By all accounts the scene in Godard's freewheeling and hella fatalistic 1965 masterpiece Pierrot le fou where Anna Karina walks along the beach complaining in an aggressively singsongy way that she doesn't know what to do with herself, gesticulating melodramatically, while Jean-Paul Belomdo sits in a stylish funk, his nose in a book and a parrot on his lap, does a very fine job of capturing the Jean-Luc Godard-Anna Karina marital dynamic, for what it's worth, and you can go ahead and look up footage of Agnès Varda saying basically just that if my read on the overall outlay strikes you as dubious. Years later, without much apparent emotion or evidence of sustained grievance, there is an interview where Anna Karina claims Godard would with some regularity claim he was going out for cigarettes only to return many days later. By the time of the interview in question, after appearing in Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette (1976), Karina had hooked up with Ulli Lommel, who was widely known to be an all but worthless cad with extremely good looks, and so perhaps Godard's eccentricities and seemingly unnecessary cruelties no longer struck her as especially egregious, especially since it was unambiguously this fraught and messy partnership that had unequivocally made her a huge international star. Indeed, Godard and Karina are among the most iconic couples of our time even if the pair were married for a scant four years and even if Godard made a few films that would largely seem to pivot on his inability to communicate with his wife (see also especially Le mépris (1963) and Made in USA (1966)). They are beautiful and colourful people, highly photogenic (whether captured in colour or black and white). There can't be any doubt of that. And once again, Agnès Varda figures here, as who could possibly fail to fall head over heels for the lithe, pantomimic couple as they appear ever so briefly in the capacity of silent movie stars in her morbid but also exquisitely floral Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)? I am reminded of a poem by the German writer Günter Grass that left a strong impression on me as a teenager, one in which the author remarks upon making regular trips to the park on account of his liking to watch the flowers die.
We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.
- Henri Bergson
For the time being there is only one alternative: to be the hammer or the anvil.
- Gilles Deleuze
Befefe was dreaming about gardening and all the gardeners and about how both the good and the bountiful each ruin us of their appreciation before too long, saps that we are. Befefe is not okay. Part of the problem is that Befefe does not know when he is dreaming. He is not able to know for certain right away when he is, uh, occupied by enemy forces.
- Playtime. Down the hatch. Attaboy.
BEFE-FE-FE-FE-FIFI YOU FILTHY HORMONAL CRUMPET!
I have awaken from a dream of drowning so horribly vivid that I shudder just to think of it. Shudder in my bones, even before my mind can summon for me the vast indissoluble contents of its images lit to flame.
(Okay, that didn't come out well. That was a bad sentence.)
Images completely soaked through.
(Ugh, pitiful sentence.)
The dream threatens nothing and I am unmoved by the Anxiety. It will be gone soon, like everything. It will fade to black before close of coming day and I shall be washed of it all; a blank slate.
… a sudden and brilliant continuation of all that which had come to pass, or so a certain passion swayed me to hold; a passion that as passions may sometimes be was only partially ephemeral and which returns to me still in the serene and gracious darkness of remembrance. I was in mind a new limb on an early and progressing fetus. I was moulded immediately into the biology of nature upon a fleeting crest of grey-white which sprang from December’s late and ashen sky and into the azure glare of the river’s cracked and jagged spine. As such, within the sturdy breast of a grand and sure-footed mountain range, I sashayed forth into the world amidst a fog of dust, roused up from dirt-topped roads…and endless trucks across their distances in iron wrath, sounding like men to battle; roads which curved into the luscious and sweet nothing of forested peaks and valleys like old languorous veins upon the skin’s pallid surface; partially my veins it seemed to me in passion, for I saw and perhaps still do see myself as…
But, alas, darn it, I cannot remember nothin’ and cannot be sure what I mean exactly.
ONE BEFEFE TOO MANY’S WHATS I SAYS!
Aya who is maybe Ida, or that’s how it sounds, also believes that I have a gift and today she bought a Mr. Enforcer Pocket Rod along with the usuals so that she might harness it and smatter or shatter or shitter me.
-Fuck, she says, you have a gift and it’s mine, baby.
She calls me all kinds of names. She came in and it was Puck. Then Fuck, because everything is always already ‘fuck this thingamajig’ and ‘fuck that thingamabob.’ Sometimes Puck or alternately Fuck Kauffman with two fs like I just spelt (spelled?) it. Then she says Zebra and tasers me. But its Benene’s the name, friend. He’s bananas, scrambled, so they scrambled the word banana. Pleased to make your antainquance.
A pistol-whipping again. Alligator clips. Electricity City. Always with the same old dog and pony song and dance. Never nothin’ but the same-ol’ shock slog and pain drone-on. Aya or Ida or I'm-a: the Charles in Charge.
She is making me write. Write these ‘entries.’ And she is torturing me because it was her specialty since way back when men were men and women knew hand-to-hand combat.
Currently she is making me write the story of Curtis Troy. One of a pantheon of former boyfriend-types or cocksman swains of yore. She’s been trying to make me talk about them and I cannot talk ‘cause I am an idiot-fuck hooked up to a steaming hot bed frame upstairs in a mouldy old lakehouse most of the time with his shorts bunched and stuffed up in his mouth and electricity shooting through his sorry ass. So I must write and that is why I do so now, dear and patient friend.
-I must substantiate, Fuck [Puck?], my suspicion that you have a gift. In order to do that you have to write down what you were trying to say last night after we had dream-and-screen with the magazine. (Loading a corresponding magazine noisily into weapon.) Remember that I hate you, Befefe Frufri, and have no qualms ‘bout when in comes to blasting people apart that I hate with poison-tipped bullets. Crumpet. God, you’re practically vibrating, aren’t you?
...
Howdy, kissmate. Bite down on this leather.
Hello, it's-a Jon Zebra. Ida who is also sometimes maybe Aya appears transfixed by my writing and as I feared, really; it seems now completely unlikely I’ll ever be permitted to stop for anything short of a reaming from her ivory strap-o or to please her in some other completely unpleasant manner that I couldn’t and will frankly not even imagine to hazard to think about it’s that bad.
The new pills are taking effect and it has begun to feel as though I would be slave to this incessant writing now even if not for the presence of Ida and her arsenal of rank incentivizers and bag-o-tricks. I’m on some loop or something, cannot clear the walls of the images or pass through them unmolested like once was I remember the case. Can’t hold it off even to go down the hall and take a pee or a poo or a what-have-you without tingling and going into one of my attacks all clamped up and shuddering and pissing myself. And everything except the walls keeps fading out. Ida has not been in the room for fifteen minutes. Maybe it is safe to sleep.
Fifteen minutes?
One way or another I’m going to need it—sleep, I mean—if this shucking like mad in thin air is to go on any longer—
FUUUCK.
TRULY IN-CROY-ABB.
-Fuuuck, this is truly incredible. What you’re writing here. Truly incredible. Abracadabra ho, landlubbers! It even sounds like Curtis. You really have a gift. And it’s mine, babe. Hoo shit! ‘n’ batter my mound like a stonemason!
-Curtis?
-My God, Fuck, you are an idiot aren’t you?
-Who is Curtis, Ida?
-Never mind. (Pause.) Do I have to stick a quarter up your ass to make you write? Why aren’t you writing, slovenly idiot? Write more Curtis! Double time, stack-o-quarters!
-Ida, don’t get mad, but why do I have to? Write. I don’t want—I don’t like to—I don’t like it, Ida—
-You have to write because you are an idiot, Fuck, and you talk like a retard and say nothing and also because I’m about to stick a quarter up your stinking pooter if you don’t and that quarter means you better poot your potables, so you had better just do that or I’ll fuck your ass for an hour with no lube in order to dislodge the quarters and try again. In fact, I think I’ll do that anyway.
...
…men like he, my brother, and myself, who is himself his own brother in addition to being brother to his brother and ready to open dialogues with other potential brothers, met in passing, whether or not he is fasting, we who have amassed and gassed ourselves, the resale limbs of consummate brotherhood, we have known distance and silence, that is where we come from. Where we were born was founded on silence, because brothers stuff their hands desperately in and down the mouths of other brothers, aghast at where the bread went, and it was the last part of this hemisphere, because brothers had to tempt me and my brother over the sea, into brotherhood as from it. We lived at the base of a mountain, the snowed-in edge of the West, where rivers and peaks surrounded us to one side and the distant promise of Wheat Chief lurked like a Grey Scale to the Other. We lived within the imbalance of the unpolished barrier between. Between what? I don’t know, you know. Imagine a brother and then another and proceed from there. We lived in the last remaining dichotomy, which would have to have been the first one, too, but of course no old cuss around then remains here to offer confession now. The broken edge of a brother, a frayed history that frays in the binding, manifest in deafening ranges of Mountain and the West and Rivers which, far away from the austerity of our modest asylum, eventually posit themselves within the heaving Pacific squalls and the walls of Ocean…
ASSHOLE P [O][U]NCH O R SLOT Ey EYL EYELETTE
L[O][N]G D[U]ISTANCE EYELET AYA IDA
FUCK KAUFFMAN LONG DISTANCE
DUNCE DISSONANCE
ZEBRA RECONAISSANCE
…my brother whose body was carted away by boat to a home that does not exist, maybe never did, then my brother who died while it rained, then brother that brotherdrank from the brothersea and brotherate of the land, that faltered, ran a fever as one runs the marathon, as a raisin est une raison…
IDADA IDA ADA DI A YA
Ida takes a few minutes to fluff my mattress (poking at my various ignoble parts with a seething violence) and thereafter scold me (verbally and physically).
-FUUUCK, WHY AREN’T YOU WORTH A CHUTE?
IDIOT! IDIOT!
...
What do I remember of it? of everything before Ida? Jumpin’ Joseph! It’s, it’s…
Do I remember anything from my childhood? my mother and father or theirs in turn? the little fat lady who sang me to sleep? tucked me up in blankets warm and fleecy? the automated cities like ferruginated systems biologique? pastures with verdant vistas? the waiters and waitresses who have served and serviced me at mealtime? the nations of earth? do I remember what I have been through? where these bruises come from? lines across the skin netting its quadrants? put there by so many hours like ghosts indispensable? markings for nothing? the farm by the mountains and mosquitoes?
Probably no to all questions.
Probably no, I don’t remember.
But what of this little fat woman I have invented? the brother? cowboy to my Indian? the very idea of a mother and father? whom I can see almost? as if they were only most barely eclipsed by some inner lunar obstruction or other?
Can I shape any proof for a memory of them merely based upon my so straining for one as I do? already almost tactile? their cities and wrought-iron nations I discover over and over in the folds of my silences? on the walls of my home-away-from-homo?
There is nothing to be made of any of this.
I would ask Ida but I know what she would say:
Fuck Kaufman, shut yo mouff! You have no memory, Fuck! Take your meds and shut up, Befefe!
All Ida ever does is shut me up with a mouth full of pills, glass-o-whisky, or by sticking her whowho in my face and making me talk or hum into it or lap at it with my tongue until I can’t anymore even if I wanted to which I don’t, thank you very much, shaking her little waist and screeching like BIG PIG, KING OF THE SLOP.
Cute as a ripple in a slop pail, you Fuck.
Sometimes she calls herself this. Like a character she plays. She plays many characters, strange characters, but mostly plays Ida or Aya (?), calling me Puck Kaufman, only that, Puck Kaufman, but one of her appelations is ESKIMO PIMP-EEL. Watch out for that one! I have no characters beyond Fuck Kaufman. And if that’s not okay, you can fuck right off, man.
And I am beaten when I discuss it.
IDAIDAIDA IDITAROD
I wish she would come home and put on a record. Any record. But mostly I like that finger-pickin’ record, it’s my favourite, the one with the one about the Christians fighting or something, which is the one from the last time when she put it on after I was done with my writing, and she came in with the music and she played a game with me—she—a good game. What it—what I—what she—what it—what it was, she, she ought to—it was a game where—where I—she said, where I—she said I ought to undress and she, she ought to would paddle my ass blue and teach me this word game, this word game where—where if I got one right, all I needed was one—ought to get one then, then—the—she—she would stop paddling, remove the harness, and I could get off. You know? Get off. It was a good game. I liked the music. That finger-pickin’ music. The getting off. All that. Ida is good with her hands. Whoa, Nellie.
I seem to remember this child, maybe my child from the past or maybe just a—a—an unreality, but I remember the laughter, and the kid, when he wanted fast food, asking to go to Tucky-Can-Fry Chicken. Screaming it out desperately, it was a gas. Tucky-Can-Fry Chicken! Tucky-Can-Fry Chicken!
It feels like movies. I’m screening secret movies on the walls of this house. I love movies as much as music. At first this is all I held to and for myself. These movies. But she knows now, and they aren’t for me alone no longer, she knows about these movies, knows of the inside, has learned to read it on the walls there with me, knows, just look at her, I know it. Why else would she make me write this down? why the pills? Will she really shoot me if I stop? why am I doing this? why is she doing this to me? I thought—I—she and I—
- Just, just, just put it in your mouth Fuck, no! no! Just, no! Just put it in your mouth and chew, attaboy.
She’s back from town with the Scotch, meds, blank video and audiotape, groceries. Ida. Currently she attempts to force feed me chocolate. I cannot talk and have no recourse, uh, to defend myself. I sputter and mutter and stutter and make noises like a dolphin or PAPA LITTLE MOUSE.
- Just eat the thing, Fuck.
- I ain’t got so much saliva as that!
Sure enough the ponderous thing just sits on the tongue turd-like, making the mouth frantic, glug, glug, Christ. My tongue stiffens and cannot handle the feel of it, the little shit wad, rubbing against the dry palate, no salivary amylase to work on the thick chocolatey thing, it sits there and the gagging comes on, be assured.
- Ah…ah…gargle, gargle…
- Fuck Kaufman, shut your goddamn mouth! Eat the chocolate and let me dab some of this Amber on your wrists!
I go limp, I always go that way, Ida dabs the Amber on my wrist, I rub both pairs of wrist, uh, together like twigs not yet fire, the Amber burning on my skin like an unholy firmament abounds.
I reach for the bottle of Teacher’s Scotch.
- Tap water. Get me tap water. Something to wash the pills down and to mix with the Scotch!
- You don’t need tap water, Fuck Kaufman. You can take your Scotch as is. You are a man, aren’t you?
- Well, right, yeah, of course I am.
- And take some more of these, too.
She puts the pills in my mouth for me. This awful woman. She seems to be subject to an uncommon level of nervous energy. I wonder what is going on.
...
They're out there, Fuck. They're coming for me.
Ida, what's up?
- What is up, Fuck? Down, Fuck. Down is up is what’s up.
MAN HEIM HAS ASS HALL
TALKIN | IN
HALL I HELL
...
Ida has told me to write down the story of her two pairs of lips. So I guess that I must do so or else risk incurring her unholy wrath and a good beating on the ass to boot, not to mention the sparky metal things that make you go buzz buzz. She has told me to expect no more kisses from her ever. Only savage sexual domination. I have set the desk up before the picture windows upstairs so that I can stare out across the lake as I write. Nothing moves outside and I feel serene in my thinking and general affect. I certainly do not want to write the story of the two pairs of lips or any other stupid story for that matter, but, I ask you: Do I have a choice? No, I reply, I don’t have one at all. I am drinking Teacher’s on the rocks. It is making me very lightheaded, I must admit. It’s these new pills, too. They send me for a loop, everything slowing down and atrophied, disguised in smoke and brine, never quite anything in particular. Outside earlier I got to feelin’ just like a big old oak tree. No feeling of the breeze, the nipping air. No sense of moving or movability; just a big ol’ sturdy-ass oak standing up assuredly against the passing of time and the superfluity of things in their respective overflowing compartments. Ida says that in Turkish her name means on the moon and that it’s a saying just like if an American or Canadian were to tell you to ‘Get out of here’ when he didn’t want you to leave but rather didn’t believe what you were saying or didn’t want to or even didn’t want to even have to think about whether he believed it or not. What kind of crazy shit is that? Are you on the moon or something? Ida says she is very happy that this is what her name means. I don't know what Jon Zebra means. I have no idea. Ida says it means that I have cooties but she is always fooling. Still, it might just mean that I have cooties. When I was a kid it was said it was the girls who had cooties. At least I feel as though this was the case despite my having no memories to substantiate such claim. Watching television regularly with Ida it has become clear that it is boys who now have cooties. It is my suspicion that it was boys who truly had cooties the whole time, but Ida will not I don’t think allow herself to speak forthrightly on the subject. Ida’s two pairs of lips like two pairs of pears. On her white face sits the first pair. Funny and bruised and reddish pink. Sometimes heavy as lead and others like the fluttering of gulls. Bruised from the sun and a nervous habit: she chews them or saws at them with her teeth when something inside her, something terribly invisible, gets excited or nauseated. Often purple scabs form and she buries them in gloss and red/purple, thus hiding her first pair of lips right out there in the open for all to not see. When Ida was a young girl just outside a small prairie town, she used to cut her lips on purpose with her father’s razor, and having done so would burst into tears and seek out her mother for immediate mending/comforting. This became habitual for Ida and it worried the family right up until the time that she went through puberty and it suddenly stopped, mysteriously, never to darken their stoop again. The hunger skipped a groove.
-Look, I'll cut your lips right this second, you smarmy no-account vagrant!
Ida stopped cutting her lips because you need them to sing and words pass out of them so they are precious and you just shouldn’t take a razor to something so precious and unsanitary-though-austere as a hole that spills words out of itself into the expectant world. Ida wanted to be a singer, she loved to talk. Mostly she loved to talk nonsense or sing senselessly. Ida’s father, Cohn Blackmore, was an ex airforce gunner who moved to Canada and got married to a local girl. He ran the special county newspaper, as marginal an enterprise as that was. Still, it generated solid cash flow in a place where everybody was destitute and basically criminal. He was known to be a large man of sturdy character who, if you happened for some little piddling reason or other to not add up on his internal human worth calculator, could have you run out of town in forty-eight hours with little more than whispered admonitions. Cohn Blackmore was a violent drunk like many small time newsmen. He was violent in general. I am Ida remembering his violence. The screaming. Thunderous shattering of vases. The horrible wailing in the kitchen at night, everything getting itself overturned and generally staying that way. Dad’s crude campaign of sexual initiation. Jesus, how many horrible fucking books have been written about that bedroom door sliding open at night. Trauma. The whole goddamn syllabus of the and then time slowed down cult. Why even bother dwell there? But still, the smell of cognac on his breath, his stubble. My eyes shut, I only hear him. And feel him. I can hear mother cleaning up the mess in the kitchen now. Actually, to think of it like this, so—so materially—I realize that I never felt him at all, only heard, grandfather clock’s presumptuous ticking and father slithering in, birds in the night, crickets, all of it so loud beneath whatever process is happening to this rank cacophony as it radiates through the hands I’ve clamped over my ears like meat. To die and continue sweating is the Ministry of Sex. And everything stops and fades to gum only to have the hum regenerated endlessly, proliferated endlessly at sleep time, all times of sleep, and whenever the lights happen to be out for whatever reason. Can you even sleep like this? For long stretches, one simply cannot. The heart feels it first and palpitates, the extremities tingle and there I am again, little Ida, prone and numb, but not ashamed, I’ll kill them all—I will show them—I could not be made ashamed by any fat pink pig with cognac on its breath. No, siree, uncle Boob. Not ever—not in a million yeasts. Besides, cocksucker got that peptic ulcer, the guilt of it probably, and I won anyway. So, fine! turn out the lights! see if I care! Mr. Baaadfuck Blackamoor was the first but by God not the last to apply pressure with his finger, tongue, and manhood to poor Ida’s first and second, much more southerly pair of lips. The ones that bled, betrayed a throat that tore and sizzled like bacon on a no-stick pan. Nope. Many followed, in dastardly droves they came, suitors to her Queen of Ithaca. They came like collection agents on a scent or maybe Basset Hounds. Like Tupperware ladies to a yard party. Yes, sir, hoo boy. Like pike to lure, Ida, like plastic-laminated-newspaper-wrapped-fish, witch, came the shaggos and horny blue-jeaned burnouts with nothing on their minds save their minds themselves, hazy figments on parade, awkward, passionless when conscripted for tawdry sexcapades, front seat, back seat, bad car fucks, behind barn and church fucks, right on the pew fucks, sloppy goddamn boredom every which where and way, every position, almost never anything human to hold it up and make it shine, only cold cuddlings-turned-cudgelling, Jesus, fucking so many men in the backseats of cars! Nothing like a human connection! Only leather and heaps of frozen spunk, coldnesses, a dry universe of nothing and less than nothing. IDA. FUCk. The southernmost pair of lips: site of abuses, visited often, remembered by few.
-That's it, motherfucker, your services are no longer required here. Trust me, Fefe, you have not yet known violence—true violence—
There is something inherently messed-up with you, and also your sex organ is not at all normal, guys talk about it, after, to one another, it’s widely known. You are only satisfied if you’re spreading social disease. That’s what you are: social disease. So, fuck you, ‘cause you shame us all with your vile syphilitic doings. For my memory-money you are my only mother and you have merely harvested a disease, haven’t you? You have no love for anything and you are rotting, smell of it, down in your sex organ, and also your teeth are silver atrocities—silver atrocities chewing the fossil. I’ll write about you all I want to write about you. If you can’t handle to see what you are then fuck you tenfold, you deserve it all the more. Like a bad dream you are a child’s nothing. I remember so much and also, at the same time, not so much, but definitely many faces, reflections of faces in other faces, but something lags behind. Earlier I could not speak. I could not feel the pain stinging with its steam, in the legs, as I do now, right now. I could not in fact make any mark of nervous function whatsoever, could do so for naught, you see, and now—now—now I am talking and in agony from the dressing you have botched of my wounds, and I am mighty sore indeed from the reaming I must have taken, and I can yes—yes—I can feel everything and can—I feel I can speak, but, dammit, now I cannot think, that’s right, yes, Ida! she is my love! she—she has her way with me! but—but she—and—and—and I—and I…
-Oh, for fuck's sake. Can we please flip the script?
...
I have been instructed by the good irreproachable missus to use as my program pod the story of “The Book of Jokes.” There are parts to this story. She told it to me but I keep getting it scrambled, which is what tends to happened with me—it is very confusing. The parts I am okay with—it’s these parts where—these parts become a story that I have so much trouble with, God. Somebody named, uh, Pilsner—or, uh, Pilner—he has an iron cabinet and the stories are in said cabinet, but when I look at the wall, well, let’s just say that the papers are spilling out of this, uh, brown folded paper package with this white note sticking out and this thing, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of the these little brown folded wrappers with white notes sticking out. They do not have jokes written on them, they have something else there. Rememoryanda, I think. Marry me. I ask Ida to marry me, she says to think of Pilsner and to unhinge her or something like that. You see, you have to suffer, or something like that, to see, Ida is convinced of this, and “The Book of Jokes” is—she’s figured—a kind of testimony—best to just kind of get to it. This is what the missus is saying with her eyes. Reach out and just take it. Right, sister? Shake down witnesses, plant evidence. Say a prayer. O, Starbright, how am I to read tonight? without any goddamn eyes? The movies of my home are a torturous ordeal; they have mushroom clouds going off over them, and the summers there will not be anything like traditional summers for some time. Gale-force winds, by God, steam from the floorboards and doors slamming in the shanty, the weeping willows weep and the birch spontaneously combusts, fronds crawl under grey-brown vine and crack the colour of swamp water out from the images in the walls as sticks and stones may break our bones, sick to death of the punch and the prayers. Ida will piss on my prayers, as though proud for her big Olympiad, me down on the mattress like a basin. That spiky-haired goddess is too good for prayer, but she had better cool off her jets, settle down, loosen up before they bust in here and start bagging up all our shit—official evidence—is she pulling one over on herself? in that fetching pullover? Ha. Look at her. I’m getting to her. Pull over and park, trollop. You’ve had enough. But not, hey, “The Book of Jokes,” it’s literally a joke book, but that’s not quite it. Let me get you started. A slice of pizza walked up to a fat man in the bad part of town. This is the man who wrote “The Book of Jokes.” He wasn’t Jesus, he wasn’t Job, but this man wrote the book of jokes—we figure somebody had to. This guy was a kind of professional sufferer, congenitally. He was not the type to make things easy for himself, but he was, it must be said, a person of learning. His first wife lied and his second died, he worked at the institute for higher learning, cataloguing the jokes of antiquity. They did not pay him well, he grew malnourished, moustachioed, had ulcers, and ultimately his kidneys failed. He studied all the jokes of the world and never laughed—not on one single reported occasion. Everything was perfectly organized in his folios and cabinets. He drove a sedan. Two dead wives at this point. Big, greasy city smells like a dead horse. Big greasy horizon. Nothing but jokes, everywhere. He drives. He works those thumbs. “The Book of Jokes.” IV scars, exposed by short-sleeve work shirt. Scars are spreading, he believes, everywhere. Sunsets and sunrises are not lovely the way people think they are, not at all, they’re a real horror show, or that’s how the man sees it, this man of the jokes, evermore. The ghosts of his wives, only one I guess literally dead, it’s a nightmare, but it’s him not being alone, also, because that’s what the word and the world are: it’s like a diabolic function at which nightmares and jokes incessantly cavort. So, Ida, an idea, she’s been bathing in all that bathos. Do they resent her? No joke, sure they do! That’s been the general trend the whole way, hasn’t it, my girl? Is she going to fuck this up? Are you, honey? Oh, you better believe it. It’s imminent: trust me. Shit, she thinks, what do they know? Right, baby, right. But do they need the knows when they got the numbers? When they’ve located the house? The people have stood united against you, Ida. All your life. I got no more wind in me, not that this is customarily what is used for writing, not that I’d know. Why do they despise you? You, she, the straw that finally broke the man who wrote “The Book of Joke.” Do they even despise you? I mean, we know the answer is “of course,” they do despise you, absolutely, but then it should go without saying that there’s a little more to it, as you know you and I know. You are the dead joke that continues to jerk the shift at the same time as its IV scars. Then you jerk your brains, or your brains jerk themselves, and it’s great, practically just in time for dinner. Your brains jerk to life, the thoughts heave and absorb their own collapse. Your brains are jerking back, jerking something maybe more like just a question. Why are you making yourself so nervous? Are you extremely nervous about the men who are coming to get you right now, already well underway, pretty much zero likelihood of delay? The death that counts down from the last joke spends every waking hour at the library. The jokes become more and more menacing as one approaches zero. They are painful to catalogue, the ciphers more daunting, and this is by no means a job for everyone. Chapters Such-and-Such. Chapters This-and-That. Now here is where we get serious, and it’s no small wonder that the poor woman’s complexion fails her. The chapter that destroys us all. The chapter about jokes concerning jokes destroying everything they touch. “Machino Killout,” the final chapter. Sort of. And this means: Ida, they’re gonna fuck you so hard. The killout spiral spirals and gnashes its calibrated teeth.
XOXOXO
BZZZZZZ
...
BE
FE
FE
ZE
BRA
(Notebook), Exit Escape Hatch (Plan) Now
The Future: a Present tense: and when the young one that I was allows itself to acknowledge the one that I am now Becoming, in this ghastly City that has long been captivating the meek and meagre senses, I suddenly forget the division and for a second feel integrated in the hazy crowd—the streets swell to Life from the feet up and course into my eye or two while the sounds give birth to minimums of duration—while for a moment I believe The Words and The World to be real articles of thing.
I believe out of drunkenness, This Word, This World, its Sanitation Department—but what manner of drunkenness is this that finds me free of alms and spirits, draughts, blessing not your wives-in-half, awake in my sober, rented room? What manner of drunkenness is this that speaks not of drink? I of past, spurt the seeds—seeds of the renting of this sober room. But I see all these white and black faces across the Grande City Wall, in flashing seconds, and in them I see a supernatural promise of faces in their personal impersonals, One which is the One that is mine. Mine face. I which they suddenly are or aren’t. I, into, like the quilt Marry made me while she was Dead, her hands turning over one another in silence, weaving us all together, tools poised, and not any longer Dying. But just imagine! How many hundreds of years from now is that? Marry is coming into Life. I feel her beneath the sheets, her hands are lighter than the silence and air, and terrified I grow at her touch softer than wind and chimes and the fledgling harvest. “Marry,” I holler again to no avail, never a-vail, and fall away from her back into the life that I live now here, in this mashed, psychotic sort of City. Cars and killer cars, its streets like so much hospital and elder. Psychotic elders with Depression Wages and Fall-Out from Neutron Conversations at the Hotel of Sheets, where the wives drink Clover Cocktails—men hatch wars as if these wars were the eggs of
goldenhens—
Secret poisons they hatch in the hotel beds of spread and thatched wives on Sheets.
Gurneys. Legs twitching as if hen’s legs twisted together. Marry was my Mother and Daughter and laughed like the Girls My Age. I would call to her but could not hear myself calling through her dancing—could thus not be sure that I was calling at all—grew frantic. And this City, which is the one where I discovered the empty room that I am on and in, found me outside the districts of decency and removed me from Marry by taxi, I that up, spat shit in their wind, but ignored. I, ignored in the dungeons of my Palace. Marry’s.
They spat it right back at me, ignoring.
Ignoring the flow between the Men we all once resembled, reassembled. In those Waiter Places where Wars were hatched and Wives were hatched and Daughters were olives soaked in gin. Taste the lips and tongues they poisoned. There is turbulent fury in my room and it is in the streets as well—has grown the same as it was and is in my room, I, as vulnerable as amongst the whores and agnostics, their bloody knees pressed together beneath the rivers of Tenement. Look at the Waiter People stacked like concrete boxes, like panes of coloured glass smeared with decorations of the twelve naked dead, minus the thirteenth dad, who has rode off all alone to hang himself. They are always stabbing their holes in me and I am sick to the wick. Their skin is black sheep silence, total—the total black of the violence of chisel. Oh save us Lord from the blackness and the stabbings and the eating of shit; save us from the aborted children they discard with the rotted-clotted milk; save us from the Ones I am Becoming, We All Guilty of Travesty.
You know this because you are the voice. Listen to us all. Listen very hard if you hear nothing. You will. You will. You will hear. I know it. I know it because I have known the being-you through accidents between our minds. We are a Hearing of Hearing. Can you Hear us being this Hearing? Because I feel This. I feel Marry becoming Life from her Death. Her gravestone grows like witch’s hair in my dreams because it is the light—exposure of all light. Feel Marry pass easily between the Life and the Death. Feel the Marry within the Me which had become the You. Feel the You which is the One.
I cannot yet leave the room because of the problems in this City. Marry is sure to rub herself lasciviously against the window. I hump the fire like a rat, licking the hardwood. Spit shit in their wind. They calling devils to task. This City is Flowing with the Devil Work. Magic is the Magic of Flames. I burn up in my room alone, as though I were in the church, their mad alchemy alight in the streets of this City, Marry arriving with reports, fucking me and lighting me up—lighting me up in the paintings I hung there—those that move and morph—
I sip from her proffered sex organ and play with the lids of her new eye or two or three, and lick her sex organ and its primordial bead up and down and side to side. Two pairs of lips. “Don’t scold me,” I beg, “for my report card. It is not I who broke those rules.”
She beats me like a slab of meat, spits up my asshole while The City slowly returns and sucks me back into refinements, refineries. Marry’s Death stinks up the Parking Lot like a Dream of Buried Sex.
Hermaphroditic sex organs buried in enzymes, cellulose, twitching hind-legs hanging out of her sick lips as she swallows the whole stomach with one sweep of her neckline in slo-mo, Oh the One Lord Almighty, save me, Oh City and Marry, which have taken control of human dreams—processing and editing machines—splicing
machines—
Save all life forms from the collisions of video. I see them breaking up in the orbit, shuteye and I cry: fear and reverence. I do not want to: witness the Death of this City substituted for the Death of Marry who is already Dead. I want to: sleep like when I was a child and it made a difference whether you were asleep or not. I HAVE NOT SLEPT IN TWENTY YEARS. Either that or I have not been Awake. The City reminds me that I must be awake because it is Changing and its Change follows certain Rules. Transmogrification of the immediate horizon. These are not my Rules, for they are truly of the Without. When I am in The City, always out-valved along the ruts of the unpainted glass of my room, I know I’m not The City and that The City remains unregulated by me. Thus when with The City I must be Awake. Mustn’t I?
Soon I’ll be returning over the flaccid course: which is: that which is called the due course. I’ll be back to the very point of my having come to arrive in The City—at that point I’ll begin keeping a series of Notebooks I’ll hide under the ‘lectric, where there’ll soon be a mattress on which I will feign sleep when the LandLady comes knocking. The Notebooks will be: are: a catalogue of the City and its Rules. I’ll map its circles—ride it—give it up into the fold. I’ll be coming back, again and again—coming back to me back here, arriving in it like white water from the Elburz Mountains—like the pebble congress of Tehran—like where the Scorpions—the Caspian sea—
I’ll capture its Science, contain it in the Notebooks. I’ll bury ‘em in flames under the floorboard and the ‘lectric…when the Devils come to collect them as they already have a million times from now. I know their arrivals, written in blood as these are, down—written down—in blood—on the bathroom mirror behind which I hide the parts, the—
A matter—I think only, finally—of trifling—of hours that are peddled under the feet, One Almighty Lord, of streets—a Street is born to the eye of the Soul, the two eyes of the man, synchronous spasms of light. I’ve seen the flashing of the eyes under the feet of the Lord's Congress. I’ve seen Man emerge from his ancient prison and reveal himself like a Light in Marry’s Lips. Antiquity, Lord. Guiding him, us, still further onward in the—the lateral feast of the—the flesh that enlivens the—spurring him onward—his Journey—
That is the eternal story of the Death’s Head. That is the Fire Science of the Devils. Be it now also: Inkwell of Creation Herself and unambiguously Lord-sanctioned.
Listen to yourself realize that this is a World of Devils. Listen to the One in the swarming Many. Listen now to the Speaking Devils who are the Caretakers of the One and the swarming-forming Many. Devils who hold the world, tip of the glans, between panes of glass, prod with their Metaphysical Authority. Slip through with Serpent Minds. Save us, Beneficent Lord! Save us from the Snakes in the Grass in the Rules of The City! Save us from the Persecution of its Sanctioned Devils!
THE DEVILS
THE SCRIPTURES
THE ORIGINAL CITY
THE CITY
UPON HAVING
FIRST ARRIVES
Stencil this everywhere. Upon the basement folios liberated from the breaker room lunch boxes. Upon the next five minutes. Upon the “before they were to be incinerated.” Upon the “a pretty fantastic discovery the next time around, pending revue.” Devils in their trench coats, carrying their Talking/Listening machines around, spitting information into the circuitry. Brief birth of The City and its eternal ebb and flow, beneath the unwrit Documents, our Task’s Task is not to write these Documents but to unwrite their being unwrit. Benefactors and the Devils, enrolled, modern man, enveloped—his evolving intricacies, preceding the erection of The City but not the erection of Cities in General, however many may remain dormant—however many—which let’s say might sit on the mainframe like Ghosts. We write this now on a Computer that is built by the Devils. Our task is to breach The City. The Devils’ve made the documents concerning ‘em a Faith, I know this. The Devils were spawned from Marry like me and Marry was in turn spawned from me like Them. Again and again, thank you very much. Above the sky, pierced. Beyond any vantage of Hotel Innards or Computer Chip: the lens and scope of human referencing throughout the underside of the circuits beneath the beneath of The City—I know now for sure because—well, I know for sure that the pipes run straight through the floor to Them.
We were ‘concepted’ and ‘intercepted’ in the Stars which still are being sucked into the Vacuum of Themselves.
I hear them whispering through the ventilation. I hear: huddled in the towering weeds: the campfires and Bluegrass.
Always advancing towards the prey and the kill-point—always—and at such speed as to remain unnoticed until the last second—like the Universe—always like the Universe devoured by the Seconds. Soon all the Stars will be gone, and such is the case with the Seconds, too. The Snows and the Dead of St. Petersburg. The Life and the Death on the Beam in Between. I’ve become versed: in: the language of Atlantis—me, myself—ne plus ultra of Hotel Management. Draw a Pentagram around one or the other of Whichever Pair of Pips and/or Lips. Marry and me, the language, the substitutions of symbols and numbers adding up to Tongue, allowing Me to Dissolve.
Even now I use a grid to translate the whispering I capture through the vents.
I would tape ‘em but they don’t sell the appropriate equipment yet, and it ain’t exactly like I can go out. It will be at least another Ten Years before they Do. If these Documents cease to serve their purpose, I’ll be at the very Godforsaken beginning.
I will have all manner of difficulty with This Grid. I’ll have to give it its numbers as if having been conscious, although conscious also there’s a trick I’m playing on myself. Just like tomorrow, for example. Tomorrow: I will: discover the soiled mat in the crawlspace where I’ve been discovering it serially, but I’ll be surprised and pleased by the discovery. The same goes for the photographs of The Founders: I’ll discover them absentmindedly while dismantling the floors. The photographs will show The Founders with their Garb, adjacent to their Machines and Horses. They’ll, the photographs, be burned and worn around the edges; they will slowly melt off of the paper leaving it blank as I remember. I will be surprised. When the photos become blank I’ll process ‘em and use ‘em to transcribe the conversations from the vent, which I’ll get to the bottom of without really knowing I’ve done so. They’ll speak about my room as though it were empty, but their whispers will have their doubts. And I, of course, shall be surprised.
Soon the Spies will arrive through the Five Windows. Five Spies through the Five Windows. Trench Coats and listing to the White Fuzz of their Talking/Listeners, this fuzz that will alert me. I’ll fold myself beneath the mat and wait for them to discover the photographs which will counter-develop them so I can fold them up, kit and caboodle, after translating the Documents and transitioning ‘em into file folders which I’ll feed to the flames when they reach too high, returning the Transcripts to the majesty of Grid.
I consult the papers: for the first time: copy and file them. I’ll decide the only thing that I know about the work of Devils is: that it is: the work of slowly through the infrastructure releasing The City like a Plague upon the Whole of Modern Man. Those who process the Devil Data cannot leave my room quite yet and wouldn’t be mad and executed outside the Hotel of Sheets where The City was “signed” in Full Knowledge of What This Way Cometh. I’ll leave only when Marry comes and puts her mouth on my floor while at the same time The City lights up in a sea of electrical, like, up from the storm drains. At this point: I will: begin to appear no more mad than anyone else.
But I, unlike the lapsing mass, will be prepared, and while The City crashes to a halt, I shall masquerade as a Devil by Dawning the LandLady’s Coat and returning to the Hotel of Sheets, via the Causeway, carrying upon my person the first hundred folios which’ll be filled with papers, as bursting-like as the dream of Marry, lifeworld and the paltry orders of the Exegetic City, now reduced to Neurones, Trench Coats, False Halos of Fire. There’s a flash from the ‘lectrical. The mattress is gone now. In the corner of Continental Park the leaves twitter. In the wind: next to: the towering pines and creaking firs. I’m outside the room and dashing Hotel-ward, arms swinging, flaming seas of cobblestone spuming. Search the leaves, archway, the terrace of a French Restaurant. Search for like forms which are human ones. See the parade of tuxedoes and deaths by cummerbund. See golden timepieces swing from the mahogany. See them at equidistances, their minds smashed to dust storm.
Marry before her Delinquent Apostolic Mayor. They curve and cower. Under her, under them, broken as certain limbs are sometimes said to be, in another park inside of this one, before the statue of a Pigeon from which some emergent voice now cries for pardoning, new madness, GOD, yes, a ghastly furor of naming—
There is no time now to vomit on his penny loafers, GOD, not now as, GOD, as I speed like the back of a passing bullet into the dark archway where I feel electricity and the darkness and the light until at last united at last, in one sweep of Lordly permissiveness—cascade of
wrist—
Ride, I do now
Actual Cascade
Marry, Lips: Lids: opening—
A tour bus has pulled over in the lawn for a washroom break and accidentally spilled its nuns and nurses into the reservoir outside. A man who is wearing a blue hat skips along the stones at the precipice. A bolt of electricity destroys the hill and the man and his bus and all the rock and sediment come cascading down like Lord's decree and/or his thumb, burying the nuns, nurses, tour bus and reservoir. The earth is destroying the water. Folios: say what they say, know what they know, presume GOD knows. Where do circles begin? Perhaps this is the Exit Machine. I leave the park for the interior and its pavement—its mirrored towers—
The City’s in the foreground and Heaven on the Lord’s back, a heavy load, a hand reaching back reflexively to establish it’s secure—the load. Follow the hand like Qin Ling to the white, watery graves of Middle Kingdom, Access Route Beijing, the Entire Entirety of the Chang Jiang, frozen like my cramping fists during a Brain Attack—
Movement is ultimately the essence of Grid. False movement. I look down to see that Continental Park has disappeared from my Field of Activation. I’m moving: will be moving: on the terrestrial freezer of Chang Jiang—swimming on cement, technically—Oh my God!—Marry—what happened to the Causeway!?
Doggin’ it, Jip, to bypass lost civic trestle, North-East of Causeway, reaching on out in Marry, galvanized, documents tucked firm, crafty drum or some such, feigning belonging to the ‘lectric current of walled space, cordons, estuaries of concrete, maneuver the city centre, coat protecting me from captors, take a line of cocaine in the mausoleum with a Devil answering to Brigadier General, snorting, now, lines up one snoot then the next, five minute intervals, finding myself incapable of remembering what nostril’s what, I let him show me the atrium where two orders of uniformed Devil burn Books synchronically, fire ever-growing, spitting crisps, papers, out into evermore, machine histories becoming just that, Histories, Machines, Flames, and I maintain a face and aspect of good will and distance, the fire tires, I’m tired but sped-up, saying something about knowing where the young dishes hide in a warehouse with the cockroaches and sailors, sell themselves to The City, legs spread, in return for a roof overhead, something to that effect, hot in the gutter, under the flashing bulbs above the high building with its one giant glass face I am wearing, weary, with the weight of my ancient task as the Devils follow the This and That of Grid across Channel, speaking our whole while in the past perfect, peculiarly fragmented grammar of which I feign knowledge, whole time covered and hunched, noble miser, legs shaking just to keep the pace, they moving as though some pulley connects genitals to asshole by way of feet which have set up roots in the silver earth, the crested cedar panel and the bones of a delicatessen, Holy Frog Leg or Some Such, where faces peer from behind counters, burned-out vistas, smoke rising still from their burning and counterfeit histories, alas, another flash from above the rim of the sector, this where the suits build their eternally building in offices and cement crawl spaces, closing in on Great Energy, beyond the Breath and Touch, beyond the Sordid Mind Space and its Creaking Steps, its intellection, perhaps not this at all, what is called sensing, fog of memories yet to be played out on the present stage, hum of the lines I’ve memorized, must presently act out, must speak into Grid already filled with words not yet spoke, but let them come, Lord, let the servants not forfeit service, ready to serve, guide me, Lord, through the unremitting familiar, through its flesh, The City through itself, let me speak my peace in pieces beneath the emerald rafters soaked in rainwater, nailed with leaves, allow me faith in my compass and in the folios tucked, still, out of view, hiding from the Devils my Business, Your Bidding, the room with its coiled staircase like a water serpent, dank with heavy bodies and their business, maintaining themselves in spite of the agony and the death of their walled spaces, landscapes, cordon in the grey, there, a heaving bustle like rats under a blanket, a smell in the air of shit, Her eyes are like Marry’s, they Look Deep and Speed Up the Valve as before Brain Attack, mine is the feeling, I feel such an attack coming, slowly and surely, feel its chest in my hands, the beating of my heart, in my hands and feet, blood, take her away, the eyes, face would crack like porcelain with the slightest touch, but the Devil has his Sorry Way, she shatters from the inside out, wailing, seen her no more, only the ‘lectrical bands of her, waves of it, a crying absence still and forever, it reticulates in the eye of my memory, very same eyes or more as in passing differences, the very last eye of the struggle, abandoned by hope in tempestuous circles, waves of circles, her eyes flash again, my eyes not flash and accede to know of it, that which was, through my entering here, the wealth of her body, the poor soiled kid, the form of my love for her or the form it was to take, writ in it, upon the pages of skin, dried, coarse, gestures, books aflame in the mausoleum, poor wretched beasts, these poor wretched beasts, my brothers and sister, our sanctioned histories, wretched, laid to waste in her, pages and monuments describing Our Having Dreamed, Our About to Detonate, having wept on a whim beneath the blanched and weathered shingles atop that wretched white room without a spectrum, monotones of that room, and then the flames and obstacles, Oh, Lord, save us, our bothers and sisters, Lord, no, no such luck, muscles twist and burn as I roll against a crate and clutch at a body with a clamped hand, banging and spitting, something asking after Her, asking me if I am all right, but my tongue is too heavy to speak, jaw froze, and I’m shaking violently, becoming a blur as my light breaks through the eyes, again with the eyes, dribbling from my every pore, sweet flow, heart has stopped, shaken into a blur, skin and wretched bone, marrows boiling, something cracking like porcelain, slightest touch bringing forth the deluge, oh, unsteady fingers clenching into venous palm a purple anguish, as with the throbbing of livid member t’ward its Marrys and Gloriettes, its bedazzled warehouse whore, porous and yielding to entrance again and again, at the flicking of her hour’s minarets and forked tongue, in my clutching and clamping there, in the superimposition of a great blackness which sparkles in turn, No More Brigadier in General, electrocuted and seeing visions at once, nor generally speaking a girl to be teased out and laid to waste on concrete bedding, only a blank blackness and a stream of new visions speaking, old visions from my room, from the womb, Marry, arms opened, falling, flashing out, Return of Gone Girl in Yellowing Robes, her legs wrapped up like serpents, sought and regulated, everything set aflame with it, every last dream of it, from the no-longer-predisposed blankness gives light like lover’s tongue in the sex organs there, on the walls of my mind, flesh-mined, indulging in the first last sin again, curdling in the cauldrons, fire in my veins and loins awash too with it, sultry liquor of being gotten to give, mind no match for the blood that it spoils, Lord, the Doing and Undoing Self, the blood-mind, folded, I come back around to The City in this grey, barred window, my eyes hurting behind my eyes, my tips soaking with the bread in the water and being stuffed up in my horrid mouth with a clump, still feel the phantom electrocution, there, bronze pan for shit and pissing, they’ve put me here, My Documents, They have Taken Them, I’m crawling through vents and ducts and tasting metal, rising to the roof and becoming it, tingling in one million twisted places, Brain Attack, Sold Away My True Identity, dust rising, breathing isn’t happening, or there’s insufficient breathing, tight space, crawling very quickly now, much more so, alive to my task, through Gridiron, rooms of Devils, Desks, Computers, air of iron or some such, tasting unbearable and heavy, searching with my eyes, again, alas, for traces and such, folios of Documents of Crush, this beast in its element, reduced to flames, Devils in Blue Arrive in Procession, open a casket of paper, see my photograph, or is it Marry?, crawling again, snapshot glimpse, nearest figure a fatherly face with its roughness, teeth blacked out by marker, and still with the electrocution vibes in the million-a-muscle, lead back out, around the others, the other side, around a girder with the photographs, eying them unhealthily in the shadows, seeing specks of eyes there, fleshing out the dirty secrets from my image on the paper, what manner of images these? they study so scurrilously of what manner of crime?, as far as they are concerned No time, Documents not there, hallways with Hospital in Them, Hotel of Sheets, moving and swinging arms at side, panting as ultraviolets race by, passing overhead, passing or becoming past, fast, Electrical Field, not differentiating passing and past, bending, coming up, swirling, body further inward, great burning fire lights up, more and more we pass through the Absurd Event, white coats appear over the white line cutting forward like a swell, a passage into her, I break and recoil in a flash, a pivot, a tilting, they are on me but I’m elsewhere, illuminated totally and blind to figures, fighter jet confronting pure light as they’ve got me down on the floor, fixing a shot to take me back out of circulation, spike to vein, I’m seeing them not feel me in this ecstatic light which tingles, rubs against the nerves there in their pieces—
A Flash
Flashing
My ribs are visible beneath the pale skin, my heart pounds under where it should be located, unleashing grotesque vibrations that are visible and which shake me into Attack, shaking inside but body will not shake, the room in the eyes, clear to me that I’m shackled horizontal, fan cuts through the air, ripples like my anxious flesh, this room, my body, no, that’s ridiculous, oh, madness, my legs are restrained, there’s a grip around my neck, no drugs, I’m screaming, suddenly its being clear to me I’m not alone here, there being Many Devils in White Garb, faces grey masks, breathing through the black holes in which I portend panic, feel the horror, once again, this uncanny stillness which is a ghastly familiar feeling, heart shall burst, shackled horizontal to a bed, Mother Marry is Delicate Blue, room and cradle huddled in the walls of wood I saw there, held to breast all fast awake, little heart there, its flutter with the prick in my vein, as well as the pricks on the Witness, Grey Mask Above Me in the White Room, decals connoting whatever Devil bonafides they connote, Big Black Eyes Void—
Flash
Flashing
Marry in the light speaks Nothing if not the Marry, curvaceous and matronly middle, blessed I am wrapped-up in: held to a: limbo with her, sky is a grey through the windows, sun strained like water through the holes it supposes, like water damage, the feel of being child, or that of being with child, the moment makes an eternal promise of itself as I sense it, very odd, then gone, so often the case, older and wincing, delivering its sex only glancingly upon Marry, spitting and slapping mostly itself, cumbersome the weight of a body, connected with the forces of the ‘lectrical, driving An Act forward, making it Spell Out My Name, spunk she swallows, tables set in a graveyard, Tenements and Condominiums, street hockey, animated feature film after dinner, run away from home with a group of dispossessed boys, go back to Marry, humble her with tears, makes a Polish Sausage sizzle, Marry, I eat, as we translate equations by lamplight, hair and sky brown, one and the other, nothing left but the schoolyard tossed into the tureen with scowl while they all watch from behind the gruesome swing set, not there, she browns and no sky, a television light in the window advertising, Marry slips out the window with the blue light and dances in the traffic circle with my teeth falling out of my head, radioactive television set, naked in her bed but high enough to look down upon the streets, fucking the market throng, cascade of fucks, her tongue and then everyone, from within the body of whoever, a well-dressed salesman, say, in sneakers, who pulls his member out just before she can bite it off and a wave comes tumbling through the streets knocking them down, before I can drown in her bed, free of the Green Generator and the Scowling Boy, the schoolyard where Marry laughs mean and boys proceed to coax manhood, parlour—I’ver seized command of the Pachinko Parlours!—door’s locked so’s I run to Bakery, but cannot attain service, they’ve conspired to rob me of my shirt and shoes, torment, squat and excrete blackest tar behind a parked car, worrying maybe my kidneys might be altogether defective, car pulling away, revealing my thin, naked body, pale, five tangled wires with a crumpled up ball at the top and half-formed genitals drooping at the intercessory node, line of onlookers, Marry speechifying, boys who take off after me down the molasses streets, heart stops beating but I run all the same and wonder at the disarray in which I suddenly find the entirety of my system, running in one spot and not moving which is not too big a problem since I’m back here again anyhow and know the area, at least I know that, the area, the quadrants, the “would be,” face stained or misapplied, crouching between kisses of charcoal lips on a service elevator where the hired help resigns, the Dumb Waiter Himself, to obstreperous state of helping, bones and chamber pot and stuck to her person, hanging and dangling and clanging, greasy hair clenched by Devil hands as in Scottish Tragedy, Storm of Baby Piss, over-the-shoulder-shot, Lord, she’s dusting ashes in mausoleum, up and out, pardn’r, Marry baking her bread and soldering shut her sons, scowling face for each little fuck bundle and sterile cotton inch, fuck this shit, a dinner of parts of me, left leg ground-up into hamburger and served with girls and loaves, spotted pumpernickel, Ales of the Crema-tavern and the Fathers of the Factory Fathers and their Empty Town of Mined-Out Brick, oom-pah-pah rampage, drunken fat socksuckers, stumbling procession through what was once Main Street, May Day. Hey!, simpering by a father, little Stacy Redding, Duckface as we call her at school, plump in the midsection and dressed up in cocoon of hand-me-downs, browns, cheeks like Apples in the Snow, Clasping Dolly by the Bleeding Hairs as in Scottish Tragedy, white gown stained by Breakfast and Mud and Turned Around Backward, the eyes have it, ripped-up knees, she’s tellin’ ‘em, falling from the porch, exposing us to the charms, hiking up her dress just this side of ever so much, I and them and her, a kiss between fathers which escalates, and I get wet between the legs feeling guilty—wetness trickles down in rivers to the sores in my knees—they heal, I’m healed—a solid flash of electricity—we undress—
Flash
Flesh
She so very tender in my arms with her dress hiked, we’ve now subsequently undressed, flashed-out, her little sex organ throbbing in my pocket, my hands roaming there, every eye on me now, stiff, impact’s threshold before me, arms bent into pressure for grounding, her mouth all wet with me, disgusting and wonderful, bending against as they move in now, naked, precocious manner of sons at play, clutching their One Sex in Greased Palms—
Flash
There is the energy that imposes energy, that which is not the crowd but is issued from it, that which is the carnal air and interlacing of all lungs, synapses in the brain, of the One Sex in Those Streets, energy assuming itself by way of The City, byways of barren mindscape cast upon themselves and all they’ll’ve foreseen, each naked figure joins together in a great bath of intensities born of them collectively, disappearing recursively, exhausted by and exhausting all of experience, that which is shared, that which is where All the Fathers Meet There, Naked and Aflame, as One, as does little Duckface with her Schoolyard Tears Emblazoned, this energy springing out of its own self-awashedness as musics, all manner of maybe antithetical energies, forces indomitable cascading like musics, Opera of History, strands and broken fragments the study of which constitute the chalk in our bones, the telling of it, we essentially One energy folded, bones are exposed like gridwork, a strand ever only strand, truth sometimes truth but always still always on its way, Life, Process, O Irredeemable Duckface, tangential sex colliding in firestorm and flood, beyond crystal, meeting of Our Flesh before the Camera Eye our brains have conditioned us to Imagine, in the ceiling, flux of young skin unnoticeably dead, unnoticeably rotting, new skin as soon as you touch it, hiking up the dress further, squeezing off a little of that sex, what’s a little squeeze?!, nothing at all, she likes it, goddamn their hands and mouths, goddamn their filthy pig hands, bloody knees, just hurry on up and stick it up in ‘er, spit out my own body, if only, tasty little piece of tart, the wave returning through the cobblestone streets, spilling through apartment windows, emptying the rooms of their contents, sweeping over the Father of the Fathers of the Factory, the Actual Fathers of the Factory, poor little Sue Redding, Duckface as teasingly christened at lunch, her dolly, her knees, her chattering of teeth, Marry swimming away with her into the bending sea through Centretown, past gallery with resilient canvases floating, through front door of adjacent Butchery, not terminating there, sucked out through the mildew in the lower loft where the Butcher lives with his Wife and four Kippers in a Ceaseless Lunacy, candles on the empty shelf now also sucked out through the back with us now, out with the garbage and dead rabbits clumped in loose stacks, afloat now too, passed on the left by the naked vestiges of Marching Band, wind instruments up dry in the sky, past and passed, Polish General drunk on coconut rum conducting a symphony atop antique dresser, glasses snapped in two and his moustache soaked through—pitiful—sinewy residue, O Sweet Jiminy the Water, buildings through which we pass, against which we bust ourselves apart at speed, rising tide and flowing relics, espresso cups and burgundy tables of Sir Quincy’s, Butcher’s lungs collapse and he releases his wallet from his hand, which then sinks to the bottom as his wife grabs frantically for it with the hand which she is not using to hold onto the lampposts and window ledges for support, all lost, all thoroughly lost, lost, in fact, half a block back, at the bottom of the ocean—
Why is there
Laughter?
So much
Laughter
Flash
Over my shoulder: I catch: the crew atop a thick, squared-off plank, rigged with solid rigging, tilting maybe a little, the whole rig, ferruginous grasshopper, downward into the prone sea, rising slowly above the very last of the ancient steeples and evenly erected scrapers of sky, submerging, finally, even the topmost obelisks of the renowned gallery, streets having risen up and emptied out, we’re all of us together, the whole population here in the ocean together, that plank, that ferruginous grasshopper situated about nine hundred yards away, I’m guessing sort of approximately above the District of the Factory from which the men had been marching this very picturesque morning, this MAY DAY Now Completely Sunk, now, arms a-thrash-against, determined will of the raving and raging sea, thrashing voice, harrowing tantrum of all pressurized bodies of earth, rising now having fully Rendered The City, there upon the plank, behold: where I attempt to focus my vision: eyes ruined: and dry red with corrosive salt of the water and the work of panic: all those priceless premature tears: attempt to focus but: capturing merely: diffuse fragments: blurred bodies: casters of shadows: undifferentiated movements: moments whose images collide like pieces of broken, worthless stuffs—I hear the voice a second ago discredited and, Lord, forsooth: it strikes to the quick—horror is where we’re at, I’m shitting myself in the warming bath like a baby wading in the pool, part of a Great Big Twisted Fresco, drowning body, insoluble speck, frantic figment, wasted dregs, killer of self and selves, everywhere in transitory intercourse with bodies, choking, vomiting lungfuls of water, screaming with the most viral of fear, point of complete, collective breakdown, no meaning left, no sign nor wisp of the last lie pawned off, told, the here and elsewhere, the one and other, no city or debts or man/woman or woman/man, just the One mind One Panicking Mob of Wet, Water and Sky, bodies as far as eye or eyes might see, possessions have over-accumulated past and beyond all pressure, rackets, watches, chesterfields, patio furniture, books, clothes, bikes, trucks, empty helicopters, park benches painted with real-estate agents, stereos, cars, parts of cars, mannequins, all of this invisible to the Prone All of Us, my baby, my baby is dead, my bundle of fuck, Marry, Marry, Marry, hold my hand, remember the Almighty Practical Lord, remember the teachings of Lord, listen to the teachings of worthy men for it’s only They who may show Thee the Way, everything, everything sunk, done away with, torn from naked hands and fobbed or fucked off by unseen fists, everything everything everything lost and never—never this horrible—unbelievable—still I struggle—the weight of the water forcing me under for seconds at a time whilst—persist—still I hear him—on the megaphone on the plank, ferruginous grasshopper in the near distance, calling to the camera man now, to the man who pulls us into focus or is supposed to, to all and sundry belonging to the Camera Department—
Pull us into focus, motherfucker
Flashbulb
Getting down, making a fuck-up use of myself, your daughter, trying to ask but speaking nothing, these million screams interceding like stadium or shipwreck, a chill down the general collective spine, pleasure and pain roar alike, the roar has its own kind of biodegradable skin, geodesic layers, partitions, downward to the Very Seat of Incomprehension, one Soul and one Soil, at the gates of which there’s said to be waiting a large pearl in the open and extended hand of the Lord's holy emissary, saying “Happy Festival,” but that’s no good, nothing doing and no can do, Nebuchadnezzar, you see, I’m fucking choking now on water now, choking now millions strong, a million and counting—closing—form and file—spent lungs—hollow hollering—wasted now—great many souls bound in water and some electricity—centrifugal force—whatever remains of gravity—a coil—killout—shattered wordless bodies inside the walls of water calling out like ghosts in an old house beneath the wood paneling and from the tomb of the attic where there’s there what’s been there the whole while, darkening all ‘em doors and renderin’ to the Lord what’s the Lord's and that film crew on that there plank, a Crazy Large Unidentified Flying Object-V dartin’ ‘bout at impossible speeds, then hoverin’ motionless, then issuing a hum like overhead radial lights at Hotel of Sheets—like giant tinfoil cigar—now other flying Vs and boomerangs and even fish—all this infernal humming—flying Unidentified Vs appear to be enveloped in a neon gas—there’s these Pneumatic Orbs, hovering—bleeping and blipping Scottish Tragedy Cauldron Colours, Distant Stars Exploding a Hot Night from Naught—Heaves of heavens squeezed—Spongy ‘lectric—
The Man with the Megaphone on the Plank Corrals His Fools and Aims the Gear at The Man in Black with Them Cursed-in-the-Extreme Eyes of Brown, who, by GOD, is presently singing, in slightly-breaking, elegantly-pliant baritone:
And while the children’s games became increasingly noisier and more complicated, while the city’s flushes darkened into purple, the whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken and exude an uncertain dusk which contaminated everything. Treacherous and poisonous, the plague of dusk spread, passed from one object to another, and everything it touched became black and rotten and scattered into dust. People fled before it in silent panic, but the disease always caught up with them and spread in a dark rash on their foreheads. The faces disappeared under large, shapeless spots. They continued on their way, now featureless, without eyes, shedding as they walked one mask after another, so that the dusk became filled with the discarded larvae dropped in their flight. Then a black, rotting bark began to cover everything in large putrid scabs of darkness. And while down below everything disintegrated and changed into nothingness in the silent panic of quick dissolution, above there grew and endured the alarum of sunset, vibrating with the tinkling of a million tiny bells set in motion by the rise of a million unseen larks flying together in the enormous silvery infinite. Then suddenly came night, a vast night, growing vaster from the pressure of great gusts of wind. In its multiple labyrinths nests of brightness were hewn: the shops—large coloured lanterns—filled with goods and the bustle of customers. Through the bright glass of these lanterns the noisy and strangely ceremonial rights of autumn shopping could be observed.
- Bruno Schultz, “The Night of the Great Season”
[Note for the reader: the 'h' in Unhinger is silent (rhymes with 'stunning her')]
IDA: […] a long-goner, me, prima facie papa, tee hee, here on this airplane, back when, which had been taxiing on the runway peripheral to my focus, which was not really focus—I wasquite definitively nowhere—began the embarkation—its takeoff. How long had I been sitting on this plane? Sensation that I have never felt in concert with takeoff before. Like a clitoral inanition unto horrific combustion in the get-up and the go. I felt something akin to relief, but it was not relief, because relief is not thrust, and it was like a cosmic exhale, but who has ever been able to project themselves forward with such force by virtue of exhale? You know what? What I thought it felt like? It felt like I was being vacuumed out of a uterus. But who gets vacuumed out of a uterus in order to go, fresh, and start to try all over again to live? Vacuumed out of a uterus. It is as inelegant a metaphor as one could possibly imagine, it is truly terrible, tee hee, but it’s also literally the thought I had, I remember clearly—so there you have it, I should think. Maybe you think I only attract dysfunctional people. There are lots of dysfunctional people. Right? At least there are lots of dysfunctional people. Maybe you think I no longer attract anybody. Maybe they can go fuck themselves. You know what? Maybe people are attracted to me. You know what? Maybe people see their attraction to me as dangerous, maybe kind of risky, or potentially fatal even. Are these lamentable munchkin communards engaged in suppressing the attraction? Don’t you often find yourself attracted to people and immediately think that if you were to go down that road it might kill you?It is certainly conceivable that people are secretly attracted to me. And it is certainly conceivable that you could go around operating as though the world is becoming more circumspect, and vast swathes of washed and unwashed peoples are concealing their attraction to you—or for you. It doesn’t even have to be true. Take it on faith. It might make it easier to navigate the world operating as though people who are attracted to you are not acting as though they are attracted to you. Because apparently it matters to you. Why does it matter to you? Worth. A question of the field of Value and its Contestation. This is a problem of establishing one’s Worth. It is irresponsible to contract out the establishment of one’s Worth. But we do. We do that. I do that. Maybe it’s also that there would seem to be some species of subterranean seismics at play. Of course, I am rarely truly attracted to anyone myself. The one thing that I do know for certain is that the few women and men and mutants I’ve been crazy about these past number of years, though some have grown very close to me indeed, have not been attracted to me, and many of them I got angry with real fast and breezily stomped right out. They’ve been scared shitless, eddying around the mystique until the whirlpool swallows them finally. There is a curse on me that severs the reproductive function from the mouth feel. Or maybe it’s just that I am so pitiably awkward and enveloped in a kind of attenuating incertitude, stymied by something immaterial. Naturally, it can be painful and crazy-making, but it is also instructive. As long as I have been running I have been running into walls. As a child my mother said I was always running into the goddamn walls. She says she knew early on that things would be hard for me. I am a lummox, like some dude, fumbling with his lessons.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Well, naturally, there’s all this incriminating footage, although you’re no dummy, and you understand, just as I understand, that incrimination is effectively a polyvocal universal. This is good footage, though, and there’s no gain in the mincing of words. You were in headlong romantic flight is what it looks like, and we folks at the Agency, as well as the ANTHROPOTECH people, all seem to want to agree this is your basic M.O. Back to about 1997. So here you are in Ottawa, 2015, about to board that plane. What is this you are up to, hmm? Not doing well—you are not looking like you’re doing at all well. Oh God. You take the bag you are checking to the washroom with you, frantic in the doing of it, shaking up a cloud of ambient suspicion. We have a bunch of camera angles on this. You appear to be calculating the steps that must be taken before you can freely puke. We know you to be a habitual hugger of porcelain from way back. My goodness, Holly Golightly, your nerves appear to be positively shattered.
IDA: My nerves were just fucked. Absolutely fucked. I had drank a Red Bull. It has done something helpful. Maybe. My reactions and my reflexes are strange. But I am so far away that I have trouble deducing what the things I introduce into my body and my world are actually doing to me. It is a liability and you, my dear good buddy, are paid to exploit those. I imagine that this is a common liability amongst the cherished maniacs...the liability of liability itself. But it had helped. The Red Bull. But I was going to puke. I was sure I was going to puke all the same. Some kind of miracle—somehow able to collect everything I took out of my pockets at security. Some shell-shock type things going on. The nerves. I had Aya’s house key. I had taken a lover’s house keys in London and now I had taken Aya’s house key in Ottawa. Both times I had made the discovery upon placing the keys in the bins at security, nerves all shot. Not abnormal, though maybe a little abnormal. The usual nerve thing, though not really the usual nerve thing, exactly. Some things were sped up, some things were slowed down to a crawl. Not a lot of sleep, caffeinating heavily, frantic activity, this rollicking mise en abyme of unrelenting torment, my métier. Of course. The torment was just the weather at this point. It was the basic prevailing condition. I guess I was a little frantic. There had been no torment in the aquarium when I had left. Please. There had been a comparatively minimal amount of torment in the aquarium compared to the current prevailing torment condition. Heh heh.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You get to the airport early. You always get to the airport early, having as a slightly younger older woman had that one bad experience years ago, and now, 2015, you always get to the airport early. Remember that earlier muck-up? Drunk, 2008. Very drunk. Heading to London. We have plenty of cause to believe missing that flight saved your life, but more on that anon. You had lost your passport. You looked frantically for your passport. Two assistants from the Agency and yourself. Looking frantically for that passport, for a very long time. I’m going to play some of that footage for you. The passport had been in the inside pocket of the lambskin coat you’d been wearing whilst frantically searching for the passport. A very well-missed flight!
IDA: Me to a T.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You drank three blueberry Red Bulls before you boarded that plane, you incorrigible maven!
IDA: Ha ha. I find that perfectly credible. I’m thinking, you know, of Eliot, ol’ T.S. Vivless, vivisected Tom. Ha ha. Four Quartets. That good ol’ “rending pain of re-enactment.”
LLOYD UNHINGER: And you know I’m just the mandrake to remind you that Eliot follows that up shortly with “Of things ill done and done to others’ harm / Which once you took for exercise of virtue.”
IDA: Sour fucking grapes, grandpa. We’re in the same bizz.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Don’t further muss yourself, please. Once so lovely, in your current state of dissipation and wreckage you remind me of nobody so much as Ingrid Thulin in After the Rehearsal.
IDA: Holy cow! Ha ha. You always looked and acted just exactly like Gérard Depardieu in Police. If it’s art movies from the 80s we’re onto now. Depardieu is the Ezra Pound of the 80s, and you were never the Ezra Pound of anything, except maybe the pound sign. With Depardieuit’s this hyperactivated megalomania slammed sideways by them northern mistrals. As for you, what it is is you’ve gotten horribly blue around the gills, running your melancholic perimeter checks for aeons. No bright new season for yar!
LLOYD UNHINGER: May I call you Aesop?
IDA: Ah! Hilarious. Yes, you may, Lloyd.
LLOYD UNHINGER: I’m going to show you a physical object…
IDA: Oh, yeah, that’s Aya’s Eiffel Tower keychain, quasi-aforementioned. Aya, Queen of Hoodwink Reiki. Hinky, kinky ablutions et al. You get up close in bed and she holds you back with a forcefield and touches you from afar, wigging you out, riling you up, very much not getting you off. But it was all my fault. Or at least God knows I kept telling her so! I wept at the Museum of Civilization. She was profoundly embarrassed for me.
LLOYD UNHINGER. This hamburger stand—
IDA: Is very much that: a hamburger stand. Assuredly. Dumb Ottawa hamburger stand.
LLOYD UNHINGER: The day before you are drinking three blueberry Red Bulls and upchucking super-predictable, you are at this hamburger stand with Aya and it appears you receive a text on your iPhone. Naturally, uh, we have that text…somewhere—
IDA: Providential erotic culverts. Eternal return of the same. Eternal return of the shame. The specific thing with Tru, the texter, she who texts me, has texted me, the mechanics of it, about which, while it was happening and after it happened, I said nothing to Aya, and which I was explaining over the phone, sitting in the airport, to my handler, as things in Ottawa were going way far off from what I had hoped, really and truly deteriorating, for me at least, and I was dragging my sorry ass through the bountiful shame, on the last or second last of the four days. The text I receive is a Messenger ping from Luna, who was then called Tru, as per her assignment, as Aya was called Aya, and I sat outside at a picnic table adjacent to a quaint Ottawa burger stand, pictured here. I read the message without letting on that anything of any particular import was going on. I hadn’t received any kind of message from Luna/Tru in a very long time, and I am sitting with Aya at a picnic table casually reading this message, the mere existence of which fills me with a kind of alarm, feeling very, very pitiable indeed. I could go back through my Messenger messages and do a full-on proper accounting of all the particulars, but Christ, I cannot, absolutely cannot imagine doing that. I know I hadn’t heard from Luna/Tru in a very long time and I could swear that the last thing I heard from her was—Christ, it’s so typical—that she was going to make a better effort to stay in touch and that she had recently been through some dark shit. Time elapses, next thing I know she is popping up pregnant in a meadow on social media, more beautiful than can be adequately expressed. Then this message, ping, while Aya sits across from me working on her veggie burger. It was a very cordial communication. It contained what to most people would seem a benign entreaty. The message. She had been alerted to my presence in the nation’s capital from cryptic hints in the national paper of record the previous day. Come visit meeeeeeee! I was filled with warmth, love, total alarm, molten anguish. Aya is eating her veggie burger. Just this grief. This tremendous grief. Everything that has slipped through my fingers. The evanescence, precondition of the amorous. The partings and absences. Everything that failed to be born, that was stubbed out premature by my feckless, hapless fumbling. Just ping! and suddenly it becomes painfully clear that time and distance have healed the wounds not one bit. And the correspondence. The four days in Edmonton with Tru that hurled me off a cliff. Now four days in with Aya and feeling disconsolate in the extreme, shivering with something like foreknowledge, knowing that cliff, by God, feeling that memory. These two extraordinary women, intense feelings for them, the whirlwind they excite, as though the moment had lined them up before me to bowl down. The women I want, or think I want, who don’t want me, don’t want me the way I want them to want me, don’t want to be with me, recoil from my feeble tendernesses. I started to draft a return message to Luna/Tru. Aya, curious, asked me what was up, who I was messaging. Oh nothing, nobody. Whatever. Typical, the perfunctory deflection. Make a non-thing of the thing. I sent Tru a short, simple message. Basically: there isn’t going to be time. I don’t have time to visit. Flying out soon and spending the waning hours in the company of a friend. Sorry. Many blessings. Hope this message finds you well. Long may you flourish. I was atomized, reduced to particulate, dispatching pleasantries, trapped in the hideous patterns, wallowing, floundering, mocked by the patterns. Aya and Tru. Tru and Aya. Four days lined up against four days, superimposed transparencies. The sad, stupid, befuddling recurrence. Mired in doom. Doom down to the cellular level. The cells. The cells in bad, bad shape. And then there is this secret terror I can confide neither to Aya nor to Luna/Tru. I cannot tell Aya about Luna/Tru, and I can confide to nobody at all that I am a little suspicious of the Messenger message.
LLOYD UNHINGER: It occurs to you that the message, which effectively begs you to visit a remote location near Wakefield, Québec, spur of the moment, may not actually be from Luna.
IDA: Well, that’s right. Ha. Yes, you and me: we definitely got the same vocation. I figure it could be Zebra or whoever and therefore a trap. You’ve deduced this, Lloyd. Don’t pretend to be all friendly. When I grow up I want to be impaled on a church spire before a cheering horde. Hurl abuses at me. Hurl abuses at me, you fucking wretches.
LLOYD UNHINGER: We’re almost getting into a mucormycosis.
IDA: The Manchurian bicarbonate.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Jon Zebra is currently in Paris and we desperately need to apprehend him, though the whole map has slid far out of its original pattern. The two of you are effectively fused. That was your doing and you bloody well know it. Here’s recent footage of Zebra. He has landed at Orly and he’s swearing at everybody who accosts him. Or who…doesn’t. Check this out: he has exited the airport and is pissing on a wall for all to see.
IDA: Orly is already the Continent’s preeminent urinal. Give the guy a break. And if me and Zebra was fused that’s the upshot of set, setting, and all y’all’s meddling. He is a maniac by natural selection, as are I. You know very well the Zebra in Paris right this minute is an Open Field of Quantum Potential and that I’m the resident expert in this stuff, so stop waxing so butch. I will relieve you of your overseer’s pretences—mind you your Ps and Qs for you. Didgeridon’t and The Muzak Kid! Crack me open a can, Lenny!
LLOYD UNHINGER: Always trolling with Steinbeck.
IDA: I work with what I got. You guys sign beaucoup checks.
LLOYD: Now that you mention it…
IDA: Very subtle, Lloyd, you cracker. You want me to do remote reading like its oldentimes all over again. Get out your fountain pen, fucker. Jon Zebra’s my prize stud and I can’t not submit. I have our albumen-deficient mestizo hustler with piss dabs on his pants departing Orly and charming a cabdriver in that weirdly fluent barrio Arabic of his. He’s gonna go online to lookup sex workers and movie houses, and we’ll have him the next morning climbing out of the high-class shopping zoo, the whole world slower among the rich and toity widow-gazers, such that he’s singing out loud ‘la danse’ as he pivots aggressively ‘round and past, down now across the Seine to catch Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy on rue Christine. Gendarmes, tail this freak! He’s emerging from Shakespeare & Company with some Chester Himes and some Madeleine Bourdouxhe, positively asking for it as he does his daffy deal way too fast past Polly Magoo on Petit Pont, shortly thereafter hypnogogically arrested totalement by the beautiful young hyper-competents in the vicinity of the Sorbonne. After singing the Maddox Brothers and Rose to the visibly delighted clerk at CROCODISC he gets the terror real bad upon stumbling zombified into the posted road sign for rue Rene Descartes, a famous hex. Beware, Paris, transystematicity of intercomplexed arrondissement etymologies, rather than the Paris who is Homer’s prize goober, this Paris though a variegated megalopolis whose denizens could get beneath Homer’s Paris and carry him off to some Queen of the Drones in her fifth-floor unwalkable walk-up. Alas, woe be to thee aujourd'hui, Paris, you city. You shan’t hardly have it so easy with our Zebra! In passing him a cigarette you may in the passing casually burn a hole in the left cuff of his coat, and you may have the occasion to present yourself as the perfect distracted lowlife Sophie Marceau nursing that Allongé at the adjoining table on the patio at Le Hibou, precipitating visions of our man’s own death by hanging decisively in advance of any opportunity he’ll have to autonomically ejaculate either in or out of his pants. Still, you have not left your mark on Jon Zebra, and there isn’t the slightest chance he’s going to go on to consider himself to’ve been the least bit molested. He hasn’t had a drink since 2013, but he’s so high on his own nautical fumes at this point he’s for all the civilized world the spitting image of Edgar Allan Poe in late stage alcoholism. I don’t have to warn prospective muggers they’d better watch out.
LLOYD UNHINGER: A kind of surrender, the bad kind of surrender, succumbing to psycho-motor oblivion.
IDA: Watch out! I got Zebra clocking the whole forensic architecture schematic what’s got Sacré-Cœur complexed in with the whole early 20th century red light district scene and them steps down from which Michel Simon as Maurice Legrand first encounters Lulu and Dédé in le premier acte of Jean Renoir’s La chienne. That’s nothing. He’s positively screaming “la danse” as he’s falling in mud in front of joggers, lovers, single women, and, like, one or two hundred spread-out Chinese folks in Parc des Buttes-Chaumont where he’s ventured outrageously afield to mock-up that little Éric Rohmer homage on his iPhone,stumbling thereafter upon a tai-chi happening straight out of Sans soleil way up top there while he’s looking out over a vista he’s sure’s straight out of Le joli mai, which I’m sure you got to know’d make anybody dizzy as shit, such that right after that he’s rumbling down the proletarian carnival funnel of rue de Belleville, long gone daddy, I’ll tell you, desperately famished for flank steak and boiled potatoes. What have me and my beau gone and done to the Paris bleu? We are technologists and lay therapists, cinematized, ripened on Federico Fellini. We know a golden rule, scoop-up the golden eggs. The thing about it is, you don’t need to bring Cinecittà to Cincinnati when you can build Cincinnati out of plywood there. Dog and pony show? Watch how many haunted hours Jon Zebra can remain all but motionless in the atelier and garden of The Dead Painter, chronicler of unstilled impressionist incipience, before recognizing his hanging self from every sordid and soiled angle in the Baselitz exhibit, sharing a giggle with old pals Joseph Beuys and the coyote, and glowering malefic at the teeming stormclouds atop the Gangplanks of Pompidou. When the deluge hits him it ain’t nothing to him. He’s zeroed into overdrive, hardcore, strung-out on the wasp waists of fashion’s subjections. This, the Zebra, Jon-about-town, who took to heart the Church of the Subgenius down Texas way—when they told him they’d help him pull the wool over his own eyes. Right? Throw your shade all night, Lloyd. They’re billable hours. The Hounds of the Baskervilles reap their blowback, and it smarts, don’t it? Stabbing an escargot, Jon Zebra indexes all things, in a cavalier aristocratic sweep of the wrist none of us other practitioners have ever been able to muster, you least of all, jacking off in your lumpy wool sock no doubt presently, and offers to pay for ‘toute les choses’ to peels of public laughter before capping it all out gamely awaiting executioner and drinking a Perrier with a fellow tall drink of superfine mixed-race in a tavern in the 11th above which this Amazon resides.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Do you know who killed Katrina Plowhurst?
IDA: I figure you and I both know it were Aya must’a
done—
LLOYD UNHINGER: Peltier?
IDA: Peckerwood. Bird is the word.
LLOYD UNHINGER: That’s nice, girl. You make me a happy man. ‘Old times’ sake ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be,’ but this is still my bread and butter. You are like a marmalade. It’s warm in here. I want to do something fun. You’ve got me thinking. You’ve got me thinking la danse. A sweet nugget. I’m going to remind you of your Heraclitus—or Heidegger’s and Fink’s Heraclitus seminar, rather: “When I speak of thoughtful transposition into another dimension, that is only a first attempt to circumscribe the manner of our procedure, because we still do not know what it means to go over into another dimension. If we wish to speak of an analogy in this connection, then we must think it in a specific way. In this analogy only one side is given to us, namely the phenomenal one. As we hold selectively to specific phenomenal structures, we translate them into large scale in an adventurous attempt.” I am very pleased to see that you are grinning.
IDA: Oh, I know where we’re going, Wendy Hiller. Thoughtful transposition. Procedure. Analogy. Specific way. Translate. Baby, it’s the analogue—
LLOYD UNHINGER: And it’s la danse.
IDA: Boy, it sure is! And I’m House Mother! Are you thinking about Robert Bresson?
LLOYD UNHINGER: I am. Quatre nuits d'un rêveur.
IDA: Rêveur, injun revver, T.S Eliot’s brown river—
LLOYD UNHINGER: Adapted from “White Nights,” Dostoevsky.
IDA: That’s right.
LLOYD UNHINGER: What did Bakhtin say about Dostoevsky’s polyphony?
IDA: Bakhtin said affirmative work is not subjective or maudlin but rather the only reality.Bakhtin said “various stories” and he conjoined that at the hip to “various planes.”
LLOYD UNHINGER: Do you think Quatre nuits d'un rêveur employs the four act structure it would appear to promise us?
IDA: I do and I don’t. It’s like one act with clay bookends.
LLOYD UNHINGER: I have a bad habit of looking at all bookends as something other than bookends, but I know you’ll excuse an old lech. Still, nobody can deny that in Quatre nuits d'un rêveur the front bookend is ‘boy meets Paris.’
IDA: For sure.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Let’s invoke yourself again. Le premier acte.
IDA: Is a child being spanked? Are you drinking too much coffee, Lloyd?
LLOYD UNHINGER: You mind I tickle a minute these here pretty ivories? Are you ready for the House?
IDA: Oh, Lord.
LLOYD UNHINGER: In Quatre nuits, the great master Robert Bresson has employed the actor-model Guillaume des Forêts in something close to a pure personnel capacity in service to the filling of the function Jacques, young flâneur, wastrel, very attractive, a connoisseur of beautiful anemic girls.
IDA: I’ve always said that if you want to build consensus and get on good with the coworkers, what you ought to go do is just start off offering to have them buy you out. You know perfectly well that the Catholic Church and Dracula have for a good long while possessed complimentary tastes.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Why am I compelled to reconnoiter your expo?
IDA: I’m not what the expo people call a humanitarian, okay? Or community activist or any Mother Courage. With me it has just always been instinctual, you understand. With pushy and mean people I have just always experienced the motivation—just I’ve always been on the verge of digging my heel into the bridges of their noses. When not actually in the process of doing so, understand. When I was a girl watching TV it was tiresome to have all the heavies be like Ferdinand Marcos or General Ass-Flappin’-Month-of-August Pinochet, each to a man of jowl and brow and trowel most pitiful, and it was much more fun to get a Idi Amin or a Qadhdhāfī.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Black Test Car.
IDA: Real great picture.
LLOYD UNHINGER: It shares a reel-to-reel tape machine outboard in common with Quatre nuits.
IDA: And Pialat’s Police!
LLOYD UNHINGER: But the machine in the Bresson is an autoerotic sermonizing box or dictaphone with attached mic. Everything salient we’re learning about policing right this minute comes from Asian cinema and fiction of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The cinema of Yasuzô Masumura is of premier interest to us in present time. The tape machine glimpsed briefly at the beginning of Black Test Car, in the ditch right before the foreordained car wreck, ends up being the equivalent of the gun introduced in the first act that must go off in the third. We rate Masumura Yasuzô’s Black or Test Car aside specifically Takamura Kaoru’s novel Lady Joker and the films of Johnnie To. Confused and passionate people trying to make some small difference in the world, in combination with…, uh, governmental and extragovernmental…corporate and intercorporate, well, espionage. Grey markets produce opportunities for the opportunistic and provide likewise the occluding haze to cover their tracks. I want this to be our bread and butter, and we over here consider these considerations. The grey market married to the supposedly above board and to sly, infernal machinations. Everybody is jockeying, mostly half-blind. The recording instruments and the various salient technologies take on lives and half-lives of their own. But the little dictaphone in Quatre nuits employed by negatively sybaritic boy-Symbolist Jacques, into which he early on hastens to rustle his lovelorn phantasms—into which he recites a sort of bored oneiric poetry and into which he would have a fantasy woman encountered fleetingly dance—‘elle danse’—this machine is a dowser and a weapon of self-injury but it also bridges gaps and produces temporal disturbances. After Jacques has spent the first few of his four nights with the young woman Marthe, he travels the city yearning for her, breathing her name into his machine and playing the tape back, some perverse reflexology, only to have the city of Paris throw all kinds of supplemental Marthes back at him. The name is now jumping out of every corner. It’s a seance. The recoding device excites a certain unwieldy conundrum in the sign. At the same time, like in all of later Bresson, the film itself is using overlapping sounds to bridge cuts between distinct spatiotemporal localities, such that the recording technology employed by Bresson himself takes on the properties of an analogous sorcery. With his isolation, his canvases, and his recording machine, Jacques has been made into a little junior version of the movie director, collecting a cinematograph like it were random bottle caps in the street. Still, Jacques is like a drunk or an addict, fixated on the playback, getting high on his own supply, destined to remain in his flat painting his pictures alone and getting wrung-out by echoes. In this sense, Quatre nuits d'un rêveur is almost like the youthful prefiguration of Krapp’s Last Tape. Beckett is here. And so are Burroughs and Gysin.
IDA: Hey, look, I’ve always said so. We made this clear back in Edmonton in the early days, playing with our own tape loops and pharmacology. Brion Gysin grew up in Edmonton. We called him the first Aurora Kid and Zebra the second. Zebra was like the mascot who became a despot. Whatis on the tape is ineffaceable and it keeps coming back. You cannot get rid of a tape that asserts its own necessity, just like certain ideas are around for good once they’ve first hatched. Suicide, anal sex. They first showed up and then they weren’t going anywhere, clearly. They were gonna stick. Certain tapes are indestructible that way. Or nearly so.
LLOYD UNHINGER: I’d like more from you on Zebra and the early days. Edmonton and right after. Not that we don’t have all this…documentation.
IDA: Well, fair enough, Lloyd. Luna and I found Zebra. Before he was a guinea pig who went a little rabid he was just a hustler and a street kid. His mother was an indigenous Peruvian domestic and his father an Edmonton oil man. He told me he was born in Ciudad Chihuahua. Might be true—doesn’t have to make sense. He’d been hereditarily de-selected and left to founder, though he did not, on account of his gifts and his looks. Luna and I connected with him through our frontline work and we took a shine to him. You had a hand in all this, too.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You and Luna made a lot of audio and videotape.
IDA: Hey, you’d know better than I would.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Back then the three of us already had the knack for this racket. You two got in a little deep with the kinkier and slinkier research. But it all ultimately became more or less official and institutionalized—call it the cooption of the sleazy option. Though Zebra has never emerged as anybody’s idea of a ‘known quantity’…however amply documented and feverishly scrutinized.
IDA: We had him in our paws, for sure. The Aurora Kid. Picking up signals.
LLOYD UNHINGER: How do you feel about Luna now, and the trouble between you?
IDA: Well, I guess what I called her is I called her a comprehensively and prematurely hysterectomizedpetite bourgeoisie nullity. She huffed and puffed and said, effectively, that I was reading too much into it. I told her it’s no different than all of us basically knowing to what sort of a creature the word Appaloosa corresponds.
LLOYD UNHINGER: A Zebra is a Zebra. Then you and Zebra shacked up in that house up north.
IDA: We zeroed in on a private variation. We ran the tape.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You had effectively retired for a period. Self-moderated technical field work, maximally clandestine.
IDA: Like you said. Shacked up. Dropped out. To the tune of Jandek’s Ready for the House. And Fahey’s Yellow Princess. Whilst slamming caps of China White.
LLOYD UNHINGER: And Phil Ochs?
IDA: Oh, to be sure. Phil Ochs and John Train too. And corn liquor.
LLOYD UNHINGER: You were always passionate about Saint Augustine and his Confessions. Do you remain something of an adherent? Of course, most of what Augustine has to repent is youthful wiles and fairly tame misadventures in the company of his fellows prior to the decisive death of his saintly mother, Monica. Are you defined now by early indiscretions and efforts to get out from under them? My Gérard Depardieu in Police’s rebuttal can only ever be “Cantos VII,” plus interest: “Shell of the older house” and “House expulsed by his house.” Have you relinquished the house that failed to contain Zebra? Do child’s games still ring the clarion in your blackest of hearts?
IDA: The Confessions are more than just a pure incantatory honey, though this is the reason fundamentally that their importance is literary in addition to philosophical or spiritual. The troubles and emotional perplexities of St. Augustine may be a quandary or set of quandaries that embody the syncretization of future languages and modes. Can we ever be expected to stop reading various futures into all the old or very old things? In Augustine we already have the trace elements of Descartes and Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, Joyce and Beckett. We play any number of drums with our hands, but with our feet we play precisely two: remorse and passion. The limits of faith are the living hiccups of faltering passions, and faith is only infinite love, acceptance of total integration and immersion, the presiding condition one of epistemological blindness and displacement, counterpoised with the either/or and the fatuous sophistry of the Manichaeans, whose influence Augustine largely holds responsible for his early failures. Faith has to exist in concert with epistemological opacity. Sin becomes a symptom of man’s wholly creatural relationship with Time, a relationship of confusion and misapprehension. Somewhere there is a mistake, and everything spread out in Time marks that mistake and answers for it. We steal things haplessly away and we lose people as Time splurges on, overflowing its banks. In the beginning was the Word, fine, but then the words come and go in sequence, making noises, lodging aimless complaints, praying in ways dignified or not. Augustine’s holy trinity is to be, to know, and to will, and the will is not wrong or fundamentally errant, but it hedges. The will wants what it wants to the extent that it wants it and does not want the same thing to the extent that it does not. That’s Book VII of The Confessions. Everything is in here. In Book X we have the Lord of the Flies and the Angel of Light; in book XI the complexivity that binds creatures through creation and creator, creation belonging to the creators and the created; Book XII is an early primer on philology and deconstruction. Augustine ends, with Book XIV, by ultimately explicating his mode: incantatory transcendence, love loved through language, the crucible by means of which we may make the most lasting contact with infinite love. Faith is testament, but that testament must truly sing. Augustine’s style is also that of a renegade river overflowing its banks. Infinite love always collides with muddled and harrowing things that thrust betimes and invariably falter. Love mows things down. Time does so likewise—the inverse.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Well, surely Augustine calls out the “deceivers” and “dumb prattlers,” and we’ve always been able to rely upon you to do the same.
IDA: And I do it in the language of five hundred-plus Bantu daughter tongues, such to assure that the trains run very much not on time. My own confession would be a whole other deal altogether. I speak of gentle genitals that esteem their own erasure. Like cream-filled holiday chocolates put on mothballs; some eternally waylaid “somewhere else.” The palsy may speak up and noisily declare itself. There is always someone sitting somewhere on some toilet without hope of reward or relief. I feel this complaint in my guts. Are we killing time most of the time or just lopping off curious quantities of the invisible? When I was ten I thought my horse was a dragon breathing blue fire. Now I’m some old bitch who cannot even remember where she left the car keys. My whole life in its condensed presence is heinous and nastily belching. I misuse myself in order to test the gullibility of lovers and potential adversaries. I am on the outs with the elders of all protocol. I have a V-shaped navel and the nostrils of a stroke victim, maybe because of all the powders that’ve been vacuumed up. I increasingly have glacial ideas that fatigue and pancake, ever promiscuous in word and deed. I am never afraid to throw fists. I will topple cops and pummel security, even if I’m essentially an old lady. Am I looking out for my sisters or merely succumbing to transient pique? I imagine a mausoleum of picture windows, fragrance of those future mandates I already renounce. Somebody will have to care for the hoarders of wealth in their protracted winter of convoluted demise, but it shan’t be I, who hoard naught but gall. I haven’t ever been treated how I’d call “well.” I am at last extremely prickly.
LLOYD UNHINGER: My story feels far simpler. The life of a beat cop, even a kind of intentionally overblown one like myself, now puffed-up and gone international, is inherently ridiculous and a little pathetic. You hit the same avenues daily and get lost all over again.
IDA: Please. That’s not exactly the whole picture. You have always been an amiable pervert with a robust thirst for knowledge. If Augustine is my pin-up guy, you’ve got Beelzebub in his space craft taking his grandson for a ride and Heliogabalus the Crowned Anarchist in his raiments. You are a fun person, and were since the beginning, because you are a bit of a monster and have the sensitivities of a monster. You relate very much to the quarry and always did. Nothing is off limits to you if it has advanced to such a degree that it unmistakably exists somewhere quantifiable in the known world. You’re more the Grand Iniquitor than you are the Grand Inquisitor of legend.
LLOYD UNHINGER: I think of it as a straightforward byproduct of the work and the mindset. A cop likes to peek into cringy corners closely. For Augustine, the young strive to accumulate totalizing knowledge and are impatient to dispute. I am maybe just a less disputatious version of the person I was in Edmonton, when all of us were both working seriously and fucking about, as you’d say, “heinously.”
IDA: You’re the same person I fucked back then, Lloyd. And you’re still disputing.
LLOYD UNHINGER: When you had absconded with Zebra and set up shop in that house, were you earnestly of the belief that you were exploiting actual faculties of clairvoyance? Did you believe his cold readings were legitimate? Did you ever pause to consider it so much calculated gaff?
IDA: It’s not clear what I believed. Not to me. I know I was deep in it. It was a sort of free-fall. An addict’s. We achieved some kind of singularity and I don’t think anybody on your end is prepared to conclude it was all so much hot air. Were that the case, you could hardly be expected to be pressing so keenly. Or to be chasing after Jon Zebra. You want and dream about what I had in my possession for a fleeting moment.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Mind control never really did pan out as a going concern.
IDA: Hey! Well, yes and no.
LLOYD UNHINGER: When you were intercepted and brought back to roost, Zebra wasn’t with you any more. You were in that house alone. Tell me what happened.
IDA: We had been watching the same movies for a few days, drunk on Scotch and popping pills. We’d been watching repeatedly both Quatre nuits d'un rêveur and Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game, the one where Madonna plays an actress who has to be killed off in the movie within the movie where originally she had been meant to foment a feminist resistance, all because the actress, rather than the character she plays in the movie within the movie, has become a sinecure indexing all the rampant male insecurity and hypocrisy percolating around her. She’s a sacrificial goat for liars, cheats, and cads.
LLOYD UNHINGER: Zebra got fed up and bolted?
IDA: I swear he told me he was just going out to get cigarettes.
