The house looked simple enough. Who knew it sat on top of a gigantic complex that was a zoo in its own right? A group of friends and I navigated its depths, passing through several large chambers. A minimum of details there, but near the end of the entire place we had to traverse a large crocodile pool to reach the elephant cage. It was a dark, wet place, a bit too industrial: concrete, dripping pipes, bar cages. Some of us played with the snaggle toothed animals, prying open their long jaws to watch them snap closed.

At the elephant cage there was a calf. We petted it, but the mother became agitated. She paced the cage and tried to discourage us. Someone, I think myself, tried to stop the others from pawing the baby. Well mama became pissed enough to bust open the cage door. We ran, scrambling across the crocs, up the stairs. The elephant came on. Passing through every room towards the surface, we locked and secured the door.

We didn’t take the threat too seriously at first. Angry, inexorable pachyderm! She broke through every barrier we threw up and paced in every room before puzzling the way out. By the time we reached the ground floor and escaped outside, she was on the same level, except this time she was stuck inside the house, apparently still trying to figure things out. We could see her through the windows.

We ran for our cars. Panic sang in our heads, but we knew we would be safe once we hit the road.

Like fluttering feathers on the back of a strange beast, white-knuckled men and women and children in all sorts of tattered, bright-colored clothing hung on for dear life. Throbbing with archaic machinery that spewed curlicues of black, rank smoke from the undercarriage, the pitted and rusted bus howled down the bustling pedestrian lanes of Tachyon Boulevard through a gaggle of construction laborers, housekeepers, compost professionals, wiretappers, juvenile delinquents, garbage deliverymen, document shredders, newsread reporters, heavy-lidded THC specialists, steam technicians, bacterial engineers, teleprompter typists, clamoring tofu dog vendors,  wicked cardsharp hustlers, retrofitted geriatrics with guttering valves, soul buskers, prowling blue badges, streetcorner winos, rickshaw operators, integument artists, SPAZ salesmen, holo skin sensations, disaffected yiffer gangs, Banger Street Boys, the cracked legend Metro Transit emblazoned on the grille in flickering blue neon that sent cool sparks haloing along its dented side onto the faces and arms and legs of these people half-heartedly leaping out of the way, to briefly illuminate their shadowed features. The bus bucked and weaved between cars and pedestrians under glass cracked, brick crumbling edifices of a more majestic past, rushed past irregular intervals of bent and broken lamp posts guttering dead pools of halogen, through an tide of waste that swirled and eddied in its wake. Empty road stretched ahead: the Corridor. Its engines groaned, and it roared on, almost mythical, a metallic dragon rising across the ferrocrete way, dribbling spumes of smoke shot with blue lightning.

In his high tower the watchman looked up blearily from the skin glossies that kept him within sanity’s breast during these shifts, and saw the monstrosity. He sighed, took a rag and wiped his hand, then sat up in his creaky crèche. He cracked his knuckles. There were always a couple every week. Poor souls. Nothing going for them in the tenements, or they caught cabin fever. There was no magic bullet; outside, they all died sooner or later. Grunting, he reached towards the switch that operated the first gate and, waiting, looked at the brutal ferrocrete wall that separated the city from the outside. Some wit had spray painted, in stylized letters, HERE BE DRAGONS. True enough though, he mused, crushing the switch.

The gate groaned open and the bus shot through. Someone lost his grip, rolling in a tide of rubbish thrown to pile up against the gate by the incessant North wind and scrambled to his feet, slipping frantically. He seemed to be screaming, the watchman thought as he squinted through scratched plexiglass. Probably was. The figure threw himself through as the gate juddered closed. A pulp of blood. The watchman imagined a sickening crunch, shrugged. This was routine. He activated the second gate, closed it, then the third.

Once anyone exited the city there was no coming back. They became voluntary exiles. Anyone or anything remaining within the second and third gates would be purged by modified jet engines. Sometimes whole caravans got trapped inside, and stinking smoke would linger in the air for days. The watchman jabbed the switch that activated the torches and turned to gaze at the city; he didn’t like to watch the burn. It was almost dark. Torchlight and gas stoves wavered a man made constellation that stretched to the horizon. The stars were faint angels in the sky. Roasted chicken and boiled vegetables taunted his nostrils. He had a craving for cold goat milk. Faint singing, boisterous, wafted in with the occasional zephyr.

Sighing, he returned his attention to the glossies and soon was snoring.

Approaching the dream busker, owl-eyed thanks to the John Lennon shades perched on hooked beak, he opened his clammy, beard-rimmed mouth. Pearly in their moist chamber hedged by unruly strands, delicate considering their owner’s standards, incisively enameling the issue in regards, debriding breath: ‘Instant zen, to go. I would get some cartoons in my head.’

Sugar-tongued with enough grape parfait to last a year, having dubbed himself the reigning charolastro and the logical successor to the moniker moonbeam mayor, he spent the next month prowling the docks, paying careful, time-invested attention towards rectifying minor civil issues ranging from the unwanted attachment of an obstinate plastic sack to an irate twig (he gave the lone breath of an errant zephyr the sack’s company and smiled indulgently at the twig’s wooden wave of appreciation) to domestic disputes between two competing brands of colas he found crushing caps. On that occasion, he delivered a tinny monologue with a such a crackling conclusion that he, satisfied that the colas’ argument had fizzled flat, sat beside a bar-breath derelict of the street and negotiated taxation, in the name of moonlighting municipal authority, expecting a rousing succession of success. Although he made a splash, the tense and jarring deliberation did not end well for himself; he withdrew his tariff and settled for licking cheap wine from his cheek.  

One day, he stood watching the wharf from coming sun up to sun down going and found a profound truth steeped in the stippled scene: God was a pointillist. As the sun rucked in its rays of light to tuck itself under the blanket of stars, he found with his eyes a rose recalcitrantly rising through a section of cracked pavement.  During the day the place was a crush of commerce, of crashing boot-strapped feet and yawing rubber wheels, of falling steel, tumbling plastic, sliding lumber, buzzing machinery.

‘Bodaciously tenacious…’ It was a small bloom, and it he smelled, bending over, his smiling earthworm lips squirmurmuring fondly between fertile russet cheeks. ‘Ewige Blumenkraft!’

From behind, in the shadows, slurring past the flash of winedark flask: ’Gesundheit!’

The Time Traveller in a past time let himself into the darkened room.

The Time Traveller, lying in bed, saw the stranger enter.

The Time Traveller walked to the bed and with cool hands reached at warm naked flesh.

The Time Traveller undid jean buttons and grasped cock with hotslick precome.

The Time Traveller, through the back door, entered and came.

The Time Traveller groaned and ejaculated a grunt.

The Time Traveller grinned at himself and said, “Ain’t masturbation groovy?”

Reality exists, as we can plainly see.

It is just there, a waiting vessel for our proclivities. It is a realm without rules save those of natural ones governed by molecular behavior en masse. An intricate webwork of electromagnetic conversation, we spring squalling from the loam of flesh into a gallery of light and sound and sensation. The world, consisting of new and frightening apparitions, whirl past us as wild static. The barrage of confusion soon coalesces into meaning as we gain mastery of our sensory apparatuses and locomotive capability; we quickly start to effortlessly process and respond to the packets of information received from the environment.

We exist in a world where information is alive, carried by points of information called individuals. Our early experience, quite often under the guidance of biological providers of our particular genetic code, are encoded into our psyche. The language of these teachers more than not involve specific religious and political cues which imprint themselves strongly on our neural framework, and these imprints are long lasting.

In short, we do not have total control of our own mental development during our younger years, but soon enough we are able to realize that we create the world we live in. It does not create us, and if it does, if we let it, or we simply don’t know it, we are just code following a higher social paradigm perpetuated by society itself. Tick-tock. Cogs. Robots. Trapped in our own belief system as provided by our parents and our particular range of experience.

Let’s say our friend, ah, Bob, is sitting at a cafe reading his Bible. As he munches at his lunch sandwich and sips at his iced tea, around him at various tables are seated a devout Christian, a Catholic, an atheist, and an agnostic. The Christian smiles indulgently at Bob’s proud public display of faith. The atheist may think thoughts ranging from the angrily derisive to the pitying at such self delusion. The agnostic looks on curiously, possibly with a slow, confused smile growing on his face, and wonders how one could determine which is true in a world where everyone claims their belief is not a lie. The Catholic, tossing down his napkin, snorts disapproval upon his departure to confession. An Muslim, by chance, passes by and feels deep-seated frustration and anger at the perusal of the man reading  the Bible. The crackhead across the street chewing at a week old chicken bone salvaged from the garbage, with gleaming eyes sizes up Bob, from his clothes and that nice shiny watch, as a possibility towards illicitly supplementing his drug habit. Bob gets up, Bible in hand, and checks his watch as he hastens to the nearest Satanist covent, wondering how the hell the devil got such a bad rap; fruits are excellent sources of vitamin C.  No one world through no one set of eyes is the same. That is the magic and curse of the Umwelt.

What we often do not realize… you can erase the damn map. Understand what you see is only the superimposition of your thoughts, beliefs, and values onto this shared reality. You attribute the objects and events with your own intrinsic meaning and emotion. Because of this, the world is wracked with pain, irrationality, hate, anger, and craziness in general, but it also accounts for the love, imagination, wonder, and spirit of Mankind.

Semanticist Alfred Korzybski has this bit o’ wisdom that will do us well to remember: The map is not the territory.

One morning he came home from work looking ten years older, with faded scars where there were none last night, but his skewed grin was just the same, if not wilder. He burst through the door and grabbed her arms, and through softly stinking breath said, “Put on a pot for me, dear?” Then he collapsed into the easy chair.

She, the sweet and irritable housewife, made to her duty. With a pot swiftly rushing to a boil in the kitchen, she timidly came back into the living room and stared at her husband. “What happened to you? Your face!”

He looked up with haunted eyes that spoke of hardships and suffering that could not have been experienced in a single night working at the docks. His eyes, as pained as they were, smiled. His grin jagged his rough face and he tenderly took her hands again, “Dear, what I am about to ask of you may seem strange…” He drifted off for a moment, resumed, “…but humor me. You have to do it. I’ve influenced too much.” He sat back and closed his eyes, but not his mouth.

She looked at him and nodded numbly at his mumbling features, straining to retain in memory his requests: a bicycle in the living room, old work boots in front of the door, pencil on the floor at his feet, crook that hung picture frame, that jug of moonshine reserved for his side of the family on the television, turn the lock a quarter clockwise, open the drapes three inches wider, and place a vase on the floor by the door.

She did what he asked of her then brought the steaming pot of tea and placed it on the end table. She tentatively woke him with a warm hand on his shoulder. He blinked. Surveyed the living room. Looked at his watch, the pot of tea, and smiled, “Perfectly on time! You’re lovely. Now go smell the flowers you picked this morning, my dear. Go on.”

As she left down the long hall to the bedroom bloom of hydrangeas dying slowly and beautifully in its crystal vase, the Time Traveller bared a grin to regain composure and glanced at his chronoscope. It was go time. Dark visors glinted behind the drapes and he smiled tiredly through the waves of deja vu.

Thud, the forthcoming sequence of events was a bright map in his mind, memorized from hundreds of failures, and thud he would not fail now. Thud. He could not! He steeled himself for the ballet to come as the door shuddered and splintered. Thud! It cracked and split, the lock in its current angular position breaking through the cheap door to stave the black clad MP first through the door in the groin. He lurched forward and crashed into the vase, a piece cutting jagged under his visor to slice through a cheek, into an eye. He bled and howled.

The Time Traveller was up on his feet, pot of hot tea in hand, and hurled it at the next man to come through the door. A cloud of steam filtered the morning sunlight as the MP thrashed onto his fallen comrade and the door’s momentum was halted by the now violently squeaking work boots, placed there earlier by his wife. The door, its full swivel limited, bucked and bulged with the frustrated, frantic efforts of the remaining MPs. Finally, a round of gunfire shredded the door and tattooed the far wall.

The Time Traveller knew his wife was crouched under the bed, weathering the storm with tears of dismay and confusion. She would be okay. So far. He kicked the bicycle over and watched the following MP leap over his feebly struggling teammates, only to trip onto and through the twanging spokes. The other soldiers swarmed behind him, and he, struggling with the bicycle, sent a round through the ancient television set.

The Time Traveller smiled. It was all according to plan. The alcohol leaped like ghost plasma to wrap itself onto the remaining MPs with blue fire. The last MP in line ripped off his helmet, now crackling and blistering, and hurled it to the floor where it bounced to a stop outside the door. He fell backwards against the wall and just above, the crooked hanging frame, a family heirloom, broke loose, slipping its sheet of glass downward to precisely curl the flesh from his red-burned face.

The Time Traveller was on all fours, watching, huddled on the floor and grinning like a madman. He lapped at the moonshine unlicked by flame. His face capered, tongue agog. His eyes rolled drunken paths in their sockets. He chortled, barked. Furiously, the soldier in the bicycle wrested himself free and with a roar leaped at the source of his misery. A solid jackboot met the pencil and lost its friction. The MP went down at a bad angle and did not move again.

The Time Traveller swiped at his glistening brow, his normal demeanor returning. He had done it! In each and every iteration, there was a miscalculation. A life lost, hers, or his, almost. He had to hurry. The unknown was spread ahead now, an entirely new vista, and he had no desire to rehearse life further. A sobbing from behind, wafting in the atmosphere like the scent of freshly rotted fruit. In his moment of triumph, he had almost forgotten the reason he had suffered so. He turned tenderly towards her.

“H-how did you know this would happen?” his wife, lovely despite all that blubber, gasped. He bent his head. This was different; she was watching! Did he make her perplexingly brave, courage seeping through the seams of experience from all these repeated moments? “Trial and error, babe. Mainly error,” he said, looking at her with so much anguish that she wanted to cry again. Then his grin split open again and her slit tingled a smile into her face.

The Time Traveller stretched his arm out and took her hand. He was still smiling when he said, “The world is as clay. The wonders I have to show you!” He kissed her hand, and a line of saliva glistened like spider silk in morning dewlight. A question dangled from the eyes that peered up. “Will you come with me?”

Shell-shocked, doe-faced, slack mouthed she, hands a-clasped at her breasts, nodded. His smile seemed to race higher through the frequencies, and she almost had to squint. He spun on his heel, and did a crazy little jig. A soldier, groaning awake, raised his head. The Time Traveller’s boot caught him square on the forehead, and it returned to the floor with a solid thud. She giggled at the cartoonish open-jawed expression of surprise that had replaced the elation on his face. He sobered up, spread his arms out, and his smile lazily returned. He spoke softly.

“Narcissistic reality, paralyzed with its own beauty against its own waters. The hall of mirrors. A gigantic vanity, woman’s dream. Come. Time is just not a dimension, you see; it’s also a place, a plane of places. That being said, we got a plane to catch!” He chuckled, peering into his chronoscope. “How I crack myself up!”

The Count of Monte Cristo, or do I dare say, The Stars My Destination, loosely provides the framework of this entertaining romp of Pynchean scope, with riffs of Bradbury waxing lyrical amid surreal strains of M. John Harrison in which Wendell Apogee undergoes a transformation in his quest to find where Manuel, his lover, has disappeared to after leaving nothing behind but an apartment that is an literal hole in the wall belching flaming pieces of a life onto the next building.

Wendell finds that his lover isn’t who he knows when –through a colorful entourage of lovers, killers, thieves, ex-soldiers, madmen, drug runners, cock fighters, cult members, soccer hooligans, and all in all, simple men and women living large in so many small ways–Manuel’s portrait grows larger than life, until one could get dizzy just peering at its high reaches.

The novel is a kaleidoscope of the near future, where the outlook is no brighter, but humanity consists just the same, in its microscopic nature of day to day living, of people working, living, laughing, loving.

A strange familiarity runs the bassline throughout this story, and the surreality leaps at you when you least expect it. An apocalyptic doom hangs over the proceedings, but instead of dampening this absurd carnival ride, it adds to the jovial madness of being true to one’s self. The honest truth of being alive and completely yourself in a world gone amuck.

I love novels like this, that jump at you from the side when you choose a book randomly off the shelf, and you’re much more entertained than you expect. I hope Brian Francis Slattery writes more, and that they are just as good, if not better, as this book.

Spaceman Blues: A Love Song by Brian Francis Slattery

In the shrunken hours of night the phone rang off its hook and with sopping lips I answered, “Yes?” I wiped the juices that ran down my jowls with the back of my hand and cradled the receiver against my shoulder, murmuring the squirming form next to me with my other hand. Like thin syrup the voice at the end of line sluiced, “Is it a bad time?”

The ninth played in the background and there was a sucking sound sloo sloo sloo. Splooo. My hand masticating still I said, “Worshipping at the base of mount Mons as the hours grow larger.”

“Ahh,” the voice sloshed. “I’m experiencing Fellini myself.” I nodded, understanding. “Tasting the papaya,” the voice continued. “Worthwhile endeavour. Soft distraction. Onto bigger things now. The dream’s hallucination has spoken.”

I tensed. The bedsheets wrothe and my lungs courted prana. Smoothness returned its limn onto the world once again. The bed flowed with luxuriant ripples. With shakingly steady breath I said, “It’s time?”

Sloo.

Sloo.

Splooo!

A jangle discordant leaked through the receiver, chased by a sibilant yessss… click. The bed shook and a rough soft form fell onto me, pasting my face wetly with saliva. A bark.

“Yes, boss,” I chuckled, picked up the papaya I had been attacking with relish before the rude interruption, and led the way to the back door. Like flame, thoughts of dreams flickered scattered through axons and dendrites as Dog darkled into the night.

Maya, insubstantial as it is, is no easy task, I reflected somberly. I chewed at my fruit and watched Dog caper through the moon silvered hillyards, knowing it would be last I knew such simple pleasures.

Under the heavy curtain of the sky, two girls joyfully bound unto the empty park. The bright green of chlorophyll dominates the scene, and is draped by gray veils of rain. As they play wetly amid bright plastic and iron rails, we remain dry under a shelter’s roof and watch the lightning play over their heads.

A Cadillac pulls into the parking lot and waits for several long moments. The door opens and an umbrella appears, escorting a woman of advanced years towards us until she is also safely dry under the shelter. She carries a heavy plastic bag. She murmurs to us. My hand points to my ear and I shake my head: the universal gesture for deafness. Ahh, she nods. She understands. This town is accommodating.

She sets to work efficiently. First, a tin of water at the head of the shelter, just out of the rain. Six paper plates heaped high with dry cat food are distributed equidistantly around the shelter’s perimeter. Lumps of canned cat food are then deposited onto these piles. She coos, beckons.

From the rain-jeweled jade of summer foliage emerge, with wary tread, her wards. Parchment yellow eyes in midnight black. A calico dream. The overly cautious cream puff with a pinched face. They emerge from beneath dripping leaves to wait in the rain, the heavy droplets effortlessly leaping off their coats. Finally they dare, and come out of the rain. They feast with darting glances and nervous twitches.

I smile at them, then at her as she, umbrella abob, leaves the way she came.

Moth wind, eddying spirals. A billion lifetimes in a fraction of that moth wing flap. Sand of time like dream powder on moth wings surface the whirl whorld which holds its own in the void, ephermal like dust in the sun-crossed straits of one’s living room in high afternoon. A verb where there is nothing but noun. Adjectives are virtual particles and adverbs coagulate. Seeing and thinking you are seeing are two entirely different things.