copypasta
by Swim
I don’t dare summon him by name, but signals are being sent, maybe by a part of me that only exists in dreams. Another me who still feels the same things. I can’t help any of that. What I mean is, I haven’t learned how to take charge of those depths. All I know is that when I pick up the phone he’s already there. I know where to find him and more importantly I know when.
That evening sun is the time. The loop is pre-recorded but the transmission is live. The routine is the same: I make my way down the windswept avenue telling myself ok, that’s it, that’s far enough–I should get on the Select Bus instead and take a direct shot over the bridge and all the way out of here but I don't. Bits of glass shimmer on the sidewalk, mocking the one who plays the fool. The sun-stricken payphone appears beneath the little girl as a boundary. Under the steady black hollows of her pupils (made even darker by the gathering shadows) I turn into a Receiver. Doubt fades away and I move through space and time with the decisiveness of a stray bullet. I’ve already described how the glass in the booth is missing and the weeds are everywhere but I can still close the door, activating the portal. The metal hole where the coins come out is stuffed with flowers (stuffed is the right word because there are so many but let me emphasize the impression I have that this was an act done with care, the variety of colors and species and their vibrancy not to mention the still damp dirt scent indicates they were taken from the earth and put here to prepare the space just prior to my arrival). On the shelf where the phone book used to go someone has carved, “Dont U Dare!” but
There I go. I pick up the receiver and hold it tight against my ear until the sweat pools and my brain drains and the whole thing starts again. There’s static. It has other sounds deep inside it–recordings of gunshots, animals howling, radio chatter. Meanwhile someone’s on the line who is not a recording. It’s not him. It’s something there, listening in. There’s no breathing or words spoken, just the occasional double click, like a tongue hitting the back of the teeth, but instead of flesh it’s a metal tongue inside a metal mouth.
“Hello,” I say, finally to one or both of them.
“Are you there? Can you hear me?” I’m breathless with desperation, just like the very first people who used a phone, like them I don’t know what else to say.
(one click and then another)
Somewhere right now (and now and now and now) there’s a baby who is trying to be born but is stuck and can’t breathe–it’s never going to make it out alive. You can’t tell me its suffering is from something it did, not in this life anyway! Later on, when our choices bring us to a place where everything is flat and measured out, the water and the air and the nutrients drying in measured bunches, we will come to understand that this whole part is just the beginning, it’s all a ritual, either an initiation or purification or both.
There’s nothing that doesn’t move, nothing that doesn’t change. Even death doesn’t last forever. Lil Mountain has proven it.
“That sound you hear is the sea," he says at last, coming through the trembling static, his voice low and drowsy, like he is waking up from a deep sleep.
“I only mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea.”
“Everything you say is lifted,” I whisper, trying to remember to breathe.
“Purloined. CopyPasta.”
“You make it sound like I could invent something new,” he says, making a sound that’s supposed to be laughter.
“Language is a virus from outer space. Every word I know comes from somewhere else, all different places–movie screens, billboards, things I heard and overheard and things I read. They went through me, they filled me up and we merged together. It’s inside me, the alien infrastructure created from its parts. It’s dark and messy and disgusting and I don’t know who I might have been without it and neither do you.”
He tells me that he remembers everything. But when I ask him certain things he doesn’t seem to have any idea. For instance our entire time in the desert appears to him only as a montage of images. It is seen from a distance, like he was driving by on the highway. There are the places we stayed in, the motels with their empty parking lots and the huts made out of clay and tires and green glass bottles with the sky closing in.
“An adobe McDonalds, a green dinosaur outside a gas station. I can see the little kid who works the register, their face is in the window. These and other places, they pass by with music playing,” he says. “Leonard Cohen songs in their entirety.”
“Are you AI?” I ask, my voice echoing on the line.
“I’m the ‘I’ in AI,” he says, and makes that laughing sound again that fills my chest with cold.
“Which part of you slept with Em? You know she really fell for you.”
“Oh yes, I remember,” he says, after a calculated pause.
“When I asked her she said you promised her that you’d come back to New York. With all of us, and, you know, with her.”
“Promised her? Does it sound like me to use that word?”
“That depends, which ‘you’ are we talking about?”
“I needed her. I mean, I needed someone.”
“For what?”
“I needed someone I knew would come back to look for me, even at the last moment.”
“But The Babies ran back in and you weren’t there,” I protest, remembering the house as it started moving. I saw it from outside, where Bruce had carried me in his arms. It was like a muscle contracting under the skin–nothing fell down or broke apart. There was an inward sucking that took the shadows with it. A retrieval of energy by a force that was like gravity but more specific
“Where did you go?” I always ask but he never answers.
“The one in front of the gun lives forever,” he says this time.
“Is there anything more of you beyond what’s been downloaded?”
“If there isn’t, hon then promise me you’ll find the CD-ROM they’re playing me off of and delete that shit.”
“Never,” I say, as the feelings stupidly rise up.
There are a few seconds of silence. This time I feel the clicks in my stomach. I clear my throat.
“Look, the scroll was made for me. It wasn’t hers to take.”
“Yes, can you imagine how that feels? The whole point of her existence on this timeline was so that she would get it to you. Which she did. And ever since then she’s been wandering around lost, an empty set on an empty TV set.”
He makes the sound again.
“Hey man, that laugh thing you do is so creepy. Whatever program did that really has it wrong.”
“The devil takes his cut,” he says with a sigh that sounds legit but when did Lil Mountain ever concede to such a sound of desperation?
“You should see this Faustian Mullet I’m rocking.”
“I don’t want to imagine how you look,” I say. “Listen, Em and Bruce made a film. Except they don’t use that word. It’s over 10 hours long, impossible to watch, but I haven’t tried yet. There are no linear stories, just a collection of narratives by HeirMax98, OA, Odious Awry, Lil Mountain, Jesse James, FK, Frida Kahlo/Franz Kafka, same/same.”
“And yours, they used your narrative as well.”
“Well, I’m the one who typed it out but I’m not sure it counts as mine.”
“Writing is not created, it's discovered.”
“Wait, who said that? Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Their project is a part of the post-posterity movement, so no one bothers with names.”
“What would you be willing to do to bring a whole new form of art into the world? And if by doing so you would spawn a new timeline. One in which everyone was healthy and happy? And the mistakes that were made that hurt people so bad were undone.”
His voice was breaking apart, sputtering out.
“Hey man…don’t go…wait….”
“Like a tape loop it lets you go back and forward forever. But you have to learn how to do it.”
Back from the dead like Finnegan. Jesus. The Digital Lazarus, man.