Killspeak

His mind is a punctuated wet cord; its traversal, a route of knots.

“Where are you going?” Heading to work. In the car—no: on the bus, bobbing his head to The New Management Singers. What he’s wearing shouldn’t be important, but it is. Impressions made, all that. Shaking hands. Clammy.

“Today I’ll be my Henry Caul.” In truth, he is a wake of abortions: you are what you’ve done wrong. Watching himself in the windows, in the words of others. New, disconnected, useless products of cancer or pure reproductive whimsy pickled in jars. These are little shards harvested to decorate an imaginary him.

“Flavour’s real.” They’ve been made into large features of the mindscape, distant and large and impassable as mountains, inescapable at any speed. The parallax of regret. Always seeming to approach, to be blue. But it just looks that way when it’s headed back to the lungs, exhausted of oxygen.

“C’mon,” Isra said, walking into the hallway, “I need to find the flight number.”

David got up. He worked himself out of his sweatpants on the way to the bathroom. He turned the faucet, full, and shook his head at the thin hot stream. The downstairs’ must be using the water, just flushed. David could hear the flow through the pipes in the floor and leaned against the shower stall until they went quiet. He suffered the weak, too-cold shower. Stepping out, he heard Isra calling him through the door.

Hinges cracked. “Really, we should go soon,” the door opened a bit more. “Sorry. I was running the dishwasher.”

It sounds like Beth Gibbons

Blue and indigo, scars bleeding butter-yellow curtains of sunlight. The feeling of being at a tremendous depth, on the floor of the atmospheric ocean. The mind sings its vertigo in a voice of wavering dread and sadness, a crying theremin sound.

“I don’t have his flight number. I’m not even sure when he’s arriving.”

Isra stepped out of the car and toward the line of locked luggage carts. Security guards in deep navy jackets were hustling the cars and taxis crowding the curb of the terminal, waving their hands, urging haste. As she pushed her cart, a red-nose bent down to look in at David through the passenger window. Isra saw the guard release a cloud of winter conversation, the car’s turn signal begin blinking, the car join the trail of taillights to the parking lot. David looked back at her through the rear window and falling snow. He would know which gate to meet them at.

The wheels of the cart she’d chosen slid, not rolled, packed with ugly snow. Through the sliding doors, she was blasted with dry heat.

Rubbernecking

What looked like fat static when they had left the airport was now much denser. The world had gone white. The flakes were now so large, the fall so dense that their impact was heard as a faint crackling inside the car.

Japan is a threesome coil

The Team of Two Geoffreys, humiliated in our games of how-did-you-know, have taken to basketball. They are now more of the colour-coded men.

Money’s man is speaking cranberries from the gynecologists’ podium. Money’s man is an absolute dog-shitter.

The government of Ontario

Four-by-fours and hammers jacked from Home Depot—Cas is part-time there and smokes by the plastic sheds facing the parking lot—and ape masks—there were no Nixons—and hammers. I said hammers. Cas also had some gloves for holding the wood—gardening gloves because he worked in the garden department—that he had on when he showed up. He walked his bike into the backyard with a spliff held between the two fingers of his gloved hand, lit, laughing—he cracks wide, gummy smiles—with a plastic bag of hammers tied to the handlebars. Deep was coming with the lumber in the back of his car. A look. The masks were in Deep’s car too.

“Hold up, wait. No, wait.” Cas laughed and puffed on the spliff that looked tiny in the thick brown fingers of the glove.

A girl passes by wearing a t-shirt that reads “God is dead is dead is dead”

Squints in the dimness of the bar, the jelly of blurry saxophones, gold rings that were or weren’t really made of gold but it didn’t matter because it’s the look of gold that counts on these sausage fingers. The air was greasy, looked streaky, and had an ugly flavour that you could taste from just outside the doors. The Men’s was much worse, and would lose the favour of the clientèle near the end of the week, furthest from its Sunday night Lysol gassing, who preferred to wet the stairs leading to the basement or, in more serious cases, would cross the street to the KFC and pester the cashier for keys.

Scourge of the meritocracy

Here is a view of False Creek. Here is another place. Here is a man putting the ugliest bread to his mouth, like buttered pumice.

Here is our prophet. To his left, past the glass, the gallows of construction dangle girders in front of the clouds. They are Money’s cranes. Our prophet has eyes like jujubes.

These are things not to be remembered with nostalgia. These written things are moving. Revile and convolve. Feel the heat of appropriation.

He shrugged at the panic grass at the edge of the parking lot. “It’s to be planted along roadsides to keep the dust from kicking up as cars pass. We’ve engineered it to look a bit nicer, have broader, greener blades.” He looked behind me as he said this, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together at his hips. An engineer and his plans.

Winter returned to Kingston. The blades where white, rising weakly out of the ground. Nighttime in the yacht club across from Ballard park, we looked at his dying grasses. I felt like 1815. That’s why I left him there.

Concerning:

Detritus and minor orphaned activation in the uppermost level over generation two hundred twenty through [[current]]

Incident notables:

Redundant spinners in the uppermost level lost activation to unidentified interference in generation two hundred eighteen. The dispatched hunting vectors discovered sources of interference and successfully identified engram connections common to the resistance in generation two hundred nineteen. They engaged in memetic co-optation over generation two hundred twenty to two hundred twenty-three. Post-averaging analysis follows:

Some resisters were so desperate to avoid memesis as to allow Strainers full access to their language. The Strainers bound and re-bound as it is their prerogative to do, mutating the resisters’ structures until they collapsed under mega-semantic exhaustion. The results were devastating, but not uniform: many resisters were rendered fully aphasic, a small minority were left rankled.

The hunting vectors were unable to control a significant proportion of the resultant activation cascades and circuit ghosts. No evidence of Strainers survived second-order signal averaging.

Projected effect:

The uppermost consciousnesses will suffer losses due to circuit ghosts and unwarranted activation over the future set of sixteen generations. The expected drop in noetic yeilds in the uppermost consciousnesses will be compensated for by lower-level mid-glials over generations three hundred three to five hundred eleven.

Request:

None. It is not needed to advise.

Reference:

TTR-09-8122

Just as he misses the pattering feet of the tin foxes and the rustle of paper bears, he misses the taste of fish. He has tired of soups, of eating them under blacklight among the buzzing of image deflectors and the rumble of gentlemanly cars. Soup—too much of it—never any fish.

Too few were dismayed at how the wineglasses the Icthyds took were replaced with larger ones, glasses that would be filled with boxed wine, whose stems would be held in full fists. Reassurances were made, and, at the time, humoured. These things were temporary; the glasses would soon return.

He heard the neighbours knocking on the door at night. When this happened, his father would stand and stare at the door with his fists clenched; his mother would whisper to him from across the room. “You don’t need neighbours if you don’t have family,” she’d say. The knocking stopped the same night the windows were taped.

People looked at the ground when the sky began whistling. Walls went up and came down overnight, but nobody seemed to care. Concern had been reined in by the fighting. No one said anything when butter disappeared and the oceans closed. The Mega-Sun and the Icthyds struck a deal. War is to overwhelm all else. There are no secondary purposes.

He was wearing an over-large orange t-shirt on the day they moved down to ground level. The shirt was more like a dress on him, its bottom just below his knees. He had never liked this. As his parents climbed over the furniture piled at the windows, stretching to reach for the ends of the tape crossed over the glass, he guided his whimpered belongings out into the hallway. He did this with his left hand. He held the bottom of the shirt to his hip with his right. He was pushing a plastic basket of towels against Mrs. Ganymede’s door across the way when he heard his father laugh. He stood in the hall with his hand on the basket, burning with embarrassment. He willed Infectors to come riding up in the elevators and tell his father never to laugh again. When they did, swinging their image guns from their hips, he pushed his face into the basket and retched. It was demanded that they flush their supply den, the whole deck was to do it. The wine would be ankle-high in the halls for days afterwards. His father giggled through a cut lip as they rode down in the elevators.

Something seeks him out, the White-as-bones, and it speaks through regret. It’s something flawless and eternal. He cries for fish. He’s kissing the floor while the bombs go off. The smoke that fills the sky makes a bruise of the sun. He misses things more now than he ever did before.