The Sci-Fi Speculum

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

July 15, 2009

www.brutepress.com

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Today I had a vision—in it, Sci-Fi was dead.

Alright, so I’m feeling a strange essay coming on. It’s still a little hot from the soaking fever of the day, and I have a gin poured, but I’ve been reading, so things are not quite back to normal.

I’ve been reading a James Blish novel, about a first contact scenario. I also rented a few movies, for what it’s worth. But furthermore, I’ve been working on this writing thing.

The writing is not precisely what I want to talk about—not directly. Not right now. There could be more on that later, all of it clearly involved.

But when you start writing, like not just to link the words together, but to actually attempt at crafting a product, you start to realize a few things. For one, almost all dialogue is complete trash. I have yet to find anyone who is able to synthesize an actual conversation. This is because nobody would want to read an actual conversation. With all the “uhh,” and “buts,” and “likes,” etc. And forget it if they are a little drunk. This is not want you want to read.

This is an old problem, or at least it seems so for me, because I bounce over it again about every week. How to balance what is real, with what should be, with what needs to be, and so on and so forth. Don’t write fiction? Don’t worry about it. Just keep buying them books.

The writing aside, the balance between form and content, what is “true” and what sounds good, is the heart of the issue in the special case that is SF. Now, just so we are clear, by SF we are talking about “speculative fiction”, which is not entirely the same as “science fiction.” We can trace these revolving lines to a similar source of course, from the pages of pulp Pop. Mech. mags, to the pulp alien books, to the hard-backed metaphysical SF collections of today, which find better company with Borges than with the moon men.

It’s not such a long road, surely, between building a crystal radio set, to imagining a home reactor or personal helicopter, to taking enough drugs to imagine ordering a home-gnosis kit, delivered by those spirits already haunting the gaps between the frequencies you were so fascinated by on that crystal radio. Those who are curious, know where to look. And they always find what they are looking for.

SF then, is about the speculation, more the production process than the act. The speculation is going on all the time, racing through the road-like circuits inside your insipid home appliances, visualizing itself in between the dot matrix lines of your ASCII print out, or simply “above”, “beyond”, “within”, or “inter”, depending on the prepositional disposition of your generation. The fiction, is just a business. Write it, move it, print it, sell it. It wouldn’t be a magazine, if there weren’t people to buy it.

It started with science, of course. Because science is what was there, and ready to be sold. Religion was mostly a closed book. Even sex and love were pretty much figured out. The career, the money, the motion, and the color was coming from the plastics industry, from string theory, from this crazy new email bullshit, and from iPod Nanoscience. Sure, religion can still be a pretty big seller. Vampires, right? Eat of my body, drink of my blood. That’s hot. Even the New Agers have themselves a cottage industry. 2012 is big, disaster flick money. And crystals, man. What a scam. You don’t even need to write a book—just hand the hippie a pretty rock and lay a thin, thin coat of eastern syncretism over it, and you can charge money for shit you found in the ground. But science—I tell you what. Those zombies are coming up with something new, like all the time. Walking around in the corpses of people, animating them with gadgetized, recycled open-sourcisism, flashy freako-apocalyptonomiconimation. Hook up to the API, and maybe we can all get paid. Yeah, at least you’re involved.

I don’t mean to sound blase, or act like there is nothing to like about sci-fi, or SF. I love it, actually. I talked about it a few posts ago on Welcome to the Interdome. Herbert, Dick, and LaGuin, etc. These folks could really lay down a creative line over top of this techno-fantasy. The fashion steampunks, the Star Wars re-enactors, the MMORPGs, the Make-for-Sake-of-Makers, and even the flash-fan-fictioneers aren’t the same, but they don’t really bother me. We’re not going to lose the creativity. This is the great thing. There are any number of “skilled” people out there, doing any number of things. Everybody’s got to have a hobby. But then, there are also the really creative people, who don’t have to predict the trends, because they just keep throwing out good stuff. Imitators are the ones who define trends, because they have to make sure it stays the same. Ursula K. LaGuin is still at it, writing science fiction and teaching people to write, and I bet she could care less about vinyl Star Wars toys. Who knows what some of the others would be doing if they were alive, but you better believe they would be doing something.

So, SF—the speculative act of fiction, will continue going on, because the creative, crazy, don’t-give-a-shit-about-trends folk are going to keep speculating, and probably keep writing fiction, if that’s what they like to do.

But Sci-Fi—that’s a whole different schematic. Some of ‘em will probably fall into the gears, getting run over before they can keep their fantasy-action going, because even going retro isn’t enough of an innovation to keep their pulp Pop. Mech. from becoming a back issue by the time it’s been published. And these are the ones that survive the great publisher purges of the 21st century. Science, as an area of speculation, has pretty much had it. The venture capitalists are reading science fiction, the science fiction writers are reading economics (either for fun or for profit), the economists are reading the liberal blogs, the liberal bloggers are reading the gossip bloggers, and the gossip bloggers are trying to figure out what VC-backed communication medium will still allow them to consider what they do a job. Everybody is happy, singing the odes of the Age of the Aquarius, as we tumble into a virtual world of Hollow-Earth inspired concept art.

I should probably let you know I’m on my second gin, and I’m thinking about re-introducing the term, “cyber-time.”

Cyber-time! So here’s the deal: we are entering an topology of informational territorialization that no longer requires either space or time as its dominant metaphor. As easily as we once sailed through “cyber-space” in our sci-fi concepts of the informational domain, we are now able to fold “cyber-time”. Trains of thought, canons, logical extensions, and causality, which once required a plausible conception of a time dimension to explain its interaction, is no longer necessary. We are “traveling without moving”, informationally. Whereas once knowledge could be lost, hidden, buried, and built, furthered, sped up, and progressed, one day everything that can be said to “exist” or “ever have existed” will be available instantaneously, if at all. How would you know Homer is not a blogger in Tehran? I mean, his Twitter “timeline” is updated, like every hour. Is it just a loop? Who knows. I’ll DM George Orwell, and see if he knows.

No, no, NO! I know it sounds like a really interesting sci-fi concept (hey I’m SMSing all these big names from history while chasing after the Magic Device and there’s a hot chick who wants to get to know me! Movie this summer! Trending topic!) but it is not. It is the end of sci-fi. As this does happen, sci-fi is dead, and not just because all devices that could ever be envisioned will either be launching their websites, or showing off their concept art on a dedicated genre chat site. It is something far more sinister.

And this is the point I’ve been feeling all this time. It’s not the technology aspect. The form of sci-fi is the issue here. Technology, running away with itself, is a problem. But you know what is really dead? The form of sci-fi that relies upon the novel.

Think of any sci-fi novel, or film.

-Act One: It is ___ Century. Life is pretty much how you expect it. There is a guy who could probably be a protagonist, but he’s busy with the boring aspects of every day life, of the kind we might read sci-fi novels to escape in our time.

-Act Two: Enter crazy object/character/event, who does something so totally out of character for ___Century, that even Typical Maybe Protagonist guy is a little confused. But what about his daily life? Too bad, crazy o/c/e calls, and sets a plot in motion.

-Act Three: Turns out, that crazy thing was even more crazier than expected! Now Typical Guy is running, jumping, and chasing all kinds of plot elements all over the ____ Century. Thankfully, there is at least one good looking chick introduced, which gives us something normal to grab onto.

-Act Four: Oh no! All those plot elements are converging! Plus, the crazy thing whipped up the BIG SECRET, which is why is probably the reason it was so crazy to begin with. Where’s the hot chick? Oh no, too late, we only have ___ much time to get ___ to the ____!

-Act Five: Whew! The plot pieces all knocked each other out. Oh, and the time crucial thing? That went okay too. But while the hot chick, who is suddenly a relationship prospect, slowly massages our wounds, let’s just pause to reflect on the ramifications of that big crazy thing, and how the ____ Century world will certainly never be the same again.

Okay, I took a little bit of liberty with that. It’s true: sometimes there is actually not a hot chick. Sometimes it is a really awesome sword, or gun, or spaceship.

Don’t worry—I like cheap thrills as much as everyone else. Plus, there are many authors out there that can take a format like this, and actually make it a really enjoyable way to pass the time, and exciting to boot. Hell, I would probably watch Total Recall every weekend, if I could see it on the big screen.

My point is more about how this sci-fi format affects the SF. Look at it again.

-There is a basic plateau of reality established.

-Rising from this plateau is a spike, which draws our attention to an area of the plateau, and makes us consider it differently.

-The spike defines expectation, and alters the plateau into a three dimensional shape.

-Our awareness slides down this three dimensional shape towards the void at the edge of the plateau, or perhaps right in the middle.

-When we have fallen off, the shape flips, and we find ourselves sitting on another plateau.

The plot, the setting, and the characters are often nothing more than plateaus by which the physics of “conceptual reality” can be tweaked. This is the speculative framework of the story. Even the hot chick is not so much the DD appeal to the demographic she might seem to be—she is actually a tug upon the line of desire in the unconscious of the reader. She’s a way to get the audience to buy it, even as everything else is thrown upside down. Look at PKD—the chick is in almost every book without fail, and especially the real head-trip ones, because if the reader couldn’t trust the sexual desire of the main character, then there would be almost no ground to stand on. Why do you think teenage girls like vampires? Because vampires are hot, ageless boys dying to suck on their necks! Something so easy to represent, like sex, is an anchor, allowing the rest of speculative spaceship to swing free.

So here is what I’m thinking: our cyber-time relationship with our culture makes problems for the technology of sci-fi, but what’s worse, it is altering our relationship with the form of the book. It is making it more difficult to write a plot.

Don’t misunderstand—it’s easier than ever to write a plot. Just follow my diagram above. Hollywood knows this. They have a storage locker at a nondescript health club in LA that is filled with diagrams like the above, marked “teen comedy”, “bank heist”, “car movie”, “sports”, or “biopic”. The keys are kept by a small, but ever widening cabal. Imagine a world, very much like our own. A man looks in the toilet one day to see that to his uncanny surprise, his bowel movement looks exactly like the one he made the day before. Not simply consistent to his diet, but exactly the same. He goes to the doctor, who refuses to see him. Running up back alleys after black market medical equipment, attractive female nutritionist in tow, he finally makes the horrific discovery for himself–he is not a man at all, but a script writer!

We lost the originality of plots when we lost the originality of the formal concept. Proposing a radical departure and reformation of the plateau of our reality isn’t really speculative anymore. The Fight Club, the Memento, the Sixth Sense—these unconventional sorts of plots are now their own tropes. What sci-fi has lost is its speculative edge. Everything is already like something, which someone has probably already seen, or something else just like it, before. On the Internet. Cyber-time doesn’t just inhabit our world of facts, or objects—but our notions of plausible reality, explored through speculative mediums. What is the Internet if not a huge manifold of all the writing in the world that is even a little bit speculative?

The loss of speculative aesthetics to the Internet is not such a big loss, compared to the loss of form. Anybody can invent a slutty-punk trope; but it takes an author to sell it. The problem is, as good as authors are at selling the concept, there is only one way to do it. This way has been called science fiction. And science fiction is dead. Speculation has moved on.

Cue the suggestion to go to video games, or concept albums, or Twitterized Serial crap. No—this is different from the “death of print”, and in my opinion, the true media problem. We have exhausted the speculative power of the form, because the vast assortment of stories at our disposal makes plot superfluous. It is not a dying industry to sell a book simply because you can get the same book online. It is a dying industry to sell a new book because you can get every other book that has ever been written, in print or online, twenty-four hours a day. Not only is science fiction dead, fiction itself is having palpitations. True, there are a million timeless stories out there, that will never die. But this is exactly my point. If a story is timeless, how are you going to write another one? Oh, add zombies. Better yet, make it porn. That is a great business model—the porn-misappropriation-of-mainstream-films. Because maybe some people will see a crappy movie. But definitely some people will see a crappy movie if its re-made with hardcore sex. And new hosts are born every week.

Now, according to the pseudo-futurist rant formula, this is the part of the plot in which I unveil what is not corrupt, and what has the potential to save us all. Too bad. Nothing will save science fiction, or the plot-novel, or even plot as a form. They’ve outlived their usefulness and ceased to function, and this is the lifeblood by which all things die. (Except zombies, which I totally expect to see, both in subject and literally. Zombie fiction, and fiction-zombies. Surprisingly hard to kill.)

But speculation, on the other hand, is something resolutely human. As is language—the bare material of fiction: words. Fiction, in the sense that it is writing that is not precisely true, is alive and well within our minds. I bet some of those truly speculative individuals will continue to write it down, working it, shaping it, and making it drive our urge to speculate. You may not recognize it. You may not be able to buy it in a store. It may be digital, or it may be on paper. It may involve technology and science, or maybe it won’t. Maybe it will seem like a plot. Maybe it won’t have characters. Maybe it will be hard to read. Maybe you read it without realizing it. Who knows? Imagination is the future. Everything else you should have looked up five seconds ago.

Around Me, Dark Tentacles

by Adam Rothstein

Published by Brute Press

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The bubbles I exhale precede me, clearing my path through the waters up the ladder towards the positive pressure of the diving hole.  As my head breaks the surface the heavy steel helmet gives force to gravity, pulling me back toward the depths of the sea.

I take off the equipment, and let it drop to the deck. Enjoying the return of humidity to my air breathing lungs, I fly up the passage ways through pressure hulls, using my heightened muscle ability to reach her as quickly as possible.  Her treat, she said: an unusual visit to my quarters.

As I reach the door way, I can see by the slight sheen of slime upon the deck that she is already here, and I hear a faint gurgle from my small sleeping space that confirms it.  She has turned off all the lamps but one, and in the germy florescence of the protazoan-bulb I can see her in her defensive posture on the bed.  Her tentacles twitch gently, and she smiles underneath her sea-mask.  Her skin is showing a warning shade of deep purple, and the rushing of liquid within her mask betrays excitement.  I pop the seal on my personal suit, and let her suction take me in.

Deep within the throws of passion, my own vocalizations block the subtle popping of the stations crepuscular air cavities, and I do not hear her screams until too late. My first and last sign of her distress is the jerking spasm of her tentacles, which I know all too well as a point along the line towards death that cannot be retread.  I only have time to see the panic in her single eye, blood shot, as she slips away and the rushing of water in her mask stops.  The Queen is dead.

It is acid, mixed into her water, to slowly cauterize the oxygen intakes of her gill assemblage.  I can see the lipids pulsing from her slick skin around the edges of the mask.  I know who did this. They are still on board.  I grip my air pistol in my fist.

As I run through the station, across catwalk and over pipe-encrusted ceilings, I think of the last strain of tension in her suckers, as they raked across my back.  I think of all the moments, in her wet world and in mine; I remember the space of shells we shared, and the contact of flesh upon flesh.  I will avenge her for the sake of the Pod, and for my own honor. But this war is over for me.  I love the Queen of the deep, and they have taken her salty skin from my grasp.

I burst into their guest chamber, and they know why I am here.  The two guards by the door fall to the floor, skin from their necks bubbling away as my gun’s charged pulse blasts through their cell structures.  I feel a harpoon laze past my shoulder, parting the fibrous membrane of my suit before it impacts the wall.  Two more of the blowfish come at me from down the passage–two more bursts of air send them gasping to the deck.  I charge forward, to the back diving hole, where I know he will be.

An assistant is helping him on with his suit.  I take off from the steel deck, and as I cohere with the skull of the lackey, my pistol barrel stabs through to his inner ear.  Slamming it home with my fist sets off the last compression shot, and his eyes burst onto the stunned face of my target.  Letting the corpse fall to the floor, I give him a look of hungry hate before leaping, and we both splash into the watery hole.

He struggles, both against my arms and with his utter terror, as his heavy equipment pulls us down into the abyss over which the station hovers.  He tries to close his eyes against the pressure, but I keep mine open, staring directly at him.  We will join each other in death, but I am going to live for one more moment than he, to see it.  I feel my brain grow dark, and I release his body to drift away into the depths.  As it slips into the shadows, I close my own eyes.  She will join me here, when her people send her body to her sea. I feel the heaviness of her tentacles around me, and water fills my thoughts.

“With Due Warrant”

by Adam Rothstein

Published by Brute Press

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With Due Warrant

“You!”

The voice was a shot, fired outward across the dry land into the wind needlessly, in a place where sight traveled much further. For the past twenty minutes both men had singularly witnessed the slow progress of the lower man’s approach up the ridge towards Division, who’s eyebrows now flexed in the speeding air. To the idiot shout he made no response or acknowledgment, continuing to watch as his uninvited companion fought to press his weight upward against the steep scrub and rock surface. The shadows suddenly seemed to grow by inches in the setting sun, and the wind whipped over the ridge, sending a new chorus of buffeting shakes down the long, ancient chain-link fence running its length. Division stood with his back to the fence.

The oncoming man did not speak again so wastefully until he was almost to the top of the ridge and only a few rocks lay in the vertical distance between himself and Division, roughly ten paces away. There he stopped and took a breath, raising his head to allow the wind to cool his neck, bathed in sweat despite the low temperature of the ridge. In his gloved hand he held a folded piece of paper.

“You… you, Division.”

Perhaps the utterance was meant to be a question, but if so, the rising inflection was cut off by the additional quest for oxygen. By way of response, Division nodded his head once, dipping his chin briefly to the level of his parka, before bringing it back up to a level position.

“Then sir—it is my duty to inform you that you are under arrest.”

He held the paper in his hand outward from his body, about at the level with his waist. He gripped it tightly, but only with his fingertips, keeping a steady, dagger-sort of balance on the object. Division said nothing. The wind blew past over the ridge in another gust, buffeting the paper. He did not withdraw it.

The man spoke again to punctuate, his heavy, stock-issue coat hiding most of his body language. “You are under arrest, on the orders of those whom I’m sure you know.” He glanced up, avoiding looking directly at Division, instead inspecting the bit of ground between them, which was quite bare except for the few rocks—it was black, crusted, wind-burnt dirt. The terrain displayed no reaction.

“So… you will come along with me now, then?” This was meant to not be a question, but perhaps this statement had inherited the rising infection lost from the earlier statement. Lowering the paper to his side, he moved a quarter-turn downhill.

“I want you to read it.”

The man froze. He opened his mouth, but then closed it. Looking upward, he was met by a direct gaze. Gravity pulled him backward against his balance, but he fought it, digging in his heels in a martial act of stability.
“You want me… to read it to you?” Now he held the paper almost behind his body, as if eclipsing the document from Division’s sight.

“I want you to read it to me.”

Below, the man’s immobility was a dance of nervousness. Division saw several of the black shadows leaping in mockery, blowing with the wind, leaping back and forth in front of him through the shaking diamonds of the chain-link fence.

“But—you know what it says.” The gloved fingers around the paper procrastinated, gently rubbing the two folded halves together.

Neither man spoke. The wind pulled at everything on the ridge in rapid tidal gusts, first one direction, than the other. The lower man looked up to the other, his eyes uncomprehending.

“Look, Division—just come back with me now. I’m sure, once we return, anything you want to know about…”

“You must read it aloud.”

“Only if you request…”

“I request it.

Glancing down at the paper in his hands, the man looked for a way out of the situation. Below, the dry valley spread out indefinitely, a vacuous source of solace. To either side, the ridge simply continued, the fence curling away with it until disappearing from view over the next rise.

“It’s just that…”

“Read it.”

There was no other option. He raised the paper, and as he could delay no longer, he quickly unfolded it, holding the top and the bottom with either hand against the motion of the air, which at any moment could have taken the paper outward into the void behind him. Division stared down the distance between them. The shadows swung out at them now, like small birds swinging on the branches of a grove of trees under gathering clouds.
“Let it be known that here, on this twenty-fourth day of the month, the court has saw fit to call Mister William Division before it, so that he might present his sworn testimony for the benefit of the body…”

His voice had staggered as he started, but gained balance as the rhythm of the familiar legal language acquired its cadence. His eyes, following the shapes of the letters joining into words, did not notice the edges of the shadows beginning to separate from the crags the earth and the fence.

“…so that they might better judge the evidence in question. Whereas, Mister William Division, as a reputed witness to the matter at hand, might be solely capable of a providing information pertaining to the case…”
The first shadows spread their wings, and launched outward from the fence, single black wings gliding in a wide arc before narrowing into tightening circles around the two men on the top of the ridge. As the dark shapes fell over the uneven terrain, their passage animated the other shadows clinging to rocks the undersides of the dry branches of the dying bushes, and even the small pits in the surface of the bare earth. These small entities scattered through, waking many of their cousins in turn. Excited by their new found freedom, it took several scampering seconds before the swarm turned round, drawing onto the scent of their goal.

“…all of which, quite by necessity, is most crucial to the overall mandate of this court, burdened with the task of determining truth from falsehood. It is thereby ordered that any and all agents of the court expediently pursue the matter laid out herewith, so that the process can be dispatched with speed and accuracy, and all reasonable actions pertaining to the case might be carried out…”

The shadows now began to gain and evolve in form. They sprouted additional wings; they grew hair and unsheathed claws; saliva and mucus filled the deepening orifices; they stratified themselves into packs, flocks, and hordes, filling the air and covering the soil with a sub-sonic chatter of bug congress. They itched and scratched at their chitinous shells and drying membranes, struggling to tune a harmonic ligature of flesh to bone in these new-found bodies. Some found this balance and raised themselves up upon tightening legs; others remained trapped in physiological discord and quietly turned the pain inward, searching out such crawling, wriggling, and squirming forms of locomotion as would express their mis-fit.

Suddenly the man noticed the shapes approaching, in the corners of his eyes not fully absorbed by the paper. Fear reached him with a sudden gust, buffeting his stature as well as the small slip in his grasp. Overcome, he stuttered in his recitation. His head snapped from side to side in disbelief of the species he saw bearing down upon him with the unmistakable inertia of their various viscous entropies, that dark terror born upon the fuming, stalking, swarming, creeping, and the sharp infectious deaths they were all too anxious to be delivering. As the shadows drew nearer, there was no escape. In either a last resort or a retreat to neurotic habit, he turned back to the paper, held quaking before him in double unsteady hands, his voice rising in pitch, attempting to be heard over the grunts, groans, and shrieks of the animals surrounding him:

“…and so, we command that William Division be placed under arrest and transported to the location of the court so that, at which time as it occurs, he can be put to question and inquiry for the…”

The rest of what he might have read was drowned from the raucous wind by the snarls of the beasts, drawn over him like a dark blanket, swallowing up the remaining light from the setting sun. Their howls and screams swelled, fed by group satisfaction in tasting their quarry. Wings flapped the air into torrents, and rocks were set rolling down the ridge by the scratching and digging of tooth and claw. The black, writhing mass collapsed in upon itself, sending the shadows exploding outward in a suddenly expanding pool of water released upon rock, and a sudden splash of dark blood into the dry ground. The shadows slowly sunk, shapeless now, seeping back into their inset holes and depressions. As they re-attained their natural sense of light and darkness, the fence and the surrounding hill gleamed in bright contrast to the sky for a single moment, before fading into deepening dusk.

The man who remained bent forward to pick up the piece of paper lying those few steps down the hill, before the breeze could carry it off. Division raised his eyebrows, but thinking better of it, placed the document into his pocket without unfolding it. He stepped forward, continuing his journey across the ridge, into the darkening twilight.

by Adam Rothstein

Published by Brute Press

http://www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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Simon Alleverde stood in place, as if he had been moving and suddenly come to a stop. He was standing before the bridge, and below it, a massive drop he could not see.

When one approaches a large, unfamiliar precipice one often attempts to peer downward, in order to inspect from a safe span both the steepness and to ascertain how far one might possibly plummet before reaching that bottom distance. What sort of a rift is this, and on what scale can one judge its abyss? Simon Alleverde, upon the occasion of approaching this promontory, did not. He did not investigate ahead, but turned to look backward over his shoulder.

But this may be forgiven, or if one prefers, forgotten; the difference between what he might have done and what Simon Alleverde did do are of no consequence here. He was not on a hike, as he was often wont to do, nor any other particular journey that would involve decisions of location, cardinal directions, and paths not traveled. Oppositional to such a pleasure stroll, his arrival at the bridge was absolutely nothing less than the pivotal moment of a universal journey; as such, his response so characteristic.

Simon Alleverde had, in fact, arrived at the end of his worldly life. Like all of his species thrust into this situation of death, he first looked backward, as he had been trained since birth. He put his hands in the pockets of his trousers while he looked over his shoulder.

Behind him was not a fog, but simply his life, much as it had occurred, free at last from the metaphysical friction of fallible memory. It, as a whole, existed-just as it once had been, in all of the color, odor, and warm vibrating aesthesia of living. Behind him was his child, his school, his mother, his uncle. They did the things that they had done in one grand scene played out as he watched; the things that he had come to expect during his life, living one day to the next, happened behind him with not one aspect missing or forgotten. These episodes knit the many objects and places into events through their clever semantics, like so many words and phrases into stanzas and paragraphs; this unfurling of time was always a clever surprise of course, but it never infringed into the absurd. His job, his garden, his kitchen, his car, his dog: after the grease of the first he puttered in the bright blooms of the second, using the dusty fourth to acquire materials for the dirt-smelling third, on the floor of which lay the warm fuzz of the fifth. An adjectival analysis could not really bring them to life-not in the way that they had lived for Simon. ‘On the page one dances in verbal acuities, only to stumble through life with vague circuities,’ as Simon had often said. There-he could see himself saying it, back in the course of his life. He had said it in a bar, there in the bath, and in the library, muttering quietly over the privacy of a book. There was none of the epic nicety of the well-formed couplet here in death. The man looked backward and saw only everything. In it was the same static worthlessness, the same disappointing lack of narrative and epithematic finality as in a room that one has just exited, upon turning to view it again from just outside the doorway. All he had known as life simply remained. It survived him-which was to say, ‘it was past,’ just as it was when he had lived it. His neighbors, his bank, his books, and his lover, were properly just as they were. Ah, his lover-Simon gazed into that past that lay behind him: his lover washed dishes, then he was kissing Simon in bed, then he was yelling at the newspaper, then he was making them tea. Then, then, then: his lover was now forever entombed in that vacant preposition of time-space. It was the same past that Simon, like all of us, had always had to view over his shoulder, only now there was nothing else. This was the experience of death.

Simon felt a breeze. It blew from in front of him, out of the empty space over which the bridge was sailing. It was warm, and lapped at the tails of his jacket, spinning his tie playfully in a flapping lap against Simon’s round belly. He took a step forward toward the bridge, unable to reach any conclusions about what had been behind. In truth, he felt a bit betrayed at being taught in life that some sort of important derivative would be drawn up at this point-a sum, or total of some kind-but he decided to let it be, for now. The ground was rocky and his loafers crackled against the volcanic stone, shattered into shards by infinite tectonic speed. The sound of it was like crockery.

The beginning of the bridge began thirty feet before the edge of the cliff. He approached the transition, laying his rough, workman hands on one of two tall stone posts. It was carved with glyphs, or symbols, or cuniform; he wasn’t quite sure which the proper term was. He couldn’t glean any significance from the markings other than that someone had intended to mark the bridge in some way. It was very old. The surface of the span was wide, cobbled in a stone that was not at all like that which made up the substance of the cliff. It was smooth, and lain nicely without gaps. On the edges of the bridge were short walls, concreted of the same stone. The span was wide enough for several vehicles to travel abreast, but from all signs, none ever had. The stones were worn evenly across, not in ruts or lanes, but as if in a long, steady drag: thousands upon thousands of individuals over time, trickling alone in separate paths.

The best way for Simon to inspect what it was that lay beneath the bridge was clearly from the bridge itself; its construction appeared sturdier that the loose slag of the precipice. With his one hand brushing around the pillar lightly-a hand gently rubbing against the tree’s bark within reach to ease the descent of a ragged slope-he stepped out. Simon Alleverde lifted one brown trouser leg and extended it outward in the direction of the hazy, far-side of the bridge. He put his weight down upon his foot, pressing into the bridge stone. He began crossing.

His heels made a quiet scuff-clap sound as his long strides moved the distance. Breeze lifted the air, scattering his hair into his eyes as he approached the beginning of the real bridge, where the edge of the land dropped. The blown air pierced through his clothing, lifting heat away from his skin. The light shining through the mist and clouds was surprisingly bright in the opaque air, but it was hollow, giving no sense of radiated heat. If there was any chance of it, he might have desired that this was a valley near a northern seaside, or even an overlook upon a high mountain road. It might even have been played host to such an exciting sensation as the smell of approaching snow. But there was no possibility of these at all, and this could not be mistaken. All was belied by the lack of any growth. There were no bushes, no wooden life, and not even sparse grass could be found among the rocks on the cliff flanking the rising causeway of the bridge. Despite the shade the walls provided and the cool clouds of moisture carried upon the breeze coming up the side of the chasm, there was not the smallest fragment of moss in the chinks of soft cobbled stone. This was not a place that was anything like anywhere else. It was only what it was, and nothing else at all.

The wind whistled around the jointed manifold of the land and the bridge. The abrupt drop of the igneous stone descending away from the cobbled brickwork resembled a lip, or perhaps more of an elbow. Maybe it was even a chin. Simon Alleverde drew each side of his jacket about him and fastened the large knit-leather button to keep the fabric from buffeting in the air. He brushed his hair to either side of his face, and pulled down the brim of his hat before realizing to his surprise that he was not wearing his hat. It had not blown off; it simply was not there. He wondered what had happened to it, or where it might be. Instead, he stuck his hands into his trouser pockets, and continued down the left-center of the bridge, towards a place where he might be able to gaze over the side.

He did not want to look over the edge-not yet. It would be best if he walked a bit out from the edge before attempting to look. It would yield a better perspective. Twelve paces out would be enough to view downward as well as back towards the walls of the cliff, or canyon, or whatever it was. But every one of twelve paces over an unseen abyss is each possibly an infinite plunge. Achingly, he tried to continue forward, but his attention and course arced slowly towards the side of the bridge. After only about five paces out into the empty space, he decided that the shrewdness of patience had been satisfied. He skipped up to the wall with quickness uncharacteristic of his manner, and gingerly placing each palm on the foot-wide wall, he bent over at the waist to peer downward.

The cliff broke away sharply, as he had imagined. But not only did it drop in a very steep, near vertical angle, but some hundred feet below the bridge, the cliff seemed actually to retreat to a negative angle, dropping away and out of sight negating its original edge, as if the land from which he had just departed from was only a crust on top of a giant hollow. Through the haze he could only make out just two or three hundred feet of the rock wall behind him; after that, what lay below was only as far and firm as the mist, not unlike the grey clouds that formed the low sky over his head. This, however, was not the most startling thing that he saw.

Underneath the bridge upon which he stood, protruding out from the cliff, was another bridge, like a symmetrical shadow of the one on which he stood. Its curvature was opposite: hanging downward rather than arching. It could have been a double of his, but for this fact. He thought for a moment that perhaps there was water beneath his bridge, and the mirrored image was literally that. No bridge he had ever seen had such a supporting span below it, without some sort of cable or trellis connecting the two. Each echoed the other, as if by specific design. His span led from the top of the cliff, and the other began at the very lowest point at which he could see the rock wall, after which the mist blocked vision in its imposing gray cloud. Simon Alleverde was no engineer, and could not account for what strengths such a physical puzzle might hold.

Bereft of alternatives, Simon Alleverde continued across the bridge. From a different angle the bridge might yet make itself clearer. Each leather-bound foot was placed in front of the other in the time honored fashion, and he looked back once more, over his shoulder. He walked a calm, dragged step: each shoe pulled forward beneath suited shoulders, head turned backward, still looking the life over. Life in all its strangeness was much less mysterious than the bizarre structure on which he walked. He gazed fondly at its familiar vignettes. In that past he watched his child grow, again and again, from the moment of conception until the very last visit in the garden. The baby was a child, then a boy, then a man; he learned to speak, to write, and to think. He watched his dog run, play, die, and be buried. Now, from this vantage point, he observed all the other mundane et cetera that he had not really thought about at the time when they had occurred: his soup grew cold in his bowl while he read bad literature at the table; his urine circled the toilet as it drained away while he whistled; his hair, day by day, came out in small pieces upon his comb and he noticed no difference.

His strides slowed, and Simon let his worn, smooth soles slide a bit more against the cobblestones, twisting the ball of his foot with each step. The shoes were thin, and he could feel the cool stone in the palm of his foot. The wind had begun to howl a bit as it blew twisting over one side of the bridge and back down again. Simon’s trouser legs buffeted about him in the moving air, chilling him and causing the old hairs that grew in thickets upon his legs to stand on end, but the pressure of his weight pushing against the soles of his feet was familiar. The flat at the bottom of each step was almost like a little friendly pat, he thought. He balled his fists in his pockets and pulled elbows in tight to try and keep his warmth. His lover had loved to indulge in giving him a little pat-an intimate, regular little tap with the four-ply tips of the fingers-on his bottom as he stood shivering in nakedness, toweling off from a shower or a swim. Simon had always been a bit peeved by it; the way his skin bounced, wet and a bit too soft, reminded him that he wasn’t as in shape as he used to be. But it gave his lover pleasure. His lover’s lips would glow with delight, and he might twist his mustache a bit; the mustache that he grew to hide just how much light there was in those lips. He would lie back on the bed, staring up at Simon, hands behind his head. Simon shaved while he would watch from the bed. Simon would play at great bombastic throws of annoyance as he pretended to be concerned with the time, saying that the reservations were for nine, and why wasn’t he ready? They weren’t attacks, those little smacks on the bottom and words of admonishment. Each was a kiss. There were so many, many kisses. Some involved lips, some made use of other parts, and some were only words, or less.

The wind roared, and Simon Alleverde wondered what the hell he was doing standing out on this bridge. He went again to the side, and looked over. Everything was the same as before, but the lower bridge was even further away, the symmetrical arcs orbiting apart on their parallel ecliptics. He looked back towards the… but that was odd, he couldn’t see the cliff behind him any longer. He had walked further than he had thought. How long had he been thinking, lost it thought? He had never been good at keeping time. Was he simply facing the wrong direction? His eyes sought outward through the wind that obscured the view through its noise and turbulence. He couldn’t see anything but the bridge in either direction; below there was still the other bridge. Was he on the left side of the bridge? He crossed to the other side and peered over. Maybe this was the left side? Which way had he been walking? Simon Alleverde could not be sure.

As he pulled his head back from the breath of the wind that roared up out of the chasm, he could have sworn that he saw something on the lower bridge, and dodged his head back quickly to look again. Nothing to see, except for identical stones. He kept walking, looking downward over the edge. A fierce gust blew by, causing him to pull his head back and shut his eyes. But was that it again? He stopped, and forced his eyes to look down, scrutinizing the other bridge for anything out of place. But wait, there was something! It was a face! Incredibly, there seemed to be a person looking up at Simon, from the bottom of the lower bridge, a few hundred feet away. How was that possible? Was it hollow, with windows in the sides? He leaned over as far as he dared, but saw nothing but a band of stones in a span just like the one upon which he stood, with a face peeping over the edge, as he did.

He looked at the face below, trying to make it out. At first he had barely discerned that it was a human face, but now he was beginning to recognize features: brown hair, the top of a suit jacket, brown, with shirt and tie, no hat. Simon walked from side to side, examining this inverse person. The person below moved as well, almost as if he was walking on the underside of the lower bridge. The strangeness of it did not alarm Simon, who only wished there was some way to pass between the two bridges, so that he might speak to this man. What would he say to another man on another bridge? He had no idea, but he was sure that conversation would take its meaningful cues if only they were close enough to exchange words. Simon continued fifty feet further down the span, no longer sure in which direction, or in relation to what he was moving. The other figure proceeded as well, first in the same direction as Simon, then back the other way. Simon turned and walked back too, then his colleague turned again. They past each other on their own bridges and continued walking. Then Simon reversed direction again, and his companion did the same. The man below had certainly seen Simon, and seemed also to be studying him. Simon then stopped, and so did the other man. He bent forward, and shouted downward to the man, but the wind was too great. The other also bent over his own edge, and might have been shouting too, but there was no way Simon could have heard.

Simon turned back to the center of the causeway. The air moving around in the sky had reached the level of a maelstrom. The button was ripped open on his coat, and his tie whipped about like a broken arm of machinery. Simon Alleverde sat down in the middle of the bridge, crossed his legs, and pulled the jacket about him to try and shelter himself.

He tried to peer around his shoulder, longing suddenly for something familiar. There was only fog behind him. He looked both ways down the bridge, but could not remember in which direction his life lay. He stared off into the distance, sitting up a bit straighter to peer over each wall that bounded the bridge, but he found himself simply alone. He knew of one certain thing from that life, which he desperately wanted to remember at this moment. It wasn’t in his head, but in the pit of his stomach, sagging a bit within his suit; there was something there inside him that he wanted to grasp. What was it called? They called it a…a brief… a small… a passing… a what? What did it feel like? It was a glance of the body, it was intimacy…. But what was intimacy? Was that inside his stomach or outside? His torso now felt hard like a shell, hollow, and fragile. He couldn’t be sure if the thing was wet or dry; warm, maybe, but it could be otherwise. Maybe the thing was outside the flesh. It was some electrical contact, there and then gone soon again: an embossing spark of the moment with raised, rough edges. It was something like that. Some thing, little, dark hole, folding all the body’s desire into it: doing it again and feeling it again. He almost had it in his mind’s grasp, but it slipped away every time. He couldn’t remember. His mind had been getting old for some time now, aging along with his body. One day his back hurt more, and the skin around his throat and shoulders hung down a bit more than usual. Then he had misplaced things, and forgotten some of the faces. It all seemed so distant now. Getting old was something that used to happen, back there… but it had been there the whole time, this “aging”; it was always present even in the intervals between its blurred, infrequent communiqués-mailed with postage due, naturally-always arriving when least expected. But this was a different hole, a very definite thing-gone-missing, not a thing-misplaced. And now he couldn’t remember, couldn’t remember that, couldn’t remember…

Staring off into the wind, his eyes watered freely. He tried to remember exactly what it was that he was trying to remember. He was… Simon was an old man. No, it was a different man, two men…. There was a man. A man had touched this man… maybe only a hand offered to another, one of so many during one’s life. No! It was more that that, more important. How would this man have touched, how would he have been touched? And why? Why did anyone touch anyone else? And this man, touch this man? Men so rarely touched each other these days, and when they did, the shape, the touch, and the attention of those touches were not the way that they should have been. But it must have been. But why must it have been a man?

More of his hands than of his mind, he began to go through his pockets. He half-hoped that there might be something to trigger his memory, an artifact of an unknown past. His two interior jacket pockets had nothing in them, and the outer pockets were unfortunately sewn closed, and only for fashion sake. What could this man have looked like? What was it that a man looked like? Like a man? Like himself? A body, there was still a body in this suit. A body gets old after a period of time, time that cannot really be remembered. The body’s oldness is never in doubt. Old was its own gland, a supplementary organ filled with the fluid of age, growing like a callus on the heavily worked areas. It grew brown, drab, but bulbous and bursting with functioning crepuscules each secreting the cytoplasm of time, in kind with all organs, manufacturing and storing their function’s substance within their own soft, interior flesh. He was certain that a man was more that a collection of organs, but organs were the only thing that he had left.

He dug into the trouser pockets again, and turned up nothing-but there was something-a very small, round pebble. Simon Alleverde twisted the pebble between his forefinger and thumb, trying to find something similar in his memory onto which he might grasp. Perhaps there had been no man, and he had touched no one. Had he ever wished to touch? Why? What would it have felt like to touch, or to wish? Might it have felt like the pebble-small, rough, and hard, but more certainly real that anything? These questions did not make any sense. He could not think; he could not remember. He could not touch anyone or anything, and it seemed he never had. There was no thinking here, no aging body, nor memory-on this bridge it seemed there was nothing at all.

Simon Alleverde sat on the bridge with his head tucked into himself. He felt a small pebble. He felt the fear-the only thing that he was able to feel-the feeling that he might be completely alone.

The wind attacked with renewed vigor in heaving gusts, and he gasped on the air that forced its way down his throat and into his lungs. As what was left of his body turned on him in spasms and chokes, he dropped the pebble, and the wind took it. He put his palms down on the cobbles of the bridge underneath his knees: only the bridge in this world of wind. He tried to think of something, anything, but he could not. He could not remember even his name. He sat, but he did not know where. Words filled him, words that he did not know. The words spoke-shaking the bridge with each syllable, stones reverberating with the enunciation of the wind.

In wind and stone moves flesh and bone; they mint life’s treasury as breath fills the chest.

In life’s small room, bodies pay out for each move, and so to memory we gamble the rest.

Simon Alleverde pulled his head up, as the wind slacked and the ambient light shone through the cloudy mire, illuminating the bridge. He felt a bit dizzy, sitting there alone on the cobblestones. Perhaps standing and walking a bit would do him some good. Getting to his feet, he let his arms swing freely at his side. Yes, it felt much better to be ambulatory. It felt like himself. He moved quicker in the soft, warm breeze, his tie swinging with each step, heels tapping. He whistled a tune to a song that he did not know. There was a man he had known who used to sing that song-but the identity escaped him. Something about when you know that you love… but Simon thought such lyrical odes foolish. Nobody actually ever said such things, such rhyming couplets empty of everything but good intention. He continued to whistle, as unconcerned with the words as with the speaker. Simon Alleverde looked down at the other bridge below him. His double had stood up to walk as well, heading back, the way that Simon had come. Simon did not look, instead gazing ahead, and listening to the scuff-clap of his soles, and feeling each worn stone beneath his feet. In succession, each stone touched him briefly as he passed, and he felt them all. Every step was a kiss, a kiss from the bridge that spanned out through the wind-filled sky. Each was a kiss. Simon hummed the wordless melody, and walked on across the bridge.

Architecture

Nearing the Machines

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

May 1^st, 2009

www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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When I was in New York I went to see Merce Cunningham’s Nearly Ninety performance at BAM, on his 90th birthday.  Actually, I was brought there, because Megan sometimes does this thing:

Her: I got us tickets to this performance/exhibition/gallery/thing.

Me: Okay, cool.  What is it?

Her: It’s some guy, and there are these people… I don’t really remember.

Me: Oh.  What kind of film/ballet/concert is it?

Her: Fuck, I don’t know man.  Just some shit I read and thought it sounded okay.

And then we get there, and its something I’ve really been interested in, or would obviously have been really excited to see because it involves things in which I’m totally interested.

This is what happened.  I didn’t know who Merce Cunningham is, but I am really interested in the Black Mountain College and the people involved with it (though I’m not very knowledgeable about it).  And then we walk past the “merch” area, and I see all this Sonic Youth shit, and I ask dumbly:

Me: Oh, did Sonic Youth play here recently?

Her: You idiot, they’re doing the music for the show we’re seeing.

I don’t know if she just likes surprising me, or if it is fun to keep me wandering about in the dark, or maybe its a combination of the both.  I suppose I’m more docile when I don’t really know what is going on.

But this fun anecdote into our relationship aside, Sonic Youth performed the music live, on this massive pipe-welded rotating structure, while a translucent screen between them and the dancers had video effects projected upon it. It was way awesome.

Now, I don’t know very much about dance from any sort of theoretical perspective, but I am that strange sort of person who when confronted with art, feels some sort of a well start filling within him, whether from conscious thought or from elsewhere, which builds until it overflows into his mind, and he is forced to watch, with mind racing and anxiety causing his fingers to tap against the seat, until the intermission, at which point he can run to find a pen and scribble notes of what he is thinking all over the back of the program.

Here’s a bit of that, from what I was able to get down.

The program printed this, about Merce Cunningham and John Cage:

“They came to the conclusion that the two time-based arts should exist independently, occurring in the same time and space but without supporting or being connected to one another in the usual way. Both Cunningham and Cage made extensive use of chance procedures, which meant that not only musical forms but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition-such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax-were abandoned. Cunningham is not interested in telling stories or exploring psychological relationships: the subject matter of his dances is the dance itself.”

All well and good, I thought to myself as I read the words before the performance. I had heard the same thing said about writing before-but these elements are so characteristic of our conscious thought that if we are going to interpret any sort of meaning at all, it must be in terms of cause and effect, directed motion, and by extension, human relationships. There is cut up text to be sure, but the fact that it is “cut up” shows that it had meaning, it has only been obscured or mutilated.

But once the performance began, I was surprised. Most of the dance I have seen live (the good, technical dance) is ballet. Cunningham’s choreography showed me just how much ballet relies upon cause and effect, and psychological relationships. The pas de deux is pure sex. You might, for all intents and purposes, be watching two people engaging in the act of love on stage. You can add one dancer, or take one away, but the sex remains, only the relationship is made more complicated. The male and female dance as classic male and female components, the epic duality, the cosmic pair, the A and B. You can have A, B, AA, BB, ABA, or BBBB, but one is still spelling this body-phrases with the same two letters. We are consigned to writing in the narrative of classical sex, bodies become symbols. It is the endless story, told countless times both with and without words every time a human being thinks of touching another.

Cunningham instead presents his dancers as motion. It is physics, a swarming pallet of vectors, directed in flows around each other on the stage. There is material there-it is not devoid of meaning, or blank substance. But we are no longer watching a story. We are viewing a building, reading a blueprint, or falling into a diagram. It is architectural-he presents cross-sectional images, elevation views, rotational, cartesian, angular phenomena. As I watched his performance, the video images echoed the motions of the dancers, spinning lines and angles above the stage, as the bodies performed excellently, portraying the curves, stretches, fittings, and joints of the body’s frame and range of motion. They did not move like people, who stumble, bend at the waist while sitting and standing, hold their sore points as they struggle for the flexibility they lost in an ancient youth. Those are stories, and these dancers moved in pure physicalities, in possibilities and probabilities of encounter rather than personification of what we know and are able to think.

But still-these are people, directed to act like machines. They are not an assembly line, not an automaton. They are humane, bodily machines to be sure, but their only design has been for aesthetic purpose, to depict a visual, phenomenal scene, not to build or produce unseen within the confines of a factory or site. We are still watching a stage, after all.

Isn’t this the way that we want our machines? We aestheticians of mechanics, who find beauty in the clean lines of a well-made device, or in the subtle depth of a diagram describing a physical form not yet realized. We want our machines to burst outward in exploded view, whirling upon three axes so that we can see and admire the closeness of their components’ motion, the tight fit of the gears, and the quick pace of the electronics converting our clever programs into physicalities we ourselves could never achieve. And more than that-we design new machines in our minds to fill the still-present voids. Rube-Goldberg machines of cause and effect are the easiest, taking our current machines and lining them up into narratives to complete the tasks that still weigh upon our own fragile skins. We name our devices, love them, and love to peek inside to see what they hide from us. How is it that they work? Why do they still fail us? When will the machine come about that will never break, and will do everything, looking beautiful while it whirls about the stage of our imagination?

The function of machines in our lives is always metaphor, always narrative. We do not love our machines for the aspect ratios of their gears, though we might hold these lovely measurements up as the proof of our attraction. We love them because they function; we love them because they mean something to us. Design is never an accident, never natural, and for that, we love it as we wish to love ourselves.

We can’t see the aesthetics of our machines as we would like. They are never as they appear in our minds, or on the blueprints. We want smooth transfers, gentle harmonics, rotational symmetry, and tight, tight belts. Instead we get rusty cam shafts, stuck and broken interfaces, dangerous vibration and pinch points. The male/female connectors are frustratingly non-sexual, despite our designs and naming. There is no good and evil in binary code, no matter how complex we make it, spitting lines of digits fruitlessly to infinity. The clean lines, tempting us with the narrative of non-narrative, that human fantasy of what is beyond humanity, and the repeating regression that will not find a straight line because there is no compound of quadratics able to approach the fundamental instability of emotional ebb and flow-all of these dreams will remain unfilled. Not even robots can live for ever.

There is no truth in metaphor, but still they speak. “What it is like,” is not actually what it is like, but that is the only think that it is like! The dance has music, movement, video, and no words. Still, words come from the dance to the humans who watch it. The dance is not a machine, nor completely human, but it tells a story of machines to us through its mechanical non-narrative.

And in the background, completely separated, Sonic Youth plays ambient, distorted sounds. Distortion is easy to play, but Sonic Youth are the masters. There is aesthetic to it as well, as the sounds ambulates, oscillates, and resounds through what we typically know as music. Is it music, or is it noise? Does it tell a story, or no? Is there really no pleasure in inserting a ¼” jack into an amp?

As they move around the things they refuse to describe, these art forms have an exacting form of a approximation. Definitive cuts, loose measurements, always fitting, because what they are attempting to assemble is not strictly material. The motion of construction, this design on the fly, this performance of the aesthetic principles before our very, un-describing eyes-they move close and around meaning through the means that inspire narrative within us, though not directly representing any to us. They require no symbolic narrative or psychology; they are mere machines. Aesthetic machines-making phenomena.

For us humans, the poorly-functioning, drunk poets of the machine world, this is as close as we get. We call it beautiful.

Open-faced Mushroom Blastocyst – A Novella

by Adam Rothstein

Fungus is a delicious food, but it makes a confusing way of life.  We’re lucky most eschatology is written in books, rather than in the heated course of the blood vessels in our stomachs.

Available in These Editions:

Paperback Version 2.0

This edition of version 2.0 is printed on #20 bond, with an #80 cover stock, and stapled flat, 8.5″ X 5.5″. It totals 61 pages.

OFMB is an experiment in “version” publishing–the idea is that the work is finished, but leaves open the possibility of change in future editions, hopefully with the support and remarks of readers.  You are being invited to enjoy the text, and pass on any comments or criticism you might have, to improve the text and presentation in the future.

Because we are asking your help in this process, we are taking the step of offering the current version, 2.0, for free.  All you need do in return is provide a little bit of feedback to the author about your experience reading the book.  And, throw us a buck for shipping. Sound good?

$1 (practically nothing.)

Digital PDF Format

If perhaps providing feedback sounds like a lot of work in exchange for getting something for nothing, there are also PDF copies available digitally for download here. Available under Creative Commons license, as usual.

By Adam Rothstein

Published by Brute Press

http://www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/download the story in PDF format here

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It had better hurt, or else what’s the point?

I wanted to turn around right there, dash back up the stairs, grab her in my arms and tell her everything: the world was a corpse and we were the last living cells; there was nothing left to say in any language; the only thing real in the universe was our mutual orgasms. But of course, I didn’t. First of all, that’s ridiculous; second of all, I didn’t need to because she already knew. Third: I had just agreed to go out and get some beer. I kept going down the stairs. The elevator was out again, but I could have walked twenty flights rather than ten.

It hadn’t even been that hard to suggest that we stop at my place later on to listen to some records. I’d mentioned it some other time before, and she never sounded against it, but now she actually wanted to go. And she was the one who said we should leave, get out of that place with the fake conversation and go do something-what did she say, more real? But it wasn’t even real, us leaving; from the moment we started talking both of us had already left. She grabbed her leather jacket, grabbed my torn sleeve, and we were out into the night. I’m glad I didn’t have to say anything, because I couldn’t have. The hottest girl-well, forget that-the most amazing girl coming to my place to hang out. And that’s where she is now, though I can hardly believe it, waiting for me why I go get beer, of all things. And not just to hang out, but talk, and sit next to each other, and she keeps looking into my eyes like she doesn’t even know what it is that her eyes could do to me. And then she said that-’it had better…’-just so casually. My god, I want to spend the rest of my life with her, if only it could be this moment.

I sound like I’m a teenager: all flustered and nervous, imaging out lives together. We haven’t even slept together yet. Haven’t kissed either, I don’t think we’ve even touched skin to skin. With someone like her it’s the whole thing, the first kiss and the sex, right away, in the beginning, up front. That way it’s got to be intense real quick, or it evaporates and may as well never happened. You know? She’s way too cool for foreplay-not that she wouldn’t be interested in… well, you know, all that good stuff about exploring a new body. I just mean that she doesn’t fuck around-and by that I mean that the fucking is the foreplay-if the sex isn’t good, you better believe that she’s not going all the way.

I think she’s going to…. She’s going to give me the chance anyway. Kind of an audition. I’ll show her a good time, I think. I know I’m not God’s gift to women or anything, but I think I can give her a few pleasant surprises. She knows a good deal, I’m sure, I can tell she’s got a number of tricks herself. But I could handle it, real cool, you know? Come on slow, and then surprise her. I know how to move a woman-I’m no amateur. But if she’s not impressed… God, that would be such a disaster. I’ve only got one chance to screw it up with her. Am I nervous? Fuck, how old am I? Still, it feels kind of sweet though, like back in the old days. The mutual nervousness like static in the room, the two of us leaning our heads close together, the glance in the eye and then the quick glance away, and then, before you know it… you’re smelling her hair and she’s biting your neck… I can feel it in my throat; that’s where excitement happens to the body. Arousal, that’s something else; excitement, that’s the opposite of choking…

What kind of beer should I get? Did she say? No… no, I know what she drinks. Six pack? Case? A full case-it will get consumed anyway. Maybe she’ll hang out all night and we can drink, mess around and go at it, and then drink more, and repeat-make a night of it, so to speak. A first date? Kind of, I guess. We don’t even have to sleep together as long as she stays-as long as she likes my company. As long as she finds it worth letting me know that she likes my company. Who dates anymore? Only those with such steady, ritualistic steps that this kind of excitement must scare the shit out of ‘em, just to think it. This is… better? Yeah, this is… well, to tell the truth, this is fucking awesome.

It had better hurt, or else what’s the point?

Of course none of the prudes would find that line as damned attractive as I do. They would think it was scary? Pathological even? Risky, certainly.

I skipped down the front steps of the building, and across the crushed concrete gravel into the road. No traffic out at this time of night. Only a five blocks to the store; parking lot, deserted parking lot, crushed bus shelter, loading dock, apartment, office, store. A hot night, we were both sweating already sitting in my room. She approved of the room-I could tell by the way she made herself at home in front of my bookcase, sitting in the middle of my bed. It probably goes without saying, if she was going to enter the building at all-the building is filled with broken glass, rubble, the usual. Ten flights up, and there she is right now, sitting on my bed, looking at my stuff, judging me-and still there!

I half-wondered if maybe she’d go; if I’d get back to the room and she’d be gone. Like it was fantasy or dream-a stupid romance I have already thought up a few hundred times hanging out with her friends or her with mine. It was that juvenile kind of fantasy; if she knew, it wouldn’t matter what kind of shit I talked; she wouldn’t even speak to me, let alone hang out. Some things you just can’t say out loud, otherwise, you might as well not even speak. That’s the sort of stuttering you avoid with foreplay. This kind of foreplay, that is, the no-bullshit kind-it had better; or else-then there’s nothing to say before hand. You can say anything you want while its happening. Unless she had the same fantasy, maybe. Maybe that’s why she’s here. Maybe. Regardless, things are cool for now anyway; we’re just going to drink beer. And maybe listen to records. Mostly just drink beer.

I can tell it will be good. The sex, I mean. Of course I don’t want to get ahead of myself here-if it happens, then it will totally be good. I don’t know that it will happen. But I know it will be good. The way she looks at me with those eyes, no fear in there. No desire to draw it out, no need to spread it out along the surface, fighting the meniscus as it tries to bead back up; there’s plenty, and its just as viscous as it is fluid. That human oil, you know-you can feel it. Coating the skin, welling up in the hollow places. Oily, coating, soaking into the grain. What the hell am I talking about?

I tripped over some of the slag in the road, and the rubble clattered against itself. A little too excited I guess, a little bit of beer already. I stopped and listened, all of sudden aware of my surroundings and nervous about real things. I heard nothing. The block was pretty deserted. There was just the hot night, pulsing its slow, steady strobe. Off on the other side of the river, I heard deep rumblings, but nowhere near. I kept going.

But it’s in the way that she sits-the way she sat on my bed, casually looking through records, as if it was both the most and least important thing in the world. No, not just that. It was the way that her feet tapped back and forth in her shoes: worn shoes that looked like her feet hurt constantly, yet tapping. No, it was in those hips. I’m a sucker for that, for a woman’s hips. Mainly for hers: amazing, among these amazing women. Hers were divine; the muscles and bone were the angelic batteries of the body, a sexual manifold engineered by the muses of corporeal existence, élan fluxed transcendent through its smooth couplings. When she walked, they spun and whirred, the most efficient transmission, and when they whirred, they… oh god, how I’ve thought about that for days and nights…

Beer was bought from the man who peeked out at me from the shattered, shuttered store, regardless of the fact that I’ve lived there and bought from him for over a year. Maybe it was the different brand of beer that startled him. Or maybe it was just that this was the way that it was.

No, what she said, said it best, and in how she said it. It had better hurt. Or what’s the point? She’s not a masochist, not a fatalist. Just that it had better. Seriously. She was in my room while I was getting beer, and yet we-she-could so easily discuss sex with such a flippant regard to the typical morals and current tastes. And she brought it up; with those eyes, she brought up not only the words, but the idea. I mean, of course we both knew that we were both down for it-and not just it; not your typical, drunken mashing of bodies, but something with a little bit more creativity, and a little more care. I was getting beer and she was in my room-it wasn’t about the possibility of sex so much as the potential. We were not only going to do this thing but we were going to really rock it, reinvent it, and ruin it for everyone else afterward. Whatever they did, we would have already done it better. We were going to destroy the possibility of sensuality for all time. We were going to come down that mountain and declare sex dead. Pain and pleasure were going to become meaningless when we were through with it.

And the truth was, it certainly had better hurt, shouldn’t it? Otherwise, what the fuck else was there? A little bit of tenderness? Tenderness is such a small wound. You flick at it gently, uncontrolled, unconscious-but it wasn’t anything that would grab your attention. It was there, and then it past; then it was just another as it was before. But real, acute pain-and soreness-throbbing, swelling, the flow of blood into the purple hemorrhage of a bruise-this was something that divided days. It concentrated, it focused, it gathered and redistributed. So it had better hurt, if we were going to do it. That was what she thought; it was what she said. She didn’t have to say that it was going to be us; we were the only one’s there. She and I had already generalized the situation. So yeah, any sex, ever, anywhere, anyone: it had better hurt or there was no point.

And it would, I knew it would. And afterwards, we’d lay there exhausted and in pain. Our bodies twisted out of joint, harsh red and blue patches and scratches rubbed into our flesh, smells penetrated and saturated wet with all kinds, throbbing swollenness begging now and needing more, and blood, just a bit in drops-delicious thick liquid heated with beating hearts and the watery, homebrewed beer, folds of muscle coiled around itself and others, nails in hair and teeth on skin. And afterwards, after this pain, perhaps there would be enough left to make us find each other again, in a week or two. Or maybe only a day. Enough time to ache and let bruises come to the surface, browning yellow for each other’s touch again… a feeling real enough to repeat.

I thought about it, just like this, as I wound through the shadows around the bus shelter, now only two ­­blocks away from the stairs to the room. I was so lost in my sexual thoughts that I didn’t hear the rotor blades, muffled thuds as they were in the thick humid air. I was imagining what would be the best part-the first time, or the second. Would it be downhill, or uphill? Was there a way to compare? Why was I thinking about this so much rather than paying attention? What was the point?

It came in low, with its lights off. Whether it was just passing, or whether this was a specific target, no one would ever say. I did what came naturally, a second nature to those of us who still manage to live here. I crouched low behind a crushed barrier in the shadows, the horrible sick cloud of fear washing over, stifling my hope that maybe they wouldn’t see me. I was small and dark, and they were fast and above; but that, after all, was all the difference. Either they would just pass, or the world would end… it would all be obvious soon. I stopped thinking about her for only ten seconds, but it was enough.

I looked up through my arms covering my head, and the punching, throbbing machine swooped lower in its arc, heading parallel to the street. The blades swung so fast you couldn’t see them in the dark; only the spinning transmission axle was visible: a throbbing manifold that allowed the beast to soar above the rubble around it. There hadn’t been any aerial activity around here for a month, and I had almost forgotten what it was really like. I could barely see them, the pilots, through their clear windshield. They weren’t looking at me. I could plainly see their insignia, stenciled on the black metal. Then I saw it: small and round and black, reflecting a bit in the few lights that still shown up from the block. The helicopter released, and it fell. They moved in the same direction for a second, and then the machine pulled up and away to the side fast, while it continued to fall. It dropped fast, like a bird, heading right for its nest. When it hit, the explosion blasted out from the rear of the apartment building-the side that held my bathroom window. The entire roof was thrown up into the air, disintegrated, and the mass was exchanged for flame. The walls, those steps, the familiar slag I had walked through too many times to count blew up, pulverized. I could feel the crushed dust on my face: little stinging pieces, sharp enough to bring tears reflexively. The smoke went up and out in two twin horns to either side-the bricks and steel falling in upon itself as it collapsed. I didn’t even remember getting knocked backward; I just watched from the ground, on my back, looking between my feet at the rubble, as the flames rose up in front of me, smoke spreading over the entire block and broken glass raining.

Two thin drips of blood ran down my neck, spurting gently from either ear.