He had been dreaming. It was the Age of Discovery. He had disembarked in
Acapulco. There were lucid categories of things. He rummaged in the marginalia.
He conquered his fear of flying. He was ruthless in his pursuit of the smallest
competitive advantage. The parrots kept materialising out the fog, and vanishing
again. It disconcerted him. The cantilevered joist had been his invention. He
thought proudly. It was the cornerstone of the company’s success.
It bothered him. The falling out with Jay.
He longed to make amends. It was a parting of the ways. It was a cataclysm.
Sean was presenting difficulties. It was the hour before dawn. It beguiled him.
The seabirds were preparing to fan out across the bay. He wove his web of deceit.
The Governor had worn a brocaded fabric. It was a blue and patterned sleeve.
He’d need a few days to go over the details. The cannons pointed out to sea.
He imagined a cannonball splintering a wooden ship.
He had inside information. He was able to
leverage a bargain deal.
He wouldn’t think twice before crossing him. It was his signature style:
leather jodhpurs and a pashmina. It was the sea of dreams he had been
travelling. It made sense. He had been carrying contraband. Antiquities
of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The winds had been good
to him. He bit into a nectarine.
They had barrelled through the horse latitudes. They had made a surgical
incision through the spruce and laurel. They had spent some time in Denver.
They had only had one cassette. They knew those songs off by heart.
Nong had got caught with the guns and was doing bird in Acapulco.
He’d have to shed this identity. The skin was beginning
to itch. Alessandro was loitering by the pool.
It was a pig of a summer. They reached the Pacific through Panama. They
scalped the codex. They made an impression in soapstone. They littered
the trail with iconography.
Lotus flowers shimmied in the courtyard. What lay within that
mighty blue lake he asked himself. Could a man truly lose himself there?
It was a simple tea hut. The couple who ran it had the gift of simplicity.
They were simple. It was a nice view they had. The grass grew tussocky
on the dune. The waves lost their balance.
The hotel was about a mile’s walk away, along the coastal path.
People round here didn’t like to talk about the island. He couldn’t find
a single fisherman to row him over, no amount of money could change their mind.
The map pointed to a cove concealed on the seaward side.
He licked his lips with avarice.
He’d backed Gross, Adams to the hilt. It had been a gamble.
There had been a minor shareholders rebellion. Their forces had
suffered a stinging reverse and retreated to the Pamir mountains.
There wasn’t much harm they could do from there, he thought with
satisfaction.
He crossed that hurdle as he came to it. He jumped through the
hoops. He opted to blow up the pipeline.
He was a Master of Affairs.
The cave was only uncovered at low tide. They had counted on
that. The island had an ominous aspect. He could see why the
locals avoided it. The sea-slosh menaced him. It slapped the
tidal pools. He would have to be quick. It was a treasure beyond
compare. It was the holy grail of automated reply services.
Kelp clung to his wingtips. He’d see about installation later.
He removed a guppy from his breast pocket. A plaintive wind
struck up from the west. It caromed around the ruined tower.
The moon popped up over the horizon. It was getting dark.
He would have to spend the night here. Lightning split
our hysterical sky.
Goosegrass chivvied his leg. Burdock gave him anxiety.
He prayed to Santo Domingo. The land here would furnish
a meagre living. Beef lettuce grew here, and there were rabbits
aplenty. He crumpled up his map. He already had what he had
come for.
God was his sustenance. He gobbled the gold of the sun. He
grew aromatic. He wore a donkey skin.
His market competitors opened up
the land route to Asia. His eggs were all in one basket.
He lost grazing rights to the Green Beyond.
He retreated into himself. He found a cave of treasures.
He lived in the miasma of belief. He believed they could
drastically reduce production costs. It was a jersey with
the letter ‘H’ on it. He had domesticated, shyly at first,
several species of gourd. He nailed his colours to the mast.
He boiled the skin from frogs. Camembert was a rare delicacy.
Value was his lodestone. He knew where the eels congregated.
He knew where the turtles lay their eggs. He said Nature is a
Harmonious Balance. Wowie Zowie. There were tin deposits
in the hills to the north.
It was a curate’s egg. He’d found it in the souk of Marrakesh.
He’d found it in an antiques shop in Chinatown. It was the
soul of the party. It was Pandora’s Box.
Nigeria would fall into his lap. Mandalay was a foregone conclusion.
The Director of Unusual Circumstances was shooting him a
meaningful glance. But what might it mean? It was a fine
line. He had legitimate concerns. It wasn’t the proper place. The
punch was getting warm.
It was a great, lost civilization. It was a loose affiliation. Let me call you back, yeah.
They’d long had their suspicions. Yeah, right mate.
It was the jungle perimeter again.
A python had swallowed the architrave. Rain rattled against the banana leaves.
In the shimmering city above the clouds. Tonto was dead before he hit the ground.
Kane hit the remote. Arrows swooped in from the upright.
It was worth it just to see your face.
And then you remember the world again, with all its painful necessity.
The garbage heaps up, even in a state of inertia. Dust barricades the doorway.
It is an easy, limber morning. Work stamps and stakes its claim. The meadows
outside of time grow rank. The fruit is not so sweet.
Lethe choked and spluttered. Computer games spit out their slogans.
Back in the world again.
He was cold again, in the small room, with the window open, for the smoke.
Sleep was a stranger in a panic. He always woke in the dark. He wished
he’d had more support. Perhaps he could of done it, with the proper support.
He always drove them away, in the end. The price they required was too high.
He washed in cold water. He smoked a neat cigar.
He’d locked horns with the administrator before. The lie he had been
so proud of the week before suddenly seemed so flimsy. It was a
crumpled shield. He left with a bitter taste in his mouth.
A single doubt is enough to defeat you. It is a chink in the aura.
The blade finds its mark. Infection pours through the breach.
Until then, you never know if you are invisible or if you are already
on the books and under observation.
It is the Dow Jones Index. It is Napoleon. It is the well run dry.
They experimented on you when you were just a child. Your mind
atrophied. They described you as a sucked biscuit. You were one
of the ones they sent into hyperspace. Hurtling towards some distant
star. Silence surrounded you ever after, it is the cloak of the
incommunicable.
You found others, damaged by the ordeal. You rejected them after
inspection. He pursued his stunned agenda. The horses bolted. He’d
only had enough for a half. The fictions which sustained him were
growing thin. He became visible to the enemy. He munched on
the hedgerows. You wanted to find one left intact. You were
desperate.
They went on their mad walks. The mania was burning itself out.
It had been quite a ride. The air stirred with embers, air, flapping
orange ash. They were mutually unintelligible again.
Fevers congregated in the backwaters. There were crocodiles
in the mangroves. Life was a fiasco. They brooded over cocktails.
They broke into intoxicated song. They regretted it the moment
it begun. He’d almost merged with the symbiote. The separation,
unavoidable as it was, had been agonising. He’d lost his rudder. He
was adrift.
He’d own up to anything. His nostrils were full of vomit.
They’d given him the third degree. His heart was in captivity.
He was a prisoner of your love.
The ape had come with its own chain. It followed him everywhere.
It slobbered and whimpered for attention.
It said We are at the forefront of kitchen design and installation. He
paused in his tirade. He remembered the days of longing, wanting
anything but this. He remembered the first installments of the electric
body, how the new nerves had shivered and trembled. He remembered
Ronald Reagan’s refulgent face. He clamoured sick for the amniotic fluid.
They had sailed right through the fog, sublimity having the mastery of
terror. It might have been Illyria.
You couldn’t refuse the updates. Life became
increasingly impossible without them. You would lose your connection
to the survival server. You would be offline. You could access the updates
anywhere, even here on the island. Parrots perched insolently in the lower
canopy. Bush pigs cannoned through the undergrowth.
It was a cosmic bet. They bet on who would be the first to die. There was
all sorts of subterfuge. They locked in to ever-escalating drinking binges.
They tried to force the issue. They made overtures to fatal diseases. It
was a situation which had got out of hand. Sleep was a frantic stranger.
Rules were for the little people. He hadn’t bothered to learn them. He was
sure his heart beat to a purer motive. He prioritised a clean feed.
They were relegated to the dungeon server. It prescribed its bed of insulin.
It had taken years, or perhaps they were lifetimes, to work his way back
up to the light.
He would have to dismantle it. It was the site of too many bad memories.
Nights botched in too many ways to remember. It couldn’t sweat out the poison.
Its flesh was bitter with it. He imagined a path to glory. If all the wrong
decisions could be righted. He saw the nights light up with triumph.
He could have been a human being. He knew exactly when he’d had his last
chance.
The river tumbled with washing machine caracasses and angle-poise lights.
It was a duty to remember it. He’d placed his pain beside theirs and made the
offering. The failure rankled. Mud came right up to the chin. The canyons rang
with choral song and goats. He hoped to make amends. He bided his time in the
bullfrog genus. The mud swamps blossomed.
There was never anywhere to hide. He wanted a refuge. He wanted it to be
safe from outside events. He wanted it soundproofed against tragedy. Death
leered at the glass. Existence made him puke. He turned the lens on the others
but he forgot to turn it on himself.
There were times he had almost walked by himself.
He had precisely calibrated the severity of each fall.
He never landed any harder than he thought necessary. He had forgotten how to
make himself feel good. He depended on the kindness of strangers.
He ate their cultivated fruits. He was a disgusting ingrate.
He had been chosen to speak for the entire human race. He was their mouth
organ. He said
this is a pipsqueak race.
Angels couldn’t bring themselves to come down from heaven. They forsook
their claims on earth. They refused their ration of pain. They grew increasingly
unreal. We grew lean and ragged on it. We died of cancers.
The honeysuckle in moist profusion. What might we cultivate? What seed
might we plant to the future? I wanted my plot of happiness to till. I had
the right to subsist on misery. I puked back my grain allocation. I just wanted
an amicable resolution.
Your readouts indicated a need for urgent intervention. You had run out
of sympathy. You remembered your winter of heroism. You could never
do goodbyes. There was a siren song it said give your body to the machine.
This is what you had refused to do. Give your body to the machine. It was
the song of God. It said, submit, proud one.
Do the will of the machine.
The compromise had worked for a time. It preserved his sense of exceptionalism.
They told him how clever he was. He was adroit at avoiding all approbation. His
ears excluded it at the entrance. The resentment mounted up in great billows
about him. It was a great cloud of dust.
He wrote everything except his glum confession.
It rose up great coloured perturbations around this cyst.
It was either a failure of the body or of the imagination.
He wasn’t sure which. He was known for a kind of impatient viciousness.
He was as malignant as a tumour. Lack of access to pleasure made him mean.
He wanted to drift on the fragrant emanances. He wanted to lie naked as a babe
in the Vale of Beulah. His skin closed up like a reptile's.
The pornographic uplands had scourged his eyes with light. He’d wanted to
be encased in the yolk of happiness. He’d wanted to indefinitely postpone
orgasm. The vomit on the console. It is a creamy field of toys. It is armageddon.
He would have to grow a skin of inwardness. It had been stripped away.
The cattle would have to graze. He would have to augment his day with sighs.
He would have to repopulate orgasm. It was denuded of grass. He’d take time
to heal.
The frenzy countermanded the pain. His grief latched onto the target like
a desperate thing. It was a clean break with the past.
Orioles warbled from the headboard. Minaret splintered
in Khartoum. ◼
