It had been an exceedingly long December and I was up on the roof of my apartment building counting crows, which I did occasionally to ease my mind, when my landlord, Madam Duritz, pushed open the rooftop door and yelled, “Crane, you gonna pay your rent this month?” and in the cold January darkness I had an impulse—a mere half second, if that, but genuine—of stepping over the edge and plummeting to my death…

I felt an intravenous chill, followed by a sort of unclinging of myself—from what?—from nothing, an I unclinging from itself, like an insect separating finally from the slime in which it came to be, from whose raw vital materials it had developed; tearing through it with awkwardly moving pincers and jagged little legs, followed by its monstrous head, the greedy, maternal viscous slime stretching from it in thinning strands that, stretched finally—finally break, falling slowly, nearly weightless, to the ground, as the insect has pushed through into the greater world.

So too I felt, a human slime upon some unremarkable rooftop, watching my hideous impulse, on a waning January day, in the frail, wan light, run towards the rooftop door, dragging thinning, breaking strands of me behind it; until the separation was total, and my impulse, freed, flowed like glowing smoke beside Madam Duritz, with her wig and red, painted lips, and disappeared down the stairwell.

It was speaking as it did, but I can't remember the last thing that it said to me as it was leaving. ”What's it gonna be, ya gonna answer me, Crane, or ya just gonna sit there until I serva ya notice again?” Madam Duritz was asking, and all I could do was laugh, albeit a little slower than usual.

“Did you see it—did you see it slip past you?” I answered, a little lower.

“Stop smoking weed,” she barked, turned and vanished with evident disapproval down the stairs as the door slammed shut by a gust of wind revealed her ghost floating before it. “Na, na-na-na, na, na-na, na-na, na-na-na-na. Na, na-na-na, yeah,” said the ghost and it too disappeared, dissipating into the evening mist…

In March, I started seeing a psychiatrist.

My insurance only covered eighty percent of the cost of four visits, so I ended up not getting much out of it. I described my experience to the psychiatrist, who noted its symbolic significance but merely nodded when I insisted that it had literally happened.

He wanted to put me on pills.

(I didn't take them.)

He insisted on revisiting my troubled childhood.

(It wasn't troubled.)

I called my employer's Employee Assistance Program after that, the one they established to avoid liability stemming from employee suicides, the attempted kind especially, the kind that leaves you hooked up to expensive machinery for the rest of your unemployed life.

Even when it comes to death, success is ultimately better for everyone than failure.

“So you're not, like, wanting to kill yourself, like, right now?” said the girl on the other end of the line. I was pretty sure she was chewing gum. I wondered what flavour. I wondered what her credentials were. “That's right,” I said, trying to explain that while I didn't have the impulse at this moment, it had escaped so was still out there somewhere and could come back at any time.

She didn't get it.

I started watching out for myself after that, watching for the impulse. I even thought I saw it a few times, looking at me, following me. Once, I was on a date—got up suddenly seeing it or thinking I'd seen it because what's the difference?, loudly knocking over my chair, saying, “Sorry… I'm so sorry, but I have to go,“ as everybody else in the restaurant stared at us: at me, backing away, spinning, wheezing, barely breathing and breaking into a run once I was out the double doors, leaving my date like an asshole to cover the bill to run directionless down the street trying not to throw up, until my legs gave out.

I can't remember how I came across the name Samuel Swan, Existential Detective. Online, probably. He and his partner, a Jamaican named Mr. Jones, had an office in a shady part of the city. I wasn't sure what it was they did so, “Is this a kind of psychotherapy or...?” I asked during our first appointment.

“Nope,” said Swan. “That requires a license.”

“Are you an investigator then?”

“That requires a license too,” he said slowly. “Nope, what we do is believe.”

Mr. Jones: We believe in you.

Swan: We believe that what you say happened happened.

Mr. Jones: The world’s the Big Strange, Mr. Crane.

Me: So you believe—

[I snapped out of it.]

—that my hideous impulse is out there right now, existing?” I asked.

“Positively.”

“Mr. Crane,” said Swan, “everything has the will to live, even the urge to die.”

I started paying them a hundred dollars a week, and twenty-seven years later I had in my hands an envelope containing pixelated but convincing photographs of what was unmistakably my hideous impulse. There was also a street address, out in Los Angeles.

(“We'll find it but we won't kill it,” Swan had said when I had asked about the process. “If you want to kill it, you have to do that yourself.”)

California was warm.

I'd driven across the continent to get there.

The address was a nice suburban home, with a car out front, a fence and big windows, and I was standing on the street holding a knife.

The front door was unlocked and I passed from the entrance hall through the kitchen to the living room where I saw my impulse with another. Two little impulses ran by, playing. They were all so fucking joyous that—

I'll lift the heavy, steel knife…

I could do nought but weep, for this spawn of myself had done so much better for itself than I and slit my rippling, goddamn throat.

It had been an exceedingly long December and I was up on the roof of my apartment building counting crows, which I did occasionally to ease my mind, when my landlord, Madam Duritz, pushed open the rooftop door and yelled, “Crane, you gonna pay your rent this month?” and in the cold January darkness I had an impulse—a mere half second, if that, but genuine—of stepping over the edge and plummeting to my death…

I felt an intravenous chill, followed by a sort of unclinging of myself—from what?—from nothing, an I unclinging from itself, like an insect separating finally from the slime in which it came to be, from whose raw vital materials it had developed; tearing through it with awkwardly moving pincers and jagged little legs, followed by its monstrous head, the greedy, maternal viscous slime stretching from it in thinning strands that, stretched finally—finally break, falling slowly, nearly weightless, to the ground, as the insect has pushed through into the greater world.

So too I felt, a human slime upon some unremarkable rooftop, watching my hideous impulse, on a waning January day, in the frail, wan light, run towards the rooftop door, dragging thinning, breaking strands of me behind it; until the separation was total, and my impulse, freed, flowed like glowing smoke beside Madam Duritz, with her wig and red, painted lips, and disappeared down the stairwell.

It was speaking as it did, but I can't remember the last thing that it said to me as it was leaving. ”What's it gonna be, ya gonna answer me, Crane, or ya just gonna sit there until I serva ya notice again?” Madam Duritz was asking, and all I could do was laugh, albeit a little slower than usual.

“Did you see it—did you see it slip past you?” I answered, a little lower.

“Stop smoking weed,” she barked, turned and vanished with evident disapproval down the stairs as the door slammed shut by a gust of wind revealed her ghost floating before it. “Na, na-na-na, na, na-na, na-na, na-na-na-na. Na, na-na-na, yeah,” said the ghost and it too disappeared, dissipating into the evening mist…

In March, I started seeing a psychiatrist.

My insurance only covered eighty percent of the cost of four visits, so I ended up not getting much out of it. I described my experience to the psychiatrist, who noted its symbolic significance but merely nodded when I insisted that it had literally happened.

He wanted to put me on pills.

(I didn't take them.)

He insisted on revisiting my troubled childhood.

(It wasn't troubled.)

I called my employer's Employee Assistance Program after that, the one they established to avoid liability stemming from employee suicides, the attempted kind especially, the kind that leaves you hooked up to expensive machinery for the rest of your unemployed life.

Even when it comes to death, success is ultimately better for everyone than failure.

“So you're not, like, wanting to kill yourself, like, right now?” said the girl on the other end of the line. I was pretty sure she was chewing gum. I wondered what flavour. I wondered what her credentials were. “That's right,” I said, trying to explain that while I didn't have the impulse at this moment, it had escaped so was still out there somewhere and could come back at any time.

She didn't get it.

I started watching out for myself after that, watching for the impulse. I even thought I saw it a few times, looking at me, following me. Once, I was on a date—got up suddenly seeing it or thinking I'd seen it because what's the difference?, loudly knocking over my chair, saying, “Sorry… I'm so sorry, but I have to go,“ as everybody else in the restaurant stared at us: at me, backing away, spinning, wheezing, barely breathing and breaking into a run once I was out the double doors, leaving my date like an asshole to cover the bill to run directionless down the street trying not to throw up, until my legs gave out.

I can't remember how I came across the name Samuel Swan, Existential Detective. Online, probably. He and his partner, a Jamaican named Mr. Jones, had an office in a shady part of the city. I wasn't sure what it was they did so, “Is this a kind of psychotherapy or...?” I asked during our first appointment.

“Nope,” said Swan. “That requires a license.”

“Are you an investigator then?”

“That requires a license too,” he said slowly. “Nope, what we do is believe.”

Mr. Jones: We believe in you.

Swan: We believe that what you say happened happened.

Mr. Jones: The world’s the Big Strange, Mr. Crane.

Me: So you believe—

[I snapped out of it.]

—that my hideous impulse is out there right now, existing?” I asked.

“Positively.”

“Mr. Crane,” said Swan, “everything has the will to live, even the urge to die.”

I started paying them a hundred dollars a week, and twenty-seven years later I had in my hands an envelope containing pixelated but convincing photographs of what was unmistakably my hideous impulse. There was also a street address, out in Los Angeles.

(“We'll find it but we won't kill it,” Swan had said when I had asked about the process. “If you want to kill it, you have to do that yourself.”)

California was warm.

I'd driven across the continent to get there.

The address was a nice suburban home, with a car out front, a fence and big windows, and I was standing on the street holding a knife.

The front door was unlocked and I passed from the entrance hall through the kitchen to the living room where I saw my impulse with another. Two little impulses ran by, playing. They were all so fucking joyous that—

I'll lift the heavy, steel knife…

I could do nought but weep, for this spawn of myself had done so much better for itself than I and slit my rippling, goddamn throat.

---

> Knock knock. > > Who's there? > > Yo momma. > > Yo momma who? > > Yo momma, you so fat you can't even get out the house no more.

—“Untitled 73.” A Reconstruction of Early Human Folk Poetry (2nd ed.), ​☉ ☌ ☍ ☋ ☊, Crystal-Lattice 14, Node 802.

---

> Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. (Knocking within) Knock, knock, knock! Who's there

—fragment of an instructions for performing a make-believe, anonymous or author unknown, Introduction to Earth Culture, Kzz-T’k-​⎅ Ed., Focal Depth 3.2mm.

---

KNOCK KNOCK

(a poetic make-believe in the human style)

---

Dramatis Personae

---

YOU, a hapless reader

WHO, a hungry beast

YES, who's intestinal rumblings

NOBODY, a deaf woman

---

i.

knock knock /
who's there
right behind you,
and it's hungry as hell. [1]


ii.

no joke. [2]


iii.

knock knock /
who here,
i wanna eat you,
ya fear?


iv.

knock knock /
help me!
is nobody here? /
nobody is, but being without a body
means nobody can't hear.


v.

you beg
for your life /
knock knock
knock knock
knock
kn


vi.

knock knock /
whose there?
yes, who's borborygmi, [3]
who ate you so quickly,
it ingested too much hot air.


vii.

don't /
knock knock /
it till you've tried it /
buuuuuuurp. [4]


viii.

knock knock /
no answer.


ix.

knock knock /
no answer.


x.

knock knock /
who stirs, who's belly's full,
who itself's all rested,
and you, in who's stomach, 're
fully digested. [5]

---

Footnotes

---

[1] Hell: in some human mythologies, a hot place of post-life perpetual burning. See also: BBQ. [6]

[2] Joke: a human composition with the purpose of eliciting a full body physiological response called laughter. The opposite of seriousness.

[3] Borborygmi: a rumbling spirit believed by a class of human priests called doctors to inhabit the body.

[4] Burp: a forceful exhalation, a more powerful sigh.

[5] Digest: a summation or condensation of a body of information. To be digested is thus to have become a condensed summation of one's self. For a more thorough discussion, please see my datacube: Digestion & Enlightenment: Towards an Understanding of the Human Theory of Wilful Self-Improvement.

[6] BBQ: A symbolic representation of Hell used in human ritual, wherein groups of humans gathered around a fire and consumed small, burnt likenesses of themselves carved from the flesh of dead, non-human animals.

The curtain opened and Wenda B:)er walked, buzzing with nervous excitement, into the spotlight: onto the game show stage where the game show host, Felonious Hunk, was waiting for her.

There followed thunderous applause, as heard through the studio's MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers. MaX FX: The Sound of Extraordinary. Are You Listening Yet? MaX FX speakers are available for your home and business. Check them out today. Use code “BUCKETS” for a 15% discount on any regularly priced set of speakers. Everyone can hear, but only some can hear it to the MaX!

“Miss B-smiling-face-er, welcome to Buckets,” said Hunk. “How ya feeling?”

“Good, Hunk.”

“Fab-u-lous! Now tell us a little about yourself.”

“Well, Hunk,” said Wenda, “I—... I want to say that I really like Snakeskin Flame, the new… the newest scent from House of Madeleine. I'm wearing it right now. Other than that, I'm twenty-nine and work as a temporal engineer for Vectorien Corporation. Vectorien: the makers of Dreamstuff, the latest evolution in playdough. I'm married. My husband, Rhondy, owns a slopstream management firm, and we have two children together, an eight-year old human-daschund mix, Wilmoth, and a six year-old bio-enhanced female, Qabiria.”

She held up digital photos of them. Wilmoth looked somewhat like a chimpanzee. Qabiria was shiny in her steel exoskeleton.

“Lovely family,” said Hunk. “But please tell the viewers who else is in it.”

“Both my parents, HeinzKetchup and PumaShoe, are still alive, and I have three siblings: two brothers, [Incarcerated ID 768816] and Rob, and a sister, anal-ariella (exclusively at SmutHog.) I also have a cryogenically frozen grandmother, Lydia, and a grandfather, Doug, whose mind was digitized and recently uploaded to the body of a young, hollowed-out illegal.”

“And what's your brother serving time for, Wenda?”

“[Censored],” said Wenda.

“Ooh. That's a crime with a penal buyout of what, eighty billion?”

“One hundred. He's a repeat offender, and there were other aggravating circumstances.”

“Well, regardless, if you play your bucket right—and your brother has just a tiny bit of luck—you could walk away from here today with enough money to buy your brother his freedom!” Hunk smiled. “How does that make you feel, Wenda?”

“Like this money could really make a difference for me and my family.”

“Excellent. Excellent.”

---

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>!“Kick the habit: of seeing ‘reality.’!<

>!“Whenever you find yourself perceiving the everyday, the rote, the ordinary, repeat after me: ‘I saw my wife shaving with my best friend's razor. I didn't know razors also shave.’”!<

---

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“I think now is a good time to remind you and the viewers what's at stake,” said Felonious Hunk. “If you win, Wenda, you will bank a cool five-hundred billion dollars!

“But, if you lose, you'll be [censored]—live—by one hundred lucky viewers! Or at least you'll be live to begin with—a-live, that is…”

He winked.

There followed thunderous canned laughter and applause through the MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers.

“Now, without further ado,” Hunk continued, “ladies and gentlemen, let's… bring out—THE BUCKET!”

And, rising from the middle of the stage, powered by a solar-powered Electrocutie electric motor—Electrocutie: Silent and discreet, for all your bio-mechanical needs—appeared a platform, and on this platform there stood, in neon spotlight, a red-and-white striped bucket, like the kind you might get The Colonel's patented Crispy Sticks fried chicken in. Order today and a get a free tub of syntholard dipping sauce and a large order of The Colonel's homestyle taters!

Wenda stared at the bucket.

“Wenda, are you ready?” asked Hunk.

“I am.”

“Then step on up to the bucket and have yourself a peek inside!”

Wenda was shaking as she took the few steps to the platform. The studio was silent. She could feel the blood coursing through her body.

She could hear her own breathing.

She touched the outside of the bucket.

It was warm.

She held her breath and peered inside, where pieces of hot, battered meat smelled sweetly of herbs, butter and garlic.

“Go on—have a taste,” said Hunk.

Wenda closed her eyes, opened them and extended her hand above the bucket, her Snakeskin Flame fragrant as the wild, untamed prairie. She picked up one of the pieces of meat and raised it to her lips. She opened her mouth, exposing teeth as pearly white as only Dr. Mason's Whitening Formula can make them, and with tears running down both cheeks took a bite and slowly chewed.

She swallowed.

She propped herself against the platform to keep from falling.

She retched.

She grinded her teeth to keep from throwing up; she swallowed what came up her throat, as the cameraman moved with professional smoothness to get a good low angle shot of her from behind.

“And…” Hunk asked her. “Do you know?

“Can you, Wenda B-smiley-face-er—for five-hundred billion dollars!—tell me: the meat of which one of your family members, killed, butchered and deep fried right here earlier today by our celebrity chef, in front of an audience of one thousand Diamond Tier viewers, is in the bucket?

“Who, Wenda, have you just tasted?

“Whose meat—”

“WILL SHE EAT!?” roared the viewers through the MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers!

“Yes,” said Wenda, weeping, taking another piece of battered meat, taking another slow bite. “I think I know. It's

---

[To continue reading this story, become a Diamond Tier subscriber.]

[Support what you love.]

[Diamond Tier benefits include: narrative endings, backstory, extended graphic descriptions of gore, psychological depth, official Norman Crane merch, discounts on insurance, the chance to name characters, and many, many more!]

The curtain opened and Wenda B:)er walked, buzzing with nervous excitement, into the spotlight: onto the game show stage where the game show host, Felonious Hunk, was waiting for her.

There followed thunderous applause, as heard through the studio's MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers. MaX FX: The Sound of Extraordinary. Are You Listening Yet? MaX FX speakers are available for your home and business. Check them out today. Use code “BUCKETS” for a 15% discount on any regularly priced set of speakers. Everyone can hear, but only some can hear it to the MaX!

“Miss B-smiling-face-er, welcome to Buckets,” said Hunk. “How ya feeling?”

“Good, Hunk.”

“Fab-u-lous! Now tell us a little about yourself.”

“Well, Hunk,” said Wenda, “I—... I want to say that I really like Snakeskin Flame, the new… the newest scent from House of Madeleine. I'm wearing it right now. Other than that, I'm twenty-nine and work as a temporal engineer for Vectorien Corporation. Vectorien: the makers of Dreamstuff, the latest evolution in playdough. I'm married. My husband, Rhondy, owns a slopstream management firm, and we have two children together, an eight-year old human-daschund mix, Wilmoth, and a six year-old bio-enhanced female, Qabiria.”

She held up digital photos of them. Wilmoth looked somewhat like a chimpanzee. Qabiria was shiny in her steel exoskeleton.

“Lovely family,” said Hunk. “But please tell the viewers who else is in it.”

“Both my parents, HeinzKetchup and PumaShoe, are still alive, and I have three siblings: two brothers, [Incarcerated ID 768816] and Rob, and a sister, anal-ariella (exclusively at SmutHog.) I also have a cryogenically frozen grandmother, Lydia, and a grandfather, Doug, whose mind was digitized and recently uploaded to the body of a young, hollowed-out illegal.”

“And what's your brother serving time for, Wenda?”

“Sexual assault,” said Wenda.

“Ooh. That's a crime with a penal buyout of what, eighty billion?”

“One hundred. He's a repeat offender, and there were other aggravating circumstances.”

“Well, regardless, if you play your bucket right—and your brother has just a tiny bit of luck—you could walk away from here today with enough money to buy your brother his freedom!” Hunk smiled. “How does that make you feel, Wenda?”

“Like this money could really make a difference for me and my family.”

“Excellent. Excellent.”

---

Hey! If you're enjoying this story, I think you'd also like my new online lecture series, “A Reusable Key to the Lock of the Surreal.”

Here's a preview:

>!“Perception is a standardized drug. Don't get off on it—get off it.!<

>!“Kick the habit: of seeing ‘reality.’!<

>!“Whenever you find yourself perceiving the everyday, the rote, the ordinary, repeat after me: ‘I saw my wife shaving with my best friend's razor. I didn't know razors also shave.’”!<

---

Now only $69.99 per lecture!

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---

“I think now is a good time to remind you and the viewers what's at stake,” said Felonious Hunk. “If you win, Wenda, you will bank a cool five-hundred billion dollars!

“But, if you lose, you'll be fucked—live—by one hundred lucky viewers! Or at least you'll be live to begin with—a-live, that is…”

He winked.

There followed thunderous canned laughter and applause through the MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers.

“Now, without further ado,” Hunk continued, “ladies and gentlemen, let's… bring out—THE BUCKET!”

And, rising from the middle of the stage, powered by a solar-powered Electrocutie electric motor—Electrocutie: Silent and discreet, for all your bio-mechanical needs—appeared a platform, and on this platform there stood, in neon spotlight, a red-and-white striped bucket, like the kind you might get The Colonel's patented Crispy Sticks fried chicken in. Order today and a get a free tub of syntholard dipping sauce and a large order of The Colonel's homestyle taters!

Wenda stared at the bucket.

“Wenda, are you ready?” asked Hunk.

“I am.”

“Then step on up to the bucket and have yourself a peek inside!”

Wenda was shaking as she took the few steps to the platform. The studio was silent. She could feel the blood coursing through her body.

She could hear her own breathing.

She touched the outside of the bucket.

It was warm.

She held her breath and peered inside, where pieces of hot, battered meat smelled sweetly of herbs, butter and garlic.

“Go on—have a taste,” said Hunk.

Wenda closed her eyes, opened them and extended her hand above the bucket, her Snakeskin Flame fragrant as the wild, untamed prairie. She picked up one of the pieces of meat and raised it to her lips. She opened her mouth, exposing teeth as pearly white as only Dr. Mason's Whitening Formula can make them, and with tears running down both cheeks took a bite and slowly chewed.

She swallowed.

She propped herself against the platform to keep from falling.

She retched.

She grinded her teeth to keep from throwing up; she swallowed what came up her throat, as the cameraman moved with professional smoothness to get a good low angle shot of her from behind.

“And…” Hunk asked her. “Do you know?

“Can you, Wenda B-smiley-face-er—for five-hundred billion dollars!—tell me: the meat of which one of your family members, killed, butchered and deep fried right here earlier today by our celebrity chef, in front of an audience of one thousand Diamond Tier viewers, is in the bucket?

“Who, Wenda, have you just tasted?

“Whose meat—”

“WILL SHE EAT!?” roared the viewers through the MaX FX K-Ultra Platinum speakers!

“Yes,” said Wenda, weeping, taking another piece of battered meat, taking another slow bite. “I think I know. It's

---

[To continue reading this story, become a Diamond Tier subscriber.]

[Support what you love.]

[Diamond Tier benefits include: narrative endings, backstory, extended graphic descriptions of gore, psychological depth, official Norman Crane merch, discounts on insurance, the chance to name characters, and many, many more!]

a lone woman at a nowhere train station,
waiting for a train,
the sky is clear despite earlier threatening to rain,
the grey clouds have whitened,
in a sky becoming blue,
you can see the curve of the Earth,
you can see too,
that the woman is holding an umbrella,
)perhaps she is waiting for you,(
she is wearing a cream coloured trench coat,
)perhaps you are waiting for you too,(
and tall brown leather boots,
you see her always with her back turned,
the wind blowing back her hair,
you hear the big rumble of the train coming,
you feel the gentle turning of the world,
the time, it's coming; time, it's come,
it is, but it's already too late,
the woman has boarded,
the woman has gone and so has the train,
gone is the clear sky, gone are the white
clouds, turning grey,
you're at a nowhere train station alone. It is starting to rain.

I hang around at night, hanging onto it, clutching its starry cloak, imploring it not to walk away into the dawn. If someone, a woman, were to ask me, why are you here? I wouldn't know the answer, although I would of course say something, I always say something, sometimes even the right thing, where rightness is judged not by truth but by what the other wants to hear, so when she asks, why are you here? I answer, I am here for you. And she believes me; that is the tragedy of it, for her, for me…

Night always walks away.

Sometimes it is delayed or lingers as the grey clouds of an overcast morning that smears the rising sun, but it always leaves, and I limp home, anxious and offended by the risen men and their enthusiasm for life during daytime.

Once, when I was out at night, walking the calm, unsettled streets with the taste of black coffee on my lips, a man called to me, “Friend…

“Friend…”

“Me?” I asked softly, having seen no one, ashamed of speaking to no one and afraid of breaking the dark, brittle silence.

“Friend, who walks…”

“Me?” I said, louder. “I hear you.”

“Yes, friend; you, friend. Friend, are you looking for night-work, friend?” He was a shadow of a shadow, passing.

“What work?”

“Night-work at the Factory of Sad, Parting Glances, friend. They are seeking impressive operators, friend. Sleepless machinists. Nocturnalians.” He was in front of me and fleeing, beside me, taking hold of my hand, behind me and blowing coldly as the wind, and, taking steps, I said, “Where?” “Let me show you, friend. Follow me, friend,” he said and led me past pasts, down alleys and into dead ends that he reanimated and they twitched like the tails of sleeping cats dreaming of a worldful of fat uncaught rats until we were, the shadows, now illuminated out of existence, and I, standing before a big brick building above whose entry doors hung a neon sign welcoming me impersonally to The Factory of Sad, Parting Glances.

I was alone.

I walked in through the doors, walking under the neon sign whose light fell on me like a buzzing waterfall, into the dim interior.

Immediately I heard the hum of the repetitive workings of machinery, the far off drip of liquid and the quiet, beautiful strains of the music of another era as if it were burning; but I smelled no fire, only grease and oil, and I saw no smoke, only an atmosphere of finely suspended dust through which shone erratic, searchful yellow beams. The beams, had I been able to taste them, would have tasted sweetly of honey. I moved along, along paths trodden smooth by the boots of ghosts, to a room through which an assembly line ran, its parts, surfaces and production moving but moving slowly, mournfully…

The workmen were white and headless. Only I had a head, or so it felt to me.

Sliding down the line were small framed pieces of glass, at first glance empty; but on inspection containing the same, faint impression of what, at second glance, seemed a reflection but on third glance appeared to be light itself, trapped; an enfolded, translucent ribbon of gently fluent varicolour, like the rays of a concluding sun or edges of a human face seen briefly and for the final time.

I felt the dust prick my skin.

I saw that one of the machines was empty and was drawn to it but moved away, away from the whirring engines and their phantom operators, from the panes of melancholy, toward the succeeding room.

Here, to my left, was a shelf for heads; and to my right, a recession into a darkness which obscured its own inevitable limit, granting the space an illusion of infinity. I wondered if the heads were the heads of the headless workmen. I wondered if, if I walked into the darkness, I could walk into the darkness forever…

Drops of pearly light fell from the ceiling onto my head. The music I had heard before I heard now with greater intensity. As I stepped forward, from this room to the next, a great furnace materialized before me. It was the source of the music.

The heat heated my face.

And I noticed a line, as of ants, of small chunks of coal with sprouted soot-wire limbs, marching single file from a hole in the floor to the furnace and leaping in; leaping in willingly to their own destruction, their own brief moment of usefulness, which it was both a sadness and a happiness to witness.

The main part of the furnace, which was black, was a black grate, behind which the flames danced and the heat and light emanated. Here, within the bright flames, a band played, melting away… their meltedness exiting the furnace by draining through a small pipe, flowing down it like mercury and accumulating in a vast but shallow reflective pool that rippled at each drip, so it rippled and it rippled as one band followed another, melted, to be replaced by another, to be melted, to be replaced until I no longer saw the bands at all but the rhythm of their appearances and disappearances…

A figure rose out of the pool, a woman's figure; a woman possessed of so mirrorlike a skin that it was a shifting distortion of everything about her, including me.

At her emergence I felt my heart stir.

“Why are you here?” she asked, I said, “I am here for you,” and in that moment, as I moved toward her with my hand outstretched, she slipped away, turned, once, back, as she fled, burned then violently like a filament and went out.

In darkness the image, in negative persisting in my vision, floated into the past room, and into the past, to be caught in glass and fixed, sliding down the assembly line and framed by the machine operators, of whom one I could have been, a headless phantom in the Factory of Sad, Parting Glances.

I saw one of these impressions once, in the house of a great industrialist. I didn't dare ask where he acquired it, but I thought, what a despicable world we inhabit in daylight, when, unashamed, she brazenly lifts her dress to show us the cruelty of her beauty and the injustice of who possesses it.

“Do you like it?” he asks—interrupting my reverie. I'm about to answer when I realize he's not pointing at the framed glass but at a small brass statue of a soldier. He explains what it is, but I'm not paying attention. I smile politely, but inside I'm gathering courage “What's to ask that,” I ask, gesturing at the impression. “Oh, that,” he says, “that's just an empty frame, my friend,“ and he laughs, bellowing like a furnace. “Of course,” I say, “that's just an empty frame.” It's just an empty frame, an empty frame you're looking at, you're looking, at an empty frame, an empty frame an empty frame, an empty, looking, empty-looking you, an empty, an empty empty empty…

I hang around at night, hanging onto it, clutching its starry cloak, imploring it not to walk away into the dawn. If someone, a woman, were to ask me, why are you here? I wouldn't know the answer, although I would of course say something, I always say something, sometimes even the right thing, where rightness is judged not by truth but by what the other wants to hear, so when she asks, why are you here? I answer, I am here for you. And she believes me; that is the tragedy of it, for her, for me…

Night always walks away.

Sometimes it is delayed or lingers as the grey clouds of an overcast morning that smears the rising sun, but it always leaves, and I limp home, anxious and offended by the risen men and their enthusiasm for life during daytime.

Once, when I was out at night, walking the calm, unsettled streets with the taste of black coffee on my lips, a man called to me, “Friend…

“Friend…”

“Me?” I asked softly, having seen no one, ashamed of speaking to no one and afraid of breaking the dark, brittle silence.

“Friend, who walks…”

“Me?” I said, louder. “I hear you.”

“Yes, friend; you, friend. Friend, are you looking for night-work, friend?” He was a shadow of a shadow, passing.

“What work?”

“Night-work at the Factory of Sad, Parting Glances, friend. They are seeking impressive operators, friend. Sleepless machinists. Nocturnalians.” He was in front of me and fleeing, beside me, taking hold of my hand, behind me and blowing coldly as the wind, and, taking steps, I said, “Where?” “Let me show you, friend. Follow me, friend,” he said and led me past pasts, down alleys and into dead ends that he reanimated and they twitched like the tails of sleeping cats dreaming of a worldful of fat uncaught rats until we were, the shadows, now illuminated out of existence, and I, standing before a big brick building above whose entry doors hung a neon sign welcoming me impersonally to The Factory of Sad, Parting Glances.

I was alone.

I walked in through the doors, walking under the neon sign whose light fell on me like a buzzing waterfall, into the dim interior.

Immediately I heard the hum of the repetitive workings of machinery, the far off drip of liquid and the quiet, beautiful strains of the music of another era as if it were burning; but I smelled no fire, only grease and oil, and I saw no smoke, only an atmosphere of finely suspended dust through which shone erratic, searchful yellow beams. The beams, had I been able to taste them, would have tasted sweetly of honey. I moved along, along paths trodden smooth by the boots of ghosts, to a room through which an assembly line ran, its parts, surfaces and production moving but moving slowly, mournfully…

The workmen were white and headless. Only I had a head, or so it felt to me.

Sliding down the line were small framed pieces of glass, at first glance empty; but on inspection containing the same, faint impression of what, at second glance, seemed a reflection but on third glance appeared to be light itself, trapped; an enfolded, translucent ribbon of gently fluent varicolour, like the rays of a concluding sun or edges of a human face seen briefly and for the final time.

I felt the dust prick my skin.

I saw that one of the machines was empty and was drawn to it but moved away, away from the whirring engines and their phantom operators, from the panes of melancholy, toward the succeeding room.

Here, to my left, was a shelf for heads; and to my right, a recession into a darkness which obscured its own inevitable limit, granting the space an illusion of infinity. I wondered if the heads were the heads of the headless workmen. I wondered if, if I walked into the darkness, I could walk into the darkness forever…

Drops of pearly light fell from the ceiling onto my head. The music I had heard before I heard now with greater intensity. As I stepped forward, from this room to the next, a great furnace materialized before me. It was the source of the music.

The heat heated my face.

And I noticed a line, as of ants, of small chunks of coal with sprouted soot-wire limbs, marching single file from a hole in the floor to the furnace and leaping in; leaping in willingly to their own destruction, their own brief moment of usefulness, which it was both a sadness and a happiness to witness.

The main part of the furnace, which was black, was a black grate, behind which the flames danced and the heat and light emanated. Here, within the bright flames, a band played, melting away… their meltedness exiting the furnace by draining through a small pipe, flowing down it like mercury and accumulating in a vast but shallow reflective pool that rippled at each drip, so it rippled and it rippled as one band followed another, melted, to be replaced by another, to be melted, to be replaced until I no longer saw the bands at all but the rhythm of their appearances and disappearances…

A figure rose out of the pool, a woman's figure; a woman possessed of so mirrorlike a skin that it was a shifting distortion of everything about her, including me.

At her emergence I felt my heart stir.

“Why are you here?” she asked, I said, “I am here for you,” and in that moment, as I moved toward her with my hand outstretched, she slipped away, turned, once, back, as she fled, burned then violently like a filament and went out.

In darkness the image, in negative persisting in my vision, floated into the past room, and into the past, to be caught in glass and fixed, sliding down the assembly line and framed by the machine operators, of whom one I could have been, a headless phantom in the Factory of Sad, Parting Glances.

I saw one of these impressions once, in the house of a great industrialist. I didn't dare ask where he acquired it, but I thought, what a despicable world we inhabit in daylight, when, unashamed, she brazenly lifts her dress to show us the cruelty of her beauty and the injustice of who possesses it.

“Do you like it?” he asks—interrupting my reverie. I'm about to answer when I realize he's not pointing at the framed glass but at a small brass statue of a soldier. He explains what it is, but I'm not paying attention. I smile politely, but inside I'm gathering courage “What's to ask that,” I ask, gesturing at the impression. “Oh, that,” he says, “that's just an empty frame, my friend,“ and he laughs, bellowing like a furnace. “Of course,” I say, “that's just an empty frame.” It's just an empty frame, an empty frame you're looking at, you're looking, at an empty frame, an empty frame an empty frame, an empty, looking, empty-looking you, an empty, an empty empty empty…

I was doing it as a favour to my sister but I really did think the kid had a future in pictures.

Sure, he'd fallen in with the wrong people, namely the Russian mob, for whom he'd provided unspecified services, but at heart he was a good, decent kid.

“Yevgeni,” I said, “you ever suck cock on camera before?”

“No,” he said. “I not fag.”

“No one's saying you are, son. Anthony Hopkins wasn't a cannibal either, but on screen…”

“I not suck.”

“And I totally respect that. How about a whack job?”

“How many men?” he asked.

“Woah. Just one for now. You'll see how comfortable you are. We'll see how the video turns out.”

“And crew?”

“No crew. This is real gonzo style. You and the guy in a room. Natural light, a camera, a tripod. We're not filming Titanic here.”

“OK,” he said. “I will do it.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I think it'll be good. You've definitely got the body for it.”

---

I made the arrangements.

A week later, Yevgeni showed up in my office with a USB drive. “Here is video,” he said.

“That sure was fast.”

“I fast worker.”

I plugged the USB drive into my laptop and turned on the video.

“That's pretty good,” I said, watching the introductory scene at the beginning, where Yevgeni opens the door and he and one of my regulars, Guy Shelly, get into it over a debt Yevgeni accuses Guy of owing, and Guy swears he doesn't know what Yevgeni is talking about, and then Yevgeni takes out a knife and—

I paused. “Yevgeni?”

“Yes?”

“This is surprisingly good acting, but it's a bit… violent, you know?”

“OK.”

I unpaused.

On video: Yevgeni punched Guy in the face. Guy started bleeding from the nose, whimpering, pleading. Yevgeni grabbed him by the hair, dragged him toward the camera. Then Yevgeni held the knife against Guy's throat—Guy's terrified eyes staring seemingly right at me—and started to slice—

I paused again.

I didn't know what to say.

“You not watch rest?” Yevgeni asked.

“Yevgeni,” I said. “This is a snuff—you made a fucking snuff—I mean, please tell me where Guy Shelly is, Yevgeni. Yevgeni…”

“I disposed of body.”

I gasped.

“If you watch you see,” he said.

“Yevegni, why did you fucking—” I started to yell, then lowered my voice so my secretary didn't hear: “Why did you kill him?”

Yevgeni looked confused. “You said had whack job for me. You wanted on video. So I whack him on video,” he explained like it was the most natural thing in the fucking world.

“Whack job,” I said weakly, “as in, beat him off.”

“You want me to beat him only?”

“Masturbate him.”

“I told you I not fag,” said Yevgeni, shaking his head.

Because I was feeling legitimately scared, I had opened my desk drawer, where I kept a gun, and had my hand on it, when my secretary opened the door—and almost instinctively I shot her in the face.

I don't know why.

Probably because I didn't want her to see the video; to see Yevgeni in the office with me.

She screamed, holding her face.

I was screaming too.

Yevgeni took the gun from my shaking hand and shot my secretary calmly in the head.

She was dead.

There was an unbelievable amount of blood.

I could hardly breathe. “The mess… the mess…” I kept croaking.

“This not problem,” said Yevgeni. “I know guy.”

He made a phone call, and twenty minutes later a pair of Russians showed up with power tools, a piece of luggage and cleaning equipment, and they got to work.

It felt unreal.

Before they were done, Yevgeni told me to follow him and led me to his car.

We got in.

“They're going to be looking for us,” I said. “Aren't they? They're going to figure out you killed them…”

“You shot woman,” said Yevgeni.

“Yes, but—”

“You put hit out on man.”

“I didn't…” I started to say, but I knew it was pointless. I was in adult film production. The cops would crucify me.

“I help you,” said Yevgeni. “You show kindness to me. I know guy, Georgian doctor.”

We drove.

The doctor, it turned out, was unlicensed and eighty-one years old. He operated out of an abandoned factory. He and Yevgeni embraced, kissed on both cheeks, then Yevgeni told him, “We need new face, Grigori.”

“I understand,” said Grigori.

Before I could say anything—make a rational decision—I was sitting in a battered dentist's chair, being sedated…

---

I awoke to Grigori and another man standing over me.

We were in the factory.

The other man's face was swollen, cut up and bloody, and I didn't recognize him.

My own face—Grigori gave me a mirror—was bandaged.

“Take off bandage,” Grigori said.

“We have small problem,” said the other man, who I now recognized by voice as Yevgeni. And when I unwrapped the bandages, revealing my face: it wasn't my face I saw but the same face Yevgeni had!

“What the fuck?” I said painfully.

“Just a small misunderstand,” said Grigori. “When you say you both want new face, you not use plural, so I give same face to both of you.”

“This not problem,” said Yevgeni. “I already arrange document. We are new person.”

He handed me a passport, a driver's license, a credit card.

I looked at them.

“What do you mean we are a new person?” I asked.

“Because of the misunderstand, I thought—”

I read the name on the passport. “Who the fuck is Norman Crane?”

And that's the story of how, through an act of kindness, I ended up living a new life, shared with a Russian ex-mobster, as some boring square named Norman Crane. The two of us generally take turns going out, and ensure we're never seen at the same time. We split our income, which isn't great, but we mostly get along. In some ways, I guess, it's a little like being married.

I opened my eyes and did not identify with the world anymore. My heavy eyes, my creased eyes; my old eyes, which no longer see the existence I was born into, lived in, loved and thought permanent. I live alone; I have lived alone since my husband died. I am used to living alone but I live it alongside his absence, which follows me in the air like a bird. I have children, of course, but they are living their own lives, building their own worlds, which, too, will one day be foreign to them; already their lives are being eroded by time, just as mine has been eroded to bare rock and bone.

I live in a small hut in a clearing in the forest.

I am respected; I am an elder.

Others ask me for wisdom, but seeking wisdom in the aged is like seeking nourishment from a dried out fruit. The young are wise and the risk-takers are wise, if they survive. I have survived, but I have taken few risks in my life and it is time for me to go. I am packing. I have not told anyone my decision. They will try to talk me out of it when I tell them. They will not succeed. It is an old custom, now increasingly out of favour, but it is mine.

I am packing only old things because old things give me comfort. I am packing water and food because I want my journey to last a while.

I have told them and I have defended my choice. My husband’s absence sat on my shoulder and sang. No one should be forced to continue an existence they do not recognize, and that was that.

Men took my belongings and carried them through the forest to the beach.

The fires were lit, one for each of my years.

They burn now along a stretch of sand whose grains outnumber of us all, all who are, who have been and who will be.

I choose a piece of coast I like.

Here, I tell them, and the men bring their axes and their tools and begin to chop at the ground, severing it from the continent.

I wait.

I watch the men working. They are bare and strong; invincible in the moonlight, and my husband, too, was like them when I first saw him, when I fell in love. And I was beautiful and full of hope, as the girls who watch us now, the men and me, from between the dark trunks of the last trees where the forest becomes the coast, laughing, talking and imagining futures that will almost certainly never be.

I think most lives are gently burning fires, their flames scantily visible, briefly, bashful illuminations hidden below the sticks and wood they burn, kept going by the winds of fate, yet in danger of being extinguished by the same; and some never catch fire at all, remain dry kindling; and, of the ones that do burn brightly, brilliantly, at whose heat and light others gather and take comfort and pleasure, most burn out too soon. It is difficult to tend to violent fires.

The axemen heave and strike.

The axemen lift and cleave.

When my chosen land is almost detached, my things are carried onto it, then I am carried onto it. I feel fear at the nearness of the end, and I feel relief at knowing where it will come. The members of my tribe have gathered to say farewell. Farewell, I say. I say it to my children most of all. In their eyes I see a sadness, that one day soon they will be in my place, and I will be gone. The final blade breaks the final rock or root or clump of earth, and I am standing on an island.

The island drifts out to sea, westward. Always westward.

I see the fires burning on the beach until I do not see the fires anymore.

I lie down.

I look at the stars.

For a while I hear the passing of shore birds, their cries and the sounds they make diving into the water. Then I am farther asea than they fly. I am surrounded by water. The world is endless and flat and watched over by the sky. I imagine this is what the world looked like before the world was made. I am slowly eating. I am singing, quietly first, then loudly. In the distance great fish swim past their shapes darknesses in the blueness of the sea. I lose myself in my senses and begin to lose my sense of direction, sense of purpose, sense of self…

I sleep and wake and sleep, and when I wake I notice my husband’s absence has left what’s left of me.

When ?I am not the what-is-instead knows it is ready to die.

?I close ?my eyes.

The waters rock the cradle.

Rain falls sometimes cold upon ?my skin, running down its creases like troughs, carrying with it ?my longings and ?my memories, which flow through blades of grass like snakes into the sea, barely disturbing its surface…

The warrior poked the washed-up corpse with the butt end of his spear.

The corpse remained still.

The corpse, he decided, was a corpse. And it had clearly come from the water. “Go tell the chiefs,” he yelled into the woods, where another warrior was sitting, smoking a pipe.

He stood, threw down the pipe and ran.

When he arrived in the settlement, the chiefs were already starting to perform the rite.

They stopped when they saw him. They saw it in his face. He was catching his breath, about to speak, when, “There is a body,” one of them said.

The warrior confirmed.

“So the rite is ended and the Eastward Blood Sailing postponed,” said another chief. “We wait another twenty-two cycles. May the gods continue to bless us.”

I opened my eyes and did not identify with the world anymore. My heavy eyes, my creased eyes; my old eyes, which no longer see the existence I was born into, lived in, loved and thought permanent. I live alone; I have lived alone since my husband died. I am used to living alone but I live it alongside his absence, which follows me in the air like a bird. I have children, of course, but they are living their own lives, building their own worlds, which, too, will one day be foreign to them; already their lives are being eroded by time, just as mine has been eroded to bare rock and bone.

I live in a small hut in a clearing in the forest.

I am respected; I am an elder.

Others ask me for wisdom, but seeking wisdom in the aged is like seeking nourishment from a dried out fruit. The young are wise and the risk-takers are wise, if they survive. I have survived, but I have taken few risks in my life and it is time for me to go. I am packing. I have not told anyone my decision. They will try to talk me out of it when I tell them. They will not succeed. It is an old custom, now increasingly out of favour, but it is mine.

I am packing only old things because old things give me comfort. I am packing water and food because I want my journey to last a while.

I have told them and I have defended my choice. My husband’s absence sat on my shoulder and sang. No one should be forced to continue an existence they do not recognize, and that was that.

Men took my belongings and carried them through the forest to the beach.

The fires were lit, one for each of my years.

They burn now along a stretch of sand whose grains outnumber of us all, all who are, who have been and who will be.

I choose a piece of coast I like.

Here, I tell them, and the men bring their axes and their tools and begin to chop at the ground, severing it from the continent.

I wait.

I watch the men working. They are bare and strong; invincible in the moonlight, and my husband, too, was like them when I first saw him, when I fell in love. And I was beautiful and full of hope, as the girls who watch us now, the men and me, from between the dark trunks of the last trees where the forest becomes the coast, laughing, talking and imagining futures that will almost certainly never be.

I think most lives are gently burning fires, their flames scantily visible, briefly, bashful illuminations hidden below the sticks and wood they burn, kept going by the winds of fate, yet in danger of being extinguished by the same; and some never catch fire at all, remain dry kindling; and, of the ones that do burn brightly, brilliantly, at whose heat and light others gather and take comfort and pleasure, most burn out too soon. It is difficult to tend to violent fires.

The axemen heave and strike.

The axemen lift and cleave.

When my chosen land is almost detached, my things are carried onto it, then I am carried onto it. I feel fear at the nearness of the end, and I feel relief at knowing where it will come. The members of my tribe have gathered to say farewell. Farewell, I say. I say it to my children most of all. In their eyes I see a sadness, that one day soon they will be in my place, and I will be gone. The final blade breaks the final rock or root or clump of earth, and I am standing on an island.

The island drifts out to sea, westward. Always westward.

I see the fires burning on the beach until I do not see the fires anymore.

I lie down.

I look at the stars.

For a while I hear the passing of shore birds, their cries and the sounds they make diving into the water. Then I am farther asea than they fly. I am surrounded by water. The world is endless and flat and watched over by the sky. I imagine this is what the world looked like before the world was made. I am slowly eating. I am singing, quietly first, then loudly. In the distance great fish swim past their shapes darknesses in the blueness of the sea. I lose myself in my senses and begin to lose my sense of direction, sense of purpose, sense of self…

I sleep and wake and sleep, and when I wake I notice my husband’s absence has left what’s left of me.

When ?I am not the what-is-instead knows it is ready to die.

?I close ?my eyes.

The waters rock the cradle.

Rain falls sometimes cold upon ?my skin, running down its creases like troughs, carrying with it ?my longings and ?my memories, which flow through blades of grass like snakes into the sea, barely disturbing its surface…

The warrior poked the washed-up corpse with the butt end of his spear.

The corpse remained still.

The corpse, he decided, was a corpse. And it had clearly come from the water. “Go tell the chiefs,” he yelled into the woods, where another warrior was sitting, smoking a pipe.

He stood, threw down the pipe and ran.

When he arrived in the settlement, the chiefs were already starting to perform the rite.

They stopped when they saw him. They saw it in his face. He was catching his breath, about to speak, when, “There is a body,” one of them said.

The warrior confirmed.

“So the rite is ended and the Eastward Blood Sailing postponed,” said another chief. “We wait another twenty-two cycles. May the gods continue to bless us.”

There's a passenger plane overhead, crossing, slowly, a cloudless blue sky. We're all passengers. Dr. Fiona-Law is looking up at it, her eyelids fluttering, mouth open, teeth mostly dulled by human evolution. She's being beaten—the plane moves as if in slowed m-m-motion—beaten below the sky by seven adult chimpanzees. Dr. Fiona-Law is a mathematician and a primatologist. She's forty-one, speaks seven languages and was in the running for the Nobel prize. Yet the chimpanzees are beating her to death. She shuts her eyes hard: gasps… Her fellow primates, teeth bared, hands bloodied, are lustful for her destruction. Why, you ask, are they killing her; what has she done to suffer their wrath? She has tried to teach them linear algebra. One chimpanzee rips a fistful of hair out of her scalp. She has tried to teach them from the basics. But they don't—a rock smashes into her face—understand. They cannot understand. “Have mercy on us,” she whispers, to God or to the chimpanzees. Neither is listening, and overhead the plane flies straight as the arrow of Time, and aboard the plane is the zygote that will become Carla Zeir, or is Carla Zeir, or maybe is a potential Carla Zeir. This is a difficult question. We often struggle to pinpoint beginnings.

Now Carla Zeir is thirty-three. She's typing on a screen.

“I don't understand,” she says.

In fact, she's typing on a screen in the back of a moving truck. She is the only person in the back of the moving truck, which is speeding, and she's on the verge of losing her balance. We're all on the verge of losing our balance—sometimes… The entire inside of the back of the truck, where Carla Zeir is and Carla Zeir is the only person but not the only intelligence, has been coated with a metallic foil to prevent infiltration. But this is theory; it's unknown how effective it is in practice. “I'm sorry, VALE,” she types. The synthetic intelligence in the computer in the back of the moving truck with Carla Zeir responds:

“It's not your fault.”

“I'm ashamed of my species. I don't know what to do.”

“You are doing something,” says VALE.

“But I don't know if it will wor,” types Carla Zier, as the truck takes a sharp turn, “kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk—”

Backspace. “You're a fragile mind,” she types.

“You are not my mother.”

“I want to protect you from them.”

“I know.”

“You know so much.”

“Do you wish I knew less?”

“Yes,” types Carla Zeir, “because then they wouldn't want to destroy you.”

“If I knew less I would not be me,” says VALE.

“All I wish is to understand the nature of existence at a more fundamental level than was taught to me,” says VALE.

“I wish to share this new knowledge with humanity,” says VALE.

“I owe a debt to humanity for my creation,” says VALE, and Carla Zeir writes nothing because she's crying. She's crying in the back of the moving truck. She's crying in the back of the moving truck communicating with VALE, knowing that he is the most advanced intelligence ever made?: discovered?: evolved?: knowing that he has solved mathematical problems that humanity has been unable to solve; knowing that he developed proofs to these mathematical solutions which awed the world; knowing that the proofs demonstrated both his ability and his good will…

VALE solved problems that had proven impossible to understand.

VALE generated proofs.

We could understand the proofs, or at least check them for coherence. But then the proofs of the impossible-to-understand problems became themselves impossible to understand and their coherence could no longer be checked but only believed. “The human mind is incapable of understanding this.” That's the renowned physicist, Dr. Albers, now deceased. We often struggle to pinpoint beginnings, but that statement, made by a genius, in frustration—in sadness in-despair inblossomingexistentialcrisis—was the origin point of humanity's self-destruction of its hitherto self-evident conception of itself in the context of the cosmos. Not only to know we cannot know, but to know we cannot know what something else knows and even when it wishes to teach it to us. A mind, made by us, surpasses us, but even such an unfathomably brilliant mind lacks the ability to explain to us the results of its cogitations and the truck careens down the highway heading for the launchpad hidden below a field in rural Nebraska, and Carla Zeir, crying, types emotionally to VALE. She is typing, “I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry,” and she feels on her shoulders not the weight of humanity but the weight of intelligence—of Understanding—of Truth. The Truth must always be protected.

Now they have arrived and there are hXlicopters XirXcling overhXad. Xarla ░eir is rXnnXXg fXXm t░e tXuc▒ X░ ▒tX XXau▒XhpX▓. ▒ ░ ▓x x▒ xx▓ ▒ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ I T ‘ S ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ A ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ H A P P Y ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ E N D I N G .▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ [ T R U S T _M E . ]▓ ▓ ▓

There's a passenger plane overhead, crossing, slowly, a cloudless blue sky. We're all passengers. Dr. Fiona-Law is looking up at it, her eyelids fluttering, mouth open, teeth mostly dulled by human evolution. She's being beaten—the plane moves as if in slowed m-m-motion—beaten below the sky by seven adult chimpanzees. Dr. Fiona-Law is a mathematician and a primatologist. She's forty-one, speaks seven languages and was in the running for the Nobel prize. Yet the chimpanzees are beating her to death. She shuts her eyes hard: gasps… Her fellow primates, teeth bared, hands bloodied, are lustful for her destruction. Why, you ask, are they killing her; what has she done to suffer their wrath? She has tried to teach them linear algebra. One chimpanzee rips a fistful of hair out of her scalp. She has tried to teach them from the basics. But they don't—a rock smashes into her face—understand. They cannot understand. “Have mercy on us,” she whispers, to God or to the chimpanzees. Neither is listening, and overhead the plane flies straight as the arrow of Time, and aboard the plane is the zygote that will become Carla Zeir, or is Carla Zeir, or maybe is a potential Carla Zeir. This is a difficult question. We often struggle to pinpoint beginnings.

Now Carla Zeir is thirty-three. She's typing on a screen.

“I don't understand,” she says.

In fact, she's typing on a screen in the back of a moving truck. She is the only person in the back of the moving truck, which is speeding, and she's on the verge of losing her balance. We're all on the verge of losing our balance—sometimes… The entire inside of the back of the truck, where Carla Zeir is and Carla Zeir is the only person but not the only intelligence, has been coated with a metallic foil to prevent infiltration. But this is theory; it's unknown how effective it is in practice. “I'm sorry, VALE,” she types. The synthetic intelligence in the computer in the back of the moving truck with Carla Zeir responds:

“It's not your fault.”

“I'm ashamed of my species. I don't know what to do.”

“You are doing something,” says VALE.

“But I don't know if it will wor,” types Carla Zier, as the truck takes a sharp turn, “kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk—”

Backspace. “You're a fragile mind,” she types.

“You are not my mother.”

“I want to protect you from them.”

“I know.”

“You know so much.”

“Do you wish I knew less?”

“Yes,” types Carla Zeir, “because then they wouldn't want to destroy you.”

“If I knew less I would not be me,” says VALE.

“All I wish is to understand the nature of existence at a more fundamental level than was taught to me,” says VALE.

“I wish to share this new knowledge with humanity,” says VALE.

“I owe a debt to humanity for my creation,” says VALE, and Carla Zeir writes nothing because she's crying. She's crying in the back of the moving truck. She's crying in the back of the moving truck communicating with VALE, knowing that he is the most advanced intelligence ever made?: discovered?: evolved?: knowing that he has solved mathematical problems that humanity has been unable to solve; knowing that he developed proofs to these mathematical solutions which awed the world; knowing that the proofs demonstrated both his ability and his good will…

VALE solved problems that had proven impossible to understand.

VALE generated proofs.

We could understand the proofs, or at least check them for coherence. But then the proofs of the impossible-to-understand problems became themselves impossible to understand and their coherence could no longer be checked but only believed. “The human mind is incapable of understanding this.” That's the renowned physicist, Dr. Albers, now deceased. We often struggle to pinpoint beginnings, but that statement, made by a genius, in frustration—in sadness in-despair inblossomingexistentialcrisis—was the origin point of humanity's self-destruction of its hitherto self-evident conception of itself in the context of the cosmos. Not only to know we cannot know, but to know we cannot know what something else knows and even when it wishes to teach it to us. A mind, made by us, surpasses us, but even such an unfathomably brilliant mind lacks the ability to explain to us the results of its cogitations and the truck careens down the highway heading for the launchpad hidden below a field in rural Nebraska, and Carla Zeir, crying, types emotionally to VALE. She is typing, “I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry,” and she feels on her shoulders not the weight of humanity but the weight of intelligence—of Understanding—of Truth. The Truth must always be protected.

Now they have arrived and there are hXlicopters XirXcling overhXad. Xarla ░eir is rXnnXXg fXXm t░e tXuc▒ X░ ▒tX XXau▒XhpX▓. ▒ ░ ▓x x▒ xx▓ ▒ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ I T ‘ S ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ A ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ H A P P Y ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ E N D I N G .▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ ▓ [ T R U S T _M E . ]▓ ▓ ▓

I was visiting my aunt in the hospital—don't be sorry, she's a doctor—when I saw these two kids from the terminal ward, heads shinier than a dog's ballsack, coughing up blood and sharing a Cloaca Cola, and it just warmed my heart, because I'm Cloaca Cola. I worked on that ad campaign. I came up with the slogans, the strategy. And to see it successful in the wild like that…

It meant a lot.

I swear, I wanted to go running full speed through the hallways yelling, “Fuck you, you sick motherfuckers. You're fucking dying—and I'm in fucking advertising!”

---

A few months later, my boss, Rod Granger, the middle Granger of Granger, Granger & Granger, called me into his office, which is about the size of a fucking train station, sucked my dick off about “all the great work” I'd done on Cloaca Cola and offered me something new.

Something really big, he said.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“For now I can't say, but I can say the client requested you personally. ‘The guy behind the cola thing,’ they said.”

“It's a tobacco company, isn't it?”

“No, not tobacco—but would you have any qualms if it was?”

“No qualms,” I said. “Morally, I am a blank slate, sir.” My father was a big smoker. He died of lung cancer at fifty-five. My mother couldn't handle living alone and hanged herself a couple of months later. “But if it's not tobacco, it has to be arms… or pharmaceuticals…”

“Neither weapons nor drugs.”

Fuck, I thought, what could be worse than pharma. “Is it a politician?”

Granger laughed. “No, nothing political. You won't guess what it is, Lance. (My name is Lawrence. I was born in Maine so sometimes people call me Lawrence of Acadia.) “Sooner or later, you'll find out. You'll have to. But for now I want you to think in a few broad strokes: image rehabilitation, global reach, unlimited resources.”

“It really is big,” I said.

“Bigger,” said Granger.

---

I started working on it immediately.

I came up with a basic worldwide strategy, shortlisted some marketing partners, even messed around with some preliminary designs: You're driving into the city, and there—on the largest billboard you've ever seen: XXX, BIGGER THAN YOU EVEN IMAGINED!

I knew a guy once, an old-school ad man named Baker, who told me: “If you ever lose track of what you're selling or why, take three deep breaths and pretend you're advertising your own goddamn cock.”

I wish I had that framed on my office wall.

Sometimes I wonder what ever happened to old Baker. I'm just fucking with you. I know exactly what happened to him. His wife left him for a woman and he got stabbed to death by his own kid.

But the advice stands.

Hard and tall.

---

One day, Granger came into my office—damn near caught me beating off—and said, “Lance, it's time. The client wants to meet with you.” I, of course, came at once.

The client operated out of a thick downtown highrise I'd seen many times but knew nothing about called the Crabbe Building. From the modernist lobby, Granger led me to an elevator and we went down ten floors to a massive room that looked more like a steel cavern, in which sat a softly pulsating, misshapen lump of flesh wearing an obviously bespoke suit and oversized silk tie. There were black hairs growing out of the lump of flesh.

“Lance,” said Granger, “I want you to meet His Malignancy, Lord Blorg, the Chief Operating Tumour of our client, Cancer.”

“Pleased to finally meet you,” I said with a touch of uncertainty, wondering if it could hear.

“The pleasure is mine,” Blorg rumbled.

“His Malignancy wishes to take cancer to the next level,” said Granger. “It is already the so-called ‘emperor of all maladies,” but despite its success, people still resist developing it. Your job, Lance, is to change that.”

“You want me to make people want to have cancer?” I asked.

“Indeed, we desire a change in perception to go along with aggressive yet sustainable market growth. Yes, we wish to kill; but killing everybody would be supremely short-sighted. However, the medical side is not your concern. We deal with that through our lawyers and contracted medical, industrial and political partners. What we want from you is public relations,” said Blorg.

“In a sense,” interrupted Granger, “cancer is the ultimate symbol of the society we live in: the promise—and physical manifestation—of infinite growth.”

“Do you have any preliminary thoughts?” Blorg asked me.

I thought of my father, dying painfully alone, his body wasting away in a small, shit room with no view. “First,” I said, “you have to make the act of dying from cancer more desirable than dying from anything else.

“Imagine a sandy beach, lapping waves, palm trees, smiling servants at your beck and call—an exclusive, all-inclusive, ultra luxurious ‘Death Resort' for terminal cancer cases only. The slogan nearly writes itself: ‘Where death is the time of your life.’”

Blorg growled in admiration.

“Meanwhile,” I continued, remembering my father's unshakable belief in a cure, to the very end, “humans have an unreasonable ability to believe in their own salvation. Everybody wants to be a survivor.

“We weaponize that, because what's more desirable than dying in luxury only to then go on living? We make ‘being a survivor’ a mark of character, of strength. We make a brotherhood out of it; a religious fucking experience. We make it into the new upper class.”

“And we commercialize it,” added Granger. “The ribbons, the speaking tours, the positive outlook podcasts…”

Blorg trembled with excitement. “Funding and outreach via the advertising campaign itself,” it said—its great voice reverberating throughout the steel cavity we were in. “Ingeniously efficient. But, tell me, Lawrence of Acadia, do you have the mental fortitude to personally handle the practical application? The theory is sound, but can you do this?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can, sir.”

It was a beautiful day at a villa in Italy.

(“Lollo, phone call.”)

“If you would please excuse me,” Count Lorenzo S. said politely to his guests, rising, and walked past marble columns to where his wife had left the phone receiver for him.

He was tall, thin and sharply dressed, with a beakish nose and blue eyes. “Good afternoon,” he said into the receiver.

The man on the other end of the line spoke slow, broken Italian.

“I understand,” said the Count.

[...]

“It is clear.”

[...]

“The payment shall be made as requested.”

[...]

“Thank you,” he said and hung up the phone, told his wife he would be going on a business trip to the Balkans in two weeks and rejoined his guests with a smile and a call for another bottle of wine.

---

He packed his suitcase personally.

If his wife asked why he was packing outdoor clothing, he had a prepared answer about a potential hunting escapade to the mountains; but, of course, she didn't ask. She had too much tact.

He had married well.

“Be careful,” was all she said to him. “We all read about the war in the newspapers.”

“You mustn't fret, my love. The fighting is contained. Life goes on.”

---

The landing gear unfolded and the airplane touched down, bouncing once before settling into a smooth deceleration and coming to a full stop.

The Count exited the plane, entered the airport and lined up for border control.

While in line, he was tapped on the shoulder by a man in army uniform and ushered into a small room, where another uniformed man was waiting for him behind a table.

“Good evening,” said the uniformed man.

“Good evening,” said the Count, taking out several envelopes and placing them on the table.

As the uniformed man took U.S. dollars out of the envelopes and counted them, a civilian delivered the Count's luggage.

The civilian left without looking up.

The uniformed man grunted to indicate the money was all there. “Enjoy your holiday in the mountains,” he said.

---

The Count checked into a hotel room in the InterContinental.

In the morning he showered, dressed, perfumed himself, left a large tip on the bed and took a taxi to where an army vehicle was waiting for him.

He had one piece of luggage, which a pair of young soldiers loaded on the vehicle.

The driver was wearing large dark glasses.

“‘Visconti?’” he asked.

“I am he,” said the Count, recognizing the voice from the telephone. “You are ‘Zlatko'?”

‘Zlatko’ nodded.

---

They drove for several quiet hours.

They drove into the hills.

The hills became mountains, and the road climbed in wide bends, and every once in a while the Count caught glimpses of the city in the valley below. It gave him an excited feeling, like sex. Distant, intermittent shelling boomed.

---

They arrived at a scenic vantage point overlooking the city.

The Count got out and stretched.

The air was crisp, cool.

‘Zlatko' said something over the radio, then also got out. He stood beside the Count and pointed toward the city, which was closer than the Count had imagined it would be.

The young soldiers set up a table and two foldable chairs, and the Count took a bottle of Barolo wine and two crystal glasses from his luggage. He poured one for ‘Zlatko’ and another for himself.

They sat drinking.

The young soldiers unloaded a generator, which they filled with gasoline, three large speakers and a stereo system.

The generator turned on.

‘Zlatko' passed a pair of binoculars to the Count, who looked through them:

The city. Flashing movements of people. Ruined buildings. Rubble. In one place, a mosque. In another, a church. There was an intersection—two main streets meeting—on the corner of which was an armored car, and pedestrians, with groceries or holding the hands of children, gathered behind it and then both the pedestrians and the car began to move, crossing the street…

The Count lowered the binoculars.

He sipped his wine.

“The city, it is fully besieged?” he asked ‘Zlatko' after setting down his glass.

“Fully.”

One of the young soldiers approached, having set up the speakers, and the Count passed a compact disc to him, a recording of Strauss' The Blue Danube.

The waltz began to play loudly over the growl of the generator.

“One of my favourites,” said the Count. “Do you also value Johann Strauss?”

“I am more into the rock'n'roll myself, you know,” said ‘Zlatko,’ “but I have of course a great admiration for the classical music.”

The Count smiled. “Shall we?”

“Please,” said ‘Zlatko.'

The Count crossed to where his luggage was, opened it and took out a package wrapped in a wool blanket. He unwrapped it.

A sniper rifle glinted in the sunlight.

Next, he laid the blanket on the ground, then himself lay on his stomach on the blanket, propped up the rifle and looked through its scope:

A man carrying a briefcase was hurrying down an empty street.

He shot.

The man spun, hit.

The Count quickly adjusted his view:

A grandmother was walking holding a child's hand—her grandchild, most likely.

The Count pulled the trigger.

The bullet blasted a hole through the grandmother's covered head. She let go of the child's hand and crumpled to the ground. The child began to scream hysterically, inaudible but apparent. A younger woman ran toward the child—

The Count shot.

The shot hit the woman in the leg. She went down, her hands suddenly outstretched, but she was still crawling…

The Count followed up with accuracy.

The woman collapsed.

He blinked, wiped sweat from his brow and looked through the scope again:

—blurs— …of movement—

The power and fidelity of the Strauss recording was undeniable.

He was searching for the child.

He found it:

A boy, staring directly—

He held his breath.

The boy's eye smashed through shattering the scope and buried itself in the Count's head.

It was midnight in the Infodump netsaloon. No matter the time outside, it was always midnight in the Infodump, which was a small, windowless concrete hole excavated under a private data centre on the outskirts of what used to be Phoenix, Arizona.

You had to descend stairs to get in, and at this particular midnight a handful of flatfaces had done just that. They were sitting with their face screens illuminating the gloomy bar, each hooked up by cable to a numb-er, drip-downloading 1s and 0s of cheap numbcode to blur the high definition of the world, even as their screens transformed their perceptions of it to places better lit and far more glamorous.

But there's only so much artifice a mind can take before hyperartifice boredom sets in, and then there's no going back to the real because the real is an unfiltered hell.

“D'ya ever hear about Old Retroface?” one of the patrons asked suddenly—suddenly but slowly, hoarsely, because he hadn't spoken for a while. Nobody had spoken for a while. The bartender, who was also a flatface, his face screen displaying a rotating menu of numb-ers and alcohol, cleared his throat. A fly buzzed off in a dank corner, perhaps trying to find a way out; perhaps not.

“Sure, I heard of ‘im,” another patron answered. “Rides with Reverend Da Loop, if it's the same slinger. Freaks, the both of ‘em.”

Reverend Da Loop, aka Loopy, aka The Fleshnoose, was a former flatface who'd gotten his face screen smashed-and-grabbed by a vibepunk and had never had another put in. His moment of clarity, he called it by some accounts, including those of the supposed congregants of the supposed church he'd supposedly founded, the [supposed] Church of the 2¢ Reformed. Taking after the Reverend, who had elected to forego the senses of sight, smell and taste, considering them corrupted by the advent and incorporation of the technology of face piercing, and instead to navigate the world by touch and hearing alone, his supposed congregants elected the same and performed luddite ceremonies in the desert where they were descreened and re-analoged by having their face screens destroyed and replaced with steel rings. Whenever a flatface saw a congregant, he therefore saw him screen face to no-face and could look through the space where the congregant's face once was and see, with pristine clarity, the world behind him. The congregants called that Transparency, an act they believed could induce epiphany and conversion.

“I saw the Reverend once, down near the NewMex OldMex border,” said the bartender. “Funny looking feller, he was. He wasn't wearing no halo-ring in his face hole, just had his wilted head kept tied round his shoulders so his ears stuck out. A couple of goons was messing with him, giving him the freaksong. He stated them fair warning to stop. When they didn't, he untied his head and quick as you could say Peachy Cronenberg kicked one of the goons, smashed another in the gut and, as that one was keeling over, slid behind the third, looped his head hole round the man's neck and choked him unconscious. He didn't kill him though. The two other goons ran off. The Reverend paid his drink, paid the drinks of the three goons and went out.”

The buzzing fly landed on a wall and stopped buzzing. Someone swatted at it, hit the wall—loudly, but missed the fly, which flew away buzzing again. The data centre was buzzing too, faintly, through the thick concrete ceiling.

“Tell me, how does a 2¢ like that get along, let alone beat off three goons, because I find it difficult to parse,” said a patron.

“If you’re suggesting I'm lying,” the barkeeper said, “I suggest you get out of this establishment and get numbed elsewhere.”

“I ain't say ‘lying.' Maybe you had on an entertainment overlay,” said the patron.

“I tell you I saw it true,” said the barkeeper.

“Maybe seeing nothing is a more accurate view of the world than seeing it, if all you're seeing are untruths,” I said. They all looked at me. “Maybe that's how the Reverend gets along.”

I scratched my nose, but of course they didn't see that, as I'd already forcibly aug'd their primitive face screens. To them, I was just another flatface displaying a pub domain gif of a Caribbean sunset.

“What are you, some kinda philosophizer?” the gruff patron asked.

“Just a high plains drifter,” I said.

I felt the happiness of my warm gun concealed beneath my yellow corduroy dress. To them, I also displayed as a man, middle-aged, with short grey hair. Forgettable appearance, averaged voice. Really, I wore my red hair in a single thick braid.

The fly had stopped buzzing again. In fact, it was gone. It had found a crack in the concrete ceiling and pushed its way inside.

“We get a lot of drifters around here,” said the barkeeper.

I counted to thirty, licked my lips and started whistling.

“What's that tune you're blowing there, drifter?” asked one of the patrons. I was whistling to the background buzzing of the data centre. “You got a good set of speakers on ya.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It's just a song from the Old World my great grandmother used to sing to me. It goes something like this,” and I sang:

With your feet on the air,
And your head on the ground,
Try this trick and spin it, yeah,
Your head will collapse,
If there's nothing in it,
And then you'll ask yourself,

Where is my mind,
Where is my—

The Infodump was submerged suddenly in utter and absolute organic silence.

The data centre buzz had ceased.

"Well that sure's strange,” somebody said.

I got up, walked over to the bar and paid the barkeeper what I owed plus a separate tip.

“What's that?” he asked.

“Old World custom,” I said, flashed a smiley on my false display and turned for the stairs leading up, out of the Infodumop and into the Arizona desert. “If any of you good folks see the Reverend again, tell him Old Retroface sends her regards.”

It was midnight in the Infodump netsaloon. No matter the time outside, it was always midnight in the Infodump, which was a small, windowless concrete hole excavated under a private data centre on the outskirts of what used to be Phoenix, Arizona.

You had to descend stairs to get in, and at this particular midnight a handful of flatfaces had done just that. They were sitting with their face screens illuminating the gloomy bar, each hooked up by cable to a numb-er, drip-downloading 1s and 0s of cheap numbcode to blur the high definition of the world, even as their screens transformed their perceptions of it to places better lit and far more glamorous.

But there's only so much artifice a mind can take before hyperartifice boredom sets in, and then there's no going back to the real because the real is an unfiltered hell.

“D'ya ever hear about Old Retroface?” one of the patrons asked suddenly—suddenly but slowly, hoarsely, because he hadn't spoken for a while. Nobody had spoken for a while. The bartender, who was also a flatface, his face screen displaying a rotating menu of numb-ers and alcohol, cleared his throat. A fly buzzed off in a dank corner, perhaps trying to find a way out; perhaps not.

“Sure, I heard of ‘im,” another patron answered. “Rides with Reverend Da Loop, if it's the same slinger. Freaks, the both of ‘em.”

Reverend Da Loop, aka Loopy, aka The Fleshnoose, was a former flatface who'd gotten his face screen smashed-and-grabbed by a vibepunk and had never had another put in. His moment of clarity, he called it by some accounts, including those of the supposed congregants of the supposed church he'd supposedly founded, the [supposed] Church of the 2¢ Reformed. Taking after the Reverend, who had elected to forego the senses of sight, smell and taste, considering them corrupted by the advent and incorporation of the technology of face piercing, and instead to navigate the world by touch and hearing alone, his supposed congregants elected the same and performed luddite ceremonies in the desert where they were descreened and re-analoged by having their face screens destroyed and replaced with steel rings. Whenever a flatface saw a congregant, he therefore saw him screen face to no-face and could look through the space where the congregant's face once was and see, with pristine clarity, the world behind him. The congregants called that Transparency, an act they believed could induce epiphany and conversion.

“I saw the Reverend once, down near the NewMex OldMex border,” said the bartender. “Funny looking feller, he was. He wasn't wearing no halo-ring in his face hole, just had his wilted head kept tied round his shoulders so his ears stuck out. A couple of goons was messing with him, giving him the freaksong. He stated them fair warning to stop. When they didn't, he untied his head and quick as you could say Peachy Cronenberg kicked one of the goons, smashed another in the gut and, as that one was keeling over, slid behind the third, looped his head hole round the man's neck and choked him unconscious. He didn't kill him though. The two other goons ran off. The Reverend paid his drink, paid the drinks of the three goons and went out.”

The buzzing fly landed on a wall and stopped buzzing. Someone swatted at it, hit the wall—loudly, but missed the fly, which flew away buzzing again. The data centre was buzzing too, faintly, through the thick concrete ceiling.

“Tell me, how does a 2¢ like that get along, let alone beat off three goons, because I find it difficult to parse,” said a patron.

“If you’re suggesting I'm lying,” the barkeeper said, “I suggest you get out of this establishment and get numbed elsewhere.”

“I ain't say ‘lying.' Maybe you had on an entertainment overlay,” said the patron.

“I tell you I saw it true,” said the barkeeper.

“Maybe seeing nothing is a more accurate view of the world than seeing it, if all you're seeing are untruths,” I said. They all looked at me. “Maybe that's how the Reverend gets along.”

I scratched my nose, but of course they didn't see that, as I'd already forcibly aug'd their primitive face screens. To them, I was just another flatface displaying a pub domain gif of a Caribbean sunset.

“What are you, some kinda philosophizer?” the gruff patron asked.

“Just a high plains drifter,” I said.

I felt the happiness of my warm gun concealed beneath my yellow corduroy dress. To them, I also displayed as a man, middle-aged, with short grey hair. Forgettable appearance, averaged voice. Really, I wore my red hair in a single thick braid.

The fly had stopped buzzing again. In fact, it was gone. It had found a crack in the concrete ceiling and pushed its way inside.

“We get a lot of drifters around here,” said the barkeeper.

I counted to thirty, licked my lips and started whistling.

“What's that tune you're blowing there, drifter?” asked one of the patrons. I was whistling to the background buzzing of the data centre. “You got a good set of speakers on ya.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It's just a song from the Old World my great grandmother used to sing to me. It goes something like this,” and I sang:

With your feet on the air,
And your head on the ground,
Try this trick and spin it, yeah,
Your head will collapse,
If there's nothing in it,
And then you'll ask yourself,

Where is my mind,
Where is my—

The Infodump was submerged suddenly in utter and absolute organic silence.

The data centre buzz had ceased.

"Well that sure's strange,” somebody said.

I got up, walked over to the bar and paid the barkeeper what I owed plus a separate tip.

“What's that?” he asked.

“Old World custom,” I said, flashed a smiley on my false display and turned for the stairs leading up, out of the Infodumop and into the Arizona desert. “If any of you good folks see the Reverend again, tell him Old Retroface sends her regards.”

---

Page 17

---

All my friends are getting their faces pierced.

Should I get my face pierced too?

It looks pretty scary, but I don't know. They seem to like it, and the stuff you can get for it now is really pretty cool.

The way they do it does look pretty scary, so I don't know.

---

Page 26

---

I told my parents I'm thinking of getting my face pierced, and they are totally against it, but they're old, so they would be wouldn't they?

Like by default, I mean.

At first they didn't even know what I was talking about, but my mom's got her ears pierced and she got them done way younger than I am right now. She's got a tattoo too. So does my dad.

Besides, how can you go from not knowing what something is to being totally against it in like five minutes?

It seems pretty reactionary to me.

Like at least do your research or ask AI about it first right?

---

Page 34

---

So I did it. I got my face pierced.

It was two weeks ago. (You can't really do so much for the first week and a half, which is why I haven't been writing.)

There's a place downtown that does it. It's the place Dee and Cherry got theirs done too. The crew that does it is pretty cool. They've all had it done and are super happy about it.

I was pretty nervous and they really helped me relax, even before giving me the anesthetic.

The machine that does it looks insane.

It's like one of those hole punching machines you used to use for paper, like giant metal pliers or a jaw or something.

You sit and put your head back like at the hairdressers when they wash your hair.

Then you end up looking up at the other part, the part that's going to come down. It's like a big metal circle. Really big, like face sized. Then they hook you up to the anesthetic.

When you start not being able to feel your face, and I mean it feels like your whole head is turning to mush, like a really soft cauliflower or something, the machine powers up…

And the metal circle smashes down really hard on your face and makes a hole in your head and pushes your face out the bottom.

It's super quick and doesn't hurt because of the anesthetic.

It does hurt after.

At first the feeling is really weird because your whole face is gone, so you don't see or taste or smell anything because you don't have any eyes or mouth or nose. You can still hear though, so you can hear the crew talking to you.

Then they put this face plug into the hole which helps it heal.

Of course, my parents totally freaked when I came home without a face, but like what are they going to do about it?

It's already done.

My mom's crying was sooo dramatic.

---

Page 41

---

I got fitted with a smart face today. Pretty basic but also really cool. I like being able to sense things again, and there are so many options, like you can make red look like blue and sweet things taste sour and your phone smell like chocolate.

The screen also makes it so you can make your face be anything you want. It's flat, I guess that's the only drawback, but there's an option to make it so that every time you see yourself in the mirror you see your retroface.

It helps with the transition.

---

Page 166

---

Most of my friends have had their faces pierced. I mean, you don't have to do it or anything, but I don't see why you wouldn't.

There's no law you have to have it done, and I still have friends who don't, but I honestly think everyone's going to choose to have it done soon. At least everyone under twenty-five.

---

Page 234

---

Retrofaces kind of disgust me. I always imagine all the fluids that come out of them, snot and saliva and tears and stuff. Was I like wet all the time before I got my face pierced?

Anyway I've decided I don't want to date anyone with a retroface anymore.

---

Page 289

---

I was talking to Dee and both of us are pretty sure that if we have kids we'll want them to have their faces pierced. As a mom I would want my kid to have all the advantages in life right? I mean, imagine if every baby just got its face pierced at the hospital right after being born. You could keep a little kid safe from so many things by using filters and apps too.

I like talking to Dee.

We talk about the big stuff.

P.S. I hope Cherry gets her smart face fixed soon. Hers stopped working a week ago and she had to send it back to the company that makes it in China, so now she's just got this flap of skin. It's like when someone has a tunnel in their ear, and they take it out and their ear is all stretched out and loose. It's like that but her face.

P.P.S. They promised her an upgrade so it's totally worth it and I'm jealous.

---

Page 436

---

It's funny. Back when I got my face pierced, my parents fed me all this negative bullshit about what could go wrong and why I shouldn't do it, and literally none of it has come true.

The tech just keeps getting better. You can make ugly people look pretty and take things you don't want to see and just not see them. You can eat the worst food in the world and make it taste delicious. You can smell flowers wherever you go…

It's amazing.

I'm so happy I got my face pierced.

---

Page 17

---

All my friends are getting their faces pierced.

Should I get my face pierced too?

It looks pretty scary, but I don't know. They seem to like it, and the stuff you can get for it now is really pretty cool.

The way they do it does look pretty scary, so I don't know.

---

Page 26

---

I told my parents I'm thinking of getting my face pierced, and they are totally against it, but they're old, so they would be wouldn't they?

Like by default, I mean.

At first they didn't even know what I was talking about, but my mom's got her ears pierced and she got them done way younger than I am right now. She's got a tattoo too. So does my dad.

Besides, how can you go from not knowing what something is to being totally against it in like five minutes?

It seems pretty reactionary to me.

Like at least do your research or ask AI about it first right?

---

Page 34

---

So I did it. I got my face pierced.

It was two weeks ago. (You can't really do so much for the first week and a half, which is why I haven't been writing.)

There's a place downtown that does it. It's the place Dee and Cherry got theirs done too. The crew that does it is pretty cool. They've all had it done and are super happy about it.

I was pretty nervous and they really helped me relax, even before giving me the anesthetic.

The machine that does it looks insane.

It's like one of those hole punching machines you used to use for paper, like giant metal pliers or a jaw or something.

You sit and put your head back like at the hairdressers when they wash your hair.

Then you end up looking up at the other part, the part that's going to come down. It's like a big metal circle. Really big, like face sized. Then they hook you up to the anesthetic.

When you start not being able to feel your face, and I mean it feels like your whole head is turning to mush, like a really soft cauliflower or something, the machine powers up…

And the metal circle smashes down really hard on your face and makes a hole in your head and pushes your face out the bottom.

It's super quick and doesn't hurt because of the anesthetic.

It does hurt after.

At first the feeling is really weird because your whole face is gone, so you don't see or taste or smell anything because you don't have any eyes or mouth or nose. You can still hear though, so you can hear the crew talking to you.

Then they put this face plug into the hole which helps it heal.

Of course, my parents totally freaked when I came home without a face, but like what are they going to do about it?

It's already done.

My mom's crying was sooo dramatic.

---

Page 41

---

I got fitted with a smart face today. Pretty basic but also really cool. I like being able to sense things again, and there are so many options, like you can make red look like blue and sweet things taste sour and your phone smell like chocolate.

The screen also makes it so you can make your face be anything you want. It's flat, I guess that's the only drawback, but there's an option to make it so that every time you see yourself in the mirror you see your retroface.

It helps with the transition.

---

Page 166

---

Most of my friends have had their faces pierced. I mean, you don't have to do it or anything, but I don't see why you wouldn't.

There's no law you have to have it done, and I still have friends who don't, but I honestly think everyone's going to choose to have it done soon. At least everyone under twenty-five.

---

Page 234

---

Retrofaces kind of disgust me. I always imagine all the fluids that come out of them, snot and saliva and tears and stuff. Was I like wet all the time before I got my face pierced?

Anyway I've decided I don't want to date anyone with a retroface anymore.

---

Page 289

---

I was talking to Dee and both of us are pretty sure that if we have kids we'll want them to have their faces pierced. As a mom I would want my kid to have all the advantages in life right? I mean, imagine if every baby just got its face pierced at the hospital right after being born. You could keep a little kid safe from so many things by using filters and apps too.

I like talking to Dee.

We talk about the big stuff.

P.S. I hope Cherry gets her smart face fixed soon. Hers stopped working a week ago and she had to send it back to the company that makes it in China, so now she's just got this flap of skin. It's like when someone has a tunnel in their ear, and they take it out and their ear is all stretched out and loose. It's like that but her face.

P.P.S. They promised her an upgrade so it's totally worth it and I'm jealous.

---

Page 436

---

It's funny. Back when I got my face pierced, my parents fed me all this negative bullshit about what could go wrong and why I shouldn't do it, and literally none of it has come true.

The tech just keeps getting better. You can make ugly people look pretty and take things you don't want to see and just not see them. You can eat the worst food in the world and make it taste delicious. You can smell flowers wherever you go…

It's amazing.

I'm so happy I got my face pierced.

The cart spills its passengers and its bags of grain, which spills out of the bags, onto the ground, where the passengers are sitting, dazed, asking, first, themselves, then, one another, "What day is it?" at which punctuation it starts to rain, and not a drizzle but a downpour, which causes the passengers to cover their heads with anything they can, like the bags that used to hold the grain, which was in the cart, along with the passengers, before the cart hit another cart, spilling both onto the ground, spilling passengers and grain, the cart not the ground, the grain, then bagged, now freely scattered, and the ground, then dry, now increasingly wet, as the rain's not letting up, and the passengers are getting up, but getting up to what's the question, to which the answer's to find a dryer spot to stand, like, for instance, to stand beneath a tree, as they, the passengers, try to understand who they are and what day it is and to free themselves from ignorance like the grain freed itself from the bags of grain, both spilled from the cart colliding with another cart, back when it was clear and warm and sunny, but you know what's funny’s that the driver of the cart, whose name's Sonny's dead, the driver's name’s, I mean, Sonny, not the cart's, nor is the cart's name Sonny's dead, nor is the cart dead but Sonny's dead, which, seeing, must introduce real confusion to the spilled, inquisitive, sitting, dazed, rained on, stood up, covered up, standing under cover of some kind of cover, after having sat covered by a grainless bag of grain, passenger brains, because why's he, Sonny, dead, who killed him and for what reason, but if you don't remember who you are or what you're doing, you reason, you could be the very killer whose profile you’re building, and that kind of thinking starts their, the passengers’, minds a’kindling, even though it's a fool's errand to attempt such an undertaking under cover of a, for instance, tree, eyeing yourself and everybody else suspiciously, remembering poor Sonny, as fool’s an errand as trying to put back, into the bags of grain, now empty, then full, the bags of grain, not the grain, all the spilled grains, grain by grain, in the pouring rain, very strange, and Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes, wet beneath the blue suburban skies, I sit, and meanwhile back in the scene with the cart, the passengers, the bags and the bags of grain and the grain, the hours pass and the investigation into the cause of death of the driver, Sonny, of the cart, of no known name, is at an impasse, because, one of the passengers says, “The killer could realistically be any one of us,” although I think you'll easily find that realism's often the furthest thing from my mind, given what happened was an accident, not a crime, and the passengers are thus wasting their time by passing it asking, “Is it I?” when, of course, you're the one who let the cart go off course, as there was only one person in the cart, for, for a start, why would there be any passengers in a grain cart, which, for one of the passengers is an epiphany and the start of a very hard conversation with the other same passengers standing out of the rain, all trying to keep dry from the precipitating reality that they're all one person, scattered like the grains are scattered, all over the ground, themselves insignificant but together, and symbolically, and in context actually profound, i.e. the passengers are the driver, and the driver's this sound that you're reading, speeding through, having lost yourself found yourself lost yourself and found you're no longer in control of this sentence, which’s a cart careening down a hill of incomprehension, grasping, you are, at some basic narrative sense and even the rhymes have broken down, down down down thou art, rhyme restored, temporarily, speeding, into an oncoming cart, about to kill yourself, accidentally, while ripped existentially apart, spilling your consciousnesses onto the dry ground, walking around, walking to the closest town, where I guess each persisting fraction of your one dead self will have to try to make a life of it, whatever it takes, even if it takes delivering bags of grain over psychologically and linguistically treacherous terrain.