Timestuff

THE NEVITABLE TORI OF DEATH
or
HEMIDEMIGREMLIN POLYFIELDS

No temperature comes to mind, for example. There is no weight for example. The dust or whatever it was we were describing in the Last Life Cycle eschewed or floated haughtily above (the latter, I think) these Material Qualities...

But you really can think of it as snow in a photograph of snow taken by cold in a photograph of cold, in the sense of our world as a snow landscape. Even though it's dust, taking no kinda photographs.

There were these balls of snow rising to your hip. & when I say balls of snow, you understand I am meaning balls of dust. Solid snowballs lying here & there, many dozens of them around the surreal curvy landshcapes, which looked like they had some special significance. None of us were sensible enough to do anything about them, other than to kick at them a few times, which they seemed to ask for.

...and when our memories are melted & the ash is gone, when time flies again, we see that these balls are little red gremlins contained in hemidemigremlin polyfields, fierce & frightening sunbeasts, they looked like, like the hideous sun-demons or Crimson Dragons curled & reptilian, as of the laughable formoviosgot tenof youryore‑‑only these little things looked tough & hot & not so laugh a bull.

But they'd been contained within these fields see. They couldn't be moved, it seemed, or else the warlocks or wizards who encapsule dem dere thought it well to leave dem dare (as cautionary scales? or just to make us jump, & therein & thereby lose our shapes? or even to kill the flimsiest, palest-yellowest of us, disintegrate ingthem to the Nevitable Tori of Death?

& how'd they encapsulem? & who were these guys, anyhwhay?
THE MANTIS FASHION

A slate guy had me cornered in one of our Great Dust Alleys in the Greydust regiums of our inner-inner nameless namegrey "town," & he was for some reason offering to sell me a packet of large yellowed symbolic poemographs. He drew them oozing from his trenchcoat, & they were loose & liquid, the size & consistency of a wet sheet. They seemed rather thick, too. They were fat pomeographs.

"Fat & fleshy," he said, with a half-leer

the closest he could come to it with half a face; I noticed he had half a face, the other half just deep shadow deep as your brain alla time, no matter which way he faced the light

dangling the huge sheets in front of me. The light from the street-lamp came through the photograph, & while neither the grain of the photo nor the light from the street light had color, the light passing through the soggy emulsion of this drenched matserpiece came into all sorts of color.

Masterpiece, masterpiece.

"Nice, enh?" he said, sidling closer to me, letting his own boney shadow slice a thin slit in silouette through the sheet he was holding up so high

much higher than his arms length would make possible; he must be extending his arms in the mantis fashion

& I could feel him feeling up the sheet.

"I can feel things in the sheet," I s1t2a3m4m5e6r7dead ammerdud. I felt sick; he was holding the damn thing far too close; it was like a sickebing odor dee inside of me.

"Heyeyeye," he chuckled, patting the sheet so I coyld feel him patting me in the sheet. "We all feel things in the sheet, my friend. We all feel things in the sheet, my friend."

I heard a murmur of agreement, no doubt from the slatey legions just outside the shadows. This is what I get for coming to the core of town, I thought.

Another murmur of assent.

"Yea & we can all hear things thought through the thickness of the sheet," he chirped, and

I realized Everything these guys think is a song.

"You mean Everything we THINK is a goddam SONG," they sang.

"Right," I said, now sidling closer & taking his magnificent cock in hand‑‑it really was damp‑‑& trying to see it.

Did I say cock!? My GAWD! What you must be thinking!!! Let's try that again.

"Right," I said, now sidling closer & squeezing his magnificent cock & trying to deepthroat it.

No good. Said cock again. There may be some repressed sexuality interpfering with things here‑‑you know, throwing us out of the story as author gets big bonger. That sort of thing.

Normally I would edit this out‑‑especially from such an amazingly long novel as Timestuff. But the rules are you can't cut them out.

You can cut the sex scenes out, then talk about them whilst licking your lips repeatedly. You can do that. Now back to our story.

"Right," I said, now sidling closer & taking his magnificent‑‑photograph, photograph of his massive cock in hand‑‑it really was damp‑‑& trying stretch my lips around it.

Just kidding.

"Right," I said, now sidling closer & taking his photograph in hand‑‑it really was damp‑‑& trying stretch my lips around it.

"Knock it off!" he shrieked. "What are you doing?"

"I dunno. Someone was sending thoughts into my head I think. Just forget everything you've read for the last five minutes. Then you'll be all right. Anyway (wiping his mouth) I don't think I can buy it under these circumstances."

Assent murmured they & murmured I this.

"Stop it!" he hawked back-atom. "Is everyone crazy here? What page are we on, anyway?"

"I mean...there's not enough light."

But look," he whispered, pushing the cloth to my face while my face lost all resolution trying to make faces too horrid for the mere flesh-planes of a face. "Look!"

Yea, you could see it all right, when you held it up to your face & your face disintegrated. When your face disintegrated in the wetness of the sheets, wellsir, then you could see right well.

"I...can...see...right well," I peeped through the grian of the scene of my wife.

"Quite a mouth, huh, friend?" he was whispering, & I had to agree that was quite amouth my wife had on her, in this photo here, in this time-locked time-stopped moment of a primal goddam photo I was breathing (choking in!) here.

Her mouth was much thicker & richer of lip, the lips much more moist‑‑hell, infinitely more moist‑‑than they had ever even dreamed of ebig when she was with me, except possibly in the early (hench forgotten) eondays...

Her mouth looked like it could do anything.

Her mouth was also much hotter, in this photograph, & was quivering so much it almost destroyed the photograph.

"Yea, that happems, Hawk mutters.

Yea, all the Shadow-Hawks agree.

"Stop," he hished them, a finger almost reaching his lips but you'll recall it was half a finger & was half-a-lips.

"Sh," Hawk says in half alisp...

Quite a mouth. You sensed great depths behind that mouth, as well‑‑great depth & love and, well, re cep ti I ty.

"Yea: RE cep TIV I TY," everyone chanted.

& they chanted it again & again, round some circular eons, which I refuse to quiote as I cannot wuote it linearly here.

Here: .     .     .     .     .

"Yea," says Hawk, plucking the phoro away & ending the rhythm & ending the circle of eternity & ending the goddam chantiong of the hawks & ending.

"That was my wife," I said like a humiliated GLINKing little BOY.

"Well," says Hawk, now looking down so he didn't even haf his half a face, just his Hawk Grey Hat© (which you can get today!) & his feet nimbly scuffing grey works of grey-art in the greyness down below the greyness down below the black.

"Well," he offers. "It was."

"Well but this was just a fragment of the whole shot," I blurted (notice how everything I say in this scene is a blurt or a stammer or a blur? notice? notice?).

Hawk was walking away, milking the most from his purchase.

"I mean...how can I get the rest of this photograph?" I hollered haltingly (hol lurd hal ting ly).

Pause. Stop. Echo-step of Hawk. Eye.

"Can I like...have it enlarged?"

Tremendouche tremulusche tremooloos of unfound hawkhi larity!

"Good joke," was the sense of it. Good joke.

"Friend," chuckled the Hawk Man, shuffling up to me again. "Wasn't the mouth e nough?"

Well, I said nothing as I sheled out right there. I said nothing, because I didnt want any of my thoughts going into this photograph‑‑thoughts which they would obviously hear in an eonminute, as they obviously had more copes of her mouth, more copies of the photograph revealing my wife's mouth in my absence as, say, O, say twice ther mouth that it had ever been.

So I bought the frag in silence & I bought the frag in si lence

but I thought, Hell no, her mouth was way too much...
THE FLYING WING

Yea, our memories come back like that, not that any of us who ever we may be wants to have our memories back. I mean, this is no picnic here, but who the hell wants hisher goddam mem ries back? Knowhateyemean?

Also, as the poet says, "Time be a Story being broken like the beating wing of a Bird flying through the panes of Time" & so & so the story start again, this me in love. I was in relove with this Qalp‑‑flying creature, the most beautiful you could ever see. Qalps are like butterflies; they are like birds. This particular Qalp was also very much like a dream, because it flew into my troubled dreams (all dreams are troubled here) & brought light & color to the dreams, & I loved it for this‑‑even though the color & light just made the dreams more screamingly horrible than before, brought entire cascades of pain into the dreams & woke me up, my lungs too full even to gasp, & no sound coming out.

Well, she woke me up, which was all right. & as far as I'm constnurned, "Even a live nightnmare is better than a dead dream," so I got up, shaking & sweating, amazed as we always are at the vague form of my body & its shakey movements.

& there she was!

The flying wing‑‑it was here, in the wake-up world.

Was this one of thise dream-within-dreamwhorls you have occasionally? Now that was really frightening...

But I was stomping round & round, & nothing changed other than the dustcircles my feet were smushing. I was awake, all right.

& she was there, fly-ying in front of me, more beautiful than ever!

So, sweet idiot that I was, & long before anyone was awake, I followed her...

She had wings that grew wider as we went, as if we were becoming acquainted & were growing bolder with one another. & this caused me to lick my lips (uselessly) & look over my shoulder in case anyone's following me.

But no one was awake. Generally we could not wake, & when we could, why bother?

She had this curved & colorful back, like an opalescence, too tiny & fine to touch but I ached to touch it.

But I wanted more to know what she was leading me to.
EMBEDDED EXISTENCE C

It wasn't easy following. The dawn papers were tattered like snow. I mean there was this snow everywhere. I mean there were these papers

shreds of paper, infinite & endless strips & fragments & waddings & sheathings & shreds of it everywhere

confettilike blazions of it flickering in the air

weightless constellations gleaming moonlike in the moonless sun

coils of it wrapped into strings wrapped into robes wrapped into cables wrapped around the sleeping machinery of this place we're in

multifarious packs of the stuff ganging up on ankles in alleys & coating surfaces already multicoated with dried remnants of the guff

somewhere high in one of our forgotten layers of atmosphere vast planes of wafery paper blown on sumptuous breezes, paper continents covered, they say (in their sleep they say!) with meaningful images

images that would solve this puzzle of our meaning, & when I say meaning I am meaning our existence meaning

so what I said back there meant something like me meaning solve this puzzle of our existence (existence (existence (existence ({endlessly embedding} meaning).

So, suffice it to say I was fighting some Pretty Fierce Papers following this dream-bug, dream-bird, goddam dream-love of mine. And, given the time of day, the papers were at their worst. I mean, their attitude was at its worst. O, this wasn't just me being crazy. This was absolutely everybody being crazy. It was a very solid form of crazy in which you could clearly perceive the attitude of the goddam papers.

You could tell the papers felt they knew something...possibly knew everything...certainly, you could sense the papers thinking, if they could just be put together again they would contain all of meaning, pupossibly all of time, or some interpretation of something infinitely & wonderfully significantly meaningful etc. (the papers were always saying "etc."‑‑you know, without literally "saying" it...just that's what they were always meaning to "say you say, I ean see (embedded existence C (which is the existence we don't live in but which these endless sheets of paper point us tweird‑‑it is the existence just beyond the scope of all these goddam shreds...EXISTENCE SEE)..."etc." is the papers' way, I believe, of saying

"If we were but all put together, you would C."

See...

Anyway, at dawn, or just before it, the papers were at their height of arrogance & paper-fancied power. Hmph. Hmph! So I was fighting my way‑‑& rather more violently, I may say, in fact much more violently than is usual with our tattered race (example of our tatteredness: we do not even know the race of our name; did I say?), & in fact I fought the obfuscating, niggling, mocking, tormenting, floundering and, as the poets say "flap-fluttering" paper leaves paper leaves in a manner utterly inconsistent & confiusedly (to the papers--ha!) uncharacteristic way.

So I was messing twith them that day.

As I followed my bug-love far away...

She leads me to something very densely wrapped in paper‑‑in big, densely-condensed, heavily-printed especially-signfiicant brpad sheets of the stuff...something, you might suspect if you suspected, the papers wanted wrapped up very badly.

& so that's what they had done. They had wrapped this object up very badly.

It was, in point of fact, a mountain of wrappage. It was mountain-sized.

My lovely little bug, touching my nose with a gleam of joy, tells me I have to dig into this.

"Why?" I coo drunkenly.

"To find the object inside. The thing wrapped up. L'objet trouvé."

"OK," I sing with mine eyes closed.

& start to digging in.

Yea, this goes on for a very long time. But consider this:

There is nothing but time but time nothing is there but.

OK? OK.
I WAS, AFTER ALL, THE WORMLIKE ONE
oer
ALL INSANE SLASH-SLASH

We decided, see, my butterfly-partners & me of Butterfly Partners & Me., Inc., that this was some sort of planetoid. We ur decided it was a moon obiting I mean orbiting at an Extremely Low Altitude (two & a half feet, to be approximately exact) with a rotational velocity, I don't have to say, pretty much the same as the sureface of the planet.

What butterlypartners?, you ask, is what I'm saying.

What butterfly asking after my partners? You pray which is what I’m asking.

What asking after partners doth this butterly froth? We bray, which is naught worth hasking.

& what boots the mariposa shifting off her longlost cloths like the moonlit hoar of a flossy sloth unto the wordvoid the WORDVOID of frosty monitors, ponder the sleeping, watching eyes or the wtaching sleeless eyes or the clear gel forming the dreamo of the space taken up by the gleam of the froshing eyes?

But to shuffle off these coils of immortality, these rills of hyperpoetry, these foam condensations of moste crystalline poetry & return to the cycliung story-o-i-o, we assumed we were we on a planet, we & / the planet had a surface / we were on the surface / the surface was rotating / we were not, at least in these assumptions, at all insane, or all insane slash-slash.

& lo, was it further decided‑‑based not quite so severely in this case on spatial mechanics or our pooled gnoweldge of interplanetary fol-de-rol as on Fiouaeour's bright dream (see, we have these BRIGHT VIVID DREAMS, which are generally BRIGHT GREEN VIVID DREAMS, known in the hi-presh depphs of the capital as VIRESCENT GREAMS for reason unknown OUTSIDE THE DREAMS themselves) that the planetoid was hollow.

"Why you say it hollow, Fob?" we said as one (1).

"The dream," Fob (she’s my butterfly-fren) doth sen. "It was the dream whatsend."

"Yea," (1), "and besides, the word planetoid sound hollow."

Have I mentioned we don't have the word is? This is difficult.

But twas true. Planetoid does sound hollow, & there was Fob's vivid green goddam dream, whic hwe trusted, the premised of the dream (that the planetoid is holoows WILL YOU LISTEN to me?) being no less outlandish than the spatial-mechanical mdel of the planetoid rotating Fiouaeour at 2.5 feet, or whatever we had for feet. I've been outside of tie so long, I begin to forfett.

& we elected we none other than me to crawl into the planetoid, to wormlike crawl into the planetoid, as / this was POSSIBLY the image Fobsie saw in his dream toward the greeny end of the teig of the springtide dweam when virescent pixels started to u h b r  e   a    k u       p / I was, after all, the wormlike one.

You should all agree on this we could all agree.

Once upon a time on a dusky dawm (there was too much forgetful dust forgetfulness of dust forget-me dusk for "dawn" so at a no-partiular no-time we agreed upon I tried to squirm my way into the planetoid. This involved bumping my head against it till a hole formed in the side (a good omen for the thoerg! Good! Bad would have been, say, if I just kept flattening my head on the rocky face leaving nothing but a pink blustain upon the face of the planetoid. That would be bad.) the following seems to have happened. Now back to our story, if this is not the story. Where are we, anyway?

Rhetorical question. Back inside the story, I got my head inside (& you will agree this too was good, importing / I were burrowing a hole into a softshelled planetoid / I was kncoking another type of hole altogether, a hole2, as it were through the side of a dream-fulfilling but otherwise hollow planetoid ha HA!

Well, I worked. No one helped me‑‑oh no! Of course not! Heaven for bud! & I snarled & rolled & kicked & clawed & reeled & rocked my seemingly-endlessly-longllyy bodyy more & more into the hole, fulfilling all that worm mythology my erstwhile "friends"'d built up around & preceding & needless to say trailing me, & my legs made useless airy walking otions in the useless airyaire,

but my shoulders got in, & larger & larger calubrated measures of my trunk

and after a while I got dusty, & the dust got wet, & the dust tuned to mud, so I got muddy, & I was like a very large, sincere-looking sapseeking bloodsapper supping into this dustball ofa goddam 'toid.

& I popped right in!

I was sitting, not in a hollow plan e toid, but in a ship, & I was in a seat at a console & (what is more( & I was perfectly clean.

I did several brilliant but brittle doudou bleble ta ta kes kes unbe lieving ly.

I was alone. I mean, there was no dirty hole freshly burrowed behind me, no friends calling in to me, no sings of the surface of my world.

I have clearly gone through the meniscus, I thought, which I thought of as a Signal Thought, not-smuch cause it come perilously close to having an is in it (but that would be adsurb, no?), but because up till then I nor no noe I'd known knowed what a eniscus" was, in the sense I was thunking it of.

The meniscus, I knew & so can tell you new, I mean now, was the thin field you went through getting into the ship. Seals you off; seals the outside off; & (evidently, now if you're folowing me wouldn't you say?) cleans you off.
[Whistles.] Decks ya out in a neatso uniform too.

Fills ya with how to work the panel too.

Unless (& as we will see, this turns out to be The True Alternative) one was just remembering,

having pasht through the mneiscus and, therefore, remembring.

Like putting the tiny limbs of a broken millionlegged doll back together again‑‑re MEMBER ing.

So I throttled up. The ship yawed a long-sleeping creature (uhbut its sleep hyperenforced) shugging its mighty shoulders if you willa wake, & she pitched to port, & shivered off the guck, by which I eman the dust caked so thick the lovely butterfly goddam ship had come to resemble nothing so much as so much as much as as a planetoid (ha!‑‑& is that a laugh or what? WHAT IS A LAUGH? Ha?) what?

& the chunks caked off in the great radiance of the revivified ship (even the unshieled friends being cooked outside must almost remember ha?) & the ship bobbed lissomely & relieved, & the ship glowed (I saw this on some sort of external scanners I must make up someday) & added just a touch of color to the dust & the ship went

SKEW!

That's right, the recovered & now-flying ship went

SKEW!

For, I seemed to know some(at that time still more or less thinking, by the crotch of my pants, more less, that the ship was somehow you know briefing me on all this know)how, that this was what they (though I didn't know who THEY were, so it appears on the template of my mind like a blank, like __________THEY?) called it‑‑a SKEW ship, having something to dew with the method of its flight, which was much muich much much more than mere sptial flight.

In fact, "they" made faces when you clumsily referred to it as "spatial flight," didn't they? I remembered that vividly‑‑the ship-briefing-me theory fading like the very duistglaze on the sun as we flew above the sun, I mean above the clouds of dust so we for the first time in nonmemory saw the sun.

Not bad...

Sun, & we looped about a bit & suchlike mannerisms of euphoric quasi-firsttime flight, & then

We left time, or rather

SKEWed outside of time and
I was flying through a grey space, but this was a really grey space, not a merely dustcovered amnesiac-grey sort of space like the space I'd just come etc.

This place was grey, was it really grey.

This blond lug was sitting with his bulbous suit slit open, his lean body leaning through the slit, leaning out & oddly bobbing, & he was either sweating or sobbing, hollow to say whisch-witch...

Who is this guy?

"Recognition Factor...Recognition Factor..." bleats the gape of the skein of the speakers of the shape, trying for the similes of them not to sound metallic & mechanical, trying with all their little metaphors, in the realms where metyaphor fucntions as soul, to get some soul into the sound, because clearly they are sembling, in the realm where symboling breathes as thinking breaves as blieving in brief symbolization of belief, these are importantmemories coming back back back.

"Mumemories coming back...back...back," I trytobarkbutcroak. I was not, as my speakers most certainly were, expecting that.

When you hit the Brittle Zones (Brittle Zones? did he say Brittle Zones? & like what the hell is that?) big memories coming back‑‑very big memories, memoriy chunks that would be dangoreus did they not float in smooth rotation like space-screen images of the chunks of memories having beauty & surface but no mass, being just mock-ups of memories.

No, the chunks of memory are harmless enough as they roll in & try to connect with one another, the memories you see the memememororoiesies yoyouyou seesesee not able to remeber their own connections (that takes intramemories, which are nowhere to be seen outside the whowhere scene of time), if any (they think, these being thinking memories).

But the memories might be dangeorius.

I land & recognize this dwarfish smiling little dude as one Hebs‑‑each recollection like a great bobbing icefloe I'm sickened upon, each one filling me not so much with asotnishment as with pique, a petty sort of outrage that these things, so endlessly hidden from me, should come back, & freeze my ass, & frostbite my hands as they hug the jags of the metaphor I float upon.

Damn, I'm thinking. Hebs.

So as I land this "Hebs" ("Hebs"? Oh yea‑‑Hebs!) is standing there arms akimbo, the blast of the engIngs turning him perfectly, plastic white, prving it seems to me for once & for all that Hebs was comprised of white plastic, of white, indestructible plastic stained each morinng ewith the daily colors of Heb, explaining the long-ignored biographical fact that Hebs was adifferent damned color everyday, like the aching screen you are forced by force of implant to stare at every day‑‑& when I say stare at I believe I mean thrust your head into to to every day, assuming you have day.

Hebs anyway, looking albino & distinctly disgusted (the (lesser, (smaller, (unindividualized (Ypions (standing (behind (him (like [surfetous parenthesuss]-i)s)s)u)s)s)i)z)y)z), doing a lot of rolling of the eyes as I powered down with the usual IngorGasmiuc Sigh & hopped in a tight parabola out to the brittle brittle brittle brittle gorund.

"Back, are we?" he snapped. Appreciative laughter buried deep behind‑‑my turn to look disgust at his little buddies.

"Don't call them 'little buddies.'"

"I didn't say anything, doll-baby."

"Think them then."

"I did."

"I mean 'Don't think them then.'" His thoughts fraught froth like ugly flowers ere his face.

I remember we bicker like this. He mad, we bicke,r then we seetle in his tent.
SUSPICION DICK

Settled in his tent (with me a double take going this way & wide), Hebs tendered me a big plate of refreshments, & of course this got my hackle zup right away. Priapic suspicions grew big green boner that just tuumed & twaddled in the timeless air.

It was not just the dreamlike size O the dreamlike size of the silver platter that did uh altert uhme‑‑though godknow twas a factor.

It was not only the way in which he did er dit (the outsized platter‑‑are you following me? are you following the nips of candy into my brain? see below), which involved some Inordinately Phancye Phö1tewerken & a dis splay of way too many fingers sticking out round the out round the eggs or the edges of the plat or the platter, or the pat or the patter, as I bleeveye said (ees evoba)...

Well maybe not...

But anyway‑‑returning if we might to the vast subjunct of my suspixiums so glisteningly impressively erect, nor even the leer, or sort of a waxy sneer, with which his face comborded as he leaned my way extending it like some shitty deal...

Sayin, "Try these, boy."

Boy? He calls me boy? He's trying to win me confidence & he calls me boy? Allow me to react right here [finger thrust in my mouƒ]: "Ack! Aack!"

"Thanks." I said. Much better now.

No, I think my suspicions really reached full fruition, really achieved a massive blossom, truly ripenoid to a color darker than even the most clouded-under oyes could see, was when Hebs said, his voice traveling difficultly round the plate which was hoovered so close to mine eyes it was, in point of fact, all I could see

when he said so help me

"Magnificent cock!" (with a gasp)

nodding toward said boner in the lucent air a sweetmeat thrust just a quarter-inch or so into his mouth, judging by the sound, just teasing into the unh! softnesses of his lips, his eyes involuntarily rolling I would think upup into his head

Where we follow him, or follow the chunk of pastry, really, into the recesses of his brain‑‑which is where these confections are designed to go‑‑& right down into the jammed & circular Intersection of Embarrassment that had brought him here, me here at his invitation, the bonbons on the silver platter, the rest of this poem taking place inside his brain for no better reason than we got sucked into his brain at this particular indentation & could never get the fuck out. There's no point in repining. We have to move on...

"Did you feel something funny just there?"

"No. I'm trying to tell you we've figured it uh out.'

"Figured uh out what?"

H "Uh you know."

"No I don't uh uh know."

H "Yes you uhuhuhuh-do. Don't pray flames with me. You know‑‑our uh problem. We've figured it out. The solution, out."

"Solution to what?"

H "You know."

X "I most certainly do not know."

Lids formed like gentle cloud halfway over his eyes. Hebs was tilting back his chair way back & nipping another nib.

H "This memory thing. This memory-nugget thing."

Upon wish it all comes running back to me in the form of a silver aura of racers running back like a maid in arms to me & I so say "O yea. So what do we do?"

‑‑first mention of drupe.

FIRST MENTION OF DRUPE

Upon witch we both remembers in a stunning roundel of stares. When he says memory-nuggest thing he means drupe & when I say drupe I am quoting him meaning the memory-nugget thing or crystal of one or more of my most terrible emories, the encystment of which memories is what's keeping me alive, but which is equally fucking up my world. My world of Dim, that is. That's why they can’t remember anything back there. It is all my fault, or more properly, my awful memories' fault, or in parallel property, the fault of me for balliong up my memories, or in conditional would-be-properlies, the fault of the Yps for implanting the wished-for must-be-encyted memories in the first (if you can call it that) place (if you can place it then) naught (if we can breathe till then).

"So," to review shall we, "what do we do?" I pant.

& with psychotic intention he sprung forward in his chairs, elbows on the table & fingers first interlocking, then massaging one another, then touching their little pads together & like humping one another in an anabsolutely fascinating updown inout backforth humping motion, nnh, nnh, nnh.

"We lock the memory," he said cheerfully. "We encrypt it."

"You can do that?"

"No. As I was saying, we encrypt it into a nugget, like these cookies (Have one? See blow), so when you go like back into time your like memories will not blow."

& here he did a weird little song & dance thing, right on the desk. He became small to get up on the desk, & danced around on the platter on the desk, the platter being on the desk, & he danced, no smaller than the cookies, & he danced around the cookies asif they was giant props, & the kicked some of the cookies so theyslid off stage o where the grips I prazoom, dollyed em auf, & he sang this little number with a full rhythm section & some horns, a few strings, like nothing so much as a scene from a Tomasio Pyncazzio novellio, uh-huh, & this hahappened very fast.

The song didn't happen fast, if I might clarify. The song & the dance didna happend fast‑‑just the set-up, as it really occurred in "time," not the verbal set-up here, which is o so long.

So, in a dark blue tux with a neonglowing cane, steel-tipped shoetoes taping on the stage-sized platter, suddenly as I said above enlarged for our entertainment if not benefit (& thiswas not a benefit), he sang, or rather chanted, "O your mem ries will not blow."

& he like piroutetted like the living Fred Astaire after he'd had a few, & huffed-hee, "Oyea, your mem ries will...not...BLOW!

& he tapped that cane very sharply on the silver sheen & shuffled some long steps back‑‑not doing too bad really, & sang, "O yeayea man, so yer mem reez willa naught BLOW! Uh-huh! Unh!"

& ran right at the camera & sank down on one kneww, still sliding, so he was like, as I've tried to imply, or downright say, he was sliding toward us across the silver platter (now to be conceived of as a stage, OK?) with his arms outspread, & Jolsoned out "So yerloving MEM o RIES willa nevaneva, uh-uh, nono, neva-neva...babababa-BLOW!

"Uh huh! O yea!"

Sure, big hit. Very convincing. Lotta applause.

But the sun glinted on my bright green Suspicion Dick.

"So," I said mock-thoughtfully, though of course there wasn't a thought in my head, which was how they'd planned it, & why they'd so elaborately staged it, clever-if-demented Yps, letting everything return back to nomral (this is me, clamly letting this happen, here, pretending to muinch on a quote cookie), if that be possible (return to the nomral, that is), "that's where the drupe come from‑‑from you? From us, doing what you've suggested we do right here‑‑right?"

"Something like that," said his voice, from behind the big back of his chair, turning its shell to me, like he's gonna be all Coy & Fey all of a sudden.

Either that or he was removing his make-up, which should not have been necessary here...

& he eventually tuns back to me & smiles, all very businesslike, even sliding the plate aside, giving me time, cutting me some slack after the big show, as if the big show had not occurred, which is how these out-of-timers operate.

I bit in, my cock bobbling.

& sure & soon & swoony nough, to get to the punch line, the cookies (o so nowthey're cookies are they? hm? hm? well yea...) were these bright explosive things that filled your mouth with blood.

Black bloodand your own black blood. Very tasty actually. I tasted & I gave that involuntsarily inevitable, I mean inevitably involuntarily sorry yip & my eyes roll up into my brain which was rolling up like the backdrop of a cheesy old travelin' show with Hebs (?) as the empresario, Road Show of the Bloody Cookies

roll up there & stay there

and I said "OK, let's do it," & did an attenuated "answering" song & dance, somewhat sentimental & lugubrious, with the enlarged plate-prop & tuxedo-props & the show tunes & the so ons, some of to so long it is still going on but which I am not contractually obligated not to not-descibe, it being shamewhit derivative, & so.
SPINNING HEADS
or
NEVERGUEST
First Appearance of Ing

It was a nice day, the light being fresh & brightly en CRYPT DEAD, HEY, bu-bu-bububu-but as you could see the cycles were making us all dizzy, what with me being urgently packed back ing the

Ing & sent bloody back‑‑which now that I was here (again) I remembered (again) in one great déjà vu containing quite number of lesser vu's, sending us all spinninf back many times, forgetting the premise, forgetting the story, forgetting everything in a fit of hyperventilation.

Some of this stuff is just metaphorical. Don't try this at home. Now back to our story, sorry to say...

I'm not sure I can continue in this state of multiple déjà vu, but I'll try. It seemed I was remembering something about more things being found upon objective measurement to be wrong with Dim, & then me packing my ass back to the Brittle Zones & the Yps in a state of mellow amnesia & smiling absinthly, hat in a hundred hands, asking for help which was for me for the Very First Time, which I can tell you & in fact will tell you & indeed am about to tell you if you'll just keep rolling out of time drove the Ypions NUTs...

So it didn’t work, & as I say there in the cockpit of the unignited Ing sat back with my big drip druke in my lack of a lap, I looked at them & they looked at me & I saw they was sick of helping me, & they showed it by standing near me in a motley semicircle with their pale lips pressed together, in much the way an urph-dad does when, after an aching day of work going in circle after circle of meaninglessness toward a core of even greater meaninglessness, he's come home, been briefed on your manifold little offences, & sets out lavish clear membranes, wet sheets of pain, electrical sheets of pain, metaphoric sheets of electrical pain you decide upon you, his kid.

So I didn't trust their looks‑‑& this as you know or have guessed or do not know & neverguest was a problem to me, because I am a Trusting Dim. I have to have trust around me or I will soon die. & even here in the brittle zones when I could not tehcnically die, I needed the trust. Or I would something-like die.

& I didn't want to feel that something-like die.

ImageBox™

Though I had this image, see, like the image the kid in the paragraph above has which nags him & pricks small portions of his thin skin, slowly flaying him all day as he waits for his heartless dad to come. It was the image of me devolving ssllloooowwwwwwly into a putrid mound of glue, which the Ypions would transport right into the time rooms‑‑a place where I could take forever to decay...

it was OK...so long as I decayed...

Yea, the Ypions were making a big show of their righteous indignation. They'd shuffle into new rings around me as I moved (trying to ignore them), folding their arms & planting their many feet. They were like clearing their throats, & I was like this sweaty dim, I'll tell you, trying to go about my tasks, or pretending to have tasks, & therefore going about the soundless rituals of doing things, when, if asked, I would have to admit I was doing absolutely nothing other than looking like I was doing things.

& that talk itself was starting to seem Immensely Important, even urgent, even an emergency, so I worked (at nothing) faster & faster & more irritably, so the flocks of disgruntled Ypions had to move back & shift their positions & try to fold their arms & spread their feet apart & frown, all in shorter & shorter units of time, as my own tasks became faster.

& you can do things with infinite speed in the brittle zones. I was approaching this. I was a blur; the Yps were an angry blur around me, disaproving as fast as they could, with me escaping just ahead of them, like two lethal lightships strekaing invisibly thoruygh space, murdering each other with speed, accelerating right up to death.

"All right, what is it?" I finally shrieked, with such explosiveness & sudden stop that the Yps, caught in their own atomic dance, were thrown like wooden toys clattering on their butts in front of me. Gave me kind of an advantage, as it was now me standing over them with my arms akimbo, & them with their elbows on the ground, or clutching their heads their heads to get their heads their heads to stop spinning heads.
"Look‑‑we made a mistake," said Hebs, who always had more aplomb than the others. He didn't try to move from his spot, but just crossed a few of his feet & acted comfy there, even though he was covered with the Ubiquitous Dust of Indignation. & I know how that itches your nose.

Observe: Hebs wriggle his nose. I also notice that Hebs zeznose will wriggle at my thoughts, but I don't let this bother me.

"Mistake?" I said, slipping back in my tenses & stomping in the Circle of the Appropriate Fashion. "You destroyed my world!"

"Well, yes," Hebs said. "Sort of. I mean, we took your minds away for a while. But we had them stored, right? & we send them back‑‑I mean, we're sending them back as soon as you stop using us. Like you're milking us for favors. Like."

"I am not."

"You are so."

We were very quiet for a while, & now I felt feeble & petulant. The Ypions, however, made no move to get up. They lay there as if lying there were their idea. Some of them sifted The Gold Dust Of Et Cetera through "serial cascades of fingers multifarious."

"What'd you say?" said Hebs.

"Nothing. But anyway, I'm not using you. I'm just trying to get my memories back."

"Ah," said Hebs, raising the Finger of But. "We didn't bury your memories like that. I mean, we didn't mayer them in, in a circle, like."

I paused a couple of beats, as Dead Actors Inanimate say they say.

"You might have done it."

"No. No way!"

"Yes way. You must have done it. & forgetting you've done it sno excuse."

I had got to them. They were exchanging The Palimpsest of Looks, wherein uncertainty & tender yielding make eye connect to eye in a circular skein, leading in this case to a different silence‑‑an enitrely different silence‑‑form the one that had gone before, hiccupping be tween the thick-tossed networks of verbs.

They never did reply, but just got up, & the old Circle of Anger dispersed. Looked like I'd won some more help‑‑some more tries at my endlessly incircling drupe of memories. But they were starting to hate it. The help would not be guilt-drive‑‑much less friendly‑‑anymore.

& I had to make it through very soon. The Yps'd try to kill me after a few more failures. It was not their fault.
THE ESSENCE OF WHINING

I got back home & was taken into silver custody to Polabetma's lab

Polabetma: The Lab

Arrested again‑‑& I'll admit I was whining. I knew I was whining even then but I had to keep whining, & that's the knack of whining, isn't it?

Yes it is.

But what was different here was that no one said to stop whining. I mean, that, too--someone telling you to stop whining--is the essence of whining, which is what we're talking about. Or I'm talking about. Or I'm writing about. Or I have whined about & you are wheaning. About.   Whriting.

"There's just too many dreams," I whining something like a baby whining in his father's dream or the father in his own dream of being a baby in his baby dream or the dream of the turtle who is the first of your animals to dream or the dream of the dreamless plant when it starts up in heaven to dream in the heaven upheaven of dreams. Something like that.

"We just keep waking up into deeper dreams! Th-th-the dreams are too many! Th-th-the dreams are too intense, etc.!" I whined!

But even as I did so my eyes moved restlessly. No one was telling me to stop whining, & even my curling, whining little mind knew that meant they were up to something.

It meant they were up to something which, they figured, was going to stop my whining.

& I didn't like imaging that.

But I couldn't help it. I'd been hanging round the godmamned Ypions too long‑‑my thoughts puffed deliciously out in visual-awkward dreamlings o' themselves, populated by universally-understood, universally-recognizable figures symbolizing my thoughts as distilled to an idiot purity, some of them figures walking round with lines through their torsoes, some of them not, but all of them whining.

Next thing I knew they'd stripped the silver I was covered with from the coverages of time & taken me up a narrowing lift into a little narrow lab which was stripped oits silver & traspupped up unto a littler silver lift upin a littlest silvrest lab & marched me off the lift & into Pola's lab & shown me round the lab blabbing very fast.

"Herewehaveretorts&stuff-herewehavewires-herewehavewvatwithinvatofcoloredchemicals-& here‑‑here...eherwehave‑‑well-hey!lookslikeanchair
yesitis-anicelittlehardchairhererightinthemiddleofthelocusofthecentralsilverlab
sohere
whydontyoujustsithereinthischairfriend
sit-here-sit-here...now."

& bound me to the chair in some Instantaneous Fanatic Fashion‑‑I imagine a Whip of Wires around me or a swift screaming of tape too high-pitched to hear‑‑& Pola sliced open my face with an old strop razor manifestly seven times too brong.

So it freely lopped my face like a steak knive lopping the numb pad of your thumb‑‑& that's your thumb, bub, not mine; sorry, bubs, but that's the metaphor‑‑in a horizontal curve from cheekbone through the upper lip & down to the jawbone on the other side

& my thought-rings poughed out various international figures with the lines hacking through them, to represent the cut going back & forth & back & forth & back & forth & back & forth in "Clones most incalculable"

so that Pola & her cronies (temporary help hired to fill up ineffable spaces in the ineluctable lab) could now pull the top of my head back like a pez dispenser & reach right in...
Which they did, while I‑‑in recidivistic reflex obedience‑‑said "Ahhhhhhh."

"STOP SAYING 'AHHHH'!" PolaPoal bellowellowed, & I did.

(Though those thought-forms I've been so ludicrously 'luding to puffed out still‑‑only very tiny now, invisible micro-puffs with reducio ad absurdum International Stick-Figures™ stuck in Egyptian poses, trying to symbolize things but now too small to symbolize, lacking now the heft & the girth to "swinge & swangle" them meanin's round.

So they posed & they danced, & they held Truly Piteous Circles with diagonal lines in front of themselves, but the lines, too, were too small, & couldn't cancel anything; nor, in that world of tiny signs, did anything mean anything nor anything meam. It was sad, but cute, but sad. I have often thought they were like prepositions dancing there.

"There," said Pola with smug professionalism, holding another drupe between the fat wood calipers of some outsized & fat wooden tweezers, as if she'd gone in there for, say, a 24" x 38" color print sozzling in its photic chemicals.

The razor was gone & I was not dripping a bit. My head was not acting like a real head, which when you ponder it is the nature of your head the whole time, isn't it?

It is. I think.

& my eyes, popped hypnothyroid out the anterior flap of my bifurcated he!ad, rolled downward to see the drupe, which was a pline & fump specimen, a dazzling seedlike replica of the last drupe we'd seen in the last drupedream, known as the Group Drupe Dream. Which was the true dream, by the way, just to let you know, get it on the record, so to spake, just so no one will think nor accuse nor with innuendo insinuate that this novel got no solid ground of truth or that everything within these wobblin' walls o' words is a lie.

Not so. That last dream was true. But it's gone. So the accusations are false from a literal point of view, but true in everyotherwise. Like all accusations everywhere anyway or how, OK.

"This look good," muttered Pol, just trying to buckerself up, I think, though she was earnestly trotting the big dripe over to her VattoChemicoze®. & I thought, Maybe it is a color photograph. Maybe if we develop it‑‑that'll be it, & we can go home to sleep or whatever i' twill be.

& she planks it into the tray. Swish the tray by lifting one edge (of the tray). Swept the drupe through the chemicals with the calipers. Sez Hmmm to us & not to herself. Said nothing to herself. Said Hmmm again.

Everyone but me went over to see. Everyone said Hmmm to herself (& you should have seen the way the self replied!). Everyone is saying Hmmm unto hirzelf.

"Nothing there," said Pola finally, walking briskly toward me & wiping her hands with a cloth made of her nacinet hands down the ineluctable timestrandes woeven into cloth my those metamorphoworms. "Nothing at all. Nothing whatsoever."

She smiles with amazing beauty & pulls loose my ropes (unless she unleashed my tape).

I stood up shakily.

"What about my head?" I said. rubbing my wrists per the stage directions of the scene of the stage directions.

"Oh, it's fine now," said Pola, nodding to some question I had not posed. "It's perfectly empty now."

& they all laughed! These whitecoated bozos just stood there for a full minute & cracked up, till their white robes fell off revealing their nakedness, wouldn’t you know, & their flesh stripped of in those strips of mirth excessive laughter, through its excessive laughter radiation, verves, & I used the distraction of their disintegration into the usual lattice patterns of fluctulant snow to go over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & over & look at the drupe. There was nothing inside, but I went into it (the drupe) anyway.
IT (THE DRUPE) ANYWAY

& they "see" my "heel" dis a "pear" & they slowly say, "Hey!"

Which is where I learn the cries of those who watch you crawl‑‑though I lie to think jump (here! think with me: Jump!)‑‑growl down real slow, you know, so I have the satisfaction of knowing I've escaped, for the mo, in the same way you escaped those roughhouse highwayman bums when you covered your self with mud, but never mind...

Hey‑‑turns out it seems "pretty easy," which is not to say sleazy to walk into a drupe, even your own drupe, especially your own damne drupe, when you're totally out of time (which a shake of my limp green watch indited clearly I was) out of time in these cycles out of time in these cycles out of time...

Snapping out of it, I walteze din their, & saw the whole nast-E-thing, the while vividly awful affair, the unbearable picture of the premise of my life, & when I say life I mean demise, & when I say anything I mean my wife, my little wife, my dry & horny little awful gorgeous humping thing of a wife...

"Snap out of it," they say, pulling me back, pullnig my face out of the drupe, & they say (they are paid to say this, just as they are paide‑‑I cannot say‑‑to appear in this novel), "C'mon, boy. We send you back to Dim."

I know I've falled for this a billion times.

So "No," I say (& boy are they taken aback! They 're going to wanta a payraise now...). "We've got to fix this cycle, rescue my world."

After they have count they pay, & after after their their laughter have died down, they say, "What say?"

& I re-say.

And, in reponse, Hebs first feign apathy, lookin through limpid blue-drooped eyelids (sans eyes behondemz) as-if-at me.
"Rescue?" he said, vivislby turning the word over wor dove r wo rdov er w ordove r in the translucent working of his mouth, as if he'd never like tasted that word before. "Rescue?" he went on, extending the metaphor with a spat.

"Well yesss," I said, considerably delfated.

Then Hebs pulled one of his patended turnabouts, lighting up & leaping up weightlessly onto just one needle-toe & crying, "Why, yes! YES, young man, of course. Why-yes-of-COURSE, that's nothing less than a brilliant idea coming from one so lowly, diseased, compromised, guilty & destitute‑‑or to put it another way, from one so hollow & dry & void of hope. We'll do that‑‑yes we will! Come on everybody‑‑we're gonna send.end Böéèöb.ymy back.ack to.o rescue.cue Dim.yl!

& the other Yps‑‑what grey volition they might have had dispersed & swept up in the various unemptiable cashes of the kashic records‑‑cheered dutifully, then rousingly, then downright euporically. Hebs had given them life once again.

Hebs enjoyed pumping me up to raid Dim. He apparently saw me soaring out of that drupe like an alien out of some actor's chest, as (saw me as, not soaring as) he marched through the flanks of Yps, who allstood pointlessly at attention, & they were all of them dressed to the dimlian nines
ENGINEERING ADJECTIVES

The preparations have been written up in all the engineering manuals‑‑particularly, one might say obsesively, in Preps Plux, which gives a good, if exaggerated accounting employing excessive engineering adjectives to describe the portioning up of the drupe & then the polydividing of me into countless me's, & it gives somewhat censored (classified) censored values for the formulae they used to thus to thus to portion me me me out, including the infamous "diagrams of the purple-stainéd yook" to epxlain the slit-divisions in time whhich opened up my both my physical & my psychic being like the superslit paperopener from the formless Myth of Rogg, the epic that flows backwards into time & up from the kashic reocrd & back from the parallel universe that thinks its so much better than mine. I mean ours. I meant to say ours. I didn't mean to claim this entire universe. That would be greedy. & wrong.

"Whatchya doing?" a million of me cried, whereas we all knew the truth was Hebs just enjoyed messing with me.

But he said, with the measure-reasoned tones of the pleasured madmon, "We need all of you we can get. We've got to flood Dim!"

The fervor with which he said it, & the shattering of my neck bones as she shooke me to hook me to tell it, made it seem most sensible at the time.

But recall: we were not in that time.
SUBZERO ON THE REFLUX SCALE

So all of me buzzed like menisces of insectisease back into the fantasy of "rescuing" my world: s billion tiny me's flying inin, piloting silver mercury versions of the old, gigantic Ing, now this bloated relic in the center of a playground half the size of a world on a playground on the brittle plains (the ones longsida time) much too big, this playground, for any kids to play, & much too far away to be reached, andplus there were no kidsa mongst the Ypions, no kids nor any whiffs of kids in the atmosphere of lies‑‑by which term designate the puffs of vapors saturated with thick & pixellated replicas of lies that puffed & poughed out the noses or noughthegheth of the Ypions‑‑which made it the perfect playground in my book.

But it was OK. I had the improved version, the tiny little nipper that would slit your skin if you came within an inch of its wicked wings‑‑wings, I might add, flaring my nostrils as I do I doo I doooogh, you cannot even see.

Silver-mercury fliers they were, dubbed Ing1, Ing2, Ing3, Ing4, Ing5, Ing6, Ing7, Ing8 (I thing1k you see the patterng2)3, & I just flew 'er in through the portals of every room alongside of time, cracking through the brittle walls which gave the appearance (shattering behind me) of titan mirrors slivering their way to earth behind me, in the emitraer rorrim casting "its lying light oer [my] refulgent brow," but which were doing nothing of the sort‑‑another illusion, another lie, this one, however, not the lies of the liesmoking, liepuffing Yp, but rather the Essential Goddam Lies of Time.

In any case, this mode of entry enabled me to appear in trillioniplicate, with multitudinous Ingsì filling the tattered air of my world, where nobody could much move & nobody remembered & nobody had the energy required to get up nor in many cases wake up.

So I was flying over corpses, as far as I was conblurned‑‑pale & slowbreathing fellows though they might be, in my ingspeedtime they just lay there, without even the gumption to react, with reflex rating subzero on the Reflux Scale (that's down where the scale is customarily colored blue‑‑even purple‑‑in the illustrations we've all had dummed into our eyes since split seconds after birth into the Reflux Scale).

I passed over an old dim sprawled in a fountain. Distgusting! I thought, swooping in a fancy frenchqurve urvurim & spraying memories all over his corpse.

That's what I did, & that's what I was thinking. But I was feeling he was my father, & that he was unusually huge, & that he more than filled the fountain, like a giant lain down to rest, like one of the Titans‑‑but what a sorry, sad, goddam snoring wreck!‑‑& with the sparkles of the fountain themselves frozen there.

I'm not sure if they were frozen there or if this was yet another lie of the lying instrumentalities of the lying Ing; I do not know; no one will tell me; I do not want to know; I cannot tell you; or do you by any chance know?; will you tell me?; WILL YOU TELL ME?; No?; You don't want to know?; What's wrong with you?

Yea, this was a Hercuhooleehoolian labor. Lucky I was here in numbers, waving maniacally at myself endlessly as the job‑‑servo'd up the zazz by servomechnaisms of the jolly Yps, looking on through their glass like the audience at an operation‑‑only in this case, unseen behind the unseen operations of time.

Yea, this whole world needed gobs of memory, all the memory it could get. Were the memories of the akashic records not infinite‑‑even those within one page within one book being, they tell me, infinite, unless this be yet another of the lies of time, being infinite, i.e., infinities within infinities‑‑they would've run out & the universe would've been in a lethic stupor for all time, I suppose.

Hey‑‑better a lethic stupor than the lies of time!

So I spritzed & I sprayed up my world, until the greyness begum to mmlt, subsiding in small patches of yellow at first, then spreading & regaining color gradually. As I swooped away, backing expertly backout of time, the Dim & their world were even starting to move again.
THE CREATION OF ADAM
or
THE FORMER ME

More specifically, it started to sprinkle. Doubtless another Hebsless prank‑‑he's seeded Dim this time, he'ld seeded all that gas around the cloudless hollow of the groundless vapors that were Dim, he'd forced me to seed the world with me's‑‑O potent device!‑‑till actual liquid droplets of that that grand miasma commensed to condense around those me's, smothering ALL the alternate versions of me (a sadness I still feel like a still wiping still inside but haven't now the time to get still with which to feel) & creating something the place had never seen before: rain, aka sweet spring rain, aka the great & healing monsoon aka.

Well, this seemed fine & straight & innocent at first (just like everything in this Dimlical curse!), & then grew unpredictable, then unthinkable, then through a series of concentric ontological declensions toward a drench definately beyond even the Kevin of God, I meant Ken of God, Kevin

so that this terrific rain was fallingon God & drenching him‑‑something nevermore since non nor nain hearn befrore‑‑& God, the rather silt-strewn droplets shagging up his beard & his white ruff cuffs, sputters & lets loose some naked curses on our world, naked God-wet curses falling themselives or themselves just like selfless hail onto a poor springing Dim, poor poor springpsringing Dim-yl, but the curses just sloughed off. Too much rain, you see, with a sopping God all agog, his great mouth open like a wet & whistling verison of the Grand Canyon Drownded Deddeadded.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but the torn paper, or was it snow?, of our uh amnesiac world turned into these severe, unheard-of monswoonish rains for a long long time. We thought it would never clear up. A severe committee wanted to renegotiate with the Yps to go back to winter again. Spring always does that to you‑‑& this was a truly horrific spring.

‑‑first mention of Dimnentia, dude

My girl Pola, short for Polabetma, also my wife Bluua, the former Bluua Bakubaloo, & my self, the Former Me, I stretched we a big piece of canvas over us, did we not? She huddled under it, shivering. It wasn't at all cold. Dimnentia doesn't know cold; Dimnentia doesn't have cold (& yet we feel cold all the time, even in the midst of our superabundant, manylayered heat. It was just so very wet).

Allow me to explain the concept of manylayered heat. It consists of warm, invariably sopping-wet sheets of warm rain, verging on & bordering on & segueing into hot rain, steamy jungle rain without the jungles, tropical fever without the benefit of viruses

Allow me to explain the benefit of viruses.

Explanation most cruelly deleted!

You couldn't really breathe in the normal fashion. That is, one could not, as was the custom, form intricate spiracles & Tubules Convolute out of mucoid membranes for the purpose of creating a massive inner hiss of gasses filtering painstakingly‑‑& if we had our way, painfully‑‑into the body.

We'd let the gasses leave on their own. We'd hand them their coats & say, "Show yourself to the door & hurry," & they'd go, slipping out like shadowy scoundrels out the big round doors we have in our bodies that iris-in...iris-out...iris-in...iris-out, quite sensuously...like the rutting of chits, actually.

Whew! Sex fantasy deleted. Sex fantasy deleted. Sex fantasies deleted like Insolently Fucking Moths.

So our bodies were constantly seething‑‑fuming & puffing with embarrassed vapors that had just been handed their coats & thrown out, essentially (at least, they knew damn well that if they didn't leave the cops would come; & your gasses hate that, your gasses they hate that & that at that; more at that). So we were a smokey, seethy lot, & we were in general quite unaware of this quality.

You might say our steaminess was data that we filtered out. Without thinking (otherwise, would it be filtered out?).
Yea so Bluua, Pola, & me‑‑we was hunched under that big tarp, though it was not a plain green cloth or anything of a plain, utilitarian nature. It had in fact drawings‑‑paintings‑‑on it. I became aware of this gradually & am therefore fore some there telling you in the incremental fashion by which the sublimity of our "garment" osmosey'd its way through my Perceptic Filters

then settled in my skin rather like the moisture which was finding its way through this tarp‑‑which was, great work of art though it might & in fact be/was, most inadequate & pitiful as a parapluie.

So I became aware. Sooner than Pola or Bluua, I am proud for some reason to say. & this caused me to gain color, to gain a bit of a glow, as if I felt warmer‑‑i.e., less shivery‑‑in my awareness of Great Art.

"Where'd you get this thing?" I said to Pola.

"I didn't get it. She did," said Pola, pointing helpfully to Bluua, on my other side, as if I couldn't have figured this. There is something about me, apparently, that seems so dumb...

"I got it from the Zome Museum," shivered Bluua, & I nodded encouragingly. But she said no more.

"Looks like a painting or something a painting or something a painting or something a painting or something a painting or something," I bled nervously, sweating, holding up my section of it to what would have been light if the sky were not so full of the melting fragments of the melting amnesia of our world.

"Yea," Bluua went on, looking & sounding quite miserable. "It was a painting."

I did some horriblly sadistic things to her, then examined it while she retaliated a thousandfold, as always.

"It," I said, stammering for a moment & licking my lips a hundred, then a thousand, then a million times time times. Time was still misbehaving quite a lot.
"It...looks like 'The Creation of Adam' from the Sistine Chapel," I said, & I swore it was so.

"Dummy!" blep Pola, slapping my shoulder a hundred, then a million times. "This is a canvas."

"Yea," I eckneggered. "It is. Couldn't be the chapel thing, could it?"

But you could tell it was. My subsequent investigation of this matter in the akashic records indicated that the painting was first a gigantic canvas, which the early Dim adventurers stole, which in turn frustrated/inspired a whimpering Michelangelo to paint it again‑‑in an unfilchable fashion‑‑on the Sistine ceiling.

That's unless I was in the LIES section of the akashic records, which is a million times bigger & indistinguishable from the factual section, which has no sign over it & no name to it & nobody in fact wandering through its vacant, interlunar halls...

"Vucking rain," humjobbed Bluua, pulling Michelangeo's "Creation of Adam" over her head & face & into her mouth swallowing the entire scene.
THE NOTHING FOG

We were handing this big fat cigarette around, but in the unnatural rains we were having it absolutely would not light. It was big & fat, like a homerolled joint in the homes of the poor, & we passed it on to share the duty of protecting it from the water, & just to share something other than being so abysmally wet with this rain.

It was literally soaking through our bones, i.e. these porpous parallel-universe things we have somewhat approaching your concept of bones, joining with our polyporous bones & making so the bones themsevles would squish, & we'd hold very still because it disturbed & very much excited us to hear our bones squish like that. Bones squishing, you see, was generally a sign of sexual excitement, a time of incredible flexibility of bodies, the time of heat.

But this was just rain squishing up our bones, & we sat very quietly on our squishy-boney butts, trying not to be excited by our own squishing, & each by the others' squishing, & trying not to let the gusts of pure energy we use for hormones fool us, & passing this stupid cigarette around.

"Here."

"Thanks. Here ya go."

"Thanks. Here."

"Thank you. Over to you."

& so on. The cock, I mean the joint, I mean the bloody cigarette grew increasingly wimp, much like our fog-suppressed will to do anything.

Typically, Bluua was blunt.

"Why don't we just fuck & get it over with?" she said, finally crushing that fat prick, I mean reefer, I mean soggy cigarette in her fist, so it bled I mean dripped through her teeth I mean fingers. She flipped it away.
"Funny how things just disappear when you flip them away," I said.

& Polabetma spud out of her goard, gluk incredulously, "You mean all three of us, fuck? Yuck!"

Bluua reached round me (her slim butt squishing most exquisitely!) & mushed Pola's head back, a Dimnentian sign of contempt between two females.

But the squish her head made as it sucked in Bluua's hand! It's a wonder we didn't fall to't right then.

Except Pola was right: we couldn't figure out precisely what Bluua meant, assuming Bluua ever meant anything precisely, or at all.

"Yes, all three of us, wimdit!" she said, squatting naked on a mirror with a very staccato plish that excited us, even though it was this plish & nota squish not to mention our afraid to look.

We breathed heavily in the rain, staring sharply forward at the nothing which lay beyond the eges of the fog, known as the nothing fog or the fucking nothing fog.

& we were indeed fucking nothing as we sat there, trying very hard not to squish & to think only abut or about fucking nothing.

Which is nothing but fucking hard thought to think.

"I could never fuck her," I kunk, pointing at Pola, who slapped my hand down & commenced to beat me with a piece of cardboard till the ice-water arrived

which she then dashed upon me to make the current flow.

Heavy torture scene deleted. Trust me, you wouldn't want to see this. Trust me, Mr. Hampton was beiong Other than an Asshole once in a while, which is to say Mr. Hamptoin may have just this once departed from his wonted assholery, as the kids would call it, had the kids not all disappeared.

Though we do feel they're watching us. Now back to the show.

"What show?" Bluua snorted, bloughing all sorts of snot out.

"Thanks a lot, Bluua."

She snickered a snicker denoting that she rerceived this metafictional fugue as nothing more than psychotic fantasy inserted by some mischievous alter. I think it was an extremely wet snicker, but I didn't look to see the sound. You could see sounds in the thickness of the nothing fog. You could hear nothing, but you could see the fucking sounds, fucking, as they were, nothing.

"Yea well I would never fuck him," says Pola, not just pointing at me but poking my soft shoulder. Her hand disappears into my shoulder & I love it there...

My eyes have been closed & absorbing the rain for very long time. My face has wellnight dissolved like some {screaming baconian pope}‑‑dissolution caused by daydreaming which will in turn induce further dissoltino, leading in circular florum to yet more daydreaming & so on.

I needed someone to slap me out of it, but the women were like as not dissolving even more than I‑‑Pola with her hand stuck inside me (Ahhh!), Bluua dreaming off somewhere to my dream-right, in the dream-directions of the dreamspace of the fucking nothing fog.

Not true. Bluua slaps me out of it, with that special steamy sting of a sopping-wet snap.

Pola is a mess, her face a concave saucer of water into which you can see you eyes O so greatly enlOrged, & we grunt & struggle to pull her hand out of me, & grunt & sigh & snruggle & moan & snuggle and, yes, end up a squiggly, squishy mass fucking itself in the form of a pale old happy face from the paldays of happyface days of your.

"Urph!" we all say all at once, & we lie there & hate ourselves for a whiley while.
CHOCOLATE-LANGUAGE BOOTHS
or
I HAD NO TEETH FOR THE SCENE

& after the mega-monsoon monsters of blustery spring came a golden, sunny time‑‑a renaissance, if you will (a concept we Dim have always been partial to, having stolen just about eveything your oan Uerph produced during most of your forgotten yours)

only it was summer, and, if truth be known, kind of celebratory & mindless, what with the fine & multicolored powders known as hormones busting our butts & forcing us to couple- & treble- & gang-up & fling off our extraneous molecules, which is what we know as clothes & pour ourselves all over ourselves in the bushes‑‑or the blue crystal plosives known as bushes

& just youknow riffle our brains out, pouring our ovol or seminal synonymous powders of meaning into one another's split & widespread interstices, an activity enforced all the more by this being our first & only spring, our first & only summer, & our first & only Renaissanse Faire Complete With Hormonial Bashe, & an activity which, so far as anyone who who knows knows, has nothing whatsoever to do with conception, or regeneration, or birth.

We of Dimnentia have not cracked that egg yet!

& there were orange & yellow tents & banners & brisk breeze tufting up the fluff behind your ears & the bright sound of toddlers laughing (mysterious toddlers of the moon? who knows?), & various ways of stuffing yourself & wasting time, & booths where you could try your skills at stopping time, & prizes involving the creation of

swirling "time-tornadios" in the spinner's immediate vicinio, & booths gifting one with languages alien & dire, full of sometimes dark & sometimes sweet exotic sounds‑‑rather like chocolate; "Chocolate-Language Booths," they were thought of by some, who, however, insantly disappeared when that particular thought was thought was thunk‑‑& the great works of art from most of your & anybody-else's-we-could-steal's renaissances, which was a monumental heap of pilfered art, suggesting a "repressed, piratic past" for the sickly Dim (a much-hypothesized theory amongst our introspectors as to what was wrong with us: a massive subject, there) (yea but-but right now we couldn't care, for we were thick with the euphoria of thieves, not to mention our own false renaissance we had going here, ar).

But it was so sweet! I mean, we remembered who our mates were. I, in particular, hooked up with my mate, Bluua (below more whom of more below), so he could interlock many an arm (& "lusty, thick-thighed liquid leg," if truth be gnum) & stroll the walkways of the big & hastily-set-up fair.

I was watching the whole thing from the much larger, glass booth of the Ypions‑‑a grey & humming, hermetic, invisible, & altogether more serious booth than the thousand or so booths swelled & flapping in the sexual winds of the Pressure Zomes down there, in compressed imagery of Dim I stared down at‑‑a bustling, miniaturized Dimnentia concavely warped upon itself, a fisheyed, spheric Dim-in-a-bottle which I & the Yps stared down at like interns observing some doomed & disgusting operation, which just happened to be going well for the moment, due to overadministration of toxo-euphoric drugs. This was the situation here.

"Hello? Böéèöb? You all right?" whispered unnecessarily whispered Hebs, gently holding my arm.

"Oh...yeh. I'm...OK," I stammered, touching my moist head. 'I forget...and slip in sometimes."

Hebs smiled indulgently. "That'll happen," he said sagely (& I always wanted to punch in his faces when he faces when he faces when he talked like that!) & he stared back down at the chaotic, self-indulgent godmam mesh below. "After all, you belong there more than here."

"O SHUT THE VUCK UP!" I screamed & while this caused a humiliatingly minor stir amongst the two to three million-other Yps in the booth with us, it had become a minor thing, an expected thing, a thing of cuistom & an almost-normla thing.
You know this is how the Ypions thought of me‑‑as "an almost-normal thing."

"So," said Hebs, speaking in an ever-so-slightly more subdued (hence, pseudo-soothing) voice which abraded me like barbed wire scraped across your antsy, desiccated, sun-dry sundying skim (yea, I was preety much a godmam patient here, wasn't I?), but stepping a few strategic inches behind me‑‑you know, in case I should blow.

I would've ground my teeth except I had no teeth for the scene.

"Any sign of drupes down there?"

"Yes," I said with an inspired controlled brightness‑‑and, I like to think, a strength, which is its very suaveness made all the million Ypions jump

Yea‑‑made all the million Ypions jump.

Yea!‑‑made all the million Ypions jump!

I pointed, my finger stretching the thick glass out as it poken through the plane of the thick glass & further scared my "hosts."

"Yes‑‑I believe there's booth down there. I tink."

Anf nosoonerhadI thunk than I was standing with Bluua before the Drupe Booth, digging through pockets eternal & infinite for some change to buy a drupe.

"Win a drupe. Win a drupe!" the barker sang, & the whole world was a hum with the tune that the barker sang.

I was vaguely aware that here was my chance to win back my own drupe. Here, therefore, was my chance to win back my past‑‑by playing some sort of weird game.

& I was game!
THE FOURTH SPHERE

"Five full mooniess, please, Mr. Barker, sir," I feg, my voice cracking into the same adolescent slide that made Bluua clutch my elbow in the standard fashion & jumping up & down with titless jiggles wriggling beneath the tank-top with Foreboding Aquatic Motif.

After slapping my many faces off, in a vibrato series of slappatos complete with with full repletive traceryraceryaceryceryeryryy, for calling him Barker Man, the Dog Man hand me four full mooniess. Now please note: I gave him no coin, & he gave me four, not five, moonies. Continuity problem, no? & I was afraid to ask for the other moonie‑‑afraid of what he would do

and me afraid with my girlie on my arm, ganging on my arms, jumping & giggling, and, though I will not mention it in the Meniscus of the Savvy Seen, ripping my arm off, not at the elbow & not at the shoulder, no, but halfway been the shoulder & the soul. & that smarts!!!

The carny music we need for the carny music we need for the carny music we seem for the carny music seen for the CARNY MUSIC SCENE comes up a bit late, sounding I might add {languid & sluggish}, & {langish & sluggord} & {lambent & buggord} & making a Lang Wish for a night slower & deeper than quag, if you dretch my rift, & some rather outafocal lights iling a whirl in a whiragig of lights in the backdrop of the aftermath of a backdrop there there there.

I made the standard moves. Sing along with me, won’t you all? I   steps back & glaceth at my goil,   pat the arm with which she holds my broken arm,   smile (you KNOW the "tune"!),   toss the first of the four moonies up in my palm, &

FIRE that sucker at the first of the four {bottled alien worlds} that live in the {preservation alienworld bottles} lined along the infinitely distant starwall starwall starwall starwall starwall my first moon plungeth down, all of us‑‑even the Barker Dog Mandog-Man

follow with our faces & our skulls phlowing phorth in the phorms of lightspeed light as one would phuphollow a cosmic tennis match of an infinite scheme, such that our features streak down the long black tunnel of the tubule at the end of time until the tossed moon, all mossy & gravid with age & the massspeed flatnesss of their eye, like a contact lense arcing toward hell in the form of a flaght-ought mooghn, smacks against the first world, a desert world, a desert world because I sets mu sights high.

But the pitched moon shatters its face against the bones of its reflected face & face & face & the bottle holds.

"ONE FOR THE BOTTLE!" hoots the fucking doggone mad to the surrounded crowd who don’t realize that in the grammar of this seen they're surrounded by a crowd‑‑something a crowd never realize they realize despite the thoughts crowding in‑‑& punish me for my miss (with my giggling Miss!) by slashing off a hack of skin from my forearm, right where I mutiliated myself not sixteen years ago after a fight with my father he will never know, & placing in my hand the secondary moon.

& this time my relationship to my gal's condensed, & my gal's condensed into a dry wraithe of seareed, but still with admiration all over her weedy eyes, some look the gods've put there for to make me throw, & I throw

this time the ball a ball of balla ball of ball a ball of finely-wrought, multicolor polyphyrene unshatterable evenglass© tossed against the goop face of the sewerworld or swampworld‑‑(just think: an entire sewerworld!)‑‑& shatters obscenely againstnthe obscene face the blopptout sewerworld or swamprowlrd is wearing.

"BOTTLES TWO!" hoops the barter to the unshelled crystal amphisphere of crowds surrounding crowds surrounding misspelled crowns arounding crowds & hangs me the third bolus.

"The third bolus," I gasp to Bluua who gasps & holds my hand as we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & we look at one another & gasp & look back down & throw the ball of glue which is

The mythical Third Bolus of Glew!

So where the ball goes, so goeth my hand.

Doesn’t even touch the glass, & besides, the world I threw my hand toward was a blur behind the glass, & besides.

"THREE FOR THE BOIT!" shouts the barker whom I realize (psst! c'mere: whom I realize is God) & hands me the Fourth Sphere.
SMILING TOROID SKELETONS OF LOVE

Hell, that fourth ball was pure fluff. Not even worth talking about, as it fluffed against the solid glass of the can in which some damned dead world covered with skulls was stored. Not even worth thinking about as Gof with the great & tooth ylaugh of God hands me the last moon.

But I could tell the way it burned through my hand this was a substantial moon, that God was giving me a chance to get through this segué, & that when Bluua kissed this last moon at the expense of her lips, which is the explanation for why Bluua has no lips which was the pollen for the seed of this metastory, this one was gonna crack the glass to the water world or storm world, which it does, seeting us forth into the great rains that formed the spring of our world, in which Bluua & I, T-shirts & all, & waving goodbye to God which doubles as a