“The fucking best. Back then my finger was right there on the throbbing vein of the world to come. Counting pulses.”
God, I’m feeling really and truly rough.
More monologuing from Dennis. Chitchat. Chitchat.
And this, my latest panic brought on by, of all stupid things, a text message. A stupid effing DM. Why am I so reachable? Get-at-able? What does the world want from me already?
“…and everything must come to an end, of course,” he seems to conclude.
The bad feeling is now threatening to mount, to become a kind of hellish inscape, but fortunately, nick-of-time style, Dennis pinches from his shirt pocket what seems to be (what looks like) one of my pills, but in a different color (Jesus, yes). Puts it on the table beside my glass. It sits there and sits there. The silence of objects. Okay then—he picks it up, puts it in the hollow of one of two spoons that I didn’t notice lying there, takes the second spoon and puts it on top of the first, conjoining them into one big vice. Down it goes on the table. He puts his hand on the top spoon and leans into it, straight-armed. Does this a couple of times. Then opens up his contraption, and shakes the powder out of it and onto the smooth tabletop, worrying the last bits out with a nail. He smiles. I smile. He looks down at the little chalky middens. I do likewise. We both look up. I look away to the game, playing it cool as I can. He walks around beside me.
“Anyway, help yourself. Seems like you may need it. You’re a bloody mess, Mr. Frobisher. Shaking like a…
“Sure. Don’t be shy. Just have…one more. For the road. Up it goes.
“The…fine. Good. Just takes a moment.
“Now. Who’s winning?”
* * *
—
A wonderfully familiar state of ease.
After the cardiac terror of the Director’s summons, my breathing is finally back to normal, bless you, Dennis.
Bless you for holding; for being the-kind-of-person-who-holds. He who holds; a holder.
Rn, warmth toward my host, albeit chemically enhanced. No more pings. Device seems fine. Whatever, none of it was worth the panic it triggered. All of these messages—texts, emails, alerts, reminders, invites, likes, DMs, comments, sexts, trollings, spammings—what do they signify, I mean, collectively? Idk, but I know how they act upon me: like my synapses have been teased out into the Irl, in an infinitely long, endlessly wide, gossamer lacework of live and soggy capellini—a mesh covering the planet, traversing landmasses, transoceanic; a network of gauzy wires, leading from each tiny quadrant, every microdot of the meatspace directly into the core of my mindspace—wires which are round-the-clock open for business; for whatever and whomever. Meaning the pings do have a way of sticking the needle in, don’t they. But Dennis is waxing on about the good old days, again. Which is, I suppose, interesting enough, and quite a pleasant cadence his voice has, posh, and mean too, but slick, while I simply can’t take my eyes off the football. Its angles. Its moods. The eternal skirmish: Blue v. Red, but both teams otherwise interchangeable, Rly. The players are smudging a bit on the screen, leaving little pixelated trails behind them. I’m cascading Dennis’s tablets from one hand into another, and then reversing the process, like sands in a perpetual hourglass.
“Back then I had the nicest clothes, nicest car…”
A football match is bounded by a fixed time period: ninety minutes in two halves. The game unfolds in real time within that particular allotment. The game proceeds linearly. Tension builds in natural time and then resolves in natural time. But televised football time runs more in loops than in straight lines. Backward and forward. Not to mention variable rates of speed. And with the addition of outside agency—the commentators’ and viewer’s agency that is, w/r/t instant replay, freeze frame, slo-mo, and the like—time in a football broadcast has become a way more complex affair, hasn’t it.
“…the nicest boys—well, maybe not the nicest exactly, more like the opposite of nice, the least nice, actually—”
Time, stretching out…
“…nicest properties, bronze; steel. Bengali maple. Mirrors. The abundant lure of mirrors. Always loved a mirror. Make the already big rooms cavernous, and multiply the light a thousandfold. But, Mr. Frobisher, I will tell you now that there is no wonder upon this earth so magnificent that one cannot eventually take it for granted. For every palace, there is some prince who is sick of the wallpaper.”
The tools of the modern broadcast have made the football more an illustration of narrative than a narrative itself.
“None of it could last.”
The score is nil–nil. Both teams probing. Dennis, rimming his glass noiselessly with three fingers of his right hand. These fingers having curiously sharp nails.
“Doesn’t matter. I stopped enjoying it at some point. I had enough money. Didn’t need any more. Didn’t feel need itself, actually.”
The cameras look down from a great height. My favored perspective. Up on high. High up. I can see the lines. The possession ratios. The pass completion maps. As if I am looking at the postgame statistics. It’s almost as if the game itself needn’t even be enacted. But the particulars down on the pitch, the relative slant on a blade of grass, the salinity of the sweat on a player’s brow, this is what is truly interesting, and is exactly what cannot be seen on-screen. All that can be seen here are the rules of the game, put into action. Brought to fruition through the ritual. And we all know how rituals end. That’s what makes them rituals. Goal. Saw that coming.
“Then, I got the offer, to come here.”
Furthermore, the announcers are doing their play-by-play, sotto voce, and the sound of their professional mumbling is so soothing—more than soothing: the announcers are doing something for me, on my behalf. And I realize now what this something is: that the men are relieving me of the burden of having to watch the game. So I watch Dennis for a while. The constant drone of voices tells me while I watch Dennis, the game is being watched by proxy, by someone, and that someone doesn’t have to be me.
Dennis gets up, fidgety as a marmot. He returns to the kitchen area, grabs the fifth of something he’d left there, and hauls himself back up onto the counter. Says:
“And then it just seemed preferable to go, to let go, of the apathy. Of the old ennui. I’d come here and that state of affairs would dissipate. Bad there; good here. As if all my feelings were geographically determined.”
That goal was writ in the opening of the game, bound and bundled into its code.
“But they are not,” he continues. “Geo-tagged. That’s the word. I mean, I am, but my feelings are not.”
I find my voice. “What do you mean: ‘I am’?”
“Geo-tagged. My office allowed me this gig, but didn’t trust me not to run off, so—”
He pulls up the cotton hem of his uniform’s trousers, to reveal his emaciated, veiny ankles, around one of which is a slender black bracelet.
“Had to. No choice. They need me, I need them. But I’d been bad. My nasty habits reflected poorly on them; so, the company, in their wisdom, decided that, rather than give me the heave-ho and lose their cash cow altogether, they would rather that I simply keep up the good work, but kindly do so somewhere else. I’ve been exiled. Here, that is. Out of sight of the clients. I don’t need to be on-site—anyway, the algorithms do most of the work for me. They removed the temptations, see. Dennis can’t really get into any mischief out here, or so they think. Aaaand, I said fuck it, why not. Yes, sirs: aye, aye. And I try to behave. We must all be on our best behavior here. Good little citizens. Upright, Institute fellows.”
“Must we?”
I’m not worrying about anything, as the chemicals are prohibiting such things. I can feel this protection almost as a woolly barrier, wrapped tightly around my head and chest.
“You are here either of your own volition, or against your will, but either way, the documents
have been signed off on. You agreed to cede control of your life, my friend. The Institute owns your ass. No sense getting upset about it now.”
Own what now? What have I agreed to?
“But, Mr. Frobisher—Percy—it’s not as bad as all that. We all toe the line and all, as much as we are able, but sometimes we slip, and the Institute doesn’t know everything, do they. There are some things one can still get away with. See, I am bored. So very bored. You feel it too, the boredom. You are like me. I sense it rolling in waves off of you. You emanate it. A sumptuous…” (lingering on each syllable) “…nothing.”
He’s right, of course.
“And I can help there too, I think.” Pleased with himself. “I have something you’ve never tried before.”
Now he hops off the counter again and leaves the room.
I’m here alone.
Time passes.
(How does he know what I’ve tried.)
More time passes.
And then he’s back, his closed grin, a little amber bottle in his hand which he shakes like a maraca, saying:
“Yes: I stole them. No: nobody knows. And: you’re welcome in advance.”
* * *
—
At some point—probably it’s much later—I find myself alone in the refectory washroom, standing confrontationally in front of the sink’s mirror. (Well, it’s now, actually.)
I stick out my tongue, nyaaaah, and think: “Who made that face? Was it me? Or that guy?”
We both look like shit.
Also, I am remembering that I may have, just a moment ago, thrown up something or other into the toilet. Something troubling. And substantial. Thinking of this makes me want to run back to the stall again, but I force myself to stand there stoically, until the waves of gagging subside.
Gap. Eventually, I unlock my gaze(s), and head out—shaky, joints aching—back to the table.
The good table.
I’m quiet throughout the meal. The Mysterious Woman appears briefly across the room, looks around. Doesn’t see what or who she’s looking for. The door slams as she leaves. Disputants 1 and 2 hold forth, fractious, uninterruptable. I float on the cadence of their arguments without understanding. No one notices me. I sit there, and I eat.
I eat slowly, mechanically, only to feel now an unyielding shim of paper resisting my molars. I reach into my mouth with a finger, hook it out, sodden, and see that it has words written on it, albeit smudgy ones. Illegible.
Roll it into a small pill, and let it fall to the floor with the other scraps.
Ominous, I think. This paper. Portentous.
Meaning that it does kind of…bode.
24
(THE PAPER CONTINUED)
A second sheet of (twenty-pound, five-and-three-eighths-by-eight-and-one-half-inch, felt, off-white) paper dances on a desert breeze, flipping end-over-end, turning in spirals and pirouettes, glissading into the intake end of a fan enclosure at the dome’s edge. It is sucked, with a splat, onto the large mesh of the fan’s protective screen. DOA.
But shortly after this, a third—twin of both the last one and the one before that—appears, jigs in, before almost slamming into the screen beside its neighbor. It takes a hard right, though, and avoids the fan altogether. It enters the Institute unhindered.
It isn’t long then before reams of the stuff start coming in on the wind, out from the desert, sheet after sheet.
The flurry intensifies. A quacking gaggle of white. Ducking, slapping, and weaving in en masse.
Thwack, thwack, thwack.
The turbine’s screen, under the mounting paper assault, begins to bend, then buckle. A tear appears in it. Access.
Access for the paper.
It is all coming in.
God knows why.
For better or for worse, the whole catastrophe is on its goddam way.
25
…and I go back there again. I bring odds and ends to the shop: an old eraser from my desk; a pair of my headphones, fraying at the jack; a dulled and scratched-up spoon I smuggled from the refectory. I am continuing to challenge the proprietor’s skill. I have become a regular. He never seems surprised to see me. I wonder if it is, in fact, each time, the same shopkeeper (I am not so good at faces) and if, perhaps there are many—though, frankly, it doesn’t seem likely. And if there were to be more than one, they all look more or less alike to me (another type: “The Shopkeeper”). I/a/c, my commissions are always accepted. And each time my item is returned to me, either immediately, good as new (whole eraser), or else sent on to the Institute for me, to arrive days later (headphones, spoon). There is seemingly no rhyme or reason as to why some of these things take longer to Same Same than others (a spoon would be easy, one would think). Each new piece of anomalous information makes me crave all the more to know his secret; the secret to his procedures. How is it all accomplished, this arcane monkey business? There must be something the man cannot remake, fix, substitute for?
Last week I dug out a lint-covered pink prescription tablet from the chair cushions back in my room (the ones that flatten me out, smooth the wrinkles, nothing too potent) and I brought my prize all the way into town, trot trot, sheepishly pushing the tiny tribute onto the counter, making the two-times-ten gesture to my man, pushing my palms forward like I’m playing shadow patty-cake, and he squints and picks it up and whatdoyaknow but now I’ve a score of as-pure-a-hit-of-this-stuff as I’ve ever sampled. (A chemist? A lab? What the hell is back there? I’m grateful, of course, but what, but how…I’ll get him eventually. I’ll reach the limits of his skills. Find that threshold. And then.)
Is my interest in this silly little native enterprise becoming noticeably close to a mania? Has this mania of mine intensified in direct proportion to my project’s stagnation? (The question—of whether the stagnation of my work is caused by my obsession with the Same Same, or whether the obsession is merely a convenient distraction from my work problems—is an open one.) Idk. In any case, I think of ways to defeat the Same Same almost constantly now, and the only impediment to my eventually doing so, at this point, is the status of my quickly dwindling funds. They are significantly depleted.
Of note: on this latest visit, I set a reminder to ask after my missing Fundaments, but when I arrive at the shop, there they are, all thirty-two of them, just sitting plumb center on the counter, as if he knew in advance that I’d ask. And as I am sweeping them up and thanking the man, he reaches out and grabs my wrist. I audibly gasp. (Huanhh!)
After all this time I’d come to think of him as an (I want to say: insubstantiality?). But now he’s holding me tightly, and it hurts a little.
“Sorry?”
Does he want me to pay for them; my own Fundaments, my own ideas?
“But they are mine already,” I protest.
He gesticulates wildly.
“And you haven’t actually done anything, so why should I—?”
More sign language. Money. More money.
“Here, how’s this?”
No. More required.
A substantial outlay.
He insists.
I comply.
And now I’m close to broke.
*
Scratch that. Funds no longer a problem. I am flush, again.
So soon? Just like that?
How, you ask? Nothing simpler.
26
(FROM A GREAT HEIGHT)
In for a penny, in for a pound.
The idea to go to the Freehold Crown Spar was Dennis’s. His idea, but I agreed to it; though I am barely recovered from our last get-together.
Here is a solitary receptionist, behind the reception desk, sitting with his back to the street entrance—deeply engaged with something or other, or nodding off even—which is, like, we can’t even believe our luck—and so we just inch thr
ough the revolving doors and then speed-walk the poorly lit, mufflingly carpeted lobby. No one the wiser.
Anyway, we start on the stairs, and I have been sucking in as much oxygen as I can, inhaling in huge nose-mouth-combos, while trying to keep as silent as I can (neither of us wanting to seem out of breath; to cede that weakness to the other). But Dennis is struggling too, I can tell. I can hear his breathing sure. Also, he is sweating a ton. His uniform, a tiger’s pelt of dark blots, big and small. When I reach the landing of the twenty-first floor, half a floor ahead of Dennis, I squint down at him, lagging, and he nods up at me in tacit agreement, and I give an exploratory push on the metal crash-bar affixed to the door marked “Emergency Exit,” hoping that it will yield, and hoping it will yield without tripping a building-wide alarm. It holds for a moment before surrendering with a louder-than-expected kachunk, and almost mauling my fingers in the process. And then the door swings open. The hallway is dimly lit.
We collapse on the carpet, right there. At this point we are both too winded for shame.
Eventually we have our breath back, and I am about to ask Dennis if perhaps this floor is high enough for our purposes, when he jacks himself up to his feet, looks down at me, and says: “Fuck it.”
He walks over to the elevators and pushes the up button. Just like that.
“Dennis—”
“Nobody’s here. Haven’t you figured that out? The place is abandoned. A ghost hotel.”
He’s right. I had had the same sense. Of being the only ones. The man at the front desk might be the only true occupant of this crazy fucking megalith. Still. There are always cleaning crews. But my aching legs are complaining so loudly that I can’t hear my other concerns over them. So bing, there’s the elevator, and in we go, and that’s how we get up here to floor 187.
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