MY ƏLD LEIGH GOSHE

The invitation to the meeting had been distributed, oddly, in the middle of the night, a practice that would have been viewed as mildly gauche.

 

 To:      istes Holoway

            Xie Xia

            Double yOu dee Cr*sh

            Urt

            Peday Conjaju

            Merci d’avoir fait votre part.

            coose-coose-loose ˈ loose

            1.800.456.1191

                        @@@@@@@@@@ @@@@ @  @    @       @                    @                        @        @  

From:   ude eer

Re:       Status Meeting

Kindly be reminded that our next Status Meeting is scheduled for Tuesday September 21 in Space 231-C at 1400h.  Light snacks will be provided.

The agenda and necessary ancillaries will be posted in StatUp shortly; as usual, any information regarding regrets or substitutions should be communicated to Merilla in Space.

Team members should be reminded that PMRFs (project modification request forms) are required to be communicated to the PMO no later than Friday 2000h.  There are to be no exceptions.  Because of target exceeding in August, code sheets are optional.

 

istes didn’t know what to think.  It worked its way over to Urt’s pod and angled its words accordingly, knowing the histories of Urt’s orientations in similar circumstances all too well.

Nice mug Urt.

What’s up?

Are you going skiing this weekend?

What’s up istes?

Just chatting.  Pod boredom.

It’s the meeting.

Merci d’avoir fait votre part. won’t like it.

Does it ever?

Right.

But it is the third time.

Right.

Urt paused and laid its mug on the recyclings, shaking slightly.  So?

So.

Funny.  I would have thought you’d have shown later.

That’s not the point Urt.  You know it.

You were trying to surprise me.

No.  No surprises.  You can’t be surprised.

Everyone can be surprised.

Has Xie Xia?

OK.  Everyone but Xie Xia.  Why is that?

It’s taken more module training.

I don’t think that’s it.

What is it then?

I think it’s its units.

Or profits or habits.

Or credits or debits.

Benefits.  Or spirits or limits or merits or deposits or …

Stop.  Stop it.  Or rabbits.

It’s hard.

Let’s stop.

You started it.

Go istes.  Go.  No more games.  We’ll deal with this on Tuesday.

Back in its pod, istes became more pleased with the conversation with Urt than it had thought.  While no resolutions had been obviously forthcoming, istes felt as if an understanding had been tangentially developed which could result in resolutions.  Urt hadn’t shut down.  The testiness at the end wasn’t real.  The references to Xie Xia were binding.  Merci d’avoir fait votre part. might be able to be systematized under certain conditions.  istes experienced joy.  It had been the right move.  Tuesday would come.

***

Xie Xia was the first to arrive, with ude eer ensconced in the authorized status post, monitoring the arrivals.

Xie Xia, ude eer said.

ude, said Xie Xia.

Xie Xia placed itself and made a move to grab a stalk of les prés garder but then withdrew, sensing more arrivings.

ude eer was greeted by ude or eer, and ude eer greeted each arrival in turn from her asp, until each was placed and stalks had been obtained and the meeting was called forth.

Have you been skiing? ude eer asked, and Urt was known to be asked.

I have not been skiing but this weekend offers possibilities, Urt tactfully responded.

Skiing offers possibilities, ude eer said.

Skiing offers possibilities, the project team said together.  While Urt was resented for this by some, particularly 1.800.456.1191 and Peday Conjaju, the majority received the repetition neutrally and oriented themselves toward the affirmation, shifting dynamics and, slightly, the future.

Bandits, said Urt.

istes almost crashed.  It had been wrong about Urt.  The testiness was real.  An understanding hadn’t been developed.  Urt had appeared to not shut down.  istes de-experienced joy and began decommissioning.

Let us sing the song, said ude eer.

The project members switched to song mode and retrieved the song.

     More than ever this is what i think

     more than ever this is what i do

     more than ever more than ever

     ever is more than evermore

They cycled through the pronouns, according to the Malaka-Nwert Standard—i, we, they, which, yours, whoms, codas of repeated i’s.  istes had always found the MNS Standard particularly satisfying; it went across memory to the space where the MNS Standard is in a meadow with monarchs and high and super fluffy clouds and white pythons melted on themselves, and humming.

I’d like to put a point on the table, said ista.

Let us subject the putting to the table, said ude eer.  Puter.

It should be Putter.

No.  Putter is non-standard.  You are not current on your utts and ees, @@@@@@@@@@@ @@@ @  @    @       @                    @                        @        @, said ude eer.  You have been asked to leave.

I request exceptions, said       @@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @  @    @       @                    @                        @        .

Are exceptions granted? asked ude eer.

ude has the gonads, Merci d’avoir fait votre part. said.

eer has the gonads, coose-coose-loose ˈ loose repeated.

ude eer has the gonads, the project team chorused.

She has the gonads, ude eer said, causing certain stirs and leakings.  You have been asked to leave.

It wasn’t an easy leaving.  @@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @  @    @       @                    @                        @        @’s dimensions didn’t fully conform (a point of discussion even at the time in Onsk, which would, though not part of our story, result in a recall of an aapstert and one or two schniks and a consideration of the nature and function of further miukumaukus), and the meeting grew unruly for a time, and more stalks became required and obtained and obtained, which caused further unsettlings.  In short, almost everyone wished @@@@@@@@@@@ @@ (@)  @    @                           @                        @ had become familiar with its utts and ees.

Puter, said ude eer.

Double yOu dee Cr*sh cleared itself.  I put, it said.

What do you put? the team members asked.

I put put, said Double yOu dee Cr*sh.

What do you put put?

I put put put.

What do you put put put?

I put put put put.

What do you …

Enough, said ude eer.  What is the resolution?

ista is facilitated, said Double yOu dee Cr*sh.

ista, said ude eer.

In cycling through the pronouns under the MNS Standard, began ista, …

Exception, a number said.

An obvious exception, said ude eer.

ista awkwarded.  It hadn’t been the best of times after all.

In this case we grant the exception, said ude eer, before the non-standard, itself non-standard, a legitimacy foreordained.  Continue ista.

In cycling through the pronouns under the MNS, began ista, we have been asked to consider the amateurishness of professionalism, jurisprudence, footbag, aardvark, Lee Valley, Rochefort, Kunstwerkstücksache, widget, tiling (as gerundation), hiiri, hiiret, миш, мишеви, ilygoden, ilygod, ਮਾਊਸ ਨੂੰ, ਮਾਊਸ, nas, Durban, nas, ụmụ oke, …

The point has been puted.  We subject it, said ude eer.

The project team subjected.  ista stalked.

Let us sing the song, ude eer said after the requisites.

The project members switched to song mode and retrieved the song.

     More is or but for the ore

     less is and and evermore

     ravens is as sows does

     does don’t do what poets was or bows

Puter? said ude eer.

There are objects and subjects, said Double yOu dee Cr*sh.

Is there resolution? said ude eer.

There is resolution, said Double yOu dee Cr*sh.

What is the resolution? said ude eer.

The resolution is that the considering is become the de-considering.

Skiing offers possibilities, the project team said together.

Skiing offers possibilities, the project team said together. 

***

Back in its pod, ista considered the de-considering, the events as a whole and fragmented, Urt’s urting, the exceptions and leaving and recalling and furthers, reviewed its utts and ees, retrieved some songs, thought of les prés garder, veered away from gonads, მაუსიd a little, slept.

Angling then into Urt’s pod again, it said, ...

Don’t say it, said Urt.

Everything’s going to be ok, said ista.

We ski, said Urt.

We ski, said ista.

We ski, they said, the two its said.

We ski.

And when the next invitation arrived, distributed, less oddly, in the middle of the night, mores were not unaltered, and ista received hopes that the puting of its considering would be resolutioned, that the angling of Urt would be arced, and that joy would be distributed and Tuesday would come again.

WAWN WAKES UP

When Wawn woke in the teaball he was already tired.  A light had shone when he had woken previously, in the dark, at the back of the dark, in his normal situation.  Now there was no light, only the forming tea, and his thoughts about Miranda, how she had treated the cats, what hadn’t been done with the funds that had been set aside so carefully, and, most particularly, the exchange.  He wanted to be thinking of the future, in its glorious nebulosity, in its sweet buzziness.  Hadn’t Miranda said, Isn’t it at some point less that we care about ending life and more that we care about joining the dead—that’s where the action is??  The future was eternally lacking flaw, a joyous multitude partaking in a feast, the unwritten song.  He thought of it as a lover who was perfect and always absent—a cornucopia of shape and movement and sighs.  Hadn’t she said, It isn’t a macabre thought, Wawn. It’s not some absent awe or some mental health issue or whatever else your pharmaceutical mind can conjure. But think of the people you love. Aren’t most of them there??  He hadn’t had answers, he never did.  The future was for answers, he thought.  The future would deal with things.  It wasn’t that he abdicated them to another time, but that that time had already abducted them (or never relinquished them), and Wawn wasn’t an impractical man.  He knew survival had something to do with recognizing the divisions of labor, the silent castes.  Hadn’t she said, Think of who’s there! None of these stupid social barriers, these equations of money and space. These morbidities masquerading as events!?  He never knew what to think of her; even when he first met her at the party on First he thought something wasn’t right, but it was one of those situations that was impossible to resist.  It didn’t matter now.  Hadn’t she said, Wawn. It’s not happening.  What we wanted. Dreams don’t belong to the living, they’re the repository of another race.?  The future he had always thought would be like one of those weekends in the winter when you get together in the snow and play games and drink and laugh, and the dog bobs up and down like a dolphin, and everything’s like a recipe for chard and oyster mushrooms and spanish onions that you’re looking for on the internet but don’t really need.  He wanted to be thinking of the future, its technical impeccability, but there were the cats and the funds, Miranda and the exchange; and there he was, in the teaball, already tired, steeping.

ULICA LUTK

The gods inhabiting doubt don’t seem to be inclined to show themselves in manners resembling anything we normally would consider divine or any purported demonic opposition, but neither do they feign to assume human garb.  What then are these creatures (though they be not creatures) and how do they inhabit?

We shall begin with an experience i had recently when drunk in the alleys of Seville, that despicable administrative region of the nation of a doubtful Slovenia.  Nothing had gone right that day.  My father called to inform me my mother had cancer and would die within three months.  My ex-wife called and said she wanted to get remarried.  My brother-in-law called from emerg to say my sister was having a breakdown and was being interrogated by psychiatric interns with no direct experience of the mind’s stranger choreographies—only textbook systematizations and rote vocabularies and envied paychecks.  And in the wee hours of the early morning i had resumed a sexual relationship with a woman who was into extispicy, expired air ventilation and quitting smoking.  Naturally when night came i boozed.

I knew the alleys sufficiently.  They turned into each other like deranged marshmallows.  Transactions occurred of a nature so dubious, so outside the law, that any jurisprudence would have to entirely reinvent itself to take them into account.  By daytime, though, the alleys were exuberances of commerce—wallets flashing like pedophiles, scarves and cravats and bootlaces, fractal romanescos and sexy kuritakes and swabs of turducken terrine with dates and plover eggs and seasoned bustards spilling over coloured tables, and everything singing with the excess of itself.  Near nightfall the shoppers would thin and disappear and the merchants would then hastily pack up and fold their stalls and scurry out, as if they were cockroaches and someone had flicked the light on.  A limbo then occurred in which nothing happened but a silent waiting for the night and its tangled cultures.  It was then i would enter, inebriated, desperate for respite from the arrows of routine, from the protocols of opposition.

That week i sought a friend skilled in the arts of such matters.  He lived in a garret off the Ulica Lutk and mumbled the fragments of sages into broken carafes.  His name was lost and i called him Substantive, as a euphemism and term of endearment and joke, though neither of us laughed.  Interrupted by unhinged doors and tomblike corridors through which ghosts lolled like dustbunnies, there were uncountable twisted stairs to his forgotten hovel which he could only afford by doing free curses for the landlord—long horrible affairs, rife with decibels and spittle, that terrified those in arrears to steal or prostitute their daughters or murder, as long as rent was paid.  We had met in the theater at the opening weekend of The Thing, he with fantasies of doing domestic work at the South Pole, me with a ticket i had found while recovering my glasses from behind the toilet at a soggy waffle place near the condemned sanatorium in which Lucia had finally fully lost her mind a few years prior during that spring in which the blossoms danced like hesperides and no one got the flu.

Haven’t suffered enough, he said, after we had settled into Turkish coffees as thick as madness and he had rearranged the taxidermy specimens so that we could squeeze ourselves into rough spaces between once loved or beaten pets on lumpy dolorous couches which seemed to chant in low scratchy voices of springier and firmer days.

What has that got to do with it?

Haven’t suffered enough, don’t see them.

What happens when you’ve suffered enough?

Not there, they’re inside you—hardly suffered, suffered enough.  The in-betweens, they make them appear.

It’s too easy to blame it on the booze.  We all know that at some level alcohol speaks the truth more ripely, with more imaginative precision and imagistic exactitude, than the tinny truisms of sobriety.  That’s why we drink.  Not to open legs or forget the whipped horrors of existence or even dance with more limbs than we thought we had … but to glimpse what is, however shady, veiled and smelly it might be.

Most truth—the common kinds that cause lukewarm heads to nod lukewarmly—is like an uncooked head of cauliflower.  True and not imperfect in its cruciferous and fractal glory.  Yet it is not the truth that drives us humans on.  Something must be done to the cauliflower.  It must be chopped and garlic added, maybe a bit of reggiano and olive oil, a plop of parsley, roasted until hot and golden, eaten to the tunes of Arvo Pärt and arguments over the attributes that distinguish film from literature or whether religion and secularism are the same.  Booze does this.  Booze is a cooked and wondrous cauliflower.  It shows us what is there.

So i step into the Sevillan maze, that medley of alleys, drunk and desperate, eager for truth.  The smell of merchants has begun to dissipate and the air is expectant and stiff.  Brick buildings of indeterminate age, their windows viscous and unopened, sit stolidly on the sidelines, devoid of any signs of life, as the sun does its daily dance into the grave of the heavens.  There was little discussion of the alleys in the polite society of Seville.  People talked of bargains, of having whittled the price of some haberdasher down to something one could boast about.  They talked of under-ripe avocados and fuzzy fungi and the latest lace.  They talked of days.  They talked of sun-sanctioned fiscal-driven business-blessed products, and then they stopped, like clams, and spoke of happy exhibitions in galleries, and maybe the price of theater tickets and the increasing quantity and quality of weddings and, if efficacious, one or two of the deceased.  The alleys i am entering are entered more than spoken of, and those of us who enter aren’t normally invited to the parties of Seville.

I saw him next under the destitution of a full moon in the smoky geometries of an undecided evening by a polluted creek on the outskirts of love.  Jackalopes, squirradgers, wombines, elephaffes, pysons, donmels, vulphins, and raphonamites lurked in the fuliginous night, gnawing on each other.  He was in the crook of a tree, screaming at unseen enemies, in a loincloth, stuffed with vatic wisdoms.  I threw some pinecones, drawing his ire and attention.

le bruit des cabarets la fange des trottoirs! verfremdungseffekt! petite madeleine! anosognosia! inter alia sophrosune sub-iectum! une riche et inutile survivance! wie es auch sie das leben es ist gut! reines bewusstsein! die schwärmerei! ho hum! l’éphémère ébloui vole vers toi chandelle crépite flambe et dit bénissons ce flambeau! ertrinken! versinken! unbewußt! Höchste! Lust!

He howled like a cloven moon, ripped off his loincloth revealing an erection which began spouting into the skies an aurora borealis of semen, greens and reds and blues of holy sperm, and threw trees and vivisected animals onto the earth like a crazed and animate piñata and i ran back to Seville, to my small apartment, and wept.

Upon his first encounter, Augustine had called them lahars of confusion, and returned to them to castrate himself over a pagan font in 392, swollen with repentance, committed to the plank of clarity, spilling the hideous blood of his testes, those thick and questing hydras, in exchange for the aseptic blood of God, returning to Hippo, never to tread again on Seville’s miasmic earth, never to look back at those purple indulgences, that tumescent sin.  In 1244 Aquinas, smitten with his vocation, ripe with holy passion, slit them off with a broken wine bottle and screamed the names of God in Spanish, which he did not know.  In 1119 Abelard, bereft less of Héloïse than of himself, sought the alleys with a butcher knife and did the deed.  Origen, apophatic and pulsing with the cries of Jesus, began the tradition in 209 when, flexible before the Lord and elastic with righteousness, he arced his body and bit them off—oh snake that devours! oh sacred sacrifice of purity! oh love!

In 1858 Baudelaire wandered in without shame or pity and lopped off the sac of a Portuguese sailor while in very congress with a corpulent Sevillan whore who smelled of turmeric and myrrh.  In 1985 Edmond Jabès, little known to history, having trekked across the desert to the mirage of questions and drank his fill, snipped them off with sheep shears and didn’t weep and died within seven years.  These are the records of castrations of the alleys of Seville in the name of the western gods and under the blankness of a blackened sun.

So i enter them, booze in my sex, a member neither of the holy nor unholy orders, neither tepid nor a scholar nor a citizen of anything resembling knowledge.  Did not Margeurite Porete write, “Are they not a miracle of an architectural prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness, an intersecting of myriad relations?”?  Was it not Julian of Norwich who said to a budding anchoress, “Have they not within them less the mirrors we are seeking and more the labyrinths that are lost?”?

Signage is absent, the forks and interstices are wayward and seem to shift with each visit.  Like Habana, without cars or people and of widths only allowing two fattish people to pass while gently melding.  But there are people.  Yet not in any normal sense.  One sets one’s constructed personhood aside as one enters, and becomes a person of the alleys, an unfamiliar, experiencing by not experiencing, feeling the discarded subjectivities that pass as long and loosened hair, like fallen rain.

The nights melt the alleys down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of black is not the most beautiful hour.  It is only the final chord of night, when the vague and temporary citizens of the alleys have forgotten why they entered, in the deepest pangs of twilight, taking every shade to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by the alleys to ring out.  Then one sees, though in an instant, though one forever doubts and though one knows most deeply, what one has come to see.

I finally found him in his laboratory in the forbidden districts of a simulated CERN, wearing only a dirty labcoat and mumbling in languages i did not know.

was scrawled on a whiteboard and he jumped from testtube to marker to vodka to testtube like a bonobo between lovers.  I sat for what may have been hours, half-watching, shifting between dream and what is ostensibly reality, while he bounced around and scrawled and drank and yelped.  I found him next to me, pawing my leg.

There, finished.

Finished? What’s finished?

Suffering formula.

You’ve solved suffering?

Solved itself.

It’s over?

Always does.

We shall begin with an experience i had recently when drunk in the alleys of Seville, and we shall end there also.  For i accidentally found myself at a soiree of a Mrs. Bimble B. L. Bomble, of 382 Rue de la Luna in the Celestetta District, not far from Nomz Bar, an absinthe haunt of mine.  Placing myself innocuously in a corner, slurping aquavit like San Pellegrino, i forced myself to listen to the conversations.

You’ve heard that Alyson’s son received the scholarship?

It was not unexpected.

How is Frederik taking the news?

Naturally, he is upset.  He can’t see past what he can’t help but feel as a betrayal.

Of course.  He should take a trip, go to India or something.  Forget about things.

The storm in the Pyrenees … do you know the total damage?

In the billions, now.  Over 3,000 dead.

Horrible.

Dr. Vertenvoken’s recent book—what a masterpiece!

I hate to say it, but I wasn’t that impressed.

Oh really!  Do tell.

While I appreciated the textures of its plot, the typically finely drawn characters, I found its sense of irony overblown, its passions pretentious, its climax unrealistic.  Too much like Flight of Magenta really, a bit of a waste of paper.

Oh Henri, you’re too harsh as usual!

The truth isn’t always pleasant dear.

She’ll die of it.

I think so too.

Soon.  She’ll die of it soon.

All the better.

We’ve had enough.

She’s gone too far.

It’s all anyone can take.

You know what they say … what you reap is …

What you sow.  It’s so true.

His best work is from his final 10 years.

Unusual.

A late bloomer they say.

What matters is the product.  Life follows its own schedule.

Magnug is doing well.

Far better than expected.

Do you think it’s time to sell?

I’d wait a week, see how Bryzon performs.

Ah, you always were a savvy one Vasiliy, a savvy one.  I like the way you think.

It’s served me well, I have to say.

An asset to our kind, you truly are, an asset to our kind.

I think we’ve finally found one!

I’m so happy for you! Who?

Pierre Lemish.  He actually played once at Wimbledon!

Really!

Didn’t place.  And I’m sure he uses the fact to bump his fees up.  But the twins love him.

It’s been such a journey for you.

She heard it from Seeba and then heard from Fransi but didn’t put two and two together and when she found out … !

I pushed my way into the middle of the crowded room, raised my hand and yelled, Friends!  The room hushed.  I am not a stranger to Seville but i am a stranger to these gatherings.  I have been in the corner—that one (i said, pointing)—listening to your … your … communication.  I have heard you talk of awards and death and charts and justice and art and the gamblings of the privileged and tennis teachers for one’s children.  Most curiously, i’ve heard no one mention what is central to Seville, what grounds and circumscribes your lives and talkings—the alleys, their effects and architecture, the society and business that transpires there at night.

The room grew quieter.  The alcohol stood still.  Ginoo Alabos, debonair musician and member of the professional avant garde, a respected professor and member of the guilds, drawing his recent tour of Hungary on Daw Jia’s lovely naked forearm, stopped and frowned.

I am a frequenter of those alleys.  I have sought God in its garbled corridors and madness in its trampled air.  Yes! God! God who is dead and yet never dies! The god who is gods and no-god and no-gods and none and all and neither.  I have sought that which cannot be found and can be known only when it is not known.  I have sought the annihilation of myself in order to find life.  I have sought to see the possibility of repairing the deep injustice of the divorce of the sacred and the profane, that life is still possible for the human.  I wish to share with you the occurrences of my most recent visit, i wish to speak of the blood on which we walk … the grammar of our walking.  I do not know if i am mad.  I do not know if the alleys are real.  I do not know what i have seen, I do not know if i have seen it, i do not know …

… We have heard all this before, Encik Mllad, a Senior Civil Servant in the Carlosian regime, interrupted. The architecture in question, since it has been mentioned, is being sealed.  Each year, fewer enter, even fewer emerge, the portals of ingress diminish, the doors of egress are closed.

There is no escape, said Zonjë Tsis. Things change.

The Councils decree it, said Gospodin Wǣs-Wǣs.  It is the only way to progress democracy.

The Ministers have approved it, said Ssi Sui G.

The remaining Monarchs have blessed it, said Whaea Wei. We must let life take its course.

The International Bodies have confirmed it, said Mevrouw Vilipa. Its time is done.

The astrological charts don’t deny it, said Seeydi Habibubad.

The computers compute it.

The scientists validate it.

The therapists, psychologists, general practitioners, specialists, neurologists, psychiatrists—with the full support of their attendant lawyers and accountants and lovers and children and masseuses and nannies and poodles and customer service representatives—systematize it and erect a program of wellness to achieve it.

The scholars profunditize it.

The artists sacralise it.

The tweeters and bloggers blab it.

The …

They didn’t try to stop me as i left or seem to notice i had gone.  No one followed me as i departed the Celestetta District and no one mentioned my having had appeared.  Daw Jia’s forearm gratefully recovered the soft map of Ginoo Alabos’s Hungary and Vertenvoken’s oeuvre continued to be explored in tones not unreminiscent of reminiscings of reminiscings.  No one found the testicles of an unnamed diplomat.  It wasn’t reported, the police knew nothing.  I went to seek my friend but he was nowhere and so i left Seville and crossed the old-fashioned way, on a ship, to New York, where I got a job as a night waiter at L’express and found a girlfriend and went to movies and made up stories of a former life.

So gods inhabit doubt through suffering, and suffering lives in the inebriated alleys of truth.  This is what i discovered in the nights of Seville, that despicable administrative region of the nation of a doubtful Slovenia, with the aid of alcohol and a man whose name is lost.

HALLIBL AND THE THRONE

Hallibl saw the lie that lay at the center of her identity.  Its name was Molok, she thought, for it seemed to indicate that it wanted to respond when she spoke this name, and lay flat and sleepful when all those other words were uttered.  She saw the lie lie in its black sheets on the black bed, light as the mirage of a star in night’s desert, at the center.

Mififlf, a once dear friend from high school, descended from her perches in the hills to visit one precipitationless day, crumpets in her mind and satchel, malice exercising and happy in her heart.  Mififlf had always been irreparably beautiful, velour and elegance, the highest ends of burlesque and musical, a spectacle for the people, a womp of impeccability on the eternal table of lump and stain.

Hallibl and Mififlf had met—as we said—at high school, during their sophomore year, after Mififlf moved from Maf, and they had hit it off, as they say, through an interstice of calculus and coitus, in a Stutz.

Molok hadn’t appeared yet:  there was truth in things yet:  clouds are clouds, as the sages say, and dreams but are dreams.  The clouds of knowledge rain heavy on god’s children.  Dreams of innocence puncture the comforts of the rich.

Hallibl’s memories. Sliced and smoked. Like corned beef. Like chimney plumes in the north in the winter.  In there somewhere, in the munched meat, in the puffy ejaculations dissipating into the belly of heaven.  Nowhere were there kisses, a storybook open on the sleeping bed.  But there was a fire, monstrous in its choreography, its edges high in the obsidian emptiness, and the stars in their routine indifference circumscribing the savagery below. Children shouldn’t wander in the woods at night.  But memories … who would trust them, other than as a stained guide to the architecture of another world?

Mififlf wasn’t born in Maf, but this hardly detracted her from saying that she had been.  It was tattooed on her perineum, the f anusward, the M the other way.  Her Maf morphing slightly as she approached her knocking, Mififlf thought briefly of the crumpets she was bringing and the convenient chasm between heart and flesh, though not in this way.

Hallibl and Mififlf hadn’t discussed the tattoo until some time after the Stutz.  Not simply because Hallibl had been too lost in Mififlf’s muff to read, but since Hallibl was awkwarder than Mififlf in society the former failed to raise the issue and the latter, being used to it, simply didn’t.

Molok bides its time.  It doesn’t really wait for anyone or disclose its temporal fantasies until you’re in them.  This is a poem by the way.  In case you’re having difficulty.  Or a myth of sorts or allsorts.  Set in syntaxes and narrations neither to confuse nor enlighten nor to do anything in fact or fiction but to, like us, to be or become or seem or kill itself—a poem.

Hallibl was hiding in her navel near tea when the knocking started.  Curled around the nipple of her heart, she wasn’t accustomed to unaccustomed visitings, attributing it then naturally to something hiding in her hiding.  She returned to herself—or at least the self or selves or shelves on which lay things that claimed to be or represent in some sartorial wizardry her self or selves.  Yet there they were, still, like almost broken pumps.  The crack of fire and flesh in their sable deserts hardly compared.

Mififlf knocked. The crumpets sang. Those which had—just this morning—risen in their destinies, disks of bubbly warmth, yeasts of promise, on the perches, before perfection, were now singing, as perhaps counterpoint to knocking.

Hallibl and Mififlf had never particularly reconciled after the breach.  Hallibl had moved downstream, Mififlf to the hills.  A missive now and then, wandering between what seemed to be authentic affection or its prefab social simulations and thinly sliced hostilities, as thin as thinned culatello, in harried french baguettes and ambiguous cheese, would arrive, opening dim stairwells in the mind that were, hidden as they were behind libraries specializing in alchemy and other medieval arts, better left unopened.

Molok has a thousand eyes and sits on a talking throne of fire. The throne does its talking and doesn’t see.  How sight and speech collaborate in such a scene might be described in a book, but the text is lost, and we resort to explanations that may be so tangential they might be true.

Mififlf lay a crumpet on a table, not unhot, even butter on its dimples and dripping down its holes.  For you, she said.  And this was not untrue.

Hallibl and Mififlf.  What a team.  As teamy as teams go.  The blackbird and the poet, the hedgehog and the walrus, odd consummations that keep the world spinning on its axis of atramental silence.

Molok has a mouth we forgot to mention.  It unites the language of the throne and the language of the eyes.  Hallibl’s eyes are laid before it, twinkling like the desert, while Mififlf hums massively forgotten tunes, her perfect belly being kneaded by the cat, Minou.

THE STORY OF OF

THE STORY OF OF

of was waiting by the western window watering her wisteria when she spotted a naked man swatting his northern window with what appeared to be a book of sorts.  Both were inside, as being outside would have, under normal conditions, without having something directly underneath them, if by being outside we mean outside their windows, meant their deaths.  What piqued her inquisitiveness were not his almost absolute nudity (if it were not for the black glove on his left hand), not his exceptionally fine penis, which hung with a graceful and not entirely limp nobility from the usual places, not the obvious fact that he was exposing himself with seeming aplomb, nonchalance and (it must be confessed) a casual eroticism, not even what he was doing there, with his hanging and swattings, but if it was actually a book he was using and, if so, how thick, how long, if it had been wholly loved or simply fingered and under what conditions, the thoughts that might have grown under its tutelage, whether it was the kind of book about which we say, that was a fine book, that was a great book, that was a book to remember, or whether the remarks were more of the type—oh well, it held notable promise but, in the end, quite forgettable you know.


she had spent most of the remainder of the day regretting she had dropped the binoculars after rapidly having grabbed them from the cassone and examined in the available details their refined quality permitted (they had been a gift from Gili, her colleague at Burberry during the Bravo years, when affairs were like acrylics and masturbation like a well-used ellipsis) the glove, the nobility, though not necessarily in that order and without necessarily equal attention given to both.  As she was thinking about preparing to move to the book (or what appeared to be the book and, more accurately, move the binoculars to focus on the book rather than those ancillary things), her cat, Miflufalot, had, in one of its periodic and always entirely unexpected episodes of severe neuroticism, leapt from one of the nearby bookcases onto Of’s right shoulder, causing her (etiology, though, we must confess again, is said by certain people about whom it’s sometimes said they might be expected not to know better to be an inexact science) to scream, drop the binoculars, breaking them irreparably (for her floors were firm), and orgasm slightly, these activities roughly simultaneous.  (Incidentally, her eastern neighbor, a Mr. Razmoos Höggendötter, heard the scream, causing him, quite indirectly and with the usual caveats, to call his wife and admit to a fling he’d been having with a dental assistant, though not Of, though she was frequently his fantasy, for she was not a dental assistant.)


of whiffled.  She thought of the book.  She spoke aloud to herself, as she had been accustomed to do ever since she had received Mikal’s note from Bangalore.  Of, she said … oh.  Here we are, our binoculars broken … Gili will be so upset … can’t tell her, she’ll tell Anah … then it’ll all end.


she casually lifted her head and looked over and above, to the window that had been swatted.  There he was not there again.  Bungled.  Yet she had seen, or thought she had seen, before the intimate distance had snapped, before she had had a chance to focus on what was most important—the very nature of the instrument he was using to hit the window—somewhere between the furthest reaches of her now defunct field glasses and the two appendages she had mistakenly and momentarily permitted herself to be distracted by thin long smears resembling the colour of blood.  The slight orgasm obviously hadn’t been enough.  It was as if, with the binoculars gone and Miflufalot having concluded, once again, that the human world was supernaturally deficient in all imaginable and unimaginable aspects, Of’s labia became like the book she hadn’t seen, that she had so wanted to languorously leaf through and become absorbed in.  This growing necessity, spurred by strange and coalescent forces, drew her from the couch on which she had intended to read back to the wisteria and the western window, fumbling now almost desperately but still with a modicum of control in the chest that had been purchased instead of the trip to Nueva Gerona, that significant budgetary struggle which had stressed her unduly for weeks until she discovered she had actually missed the deadline of discounted tickets thus making the decision effectively made, for those kidskin black opera gloves that she had inherited from her mother who had most fortunately been run over by the dysfunctional tram in Prague during that one summer of blossoms and happiness, grapping the left one and wrenching it past her elbow—thank god she and her mother were both size 19!—ripping off her blouse and earrings and bra and bracelets and skirt and necklace and hose and thong and anklet and even rings—what work they were! she even had to run to the bathroom and use soap! but that wasn’t a bad thing! her hands now smelt like tea tree and lavender! the kidskin was wet though!—running, galloping, back to the wisteria and western window, on the way tearing a chair from the table, splaying herself on it like a dropped cat furiously going to work hoping the man had binoculars but not a cat oh something was missing she ran to the bookcase almost slipping on herself and yanked a book what should it be? oh fuck it didn’t matter back to the wisteria back to the window back to the splayed chair everything was ready now hallelujah she began frantically swatting the window with one hand and with the other … how many pages were down there!? what a tome! and one to remember! like those drenched books pressed on the rooftops of Sayat-Nova no no the images! the images! back to business … that he was using them … she was forgetting to swat but something was … still missing oh … fuck the smears the … smears she shoved one of her many hands into a drawer she hoped he was there the … book the glove the smears the tumescent … perfection gathering … like … doves on the ark of the … covenant that was the whole thing the … tongue of … the kernel … of … mystery the … finger of … doubt the long … leaves … of questions … was … it … Of … or … was … it …