MK-135

Perhaps a dream is special only because no one is there, breathing in your hair, explaining as you go.

We watch the surveillance video in the basement office. Ice skaters, black rink. Spotlights following the inexpert skaters. City skaters-- regular people, at leisure. Metro ice arena. Lodz the Dalmacian; blond Lodz the Moral, tells me something is wrong. Look at the way this man is skating. I watch the icy parabolas carve onscreen. A bladed foot kicks something out of the circle of light, following the sweatered, scarved, hatless man. A skittering echo-- something frozen lost in the black of the rink. The albedo is too much to see anything. Surely the skaters, gliding in their tracking moons, would have been able to avoid debris-- I say this to Lodz. That is not what happens, he tells me. Look. How is he Dalmacian? I keep looking. This is City feed-- public network linked to grungy CCTV likely unupgraded since Gretsky inspired the local junior high hockey team to get out on the ice. Central location-- down on the pedestrian mall. Good food trucks down that way. Meat on sticks and pho bleeding heat and fragrance into the City's winter dose.

Lodz gets me to pay attention real close now-- he elbows me with his bent wristback gently. He adjusts the contrast. I lean into the display. Clearly, I watch the blades of the man skating slice off most of a hand, outstretched on the ice, penetrating the spotlight cone just for a moment. I freeze, Lodz' hand still pressing. The skater gracefully continues his arc, trailing blood behind. He picks up speed and slashes a ragged torso farther along-- a headless, dismembered trunk, ragged with detaching ribbons of bloody connective tissue. The hunk of chest and meat is heavily lacerated and kicked spinning away by the skater's blades. The man falters, then recovers, as if completely automated. Reeling, I realize the other spotlit skaters are also chopping bodies apart with their blades, as if they were not even there. Not just chopping-- killing, then cutting up, again and again, but without any recognition. I watch as a middle-aged woman in a puffy silver coat gashes a small boy in the throat as he lies on the ice. She just, up! Hops a little and slices clean through his neck. Gouts of steaming blood burble out in a spreading red fan just caught in the last flash of her tracking light.

There's a party you need to infiltrate. I want you to locate a certain Bad Hombre. Lodz is talking. I have questions. MK-135 says Lodz. It's a rust-inhibiting coining and deburring lubricant used in parts manufacture. It also causes automatic behavior like this. It's... been found. Adulterated mangoefflour juice. I need you to get to the adulterer. The Bad Hombre.

The female body is tight on me as I mingle. I have to keep drinking little doses of some chemical that keeps my real shape from showing too much. The party is a holiday party, everyone in thick sweaters, lots of drinks, lots of punch bowls. I gather samples for Lodz. Why is his name Lodz? He is clearly an American. The Americans want a way in to the City. I am probably working for the CIA. My breasts are too large and I can't see what I'm doing. I try to mingle. I siphon samples of punches and liqueurs on the sly with thin syrettes. This is a J.G. Ballard. This is a Lieber. This is penile inversion, an itchy garden. Inflammatory dream. In the crystal bowls and pitchers I can see sediments. Vodka and mangoefflour juice. The Bad Hombre corners me at the folding table with a vinyl tablecloth with little English flowers around the edges. I begin to panic. I see the look on Bad Hombre's face. He is dark tan, Welsh and Sicilian, with black, ugly hair like Mr. Brady from The Brady Bunch. He notices a male face emerging from behind my female disguise. He wants to rape the real me out of the false me. Hastily I pour myself a glass of vodka mangoefflour, toss in my last vial of infiltration serum with a shrug, and break the tension with a slurp. Bad Hombre seems satisfied. I'm automatic too. Get me outta here, Lodz, I mutter.

It's like being born again, in the back of the surveillance van. Lodz watches as the female body changes, as I emerge in her face, as my corners come back and hers decline. I'm squirted out the top of her head, like toothpase brains through a fontanelle. Like a sea cucumber. He says something about time being real. About the speed of Paradise. About bleeding and heavy, heavy breath. About parting dark curtains. Something that hides a mosaic. The Mosaic of Disorientation.

He drops me off at the ice rink. I lace up my skates.

STAYFREE

Shroud of desire, pink baby, buried at sea-- buried by waves, saline, bromine, butoh ghost-- dime of the moon, swirling in chisels, course-grained faces of the water, faces of the nil child, disrobed and then macerated by eons' broad lace-- faces of the killed, of purple maple and yellow, faces of yarn, knit with guilt, faces of the dogs, throats whistling "Ona, Ona, Ona-ei!" My leaky chaplain, stutterer of months, bruised and bitten, limping and burdened by the broad book-- a dime and a dime fed into his slot-- he whirs mechanoid hymns, guzzles the agony unwrapping the drowned infant-- spreads his coat and lets the animals feed, lets his milk saturate the delta of the exit of thought-- whistles hollow life-- screeches hollow sendings, mapping back up the river of inflammation toward glaciers of numb dissociation-- his semen is sewing machine oil, squirted in the stack of a toy train. White smoke rings puff gently away, spelling Ona, Ona, Ona-ei.

Mystery child, mystery fetus, mystery abortion, mystery made amniocentesis by chugged word, by linking work with wish, clasping itself-- blue child now, blue swallowed by a snake-- pink and blue feeder mouse, down down and pooching out gravity's gullet, through phase space for peacocks, spelling the names of life in the broad book. Ona-ei, drowned child. Drowned, choked lust, want, drowned reaching, drowned song. The same way the store mouse fetches its food, Ona, fetching the bottom of the sea. Half-dime of moon, silly letters gummed black by intervening time, by weight, by pressure. Black, black are the worms of eidetic geometry as the infant skull caves in, fontanelle squirting like toothpaste, like sea cucumber, inky blank now in mock camouflage, rest, rest, examine your rest.

And this is the rest then, a dodge, a flipper, a duck, a wipeout. A blackout. A memory dodge, memory pills, a writing, scrawled by lasers-- the hologram haunts as sight pulls away, revealing the globe in its evil totality, in its twists, its anisotropy-- false specular heavens teeter through, the body chooses such angular aspects so as to comfort itself-- it finds all things to be true-- finds the guts pretzeled and wrung out over continents, boiled in salty seas, the neck cut open and roaring, gargling its own contents like a puppet volcano-- the stare of reality crazily insists it is really real, really simultaneous, really operationally overloaded, really recursive, enfolded by flags and shrouds and demon wings and crowned by an orbiting ring of human gore-- a baby in a gyre, equatorial and gross, a peppered eyeball retching tears, naked in the construct.

There will be no coming back.

GILEAD

How lies the City today?

It lies. It lies and that is all.

From the catapult of youth to the catcher of age, the hurler-back of memory, all a distribution; all an extant history; all a plot, a histogram, a statistical Lord-- Sparrow Christ emerges, robed in industrial paint, carbon fiber, fullerene dust on his shoulders, and plastic wire, chartreuse, gilding his hem. He yawns and beholds the dawn sky. A yellow dawn. A flock of rushing fingers, punching through the stratosphere to dip, brushlike, into the coughed clouds arching overhead. A morning like another morning, blue black and with wan orange bruises; inflammation of part of a mute sky, a mourning dove beating its soft music against the clinging air. A morning of hydrocarbons, their precursors, their chemical afterimages, hexing grimaces in the trees, the ground squirrels hunched and hypoxic. A morning of tetragrams, of randomized puzzles, of lost blood, lost time, hemmorhagic keys, of love's conformal suck, of cosmic dust.

Ecce homo. The Lord, Jesus Christ himself takes a long drag on his cigarette, exhales blue smoke slow across the neutral panel of green gray black, watching it swirl against the pine wall. He knows all formulae, every eddy and Lorenz function, every mote, caught in the dew of spiderwebs only seen in his cat-like ultravision. Considering the holiness, the power, the righteous being radiating from his Lordly countenance, it is easy to forget he is made of sparrows. Such genius. Such loving genius in that flock of chirruping, shitting, mite-ridden short-lived birds.

I nod at the Lord. He nods back, then looks off, dragging again. Kicks his foot and shuffles, coolly. I make my way to the Dollar Store to buy a 9mm pistol. I'm gonna kill myself today, and Jesus thinks that is just okay. Jesus is just alright. Jesus loves you more than you will know. Jesus is my friend. Jesus is the catcher, the waiter, the first responder, the 9-11 cop, the fireman, the emergency planner, the disaster relief agency, the watchdog, the regulatory commission, the NGO humanitarian medical task force, the UN, every Robin Williams character.

It's gonna be alright. You always get what you deserve, in the end.

I walk past an old lady in rags, propped up against a building with smoke rolling out of the windows. Like an office building. She holds out her cup and tries to tell me poetry in Arabic but I don't understand. I give her five dollars, and she doesn't even notice. She has no teeth. Huge liver spots cover her face. I smell farts, I think. I sit down and take the vodka out of my bag. I pass it to her but she waves it away, admonishing me with more poetry. I drink. Three big swigs in succession. I feel the demon power soak through me like wading up to my crotch in a pool of hot jizz. I feel the raw malice steeling my frame. I'm ready to kill. To fuck. To be obliterated. But I just sit there, remembering, with her. It must be horrible to be old, and to remember everything. I say this to her, and she just smiles. I know there is something she has learned about life, something that gives her a kind of peace-- or maybe perspective. Something to rest against, like a building slowly being consumed by fire still offers some solidity. I know what she knows is something I will never learn. It makes me cry. Tears erupt from my eyes. I swallow more vodka. The old woman grabs her belongings and hurries away from me. My shirt gets soaked from my tears. I keep drinking until the vodka is all gone. Then I get up and continue, the other way. I wipe my face with my bare hand, and then I wipe my hand on my pants. All I can think is, how am I gonna hide this?

It's a desolate road, through a run-down business zone. There is a mini-highway for a stretch, and I clamber up the embankment to the bridge connecting the roadway to the countryside way, way down. Hardy grasses and cordlike plants, some remaining thistles, some goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace. I get a few burrs in my shoelaces, stop to dig them out. I hear the unmistakeable roar of skidding tires, and I look up, freaked out. A few hundred meters, a black car wrecks out, shrieking and blasting itself through a fence, down the bank, and flips over and over. I watch in shock, in horror, in disbelief as a body flies into the air like a chewtoy tossed by a dog, and slams back into the sparse, long grasses. I take off running. The car is pancaked. Vapor streams from it and it hisses and rumbles as the engine dies. I look for the driver. I see a crumpled pile of something. I run. Running. Sliding. Tripping. It's a woman. Heavyset with dark skin and long hair. her face is smashed open. She has a cranial avulsion and her brains are scattered in little piles around her. Her limbs are twisted and bones are stabbing through her dress. The smell of ruptured bowel assaults me. I vomit like crazy, turn away and just puke and puke. It's a few minutes before I can stand to look at her. Her eyes are just... staring up. Like, she is looking at the ceiling. Not the sky, but something closer, above her. I can almost imagine her eyes tracking something. Imagine her eyes tracking... her lover. Her mother. A movie on Netflix. A mobile game. The rushing road, right before she lost control. She is undoubtedly dead. I stoop a little closer. No brains in there. None. She opens her mouth, looks right at me.

AGHAAHAGGGAHHAALLAHHAALLAHHAHGGAAAGGA

I fall back, dumbfounded. I pick myself and run. I don't stop running. I fall, crazily without ground under me, down into a drainage ditch. I hit my forehead on a rock. Lights out.

I wake up in the parking lot behind the Dollar Store. I'm a mess. Blood is crusting my hair and it's all over my fingers. I'm holding a gun. It's bright orange, like a capgun, but I open it up. Looks like real bullets. Like a .38 like the cops used to carry. I stick it in my mouth and pull back the hammer. I try to pull the trigger, but something snaps. My finger breaks. I take out the gun and look. My finger was just a dry thing, hollow inside. I watch, fascinated, as little white mites pour out of the hole. Stream out of me like... automata... like purposeful sperm. They carry  themselves in waves over my body, exiting my finger hole in uniform pulses. Soon I'm covered. As they begin to consume my flesh, I see the Lord. He's pushing a cart full of plastic bottles and crushed beer cans. Probably gonna get his deposit back from the Dollar Store. He waves, then goes in to see the cashier.

AXON

What's the matter?

I--think I'm injured.

What's wrong? Where are you hurt?

I'm bleeding. I was in bed and I felt it. Bleeding, so much, it was like a pool around me.

I don't see any blood.

I'm bleeding time.

Bleeding time?

Yes. Like it's a liquid, just pouring out of me everywhere. Loads of it. I think-- something bit me.

Like... an insect? An animal? Something in your bed?

No. I mean, not really. It was-- when I was-- younger. I must have started bleeding then.

Well... I mean, what exactly happened?

I was on the floor, on my back. Something-- came-- out of the white of the ceiling-- at me.

Like a spider?

Well. I mean maybe, but huge. I couldn't see all of it, just its head, and some long things like legs, anchoring it to the other walls-- but--

Go on...

It was invisible. Like, like its shape was there, but its surfaces were just copies of whatever was behind it. I didn't even see it until it had come down right on top of me. I had my eyes wide open, and it just-- lunged-- at me.

What did you do?

Nothing. I was-- paralyzed, I think. It filled up my whole vision, and then it said my full name in my own voice. And it-- bit me. In my mind. Somewhere in my mind. And all this time it just kept bleeding inside me.

Bleeding time, you said.

Yes, exactly.

But isn't time just a... an illusion? A consequence of being made of matter?

No.

It isn't?

Time is real. It is more precious than your blood. And things-- something-- hunted me down for it. I think it has been following me for years. I-- see it sometimes, against the ceiling corners, waiting to drink from me.

But... But what IS it?

Acompheacmocmecniaz.

What??

You asked me what it is. That is what it is. It told me.

I thought it just said your name.

It's my name too. Just-- the negative of it. Like a-- reciprocal function of my name. An inversion maybe. I heard it, in the spaces, between the phonemes, when it used my voice, to say my name.

Are you in the bath tub again?

Yes.

Burning your feet?

Yes. I only feel good in here now, and for a little bit after. I have had three today.

Try to get some sleep.

Yeah.

DA LI JE ONO

Work calls me on a Saturday. They can't find the country ham. It's in the fridge. I tell them it's there, and they are then able to recognize it. Fatah is running a leaf blower three inches away during the phone call. I hang up.

I'm still sick. I felt headachey when I got up, but not horrible. Then it's like I remembered something and the fatigue shot back through me like a vaccine. Curing me of any ambition. I'm a rat at sea on a piece of floating wood, passing out, waking up, watching the land of my life get further away as I get drenched and then cooked over and over by the waves and the bastard sun. Fungus from the wood is reprogramming me, replacing my cells with its rank bloom. I've been dreaming, tossed in my sleep. Themes all knotted together like an octopus in tetany, in freak spasm. Familiar faces who were secret encounters, incognito cameos earlier in the story, now revealed as agents in secret roles, filling as many holes in the mechanic as they then create. Lines of narrative, world tracks in a fever bulk. But a cold fever. No gauze, just razor brite.

Yesterday I forgot to take the cats back to the vet for their second shots. I will have to call and tell them I have been horribly sick. They'll understand. They'll let me off the hook.

I get back in the bathtub. I'm not even really sick. I just don't have energy. I keep thinking of Peter Watts' parable of the woman who died of thirst, not because she couldn't see the water faucet, but because she couldn't recognize it.

I let the water burn my feet. I just keep them in there, burning, getting redder. The nerves are like pampered slaves, reluctantly and with much shuffling of feet, carrying their message of banal pain to the big house. Infoweb. Neobiology. Shunt topology. Knot theory. All happening serially with the pig blood, rat blood, bird blood pooching out my body meat.

Somehow, nothing really changes. Things just become less and less recognizable to me.

The one thing I keep coming back to-- of the pistol gagging me, of the maybe tears it would bring to my eyes, of the romance of the clitoral trigger attached to the phallic weapon, and sucking it, fingering it, like the last lover. It's like hugging a pillow, to imagine it.

Zzzz