Aix/salon

There is an opportunity to answer correctly and then that door closes forever. Lifetimes are spent waiting for it to open again. There are miles and miles of scrubland riddled with fire trails; it seems the only purpose of this place is to burn down every few years. The hum of power lines proves that civilisation still exists, but that it exists elsewhere. It's a place to return to every now and then, like the surface of the moon. The paths fork, criss-cross and double back on themselves but it is never possible to cut a different trail. The question - more of a plea, really - was perhaps answered correctly after all. Perhaps there was only one form the answer could take, whatever the words. These days it's different. They keep to rocky ground and sometimes they wrap their pistols into plastic bags which they hold above them as they wade into a river and float downstream for dozens of miles. There's almost no trace. The stakes are a little lower, the footsteps softer. Still, sometimes in the night a hand reaches out and tries to weave the darkness through past lives in flooded cities, the sigils of the road, the rows of empty chairs, the secret passages and through all the threads a voice is shouting "listen! I know the words now!"

Repeating Myself

Every word I have ever written has been an ineffectual and, since 1941, frankly redundant, attempt to describe and simultaneously solve a complicated labyrinth that stares out at me from bus shelters, tourism offices, smartphone screens and anywhere else where can be found the words "you are here."

Nothing is more terrifying. Because all of these maps are blank and this is a boundless maze with no walls by which to mark progress. I am here. Every day I wake up and I am at the beginning again; the puzzle has recapitulated itself around me. I have been asked where I am and I respond that I am in the only place I have ever been.

Still they insist on breaking matter down to ever smaller, more discreet components. To fix themselves, quantifiability. But the decimal points never end and we drift further and further out to sea, having done away with the compass and sextant, star-charts and astrolabes, the global positioning satellites, the signposts, the standing stones and mountains, with the very sun, an endless journey to find a stick to place in the ground so that we might say "This is the point from which all space is reckoned and by it you shall know your way."

Kingdoms

- I spent longer than intended trying to find the spot where I had buried the lump of coal in preparation for the race. The dunes I had marked against the stars a year ago had shifted radically and by the time I had excavated the shimmering black horse from the sand and rode back to the city there was no one left to race against.

- hundreds of escape pods carve contrails across the sky as in the distance Mothership crumples into a mountain range. They tear through skyscrapers and crash land into an alien city abandoned not ten minutes earlier. Meals rot uneaten on strangely carved tables.

- it was my task to present to the public the amicable face of our organisation and to lead interested parties down the dusty cellar that was the terminus of all those little passages criss-crossing beneath the bazaar. And here they would sit and stare at the crumbling skeleton in the center of the room, which is to say, at god. And none would ever move again.

- I slipped away from him in the night and kept to the rocky ground until I reached the river. The current carried me for more miles than I could count. I picked up the pilgrims trail, towards a cathedral in the west wherein interred are the remains of a saint. Her bones are all we have left, and somehow it is we who are to be envied.

- that night there was a terrible thunderstorm and when he awoke he was fixed to a rusting iron mast that was the peak of a mountain of similarly deteriorated metal. Years passed and the sun grew larger and brighter until it covered the sky day and night, turning to molten slag everything but the mast he was bound to. Eventually all was fire, borderless, and he knew not which way to turn.

- and these are streets and roads and houses unending and repeating in configurations known to all by heart and here is a labyrinth of the usual corridors of tall hedges right angled to one another and a now a variant with the false paths and dead-ends removed, but this maze is a single mark on a blank page, without clear beginning nor any indication of an exit.

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.

Apologue $

I no longer have need for even one monkey let alone a thousand of them. Here are a countably infinite number of writing machines. It's been a big problem for me. Eat the galaxy, sure. Anything you like. Here is a symbol representing an unknown number of parallel lines which you can take to the local shops and redeem for twenty percent off apes. In Vietnam I couldn't access your twenty-four inch Vizio smart TV and the stench of fear that filled the jungle was so palpable, so thick, that I thought "surely our position will be given away and surely we will all be shot at last. I cannot live in this submarine by myself."

Here are a countably infinite number of monkeys. Here are my automatic writings. He eats the library of Babel but I am still not satisfied. It creeps up in the daylight, the terrible datum. Two times now I have heard it hammering down on the roof. I know it doesn't phase you; the horrible CDs, church nights, skinless salmon fillets, florescence, the groaning from the poles, from the east and west. The sound of tearing felt on a pool table. A stopped clock as adjusted for daylight savings time. Here are my extended universe Hamlet fanfictions. Here are the dragons.

Accelerated Turing Machine

Dango picks up an Accelerated Turing Machine at fifty per cent off in the post-holiday sales.

‘What does it do?’ asks his son, phasing into continuity.

‘It divides time infinitely.’

‘Can I play Minecraft on it?’

‘Maybe. I’m still not sure if switching it on will end the universe or merely collapse it into a singularity of limitless computational capacity.’

‘What do the instructions say?’

‘Threw them out.’

Dango’s son is also overweight and a source of constant but vague disappointment. No one really remembers where he came from and in many versions of the story he doesn't exist at all. He starts in again with this shit:

‘Dad, I've been meaning to say, I don’t really want to live like this, it’s too complicated you know and I’m not really even sure what algebra is let alone any of this stuff about chronology, I think I’d much rather be a painter, I did this really good still life of a Caesar salad the other day, particularly the croutons-‘

Dango cuts him off by groaning loudly and for an incredible amount of time. He glares at his son until both of them begin to feel uncomfortable. The vibration causes some of the ash at the end of his cigarette to fall off, but as the embers reach the point halfway between the cigarette and the floor they discover that motion is impossible and self-consciously climb back up.

Dango, still groaning, decides he’s glared at his son enough and resumes tinkering with the computer. A salad. Jesus. His own flesh and blood. It will not stand. Pointing a finger and roaring mightily:

‘There is work to be done, boy! Do you really want to live in a universe made of seventy five per cent dark matter like some sort of fucking poor person all your life? This is it boy, this isn't like the time I sent you off to sell the cow and you came back with that dodgy particle accelerator-‘

‘I still reckon with a bit of repairs-‘

‘No, listen to me dammit, it’s useless, couldn't fry an egg.’

‘But-‘

‘Shut up. The point is, this is the real deal. You’re good with computers right? If you set it up you can play your thing, I don’t know where all these cords go.’

Dango finds the existence of his child worrisome and uncharismatic, though he’s not sure why. The boy brings out the worst in him, there’s no denying it; he feels as though his character flaws were graphed out and represented with unpleasant fractal imagery, spiraling endlessly through the deep-seated root of yet another anxiety. He has never quite gotten to The Bottom of The Thing.

Globehead

By the time we rolled through the Mojave, the phonanesthetics stiched inside the lining of the seats weighed scarcely twenty kilos. It was going to be very, very close. The federal police of the Analgesic Unlimited energy concern was moving quick but we hoped to outrun them in the desert. They jump us within site of Vegas  - razor wire along the road pops the tires and we skid out. Someone must have talked. Cries of "who, me?"

Figures appear in the distance. We live and die by the glint of iron on the distant horizon. Larry catches two in the head and gets the blood absolutely everywhere. The rest of the crew try to shoot back while I make a break for it. Someone swings at me but I tase him and his gimmicked fingers malfunction into knives easy enough.

"To explain: there is a vast network. A whole ocean of possibilities. Now these here amulets will protect you from curses both witchcraft and voodoo in origin, up to three demonic possessions, malignant sigils and scabies. They'll be expecting a full report in the offices and I for one do not intend to get written up again."
The firefight switches into the high-noon showdown. They bring out the old cliches. In the red corner, weighing in at one hundred fifty pounds and packing a Ruger Bearcat, Theodore Rosenstein my collaborator and neighbor from the flat downstairs. In blue, of mass only detectable with a particle accelerator and wielding authority roughly equivalent to the energy output of a neutron star is the unnameable presence behind this whole thing. It's gonna be a hell of a fight, kid. The dusty street goes quiet. Tumble weeds beam in over the shortwave unconvincingly. Three cold seconds under the desert sun. For a moment everyone has fixed themselves in the world. Then Theodore moves - too soon - and it's all over in an instant. He screams as the big hands come down. The new rules are read forth briskly and terribly by every roided up goon of the right and established order of Goons and any fucker tries to shirk his union fees is subject to a beating at full cost.

Sweaty Charlie

Charlie Green – ‘Sweaty’ Charlie to his friends – was and presumably still is a large and nervous man, prone to crippling obsessions and paranoia. True to form, he was being large and nervous in a café. He was eating a chicken Caesar salad, which in his opinion contained rather too many croutons. Charlie like to represent every ingredient equally in every bite, but this salad was simply too saturated with bread for this to be accomplished whilst maintaining both a correct ratio among ingredients and a regard for taste. 

Indeed, it seemed that as he ate each even forkful that the quantity of croutons relative to that of say, chicken or lettuce was steadily rising. Soon, he realised, croutons would comprise the entirety of food in the bowl. Given that in the beginning they had comprised but a fraction of the meal, Charlie reasoned that they must somehow be propagating, multiplying themselves whilst retaining the same volume. Soon his lunch would reach a point of infinite density and form a black hole which would then devour the solar system, if not the universe.

‘My god!’ cried Charlie, as he flung the bowl through the café window, ‘I knew I should have ordered chips!’

Apologue five

Indulge me temporarily. Look up and see: through the outermost orbits of the solar system moves a mysterious and terrible planet. Unknown by telescope or any other traditional means of inference, we perceive it as breath on the back of our necks, a strange light on a deserted street. There's something wrong with that man. A voice that whispers in your headphones, beneath the Morse code. Tension rises and all the old numbers stations go dead. Theia has come back to finish the job.

I can feel it in my bones now. The gravity well's run dry. Look up; they're here already. Fiddling with radios somewhere near magnetic north. All of this is stricken from the record. Damnatio memoriae. Like electrons around an atom we spin through the void and with us spins this planet, the malfunctioning engine. It's over. Arm yourself. Bring a knife to a M.A.D. doctrine. It's almost ready. A little further now.

Here it comes.

Even Smiling Makes My Face Ache

He was bankrupt in seven dimensions and 

having nothing better to do of a wednesday

I offered him shelter from hungry and vengeful 

creditors. He'd been financing an insurgency -

on the astral plane, dear boy, where the final

battle will resolve itself and I will free mankind 

of all tyrannies, spiritual, existential, benign or

otherwise, as foretold by ancient prophecy and 

tv guides. I said yeah, but look here at these 

faucets in the shower. They're fiddly, you hear me? 

Fiddly, and they must be fiddled in the manner

of a safecracker in order to achieve correct 

tem-per-ah-ture - oh, and you'll be sleeping

on the couch. He thanked me for my hospitality 

and for taking such an enormous risk, dear 

boy. I told him that I liked to live, as they say,

on the edge, and that really it was nothing; later 

that night I crept downstairs and phoned it in. 

The look in his eyes as they dragged him off in

manacles delights me to this day, and though

it's been close I have never since felt so

free.

Apologue Four

Look. Charlie don't surf. He do not. A question of grammar; the narrative play out otherwise. He just don't. Oh lord, oh Jesus, make sure they broadcast my death live on Foxtel! Skimp not on the details, I seen nothing better yet. Come on! I am calm, I am ready! Out with it man, give me your vacuum cleaners, I do it me self. My reptile brain, see, it's just no good. Like rotten teeth. I am the dentist around here and I do the dentistry and I do all the dentistry. Lay it on me! The gear, the really good bits! This is it folks, this is it. Or will it be. Surely. Yes, this time for real. Dissipate my existence. We've got freaky Zen koans out the wazoo and special machines what write more if you tickle them with correct posture and dexterity. Here we go now chums and chumettes, strap yourselves into the apparatus which I happen to build real comfy so don't make me have to come down there strap you in personal. All refreshments available at extra charge. We run outta Twix. Sincerest apologies.

My bones like bubble wrap clickety pop outta get it checked out but who has the time? Not I and certainly not you; real life only a nice example of pointillism anyway and we all know that Seurat was as French as they come. I give you good deal, nick your wallet and shoes leave yer Dendritic cells and most of the spine unharmed. A persistent disintegration of memory. We recall John and we recall Johns actions as distinct entities. John put the can in the bin. So who put the can in the bin? It could have been John, he is like that after all. Clearly the whole can thing is a set up. Treasonous little shits. No brand loyalty talk trash about our motives behind our back. Hire someone to level the score; he equalizers things, so to speak - nice and thermodynamic.