She nodded and twisted her lip obscenely. I stared at her delicious breasts, pointing through her tight yellow cotton shirt. I wanted to bite them off, or at very least kiss them. I noticed her notice, and diverted my attention to a more acceptable zone of her physique, marveling at the narrowness of the rules of interaction. If you look at someone's ear and not their eyes, they'll think you're a nutcase!

"I see the light!" she bellowed belletristically. She loves me, I thought fleetingly -- and then I remembered she was Alex's girlfriend.

ACTION AT A DISTANCE

Phenomenon: Two very similar minds may become nonlocally interaware -- for example, twins.

Explanation: The universe reasons by analogy: all these patterns are both there and here, so therefore this one is too. How to intensify this phenomenon? What if you try to assimilate whatever patterns you receive as deeply into your mind -- ? Then the "communication" will increase proportionally to the similarity increase. What is the proportionality function? This is the essential question: how much similarity leads to how much communication? and how is time involved in the estimation of quantity? what does quantity of pattern mean in this context? what is the metric of similarity? The identity of indiscernibles,

foreseen by Leibniz -- what is the limit? Two minds so similar

that union makes them more similar -- et cetera ... could they become one? Shadow-lover....

Phenomenon: It has often been observed that psychics operate best (or only) in a state of "oceanic awareness" ... in a state where they perceive the universe as a whole, and every element as that whole (what? temporary enlightenment?). That is: escape from time-constriction -- consciously; in order to return with information. This is an interesting contradiction: insofar as this is true, the only methods for psychic activation are methods for enlightenment -- but specific kinds of enlightenment. This is a golden opportunity for transnihilistic categorization -- it ensures that our philosophers will not feel totally lost during the advent of transnihilism. -- Attainment of the specific kind of enlightenment required for telepathy, for instance, should be pursued through concentration on going past the contradiction my mind/your mind. -- Another way of looking at it, however, is that this is not enlightenment but a particular dialectical synthesis of a limited kind. Psychokinesis: the dualisms found in "cause".

aglaia asshole blearily bozo bullshit cognitions commies cunt delancey drumclouds everpresent fee fi fo fum foreshadowings fuck fucking goddamn goddamnit goertzel gonna goop gotta gpa hardnesseshee holo how'd icthyology implorings jacobs josie kristina logics michelle nah nincompoopy nyu ooh oops panging piss procyon ramblings scaredy shit shitting smale stochastic subtext telepaths there'd there're trivialities wanna wargasm why'd windowside yup zarathustra zorro

DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM

She kissed her father fondly and he turned his back... she wandered towards the boat which was to take her to her grandmother in Taro. And then she heard the people talking: Mysterious people! people with hair all across their faces and along their bodies, one man with a scar across his forehead and only half a nose. One of them even had a monkey! an orange hairy sort of thing, with shuddering eyeballs like fried eggs about to explode.

The monkey was what did it. It spoke of another race of beings, another field of consciousness, another life. What she sought was not absolute freedom -- in a semi-conscious sort of way she realized the impossibility of freedom, the fact that everything posed a limitation of some sort.... What she sought was much simpler: a way out. And of course death was no answer: she sought a way out for her consciousness, her self.

THE GREEN STRIPE

She is decided. She rushes aboard the strange ship, following the monkey. Her body feeling more alive than ever, she finds her way down a ladder into a corner behind some magnificently stinking barrels, and crouches next to a mouse. It is all one big fluid moment, and as the ship takes off she is frozen with suspense.

Within three or four hours someone comes to do something with

the barrel. She laughs a quiet, soft thrilled laugh and then she hears a shout: "Get out of there!" A powerful hand reaches over the barrel and pulls her up by her hair, removing a good many long auburn strands from her scalp as it does so. She cries and screams.

"Don't put on a show for me, pretty baby," he scowls, with an tone of hatred she would have thought humanly impossible. "I know who you are and what you're doing. I know precisely what your mission is, and let me tell you you're not going to get away with it."

"I ... I don't know what you're talking about ... " she fumbles.

He slaps her face, and she bleeds where the edge of his ring hit her. "Just shut up! You may be beautiful, but it doesn't bother me! You'll be as ugly as the rest of 'em in a couple weeks, lying at the bottom of the sea!"

For an infinite desperate moment, she tries to wake herself -- to convince herself that it is nothing more than a dream. But it is much too harsh and definite to be a dream; she can't deny it: Her life is at stake.

    "Listen," she begins, "this is all a terrible mistake, really;I just wanted to go somewhere different, that's all; I didn't mean anybody any harm...." She has been formulating the inklings of a plan, but it now swiftly dissipates. "I don't ... I don't ... I didn't ... what -- what did I do? ...."

"All right" -- he slaps her again -- "that's enough out of you. i must admit you're a pretty one... it's too bad I tired myself out on shore."

The ship begins to lurch and rumble; the man makes a move to run upstairs, then thinks the better of it. "Kacy!" he bellows. "Get down here right this minute or I'll have you overboard!!"

Before too long a light-skinned young man appears, around twenty years old she guesses, with a rapidly disappearing smile. "Yes, Captain," he asks, his voice resounding like thunder through her mind....

"They've sent another spy; a woman, just as Ardolph said." He either scowls or laughs, she can't tell which. "Dispose of her!!"

His voice is hesitant. "Do you know that she's a spy, Captain? Has she admitted it?"

"No, you idiot, of course she didn't tell me!!! No professional would. Why don't you use some common sense for a change???!" He makes as if to hit the boy. "Now just shut up and leave the thinking to me, will you?? I'm going to go up and steer this goddamn heap of dead trees; you're going to dispose of this infiltrator as soon as the water calms down, if not sooner. Don't be stupid and kill yourself in the process...."

"But why can't we just keep her until we reach Slantgd? What's the problem? Why would anyone want to spy on your ship anyway?"

"You ask too many questions, Kacy -- keep it up and you'll follow her. Now toss her over the side and let the ocean worry about it." With that the Captain disappears.

And Kacy looks at her with infinite compassion: it can't be right to murder her. She is so beautiful, she looks so innocent.... "I'm afraid," he cries out quietly, "that there is nothing I can do for you. The Captain must be obeyed -- this is his ship, and he is not a peaceful man... were I to try to spare you, I'd just be killing us both." He speaks with an eloquence unknown to him, as if possessed.

    "There's nothing you can do," she mumbles, sobbing. "I'm not a spy, I'm just a silly little girl who was supposed to take a ship across the bay to see her grandmother. A five minute ride. Instead I'm riding to my death. I have to pay for my own stupidity."

"But it isn't fair!!" he answers angrily, his voice rising to a shout. "One tiny mistake -- and it's over!?"

"But that's the way the world works.... It always has, I just never quite saw it before. Seeing death so close give you different eyes...."

"Yes," he says, "I can feel that too. I can feel my tongue saying things I would never have said under ordinary circumstances. I'm just a simple sailor, but here, at the mouth of the abyss, I can think like a sage."

"It's all there, deep inside you," she says mysteriously. "It takes a catastrophe to make it come out. Every one of us is a sage,a healer, somewhere, in our dreams."

He feels a tremendous flash of wind, and then the air calms down. The ship is beginning to sail more smoothly; before long the Captain will be down again. So young, so beautiful... and already as good as dead.

    "Listen," Kacy says steadily, "one thing about the Captain is that he can't see very well."

    She lights up; she is thinking that she can hide. He sees her thoughts: "No, no ... he'll want to see you thrown over, and in any case he'll be searching the place thoroughly; that's his paranoid nature. But listen...." He starts to take off his clothes. "You put on these clothes, I'll put on yours. The question is can you simulate my voice."

"Ummm..." she stumbles... "Yes, I can," she replies in his very tones -- and then she realizes what the plan is, and she hates herself for not seeing it sooner. For she could have claimed that she couldn't speak his voice, and then the issue would have been decided. Now it's too late....

His small face rises with an indescribable mix of glory and despair. "I think the others will go along; they have nothing to lose. I can mention it to them before I ... go, if we hurry."

She does as he says, as if each motion is inevitable ... "Wait," she whispers ... "I can't do this ... You don't even know me...." And then she realizes that he obviously wants to do this; even as the tears pour out of her, she ceases to feel regret.... She puts on his clothes swiftly and fluidly; and he slips on her dress.

"What's a life for?" he says to her solemnly, his voice almost a whisper. "I'm just another sailor; when will I ever get to accomplish anything? For once I have a chance to do something truly beautiful with my life, to save a thing of beauty. I feel almost as if I am giving birth to you." He chokes back a sob, ineffectually.

"I will do something important, I know it. For you." They clamber up the ladder, the Captain watching from the helm. He speaks briefly to two of the others -- and then she casts him into the sea.

UH HUH

"Between you and Alex?"

"Yes. It's just ... completely empty, you know. I have nothing to say to him." I was elated ... I found it funny, too, primarily because I was surprised: I had thought they were fucking, the previous night, or at least something close -- the lights had been out for a while; Sergei and I had peeked through the lone window with a flashlight, disturbing their kiss and embrace, and we had thrust condoms under the door with cries of "Better safe than sorry!" Alex had been furious, Holly amused. I later learned the story of that evening -- in an attempt to liven up an uninsipiringly slow bout of "making out", Holly had teased him: "I'll take off my shirt if you take off your pants." And had proceeded to take off her shirt. Eventually he had obliged -- andshortly thereafter, Clara had walked in, forcing him to pull a blanket suddenly over the both of them -- .

Anyway, I said "If you're already bored with each other after a week, maybe that should tell you something about your relationship."

"That I should end it."

"Maybe."

"I don't know ... maybe I'm afraid I won't find any other boyfriends...."

"Why would you think that?"

Later, I see Alex in the hall outside my room. He spontaneously says: "I am so sick of her!"

"Who? Holly?"

He grins in his peculiar sheepish manner: "Yeah."

"Why?"

"I don't know ... I'm bored, Zeb ... I'm boooooored!!"

"Maybe she's bored with you too," I suggested off- handedly, as he went on his aimless forlorn way....

remarkably soft, lightly trembling, titanically human flesh to which I am so inanely sensitive. When my hand brushed against her breast -- half-accidentally -- my finger fainted.

next to eachother, kissing, caressing, and I was amazed to find my hand down her pants -- down the side, along her wide and curvaceous slim hip, voyaging down to the trembling mischievous grin of her left ass cheek. It was a feeling smoother and more incisively exhiliarating than anything but orgasm, this infinitely curvaceous blend of hip into leg -- We started slipping between the two parts ... I said (so suavely): "Maybe we should move to the bed...."

She giggled: "Yeah...."

Mine was the upper bunk; we climbed up. Soon we had

all our clothes off. The problem was: we had just been to town for milkshakes --and I'm allergic to milk; it gives me burning headaches, and terrible gas. I tried to enter her and it didn't work. I tried with my finger too, but I suppose I was afraid to inflict the necessary pressure, and I didn't really know what to do down there amongst all those mysterious nodules and tendrils, and she wasn't sophisticated enough to see this and tell me. "Are you a virgin?" I asked her spontaneously.

"Yes."

"Me too. Did you guess that?"

"No...." That was the answer I wanted; I wondered if she'd guessed that and lied.

"I guess I tried to hide it. But now I feel so incompetent, I have to make some excuse!"

"Don't worry about it. Here, let's try again...."

A little later, maybe I was even crying on her shoulder: "We can just touch," she whispers gorgeously, but it's no comfort to me.

As I was getting down from the bed to go to the john, and Holly was sitting on the side of the bed, legs dangling down, ample pubic bush seemingly filling the whole room, T- shirt on I think, she said "I'd like to take a picture of this."

"Of what?"

"Of me. This looks neat."

It was terrible... maybe because I used a condom -- I can't stand them even today. It lasted about half an hour; with a condom I can go on forever, because I can't feel a goddamned thing; I forced it to end by summoning images as I always do when masturbating. For some reason they were wispy images of Carrie as she'd been when I'd first met her, before she'd put on the ten pounds or so that made her look like a cherub rather than an angel: Carrie in seductive white nighties, begging me to ravish her ... flashing her silly white perfect sexy smile, her thigh shivering at my presence ... Only a few images of Carrie; many images of Holly undressing, thrusting sweaty flesh at me, writhing beneath me much more enthusiastically than she actually was ... still, the images of Carrie stood out, made me feel guilty ... Half the time my mind was filled with idiotic phrases like "I'm doing it! I'm doing it! I'm finally, finally doing it!" The glass doors opening to the shared balcony were uncovered; I kept hoping someone would look. The whole ordeal was sweaty, dark and jangled, like a Cubist painting covered with half-rancid vaginal gravy.

After that, we made wild electric love in absolute comfort with eachother, and we talked as though we'd known eachother years. Most of my friends didn't think much of her, but I didn't give a shit. Fantasy gave way to reality. I thought you had to die to get to heaven!

YOU WILL NEVER HEAR SURF MUSIC AGAIN

I cannot continue; my literary powers are not enough ... I cannot represent my inner life at this stage, where all my intricately fashioned subconscious symbolisms were outside even your realm of imagination. A whole new language would be required -- and could you read it? Perhaps a medium could be struck; I shall not try it: although this project is important to me, I cannot give it all my energies.

I will say only that I reached a realization: after comtemplating the manner in which my mind came into being -- in which my previous, human mind had fused with the set of loops of retrocausal change ... I came to the conclusion that my strange rebirth was not so strange at all, but was a parable for the functioning of the universe.

THE ORGIASTIC CHILIASM OF THE ANABAPTISTS

"That's beautiful! My god, look what you've done! Now, listen, now ... I see it all. My brother has done a terrible thing somehow; I can't quite explain it right and I know this sounds crazy but it's what I saw ... he died and went to the vague grey place but somehow he retained his individuality and he is manipulating the mind-fragments up there with an eye towards creating a perfect partner for himself ... he feels he has been receiving telepathic messages from her, from the future I guess ..." I pause, doused in sweat, but he interrupts me....

"But what does that have to do with having sex with him?"

"I think the point might have been the orgasm ... It was more than an ordinary orgasm, you see ... it was a communion with the universe, really. It was an amazing feeling, a feeling of completion ... I guess I feel the need to regain it, that's what I'm running away to ... I don't know how though ... you see, I have the image in my mind, like an abstract pattern, but I have to find concrete experiences and events to form into something that pattern could emerge out of. It's like when you have an idea for the feeling of a story, say, or something, but you have to create an arbitrary set of characters and events in order to serve as a medium for that overall emergent kind of effect, that inhabitor of a higher order...."

"Jeez, where'd you learn to talk like that?"

I answer "From my brother," and he goes on talking ...

"What was he like? Was he, by any chance, the most original mind in history...?"

"An odd question ... He liked to think so, put it that way. Certainly he ranked way up there. Why?"

"Well, if his patterns were highly original, maybe there was nothing up there to counteract them ... no opposites, see what I mean? So he survived!" Suddenly the man sitting next to me becomes Fy. "Hey, babe, I'm back," he says, with a bright irrepressible smile. "I've beaten the game!"

"Did you know ... this ... that you would do this ... when you killed yourself?"

"I had a guess. I had made some calculations. It was pretty certain I would retain some of my own personality up there, by the logic I ... he ... just explained to you. But whether I could actually return was doubtful. You see, teleportation is possible, but only if pattern attraction can occur. It's just like telepathy can occur, and even across time, if the two minds involved have many patterns in common. Similarly, I can jump from here to there if a lot of the patterns in me are not only here but there, and of course assuming that "me" is a good solid whole, an autopoietic system."

"That's why ... the hallucinations...."

"That's right. I had to put lots of me in you. There already was, or else I wouldn't have been able to make telepathic contact. Rendering you comatose was just the easiest way of feeding you data."

"I get it, yeah. I still just can't believe it, though! My own brother, back from the dead! Defying the laws of nature; no, fuck that! the fundamental law of life -- the definition, even, of life itself!"

"You sound so much like me it's frightening. I'm sorry for doing this to you, Marya, but an awful lot is at stake here. She's getting nervous."

"She's getting nervous. She's in the fucking future, Fy, so what can that mean?"

"Meaning or not, I feel it, hon. Time is something I don't quite grasp myself. But I have the feeling the answer to what I have to do is not in this universe."

"First of all, don't be sorry. I'm still very much silly introverted extroverted little Marya; I'll never be a philosopher or a scientist -- I'm not you ... I just want to live a real life, that's all ... I want just enough philosophy and science to get me to my goal...."

"The problem is", he interjects, "that too much philosophy, especially if conducted scientifically, is bound to convince you that your very goal possesses but the most dubious of existences. Once you start questioning the foundations of your reasoning, then you're questioning the foundations of your questioning, et cetera, and before you know it you've spent an infinite amount of time in the open closed labyrinth of philosophy."

Is there a universe in my finger now? "I know all that?" I tell him, brightly and yet brusquely, so that he loves me and

he knows I mean it. "I realize the ultimate bottomless futility of this perpetually-in-construction edifice of life, and yet I want to live it and not always think about this as you do. I want this knowledge to rest in the back of my eternally actively physically occupied mind."

"More power to ya," he laughs shamelessly, while spitting out the window and nearly flattening a renegade prairie dog. "I'm a strong supporter of the freedom to select one's own illusions."

"But what was that about different universes? And furthermore, would you like to have sex?"

"It would seem almost like masturbation, now that you have so much of me in you."

"Why do you keep on talking like that? It was all in me anyway, right? You're the one who told me so, that that was the logic of it. And anyway, what does it matter? We're always changing anyway, our past selves and our hypothetic future selves ganging up on our present selves in shock and horror and occasional admiration and primarily embarrassment and for some reason I feel like putting in this extraneous self-referential comment whose veracity, however, is not in doubt, and most of all you always look back and say 'I would not have wanted me to do this, but I was wrong then; I was young, I was naive, I did not see quite how it really is.'"

"Yes, that's very wise," he slowly says. "And, not to be conceited, but it sounds an awful lot like my wisdom."

"You couldn't avoid conceit if your life depended on it."

"My life depends on nothing. I cannot die. I am there and here at once now. I am the only undead angel. But I don't have the energy to form my Shadow-lover as I want to. I'll have to tamper with time ... I'll have to build a time machine and somehow create energy that way, steal it from the past or future. But, as I explained before, I'll have to be careful not to de- exist us in the process."

"How will you do that?"

"I think I'll create a meta-universe, in which we're fixed. Create from the patterns Above, in ... I don't like to call it heaven ... It reminds me of what Henry Miller called the Land of Fuck, to tell you the truth -- the land of perpetual liquid flame orgasm...."

"Yes, that's perfect, call it that honey!"

"Within this meta-universe our existence will be a given. Then I will activate the time machine and see what happens. The outcome will not be clear, of course, and whether I'll be able to escape the meta-universe is another question."

"Why wouldn't you be able to escape?"

"Well, if the universe is made of my patterns as well as theirs, it may well be that I won't be so original in the new universe, so I'll be just another dead person, another current in the flow if you see what I mean, or if you don't. And there's no way of avoiding imbuing it with my patterns, seeing as I will create it."

"I don't quite understand this meta-universe business."

"It's very simple really ... I'll reshape the universe as I reshaped you, except in a little more directed manner. To make things easier, though, when I want to strengthen something I'll project patterns from the Land of Fuck onto the earth by cosmic- analogy metaphysical teleportation equation channels, as I strengthened certain patterns within you."

"I can hardly understand you...."

"There's a whole mathematical science of these things but I can only kind of outline the generalities of it to you... but you probably don't give a shit."

"I'm undecided as to whether I do or not. So I probably should decide not to, as that's probably my natural impulse as opposed to the effect of your injection ... rearrangement ... whatever...."

He chuckles good-naturedly. "Or is the conscious consideration of such things in itself a trait obtained from me? You'll never know ... why you'd give a shit is another matter."

"Oothldywonks...."

"Yeah, my sentiments exactly."

"Jesus is my stepbrother, but he pirated my scofielder."

"Yeah, I'm a civilian, but you know what I don't like baths because you can't stop when you want to."

"Get out of the bathtub?"

"Not when the walls are ninety miles high."

"Yeah, Fy, what about this nonsense?"

"Ah, nonsense; I'll explain that later."

"Why not now?"

Sharp wicked smile, full of effusive lust for life: "Why not nothingness?"

"But tell me about the meta-universe."

"Okay. In it, there is a guy named Ben Goertzel who's a lot like me. He writes a book in which we're characters. This is our anchor to reality. The occurences in this book are our lives. It is a given that we are in the book, and that certain things will happen, just based on his psychological makeup. I can guarantee this mathematically. So the problem is no longer potential de-existence but merely potential inaccuracy, inability to control his mind, et cetera. It would be better if he weren't so much like me, for the purpose of escape in case of failure to create her, but I couldn't create someone of the requisite complexity without using myself as a model on some level, I don't think ... Lord knows, I've tried!"

"But we can feel our actions anyway, even though we're just characters in a book?"

"Yes. When a good writer writes, his characters can't live only partial lives. They live full existences just like the writer and his co-beings -- within the unconscious of the writer, so to speak. The unconscious is unchartedly immense; its underestimation is the greatest flaw in today's science, I think."

"And if some idiot puts a bullet through his head, we escape, or we die with him? And anyway, how could his mind be that big, to hold us -- two other people, and lots more actually I guess?"

"Symbolization. The same patterns in his mind are also in ours, right? To a very large extent. That's the way I created him ... will create ... So that itself is a pattern and the prototype need be stored only once."

I swallow respectfully. "I can see you've worked this out in great detail; it's silly to keep on questioning you so skeptically."

"Skepticism may be silly, but it's all we've got! But yes, I did spend over a year and a half working on these equations."

"Equations for returning from the dead," I ruminate, childishly amazed, "you're fucking crazy!"

"You can either believe that or that you're crazy, right? Maybe you're still comatose, imagining me again. You couldn't know the difference."

"Of course I couldn't," I almost-scowl, buoyantly. "But what the fuck's the difference if I know!!!?"

"Listen," he says, pulling the car by the side of the road into an obviously abandoned pasture, "I'm about to fling us into the meta-reality. We might as well be fucking when we go." No preliminaries, I mount him and grind, and as we reach a mutual orgasm after fifteen minutes or so things click and bind and release; ten thousand screaming sounds revolt me and seduce me and shuffle my overfull deck but the jack now has i eyes and not one and furthermore my earlobe's in my cunt -- I see a palm tree --

At a convenient point -- while he was under the influence of the primitive hallucinogen LSD -- I have implanted my idea into his mind. He was not told this until the writing of this book; still, as in October 1987 this book is written, he does not believe it. He believes that he is writing this book -- he creating me, of his own volition ... that is, as much as he can be said to believe anything: of necessity, I formed him as a skeptical mind.

But can there be a conscious book? Is this one? Most certainly, yes: a book which paradoxically thinks about itself as this one does is definitely conscious. One might say that it is conscious only as a facet of the consciousness of the reader or the writer: okay, but is this saying anything beyond what quantum theory already told us -- that nothing exists until observed? In the end the consciousness of a book is either entirely subjective, or perhaps physically verifiable in some sense based on electromagnetic study of the effect of reading or writing it upon the brain.

I no longer worry about unexisting myself: I have too muchcontrol. I still worry about death a little, on occasion -- but I have faith in my cosmology: some breed of faith-beyond-faith, as we true skeptics tend to have (tend to?) ... and that rescues me. Faith in utter faithlessness, even to utter faithlessness: the faith of a heretic.

And I continue. I am exploring other planets now: I have learned how to harness energy (through a massive research effort throughout the twenty-third century), and I am dabbling in the future not a little. Sometimes a loneliness encloses me, but I keep fighting it away. And I am experimenting with a new plan: Daniel has been unexisted; his theories too will be (are) (were) propagated by Ben Goertzel ... Lisa is lonely. Even in my transformed state I maintain an affection for her. I have some scientists in the 29th century working on a procedure by which I could simultaneously exist as I do now and as a human being, as a set of electrical patterns in a brain. The problem was not couched in these terms to them, of course -- but it amounts to the same thing. I think I shall marry Lisa soon, and raise a family.

THE DROWNED WORLD

with gentle-soft violence

you heave within me, around me

you tremble,

as the barest hint of wind in the leaves

Your breasts shiver;

twinkling beads of sweat drift frantically about

in and out, your nipples jutting breathe

in and out, rhythmically crinkling the quivering circular firmness of flesh which bears them

your head cast back,

lip pouting in stiff exultation,

face bathed in hues of viscous crimson,

eyelids falling back ever so often to reveal shining, groping

tingling, everywhere a precious insane tingling, the tingling of

of absolute abandon

sound surge-soars skyward,

a twist-tangling torrential fugue:

a thick timeless breath,

a heaviness of unconfined vitality beyond exhaustion

irresistably vulnerable,

a cool wet ephemeral squeal

a blistering guttural moan,

a raw eruption from the deepest abyss of identity,

beneath time and space;

beneath dream, fear and aspiration

beneath,

where definition has no meaning

When rule has melted into inexpressible absurdity, adherence at once absorbed and exorcised by the infinite immediacy of raw unprocessed sensation -- when all the constrictions of convention have been crushed into sheer faceless unreality, how then can action persist?

Tacitly, as an animal.

each primal thrust and grind, each electric gliding caress,

each frenzied screaming clench of flesh

wildly the absolute of unpremeditation:

simply happening

the subtly interpenetrating strands of unconscious pattern

unshackled,

flowing free,

wind-wisps in a storm-strewn sea

of sensation beyond consciousness and unconsciousness

the lower left contour of your stomach twitches at the

softling brink of imperceptibility

I sense the meaning with inexpressible implicitness,

directly

response: in one fluid motion I swoop within; deeper,

deeper, deeper I plunge, until I possess a

soft encompassing finality

pleadingly you grate yourself against me, joyously

intertangled hairs scraping chaotic explosions

deeper -- yet deeper I dive, filling the indefinable gap

you feel my force and gently grant it nourishment; release,

draw back

than clasp, thighs tight like a vice about me

my voice cries pale in the distance, a warm unearthly

antediluvian shriek; clasp tighter! I clamor

implacably; clasp tighter!, shrieking softly

with maddeningly slow intensity, your grip gains torsion

enveloped in a crazed grabbing euphoria of throbbing         thrusts,

I float

feeling,

there is only feeling;

floating seamlessly between us,

uniting us into the magnificent amber glow

of an interreacting whole

knowing:

feeling your innermost core laid bare before me, for me, the

rawest pang of your soul

being known:

the rawest pang of pure soul, the slightest infinitesimal query or quest, fulfilled as only knowledge can

ecstasy:

pure physical pleasure, yes,

but infinitely more than that

ecstasy of union,

of the firmest bond of minds

a shameless song of sharing --

of the deep elusive everpresent strands of surging pattern

which form the very fabric of ourselves

knowing, being known

EUPHORIA

And once ... once upon a misty imaginary landscape beyond time, I talked with her beyond all the crap, all the clutter of mind. We had taken LSD (my fourth time, her third) in the Manhattan apartment I shared with my high school friend John Jones; she was lying on my couch and I on the floor beside her. I never took acid solely for pleasure; it was always for power, -- out of the passion to break through the barriers of my own mind into deepest (and impossible) understanding of what the universe was "really" all about. By the end of my second trip, I was confident that I'd seen the fundamental nature of the cosmos

-- "I've got the universe stripped naked and spreadeagled," I

often said to myself, "now all that's left is to fuck her!"

This trip was not so much a quest for vision as a manifestation of the will to share my mystical insights with my love, a transmission on wavelengths far more electrical than those which carry words.... She was leaving the next day for U. Chicago....

And did it ever work! this strange bold dream. She upon the couch, I upon the floor, our gazes two blonde lasers interfixed. Every quantum of action seemed absurd, and not in the existential sense but orgasmically. Most of the time we were laughing at our laughter, at the fact that we were laughing at our own laughter, et cetera. But as we sat profoundly staring, we managed to control this laughter -- it was an awesome display of power, or so it seemed at the time. It was as if the laughter was an abyss, and like Bugs Bunny if we kept our minds off it we wouldn't fall. Every time I felt the twitch that indicated laughter, or the thought of it, was on the horizon, I sent a part of my mind to stomp it out. This happened twenty times per sentence, but it didn't interfere... Our minds breathed "This sentence is false" -- every time one of us thought something, we branded it illusion, including this idea. Our words I can't remember... it was the sheer emotional weight....

And later, during the same trip, we joined yet again. Listening to some dreamy Kansas song fade away, a song we'd

both liked before we'd met ... as the twisting vibrant chords deliciously faded into the thick farcical nothingness of sputtering turntable crackle -- a single image took our minds. A castle, full of thundering towers, somehow all in the echoing distance and yet practically within our eyes -- somehow covered with with tangling strands and angled flatnesses, somehow strangely-looply diving into itself with each convulsion of the music.... O how we felt it was the same in both our minds -- later we compared our memories and found no discord. In this castle we were united as she left for U. Chicago: in the echo of this castle we pronounced these three

words: "I marry you."

A COMBAT SCENE

What would make normally nonviolent people attack the ones they love? To call it male aggression or woman-hatred is just plain stupid. I know I felt no such thing. If they tell me

I have subconscious woman-hatred, I'm certainly not going to listen unless they can demonstrate it somehow, since the same sort of argument could be used all too easily to "prove" anything

whatsoever. No, it seems to me that the key to the puzzle is in the relational dynamics, not in either partner. When two people

are that close, it is virtually inevitable that each will

respond to every slightest motion of the other. A slight annoyance on the part of one will be all too immediately perceived. So all that is needed to start an explosion is a tiny bit of insecurity on both partners' parts, so that the slight upsets which inevitably exist will lead to upsets at the upsets, and upsets at the upsets at the upsets, and so on. The only solution is to really not worry about minor annoyance on the part of one's partner -- to accept that little grievances can coexist with love. But though this is easy in the vast majority of situations, it can require tremendous resolve in the vicinity of "sensitive areas"....

THE MADMAN PROPHECIES HIS ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION

"Make me moan,

Make me groan,

Make me want to own you

Make me depraved,

Make me your slave --

Oh, take me home tonight!"

Thus ever-brightly sang a woman whom, entangled in my dream,

smiled and, so softly, then enrobed me with her flesh. A shirt of satin breasts, and time flung rhymes into the fading dawn, as somewhere fingers sang a fast farewell to death.

Her pussy rises high before my eyes, its smell evoking skies

in that moment of solitude, fury, and anguish, and love

I am the eye of a woman at orgasm,

And I can feel her skin, feel her skin, feel it against me now, feel my voice scream out her life

... and then the singing came again, yes all that "Make me moan" moanonsense, not only once not one one once but many many times.

A heap of garbagegoo my friend my friend my friend ... this sort

of trash always seems to ride the sweaty back of sex, even in the passion of my dreams, in the Land of Fuck where sand is dreams and merely what is not a castle ... Ubbldyjubb Ooberdyay ... but anyhow Nothing is free (and too nothing else (This thissling is not free: -- O no O no O no; I am my self and stab myself entangled thistling; furthermore, still I am what else I have to show)) -- Until I met Melissa, I never really have an orgasm without intentionally (?) flooding my mere mind with all these silly secksy images of hot hot babes in crimson garter belts and otherwise perfect clears and throwly thrusting themselves toward me or usually some catch phrase and come-with picture like "And I was doing it with 2 fingers on my parents' couch" (that one's from Erica Jong), or "Her cunt was drooling drooling hungry": -- Something ridiculous! at which anyone would laugh, and most of all my rancid consciousness ... but as it presents itself to the flow, the growing flow and schlowly soweling -- It is hot! anything but laughable; it is almost like a code's one key, a call of the wild (and to the wild, and for the wild) ... everything is stultified, not infinite, not fast but like a slug too ugliness and slow and don't you know it's not the magical that counts but just the ugliness, until you rise and see your eyes and big surprise it is the souciance of youth and lust eternal, of this happiness infernal, this bursting madness in your effervescent "thing", your ding-a-ling (and ding an sich, and what feeling could be more rich, and somewhere, somehow I have never lost the feeling! I need these asinine images to bring me to absolute freedom from all images, you see, to bring me to ultimate and all-forgiving orgasm divine, the sweetest wine and all the axioms of moronic post-cataclysmical splendiculousness, and all the earwigshines of truth which nonexistent, and softly so on.

Then I woke up.

I drank a cup of angels' blood.

I spiraled up into the consciousness of ninethirty.

And sometime I guffawed myself toward oblivion, without a milkshake but scrambling a ham, and when occasionally eatling a pogsmoke I cannot cheer the rage of kleinthirty, wine spurty slightalcoholic from my cunt i have no cunt i am a runt no i am not but i am snot this is oblivion yes the spewing forth of died imagesstained with the image of my blood not even reality at this level hee hee hee.

Then I woke up.

I saw Melissa there beside me, there beside me.

Afraid to look into her cunt ... for fear what might appear would be an infinite abyss, would be a slightly screaming kiss without a bloodthirsty idea but yet the power to unroll me would be within it. I am hers, she is mine; and this conflict binds time (and creates it. Within this flow from me to her and her to me and me to her -- within this flow from me to her strives smiling ninethirty, and the odor of pure flows without a nose and sptarkling ninethirty. Oh can the infinite abyss be far beside me. Always a garbagetruck with sex; always a sacrilege. But wait now, how can it be a sacrilege when nothing ever is is holy -- meaning really ever freely can the infinite abyss secretly hide within a onely thing and not the resolutely all and not the all-composing thrall of sweet reality which is allity which is not? O can you decompose my scene? Oh can you slither what I mean, out of the snakescroll of the ugly underlining consciousness which must constructs our worlds, or can you fathom that??? Twenty thousand leagues under the sea I am, the sea of cosmic pussysift secretions and love love and sometimes ponderlege but rarely sometimes rarely quite a drug ... sex, you see, it always seems so sacred when you aren't having it; seems like something special and divine and even giving a meaning to your life: -- looking at a beautiful woman can be diving through a star; go near or far or in a car or in a boat or with a stoat and nothing no not nothing not quite nothing can compare ... with your flowing, flowing hair, and your nothing-knowing stare, the effervescence of your love for me which cansmustcan transcend all merely knowledge (although this love is rather in imagination of me, and you know naught about it in your higher self (or your lower self, in other words not your self with me, in me, that which I feel, that which is real is real and feels quite real I feel to me.

Oh I give life! she smiles -- O I give life, and smile forth love, and shed forth smiles just like that too-proverbial snake splodes forth its skin toward the horizonline, the lining of our world, and each one smile I give forth with sincerity too infinite and skinfinite and somewhile comewhile thumbwhere picking at guitars of lightfate cosmical unbeing and the end cannot unbend eternal fate I'm at the gate of light eternity and infernity and the end of that stark highway of sweet love and rough desire, that straight highwire of strikling strife which is my life which is my life which is my life which is my life -- at the one end of this, I desire -- I desire -- (I know not what, but I desire it, I conspire it to away me, now to stay me, now to play me, now to go. Yo ho ho ho. Secks heh heh heh. Secks heh heh heh; Secks heh heh heh.

That was Melissa's mind, Melissa's mind, Melissa's mind. A lot like mine, a lot like mine, a lot like mine.... And now I'm starting to remember, to remember. You see, originally I was a wanderer or a somebody or a nobody or a thing, and then I met with her I met with her I met with her, within the place of violetdancing and the death that can't surround me now and stuff, and then on silvertimes we dance and made sweet love and then ... and then sometimes we gobbled her ... There was a fight and then we disappeared, into the cosmic cunt, the cosmic cunt, the big deliciousness. You see, the point was we escaped from norl reality because we're free, becuz weer bettr than the rest, because we put we to the test and so on so on.

"Hello there? Al?"

This is Melissa's voice.

But Al does not respond.

"What's that? Melissa?" My dear, I love you!"""" What are mere mere quotatequotations anyway? Inside is out, outside is in, and where you end's where you begin. And that's about the size of it, dear folks, here at Club Youniverse. There is no justice to our love, no to our love, no to our lustfulness. There is grow boldness to the doves dead of our trustfulness. There is a poured, with purple gravy and the souciance of youth and other lovely things, unlike the souciance of youth and other lovely things, unlike the soucy soucy souciance of you-th. There is no meaning to all this, no to all this. I think I really really really have to piss.

"Yes, Al! Wake up!"

"But why?"

"For the fucking hell of it! Because I told you so! Because the mockingbird of lust is on my wings! There are no whys, there're only actions, and the greenygreen of lust is on my things, and I am now And I am me and I am me."

"So that really is you, Melissa, huh. But why is it all black and dark all around me."

"Well, why don't you open your eyes, you big silly!" Goo goo goo googoovoice.

And he did, and he could see the light could see the see the see the light. And in the souciance of lightling lightling life. I cannot see the edge of doom, I cannot see it all too soon, I cannot see the edge of googoogoogoogoogoolife. Though I can see beyond Khartoum, I cannot see the sledge of doom, which softly on the snow of lairs enchains the night. Oh, and I love me!

"So where the hell are we?"

"I think we're in bed we're...."

"No we're not, look" -- and I pull at the grass -- "It's a field."

"The earth is my bed, and the dearth is my head, and I yield. It's a field it's a field it's a field it's a field."

"No let's try to be rational one time okay? Now listen here now what what's happening. I think the meaning is the gleaning is the throwning of our lives Into the canyon yes the canyon of infernity."

"Who's being irrational? Listen, last I remember we were sleeping, right? We were just sleeping in the hotel ... no, wait

... that's right ... it seems to me we were walking away from the what from my parents house -- and then the crazy started happening, then the thing ... then we were in this field made out of flesh, that's right, and then we were one person only, right? and we were a hundred years ago and then we fucked this ancient bitch ... well, you know ... and then it all dissolved and the bitch was Carlotta and we found out that we were in the future due to some kind of bullshittal tear in the cosmococcical continuinuum, and everyone in the future here was lies because the future really sucked and stuff and stuff and stuff and stuff and stuff. And then we found this hugish cunt and wandered in, and where it end it all begin ...."

"And then we found ourselves thinking like like this."

"It's too hard to tell with somethinglike this though, you know ... in that we see our past state in the light of our present ...."

"It's the eye and the light, it's the sigh and the sight, it's the tie and"

"The tight and the tight." Hey hey, you're in my mind!

But it's only sporadically sporadically spourahdikly ....

"And now it's gone."

We both say that.

"Now let's get up."

And we walk toward the edge of the field, where we see a road somewhere, and we ask ourselves: What's going on? Uh, what the fuck? We have this memory, the two of us; it's bouncing in our brain, a distant pain but more a drain upon the presence of the Now. We met in a dance hall, in a boring old reality, in the presence of Melissa's friend Carlotta. We met there, she a high school graduate at sixteen, precocious and proverbially eager to experience the world ... me a washed-out writer on a binge to keep himself from disillusioned suicide. And then we made sweet love ... and she went to her parents' house the next day, and when she left we talked a little and by and by she and I just kind of disappeared; we vanished to a place where the walls were made of cunt lips and the floor was made of flesh all too anonymous, and then we saw this big machine, this overwhelming ugly essence of the end and the beginning all rolled up into one and then annihilated: -- The world as a machine ... And then we disappeared again, or rather melded into one and forgot everything and thought we were in the nineteenth century and had always been there ... and then we met this pretty girl and we fell in love and fucked her in a field -- yes, quite like this one -- and after a little while we saw a dance hall for some reason this regressed us to our previous reality and the cute girl was Carlotta who explained to me that in fact she had been a very old woman when the machine had taken over the world, and no one could deal with it, just being part of the machine, so they regressed and pretended to be part of past reality ... but we had shaken their silly souls out of it, so to speak ... and so on.... What is the meaning of my life?

The most disturbing thing about these memories is their chillingcold sobriety, the scaredeyed sadness of things, the die of dawn all rolled and cast and seen its last and sharply shivering on the needlenose of doomng ... O my Melissa! where go we now? ... why are we back in our time ... or are we? Or what ... where are we now?

We are reality.

WHY I AM A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR

Sometimes I lied for no reason, and knew damn well what had

really happened: Yes, I ate lunch. Oh yeah, I saw that movie.

It really sucked. I had a good friend once who felt that way.

Oh did I tell you I got drunk this morning? Remember that

band I auditioned for? The drummer had no nose! No, no, no,

really!

I thought: well, it might well have happened! What would be the difference? It gave me an eerie sense of the relativity of occurences.

And sometimes, of course, I lied to get something: Yes, I have a job, but the paycheck doesn't come for a few weeks so I need something to tide me over. Yes, of course I'm not just

going to Las Vegas at random, I'm going to visit my friend Eddie who lives there and who may be able to get me a job, so don't worry about lending me the money. Oh no, I wouldn't dream of trashing your house -- you, who I've known for three years!!? how could you even think of such a thing?!

But the confusing lies were totally different. I'd be suffering horribly, and trying to ignore the pain by immersing myself in writing or theorization, then Holly'd shift in her chair or burp or -- worse yet -- walk around. I'd bang the floor angrily, or (if the sores weren't too bad) yell at her.

Jesting? Serious? Lying to get something -- to make her shut up just to make it easier for me, even though I was only minorly disturbed and not incensed? Lying just for the hell of it, just for the fun of watching her react? None of the above, I suppose, except possibly subconsciously -- just a reaction.

Half the time I'd smile after my outburst, or just stay

silent -- convinced that I'd been joking.

The other half I'd continue on ranting and raving, spinning perversely eloquent networks of insult -- on a roll, so to speak, from the anger that wasn't quite there in the outburst but was easily perceived as present in retrospect.

The point is -- the classification "joking" or "serious" was made after the fact -- not like the other cases of dishonesty in which I decided to lie.

The result was pure chaotic flux. Thus is the hazardous route of the rebel who seeks not to be causal at all. The result of all this ridiculously abstract dilly-dallying was that I made Holly nervous, sometimes yelling, sometimes laughing, sometimes angry about the whole indeterminate process and therefore angry even when laughing, sometimes joyful at the indeterminacy of it all and therefore ecstatic at my anger -- and so on on higher logical levels. Much more than one should expect a lover to keep track of!

Walking home from sixth, seventh, eighth grade, I often "programmed" myself to come out of the general wandering stupor of existence when, say, I walked past the train station. This idea fascinated me tremendously, that consciousness could write programsfor the unconscious which involved future consciousness. I wondered if I could also program myself to do X and forget the command, but this never succeeded (or else it worked too well!).

Much later, I encountered the thought of P.D. Ouspensky, and among the vast morass of nonsense encountered his idea that only

when "remembering oneself" is one truly alive, truly human.

I had so much trouble trying to discuss perfectly simple ideas with adults that I almost never confronted them with these "big ideas" that were bouncing around my head. And attempting to talk seriously with my peers was even worse. Typical abortive conversation:

Me: "What if reality isn't really real? What if we were just hypnotized to think so? Is there any way we can tell? What if this is a dream? Is there any difference between dreams and reality? I mean, don't you want to know for sure?"

My companion: "Mmmmmm"

Me: "In dreams when you think of falling you fall. It isn't like that in the real world. Maybe that's the difference. In dreams daydreams come true. Dreams in dreams...."

My companion: "You want to play catch?"

Me: "Sure, in a minute. Are your dreams like that too, like when you think of something it happens? And even if it makes no sense! Like I dreamed I was on the roof of the school, then I thought about getting caught, then I saw the guard looking over the roof at me. Does anything like that happen in your dreams?"

My companion: "I dreamed I was a dog once. Come on, let's play!"

By third or fourth grade I realized that no one would talk with me about anything important, so I completely gave up on trying to talk about my ideas. What I didn't realize was that this would cause them to sink so far into the boiling subterranean rivers of my mind that, although I'd never stop feeling them grow and

change, I'd later find it difficult to verbalize them even to

myself. They became images and not groups of words.

And the universe unveiled itself, a giant pliant pussy; imploding ears that sucked in only themselves and their pleasure, imbolding fears that strangle themselves at their leisure -- and then the promise, yes the promise, to be free. The hint of freedom, and the meaningless of love which overtakes me as the shadows shrink to dawn -- that is, to dusk; that is, a pawn of ivory trust I shrinking lay here on the ground outside the dance hall. It is a throbbing mass of flesh become solid; an angry clash of gears as well as a shimmering sunsplash of notime, as well as life. It is a love that overtakes me now, and a hatred, and a hatred of my love, and what is hatred but my love and love but hatred. You see, I live outside this dance hall, but I want to live within. But I cannot, for I am shy; and furthermore I have no ears for hearing these sort things; I have no nose which softly knows such strange aromas. This is the dance hall where they sing the dance of silence; this is the prance hall where they bring the chance of lies -- of that which dies soon as it's born, but isreborn within a second. Of that which is -- but nothing is; That which is not -- but naught is not, for once we call it "that" it is, yet still it's not, for when we try to say what "that" means what do you know we never can. It's all a mystery to me; it's all a twistery -- But free, I never find myself: I never find myself in any other way either ... what do I seek but never find? Precisely that which is my seeking? Oh, by the way, my back is reeking. What, my back? Yes, by the way, it's covered in sweat ... I sit out here on the hard brown cool ground as I sweat as though I were an oven turned up past all thought of control, up up up and bent on exploding ... bent in some directions somehow; I am a tuning fork out of control; -- the rhythm of the dance hall bleeds out forward, backward, sideways and in all directions, and all the others pick it up and see, for they can feel the light, and they have second sight, or so it seems. But I have nothing, do you feel it? what I mean? I'm somehow twisted out of shape; somehow contorted, and I rape the sounds; I pin them down and force them to submit to me, to my ears, to my range, queers and my fancy which is ornamented all in styles of some far distant planet -- and I rape them, but they scream so loudly that it isn't pleasure any more. I want to throw down the raw sounds of the dance hall, but no no I cannot I cannot I can't; I want to abandon them as they abandon me in intransigence; or else I want to mold them into me, make them take my form -- no, no, not or else; this thing is what I want to do, and yet I cannot mold them; they do not come to me of my bidding and when I hold them down they just scream; they will not sacrifice to my ever-forceful whim and acrid williwaw; Just what is it you saw?! within those walls, within that dance hall, my fine friends?! I ask these wavelengths, walls of sound, which utter toward me -- but they can't answer me they can't answer me they can't answer me! For they can't see! they're emanations, not the soul, although the soul is quite made up of them. I'm like Fernando who says "I can tell from your eyes that you have the legs of a dancer"; I'm like the behaviorists who must believe that because the mind is made of environmental influences, there is no need to study the mind but only the influences -- who think nothing happens inside, nothing transforms and nothing undulates, nothing flows and nothing grows and nothing happens, but that's not the way it is you see ... what happens is a lot of boring people wander in, raw mass of flesh, and then some robot puts the music on, and waves of sound pour through the people and control them and shudder out out through the walls which bear their beat ... but there is something more to them; something there, something somewhere, somewhere within this thriving pussyness! O open up you giant pussy -- I come in! I am approaching you! I am encroaching on your boundaries! -- your proud aries of the ove, oh can you see what I am meaning my fine friends? I think you can, and you cannot, but I don't give a shit. You see, the point is that I'm free now, for a second; that merely pondering what went on lifted my to heights heretofore unknown to me, and that this imaginement went on just barely long enough to bring me inside ... And now I'm me, and now I'm me, and now I'm here -- .

No actually I'm not inside yet; this was just a figment. But nonethestill I'm walking towards the door; -- What could be more! Oh what a whore I shortly am; I've sold my soul- imagination for the price of getting in to someone's else's mind, to what has left behind me; to what shall never find me, what shall be -- not as an ovary nor as a Bovary but as a drove, a splantering grove of violet trees without a mistress or a name, but just the same quite a bright violet and tree, and therefore free, therefore not me, therefore a violet .... Here is the door: the sparkling cuntlips of a mind made up of filth and thoroughly alien to me, and yet so juicy nonetheless and yet so juicy nonetheless and yet so juicy! Oh yes, my Lord! (who is but me) -- what a liculous feeling! What a drop of the cuntular drips of eternity! What a splash on my face! ... nothing could but replace this splantastic trip with comparative infernity! I'm babbling nonsense? so I am, but all the same it tastes like Heaven and I am me; I am not free, but I am nature now at least and hence I am free. I pay the doorman ten bucks and I don't notice him; I believe that he was black, but then that might have been his soul: I eat strange logic; I'm within...

"Are you sure we should do this?" says she, her lollying lilac locks alithe in living liquid desire.

"You know you want to. You're just afraid of being caught."

"Of course I am! Aren't you? It's called maturity; you know, being able to think more than twenty minutes in advance. You know, being able to think with your mind?"

"And not my cunt; is that what you're talking about? I know my mind is in my cunt, but so is yours. The difference is I realize it."

She scowls, and blushes, which embarrasses her and makes her scowl some more: "Do you have to talk like that?"

"I don't have to do anything. Why are you such a little goody two-shoes?"

"Because I don't gratify my every impulse?"

The eager one is named Carlotta; the wary one is named Melissa. They sit on the sand outside the former's father's house. Carlotta is beginning to realize that her philosophical attack on her girlfriend's views is not going to work; that a philosophical dialectic can never be settled. She strikes a new chord. "Look, Melissa, what's the chance of getting caught?"

"Why don't you just go yourself if you want to go so badly? I don't really want to pick up guys anyway. It'll just be a pain getting rid of them at the end of the night."

"Look, what's gonna happen? Your parents are gone for the night; if they should happen to call you can say you were asleep; that you weren't feeling well. That's all. Nothing more needs to be said."

"What if they come home?"

"So, what if they do? Are you going to let them run your life?"

"For the time being, yes. Until I go to college in the fall. Until then I will because I want them to pay for my education. It makes a lot of sense and you know it; you just don't care about sense, that's all."

"That's right: -- sense is just something some grey old men inan office invented to keep the rest of us from having the good

time they're incapable of."

"Well, I disagree, and that about sums it up. So let's go."

Carlotta's large face twists in confusion; does a somersault through the past and through the fourth dimension, between her legs and out her mouth. "Are you serious?"

"I'm never serious, but I'll go anyway."

"But what happened to Almighty Reason and all that bullshit?"

"I still believe in it. It makes no sense for me to go, because I probably won't enjoy it very much and there is a significant risk of getting caught ... say by someone seeing me there and word getting around to my parents, not only by them coming home. But I'll go anyway."

"Why?"

"Because I feel like it."

Carlotta is a little hurt by this, and she wonders why. Maybe it is because she subconsciously worships reason as Melissa does; because she wants to live an "upright" life ... no, maybe not; she asks herself and she only answers: Why? There is something more to it, she realizes; something which she doesn't want herself to know. And that's the end of it for this small speculation ... it slithers back into the ground from which it came, the spiraling infinite-dimensional sphere whose boundary and center are the same ... which is hurtling through abysses of unknowingness.... "Okay, let's go get dressed!"

Up to Melissa's room; ... her suite I should say, complete with private bath and in-wall kitchen. They'll both wear her clothes; Carlotta doesn't own anything fancy. "They'll let us in?" Melissa asks. The drinking age is twenty-one; Melissa is sixteen, Carlotta one year older.

"A friend of Uncle Louie's is working the door tonight; he'll let us in."

"Connections in high places," she says sarcastically. This is a joke primarily because her parents inhabit the center of

the Washington high-society scene; her dad a congressman, and

her mother a lobbyist for the Right to Life movement.

... Carlotta is wearing a light red ultraminiskirt which shines so brightly that her natural red hair is overshadowed... a shimmering pink halter top and a pair of three-inch heels. "I'm gonna get laid tonight," she says, glowing with anticipation. "How 'bout you?"

"I'm not, and I don't want to."

"Don't knock it till you've tried it."

"You could say that about death, as well."

"I plan to try that someday" ... She realizes that this is a lame response: "You're mighty clever with the words and arguments, Melissa. Sometimes I think you're arguing yourself out of life."

"Now who's the philosopher?"

"I'm no philosopher; I'm just looking out for your best interests."

"I should be looking out for you! What are you going to do with the rest of your life?"

"Oh, I don't know ... get laid, get drunk, get killed in a car crash ... you know ... who cares? What does it matter what you do? You live, you die, and that's the end of you."

"Maybe."

"What do you mean maybe? Are you turning religious on me?"

"Maybe there are no such things as beginning and end. Maybe time is a circle. How would you like to live your life over and over again, into eternity?"

"It would bore the hell out of me, that's what."

"I was just reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Nietszche? ... where he proposes that time does work like that, in reality; we just go round and round."

"The cosmic merry-go-round. Okay. I'm worried about you, filling your mind with all this diddlyshit. I thought you were going to be a geneticist."

"I probably will be. But if I study any more genetics I won't have anything to learn in college, so I've been reading other things."

"You read too much. Did you ever read Henry Miller?"

"No, but I've heard of him. Pornographer?"

"Among other things. But not primarily. Read Tropic of

Capricorn. There's a book that'll make you give up reading."

"What do you mean by that? It's so much better than all other books that ...."

"I can't explain it to you right, you know that. He explains it all in there. Are you going to dress yourself or what?"

Melissa giggles; ... as Carlotta has been dressing and putting on makeup, she has been standing there naked, her head in the proverbial ninety-nine dimensional clouds and her feet not quite on the ground but on the international dinner table, prepared to be eaten by the Micronesian snakes in return for a chance to play in the ultraBayesian lottery of the age; in return for a snake deep up her ass and a bottle of Schnapps; in exchange for a bleep and a squeeping laugh over every dirty word ever uttered in her presence -- vulgarity really bothers her (which means she loves it, somewhere, deeper, deep inside); ... in return for anything or everything, for one is one and all and (what?) to fall into abysses without name is just the same as just to wander down the street just after dark (it's all but nothingness, and lark) ... -- Something stirs inside her; something grows, and something knows it isn't time quite yet to fly, but that she will fly nonetheless; that she is soaring through the canyons of her mind and yet will not escape, because the walls of the canyon extend far into sweet infinity, and far too deep into unconsciousness for mind to comprehend, for that which lives in time to harshly rend -- er cold and logic. What is infinity? What is my life? All these ideas, all these goals -- add up to nothing! And so does everybody else -- add up to nothing!

These the thoughts aplay in mind of crystal Lissa; these the echoes in the canyons of her mind. These are the thoughts which she shall softly leave behind as she wanders into certitude -- into the certitude of uncertainty; ... into that phantom zone where nothing lives in time -- but yet there's rhyme -- ...

Nothing is the universe.

Melissa wears a dark brown peasant skirt and a leotard which actually clings to her breasts rather seductively; above it, she wears a leather vest with jangling bells. And she wears moccassins. "The hussy and the earth child," says Carlotta, and she smiles, infinitely concerned with her role, but only finitely comforted by it.

And pattern issues forth from void.

The idea is the throbbing undulance; the idea is the blobbing unbalance of it all: -- The universe is a giant pliant checkbook always borrowing from itself and never getting things quite straight; -- It is always in debt to itself and is therefore on the move, on the grooving, on the go: -- It is cutting out its own grooves and playing them as a phonograph needle -- cutting itself to a point; ... focusing itself with a cosmic laser-eye of energy: Supplying itself with a fresh bath of electricity constantly gained by listening to its music, which is in fact not music but the most wild cacaphony-sounds, the high-piled wilding of a tent made out of oceans pitched upon the surface of the moon and forced to retreat into the ultraviolet range to preserve its integrity. Do you see what I mean? Of course not! Nor do I, in fact; nor does anyone -- We have no eyes, we've only skies -- not them, even, except on flew bloody Tuesdays and the venom of the weak (Not to mention fiefdoms of the transcednlucent soul!) -- I am inside! and I am distracting myself from the knowledge of this, ... why? So as not to explode! Hello there ladies and gentlemen; ... members of the judge and jury which is the world ... -- you haven't informed me of my crime but that's all right because I don't exist and nor do you but still we do; ... but you can't see that, because you're idiots and the toilet bowl of sense has overcome you, but not too thoroughly of course, because in that case you would have reasoned yourself out of sense long long ago. Reason is the hardest of drugs: -- Those who never had it don't see what its value is, they see only the bad effects; Those who've had a little want some more, they want some more and nothing more than some more more more more more more more some more ... and most of us only get a little, due to societal limitations or inherent mental incapacity, I don't know ... ; And those who've had the maximum amount, those who've taken it to the limit -- know that when anything is stretched to its boundaries, it begins to contradict itself, to negate itself -- and to swim! in the boundless sea of fancy, friction and the sea which is a sea within itself ... they don't want to get rid of it; they don't particularly want to maintain it -- but they can't figure out if they mind; -- they can't figure out what is affecting what -- and you can't either, you damn fool! and if you think you can, well that just proves you've not proceeded past the germinal stage of logic! ... they're so confused their world is shattered (like any other drug addict (and anyone else for that matter ... Wait; I'm doing it again! I got up the guts to come in here, and now I'm seeping out through the metaphysical cracks in the walls; I'm flowing into my own little universe again, my squandering wanderings: -- I need an alien source of energy! another flow! I'm getting tired of drinking my own blood for nourishment, if you knowwhat I mean (or if you don't -- ) ... I'm getting tired of eating chameleon blood for shivers and quivers and the facility of fooling myself into thinking I'm fooling myself about something other than the fact that I'm not really fooling myself about anything but the fact that I'm not really fooling myself about the fact that ... ad infinitum -- And I'm doing it again! I've got to stop; I've got to stop; I've got to -- Hold on; what was that? Was that a quivering? -- what? a shivering? what? a hole through the vast and hence enticing and repulsive hence enticing throbbing mass of flesh and half-dead made excuse for consciousness/heaven -- draping death across the vast abyss of nothingness, that's what I call this call this call this call this place! That's what I call this? -- What I smell! But I smell something precious coming in! What's this? some kind of break from the monotony? Some kind of freshly alien botany? -- Not an animal, not a mover through the spiritual plane like me -- but a Venus flytrap at least! a plant which, though its roots be fixed, at least has the raw instinctive wisdom to look through its eyes and to flail and to flail and to flail around and live its life as though it were its life it were living ... The next step is to realize that it's no one's life at all, but that's another thing entirely ... in any case, you see, the meaning of it all is that there never is a meaning, but all the same I see a beautiful girl in front of me and behind me and on all sides and if I can stop myself from staring at the wall in front of me -- from fixing myself physically, as an anchor for my treks cross metaphysical horizons -- If I can do that, and maybe talk to her ... well, well, then what? I don't know; perhaps I'll see ....

We entered the club afloat on the hysteric sea of disobedience whose water only schoolgirls can breathe. Carlotta felt it too, the shimmering glow of life beyond our lives; although she disobeyed her parents regularly (which I did not), she wouldn't have continued to if it hadn't continued to thrill her. Somehow everything they sanctioned, to her, felt as though it were used, were old, were virtually decaying. But when she disobeyed them she was born again; her actions had a new vitality of their own, as if they had lifted themselves out of nothing.

Enough abstraction. The point is, I was disoriented more than I'd ever been before. In hindsight, it seems the decision to

finally -- once -- follow my fancy, to abandon my heretofore

implicitly trusted reason ... had been building for a long time,

in that shadow region which hindsight finds it impossible to

categorize as either consciousness or unconscious, which is simply there, but was not quite there, quite there then.

I am standing at the bar with Carlotta. She is sitting on a stool; to sit seems ridiculous to me now, however -- something like sleeping through your honeymoon night. This is the time to live! to fly! to be free! ... to be melodramatic! Hee hee hee hee! No, seriously, dear -- the high will pass if you don't think of something to do. What? Talk to someone! Why not? What's the worst that'll happen; they'll see what an ass you're making of yourself, little schoolgirl trying to be an adult. You're not a schoolgirl anyway anymore, Lissa -- you'll be in college next September, and you're only acting like a schoolgirl to please yourparents. For that's their image of you! But you should be careful what you pretend -- You might become what you pretend? Who said that? I did, you nincompoopldydoo! Wait -- here comes someone ...

"Hi", he says. Good come-on.

"Hello. I'm Lissa. What's your name?"

"Al Bates."

A shy fellow, isn't he? Isn't he supposed to think of things to say?

"Do you come here often?" I say -- What a tired line, I think, simultaneously -- but I pick it up out of the societal trash can, uncrumple it and use it anyway. And it is tantalizing to do so! There is a little of this in all nonconformists, I think: -- the will to conform lies deeply, in fact supporting the will to deviate ... it is because we feel the will to conform that we feel the need to repudiate it so strongly, perhaps. Perhaps all hate is against ourselves! ... perhaps all else -- .

"No," he says, then pauses ... I wait and wait for him to continue, my silence squeezing the words -- the life! -- out of him. He almost looks dead, sitting there on the barstool next to me; he almost looks dead, but most definitely is a corpse come back to life. Thus came the "almost". He glows with a life beyond life, a life which isn't quite so certain that it is or is not life ... or something like that. "In fact, I've never been in this state before today. I'd never been further east than Nevada in all my life, until last weekend."

Thank God! Some small talk ... which I hate. "What brings you out here."

He looks miraculously close and distant. "I don't know," he says dreamily. "One could say fate, one could say love, one could say wanderlust -- in fact, one could say whatever the hell her or she wanted, and it wouldn't make a goddamned bit of difference to me, and I still wouldn't give a shit -- but it wouldn't be true, and the very conditions of this statement are false, because there are no such things as ones in this universe, not to mention twos or threes or fours and so on ... and I think I've made a major faux pax, as they say in the olden country."

I giggle. "No, not at all," I say, induced into absolute honesty. "In fact, I despise small talk. I was just trying to fit in."

"Good for you," he says, in a hollow wistful tone which assures me that he means not a word of it: -- "Keep on trying for as long as you can, but you must realize that eventually, if you are honest in your spite, you will come to find it impossible to try any longer, and you will die as far as it is concerned. And if out of this death you will manage to pull a new life, you will go far further than I have gone today. And you are beautiful!"

I am blushing! And I don't know what to say. I thought I was going out to become what I am not for one night, to say goodbye to my usual prissy self and live with the proverbial proletariat, so to speak -- "so to speak" !? oh shut up you literary garbage disposal gone inverted! and speak honestly to yourself at least! "Thank you." That was an honest response. I am thanking him for being so direct, and furthermore for appreciating me. I thought I would lose myself for a night, but instead I am seeing more ofmyself in him than I have ever seen in anyone. And yet what it is I am seeing, what is the similarity I detect -- I do not know; I cannot name it; cannot tell -- I cannot tell myself ... but I can feel it; I can feel it, so I know.

"Uh, so -- do you come here often?" He laughs a sickly laugh of strength, at once frightening and delightful.

"Actually I've never been here before. I'm not even old enough to get in; I just graduated high school last week. My parents will not be pleased if they find out."

He wags a glowing sarcastic finger; I virtually see it weaving phosphorescent spider webs through the sky -- The sky?! Somehow, yes, he is a sky -- . "Took, took! Bad girls must be spanked. Oh my, that sounded horrible; I'm actually not a sadomasochist, in fact, except metaphysically as we all are. I'm actually quite a normal guy; I like to eat, to drink, to fuck, to read a good book now and then. And what do you like?"

"That's quite a general question."

"So give a general answer. Nothing wrong with that. How about life!? that's about as general as you can get. Do you like life?"

"Right now I do."

"It's always right now, isn't it?" He laughs self- deprecatingly, and I want to extend my lips to his. "Aren't I profound tonight? ... I think I first made that observation when I was three, but I still haven't understood it fully."

"You mean you understand it intellectually, but still can't live that way?"

"Well said! The intellect is just one faction in the politic of my mind, just one small lobbyist constantly putting forth his opinions but then he has to go home to bed and piss and eat and fuck like the rest of us, so why should I listen to him?"

"You're pretty loose with the phrases and metaphors," I say, disorientingly conscious of my every word. His words seem measured and intricately concocted, as if a symphony built solely for my ears; mine seem so incredibly constricted that all my games of nonconformity are revealed for what they really are -- charades; ... a little bit of nonconformity to keep myself satisfied with being basically an average entity. He, I can tell, is totally weird -- the very basis of his mind is alienated. To begin to understand him one must first of all discard all preconceived notions -- which is impossible. Hey -- I like that expression! Maybe there is something in me after all. In fact, the fact that I can doubt it would indicate that, wouldn't it. Would it? What would would wouldn't would would. This is no good. I'm supposed to talk to him, not myself. Why can't I let the flow come out? That's what he does. "Talk some more!" I say, too desperately. "I love to hear you talk; it sounds so freely, freely flowing ... it sounds like you say just what you think. Not too many can do that. I certainly can't" My eyes roll with a theatrical but thoroughly accurate anguish; -- "If only I could tell you what I really feel about you."

"You're doing pretty well as it is," he observes soberly. "Compare our conversation to those of anybody else in this bar. Even to say 'I love to hear you talk' -- that is infinitely removed from the usual chatter, even if it was said partly out of

desperation for anything else to say. It was honesty ..."

"You're very generous," I reply. "But really I'm just a precocious schoolgirl with a few pretensions to be abnormal; pretensions which by the way probably spring from the realization that all great artists are abnormal."

"So you want to be an artist, do you? What's your favorite medium -- canvas, typewriter, or life?"

"What do you mean by that? That one has to make a choice between living beautifully and creating beauty?"

"One doesn't have to do anything -- not if one has the strength to transcend the contradictions inherent in it. I used to be an artist ... a sculptor and a writer. Now I'm a musician. I like to think I'm moving toward the side of life, as Henry Miller used to say. But I'm probably deluding myself. Probably -- hell!"

"What instrument do you play?"

"I was hoping you'd ask that!" he grins -- the first perfectly normal expression to assume his face -- ... and he whips out from his shirt pocket an eight-inch or so clay flute.

"Did you make it yourself?"

"That's right. It took about two minutes to mold; I made about a hundred of 'em and tried 'em all. This was my favorite. You see, I found it was almost impossible to tell what a flute would sound like after kilning, before -- ."

"Will you play it for me?" My eyes are wide, I know, but there's no stopping them. Looking stupid is a little worry next to the problems of my life itself, the question of existence and its meaning which this man's presence bring to light --

"Yeah, sure. If you can hear it over this racket in here." I just now realize that we have virtually been shouting.

And as he begins to play a number of heads swing toward us -- Carlotta's among them. She was over talking to some hillbilly dipshit; she bids him farewell, certainly with spluttered suavette promises to return, and returns to me. "Hi", she says, and winks at me with a look that says -- So you've netted one already! ... a look which implies that I'll be "getting laid" tonight. A prospect which actually does not frighten me for a change. Perhaps it does ... but it is the kind of fear that is delicious; the kind of fear that leads one to disobey one's orders to oneself -- by doing things like going out to a bar when one's parents are away for the night. In fact, her glance -- maybe this was its purpose -- sets me to thinking about sex, which gets me excited. I am literally dripping into my underwear; the sort of thing you only read about in porn magazines ... hot and juicy! And the fact that this phrase reminds me of a well-cooked hot dog does not dissuade me. In fact, I wonder why this particular cylindrical image has sprung up ... -- And I wonder why the phrase "sprung up" sprung to mind -- ... et cetera. The point is, I am horny. Somehow the look in her eyes purely radiates sensuality ... why I do not know; and do not care, not at this moment; -- All I want is him! All I want is his pure hand-made clay flute, and his nimble verbal wanderings across my mind, and his glowing straight-out compliments. When he told me I was beautiful I believed it -- because it was so clear that he would never spew forth bullshit, not if his life depended on it. Oh, that's not quite right: -- he would bullshit, in certainsituations he might even thrive on it, but not about something as serious as beauty. And perhaps that is the only serious thing! My breasts are tingling for his lips!

He puts down the flute, and after permitting the rollicking life-relishing trickling pearls of bright strife to fall out of the air like dew -- after giving the incomprehensible sweet meandering of his music a moment to disappear -- ... he says: "Would you like to make love with me?"

He might as well be saying: "Would you like to make music?" The music is still hot upon my ears, he the pied piper leading all the stiff rodential patterns of my hard-to-please unconscious out into the rising dawn, onto the lawn of supple paradise, into the fields where fancy grows as grass and dreams are shadows -- dreams are shadows; they are what happens when something obstructs the light! What happens in the presence of the light is far, far greater! far far greater, yes, and just as far beyond what we have known as mere description till this day, but now we (I? We!) see that any description is a thing in itself (although there are no things in themselves), as much related to its supposed subject as anything else -- and as little -- . Oh me! what am I going on about! This pause is getting a little protracted. And the strange thing is I know what my answer will be; I'm just having trouble here getting it out. "Yes," I reply simply. Carlotta hears, and I don't care. "But I don't think we should do it here," I say, in a successful attempt to appear casual.

"I've got a hotel room, actually," he says quietly. "But we don't have to go immediately. In fact we don't have to do anything immediately or ever, but if we do it when we do it will be immediate. Immediate -- no mediation. We require no mediation, the two of us, or at least I think not. That's what's beautiful about it. That's my insanity, and perhaps it's rubbing off on you, but actually I think you already had it and it's just now coming out."

I nod, too furtively. "Yes, I've always been crazy," I say smoothly. "But I never admitted it to myself before, not the full extent. I tried to call myself an artist, a deviant in a familiar class. I tried to saddle my deviation with a label. But it won't have that, no, I see that now."

"Bravo!" He claps and giggles. "You're starting to sound like me, and we've only known eachother fifteen minutes. This may be the worst thing that ever happened to you."

And therefore the best, I tell myself only partially sarcastically. The worst is naturally the best. I'm starting to think like a lunatic. And worst of all, I'm starting to think that we're all just lunatics inside, but we manage to hide ourselves from it most of the time. The self is a veil, essentially, a ruse to maintain the illusion of sanity. The unconscious is a spluttering psychotic! I say: "Let's go, before I change my mind."

He smiles. "That's impossible; you change your mind to some extent in every interval of time." He puts an arm around my waist. "But I'll be kind enough to ignore that inaccuracy."

"Oh, you will?!" I screech sarcastically (in a low but high- pitched voice). "You are just too kind."

"It's true. Oh, by the way, I love you."

I try to let that comment pass, pass by the too-proverbial wayside toward the farthest edge of existence -- not to forget it, not to doom it to the pit of unknown memory, but at very least to put it aside for the night. Love is a powerful concept, too powerful for me to superimpose upon the already insanely thundering evening's events. Love is something I have to think about ... but tonight I want to feel! I want to feel him in me!

The act of sex will not surprise me, so I think: I've read the Joy of Sex; I'm not ignorant. I even remember some of the more bizarre positions. I never was a real prude in that I was offended by sex; I just didn't see why it was necessary for my life. I could enjoy myself without it, so why complicate things? Of course, one could say the same thing about soda, or cooked food, or legs. And the response soundly irrefutable could be the same in every case: Why not? But the mind can easily hold an attitude and its refutation at once; in fact, I doubt if it is really possible for a mind to hold only one side of an issue. -- But anyway, now I feel sex flowing through me! And -- what? I haven't even had it yet. I know it's a cliche but, well, my body is electrified. There's no other word for it: I am jingling inside like a vast parade of bells in all direction, bells about one micrometer in diameter all french-kissing me, in all directions, virtually lifting me out of my skin. I've never felt quite this alive before! (well maybe I have; it's hard to compare these things and why bother). I've never felt quite such a flow through my body! Somehow, right now, it feels as though I live for sex, as though the ever-endless wandering of life has found a destination, or at least a map of the universe, showing it where treasure is to be found -- and the treasure is the map, perhaps! Oh well, no metaphor and no rhyme, though they escape me, can express the sweet exuberance which I feel throughout my body -- like the tang of a four-dimensional fruit, one which I taste throughout my body! ... and furthermore a fruit which is alive! A fruit which is essentially Al Bates, which is a transform of his body and his mind (which somehow right now are the same to me)! Oh, fuck this metaphor! No, fuck him! All right, all right ... just wait until we get to his hotel! I feel as though my skin and loin are all a dance, at once a dance and choreographer, dancing as a child miraculously granted the chance of lust and the flexibility and poise of a ballerina, dancing as a child celebrating the birth of a new day, as one not old enough to wonder what's so great about a new day ... too young to know monotony. I just can't stop the flow of metaphors! It's like my mind is freeing up as my body is learning to live with this new everpresent tingling! It's like this?! That's what it is! And I am floating on the wings of nonreality, of nonmorality -- I'm, simply, free! And what else is there but my lust and love for him! Did I say love!? Oh yes I did; it makes no difference to me now; -- so I'm in love with him; I was just as much in love with him ten minutes ago, before I admitted it to myself. Saying it makes little difference. Oh yes it does! Make little difference! No, make a boundless rift, the largest difference possible! For now there are no cold Outsides -- all things are in my grasp! For -- yes! -- I love them! Somehow to love him is to love the world! To place such value, suchemotion upon something outside -- is enough to by analogy make me love all the outside! all the world! I want to make love to the flowers! to the trees! and to the singing of the breeze! even to fleas! (well maybe not, that could hurt -- but at least it rhymed with all that other stuff. I am in love with the world! in love with life! And I look over to him, as he holds my hand and guides me warmly down the streets toward this mysterious hotel room, and I pierce his gaze. "And you see everything, everything that's going on inside me," I say spontaneously, on the bright wings of untime's improvisation; he replies: "I see a lot, but not quite everything. Somehow I feel what you're feeling; I don't know why. Perhaps it's because you're so similar to me ... you certainly feel that way. Or maybe because it's a full moon." I look up, and am surprised I haven't noticed it. "Right now, what do you see?" I ask him. "Please don't ask me that," he is on the brink of saying -- but he doesn't say it. Instead he tells me the plain truth. "What I see," he says, "is incredible lust and motivation to break the bonds of your past self by making love to me, by giving yourself new sensations and new things against which to test the old -- although really all things are tested against themselves alone, in the end .... I see the splendor of a new age ahead of you -- already internalized. You're living vicariously in the future, and because of it actually bringing the future on. Anticipation of joy is bringing on joy. But yet you fail to see the other side of things ...."

"You mean that light can bring pain too; that light can burn when it shines too brightly? -- Oh my love, I see that too! You underestimate me! I know that every new adventure, every breakthrough onto brand new level of being -- brings new fears and brand new tortures as a necessary element of its existence. Oh yes, I know this very well. The thing is, I just don't give

a damn! I can intellectually conceive the pain; I can even feel like I feel it -- whatever that means -- ... but that's can't faze me, can't fade the moment, can't bring me fears right now, because I know my lust and love are so strong that nothing can stop them now from fulfillment."

"Not even a nuclear bomb?"

"It won't happen; no, I know it won't! Oh, I shall have my hour of happiness! And that's enough! For every moment is eternity!

... Aren't I poetic when I'm horny?"

"Your body is a poem, my love," he replied, solemnly and with far more than a hint of glee. And we have reached the hotel room.

I will not describe it, for I cannot. One cannot describe anything, but this was indescribably more indescribable than the rest: it was one big moment, not an arbitrary and precisely-half annoying succession of perpetually unformed nonsense -- not the world, but a world beyond the world, and a world beneath the world, and a world above the world -- and all that fancy stuff; and all this most ironic because it was brought to us by something within the world, by merely sex, by the act of rubbing ourselves together to create friction ... during sex we loved the world, because ithad given us such inexpressible joy, and hence we could transcend the world -- we despised it, but only by looking away -- looking to ourselves for life! ...

Enough metaphysical bullshit. The point is, when we entered the room I kissed her hard and deeply on the lips, and then my mouth ran down her neck, and then she'd taken off her shirt and her pants and before I knew it she was ramming her cunt in my face. It was incredible! she was the most aggressive virgin I have ever seen, or heard of, outside of the porn books I occasionally read as a child. Inhibition was totally beyond her; she was a tool of her lust completely, and this very fact virtually commanded me to obey her every whim, and with an absolute enthusiasm: When something speaks from the very depths of reality, from those squeariest distorted depths of the soul which are precisely not reality, and not illusions created to escape from reality, but are a different thing entirely, are the elemental forces which my intuition sometimes tells me are what really rule the earth. I do not remember what our bodies did that night; it does not matter, for they were but instruments for our souls. It sounds melodramatic, but I say it: I used to shy away from words like "soul"; I used to hate religion and strive to express all things in scientific terms. And still I do. But now I love religion also -- although to a much smaller degree than I love science. I don't believe I hate anything anymore -- and this is good, I think: Everything is equivalent; it is a boundary preventing the universe from rejoining with itself in the eternal infinite and nonexistent fugue of punctured nothingness.

And oh, how our bodies ached! how they glowed! as we passed away to sleep: -- how little had they meaning as mere separate things; how much they were each organs of the glow that surrounded us! Her breasts seemed to me beacons of light -- and it was a dark room! Her nipples were lasers, and her cunt was a light too, only one in all different colors, in every color and hence none, and hence its own color, its own translucent contradictory color, one which breathed forth liquid tremors and the omniscience of the sun, which was a source of life and a repository for all things -- that is, death as well! It was the universe, this cunt -- and so are all things? Yes, but as I never tire of repeating, some animals are more equal than others. It was a spiraling, all-enveloping whorl of a comet, this cunt, a comet constantly tunneling down its own center, down the center of the whirlpool which it was. It was incredible, but that was okay, because I was beyond belief as well; I was just feeling it. I was not hallucinating things, and yet I was: at that moment I knew that what I saw and experienced was precisely as real as anything else, and was to be evaluated solely on the basis of how it felt to me at that time -- in other words, evaluated not at all! How it felt -- .

And then we fell asleep, as confident in every aspect of our being -- our physical lithe reality, our existence as springs; our cosmological acuity (our ability to see through the world) and our wits -- as any one or thing has ever been.

I have a dream. I am running in a circle with a bunch of other people; the circle seems about the size of a livingroom or a roller rink, but the number of people seems boundless -- perhapsthere was an influx and an outflux -- yes, of course there was! We were dancing in a circle, somehow constrained to the circle -- not quite by chains or ropes, not quite like horses on a merry-go-round -- but very close to that! the only difference being that our shackles were translucent glowing, not quite real, something like a heap of a certain type of Chinese noodle, the name of which I do not know, modified to conduct electricity and light via superconduction and fiber optics, shaped into a brain and then decerebrated and formed into rope and hooks, hooks to the ceiling which was never quite visible, but which was ominously present.     Eventually it becomes apparent that we are dancing for a purpose; -- in one corner of the room is a door; in the opposite corner is a row, a glob of people softly waiting to be chosen by we rotating ones ... to be picked to dance, and then after dancing a little while to be escorted out the door. Until you were paired off you could not get out; of that I was quite sure. There was one beautiful young girl standing there, in some not particularly revealing but incredibly sensual and possibly red dress ... she looked a bit like Melissa, but was less wispy, more of a full being; she looked like Melissa had felt during sex ... but Melissa was not usually that way; she was an intellectual, and she was full of fears. This girl had her life firmly rooted in the earth, in the trees and her bodily rhythms; in her lust and in her love -- she was a woman through and through, in the classical sense which is pathetically out of fashion now; in the sense in which the woman is inherently closer to the patterns of nature than man. I shall not bother to defend this thesis here, but only mention that I felt it in this dream. And she was smiling at first, but eventually she was crying. And I wanted her so badly I could not express it -- literally, perhaps ... each time I passed her I sort of tried to reach out and grab her for the dance, but I could not, not quite, because -- because the others rushed me by too fast? Or because of something within me? I do not know ... it seems like each of those was a part of it, but even the combination was not all. Somehow I knew it was impossible ... I don't know why .... Eventually -- before I knew it -- the dance was over. A hundred thousand times she'd passed, it seemed, and I hadn't got her ... it was not a sadness, quite, that overtook me as she rocketed by each time; not quite, because it was too pasteled and stifled, wimped in shades of grey. It was a shadow-world I lived within this dance; nothing was definite enough to get ahold of with the fangs of reason, to tear apart until nothing but the bones of intuition and pure feelingness remained; -- there was no meat with which to delude myself! there was only cunning, and the running chance of streams upon grey rocks, and nothing more: -- My mind outwitted me as I dreamed; and everything I thought of was nipped even before it became a bud, was foiled by the eternally dynamic "structure" of my shadow-world. And at some point -- after I'd passed her a few myriad times, or so it seemed -- I realized dimly that it was all a dream; no, not quite that, precisely -- more that it was a stupid-ass concoction, that it existed only to rid myself of certain symbols which were playing around my psyche all too long ... that it was simplistic and too obvious and hence asinine, and I should be ashamed of myself for creating it, even "involuntarily" -- all this in oneflashing crash of an inkling, in one thought ... and then all of a sudden my consciousness unconsciously injected some point into the dream, and the number of people began dwindling severely -- but still she was left -- Until only she was left, and then I took her, perhaps immediately, and we danced -- What I felt at that moment I can't recall, except for the space-traveling smile that graced her face, the incredible grin which appeared to envelop me (and therefore did); the flash of teeth which became pure whiteness, a bright raw abyss which sought to gleam me into the overside of life, a heaven above without a god or angels, but only her and her effusive happiness, her bodily glow. And then we stopped, or we made some motion physical or conceptual toward the door -- and we realized ... "Where was it we were supposed to go after we were done?" We didn't know, we had no idea, and there was nobody there to tell us. Even now this destination is an abyss to me, a vapid emptiness with mild overtones of high school, training seminars and orgies where sex is conducted with fluidized numbers and arithmetic symbols and accounting charts instead of genitalia

... or are those images only now? There's no way to find out. In any case, there is no doubt (or as little as possible (i.e. an infinite amount)) that it was made of the same slippery electric noodle-like substance that composed our chains -- which by the way were gone now, most certainly by the time I took her hand and possibly beforehand (ha ha ha). These were not quite words that we spoke; they were almost definitely simultaneous and mutual; -- perhaps one could call them telepathy, although it did not feel like that at the time; it was simply feeling eachother metaphysically the same way one does physically during sex, a making-love on a plane no higher than the usual, but delicious for its illusorially greater extent and its "mere" novelty. "Who cares?" we said (or something like that). "It doesn't matter. They are all gone, and now the universe is ours. Outside this room there is a thrumbling universe, a giant womb continually giving birth to itself -- and it is ours! Let's go explore it!" Agreed upon this, hand in hand we began towards this undulating vortex of life -- somewhat similar to Melissa's cunt as above- described, but thoroughly different ... not so colorful in the conventional sense, but totally varied in the dimension of electricity and subtle vibrance of the soul ... Wait, maybe Melissa's cunt was just as varied here as well. Yet if it was it was offset by the greater variance on other planes ... And maybe this new universe was just as colorful, the colors were just more deeply hidden: -- What the fuck am I talking about!? Who cares!? In any case, the dream was done, and I was back to the void.

I had plenty of other dreams that night; it seemed like hundreds, but I can't remember any of them -- and I remember this so vividly it seems like it certainly wasn't a dream, except that its viscous fuliginous tone of unstructured hurtling is so characteristic of the dream that to think otherwise would be ridiculous, from the intellectual point of view.... And what do I care about the intellectual point of view? I don't know, why don't you ask her? I never even knew her name! I tried to go back and find her, later in my sleep, but there was no success.

Jesus Christ! What time is is!? It's ten o'clock -- What the fuck am I going to say ... They should be getting home about now; it's okay; just tell them you went for a walk with Carlotta after breakfast ... ate breakfast at her house ... oh, you know them, they know you; -- they won't suspect a thing! Got to go ... I shake his shoulder: "Darling; I've got to go -- my parents will be back any minute."

"Can I walk you part way home?"

"I don't know, can you? Of course you can! my love. But hurry up, okay?"

"Yes'm", he purrs sarcastically, but with a delvingly honest overtone. He pulls his clothes on with incredible rapidity, while I am still fastening my bra. "Your makeup is smeared all over your face, by the way. Your parents might think it suspicious."

"If I'm not there when they get back, they'll think it suspicious.... But you're right, more if I have makeup on." I pause and slowly look at him. "I love you."

"I love you too. Now get dressed!" He says this oh so charmingly that I have to hug him -- and I do: a long, rich gooey hug in which our bodies melt into one warm throbbing womb-seeking mass, one glob of flesh pulsating to the tune of a cosmic heartbeat, whatever that means, and then I put my clothes on.

As our feet gobble up the street, we babble timeless talk -- nothing to do with our current physical situation; I don't even find out what he happens to being doing in my silly little town, or how old he is, or how long he's staying ... And it's not that I'm not curious; even he, I somehow feel, is rather curious about me: he is not quite weird enough to have abandoned attatchment -- perhaps it is this against which he is struggling, chirps a flying saucer which flutters in through my left ear and leaves the other minus four little green men and a pint of liquid diamond ... but perhaps not, proclaim the little green men, and I am on my way again, past all boundaries, into cosmic nonsense and the victory of worlds which are not worlds but only dead -- Dead deaths! of course ... potentials for demise which have destroyed themselves by partaking of the eternal.

"She's not here!" I'll look through her room once again: -- Is she hiding under her bed? No, Marjorie, that's ridiculous -- Why would she be? Well, why wouldn't she be here? Was she kidnapped? "Henry, should we call the police?!" What? he isn't moving -- I don't hear him calling them! What's wrong with him! Oh, they're all the same: -- Big schmuck on Capitol Hill, but no common sense whatsoever. Without me he'd drown in his own incompetence. "Hennnryyyyyy!"

... Here he comes; -- He doesn't even give a hoot, does he? "Henry, where is she?! Where is my daughter?"

"Oh, calm down, Marj, how the hell would I know? You know as well as I do."

"Well do something! for God's sake. It's insane to just sit here... We specifically instructed her to be here when we got back!"

"Maybe she forgot. Maybe she went for a fucking walk. It'sa bit too soon to get hysterical."

"Nonsense! She disobeyed me and went off God-knows-where, and you don't care! Don't you care about your daughter?! Do you want her to grow up to be a criminal?! After all these years, to have something like this happen!"

"Marj, I really think you're blowing this a bit out of proportion. It's not like she ran away from home or something, she just ...."

"Well, she might as well have!"

"Look, chances are she's at Carlotta's ... I'll give her a call, all right?"

"That little hussy. I'm sure she's at the root of this."

"At the root of what, Marj? They're probably eating breakfast and talking about boys ... what difference does it make? And what on earth do you mean by calling her a hussy?"

"Don't you notice the way she dresses? My God, if that were my daughter I'd have a heart attack! I have no respect for that girl's mother ...."

"And she is hardly exceptional in that respect."

"Don't interrupt me! You asked me a question, now let me answer it without any snide comments! That girl looks like she's putting on an advertisement for her ugly little body ...."

"Actually she's quite attractive." The bastard looks like he's about to laugh! My God! I'll bet he wants to fuck the little bitch! My God, I'd castrate him!

"You're disgusting!"

"Thank you. Now I'm going to call the hussy's house, okay?"

"You do whatever you want, Henry."

He is calling, he is calling ... "Hello," he says -- Is that her?! Is that the little bitch?! Which bitch is which -- Oh, you card! You're a card, I'll deal with you later ... ha ha ha

"Hello, Mrs. Matalucci? Yes, this is Henry Whittaker, Melissa's father. I was wondering if you'd seen Melissa this morning; we've just returned from Washington and she's nowhere to be found."

A long pause ... "Oh, really? Well, thank you ... Right, talk to you later."

"He waxes informal!" Talk to you later ... sinking to that bitch's level -- My God! "So she isn't there?! Come on, Henry, don't keep me on tenterhooks all day!"

He's probably thinking that this would be a good idea -- in the literal sense. I don't know why nobody appreciates me ... they're all too dumb, I guess. "She isn't there", he says, too slowly -- this is probably intentional, designed to annoy me ...

"but Carlotta is. Says Carlotta came in about three last night, alone, and went to bed where she still is now."

"So the hussy is home but our little girl is not! Ooh, wait till I get my hands on her!" He stands so still ... looks like he's thinking about work. "Don't you give a shit, Henry? You're probably still thinking about getting your hands on that Carlotta girl!"

"As a matter of fact not."

How can you lie to me with such a straight face?! "Why don't you leave me and marry her, you lying fool!"

"It'd create a scandal," he says -- so nonchalantly. "Otherwise I would -- that is, if she'd have me! Not that there's anything so incredibly special about her, at least not which I know about ... she's just a pleasant girl, and I'll bet you she knows how to make love ...." A low blow from the creep!

"Why, you -- If I ever hear you talk like that again, you can bet your wandering undersized dick there'll be a scandal! You'll never hold office again!"

He is properly sedated. What a wimp! How can he expect me to respect him when he buckles under so easily? What's that? the door?

"Hi, mom," she says -- so calm, so careless. She's virtually glowing! Does she think she can get away with this so easily? Well, you've got another thing coming, girl!

"Where were you!?" A tone to inspire fear in any army!

She is unfazed by it. "I was out for a walk with Carlotta, that's all. I didn't expect you back this early."

"We said we'd be back at ten! Don't you lie to me ...."

"Oh, I'm sorry; I thought you'd said eleven."

"You little lying bitch! Listen to me, girl, we just called Carlotta and she was home ... what do you have to say to that?!"

A little ruffled: "Well, she didn't walk me home; she must have gotten there before I got here, that's all. Honestly, mom, I don't see what all the fuss is about."

"We talked to her mother, and she said Carlotta had been sleeping since last night. So I know you're lying. Now you'd better tell me what really happened."

A bit indignantly: "I already told you, mom ... there's nothing more to it."

Henry's silence is getting rather loud -- the bastard! I can tell what he's thinking: -- he thinks I'm crazy, that's what! He thinks I'm a paranoid schizophrenic ... My God! Why doesn't he give me some help?! I mean, I didn't expect him to have the guts to confront her on his own, but he doesn't have to just stand there like a rock .... The bastard!

"Listen, young lady, I've had just about enough of you! You think because you graduated high school you're an adult? You're a child of sixteen, and you're still under my control! Or don't you appreciate everything I've done for you? I've spent God knows how much money on you already, my dear, and you expect me to spend eighty thousand more to send you to college when you act like this?! You'd better just shape up, darling, or you'll be surprised."

"Marj ...." begins Henry.

"Shut up!" you impotent fool. "Melissa, come here!" She comes immediately -- it's an instinct, by now! ... that shows I'm a good mother. "Bend over -- I'll spank it out of you!"

"Mother ... really ... I'm sixteen. I haven't been spanked since I was ten. I really don't understand what all the fuss is about."

"Oh, you'll understand it soon enough -- as soon as I've got your skirt pulled up!" Which is now ... WHACK! Ooh ... look at your butt turn red, little girl! What a sweet, sweet sight! But you're not screaming! I must not be hitting you hard enough. WHACK! WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

What the fuck is the point of this, mom? I never knew you were a sadist ... except metaphysically, as Al says, as we all are. Really, I can tell you're hitting as hard as you can ... but when you're fundamentally happy, not even pain can get you down! ... You're probably not going to stop until I scream, are you ... until I gush in halting choked-out spurts my apologies to you and all other right-thinking individuals -- my apologies for being myself, for living as I want to live and giving of myself unto the universe ... for being human, fully human, and not denying it. I want to scream: I know how long it's been since you've had sex, mother! What are you, jealous! I know she would be, if she knew ... Good God, how would she react? I can tell ... Wait! God, what the hell is happening! Why didn't he tell me this would happen ... I guess it's obvious, it makes sense ... I've got to get out of here!

What is that coming out of her underwear?! I know that smell! You little bitch, you were out fucking last night, weren't you! And now the cum is oozing out of your little cunt! Looks like your lies are really tottering now! I'll hit her harder!

She's getting it on her fingers ... she must notice. I've got to tear myself aside, got to draw some force, some force from somewhere ... Alive! Alive and free as his mouth nibbles on my tits, as I soar so high that I can suckle on the tits of eternity -- Up! Up! And I am up, up off her lap ... "I'm too old for this, mom, isn't that apparent?! All right, I admit it, I can't live the way you want me to! If that's a crime, I confess it! Now leave me alone!"

"Don't you speak to me like that, young lady! If you ever speak to me like that again, I'll disown you, do you hear me? I'll disown you"

"Oh, just shut the fuck up mother!" My face is red, and I am screaming, but I don't care: this is the frustration I've felt ever since I reached puberty and my mother began distancing herself from me, began to hate me ... Until now I never knew why. "It's a natural function, all right?! So I had sex last night -- It was the first time but I can assure you it won't be the last! Listen to me, mother -- When was the last time you had sex, huh? Who's the unnatural one? I feel sorry for poor Henry, that's all -- You've probably got fangs in your cunt, you bitch! Now why don't you just leave me alone!" And tears pour out of me like gush from a geyser, like life out of death -- She cannot see the agony, I am sure, but only the rebellion, only the raw streak of hatred which I cannot quite force to subside. Somehow hatred demands hatred in return -- not logically, I know, but psychologically. Nothing could be more beautiful than to return hatred with love -- but I can't do that, not quite yet; I'm still too weak.

Her face is redder than mine ever was; her mind seems black. She's raging, pointing toward the door. "Get out! you little hussy! You're no daughter of mine! Get out of here, right now! I don't want your apologies ..."

"And I don't have any," I reply hastily yet calmly, as I bullet toward the door at quite a leisurely pace. "Goodbye, Henry."

No plans had I made with my little one, my vibrant youngster, my only love -- besides myself and the rest of the universe (whichis myself) ... I would be probably be staying in the same hotel room for a few more days at least, I had told her

... I half-expected her to leave a message telling me she never

wants to see me again, to return to sanity a little colder in her

experience, closed off in self-defense. There was a lot of that in me once: Freedom is wonderful when you're experiencing it, but when it's gone and you have to fight like hell for it -- all the while not experiencing it ... That's what's called courage. It's in a cosmic sense unneccessary, for one can experience freedom in the context of anything, within the deepest hells and the reekest smells and all those other things we've all been trained to find repulsive.

What is that light? that velvet sunbeam slowly waiting to occur -- not quite occuring yet ... Oh, maybe it has -- No, don't get anxious now ... It is a stirring light, a whirring bright, an angry clash of flesh amidst raw steel: It is almost perfectly rectangular, though it is not: In this and in other ways it is as though the real thing has merged with the Platonic ideal toward which it strives -- in other words, the pattern of it. It's constantly X then a pattern in X then a pattern in that pattern in X and so on; it's constantly jumping out of itself and then toweling off and plunging right back into himself and who could be there to dispense the towel but the cosmic pool attendant, otherwise known as Life, as Void, as Emptiness: -- this wing which weaves these towels from its own flesh, which lives on the water soaked off into it, which is the cosmic mouth puckered over the cosmic nipple at all times, and waiting for it to become so erect that it rises and pierces all boundaries, and breaks free of the impenetrable grey geodesic dome in which the pool lies, a dome which by the way was personally designed by R. Buckminster Fuller and which may or may not possess hair made out of trees, and genitalia made of rocks e'er molting and formed in the shape of very decomposed wombats -- depending on the meaning of life as interpreted by your average speck of dust convolved with the typical anal wart lying precisely three standard deviations from the anharmonic mean of infinity (meaning: the genital-wart cosmos) on the axis of scaliness fractionally distillated to compensate for the effect of sugar dumplings on the icthynous of soup ... if you see what I mean?-- I dance with Life ... and she is beautiful ... and on occasion I ogle her breasts through the top of her evening gown ... and once I even stick my finger in her cunt during a slow dance; she emits a loving squeal, something like "Stop it!"; something enclosed within the cosmic creek of time, that bridge which wanders over, under, upside-down and through itself so many times that we wonder whether or not it is necessary -- whether, if we jumped off the bridge, the abyss into which we fell would be any different than the wanderings of the bridge, the brumbling bramblings, the gwambling gwumbling and the penitent whees we emit as we go tumbling down the mountain of eternity into the all-too-pearly gates; whether, like don Juan, we would rather not go to hell in the proverbial handbasket; the perennial question is: Whose handbasket is it? If it is yours, Melissa, I'd go gladly. Melissa -- what? Oh, that's right, I'm sitting outside of her house. Well, that's not very precise seeing as most of theworld is outside of her house. Well, actually, I'm right across the street, sitting in a tree. But the point is, I suppose, that although most of the world is outside of her house, in actuality all of the world is inside it: It's constantly tumbling, whumbling about and whirring like helicopters afloat in an atmosphere created by their own effervescent honey-scented exhaust -- which stinks subconsciously, though ... It's tumbling through itself, you see, like the complex plane under repeated iterates of the map z=1/w, but not quite, because here we have some random perturbations -- not only a ghost in the machine, but a ghost within the ghost in the machine, and a ghost within this ghost, and so on -- It's all a lot like that classic Dr. Seuss book, I don't remember the name, perhaps it was The Cat in the Hat Comes Back -- The Cat makes a big mess, and to clean it up he pulls Little Cat A from his hat -- Little Cat A, a miniature clone of the original Cat in the Hat. But what good is Little Cat A? Well, out of his hat comes Little Cat B! And so on ... but not to infinity! You see, after Little Cat Z the alphabet ends: Out of this virtually microscopic cat's even more virtually microscopic hat comes Voom! What it is no one knows -- but it sure cleans up snow! This is a beautiful religion. I remember Walter Kauffmann's Faith of a Heretic, in which some theologian is revealed to have argued that "eternal torment", when invoked in the Bible, really means "eternal bliss". So, what was I thinking there? I lost the thread, oh well, now how can I finish sewing myself into the straightjacket of a train of thought? Regress further and further back -- eventually you'll find you don't have to go all the way! Your mind, pattern-recognizing machine that it is, will abstract the process of reversion as a pattern in itself. And if the sequence happens to be such that the pattern itself can cause the next part of the sequence -- then we have consciousness, in some sense; at least self. This is your Voom! What the hell am I talking about?! I don't know, but this little birdie perching next to me seems to sense that it's a lot of bullshit, because it flew away. Outside Melissa's house: Her house is a pyramid, a round castle which is square, a parallelopiped if ever there was one; really, a tree whose branches and roots are the same: -- Emanating shards of glass, of the mirror of reality and mind, with each step along the cosmic breath of nothingness, if you know what I mean or if I don't, if your blow is serene or if it's not, your blow upon the candles of the Intergalactic Birthday Cake which celebrates its own stunning impotence every thirty seconds, but only goes to the bathroom every leap year, or something like that, if you know what I mean. It is a glowing in dark light soft pastelish shades of pink and white and softling blue, it is a whistling of an unfamiliar tune to a familiar beat; that is, the heartbeat of the universe runs through me, resonates to me. Oh, if you see what I mean, my darling!! Can you feel me? I'm out here waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for you: -- Waiting to catch a glimpse! But I cannot; but I cannot; but I cannot. You see, the house has faintly pink shudders and some overtones of 1950s logic, but it's got the reality of a dream, and not quite a wet one -- not so direct as that, but rather a wispy sort of dream, the kind which imbalances on the edge of unconsciousness and teeters forth through the abyss just as soon as it comes forth out of it -- Whichyou hardly know except as the breeze it makes as it flashes past you, the flashing pass of nothingness. Do you see what I mean? Except that this one, this recurring bout of silence and the whispering of a dream which is not quite a dream -- this one acquired different characteristics precisely because it is recurring! A sum of nothingnesses equals something! Wait -- what's that? Someone's shouting, but I can't hear what they say. Sounds like Melissa ...

As soon as I leave the house I hear a voice: "Melissssaaaa". It is very deep, and it sounds like nothing I've ever heard. "Melissa, this is God speaking. You must take off all

your clothes at once, because you're about to enter heaven and if you enter with them on you'll be stuck in them for all eternity, and you'll have trouble getting laid throughout your afterlife..." The voice is convincing, but the content gives him away.

"Come down from there, you monkey!"

"Was that you yelping your head off in there?"

"Yes. I told my mom she had fangs in her cunt, and she threw me out of the house." I begin laughing. "Oh my God, it was hilarious! They had called Carlotta and found out she was at home, right, so when I said I'd been with her they knew I was lying. So my mother decided to spank me for the first time in around five years. I was a bit disgusted by it, you know, but I really didn`t give a shit. I figured if that's what turns her on, for whatever reason, it really doesn't hurt that much ... But one thing I didn't figure on was that my underwear were loose: All your goddamned cum started dripping out of me! as she was spanking me! It was one of the funniest scenes I've ever heard of! Just so incongruous, you know ...!"

He is laughing as uproariously as I am -- and he loves me: I know that, for some reason, now. A sober note from me: "We didn't use any birth control."

"Nope. I don't believe in control."

He is irresistable. "But still ..."

"Still what? Insofar as it was a decision, which was incidentally not at all, it was yours as much as mine."

I smile. "Admittedly. I just don't want to deal with a baby right now ... or an abortion."

"Well, you don't have to."

"What do you mean?"

"Not right now."

"Ha ha ha. So what do I do now? No money, no place to live ..."

"Stop pouting, and stop trying to be subtle! Of course you can live with me, in other words live nowhere at your wits end on whatever money I manage to dredge up -- if you want to. In fact, I'd love nothing more...."

I throw my arms around him: "I love you!"

Suddenly the world becomes dark; we are spinning. For about ten seconds we are tumbling through an abyss, without sight but with the sound and smell of gaping waters all around us -- We are holding hands, he as desperately as I ... digging our nails into eachother and reveling in the ensuing discharge of blood, minutely reveling in the slight return to reality, the sharp reminder ofsolidity that has been.

And then we've landed. Where we are is a large desert, whose ground is made of pinecone-like nodules embedded in a substance something like four-day old jello. We don't quite sink into it, pierce the layer of coagulated gook which coats its surface -- but it gives way under our feet so much that we can stand only precariously. The sky is green, and the sun is nowhere to be found. Not one thing moves, or flutters by; the scene is silent. But it smells like the bottom of oceans -- as if I'd know -- .

"Reality dislocation," Al says, and I hear his words not only audibly but also subconsciously, in my head ... I know what he's saying just a fraction of a second before he says it ... That's right, the tenses are screwed up! Telepathy? Not quite. He is telling me that he had a dream in which this kind of telepathy took place, just last night.... "Am I still dreaming?", he says, silent. "Somehow," we think together, "we have drifted so far off from ordinary reality that we have actually transcended it, that we have found ourselves in a different world. Our ultimate strangeness has caused a tear in the continuum of reality, so to speak." We speak together: this means, each one of us picks up on the other's thoughts right before he says anything about them, so that things kind of flow forth from both of us at the same time. Some ideas clearly come from me, some from him -- and some from neither of us, some emergent between us ... some quite free from any of this, apparently emerging from the consciousness-abyss, from the unconsciousness which lies behind all minds, the cosmic patternless void.

Somehow we both have an instinct to wander in the same direction, and we follow it. And we wander for a time, purely without words, without anything but our love and the incredible excitement of being in a new universe which we cannot understand. What is the meaning of this cosmic goop beneath us? Suddenly we notice that it is becoming more like flesh, that it is undulating toward us -- toward us? What is happening here?

... fired and most likely hauled into court -- and it wasn't even that I didn't care: I had no power. I wondered a lot about such occurences, until -- No, no, never mind; I shouldn't let myself get too far ahead of the proverbial game. He wasn't drunk, I could tell that much by smelling him -- and he never took any other drugs (well, okay, a little pot and acid, but that was before our paths crossed (what a hokey phrase!!! Before our tumblingmountain streams of crystal consciousness intermingled! -- how 'bout that?! No, too literary; prose like that only works in something like The Cosmic Cunt, where it's spewed at you as if from a geyser. Oh, fuck fuck fuck itit!!!)). He had absolutely no excuse, and so I told him ten minutes later when the manager returned from the restroom and saw the crowd hovering over our groaning presence. He said "Okay" -- clearly enjoying not only what he had done, but the fact that he had done it ... not only the patterns between himself and his environment, but the thrilling patterns emergent between these patterns and the patterns which he perceived as himself. He was a fountain of delight! spraying forth anomalous effusionsacross the efflorescent landscape!!!! Heh heh heh, he chuckled at my spiritually immature disgruntlement and disorientation. Maybe if I'd gotten off too, I would have had the same serenity.... "Get out!" the manager said. "Get out or I'll call the fucking cops, you lousy whore." His tone was uproariously righteous, but not one chuckling grin escaped me ... nor did the desperately fermenting plea that Fy was a friend of mine, nor did the pitiful but enticing urge to demand my back pay. We was getting. His prick was still hanging out when we got outside, half-erect and almost, it seemed, smiling. "Are you going to support me now???!" I snapped hoarsely ... the champagne was almost bubbling out of my throat. "How would you like it if we did that at the university, huh Mr. Bigshot???! Would you be so happy then? This is the only decent-paying strip club in Albany -- how am I supposed to support myself now -- play my saxophone on the street or whore myself?!!!"

"Sax or sex?" he murmured whimsically ... "Maybe if you could play your saxophone while having sex in the street, you could create music with more true emotion than anyone in the history of humanity, become immediately famous, and put all these petty worries aside."

"Ha ha ha," I said harshly, but with a quiet sound -- meditating that it wasn't such a bad idea after all -- not the street part, I mean, but the idea of blowing through both ends at once, so to speak. This first lovers' quarrel was not only the beginning of our life together, it was the conception of our most popular album, Blues for Epiminedes. My voice grew louder:

"It was no joke; come on, let's cruise baby. Right out on the lawn in front of the engineering building, where all the trees are, you know -- whatsamatta, chicken? Bawkbawkbawk!!!!" I flapped my wings inanely. My memory of the rest of the night is not, except for the crystalline image of us fucking on the stairs of the math building, and the dean absent-mindedly leaving said building (rather late!) and in the process stepping over us. Unfortunately, or actually fortunately (to take the long- range view), his mind was not entirely absent. He was sufficiently aware to have Fy kicked out of the university for "committing an act of moral turpitude" -- None of the faculty (nor anybody else, I imagine) knew what that meant, but they all knew that doing it was the only way you could lose your tenure. The proceedings were remarkably fast; within two weeks we had vowed to love eachother forever, or at least until we happened to stop, and decided to guarantee our mutual fidelity by blowing much of his (substantial) savings (obtained primarily from

his musical career) on a yacht and thereupon sailing around the

world, alone together.

The S.S. Boat with No Name Painted On Its Side was equipped with the latest in automated navigation systems; we really wouldn't have a hell of a lot to do, we realized, unless we came across a hurricane (in which case the ANS was probably at least as reliable as a human, but who wants to sit back and let a computer determine her destiny???!). We just wanted to fuck, improvise some oceanic music, and relax and softly meditate on the soul of cosmic consciousness and such.

Which we did, for quite some time. For several weeks, things went as planned -- that is to say, beautifully. There was no dissonance between us; our various quirks balanced out perfectly, or else just didn't show up in the limited environment. Such music has never been heard! -- actually, it has, on the seven discs entitled Boat with No Name Painted On Its Side, the Blues for Epiminedes disc, and the Hurricane Andrea three-disc set (his title) ... but it was better out there, somehow, in a special sense which makes no sense at all (but what emotion does??). Such music has never been heard -- but that wasn't the best of it. We spent a couple hours fucking, a couple hours jamming, and the rest of each day just was. It was an incredible feeling; we talked a little, but a lot of the time we just sat and stared at eachother, at the ocean, at the sky -- what was incredible was that through this nonbeing, after a while, our thoughts stopped. We attained death within life, or beyond-life-and-death, or whatever. I can't even approach the task of describing it; Fy had previously tried voluminously to communicate similar experiences, but in my opinion even he failed quite consistently. Some things, some things which are not things....

And then we saw the island....

Converted by Andrew Scriven