whistlestopursus

I have been high folk for three thousand years. I had a chalet last year with a beautiful wife, furnished.

Now I have this space in space. Doctors say an avalanche buried me deep and cold enough for them to thaw me out one hundred years later. They knew where I was all that time. There just wasn’t the science to revive me until recently.

There were a couple dozen researchers working on my specific case of reanimation for the whole century I was buried because I was important to the concern. I now have to recover in this extremely low gravity chamber some six hundred miles above terra and as long as I’m at it I might as well maintain sky labs and monitor terra-firma to earn my pay while the high folks find me another wife, blah, blah, blah, bullshit.

Eyewash.

I may as well be software. I see things. I watch the Wealth Runners. One, name of Jean, is an irrevocably submerged hostage at full gravity in his own lake. Great. This is an obvious gullibility test for me and the other line of code.

Just how stupid is he supposed to be? Does he know that he has been fed his story? What do I know of mine, for that matter?

Wait now. He speaks.

“Neighbor!” (He thinks his community is real. He is shouting). “I think I can get you out of your fix, if a fix is what you’re in right now, just tell them my phone number at the lake, have them call me.”
Jean’s phone number? He has a phone number? All right, who is it that is supposed to have the slyboots?

It could be SFPD, BART cops, Harbor Patrol, or one of us. I think I’ll check Jean’s Realtor badge.

Southern California. The Sea Dwellers are cocky. Depth charges or the “sprite”? Where is Jean really being kept?

The R badge was rented from a “Bellosh Aesquarlite,” rented or stolen three days ago, when it was reported missing, missing in what was left of Ann Arbor, oh shit!

Shit shit shit shit shit! Jean is a real runner!

“Hey! , Jean?” “Yes?” “ What’s your number?” “Find the neighbor!”
My Respite from Terrestrial Action
I must be sitting in a tank somewhere. Hell, I might even be the neighbor.

“Jean!” “Yes?” “Start pushing buttons!” “What buttons?”

He found something to push. It turns out we’re in the same shelter with our own rooms. It turns out my name is Harry.

We don’t know where we are. We don’t have any place else to go. How about that?

“Do we get our memories back?” “You were one of the controllers?” “I don’t know, of course, but my current memory is of being a monitor with a huge chalet in the Alps and a most times naked woman for a wife.” “Do you worry about the wife?” “Naw, I guess that means I made all that life up in my quandary.” “Drug induced?” “Sure, I guess.” “You are the neighbor who glided to Consultation Lake, paid off ambush specialists with their own disappear stickers. Those guys are dead. What happened to the dupe?” “Dupe?”

We concluded that we were both in love with the sprite thusly . . . Jean knew her from back when reality was interwoven with life, I knew her as an embodiment of disencumberment, if not freedom.

We acted as each other’s remembrancer until we were reasonably sure of our own names. That is to say that I am certain that my name is Harry whereas he says that he knows my name and where I live. I know his place and his love, I know that they take in children from the low altitude environs and sell them to the high folks. He was always Wealth Runner to me until my base gave me a name.

We rat each other out to one another, bypassing the defenses our comas induced. The projection of the sprite is his making. I have never seen her.

Who is imprisoning us? Are we in truth only at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, waiting for the BART crew to rescue us? We could be twentieth century drug addicts on our way to work. We might only be a conglomeration of my thought.

I am alone. A door opens. Behold!

And there is no one.

It is cold. I pinnacle an aery spectacle with my consciousness, the curve of a planet before space, all round and miles under me monstrously proportioned mountains endure snowstorms, now exceeding, now decelerating from sound speed.

My firmamental recluse again, yet it resides over an unknown planet. This must be my projection of earth future. Sound booms and radiations. Lifeless and clean.

My Respite from Terrestrial Action
Nothing. The wealth runner sees nothing. He is already back at war.

There is a technique by which one can ascertain with a fair degree of accuracy the subject upon which a person occupies himself. You ask him.

I asked him. He, of course, fights wars by avoiding the entanglements that restrict the flow of wealth runners. Victory by recusation.

We decided that a little old fashioned iconoclastic vandalism was in order. We were immediate to a riot. Harry had managed to pry open an auxiliary door panel with which he got something big enough to bust a hole in the shelter.

The rioters did the rest from their side. Our tenuous positions congealed into tenuous conditions. The reality of a mechanical assault from the thin air was working someone’s desired effect on the inhabitants of some metropolis full of men who wear feminine clothes.

I didn’t see any smoking pocketbooks, abnormal preponderances of facial hair, or women.

We were in the midst of some old world colony of new religious nuts and they were running around killing each other because someone was dropping bombs on them.

There must have been some kind of jives in the shelter air because once the cross ventilation from the outside vandals’ bashing and smashing holes in the thing got going they fell back from us. We thought this kind of behavior by fellow humans was too bizarre to be mere hallucination.

We were again encased in the gnarl of reality.

It was some impossible city in a large desert made thanks to some political crap that nobody can blame me for.

Jean and I made for an underground something and waited.

Shelter. There is none. I looked through the eyes. The lake was the same as it had ever been. I could see the Lone Pine tribe wandering the trap trails looking for refugees, ready for the odd firefight.

Why could this shelter monitor my lake? Was the “Ours” re submerged in the lake with me in it? Am I truly at the bottom of Consultation Lake?

It is time for another time travel vacation.

There were conglomerates consisting of wealthy people and conglomerates consisting of people who had nothing.

Long after systems of government had dissolved there came into being an arrangement of power. There is currency and there is possession. We keep the land. They keep the space between. We have currency. They have obedience.

The Sea Dwellers side with the wealth runners who control the land, conquering other wealth runners, whoever is likely to prevail with their help.

Why are the Sea Dwellers’ eyes seeing my community? It must have something to do with the sprite. She may have died. This entire planet may be dying.

Whoever has imprisoned me in whatever this environ is must be watching me.

They need the population to be so many in Africa, so many in Europe, on and on like that. They need enough production for their needs but not so much that their position is threatened. Too many wealth runners, producers, or simple independents and the Sea Dwellers will lose the power to regulate.

There was a time when explosions dominated world action. A conglomeration was formed on the base of the Pacific. Invulnerable and formidably unreachable.

We wealth runners keep them unreachable.

I must talk out loud to find out where I am. I will be heard. Someone may even come and get me.

Is she alive? What have they done with her? Did fortitude match the motive tangles twisting yearnings to remorse, to a passivity and a betrayal of purpose? Is she minding herself?

Where is the sprite? She must have sunlight. The Sea Dwellers will only accommodate a spy so long as her high folks delegate her.

That would be I.

She needs a harrowing mission. Someone will deliver instructions to her dwelling. There will be an escape plan that includes a way to commandeer passage to the surface, signaling routines to secure a rescue in an open sea, lists of nefarious conspirators.

High folks and Sea Dwellers alike want this good waif to prosper.

An escapade is in order.

First we will make her believe that her life is in danger. Making her bulkhead leak while she is out shopping herself in the confines for drugs might start her pondering the inflexibility inherent to wantonly suicidal predations.

Her cell door could start leaking sea water whilst the lithesome sprite's equine haunches
propel her through the corridor, and, turning, launch her back to a common area away from her abode and the inspectors who hunt miscreants.

Into a trap of freelance spies, who, in spirit like to them, she does sell herself in a panic.

Any fecund lordship proliferates from the same lie.

First, the good lord asserts the invalidity of a subject. The subject as victim may be a person or a concept, real or unreal, true or false, it matters not.

Second, action is taken as part of a proof of the assertion, no independently verifiable facts can dictate the outcome of a conclusion or the proponent exposes himself.

Third, a dichotomy is propounded between the nature of what is and what would have been had the proponent let the isolate be.

It is simple. My dog would not have bitten had you not run away.

The prisoner would not have murdered the guard if he was not guilty of something.

She betrayed them to us, us to them, she to herself, because we all wanted to.

What is her present fortitude? Can she dance like Gav?

Gav would go and get her if he were not in love with his foundling, and if he were recovered to the point of action. He must lay and sort out the confusions of loyalty again, we all do when our mortality is cheated. The isolation sometimes lasts as long as a life. We do not care. We are the mantles of our cause, the subconscious.

I must find her.

Malibu is deserted. It is no ones' turf. The homes are gone, as are the roads, utilities, police, criminals. The satellites see it and no one dares to be seen by them.

It is where we met to discuss the problem of intelligence clearing desks and the untimely deaths of wealth runners and our counter parts from the sea, the Realtors.

I must rent a Realtor badge. There will be Sea Dweller patrols on the beach and she will be delivered by the freelancers in view of the eyes. I need credibility with the beach platoons. I might even need backup.

The adjunct freelancers are known to the coordinators of both sides but nobody knows who, (or which, for that matter), is the prime. I suppose that as long as we get them all it will all be sorted out. Will we get them all?

Two were gigolos until deadly youth swept by the carcasses of their careers, duly noting their empty pronouncements of loyalty to themselves. Loyalty is fickle among the undeclared clientele. Youth barters pain from a fetid heart.

One of them was a god damn social worker. I hate social workers. It would be fine if they just stole from people and paid other people to protect them from their victims, we all do that. I hate the pietistic shits, that's all.

There was a cop from the old Los Angeles Police Department who walked into a hotel with a machine gun and eliminated about a thousand suspects one lonely night, did a couple hundred years of forward time travel in a cooler, shaved once, and started looking for a submarine to fetch some gold with. I think he's headed for Michigan.

She might think she is the prime.

There ends up being about a hundred people there waiting for them and they don't see any of us. The freelancers were getting ready to off her when one of our guys sunk their boat. One of the special operations guys swam under and stuck her with a draught.

She came to on the western shore of Catalina

Island while I was watching for the transport to my lake.

A team came by to question me. This place was somehow spared the ravages of development. They didn't want any speculators spoiling the surf. Enormous wealth preserves what mankind tries to spoil. The social worker had pulled strings to get hold of the sprite for something she wanted. Infuriating Sprite had powdered on me and I was alone, closing my eyes against penetrating light from a landing craft. None of us knew where she had gone.

Up the hill, probably, peering down at us from behind a tree was the Amazing Infuriating Sprite, plotting her disappearance.

It was then that I realized my predicament. This god damn social worker wanted the children Gav and I had run and was going to barter me to the high folks for the high folks who had the children.

It would take fifty years to sort out my priorities once they were through drugging, prodding, questioning. Sprite wasn't going to extricate me. My Realtor badge accoutered me well enough for a way to stir with the surfers, they don't believe anything someone with an R badge says.

My shit was backing up fast.

There is no place else to go.

Consultation Lake. Are my friends watching?
I hope so.

Are you paying attention? Come and come and come.

Out comes the neighbor. He hands out credit cards. What is he wearing? What would it be that would give me pleasure to see him wearing? A prison uniform!

There are doors that close unnoticed. One passes through a fissure, or a chasm, there is a wide thought, or a twist of logic, and exotic possibilities are but plain existence. Vistas are replaced by their backsides. This redoubtable closure forgives nothing. I amaze insolubly at this forfeiture of old perspectives. But I respect it.

So here is that door. The neighbor obtained Sea Dweller visas to Golden Gate Park for us and we hopped a freight north. There is a pond. Set on the edge of the pond is the frame, the door shut. We were filthy. My neighbor removed his cravat. We used it to bathe our heads. Constabulary immediately drew our attention to themselves, large ingratiating men with sinew and weapons.

We were utterly charmed.

"See you the yonder door? It opens not." "Nay, only in the mind's eye does it restore gallantries,
or the discourtesies of foul abandon." "Yea, and I discern the one side, ever removedly placed, the host to the cusp of sagacious and lissome preponderance." "Naught but demons seek passage from this side."

And sprites.

Time travelers? Most assuredly.

The officers were most courteous and knowledgeable, telling the history of the place to us as if we were come to a pilgrimage.

Seeing as we were strangers, they did us no bonding as payment for the fouling of the sacred pond water, but did only beseech our respect for our visas and be gone at dark lest ungentle accommodations bequeath the night repose.

They would not accept credit, nor were they unsettled at the neighbor's offer, or surprised that we were wealth runners.

All people in the park are known.

We drew close to the door.

Naught but demons seek passage from either side.

The sprite is gone.

I will return to my lake and wait for an assignment.

We are all invisible to the eyes. There are no off-world colonies, there is no place else to go.

But for now, I sit by this melodious melancholy pond and wait for this Lissom Amazing Infuriating Callipygous Sprite.

But for now I would act. I merely scribe sans sensual interaction.
On the one side of the door is the reflection. This side is present.

Here is the sprite. Here is her life. May her wisp pass hence twixt door and frame.

Sunlight faded. No supernatural appendage manifested. My R badge and the neighbors' visas could keep us out of general population after the constabulary nabbed us. So could my explanation for being in the park.

We legged it. We did ruminate the mysteries of the attractive sex whilst the BART moved us on to Berkeley.

Somewhere under that bay the Sea Dwellers have considered theirs since they commandeered the Pacific was built a porthole of sorts, possibly the entrance to a refuge, to protect passengers from earthquakes, vandalism, and incompetents.

We were ushered through it, and there stood the very projection of her to me, that merry sprite!

"How come you here?"

There was something magical, or at least disorienting, about the environ. We were treated to some strange atomized drug when our car cleaved unto this immobile distraction and we could not trust our perceptions. My neighbor thought we were on an eighteenth century plantation. I thought it might be a great drafty edifice.

We knew that we were hallucinating.

I related as to how we were resigned to returning to our refuge without her when the diversion occurred and our visas became appallingly obvious fakes.

The sprite pointed out that visas have always been as fake as the apparition she was speaking to us through.

My neighbor said that he didn't know why we were where we were but would gladly pay ransom to be gone and sober again.

I conjectured our stint forward the invisible park facade led us to particularizing this aquatic akinesia in our mind's eyes. We were as sunk as if the apparition did not need us to exist. We didn't know if we could move, or were moving.

Two people were arguing with one another and calling each other crazy.

One said that it was impossible to apprehend perceptions without the mind's corruption, ergo, mind ruled the interpretation of matter.

The other one said that the mind itself was matter and so matter ruled the interpretation of itself.

Their child told them to never mind and that it did not matter.

Wise and gentle folk keep young ones at hand to learn the subtleties.

Our ushers introduced themselves. One said that he was the usher on our left. The other said that he was the usher on our right. They assured us that there was no conflict inherent to their positions, that we would not know if they had chosen their respective positions or had been assigned thereto, whether they wanted to be there or not, if they believed in whatever it was they were doing.

They looked the same to us. They wore blue blazers with orange seahorses on the front pockets, white shirts and black neckties with silver tie tacks, blue trousers, back oxfords. Their socks were black.

Remember the "Ours"?

I saw the interior of the shelter. I flipped the exterior lights on. Consultation Lake. Fish. How to get to the surface?

I imagine the subconscious. What crucial intelligence must be sent to the controller? What must I conclude to conclude?

I must finish something. I must get out of this shelter.

Time was when a person might live a long life and never travel more than a couple days’ walk from the place conceived without being unusual. There was no secret life for this person. Life was completely performance. There was audience and no more. There was no true hiding.
After that, came the time of illusory freedom. Small parts of the world harbored fed populations who could move about at will because high folks could not track them.

War wiped out the illusion. The world is at war. Freedom is naught but a sprite.

We plot to control a satellite. Gav is in Washington to decoy the project. Many role players think to glean a purpose of his circling and crossing, but he is only following his whims.

From monument and edifice to home and school Gavroche’s roam leads in a cruel, fearsome, gathering of a muddle of executives, sharpshooters, shadowers, informers and detectives. Strait to his life all these outpourings converge upon Gavroche the adamant, the allusive, the cured.

We hope he made it. He drew the attention of the satellite operators long enough for my runner group to insert some instructions. Every possible satellite is looking at my lake.

They see nothing. We count the fish.

Soon the platoons will come. We wait on the highest point in the continental United States. Half a day’s walk down a disheveled trail two hundred ambush specialists approach our homes.

It is time to recruit the troopers. The neighbor flies down to them with anonymity programs.
Soon the platoons will come. We wait on the highest point in the continental United States. Half a day’s walk down a disheveled trail two hundred ambush specialists approach our homes.

It is time to recruit the troopers. The neighbor flies down to them with anonymity programs. Our subterfuge has bought him enough credibility to let him land.

What we want is the spy, the others will reconnoiter the Sea Dwellers, farm, perform other useless tasks that have nothing to do with our quest to disappear. Their spy will carry our message.

We do not exist. We have emigrated unto dust.

The neighbor looked preposterous in his courtier garb, floating over Consultation Lake in descending spirals, dropping a raft, circling again, dropping out of his glider, climbing onto his raft from the thirty-degree water, drinking hot liquid from a thermos, waiting for the raft to drift toward his captors, his customers, his dupe.

The dupe wanted to live interdependently with the Sea Dwellers.

Fair enough. The Sea Dwellers want California. The high folks will accede to the requirements of property. They need to use the Pacific.

America owned the world once it was worthless. Once it is worthless, worthlessness is all to a wealth runner.

We do not wish to be appreciated.

That is why I upped my indemnity.

In a park do I wait for a friend for to make clear to him the complexities so overpowering to this love of mine and me.

I wait for my friend. I need to explain the mess I helped to create. There was beauty, hardened, aching of the old parental ambush. Verily we were so afflicted in conscience, verisimilitudinous stumblers, heartbroken.

Near to the truth as I was I was yet unwilling to express the reflection kindled by her mind. I became a distraction. I sapped. I panicked. That lovely child drew back from my embrace, seeing in me, perhaps, another child screaming at that very horror grown people inflict on the vulnerable. What I was, lashing, stupefied by the ripping of a fantasy no longer alive with the illusion of danger and purpose, wounded, falling into resentments and false hopes and ambitions was my self, only, hard won and most sycophantically courteous.

To myself.

And yet I did arise.

This friend, who sits and listens, he smiles. What could have been had I stayed, let that peaceful discovery be, stayed the proof and circumspectly acted!

Yet I might not have known her so well, infuriating sprite!

My other love is the autumnal perfection of my youth. That time of my life, (this is no delusion), embraces, comforts, clarifies my direction, saves my adventure. ‘This,' I can say when I bespeak some ruinous path, ‘This does not lead to that bliss I once had'.

This love I had. This love I have.

About my friends-are they not irreplaceably interchangeable? We of a conviction, or spirit, willfully somnambulistic treading through dreams and ambitions as we are, do not tire by the grace of the primary incursion of life, time, memories, and the rest of these friends of ours.

None of us leave.

Yet we fly.

Weary reminiscence gives way to the point. I want to find her before the high folks clean out this place. There will be an enormous war, or, understanding, between the high folks and the sea dwellers.

She remains important to me.

In a Park

My friend is as alarmed as I was when I got wind of the plan to replant Michigan.

"Are you thinking that I have gone mad, or that I am here to plant rumors among the elite? There will be nothing here soon, we must be gone by the time the Detroit riots start or they will track us. Sea dwellers will take the west coast and this will be high folks farmland by February if the satellites are not knocked out."

I show my friend his credit rating and a list of his last hundred phone calls. I tell him about what is happening in South America.

"You have to get out." He says he does not know where this troubled sprite resides. "I will have a team come for you, tell them who I am, ask them if they know where the sprite is, and they will conduct you to my lake, or leave you alone, if you wish. Goodbye."

The shock of a decision like that, to uproot in a day and leave, coming slowly and the object, fairly alone in a wandering and a perpetuation of a distant unknowable homecoming blasts away presence.

Time travel? Most assuredly.

Wealth runners have no more synchronous mesh with presence than wild animals. We do not advocate causes, nor do we simplify incongruous attitudes for small children. I belong to no time. This apocalyptic transference adds but one element, a carrier-identity.