56 Wet Dog Itch and the Nostrils of Fire

There will be no serious competition with reality here. Nobody will read this so I can afford to be honest.

Because reading, along with the ancient science of acoustics, is permanently lost. I myself am not long for this world. Why remain? None of the children of my Arcology know how to read. They imagine they do, as they .pict each other and .txt each other but the link between reality and meaning, meaning and language, is just another academic pipe dream. I myself am not immune to the charms of what passes for modern communication, it has been impossible to sustain a complete idea long enough to follow its train of thought in more years than I care to count. Everything happens in bursts. Semantic content? Zero.

All my friends are dead. They died before I was born. It's no wonder I'm looking forward to my own exit. The company is better.

As for pipes, no one under the age of 80 has even seen a pipe outside of a museum and Opium is now slang for dull or boring.

My portable Church, the world's museums, were closed half a century ago. My local planetarium, one of the largest in the world, was not large enough for a Mall so it was demolished.

Museum has the same root as Muse. As if anyone remembers who they were. No one remembers that a Mall was once a tree lined pedestrian avenue, either.

Although the museums were closed. They escaped the same fate as the planetariums because some developers guessed correctly that they would make excellent mid-density luxury condominiums.

Our machines have been designed by machines which were designed by machines so complex no human mind can encompass their complexity.

Knowledge is a barrier to consumption. Intelligence even more so. Wisdom is unofficially outlawed.

I am surrounded by middle aged infants. When I feel it's my time. I'm going to disappear into the wilderness, dig my own grave and lie in it. Let the animals and the clouds be my pallbearers.

The last thing I hope to feel is the itch of wet dog hair burning my nostrils. To borrow and mix the metaphors of this unselfconsciously gleeful generation, I am a discontinued product withdrawn from circulation due to low demand.

I must say I agree with my unintentional critics. This once great conversation will go on so long as I have breath to draw but I have no illusions that this sun will rise again.

Yet hope still burns although for what exactly, I haven't any idea.

57 Hrapa Nguyen Wallace

The time was the distant future, everything was mixed up and nobody remembered anything anymore. Hrapa could not remember what time it was nor where he was and the long lonely hours he spent at his desk made of energy fields were without significant affect. Hrapa had inherited the job from his womb parent and one day he would serve as half the material for a womb parent in his turn.

Gender was history, all genes recombined, the gender of the donor was irrelevant.

Hrapa was bred to be effective, what marked him out from his brood sisters and brothers was a simple thing. Sadness, Hrapa was the only person he knew capable of it. He had not even had the capacity to verbalize the feeling until, by accident, he had read about it in a very old book left to his family long ago by a mad ancestor who had hoarded fiction books despite there being nothing useful in them.

Hrapa was embarassed by what was considered, in his society, as a dangerous mental deviation. He wouldn't indulge unless by himself, in the comfort and relative safety of his living quarters. Not every evening of course, what would be the point of that? But when he felt the urge to indulge, he would sigh sadly as he set the table for his solitary evening meal, he would exhale wistfully upon biting into his vat grown steak, he would even let a tear escape.

On delicious nights he would bawl unashamedly into his pillow.

End of part 8

58 Time Fly

There was a time when all he could see was cabbages, fields of cabbages. Now it was mostly low density residential communities. Some of the last farm buildings would likely be demolished in another summer or two. There was one across the street, plucked out of time like an insect in amber, The fence was high and in any case, it would've been trespassing, he walked past those farm buildings almost every day, rocks in the river, the time within their walls as obvious as the sun in the sky.

He didn't think to remember overcast days, when the sun in the sky is taken on faith. He forgot somehow that you never went out the same door you came in, he had lost track of how many times he'd done the trick in the past, so much easier after the first time, It was like breathing, it happened all by itself. When he dropped the disguises and witnessed, when the life of inanimate objects flooded forward, when the doors could be seen, when he stepped through.

He knew intuitively which doors to use, which gates, he used the terms indiscriminately, some were as large as a city, they needed no special goggles to recognize, some were as subtle as going around the left or the right of certain trees. That farm out of time across the road tempted him endlessly, from the perspective of eternity it was saturated; drunk with time.

However tempting, he knew to leave it alone, some gates took him to better worlds, some took him to other worlds, most times, he knew the difference, they smelled different.

That farm, he knew if he crossed there he would never find his way back.

So he never went. The farm was demolished on schedule, He made no plans to visit.

The rock had remained but he was far downriver, with no plans to swim against the flow.

59 Running from the Guru Monsters

Sister Mary Janice Magdalena Missouri clucked at the article she was reading about Australia. At the moment, the article was relating the wonders of Ayer's Rock 'which the Aborigines call Uluru.' This irritated Sister Mary, she knew that Uluru, the largest rock in the world, had been there long before either Aborigines or Colonials had 'named' it.

Sister Mary was one of those rare people, when she spoke you heard the quotations.

She pencilled out the offending passages and rewrote them in the margins to emphasize Uluru.

She realized it was like being called Janice for your whole life and then suddenly being called Sister Mary.

It happened.

The coffee was hot, the day was hot, Sister Mary felt the weight of her habit suddenly burdensome. Many years later, she would refer to what had just happened as the experience, never 'my experience' or 'an experience' but only the experience, no quotes required.

Doctors would call it a whiteout.

A blackout can happen after too much to drink, a person wakes up the next day and has to be told by her friends what she did last night. A whiteout is the opposite, an awareness so sharp that you can experience it but it cannot be pressed into words; a person may as well press butterflies into a book with about as much success.

Mystics would not call it anything.

It happened.

Sister Mary eventually left the order for a flesh and blood husband and together they carried on quite naturally.

60 First among thieves

Freddy Arbuckle was a thief, a good thief, he only stole from those richer than himself, this included almost everyone because when you got right down to it, Freddy was a bad thief.

One day, Freddy found himself stuck in a difficult situation involving stolen children's toys, Freddy wasn't above it, and as the snow fell on the roof of his van full of toys he felt a sudden twinge of guilt at what he'd done.

Christmas was around the corner and here he was, Freddy (Fatty to his friends) was sitting on top of a mountain of toys which he'd duly stolen and duly planned to fence.

A sudden explosive detonation happened inside him: This once, because of the season and because they were toys, Freddy decided to give his haul away. It would take all his breaking and entering skills (of which he had few, thus almost all toys ended up at the front door and not under the tree; except for one family whose door had been left unlocked) but he would find a way...

Shortly after Christmas that year, the parents of 73 children were arrested and charged with theft when the RFID tags of their children's toys set off the alarms as they entered shopping malls across the city.

Ho ho ho.

61 Where's my medicine?

Once upon a midnight dreary
As I pondered, weak and weary
There came a rapping a not quite tapping
Upon my chamber door

Stumbling from my broken slumber
Quaffing down a wooden tumbler
I made a grabbing, a not quite stabbing
under my chamber door

Left alone that endless tapping
Would've wrecked my evening napping
Now there's murder soup galore
To feast upon beyond my snores

Crows shouldn't tap at poor men's chamber doors.

62 The only way is my highway way

Running through the jungle ahead of the gun-running colonials, one local noticed his thoughts taking a decided left turn: what was this whole sad business about? He realized that running had become tiresome, he gave in to the nonsense, he lay down to sleep and despite the danger of imminent death, found he was successful. He slept, buried by the underbrush, as the colonials ran past, no one who noticed him decided to put a bullet in his eye for good measure because given his rag doll appearance, there was little chance he wasn't already dead.

Certain colonials noticed he was alive but spared him regardless.

A strange compassion happens.

When the chase was well beyond him, the local woke from his deep sleep and gave himself a new name, to remember the day.

"Oko-Jumu" which means the dreamer.

Later in life he became an infrastructure developer and private contractor and helped create some of the prettiest roads in the world.

63 My Generation

Last night, she waited quietly in the bar, surrounded by laughing people and happy music, colour and substance, neon and noise. She waited, patiently for the musician to arrive.

Can you imagine? her husband had died in a motorcycle accident two days before, leaving her alone with a young son.

She asked the musician to play at his funeral. All of this happened quietly, the air of unreality around this woman blurred her edges, at the time, I admired how she could pull herself together, her stoicism impressed me, later I told myself it must be shock, no one can imagine what's worse, to lose a father or a son, a husband or a brother. Regardless of gender, loss is loss and the world moves on. Quickly or quietly, it moves,

When she left, I did not see her go, I thought of her husband, a man I had never met nor would ever meet, dead in circumstances most vaguely defined. Regardless, I felt certain he'd died having lived.

Having lived his life as he had conceived it, death in the process of living his ideal was far better than the alternatives.

The courageous man dies once, the coward dies a thousand times a day.

Having no choice about the timing yet having choice in so much else, he lived according to himself until the end.

64 Rhythm Monkeys of the End of Night

The moon eats us, hmm?

Those were the last words my long legged friend Cindy Canvas spoke before she drove off in Agnes Sherman's car. A dusty wreck which even Agnes didn't want. I never heard from her again, she did that thing, a cat's goodbye, and I got on my bus and headed back across the country. On the way I watched the mountains appear in reverse and kept my hand on the seat until it was numb and in those young days full of nothing but hope and cinnamon buns I never bothered to ask myself the question: was I good at this?

Writing. Righting. Making what is wrong, right in the act of fiction, lies that speak the truth, famous for buffoonery, the best comedians have a dark tract of inscrutable philosophy under their beds of a degree of seriousness so profound and disturbing they haven't let anyone, even their thesis advisor, see it.

It doesn't matter since everyone retires and the moment is long lost, the final product of the page is not the ink blasted into its fibres. A book is a blunt instrument, the mind is where the final product blooms and if that's so, the final product is nowhere for nowhere can the mind 'be' which is. It needs the space of formlessness to make it's mark. How can a thing be bounded by nothing? That is the way of the mind.

So I understood why Cindy drove off without a single backward glance. It had all been for the journey, the destination had been a pretext, Cindy, Agnes and the whole sad affair in the hills had left me with a single idea:

Happiness for no reason at all was best, Cindy had suffered for the conditions she'd placed on happiness, Agnes had come out of it the best, because she had avoided conditions entirely. As for myself. I came out in the middle, sometimes I forget that it is never me who suffers, I can watch my mind suffer, I can watch my body suffer, I cannot suffer except when I forget and my attachment becomes inappropriate.

To tell the story of how these realizations leapt out of the night and into our lives would take a great deal more time and space than a single night's experimental fiction.

The novel is not the product, it is simply the occurrence, from time to time, of a creature which exists in many places at once, the author is a part of it but not the whole of it.

Tired and sleepy, I watched the rain fall horizontally across the window of the fast moving bus. Gunship metal clouds attracted lightning and I was afraid to sleep. People had been killed that way on the bus. The chattering in my mind faded as I imagined every thought being left behind, a psychic trail of breadcrumbs, for Cindy to find me someday along the edge of the future. There was a battered old structure there, built of dead memories, windows of distortion, lit by vortex, where insects made meals of men.

Wherever my bus went tomorrow, I knew that was where I was headed in the end.