we know where you live
by Swim
I wasn’t sure which parts I said out loud and which were only in my head. But maybe it was enough. Maybe I could stop and try again another time. I wanted to help; I reminded myself that I’m happy to serve. But I’m not a machine.
It was nearly morning. Em leaned over the table, smearing a glob of cream across the plate with one of her greasy stumps. The cream looked yellow against the white paper, it was oxidizing already or maybe it was just a trick of the light from the single too bright bulb that hung from the ceiling. Em’s cleavage was exposed as usual in her trademark barely buttoned blue Oxford shirt. A mic was hidden in there somewhere, I was pretty sure. I imagined wires running up and down her body, over unknown birthmarks and scars. Just then a train went by. Em and I both turned to look out the open window at the shimmering blur, above which rose a snippet of starless dark. “The bible black predawn”, I quoted, too low for her to hear but loud enough to get picked up for the recording. I thought about how Em and I had lived under several skies together, in secret places only a handful of people knew. It was a greater intimacy than if we’d fucked.
“You pulled a gun on me,” I said, trying in a half hearted way to get back into the whole sick thing.
“I needed you to get moving.”
“I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t.”
“You loved it. A beautiful woman holding you at gunpoint? Yeah, c’mon.”
“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“Look at me.” She reached across the table and grabbed my face in her cold, sticky hands. She pulled me close and I flinched.
“What is it?” she demanded.
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“Are you hungry?” Her surviving nails were sharp and long and they dug into my skin. Behind her the pastry was strewn in shards and slivers. I shook my head.
The tears came and I didn’t try to stop them, though I didn't want her to see me this way. We had never gotten this far before. I was scared but I had to know.
“Em, there’s something I need you to tell me.”
“Look, it doesn't matter. It didn’t work, you can stop.”
“But I need to know. I need to know how much to atone. How far it really went.”
“Ok.”
“Did someone really fall out of the truck?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I mean I didn’t see.”
“But you know that someone did.”
“I felt it. Those of us who lived at the SGH were so inextricably linked we became a singular entity. Some call it next level love, to me it’s just simple network biology.”
“For real, Em, someone got hurt. Someone may have even died.”
“Someone always gets hurt. Someone always dies.”
“No one could have fallen out of the back of the truck going at that speed and not gotten really fucked up.”
“That’s not true. Some people walk away from a plane crash that kills everyone else onboard without a scratch on them. Some people get buoyed along by the dark and deadly wave while everyone else is pulled under. They latch on effortlessly to a branch that just so happens to be there to save them.”
“So what you’re saying is this person is ok?”
“I didn’t say that. But why are you so upset about some kid who was only ever part of the backdrop, when you don’t care a lick about [Lil Mountain]?”
(Only she didn’t say Lil Mountain but used his real name instead).
“I care.”
“So why don’t you ever talk about him?”
“Because it doesn’t feel right.”
“Why? Is this some sudden holiness at work? Is he sanctified and held aside, like an old childhood toy, covered with chew marks?”
“No, it’s just not time. It’s like something’s not fully decided yet.”
A burst of squawking erupted from between her milky white tits.
So I was right!
“Pure as the driven snow!” I said, not meaning to say it out loud.
“So you agree with the others, that he’s not really dead?” she said, her face red and her eyes flashing.
“You sound like a lawyer.”
“Just answer the question.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not? Aren’t you supposed to be the one? The one who knows?”
“What are you going to do, pull a gun on me?”
She leaned forward and adjusted her wig and then looked back up at me, this time with kindness. The squawking had stopped but it must have told her to change it up. Far away, a car alarm started beeping. People were getting up. They were going to go to work and when they got high on their break they’d be here too, sitting at this table at the end of time. And I’d keep them company, I’d keep them safe.
“Look, Swim, it’s all good, you did great. The theory was that the primal, inhuman dark mesh of the mushrooms was interwoven with other, as yet undiscovered data. Things that hadn’t even happened yet but were infused on the circuit, deep in there, waiting to be absorbed. That’s why we’ve gone over and over this one part.”
“A car crash,” I said, dizzily.
“We need to isolate the parts where the act of writing changed what you were writing about. Our sense is that this will be in a section that has to do with Odious Awry. Think of it like a misheard song lyric. You think it goes a certain way for months, maybe even years but then you find out what is really being sung and it changes everything.”
I nodded and gave a thumbs up but then changed my mind and flashed my middle finger instead. All at once there was a pin prick. My sleeve had already been rolled up by gentle hands. I turned to see him but there was only shadow.
The beeping got more and more faint, I tried to hold on to it, it was my duty to keep it afloat, but the grass was already covering me, filling up my ears and my mouth as I tried to say something. I was going down, descending a narrow chasm in the earth, trying to hold on to the rungs of a metal ladder, this precious human built thing. But I knew I had to keep going, I couldn’t stop. Bruce was there–now I could see him– he was leading the way as always, telling me where to step, moving like something in between a human and an animal, the helpful, servant kind. He was in front of me which was also below, leading me down to my darkest hour in his usual joking way.
From way up above I could hear Em, her voice pulsing in time to the car beeps.
“Here’s the thing, as long as you write all of this down, I promise it will make sense eventually.”
Down, down, down. Dead things float but everything comes down in the end…
After my rescue we were on the run. Bruce was the doctor. He sewed Em up. Stitch by stitch by the side of the road. He took blood from my arm and checked my stats. Then I got an injection that made my neck stiff and everything taste like metal.
“I had to get them too”, Em said, as she rubbed my back.
“The events, in particular what happened in the basement, had a corrosive effect on our blood.”
“Which basement? Cyndi’s or the one back at the mountain?”
“Both…one, none. It doesn’t matter–all basements are connected. The crypt shared by us all.”
We dyed our hair and wore hats. Hats are good because most cameras are looking down at you. And if you wear them inside you lessen the amount of hair that falls around for others to pick up and analyze. As it was we wiped down a hotel room so hard you’d think it had already been cleaned.
Em and Bruce made me get in the habit of always wrapping a napkin around a cup or a glass before drinking out of it. I used toilet covers when I went to the bathroom and if there wasn’t one I covered the seat with paper. I had to remember that my skin was flaking off all the time, all around me. Every article of clothing, every door knob, every keypad, every carpet collects little pieces. The teeming mass of the dead and dying world that was beneath us.
The hotel rooms were a treat and a welcome break from the sedan. One time I was out looking for a light when I saw Em and Bruce with a young mother and her baby outside the metal fence that surrounded the chipped turquoise pool. The mom was holding up the baby who had its brow furrowed, transfixed by Bruce’s silver hoops. He was smiling and red-faced as Em laughed her crazy laugh and I was jealous of this little being who got to have this moment with the two of them. How could they love him more than me? I jammed the unlit cigarette in my mouth and tried to imagine what it would be like to be pure of heart.
The three of us spent afternoons in old movie theaters, watching the same movie over and over. I gathered details and judged directorial intentions. Sometimes there was an old person eating popcorn or a person sleeping across several seats with bags gathered around. I came to crave the comforting glow, the steady white projector beam. Not the movies themselves, which went by as a surge of electrical impulses, but the steady white light of the unblinking eye that came before and after.
Sometimes she was with us and we were four. We wore our animal head masks and the light formed a halo around them. But other times that was just a story, the one Em whispered to me as we sat huddled together in our blonde bombshell wigs. I rubbed my dry eyes as I struggled to follow her like she was speaking another language.
She told me about her people. Not the family tree with all its straight lines, but her new ancestors, the artists and cyborg saints who had made her who she was.
“They exist as a data swarm from the future, but they retro-chronically triggered themselves and made a temporary habitat out of the union of my mother’s egg and my father’s sperm.”
“I have no genealogy, geographical center, biographical attribution, or institutional dependency.”
I turned to see if Bruce was still there and I saw Cyndi instead, sitting there in her gray and silver rabbit hat.
She was facing the screen but turned her head ever so slightly to show me where the right eye of the mask was torn out and filled with blood.
I didn’t want to see it.
“Why is she here?” I hissed.
“We knew where she lived,” Em said, laughing.
“Well, not at first,” Bruce corrected her. “The map was all blacked out, I don’t know how they did it but there were trees covering the roads on the aerial shot.”
“Easy! They put the past inside the present, which is the only place it could ever be,” Em said as she shook the ice filled remains of her Fanta fountain soda. “But we got the faxes with the geotags.”
“And a box of animal heads.”
“Not real ones.”
“But not-not real ones.”
They laughed together, while I waited.
“We followed the signs, red crosses on wooden doors.”
“I constructed a model of the labyrinth beneath the houses, so we knew the way.”
“The design was the same as the OG one in Crete,” Em said, unable to contain her awe.
“A Minotaur at the center of every internet,” Bruce chuckled, shaking his head.
“No wonder you couldn’t get out.” Em gave my thigh a little squeeze in the dark. This was when they still assumed I had been trying to escape, before they read my posts and learned that wasn’t the case, at which point her touch became tinged with something less than friendly.
And Em wonders why I don’t want to write any more about what happened. It doesn’t matter what my intentions are–even my sense of duty to Odious can’t make the words come out right. They told me it was important to get out what’s happening as fast as I can and it’s true I held on to that for a while but now it’s gone, and the only reason I’m still typing away is because I have no choice. I’ve tried to stop but I can’t. Even with HeirMax98 sucking up what I do and using it to strike the tinderbox, even with it making everything worse for Em, who is turning from an innocent girl into a cold player–even with The Babies gone and one of them even dead not to mention Lil Mountain–I still can’t stop. Em wants to hurt me and though this scares me she is right that it also turns me on. She’s a whiz at reading the sexual subtext, that’s why all those rich soho lit kids are down to help her evade all consequences as long as she keeps decoding next level subliminal shit for them.
Even if she had shot me square in my cheesy grin the nature of my sentence is that it still wouldn’t end it. I’d heal or try to and eventually whatever was left would be sealed back up, a future proof Frankenstein, deaf dumb and blind and uncomfortable as fuck. As high as they might make me, it wouldn't be enough. It would be just like it is now, when I’m going to sleep I’m thinking I should try and stay awake and when I stay awake I want nothing more than to let myself shut down and slack off but I can’t allow it, I can’t let everything that’s happened be in vain. And Em knows it. It makes her pissed and do things like pinch my skin when she touches me, always without asking, always coming on hard, pushing, making me step back as she’s leaning in, not to kiss but to clack teeth, her lips puffy from too much plumper, the red matching the red circles on her cheeks like Strawberry Shortcake.
Fuck it, here they are, all the words past the margins. The choice is I either dig the harrow needle into your back or let it tear open my own, and after a million years I’ve finally decided to be to make a different choice:
It was better when they were talking–one or both of them, otherwise I sat there with hollywood machine light working on my feelings till I felt far away, I felt a way about it, like Alex with my eye wide open there was no way to know what was right because the feelings covered up everything with a sickening goo, and an unstoppable reaction took over my mind. I want to puke out all the sadness, the rushing wind of the end.
When they didn’t talk I felt her there, sitting bolt upright in her chair. Better to get lost in the intricacies of how they sabotaged the cars and the sound of their shoes crunching on the muddy gravel path. They were looking for me, the sunlight bright and heavy in the air like a ceremonial guitar made of steel and bone as Bruce slid back the concrete lid on the top of the well and down they went on metal rungs, wet and slippery. It was hard to see with their masks on but they couldn’t risk taking them off. They were in it now, they were down in it, cue the 90’s production values that I always strive for, the budget was such that the tunnels resembled the cinderblock back rooms at the mall, but it’s all made up for by the achingly beautiful score that pounded at the feels in Dolby Stereo.
“We passed bodies strapped to operating tables, wired to batteries with jumper cables. They were robots wearing animal masks. They had on lots of layers, flannel on top of extra long t-shirts, with gloves and long hair too. The fake skin was tatted up, to distract you from its shitty quality. The tables were surrounded by ring lights, the kind you use for streaming. The bodies didn’t move, they were frozen like mannequins. We didn’t get close to check if they were turned on, we didn’t know how to know, and anyway we didn’t want to wake them up. On some tables there were animals, they were also frozen and were either real and dead or were robots covered with actual skin and fur, we couldn’t tell. Further down there were unboxed electronics stacked up to the ceiling, giant TV’s, video cameras and Apple speaker buds, and down the way rows of terminals and busted workstations with CRT monitors, the latter covered in stickers for The Grateful Dead and blue lives matter, humming together as DOS code flickered past on their screens, making us jump back and wait until they stopped. What was this, what was happening? The cursors paused, blinking, waiting for the next command line prompt. But there was no one there, whoever was programming it was somewhere else. The keyboards might have been unlocked. I kind of kicked myself because we could have taken the whole thing out right there. Sent a virus that came from the inside.”
“There were silver room service carts filled with bottles but when we got close we saw that the labels looked funny. Like they were hand drawn and homemade. The liquid in the whiskey bottle looked more like orange colored water when I held it up to the light. I grabbed a pack of cigarettes thinking it would be OK because they hadn’t been opened but when I tried one later I didn't know what it tasted like,” she scowled. “Not like cigarettes, that’s for sure.”
This was the cardboard world where I’d been living. Things appeared a certain way on the surface but just a little way down the illusion was destroyed. They had found the outskirts, the liminal space that bordered its boundary. There were pale blue lights at the bottom of the walls that lit their way. From the intel in the Fax they imagined my room was somewhere just above and to the left of the center of the maze, and while they made it to that area they still were unable to find it. The sound of someone moaning meant they were close–they knew that from what I had posted–but the further they went the more empty the corridor became. There were no more tables or boxes or computers–no objects of any kind. The blue light itself became more and more faint so that it wasn’t immediately apparent that the floor had turned into Earth until they found themselves kicking chunks of soil as they hurried along.
“We were running, you see, holding on to the side of the wall and running.”
“It was so disorientating, the space stretched out into darkness in front of us and behind us and above us. There were sounds but we didn’t know where they were coming from.”
“I think it was a loop. The sound of wind blowing–it seemed to start again as we came to the light.”
“More blue light. And now it was brighter–coming from the ceiling which was now far above our heads.”
“We were running for our lives.”
“The tree appeared, made out of wire and foam and El wire, pulsing blue and white.”
“Blue veins. Even before we saw it I knew we were close to something big. And then it was there, staring down at us.”
“The tree was the last chance.”
“We could turn around, we could go back and try to get out.”
“Or we could keep going to find you.”
“To save you.”
“The fake tree and the fake wind.”
“The fake tree stuck into the real earth like a scarecrow.”
“A signal to stop.”
“We stood in the suddenly open space. The urge to keep moving was overwhelming. Although we didn’t speak I knew she was feeling the same thing.”
“We could see the light up ahead, and I could feel that the air was cooler.”
“There was the smell of the earth.”
“The smell of life and death mixed together in the soil that holds all animals from the ages.”
“And the blood, the snot, the skin, the flesh.”
“I could never leave, even if it is ending. I would never be able to live on another planet so far away from that soil. Especially now.”
“We had our masks, and we had our guns.”
“We started on and there was music up ahead. And the sound of machines.”
Image: Jon Rafman, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View
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Love Always,
--Swim