RICKRUCKER.COM
I spent much time perfecting this funny, scary novel about life and death. It's intense! If anybody knows anybody appropriate, I would appreciate any help, advice or encouragement, especially re: publishing. I've been writing novels consistently since I was ten. I don't know how you top this, anyhow.
The whole manuscript is 85,000 words. It just keeps going like that. This is a substantial excerpt, sufficient to demonstrate the face-eating chimpanzee kind of effect I attained. But if anybody's interested, the entire MS is pretty awesome. I'm at rickrucker1@gmail.com.
Alarm Trumpets of the Void
Giant Resonances
2006
Bebe's a short, pale woman, white as a ghost. Growing up, she dashed up and down interconnected house-corridors, erratically, often hiding from nothing. Like perpetually appearing out of thin air, she sometimes startled her father. Mother tells how little Bebe said "I want to meet the gods," and thought high-flying birds were angels (aww).
"I didn't want to be eaten, I thought angels--were animals or--predators, or-"
Everyone's nice the town she moved to for university. Being from the city, she's out of place small towns. Back home, Mother taught her painting, the woman did Inspirational painting, like majestical naturescapes revealing the Lord's bounty. Bebe lost the God-angle, mostly, retaining Inspiration in notions like noble, formidable bigness. Now she studies that in school. One day, maybe she'll design ad-aesthetics and have one child.
"I haven't ever talked about angels being terrifying--"
In the United States, made up by legally-binding boundary lines imagined to be etched over landborders and water. Reasonable brand-clans paid for parts of people's actions, and repetitively, buildings assembled steel cars, singing plastic and faster computer-processors, all-proliferating. So Bebe's seen, she'd soaked it in, liking stars, ponies and sprinkles, then music and arts. Not enough time to grow right what with dancing places, bad crowds and strange drugs. With all the giant apparatuses around newly vivid, now nearly a woman, her incepted self blathers and soars variously, Bebe's in-brain blaring outward, substantially.
Settled in an apartment by the capital building she's fructified, what with prime lifetimes now, to penetrate, rend and smash-through to make good. With her hair done up a preferred dark shade, and her breasts pretty big, she's ready for the best times. Every morning thrusts, outer-things thirstly spur new absorption daily bleeding into her mopping-mind, all the billion-patterns reinforcing and reconnecting boomingly, whoooooo, whoooooo like the dumb drunks call out after the bars close--whoooooooo they say, in animal-packs proceeding whooooooooooooooooooo, they march. She'd fucked three boys and often checked her hair. Okay, an okay pretty. Depends, but they do like her. She likes life, well enough.
Looking out the window, she sees three little boys in the residential street throwing a baseball circularly, faster and faster til the ball flies free. Out of sight. Next door, the old man in his front yard--his clothes filthy and torn places--walks the bushes that line the edges of his fence, like inspecting for evidence. Distantly, sounds come, like a parade on some nearby street. This got you up, the strange sound filling what should be--and shouldn't it?--be a quiet nothing?
Inhaling the foyer-smell and slamming the door, the outside startles Bebe, like omening senselessly that this is the last day, a last sight over, her the last, this the freeze-framed and final sensible actuality, since||||shorter maybe the moments' infinitesimal[]time-divisions could be--it--out of nowhere, fine morning's transpiring, but you should remember your astonishing place. What? She rubs her heavy eyes and|[]it's lit again, these yearns forded through this passageway someways wellknown. Effectively flown-remotely flies our universal outflowering, upswollen portly rich-petalled blueprinted pieces of all sticking out[]of whatever's underflowing. She knows what's going on more or less, and this day's fine, exaltedly infinite in potential, like everyday.
Bebe descends the steps and passes through the chainlink gate half off its hinges. Somehow unreal mist's palpable in the hot air, something like it, insensible but there, isn't it? Obscuring far off. Walking straight down the sidewalk, she's forced to stop as the streetboys' loose ball bounces once before her right leg. It lands in a square patch of yellowed lawn.
"Hey girl," a behatted boy says, waving his arm jaggedly at her, and his friends glare, looking off in different directions, nonchalantly, as if embarrassed. "What's your name?"
Bebe rolls her eyes. "You're too little to ask my name."
She throws the ball back in one smooth drop and spin and throw, walks on and reaches the corner. Indefinite parade floats pass three blocks north, with people besides. Distant heat-distortion obscures slightly, and she draws a block closer to the hubbub. Sweat streams beneath her bralessness. Just hungover.
Ahead, the indistinct parade-forms press on slowly. It's no sacred dayfest to march for, like a Day of the Dead. But people and floats--whatever those floats are--befitting their hazy slowness, might as well be dead, no? Yes? All's asleep, dreamed and dead, paltry metaphors, manifestly, for living, but differently assembled and seen, you can re-imagine the same world with the same words, calling life unlife, moving unmoving, Bebe not Bebe, say a progressing parade is in fact standing quite still, and this signifies something.
Anyway so if were a Death Parade, it'd be following a giant coffin. She guesses where this absurd wheeled coffin is, visualizing it. But what body could huge coffins carry?
Certainly only the biggest people. Satisfied, her head aching, she returns, following back the way come.
Even at a distance, it's clear her neighbor's stopped examining the bushes, instead standing, staring over the top of his fence at the boys triangularly arranged there--holding their mitts up expectantly.
"The ball's in the bushes," the brave boy closest to the neighbor says.
"No throwing," the old man says. Eyes downcast, his beard's only half there, greyly, the hair's greasy and hanging, uncut. "The street isn't for that," he gurgles. You could see his eyes not seeing the boys rightly, that he's not all there. Whole body slants this way and that, tottering some.
Bebe walks between the impasse, spotting a man on her porch young like her, outwatching. She noticed him the last month moving in onto the floor above her. Unsexy, having just awoken, she's wearing unpleasant sweatpants, but her breasts push through her T-shirt noticeably, maybe nipples.
Bebe reenters the gate, then quickly ascends the stairs toward the grey three-flat. The man looks at her, smirking friendly. Everyman likes a woman. He's slightly older with stubble, his brown hair unkempt. To bond briefly watching weird people outside doors? But everything interesting is some conflict, isn't it? The exception being? The exception being. Parades perhaps? As they're celebrating themselves in and of themselves.
"It's ours," a boy says.
"Not anymore," says the neighbor. His shirt's open, his white chesthair appearing wrong, what with the unlikelihood it'd be shown on TV. Near impossibly old, he's pushing his bodyframe forward, like challenging, lording over the boys.
"He just wants to steal the ball so something happens," Bebe whispers.
This man then winks. Bebe's embarrassed and a little disgusted by a wink. Ignoring him moments, Bebe stands alone over the conflict godlike, but then must say, "what is it? What's it for? Did you hear it?" she leans into the winker. "Even over the houses across the street it's like the float-tops are there a little. Look. Is that passing? Something passing over the housetops?" Bebe points across the street.
Delirium tremens, it's housetops only against the sky. Floats wouldn't be so tall anyway. Now she seems crazy to him. Seeing things. He smiles at her dumbness?
Bebe shakes jangling keys in her pocket. Still his eyes do, and so do hers the closer they get, she smiles stupidly, girlishly. Still smiling, him too now, him having detected her weakness, they smile, mutually seeing the old man and dramatic terroritorial dispute, the boys, snickering, demanding an item returned, contrasting the dementia--HILARIOUS DEMENTIA--in the old man's eyes, the way his body turns, its shaking mouth and hands.
The hatboy plunges through the gate, like a race, and the old man recoils, scared. The boy pauses, fearful too. A moment they regard each other. Then the old man relents, stepping back. The boy's wary but soon laughing at the retreating, discredited old nothing.
Burying his hand into the bushes, the boy pulls out the ball. The other boys scream delightedly.
"Let the kid get his ball!" the wink-man says.
The old neighbor looks up, scowling like half his face-muscles don't work right. Wrong how the old thing sees its authority nullified, the fence made nothing. His wide eyes show he'd thought it was solider than that, able to block boys, that the fence truly guarded against outside. That fence's nothing really, not even much for show. And his old arms long lost force to arrest boys. He looks to Bebe like for help, and Bebe sees his early-self humanly, not just a lost and bound nonentity senilely linewalking, but as a long-historied individual who had feared, perhaps specifically this very old age, and his disappointment shows like psychically, appalling her young fresh-facedness.
The boy runs out of the yard and holds up the ball, winning. Away down the sidewalk to the end of the block, running boys jubilate. They turn a corner, gone laughing at the stupid old man. He's pitiful.
Bebe steps quickly into foyer of the house, through the first door. Relief. You couldn't look at that, even if the old mindless man-thing senselessly stole balls. That guy's behind her and they both laugh, he says,
"How about that?"
She pulls keys fully out of her pocket, looking back at the door to her apartment. "He's craaazy. But the kids got the ball back," Bebe says, retreating slightly through small steps.
"You know I live here. I see you sometimes coming in. Also out."
"I'M EASY TO SEE," Bebe leans forward, flaring open her eyes.
He's Anson and she's Bebe. They take hands to shake, squeeze and nod.
"What do you do here?" Bebe asks.
"Nothing now. I have to go back home soon for something. Maybe forever," Anson says. He smells the foyer theatrically. Odor's bad, like dead beer.
"Smells! I like it okay. I hate everything closing so early sometimes. Some areas of town everything feels alien."
"Maybe everything is alien."
"If everything were alien alien wouldn't mean alien."
Anson's mouth trembles a little.
"Just kidding," Bebe forces laughs.
"Leaving is weird for me."
"Living is weird? Why is that?" Bebe says.
"Not living, leaving, but living's weird too."
"Living's weird? Oh man you're too sharp for me," Bebe feigns amazement at living being weird. Hugely smiling, she mouths "WOW."
"Anyway I think I'm really sick."
"Oh," Bebe says, her little smile reverting.
"We should meet each other before I go. At least we'll have met each other now."
"Oh, I'll meet you," Bebe says, narrowing her eyes. "Now."
"We could meet later more too."
2008--Two Years Later
"After all we tried, I mean, God knows, God knows we tried? Whatever it is, whatever we are...whatever--we really always, ever are."
Caught up in folding fabric, Bebe's body struggles against the sheets.
Heavy-headed, she awakes fully, entangled in blanket, blinking up at the circular see-through whooshing overhead: blurred fan-blades spinning. Beside her, the clock flashes 4:04. She gropes for the alarm, incoherently hissing.
Power stopped sometime during the night. Light pours through three windows onto sealed-shut boxes. The beige wallpaper's peeling, exposing another layer underneath, slightly less beige. The new apartment smells of paint, like the landlord touched up a tiny surface-patch somewhere unseen. Back living in the city.
She crawls to the lone wooden chair supporting the closed laptop, cellphone and gray pants. Without a bed, she's been sleeping on the floor. Change's fallen all over from her pants-pockets. The self-portraits peer in on Bebe from every wall, all the constant eyes felt some. Twelve borderless portraits of Bebe lean, all of them pretty big--evenly spaced out--three to each wall.
Flipping the phone open there's five missed calls. Five Elaines. Flipped closed, it's 11:02 AM. The meeting was 9:30 AM. The alarm didn't go off. Bebe stands, circling the chair and presses Elaine, getting voicemail.
"My clock stopped overnight. Call me back, or I could stop by the gallery. I apologize," Bebe ends the call, the now useless arm and device dropping to her side. Her fingers, like losing instructions, release the phone. Striking the floor, the plastic clatters as the battery looses out the back, everything spinning over the wood then stopping. The time vanishes from the bounced-upright square screen. Miss a meeting and they don't answer. As punishing retribution for your apparent cold dismissal.
The mirror in the bathroom beckons, ominously? She won't make it a ritual for the rest of her life, but these days she looks at herself every morning, seeming to feel a little residual sting on her cheeks that doesn't dissipate unless she studies herself at length. Today, the sting seems worse, palpable, enhanced because of missing the meeting. All psychosomatic.
In the bathroom, by mirror Bebe reexamines her farcical red facial tattoos three inches high,
BE and BE, her preposterous name, "Bebe," a "BE" for each cheek, there dense and definite. Reflected, the tattoos show backwards. Obviously. Again it's confirmed water can't wash away ink embedded so, buried under skin. The marks won't fade away.
Her eyes crystally stare into her reflection, straight forward like always windowly opened, letting light in and pushing something[]--out. Which is all evident. Then the image reflects back. She seems only this flat image, a two-dimensional layer refracting what light's bounced on and off it. Again she envisions the dead boy, Anson, seeing the faucet under drip.
The tattoos mean something? Still? Now she can't remember why she got them to begin with. After Anson? She's marked for life. With BE tattoos on her cheeks. Just because Anson died?
Her legs weaken, then even firmness leaves her bones. Muscles now enfeebled, like sleep's returning, or something behind her closes in, a rangeless other reaching. For her? To take her, too? For everything? Holding porcelain to balance, she grasps the sharp edges of the sink. Her teeth knock together. Breathing now, finding rhythms. This is the worst panic attack so far.
The face's surface stands broken with your name. No marks remain, and all meetings will miss, forever the ever's ether diffused more out, out--then just particles strangering through the dimmest expansion, your specks drifted through the final night as remote little bits.
The small song gone from the form overall, this elementary audibility exhausts itself away. She looks right and left and now flashes--an eternal fountain--unwavering light glimpses her and the thing now gleams, there's seeing it's big--what forever was--flowed speaks through for her--this--some moment to see. Whimpers in her, outcoming so loud God heard it then, that there's just-rounding this, by bit-seers, flecks-stitched--flared obscenely, and then their atrocious falseness was irrevocably strangled.
Away, but now not yet, still some for time, you process a mode known. Wasn't so long before she saw extinction, near as you can, but everyone knows that nothing matters. Now you must look away from the blinding intensity of what happened to live day to day.
It's time to check the weather before the morningshow's over.
2006
Bebe
lays on the couch reading stapled photocopies about commodities or something.
Her roommate Karen plays dance music. Through a light-sliver Karen's body
evidently moves, stupidly.
Why dance alone? Practice? The music throbs drum-bass
stuff, which repeats, going through walls moreso than other music. It
pounds.
Floundering thoughts, Bebe puts the long, winding sentences
down onto the table and takes a cigarette, wandering to the kitchen. Two
repugnant photos of Karen on vacation sit, magneted to the fridge. What a skanky
springbreak bikini, looking like she'd hump the ocean. Bebe plays with Karen's
stupid word-magnets, making smile up big need going, then see what I'm could remember?
Hard to think sometimes, and rethinking the waking to
parade-sound, she trembles, like another omen. No reason, something about the
kitchen's tiles, the lines under, the grout-down like her insides. It's some
day, she still doesn't know what the parade was for. No one she asked knew. Some
friends called Bebe earlier but she's tired of them. Everybody's trying to bone
you all the time. She thinks of Anson and like magic, there's
knocking.
Karen hears it and pushes open her door, turning down the
music.
Bebe puts her eye up to a little hole to look through,
saying "hmm."
"Who is it?" Karen asks.
"It's the guy from upstairs I met earlier."
Bebe opens the door for Anson. A good tall man dressed now
in jeans. Bebe observes details to tell of his fuckstatus, what lifestyles he
signifies. His shoes are dirty and his eyes are blue, his clothes adhering to
his bodyshape well. Fingernails clean enough, he lanks, examining inside.
"Come in," says Bebe.
Sitting on the living room couches, Karen casually settles
beside them. She doesn't chat much anymore with Bebe by herself, only chatting
amongst others. Karen talks about the neighbor, she knows because she lived in
the house a previous year. He's a mad oldman, dying, could die anyday, and he
stands in his front yard like he'll find heaven under bushes. HOW RIDICULOUS.
Anson's looking at Karen's skeeze-longlegs, beshortshorted,
boilsnaring Bebe jealously. Bebe knows legs are hypnotizing to weak men.
Anson's from California, will go back there soon, no doubt
now. Sick with something, doesn't want to talk about it. Talk's slow a while,
then Karen's friends, Dave and Kelly, knock and enter. Music begins, windows
open and warm-wind blows in, smellable. With air fresh, Bebe sniffs, emoting
herself flashly like the air itself is drugs. Because noses are connected to
deep-brain parts close to memory of emotion, she knows. Eyes-closed, air evokes
colorscattered things-themselves, showing unplaces once known. Some specific
then she harnasses, Bebe young-biking to a park, circling a baseball game. She
wondered about that game, how the people got organized together into so big a
league of ballplayers. Bebe stood in the center of the park where three sets of
people played chess. She went to the fountain to drink, but the city had turned
the water off already because winter was soon coming. Once the water spit up
into another hole, but not then. Bebe looked for a button, seemed like a button
should be. But it was only unwet stone. The fountain was off whole seasons.
"My name is stupid," Bebe says.
"It's cute," Anson says.
"I always wanted another name."
Anson looks down at the dirty carpet. "Ow."
"What's the matter?" Bebe asks.
"Just my head."
"Are you sick there?"
"Sick--in--the--head, I guess so. That's where I'm
sick."
Bebe reaches out to touch his hair, he's unright looking
next to the three others laughing loud about something. Disbelievingly, she eyes
their uncaring, then Anson's face down between his legs. He's all small, serious
sounds.
"Are you okay? Is he okay?" Karen asks. Her face opens too
wide, her flicking tongue wetly slithering like a stupid snake, Bebe thinks,
hating that outershape. Most of her, isn't it? Girl throws her face around
everyday, toolishly. Not much more to that dance-master phony puker.
"I'm fine," Anson says.
"What does it feel like?" Bebe asks, leaning in close.
Motherly, too forward, so what? She will be whatever from now on, she decides,
whatever is nice. She puts her hand on his back and rubs a little.
"It's just the pressure in my head," Anson barks funnily.
Karen and her friends frown scowls, expressions disbelief because they know
Anson can't see them now and it's so strange what he's doing.
"That carpet's pretty stained," Bebe says as Anson's eyes
get lower between his legs, nearer ground.
"Ye(*cough*)ah," Anson says. He laughs.
Bebe walks trancely for water, seeing smile up big need
going on the fridge. She breaks it apart.
Karen meets her in the doorway. "Is he okay?"
"I'm fine," Anson says.
"You don't look fine," Karen says.
"I'll be wonderful again soon, is how it happens all the
time. So far."
Karen and the others left to the bar. Anson's now getting
better, steadily drinking water and apologizing. Bebe shows Anson some paintings
when he asks. Here's a giant eyeball with an exclamation-point in the center,
Bebe says, it's clearly a little much, pointedly lame. She painted a big dong
with an exclamation-point in its hole once, sort of erecting up,
painting-perspective from on high like the disembodied dong strives to fuck-up
at an uncertain heaven above--but the artfan knows that this dong's coming can't
ever get so high. Very tragic. Bebe likes to paint exclamation points, though,
not dongs. Here's a comic-book about South-American monkeys looking for fruit,
she shows to Anson. All the dialogue-bubbles are filled with different
color-styles of exclamation-points, matching the kinds of vocalizations the
monkeys really make, pretty much. Bebe got halfway through issue two, but lost
motivation. A monkey was going to stop and look at a waterfall at the end of the
unfinished issue, someways comprehending all-majesty.
"I guess...I guess it's just exclamation points," Bebe
says. "It's a stupid gimmick, but I like them."
"That's something."
"It's something," Bebe
says, wondering about ever trying. She strolls up-off the couch as Anson reads
the comic.
Through the window wind enters, night-cool blowing, more
and less fiercely pushing. The undaying carries voices from near activity,
clearer like good friends not known yet, just soft-coos and laughs carrying.
Hearing nice chatter, Bebe wanted to be the people, up next door or on-decks,
different floors. To unhinge from body, floated-out, through upseeing it all
just passing. Become all mystery people stood on other surfaces, feel laying on
a mattress, an other-body's weight sinking-in, down, small pleasures like a
girl's tooth-brushing or man's beating-off. Different from Bebe. Somewhere up on
another floor, you hear drunks sing together, everybody knowing lyrics, you can
envision a group pumping-fists, "here I am, rock you like a hurricane." She could know what they know, assuming their best
parts, even liking shitty songs. Possibly anything, but only from far away,
apart from their specifics. It ennobled, seemingly, to dream vagueness,
unbound.
"So what is it? Tell me. If you want?" Bebe says.
"You don't even know me. Talking about disease
shouldn't--that shouldn't be the way people meet each other," Anson says,
closing South American Monkey Comics.
"Tell me."
"I...okay well this pressure in my head, when it gets bad
it's like...everything changes color."
"It messes with your eyes?" Bebe says.
"Everything changes color. All life goes from white to
black. Or black to white. Like stomping on a human face. Not like politically,
but completely. Everything. You know. It's all inverted, and it's worse, it's
gotten worse, and I can see everything like...not colors at all. Sort of...maybe
a gridworld like Tron, but different."
"That's pretty serious."
Standing room-center, Bebe imagines what gridpain would be.
Makes sense. Everything going from up to down, being to not. The things just
chemically spoiled, rotted in-senses, not possibly redeeming because you're
their discolor. The real colors around are you. But maybe he only philosophizes
his pain to seduce? She doesn't want to be taken in like a skank amateur.
Despite youth, in fact because of it, you need to redouble defenses against
cocks, being always wary.
"I'm sorry," Bebe says. "I just never know how other people
really feel."
"Just telling the truth. Even if that's
weird."
"Everything's weird. But we like it that way," says Bebe.
"How else could it be? And you know it's just...just your chemicals. Bad
forces."
"That's all it is," Anson says.
Bebe thinks new weight too much, like goodness might ably
recede, to darker indefinitely. Some awareness surfaces-moments, edges of
ghastly overarching realwebs networking, dimensions supremely exact and what
for? Maybe you don't want to meet what gods are.
"It's depressing," Bebe says.
"I try to be pragmatic. Like I've got these troubles in my
head, but it's amazing anything exists."
"Yeah," Bebe says.
"Seriously."
"Of course I'm serious. Who's not serious about being
always amazed," Bebe checks the room's corners, offhandedly assuring herself of
the absolute incomprehensibility.
"Some people are unamazed," Anson says.
"Let's be amazed! It's common sense."
Bebe
goes leading outside, pulling his long arms up, up. Dusk is very beautiful and
Anson's looking better under it. Getting some color. The people visibly walk
forward in straight lines. You'll be better, Bebe says, you can keep walking and
get better. Bebe and Anson turn, left and left again to a residential street, a
brown dog there animated, rattling a window, he's a big one barking! He's a
killer! Squirrels freely cling treesides, sniffing jerkily around. There are
whole dreamplaces. Streaks of not-nothing swirl-seemingly to them, as autolegs
locomote, most of mind in mouth.
Nice night
there, even under the overarch of horror-tinged, self-nullifying reals, and what
that was once, algorithmic a tight be-good chemically, fractally for those two,
like ladles sinking, up-pulling new vibrations, artful, delicate orbs there over
the thing, glissandically resounding pollution of art-hanged from overness.
2008
Carrying a computer-bag, Bebe's out walking. Ascending
metal stairs to the train platform, around suits and ladyworkers blithely stand,
a couple on cellphones. Long coats flap as wind comes. Phones air-connected?
Signals like radio, fielding-electromagnetism you can't see. Enough to make you
nervous, the sheer numbers of signals always around. Whole programs and speech
transpire in the air, can be taken in, transmitted and interpreted by the right
tools, but all you've got is weak hands and five ordinary senses, no antennae
like that. What else could be around? Unsmellable? Coexistent?
Something with different hands, maybe closeby. Could they
identify differences between you and ashes, would they see any specialness? Do
you have any? Feels so, but it couldn't not. Is there anything here like you
think? Just some chemicals--that's--just some chemicals. |||t's true it's all it
is and shaded forces |round, waves and signals, a blown-up underground God
growls, realplacing outed-come, sure-spaced, always like that this sort of
incarnation, looking so. Whatever.
Bebe's cheeks sting hot and cold, tattoo-texture
consciously felt, as gusts impact her. Eyes flair seeing a street over the
railing. Busy-beavers everywhere. Straight walks, speedy bodies with long-legs,
carrying leatherskin bags. You can hear a fight two drunk-bums have underneath
the tracks, an old lank couple yells at each other. Screeching drunkenness, a
domestic disturbance without walls.
Huge holes sank in her, anxieties from the missed meeting
and everything else. Elaine could have gatewayed Bebe to city society she now
needs. Now Elaine won't answer the phone. Bebe has resume plans. Bebe will
travel by-train somewhere and work on her resume. But you need to know people.
It's all word of mouth.
Some lady's looking at her cheeks. All feelings plummet and
Bebe flees from the standing people to the platform-edge, staring at the tracks.
Every year a few more people fall down, the train or track killing them.
Becoming more fear.
"Shouldn't it transform like butterflies?" she says. What
is it? She doesn't know what it is. What's not to fear?
It mattered so much.
She'd lied to Anson. That wisp of boy momentarily recalled,
only memory-components now more degraded, deteriorating in time. She can see him
different places they were, his lips moving. His ideal form in her might say
whatever in a voice like he had. But feeling the way the el-platform supports
now, its firm seeming-suspension for her body, she knows a solid surface doesn't
break yielding or buckle at all even with all the bodies weighing upon it. Like
that, he never was here. Once-was, but his pieces broke--it was all it took--his
parts were stolen from him, the simplest thing. His mind's nowhere anymore.
Ever, back and forward, just what he was is gone. You could make many sentences
the same, saying he's unbecome. Just his approximate in her endures, some Bebe,
and Bebe's Anson image surfaces-blurrier again, the poor, poor thing it was. Not
it but he.
Nothing's maintained forever, or even fractions counting.
Could be nothing. The day's vision, platform of people then, there could shatter
shardly, not being, swall[]owed, unsinging, an unsong with no mourns recalling.
Just the forgotten all-dead, inscriptions on stone fade as the inscribed
world-realm vaniss[][ ]vanishes. Even now's passed, albeit microscoped--looking
long like fullness to you--but what cuts is only small, like a piece of grain on
a mountain-base. Partitioning like minds do makes moments like a window's glass
(glass is liquid slowly, slowly dripping-down). It erupts selfing what's human
all-song, however ever-ends sever the slow-motion pacing-chemistry of
metabolism, its effects-ending, like for Anson and Abraham Lincoln. Bebe now
phones Lakshmi, a girl-friend in another state. "Tell Elaine I'm sorry," Bebe
says.
Traincoming sounds drown out, Bebe says "hold on." Chugging
the biblical big-sound, the train stops and all board. Most find some open
seats. Bebe sits beside a tall white man balancing a guitar case between his
knees.
"I hardly talk to her," says Lakshmi.
"She won't answer her phone."
"Wait. She's probably pissed you missed the meeting. How's
it going?"
"Bad. I need a job. I was hoping maybe at the gallery or
something, something with Elaine, but she's not going to want to do me any
favors now."
Lakshmi sighs.
"Now what is that supposed to mean?" Bebe says sharply.
"You need to/ \rid of those tattoos. No one/ \ants to see
that," Lakshmi's voice drops out.
"Oh."
"Your friends felt bad for you/ \Anson? Sorry/ \thought you
knew! You acted surprised/ \hard for you to get an apartment? What/ \expect,
they're the first thing anyone sees. Why/ \why?"
"It's just tattoos on my face. I think--I know," Bebe's
embarrassed, speaking. She's flushing, hot.
"You don't know? Why did you get tattoos on your face?"
"Anson died. I know. To remember life," Bebe says,
unsurely, sounding pitiful and lame moreso even to herself. Outside through the
windows, down is a graveyard, excessively signifying, like her old shitty
paintings of the eyeball and dong. She's the worst artist. Look at her lineage?
Her stupid, religious mother. Bebe's a child, and Anson just used her like a
whore, that was all. Any dying man would use a naive young girl, but now she's
older and with facial tattoos, nobody will ever marry her. No one would marry a
girl with her name tattooed across her face, especially with the sophomoric
existentialist symbol it seems. But Bebe...meant it to be so? She doesn't--
"Nobody ever/ \rgets they're alive. Those are all just
words, Bebe! Everybody knows, everybody's trying to live like it means
something, what do you think everybody's/ \ing right now? Look around! They're
looking for happiness or whatever/ \you went through some crazy shit. Everybody
does sometimes. Not everybody tattoos their face. What is that, some art
theory?"
"My face isn't a theory!"
Eyes all come onto her from around.
"I still feel sorry for you, Bebe, but hearing you complain
is--"
"I don't complain. But I...didn't think how people would
be, looking at me. I thought about...I don't know, burning. Like...I didn't
think how...it would, I knew..."
"Fire? Is that/
\metaphor? You can't even talk about why you have tattoos on your face? You
better get an answer, because people are going to asking you for the rest of
your life. I'm just doing you a favor. Elaine asked me. You're crazy! What other
explanation is there? That's the only explanation."
"I don't know."
"I already felt weir/ \at's doing this in the first place."
"But why?" Bebe whimpers.
"You went totally crazy. Now you want a job with a friend
of mine? What was I supposed to say? Your cheeks are like a joke, it's like
you're playing a joke/ \verybody all the time. Nobody can get used to it. Then
you go ahead/ \miss meetings too? That's pushing it."
"What does my face matter?"
"You tattooed your name on / \cheeks, maybe you're used to
the idea but nobody else is. You have to be a really established artist before
you can do something that extreme. And even then only be respected by a few
idiots in art school, and laughed at by everybody else. FOREVER."
Bebe ends
the call. Eyes cut in everywhere, inside the rumbling car.
2006
In the morning, Bebe resents Anson leaving the bed without
waking her. She can't resist men well. She will try harder.
He stops by days later to say he's off to California and
won't be back to town. His things are packed. Bebe sees two men carrying boxes
down the stairs. There's a car out front.
"O, men carrying for you!" Bebe says. "You're lazy!"
"I'm in a hurry. Sort of. It was good meeting you," Anson
says, holding an old lamp, the cord trailing behind. He wipes thick, accumulated
dust on his T-shirt, and extends his hand to shake.
Bebe shakes his hand, that shaking continuing a while. "I
can barely remember what it is we were talking about. Just outlines. But vivid
outlines."
"That's why I liked talking to you. You're so honest," he
says.
"I'm a straight-shooter,"
Bebe says in a President George W. Bush voice. "I hope you're not so sick. Come
see me. Anything, it was really very nice to meet you."
She
turns back, her apartment's empty. Still furniture can be used at will. Nothing
moves. Her painting of the apartment hangs on the wall of the apartment between
the two windows, she made sure to paint a little painting-square into the
painting, a gap where she planned to put the real painting she was painting, to
suggest whatever you'd call it. Anyway, she takes it off the wall to the trash.
The empty square in the painting, the nonpainting missing within the real
painting, does embarrass her. Now there's nothing there anymore at all.
Months ensue and Bebe feels bad.
"Something that guy said," says Bebe to Lakshmi, after a
party. They're walking nearer Bebe's house. Lawns are dark, the streetlights on
the block temporarily gone, dimming. Down sidestreets calls carry from
roving-drunk groups.
"The guy from upstairs?" Lakshmi says, wasted. Barely has
her eyes open.
"He was describing this scary thing with his head. He
actually went back to California I guess, because of his head. To get treatment,
maybe."
"That sucks."
"Yeah but he was describing what it felt like when his head
hurt. It was weird. About the world being discolored. Like...the opposite of
mysticism, or something? Like for an instant, you see, not like beauty, but
something else bad."
"You should read some Buddhist shit or something. Or meet
your needs of love and affection, then philosophize. Then it won't seem so
bad."
"But then it's an illusion."
"Yeah, Bebe, that's the point."
Next morning she stands by the waters, watching the
splash-billows buckle, the wind hitting water, welling up wave-walls, kind of
cascading blackly out there, constituting the chill-day's moment. Bebe walks
straight up and down the shore, thinking. Around-times seems toppling knocked at
narrowly spilt split-seams, that wire-system of the any-worlds appearing
garishly, only an empty container, only-gashes, and her, another kind of
thing-over. Over the thing. Little droplets of water airly upcarry, it doesn't
remotely mean.
Weak-touches worldly, she imagines the timelines, how deep
the planet went, those eternities the shore-rocks took shaping so, eroding
eterno-repetitions for slow-chiseling coming finally to this--=-==-=-shape. Why
compel reflection over it? She shouldn't. No consolation matters. How limitless
fear, pain, and thought-then only-tatters, drifting listlessly, briefly blown by
the outer draft. No, no consolations could really be, only alarming what was
before, and still these brief pains transpire. It appalls, seeing what shrunken
layer[]all is. How imbecilic world-grammar is, showing nowhere to flee to, just
weeps-splashing more fakery from the soul-loom. She will lock in herself to die
someday. So what?
"Not living," says Bebe, answering. And that yearning
resounds, the base query comes obviously. A certainty: it's unanswered. Like
mock-logic of the primate overlord-archetype, a self-congratulation through
demeaning His lessers. Where in the world would you look anyway? How degraded
because of protocols, programming for mediocrity, pushed down always by some
hand, twisted to ordinariness, then pimped by universal rockness. Huge bags to
throw away, always runtiming, ripselving to downpours, it's the saddest thing.
Tepidly, rashly rotating somepeg, there's waking pants putting-on and bathlayers
like birth su[]submerging. Its dribbling unbecomes the passage, just purposeless
map-making? No one can say anything but puffed fatuity.
Where would something like you go anyway? You haven't the
first notion. Lost peril, on-perch precariously, you're looking hard but it
won't matter, none flee much, they're all like you, locked-lost in hulls
catastrophically ruptured, any-keys out of that casket-thing containing them
long thrown offdeck, busily their hope is wisely worldly, while the world's
conditions sustain their gibber a bit longer. Something frames behind sceneries
like godheads. That is all.
2008
Bebe's laptopping at a table just like anyone, head low.
Why aren't there more unsecured wireless networks? They all have locks now. Down
the long-list see locked air. Air's telling air's locked, computer's
inner-antenna detecting seven, all around, seven? How's it possible pornographic
films can computerly incarnate from any one point, furthermore from seven
separate sources? Plus the same very place is radio stations and TV programs
speaking in samely small potential space-holes, an antenna made-probing, and
devices can receive. Always around city-places, data-packets potentially stream,
ready to give and take if you know codes. The networks are locked, but there.
Bebe knows hardly any-science about how force's energies are everywhere at once.
Everyday she forgets more school, and how do atoms link anyway?
Shooting antennae transmit TV images to space everyway,
signals anyone could view, if any viewers could. Probably aliens'd think
mankind's Good Times and
All in the
Family are like Aurora Borealis popped,
signal fireworks blazing only like Jupiter-gases. And what else are they, only
mind-slivers yelping, pomposity out-pouring like smokestacks, we think we mean something. Why
should you care about beings? Silly to think empathy's anything between sentient
species, they'd only say "huh," is likely, and keep eating their silicon-fuel,
never radioing us blueprints for superships, like nobody'd affectionately pet
waterfalls. Should anyone care about phenomena because it likes its own
phenomenality? Self-serving, no? Self-interest's hard-wired, a hyper-fundamental
aspect of evolution by Natural Selection. Why should you think a pond feels, or
aliens care? That chemicals churning should mean much of anything, even to
Almighty God?
Anyway, those TV signals fire off toward every direction of
outer-space? Is that like her head's all-encompassing, as it seems? She does
exist, significantly. Well, what would you call this? We seem everything
ourselves, no? See this: [ ! ] Right? You're you now? Am I speaking another
language? No? No? You think it vacuous folly to assemble words together so?
Little foolish and unrewarding? Fatuously Artsyfartsish to speculate along such
barren lines? Rather do data-entry? A lambchop for you, some noble savoring?
Watch worldcup soccer? Parse Samuel Johnson essays? Go to a cockfight, then,
instead of this truly bland and futile sentence-stringing, quasi-comprehending
unsummation? Bask in the good fun of faroff sniper headshots. Study Martha
Stewart for successful partyplans. Hero, tell! No, no, wait, stop, you, tell all
the properness protocolled, you've stone-set for good, good reason! Don't let me
interrupt your preciously planned, sensibly wellset unfurling of the asshole end
of some hiccupping shitspaced heaps. Your vitally true insights were beyond
vulgar reproach. As you club baby seals hungrily, half-orgasming in sheer
wonderment the moment its tiny skull explodes under your well-sharpened axe, you
can explain in detail how you've already summed up and philosophically settled
your reality sufficiently for your modest means and worldview, and furthermore
how you find positively unseemly certain grammatically and rationally untethered
gibberings. What should I do, you-wise, to entertain literarily? Tell. A little
maudlin clitoral-massage, some prostate fingering, a firm but essentially gentle
scrotal-sucking, after which you can pat your own back for your enlargement of
knowledge, understanding and empathy? A positive moral message, maybe, to uplift
the middlebrow to a truer, more refractorily laminated mediocrity? Oh! And
wombing words, please, not weapons bluntly, garishly applied, haphazardly.
Well go fuck off then. Read something else, Bebe doesn't
care. Maybe it's just everything touches everything's simmering, and now you're
every-thing transmitting universally, like omnipresence? You understand? No? Is
Bebe really crazy, is she out of line? Who do you think you're talking to?
Hopeless, sure, of course it's lame grasps, but at least Bebe tries to think,
it's all that's propping her...she can't help it she's not so stupid as to tie
infinite mystery-knots by moronically myopic godhead-distillations, or laserly
reason, clearly like-Spocks, hard science-definiteness is largely apart from
mystic-bigness, the deathly big thing that's everlastingly perpetuuming.
Locks
don't need all that bandwidth, you're just stingy. And why don't people give
rides? You could hitchhike everywhere but nobody will pick you up. Any car has
room. That's out of the question. You could never inquire after random
car-pooling madness or they would lock you up, in the whitehouse forever,
whiteroom, whiteroom, banging against walls straight-jacketed, with your cheeks
you'd fit. Never can ask strangers for rides, or tap bandwidth unpaid for. It's
madman talk, that share-style. "I just wanted rides," you'd say, condemned. "I
asked any driver I saw if they could carry me." Mad, they'd whisper, this
crazy-cheeker babbling, wanting--with unspeakable perversity--to crouch in
backseats, rounding towns. With strangers? You'd have very little in common,
after all. Make sure no others ever see her. Lock her up in air! Lock her! Lock
her! FOREVER.
She'll flee the shop soon, tattoos too heavy, like real
weight sagging her cheeks. Lusty eyes travel from tables hitting her, but they
linger without desire, zeroing-in, heads only doggishly turning, wondering why
you're marked there. Her okay-looks can't conceal the tattoo-shining lifeblood
red.
Others always see sooner or later. Ugly, ugly, Bebe's
uglied. FOREVER.
The coffee-girl had stared too, eyes back and
forth--affirm--they were real. Then, smirking, the coffeegirl bit her lip not to
laugh. The sordid, daily, unseemly self-consciousness of a self-consciously
inscribed seeming-self irrevocably bends, warping this blazing-miraculous, and
fuck words too. All the gesture-directions. No, no miracles, Bebe scowls. What
pettiness the real sun should be made of, if anybody could know? What
dirt-headed drooler dragging their fists against ground is the
grandmaster-designer of such a noxious, vile congregation of vapours? Bebe's not
right, but nothing's ever so, is the point, the pointed sharp realness of the
stupid realm Earth milking its ways, this burped farce-faced cosmos, knowing
nothing, only growing growling lice-life like dust, only accumulating dust.
Pissing life all over itself, soaking, darkening-down its pants, like a coked-up
frat boy 16 draft-beers into it, not even aware, just pissing and pissing as he
stumbles, tripping over a garbage can, collapsing under somebody's window.
That's our god-father, our earth-mother, now fully urine-saturated with our
hymn-humming wet thought-glows: alcohol sweats all-over, half-consciously raving
about "yall buncher fags, fuckin' faggots" while the other universes laugh at
His lameness, poking his pissy, passed-out pussy-ass all night, always careful
not to get any of that shit on their hands. They'll talk for years: remember
when you pissed all over yourself? Classic. That one night? Shouldn't mix so
many chemicals together or you will soil yourself.
...END EXCERPT
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