PLEASE RELOAD LETTER-SIZE PAPER IN TRAY 2
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THE FUNDAMENTS OF MY PROJECT
Fundament 28. Write what you kn
Complicate traditional notions of authorship through deploying strategies of
Fundament 29. The project—and what makes up the project—may, in fact, turn out to be a contrivance. Okay. But claiming something is a contrivance doesn’t absolve one of the responsibility of having to construct a fucking decent, readable one.
Fundament 30. On this _______ day of _____ the Alterberg Institute took up the involuntary detention and treatment/rehabilitation of the respondent herein. That the respondent was present in person. That having had the matters submitted, the Institute found upon clear and convincing evidence as follows:
1. That the respondent should be detained and involuntarily evaluated and treated/rehabilitated 2. That the respondent had ________ illness or was a ________ or _______ abuser, and by reason of such, presented a likelihood of serious harm to himself or others, and was thus in need of continued detention and treatment/rehabilitation 3. That detention and treatment/ rehabilitation in the least restrictive environment, as defined in Section ______, was to be provided by the Institute. That the Institute would appropriately handle the respondent’s condition and had agreed to accept respondent. It was, therefore, adjudged and decreed that the respondent was to be thereby placed in the custody of the Institute to be detained for involuntary inpatient treatment/rehabilitation for a period of
Fundament 31. Consider that the paper is not, in fact, white.
White? With all the words that have been written already, down the eons, by all those others? Nah, the paper is all filled up, and so (I want to say: black?). White would be easy, Imho. If I could just find a glimmer of it—a little glimpse of that pallid promise; i.e., some room to write my own thoughts down. But I can’t. Lord knows I’ve tried.
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(RESEARCH)
I pass yet another year at the Institute, in which I continue to study the novelist’s art and apply what I’ve learned to the construction of a traditionally plotted novel, or at least what I hope is a passable approximation of one. (Or not, Idk.)
* * *
—
Time passes.
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(A STROLL ON THE SHORES OF TIME)
“Time passes” is an odd thing to say. Gratuitous, certainly. Passing is what time does, and time is nothing if not an obvious precondition for anything and everything. Aside from the blatancy of the statement, there is its obvious facility. An easy pronouncement; one which replaces a lot; a thoroughly dismissive &tc to stand in for a rich field of occurrence which one could otherwise report on. It is the temporal, storytelling equivalent to that cartographic problem in which a coast may only be rendered when its fine details are ignored. The truer the map of a shoreline, the longer the shoreline grows, and the closer to impossible it is to execute. Me, I don’t have the patience for infinite shorelines, so “time passes” has to suffice. And, in my case, there is little in the way of this fine detail to report.
All of this being a rather baroque way of saying that it is now time for me to call it quits, as the project has more or less shot its bolt. I’ve only just now added the last bit. Meaning that I will, soon, perpetrate my work upon the world.
I merely have to pack it up and pack it in.
Time to leave. Mind’s made up. Friends fled, nerves shot, games played out, cut off entirely from the Irl…the hour has surely come. I’ll leave, and won’t Brb. It’s all been a farce, tip to tail. (Let’s face it.) Many a poor soul would have stayed longer of course, but some braver ones would’ve left a lot earlier. Me: In trying not to underappreciate my welcome here, I have overstayed it. I have malingered. What a dreadful show I’ve made of it all, but it isn’t too late. All I need is the courage to submit to the obvious—courage I will summon with a little final-inning amor fati. Thus, with little in the way of personal possessions to account for, but much in the way of a giant network of paper to fold up and put away, I now get to work—striding around my project, thinking resolute thoughts.
Specifically: How to carry it with me?
I will have to clean the thing first. All manner of junk has landed in the web and become tangled up: dust, sand, dirt, food wrappers, orphan socks, toilet paper, newspapers, receipts, and other general trash. (I can’t open the windows anymore to air the project out, as doing so might jeopardize the delicate structural integrity of the total contraption.) So Phase One will be a manual cleaning. Then, I’ll need to track the various guidelines to their proper anchors—taped to walls, floor, various spots on the ceiling. This could take days. I’ll have to detach all these anchors and furl up the string according to some kind of strict (and most important, reversible) methodology. Then, parts of it will need to be folded. The project was built in three dimensions, so I will need to create some guiding principle with which to collapse it into two. A manner with which to collate one stack of paper with another. It hurts my head to consider how this will be accomplished. It occurs that maybe I should just crease and bend the entire thing up into a rough taco shape? Fold it again into a pie wedge and then into a smaller pie wedge? But, no. It is too flimsy to survive such a brute-force operation. I’ll have to take the project apart one page at a time and
(This realization causes me to become so overwrought that I have to take a breather, Brb)
so I now turn my attentions to my more easily packable items. Clothes, for instance.
The uniform.
It hangs there on a hanger in the closet, a limp and suicided version of myself.
Though I’ll miss it, I think that it must remain with the Institute that spawned it, and so I hoik on my ragged civilian clothes, musty from a bottom drawer.
Next, I pinch my toothbrush from its bathroom glass, and a few other items are tossed into the vivisected suitcase on the bed…but what am I neglecting? Ah, right. And just as I pull those crucial identity papers out from the closet safe, as tenderly as I would a splinter, something stops my hand.
A question; a hunch; a throb of dread. Of excitement.
An idea for the work? A coda.
I vaguely hear the safe door clang shut behind me as I spasm over to the desk, clutching out at the scissors, the knife, the paste…
And here we are.
Rn, I lie in and among a tangle of pages: that jumble of sheets which includes, yes, a library of other works but now, also, my precious traveling papers as well. The passport now belongs to the final mess. Its excised pages dangle right above my head in my current position. There they sway—tantalizing pale leaves—from the virtually invisible threads to which they are crudely taped and stapled, and from which they connect to the work as a whole.
My passport? So lovingly Same Same’d? It is now completely minced up, pages redistributed. Thoroughly worked in. Voluntarily. The breakthrough. The missing bit. The final impediment: conquered. Last puzzle piece. What had been missing from the project was this small tribute: this little piece of myself. And it comes at a cost, to be sure.
But now is not the time for second-guessing. Now: time for a return back over the old material. A last read. This, the final agency available to us: a determination to inspect what we’ve already made. Of course, this is a choice. Some ends are unreflective; some eyes, at day’s end, fix themselves steadfastly forward. But many ultimacies (I want to say: most?) are retrospective in nature. Nostalgic, even. Nostalgic and so: kitsch. Mine is. Or will be.
So, let’s see what this last bit has to say, shall we?
It’s not like I have anywhere to go, now. That door has closed.
A little light reading before lights out?
I reach up and pull down the dangling pages from my passport and begin.
(VIATICUM: THE PAPER CONTINUED)
Name.
C
an we talk about the name? Percy Frobisher? Being, selfhood, are built upon names. Names should not be arbitrary. They should be, above all else, naturalistic. Mimetic, sure, yet also intentional in some deeper sense. That is, one should also learn something from names, without realizing at first that there is anything to be learned. Given name: Percy. Surname: Frobisher. (Why am I this name?)
Country of Origin.
Where is home? And who would we find waiting for you? Just who are these people—your people, Percy, the people back home? Background pls.
Date of Issue.
When are we, that is. The future? The not-yet-to-have-happened, certainly. On the face of it, yes. It would seem that way. But, is anything—environmentally, technologically, culturally speaking—presented herein, inconsistent with the present moment; that is, in evidence, available, even now? Has time itself collapsed? But, we’ve had enough of time, have probed the notion enough, so, n/m. Moving on.
Certificate of Good Health.
Go on. Complete Medical History. Less elliptical this time. By which I mean don’t omit performance results on a series of exams: multi-phasic personality inventories, word interference tests, house/tree/person projective tests, attention deficit scales, color word interferences, etc., blood and urines, MRIs to rule out structural causes, EEGs to rule out seizures. A complete case report with mental-status examinations, Axis diagnoses, the all-important medication list, so on. Throw those on the pile with the rest.
Occupation.
Idk. “The Novelist” hasn’t really worked out so great now, has it?
Photo.
Look at me. I seem to be in the act of spinning away from the camera. Just at this instant having had the idea to turn tail. See, I’m headed out somewhere. I’m on the go. Leaving the flat, closing the door behind me. Going where? Where are you going now, Percy?
I am going (I want to say: out).
Purpose of Visit (business; pleasure).
Both. Business and pleasure. My business and pleasure which were, once, the creation of this project, my project, and the subsequent delivery of my talk. These: my everything. I’d imagined it all so often, this climactic experience. So often, with such clarity, it was as if I’ve already done it all; the fulfillment of this dream being the dream itself.
You see, I’d arrive via the main allée, in a grand, but solitary processional…
* * *
—
…and instantly, the mercury would drop. I’d smell the crisp and palm-blessed air, notice the quiet, and would realize that the place would be empty—that I wouldn’t have seen a single fellow yet—i.e., that there would be a hushed expectancy about the place, and I’d note that the copses and nature trails and even that bright blue artificial lake would be collectively giving off a feeling of taut eagerness; and as I’d round the first buildings, the Mountain House and Pleasure Centers, amid their finely carved shadows—I’d open the car window and fill my chest full of that rarefied oxygen provided by the air circulator/amplifiers, and I’d see the just-greening lawns, the newly dredged, refilled and purified glacial lake, the copses so recently spritzed with their first growth of tender buds, the concrete spatulate column, the distended cloudlet, the conjoined volumes and rectolinearities, the grid-sleeve and arbitrary torus. Leaving the road then, I’d take a hedged-in garden path around several plinths and obelisks, up a knoll and down its far side. I would be a solitary man, walking in a vast playground of dwarfing structures, a man who would be heading, inevitably, toward the huge double doors of the Presence Center, the doors of which would have been left wide open, it would seem, just for me.
There’d be no need to psych myself up for what surely would happen. I’d be ready.
Bells, far off, would be pealing.
Ding. Dong. Ding…
And as I’d reach the threshold, in the brief moment before the adrenaline would kick in and unconscious expertise take over for conscious thought, I would muse on the fact that I had always known where the paper would lead, that this was the first thing I knew, and that I had followed the thread anyway—though whether it was a profitable direction to follow, only time would tell. But then I’d think, “This is how it all spooled out.” The end—that is: this end—which would be the best and only end there could be, and there it would be, right in front of me.
Would regret be in order, then? Apologies? So on?
I would surely realize that it would be too late for all that as well.
(Late times. Late, late times, I would think. Too late!)
So I’d walk through the doors, my work polished and ready—boiled down to a neat fifteen minutes, a swift, clean nine-hundo seconds, a real demi-glace of a thing; simple messages, nothing cryptic or overwritten, no spastic grandiosities, everything bright and obtainable; my manifesto, my inspirational, creative guidebook, my deck, my manual, my diary, my brilliant act of creation—and I’d see that an audience would have assembled—assembled there for me, and I’d stride on past the rows of heads, none of which would crane to watch my journey down the center aisle of the auditorium—faces forward—they would be as immobile as an audience in a dream—and as is the way of such things, everyone would be there, all the fellows, Miss Fairfax, Miss Chatterton the Mysterious Woman, the Cryptographer and the Sculptor and the Philosopher, the Psychogeographer, the Actor, the Translator, the Set Theorist, the Miniaturist, the Critic, the Sociologist and the Composer, the arguing couple—including good old, dearly departed Disputant 2—the Woman-Whose-Face-and-Hands-Are-Covered-in-Yarn, the Brand Analyst (Miss ☺) and the Architect (Mr. 鼎福), the Man-Who-Assiduously-Tracks-His-Own-Life-Data, the Poet, the Philosopher, etc., etc., and the Director, of course, presiding over everything, always, and, of course Mr. Al’Hatif and Dennis Royal would be there too, those fellows, who, like me, had acclimatized so thoroughly to the Institute that there would be no way back now, no life outside of the place, no way forward except back to it, always back, returning not as visitors, not even long-term visitors, but as permanent residents, and so there they’d be, among all the others, everyone looking fixedly ahead at the luminous stage, at the white scrim with its Institute logo emblazoned upon it, which I would walk toward like a clear signal cutting through static, noticing the slight rake of the aisle, and as I’d complete the final few feet of carpet and take the (four) stairs up to the platform, among the almost-canned-sounding crowd (murmuring, whispering: Percy. Mr. Frobisher, Percy…It’s Percy, etc.) with the love (yes, love) rising from the ranks like a fever, they’d all settle down in a rapid decrescendo from mezzo-forte all the way down to pianississimo, the new silence broken suddenly by the bright and brassy, synthesized heralds, that introductory theme song heard round the world, the tune we all know and love, and in a few more bounds I would be up there, ready to provide; ready to articulate my insights, breathing deeply and calmly, arriving at my designated spot, X-ed out on the floor of the stage, the clicker comfortingly in my hand, though having never been handed to me, the lights in my eyes, the music in my ears, my mic upon my jaw, my feet planted, and I’d look out, straighten my spine, and then I’d be talking…
* * *
—
But.
But instead, now, now, I couldn’t care less. Not a fig, not a farthing, not a whit. Not for any of that.
How could I have wanted such a truly vapid end to it all?
I now have other, deeper mysteries to plumb; more insistent itches to scratch. Certain mysteries which lie on the far side of the Freehold’s bounded life. These mysteries are, from here on out, my “business” and my “pleasure.” Finding answers won’t be easy. No. But still, out I go.
Port of Embarkation.
There’s no light and where are all the stars? They are gone and instinctively I know that the paper has covered everything. I am buried completely. But still I go forward. Down the steps, past the swimming pool, shimmering with water
browned with pulp, down the lane, across the downs, up the narrowing path, past paper towers, edges crowding in, accosting my face with a special predilection for eyelids, stabbing out like dried branches, the way growing darker and darker until the lane opens out, widens into a circular area surrounded by a wall of silent witnesses—all the true palms are gone, burnt, felled; only these fake ones left—the cell towers masquerading as palms, gone are the trunks of the truer trees, with their sere, aromatic bark peeling down in slender belts, I miss the smell of them, but there are no more now. No matter. I walk on. The sensation of walking on the paper is like strolling along a wooded lane in deep autumn, after a rain.
I can see the bench at my Observation Point, though, some little ways off. I could imagine resting, sitting and taking stock, thinking for a beat, perhaps then deciding, upon reflection, at this late date, that I should take a more prudent course than the one I am currently pursuing; that I should try to avoid whatever fate is fast approaching me; that I should swerve away from danger. But there is nothing to consider here, nothing to observe at the Observation Point; nothing inside the Institute but filth; nothing to see outside of it but squalls and gloom.
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