Part Three: "Underground"


I wake up in the bottom of an elevator shaft and wonder who I am,
quickly realizing that I'll probably never know. Someone has just
pushed the basement button and I'm soon to be smashed to blood and
guts. Damn, It'd be nice to at least know who I am before I die. I
suppose, though, that I must be committing suicide. Suddenly the
letter L. jumps to my mind. That's who I am. L. There's an L. on
the front of my blouse. I have a purse with me. Inside is a wallet.
Inside the wallet is a bussiness card. It says: L. Inspiration
tells me that the whole story is told in a long letter after my death.
What happened to L. The creaking of the walls tell me I'm about to
die. Smack! The bottom of the elevator hits my head and shoves me
down into a compressed ball and then stops. I scream in pain.
--What's going on? says a voice in the elevator. I need to get to the
basement!
--Ow! Help! I scream. Go up! Pleeease!
--No! What's going on? I need to get out!
--But I'll be crushed! I'll die! Pleeeease! I scream in agony.
--But I'm late! the voice protests.
This is when I realize I'm in New York.
--This is a gawdamn dream, I scream. I am L.!!
--Oh.
Sure enough, the business card leaves my crushed paw and floats in
front of my eyes. A dream. Not being crushed. A shitty dream and I
guess maybe I'll never know who I am. If I could just wake up. Maybe
I can't. Maybe I don't exist. I try to wake up and only slip into
more dreams. Incomprehensible. Colors, startling mathematics. I
know many things. The elevator dream repeats, this time with the
letter E. I am still L. but I'm playing E. This time the man in the
elevator says his name is Lenny, says he's tired of this shitty little
dream and stomps a couple of times. It hurts. If my neck would only
break. And then I'm clockwork back lost in space, a beautiful oily
dream floating across vast emptiness. Don't know who I am. OK.


Okay, so it's difficult I know. But, hey, it's difficult to be a
disembodied voice, a text, a narrator. I don't even know who I am.
And I haven't even begun to plan. My oblique strategies for getting
this all across are weak at best. At worst I might never get this
whole business started. Perhaps I'm more formula than verbal
employer. I seem to eat words by the mouthful. They burn when they
come back up, they burn my legs when they come spraying out. I'm
either this or that. I haven't even read the author I plan to steal
the narrative strategies from, see? It's about what we don't have
here, what appeal. Morality, huh? Help people here? There're people
here who need help in all sorts of ways. We are born one among many
and become many by the badges we work for, see? Why can't we all then
contribute to this verbage in a jar? This registered French trademark
juicered juice. Will my identity then dicate place? No. I'll beat
my face against your goodnight if not brought against you--we all
remember who said get a box. The producers disagree. We want a safe
dream. What's this river?

A function of beginning is trying. Ability. Educated integrity comes
with margarine soft squishiness. My toes. Did she survive? Now
we'll try several ripped beginnings. Burns every one. Tuned in air.
Phase one in turtle soup, a world goes and waits. Phase one.

My snail shoe see might a bunyon tattle as tweed dight, o fall...
Orphan nut's'll... oh no not it.....OK I shall soon be a dumbshit, a
flight from fall, a double dumbass lines demarked for the predictable
slaughtering of pedestrian zero. The program. My cut. One big pace
of trailing off into, eyes up I see a wall and little images dancing
on it in pale light. I cannot move my arms nor legs. Everyone is
laughing except the ones who are crying. I'm unsure what exactly is
going on, but I've a hunch that I'm several meters below the city at
some sort of ritual or high-paid performance piece. I think perhaps
this is a kinky date or maybe somehow my excuse for life. I can
remember too many things to be convinced of too much though--a place
called Montpellier, an idea called stealing themes from the ancients.
See, I couldn't have made all this up. Still it isn't helping much.
What'd you expect phase one to have any meat on its bones? We're done
with this one, bring on the next. Phase two. Glue for my left one,
my shoe. Amen. Phase two.

Writings that clarify theoretical disputes over two things, one thing,
work and how to do it, or life and how to live it. Archaic.
Primitve. These are words that we all know. Common substantives that
rival some third world nations in market productivity. Anthroplogy is
concerned with economics, frameworks of spacial (specious) concepts,
leading who knows where without page 250? Oh well, in truth Frazer
had a boil on his left one that kept his head dancing in the clouds
for decades. Still only came up with one answer--it's kinda like this
lie:
-------.1968. "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach."
-------.1975. "A Theory of Marriage"
Buchananan: "Tax Rates and Tax Revenues in Politically Equal Libriums"
Coarse: "The Problem of Social Cost"
-------. "The Lighthouse of Putrid Rich Dung Pie"
Colander: "Rationally, I expect you function as a pig...Inflate
Post-Keyenesianly and fly to market a fat sow, fate!"
Stop it, says Veronica Stigler, 1971, "The Theory of Pied Piper
Regulation blows open bells in my tinkling brass ears....I hear no
notes, no Early Empire Wittgensteinian investigations. a
resurrection...

Phase Three: Now cleanly anounced, phase three begins up a tree. A
monkey up there is my left hemisphere. Phase three-tree. Phase. Out
of, no... I'm surely underground. Held against my will. The first
time we came across the disability circuit we were sitting in a pool
of blood, looking closer, it was mine, shazam. Up false, over true.
I didn't come across my will, it abandoned us. Crept skyward in a
twinkling. GET OFF MY NECK, DICK! Shazam! My keyboard's an
interrupt sequence! Held against my will and somehow this will all be
written down from my brain. It's happening now, some electronic
flipflopper, complimentary of GET OFF MY SICK SEDGE, my jujube
minions! Mustard! Mustard and rye with a jellyfish! Arf in a blue
handle bay minions! Onions! We got onions, and celery, and
tinkertoys, yes, tinkertoys. That's a roll for ye, my friends. There
are no mockerys in words but what we intend. No mallice, my friends.
I want to say it cleanly, put my hand in the good barrel for a test.
May I be given on my death bed a small honey-comb book for Senior's
tongue. A holiday. Push hands away. A double storytell, blip...
blip... blip...

Once in a Hollywood theatre, rill dinger, imported from the 1920s
Midwest during the 90s. Some fat lady running it smoking cigars and
finding ways to look up the girls' dresses as they deliver popcorn.
I'm washing my hands in a men's lavoratory. Why? I can't even
believe my own explanations (too painful to face). I'm washing my
hands and the urinal flushes, just like the old days, on its own in
intervals. I'm washing my hands and at once the world seems as if we
do whatever we do time and time again. Wash the hands over and over
again. One big monotonous reel at a time. We cut and splice our
mundane reels and make a life. Straighten it out into a mess what is
us. All the carrot eating done in a sitting, all the waking up hungr
y and confused. Linearity can be a good friend I think. Phase four
this is. Phase four. This one stolen from page seven, hah! It was
the first page. It was the first day of the Herbal War, no, it was a
Verbal Vortex, I was activating my brain-translator to write just what
I'm writing now, a difficult farewell letter to my alter-ego's alter
ego, a dwarf ghost named the Feeler or R. Listening to the Pathenogen
broadcast on innerspace when the whole thing blew up. I waited,
erasing my mind as I went. Wonderful device this Japanese model. I'm
in a dream. I'm going to get someone from this. Later, I'll only
later pick it up again. Why all these phases? Look at the bottom of
this one. It says, "No, no, this isn't working" and it's not, see?
Go back and insert one of these endings after each previous phase.
See? A game. They're attempts at verbal thievery, feeble attempts.
Can't even do my own washing in public restrooms. Scrubbed down to
the nub. Deprived in youth by TV I don't sparkle with your deep
wellspring, your watercloset of modern cultural underpinnings. So I
will steal from you, you word-whore. I can't remember anything on my
Xmas card list. I've been in Zanzibar and the Bahamas, I've been to
dance bars in my pajamas, refabricated for thousands, millions.
People who've never freely written down grocery lists since all the
school's burned have tied their laces together. A universe screams
out this face fate in agony, you know, or at least comprehends my
tail, sawed off and all as it is. To the disgust of writers, or
brainkillers my new now label, who, already too numerous, do not
invite links with silicon wafer bundles too quickly. No, they cry!
Give us back our laws! Give us a generation or two to change our
ways, eh? I'll give you a lamp on the head, a secret delighted lump
of the audiovisual collapse, nevertheless earned at least shit-eating
sandwiches from that college. Listen for instance: I cannot go on.
My dog ate the other pages for a midnight snack. The binding was
cracked anyway and he'd been shot with an arrow for stealing pigs. He
was NOT herbiverous, if you hadn't guessed. He was, after all, a dog.
A word-dog, but my processing plant ID says I'm in the right place
after all, and so the requisite ending: No, no... It's not working.

Phase Five then is ours by default. We have to go with this one,
there are no more, which is too bad, being that phase three would've
gone better with the draperies. I'm starting to feel alright.
Something's worn off and I can feel my mind mentally typing this all
down. Somebody's going to love reading it and I hate him for it.
Still the fascination of it is worth the lame violation. He's an
impotent slob, I'm suddenly reminded, a dinner-monger. Worse, he's
got a wire in my head. Still, I can't deny the Piper. Phase Five is
Underground, is Out and I'm slipping into it.

Phase Five: Man thinks he's lost in Irkutsk. Thinks he's in a
hospital for the criminally insane. He's actually in a Southern
Region retraining camp, No. 49. People call him Dr. Tea. He knows
he's destined to wake up in somebody's dream. And so he does. A fly.
No, three flies, doing it on the edge of my nose. I can see it all as
if through cellophane. They're shaking in a bestial perversity
amplified by their seeming insignificance. Why should flies have all
the fun, huh? It's a chinese water torture with a twist, a semantic
nihilism that doesn't fail to pierce my cross-eyed weariness. I need
to go to the bathroom, I need to eat something, I....but I cannot
disturb the perversions dancing on my face, now down my cheek, rolling
onto the curl of my lip. Wish I could swish them off, but my hands
are tied. I consider swallowing them. All at once a peel of
crackling electricity ignites across my brow and zaps all three flies
in one hideous blow. Only the faintest smell of singed flesh is left
behind. All this while a dialogue goes on in my head. I am ninety
years old and living in a home in South Carolina. Nobody knows me.
Everybody I ever knew is dead. Suddenly a rectangle of light drowns
my face in shocking glow and I find myself lying flat on a wooden
table in a loose robe. Someone is trying desparately to tell me
something. I can't quite make it out. The thought occurs to me that
I haven't been conscious in some time. Someone is trying to program
my mind, that's the conclusion I come to. I decide it's best to nod
my head. It's difficult but I manage to do it. I hear a sigh of
relief and inwardly hope that I've fooled whoever is after my soul.
At once I feel a shock, an electric jolt to the neck that sends me
arching back into dreams and memories. As I go under I'm aware of a
large and curious presence, an interloper, an observer unknown either
to myself or my torturers...unknown till now. Another shock and I'm
lost again at the old folk's home. Someone with big round glasses
named Misses Magoo is trying to fondle me....no, she's trying to
change the sheets. I open my mouth and say "bock bock". She thinks I
think I'm a chicken. This is utterly absurd and mocking to me until I
realize that I AM a chicken.

Several non-descript personages come for me. They hold up a sheet
that says "You are Dead" in pale, piss-yellow letters. I am dead,
they have come for me. But I can see in their eyes that there are
many worlds to be created before these things come to pass. I may
live to be a hundred if I can figure out who, how, where and what I
am. I am a recording machine. I will awaken soon. Yellow shower,
circles or blue and the brain goes golden, pale in a hundred and sixty
nanoblips, thirty-three point three three three zillion years and a
little more. A year and a day. I have this piece of chalk I'm
keeping tally with. Of what I don't know. I'M IN PAIN!! There's
something human in that. I am human after all then and not a machine.
I find out too late. Now I remember how I died. But I can't tell
you. Not now.

I got out. Manegui called to me and I answered. We became the only
kind of lovers we could be. We became a bond.

Well thanks CB-R, thanks for getting me out of my marble slab bed.
I've got my feet in a pair of pink fuzzy slippers and though my head
feels like its going to explode into a zillion pink dots, I feel as if
my narrative is closing so that my life can restart, whatever it is.
I seem reasonably sure that I am myself, whoever I am, and therefore
now out of the dream world, or wherever I've been, and not suffering
delusions. Yeah. I'm in some sort of bedroom. It's not mine. I
remember all my dreams. Is my name Edith? No. I'm awakening and I
feel my narrative ending. The machine recording my consciousness does
not exist outside of the dream world. This leaves me feeling empty
and I'm tempted to have one last nap. The price of that love could
easily be too great. There's a dripping making me think about water.
I'm thirsty, very thirsty....

And I knew I had to awaken her. She knew me if just for a moment.
And we must then be allies. I have no enemies except among those who
do not know me. I am the conglomerated remnants of what your jazz
poets would call a smooth killer mind, except that I cannot kill
anyone. No other introduction is needed, except maybe to say that I
am a pit, perhaps a trap or a well. My narrative will be complete and
I will attempt, then, though I see the action from many perspectives,
many facets--still I shall strive to keep my boundaries out of it
until this intersection. Being awakened now she'll begin to be her
story, her action, and I will be your eye on the world through her. I
am not too discarded that I cannot do this service. And my ancient
bones tell me that a thousand years hence and a universe contemplates
this very fate. I'm unsure if it is to be absorbed or spit out and
cannot care any less. Sometimes to be marginalized, even by the
entire universe, can have its advantages. Other times not. I can't
see you very well either, ok? So we're almost even in this venture.
Something it's my perogative to shove. Okay now Out.

I am unsure how to proceed. I am unsure of what exactly oblique
strategies are and how they are to be properly employed. Hmmm, very
curious. I am neither sublime nor human--more of a machine, except
that I know some specific things about geological time that no machine
could know, I won't bore you with them. They tell me that I'm real.
Enough to be reminded that the caves of this continent all report to
me. I also often hear echoes from the extreme northern portions of
the old world. Right now I'm deciding to proceed by narrowing in on
L. as she begins to come to her senses for the sixth or seventh time
this past month of sundays. She feels like a tallier or a tally.
Someone's voice inside her rings: "We are merely barking time and
time, like a cold dead universe, is nothing." Somewhere, though,
there's a pain behind her eyes that lets everyone know she's human
after all. I stop, confounded by my own lack of empathy for this
suffering, again a machine-like response, and find myself shuffling
glaciers in order to understand how no hand but the Master's could've
shaped me. Still why no lump in my throat for this fish? She is,
after all, the universe's navel at the moment. Someday she'll be an
interesting artifact and sure sign of a telling tale, but for
now--well, birth is about to occur, a nasty, bloody thing in which
this belly feels the cold slice, a cut separating this world from the
next, cold breath of pain to be sure. What her eyes feel is one last
illusion allowed before the onslaught. This is a race, my friends,
and I am on a team. I am thrilled to say this after so long, but,
alas, see my weaknesses seeping through? I had promised not to
interfere. I'd promised to narrow my narrative to our lovely
heroine's pouty features and steely inner core. Perhaps that is too
unbecoming of one so presumably human, and so let us dispense with it.
She will be to us, a bag of features, an icon, a shadowy persona on
someone else's strings whom we are called upon to enjoy and
understand, perhaps to feed. This ghost someone, this L., finds her
mirror in her handbag and she's who she thought she was. Great, she
thinks, couldn't have picked a better life to fall into I'd wager.
And sure enough, she can feel a throbbing of life through her solar
plexus and the bottoms of her feet that speak guarantees to the
rightness of her being who the mirror and her sensibilities dictate.
Every detail right. Frighteningly right...only, no some irony that
this is one of those "this time"s and that "this time" every detail
will fall silently into her favor. I don't know what's happening now,
through L., but I know it's going to be good. Good, indeed, my L.,
good, if our plans don't wash away with next earth's throbbings.

Oh shit! Where am I? How come I seem to be typing again? Well
wherever I am it's nice. I like nice places. How do I know that? I
don't even know who, or what, I am. Hmmm...I think therefore I
am...Is this thinking? Or does it only seem to be? Wait! I can
still remember my dreams! I can sit down right now and review them.
I must know a good deal about these matters somewhere in my
subconscious and I'm confident I have the skills to decode
myself....unless of course this false confidence is programmed
in...Hmmm...that reminds me of....Well anyway if I'm being programmed
then I guess this drive for self-reflection is part of it. Hey
there's a mirror--look at that self-reflection! Nice features! Yeah,
I'm beginning to believe I rilly am someone special....or dangerous.
Now let's see I was in a dream, running through a maze and punching
out dummies around every corner. I'd slam 'em, a bell would ring, and
they'd rock back and forth never losing that stupid grin...and then
one exploded!

And now let us, shall we, myself, let us sleep and allow our friend to
recall what she can't remember. I shall take interest in her
unraveling. No, I'll not feign my desire.

--I'll not take that for a 'no' because whoever you are I still think
you're a part of my head....OK, so what's silence supposed to prove.
See I think and it comes out of my fingers even though I'm sitting on
my hands. Am I a secretary then? No, you're the secretary. Well
then, if that's my insanity, then take dictation, mon frere. A story
to ghosts: listen up, ghost world, this is the rill world. And I
still think I know a thing or two if I can only remember. What's your
name? Not that easy, huh? OK, so I'm a... I'm walking around this
room. I'm wishing I had more clothes on. I'm not going to do
anything weird to myself. There's no time for that. I'm looking for
a door and keep finding closets. No wait. I think I will lie here on
the bed for a while. Sure I have time! Yes. Please turn off your
recorder now while I begin like this, I touch--

O.

There you are there. Then I--

Thank you. My pretense, I suppose, was cheap.

Ok so what's up?

{I thought not, my friends, to intrude here, but now I must. This
dialogue is interminable and annoying. The interaction of heads
without bodies is trivial at best. Manegui knows that and it pains
him to tell his tale. It's like there's a knife at his throat, if he
had one, which I'm unsure of, a fear of just punishment for some long
forgotten crime that makes him suffer this torture. Still he tells
all. How L. is the victim of a diabolical genius of the literal
underworld. He uses her for his designs and experiments, allowing her
to go to the surface to have a life from time to time. Drugs designed
to make her forget. Other enzymes to trigger returns at intervals or
on command. The inability to distinguish her programed dreams from
reality. L. feels lucky that she can't now remember herself very
clearly. It all seems so sordid. Even for her this is a messy
conversation. Like bleeding in public in all the wrong places, the
nose, the lower extremities. By the end her anger and sorrow have
turned to sand and arisen as pitty and a determination to ride this
wave. The resolve in her mind makes Manegui tremble with fear and
delight. He laughs in a nervous joy. These things were supposed to
be the story. Well, it's gone too far now and can't be retrieved.
Perhaps it's ruined it for you. Well, my perogative to leap to my
death if I dare, despite the letter of the law. I have half a mind to
summarize the rest of the it and be done with. The other half would
like to eat figs and throw shit at you. But since it's mine to decide
I'll bully-for-you if I must or list. We'll dispense with the details
as well as the plot. You make em up. It's my fiend friend to give
this abruptness, or better said clumsiness, and one may say that I'm
at liberty. Suddenly there is no more time for light bulbs between
the ears. L. leaps to her feet and says:}

--So. How do I get out of here?? Wait! This has happened before!

--And so it has, my love, yes, many times.

--Why do I feel a voice in my head telling me that this time I'll work
it out?

--Because it's said that before, many times. But this time it will be
different. Even now you're going up early. This should disrupt the
pattern. This time many more things will be strong. You must plan
something that will drive you into the holes. Given the chance you
will come down early. Commit some crime on the surface if you must.

--I see. What month is it?

--February. Almost March. Be hard.

--And this is all getting written down?

--All of it.

--And will anybody ever read it?

--No, nobody.



Back to January 28, 1993

_CityCity_ Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5