|
Xf
ORDERS IN THE SIGNS OF XF or THE SYMBOL FOR THIS HAPPENS HERE It was a dork & starmy night. Chiin was huddled amongst the dead & wounded vapruux down in down downtown Phrinedde, out on Xf. These vayz advertived mostly adjectives & the odd, brokemen prepositium, which is sad to contemfuckinplate & to read & to see see see. These pathetic, sentient signs of Xf‑‑the Vapruux Entities, or Vayz (just name for the signs!)‑‑craved & vacantly pined with aberrant desires just to be read. They pressed themselves to your face till‑‑if you were possessed of breath‑‑you couldn't breathe till you read. But these signs long expired just couldn't be read. This was the low-life on fabulous Xf, but Chiin had his orders from something funneling orders through the intricacies of Xf. This was Jeeg's Solo in B-Flat for Master Thief wherein Chiin has none of his equipment. Xf was effless, heaven knows. Chiin was under the thumb of these rotten orders, except he had no orders but to nestle in his breath amongst the signs like a broken sign himself. He guessed he was to steal for the Xf, but he didn't begin to know whether or what. His orders come within the signs of Xf. He had to nestle down deep inside, right in the fluffy guts of the goddam signs‑‑& this proved much less disgusting than he thought. He got the pale-green fever of the signs, the pastel fevers of the fabulous signs (they still had some of their magic that was the ESSENCE OF SIGN!), & he began to even think he could read these signs. He blurt out his eyes (this happens here, §, the symbol for This Happens Here}) trying to read them, & that's where his orders come in. His instructions come within great clusters of Fluctuating Nothingness which is something like mud suffused in doubt, sometimes so severe he found xmxelf making plans to leave, thinking he was never sent there in the first place, that it was all the impulse of some aberrated dream or some drug or marching like an idiot in my sleep. Then a small fold of the rumpled cloth or something would turn, & he would have another part of the message. He had to stop planning things then & settle down like a Gake antegrovidy bob, & wait, trying to see such meaning in the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything the meaningless everything. HIRTUAL VAMP or THERE IS NO BODY OF THE QUESTIONER Q: Are you not in fact trying to take over the reader's mind with these repetition? A: You mean "repetitions," asshole. Absolutely not. (thundering) I give the lie to that! (roaring) May God strike me down if that's a fact. (sinistring) If you repeat that question or rephrase it to me in any way I will skin you alive. Do you understand? But no questioner is to be found, nor parts of a body. There is No Body of the Questioner. God may have struck herorhim down. Now back to our story. Chiin was, to speak bluntly, a corrupt formulation‑‑an experimental compound, perhaps‑‑simmered into being in the glades of Dew, my sources tell me (OK‑‑giggling, somewhat psychotic sources...and yet always so true)‑‑somewhere in the deep glades, they figure‑‑you know, where the rains become visionary, & where breath is plucked like light from the very thought of (breath) plucked from the very thought of (it), plucked from the very thought of the sources of the memory of my Very First (Breath) resources memory, with with the sap of the turquoise pollum pouring over my face. Great clouds filled the Faces of the Innihlatians watching me. These were some weird faces, I don't mind telling you) I don't mind telling you) I don't mind telling you &) I don't mind telling you. Excuse me. I believe I may have reached enlightenment. Certainly I'm levitating. Certainly I'm feeling pretty good. Author quits writing at this point. Xf is now & will till the end be written by a Hirtual Vamp {* or narrator here} we've created here... Yea right. You can't believe everything you read, including that you can't believe everything you read except you can't believe everything you read saving for believing everything you read, which is well-nigh impossible. Mystery Box Q: Why this syntactic shit, Mr. Hampton? K: A rhythm-riff. A sort of rhythm-riff. Honestly! I was also trying to express the Chinese box of confusion that comes with trying to throw off your myriad illusive selves. Yea right! But back to our story, if any. Figure 1: Story If Any The formula was registered as Bad®‑‑he was registered as Bad®. There was laughter everywhere. His Lightplume Seal of Induction read curtly he was to be "the Genius of the Genius of Thieves" (!)! His plume spoke to him curtly, yet gently, surly yet sexy, sullenly yet swirly, soddenly but z!rly. It definitely has something very soft beneath, which Chiin could find, & steal, & corrupt as he could steal up forth (which means the truth) from words. Everyone condemned Chiin for thinking this, but he thought he was supposed to be the quintessent angel of the Poets of Omstrolohom, something insanely beautiful & extraordinary. But the image of what might have been me went wrong, or had bad sectors, or was just too illegally daring ever to work. No, Chiin was the umpteenth conception of himself, & he was still All Wrong. He would have been rescinded like a broken law had he not been illegal in the first place, & a lost corruption lost in the ridiculous everglades of poor, forgotten Dew. He was instead raised by the Innihlatians, who would of course raise anything, even with those gog-clouds of fascination in their faces. THE MERCHANT OF THE STRANGE or THE SHOP OF THE FRIGID AIR Chiin stomped his feet in front of the glass of the shop of the crystal store & heaved out one preparatory sigh. He stepped through coronas of light coorornaos nofa lsight crnso ih coronas of light signifying passage through the Meanings of the Meanings of the Store. He gasped as his suit shiddered up much shuver to an yltramuff. "Bracing in here," piped the sidling little Pl p coming up again as if he hadnt just crawled like a snail up your spine one time. The air was white, but this Pl p? was seeming here to Chiin to be seeming to move to be in these strange little ice-skating motions. He had the frosted face of Pl p? & mercurial perforations opening up to eyes & the skin covered in tattoos in the shape of metaphors & the snow-peaked cap of a head with the miniature pinetuffs atop it & the trademark "signature sloup" of the casual Pl p? & the general Pl p?y aura typified in the Book of Atmospheres as of "sleaze-congeniality." This skating stuff curved against the back of the crystal floor. Chiin cracked pop his mask pock off & pulled back the crust of his frosted crunch (with fragment antique eggshells rollicking downdown everywhere!) & looked down at the Pl p? (he couldn't help himself) awfully askance. He couldn't help himself. This slight chap must be one of the lower forms. "I am not of the lower forms, you fucking thief," the Pl p? said, as if reading the poem. What's worse, he was attemping a comforting tone. But he sounded odd, dry. He sounded like someone gone quite mad quoting the exact words of an ancient story of himself (except for the "fucking thief" part). He sounded dead. He sounded creepy. He sounded very suggestive & lewd & at the same time enchantingly sycophantic. He sounded very mesmerizing, for what or hero didn't know didn't hurt him not to know these Ploops or Pleeps or whatever they are with their smiley faces & their big, friendly eyes, the way they lick your face, do for you, etc., these Pl ps if you will, can very quickly control your whole mind with their voices personality. It's just a thing they can do. Our hero is a slave for the rest of this narrative. I tell you the things he made him do!!! "No...of course not," Chiin said somewhere back in the stream of time far behind me, & he sounded cold, like someone in a frozen room babling into the puffings of his all-too-visible visible breaths. "Did you come up twice just now?" "I beg your pardon, motherfucker? You sayin I came up twice or sumtin?" Scene of Chiin enduring Gross Physical Intimidation, Chiin eating humble pie, Chiin humiliated, Chiin abased & used, etc. The Usual Humiliation, but I promised I would cut out the Big Humiliation Scene from this here poem. This is just me, your long-dead author, keeping his word. Chiin was worried he would be thrown out through Empurpled Coronas unto Reversions of the Outside (outside night) night outside air, but the Pl p? merely smüff'd, electing the Zemblances of Professional Deportment and poked some sort of skein which had just then floated to floating by happen when, & two lonely flows of music began chatting back & forth. He poked the skein again & the skein again & the music stopped. The music stopped its little talk, & the event folded in gracefully like a very tidy dream. The separate strands of music fromthe ambulant skein stoptok, & the skein infolds in the shadows of the imfolled trance, & it moves right on. The Pl p? paused to savor the silence. "You seem a bit dumbfounded, sir," he said, with that spike of acrid scorn only sir can carry. "What can I show you?" Chiin sniffed. Lower order definitely. Two signs certain of the lower forms: 1) deny they're LO; 2) talk funny. "My name is Chiin Said Chiin," said Chiin Said Chiin. "I'm seeking a means by which to disappear." Why wasn't this as hard to say as he had thought? But there was no time for thought. "Yes. The frijj * hoover round you like a vacancy of flies," the shrewd Pl p? noted, nodding at the nothingness outside. "Like fucking vacancies of flies, sir. I don' think I can help you here." "Well" Chiin sighed, with surpising breath. "I'll see everything, then." "Ah. That we have. This way." TRANSPOSITIONAL CLOCK He drew Chiin deeper into Madness Bazaar®. They come to the weaving of tenses from past to present (just happens sometimes) a tall bureau sort of thing, leaning & glinting like a ruined tooth. "Beautiful, in't?" the Pl p? said cheerfully, though it wasn't reality. I mean, you could tell you were in the midst of a powerful hallucination, overwhelming dream or some sort of mind control. But there was nothing you could do but live it out, & hope it doesn't get too bad, really hope like mad... "Here may indeed be perhaps maybe be the perfect item for your impossible needs," the guy with the weirdassed name goes on, evidently not aware of the literary hankypanky going on just behind his ears, if those are ears... Those are not ears. Back in the story, Chiin was trying to let many things pass. Signs rustled past the distant window in the distant stormy spaces of out doors (though the doors, the doors, the doors I must say were like DISAPPEARING FAST). "Perfect? Why?" "The cabinet of a man gone mad," the Pl p? laughed madly. You shoulda heard it! You should definitely find this & download it & listen to it. This would explain everything! Just kidding. But he was really & truthfully covered with that lurid make-up that comes in on the air (if you want it to) but then but swug but open the door, which swig unugently on its crystal hinges. There were distinctly mad devices inside. "Alien objects?" quap Quiin, licking his liverlips. The little Pl p? plucked one of the bright devices out & actually tossed it in the air. The arc was uncertain, & Chiin reached out to catch the thing, only to find his hands entangled in the Pl p?'s. They looked at one another. "No bother," the merchant of strangeness said, pulling his hands back. The shiny thing was hanging in the air, emitting a phased series of charmlike wrinkles to the light in the spaces of the light between the spaces of the airairair. "An ether clock," said le geek or creep or Pl p? nodding up at the thing. "Measures time‑‑or the stuff you see that passeth for time‑‑on a much much finer basis than ours. & this‑‑" plucking out a green ovoid sheathed in a series of amidly I mean amadly-interacting lunar slices. This object he tossed up & down in his palm, then lobbed to Chiin, who caught it with the awkward reflexes of misfiring fear. Ze Pl p?'s pleasure was obvious. What a name, huh? "Another clock?" "Indeed. You begin to see a pattern here. Technicians of Snall as I recall keep studying this one. They've come to really hate the thing but they can't stop coming‑‑sometimes tattered & alone, sometimes at awful hours. They seem to think it's some sort of transposition clock, because its units‑‑inasmuch as they can measure them‑‑are going down." "Counting down?" "Counting down‑‑like fate, sir." the Pl p? took the device from Chiin & placed it back with a French-curved slice through the shop of the frigid air. "Measurring what‑‑antitime?" "Reading backwards from the end of time, methinks. Then there's that." This time he merely pointed, at an object like the gashes of a silver sphere, crisscrossed & clustered together into intricate fractal ratios. "An ogre," the Pl p? said, firmly but mytseriously. "Perhaps measuring subparticular time or time as seen from the quanta of a tachyon, not that it's working. Hard to say. It simmers in the mind, eventually, boiling it, & drives one mad." With that he closed the cabinet, knowing that Chiin was aching to see more. "You should purchase this & leave," the Pl p? said abrutly, I mean abruptly. "If you can't disappear, you could at least be relieved of reality. Believe me, that would drive the frijj mad." "But they would still be here?" "Of course, sir. They would be in your dreams‑‑in even & especially your maddest dreams." Chiin stood in black silence. "They would be much larger...in your dreams." Chiin couldn't speak, his fingers on the door. The Pl p? gently pulled the door away & closed the cabinet with its madness of clocks inside. "But there are other ways," the Pl p? said cheerfully. "Over here, for instance." He pointed & then actually skated toward the model of an iridescnt ship implanted in the darkness of your brain or unwieldy ymusical instrument lowering in the corner like the genius of a sullen child. The Pl p? let Chiin observe the thing, sloping his neck yo & bobbinghis little head in the dance of incomprehension. "This," the Pl p? said, "manufactures health‑‑but whose kind of health we cannot say." "It's been tried?" "It has been tested indeed‑‑on some of the 'lower forms,' you might say." "And...?" The Pl p? looked affectionately at the thing, seeming at once inclined & afraid to actually touch it. "It gave them health," he said slowly, "but of the wrong kind. & then there is this..." * held the thing to his eye which he had for an eye which he had for an eye what he had for the occasion, handed it to Chiin who held it to his eyewhhfto, who then tossed the thing high up into the air, where it paused where the author forgot he had the scene. "It looks like an eye," sez Chiin. "Yeawell it is an eye, sir," the Pl p? cooed admiingly. "It is taking everything in‑‑nt watching us, you mind, but rather seeing (& no doubt more than seeing) the seeingof all other beings." "'Seeing the seeing of all other beings.'" "It is the eye of collected vision. From Gpadjygom V. The only one left of its kind, of course. There could never be two of these for long, now could there, sir?" Another thing about your lower forms‑‑they liked to mess with your mind. "And even though you are thinking lower order," the Pl p? went on, "I will still show you more." "You'll note, sir, this hollow‑‑here, in the air here‑‑shape of an enraptured woman. You'll note the plane of the table over which snow flies. You will note the puddle of ice. & here, swelling its bottle, what looks to be an insufferably tough beast in colossal chains ("symbolic chains, of course"). Here we have a vessel, still sealed, full of unreleased seasons‑‑seasons whih have therefore never ben seen, & here, quite a few wafers of a fluttering sun, a very literal, subtle sun, right there in the room with you & me." & here is a book. They call it The Rotten Gospel, although such sweet smells waffle out of it! Here..." He held the Rotten Gospel to Chiin's nose. It smelled indeed most sweet, like one of the azure mint glades of Bphreen or Pake. Just think‑‑I could buy it & open it, Chiin thought like an evil child. But he simply nodded & pulled his face away from the book. "God knows what's in there, ay, sir?" the Pl p? piped, tossing the book into a vat of hadow like a piece of junk, then plucking out another ting‑‑a lamp that filled the room with an absolutely startling light. Chiin's smood opaqued all but the instantaneous phases of that light. "Amnovoreeyan spring," the Pl p? said. He waved the light around the room. Everything warped into its light. It was rather dizzying. "Observe, of you will, how nothing that was here in the dark is here in this awful light." The Pl p? said this loudly, as if the light were deafening, & distinctly, as if the light rendered (or revealed) Chiin an idiot. He put the light back down & it faded slowly. "Dusk!" said the Pl p? fulsomely. This thing must be one of his favorites. ... Thus did the Pl p? adroitly pique & tantalize, always pulling Chiin gawking away from each precious item h was stolen from. And they went down the corridor that flows forth wealth, & in some nook there Chiin & he were looking at a box of spare planets‑‑aromatic balls rich with the tracings of every color. Nice velvet box you could coo into. Chiin felt astonishing maze of mountains. "I'm feeling very very warm toward you!" Chiin declared‑‑something he would never dare later to believe. "And I toward you sir." "Chiin." Infamous pizzichilli love scene goes here, but has been deleted to protect the children, or else stolen by the children when they disappeared, if that's what happened. "Yes well, that would be this box here of luminous buds. Watch it! They serve as currency on Armam, which is imploded deep, somewhere very deep & not to be found‑‑in this cabinet here. You could find it if you bought it, I suppose. & here‑‑a loge * full of suppositions‑‑peculiar half-thoughts ("Three-forths, octually") curled forth curiously in the terminus of their own utterance. .... "We have to strip naked to see these other things," the Pl p? said. "You're kidding," Chiin said reflexively, but the Pl p? was instantly. Chiin noticed nothing about his body. Please note that there is nothing to notice in his body. "Or have you seen enough?" the Pl p? said, but Chiin was naked instantly. They went through a serious of perspicuous paintings * hanging chiffon in their very faces. Chiin heard a brook‑‑distinct inclinations of a brook with a crystal clashing. The Pl p? clicked it on & the room went transparent. He could see the outlines of things, like bubbles on an invisible hand dunked in the water, but he stood within limitless spans of perspicuity & was breathless & without words anyway (the light made words too limpid to use, or he was just in shock. "Night light," the Pl p? said, taking the device rather sternly from Chiins somewhat stuporous grasp. "Dangerous, though. If you leave it on too long you lose all vision of solidity. I should put this thing amongst the locked things." He brightened & looked at Chiin. "Would you like to see the locked-up things‑‑the dangerous things? Come this way." Chiin noticed that the Pl p? never waited for an answer. "You'll excuse me while I put on a disguise," the Pl p? said, & swept up his hand before his body, instantly attaining the look of an acid-crazed charlatan. His each & every furrow seemed to be laughing. While Chiin stood more naked than ever. Not only naked, neither‑‑but wet...suddenly very wet. There were internal storms everywhere. "Just a precaution," the painfully grinning charlatan painfully said. "When you descry this stuff you'll forget you're dying, believe me." He's just messing with me, thought darkly Chiin, trying to reassure himself by looking at his hands‑‑& it did reassure him, till he notice he uh-huh-huh-huh! notice these not his hands, & there too many. Way too many many alien hands (& they look as though they want to touch his body!!!). "Nothing, sir," came the voice of the harlequin, but it was coming from nowhere. "Come in here, please. Don't mind those. Those are just the hands of amazement," as if this canceled everything. There were bones & skeletons & remains everywhere. Inasmuch as Chiin could decipher the bodies that once lay the bodies that once lay behind them, it looked like their heads simply rolled right off. This is a nightmare realm. This is a scarey realm. What on earth * would he want to buy in here? "You'll be buying your way out, basically," the smile on the harlequin brooding oer the doer into the locked chamber said. "Get your ass on in," & Chiin‑‑feeling very sorry for himself in the mist of these compulsions‑‑pulled the portions of his body pulled the portions of his of, which seemed druping loose like the portions of my syntax prose, & then nevertheless then went right in. Everything was back up to normal now, possibly. He stood up in a room whose warmness were like voices in the half-remembered room you droop to long past certain horizons of a half-half sleep, & whose warmness, by the way, increased toward the level of your head. "Just above your head, it is freezing," the Pl p? seemed to said. Anyway, normal. They had clothes on; there were no longer bones no no longer round, and, in general, so on & on. "That was the lock we went through, sir," the Pl p? said. "Just a precaution. Actually everything I sell is‑‑well, limitlessly dangerous, bringing on all sorts of fates beyond the comprehension of even a dying consciousness." "You're trying to calm me down?" Possible sex scene here. Lost or deleted, the subject of many a failed archeological dig by many a failed archeologist. Definitely something about this spot in the text our universe my master your personal sexual slave, something that leads to innumerable further sex scenes, but we're just not sure. "Now this, I call this the Labyrinth Chair." It was a chair indeed‑‑miniature, obviously the plaything of a sinister child, & it was overstuffed unto absurdity or else a dumb uncertainty, "onto which the sitter clambers to be perched & which then, as near as we can figger, superimploves into the sitter's inner picture of the sitter, if you will, the comprehensions of a picture of each soul who has sat upon it then took the picture of the compressions of the soul now sitting in it then throws the nub of the former sitter quite off, like a crushed Bacon painting, to...not so much to a floor as onto thse trickular invert lost-velocity rivulets of some sort of dismally playful crud, like a melted rug, which you would lay on forever, till you turned unto these tricky bones, unable in your sudden multifariousness to figure out how unable how to figure out to move, if you know what I mean, sir. It's Quoaquoalean in origin. God doaknow what they might have had in mind. It might possibly be a reward, or a joke to them." "Have you asked them?" "We're afraid to ask them. They might find out that we had their chair." The Pl p?'s tone suggested he was talking to an idiot, which Chiin certainly felt. "Well I don't want it." "Of course you do. But neverthelss, come here. Come to the transparency of here, & look at this baby here, my friend. IN THE MANNER OF A MANUFACTURED DEER Tired of showing me shit, the shopkeeper shows me some slides in a media hallucination wihtin a media hallucination wihtin a control group not undergoing any form of reality alteration whatsoever, & that you're going to just have to believe, believe or die, ha ha. I was just kidding there‑‑just some narrational hankeryprankery, just dickin withya. Here are some slides to calm you down while I slip my hand into your pants. Just kidding. What an asshole! I'm thoughtform of beads containing various interesting fevers, "most of them letal, judging from experience," commented Pl p?. Presentation thoughtform of a vast collection of fingerguns, which were guns that fit the fingers perfectly. You couldn't wriggle off the fingers till you'd wriggled off the guns, & the guns looked like cannons by then. "God!" cried Chiin in dismay. Chiin was grunting through the forest of his fingernerves with a machete, disconnectinghim one by numberless oneway ones. "What do these fingers shoot any anyway?" "Mm," answered the Pl p?, with a sweep of histrionic magnitude. "The silver ones with the sharp tips‑‑you know, the ones that seem so clean they shoot blindness. The Jnebraem tastegun there‑‑you know: azure-tinged, brachiating space like the antlers of a Csuruitam elastic deer {these were manufactured, in te manner of most deer}?‑‑they shoot you a taste that makes you crazy (actually a pleasant taste; I have in fact shocked myself many times. Shot. I mean I shot myself many times." "You shocked yourself with one of these guns?" "Shot. I shot my goddam self with the Jnebraem tastegun, dear. After I had tasted it, after I had found out what madness was about." He pause. "You want a taste, my friend?" Chiin grunted, pulling his fingers free. He noticed that he had finger after finger to pull free, & that these finger after finger frees lengthened in the manner of a morphic dream almost infinitely. As a matter of fact, he did want a taste of the Jnebraem tastegun. He wanted a taste of just about everything here‑‑& the Pl p?, sweating in the jungle of the fingers of his nerves, wiping his brow now & then, looking tired, feverish, possibly malarial, knew he did. But did the little sugger care that he did? They were too deep inside the shop, both of them, with both seeing vision visitations * much too intense for them. As * had said, "These are the products of imbalance, here‑‑the contrivances that made alien civilizations die, or shy off the edges of the known & practically die. Their respective role had become very very very un unclear, if I may sututter it so. "Well, never mind," sighed the Pl p?, putting down the gun. "Some would shoot you poisons (some would make your mind turn blue‑‑like a bingcrystal egg of poison or the turquoise blob of a meniscial, faceless head), dissatisfactions of the dead, & some would should unprecedented writhings so you make like the wormings of a lower form. Let's see...that one simply sprays you with a bstle of very urgent noise. Backfores sometimes, making everything very quite (I should know!)." "Well, do you?" "What?" "Know." "No," said the Pl p? with the caution usually reverved for a dangerous lunatic‑‑say, a lunatic standing near a plenitude of mysterious alien guns. "No, I don't know," he added. The man had obviously forgotten what they were talking about, as have I as have we all. DIDDLES or REFLECTIONS OF THE Pl p?-WAS-HE "Have I mentioned this one?" he teje, holding up the most beautiful nimbus. "Diddles with your short-term memory, I think. "It leaks, actually. Defective. I could give you this as a steal‑‑a fucking steal, I say." "All right," spez Chiin very calmly. He was hoping the calmness would spread, rather than settling into mists within the blue articulations of the mystical, inner swump. "Would you?" "Would I what?" "Give me the nim at a bargain, friend." Chiin put the gun down, his eyes full of aitated mirrors. "No," he bled, then looked at the flower of the blossoming little nimbus little nimbus rather helplessery. He had no idea why he had just bled "no." It didn't seem to be affecting Chiin, so he took what's left after the Age of the Blistering Laughter of the after of the Pl p?'s little pleepslittle arm. "Let's move away from here," he xoox, & from then on was trying to sell this stuff to the Pl p?. "I'm not actually on the market for any guns," blobe the Pl p? slowly. "Of course not," fneb Chiin, who felt an elation & a confidence he had not felt he had felt in a thousand years. "You want something healthy. Here..." He held up a Xroxy shell‑‑actually the cone from a manufactured tree‑‑a container like a onion of absorptive indimensions which surrounded one with the pollen of strange sycophantic admiration. "With this, you would be the star of the universe from here on in," he told reflections of the Pl p?-was-he. "Why would I want that?" zeet the Pl p?. He was clearly going to be a dificult customer. "Clearly, I shall have to take you round the corner that melts," said Chiin, maintaining his sheen of illustrious humor. He felt he was selling the gifts God that God gave here. That was it: he was selling the gifts that God gave. He was like some sort of angel, an inspired man, he thought with his First Thought. Or like some horrible, decadent worm, on the turn of his Second Thoght. Or like something other still, something inchoate still still worming at the passage of that Third & Awful Thought. & yet there were stil more thoughts... "My kids call it the game of the awful thoughts, though it is actualy called Purplux, the game of the lost thoughts, in which the mind, thinking it is playing Purplux, gets lost in the Mountains of Thought, Thought Mountain of which you can see, you can see yourself seeing, anyway, through consequitous skeins of thought thought. There it is, friend, its crest risen risen through the skeins of the mythic atmosphere (here, sworls secreting three seasons of recursive mental rains, the Rains of Memory; there, a laughter of atmospheres, admixtures of airs too nobly alien to fuse; & over there, at the last sufficient sigh of the lost horizon (where you see it there, lost in the corners of that secret eye you have kept mouring forever over the traces of your dream of a stillborn past. That was your beautiful dream, friend‑‑that was the dream that breaks your heart, not unlike the mutual, respective dreams, the dreams in fact that keep us each all mourning through the ruptures of the dreams of subliminity that were going to be our lives which comprise these actual, dead lives (lonely suckrs, aren' they?), all formed so beautiful in the folds of the red-swelled dawn. You can't see them? Well, never mind. Just as well, & never mind. I was pointing too much in the dreamscape, such as your eye weeping for the nature of its unborn past, right there. You do see the moutnain there, don't you though? its crest breaking past the other thoughts like the fist of God? They call that Fist-of-God, friend." But Chiin couldn't see it. It was all so beautiful. He was weeping way too much. "Look at this," he said, after they had passed across the sands of that aforementioned Corner of the Melting Sandsoresaid. He displayed a tiny array of needles arranged like the pipes of a minuscule organ. "What's is it?" "It's an Uquularian musical aquarium. With this, you can feed passionate swatches of perfect music, each note shimmering through the stanzas like a shiver of beautiful seas." "Where are the fish?" "It is an aquarium of seas, my friend Chiin‑‑an aquarium of nameless seas, my friend my friend." But the Pl p? was getting worse & worse as a customer, worse & worse as a friend. "'Aquarium of nameless seas,' he says," he said. Hor charming." The son of a bitch! "What else you got?" "Here we have rocks‑‑lots of aorcks. A collection of very special rocks." "You selling them as a set, or one by one?" drawled the Pl p? uncaringly. But he was caught up, Chiin could tell, by some of these suggestive sotnes, "Yes," Chiin replied, since straight answers were getting him straight anwers were getting him answers were getting him no nowhere. "Hold this one," said the Pl p?. "It will make you very very still." He plunked it in the Pl p?'s hand rather before he had time to think. The Pl p? turned motionless & mirrory right there theng. He in fact became a statue from then on in." "A Lilimbion statue stone, of course" Chiin said to himself. "Makes statues out of anything, you see. Your Lilinbions were crazy about statues. A Lilinbion sculptor (thy've maintained a few) can can make statues out of air." He paused & enjoyed the stiless of the atued figure there. It was an excellent statue, really. Then he plucked the stone from the statue's hand. "But maybe that's not for you." "I guess the set would be too much for you. How much did you say?" "It's still being calculated," said Chiin. " We can't seem to calculate the cost of the collection in anything like a finite span of time. W're not seeling these sotnes as a set. Whatever gave you that idea?" "I..." "Tell you what: we'll get back to you after the edge of the aftertime." The Pl p? was wondeirng if Chiin was mocking him. "Consider these," he said. --food of unbalanced goodness --a Hoddgoggean tantrum-stone --vacuum pebbles --Here, in box after box, we find the last dose of medicine of some one who disappeared‑‑a murky dreg or crystal or droplet, medicines of numberless kinds, some of probably lethal oxicity, some no doubt far worse. But you could touch & look at each of them, couldn't you, if you owned them‑‑touch & look at & wonder at the touch of each of them: would this one send me into the mystery? But we have much surer stuff. a corner of shatterings TORTURE SONG Unused faces wrapped in a blanket that we found in someone's barn. But these are the faces of an artist‑‑look! Not the face at the artist amazed at the pain of creation, but the faces looking into him like the bowl of a terrarium, exuberant to see the torture morphing more & more into more & more intricate shape‑‑torture growing down the clogged tubeways of past; torture growing round the pure globus of the future, torture riot in the nervous twitchings of time; the torture growing along outside of time like the anagogic Book of Krels the torture like tickling little leaves along the edge of your temple the torture engaged in a distant sound, too loud & to distant for thunder, some sort of horrible sound torture dancing in its masks around the child attempting to play torture awaking from its dreams at night, staggered by its own dreams of pefection. You will notice torture grows along the lines of your favorite song, darkening it like fungus, making it somehow an even finer, more unbearable song. You will notice torture looks on unhappily as God comes along & takes everything you love, one by one you love, away away. Torture is your friend after all. Torture is sad at that. God does not take the torture away, ever. You have therefore a friend. You have a friend in torture, which you niether had in God. The hollows of a storm brood down as you both stand vacantly there. "You tortured me," he says, & you sob hypnotically hypnotically at this weird weird torture song. HARDURNED SHIT "We have to dress up to go to the next section," Chiin says, & they both start to laugh these disgusting laughs these disgusting laughs in which snot comthout, in which great gobbets of this rotten snot goop out the sides of deir dozez at the thought of a party, a very fancy, dress-up ball sort of party, which strikes them as especially funny, lying naked there, after all, rolling around not in their own shit (which would be OK) but in someone else's Hardüürnd Shit, covered in shit & stinking of the rottenness & essential stinkingness of shit. Sorry about that. Author was very bad for a moment & is now very sorry about it, taking all the blame even though it was not strictly speaing he but a powerful rogue alter known as the Tourettes Guy who said that. Plus it ached very much to get up, plus they were grogged with opiates, plus they had used up any credit within Health Division they might of had, so they had no strength nor energy, nor bounce nor stamina, nor resistence to the diseases festring extravagantly ther (& these were extravagant diseases gleaned profusely there (& whoever we're talking about was like afraid to ask if they were for sale, for he could see himself sans resistence & buying all these free diseases up, & setting them free into free diseases into the smaller alcoves of light in the universe which had not yet been darkened to the silence of disease, which had not yet met the affliction of themselves turing the corner of that drugged alley strange in the sicknesses of night of the night) (of extravagant diseases, too.) But wiped & sponged up they were, & sudsed up & sterilized & dried sardonically they were, & powdered down & spiffed were indeed they finally were, & popped into the limosine, & driven through a rain difficult as torture to that great, spangled house like a cluster of bexels in the infinite sky, & sent to a party. Too bad they had to run through the rain to get in. They were slobbering masses of muck but the time they time by the by they arrive. It doesn't matter. No one notices because‑‑even though everybody is there‑‑nobody is really there. This is that party cut from The Great Gatsby (cut, just for so plainly being the all-too-perfect party party it were. Cut out of something great, it is full of stuff to buy, so that it never happened except in the sense it happens over & over again in the Akashic Records, under "Surveillance Tapes of Everything," Section 201). THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS OF SIGHS OF SIGHS or THE TANK OF THE VAGUE & ACHING BONE Then into the chambers. More difficult by far than the Chamber of Exfoliation than the Chamber of Smells than the Chamber of Powders than the Chamber of Executions than at all was this crossing here of the Bridge of the Powerful Sighs or the Bridge of Sighs of Sighs of Sighs. Halfways over the swaying, goddam thing & Chiin & the Pl p? were sobbingone another's sopping arms, their torsoes begleamdid in the dusk of the faded faded Viennese nightnight. Beneath all of this swishing pathos, Chiin was starting to get sick from all the seastruck swaying, & you can see his EYE distend into lumpish horror as he sees the alley of the valley down belo, & he thinks What if I fall into that mud? at which a thousand gackling natives cackle mad. Extrapolation Formula D reveals this sentence splashing through the gasps like the Droned Swimmer of the Hundred Mooms (or is it the Hundred Suns? or is it Hundred? or is it not, not to come not to unthink of it, The Schvimmer in the Zecret Zea? or was that down the effluorescence of another hundred sighs? It is useless to try): "We're so...full of trapped water!" sentence says, gasping on his last against the dreary shore (near the house of Someone Very Important to this story, by remorse of a weeping coincidence, as often happens here). & of course Chiin was going to say "We're going to fall," butcept they tumbled like already dolls in one another's arms (or whatever passes for arms this way) passes for arms like figurines through the waters of the azure, ancient tank in the Tank of Dreams in the Tank of Tanks in the Tank of the Tank of the Tank of the Tank of the Tank of the Vague & Aching Bone. Except that they don't have bones. I deny that completely‑‑that they don't have bones. They had something inside them, of course, which was certainly all broken...except that they couldn't have bones, you see‑‑only the metaphor of bones, which can have but doesn't have but plenty of these yummy goddam bones, what with bones aplenty clopped across the cornucopia of their crossoptyrygian fucking heads, crossing as it were opt with the bones they have across their Very Boneless Face, if you catch my meanin'. GREENHOUSE IN THE SHAPE OF A FRIENDLY FISH The greenhouse took the form of our belovéd Poabby the Greenhouse Fish, i.e., that beautiful, crystal fish from the child's TV show airing just before your parents could ever wake up, therefore your special show, therefore a show that frightened you, & almost cut the squawk of many a lifetime squat, therefore the show that was eventually annulled & then arraigned & then (its bail once gone all gone jumps) hunted down forever in what they call Hunted Down Forever Intent‑‑stalked if you will forever by various of our magnificent form of fridgets, but‑‑even though you might at first blush think that a great crstalline fish in the shape of a green house with these fulsomely friendly, Barny type-of-eyes might be easy to catch‑‑come in images of which which were never quite caught. This greenhouse as we approach through concentric troughs of receding furrows was a fish with scales for facets & facets for scales, blinking like sentient minnows at one another (unlike the limitless crystals seeming to shine in the facets of the grass along the grass along the banks of the Empgnobual Furroughs, where many a fine funeral have been spanned unto the stretches of an the utmost of an endless effervescent death, in a passage on which I or someone like me wrote blinking like sentient willows onto one another's dewbedript, morning breath spread like gems across the furrows of the meadow of death (there are many places here I must say) I must say) I must say "I must say," not to be mistaken for the trenches of death. Anyway, this fish‑‑friendly eyes, all right, but secretly hating everybody & pretty much the random access of anybody‑‑in the shape of a greenhouse in the shape of a friendly fish into which did the customers enter, very distraught‑‑swam in a place ran with squelched & squeaking little plants, sleek & irritable plants, whiny little tendrifiddled plants serpentining like vermin under the log of the nervous rock "These are not plants, actually," registers the Voice of the Inner Fish. "They are more like liquid nerves, or the vegetating gestations of various swaddling, disembodied nerves‑‑nrves too hurt to touch. These are the nerves of babies that have disappeared, my friends. You wouldn't like them any. I like them all right, but you won't like them any." Thus the fish. So of course they imply had to look... "Maybe now we'll find out why babies disappear, enh?" muttered the Pl p?, but Chiin said nothing. In the nadadldadan‑‑which is the glass depicting one hell of an awful alterniverse‑‑Chiin was laughing his ass off, slavering as he asked, & the Pl p?'s own ass fell off, but he still was silent, & in the inerdldreni, or inner glass within the glass in that artful uniternate, there was just this rhythm‑‑"dada DOOM DOOM dum, dada DO da dada," & so on," & in the altenrate glass within the glass refracted in the enhanced glass of the otheroltor univerps was just this scraggle of weeds that were nerves (nerveweeds?) trying to scribble it like an idiotoditherit all down. & in the next room, Had Fine Wafers, they had fine wafers all of these chips & splinters purported to be glass-unto: 1) Proxy Universes One & Seven, 2) Divine Unruly Universe, 3) Le Moon Universe, 4) Le Verse of the Fine Unfitting Moons, 5) da Universe of du Intricate Holes, 6) the Universe of Bulps, 7) Universe the Unsalvageable, 8) Garage-Sale Universe, 8) Junk Universe, 7) Seeming Universe, 5) the Universe of the Splinters to the Other Universe (have we done this one?), 1) the Candle of your memories melting down, 0) the End of the Universe, Manypain, Universe, the Universe, & the wisps of the Whole Damn Goddam Universe, & all manner of other conditional imposter subjunctive vucking fabrications, fakes, & hoax all just nicked in apostrophes just like this humiliating universe, come to think of it, & when leaning like the sixteen-foot face of a movie hero contraposto to just bt one of these fine & crafted chips, why you could see this weasley little loser touch his cheek, a sigh but the microcosm of an anagogical sigh, a sigh misbegotten, I'm afraid, in the vacancy of sighs, not a breath but a drop of blood, a sigh, containing the pain of this unimaginable, blue grief inside the tear inside the unit in the corner of the inside eye. "Hm," sniffs Chiin, stepping back to look like somesorta conoisseur. "Huh." SUMPTIVE BIN BUT-ONE "I'm looking in particular for weapons ah that don't exist," Chiin told the Pl p?. "Ah," the Pl p? replied. "I'm not sure. I lack my the surety of my usual certitude on that. Boy‑‑I've never been asked that within the bifurcative vergents of my assorted be-befores or disarraying clusters of my mixed & sundry yores! But ahh...let me see me see... OK. OK, my friend. You have a deal. Bypass weaponry, weaponry of shunt‑‑that would be somewhere in the Hodly Homper. Lessee...yas...yas. Here in the subjumctif drawer, I'd posit. Posit-scrummage disarrayment bin, Sumptive Bin...Sumptive Bin...ah! Here we are, sir‑‑specifically Sumptive Bin But-One, subjumptif drawer of the Hodly Homper, just like I said." He hadn't said, but Chiin looked in anyway. & there they were, the Weapons of Never, simmering & smarting quite recognizably, snorting hey & shifting like culpable figures of a choir or guilty members of a line-up, the light from inside each of them redoobiling onto each of them, if you catch the meager meanin' of my driff. These were they‑‑precisely they the weapons she'd been firing. Nonweapons from the Hodlybim‑‑no wonder they'd hit missing him! FUTURE ONE (COPS NEVER CLARIFY) "Oh that," mutters the Pl p? (flying upward like a ghost toward the light of present time), & with a strange disconsolance‑‑but then one noticed feelings, faces, aspects of being found astray within inadvertent stratagems of dream. "That there's a kyewg." "A 'kyewg'?" The Pl p? took on the laquered tones of someone who can't help himself. "It's just a box that sits inside you. But you can't buy it. I can't sel it to you. Why, I could give this box to you, but you wouldn't like it. It wouldn't work out. He paused purringly. "I-it sits inside you, right in here," & he touched Chiin's chest which flushed with a radiance of blue & a friendly radiance within the blue which was of a lighter, kinder blue‑‑not quite blue, & not quite friendly either, but smiling, definitely, for him & into him & from & for the depths of into him. Chiin made a face or two & delicately rubbed the meccas of his chest. "Why can't I buy it?" "Forbidden by frijj!" the Pl p? rather snapped. "Strictly forbidden & illegal, friend. Anyway, it's just a memory-leech‑‑just a thief, very smartass & talkative." Chiin stood stoically, murks of suspicion hanging from his eyes. "I sold it once. But it came right back." "The buyer brought it back?" "O no‑‑one can't bring anything back. When I looked, it was back." The pleep stared at the thing as if it were filled with light. Chiin's face was all cramped as it were in stammers. "'It was back?'" "It was back, my friend‑‑right here in this cabinet," He had a light of madness shining from below. "The buyer of the kyewg ceased to exist. The frijj talked to me & left, & then I saw the kyewg was back, as if I had never sold it. I called the frijj back. They took the kyewg, but they came right back. They had lost a fridget, you see. They had 'the remnants of a fridget' (they would never clarify)." "(Cops never clarify)" reponded Chiin, bags hanging grandiosly under his eyes, stealing darkness from the greatness of the sky. "You can bet the frijjs were upset. A frijj had ceased to exist‑‑& the damned kyewg was back. Well, those frijjs took the kyewg again‑‑heedless frijjs. But they came right back after that, having lost another frijj." "And the kyewg was back?" "Yea, the kyewg was back again. Or it had never left. Or something. Anyway, the frijjs came back to inspect it, quite a number of times, but they never took it again. & they told me never to take it, or sell it. So it's illegal to sell it, pretty much." DECIDEDLY XFEAN GREY Anticipatory Frost® was everywhere, preceding your feet in formations like the coursings of a fern, intricate symbologies & silken colors reflecting on your worthiness, your fate, as it were all decided ore it was decided. The Xf Buildings recoiled & got blocklike & even more Decidedly Xfean Grey & insanely grey & more densely unimaginably impossibly specifically Grey. They get greyer & greyer & broke subtly into more & more illusive blocks‑‑structures that cannot possibly exist‑‑& wince like the virgin all blubbered oer with cum as the frost rolls onto them. Disgusting weather, Chiin thinks. This was the dry chill of protowinter‑‑nothing like the colossal color structures of the real & deadly thing, yet already straining his fucking buffers. Fucking buffers, he thought. & he thought of light in a marble washbowl, a perfect morning in the life he'd never lived. He wanted to sigh, but the suit said he couldn't. How ever did the Xf find their way around these strangling, unsigned streets, anyway? & did the Xf realy come from here? Did anyone ever come from Xf? No‑‑one suspected the Xf had been engineered for Xf by the ejjetineers. "Your parents are on Xf," * said. "Not that you have parents. But the ones responsible for forcing you to live‑‑they're on Xf, *." "What the hell is Xf?" "You don't know Xf? Xf? The most fabricated world of all? Outside of iospace, that is?" "Oh yea‑‑Xf. I know Xf," Chiin replied, though he knew no such thing. He could not shake his shame about not knowing things, & he was therefore memorizing all the time, as well as lying all the time BI-GOD "Would you like to land in spatial patterning?" asked the * {ship} with some distaste. We could all taste metal like fillings fillinf the questionable heavymetal lucid hijinxéd mesoaire (which was this bland air made for everyone, even your corrosive vacuum-dwellers, such as the Blelm OK? (the Blelm, who are, come to think of it, the only corrosion-prome vacumm dwellers anywhere the quarries of the sourthern universe, & who the hell are the Blelm (!) to bedull our flaffid air, the drab bastards, anyway? (By the way, try not to tell any member of the Blelm that I called them bastards, OK? I am not afraid of the Blelm, but they know the Brub, you know. & we are all afraid of the Brub from another indistinct loss of a novel dealing with the dealings of the feckless, rolling Brub.) "Why...sure," Chiin gurgled, snuffing the patended mintular kryxtles© of the singular bombardment of the breath of the gasp dying from its own last breath (!!!) of CRUFF!, his pollenation imbibement suave lozenge glide-flux aviator ring, which was the name & the essence of his drink Id guess you call it. "This means we will land in the context of space, within the context of flying, you see," added the ship to a * with his nose stuck deep into his Cruff to snuff the udder shame of his nescience or the Üdderschame of his nescience or the last outer shade of the last eclipse of his languid utterance. A sun comes liquidly to view. "Lovely!" cries Chiin, exhaling that sweet pollen that did make all the women sigh. & it was lovely, too. Hell, it was lovely through & through as they came in on ship mode, employing the grid demarcations of your spatial constants & proprioceptic cautions of your various ocular (or, as in the case of your Hyldelazhios, auracular or oldevacuor arrays) arrays arrays in the display of God's visionary day. "This is beautiful!" everyone enthused. "'Snot real," sniffed this peevish Xylian ship, but he seemed well pleased. NOTHING LIKE A SUN So in they went‑‑not through haphazard clouds fulgent with the sheen of impossible suns, not through random-access astroid belts or various Variegated Clutters of Lustrous Junk, much less your merry rogues waving at them from the far manic distance of afar nor the sharp gleamings of * moons known to be nothing more than dream & nothing less than moons in an astral-twinkling dream, & not past vacuum caves fairly howling with their emptiness, cavemouths agape like the faces of a thousand races petrified by doubt, & with rocks straggling from the toothless caves engaged in light, engaged in an illustrious paralyzing light, & with rock-worlds grokked in their entirety by the vapid nothingness of their vapid, sterilized sand (belonging to nothing, that sand!), clusterworls hung on their various arbitrary arcs of forgotten randomness & various, inferior grades of subregotten sand, sub-snad, dirt, rot, crap, & the crazed entherowlds of the crazed netherworlds of the gas giants sleeping blue inthe bluish wilderness in cones of penumbral scorn flung thoughtless from one lost, omitted sun (really a rumor really...nothing like a sun) Well hell no! Their sun‑‑the Xfs' sun‑‑was a perect cube. That's right‑‑a distinguished, perfect cube but for a jot of festoonery‑‑ornamental traceries upon its "sheened & smoothéd planes" & its insinuated colorations & the coroprate logo falling like the incandescent edges of Dedeenktal data-paper, which is a sort of torn-and-vacant sort-of-snow, down the hatchet edges of the shield-menisces of its beaming faces & faces & faces drippedalong the cartoon cheeks of the incidental phasal faces dinkled like dimples down the wimples sheening the idiocies of diversly reassuring faces, which the Xf they were Xf they were always channeling through the mahogany panels o your senses, where your sense here were understood to be the richly paneled houses of that special class, The Ridiculousy Enriched (& belie me, the Xf all claimed to be rich), & gettingback now to that cube‑‑a plain & perfect cube, you will remember‑‑but fore the aforementionéd butfore & for its goddamned beveled edges (!) & that most smarmy, provoking (equals guilt-provoking) poke-provocative smile, & its name (Larry...Larry the Goddamned Sun), Larrylarry through the carefully-placed planes & the well-posted moons of this gorgeously unnatural supernormal system of Xf, through contextually layered, manicured atmospheres (smiling like airy lovers), down to the landscapes of one finely refined planet after another, with even its darknesses systemarized, Xf had Artificial System marked all over it, & the Xf‑‑like most cohmsprux‑‑seemed almost imperceptibly proud, standing amongst their mad plants varved like buffalo, where buffalo zare understood as long, meandering coils of machine-shaped leaves, furrows & bowers, labyrinths & burrows, phase-changes of intricate, lathed moldings & thumbprint traceries‑‑glint with revelations, nothing less‑‑& ecletic hypergardens riddled with allusions unto All Gardens Everywhere, & themselves full of miniature gardens, of course‑‑the tiny timberlands of Meem & Jakshtro & Goaroaeui, the blind, excandescent blossoms of Qing (absorped in these special lightsops, lightsops, that they have‑‑made in miniature like the lost lense of the Pope's SPECIAL MAGIC SUNGLASSES!!! refracting their fires to the very Xfean core brewing its grand ineluctable blow-up some-blow day up-blow by-day bi-God, not to mention your talking gardens, chattering in intricate crystals & in sentences throwing sparks about like wheels, semantic gardens & thought gardens & that hilariously famous Garden of the Miserable Musicians (& never such a blue bunch have you neverseen!) & the eerie little Garden of Meltings (pictured like a landscape of candles melting like Dali dreaming & yet scintillatingly conscious of his waking dream not to mention the opium-dream of his waking dream & the lucid dream sitting like God, like the Moon in that grade-school play which play which featured God as Moon or the Moon just playing God, explaining all these lesser dreams to his forgotten lesser children, his frozen children, his beautiful little frost-children (this is us I am talking about) exhausted from running naked in those very frosted dreams those naked dreams & those dreams so full of apostrophes) & the garde of fruit that caused the downfall of the serpents (with the race of the serpents tending the dirt of the gardens, shamefully, down below beneath anything we could ever by the Goddess of the Suns be'llow'd to see), & the arden of forgotten & that forgetful, silly garden, & the gardne where they take you, freshly rescued from your own lethal dead vacant excandescent fucking memories, the Garden of Vacancies all very neatly laid out, you understand, & the snarled garden or the gnarled Snarden of Impossibilities und die Garten of Misumbralspandings & the various Gardens of the Vatious Incomprehensibilities (the air in these suckers yes the air fluting with floralamulae, flooting with flootational floalamulae, as vibrantly incomprehensible as the words of the dying physics, wherein physics take to be as the Dying Physicist, finally dying of brilliance in the rotless gleam of his own dying incomprehensible chair, & stuff like that, & THE GRANDILIQUOSITIES OF MAY and the ridiculously redundant ridiculous beebpames or beebpames ridiculous bleeding somehow informatively passing through the garden of the inner beedpames passing with reluctant molecuphemeral deezy ease inane pariformation through your temples or whatever passed therefor, making the temples cling & one's hair (if any) or follicles (if any) or or antennaefaeny or shootsifinny curl or curl up just a bit, saturating your mindstuff with this Xf-intelligence (Xfintlligence that had to be washed out later, up in the pressure cone of your Very Owne Hotel which was something they had there, where you lay like a chilly maggot dreaming you had a hotel all your own, what with superfluous rooms of variegated loves & joys & despairs & rooms of heartaches & rooms full of nothing but the word yes in fatty, azure letters crammed to the everlovin' brim what with if I may-may grandiliquosity beyond the knowledge even of the Grandiliquosities of May & the vapors of the Evermay, which is this May they have on Neth, which is one pf the worlds we have in the Room of Worlds within one of the rooms in the Ballroom there at the center of hell, I mean hotel, I mean the center of Hell Hotel here at the Center-of-Hell Hotel right here within the flux, friends, the fluxless flux, here friends, of of towndown phucking Phrinedde, which is not the Xfean capital city, but which is generally regarded‑‑even by the government‑‑as as Xf's phunquiest city!!! & so what the hell, & any way each sep ar ate Xf e an ci ty the image-containment neural-nexit field of every other Xfean city, such that each Xfan city, whate'er its size, is the same proportionate Xfean city they first constructed out of light, out of these little tothpicks of light, during the Year of Impossible Engineering, during the Decade of Feats, during what they called for a whie the Xf Century, during the onslaught of the fall of the Ikkissles, the creators of Xf, the Xfean builders and/or Xfeal hyperarchitects, now dropped out of context PERMANENTLY!, but as I anyway think I was alleged to be heard to be said to be saying, you or at least someone a great deal like you (& what does THAT imply, friend? Hmmmm?) was washing out the blue of the supersaturated Xf self-commentary the Xfean bleedpanes (special technology) snuck into your heads, creating many heads that were really virtualy heads, or at least virtually virtual heads anyway, not that the Xf the Xf would ever ever fill you in. You arrived, for example, with the structure of the entire Xfean city stuck like an arrogant bolt inside your head. If you were given to dreams you were given a dream throughout the city, swimming its streets like a Opnacalion minnow, or like a school of exuberant xyysies, which are guppies kicked back suave upon the Plane of Intelligence, just a bit south south by south southwester of the lucent mucoid Planes of Indifference where you could, as i say, could dream your way through the city, all night, every night. You could do very lttle else, actually, other than that, that, that & standing on one foot in anxiousness, assuming you had one foot & were ah "gifted" with "anxiosness," gazing in anxiety at Tulg, their perlous, vermillion sun invading town darkling on his bingemurpled chopper, wiping the wie off his mush with a potent flick * of the tibulum, if you are gifted with tibulum, my friend, that, or do some more beebpames, Xfean "entertainment" beadpames in the frame of which succulent univerps everything grows like orderly berries down their cosmic, incandescent groves toward perfect symmetry. Excites some, bores everyone. Everyone dies in excited boredom, in the motel Excited Boredom flashing dismally * at the verges of the idge of the spark-lit "town." "Town" was in quotes up there. It came out like "'town,'" or something like that, which I think is terribly funny. These were the neatest, sweetest, most orderly dreams you could ever wake up screaming from. This was if you didn't shampoo with that azure stuff (they provided, mind you, at behest of the Sector Governants. This was not the Xfs' idea. To those who called Chiin a thief, he would offer the following refutation. He offered the following refutation, followed by a gesture so very viscerally potent in its grim spoliation on the accuser's fucking nerves he would heed these thousand spoilers I spoilers fling before you like swiimpurlz, so ardent with light, through the untold hesitations of the infinte night. The refutation, then, that while he may have been alleged to have been said to had been having been alleged (or is it said?) to have made many things disappear, these things have never turned up, say, at Chiin's house haddy-had-he-houfe or on one of the tangled black markets of the so-called shops of the strange or of the vivid air, whatever that means, nor reappeared anywhere, so down this branch of your unconditional nerve, blind with rain in the supermoist hyperfrigid Extepelian protodawn, he was at worst an annihilator. But he actually denyied (gesture coming) that things had disappeared. Nothing ever disappeared, he said, certainly not by his hand (except he didn't have a hand (excpet he didn't know really what really elsewhat what to say) except). If it were him,so Chiin wendt, he would be handing hand mirrors out handmere to each specific molecule. So the thing's still there, but with the molecules holding up mirrors to their mirrors upselves, refulgent with their own reflected darshan. Chiin wendt to places where things are very incomplete, very uncertain. Someone or something had been trying to drive him mad. Correct that. Someone or something had been taking chunks of existence, or making them appear to go away. --Chiin took certain inhibitions of the *. Now they're relaly getting somewhere. --Chiin took a certain aspect of the *n program, which used to cause madness quite a lot. It ran much better now, he felt, & gave the appearance in fact even fact of not yet stop run running ever, & how much better tis one was. --Chiin had he Chiin he had a few things Chiin keep. Very special, usually problmatical things, such as the famous self-contradictory government of Ioo. He had to see how this thing worked... --People ingest the stupid symbolizations of actions & beings. At least Chiin think it's stupid. Stupid beings! & now the Gesture of the Thief.... COLLAPSED HALF-UNIVERSE OF THE ALLEGED MURDERATION or OR GRAIN OF THE IMPOSSIBILITIES OR Ladoga Bojje was following Chiin because (his lawyer said for him to say hethought she blieved Chiin took some essential part of her femininity‑‑like her femininity done come in these pale, airy divisons, for Chiin if Chiin were to steal to steal away! Nevertheless, she had stuck him with this blame, & she was indeed pursuing him, all the more frightening because she didn't seem to have murder in mind. I mean, we could tell if she had murder in mind because 1) it would show up on the * amber solids we can shoot thoughts through in this age, when the development of everything has developed into everything, & 2) there would be murder. There could me no murder in the first place here, you see. Nay‑‑no murder here, because it (murder) murder (it) was before the crystal daw of Life's Perfect Memories which is Life's Pristine Memory which is the first memory (allowed) of unconditonal (legal) life (was) in fact legislated by the Congress of Subsistence or the Conditional Congress or the Congress of Surds or (before that) the Ylem Congress into pale increments answering only to the Two Legitimate Means of Death, or licit or permissible dying, of which not murder is not not-one. Murder is deathcause NOTONE, not allowed. Deathcause NOTTOO is by any oter means, so the only way you die here is to be dead already. & they say they're working on that. I mean, they1 say they2're working on that, where that equals collapsing of death, equals various collapsings of of death death death in which even this grand ineluctable form would, much like Ladoga's murder of me, compact by means of autozip maneuvers which are these strange maneuvres that we euvres that we do-have here into a sheeries of ever-more limpid curiosities, or grain of the impossibilities, till there were just abstractions, gossamer membranes of a sheer idea, with one (1) Goddam Canceled Version of me wrapped in the block of ice in the frozen middle‑‑this known as the "collapsed half-universe of the alleged murderation, your honor" Chiin felt that if she killed Chiin there would just be this embarrassing little collapsed half-universe of Chiin in murderation (legal jargonese), & she would be fined. But like I say, Ladoga Bojje was not trying to murder Chiin. She was stalking him for some grand cause, not just stalking him for the cause of stalking him, but it was a cause nothing stolen can reveal the causes of, or the nature of, that is, or the stumbling through another Yillt forest of the very palest blue probabilities. She was stalking Chiin in order to do something fearfully improbable to him. Chichi-Chiin-chichi-Chiin chi chi. She was going to inflict the wounds of her unborn children into him, till he staggered off into the realms of invisibility, which is not o say blindmess, the realms of blindness, in the form of her own damned murdered children, doomed as they be to nothingness. XF GRAPES The Xf looked like large lumps with knobs on them, or mountainous knobs with lumps all over them, expressing various floating-point, fractal imageries with l.a.o.t. expressive of perfect Xf poems expressed electronically expressed poems expressed like the dew on the myriad faces of the morning dew or like oil beaded on the brew‑‑O, the serious serious brow of the Moste Serious Brew!‑‑of the fine quanquana nut, or like those lost & final words, words sublimated into the finest very blush of nothingness, blush of purple nothingness, blush of an embarrassed night, blush of one ever-remembered, humiliating night, blush of humiliation, blush of night, rather like those lost words of Laefana as he blurtz his last poems, words unfurled to nothing in the drawn empurpled night...in other words, pure & perfect love-poems engraved in the etch of perfect, pure-and-proven mathematics, with nothing of shame or humiliation in any of it, opne presumes, which however wouln't seem to explain the Xfs' many shells of disguises, unless the disguises are somehow part of the perfect mathematics of the Xfs' own forms. But they would never claim that. No, your Xf would stop short of ever claiming that. "They would just enjoy their eningmatism," as &, that most intransigent critic of the Xf & proponent of deradication would say. Deradication of the Xf. Reduction of the Xf down from superrace status, down further proponents would suggest down past the levels of fractal admiration through the various phylae of quantum enumeration past the worlds of tensor rumination & the subworlds of integral numeration through the sweeping goddam ghostwhirls of ghostworlds of totitive doubt (& superdoubt) & doubt & super (doubt) andoubt andought & indubitible hyperdoubt & the doubt of my hypertext doubt, past various surds & unreal radicals, past the Mountains of Figura & the waves of the Sea of Primes, through the ofreets of the repetendal Fluxions of Modulum, well beyond the tentative branches of Tensor & the hairlike Roots of Totient, down‑‑so the thoery goes‑‑to the level of subsentient equation, where, they have the wonderful nerve to say, the Xf themselves would be happier. "They wouldn't need those sheathes of admiration," which is what the Xfs' sheathes of hallucination are called in the light of admiration, let's face it folks, of the entire universe. But it's just sour grapes. Xf-envy, Xf-begrudgement, envy & rancor & hatred of the some-say-beautiful Xf, or simply Xf drazheuzho, which is a sort of grape, hence Xf grapes. TWENTY TIERS DOWN THE DIMINISHED MINOR IN-MINUSCULATIONS SCALLOPS OF THE IMPLITUDES OF PHASED DIMINISHMENT There had always been eff or dysphasic crud or timedew, & Chiin had always been a skub. Eff was entropy dew or tarstuff accumulated off the excess of time or an excess of uncertainty God had given to us, or something, & I was one of a crew of idiots, sent round the Baarberr ectors, usually, where there was penty of * {filth, crud}, cleaning the entropy off things. A small band of entropic idiots, none more idiot than he. For a very long time all we could see of him was a clothed hand winding down the sinews of a Jyystyrian body wimpling off in the darkness of perpetual mindless twilight (& the dreamo of the Jyyst, coming to life with vivacuou sigh, sighing :Thank you!" & handing hm & handing him some sort ofeocious goddamtip. There were entire races swallowed in darkness, & nothing but these detested ministers to tend to them. They saved no one. They helped no one. They just wiped & wiped & mindlessly, mindlessly, wiped as the eff poured down the back of the wiping hand. It was hopeless, but the * were too dumb to know. {Chiin was one of a crew of idiots, sent round cleaning things. It was very exciting when the owners hung round. The owners were very very sexy‑‑very sexy. It all changed when Chiin found some sort of intelligence heightener. It was then he found he could steal aspects of things‑‑qualities & parts of things‑‑to the point that the vicitms didn't even know they had been robbed. It carried with it a heady sense of power, along with a sense of disturbing responsibility‑‑a very unwanted responsibility‑‑which he doesn't understand.} Chiin would compact hissself & crawl into the {dolls'} houses. That was his specialty. Chiin was the only one who could really do it, "like having a goddam Vuor reducer in your goddam pants!" as * would say. He'd crawl through the window of the dolls' houses, by which time he was every bit as small & as tiny as a microscopic doll. & he would clean these places. Things get infected with a strangeness here, or infected with a strange sort of exhausted discouragement, arguing the imminent end of this imminent end of this imminent universe, or else some sever sort of lassitude in God, suggesting boredom with us (& that is bad, I would think). & into the lesser dollhouses inside those ones, which you would think were more immaculate even still, but which were in fact more compacted & in need of the most radical of cleaning. They * bragged they could make anything disappear, but I tell you‑‑there were...let's call them items‑‑there were items in some of these dolls' houses, say, twenty-odd tiers down-odd the diminished minor in-minusculations scallops of the implitudes of phased diminishment, items most sordid & base & bad & vile, dirty items that had to be expunged to what they called mere ghostments of themselves or of the selves of their former selves, becoming mere hallucinative ghosts of their former selves, faintly glowing. Brother Chiin always felt like a thief when he did these cleanings, & they wree cleanings, he thought, no one other than the * {which is this strange & resident sort mirror that knows everything} would ever know. He was conscious of temptation. He was surprised. None of them * were aware of temptation. It was known that none of them could steal. But when Chiin involuted farther, he found there was temptation‑‑just a tiny, expectant thing, blue as an unborn baby‑‑which grew in magnitude as Chiin grew grew grew smaller. Finally it stood in the room with him, precisely Chiin-size, & seemed rather smugly glad to see him, as if he had been expecting him. & Chiin was cleaning out the remnants of this ghost which came in the form of crescents. I mean, you couldn't even tell what this ghost had might have once had been, just with these lucent crescents glowing vainly in the * air. & temptation was helping hi, like his helpful cousin, the ultra-idiot Umpligeug, blessed with sheer nonexistence, & he didn't say anything or look at him, Chiin-him, & in fact seemed focused on the job to the point of crmaping, so sombre did he look, as if he were doubting everything all of a sudden. They were working, & there was Chiin-he & this mysterious ghost, & this one time Chiin up up & stole the ghost. He received at that moment the genius of theft & emerged like a vapor from the dolls houses * with the invisible unseen smile of the perfect thief. CRUSHEDCRYXTALYM TOUAEMS You should have tried to see Chiin's eyes‑‑like the phases of apathy down sequential tunnels of a Rorrimian Mirror, so effortlessly, so hopelessly detached!‑‑as he did nothing forever but "brush dryest Formes of Light oer impossible powders," as the incredibly boring first book of the first of the Songs of His Exploits says, or as he buffed the contours of a lost fragrance of madness, taking the forums of a curtain in the awesome lunar halls of an awful Noaol (probounced with a wailing interrogative of the wobobobboling lips‑‑"Oa-ao-oa-ao-oa-ao-oa?" quite comely enough to make one "cum & cum," as the Kids® used to say before the Kids disappeared), or as he crept humiliatingly on his awkward knees, reaming the furrows of some longlost ecstasy (probably sexual, but too murked to tell, possibly religious ecstasy, back when they had that here, possibly the ecstasy of an impossible idea, or the energy you expend keeping your hopes up & the seeping loss of life attendant thereong) barely blinking, much less giving out a good long grunt, at the glimpsed winces of goldness rumbling out, like the injured memory of a passionate thunder of the kind they just don't make here anymore, or * wiping the tarp someone had put across the glazed an dintricate center of a crushed crystallie town (which was all they ever had around here‑‑crushed-crystaline towns, crushedcryxtalym touaems!), in supposed preparation for the act of cleaning the shatteres of a shatere town, in imposible preparation for the cleaingof this once-presuméd town, & puttingup the last piece of crystal & then not even turning round, his cloth held vaguely at the ready for the next overgrowth of eff spreading like a ribbon of mad recordings of some lost inanity as if from the emptied, long long emptied, Tombs of the Loft Inanities... or Chiin, cleaning the ribbons of madness recording the chambers of a lost eternity, erasing grains that kept whole continents alive but they were the WRONG GRAINS & then tracong down & erasing, not the records of the deaths of various continents, but the traces of the sundry acts of erasure that had occurred before him‑‑perhaps some other crew, perhaps himself & himself's own crew, the tracers of the memory of having erased these deaths of continents having themselves been erased by God knows what kind of crew, erasing then the drifts of the continents, erasing continents. They all had plumes that said this was all eff, this was all timedew, so they would often find themselves sitting, talking quietly about something the referants to which had been abandoned so achingly long since down echo corridors (the flat slam of doors on their paddings of dust, the hudshlocks of memory, the silence with its distinctive smell, the aching still), & as their plumes like so many dour old Scots informed them all was essentally eff & nothing more, what little dabs of temptation they saw like paintflaws along the edges pf the eye of the agéd master they would suck dimensionless into elongations of dimension tubes. (So the tybes contain temptation, eh?) Yea, the tubes contained temptation, I would say. THERETHERE What they would do was they would suck things into these mobial spiracles of dew they used which were, unknownst to them, known as dimension tubes. This was their basic equipment of this most rareified suction into half-abstraction of a half-abreaction of a half-reaction. Anything would go in there, of any absolute size or conveyance of meaningor fractionated attitude‑‑anything you thought you could point the inklings of tube un to (& every day you found new things you could draw the tube into, though it wasn't a tube, just a smattering or a smatteration of the absolute relative inklingly-invisible visible light of the recoiling lions of physics they had absolutely functioning functionless here & where here meant there & where there meant there there meant therethere‑‑light that you waved at anylight you thought with the inklings of your hand, except that they were not hands, assuming that's confusing enough)‑‑& there indeed & in the withers of a tiny fact (like a broken tree inside desiccations of an awful crystal vat) comes a time along the walking lozenges of a simple singularity called "time" here when Chiin was cleaning out curiosity. He was cleaning it out & drawing like the fluids of the mythical Ether of the Pastl Ethers this curiosity he got from the looks of this sleeping woman sleeping in this woman's curious world that he, world that had charred from the instance of its own curiosities, & he was charged like up with this like curiosity, & he saw temptation slipping through a fork of hallucinative leaves, & he drew up his tube to suck it, & then he paused. He sucked it up all right, that temptation, but then he wondered where it went. he wondered, suddenly, just how many temptations he had drawn into his own dimension tube his own dimension tube of his own dimension tuibe, & suddenly he wanted to see his temptations‑‑where they dwelt & how they might have aligned themselves & their qualities as they may nor mayn't've existed in the chrome hushings of the silver wilderness tube, & what he had been all so tempted about, & what did his plume know anyway, & in short, friends, he went in, because he wanted his temptations back. Just to know what they had been, you understand. The innihlatians raised him, stretched out a long, illusory childhood down azure-crimson bowers & tough forests studded with crystal leaves, etc., then experimented on him wildly, putting him through many phase-changes, detchaed from him his memory & will, hung with his identity like gossamer nothings in a closet choked with strange, darkly insidious coats bearing lethal secrets within indimensional© pockets lined with the razories of being, & made him do the most hilariously humiliating things. This he had been told, & this he had seen on the (uncut, unaired, unedited, unseen) show they had done about him. He liked to think the show had been pulled off the ether by some force that needed him, he liked to imagine. It happened in the case of exploding memories. I mean, he went to this one bright sector bightsector called Blaer known henchfroth as The Sector Where the Memories Blewing Up upsector-up. Yea, Blaer seemed to be expiring constantly, & everywhere the everywhere the atmosphere was popping popping thin blithering vapors of material mists. Yea, thangs were righteously explodindere, specifically memories (were (seen (to (be (ex) plod) ing) here), more specifically more specific memories, & they & they had been (led in their (sleep) to (their sleep to) believe this was an area of exploding memories‑‑specifically of the specific sort explding sordid memories. Apparently, so went the story, memories had just started exploding here‑‑which, as any buff the properties of memories of doth know, the inherent pressures keeping memories memories is very much likely todo, & in any case this area, or sector, or scene, or zxryyn had seen something which was causing the inhibitation membranes of their memories to like explode right in the air! This was all called known as expldong the explodng memories of explodng Blaer Blaer Blaer. Don't ask me why this thing is so. Don't ask me why. & like nothing could help it, neither, because they'd tried pumping out the air‑‑just shipping the motherfucking air right out of the motherfucking sector, then & there, but the seizures kept coming. & they'd pumped out numberless other qualities too. They'd pumped out time, they claimed, & they'd pumped out the intelligence of betterment on the which of the whisch depends, but it didn't help, & they'd pumped out some of the strange & eerie variations on the blindnes of that pure & perfect subnoctural night or moonleth gnight, & sucked out as well as well sucked the variations of blindness hurt forever in the child's lost dreams inhabit & inhibit that night night‑‑but the hurting was not hindered. And, too, they'd exported in this one cavernous mass of a structure of a box the substance (submolecular‑‑more a number, really), OK the number (though really much more a sensatin lingering round the tmeple area, the temple area that everyone & everybeing has, a sensation that someone very close to me is going to going to die) all right, so the sensation (in the form of a substance, actually) all right God damn it, this substance that caused the development of one or more connections aonngst the many many Grey Galaxies of Being that exfaholy-oliate like like self-extracting Exacerbatory Files© connections from one thought to the next, but even as they sat round in this permenant eternal midnight in which their selves like high-memory swap files not din match, blinking like so many assemblies of white, detahced & eyes gloowing with their own intermittent inter inner in intemrminable (gl!nks) which are just like w?nks, they saw, or rther felt some other cousin not fell nor hear, that drastic fundatory psychic reactions still happened, that they still happened, despite this shipping out of the youthfulness of souls & this exporting of the meanings of every single (so they said) of their one-of-their-single lies, despite shipping out even the goddamned Blare of Everything, but that they JUST STILL HAPPENED & were happening. & so the subforce was forthwith called. Everyones hesitates, by the way-reluctant way, to call up your skub, because everyone is no one lying in a gutter, full of blood, unable to feel yourskub were not going to hesiate not to unnegate nor steal something very permanent & personal & most painfully intimate (they could do so, after all, so went this belief of the no-one-belief, knowna as the No-One Belief of the systemsof nonbelief of the Bliefs of the Non-Nonsectors with their blinding God-be-liefs) that they (being no one) did bethought they had, even though the basis of ths god damned belief had itself been longself since not longthought skub skubbed clean. But whattaya gonna do? In come Chiin & his team, explosions fascinating all but that most murk't ovay of eye, & stood with their dimensional brooms held up to the crying sky. It was funny, Chiin thought, as he started cleaning. No one remembered how often memories started exploding. It stood to reason, that. And, he added to the additonal *s of his thought, it served the bastards right. This business of conceiving everyone as bastards was a skub sort thing. Bt it was also a * thing. He had conceived ofeveryone as bastards ever since he had been allowed to pretend to conceive conceive. That's just how it skubbin' was, as the tough women from the coroners of their mouths do not hesitate say. & he started cleaning, & he really did have to get very close to peopelt to do this right. I mean, time had to be frozen (this was the timethey'd shipped in to the sector which as yule requoll had had its time vectored out), & he had to sail in like a lightship through frozen infinite speckles of illicit solar flares & puk up the memories, one by the agonizing lit-gold-canlde of the one one one. & so he did. A STATUE'S BLOODY EYE He root like a joyful pingout the silt-foul furrows of this statue's brow, this statue of a woman's brow here, somewhat like a forehead only much more like a brow, a goddam fucking brow, Mr.Goddam Hall, & it was a grey & a hollow brow like a brow only less so, Mr. Brow. Now he couldn't help but thinking the cleaning couldn't but help but thinking the cleaning might would go better if it couldn't help but thinking the cleaning, goddamit, & What Is More, if this rain would constant stop. I mean if constantly this rain constant wouldn't not but stop. But the rain reversed all meaning. It was grey & grainy & silty, the Evident Rain of the End of Time (time for this little universe to be running the fuck OUT!!!), & he wouldn't if he could of wished they would stop him wasting his time, cleaning out this gutter across the Edge of Time. Hell, those walls thinned out the curtains wove-d'obscure across the undeleted meanings canceling themselves‑‑I say these meanings canceling of themselves!‑‑beyond the Aztect patterns of this stone he was running through. The rain was warm, foc course. The rain inducéd fever, but of course, & metought he was a child running naked through a concrete meadow of some sort. Foreguessing himselve, he roam thro' organic eaves, colossal & most cavernous meaningful eaves, Alle o'ergro'n moste titanically, so he couldn't see who or what was chasing him, but he knew with the dullness of a dullness known in the ill-lit consciousness of dream they were going to torture him. It was a dream, so he knew they would be toruteim, but he couldn't get up that visceral charge of caring that tortures you outside of all dream, as he was runnning here trying to root his way outside this formidable dream. But really, see, he was rooting out the furrows of this woman's brow on the vert phosphorescent lip of the edge of time. I think I've clarified that. I think I've indicated how he was running, viscous with a multitude of fevers (or perhaps I omitted to like clarify that that that) I don't know the names of every switch, but they're working on it. We will fortwith forward you this lists of the names & geneologies, of the forkings & the loopings branchings oftheir anillustrous formings of their many family tree respective tree of the loopingsof aforesaid fever-family tree, doanchew worry boyut that, soon's we've run down the ragged ass of this fucking fever off, in the form of that detestable little boy who is making just things so much just much worser from himself by the runnin of the running of, let me tell you that. He was running his cleansing fluids through the furrows of her brow, & she was watching him. I mean, inasmuch as she couldn't really like reach her eye all the over into those furrows there to see him then, but that BingEye definitely not A Statue's Bloody Eye was like following him, across every second of the minuscule arc, modified constantly & reudndantly with evepresently repeating option-furrows of beief, these are the Option-Furrows of Belief Belief reodubling redupicatively back upon himself, so he was like tracers of his modified internal selves cleaning now the motions he was making of the furrows of his motions cleaning out, then cleaning them out, then once more cleaning out, once more seeing himself (with as i say the BingEye following comically himself) as I think I said before the furrows of my mention didn't said, & then moving on. "I am afraid I'll fall through," he was saying then (to her? to his comrades, lost in the aches of other furrows otherwhen? of his bosses, heavens forfend?). "What do I do when I fall through? It's the end of time here, etc.," at which etc. the passage I just wrote before almost falling through into the mostness about this falling through, I think it musta was. But he was in no ways falling through. He was just getting intimate with the furrows of this woman he was rescuing here. He was saving her, sure, but he was nicking his way far too in the furrows of her most variegated, intimate memories. He was doing his job & cleansing way too far too in, by ye Various Unmentionable heehee Standards (pardon me, heehee) of whomever oer whupever tuck the standards in, you'll parmehee, by which it evidently seemed to him he was cleaningout the Aztec channels of this statue here & risking falling forever I guess through iridecent idges of the edge of time, etc., but it as will later become apparent evidentially seemed somewhat to her that he was you know starting to take things from her & was no doubt scarring her. In any case, this he did, & in any case he did, & came as in the end of any fever to a room full of ill-lit wonders. His eyes close & so do she, & this of course was the Womb of the Curiosities or (rare) the Queer Boudoir, where he would see too many things it would seem to kill him not to take. & so he took a few. In a movement so sublime it missed e'en the quiver'd fevers of the Subtlety Frijj, he buffed up a fine pollenation in that room & drew it away. It wasn't his, but he had it, & he did then first did taste did he then but then but the fine Taste of the Perfect Thief, the taste of his own blood run fiercly cross his lips, this the blood, my friends, that would silence him forever. Never aain, in the future, would a word pass that fine barrier of blood, for a thief's first theft is his own gift of word, tasting like blood in the wounding thereof. Then he couldn't help himself. Then the silky waves of that most pliable air (an atmosphere till then perfectly secret & forever unheard) surrendered to his uprut jaggedness. I mean he was deploying yes he was these increasingly gross arrays of his invasive tumors on the submolecular level, volatile, comic-book rays like explosions in the clarity of most inviolate ice or shrieks of madness racking the sanity of innumerable neural nets (which is how our wars won anyway), or the simple upthrusting ugliness of that face you hated most to see, which is to say he was basically sacking the place. This was his first time, understand, so he was making involuntary grunting sounds (soon to be suppressed within lesser grunting sounds to be suppressed within subtler grunting sounds which can be percevied on enhanced digitalis as gunking sounds, which persist in the ether as that most refinéd sublimation of unevolved gumping sounds the fossils of what was once were in fact supping sounds, but without the gulp, the flavor, not to mention any of the umentionable moistness o those sounds. There was none of that here, I assure you. His head is all a mass of invisible files now, of course, but this was not so when. He wakes up gasping his nothingness at the ribbon of rainrish representing her door or the airless hush at the apparency of door (for this was certainly not a door) with a swollen bag of swag like the great Mother of Leeches snuggled on his shoulder there (certainly no real shoulder there or there or there), with a migraine of disjuncture standing there in its loose & soggy pants braying how imperitively must he suss up somehow how to put back this stuff & pick up the tattered rag (with his name on it) that was his life he had left inside. All thieves, even the perfect ones, even the countless Perfect Thieves of *, have this thought, which can last momentarily forever in the everhours, & which in fact does & did, & is the dusk barely visible behind his eyes as he pickes up the bag & leaves unlike a thief in his native night. It was not her door anymore, but a nameless gate‑‑some sort of park, with the rain on the ironwork just barely edged with ice. A very murky grey, yet bracingly ecstatic to breathe. You better get home. The ice forms across the ground. Soon you won't be waking anymore but just sliding like the dead child on his butt forevermore. But the ice fored righunderfoot, & he had to walk across this empty square on these thousand-year-old legs with his swag compressed up his butt. (H hadn't seen that coming on!) H had to find someplace to hide where he could hide his stuff & then hide the nothing of his stuff‑‑someplace he couldn't sleep. Thre was no team any longer, no little hutch here they could rest. No one sees how brittle is their universe until t cracks, sending them slipping down the gullies of imposible ice. So vanished life, to a strange residue much more intense than life. There was nothing to do, it seemed, but to perfect himself in the stealth of his newborn self, & to bring others into this perfection (in that none can stand the violet night of stealing by oneself, that night in which you cannot that hand you wave so violently, having stolen perforce your naked sight). THE TEEMINGIN OF HEAD He slept that night in the sector of ideas exploding just like ice, with each iceball bashing on the wall of the tidy dumpster. Of course it got all plutonic, & in the pop & puff of bitterness strange sorts of linethings formed across his face, as if diagramming some quality revealed in the oddly panicked face. First he slept atop the bag, then slept ome more (yes, he was sleeping) with the bag coiled blackly round him like a beast formed long before the Evolution of Supposéd Shape, then wriggled into the shape of an even weirder beast & then slept some more that way, then held the bottle of swag which was a bag of swag at arm's length (I think he was dreaming I think I think), then crawled his fat ass into the bag with his tattooed ass like Gully Foyle sticking out & slept most resolutely indeed (this night was going on too long!), then pull'd his head into itself, where he did not sleep. It was a warm room back when a small boy lit soft golden candle after soft golden candle in preparation for his ravishment, & as the frost of the exploding ideas of the Sector of Foresplodling Ideas melted off his head, the migraine he'd been sleeping deliquesced, together with the thought he had been sleeping in a migraine, a goddam migraine, for Chris Chrissake, & he was smelling everything. This water dripping off his nose, & he was smelling everything! Like absurdities of the one hilarious dream God makes you dream, & he laughed very delicately for a long long while. He hadn't een prepared for the long length nights. Either they had these longlength nights in this here sector or what's left of its time wound down into an endless, Blakey night. You just couldn't be sure. Anyway, he warmed himself in there (see him rubbinghis hands!), & he looked around, but he never did dry out. & it was in this special fuzzy light in which it looked like nothing would be clear. It looked that way, but you couldn't be sure. Not in this fuzzy light, that was almost not for sure. He listened to invisible clean commands teeming in The Teemingin of Head, but they were not working anymore. He had to devise a plan, so as not to be suspected, much less caught, but all he could do right now was look into this stuff‑‑like there was some fuzzy light in his eyes pouring like more rain, but it was warm rain now, so no matter how many times he did pinch his eyen he could not make out. Maybe I stole it wrong, he thought in his first ever thought (first-ever thought, not first everthought of course) of course. Maybe I forgot to steal its exact shape. But it had plenty of details & shape, resting in this canvas resitng in this light. Take this small statue of her mother here. It was positively rife with dtail & shape. It was just a matter of pressing your head in close to it till you face took on the magnetics of its field of shape...like this, see... A NOVEL OF ACTUAL CATS He had stolen the shop, stolen the consciousness of the shop, stolen the owner's identity packed up in SO MANY CRESCENT WALLOPS as they they, stolen his own memory of theft (always important) in the form of too many beads of light curling starkly round the cryptic panes of an alien alleyway or a crystal alleyway or an alleyway of the third design or a mere chip in the meremere cube of glass or cube of possible impossible light living in this cube he was staring down (with his eye situated in the cube, thus-ly...) or just another alleyway or the Altogether Alleyway, which is where, since we're all lost here, we cannot say takes place, but which, since we are all lost, most probably takes its place. & now he sat in the vacant alleyway (the unused alleyway whose essence had been stoln, but he can't of course remember which by whuch), & he was going to need plenty of these poison snikes which you dabbed with ice & pulled into your eye. Don't blame me‑‑this is how they get high so this is the alleyway where you have to get high, & so he was pulling these snikes of light into eye (& his eye makes a surreal schlump ing sound like the little whore's mouth around your spurting cock, but never mind, I can't describe that, never mind) producing a succulent sweetness or concupiscent cuteness forming caves across the menisces of his own lost faculties (lost in dark caves, those f cul ies, so that his own lost memories develop those caveblind eyes‑‑eyes which see nothing evenwhee there is noting to see, eyes of lunacy, eyes which, given light, could glow quite mad but see never see) together with the chirping of albino crickets, all in a dithering row in the saturated hue & cry of a billion poisons (be cause that's what the snikes contained‑‑these special poisons that would make you Unconditionally Blind (you could get your money back if they failed to make you fail to see you see). But it wasn't just the snikes that got the man so high on Forguesserships, no. He had quite an array. He was pouring for adhomple that that chillchill music through his nerves that made but ghostly white absences of his special nerves & echololations of his special verve, & he was setting these oonts, I say these things like tiny birds (the size of your neatly-nicked thumb‑‑there) called oonts this & that way through his heart, threading his fucking heart (which was fucking quivering, fucking scared, ready to shit its baggy pants‑‑afraid of the imminent torture, you can be) & a current of fine energies like nuanced spices if you will through some of the vacant corridors of some of his vacant corridors through some of the vacant spaces inhimselves through similar corridors in his vacancies of selves, not to mention another, through & through & I think it's safe to say that we've all been there, & he set loose Variously Incubated Animals (if you can call them that ("Animals!" (Take that!) but you cannot call them animals to breed & envelop & devolve along etiolated shorelines of his various, hypnopompic halp-realities and he poured forth paint into his furrows, & time melting like a soggy watch (he had these vials, these little marbles full of a stuff so volatile it would melt the imaes I mean images of time or melt the images of time melting the images of the images of time of time like like that) or like a Soggy Fucking Watch, & he touched those starthings to his crotch (& we won't get into this (we won't get EVER GET into this) & he lay there cuddling these little gods like cats unless they were really cats, wandered into this novel, actual cats, making this novel, against my better will, a Novel of Actual Cats rather than this novel of the most improbable acts, occurring if you will in a universe filled with bellowous bells or at least the very sound of the bellicose bells, a universe of bells then, if you rill, crawling with the hollows of air oer the backs of these invisible cats I have talked about & so therefore can't get rid of in the memory of these actual acts yes & he was popping down one Annellian tear after another likeit was going out of fact, & so was himself sobbingbelow skies of the Great Annellian Spheres where his flesh was hung among, laughing at the sight of his body racked like the melting face of a Bacon painting‑‑which was why he was taking all this stuff, after afterall: to celebrate & to get the kind of good laugh you can't affford to take unless you've taken way way too too much to ask and he configured those mildly-colored rings that came in pairs, pairs of these different-colored rings, as flat & unambiguous as intrusions of comic books into you rlife, calling into question the breathtaking tensions & the ruddy textures of life you thought was life (THOUGHT, anyway!!!) and he thought he heard this talking, & he had to grunt & try to get up & shuffle around, looking for something, whch was this great, awful effort taking place wihing the great & awful effort of this grt nd wfl dream, but he thought he heard this talking was this talking of the rings. O yea. He had taken the talking rings, now hadn't he now? ‑‑I like the fancy syntax & the rhythm of the fourth sentence below, "Inten within..." Xf is all about syntactic rhythm. THE MONSTER OF BEFORE He hunkered down in the dumpster there, did Chiin. He sat splay-leggéd pulling booty from his bag, item by item, inspecting each with un uncomprohunding nod. This went on for a long long longlong time. Intent within some sorta simian trance, he would note for example how each purloined trinket, however once abstract or massy-large, became when he held it but a nice elaboration of his hand, with its matter blending to the glass of his marbled hand. He would turn each bauble in his wrist (half a circle), then turned it half-a-circle back, then half a circle, then bobbed it in his palm, then finessed it, & finally lay the thing aside. It is verified that each rotation of his hand produced a universe of time‑‑one universal span to the to-rotation, one backward transposition to the fro-rotation. He would lay the thing aside, give it a last, proprietary look, & give it one last nod. He would turn to he next bit of contrabond. All this while he was grunting gently quite a lot, & in this way finally sorted out the lot. The bag was empty, but he groped around inside for a bit. It looked kind of gross, but he finally stopped & tried to read his watch, but his watch was evading his eye. He rumpaged round for a stolen watch, but that watch had died. It still glowed‑‑very much like some forgotten moon, in fact‑‑but it had died. He made a look very much like someone trying to look thoughtful, although there was no thought in his head. He would have to take it all back. He looked at his watch again, but his watch only gave him a disgusted look, much like your mother would if she knew what you'd really done. Surely there was no time to take it back. Surely in a moment dawn would crack. He looked at his nonexistent watch. It had withdrawn in disgust from his idiocy. He looked around the dumpster, as if an entire community stood by appraising him. But it was just like everything: nobody knew enough to care nor cared to know. It was still dark when he got back to her door, which hd kept on chaningng form, to the point where it wouldn't be known as a door anymore, but as a small foreign country of imponderable morals. He'd uniwittingly stole the clock that manufactured dawn, but this he couldn't know. So he tried to act as fast as his pure-clear silence would allow, as he lobed his transposition musket for this unusual return. He presumed she was there & presumed she was still sleeping as he softly he went round her room, emitting soft simulacra of her stuff with a tubular bloop which must might have been fufunny. Each was just a soft emnanatin of light, at first. Each quivered like a jelly as it tried to come back. Yea, they were trying to come back to their like once-accustomed mass, but these things have poor memory, & soon her room was moony with thse tremulous things. She woke up from the sheer & eerie loveliness, just as he was trying to be gone. But their eyes met, he with a liquid sigh in hand (from that series of breaths he had forgot he had forgot he stolen), she with the brittle frailty of surmise‑‑but not for long. She let out a hwar-hwoop & came after him, & he was throwing her OWN STOLEN BREATHS at her to try to slow her down (which just filled the room with gasping as my Theory of the Lies of Air preduced). Hysteric weapons bristled out‑‑doubtless thoughts of His Owne Maddnesse bursting outward into outto inward the masses of these cold wet great bingstatuesques‑‑& O how backed he like to an awkward aching crab yeshedid round & round her room, as she came at him like a sheer plane of madness like nightmares eruptiung in his face. Cornered, he vented a comical little squeak & threw the bag all over her. He knew this was bad, knew she would rip through ten thousand times the monster of before, & he fled that chamber of odzure in much of a curvy streak. CRESCENTS OF SO CUSTOMARILY DEW Like many a lesser thief, Chiin decided never to steal again, & thereby only moreso than they developed thus such an infinitely crabbed & dapper sublety to the craft of his breathless breath... ..... He was cleaning out a burned sector in a world that had very much burned (its stars misplaced, its songs all gone, incredibly its people still just walking about, looking not for water nor the end of thirst, nor even the concept of the end of thirst, but for the lost ideational root of thirst itself, bingeyes, just wandering & trying to clear their powdered throats, asking visitors like Chiin, too pursey with liquids, who would spray them with a synthetic variant on that once-so-fractionated quality known as moistness, but they were too burned. They were too too bunred‑‑it did not connect. (It was enough to make you cry, butcept you was afraid to cry, broken grammar lying like the broken thought of twigs dreaming arid dreams dreams of the ashes of these erstwhile twigs & the ghosts of twigs gazing down at the bark of their own vapid bodies, or so they dreamed they thought.) & Chiin was cleaning this stuff up, his movements just so slightly miiaturized with the pressure of the normal trying to stay within itself, when he noticed he was vacuuming the glee off the edges of the sun. This place had a sun, Sun, Subbsunn the Sublte, they called it, sure, nothing other than a jolly stellar clown with his jingly blue cap & his fat lips painted round like the lapses in a greasy racetrack & his fair eyelashs like brittle Niniscian gorgsproots & his tongue (& his tongue!) & his gaudy Tongue of the Subparentheses, tasting light, so obviously asting the light & the way his flesh quiviverered like the face of a bloond baluum'd with his with his muddled honksters laugh, a sun, forsooth, & a subtle fellow... ...and like I was saying this Subbsunn sun had like a single great unbespectacled eye, as suns in the lostness of these strewn sectors & inkling segments & and Crescents Of so customarily dew, & the sun there had a certain spent sort of glee to the edges of its eye, eye-naturally, & look how he was up there by the sun, calmly vacuuming with a tender swing & a sway, sucking the glint right off the edges of its eye even as the sun shone there looking at him. SUBB ALARMED! the sun's bright headline which is how suns talk likesaid. "Ah," stammered Chiin, who hadn't given it nor anything anything like that scattered tht scattered that thought, "Just cleaning your eye, Mr. Sun?" SUN PROTESTS ABOVE! Chiin looked slyly round, a shadow in these beaming messages, then swept the delicate broom across Subbsunn's subtle brow...and thus stole Subb's awful subble thoughts. & now Sunn now smiled amazingly, his flares churing cheerily, & seemed much as before in this strange strange sector, & Mr. Chiin's work did thus went on an dth ewor kwen ton a ndt hewo rkwe nton. COP'S VIRTUAL BLINK or TUCKING LITTLE STUFFS INTO THE GATES OF NIL This happened to Chiin. "Mr. Chiin?" "Yes?" "You work in this sector, Mr. Chiin? You work in this sector, yes?" "No." "Yes, Mr. Chiin." "Not normally, no." "Ah! I should say you are working in this sector, Chiin?" "Ah...yes. What seem to be the problems, officers?" "Funny you should ask, Mr. Chiin." The officer looked up casually to the great green grinning grünning sky. "It would seem our Subbsunn's giving out strange headlines, Mr. Chiin." Chiin tried to give no reaction, but the signs reacted wildly, psychotically, all over & around all over him. Suddenly he was wet & nested & covered in membranous signs & he just went mad. "Sicky signs," he muttered, pulling them off ALONG WITH HIS SKIN. "I suppose that's sad to hear?" He said this in a drawn-out, airy manner, like a composer's sweeping pen. Ballooms rose behind him. The frijj seemed grimly pleased. "Yes. & did you happen to work near Subbsunn at any time, Mr. Chiin?" "Subsunn....that's the clown one, right? Yea....though so. Mm...No, officer. I'm sweeping up down here, in people's closets, drawn folds of their inklings, the odd childhood sin or two." "I see," said the frijj. He was jotting it down in his notebook, & he obviously wanted to remain very glum, but this incredible spring light was rising (like the aforestead bolwhooms) & simply spritzing silver euphorias over everything. His heart was beating in his wet wet mouth. You could tell as much. "Ahem," he said, trying to clear some ruin into his throat. "Well something is missing from the sun." "'Something is always missing from the sun,'" intonéd Chiin in raese, the articulation of enjoined iterations (phrases of the races, source unknown) which happens as the Fifth of the Damaged Lions of Physics that we claim to you to have. Raese is always ignored. Always noted, I mean, & memoriezed, but always in condust of intercourse IGNORED. "Would you mind mind if we popped into your bag, Mr. Chiin?" "My bag? This bag?" Chiin gave a watery little laugh in the shape of silent bubbles in the shape of the dreams of images in the shape of false hopes in the shape of these audacious marbles‑‑smaller than ordinary marbles‑‑yet etched yet in the imagery of microscopic Buddhist gods & the gods & the goddesses & the godlets of your Hindus, too...especially your Hindus, in fact, once your tiny sub had navigated the larger, jollier Buddhist gods forming the outer circle (& who's to say what insanely detailed gods might lie underneath?) in the shape of a heart, possibly your mother's heart or the the heart of a mother quite close to being your mother or of someone close to being a mother on some dozing level of appal‑‑a heart bent, melted, but not quite broken in the shape of an old metapor, broken in an alley & suzzling some Very Rotten Gwill, ifn youn willm, hacking out last dweggsa meaning in the form of tiny droplets of blood on the rag of his rotten handkerchief, incredibly rolled, in the shape of mixtures of being‑‑these are paisely powders one mixes in the Milkshakes of Being (listen‑‑don't blame me; I never call them that), delicious colors, delciious drinking delicious listening, delicious et ceteras in the shape of in the shape of in the shape of * "You can't 'pop into' a bag." "Yes, we know, sir, but may we virtually do so?" "What's this 'virtually do so' shit?" "You'll see!" they chorused cheerfully, like psychotic cartoon characters, disturbing Crumb characters messing with your primal urges. "Ahhh well then," stammered Chiin for a moment uncertainly moment a for Chiin stamrstamrd, "Well then, I guess it's OK. I guess it;s OK, right? Well then, my Valiant Protectors of the Public Trust, be my guests." Sex scene deleted. Things are hard to delete here, hard to change, hard to edit. The words bite you if you try. The words gnaw at you like the pasty-faced zombies you see in every movie. No shit. You see them in every movie if you look really hard. It helps to have DVD, succession sequencers, bubble analyzers, iospiers, or better yet, just cut to the chase & get whatever they watch movies on at the end of time, if they're not just too totally cool to even watch movies, the pricks. Buncha pricks! (nervous laughter) No, really! Meantime ol Chiin here's forced to watch these cops dive into his stuff, against all laws of physics. This means these cops have control over the laws of physics, suggesting you might want to cooperate with these here cops... After servicing the cops thoroughly, Chiin wipe his cheen & answer questions trying to keep his words cwisp, don't you know, turbulent with desperation gasping for thought gasping of desperation grasping for unthought-of aught-of-thought, but subtones only RECENTLY REVEALED by some advanced research funded in large part by starvations of the poor reveals a blueness melting down the screen, like the saddest poured paint down the faces of an unthought world or paint sobbingdown the faces of an unsobbed world or this confoundingly beautiful gloom down the faces of the Saddest World (that would be Zaypossia‑‑the saddest world, known as the Saddest Fucking World (this is the way we talk), which may not be so sad so sad‑‑not sad at all, in fact in fact (our facts I'm afraid come condensed within these facts we call carrier facts) but with some very sad faces, datz forcerpt). "In you go, *," the frijj said, gesturing vaguely his stick of fridget which was this stick of the instaneity swizzling the veryv lip of Chiin's dimensional bag (which had gone very vague indeed), lying like a kn |