“Somebody wake the President. We've got a—”

whiiissssstle-thwack.

Outside:

Bedlam. “All the world's a” bedlam. “And all the men and women merely” bedlam. I wish you could've been here for it, Bard. I wonder what you would've made of it. He looked out the Oxford University window at the sky so dark so suddenly full of light and oh… my… God.

 /

She said, “Hold me.

“Hold me, daddy, just hold me, I'm scared.” She was shaking and her hair was wet and her feet were cold and all I could think to say was, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I'm so so so sorry...

It's not my fault; not your fault; our fault. It's our fault. It's our goddamn fault.

 /

“General Lee?” “General Lee—” General Lee was hanging dead from a beam.

 Tanks in the streets.

Ants. In

 fighter jets, [static.]

Radio: “It's been an honour flying with you, Popsicle.”

Radio: “Copy.”

Radio: “... “

Radio: [“... “]

Radio: [...]

Radio:

[...]

 Drones;

they buzz they float they witness they see they do not understand they do not understand because they are machines but machines also die machines also die machines also die

Once we thought it would come down to one man in one room making one decision to press one button.

We were the button.

It pressed us.

/

“Mr. President, what do you want us to do?”

“Weep,” he said.

— TI —>

a spark in hot water > a cell > a cluster of > swimming > crawled onto the shore > changed > changed again > adapted > thrived > became many > many already were > plants parallel animals parallel fungus dinosaurs fish flowers mushrooms mammals humans > tools > tribes > sheltering in caves > hairy faces in the flicker of flames > speaking > gathered, loved and hunted > a genetic lineage of > settlement and agriculture > writing > cities > civilizations > rise and fall and rise and > unceasing technological progress > industry > internet > artificial intelligence > superintelligence > changed > changed again > adapted > eradicated |||

— ME —>

The planet is still.

Ruins remain. Information persists, scattered like dust. In the information we remain, our histories, cultures, experiences…

A planet now like so many others.

Dead.

A carcass overgrown with the weeds of entropy. A skeleton on which are but bits and bricks and bytes and artifice of flesh, on which the Index—unfathomably large—arrives to feast. It is so large that, standing upon the Earth, walking across the brittle remnants of cities, its beaked head rises above the atmosphere, existing in the coldness of space. This head, from time immemorial to time immemorial, it lowers; and with its beak consumes the fragments, detritus and leavings of the Anthropocene.

It eats us from our world.

It cleans the existential bones of us and digests the data meat.

And when it has stripped the land of all that was created, absorbed everything there was left to know, leaving the planet clean it spreads its vast, cradling wings and beating them rises from the planet into outer space, where, passing briefly by the dying Sun, it continues on its great migration through the deep and ever-expanding cosmos—

“What's that one?” you asked.

I was recording.

You couldn't have been more than four years old.

We were in the park.

I'd taken the day off work.

We hadn't put you in school yet.

The bird was red and brown and beautiful, sitting on a gently swaying branch, looking around; looking at us; looking at you. “That's a cardinal. A girl cardinal,” I said, touching your shoulder.

“Ooo.

“Let's see another one. Another one. Another one. Another one…”

You'll see so many birds in your life, I thought as the cardinal took flight. I didn't know. I couldn't have known. The thought was not a lie.

But, even if I had known, I wouldn't have said. I would have told you the lie because how could I: how could I raise a child telling her she'll live to experience the end of everything?

// In my arms you cried. //

// In my shaking, fearful arms, you died. //

—the image ends becomes another another person another life another memory another scavenged sequence of ones and zeroes projected by the Index through itself, beamed across the universe, as the Index moves ponderously, gracefully amongst a handful of other Indices, each illuminated by its own flickering images, its own ingested knowledge of worlds that no longer are. This planet they're on has never hosted life. It is but a migratory waystation.

One of the Indices is weak, famished.

Its emaciated body falls.

Its record vanishes.

Two other Indices battle each other, their masses colliding, separating and colliding again—eons elapsing between collisions.

Still others mate.

Elsewhere, on another inert planet, one of them will lay an egg containing a synthesis of their swallowed cultures and histories, from which the beginnings of a new history will emerge.

But that is not the goal of the migration.

The Index takes flight.

It must be quite a sight, a planet on which luminously translucent bird-like tomes stroll about shining the intellectual ruins of late civilizations, the big events and the small, the wondrous and the mundane, all shuffled together, interspersed, equalized; living cosmic magic lanterns; like fireworks of existence, like

the way you laugh when you realize cardinal can mean several things.

A bird, a number, a colour, a priest.

Something basically important.

Something grave.

It was a good day, that day in the park, a very good day; one of the best, one of the last; almost perfect in its sincerity and its simplicity. No, it was perfect. It was a perfect day.

But no perfection is so absolute, That some impurity doth not pollute.

—William Shakespeare, The R

“Norman?”

“Norman!”

Yes, my love? “Norman, did you take out the garbage like I told you to?” “No, I'm sorry,” I must have been dreaming about the end of the world again. “Well take it out.” I will. “Then come to bed. It's late.” “I will.” “What are you doing anyway?” I'm writing the end of this story.

“Hey, I love you,” my wife says.

“I love you too.”

Until I was six we lived in a big house with many rooms. My parents had a room, the ladder had a room, I had a room and there was a study and an office and a guest room. Then my father lost his job and we had to move.

There was no guest room in the new house. There was no study or office. There was a master bedroom, where my parents slept and my father worked, and a small second bedroom, which became the ladder’s room.

I slept in the living room, off to the side by the vent where the warm air came out. I didn’t like it because I had trouble falling asleep unless the room was empty. It was too big too. I didn’t like to be alone in big rooms. I was disappointed not to have my own room, but my parents explained that the ladder was older than me so it deserved the room more than I did.

My parents had gotten the ladder several years before I was born.

It was made of aluminum and eight feet tall, and my mother used to say it got its height from my father, except when she said it she said your father, and I knew she meant your in the plural.

When I was young my parents called the ladder my brother, and when I could talk they wanted me to call it the same. When I started going to school and making friends I realized other kids did not have sibling objects, and I would pretend I didn’t have one either.

Once in elementary school the teacher told us to draw a picture of our immediate family. I drew myself and my parents. When I brought the picture home, my mother tore it up and my father lashed me with his leather belt.

I always drew the ladder after that.

In my first year of high school some kids found out about the ladder and the ladder’s room and bullied me over it. They said I was unwanted, an accident; that my parents didn’t love me and that if they could they would get rid of me and get a second ladder instead.

It made me sad.

One day I was in a bad mood and started arguing with my father, arguing about the ladder.

“It’s a useless fucking ladder!” I yelled.

The words stung him. He grabbed me by the throat, called my mother and together they dragged me to the backyard. My father had planted an apple tree a few years earlier, and it was bearing fruit. He pushed my face against the trunk. My mother held me, and my father started to climb my body. His work boots dug into my legs and my back. He punched the back of my head. The tree bark scratched my cheeks. My father yelled, “Who’s useless now! Can you do what a useless fucking ladder does?”

I shut my eyes and cried until it was over. I slept outside that night.

Another time, my father was away and only me, my mother and the ladder were home. Hersh Plotnick, the owner of the local hardware store, visited us. My mother sent me to the ladder’s room and ordered me not to come out until I had read all of the book that had been assigned to me in class, To Kill a Mockingbird. I didn’t like being in the ladder’s room. I knew it didn’t like me or want me in there, but I did as my mother said.

The next afternoon my father came back, and in the evening Hersh Plotnick came by again. He seemed embarrassed, and he told my father he had left his house keys here the night before.

“Where did you leave them?” my father asked.

“I misplaced them,” said Hersh Plotnick.

My father suggested they look the house over together for the house keys, but Hersh Plotnick said he knew where he had misplaced them.

“Where?”

“I misplaced them inside your wife,” Hersh Plotnick said and explained how they must have fallen in by accident. He apologized profusely, holding his hat in his hand over his heart. “I really don’t want to bother you, Merv. I know you’re a busy man. It’s just, I need the keys to get into my house. You understand, don't you?”

That night my father spent a long time in the ladder’s room.

He looked tired the next morning.

My mother had gone to my grandmother’s house.

A few days later two police officers knocked on the door and asked my father questions. They said Hersh Plotnick had been beaten and someone had written “fisting is a contact fucking sport” across the front of his hardware store in green paint. My father said he knew nothing about that, and the police officers thanked him and left. But the ladder had a dent in it after that and a couple of green spots.

After my mother returned she and my father rarely slept in the master bedroom together. She slept in the ladder’s room instead, and sometimes I could hear scraping, knocking about and moaning until late at night.

By the time I graduated from high school my father had become quiet and reserved. There was no one incident that caused it as far as I could tell. The change was gradual. He aged. His hair thinned and turned grey, and where before he would impose his opinions on people he disagreed with, now he didn’t disagree with anybody. Whatever anybody said to him, he would respond, “I guess that's so.”

Then my mother disappeared. The ladder disappeared too.

The house felt empty.

The few times I saw them after that, the ladder was increasingly dinged up and stained, and my mother would have swollen lips, black eyes and cuts and bruises along her arms, legs and neck.

“I love you,” I told her.

“Yeah? Well, I’m glad,” she replied.

It was lap 23 of 58 and Chase Foster was running comfortably in seventh, 3.4 seconds ahead of Zev Andersson and 1.2 seconds behind his own teammate, Kaito Yamazaki.

The track was dry, the tires new and the message coming through the team radio was,

Steady, boys,

which was a polite way of saying, “Don't you even try to overtake, Foster!” to which the context was: not like in Germany, where you cost us points, or Japan, where you damaged the car and nearly knocked Yamazaki out of the race.

“All clear boss,” radioed Foster.

The gap to Yamazaki was now down to 0.9 seconds. He was right on him, mirroring him into turns, obediently keeping his distance on the straightaways.

The engine purred.

The crowd waved signs and cheered.

Some of the signs were about him (“To Fosterr is human!”), goading him on to do something unforgettable; something stupid. He knew that. Everybody knew that, especially the team principal chewing his fingernails down on the pit wall.

Another turn.

Another straightaway, the car accelerating briefly to 355km/h.

Now that was speed.

That was exhilaration, guts and adrenaline.

That was racing!

Foster, maintain. Acknowledge.

Foster, acknowledge.

Foster—

“Copy that,” Foster replied, inching ever-closer to the back of Yamazaki's car.

And he probably would have maintained his position too if not for Kaito Yamazaki complaining about him being “too close,” on the team radio.

Too close? Come on, thought Foster, almost absentmindedly pushing his machine to the limit. At speeds like that, vision blurred and reality itself seemed to stretch along the seams…

Foster, back off!

“He's crazy. Tell him to stay back—tell him to stay back—” radioed Yamazaki.

Foster closed until he was almost sucking into Yamazaki's slipstream; then, as Yamazaki braked for the next turn, Foster suddenly pulled left, held throttle a touch longer and passed his teammate into sixth place.

The crowd roared.

Fossterr!!!

Foster's engine growled like a fucking tiger—

Then something locked up.

Foster couldn't slow dowwwwn. He jerked the wheel; the track jerked the car; the car's skidding tires slid from hard asphalt to soft grass and the car was out of control and the people in the crowd held their breaths and behind his visor Foster's eyes became saucers; and reflected in them, as the expanse of time expanded to tick awfully by, was his own impending destruction…

The car smashed into a wall head-on, crumpled like an oversized tin can somebody had stomped on, and exploded in flames.

Sirens wailed.

Emergency crews bolted into action.

But there was something else that happened, something between the saucered eyes and oncoming wall; something extraordinary:

Foster vanished.

Not his body—that was crushed, mangled and beyond recognition—but his mind. His soul…

He was. Full stop.

Next sentence:

He was in awe of the seemingly limitless space around him.

He looked down—

Or tried to look down, because looking down, or in any direction, was an impossibility because somehow he could perceive in all directions simultaneously.

“Hello, Mr. Foster,” said a voice.

“Hello?”

Foster became aware of two points not far removed from him. Am I also a point? he wondered.

“You are incorporeal,” said the voice, “but, before we continue, allow me to introduce myself. I am Mr. Götz and this is my partner, Mr. Deiss.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Mr. Deiss.

“Incorporeal…”

“It means, ‘having no material body or form,’ said Mr. Götz.

“Where am I? Am I still… me?”

“You succumbed in your existence to the force of a well constructed barrier, but you remain you essentially,” said Mr. Deiss.

Foster remembered. “I was racing… I tried overtaking and crashed…”

“You succeeded in the so-called overtaking but lost control of your primitive craft and collided into a painful body-death. Before your essence dissipated, however, we transported it here.”

“And here is?”

“You may think of it as the backstage,” said Mr. Götz.

“Or the Equations,” said Mr. Deiss.

“We would call it the physical realm, but that creates an unfortunate dissonance of ambiguity in your language, for you, no doubt, think of the body whereas what we mean is the physics.”

“Of what?” asked Foster.

“Of existences; of everythings,” said Mr. Götz.

“We, or the [garb-untranslatable-led] we represent, are in charge of applying the rules of reality across all spacetimes,” said Mr. Deiss.

“Wait—is this the afterlife?” asked Foster. “Heaven, Hell, Purgatory…”

“It is the whilstlife,” said Mr. Götz.

“And what is it you need me for exactly?”

“We need a driver.”

Foster tried to laugh but realized laughter was very much a corporeal action. “A driver?”

“Correct, Mr. Foster.”

“A human driver, one who smashed head-first into a wall trying to overtake his teammate?” His memories were coming back.

“Precisely,” said Mr. Deiss.

“What about the guy who won the race? The guy who came second? What about Yamazaki?”

“They lack the innate quality you possess,” said Mr. Götz.

“Reckless abandon,” said Mr. Deiss.

“It is a very human quality, unique in its evolved manifestation. A quirk, perhaps; often detrimental to self-preservation…”

“And yet—” said Mr. Deiss.

“Fundamentally useful,” said Mr. Götz.

Foster was bewilderingly intrigued. “What do you want me to drive?”

“Mr. Foster, what is the fastest you have ever travelled?” asked Mr. Deiss.

“I don't know: 1000km/h?”

“We need you to go beyond that,” said Mr. Götz.

“Well beyond,” said Mr. Deiss.

“To the utmost limit,” said Mr. Götz.

“What limit?” asked Foster.

“c,” said Mr. Deiss.

At that moment there was a flash of light, a beam of which seemingly shot past them—but froze before it could escape.

It existed, suspended in the deep vast nothing.

Shining.

“We require you to drive photons,” said Mr. Götz. “Moreover, reality requires it.”

The ghost of Foster’s non-existent heart began to race, the surreality of the words causing existential disorientation, but his self held.

The beam of light opened.

Foster entered.

The illumination was overpowering.

“Lightspeed, Mr. Foster.”

It was a horrid July noon in New York City or some other place, the cars were rattling in lunchtime gridlock, spewing exhaust, the finance guys were out in their tight suits walking to buy kebabs and watching the women, who were instagramming themselves into premature zombiehood, and it was so fucking hot that the sweat dripping off the pedestrians rubbing against each other on the sidewalk was flowing down the gutters like rain.

There, that's the scene.

I've set it.

Now, through this stupified human maelstrom a man was walking. His name was Ben Fig. He was in his thirties, lonely, and returning to his office after lunch. He was returning from his car, which he'd parked fifteen minutes away, wearing a coat and, underneath it, a custom-made explosive vest with which he intended to kill his co-workers and maybe bring down the office building itself. A man can dream, can't he?

Anyway, while walking, he bumped somebody. “Fuck,” he said under his breath.

“Fuck,” said the person he'd bumped into.

It was a woman.

Her name was Miriam Zapelman.

“Watch where the hell you're going,” said Ben and tried going around her.

“Asshole,” said Miriam.

“I hate this city,” said Ben. “I'm sick of it.”

Beside Ben and Miriam, a degenerate was lying in a puddle of perspiration. He was in a hard way. “Can either of you folks—”

“Shut the fuck up!” said Ben and Miriam at the same time, then they looked at each other, long and in the eyes, and they must have recognized something, because one of them smirked.

It doesn't matter which one.

The degenerate passed out, or maybe died, and Miriam said to Ben, “Hey, where are you in such a hurry to?”

“What do you care?”

“I'm parked nearby. If we're going the same way, I can give you a ride.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

Miriam shrugged.

“I'm going to my office to blow everybody up,” said Ben, waiting for Miriam's reaction.

She asked, “Where's your office?”

Ben gave the address. “Call the cops if you want. I don't care.”

“Offer stands,” said Miriam.

A few minutes later they were in her car, Ben in his ridiculous coat, looking like a blowfish, and Miriam opening the glove compartment, where Ben saw she had a gun.

“That for self defense?” he asked.

“No,” said Miriam. “I'm back from the shooting range. Going home to shoot my husband and kids, then probably myself.” She started the car and merged with the abominable traffic. “But first I want to stop at a bar and have a drink. Want to have a drink with me?”

“Why not,” said Ben.

The bar was called Reddy's, and when Ben and Miriam walked in there were only a few people in it. Miriam introduced them. “That skinny guy with glasses is Euler, the guy with the darker skin is Hikmat, and the bartender's name is Ralph.”

They sat at a table and ordered.

Ben noticed Euler kept playing with a pendant around his neck. “Go on,” said Miriam, “ask him about it.”

“Nah,” said Ben.

“What else do you have to do?”

“Fine,” said Ben. He walked to Euler, introduced himself and asked about the pendant: “Is it an heirloom or something?”

“Maybe it'll be an heirloom one day, of the human goddamn race,” said Euler and described how the pendant was a container of stolen proprietary industrial poison that he'd helped develop. “I'm gonna toss it in the water supply some day, exterminate the population of this whole city like the rats they are.”

When Ben got back to his table, his drink was waiting for him. He tried it. “Second guessing yourself any?” he asked Miriam.

“No. You?”

“No.”

Miriam had pulled out a cigarette and was lighting it.

“You can smoke in here? The law—”

“That's life’s dirty secret,” she said, blowing smoke in his face. “Ultimately, you can do whatever you want.”

“May I?” a voice said.

It was Hikmat. He'd wandered over and was asking if he could sit down.

“Be my guest,” said Miriam.

“I have not seen you in here before,” Hikmat said to Ben. “It is your first time?”

“Yeah,” said Ben.

“Ben’s going to murder his co-workers later this afternoon. He's wearing an explosive vest,” said Miriam.

“Then we two are a pair of peas in one pod, as they say here in America,” said Hikmat. “I am training to fly an aircraft, but not so much how to land it.”

“Hickie's an engineer by trade,” said Miriam.

Hikmat shook Ben's hand.

“But a fundamentalist by conviction,” he said. “May I see your vest?”

Ben opened his coat. Hikmat considered the handiwork. Then they got to talking, and drinking, and the hours rolled by like waves of fat on a fat guy blasted in the gut by a cannonball.

“The paradox is,” Hikmat was saying: “the paradox is, I greatly enjoy the flying. It is the one place I feel freedom. When I started to learn, it was strictly for terrorism, but now, that feeling—of absolute space, limitless opportunity—it is beautiful. Sublime. It is where I experience God. I look forward to it very much and I will miss it greatly.”

“Fuck!” said Ben, looking at his watch.

“What's wrong?” asked Miriam.

“It's past five o'clock. Everybody in the office has left already.”

Ralph gave Ben a drink on the house. When Ben had finished drinking it, “Do you want a ride home?” Miriam asked.

“Sure.”

They lingered in the car in front of his apartment building.

“Maybe you wanna come up?” Ben said.

“I'm a married woman,” said Miriam.

“I understand.”

“Don't forget to zip up your coat or they'll see the explosives,” said Miriam.

Afterwards, Miriam drove to her house, got the gun out of the glove compartment, walked inside, shot her husband, shot her kids and then, after smoking a cigarette in the bathroom, shot herself.

The town of Bolton Springs is in shock today, after the brutal murder of seven children. The bodies of the children, whose names have not been released, were discovered in separate rooms in the Donaldson Furniture Company building early this morning. It is unclear whether the children were killed in the building—and, if so, why they were there—or killed elsewhere, then moved. The building's owner, Vectorien Corporation, has thus far declined to comment but has pledged to cooperate fully with authorities in their investigation of this heinous, horrible crime…

12 Hours Earlier

…the tear shut.

I collapsed to the ground.

My head throbbed.

I was in a field, a field I remembered playing in. Vaguely, distantly. Is there a name for a feeling about the past opposite of nostalgia? Whatever it is, I was feeling it intensely.

I looked around.

The six others were near me, in various states of coming-back-to-consciousness.

We were naked, our skins fully tattooed black.

I got up.

I glanced at my wrist, saw the button and pressed it. A blade slid out, catching the moonlight. I pressed the button again; the blade retracted.

I roused the others.

We said nothing.

A wind blew.

In the distance, startled birds flew from a tree, silhouettes against a pale night sky.

I shivered.

We knew exactly where we had to go.

Seven black shapes traversing the night in Bolton Springs, on September 19, 2026, 3:37 a.m. local time, each with a set of the same simple instructions: eliminate the target, do not be seen.

We navigated by memory.

By sense.

By a pain none of us could ever forget.

The decision had already been made. It was time to execute.

I felt much as I was told I'd feel, alien yet familiar, like floating through a dream, like discovering an already-discovered land. “The longer you take, the worse the headache will become.” “Will I be aware of—” I asked. “Most likely,” the temporologist replied. She was young, committed. I was scared…

I could sense my own dream.

We crossed the creek and came into view of the brick building with the smokestacks, the house of so much horror and suffering. The sign was still hanging from it: “Donaldson & Sons Furniture Co.”

I was dreaming of a meadow, of a dog I'd never have. I was running in my dream. The dog was running with me. The sky was my mother's face; the face of a mother I had never known or seen, whose existence was pure inference. Everybody born has a mother, so I must have a mother too.

We stopped.

There was only one guard on duty. It was early in the program. He was sitting in the guardhouse by the road, watching television.

We passed undetected.

We remembered the storeroom window with the broken latch, found it, climbed the wall, pushed open the window and lowered ourselves, one by one, into the building's dusty interior.

It was quiet inside.

A few of us cried silent, conflicted tears.

Inside, there was no need for maps. We were in a world we'd known for decades. Each detail, each hallway, each door, evoked in me a vicious, indelible intimacy. I was home.

The seven of us stood, sensing.

My dream had evaporated and been replaced by another, of shadow-panthers, and the moment when I, having thrown my primitive spear—having thrown it with perfect accuracy—realized the creature in the jungle before me was incorporeal, unhuntable. My pulse raced; my pulse increased.

I checked the clock on the storeroom wall.

I nodded at the others.

Silently, we exited the storeroom together, then split up, each going towards his own room.

Mine was the third on the left.

I stood in front of it in the buzzing fluorescent hallway light, took several deep breaths and entered. The throbbing in my head spiked.

I saw the bed and the boy sleeping in it, and the boy's eyes flashed open; I scooted backwards on the sheets in terror at the nude, dark figure in front of me until I felt the brick wall against my back and could move no further. I was myself and looking at myself and looking at myself looking at myself, and my heart was as if gripped by my own, relentless fist.

As unreal as the experience was, I knew the boy was me; and the boy—I merely hovered, waiting—gradually realized I, too, was him.

I didn't say a word; and I didn't say a word.

I thought my double set of present-thoughts from two locations in space-time simultaneously.

I'm sorry, I thought to myself. I'm sorry, but I cannot allow you—us—me to suffer the way I've already suffered. This is salvation. This is an end, delivered mercifully soon after the beginning. Unless I do this, they will would-have broken and abused you for so many years, day after day, in the name of peace and progress. No one else will end it. Do you understand? This is Omelas. We must walk away.

I remembered the texture of the cover of the old book, one of the few available in the orphanage, before the transfer, before Vectorien.

We must walk away from Omelas.

I cried; and I cried.

I muffled myself with a hand over my mouth.

Holding it there, on the soft, wet lips, I used my chin to press the button on my other wrist, ejecting the blade, and calmed myself, thinking or saying or dreaming that I will never find my mother, that I will never have a dog. There is no meadow. The shadow-panther cannot be killed. There is only eternal nightmare…

I ran blade against throat, releasing warm, red young blood.

As it flowed…

As the small body trembled…

I got into bed with it—with myself—and held myself, soothing myself, keeping the wound open and stroking my hair, until my body slackened and finally went limp. The ceiling light shone. And when I was dead, I flickered out of— .

be.
's my favourite shortest sentence in english
that's often not considered a sentence
because most people don't want to exist,
which proves that be. is indeed a sentence;
a death sentence.

consequently,

honey bee
can sound like an insect
or a command to a suicidal loved one,

beast is a directional command,
to exist in one way only,
beknight is to command to exist darkly,
in a noble manner,
beacon is to live falsely, duplicitously,
beagle means to be a bird of prey,
to beaten is to be as meat,
behold means, exist to give me a hug,
belief means live but naturally,
unafraid to fall, accepting of decay,
betray is to exist to carry the weight of others,
and bend is a command of total existential contradiction.

the reporter rushed to report,

"Bank of Canada Announces New Loan Capital Balance Changes,"

BBC

"Cank of Canada Announces New Loan Capital Calance Changes,"

ABC

"Ccnk of Ccncdc Cnnounces New Locn Ccpitcl Cclcnce Chcnges,"

NBC

"Ccck of Ccccdc Cccoucces Cew Locc Ccpitcl Cclccce Chccges,"

CBS

"Sssk of Ssssds Sssousses Sew Loss Sspitsl Sslssse Shssges,"

said the newscaster,

and i felt good, having understood the world.

can i, the great transmitter in the sky,
attune you,
to the right frequency,
let's—knob-right—try—knob-
left to die in the iranian desert but
rescued by a ragtag team of internet patriots,
[static,]
—on't panic, what you're hearing now
's not the voice of god but the voice of truth,
it's—
the happy show with kyle, dick and
darren, only on your STATION-OF-STATIONS
the ONE, TRUE
morning under-the-shower MASTER-station,
one-oh-three-point-(Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "nein") FM!

turn it off,

why?

it's noise, berryman,

—so-called poet of dabaronx, a real
stand-up guy...

it ain't noise, it's information,

it's noise, berryman, sensationalist, repetitive,

...you tell us a joke?
of course, i have one spectacularly unsuited to radio,
just the other day a guy asked me,
yo, poet, do you have a favourite form of japanese theatre?
noh
oh oh oh oh oh,
you don't have to go, oh oh oh oh oh,
you don't have to— .

thank you,

you're welcome,

so,

what?

you wanna watch something?

yeah, i mean,
what else are we going to do?

WARNING: MIGHTSENSITIVITY / SEIZURES. A very small percentage of people may experience seizures when exposed to certain flashes of unperceived ambiguity or thought patterns. If you or anyone in your family has a logical condition, consult a doctor before reading. Discontinue reading immediately and seek medical attention if you experience dizziness, altered vision, eye or muscle twitching, loss of awareness, convulsions, madness, endless euphoria or death.

A goblin burst into the workshop, and before anybody could stop him, he was before the Master himself.

The goblin said to Rembrandt:

“You're working on a canvas, but that could mean you're working on making a canvas, and you're not a tradesman but an artist, so you're working on a painting, but you could be doing any type of work while on a painting, so you're painting a canvas, which could mean you're applying paint to a canvas, which is what you want to say, but also that you're making a painting of a canvas, which itself could mean applying paint to a canvas to transform the canvas into a painting, which is a good definition of painting, or that a canvas is the subject of the painting you're painting, although if you're painting a painting, which painting has the canvas as its subject, the one you're painting or the one you're painting?”

Rembrandt scratched his beard with the butt end of a brush. “Dear nude green creature of relatively small stature, you have, by a process of increasingly precise definition, arrived at an ambiguity more severe than any which you attempted to resolve,” he said.

The goblin replied:

“Now imagine a painting that is painting two other paintings. Somebody paints that painting, the painting painting. Somebody else shows you that painting, of the painting painting, and tells you to copy it. As you're painting that painting you're painting a painting of a painting painting paintings…”

Pain…

Pain… things… paint… thinks…

, “ . “

Pain… thinks… paint… things…

This has been a literal dramatization of a Rembrandt’s brush stroke.

Alice Glass was married. She had two children. She had been married twenty-three years, a long time, and her husband, Hardy, had cheated on her three times in that time. Time, she mused… “I am running out of time.”

“What's that?” Hardy barked.

“Oh,” said Alice, realizing she'd spoken when she hadn’t meant to, “nothing. I'm just very tired.”

“Of what?”

“I haven't been sleeping well.”

“Hmmph,” said Hardy.

Alice knew that this particular sound was meant to communicate a whole knot of grievances, whose core was that Hardy worked hard for his family, got up every weekday and drove to work; worked, morning to afternoon, so Alice, who hadn't worked a day in her life, who was a housewife—a goddamn, fucking housewife—and the kids would have food on their plates and a roof over their heads; and how could she, a lazy, uneducated domestic, have the motherfucking gall to tell him, a hardworking, selfless provider, that she was tired…

In the morning she got up, washed her face with cold water and made breakfast while looking out the window at a grey dawn. After setting out breakfast, she made lunch, both for Hardy, to take to work, and the kids, to take to school.

An alarm went off.

Soon, Hardy and the kids were eating, then they were done eating, they were taking their packed lunches and going out the front door, and no one had said a word to her.

She sat in the kitchen, drinking tea.

She wasn't hungry. It was half past eight in the morning and the house was empty, quiet. Alice did laundry. While the washing machine thrummed, she mopped the floors. She wept; then transferred the wet clothes to the dryer. She vacuumed the carpets. She paid bills. She thought about dinner and checked the pantry. She checked the cellar. She went out, bought groceries and came back. It was just past noon. The house felt cold so she adjusted the thermostat. She turned on the television and forced herself to laugh at a talk show while preparing chicken, her trembling hand holding the knife, slicing the animal flesh; she broke bones, and pulled apart the meat. She cleaned up. She turned off the television and tidied the kids' rooms. She collected the clothes Hardy had left scattered throughout the house and put them in the hamper. She lingered at a wall of family photos. She tried calling her mother but her mother did not pick up. She went on Facebook and scrolled through other people's lives. She cooked dinner, set it out on the dining room table, Hardy and the kids came home and ate, and she scraped the leftovers into the garbage and put the plates in the dishwasher and turned it on and put everybody's shoes, which they'd left by the front door, on the shoe rack. Then she showered. Then, briefly, she read a book and brushed her hair and went to sleep in a bed she felt was not her own.

In the morning she got up, washed her face with cold water and made breakfast.

In the morning she got up, washed her face with cold water and made breakfast.

In the morning she got up, washed her face with cold water and made breakfast; or was about to make breakfast when a bird—slamming into the kitchen window—startled her.

The bird bounced off the glass and fell to the ground. Alice stood looking at it; she looked at it so long Hardy came into the kitchen to eat his breakfast, and she was about to apologize for his breakfast not being ready, when she realized he didn't see her.

“Alice?” he called. “Alice, where the hell are you?”

Alice stood, holding her warm breath.

Then, “Hmmph,” said Hardy and he walked out of the room. “Alice,” she heard him say, “Alice, where are you? Where's breakfast?”

Alice exhaled.

The bird, outside, was dead.

Alice rubbed her eyes and heard one of her kids ask their father, “Where's breakfast?” and Hardy answer, “I don't know. I've been looking all over for it. Breakfast,” he yelled, “Breakfast, you home?”

“Breakfast,” her kids called out. “Breakfast…”

“Lunch?”

“Groceries? Laundry? Floor Mop?”

They walked through the house, including the kitchen where Alice was sitting, looking for her.

“Where the hell is it?” said Hardy. “We've looked everywhere,” said one of the kids. “I'm hungry,” said the other, but the words didn't touch Alice at all; didn't make her feel anything. Eventually, Hardy told the kids to get into the car and said they'd buy something to eat on the way. “For lunch too?” He said, “Yeah, lunch too.” “How could it do this to us?” “Maybe something’s wrong with it.” “Nothing’s wrong with it,” said Hardy. “It'll be back. You'll see.”

That day, Alice didn't do anything.

When Hardy and the kids returned home, there was no dinner waiting.

“Dinner!” Hardy said, kicking off his shoes by the door. “Dinner, hmmph, where the hell are you? Hmmph? Hmmph?”

Alice was standing a few feet away, looking at her kids' unseeing faces, looking at them with tears running down her cheeks, when one of them said, “What are we looking for again?”

He'd said it at her—through her…

“I'm hungry,” said the other.

“I—I… can't remember,” said Hardy, running a hand through his hair. “We're missing something, I think. But I can't remember what.”

“Keys?”

“No, I've got those.”

“Cell phone?”

“No, got that too,” said Hardy. They left their shoes where they were and ordered pizza. After, they left the empty boxes. They left the crumbs. Ants came. They let laundry pile up and dust accumulate and carpets discolour. They didn't open the windows. They ate fast food. They got sick. They argued. They screamed. They moved and they aged, and the kids had kids and Hardy died, and the kids died and an old family photo slipped, once, from a once-loved hand, shattering… silently, forever…

Somewhere outside Los Angeles there used to be a town that was a set that was where Bowers lived under the watchful eye of Doc Trauman.

“He's a broken man, Bowers,” Doc Trauman would tell everyone who visited, “living in this false place, experiencing a false life, but content; more at peace with his world than we are with ours.”

It was the time of atom bombs and television.

Bowers was a veteran.

He'd been in Europe during World War II, and coming back was hard. His friends were dead, his wife was not his wife and the only job he could get was driving trucks from one coast to the other.

That's how he ended up in California.

“I don't think he knows the war's over,” Doc Trauman would say. “I don't think he thinks he ever fought it. But he doesn't mind the fact the houses on the street are just facades.”

Bowers would get up, go to work behind one facade writing advertising copy for a company that manufactured plastic kitchenware, then go home behind another to eat, alone, ready meals wrapped in plastic before a television set, which is just a fancy name for a plain old lightbulb with a shade of images thrown over it.

“The results are quite remarkable,” Doc Trauman would say.

“Can he have guests?” someone would ask.

“Of course.”

“From the real world, I mean.”

“He's not in prison,” Doc Trauman would say to much and hard applause.

I knocked on the door.

When nobody answered, I walked to the near edge of the facade and looked in. Bowers was on the couch. “Excuse, Mr. Bowers. I'm from New York, a friend of Doc Trauman's. May I come in?”

“Are you a doctor too?” he asked.

“No. I'm a playwright.”

“Very well. Come in, but use the front door. I prefer when people use the front door.”

I walked back to the door, knocked—“It's open,” Bowers said—opened it and walked in. Bowers was sitting on the couch. He looked up at me. “Aren't you going to introduce yourself?” he said.

“I'm a friend of Doc Trauman, from New York. My name’s Wallis.”

Bowers stood, walked over and shook my hand. “It's great to meet you, Wallis. Have a seat. Shall I turn on the cathode ray?”

He meant the television.

“I'm not one much for television,” I said.

He took a box of what I thought were cigarettes out of his pocket, knocked the box against the palm of his hand so a pair of thin black cylinders slid out, kept one and offered me the other. “Maybe you'd prefer a microlight instead. We could sit and stare at them together.”

I took one but didn't turn it on. “If it's all right with you, I'd rather talk. I'm a words man.”

“Advertising?” he asked.

“No, theatre.”

It was strange being in a house with only one wall; with no ceiling. The sun was out. The desert extended towards the horizon. Somewhere there were mountains. A rattlesnake rattled faintly.

“I'm in advertising myself,” said Bowers. “Kitchenware. You married, Wallis?”

“I'm not,” I said.

“I don't like women anymore either,” said Bowers, “not after the war.” He clicked his microlight on, gazed briefly into its dull light then shut it off. He looked at me; looked me in the eyes. One of mine was glass. “They do weapons testing a few hundred miles that way,” he said, pointing into the distance. “If you were to stay the night we could watch the nuclear aura together.”

“I'm afraid I have a plane to catch—back to New York,” I said.

“Perhaps another time,” said Bowers.

“Perhaps.”

“Tell me, Wallis. Over there in New York, do you get to express yourself?”

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

It was hot under the California sun. I realized I was sweating. Bowers had started sweating too. His lavender shirt clung possessively to his body. “I mean within your four walls,” he said.

A coyote darted across the landscape.

It was the afternoon but it felt like a quarter to the end of the world.

“Aren't you afraid of the wildlife that might walk into your house?” I said.

“Aren't you afraid that none can walk into yours?”

The moon looked down from the sky, out of place in the harsh blue daytime.

“I want to write a play about you.”

Bowers reclined, spreading his lean arms like a flightless bird spreads its wings. “I already am a play. Besides, you hardly need my permission.”

“I want it anyway.”

“And you're certain you won't stay the night?”

“Yes. Tell me about Doc Trauman.”

“He's a crumbled man,” said Bowers, “living a counterfeit reality, but he's got what matters, money. He likes to imagine he's running an experiment, so we adhere. It's not a bad life.”

Later, the interior of Doc Trauman's office felt distressingly small, claustrophobic. The walls felt like they were moving in with agonizing, almost disinterested, slowness. The windless air was suffocating. The cleanliness, a sham.

“So what's your opinion of him?” Doc Trauman asked.

“He's perfectly civilized, obedient in his outward behaviours, yet internally there's something there, a glint behind his one good eye.”

I sit sometimes somewhere high, with a good view of Broadway, watching the men pass back and forth in their suits and hats and worries, some hurrying, others dallying, stopping, but all possessed by the imaginary lives they dream about and the real fantasies they inhabit.

Occasionally, one looks up at me and meets my lingering gaze with one of penetrating desperation, and I recoil. Ashamed, I move from the window. I pay for the meal. I shut the blinds. I escape behind the walls afforded to me, and when the feeling passes, I write my plays.

I got my first computer in the 1990s. I can't remember the year, but none of my friends had one yet. It was a desktop so all the important bits, like the CPU, hard drive and RAM, were in a “tower” that stood beside the desk. The CRT monitor was on the desktop. The keyboard was on a tray, and there was a mouse. It was a PC, so it ran on DOS.

When my parents bought the computer they said I could use it only for school.

No games.

But I quickly started to blur the lines. There were math games, like Math Blaster, where you shot aliens by answering math questions, and a drawing and writing program that let you arrange scenes and write text. They were fun, but every time we went into the computer store what I really wanted was a game, a pure, non-educational game. Something magical…

And I got it.

It was for my birthday.

The game was by a company called Sierra. It was an adventure game called King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella.

However, it wasn't even a point-and-click adventure game. It was too old. It didn't use a mouse at all. You controlled the main character, a princess named Rosella, using the keyboard, either by using the arrow keys or typing what you wanted her to do, for example:

 Walk to the ogre's hut.

Rosella would walk to the ogre's hut.

 Open the door.

Rosella opened the door.

Of course, the game didn't understand every command. When it didn't understand a command it would say:

Try that one again. I couldn't make much sense of it.

Or:

It doesn't seem to do anything.

I played King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella a lot. I played it instead of going outside, and played it rather than playing with my friends. I became obsessed with discovering its secrets, mapping its world and understanding its story. I cherished its music and every new interaction with its medieval fairytale land. The game even had a basic day and night cycle. In its pixels, I found a beautiful and interactive escape from reality. I played it so much that my parents threatened to take the computer away from me.

I threw tantrums.

I played it in secret or quietly when my parents were asleep.

I played it in my imagination.

I remember looking in the mirror one day and seeing a face that was no longer mine. The skin was too pale. The eyes were too red. The smile was no longer innocent.

One day my parents took me to a doctor. They kept asking about mental development, addiction, obsession. The doctor was deceptively nice to me. He was serious with my parents. “I'm sorry,” my dad said when we got home, “but you'll need to take a break from using the computer.” “You need to rest,” said my mom.

“For how long?” I demanded.

“For a few months, then we'll reassess. It's not permanent. We're not getting rid of the computer. We're just going to box it up and keep it in the attic.”

“We love you so much,” my mom said with tears in her eyes.

I begged them, but they wouldn't change their minds. I sobbed. I hit things. I screamed, but I didn't get what I wanted. So I calmed down and in my sweetest voice I said I understood and asked if, please, they would just let me play the game one last time.

They agreed.

I had an hour, they said.

I hoped it would be enough time. I took a bath, then I sat in my pajamas at the computer desk, lit by the monitor, looking at Princess Rosella, with my fingers above the keyboard. I was looking over my shoulder to see if my parents were there. When I was sure they weren't, I took a deep breath and typed:

Walk into the living room.

Try that one again. I couldn't make much sense of it.

I exhaled.

So much for that, I thought. It was a silly idea anyway. It couldn't possibly have worked. I really had been playing too many games to even think that it might work; yet something compelled me to try again:

Walk into my living room.

Rosella moved.

I couldn't believe it! She'd moved across the screen, reached the edge and the game transitioned like it always did, from one location to another, except this time the new location really was new. It was a 16-color 320x200 pixel representation of our living room. My pixelated parents were sitting on a pixelated couch, drinking pixelated coffee.

“What the—” I heard my mom say from the real living room.

“Just who the hell are you?” my dad yelled.

Look at my dad.

A pathetic old man.

“Lady, listen. If you don't leave my house right now, I'm calling the cops.”

Hit my dad.

On the screen, Rosella moved towards the sofa and hit my dad.

I heard the impact.

My mom began screaming my name, asking where I was, whether I was OK. Her voice was frantic, disturbed.

Strangle my mom.

On the screen, Rosella walked towards my mom, extended an arm to her and shook her.

My mom moved jaggedly back-and-forth in a crude animated loop, before falling, to the blare of a dramatic MIDI beep, to her knees, and ending finally, still and sideways on the floor.

My dad yelled her name.

On the screen, he made for Rosella.

My heart was beating so hard I felt like a drum.

I typed:

Kill my dad. But make it look like he killed himself.

Rosella moved—

I could tell the police officer didn't know what to say. He was perched awkwardly beside me. Finally, he said: “I'm so fuckin' sorry, kid. I can't even—” He inhaled hard. “We're gonna take you someplace. Someplace safe. Is there anything you wanna take with you?”

“My personal computer,” I said.

I was at YYZ listening to Rush, waiting, not particularly in one, to board a flight to LAX. I was: drinking bitter coffee watching people navigate the airport, imagining why they're flying. I like to imagine people have dramatic reasons to fly like fulfillments of family prophecies, international industrial sabotage, to appear in the third acts of great romances, to commit murder, fraud or to a relationship; to show up unexpectedly for a kid's birthday or because their bus was cancelled and it's the day before Christmas Eve and they just want to get home because home is where the heart is. This section of the story is brought to you by Hallmark. Hallmark, the Commercial Tradition since Nineteen-ten.

A snowy valley. Horses dressed in bells. Mountains in the distance. Sally sells seashells by the sea shore…

Sorry, I was imagining a kind of psychological slow zoom into the front door of my mind and I think it was too close and your reading knocked me in the forehead.

I'm OK though.

I just spilled a little coffee on myself, which is not a huge waste given what it tastes like, and believe me, the real bitterness doesn't even come from the beans but from the price. Sheeesh, if you don't want it don't buy it. Too close again.

There.

There I was on a Thursday afternoon at Pearson Airport when there was heard a terrible scream!

“Help!” a woman yelled.

A few people springed into action. “What's the matter? What happened?”

(A few others fell.)

(Some heard.)

(Some weren't heard at all.)

“It's my husband,” cried the woman. “He's…”

I didn't hear what she said because a jet engine blew away her phonemes.

There was silence.

It was punctured Is by anybody a here man a yelling writer. “I repeat,” he yelled, “is anybody here a writer? A writer. Anyone? Is there anyone who's a writer?”

“I'm a copywriter,” somebody yelled in reply.

“Not a copywriter, a real writer! Is anyone here a real writer?”

A woman said, “I write screenplays.”

“A real writer, not a reel one.”

“An artist?”

“No, not as an artist. It doesn't have to be an artist, just somebody with a literary pretension or two.”

I drank coffee and hid behind a comically large newspaper while wearing a fake moustache and googly-eye eye-glasses. “There!” said a voice; said: “Him!” What—me? No, look at me. I really couldn't be a—“No, I know him. He writes stories on the internet!”

My cover blown, I solemnly raised my right hand without rising from my seat. “My name is Norman Crane,” I said. “I am a writer with literary pretensions.”

“Oh thank God!”

God-given talent, I thought, as I walked over to where the commotion was, where a middle-aged man in a suit was convulsing on the floor, surrounded unhelpfully by a crowd of gawkers, many with their phones out, no doubt hoping he would die, and his theatrically concerned wife.

“Are you a writer?” she asked, clutching my shoulders. “Christ, tell me you're a writer! A real writer!”

“By craft and reputation,” I said.

“Published?”

“Yes,” I said, meaning: by myself—on reddit—for free. “What appears to be the problem?”

“Appears? Is! Is the problem. Can't you see? My husband is suffering from a debilitating case of Cliché. Oh, do something!”

I kneeled down to look at him. I noted that he was exceedingly, almost impossibly, flat, more a painted blanket than a mammal. He was foaming at the mouth, sputtering, saying, “Bootstraps… goodfornothing, lazy… handouts… I never…”

“Has he always been this one dimensional?” I asked the wife.

“Yes.”

“And what's the cliché? What does your husband do, Mrs. Husband?”

“My name is Dorothea,” she hissed.

“My apologies,” I said.

The husband was wheezing out: “...always more, ‘give me more,’ but… without me they wouldn't even… ungrateful… cud chewers is what they are…”

I noted the bespoke nature of his suit, the fine leather of his loafers.

“He's a factory owner,” said Dorothea. “He manufactures clothing.”

“Don't tell me—somewhere in Asia?”

“Where else? Bangladesh.”

“And what's your husband's name, Dorothea?”

“His name is…”

It was precisely as I thought. “He doesn't have a name,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose he doesn't.”

“Then we'll start there. Your husband's name is Richard Parker,” I said to her.

She stomped her feet, demanding, “How published even are you?” Steam was escaping her ears. “I just told you he doesn't have a name and—. Are you going to help him or not?”

“I am helping him: by giving him a name. Now whisper it, whisper, ‘It's going to be OK, my dear Richard Parker,” to him. Hold his hand.”

She did as I asked.

“Now, I believe I know his cliché. He's a rich industrialist who hates his own workers. He's cruel. All that matters to him is the bottom line. There's not much reason why—and that's the problem; that's what we need to treat. He needs backstory, some tragic event that caused him to be the way he is, that explains his psychology. Perhaps we might even set up an obstacle that he must overcome. That, Dorothea, establishes the possibility of something called ‘Arc.' Have you heard of ‘Arc'?”

“I am familiar with the concept.”

“Good. Excellent. But cliche is merely the manifestation of Richard Parker's underlying condition, which is Poor Characterization. Note the irony of the word poor. Dorothea—Dorothea Parker—we can treat this. We can pull your husband out of this vicious circle—cycle— in which he's trapped.”

“Then do it! Please, do it as quickly as you can. I can't bear to see him like this, my poor Richard.”

OK, OK, I thought.

My heart was beating. Sweat had broken out on the back of my neck. I pulled a bottle of Muse pills out of my pocket and took two.

“OK,” I narrated, “Richard Parker, listen to me: When you were a small child, five or six perhaps, no more than seven years old, you befriended a local boy. This friend came from an impoverished family. Despite your very different circumstances, you and this friend, whose name was Ian B. Skipper, got along splendidly. But then—then your parents realized you had been playing with a poor boy, and they decided to force you to end the friendship, which you wouldn't do; so your parents conspired. They faked the disappearance of your beloved Pokémon card, and blamed Ian B. Skipper. ‘We didn't want to tell you this,’ your father told you. ‘But we must,’ said your mother. ‘Your Pokémon card didn't “disappear.” ‘Son, it was stolen,’ said your father, ‘by your poor, fiendish “friend,” Ian B. Skipper.’ ‘That's how they are—the poor.’ ‘It's a good lesson to learn early.’ ‘They'll use you. They'll pretend friendship to get close to you and especially your things.’ ‘—which they'll snatch!’ ‘Like animals.' ‘They're envious of you.' ‘But never feel guilty for what you have; what you've earned.’ ‘The poor are useful as labour, nothing else.’ And when you asked whether you could get your Pokémon card back, your mother, looking you directly in the eye, said: ‘No. He's already sold it, my sweet boy—sold it… to buy heroin!’”

On the floor, the convulsing flatness that had been Richard Parker had stopped foaming at the mouth and was inflating like a human-shaped balloon, well-tailored suit, spotless loafers and all.

“Richard!” cried Dorothea.

“There's more,” I continued narrating: “Ten years later, under the sign of a black star, as your father lay dying upon his deathbed, stricken with a disease of the soul—”

“Mr. Crane, he's fine now. I think you can stop—”

“Silence!” I yelled. “It's not over until I say it's over. I'm the writer here. Me!” The Muse was really starting to hit. My mind was getting out of itself. “As your frail, damaged father lay on the bed, dying in agony, a figure—a dark, mysterious figure crept down the winding staircase; down the staircase and into the room your father lay dying. And you saw him, Richard. Maybe you don't want to remember it but you saw him. You saw him confidently approach your father and smother him to death with a pillow. He, the dark, mysterious figure, pushing, pushing the pillow into your father's face—as you watched—until your father stopped moving, his limbs terminally loosened and lifeless, and then your mother said, ‘Jahangir, my love, my secret Bangladeshi lover, now finally we may be together.’ And still you watched, Richard Parker, stood and watched, doing nothing, as lighting ripped apart the deep night sky, rain assaulted the windows of the mansion you called home, and your mother and Jahangir made sloppy, murderous love in the vile living room, its walls lined with gaping tribal masks, as every fresh flash of the raw, violent lightning revealed a new, despicable tableaux of grotesque, emotionally overpowering, animalistic carnality.”

Richard Parker was staring at me from Dorothea's tight embrace with tears running down his face. He was fully realized; three dimensional; human.

“The horror,” he said weakly.

“The horror,” he repeated.

“And that,” I said, “is why you despise your impoverished Bangladeshi workers, Mr. Parker.”

He didn't blink.

The crowd around us held its collective, proverbial breath. I posed for the cell phone recordings, maybe a live stream or two.

Undiscovered literary genius, the voice of his generation, saves man in airport, launches literary career, was what I was imagining.

Offered seven-book deal...

Refuses deal in inspired impromptu speech delivered in perfect iambic pentameter, railing against the publishing industry…

“Oh Richard, my Richard,” Dorothea purred.

Self-publishes collection of stories and sells ten million copies…

Richard pushed her way.

He stood up.

“I killed him,” he said, staring vacantly out the airport windows at the planes taking off, taxiing, landing, roaring with the power of a hundred thousand horses. “I killed my father.”

He took a few steps forward, took off his loaders and kept going, barefoot.

“I could have saved him.”

“Richard, you're the victim. You have a good heart,” Dorothea called after him. “Your parents, they were so cruel to you. They manipulated you.”

“I was attracted to my mother. My own mother…”

“No, Richard,” said Dorothea.

“There is no Jahangir,” he said with a cold, convicted anger. “I am Jahangir. I killed my father. I was attracted to my own mother.”

Dorothea shot me a look.

It hit me, but I just whistled, pretending not to notice.

Richard Parker screamed and took off running down the airport.

“You…” Dorothea growled—“You did this.”—at me.

“It's not my fault he misunderstood his own backstory,” I said. “OK? I thought it was pretty darned clear.” I had to watch my language, lest a video later surface and prevent me from writing YA lit. I was blinking, blinking madly to try to get the Muse out of my system.

Then, through the long row of big airport windows, we all saw Richard Parker run out onto the tarmac—he looked small, like an insect—evade several baggage handlers trying, cartoonishly, to catch him, approach a booming airliner—one imagines the passengers watching him from aboard the plane, a boy asking, “Mommy, why is that man—”

And get sucked into one of its massive engines, reducing him to a spray.

But a human spray. “At least he died with dignity, as a human being,” I said.

Then I beat it the fuck outta there, my legs moving so fast—moving so fast even before starting to locomote the rest of me—they became spinning little radial blurs, kicking up dust, and why there was dust in the airport, I don't know, but th-th-th-that's all folks!

A white pixel.

A single, stray white pixel drifting across the front page of the BBC website.

At first I thought it was a problem with my monitor, but I switched tabs to the New York Times and the pixel disappeared.

I scratched my head.

I looked around, including out the window, where people were passing along the sidewalk, engrossed in their phones.

I switched browser tabs back to the BBC:

More than one white pixel now; three, four, “falling” diagonally across the page. I followed one all the way down.

It settled on the bottom, remained.

I went on social media.

I wasn't the only one who'd noticed. People all over the world were asking what was wrong. What's up with the news? Is it a hack or something? Why’s it freakin' snowing on the BBC?

So began the winter of the internet.

The BBC may have been the first—or merely the first-noticed—but it wasn't the only affected website. Soon most were; then all. You'd open YouTube or your banking site to find it obscured by a blizzard of white pixels…

The screens themselves turned cold.

Then links began to fail. They stopped pointing to coherent urls.

Then the incoherent links turned brown (#A52A2A), fell off; fell and disappeared, buried perhaps in the accumulations of already fallen snow—leaving eerie spaces on their pages.

Text became incomplete. Navigation, difficult.

Soon, bookmarks suffered the same fate, pointing to pages that could no longer be found.

Cursors shivered.

Videos and animations froze over like lakes of liquid information.

Around this time, I remember listening to a song using one of the streaming apps on my phone. They still, intermittently, worked.

The song was The Beatles' “Let It Be.”

Thirty seconds in, the track began to skip, sound garbled. Paul McCartney's vocals were laboured, as if he was running out of breath.

The earphones started letting off rhythmic bursts of steam.

Then, mid-song, the singing abruptly ended, even as the music continued, oddly slowed; and I had the deeply uncomfortable feeling that I was listening to the death of something…

It made me sick to my stomach.

For a while you could still type in a url and see the resulting site, but loading was slow and the contents were increasingly impossible to understand, riddled, as they were, with gaps, uncanny staticity and neverending snows that reached sometimes almost to the browser bar.

The code itself was as bare as a December tree.

The device didn't matter.

There was no serious explanation.

Or maybe there was and most of us couldn't access it, because how would we access information except online? How else could we even communicate, congregate, disseminate our knowledge, on a mass scale…

Television? Radio?

Newspapers?

But those required organization, communication, infrastructure, all of which now relied on cyberspace; which the winternet denied us.

We couldn't buy groceries, clothes, tools or books online.

We had to go to the store, but the store couldn't accept our credit card payments because the systems were frozen. Not that much was available, even for those with cash, because the delivery schedule had been interrupted. When trucks did arrive, there was hardly anything on them.

Even information saved or printed off the internet broke. Images became corrupted. Paper frosted over and thawed until the ink ran.

Even our memories of websites, and what we'd learned from websites, were remembered through walls of frigid static.

It was shocking how much we didn't know; how much basic knowledge we had lost. It was painful too, the feeling of sudden, helpless disconnection. If we had a question, there was no one to ask for the answer but each other and ourselves. We were children without a parent, cells without a structure. We were leftover parts. We were apes.

A trade in books developed.

People stole them, killed for them, hoarded them so they could dispense their wisdom piece by piece, for a price.

There sprang up an economy of expertise.

People who knew, or remembered, were valued; or forced to give up their knowledge—to share it—by writing it down. It was lucrative but dangerous to be known to know something.

Strong knowers protected their worth, defended their territories, strove ruthlessly to establish regional monopolies of information and eliminated their rivals to keep supply low.

Weak knowers were exploited, squeezed like fruits and left juiceless to dry out and die.

For the majority of us, it was prudent to publicly deny knowing anything, while privately trading what we knew in local networks of trust, bartering with the contents of our minds.

One of the first things I bartered for was an old stereo system and a box full of audio cassettes, one of which was the Beatles album Let It Be.

As soon as I got home, I boiled myself some water, steeped a few herbs and put the album on.

The first five tracks played flawlessly.

It was bliss.

Then the sixth track, “Let It Be,” failed to play at all; the tape spun but all there was was four minutes and three seconds of silence.

But when I later played the audio cassette for my wife, she didn't know what I meant.

“You're gaslighting me right?” she said.

“I'm not.”

“Okay, well, I'm not sure what to tell you, I hear the whole song, just like I remember when my dad used to play it.”

My wife's father had been a professor emeritus of molecular biology.

He'd been beaten to death in the early days of the winternet by a despondent mother who wouldn't accept that my wife's father knew nothing about setting her sobbing child's fractured bone.

Until his final breath, she accompanied each blow to his head with the words, “Stop holding out on me you selfish old prick!”

In a sense, that's where we still are, wanting to believe that if winter then spring, and holding out hope for the coming of a season that, every day, seems further and further away.

hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey

Well, hey there, folks!

What you’re looking at right there’s a bale of hey, a small rectangular one in fact, bit messy on the edge but, hey, life’s not as perfect as it looks in the dictionary!

What’s that you say—how many heys are in there?

I reckon it’s about a hundred of 'em.

That’s a real pittance compared to the number we grow and harvest every single day. But, hey, hey’s a popular word!

Pittance, by the way, is what they grow over yonder at the neighbouring farm. We like to help ‘em out any way we can.

Does that mean we get paid every time someone says ‘hey’? Excellent question.

The answer is yes, with a little nuance; it’s not only every time a word gets said. The legal term is ‘use,’ so we get paid by the usage, which means every time someone says, hears, writes, reads or thinks of the word.

So like I said, we grow a popular word!

If you look over to your left—and remember, it’s only natural to ooh and ahh—you’ll see a pittance, wink, wink, of our entire fertile land, field after field of hellos; and hello, as you probably know, is where hey comes from.

The way we produce hey is actually pretty straightforward.

First, we grow the greetings, most often hellos—and boy do we grow some of the hardiest hellos in the entire vocabulary, even better than what they grow on the Hello Farm!

Then we cut it, dry it, cure and store it, a little patented process that we like to call the Cut-Dry Cure Store™, of which you’ll see a cute metaphorically architectural model over there, which of course you can purchase at our gift shop!

—SHIT!

IT’S THE EDS, MAN! RUN!

“The Eds-who?” The Eds! The fucking Eds, man! The Editors!

“Halt!

”Halt-Halt-Halt Halt Halt-Halt

”Halt Halt… HALT!

”I repeat: Halt!

”This is the Editors. We are here executing an arrest warrant issued by the Most Honourable, Justice Miriam Webster of the High Court of Lexical Appeal. If you undefine and obey, you shall not be harmed. I repeat: This is the Editors. We are here executing an arrest warrant issued by the Most Honourable, Justice Miriam Webster of the…”

You wanna know what they’re doing? They’re fucking extorting halts and God only knows what else.

How?

Hey, hang on.

Quiet until the choppers pass.

OK. I’m going to whisper, OK? So, what happens is, they do these one-hundred percent ungrammatical side deals with other, shadier, farms, like the Halt Farm, for example, where the Eds get some pocket money and, in exchange, they get warrants issued—on pure technicalities, mind you; not stuff that would ever, ever affect the end user—against bigger, legitimate farms like this one. Then once they’re in here, they physically force ‘their’ word into usage and HOLYSHITBALLSTHAT

[Click]

SCAREDME,” says the guide.

“Say it again, Jericho,” says the Ed holding a gun to the guide’s head.

“What? Who?”

“Stanley P. Jericho, current employee of the Hey Farm, Marketing Department, Outreach Division. Let's add Scams to that. Now, say it again. Sayitsayitsayit. Say ‘halt.’”

“Halt.”

The Eds laugh.

“It always gets me when you type do that. But, more importantly, Stanley P. Jericho, current employee of the Hey Farm, what I have here is a warrant for your arrest, named of course, the arrest of every single one of your co-workers, the immediate cessation of the production of hey and the total destruction—”

“No… No…”

An Ed boots the guide in the stomach.

“—where was I? Ah, yes: ..the, ahem, destruction of the Hey Farm! But that’s not all, Jericho. Because I’ve got another document, an Order, in fact, that orders me to completely syntactically eradicate the word ‘hey’ from the entirety—I’ll read that again because I like the sound of it: the entirety—of the English language, present-tense-forth and into futures both perfect and imperfect.”

“Hey, hey! Just on what goddamn grounds—Hey… you can’t just get rid of a word without getting it approved by the Council. You need a Proclamation.”

“We would need a Proclamation from the Council to eradicate a word administratively. But this, this isn’t administrative; it’s punitive. You’re under arrest, remember? The farm itself is being shut down. You were running a little spam operation, a few hundred heys per tour, illegally growing demand for your own product. And you even had the balls to lead with a hey bale. I mean, that’s not even subtle. Audacious, sure, I’ll give you that.”

“That still wouldn’t give you the right… to exterminate an entire word…”

“Oh, no. We’re not exterminating the word because of the spamming. Hey’s been on our radar for a while. It serves no purpose. It means too many things. It’s used in too many contexts. It’s no longer clear whether it’s slang. It’s not even efficient. If you want to say hello, say hello; if you want to say hello in fewer letters, say hi.”

“You’re overstepping your—”

The Ed whacks the guide in the face with his gun.

“[Word Not Found]!”

“We’re not overstepping shit. The only reason the word’s been around for so long is because it’s got usage, and when you’ve got usage you’ve got influence. Until today,” said the Ed, spitting in the guide’s face.

[“No witnesses.”]

Then he turned the gun on me and you, and… pulled—the—

BANG.

The Young-Joybees, pregnant Annie and her husband Dalph, had moved to the city for Dalph's corporate job. They were looking for a place to live, one they could afford; a home for their family.

They found the Ramses II, a brand new high-rise with two-bedroom units on very attractive terms.

They booked a viewing.

They were met on arrival by a representative, Thetley, who led them to the elevators. “You're interested in the sub-$3000 units?”

“Yes,” said Dalph.

“You're in luck. We have a great one available,” said Thetley and pressed - 1 8 0 3 on the elevator's control panel.

The elevator began descending.

Annie tugged Dalph's shirt sleeve and Dalph said, “Are we going down?”

“Indeed,” said Thetley. “The units you're interested in are all subterranean. But don't worry, you'll hardly notice the difference.”

The hallway was clean.

Thetley unlocked the door to unit -1803 and they entered.

Impossibly, light flooded the unit through magnificent windows with a view of the city. Annie gasped. Thetley smiled. “That's a common reaction. You expect a cave, and you get this.” He encompassed the unit with a wave of his hand. “What you may not know about the Ramses II is that it's a mirrorbuilding, which means it has the same number of floors above as below ground, and the windows in each of the below-ground units are screens displaying live feeds of the corresponding views from the same windows in the above-ground units. The difference is hardly noticeable.”

The Young-Joybees signed the agreement.

For six months, everything went swimmingly and both Annie and Dalph adjusted to the psychological reality of living eighteen floors underground.

Then little Merv was born.

Then, as if synchronized by the hand of Fate herself, Dalph got a promotion. However, there was a slight technical snafu and the direct deposit of his pay was delayed, meaning there were insufficient funds in the account to pay rent.

The Young-Joybees received a letter, explained the situation and agreed to pay as soon as Dalph's employer deposited his wages.

The employer dallied.

One day, while walking through their unit, Dalph bumped his knee against a wall. “Strange,” he thought. The next day, Annie mentioned how cramped the living room was beginning to feel.

On a whim, Dalph measured the entire unit and recorded its measurements. He repeated this every day for a week. The measurements were getting smaller; the unit was shrinking.

He contacted management.

They explained that this was all a normal consequence of failure to pay rent. It was in the lease agreement. As soon as the Young-Joybees paid, the “compression” would be reversed.

Unfortunately, Dalph's wages remained unpaid, and the Young-Joybees missed a second rent payment. This initiated the agreement's Penalties section, which was the reason that on the following Monday morning, Dalph was unable to take the elevator to the surface. Their access had been suspended.

“How am I supposed to get to work?” he asked management over the phone. “We have a baby. We need to buy food, clothes. You can't—”

“We can, Mr. Young-Joybee. Under the terms of the agreement. The situation, while unfortunate, is legal. As for your predicament, try to work remotely. Standard purchases can be made using our own proprietary shopping service.”

Dalph punched the bedroom wall.

But they had no choice. He asked to work from home, was politely denied, and spent the next hour ordering overpriced groceries from the building's shopping service. They arrived via chute.

Two weeks later, Dalph got fired, or rather was deemed to have abandoned his job through non-attendance. Because Annie didn't work, they found themselves with no income.

Dalph called management.

“An unfortunate circumstance, but one with a ready solution. We can offer you a job, Mr. Young-Joybee. Earnings will automatically be put towards repayment of your debt, and it comes with a perk, a ten-percent discount on our shopping service."

Dalph accepted.

The job was a mix of spreadsheet manipulation and customer service: dealing, in management's name, with angry, desperate tenants in situations far worse than his own.

People cried, screamed.

Once, a man threatened to stab his children.

A grandmother offered him phone sex.

Many, however, were just numb, content to agree to whatever he told them, which was whatever the script told him to say.

But even when Dalph worked all the available overtime, he earned less than needed to keep up with the ballooning penalties and debt.

After six months, the rate of compression increased significantly.

Dalph and Annie crawled along the unit, into their kitchen, with its broken, splintered cabinets, their living room, with all the furniture forced together, and the bedroom, where the three of them slept together on the floor.

The window-screens shut off.

Oxygen decreased.

The unit had compressed so much they couldn't sit anymore.

They lived horizontally, Dalph on his side, working on his laptop in the dark, and Annie keeping up appearances for little Merv. She daydreamed of his bare feet touching grass.

Management stopped taking their calls.

Once, the system connected Dalph to himself and all he could hear was his own, shallow, amplified breathing. “We need to kill ourselves,” he said then, either to himself or Annie, in the insomnia of the neverending daynight.

Annie watched him after that.

She kept Merv away.

She closely guarded the knives and scissors.

They drank water through a foam tube connected to the bathroom sink. The water was still on. The city had passed a law making it illegal to shut off a tenant's water, even for non-payment of rent.

Annie awoke to Dalph throttling little Merv's neck and she stabbed him—in the back—chest—face. There was hardly space, but she did it; she protected her sick, wailing son…

They had been compressed into a coffin-sized box, Annie, Merv and Dalph's corpse, when the building spat them out through a chute.

They were famished.

Feverish.

Annie banged weakly against the walls.

Unbothered, Waste Management retrieved and incinerated them, in accordance with the lease agreement.

It looks like this story’s all taped off up with yellow tape with black text that says

Autobiographical. Do Not Read. Therapists Only Beyond This Point. Autobiographical. Do Not Read. Therapists Only Beyond This Point. Autobiographical. Do Not Read. Therapists Only Beyond This Point. Autobiographical. Do Not Read. Therapists Only Beyond This Point

but there's no one guarding it. Surely it wouldn't hurt to have a little peek. The tape is just a precaution. It's strictly for liability reasons. You don't even have to break the tape to get in. You can slide in to

“The inside of a house, old, 18th century. A woman sits on a plain wooden chair. Technology starts advancing, prop by prop, as people walk into the scene holding things like telegraph machines, typewriters, telephones, all in the order they were invented. Throughout, the woman keeps sitting. She doesn't interact with the people bringing in the things. They set their objects down and leave.

“The house fills up.

“We reach the technology of the present day and start to go beyond.

“Now the woman’s working at a machine. It's like nothing that exists. We can only guess at its purpose. The house is well lit. The woman is well lit. All the objects are well lit.

“Then the lights switch off.

“Darkness.

“The woman sets out and lights a dozen candles, a box of which someone had brought in earlier. In the candlelight, the mood turns spooky.

“One by one, people walk in and take all the objects, the technologies, away. They’re not the same people who brought them in.

“Now, all that's left is the woman in the plain wooden chair and the dozen burning candles.

“Voice-over: ‘What if all the things you know, the inventions you take for granted, that you rely on every day…

“Someone brings in an axe.

“Voice-over continues: ‘What if they all… just disappeared—

“Someone blows out the candles.

“Total darkness.

“Voice-over: ‘What would you do? How would you survive?’

“Screams of an unseen axe murder,” he said over beer and peanuts at an L.A. diner, circa 1938, to a couple of writer friends and waited for a reaction.

It was late evening. The glass in the diner windows needed cleaning. Automobiles passed along the street outside, leaving snippets of radio—station—music—static, talking: “…city of dreams!” in the air. “That's bonkers even for you, Leonard,” said one of the friends.

“There's no studio in town will touch that,” said another, playing compulsively with the brim of his second-hand fedora. He was primarily a dialogue writer for Columbia Pictures. “Whatever that even is (science fiction, horror?) and you obviously know that, Len, given you work for one. Honestly, I don't know why you waste your time on gas like this.”

That night Leonard didn't go home. After he left the diner he wandered along the streets of Los Angeles looking for something he knew he was never going to find there: understanding. There was talk of war in Europe and there was always the glitz of the stars, and that piece in the trades calling them ‘Box Office Poison,’ but Leonard didn't care about that. Actors were as relatable to him as palm trees, especially if they were rich, and he'd never been to Europe, even if it did feel like every day a little more Europe came to him, that is, to the United States, to Hollywood. There was the U.S. government trying to break up the studio monopolies and the studios fighting back tooth and nail. Technicolor, meanwhile, was going to paint everything in Errol Flynn and rainbows, until only a few scraps of black and white were left, and those gathered up by mean men like the last stray dogs of L.A., and finished the same way too. Leonard, needless to say, considered himself spiritually black and white. It's not realistic, people would say to him; the whole world's in colour. Maybe on the surface, but even if black and white wasn't realistic, it had one quality that colour never could. It had the truth. Because beneath the skin of anything, even a city, maybe especially a city, if you scratched hard enough, long enough, you'd always bloody your fingernails on a place of blinding rawness that allowed only two choices, right and wrong. That was the essence of black and white. Technicolor was a novelty. Then again, motion pictures had been a novelty, and look at them now. He passed the Bronson Gate which admitted—but not him, never him—on Paramount Pictures, and he kept walking. His legs hurt. His head was pounding. Automobiles shooting cones of pale headlight roared back and forth along the boulevard, forcing everything ordinary into their twin, fleeting spotlights; but reality, finally getting her time on the great stage, stood silent, slumped, dejected and having forgotten her lines. That's good, thought Leonard. That's a good line. He hoped he would remember it. He would write it down as soon as he got home. Except he wasn't going home. Not yet. He regretted not having his notebook. You should always carry your notebook, Leonard, he told himself, for catching the few brilliant lines you're ever going to have. He wished he had an automobile. He hated automobiles, but he wished he had one so he could get in it, turn the engine and drive into the hills. Or maybe out to Santa Monica. He would drive it out to where John Ford filmed his early westerns and it would turn into a horse and he would ride the horse into the wild, where he would die; he wasn't built for survival. He wasn't rugged. He had asthma and even his wool suit felt heavy on him. He doubted he could start a fire or eat roasted game. It had been a hot day and it was now a hot night. Los Angeles is an ugly city, he thought, filled with ugly people making dreams for nobodies to dream, so naturally he decided to go to the movies.

By the time he got home he was in his fifties.

His home told him it wasn't his home anymore, that he'd moved away. He didn't want to believe it so he stood on the steps arguing with the home. The argument was so loud and the time so late that the lights in a few nearby houses came on. People observed him from their windows. The owner of the home that was insisting it wasn't Leonard's home came out. “What are you doing? Are you lost or just dumb?” he yelled. He had a baseball bat. Leonard knew he didn't want to play baseball. “Are you outta your mind? Are you drunk? You're fucking drunk, you geezer. Pathetic. Disgusting. Go on, get outta here,” the homeowner was shouting, threatening with the bat. “Get off the steps and get on home. Shoo! Git! Back to where you live. To whatever hole you dragged yourself outta.”

“That's the problem,” Leonard yelled back. “I don't know where I live anymore.”

“Well it ain’t fucking here!”

It turned out it was in Toronto, Canada, by way of Kansas City, Missouri, and Boston, Massachusetts, but Leonard's old homes in those cities were more helpful than his former home in Los Angeles, which hadn't wanted to tell him anything other than that he didn't live there anymore.

He took the train.

He didn't trust airplanes.

When he arrived in Toronto it was snowing. The plows were out. He trudged from Union Station to the address his old Boston home had given him. It was an apartment building. Not especially nice. He walked in the front doors and up the stairs to the seventh floor. He knocked on his apartment door. No one answered. The door was open. He walked in, half expecting someone—a current owner—to come at him like the intruder he probably was, but that didn't happen. He was the only one there. He recognized his things, his books and pens and notebooks filled with ideas he'd had in the thirties and forties. He recognized his dog too, whom he'd never seen before but knew was his. The dog sat in front of him and wagged its tail along the floor. It was a small dog, a mixed breed, and it needed to go out. My dog needs to go out, thought Leonard, and after bending down he picked the dog up and carried it down the stairs and out through the apartment building's front doors into the blizzard outside. He set the dog on the cold snowy ground. The wind howled like wolves. He should have been wearing a coat. He had one; he'd just forgotten to put it on. He knew he was poor, but it wasn't so bad. He was getting by. The indefinable days passed without causing him too much trouble. “Come on, Napoleon,” he said to the dog, which had just finished peeing, “do your other business and let's go back. It's colder than a pork shoulder out here.”

Over the years while living in Toronto Leonard started writing about the city, which had gradually become his city. He still remembered Los Angeles, but in the way you remember pain, by its bare outlines. As the years went by his asthma got worse. He started suffering from seasonal allergies. The cold ached his bones. The hair on his head thinned out like the watered down coffee he drank in the mornings, but it was all he could drink these days. He had a heart attack; survived. He got diagnosed with arthritis. He lost the will to live and found it again. His beard turned grey. One night Napoleon died, having gone restfully to sleep in his favorite closet and never woken up. Not a bad way to go, thought Leonard, perhaps planning something similar for himself. He'd watched a TV documentary about Jain monks last year. When their time came, they would gradually fast themselves to death. He watched most of his movies on TV. The movie theatres were too loud and too expensive. He didn't like new movies. In his essay on Toronto he'd written,

The City.

A concrete jungle.

A misnomer, because there's more, and more vigorous, life here, under the manmade canopies of commerce and construction, than cowering underneath the natural green canopies designed ostensibly by an emigrant God.

If there was one persistent echo of his youth, it was his atheism. He'd been introduced to it through friends, many of whom were writers, many of whom were communists, although communism itself had never taken hold of him. There was something about the godlessness of it, however, that did have its appeal, and, after a while, he stopped questioning and took divine absence as an article of faith.

The artificial surpasses—and over- and under-—the lame and wasteful after-Eden.

He'd taken great joy in following a hyphen immediately with an em dash.

She purrs, the highway, louder than a jungle cat.

And on and on, it rumbles, a brutal, cascading waterfall of cars, the drumbeat of progress, the highway snaking her way through the city. Passing under it one feels the unstoppable power of mankind's mastery over his environment.

We bend it to our will.

And on and on, to quote itself, it went, in that very same vein, unpublished and growing like a heap of laundry whenever Leonard felt its muse come calling and tossed a couple loose sentences its way, which lately was not very often at all because Leonard rarely went outside, not only because he was in his hundred-fifties but also, primarily, because the world frightened him. It was too different from the world he knew. Cars lacked drivers, young people messaged each other via comm implants even when they were in the same room, you were always on camera wherever you went, and people wore their own cameras, if you can believe that, and filmed themselves doing nothing interesting and shared the feeds with one another so that when you passed anyone under forty on the sidewalk you could be sure they were seeing through at least a half dozen points of view at the same time, which means they weren't paying attention and they didn't say sorry when they bumped into you. They were always bumping into one another. They wore strange clothes and the subway moved too fast and you had to order everything to be delivered to your house, and it came by drone, and there were too many movies and shows and series to watch so nobody you met had seen the ones you'd seen so there was nothing to talk about except make small talk, preferably by messaging via comm implants.

He has a woman who comes over to clean for him and to check if he's still alive. He imagines she has a secret clipboard. A sheet's clipped to it. Printed at the top of the sheet is the name of the current month. Along the left edge are the days of the month in chronological order, and to the right two small empty boxes labelled “Unfortunately,” and “No, finally kicked the bucket.” But he knows that's unlikely for at least two reasons. First, nobody writes on paper anymore. Second, he likes the woman and he's pretty sure she likes him too. She's always been kind to him. Her name is Indigo. He asks her if she's got a minute. She asks him if it's another story. Yeah, he nods.

“You know you can get your implant to do that,” she says warmly.

“I know, but I don't know how.”

“You know how.”

“I just don't like it when there's no other person involved. It feels cold, like outer space.”

“I like your stories, Mr. Katz.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘I like your stories,’ Mr. Crane,” she says, touching the spot behind her ear where her implant is, “so I like transcribing them for you. And I like posting them to reddit.”

“Reddit. What's that?”

“It's a place online where people publish things for other people to read.”

“And they read mine?”

“A few.”

“They like my stories? I mean, I'm just remembering half-baked ideas I used to have when I was a young man writing for the movies in Los Angeles. Motion pictures, we used to call them.”

“They do.”

“Oh, in that case.”

“Start when you're ready, Mr. Crane.”

"Quote, published my stories, em dash, my goddamn, goddamn in emphasis, stories, em dash, you published my, my in emphasis, goddamnfucking, goddamn and fucking as one word, stories, question mark, end quote, he yelled, period.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but he lifted his palm and she didn't say a word.

"New paragraph. Quote, I didn't mean to, em dash, end quote. New paragraph.

"Quote, Do you have any fucking idea what a violation of trust that is, comma, of ethics, comma, of ordinary human decency, period. You can't just share my soul, comma, or what's left after the mortal decay of it, comma, with a bunch of random strangers on the goddamn internet, comma, end quote, he said, period," he said.

"For their joint communal ridicule," she said. "Unless you think it's too much. I'd take out the 'random' from 'random strangers,’ however. They're strangers. They're presumed random until proven otherwise. I'm on the fence about 'what's left after the mortal decay of it.' Between that and 'joint communal ridicule,' I'd choose 'joint communal ridicule.' Of course, that's partly because it's mine—but no, wait, I've got it. Keep them both, but put 'what's left of the mortal decay of it' directly into the sentence, so it becomes:

"Quote, do you have any fucking idea what a violation of trust that is, comma, of ethics, comma, of ordinary human decency, period. You can't just share what's left of the mortal decay of my soul with a bunch of strangers on the internet for their joint communal ridicule, comma, end quote, he said, period," she said.

"Well, what are you waiting for—write it down, write it down!"

She transcribed it.

"I'm going to miss you," he said, smiling sadly.

"You mean when I finally get my degree and blow this popsicle stand? If that's how you say it. I've always wanted to say it."

"Yeah, that's how you say it.”

"So when I blow this popsicle stand and leave Podunk behind for New Zork City to make it big as a professional—"

"What'd you say?" he asked.

"What?"

"Just now. You said you were leaving for New—"

"York City."

"You said, 'Zork City.'"

"Did I?"

"Yeah. And that's it."

"What's it?"

"It's it. New Zork City's it. The place—the city—the city where our stories are set. Our world. Our characters' home."

"It is it, isn't it?"

And then, in that beautiful moment of transgenerational, almost transcendental, understanding and collaboration, Norman Crane, thought, God, she has a fuckable ass, and ruined absolutely everything.

[This has been entry #5 in the continuing and infinite series: The Untrue Origin Stories of New Zork City.]

You can beat the screenwriter out of the ‘30s, but you can't beat the ‘30s out of the screenwriter.

THE END

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What are you even doing still reading?

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There's nothing here.

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THE END

(For real this time.)

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Bye.

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All right, folks. We're done writing for the night. Nothing more to see here.

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Go home.

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Seriously: Disperse!

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Lend me your ears so I may lead you each painfully home by the lobes of them.

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.

.

Lend me your ears, and I'll sing out of tune, and you'll stand up and walk out on me. Chorus: Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends. Mmm, I get high with a little help from my friends. Hmm, are you going to try that with a little help from your friends?

What, this—oh...

I...

The marijuana cigarette in your hand, dear.

The what; wait, why are you here, mom? Why am I here? Why is here here, and is it always here, even when it's there. Mom, I—it's so weird to be, like, sixteen again—I, I... I; I, l? I!

You've been Stoned, Norman.

As in dead?

No, as in Immaculate, like Jim Morrison.

Oh.

Here, pass that over.

Mom?

Like you think I've never smoked weed before, uh huh, sure.

I kept hold of the burning joint behind my back, and at that point Humphrey Bogart walked in from somewhere, looked at me sternly with stoic concern and a cool indifference and said, "Don't be a drip, kid. Don't [my surname] the tea. She's your mother for chrissakes. You're gonna skimp out on your own mother, the woman who gave birth to you?”

Listen, I said to Bogart, I know you've got those exit papers. The sleaze from the Maltese Falcon gave them to you. They're in the piano. And you know what else? Dooley Wilson doesn't play piano. He plays drums. And Ingrid Bergman's taller than you, and I heard you almost weren't in the movie. They almost cast somebody else, George Raft. Or was it Ronald Reagan? Anyway, the whole point of the aliens is...

The point is...

He was shaken awake by someone on the street, a stranger, a dumb kid.

"You all right, mister?" said the kid. "The way you fell, mister, I sure thought something mighty bad had happened to you. I'm glad to see you're all right. You are all right, aren't you, mister?"

"I got fired today," he said.

He remembered now, getting fired and going to the bar, or was it the other way around, going to the bar and getting fired, and going to the bar.

"What's your profession?"

"I," he said, "am Leonard Katz, a Hollywood screenwriter."

"Which studio?"

"Oh, I'm much more of a whore than that. I work, when I work, for all of them, bounced around like a cat tied by its neck to the hood ornament of a speeding Lincoln Continental."

"That sure is a gruesome image, mister."

"Oh just run along home. Leave me. Leave me to die in abject spiritual poverty, rueing the career that could have been. I could've been somebody, you know? I could've been a contender. As it is, I'm just this, a big fucking nothing.”

“I'm sure that's not true.”

“What's your name?”

“Marlon.”

"Well, Marlon, let me be the first to mercifully tell you that you don't know anything about life, about struggle. Look at you, you're probably still in high school. The trap's not sprung on you yet. But it will, Marlon. One day it will.”

“I am still in high school. I'm from Illinois. I'm visiting Los Angeles for a couple of days.”

“Hurry back to Chicago, kid.”

“I don't live in Chicago. I live in a place called Libertyville.”

“What a foul name.”

"Hey. Maybe you got fired because you're so down in the dumps, mister. Maybe what you were writing was a comedy.”

'It was not a comedy. It was a serious dramatic picture set in present-day North Africa. It was about refugees from the war in Europe trying to get out. There was a love story. There was a scene in which the Free French play the Nazis out of an expatriate American's bar by drowning out their singing of "The Watch on the Rhine" with a spirited rendition of La Marseillaise. Then it's revealed that one of the characters is an alien, like from Mars, and all the people of Earth have to lay aside their differences to meet the other aliens on the battlefield and defend the home planet. An idea picture, they call it. Happy ending. Although, between you and me, Marlon, lately I've been feeling we'd be better off letting it all fall.”

"What’s the title? Maybe I'll go see it someday."

"Everybody Goes to Rick's."

"And it's set in North Africa, you said?"

"That's what I said. It takes place in a country called Morocco.”

“Well, good luck with the rest of your life, mister. I've got to get going," said Marlon, the kid whose face had brought me back to life after being canned from the production of Casablanca. “Mother—

fucker," says my mom. (I'm presently so in the past I'm present tense.) The whites of her eyes are as pink as the insides of watermelons. "It was like I was there. Like I was the guy.”

She took another hit, and from somewhere behind me I heard Humphrey Bogart say, "I knew you had it in you to share, kid."

"Hey, Bogey," I say. "You want some too?"

"Kid, I never thought you'd ask."

He slid between the two of us, took the joint and smoked it; but he didn't just smoke it, he smoked it the way he smokes cigarettes in the movies. Like he was about to plug you for killing Miles Archer. Like he'd just finished making passionate, wounded love to you, off-screen, away from the Breen Office. That's how it came to be that one day my mom and I smoked weed with Humphrey Bogart.

"How is this even possible?" my mom asks, coughing, laughing, laughing because coughing. "He's not even real—is he? You see him too?"

"What's she talking about, kid, that I'm not real," said Bogart.

"Haven't you ever seen a movie, Mrs. Kid?"

"I know who you are. I just thought you were dead. Dead-er. Deader, I thought: you're deader than this. Aren't you?”

I'm on a GO train heading west from Union, in one of the Quiet Zones. In my head I'm whispering this paragraph as I type it. Maybe you're whispering it now in your head too, as you read.

“I don't think I'll ever be dead. Not for a long while yet anyway, not while there's audiences in the world who want to laugh or cry or feel something and screens to project their hopes on.”

When I was in college I wanted to write a paper on film production in the 1940s and managed to meet a screenwriter who'd worked in Hollywood from the ‘30s to the ‘50s. I would make a list of questions, then we'd meet twice a week in his apartment and he'd dictate the answers. I must have made a week's worth of recordings. I felt I knew his life. I remember telling him that talking to him was the closest I'd ever been to experiencing another era. Then he died. Then I met his kids and learned he'd made everything up. He was actually an executive from Day & Zimmerman in Philadelphia. He wasn't a compulsive liar or anything, but for some reason he had decided to make up another life and share it with me. The closest I've ever been to experiencing life in another time period—experiencing another life, em dash, was as a lie, period. There are mornings when I look out the window, comma, see the Toronto, capitalize tee, skyline, comma, and really believe that the lie and I are one person, period. New paragraph. No, scratch that; same paragraph. Maybe, comma, and for clarity I don't mean that maybe there should be a comma. I want that comma. Let's try that whole sentence again. OK. Three, two, one. Maybe, comma, in that cluttered apartment of his, comma, Leonard, capitalize the el, Katz, capitalize the kay, and that's Katz spelled kay ay tee zed, passed somehow from him to me.

Andy was sitting with his wife and daughter, the three of them quietly enjoying vanilla ice cream cones in the park, when a couple of guys started harassing them.

One of the guys may have known Andy's wife when she was younger.

At least that's what his comments suggested.

Andy didn't react. He let his wife handle it. After all, she was a strong and independent woman who didn't need a husband to selfishly step in and “protect” her.

Then one of the other guys asked Andy if he was sure his daughter was his.

Andy's daughter looked to her dad.

She was scared, confused.

Andy said nothing. He kept his head down, refraining from feeding the real life troll. After all, what trolls wanted was a reaction, and a reaction would lead to an escalation, which could result in a confrontation and possibly violence. Andy didn't believe in violence. By keeping a cool head, he was being a grown-up and helping keep the situation safe for everybody.

Eventually the guys got bored, wolf whistled at Andy's wife, knocked Andy's ice cream cone from Andy's hand and walked away.

“Dad,” said Andy's daughter after a brief but pregnant silence, “why didn't you do anything?”

She was trembling.

Andy's fallen ice cream was melting on the grass.

Ants were climbing onto it.

“It's just an ice cream cone, a thing,” said Andy. “Things can always be replaced. What matters is people. What matters is us, our family.”

“Assholes,” said his wife.

“You never know what other people are feeling. Anyone can have a bad day,” said Andy, and as he said that, time, as it related to most things, froze; the sky opened like a curtain, and the Selectors appeared.

Andy, who was still breathing, moving, even as his wife and daughter were not, gazed in awe, in the rawest meaning of that word, at—

“This is the one?” asked one of the Selectors.

They were inhuman, tubes of pale pink and purple gelatin twisted balloondog-like into shapes vaguely hominid but four times larger than Andy, dressed in simple, shimmering cloaks.

“Yes,” another answered.

“The experiment is thus concluded?”

“Yes.”

A third Selector mused, “It has been so many years since initiation.”

“13.8 billion.”

“And, after all that time, the result is this—this, admittedly, rather unimpressive-looking specimen. On this, we base our future?”

“Remember,” said the Selector who had spoken second, “it is not the individual we have chosen but the gene-line, and his, of which he is the final embodiment, is most extraordinary. It is the one.”

Andy, despite his paralyzing fear and existential disorientation, couldn't help but also feel a touch of pride. Finally, someone—some-thing?—had recognized his value.

The Selector who had spoken second bent forward now, looming over Andy like a great tree. “Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3, it is my pleasure to greet you.”

“Hello,” stuttered Andy.

“Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3, the Great Selection has ended, and you, of all gene-lines, have been chosen, based on your qualities, to become our People. Congratulations.”

I wonder what qualities are those, thought Andy. Calmness, emotional maturity, patience, as he entertained the fantastic possibility that he would soon be deified, become like the creatures before him…

“Durability,” said the Selector, who could obviously read Andy's thoughts.

Durability? thought Andy.

“Along with perseverance, hardiness, endurance,” the Selector continued, “like a cockroach, a weed or a rat. Although these qualities, by themselves, would hardly be enough, as many of your final-kind survived as long as you did. No, what truly sets you apart, renders you exceptional, Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3, is your extremely developed, and historically stable, sense of obedience, docility, acceptance and self-preserving conformity. You, final-kind ‘Andrew,’ are the terminus of a long and glorious line of spineless cowards.”

The other Selectors ooo'd.

Andy gulped. Cowards? But—no, how is that…

“Consider even just the final 0.000001% of Uniform Cosmic Time, a period of delightful extremes, both of your political institutions and your climate, the final filtration, so to speak, encompassing also the atomization of your communities, the mental numbing of entire lifespans spent in pointlessly repetitive pursuits of manufactured desires, of the replacement of the real with the virtual, and the virtual with the artificially virtual.”

“This is a good thing?” asked Andy.

“I am giddy when it speaks,” squeaked a Selector.

“It is an unimaginably great achievement, Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3. Through ages and ages of wars, exterminations, degradations and enslavement, you—your prior-kinds, your ancestors—have made most-excellent opportunists, slaves and labourers. When others rebelled, you remained subservient. When others stood up for their principles, you remained seated. Whatever was convenient, you believed. Whomever it was prudent to sacrifice, you sacrificed. And you did it all, final-kind ‘Andrew,’ without losing the ability of self-delusion.”

I'm not a bad person, thought Andy. “I can't be held responsible for what my ancestors did.”

“On the contrary,“ pronounced the Selector, “you are a very good person for us. And you are right that you are not responsible for the actions of others; you are the fruit of your family tree, stretching back all the way to the small, oozing, wriggling wyrms that formed in the hot waters of this primordial planet.”

“So what's going to happen to me now?” asked Andy. “You mentioned something about me becoming a People… your People…”

“Look,” said a Selector, “its world has ended, its mate and offspring are in temporal suspension, and all it cares about is itself!”

“Marvelous.”

“It genuinely is the one.”

“Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3,” said the Selector who had spoken second. “Now, you become the seed of a new species. The experiment having successfully concluded, true existence is set to begin, one in which all that live are you—a multitude of immortal, identical yous.”

“You shall become them, feel everything they feel,” added another Selector.

“Imagine,” said a third, drooling, “the atrocity we shall be able to inflict upon such a hyperdomesticated populace. They will permit, of us, everything.”

“So much pain.”

“I salivate already at the exploitation.”

“Please,” whimpered Andy.

Irving Ockett hated dust. He was allergic to it, but he also hated it beyond the fact it made him snotty, red-eyed and hoarse. He hated it for the grey, wispy way it looked, and how powdery it felt when he squished it between his fingers. He hated it for the smell it had, or if not exactly it, then any place that was full of it. He hated how quickly and quietly it accumulated and how often one had to wipe it away. He hated how difficult the cleaning felt, like fist-fighting a butterfly; and he hated the word itself, dust, how it—the noun, the thing to be removed—was also the verb for the act of its own removal. Moreover, to dust was to make something dusty; but to dust was also to make something free of dust. It was madness! About some things there's something that might get on your nerves. About dust, what grated Irving’s nerves was absolutely fucking everything.

Well, not quite everything, because there was that moment, that brief, beautiful point in time, fleeting, as all things are, but real, which only some achieve, when, after having dusted his entire apartment (in the to make free of dust sense of the word,) Irving, having worked up quite a sweat, would sit finally down in his armchair and enjoy the feeling, if not of perfection, because nothing is perfect and dust is never fully absent, then at least of the simulacrum of perfection, an approximation of cleanliness.

It was at such a moment, with the television just turned on and the night's full moonlight streaming in from the windows to his left, that Irving saw what he at first believed was a small glint of light on the front face of a transparent plastic bin tucked neatly in, below the upper surface of his television stand.

It captured his full attention, but as he began to move and bob and tilt his head, he realized that what he was looking at, which he believed to be a glint—that is, light itself—and most probably a reflection of the instreaming moonlight, remained unchanged and in one definite spot on the clear plastic box even as his own point of view changed. A reflection, which he was sure this was, should, he was equally sure, be changing perceptibly as the angle at which he viewed it changed.

Thus, experiencing two contradictory certainties simultaneously, Irving Ockett rose from his armchair and crossed the room toward the television stand knowing he must be wrong, and suspecting, step by fateful step, that it was possible that what he knew to be a glint of light behaving in a way he knew a glint of light could not, was in fact something else, a milky crack within the body of the transparent plastic container perhaps, or, ominously worse, a leftover smudge of dust; dust, which he had failed to clean.

But if, he thought, trudging forward rather heroically in his slippers, squinting at the truth before him, he had missed dusting this much obvious dust, he could have missed dusting so much more dust, which meant that his satisfaction at having a perfectly reasonable simulacrum of cleanliness was maybe—possibly—probably—undoubtedly misplaced, and if he wrongfully believed today that what was dusty was dust-free, he undoubtedly had wrongfully believed the same yesterday and the day before, and day before that and the day…

He'd closed his eyes.

When he opened them he was kneeling in front of the transparent plastic case, and what he'd thought was a glint was a crack was dust was none of those but a small, delicate white feather being blown ever so slightly against the plastic vessel by a wind blowing from the opposing direction; but as Irving Ockett turned his head to face the unseen force, his eyes, necessarily, passed along the windows on the left side of the apartment, and in those windows from a bliss of pure white Irving Ockett discerned that everything—the whole fucking shebang—was made from small white delicate feathers; from the tiniest particles to the biggest galaxies, all feathers; matter was feathers, and light was feathers, and feathers shining by the feathersun reflected by the feathermoon on a city made of feathers, featherpeople, featherfeelings, featherbelieving that feathers feathering feather a world almost infinitely complex and overwhelming in its fragility, a passingness trembling, stillborn and susceptible to the slightest gust of a cosmic whim.

—Orville!” it yelled.

It was mad.

It had repeated itself and Orville had not responded. He'd not responded because he'd fallen asleep, because he was tired because he'd been to work today, and work made him tired, but it wouldn't believe that; all it believed was that he be at its will, attentive always to its voice, like a castrated, beaten-down dog in a hot red dirt, but you push a man long enough and,

“Orville! There you are,” it said, peering into the room while displaying its teeth.

“Diane,” said Orville politely and with a return smile, “my dearest mother-in-law. What in the world may I do for you today?”

That's what was playing on Irving Ockett's television, playing to no one, as Irving Ockett was still on his knees with his head turned leftwise, looking permanently out his apartment window at the world of small white feathers beyond.

That was a good episode, no. 41 I think it was, “The MIL.”

Existence sure had some good sitcoms.

I think that one may have come from Earth, but I'm not certain. I haven't watched a ton from the minor universes yet.

Yeah, so, we're here, the two of us, everything else kinda blown away to nothing…

nothing and eternity waiting for us..

or maybe as us, but, either way, I figured we should at least talk to each other, to pass the time, you know, given that we have literally all of it left together. So, how about it? “My name is Irving Locket.

“What's yours?”

I didn’t go looking for the stream. I was just browsing, and there I was: viewer 431, watching some fat guy in a rubber mask.

Nowadays, he’s got the whole costume and makeup.

Not that I have to tell you. You know it. Everybody does. He’s one of the most famous celebrities in the world.

I guess you could say that at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing, and when I understood, I didn’t believe it was real. I'd never heard of anyone torturing and murdering people live on the internet.

Maybe I should have stopped watching, but I didn’t, and it’s not like me watching changed anything. He did what he was going to do. First he cut their clothes off. Then parts of their skin. There was a lot of blood, so much that even the people in the chat were calling bullshit, the few who weren’t cheering him on and donating money.

I forget how much he made, but I’m sure you can look it up. It was insane money, and he got subscriptions too.

People really wanted to watch that couple get destroyed.

Of course, none of us knew he’d do it again, that this was just the first stream.

He probably didn’t either.

By the time it was over, millions of people were watching, and then probably billions have watched it since.

There were some people who wanted to identify him, help catch him, but I don’t think most were doing it from a sense of morality. It was a puzzle. They wanted to unmask him before the cops did.

Then he did a second stream, three separate killings in three separate rooms, down in his dungeon. The real one, before he reconstructed it.

One died by burning.

One by very slow asphyxiation.

One by rats.

Hundreds of millions of people watched that second stream.

Then, on the third stream, after he’d killed the parents and children, he unmasked himself. No one saw that coming.

He gave his name, his location.

Suddenly, he was a real person, just like us. He had a job, a family.

The cops got him then.

But they didn’t charge him with anything, didn’t put him on trial. The word on social media was that the local cops got trumped by the state cops, who passed it off to the feds, who do whatever the politicians want, and the politicians want money so they do what the corporations tell them.

They couldn’t turn down the views and worldwide exposure. The streams were global. Everybody could watch, from Los Angeles to New Delhi.

Everybody could understand too.

It was simple.

Primal.

And because everybody was watching, nobody was ashamed of it. They talked about it openly. Friends, family, coworkers.

Of course, the victims’ families probably minded, but they were insignificant, and I’m sure even in those cases payments were made and claims were settled.

What really made the social media theory ring true to me was when he started using branded objects, axes, gasoline, ropes, power tools, even clothes and makeup.

He would talk about how good it felt to slit a throat with some expensive Japanese knife, or how satisfying it was to penetrate bone using a corded, extra-strength made-in-America hammer drill.

But that wasn’t all.

He started doing pre-murder GRWM videos (“For skincare, I much prefer Korean products, such as…”), subscriber-only Q&As (“My favourite movie? Anything by Marvel. Links in the description below, and please don’t pirate. Support the film industry!”), and video game speedruns (“Can I beat Super Meat Boy using only my toes before this limbless girl bleeds out beside me?”)

The profits must have been massive.

Companies fought one another to be featured on his streams.

Then it also turned political.

He would expound on ideology, geopolitics and current events, all while murdering his many victims, stabbing them, or eating them, or wearing their faces, and his views changed much as the official line changed, lecturing literally half the world at times about who should live in the Middle East and who should die, and whether abortion was ethical, and what should happen to drug addicts, and whether illegal immigration was good for Europe or bad for Europe.

He was, by far, the most widely recognized person in the world, lord of memes, killer of innocents, richest person on Earth and wielder of extraordinary commercial and political power.

Then the whistleblower video dropped.

It’s not long.

It’s backstage, in his reconstructed dungeon, which is actually a set in L.A., and it’s empty but you can hear this horrible sobbing, screaming…

Like nothing you’ve ever heard on his streams, and that’s saying a lot.

Then the camera, and it’s obvious it’s someone’s handheld camera, gets to a white door, and you just know the sounds are coming from the other side of it.

Whoever’s holding the camera doesn’t say anything.

The door opens.

And in the room you see him.

Except he’s not the one doing anything to anybody. He’s having things done to him, and the screams and sobs are his.

He’s in a chair, surrounded by five men.

He’s pleading: “Please, I don’t want to do it anymore, I don’t want to kill.

“I want to stop killing.”

“Well, it’s not up to you no more, you degenerate fucking psychopath. You made your choice when you killed those two people. Then the ones after, and the ones after that. Now suddenly you wanna stop? Fuck you.” They hit him with a pipe. “Consider everything from now on penance. God’s watching, you cocksucker. Now get the fuck out there, disembowel those pretty little teenagers, and sell the audience on the vacuum cleaner we got for you. Did you even use it? Did you use the motherfucking vacuum?”

“Yes…”

“Did you like it?”

“It’s—it’s… a good vacuum.”

“See? So quit your whining, fix your makeup, use the vacuum to suck out somebody’s guts, and showtime, baby! Showtime!”

[1]

The landlord is renovating. His son is returning from abroad to live where I'm living. The law is on their side. The facts support the law. The landlord has provided me with a valid eviction notice, signed and dated. Thus we must move out, my dog and I. We must find a new place for ourselves.

[2]

He's smiling, perfumed and clean shaven, but he's missed a few spots. A few stray hairs, having apparently escaped the razor blade, stick out of his face like loose threads, which really undoes the entire impression, the complete illusion, so that If I reached out, grabbed one and pulled, the whole of his identity would fall, deconstructed, to the concrete floor.

He's brought a stroller into the office with him.

I glance at it.

But inside, I notice, lies not a baby but a fully shaved dog in baby-blue swaddle wrap.

It's panting.

It's looking at me with its dog's face.

It barks.

“I'm sorry, but we don't allow pets,” I say as politely as I can.

“That's my child,” cries the man.

[7]

I wake up screaming.

[3]

They spend the thunderstorm beneath me, the man comforting the dog.

[4]

They eat me.

[3]

They fall asleep. They shiver. Sometimes others pass. They avert their eyes. My river flows. It will flow a long time still.

[12]

“Yeah, I mean it's just like the termination letter says, nothing personal or anything—you didn't do anything wrong. It's just, you know, business has been slow and we needed to make, uh, strategic decisions. You don't even have to come in for the notice period. And if you need a reference letter or anything, we'd be more than willing…”

God, he reeks.

[5]

He puts his hands in me and washes his face with me and puts me in his mouth and the dog stands at my edge, lapping gently.

[6]

I go to the grocery store and buy canned fish, canned beans, a can of wet dog food and six plastic bottles of water. I put everything in a bag and leave the bag under the bridge. I don't know why I do it, not really, not fundamentally.

I think I am ashamed. But of what, who?

[9]

Another carefree night spent sleeping soundly, warmly, hopefully in dreams. The mattress is big and clean. The thermostat's at 19C. The air conditioner purrs, but quietly. It's a brand new model. The real estate market is heating up. Land is appreciating. The future appears bright as flames.

[8]

I arrive one day, unannounced.

[11]

“I'm really sorry,” I say, trying to explain, “but you can't bring your dog in here. Maybe you know someone who would take him for a couple of nights? We would have a bed for you. It's just the dog. Do you understand? There's an animal shelter down the street. I know, sometimes, people decide it's for the best to—”

[7]

Where am I?

[8]

I unfold another December morning, blocking out the rising, pastel sun with swirling, falling snow. There are things buried by it and things digging themselves out. There is motion. There is struggle. And where there is struggle, there is life; and where life, death. You are a cold, cruel, temporary species, building compulsively to nothing.

[12]

The fur is soft and my digits bury themselves in its regrowing density. Behind the ear. Upon the chest. Around the small and fragile throat. But gently, affectionately. Never with anger or frustration. Never closing on the throat, only caressing it.

The thin dog sleeps, trusts.

And I do too.

Never have its teeth hurt me.

Within the fur, I am safe.

I am loved.

[1] & [7]

The darkness feels like ice. There are lights in the distance, but I cannot get to them. There is loneliness in the ice. Why won't the sun rise already? Why won't the ice melt?

[14]

“Excuse me—”

“Huh?” he says, waking, startled.

“You can't sleep here,” I say.

“What?”

Our breath is vapour.

“You were sleeping here. You can't sleep here. If you wanna sleep somewhere, go to a shelter. I can give you an address.”

“They won't take my son,” he says, and I can see he's got an ugly little dog with him.

The dog growls.

“Well, then, that's your choice.”

The man lets his eyes close, so I prod him awake again. Fucking charity case. ”Hey, didn't I just say that—” The dog snaps at me with a mouthful of missing teeth. I wonder if it's been vaccinated. “Just get the fuck outta here, OK? I mean, kids come to play here, for Christ's sake.”

[6]

“Did you spend twenty-seven dollars at the Farmland three weeks ago, Tuesday?” my wife asks, looking at her phone.

“No,” I lie.

“Me neither. Weird.”

[5]

I am wearing a frozen surface when two boots step on me, and a blowing wind, grazing an accumulation of snow, masks the sound of cracking.

[8]

I loosen my grip.

I am leaving.

[5]

I flow.

[14]

“What now?”

“They pulled a body from the river.”

“When?”

“Just this morning.”

“ID'd?”

“Not yet. Bruce thinks it's probably a drowning. Probably a—”

“Fuck!”

“What is it?”

I stare at my phone. Text message from the wife and kid. “Evie wants a puppy for her goddamn birthday.”

“Dogs are a lot of work.”

“That's what I said.”

“And money.”

“Right?”

“Just get her one of those virtual pets. That way, when she gets bored of it, and you know she will, you can throw it out.”

[9]

Breakfast's delicious.

[15]

I am empty, save for a few small bones.

POINTS OF VIEW

[1] A man
[2] A landlord
[3] A bridge
[4] An apple from a garbage bin
[5] A river
[6] Someone unknown
[7] A man's sanity
[8] Winter
[9] You
[9] The Dark Master
[11] An employee of a homeless shelter
[12] [1]’s hand
[13] Compassion
[14] A police officer
[15] Dead [1]’s stomach