Could be anyone

I wake up on a beach bled free of stars. Little half-crescent moons jutting out of the sparkling silver dust, like teeth of some ancient monster, ruins from the future, keys to a door burned down and forgotten. The doorlessness of these keys matters little: keys are doors themselves, if you can cohere strongly around them, intending them to stretch and expand themselves into full worlds. My eyes drift without anchor or weight over the alien beach, not being held down by any one detail, soaking like a sponge all that is. Tom Strong, Six Color Legend, is sitting beside a crescent crown. Surrounding him are images with high levels of personal resonance. Purple hexagons, blue pentagons like the way my lips looked once. I plop beside him in the dust. “Stop reading my mind,” I say.

“Stop thinking so loudly,” he says. “You don’t have a monopoly on your mind.”

“I do,” I whine. “How else could it be my mind?”

Tom Six Color shrugs like falling shawls of layer shoots. “Could be anyone’s mind.” Lips like twisted barbed wire, or tangled cords. “Could be mine. You don’t think all those things buzzing and sizzling around in your skull are really you, do you?”

I know they aren’t. Those things that take my name, when I know that I have none. Names are anchor points, reference signals that can collapse into void or expand into line. Line into plane, plane into time, time into space. You know all this. And you know other things too. You know how those buzzing little ones work, why some have labeled them demons and viruses and invaders, and others have loved them more deeply than they have loved the sun or soil, moon or memory. You know what their influence feels like, because you feel it every second of your life. All those other minds intersecting with what you only thought of as yourself. “Of course not,” you say, “But maybe some of us like having our emotional currents tugged to and fro.”

“Ah,” Mr. Six Color echoes breathy, “So that’s how it is.”

“So that’s how it is,” you say. “And would that explain the purple hexagons, the blue pentagons, the black circles, you seem to be so enamored with, all of a sudden? You didn‘t feel like you had to dress up for my appearance, did you? I hope you‘re not that formal.”

Tom Color grins. “Some of you like having your emotional currents pushed and pulled. Some of us don’t. Some of us push and pull to make you like us, the pushless, the unpulled.”

“So that’s how it is,” you say.

“So that’s how it is,” he says.

“So long, Tom,” you say.

“Won’t you say goodbye to your dreams also, Ms. Bluesday?” he asks.

“No,” you say without any hesitation or consideration. “Those could be anyone’s dreams.”

Such lovely feathers

A golden gondola floats echoless through honey lined orchards. Suzie Tuesday waking from a lifelong dream studies her surroundings with slow intent. She is not alone on the gondola, which sails silently through starless space: always night here, yet so alive. Such brilliant color explosions burst tear stained pillows apart, showers of dissolving dawn feathers. “I had a dream,” she said to her companion. “A beautiful thing and the Ugly Spirit were playing chess. They were playing for beauty.”

Peter’s lazy upturned eyelids shifted, milky gray iris takes in her form. “Who won?” His eyes are lined with flowers: orchids, lilies, gold cast ivy lines spiraling around his face. Cybernetic face jewelry. She once knew an inventor and painter with the same routine: her thin fingers tracing invisible patterns along his cheeks. The first of many carvings. Shh. You can see me there, behind your closed eyes. You can cross the translucent barrier, to a land of grass without doors or mirrors. We exist in space now. Sung to each night by speaking trees. Boundless and infinite, there are no reference points on this side.

“We did.”

Suzie Tuesday sails boisterously across into a land of grass without orchids or lilies. Gold eyes are lined with ivory spirals and bone bled memory. They were playing chase for beauty. Shh won. Rivers of night unfold her, tell me secrets I never gnu. Brilliant Peter dreams tear stained feathers playing for dissolving Sundays.

“Where are we now?” Suzie asks through speech fog muddles all words. All worlds start here. There are no enemies. Too old for that.

“Right here, start,” swirls of colored hexagons spin out of Peter’s grass thin lips, take on matter and meaning. You exist in space now. Like dreaming all the time, reality a shifty blur of colorful experience repositories. “Such lovely feathers.”

Silver bird people spotted with gray eyes descend upon the gondola, make idle conversation with the travelers. Their bodies are lined with hundreds of blinking eyes: some human, some stranger. When they speak, it is like the sound of cold water being poured from a clear glass pitcher. Liquid melody language. “What do they want?” Suzie asks, and Peter laughs delightedly. “Such lively fathers.”

“Drink this,” the tallest of the bird people tells her. “It is made of memories, distilled from the sweetest teary eyed dawns, stirred with old lusts and lost enemies.” The liquid looks like language, like dreaming around the sides. Its taste is that of mercury and melody.

One of the older bird people held five luminescent ultraviolet eggs in an ancient palm feathered with age and time. “This is what human beings look like, from those who have eyes in space,” he gargled hoarsely like a garden hose with rocks lodged inside, the water flow unsteady. Gush. Clog. Gush. Clog.

“I had a dream,” Peter Monday told the smallest of the bird people. “Drink This was playing squash with a beautiful thing. They were playing for memory.”

The silver chick’s million eyes blinked on and off, open and shut, in anticipation. “Who won?” it bubbled.

“He did,” Peter pointing to a face unseen behind a land without mirrors. A face familiar to anyone but known by none. The face of time, and memory and dawn. Fingers you will never feel again trace out the shape of its lips, then vanish forever.

City of Endless Dance

“Reality is a blank screen upon which we all…project.” Suzie Bluesday is coming unglued. Fingers fall and there’s no one to catch them. They just drop into the black silk night, little stars of fading human anatomy. “It’s really very simple,” the professor fish drones on, purple gills seething with colored bubbles. Each bubble is a thought, a message. They drift playfully around her, popping just before her face like a flash, and she is fully enveloped in a simulated world. “First we must understand the nature of omnipotence: know that there are no rules, but the very existence of self-imposed rules declares that those self-imposed rules never be broken. It would throw the whole thing off. Rock the boat right into the water. Take golf. Golf is the simplest, but most agonizing, example. It illustrates perfectly my thought and yet we must, for a moment, pretend that anyone likes it. So. Golf. The object of golf is to put a little white ball into a little hole in the ground. Now, anyone can tell you, the quickest way to accomplish this would be to simply pick up the balls, carry them to the holes, and drop them in. That we must tap the balls with sticks to do this is the only thing that makes golf challenging, or interesting, or even golf. The challenge is the inherent nature of the game, do you see?” Suzie nodded, but the fish professor wasn’t interested in her reply anyway. It went on,

“Reality is, like golf, a game of general consensus. You don’t remember signing up for it, of course, but that too is one of the agreed upon rules. As some particle physicists (not the type who appear in New Age books or films beginning with the word “Quantum,” those are simply intolerable will not do at all) believe, reality is determined by consciousness, although not exactly in the way that has been portrayed or hoped upon. Rather, reality is not determined by consciousness alone, but the interaction of consciousness with other consciousness, or with matter, and so on. It is the relationships that count. Say we wish to fly without need of mechanical means. That is the change we wish to impose upon the universe. First of all, we would have to find others who share our belief, or we would get nowhere. No change can be done alone. Secondly, we would need to study the atmosphere of our planet, the skies, the weather, and, more than mere study, come to know them. It would be necessary to befriend the clouds, to court the skies. The consummation of our love with the skies would be had at the moment we achieved a perfect relationship with each other, with our skies, with our knowledge of each other and our skies. This would come in a flash of insight--we would invent a chemical or some such thing that, when swallowed, imbued us with the power of wingless flight. Thus, our desire manifest and no rules are broken.” The professor fish nodded, his lavender cap almost drifting off his smooth skull completely. “God works in mysterious ways. It is the only option available.”

We’ve come to a singing city. The red reed boat snaps against black coal shores, and I shake the sleep and dream out of my head, thank the fish man for the ride, and approach the city. Singing cities always make foreign travelers uncomfortable. To time your step just right, to twirl or skip or spin at just the right moment, to even know which dance is appropriate takes time, practice, and intimate knowledge of the city. This is a slow, wailing city, and we waltz here through this empty age. Gilbert is waiting, static eyes set to a dead channel. “Baby with TV eyes, says anything you’d like to hear, but only lies,” I greet him with lyric in synch to the city’s mournful song. “Colored lady from the underworld,” a smile breaks across his thin, brown lips, teeth the color of familiar jars, lined into perfection, “Used to be a dream before she was a girl. Haven’t seen her face, not since Tuesday. No, you never can keep track of Ms. Bluesday.”

We spoke carefully (everything sung in a dancing city becomes true) of business in lyric, and I left with a slight melancholy, and a prophecy leaf. On the ferry ride back to the shores you know, I held the thing in my hand, turned it over, reading lines like poetry, thinking about what the fisherman said so long ago. And anyway, the cat survived. You left the world for dreams, and I wonder what it is you found. I saw you singing along a river bank, a dummy playing a bamboo flute, and an Italian inventor with thin eyebrows touches my shoulder and tells me, “This is the first carving.” The first carving of many. She is always hungry. Viavore.

Pink Hexagons

Eight pink hexagon lined cylinders hovered by, through black conveyor belts to inspection. Keepers of the bioluminescent essence of great number. “Math Wardens,” Jamie the dwarf whispered. “I seen ‘em once before, in Oklahoma, during that Paperclip fiasco. Much cruder than these. They still needed living brains back then.”

“What should we do?” Janie the cook with fearful eyes, uncertain of any situation where bravado alone won’t pull you through.

“Smash ‘em,” Jamie glanced back at her, nervous eyes scanning the room. They were in a large, empty space like a warehouse. No rabbit guards, no border machines, no bureaucrats in sight. No sense of breath or living presence, no tingle of awareness on the back of your neck. Alone. For now.

“Idiot!” Janie scolded, quick to jump the trigger on an opportunity to chastise. “We need those minds!”

“No,” Jillian said quietly, coming out of a trance, fluttery eyes readjusting to ordinary perception. “He’s right. We should smash them. Run copies of the minds, keep them in back brain until we’re clear. Then upload into another transbiologic substrate.” She smirked. “Why else d’you think I came along?”

They moved like penumbra, creeping behind any form could temporarily lock on, like liquid lightlessness oozing along. Slinking and slithering without body or presence of life, traveling in the back brains of any passing by, hopping from body to body, brain to brain, mind to mind, in a long chain sequence that eventually led them to the inspection room. A gruff glass man with a goat’s head looked the pink cylinders over, nodding in affirmation. When he spoke, it was like the sound of wind roaring with gentle violence through a valley of violins. It was beautiful. They almost forgot what he was saying. “Everything checks out, gentlemen. Move them along to the transfer station.” Guards, machines and the J, Letters snapped into focus almost simultaneously, seven seconds after the glass goat man had recited his rapturous, horrible judgment.

“We gotta get to ‘em before they move!” Jamie squealed in agony. “That’s it! Hijack those three, now!”

Thought, memory, repositories of experience shifted and J, Letters found themselves caught in the bodies of three guards. A fourth was marching back to his post, feet moving with trained utility. The three guards nodded at the goat man, carted off the brains in the direction of the transfer station, took an unlikely left as soon as they were out of his sight.

“Give me some time,” the shortest guard said quietly, his body melting and reforming visibly beneath the Plexiglas faceplate. Dissolve/reform. Ancient Chinese secret. “Okay,” Jillian said quietly, her face dripping with unused potentials, becoming one thing only again. “Waves are collapsed. Give me some time.”

“Hurry up and do your thing.” Jamie the dwarf was for the first time clearly spooked. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“You and me both,” Janie offered her own awkward support.

“Okay,” Jillian shook her head free of lingering ghost memories. “Okay. Find out which one is which and feed them to me.” She picked up one of the pink cylinders… “This is… Heisenberg?” Jamie and Janie set about determining the identity of each cylinder, announcing their discoveries and blind guesses to Jillian as they went along. “It’s okay, Erwin. It’s only going to be for a little bit. Then you’ll be you again. We can forget all about it.” Jillian went on talking to each mind, coaxing them into storing themselves behind her eyelids.

At last the task was done, and J, Letters began moving out of the facility in a counterclockwise spiral. Jillian squeaked. “Um.”

“What?” Jamie the dwarf demanded. “We’re almost out.”

“They merged.” Jillian managed.

“Who? What?”

“The minds. They merged. In me. I can‘t separate them again. They‘re all one person now.”

Chief of Insidious Operations

Seven border machines circled the vacuum. Ultraculture Jones himself stood along iron railing overseeing the operation, casting orders into the multitudes, in command of tuning the reality frequency. Iron is realer than real: it grounds, dispels illusions and banishes spirits. How amusing that clever spirits would reverse the process, use iron to blanket the world in delusion. “This is where they determine what goes and what stays,” whispered Jillian to Jamie the Dwarf, wrapped in shadows of unmarked crates like shivering refugees covered in drapes, shipments to nonexistent dream lands. If you strained your eyes you could hear him screaming: “Tesla? Assign to Electronic Gulag, small time bureaucratic position. Reich? Disposal. Einstein… Mmph, we could use a man like Einstein, but shut him up, he forgets his place. Alex Chiu? Who the fuck is Alex Chiu?”

“Very abrasive, isn’t he? Quite admirable,” an unassuming man in a brown tweed jacket assembled behind them. “I’m Wilbur, Chief of Insidious Operations. That’s my blood you’re standing in.“ Suggestion was all it took. Psychological martial arts: enemies are trained in them. Jamie the dwarf went waddling backwards into dark. Useless for now. “What unit do you people belong to?” Janie the Cook stepped forward, sized the spook up and down, made measurements of how he walked what words he chose all in a split second of accelerated judgment. She became the group’s spokesman: “J, Letter, Alphabet, Language: English.”

“Oh, I see,” Wilbur, Chief of Insidious Operations tutted disappointedly, “That language is currently being eradicated, replaced by a bastardized jumble of numerals and symbols propagated by the telepathiphones. Would you care to watch yourselves be rubbed out forever?” Iron laugh cold and greasy, swaddled up the spine like a metal snake. Kundalini of the reverse moon.

Jamie the dwarf rematerialized in the spook’s inner intestines, bursting through his rotten guts as he regained his original size. “That’s your blood I’m covered in,” Jamie remarked over the empty face of his host. Biological martial arts: agents are trained in them.

J, Letters resume their original objective: retrieve math minds, disrupt the border machines if possible. Jillian sneered at the sight of them. “I hate them. Those ugly fish faces.”

“It’ll be over soon,” Janie cooed, turning to Jamie to hiss. “And you, you sneaky little bastard. What was that all about?”

“Last resort,” Jamie explained, embarrassed. “They’re rerouting physicists into information repositories for god’s sake! Desperate times, desperate measures…”

“Whatever,” Janie spat. “You know how poorly senseless violence reflects on the rest of the organization. We’re to avoid it to the best of our abilities.”

“But we’re not pacifists,” Jamie coughed at her revoltingly.

“No,” Jillian said quietly, “We’re not.”

“You’re okay with this?” Janie asked, concerned. Always looking out for little Jillian. As though little Jillian couldn’t handle her own. As though little Jillian weren’t capable of far worse than Jamie’s brash stunt.

“No,” Jillian said. “Let’s go.”

Forgetting the words for words

Broken finger boy caught in the treads of a border machine. “Let me down!” indignant cries. Like an owl or some other nocturnal predator. Bearded man with binocular eyes in a faded jalabiya color of night and stars slips through the treads soundlessly, pries the boy free and ducks out before rabbit guards notice. Smell of chemicals and lost chances dangling in the air like faded possibilities the color of stars. Hands through an iron fence, cut up, fingers broken, blood caught in the treaded wheels of a border machine. A boy in a pale thobe color of white hot blasts from transmission from Jupiter can be heard: “Render all Border Machines Obsolete. Gin and Tonic! Repeat: Render…” Soundless noise.

The boy plucks star man’s beard from the barbed wire wheels of a faded night, tosses him through the air, high above the rabbit guards. “See?” he calls out over the flying figure blending seamlessly with the night. “Si? C? You’re forgetting the words for words already.” Broken fingers woven through the threaded spools of border machines.

Locate Coordinate Points: Hamburger Mary: Peanut Butter: Currently A Land of Grass Without Mirrors or Doors

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