Lovely Sight

It's hard to do in this kind of job. Even from a distance she hits you straight in the lungs in much the same way as one of those cigarettes you keep rolling from other cigarettes you find on the ground. I haven't actually messaged her yet but I am convinced that we are meant to be together. Still I am covered in someone else's blood. It's possible at this stage to hear the first radar reports. 

Our relationship is complicated: She kills people like me for money and sometimes for free. She can't see me till January two thousand and eighteen, possibly. 

There's no pressure. After all, three million dead is a lovely sight. She's OK as illuminated by gunshots, artillery fire, a knife pulled from a boot reflects the light of the moon on her face and in the moments like those- yeah, she seems OK I suppose. 

Gamma ray burst eventually melts the entire western hemisphere of the planet into a wasteland of liquid magma and I ask her if she wants to go to see the double screening of both the Bad Boys films they're showing as a run up to the recently announced third. Unfortunately she is dead along with most of the other people I know so I have to see it by myself. It's no big deal, really.

Raygun Gothic

They have been checked into a hotel for some years now. The building is badly weathered and at some point during the nineties an abortive attempt was made to do it up in the Raygun Gothic style, which was by that point already a naive vision of a future which had not come to pass. All the furniture has fins of no discernible purpose. The television, which only displays in black and white, is rounded and built into the shiny plastic wall.

The hotel, at three floors, is the tallest building in the small town, itself little more that a petrol station and a few houses on the road through hundreds of miles of scrubland.

They sleep in six hour shifts like submariners, endeavouring to never be awake at the same time. You cannot design a complete reality, you have to start small. A beating heart in an otherwise empty room still implies the existence of walls and floorboards, construction materials, the networks and supply chains required to deliver and assemble them. A few fingernails and teeth in an empty void betray knowledge of voids and teeth and the presence of something to know them. Start small. They miss each other terribly.

Their suite has two rooms connected by a door and a bathroom. Sometimes one of them will hear the other stir in the other room and overcome with some emotion will step through the door into an invariably empty room. The other always knows they are coming. They switch rooms through the separate doors and apart from a few crumbs of room service sandwiches leave no trace of themselves.

At first there was a dream of a single cell and nothing in which to contain it. Decades ago there was some kind of car accident. Their future hit a tree at seventy miles per hour. Three seconds faster than death. The hotel suite is registered to one name only but neither of them can remember whose. 

Daguerreotype

8

He finds a small leather bracelet on his shelf while throwing out old books and holds it to his face. A faint scent; he is floating on a swell of memory that fades almost instantly. He holds it closer but it's used up. Everything has gone. The bracelet gets thrown out with the books and all the rest of it. How long had it sat there on the shelf, biding time? They are sitting alone in dark rooms many miles apart. He feels he has knocked over an urn.

7

Have you ever felt momentarily the rotation of the earth around its axis or even its rotation around the sun or the Sun's movement around the center of the galaxy or the galaxy's movement around clusters, superclusters, nothing?

Doesn't it just make you sick?

Nausea creeps up the spine at one thousand miles an hour. If you vomit now the world will end and everyone will know it was your fault. Nails rake a digital smart board. Have you ever been unable to move or breathe during daylight hours? What does being the only one without a life jacket say about you? Have you ever felt you were going mad but were unable to reap the full benefits at the time? Could you be eligible for compensation? How many thousands of times can you really be expected to do this sort of thing? Do trillions of stars really burn out just for me? Has a boy ever wept or dashed a thousand kim? A hundred? Ten? Everyone is witness against themselves. Will you take it further?

This Dream Has No Value

5

She is sitting at the bus stop in the early morning searching for something in her bag. Then there is a piece of paper to hand and she is folding it lengthwise over and over until it reaches terminal density and she uses it to lever the cap from a bottle of beer.

All night she keeps lit an energy saving light bulb of the kind found in cheap motels. She requires the tinnitus-pitch hum it generates to sever a connection to the otherwise brutal quiet but lately the cold light has begun to disrupt REM sleep, and when she can dream at all she dreams she is in bed, staring at a lightbulb in an unfamiliar room. In these dreams there can be no noise of any kind. The silence will burst her eardrums. Wake into an unfamiliar room.

You do it for the picture because the picture has value. In her absence someone just like her would surely have been found or produced. What difference does it make? There are still a hundred million more prototypes that will fall by the wayside. Where is the history of these unfamiliar rooms if it is not written in the very walls? By the fact there are walls at all? What happens when every lightbulb grows dim and the noise does not stop? She's heard it all her life. Dreams come on at the speed of dark. It makes no difference at all.

Clark-Nova What Have They Done

4

I need a machine and I need it now. Something to rehash it with. All my paperwork on file in the cold in the dark in the dead of the night comes on like a bullet through the forehead. Fully realised action potential. No cold warriors no a-politicks a death of blinding vertigo the radio screams CLARK-NOVA WHAT HAVE THEY DONE

Spring and the Jimson Weed

3

Spring and the jimson weed grows tall through the train tracks. For one euro the bronze living statue will gleefully pretend to hang you or up to three children at once. Five and he'll do it for real. Further along the city itself staggers over, reeking of piss, gently prodding at the edges of something less tangible than a noose with expert pickpocket's fingers. Last requests are sacred. Twenty three executed in twenty eight minutes - no one could fault his form.

I will wring first blood from a stone and then an entire person from a brick. Guns are piled high by the umbrella stand. Some last words. Who is it? My grandfather's final entry in a diary: "The battlefield is strewn with four thousand dead - a lovely sight."  I used to outrun the horror, but these days I just pack it up and take it with me. Last word's on you.

Kingdom of the lord

6

The ascent takes us from a thunderstorm up through fifteen thousand feet of pure white cloud, reminiscent of the way an elevator carries me, with barely perceptible motion, from a grey carpark up to the beige heaven of a Carrefour municipal shopping complex on the eastern edge - and as in the kingdom of the Lord, I step briskly and avoid making eye contact with any of the anyone. The symphonic trill of cash machines is replaced with the more compete sound of air conditioning units, small streams, frogs and the occasional birdcall.

At a customer information point I am able to negotiate safe passage to the aisles of cordial and soft drinks in exchange for my bullup rifle and a few magazines. Management provides me with a guide who speaks good English and we set off down the river.

The aisles here are heavily overgrown and descend beneath the water further than the florescent light can penetrate. My guide lowers a rope with a rock tied to the end. He explains that the rock is a powerful magnetic meteorite, which his tribe mine from an aeons-old deposit near the stationary. Hooks aren't used when venturing from the camp as they catch on roots and shelves.

Due to a shipping accident involving over three hundred tons of table salt a dead river flows beneath the fresh water one. The dead river flows to a separate current and is dense enough to carry the shopping carts that the natives throw into the water for the hundreds of miles through the twisting canals. The carts accumulate canned food that falls naturally as tides change, or as the result of floods or shelves collapsing.

My guide is able to feel the meteor making contact with the cart through hundreds of metres of rope. Over the next hour he tracks it through the rows of trees and shelves, standing on the wide raft and directing me to steer in this or that direction. Finally we reach an area he deems clear of roots. He runs a hook down the rope and begins to haul in the cart.

He tells me that it is the spirits of the dead who push shopping carts through the underworld. So, as in life we are provided for by the dead, in death we must take our turns on the infinite aisles.

He hauls up nineteen cans of tinned pork, a waterlogged flintlock pistol, three dozen spears and an eighth of crack cocaine; he screams for a glass pipe. I think I will be rewarded handsomely by the company for this venture. Most men give less thought to crossing the street. My guide is still screaming for a glass pipe and his cry reverberates throughout the neat shelves, the glass display cases that crack and crumble to dust, mountains of ash blowing away in the wind, his cry reverberates throughout the visible ducting in the ceiling and the secret ducting in the walls, the power is cut and in the last moments as all the lights in the sky flicker out I am unable to remember what I have gone shopping for.

Paraphernalia

2

There is a list of nightclubs written on a year old receipt, obscuring the names of the purchases, which are any case written in spanish, total of twenty euro seventy. Further evidence abounds: a few stickers peeled from a crumbling wall, reams of receipts for burgers, various brands of beer, coffee, wi-fi access, many of them signed - although with never quite the same signature.

Two ticket stubs for a film, one for a museum, piles of empty cans, discarded cigarette packets, warrants, parking fines, hospital bills, digging through a bin turns up a document entitling the bearer to check in a single bag of no more than fifteen kilograms on a flight from Dublin international at six-forty-five in the morning, a diary written in once and then thrown away, forensic accountants turn up mysterious endowments from untraceable sources, an original birth certificate thought to have been lost in a fire is produced by interrogators as if by magic along with passports, rubber stamps, proof of being at any given location on any given date - and the paper trail is accelerating to faster than sixty seconds a minute, purchases made three days from now must be explained, in little under a year there is a death certificate of an eighty year old man, signed by himself, lungs forming cancer cells automatically as ashtrays materialise ash, a wave of material that does not yet exist overflows from the offices of every police station in the world and delays the investigation.

A Book in Motion

1.

In walks through departure terminals, docks, bus depots, railway stations and other jumping off points I have often found a short novel called "Margaras Unlimited" with the subtitle "A Book in Motion," and the book is always read in motion, during the downtime in any journey which is also where it is written; a book of motion, a cloud of dust which when viewed from a certain angle at a particular moment appears to spell out the letters 'A,B,Q, etc' - it is always very easy to read and constitutes the perfect accompaniment to purgatorial voyages across floor-boards, fuselage, decking, floorpans, broken chassis, wreckages both submerged and terrestrial, the story of a traveller flows - bloodstain pattern analysts divine eloquent copperplate sentences in the splatter that resulted from an argument about the contrails that criss cross the sunday morning sky, shining gold in the daybreak.