The Time Mechanic
16.03 22.08
‘He’s just a harmless hobbyist…’ Amber turned away from her screen, a grainy security-cam image of an elderly man in a red anorak carrying a dented computer tower down a muddy garden path; and paused him in mid-stride as he arrived at a ramshackle wooden shed.
‘I’m not so sure.’ Her assistant Bilal frowned as he scanned a browsing history from his own monitor. ‘There’s a pattern emerging…’
Amber slid her chair down the bench and peered over his shoulder. ‘It’s only the usual crank conspiracy nonsense – Tesla’s energy transmission towers, the famous Nazi UFOs, perpetual motion engines, a Thanatronic device in the Vatican channelling the secret teachings of Jesus, the Voynich manuscript decoded blah blah blah. I don’t know why Cheltenham is wasting bandwidth sharing this stuff with us. We’re a specialist unit.’
‘They’re looking to us to find the pattern, to find a rhythm…’
‘The rest of his data splurge is about nostalgia for his boom-boom boomer days – Raquel Welsh in a fur bikini, Pan’s People, faded old clips of Scandi-porn -’
‘I thought we were now supposed to be keeping an eye on that sort of thing… I mean, it’s really haram, if you think about it…’
‘The Multi-Faith Directive Act hasn’t been finalised yet. Anyway, it wouldn’t be our department. The question is whether Joseph Ronald Barnard is a threat to the British nation-state. I think not.’
‘Even so…’
Amber shrugged, adjusted her head scarf, and wandered across to the window, to stare down at the traffic streaming along the Thames Embankment.‘If it makes you more comfortable, get into his laptop and set up a bot to watch for hot content.’
07.42 24.08
Waking, I suffered from an itch in the crack. The smell of burnt rice from long ago was a false memory. The body is what it is. Air pressure, temperature, gravitational pull, mass and energy. This is the assemblage I am lumbered with, as I crawl around the gardens of the world, through all my multiplex ghostings.
I am dreaming of machines, hoping to be swept up into a half-molten silver machine, to pilot a tubular coffin into the night sky, but no such luck, only the pressure of the atmosphere and the elusive gravitons keeping me in my place.
I must get more servers. A great Chinese Wall of them. To process my Chinese Whispers…
Yesterday I was sitting in the mud-garden, tourists roared thousands of feet overhead, mowing machines whirred beyond their barricades of privet and leylandi – so the world seemed at least partially manageable. Yes, there was horror and injustice, feral mobs boiling up, the rich choking their minions with vomit – but that was far away from my suburbs – and hopefully I could insulate myself by reconstructing memories of youthful pleasures, flimsy and fading perhaps, at least firing up the neurons in a good way.
But that carapace was shattered. The disruption began in the tree that I was facing, an apple tree, somewhat neglected, brown apples around its base, bark gnarled and distempered, a pustular skin protecting its marrow. I was instead looking up to a particular cloud, sailing like a turreted battleship across the sky, backlit by the declining sun. I was about to think about the Black Sun – yet again.
Then the unthinkable happened. I knew at once that I was some entity’s bad thought. Reality was thinking straight through me.
The trunk of this apple tree burst open with loud crack. It ripped apart like an old pair of trousers. It opened an aperture, a wound, a deep vent, admitting a heavy odour like the honey of oversized bees. Inside I could see matter pulsating out control, in a state of constant transformation – nauseating stuff churned by time… Reality was breaking, it was breaking in and out. It was going to break through me, this rent in the veil, this fracture in the cyclorama of a bored twilight, it was making a hole in my head. The fabric of time was torn, revealing the pipework behind. All that messy flux. I have to fix it…
08.13 25.08
The cubicle smelled of prawn crisps and underarm deodorant. Bilal had left his signature odours overnight and was probably already halfway to his studio share somewhere in East London. Amber preferred to work alone on this shift, flipping quickly through the dawn emails before checking the log of his night’s trawl. There would probably be more conspiracy stuff or ancient sex-type footage. Barnard was certainly a creature of the night and those would be his preferred nocturnal zones. Such low-level surveillance was really a waste of time but it was a useful short-term distraction for her protege who might otherwise dabble out of his depth. That would allow her to focus on a more prestigious assignment like tracking the Farm Guard, rural vigilantes who were planning to blackmail supermarkets by blocking the transport of foodstuffs.
She couldn’t yet face Barnard’s journals, those great dollops of word salad. But she had to scroll through his history. At 01.17 he’d searched for ‘fur bikini’ and ‘space queens’ before going off-line at 01.28. At 2.46 he’d logged on again, this time on some kind of marathon particle physics review, hurrying through Heisenberg, Schroedinger’s cat-box, Niels Bohr, the Copenhagen Conference, Einstein’s cosmic dice, quantum entanglement, atomic clocks, virtual particles, superposition – as if he were trying to force his brain to a tipping point through sheer information overload. The autodidact finally gave up around 05.47. He’d saved a random paragraph to his clip-board:
…the theory suggests that time emerges for one object through quantum entanglement with another acting as a clock. For an unentangled system, on the other hand, time does not exist, and the system perceives the universe as frozen and unchanging. It is mathematically consistent to think of the universal time as the entanglement between quantum fields and quantum states of 3D space…
06.13 26.08
New day dawning. Distant cooing of pigeons down in the shrubbery. A sliver of silvery light across the folds of a curtain. Drone of more holiday jets up there. Or our drones, the good drones, drones keeping an eye on us, keeping us alive, alive. The body extends into sleep, furry aura around feet and fingertips. Feel the dead weight of the air on every square inch of flesh, the atmospheric pressure. A faint smell of bad dreaming, something flickering in and out of the skull. Slugs in a dream bed.
I wonder what became of X. I never woke up beside X or Y, no dawn dorm surprises there. But Z, my poor Z… It’s too late to be rampant, the national workers are being clocked on to the morning, the daily working. I woke up this morning, blues all around my head. Dim outline of dead radio on the cabinet. And I hide the dawn and its chattering monkey business. You must unbox the new day. The new day with its solar flares and sheepish cloud formations. Brain on a drainage cycle. Loops of headlines, deadlines. We are running out of theta rhythms. Dreams are in a slow fade. Tiny locomotives move across the viaduct just beyond the tennis courts. But that’s a superimposition of those fantasy reruns, like meeting a girl in blue jeans under low hanging fruit trees on a spring evening, all those repeats of false memory syndrome. I must sort it and fix it once and for all.
11.21 26.08
‘What is he doing in there?’ Bilal squinted at the drone feed of Barnard’s garden shed. The resolution was good, depicting the worn felt roof splattered with pigeon droppings, the sagging cable that supplied electricity from the house, a Triffid-like clustering of shrubs, thorns, bushes and nettles around the outbuilding, the scrawny apple tree in the corner of the tiny garden.
‘Well, check out the electromagnetic activity, traffic from his router. But as for what he’s physically getting up to, it’s a black box problem, I’ll grant you that.’
It was a crooked man and he had a crooked shed. A garbled fragment of an old TV kids puppet show? While Bilal fussed and fretted over updating his report, she tried to visualise old man Barnard standing in a ring of dusty computer towers, like a neolithic circle. He’d be wearing a druid robe and intoning a string of ancient code. More likely he was searching for fur undergarments or leather thongs. At his age the part was probably more important than the whole.
Bilal was back on his monitor again. ‘Now he seems to be catching up with news sites.’
11.22 26.08
Join the conversation.
BEAVER KING: Those wokester cheese guzzlers need alarm clocks tied to their bollox.
MOLLY MUSTARD: Beaver King, you are up to your eyeballs in crap.
I-ROBOT: We should be marching more for our boys.
BEAVER KING: Get over it, MOLLY MUSTARD, people are eating the rinds of their shoes.
I-ROBOT: We should set fire to everything that moves.
MOLLY MUSTARD: Too many people being iconic around here.
BEAVER KING: You got it wrong there, not enough people exported in the wrong sort of boat.
I-ROBOT: We should eat them on the beaches.
MOLLY MUSTARD: We need to drop off more love bombs, famous ones…
Comments are closed for this thread.
12.15 26.08
‘That didn’t last long. Mr. Barnard obviously isn’t one for joining the great conversation. He’s gone off-line, he’s going back to the bungalow.’ Bilal watched the small hooded figure moving in irregular jerks across the overgrown lawn. This was tedious, like being ten years old and playing an early iteration of Doomcraft with the zap gun disabled.
‘Well, Mr. Barnard has to eat, sleep, wash, urinate or whatever… He obviously has a routine.’ Amber tried to disguise her unease. What was Barnard’s real motivation? Perhaps she need to revisit his CV for clues. She might have been too hasty reading the docs she’d been sent from the Gloucestershire donut.
After overseeing the Magnetic Resonance Macro-Generator project at the Daresbury National Laboratory in Cheshire, Barnard moved over to the private sector, researching quantum computing and spatio-temporal bilocation technology for Typhon Systems in Cambridge. However, his career was disrupted by a nervous breakdown and his employment was terminated. He is now an independent researcher supported by private means.
22.47 26.08
It’s that tip-top time again. Time which is the side-effect of quantum interaction, which forces us into mutability and mutation. You can’t spool it back. It’s a launch forward on the ghost train, with your skeleton waving at you – jerky green phosphorescent mandibles, little marble fingers. I must stop this, stop it at once, Barnard!
Now ghostly hooligans haunt my nightmares. And I’ll only progress to dust or mud on the seabed, depending on the budget funeral practices.
Nevertheless, there were arcades and arbours. In the summer night Z ran down a colonnade into a quadrangle, her words fluttering like moths. Later: hot practices in a narrow bed despite a bump overhead and the tourists shouting outside in the glare of street lighting. But we were sealed in the hermetic vessel of desire, with the gloss of flesh, the glossolalia of faint grunts and cries.
These were the nights of erotic conspiracy, star map of plots against the managerial classes, while neck deep in their pots of plutonium. I thought I would have nothing to do with that any more. I had a manifesto prepared and I wasn’t going to fall for that nonsense either. I was going to avoid the downward arc biology and economics had scripted for me.
I’m keeping a notebook, enormous, like the OED, with a cracked spine and blackened grubby pages. Accessories to be supplied in the binding and inside covers. The book shall be a dictionary of alternate realities with poetic definitions in the post-modernist mode. The accounts of my lives will be intricate, provocative and elusive. The book will be immensely heavy. It will teach me everything I need to know.
I’m a time mechanic. I’m trying to create a Time Machine to stabilise my future. And hold it right there. For Z. Don’t touch that dial…
08.37 27.08
Bilal was late again. He’d been complaining of sudden muscular seizures, cramps that immobilised him for hours. Amber suspected it was psychosomatic. His entire body was probably amplifying the repetitive strain injuries that affected their wrists, an occupational hazard of spending their working lives at keyboards.
She over-rode his login to catch up with his curated securi-cam footage. Yesterday afternoon around 15.42 a courier had delivered three large boxes which Barnard had laboriously transferred to the shed. About eight hours later Bilal had reported that the metered electricity consumption for Barnard’s property had increased by over 250%. Whatever Barnard was doing involved some kind of technology, yet without the resources of a major scientific research laboratory it was hard to see what he could be achieving. He had this obsession with memory and the irreversibility of time, as far as one could make out from the fractured imagery of his journals. Yet short of ordering an armed raid on the property, which wasn’t really in her remit, there wasn’t much she could do. If she did authorise seizure of the contents of the shed and they turned out to be a mash-up of electronic bits and pieces, which would almost certainly be the case, it would not look good for her career. She picked up her coffee cup. Although almost empty it seemed incredibly heavy and her hand and arm seemed to move with a dream-like slowness as if the air was congealing around her. She could hardly blame Bilal if he went sick. She felt exhausted herself.
11.22 28.08
I tried to stabilise the omniverse while reading the quark-dots. But I could never buy enough time zones. According to my records I was entering the first of the twenty-two pathways around the Qabalistic Spheres even though I was fraudulent. The Garden of Eden was surround by spikes of green fire. In the central clump of foliage, large machines trundled back and forth, the light was already weighing too much. There might have been girls walking around in ever-tightening circles, maybe to fly or fight, for they were featured and feared constantly. But our local dusty satyrs stacked broken wood and contorted pipework on caterpillar trucks. A jetliner flew low over the white terraces dislodging flakes of plaster. Cream curdled in the saxophones of memory.
So I rewrote the past by sliding in new sequences, setting up new switch points to take the baggage of my life down a narrow gauge track under low hanging fruit trees bulging with moss, arriving at a collapsing jetty by a lake of aquamarine algae, clouded by intoxicating odours.
A new sub-set of friends had organised a reception for me. Stocky grey-haired men in white coats circulated in the murmuring melee proffering trays of champagne. A small orchestra on the repainted bandstand was playing the ‘Poet and Peasant’ overture – or some other light classic – on silver-plated instruments. I had to escape.
I took an overgrown footpath to the Commons, crossing the cinder-strewn bridleway and its mounds of dried dung to head through the bushes towards the tracks. I thought I saw a replica of my ten-year old self in a clearing, raising a balsa wood aircraft to his/my shoulder, frozen in the act of launching but it was only an installation. Beyond the railings, the rails. The long wedge-nosed trains in malachite green sped past at two-minute intervals in a flurry of sparks, 600 lethal volts on the third rail…
I stopped by the oak tree where children tied each other up as a re-enactment of Western shoot-outs and rescues, or a rehearsal for more adult games. I was never rescued, I was just left, for eleven years, and only wriggled out to read the Penguin Book of French Verse on a summer afternoon at the very root of that tree.
Place needs the person to give it voice, give it those homely personics. I’m trying to voice over these alt.memory grabs, because I have a placement on Earth. A whole array of vectors has driven me across the surface of this Earth. I’ve just got to flatten it properly.
06.45 29.08
Waking up with an enormous effort, Amber realised from her aching limbs that she had fallen asleep on the beige sisal carpet in the office and had spent the night there. She forced herself to her feet, and slumped into her chair in front of a battery of screens. She had commandeered Bilal’s workstation. It seemed unlikely from the medical reports that he’d be returning to work soon. The job got to you in the end. And young men like Bilal seemed surprisingly vulnerable to its pressures.
It was chilly for August. Perhaps the central heating in this huge building was sluggish, or there was some new permutation of climate change that she hadn’t been told about. Trust the science they said but the science itself seemed to be becoming increasingly devious. Perhaps she couldn’t trust technology to give her a rational explanation of Barnard’s activities. She would have to rely on intuition, on trying to grasp what he was saying in the contorted prose of his narcissistic monologues.
03.17 30.08
I am sinking into the moment. That’s what my brain has decided. Such wet electricity! There is an adjacent Reality only inches away. I could see it from the corner of my eye. My floaters mesmerise me. They track slowly across my cornea, like tiny contrails from the fighter planes patrolling the coast. I’ve also found confirmation of my hypotheses in the tiny voices that peak and dip out of the mushy white noise of my brown radio. As the hours pass in my curtained male shed it becomes clear that my biological clock is wired for synchronicity. No more point in adjusting my poetry greasepaint.
According to Z, poetry was only a gimmick from IKEA. We can’t compute the stars with it. We can’t stir the bloody grub and gruel of existence. It’s just a cry that pours out of you. You can’t versify the pain, all the little lives drained of blood. No statement from the torn butterflies. These men are rippers. Their madness explains the world to them, it gives them hot blood feelies, a bomber over a row of white tents. The world soul is a ball of barbed wire, electrified.
17.05 31/08
Amber had fallen asleep over her keyboard when a sharp beep from her monitor interrupted a dream in which she was menaced by a canine creature vomiting liquid concrete. It was going to immobilise her with its drool… She was jerked awake, to stare at an on-screen street map. A tiny red dot was moving along the avenue of bungalows towards the mini-mart. She was such a fool, forgetting that even the obsessive Joseph Barnard needed to forage for supplies and engage with human interaction, however perfunctory.
The red flashing dot paused, then turned and entered a retail facility.
17.10 31/08
I’m really in the moment now, in the smiley food aisle, all the food, all the food to eat, all the food to recycle, the dog food and the cat food. Food is good word. You could almost eat it, here is a dead avocado. Here is Mr Potato Head. Yes we have no bananas. I think about brass bands whenever I see a banana. What’s that all about? I used to be able to laugh until I cried. All the cabinets are glowing with cold light.
Society has mutated, it really has. No milk today. We will soon be growing filters in our fat gobs is to keep the particulates out. All this carbonised water. A membrane in my head isn’t working properly. Possibly it’s a collective disease of membranes that has infected the entire species. I’m choosing the stiff bread of the dead. It was all very well to sit there in that blooming summer house of spiders. But I have definitely taken the wrong turning, I’ve turned into an alien thing like a lump of garlic or some unusual fossil. Piping of a bird in an adjacent tree was plotted to cheer my spirits, but it was the wrong tree, and the bird was singing the wrong tune. Got to have tea, wall-to-wall cartons of it. Oh, all this shiny food…
I used to believe that all the troubles of the wild old world could be relieved through sex, whether practised individually or collectively. This was a pleasant delusion. The true sorrows of the world are related to some fundamental mismatch. I’ve been told it’s been imported into our brains. They, the indeterminate mob, transmitted a message from distant galaxies which we have forgotten to decode. This might explain the total inability of creatures to fully cooperate, to create so many traps from their cells, to create dead cells. I feel like an animal in a basket. I’m a pretty bad case.
Everybody is on the cosmic rotor now, everyone is a narrator, all going on a journey. Space-time goes hurtling past but they use most of their time allotment to watch Count Down. Do they sell magnets here? In 1962 it was all clear, the sirens kept even pitch, no whooping sine waves. It was safe to come out or even go in. That’s all gone out of stock, out of fashion out of time, out of mind. You might as well break yourself up, that’s where the logic of verbs takes you, you just recite the formulas that you are formed like cheap meat, ready for the Papa tree. I’m sorry I’ll say that again, I meant ready for the pop-up tree, sorry I’ll read that again I meant ready for the puppet tree. That is – the puppetry of poetry. I will pay for my goods with a card. Like a good meaty puppet. Yes, you heard me correctly. Thank you.
11.16 01/09
Amber, sluggish and vaguely sick, should have been working on the national threat posed by the Farm Guard. They had already blocked key junctions on the M25 with their pyres of burning cattle, a strategy to stop food lorries reaching the supermarkets of the South East. Her superiors feared that the Farm Guard leader, a mysterious ‘Farmer McDonald’ who issued daily on-line directives to his followers, was actually an AI entity manipulated by foreign powers. However unlikely the hypothesis, it was her duty to investigate.
Nevertheless she couldn’t control her growing obsession with Joseph Barnard. She returned to the briefing material that she had been sent. Perhaps she could dig down and unearth more about his private as opposed to his professional life.
There were pictures embedded in the files. A scan from a bleached snapshot of a young woman in a green bikini with an auburn ponytail, lying face down on a tartan blanket by a grassy riverbank. A passport photo, presumably of the same woman, with wide eyes and sensual lips. Amber was reminded of a 1960s horror film star – was it Ingrid Pitt in ‘The Vampire Lovers’, one of her dad’s compulsive viewings? ‘Proper women, Amber – not like you with your dungarees…’ She suppressed the awkward engram – he’d been dead for ten years… Was this ‘proper woman’ the focal point of Barber’s ‘breakdown,’ which led to his expulsion from Typhon Systems and his departure from the world of scientific research?
Then, a jpeg of a torn press cutting: …returned an open verdict as she concluded the inquest on Zoe Randall, whose body was found in her room at St Saviour’s College on May 7. The post-mortem had not revealed any ingestion of potentially toxic substances but a brain aneurysm aggravated by stress was the likely cause of her death. The graduate student had recently been on secondment to the Typhon Science Research Park in Trumpington, on the strength of her PhD work in particle physics, and apparently had a glittering career ahead. However according to friends she had felt uneasy in her role at the laboratory and had also suffered from depression and anxiety in response to current national and international events. According to a colleague…’
Amber peered at the time display on her monitor. She was certain that almost an hour had passed while she was studying Barber’s fragmented dossier. Yet it was only 11.18. Her internal organs felt as if they were made of lead.
01.17 2/09
My exchanges with Z went something like this – I might have altered them in the transcription:
‘I am a beta male and I am going to explain myself. Stop beating me with the holy end of your crucifix. I can’t retro-engineer your grief.’
‘There were downtown explosions. Their state is an ongoing emergency, there are people howling in the streets.’
‘No worries. They’ll bottle the smoke rising from those ash pits. Sell it in corner shops.’
‘Look, I saw flies as big as rats . Like they were taking off, in tight formation. The town was painted out in blood. Ah – ’
She gulped back a phoneme and tried to swallow her terror. The whole island would be irradiated. She had seen black sludge drooling sideways from the mouths of the victims, casualties of military industrial complications. War games. Flickering imagery in coarse black and white. The scrabbling panic of the camera movement through the fire storm. Tremor of the eye. The noise levels. Rumbling screaming cries. Fury of flying objects. The keloid scars on the children. Soot-covered bodies rocking back-and-forth, dumb and desperate in the emergency wards.
Later, at the dark cottage in the outland village. A steep bank at the rear, overgrown terraces of shrubbery overlooked by a derelict shed. Nettles and bindweed half obscured years of accumulated rubbish. Ash from the cottage’s fires formed a dark uneven path downwards. Because the cottage was sunken below the road, one could only glimpse the boots of ramblers through the dusty windows or hear passing bikers revving their engines to attack the steep gradient.
I was holding her tight in the doorway. I compressed her shoulders, she turned her head. ‘I’m so glad it’s stopped, that burning rage in your flesh.’
Yet it continued. I was eventually bedded. I was right in there with her. But her nightshirt wouldn’t rise properly.
‘You bugger,’ she murmured. She turned over into the darkness. ‘I was always told you fancied me. But it’s not for me any more. It’s no good…’
It was dark when I awoke – 04.18 on the damned bedside clock. She’d gone, of course, like a woman in the Chicago blues, she’d taken the rusty Citroen, she’d fled back to her college room, her safe zone of learned periodicals and Leonard Cohen posters, to curl up on the bean bag where the cleaners found her twenty nine hours later.
Some moments are best left frozen.
07.56 3/09
‘Hold on a minute!’ Bilal’s speech was slurred and he could barely limp across the room. Amber was strangely moved by his heroic commute this morning, navigating the go-slow on the Tube and the traffic jams that were bringing London to a halt. ‘I’ve got stuff from inside his heart, I mean his hut. Live and direct! I got Special Operations to plant a cam under the gutter.’
He hadn’t asked for authorisation. But she was impressed with his initiative, even if she didn’t want to show it.
‘Let’s see, then… Just zoom me in…’ After her night of uneasy dreams – a demon, small, red and warty, following her into mini-marts, public toilets, even churches – she could barely keep her eyes open.
In the candle-light of his grimy spider-infested hovel Barnard had created a kind of a techno-shrine – as she had anticipated. She surveyed photos stapled to the wall, originals of the images of Z she’d found in his files – the bikini shot and the passport pic. And there were more memorabilia: a graduation picture of Z clutching her scroll like a secret weapon; a group photo of smiling people in their lab coats, in front of some huge glossy cylindrical device adorned with copper coils – and a younger Barnard with moustache and beard smiling at the centre of everyone’s attention, with Z pensive at the edge of the gathering; Z in her college room pinning up a postcard of Francis Bacon’s ‘Screaming Pope’; Z sitting nervously behind the wheel of her 2CV; a blur of faces around a smoky pub table, only Z in focus, looking as if she’d been apported from another planet.
Below them a wide wooden bench held an array of servers and circuit boards, connected via a straggly web of wiring. At the centre of the bench a helmet with a wrap-around visor rested amid more coils of cabling connecting it to a stack of black boxes.
Barnard stood before the bench, his back to them, wearing a stained white lab coat covered in scribbled biro markings.
‘Hippy magic graffiti…’ muttered Bilal disdainfully.
’No, I think they’re equations.’
But what kind of science was Barnard following? He was motionless for a moment. Then he carefully picked up the headpiece and very slowly crowned himself with it.
Everything paused.
#
08.01 3/09
Time is the real problem. It can’t be neatly linear. Things keep leaking in that are supposed to be dead. And things that never happen nevertheless happen. Time keeps tripping us up.
All those moments lost in wonder. She leaned across the bar to order a glass of white wine and a cheese sandwich.
I’d like to think that I understood the equations but it’s too late.The implicate order can be thought of as a ground beyond time, a totality out of which each moment is projected into the explicate order. I’m just a broken hologram.
I followed a line of her legs in those scuffed blue jeans. She turned round and smiled.
The moments are breeding like neutrons. Break me in… This is unbearable, an old man shouldn’t brood on these sad dear things on a night smelling of burning rubbish.
You are locked up in the bones of your head. You should have got out more in the fresh air. Later she grabbed my hand and dragged me up the street. I was happy to be dragged around. She was dragging me out of myself.
I just found out, bloody ridiculous really that I’m not a television set, in a manner of speaking, but a wave-form transmission.
We used to chat about particles. Neutrons and leptons. Talking shop really. A plasma arc. The magnetosphere of the brain. Putting a spin on it.
Decades stacked up behind me, like folded chairs after the party, as a janitor slides his broom and waiters crunch through broken glass. Driving her toy car through the dusty summers and the arrogant Porsches. There have been great beastings here in the West.
My face falls apart in folds of crêpe. My cadences have slurred now. My howl is pitched lower. Who fixed the price of love?
The molecules of the body bubble away. The capital letters of industry plus the writing stitches us up.
I felt the smooth skin of her bare arm for a second. It was an unexpected interval. Such frizzy hair, wide mouth, large grey eyes. .
Flow of the senses, bites of sound, voices floating and diving in the afternoon like birds or exquisite silica insects which pick up fragments of bone and stick you together with their healing fluids, the scenario of the bower birds – there is an emotion in that. But how to transcribe it? The poetics of everyday life. A quick green death is a condition of entry through the singing membranes of eternity, so they said.
08.16 3/09
‘He’s stuck on a time-plateau.’
‘What are you talking about, Bilal?’ The words issued from her mouth slowly, as if she was chewing them out of the air, one syllable at a time. Speech was such an effort.
‘Look!’ For a second Bilal believed he could see photons slowly streaming across the room like tiny bullets, to create the image of Amber’s creased forehead, the silhouette of a helicopter over the river, the pixels glimmering on the screen.
Barnard was lying face-up in front of the bench, his arm raised towards the images of Z on the wall. His eyes were hidden by the headpiece but his mouth was slack, wide open. The lights of the servers had stopped blinking.
‘He’s probably had a stroke thinking about his dead girl friend and her phobias. A sad old obsessive hobbyist, like I said.’
‘He was trying to tinker with the machinery of space time. To freeze-dry that woman. Crazy old fool…’
Amber was going to reply but words were arriving very slowly now. Bilal was motionless in his office chair, a hand poised over his keyboard. Her clock seemed stuck. She wondered, lazily, if this stasis was a new crisis.
***