ranging reel-to-reel back catalogue containing everything from tape experiments to folk jams, spoken word to synth noise insanity—all animated by the remarkable spirits of MacLise and his cohorts. Set of 3 c60s. Edition of 100. SOLD OUT https://pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-4 Fri, 13 Oct 2017 19:38:47 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-4 <img width="1944" height="2592" width_o="1944" height_o="2592" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a58c05dfad25c2890f8fd0687268666a482af93fce7aa97c0bccc534db5f1e48/illtombera4_o.jpg" data-mid="11082261" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a58c05dfad25c2890f8fd0687268666a482af93fce7aa97c0bccc534db5f1e48/illtombera4_o.jpg" /> PREVIOUSLY: J.R. and Georgia reunite in the wake of Ritchie Ra’s death at the hands of the henchperson Renfro Vale; we meet some of Georgia’s many roommates--somnolent Ket and Kava, Poppy the runaway, musclebound Herb; Bob the cat is stymied; in Georgia’s bedroom, she and J.R. play at circumlocution, letting things ride pretty close to the vest, and for all their professed desire for connection their farflung stars reveal no discernible constellation. He, who’s inherited his father’s penchant for secrecy and brutal, stultifying logical interiority, recounts some dispiriting paternal memories, and she indulges a familial impulse for libertinism; a certain identification with the moon is posited; a diagnosis of refraction is made. We are all living ends. “You know what this song really reminds me of, right?” There is a sort of hopeless boredom that wafts over the courtyard, men leaning arms folded, whispering to each other and gesturing, in terse shorthand and with just-lit cigs, towards the tower. The winds are quiet here, though in the columns of warm floodlight ahead some swirls of what looks like dust, or maybe tiny flecks of vapor, coalesce obviously into little shapes, tongues of breath forking like flame and winding up the facade, brushing, kissing the brick. The tower’s base glows in the fine particulate mist. Seems the breeze is somehow starting out here, being generated, snatching up some energy or movement from the tired huddles and pulling it in, along the path and up the interior spiral ramp to the lit platform at its top. Some nighttime anomaly is sucking vampiric, some unknown specific of the night’s pressure gradient drawing, ceaselessly, on paltry human respiration; nobody here can breathe too deeply, and the cigarettes keep going out. Everyone is just sort of standing around, waiting for the next group to be called. Some nap, hats over faces, leaning against the heavy marble plinths deposited along the stone courtyard’s statue-lined circumference. You stroll destinationless--it’s chilly, keep the blood flowing, type of thing--and try to clock your surroundings. Take a look, squinting and teary against the night’s chill, at the various sculptures. A bronze spear-carrier without a head. A pharaoh with a broken-off nose. A faceless female nude, cut voluptuary and languid in the old style, lounging upturned on a scorched granite pedestal. You take a look at the cylindrical drum stuck obstinate in the earth before them, rising squat but resolute the 119 ft to the ruined turret that punctuates its tip. The White Tower. No interior platforms, just the room at the top, just this helicoidal ramp winding ceaseless, just this central chasm mawing wider and wider the higher up one gets. You can see, silhouetted through the row of embrasures lining the structure’s upper half, another coterie on the inside, gaggle of troops waiting, ramp-locked in single file, stooped and hunched in various sorry postures. In the dark and distance, you can’t get much of a lock on their expressions, and you know actually it’s much the same for the men that surround you, now you think about it; you’d only been glancing, cursory, but even now, under the weight of sustained gaze leveled at point blank range, they are inscrutable. Their faces are the pharaoh’s, the spear-bearer’s; half-finished, fragmentary. It’s about to rain. You make about 120 yards to the tower’s entrance, a small arched portal set into a thick rectangular recess. 119 yards to the open latticed grill. 357 ft as the crow flies, but the route from the courtyard varicates considerably; the footpath is longer, ringed by thick low grasses on both sides, down a swathe of circuitous, pitchblack mud. You’re halfway, moving at a blurry, anxious pace, before sudden sounds overheard snap you still. There is movement close by. Indefinite shapes are lurching, black on black, in the brush. Grass blades snap and crunch. Damp soil turns over. Grubs surface, tunnel and plow on either side. But the path--wait. A shuffle, just in back of you, caught ringing out a half-second past your untelegraphed halt. A shuffle, unmistakeable. And so, suspended, you take a breath and hazard an intrepid look behind. In the mud at your feet--actually reaching high as the mudflecked tops of your mil-spec Altama boots, 21 inches--swaying squat in a contained, modest oscillation, a movement whose depth is roughly that of a respiring pair of lungs, is the most enormous bug you have ever seen. Thick, black and fiercely reflective, the sheen off its exoskeleton about the only thing, besides an implicit but untraceable spatial suggestion of large mass, describing its shape at all: a huge beetle, dung or scarabaean, black curled antennae and furred forelimbs nearly a ft long apiece. Sharpened points projecting out, nubbing its front joints in armored symmetry. And this heaving breath, labored, human, even a little wheeze coloring its underside, light, sensual, in a touch of eerie femininity. “Go on,” she says, between breaths in an unaccented but tonally insectine drawl, “you’re almost there.” “The entrance?” you here with a feel for what seems to be expected by the night. She nods, mandibles cooing, a calm extension of her wheezy intake, and a light drizzle commences. You swallow. “But then I’ve got to climb all the way to the top?” “It’s not so far.” “Won’t I have to wait in line?” “Not you,” emphatic and softening, in fact, toward something resembling flirty. “You can just walk right in.” You smile sheepish and turn back toward the tower. “They’re going to pick me, huh?” Behind you her voice is all smooth edges now, as heavy raindrops start to come down and her antennae uncurl, fan out into six-leaved peacockian splendor, and palpate excitedly. “You are going to make just the cutest subject.” Fifty feet out, the footpath gives way to deep sinking on both sides, pools and rivulets, bits of brush and small stones washing out from the center, spilling down and running back aground somewhere in the dark. A stone causeway juts across this last span, with low, white brick walls running the interval to the tower’s doorway, the ruined open grill, and the floodlamp cans deposited around its base. The walls’ widths are cut in wave patterns, alternating concave and convex the whole way, ostensibly to account for cracks from shrinking bricks or swelling, marshy ground, though their look--periodic, steady--pushes certain correspondences to the fore: this sinusoidal curve, conducting you inexorably to the gate; those sealed beam lights, radiating upturned against the building’s underside; the individual resistances encountered at each successive doorway, and their aggregated volume of cold opposition waiting, up there, on the platform. You break into a run, sudden exhilaration, enough to just begin to feel it till-- “Look!” a sudden call going up makes you look away at precisely the wrong moment, kfft--some sliding out from under and--crfft, thud. Altamas, torn jeans, mud; nope, you can’t see much, and a fat raindrop just fell right in your eye, but “Look out!” again, from somewhere just ahead. And behind you? Yeah. Growing out of the wrought-iron gate--left ajar on wet turf for who knows how long and gone planter--are a gaggle of weeds, and having gunned it down the causeway, across the marshy ditch divide and past the open lattice door, you’ve snagged a mil-spec foot on one, tripped and fallen, tough guy, right on your face. But who’d yelled out? Scrambling up, muck splatterns and tiny bits of blood fringing the spot where, hmm, and your hand feels funny, must’ve landed on it weird--though finally sheltered under the tower entrance’s outcropped lintel, you’re inside, and not thinking of complaining. The speaker is just ahead, peering out a window, a heavy canvas rucksack blocking any opportunity for positive identification though, even with his back turned, you can see that you both are wearing the same uniform. Got two arms out the window, pointing double-indexed down one of the tower’s cardinal sightlines, past the lamps to sunrise’s earliest glowings, out over the town, at horizon’s edge. Without turning back he lets out a wordless low bleating, and rubs his palms together. “A mysterious light from the east!” Knowing you’re not to look, though, you elect to walk past. The rain’s kinda pounding away out there, but inside there’s this mist you’d been eyeing, beads of perspiration depositing on mudscrapes and ripped clothing and a chill whose profundity, even in the stark absence of draft or breeze, is just beginning to kind of peek out. Starting up the ramp, you crane for a look toward the top, where, from the courtyard’s distant vantage, you’d seen those other subjects. Now there’s no one, just silence. They must have gone inside, and now nothing--neither your footsteps nor the rustle of clothing or of hand against waveform-patterned ramp banister, not the pump of arterial blood in temples or neck or in the nascent throb of your swelling hand--makes a sound. The light hits suddenly, and four shadow forms leap upward to fold compacted against the ceiling and crumple, obliging, at stations north, east, south, west. You’re being quartered in the floodlight beams. You’re looking at your hand, at the modular ornamented stone ceiling, and out, onto the platform. You’ve hit the staging area. The space is dusty, hasty swept Dryvit shavings, fake plaster lumped in piles here and there. Real cheap finish on the floor tiles, thin with perforation holes and substrate showing through. Construction was only recently suspended, and this whole arrangement is temporary. Dust forms twist round each other, billow and preen. Large gray cushioned swivel chairs are set up in a large inward-facing circle, with distended bubbles of chrome or hard shiny plastic welded to their tops on bony metal cords. All the chairs are occupied--their domes bent down, over the heads of seated subjects, resting mute with heavy black headphones clamped on them--save one. Your chair. The headphone cables disappear into crude 1/4” drilled holes in the tile, and little mounds of fine powder are still piled up alongside. But you’re looking at the spot on which the seated subjects’ sightlines converge, where the lightbeams meet and refract, harsh and prismatic. They’re lit, aimed and calibrated to provide heat for the simulation. To control, on cold nights like this one, for environmental conditions. Their beams center on a compound glass-fronted case on a coated plywood frame. Modular stacked tanks cut in irregular cubed chunks jut wildly and pile one atop the other in a crude tetrominal pyramid. Heat lamps, mats and glowing plates line the structure’s edges, converging at vertex points and illuminating the byzantine frame. Vapors hiss gently, water drips or bubbles from onboard humidifiers, maintain the oxygen breakdown at proper levels but it’s all academic because, see, you can’t breathe at all. Aquaria and terraria, arranged like puzzle pieces, and swarmed--inside is all wriggle and squirm: here a mass of long-tongued black skinks buckling and pivoting with the gut determination of a single creature; here a tendrilate lump of brown flatworms, cavernous pharynxes stretched inside out, attacking, devouring, fucking a few of their own; here a single fist-sized hymenopteroid, a fat hairy bee preening, rubbing legs against the edge of her shadowsunk glass case; a--yeah, hundreds, insects and reptiles, arachno-, mammali- and tongue and beak and no--their blown-out dimensions and frantic activity, their jerky, violent movements somehow exactly what was anticipated, exactly what you’ve been inhaling all along, exactly what snatched the breath in your meager, wet lungs. Exactly what’s loosening the veins in your--yeah, as balance leaves you you look down, down at the hand you sure can’t feel anymore, the hand which has doubled, roughly, in size--and you drop. You’re in the allotted chair, headphones on. “The subjects are escaping,” you murmur to no one in particular. “They’re getting outside. A beetle--they’re getting out of their tanks. I just talked to one. She was--she said--” But the placid white wash of playback clicks on and you can’t hear yourself sputtering anymore. The program tonight is brand new. “Gentlemen, we’re glad to meet you. Welcome. Remain seated as the magnetic tape is engaged.” Hand throbs agreeably. “Be aware”--as your gaze spills down through the drilled-through floortile, down through the vast central gulf of the White Tower, as insects click to frenzy outside and, in the courtyard, soldiers stand at attentive worship of a sun threatening never to rise--“it does get loud.” * * “And when I woke up,” actually shouting here over the gusts of wind, “I had a tear in my eye. I was crying.” Respite’s been slow in the offing for ragdoll Atonwa, who can’t seem to quit being tossed around, especially here on the Perdido River, sharing a beer in a tent while vicious wind and sideways rain whips its sides, fabric puckered tight to the metal poles, this whole raft, in fact, leaping a good half-foot into the air every couple of seconds, knocking Atonwa and his new companion Pat clang, skulls into tentpole, again and again. And getting in the way of this dream recounting sesh. “You had a what?” Pat making can’t hear you signs with one hand, using the other to press cold beer compress to fresh bump on the head. “A tear in my eye!” but no use, Pat shakes his head again just as the tentside zipper opens with a sawtoothed screech and they both duck instinctively, faces buried to avoid that incoming squall. Each, holding on to something, looks up tentatively at the figure stepping through the flap and notes it’s just Billy, back from shore--really just the convenience store a couple miles back up the country road whose ‘Scenic River View’ parking area they’ve decided to tie up and wait this blower out alongside--and he’s brought more beer, which happy fact requires nary a word to convey. But there’s something else--here zipping the tent back up, checking on the snugness of the stakes in their pine joist holes--Billy means to show them. “This motherfucker,” talking to Pat but pointing at Atonwa, “was dead right. Check it out,” riffling excitedly through his duffel bag, clank of loose bottles and fireworks just about the only thing audible over the din, he pulls out a rolled-up dirty sweatshirt, unfurls it in a single fluid ribbon dance. Out spills a roughwrought cube of an object, wooden, 1 x 1 x 1, onto the deck, which--the pontoons below jolting over a sudden swell--leaps up once more, bbbbump, and lobs the item, pop, into Atonwa’s somehow ready, somehow steady good hand. Whatta catch. What it is is a strobe light, little homemade lightbox with a lamp behind an opaque white plastic screen and a loose photocell, tiny round piece of metal knocking around inside, unattached and so grooving on the bouncy current, pinging like a marble against the other components. A short length of cord lolls out of its front like a tongue, but ends a few inches later in a gnarl of stripped wire. Yellow sticker on the side reads “$??.??.” Atonwa, for whom confusion has so far today figured as default expression, looks up nonplussed. Pat, by contrast, is wearing a look of considerable shock and a jaw so slack that, when the next bump catches him off-guard, he jumps practically through the canvas roof. What it is is a clue, folks, as to who robbed these guys. A corroboration, more accurately, on a tip. Damning, too. Alright, to back up, Billy--sometimes Billy Bonney, fake name, thanks--Red Indian guitarist for the Seminole punk band NMF, and Pat, Pat Garrett, drums, found Atonwa early this morning. Or he them, more accurately--it happened while Pat was out on a little truckstop walkabout which had really just been about getting cellphone reception. With no idea who had unhitched and spirited the trailer off of their Econoline camper conversion van in advance of their Pensacola gig, the two had spent a while trying to call friends up and down the coast and put the word out--”all our gear was in the stolen trailer, there’ll be no shows without it, we’re fucked,” being the main takeaway--but even after Pat’s calls started getting through no one was picking up. Ritchie Ra was throwing a big party in New York that night and everyone was presumably hanging there, and so with no better plan the guys had sort of settled into a measured panic, resolved to just drive north through the night, maybe make Richmond by noon and take stock then. And so here they were, at a quiet Flying J just over the Alabama border, gassing up for another night-drive, this one a touch more depressing than usual. Billy went inside the station to piss, buy two giant cups of watery coffee, and pay for the diesel--the cash for which had to come, rather terrifyingly, from the theretofore untouched “emergencies only” envelope, a measure NMF had only just put in place after years of tour catastrophes firmly cemented the theoretical usefulness of a store of bills, carried on one or the other bandmember’s person at all times, set aside for bail money or vehicle breakdown. But fuck if they hadn’t counted on theft--personal, targeted theft of their musical gear, all the shit they required to play; their livelihood, such as it was, not to mention the only possessions either of them really owned. It was an extraordinary violation. Such were the types of thoughts, at least, cycling through Billy’s frazzled late-night cortex as he shook off the endorphin comedown of the canceled gig, stared past the ruddy-complected checkout clerk and the racks of cheap Alabama-priced cigarettes to the row of video screens that lined the store’s back wall and locked eyes with his most dejected self, there on one of the closed circuit monitors. His tall frame and crooked posture, exhausted, pissed expression; bleached shirt, filthy, threadbare and a nauseous yellow, cut into a crude beater shape; some crummy travel trinkets from the just-completed drive out West, a leather pouch of red rock sand from a vortex zone in Sedona and an arrowhead from the Mt. Shasta foothills, now hanging round his neck and just feeling like a couple of bad luck charms; patch-sewn torn-up pants that had once accounted for some kind of nice cotton deal; beat-up red leather vaquero boots, a rusted bullet belt with a broken buckle, a lot of stupid tattoos and, there in his hand, the bag of Little Debbie mini-cupcakes into which he’d already tore. The accumulated tokens of a youth spent as a proud peripatetic revealed, in this harsh fluorescent light, as the costume of the oblivious derelict, the directionless slob, eager to put on appearances but only so much dead flabby weight when push came to shove. No purpose, no skills--aside from a certain prowess on those guitars of which, yeah, he’d just been stripped. Amidst the tinny moan of country radio and the sweaty stink of indifferently rotating hotdogs, Billy saw himself, really saw. Fuck. The bleakest of moments. He had been running mental inventories on the stolen gear over and over for hours. There were his two guitars and a bass. The guitars had been the gift of Edgar O’Nubb, who’d used them back in the 80s. Now, sentimental value was kind of goofy as a concept but Billy--for whom all the early O’Nubb axe work had been the reason to pick up a patch cable in the first place--could already tell he was going to be torn up over their loss. The bass had belonged to a former bandmate, and truth be told Billy was not too hung up it’d been taken. Pat’s drums were also nothing too special, a set of Japanese beginner pieces that he hooked up to contact mics and ran through a whole battery of effects. A material loss there, yeah, but one easily replaceable and so not really the end of the world. Still, the rest of it he couldn’t bear to think about. Most brutal by far was the speaker theft: gorgeous, giant guitar amps, the custom PA to which they linked up (a powered mixer, huge subwoofers and sundry tweeters to catch that bright end), ten pieces in all, painstakingly assembled, broken in over countless shows until they sounded exactly right, and always transported lovingly, with the utmost caution and care; indeed, though the equipment was mightily, absurdly heavy, Pat and Billy always refused help loading in to a venue, as if it was dignity itself they were carrying. They loved those fucking things. Whoever took them was going to have to die. “Do what?” in an alarmed whisper that emanated just then from the kid checkout clerk, as Billy kind of clicked back out of his little woolgathering session and realized he had been staring up at the security feed, tensing into ever-angrier facial contortions, and--most disconcertingly--that he had voiced that last threat out loud. “Sorry, just a, thinking, heh, fucking, Christ, almighty,” giving up on excuse-making halfway through this one, settling on just slamming a wad of emergency cash on the table, slapping a manic grin over his exhausted features and winking, for some reason. Shouldering in for the slump toward the exit and taking one last look, punishment glutton, up at the row of security camera displays, he--but not so fast. The feed trained on pump #2--and their attending vehicle, still gassing up--caught his eye. Time stopped. A long evening’s worth of accumulated, deferred aggression found its referent. He made a fist instinctively. There, on the screen, was a shape, a human shape, climbing onto the van, monkeying with the back window. Some motherfucker was trying to break back in. “You fuck!” pointing at the screen as the kid, who probably thought Billy meant him, literally ducked behind the counter. No time to fool around and with hands full--two hot coffees and no particularly sense he ought to put them down--Billy kicked the door open hard, knocking the “thanks for visiting” entrance chime into some kind of manual overdrive, and came tear-assing down the path to the gas pumps while the doorbell dinged behind him over and over. He arrived there in a second and a half, instantly locked on to his target--this skinny shirtless Red Indian scrambling atop the van, mid-climb, halfway up the rear gate, one boot on the back bumper and a slippery palm slapping down on the roof for purchase--and thoom, whipped one cup, hard, then thoom, the other. “Aaah!” and Atonwa--for duh, it was he--looked up with an expression of utter vacuity, each eye going in a different direction, just in time to catch both offerings dead in the forehead, foam cups exploding into hot black fonts, liquid fire splashed raw across his sightline and he fell, spectacularly: first an “ehhhuh!” kind of babyish staccato as he lifted hands to shocked face and “bhugh,” leveling into low wordless bleating here as “gguh,” more hard-edged he went over the side between the van and the pump, whose nozzle was still in the fuel tank, and so “aaooh!” the pump’s hose went taut and caught him right under the chin, knocking his neck whiplash-straight back and landing him head-first compacted vertebral while his legs got caught on the fuel-hose clothesline and kind of pretzeled around the rubber, snagging on his boots at at least three different points and bringing the whole arrangement more or less to cat’s-cradle proportions. Just then the gas tank--still being filled--clicked to completion and the pump shut off, spitting the nozzle out of the tank onto the ground, allowing the rest of the hanged man to drop finally, thoomp, lumpen, against the pavement. And to lie there, silently. Billy, who for a truckstop cupcake-eater was strong in a way that kind of snuck up on you, was positive he’d killed this guy. But not for long, as the whine soon kicked back up. “I beseech you brethren...”, weak-voiced from tire-level. He approached, wary, and stood over the would-be-intruder, lying face-up. “The fuck were you just doing?” “I give up my body a living sacrifice,” Atonwa said, leery, brow furrowed across sad, expectant eyes, “holy, acceptable...” facial expression going blubbery in a profound way, like the skin might drip clean off the frame any second now. “Hey, c’mon,” Billy way too fried for all of this. “Are you hurt?” “Holy...” Atonwa lifted his right hand--badly swollen and wrapped in a grass-stained strip of white gauze--over to the hose, and before Billy could say anything had snatched and six-gunned it with a little backflip twirl to turn the nozzle on himself and douse his own body in gas. “What the fuck are you insane!?” grabbing the dispenser away from Atonwa, who gave up right away, and stuffing it back in the pump’s holster. “Holy...” as reaching with his unbandaged left hand the fuel-drenched Atonwa grabbed a rear mudflap of the Econoline and slid himself out of range, back into position to re-climb the bumper. Billy froze as--“acceptable,” Atonwa kept kind of mumbling, clambering up the gate yet again until before long he was back on top of the van, “acceptable unto the Earthenware Virgin and Child--” “--Wait.” Cold singularity, a flash; brutal, anesthetizing. A plot, emergent, darting, though in that moment, Billy detected it: there, a weighty beast of unknown origin, spotlit prey fringed by the tallgrass of his earthly desires, his complaining, this anxiety and embarrassment, painful spot on his neck where his guitar strap should be hanging. The gear. Billy felt a hand on his shoulder and looked back. It was Pat, returned from his quest for a phone signal. He’d heard it too. “Did you say Earthenware Virgin and Child? Do you know that band?” Atonwa--suddenly unsure whether he’d said too much in mixed company--seemed to panic, chickenshit, and clamped a bandaged hand over his mouth as if to actually stuff the words back in. “What about them?” Billy, in a pretty scary voice that came out more or less automatically, impulse to angle for violence kind of renewed. But sing-no-evil Atonwa just shook his head uh-uh, hand still idiotically vise-gripped around his jaw. Earthenware Virgin and Child was a stoner metal two-piece out of New Orleans. They were on a southeast tour at the moment, and would have had cause--P.I. mind kicking in for old Billy here--to’ve been in Pensacola that night. They knew NMF alright, had crossed paths once or twice; and even though the conventional wisdom said no one but no one ever steals gear from a fellow touring musician, something about this band in particular seemed to check out, at least in a “persons of interest” kind of capacity. Pat and Billy, stuck fast with indecision at the discombobulatory ride of it all, just looked at each other, the gas station doorbell still chiming some 50 ft away, repetitive backing soundtrack buying Atonwa here some meditative moments to peer into the van, whose back windows didn’t roll down, only opening maybe an inch or so on an offset, ventilational basis, meaning he had to tilt his head at a crazy angle to see inside. And so of course he lost balance and fell again--not quite so ceremoniously this time, just a quick anchor drop, thud, straight to earth. All that Pat and Billy had left in the van were their 8-ft plywood boards, styrofoam pontoons and a pretty cool tent they’d picked up out west, pieces of the raft they had vaguely planned on constructing on one of their scheduled off-days, which, heh, was all their calendar comprised now. Lying in cozy collapse on the ground with his good hand still muzzling himself, Atonwa looked up at them, flecks of coffee, blood and gasoline girding an expression of perfect lunacy as he issued a muffled rejoinder, though not the one for which they’d asked. “Let’s build that shit.” * * Which is how they spent the morning, dropping the remainder of the emergency money (a cool $98, when they bothered to count) on more plywood, a cheap Ryobi drill and, oh yeah, these beers. Something about having Atonwa around--though he’d spent all night and day sleeping--had them putting in a little more effort, lending a touch of, maybe call it lunatic immediacy to the process. By noon, Pat and Billy’d quickly assembled a more seaworthy craft--long beams screwed flush against the floorboard, a perfect fit--than the two of them, they don’t mind admitting, would’ve managed on their own. But then, this was no pleasurecraft, their mission no leisure pursuit. They were planning a straight-up rescue. “Where’d you find the strobe?” Pat asking between bites of pizza, wind died down and the river’s southbound flow having returned to its casual norm, hot sun out but readying to set, the cast-off craft puttering smooth toward the ocean, a few beers in every belly and Atonwa napping somewhere in a pile of sleeping bags on the tent floor. “Pawn shop just up the road,” replies Billy, smiling significantly. “Clerk, nice guy, told me it was brought in this morning.” “And did he tell you who--” “Sure did. ‘Ah yes, a tall boy, long black hair, beard, seem to remember an older blonde lady friend of his waiting outside in a matte black station wagon with some heinous, highly offensive designs painted on it.’ Apparently they hung out smoking for a few minutes; guy described both of them perfect.” Earthenware Virgin and Child, the pride of the bayou metal scene, a band with a couple, let’s say unusual proclivities, not the least of which was manifested in their hearse-like touring vehicle. The clerk was probably talking about the inverted-cross decal painted on the hood, which was honestly kind of cool and glowed in the dark. “And the car--” “No trailer hitched up to it; I asked. But plenty of gear in the back. The clerk tried to make an offer on some of the equipment, but the tall boy wouldn’t have it,” Billy relishing the reveal here, “especially when it came to those Sunn cabs.” Sunn cabinets. Same amplifiers as these two use. Or did, till the things got ripped off. So they’d ditched the trailer, maybe, but wow, the case is open-and-shut. Pat, bit of crust in his mouth, can only chew and chew in quiet disbelief. “There’s more,” Billy spitting overboard. “Seems they asked about a young Native, wandering around alone, whether the clerk might’ve seen or heard of him.” “Meaning me?” Pat had been out alone early this morning, it was true, on that cell phone odyssey. “Clerk thought it was me, actually. ‘You being, might say, a singular Red Indian, heh heh, uhh, think may’t’ve been you they was asking after,’ and I didn’t correct him.” “Because you didn’t want to mention our new friend?” “You know,” just then, sloppily from behind, “You know what this song really reminds me of, right?” Atonwa, some sleeptalk intonation piping up from inside the tent, groggy, groping for a response. And, some shaky contemplation of just what it is they’re mixed up in taking hold over their unaccustomed features, the members of NMF look one to the other, and back at the tent, and down at the water. * * In the last few weeks, Ket has taken to wearing a small golden swastika charm around his neck (‘ancient symbol of cyclical creation,’ as Kava often reminds onlookers, although Ket himself has kept mum on the item’s personal significance). It’s shabby and shiny at once, and is always at a bizarre angle of disarray, knotted up on its chain or stuck someplace in its wearer’s long rat’s-nest hairdo or single bleached dreadlock, or else caked or dripping with food. Ket leans a lot--back and forth and often without much regard for the oscillation’s depth--and since he’s pretty much always cooking, it’s not uncommon for him to start awake with a heavy whiff over a bubbling pot, his jewelry and sometimes his loose shirt collar already in the soup. Sometimes he finds himself absentmindedly sucking on the nubs of the swastika-legs, picking up on the ancient tastes there for the detecting. Think whatever you want; Ket really is a great roommate, and his girl Kava too. Where their clan is concerned, they do right by all. Kava, who moved in last winter, has deep connections in the natural foods underground, which vague hookups, combined with their EBT accounts, are responsible for feeding pretty much 95% of the house--everyone except Herb, really, who doesn’t like to share--all required sustenance on any given day. And though their meager earnings, from the exotic plant and tea mailorder Kava’s been supposedly running since moving to New York and the odd gig Ket gets doing sound for a band in the city, all seem to go to the drugs they share, the couple has never been late on rent or bills of any kind. They appear to genuinely care about the house--cleaning and making small repairs as needed--and its inhabitants, giving away all their cigarettes, watching Bob the cat when Blob’s out of town or contriving medicinal decoctions when someone’s sick. Mornings usually Kava will head into the city to meet their guy and return with the day’s worth of product as well as a bike basketful of fancy groceries. Usually by late afternoon you’re looking at Ket’s famous lentil mush frothing accommodatingly, a steady though leisured boil; he and Kava are vegans and opioid-cases and so, as you might guess, they like to cook it low and slow. Which has pretty much been the deal today, a stew pleasantly enmushening in the big pot since about 10:00, 10:15 this morning, and Ket standing guard blankly in a corner of the unsanded, butterfly-grooved and decidedly ramshackle kitchen area, actually staring straight ahead through the greasy dark hair that frames, bisects and oftentimes completely obscures his sightline (this not counting the one white dread off to the side, which, questionable aesthetics aside, never gets in the way), while an 80s new age cassette dribbles tinnily from the spraypainted old Califone he’s got parked on the countertop, the soft synths drowning out the occasional hiss of his long boil as bubbles drift up to the soup’s surface and swell, momentarily volcanic, before popping with a satisfying burp and spewing out a bit of vapor. It is an intoxicating, primordial pattern: a placid brewing punctuated with moments of terrific volatility, crackles and hisses appearing out of nowhere, before everything returns to safety and warmth. Can’t blame a guy, eyeing the routine, for spacing out. Kava is reading a magazine or maybe napping on the couch, and fat Bob, the only other resident that seems to be home at 2:45 on a Thursday (though nobody’s seen Georgia today; could be she’s still up in her room), is almost definitely sleeping in a cupboard somewhere. Everyone feels alright. Ket is kind of hung up, though. What he’s thinking about most likely has something to do with the current fortunes of NMF, the band in which he figured as a member for something like five years--playing bass on records and shows around New York as well as touring religiously--until quitting in a huff last New Year’s. Ket had long regarded bandmates Pat and Billy as brothers, could never have imagined their collaboration coming to an end. But hooboy, ended it sure had--and if the same wasn’t maybe officially true of their three-way friendship, once ironclad, then its current material metaphor was decidedly less metallic; something more along the lines of a threadbare string, if you really wanna know. The wound is still raw, at least on his end. So what had they fought about? Well look, it does seem kind of overblown, but in Ket’s opinion the disagreement had been sort of, well, fundamental. And far-reaching too, going back, in point of fact, to the mutual political passions that had initially underlay the band’s founding. Ket is actually Russian. Born in Leningrad in the last year of Soviet Olympic domination--his hardliner father had often proudly recounted how Nikita Aleksandrovich had emerged at the precise moment the USSR notched a 7-1 win against Sweden in the 1988 gold medal hockey game--he was inculcated from birth with a healthy store from the dwindling supply of old-world European national fervor. Most of his friends growing up listened to rap, new American groups, or at least the Beatles or something; Ket’s dad, on the other hand, had kept a strict eye on his son’s CD collection, and in family settings had jammed only Alla Pugacheva and Valery Leontiev tapes. All of which meant that when, after years of experiences marked by the corrosive character of post-dissolution Petersburg and a youth at the margins of a crumbled orthodoxy (as in ‘Orthodox;’ his grandfather had been a priest in the Eastern church and his mother, a Kazan Tatar, was for the most part stringently kept out of the equation), Ket found himself in the States, alone, stridently cultivating a sort of areligious, outlaw punker identity for himself, with--he admits it--something of a political stick up his ass. Meeting Pat and Billy constituted the perfect opportunity to make good on subverting his heritage, his unsolicited birthright, and so--in a move designed specifically to turn the bones of the late Aleksandr, buried in Tikhvin, to ever-finer flecks of paternal dust--Ket began playing punk music with a pair of American Red Indians. And it had been sick, man, so much fun; touring endlessly, living off their tunes for years on end with nary a booking agent, manager, lawyer or record company jerk in sight. All until the end of last year, when Pat and Billy, tired of losing money on long drives and house shows, seized on a promised cash advance from some NY party-scene fools and cut a deal (Ket, whose feelings on the matter wouldn’t have been hard to guess, was not consulted), signing with some group called Jeweled Opal Booking for full rights to schedule shows, tours, record company meetings, the whole bit. First gig under these new auspices--and the moment Pat and Billy chose to inform Ket of the band’s new direction--was a December 31st midnight set punctuated with drunken flare-ups, live sound problems, sundry ill omens and an epic fistfight. Of course Ket had walked. And he hasn’t seen Pat or Billy since. “And now we’re high and dry! No gear!” Not actually Pat talking to Ket here, just his voice, discreet hallucinatory murmur. Happens from time to time, Ket imagining himself attuned to certain frequencies but, you know, could obviously just be making these visits up wholesale. The sound is unmistakeable though; it’s his old friend’s, soft, wispy, emanating direct from the bubbling soup. “I heard, man, bummer.” Ket is speaking right into the pot. “They got my bass too probably?” It had never been returned to him; truth is he hasn’t much felt like playing music these days anyway. “‘Fraid so.” The soup pauses a moment. “Hey I guess you were right, huh? Looks like those booking agents really fucked us.” Ket hesitates a second, peeks over at Kava asleep on the couch, mulls something over. “I just didn’t want to play the game, you know?” What passes, here in the kitchen, for an apology. “Didn’t want to be famous. Didn’t want to try. Worried it would change me...” Does this sound dumb? Like one long cop-out, a series of excuses hastily thrown together for self-protection? Ket can’t decide. That he’s shooting himself in the foot, living like this, is plain as day; there is a growing fear, stuck fast to the underside of his every waking thought, that says he is dissociating further every moment, careening away from reality into a kind of managed stasis, a functional dementia that sees him, sure, talking to the food, but otherwise keeping up. Causes are not hard to spot, and the timeline doesn’t lie: this drug thing has only really kicked up in the last six months, you know, since he’s quit the band. “I don’t know, though,” brow furrows narrowing, maybe a tear? “I got a lot of doubt...” “It’s okay, dude...” the pot here radiating blissful, condolences all around, “be seeing you soon...” so inviting, and-- “--Nikita!” a yank on his necklace tears his head back flipping sopping hair and splashing lentil bits, cooked carrot chunks and--yeuch--flecks of vomit all over the counter, the Califone, and on Poppy herself, who’s just done the yanking. “You passed out!” He’d actually dropped to full submersion, stuck his head all the way in the boiling pot, and started barfing and shaking. His face, as she dabs it with a wet paper towel, burns something awful. “You gotta be more careful, man! Jesus...” Poppy, getting the puke out of her hair, trying to sound in control but pretty stringently avoiding eye contact. “...when did you get home?” all he can manage to warble out, slow, frighteningly slow, leaden. She finally looks up, countenance of piercing concern, too freaked out to shoulder this burden. Nobody’s nurse. “Ugh,” she just turns and walks away. Shakes Kava, who wakes with a slow smile, and points back to the kitchen, ‘go talk to your homeboy, he’s not doing so hot,’ kind of gesture. And sprints the rest of the way to her room, knocking over a stack of LPs in the corridor, slams the door shut and dives onto her bare twin mattress to bury herself in a pile of dirty laundry. * * That the info on Pat and Billy’s lost gear should’ve gotten to Poppy so quickly should come as no shock. Of course she has her ear to the ground where they’re concerned--they’re in NMF, her favorite band, one of the first she saw when she got into the city, the same night, in point of fact, on which she first met her beloved roomies. So just for starters, Poppy, who’s grown up plenty fast, has no qualms about placing herself in the archetypal lineage descending from those disaffects who pack their bags and, in the verses of classic rock and roll tunes and attendant cultural lore, decide to leave their old life behind for New York. In her embrace of this folk legend and all it implies we might note her desire to mythologize herself, perhaps wilily gloss over some incidental heartache. She would probably say it’s worth the lie and be done with it. Like NYC emigration, Jersey childhood, for a misfit, is after all pretty well-troped-out: cutting gym to smoke in the woods, hanging with older kids, getting a ride to the hardcore show a few towns over, etc. She’d stumbled through it, had fun, had fights, lived. Participated, half-knowingly, half-bashful but enjoying it all the same, in that inflation of purpose so intrinsic to being young. After getting socked, thrown around, elbowed for four hours in the mosh pit, she’d kissed the boy she liked in the parking lot, gone home wearing his studded leather jacket and been unable, even back amongst her viciously feuding parents, to stop smiling. Different story for them. Their little girl, their obstinate Renoir wildflower, was misbehaving. How could they put a lid on it? She’d get called into the office of the principal, caught with a joint or a bottle of wine in her locker, and they’d be waiting there for her, Dad stooped over and Mom’s eyes all a-fury. Later she’d get an earful about that commute in from the city, where they worked, and just what it took to get someone to cover for them at the office, etcetera and so on. And she was sorry, honest; not for enemies, least of all these two, Poppy just wanted them to understand the situation, so she’d tried to explain that if, sure, sometimes she fell into that bored program of chemical-stoked misadventure and creeping behind backs, she was also mapping the parameters of an adolescence wherein identity was beginning to crystallize, wherein exhilaration at getting away with something could actually be pinned down to this nascent feeling, only ever a hinting thereof, that she was alive, beginning to be, feeling it out... That she was sorry, anyway, but couldn’t change who she was, who she was coming to be. Why--when she’d tried to explain, when she’d detailed it in all sincerity and love at their having delivered her this far, when she’d assured them she knew what was happening and had in no way fallen in for some headlong stumble, when she’d told them, hat in hand, Mom and Dad, that she would never lie to them, that they would go through this together, that at the end of the day she would need their help--why, then, did her parents turn away? Thought she was posturing, maybe, and tried to call her bluff. Well, she wasn’t bluffing, man, and so ugh, things spiraled from there. She ran away, sort of a dry run, over the winter, came home after a night to find they’d bought her a little turtle, blinking dead-slow in a tank and turning its wet head hi. Quiet things down, no listening to her confessions and keep the unsightly out of sight, right? Noble effort, Poppy guessed, and so being on a real Motörhead jag in those days, she named him Lemmy and began to keep secrets, the way they’d trained her to do, only ever confiding in her turtle. Was it guidance she craved? No, not particularly; she found guidance in steadfast camaraderie, in braving danger with her new cadre. What she sought at home was an end to denial, to the holding pattern. To all this avoidance. Now with it all gone sour, she couldn’t stay strong, not even for her own benefit. The night she let somebody’s older brother--he of the 40oz breath and the confident touch--snatch her virginity, boorish, all business, she’d come back to the house and started sobbing in the shower, gone to sleep drunk, haphazard and thrashing around without telling Lemmy the first thing about what had happened to her, and when she woke up in the morning his bedside tank sat cracked on its side and tiny lilypad puddles betrayed the hesitant tracking footprints showing her exactly where, upon his evident escape sometime during the night, the little creature had plodded along the windowsill and--her heart choking on despair--out the open second story drop. This was what did it, see. She packed her shit and as soon as her folks left for work, Poppy was gone. Hasn’t been back since, but she wrote them a real doozy of a tender letter, early in her stay in the city, let them know she was alright, that she loved them dearly and knew they loved her, too, that she was sorry that it had to happen like that. But she included no return address. Enough’s enough. Poppy will do no more on behalf of Mom and Dad. Now this swarm of roommates here at Third Mind House bespeaks plenty in the way of familial bonds, alternately healthful and danger-fraught as are all close relationships worth their salt. Of course Poppy, to take the primary example, loves the Georgia Klay who dotes like a sis, and notes that affirming upswell of enrapturing admiration and comfort that breaks over her each time she finds herself afforded entrance into that mysterious bedroom. When winter’d piled snowy on the outside of their windowsills and no one had bothered to clean up, sweep the stairwell entrance or rescue the bikes from their chained-in alleyway crypt, these two stranded themselves on Georgia’s loft bed smoking rollies, drinking coffee with Reddi-Whip and doing art projects while all the world’s whiteness pounded outside, Poppy absently collaging all weed-nugg centerfolds to be found in the moldy pile of Ket and Kava’s old High Times magazines, Georgia sewing together an octopus costume for a play they’d always talked about putting on but which existed at this point as little more than a shared joke. Poppy’d drifted through steady regard of Georgia’s heavysheened hair hanging pendulous, falling by hap here, there, partitioned by the threaded needle poking edgy from her lips as she looked up smiling through meaningful eyes at something the other’d said. The play was to be a sort of Hansel and Gretel for the new stupid century, wherein the two blaße Kinder were a pair of grimy mole people from beneath the city--much of the action would take place in the swampy Gowanus Canal and so here’s where this octopus fella would come in as ostensible nemesis--but don’t worry, they’d all be friends by the end, teamed up against the real enemy, a vulgar witch named Mrs. Shitler who bore a more-than-passing resemblance to Poppy’s onetime school principle. Look, it was only ever half-intended to be performed; it was a creative project, something done for its own sake, something unifying, a manifestation woollily and impulsively assembled from this and that idea that’d made one or both of them fall off the bed laughing. That was all it was, and all that was needed, at least for Poppy, trying to acclimate to life on one’s own (headstrong but mature, she really wouldn’t go back home; didn’t mean, though, that she hadn’t begun to miss it), and, she surmised, for Georgia too, who always operated on some edge of the unspoken, whose every action contained a correspondence with a hidden world from which, her little friend could tell, Georgia was seeking to protect her. Some place quite obviously sad, drug- and danger-inflected. Every so often Poppy would prod at this barrier, to what end she couldn’t say, maybe just to bolster herself in the eyes of the admired; admittedly childish, and anyways it never worked: like here they were on the bed all slumber party vibes and, jeepers, this whipped cream can all done? Georgia trying to shake out the last bits, yup, but Poppy who sees an opportunity all of a sudden decides to pull something she once saw a friend’s Rutgers fratboy brother do--grabs the next Reddi-Whip in line, stands it up unshakingly with nozzle between pursed lips, and rips a fat whippet. Drains the can’s nitrous oxide content into her lungs and falls back on the bed, back arched crazily in a forced Exorcist-level contortion, giggling, head spinning, rolling around for thirty or forty seconds. When, still lying face-up, ears ringing and face kinda achey, she props two elbow supports and cranes neck to shoot a look across at Georgia--hoping presumably for some kind of reciprocal crazy-eyed party-girl expression--she’s not peering back at all, actually seems to be avoiding Poppy’s gaze, eyes cast off to the side, refilling a coffee cup in a bit of intentional busywork. Wordlessly she tries the can of whipped cream but with all the propellant gone the only thing that comes treacling out is a nasty glob of thick milk. Georgia looks up at Poppy, smiling but all facadey, actually a smile imposed on a frown, on the face of a shared moment now ruined by Poppy’s asinine insistence on seeming adult, and tosses the can off the loft into a pile of clothes on the floor. Its impact is muffled by the laundry, and ditto for whatever Poppy begins to say here by way of apology as Georgia accommodatingly changes the subject and seems to take no major notice. But Poppy’s face starts to burn, the cold giggly N2O globbing into some kind of hot humiliation compound in her brain. So you’re feeling tough now? something inside needling, and what, exactly, are you trying to prove? Yeah, would that you could leave all that flexing and showing-off to the phonies out there, the phonies everywhere, the power politics and petty jealousies of socializing in the world of nowts and poseurs and their insecurities, their jockeying for coolness and their shabby escapist rituals. Really you ought to just be grateful for what’s brought you here: the right show at the right time (NMF, natch) to meet Ket--then the bass player, kind, if kreepy--who’d introduced you to seraphic Georgia outside on a cig break, for the hand of providence guiding you to this bedroom, to this window for sincerest connection while meantime alternate-universe Poppys are stuck suffering in study-hall periods stretching to infinity; really you ought to just do away with outmoded attitudes and be sincere. You’ve positioned yourself, lucky kid, to avoid high school outright. Now make good on your promise, on hopes which from the outset seemed utterly unrealizable, jeez, on what you’ve done to your parents, and become a better person for all of it. Don’t relapse, now you’ve come this far. But you know, maybe Poppy could be a little hard on herself, too, and thankfully the housemates make allowance for this sort of thing, oblige the odd countervailing experience to ratchet the childlike wonder and so offset the teenagey slip-up here and there. On the third day of that long snowed-in weekend, they resolved as a group to battering-ram down the front door and start fuckin’ playing out there, already. In the downstairs foyer, then, as a team, ready? One, Poppy delightedly surveying the other determined faces, two, now turned hard-nosed for the job at hand, three! and she threw all her weight against big Herb ahead of her, who barreled into the next person and so on until as one great mass they cracked the barricading ice into powerless component pieces and great hingey swing, the door opened. High-fives, back-pats. Not bad for ninety pounds, a little trick she picked up in the basement moshpits of northern Jersey. Outside she entered another life. The world was pristine and dusted pure, snow up to her knees where left untouched and piled even higher in buildingside mountains fashioned by neighbors to allow for a clear sidewalk, long-since repowdered and repacked, generation after dreamlit generation. And it continued to fall still, flakes cast black against the white sky, whiter than she could remember ever seeing, and turning effortlessly white themselves at the instant the background shifted, her eyeline tracing their downward path, to dark buildings and street-level. Such invariability of purpose. Such comfort in the inexorable drift, in one sanctioned by all drifted past. As if there were, truly, a plan, and divergence, what looked outwardly like rebellion, were an inseparable component thereof. It was a pantheistic reminder of unity, in case she ever forgot that some things transcended her infantile delineations--enemy and ally, virgin and grown-up, jock and punk, cliché and straight dope--with an eye toward a grander network of more delicate correspondences. It was a hint of the bright cumulative totality of youth’s experience to carry across the darkly sundered spots, unspecific, nothing to pin down but this suggestion of glory, of purposeful bestowal, these unerring snowdrifts a gift vouchsafed from heaven. She tries, hard, to integrate any and all of these miasmic hints, and to apply them, as she applies such religious thinking anywhere it seems called for. Which is to say that even though she knows otherwise, rationally speaking, the suggestion stubbornly persists: Georgia is some kind of angel. Not the sort wont to post up in the corners of a childhood bed of fantasy, no, she’s not ostentatious, in fact largely withdrawn, and yet she carries on her person some mementos. In a symbolic conception that trumps any stringently factual one, Georgia Klay has been touched, kissed, wrapped in the silvery-threaded cloths of another argent world. When she walks among secular workaday souls, there is a soft light of distinction that haloes her around. This much is clear to Poppy, even from her vantage at arm’s length. It’s equally irrefutable, though, the way Georgia sometimes avoids her gaze. Often those errant half-seconds, the moment before the nitrous hit her lips, the false move hastily whitewashed over in their history, their relationship’s path paved quickly and detouring direct beside these moments of missed connection, of overstepped bounds or raw-nerve-exposure, so that the side of their road, forever finely snaked and hopeful, is yet littered with countless little tokens of dishonesty. How can Georgia mean so much to Poppy, be so open to all that her meaning suggests, and still, in this one secret arena, dissemble without pause? What was she hiding? Hadn’t Poppy gotten enough denial at home? Of course it was different. Her parents’ refusal had arisen by proxy, out of their general lack of interest in the tough questions of raising a kid who didn’t want to take orders, plain and simple. Their systemic program of meekness and their hope it would all just go away. It was passive, their failure, almost a side effect, bloating till it eclipsed the center, the rapidly dwindling stores of what had been unconditional love... Georgia’s refusal was intentional, see, by way of distinction, willful, and borne not from the negative space that surrounded feeling but from feeling’s very core. It was the action of someone who understood perfectly, who sympathized and related and had likely gone through all this and more, little girl, and who in spite of it recognized this furthest frontier as one step too far. She, who shared everything, would never share this--and the gravity that that exception implied, and Poppy’s all-around trust in Georgia, was enough. Curiosity’d lingered, would always linger, but Poppy’s maturest self will keep assuring her that to be kept at such specific distance must be for the best, though there’s no way of knowing for sure. And Georgia, who knows too much, and indeed, knew too much much too young, neatly bouquets this relationship’s twin reliances on openness and concealment. Yeah, she has tried, at length and effort, to stay honest, but she has also sought to keep Poppy from growing up, much as can be managed, doing so for all the apparent altruistic reasons but also for that other one, the one that allows her to revert, to regain some modicum of innocence, a--not to say secondhand childhood, but at least an evocation; one capable, out there that day playing in the snow, of loosening some of those sullying calcifications of age and compulsion and accumulated awful behavior, of easing her back toward a former wholeness, of helping her cope with the vacuums and lacunae, the capacities of which she’s been forever emptied... It might not be overstating the case--Georgia standing that day in the snow watching Poppy at self-conscious frolic--to think of this little thirteen-year-old form, bucking and bristling at a purity she’s desperate to reject, as the logical complement to her own weary self, in perennial mourning over that very purity that’d long since been revealed as all too transient, there bicycle-kicking a hanging icicle and couldn’t rightly say whether it was Poppy doing it or Georgia, another Georgia herself, something blurring before gahh, what the-- --and she jumped near out of her skin to say nothing of her reverie, diverted attention shocked back to the immediate, this stuffed snowball streaking slick hot numbing down the back of her shirt, frantically patting it into freezing ice smush as who? turning after some unseen culprit, couldn’t have gone far--and a meatheaded chuckle from behind her gave it away. Yeah, it was Herb there, lounging in the open doorway, real pleased with himself on account of his maneuver: hide, bide time, strike. Why? It was an unwarranted attack, and neither was it the first time an action of his could be so described; Herb, in fact, had become the handful of the house, the roommate who was always going too far, hurting someone’s feelings, riling everyone up, or, as often, bringing the cops out on noise complaints. “Did you just stuff a snowball down my shirt?” Chortle. “What the hell?” Georgia kicked some snow at him while he just laughed harder, “Christ, that’s really shitty, Herb, a shitty thing to do,” in a schoolmarm tone that surprised her. Poppy and Blob, who’d right then been engaged in an intense firefight of their own, stopped and watched, not sure how serious it all was. “Get over it?” Herb impassive, or feigning it, just leaning. Georgia had suddenly felt like she might cry. “I didn’t do anything to you!” Herb’s expression, eyes gone strabismic and mouth sewn shut, suggested he was surprised at the depth of her offense. “I, uh,” embarrassed, smiling jocular but averting her eyes, and he just went back inside, recess up, the schoolyard unwelcome. Some days later in the kitchen he’d tapped Georgia, washing dishes, on the shoulder and given her a real apology. “It’s okay, but are you mad at me about something?” she’d asked then. “I thought we were pals.” “I, uh,” searching for the words, “no. It’s like... I just have to. Because I don’t really mean it. It’s like you’re my sister or something.” Eyes denoted sincerity, regret, distress and she, seeing it all, hugged him for his trouble. “I don’t know why,” Herb offered, pithy, mid-embrace. Herb was, even for a Third Minder, an odd one. Didn’t hang out, rarely socialized at all. Had lived at the house for almost a year and yet had been, until recently, more or less a nonstarter in the arena of the interpersonal relationship, any level past casually-acquaint. All’d known him, but hardly at all; he appeared regular and regularly, but was at home a lot, if we’re tallying, and kept in-between times tacitly guarded behind the logical prompt of a locked bedroom door. And if things had changed of late, the suddenness just bespoke the eerie regularity of what had preceded. Because yeah, no denying a transformation had commenced with this guy, twinning forth on planes social and physical. Herb had grown in confidence, to be sure, if that was the right descriptor for the dude who could now be regularly seen haranguing and challenging roommates on every conceivable issue (how to break down the snowblocked door over the winter, for instance; Herb had pished every plan but his own, which involved a group-jump from the roof and seemed in Blob’s words, with which all had agreed, “super ill-advised”). So Herb was pushy, but there was also this other side of things. Along with his assertiveness--really his aggression--had come this conspicuous fitness indulgence: calorie counting, a stringently-managed weightlifting regime, a clearly delineated program of self-intensifying and with it an attendant clamming up, a denial that anything was different, an omission that stuck out horrendously. Acting as if he had always been driven to lift, to bench, to squat, lunge, burpy; fuck--soon enough all of this meaning to hassle, to push people around, well, something in the changing Herb wanted addressing, no question. But what? Suppose his personal history, but Herb (who came from a happily unbroken family in Long Island, to nip that line of inquiry in the bud) hasn’t one too likely to oblige an instructive symptom. One could look at interests, maybe: like his roommates, he had applied an underground cultural ethos formatively, dedicatedly. Maybe it’d gone awry, planted itself in some latent insecurity, lying there by dumb luck, too raw not to inflame. Maybe his thinking afterward had been a little, well, dogmatic, as watchwords like punk and DIY, meant to confer some handy self-determination to wayward kids, began to resonate in the young, hopelessly shy Herbie more as terms of power, projections of dignity, end-alls, be-alls. Not to say he’d ever punched someone over a difference in underground doctrine--for bringing booze to a no-booze show, say, or for calling someone a hateful name where good vibes were to prevail--but the very fact that he could, that he was armed with a philosophy, a moral calculus to smooth out his impulses, his shamelessly self-aggrandizing ones, the ones of which he was less proud, well, it catalyzed quite the shift. He saw the world as if through new eyes. Saw the way folks acted around him. Saw he was maybe getting pushed around a little more than he’d’ve liked. And so he started in with this tough guy shit. Don’t judge too harsh; I mean, Herb knows it’s a bit juvenile, these compulsions, but lay off their foundation, at least. Why shouldn’t he, after all, have sought solace in music, in an aesthetic, in a community which neatly transmuted pariah status into inner strength? Why shouldn’t he have sought to turn that strength outward, with an eye toward living more proudly, more fearlessly? It was only that something, somewhere, hit a switch, clicking the whole thing over into anger, into hostility, into a zone decidedly past goofy youthful conviction. Maybe a lurching moshpit bully flouted basement-show-logic’s safety standards and just wouldn’t stop elbowing him; maybe a girl whose eyeline he was trying to catch instead stared traceably past him as she up and went swooney over a rival; maybe, probably, both--but whatever did it, it got done. Suddenly Herb was intent on getting big, and every hard-fought arm extension at the benchpress was alive with the searing satisfaction of another hypothetical jerk put in his place. And it proceeded apace till, too much hardcore having turned him into an unlikely bro, aggro as his compatriots across college campuses the nation over, he became a jock in punk’s clothing, found himself at Third Mind House living with crusty kids who mocked him behind his back, pointed at the accoutrements of his bizarre hybrid lifestyle, protein powders and free weights and other substances and paraphernalia littered among the creature comforts of the scrawny, the perpetually-winded and wet-cough-prone, the nutritional invalids he called roommates. Other substances? Well yeah, sometime during Herb’s first structured forays into weightlifting, in the corner of a rusty locker room at a YMCA under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, he came upon some pentagonal pink pills, “BD” imprinted on one side and a snake design on the other. “Not for everyone, guy,” the white-haired middleman, red skin, pallid grayflecked eyes had offered in accented English on noting the then-underbuilt Herb’s tempted glances, “different reactions for different people. You will want that Human Growth Hormone too.” Herb swallowed, wiped palms on a towel that happened to hang nearby. “What do you think I should do?” With no one around to ask, he had actually put this question to the dealer. The man shrugged. “Buy some.” 0.3 IU per pound of bodyweight weekly put his initial HGH dosage at 52 IU, or 7.4 per day. Dry somatropin wafer plus 1.5 mL bacteriostic water, gently swirl to solution. Pinch the flesh and pull back (easiest subcutaneous injection site was in his stomach) and inject, Christ, did he really mean to, hmm, there in the pocket of soft tissue and already swore he could feel the whisperings, cells responding, hormone passing through his liver for conversion into insulin-like growth factors, this powder just a precursor, see, with exogenously elevated levels of thyroid hormones and anabolics headily brewing, injection after injection spaced careful and methodic and of course he felt it: fat tissue burned, muscle cells increased in number and size, protein was spared for mass retention. He became weightier, quickly. Ditto for his perception of the stuff; he began to imagine the brittle clump of hormone as Eucharist, a rite towards alimentation of a transubstantiated morsel of another’s flesh--the first exogenous HGH was obtained by extraction from the pituitary glands of the dead--in pursuit of nutrition most precious and celebration of corporal vibrancy. He consumed the life force of others, body and blood, soul and divinity, to bolster his. It was positively liturgical. But not without its downsides. The hormone gave him horrendous nightmares. There he’d be, bed alone and only his own body’s thickly inorganic warmth to keep the cold away and this communion become far more powerful for his dead-of-night defenselessness, a magnetic draw leading him down endless subterranean streets toward buildings, hallways, rooms he knows he must avoid for their promise of certain oblivion, disintegration of this petulant reformed kid’s soul that’d regressed so egregiously, overstepped so flagrantly its rigid adult bounds, drawing nearer the patient creature that waits at his sinful regimen’s conclusion, Herb resisting the pull with all his power but of course in the dream he is not strong enough, not very strong at all, and he can’t fight it... It is always the same: a grand cityscape of demonic thoughtforms, peering down through fogged windows, tittering on balconies above, often dripping viscously, bacteriostically on his shoulders and burning, every step a further glimpse, hells which should desensitize for their interminable repetition but never do, only proceed, proceed, proceed, in all due terror... On waking, often enough too early, no promise of light, barely the prospect of sunrise, he recalls too much and must relive, stew for hours afraid to go back to sleep, even wait up the next night in safety of secular civic cold, shivering and yawning but at least in control. It’s not even an issue of desolation; indeed, sometimes he thinks he spots other trapped souls conveyed as slow and tortuous as he, and though they appear never to see him he nonetheless believes that in these moments he is sharing in genuine oneiric correspondence with another, that these fellow subjugates are the avatars of living breathing humans asleep somewhere in the physical world, suffering same as he. But there is no tenderness in connecting this way, without reciprocation, without even confirmation, just a taunt. It is worse than being alone. He even swears to have made out, adrift one night in February, the coldly acclimatized face, faraway but unmistakable, of Georgia Klay following a similarly preened female escort, the latter guiding, tracing a parallel path through the land of the dead, gossamer footfalls traceable, dizzyingly backward and labyrinthine, erring asymptotically toward Herb’s own delineated course stretched behind oily visible but naturally never coupling, never even crossing. No connection. Herb can plain see something’s off the rails, to answer your question, would probably benefit from talking to someone, all the ifs and buts unfurling with a grace which, being in short supply in most areas of his life, makes here a last show of itself. Snatches, briefest attempts at openness--as when he apologized to Georgia--seem to confirm the fact he’s come to lack something essentially human. Incapable of explaining, Herb won’t even broach it. And meantime he, uh, can’t seem to quit injecting this stuff... * * Ket’s lentil soup--barf-riddled and ruined as it was--got thrown out and the kitchen thoroughly cleaned, after which he and Kava, feeling bummed, self-conscious, and a touch alarmed went ahead and cleared out of the house for the night. Probably the first time Ket has left in months, and though he’s only at a noise show up the street, the eerie empty vista of a Third Mind kitchen scene with neither his reliably hunched shadow in the corner nor his tea-tree olfactory signature pervading the smellscape is just now lending the whole house this subtlest uncanny that Bob the cat, keyed into the vibes, is doing a poor job of handling, running crazed laps, jumping up and down, just completely freaking out. Georgia’s in her room working on music, recording source sounds to use in a possible set at the Third Mind Grind show, just under two weeks away. No idea what she’s going to do for her performance exactly, but a certain trust in the process has got her at least giving this cram session a shot. She’s got headphones on and a decent room microphone to catch the tones but Bob, scratching at her door and mewling psychotically, has been ruining every take, so she decides to take five and just opens the door to let him in. “Hey whoa,” as he rockets past her and instantly starts in running riot across her desk, hurriedly stacked pile of books, her music station, shitty keyboards and old stereo, CDs, letters, scraps of paper and scribbled index cards fluttering desultory to the floor as he goes on leaping, clawstuck from speaker to speaker, scrambling up her hanging bedsheet, yanking it loose and exposing the aluminum ladder it covers before landing with a thump, purely agravitional, atop the wooden loft. “Damn dude!” Bob is, you’ll recall, extremely fat, and Georgia’s duly impressed with his nascent get-up-and-go. But still, she’d like to contain the fallout, so she climbs up after the creature with an eye toward going ahead and gently shepherding him back out into the common area. “Alright, fella,” as she scales the ladder, “party’s over--” but he sees her coming, hisses, arched back fur mohawking in attack posture, and bats her across the forehead. “Owwwhat--!” a pretty major scratch here announcing itself with a numbing blankness already arcing up her brow but no time even to lay in with some reprimanding as whushhhh he hurtles past, heavy landing sounds rocketing backward into the house. “Why...” he’s never done that before, too weird and oh, look, great: now everything’s all disarray up here too, the writing drafts she keeps stacked on the plywood landing, lazy mornings’ desk space at the foot of the mattress, papers sticking wet together and ink bleeding through thanks to this open jar of bedside water that’s just been knocked over, naturally, why not--fuck it, grabbing the stack of sheets, “Bob, you’re banned! No longer welcome here!” calling back over her shoulder and--hmm. One new item up here, actually, now she stops and takes a look. It’s halfway hanging off the loft landing, J.R.’s leather suitcase, slipped in sideways down the gap between the bed and the wall. Evidently got left last night; but how? Wouldn’t he have known? No way could it have slipped his mind, yet, yeah, alright--grabbing at it--it’s wedged pretty good, and though combo-lockable it’s actually opened; a little page of something has already spilled out of its maw. It’s an invitation, cardstock printed 3x5, postcard style, paper quality cues somehow conspiring to lend it an air of importance but here look, its edges’ve been torn off in small rectangular strips; the kinda bits--she needs no help recognizing--that get rolled up to crutch joints with. Her forehead is starting to sting. Unhesitating, she grabs it and reads. It’s a letter authorizing a temporary furlough for a Non-Ranking Basic Serviceman J.R. Shrapnel, no middle name and this perfunctory insignia at the top, a rudimentary half-toned lightning bolt inside a circle, comic-book crude, and above it centered blue stencil print in fat sans-serif: SURF. It specifies a 24-hour window, back in January, for a visit to the Landstuhl US Armed Forces Medical Center in which a Major Benjamin Shrapnel is being treated. It thanks J.R. for his compliance and discretion. Georgia blinks, looks away, not quite locked in just now on what’s real. Catches an errant reflection in her big cubed loft window, can already see Bob’s slash claw-cut on her forehead starting to bead out red, with white bits of kicked up skin peeling its edges. She turns back to the paper, gives it another mechanical once-over. Reads the signature at bottom, delicately wrought in the impeccably curlicued mode of the old masters, and stifles an involuntary shudder, stuffing the sound back in though she’s alone in the house. ‘Renfro Vale,’ it says. NEXT: An innocent basement show goes awry; a mechanic restores an old clunker; a demonic possession is observed; Atonwa crosses paths with the Earthenware Virgin and Child. MARK IOSIFESCU, 2013 https://pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-3 Mon, 18 Jun 2012 03:37:35 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-3 <img width="2048" height="2986" width_o="2048" height_o="2986" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c4c9ba5a1b9f35f12cb31da810a1efcd698fddd88431c365e6fd76135111a03c/illtombera3cover_o.jpg" data-mid="11082370" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c4c9ba5a1b9f35f12cb31da810a1efcd698fddd88431c365e6fd76135111a03c/illtombera3cover_o.jpg" /> PREVIOUSLY: The Transfiguration of Ritchie Ra, wherein he explores the eye, illness, and the last Transit of Venus likely to pass over a populated earth. We’re introduced to some of our heroes. Phenomena astronomical are discussed, accidents happen and thoughts return to Earth as Alfonso Heliotrope leaves his mark on Ritchie Ra’s body. Behind the mask is something even worse. Haze of sin settling over windshields and windowsills, leaving thin deposits, worming ways in toward bedrock. Topside graveyard nettles grasp and catch. Night falls over the city of the dead. Oh, but the lights come on, we can see it all. Let’s to the tall buildings, then, feeble axes mundi of glass and steel shearing delicate winds, diverting gentle current into scrappy threadbare components and refusing to budge while gray birds take lazy wing below, coasting on downward breezes, castoffs from considerable lateral wind loads. Skyscraper engineering a tricky goddamn business, account for wind pressure or load by engaging a rolodex of variables, velocity pressure times gust effect factor and external pressure coefficient minus likewise for the internal, providing the structure has no response characteristics that might make issues of, say, across-wind loading or vortex shedding or the like. So much work just so they can stand tall and resilient after fifty or a hundred years taking a beating. Still, without it we’d of course be nowhere, painting cave walls and fucking indiscriminately, or--hmm well let’s not get ahead of ourselves here--maybe just the latter, early sapiens leaving behind African origins at more or less the same time this whole place sat preserved under a thousand feet of ice, the era of our common Y-chromosomal ancestor, long before shamanic wall decoration entered the picture, that is, you know, long before the Word... and when cold retreated (not to return to the Northeast coast until Vinland turned icy under Viking incursion ten thousand years later), tentative bands took to hunting in Central Park and tossing scraped bones into the East River. What so defied nature in those days, when the only questionable ‘sustainability’ was that of our own race, never sure whether or not fickle deities might choose to plunge us back into frost? Adherence was the only option. Not that we ever thought about it, or needed to do, still no shaking the feeling that back then the equation was balanced, young human species wont to overstep and nature a vengeful demiurge repeatedly reminding us who was really in charge. Teleological theorizing is real easy to do, of course, with these bright city lights on. Where next? To the coast, through the Narrows, oceanside, Lenape having once referred to this whole area by an appellation meaning “place by the sea,” subsisting in summertime largely on the fluke, sturgeon, mackerel, eel won from local fishing sites and then moving on come autumn. At least that hasn’t changed, family boats heading out of port long as the weather’s good and coming back loaded with, well the once-superabundant oysters are gone but striped bass and sheepshead supplies can still be counted upon, no extant seals either but wouldn’t have wanted any in the first place, and anyways (here the city itself interrupts) doesn’t the fact of those Munsee fishermen sticking weirs in the water constitute as good an example of Fucking With Nature as does any sputtering motorboat or highrise condo? Well technically it’s not for us to say, but what the heck--these streetlights, glare streaming from some of those eight hundred thousand civic living and working spaces practically daring an answer--for a start, those weir-setters never made for an overshot carrying capacity, never took food out of the mouths of future generations and stuffed it in their own. If only we could, as in the world of real estate developers--which swarm has made such proud inroads on these islands--just crunch some numbers: let’s see, 15,000 Lenape New Yorkers have been estimated, split into some eighty kinship-structured groups rotating campsites, building longhouses, clearing trails, burning fields for planting, otherwise reshaping their roughly 320 square miles of land. Just stick some sort of natural resource metric in there and we might see whether K, akkursed karrying kapacity, had already been met, maybe even surpassed, by the time the canoe party sailed out in 1524 to greet Verrazzano and show him, without hesitation, the safest place to beach. Oh man, New York is steamed up over this--would that such a calculation could be done, one that spoke of a negative population growth, an exceeded upper limit, some clue that even their hunter-gatherer model was one which dealt in destructive consumption, that that calling isn’t exclusively ours... But in the absence of firm data, the proud metropolis will rely on its common sense, take care not to rationalize, just objectively assess, something bound to crop up--here’s one: the fact that those same romanticized human ancestors (got ‘em now) killed the mammoth, drove it, it just so happens, to extinction! But the derisive laugh catches, hollow, in the city’s throat, for yeah, that’s just it, fella. You’re a symptom. Alright, New York will concede that one (despite it being perhaps a little below the belt), but not ready to admit defeat, chooses to leave its lights on, just sort of inviting more speculation, here grasping at passing that buck, well what about that slash-and-burn agriculture you mentioned? Clearing fields, burning the woods, making room for those squash-maize-bean crops all pleasantly commingling undersoil--w-what do you call that? The growth of this city, the imposition of the grid, 1811 Commissioners’ Plan being the last straw (we graciously maintained the odd Lenape trail, the city reminds; you can still walk them today), can’t it all be seen as a natural outgrowth of any one of these techniques, no symptom but evolution, a defiance of nature, sure, but in its place a proud assertion of survival? A salmon fighting the current, a bird flying south, a diver depositing caissons at a bridge’s base, triumphantly drifting surfaceward and bravely fighting off the bends; what’s the difference? The strong survive, Might is Right, what happened to all that? Nature is but an element of a world built for manipulation, for exploitation, for-- --well, jeez, I mean have a little faith--(I can’t, the city answers. I am faith’s opposite number.) And the lights? I ain’t turning them off for nothing! Someone’s gonna have to (can’t help noticing its voice cracking here) d-do it for me! Yes, well, that might be just the thing... but no, no use being so cruel, reminding it. It’s living on borrowed time. It knows. Shall we just on with the tour? To the forests, then, manicured municipal parks, give the people a little green space, let them stretch their legs (See? New York by now pleading, Don’t you see we’re trying?). Round here at night all manner of life runs riot, fat subway rats crawling everywhere tipsy on pondwater, sneezing flecks of flu without discretion. Often these terminal cases are set upon by chickenhawks, who pretty much have their run of the place and so are often up past bedtime swooning dihedral unto any stragglers. Realistic-looking rock outcroppings encircle fake lakes, overlook bike paths and nocturnal rollerbladers. Kids drink pilfered beers and smash the bottles delightedly. Not too shabby, right? A little ecotope of our own, and you gotta admit, this dead city has a point. Every niche testifying to imminent collapse, to excessiveness and disintegration, and yet doing so in one voice, the lights blinking it out in code, manhole covers and grates steaming their missives, billboards in Times Square really magical sigils chanting the tenets of well-worn spells, the dead city, to be lost forever but content for having, in the face of inevitability, maintained a real fuck-you spirit, oh this place by the sea, such a shame, dressing itself up in funeral attire, lacing up boots for the march to the gallows. Well, then, join those proud ranks, O Doomed City, and be a sunken Ys, an invisible city of Kitezh. Be a swampy Saeftinghe, a dried-up Ur or Otrar. A razed Nineveh, an abandoned Petra, Ani, or Tikal, a ruined Babylon or Perperikon. Become Hajir, the city destroyed by a scream. A city of rumor, Z or de los Cesares, Paititi, Erum of the Pillars, defined by the tantalizing negative space you leave in the historical record. Become the Turquoise Mountain, the lost island kingdom of Salakanagara. Oh, become l’Anse aux Meadows and let the frost back in. Become Hattush and leave a curse for anyone who durst challenge. Stand proud and fight to the last; bring it all down with you if you can, O New York, dream city of lost light!; never buckle, don’t give an inch!; though the trapdoor may idle briefly before the drop, don’t turn away, don’t look back or down, hold fast to your rotten star but die, die, die, my darling. In her time, Georgia Klay has found occasion to set some likeminded observations down, the theme for her rather meaningful and the written word something for which she’s more or less always had a knack. Knack? No arrogance in the claim, see, she doesn’t quite know what to do with it herself, having more than once written a topic past the fullness of its meaning and, unable to stop, taken it into a realm of such devastating emotional consonance that she finds herself tearing up the pages and sobbing. So ‘knack’ will do for now. May be said, on that subject, that Georgia cries a little more than do most, but no blaming her when specifics are considered; just this morning, the long walk home and note on her door, straining through the already blurred vision of the morning-after at familiar handwriting joining up to signal that ghastly internal drop, a sinking not just of heartbeat or of stomach but of everything inside of her. Ritchie Ra is dead. AND WHERE WERE YOU??, means Arthur’d been there sometime during the night; she can see him knocking, knocking, giving up, scribbling this lame thesis and tacking it to her forbidding door. He always uses these histrionic notes, doubled-up bits of punctuation and overwrought phrasing, must think it’s be extra-affecting but man, she just doesn’t care. Where’d she been? She’d been elsewhere, stupid but it was too late, all too late anyway, and so she’d come home fucked, yeah, traitor, just the way she’d always been. So anger, denial, no way is she ready to accept. Never will. She’d walked, dazed and unclean, another couple of hours, gotten coffee and the fat proprietor had smiled at her, winked, chortled “Now why should someone as pretty as you be looking so sad?” and almost couldn’t say who it was actually doing it but someone, someone had thrown that same coffee right in his fucking face, and run out. That kind of talk she can’t handle. Is pretty, yeah, classical, always sort of thought of it as unexotic, bordering on plain. Resents it being used against her, she who’s done nothing to earn it, who’s in fact taken some pain to rewrite her appearance more appropriately, to err ever closer to ruin. To treat everyone, her own self included, in what she’s begun to think of as the only way could be called, amidst this Terror, ideologically defensible. But she hasn’t been able to blight her delicate red hair, pale skin and dark shadow, softness of feature that won’t, doesn’t ever seem to harden. Sullied, ravished, ravaged, Georgia still looks like a vestal young miss. Knackered, shattered, short, she still seems friendly. And wasn’t she, once, many years ago? When talent bespoke possibility, those optimistic days, when things were fun and despair cropped up but lo, she didn’t sweat it. Of course neither had she then experienced the thrill, the phenomenal satisfaction of something corresponding so genuinely, so perfectly, with her specific humanity, of vibrations ringing true, down cupola and campanile, to the foundation stone at her soul’s source. She had been friendly, okay, but hardly as thoroughly as she would become fouled. “Something about you,” she’s seen herself, a version of herself whisper. “You’ve diffracted.” “I have?” “Yeah. Just take a look.” But she couldn’t, never could. It wasn’t her, there in the mirror. “Now you’re all living ends...” She cried a lot, it was true. Changed her look, dyed her hair but boys and girls still played with it, what they thought of as some intimate gesture might make her propose marriage or something but inside she’d just be fighting back laughter at how cheap it all was beside that real intimacy, that brand on which she enjoyed a monopoly. She could maintain external ease, separate it from her true self--it was just something she could do, having never been prone to nerves or hesitation--but she could never bridge the gap, never really share with another. Just this explanatory Georgia, telling her what’s happened and what to expect--“some of you have a little longer; some are already dead...” And it is this Georgia whose measured words, in those infernal writing sessions, she is basically transcribing, a medium incapable, at any other time, of comprising such cogency, of such force. Certainly not with lovers, whose variance and patent nickel-and-dimeness really bespeaks the whole disconnect. Georgia, whose diffraction routine makes a diagnosis of solipsism sort of the elephant in the room, thinks of being an undependable, a deadbeat, not as a function of her personality but of the physical world itself, the field through which her various shards pass, alternating states, being and unbeing both. The lives she lives are discrete ones, proceeding serially and wholly outside of her control. She regards herself as someone perfectly honest about this. “Wow, because,” two nights ago with Mariève, pale Québécoise, dance student down from l’îsle on a tourist visa and a Bushwick sublet, “my mom spent some time up there in, uh, the sixties, I guess.” Mariève, beautiful and all but so tall her frame’s begun to encircle Georgia’s smaller one, in a polite French Canadian smother... She’s leaning away but the pursuit continues. “À Montréal? And what was she doing?” this poor thing already sodden with emotion, a languor Georgia’s learned to pinpoint, really a warning sign, slow breaths coming up intent behind her soft voice. “She, well,” Georgia looking out at their reflection as it murmurs back from a mirror in the darkened hall. “She was a student there.” Meaning a whole host of different things. “You should come up. Stay with me,” danseuse locked on and trying, trying hard, to hold Georgia’s body and attention close, sensing this implacable separation, gripping one to the other like Apollo did Daphne. “we’ll work on some new stuff together.” Georgia’d pretended to think about it. The next night, last night, the last night, as though untouched by events of the prior twenty-four hours, she’d reenacted the scene with high school kid Andreas, parents out, couldn’t believe his luck. “So maybe,” across the bed looking over at her looking up at his ceiling, the photos he’d pasted up there all friends smoking in the courtyard, and down at his desk to the bottle of india ink half used up on stick’n’pokes, a couple grody 40ozes they’d downed together, scenes from an all-too-familiar early upbringing to which she wasn’t wildly keen on returning, “you know, graduation’s like, it’s next week. Maybe we could stay at the same place, some house, you know, once I’m out of school.” “I don’t know.” Staying’s something Georgia doesn’t do, unless he means staying stuck in this timeless uncoupling scene. Perennially vowing not to stay. So that her life, night to night, is best remembered as a routine succession of these, days hollowed out but for the offer that ends one and the refusal that begins the next, that sees her step out into the blinding light of morning to head home with head hung. This proclivity for betrayal her life’s sole structuring principle, practically speaking. The other Georgia, the all-Georgia who can name things, speaks of this walk as the path that shapes the aggregate sum of her experience, the function that bounds her deviance like a definite integral. The street becomes a key through which she can decode all the correspondences between this rank town and herself. Why? Maybe because she’s known these passing junkies, because she’s turned into one. Because such intemperance, even the thought of it, fills her heart to bursting. Because the stoop and the gutter signify, for her, seats of prayer practically tabernacular in their sacredness, and entering one and performing a sacrificial rite an experience as incomparably mystical as it was for conquering Pompey to stand outside the Holy of Holies, rip the veil that guarded that secret place and step inside. That sort of pagan profanity in the face of transcendence the highest Georgia’s ever been, the benchmark of closeness against which every mortal partner makes his or her tepid claim. “Why not call it narcissism?” mother Frances, on the phone by the kitchen window, only half-joking in the days when Georgia might have spoken about this tendency, when it still eluded her ken. “Well it isn’t,” knows that much. “So what? Strip it of power. Put it down to vanity.” “But it isn’t,” something weary here. Frances just breathes on the line. “Why not, at the very least, stop writing so intensely about yourself?” mom’s desperate tone only making things worse, and she knows it too. Her opinion being Georgia realizes she’s special and that’s fine, but not this further recognition; this isn’t. Not this emerging facility with satanic paradox, this nurturing of darkest impulses. Frances shares enough of them with her daughter to see the danger ahead, and so tries, pathetically, her heart breaking in mid-sentence, to play the rube and dissuade her, call her names, hurt her feelings. Pretend not to understand. Anything to push her off the path of self-discovery that leads, in Klays, to serious trouble, and knowing all the while, the suggestion standing stock-still and unflinching in her nether perceptions, that the die has been cast, that her daughter is, in some measure, lost forever. That Georgia’d called down a family curse and was henceforth one of the damned, one who won’t even be able to count on wandering shiftless in some pleasant purgatory waiting to be named; nope, Georgia’d named herself... “What do you hope to get out of all this?” This all-Georgia could be an inquisitive sort, and impatient, once you got to know her. “Your rocks off?” She thinks for a moment, nods. That was more or less it. Could she tell her mom so? Put this down on paper, this further degree of realization? The way that it invigorated her dealings, how exciting everything became with such conversations echoing inward, the way its words pointed to a more terrible unspoken one that sat just out of reach--indeed, her charge is to ever search for that word, looking for it in overheard snatches of dialogue and invocation, in imagined secret histories and prophesied futures and scraps of torn-up pages, in powders insufflated and the mouths or movements of lovers, meanwhile the all-Georgia up ahead dangles it for her, can be seen holding this word out for the grabbing, and promises to join her in its vocalization if only she reaches a little further for it, in the grips of passion’s heat or of euphoric oblivion coming closest and pushing herself past humanity, past this company of souls to a place where she’s all oneness and hears, above the sudden thundering of tears, someone, some part of herself, say, “Death.” And she weeps and shivers and is home. * * This afternoon she’s dressed up penitent, as if that might make any difference, wearing the very same dress as yesterday, actually one she’s had for years, faded beige and grimy, and a leather jacket. Some sort of mark of shame, self-affixed and held firm, but of course nobody around here can see it for this and so no judgment’s to be expected. That she’s inured to this absence of punishment in no way diminishes her despair over it. J.R. Shrapnel, due any minute, has figured all day as a persistent, if nebulous, shape in her thoughts: a theoretical boy. The revelation of his name, which she hadn’t heard spoken in some time, on a voicemail left sometime during the night (“Hi Georgia? It’s Fiona, Fiona Snuzen, I don’t know if you remember met me at--” with vague merriment in the background, the clink of the drink, an insufferable drunkard’s soundscape that went on a ways until, “enways I was thinking if you wanted to collaborate on something in honor of J.R. Shrapnel’s father died or something? I heard?”) had led her to work backward through a sequence of equally revelatory realizations, that he’d been at Ritchie’s party, that he’s in town, that he’s alive, so on. And without much in the way of pretext, she’d asked her way over to where he’s staying, way uptown on Fort Washington, and is presently waiting, on his stoop, naturally, and in her dingy getup against the unseasonable cold, for this shade’s arrival. Georgia being the reigning ‘never-come-home’ champ, the thought does cross her mind that she might, as part of some ironic reversal, be forced to swig down a little of her own medicine and sit here all night, but the worry never really lands as soon enough she looks up to see him standing there, just ahead, struck dumb. A mutual hallucination, categorical proof of that external realm of fantasy, not some concocted zone of delusion but one shareable and thus impossible to write off. How else to explain this synchronicity of expression on their faces, the suggestion implicit, for Georgia, that he must be reeling same as she, taking measurements of physical change counterpart to her noting that he seems somehow taller, wizened, grown-up, sure, but a little peculiarly so. Not that she had prepared any elaborate tabulation of expectations for this meeting beyond the normative--or had she? Whatever, this is kind of unforeseen. Everything boyish about him has remained, just been consequently settled upon by a thin layer of decrepitude, where normal folks would’ve split the difference. Uncertainty has been hardened into permanence, tentativeness undermined by inveteracy, so that what emerges is the plain fact of contradiction. His short hair is somehow tangled and his clothes torn but his eyes belie youth, burn faint but detectable from within a yawning darkness, perhaps right around vision’s absolute threshold, a single candle’s flame at thirty miles distance. A trip from here to there, then to now, that to this, and is it really, empirically, him? “Did you know me?” a voice, apparently his, seems to ask her when she stands up and hugs him. And holds it, thinking. “Yeah, obviously.” Withdrawn, she looks away. “I, uh,” laughs and her eyes dance up to his, a brow cocked, “actually I’m not sure I did,” and she traces his gaze, what glister of it she can make out, as it settles on her hair. His Washington Heights upstairs is empty, as far as she can tell, a couple of library books on a coffee table, a mattress, a half a joint in an ashtray. “You hiding from somebody?” “No,” he nods. The trainride down to Georgia’s place (for once inside the apartment, he’d grabbed a small suitcase then ushered her promptly and unabashedly back out toward the door) is real weird, its conversations consisting of dangling allusions, fatal omissions, hints and implications gone unpursued. Their common experience has evaporated, so, each unknown to the other, they play at deke and circumlocution; with J.R.’s reveries hinging on but leaving out certain lingering reminiscences of last night’s party and Georgia’s doing the same dance around some roughly contemporaneous but unspoken actions of her own, an overlap presents itself in the empty space: “What happened to Ritchie Ra,” Georgia, wordsmith, so heedful of J.R.’s passive phrasing as he says this, “and on the same night as this trouble in Florida.” He looks at her. “You know more about it all, Ritchie and Thwock Morton and, and Heliotrope.” A small noise escapes from her throat at this, but it’s swallowed by subway rattle, and she shrugs and puts on a sad face. “Never been in on all that. I try to stay away.” Eyes starting to well up. J.R. staring lazy out the window, “Someone said you’ve got something new coming, some new project,” and he turns to see her halfway crying but smiling sloppy and sheepish through it. “Yeah, real new,” wiping her eyes, “least for me. Some music, performance, you know,” a self-conscious brag, “uncharted territory.” “And you’re working with them on it?” “What? Who?” J.R. gives a shrug that doubles as nothing. “Thwock Morton, O’Nubb, I don’t know.” Georgia falls into an uncharacteristic mumble. “Right, no, uhh you’re, right, I am, working, with,” and thankfully the doors open on her stop before this locked groove gets any worse, and she hops up like everything’s kosher, ushering J.R., whose sense of logical impropriety is kind of buzzing, up into Classon Ave debarkation. The space where Georgia’s been living, a big repurposed loft called Third Mind House, offers a similar respite from stultifying rationality, being, actually, very confusing. “This leads to the sort of common area, which is connected to every bedroom,” Georgia walking through her mental map in a musty stairwell that ends in a heap of doors extending some twenty-strong across the landing with nary an inch of jamb to separate one from the next. “We don’t have keys to the bedroom doors, which are all locked, so they’re pretty much ceremonial. That one’s me,” pointing to either the fifth or the sixth one, J.R. not bothering to falsify a nod of comprehension. “How many people do you live with?” “Right now?” She rolls her eyes up and bounces side to side, body language for ‘calculating,’ and at least ten seconds go by. “Too many. Or not enough. Don’t know.” They enter that common area, find a few big couches and lots of bodies. “Georgia!” It’s coming from Poppy, fourteen years old, a Mahwah, NJ runaway with bleached streaks in her black hair and braces. “A lot of messages, man, I mean a, two hundred or something, a guy called Adam from a label, Jeweled something--” but Georgia makes an ixnay face and hastily introduces her to J.R. And him around, “That’s Kava and Ket,” a blonde couple leaning each asleep on the other’s shoulder, “Herb the musclehead, hmm oh there’s Bob, with Blob,” pointing to a button-down Yagodaesque middle-aged man holding a corpulent white cat, “and here’s Bennie,” a thin, red-robed young man who bows deeply into a folded-hand namaste--so deeply, in fact, that a turquoise water pipe falls out of his billowy wizard sleeve in the act, spilling ash and weed into a great rising dust-and-cat-fur cloud on the square of flooring next to a splintry couch leg, though everyone’s too polite to notice. Heys all around. They try for casual chat, but some force, maybe gravity itself, drags all discourse toward a dark singularity, the center of this conversational black hole. Soon everyone’s sitting round speculating on the possible meanings of a novel and potently weird situation. “Getting really mixed up down Pensacola,” says Bennie, checking the news on his phone, “hostages, and gunplay.” “And NMF got ripped off!” Poppy stabbing vociferous underhand at the air just in front of her. “Yeah man, supposed to be playing a show down there today, got all their gear stolen during the night, guitars, amps, everything.” Georgia shakes her head blankly. Poppy has Bennie look up the distance between the woulda-been gig, in a backyard in Warrington, and the Little Institute, the unfinished development set snugly on forty acres in Beulah. “Twenty-five miles, man, but they never, you know--” “--And they’re sure this is a Seminole thing?” J.R., who’s been staring at the floor, still manages to eke this question out in the half-second it takes Poppy to swallow. Georgia jerks to attention, following the words up to the unlikely creature that’s done the issuing. “That’s just it,” Bennie standing up, keeps it going a bit louder over the shoulder as he heads to a raw-wood-paneled kitchen area in the corner of the living room, “it’s all so hush-hush. No Red Indian militia has claimed responsibility,” kind of shouting, actually. “There’ve been disputes over that spot forever,” J.R. obliging a history lesson but still holding out on that eye contact. “Protests. Cops, lots of cops and military. I don’t know. This kind of thing, it doesn’t really happen.” For some reason he looks at Georgia. “But I don’t--it’s not unheard of.” Georgia blinks back, looks away. Ritchie. Kava, who is woken but impossibly woozy (may have, in fact, been this way the entire time), begins to formulate a synthesized group hypothesis. “What’s taken place in Florida is an armed,” something here between a blink and a nap, “armed uprising, devised from the outside, numbered among whose principle architects was, in all likelihood...” “...one Ritchie Ra,” Ket takes over, his eyes still closed and employing the same groggy drawl, “who as we all know has played at this for like thirty years... and was, you can bet, simultaneously being targeted by forces disagreeable,” big yawn, “to his scheming.” “I don’t think that’s right.” Georgia has shut her eyes too, though for a different reason. “I don’t think Ritchie knew anything about it.” “Then why’d they cap him, man?” Poppy wants to know. “Yeah, why’s someone dead?” Bennie, who’s returned with a cup of tea and a fresh joint, wonders. “And who robbed No More Forever?” “Mis-di-rection,” pronounces halting Kava. “Perhaps just coincidence.” “Twenty-five miles man, that sound like a coincidence?” Poppy, tough. “Yeah, bullshit! Bullshit!” hothead Herb’s reaction is a little harsh, and he’s given a second to cool off, during which cooloff everyone tries to smile. “A diversion, then,” continues Ket after the beat, “meant to distract, redirect, or delay our investigative eff, ff, fforts,” and no help required on that last bit, Sherlock, since he’s now fast asleep. J.R. appears to be taking it all in, might be attentive but is really just inscrutable, Georgia sneaking a few more glances, none of which reward the effort. “You think they had it worked out back there?” a little later in her bedroom and either she hasn’t had a chance to turn the light on or it’s meant to stay off, something moving behind her question and her smile tending a little too close to simpering in the ask. “Maybe.” He fixes her with a stony stare, even but for maybe a couple degrees of chary narrowing. “I don’t know about Ritchie being involved in any of this. I was there, last night.” She bites her lip, kicks a speck of halflight on the floor. “Like, you know more than you’re letting on...?” J.R. cracks a smile. “No, come on, not exactly.” What then? “Not sure. It was night. I was upstairs. I didn’t see a body.” Well see this, smartass: Georgia taking off that jacket, letting it fall to the floor, follow it and savvy she’s standing there in just her dress. “Don’t you believe he’s dead?” “Sure.” He regards the discarded item. “I don’t really know how much it matters.” She looks down with her head level, just eyes doing the descent, there in the ghostly dark. “You don’t have to sleep here if you don’t want to.” How to quantify their relationship? They’re scattered as distant stars; the odd observer might make out, faintly, some sort of constellation but couldn’t ever imagine a single coalescent shape, could never go further than those fanciful lines hanging interdimensionally suspended, part space, part time, distances lengthening, separations growing more pronounced, look back now and again to note, man alive, but we’ve drifted... Other people just stayed put, feet on the ground and sick with stress, but J.R. and Georgia have, not to say transcended all that--their different bearings being the operative element--maybe ascended and descended, respectively. Each finding comfort and trust in what most’d style illusion, J.R. on the one hand looking to impossible cosmic measurements as proof that nothing bound by their majesty holds much import in comparison, Georgia on the other finding in begrimed urban detritus and buried debris affirmations of certain inescapable principles, secret internal laws which easily trump any imposed by another. Her magic more powerful, for being the more deadly, she can affect a change in his cognitive sphere as though it were her own. She can play with perceptions, sure, but so can any pretty girl; this is deeper stuff, this is too much. Ergo J.R. comes to know, caught jagged though he is on time’s gears, all mixed up and her dress falling, almost floating, to the floor, whither that errant satellite, disappeared from last night’s sky, has gone off. “The Moon...” as she crosses the room toward him unmistakable, purposed, approaching the assured calamity of meeting Above with Below and Christ, her beauty and her secret and it’s like he can’t keep it to himself saying without even meaning to, “She’s in you! She is you!” and at the point of contact she agrees, agrees, agrees. * * Georgia afterwards dispensing with her usual stratagem and actually not lying. Not looking up at the ceiling either, but straight, sitting, smoking, gazing straight at him, more curious than she can remember being, in forever. But there’s this shame. What is it about her own home, her own room, her tucked-away loft bed? Maybe she wants not to invite comparisons, it being the seat of her nightmares, her stupefactions, her lapses toward, well... The idea that, on those nights during which hope of survival is a lark, it’s these very sheets upon which her corpse lies sprawled, some nucleus thereof still alive somewhere inside awaiting the moment she’ll be able to ask whether morning will come and steeling herself for the inevitable, shattering No... sounds funny, as these things go, but she never intended to sully, to profane such a place, even to let another into it, scared it might communicate some classified fact, or worse, spread whatever ailment she might be said to suffer from, the walls of this place so caked with accumulant by now, testimony to her iniquity so thick in the air she can barely breathe. But she’d brought him over all the same, a gesture irrevocable, an effort at defining their heretofore clumsy connection, or maybe just a gambit meant to loosen his hold, get J.R., made of stone, to reciprocate, to simply register and share a single identifiable emotion. He’d asked whether she knew him, really underlining the whole issue: she didn’t, the right answer, for he wouldn’t allow her to. All the itchiness back at his place, her reluctant resolution to offer an invitation, that decision’s attendant result. All conducted outside of his purview, J.R. just going with it, his manner unquestioning, sure, but actually something closer to, say, Grand Indifference. Here’s his cold body now, next to hers, and she can’t seem to warm it. The type to normally take, in partners, a certain dumbness as read and untroubling, Georgia doesn’t, this time can’t let him off the hook, the idea holding firm that he’s hip to her ingenuousness, her desperate desire, and is yet so pitiless. That he’s aware, somehow, of what it’s taken her to be with him in this place, that he knows she’s sharing to counter the shame, and that he withholds still, will offer up none of himself to make her feel, Christ, not so alone in things. What’ll it take? What’s cutting, where this shell’s concerned? She can think of one thing. “I heard something about your dad.” And from next to her comes an indubitable bodily fluster, barely noticeable but then she’s got a feel for matters corporal. He’s jolted some. “Yeah?” “Is everything alright?” Considering it. “Not really sure.” Well now wait just one second. “‘Not really sure?’” “Standard operating procedure, the runaround, you know. It’s the military. They let you go weeks without an update. What have you heard?” “I’m sure you know more than I do--” “Don’t be.” “I mean, probably amounts to just idle speculation--” “He’s my father, Georgia, if you heard something...” Inhales here to bursting. “J.R., I heard, someone said, that he’d died.” So here’s her reciprocation, then, and isn’t she just thrilled for having catalyzed it, doesn’t, oh I don’t know, instantly regret the move. Shrapnel’s eyes broaden, slackjaw lets out a little air. He sits up slowly, dizzily, and turns a stricken gaze on Georgia, whose tear ducts, on permanent alert as we’ve already seen, spring into action--can’t believe she’s said it, hates that she said it, this stupid experiment gone awry--and in the moment before she makes the transition to a state of active crying, with tears massing at the brim like troops at the border, a little giggle escapes from the depths of his maw. J.R.’s expression resolves itself into classic goading posture. He, liar, has had a little fun. And is met with a slap. “Ow!” “What the fuck?” Georgia’s eyes are all shock of betrayal, but there’s a hint of a laugh somewhere. “Yeah, what the fuck, good question.” Rubs his cheek a second, then is calm. Takes a second to denote new seriousness. Lays a clumsy cold hand on her warm shoulder. “Won’t get me to come back, these questions. I’m not staying, Georgia.” She nods, thoughts in perfect concert, for what do you know?--she was right. He’s been onto her all along. “It’s fine. I get it.” “I don’t mean to make it so difficult. It’s not about you, not I won’t come back to you, to...” and gestures about her drug den, her shame, without speaking. Yeah he knows. “It’s okay. You can’t do anything but what you’re doing.” His eyes screwed up. “I don’t know. I guess. I should leave. I’m--” Is he trying to say he’s sorry? Instead he opens eyes, commences with the truth about commander Benjamin Shrapnel; in a minimally conscious state at the military hospital in Landstuhl by the German-French border, effectively comatose, effectively vegetative, there being some distinctions. “The usual thing, phone calls from blocked numbers, bits of information showing up in rumor or, or threat.” Threat? “I, uh...” he can’t talk about it. When did it happen? “Beginning of December. Seven months ago.” “And does this have anything to do with your return?” He takes a second. “I’m not returning. I wasn’t even here,” with a look that hammers home this need for secrecy. “Georgia.” Alarming, kinda, thinks Georgia, but then she’d known, vaguely, that Benjamin Shrapnel had been up to some strange and secret shit. So there he is, strung up to feeding tubes, cached behind corporate and military insigniae, on the other side of some unbridgeable apartness, alone with the void. She never met the man, only’d ever seen the missus, J.R.’s mom, Hertha Shrapnel or did she go, in those days, by some Mädchen appellation, perhaps one hyphenated? Oh, cruel refusal, this kin-group of withholders all adrift, with nothing to bind them, not even a designation of family in a shared surname. Georgia, naming proficient, sees this vacuum there. J.R.’s memories, as he begins to relate them, are defined by such nullities. The Happy Shrapnels with Uncle Ritchie Ra, the latter’s Sandwich MA home, the balmy cape summers of the grotesque Nineteen Ninetees. The first: kid J.R., perhaps seven years of age, with his host out walking the beach at night, scuttling crabs out of sungod Ra’s flashlight beam and finding, some light-lengths ahead, a nocturnal detachment of--what?--scavenging crows. Not at night, no way, and yet--there they are, thick on some immense kill, swarmed and chirruping, must be dozens, every angle of this shape beneath acrawl with tittering black hangers-on; at the swing of lantern’s arc a number take flight, revealing patches of mangled carcass, pecked at and torn up. J.R., guts and gore connoisseur like all kids his age, of course comes closer, examines sections, look look! might have been a head here, once; feet, maybe flippers down this way; there’re these cracked yellow vertebrae reaching up sharpcarved and fingerling, dead organs gurgling black somewhere beneath tattered muscle tissue. Just what manner of rough beast’s washed up, here defiling Cape Cod’s childhood shore? Ritchie Ra, no Cool Uncle by this measure, resolves to pull fascinated J.R. back, threatens, in fact, to tell the boy’s Father if he doesn’t get away from that skeletal heap. Yeah, good luck with that, Ritch; how to explain to him the fact, J.R. computing acute kid’s logic, that his beloved pop already knows all there is to know about this carcass? The boy’d been accused of overactive imagination but no disputing the memory, bobbed up surface-side and impossible to tip, that he now relates to an astonished Ritchie: that he and his father, days past in some lightfilled dream landscape, had met over this body, nodding like birds, and themselves crowed--that his father had told him a story, half-remembered, about Jan Sibelius and his resolute birds of youth, that Ben had said it was no secret to him that people could become birds as easily as breathe, if carefully hazarded, if undertaken with a little faith. This bird was here, J.R. preaches, to teach them about the transience of life. “For it is soon cut off,” he quotes, stunning Ritchie, who’d been an altar boy at his age, “and we fly away...” “That was a dream, J.R.!” Ritchie shouts, uncharacteristically harsh. “This is real!” When they head back to the beachhouse Ben’s on one or more hushed backroom telephone call (later, a teenaged J.R. would begin to correlate recalled periods of increased cellphone-chatter with their attendant foreign warfare operations) but upon tucking in for the drift into that surf-backed sleep soundtrack he ventures to ask about the dead creature, about this memory he can’t shake. His father’s face looking down at him is, at each stage of the story, reliably pokered, but the child can detect, certain as their shared sin, a twinge of recognition. Understands that Benjamin has to pretend not to know what his son is talking about, can’t be seen agreeing with any old outlandish claim, a simple matter of decorum and no offense taken. The rational role-playing dad assures feverish J.R. they’ll go check it out in the morning, now go to sleep, his expression’s underside as certain as J.R.’s that tomorrow there won’t be left for them a trace. All dreams evaporate. This connection, assured by paternal denial, meant just for tonight, and the souls of both Shrapnel men the more vigorously transported for it. One of the few trips they shared, really shared. Or memories of the days when J.R. began to see less of him, Long Twentieth Century having petered, or the new one kicked up vicious in its wake, at home alone with mom and the news on infinite loop, late nights finding her creeping zombily around, creaking open his bedroom door, leaning heavy shadow in the portal while he feigned unconsciousness. This sleepwalking, tailing him on city streets--familiar black car straggling behind and she’d be there in the crack of tinted window--listening in on calls, forbidding him travel or diversion or otherwise drowned in front of the TV set imagining what secret wars were being waged by her husband, by the father of her only son. Might’ve had some kinda effect on him, J.R. notes now, chuckling, eyes strained. This all checks out with Georgia, who after all had in those days known this cagey kid. Had tried to get close and found him slipped past time and again, had occasionally connected in ways which rose above their petty circumstances, their maladroit jumbling of identities, but which would sure enough be dashed by the end. Had they tried, really, to connect? She’d thought of him often, had worried for him, had wanted him to know so, soon enough satisfying herself that he did; still this missing piece, this hole in him tugging relentless anyway and telling her he’d never settle, if that was what she was after. She could relate to being trained, by parents, for betrayal, really she could--and he’d know it, too, if he’d ever thought to ask. But so could she be strong, and fight it. J.R. Shrapnel made no such effort; he just let himself get beaten. “Do they know what’s caused it?” she asks, meaning this coma business. He gives her a pained smile, shakes a fist skyward, knuckle sandwich for God’s own secrets, and says nothing. * * They part on iffy terms. No telling what might spur J.R. to further movement, a species of imminent evasion perfectly legible in his tone, he nonetheless will do his best to pay respects to dead Ritchie in whatever ceremony might, in these antsy times, be contrived for the purpose. Surely there are some worthy events coming up--the solstice approaches, after all, and with it the annual Third Mind Grind, a music-festival-cum-party-cum-house-trashing that has tended, in its prior iterations, to attract and bring together so many freaks from up and down the east coast in such woolly states of intemperance that brazen, fateful behavior is a given: any and all lingering business is usually dealt with, where their adhoc underground society is concerned. Unspoken issues are laid out, grudges and crushes are exorcised, pretty much everyone goes crazy. This year should constitute no exception. There is talk of an already-quite-lengthy RSVP list, probably on account of the promised entertainment: William Thwock Morton is scheduled to give the debut performance of the new pornosymphonic opus he’s been touting for months now, and Georgia has sort of half-promised to play, too, to give her new musical project a try, though she was careful to tell Bennie, who booked the show, that she wasn’t sure it’d be ready in time. Ritchie’s friends will all be there. Maybe that’s all the commemoration he needs. And maybe she and J.R.’ll just see each other then, Georgia mumbles, in an even undertone of surrender. No Say-hi-tos or Give-my-regardses, as for whom might such banalities be employed? They just separate, and J.R. heads into the common room, his error-fated trial of Georgia’s bedroom door having reminded him it’s locked, kid, and ain’t no key. In here all’s empty darkness, can’t see his hand and roommates gone to bed or, okay, snoring away somewhere in the room, a few distinct tones sounding and his steps quiet and careful, undetectable in the black, at length estimates he must be spitting distance to the exit now, letting down his guard a little and immediately--perfect hubris--clang, trips on something’s loud edge, snarls a curse, and falls onto the couch atop a supine body. “Gah!” the voice is a man’s, and as the light comes on J.R.’s thankful to see at least it wasn’t little Poppy, ninety pounds soaking wet, but musclebound Herb, who can more than handle such contact, now that you mention it, J.R.’s concerns suddenly tending in the other direction, like maybe he can’t say the same for himself, Herb here getting up and, jeez, standing he’s sure a huge one-- “Sorry, pal, didn’t mean it, honest.” “What is your problem?” in a snarled whisper that’s louder than a shout. Herb, small-headed, large-necked, sporting black biker shorts, makes to think what to do next, but is interrupted by “Nah, don’t worry about him, it’s no problem,” a hushed voice from across the room, the resident cat-carrier met earlier, name of Bob, was it? Points at whatever J.R.’s stepped on, a configuration of heavy salad bowl, pair of chopsticks, rubber bands, and a little square of cheddar cheese, “’Cept you’ve ruined Bob’s mousetrap.” “Oh man,” J.R. a little bemused at the choice of third person but just going with it, “sorry, Bob, you know, in the dark and everything.” “Oh no, common enough mistake but, as a matter of fact, I’m Blob. Bob’s the cat.” Who, as it turns out, has this fixation for catching mice, though not via any technique identifiably feline. “You saw him, he’s kinda, you know,” holds up an imaginary rotund belly, jiggles it around. “Thyroid. Poor guy, dealing with the little bastard day and night. Since we moved in, this asshole mouse taunting him every chance it got, parading around, once or twice even bringing some friends over to traipse by. He usually chases it once, twice, tires out, and just sulks. So sad to see, cocky goddamn mouse faking sleepiness or a leg injury just to linger nearby rubbing it in.” “At some point enough was enough,” Georgia, having heard the commotion, steps out of her bedroom to join the recounting, “and these little traps started popping up.” “A tunnel, made of a toilet paper roll, bit of cheddar on the end leaning out the window. You’d think it’d be a lock, right? Well the son of a bitch actually levered the tube to a vertical position till down dropped the cheese and he sat munching, on the windowsill, looking right at Bob.” “Or the peanut butter ball, a hollowed-out piece of bread which, when entered, would’ve tipped and rolled into the toilet. The mouse ate a chunk from the outside, and the no-longer-round, no-longer-rollable trap just sat there.” “Now this one, the latest prototype. Bob’s gotten real handy recently with the chopsticks, it’s pretty cool; looks like he stood them up in the floor, with those rubber bands at the base, holding up the bowl. Mouse trips the rubber bands getting at the cheese, and it all comes down on him, baby, he’s trapped.” “Or woulda been,” Georgia gesturing, maybe not entirely jestingly, at the circular ruins on the floor. J.R. feels just terrible, moreso for the fact that suddenly here’s Bob himself, emerging from under a bed somewhere to regard his handiwork all gone to pieces, sniffing inquisitive, impossible not to hear him asking Why. “Jesus, I’m, how should I make it up to him?” “Don’t bother,” says Blob. “Par for the course; he’ll just build something better next time.” J.R. supposes he’ll lean in for a word, extending a few envoy fingers. The cat’s manner’s all enigma, disregarding the ghost hand even as he brushes ass and nervous tail swept against the clothed legs of everyone else. Pleasantly white and, sure, rotund, Bob’s eyes are honed and set cold green from disappointment. He circles a few times, sits, but for all the world acts as though J.R. is not there. Well, may as well make with some message from this afterlife to which he’s been consigned, even if he’s not sure he believes his own advice: “Stay true, bud, and you’ll catch him,” to which words cat ears prick up and piercing eyes peer here and there, around the room, everywhere but at their invisible speaker. * * An acceptable span of time having elapsed since J.R.’s departure, Georgia soon heads for another bedroom, opens the door, knocking as she does on its interior face. Ket’s fetal atop the covers on one side of the bed, Kava tucked in on the other. Gentle though insistent rapping soon wakes Kava, who smiles sweetly. These sleeping beauties, who share everything with each other, have settled into lotophagous addiction, an apathetic peace habit manageable but for this constant somnolence. Not the sort, themselves, to doctor the opioid high with amphetamine or the like, they just sleep it off, sleep it on. Georgia, for her part not sure where she comes down on the question, knows nonetheless to tailor her request to their specialty. Kava makes with a red-stamped bag, product name ‘Friar’s Balsam’ logoed, “nothing special,” she notes, “clumpy, like, don’t get your, hopes,” but Georgia nods shakily, no big deal. “Just a little,” meek-toned, suddenly nothing more than a child. Kava shrugs, “Bring it back whenever,” throws up a lazy peace sign and hits the hay. Back in her room, Georgia gets to messing with the abbey gospel, mixing in the other stuff, working things as best she can into a decent powder. Eyesight unaffected by cries past and pending, she is here possessed, self- and otherwise, sure of deed, and careful. She will greet not a feeling more for the foreseeable, will drop entirely from that world, a chasm in time there to welcome her, its waters to lap gentle over her naked soul submerged. Is that cocaine she’s adding? Look, she does hate it, honest, preparatory school drug, college party drug, tacky and imaginationless, choice of rude apes, blustery chauvinists, rakish dolts, doltish rakes. So shot through with edge, with sophomore agitation, that it could only appeal to antagonists. So Georgia, hypocrite, sees its coupling here--rationalizes it--as a sort of check on its purpose, a strike against such clods, stealing the drug’s rush, as it were, and letting any harshness be met and felled by that other element, drowned in the Friar’s warm undulations. So she’s never some slimy model or sororitrix, never come down with rushed respiration and sweaty stares. Never using with another, above all, her ritual a private one. Afraid of needles, she at least has that, having more than once fended off accusations made by other deviants that any other administering mechanism is a gross waste of precious narcotica. As if that were one thing that Georgia, pale, frail, human, could manage for herself in the way of striking a blow against the beast, a bulwark of humanity so she for a moment remembers that this inner life, its world of worship and the dreadful and imminent danger it will always pose, is really just a quantum of earthly material, and that it can be defeated on that practical plane. A modicum of hope that someday she might be convinced the measly concoction needs never even approach the blood-brain Rubicon. But identifying excuses, she stops making them, and sniffs. Fa so la, do re mi, music spontaneously overtakes, singing out life and love in quietus valley. She falls back in bed, a transfiguring dance seizing her spirit, bodily transformations stirring, identities shed into wastrelsy till she feels, sudden and forever, this being come to her fore. A totem of transgression, manifestation of core sensibilities, the spirit of her betrayals, her perversions, her dependences. The succinct threat that lies simmering beneath her protracted snarls of unpardonable behavior and constant disloyalty. The destroyer, the devourer, the deflowerer. She’d goofed on a name for this identity, looking--like William Thwock Morton, to whom she’s become a kind of protegée, heh--to subvert the nonstarter end of culture, static art of this static age, free to be walked on, ignored, marketed and commodified. A name describing the shift in methods, the active sin no longer shyly lying in wait but corrupting, confronting. A name that’s a lie, that doesn’t pretend to truth or beauty, or decency. A name that’s short-hand for contempt, for contemptibility, that’s disgusting, that’s stupid and proud, that’s ready here in her to loose, to get hold of hearts and minds, to give and take it, to use and to be used. Georgia O’Queeffe, human animal, is almost too perfect. Soon into her journey she takes a turn, one phase worn to sweet frailty, her short rush up fallen into downward spilling promises, softest violet diacetylmorphine deliria. Not such a stretch towards fear here, a formidable one, just don’t count the breaths that seem to come few and far between, only trust in the warmth. Everything smooth, even the memory of pain hazy as a dream woken out of. Love molecules mingle in her bloodstream; film fogs over colors, an agreeable dullness stirring sensual atop her skin. She feels a hearth set in her hateful insides, now open and gently crackling ardorous energy out to mix in environs, coagulating and spreading universal a treacly and dirt-thick peace. Her heart swoons and she lets it, falling, falling, into holy rebirth. * * Alone in the night, a thousand years later, she finds herself in the secret city beneath the earth. Its mirror projections, inverted shapes, skyscrapers just funny now, just lame, fragments of glass and bent metal everywhere. Wanders around, approaching certain corners shot through with alarm at the certainty that around it she’ll find another of her selves, so turning and going the other way. Continues on for a while, dodging, dancing around shadows and iterations, this place so full of them, and finds a clearing and a platform. “Hold on!” shouts her mother Frances as she comes up behind, here Georgia’s age and indecently pretty--she was, too--and grabs her daughter’s hand. They run for the square, climb stairs and board a train, eking an entrance through its closing doors and stand proud, catching their breaths. In the first car, where they can peek out the front window, thrill to disappearing track signaling sudden drops up ahead, set themselves resolute against the toss of sharp turns. “Sure hope we made it in time,” Frances indicating it’s not over. Points in the meantime at the sights, smiling at city’s ruins, abandoned zones once thick with throngs and tourbuses. They hit all the NY highlights, downtown of revolutionary engagements and market bombs, shelled tower remains and cemeteries; midtown with vast junctions and blinking billboards, now bereft of souls, in the way so easily foreseen by anyone trapped in its bustle, the inescapable future wherein it’s abandoned, or relegated to the other, become a mass grave; apartment complexes and flashy restaurants, storefronts and loft spaces, open bar with death strewn casual, shrugged off lands hardened from warning, from cramping, from malevolent human intent. And Frances Klay herself a vision caught in time, young and yet reflected off surfaces shot forth in senescence, an older, parallel counterpart. Those wages of guilt cut in the urbanized earth are cut too in some layer of her, the whole deadened some by exposures and subjections and her face so busily layered by addenda and memory that to even make out an expression is inconceivable, though Georgia is hard-pressed to ignore this suggestion of ‘sly’ she feels close at hand. It doesn’t feel like her mother, just doesn’t. “Here we are,” and they step off onto a station so packed, so crowded with bodies that it’s immediately clear here’s where all the survivors went, safe haven with refugees gathered in retreat, the collapsing society outside assured of reaching soon enough but no matter to these herded citizens, who have given up, and are only here to mill around in tears, saying their goodbyes. Infant Georgia, by now regressed into early childhood, urges her mother on--can’t stay here, I mean, look around--but is met with unreadable silence and a look around, a nod, a thought that this might be just the place. Frances effortlessly lifts enervated, limp Georgia, and moves ahead where this delegation’s lined up to meet her. Venturing a glance, she can see these exiles are done-for, already dead and halfway putrescent, nothing left in them but brittley weighted matter. Terror swells, and looking up, seeking steely protective mothering in this discovery’s wake, she sees only Frances’ determination, and grasps the meaning of all this. She’s an offering. Their splintered hands out for the gift, Frances complies, hands baby Georgia over without the merest flinch of hesitancy, and turns away while her daughter, in the passing, attends. Immediately their fingers plunge through to bone and boiling, flesh vulnerable and unresistant to their unearthly advance. She, in the arms of the skeletons, becomes one, sees her mother leave her to it and escape while she hangs sacrificial, altar-borne in the fields of carnage, the torture garden, trapped there, unable to wake until an appreciable degree of illumination, many lifetimes’ worth of miraculous threads of delicatest daylight, are pieced together and dangled overhead by familiar all-Georgia, standing like Bernini’s piercing angel above the bed, a commendatory word on her lips on the occasion of her pale familiar’s most recent journey pitward. “Dig those living ends...” NEXT: Poppy charts the history of NYC runaways and Seminole punk; Atonwa, ragdoll, gets tossed around some more; NMF attempt a daring rescue, and Georgia starts to get the feeling she’s been had. MARK IOSIFESCU, 2012 https://pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-2 Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:18:11 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-2 <img width="2048" height="2650" width_o="2048" height_o="2650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d563eb67294748dca67a0ce733c77a476c37292ecf47481ae0ff269492d9408f/illtombera2white_o.jpg" data-mid="11082372" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d563eb67294748dca67a0ce733c77a476c37292ecf47481ae0ff269492d9408f/illtombera2white_o.jpg" /> PREVIOUSLY: The siege of the Little Institute for Advanced Study and Noah’s Park Paviolion. Witchy subversion cuts through staid puritanism, rocketing via rail from the Old World to some hazily glimpsed New one, dangling just out of reach, just past the absolute threshold of our feeble vision. Atonwa, fresh out of a mysterious subterranean operating room, leaves the Institute employing a preternatural sense that says he’s at the center, or at least somewhere within the central iris, of a sinister frame-up. No onkwehonwe colonist distrust, Atonwa is clearly onto something or other—or are they just smelling his native cig butts as they litter the backroad? And anyways, didn’t he just do time in the most uncanny of holding cells? things starting to run together and congeal amnesi- and paranoiac as he drives north under assumed surveillance and is at length captured by ADAM, some acronymed tendril thereof, when he crosses state lines into Alabama. State apparati do what they will, and sometimes all you can do is laugh like a mental patient. Up in New York some hours prior, day’s golden end piercing a certain crystal glint that seems already to suggest some logical underside yet to announce itself, Arthur Yagoda gazes into reflective lobby glass and jerks gums this way and that, sucks his teeth, sends a finger in, hands smoothing the black necktie that’d hung dopily outside his buttoned dinner jacket the whole walk over, that’d knocked askew into once-sharp-now-dulled lapels and made, reflection seems to say, a mess of things. Wherefore, why a tie with a tuxedo, the real question he’d been mulling--by definition no tuxedo at all, no form of suit known to modern man, kind of closer, in point of fact, to the plain fact of disorder, to nothing. He thinks of the guests upstairs, pictures his entrance, can already feel polite glances masking less generous judgments. He’d been careful until now, pretty solidly attendant to the vagaries of get-together fashion, a dedicated follower thereof. And then this happens. Which means he’s staying down here till Georgia arrives, at the very least, late though he is, for Georgia’s late too, later; almost sunset, but he’ll wait and offset his own false steps by entering on her shoulder way he’d previously intended and we’ll see what the glances are saying then. Necktie, Christ, but just what’d come over him? This Arthur here being a guy who truly and quite openly thinks himself a pro, no sarcasm but actual, if boastful, sincerity when he speaks about parties, fancying around, looking like a million. Because he knows himself to be of the generation took ‘Unpleasantness’ as its cultural aspiration, he’s resolutely defined himself as Classically Cool, meaning here the light hi-hat taps and polished Oxfords, basically the hepcat rug-cutting sense. Accent on ‘Class,’ like. He’s tried to listen seriously to boring big band jazz. Actually flirted with British inflections, elements of style, the letter “u” and other orthographic cues. Eschewed excessive drink, casual fun, save when it’s allowed him to better cultivate this avatar, enrich its expansion, develop its idiosyncrasies. Make it real. Which meant ordering something harsh and straining to withhold the ensuing grimace. Or dillydallying at home before a party so that he could arrive hurriedly at the last second, apologizing but see, he’d had trouble extricating himself from this vague prior engagement. So that’s that, then, still eyeing his reflection. Not an error at all, this stupid tie, but an elegant idiosyncrasy: scoundrel Yagoda’s patent twist on the old favorite, his giving it a new shake. You know the guy, he can’t help but look cool. It’s the best he can do on short notice to rationalize what he hopes no one’ll realize is just your bog standard fuckup. The offending issue straightened out in both the figurative and literal senses, and a commensurate calm coming over his features, Arthur allows himself a moment of quiet composition, twinkles a little wink at his reflection, decides the hell with Georgia Klay and heads down the short hallway to the elevator, buoyed confident and ready. * * Upstairs, Ritchie Ra’s in his rooms, one story beneath the gathering, bolt upright on a shabby plastic mat, focus sort of coming and going. His small apartment, adjoint quarters to the workspace above--in all, the full top two floors of an eight story warehouse he’s been renting for twenty two years--and the atmosphere down here, down in this specific, tiny room spare by design, so that, with nothing much to focus on, a sort of defocalization--the necessary sort--comes settling over him natural as a nap. Loosening his gaze, the empty egg cartons pasted overhead to line the shared ceiling spool readily into infinite repetition, distant projections, blurring into space. Put there for soundproofing, tonight a little leaks in from upstairs anyways, noise pollution through the mosaicked cartons, unwelcome but ignored easily enough. Dirty cinderblocks, stained smoky red from the building’s formative industrial years, stack cleanly out, running the edge of the bare room, no art hanging. Spare by design. Ritchie’s hands lay themselves flat against the floor’s coldness, his brain noting this bit of disconnect, by which it means to say he can’t feel it. Knows it’s cold, but can’t feel a thing. Can’t even remember the sensation. More mineral than man, if a man’s got that somatosensory hookup, Ritchie’s been here for he doesn’t remember how long, straining through dissociation to stay 100% present, to let focus emanate but finding instead that it’s all caved inward, every level down to the minutest ending on top with these vaulted ceilings that, with no counterresistance, lower, terribly, each time he looks up at them. Messing with his private mental map. His home disappearing, this home he’s loved, in which he’s lived out so much, rooms wherein he once slept, worked, ate, loved but which now figure only as his summoning grounds, all memory, all life dropping out of view for long stretches, ugly and nightmarish when a glimpse is afforded, through his lens of truth out over the perverted mirror world, the Looking-glass House he used to think of as his own. It once necessitated a fatal break in concentration but now he’s learnt enough he can put a hand out to the glass all gone to gauze, smiling through, and note his faroff mirrorworld counterpart’s expression without losing control, without faltering. His Will holds fast. In fact, at this point he barely has to try. Already the air in front of his forehead begins to flutter, steam off a hot road in his steadfast attention’s headlights. Details begin to delineate themselves: teeth, nostrils, brittle links of hair. A hand, soon a body. Ritchie breathes deep, resolve locked on the shimmering figure before him. That thrillingest act, invocation. “O Shadow O Radiance usher command me signal ATAPAO ODIO O.” A voice he swears rings out verifiable. A prompt for direction, for command, voice prone in submission, cadence shaped by a tide Ritchie can’t quite see yet but which he detects in the recitative, low and slow as a creaking, tilting prow on very old waters. He’s had a hard time, these last few months, extricating himself from these exercises. A certain notion of imminent revelation hinting, baiting, bolting him in place, he’s got little patience for the outside world, safe in the assumption that to live publicly at a time like this, to engage in some crass pantomime of life as usual, would be plain wasteful. No, it’s this private realm and its exhilarating promise, this hint of mystical ascent that’s compelling, that demands further investigation. In becoming sick, in examining his sickness, he’s really started to work at this piety wholesale. Busy days, made to wallow in the quotidian, he dreams of the moment he’ll be able to return to this seat, surrender in worship, keel and list on the tide, usher up a guide with whom to confer, some entity from that realm of fullness, a being who’ll speak to his symptoms, who’ll illustrate what they hold, Ritchie’s real goal being--in a frail human way that, no matter his ever-strengthening will, he can’t shake--to prepare, to be ready for what’s next. Somehow, Venus and her orbit, ordained forever ago, have become swept up in all of it. The planet’s appearance, the deliberate passage across the face of the setting summer sun, mythical analog to the tumor spreading over his brain, will cement his newfound telic perspective, set the entirety of this feeling, its incidental moments and cosmic flashes, onto the short road to terminus. This day will be some kind of last one. But in a final concession to the Ritchie Ra the world once knew, he’s put together a party. Certain though he is that before the evening’s out he’ll return to this room and confer, he’ll just as surely do his social animal thing, run out the intervening hours in the company of those few whom he likes and those many whom he tolerates. Though the mirror, as we’ve seen, no longer projects for him any stale one-to-one expression, Ritchie’s roughly aware of how he looks to others. Handsome at the outset, hardly dead, not even within spitting distance. Fifty-nine, and mockingly vital. Closer inspection reveals those telltales; left pupil a little larger than his right, pronounced hood forming on the lid. A world of details conspiring to form subtler facial asymmetry, but the way he’s been wearing it, no one seems to’ve detected a thing. Indisputable, though, on his inside. Just a month ago--only a month, Christ--on another clement Cape morning indistinguishable at its start from all the others, thing’s’d woken up dizzy. Ritchie’d stood, confused (as all waking moments are shapeless, hazy and uncertain as their preceding sleep) rocked boatlike, tried walking across the room on marshmallow feet and actually fallen over. At that moment, he swears, his mind shot flashforward to that portentous diagnosis. Could his body have known, detected the encroachment? Which element had done the reporting—the invader itself? A spirit, invoked unknowingly? Had one already whispered a kernel of the truth to him, and so soon? No matter; doctors exist to shout down such whispers, and did, urged caution and lack of imagination and left him mumbling something about mild labyrinthitis, Dramamine to taste, nothing to worry about. Try and get some new work done, Ritchie, mean how long’s it been? But, without family or other easy distractions, he began to dream, began to dwell. Those nights he slept through, he’d awake to an awful mortal recall, having, during those few merciful hours, forgotten everything. Waking life now held all the familiar promise of nightmare--like he was living out some reverse childhood, a symmetric tapering off at life’s end--and made good on this hallucinatory potential. Visitations, wherein he’d walk into a seemingly empty room and without ever looking know, know utterly beyond doubt, that he wasn’t alone. Nights drifting, those immortal moments at the border of wakeful- and sleepfulness, when he’d be startled horribly at that sudden drop felt or scream heard, the moment every kid tries futilely to train him or herself to expect at bedtime. It was only natural, you’ll agree, to impute an ironclad connection between the thoughtforms he’d been learning to conjure--but couldn’t, not fully, not yet--and the growing cancerous mass behind his eyes. Surprise no longer entered into things, just this Uncanny, this expectation. He found himself reveling in it, hoping to get sicker and sicker, knowing he’d soon cross the threshold and receive a genuine magical communion. What thoughts, then, flashed in Ritchie’s head as the first seizure announced itself, and did so, as promised, right alongside that bonafide invocation, impossible simultaneity, the light there in the corner, shifting, turning, an experience he’s recalled ten thousand times since, an aura which propelled him upward into terror as the moment mounted, allowing himself to turn around, finally, to face this occupant, hazarding the long-avoided look behind and seeing, in a moment of searing culmination, its face, ancient and incalculable, staring him right back... then, as he buckled under confirmation, what question did he ask? Was it what this all was, or whether this, finally, was it? He can’t remember. He came back to himself, sprawled on the floor, tongue flopped in a puddle of vomit. In his account (which naturally he’s kept to himself) the seizure was a fulfillment. Likewise for the second such episode, the subsequent waiting room, and the neurologist carrying the MRI scans, shuffling slow down the hallway toward him and staring at the floor, steeling himself against eye contact. Little fulfillments, checkpoints headed up to the border, the big one. Which now lies just ahead, and who-knows-what there waiting on the other end. Okay, so, has Ritchie allowed himself to grieve, to be afraid, or just opted for this communion as substitute? A mirror world question, one with which he needn’t bother. Not so much plainly irrelevant as moot, too debatable to spill over into pertinence, and at any rate, it’s his private rejection of such banalities that constitutes this last half-proud rebellion and he’ll be damned if he’s to acquiesce now. Ritchie is either woefully stoic or just plain stoked. He honestly regards mortality as a goof. His aloofhood can, by now, hold the whole world in its sights with nary a blink, and beyond--so that if, say, the imminent transit of Venus is to be the last one anybody ever sees, it’s no skin off his elbow. No goofy kid’s nihilism, Ritchie’s outlook is hard-won and confirmed at great length. He’s found a kind of contentment, here living in the space between two apocalypses. Wish him well, though he doesn’t have long. We should all be so lucky. * * “Seen Georgia?” people want to know. “Uh, um,” or something, Arthur’ll stammer, and they’ll slide without much trouble into talking about what they’ve evidently wanted to all along, invariably some work of hers that they admire. Making things difficult for Arthur, eager to shift focus onto his own stuff. “Yeah, she and I’re actually thinking about collaborating on something, the two of us,” some patron saint of the segue smiling upon him, “see, I’ve got a new one I’m working on, some of the same characters from Intermission, but in a whole new context.” This girl, some artworld hanger-on, party type and as it just so happens an attractive young filly, may or may not know who Arthur is, what he’s talking about, any of it. Instead smiles pleasantly, says nothing, lets it fade slow while they just stand there. “You know,” Arthur with an eye toward keeping things in motion, “a little more minimalist, not so constrained by—” “No shit?” she says, interrupting, and loud. “Yeah, cause, Ritchie and Edgar, Edgar O’Nubb?,” referring here to the downtown instrumentalist, arranger, composer, producer whom Arthur’d met a handful of times but with whom, as she’d guessed, he couldn’t claim a first-name-based relationship, “couple parties ago they were talking about like new work she was gonna be doing, Georgia, something with that flower painter, like, it just I don’t know didn’t seem like something she was going to be like working with anybody else or, I don’t know it’s just that was my impression. Seemed kind of like, you know, something personal.” She mouths something, shyly but kinda emphatical. “Sorry?” In a barely audible whisper: “Something vaginal.” Arthur swallows. “You, uh, check out the bar yet?” * * The top floor of Ritchie’s South St. warehouse--built in 1830 to house hardware, machinery, dry goods, dry enough they provided ample fuel for the Lower Manhattan fire five years later that marred the redbrick facade, left it black and shabby ever since--retains that spartan downstairs layout, smaller rooms fringing the blueprint and this huge open central hall, dozens, maybe hundreds of sweaty folks here already attesting to the space’s haughty railway terminal grandeur. A welcome breeze snakes between the gaptoothed brick windowsills which arch high, stretching floor to ceiling with sooty stone gargoyles peering out from on top, and cools off the already stinky coteries. In between the windows are blotchy gray cement interstices, new wall put up as the building’s skeletal foundation got grimier and grimier. Ritchie, who moved in in 1980 and liked the place way it was, had had a mind to fight any and all ensuing renovations, but nothing, not even appeals to the Landmarks Conservancy, seemed to draw the slumlord owner’s eyes off the property prize, so he just gave up. Huge canvases, leftovers from the last opening, cover these walls so that folks are afforded a chance to see some paintings instead--though no one really spends much time looking, preferring to sit around, crashed out on these couches circling the ad hoc, cinderblock-built bar, and shoot the shit. Over at that bar, as a matter of fact, aforementioned Mr. O’Nubb and William Thwock Morton, virtuosic pianist, unrepentant hedonist, and incorrigible punnographer, have been drinking and discussing the latter’s latest project, a series of piano sonatas entitled Ticklin’ the Ovaries. “Eventually we go orchestral with it, recording on, you know, on a large scale,” the ‘it’ in that sentence referring to Thwock Morton’s nascent venture, the creation and dissemination of what he’s taken to calling Modern Erotic Composition, “and our interests converge.” O’Nubb, who’s always had unorthodox ideas of his own and is of late a professional studio engineer, is, it’s safe to say, on board. A permateenager, weird-tall and lanky in t-shirt, sneakers, unkempt dark hair worn shaggily though gone partway gray, his pretty much universally agreed-upon reputation is of a good guy who’s managed to stave off uncoolness well into middle age. Possesses enthusiasm, the brand borne of youthful positivity, not that phony stuff, and has been in the game long enough that it all seems rather miraculous at this point. Doesn’t coast on ‘Did seminal work in multiple musical outfits,’ ‘Has appeared to retain some degree of artistic credibility for some thirty-odd years,’ ‘Influenced all the non-notational music being produced today that’s worth listening to,’ anything else the gossipy types around him are right now whispering to those who confess embarrassedly not to be familiar with the man, because, oh yeah, he ain’t rich and famous neither. Sure, you do the research, read your liner notes, you’ll find his name’s relatively ubiquitous; meet the kids, maybe, who never heard a guitar the same way after the tenth or twelfth listen; if you’d like, track down a recording of one of those first New York shows and judge for yourself. O’Nubb’ll still be working for a living, careful not to price his services out of the realm of the interesting music, wherein the good musicians, the real freaks, can afford to enlist them. Which means none of this mansion stuff. But more than enough, anyway, to occupy his attention. O’Nubb runs a label/distribution firm, writes columns for friends’ magazines or introductions for friends’ books, plays in bands, tours, for Pete’s sake, in addition to the studio day job. And is fundamentally hard to angle, since by rights he ought to be bitter, angry at the musical mainstream, the record conglomerates, the plumb-stupid American consumer, but isn’t. He doesn’t partake of that kind of harshness. No political ire to raise, even. He’s peaceful, concerned with fun, and thus constitutes, for most, an unsolvable mystery. Thwock Morton, who’s fat and wears an obscene mustache, is the opposite. Warlike, bellicose, he philosophizes and labors over his musical output, is serious, in fact, as a heart attack on that score. A reflection of his notational upbringing, perhaps. Something of the rote in the way his art functions, those same dilettantes, heartless manipulators, flibbertigibbets’ll tell you. Unlike his compatriot, he harbors actual hate for them, for the terms based in fashion and fascism, all those ossified taxonomies. He, who won’t brook the hierarchical, confronts it. And so he creates this music that descends, pestilential and quite nastily, upon its mores. Now, make no mistake, he can play Liszt, grow his hair out, crack his knuckles, sit down to an étude would make your head spin. Has been known to. The establishment is not to be sloppily conflated with the enemy; leave that to the credibility-obsessed, the desperate-to-please, that younger, desperater generation. Thwock Morton laughed, for instance, when he heard Haydn’s little ‘Surprise Symphony,’ that kind of classical cuteness a prototypical iteration of the type of audities he’s sought to present in his own work (not to mention the wealth of jokes that sprang from the composer’s name—‘Why couldn’t Beethoven find his teacher?’ and the like). Clean fun has its place. And so for the other sort: he’d worshipped Otto Mühl and the Viennese Actionists (in honor of whom he submitted his first symphony under the pseudonym ‘I.P. Freely’), thumbed well that inimitably bawdy French literary tradition, spent his collegiate years developing and virulently defending theses on specific porno films, less-than-noteworthy ones whose admittedly straightforward efforts at titillation he was happy to resituate (“A Cross-Theoretical Analysis of Rhizomatic Tropes in Amazon Ass Splitters”, A-). Had it begun as a goof, the fulfillment of that universal prerequisite that says Throw It in Their Face If You’re Young? He’d parse the question some: it had begun as youth itself, which is unconcerned with Their Face save for when They interfere with the progress that youth strives to engender. Being young, eager, and talented, he’d been offered for perusal the breadth of artistic possibility; this portal slid open, he’d moved to prevent its narrowing. Genre, Vocation, these epithets, for him, had failed to fix, and even as he aged, intrinsicness and categorization meant nothing, a freshness of perspective that he shared with all good artists and all small children. Which has led to this commingling, one such new synthesis and the formal debut on the horizon for its typifying piece. The porno sonatas promise--or maybe it’s just their composer doing so on their behalf--to confuse, arouse, then maybe if they’re lucky outrage. Really anything but adoration, which would catalyze some serious reconsiderations; selbstlob stinkt, as the Germans say about praise. No, horror would be these works’ rightful reception. Same goes for their composer’s stand on parties, more than one of which has ended for him in a decided lack of clothing. But work before play, and see if it all doesn’t start to sort of run together anyways--“Your psychoacoustical expertise, Edgar,” Thwock Morton by now lubricated enough he’ll talk flip about art, “is what’ll really induce a physical reaction,” leaning in queerly close, “if you know. What. I mean.” * * Talk drifts, drinks drunk. Arthur Yagoda insinuates himself into what conversations he can but sits hesitant a few feet from O’Nubb’s turned back, glances over cautious now and again. A figure in a darkened corner holding a saxophone piques something in him, may as well call it interest. But where’s Georgia? His new gal here, who’d claimed personal friendships with every noteworthy guest, is similarly shifty, seems to be working on getting sufficiently blottoed so’s the laughs at Yagoda’s jokes come a little easier before she grabs the errant necktie and leans in close. Something gets whispered that, despite the distorting effect of her dusty cig-voice, makes drunken Arthur--who knew the tie’d be good for something--perk up, and they head, hand in hand, for one of the other rooms. The filly’s pulling him down a hallway, fingers slipping playful against his, leading, grasping the tip of just one or two, doing their dance: first brush, then joining, then the letting go. “Come on,” and he does, around a corner where she, ahead, almost topples over onto an oncoming figure, turns on him with indignation but opts just to chuckle slurry. “Hey, come on,” Arthur making the connection, “that’s J.R.” Yeah it is, he of the pallidness, the weak protein-thin hair dribbling and coming loose on top, J.R. Shrapnel, military heir. Boasted a, call it ‘tenuous’ familiarity with most of the other invitees, though Yagoda’s not really one to talk. “Hey bud,” Arthur feeling it out. “Been a while.” “Yeah,” J.R. forcing some species of smile but neglecting to cover up this sad strain around the eyes, “how--” “--Georgia,” They’d known each other. In high school they’d all known each other, two and one but hardly ever three. Yagoda the latecomer’d never achieved comparable closeness. “She’s not here? I’ve been looking--” J.R. is dressed far worse than he, thankfully, crappily patterned waistcoat and pocket square and nauseous pants that don’t fit. Some middle ground twixt ‘try’ and ‘give up,’ ‘don’t care,’ all that sloppy that Arthur abhors. A whole air of half-heartedness, in fact, is palpable in this figure’s presence. Though young, he’s sunken and beat. The name doesn’t ring a bell for the filly, who admits it openly and introduces herself to J.R. (and to Arthur, procuratically, for he hasn’t caught her name) as Fiona Snuzen, of the Upper West Side Snuzens, and making full use of that simultaneously loud-quiet cadence reserved only for the inebriate, wonders mightn’t their parents know one another? See, but it’s complicated. J.R.’s father is Benjamin Shrapnel, who, notably reclusive on account of the sensitive nature of his government work, still managed a decades-spanning friendship with Ritchie Ra, lasting until their respective recent tumbles into corporeal catastrophe. Between the two men had held the kind of true feeling which, artless and beneficent, confounded outside understanding, and so most of Ritchie’s friends spoke around it, while others, revealing in themselves the coarseness which grows, weedian, out of another’s success, indulged in furtive partygoer whispers. J.R., who’d known Ritchie his whole life, didn’t, not really, was locked out same as everyone else. Add this further wrinkle, awkwardness, perhaps resentment from the others on account of his father’s status, goes some way toward explaining the body language he’s displayed thus far tonight. “You might’ve known his Pop once, maybe, but not lately,” Arthur driving in some weird wedge. Their history a muddled one, seems he’s elected to assert himself nastily five years on, this girl a buoy at his side. “How is he, anyways?” J.R. means to just leave, but Fiona, for whom a switch has flipped, touches his arm, sighs, asks what happened. He looks up, eyes somehow narrowed on both of them simultaneously. “Excuse me,” and a move to creep away. “Well, I’m just,” the brazenness kind of throwing Arthur, “I was just asking, like, I mean no one’s seen you,” turning to Fiona in an effort to usher her toward him, “no one’s seen him in years.” She acquiesces, and he smiles at J.R., back in control, “There’ve been stories about you, like, that you’d get a kick out of.” No matter how long Arthur waits, J.R.’s gaze won’t meet his again. Is it possible that he actually doesn’t care about this stuff? “I mean did you get lost someplace?” J.R. starts in laughing at this, a nasty dry laugh, and spiteful. Arthur’s feelings harden instantly. Arm around Fiona, who doesn’t resist. “Well I guess I’ll just sort of see you, around, maybe,” trying to sound like he’s not even trying to hide the disdain as he sort of pushes her down the hallway, follows, marches. A second later he thinks to call out something else but upon turning back for the sidelong glance there’s no J.R. there to take it. Where’d he go? He’s actually just now sidling up to that aforementioned bar, where, though it’s easy to loose petty Arthur’s hold, he’s not quite as casual about tonight as he may’ve let on. He doesn’t sweat the guests, doesn’t care a whit for the digs of his peers, if Arthur even qualifies. But look, he can’t put too fine a point on this matter of Georgia Klay. He’s come today to see her, a goal borne not of hope or desire or anything like that; though he hadn’t much wanted to, he knew he couldn’t let himself flake, something like that. His will, this internal obstinacy. Even the worst thing that could happen here, tonight, well, it’s preferable to the brown study he might’ve lowered himself into had he not shown. Because he can sail past a lot of it (take Arthur Yagoda, see above), but the things that bother, do, and dreadfully; J.R. has presided, in his time, over some real festering of feeling, spells of dark in which all life is drained. He copes via low expectations--counting as a sure thing that he’ll be back there, in that heady zone, anyday soon--and in the meantime sees the beast crop up in this more manageable form as, say, anxiety over a girl whom he hasn’t seen in some years. Georgia. Now she’s abandoned him, as he abandoned her. This symmetry, see-saw link between them, tilting this way and that over the years, the connection unseverable but played out in feints or by proxy, defined by its own negative space. Which somehow suits J.R., cipher, just fine. * * Meantime Arthur’s in a half-darkened sideroom with Fiona, this early evening party kind of throwing off the tried-and-true go-in-a-room-turn-off-the-lights-let-it-happen thing on account it’s still bright enough, Manhattan turning under the sun, terminator line approaching, skewed off-axis this phase of the ecliptic, to see everything--see Fiona, her every expression, her energy somehow fucking with his hookup-equilibrium. Not supposed to go like this, force him to face a truth from which he’d rather look away. Should he feel weird about it? Is there something to it? This pesky light preventing him from banishing thoughts of J.R. back there, unimpressed, making him feel, oh, spooky doubt all of the sudden, an eldritch landscape mapping in his head, illuminating hidden thoughts wherein their possessor is, I don’t know, some kind of phony? Gah, get that shit out of here-- “I gotta,” separating from the girl, lifting her hands off and tossing them out of the way, making a move for the outside. “You’re joking,” Fiona having expected a certain professionalism, should’ve taken a hint from the sartorial goof. “No, because,” craven Yagoda pawning off everything, “they’re all going up to the roof, is, hear that?...” The sounds of footsteps are corroborating this, it isn’t pure nonsense. People are headed upstairs. The transit of Venus. “Who cares?” as she eyes him, upturned and keen. Christ, what does he do at a moment like this? The light’s still streaming in dusty through drawn blinds; there’ll be no avoiding it. A voice has hold of him, is yelling emphatic “No”s. And yet a promise, so simple, and Arthur a red-blooded American male who, thanks very much, never turns down a chance. Thinking it over for a second. Yeah. A wrinkle, though: Ritchie Ra, one story below, in private conference with one or more of those otherworldly representatives, has in fact been right beneath this very room, and had Arthur more of an eye toward the bigger picture he might have seen the actual cause for his sudden faltering, not any trick of the light but, in an unforeseen bit of collateral damage, a real-deal unholy miasma, a thought given form, a spirit, folks, conjured maybe a little laxly in the discipline department by the relative neophyte downstairs and now lo, reaching up for Arthur through the floor. Arthur, who’s read his Yeats but has no idea the man practiced Golden Dawn magick, Arthur who thinks of himself as learned enough he needn’t allow for the existence of such forces at all, is by going ahead with Fiona nonetheless entering into a tacit arrangement with them, a tenet of which says he’s going to have to make restitution for this offense. Proud youth who go against their instincts often run such a risk. But not J.R. Shrapnel. Standing there at the bar, outwardly alert but actually paying no attention at all, he drinks something and observes, altogether passive, interested--at least theoretically--in being drawn up in some sort of feeling but for the nonce just detached. Guests have begun to file upstairs for the astronomical portion of the evening, which frankly seems like it’ll be a world of trouble, poseurs having drunk to drunkenness, looking for those vague cosmic implications, coming up with some horseshit upon which to expostulate--the situation reels forward thusly in J.R.’s calculation, a safe one, he thinks, conservative. But surely it’s better than not trying at all? Well, yeah, he guesses, looking around, it’s a party’s got some actual thinking folks and maybe he should be a little kinder. But, cynics, check out this stratification: little gatherings cluster constellational around those guests of note, some hotshit actors, publishers and book agents, art critics, this guy in the corner miming along on a saxophone, a couple of, jeez, fashion models, each sporting their own eager-faced detachment. Mustn’t these celebrated personages know that the flunkies just want things from them? Mustn’t the flunkies know that they know? How long can the game go on? Exactly who’s the sucker in all of it? Ugh, zoom back camera! It’s too exhausting. “J.R....” He knows the voice, has known it since childhood, summers out on the Cape, that weighty thing, memory lurking under the thin topsoil of the present, its interactions, years welling up over dams and levees to crash through and swallow, see, for it’s Ritchie Ra himself, warm but looking maybe a little beat up. Just engaging this mutual moment, peaceful and boundless, nothing much to say. They look at one another for a few seconds before walking, side by side, to the stairs and onto the roof. Everyone up here’s walking that fine line J.R. prophesied, arranging themselves much the same as downstairs, this jazz guy over in the corner, this major record label A&amp;R asshole, their respective corteges. The sun, beating thick across the river, tilting over New Jersey, engages the odd onlooker, puts a momentary damper on appearance-keeping-up; Venus’ tiny disk appears on its edge. “That’s it?” when someone points it out. “I can’t hardly see anything.” So, no orations, no jubilations? ‘That’s it?’ Just this unabashed voidfulness that leaves J.R. vindicated but bummed, being he doesn’t see it either. His mythological digression, in which he’s equipped to handle the mysteries of the universe better than any of these flim-flam artists, falls apart. Venus sits there mocking. Ritchie waves J.R. over to where he’s lounging on rusty deck chairs with O’Nubb, who’s migrated up here without Thwock Morton. Formal introductions are made, but J.R. doesn’t know music real well and so doesn’t start in swooning or anything like that. O’Nubb, who’s drinking a soda and grinning, is completely fine with this. “Nice to meet you, man,” and J.R., all of the sudden, is driven to an uncharacteristic openness. “...I’ve been trying to get it,” pointing over solar way. O’Nubb knows instantly what he’s talking about. “No real trick to speak of. Conversation, I once thought, but,” taking a sip, “when you get right down to it, there’s no way it’s going to appreciate what you have to say, is there?” “Sure there is,” Ritchie looking over. Past them--past the alarmingly asymmetric stare, the façade which, like that of his building, has got close to nothing left--expression says he’s been trying to get it, too. “I just mean that’s the least we can do, is praise it, Him.” O’Nubb laughs. “‘The Sun is God,’ something I heard somewhere.” “Yeah?” For J.R., all pretense melts. He wants to know something, he asks. “He’s being cute,” says Ritchie, “Turner, those were his last words, it’s said.” “Cute on account of ‘Ra,’” O’Nubb obliging some background. “Right, but it’s got to be true,” J.R. stumbling over sitting rapt and talking at the same time, “if it was ever worth worshipping... well, then now it must be all the more.” Some of that kid’s pantheism. He barely knows what he’s rattling about, but the words come quickly, feel natural in the saying. Ritchie nods, hazards another look. He wants to become available, put out feelers, open to it. “Pat and Billy,” here referring to the constituents of a seminal Seminole punk outfit called NMF in whose development and promotion Ritchie and Edgar’ve had a hand, “they’ve a song on their new record talks about it.” “In their charming roundabout way.” O’Nubb meaning sloppy, loud, drunken, honest. Earmarks of, you know, rock and roll. Ritchie Ra has spent his life ‘talking about it,’ too, in his wise. When he hit his stride, did his best work, he was creating out in repossessed territories, one of a handful of white men allowed on the land of Red Indian traditionals. “Instead of an abuse of nature,” they’d written in 1974, when Ritchie was twenty-one, Ganienkeh’s resettlers, the people of the Flint pitching tent for a return--centuries-old Haudenosaunee shade over the vast woods all the prefab shelter necessary--“let there be an appreciation of nature.” And some years later he’d come out and tried, shrugged off what he knew, what we all know, deep down, to be false and degenerate, set himself straight, sought sanctuary beneath the Tree. Painted, built, fought. Took shots at the passing helicopters night in, night out. Fell in love, lived loss. And what else: whiled away a universe in blissful submission, began to accept the bad for having spotted, though faint and far-flung, some of the good. Lived a life that seemed defensible, that seemed, in the face of what he’d left behind, survivable. But not exactly sustainable; idyll waning and well of goodwill dripping dry, he left. On his return to New York City the cynical and shitty art establishment opened its arms wide for its reformed rebel; representation, shows, a good amount of money followed. Ritchie, who at that time would draw as soon as breathe, tried to stay excited, keep an unerring eye on the movement of the spirit of survivance that he’d observed, that hint of the sublime that’d once invigorated his plans. Tried to stay enthused, to cast himself steady and unhesitating toward new ideas, above all else to keep on working. He’d returned, he thought, in order to curate exhibitions, to foster collaborative publishing plans, to sit back cozy in a well-defined collective of friends with few ulterior motives and even less politicking, to live out the spill into middle age with the surefooted aplomb garnered from eight years away from deadening urban life, eight years in the woods. Well, he’s managed to squeeze some of these projects out, find new ones, achieve a degree of notoriety whose emergence he’s treated with what grace has been manageable, he hopes. He’s traveled the world, spoken to vast audiences, talked on TV, once in French. Proud experiences on paper, but ones impossible to quantify genuinely--now he’s doing his final tally--save as “time wasted.” For it’s those years in Ganienkeh, naturally, which he pinpoints--or did, at least, until recent spiritual concerns superseded them--as his most thrilling, the time to which he’s since sought return. So that years’ worth of sharpened memories, dispatches from the past, are caught reflective when here, dying, Ritchie Ra looks at the fading face of the summer sun. Catching its light unawares, he might become paralyzed, but letting it in carefully, staying with it, he is filled up. Love, suspended miraculous in time’s invisible crosshairs--through to transfiguration, and glory. “I think,” voice unsteady, “think I’ll head downstairs.” “Really?” O’Nubb pointing. “It just started; mean, we got another half hour of viewing at least.” “I need a break.” Ritchie’s alight, vibrating, wants to be in his rooms alone. “J.R., have a good time. Edgar.” Edgar O’Nubb takes a look at his friend of two and a half decades. “Alright Ritch. See you.” * * So does O’Nubb know Ritchie’s sick, really? How about J.R. Shrapnel, who still figures in Ritchie’s conceptions as a clueless kid? This tendency to withhold, a quality Ritchie long ago consigned to ineradicability, has dictated his disclosure strategy to the last. People find things out their own way, like, if they’re meant to be made privy... but he’s human, after all, and mightn’t his last days be less lonely if only he’d share a little? Mightn’t he be underestimating his friends, their empathic capacities? He admits that he can’t say for sure--and anyway, when lucid, he can reflect on the way in which, having been human, he’s given up on some things. Heavenly minded, he’s no earthly good. No big deal when it’s all tabulated, but this decision, fatally followed through, does mean that personal fulfillment will not come for him in warm friendship’s guise; no lover’s comfort will usher him into the next world. He’s an artist and so he aims always to exalt in life’s transcendent mysteries, but his body is a man’s and it’ll die plain and unadorned. A note here on illness: his brain tumor is of the type designated glioblastoma multiforme, nothing with which to fuck, the proto-cancer, alpha and omega, impossible exponential cell growth, unfazeable. It’ll scrap, in fact, fight radiation and chemotherapy and render it all of it moot if you don’t care about the extra month or two. The best dent you can hope to make, if you want to call it one, is the knocking off of a hundredth or so in surgery and a subsequent regimen of radio- and chemotherapy to march through, salt the earth with innocent tissues chalked up as collateral damage and the whole affair meanwhile taking on absurd, comical shades of misery. Ritchie has undergone no medical treatment, cannot be said to be “battling” his illness, “a real fighter,” any of that. But he’s taken an interest, anyway. His second seizure--in which he felt himself, finally, begin to ascend, intuited a hint of the treasure behind the curtain--quite naturally raised the discourse to eschatological heights, ones cruelly defined by absences and almosts: would the next one take him all the way across, to a full and brutal perception of the glory of the Throne? Or--the splintering proposition he’d been forced, by his seizures, to consider--was he being tricked, descending into simple delusion, nonsense, hokey hippie horseshit? Too far gone, he couldn’t really engage, could only hope never to know for sure. Ritchie, considering these seizures, began to harbor a secret wish for another, a final transfiguring assault, one on whose wings he could lift off, survey his surroundings, gain dizzying altitude, give up the ghost. Some kind of absolving achievement, let him know he was right to play things the way he did--close, so goddamned close to the vest, wasn’t it? A personal transit of Venus, wherein the unknowable object might cross, purposeful and with grace, the cracked orb of his damaged left eye... * * The viewing party proceeding apace, those that’ve stuck around find themselves stumbling, literally in the case of the ever-more-deeply-intoxicated William Thwock Morton, onto ways of understanding, of not pretending. He’s dragged his sizable carriage upstairs in search of a figure spotted earlier out of the corner of a red-rimmed eye, is presently hectoring the other guests for confirmation--hadn’t they seen it too? His quarry’s identifying characteristics come out garbled, confused, results in no one quite knows who or what he’s talking about, despite the urgency indicated by his tone, most deciding instead to inch tentatively away, turn backs and drift outward to roof’s edge, hugging the peripheries of the peelt metal fire escapes. The hectoring rings out unabated, though, flirtations with belligerence giving way to a talking-to from O’Nubb and subsequent comedown, a gentle reframing of the narrative, so that Thwock Morton’s left here sitting ‘cool older dude’ style, leaning forward into a turned-round wooden school chair in the center of a group of lounging kids, expounding in storytelling mode, no longer haranguing, just a spot of warm relation, a fire-escape-side chat. Soon he’s surrounded by yet more acolytes alternately enthralled and bemused. On the subject of the transit, he adapts the countercultural creation myth, likely apocryphal, that’d been recounted often in the autumn of his years by the once-vicious dodecaphonic rebel Pierre Boulez. The story is of a conversation between Brahms and Mahler held along the Danube’s Vienna banks, wherein the former, decrying the state of contemporary composition, lamented for the lost spirits of Mozart and Beethoven and the long-gone golden age. In response to this, the story has der Mahler merely pointing to the river, noting it was impressive, sure, but that its flow ensured new waters for every consequent glance, so that one could never greet the same river twice. “The sun forges those new atoms faster than we can ever hope to get to know all the old ones, being, see, awful fucking big,” Thwock Morton well in the bag by now and fighting to stay on track, “but it changes, is the crux, renews itself. The sun that’ll see Venus off, won’t, will not, be the same sun who welcomed her, or, you know, as Heraclitus had it,” belching, “‘the river is never the same river, nor the man the same man.’” Freshly-hexed Arthur Yagoda, whose tryst’s concluded rather disappointingly, can be seen hiding on the outskirts of Thwock Morton’s detachment, listening intently. Times during the speech he laughs a little, at appropriate points. Nothing to do with his hands, he picks someone else’s drink up off the floor, holds it but doesn’t sip, eyes for detectable germs. Peers to and fro for Georgia, for Fiona Snuzen, for the nightmare vision of the two in conversation with one another. Off his game, ’s what he’d been, and really no one needs to know about it, least of all she. Handily distracting, Thwock Morton keeps on talking, equating the movement of the celestial spheres with the inexorable march of government totalitarianism, offering a jeremiad on the role of the artist in such hopeless times. Invokes the ghosts of Richard Strauss, poor comrade Shostakovich, Sibelius, mere men, mere Europeans, rendered anxious and assbackwards by manners and mores and idiotic pride, made pawns, collaborators, their gorgeous outputs sullied with all manner of political slime and their characters consequently consigned to that sorrowful realm. And comes to rest on this sellout trend’s latest contemptuous torch-carrier, the one whose mention hits home for those guests in the know as he entreats finally for the release of a concentrated solar flare “to strike fiercely, and mercilessly, and penetrate the black heart of Alfonso Heliotrope.” The very name, its saying, darkens the moment. A hush come over the rabble. “His representative is here. That beast of his, Renfro Vale. The monstrous pandrogyne. Here tonight, spying, and I’ve seen it.” This being the identity of the mysterious personage, spotted from afar, “And why shouldn’t he have sent someone? Why is any of you surprised to hear it?” Thwock Morton starts railing and Yagoda, confused, looks over at Edgar O’Nubb, who’s got this faint outcropping of concern, and at, ugh, of all the--of course it’s J.R. there alongside, whose very presence, very gaze, does Arthur offense. Can’t say whether eye contact was made, but resolving not to chance being seen a pussyfooter, Arthur Yagoda inhales sharply and walks over to Thwock Morton to introduce himself. “Hey man, just want to say it’s real special meeting you and—” “Yeah, special, sure,” Thwock Morton, unbeholden to those dumbshit niceties, can just let loose, “Special ed, special olympics...” actually turns away from Yagoda here, looking for something else, never bothers finishing the thought. Arthur for his part laughs, nods, calms his twitchy hands and wipes them on his jacket. Takes a second to steel himself and then goes for it: “You haven’t seen Georgia Klay around, have you?” And he looks up! Is J.R. still watching?--Arthur doesn’t dare check. “No Georgia, man, she never showed,” comes the response, still heavy on the insouciance. “Huh,” foot’s in the door just stay cool, “well, maybe she might’ve told you about me, she and I like, us having done some work together; Arthur Yagoda?” “As in the bathroom?” Thwock Morton, tall, wide, just sort of dimensional, really spreads out in this question’s asking. “I'm sorry?” “Where?” offered as naturally. “Where, what?,” Arthur’s drinksmanship not as advanced as this situation requires. “Where do you mean? Here?” “Where... where do we work together? Wait what,” doing his best under the circumstances, but sinking fast. Thwock Morton’s a different story, has in fact rarely been prouder, ergo straightens up to deliver the following: “Yagoda the bathroom here, here and now?” Okay, so the punnee detects it, but, bowled, he can only play it straight: “Uh. Yeah.” “Yagoda the bathroom,” giggling, mostly harmless. He really can’t help it; Thwock Morton, austere art hero, has this lamentable dick-around habit that he will not, cannot break. Let one of these pregnant vocables go in his presence, he’ll deliver it of all manner of gaiety. Sees playing with words as a bona fide component of his transgressive duty, one from which he won’t allow himself to shrink. Not that the other elements go neglected, though, don’t worry; he’s a workhorse and can juggle various brands of confrontation at once, a trait to which his present behavior attests: having tired of the Yagoda pun parade, Thwock Morton slowly, deliberately, methodically (if slovenlily), undoes his belt, reaches into his pants, actually pulls it out, and, looking square in the eyes a beneficiary chosen at random (a balding publicist with a cummerbund and a neck tat), commences pissing. “Yagoda the bathroom,” he slurps, “where and when you wanna.” But his target’s disappeared back into the crowd, and few are left lounging around to laugh. * * Jeez, but what must Arthur be thinking? Nothing, really; he’s wrecked. Wants little anymore and expects even less. This party, this encroaching nightfall, these wraiths tittering and him powerless, at their mercy, with no ferryman, no guide. Georgia. He considers the depth of his mercy toward her, the wanton fullness of that mercy’s betrayal. He’s often thought, in shaky efforts to assuage ill feeling, of how similar they are, how inarguable, underneath all the pretense, was their case for companionship. Somehow he still trusts in it, some far-flung future he’d be unsurprised to wake into wherein it’s all worked out exactly right. But then these moments, all of that feeling turned, spleen overpowering, venom discomfiting so that Arthur can only watch, from outside, as the night happens to him. All the transit talk’s just reinforced he revolves around her. His orbit steadfast, undecaying, would never enable him to just move on to something new. A sufficient catalyst would have to be something truly calamitous, truly revealing. Did Georgia feel as strongly? Could she ever do? Arthur can’t see a way out of the labyrinth, his every day beginning so heavy with expectation and ending heavier still, its burden left unclaimed. He has thousands of wishes, all variants on the one says they’re together and there’s nobody else with whom to bother. How did it get so serious? Arthur, prankster himself, wasn’t always like this. His private persona once synched neatly with the public; in school society he did pretty goddamn well thanks; sure, held some vague envy for those around Georgia, for her gifts, for J.R. Shrapnel and his stalwart elements of refusal, but yeah, suffered not from want or however that goes. He was the kind of kid, after all, for whom that life’s made: liked to have a good time, could impress easily enough, pull one over on anyone and everyone, teachers as easy marks as were girls. Wasn’t so polished, hadn’t perfected his game but still stood way out ahead of the pack, and knew so. Say what you want, Arthur’s awareness has always been sharp—he embraced the artifice early, had no qualms about fakery, networking, getting ahead. That this recognition informed his writing is indisputable. About that writing, then. Well, the less said about his earliest plays, names like La Danse macabre and Chiaroscuro, the better. An omnivorous reader, he grasped some, ripped off more. Young as he was, it could hardly be called an offense, and questions of integrity went out the window, anyway, in light of his philosophy that said it all justified itself if he could just do well. At some point or another it became his defining characteristic, the pursuit of this Arthurian legend--well, that and the Georgia Klay side of the equation. Her becoming a fixed point in his universe lined up nicely with the expansion of this playwriting thing, on account of the overlap, cause she could write, man, and effortlessly, not like Arthur who’d sit pulling teeth late nights pounding out shitty work he just hated, three bad pages for every good one, who’d dishearten, who’d feel more and more a victim of cosmic castigation, a fingerwag at his pride swooped from above. Not so with Georgia, a fact that just fascinated. Her situation was complicated, by the standard of those immature days. She’d struck Arthur as being somehow outside the desperate vying that so seizes young people, that so colors their relationships. She didn’t spurn it, as surly J.R. did, but seemed for her part to good-naturedly brush it aside, the implication being she’d lived and found fulfillment in the real world, outside of this circus, had never succumbed to it, and was thus impossibly adult. That she would never be his, not ever, but cared not for the inflated status that might otherwise attend such a haughty pose. Georgia intimidated other girls, it was said, though never on purpose, or for any reason besides she could talk to anyone with ease and never seemed to need, or to risk, anything. Arthur, who in those days was always risking, always needed, and couldn’t write for shit, had to fight to play it cool. He placed himself constantly in her proximity, tried to balance being genuine with that unflappability but something would always give the whole game away. Georgia, funnier, would let him know she knew it but put him at ease all the same, joking with him--they would often drink together--calling him names. He’d never felt ashamed to so brazenly bask in the attention. That it didn’t bother Arthur not to have progressed beyond this stage in their relationship spoke perhaps to the superficiality of the whole operation. It was enough, back then, to be attended on, to meet on the goof-around plane and never rise above. He could continue his empty pursuits of other girls, seek status, play the picaro, long as he was getting this on the side. It may even have had some depth to it, her ability to see through his bullshit somehow giving license by, say, cutting him down to periodic size. Indeed, he came to rely on this penance, his mockery at her hands, to get through those flirtations with soullessness that otherwise threatened to consume. Anchored, he stayed somehow decent. Until, separated by the cold northeast winter and the colder Ivy League--in four years she never came to visit him there--he saw the arrangement’s breakdown. To remember Georgia at that distance ceased to mean remembering times shared or conversations held, but meant rather to recall the sensation of being near to her; of holding on to her when, drunker, she’d stumbled; of how small she’d felt. Lush, oppressive corporeality usurped what had been platonic, secular, and in the same instant, what he sought overtook what he could reasonably expect to receive. He was, all of a sudden, the selfsame pathète against whose emergence he’d organized his whole life--what the fuck? He had been merciful, hadn’t he? in getting the callous treatment and not turning away, in doing his time, at her side, waiting, the better part of a decade. But he’s here anyway, floating through the throngs like a ghoul, alone, every detail of his environs testifying to that deep Colossal Bummer. The cruelty of the circumstances flabbergasts. He’d sought a temporary stopgap in the rendezvous with Fiona, whose gritty cigarette whisper had been reverberating hauntingly ever since. He’d fumbled the J.R. putdown. Gotten nothing from Thwock Morton, O’Nubb, Georgia’s peers. What next? Promise an increasingly rare thing up here, this dark-suited figure with the saxophone he’s been seeing all evening seizes attention and Arthur hazards an approach, following the instrument’s glint and wading into yet another retinue, where befalls a final ignominy: “Hey man--” these new friends give a start, look up spooked and droopy-eyed as Arthur sees it’s actually a bong, no reed just a mouthpiece and a bowl sitting inside its bell which, when lit, reflects and colors the shiny plastic beacon, this instrument he’s been following absentmindedly for hours, a smeared patina on the paraphernalium that, to his untrained eye, had made the dopesmoker appear a jazzmaster. “You wanna hit this?” A distant yell goes up in William Thwock Morton’s recognizable timbre somewhere behind, with what sounds like Fiona’s scratchy cackle sounding in response. Pulling at his tie, feeling like an idiot, Arthur accepts as, outstretched lazily, they offer him forgetfulness. * * The dark sees summer’s violence alight, raw on hot southerly winds, a change stretching the capacity for explication in those observers who, just outside of their sphere of comprehension, detect a little something missing. What’s been taken away, now that sun’s set and city lights once again smother and snuff those of the stars? What’s abandoned these souls? Certainty, pretty much--maybe faith, another name for the same thing. The comfort that informs any interaction between bodies human and astral, that says the very fact of the latter’s existence, its overpowering presence at any degree of remoteness, its utter exceptionality, means the former can safely surrender, knowing that nothing that can befall a life, neither death nor war nor the most grievous of lies, will ever constitute a real threat, not while living gods knock about the solar system, circling indefatigable, even servile moons and small bodies persisting beyond all comprehension. This, J.R. thinks, might be a sensible stand on things; that, in effect, earthly doubt’s of no consequence in the face of celestial riches simultaneously inconceivable in their scale and yet irrefutable in their verity. A truth that’s surely self-evident to any who’re made privy to a legitimate astronomical phenomenon, the jaded, the proud, the idiotic, whoever. And since the category’s such a resplendent one, near anything can qualify as an adequate reminder, a stand-in for more sumptuous metaphysical treasures and pleasures waiting for us, we hope, at the end of everything. Anything to keep us humble would do the trick, to just wink back at us in knowing solidarity--and yeah man, it hits J.R. of a sudden, that’s what it is, something is missing: ain’t no moon out. That’s what’s left them hanging, its vacuum filling up with uneasiness, dark emotions scooting down the pressure gradient with no nightlight to deny them, to embarrass. What’s worse, the absence of any hint of the cosmic order means that the night’s won for the ersatz, these mangy man-made trinkets, smog and tall buildings, civilizational junk blotting the rest out, proclaiming its note as if it were worthy of any, and getting away with it, too, on this night with no counterpole to hang there, solicitous and warm and vital. So where’d She go? Waning gibbous a mere two nights since full flower, there’s no excuse for this desertion. Further questions seize; is the polarization of emotion J.R.’s here identified among associates an effect of their being astrally jilted or some kind of cause of it? Which is the symptom, which the ill? By way of illustration: William Thwock Morton, seriously hammered, in and out of crowds of guests, just won’t calm down, and having now, sure enough, gone ahead and disrobed, commences blustering his way around, shouting for this spy in their midst to reveal his or herself, running up to people and trying for that bodily contact. Edgar O’Nubb keeps an eye on his progress, periodically runs interference on his increasingly combative nude friend so innocent souls have a chance to escape. Yeah, it’s mere containment that seems to be of paramount importance to O’Nubb, so it’s a bit of a surprise when he reappears at J.R.’s side wearing an expression that lends the boorishness some credence. “I believe him.” In response J.R. looks up, says something quiet that doesn’t catch, that neither hears, all attention now focused on the rooftop population, which, though thin and still thinning, constitutes all the same a faceless swirling mass on whose fringes Thwock Morton’s prey might be hiding. “Renfro Vale!” guests actually cringing to see things go this far, “Mark me! Take this to your master! Tell Heliotrope!” Thwock Morton summoning, demanding a trial be assembled even as guests begin to flee downstairs, “the coward!” the voice becoming lost in the increasingly panicked retreat’s general hubbub, even O’Nubb hesitantly packing it in as Thwock Morton launches into Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Siegfried stabbed by Hagen, “pointing to the ravens, right? ‘Errätst du auch dieser Raben Geraun?’” his voice being drowned out as he begins sputtering the names of sellouts, hypocrites and opportunists, traitors and informants, “your compatriots--Vidkun Quisling!--La Malinche!--” bodies pushing past--“Ronald Reagan!--Alcibiades!--Lord Haw-Haw!--” palpable anger above the din--“J. Edgar Hoover!--Jacques-Louis David!--Talleyrand, the preacher who didn’t believe in God!--Fouché!--Henry Kissinger!--” a space now cleared for the home stretch--“Elia Kazan!--Boris Yeltsin!--Delilah!--Rudolph Giuliani!--Bob Dylan!--” and in a moment designed just for straggler J.R., backed up as he is against the roof’s very edge, the quintessence of that reliably unreliable party timing when all extant sound drops out and the night condenses into singularity so that he can hear uttered, crystalline and unambiguous, the name of Benjamin Shrapnel. Whereupon his insides turn to steam. * * The fact was, it was all true. The pandrogyne henchperson of recording impresario Alfonso Heliotrope, one Renfro Vale, had been there, just moments ago, and though not too keen on being seen or joining in had nevertheless had some places to see, some people to go. Thwock Morton’s revery is right on the money, and it’s overwhelmed him. He’s haunted by Heliotrope, a mortal all at once in cahoots with the present’s hidden immortalities, a revealer of patterns and a participant in their perpetuation, a snake oil salesman and one all the more dangerous for knowing even a little of his larger role. Not for representing, he embodies; not for rationalizing, he acts. His present incarnation just a mask, understand, he’ll still saddle up for the triumphal procession, a small parade in the larger Roman pageant. “Remember that you too will die,” William Thwock Morton dreams, has long dreamt, of whispering into his ear as was done in those days, but that’s just it, it doesn’t matter. He’ll die, but not really, not in the way that death connotes consequence. Heliotrope’s but a stand-in for a much larger program. Take it off if you want, but behind the mask, see, there’s something even worse. Thwock Morton, prostrate on the roof in a puddle of this or that, looks over and sees at building’s edge, indeed cantilevered perilously out over the busy street below, someone that looks an awful lot like Ritchie Ra, some doppelgänger thereof, younger, less fierce but as angry. As sick, in the way that certain people are always sick, in exquisite private torment, a distended shadow draping over them from too far away for its source to be pinpointed, winds snapping cold breath at their backs, rattles of bone unavoidable as fate and non-transferable as nightmare, the storm of progress blowing down the angel of history. The figure looks over, locks attention, and Thwock Morton lifts a discombobulated forearm to reach out, somehow affect a rescue, but it won’t take, and anyways, he’s much too late; Renfro Vale has come and gone, and this is just J.R.; Ritchie Ra lies dead in his rooms two floors below. * * So. Things go muddley. The people seem content to characterize themselves, or be characterized by the night, as mere masses benignly opiated by their night of frivolity and so politely conceded to shifting and shunting and ending up nowhere at all, only really important for the jostle and confusion they wreak on those persons worth mentioning, in turn, by dint of their having been able to separate themselves in the first place. And jostle and confuse they do, and so make it impossible to establish any continuous account of the rest of the night’s events. Law enforcement arrived, stood around. At some point or another Edgar O’Nubb was back in the fray, wearing an expression said to be uncharacteristically severe. Arthur Yagoda might’ve floated around a while longer, stoned and on the lookout for either of two female companions, one of whom had of course never showed, the other having long melded into the rabble. And the standoff on the roof? Hard to say, really, whether or not it found resolution in dutiful J.R. Shrapnel’s acquisition of some greater knowledge of father Benjamin’s activities. How much he’d yet had, what’d been waiting there for augmentation. Whether familial fiat had plucked him for deposit into some frozen snapshot of an earlier age, doomed to await the long arm of the thaw reaching back, detritus from an explosion that hasn’t yet occurred. Whether his past staggered up into the night, steadied itself against the dogged wind, `nodded a flicker of hello at pale future. Whether the government operation that goes by the heiroglyphed name of ADAM came up at all. These being, after all, the sorts of singular insight that outside observation, however spirited, will never yield. NEXT: Georgia Klay. MARK IOSIFESCU, 2011 https://pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-1 Fri, 30 Sep 2011 02:21:03 +0000 Pleasure Editions https://pleasureeditions.com/ILL-TOMB-ERA-ch-1 <img width="2048" height="2813" width_o="2048" height_o="2813" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0d43026ba6e6285e2f9b934b40f092ac023244a70d7cc56fd8f40b2bbfd30869/illtombcover_o.jpg" data-mid="11082374" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0d43026ba6e6285e2f9b934b40f092ac023244a70d7cc56fd8f40b2bbfd30869/illtombcover_o.jpg" /> What is it that came before the word? Who is it laid bare the stakes? Some figure, hard to catch sight of then and harder to remember in the careening days that followed, though all were quick to recall that brush past the door, footstep in the dirt outside, tiny lift in the kitchen curtain just so, feeling of something invisible sweeping into the house as the first prayers went up, and on a night like that... Mothers with young children, for whom nursery rhymes were still wont to spill forth only half-bidden, were apt to think of him as Luceafarul, Eminescu’s famous evening-star, here finally descended down its ray of creation to smile on good, simple folk. Children, no less suckers for the magic conveyed in verse and raised on this heady backdrop of Sabbath chants, swore it was tiptoeing Eliyahu come through to finally take that sip of wine. Others--the lush on his barstool, the old man behind the leather shop counter, those whose connections to those old poesies had just about fully eroded, and been replaced with poporanist workaday practicalities--casted meaningful glances at one another until the stranger moved on, mumbling afterward about the accent they were sure they picked up, a new Jew arendator, landlord oppressor, another sent by cosmopolitans to infest the area, this town, Moineşti, rotten with rites and tribalisms and secret societies as it was, and by now its every parcel of land just so much commerce to line the cabal’s filthy pockets. And such an odd timbre in the man’s voice--what had he said his name was? No one could recall; only the most recent exchanges lingered in the memory, then they too went gossamer, took wing and flitted. He had asked for directions to the railway station. Word was he was headed for the capital. He is pictured, when done so--in fresco cycles on seldom-passed walls, or in shabbily-xeroxed concert fliers pinned to telephone poles--in a few key poses. Here lifting a gloved hand up to the big departures board, here wandering in the aisles and whispering in a conductor’s ear, hiding in the locker toilet during ticket control, gazing out the window, expression content, peaceable as the countryside that just rolls by. Smiling at the gendarme who walks past and doesn’t see a thing. Smiling at the downcast woman in black, husband felled of late in an attack by rampaging peasants, whose wan countenance now carries with it this obscene suggestion of earning for oneself, however she must do it, on the city streets. The train reaches the capital, in fact, just as the attacks back in Moldavia spill over into a full-blown workers’ revolt, those same Mojnescht Jews now in, yeah, some trouble... And this hazy shape--call him Domnule Zgomot, Monsieur Bruit, a Herr Rauschen, a Mr. Noise, names being academic, and meaningless where he’s concerned--what concentrated kernel, what diamond-dense nucleus of his essence comes ripping before the Word, appears as if by hap, in a Western-style tailcoat and Beau Brummel boots, on the rainslicked streets of Bucharest. He gets to work immediately, slipping handfuls of foreign gold coins, francs, sovereigns, Turkish lire, in the designated pockets. He hints, sly in backrooms and sure steady handshakes, speaking whatever language is called for, on account he knows them all. He tracks down the children, those chosen whose mothers still speak of his golden descent, children whom he means, in accented sagesse and an eye on the longview, to initiate. “It’s a hard path, and doomed,” he says, in the darkened out-of-the-way spaces in which he makes his offers, this funny paradox being pretty much the crux of the whole schpiel. “Do you accept?” “Ja ja.” “Oui oui.” “Da da.” He smiles, and the cellars illuminate, with just the barest spark of countervailing light. Initiatory rites are proffered. The magic used is very old. The girls are separated from the boys and each is cleaned thoroughly, from head to foot, in warm waters that smell of linden and chamomile. Dried with flowers, white basil petals and ruddy umbels of dill. Eyelids are shut, like a corpse’s, with the gentlest brush of the stranger’s fingertips, and each child falls into a warm and welcoming sleep, hardly settled into for exploration of the lengthy gestation ahead before the stranger is gone, whoosh, the doorhinge flapping once more. Years pass, and they are bad ones. Suddenly there is this saying going round. It’s in French, about l’état,&nbsp;and it goes, “Il tombera.” The mothers in the countryside fret and observe with silent dread the way things seem to be getting worse and worse. Yet there are contraindications. In the city, on the street, people begin to speak strangely. Old languages up and reappear on the tips of their unaccustomed Orthodox tongues. A rich father brings his daughter to the doctor, says he can’t figure out why she’s been spewing these snatches of trashy old noise. The doctor, world-beater, Budapest-born and rational as they come, furrows a practiced furrow, bustles a filing cabinet, talks about the weather, stalling on account of, well, it’s strange but the way the girl just sits there--dark hair straight down and sticking out in front of her eyes, also black, hard-set, yeah she’s got that initiate look alright--and babbles, oblivious to the grownups’ conversation and all in an unearthly, tilting low register. The doctor sets her up with a basic hearing test. Pulls a phonograph record off of a shelf, explains that musical tones will sound in groups of one, two, or three. “Repeat them, that’s all,” but when the recording pops and wheezes to life, what begins playing is something different. Before the doc has a chance to realize he’s put on the wrong disc, a shimmer of clarinet birdsong lifts into the dingy room, arcs over their heads and next thing you know the girl is whistling back the trilly beginning of the ‘Quartet for the End of Time’--that infinitely slow piece of Messiaen’s, composed and performed of late in a freezing German prison camp, at a performance attended only by fellow captives, starved and faded, and the guards who just sat there, as this doc sits now, rapt... As this doc sits now, rapt, here in indisputable waking tangibility, dingy security guard booth lit up in blinding fluorescence, overhead lamps and pale snowy TV monitors, one latexed hand on the Red Indian’s temple and the other stuffing in this plastic mouthpiece, stop him whistling, seizing, c’mon, wake up, these voices that’ve on occasion been known to just well up, ow, right up in the subject’s eardrums from wink to heady roar, shaking his brain with ghostly third ear tones. It’s not a new phenomenon, the subject here coughing, spitting up some jailhouse infant formula; what is it they’ve been feeding him? His tongue spills out and he bites it, gnagn, hard, but the dull mouthpiece underside prevents any real damage. He shakes, sputters and goes back to lowing, another long, wordless cowcall. “Shhhh!” the doc jamming shushing latexed finger in the subject’s plastuck mouth. “Shut it!” The Red Indian lies back and the doc calms noticeably. In the brief window for observation afforded, he begins to note dimensions of the subject, though ultimately all he writes on his pad are the words “skinny kid.” The subject, eyes still shut, pushes up off the steel examination table, grunts and notices the mouthpiece, which he makes a move to pull out but ends up just losing his balance and spilling off the table onto the floor, where he lays like a lump. The doc springs into action. “You alright son? C’mon...” The subject turns around, eyes open, smiling through the mouthguard. He mushmouths a few words, intoning them slowly. The doc pulls the plastic out of the subject’s mouth, a long line of yellowy spit trailing with. “What was that now?” “Too many wines and too many beers,” the subject repeats, in a strange low voice. “I’m feeling dozy.” The doc smiles, jots something else down. “What else can you remember?” “The band’s all done, man, better pay up. Except--whoa, someone’s stealing all their shit. Someone’s robbing the band. Hey, whatchu writing?” The doc shows him the pad. ‘Proleptic flashes.’ Flashes? ‘Atonwa’ is the name he goes by. His father was named Laloux and his mother St. Cyr and so he probably had a French name at some point but for a while now at least he’s been Atonwa. He’s been locked up a while too, and--here hazarding a glance in the reflective glass face of an out-of-order security cam monitor--looks to be loaded, heavy red-rimmed of eyelid, the whole bit, so he may just be forgetting some more crucial identifying information, maybe meditate on it a bit, get his bearings, except-- “We’ve got to get you out of here.” The fuck, doc? Where to? “Never mind where,” the doc here motioning to the table, where a rig of working television monitors, beige plastic cased and antenna’d, a bunch of kitchen TV sets all lined up in series, blink out their various black-and-white feeds, crummy label-maker numberings spelled out beneath each, “ONE,” “TWo,” “THR3E,” like that. One of these feeds, the one to which the doctor is pointing, seems to show a number of figures--there are five, now six--standing around, shirtless, heavy rucksacks, masks on, strapped. Strapped? Yeah, with a quantity of firearm. Guns, big ones and small, hanging off makeshift shoulder holsters crazily precipitous, or else in hand, as they pace and confer, but there’s no audio. “We just want you away from here.” Just, wait, who, what’s that? Atonwa’s head pounds, a heavy tinnitus tone is oppressing the entirety of his perceptions, he can barely listen to what the guy is saying, and just what is it he’s talking about anyway? Puts a hand up to his eyes, cover, bright light, thump, metallic, pummel, blood, yeesh. “They,” guess the doctor talking about the dudes in the video? “are in that building. Here, get up.” He pulls Atonwa roughly by the shoulder, ow, shit-- “That building.” They’ve climbed onto a counter, now ducking into a sort of bubbled pod window right at ground level, the concrete and the night before them, the view is worm’s eye at best. Below him Atonwa can see the steel observation table he fell off of a moment ago but has now risen miraculous above like a spirit leaving the body. The room was underground--where he’s been, he thinks, maybe, for a while now--“that building there,” jerking his neck to attention, Jesus, and pointing out across an empty gravelly lot at a big concrete structure, maybe ten stories high and squatting just as wide, in the shape of a ship, hmmm. It’s only half-painted, rigged up with scaffolding, attendant portions slathered in blinding white primer. Police cars circumscribe the place--siren flashes continuing to do a number on Atonwa’s worn eyesight, not to mention his dizziness, or his blues--and a helicopter circles overhead, searchlight dripping lazily onto the ship’s upper deck, that is, the building’s roof, that is. “Cool boat,” Atonwa says, and slides slitherine out of the doc’s grasp, slipping off the counter and knocking the TV sets over with a huge clatter. The constant falling feels natural, and he can’t seem to feel any pain just now anyways, so. “Listen to me!” The doc--wait, are you a doc even?--is leaning over Atonwa, pulling him up again, rough, by the armpits. The guy is all elbows, jostley, jerk. “They are attacking the institute. If they find you... you’re going to want to have listened to me.” Going to, want to, have listened, this convolution. Must be serious, he is speaking so importantly. Atonwa puts on a serious face for this important man. “What’s the plan then?” And congratulates himself on getting focused, see, not so hard, except that while he’s been reflecting proudly he’s been missing the plan; the doc’s already responded. “Okay sorry, once more.” Points to a door. “Go that way. Through the tunnel.” He slaps a magnetic card in Atonwa’s bandaged--bandaged?--hand, which he stuffs in his jeans. “Works on any institute vehicle. Drive, head north. Stay off the highway but get to Alabama.” Cool. “No sweat, it’s done, baby,” he replies to reassure this guy, except he’s already in the tunnel, the doc is gone, Atonwa must’ve been sort of chewing, ruminant, on these words for a while now. This corridor is long, and, yeah, plenty dark on top. Through it all buzzes this steady metallic cricket hum, something loose in the lighting circuit, the sound flickering, following him, or else it’s he who follows. He breaks into a run, it gets louder. He stops, it stops. The hall terminates in a plain wooden door dead ahead. Laughing at the eeriness and moving at a pleasantly buzzed, hotfooted dancing pace, Atonwa raises a bandaged fist. Knock knock, who’s there, don’t know, thought you might tell me... alright, very funny but as the door falls open, Atonwa skipping through like it’s nothing he--yikes, what’s that--jumps back out hastily, for there is someone else in there, no joke, funny guy, a figure caught sight of for a split second, and as Atonwa, responding to some inexpressible biological imperative, automatically makes to run the other way, a call goes up: “Freeze!” He’s spotted, too late, should he keep running or freeze? Freezes. “Turn around.” It’s a woman, Red Indian, young, gun pointed, hey--characteristics coming to Atonwa jagged, straggling through a haze. Behind her another dark hallway stretches, at whose end Atonwa makes out, through a large glass window, a dank but well-lit underground parking garage and some shiny rides tucked in, headlights peeking winks at him from a hundred yards away. Ahead of all that, leaning up by the door as if waiting for someone to come through--now standing between him and what’s his--is this figure, here fixing him with this weighty stare, an intensity. Fixing him with that Glock as well, heh. “Where did you come from?” suddenly her expression’s changed; her gaze drifts nonplussed over him, up and down and up again. “I don’t...” Atonwa’s teeth feel rubbery from the mouthpiece, words being bounced down in the asking to a tentative master statement, offered with exactly zero conviction. “To be honest I definitely pretty much just woke up.” For some reason she accepts this answer. She’s a teenager, eighteen at most. Skinny, with huge eyes peering dark over a bit of torn green cloth she’s tied round her nose and mouth. It occurs to Atonwa he’s shirtless, like the men in the video. “Who were the men in the video? In that building?” he notices his heart, finally, feels a little more alive. But there’s no pretense of a response, even. “Where are you supposed to be going?” she asks, lowering her weapon, and he just points down the hall, out the door, the cars. “Go.” Atonwa pauses to think, but nothing much happens here on pause; instead he just nods, and walks past, into the moisture of the hot garage which, an exit ramp laying invitingly upturned at its far end, sucks in and swirls around a quantity of the heady vapors of the air outside. The cars are tiny Florida-plated scenic tour numbers, not built for much more than what might come up on a pleasant amble in your favorite golf cart. Which is what they resemble, really, no backseat and open sides, white roofs and compact flat fronts. Magnetic card readers to swipe access cards through instead of any key ignition. There are a dozen of them huddled close in this garage, all the same. One other thing, Atonwa peering around for clues to a nascent mystery whose initial parameters, at least, a certain instinct’s telling him he’d better start mapping: around front each car’s got a logo printed heavy decal on the flat-paneled, vertical hood, big green letters, arranged in a circle, with exaggerated Hebraic serifs: “The Little Institute for Advanced Study and Noah’s Park Pavilion.” Inside the circumscripture a big tree blooms agreeably, and animal silhouettes--sheep, goats in monochrome--mill about the grass, one bending over to chew on the apostrophe in ‘Noah’s.’ Noah’s Park, hence that big boat building back there, he thinks--or maybe says aloud, since the nearest car answers by whizzing on by itself, engine all awhirr all of the sudden. Gah, jumping back for what feels like the hundredth time seized by the notion everything here is alive, or--wait--Atonwa noticing that actually it’s just recharging, this plug spit out the back and resting snug in a damp concrete-set outlet drilled safe in the ground. Yanks the ripcord, gets in. He’s pulling out before he knows it, gliding up the ramp into the night air, no signals on this thing but no one around so far either and the rush of wind in his little open air cage feels fantastically exhilarating, his stiff body surface vivifying into sensibility, reacting to the outside in a way that he can’t remember doing for some time. So what can he remember? spilling here onto the surface, through a vast “Visitors Parking” section whose constituent cars he feels he’d better snake between undetected, for suddenly there’s that siren and copter soundtrack, and sure enough, the small bubbled sideview mirror on this dumb cart is glinting back a lightshow, lines of black cars and yellow cordoning, siren flashes blue and red. Commotion back there behind him, and a dead certainty that he’s better off as far as possible from it. What can he remember? pulling here past an EXIT sign onto a short outgoing road flanked by billboards, one of which he hazards a glance up to check out. A cartoon lamb, eyes big and expressive. A sunburst, pleasant yellow light gleaming warmly from the backdrop. Big letters at bottom, outlined in stark red, say “ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE RAPTURE?” Something tugs him, he’s miles away. Is it memory? He can’t tell, wants to call it something else. Proleptic flash. The band’s all done. Why’d he wake up on that table? The band got robbed. What’s all that commotion back there? Someone’s robbing NMF. Quatuor pour la fin du temps. La fin. Fin. He unfurls the bandage, peeling off sticky, some kind of ointment, hey man, where’d you get that lotion? The anointed hand looks alright. “Ça va?” It starts to make with a thumbs up for response, then reconsiders, comes back horizontal shaky, comme ci comme ça. How about you? Heh heh, good question, Atonwa giggling, dummy, not sure at what. “Fun night,” man and hand seem to agree. Wait, not so fast; coming up to an intersection, traffic lights bright enough to confuse but hey, check out those sirens in the distance. Aw jeez. Pull over? Peel out? What had the serious doc back there said? North. Alabama. Looking up at the road signs. Mountain City Road, north to Alabama. Up at the red light, down at the wheel, up at the distant but approaching sirens, down at his hand. “What do I do?” The hand jerks right, north to Alabama, and points fiercely. Very well, whee, he peels out. Out the open side, the hand flips the bird for good measure. The road’s a quiet one, but he guns it all the same. North feels good, the doc was right, and here’s that sign now, ‘Welcome to Alabama the Beautiful.’ Beautiful, sure! Hand’s posed in a confident thumbs up now, and whoosh, some noticeable weight’s lifted off of him, here crossing the border and making with a real deal smile, except, hmm, this sudden light up ahead. A black unmarked car, tucked in and well-hidden on the underbrush-swathed shoulder. What’s that sound? A building buzz, hasn’t left him since the tunnel but is now rising, supplemented by a squeal of dopplering sine, feeding back, something awry in the signal path--a siren, bright lights, Christ, and it pulls out to block Atonwa’s way. Sound, thump, pounding, too strong, no conscience, no resistance, he slows down, sputters, put-puttering to a stop and peels out the edge of the cart--sweaty limbs tipping over the cool aluminum safety bar, the point of sensory contact the last physical sensation he’ll be able to recall--blots onto the pavement, and lies there, dripped and checked out. Fun night, then fin, Atonwa afloat on the slipstream, back amidst the comfortably freeflowing dreams of days past, consumed, monolithic feedback signal having shivered up to blistering brain-rattler levels, ana- and prolepses exploding in a thousand directions, halflimp body spasming, locked flesh to thundercrack and squashed, there at the compass point, like a fly on a map. <img width="792" height="1224" width_o="792" height_o="1224" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f9e17841c278d3223f141b0373c82d8a613f808f2a3d8a1eb836dacad06c8fe4/illtombback_o.jpg" data-mid="11082376" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/792/i/f9e17841c278d3223f141b0373c82d8a613f808f2a3d8a1eb836dacad06c8fe4/illtombback_o.jpg" /> Next: The Transfiguration of Ritchie Ra, wherein he explores the eye, illness, and the last Transit of Venus likely to pass over a populated earth. We’re introduced to some of our heroes. Phenomena astronomical are discussed, accidents happen and thoughts return to Earth as Alfonso Heliotrope leaves his mark on Ritchie’s body. Behind the mask is something even worse.