Excerpt from ScatØlØgically Yours

The novel details a near-past-then-future inwhich Lake Michigan empties of water — becoming an endless desert. A disenfranchised population that worships an arcane “World Worm” moves in, and the Quadrilateral Commission, a planned-community corporation, gradually supplants these people with towns not unlike Disney’s Celebration, Florida.

Yet allare not so easily supplanted. A partisan leader working against the Quadrilateral communities where she was born, the charismatic Dial-Up Networking leads the Blackout Angels gang in paramilitary activities. A second protagonist, the perpetually coughing Quadrilateral employee Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui, combs the wasteland of old Lake Michigan in search of the memory of his burned sister, whom he knows now only as “blank hiss at the tape-end.”

—[when we sleep with tape recorders, we get electric dreams]—

Qui stops the recorder. Rewinds. Falls back into present time. 2039. Smoldering rubber and acetate-soaked palmetto fans scorch the lower Interface scrub. A great fire, no, a labyrinth of fires, no, a series of great fires in serial repetition, enough to consume old Chicago like a used-up matchstick … hundreds of miles wide, thousands of feet high, mountains of ash smoking in deliberate arabesques. Curtains of perpetually boiling soot, the horizon fires eat themselves, grotesque Saturn devours his children and drools bone marrow onto the earth below. What really happened that day? Oh little brother little brother!

Filmore’s low-slung back watches the horizon swell like a thick berry: thunderous butterfly wings in translucent smoking patterns, oranges overtaking yellow fields of buttercup burn. Closer, over the months, to their town, their home, their bodies. Twirling spiral jets, soaring over margarine fields of flickering goldenrod in a gloaming Tower of Babel, higher than even Filmore could imagine; the flames hang on the verge of eternal collapse, an electric tidal wave poised to smother Calibration. Even now, remembering the fires, Lincoln Qui’s epiglottis chokes from smoke poisoning.

Hayes Garfield Filmore Qui, attuned to these peculiar rhythms, sees the collapse of old-world: yellow cities crackling into a hellish bonfire falling upon itself, swirling dried bramble scorch through her sinuses. Soon, maybe tomorrow, the fire comes for them, for their parents, and so, a paper bag, Filmore fills with smoke, a ball of pulsing hack distending into a cloud. Her eyes go smoky the hue of nautical wind; mucous blasts from her orifices in warps of magnificent daylight speckled with deep orange flakes. Covered in sticky discharge, bravely, she lifts from the ground.

Filmore. Jumps. Dives. Splashes into zooming flame. Disappears into the undulating heat as Lincoln follows her lips across slow unguent rivers. — [When you sleep with tape recorders, you get electric dreams little brother little brother.] — The trembling landscape dissolves into margarine fire bleed. — [When you sleep with tape recorders … ] — Cue muscle memory. — [a shadow on the neck of the sun, little brother little brother,] — Headphones breathing. — little brother — all he has left as the tape clicks — little brother — to catch on the ruddy twists of his lungs — little brother — and on the ground his knees scrape and bloody his head tilted up into the eyes of the sun tearing and steaming as Filmore fades into the gas and char and bloody smaze of — little brother — pools of silver flashing fire spots — little brother — Filmore no more.

Lincoln Qui’s mouth is hot, passing a plug of bloody mucous like an impacted tooth across the lip of his lower larynx.

The headphones rattle.

Recording a tape.

A Quadrilateral Commission Report on the Nature of the Maneuverian Cultists, or, The Strange Counter-Evolution of Peoples Heretofore Recommended as “Backward” following the Great Drainage of old Lake Michigan, 10,000 years after the Last reported Ice Age, in the Common era 2000 …

… Another legend of the troublesome “Cultists” a.k.a “Maneuverians,” or, “First Families,” as their descendants prefer to be called, maintains that the carapace of the world is actually the boundary of an ancient sweat lodge:

Swedish philologist Hans Dialectic’s landmark anthropological treatise, Of Worm and Man (2018), notes that, “They actually think that the sky above the former Lake Michigan is lined with fat that rises from the bubbling of the planet. They believe that this miasma, burned off by the fires, with cold sores; he coughs and with great gesticulation passes, settles into the celestial lining as a great energy accumulator between the domain of land and sky.”

The treatise quotes “new” journalist Henry Mescaline’s findings (from Post-America: A Tragedy in Three Centuries [2012]) of direct overlap with the theories of radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich: “These wormfuckers have their own version of the sky — a dome of sorts not unlike a football helmet for Louis Quinze. The dome of the sky becomes a border between their two worlds.

This doctrine separates the “regular” people, Quadrilateral Commission residents (settled in numerous towns from Calibration to Amelioration to Jubilation … ), from the Cultist communities. Mescaline notes the 2008 experiments of his associate, Doctor Baron Fritz von Hepplepheffer, which proved in repeated laboratory conditions that a Quadrilateral Commission settler and a First Family Cultist can be opposed at a distance of no less than three feet without any awareness of the other’s existence: “These people seem to exist, on some level, within an entirely different plane of existence. Yes, there are overlaps with our own, but the coordinate points are extremely slippery.” The Doctor-Baron additionally notes that when placed against certain non-Cultists, “the subject’s eyes will gloss over into reptile vision, and he will experience the nothingess of his alternate state.”

Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui folds this latest rambling communiqué from his boss, Dr. Zebediah Dooger, and imagines what smoking a cigarette must be like. The train nears Quadrilateral Commission regional headquarters. He swallows a bit more blood and strikes an invisible match against the side of the passenger car. Get it together Qui. How to even think about the Cultists? The religious doctrine of negative theology. Via Negativa. The Negative Way. Well sort of. Puff puff. Qui approaches the idea in its own emptiness. He inhales. This principle, when stated positively, instantiates the existence of god through the lack of empirical evidence:

For instance, if the beauty of the cowslip flower indeed exists, just as a long-stemmed primrose with strong yellow blossom can push majestically over the top of tall grass, then surely the divine supercedes such creation. From the Cappadocian fathers of the 4^th century CE, to Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, and Basil the Great, to the medieval mystic Moses Maimonides, the deity can only be defined as beyond the utterly useless limits of human cognition; god thus becomes uncreated, incomprehensible, unknowable.

He exhales, taps oxygen ash onto the tip of his shoe.

Yet these Maneuverians always take such things negatively compared to the West; they imagine their World Worm Umma-Segnus not as uncreated, but as created emptiness. Whereas the traditional monotheists consider their holy ghost to fill the bodies of the chosen, to breath life into the world … for these Cultists, the Worm exists as an epiphenomenal void ready to suck everything into a vortex of salt. The beast does not represent an inscrutable absence for these people, but exists only against the conventional sense — a tangible, knowable nothingness made remotely ethereal by Qui own skewed attempts at understanding. A globule of water becomes lost to all but the rolling cavity of the planet. Something isn’t coming coaelescing.

The Negative Way. Inhalation.

Qui again picks up Dooger’s folded article. He presses its corners to the skin of his fingers; he sees a meaningless paper trap not entirely different from Quadrilateral meaninglessness imposed upon the Cultists. He kicks off his shoes as he feet begin to sweat; he is barefoot, his nails are overgrown. The sky outside his train car turns from a placid, smoky white to a polluted canvas streaked with pastel red, as if a god who will never exist in a way Qui can comprehend painstakingly bleeds itself out of the picture. Exhalation. Leaving a stain.

Try again … If first there was water, dirty, evil, polluted from years of industrial shipping, from nuclear power plants rimmed along its muddy banks, ever-present, churning with a quiet fury — and then, one day, Lake Michigan is gone … poof — it is only natural that the Cultists would come to see the emptiness as a gaping wound, a sore so pregnant with meaning that all the meek and inept cruelties of the human imagination would rush in to paint narratives of damnation and blood retribution in the broadest possible strokes … Almost there.

Might he too, of one Doctor Baron Fritz von Hepplepheffer’s subjects — recording a tape of his belches and farts in the remnants of “Buffalo Station” in the lower center of the lakebed, the site of the “Father Benjamin” settlement in the northwest — have stood many times before a Cultist without seeing? And if so, isn’t it entirely possible that he sees Filmore — living, breathing, flaming — where the others see nothing but Lincoln’s “nervousness”? After all, there are documented cases of native Interface residents seeing someone who may not be there, but as far as he knows, only Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui sees, and loves, a sister who died symbolically saving his boyhood home, and, if Hepplepheffer is to be believed, never existed. And only he maintains what the therapist calls, — absurdly high-grade daily functionality. Most of these fucks in your state are zombies, Qui. —

His breath, stale with invisible smoke, passes under the door cracks into the train corridor. When he inhales, after a lingering moment, noxious gases come rushing back: rivers of methane, sulfur, carbon monoxide — choking the train berth with recycled heat. He daydreams of covering everything in a code-breaking veneer, unlocking the exact combination of Filmore’s lips. The temperature in the train car rises. He jerks from the smoky rim of a distant world, a memory of Calibration childhood, into a closer blur of smoke and steaming tears … outsiders want to break apart his primitive communication stellae with Filmore. And in less than a few seasons, as Quadrilateral progress continues unabated, the few Cultists entrenched in the northern remains of Lake Michican will sweat fart burp and go off into the rafters as they suck down castor oil and bovine-growth-hormone above the unforgiving stench of their radioactive sores.

Lincoln Qui goes dizzy from the smell. On the floor of the train car, the sweltering liquids of his body are made to boil; his legs hump against his chest like mountains rising from a medial moraine populated with lead, mustard gas, and asbestos. Fibrous dandelions sprout from the blackened scrub of his knees, calling forth a swarm of winged maggots that feed on congealed soot. In a flash, he burns out the cigarette onto the skin of his cheek. Forget Filmore. They tell him. There is nothing to know but the boiling hump of a dry planet, the never-ending hack raising Qui from the edge of this seat to the bed, in this unsteady train car, this tin-covered accumulator speeding slowly over the desert.

No mirrors. Still, Qui knows, that the cigarette fails to leave a mark.

An article of con-federation

My rude-boy Blackout Angels — None, Nothing, Number — sport “Up With People” armbands and sing cheap cabaret songs in reverse to evoke a tasty suicidal subtext. Play back “I Kiss Your Hand, Madame” and “Bei Dir War Es Immer So Schön” with the stylus moving counter-clockwise, and you get a goat-headed orgy starring wrist-slitting demonic harpies who shit on your face and slather themselves with pig intestines before you’re even a quarter way to the runoff grooves. My boys whistle along to fucking “When The White Lily Blossoms Again” during their masquerades as Quadrilateral utility zombies.

Style is important and we dress impeccably.

The inept Desiccation fuzz patrol, composed of several K-9 units, trains with three-legged miniature schnauzers due to budget cuts. They tool around in dilapidated Vibraphonic Everywhere Vehicles — or VEVs — Keystone Cop golf carts powered by vibrating sound channels and complex dodecaphonic scales. Just for kicks, we call in an anonymous tip on one of our in-progress energy drains that’ll Go Down Moses as he bitch slaps Yul Brenner with a leather-coated bulrush.

— Hey you Blackout Angels — . Coppers megaphone while we tap the enormous fiberoptic power lines. — If it’s real juice you want, then why not join a political action committee to get the Interface recognized as the 52^nd state? With federal monies flowing in, you’d do even better on the white-collar crime! —

Treacherous cunts. We don’t take no guff. First, we drop sneezing powder into their Five-Oh britches so their blowjob whores’ll spray mucous where the sun-don’t-shine. But here’s the rub — we pre-load that mucous days before with all sorts of nasty filth: red lacquer beetle larvae, microscopic dust mites from Interface sandstorms, mad cows feces ground into seahorse virility toxins, and None’s personal favorite, fresh Amazonian candiru fish. Watch the tiny parasitic catfish riding roughshod up those cumstreams, right into the jackbooted urethras … because nobody knows they trouble they’ve seen. We Blackout Angels take energy all right. By any means necessary.

Under his fedora, None’s brimming with other ideas; he’s a wonderful technician in a perfectly pressed three-piece suit: — We’ll thrust electromagnetic divining rods into the earth, near the largest energy generators, crowbars splitting the skull of the old World Worm, Umma-Segnus. And the juice’ll flow like cream soda into our frothy mouths. The milk and honey of hot white light bubbles up, and we get charged with purpose. — Something even these Quadrilateral bastards can understand: purpose porpoise purpose porpoise swimming along the electroscopic interior of a microwave spectrum.

Porpoise, motherfuckers.

— It smells, this Post-America, but the air tastes of stale ozone, — I say, in reference to our electrified bodies. I was the Blackout Angel leader back in Desiccation, and the leader still today. — Call me Dial-Up Networking, you cum-stained coppers. I’m archaic, used up, spilled and abused, a pitch-and-tar ring along my black-eye tattoo. Shades of meaning, brilliant hues of skin-folded centipedes caught by a lungful of exterminator breath. —

I might describe myself in intricate detail after they arrest me for the sugar-rat gig, but it would only embarrass their speech-challenged stenographer. Instead, watch the rings of Saturn growing steadily around my left eye, as you get real sleepy. Look closely now, you scabies-ridden entrail-stained pig turd. My left eye no longer exists, the skin has grown over — a bloody mess of white pus and inside moon-rip, weathered black by the endless Interface windstorms.

— Consider the force of a trillion bits of soft sand silicate and hot soil pellets shot at high speed into a whipping frenzy of palpitating whorl, — I tell the man, — accelerating with sub-atomic particles to the speed of sound, a symphony of fluttering fragments rising into a monsoon battering a small coastal village, a tsunami of dust and hacking cough brushing my eye with heavy-grain sandpaper. This whirlwind blackens the flesh around the tattoo, and so long ago signaled my disassociation from the life of your pathetic Quadrilateral norms. — I’m the only Blackout Angel completely unafraid, and the cops are mesmerized; they all want a run on my pussy.

The trick is to get ‘em hot-and-buttered until the Blackout boys break in with reverse choruses from “Pirate Jenny” — “freighter black the, ship the and!” Just a few seconds to liberate the fuzz’s naïve colonialist notions from wayward mouths with gold-digging dentist drills. Then, just for kicks, we disappear in our bright-colored jockstraps, smoke bombs, and half-broken jet packs, painting a rainbow of ash onto the smazy plume of sky.

After all, my friends, style is important.

— [when we take down our drawers, we lose a secret garden] —

In 1569, Gerardus Mercator presented his strange new map of the world to the assembled mariners in the Flemish city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch. The amazing fluency by which his Mercator Projection, with its perpendicular lines of latitude and longitude, its distortions of scale in favor of maritime activity, became the accepted view of the world never leaves the mind of the Quadrilateral Commission’s Vice-President Zebediah Dooger. Such acceptance hangs even now in his left occipital region. And while projection on the three-panel window of Dooger’s office makes no explicit reference to the unexpected reversals of Quadrilateral fortunes, Dooger smells the future. Just as a bee inhales the fragrance of the possible flower, never in sight, always promised in the next field. Dotted with multicolored pushpins tracing the surgical scars of half-completed highways, gas nozzles promising all sorts of obscene gang rapes with a hundred thousand souped-up VEVs, Dooger’s transparent charts prophesize an inland sea of replicated towns engulfing the everyday citizen: the Quadrilateral Commission master plan.

Qui adjusts the bottom of his dress shirt before this window glass, peering beyond the messy maps. — No need for modesty, — Dooger says, — It’s a one-way looking glass. Keeps those fucking Cultists on the other side. —

Dr. Zebediah Dooger, the older man, considers repeating himself more loudly as if talking to a witless Maneuverian. Instead, he ignores Qui’s struggle with his belt loops. Dooger tries not to think at all about this odious man in his office. Dooger’s vanity, also well-hidden, provides other territories to advance upon: the perpetual battle between varicose snakes crinkling up his thighs, or, the laser gun wielded by his large-chested plastic surgeon who remains strangely unattractive, he thinks, for a woman wielding a powerful ruby weapon. He can’t quite get over his own whips of white hair sprouting from his roots in a twisted garden of dried-up nostril ivy, transplanted onto his head; he may be old, but compared to this Lincoln Qui, he’s a regular Cary Grant. He regards his employees in the same way a carnival patron might regard the penguin-toed girl writhing in pain behind a dirty polyester curtain. How will this bumblefuck ever prove his innocence? Dooger reads the telegram to Qui:

To: Dr. Zebediah Dooger

From: QUADRILATERAL COMMISSION HQ

Re: Contract Employee: Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui

Good Zebediah. Stop.

W.J.L. Qui is a valuable employee. Stop. Also an important subcontractor for Quadrilateral projects. Stop. Umma-Segnite activity may compromise future operations. Stop. Qui to be recalled for improprieties. Stop. Immediately. This must. Stop. Immediately. Ask him yourself. Stop. To take down his pants. Stop. Advance timetable if possible. Stop.

— And so we’ll do exactly what this missive says, Qui. So stop your sycophantic stalling. —

A camel trapped under a shroud of sand and dream, a caravan of frankincense led by the Bedouins of the Adam’s apple, Qui feels his limbs tighten.

— Sure thing, boss. — A few drops of his chai latte spill onto the carpet. — But why would HQ write you by telegraph? — Qui mumbles, — there aren’t any telegraph lines running through the Interface? —

A phone rings into an echo of archaic images: attention-starved nomads fade into the muted color of Dooger’s skin as he recalls the insufferable drought of the early Interface. Deep breath, Dooger, deep breath:

— Do you know how much environmental radiation the average desktop computer spews out each minute, Qui? The glowing screen here shoots more carcinogens in one day from its motherboard — more particles of soot, smog, smaze, and other sundry post-industrial crap — than every other day stacked together since the fall of the Roman Empire. We’re soaking all that crap into our cells. Why, we may as well be plugged directly into a giant cigarette, lit, continually, by a chain-smoking Gulliver in the land of radioactive Lilliputians. — A few Velcro pushpins fall to the floor. Dooger stamps his feet.

— Can you imagine, Qui, overlaying the smoke from all those Bergen-Belsens, every corpse-ridden burial on the Ganges, the flames of the Alexandria Library fire … all that noxious gas smashed together won’t add up to this single day? —

Dooger downs his tea in two quick gulps and Qui can’t help but stare at the lump in his boss’s neck. An incipient goiter? — But if it’s any consolation, — Dooger adds, — the fires may get us first. —

A mucous plug pushes up Qui’s throat like a snake. His brass belt clanks dully against itself as his pants fall to the ground. Dooger smacks a fresh latex glove. No more stalling.

— You should recite the plan, so far as you understand it. A good distracter, Qui? Counting in Spanish while pulling out a splinter with a sewing needle. — Dooger’s fingers press close to Qui’s scrotum; a large cloud of dust rises outside the center window, where a steel erector beam smashes against the a cement mixer.

The Quadrilateral plan: movement from the town of Jubilation, due east of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, to the opening of the northern Quadrilateral hub, Consecration, past the tip of the Door County Peninsula — all within the next few months. Dooger’s fingers tickle Qui’s pubic hair as the summer wind blows puffball dander across a lazy meadow.

— Bend down. — Dooger pushes the teacup toward Qui. Hot, dusty grime from Qui’s sweaty crotch glistens along its handle. Qui feels ghostly latex proceed around his inner thigh.

— Er … my assignment, as usual, will be to facilitate final plans for the residential occupation of the new town, Consecration, focusing on relations with the local Cultists, while seeking out expansion opportunities in the remainder of the northern lakebed. —

A shrill voice — while seeking out expansion opportunites in the remainder of the blah blah blah … — Dooger grips, hard. — Always so formal. My hands are on your naughty bits for wormsakes! Don’t underestimate the importance of the Consecration site, Qui. Even you can’t forget this one. Fulcrum Maneuvers, well, he died there: “descended” as his flunkies say. —

When we die, considers Qui, our tape recordings become a maze of free-form data, archives of our linguistic perversions. To think what arcane stores lay buried in the tomb of Fuclrum Maneuvers. Dooger’s hand slips around Qui’s thigh to the rear.

— Why … um … oh … have we advanced the timetable? —

— Keep still boy. If you want me to keep the catheter in its sheath, that is. If you must know, our sheep in the Tierra Del Fuego have been developing cataracts with such rapidity that as soon as our boys get ‘em lasered off, there are seven or eight new layers of gelatinous skin. The Patagonia branch is in stitches over the whole thing, but I don’t think it’s particularly funny. You probably didn’t know that the magnetic field of this dime-store planet is gradually reversing. And according to my viziers, north and south are gonna’ swap party hats soon. You think the fires are bad now? If nuclear warheads are piece of the sun brought to us by the power of the atom, these fires, burning for 34 years, well, they’ll push us into a nova state. This planet is highly flammable and we have to coat the entire Interface with some soft of asbestos substitute in the next 43 months or leave the whole thing to the free-market Chinese. —

Qui grabs his tea. For Fulcrum Maneuvers and his followers, the gleaming city of Consecration is near “Venus Flytrap,” holiest of their many Interface holes. The Negative Way. The still-warm liquid presses against his cheeks, bubbling coagulate for a nut-hoarding squirrel.

— Why the fuck do you think we’ve advanced the timetable? — Dooger’s hands rub the back of Qui thighs and move toward the great, yawning emptiness. Fumbling against Qui’s soft genitals. Beady-eyed little shit-for-brains sycophant. He can’t even control his breath. He’s a smashed accordion swilling tea through the bellows of his chest. — The Umma-Segnites may be a stupid people, Qui, but they understand the body. Toothy Cultist children, dried into meat strips on the hot sand, die, defiantly, emaciated Australopithecines gnawing the carcasses of half-rotten Homo Sapiens. They will not hesitate to eat the future. —

Qui imagines a dark pool of clarified butter coagulating over the centuries, smelting into the tip of a nuclear warhead intercepted by a European-designed missile; the velocity and content of the brisk, highly caffeinated tea calls attention to the sores populating the interior of his cheeks. These pustules fester, radioactive pomegranate seeds bubbling the sunken pits of the lakebed. “Venus Flytrap” lore is far from secret: the mad patriarch Fulcrum Maneuvers descending into the salt of the former inland sea, penetrating the ground just like Holy Mary Mother of Worm ascended to heaven — but in reverse — right down into the bowels of the desert floor, the geological sphincter sealed once Maneuvers’s waterless fingertips passed through the sandy membrane.

— There’s something else, Lincoln, — Dooger’s probe redoubles its effort. — For years, we’ve been providing, er, counseling, as part of the your health plan. For the unique problem of this sister you claim to have. Hayes Garfield Roosevelt Qui. —

— Filmore, sir. —

— Yes, of course. Just checking to see how fresh this delusion is with you. Clearly, you’re right on top of it. The whole thing is superimposed on your person. Everyone here … —

— I’m sorry if I’ve let it affect my work, Dr. Dooger, it’s just that I can’t seem... —

Dooger frowns from his crouching position, asks Qui to balance on a chair. — Frankly Lincoln, Quadrilateral doesn’t care anymore about getting rid of this delusion. Our doctors have concluded that no additional amount of therapy will eliminate the belief that your sister was consumed by the fires ringing the Calibration settlement in 2019. —

Qui’s heart drops below Dooger’s probe, slatering it with accumulated plaque.

— Rather, Qui, situations have arisen. Situations that might benefit from your unique perspective on the non-transient nature of the human spirit. As you complete your new assignment, we formally … .oh, what’s this … hold on … what have we here Lincoln? —

Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui prides himself on an ability to remain insulated from the depravity of human relations, so that any wound, any intrusion onto the smooth path of his colon can be internalized and fixed into a tiny rectal polyp, and over time shaved into nothing by the regular movement of his bowels.

— Aha! I’m not the least surprised, really, to discover a recording device hidden in your intestines. — Dooger mumbles last night’s dream to himself as the tiny catheter winds its way up the hedge maze of Qui’s lower intestine. Dooger stares out the triple window, through the projection map, past the cloud of still-settling dust, and laughs hysterically. The atomic sun settles lightly into the arms of a twilight horizon. Dooger stomps his foot on the floor and crushes a tiny mechanical chip. — Cultist crap. Now, Lincoln, you are free to find Filmore for us. —

Qui shuts his eyes during a mild flicker episode brought on by the dust cloud interrupting the setting sun. Dooger becomes a VEV mechanic operating under the open asshole, probing the stomach and up the esophagus, through a tiny penetration into the mouth where everything catches on the reverse sheen of teeth. — Um … er … what was that boss? Shit. —

Qui squints, his cheeks fermenting with cinnamon soy while barges of sun-bleached trash float over a field of orange construction hats as the probe wends still deeper toward his brain. His eyelids tremble, a sheet of thunder metal pounded by acupuncture mallets. Qui can see the whole thing hit its polar opposite; the grooves of Post-America’s former Lake Michigan, dry and cracked like the surface of Mars at the “Venus Flytrap” site, flooding in a rush of acid, exploding in a flotilla of yelping seagulls scattering soap bubbles over blaze-orange fields of margarine fire. Enzyme-soaked tea, raw from the yeast of Qui’s mouth, sprays furiously over the Quadrilateral map.

— Damnit Qui, you’ve spritzed all over the window. — Dooger retracts the probe with a great tape-measure clack. — Looks as if you have not been fully compromised. Still, you sure as hell could use one serious colonic. I’ll send Bush-Bush Bush with you, on assignment. — Sputum burns Qui’s tongue, ignites his throat. — She’ll escort you the Consecration site. But remember, Filmore is now fair game, Qui. Produce her, and everything can change for us yet. —

The office door opens in a hazy dream transcribed from a tape recording. Qui pulls up his pants. — It’s the antibiotics I put in the tea, Qui. We need to keep our people inoculated against Cultist filth. — The woman clicks her heels in time to a rapidly accelerating world, a blur below the waist. — There may be some long-term scarring, and a bit of that foggyheaded feeling. —

A Story

— The Story of the Eye is the tale of the genji the song of the pillow book the thousand and one nights threaded through the anus of a camel, slam-dancing on the head of a pin, — I say things like this, offhandedly, during the fifteenth hour of police interrogation. Their dicks stiffen into broomsticks rimming a sperm whale, and the cell door swings open before the black circles orbiting my canthus, joining upper and lower eyelid.

Later. No. Now. My body remains supple at the insertion of the 83 precision acupuncture needles filled with tinctures of morphine, Vioxx, Celebrex, and Novocain; my nose catches everything through the half-rimmed twist of metal characterizing the odor of this dive, Uncle Eyeball’s Erogenous Zone Bar and Grill, steaming, here, far from our Desiccation beginnings and police entanglements in two-bit sugar-rat capers those many winsome years ago. Now, we blast off in the Buffalo Station nuclear processing zone just outside the city limits of Quadrilateral #32, the most comprehensive planned community to date — Jubilation. Desiccation was 2028, and it is currently 2039; we age with a disturbing rapidity.

Location. Location. Jubilation. You gotta’ hand it to the bean-counting Quadrilateral fucks — this outland set-up beyond Jubilation’s official boarders, clearly run by the Quad, puts out like a supercharged vibrator. Uncle Eyeball’s is Shakespeare’s Globe just outside London. A bit of a speakeasy throat job: Robotic slaves cook dinner in their bellies and serve steaming shit-on-a-shingle sprinkled with artificial colors. Homeostasis managers to track your pulse, heart rate, and the decomposition as you engage in a regimen of semi-legal drug suppositories not unlike the chemical wash that licks my veins with the uncrurled tongue of the wind. As we speak.

And these sick fucks around the Eyeball … — No validity to the Maneuverian/World Worm/First Families/Umma-Segnite/Cultist whatever the fuck you call it “systems of beliefs,” but all-due-respect should be paid to the quaint, indigenous religion by not building settlements directly on their land because blah de fuckin’ blah blah … —

Some of these shits insist on only half-dosing, using banana-tasting swab medicine to prime the gums for injection while waves of smokestack lightning from their cocks rise all greasy into the ionosphere. They’re scared shitless of what they can’t understand. Look around at the crowd; look deep into their eyes. All you need to see is the manufactured sadness, the illusion of broken dreams provided by Quadrilateral for a bit o’ local color. Ask a dilly boy for his story, and you’ll get some familiar shit about the curvature of the earth the unfaithfulness of the spouse the geo-political burn of the fermented kumiss cause the tiger in the tank slept with a political official who prefers to catalog his pervert tapes using the Dewey decimal system.

His story’s a sham because it’s too tight, a dried-up asshole. No room for the natural … er … oscillation of the human condition. Surest way to tell if someone’s casting a bullshit line is to keep biting.

— [when we step blithely through the desert, we towel off with skin] —

The telescoping travel toothbrush combs Bush-Bush Bush’s long hair as a koi fish might guard a mansion. Uncaring, she raises the open-topped VEV mirror sail toward the still-distant borders of planned community #37, Consecration. The brush separates each strand as if picking apart lice from the mane of some ancestral Cro-Magnon; she keeps silent amid the crank of gravel and sand kicked through the sound-dampening VEV processor. Square-framed glasses block her eyes with pieces of cloudy construction paper. Lincoln Qui, all but invisible, thinks about his sister Filmore and the strange experiences of the day — the recording tape canceling the noises of her body, the intrusive examination from Zebediah Dooger.

Several hours later, Qui notices the façade of yesteryear’s model, Quadrilateral city #32, Jubilation, already fading in bad reception as they pass over its mid-lake VEV path; the village green decomposes into a transistor array of mechanized row homes and manicured, animatronic lawn elves. Qui sighs. He must raise this new town, Consecration, from nothingness — a blackhead on the skin of the desert set to overtake one of the last and strongest Cultist settlements, “Venus Flytrap.” Not to mention Fulcrum Maneuvers’s disappearance there. Qui has long read the patriarch’s supposed diaries, each filled with existential terrors, glimpses into the sublime of the World Worm Umma-Segnus. Now old Jubilation stands as a facsimile of itself, boasting the largest concentrated population in the Interface; still, a profound emptiness penetrates as they speed through her streets, turned inside out by some acidic malfeasance. If people live here, then some dark Chernobyl must have irradiated half. Something isn’t right. Qui has never been deployed on this type of assignment with anyone before — let alone an attractive woman, now certainly wearing pants, who must be no more than 20, the scent of hanging puberty. And then, this Filmore business. After years of immersion therapy, now this!

They pass Jubilation, heading vaguely northwest. He half-suspects that the occasional desert garden, undulating topiaries of a fabulist-themes hedge maze (hermaphroditic Gryphon, multi-horned Hydra), makes shift to disorient him by appearing too precisely cultivated. Why, this one (Qui surmises the stiff angles of Bush-Bush Bush’s body) refused to crosscheck the most basic statistics with Mayor Gompers in Jubilation. And with increased reports of partisan activity … She sped right through town, with barely a moment for Qui to surmise the relative success of his prior initiative to have spring begonias mask the increasingly noisome garland of raw eggs and sewage. No, something’s not right.

Over headphones, Qui blasts feral spaces of blank data whispering inarticulately to the brain’s digital processing center. And what of the possibility of memories becoming tape recordings? Qui keeps his own counsel on such matters, but when the low electronic hum of computers and toasters and automatic doorbells and VEVs and headphone noises finally moves into the background of every journey, there remains just enough hiss to keep him jittery.

He shifts, scratches his leg; his arm jumps from his lap to his ear with difficulty as the open-air VEV faces a particularly virulent headwind. Qui adjusts the noise-canceling headsets to the highest setting. Still, a hiss — where? Her head, Qui’s mind, the sun-as-burning-gasball hanging low in the muggy sky, or, the crackling horizon fires? Perhaps something underground? Buried, yes, but present, the proverbial ghost in the machine that mimics the sound of his breathing and the beating of his heart.

Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui does not remember, exactly, the reverse-colored image of his sister Hayes Garfield Filmore Qui as anything more than a buried negative from the past. Yes, this is it, he decides, a memory doctored by over-exposure to the incidental radiation of the earth’s deteriorating atmosphere. As far as he can tell, she exists merely as a fragment of the porcelain plate of his life shattering daily, but strangely, without a sound. If her lips did move in his memory, and this is by no means certain, then Qui must be speaking for her. No one could hear anything with those fires raging. And she was in the fire when she disappeared. But, now, with misplaced shrillness. This is her: blank hiss at the tape-end.

Taken together, these desert soundtracks would surely be of interest to his handlers at HQ. For many years they, well, not “they” so much … but his company-sponsored therapist, Dr. Sonia Auslanspacher, forced him to provide approximate sounds for his many remembered images of sister Filmore. The sound of her voice and the beating of her heart reduplicated in oldd cassette fizz. Quadrilateral wants something, all right. Quadrilateral desires, always. Something from Qui’s past, from his own record: a rambling suicide note processed in a teepee of fire, a heat cone bursting into the sun. — Natural hallucinations of loss, — remarks Dr. Auslanspacher into her digital recorder shining diamond bright against the dankness of the inspection room; her eyes penetrate to the centers of outmoded satellites. — This Filmore is nothing to be taken seriously, Lincoln, never to be acted upon. —

From this electronic tincture, Consecration looms ever distant on the horizon, because it is expected, and perhaps because the chance of any breakthrough here, without the comfort of the Doctor’s therapy room (and its array of warm herbal teas, alpine sound machines, bright Tahitian birds of Paradise), offers an odd sort of clarity. With a word, this will certainly force his hand. So Qui must scramble, ignite the Interface desert in a paste of dusty sand, Via Negativa, a smoldering fire flue, away from Quadrilateral ash.

She lacks conventional beauty … pulses throbs and thrums the way a shadow from a tree might suddenly break from its border to overtake a neighboring sapling. Except there are no trees indigenous to this empty lakebed; everything is artificial, imported. The figure overtakes the two other shadows in a long-hooded burnous, approaches the clearing with a shawl of burnt muslin, a death rattle mandrake root. Fire signs in a flux of dead languages: Sanskrit, Etruscan, Algonquin, Nostratic. Patterns of wondrous orange yellow and the skin of the woman melts into decayed film bubbling in silver spots, pulsating anxiously from an image track of 24 shots per second to a lingering close-up of flesh shriveling in ovencrash blaze. If there are screams, they are overwhelmed by the spectacle of burning figure, overtaken by the hiss of the metallic salts, the carbon electrodes providing the scene with a sepia color shared with blue movies flickering through an outmoded projector.

Qui moves in and out of this vision as Bush-Bush Bush drives with a rare precision along such tentative roadways, overhangs cantilevered from rocky cliffs. The rhythm of the VEV’s vibrating intestinal track encourages the sky, a sheltering canopy of fantastic red and orange through-lines, to slowly supplant itself with a stretch of long toffee-colored clouds. Everywhere past Jubilation, twisted husks of polymer swamp marsh trees, artificially aged beyond the four decades since the lake went dry, collapse in kindling piles sized for a dioxin-hungry god.

Sunddenly, gigantic “X”-shaped sentinels rise ramrod from the earth. Thirty-feet tall, some fifty. Everywhere at once. Branches of overgrown sagebrush cross slats of wooden pole and aluminum siding; anthropologists have hypothesized that the structures lay dormant under Lake Michigan for thousands of years, pushing up like giant sequoias in the first months after the 2000 drainage. Did the Cultists add the aluminum siding? “X”s gleam proud under the remains of the baking sun. Heat lines shout arcane hosannas from the highest edge of the highest lodge polls. Everything here is shiftingsand; the clouds are grey and long, fields of brown stratus punctuated by the fading lights of Interface summer … all cut to shreds by the angle of Qui’s eyes leaning back against the VEV passenger headrest. This plain in the sky is fallow, he thinks, trying his best to ignore the subtle come-ons of Bush-Bush Bush: her shirt unbuttoned to the bosom, a pair of oversized wind-goggles now enlarging her eyes to enormous showers of flickering lash in direct linkage with the mysterious “X”s.

Qui can’t be sure of anything. Scale surrenders itself in the Interface; the traveler fluctuates on the lip of sanded rivulets and in center of dried-up springhouses at the same time. Lincoln Qui may as well be stranded in the stomach of the relentless Gobi, digested by the impermeability of endless sand, subject to the omnipresent Ghoul whose laughter can flake the skin off a leper’s rotting arms, and whose spittle causes the transubstantiation of black clay balls baked with margarine and salt, a penny delicacy, seared against the dead skin of a beggar boy’s face. There are no borders here really, world without end — and just for a moment, Qui can picture that deity of the first settlers, Umma-Segnus, the World Worm, sluicing over the barren flatlands and sucking up pools of lake water into its bloated corpse, burping out a counter-sun and anti-moon, shitting comets, vomiting stars. Just for a moment, there are such things.

A ritual

Step right up and lose that ungainly voice, you vitriolic rube.

Paint a spectral chalk mark cause your vox populi hibernates under the soft pleather of my skirt. Picture my crotchless panties flaring in the morning soot, vibrating in the liquid thrush of you unable to quiet as I guide your head to the floor and slowly lift the incline of my legs as I lean back on the easy chair and writhe, you sweet little worm, along the flanks of my rock-hard hips swiveling you dizzy along the spread of a flowering vulva. Clamp that fat fuck-me tongue to the edges of my sweet sugar spot, cascading ice-cubes rubbed along the outer lips, while I twinkle into your mouth and you call the clitoris from its slumber, alive.

I don’t feel your sucking mouth so hot and wet on the eye of my vagina, but I hear it all right — the dry thunder bleating against the larval roots and pockmarked birch trees that scatter across the terrains of my twat. Sonic rainstorms. Pubic hairs crawl with ticks and lice in the key of supple flesh. Just as a mother knows the faded apparition of her prematurely dead daughter by the spirit knock on the window, there’s some clever Mephistopheles the devil you won’t know when you scream BLOODY MARY into a wireless device at the stroke of midnight on the International Date Line. Makes you. Numb. Everyone numb. The Novocain injections directly into the left lip of the labia minora shoot into the depths of my retinal blood vessels, piercing the lens as a pebble pinches a placid spring pond. Paper bags crackling in a dust bowl wind, the vaginal eye folding open to a poison calla lily whose burning stench bursts under the taste-bud heat lamp. Numbing fuck and numbing fuck … bird calls in a rainstorm. Cum juice. Fire ants. So sound it out completely.

Mouth a syllable, go ahead … there is nothing.

Burst a word into the wet heat as you go quiet little darling. Loose yourself in the blackness of the tiny clit. Language has a way of forgetting itself, of hearing itself speak so as to say nothing at all beyond the hot thrush covering your mouth and chin in the sticky summer. You visualize the sweat dripping down my tight ass rubbed by your warm hands. You lick along the inside of my wet things and run your mouth and nose over the balmy hole radiating outward in numb ginger juice. My sweet mango freeway driving you wild with orgasmic colors of hot crimson summer as the tongue pronounces itself all over the sticky hairs and the palate moves like a voiceless breath floating out from your lips, floating silently along the waves of the wind until it catches along the raccoon ring of my left eye. You run your hand into the lubricated sweet of my asshole as your tongue corrodes over the open eyeball of my cunt covered in fluttering lash and you taste my vision in a boiling soup of nervous shimmers while the hot eyeball explodes into a candy sun, endlessly foaming your tongue and your breath.

You’ve caught the sun in your mouth. You are eating my eye. Now you see what I see.

But there is a price: you are unable to speak.

— [when we wish for distemper, we acquire diphtheria] —

— These “X”’s originally marked this section of the upper Interface into fire and non-fire zones, Mr. Qui, — Bush-Bush Bush begins while navigating a field of sand-traps. — Like the heads on Easter Island, don’t you think? —

— I can’t hear one fucking word that you are saying. — Grunts. Endless sand. All that endless sand. Tiny bugs grizzle his voice like an overcooked rib.

— The siding — . She screams, — THE ALUMINUM SIDING! It wasn’t added by the Umma-Segnites at all, you know. I know that seems unbelievable, but we’ve discovered from soil samples that go at least 60 feet below the “X”s that the siding could not have been applied after the structures emerged from the lakebed. And since aluminum siding has only been around since the late 1940s, and Lake Michigan, of course, only drained at the start of the twenty-first century … well, let’s just say this we’re keeping this … er … disjunction, quiet … —

— Who the fuck are you, even? — He hears her this time, but lowers his voice so she can’t do the same, his eyes skirting over her business suit as his mind makes an allowance for the press releases: SIDING ON MYSTERIOUS INTERFACE X’s FOUND TO PREDATE DRAINAGE EVENT. LENDS CREDENCE TO WORLD-WORM CULTISTS. Qui isn’t certain how the Maneuverians would even spin such a tidbit, but of course they would: Lake Michigan, they claim, before it became a lake during the last ice age 10,000 years ago, was actually a series of settlements with their own advanced technology and “aluminum siding” and these “X”s thus prove … .Qui cracks a malicious-looking smile that catches in reflection against the mirror sail above the VEV. — Bush-Bush, right? The whole thing is ridiculous, of course, perfectly ludicrous! —

— Mr. Qui, we’ve done our best to spread myths about their significance, the “X”s, I mean … that the Umma Segnites, the first trappers in this area after the lake’s drainage, well … this was their warning to those who would follow that something mysterious was happening here. They were building a society that refused to play into the consumerist paradigm of Post-America. Isn’t that it, Mr. Qui? — citing one of Lincoln’s early Quadrilateral position papers. — We’ve published records of Fulcrum Maneuvers shipping truly monumental amounts of aluminum siding in from his Home Depot in Kalamazoo. Why, Maneuvers even wrote about this adventure in the Cultists’ precious book. —

The Book of Maneuvers. Qui knew this portion well. Why tell him about a campaign he had spearheaded? The idea, in fact, had occurred to Qui almost a full decade past … his way of explaining things to the federal government when it was time to secure Upper Interface zoning permits. No one had been out here for any length of time, except the Cultists, so one story was as good as the next.

— “The bounty of Post-America becomes useless … ” —

— “decoration for the Worm,” — Qui finishes under his breath, having helped the ghost of Maneuvers to compose this line in 2030, eleven years after the end of Fulcrum’s long and increasingly troubled life. An expert in the prosopopoeia of Fulcrum Maneuvers, Lincoln Qui can barely speak up for himself these days.

Bush-Bush slows the vehicle in time to the engine vibration. They travel almost in slow motion, a crossbow bolt suddenly piercing a zone of brown sugar molasses. The ambient noises fall away: gravel pressed through the wheels of the VEV, the dodecaphonic scales tinkling in a minor key. Qui’s head swims. Bush-Bush comes across clearly — Something awful up there, Qui. Vultures on the rims of the “X”s —

Yes, he agrees: there are vultures, a disquieting amount of vultures, perched on the tips of the “X”s, replacing the smaller sage thrashers reborn as carrion birds after cavorting in the smokestack fires. Thousands of vultures, hunched backs, red necks strung out in the elongated details in a Modigliani painting, camouflaged now on the enormous “X” crossbars. For vultures, a gas leak in the desert smells oddly of rotting flesh, and under this blazing sun, Qui can’t be sure that they care to know the difference. Opaque brown, red and black over dark grey sky, they blister the firmament in welts of red feather, patches of hollow bone.

— My worm — , Qui says without thinking. — They must be waiting for something quite massive to die. —

A Biographical Note

“Butch provocateur” Dial-Up Networking, fuck you very much. Co-founder and leader of the quasi-terrorist/revolutionary organization, Blackout Angels. I am diseased and rotten, editor-at-large of the BLACKOUT REVIEW. My daddy routinely fucked me with rabbit-ear antennas until I was nine, then with the corded remote control connecting the fat, unwieldy cable box with punch-down buttons to the processing vacuum tubes of Ed Sullivan’s decimated body. I licked the shit from his UHF asshole. From much of the 21^st Century, I was in reruns and did not age. My doctors expressed a sort of underhanded medical bewilderment reflected in the worst of the JAMA articles of the 1980s: Five gay men get a nasty case of pneumonia, and President Regan never speaks of the pandemic until Surgeon General C. Everett Koop jacks him up in a broom closet and says, — We’ve got to face this thing Bonzo. Admit it, you obsequious little fuck, — but Reagan stares blankly, concentrates on the lugubrious game of his next bowel movement and ICBM missile-silo start talk salt comprehensive test ban treaty meeting with Gorbachev in Iceland, replacing the dead goldfish in the little boy’s bowl … and well, I’ve go so much on my mind he thinks and all this guy wants me to think about is the plight of a few lousy faggots. Can’t show that sort of weakness in front of stain head.

In a flush of nada, I push your sucking head gone bald from the heat of my crotch and adjust the leather fringe of my underpants. — The eye has a story all its own. —

You see, the round ring inscribing my left eye is a tree trunk offering the lines of its pulp. Look closely, for each passage of time I’ve added a thinly stained ring of a slightly different tone. There’s an entire world in there: a sanctuary of headless sea anemone hovering in blue green sparkles on a flotilla of red umber specks. The colors go deeper than black. Same with us Blackout Angels in the present of 2039: the expanded organization. We pounce on stale bread and water rations, strike in biotech factories to dismember the polymer production of ore and grain, coal and petroleum. We exploit the absence of water in the average Post-American who has a 76% chance of dying morbidly obese, with male-pattern baldness rising in an ugly red tide. Cancer-busting wonder drugs get Canada-style makeovers cut-and-mixed with some of that good-ole mood-altering forget-me-not valley-of-the-dolls’ psychiatric shit. I sharpen my fingernails to inhale the putrid soil sunk around the foundations of your house that takes a French drain up the asshole because you think the water should be pumped instead of cultivated. That ship has sailed motherfuckers.

No surprise, that Jane Q. Pubic III, esq., Jr. Quadrilateral resident hesitates about this space that was once a lake but is now a raging fire pit, as if the waters might return any minute, and I could be caught, she thinks: intercepted while fucking the gardener with a side of lettuce and a suicide enema thrust deep inside my anus, interrupted in the process of stealing a box of carb-free farfalle from the supermarket as the plan for the perfect murder enters their hearts of palm with such a ferocity that there is no chance to ignore its high-protein call. Pharoah’s men caught chasing after Moses while a poison-toad colonic wash goes in for the tight shot.

What’s left of this once-mighty body of wet forever? Once the fifth biggest source of freshwater in the world, once 492 km long and up to 190 km wide, once covering an area of 57,757 square feet, once 281 glorious kilometers deep. Nothing nothing nothing more than a series of small puddles and a trickling river system so polluted with the eternal fires, that just one inhalation of a tiny ember — less than a sip of cold mountain air — can fuse the manifold cilia of your nose into a mass of tangled, useless pubic hair to the mottled carcass of a wounded Buffalo whose nuts will be cleaved and frozen for the first Post-American thanksgiving banquet. The inside of the body becomes a burn unit; triage works on the most scarred sections first. Water is dripped onto the scratches of multinational unilateralism proceeding from the cleft of the chin to the bottom of the long anterior of the throat. For the last four decades, the Interface receives tentative land claims from Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and even a small section of Canada hoping to annex the whole dry landscape on one of its south-of-the-old-border pill-distribution fireworks-gathering frenzies.

Blackout Angels pull out reconstructed Gatling guns and street-legal taser bricks for some of the old soft and wet, and oh yeah, lick it right there, I think baby. That’s where I used to feel my clit. We want to liquidate these shits where they stand, before birth if possible; our struggle makes me cum just thinking about the fortuitous rape of market forces that produced my stock and trade, my net-and-bolt action. I imagine that my DNA has been selected and re-produced in a secret test-tube chamber, a mixture of many great men and women who once struggled against the scourge of the Quadrilateral morass.

From Emma Goldman, who said there should be no revolution if she can’t boogy woogy to its rhythmic trance, I receive the power to smash windows and remain immune to Bovine Growth Hormone. From Anastasia, luckless Czarina, I learn how to be a victim of proletarian forces, how to be thrown carelessly into a pit. From Hidelgard of Bingen I absorb herbals and rhizomes.

Most important, from Katherine the Great … I learn to fuck horses using a complicated pulley system liable to crush my bones at the moment of orgasmic apogee.

— [when we drive in a shadow, we break with the sun] —

The position of Qui and Bush-Bush Bush’s VEV, like the advance of a rainbow across some massive waterfall, becomes a question of vantage. Nonetheless, the vehicle locates itself seemingly thousands of miles from the rusty skyline that was once the city of Chicago, an azure jewel set against the crown of the lake’s impenetrable end: the now desiccated Lake Shore Drive sucks heat from somewhere beyond the phosphate-covered remains of Michigan Avenue; Navy Pier abandoned as a post-apocalyptic Coney Island collapses under the weight of its carousel, buck-toothed horses crushed under the margarine-colored fadeout; congestion Armitage through Adams as the skyline comes into view for the sage thrasher, for the bevy of red night vultures … green highway signs, Morton salt, Miller time, thousands of cars become tiny rats winding and weaving out of the subaltern speedway, the arterial blockage. A slick rhythm to the terminus of roads … drive and drive but Lake Michigan evaporates into nothing, an oasis of smoke and char … salty fruits of paradise, belly dancers made of industrial smoke, hookahs burning raw sand silicate, blue magnesium scoring the lungs. The border between the Interface and the Post-American mainland folds as a double-curtain: Make a move from either side, and you’ll never get anywhere. There is nothing but the ground, the cracked killing floor of the endless Wildland-Urban Interface, porkmaking by applied mathematics.

— So Mr. Qui, now that we are alone, — She gestures to the expanse. — Question time. —

She heaves lightly along with the bumps of the broken road, undulating as a superhighway collapses the contours of the landscape into the illusion of flatland. Her pelvis shakes in a strangely mesmerizing fashion, and Qui feels the liquid heat of her legs rushing into a cordial glass, served with a plate of dark-chocolate -covered cherries. The vultures trailing above their VEV are iron filings stuck to this core.

— Depends … if I can ask you one first? —

— Shoot, Mr. Qui. — Her cheeks red with maraschino stain.

— Why “Bush-Bush?” —

She bats her eyes, twice, and the road enlarges into a projection of Qui’s swollen head. — Same reason I’d guess that you are Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui, Mr. Qui. —

— “Lincoln,” please. But aren’t you from somewhere in the Midwest, Iowa maybe? — Barn raising. Cotton specters.

— Sure, but well … when I came to the Interface about seven years ago, must have been in ‘32 or ‘33, I wanted to, well … the tradition of Quadrilateral children given the first names of US Presidents, well, you may not realize how useful this … —

— So “Bush-Bush Bush”? I suppose it fits. If that is indeed your last name. —

— There is a certain status to names here. Goes back to the Cultists fires, I think. Wouldn’t you agree … Lincoln? —

Qui scans the language of the horizon. A tinkling curtain of smoking sentences and blazing paragraphs, punctuated by the glyphs of silence and introspective phrases, diagrammed with flaming underlines. — So much fire. — Something isn’t right.

— I said, “WOULDN’T YOU AGREE?” —

In the heat, Qui’s eyes close. His chin, a weight of shale and soapstone, sinks into ruddy loam. Vertebrae of dirt. This is return, homecoming. The fire moves evenly here, below things, catching the roots and wax-covered seeds along the green lips of the long-buried salt worm. A subterranean flicker holds his backbone, oily eyes sockets spinning slot-machine lemons, Uncle Sam hats, dollar signs. Skin dry and scaly, salted in the lizard thickness on the sternum, over the ribcage, tiny scars that might evolve into mud gills. The reptile on the rock, Qui, rolls silently in the sun, wallowing in tractionless sand.

— Yes, Bush-Bush, — his lips move of their own inertia. — Names are important here. —

Qui smells the ferment of bulrush reeds and bitter dirt cakes, disemboweled termites releasing their stomachia. Numberless vultures circling above like a locust cloud. Red demons embossed with layers of crimson beetle lacquer swooping over the slowly humming VEV. Sand penetrates Qui’s face, tiny bullets eroding the skin as sandpaper burnishes balsa wood, until both of them, Qui considers, become nothing more than a sack of discarded offal, nameless and rotten under the heat of an unforgiving sun.

An invention

The Blackout Angels simply love to rape, dahlings. We practice a brand of extreme physicality. Picture the Jesuits — never knocking, they burst into convenience stores without shirts and shoes, riot squads overturning the slush machine; weighed down by crosses and cheap gold-lamé habits, they barge into your condo, unplug the microwave, spit into your burnt popcorn. They’ll goosestep into a crowded stadium, throw drunk Jansenists out on their arses and toss mint julep Molotov cocktails spiked with battery acid. And we’re a thousand times more physical. We’ve constructed a machine that demonstrates our tendencies.

Snarling cracks and widgets, flying iron filings, rusted spark flashes characterize Dr. Zebediah Dooger’s Amaz-a-tastic Self-Conflagrating Shit-Hole Wonder Machine, named after that worm-forsaken Quadrilateral hack hisself, Zebediah Dooger. My Blackout Angel called Number, his white-boy afro teased out to gargantuan radius, is the prime mover of this, er, particular pet project …

— Ladies and Germs, Blackout Angels-at-large, sympathetic funding agencies from the accursed Quadrilateral bourgeoisie … when I remove this protective blanket your sight will at first serve no discernible purpose. Do not be alarmed. Rather, let your nose astound and delight you with the putrid stink that we have successfully replicated at great cost to several of our most double secret operatives … — Whoosh!

The Shit-Hole Wonder Machine announces itself in a series of odd-toned knocks and rustling leaves snapping cold grey sobbing afternoon olfactory buzz: Vacuum sucking stench of New Age massage parlors, plunge pools drained by a single hose channeling the sum of human experience into a wash of cilia caked with Cenozoic mucous. Brimstone-flavored Gatling-gun residue in a civil war aftershock, pungent skunkweed in the fermented mash of mason jars, mold-covered molasses soaked in turpentine unearthed after one hundred years buried six feet under a two-way radio.

— This is vintage shit, — Number proclaims in his dapper lab coat, still sporting bandolier. — Sniff, my pretties, and whole new world flowers before us. Let me demonstrate the … er … proclivities of this particular fundamental fundament machine. —

He lifts a wet wad of steaming uncut feces with a rubber glove, and then squeezes it just so. The mass forms ridges and bumping furrows as if a comb made from human bicuspids pushes through a mound of rotten compost. We gasp for breath as a million microscopic toxins escape into the air, pollinating the bland horizon, the colorless, textureless air of your hometown: nearly 20,000 Quadrilateral settlers embossed on a grid of perfectly ordered streets and 10-yr interest only mortgages with low points offered to qualified buyers, courier envelopes filled with welcome-wagon cleaning powders run along the inseam of your trousers to wash out the fireplace smell etched deep into the shag rug. The air around the Shit Machine reveals a mix of fire and feces, a disclosure of brilliant odor at the fusion of earth and flame. The entire metal contraption shakes excitedly.

— Comrades! — proclaims Number, — This lump of shit will be taken into the ass of the machine, like an especially unpleasant vinegar enema, and after “processing” in reverse, return to its original state: a savory meal of radioactive-seed white asparagus, thick sirloin gristle cubes sautéed in port-wine sauce, aluminum flambé flavored with union-made polycarbonate, and for desert: pre-processed snack-like amalgamate bar in the shape of a chocolate dung beetle, peppered with cellophane nougat. Low in carbohydrates if you’re watching your figure. —

The machine’s ferocious anus snaps to life with a gear-grinding, earth-moving monster drill crushing diamonds into a thick paste of glittering stink while the processed “food” flushes itself in reverse up the machine’s asshole with a soft farting whoosh. White-noise freakouts turn to noxious gas as the foodstuffs sluice backward and upward through the intestinal track. Low groaning waves crumble across our stomachs and even Number taps his steel-toed jackboot uncomfortably against the cement floor. Into the belly — the sound of acid leaking from old batteries suspends over seething lava rocks hot from igneous afterbirth; the reconstruction of the meal is a reaffirmation against your ears as the asparagus reasserts its bristling tip along the esophagus of your earlobe … gristle cubes go tough on outside leather hides, then soft and fleshy on the inside with tender screams of knife wounds cut horizontal across the wrist … submerged in a bubbling baptismal of lemon juice washing the helix of the ear … cupping the slats of aluminum flambé unfolding up the back of the throat then the bottom of the concha and antihelix of the ear … until the snack-bar nougat crinkles like saran wrap over the external auditory canal of the teeth and the gums … rubbing its sugary loam on the outside of the giant lips that cover the local town until the machine eats only what we feed it … producing shit-to-order pre-excrement.

— In this way, my revolutionary brethren, we can determine the composition of any consumptive by-product and its waste material in any order: starting with bullshit and returning it the primal state in which Quadrilateral makes us eat. —

Number waits for applause before the splendor of the reconstructed meal, and hearing none, grabs the arms of the nearest reporter, whose bloody fingers tickle the snarling teeth rimming the machine’s steel-reinforced asshole. Entranced, he follows the story hisself.

An Interview with the Experimental Writer and Multimedia Artist Davis Schneiderman
Megan Milks: When Eyeballs Land on Blazing Paragraphs