Tap, tappety-tap, tappety-tap-tap.
While I drum away like this, I consider first causes.
What is the light’s source? Is a window being opened—a possible egress? Idk, but the more I fiddle with my fingers the livelier the light, so I just keep at it because I have nothing to lose, honestly. So I’m really getting into it now: whiz through some paradiddles, a couple of trills, roll a few chords, add some five-fingered arpeggios going up and down, lots of grace notes, flams and drags, bunch of Swiss Army Triplets, and that light—which is just overhead but aggravatingly just out of my line of sight no matter which way I turn—swells way, way up. Brighter and brighter.
Both hands now. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!” “Pack my red box with five dozen quality jugs!” Etc. The light—which is a crazy kind of fluorescent teal: nuanced, bewitching—responds, and jigs along.
The unsung—purely tactile—pleasures of this mode of finger tapping to be indicated by letters in formation
Q W E R T Y U I O P
A S D F G H J K L
Z X C V B N M
Swelling, warming, and, frankly, burning a little. Just a little. My skin is starting to itch. Don’t care. W/e. I’m no longer tapping out of fear, see, but in hope rather, and kind of, just a little bit enjoying myself really, despite the itching, and despite the fact of my reddened, irradiated skin, which is—matter of fact—beginning to actually flake and peel off a little now, little bits of hair too from off of my head and arms. My hair is all kinky, pubed up from the now-withering heat—it has tumbled to the floor in front of me in little ashen piles, and what is this but, yes, great big wounds; my skin weeping and opening and then miraculously scabbing over, in an accelerated, stuttering, stop-motion time, and I am just, like, shedding. Rapid-fire. My body molting, and it (my body) beginning also to reek like (disturbingly) a backyard barbecue—and though I am in exquisite pain and itchy as an ant farm, tap tap tappet-tip-tappy-tap the feeling is ecstatic. And my fingers keep going: whirlwind air stenography, faster and faster, fingers as wild as all get-out; virtuoso stuff coming out of me, a real barnburner, just riding this excitement to swelling ovations while my body now expunges its fluids, deliquesces in ecstasy (and the light really goes incandescent at the word “deliquesce”), and I’m doing it compulsively now, unstoppably, clickety clack, clickety clack: “jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz,” so forth, and I can feel so much pressure building, the brightness mounting, the acrid stink filling my throat, the light is now so bright, my head, as to actually have a sound, a pulsar-noise—electromagnetic, crystalline, purring—and my head, my head, tap tap, and TAAAAAAAPPP as the light finally goes nova, and all the walls, my head, seemingly collapse, I’m blinded by white as the light peaks.
And must stop.
The light fades rapidly. And, Rn, though the room is darkening again, and though my eyes are blurred by the auroras branded into them, I can still make out the basic shape of the space around me, unchanged by the recent photic detonation, and I look straight up, finally, toward what seems to be a fancy chandelier, an insectile ceiling fixture on a long and articulated steel arm.
The bulbs: space-age, and tessellated like a bug’s eye.
Men and women are gathered around me in a circle. Men and women who were always there, looking down at me. Gathered like druids for a sacrifice; to violate me with a ceremonial blade, and to read the coming world in my convulsions.
And then, just like that, it’s dark again.
Wait!
Much later, a door opens, and I’m wheeled out.
In the next room, an antechamber of sorts. In it, the Director.
“Ah, Percy. Good.”
“What gives you the right to do this to me?”
“You did, my boy.”
“I demand my papers back.”
“I think NOT. We are making such progress.”
A gap.
(MESSAGES)
But on the other hand, the good news is, following a lengthy convalescence and recovery period, I’m back in the flat; my original Institute lodgings. Good old Room 34. In my own bed, thank the Lord. I’ve had some visitors, who sat in the chair beside my bed, or who just stood at my side looking down at me. I don’t know these people. Eventually they stop coming. So, I’ve been using the device to reach beyond the Institute. I’ve sent several messages. Searching. Scanning. Probing. Feeling my way outward. Some of these communiqués have been long. As in, full-blown missives. Others are no more than a quick ping:
—HOW u
—u out there dennis?
—Ousman? Uuuuu’s-man?
—fkkkk it sinks here
—*sinks
—Autocrrct FUCK it *sucks here
—Dennis
—U there?
—How u
—Where u
—Ansr pls
—Dennis
—Kk
—L8tr
I’ve been lobbing such pings—my carrier pigeons—up and over the walls of my confinement, hoping that they’ll flutter their way out, and then alight on the correct windowsill. Rapidly firing them off, hoping for replies, for information, for some proof that, indeed, the world is continuing, unabated, elsewhere. That life exists outside of the increasingly radical insularity of Institute life. Hoping that, even if the messages don’t make it to their recipients, at the very least, one of these aimless messenger-birds might just shit on the world outside of this one, thereby confirming that world’s existence. That world without domes, without Discourses™, without projects.
—hello
—any1
—It’s been a while.
—??
Though I haven’t heard back from a single soul yet, darned if I don’t keep at it.
—Yo
—still here. Where is u
Meanwhile: so many white servants, so many dark charges. So many doors opening and closing. Footsteps. Boundless echoes reverberating in glazed corridors—so many echoes outside my room. (The admins of course. They have the brightest shoes. Shoes with laces even.) I hear them talking through the door, from my bed, from the cold tiles of my floor, from the bathroom, even over the running taps; these echoes without source, each echo slipping down an endless chain of sound whose center is nowhere. Not Midnight Rain Forest, not Maternal Heartbeat, or The Great Cataracts of the Far North. But echoes. I tried counting them and I simply cannot NEmore. Tried counting all sorts of things. Years, eons, minutes, months, heartbeats, eye blinks, loops, echoes. Can’t tot any of it up, Ffs. Can’t make a total. I thought I could tally the days in garbage. In paper. In pages. But no.
—Can someone please come and get me now?
—srsly
—I’m super serious. Really.
—I’m sorry if I did something wrong.
—for wtevr I did
—Please?
(No reply to this last one either though.)
W/e.
My words are clearly no longer working here so next I send along this:
:(
Which means: “It all makes me sad.”
And time passes.
Even more time passes.
Much more of it.
And now I don’t wait anymore. No one answers back.
Is it that the churning front of wind and sand cannot be breached?
No matter.
No matter.
No matter: there is still work to be done. I’m succeeding at this. Me, Ftw.
By hook or by crook: me, Ftw.
49
(ENCYCLOPEDIA)
I pass another (I want to say: year?) at the Institute. The desert continues, throughout this period, to provide fodder for
my work in the form of pages of text. Given that all of these texts, though superficially random, are, upon closer inspection, quite germane to my project—all seemingly relevant to me and my labors, as if specifically curated for me, on my behalf—I can no longer doubt the papers’ provenance. That is, I can no longer deny the obvious: that the source of this great in-surging of material is my Same Same shop, and that the organizing principle behind the deluge must be my very own Fundaments.
Perhaps I’ve always known this. But what does it matter, now? What does it matter where the paper comes from; its provenance? Who cares where my bricks are made, or what they are made of, so long as the edifice I am constructing continues to rise up? What matters is that the material is coming in, and who am I to impede its progress.
Conditions under the metastructural vault have—incrementally, if steadily—continued to worsen. Yet, despite the depredations, despite the fact of our collective enterprise having been hermetically vacuum-packed, despite our submersion inside of this bubble—our dissolute Atlantis under the seas of red storms and white papers—despite the disarray, the stench, not to mention the slipping mores, nosediving ethical standards, the sudden sartorial and ethical wildness evinced by our environmental catastrophe, this Anthropocene nightmare, despite all of this, life at the Institute has not, in fact, changed one iota. By which I mean that despite my progress, despite the outward chaos, the daily rhythms remain unaltered.
I still attend my clinics, my guided meditations, my creative-dynamics workshops; still read the info-blasts and reply to the subsequent online questionnaires demonstrating my having read them; still have it all to do. Everything the same. And you could say that it is all working: the project, my novel, is rounding the corner into a final lap, with a fully completed and polished, sacred nine-tenths of the work all locked up.
I can hardly believe it.
I simply cannot (believe it). After all of these years. So many false starts. So much fruitless ambition wasted on aborted works. But I am, now, demonstrably, “getting it done.” I am rising above the ranks of those whose destiny does not include a finished project. Those whose aborted, malformed, inertia-laden, or otherwise thwarted works will never see the light of day.
I will finish. (I think.)
And it seems (I think, again) to be happening quite of its own accord. I/o/w, despite me.
News of my impending success has no doubt got around, as Miss Fairfax is back at my flat, checking up on my deliverables, no doubt. She has trouble getting through the front door.
All the surfaces are plastered with pages; a world of pallid, but mottled whites, yellows and browns, pinks, and occasional blue or green, but mostly the spectrum which ranges from tooth to Caucasian. Each page here, here in my studio, seems unique, unique in height and width, in color—each page a distinct shade—each marked by a different typeface and margin size…in short, as if every page were a page torn from a different book. As if it were book litter. Book trash. But I know better. This is material for a great recycling.
Some are blank, most are written on. Some drawn on, some folded or sculpted. There is an order to it all, here in my flat. Unlike on the dumping grounds of the Institute, the paper in my room is tightly, intricately, deeply structured. One page leads to the next. There are diagrams and charts and even sculptures, paper facsimiles of just about everything and everyone present in Institute life. There are now lines of thread, in bright colors, connecting all of the pages; the whole thing forming a vast web, an overlapping, doubling back, tangled-up network of coded lines.
She tiptoes toward me like a crane through a marsh, tutting and sighing disapprovingly. As she seems lost in it all, I take her arm, and begin to guide her through, cautious around the threaded matrix, the piles on the floor. It is slow going. We have to stoop, and jump over heaps; step through the threads and stacks. She stoops to examine some of the paper more closely, and seems surprised that the first page she pulls up is a travelogue.
“That one came in handy,” I admit.
We wander on through atlases, cookbooks, works of literary criticism, philosophy, seemingly random lists of objects and names, various registries, printouts of social networks and feeds, minutes from board meetings, manifestos, medical references, thrillers, feuilletons, puzzles, murder mysteries, religious tracts, shopping lists, poems, newspaper clippings, biographies, postcards (boats, buildings, deserts…), paranormal testimonials, sheets of note-shot staff paper, abecedarians, classics, memoirs, diaries, classified ads, marginalia, pornography, assembly instructions, children’s board books, building directories, architectural elevations, suicide notes…
“What the hell is all this?”
“My project. In these pages. Yes. This is it. I arranged them. Just like so.”
She just stands there, hands on hips, the very picture of…what exactly? I, meanwhile, continue to navigate my network, trying not to upset the delicate ecosystem, chary of tearing the web around me. Miss F. looks down at the apparatus, and then over at me, then down again. Though I wish I could read her, I cannot; I can’t tell what orders her features as she assesses my work, but it might be maternal concern, or weariness, or anger, or perhaps the patient sufferance of the chronically unheeded. Idk.
“The desert has provided,” I continue.
I sweep my hand around in a generously arcing, grand gesture, scooping “it all,” the room, its contents (a room which, to the untrained eye, would resemble a hoarder’s den), all of the paper, and the discourse contained upon it, even her, and I gesture it toward myself, encompassing with the gesture all of it, all of it. I bring it all toward my bosom.
She turns away from the jumble of my work and says, “These are the books we brought you? Jesus Christ, Mr. Frobisher, do you see these stamps? These are property of the Institute library. They are not yours to destroy.”
Brought to me?
“We do not tear up books, Percy!”
(Admins, with rolling carts, carrels full of them, a muted rainbow of bindings—buckram, canvas, cloth, paper, board, their smell of time spent, these books—and the reams of paper too, in crisp, glossy wrappered blocks, the room filling with them…)
No. No. The desert. Either way. Tbd. Doesn’t matter. What truly matters is that I winnowed them.
I cut them to pieces. I made sense of them. I did.
“You cannot say that of what I’ve made here, that this isn’t a project. Of a sort.”
Looking around, she seems angry I suppose, but also a bit moved, perhaps?
“Good Lord, who is going to pay for all of this?”
“A novel of a sort,” I repeat, undaunted, “if nothing else.”
“I’ll have to speak with the Director.” Not threatening, but resigned. “I’m sorry, but—”
* * *
—
After she’s gone, I take advantage of the solitude to do a little more pruning.
I continue through my maze, following a particular thread which winds through Crime and Self-Help, through Cybernetics and Media Theory. This page here carries at its top the title: History of the Arabic World. Another reads as though written by some contemporary humorist. Here’s an ecology of deserts. Several pieces of critical and literary theory. Not to mention that many of the pages here bear more than a passing resemblance to the monumental novel I’ve been trying for years to finish reading; the one I lugged with me out here; that modern classic we all know and love; canonical, colossal. Here are its pages, sacrificed on the altar of my project. Cut in. As if my own novel were nothing but a prismatic version of this other book—as if that great work had been thrown in a wood chipper, its chapters, sections, sentences, words even: mixed willy-nilly. Its names, themes, locations, all kaleidoscoping together into something approaching randomness, though still making a (faint yet decipherable) pattern.
I continue to follow where the thread takes me. To m
e, at least, there is the hint of a coherent narrative here now. But as the one thread begins to run out, leading to another to which it is loosely knotted, the tale becomes a bit clearer, my tale-slash-collection. At one point in the traverse, I notice how dark it is outside and realize that I have just read close to (I want to say: three hundred?) various-sized, pied pages. As I wade on, there are a few things I can say now, definitively, about it. About its plot, about its principal players, so on. I could make certain reasonable assertions concerning the novel’s structure, about its general themes, its overall aims and underlying meanings. A competent reader could even tell now where it is all heading—as, of course, I myself can. And though I am still quite far from the (final) thread, the finish line that is, the last of my strands, it is just the most obvious thing in the world to me what I am doing here and how it ends.
Brb.
(THE THUNDERBOLT)
Breaks. Much needed breaks.
In order to relieve my mind a bit from the intense labor of my project’s final chapters, I spend much of the next span in relaxed preparation. I.e., a dissociative fugue-state of game playing. There are puzzle games and mind teasers and crosswords and platform jumpers and races, but I love the first-person shooters the most. Frontline, Festival of Death, Over the Top, and Attrition modes of Passchendaele Multi-player FPS™. Mud and sandbags. Vertebrae of burnt trees. Barbed wire. Bomb craters. Tracers. The whole thundering, smoking, quagmire-of-no-man’s-land deal of it all. Fokkers droning overhead, Mark Vs, grinding their monstrous treads over body piles. Gas attacks in a wide range of beautifully toxic shades. State-of-the-art particle effects. I bob around, hand on the stock of a bolt action mauser, locked into my own, red-misted line of fire, looking through the dual rose windows of my virtual gas mask. Screams. Bones snapping in the headphones. Going over the top, ducking and weaving, mowing down the enemy, one bullet at a time, or in bursts. Killing with my knife, killing with my bayonet, killing with my trench shovel, killing with a grenade. Death throes with lifelike sound effects. Enduring the tedium of cut scenes and death marches. Maps. Orders. Digging in. Eating a rat. Contracting cholera; Spanish flu. Being shot, stabbed, dying in every which way but always rejuvenated, procedurally regenerated for long enough to reach the kill screen. Going again, and again, new lives, new me’s, from the beginning each time. Repeating this same solo campaign, over and over and over, reborn, etc.
Same Same Page 31