Tuesday, 17. November 2009, 22:06:32
“Gentleman, we’re going to fire a squid at Mars.”
“Earth, this is Humboldt One. We’re a go. Out”
“Humboldt one. This is earth. You have a green light. Out.”
The Humboldt ejects from the tube, appendages splayed in a delicate ballet through space.
The melancholy of listless eyes and atmosphere fights through reality to produce a tear, solitary and frozen in time.
Atmospheres burn…
…And with a dull thud the carcass struck the surface, painting a deeper red.
“Earth, this is Humboldt One. We’ve detected
life…”
Tuesday, 17. November 2009, 21:21:37
*This report was prepared by Introspective Solutions LLC.
Subject: Simon *******
Currently employed by: The Company
Status: Open
The subject seems to exhibit a tendency towards the unorthodox as illustrated by ‘Bob’, a former controller:
“We wanted him to infiltrate and observe the Epileptic Lobby. Anyone else would have faked a fit or two, but not 8. Sensing the threat they posed to the natural order, he took it upon himself…”
“I’m sorry, you have to refrain from hearsay. Don’t hypothesize as to state of mind or intended actions.”
‘Fair enough. He attended an epileptic convention and handed out gift knives! While I wasn’t there, I know from his report that he proceeded to flick the light switches in the auditorium, rapidly.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Imagine a packed auditorium of epileptics with knives in their hands as the lights flicker!”
“Oh dear!”
From Sally ****, receptionist:
“He came back from Cuba with cigars! You know what he told me to do with one?”
Anna *************, in accounting:
“He wanted to ‘re-check’ my numbers…”
**** ******, The Spy:
“He offered me a bag of coke for my car! Out there!”
Jason ***, analyst:
“…Napkin after napkin. Sometimes even toilet paper. The reports made absolutely no sense!”
Navdeep ******, analyst:
“People were, you know, eliminated because of *** ****************”
At this juncture, it’s prudent to incorporate the “Organic Olives” report:
“In recognition of the need for a coherent report, I’ve purchased this nifty digital recorder. I hope this helps.
I’m chain-smoking in a shattered bus shelter as delivery vehicles lazily drift by. Two hours ‘till the sun and seven hours from it as the crow flies.
It’s times like this that I find a certain degree of hyper awareness. Take the organic olive shop across from me. It’s two blocks down from any traffic on a semi residential street and open.
It’s four a.m.
I don’t know about the rest of you (if I did, I’d blackmail you), but when I've a hankering for organic olives mid sleep, I don’t expect there to be a purveyor of this need at four a.m. No, I’m a bit of a cynic.
I expect to have to deal with it. The fact that it’s a bit too early to fulfill this unforeseen need causes no great tragedy in my life. I simply acknowledge the wish, file it for later fulfillment and return to my dreams. But now, as I sit here across from said establishment, I can see, clearly, this callous disregard for my desires is unwarranted. In fact, my cynicism is apparently unfounded. And if unfounded in this regard how many other ways unfounded? My world is not mine.
Apparently.
But back to the hyper awareness bit. I seem to have digressed. I don’t buy it. Not for a second. A four a.m. organic olive shop? An organic olive shop? There are enough people out there, needing organic olives to justify a storefront? No way! There’s something else here. And of course, I’m well aware of what that something is. I wouldn’t be chain smoking in a shattered bus shelter in the pre dawn hours if there weren’t.”
From records supplied by the local law enforcement agency:
Around four thirty am on November **, 20**, Yana’s Organic Olives erupted in…
(To be continued)
Tuesday, 17. November 2009, 20:16:14
Storm chasers, you say? Wait long enough and one will come to you.
No?
Tuesday, 17. November 2009, 20:03:41
Dear Sarah,
Last post. Exile’s not what it’s cracked up to be.
-Simon
P.S.
She gently folded the paper, tracing preferential lines as tears ran through new valleys.
Tuesday, 10. November 2009, 22:27:03
Like a photogenic hitman stalking the night through twisted minutes and white rabbits, I clutch red herrings and autumn trees stripping, shaking their clothes off in symphonies of sound.
“You’re under the influence of foreign agents. Secret powers.”
Report!
How we lost everyone, by Agent 8.
There was a bag and a burial.
And as I traveled, there was also a quarry, to the right, and mushroom clouds over southwest towns. Gaping pits in the earth and mute Irish-Mexican dwarves.
Sancho McGillicuddy?
“No! No dream sleeps that deep.”
Like a shadow, a Rorschach test gone wrong, stalking me along the riverbank. Across continents adrift in the ever-growing absence of space: My mind:
My time.
“This electrician’s incompetent. He’s knocking down the walls!”
Riding the white light on my translucent star, more like a moon, less like a comet, and a lot like you should have been.
But I have to go.
(Millennia later)
The copper sarcophagus in low water, fourteen feet long. Perhaps female, but androgyny escapes me. The curious children are playing around on the flat stones mere inches below the crystalline waters.
Crystalline promises.
The point?
Paint everything Bronze Age.
“We have to go.” She delivered it, all matter-of fact with those eyes…
…Alien skies that hide the lie of infinite highs, failed tries and useless sighs.
“Sigh anyway,” (Despite or because of it),
“Sigh.”
Anyway,
Enter Earth: Noah’s Ark as a metaphor. Sailing through the cosmic waters, forty nights and endless days to the last circle and my man Virgil.
Now I’m walking through the sound of velvet corridors, making my way to the light. Pulled through a door unseen. Hands and infants passed through bones like a regurgitation of promises dropped from my lips…
“…Are canyons cutting through the façade of something I will not say.”
Cannot say (at least not today). But tomorrow…there will be cranes in the marsh stacking blocks like alien children. New habitats for the invaders, rising defiant like propaganda fists clutching promises that drop from my lips like so many lies.
Who Knew?
It’s important that a shrug of innocence accompanies any denial of guilt.
“That’s what she said!”
The studio audience erupts in uncontrolled fits of laughter. Ten minutes later, with no end in sight, bellies fracture, faces peel and the robots are revealed. Mechanical laughter something like…
“Ha, ha, ha.” Repeat till you vomit.
The reporter stands outside the studio, mike at the ready:
“What’s so funny?”
“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha…” a pained look on the young mans face.
“Here’s another, we’ll ask her. What was so funny?”
“Ha, ha, ha, oh, oh…” the girl doubles over and spews hydraulic fluid from her eyes.
“Har, harr , harrr, haarrr, haaaaaarrrrrrr…”
“Are you getting this? Oh my god! There’s more!”
The camera zooms in shakily to a throng of laughing spewing robots as they exit the studio doors.
Cut to the anchor.
“Well Sally, It seems like we’re experiencing some technical difficulty…Sally?”
“Ha. Ha, ha, ha…”
“Sally? He, he…Ha, Sally! Ha!”
The screen changes to the snow of three am wake up calls and hotels. Or motels, it really depends on how you arrived.
Standing or sitting by the pool sipping a cocktail while she puts her lipstick on, staring into my sunglasses.
Little does she know, I stare back…
…And out. Or up at the universe, head on the North Pole feet at the south while anacondas explore the vast anus at the center of my being.
I could have been the ocean; I should have been the clouds...
…Transient colossi, benevolently hovering, yet destructive in wrath, casting shadows on all who pass. Pissing down that which I choose not to hold, so that you may live vicarious through the experience of my storms.
But I digress.
Once the red dust passes…
…Everything unpainted and…
…Once the red dust settles on childlike soundings of emotional portraits…
…I paint lost thoughts in the clutter of random notes from bleeding hands.
It would have been a perfect segue to snoring. But I’m wide awake in the grip of life.
“Well, 8, if I may interject…”
“You must!”
“Very well, next time, something a little more coherent, shall we? Yes?”
“Perhaps.”
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