#benito sinclair

Starring: Clifford, recent college graduate with a kitchen job on campus Mike Simone, Cowell Dining Hall General Manager The chef, older gentleman with an extensive menu Henri, keeper of Fridge #2 The messenger, layoff handling expert and ex-WEA strongarm Ricardo, Cowell Student Lead Carol, girlfriendus ephemerus Cowell Dining Hall staff The Forever Dining Hall staff

Carol, sitting legs-crossed on her frameless mattress, listening to an Alice Coltrane record from the 'borrowed' pile in the living room. Close to meditating, finding herself preoccupied. Consider Clifford. Put yourself in Clifford's shoes. Telling herself, probably too often, Read Clifford. As a text he'll be easier to say goodbye to. You don't have a choice but to say bye to him that way--he's already gone. 0. Helmeted in machinery it hunts you, sounding like engines in the air, its arteries hemorrhaging, constrained from bursting by the tissues around them. Cavernous nostrils, splintering teeth, thirsty, vacant eyes: a security dinosaur rubber-sheathed in kevlar skin. Impenetrable, but not indestructible. "Their skin was so thick, and so dense," you'd been lectured, "you wouldn't be able to get a bullet through it. You'd need something larger." There is, however, a kind rumored to indeed be indestructible, made of ground-up chicken or fish, compacted, reshaped, breaded and golden-fried into nuggets and sticks. Composite objects, torn fibers of meat mashed into larger chicken nugget and fish stick Tyrannosauruses, betrayals to the proud, original distinction of the Rex's form, somehow maintaining in their condition a predatory instinct: the urge to kill in absolute, reptile, fast-food solitude. To nibble on you and nibble on you until you stop screaming. Long as you're not chased by this kind, you stand a chance. A high-up country road paved not a year past, spotless between property lines. A grid of wet orchards. Log fencing so old it's petrified. That's a lot of fog. On your right runs the slope of a forested hillmound, on your left a meadow cut by a thick mist distorting the thin window glass of a small river. Take the bend in the road. The slope continues up on your right, dewy grass bristles gleaming down along your left, Tyrannosaurus so close, stomping after you around this long corner, the visibility of which, you now see, offers no appeal. No hard angle, no warning sufficient; just the uncertainty of when contact will come.

The great jaw chomps. No surprise here, no roar. There needn't be any roar. Only his breaths. You can't make sound. It won't come out. Then uprisings across the drum heads in your ears, all that background noise emulsifying into a nervous and blaring static. You yourself become a chicken nugget, or fish stick--indestructibly compacted, reshaped, breaded, and fried golden-crisp. Rebuilt, rootless in shape--taking a left towards the river, across the grass, Microwavable Rex in tow. The sensation of lift. Awaken by canals in another hemisphere. Where, you're not sure. An open air market, a familiar salt smell so fresh in its own way, two or three other languages written everywhere in strings of new shapes, new positions. What feels like a lover not long past congratulates you at what seems to be a reunion out on docks, under a fisherman's awning. The gulls squawk by, the sea lions bark down among the barnacle studded columns. You would cry about something but you're prevented from doing it, whatever it is. Just choked. It's not her, it's you. As her. Rather, you are her. Then management's there breathing in and out with you in peaks and troughs, saying any associations between solutions and dreams come from inquiries demanding the latter make any sense. The corridors only appear--you remain skeptical, but are you breathing for yourself now, or two? Or more?--to the provocateur. Or is it inquirer?

"No. 'Provocateur'. Nothing else will work. Now do you want something to do, or do you want something to do?" grinning, expecting your attention. Mike Simone. What feel like sparks scatter on your forearm--the chef has dumped a batch of coconut balls in the deep fryer next to you. It's oil.

1. "There's news: news that will hurt Mike," the chef told Clifford after Mike had returned to his office. This guy couldn't get a break. "It's... it's that, either way, fire him or move him out, they aren't going to be letting him stay at Cowell past June. I'd put fifty bucks on it." "Some are blessed with the high road, ascending the mountain," Clifford said in a lousy caricature of some asshole idea of an Eastern tongue, eyes blinking, coming back now to the scattering of burns on his arm, "and some must tunnel through." He rubbed it. "Yeah... and some just go around. Christ and it can be hard to predict who. Lemme have that onion," reaching, beginning to chop, "and stop trying so hard to sound like a graduate with me. Your future employers will be well-acquainted with the smell of bullshit." The chef rolled the onion in some batter and plopped it in the oil.

Clifford asked if Mike knew yet. After a minute he said, "I can't talk about management anymore. I was up all night with Gloris, at Dominican." Wife of thirty-five years. She'd be gone soon. Sorrow had been clamping his mood these last few months. Clifford always let it dampen his and stayed quiet. "Thirty-five years," the chef repeated to himself, eyes wide, lost in their work unsuccessfully blocking his instinct to endure memories. Flashes of Gloris came in whole reels, not in snapshots but in whole periods of her life. She'd given him comfort, relief, company; earlier on, the sex young people luxuriate in and the old fetish. Fuck it, he'd thought, and settled. Before her he'd thought these things weren't even possible for himself. So he gave her what he could. Had Mike ever been as lucky? Probably not. But now empathy towards Mike had become distasteful. He noticed Clifford's freshly speckled forearm. His best efforts at thinking of something other than impending loss this morning included the way his bald, spotted head would look in a big chef's hat, a really tall one. He'd stood alone in front of the bathroom mirror staring at himself for a half-hour. Well. The thrill came and went, there being always the stacks of steaming trays of broccoli and carrots and cauliflower to worry about, getting these damn kids to clean the mini pizza station in time before the night shift switchover, and carving those rows of roasted chickens, into trays. Wasn't tonight's off-menu cheddar beer soup supposed to be on the stove ten minutes ago? The essence of duty wafting thick as steam. The chef looked to Clifford's slack posture beside him. The boy wasn't terrible company at work--certainly nothing on Mike--but he best responded to a whip, like most of the white kids here. He swatted the young man's upper arm with the back of his hand so it stung a little. "We're out of pepperoni." "Oh right," Clifford yawning, the first shift's smoke wearing off. The chef sat against the counter, his fingertips gripping the pressure points on his temples. He held his hat upside-down and crinkled it against his navel. Demonstrating the gap between his and Clifford's priorities he formed sarcastically wide eyes and said, "Hello, Clifford. Yes. You are the one who must now go get the pepperoni. The pepperoni. It's what you do. For the Dining Hall." Their eyes met. "Fridge #2."

The chef closed his eyes and rubbed his temples again. Soon the pain would move to his shoulders, then to those soft spots on the lower back of the head, then the jaw and up to the temples again. It made Gloris more present than he needed. He put his hat back on and whistled a few bars of "Panama" by Van Halen to refocus. Clifford, later strolling through in his blue tee and yellow cap, name tag riding left pec, white headphone in left ear, supervisors on the right so as not to notice. The big kiwi colored potato blender passed him by, the salad ladies in the salad area, the sign-in sheets by Mike's office, the end of the day's sour garbage cans hoisted over the vomit-inducing dumpsters, trays of chicken and steaks roasted in salt and rosemary, waiting for a second cooking, where they''d be finished with a coating of the chef's own Slug Nectar barbecue sauce. "Sometimes you have to take it there," he'd said. All else fell away as Fridge #2 appeared before him, as some suddenly sacred threshold. He stood modestly before the walk-in and swung its awkward metal door open. It was heavy and creaked with punctuation. Moisture billowed out in a cool plume. He stepped in. Henri waved delicately from the back right corner. "What can I hand you for, comrade." Henri, with his extraordinarily long body, thick ass, small arms. He seemed to hang right-side up from the floor; that is, his shape seemed to somehow defy gravity; that is, he'd float off if it weren't for his ass. Shivering, always shivering, glaring now at Clifford as if from some distance. "Need some pepperoni. You got the pepperoni?" Henri spotted an unopened bag in the corner and made his way over. "You know it sort of, always seems like... you're always the first one to arrive, and always the last one to leave this place, Henri. It's like. Like every day." "I must always be in here. I must always work in here." "And no jacket? I thought you couldn't work after eleven on campus; it's illegal. We haven't been keeping people after hours have we?" "It's like slavery, I guess," shrugging, eyes still the same, "but if that is... part of what I must do, then that is partly why I must do it. It's my condition." "Benefits package?" "Oh no, nothing extra. Nothing more is needed." Smiling, in good faith. "Just the managerial benefits. County transport, medical and dental coverage, union, allowed off-time in Summer. Though I must always be in here," saying it again, his smile enigmatic now, pausing. "I'm allowed out sometimes, when I use the bathroom. At night. Well. Not allowed, exactly." Henri seemed uncharacteristically guilty of something. If the comment wasn't true it should have been. Why was his face unsure? Henri paused longer, then his body began trembling, making a purring sound. He held his elbows in his palms. His eyes moved in elastic spurts. "Sorry. No one asks, so I never say anything." He handed Clifford the pepperoni. "'Turn not from the feeling of ownership when it drives you to curb your ambition', Mike always says." Clifford thought of his cat, who at that statement--were she to comprehend language at all, much less English--would have stretched out on her back, squeezed her eyes, and yawned. She, after all, found it so easy to act like she owned the place. Carol used to say her only contribution was being cute. Carol must have known how the cat felt. Henri began stocking fruit. For minutes Clifford meditated on his individual actions, the way his body shifted between the boxes and shelves and the way he squatted to reorganize a row of vegetable buckets. There was a surplus of faith in the attitudes of Mike and Henri, their ability to do this kind of work, live this cafeteria lifestyle in which glory and humiliation became one. Henri kept stocking. Look at him. My time in the fridge shorter because he knows the fridge better, hands over these goods so much faster than I would. Always on-call. A specialist. The only pantry chef who never leaves the pantry. Cold storage, in this case. Clifford said, "They talk a lot about the way we value ourselves here. At school. I was just thinking about your 'use value', doing this. This way." "I don't hold any 'use value', necessarily, to myself. Being here. I'm dependent on it. What I do's just for the Dining Hall. Anyway, it's been too long since I was anywhere else for me to know. So I guess I don't consider that." "Then you're an even truer asset, Henri. Like land. You're just there. Somebody else is valuing you in a way you never would do yourself." "You're a daydreamer, and romantic of some sort. I can tell. We like you here. But your dreams and your romances make themselves seen in all that you do. You have a knack for those mini pizzas and a good eye. But first and foremost we have a need for reliability. We depend on you. As such we must maintain a level of confidence in order to continue doing do." Henri sneezed like wet fowl. "At least that's what Mike feels I should tell you." "Rapapport or Simone?" There were two Mikes in management, but how long was Simone really going to be around? And which was Henri's man? "Simone. Trying to discourage Rappaport from coming in the Fridge lately. Hiding his precious pickle jars. Can't stand them. He's an idea person, like you. But a lot louder. Has something going with those pickles. No role model. Hates Mike. Like everyone else." Henri's hands went into his armpits. "I think Mike just wants you to hustle. They're thinking of sending him to another hall or firing him, across campus. Maybe Porter. Anything helps. To keep him, I mean. They want to see all you kids moving." "Sure it wasn't because something he did? Just since it usually is." "Well. They: they, Clifford. We aren't getting it done under him efficiently, I think they think. That, and most people can't stand being anywhere near him." He shifted his arms and grabbed a broom. "And the music he allows. I just want things to stay the way they are, personally. I'm prepared to fight for what we have with Mike. I'm comfortable." "So I'm not that bad, then?" "Oh. No. You just look like you never want to be doing any of the things you ought to be doing whenever anyone's looking, like everyone else around here. It's... basically never really a good time for Mike's superiors to show up. Hence I'm saying something. To you. For him. For us, really." Clifford glanced around at the metal shelves, their plastic containers abloom at the lids with carrots, yams, potatoes, melons, tomatoes, bags of thawing meat, blended condiments and boxed refill for ketchup and mayo lined up beneath them. Did Henri, with whatever unique condition his body had, ever get to look outside? Was he only peripherally aware of the outside, from the door's periodic openings? Sudden, weak moments of light without a presence, where the infertile yellow glowed?

There was slavery and then there was slavery, he thought. Then he considered that there also could maybe have been neither. He said, "All these ingredients. How can they mean anything to you without there being something else besides them? Or thinking of the way they are before they get here?" "Well. They're not each other, for starters." Blankly, "There's always limits somewhere."

Deep faith can require hard contenders; there's only so much room that far down.

He felt a surge, a new appreciation springing inside himself, for this keeper of Fridge #2. "You know Henri's doing a real service in there," he said to chef, pepperoni in hand. "I never spend more than twenty or thirty seconds in the cold because of him." "We're each of us required for a specific task," starting up now, "I'm not really in their inner circle, though I ally with them on food. It looks to me like you're being let in." Let in? "All I have to say is, consider Henri: there's a passage connecting all three cold-storage units--two fridges, one freezer. When he's not in one he's in another, then he shifts on demand. It's all one room to him. He affords us operational efficiency," chuckling grandpalike, hand going for the pepperoni, "but would you want to be him?" He doubted it, obviously, and Clifford didn't answer. They laid the blank frozen pizzas out in an array of just-thawed dough canvases. In the managers' office, later, Mike looked up from behind his desk, intense focus coming into his eyes from just to the side of Clifford, onto the boy's face. A scar ran from the summit of his left cheekbone to the edge of his jaw like the mouth on a wooden puppet. He sat tense, rigid. "I'm just worried about getting laid-off is all. I'm always a little worried, I guess. It's supposed to keep me in line." "Please, please. Clifford. I don't want you to think there's any reason to think that that's the case. We need you here. You're one of the ones. Come in, come in. Is that pizza?" "Oh, yeah just made myself a little custom pie here, when I finished with the rest. Hope I'm not, uh, in trouble." "Oh no no, let's have it, let's have it." "Also fried up an ice cream bar here, with that coconut batter, and some candy toppings inside." Munching, his eyes curious, "An ice cream bar." Stopping to breathe, "You fried ice cream? We can have ice cream bars?" They munched. "That is absolutely beautific and all-around politicule," Mike snorted, reflecting on the snacks, looking up and then then all around with the impulses of a lizard. He bit an ice cream bar and continued talking. "This. My friend. Indeed. Shifts borders between ridicule and beauty," more bites disappearing into his mouth, "profound and rotund. You rofound me, Cliff old boy," puppyfaced at him, mouth full and chewing, "at least protund to laugh," and the pizza disappeared too. Clifford noticed two tubes of lipstick on Mike's desk, raising his brow. Mike brushed them into drawer. "There you have it, ladies and gents, it's now been said: 'Beautific and politicule'. 'Rofound and protund'. Only Mike Simone, only with my snacks." "Those words are great kid but what you really want is 'gaseous'. Take 'gaseous' with 'nausea' and you've got 'gasea' and 'naueous'. Now you're really getting 'whomesere'. "If words were stories, you'd gleefully misread half of each of them." "Cross-interpret, really." This rare form of grammatical dyslexia--whether Mike suffered from it or just thought it was funny--bore Clifford's first genuine motive to sympathize. The boy still enjoyed the guilty pleasures of English. Guilty pleasures. Mike would generously pontificate on Pink Floyd. It'd become another pastime, charming to Clifford. Though he'd limited respect for the topic. Mike often made it known that he ran a Roger Waters fan club, a sort of newsletter and web ring, a labor of love which he said constantly lost him money.

But it made his other thankless real life at the dining hall bearable, despite his more spirit-oriented love for his managerial duties. Clifford once looked at a copy of his newsletter in the office. It was a stapled bunch of 8.5" X 11" sheets with a pink cover page and very bad ink drawings cluttered all over. In terms of labor, Clifford couldn't imagine how this was competitive with the dining hall. In terms of love, he understood. He read the letters page. Mike had chosen several voices from his three-hundred subscribers. That he received any letters between issues was astounding. The first wrote, "People treat you terrible Mike. People are so mean in this world. People are cruel. We are the cruelest animals of all. We make the ways we cause pain emotional and personal and we make them complicated and we make outcasts of people. Perfectly nice people. It's not about kill or be killed with us Mike and we do it anyway. They do it anyway. Next time someone says your newsletter sucks or if people at work aren't being nice to you tell them you're doing a good job and you don't care what they say because they're mean and mean people are stupid." A snapshot of fan pathos, sent directly to his own new hero. Like something in a Roger Waters rock opera. Sort of. And if Roger Waters ever read Simone's newsletter, wouldn't it be this same fan-to-idol moment, as often we're speaking to our idols and not the actual recipients of our words. Clifford said, "I don't know... to me the band hit an unfortunate creative plateau by early '74, probably late '73." With urgency, "Don't argue that about them. You shouldn't argue that about them. If you say that, then you're saying their whole discography between 1974 and now are insignificant--if not... bad! I just can't stand behind that, or anything allied with it. You're in with these punkers, obviously." Clifford shrugged and tried not to seem nervous.

Mike smiled and let out, "You're my best employee. Do you know that? It's you. So responsive." "What about Henri?" "He's something else entirely. But you're out on the floor." "That's... wow, that's inspiring, really. Frightening that it could be true, all things considered, but still inspiring." "Nobody's getting fired. But we have to watch each other's backs here now. Upper management's on my ass. These fucking people." "What did you do?" "Nothing, I," taking a breath, "I run as tight a ship as they need, we've been voted the best dining hall on campus. The absolute best. Students took a vote: best desserts, mini pizzas, best salad bar. They wrote that. Then they get on me because of a few complaints from some few kids, some fucking loudmouths. Take it out on me." "I'll uh. Set a good example. We should really try putting fried ice cream bars up as an option. Also, you should let me use fresh basil and tomatoes and garlic on the mini pizzas." Clifford waited a moment while Mike tried to remember what he was going to tell him. Eventually Clifford got tired of waiting and said he had to go. "Chickens are supposed to be quartered and served in less than ten minutes..." "Tell Ricardo to come in when you see him." Ricardo was right outside, texting, leaning. Clifford told him they'd been getting complaints lately, mostly about Mike. Ricardo said he knew someone who wrote one of the complaints. "I guess she felt like he was always trying to rope her into... you know, uncomfortable conversations about such... weird things. Like the 'color of the sky, on earthquake days'," and chuckled, walking into the office. Mike came up behind Clifford later as the boy was slicing into a chicken's back, losing himself in the crisp, moist crunching, lost in the spectra of aromas in the air, thinking about God for a moment.

Mike said, "Clifford, do you think much about God?" "Mike, woah. Of course. I was just thinking about God right now. Coincidentally." Mike smiled, his scar crooking left, his mouth confined to move vertically. "You're something, boy I'll tell you." He pointed at him. A one-eyed squint. "Everyone thinks about God. Some would argue we're always thinking about God." "Not right now. Not all at the same time."

"I know, it's like, no way, right?"

Mike gave him that pretend-hurt look.

Clifford said, in another quoting-voice, "'Like arguing over whether or not God does exist, we run out of concrete variables so fast in considering whether God can exist that to continue debate without talking in long, fluffy sentences made from generic terms with vague meanings is impossible'. Know who said that?" "'The word God itself holds truly the vaguest of all possible meanings'. Know who said that, Cliff?" "No." "I did. I just said that." "Well. It's yet, somehow, also the most precise," stuffing the last tray of birds into the hotbox. "You're a pain in my ass, but I think it's a good pain." "That's wildly inappropriate, Mike."

2. "There is news: even though Mike has been doing a better job, people generally don't like him. This will hurt him," said the chef. "How often did you say they try to fire him like this?" "Oh, they're always ready to move Mike around, it seems like. Don't know if they can necessarily just get rid of him with the restrictions. If they get ancy they'll move him over to Porter. He was at Nine and Ten a while before he was here. Already had a reputation." "I want you guys to try something," Mike storming through, "These babies. Tell me if they're nutty enough. I want to make sure we're ordering the right brand." Macadamia and white chocolate cookies. The chef and Clifford each took one. "Oh, just fine, just fine Mike," said the chef. "Yup." "You don't think we need something healthier? But maybe sweeter? Some people are allergic to nuts. I don't know. I don't know." "These will probably do," said the chef. "Offer one other alternative."

Clifford, nodding. "Oh yeah," Clifford dipping his cookie in an abrupt glass of whole milk, "and you can always roll them in extra sugar before setting them out." "Listen. You guys should know. I've been getting complaints. The food has got to improve around here." "Complaints about the cookies or complaints about the management?" "No, no. Now be nice. While some students have compared the 'stacks of cookies' to 'posterboard', and we do order those--not bake them here." The chef rubbed his face curmudgeonly. "What it means, Mike, is 'your head' is like 'a stack of posterboard'. I wrote that stupid comment card. About your head. About ordering. Not cookies. How many phony comment cards from the dozens of phony comment cards are you taking seriously? Very worrying, here." "Damnit, our own side dishes are getting panned too. Nothing's stirred often enough in the tubs. Anything said against this dining hall reflects directly on me. Your fuckups are my fuckups." "People could be a lot harder than 'posterboard'. Christ," the chef walking away. Clifford, going back to his increasing thoroughness about the dining hall's needs. No need for disturbances. Mike back at his desk. The chef said to Clifford and Ricardo, "Thay're definitely looking at a few options right now. One is he stays. No one wants him to. But I don't know." When the chickens were quartered and in the trays Clifford went back into the fridge feeling sorry for Mike. "Does the body toss the skin or does the skin toss the body?" Henri sometimes welcomed fellow workers into parodic singsong. Clifford assumed the question was rhetorical. "Chicken nuggets?" Henri handed him a full bag. "Don't eat them anymore, myself. Got me sick last time." "You can get sick?" "I'll usually eat anything frozen, if possible; cooked first or not. They thaw inside me. Nuggets and fish sticks were my favorite for a while. Now I can't think about them without gagging," then thoughtfully, "getting...sick...that last time sucked. But it was a kind of medicine. It began for me a deeper kind of love for this dining hall. The way it's run, from the inside-out; the way I can sense other parts of the dining hall from here, like a body. I wondered if the body had erogenous zones for a while, which could all sense each other. I don't remember being...sick, I guess is what you would call it...passed-out, wake-dreaming, eyes open...as much as I remember waking up afterwards. I felt fond of where I was. In that place. "Place?" "Not just Fridge #2--all Cowell. The whole Dining Hall. A Dining Hall that we are all a part of--there is the inner dining hall, where we are now, and there is the outer Dining Hall--The Forever Dining Hall." Clifford hadn't a clue as to what that meant. "I can't lie to you, Henri--your dedication is in every way unmatched. I'm envious." "Everyone hates Mike. I hold a love for him. I'm the only one who truly does. Perhaps I'm the only one who can." "I don't mind him, he's not that bad." "But of course you cannot truly love him. Can you." "I suppose not off the bat. I could eventually, though, soon..." "Doubtful," Henri's head shaking. "Anyone else had this experience? With the chicken nuggets and fish sticks?" "Mostly everyone who was switched out at the end of last year had been working under Mike. They overhauled his staff except for us two. Upper said their 'sell' was becoming too 'hard', our menu too distinctly eco-friendly, the tone cultish. Reverse it or we'd be moved out, or our extermination prioritized this year. Not one of those kids complained on the way out, and now they run the campus co-op." "I'm telling you: fried ice cream bars--any fixings. It's gold." "You eaten a nugget yet?" "No, not yet, I guess." "Mike seems to like you so much. Maybe today will be your lucky day." "I'm still pretty new. I figure so long as I've left the option open to eat them, what happens is out of my hands." Clifford headed to the deep fryer chuckling with the sack in his grip, passing the chef, "the value of chicken around is astounding. We're not only serving roasted barbecue sauce-smothered chicken quarters, we're offering fried breast hunks too. Plus Chinese chicken salad." "Actually those aren't hunks. They're ground, compacted breast meat. Mike's favorite. Composite. Mike's favorite." "They're everybody's favorite, it sounds like," Clifford dropping the basket of nuggets into the bubbling oil. Clifford later, getting a plate of nuggets down on a break. A boy playing guitar on the stage, some folklike tune breathing its way through him cool and shy, whispered singing through a sea shell. Clifford's phone rang. It was Carol. "I'm thinking it over...and maybe I should have some alone time tonight." "The whole night?" "I don't know. Maybe? She said nothing more for a moment. "I mean, you know if you want to talk about anything," Clifford let out and paused but she said nothing again. "I guess this means I should turn my couch back into a bed. Or, like a true bachelor, sleep on the couch." "That is the saddest thing you've ever said," she said. Clifford silently waiting. Carol saying, "How about I take a few hours tonight and then we talk." The phone sitting there on the table. The plate of nuggets empty. The boy's song finishing in startling, full-chord pluckings at once near-atonal, disarmingly soft, calm, attractive as Carol tossing baked zucchini in a bowl with oil and vinegar and laughing about her favorite Tarkovsky film, with all the subtle noise of the television in the other room padding her.

Wait. Where did that come from? He preempted his initial feelings of not being needed by her with an awareness that he was not needed by her. Then dread, like Clifford had a medicine ball on his lungs. Images of Carol were impossible to disallow. Wimp. This is no kind of behavior. Be honest: there's no past, no present. Only what lies ahead of now at any given time. Milestones left to report accomplished. One cannot lose a thing that exists only in the future; this attracts the stoics. There can only be one direction when it's felt that all others lay behind. The weight upon him began to alleviate. "Mind if I sit down? Haven't got the stomach to squeeze in with the student population today," said a man with a tasseled leather jacket. Clifford's head perked up, supposing he could have been a student still to this stranger, but pridefully wasn't. He was the only uniform eating right then.

The man had a calico pony tail, its nature ambiguous. He was somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, depending on his party schedule. "You a parent?" Clifford, cordially. "Don't think there's a kid knows what's good for him who'd want my genes, boy. My line of business puts those priorities elsewhere, if you see what I mean." "You're forward. Unless you're a porn star, I don't." "Run a private, man-to-man, contract-based messenger service for several clients at the University. Whom I'm not at liberty to divulge. Powerful men. Mine's an ancient tradition, and going strong. With me." "I'm delighted to break bread with the carrier of this torch." "Yeah, you too, you too," eating now, but still talking, "so I'm in layoffs. Got used to being the bearer of bad news. Here for the manager today. Got out of the service the same exact year as him, you believe that? A fact my employer thought'd help me soften the blow." Clifford continued eating. "You'd be surprised how many students I'm doing jobs on these days, too, 'student' being a real occupation, legally. Which there's gotta be, so I can take it away. Compared to before, the Regents have gotten smarter. The more fuckers you expel, the more chances are offered to students that give more of a shit. Least it seems like, anyway. Anyway things are changing. Whole industry's changing." He munched into the roasted chicken with the Slug Nectar all over it and said "God," then glanced at Clifford's fried crumbs, catching a waft of fryer aroma that seemed appear every few minutes, linger and fade out. His memory said he hadn't experienced this combination of senses since he'd quit the music business, back in the seventies when he'd performed A&R dish work for Warner-Elektra-Atlantic group off the books. His time in the service had lent him carnal knowledge of such espionage. Something crowed from the stage. "Mike's been letting noisier groups slip in between Wednesday's folkier acts," Clifford explained. "Can't say I like it. Good he wants the kids to put it out there, though." "It's admirable." Then groans, washed in feedback. Clifford and a small resistance of others had been giving the impression it was tolerable and were openly willing to entertain each stage effort. Those other folks' groans trickled up, though, and the complaints laid the blame on Mike. Another couple boys came on, laying out pedal mounts and wiring their instruments to their amps. They began to play, briefly capping each of their respective parts at the press of a looping button, allowing the loop to then ride out, then adding. Layer after layer accumulated until the sounds, after five minutes, became themselves indistinguishable from the whole effect; a gaggle of jukebox angels blaring to Clifford; a statue of Nike rammed through a trash compactor to the Messenger; dying old printer trying to print, no picture coming, to Sue over there. "How can you sit here. And listen to this. Your generation. You're crazy. Can't you hear what they're doing to Nike?" "Well, putting it that way, it's a kind of natural sound you must admit. It reflects culture at a time when we might consider the value of some raw materials--mineral wealth--as being worth more than our own footprints in social history. Or maybe it's that both great anger, and a wider representation of the margins than ever, relatively speaking, are now more commonplace." The Messenger glanced about at the hall's largely indifferent or annoyed crowd, many of whom were leaving. "Nice try. Not common enough, I'd say." He drained his soda. "It's the sound of the surface becoming static. Were you to be correct. Which you're not." They could no longer hear where the music's individual parts began or ended. "Stuff like this will never sell beyond an inherently low capacity market." The effect of one boy's resonance knob came in swells. "See, it's sort of like, in cycles. Why not ask what we hear in the static image? This is what's being asked." The Messenger brought to his mind the image of a spinning vinyl record. "But this is the revolution inside. The revolution in you. So what are you left with outside? Itty-bitty uprisings everywhere, like someone dropped a glass into millions of pieces, like little fucking origami creatures, no two exactly the same, yet each indistinguishable from the next. And for what? You haven't a clue. Maybe you are moving, but it is toward nothing. And not together, that much is clear." The Messenger reached into his tasseled jacket for a handkerchief. Clifford caught a glimpse of a particular Cuban guerilla on his t-shirt, before the jacket closed up again. Clifford pointed at his chest and said, "'Does Not End', I believe that guy on your shirt said." "The most redundant of possible worlds, you may live in. See we aren't stupid; it's not like we didn't have this stuff in mind when we first really starting selling kids blockbuster records. Shit." "Then what's there for you to complain about? This is the result. A lot gets piled on in times of great shift. Some adapt to the conditions, everyone fights them. The meaning of effort has become further nuanced." "Bah," said the Messenger. "Your generation judges us based on its own past, then blames us for thinking our future looks bleak, when it does, realistically. Because of your past. You're probably jealous of our future: it will seek to undo your mistakes. We'll have to become greater than you to overcome them." "Our children. You're children. I'm not one of these professors around here. But--it's clear for some reason to my generation--that you should at least appear to take things seriously when people older than you're around. But you don't want be seen as adults by adults, in the ways adults conceive of adults as acting. What, are you afraid if adults see you that way you might actually have to adapt and live up to it?" The music had dashed his warmth. He ruffled through his pockets trying to find his flask. He avoided fried foods now but kept his whiskey in reach. Clifford didn't know what to say so he threw out a canned, "You don't have a desire to be a child? At all? What was all that music you used to sell all about? You guys started this whole entire thing." "Yeah. Well. This here's the only real fountain of youth for me, now, boy," drawing up the flask and taking a long sip, a shot's worth, probably two, then backing off of it and looking around, taking a second. There's definitely something about this place, Clifford considered. Take Henri. Look at how much Mike is willing to do with the help of Henri's dedication. That they put the needs of the hall before their own. There's little left in my heart to keep me from dedicating the utility of my citizenship solely to this culinary institution. Maybe this is a nudge. Mike walked by, smiling at Clifford, "you know how they're going to remember me here?" "At the dining hall?" "On Earth, silly. They're going to remember me as the guy who built this place up from the ground. From the ruins they handed me when I started here." Clifford saw The Messenger leave Mike's office five minutes later. He stopped for a few chicken nuggets on his way to the hallway bathroom, out by the exit doors.

3. Clifford turned from where he'd been watching The Messenger and looked between two hot boxes, then back at what he was supposed to be doing, then did a double take through the hot boxes: Mike was there staring at him. He motioned with curled brow for Clifford to follow him into the office. He must be in quite a state, Clifford presumed. "There's something I need to show you." He received a questioning look from the boy and cackled wildly, "No it's not like that, no no, really Clifford," then to a slow and patient speed, the quality of tape slowing, "I'm serious now. Step inside the closet with me." He motioned for the boy to enter. "After you." So he did, into the lightless void. The door shut behind him. He turned to see if Mike was there. The office light vanished across the man's face in striking proximity to his own. "Just a few paces to the left," he said. "You'll see the control room. Watch your head." They stepped through a short storage door that opened into a larger chamber. Screens of what looked like security cameras at first were mounted across the entire wall facing them, cyan tinting the darkened other walls. "Absolutely beautific. Controlled observation." "Clearly observation and surveillance are different than control," said Clifford. "They built rooms like this during our earliest LSD experiments. Social situations: parties, dinners, orgies. Apartments with families in them. Didn't matter. You wanted to know. So you observed. These days the real experiments are with nanobots. Controlled molecule-groups forming and breaking in and out of compounds, traveling in formations, through fluids and gases to achieve limited chemical control over compatible parts of the human body. Perhaps to harm them, perhaps to heal them faster--all from the inside of the body. Why not? Useful in the medical world, useful in military capacities." Clifford noticed most of the people on the screens looked as if they were asleep at the tables, and passed out on the floor in some areas. There were a few people scrambling around from camera angle to camera angle. "Maybe even useful in the workplace. Welcome to 21st century management, Clifford. This campus was one of those early experiments. Did you know? They used to set cameras in the most obvious places. What were they thinking... outside the building they put one above the back loading area but hung it below a beam instead of above it. Had one up on an exposed corner. First time I found this stuff it was clear to me that I was meant to rewire it. Make it all come alive again. It was just too lucky." His face was pure and joyful, like none he'd shared before. In his own way he glowed like the monitors, both self-illuminated from within and bathed in their light. "Replaced the old cameras with smaller, newer ones; so small you see all the things you hadn't even thought of seeing. Put one that's heat-resistant in the back of the oven here," watching together as the skin bubbled on a sheet of crisp breasts, fat washing down the burned skin, as nobody was there to take them out on time. "I stuck one above the pizza oven's conveyor belt," mini pizzas going by in a screen of horizontal slots all spinning the same direction, same speed. Clifford imagined Frogger with pizzas instead of cars. "All sorts of other places you can't know about yet." "I dedicated three monitors to Henri. All of them along the wall the fridge's door is on." Henri looked up at them through the screen with longing and waved, the red and blue of his veins showing through the white of his skin in the screen's grains, gray at the ends of hair's brittle strands. Mike smiled down at him. "He does that every hour or so. The best thing? I got mics wired all over the place. Twice as many as we've got cameras." He patted an old four-track tape machine gently. A sixteen-channel Mackie mixed to it. A wall of used and unused tapes stood above. "Semper fi." "This seems like an odd strategy." "There are parts of the strategy that I can't control. You see? It's something so comfortable that... God I don't think I could be happier at any other job," forming a monk's smile, "not in a million years. Not in Forever." On the last word Clifford felt a pressure drop in the room. Mike told Clifford that when he had first encountered the nanobots himself, he'd daydreamed a recording studio on the other side of the wall, where three refugee members of Pink Floyd had taken a sound engineer hostage. The technician's sweat poured over the console, the barrel of David Gilmour's sidearm pressed against the back of his head, Roger Waters to his left drawing on a pad of paper and repeating, "this is the only way I can express love. We will surround them. Become their environment." Nick Mason doing the French military's execution march on his lap with a pair of sticks. "Then I think you'll side with me. You already have, in a way, joined Henri and myself." Clifford, passing out. Mike, continuing on awake, standing above the boy, still imagining as he looked down his favorite rock band's glory, the way a child reads the words National Bestseller from the cover of a mass market paperback and continues to be impressed after leaving the store. The sound engineer at gunpoint. The band fantasizing: we may or we may not grant mercy this petty technician, who--though seasoned, caring, and wise to us--has retreated now towards his own cliff, teetering on the edge of useless in manifesting our artistic vision. (ka-chik).

Mike was decidedly merciful. He chose a large cereal bag from the Dining Hall's pantry to take with him on the road. Cinnamon Toast Crunch. He changed cars in the parking lot of a drive-in movie theater two cities down the freeway and another man drove, while he crunched.

4.

The Messenger was leaning back on the toilet, his pants collected around his ankles, eyes still open. Thinking hard on his time in the music industry, focusing on genre-generated thinking, sub-market proliferation. The stall spinning. His inner voice thin and perfect as a computer's; some Haackian virtuality wrapped in a wrinkled spinster, talking to himself. The whole time you were trying to call it by a new name but you never bothered to change the process--angles, data flux, sets of positions in which you originally viewed it, so 'its' meaning never actually changed, while 'it' did. The new name just stood for the fact that you couldn't change your original conception of 'it'--'it' was as if rock, rock and roll, R&B, funk, electronic were all at the same party and it went on for years. By the decade in question they had each been playing the wall on different walls of the same living room, turned closer and closer inward over the years, spiraling impossibly and achingly slow towards the same center, where a six-foot slab of redwood lay, stained, sealed and looking like petrified dinosaur shit with less character, waiting to display this confluence of genres for all to watch; the slightest movements measured in months, each one a stop-motion image on a composed timeline. Saliva, passing like film between reels. The room's full of industry face from all the outlets, all central nodes, hubs; all representatives from the circulatory system of the popular records industry and, in turn, the unpopular record industry: all pressure points across the anatomical map of the culture of their livelihood, their productions, their reportage. These ones in the middle here nude, together displaying and bartering flesh at times seductively, others playfully, easing in and out of whatever common tortuous need...release, maybe more than that. Lashings. Each movement comes in tones, moods, rhythms, sounds that remind you of melodies but aren't, in the model; every feeling of being touched spawning a new sub-section of industry; every hybrid meeting, every ripple converses in a language of interferences. Had you been there you'd see the ripples from that meeting on, instinctively. All of them increasingly intersecting, cross-pollinating outside the nucleus. Gathering density on the graph, every trace back and forth, every reference a  wormhole between events. Those who attended the first years of the party didn't need to try touching the display, didn't take part. Here in the later years we can't help but allow ourselves to. As though the party never really stopped. The people who were there just have different amounts of their body, different parts of their body present. Some are still profiting from either being a part of the sex act since it began or by keeping parts of themselves there for the sake of identity. How would one be able to know how much of oneself is still there, how could we have any confidence in coming up with a quantity with which we might conceive of the energy, vigor, or passion left there. The chef does not dream. He defends himself, wide awake in a psychic battle, having eaten the nuggets. They fight on radio waves. The nanobots a are several billion strong. Only the chef recognizes what they are today, having gone through it before and reacting similarly. Didn't know they'd be hiding in today's batch, did we. For everyone to experience. Neither sleeping medication nor layman's hallucinogen; rather billions of automatons communicating inside him, synchronizing themselves into corresponding shapes, like swimmers. But he has seen the Messenger over at physical sciences and engineering, has prepared himself for this siege with a reiteration of his training, knows this man who came to lay off Mike did so with a parting gift their mutual employer mustn't have known about. The effect delivered by the serum was elegant. It attached itself to your brain via nanobots, that infinitesimal chain of workers whose pattern traveled like Mike's sprawled, flying squirrel-like body, and which activated the amygdala, releasing dopamine and serotonin in precise levels, making the host fall to a state of semi-consciousness. While triggering this effect the nanobots signaled in a range the host could hear: high and mid overtones of Mike's microphone feedback recordings. It wasn't the sound of the dining hall as much as the sound of being Mike while listening to everyone in the dining hall from the control room. Clifford's out running on those bicycle wheels again. You've felt different since you became like a chicken nugget or fish stick, become absolutely indestructible. A Tyrannosaurus Rex wearing a saddle and a computer-assisted helmet with remote controlled laser cannons hurdles behind. The control room your destination. Another wall of graffiti in a language made from unlocatable characters; the feeling of a roar without a source; the urgency that its source is near; the footholds and handholds of the battered wall. With every pace you feel the avoidance of death. The lasers blast at you from the helmet, heat singing hairs on your forearms. The jungle burning, you climbing, skin ripped on your calf, trees crashing, foliage brushing and breaking, stomps. The dinosaur is indestructible; you are indestructible. You make it over the wall and through a courtyard to a door. Outside the wall crumbles. Inside there's a hallway, at the end there's a door with a red and a green light above it: the control room, laced to its brim with levers and switches. Hosing and copper part hydraulically operated pieces of equipment--and part person, even--working in the center, awash in the light of a thousand screens. Mike's cottage. In the forests behind campus it sits, raised on a seven-foot tall log base wider than the building by three feet. Curling smoke rises in the thin, frosted morning air. The light's falling white and soft. You've never been here. His voice carries you along the house corridors, carpeted in thick white shag. A fire is going. The heads of mammals hang stationed above the living room mantle. The smell of pine aflame, herb roasted meat in the oven, a cigar. Footsteps coming closer. The occasional popping of sap from the flames. The voice has always been there but now you hear it. "Indestructibility, Clifford. Mawarinohito. The people that surround you. Use them. Your actions composite. Basic distributive: spread it out before you. And turn." Your path is lit by Mike's glow. You do turn. He's just stepped out of the shower and into a marshmallowy down-padded indoor outfit, with ski goggles. "I never saw how you really looked before. It's like I can see you from the inside now. It's warm, bright," you say, "like a microwave." Feel a blossom grow and unfurl in your gut, dry and flittering in a cool wind as Mike appears in a kimono. You follow him into his kitchen to fix a drink. It's as if he's aging before your eyes from inside his marshmallow outfit. His mouth will never open again. His eyes fall to his feet. You know without having to hear it out loud that he needs you; that you belong here; that your place is Forever within this management team, these circles, this force in Mike's cottage of possible cottages.

5. It was a brief seven minutes in which seventy-six people ate four-times that of chicken nuggets. Then long moments passed in languor: students and several faculty lay daydreaming in their spilt drinks, captive to Mike's frequencies generated by the nanobots, until he faded out and new noises began to buzz everywhere around the dining hall, like fog condensing to rain. Police and ambulances came in cries and wails urgent and electric against the barriers of a cautious awakening, of those arriving back. Everyone came to in nearly the same way and around the same time. Campus doctors said the chemical would wear off soon though clearly they had to be guessing, unless they were in on it too, which they might have been. Clifford felt it leaving, almost all the way. Mike was gone. He'd scrawled a note in white chalk across the black double doors between the kitchen and the loading area. It said, "you can't remember the beginning of your life, nor can you remember the end of it. What's something that's like life, but isn't, that you can recall the end of?" A few inches down it read, "dreams don't begin. Your narrative memory catches up with them after they've already begun." Clifford felt the pressure change back to normal. Whatever Mike had intended here, were a goal to his to have been taking everyone to the Forever Dining Hall with him, he could only have done so temporarily. Clifford wondered if there would be a morale boost, like last time. Or maybe this experiment was different. Or maybe it didn't go right, and we're lucky to be alive. As the day went on he became conflicted. People seemed fine after fully awakening. Mike had left the mortal dining hall for the next batch of fresh hires to carry on and with luck rebuild. Suppose Mike didn't need everyone. Maybe he just needed one success in the whole experiment. Maybe one success would make it worth while. Then it couldn't matter to Clifford who ran this place. It was about duty now. Upper management initially sought to avoid hiring anyone under the age of thirty for Mike's job but Clifford had the effect of peanut brittle in child's reach to them, seeming to already know everything required of the job. His coworkers liked him and his general gumption about duty offered the temptation of a probably painless turnover. For a boy he had the good fortune of signaling he'd make everyone's life easier, here in the dawn of a new regime. Since he'd woken up days prior he'd thought just like the management, just like how he'd thought management would think. At first he worried others would notice his spirit and mock it, but he was too useful, and began to not think about earthly matters. Then without asking his age or name upper management sat him down. Luckily he had been first; they held no further interviews. They said Clifford could help them out full-time for the year's last month, as manager, since whether he turned up again or not Mike wouldn't be there to finish the job. It was a fit. Glowing. "I was planning to be gone in a month," he said, "because my lease expires after the quarter. But the more of myself I can put into this house of service, of daily good, the happier I'll be. This is the home of my efforts." "Don't try to put too much of yourself in the food," chuckled one the uppers as he went through Mike's browser history. "We only need you for the month and a few extra days before last work day. You get some overtime if we can keep you until the twenty-second. Can you wait a few extra days to move?" "I'll work it out." They nodded. "My friends, I'll try my best at this. For all of us. For Mike. He really was a great man, despite what it looks like now. He was probably sick, but he seemed to be a part of some cutting edge experiment. He embodied greatness. He embodied man." The back of his skull flooded the front with the piety, or pleasure of self-righteousness. He felt himself dissolve into the staff, management's schedule, the food, the building, the cameras, the recording equipment; and it was in the new regime--the fragrances of the new regime, attitudes, confidence--because something was needed in an atmosphere that had fallen solemn, having been mysteriously dosed; awoken to an amplification of their lack of power. What sort of feeling, this, Clifford, this Clifford of all possible Cliffords?

The impulse to indulge those desires which convinced himself he existed extricated itself in printing sign-in lists for each day, checking each week's shipments item by item, walking the front and back of house to make sure the students performed the tasks he'd asked of them. And he worked with the presence of a ghost, some cloud in place of a personality whose absence and silence were louder than anything in or around the dining hall. He made sure nothing really happened there, nothing went unsmoothly; that the aftermath of the incident was mostly unfelt in the workplace. No more trauma. Replacement Mike. Update.

6.

There had hung what seemed like quiet for weeks now over Pacific Avenue, down between the tidal crashes and boardwalk bustle and the highway streaking down the side of the Doppler-brazen canyon, into the river delta Southeast of campus. It was halfway through July. Clifford and some of the other staff had been switched over to maintenance crew for the Summer, a sort of emergency option for employees who'd work full-time year-round at the dining halls if they could, but couldn't. Because of Summer break. Work crew day was a Friday each month when everyone spent the first four required hours at the Signature 16 Cinema and four more barbecuing at the beach, drinking bourbon with a honey-mustard meat glaze for the grill stirred-in. It was that time in the early afternoon where the film's just finished and nothing else in the cineplex is worth skipping to. He'd missed his ride out to the beach where the smell of carne asada called to his nose in pheromones and  and the sandstone eroded in arches, shading the tide pools. He already had a terrible hangover from breakfast, a work crew day tradition. It was a bad one but the streets were empty enough to accommodate. A warm, dry wind blew in. The only thing on Clifford's mind. That there had been a real live Mike Simone here once, up and down this avenue. An exemplary--though somehow also mostly topless--team leader. A severe job coordinator, striding with his intent gait and awkward gazes here under sunsets at the continent's edge. Simone was that proud and tragically unsung sort of hero who would, each weekend, trade his otherwise solitary, up-the-mountain living for an impolite appearance at the mall. And always trying to pick up new friends. He wasn't one for alcohol these days and had said he liked it too much once and now was through. He ventured almost gallantly in and out of the cocktail joints, feeling the presence of others, denying himself the drink. He'd leave thirsty for more than company and continue on somewhere else. At work Ricardo had said he'd seen Mike weasel his way into a group at a bar and soon press the party to go back to his cottage behind campus. In the woods. Clifford turned from his pioneer gaze across Pacific. A smoothie repaired him.  He gave some time to the thought of Mike owning his own few acres. He remembered hearing Mike mention it. There was something up there. Clifford's lease was up. For two weeks he had slept in his storage unit. The thought of quitting work crew this early in the Summer just to move pushed him to stay and take the money. Nothing was lined up back home. He hadn't talked to Carol, had stopped listening to her old messages on his phone. Clifford went down to the ocean, where the wind tossed his hair around and he stood under one of the sandstone arches. Mike had told Ricardo at the cafeteria table over dinner, "you know you only get so many kilos of snow; so many vials of that good cid; so many pounds of the sheesh; so many cases of the special ree-serve hooch in your one life, kid. Gotta know when to give up, when you can settle down with some conditions, that is, self-imposed ones." Ricarado laughed uncomfortably. Later he thanked Mike for joking about his bathroom deals instead of firing him. "Hey," he'd said, shrugging, "it's only my ass if I'm actually taking a cut. Otherwise, I don't see it happen. And these damn kids are fucking sneaky these days, alright?" winking. "Gotta know when to give it up though. When to settle down with some conditions, hopefully some self-imposed ones." Ricardo got off on enhancing Mike's troubled and nervous appearance he never felt the pull to treat the man with any sign of respect, so he made fun of him. Respect would be giving him too much, as though you desired something from him in return. "How's Gloris?" Mike had asked the chef with some big stinking grin. It was a stupid question because he knew the answer wasn't good. His intentions were pure but in practice damaging. He grumbled. "Fucking Christ hell of a thing to ask right now," to which Mike's face would offer only some protective smile that said he was saving face. "Head's killing me. No fucking sleep. Really, really. Fuck." And away in a series of mutters towards the loading dock and through the bathroom door.

Simone: his body baring down Pacific. Road up the side of his sunburned face like a vein of cooled lava. Running into people he knew from work, who tried to keep walking or returned a hello, stopped, and made sure they had to keep going.

At work Mike asked the chef, since he was also an older guy, if he'd like to go hiking some time. None of the students he invited to movies and hikes ever wanted to go. He told the chef he had a couple acres behind campus, and a cottage; not exactly his home, more like a retreat for gentlemen. The chef said he had a bum knee, wouldn't let him out hiking. Mike asked about movies. The chef told him movies weren't his thing.

Clifford in his storage unit. The sun baked the tin roof, his sweat collected on the concrete. He was tired of smoking in here and bored with the pot, bored with working maintenance. It wasn't the same. He packed a bag and swung it over his shoulder. The storage unit's door crashed down behind him and he turned to think about a bus ride home. Instead he walked back to his car and drove up the hill. He parked in a neighborhood along the campus's south edge.

A gentleman's cottage. A hidden villa fit only for a certain kind.

He found himself hiking through the forest along the east ridge, the sounds of the highway and the narrowing river below. The birds called and he had to keep himself from stopping every time he thought he heard rooting noises coming from the brush. An hour passed. He came across a thick pine grove where red needles carpeted the forest floor and he relieved himself a couple yards off the trail where the needles had fallen in drifts, like snow.

The sun kissed him through the trees. He let it blind him for a second. His eyes meet the dark forest for comfort. Things were not immediately visible. About a yard back where the brush began and more sunlight shown, Clifford spied an outhouse, painted in five colors: white trim over stripes of olive, black, red, and brown. It looked aware.

Drawn to its shape, to the harmony of its right angles there, its cuteness in the wild, he walked out from the groves. There was an immediate change in temperature when he distanced himself from the shaded redwoods. He took the shack at several angles before going up to the door. He hiccuped, then stepped up and opened it.

It had once been awesome, he could tell. The colors continued inside: everywhere its neglect was evident, compelling as its past beauty. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and silverfish scattered from the surfaces when the door sprung open. Fur matted the toilet seat, frazzled in areas with pine needles where above the window been smashed by a rock. He looked out at the treeline from the stoop, almost for so long that he saw himself there in the shade, like a pool:

As an undergrad he'd walk back here from bundle to bundle of redwood stalks, so dense that they grew together in groves, giant broccoli for some enormous grocer's hand that never arrived, thanks mostly to the forest service, but also to the fact that grocers never grow more than seven feet tall. Most growths had at leas one burned-out stump. All in all there were thousands of these blackened rounds on campus property. If you waited a month at a time to do it, when nobody else was out doing the same thing, you could go back through them and find glass pieces either left on accident or hidden for returning smokers beneath a leaf, in a crevice or under some pile of needles. If you didn't find enough that way you could raid the meadows after busy weekends, and after organized celebrations like April 20th. For the scavenger, that day was rife with forgotten goods. There were the caves below the highway to scour as well, and one also paid mind to campus trails. You could rack up a drawer full of small pipes, which only this kind of student population would ever consider disposable. This also meant that if you soaked them in alcohol and boiled them clean, freshmen and the occasional dire needs case would buy them for just under market.

He could practically hear himself aging. Those were days of entrepreneurial misguidance. Who was a man of action to be off cleaning and hawking pipes, wandering? The dining hall had let him concentrate on the mechanical propriety that gives a job its charm.

There was a one room cottage ahead of him, a sort of octagonal hut with tinted paper over each flamboyantly colored glass window. How had he not noticed before? A generator and a small shed sat against the near side. On the other a makeshift drive led off to the fire road and that, he assumed, ran back out to Empire Grade. He went round to the front and jimmied open the panel door, a neon pink ordeal though the rest of the octagon's colors matched the outhouse.

Inside analog synthesizers and tape machines had been strewn about and three tables stood with boxes stacked on them. Two windows had been broken-in by rocks. Notes had been windswept about the room. Pink slips of paper meant everything had been ruffled through during the short-lived Mike Simone manhunt.

Clifford tried turning some of the equipment on but nothing worked. He took a look around before going out to the generator to see if it needed gas. The rod dropped into the tank and came up again. It was low. He didn't know what else to do so he tugged at the motor for some time until it started. He went back and tried the equipment again. There was a tape in one deck that Mike appeared to have been working on. Clifford played it back. An entire open air market worth of noise plumed up but several consistent, standout voices and the character of their reverb meant the mics were indoors. He heard his own voice, then those of Ricardo and Mike. A sliding tray made a scraping sound, then slammed into something metal. The chef told Mike the cookies were alright.

It was the dining hall as it had once been. Mike hadn't left without compiling his last day.

Clifford cranked the volume up and grabbed a mic from a table. As the old feedback rumbled he swung the mic in front of the speakers like a pendulum. He recorded his cottage and Mike's dining room surveillance noises became part of it. The room's eight sides fed a reverberating effect. The levels became so hot that every pop and click was heard like percussion. A shoe squeaked on the kitchen floor. Then it was like an animal trying to get in from outside. Then it was gone. Then there were more. So many people were breathing that it shook the monitor subs. All the talking got to feeling like scratches on Clifford's ears. He began pressing buttons he didn't understand.

A delay box sat to the left. The signal was already being sent through it. He flicked it on and hit the send button on the mixer. The tape took on the effect. First he left the dry knob all the way up and the wet one down. Then he adjusted the distortion a tad. It hurt more. He turned the wet knob right. It threw everything into disarray. The pops and clicks and scrapes and squeaks and conversation all repeated themselves unto decay so that a semblance of rhythm could be imagined, or cross-rhythms if you liked. the mic picked up the bubbling speakers now, so that the low rumble, unstable and heavy underneath everything, pulsed like a bad heart. A rhythm would appear and then the feedback would rise and drown much of it out again. Then they would trade off.

Overwhelmed, Clifford stalked the room with a second mic, breathing in and out over it, teetering on the edges of tables, trying to capture as much of the room as possible.

Night fell. Clifford lay asleep on the floor. He didn't dream of Carol, didn't even remember her. Reading materials collected near the spittle under his mouth. His notes and Mike's lay scattered together. His drool fell on one containing quotes from a Harvard Gazette article, arguing "descriptions of dreams are narratives... side effects of chemical changes that represent the real purpose of this nervous activity, like learning and consolidating memories." A slightly dryer sheet near that was cut from an article by someone named Wieder. Only its conclusion was exposed: "...the dream that results from the reaction is beyond measuring, beyond description. It may best be defined as the essence of that reaction."

The windswept redwoods whispered en masse as always. You could put it in focus because nothing else was happening. The tree tops brushed and caressed each other in waves and the bristles just below of canopy flora against one another. The stars arched silently by. Clifford had repositioned himself. His head then lay on a bundle of dusty cables, eyes rolling around behind his twittering lids. His lashes wriggled. He scratched his beard and went on sleeping. Weeks passed.

7.

It was nearly fall.

One can properly frame retirement sitting on a river, thought the Chef, his feet in the water and hands folded. The river narrowed to a rushing stream of deep green, carving through the sandstone bottoms of the coastal mountains into town and out to the bay. His daughter's magenta kayak buoyed him on the water's surface. He didn't like borrowing from her because she gave him looks but he couldn't bring himself to use the kayaks in the garage. He wouldn't go in there at all. One was his, the other had belonged, like he had, to Gloris. Without her his kayak wasn't really his. And if he'd taken his own she'd have returned to him again, of which he'd grown weary. Having to recall his training and combat during Simone's plot hadn't helped.

So here he was. Memories instead now of Summer kayaking, day trips from the reservoir to the bottom of campus, times he'd rowed in foreign waters. He couldn't tell if his heart had attached itself to retirement to underline the state of his lover, or if he needed to just change everything he'd been doing altogether, and retirement seemed like decent fuel for that.

All day he'd been looking for rope swings he'd used growing up. When his extended family visited later his daughter and her cousins would play on them. The family even helped the girl make her own over a swimming hole. Today he'd seen none. The river changed every year, which was why you couldn't own any of the little islands in it, but it was more rapid lately so its effects were drastic. The pebbly islands morphed and eroded and the banks and the roots beds did too. You could own a rope swing but depending on the weather you probably couldn't keep one. Those of his and his daughter's youths were ghosts yet so much seemed unfamiliar this day that it didn't surprise him, and instead brought him back to the familiar.

He floated along. It didn't seem proper that he had to paddle. He ought to be able to just float down a river. That is the nature of current. Hard blasts of canyon wind pushed him upstream. He winced. That, indeed, is also the nature of current. The paddle came in handy then.

Right as he came to a calm half-mile before a cascade of rapids he met a fallen tree, submerged deep in the current's path. He would have to go ashore to continue. He climbed from the kayak onto the close end of the tree, his paddle dug in the river stones, maneuvering from where he stood to where he was jumping. The kayak slipped from under him and got sucked under the trunk. He grabbed onto some thicker moss with his free hand and pulled himself up too a branch and to the top of the log. He crawled down the trunk to the bank, soaked and muddy. On the other side the kayak acted as if nothing had happened, gracefully afloat in center stream, filling slowly with water.

The chef tracked it from the brush a quarter mile before it submerged completely. He waded out with the aid of his paddle. After just a minute watching its last gasps--before he could fetch the damn thing--the little vessel went under. He struggled back through the stream, water above his knees. He looked on and accepted defeat.

He would get the old kayaks out the garage and give them to his daughter.

In light of this he thought he'd go up into campus the back way for a hike home. Why not. It's not like he actually had a bum knee, like he'd told Mike. He was ill equipped for the flatter trail that followed the canyon into town, due only to its tendency for train-hoppers; young slews of tradeless gypsies with feral reputations to uphold. He would rather take chances with the forest. And maybe before too late a campus shuttle would take him closer to town, and he could take the 16 home. He'd have to see what time it was, but he might stop at the dining hall and see about the fall staff, talk to Rappaport, retire a year early; who knew. Never was he closer to relinquishing duty.

He trekked across the slope of the east ridge where the soccer fields lay south another mile or so below. He stepped into a redwood grove to pee. With his zipper down and his hand on his dick he noticed something irregular ahead in the foliage. Behold: an outhouse, waiting several yards away. He put his dick away and came around the front of the shack. There was a generator but it wasn't running. All was quiet. Curious and in need he unbuckled his shorts and opened the outhouse door.

Both men yelped, but the chef was louder. There squatted Clifford: throne, beard, and Cuddles, whom he petted. The boy looked startled and cat meowed with yawning jaw. The chef could tell Clifford from his eyes.

"What the hell are you doing back here? In an outhouse? With this cat?" He fastened his belt, his heart palpitated.

Clifford didn't know how to answer that. He started unrolling some toilet paper. The chef backed away. Cuddles jumped from Clifford's lap to the ground outside.

"It's Mike's property. Hasn't been fully reclaimed yet. I'm, you know, caretaking it for him."

The chef gave him a blank look. Clifford spiraled into gibberish too fast to make much sense of; about what he called the overriding necessity of staying for weeks and only going into town for things like Cuddles, and "riding undercover" which he said twice without explanation. He showed the chef the cottage. It was not orderly. He thought of Mike and of Henri. Mike's things were not to be kept disorderly, not this long. Something was wrong. He had to think briskly. He was sure Mike wasn't coming back here; that couldn't have anything to do with it.

Instead of asking what he meant by "for him", he said "Clifford, everyone will want to see you. We'll get Henri up here. And Ricardo? To think they've even allowed this place to keep standing, much less remain filled with equipment! Just wonderful." It was a particularly unsuccessful way of trying to let Clifford think his behavior wasn't out of the line, but Clifford was patient in his little monastery and showed no reaction.

The chef tried to picture the shock and excitement the boy exuded in the last month of Spring. He could have gone right home to the city; he'd been talking everyone's ear off about it the rest of the year. Then there was the final month. But this was something of an entirely different nature. Should Henri have been serving here instead?

He ran down to campus.

Henri had been let out of the fridge.

Upper management had found out about his position. That it kept him in the cold they couldn't understand in the least. He didn't spill about Mike, and during the interrogation he made it seem like he and Clifford had nothing to do with the poisoning incident. Mike Simone had probably not acted alone; but it didn't involve these guys, the police figured. Well, it was true. Mostly.

Henri had spent his first days of Summer indoors, staying air conditioned, for his condition. Dressing against the heat, biding his time in the shade. Before, his hair had been shaved off for skin treatments. Now it grew back into a dense bushel of chestnut brown. It troubled him how easy it was to acclimate. He wore dark glasses.

When the chef got to the dining hall nobody was around. He went to leave a note about getting the proper links to his online retirement account on the door. When he placed the post-it against the glass the door creaked open. Lucky him. He frisked the files for Henri's number, hoping the boy still lived at the same place if Henri was not able to leave. For that matter... oh well, who knows what they had going. He shut out his inquiries and called Henri.

He picked up. When the chef explained the circumstances, Henri guffawed.

"That's obviously my position he's got. He's been keeping it for me and he doesn't even know it I'll bet. If Mike comes back he'll contact me first. Clifford can wait. Was I intentionally not told about this?"

"Don't think so," said the chef. "In fact, no."

"Oh he's just trying to drag fridge number two into the woods with him and live there himself. Because he couldn't serve a position of actual commitment before."

"It was a dignified position you held."

"This cottage belonged to Mike. I belonged to Mike. By rights, I inherit Mike's domain or care for it until he's back. If he ever comes back." Replacing Clifford might have been the only way to retain a position on earth in Mike Simone's dining hall. Otherwise, it was all spirit and no flesh. "I'll go. I've had enough of this purposeless crawl outside the fridge. The cottage. This octagon. This is the sequel to the fridge. We'll install an air-conditioner. There's no other choice. I see now."

"You'll like it. It's pretty damp, but it's cool," said the chef.

They trekked across the northernmost campus parking lot and hiked up to the striped cottage. Clifford was there among the wires and boxes, oil and dust now painted on his cheeks. Clifford hung his entire head out of a broken window, appearing more prepared to remain in the cottage than the chef had expected. His hair was tussled and overgrown; pieces of food hung in it like a furrow of blackberries. The two men approached the octagon.

"Come on, Clifford. Time to go."

"Henri. Comrade. It's you. You're out. Are you off duty?"

"Yes. And it's hell, let me tell you. For a while there wasn't a place for me." He looked down with pity, perhaps not only for Clifford. He didn't want a struggle. "Are you? Seems like you're sort of holding down the fort back here, for Mike."

"I thought it was hell too. Before. Did you go to the Forever Dining Hall and promise yourself you'd stay there always?"

"I've always been there. I'm here right now. I'm always going to be here. It is the nature of commitment."

"I can be there too. I can be there, here."

"No you can't. You're contriving this competition. With the source of my love." He moved towards the window, cautiously.

"I want to continue to love in this place. I need to. I've been so good at it." His eyes said he knew he was getting the boot. "Stay back..."

"Look. This place is mine. We can't both live here, can't both serve. And you can't love Mike like I have. By rights, Clifford." The boy began to cry and Henri knew then, and smiled. "By rights."

Clifford tried to think of some way to explain himself out of the guard-change but it held all the signs of being unavoidable. Emotions overrode him on all fronts, the way you can't tell whether you're sincerely too distant from the situation you're in to feel anything or you just haven't begun to recover from the prick of its trauma.

He said, "They won't give you benefits out here, Henri. It's different. It's the frontier. It's not like the union; not like when Mike was around."

"That is my challenge to take on, not yours. For me he is still very much around. For you he is gone. And you will be gone soon, too. We can tell." Abruptly Clifford popped his head back inside, sensing that Henri was correct. When had Mike truly left Clifford? How long had he stuck around? When was the last time Clifford talked to anybody? The two men came through the door.

Clifford's show of fear turned to that of shock. Henri started immediately: "Mobility here means you can be mobile between duties; meet the demands of the system. That is, from one to another. Not necessarily up or down. I, I'm a true slave. You're just an indentured servant. With a real future." He scoffed and put out his hand. He had never pulled rank before and never had to. It made him uncomfortable. He needed Clifford to leave. "Please. It will be easy."

Henri and the chef crossed the cottage's floor and helped the weakened, tired body of the young man up. He tried not to stand; he was so thin now his shoulders needed propping. Henri looked around and took a seat on a table, eager to examine the cottage. He turned away and said goodbye to Clifford, and that if he ever wanted to visit he'd know where to find him. The boy stood motionless and dazed. Cuddles ran out after them, mewling. The chef smiled and took Clifford with his arm. He walked him from the clearing back through the grove. The boy couldn't say anything.

Henri waved and shut the door behind him, placing his fingers on a cold dusty synth. The octagon needed cleaning. the equipment was eager to be used. Clifford had left some gas in the generator so he fired it up and got started.

On the way down the mountain the chef told of his arduous day. He carried with him the spirit of triumph. He told the young man he'd found himself becoming less depressed now that Gloris was gone, rather then being perpetually torn from him. And he wouldn't miss the kayaks. Not a bit. His grandchildren needed them. Clifford kept nodding in agreement. Maybe he would remember that. But he was distracted and his stomach was coming to a hunger for the first time in weeks. It grumbled and squeezed like the amplified sound of ice freezing. Cuddles growled in response. The chef didn't care if the boy was listening; he comforted his shoulders. They approached the parking lot and the chef reminded him of all the things there were still to do. Clifford's mind was coming around a bit slower than his gut. When they got to the parking lot they stopped to wait at the bus stop.

"Do I begin," Clifford kept muttering, or asking; the chef couldn't tell. The old man's weight held the boy's drunken lean. "Do I begin. Do I begin. Do I begin."

The chef groaned. "Boy. You ought to know by now that's a damn fool question."

Clifford felt himself come back again, this time for good. Whatever that meant. A shuttle arrived. Its doors swung open.

I'm not sure it even was a question, he thought. I didn't expect an answer.

Benito Sinclair [strings] [image of PLANETARIUM] [image of OUTER SPACE] [image of LARGE TRANSFORMERS HUMMING] MEG [girl reads aloud:] "Tremble. Dry lips paint in window description outside The signs of my arrangement With you." KURT [boy reads aloud:] "He was immune to fire. He'd jump into the pit and play around. He'd take what was burning and play with it, in dust. In what it was becoming, burning down to. Still embers, still coal. They would premature the dust."

MEG & KURT ARE ON TWO DIFFERENT ASTRONOMICAL OBJECTS [prose:] They had their own ways of responding to pressure--as if, at work, their patellar tendons had been struck by the same sort of ball peen hammer. Light taps, echoing and diverging; in one direction Kurt's: shutting down at home, keeping more and more quiet, more disheartened as time stagnantly drifted by... his desk, his couch, their bed, his still and eager body. She watched him there. He came and went. He never took off. Whereas she would: the echo of her, heard elsewhere... work: traveling, writing reviews for a design magazine out of Dubai; rather, the State of Nevada, which was owned by Dubai. She lived in a little burb there, Coney Island. A kind of paralysis. She was unable to disconnect the feeling of descent--in those moments she repeated over and over, just before the tires skipped and burnt on the tarmac--from that other stress of having to meet deadlines. There was always something uncertain in those moments before contact, a send button pushed or an envelope mailed. If it wasn't paralysis, it at least recalled paralysis then. She'd been working on an extended feature the whole last month on the U.S.-China moon colony. The contractors had gone over-budget, somewhat predictably, underspending in the wrong areas; so many unnecessary custom poly-carbonates for the interior (safety) and highly reflective metals out on the exterior (heat), trying to apply most effectively two formerly competing aesthetics--that of man-made structure, i.e. rigidity, focus, maths--and that of ecology--structures unique, truly, to the planet holding the old vacant rock so close. Interior, exterior, interior, exterior. But even on Earth a hermetic environment couldn't rely on its own production of oxygen: there was no self-contained hydrological cycle, no iron core. Aside from the other gases required of the habitat you still couldn't get more than you put in, to be sure. In an interior environment with a large amount of plant life the right bit of oxygen had to be added incrementally during local "bloom cycles" in order to keep a closed system fresh. You were never quite producing, but you could move oxygen there from Earth to maintain stability. How much spare oxygen did Earth have, she wondered, before the colony became unsupportable? What timeline? There would bloom an oxygen trade. Meg thought, It'd really be something to watch them unload and lock-in some fresh tanks from Earth down in the moon's lowest reaches. They stored it there and pumped it up. It was a labyrinth of long halls and wide rooms. Above on the surface the interiors felt more like a tiny space station. She would be there soon. She looked to Earth above from the window in her cabin. [A bold and searching poem on a desolate stage.] KURT FINDS A CORPSE THAT MAY OR MAY NOT REPRESENT HIMSELF TO HIMSELF The smell brought him in. It must have happened over night. Whatever had happened. The old oak door hung on sliders and went back in the wall when you opened it; showing its age in a violently interrupted gradient of browns. Its scars worn crisscrossed in varnish. Splinters of a lighter hue jutted, frozen. It squeaked open as he used his fingernails for leverage on a middle panel, and rolled it to the left. First he saw the other one asleep with his head down towards the wall. He opened the window over by the computer tower for air. He poked the body until he decided to roll it over. He stood there a while. Had to think it over. They weren't breathing. There was rot and fluid around the mouth and all over the bed. The eyes had rolled back, not all the way. That hit him: their stare. Given up. Completely lacking any chance at holding fascination anymore. Not interested. Nothing here. Nothing to discover. Nobody. Fuck you. At least it felt that way. He didn't know anything of course. Certainly not what had happened. Not why, not how. When, sort of. What more could he know? When he looked back he noticed the shapes of their mutual friends in the vomit. KURT'S SOLILOQUY: A SERIES OF QUESTIONS "Felt something leaving me. Empty now as the sound of air escaping. Maybe youth, ambition, yearning to surround myself with pretty things, inspiring things. Just sort of giving up on my resolve and leaving it walking off shaking its head. Sound. The work involved. The vagaries of specifics. If youth was going, that had felt better than all the other options. But I felt distinctly un-adult. That is, if you call an adult someone who knows what they want and knows that they must work for it. Lot of kids do that. I wanted too much. Spent my thoughts and my feelings and my time like money burning in my pocket. You look back on the things you haven't been able to detach from. The books, albums, films, shows, sites, magazines, images, signs, nonsense phrases... what you've owned. What's shaped you. Who owns you. Was it all there so you could reproduce it, better it? Succeed the preterite? Or was it all just entertaining at the time? Where can I locate my training if its forms come without discipline? Like the fat and muscles between my bones and skin I have been malleable, susceptible to influences, perhaps beyond repair. Jello to the point of spoilage. What lies here but pixilated brain damage enhanced at the cost of quality? Sprawled out, stretched. Vellum drying. As the 'something' leaves me I consider who I'm dating. The sudden warmths. Ability to open the heart again. So natural. Is this what I've been trained for? Lying around, looking up at the sun or ceiling, seeing what I please then? Confessed to her I was ready somewhere inside, just a piece of me, to envision a garden, hoeing, sowing, watering, watching fruit, vegetables and herbs grow tall. Prospering, for us. Maybe I imagined a child. Two. She wept, and I think began to leave me then." DESCRIPTION OF A GEOLOGICAL SPLIT The quake left new canyons on the shelf where the reef had grown for thousands of years. Some of the reef had split too as a result, from the bottom-up. Even the surface was cloudier now. NOTES FOR ARTICLE ON FILMMAKER PEDRO COSTA "Lisbon is a series of small, confined spaces." "The discipline of just being there." "Ocean or abyss between filmmaker and subject as abyss between camera and object." "Getting away from trying to understand the other." "Production is the organization of work. It is a higher priority than filmic philosophy. Shooting a film is a police operation: it is cruel and violent." "It's very violent to talk about the film afterwords, but we have to do it." "The violence is for yourselves." NOTES FOR ARTICLE TITLED "THE GLASS NEVER FALLS" Slight parabolic curves in rectangle sections, 4" thick glass pieces hanging in grid over performers, 25' vertical space between performers and glass. Hanging by wires, one on each corner of each panel. More wires hang lower from the grid, holding chrome cylinders with stage lights hidden in them... performers emanate a bubble with the sound of their instruments together, so strong it holds up the glass panels from falling. Were you to snip the wires. Glass's music requires so much simple repetition on behalf of each player that it wouldn't be difficult for a very very small person to run across entire sections the keys during the concert. A hamster even. Consider how difficult such a proposition would be in the case of an improvising pianist. Each ivory up for grabs. A single lone feather glides down through the glass grid, below the cylinders, back and forth in the air; lands down among the performers on the wood, under white light, in front of everything. NOTES FOR ARTICLE TITLED "THE GOOGLE PLEX" As I entered the premises I felt the weight fall away. Maybe in the same way you enter a university campus; perhaps moreso in the way you enter a 1980s conception of "cyberspace". 3D environment as real environment. Buildings painted in primary colors. Angles versus elegant, understated curvature. Scandinavia? Furniture is comfy and simple. In the lobby a Naked brand juice fridge and a 'cyber relax' massage chair complete with arm things. Not a vending machine but a fridge. Baby palms in red planter box. Posters re: Google's expansion in NY. "Information @ work" Receptionist quick to assist us and leave us alone. No small talk, very nice. Like modernist angles taken from an early 20th C. avant-garde painting turned into a large and dysfunctional jungle gym. "Don't touch". The tables in the courtyard are arranged so their primary-colored umbrellas appear as a series of shapes that make up a surface, if viewed from above. We dine beside an herb garden. The fountain--a series of smaller bowls pouring into the larger base bowl. A dinosaur in bone & epoxy form stands to the West several yards. Pink flamingo in its mouth. There is a Santa Claus hat on T. Rex's head. North American herbs. Red plastic volleyball net. On the table next to me lie two plastic swords in two black plastic sheaths. Morgan and Dave are playing pool. Dave wants to eat more. I'm stuffed. It hurts. The Google "compound" is fairly open. It's home complete with cookies and milk for California's upper middle. There are snacks and games everywhere. Google is a composite monopoly; the extension of consumer dependence on what they offer. Kurt's thoughts will never be published or recalled. KURT'S THOUGHTS

AS HE FEELS HER EXHUME HIM EMOTIONALLY, EARTH FALLS AWAY: MOTION OF LANGUAGE ON MEDIUM.

Writhing on film. Writhing down sides down sound track, on celluloid lining on sound track. Rummage must rummage much as manage to here whole field lie back uprise writhe naked Body lie giant smooth doll head hurdle through them Pass on intimate down her the soil flesh against Body lie smooth doll's head the frame see each frame Blink and thing not go away try and thing not go away Way water's like fire when light hits it moving Sunsets good sunsets work Out in waves shadows mostly and sudden lives of blue light darkest blue light Way television stimulates same part of brain as fire thus introduction of television like that of fire on human brain Hypnosis often been associated with shock. Fire and television collective stimuli hold social weight lead in many cases to consensus truths require degree of hypnosis Introduction is shock look at water Pine needles accumulate dry out Season come on cooler force drops water everything Tire not move much Hear a branch fall maybe a few and by February or March sprouts pop out of the dead things garbage stacking up around side of the house too in burn pile brought high now in orchard smoke come thick in early season you burn outside cold still wet flames not as tall then smoke more Times you stand round pile add garbage to it gas it up for the guests Wet smoke activate brain all television flames remain of water inside Writhing wonder if hypnosis works same on you Does composite-conscious stimuli still hypnotize if randomized Unfix inkling at wonder ballet check worn run display buckling near hem line under ballad Hinterland clear relate wheel men lying still REEEEEEEEEMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIX Mallard hay shallots pink stained lunatic rear chuckling one. Redlined dial born Winter hand to ranch. Hell then buying time bring mallet. Mimes in gallop way prying trills from instruments. The stills arrive in increments. Mile you dance. While chances sink tainted wed wrecks. In shed in med checks in chills then trying license. Will. Silence. Steps a mink trained ingests what left bled while tied out. Blunder ten men follow still checks a mink stained in jest what two made cleft medical will tried out. Wed in chills men prying silence quills licensed stances painted. Dial ranch instruments. Chills abide. Time in shallots preparations astray miming stills increments at away. Shell redlining miming kills at the fallout. Lying torn hinter land at hot pitch. Chuckling one with lunatics in rear steering mill wheel. Under ballad the hem line near display buckling run worn check. Ballet wonder at inkling unfix. Game example homophonics replicate water motion light motion overlap. Sounds like shapes writhe composed paper like film word processing paper what video what film appear close. Typewriter piano word processor composite image function television case computer use.

DREAM The campus lay on the top of the hill.  The way up was like switchbacks mostly and then stretches of road that slowly and dramatically curved around ranches. We went up because Mike challenged me to the ride down. When we started down it became true that the campus was atop an island like Capri. After a moment there was just this tall island jutting its way buoy-like from the clear saltwater. At its bottom the tide crashed gently against rocks. We were down there without Mike now just myself and my housemates. I saw a long flat concrete slab heading out like a pier from around a corner at the end of a small beach. The beach did not circumscribe the island. So when I decided to and the others followed we had to jump rocks and wade in up to our lower halves. On the way there was an inlet. We began to think it a better idea not to swim across and to follow the edge as it went in and then back out. Fear: perhaps we thought there were animals larger than the enormous starfish floating alive everywhere, more harmful than mollusks. When we made it out to the concrete slab we noticed a house a ways down. It was then true that Mia was with us. We decided to explore the house. I couldn't imagine anyone returning while we were around. Besides at least it seemed this way but there seemed reason enough to consider it abandoned. We entered. The exterior walls had been rose with cream trim. The inside was something between a home built in the 50s and an L.A. villa. There was a hi-fi but we didn't use it. I don't recall what we did exactly but it was fun. I saw someone coming down the path from the kitchen. We all looked outside. I thought it was a circus troupe but then it became true that it wasn't. Doc was already sitting out on a green and white checkered picnic table across from two elderly dark skinned women dressed in the same colors as the house. The owners and their families arrived peaceably it seemed. It's fading now but I remember us all being taken out to the slab for departure on a boat we had to wait for. I slipped on a rock and fell in. A shark almost got me but it then became true that it was a swordfish. They don't eat people do they? I asked, as I was pulled out from the water. It jumped up screaming behind me. We all looked. That's a swordfish shark! Someone yelled.

OUR ANCESTORS AREN'T HUMAN ENOUGH FOR CANONIZATION One thing you learn is that you keep learning of course and after a while that stops surprising you but what keeps surprising you is how much--just the shear amount--that there is to learn in the first place. Sometimes the age gap in certain circumstances is more like that between species. Some of the ways in which we measure humanness can't be applied to our ancestors or elders. They can't be as human as we are. We reserve that term and we renew its definition, criteria; flame which illuminates whatever it burns near. While we always turn to the past to reference what we mean it's always a minority of people--never the bulk--whom we recall. EPISTLE WRITTEN ON WAY TO THE MOON: SECOND-PERSON; READER PLAYS ROLE OF COPY EDITOR Sir or madame Copy Editor, In this stage you begin in the subway. Awaken to Bart ads placed in pairs on the wall across the tracks from the platform. Later you may notice them in elevated stations too, outside in the weather in the middle of the tracks on their own boards. Today the first pair, on the left, consists of a Medical Marijuana Evaluations ad on its left half, portraying the medical symbol (plumed serpents rising around a staff) layered over a marijuana leaf in front of a sun whose rays blare across the poster, which makes its implicit political motive politely explicit via adding "Prop 215" to its phone number and website; and a Resident Evil ad on its right half showing a zombie attacking a girl playing Resident Evil on a Wii, playing safely from her couch and about to kill the zombie by shooting the screen. The tagline reads "Let your darkside out". Why "dark" and "side" are so close together compared to the other words is unclear. I propose switching the copy and footers: it should say "Let your darkside out" to the right of the glowing marijuana leaf, and "Resident Evil" along the bottom, over a background of marijuana plants. On the right poster it should read "Medical Marijuana Evaluations" next to the attacking zombie's clenched grip, and the contact info should sit beneath the girl's feet. The next pair: on the left, "Get your flu shot." Then in smaller font beneath, "Stay healthy this flu season." The graphic under the text, taking up the rest of the ad, is a close-up of a calendar on which is scribbled "Flu shot!" over the 17th. A series of CDC recommendations follow. To the right is a darkened and brutally textured image of a group of shadowed men firing automatic rifles at "you", in front of which is "your" boney, clawing hand, either going up in the air as "you" a. fall from the force of bullets, or b. viciously run at the men. In the space above them it reads, "Left 4 Dead 2, L4D.com". Clearly this should read, "Get your flu shot. Stay healthy this season." Below the men with guns and the outstretched zombie hand, in the footer, "Flu shot!" Over the calendar it should read "L4D.com" and on the 17th should be scribbled, "Left 4 Dead 2". On the left of the third pair is a close-up of an American flag, where the corner of the blue strikes the middle. A single white star is shown. The silhouette of a soldier sitting down, head in hand, wearing helmet and rifle, is placed against the red and whites stripes. Along the top it reads, "It takes the courage and strength of a warrior to ask for help..." then below, "If you or someone you know is in an emotional crisis call 1-800-272-TALK [8255] Press 1 For Veterans". A Department of Veterans Affairs logo sits on the bottom. On the right poster, four middle aged white women in pink jackets and baseball caps smile at you uniformly. It is not a real snapshot but it thinks it might be if you let it. "In It to End It: Every 3 minutes we have another reason to walk." On the right reads a series of contact information for "Avon Walk Breast Cancer San Francisco". In this case the left poster should read "In It to End It: Every 3 minutes we have a reason to walk." over the American flag and broken soldier. Over the middle-aged white women smiling uniformly at you it should read "It takes the courage and strength of a warrior to ask for help... If you or someone you know is in an emotional crisis call 1-800-273-TALK [8255] Press 1 for Veterans". Finally, with a repeat of the Resident Evil poster on the right, the left hand poster of the fourth pair depicts a basketball play: one Lakers player hangs frozen in mid-air, his back to the hoop, about to back-slam. The purple key says it's his home court. He's followed from below and behind by ten players in white uniforms and two mascots in animal costumes. The upper left corner demands to know, "How will you TAKE OVER?" then beneath, reads "EA Sports NBA 2K10". This should say, "Let your darkside out". Next to the attacking zombie on the other poster the text asks, "How will you take over?" HOW WILL YOU TAKE OVER?

A 75-MINUTE RECAP OF 2010 DJ'D BY LIL BEN ON 'NEW HISTORIES FOR NEW TIMES!' AT 9TH FLOOR RADIO.COM!

NEW HISTORIES FOR NEW TIMES #15 03.08.11 by 9th Floor Radio