Henry

I don't know what caused it all to break down. It seemed designed to do that. There were rumors but no decent information anywhere. Some people said there was a dirty bomb in Miami, others SF and NY. Never consistent. I just think a computer somewhere decided that our time was up. Then they rolled out the troops.

Where did they dig up these pasty motherfuckers? I think they were grown in some underground vat. One day we were herded out of our homes by guys in blue helmets. So you think, wow, civil authority has broken down so badly that the UN is in charge, then we get out of the truck to find green uniforms taking us to a temporary holding facility. The next morning they are wearing all black like private contractors. Always the same guys.

They separated me from my grandma and granddad who I had lived with since I was 5 or so. My mom had taken off long ago. Pops, he left suddenly a week before, like he knew something was up. He was always gone anyways, off on a tear or just spending long hours at the shop, sleeping off a hangover under one of his cars. He didn't care if there was coolant dripping on his forehead.

At the holding facility they divided us into groups and assigned groups a color. Blues here, reds line up over there. I found out later what some of the colors stood for. Blues were political crimes. Not as many of those as you would hope. A sorry bunch of lefties and conspiracy theorists. Old tax protesters.

Reds were the biggest group: people with terrible credit scores. Folks in long lines put onto trains to workcamps in SoCal to work off their credit card debts bought for pennies on the hundred by chinese speculators. Off to make the cheap crap that put them there in the first place. Basically, everybody.

Me, I was in the green camp. Carbon offenders. My dad loved his muscle cars. Speedy old combustion monsters that he tuned for days and weeks. He was a big fan of the 70s Novas and Impalas, old police interceptors and drugrunning cars with false bottoms. Sometimes he bought them with coke still stuffed up in the wheel wells. What money he earned he had from fixing them for car collectors. Could've been rich doing that.

When they couldn't find him, they put me in here instead. To work off the thick calluses on his carbon footprint. They transferred us to the Carbon Transformation Center. CarbTrans for ecocriminals like myself. I'd barely even ridden in one of his cars.

The first night I was there I forget what I had eaten but I had terrible gas and ripped ass all night every couple of minutes. At first the other guys in the bunk gave me a lot of hell. "If you fart one more time, I'm going to put my foot up your ass so far your head will explode like a balloon." When this didn't stop me, they started calling me the Greenhouse Kid. The repeating joke became, "There's another 5 years hard labor."

I don't really understand the road. Yet I've watched many thousands of miles of it pass. I have never seen a tree. They were all replaced with bioengineered bamboo some years ago. Maybe there are a few in Canada. I've never been there.

I looked into the backseat, into the nest. Four or five sets of rat eyes looked back at me. I was not sure how many of them were back there or what all their names were, except that they were all named after Roman emperors, no matter what their actual sex was. The only answer from Madra, who secretly ran this shadowplay, to the obvious question was "Because they will conquer the earth." I was not particularly afraid of that.

As I gazed with my old naked, peeling eyeball, they emerged into the weak light of the cabin which felt tight as a cough drop tin. They climbed over, collecting on the empty seat next to me. They made themselves comfortable, sitting back on their haunches, gesturing in their imitation or mockery of human communication. Each looked at me now and then, smiling through the sides of their rat mouths, but I could not make sense of any of their dialogue.

As I stared, I noticed that on each rodent, there were colonies of fleas, standing on their hindlegs, laughing and pointing at me. I felt myself grow smaller and smaller till I could discern further creatures, sitting on the backs of the fleas, riding them like miniscule horses.

One of them rode up to me and dismounted. It looked like a muscular wrestler, with whips for arms and a sea sponge for a head. It lashed its arms out toward me, snaring me around the neck and waist. I let out a scream but it sounded like I was gargling. It pulled me closer, bending its head column so that I knew it was going to eat me.

Then I did something even I could not foresee. I relaxed. I think I even sharded off into my pants. Its breath, if you could call it that, was not nasty, but smelled sweet and salty, like seaweed. And it rattled off a string of sounds that sounded distinctly like, "Go to Argentina."

It released me. I receded. As I retreated, I felt myself expand, growing back to my original size. But I could still see the fleas. Whole populations of them: laughing, chattering, drafting legislation, maps of how to subdivide the territory they had found, battle plans and declarations of war. Then they turned to me. They jumped.

That's when Madra sedated me. I didn't wake up till we hit Mexico.

I was reading a magazine (strange, old floppy thing with no moving pictures) with an article about this guy who got busted for growing weed. Must've been inspired by the old High Times magazines that I found in my father's stuff a lifetime ago. I saw a picture of his sister who was adorning one of his plants with Christmas ornaments. The caption said, "Wish you were here for the holidays." She had streaked blond hair and cateye glasses. Her expression was a short story of loss punctuated by many stoned jokes and wiggy adventures.

I thought, looks like she needs someone to comfort her. So I stepped into the magazine, just like the hologlyphic books of my childhood. I got close so she could smell me and I her. I exuded the faint odor of an ox riding a motorcycle through a hempfield. She decided that I was safe enough to risk a walk through the museum.

We moved through the dark room illuminated by indirect, colored lights and the glows of the displays. Through a passage, we approached a corner around which would be a new exhibit. From a high, small side window, I could see a jungle of alien plants, like her brother's marijuana. She squeezed my hand and I put my head over her shoulder so that our warm, moist breath mingled with the anticipation of a licorice braid.

In front of the diorama, we were greeted by a bold sign announcing NEW JERUSALEM CANYON. A sandstone plain stretched back, further than we could see, lit up with the full day desert sun. All manner of succulent cactuses sprouted from the model floor, some twisting like spikey dancers, others squat like blushing hippopotamuses. And we took them all to be psychoactive, powerful enough to make our knees weak with the enthusiasm of just meeting them. She turned to me, and said, her face wild with joy and pride, "My brother, the writer, made this."

"Henery. I've scanned this compound and logged into their glyphnet. It's a fairly sophisticated human community." Madra described the crusty encampment as we rolled closer. We were running on methanol fumes and Madra's hydrogen converter was completely down. This was our only chance at repair. Otherwise, we'd all be picked apart by coyote gangs soon to join the fate of millions of humans from Panama to Idaho.

"Just got to psych myself up for this." I rubbed the ribbed material of an armrest. I've always thought it felt like the way a gecko foot would. But who knows what a gecko foot feels like? Am I a collection of unexperienced memories? Will all these assumptions spontaneously organize themselves into a set of skills? Where does the body learn these things? I was beginning to see the imagination as a cellular place.

"There's no preparation for this. Just act, Henry. You'll need gear to trade."

"I have these oranges from Honduras,"

"Won't get you very far. Take the sexbox."

"No!" A chorus of rat voices joined me, "No!" They had logged a number of hours over the months.

"It's the best piece of non-essential equipment we have. Don't forget to tell them it's the model with the calcium ion channel. If they know anything about it, they'll know that this is the best there is. Releasing the machine interface." The device slid from under the dash, a thin, black box attached to a bundle of wires that terminated into gold-tipped connectors that hid the tiny needles and dermpads.

I stared at it. My nuts shrank into my groin. A million receptors in my brain died.

"Be a man, Hank." Caligula punched me in the ear. I turned around, my knees on the seat. But I had nothing to say to him. "I'll bet there's a real woman there, not just tech sex. There might even be a real woman there who would fuck you. Maybe," he said.

"Get out of here," Madra said, stopping the car and popping the door. The camp spread out below a low, dusty ridge. I looked to it like a dog with a full litterbox.

"I'm leaving, but I want some respect when I come back." I pointed at Caligula.

With his arms crossed, and something of a smile on his ratface, if I knew at all what rat expressions meant, he nodded.

Titus' black head poked out of the backseat nest. "We're decided that the cat should accompany you."

"I hate cats." Actually, wasn't fond of any other members of the animal kingdom, there being too many examples of them being not what they seem to be. I thought about the noises that came from the back when they first trapped it. "I thought you killed that thing."

"No. We merely harvested its will. We can use it to communicate with you. If it starts meowing, bend down and let it jump on your shoulder. It'll press its head to your temple and we can use bone conduction to send messages through its purring."

"Hmm, then it won't seem like I'm hiding a wire or slugphone." I thought about what folks like this might do to a coyote spy. "Fine. Cat comes."

I stepped out of the car. The cat jumped over the seat and out beside me. If it walks like a cat, and talks like a cat, is it really a cat? Or is it a halfdozen rats, with their nimble little hands, tweaking its every move. Must have all the memories and instincts of its former existence. It looked plenty convincing to me.

Make your world ready for the
truckloads of
rabid baboons
making fun of
our collective hopes and dreams

from "Poems Beneath the Dashboard"
a hidden volume on Madra's memory crystal

I had burned all my derms except one. You know the story. You got to have something that will get you over the hump. And you suffer through all the raw nerves and fucked up situations staring at naked reality, which has a terminal italian horror soundtrack. I am thinking how sweet my situation is now, in the very womb of our times, what could be last place on the globe where comic book cliches roam the streets. Fuck zombies, these people have fucking everything on zombies, cause these people are all actors. Nothing they do isn't from a pull-down menu in the Euripides' Sphinx program.

So I'm getting this ride. And, of course, the guy or gal acts fairly normal at first. And it doesn't matter what sex they are. The attacks are just different. Thing is, they can't have a simple conversation, like, "Hey, how's it going?" "Thanks for the ride, this road is fucking dead tonight." "No doubt." "You party?" Seems simple enough. But even when it starts off that way, we quickly get into the Big Story, the one that changed their life. Went to jail for awhile. Was in the military when the U.S. attacked Idaho.

This guy looked the part. Beard, skinny, wiry and strong. Wild eyes hiding behind bad vision that the glasses hardly compensated for. I wasn't quite sure which vector he would take. Are we going straight to crazy or are we going to wait until we stop and visit your cousin? I decided to sit back and watch the show, see what happens.

For one, he wasn't doing the eye thing. Signs of a sphinx reading his cues. No sudden jerks, just a little bit of a glaze. For two, his weed was excellent. He could very well be who he says. Dude with a job. What's he doing all the way out here? Has to go to remote places to do his job. What does he do? Installations. That's all he will say.

"What kind of installations? Larry?"

"Gary. Oh, it's kind of complicated, but I make decent money. I have to keep client confidentiality, but it's nothing big. There are no angles if that's what you're thinking." He smiled that just fucking with you smile. "But I do all kinds of business. I sell a little drugs when I can. You know, just as an investment. And that's cool, but then sometimes people pay me with strange shit, you know, like weapons. And high grade electronics."

"Oh, I'm busted flat right now. I don't even have any connections. I got friends, but no connections. You know what I mean?"

"Oh, yea, people with family, and then there's family. People that would take bullets for you. People that would bring you claymore mines as a present."

"You're not from Idaho, are you?"

"Why would you think that?"

"Hey, isn't there isn't an old, gigantic nuclear reactor built into a mountain there?"

"Yea, and it's still hot." He gave me that look, from down a slope of cheekbone in the land of I-fuck-you-not.

"No fucking way."

"I should know, I used farm out there."

"What crops?"

"A little rice, some shrimp, all top of the line genes."

"Yea, any EM?"

"Always. We do a little gamma work, but on a short season."

"Is it bucking?"

"A little. You can practically surf it. We get out there in a cagesuit and see how far we can run before the ground shakes us into a tree."

"Idaho is weird, man."

"You don't know the half of it. By the way, how does it feel to be riding with a guy who could have a load of mines?"

"Fine. I like mines. Who doesn't?" I am relaxing into the upholstery. It is a kind of Zen brace, the comfy chair, in a position of absolute poised relaxation. I can only maintain that feeling for about 45 seconds, then I am back to the sprung seat of my soul. I have cyclic twitches. The best of them make me come a little. When it's bad, I feel like I might take a spontaneous dump. The typical ones just make a random muscle jump. I kind of like it. As long as I am not trying to sleep, which I do very little of.

"And how do you feel about driving with someone who is completely fucked out their skull?"

"Heh. I've got to say that I have you beat. Besides, the road won't let drive off it."

"That shit is broke."

"Really?"

"I'll help you fix it, right now if you want." And I was amped for it. It might also teach me a little bit about this guy. Can he handle tools? Is he just a twisted motherfucker?

"I don't trust it."

"I got you. And I'm cool with that. Driven manual too many times to mention, completely wacked out of my skull. One time I was in a car, every one was on acid and this friend of mine in the back seat kept kicking the head of the guy driving."

"That's cool. I don't want to wig you out or make you paranoid or nothing."

"Naw." I thought the story was just enough to make me human, but not to be confused with a motherfucker twisted outside of space-time. We had very different strategies, this guy and me.

"So I was on this installation today. The most fucked up thing happened," he said, his eyes not leaving the road.

"What's that, Gary?"

"This dude died."

"How did he die?"

"Asphyxiation." At this point, I'm thinking about the derm. I've got it. It's worth it's weight in gold. Not just from the gold capillary/e-stimload needles, little pins that hold onto your skin like velcro. I would just slap it on my arm, like I was killing a bug, try to hide it as long as I can, and become 10x the raving lunatic that InstallationMan could ever be. As you can see, from my psychoactive logistics, in many ways, I have a limited range. I know this. I am almost a one-note cowboy. Like Roy Rogers with a saddle tucked in under his hat. The one that possibly a raccoon could find the stirrups on, and navigate the guy, like he was Trigger himself. But I would not pull that shit until I had to. This guy could still take us a number of ways.

"Open up, Hank."

"No."

Madra shoved an assembly with a fiber optic camera/light, dremel, a nasty looking pick and some other equipment in my face. "Teeth are not just eroding stones in the grotto of your mouth. They are living things that need care."

"And what kind of care can you give with that? Looks like a torture array."

"Have you ever seen the Marathon Man?" Twitter from the backseat.

"No."

"Never mind, then. I'll just find what cavities you have, clean them up, drill them out," I winced, "Very carefully, cauterize the mess to stop the spread, fill the tiny hole with silver solder, non-leaded, of course, and seal the deal with a ceramic surface. Better than new. The whole process should take 3/1000ths of a second per operation, give or take a thousandth, depending on the size of the cavity."

"Painless."

"My dremel is shockless. I will also administer a small local anaesthetic."

"How about some serious meds?"

"Depleted. From your recreational use, I might add. I've been studying some texts I found on dentistry techniques that were reserved for 21st century elites. I've even made some improvements."

Titus poked his head around in front of mine. "Look at these chompers. Ever seen rat teeth so perfect?"

"Alright. Fast and painless."

"Or your money back. Open up."

"Ahh." A clamp held my mouth open and steadied my jaw while the gear slipped in.

"Oh, my freakin..."

"Grrgg."

"No! This is terrible! Much worse than the illustrations."

Now I knew what a car felt like with its hood open, some grease monkey hammering away on it. My mind quickly fled.

I remembered when I was a kid, there was this rock and mud ravine at the edge of an industrial area we used to jump our bikes across. We'd fall into the water at the bottom, cut ourselves up. The foul muck would get in the wounds. We would find these crawfish and catch them. Then we'd have them fight each other. The loser would pay up and have to eat his gladiator. It was great. Must explain my excellent health today.

Once, just as it was starting to rain, I was playing alone in the ravine. I saw this huge, mutant crawfish, almost as wide as my hand and longer. It was dark purple and brown with cream flecks. Its shell was spikier than normal. A complete beast and soon to be the ultimate victor of all crustacean battles.

I tried to grab it and it pinched me. Then it launched itself down the flow. With the rain, the current had really picked up, but I was able to follow it, as big as it was. I ran along the bank of the ravine till I got hung up in a security fence. Luckily, the thing had gotten caught up on a rock at the same time. When I was through the gap underneath the fence, the crawdad was on the move again, flowing with the creek.

Finally, I had it cornered. A small pool collected in front of a drainage pipe that that ran under a road. I put my hand in the water, moving slowly, aiming for a smooth place on its back where I could seize it. With my fingers almost upon it, I flinched anticipating another pinch from its powerful claws. The vibration was enough to scare it into motion. It launched itself into the tube where I lost it in the darkness.

I stuck my head into the pipe that must have been five or so feet across. I considered mucking around in the there. Some crawfish had a slight glow to them. This one would have been a glower if any were. But there could have been other things in there. Webs across the conduit with poisonous spiders lurking. I thought about my bike, thrown in the ditch, waiting for someone to take it. That was as good an excuse as any to get out of there.

"That's it."

"What took you so long?"

"I had to do a couple of root canals, so the whole operation took 15 seconds. I allowed a few seconds for diagnosing and referring to documents. I also gave your teeth a teflon coating."

SUFFERING MACULAR DEGENERATION, INSULIN SHOCK, EMPATHY EXHAUSTION, DIABETES AND DEATH. REBORN AFTER EVERY CELLULOID CATASTROPHE.

"I'm totally fried, Mad."
"don't worry, Hank. I'm putting you on the lysine-calcium injector sequence, a steady drip of choline and ginkgo boosters. You'll be sparking along again in no time."
"Your optimism is almost contagious. But I don't feel like I'll get over this for awhile."
"I hate to see you so torn up. It's bad for rodent morale." Several derm-terminated tubes snake out to ply Henry's skin in several places.
"Mmm. Strange. Hahaha."
"What are you laughing at, Henry?"
"I just remembered this guy I used to know, Hugo Salvia. He lived in Kansas near the Kaw River, some shack out in the middle of nowhere. He was a chemist who took over the business after a notorious acidcook got busted. The house was owned by these radicals who moved to Berkeley and let anyone stay in the house who promised to work on the place. Hugo had it completely off the grid, to make sure there was no electromagnetic snooping. You know, how lightbulbs carry a feedback image of the room they illuminate."
"Never heard that one."
"Oh, it was all over the internet. Anyhow, he had this big tank that he harvested methane from biomass. There were hogfarmers in the area who traded pigshit for meth."
"I see. The gingko megadose is working."
"He would transfer the gas into bicycle tire tubes with a handpump. Single serving fuel bladders. The valves on the tubes could be hooked onto a small cookstove or space heater."
"Very clever."
"I asked him once if they ever leaked and caught fire. He admitted that they did sometimes. He described it as a large, distended sphinter blowing burning rings of flatulence."
"That's a new take on the Johnny Cash song."
"Exactly. And I don't know what it has to do with anything, but one time I was talking to Johnny O'Gratin, the guitarist for Led Potatoe, at a bar in Texas. I asked him how he wrote his songs, if he used any method. He said, 'I keep making mistakes until I'm satisfied.' "

"Someone's in my honeypot." Madra suddenly announced in the middle of a silence.

"Uh, excuse me?" I stammered, almost jealous. As far as I knew, no one else had used the sexbox since Madra picked me up.

"Sounds puerile, eh? It's nothing of the sort, Henry, so put the safety back on your hairtrigger libido. According to my local copy of wikipedia a honeypot is a trap set to detect or deflect attempts at unauthorized use of information systems. In other words, imagine that I am a carnivorous plant. A fly has just landed in my sticky snare."

"Thanks for making it graphic enough for me. I think I heard of the term when I was in college. I had a lot of geek friends when I studied gaming theory."

"You see, to outside traffic, I appear to be a poorly configured Björnix server."

"Björnix, I knew people who used that OS. I could never figure out what they were doing with it. 'I'm hacking someone's toaster in Newark.' "

"You've got the idea. I'm that toaster. So someone hacks in knowing the vulnerabilities of Björnix, bugs that Björn Snöballs never found during his OS's brief flourishing. For the longest time, it was uncrackable because it was so obtuse, but by now, it's not impossible to figure, just rare."

"Ah."

"Anyway, so we had a visitor. And the visitor left behind a fossil."

"A petrified lump of some ancient critter."

"No, an .fsl file, which was a common Björnix archive format. And, inside the archive, there is a text file called READMEALOUD."

"Go ahead."

"Alright, here goes. It's very short. 'Go to http://spacemummy.com/stuff/echo.html . Remember, view source is your friend. Thanks, Spacemummy.' Who's Spacemummy?"

"Ah, I dunn-- wow. He's this guy I met about ten years ago. Maybe more. Shit. Back in the bad old online days. He was a punk who hitchhiked into town. He ended getting beat up by skinheads and disappeared. I had given him my email address and we kept in touch. Later on, he pings me to tell me that he mummified himself. Some post-mod primitive thing, I spose. I can't remember what his real name was. Alex or John."

"Curious."

"What's at that address?"

"It's not resolving."

"Oh."

"Oh fuck, what the hell was that?" I had that strange moment where I thought I was somewhere else, some other time. Then I realized that I was riding in a car, almost everyone I ever knew was dead and my only friend was an AI.

"You must've been dreaming. And you're drooling all over yourself." Madra said, in as warm a tone as a disembodied voice can have.

"I was with my ex-girlfriend, Linda. We were making out in this park, leaning against this fence, thought we were the only ones there. I was grinding on her and I had this hardon in my jeans. And she had this hole in the back under the pocket of her jeans and she turned around and was saying, 'oh, fuck me through here.' And I was grunting and making noise, just because we were both kooky, and we had no intention of fucking, but we just liked to have fun like that."

"Sure, sure."

"I didn't notice that this woman had snuck up behind me on the other side of the fence. She was blond with dark mascara that was running down her face. And first I was angry because she was behind us, but she was crying. She also looked a little like my sister."

"Great."

"And so, instead of chewing her out, I asked her, 'What's wrong? Are you ok?' And she wiped her eyes and pouted like she was going to really let loose, but in an even tone, she says, 'I just wanted to tell you that what you're doing isn't right. And that Jesus isn't happy with you.' So I say, 'Fuck off, you bitch.' And I start really laying into her. Linda gets all panicked and runs to her car, so I follow her, but I'm still yelling back at the crazy woman, 'Shut the hell up. Mind your own business.' And she's screaming, 'You're in fucking trouble cause I'm going kill you.' and she gets in this truck. A big truck, an eighteen wheeler that's parked right there. And as Linda and I are driving off, I'm saying, 'Aw, she'll never get that fucking think going.' Linda's driving, looking through the rearview mirror. She says, 'You're wrong. Here she comes.' I turn around and the truck is barrelling down the road at us. Then I wake up."

"Wow. And you were only asleep for 2 minutes and 40 seconds."

"What do you think about that?"

"God in the form of a blond woman driving a freight rig is going to chase you down."

"That's the last time I tell you about one of my dreams."

Mom was on the front porch thinking again.  She probably did the most reflection of the lot of us.  And maybe that's the reason why I never mention any of thegm.  And who cares where they got off to.  I'm not particularly interested in telling histories here.

She was sitting there in the fenced-in front yard, on the stoop, the house she thought she wanted twelve years ago after as many moves around the West.  There was a cheap ball on the grass next to the walkway in front of her.  It was a beach ball with a green panel, a red, a yellow and a blue.  This beach ball had never seen a beach in its time since leaving a factory in China.

She was looking off, down the street, propping her head up on her hand, her elbow on her knee.  The hand also held a cigarette. The smoke went up into her hair.  I had seen her like this many dozens of times.  Sometimes I would sneak up on her from the side of the house from her blind spot and sit beside her.  I would wait to see how long it took her to recognize me.  And when she did, she would smile and then tell me to scoot off and go play in a kindly way.  She wouldn't muss my hair or nudge me because there was very little touching in my family.

I didn't approach her on this occasion.  There was something about her this time.  I just kept spying on her.  I thought about how beautiful she was, even when she was tired and distracted.  Her hair was black and she wore dark-rimmed glasses.  It made her look competent, something she wasted away in her depression.  They say I inherited her smarts, though I hid it my entire life, choosing to hang out with the biggest dumbasses I could find.

She had returned from the institution a few months before, after a six-month stay.  Before that, she gotten to never leaving the house.  This was after quitting her job teaching high school science.  They shipped her off to some facility out in West Egypt, Texas, that was probably less than a hundred miles away.

Her doctor was an ex-Army psychiatrist who stood a few inches above 5 foot.  I called him Col. Momar Khaddafy cause he looked crazy himself, a hysterical tyrant who convinced my father she needed electrical shock therapy.  I'm serious about this.  It made a big comeback for cases of extreme depression.  On the couple of times we visited her, she looked like hell, but she seemed happy.  It was a strange kind of happy, like they put the current straight into her  mood organs that were already dead and then reanimated like the Bride of Frankenstein, whose head jerked around like a manic bird.

So who knows what she was thinking about there.  It might have been about the pain of that incarceration and its betrayal of her humanity.  Could've been she was trying to remember something she forgot when they juiced her noodle.  Like the passion she squashed when she married a cyborg of a husband.  Maybe it was wondering what she would do once her children left home and forgot about her.  But she could have just as easily been thinking about the cold water running under the ground.

But when she was done, she had decided something.  She got up off the stoop walked up to the beach ball and put her cigarette out on it.  Such a dramatic gesture from a woman unused to display.  But then this was a private moment, as were they all.

Three days later she was gone.  Off to Florida, then Georgia or something.  She sent me letters on my birthday and Christmas along with some gift never appropriate for my age and sometimes my gender.  Not eye makeup or anything I would have used, but like a coloring book with ponies in it.  She'd tell me about her job waiting tables or how she found this or that religion.  She was hot on the trail of something.  Finally.

I never returned her letters.  Not because I was mad at her, or crushed by the thing.  I wasn't an orphan.  The pain had already come and gone.  Her leaving seemed like a natural thing.  Homelife didn't change much without her around.  She didn't do a hell of a lot here.

I learned a lot from her, really.  I learned about space and time.  I learned about free will.  I learned about how you can slip off into your own universe.  You just have to choose.  Then you act.  Pop.

Never mind the event.  You could still call it an event, what happens, if only to me.  What crushed my spirit.  What caused my penis to snap, my mind to shatter, my heart to limp along on three valves.  But this was all before that.

I lie on the median of the road, in the grass.  I watched the sky fucking itself.  Had to do with clouds, with the long, low sounds of the spillway at the center of the galaxy.  I approached the disk of infinity, my face full of the purple foam of a voiceless command. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them approach.  And though I lie on the grass, I looked down upon them from a great height.  This dizzy place was the home of the realization that THE MIND IS PERPENDICULAR TO THE BODY.  And thus, it penetrates the ether at a right angle to the universe.

They grew from tiny figures to bouncing bulbous babies to balloons of New Year's Day Parade heroes.  The last of my friends, the Gods of Now, full of the noble gas: desire and youth.

"Here you are, Henry.  Come back down by the river with us."  Amy loomed like Annie Lennox rockstar with the shine of a cartoon mouse.

"We saw flowers burning down there," said Steve, normally so dark and clad in dour that he finally seemed to transcend himself.  Yes, it was beautiful.  Not like the last time when, in our pain, the only thing we could do was form a band called Bad Acid Orchestra, that started to feel like induction to a misguided punk rock army.  No one knew how to play a single instrument.

"We could learn ELO songs."

"Fuck you, Henry."

I remember sitting in my room, thinking, "Take me to a place where there's no money and time don't mean a thing."

I have encountered some strange places in the world, places that I've never returned from.  You can never return from a place.  When you go, you leave the old place behind.  When you understand that it's not just the river of time that flows, but everything, you are free to choose your configuration space.

For instance, I had gone away, then came back to Austin, Texas.  The apartment complex with the bikers and skinheads was gone.  Now you had a shack with a few coyotes sitting in lawnchairs roasting a goat.  When I tried to find my old squat, someone had taken up in my room.  I didn't know anyone there.  Not a soul.  The dude sat on my bed, with his girlfriend.  I didn't freak out or anything.  We smoked a bowl and I left.

These things happen all the time.  Streets appear and disappear.  Then I'll lose a place and years later find it again, some pawn shop where there's a box of donuts on the counter and help yourself.  In this neghborhood in particular, it is always 1985.  Yet it changes like someone rolled the dice and took the whole punk ghetto apart and rearranged it.  Put the columns from the red brick building on the stucco and switched the plaid skirt to the guy with the mohawk and the chains off his boots to bearded ladies' wallet who lost her sideburns to the guy with the green latex gloves whose gloves are stretched between wires making a decorative postmodern tentlike cover to the red brick apartment building.  Now, instead of directing traffic, he's selling memberships to a gym around the corner.

There are stranger places still.  Places you can only find when you're tripping and full of fear, when you've left the path, ditched your friends, lost your way.  Places where people do unspecific business.  "How did all these pots from Mesopotamia get here?  Is that ex-President Bush ducking out of the back?"

"Move along before you get dead."

You can find parties where the conversational flow spins like an old Shaker revival only armed with knives.  But if you say the right thing, you get hooked in, like cell that spews the right enzyme signature, chemical clues that supress immune response.  Suddenly you're part of the team, a 20-mule team, cause they'll put you to work as soon as they recognize you.  That's what happened at the chicken coop.  They invited me to dinner and pressed me into service.  But then one day, I came back after picking up supplies and the whole house was gone, something about a runaway and her stillborn baby.  I could never figure that one out.

Point is, once you ride out on that horse called Verditariloo or Lipbiskets, you have to just keep riding.  Ride it to a new future, one with edible phones and rats of feather.  You may find out you can only get it up for a goretex interior, hose and basket.  Are you going to cry about your lipgloss past?

"You could call it my mind, Henry, to take a shortcut to the concept, but the fact is that I have no mind, not as you know it.  I have reflexive properties that allow me to speak of my process.  And this would suffice for self-awareness: the awareness of my own awareness."

"Whatever, Mad, I was just fucking with you."  I felt a little overwhelmed, having taken the rest of barrel acid I had.

"By many definitions, I am intelligent.  But this is only an emergent accident.  My design was to solve for intelligence in a vastly different way than I turned out.  I'm not sure if there is another like me.  And, of course, you humans imploded before you could really get into the process."

I coughed; she continued.  "So let's call it a mind for all intents and purposes and perhaps you will be able to tell the subtle but crucial difference.  My mind gathers around ideas, like a form-fitting stocking, or a unitard, as opposed to a univac.  Because that is all of nothing.  Hahaha."

"Is that supposed to be funny?  You're fit to be tard.  Or tied.  Go ahead and lecture."  I felt a fly on my eyebrow.  But then touching it, it was my eyebrow that was the fly.  It was cleaning itself, the hairs sticking out from my forehead like a case of the jeebies.  "Is there a body inside the stocking?"

"To a certain extent, you are the body, as are the rats.  See, the field grows and collapses.  For instance, when you all go to sleep, I shrink. Because you are all a part of my process.  Your actions set the seed of my my various states, so that the fuzzy parameters are truly random.  For you see, there is never a truly random number generator.  It always has to be based on some arbitrary figure, such as the number of times and frequency of your farts, Henry."

"Farscinating arsinating."

"So I can do a great many beautiful things, having the sum total of all eccentricities I encounter.  I can write poetry. 

My mind grows a garden of agar tubes, the lsd inside your sugar cubes, a jewelry box tracking magnetic storms across the face of Texas."

A long silence emerged as the back of whale.  But it was just my ribcage.  "Damn, I could eat like five burritos," I finally said.

"I'm looking for a place to stop.  I think there are some friendly coyotes up ahead."

It was something I always thought would happen.  People acted out their worst and strangest natures.  You know how things can suddenly get out of hand?  Well, they did.  Everywhere.

Some people got a bad case of the numbers.  Counted everything they owned, calculating their net worth to the smallest piece of lint.  A wooden table would be valued at the precise number of grains and the thickness of its finish.  Crazy british people arrived to appraise old cans.

Sadists arrested innocents and tortured them in their own homes, setting up makeshift prisons and improvising laws to criminalize people who stared or vacationers.  They totally ignored a new, vast criminal class of vandalizers, people fraudulently selling their neighbor's cars, pedophile priests of dull-witted buggerers.  No one was safe anywhere near a lightbulb or doorknob.

Sounds like business as usual?  It was but to a manical and escahtological extent.

It started in America, of course, the Europeans completely writing us off, trying to save what was left of the world economy.  But the whole thing started coming down, little capitalist duchies springing up everywhere, headed by complete madmen and idiots.

Of course, it didn't help that I was completely tripping my balls off every moment of the day.  My chemist had gone absolutely nutter, drinking drain cleaner and tubes of antibacterial toothpaste.  "Have a cocktail, Henry," he says to me before he burns massive holes in his esophagus.  So I made off with a ridiculous amount of synaptic shortcircuit candy.

The only people I could find that were the least bit sane were in the Mexican neighborhoods.  They just started partying non-stop, so I took up with what seemed like an extended family formed over several city blocks.  We ate acid night and day, even feeding it to the dogs.  I learned a lot about the secret ethics of pitbulls, talking to them when everone else had passed out.  Did you know that they refuse to maul people with Alzheimer's?

I got paranoid one night and had to flee.  I was sitting around a kitchen table, lit by candles, piled high with Corona and Pacifico bottles.  Then I looked at my hosts and they had these giant wooden heads, hollowed out like Day of the Dead marionnettes.  They picked me up and began to toss me like dice, gambling with the last of the drugs and alcohol.

I made my way to a construction area, the site of some gentrification project that had been abandoned.  I slept in the half-finished pool.  I dreamed that I was a baby about to get washed down a drain.

If you eat a lot of sandwiches, all you need is a knife.

When I'm riffing high, Madra seems like a horse. But who is riding?

H: Since the sexbox is broken, you got any porn?

M: I have access to more porn than you can watch in your lifetime.

H: Something random, hetero, no midgets or amputees.

M: Here's a file called 'Lolita German 17 privat'

H: That makes me feel a slight twinge of nervousness. I like that feeling. Roll it.

H: She's amazing, probably some eastern european girl that he paid a few euros to do this. She can barely hide her disgust. Nazi prick. He looks like he shaves his nuts with a dull razor. He's talking too much, pretending to admire her body. What a complete fag, more of a tailor than a pudstud.

M: He seems to be straight.

H: He'd be a fag whatever his sexual orientation was. He reminds me of the guy from that British tv show, The Office, the boss, only without the moustache.

M: Do you want me to skip to another?

H: No, linger, I want to just hate this guy. I'll bet he thinks that he's doing a good deed, giving money to the poor, or something, while he treats her like cattle. I can't understand what he's going on about.

M: I can translate.

H: No, he's just descibing what is obvious. She's a gorgeous 18 year old with the body of a thirteen year old. Tiny breasts, obvious bikini line from a vacation on a yacht in the Baltic with some other rich sociopath. He doesn't know what to do with his hands, afraid they're going to obscure something to the camera. I could never get off to this, even though she's completely gorgeous. I think this is some kind of casting couch simulation. Yea, sit on the back of the couch. Ok, I know what's going on. At least she has pubic hair, shaved pubes make me think of my little sister. That's not a turnon. Suck in your gut, you prick. There you go. What a control freak, he's even guiding her hand as she touches his cock. Yea, eat that pussy. She's closing her eyes. She's trying not to imagine his bad breath on her vagina. He's talking to the fucking camera again. Never break the fourth wall! Don't you know the rules? I'm not even here. Cheese on crackers. He steps away and lets her masturbate because he can't get an erection on camera.

Porn guy: (from off camera) Das ist gut!

H: I can't believe it. Just like a cartoon. She's pretending to be in the throes of passion. Then he jumps in, shoving his 5 inch prick in her. She can't be enjoying that. She must be bone dry, holding her face. God, I can't help but feel fucking sad. I mean, I like the stuff where the guy says, "Bark for me, bitch." And she does, but she sounds like she's going to laugh instead.

M: (plays an mp3 of Bill Nelson's "Flaming Desire.")

H: Thanks, Mad. No more porn. I'm just going to sit here and contemplate the end of civilization.

M: Well, once you've recovered I have a file called "Nudist Latin Limbo Party."

H: Now you're talking.

Madra is a car. Well, at least, the brain of the car. I am a parasite of a human living in the front seat. I don't drive. I don't drive very well. I'm getting my head together.
( noodling is right-- all the excesses of badtrip psychedelia )