Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  We were stuck in our hole like a chump.

  We stayed in the hole like that in the cold with insects crawling and somewhere coyotes making their sounds for hours we think.

  The coyotes got so near and loud we thought they were circling the hole, or digging through to us, or up above, sniffing up near our butt and haunches. We thought the bugs and worms that touched our face were the little feet of coyotes who’d come down in the hole, we just made little noises, moaning into the dirt and waiting for the end.

  Then the dirt shifted, and our phone fell next to our face, and we got a hand down and called Sebastian, our boyfriend, now our ex-boyfriend, and asked him to come back for us.

  He hauled us up by our butt, enough for us to get our arms out, to scramble our feet up out of the hole, we popped out and swayed in the headlights and fell again on the dirt. After a time, we were able to walk out and get in his car.

  We thought we were paralyzed, but it was just the muscles of our back we’d hurt, it turned out.

  He turned on the heat and we stuck our hands in our pockets.

  All the birds in our pockets died. Did we mention we had birds in our pockets. Our pockets were full of birds and they all died.

  We remember the birds.

  The pockets were dead, have we mentioned these birds.

  There were birds.

  We have always had a thing for birds.

  Yes, there were birds in our pockets.

  We had brought birds, we were going to show him how we placed birds in the holes, how that was part of it, how we so gently and lovingly placed the little birds in the holes, but we had forgotten and they were dead now, perhaps in our fall, or from our wriggling around in the hole, folded up like we were, all those little tiny baby birds, we had started to have the idea about an internet of birds, we were working toward that, we knew we couldn’t tell him.

  We rode back to Oakland in silence. The pockets of our windbreaker all bird guts, beaky.

  We couldn’t take our hands from our pockets or he’d see or smell the guts of birds, and we’d have to explain the birds.

  But near home we sneezed and our hand came out, slick with bird guts, and we blew them everywhere, and Sebastian’s eyes went wide, and we were really and truly done, we understood this, as he took us in, when we were about to sneeze he looked at us, and we at him, and we sneezed, and he wiped his eyes, and turned back to the road, with his bird-guts face.

  And Sebastian said we would never see each other again, we were over.

  And we said we wanted BIND, the backdoor he’d put in, but wouldn’t give us the magic words for.

  And we saw him thinking, If I do this, then truly it is over.

  And he said, Okay, I’ll never use it.

  He said, Use it for something good. He said, All yours.

  DNS is an addressing system for all things.

  The doors that they stack up, one after the next, in Zelda, in Marathon.

  How we used to love the doors in video games, opening a series of doors.

  We’d like to give you the password, we really would.

  This town will follow you around.

  How we loved the doors in the internet, the rooms inside the rooms, inside the rooms. Link layer, internet layer, transport layer, application layer.

  Our little room in the basement, our Nintendo and PC. The blue couch, the bed, the desk with the owl lamp, overhead light turned off—Let’s just rest a minute, he would say, and crawl into bed—play of light from the CGA, then EGA, then VGA, as the years passed.

  There were doors he had to push through to get to us. And we think: There were doors he pushed through inside of us, doors to rooms that weren’t there before.

  Doors to new levels that we hadn’t been to before, deep down inside of us.

  We contain all the unremitting thoughts of humanity, we broke things and made new things, new places, that’s how it works.

  The doors and our father.

  All of this kept within certain limits, or we think so, when building his doors.

  We mean: He didn’t touch our genitals, or did so only glancingly, in a way that could be excused as accidental, incidental to what else was going on, goofing around.

  His hands, what they touched, what they erased was the memory of what they touched, of the possibility of that memory. Those hands took away something, and meanwhile they were building something we didn’t find out about for years, though we heard it, a high-wire whine in a room in a basement behind a door we didn’t have the key to.

  Maybe one more. Maybe one more hole in your skull.

  We drove out to Sailor Gulch, near Telegraph City, and that’s where we started to dig.

  The ceiling is always the system, in movies. It often is. The system, the grid, hovering over us. The camera pans up to reveal what we always knew. The ceiling reveals the truth of the land—the grid, subdivided, tended, glowing.

  The murder of buffalo, the treaties with the Indians—familiar stuff. Glass beads for $800 billion worth of real estate. The way land is stolen. The way a house is stolen. The bureaucratic so-called accidents at banks. The punitive desire to never renegotiate a loan. Everything always clawing and scraping to take away. Take, extract from life. To be sure that cradle to grave value is created, and then juiced, extracted. How land and home are defined. How they are distributed.

  It is not an accident when there is a ceiling. They have to build those. The movie people. They have to build them, they cost extra.

  The system of the coffin, the great fear of being buried alive, the string clutched in the hand. Ring the bell.

  Did you see The Matrix. The real truth—the reason Neo can stop the squids in the real world, otherwise barely acknowledged—is that there is no outside to the system in The Matrix, they’re all in there all the time, it’s bedtime stories or lullabies, this dream of resistance. The metalevel, the outside of the real matrix, in that, their head jacks aren’t removable. Why would they be. You want out, you die, that’s it. Perhaps that is a less interesting movie, which is why they buried it so deep.

  But here we can. We can do something about it here. We are drilling in your head. Here comes a drop.

  Here comes a little droppy droppy droppy.

  You can scream into tape, but also: you can’t.

  We can plug up your nose, we can pinch your nose: like this.

  We’re sorry we did that.

  But we hate your screams.

  And no you won’t die. And no you are not outside the system.

  The unremitting horror of having a body.

  Here comes a little droppy droppy droppy.

  But it will be better.

  Did you see The Matrix II’s exploit, SSH, secure shell, she ran sshnuke, which was a program, an actual program that existed at that time, that would go into a particular computer, 10.2.2.2, that IP address, and she hit the z10n0101, and we cheered, or Sebastian did, we heard from him that he and his friends he saw it with cheered. It was not perfect, but it was good for the movies.

  And BIND, the zero day we put inside it, that Sebastian put in, that lay hidden and untampered with for almost two decades. BIND has been through the wash, private industry, US government security, but no one found it, in all the hundreds of thousands of lines of code, it slipped through.

  And we kicked the door in.

  Security is a feeling.

  Some soldiers just reached the hungry hungry lions room. Ooh, here come the lions. Ooh, there’s a retreat.

  But there are lions behind now too. We don’t like it, we don’t like the screams, and the way they cower, how they cower and scream and how fast the lions are. And the soldiers are not even in the right branch.

  The other two groups are safe for now. There are more soldiers at the door.

  We have heard the stories of fathers here in the Aviary, what they have done. How they gaslight you. What they did to you was nothing. For seeing it that way you’re the pervert. And your motherboard is now fuc
ked up, so it really does seem it must be you who’s the pervert. The sight of children can glitch your system, even if you never act on it, and that in itself allows the narrative to be rewritten: you were the pervert, you were always the pervert, nothing was really done to you, it was just affection, there’s nothing wrong with affection.

  Mothers, where were mothers.

  Sometimes they play I Spy with My Little Eye.

  Sometimes our mother played that game with us, surveying the space, telling us what we should see.

  Where even are mothers.

  What is the deal with mothers.

  Some soldiers just reached the machine guns on swiveling mounts room. Ooh, they’re getting so shot up, the ones in front.

  But the floor of the hallway has tipped up, and they are all falling into getting so shot up. And they are not even in the right branch.

  The other two groups are safe for now. There are more soldiers at the door.

  We had terrible spasms in our groin, in our asshole, our penis hurt terribly, it hurt when peeing, we could never seem to get it all out, all of the pee. We woke up screaming with muscle spasms in our asshole, attacks of electricity seemed to cut through our balls, through the shaft of our penis. We went to doctors, they didn’t know, and didn’t understand. They didn’t seem to believe. They jammed a catheter down our peehole to check if there really was urine that wasn’t getting out, the worst pain, the worst pain we’ve experienced, it ruptured something, something that was holding on too tight, imagine a peephole in a door, the glass lens, imagine a screwdriver going through it, imagine it shattering through lens after lens, all down the urethra.

  How to describe the pain.

  Imagine having nettles driven into your penis. Or imagine having a penis, then that. I’m sorry, Rachel, imagine, though. Let’s say on the back, slightly on the right side. Then imagine a spined rod being shoved down your urethra, then imagine a static—an odd tingling, that static TV noise except it’s inside your urethra. And it’s pain. Throw all of that all together. Imagine it as a 10 on the scale of the worst pain. Screaming. Kicking. Wrecking around. Imagine all that, and then imagine that someone took hold of the dial, and turned it down to 3. Even 2.5. There is pain and it is constant. It is forever pain. Forever pain. In your urethra, the thistle and the static and the rods. All at once, forever, then dialed to a 2.5. Not a 10, sometimes less. But here.

  Of course your body recoils, of course it tries to pull stuff in, for safety. The shell, the turtle, that life.

  That is what it feels like, all the time. How do you deal with that all of the time.

  You blur it out somehow. You learn not to feel it, even as you feel it.

  So many things are invested with an urgency you have to repress when you have that pain. Something in you is screaming DO THIS, DO THAT, DO THIS, THAT, GO, GO, KEEP MOVING, and another part of you knows you can’t present yourself that way, so you throw a big blanket of cotton batting over it, two, three like that, over your whole life. You wrap it up, the voice becomes far less defined, sort of fuzzed out, just as the screaming figure comes down to almost nothing—a bit up at the nose.

  We hid bottles of Smirnoff Vanilla around the house. Sebastian snooped, and we hid our half pints of Smirnoff Vanilla. We hid them all around, we drank them, they took down the activation, the pain. They really helped with that.

  At night we’d smoke weed and play Wii Play. It was two console generations before where we were, but we liked it. He was really good at the escalators, and we were good at space.

  Then Sebastian left.

  There is a ghost body within our body that has these experiences. Or a semitransparent body that mostly conforms to us, that is slowly vibrating at the edge of us, just trailing us, and this body is the one that raises the handgun to the side of the skull—right in the middle of the skull, perpendicular, right where the most meat of the brain is—and pulls the trigger, and the bullet goes through in slow motion. We feel this in our own body. But it is not us, or it is somehow other. Because we can feel that bullet dozens of times a day. We can feel it a couple times a second, three times a second if we’re so upset. Blam blam blam. Sometimes thousands of times a day. That’s how it was for so long.

  We drilled the holes in the head and all that stopped, or it came way down.

  We still drink, but not nearly so much.

  Perhaps we will have a drink now, we have so many cases of them, the half pints of Smirnoff Vanilla.

  Ah gug gug gug gug. Ah gug gug gug gug.

  Ahhh. Tasty.

  We have butt cancer. Did we say it was butt cancer. It’s butt cancer.

  We can’t remember. It’s so hard to remember.

  Ah gug gug gug gug. Ah gug gug gug gug.

  We love our Smirnoff Vanilla.

  Why is this happening to us, what did we do.

  Did you see The Matrix.

  We’re dying of cancer!

  We’re working on our internet of birds. That will be our gift to the world. Or to the birds. That will be our last sucking of order from the chaos, but a system that embraces chaotic flows. Birds wired and whole, no need to snip a leg off.

  Don’t snip a leg off.

  Do you hear me.

  We just need to get these birds wired right and then the protocols.

  Did you see The Matrix.

  The screens when Neo is taken into captivity—they are not flat, they are curved cathode ray models, the archaic technology, the tiles on the wall, the grid on the front of the notebook, grids everywhere, a systems moment.

  Keanu’s abs are a systems moment, the creature crawling inside him.

  When Trinity does the hack, Sebastian said, sshnuke, he and his friends all screamed. They loved it. We wish we had had friends like that.

  Our father used to lie in bed with us, we were washed by those low steady lights from the computers ratifying everything, or simply bearing witness.

  It is hard to know, it is hard to know. That we were personally a vector of history that killed so many people—sometimes we think that.

  Hum hum hum.

  Everything turns to shit.

  And alongside that, ILOVEYOU, the worm from the Philippines, perhaps the greatest worm of all time.

  We miss him.

  Oh my gosh we miss him.

  Where is our world that was ours, that had our futures in it.

  Don’t blame Sebastian. Maybe we wouldn’t have kicked the door in if he was still here. But you shouldn’t blame him.

  If anyone, blame us.

  Or just the universe.

  It’s always women, mulattoes, queers, minorities who are the points of exception, the instability that brings the system down.

  Have you seen Tom Cruise movies. He is always out there because of a woman. Fixing things because of a woman, saving a woman.

  Have you seen Smiley’s People.

  Vast powers, the great systems, the West and the Soviets of old, Karla and Smiley, the greatest minds of the greatest power, and all of that brought down by a woman, a crazy woman, Karla’s daughter.

  That is what the system is.

  We do not ask why she is that way, why she is insane, hypersexual, seemingly incurable.

  No one asks, it is not important, they want us to believe.

  It is not important to the work of the system, of sustaining it and dissolving, or that’s what the system tells us.

  Systems moment, the grill of the truck in the opening scene of The Matrix—arrayed like a drop-tile ceiling. The replacement of the individual with this brute system.

  You look a little whiter than usual. Do you remember when they said that to Keanu in The Matrix. A certain type of ethnic ambiguity is the right screen for our projection.

  Have you seen the lobby in The Matrix.

  Have you seen the lobby in The Conversation.

  Have you seen the lobby in Three Days of the Condor.

  The lines, curved or straight, the elevators or spiral stairs.

  T
hese points of access, these choke points, the protocol required to get in, to advance, unless you can beat the protocol, unless you can blast your way past it.

  We like doors and we like lobbies.

  But the internet is quite different. There are choke points, yes. But every packet, you see, every packet of the trillions sent down their twisting routes each day, every one goes in and out of that lobby, TCP/ IP, the protocols, controlled by the system, even as it follows its distributed logic, each packet being routed its own way, it is timing and congestion and the vicissitudes of protocol.

  Ah gug gug gug gug. Ah gug gug gug gug.

  Ah we miss Sebastian.

  Ah gug gug gug gug gug gug gug.

  We live in a universe—it’s perverse—a universe fine-tuned, they say, for life. We say: for death.

  We remember Pepe.

  The rarest Pepe.

  All expressions of humanity, and it’s Pepe, he’s the one we see, he’s the one who confronts us.

  The things in us, the space in us that we created, to draw all the things into our body—the space, the things, are warmed, made tender—and then burnished—brought to a beautiful heat. Out loud it is cold, yet everything inside burns with a big heat.

  What happens to those of us whose lines are subtly redrawn, who are gaslit, who must hold in our heads the notion that everything is okay, that nothing is happening, when in fact there are parts that are screaming Stop, we hate this. The abusers off the hook. Perhaps the abusers fooling themselves, even believing that nothing is happening—but no, of course not, they know precisely what they’re doing. And perhaps with the best possible motives. They are getting to touch a body in a way they want to—within certain limits—and believe that they are doing no harm. Believing they get away with it. Not knowing or caring that within this supple and compliant body there are parts that are screaming like they are in hell. And of course, you can’t have parts screaming and lie there, supple and compliant. So those parts are sent away, they are sent to the very edge of the horizon, and they can scream there. Yes, to have your father lie in bed with you, under a pretext—his back, his plans, spread out over his own bed.